ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I challenged him to put his money where his mouth was and to bet that massive deflation (falling prices, yet higher unemployment, food and other shortages, debtors prisons, etc) would happen within the 2-5 years he predicted against my bet that it wouldn’t. Some of the ZMers in the audience were shocked as, after all, Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph argue that technologically we could have a world of abundance now. I’ve since emailed the organisers offering to debate him at next year’s Z-Day in Cardiff on “Why the economic system will not collapse” and in 5 years time on “Why the economic system did not collapse”.He was mixing up two things: so-called peak oil and the economic collapse of capitalism through some flaw in its monetary and banking side. The second is not going to happen because the supposed flaw doesn’t exist. As to peak oil, if this is the case, as it becomes more and more difficult to extract oil then its price will rise. This will have two consequences. It will make it profitable to exploit previously unprofitable sources including tar sands, shale and deposits under the North Pole. And it will accelerate the search for substitutes such as renewable energies and nuclear power. He claimed this wouldn’t work because it would cost more energy to use these than the energy they would produce (I’m not competent to comment on this but maybe there’s an engineer in the house?), but he himself admitted that there was enough coal to last for centuries.So, don’t be alarmed. It’s not going to happen (even if nothing is going to go smoothly and without undesirable side effects as long as we have capitalism). No need to stock up tins of food or convert your savings into gold.
From the Raconteur supplement on “Funding Britain’s Growth” in yesterday’s Times:
Quote:It is not in the nature of a bank to take risks. As a rule, they make a relatively small profit on lending — usually in single digit percentage points … [Doug Richard, founder of School for Startups]What Richard is talking about is the net interest margin, a key concept for understanding how banks work and which currency cranks ignore.
stuartw2112 wrote:it’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re not actually there.You’re not saying, are you, that this means being there in a tent? Or can visiting occupations and talking to people there, reading their leaflets, blogs, etc count as well?
It’s not easy from over here to work out exactly what’s been happening in Oakland. Here’s a rather different analysis, from some “ultraleftists” on the spot (taken from one of their discussion forums I’m on). Don’t know if there’s any truth in their allegation that the movement there has been hijacked by a bunch of varied vanguardists (and of course any contacts with the organised trade-union movement would be anathema to ultraleftists even if not such a problem for us and a delight to vanguardists):http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/01/30/18706115.php
The examples we used to give to back up our argument that socialism and communism meant (and mean) the same thing were:1. Engels’s 1888 Preface to the English edition of the Communist Manifesto where he explains why, when it was “the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist literature”, in 1848 it was called the Communist rather than the Socialist Manifesto.2. The Manifesto of English Socialists, issued jointly in 1893 by the Social Democratic Federation, the Hammersmith Socialist Society and the Fabian Society (!) and signed by, among others, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Hyndman and Sidney Webb, which declared:
Quote:On this point all Socialists agree. Our aim, one and all, is to obtain for the whole community complete ownership and control of the means of transport, the means of manufacture, the mines and the land. Thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage-system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish national and international communism on a sound basis.Marx himself seems to have preferred to call himself a Communist. Which is why he referred to two phases of communist society rather than to socialism and communism being to separate phases of post-capitalist society. We have to admit, though, that there was one pre-Lenin socialist who did use the terms in this way — William Morris, though even he called himself indifferently a socialist or a communist.There were also reformists who said they stood for “socialism” (meaning nationalisation) and not for “communism” (abolition of wages system, no money, to each according to needs). Thus, Ramsay MacDonald wrote in the chapter of his The Socialist Movement (1911) entitled “What Socialism is not”:
Quote:“From all according to their ability; to each according to his needs ” is a Communist, not a Socialist, formula. The Socialist would insert “services” for “needs.” They both agree about the common stock ; they disagree regarding the nature of what should be the effective claim of the individual to share in it. Socialists think of distribution through the channels of personal income ; Communists think of distribution through the channels of human rights to live. Hence Socialism requires some medium of exchange whether it is pounds sterling or labour notes; Communism requires no such medium of exchange.So, Lenin would have got his distinction, not from Marx, but from Ramsay MacDonald ! Come to think of it, they did have something in common: despite coming to power in different ways, both tried to make capitalism work in the interest of the workers and both failed (because this is not possible).Engels’s articles calling for the abolition of the wages system were written for the trade union paper the Labour Standard in 1881 and can be found here.
Funny you should mention this as I’m reading a book on “Anarchist Economics” that AK Press have sent us for review. And what does the first article advocate but “parecon”? I see there’s an Afterword by Michael Albert himself. I’m hoping that in between some more sensible ideas will emerge. After all, there are anarchists who are communists and want the same sort of classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society we do.I can’t understand why some anarchists should fall for Albert’s detailed blueprint for a society which would be a bureaucratic nightmare of form-filling with your consumption monitored by your neighbours and your work performance by your work mates, and with rationing taking place through plastic cards registering the “labour-credits” you’ve earned instead of conventional money.
Just remembered. Nader can’t plead the Lesser Evil since wasn’t he once a candidate for the US presidency with the result, some say, that George W. Bush (Chomsky’s Greater Evil) got elected instead of Gore?
Actually, the “Nobel Prize” for Economics is not a real Nobel Prize as it was not provided for in the will of Alfred Nobel (who died in 1896). It was started by the Bank of Sweden in 1968 and seems to be awarded to whoever happens to have put forward the economic theory that is the flavour of the moment. So, when Keynesianism was in it went to one of them. When Monetarism was in one of them got it. I don’t know who gets it today but someone who knows nothing about economics seems appropriate.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:Or does SPGB stand for ‘Spiritual Party of Great Britain’?Of course not and the spiritualists don’t think so either, but they do have the honesty to draw attention to our criticism of them as here:http://www.spiritualismlink.com/t1529-science-v-spiritism-socialist-standard-1927-ukAnd here’s the Society for Psychical Research publicising this too:http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=373797202648627&id=295503008217Obviously they consider us worthy, materialist opponents.The full exchange (recently added to our archives section on this site) which went on for months can be found here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1926/no-268-december-1926/materialism-v-spiritism-criticism-and-our-replyhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1927Incidentally, Isabel Kinglsey was a Leninist, expelled from the CPGB for her spiritualist views.
There’s also this, especially the last two, more general chapters:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/strike-weapon-lessons-miners%E2%80%99-strike
stuartw2112 wrote:In the narrower sense of money, ie, money as a commodity (coinage) that facilitates trade, it is as much a myth that it arises naturally out of exchange (barter) as is the idea that markets arise naturally as a result of our tendency to “truck and barter”. (There is no evidence that money or markets ever arose in this way, plenty of evidence to contradict the idea)Whatever Adam Smith and those who followed him might have thought about money (coinage) emerging out of barter which itself emerged out of some supposed human nature to “truck and barter”, Marx for one was well aware that barter originally arose, not within societies, but between them. He says so explicitly in this passage in one of his published works A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
Quote:The exchange of commodities evolves originally not within primitive communities, but on their margins, on their borders, the few points where they come into contact with other communities. This is where barter begins and moves thence into the interior of the community, exerting a disintegrating influence upon it. The particular use-values which, as a result of barter between different communities, become commodities, e.g., slaves, cattle, metals, usually serve also as the first money within these communities.While the State obviously had a role in coinage, surely Graeber can’t be saying that the emergence of money as a “general equivalent” (i.e. a commodity that can be exchanged for all other commodities) had nothing to do with facilitating trade (the exchange of commodities)?
My argument is not that Dietzgen never read or studied Hegel but that, when he wrote The Nature of Human Brain Work in 1869, where he first put forward his view that all that existed was the ever-changing world of phenomena which was a whole, he was not influenced by Hegel and had probably never read him by then. Later he did, yes. Just re-read this work and with your knowledge of philosophy you should be able to conclude that there is no trace of Hegelian influence in it.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:If he read Feuerbach, then he will have read Hegel (in view of Feuerbach’s own concerns).What sort of logic is that? Dietzgen read Feuerbach. Feuerbach read Hegel. Therefore Dietzgen read Hegel ! Come on, you’ll have to do better than that. I don’t know which of Feuerbach’s writings Dietzgen would have read but Feuerbach’s reputation and popularity was based on him being a materialist and an atheist, not on being an ex-Hegelian.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:The evidence of his son, and the circumstantial evidence I mentioned suggest that he was influenced by German idealism and/or mystical Hermeticism, most probably from Hegel himself.Indeed, we read this in Some of the Philosophical Essays:”Philosophy has discovered the art of thinking. That it has thereby occupied itself so much with the all-perfect Being, with the conception of God, with the ‘substance’ of Spinoza, with the ‘thing in itself’ of Kant, and with the Absolute of Hegel, has its good reason in the fact that the sober conception of the universe as of the All-One with nothing above or outside or alongside of it, is the first postulate of a skilled and consistent mode of thinking, which both of itself and of all possible and impossible objects that they all belong to one eternal and limitless union which is called by us Cosmos, Nature and universe” (pp.274-75.).I don’t see anything wrong with this statement of Dietzgen’s. It’s merely saying that the unity idealist philosophers had talked about as being something non-material (God, etc), as did the famous Hermeticists you keep banging on about (was Buddha one?), was in fact something material. Or what do you think the universe is?
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:Well, I didn’t mention the occult, so I think you and I are operating with a different understanding of the word ‘mystical’You may not have done yourself but you quoted with approval this passage from Glenn Magee which certainly does:
Quote:“…The universe is an internally related whole pervaded by cosmic energies.” [Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p.13.What are these “cosmic energies” if not occult forces? In any event, there is nothing in Dietzgen to suggest that he thought the universe was pervaded by such energies.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:Be this as it may, the passage you quoted is full of a priori dogmatic pronouncements and Hegelisms. Dietzgen has plainly bought into Hegel’s mystical notion of a ‘contradiction’ (even though it is plain that the thing he calls a ‘contradiction’ isn’t one, and does not even look like one), among other things.If you read that passage again you will see that the contradiction was one raised by Kant not Dietzgen and that Dietzgen says it can be resolved by dropping the whole idea that there is a world of things-in-themselves behind the ever-changing and single world of phenomena that we experience.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:It [the theory that everything is interconnected] becomes mystical when applied to the whole of nature since it pretends to give us knowledge that is way beyond anything we could ever espouse to, and which we could never confirm, no matter how hard or how long we triedIn Dietzgen’s version it is not a claim to knowledge but a methodological assumption. Your mistake is to assume that what Dietzgen is saying is that all the physical things in the universe exist as separate entities and are interconnected as such, and that this is statement of alleged fact that can be empirically verified or falsified. If he did make such a claim you might be right that it can’t be verified. But this is not what Dietzgen means. He is saying that, to understand the world around us, you have to start from the assumption that all that “exists” is the “one eternal and limitless union which is called by us Cosmos, Nature and universe” and so physical objects don’t exist as independent entities but as parts of this whole distinguished and named by the human mind.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:Incidentally, this view also provides the ‘rationale’ for Astrology and other assorted ‘New Age’ nostrums. There’s hardly a mystical system on the planet, as far as we know, that does not or has not viewed the cosmos in this way.Another example of your eccentric logic. Some “holists” are mystics. Dietzgen is a holist. Therefore Dietzgen is a mystic.
stuartw2112 wrote:As for occult forces, what could be more occult and mystical than Newton’s force of gravity?For Dietzgen gravity is not a force on its own but a description and explanation for particular events we repeatedly and regularly observe and can predict in the world of phenomena. On the other hand, Buddha’s Seventh Heaven is a figment of the imagination and exists as that, ie it’s a real figment of the imagination.
Although we criticise syndicalists who think that the way to end capitalism is through a general strike (that would be suicidal with the state machine still in the hands of the capitalist class), this does not necessarily mean that we think that a general strike can never be useful for the working class. Under certain circumstances, this can be an appropriate means of trying to defend living standards and trade union rights. So, for instance, we supported the General Strike in Britain in 1926 and here’s what we commented on a general strike in Belgium in 1960-1The planned general strike in Spain is not going to be a real strike (as these two were) but more of a one-day protest demonstration. There’s nothing wrong in that but it’s probably not going to have much effect as the law that is being protested against has already been passed by the Spanish parliament and the government (recently elected) is not likely to repeal. Also, the situation in Spain is (I think) complicated by rival trade union centres. You on the ground in Spain are in a better position than us to judge whether there is an element of one union confederation trying to show that it is more militant than some other one.There was a one-day protest public sector general strike in Britain on 30 November last year. Our discussion of this (and the text of the leaflet we handed out) can be found on this forum here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/30-november-tuc-day-actionIn the end, while showing solidarity to those on strike and joining it if we’re involved, we can’t do much more than JohnD says: argue the case for political action to end the wages system altogether by converting the means of production into the common property of society under democratic social control.
