Young Master Smeet
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
SocialistPunk wrote:YMS supports this view in the above quote. What he fails to grasp, is that those values need be encouraged within a socialist space.
I don't know how that can be said, when I haven't made any comment on that topic.As for socialism, obviously, the values of people in socialist society (and it's structures) will be different 100 years from the revolution, and again 300 years. On the eve of the revolution people will have a set of values built on and closely resembling, those they have today. What will drive the change is necessity and the inherent skills of humans to negotiate their social space. I should certainly hope their values will be fettered and shaped by socialist society.
Capitalist ideologues, in their utopian mood, offer freedom and equality for all: universal human emancipation. Individual responsibility, dignity for labour, all sorts of lovely goodies.Even in twenty years, most of the people in socialism would be the people who are around now, and they will have to change their minds (certainly) to get to socialism, but but that will be a process of adapting existing attitudes, rather than wholesale implanting entirely new ones.
I do hope the positive values in socialism won't include the use of the exclamation mark. I don't know what values will be needed for socialism, I can only say they will be those compatible with a a society freed from waged labour and based on common and democratic ownership and control of the wealth of the world.
SP,exactly, Marx reacted to and understood the world around him (and even changed his ideas from those of radical democracy to Communism in the light of his interaction with the existing workers movement). People make history, not in conditions of their own choosing (as he said) and they can conjure up and imagine any sort of society, but can only realise the possible ones before them. Capitalist ideologues espouse freedom, justice and equality before the law, noble values, but they cannot realise them. We have to start with people as they are, not how we'd like them to be, and go from there. As Alan has demonstrated, much of the time socialism does espouse the same values as capitalism, but it focuses on the practical mechanism to realise them.
Starting from values and ideas is the utopian approach (and a very dangerous one, I might add). Starting from the world as it is is the materialist approach. Yes, even now there are signs of human empathy, solidarity and the need to help one another, but for every one person, say, who gives to a beggar, there are a thousand who simply don't. For every one person who might shout at a group of kids playing silly buggers, there are many too frightened, or too busy, or determined it's not their business.Indeed, capitalism relies on bonds of human solidarity as an externality it can slough its costs off onto, and many of those acts of kindness are a necessity to simply live.Like I said, the people who live now, with their attitudes, temprements and ideas are the ones who will exist in socialism, not some abstract 'pure' new people, so if the capacity doesn't exist in the here and now it won't happen at all.But, take the example of parents. Parents who are holding down jobs all day, and come home tired don't have the same time and energy to play with their kids and give them attention as someone with a bit more free time. With the best will in the world, no no less love, the former is more likely to snap and appear to be an ogre of a parent compared with the latter.
Just discovered that Kevin Carson (of anti-capitalist free markets fame) has made his work on anarchist organizational principles free to air:http://mutualist.org/id114.html"Studies in the Anarchist Theory of Organizational Behavior"Chapter 7: Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth (the Corporation asPlanned Economy)Is quite interesting, as he 'goes through' (to use the academic jargon) the calculation debate to show how large capitalist firms are just as subject to the problems of calculation as the 'socialist commonwealth'. It's worth reading, because at the least it is suggestive of the necessities of what socialism proper will require (the active engagement of those doing the work in planning the work, open aaccounting and free information, etc,); and because it's kind of fun to see the tables turned.
It's not mechanical versus values, but materialism versus utopianism. The values of society will be those that it is capable of in its material conditions. As one of our speakers is fond of saying, at the moment we're so busy taking care of business, we don't have time to take care of ourselves: when we have a society run in the interest of all human beings (with the human being at its centre) we will have the capacity to deal with one another in depth.I agree that the means must be commensurate with the ends.
I don't think I overlooked "values"; what I stated was a materialist approach which says that values don't just drop down out of the sky, but are a function of the time and effort we can afford to put into them. Thus, bizarrely, our first response to the question of crime is to discuss cutting the working week (coupled with meeting everyone's material needs). Once freed from the necessity of wage-slavery and poverty, we can find out what humans are really like. If we're robbing, murdering cads, that's what we are, and we'll have to relate accordingly.
SP,in socialism, people who refuse to comply with health and safety policies will be removed from workplaces. People who disrupt theatre performances will be kicked out. There wouldn't be a lot of time for empathy, and discussion with someone putting their own or their colleagues' lives in danger. Yes, cutting the amount of time we work so we have more time to build alliances, to discuss and encourage will help in the longer term; and removing the existential threat of the loss of means of subsistence means people may well be more willing to comply (or have less incentive to flout rules). But, as William Morris said, Peter sober needs protecting from Peter drunk.
ISTR Bernard Shaw thought there could be a socialist death penalty, but to avoid cruelty he felt the criminal should be secretly tried and then put to death in their sleep with no warning. Not remotely terrifying then (he felt that a life sentence was a form of cruel punishment so heinous you might as well kill them).The death penalty has many problems, from a political angle, do we want to have any machinery in our society that can have us killed? It's a pretty effective way for a minority who can control that machinery to come to dominance.Of the philosophies behind punishment, ISTR watching an old Open University programme that discussed retributivism and utilitarianism. Retributivist philosophy is that the punishment should be scaled to the crime (which is plain nonsnse, the death penalty for killing one person is the same as for killing ten, there is no metric to make a punishment actually match the harm, and any action comes with the added fact of the deliberateness of the public body inflicting the harm).Utilitarian punishment would be a deterrent: however, logically, that means the death penalty for parking offences but not for terrorist offences (killing a terrorist wouldn't deter them, so it would be inhuman to do that).The basic problem with the death penalty is it inflicts the self same harm that it purports to punish.And, while we're quoting:
Uncle Charlie wrote:Plainly speaking, and dispensing with all paraphrases, punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that, which knows of no better Instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims through the “leading journal of the world” its own brutality as eternal law?(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/02/18.htm)Also worth reading is: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch33.htmI suspect he may be taking the piss…
I was just flicking through a book, yesterday:ISBN1137277742 (hbk.)TitleCooperatives and socialism : a view from Cuba / edited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker.ImprintBasingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Collationxii, 351 p. ; 23 cm.The chapter on the legal framework for co-operatives in Cuba didn’t enthral me, and described situations very much like what Wolff seems to envisage (co-operatives are sanctioned state patrimony, with usufruct rights of land and resources, where workers get wages and a cut in the profits).But, the first chapter on Marx, Engels and Lenin on co-ops was interesting. Marx’s view was that co-ops were a progressive, powerful force, showing workers could run their own industries without capitalists, but that they could also become the workers exploiting themselves within the market system.We don’t need clever exegesis to work out what Marx thought of co-ops, he expressed himself pretty clearly.
Just on a similar point, and to perhaps give a little credit to our political opponents. Although it does sound a bit twee. When Lyndsey German was standing for Left List Mayor of London, part of her manifesto was more bus conductors and park keepers, as a part of a public order measure and, also, employment). Now, i'll admit to being a little impressed by that, a small reform suggestion but one that bounced the law 'n' order debate into a new territory of supporting civil society as a bulwark against deliquent behaviour.Is the swimming pool attendant a cop?Incidentally, the political right have a virtuous circle on law enforcement. Cut the cost of the state, which drives up crime, then demand stiffer penalties for the criminals, whilst slashing the costs of prison and the police (whilst making them yet more draconian), thus driving up crime, etc.
My opinion is there are two minimums:1) There should/would be no organisation with special powers of arrest/violence. That is, the power of 'common law' arrest/violence, if you will, will have to be a universal power available to all citizens. Now, that doesn't mean, as per above, there may not be a body dedicated to public order, but in much the same way, I'd suggest, as a baker stands to the unviersal right to make bread, as a specialist.2) Whatever such body existed could only work by consent, and would have to be internally democratic and subject to the general democracy of the community. So, no ranks, military styles or, even (maybe) uniforms.Let's not forget that police in the modern form have only existed for the last two hundred ish years, but the capacity of communities to protect themselves from deliquent behaviour (and to protect the deliquents themselves) is a unviersal feature of community.
Abstract wrote:Most hypotheses proposed to explain human food sharing address motives, yetmost tests of these hypotheses have measured only the patterns of food transfer. To choose between these hypotheses we need to measure people’s propensity to share. To do that, I played two games (the Ultimatum and Dictator Games) with Hadza hunter-gatherers. Despite their ubiquitous food sharing, theHadza are less willing to share in these games than people in complex societies are. They were also less willing to share in smaller camps than larger camps. I evaluate the various food-sharing hypotheses in light of these results.Skip to end:
Quote:The Hadza expect a fair share of what others have. In real life, unlike the Ultimatum Game,this expectation is rational since the Hadza rarely face a one-shot decision but can instead keep pressure on until someone hands over a fair share. Among the Hadza, no begging or threatening is required to get food from others. The mere sight of someone’s food seems to suffice, though this applies to some foods more than others. No one would think a man stingy if he shared a small bird only with his children, but large game could never be kept within the household. Although there are no precise and formal rules about division (except for certain pieces called epeme meat, that can only be eaten by men), large game is pretty equally distributed to everyone in camp, with only slightly more going to the hunter in the case of the largest game animals (Hawkes et al., 2001b).Obviously, such observable behaviour has implications for socialist society, and no-one is suggesting that anything remotelyu similar could happe in our vast and complex society (indeed, as the article notes, larger more fractious communities seem to promote a greater sense of fairness, the Hadza approach, it seems from the albeit very small survey, is to pitch for as much as you can get, in the expectation that everyone else will try to stop you, a bit like Ken Macleod's space Nietzschean Juchists.
Quote:For example, if I see a banana growing on a tree, I can't claim to "own" it just like that. But if I climb the tree and pick up the banana, everyone intuitively understands that it wouldn't be appropriate for you to just take away the banana from me like I did from the tree.Actually, ISTR when we had a talk addressed by an anthropologist, Camilla Power, she told us of the Tanzanian tribes people who had exactly the opposite view. If one of their number has a honeycomb, someone would just wander up to them, and demand it be handed over, and they just would. The expectation is that food is shared out. [Edited wrong country]
