ALB
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I think that’s scheduled for sone 50 billion years, isn’t it? You can’t really think that capitalism can last that long. Given that world socialism is the only way forward beyond capitalism, I would have thought that we can be fairly certain that socialism will have been established — on other planets besides Earth — tens of billions of years before that.
Paul Lafargue was good in this sort of thing as in the appendixes to his The Religion of Capital”:
Don’t worry. It’s in English.
What we are discussing (though perhaps there should be a separate thread on this) is what a minority of workers who have come to want and understand socialism should be doing.
The SPGB has developed the position that at present this should be propagandistic. Socialists should organise themselves — in a ‘party’, if you like — to propagate socialism. That is all the party should do at the moment. It should not itself get involved in the ‘immediate demands’, not even over wages and working conditions. Of course it expresses general support for struggles against employers and its members can and should take part in them but as workers involved in the struggle not as a party. Such struggles should be run by the workers involved.
Mattick’s position in that extract was written on behalf of an organisation which actually called itself a ‘party’ (the United Workers Party of America). One passage starts well enough
“It does not seek to lead the workers, but tells the workers to use their own initiative. It is a propaganda organization for Communism,”
But then adds
“and shows by example how to fight in action.” (His emphasis).
The passage about the party engaging in the struggle for immediate demands is in the following paragraph.
The difference, then, with the SPGB position is that Mattick is saying that the party itself should get involved in such struggles.
Pannekoek’s position seems to have been nearer to ours. He was certainly opposed to “Council Communists” organising in such a party as Mattick envisaged and did. In the article discussed in the Socialist Standard, Pannekoek wrote (part of which the article quoted):
“If, in this situation, persons with the same fundamental conceptions unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussions and propagandize their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of today . . . In this lies the great importance of such parties or groups based on opinions: that they bring clarity in their conflicts, discussions and propaganda. They are the organs of the self-enlightenment of the working class by means of which the workers find their way to freedom.“
In fact that would be a good description of what we we are — “an organ of self-enlightenment of the working class.”
The difference between Pannekoek and Mattick (in 1934) would seem to be that Pannekoek thought that a ‘party’ should be a group “based on opinion” and propagating those opinions, while Mattick thought more in terms of a group getting involved as well in day-to-day struggles (which has enabled the vanguardist CWO to claim him as one of theirs).
Of course, the conclusion we draw and propagate differs from both of theirs. For instance, we are not opposed to workers organising in the existing trade unions nor do we dismiss the vote as useless or worse. In fact, we say that at some future point workers will need to organise themselves into a mass socialist political party with a view to wresting political control from the capitalist class as a prelude to establishing socialism. That’s the opinion we propagandise.
Last June’s Socialist Standard was a special issue on AI in which the point, among others, was made that
“The idea of the whole working class being replaced by intelligent robots is also a fantasy. AI equipment, like all machines, does not create any new value (transfer any new labour to the product) and so no surplus value; it just transfers gradually the labour expended from start to finish to make it. If production were fully automated, no surplus value would be produced, so there would be no profits and capitalism would no longer exist. Not that there is any chance of capitalism evolving into a ‘fully automated’ economy. This could only come into being if, at some point in the future after the abolition of capitalism, socialist society were to decide to go down that route (not an evident decision) and establish ‘fully automated luxury communism’. At the present time, given the low level of productivity compared to what it would need to be for that, this is science fiction. Humans are still going to have to have a substantial direct input into production for a long time to come, even after socialism has been established.”
There is nothing wrong with AI as such. Any danger will come from capitalism’s misuse of the technology as it has done over nuclear energy and drones.
If the AI scientists are concerned about the threat of human extinction they’d be better concentrating on the less remote possibility that one of capitalism’s inevitable war ends up being nuclear. That could happen now while their imagined extinction of humans by intelligent robots would be centuries away.
There is also this more recent article:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/30/media/artificial-intelligence-warning-reliable-sources/index.html
I am trying to work why all those experts in AI and the bosses of the giant tech companies are warning against the potential threat to humanity from AI. Even science fiction speculation about intelligent machines taking over the world and make humanity extinct. Since that would be a long way off, even if technologically possible, there must be some other reasons for their campaign.
I can see, too, that it will be a threat to so-called “intellectual property rights” (which are entirely artificial) and that people in that field will want to slow it down. But it’s not them that are kicking up a fuss about it. It’s the tech companies themselves.
The only ulterior motive I can think of is that it’s a publicity stunt to get everybody talking about AI with a view to them selling more of it.
It probably does but engagement in campaigns for “immediate demands” is dubious too:
“The party engages in the struggles for immediate demands as long as the workers themselves are directly and actually engaged in the struggle.”
Didn’t Mattick later change his mind and come to a position closer to Pannekoek’s discussed here:
Is he the one who criticises NATO’s Drang nach Osten in Ukraine? That would be an additional, perhaps more important, reason why the German authorities would want to cancel him.
Meanwhile Zelensky’s can trivialise the atom bomb on Hiroshima by comparing it to the destruction of Bakhmut and of course get away with it.
Another move in the only game in town:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65736944.amp
Note the political ignorance of the Labour spokesperson. It wasn’t just Tory PM Heath who introduced price controls. He was merely pursuing the policy of the preceding Wilson Labour government which even imposed (or tried to) a freeze on the price of labour-power.
It won’t work anyway. One reason why the price of basic necessities like bread and milk has gone up is that, with the rise in the cost of living, people are cutting back on less essential things to buy them, so maintaining the paying demand for them and allowing the supermarkets to put up the price of them.
You can’t beat the economic laws of capitalism.
Drones are a useful invention that could be used for in agriculture, monitoring rivers, the environment and forest fires, inspecting bridges and other structures, aerial photographs, deliveries including medicines and food and equipment in remote areas or in a natural disaster. In other words usefully, also in socialism.
But capitalism being capitalism, their main use today is as a weapon of destruction, as we are seeing in current NATO-Russian War in Ukraine.
You can have it all when the working class establish socialism and there is no longer any need for a socialist political party and it is dissolved.
Actually, you are on the right track. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
Just got round to the reading the ex-Militant Tendency’s paper called “The Socialist” (though more appropriately “The State Capitalist”) that we exchanged for ours.
I see that they have reverted to their pre-Corbyn position of calling for a “new workers party”, ie, essentially a new Labour Party. It seems they want to repeat in the 21st century this failure of the 20th (in fact both failures of that century as they are also Bolsheviks).
Even though they are now against Labour, they still campaign like Labourites talking about “Tory austerity” and “Tory crises” blaming these on the Tory government rather than on the unavoidable workings of the capitalist system.
As we say in one of the leaflets we were handing out “The problem is not the Tories (or Labour). It’s capitalism”
