DJP
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Incidentally, John H. Kautsky’s claim of the unorthodoxy of his arguments – that Marxism and Leninism are two different ideologies that use the same terminology, and that Leninist “Communism was not anti-capitalist and was not relevant to industrialised societies but to underdeveloped ones” – are perhaps not so unorthodox these days, at least within academia and within my limited interaction with it.
His other books about capitalist development and underdeveloped nations might be worth looking at too.
“In the 1960s he was a bit of a Marxist and wrote quite a good article in Economica in August 1963 on “Marxian Value Reconsidered””
Thanks for that. Was not aware of that paper before, it’s quite good yes.
“You can scrutinise Marx’s economic writings until your eyes ache and you wont find the cause of war in them.”
The original plan of “Capital” was to have a book on the state. I think this is where it would make sense to talk about modern war.
“The anarchist position […] is based on individualism”
While there are people that call themselves “anarchist” that are definitely individualists, this isn’t the case at all for the communist anarchists.
Yes the new version is much better. Workers are exploited even if they receive the full value of their labour-power (which they usually do, and occasionally will receive more – due to the fluctuating prices of other commodities).
Lew wrote “This hasn’t worked in the past, it isn’t working now and there’s no reason to suppose that it will be more successful in the future.”
But the paragraph you mention, when taken just by itself, is just a vague passage about the unity of means and ends and the need to develop capacities through practice. As socialism is a democratic society it can only be reached by democratic means; and for people to live in a democratic society they have to develop the skills required for living in that way – skills that are developed through practice.
The author of the book would presumably disagree, but the type of democratic activity that the SPGB engages in could fit this description – the SPGB doesn’t think that you can get to socialism by force, by decree or without the majority playing an active role.
I don’t know how different the published book will be from the PhD thesis, but the dissertation version can be downloaded for free from here:
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/The_revolutionary_strategy_of_anarchism_in_Europe_and_the_United_States_1868-1939/16961263/1Danny Evan’s book is well worth reading. As is this forthcoming one, which also started off as a PhD thesis and is published by AK Press:
https://www.akpress.org/means-and-ends.html
Not that there’s anything to disagree with, but both are good scholarly studies.
This text looks interesting, but it is unreadable as forum comments.
Another option would be to post it somewhere like Libcom.org or archive.org and then share the link to that on this forum.
For Graeber, anarchism was equal with ‘democracy’ as practised through consensus at things like the Occupy movements. He was not a communist in any sense of the term, and his ideas may actually be counter-productive. See in the Standard the longer review of his book with Wengrow, for example.
Incidentally, there’s more anarchism on the BBC here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07k3ngyI think there’s an episode of ‘In Our Time’ too.
“police brutality is State brutality not necessarily racist”
So state brutality can’t be racist? In this case, the kind of snatch squads that beat Tyre Nichols to death are only deployed in black neighbourhoods. That is the structurally racist background of this incident.
A bit of a long view, seven hours in total. But Adam Curtis’s latest film outing ‘TraumaZone’ provides some good background to the ever popular ‘Russian Tensions’ thread on here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0d3hwl1/russia-19851999-traumazone
Incidentally, I have been reading a fair bit of Pannekoek lately. He keeps referring to the need of a “spiritual revolution” to bring about socialism. Of course he is not talking about mystical religion but using “spiritual” to mean “mental” or “consciousness”. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the only one to use the word in that way at the turn of the twentieth century, but wonder how widespread this usage was?
“Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?”
I didn’t watch the video, but the arguments seem like the common ones. I think the mistake being made here is one of confusing different levels of explanation. The assumption is that every explanation has to be reducible to physics, and since ‘free will’ can’t be seen in the world of physics (in the interactions of atoms, particles etc) then it doesn’t exist. But the kind of social explanations we are looking for take place at the level of intentional agents (eg in a social world made up of agents that act according to intentions – not in the world of atoms and particles), there is no need to reduce the explanation to physics.
This podcast explains it better (you can skip to 13 minutes if you are already familiar with the arguments): https://philosophybites.com/2020/02/christian-list-on-free-will.html
