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LBird wrote:

Yeah, the Marxian perspective on 'class' has nothing whatsoever to do with 'placing every individual' in an 'individualist schema' of society.It is an approach to understanding, describing, criticising and analysing a society, at the level of a society.A society is not a collection of individuals. It is more than the sum of its parts.Marxian 'class' is nothing to do with individuals, their pay, their income level, their accents, their clothes, their habits, their education, or their cultural views. It is nothing to do with 'appearances', that can be easily seen.'Class' is a social relationship, a relationship of exploitation.

 Society is indeed more than the sum of its parts but that does not mean that thereby the parts have somehow mysteriously disappeared from view by virtue of simply saying "class is a social relationship".  There is no such thing as a "class" or a "society" without the individuals that comprise it – even if those classes and individuals are socially constituted What that means is that of course you can in principle "place" individuals according to their class.  Or are you seriously denying that we can confidently claim Bill Gates is a capitalist?  That would be ludicrous! Of course, we are not saying he is a capitalist because of his habits, his clothes, his accent etc etc but rather because of his significant  ownership of capital.  That is what counts in the Marxian class schema and on that basis you can certainly differentiate between individuals. In fact. if you think about it,  if you could not do this then the whole concept of class would be rendered meaningless.

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Richard wrote:

2.) There is a large pool of CEOs who simply move from one corporation to another collecting large incomes and bonuses based on the mental energy that they sell (albeit at grossly inflated rates). Your definition as given above would make these CEOs members of the working class. Is the managerial class a part of the working class?

 Hi Richard I think it is important to understand that the notion of  "class" in the Marxian sense is an abstraction  and that, in reality, there is a grey area where one class shades into the other.  Some in the managerial "class" occupy this grey area  but many do not.  Lower and middle level management tend to be unequivocally working class albeit relatively well paid members of the working class.  The top CEOs, on the other hand, with so called "compensation packages" running in multiple millions of dollars per year tend to be unequivocally members of the capitalist class albeit on the lower rungs of that class. Increasingly their income and wealth is derived from exercising their share options as opposed to their supposed labour contributions. Here are a few facts derived from this site http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/ :Average CEO compensation was $15.2 million in 2013, using a comprehensive measure of CEO pay that covers CEOs of the top 350 U.S. firms and includes the value of stock options exercised in a given year, up 2.8 percent since 2012 and 21.7 percent since 2010.Longer-term trends in CEO compensation:From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period.The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 29.9-to-1 in 1978, grew to 122.6-to-1 in 1995, peaked at 383.4-to-1 in 2000, and was 295.9-to-1 in 2013, far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.If Facebook, which we exclude from our data due to its outlier high compensation numbers, were included in the sample, average CEO pay was $24.8 million in 2013, and the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 510.7-to-1.

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This might be of interest to some and relevant to the theme of HG violence  –  an assessment of the conflicting worldviews of the optimist, Stephen Pinker and the pessimist , John Gray .https://www.academia.edu/11884097/Human_Nature_Reason_and_Progress_John_Gray_s_Straw_Dogs_and_Steven_Pinker_s_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

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gnome wrote:

The capitalist class is comprised of those individuals who, because they possess the means of production and distribution, whether in the form of legal property rights of individuals backed by the state or collectively as a bureaucracy through the state, do not need to work and live on privileged income derived from surplus value produced by the working class. The capitalists personally need not – and mostly do not – get involved in the process of production. Social production is carried on by capitalist enterprises which are overwhelmingly comprised of members of the working class who have to sell their mental and physical energies to an employer in order to live..

 To back up this might I recommend"The Rise of the Working Poor and the Non-Working Rich"http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/29395-the-rise-of-the-working-poor-and-the-non-working-rich

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There could well be something in what you say about the link between education and violence as a generalisation One of the arguments I have sometimes encountered amongst socialists is that  advanced capitalism needs an educated workforce and this in turn will tend to push a country  towards a more bourgeois democratic form of governance.  That, in turn, exerts a restraining influence on the extent of institutionalised warfare: you don't find many western style multiparty "democracies" going to war against each other.  Institutionalised state violence tends to directed and channelled outwards towards parts of the world where "democracy" is fragile or non existent – as in the case of proxy wards  So by extrapolation goes the argument the more bourgeois democracy takes root across the globe the less likely will wars be. Certainly there are weaknesses in this argument that one can point to but it cannot be entirely dismissed.  For instance, I have often argued that one of the consequences of a growing worldwide socialist movement is that it will be much more difficult for capitalist states to wage war. The moral legitimacy of waging wars which capitalist states need to obtain will be progressively undermined by such a movement. You also quote Pinker as saying:More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the mind of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms.  Vivid depiction of the suffering wrought by slavery, sadistic punishments, war and cruelty to children and animals preceded the reforms that outlawed or reduced those practices. It is certainly true that the movement against cruelty to animals had its origins in an urban based and relatively educated  "middle class" (see, for example, Keith Thomas' wonderful book "Man and Nature: 1500 to 1900" in which he talks about this and the whole romantic backlash against the depredations of  industrial capitalism).  One of the arguments used by these early animal rights activists is that cruelty towards would set a bad example to human beings. Of course, in looking at the influence of education as a factor in levels of violence we should be wary of treating it as an independent variable.  Some would argue  that the drift towards de skilling and the polarisation of the workforce into a small technocratic elite, on the one hand, and a large and increasing part time poorly paid workforce of burgher flippers and the like is has having a depressing effect on educational levels in general. True, there is the Internet, mobile phones, Ipads and whatnot but it could also be argued that the net effect has been to foster a more disempowered atomised view of the world in which we have more and more "facts" at our finger tips but our ability or inclination to integrate these facts into a coherent worldview has been diminishing. So yeah, its a big subject you have touched on Meel with so many different  ramifications to explore!

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Hi MeelHere are one or two links that might be of interest on the higher productivity of smaller multicropping farms vis a vis large scale monocultural unitshttp://www.monthlyreview.org/090810altieri.phpand this article by Geoffrey Lean:"Study after study show that organic techniques can provide much more food per acre in developing countries than conventional chemical-based agriculture. One report – published last year by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) – found that 114 projects, covering nearly two million African farmers, more than doubled their yields by introducing organic or near-organic practices.  Another study – led by the University of Essex – looked at similar projects in 57 developing countries, covering three per cent of the entire cultivated area in the Third World, and revealed an average increase of 79 per cent. And research at the University of Michigan concluded that organic farming could increase yields on developing countries' farms three-fold.("Organic is more than small potatoes", Daily Telegraph, 7 Aug 2009).

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Meel wrote:

"Full automation" sounds ok for some things such as medicines, vehicles, some buildings and some staple foods – but I would prefer home cooked meals, and hand crafted articles in the home, such as clothing, utensils, furniture, etc. Technology is great, but not for everything.A society where we sit around just adjusting robots now and again sounds horrendous.I volunteer in my local park and get involved in ditch and pond clearance, mending fences, and dragging logs through muddy streams on a cold and rainy winter's day.  I love it.  Aren't we forgetting the pleasure of physical work, when it is voluntary?Meel

 Absolutely Meel! I couldn't agree more!  And what better refutes the argument that socialism could not work because "people are inherently lazy" than the practical example of volunteer work we see around us today and in such abundance… In a socialist society I would hope some aspects of  work would become more labour intensive even if the more boring or dangerous work might become more automated.  I think growing food is a case in point where there is a very strong argument for shifting towards a more labour intensive organic approach. Contrary to what some might think,small scale, multi crop organic farms are much more productive per hectare than large scale monoculture farms. They are also a lot more environmentally sustainable.  In terms of output per farm worker they may not be as productive as large scale monocultural farms but this is slightly misleading since you have to also factor in the indirect labour  involved in the manufacture of inputs for the latter. In any case since in a socialist society most of the work we do in capitalism will no longer need to be done, that means there will be an abundance of labour  available for socially useful  work of all kinds.  Given this, it makes sense to adjust the nature of technology – the degree of  "capital intensity" you use – to fit  the facts of labour supply as you find them .  Its called "optimising your use of factor inputs" One more reason why socialism will be a much more efficient way of organising production!

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steve colborn wrote:

robbo, its probably the "all things to all men" approach! They are after all a bunch of using, two faced Aholes!!!

 Well, the thought crossed my mind, Steve,  that maybe LU had both a maximum and a minimum programme along the lines of the old Social Democratic parties of the last century  in which case I would be interested to read the former.  But I dont think they have even that.   (although I could be wrong)In fact,  how many Left parties, one wonders, do explicitly publish a maximum programme which clearly outlines the communist objective.  That would be something at least  – even if such  parties maybe irredeemably compromised by pursuing a minimum programme as well.  I dont think many if any such parties exist. For most if not all of them, socialism/communism boils down to some form of state administered capitalism under pseudo "public ownership"

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Out of curiosity I looked up LU's recently agreed 2015 Manifesto and straightaway was quite surprised to come across the following under the section entitled  "The Economy": "We need an economy run democratically, not controlled by the few in the interests of 1% of the population. This means the principle of common ownership of all natural resources and means of producing wealth, and an end to the dominance of private financial interests such as the City of London over the economy. We stand for ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"(http://leftunity.org/manifesto-2015-the-economy/ This in a Manifesto that blatantly calls for full employment, taking over the banks, taxing corporations and a whole host of other capitalism-tinkering reforms. I cannot believe that the authors of the Manifesto would be so unfamiliar with the argument  that the very concept of "common ownership" logically precludes economic exchange  (and hence any kind of  exchange-related phenomena such as wages, taxes or indeed banks) or that the expression "from each according to their ability  to each according to their need" specifically rules out wage labour  or even labour vouchers and refers instead to a system of voluntaristic labour and  free access to goods and services (Marx's higher phase of communism) Why is LU cleaving to – or hijacking – a form of wording that clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with what their Manifesto is actually proposing?  Whats going on here?

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Vin wrote:

and how will a minority get control of the state when there is a majority of class conscious workers with delegates in control ? This is the claptrap and confusion I am refering to. It has nothing to do with Leninism, it is an irrational fear of the state. The anarchist position is dangerous and we would do well to oppose it as we always have.

 I'm not advancing an anarchist position,  Vin.  Like I said, i have no problem with the democratic capture of state power but I see this democratic act as tantamount to signifying the complete disappearance of the state.  This is why a minority will not be able to re-capture the state from the socialist majority – there will be no state to recapture!  In the event of such a minority trying to forcibly reinstate capitalist ownership of the the means of production it wont be a "state" that  will forcibly rebuff such action. It will be a the citizens of a classless stateless communist society that will be doing that! Your mistake, Vin, is to equate the use of force (should be necessary) with the actions of a state. It is not.  There are stateless egalitarian societies where force is quite clearly in evidence such as the Nuer, the subject of  Evan Pritchard's ethnography  (http://classes.yale.edu/03-04/anth500b/projects/project_sites/00_Busbee/500b_evans-pritchard.html) I don't see why in principle a future socialist society might not be able to resort to force, if called upon to do so, without resorting to a state 

Vin wrote:

You should not be surprised by my confirmation of clause 6 of our principles Anarchists don't believe in using the state,  the World Socialist Movement believes the opposite. Our conference resolution proposing the immediate abolition of the state was anarchist nonsense. There will be a dictatorship of the working class, the dictatorship of the 99%.

But cant you see that this implies the continuation of the class relationships of capitalism if you advocate the dictatorship of the working class?  The existence of a working class implies the existence of a capitalist class and insofar as you allow the latter to continue to exist what actually has changed in substantive terms?  Nothing! The socialist revolution will STILL not yet have happened – by definition.  All that will have happened is that you are allowing capitalism to continue and therefore conspiring in the continuing exploitation of workers by the capitalists. THIS is why any talk of the DOTP is so dangerous from a revolutionary socialist point of view since it lends itself to a Leninist position where a minority come to claim to represent the majority  in the transitional period but in practice come to oppose the interests of the majority just as the Bolsheviks did. It is just not realistic to suppose that a militant socialist movement having become a majority and having captured state power by democratic means will allow capitalism and the state to continue one second longer.  On what grounds must workers wait and refrain from abolishing their exploited status for the duration? I cant think of a single plausible reason why they should.  Saying the capitalists (or rather ex capitalists) might use force against them is not a reason at all because such an attempt can clearly be opposed by the non statist use of force if necessary  

Vin wrote:

 This is our position:That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.It would be foolish to expect the capitalist class to voluntarily give up its privileged position in society. The State will be an 'agent of emancipation' in direct opposition to the anarchist utopian position.

 The capitalist class may or may not voluntarily give its privileged position but it won't be a state that it will have to deal with but rather the militant organisation of a classless stateless communist society.  It is the latter that will resist any attempt to forcibly reintroduce capitalism. In one sense  this argument is a semantic one but it is important to be consistent here in your usage of terms.  A state is an instrument of class oppression in Marxian terms. Consequently the very existence of a state implies the existence of classes and therefore the absence of classless communism/socialism.  If there is no classless communism after the socialist majority has captured power then I put it to you that no socialist revolution has yet taken place and that whoever controls the state in these circumstances will end up being not that much different from, say, the early Labour government and we all know how that panned out in the end!  After all capitalism can only be run in the interests of capital and against the workers.  So who is going to take the blame for continuing to administer a system that operates against the interests of workers in the face of a majority of those workers  who want to end that system forthwith only to be told that they must wait a while longer? It makes no sense

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

 Taking control and using the state to establish socialism is after all just going to be a brief period at the beginning of the revolutionary process. Isn't that our message which we emphasise…and once that is accomplished the state is transformed in such a fashion that it can no longer be described a state.

 To be pedantic, Alan, I can't see how this can be case…  I think the confusion arises from how one defines the state itself which is something separate from the machinery of the state i.e the bureaucratic apparatus.  I can certainly foresee the latter continuing to exist and to be adapted after the capture of state power but not the state qua state.  To say the state continues to exist albeit for an allegedly "brief period" is tantamount to saying that class ownership of the means of production continues to exist when the whole point of taking over the state is to abolish class ownership!  In other words it is a symbolic act marking the switchover point to a classless (and therefore stateless) society Which is why logically speaking and in terms of Marxian discourse itself, taking over the state must mean exactly the same thing as the dissolution of the state

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Vin wrote:

I cringe when I hear members say " We stand for  a stateless, moneyless, wageless ……."What about the first step before we can have such a society?   Taking control of the state and using its power democratically to dispossess the parasites and reorganise society. Its as if we are afraid to say it.

I'm surprised to hear you say that Vin.  I would have thought saying one stands for a stateless, moneyless, wageless society is precisely what distinguishes socialists from the reformists.Taking control of the state and using it against the capitalists begins to sound like that claptrap advanced by the Leninists of all hues – the so called "dictatorship of the proletariat",  an oxymoron if there ever was oneI've got nothing against the idea of taking control of the state but the very act of doing so entails ipso facto the complete dissolution of the state.  Anything short of this leads us into the quagmire of Leninist politics and inevitably the retention of capitalism in its statist form

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gnome wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

Ozymandias wrote:

Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT! 

Just as a matter of curiosity do you have a link to this incident at Telford?  I would love to run it past my local  FB group and see what sort of reaction it elicits

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/16/threat-of-prosecution-for-people-who-taunted-and-filmed-suicidal-manhttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/telford-suicide-thousands-sign-petition-5347573

 That confirms my suspicion.  For every scumbag-cum-stupid bastard, there are many many more who are not.  There is hope for socialism yet. Ozy!

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Ozymandias wrote:

Recently some poor guy in Telford succeeded in throwing himself to his death because of the encouraging shouts of "Jump", "Get on with it" and "How far can you bounce?" from a crowd of "Workers" below him. Some of these fuckin cretins were filming this horror on their smartphones then uploading it onto "social media" for a laugh. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Well the smartphone phenomenon is making our glorious "working class" anything but smart. Let's face it they were a shower of stupid bastards before all of this…now made even more stupid with the emergence of this technology. They are more addicted, more myopic, more desensitised and more detached as a consequence. This is what you are dealing with now. The masters are turning them all into DRONES! You only have to look at the kids. World Socialism? That'll be right…FORGET IT! 

 Ozy, its an appalling incident , I agree but I seriously wonder how typical it is.  Here in Spain for example there have been cases of ordinary folk, harassed and driven to despair by the efforts of banks to repossess their flats,  plunging to their deaths on the street below.  Far from provoking the kind of reaction you describe at Telford. it has induced a sense of horror and widespread outrage. There have been two ore three case of this in my local city of Granada I remember when I worked as an admin penpusher for a view years back in the 1990s at a London university. college, there was an incident involving a student who jumped from the eleventh floor of Engineering Faculty block.  As I recall, what happened is that he  had just been diagnosed with an incurable cancer.  The shock  – even trauma – that this incident caused among my colleagues was pretty much palpable. I can assure you.  Most people I believe are fundamentally decent and caring when it comes down to it, and this shows particularly when disasters or catastrophes of some sort happen Of course there are always the exceptions that prove the rule but don't be so disheartened Ozy! There are a lot of good folk out there who don't buy into the dog eat dog worldview Just as a matter of curiosity do you have a link to this incident at Telford?  I would love to run it past my local  FB group and see what sort of reaction it elicits CheersR

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LBird wrote:

I know I'm wasting my time, and yours, Vin's, YMS's, and anybody else's who isn't interested the the philosophical relationship between subject/object/knowledge.

 LBird, somebody once said something along the lines that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways and that the point is to change it.  I don't have any great problem with your view on the "philosophical relationship between subject/object/knowledge". In fact, if you recall, months and months ago I expressed support for the position you were advancing which was a fundamental assault on the notion of objectivity in science – positivism – and the idea that science is somehow value free.  You may or may believe that you are unique in holding these views  on this  forum but you are not and there are others here apart from me who likewise hold them. Where you fall down badly, and with all due respect, is not the philosophical basis of your thinking but in your working out of the practical implications of what you are saying – like your ludicrous  idea of everyone voting on scientific theories. You never explained how or why.  Did you seriously think for one moment what all that would entail in practical terms? I don't think so and your reluctance to engage with the arguments at a practical level was all too telling.  It suggests you subconsciously knew you were on dodgy grounds I think you would be far better advised to shift your focus of attention away from abstract philosophy for a while to something a little  more practically oriented and down to earth,  to be brutally frank.  You've been reading too many philosophy books lately.  Time to take a break!

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