twc
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Alan, you ask why world socialism is in this mess? Two significant reasons spring to mind:the practical calamity caused by Leninism,the theoretical calamity caused by neoRicardianism (see below).The first is the obvious calamity. What, at least to me, was less obvious is the resulting collateral damage to the conviction in genuine socialism as a realisable possibility that was wrought by the demise of Leninism.The second is the less obvious calamity, and its retelling is bound to be misunderstood. Nevertheless here goes.The neoRicardian economists clearly proved Marx to be theoretically wrong, thereby undermining the entire Marxian enterprise. Theoretically this was far more significant than the trivial demolishing of the casuistic communist rationalisations of sovietism.The neoRicardian demolition of Marx was made more shattering because it was the unforeseen outcome of a wonderful (in its now historic way) economic book by respected pro-Marx economist, Piero Sraffa, editor of the collected works of David Ricardo, etc.This surprising anti-marxian result universally weakened the resolve of a generation of academic marxists from the mid ’70s onwards. Not a single economist of any stripe and from any nation, no matter how determined or ingenious, could pinpoint the flaws in the neoRicardian argument against the central marxian economic category of value.None could rescue marxian value from total incoherence—the neoRicardians openly demonstrated that marxian values could be positive, negative, or zero, or all over the place, independently of profits.It now seemed convincing enough that marxian value was a totally meaningless category of the capitalist economy. At best Marx’s theoretical ‘essence’ value was redundant, and economics lived solely by what Marx called a ‘form of appearance’, namely prices.How could marxism survive? It had never faced an assault on its integrity like this before. The entire body of marxian theory was now considered, charitably at best, to be terminal. In practice, an entire formerly sympathetic generation had confidently consigned marxism to its grave!It was not until the first decade of the millennium that economist Andrew Kliman, and colleagues, exposed the deep flaw in the neoRicardian argument, thereby showing that the perceived errors in marxian value were hidden within the apparently transparent and open neoRicardian system. Everyone had fallen for the blindspot that Marx employed the economic category value to expose.Suddenly the boot was on the other foot. Not only had Marx been vindicated, he was found to be far more prescient than his successors. This man is our theoretical guide before which all else is socialist illusion.Kliman clearly demonstrated that the universally perceived economic incoherence lay within neoRicardianism itself. Marxism is stronger than ever, and better understood.However, the resolve of a generation had been severely weakened and conviction in socialism almost completely spent. It’ll take a while for them to recover.But we take hope. The capitalist economy is doing its very best to inspire conviction in world socialism as the only practical solution, and that will reinvigorate resolve. In some ways, it has been thus for marxian socialism since its inception in the 1840s.
Alan, like everyone here, I have unbounded respect for you. Others may have done as much for socialism, but none could have done more.So in that spirit I am simply challenging your specific proposal that we must be prepared to lose our souls in order to save ours skins―we should make a faustian pact with the devil.Back in 1904 or thereabouts the party already saw the contemporary SPD (where Bernstein was repudiating scientific socialism) as nothing more than the fruit of reformist seeds sewn in the 1876 Gotha merger of convenience. Today the SPD hails Bernstein as its spiritual founder. That is the crux of my concern.You know that I consider scientific socialism as the only rational scientific explanation of our position that carries conviction. And I appreciate that you remain unconvinced. I'm totally happy to live that.All I request is that you make a clear, direct and strong case for your proposal.
ajj wrote:I provided one individual and one political organisation which met your request. The means to achieve that solution may not be the SPGB's but they seek the same society as we do as a solution to all the social ills.Before you get carried away, you might reread my challenge to provide an instance of someone or some organisation outside the party that actually advocates the same practical solution as we do. I worded the challenge carefully.Just because people or organisations imagine the same future world doesn’t mean they have the the same practical solution as we do.Imaginary worlds are cheap. They all remain utopian dreams—in Marx’s and Engels’s sense—without the necessary means to achieve them, and then to convince their proponents that, once achieved, the system will maintain itself as socialism.And therein lies the crucial point of the challenge.Therein lies the necessity for the socialist party to ground its existence on its signature Declaration of Principles, which is the party’s practical solution to achieving socialism and, once achieved, of reproducing and maintaining it.The Declaration is based on the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. It is the party’s rational means of convincing people of the necessity and viability of socialism.As a succinct rational document it also serves to actuate class consciousness; to convince people that socialism can be achieved practically and, once achieved, that socialism will reproduce itself practically. That is a powerful weapon.By comparison to scientific conviction, all else is socialist pipe dream. No matter how immediately compelling the non-scientific alternative, conviction remains utopian, and practical socialism remains stillborn.Of course none of this means anything to you. You flatly deny the predictive force of scientific socialism and you effectively repudiate its deterministic scientific status. From your angle, the party’s socialist platform and rationale are decidedly not scientific. They are fundamentally matters of pure opinion.To reduce socialism to mere opinion is to scuttle the party—to remove its rational scientific foundation. Without its scientific platform the party has no convincing reason to exist at all.And that’s why your purely opinionated socialist stance fences you into the invidious political position of putting unbounded faith in the following priceless specimen of lamentable opinion “Can’t you accept that others may well be right and we wrong?”
i.e. where was your sentence two when fellow members were being abused and you kept on encouraging the blood sport?
ajj wrote:On a personal level i found it hard to be on a picket line with a co-worker, united to stop the bosses, and then to treat him and on occasions her as a political enemy because they had a different understanding upon how to reach socialism from my own.Argument and discussion took place but they were conducted on the basis of comradely disagreement, and not based on accusations of being an accomplice of the capitalist class because opinions differed.This is the full two-sentence paragraph.No, Alan, they are political enemies. And here you are advocating that we treat them as what they are not—political friends.Normal decency naturally demands that we treat them respectfully, without fear or favour, for exactly what they are—a political enemy. That is not a moral statement like you want yours to be. It merely recognises that moral imperatives aren’t promulgated by decree.By the way, you recently violated your second sentence when you condoned the un-comradely abuse of your political friends by a political enemy you were comradely desirous of befriending.
I request moderator1 to move my post #512 (which was a reply to an earlier post) to become the start of a new topic, under General Discussion, called Socialists Outside the Socialist Party.
So socialists outside the Socialist Party apparently comprise Derek Wall and the Anarchist Federation.Derek Wall is unknown to me. I sought out his wikipedia entry, and assume its content enjoys as much of his blessing as he is able, within the constraints of wikipedia integrity, to bestow upon it.I ask you to read through the wikipedia section headed Propositions which outlines for calm objective consideration his solutions and measures, stripped of vehement rhetoric.Show me how Wall’s propositions are nothing but another shade of Paul Mason’s.Derek Wall’s obvious disagreement with us is over the identical issue that Eduard Bernstein disagreed with us. Bernstein, like Wall, considered himself an authentic socialist. We, alas, didn’t.Both take the same anti-scientific stance that Rosa Luxemburg anathemized as repudiating the necessity, the determinism, the predictive force of Marx’s scientific socialism.If there’s no necessity, determinism, and predictive force in Marx’s scientific socialism we’d all better pack up.This was Popper’s key line of attack. If you demolish the deterministic essence of Marx’s scientific work his whole enterprise collapses and is exposed as thoroughly misguided.The point for all socialists is to comprehend the unfolding, working out, development of the base–superstructure determinism of Marx’s scientific socialism.Now one thing is obvious. Wall and Bernstein along with the 50 or 50,000 shades either deny or fail to comprehend the unfolding, working out, development of the base-superstructure determinism of Marx’s scientific socialism.They raise themselves above scientific socialism, dismissing it out of hand as an oxymoron, unworthy of serious consideration, even though they unconsciously rely on the very same predictive mechanisms to negotiate every second of their waking lives without dismissing them out of hand.The intellectual instinctively defuses, annuls, renders impotent in his mind the power of deterministic science once it’s directed at society.Whenever the dynamics of society enters his mind as a thought, he imagines it in voluntaristic fashion. But that is his illusion necessarily bred out of all he’s left himself to go on—the mere appearance of social things—since he has repudiated the dynamic essence of social things.That society will not let him do just what he wants to scarcely, if ever, crosses his voluntaristic mind. Consequently the stream of supposedly ‘socialist’ subsystems desired to coexist and survive within an obligingly accommodating capitalism.The intellectual false consciousness that denies society is a necessarily self-generating system is the very philosophical mindset that Marx and Engels devoted their entire theoretical lives to demolishing. It is not our stance.The noteworthy intellectuals who cling to such illusions stand in need of learning socialism from us, not we from them.Advocating democratic methods, making rational criticisms of capitalist society, or even advocating a moneyless future is not socialist if there’s no necessity, determinism, scientific force in getting there and, once there, in maintaining socialism as a self-reproducing social formation.This won’t happen by voluntarist chance in a social formation driven by necessity, if that social necessity to which all must submit, remains uncomprehended.Our Object and our Declaration of Principles remain to this day, after a century, the only practical scientific way of achieving just that. The rest is anti-scientific day dreaming, i.e. utopian!No, Derek Wall is not a socialist outside of the Socialist Party, any more than Eduard Bernstein, Paul Mason, etc.I may continue on to the anarchists, if you are willing, but their position on the substantive issue is similarly tainted.
No, not one of the 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalist criticism ― including those made by bourgeois critics, since they also carp bitterly over capitalism ― wants the same thing as we do.We distinguish ourselves from all of them by advocating the only practical solution to capitalism's problems ― a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of production by and in the interest of the whole of society.On the other hand, these proponents of 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalism's woes interpret our workable solution as utterly unworkable. It is they who openly disagree with us. It is they who stand intellectually superior to us. It is they who talk down to us.Don't turn two-sided disagreement one-sidely against us. We and they genuinely do disagree with each other. We are at genuine political loggerheads.They advocate capitalism without its problems. That is impossible. That is genuinely not agreeing with us. They interpret capitalism according to their imaginary desires, and so genuinely crave the impossible, a fictitious fantasy. We cannot genuinely agree with their grounds for genuinely disagreeing with us.Despite their delusory stance you claim that some among these 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalist critics actually agree with us ― genuinely agree with our solution ― and genuinely want the same thing as we do.I therefore challenge you to point out just one of the 50 or 50,000 shades of capitalist criticism ― just one of them will do ― that actually advocates the same practical solution as we do. Show us just one of them that genuinely wants the same Object that we want.
So we must obliterate our only case because people are once more forced by circumstances into having grave misgivings about capitalism as a social system, which misgivings have for decades been suppressed by the wholescale victory in the battle of ideas by the capitalist class.These are such rare times to show a receptive working class our unswerving steadfastness to our sole justifiable case for socialism. To miss that is truly to take one’s eye off the ball, and play merely to the crowd like all the others.
No, it remains Coke v. Pepsi, plus 50 shades of austerity.Corbyn changes nothing in the anti-socialist cocktail, apart from adding false allure, like the communist party did for 70 years.Capitalism will continue to operate the way it always must, in order to reproduce itself as it always must ― neither better nor worse than it must always be ― by daily reproducing society as the necessary byproduct of capital expansion.The socialist case against capitalism remains the same as ever ― that capitalism is a social mode of production driven by the need for capital to expand itself ― that capitalism rests on the deprivation of a majority class of society from ownership and control over the means of social reproduction ― in the interests of a minority class of society that owns and controls those means of necessary social reproduction.The socialist case for socialism remains the same as ever ― that socialism is a mode of production in which all of society takes ownership and control over the means of social reproduction ― in the interests of the whole of society.Get that case over, and you proagate the sole case for socialism, from which all else follows.As for imaginative economics, the party case against capitalism and for socialism (as described in the preceding paragraphs) is based on marxian economics. We'd better get that right before we get it imaginative. No, it remains Coke v. Pepsi, plus 50 shades of austerity.Nothing substantial changes when soft drinks are revamped as diet Coke and Pepsi lite.
Before wallowing in selective sentiment, previous writers might pause to consider what the socialist message must only be.Capitalism is driven by the expansion of capital, which is necessarily indifferent to collateral suffering.That is our case for striving to change capitalism for socialism.The significance of this crisis is that it forces European capital to demonstrate to the world its response to unmistakable human suffering.Before falling for capitalist “humanitarianism”, previous writers might pause to consider how mercenary capitalist “humanitarianism” must necessarily be. How ineffectual to solve the problems the expansion of capital has thrown up and must continually throw up!Previous writers might pause to consider how more ineffectual a gesture of socialist “solidarity” with non-socialists must appear, and how ultimately detrimental to our anti-capitalist case.These judgements may seem harsh, but the situation and its capitalist “humanitarian” remedies are harsher.To presuppose that a gesture of ours will be effectual is tantamount to denying our case. It descends to the level of every sentimental anti-socialist moralist reformer of capitalism.In the past the party has wisely left capitalist “humanitarianism” to the willing occupation of those capitalist supporting organisations—and they are legion—that openly promote the delusion that capitalism can be reformed in working class interests.We do not hold that illusion. It is the antithesis of the very thing we claim to be the only mode of actuating genuine humanitarianism.I see the above proposal as a token stimulated by a desire that we must get in on the action. Quite so, as long as the socialist case is forefront.
Here is the section of Engels 1895 Introduction to “Class Struggles in France” that describes the vulgar democracy.
I give a free translation because I’ve lifted this section from its immediate context.
Engels, 1895, wrote:After the defeat of the revolution in the year 1849, Marx and Engels did not share the illusions of the vulgar democracy that grouped itself around the upstart provisional governments in partibus, [i.e. the post-revolutionary governments then emerging throughout Europe during the immediate reaction].This vulgar democracy deluded itself on an imminent decisive victory of the “people” over the reactionary “usurpers” of the revolution.
We, however, foresaw a long struggle, after the removal of these reactionary “usurpers” of the revolution, between the antagonistic groups now concealed within this supposedly united “people” itself.
The vulgar democracy confidently expected renewed outbreaks of the revolution every day.
We declared as early as the autumn of 1850 that the first chapter of the revolutionary period was now closed, and that nothing further was to be expected until the outbreak of a new world crisis.
For this reason we were excommunicated—as traitors to the revolution—by the very people who later, almost without exception, rushed to make their peace with Bismarck—so far, of course, as Bismarck found them worth his trouble.
Even drinking distilled water “ain’t necessarily absolutely harmless”.Its zero mineralisation, neutral pH, different osmotic pressure, etc. will change the conditions under which biological processes operate at the cellular level. While these processes are necessarily tolerant, conditions that depart from slightly alkaline pH, trace mineralisation, etc. might well have long-term biological consequences.It would not be surprising if demineralised water tended to leach minerals out of bodily cells, etc.
YMS wrote:his goals are to take he wages system to its own breaking point: in that light his policy suggestions are eminently sensible, from what I can see.If so, then his policy derives from all past communist-inspired attempts to trash the existing system—which system he acknowledges to be a nonlinear complex adaptive system.He must realise that, if he takes the complex system's nonlinear adaptability seriously, the system will react against destabilisation to break its assailant in unexpected ways.Sabotage directed against such a system that is not directed against its foundation—the social base of class ownership and control of the social means of life—will prove ultimately powerless to achieve its goals.In practice, the system responds by forcing upon its assailant the awful recognition that society must, and will, continue to find a way to function.To save his political skin, the failed system assailant is forced to backtrack—like the social democrats and the leninists have been forced to backtrack over the past century—repudiating the very tactics they hitherto trumpeted to the world, and shamefacedly falling back on hitherto despised Plan B.Such is the archetypal road to political annihilation and continued working class defeat. This “cunning plan” has nothing rational to recommend it.So, you claim that Paul Mason is apparently recommending people should actively seek to reduce their wages to zero—perhaps going on hunger strikes—in order to undermine the wages system, but never ever recommending them to directly abolish it. And this undermining is fondly supposed to take place under a protected market system where profit taking is recognised as the legally sanctioned “motivator of entrepreneurship”.What, if anything, is socially sensible or implementable about that? What, if anything, is socialist about it? Such a duplicitous hair-brained enterprise merits our total condemnation.
