robbo203
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Yes, that is a very good summary of a vision of a post-capitalist world…
Personally, though, I don’t mind the word “enterprise” being used rather than the more technical-sounding expression, work units or production units. I always remember Ron Cook´s description of socialism as being a “genuine free enterprise” society (if I remember correctly). I thought it was a very innovative example of a sort of “cultural appropriation” (if I could put it like that), which might make supporters of the capitalist free market think twice.
At any rate, it conveys the idea of such qualities as initiative, imagination and human agency that lies at the heart of the concept of “freely associated labour”
It looks like the government of Milei has increased the popularity of the Trotskyists in Argentina; there are predictions that they might win the next election
That’s very interesting. Do you have the source for this prediction that I could cite?
I am constantly coming across FB sites that seem to have a large fan base for Milei, although the people concerned tend to be MAGA types based in the US. British right-wingers have a more ambivalent attitude towards Milei because of the Falklands/Malvinas issue
If the far right are against the EU’s obsession with war with Russia, are they not then preferable, as Orban was in Hungary?
Interesting article on the views of VOX and the Spanish Far Right, which does not seem to be opposed to supporting Ukraine in the Ukraine-Russia war
The Spanish Radical Right under the shadow of the invasion of Ukraine
With Spain back in the news, falling foul of the Orange Blob over NATO, it is worth noting that things are not looking good for the ruling PSOE government. Probably, there will be a new PP government in alliance with the ultra-right VOX party in 2027
It looks like this idea that Trump’s stop-go approach to war/peace with Iran, being linked to insider trading on the stock market, is gaining currency…
I read somewhere that his sprog, Barron, has been in on the act as well (maybe tipped off by his daddy), but that might just be conspiracy theory
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns
Not too sure about this, but there is some suggestion that Trump´s stop-go approach to the so-called peace process may be linked to the phenomenon of insider trading in that glorified casino called the stock exchange:
BREAKING: Just 20 minutes before Trump’s announcement that the Strait of Hormuz was open, massive trades hit the market.
Investors sold a combined 7,990 lots of Brent crude futures, a $760 million bet that oil would go down.
These orders were much larger than anything else at the time.
The traders made huge gains.
Unusual.
– Post on X by unusual_whales@unusual_whalesFor context, there is also this – the phenomenon of “dark pools” on the stock market geared to profiteering:
“In 2009, Alexandra Zendrian, writing for Forbes, said, “Dark pools are venues where trading is done off of an exchange to obtain price improvement and not move the price if a large block of stocks is being traded,” — theoretically, a dark pool is just any sort of exchange in financial markets between parties that happens invisibly to the public or ‘retail investor’ eye.
Arguably, the most interesting fact about dark pools right now is its immensely uneven growth vector statistic — dark pools make up, according to more recent reports detailed below, an estimated 65%+ (As of December 2018) of the stock markets daily volume. However, an estimated 7% of all investors even know what they are.”https://medium.com/banz-capital/the-basics-of-a-dark-pool-in-investing-35dd37119ea5
I never heard of the Mayflower gang being called communists!
Oh, you will be surprised by the number of times this is done by “free market” libertarians, imagining in that fertile imagination of theirs that this constitutes decisive proof that “communism does not work”. LOL
Just a quick Google comes up with a long list. Just this one example will suffice:
https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/pilgrims-beat-communism-free-market
Interesting thread this. Should be turned into an article for the SS, I think
Relevant to this is the myth of the Puritan Separatists, called the Pilgrims, setting up a communist colony in North America, and failing woefully – thereby demonstrating in the uncritical minds of free marketeers that communism does not work and that we need a free market instead.
This article demolishes that argument comprehensively, though it is surprising how frequently one still comes across the argument on the internet
“How China Forgot Karl Marx
The Chinese Economy Runs on Labor Exploitation”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-forgot-karl-marx
Wez
Yes, I think that’s a fair point you make about Hitler (the same could be said of Trump in the current situation).
I guess the important thing is not to deny that particular individuals can make a particular impact on the course of history, but rather to focus on the social context that allows them to do so. It is in this sense that “great men” are a product of the times they live in.
It is when you separate the individual from the social context that you succumb to the basic error of the Great Man theory, or what Plekhanov called an “optical illusion”. This is the belief that these individuals were almost, as it were, parachuted into society and that the accomplishments associated with them are primarily (or even entirely) a manifestation or product of their own personal qualities.
I’ve always had a liking for Plekhanov´s great essay
https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
I know we should have no truck with the Great Man theory of history, but this piece offers some fascinating insights into the Man-child (spoilt brat) that is Mr D Trump
Without the slightest degree of self awareness this is what that feckless Orange Blob said: ““I’m not worried about it,” the US president said. “You know what’s a war crime? Having a nuclear weapon.”. Indeed, Mr President….now tell us who in the world possesses such weapons, eh???
This bit in the article ZJW linked to caught my eye:
By contrast, the work of Neurath is explicit in its criticism of a technocratic politics. Thus he opposed ‘what is called the ‘‘technocratic’’ movement’ which assumes there exists ‘one best solution with its ‘‘optimum happiness’’, with its ‘‘optimum population’’, with its ‘‘optimum health’’, with its ‘‘optimum working
week’’, with its ‘‘optimum productivity’’ or something else of this kind’ and
which asks ‘for a particular authority which should be exercised by technicians
and other experts in selecting ‘‘big plans’’ ’ (1942 [1973, 426–7]). The basis for Neurath’s scepticism about the technocratic movement can also be found in both of the key papers in Neurath’s engagement with the Frankfurt school, in
‘Inventory’ and in his unpublished reply to Horkheimer. In the first Neurath
develops a theme that was central to his contributions to the socialist calculation
debate, the rejection of any single measure, monetary or non-monetary, through
which one could arrive at a technically optimal social outcome.44 No such single
measure could adequately capture the multidimensional nature of welfare
concepts, such as standard of living: ‘The attempts to characterize the standard of
living are like those which try to characterize the ‘‘state of health’’. Both are multidimensional structures’I’m currently debating the question of democracy with some people on FB who are clearly sympathetic towards the ideals of technocracy (the Technocracy movement, which reached its peak in the 1930s, is still around, apparently, but contributed to the rise of other bodies like the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist movement). For such people, democracy is clearly an anathema, and the assumption seems to be that for any given problem, there is one universally agreeable solution that can best be left to the technocrats to arrive at, thus rendering democratic discourse redundant.
This, of course, presupposes a perfect world in which there are no conflicting views or interests to concern ourselves with – something that strikes me as completely implausible even in a socialist society (despite the elimination of class conflict and national rivalries).
There are still going to be issues to contend with, likely to generate disagreement (“should we build a hydroelectric dam and what is to become of the people living in the valley that will be flooded”, for example). Democratic decision-making provides the framework most conducive to conflict resolution and compromise. Technocratic top-down decision-making, though quicker, is likely to lead to the exact opposite outcome
Interesting post from PJ again. Since some people reading this might not be on FB I will copy and paste:
For a very long time now, I have described how one of the worst symptom tumors of modern life is Wall St. speculation, which is an umbrella term that embraces everything from stocks to bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, futures, and endless derivatives.
If the toxic nature of these completely unnecessary, meaningless, wasteful, and DEEPLY socially damaging elements were not bad enough, as a side effect of the sickness of market economics, a.k.a. capitalism:
Meet the Polymarket.
It’s a prediction market platform where people bet on the outcomes of real-world events—politics, economics, global crises, and more—based on what they think will happen.
Kinda might seem like an innovative way to aggregate public knowledge, as some argue… but no.
Step back, and it becomes a system that turns reality itself into a speculative asset. Human events—often serious, complex, and consequential—get reduced to binary wagers.
Yes. It’s just about as grotesque as it can get.
The root idea traces back to the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when some “genius” proposed that there might be a kind of emergent intelligence in collective betting behavior. The theory was that if people could gamble on things like possible terrorist attacks or geopolitical instability, the market might actually predict them.
This is the same mythology that underpins Wall Street: that markets are somehow intelligent, that speculation produces truth, and that the aggregation of self-interest leads to meaningful insight. But what it actually produces is an abstraction layer where human suffering, instability, and even death can be reframed as $opportunities.
The only possible “positive” in this structure is if someone were using it to track insider knowledge—if bets reflected real, privileged information about events before they occurred. But even that collapses under scrutiny. If that were widely understood, no one with real knowledge would risk exposure just to participate. The system would undermine itself.
So what remains?
A feedback loop of detached, indifferent speculation. A culture where everything—war, elections, disasters—can be converted into a position to take. It doesn’t matter if the outcome is good or bad. The only thing that matters is whether you were right—and whether you made money.
This is the deeper issue. Gambling platforms like this, and financial markets more broadly, don’t evaluate reality based on human well-being or long-term progress. They operate on a completely different metric: selfish, narcissistic profitability. And once that becomes the dominant lens, everything else is secondary.
The incentive structure oriented around this kind of thinking is beyond psychopathic
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1491426675680919&set=a.255266979296901
This is quite an interesting take on the war by Craig Murray
The attack on Iran was always planned by Trump. He was not “bounced into it” by Israel. It had been in gestation for months. That fact had been held within a very tight circle to avoid both political opposition and institutional opposition from the US military and intelligence community.
…
Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil has secured a US monopoly of its sale and distribution. As with Iraq, only US-approved contractors can buy the oil and payments are made to a Trump-controlled account in Qatar, from which revenue is given to the Venezuelan government entirely at Trump’s discretion.This audacious imperialist grab of the world’s largest oil reserve further insulated the USA against the effects of the forthcoming closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Again, the narrative is being spun that Trump did not foresee the closure of the Strait by Iran. That is plainly a nonsense – every commentary on a potential Iran war for half a century has focused on the Strait of Hormuz. The only possible explanation is that Trump does not mind the closure.
…
Trump’s thrashing about to articulate objectives for the war in Iran is performative, a blind to cover his true and steadfast objective – simply the annihilation of Iran as a functioning state, the infliction of the maximum amount of death and infrastructural damage, the reduction of Iran to the condition of Libya.
…
Destruction of Iran on the scale envisaged will take years of hard pounding. Again, it is planned – you don’t ask Congress for an instalment of $200 billion for a war you plan to wrap up in a month. Again, Trump’s taunts about having already won, objectives being achieved and about possibly finishing soon, are all just smoke and mirrors. The scale and horror of what is planned for Iran has to be obfuscated to limit a public revulsion that would be echoed in parts of the state apparatus.Netanyahu yesterday revealed an interesting part of the endgame – construction of an oil pipeline that brings Iran’s oil out to be shipped from a Mediterranean terminal in Israel. That is a breathtakingly audacious plan, but absolutely aligns with Netanyahu’s and Trump’s actions.
