ALB
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I just listened to that. It confirms that Mau’s basic argument is that what maintains capitalist rule is not just physical force (threatened or actual) and ideology (brainwashing) but also “economic power”. He sees this as an impersonal form of power, an expression of the logic of capital that every market agent (ie not just workers but capitalists too) in capitalism is subjected to through the impersonal operation of market forces.
The book sounds as if it might be heavy going but a reviewer has been found and a review, as well as a comment on his blog about communism, will be appearing in the Socialist Standard.
Mau was interviewed by Jacobin last February. In it he confirms the summary of his argument in the introduction to the interview, headlined “Capitalism Makes Everyone Bend to Its Will, Rich and Poor Alike”:
“In his new book Mute Compulsion, Søren Mau argues that to understand and end capitalism, we need to analyze how it not only subordinates the poor to the rich but in fact exerts economic power over everyone — including capitalists themselves.”
This of course is something we have long said and is in fact the basis of our case that capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority class of wage workers. Not only capitalist firms but governments too are subject to the “logic of capital” enforced through market competition which dictates that priority must be given to profits and the conditions for profit-making. That reformist governments can’t escape this “mute compulsion” has been confirmed time and time again.
Looks as if we should review it.
https://jacobin.com/2023/02/soren-mau-mute-compulsion-marx-capital-economic-power-domination
“Will happen” ! So Russia is going to conquer all Ukraine and NATO is going to send its own troops in to counter this? And bang, a nuclear war. I don’t think so. Conquering the whole of Ukraine is not even Russia’s war aim, though no doubt they would like to seize Odessa and the whole of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast if they could.
Most observers seem to think that the most likely outcome of the war is going to be a stalemate based on the existing line of contact between the two armies.
According to this there are over 200 other teenagers who have said they will refuse to be conscripted into the Israeli killing machine but that was in August:
“Over 200 high schoolers who are supposed to be on the path to being drafted in the near future to the IDF announced in August that they will refuse their call-up not only because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform but also because of “the occupation.”
That anti-militarist got 30 days in jail (the first of many more such spells no doubt):
https://www.newarab.com/news/young-israeli-jailed-refusing-army-service-over-gaza-war?amp
I didn’t know that 13 percent of Israeli subjects were members of an ultra-nutty Jewish sect.
The original thread is still there, i think, if people want to consult it?
Labour steals yet more Tory clothes:
This, about war propaganda, from the last Gulf War is relevant to today’s war in Gaza:
Some billionaires evidently have more money than brains — which other capitalists exploit by selling them bunkers which won’t protect them in the end anyway. Unless of course it’s a tax dodge.
This is the sort of discussion — and the sort of people we should be discussing with — about the feasibility of organising the production and distribution of useful things and services without money or markets and on the basis of common ownership ( ownership by everybody and so by nobody).
I think the article’s criticism of Mau’s blog item is right — of his localism, “democratism” (everybody having to vote on everything instead of leaving many decisions to groups of people who know what they are talking about) and, of course, his retaining of a “private sector” which still uses money.
The same cannot be said of the authors’ assumption that communism will come about as a result of victory in a world-wide civil war in which communists and pro-capitalists fight over control of territory. That would lead to technological regression which would make communism less likely if not impossible. Look at Gaza today if you want to see the consequences of urban warfare with modern weapons.
But this doesn’t affect the technical solution they put forward.
People are beginning to see the economic implications of trade via the Red Sea and Suez Canal being disrupted.
“Some analysts point to potential damage to the principle of freedom of navigation. More concerning, however, are the immediate economic costs to global shipping and oil prices, especially at a moment when inflation just seems to have been brought under control.
The precise magnitude of the economic damage is hard to predict, but real damage could occur and will probably increase over time if more and more vessels end up being rerouted. Before the crisis, 12% of global trade and 30% of container shipping passed via the Red Sea route. The Cape of Good Hope is the main alternative route, but it takes much longer and is more expensive.”The article (which wants the US to bomb Yemen, but not too much) also shows the wider geopolitical aspect of the Gaza War, as part of the US’s attempt to contain the Iran’s threat to oil supplies from the Gulf and Iran’s attempt to weaken Israel as the US’s attack dog in the ground. Which is why the US is so intransigent in its support for Israel. It, too, wants to see Hamas destroyed for being Iran’s proxies against Israel.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/22/risk-war-middle-east-biden-israel-hamas
That the war in Gaza has a wider geostrategic aspect (and is not just about Israel trying to crush Hamas and extract revenge) is shown by what is happening on the major trade tour that is the Red Sea and Suez Canal.
Independently of what is happening in Gaza there is a struggle going on for control of the oilfields at the end of the Persian Gulf and the trade route out through it. The “West” has already fought one war to maintain control of this, against Iraq. Now the threat is from Iran.
The US has built up and armed Israel as its pawn in the area (even if a rather unruly one). Iran seeks to undermine Israel and Israel to undermine Iran. In fact the two states have been in a state of undeclared war. The US is supporting Israel in Gaza because it needs Israel to counter Iran, but its main concern is not Gaza but Israel’s effectiveness as its agent in the Middle East.
Iran can control the entry to the Red Sea through the Houthi government in Yemen which has been harassing merchant ships destined for or connected with Israel passing through it. As a result the big shipping companies are diverting their ships round Africa.
The consequences for the “West” could be grave — supply chains disrupted and costs and prices rise as they did with Covid, causing stagflation to be prolonged. So a war fleet has been put together to try to protect the trade route through the Red Sea.
Like we have always said, wars are military extensions of conflicts of economic interest over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets, investment outlets and strategic points and areas to protect these.
I’d be more worried about the very real prospect of ‘non-world” wars such at the moment in Gaza and Ukraine (and before that in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia. etc, etc, etc) continuing to break out from time to time for as long as capitalism lasts. The case against capitalism as the cause of wars is strong enough without needing to invoke (or getting anxious about) an apocalyptic vision.
Actually, in saying that a socialist society could easily decide what consumer goods should be produced Mises made an enormous concession, even though he was just stating the obvious.
David Ramsay Steele (another one-time socialist who went funny) recognises this in his From Marx to Mises, a title that reflects his own itinerary, and criticises Mises for it.
Mises, he wrote on page 118,
“wrote ‘in any social order, even under Socialism, it can very easily be decided which kind and what number of consumption goods should be produced. No one has ever denied that.’”
Steele commented:
“Well I deny it. A society that cannot value factors ipso facto cannot value final goods-therefore a society that can value final goods can value factors, so Mises’s unwarranted concession about consumer goods contradicts his economic calculation argument. Without knowing what consumer goods cost to produce, the administration is in no position to select the kind and number of consumer goods.”
Why not? Of course it can, even if it is only a wish list. The decision of what to produce is a quite different decision than how to produce it.
Mises’s reply to Steele would no doubt have been to say that his argument was that a society without a market mechanism would not be able to decide how to produce what it wanted in a “rational” way. But, as has been pointed out, Mises’s argument here is circular as he defines “rational” as what the unrestricted market decides.
