ALB
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“Partially Automated Reasonably Sufficient Socialism is quite adequate, thank you very much.“
It’s reassuring that you haven’t gone completely off your rocker, even if you did need prompting.
I suspected that you were trying to argue that technology does not prepare the way for socialism as that’s typical of those anarchists who do actually want socialism (a minority) and who think that it could have been established at any time in human history eg in 1720 or 1820 or 1020 for that matter as much as in 2020. Talk about voluntarism.
I would have thought that it was obvious that socialism only became possible when the capacity to produce enough for everyone had developed, which can be said to have happened towards the end of the 19th century in the form of a world productive system reflected under capitalism as a world market that had come to dominated the whole world including the non-capitalist parts.
Every technological development since then has strengthened the case for socialism by making it easier and more feasible, and so is to be welcomed even if in the meantime it is misused under capitalism.
“Technological determinism. Meh. Surely we should be able to assess from our own experience and knowledge that technological advance is totally unrelated to social advance. We are more alienated from each other, less cooperative, than we were forty years ago. I think it no coincidence that the less developed areas of Spain were more communist during the revolution.”
Another manifestation of the an anti-technological-progress ideology that crops up here from time to time.
While it is true that we have become more alienated from each other I don’t think this can be attributed to technological progress. It’s due rather to the workings of the capitalist economy that has a tendency to reduce us to isolated atoms that collide on the market place as buyers and sellers of one sort or another. It is the workings of the capitalist economy that have a tendency to break down existing pre-capitalist communities like the ones you mention that used to exist in Spain.
To blame technological advance for increasing social alienation is to commit the classic logical error of concluding that when two things happen together one must be the cause of the other, whereas in fact both could be caused by a third factor.
Anyway, what are the specific technological advances that are supposed to have caused increased social alienation? The main recent advances that have affected people’s everyday life are, I would have thought, the internet and mobile phones; before that it would have been television and landline phones. Not to mention electricity in those parts of Spain. Besides making life better, these have the potential to bring people together but this is being frustrated by economic and social conditions of capitalism.
To blame technology and presumably want to turn the clock back really would be a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
KAZ has put another finger on another difference: that Jacque Fresco was an unapologetic technocrat. A point we have made in discussions with those influenced by his views. But neither the MFP nor Peter Joseph are orthodox Frescoists. Both have moved some way from his technocratic position towards bringing in elements of democracy, the MFP merely by contesting elections and Peter Joseph by the indefensibility of Fresco’s position. It would be nice to think that we have had some influence on this change of position.
I think you’re being a bit hard on Robert Owen. OK he was an elitist, a philanthropist who wanted to do something for the working class, but he is credited with introducing the word “socialist” into the English language and the Owenites (many of whom were better than him) were publishing pamphlets in the 1840s with titles like “What is Socialism?” In fact, I wonder if they are not responsible for the word “socialism” replacing “communism” in England as the word for a society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of life with production directly for use not sale and profit, which we inherited (but which anarchists have been reluctant to, even though I think Kropotkin did call himself a socialist a few times).
As Zeitgeist and its offshoots like the MFP (there are many more) appeal to all persons of good will to change society rather seeing this as the outcome of a class struggle against those who own and control productive resources, a rehash of Engels’s distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialists, seemed a good idea. Like the distinction between the nebulous anarchists around Freedom and the self-styled “class struggle anarchists”.
It sounds as if Nick Tapping has come a long way since he was virtually a troll on our old WSM yahoo forum. Somebody should send him an application form! A case of us influencing them rather than vice versa, which of course is as it should be.
KAZ has put his finger on another difference. They are “Utopian” moneyfreers who appeal to all people of good will while we are class-struggle moneyfreers. They are Robert Owen. We are Karl Marx. Still we do have the same objective and Owen wasn’t that bad.
I am afraid that what you suggest is precisely what Royal Mail does not permit. We tried inserts in a local free paper in Kent but got no response. Apparently “intellectuals” don’t read them. Can’t say I blame them.
The other odd thing is that our experience shows a better response from the South than from the North or Scotland. Make of that what you will.
There has always been a tension about who we target. Our theory (which says that socialism is an immediate possibility but can only come into being when a majority wants and understands it) means that we are targeting everybody, ie scattergun approach. In practice, however, our immediate aim to build up a larger and more effective socialist party, to campaign for socialism (I hasten to add, since this sounds a bit Trotskyoid, not to leader the workers) and, though I don’t think we’ve ever explicitly said so, to be around when outside events beyond our control spark off a mass movement seeking a way out of capitalism.
This latter means that we are targeting those who are politically interested and who have the time to be politically active. That is a very small percentage of the population which can’t be more than 5% if that. I wouldn’t call such people “intellectuals” just because they are prepared to read an 800-word article or leaflet. You don’t have to have a college degree to do that.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that we should be aiming at getting replies, so we can acquaint them more with our case via, in the first instance, a free 3-month trial sub to the Standard,
As to costs, you’re lucky as I happen to have them to hand as I’m in the middle of preparing a report from the election committee for the January EC Meeting.
Inserts in the i paper costs £18 per 1,000 + VAT (=£21.60). We had 160,000 inserted, at cost of £3,456. The printing cost £2,045, making a total cost of £5,501. These leaflets weren’t distributed specifically in the constituencies but over the whole of the south of England and Wales and parts of the Midlands. (They didn’t mention that we were contesting and could in fact have been distributed even if we hadn’t been.)
Printing the 55,000 leaflets for Folkestone cost £722 and the 45,000 for Cardiff cost £1,087 (their leaflet was more elaborate). Cardiff also spent £450 on a display ad in the local evening paper. On top was the election deposit of £500 for each constituency. So, the total cost of the campaigns in the constituencies was £3,259. (This suggests that running a campaign to get free postal distribution could cost as little as £1,200, but don’t expect many responses).
We also spent £210 on printing 15,000 leaflets for distribution by members and sympathisers outside the two constituencies.
The total cost of everything (excluding some travel and other minor costs) was £8,970.
Yes I remember now. Those were the two main points. Money free in one country and transitional measures. I think that in the meantime the MFP has deregistered as a political party which means they can’t contest elections under that name any more. Nick Tapping is still around as he puts in an occasional appearance in our Facebook page. He knows us of old.
“How are the reply rate going? Is the newspaper ad still the better response than the election leaflet?”
There is no comparison. Replies to the insert in the i paper (which was also about the election) are now approaching 100 while replies to the election communications remain stuck at 2 (1 from each constituency), useful replies, that is, as we had three hostile replies from Folkestone intended only to make us pay the return postage.
What this shows is that contesting elections to get replies to the free postal distribution is not a reason for contesting. This is not a reason for not contesting, nor even for not using the free postal distribution (since many more will read them than reply and it’s relatively cheap to have even 50,000 printed) as there are other reasons for this, e.g. local activity, national publicity, showing we are apolitically ctive.
The relative success of the newspaper insert confirms that you get a better response, in terms of replies, if you target a specific group (in this case, for us, the readers of a non-Tory serious newspaper) than if you have a scattergun approach aimed at everybody.
That dates from 1907 before Catholic Connolly became one himself as one of the founders in 1912 and leaders of the Irish Labour Party along the same lines as its British equivalent.
There’s a better poem than Connolly’s turgid stuff here called “The Labour Fakir”:
Oh, he preached it from the housetops,
And he whispered it by stealth,
He wrote whole miles of stuff against
The awful curse of wealth.
He shouted for the poor man,
And he called the rich man down,
He roasted every king and queen
Who dared to wear a crown.
He clamoured for rebellion,
And he said he’d lead a band
To exterminate the plutocrats,
Or drive them from the land.
He fumed, and roared, and ranted,
Till he made the rich man wince
But he got a Cabinet job and
Has never shouted since.It appeared in An Phoblacht, which supports Sinn Fein, themselves another bunch of Labour Fakirs, aspiring to be Cabinet ministers in Northern Ireland as well as in Eire.
Here’s Marx on capitalism’s role in preparing the material basis for socialism by imposing a transitory historical period of “production for production’s sake” (from section 3 of chapter 24 of Capital):
“Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence, which, to use an expression of the witty Lichnowsky, “hasn’t got no date.” And so far only is the necessity for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production. But, so far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.”
Fortunately capitalism has already done this and there is no more need for “production for production’s sake.” Unfortunately it continues, causing all sorts of unnecessary problems.
Socialists say that it’s been long overdue to stop this and for the humans race to enjoy the benefits of the sacrifices imposed on them by capitalism, by going over to a “higher form of society” where there can be “production for consumption’s sake,” which is only possible on the basis of the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.
For those who imagine that it is the word “Socialist” that is putting people off, here are the results of the Money Free Party in recent elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Poole_Borough_Council_election#Canford_Heath_West
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_West_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
The Socialist Standard reviewed that book of Camus’s in 1973:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2010/02/camus-portrait-of-rebel.html?m=1
