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I think our ideas of ‘socialism’ are different. I’m happy with that.
You know where we stand on Socialism. Here’s our Object and Declaration of Principles.
Where do you stand? What are your “ideas on socialism” that you are “happy with”?
Thanks for the Swift memorial.
And, yes, it does take intellectual fortitude to stand—as GBS said of William Morris—on the side of Karl Marx contra mundum.
If only…. 😀
You want capitalism without its “disadvantages”. Fair enough?
What if capitalism’s “disadvantages” aren’t bugs but features, expressions of its heartless heart and soulless soul.
OK, suppose you can’t eliminate capitalism’s “disadvantages” then you’ll soften their effects with a “minimum” proposal:
Let the “rich man/woman have their 10 cars, but there should at least be a minimum.”
If you understood Marx’s Capital, you’d realise that giving workers more to spend on commodities is not “disadvantageous” to the accumulation of capital. It’s beneficial.
Your “minimum” would usher in a capitalist paradise of increased profits for capitalists, and bread and circuses for workers.
Perhaps you don’t realise that you are mouthing capitalism’s perennial anxiety over the risk and uncertainty that is part and parcel of capital accumulation.
You suffer anxiety paralysis “I no longer think”.
This is evident in your naive expectation that Socialists will rush to soothe your unavoidable insecurity within a social system that is totally dominated by risk and uncertainty.
Meanwhile you blithely continue to tolerate capitalism’s exploitation of the working class, and its attendant anti-social machinery (“advantageous” to capital because it is solely productive of capital accumulation)—wage labour, hiring and firing, buying and selling, banking and insurance, advertising and manipulation, stocks and shares, policing and gaoling, military and armaments.
Let’s hope your own insecure wealth remains safe.
I don’t think [about becoming a socialist].
I don’t think, therefore I am not.
‘..to make life better for all who dwell in it?’ But that is subjective. What you consider a “better life” might be different to my definition.
I imagine that you and your partner seek a “better life” for each. That is the analog of what world-socialists seek for humanity on a global scale.
World socialists, following Marx (especially in Capital), seek to get rid of capital’s socially-necessary machinery for extracting surplus-value from the working class and carving it up among the capital-owning class.
What will vanish is wage-labour, hiring and firing, buying and selling, banking and insurance, advertising and manipulation, stocks and shares, policing and gaoling, military and armaments.
Removing the machinery of capital will render “intellectual” mediocrity and moral vapidity, indispensable concomitants of a lifetime of self-serving anti-social activity, socially unnecessary.
[In passing, on abilities and needs, you may get inspiration from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.]
Finally, your limited horizon of “living standards of the average middle class American” is poor Oliver Twist in the workhouse daring to ask “Please sir, can I have some more [gruel]”.
Socialists demand so, so much more—a far, far, better world!
I notice you’ve made no attempt to address my original point that Socialism tends to be associated with sharing out the misery.
Oh, I addressed it, alright. Either you didn’t notice, or you ignored me.
- I asked you point blank whether you also shared that popular mindset?—which you refused to answer, i.e., it was you who “made no attempt to address”.
- In the absence of a shared basis for dialog, I asked you why you dragged in a commonly agreed fact unless you assumed that your popular fact was the killer demolition of Socialism?
Your reticence indicates that, at minimum, you do incline toward the proposition that “Socialism universalises misery”.
Here’s a scientific warning for you: an immediately observable fact is not, of itself, mediated science (read Marx on scientific method—essence and appearance).
An observable fact begs scientific comprehension. For example, it is immediately observable that the Sun moves across the sky from sunrise to sunset, and yet, contrary-wise, mediated science compels us comprehend the phenomenon as the Earth rotating on its axis.
Waxing lyrical about the disadvantages of capitalism, and surmising what Marx might have thought about the present, doesn’t address the point.
You threw down a provocation—your “surmise” that Marx would be totally clueless about certain modern phenomena—and I met it by evidencing relevant counter-clues that Marx has left us.
Being found out as a pontificator bereft of knowledge of the subject matter on which he pontificates, reduces you, the pontificator, to a mere clueless “surmiser”.
You accuse me of “waxing lyrical about the disadvantages of capitalism”, which only proves that it is you who desperately desires to wax “lyrical about the advantages of capitalism”.
In passing, maybe you should follow through to the actual class that mostly suffers the [your word] “disadvantages” of capitalism. I assume you also belong to it, but are nevertheless inhumanly tolerant towards capitalism’s disadvantages.
Your limited horizons and inability to notice the huge strides that humanity has taken over the last few centuries has blinded you to the progress that has been made.
In short, you are claiming that my inability to notice progress blinds me to progress—tautological drivel. And any remnant content about “inability to notice progress” is patent nonsense.
There are people out there now trying to tackle these scientific and engineering problems. Yes, they’re probably doing it so a company somewhere can make a profit.
Have you ever stopped to consider why these [unspecified] “scientific and engineering problems” are driven by the inhuman need for commercial profit instead of by the thoroughly human drive to comprehend the world we inhabit, and to make life better for all who dwell in it?
Have you ever stopped to consider that our social lives are conditioned by the class-divided society we spend our lives under, subject to a ruling class that owns and controls the means of our social existence.
As old Shylock, who knew a thing or two about commerce, says “You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live”.
But it is my opinion that socialists should be harnessing those strides forward and make the case that all people can benefit from them.
Yes. When humanity ceases to meekly condone and justify capitalist exploitation as humanly inevitable. Yes, when humanity turns the social means of life into our common possession under the democratic control of us all.
Until then, it remains exploitative and profit-driven, not collective and humanity driven.
Maybe think a little more about becoming a socialist.
Can you define ‘accepted devastation’?
Companies usually seek out countries with weak regulations and a lack of institutions. They are usually countries in which corruption is rampant.If you can’t see ‘accepted devastation’ in the water and power guzzling AI data centres, or in mining/fishing/agriculture, then why bother?
Companies seek out resources—means of production—read the Party’s Object and Declaration of Principles—that we seek to become the common property of all humanity under the democratic control of all humanity.
They can’t choose where nature concentrates resources—that’s the province of geology. If deposits are found at home, they’ll be extracted there. Corruption is best when not carried out by a gun.
At present, wars are being fought precisely over which capitalist powers own and control a large chunk of the world’s petroleum resources.
And wars are among the most glaring example of “acceptable devastation”—sanctioned by governments and bolstered by nationalism—under world capitalism.
Signing off.
We don’t know what Marx would think if he were alive today.
Why triumphantly turn ignorance into a bludgeon against socialism?
In fact, we do know what Marx (and Engels) wrote about environmental devastation in the pursuit of capital expansion.
Maybe he would be amazed with the potential of A.I. to help tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.
While everyone (including its developers) is amazed by AI, we can be fairly certain that the Marx who wrote on Machinery in Capital would also be amazed, but that the scientist in him would immediately recognise the significance of AI’s provenance in training by machine learning.
Therefore Marx might be expected to conclude that AI, just as money is tightly constrained to function reliably in exchange, so also must AI function reliably in universal cognition, with the major proviso that AI is subject to what it was trained on, but that—and here’s the big arrow at the heart of AI—it must also satisfy objective scientific/logical criteria.
And so Marx might be expected to foresee that AI will ultimately spill the beans on the essential nature of capitalist exploitation—the source of capital expansion—as the basis of humanity’s miserable lifetime subservience to capital.
Scientific logic must undermine capitalist ideology. That was Marx’s enterprise in writing Capital—to expose the materialist base of capitalist confusion.
Finally, the class-conscious Marx would definitely stipulate that AI can only help humanity, rather than just help its ruling class, when it is wielded collectively by associated humanity in the interest of all humanity. That is, when it is wielded under socialism.
We don’t know.
The ignorance is all yours.
These are minor infringements.
A step above the council park ranger dishing out littering tickets. And no-one has gone to gaol for it.
What about the accepted devastation wrought by the big companies and their heads?
Which countries?
Countries like the UK/US/Australia—nationally and internationally.
For capital, green pastures are wherever it can expand.
