ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
North East branch may not meet regularly (in fact not at all) but they still have their supply of basic Party pamphlets and regular Socialist Standard order. Some more recent leaflets, including the new Introductory one and the one on Identity, have been posted to them today.
hallblithe wrote:Another academic remarks:Classes can be identified “on paper” by charting out the capital structures in a multidimensional space of capitals, and by locating the positions within this multidimensional hierarchy. Whether or not these classes also become actual classes, i.e. mobilized groups for struggles, is a different story.I don't know about Bourdieusianism but this sounds a bit like Marx's distinction between a "class in itself" and a "class for itself".
I was merely suggesting that we were not alone in not liking to describe socialism as an "economy". In fact, anyone who has understood and agrees with the point Marx was trying to make in the famous chapter in Capital on "the fetishism of commodities" must take up this position.As to Occupy, it turned out to be a big disappointment and was more important for what it was perceived to be ("anticapitalist") than for what it actually was. Many of those prominent at the St Pauls site refused to consider themselves anti-capitalist (and were instrumental in getting a banner criticising capitalism taken down) being rather monetary and banking reformers. In fact, sadly, a revival of currency crankism and funny money theories seems to have been its main legacy, at least in Britain.The divide in the discussion here seems to be between breathless enthusiasm for anything that moves (until something else moves) and alleged kneejerk rejection as reformism of anything that moves. Both of these positions are no doubt caricatures but the difference is that we don't live up to ours.
It's not just us being "sectarian" in not referring to socialism as an "economy" and in saying that socialism will in fact mean the end of "economics" (since there'll be nothing for it to study). That communism (as they prefer to call it) will mean the end both of "economics" and of "politics" is widely held in libcom circles, eg by those on the libcom forum who call themselves communists.So the dividing line is not between us and the rest but between those who see socialism/communism as necessarily a non-money, non-market (and so non-economic) society (a much wider group of people than just us) and those who see "socialism" as a planned "economy", i.e the planned production of goods for sale.
stuartw2112 wrote:I was interested, back at the height of Occupy, to see that many people were reading their Hayek. Might decentralised democratic decision making lead to the emergence of spontaneous economic (socialist) orders, something like Hayek argued happened with free markets? Might an Occupy consensus model if it took off lead spontaneously, without central planning, to a socialist economic order? Probably not, but I'm sure there's interesting debates to be had here, work to be done.Actually, this sounds a bit like Robin Cox's "Guildford Road to Socialism" which we debated in the early 90s (the exchanges are on the files section of the WSM Forum). Only Robin didn't rule out winning control of (central) political power too at some stage. So we've sort of been here before.
You're right, Stuart, that whether we refer to socialism as an "economy" is a matter of definition of the word "economy". You may well be right that most people wouldn't regard the term "socialist economy" as a contradiction, but that would probably be because they envisage "socislism" as having the familiar features of today's "economy", i.e. production for the market, monetary incomes, etc.My point was that this is not how Marx and many in the Marxist tradition (including us) would describe socialism. For instance, in her series of lectures later published as What is Economics? Rosa Luxemburg concludes that it is the study of the impersonal economic laws that come into operation as if they were natural laws when there is generalised production for sale on a market with a view to profit. The subject of "economics" is "the economy" that comes into being under these conditions.In other words, "economics" is not the study of the production and allocation of resources as such but the study of this when there is an "economy". Economics only arose with capitalism, as in previous societies, where there was production and distribution (and, in most, exploitation) for direct use, there was no need for a special branch of science to study this: it was transparent. For the same reason, there will be no role for "economics" in socialism, precisely because socialism won't be an economy.OK, this is just a definition, but it's the Marxist one. Having said this, I don't think it's a capital offence to talk of a "socialist economy" when arguing with people who have a different definition of economics (usually the conventional one that it's the study of the allocation of scare resources to competing ends — rather than this only where's there's production for sale and profit). I must have done it myself.You might mean by "planned economy" what we mean by socialism, but I doubt Ken Loach or most of the other Left Unifiers do.
It's not the Co-op Bank or having an account there that's the quackery. I've got one there myself and am also a member of the Co-operative Movement (for the divi). It's the claim of groups like Move Your Money (slogan on their homepage: "Using consumer power to build a better banking system") that consumers can somehow influence what happens under capitalism by the exercise of so-called "consumer power". That's the "quack remedy" that's hit the dust.I don't know if you meant to explain the Co-op Bank's current difficulties as being the result of pursuing an "ethical" rather than an income-maximising investment policy, did you?
Young Master Smeet wrote:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htmCharlie wrote:If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?Paresh Chattopadhyay interprets this passage above as a rejection of planning from a single centre ("central planning"):
Quote:The habitual discussion on the possibility (or otherwise) and method(s) of rational economic calculation in socialism has been carried out in terms of the opposites :’plan’ vs.’market’ where plan stands for socialism and market for capitalism. For socialists, planning is supposed to eliminate what Marx often calls ‘anarchy of the market’ reigning under capital leading to economic fluctuations and crises. But what kind of planning for socialism is in question? For a large number of people, both Right and Left, largely under the impact of the experience of planning in the post-1917 Russia, the type of planning considered in this connection has been central planning on the basis of mainly state ownership of the means of production which has been taken as the hall mark of socialism. (…) this view of planning, centralized at the highest level, is the very opposite of the type projected by the 1871 communards for the free society of the future and summarized by Marx (as given above) as decentralized planning by the associated producers.[his emphasis]Personally, I'm not convinced that Marx did envisage "planning" in socialism as being decentralised to that degree, even though he clearly did not envisage the sort of planning that was tried in state-capitalist Russia. Nor do I think he would have used the term "planned economy" since he didn't envisage socialism being an "economy".
Another Miliband and capitalism quote here:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/29/ed-miliband-labour-leadership-changeAnd that was before he was elected Labour Party leader, in fact was one of his leadership campaign promises.Another one here. They're on to him in France too.
stuartw2112 wrote:Adam: Oh, I don't know. Zeus?In that case the appropriate phrase would be "it's in the lap of the gods" as Homer put it.
stuartw2112 wrote:But we do the work anyway and leave the results to 'god', as Ghandi put it.I think Napoleon put it better when he said "You commit yourself and then you see" ( "On s'engage et puis on voit"). Lenin liked it too. But look what happened to them. Anyway, I wonder which particular god Gandhi had in mind.
Professor Mike Savange (one of those behind the new classification) does indeed seem to be saying something similar to us, i. e. that the real division in present-day society is not between a "middle class" and a "working class" but between an "elite" and the rest:
Quote:Previous models of class, with their concern around the boundaries between middle and working class are supplanted by three other dynamics which run through our analysis. We can define these as (a) the role of the outliers and especially those at the ‘top end’ of the class structure, (b) boundaries of age and generation, and (c) the redefinition of expertise and technique. Let me address these in turn.We felt that one of our most striking findings from the GBCS is the clear delineation of an ‘elite’. It is rather bemusing that Marxist critics of our work abound, given that our account of contemporary class relations has far more affinities to Marxist theories of capitalism than any other sociological models available (certainly compared to the NS-Sec). If one has to detect the single most important cleavage in Britain today, it is not between ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class, but between a small corporate elite and everybody else.This distinctive elite has not been recently recognised in previous forms of sociological class analysis – though it is certainly manifest in the public imagination. As I have argued, this is due to the preoccupation with the middle reaches of society, which dramatically weakened the capacity to bring the purview of the ‘extreme’ social classes into the purview of class analysis.Perhaps we've misunderstood him (or rather the publicity surrounding the announcement of the results of the "Great British Class Survey" which downplayed this elite vs the rest aspect) and should be using this point of his to back up our analysis.
You're right Steve. And I used to live in Euroland and got paid in euros. So, also, a 5 Euro note is worth £3.50 not 35p, not the sort of thing to burn.
Sounds like it comes from the same stable as this one by Diamantis and Kotler we reviewed in the May 2012 Socialist Standard:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1293-may-2012/book-reviews-intrusion-abundance-future-better-you-th
