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Fabian wrote:

The point is what follows from this kind of appeals. From talking about how the wealth of the capitalists is not their because they have not worked for it, but have stolen it from the workers follows a desire for a revolution where the the workers take from the capitalists what is not theirs. But does from the talking about everything being “communal” because of vague interconnectedness of labor done in past and present and in all places follow the desire of the community to take from each individual worker that which he personally made because “it is not his”? Kropotkin doesn’t thinks so:

I hold no brief for Kropotkin (after all, although he was a communist he wasn’t a Marxist!) but I think you have misunderstood him here. In the passages you quote he was talking about the revolution and expropriation and explaining that “expropriation” would not apply to “a peasant who is in possession of just the amount of land he can cultivate” nor to “a Sheffield cutler, or a Leeds clothier working with their own tools or handloom”. I don’t imagine this will happen either. After the revolution, when common ownership of the land, instruments of production and the products (on being produced) has been established, Kropotkin envisaged the application of the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. As he put it very eloquently (can’t fault him here):

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The means of production and of satisfaction of all needs of society, having been created by the common efforts of all, must be at the disposal of all. The private appropriation of requisites for production is neither just nor beneficial. All must be placed on the same footing as producers and consumers of wealth

and

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Common possession of the necessaries for production implies the common enjoyment of the fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable organisation of society can only arise when every wage-system is abandoned, and when everybody, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy also from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of his needs.(Anarchist Communism: http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kropotkin/ancom/)

I imagine that he would envisage his peasant and the artisan Sheffield cutler and Leeds clothier continuing to work as before if they wanted to except not producing for sale, and having the same right as everybody else to satisfy their needs without having to pay, not that there are too many artisan cutlers or clothiers left these days.

[ALB]

Fabian wrote:

Kropotkin

Here’s his answer to your argument:

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There was a time when a family engaged in agriculture supplemented by a few domestic trades could consider the corn they raised and the plain woollen cloth they wove as productions of their own and nobody else’s labor. Even then such a view was not quite correct: there were forests cleared and roads built by common efforts; and even then the family had continually to apply for communal help, as is still the case in so many village communities. But now, in the extremely interwoven state of industry of which each branch supports all others, such an individualistic view can be held no more. If the iron trade and the cotton industry of this country have reached so high a degree of development, they have done so owing to the parallel growth of thousands of other industries, great and small; to the extension of the railway system; to an increase of knowledge among both the skilled engineers and the mass of the workmen; to a certain training in organization slowly developed among producers; and, above all, to the world-trade which has itself grown up, thanks to works executed thousands of miles away. The Italians who died from cholera in digging the Suez Canal or from “tunnel-disease” in the St. Gothard Tunnel have contributed as much towards the enrichment of this country as the British girl who is prematurely growing old in serving a machine at Manchester; and this girl as much as the engineer who made a labor-saving improvement in our machinery. How can we pretend to estimate the exact part of each of them in the riches accumulated around us? (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/revpamphlets/anarchistcommunism.html)

and

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Let us take a civilised country. The forests have been cleared, the swamps drained. Thousands of road and railways intersect it in all direction; the rivers have been rendered navigable, and the seaports are of easy access. Canals connect the seas. The rocks have been pierced by deep shafts; thousands of manufactures cover the land.  Science has taught men how to use the energy of nature for the satisfaction of his needs. Cities have slowly grown in the long run of ages, and treasures of science and art are accumulated in these centres of civilisation. But—who has made all these marvels?The combined efforts of scores of generations have contributed towards the achievement of these results.Our cities, connected by roads and brought into easy communication with all peopled parts of the globe, are the growth of centuries; and each house in these cities, each factory, each shop, derives its value, its very raison d’etre, from the fact that it is situated on a spot of the globe where thousands or millions have gathered together. Every smallest part of the immense whole which we call the wealth of civilised nations derives its value precisely from being a part of this whole. What would be the value of an immense London shop or storehouse were it not situated precisely in London, which has become the gathering spot for five millions of human beings? And what the value of our coal-pits, our manufactures, our shipbuilding yards, were it not for the immense traffic which goes on across the seas, for the railways which transport mountains of merchandise, for the cities which number their inhabitants by millions? Who is, then, the individual who has the right to step forward and, laying his hands on the smallest part of this immense whole, to say, ‘I have produced this; it belongs to me’? And how can we discriminate, in this immense interwoven whole, the part which the isolated individual may appropriate to himself with the slightest approach to justice? Houses and streets, canals and railways, machines and works of arts, all these have been created by the combined efforts of generations past and present, of men living on these islands and men living thousands of miles away (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/SBA.html).

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DJP wrote:

Any idea what happened to the author? Is he still a member?

I’m afraid not. He was a vegetarian and pro-animal rights and resigned about 10 years ago after another member (now an ex-member too, who contributes here from time to time) baited him by saying that he saw nothing wrong with bull-fighting. It seems we never learn how to behave on internet discussion forums …Pity really as he wrote a few good articles for the Socialist Standard, eg:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1999/no-1134-february-1999/utopian-socialism

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Fabian wrote:

Let’s say I’m an artisan, and I make tools from natural resources that I collect myself. Are those tools mine?

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Under modern conditions, the “labour theory of property” leads to common property.

You have complete misunderstanding of labor theory of property, but answer my above question first, and we’ll talk about it more.

I’m not a defender of the “labour theory of property” but am merely pointing out that logically under today’s productive conditions it leads to common ownership of production.I think that a supporter of the theory would argue that your artisan would be able to claim the tools he himself made from materials he himself collected from nature were his property, on the grounds that he had mixed his labour as the exercise of his body in them. But this is an imaginary situation that could only be taken seriously by an armchair philosopher.Here’s Engels’s take on the argument that the labour theory of value leads to communism (from his 1884 Preface to the first German edition of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, which Marx wrote in French):

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The above application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed indicates in the above-quoted passage, it is incorrect in formal economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness.

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Fabian wrote:

Actually it leads to mutualism. If people have the right to the full product of their labor, then the products that a factory makes is not the property of the society as a whole, but only of the workers of that factory as a whole.

No, it doesn’t as not even one factory does/can produce a product on its own, eg without materials or energy from outside. Today the whole social product is produced by the whole (worldwide) workforce.

Fabian wrote:

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(who seem to be living in a world of isolated and independent producers which never existed anyway).

People cannot till the ground by themselves for the purpose of feeding themselves?

What with? Some sticks they’ve found lying around?Under modern conditions, the “labour theory of property” leads to common property. Ironically, this was precisely the view that Locke and the other theorists of “possessive individualism” set out to refute as, up till then, christian theology preached that originally god had given the Earth and its products to all humanity in common with everyone having an equal right to satisfy their needs.

[ALB]

You’re right that the argument that a person has a “right” to the product of their labour as this is an extension of their body does lead to socialism (common ownership of the means of production and the products). This is because production today is collective and social, so that the entire social product should, on this theory, belong the entire workforce. However, this is not an argument we use but it does refute rather effectively the so-called “libertarians” (who seem to be living in a world of isolated and independent producers which never existed anyway).

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Looking for something else, I came across this contribution to a discussion of this same theme on our other forum in 2000:http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/1905I don’t think his article did get published in the Socialist Standard.

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This extract from an article in the January 2006 Socialist Standard refers to C. B. Macpherson’s book which explains the origin and significance of the so-called “self-ownership principle (and which everybody interested in this question should read)”:

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So-called “human rights” have always been linked to property rights. As C.B. Macpherson showed in his classic study of 16th and 17th English political philosophy, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, the whole concept of human rights was based on the idea of every human being having a property right to their own body. The state is not supposed to stop them using their mental and physical energies as they think fit; this involves not just freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, but also the freedom to exercise their mental faculties in speech, publication and religion.Property as such came to be regarded as a human right when it was argued that humans also had a right to what they themselves had got from nature by their own bodily efforts, i.e. by their own labour. However, given the existing unequal ownership of property, especially land, the bourgeois “theorists of possessive individualism” shied away from the egalitarian implications of this labour theory of property. Instead they came up with various more or less specious reasons as to why property, however acquired (and including land, which no one created by their labour, and even slaves), was, in the words of the French Revolution’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, “an inviolable and sacred right”.The freedom of property-owners from arbitrary dispossession by the state was what the French Revolution established in France, but which the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688 and the US Constitution had already established in these countries.

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There was an article on the theory of  “animal rights” in the April 1995 Socialist Standard entitled “Do animals have rights?” Unfortunately, it is not yet up on the archives section here but a copy will be able to be got from us at 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN. It answers the question “The short answer is no, But, then, neither do humans”. The introduction summarises the argument:

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The case for not being cruel to animals rests on the fact that this is not in the general human interest, not on the theory that animals have some inalienable natural rights. But the profit system prevents what is in the general human interest being applies.

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Just looked up how the WSPUS deals with this question. Their questionnaire takes a different form from ours in that they make a statement and then ask the applicant to tick “I agree” or “I disagree” and write “Why I think so”.See: http://wspus.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/App_d.pdfHere is the last of the 8 statements:

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Supernatural ExplanationsSocialists hold that materialist explanations of human society and the rest of nature supersede supernatural ones. A religious perspective won’t necessarily prevent anyone from striving to abolish capitalism and its evils, and the ethical elements of religious teachings may even be what first make many people aware of the injustices of a class-divided society. But they don’t in themselves lead to an understanding of the causes of such injustices. (More often than not, religious institutions themselves justify and commit them.) The world socialist perspective is in any case essentially post-religious, because the case for socialism hinges on the scientific use of evidence. Socialists therefore look on supernatural explanations as obsolete.

Don’t know if this satisfies people here. This at least brings out what we are looking for (acceptance of  “materialist explanations” and of “the scientific use of evidence”) and is less confrontational to religion in that it doesn’t single it out in particular but treats it as one sub-set of “supernatural explanations”. Could this be the formulation we’re looking for?Incidentally (or perhaps not) the previous statement reads:

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7) Historical MaterialismThe socialist point of view rests solidly on the materialist conception of history, a way of looking at things that focuses on how human communities meet their actual survival needs by producing what they need to live (their economic systems, in other words). Out of this process the human brain weaves its ideas, which eventually exert their own influence on the cycle, causing it to become more and more complex as society evolves.This approach, known as historical materialism, is a scientific method for helping us understand how and why capitalism does what it does. Armed with this understanding, socialists realize that capitalism can never deliver the goods for the vast majority of people. Other approaches, lacking this focus and overlooking the basis of capitalist society, can easily miss this point, so that their advocates get bogged down in vain efforts to make capitalism work for the majority.

 

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SussexSocialist wrote:

Either way the question still remains unanswered (and notably by comrades in the editorial comittee – are you silent on this issue?), WHAT has this article achieved for the Party?

The reasons why the editorial committee published the article were: (1) It was submitted by a member about a radio interview Bragg had given recently, so it was news; (2) we held it over till the Olympics because Bragg has expressed nationalist views and we wanted to say something on this in a period of heightened British nationalism which, unfortunately, turned out to be worse than we had thought; (3) precisely because he is popular as a song writer and singer his political views (such as vote Labour or Liberal) get a wide hearing and so discussing them is a good way to introduce our ideas to people, in fact discussing the political views of a person like him is probably a better way of getting our views across than an article criticising the same views in the abstract.  And of course the article was not an attack on him personally but on the political views he had expressed.What have we achieved? Well, we received a letter which said:

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I greatly enjoyed the article on Billy Bragg in the September Socialist Standard. By anyone’s standards, Billy is a great songwriter (if not a great singer!), but it is true to say that he has always been much clearer about what he is “against” than what he is “for.”

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robbo203 wrote:

The point about emergence theory is that it allows you to think about society in non deterministic or non reductionist terms and yet is still in keeping with a materialist conception of history. Thus,  it acknowledges that people are creative agents and develop or pursue ideas,  even those quite out of sync with their material conditions or material interests – in short, that ideas too have a life of their own  and an impact on history  – but these ideas are sifted through  the material infrastructure of society which determines which survive and prosper and  and which fade out and die.

This is precisely what the materialist conception of history says:

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The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. (German Ideology, 1845)

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Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. (18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852).

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History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.(The Holy Family, ch 6, 1846)

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theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. (Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844)

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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. (Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)

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even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement — and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society — it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs. (Preface to First German edition of Capital, 1867)

Whoever thought that the MCH posited otherwise — except of course the likes of Castoriadis?Incidentally, did you mean to use the word “determines” in the last sentence of your contribution? 

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robbo203 wrote:

The emergence paradigm which I am advocating here and which I suggest the Party would do well to consider is something that gets round the kind of intractable problems thrown up  by a reductionist deterministic model of society.

Why? Why does the Party have to commit itself to a particular non-idealist theory of the relationship between mind and matter or between mind and brain? Let a thousand flowers bloom except for the weeds that want to bring some supernatural being into it.

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I tried to listen to the video but couldn’t hear it properly, so gave up. Don’t know whether it was due to him speaking so softly or to my loudspeaker. Anyway, I was just looking for an excuse to bring in this story:http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.htmlSome people here don’t seem to have much of a sense of humour.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

Interestingly, Grant Allen was a proponent of the Ghost Theory of God (which early party members gave some credence to, I believe).  Anyway, his interestingly looking book is available online.The evolution of the idea of God: http://archive.org/stream/evolutionofideao00alle#page/n5/mode/2upI believe it is superceded by modern anthropology, but still, it has that Victorian brio about it.

I remember reading that book ages ago in school even before I became a socialist. If I recall correctly, he argues that what was inside the Ark of the Convenant was a phallic symbol. In other words, that god was a prick. Good point, as he would be if he existed in view of what he’d have let happen.

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