ALB
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“… a dangerous belief. This is the same as when people say that personal choices of consumers are responsible for the environment. No, we are not responsible. When they build cheap fast underground mag-lev trains I will stop flying, but demanding that I alone stop airplane industry by refusing to fly is nothing more than capitalist propaganda, it is impossible. “
Good point, Schekn, but I’m not sure that all those around XR have understood it. While their campaign is aimed at pressuring governments to do more to tackle the problems caused by global overwarming, it would also seem to be aimed at pressuring ordinary people into not flying, not driving a car, not eating meat, etc. As an attack on people’s lifestyles, this will not win them support. Just the opposite. Coupled with disruptions to everyday life, it will create resentment and antagonism not just to them but to their aim and so provide a potential mass base for vested interests to manipulate. Completely counter-productive. I’ve got no problem, by the way, with kids taking a day off school. That doesn’t harm anybody. Good luck to them.
It is not as if people don’t already know about the dangers of global overwarming. Most do and are sympathetic to something being done about it. We shouldn’t be antagonising them but explaining the cause (capitalism) and the way-out (socialism as the common ownership of the Earth’s resources). Not so exciting but more effective in the long run.
Good stuff, Alan. Liked the bit about the important distinction between resources consumption per head (which includes all the waste of capitalism represented by everything to do with buying and selling and with the military) and personal consumption; which means that, with the abolition of capitalism, personal consumption levels can be maintained (albeit more rational in the absence of advertising and adulteration with sugar, etc) and even increased in the parts of the world without using up more resources.
We are of course all “ordinary people” but there is another aspect. At the moment, when socialists are so very few, a higher degree of understanding of the workings of capitalism and the course of history, are required of socialists (at least of organised socialists) than will be the case when the socialist movement takes off and begins to become a mass movement.
To be a socialist, all that is required basically is:
- To realise that capitalism does not work and cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority, those excluded from ownership and control of the means of life.
- To want socialism (as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life, with production and distribution to directly satisfy people’s needs) and understand its implications.
- To realise that socialism can only be established democratically by a majority who want and understand it.
These are relatively simple propositions and do not necessarily require much reading or even being literate for that matter.
However, today, most people do not accept (1) and don’t want (2). So the few of us today who are socialists have to be able to convincingly argue that capitalism can’t be reformed to work in the interest of the majority. Yes, this does require some reading (though it is also evident on the basis of lived experience). With regard to (2), most people don’t think it possible; so, here again, some knowledge of “human nature” and past societies is required. As to (3), the disagreement here is generally with people who already largely accept (1) and (2) but refuting the view that socialism could be achieved through some other means (minority insurrection, gradualism, following leaders, dictatorship) does, again, require some knowledge of past attempts to escape from capitalism and why they failed. More reading.
So, yes, socialists today do need to be more well-read than most people are or need to be. But when the movement takes off, people who want socialism won’t need to have read up on economics, history, anthropology, etc. They will just need to want socialism. Then the time of arguing against capitalism and for socialism will be over; which, incidentally, won’t have come about purely from the arguments of socialists but also, even mainly, from external events making people really discontented with capitalism (even, who knows, some eco9logical catastrophe or war). It will be the time for the growing socialist minority to be discussing how to bring it into being.
So, no, we are not saying that to get socialism a majority will have had to have read Marx.
To blame popular consumption (what people consume) for exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for humans is to assume that meeting people’s needs is the aim of production today whereas the actual aim is to accumulate capital out of profits.
Popular consumption is in fact a function of capital accumulation. The more capital accumulates the more people are employed or drawn into employment the more popular consumption increases. And vice versa as the drop in capital accumulation (slump) that followed the Crash of 2008 showed when greenhouse gas emissions slowed down.
If under capitalism people were to reduce their consumption or consume more efficiently the result would be more of what was produced would go to the profit-seeking and capital-seeking minority as profits.
Capitalism is an economic system governed by relentless economic laws from which there is no escape; which is why it can never work and can never be made to work in the interest of the majority or of the planet. It has to go and be replaced by the common ownership of the Earth’s resources before anything constructive and lasting can be done to tackle the threat of global overworking in a rational way. There is no alternative.
There is a chapter on “The Myth of Overpopulation” in one of our old pamphlets here. Although the sources are dated the basic argument remains.
In the meantime humanity’s technological capacity has increased more than population. After surveying these, Aaron Bastani concludes in his recent book Fully Automated Luxury Communism:
“[T}here is more than enough technology for everyone on Earth to live healthy, happy, fulfilling lives. What stands in the way isn’t the inevitable scarcity of nature, but the artificial scarcity of market rationing and ensuring that everything, at all costs, is produced for profit.’ (p. 156)
Meanwhile, as mentioned on another thread, Zeitgeist sympathiser Lee Camp tweets:
“There are millions who need food, healthcare, therapy, shelter, & education. There’s a society that needs saving from catastrophic climate change. Yet these problems don’t get solved because our economic system seeks profit over all else & that’s sociopathic.”
Ever since Malthus’s day “overpopulation” has been used as an argument against the possibility of a better society. It’s a shame that so many ecologists and Greens have fallen for it and so shooting themselves in the foot. It’s the profit system that’s to blame, not overpopulation.
“We need socialism urgently, so planning to sit back and slowly get more party members is not quick enough, we may be too late. XR movement people understand this. “ Yes, but that begs the question by assuming that something effective and lasting can be done about climate change outside of the socialist framework of the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources, i.e under capitalism. Which it can’t be. So the best thing we few socialists today can do is to put over the case that socialism is the only way-out and whose establishment requires majority agreement and participation. There is the most effective thing we socialists can do now.
There is a methodological problem here. which the quoted statistics don’t take into account Currently, the Earth’s 8 billion people are living in a capitalist society much of whose use of resources has nothing to do with feeding, clothing, housing, etc the population but is used for capitalism’s huge superstructure of buying and selling and preparations for war. If this waste were eliminated, as it would be in a socialist society, then the impact of a population of 8 million (or more) would be far less. Logically, then, any overuse of the Earth’s resources should be attributed to the existence of capitalism not to the number of people. To deal with it, the answer would be to get rid of capitalism not reduce the population.
Just got round to reading this. There is practically nothing in the first 6 pages, describing the ideology of the groups studied, that we would disagree with. For instance:
“Vanguardism is the core ideology of the sectarian far left. Most influentially expressed by Vladimir Lenin in What is to be done? (1988 [1902]), it is a belief system structured around the ambition to replace the current social, economic, and political system with ‘communism’. This is conceived as an ideal mode of existence in which there are no class differences, no state, and no market economy. Vanguardism is distinguished from related forms of radical left wing ideology by the idea that, while history inevitably moves towards communism, it will be able to reach that destination only after the workers have been led into a mass uprising by an elite cadre of professional revolutionaries, initiating a transitional phase known as ‘socialism’ or ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Vanguardists do not take up arms against the state, because their long-term strategy is the weaponisation of the working class itself. They implicitly conceive contemporary society as a conspiracy against the workers (in contradiction of Marx; see Popper 1969, p. 125), and for that reason attempt conspiracies of their own: ultimately, to bring down the state and seize control of industry, but, in the shorter term, to take control of non-radical organisations in order to radicalise their members. There would appear to be a contradiction at the heart of vanguardism. Revolution is understood both as the predestined self-liberation of the working class and as achievable only through the intervention of an elite leadership. “
They go on to discuss the vanguardists rather special definitions of “imperialism” and “fascism” and so of “anti-imperialism” (basically anti-Americanism) and “anti-fascism”. Then follows the technical part of their research (analysis of replies to questionnaires, etc). The conclusion is that, although these groups are committed on paper to the violent overthrow of the capitalist state, this is just talk, and anyway is not shared by those more moderate leftwingers they seek to recruit. The danger (from the government’s point of view) is the ideological support given to anti-American and anti-Israel groups that do use terrorism as a tactic.
They also find that vanguardist ideology and practice is more attractive to young males than to older people and to women generally.
There is something worrying about the tactics the leaders of XR (Roger Hallam, etc) are getting well-meaning but naïve people concerned about climate change to engage in, i.e. disrupting the everyday life of other workers. This will inevitably provoke a backlash and so make people not to care about the problem. So, instead of consciousness-raising, it would be consciousness-lowering.
There is also the unrealistic nature of the demands, as expressed by the health care worker from Birmingham. First, the extinction of the human race is not a reasonable worst case scenario (it is only the most worst case scenario imaginable, unless you want to add Earth becoming a fiery inferno like Venus). Second, the government is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025; due to competitive pressures it couldn’t even if it wanted to, quite apart from the drastic cut in the standard of living being politically unacceptable. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that, were socialism to be established tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to achieve that target. With capitalism gone, we’d be able to make quicker progress towards it, but reach it in only five years? Especially when the most immediate problem is going to be to end world poverty and its effects.
Disappointing in that it could have been written anytime in the last 80 or so years. It adds nothing new to what has been written on this before. But he does identify that capitalism’s problem is not markets (or lack of them) but the incentive to accumulate capital and that if you think it’s markets then you will end up like David Harvey as in effect a leftwing Keynesian.
Seeing that it comes from the Marxist-Humanists, who realise that exchange and so exchange-value and value can’t exist in socialism, I thought it might develop the idea that if capital, invested in technology and machinery, kept on reducing the rate of profit the stage might theoretically be reached when individual commodities might contain so little labour as to have no price, a stage that of course would never be reached. After all, he did say he was going to write about how the fall in the rate of profit created the material basis for socialism.
He seems to have been influenced by Peter Joseph and the Zeitgeist movement. Type Lee Camp and Peter Joseph into a search engine and see what comes up.
There is an amusing story in the christian part of the bible. Jesus is brought before the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, and tells him “I am the truth”. Pilate replies “What is the truth?” and asks the crowd outside to vote on it. They decide that the truth is that Jesus is not the truth. Which actually happened to be true, though not because they voted that it was.
“to treat Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a serious contribution to the philosophy of science, as Richey does, is ridiculous. As anyone who has tried to read it knows, it is just a rant against some of Lenin’s opponents within the Bolshevik Party in 1908 who he accuses, quite unjustly (but quite typically), of harbouring or condoning religious views just because they rejected his crude and untenable view that the mind merely reflects and photographs (as opposed to mentally reconstructs) the external world. ”
— extract from a review of Anton Pannekoek’s Lenin As Philosophy, in the July 2003 Socialist Standard.
