[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

…as a democratic communist…

So you agree that we can elect truth then, robbo?If not, 'who' or 'what' produces 'truth'?

 You know my answer to this LBird so stop playing games.  I see no point or purpose in 7 billion plus people  democraticaly voting on literally tens of thousands of scientifc  theories to determine their truth status and I see no practical way in which this crackpot idea can ever be put into effect.  If you think otherwsie then explain in practical terms how your idea could be put into effect? But you wont will you? You never doDemocracy for me is about practical decisions not abstract theories and the praxis of communist democracy involves different levels of decisionmaking – local regional and global – but mainly local.  Which means local people get to decide democratically what applies at the local level  – not  the 7 billion plus people that constutue the world's population,  Or do you think the whole world population should be able decide on where you want to site your local sewage processing plant?

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

LBird wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

…as a democratic communist…

So you agree that we can elect truth then, robbo?If not, 'who' or 'what' produces 'truth'?

You don't have to answer that question publicly here, robbo, but, for your own development, try to work out for yourself what you think that the answer is, and then try to work out why you think that.That is, come up with a socio-historic answer of what you believe, where that originated, why that originated, and who benefits from your continuing to believe that answer.Of course, you can always refuse to do this historical analysis of a social product, and just continue to claim that, as an individual, you just know eternal truth (probably on the basis that 'reality' is 'obvious' to your biological senses).alanjjohnstone mentioned a history book on the other thread, and you could do worse than reading that, to help situate your political beliefs about 'nature' and 'science' in a socio-historic context of human production.That is, in a social context that we can change.

 Perhaps you would do well to stop trying to patronisingly lecture others on what you see as the inadequacies of their beliefs and what they should do to overcome these and focuss instead on addressing the glaring inadequacies of what they see in your own beliefs.  But no  – whenever your critics on this forum point out these inadequacies to you, or ask serious questions of you, all you ever do is to point blank ignore them and take refuge in a, by now, very well rehearsed little ritual of intellectual evasion. There is more than a touch of the Jehovah Witness way of looking at the world in your case which is richly ironic given your tendency to boringly and oh-so-predictably  label anyone who has the audacity to question your presumed elitist expertise as a…err…"religious materialist"!

[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

Vin wrote:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. "(my emphasis) Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 

I know that you're not very good at this theoretical stuff, Vin, so I'll make it easy for you.'Relations of production' are socio-historical products of human activity.This doesn't mean that 'rocks talk to us', as Religious Materialists like you allege, Vin.No worker with half-a-brain listens to this 19th century guff any more, Vin, so you're wasting your time pretending to them that you have a 'special consciousness' and access to something that they don't have. If you agreed that they had the same access, you'd clearly agree that they could vote on this access, but you don't, so you have to deny democracy to those you pretend to able to persuade to give you power within socialism.Have a nice night, chatting to the rocks.

 Nice. LBird has taken the art of patronising others to a new level with this contemptuosuly elitist brush off of his but never mind… The odd thing about this quote that Vin cites is that it comes from Marx, the same Marx who LBird claims to faithfully interpret and endorse unlike the rest of us who are supposed to be "Engelsists" prone to engaging in fascinating conversations with rocks. The point about this quote which seems to have eluded LBird competely is NOT that relations of production' are not socio-historical products of human activity – I don t think that is what either Marx or Vin are suggesting at all – but, rather that these relations present themselves as being independent of the will of individuals.  That is to say, particular individuals. Or to put it differently, the way society is organised has a certain "objective" character vis a vis these particular individuals insofar they cannot as individuals do much about it. These relations of production exist for them  as a set of external constraints According to emergence theory higher levels of reality "supervene"  on lower levels of reality but cannot be reduced to lower levels of reality.  So society depends or supervene on concrete individuals – you cannot have society without individuals – but social phenomena , like the "relations of production" that characterise society – cannot be reduced to individuals (who in case differ sharply with one another – for instance over the desirablity of a given set of relations of production). Rather, they are what are called "emergent" phenomena that exhibit a degree of relative autonomy vis a vis these individuals. This is the point that Marx was getting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence The irony about all this is that it is LBird who, after all, reveals hinself to be an an extreme individualist and reductionist (and Anti-Marxist) by denying the emergent character of social phenomena like the relatons of production.  These arise out of the interactions between indviduals rather than .their "will".  Only particular individuals can express a "will",  Society is not an individual that in some reified sense expresss a "will".  So what LBird is saying in effect is that the relations of production that characterise a given society are the direct product of some particuar individuals "will". Naturally, as a democratic communist I throughly repudiate LBird's extreme  individualism

[robbo203]

jondwhite wrote:

Indymedia UK has closed down. Add that to Freedom Newspaper and The People (SLP) who also tried online only

 And Common Voice/World in Common unfortunately which was a purely internet-based phenomenon (apart from a very brief spell when a physical leaflet was produced for distribution).  This is why I say dont go down that road of becoming totally reliant on the internet.  Your primary tap root has to be grounded in the physical reality of face to face contacts, not cyberspace. The internet must   of course be exploited in any way you can but it should be seen as supplementing not replacing physical organising and activity

[robbo203]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

 This is a version of Brexit Exiting As Name Only (BEANO).  Also worrying is May's view about European nationals.

Not to mention British Nationals in Europe like yours truly…Still not quite sure what the wider implications of Brexit are for us emigrants

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

Our comrade Binay Sarkar in India has written an article about "The Bolsheviks and the Abolition of Money":https://www.academia.edu/24449687/THE_BOLSHEVIKS_AND_THE_ABOLITION_OF_MONEY

 Thanks for that very interesting and useful link I dont know if you have come across an article by Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison, entitled, “Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives” (Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XLIII , September 2005, pp. 721–761). They make the point that while, in theory, “money was relatively unimportantin the Soviet command system”, in practice this was far from being the case.  In theory, what was supposed to happen was that the planners would set about the task of drawing up their plans, directly allocating producer goods and fixing controlled prices for such goods with the banks supplying “money and credit to ‘follow’ the physical plans”.  This was a process dubbed “planned autonomism”. Money, from this perspective, was purportedly just a means for “monitoring financial flows to detect departures from physical directives”. However: as they put it: "A major surprise from the archives is that money played a much larger role than we expected. Allocation actually began not with physical supply plans but with nominal budgetary assignments to investment and other government uses such as military orders. The Politburo gave much more time and energy to how rubles would be spent than to consideration of the “control figures” for output in physical units (Davies 2001a; Gregory 2001; Davies, Iliˇc, and Khlevnyuk 2004). Budget outlays usually came first because broad-brush supply plans could not fix the detailed assortment of physical products or their final uses. Plans in rubles of output were then calculated at “fixed” plan prices. Plan targets had to be fixed in rubles because most producers supplied many products and output was too heterogeneous to be planned any other way" This last point is highly revealing for it demonstrates all too clearly the underlying capitalist rationale that justifies the need for a single universal unit of accounting – namely, money – to facilitate market exchange

[robbo203]

Dave B wrote:

it comes under the “Communist subbotniks” movement thing I think? There is quite a bit of it from Lenin around 1919 on it re unpaid gratis labour etc. just one link on it from Lenin below; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jun/28.htm

 Very interesting link Dave B.  These two passages in particular: We know that in practice such contradictions are solved by breaking the vicious circle, by bringing about a radical change in the temper of the people, by the heroic initiative of the individual groups which often plays a decisive role against the background of such a radical change. The unskilled labourers and railway workers of Moscow (of course, we have in mind the majority of them, and not a handful of profiteers, officials and other whiteguards) are working people who are living in desperately hard conditions. They are constantly underfed, and now, before the new harvest is gathered, with the general worsening of the food situation, they are actually starving. And yet these starving workers, surrounded by the malicious counter-revolutionary agitation of the bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, are organising “communist subbotniks”, working overtime without any pay, and achieving an enormous increase in the productivity of labour in spite of the fact that they are weary, tormented, and exhausted by malnutrition. Is this not supreme heroism? Is this not the beginning of a change of momentous significance  It would be a good thing to eliminate the word “commune” from common use, to prohibit every Tom, Dick and Harry from grabbing at it, or to allow this title to be borne only by genuine communes, which have really demonstrated in practice (and have proved by the unanimous recognition of the whole of the surrounding population) that they are capable of organising their work in a communist manner. First show that you are capable of working without remuneration in the interests of society, in the interests of all the working people, show that you are capable of “working in a revolutionary way”, that you are capable of raising productivity of labour, of organising the work in an exemplary manner, and then hold out your hand for the honourable title “commune”! Of course "working without remuneration in the interests of society" begs the question as to how then one is supposed to obtain access to the means of living.  In socialism/communism,  the corrollary of "unremunerated work" is free access to goods and services.  You can't have one without the other.  This brings us to the question – if you dont have free access, if you continue to operate an exchange economy, what then does the call to "work without remuneration" – or more specifically to "work overtime without pay" –  really amount  to?  I would suggest it amounts to little more than code on the part of Lenin to signify the desire on the part of the Bolshevik state to step up the rate of exploitation, to increase the volumne of unpaid surplus value extracted from the Russian working class for the purposes of capital accummulation All this talk of the so called "war communism" of the period 1918-21 " is just  sheer bunkum.  Yes Lenin and his associates might have discussed the idea of the abolition of money in relation to the period  we are talking but that doesnt translate into any serious attempt to introduce a communist society which was simply not possible anyway under the circumstances then prevailing,  Talk is one thing ; action is quite another.  Besides, communism signifies far more than just the "absence of money". Money was not abolished though its value was undermined by hyperinflation.  This may have contributed to the practice of paying wages in kind rather than in money and I understand that at the height of the period of "war communism" up to 90% of wages paid to Russian workers were paid in kind.   We also know from Lenin writing in 1918 that the policy of  uravnilovka or income levelling – as a political tactic to gain working class support – had to be discontinued. In an address given in April 1918 (published as "The Soviets at Work") Lenin stated:  “We were forced now to make use of the old bourgeois method and agreed a very high remuneration for the services of the bourgeois specialists. All those who are acquainted with the facts understand this, but not all give sufficient thought to the significance of such a measure on the part of the proletarian state. It is clear that such a measure is a compromise, that it is a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian rule" With regard to the money component of the wages Russian workers received, it is interesting to note that in the Soviet Union there was a determination on the part of the authorities for this to be paid according to the peice wage form.   This is significant because as Marx had observed: "the piece wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production” and that "piece wages become . . . the most fruitful source of reductions in wages, and of frauds committed by the capitalists."(Capital 1 ch 21) By 1933, peice work accounted for 70% of wages according to Peter Petroff  (February 1938, “The Soviet Wages System”, Labour, p.141-2) Payment in kind continued in the Soviet era though it was disproportionately skewed in favour of the political elite.   Some theorists like Howard and King have argued that a substantial proportion of the soviet workers' wages were provided outside of the market, thus providing grist to their mill that the soviet union was not really a capitalist economy.  However, that claim appears to be based on an exaggeration since according to some estmates the “social wage” constituted less than a quarter – 23.4% – of the income of the average soviet worker – though, during the seventies, this figure apparently grew   (Arnot Bob, 1988, Controlling Soviet labour: Experimental Change from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, M R Sharpe p.36)  The greatest irony of all is that since the so called "fall of communism", payment-in-kind has increased.  According to Tore Ellingsen : Recently, we have witnessed massive domestic barter at the firm level in Russia (and in several of the other former Soviet republics). In Russia, barter constituted almost fifty per cent of industrial sales in 1997, up from around five per cent in 1992 (Aukutsionek (1997,1998)). In the same five year period, Russian firms started to pay their workers in kind on a grand scale, sometimes under tragic-comic circumstances. Hungry workers were paid everything from porcelain and kitchen utensils to sex toys and fertilizer, in the form of piles of manure, instead of their ordinary money wage. Likewise, a large fraction of taxes were being paid in kind rather than cash (OECD, 1997) (Tore Ellingsen, "Payments in Kind", Stockholm School of Economics Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance, No 244,  February 10, 2000)    

[robbo203]

moderator1 wrote:

alanjjohnstone wrote:

One question has now been answered – what chemical was used http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39648503

Quote:

"Incontrovertible" test results show sarin gas or a similar substance was used in the chemical weapons attack in Syria earlier this month, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) says.

Now the matter of what is settled it is now the questions who and why?

Now that the investigation has identified the chemical as sarin the finger must pointing at Assad. As for the why is that relevant in a war situation?

 According to RT at any rate the evidence shows that it could not have been Sarin. With Sarin the victims' pupils are supposed to dilate whereas in this instance the pupils of the victims appear to have contracted. A further point is that Sarin is supposed to be an odourless gas, yet people in the vicinity reported a smell of some sort Personally, though one can never be absolutely sure, I think that, on balance, the weight of evidence points to this being a false flag operation – particularly since Assad had nothing to gain by such a chemical attack and a lot to lose as we have seen

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

In any event, the disappearance of money was discussed by the Bolsheviks in the early days after their coup.

  Yes,  I wouldnt dispute that.  Didnt Stalin  in his 1906 work on Anarchism say something similar – about a socialist society being a moneyless society? However, the question is whether the period of "war communism" represented a genuine attempt, as some have claimed,  to institute a moneyless communist society.  Somewhere in my chaotic computer filing system I have a copy of the front page of – I think-  the New York Times dating from that time which talked of the Bolsheviks wanting to abolish money.  I will try and track it down..The conservative historian, Richard Pipes, argued that "War Communism" was not simply a 'temporary measure' but an ambitious attempt to introduce "full-blown communism."  (The Russian Revolution, Fontana, 1992).  Likewise the anarcho-capitalist,  Murray Rothbard, claimed in his essay "The Death Wish of the Anarcho-Communists" that: The Russians, after trying an approach to the communist moneyless economy in their "War Communism" shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, reacted in horror as they saw the Russian economy heading to disaster. Even Stalin never tried to revive it, and since World War II the East European countries have seen a total abandonment of this communist ideal and a rapid move toward free markets, a free price system, profit-and-loss tests, and a promotion of consumer affluence.(The Libertarian Forum, January 1, 1970.) Personally I think this is a load of tosh.  I dont believe  there was a genuine attempt  to institute communism although it was politically expedient for both the Bolsheviks and their opponents to suggest that such an attempt was being made.  But even if a genuine attempt had been made there is simply no way it could have succeeded – not for the reasons advanced by the likes of Rothbard and co but rather becuase the preconditions for a comunist society were wholly lacking at the time 

[robbo203]

The data suggests that 1 in 7 workers are self employed in the UK.  Historically this fraction has been declining giving credence to Marx's speculations about the petit or petty (the latter is the english vulgarisation of the  french word for small) bourgeoisie being progressively absorbed into the wage earning proletariat – although more rcently this trend has reversed and seems to be associated with the effects of recession.Here in Spain I think the pecentage is slightly higher and while the official unemplyment rate is also comparatively high, it must be borne in mind that there is a quite a flourishing black economy which is not possible – at least to the same extent – in a closely monitored Big Brother  state like the UK. This would tend to bump up the numbers of self employed

[robbo203]

Mike Foster wrote:

The publication from 2015's Summer School is already available from the online shop: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/catalog/non-party-publications/new-perspectives-socialism and I'll look into making last year's one more widely available.

 I didnt realise there was a category called "non-party publications" with a paywall in place. What is the rationale for this?  Would it not be better to make these 3 publications, party publications, with full access to contents as per the Marxism Revisited pamphlet also based on a summer school?  I think visitors to this site would benefit from a wider selection of material being made available and, as mentioned, I do refer people quite often to this site and its stock of literature – as, I imagine, do other people here

[robbo203]

Mike Foster wrote:

Thanks for your suggestions, robbo203. The remaining talks are still being planned, and I'll see if your thoughts can be incorporated into them.The last two Summer Schools have been accompanied by pamphlets which include versions of some of the talks (and most recent Summer Schools have had special publications), so there's a chance that something similar will be produced again this year… 

 Hi Mike Yes, it would be useful to produce a transcript of the talks in a proper pamphlet form.  I have often had occasion to refer people interested in socialist ideas who I have met through the internet forums and the like  to the "Marxism Revisited" pamphlet based on the summer school  of 1998 What are the two most recent pamphlets you refer to based on talks given at summer schools? Shouldnt they be listed as part of the pamphlet stock on this site?  The SPGB suffers from a real dirth of recently published pamphlets in my view.  This year you have an opportunity to produce a new pamphlet on the environment and I would urge you to seize that opportunity….

[robbo203]

rodshaw wrote:

I think that wage and salary are commonly understood to cover different types of income, the latter being more 'middle class' than the former, probably paid monthly rather than weekly. By using both we include both types of worker.Self-employed income is a bit more problematic and to include it we'd probably have to use more words not less. Unless we used 'income' to cover everything. But then we'd probably have to use more words explaining that we excluded capitalist income, or income from shares etc.Pensioners are another category not strictly being paid a 'wage or salary' (although we regard a pension as deferred wages, which in itself takes more explaining).Rod

 I guess "earned income"  would cover every contingency but then "abolition of earned income" doesnt have quite the same ring to it as "abolition of the wages system"…

[robbo203]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

As someone who makes extensive use of our archive material, some things become very noticeable.In nearly every article we publish we talk of "work for wage or salary".It is repeated ad nauseum in our literature .."work for wage or salary…work for wage or salary….."Can't we use one or the other and not be deemed imprecise. I prefer wage.And what do we use the recompense that the self-employed in the gig economy get?

 Indeed.  Many on the Left talk of the self employed as a distinct class separate from, and outside of, the working class – the so called petit bourgeoisie or small capitalists in the traditonal sense – although more recent usage e.g Nico Poulantzas 's  – widens the meaning of that term to include also  the non productive salariat. e.g.  bureaucrats of all kinds. I dont find that argument particularly persuasive,  As a self employed person I regard myself to be fully a member of the working class.  The notion that I am somehow a member of the (petit) bourgeosise by virtue of the fact that I own small sums of capital – to wit, a 7 year old strimmer, 3 chainsaws and an assortment of garden tools – is frankly laughable considering that many blue collar workers on a regular waged income – probably possess a lot more capital tucked away in various financial investment schemes and savings accounts than I have ever had! But if I dont technically earn a wage perhaps the old Marxian slogan "abolition of the wages system" needs to be re-jigged to be made more relevant to workers like me

[robbo203]

I would be disappointed if some of the other remaining talks did not touch on the subjects of 1) the theory of externalities  and 2) the structural waste of capitalism. The latter, focussing on socially useless forms of work under capitalism – not just the role of the military – is a particularly salient feature of the case for socialism and indeed provides a uniquely socialist insight into the whole question of the sustainable use of resourcesIs there any indication that these subjects might be covered at the Summer School?  Also, will transcripts of the talks be made available perhaps in a pamphlet form as happened in the case of the previous Summer School on Marxism?

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