robbo203
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But (unsurprisingly to me), the replies generally seem to think this a bad idea. Fair enough.
If you are referring to the meeting (I didn’t attend it) I would be very surprised if anyone there would have suggested it would be a bad idea to discuss the kind of problems a socialist would face in the short term – that is, if I have understood you correctly. I recall that when the production-for-use committee report came out back in the 1990s or whenever it was, the reception was generally positive.
You mention your interest in William Morris. There has always been a strong current of support for the WM approach within the SPGB. There is also a “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (the title of Aaron Bastani´s book) tendency in the party as well, Some of the most interesting debates within the Party have pitted WM comrades against FALC comrades.
I’m somewhere in between. There are pros and cons on both sides but I tend to place heavy emphasis on the shift in values that needs to occur before we achieve a socialist society. Consumerism is something I am particularly opposed to because it is essentially all bound up with status acquisition under capitalism – a way of reinforcing capitalism – and has little to do with having a reasonably materially comfortable life as such (which we will need to achieve for everyone in socialism as a priority). Consumerism is consumption for the sake of consumption. It is alienated consumption that also has very negative consequences as far as the environment is concerned
This doesn’t look good for the Zelensky regime. Even the attempt to lure Trump with the promise of Ukraine´s mineral riches seems to have failed because 1) rights to these have already been sold off (so it was just an attempted con trick) 2) Most of the rare minerals sites are on land occupied by the Russian military.
Now this:
“No NATO membership, no return to pre-2014 borders, and no more relying on U.S. for military funding – Trump delivers hammer blow to Ukraine as America comes first”I can´t see this war lasting much longer. I read somewhere that there have been in excess of 100,000 deserters from the Ukrainian side and military recruiters are facing increasing hostility when they visit towns to try to harvest more cannon fodder.
One would hope that same is true of the Russian side and that Russian workers in uniform would desert too. Some have but I’m not too sure of the total. This has been a stupid pointless conflict in which workers on either side have absolutely nothing to gain and so much to lose.
Nationalism is a sick death cult. Hopefully, the killing will soon come to an end
DJP
You’re right about being careful about going about contacting ex-members – one has to be careful and so a case-by-case approach would be advisable. But I get the impression that most comrades just lapse – drift away – perhaps, ironically, because of the lack of contact.
You’re also right about the lack of younger members. Geez, when I think back to the days of the old Guildford branch (of which I was a member) in its hey day it was buzzing with younger people. Very few were over 40, I guess. On one memorable branch meeting, we had 5 Forms A accepted (could have been 7 but the couple couldn’t make it that and joined at the subsequent meeting). Those were the days….
Maybe the Party should get into Tiktok or something..
As an aside could I ask why people leaving the party was a subject for discussion in the first place? I would have thought, when compared to other political parties or voluntary organisations in general, the churn of members was quite low. Has this recently changed
My impression is that the Party is fairly steadily losing members at the moment and getting smaller. It is concerning frankly. How this rate of loss compares with other organisations such as those on the left, I don’t know. All the more reason to take seriously the concerns of those who left the Party. How about you DJP? Have you considered rejoining?
I do believe we can turn this situation around and build up a head of steam. Maybe reconnecting with past members could be part of a strategy for renewed growth. But we need to do other things as well.
Personally, I cannot see the point in not belonging to an organisation if your basic values and outlook align with it. It is important to connect. Heaven knows, the SPGB is far from perfect but – let’s face it – it is easily the best option for people of our political persuasion, people who want what we want. What have you got to lose by rejoining?
But I’m getting away from the point of my original post, that I thought might be of help to the SPGB. Where I think the party fails is that there is no serious examination of problems that will be encountered under socialism, particularly in the short term, such as getting resources to poor countries, and how to create alternatives in areas where dangerous work will no longer be done. Which, for what it is worth, is one of the reasons why I left the party
I would agree with Howard that this is not really a good reason for leaving for the Party but I also agree with you that we do indeed need to be thinking more, if only in broad terms, about how a socialist society might hit the ground running when it comes tackling something like the huge problem of material deprivation that exists in the world today.
I believe some components of this problem – particularly food production – can be very easily and rapidly resolved. In fact, the world already produces more than enough food to feed the global population. Just over a third of it is wasted. The pattern of farming also needs to be modified. There are problems with the large-scale industrial model of agriculture based on monocultures as practised in the West. Yes, it is productive in terms of output per worker but it is not as productive in terms of output per hectare and there are numerous environmental issues associated with this form of farming.
The problem is that the increasing concentration of farmland in fewer hands is locking farmers into this industrial model of farming based on mechanisation and chemicalised production and I would hope that, come a socialist society, would see a reversal of this trend – the break up of large farms, more multicropping and organic farming and more people living in the countryside instead of what is the case today where in many parts of the developed world, you face a serious problem of the “emptying of the countryside”.
In the poor countries, you mention the opposite problem is occurring – the average landholding size is shrinking, making it more difficult for small farmers to eke out a living.
Agriculture is a good example of a case study where we could indeed develop a more detailed and practical approach to a set of problems and, in the process, convince more workers to join the cause. The point is we need to stimulate and encourage each other into thinking – using our imagination and our existing stock of knowledge – how socialism could indeed be a very practical and sensible alternative to the system we currently live under.
We cannot just leave things at the level of vague abstractions or generalisations. A formulaic stock response is unlikely to convince many workers….
The Danish seem to have a sense of humour LOL
“Meanwhile, the Danes have launched their own effort to purchase America’s most prosperous state: California.
An online petition seeking the ‘Denmarkification’ of California has almost 200,000 signatures.
‘Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.’ Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality,’ petition organizers write.
Organizers estimate they need $1 trillion to purchase the state from Trump.”
Can’t Trump get the same from Putin?
Well, according to Reuters article I linked to above
“Zelenskiy said less than 20% of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including about half its rare earth deposits, were under Russian occupation”In theory, Trump being a capitalist businessman might want to juggle with a few options. Should he support Ukraine and hope that it might recapture some of the ground the Russian forces now occupy so he can get his hands on more of these rare earth deposits? But that scenario is very unlikely to happen, it is more probable that Russia will gain further ground this year and there are the costs of further military support to take into account too. Of course, there is always the Greenland option but it looks like the EU is going to intervene and prevent mineral-rich Greenland from becoming part of Murica
This may or may not have implications for the ongoing war in the Ukraine–
Someone said it lasts for more than 2 hours. I only watched so far to the brief description of projects A and B. Have you got to the end? In fact will anybody?
Well, I have just finished looking at the video. It’s long and I had to do it in two sittings. There is certainly a lot of useful material in there – quite thought-provoking, in fact. She is certainly an effective communicator though some people might find her wacky sense of humour a bit OTT. I didn’t mind it that much though there were one or two times when she engaged in it for a bit too long
In the end, she came out with 3 actual alternatives, the third one a derivation from the first
1) NTC socialism (non-transferable currency)
2) Free access communism
3) UFI socialism (universal full income)No 3 shares with no 2 the fact that labour is completely voluntary and uncoerced in the sense that you still get access to goods even if you choose not to work but each individual is allocated spending points which are non transferable (as with NTC socialism).
She gave a pretty decent rundown of the reasons why free-access communism could work and I particularly enjoyed this part of the video. We would have criticisms of the the NTC socialism model obviously and she did touch on some of these.
She ended with a discussion of various forms of participatory planning – such as in Kerala and in Spain during the civil war. One could easily imagine some aspects of these being adopted in a socialist society.
All in all I thought it was very good video and certainly, I learnt some things from it. I would certainly recommend featuring it on our website but with a short intro from us on where we disagree with some of the ideas – notably NTC socialism – with a link to articles on our website
TBH I”m still not sure why that Lucky Black Cat video is supposed to be special. The idea that a fully communist society would be one without markets is commonplace amongst people concerned with that type of thing.
DJP, I am not saying her video is unique or special and in fact, if there are others talking about the same thing and in much the same vein I would urge that these too be featured on our website. I haven’t seen the one you linked to and will check it out. I have to say I do like the Lucky Black Cat video for the style of delivery and its wit….
Thinking again about the point Moo makes about leaving off “planning how we’re going to solve problems, such as lifting people in the Global South out of extreme poverty as quickly as possible” till we are a much larger movement – perhaps a clarification would be in order…
Moo, if you are talking about detailed planning then you are probably right. We cannot predict when, or if, we are ever going to be a mass movement – not to mention the circumstances prevailing at the time that would affect the details of such planning anyway.
Perhaps “planning” is the wrong word here. But we do need a theoretical approach or perspective informed by the data that is already available to us now as to how we might broadly go about tackling this issue. We can’t just say “The problem is capitalism and the solution is Socialism” and leave it at that. We have to explain and justify to the outsider why we consider socialism to be the solution and in a way that is convincing and persuasive. That unavoidably means getting into the nitty gritty- outlining some of the mechanisms, institutions or procedures that might be brought into play – even if we preface or qualify what we say by pointing out that it is provisional.
We cannot NOT do this. If we do not do this then what we have to say about socialism will come across as utterly vague, utopian and too abstract to convince anyone.
Of course, in practice members do have a lot more to say about socialism than simply that it is “moneyless wageless classless and stateless based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production”. Nevertheless, we should be saying much more than we do and out in the open for all to see.
We should be actually encouraging debate within the Party and perhaps also in the Socialist Standard itself (a debate forum as a regular feature, perhaps?). I know members have different views on matters such as the role of nuclear power in a socialist society or whether people should turn to vegetarianism and abandon a meat-based diet. I don’t see a problem at all with having these kinds of debates and we shouldn’t try to pretend we are, or should be, a monolithic entity
Maybe this is partly what lies behind the idea that we shouldn’t get too much into the details of a socialist society – namely the fear that talking about it will have a divisive effect on what is after all a small organisation, maybe causing some to leave and thus making the organisation even smaller. So we clam up to retain a sense of unity.
Actually, this strikes me as a very misguided way of looking at this matter. A certain degree of divisiveness (beyond the basic agreement over the fundamentals, of course), is something to be welcomed and encouraged. Ironically, this is probably much more likely to draw in the outsider and encourage him or her to join the Party – knowing we are not a monolith.
The Party needs to develop a culture of feeling relaxed and comfortable with the idea that we are not ever going to see eye to eye on everything. Nor should we
When it comes to planning how we’re going to solve problems, such as lifting people in the Global South out of extreme poverty as quickly as possible, I believe we should wait until the World Socialist Movement starts to really take-off before doing that (for example, when the SPGB has at least 100,000 members).
The problem is, Moo, that if you do that then the effect is make it sound like socialism is just some vague abstract formula disconnected from the world we live in. This is what is so offputting for many people coming into contact with the Party. It conveys the idea that we are not really serious about establishing socialism
While we are not in the business of writing detailed “recipes for the cook shops of the future” as Marx put it, there is surely a sensible middle path between this and a formulaic abstract approach which consists in just providing the sketchiest definition of socialism imaginable and leaving it at that. People will just dismiss the idea as airey fairey if you are not prepared to go into more depth about what what socialism would entail.
There are a lot of things we can say about socialism that logically stem, or can be inferred from, the basic definition itself. There is even more we can say about socialism that stems from current developments and technological possibilities. We should not refrain from, or be scared about, saying these things. They need to be said if we are to come across as minimally credible.
I remember Pieter Lawrence used a wonderful turn of phrase to explain this point of view. He said something along the lines that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be “hostages to the future”. If we want to make a socialist future then we have to imagine it in considerably more depth than we currently do
“I have been a socialist for as long as I remember, and I still am. I am in accord with the DoP. But I think that, with respect, the party is not fit for purpose. Why? I think it’s because so little thought is given to a socialist society. Yes, Socialism will be unutterably better than capitalism, but this isn’t often put in the Standard”
I strongly endorse this sentiment that there should be much more focus on the nature of a socialist society in our literature. Although, comrade, having said that, I don´t quite know why you felt the need to leave the Party for that reason. I hope you reconsider and rejoin. There are others within the Party who share precisely the same opinion as you.
The problem is that any such shift in focus has to come from members themselves. We are not a top-down organisation. Stuff that gets to be published in the Standard is freely written by members, for the most part, without direction as to content – commissioned material. That doesn’t mean that branches cannot put forward a view on the matter and urge that more material of this nature be published, From a writer’s point of view it would be good to know what kind of material would be of interest not only to members but to the general public.
I think you are right in emphasising a need for a shift of focus. I get the impression that in the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the concept of a post-capitalist society – on internet forums (such as the large “Moneyless Society FB group with 24K members and many other such groups) and in the publication of more and more books on this very topic. A case in point is the buzzword “de-growth communism” which has recently come into circulation and takes on board the notion of ecological limits to production. In a way, it contrasts sharply with another trendy buzzword “fully automated luxury communism” (FALC) But note that in both perspectives the basic focus is a non-market alternative to capitalism.
The Party has itself made contributions towards firming up or consolidating the idea of a post-capitalist society – putting more flesh on the basic bones of the idea. I don’t know if you were a member back in the 1980s or thereabouts but there were various initiatives going on then which culminated in the formation of a “Production for Use” committee. The late Comrade Pieter Lawrence wrote up a very lengthy report which later bore fruit in the publication of a pamphlet called “Socialism as a Practical Alternative” which you can access on this site
I am very sympathetic to your anti-consumerist stance which in my case is partly driven by an interest in environmental issues and the anthropology of writers like Marshall Sahlins, author of “Stone Age Economics; The Original Affluent Society”. However, there is a need to strike a balance between the kind of stoicism advocated by de-growth communists and the technological fantasies of FALC enthusiasts. We are indeed going to have to reconsider some of our lifestyle choices come a socialist society if only because there is this enormous deadweight of actual material poverty to deal with that exists most particularly in the global South. Tackling that is unavoidably going to entail a massive readjustment in the way we allocate resources
However, we have to also take into account the enormous productive advantages that a socialist society will have – above all, the elimination of capitalism´s massive structural waste in the form of socially useless work – that will allow us to tackle this problem much more effectively without adversely impacting too much on material standard of living of workers elsewhere in the world (the capitalists are another matter, of course). I think there will be some negative impacts, as you suggest, but this will be vastly compensated for by the big improvement in the quality of life. For most workers in the West, this is the real issue – the quality of life and the drip effect of chronic insecurity, not so much the lack of material goods. This obsession with consumerism is just a pain in the backside and a bore.
A scarcity mentality that feeds a competitive outlook on life (and consumerism itself) will die out anyway, and all the more rapidly once the material conditions of many workers in what is currently the Global South, improve. There has of course been some improvement in this part of the world already, however, and one only has to consider places like China where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of absolute poverty. So to an extent, capitalism is preparing the ground for us and making our task easier to accomplish in a socialist society.
Anyway, this is just my tuppence worth…
Maybe an alternative is for it to be reviewed in the Standard?
Or maybe both? It would be good to beef up the videos on this website
I don’t know if you know this already or not, but if your videos get enough views YouTube pays a share of it’s advertising revenue to the content creators. There’s probably at a guess tens of thousands of people who earn a living that way.
I am not that familiar with the set-up but this surely would be all the more reason why someone like this person would want us to publicise her videos. It would broaden the audience and therefore increase the number of visits to her site. She benefits from that and I have no problems with that at all. In a sense we would be helping each other.
I don’t think the party should simply be “publishing this on the website” though, at least not without passing comment.
Why not make a feature and talk with some “BreadTube” creators about their experiences making socialist-ish content? That would help reach out to other, and larger, audiences.
Well, if the video is making exactly the same case as us, and especially if it is making the case in a manner that is effective and interesting, I cannot see any reason why the party should not advertise it. What is there to lose? After all the party website does feature books written by non-members so why not videos? In fact there is all the more reason to do so since a video is immediately accessible and free of charge. Much more use should be made of videos in my opinion
I don’t disagree with your last point but there has always been a problem in the Party with getting more comrades actively involved. It strikes me as being an effective use of resources that if there is already a video out there that is saying more or less what we are saying that we should make use of it.
Sure, we can make a comment or two introducing the video. For example, as Adam has noted the postcapitalism video offers 2 alternative versions of a post-capitalist society – the one involving labour vouchers and the other free access. We could simply comment that we favour the latter option and maybe supply a link to an article on the SPGB website where we criticise labour vouchers.
It’s all very do-able in my opinion
