robbo203
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
was Robbo who brought the argument it was not me.
Untrue. The post that stirred up this shit was Marcos’s one under President Biden thread (205706) which included the gratuitous insult :
“Her biography sounds like a typical American politician. Nothing new, it does show that any sex and any colour of the skin can serve the interest of the ruling class. The best example is Barrack Obama. The Feminists of the Socialist Party should support her” (my emphasis).
This post (by a non member of the WSM) should also have been deleted or transferred to this thread like the others to maintain consistency
“ENGELS LOVED killing animals.”
Fair enough, MA – Engel’s attitude to foxhunting is not something we would approve of. But I am not quite sure why you brought the matter up. The case for socialism does not depend on Marx or Engels or any particular opinions they may have held on this or that subject
Hi MA
Whilst it is perfectly true that you dont have to be in the party to be a socialist, all things considered it is better to be in than out. Numbers do matter. However irrational it may be – and human beings are both rational and irrational creatures – we do tend to judge the credibility of an idea by the support its attracts. How does one gauge this support outside of the particular organisation promoting the idea you want to attract support for? Unity is strength and atomism makes for impotence and eventually apathy.
So like Alan I would urge you to reconsider. I have never quite understood why subjects such as animal rights should give rise to such heated controversy in the party. I am not saying the matter is not important in itself – its certainly is – but is it important from the standpoint of what the purpose of the party is about?
I dont think anyone here is saying that animals should be treated cruelly. The controversy seems to be more about whether animals should be bred for human consumption. Strong views have been expressed on either side of this debate which is perfectly OK but I think the problem arises when comrades try to formalise or harden their own ideas into some kind of quasi-official “party line”.
There is too much of a tendency towards “Party Line-ism” as it is. The SPGB is not, and never has been, a monolithic organisation, thank christ. There has always been a diversity of opinion on a whole range of subjects. By all means let us have robust debate on these subjects but on the understanding that it is perfectly OK for members to hold differing and conflicting opinions on these subjects.
It is only with respect to the absolute core principles of the party that we can expect more or less unanimity of opinion. These are the principles upon which membership of the party is predicated But even here there is scope for pruning back. (I particularly have in mind the requirement for applicants to not hold religious views. I have long felt that this should apply only to organised religions. It is perfectly possible to hold vaguely religious-cum-spiritual views and for all practical purposes, to think in “historical materialist” terms but this is for another thread and I wont derail this one)
The point is there nothing to stop you as a member putting forward your strong views on the subject of the appalling way animals are treated under capitalism and I for one sympathise very much with what you are saying. But leaving the Party is not going to achieve anything as far as promoting the socialist cause is concerned and in fact will – sadly – do the opposite.
With the WSPUS having stagnated for decades, we see some small signs of progress but they need a target for their campaign.
There is a constant trickle of new contacts being added to the WSPUS database. Its not rocket science to see how or why this is happening. It is by pushing links to the WSM on the social media notably political forums, using the free trial offer of the SS as the “bait”
If we want to to target our campaigning then I suggest this should be a major part of our approach. It is proven to work and I am genuinely perplexed that very few members seem to want to get involved in this
” I have nothing but the fondest memories of my time as a socialist, a feeling not at all affected by the fact that I can no longer agree with what I thought then. I’ll take this opportunity to apologise most sincerely for the intemperance of polemics past, and to wish you every happiness in your endeavours, even if I cannot, I am afraid, wish you any success in the socialist one.”
Fair enough, Stuart, but I I hope that in your efforts to criticise socialism in the future that your fairly and accurately present what socialism is about, nor some gross caricature of it. You know, or should know, enough about the case for socialism to be able to do this
Like others here I am completely dumbfounded by your road-to-Damascus conversion to mainstream capitalist politics. I could sort of understand , though obviously not endorse, your earlier support for Left Unity but this latest move of yours is utterly baffling
Clearly the universe is a more mysterious place than we perhaps allow for….
ZJW – oops sorry I overlooked your post preceding the one I responded to. No, I haven’t come across this text by LLM before – thanks for pointing it out. Its very long and will take time to digest but flicking through it, I noticed some comments asserting that Russia in 1917 was ripe for socialism Really? Lenin himself talked of the subjective and objective preconditions for socialism and very clearly Russia did not meet either. Indeed Lenin repeatedly acknowledged that the vast majority were not socialists in Russia in 1917.
The text seems to argue that a socialist revolution does not start off with an explicit programme for socialism but that this grows out of the struggle for reforms. I think that is a very mechanistic way of looking at things not to mention a case of wishful thinking but I might be misinterpreting the text not having really read it. Perhaps you can correct me if I am wrong
Hi ZJW
Yes it was the same article basically. the reason being the original home of the article , the Common Voice journal, is defunct, I think it succumbed to a virus some years ago.
A central point made in that article and repeated many times elsewhere in our literature, is our clear repudiation of the concept of society-wide central planning (in the sense of a single planning centre for the entire production system) along with our clear need for a system of (non price) feedback to inform production decisions. I recall coming across articles in the SS going back to the 1930s which talked of the need for a multilevel (global/regional/local) polycentric framework of decision-making in socialism. It was in the 1980s primarily through our contact with the Libertarian Alliance that these ideas become much more explicit in the Party literature
What irritated me intensely about Dan and Stuart’s article was their droning on about ‘communism’ and ‘central planning’. You can understand this coming from some fresh-faced naïve Ancap completely unfamiliar with the SPGB. But these comments came from two ex members. Fair enough if they wanted to do a ‘Toby Crowe’ and cut all their ties with revolutionary socialism to embrace the status quo – that’s their choice. But you would at least expect then to have the integrity not to a present such a caricature of the case for communism/socialism and at least make some nodding reference to the kind of arguments referred to above which they could surely not have been unaware of having been members of the SPGB.
But no – their article is like a slap in the face of those who were once their fellow comrades
Talking of using knowledge gained during his time in the Party perhaps Stuart could have researched the subject a little more thoroughly before coming out with his claim that the Bolsheviks attempted to abolish money, collectivise property and centralise planning led to short-term suffering on a huge scale and long-term economic disaster that in the end brought the whole system down
Its a pity he hadn’t read our comrade in the Indian Party, Binay Sarkar’s, comprehensive article on the subject
https://www.academia.edu/24449687/THE_BOLSHEVIKS_AND_THE_ABOLITION_OF_MONEY
Stuart has a wonderful turn of phrase, a literary style to be admired. He made no secret of moving towards a reformist position and defended it, strongly
Yes and to underpin and rationalise his complete severance from revolutionary socialism he has found it convenient to appeal to an arcane theory that purported to demonstrate the impossibility of socialism and therefore the pointlessness of striving to realise socialism. Never mind that the theory is bunkum and based on an utterly absurd theoretical model of socialism – a complete caricature.
Stuart has not become an anarcho-capitalist but he has used a key argument employed by Ancaps to justify his moving away from socialism and his fulsome embrace of bourgeois politics. His whole outlook now reeks of that. He has gone mainstream. That’s his prerogative, of course, but it does illustrate the dangers of reformism. Once you go down that road you will eventually jettison socialism. Sooner or later. And in Stuart’s case sooner than I imagined
If you look at the MoneyWeek page and type in ‘Stuart Watkins’ in the search facility a list of articles that Stuart has written for this publication appears. One of these is
Modern capitalism and the rise of the bullshit job
Lo and behold in the text of the article we find this:
“When asked what we can do about bullshit jobs, Graeber grumbles at the impertinence and stupidity of those who raise the question and waves his hand generally in the direction of giving everyone a ton of money instead. (He halfheartedly proposes a basic income, but his proposal sits at the more unrealistic end of the spectrum of possibilities.) However, as David Ramsay Steele argues powerfully in his 1992 book From Marx to Mises, neglecting the economic details of proposed alternatives is much more than a minor intellectual oversight or foible. It is dangerous.
The Bolsheviks took power in Russia armed to the teeth with analyses of the problems generated by capitalism, but with nothing but the vaguest notions of what they were supposed to put in its place. Their attempt to abolish money, collectivise property and centralise planning led to short-term suffering on a huge scale and long-term economic disaster that in the end brought the whole system down. As Steele says, “all arguments against capitalism fail unless there is some feasible alternative which can do better”.
The basic problem, which Graeber touches on but does not resolve in his book, is to do with value. In any society, resources must be allocated in a more or less efficient manner between the various competing uses to which they might be put. In a market society, the conundrum of how to decide this unfathomably complex issue is delegated to society as a whole. Private ownership of the means of production, free markets in factors of production and consumer goods, and prices perform the role of an all-knowing and invisible hand that solves a vast economic problem that to date no human or computer program has been able to. If there is some other and better way of valuing goods, including our labour, and solving this problem in a better way, we should hear about it and evaluate it pretty carefully before moving to smash up the system that provides us with our living simply because our role in it occasionally bores us.”
Ah, so its our old opponent D R Steele – another ex member – who Stuart invokes in support of his new found moderate bourgeois liberalism no doubt with an eye to the new kind of moderate bourgeois liberal readership he is writing for. And so he he comes up with the same old dumb blinkered either-or dichotomy . Its either the market mechanism or society wide central planning. There is absolutely no conception here of any other alternative..
And his conclusion?:
“As Darren McGarvey argues in his book Poverty Safari, the left wastes a great deal of time critiquing “the system”, and believes it is doing good. More good would be done if they could instead help people give up drinking, smoking and eating rubbish and find something meaningful to do, both within and without their bullshit jobs.”
Sorry but I get the distinct impression the spark has gone from Stuart. He has been successfully co-opted into the business of “manufacturing consent” as Chomsky put it.
How sad. What a miserable end for a once fine socialist
I am not too sure I would entirely agree with Adam’s characterisation of these ex-two members as “defenders of laissez faire capitalism”. They do , after all, talk of ‘market failures’ and the need for state intervention in some instances e,g the coronavirus pandemic.
However, they do also assert that “the case for classical liberalism is based upon some deep and compelling arguments, the force of which has been underestimated by the left. ” These arguments are ‘compelling’ only insofar as strawman arguments come across as superficially compelling and in this case the particular strawman argument put forward by Stuart and Dan is this:
“few advocates of socialism or social democracy these days envisage the kind of centrally planned, entirely non-market communism sought by the Bolsheviks and stringently critiqued by Mises and his fellow Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek”
I find it astonishing and deeply disappointing that they can come out with utter bilge like this knowing that the organisation to which they once belonged quite explicitly does NOT endorse society-wide central planning, In fact the refutation of Mises’ so called economic calculation argument hinges precisely on the possibility of feedback provided through a self regulating system of stock control which in turn presupposes a polycentric system of planning – not a unicentric system of planning which is what central planning boils down to
Stuart and Dan must surely have been aware of these kinds of arguments that have long been swilling round within the Party yet they seem to be wilfully intent upon presenting a caricature of what socialists stand for. It reminds me of Rothbard’s ludicrous claim that the catastrophic experience of ‘war communism’ shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power demonstrates the impracticality of communism as such. But was ‘war communism’, communism as we understand the term? Not at all. More to the point, even if the Bolsheviks earnestly wanted to implement genuine communism the preconditions for such a society simply did not exist. So of course any attempt to implement communism was therefore bound to “fail”
I dont know quite why these ex-comrades have come to embrace the views they currently hold – a kind of dull middle-of-the-road bourgeois liberalism based on an oh-so-predictable collection of clichés – but I would hazard a guess that in Stuart’s case – I dont know about Dan’s circumstances – that it was probably as a result of his disappointment with the reformist Left Unity organisation he was once enamoured with for a while. (Maybe I am quite mistaken in thinking this in which case I stand to be corrected) I remember him being criticised on this forum for his support for Left Unity so perhaps his current flirtation is a case of being on the rebound. Perhaps he should be invited back to this forum to argue his case
If you dont want to return to revolutionary socialism, then what better way of rationalising this than to big up some arcane theory put forward by some obscure Baron in the early 20th century purporting to demonstrate the impossibility of “socialism” , something which he imagined would operate on the “Fuhrer principle”. That says it all, really. Von Mises really didn’t have much of a clue about socialism – at least now as we understand it – and far from finding his arguments “compelling” I consider them to be quite misleading and unconvincing
This might be of interest. Goats can play a very important role in the ecology of southern Spain as well as providing goat cheese. The article should automatically translate into English
This should clinch the argument that the virus scare is overblown and basically just a conspiracy to assert ruling class hegemony (I can think of far more effective ways of doing that than closing down businesses and running up huge financial losses)
“Number of excess deaths in UK since coronavirus outbreak began nears 60,000
Tuesday’s figures from the Office for National Statistics, showing 53,960 excess deaths in England and Wales between March 21 and May 15 2020, follow figures last week showing the equivalent numbers for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The National Records of Scotland found there were 4,434 excess deaths in Scotland between March 23 and May 17, while the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency put the figure for Northern Ireland at 834 excess deaths between March 21 and May 15.
Together, this means the total number of excess deaths in the UK across this period now stands at 59,228.
All figures are based on death registrations.”
