ALB
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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”.
Though it is understandable why, in terms of dirty politics, both the pro-Israel lobby and the anti-Corbynites in the Labour Party should, independently, have thought it was a good idea to play the anti-Semite card against Corbyn, it is not clear that it is proving effective outside the media itself.
They may well have overplayed their hand, as it doesn’t seem to be having any effect on votes for the Labour Party. This will be due to a combination of people dismissing the claim that Corbyn is an anti-Semite as untrue (as it manifestly is) or because people don’t care or don’t think it important. Melanie Phillips, one of the traducers, drew attention to this last point in an article about the result of the Peterborough by-election in June where the Labour candidate, despite being targeted by the campaign, won with an increased majority:
“the by-election result shows that the stench of antisemitism is failing to repel the voters. Either they don’t care or, worse, they may actually be sympathetic – perhaps because they don’t like what they perceive as people ganging up on someone.”
The Socialist Standard also commented on the German elections of 1912 and 1919. The first, while conceding that there would have been some socialists among the members and voters of the SPD was scathing about the party as such. This was repeated in the second:
“For years we have pointed out that the Social Democratic Party of Germany – now called the “Majority Socialists” – was not a Socialist party. Its persistent support of the capitalist parties at elections, coupled with its advocacy of capitalist reforms, marked it off as merely a reform party similar to the Labour Party in this country, though it carried a Socialist name.”
It went on to say that any socialists would be found among the members and voters of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had broken away from the SPD over its support for the war (and included Kautsky and of all people, Bernstein and, before they split to form the Spartakist League, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg). It also clearly identified Karl Liebknecht as a socialist, though critical of his attempt to seize political power for socialism without majority working-class support (though unaware that the week before the issue appeared he had been murdered).
The USPD later split, with some (including Kautsky and Bernstein) going back to the SPD and others joining the KPD, or Communist Party of Germany as the Spartacist League had become (a few, including Liebknecht’s brother Theodor, refused to join either and kept the party going for a while) That was the problem: many of those who could be considered socialists were led astray by the Bolsheviks (including for a while Pannekoek before he realised that Bolshevik Russia was heading for state capitalism not socialism) and the trend towards the growth of socialist ideas halted and reversed. The Bolshevik seizure of power put the clock back as far as the growth of socialist ideas was concerned, as those who supported them absorbed ideas that meant that they were no longer recognisably socialists.
Actually individual articles there do have a unique URL but it’s not easy to find. There is a way but it’s very roundabout. Copy the title of the article into a search engine and its URL should appear. Copy that and paste it. On my browser the URL also appears briefly at the bottom lefthand corner but not long enough to capture it, but you can copy it by hand. It works for me, if anyone else wants to confirm it.
All this is not very practical, I agree, but not impossible.
Which article did you want to link to? Let me know and I will see if the above works for it.
Robert Michels’s 1911 book, Political Parties, in which he propounded his “iron law of oligarchy”, according to which democratic control of large organisations such as mass political parties and trade unions was not possible, was largely based on a study of the SPD of which he had been a member even of its radical wing and a parliamentary candidate (resigning in 1907) . He later, logically enough in a sense, became a member of Mussolini’s Fascist Party (arguing that charismatic leaders represented the masses better). Even so, there are some interesting insights in his book as to how the SPD was organised and operated. Essential reading for anyone who wants to go into this in detail.
The “radicals” in the SPD attributed its drift towards reformism as being due not so much to the bureaucratisation of the Party (after all Luxemburg and Pannekoek were at one time paid Party officials themselves) as to the fact that the SPD was the only party firmly committed to introducing political democracy in Germany and that this attracted the support, in both members and votes, from radical bourgeois democrats who wanted this rather than socialism. I don’t know how much there is in this nor how the SPD could have avoid advocating political democracy. Even Luxemburg regarded the proletariat as having to take up the torch of political democracy that the bourgeoisie had abandoned.
Speaking of her, there were only two SPD members whose articles were translated and published in the early Socialist Standard: her and Kautsky (the Party’s first three pamphlets were a translation authorised by him of most of his introduction to the Erfurt Programme).
I think the early Party members regarded the SPD pre-WW1 in the same way that Tony Benn, I think it was, regarded (mistakenly) the Labour Party as: while not a socialist party at least a “party with socialists in it.” After all, they had themselves just come out of such an organisation.
The problem of the pre-WW1 SPD is not so much why a once revolutionary socialist party went reformist (which has tended to be our approach, ie because it had a minimum programme of democratic and social reforms which attracted support for these rather than for socialism) but why what was always essentially a pro-democracy reformist party claimed for a period to be a revolutionary socialist one (a thesis subject for Alan’s Ph.D. candidate).
