ALB
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Interesting article from New Zealand which raises a problem for lesser-evilists — from an ant-war point of view, was Biden really their lesser evil?
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO2306/S00064/when-did-progressives-become-warmongers.htm
To adapt one of our slogans in Britain, “The Problem is not the Republicans, it’s Capitalism” or maybe, in line with how we amended ours, “The Problem is not the Republicans or the Democrats, it’s Capitalism”.
Finally got round to listening to this, till the end (I wonder how many do to a discussion lasting that long). It was disappointing.
Trends in world capitalism were discussed such as the retreat from “neo-liberalism” back to a degree of economic nationalism, as instanced by the US’s ridiculously named Inflation Reduction Act (as if inflation could be reduced by legislation). This Act and the policy behind it was seen as aimed at doing down not just China, but also Germany and South Korea. More trade wars were predicted.
The recent rise in the price level everywhere and the attempt to combat it by raising interest rates was also discussed. This wouldn’t work but would kill off hundreds of “zombie capitalist” firms (firms which survived by making only enough profit to pay their interest commitments). The massive amounts of central bank money created by quantitative easing together with low interest rates had just led to a huge rise in the price of financial assets.
There was some loose talk about this money having been created “out of thin air” not just by central banks (true enough) but also by private banks (not true or possible).
Mattick revived the theory that most of this money didn’t go into productive investment as the rate of profit from this was not high enough and so went into financial speculation. In fact he thought that capitalism would not be able to escape from its current contradictions which would end in its not too distant collapse into a 1930s type depression and/or a world war.
It was mentioned that Mattick has a book called “The Return of Inflation” coming out in September. We will need to get a review copy to see if and how he elaborates on this.
https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/the-return-of-inflation
The low point came when a questioner asked what the panel thought was the alternative to financialized capitalism. In introducing it, the moderator said it might take 4 hours to answer. Actually they took only 4 seconds with Mattick saying “communism, anarchism, socialism” without going into detail and they moved on to the next question.
What they could and should have said (if they believed it, as there is evidence that Mattick does) was a world in which finance and money would be redundant because there would be common ownership of resources and production directly to meet people’s needs. I’m guessing that they didn’t for fear of being mocked, as we have been here, for proposing something most people think is unrealistic.
We haven’t finished yet with Popper and his view that historical materialism is unscientific because it makes no falsifiable predictions. By coincidence I was in the middle of reading his autobiography when this came up on the thread and was surprised when I came across him declaring that Darwin’s theory of evolution was unscientific, because it didn’t make any predictions about the course evolution would take that could be falsified.
Apparently, he later retracted this. Logically, he ought also have retracted his criticism of historical materialism as unscientific. But he never did. But the fact that he himself once thought that Darwinism was unscientific shows that his theory of science cannot be the whole story.
Actually, historical materialism does make predictions that can be falsified. For instance, that given world capitalism pre-and non- capitalist societies can only develop through capitalism — they cannot leap from feudalism to socialism. Another socialist view that has been confirmed many times.
What, then, is the framework within which the problems facing humanity in general and the working class in particular can be constructively and lastingly solved? Or isn’t there one, even in a million years?
Nobody can deny, or is denying, that workers and their dependents (ie most people) accept and put up with capitalism because they can see no practicable alternative or don’t think they can do anything about it. But that is not the same thing as saying that they consider to be in their interest or to their benefit.
It can in fact be shown that it isn’t. I think we can even go as far as to say that, irrespective of what they or anyone else thinks, it is not in their interest. This is not elitist or patronising but a demonstrable objective fact. A socialist world is, as a matter of fact, the only framework within which the problems facing humanity in general and the working class in particular can be constructively and lastingly solved. That is a matter of fact, not just of opinion.
Apparently this is a private not a government initiative, by a group advocating UBI, and which has not yet obtained funding (see p. 47). Which means that the results, if the project takes place, will not commit government to doing anything.
Yes, the word “exploitation” is used very loosely in Leftwing and reformist circles. Often “oppression” or “bad treatment” would be better. In an economic context they use it to describe lower than normal wages (as opposed to “fair” wages). Similarly, they are not opposed to profits, only to “profiteering” ie to higher than normal profits.
Basically, they see nothing wrong with the wages-profits system as long as wages are fair and profits are normal. They only criticise capitalism’s excesses not the system itself.
The US is never really going to default of course. Going to the brink about this has just become part of the US political gane.
So it now says(just looked it up, didn’t see the first version):
“Who’s exploited?
June 5, 2023
UK children’s charity Barnado’s says that a record number of children are in danger of online ‘exploitation’ as parents struggle with the cost of living and can’t afford summer break activities or holidays (Guardian).By ‘exploitation’ they mean specifically criminal activity (drug dealing) or sexual abuse via online grooming. The treatment of children in capitalism is often appalling, especially when there’s money to be made out of them. But the term ‘exploitation’ should not be confined to cases of extreme abuse. In fact, all workers are exploited. Otherwise there can never be any profit for employers.Ever. Exploitation isn’t just a cruel and unusual feature of ‘bad’ capitalism, it’s built in.”
I suppose the objection to the original wording was that it was ambiguous as it could have been interpreted as saying that workers are exploited by not being paid the full value of what they are selling (their labour power, or capacity to work). Whereas in most cases they are but, despite this, they are still exploited as this is less than what they produce for their employer.
To return to the your point, just because those who vote for parties that support capitalism doesn’t mean that they therefore consider capitalism to be in their interest.
They could (and some will) just be accepting that capitalism is the only game in town and voting for one or other of the capitalist parties in the hope of getting a slightly better deal under capitalism; making the best of a bad deal. I would hazard a guess that up to as much as 20 percent think that the profit system is not in their best interest. It’s only a guess but I don’t think that those who vote for a non-socialist candidate can all be said to think that the present system is in their interest.
And then there are those who don’t vote — 70 percent in local elections as in Folkestone, some 1 in 3 in national elections. They have come to realise that “changing governments changes nothing”. How can they be counted as people who consider the profit system to be in their interest?
When I said that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the working class, I was using “interest” to mean their interest is solving the problems they face — as over wages, pensions, benefits, housing, health care, transport, education, etc, etc — and which the vote-catching politicians are always promising to solve; that capitalism cannot satisfy their material needs properly. I was not talking about their interest in getting rid of capitalism as it’s a system based on their exploitation for profit and replacing it by socialism and production directly for use not profit.
I would say that our view that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work for the benefit of the wage-working majority was the strongest and most irrefutable part of our case. It’s been confirmed time and time again as even reformist government have been forced by the economic laws of capitalism to put profits first, to the detriment of the majority of wage workers and their dependents.
Capitalism is a system that runs in profits; which is why making profits always comes first, before meeting people’s needs properly. It is the cause of the problem wage workers face that the politicians try in vain to solve.
You are missing that in these local elections voters have more than one vote (two in one of the wards and three in the other). The number of ballot papers returned, representing the number of individual voters, was 1471 in one the case and 2501 in the other. This is the figure to be used to calculate how many voters cast one for their votes for the socialist party candidate.
You don’t need to tell us that most workers (who vote) currently vote for candidates who support capitalism but I don’t know where you get that figure of 0.12 percent from.
As you can see from the results in the two wards that we contested, in the one 1471 people voted (45 of whom used one of their two votes to vote for us) and in the other 2501 voted (81 of whom used one of their three votes to for us). I make that 3 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
Put differently, that’s 1 in every 33 voters. Not as bad as your figure of 1 in a 1000.
It seems, then, that the CWO are being a bit disingenuous in quoting what was possibly the only passage in which Mattick expressed a view similar to their conception of a vanguard party.
Actually, in practice the CWO are doing the same sort of thing as us — a “group of opinion” propagandising for socialism (as we both understand it) but in their case tied to the dangerous idea that a vanguard party is needed to lead workers there because under capitalism workers as a class are not capable of advancing beyond trade union consciousness.
Ironically, when it comes to participating in the day to day struggle, because they take up an anti-trade union position, their members are probably less active in it than ours.
I see you are a partisan of the theory of science from someone who came from your part of the world, Karl Popper. I imagine that that’s what they teach people studying the “natural sciences”: that a proposition is not even a hypothesis (but “unscientific”) unless it can be falsified; in fact that all scientific theories are hypotheses that are either being confirmed or falsified.
That makes sense for the “natural sciences” but is more problematic for the “social sciences”. Even so, socialist propositions are falsifiable in Popper’s sense. For example, the proposition that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the working class. This is falsifiable even though in fact it is being continually confirmed.
The proposition that only socialism can solve the problems facing the working class is also falsifiable in principle, though it could only be tested once socialism is established. If socialism did not solve the housing problem or the poverty problem or war, etc, etc then it would be falsified. So it is at least a scientific hypothesis even if not yet a confirmed theory.
If all you were trying to say was that accurate predictions in physics and astrophysics are easier than in fields which involve human action then you are not saying anything new. But if historical materialism is “unscientific” on that account, then so are a lot of other theories, including the view that capitalism will be the only game in town for ever or at least for the next million years.
The “collision” between those two galaxies is more certain than the other two futures to socialism that you mention (nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe — you forgot to mention, an asteroid hitting earth or, the latest, a super-intelligent robot killing off the human race). Does that mean they have to be discounted as “unscientific”?
Anyway, none of these would invalidate historical materialism even if they made socialism impossible. It would still be the case that the basis of any human society would be how its members are organised to survive and the means at their disposal to do so, and that societies change as this does, especially technology.
Other planets? Mars would be the obvious one in our solar system but I was thinking more of some of the planets in other solar systems that astrophysicists are always identifying. After all, you were talking of something that will happen in billions of years. Humans haven’t existed even for a half a million years. I imagine that even in a million years it should be possible for humans to visit some of those planets (don’t ask me how). In fact, they might even find that socialism already exists in some of them. So obvious is it that the absence of private property over productive resources and cooperative production and allocation of wealth directly to meet the needs of society’s members is the best way for a technologically-advanced society to survive
