ALB
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That would be interesting a debate for astrophysicists on “Capitalism or Socialism?” between Albert Einstein and Sabine Hossenfelder.
There’s this TED talk by Jade Saab at Edinburgh University:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jade_saab_a_world_without_money
Of course we are not out just to “abolish money”. It’s to replace a society whose economic system gives rise to money (as a result of separate ownership of resources and production for sale). What we want is a society of common ownership with production directly to satisfy people’s needs — which makes money redundant.
This said, people who already have no problem with envisaging a society without money ought in principle to be more receptive to socialist arguments.
Incidentally, elsewhere Saab declares himself to be a member of the IWW.
No, Sabine, Capitalism Is Not Good and Your Explanation Is Nonsense.
The great “mentor’s” video (referenced above) is just a bog standard child’s guide to the supposed merits of capitalism such as might be put out by free-marketeer think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs (or in the US the Cato institute).
What I don’t understand is why she risked trashing her reputation as a serious scientist to echo such views. The only reason I can think of is to make money, not just from the advertisements that interrupt her talk, but on behalf of the “sponsor” whose paying services she advertises at the end. It looks as if she has been paid by them to say “capitalism is good”.
Just because she is an expert in astrophysics doesn’t mean she is also an expert in economics. Outside her field her views are worth not more than anyone else’s, probably less in fact if she is just parroting them to make money.
(By the way, she has appeared on this forum before trying to argue that everything that has happened since the Big Bang was predetermined at that moment.)
I think the Free World Charter, like the Moneyfree Parties in various countries is an offshoot or product of the Zietgeist Movement. Meanwhile Peter Joseph soldiers (and sometimes rambles) on.
And does anyone seriously give a toss about what happens after they’re dead?
Are you saying that people don’t (which is open to question — I would have thought that most people do) or that they shouldn’t? If the second case, you are up against not just us socialists but anybody who wants to improve things in a period longer than they expect to live.
Go tell David Attenborough that capitalism is the only game in town and that he is being stupid in worrying about what happens to nature after the next five years (or maybe ten if he lives as long as James Lovelock).
I see a Labour government was involved in watering down standards:
“The film begins in 1963, with the Conservative Minster for Housing Keith Joseph setting an annual target of 400,000 new homes. It was this that kickstarted the ‘numbers game’, which prompted Labour to pledge, in their 1964 election-winning manifesto, that they would build 500,000 homes, and which continues to dominate political discourse about housebuilding today.
Labour’s Housing Minister Richard Crossman introduced subsidies for contractors to adopt offsite manufacturing methods that were intended to allow local authorities to deliver housing from a factory production line.
Contractors such as Wimpey, Laing’s, McAlpine’s, and Costain, began to court council leaders like T. Dan Smith for public contracts, offering ‘package deals’ that would encompass all aspects of the project, taking advantage of the perceived complexity of the new building systems. The new approach was summed up by one council leader as, “build it quickly, think later.”
The contractors began to build across the country with the mindset of building as cheaply and quickly as possible. The contractors’ workforce was often unskilled labour on wages that were determined by how quickly work was completed, thereby tacitly encouraging the corner-cutting and time-saving that became endemic.“(https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Adam_Curtis_-_The_Great_British_Housing_Disaster)
It would be surprising if the same mindset didn’t apply to the building of schools, hospitals, etc during the same period by the same capitalist enterprises.
“my mentor being Sabine Hossenfelder – you may have heard of her…. but I very much doubt it”
Oh yes, we have:
https://groups.io/g/spintcom/topic/physicist_on_youtube_explains/101119513?p=,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate/sticky,,,20,2,0,101119513,previd%3D1693685452634955325,nextid%3D1690712473118989563&previd=1693685452634955325&nextid=1690712473118989563
So that’s why you think that capitalism is the only game in town.
Of course. That’s the main purpose of this forum — to provide resources for putting over the case for socialism.
Leaving a country where there’s a war on is of course another good way to avoid getting killed for nothing.
In the meantime isn’t there this?
There’s a good one here:
When Russia first invaded Ukraine two cities negotiated to allow the Russian army to take over without armed resistance – Kherson on the Black Sea coast and Kupiansk near Kharkov and the border with Russia. This saved the places from destruction and their population from being killed in any crossfire and was obviously, as we pointed out here at the time,the sensible thing for the local authorities to have done.
But it wasn’t to last. Last year the Ukrainian nationalists recaptured Kupiansk and later the Russian army withdrew from Kherson. They were “liberated” but were now in the front line and both have since been bombarded and large parts of them reduced to ruins.
Only crazed nationalists think that it is better to be dead than not under their rule. Ordinary people don’t agree but don’t have a choice in the matter.
Here’s what I was going to argue on the other thread before it became scatological.
If the term “epistemological idealist” means anything, it ought to mean that the only world that exists is the world of ideas. But it doesn’t seem to be being used in that sense. Apparently, you can be an “idealist” even if you accept that there is a world that exists outside the mind.
Academic philosophy draws a (valid) distinction between those who hold that “observable characteristics exist in the observed object, independent of the observer” (which they call “epistemological realism”) and those who hold that “the characteristics exist in the mind of the observer independent of the object” (so-called “epistemological idealism”) but I would have thought that these were two different types of materialism (since both accept that there is an “object” outside the mind).
I think it will have been Lenin in 1908 who first called the second view “idealist” (and argued himself into a corner of having to say that the mind was like a mirror). Which would have made Bertrand Russel and AJ Ayer and the Logical Positivists. staunch atheists all, philosophical “idealists”. I think in fact that was CP line on them.
An “epistemological idealist” ought to be someone who thinks that “objects” only exist in the mind (whether of a god, collective humanity, or an individual human). If you accept that there is an objective world (whatever it is like or whether or not it can be known) that exists independently of the mind then you are a materialist. In any event, you are not an idealist in the classical sense.
If saying that the mind has a role in understanding the world makes you an “idealist” then, as Engels pointed out, everybody is an idealist:
“The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, impulses, volitions — in short, as “ideal tendencies”, and in this form become “ideal powers”. If, then, a man is to be deemed an idealist because he follows “ideal tendencies” and admits that “ideal powers” have an influence over him, then every person who is at all normally developed is a born idealist and how, in that case, can there still be any materialists?”—[Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 2, Materialism]
(Quoted by twc in a draft of his post that appeared on Testing2).
In that passage Lenin quotes, Kautsky is not just saying that socialist consciousness will not develop out of the elemental day-to-day workers struggles. He goes further and says that the idea of socialism first originated in the minds of (bourgeois) intellectuals who communicated it to “the more intellectually developed proletarians” who in turn communicate it to the rest of the working class.
Is this historically correct? The “members of the bourgeois intelligentsia“ Marx and Engels may have clarified socialist theory but they learnt socialist ideas from German and French artisans.
Lewis may have satisfactorily shown that Kautsky (and Lenin) held that socialist consciousness would not emerge spontaneously and automatically out of the elemental workers’ struggles, but not the different proposition that the idea of socialism itself first arose outside the working class. I haven’t read his book so I don’t know whether or not he defends this proposition too.
Actually, the (English translation of the) passage from the draft programme of the Austrian Social Democratic Party that Kautsky criticises does not seem that bad (or to necessarily bear the interpretation Kautsky puts on it):
“The more capitalist development increases the numbers of the proletariat, the more the proletariat is compelled and becomes fit to fight against capitalism. The proletariat becomes conscious of the possibility and of the necessity for socialism.”
What’s wrong with that?
Yes, I think the difference will be that while we agree that socialist consciousness comes from outside the day-to-day economic struggle we would say that this comes from other workers and not from outside the working class (as by Lenin’s professional revolutionaries recruited mainly from the Russian intelligentsia).
Also, the political consciousness that Lenin had in mind in 1901 was not a socialist one but a consciousness of the need to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish a bourgeois republic in Russia.
The really big difference came when, after seizing power, the Bolsheviks including Lenin himself apllied their theory of the need for a vanguard party to lead the political struggle for bourgeois democracy to the political struggle for socialism.
Ironically perhaps, this is how the Socialist Standard first interpreted,in 1933, what Lenin was saying.
