twc
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
“Modern Socialism” by R. C. K. Ensor (Harper, London: 1910) gives you access to some key Party platforms, speeches, documents etc. The book is now out of copyright and was digitised (photographically) by Microsoft in 2007.
The book is available on-line from the University of Pennsylvania:
You can download it in PDF format:
It includes the objects and programs of the
- Social Democratic Federation,
- Independent Labour Party,
- Fabian Society
For comparison, it includes the object and programs for continental parties: the German, Austrian and Belgian Social Democratic Parties; the French Socialist Party.
It is a pitiable spectacle indeed to compare what these self-styled “socialist” parties claimed to have stood for then and what their descendant parties claim to stand for now against the forever-current Oject and Declaration of Principles of the World Socialist Parties (SPGB, etc.) we stood for then and stand for now.
ajj wrote:Are we too dismissive of the religious liberal left?No!
ajj wrote:Should we now be much more pro-active in engaging the Churches?No!
Fascinating! Wallerstein staked his economic reputation on opposing and improving Marx’s theory of value — just like Postone.
Fine, but the Party literature is not under immediate consideration in the context of your original post.In keeping with that context, I chose to amplify Wallerstein’s encouragement (in your quote) for us to read, and to re-read, Marx by recommending some of his most significant and accessible mature works that reveal how indispensable Marx is for comprehending capitalism and for supplanting it with the world socialism our Party literature advocates so well.Reading, and re-reading, both are indispensable. But it is Marx’s literature that is under consideration and that laid the indispensable foundation for our own.Read, and re-read, it.
Excellent advice.For starters, read and re-read…The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels to comprehend the significance of class struggle in human history.The Preface to Marx’s A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy to come to grips with Marx’s guiding principle of his studies.Marx’s Prefaces and Afterwords to his Capital Volume I before venturing into the work itself.These texts are available on-line: (1) https://…Manifesto.pdf, (2) https://…Critique_of_Political_Economy.pdf, (3) https://…Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
Correction My assertion that Böhm-Bawerk “was in no mood to recognize conditional methodology in Marx” misrepresents his case.Böhm-Bawerk recognised Marx’s conditional methodology but he viewed its content and development through marginalist spectacles:“I cannot help myself; I see here no explanation and reconciliation of a contradiction, but the bare contradiction itself. ”https://mises.org/files/karl-marx-and-close-his-systempdf/download?token=_cPu9SFP (p. 30)
Andrew Kliman, in Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, §8.4 “Postone’s Counter Critique”, reveals Postone’s scientific incompetence on the subject of Marx’s value.To set the context of Marx’s Capital…Capital Volume I is a critique of the political economy of capitalist production, conceived by Marx as the process of producing value as capital.In Volume I, Marx investigates capitalist production under idealized conditions in which commodities sell at their values.Capital Volume II is a critique of the political economy of capitalist circulation, conceived by Marx as the social process of circulating value as capital.In Volume II, Marx investigates capitalist circulation under idealized conditions in which commodities sell at their values.Capital Volume III is a critique of the political economy of capitalist distribution, conceived by Marx as the social process of distributing value as capital.In Volume III, Marx investigates the interconnected capitalist processes of producing, circulating and distributing value as capital under realistic conditions in which commodities do not sell at their values.Just after Engels published Capital Volume III, a marginalist economist and Austrian Minister of Finance, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, in his book “Karl Marx and the Close of his System”, famously claimed that Marx unconditionally contradicted himself: price = value in Volume I, but price ≠ value in Volume III.Böhm-Bawerk had been scientifically trained in conditional methodology, where a scientist investigates idealized conditions before progressively investigating more realistic ones, but he was in no mood to recognize conditional methodology in Marx.Postone is scientifically naive. He blithely sidesteps the “unconditional contradiction” by claiming that…Marx never intended “to write a critical political economy”.Marx never intended to use “the law of value to explain the workings of the market”.In other words, Postone wriggles out of his “unconditional contradiction” by unconditionally contradicting Marx’s thoroughly well-known intention, already announced in his well-known Contribution — Marx’s unconditional subtitle to Capital: “A Critique of Political Economy”.To this extent Postone has nothing of value to contribute to Marx’s value.Andrew Kliman proceeds to consider Postone’s emphasis on Marx’s intentions in Capital — which is philosophical guesswork on Postone’s part — as follows…“The crux of the problem, once again, is that Postone is discussing Marx’s intentions and method when the point at issue is instead the logical consistency of his arguments….”“I suspect that [Postone’s] misplaced emphasis on intentions and method is due in part to the influence of relativism within much of the humanities and social sciences. If our presuppositions fully determine the conclusions at which we arrive, as relativism holds, then the logic of our arguments is irrelevant; presuppositions lead to conclusions directly, not through logical argument. If that were so, one could bypass the logic of Marx’s arguments and acquit him of error simply by explaining “where he was coming from.” It seems to me that this is the methodology of Postone’s discussion. I do not mean to suggest that he is a relativist; his text indicates otherwise. My point is simply that, if Postone had been working in a different milieu, he might have been more cognizant of the need to respond to allegations that Marx’s arguments are logically flawed.”
Dear Ike,Use value and exchange value are not abstract.The use value of a spade is its social function as an instrument for digging.The activity of digging is socially concrete. What social practice does it abstract from?Capitalist vendors throw use values — like a spade or a bike — for consumption onto their market, and vendors concretely commensurate their incommensurable use values by sticking concrete exchange values on them.By your turning use values and exchange values into abstractions — thoughts — you fail to appreciate that through necessity, first and foremost, we are compelled to understand concrete processes:concrete processes are what we must investigate and comprehend,concrete processes can only be comprehended by thought that abstracts from them.That is Marx’s dialectic — the way the human mind grasps dynamic processes.For you, sensuous phenomena are abstract thoughts that arise from hypothesis.Thus, you pontificate, without a blush, that “socialism is only a hypothesis” and that marxian value = exchange value!* * *Value is Marx’s abstraction from the concrete social process of exchange. It is the foundation of his abstract political economic science of concrete capitalist society.Exchange value is the concrete form — the price tag — of value.What the market abstracts from when it commensuratesthe exchange value of 20 spades = the exchange value of one bikeis precisely their incommensurable use values.And that is why another incommensurable use value money can arise, naturally, out of the market, to concretely function as the abstract measure of all use values — the “substance” they all express their exchange value in.And that is why marxian value expresses abstract human labour, i.e. labour that abstracts from its concrete social practice.* * *Hence the sorry concrete capitalist spectacle of the abstract labourer seeking abstract work, pitted against abstractly commensurable humans, and settling for an abstract wage, in an existence that abstracts from all concrete human possibility.
Bitcoin is not money.Bitcoin was never designed to function as a social means of exchange.Bitcoin was designed to function as a means of speculation.It was designed to be a virtual embodiment of speculative desire that is carefully restricted to privileged speculators, but marked out to evoke unrealisable desires in the enthusiasts who would fan its essential speculation from the fringes.Bitcoin is intentionally dynamic. It is intentionally too unstable to function as a trustworthy standard of wealth, to function as a means of general payment, to function as money.Even if it were stable, bitcoin would be at war with money. “A double standard of value is inconsistent with the functions of a standard” [Marx Capital Vol. 1].Bitcoin is far easier than material wealth (such as speculative artworks, jewelry, etc.) to effect commercial transactions with. It embodies fictional price, freed from the burden attendant upon having to assume an actual physical body.Social faith in a non-currency like bitcoin ultimately rests on its convertibility into social currency, i.e. so long as it is convertible into money.Dynamic bitcoin can only function as speculative desire because it rests on stable money.Bitcoin is not its own ground.It is not money.
The committee of the problematic Nobel Prize for Economics would never award it to Marx:Per Strömberg (Chairman), Professor of Finance. https://ideas.repec.org/e/pst18.html#articles-body Jakob Svensson, Professor of Economics, http://www.jakobsvensson.com/uploads/9/9/1/0/99107788/cv_1page.pdf Tomas Sjöström, Professor of Economics, http://economics.rutgers.edu/component/content/article/86/224-sjoestroem-tomas Peter Gärdenfors, Professor of Cognitive Science, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_GärdenforsPer Krusell, Professor of Economics, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Krusell Torsten Persson (Secretary), Professor of Economics, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsten_Persson And Marx, of course, would refuse it.
The claimI followed up on your reference to Anthony C Sutton’s book The Federal Reserve Conspiracy which claims that the pirate Jean Laffite was “an agent of American banking interests [who] financed the Communist Manifesto”. I had never come across this claim before.Incidentally, the Collected Works of Marx and Engels don’t mention Jean Lafitte, but they do mention an unrelated banker, “Jacques Laffitte”, the French prime minister who gloated after the July Revolution of 1830—the one immortalised in visual art by Delacroix painting Liberty leading the people—“Now we, the bankers, will govern” [Engels].The Journal of Jean LaffiteThe Sam Houston Library in Liberty, Texas, holds the “Journal of Jean Lafitte”, supposedly written by the pirate in 1845–50, though from internal evidence written later.The Laffite Journal was claimed to have been passed down from the pirate as a “family heirloom”. The library obtained it indirectly from the pirate’s great grandson, a certain (or perhaps, uncertain) John Laflin.Given that most historians agree that the pirate Jean Laffite was killed and buried at sea in 1823, any account of his European activities in 1845–50 must be considered to be as imaginary as his buried treasure.Suspicion was heightened when it was learned that the presumed great grandson John Laflin had changed his name to “Lafitte” by delayed birth certificate.This invited accusations, fairly or unfairly, over John Laflin’s involvement in the counterfeiting of letters presented as being written by Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Davey Crockett.The book Great Forgers and Famous Fakes: The Manuscript Forgers of America and How They Duped the Experts by Charles Hamilton devotes considerable space to exposing John Laflin’s letter forgeries.The upshot is that Wikipedia sums up the consensus that “most historians now believe the Lafitte Journal to be a forgery.”Forgery or HagiographyThis might have been the end of the story had not the Laffite Society of Galveston published an article Who Wrote the Journal of Jean Laffite: The Privateer-Patriot's Own Story by Reginald Wilson https://journals.tdl.org/laffitesc/index.php/laffitesc/article/download/247/230.Wilson gives grounds for identifying the Journal’s author as Jean Laffite’s son, Antoine, who lived with his father on the Galveston commune (1818–20) before his father torched it and turned to piracy.Antoine never saw his father again, for Jean Laffite died an unmourned pirate at sea, three years later.Wilson concludes that Antoine wrote the forgery sometime after 1860 (in his twilight years) adopting his father’s name in an act of filial piety to set the bent family record as straight as he could—with an eye to redeeming his father’s and his family’s reputation in the eyes of his descendants.If so, the Laffite Journal is not a modern forgery concocted by the great grandson.Lafitte’s son Antoine had travelled to Europe and mixed in socialist circles, and so was able to embellish his story with the fantastic claim that his father—though buried at sea a quarter of a century earlier—actually met Marx and Engels in 1848, and bankrolled the Communist Manifesto.Clever CounterfeitOn the other hand, a French article Barataria: the Strange History of Jean Laffite, Pirate by Louis-Jean Calvert https://journals.tdl.org/laffitesc/index.php/laffitesc/article/viewFile/201/184 makes the alternative case that the Lafitte Journal is the modern forgery of John Laflin “in search of acceptance and confirmation of an assumed identity for almost thirty years”.The Journal contains too many checkable errors to have been penned by Jean Laffite himself.What to make of bankrolling of the Communist Manifesto?And so the Lafitte Journal turns out, on generous estimation, to be at best untrustworthy or, considered ungenerously, to be barefaced fiction. In either case, it merits no great reliance being placed on its substantive claim.Of course, even in the improbable event of the Committee of the Communist League having accepted Lafitte’s generous financial offer to bankroll the Communist Manifesto, it remained obviously unswayed politically by whatever authoritarian views Laffite may or may not have tried to impose.And we know that unfolding events prove that the League was neither compromised nor duped, as claimed, by US banking interests.Perhaps future scholarly work will clarify the dubious matter further.Nevertheless, the incomparable Communist Manifesto continues to utterly transcend the tawdry commercial world of US bankers and the mercenary privateering of adventurer Jean Laffite.
I understand. For computer, I heartily agree. Just move the mouse over the link.For mobile (iPhone, iPad, …) there isn’t a mouse.I was wondering (not requesting) about a compromise that might work aesthetically on both.Thanks.
I understand, Victor, that you are a parishioner of the Russian Orthodox Church in Lithuania, the land of your peasant ancestors, and that you were raised by single mother, you were educated in central Russia, and were sometime gaoled as a dissident for disseminating anti-Soviet literature, and that now you run a translation service in Lithuania.I dimly comprehend your suffering under the Soviet Union, and there is no mistaking your bitter hatred of it and its supposed “socialism”. But to its supposed “socialism” anon.So, you have come to us to reveal a fiery apocalypse, that would ensue from implementing the so-called Marxian “tenets of socialism, namely, equality, and the elimination of private property, the church, and the family ” which can only engender “the extinction of all mankind, its death”.Why so? Because Marxian socialists forget human nature. They ignore evil. They deny the obvious truth of traditional religions: that humans are “good and bad, decent and indecent”.Equality is not a socialist notion“Equality” is a capitalist notion, and it enters the world fully formed as such.“Equality” is the rallying war cry of the rising capitalist class—the class of manufacturers, professionals and traders—in their battle for social supremacy against their class enemy, the feudal nobility—the socially privileged monarchs and aristocrats who control the vast landed estates.The general notion of “Equality” enters general human consciousness in some of mankind’s most memorable formal declarations:“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” [Declaration of Independence , 4 July 1776] Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in the American Revolution against King George III of Great Britain.“All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and of their talents." [Declaration of the Rights of Man August 1789] Lafayette, Mirabeau and Jefferson in the French Revolution proclaiming an end to feudalism and abolition of the monarchy.“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. The same words are inscribed on flags which bear the three colours (tricolour) of the nation.” [On the National Guard, 5 December 1790] Maximilien Robespierre.These official proclamations of “equality” are unmistakably bourgeois. They are shameless attacks on the despised social hierarchies of feudalism.The equalisation of labour is not a socialist operationIn your quotation on the equalisation of labour, Marx is simply saying that the concept of value remains a mystery that can’t be solved theoretically before capitalism solves it practically by implementing it unconsciously behind the backs, so to speak, of the actors in the capitalist market,The mystification arises because the concrete forms of commodities—e.g., table, cloth, coat—are the products of different concrete forms of labour—carpentry, spinning, weaving. All concrete things are concretely incommensurable, unless you can find something non-concrete that is common to them all.Capitalist society in practice manages to compare them on the market. Only then can secret of the common commensurability of concrete incommensurables be discerned, and it turns out to be their common “social substance" abstract (not concrete) labour whose equalisation the everyday market establishes as a matter of common practice.That is the only equalisation Marx is talking about here.Consequently your forced attempt to turn Marx’s specific analysis of abstract labour into an axiomatic theory of socialist equality is utterly misplaced.All I can say in your defence is that such a total misapprehension of what Marx is actually doing is a sad example of the deleterious effects that Soviet obfuscation still has on its citizens.Primitive accumulation of capitalI am well aware that it is futile for me to point out to you that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, like the English one of the 1640s, the American of the 1760s…, the French of the 1790s…As such, your grandparent’s and your mother’s generations had to endure the painful birth of a capitalist nation—not socialism—as it emerged out of the womb of old feudal society.Old feudal society couldn’t deliver to the nascent capitalist society a mass of unpropertied workers that were seeking employment. That is a huge social problem because unpropertied workers seeking employment are the pre-condition of capitalist production to take place.Instead, old feudal society offers the nascent capitalist society a mass of propertied peasants, which are the foundation of the old (feudal) mode of production.Capitalism, if it is to succeed on the ashes of old feudalism, has no choice but to dispossess the feudal peasants of their property—to rob them of their livelihood—and to turn them into unpropertied workers readymade for capitalist employment.Never forget that capitalism is necessarily based on the forced dispossession and ruination of the peasant in order to create the propertyless worker.Marx thoroughly studied this terrible process of “primitive accumulation of capital”, and this investigation concludes Capital Vol 1. It is the conclusion of Volume 1 because the “primitive accumulation of capital” is essential to comprehending in theory how the whole process of capitalist production gets going in practice—out of the womb of its predecessor mode of production.Lenin had read Marx on the “primitive accumulation of capital”, and yet it was Lenin’s denial that determined the fate of the Russian Revolution, and that forced himself to play the ghastly midwife to the gruesome birth of capitalist Russia.To see what we understand by socialism, read our Object and Declaration of Principles.
Please don’t derail this thread.It is devoted to a critique of something highly specific — even though it has general ramifications — Michel Luc Bellamare’s Principles of Anarcho-Historical-Relativism.He requested people do him the honour of reading his paper in Dissident Voice precisely because it summarizes his (1) theoretical position and (2) his criticism of Marx.He has the undivided right to defend, in this thread, unadulterated by extraneous posts, his Principles paper — i.e. his published exposition of his theoretical position and his detailed criticism of Marx.He has the authorial right to respond to specifically targeted critiques of what he has exposed for our attention. Any other discussion does him, the thread and the forum a disservice.The theme and contents of Michel’s paper, and only its own narrowly targeted focus, should be solely what is under discussion here in this thread devoted to it.That is the courtesy he expects and that we must always offer anyone and everyone who agrees to make a detailed case avowedly for or against us.Parcipants who stick to the thread — unadulterated — have a right to get their conflicting points across.
