Young Master Smeet
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LBird wrote:If you want to start from a non-Marxist concept, like 'propertied workers', fair enough, but why not openly say that this is nothing to do with Marx or, indeed, 'class'? (because 'class' is a relational concept, too, about 'exploitation', not about varying 'groups' of 'property owners', which it would be in your usage of 'working class')
Marx is dead. I am exploring the conceptual implications that through ownership of votes and citizenship, working folk have a property interest (as a property interest, analogous to the category of rent). This property interest gets them a share of the social product. It may not be much, but like any small holder, they are aware and jelously guard their share. Now, on a global scale, this does leave us with propertyless proletarians; those in states where they cannot vote, and stateless migrants. That would indicate some sort of third worldism is the way to socialism.This would also make left-nationalists of the Labour type the more likely party for those states where workers have votes, and also form the basis for explaining working class Tories who find common cause with small shop keepers in nationalist movements.
LBird wrote:Young Master Smeet wrote:And the thesis I was building was that …the working class may not necessarilly be the or even an agent of communism.Yes, and I was contesting this 'thesis of yours', YMS, and suggesting the socio-historical origins of 'your thesis' (ie. that it's not 'your thesis', but an already well-known one). I'm contesting from a Marxist perspective.
But you haven't refuted the proposition that the working class are not propertyless, and, to continue with the Thompsonisms, seem more disposed to plebeian rather than proletarian politics (prefering to bargain with power than to displace power).
LBird wrote:No, the 'working class' haven't 'built a Labour Party' – over generations, many workers, still under bourgeois consciousness, have helped, under bourgeois leadership, build a bourgeois party.Most workers looking to Corbyn are still held in thrall by bourgeois consciousness.I'm sure we all know where this is going, because we have a socio-historical method which examines what the Labour Party does in government.And bourgeois consciousness holds their minds, seems to meet their needs and aspirations, and they have more use for bourgeois consciousness than socialist consciousness, and we can ask ourselves why. We can also ask how workers escape bourgeois ideology, if it is all pervasive? How can we know, per Zizek, that any alterative ideology isn't in fact part of the support mechanisms for the ruling ideology (Zizek calls it disidentification: "I'm not a bricklayer, I'm a rock guitariusts, really, etc.": "I'm not a boring office worker, I'm a dangerous socialist revolutionary" And yet they still do their job).
And the thesis qI was building was that for the working class, the sale of their votes in return for 'gifts' from politicians, suggests welfare statism and a social wage is the 'natural form' of capitalism, and the working class may not necessarilly be the or even an agent of communism.The sheeple/brainwashing explanation doesn't wash, because any ideological control must conform in some way to lived experience, or it would be totally rejected.The working class have built a Labour Party, not a Socialist Party.
Ozymandias wrote:I know capitalism could theoretically rumble on forever but surely this level of debt can't go on and on. Is the planet in debt to itself and if so whit's gonny happen? https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/05/world-debt-has-hit-record-high-of-152tn-says-imf#img-1Well, it can go on: states and corporations are immortal, they can assume the debt and let growth and inflation degrade it before making any nominal repayments. The Tories blew the gaff by making a song and dance about finally paying off the Napoleonic war bonds: debt can live for ever, ignore it.
LBird wrote:This argument of YMS's rests on the assumption that 'citizenship and a vote' are simply more important to workers than, say, affordable housing, unadulterated food, critical education, etc.If citizenship and vote are the means of achieving the means of living, and they can be deployed without fracturing the capitalist economic system itself (and, indeed, give the working class a vested interest in maint9aining capitalist relations) then the whole political edifice of Marxism falls.
Marx & Engels wrote:But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.But if they can live by selling their votes as well, then out goes the revolutionay role. Thus, that would falsify:
Marx & Engls wrote:Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.And also
Engls & Marx wrote:The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.I'd also quote from Engels' 'Principles of Communism', but I think those passages are enough. The gift relation of selling votes for benefit and a 'social wage' could account for how the workers' movement is continually blown off course by regionalist and nationalist movements.If that goes, we also lose the agent of socialism: if the working class can seek remedy within capitalism. Without an agent, we're thrown back on utopianism.
Well, Lbird, no, Marx' idea was that the working class having no stake in the status quo had no option but to overthrow it, if, though a considerable proportion do have a stake, that changes things, they will support the state and reactionary politics, and they will divide against those who do not have the same interest: foreign workers.
Well, I did float an idea in the discussion of Brexit: the working class aren't propertyless. They own two related things: citizenship, and the vote. this gives them an interest in the state (and makes them effectively rentiers, or intellectual property holders), and they vote accordingly.As such this knocks out the idea that the working class is the negation of existing society, since they have a considerable stake, at least, those that are citizens, that is.
Negative interest rates impact on pensions (my workplace pensions funds have been hit by the low government returns); they impact on our 'fuck you' money, and make it harder for workers to save, they would increase volatility in the housing market (and other asset markets) as people look to store value in a way that is degraded by charges, this will also impact on renters.Interest is just a price of borrowing, and a share of surplus value: if capitalists aren't making their cut through interest, then different capitalists are taking their slice of the surplus value pot.Essentially, this is just about choosing between different bnches of capitalist.
As this article suggests:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37504449Disincentives to save are also bad news for workers: we lose our 'fuck-you money' and ability to self insure.
Quote:More than 16m people in the UK have savings of less than £100, a study by the Money Advice Service (MAS) has found.I think this is also a good index on poverty, since having no savings, no capacity to live beyond your next pay cheque is pretty much the definition of poverty.
http://press.labour.org.uk/post/151053788194/jeremy-corbyn-leader-of-the-labour-party-speechCorbyn wants municipal socialism:
Quote:But I want to go further because we want local government to go further and put public enterprise back into the heart of our economy and services to meet the needs of local communities, municipal socialism for the 21st century, as an engine of local growth and development."public enterprise" and
Quote:But we will also be pressing our own Brexit agenda including the freedom to intervene in our own industries without the obligation to liberalise or privatise our public services and building a new relationship with Europe based on cooperation and internationalism.and
Quote:We know how great this country could be, for all its people, with a new political and economic settlement.With new forms of democratic public ownership, driven by investment in the technology and industries of the future, with decent jobs, education and housing for all with local services run by and for people not outsourced to faceless corporations.That’s not backward-looking, it’s the very opposite.It’s the socialism of the 21st century.and, playing to the home crowd
Quote:Let us do it, in the spirit of the great Scots-born Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly who said:“The socialism I believe in, is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.”We are not all Bill Shanklys. Each of us comes to our socialism from our own experiences.Isn't the point not what we write, but that we:a: Don't vote for non-socialist parties.b: All write the same thing to show we are a discplined distinctive movement.If 15,000 people wrote the same thing, the message would start getting through.
LBird wrote:And this is the SPGB dealing with epistemology, and the politics of 'science'?Hmmmm…. curiouser and curiouser… as Alice said. I've heard of a politics without a party, but never a party without a politics.All I know about yellow is that it's instances are like the colour of objects that someone called yellow the last time the word was used. I know that yellow isn't green, isn't red, etc. But, can I come up with any positive definition of yellow, a list of properties?
LBird wrote:This is incomprehensible, YMS.You call this your 'scientific method'?And you're still bangin' on about "I", rather than social production.No wonder you won't have workers' democracy, but argue for elites, like you, who 'know' (but not 'difference') what the rest of us apparently can't.No it isn't.No I don't.I am socially produced.No I don't.
