ALB
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This seems a better way of arranging this sort of thing within capitalism than LETS schemes and their accounting, not that it's a challenge to capitalism of course:https://www.gofundme.com/el-cambalacheBut I'm sure people will see the irony of the opening lines of "the story".
It was written in Italian ! And was first published on the blog of our comrades in Italy:http://socialismo-mondiale.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/il-giovane-bordiga-parte-prima.html
This article has been translated into Swedish:http://www.worldsocialism.org/svenska/ryssland-var-aldrig-socialistiskt
Osama Jafar wrote:there is no solutions except for INDIVIDUAL solutions.It's not clear whether this is what you are saying or whether it's what you are criticising. In any event, it's wrong. Our problems arise from society, so the solution can only be a society-wide one.
You sound like Marx at his most paranoid over the belief he held that Tsarist Russia wanted to rule the world and had been scheming for centuries to achieve this and that it still was in his day; that Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister was a Russian spy and other such nonsense.Most of the statelets created in Middle Europe after the breakup of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian in WW1, all with minorities speaking a language of at least one one of the others, were so weak that they were bound to be dominated by either Russia or Germany, as they were by one or the other in the course of the last century. Now it's Germany (the EU) again. Socialists don't need to take sides in this, only the ruling elites in the states concerned do.
Quote:More than 80 percent of the Belarusian people can't speak Belarusian.So what? They are humans who happen to speak Russian as their mother-tongue and shouldn't be forced to speak some other language just to bolster some so-called "nation state" in the interests of its ruling class. And I bet that in this case the other 20% can, and probably do, all speak Russian, so what's the problem?
gnome wrote:Quote:….can’t we just rebalance capitalism: regulate the financial markets, and put rules in place about shareholders needing to act in the interests of long term sustainability?In theory, maybe…Quote:…in practice, probably not …I haven't read their statement yet, so I'm only commenting on the passage you quote, Gnome, just to say that , taken at face value, it doesn't seem to necessarily be "confused drivel". It seems to be making the point that capitalism can't be "rebalanced" (cannot be reformed?) and so should be replaced by something else. That should provide Tim with a good way in to introduce socialism.I'm sure there must be other passages that might merit more being called "confused".
Osama Jafar wrote:once you end soveregin state there no capitalism. [Not necessarily. It's more like the other way round: once you end capitalism states disappear. That's what the argument is about. Your view means concentrating on getting rid of the states into which the world is now divided. This would create a world consciousness (which would be a good thing) but not necessarily a socialist, ant-capitalist one (in an earlier post you envisaged markets and money continuing to exist after the end of sovereign states). Our analysis means concentrating on helping a world socialist consciousness to arise. As states are armed centres serving the interest of a ruling class, the end of class society will mean the end of states (and their replacement by unarmed, democratically controlled administrative centres).
Sympo wrote:So transportation is productive labour?Yes, that was what was taught at SPGB economics classes. It is based on what Marx wrote in section 3 on "transport costs" of chapter 6 of Volume 2 of Capital:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm#3
Quote:It is not necessary to go here into all the details of the costs of circulation, such as packing, sorting, etc. The general law is that all costs of circulation, which arise only from changes in the forms of commodities do not add to their value. They are merely expenses incurred in the realisation of the value or in its conversion from one form into another. The capital spent to meet those costs (including the labour done under its control) belongs among the faux frais of capitalist production. They must be replaced from the surplus-product and constitute, as far as the entire capitalist class is concerned, a deduction from the surplus-value or surplus-product, just as the time a labourer needs for the purchase of his means of subsistence is lost time. But the costs of transportation play a too important part to pass them by without a few brief remarks. (….)Quantities of products are not increased by transportation. Nor, with a few exceptions, is the possible alteration of their natural qualities, brought about by transportation, an intentional useful effect; it is rather an unavoidable evil. But the use-value of things is materialised only in their consumption, and their consumption may necessitate a change of location of these things, hence may require an additional process of production, in the transport industry. The productive capital invested in this industry imparts value to the transported products, partly by transferring value from the means of transportation, partly by adding value through the labour performed in transport. This last-named increment of value consists, as it does in all capitalist production, of a replacement of wages and of surplus-value.Within each process of production, a great role is played by the change of location of the subject of labour and the required instruments of labour and labour-power — such as cotton trucked from the carding to the spinning room or coal hoisted from the shaft to the surface. The transition of the finished product as finished goods from one independent place of production to another located at a distance shows the same phenomenon, only on a larger scale. The transport of products from one productive establishment to another is furthermore followed by the passage of the finished products from the sphere of production to that of consumption. The product is not ready for consumption until it has completed these movements.Osama Jafar wrote:Alb, once you end soveregin state you have that; & that is only a part. (….) The what to do is not that hard neither, for people to achieve thier freedom from control need abuse & ignorance, they should gather thier forces a globaly/ territory to force ending governments & establish organizations thier sole purpose is to end the need for those organizations – not sustianing its ever existence! – to handle later its business and all its jobs to the generaly known now possible the global producer net. there no need for physical bodily gatherings for the metaphysical cyber gatherings have made it possible to force this major territory/global change..It's a question of which comes first: ending the division of the world into states or ending capitalism (production for profit on the basis of minority ownership of the means of life)? The present division of the world into separate, competing states is a consequence of capitalism and capitalist competition and so won't disappear until capitalism does. True, it is theoretically possible to imagine capitalism with a single world State but that's not worth striving for (and, if it happened, would be a nightmare).The issue of the relation between capitalism and the division of the world into rival states is discussed in the (second) book review here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2016/no-1345-september-2016/book-reviews-wealth-secrets-1-nation-states-con
Quote:at the last count the world is divided into some 194 states and statelets. Davidson discusses why in the chapter entitled ‘The Necessity for Multiple Nation-States for Capital’. The emphasis here is on ‘necessity’ as he is arguing against both the possibility of a single world capitalist state and that the world just happens to be divided into capitalist states but doesn’t have to be, positions defended by some of those he is arguing with (including SWP leader Callinicos who defends the second).His argument is that capitalism is necessarily a competitive system for profits and that states are, and have to be, just as much involved in this as capitalist enterprises:‘Capitalism is a system of competitive accumulation based on wage labor, and these two defining aspects also point to the reason for the persistence of the states system: on the one hand, the need for capitals to be territorially aggregated for competitive purposes; on the other, the need for that territory to have an ideological basis – nationalism – that can be used to bind the working class to the state and hence to capital.’So, to bring about the end of states you'd have to undermine nationalism in favour of a world consciousness, which will have to be done to get socialism anyway.Only on the basis of the common ownership of the Earth's resources can states (as armed centres managing the affairs of a ruling class) be abolished and replaced by unarmed purely administrative bodies. No doubt computers can play a role in this, but not decide everything (as Zeitgeist sometimes suggest) — in the end that will down to what people democratically decide.
Did somebody really say that in a restaurant the chef was an example of a productive worker and a waiter of an unproductive one? If so, that doesm't strike me as correct as transport is part of production (part of fashioning materials that originally came from nature into something useful). Food in the kitchen is no more a finished product than coal at the pithead — to be useful they need to be transported to where they are going to be used. The non-productive workers in a restaurant will be those who order and arrange to pay for the food that is to be cooked, those who count the money collected from customers, and those who calculate the wages of the chef, the waiters and other staff.Anyway, surplus value is best seen as not just being produced at the level of individual businesses (that's where it's turned into profit) but at the level of the economy as a whole, so that salaries of civil servants (including elected ones like Corbyn) will come out of the surplus value produced by the productive section of the working class as a whole.
Another letter this week from Robbo demolishing the whole idea of "market socialism". Another, signed Jack Conrad, endorsing the view that the market, money, etc should continue to exist for a whole in the early days (and years?) of "socialism":http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1136/letters/Wrong guess from the letters editor that Robbo is actually a member of the SPGB. Hard to distinguish, I agree.
Hadn't realised yet that 2017 is the 150th anniversary of Marx's Capital. We should do something too.
Anything, I suppose, must be a better xmas no 1 than last year's (or was it the year before?) one by the military wives.
Sympo, here's the supporting statement for an item for discussion, put down by the old Haringey branch, at our 1973 Annual Conference:
Quote:What is a Capitalist?One of our current pamphlets, The Case for Socialism, outlines a capitalist as follows:“What makes a person a member of the Capitalist class is the fact that he has enough ownership in the form of bonds, stocks and shares to enable him to live without going to work for a wage” (page 11).We suggest, that this traditional definition is inadequate for the following reasons:1. It is not comprehensive enough as it does not include those members of the capitalist class who, as in Russia, do have to work and do not have large amounts of legal property titles.2. It implies that capitalists can only own the means of production as individuals through legal property titles in their own names. But this has been proved historically to be only one form of capitalist ownership. In Russia this has largely taken another form: collective ownership by a group which controls the State and its industries. The common content of both is actual control of access to the means of production (plus preferential treatment in the distribution of the products), whether legally recognised or not. This fact is not reflected in the definition.3. In emphasizing the high income of the capitalists it places their preferential treatment in the distribution of the products above their more basic position with regard to the production of wealth. In fact it makes no reference at all to their function in social production and does not allow for any distinction between the capitalist class and, for instance, a landowning aristocracy whose members also own sufficient wealth so as not to need to work for wages.Any adequate definition of a capitalist must highlight their function in capitalist production (not production as such, mind you, so we are not looking for a technical function: we wouldn’t find one anyway since, from a technical point of view, production is run from top to bottom by the working class).The aim of capitalist production is not (contrary to what we sometimes suggest in our necessarily simplified outdoor propaganda) primarily the consumption of the capitalists any more than it is the consumption of the workers: it is the accumulation of capital, as Marx showed in Capita, at the expense of consumption. The function of the capitalist class in the social process of capitalist production is, therefore, to hold back consumption so that the maximum amount of capital can be accumulated. Or, to put it another way, to restrict the consumption of the working class to a minimum compatible with productive efficiency so that the maximum amount of the surplus value they produce can be reinvested as capital. Marx spoke of the capitalists as "personifying capital", saying:"Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalists, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels (emphasis added, Capital, Vol.1, the section on the theory of abstinence).(Marx went on, incidentally, to state quite clearly that he did not regard the aim of capitalist production as the consumption of the capitalist: "So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital — endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is a robbery perpetuated on accumulation. .. ").Engels, in the often-quoted passage from his Socialism , Utopian and Scientific used the same formulation when he described the modern State as ''the ideal personification of the total national capital". The implication being, though Engels does not specifically say so, that capital would be personified under State control of industry by those who controlled the State and the key investment decisions.This of course is another way of putting our case that any party or group which takes on the running of capitalism must come into conflict with the working class because it will have to restrict the consumption of the working class in the interests of capital accumulation (not, as we again mistakenly tend to suggest, the personal consumption of the capitalists).Not that every group that, for however short a period and however chosen, presides over the accumulation of capital can be described as a capitalist class; a ruling class has to have some preferential treatment in the distribution of products. But what we can say is that any group which, through its control of the State, does "personify capital" over a longish period will tend to become a capitalist class, even if it doesn't get the legal right to draw a property income. This is essentially what happened in Russia after 1917.To sum up, the rise of State capitalism —in Britain as well as Russia —has clearly exposed as inadequate the traditional definition of a Capitalist as a person who has sufficient personal wealth and legal property income not to need to work for wages. It is not so easy, however, to frame an alternative. We offer, for discussion, something along the following lines:“A capitalist is a member of a stable group which over a longish period… .. directs the accumulation of capital/runs capitalism/ personifies capital.”
