ALB
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User555net wrote:Have you ever wondered the amount of money spent in warfare’s
Yes, many times. It's part of the waste and misuse of resources built into capitalism.
User555net wrote:and how that money could help the people in needs?In theory it could, but in practice it wouldn't as capitalism is not a system geared to meeting people's needs. Before adequate resources can be properly directed to this we need to get rid of the whole profit system and replace it by one where resources are owned in common and so can be used, under democratic control, to provide what people indicate they need. This can be done directly, without money, according to the principle "from each their ability, to each their needs".
I see Paxman has since come out as a "One Nation Tory" and has been canvassed but turned down being the Tory candidate for Mayor of London in 2016:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/tories-urge-jeremy-paxman-to-run-for-london-mayor-9889047.html
Yes, there are plenty of "Asian" capitalists (quite a few figure in the Sunday Times Rich List) and African kleptocrats. It's true, though, that people from the West Indies seem to be under-represented in the higher ranks of the capitalist class.
Agreed, we could take up the question of "human weaknesses" (but they presumably exist as nobody's perfect) but there's nothing wrong with "resource management" as isn't doing this rationally what socialism is about? But this part (emphasis added) is something for one of us to take up:
Quote:We should be aiming for a utopia: the best of societies, the one that provides in the highest degree all that a society should provide to its citizens. In utopia, the individual is the fundamental reality, not the state. Its fundamental concerns are respecting the natural rights of each person, which entails justice and the happiness of each (as opposed to justice and happiness for classes, averages, or majorities). To achieve this, society should be organized under the governance of robots.After all, we've got a talk entitled "I for one welcome our new robot overlords" (even if it's a provocative title not supposed to be taken too literally):http://www.meetup.com/The-Socialist-Party-of-Great-Britain/events/192228162/
Yesterday Podemos presented its "realistic" economic programme:
Quote:Podemos, the new left-wing party that has taken Spanish politics by storm, unveiled plans for a swathe of economic reforms yesterday, including the nationalisation of key industries, tax rises and banning redundancies at profitable companies, as part of an emergency programme to pull the country out of six years of financial crisis.Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed leader of Podemos, which means “We Can”, said his party was launching a realistic programme to help Europe’s fourth biggest economy to recover, and reduce its devastating unemployment. (….)It proposes to make it illegal for Spaniards to be denied access to borrowing, and would seek to secure loans from the European Central Bank to families and small businesses on the same terms as private banks. The measure is designed to encourage spending to help to boost growth and investment to small businesses.Mr Iglesias said he would cut the retirement age from 66 to 60 to free up jobs for young people and raise taxes to pay for a Nordic-srtyle welfare system. Podemos also proposes to introduce a 35-hour week and nationalise key industries such as energy companies.Mr Iglesias proposed to cut state incentives for short-term employment contracts, on which many Spaniards are employed, and introduce fiscal reform to improve tax collection.The party would raise funds by cutting expenditure on Spain's high-speed rail network and use the proceeds to pay for schools.And they call us impossibilists!Another new party with feet of clay.
Looks as if this thread could be combined with the one on diversity under General Discussion. These people could borrow from the apartheid era in South Africa for a definition of "non-white", though in their case to exclude "whites".
Interesting article here by Danny Dorling on the decline of racist attitudes:http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id4238.pdfHistory is on our side on this one.
Quote:Walmart spokesperson, Kory Lundberg, thinks this is all just the most wonderful thing—bragging that the drive to collect holiday food for fellow employees shows just how much Walmart employees care about one another.[/quote]Maybe that's why they call it Black Friday:http://www.asda.com/blackfriday/index.htmlIt's today if you're interested.
Vin wrote:I agree tho' that socialists need to find a way to explain exploitation in simple terms.One of the problems we face these days is that many, perhaps most workers in an advanced capitalist part of the world like Britain, are not actually producing any "value" let alone any "surplus value". Some of them can still be said to be "exploited" in the sense of capturing for their employers more surplus value produced elsewhere than what they are paid in wages. Others are in effect just servants of the capitalist class as a whole paid out of the surplus value produced by the productive section of the working class, i.e part of the consumer spending of the capitalist class.There are various ways out of this, the most plausible being that the working class as a whole (irrespective of the job they do) are exploited by the capitalist class as a whole. This is plausible because, although health workers, teachers, civil servants don't produce any value their work helps the functioning of the capitalist system and without it the productive section of the working class would not be able to produce as much value and surplus value as they do.This could even be explained without needing to have recourse to the concept of value, by just using a Labour Theory of Wealth. It is obvious that wealth (useful things) can only be produced by humans applying their mental and physical energies to materials that originally came from nature. So that if anyone gets an income merely as a result of ownership rights that person is living off the backs of those who work and so are exploiters. The concept of "scrounger" is already well understood by most workers, though seriously misapplied.Of course it could still be explained in terms of value and surplus value, but our critique of capitalism should also concentrate on the indignity of "wage slavery" and on the corrosive effects of money and of not having it on people's life and society in general. I think in fact that this has already happened though we don't always realise it.
From the New Speakers Handbook on this site here:
Quote:7. What is value?A social relationship between people which expresses itself as a material relationship between things. The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary abstract labour time needed for its production and reproduction. Price is the monetary expression of value.8. What is exchange value? A relative magnitude which expresses the relationship between two commodities. The proportion in which commodities tend to exchange with each other depends upon the amount of socially necessary labour-time spent in producing them. Commodities actually sell at market prices that rise and fall according to market conditions around a point regulated by their value.13. Will value exist under socialism? No. Value exists only under certain social conditions and relationships, where things (including human labour power) take the form of commodities to be bought and sold on the market. In a socialist society there will be common ownership, and so no commodities, just freely given and taken services and. products. So exchange value will not exist, the law of value will not hold – leaving only use value. All production will be for use, or for the satisfaction of human need.58. Did feudal peasants produce surplus value? No. They performed surplus labour upon the fields of the lord or rendered to him a portion of their own produce and these were both unpaid labour. But the products of this surplus labour did not uniformly come onto a market; they were for consumption in the manor or for exchange in the village mostly. Surplus value is a peculiarity of the wage relationship and generalised commodity production under capitalism.I agree, Vin. I don't see why he thinks this sort of criticism is relevant to us. We have never said that "value" is a thing. Others have, but not us. See this criticism (the first item) of the old De Leonist SLP by someone expressing a view similar to ours:https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/english-pages/1969-02-why-we-have-resigned-from-the-socialist-labour-party-of-great-britain/He should direct his criticism at Maoists and others who do think that value is a thing and one that will survive into socialism. Our maybe he can form a united front with us against them on this issue.
LBird wrote:Comrades just have to understand that not everything ‘powerful’ in nature is ‘material’ (in a ‘touchable’ sense). Perhaps like magnetism or gravity: they have power, but can’t be touched.As an explanation of ‘value’, though, I think that this will be rejected by the ‘materialists’, who like their ‘things’ to be concrete.Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB will know that we have always insisted that "value" is a social relationship, i.e between people, but which expresses itself as a relationship between things (commodities). The same for "capital" which is a sum of values. And in fact for "money". We don't want to simply abolish the thing of money but the social relationships that give rise to it.Members have been hauled over the coals for describing "value" as a relation between things. There was a famous incident in the 1970s when an article in the Socialist Standard which said this had to be repudiated. And woe betide any speaker who talked about the "ownership" of capital. Because of course if "value" and "capital" were things it could be argued, as by certain advocates of state capitalism masquerading as socialists, that they could survive into socialism. In fact this is "marxist-leninist" orthodoxy.I don't think even 18th crude materialists would have any problem accounting for gravity and magnetism, though more modern ones might baulk at reviving Aristotle's idea that there are hidden forces at work. But let's not digress.
LBird wrote:YMS wrote:In a way the value is the thing in itself…[my bold]Yeah, that's what the materialists say.
I thought LBird knew his history of philosophy. The "thing in itself" is not a "materialist" concept, but an idealist one thought up by Kant to explain what lay behind the world of experience. It has more in common with "Critical Realism's" mysterious "non-physical causal powers". Dietzgen's materialism was based on denying that there was such a thing as a "things in itself" ("noumena") "and that all that existed were "phenomena" that could be experienced; there was nothing behind them that caused them to appear.But of course LBird is right. "Value", for Marx, is not a thing. It's a social relationship. Under petty-commodity production (which never existed, but is just a theoretical model) the relationship between independent commodity producers. Under capitalism (which does exist) it's an expression of the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. Which is why, of course, it won't exist in socialism since there'll no longer be production for sale (production of commodities) and no longer that relationship.There's a definition of "value" in the Marxian sense in the education document section of this site here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism/vSee also the definition of exchange value (stop off to see Engels on the way down if you want):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism/e
