ALB
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A blast from our past by a member of our companion party in the US:
Our review of the book on the WRP reproduced here (scroll down and press “press coverage”):
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/history-politics-society/my-search-for-revolution/
I don’t understand the attraction of these “simple solutions” as opposed to socialism, as the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources. Socialism may seem remote at the present time but at least it is possible.
What these reformist propose may seem more realistic but they are impossible. No government is going to introduce a jobs guarantee or a state payment to all of an amount more than the poverty line. These go against the logic of capitalism and the wages system and could only be financed out of profits. But taxing profits to the extent these reforms would require would provoke an economic downward and demands that they be abandoned or watered down; which, to get production going again, would be acceded too.
They would also require majority support to be attempted in the first place; obtaining which, quite apart from wasting time, would be no easy task. Such efforts would be better directed at campaigning and organising for socialism as something possible.
Just dug out my copy of that 1986 pamphlet by LLM that ZJW mentions. A quick re-look at it confirms my memory of it as advocating the “employment of labour time as the basis of and measure for production calculation and distribution” (p. 69). A proposal we have discussed a number of times here.
What I had forgotten was that a letter from me figures in it (p. 99) which leads him to write in a footnote:
“The SPGB is a ‘Marxist’ group which believes that the socialist revolution will occur when one fine day the majority of the workers (who it defines to be anyone, be him an accountant or a bank manager or a government minister or a secretary or a factory worker, who receives a wage – further, there are, according to the SPGB, only two classes in capitalist society: those who earn a wage and those who do not), having first understood intellectually, and thus demand, socialism will simply take over the
existing state machinery and re-organize society on socialist lines. There
is no space here, nor is there any need, to criticize these feeble-minded
idealists.”and, in the main text:
“… many people claim that the Russian workers were not struggling for socialism at all, but only for the ‘mundane’ demands for bread and peace… These people do not, of course, deny that there was an extremely high level of working class activity in 1917, but deny that it constituted a socialist struggle. Reason? Simply because the majority of the workers did not demand the communist programme. For them, for the class consciousness of the vast majority of the working class to qualify as communist consciousness, it must reach the level of knowledge in Marxist theory… What these people fail to realize is that, at least for the period prior to the revolution and that of the initial phases of the transitional period …, for the vast majority of the working class, their conception of socialism will never be couched in the terms of the communist programme.”
Nothing new there, then, just the usual caricature of our position (except on the two-class theory). And since he thought that the what happened in Russia in 1917 was a “socialist revolution” his analysis of what happened after starts off on the wrong foot. And of course he is echoing Lenin’s view that under capitalism the working class cannot develop beyond a trade union consciousness (only a select minority like him can).
ZJW is right that this might not be the place to discuss this, but we could do. Anyway, I’ll put this on Libcom too, so it’s on record there.
I agree this is a rather good description of what capital(ism) really is and how it controls our lives, based on Marx’s idea of the “fetishism of commodities”, ie that it is a something that people create and which comes to dominate them as if it were, and which humans regard as, an outside force operating on them. Ian Wright explains well how it does this
But there is one thing that is problematic. At the beginning he describes money as an invention, a unit of account as a thing for measuring human labour-time. Money is used as a unit of account but it is more than this. It is a social relation, an expression of a society in which wealth is privately owned and produced for sale.
His definition suggests that money could still be used in a post-capitalist society insofar as a common unit of account is needed. Which in fact is his position as he envisages post-capitalist society as one in which profit is eliminated and humans are no longer compelled by an alien force to produce it, but where worker cooperatives still produce for sale and where there is in effect labour-time accounting using money to measure this.
I could be wrong (since I have not checked) but I think he also envisages abstract labour and value continuing too. In other words, that his objection to capitalism is that it obliges people to misuse these tools. Maybe I will ask him (he knows us and our position).
He will have been sent our review of his previous book as are all authors of books we review. It will be interesting to see if has taken on board any of our comments:
Book Reviews: ‘Utopia for Realists’, & ‘A Place of Refuge – An Experiment in Communal Living’
We’re ahead of you ! We had already asked for a review copy and two members had bought their own. One of them will review it for August or September Socialist Standard.
His previous book wasn’t that bad. His “utopia” is a civilisation based on UBI, not envisaged as some reform to the poor law system but as a way freeing people from drudgery and money-hunting. The sort of UBIer we can talk to. He should be a socialist.
The author of the book review on food production has received the following reply from the book’s author:
“Thank you very much for your kind message below left on my website and for your very generous and thoughtful review of Sitopia. I am delighted that you liked the book so much and feel that there is much in it with which socialists could agree – I do consider myself a socialist at heart and clearly the metaphor of society being a place in which everyone eats well – and by implication has the means of leading a good and meaningful life – is, I believe, at the heart of socialism. We are clearly agreed that capitalism has proved itself unable to deliver such an outcome – and I accept your point that one cannot lay the blame for totalitarian regimes such as those of modern China and Russia at the feet of Marx – although I found myself very taken with Proudhon’s argument that his optimism in vesting all power in the state had its own inbuilt pitfalls! In any case, I welcome your comments, and with the caveat that I am just an architect who has learned to think through food and by no means a scholar in political philosophy, I should be delighted to continue the dialogue!
With very best wishes, Carolyn Steel.”Additions here including where he explains the Marxian theory of value and the materialist conception of history (MCH) in easy-to-follow terms:
The wise captain of industry is Mr. Selfridge.
Added to the Gilbert McClatchie Internet Archive:
- Irish Notes, April 1917
- Irish Notes, May 1917
- A brief exposition of socialist theory: Class Struggle, July 1920
- A brief exposition of socialist theory: Political Action, October 1920
- A brief exposition of socialist theory: Value, December 1920
- The “Wisdom” of a “Captain of Industry”, September 1921
- A brief exposition of socialist theory: Value, November 1921
- How “Ability” directs, April 1922
- Co-operation—A hopeless experiment, July 1923
- The staging of another pantomime, July 1923
- Prosperity and “dividing-up”, February 1926
Yes, if they hadn’t been in the party they wouldn’t have known anything about Von Mises (we were the only people from the 1980s on to take on the task of refuting his claim that you can’t rationally organise the production and distribution of wealth without money and markets). Now they seem to be commercialising the knowledge they acquired from us.
Von Mises was a supporter of the pre-war tinpot Austrian dictator Dolfuss who did this to the Social Democrats:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/1934/austrian_workers.htm
Shortly afterwards Dolfuss was overthrown by the Nazis and murdered and Austria joined with Germany. Von Mises wisely fled to Switzerland and began his new career as an ideologist of Liberalism.
Ironic then that our two ex-comrades should tolerate him when if need be he would have justified crushing them just as he did their equivalents in pre-war Austria. He preferred Italian/style fascism not just to Bolshevism it to social democracy too.
I think you are right, Robbo. I don’t think Dan has been infected with Von Misesism. He’s just a common or garden reformist who accepts and provides a theoretical justification for the the existing “mixed economy”. Maybe he wants to tweak it a bit and, I’d imagine, supports Labour or the LibDems or both. A sad fate for someone who used to be a good socialist.
But if you support the market economy why single out the two Austrians barons for special praise? Surely there are others who are better champions of this, especially as he supports a mixed private/state capitalist economy. Keynes for instance. Von Mises and Von Hayek weren’t even political liberals when they were still in their native country but supported authoritarian regimes and were implacable opponents of the Social Democrats and all their works. No wonder Thatcher liked Von Hayek and made him a Companion of Honour.
Yes sorry. That what automatic spelling prompts bring about! Tony Robinson is a bit of leftie, isn’t he?
Just checked. Sir Anthony Robinson was a long-standing Labourite even sitting in its National executive committee.
