ALB
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Good point. What can be abolished “overnight” is capitalist ownership and control of the means of production. All that requires is a decision by the state, once the socialist-minded working class has won control of it, to abolish the laws granting them this. What cannot be introduced overnight would be the full implementation of the principle of “from according to their ability, to each according to their needs” as that requires the reorganisation and reorientation of production.
I think the point that was being made was that there isn’t, and hasn’t been for decades, a century even, any need for a “transition period” during which there would be a further development of capitalism but under state control.
Hope the new forum has inherited the same facility as the old one had to delete and ban nuisance spammers like this one.
So Marx didn’t hold that capitalism paved the way for socialism by creating its material basis? That must have been Groucho Marx. Here’s what Karl Marx wrote in his Preface to A Critique of Political Economy:
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
I’d say by within a generation of Marx’s death in 1883, i.e by the end of the 19th century. By then, capitalism had come to dominate the whole world (a phenomenon some called “imperialism”, which began to be noted and commented on at this time). Also, with the application of electricity and chemistry to production and other technological advances(what has been called the “second industrial revolution”, see : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution ) the possibility of producing enough for all had been reached. In short, the material basis for socialism as a world system had been created,
Not an occasion to open a bottle of champagne I agree but perhaps worth a single muted cheer. After all, although we don’t advocate reforms we are not against all reforms on principle but can recognise that some can be of benefit.
Here’s the result of the referendum:
Good news of course but it remains to be seen what secondary legislation will replace it.
Since we’ve just been joined by our first troll since re-opening, another p.m.: To restore the way to deal with them that we had before, whatever it was. Was it moderating their posts before they appeared or something like that?
Actually, Richard Montague did write a short story called General Immunity Serum (A work of fiction?) which was proposed in 2003 as a Socialist Party pamphlet but the Executive Committee turned it down. Fortunately, someone else picked up the text which is available on the internet here:
http://right.is/politics/2015/02/general-immunity-serum-short-story-16348.html
Some copies were printed before the EC turned it down and were not supposed to circulate but of course they did. I have a copy and there are others in our archives.
It is also included in the Within The System that you mention.
Another work of fiction criticising capitalism is Castaways of Plenty. A Parable of Our Times by W. E. Hawkins, a science fiction writer influenced by the Technocracy movement (it was first published in 1935). Details here:
https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/content/castaways-plenty
If anyone wants a copy of Pieter Lawrence;s The Last Conflict they can get one from our Head Office.
It looks as if the end-of-history-is-capitalism man disagrees with the White House’s economists and has gone over to the reformist camp they criticise:
There is one passage where they make rather a large concession to the advocates of reformism and/or state capitalism:
In modern models of capitalist economies, there is, of course, an ample role for government. In particular, there are public goods and goods with externalities that will be inefficiently supplied by the free market. Public goods are undersupplied in a completely free market because there is a free rider problem. For example, if national defense, a public good enjoyed by the whole country, were sold at local supermarkets, few would contribute because they would feel their individual purchase would not matter and they would prefer others to contribute while still being defended. Consequently, the market would not provide sufficient defense.
The market doesn’t do this in other cases too, not that state intervention can rectify this.
Here you have to use <em for italics not <i. I made the same mistake over bold by using <b instead of <strong
We are all still learning !
I’ve now finished reading the 50 or so pages. We already know that it is not an attack on socialism/communism. It is in fact a criticism of any state intervention in the working of the competitive, profit-seeking capitalist economy (whether through state ownership or through state regulation) to redirect production, redistribute income or introduce free services (education, health care). According to the report, this leads to a misallocation of resources (ie not what the unregulated market would bring about) resulting in a lower standard of living all round. Hence “the opportunity costs of socialism” of the title.
The report says this applies just as much to the milk-and-water reformism practised in the Nordic countries as to what went on in the USSR under Stalin and China under Mao. It states explicitly that it has been drawn up because “socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse” and it attacks “Senator Sanders” and “Senator Warren” for standing, in a moderate form, for the same sort of thing as Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
To tell the truth, I was surprised at the extent that the authors are “mad marketeers”, citing with approval Hayek, Milton Friedman and … Margaret Thatcher. I can’t imagine that this is going to get them very far in the debate between raw capitalism and reformism. No doubt “Senator Sanders” and “Senator Warren” will be able to defend themselves but, as it’s not a debate between capitalism and socialism we don’t need to take sides, especially as we know that reformism doesn’t and cannot work.
It must be a good sign, though, that the word “socialism” has made “a comeback in US political discourse”. That gives us a chance to get a join in, if only to say that socialism is not about state ownership or regulation. In fact by stating that communism (which = socialism for Marx and us) has never been tried and is “a social arrangement where there is neither a state nor private property” (footnote p. 4) the White House has given us a perfect cue to intervene.
Yes, we will definitely deal with this in the Socialist Standard but note already from the passage quoted by Alan that it is self-confessedly not dealing with what the Leninists call “communism”, i.e what we mean by socialism, but what the Leninists mean by “socialism”, i.e. state capitalism which is neither socialism nor a step towards it.
For classical socialists, “communism” is a purely theoretical concept that has never yet been put into practice, which is why the second “S” in USSR stands for “Socialist.” Communism is, in their view, a social arrangement where there is neither a state nor private property; the abolition of property is not sufficient for communism. As Lenin explained, “The goal of socialism is communism.”
The classic Marxist work debunking Boehm-Bawerk is Rudolf Hilferding’s reply (1904):
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1904/criticism/index.htm
Ironically, while Boehm-Bawerk had been Finance Minister in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Hilferding was to become Finance Minister in Weimar Germany.
He was also debunked by Louis Boudin in his The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (1907) and by Nikolai Bukharin in his Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1927).
Bukharin book can be read here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1927/leisure-economics/index.htm
