ALB
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I was about to send in a comment saying what a dreamer, then I read the whole article. I think it ( and his book) deserves a more detailed and considered reply as he starts off putting the same question to single issue campaigners are we do — don’t you ever think about a society in which you wouldn’t have to protest without end? — and attempts to outline an alternative to capitalism ( as we know it).
I see he has come out as a “socialist” even though as that contradiction a “market socialist”. Must get hold of the book anyway so it can be reviewed.
“If tomorrow God made me president”
So, the US is a theocracy now. Not that it would make any difference if it was, since the christian god could no more control how capitalism works than an elected President. There is an added difficulty if you don’t exist.
I know but I didn’t want to speak too much ill of the dead on the day after they died.
Ok, he said to vote Labour under Corbyn and so was (like Chomsky) a peculiar type of anarchist, and he also subscribed to currency crank theories about banks. But what I meant was that he used the language of anti-capitalism and so like others (Picketty, Paul Mason, David Harvey) contributed to making “capitalism” a dirty word, so making it easier for us to get a hearing for our case.
And his exchanges with us were courteous enough.
59 is not a good innings. We didn’t agree with a lot of what he said but there was still enough common ground to be able to discuss differences sensibly, as for instance here on whether or not capitalism is based on wage labour.
“We can address this question effectively by excluding from membership
- individuals who belong to organised religions
- individuals who subscribe to theistic notions of divine intervention in human affairs”
This would allow the Roman materialist philosopher Lucretius to be admitted, as although he didn’t deny that the gods existed somewhere he insisted that they had no influence on the course of human affairs. He’d make a good member.
It would also admit some of those “bourgeois Englightment philosophers”, the Deists, with their “Belief in a god who ceased to intervene with existence after acting as the cause of the cosmos”. Not sure we would want to admit creationists, would we, but then the Deists did have the excuse that they were living in the 18th century. Maybe tighten up 2. to say something like “to theistic notions of divine intervention, past or present, in the universe or human affairs“?
Then there are the “Nontheist Quakers” but they might fail the first test. I believe one, who called himself a “Quaker Atheist”, was turned down for membership a couple of years ago but I don’t know on which precise ground.
Point 1. goes without saying as it’s the same as belonging to another political party, with mistaken ideas and policies.
But would all those covered by the above be able to be described as religious anyway? Might it not be better to argue that such people weren’t religious in the sense we are using it (to sort out creationists and believers in divine intervention)?
Incidentally, Robbo, if your proposal is to have any chance of success I wouldn’t tie it to a head-on attack on “science” and “philosophical materialism”. That will get people’s backs up and is a separate issue.
As God’s representative on Earth (self-proclaimed) the Pope presumably discussed this with him first and, as usual, this all-powerful individual refused to do anything about it himself.
So, it’s a case of God proposes, Man disposes. Only capitalism prevents Man solving the problem. In the end, then, it’s a case of God proposes, Capitalism decides what happens or doesn’t happen, with the pope in the middle as a helpless messenger.
As anticipated, the resolution on undefined feminism has been rescinded:
https://groups.io/g/spintcom/topic/report_of_the_results_of_the/76540036?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,20,2,0,76540036
Headbutt. As Robbo has pointed out, we don’t criticise your lifestyle choice to live on a commune but you don’t seem to reciprocate but criticise fellow workers who work for wages. But most workers have no choice.
The basis of capitalism is the minority class ownership of the means of living, which leaves the majority no choice but to sell their mental and physical energies to the owners for a wage. You describe this as voluntary slavery but it is not really voluntary except in the sense that workers support capitalism when they could get rid of it if they wanted but, given capitalism, workers don’t have much of a choice. Some individual workers can choose to lead a life of crime or to become professional beggars or to drop out but the vast majority can’t. We have to work for wages.
Everybody dropping out wouldn’t work. In fact if a majority had come to reject wage slavery they could end capitalism and replace it with a society based on common ownership, democratic control, production directly to satisfy people’s needs and distribution on the basis of “from each their ability, to each their needs”. That would be a much more sensible thing for a majority to do.
In other words, society-wide communism not isolated and inevitably limited and stunted colonies within capitalism.
We also discussed this 30 years ago and 1989 Conference passed this resolution:
”This Conference reaffirms the Party’s position on co-operatives as set out, for instance, in the chapter on “The Co-operative Movement” in the 1942 edition of Questions of the Day, that is:
“In the minds of many workers the Co-operative movement is regarded as being in some way linked up with socialism. When the co-operators take up this attitude they claim in justification that Robert Owen, the co-operative pioneer, was actively concerned for some part of his life with possible means of escape from the capitalist system (…) Robert Owen’s solution was that small groups of workers should try to establish self-supporting ‘villages of industry’, in which there would be no employer, no master. They would constitute, as it were, little oases in the desert of capitalism, owning the ‘land and means of production common’. He anticipated that the movement would grown until finally the workers would have achieved their emancipation (…) The Co-operative Movement cannot solve the basic economic problems of the workers as a whole, or even of the co- operative societies’ own members. Its success is merely the success of an essentially capitalist undertakings (…) Co-operation cannot emancipate the working class. Only Socialism will do that. The workers cannot escape from the effects of capitalism by retiring into Owen’s ‘villages of industry’. They must obtain for society as a whole the ownership of the means of production and distribution, which are the property of the capitalist class. For this they must organise to control the machinery of government. Once possessed of power they can then reorganise society on a socialist basis of common ownership. Owen’s original aims can only be achieved by socialist methods.” (1989)On Roger Hallam from that link mentioned in the climate crisis thread:
”Alarmism, doomism and Roger Hallam
What most scientists had not foreseen with an eye so fixated on the artillery of denialism, was the sustained and one would presume well-intentioned misuse of science from the other end of the spectrum, by those who do accept the reality of climate change. When Extinction Rebellion began in England, it conveyed a sense of being witnesses to the cascade of plant and animal extinctions that are escalating around the world as many habitats become less habitable. There is no scientific quibble with that. However, the narrative soon escalated to human death on a massive and imminent scale. As the prominent co-founder Roger Hallam saw it, the burning question had become: ‘How do we avoid extinction?’
His 2019 manifesto, Common Sense for the 21st Century(9), was written in his own name but widely hailed as representing the views of Extinction Rebellion and heavily promoted by the organisation’s London HQ. Referencing his claim to ‘one recent scientific opinion’, he warns of 6 to 7 billion people dead as a result of climate change ‘within the next generation or two’. The paper cited as his authority in the footnotes makes no such claim(10). It is purely Hallam’s extrapolation of a 5°C world, given what Common Sense calls ‘the central role of methane in a climate emergency . . . with the system spiralling out of our control and the likelihood of global collapse within a decade or two’. He reiterated the mass dieback claim in a BBC News interview feature, trenchantly insisting: ‘I am talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of 6 billion people this century – that’s what the science predicts.’(11)
Climate Feedback, a website more used to taking on deniers than alarmists, invited an expert panel to give their opinions on this prediction. The responses ranged from ‘an illustration of a worst-case scenario’ to ‘wild speculation’. Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, put it bluntly: ‘I know of no climate model simulation or analysis in the quality peer-reviewed literature that provides any indication’ that there is a substantial probability, above zero, of 6 billion deaths this century.”
The X (for extinction) R followers are no doubt sincere and well-intentioned but their leaders are crackpots.
He is not being original in that. It was coined by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp
To some extent it is true of course as industries rise and fall. The link mentions Marx about this.
It is interesting to see how, in their bid to get people back into the city centres to buy things and keep office rents up, they are emphasising the social relations aspect of work and how not having this by staying at home all the time might harm health and well-being.
A different story from when they are objecting to socialism on the grounds that no one would want to work as without wages there’d be no incentive to.
From those who tried to stop workers going to work by tube, more on how to put people off and lose friends. Disrupt people returning from holiday.
Their actions are neither necessary nor logical. Everybody knows now about the threatened climate crisis and it doesn’t help to exaggerate it as that will tend to make people either sceptical or resigned. Illogical because capitalist governments are doing what they can afford to in the context of international competition to deal with it, and no amount of jumping up and down will, given capitalism, be able to make them do much more. The problem will only be able to be dealt with rationally within the framework of a socialist world of common ownership and production directly for use and not for sale on a market with a view to profit.
Once again their antics risk impeding socialist activity, in this case comrades getting to head office to send out the September Socialist Standard. That reminds me, I must fill up today in case they won’t let me tomorrow or Monday.
Denialism and Alarmism: two sides of the same bad penny?
Following a discussion on Discord about whether or not our case against capitalism should be alarmist on this and other issues (as opposed to pointing to the scientific advances that could be applied in socialism) a comrade has drawn attention to this article;
Denial and Alarmism in the Near-Term Extinction and Collapse Debate
I see my pet hate Roger Hallam of XR gets a well-deserved bollocking,
