[ALB]

Two of us went to the book launch as well as 30 or so others, mainly members of James Heartfield’s family and ex-RCPers (who used to publish Living Marxism, of which he was a member). He seemed a decent bloke. I gave him a copy of the May 1985 Standard (50th anniversary of the outbreak of the slaughter) and in his speech he mentioned that when he set out to write the book he thought that only the CP (between 1939 and 22 June 1941) had denounced the war as a conflict between rival imperialist blocs but had since learned that anarchists, the ILP and the Socialist Standard had also taken up this position (throughout the war). I bought 5 copies at a discount (£16 as opposed to £20) for resale to members. He also said he’d be prepared to do a talk on it. So we’ll have to take that up.

[ALB]

DJP wrote:

Fabian wrote:

Are you kidding me? You’re talking about a world where there is abundance of everything and it’s all free for everyone to take, even if they don’t contribute, and that kind of a system will sustain itself by I don’t know what kind of magic, and I’m ridiculed for accepting moral norms? That’s not even utopianism, that’s basically a fairy tale. 

This seems to be a strange comment, as do some of your others, for someone who introduced themselves to the forum as an anarcho-communist. You don’t even seem to have grasped the basic ABCs of anarchism.

Yes, it was a rather rapid transition from anarcho-communist to free marketeer. But let’s not forget that Proudhon, who anarchists praise as one of their founding fathers, was one too, a free marketeer that is. He envisaged an economy of artisans and cooperatives producing for exchange at labour cost without the interference of a state. Forum members in London and its environs will be able to hear more about this at a talk by our comrade Steve Clayton on “PROUDHON’S PIPE DREAM AND OTHER FAIRY TALES: SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM VERSUS UTOPIAN SOCIALISM” on Sunday 28 October 7pm.at our premises, 52 Clapham High St, SW4 7UN.So perhaps it’s just anarcho-communism, where money would be redundant, that he doesn’t understand. 

[ALB]

robbo203 wrote:

So what is thei SPGB’s official position on this matter or does it have one?  A link would be appreciated

Here’s what we say in the chapter on “Socialism and the Less DevelopedCountries” in the 1978 edition of Questions of the Day, here on this site:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/questions-day

Quote:

Socialists are sometimes asked about another aspect of uneven development. This relates to the possibility that the socialist movement could be larger in one country than in another and at the stage of being able to gain control of the machinery of government before the socialist movements elsewhere were as far advanced.Leaving aside for the moment the question as to whether such a situation is likely to arise, we can say that it presents no problems when viewed against the world-wide character of the socialist movement. Because capitalist governments are organised on a territorial basis each socialist organisation has the task of seeking democratically to gain political control in the country where it operates. This however is merely an organisational convenience; there is only one socialist movement, of which the separate socialist organisations are constituent parts. When the socialist movement grows larger its activities will be fully co-ordinated through its world-wide organisation. Given a situation in which the organised socialists of only a part of the world were in a position to gain control of the machinery of government, the decision about the action to be taken would be one for the whole of the socialist movement in the light of all the circumstances at the time.There remains the question whether in fact there will be material differences in the rate of growth of the sections of the world socialist movement. At present, throughout the advanced capitalist countries, the vast majority, because they are not yet socialist, share certain basic ideas about how society can and should be run. They accept that goods must be produced for sale with a view to profit; some men must work for wages while others must be employers; there must be armed forces and frontiers; and it is impossible to do without money and buying and selling. These ideas are held by people all over the world and it is this which accounts for the basic stability of capitalism at the present time.It was Engels who remarked that a revolutionary period exists when people begin to realise that what they once thought was impossible can in fact be done. When people realise that it is possible to have a world without frontiers, without wages and profits, without employers and armed forces, then the socialist revolution will not be far away. But this advance in political understanding will be achieved by the same people who now think that capitalism is the only possible system. Because workers all over the world live under basically similar conditions and because of modern systems of communication, when they begin to see through capitalism this will apply everywhere. There is no reason at all why workers in one country should see this while those in others do not.The very idea of Socialism, a new world society, is clearly and unequivocally a rejection of all nationalism. Those who become socialists will realise this and also the importance of uniting with workers in all countries. The socialist idea is not one that could spread unevenly.Thus the socialist parties will be in a position to gain political control in the industrially advanced countries within a short period of each other. It is conceivable that in some less developed countries, where the working class is weak in numbers, the privileged rulers may be able to retain their class position for a little longer. But as soon as the workers had won in the advanced countries they would give all the help needed to their brothers elsewhere. To sum up, we can say that the less developed countries might present Socialism with a problem, but they do not constitute a barrier to the immediate establishment of Socialism as a world system.

Actually the whole chapter is interesting and relevant.Agree there could be a separate thread on this subject.

[ALB]

Fabian wrote:

ALB wrote:

Why on earth would somebody, in a socialist society based on common ownership and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, want to behave in this way? Since everybody would have free access, according to their self-determined needs, to what had been collectively produced this doesn’t make sense. What you are talking about just wouldn’t arise. Perhaps you haven’t grasped that in a socialist society there will be no production for sale and no money?

Firsly, that doesn’t adress the question. Secondly, people are freely acting individuals, they are not machines determined by social circumstances, and some people just would behave that way. Thirdly, I’d want to behave that way, because I think most people are lazy and I don’t like them and wouldn’t want to give them anything for free.

I see you really are a wild frontiersman and misanthrope. Fortunately, most people aren’t lazy. You don’t seem to be for one. Me neither. It’s always the others, isn’t it?

Fabian wrote:

ALB wrote:

If, in a socialist society, someone (like yourself?) wants to work as an artisan producing something nobody is going to stop you, but you’re going to have a problem if you try to sell what you make.

Oh yeah? Society is going to stop me?

No, nobody will, but I’m adding a new contribution to the joke section here: Have you heard the one about the man who wanted to sell something in socialism? He’s called Fabian. I’m afraid you won’t be able to open a bank account either.

Fabian wrote:

ALB wrote:

As buying and selling and money will have disappeared

We’ll use commodity money to buy and sell.

It has been suggested that there could be reservations in socialism for people who can’t get use to not using money, but personally I don’t think this problem will arise.

Fabian wrote:

ALB wrote:

you’ll have to give what you produce away free

Society would make me give my products for free?

No, nobody would make you do anything. Even if you stockpile your products in your back yard (which is what would happen since nobody is going to buy them when they can get the same things for free) you’ll still be able, like everyone else, to have free access to what’s available in the common stores and distribution centres.

Fabian wrote:

You realize that is pretty much the definition of theft?

This looks like another contribution to the joke section: Have you heard the one about the man who thought that giving things away was theft?

[ALB]

Fabian wrote:

Yes, I’m a deonotologist, not a consequentialist.

Is that the same as a “deontologist”? I think we may be pragmatists.

[ALB]

Fabian wrote:

A socialist society stoping people from keeping the product of their labor to themselves to barter or trade it with likeminded people who didn’t want to give what they made to the community for free.

Why on earth would somebody, in a socialist society based on common ownership and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, want to behave in this way? Since everybody would have free access, according to their self-determined needs, to what had been collectively produced this doesn’t make sense. What you are talking about just wouldn’t arise. Perhaps you haven’t grasped that in a socialist society there will be no production for sale and no money?

Fabian wrote:

The point is, if anyone is for taking from me what I made myself (and I have payed for everything that I used in making it) because “it is not mine”, I consider him a robber/ thief, and an enemy to be fought against. The only communism (/socialism as you here define it) that is justified is the one that is voluntary, where the workers by their free choice decide to give products of their labor to the community they belong to. But if they are deprived by force of the products of their labor, or defrauded by lies that they are not entitled to the full product of their labor, but that a part (or all) of it belongs to someone else, that is oppression and exploatation, a crime and a wrong.

Since socialist society will be a society without a state (a central administration having armed force at its disposal), in this sense it will be based on voluntary co-operation. But, as I (and Kropotkin) keep emphasising, the whole concept of an individual producing anything on their own, or of trying to measure an individual’s contribution to collective production, is silly precisely because production is now collective. It’s a leftover from an ideological justification for capitalist society at an earlier stage of its development (which only ever existed as an ideal anyway).If, in a socialist society, someone (like yourself?) wants to work as an artisan producing something nobody is going to stop you, but you’re going to have a problem if you try to sell what you make. As buying and selling and money will have disappeared, you’ll have to give what you produce away free, as I’m sure most craftsmen would prefer to do anyway rather than seeing the products of their skills being mere commodities turned out just to make money.

[ALB]

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):

Quote:

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

Quote:

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:

Quote:

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

Quote:

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).

[ALB]

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

[ALB]

Fabian wrote:

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

Quote:

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):

Quote:

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.

[ALB]

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:

Quote:

(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).

[ALB]

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.

[ALB]

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)”:

Quote:

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.

[ALB]

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:

Quote:

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.

[Author]

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