ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
As Shaun Commack wrote:
“Postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of objectivity and absolute truth, which obviously brings it into conflict with the labor theory of value. However, postmodernism is also highly skeptical of logic and coherence, so we end up with a postmodern labor theory of value, in which an individual’s subjective value is the objective value of the object. Both absolute objective value and negotiated value are rejected. This introduces a problem, which is solved by group identity.”
Just mumbo jumbo if you ask me.
We shouldn’t be discussing this here of course, but we are. (I don’t know if it is technically possible to move this to “General Discussion”? )
Anyway, what Trump is doing is playing “identity politics” (the target “identity” group being “white” Americans). It’s all very well minorities engaging in this, but it’s dangerous and potentially counter-productive as others can appeal to it too, with more chance of success if the “identity” is the majority. Better to emphasise what workers have in common, not what differences can divide them.
I have found the quote. It’s in chapter II of Mein Kampf on the internet:
“For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. ”
At the time he would have been in his late teens or early twenties.
Earlier he had described what seems like a scene from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. At the time he was working as a building labourer (since he was born in 1889 it would be almost exactly the same time as events in Mugsborough):
“I drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread somewhere off to one side, and cautiously studied my new associates or reflected on my miserable lot. Nevertheless, I heard more than enough; and often it seemed to me that they purposely moved closer to me, perhaps in order to make me take a position. In any case, what I heard was of such a nature as to infuriate me in the extreme. These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the ‘ capitalistic ‘ (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience, etc. ”
His fellow workers certainly understood the socialist case (which is more than can be said of Owen’s) !
Yes but he believed the crap he spouted, ie wasn’t cynically pretending to be antisemitic just to win power. No doubt some of the capitalists who financed his party were but not him.
Found it. On Wikipedia in the entry on Hitler’s religious views. It’s a quote from Mein Kampf about his views when he first moved to Vienna before WW1:
“When he arrived in Vienna as a young man, Hitler claimed, he was not yet anti-Semitic: “In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith.” He thought that anti-Semitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: “The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles.” Instead, Hitler argued that Jews should be deplored on the basis of their “race”.”
I don’t think we can use that quote as his final, considered opinion.
There is a reasonably balanced article in the June issue of History Today on antisemitism, “Antisemitism: the Socialism of Fools”, from which I learnt a couple of things I don’t know before:
- That it was not August Bebel, the pre-WW1 leader of the German Social Democrats, who coined the phrase “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” but a certain Austrian Liberal politician called Ferdinand Kronawetter.
- That J. A. Hobson, author of a 1902 book Imperialism, was a bit of antisemite. It doesn’t surprise me as a lot of people were those days. What is surprising (though perhaps not) is that Corbyn should be accused of antisemitism for not mentioning this in an introduction to a new edition of the book. Lenin’s 1916 pamphlet Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism on imperialism relied in large part on Hobson’s book but he didn’t mention this either, but nobody has accused him of being antisemitic for not doing so. I daresay I have written about Hobson’s book without mentioning it either. But where does this absurd sort of deduction stop? Churchill is on record as making antisemitic remarks at the time of the Russian Revolution. Does this mean that anybody who writes about Churchill (Boris Johnson for instance) but doesn’t mention this is an antisemite?
What is the source and date of that quote as it not how the law under the Nazi government defined a Jew?
Of course Marx didn’t know about software, but he did anticipate what would happen if capitalism’s tendency to increase productivity (output per worker) continued indefinitely: it would result in individual commodities having so little direct labour content as to have a price close to zero. Software achieves this in certain fields today with digitalised sounds, images and writing. Once produced, anyone with a computer or similar device can, technically, access them for free. Steyer himself recognises this technical fact when he says there is now an ability to produce a song “infinitely at very low cost”. This means that they could be made available for free, but that’s not capitalism’s way. The digitalised song is private property thanks to copyright laws. That’s why Beyoncé, Rihanna and the rest are filthy rich. They are living off artificially created rent. Without this, their incomes under capitalism would be limited to the income from live performances and the sale of the first digitalised copy of any song (or video or photo); they would only recover the cost of producing it plus the going rate of profit. Steyer himself is also a parasite even by capitalist standards. He didn’t make his money by investing in production, but merely by buying stocks and shares at one price and selling them later at a higher price.
Wow ! Can we used that in the Socialist Standard as a definitive refutation of the nonsense/slander that Marx was some sort of post-modernist?
It looks as if those who financed, and won, the Leave campaign are beginning to reveal their hand — to take the UK out of the EU regulatory system and into the less strict US one.
The front page headline in yesterday’s Times was: “Johnson to seek Trump deal in first move as PM”. Mind you, that’s easier said than done as the US is likely to take advantage of Britain’s weakened negotiating position to extract the most advantageous deal for them that it can. After all, might is right is the law of the capitalist jungle (and why, in 1972, the British capitalist state, acting on behalf of thedominant section of the British capitalist class, decided to join a bigger trading bloc).
Further evidence that what is envisaged is “jazzed-up international payments system” from a piece in today’s Times headed: “Libra ‘will not compete with currencies'” which reports what a key executive will tell a US Senate hearing later today:
“David Marcus, head of Facebook’s libra project, also will say that the social network’s digital currency is not being built to compete with sovereign currencies and will not interfere with countries’ monetary policy.”
“The system will allow users to change pounds, dollars or other currencies into libra. Users will be able to buy items online and in shops or to transfer money to friends and family on Whatsaap and Facebook Messenger without the need for a bank account.”
Of course, Facebook will need to convince national state authorities that it won’t also be used for money laundering, tax dodging, etc.
What happened after WW1? Well, as this article from the June 1962 Socialist Standard put it, Russia put the clock back. The great majority of socialists and potential socialists were side-tracked into supporting Bolshevism, a doctrine that originated in any economically and politically backward country and took critics of capitalism back to a pre-Marxian stage and worse:
“Before 1914 Socialism had a definite meaning, understood by all who claimed to be Socialist. It meant the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution. This was accepted by the Social Democratic Parties that were developing in different parts of the world, most of whom gave allegiance to Marxism.
In these parties there were writers who made first class theoretical contributions to Marxism. Writers such as Plechanov, Kautsky, Labriola, Lafargue, Bauer, Boudin, Luxemburg, and many others. All of these people were in the Second International along with Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolsheviks. In fact, in those days, Lenin had a great respect for Plechanov, from whom he had learnt much, and he described Kautsky as one of the best theoreticians in the Socialist movement.
Where, however, they all came to grief was on the question of reformism. In theory they were sound, but on the practical side they were weak. Whilst advocating and writing about Socialism they also felt it incumbent upon them to take steps to try and ameliorate the conditions of the workers by having a lengthy platform of reforms. They also looked upon state ownership as a stepping stone to Socialism. This attitude attracted to the ranks of the Social Democratic Parties large numbers of people who were only interested in particular reforms, and had no real understanding of the class division in society or the Socialist objective. They gave lip service to the ideas without understanding them, or even being interested in them.
Had this been all that had happened, it might have been possible to rescue something out of the confusion, and spread sound Socialist understanding, after the 1914-1918 war. Particularly as workers everywhere, feeling that they had been betrayed, were in a ferment of discontent. But the Bolsheviks, by corruption, distortion, betrayal and mud slinging, destroyed this possibility, setting out by lies, trickery and distortion to politically, and sometimes physically, destroy all the parties and individuals who were not prepared to be abject tools of the Bolshevik dictatorship.”
Is this just Marx or can Engels be called as a witness? If so, there’s his famous explanation in his 1888 preface to the English translation of the Communist Manifesto where he explains why it couldn’t have been called the Socialist Manifesto in 1848 whereas if it had been published in 1888 this would have been what it could/would have been called.
There’s Marx’s comments in 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha Programme on the section of that programme which reads:
“Starting from these basic principles, the German workers’ party strives by all legal means for the free state—and—socialist society: that abolition of the wage system together with the iron law of wages — and—exploitation in every form; the elimination of all social and political inequality.”
In section II of his critique, where he lambasts the “iron law of wages”, he talks of critics using the existence of this so-called law to criticise “socialism”:
“Basing themselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for 50 years and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over the whole surface of society! “
In section IV where he lambasts the idea of a “free state” he uses the term “communist society” three times as the society that will follow on from capitalism and which he had already defined in section I as “the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production” where “the producers do not exchange their products.”
So, here, in the same piece of writing, he uses the words “socialism” and “communist society” to mean the same, and he doesn’t object to the Gotha Programme referring to what will replace capitalism and abolish the wages system as “socialist society”.
