h.moss@swansea.ac.uk
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“What you don’t explain is the practicalities. Who is the distributor, who solves disagreements, how do you make people want to work, how do you persuade people to give up what they already own? What’s in it for them? How are you going to reconcile the other groups who also think they’re right? You can’t explain anything above theory, you just believe.”
It’s all on our website, Grandpa. Just look. But I know you won’t. Even having a look at this month’s Socialist Standard would help (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb), but again I know you won’t.
Fantastic post, Robin. But Grandpa is obviously stuck in a groove he’ll never get out of. So is it worth persisting? Hard to know exactly what his purpose was in initiating this discussion. In his very first post he said ‘I don’t know whether I’ll fit in here’ and then, in the same message, accused us of harbouring ‘some utopian communist fantasy where 8 billion people live in a wageless society, share everything and live happily ever after’. How likely are you to ‘fit in’ with something you immediately mock? That’s why, at a certain point, I suggested he might be a troll. But perhaps he just wanted a bit of fun. And maybe he’s had that by now.
If you have a good look at this site, you’ll see it’s far from being an echo chamber. But it IS a place of meaningful – and even exciting – discussion.
‘Howard, pity you had to waste time with this chap. He obviously hasn’t got a clue about the SPGB’s position.’
No, and in his confusion he seems determined not to find out either. Is he just a troll or is he someone who, in his retirement, is looking for something to fill his time?
Rarely (if ever) have I come across anyone so mixed up while at the same time thinking he knows everything about everything (he’s even become an anthropologist now). And you just bat away pretty offensively all attempts to propose anything even marginally different from what’s already floating in your mind. I’ve had many discussions with people vehemently opposed to our arguments but never in the course of these have I heard us compared to Pol Pot. You need to focus your mind a little instead of swimming in platitudes.
You said at the beginning: ‘I don’t know whether I’ll fit in here’, when it was clear from your very first post that you knew very well you wouldn’t and that your main purpose was to taunt. So please do it elsewhere.
Amazing. Where do I start? Somewhere far back, I think, with someone who doesn’t seem to have got very far with thinking things through. (Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, so please forgive me if I am being)
First. Marx used ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ synonymously and so do we. They’re both a society based on what you say: ‘From each according to ability, to each according to needs’.
Second. That kind of society doesn’t have ‘a proven track record of failure’, because it’s never been tried.
Third. Europe is definitely not a ‘borderless society’ in the way that we conceive of that. It may have a common currency but it’s got loads of borders and anyway you seemed to be saying in your last message that things were pretty good as they were (so presumably despite the imagined lack of borders) and that it was just a few tweaks that were needed.
Fourth. ‘Self-interest’ is a form of behaviour characteristic of capitalism because its dog-eat-dog nature pushes people towards it. All the evidence is that the kinds of society that have existed for at least 95% of the 300,000 years that homo sapiens has been around (mainly hunter-gatherers) were egalitarian and characterised by cooperation and sharing. The same of course applied to so many everyday interactions between people even in today’s society, and even when they’ve nothing material to gain – and this despite the pressures of capitalism.
Fifth. To describe the Pol Pot’s regime as anything in any way resembling the kind of society we advocate (please have a look at the stuff on our website) is just off the wall. To say that they tried to ‘socially engineer a society built on what you’re suggesting’ is profoundly absurd. We’re not suggesting ‘social engineering’ in any shape or form, we’re suggesting voluntary cooperation on a democratic basis. Again have a look at our website.
Sixth. We don’t need to ‘curb the power of the capitalist elites’. We need to remove that power – democratically by a large majority of people voting for something else. Nationalisation might be of some assistance to some people in some cases, but in the end – as history as shown – the best reforms like that can do is to tinker at the edges of the problems that capitalism inevitably throws up – poverty, insecurity, war, for example. You assert that we’ll never get rid of capitalism, but how can you know that? I’ll refer you again to Ursula Le Guin’s words and the fact that change happens when the circumstances dictate and require it.
Seventh. You’re not the first to say that ‘Marx got it wrong’ (even if he actually he did get some of it wrong), but you’re surely not placing yourself on the level of one of the most profound thinkers of the last 200 years. Society is still about class and workers not coming out on the streets to protest (even if some of them are doing that at the moment in ‘borderless Europe’) has nothing to do with it, since, as I say, the socialist revolution will not be that kind of thing. It will be about the vast majority asserting their will through democratic means.
Eighth. As for Gramsci and so-called ‘cultural Marxism’, well don’t get me started. I’ve spent a significant part of my life studying Gramsci and, despite his defects, at bottom he wasn’t denying the class struggle but simply saying that workers of all kinds and from all social milieux need to get together to enact change.
We’re against ‘rich pickings’ for the tiny minority as well. But we also consider that whoever runs the public services, the overall system of production for profit will continue. As long, that is, as the workers of the world (i.e. the vast majority) don’t get together to bring in a completely new system of society – moneyless, wageless, stateless and based on from each according to ability to each according to need. That was actually Marx’s vision too and I wonder whether he would really have been surprised that capitalism would be able to deliver a lot more than it was doing in his day? The important thing, however, is that it’s still capitalism, a system that still prevents us from realising the abundance that the modern world could readily deliver under that different kind of system. As for whether our (and Marx’s) view of socialism is a utopia, well forever it will be until the Grandpas of this world decide to be part of making it a reality. Things do change over history after all. Remember Ursula Le Guin’s words: ‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable. But so did the Divine Right of Kings.’
Bijou Drains wrote: “Changing minds is a slow process , but we cannot afford to write off a section of the working class as unreachable.:
Well observed
Greenstein’s speech at his trial was stirring and caused the jury to go against the closest thing to a clear direction from the judge. Well done to Greenstein, even if we can’t share his views.
On a connected topic, a new book that looks well worth reading and is already being much praised:
How did Christianity, starting out as a minor offshoot of Judaism, grow into an international faith that shaped the world as we know it? Rome’s Age of Revolution corrects the triumphalist narrative that the Christian message was so persuasive, and indeed superior, that people converted in huge numbers, abandoning their pagan beliefs, thereby turning a small persecuted sect into the state religion of the Roman Empire. Tim Whitmarsh shows that Christianity would never have succeeded if it had not taken advantage of the infrastructure and culture of the Roman Empire; in turn the new religion was indelibly shaped and transformed by Roman beliefs and ideas, especially those circulating in the Greek-speaking, or Hellenistic, eastern parts of the empire. This radical transformation, Tim argues, can only be described as a revolution. The consequences are with us to this day:
Rome’s Age of Revolution. Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity
by
Tim Whitmarsh
Penguin 2026
