ALB
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Lenin: family of tailors.
Are you sure about that? According to this, his father’s father had been a tailor and former serf but his father was a government official who rose to the rank of noble (but not of the sword of course !):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ulyanov
Not that it matters all that much.
I can see the problem with the term “bourgeois revolution” as it implies, and was original intended to mean, a political revolution led by the bourgeoisie as in France but also by their equivalents in England and the English colonies in North America. But this doesn’t cover how the obstacles to further capitalist development cane to be removed in Japan and Russia for instance.
But the term has come to have a wider meaning amongst Marxists even if , taken literally, it is misleading for non-Marxists who do take it literally or for anti-Marxists who want to use it to criticise Marxism.
I suppose the most appropriate alternative would be “pro-capitalism revolution” . That would cover the various other social groups that have carried out such political revolutions in other parts of the world.
An irresistible “drive to tinker, to redesign, to incrementally improve or upgrade technology” is what you would expect in any society not just feudalism. In fact it’s a basic assumption of the materialist conception of history. As Anton Pannekoek put in in his Marxism and Darwinism:
“It is self-understood that the people are ever trying to improve these tools so that their labor be easier and more productive, and the practice they acquire in using these tools, leads their thoughts upon further improvements. Owing to this development, a slow or quick progress of technique takes place, which at the same time changes the social forms of labor. This leads to new class relations, new social institutions and new classes. At the same time social, i. e., political struggles arise. Those classes predominating under the old process of production try to preserve artificially their institutions, while the rising classes try to promote the new process of production; and by waging the class struggles against the ruling class and by conquering them they pave the way for the further unhindered development of technique.”
According to Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of capitalism as a world-system (with a hyphen), capitalism from the start, in the middle of the 16th century, has been a system of production for sale on a world (inter-national) market of goods produced within states none of which is strong enough to dominate it. In these circumstances market forces come into operation which force all participating states to encourage capitalist methods of production so as to keep costs down and be competitive in this world market.
At one time Spain was a possible candidate to dominate the world market and so be in a position to resist its pressures but in the end wasn’t powerful enough. It also failed to convert its internal economy to capitalist production methods, relying instead for wealth on imports of silver and gold from its empire in America. It did compete on the world market but not successfully because it had failed to adopt capitalist methods of production. This is why it was eventually left behind and went into decline (despite the Catholic counter-reformation).
I think TM has a point. Feudalism as a system where barons exploited serfs had already ended in England by the beginning of the 17th century. The Tudor monarchs had destroyed the power of the barons and concentrated political power in the hands of the monarchy. Serfdom, as labour service to the lord of the manor, had died out and been replaced by money rent. The last serfs were formally freed in 1574.
In other words, capitalism as an economic system (with a money economy) had largely come to replace feudalism. What the English Civil War was about was a political struggle, a struggle to take political power from the monarchy, which had become an obstacle to the further development of capitalism, and vest it in a parliament controlled by capitalist farmers, merchants and manufacturers who wanted to use it to further their economic interests; which is what happened under Cromwell.
In that sense the overthrow of the monarchy was a “bourgeois revolution”, later consolidated in 1688 by the so-called Glorious Revolution (the English bourgeoisie’s own term for it) that overthrow the catholic king James II who foolishly wanted to turn the clock back.
What is a flu jab? Never had one. Isn’t it something to increase the income of doctors and chemists? But sounds as if I should get this Covid jab when it comes out and become part of the immune herd.
More on “democracy in America” (from today’s Times of London:
”Michael Bloomberg has helped pay the fines of 42,000 convicted criminals in Florida to enable them to take part in the US election as tightening polls put President Trump in the lead among those likely to vote there (…)
”Florida’s lifetime voting ban on 1.5 million adults convicted of felonies — the more serious criminal offences — was overturned in a referendum in 2018 but Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, ruled that sentences must be fully discharged, including all fines and fees, before a return to the electoral roll. Those fines relate to money owed by the criminal to the court system. Mr DeSantis’s ruling effectively disfranchised 775,000 people, including many African-Americans, who largely vote Democrat.”
An undemocratic law denies 1.5 million people who in countries practising universal adult suffrage would have the vote. A referendum overturns this. A Governor, representing one political party, find a technicality to keep 775,000 disfranchised to benefit his party. A billionaire, representing a rival political party, then pays for them to get the vote so as to benefit his party.
Imagine if that went on in a country whose government the US opposes. Venezuela for example. The President and Secretary of State wouldn’t hold back on denouncing it as a travesty of democracy. As if course it is.
Just as we (or some of us) are saying that philosophy is irrelevant today a judge has ruled that you can’t discriminate against the Ancient Greek philosophy of life Stoicism:
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/scottish-daily-mail/20200924/282170768585458
Today Protestant and Catholic Churches are reformist in the sense of wanting to reform capitalism in the same way that Labour and Social Democratic parties do (when not in government).
Not that it is winning them any new recruits. The new recruits to christianity are going to the Pentecostals who are not interested in this world as they don’t think humans can do anything to change it, only their god can. Truly, the hope of a hopeless world. It’s how I imagine the early Christians must have been or maybe they were more like the Jehovah Witnesses.
I didn’t think that Weber’s linking of capitalism and Protestantism was about Protestant churches and religious leaders supporting capitalism but about how Protestant teaching on how an individual should behave (work hard, don’t enjoy yourself) encouraged the accumulation of capital as opposed to spending wealth on luxuries.
This would explain why so many early capitalists were Protestants. In England many early capitalists were “Nonconformists” such as Quakers, Congregationalists and Baptists as non-Anglican Protestants were known (the Church of England being semi-Catholic anyway). Their attitude to non-essential consumption was illustrated by their opposition to drinking alcohol for which they were popularly known. Even in Catholic countries most early capitalists were not Catholics.
So I think it is fair to say that Protestantism was the religion of capitalism. This doesn’t mean that the Roman Catholic Church didn’t support capitalism but that Catholicism didn’t reflect or encourage “the spirit of capitalism”; in fact it was against economic liberalism and free market capitalism wanting to restrain it through social reforms.
“We still believe a lot of Roman propaganda that has since proven fraudulent, for instance St. Jerome’s description of the “barbarian” sack of Rome – which never happened, and we use words like “barbarian” and “vandal”, when it would be more apt to say of a damaged phone booth or ransacked shop, “It’s been Romanised!””
I think it might be better to say “Roman Catholic” propaganda as both the Visigoths and the Vandals who “sacked” Rome in the 5th century where Christians but of a different sect. They lost out in the end and the victors wrote history. If they had won the West might have inherited a genuine monotheistic religion like Islam is instead of the ridiculous and incomprehensible doctrine of a three-headed god called “Trinity”. Of course it would still have been mambo-jumbo.
Other words of contempt inherited from the ruling class of those days showing how they regarded the peasants they exploited are “villain” and “churlish”. It is of course to their credit that the villeins and churls of those days earned these descriptions from their opponents in the class struggle.
I can believe that in their ideological battle with the obscurantist Roman Catholic Church the ideologists of the rising bourgeoisie exaggerated how bad things were under feudalism. But they had to win that battle and fortunately they did, otherwise socialism would not have become possible.
Technological progress continued during the period, as it always does in human societies as they strive to make it easier to produce what they need. Indeed it was this that laid the basis for the appearance and development of the capitalist mode of production.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/08/30/tech-lessons-from-the-dark-ages/amp/
If the situation is as serious as the government’s two top scientific advisers said on Monday, the measures announced by the government yesterday are not going to prove that effective.
They know that they should have closed down pubs completely but the brewers have traditionally been supporters of the Tory party. Making them close at 10pm is only going back to what used to be the case in the olden days. They also know full well that allowing university students to return is inevitably going to spread the virus.
But of course they’ve got a huge problem — they are having to deal with organising the necessary social distancing in the context of capitalism. But capitalism, because it depends on profit-making with so many depending on the money they get from selling their labour power to live, makes it impossible to organise to continue production and distribution with social distancing in a rational way.
This from an email circular from comrade Alwyn Edgar is relevant:
The papers say that half of Americans will refuse to accept vaccination against covid-19. What is it with Americans? Andrew Wakefield took his bogus theory (that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism) to the States, and found a vast number to support him. (Trump, not yet president, accepted this baloney, and in fact – being Trump – claimed he thought of it first.) In America, millions believe that aliens are regular visitors (at any rate to the U.S.), that the “second coming” of Christ (“the Rapture”) will be here any day now, that the moon landing was all a hoax, etc. But it’s surely dangerous to reject vaccination.
When smallpox regularly killed 10% of the U.K. population, some clever clogs worked out why dairymaids didn’t get it (and therefore were noted for being pretty – not having the facial pockmarks left by smallpox). Instead they got cowpox from the cows – that is, a much milder variant of smallpox: and people who’d had cowpox didn’t get smallpox.
When I began 60 years ago (!) to write about the Highland clearances, I plunged into a survey of Scotland, parish by parish, written in the 1790s by the parish ministers (the “old Statistical Account”); I studied every report on the 162 Highland parishes, nearly all of which talked of this new idea of inoculation against smallpox. Some said the locals were against it, and there were still many deaths from smallpox; some said it was beginning to be accepted, and there were fewer deaths from smallpox; some said nearly everyone now had it, and there were hardly any deaths from smallpox. Short of accepting a plot among a pious crowd of Highland ministers to tell lies, this large batch of parish reports left a reader with no alternative: inoculation against smallpox worked.
But if many Americans refuse to accept vaccination (when a vaccine is found), even though everyone else in the globe accepted it, the disease would repeatedly spring up again. (Like smallpox did, for centuries before vaccination.)
There are two different senses of the word “philosophy”. The one you call “a tool for living”; the other is a theory of the nature of the world.
I suppose everybody has a philosophy of life even if only that “shit happens” or that “what will be, will be”. But philosophy in the other sense as “metaphysics” is useless and has been replaced by logic and the theory of knowledge and science. This is what Dietzgen meant by “the positive outcome of philosophy”, ie that this was science, and Marx by the contrast he made between “philosophy” and “the study of the actual world”. That’s why I think it’s dubious to talk about a “Marxist philosophy”, though as a tool for living I suppose it would be that philosophers only interpret the world but the point is to change it.
Marx’s correspondence with Engels and others shows that after 1845 he was not interested in philosophical theories but in scientific advances and inventions. Which of course makes sense as they change the world and pave the way for socialism as a society that can satisfy the material needs of all.
