On Marx's Definition of Economics.
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“If we refuse to use the terms ‘proletariat’ or ‘workers’ within this society, then we lose sight of the exploitative nature of our class society. But clearly the ‘proletariat’ or ‘workers’ literally forms the basis of the ‘social producers’ within socialism. The ‘proletariat’ or ‘workers’ are the creators of ‘democratic socialism’.”
Two words I dislike —proletariat and bourgeoisie.
I understand your case that they are political and economic terms which describe clearly the class nature of capitalism. But I know from experience that their usage immediately puts the listener off.
I now tend to talk of “the people” (my hippie Citizen Smith days of “Power to the People”) or “working people” and I acknowledge that those also possess inadequacies. 1% and the 99%, I have used sometimes. I never really found the right word that attracts or appeals to me.
It seems describing our enemy, the capitalist class, provides us with a rich variety of synonyms that are easily understood as who we are talking about and they are as vague as “the few” to their function – “investor” class.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “The freedom will be that the student can stop attending the lessons and lectures…”
Ah, the old bourgeois myth about ‘individual freedom’!
Just like when one doesn’t like one’s pay being too low, simply ‘stop attending’ that workplace!
No, alan, collective, conscious, political action to change the structure we find ourselves in.
As for workplaces, so for universities.
We are having some revealing political statements today, aren’t we?!
alanjjohnstone wrote: “But I know from experience that their usage immediately puts the listener off.”
Yeah, you’re right, alan.
‘Experience’ during a retreat from class politics (such as the last 40 years) provides such a lesson.
But, we’re Marxists, who always place ‘experience’ within socio-historic contexts, and know that, as the context changes, ‘usages’ produce different ‘experiences’.
My advice, alan, is to go back to ‘proletariat/bourgeoisie’, which so clearly exposes the exploitative class nature of our current society, and as the new audience for class politics emerges amongst the young, your ‘experience’ will change. 🙂
“We are having some revealing political statements today, aren’t we?!”
Yup, your authoritarianism has become very apparent 😛
I thought I was discussing the situation in socialism, not what we have today, or the means to achieve it. I was speculating on future society, LBird
And in socialism there will not be the removal of position for teaching “heresies” or a minority opinion because they might be unpopular as signaled by some sort of vote by the students.
Call it what you will, but Marx vigourously defended freedom of expression, even for the bourgeois press.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “I thought I was discussing the situation in socialism, not what we have today, or the means to achieve it. I was speculating on future society, LBird”
Yeah, I thought so, too, alan! 🙂
But… whereas I seem to think the educational structures within socialism will be different to those in universities now – revolutionary different – you seem to think they’ll be very similar, if not even identical. I doubt that.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “And in socialism there will not be the removal of position for teaching “heresies” or a minority opinion because they might be unpopular as signaled by some sort of vote by the students.”
Of course there will! That’s what power is all about.
Otherwise, who will have the power, to remove, reinstate or retain ‘teachers’?
The ‘teachers’ themselves?
Once again, I find the political awareness of ‘power’, both now and in the future, to be very naive, on this site.
Whenever I ask political questions about ‘power’, there seems to be a general assumption that not very much will change. That is, there’s going to be a revolution, in which ‘the world will be turned upside down’, that will involve much sacrifice (almost certainly including torture and death for some), and yet things will carry on in much the same old way afterwards.
This is all very different from ‘heresies’ (not least because I’m the heretic here!), or unpopularity, or difference, or disagreement, or debate, or opinion, etc.
The point is, who’s to decide if any given ‘teaching’ is inimical to our collective interests as humans?
If you can’t tell the difference between ‘difference’ and ‘danger’, I’m sure that the democratic producers will be able to.
Indeed, if I didn’t believe this – that the majority can come to consciously know their own interests and needs – I wouldn’t be a democratic socialist. And when there’s any issue about what’s ‘heresy’ and what’s ‘dangerous’, only the democratic social producers can decide. All social production – science, education, physics, mathematics, logic, etc. – is done by us, collectively, and only we can determine our social product.
To argue otherwise, is to argue for an elite, and to denigrate, from the outset, the potential of humanity as a collective force.
“you seem to think they’ll be very similar, if not even identical. I doubt that.”
LBird, from my perspective it is you who appear to be replicating the present form of universities in socialism. And the power structures of capitalism.
“That’s what power is all about.”
Might is not Right
For how many years have we been playing this Ping Pong game ?
BD – How many people does it take to decide to change a light bulb in L Bird’s concept of a Socialist Society?
L Bird – half the population of the entire world plus 1
Well, since Marx argued that humanity creates its own ‘entire output of global production’, the most fundamental political question is ‘who should control that output?’
It seems to me that Marx also argued for ‘democracy’ within our ‘social production’, and that particular political mode of social production would be called ‘communism’.
LBird
I earlier asked you: “are you saying that humanity in its entirety should democratically determine the entire output of global production…” Its seems to me that what you say above is simply evading the question
Its seems to me that what you say above is simply evading the question
Yes production today is social production but it does not follow therefore that the whole of society should or can democratically control the whole of production. This is where you constantly err. You don’t seem to understand the implications of what you are actually proposing…..
An example. You earlier said “I don’t regard ‘democratic’ as meaning ‘centralised’.” Now you appear to be saying that, since humanity as a whole produces the entire output of society, humanity “as a whole” should democratically control the whole of production. Not bits of humanity controlling bits of the apparatus of production but the whole of humanity controlling the entire apparatus of production because it is “social”.
So you are actually proposing there should be one single centre of decision-making in which everyone in the world is a participant which democratically decides on everything that is produced, right? Actually, contrary to what you earlier said, you now seem to be advocating the most extreme form of centralisation imaginable – i.e. society-wide planning – in which there is just one planning centre effectively for the whole of society.
I probably don’t need to explain to you why this is completely ridiculous – just on the grounds of the sheer logistics of decision-making alone in a world in which there are probably billions of decisions that need to be made each and every day. Instead, what I propose to do is tackle head on your argument about democracy and your naïve suggestion that the form of democracy should equate with the social nature of production.
Like you I fully support the concept of democratic control of production. I believe this will be a much more potent and salient aspect of life in socialism than it ever could be in capitalism.
However, unlike you, I say there are necessarily limits to how far you can extend democratic decision-making even in a socialist society. In fact, paradoxically if you do not set limits you risk destroying the very thing you cherish most – democracy itself
You do not wish to set any limits except those of the whole of society itself. i.e. society wide planning. I suggest to you that this will spell the complete annihilation of democracy in practice. In practice, what would happen in the absence of society as a whole being able to decide on anything for sheer logistical reasons – except maybe a handful of global plebiscites in the course of a year – is that all de facto day-to-day decision-making would be taken over by a tiny elite supposedly deciding things on behalf of society as a whole
The limits you need to set on democracy in order to ensure its optimality are those to do with the spatial structure of decision-making and those to do with the role of individual choice
The first is obvious. You have to disaggregate decision-making and assign particular decisions to particular spatial levels of decision making. Local communities, for example, are best placed to make decisions that are essentially of a local nature. Yet you have never once conceded that in a socialist society there would be such a thing as a local communities making local decisions because this fundamentally undermines your whole thesis on social production being democratically controlled by society as a whole.
Secondly, there has be substantial scope in a socialist society for individuals to make choices which do not require the formal stamp of democratic approval. Examples would be lifestyle choices, consumer choices and choices regarding what work you do. Yes, society has a say in determining the parameters in which such choices are made but, necessarily, it is the individual who makes the choice in these instances.
You are fond of quoting Marx in support of your arguments but actually Marx would be strongly opposed to the arguments you present. Marx held that the free development of each individual was the condition of the free development of all in socialism/communism
For example there is that famous quote from the German Ideology:
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
What Marx was asserting was the need for the individual to be able to choose (“just as I have a mind”), what form of activity she engaged in rather than submit to the compulsory division of labour applicable in capitalism. What Marx was trying to underscore with this rather colourful example of his was the essentially voluntaristic nature of labour in socialism.
This would not be possible under your system of society wide planning which would require everyone to submit to the task they has been assigned by society “as a whole” in order for the single giant plan that you envisage the whole of society having “democratically” decided upon beforehand
robbo, I’ve been trying to give this answer some thought, so that I can illustrate what I consider to be the political problem at issue here.
Perhaps this formulation will help to capture the issue of power within democratic socialism (and I’ve tried to find as many examples as you’ve given in this thread of political bodies that you say will wield power without the oversight/authority of what I argue is the supreme power within democratic socialism, the democratic social producers).
If there is any dispute between “local communities/individuals/particular spatial levels of decision making/polycentric [bodies]/decentralised [bodies]”, who will have the power to override either/both/all the disputants, and, if necessary, disband a disputant?
Unless you can come up with an answer to this vital political question now, when, in the future, the need arises within democratic socialism to solve any political disputes, it will not be clear just where supreme political power resides – that is, where the buck stops for political decision making.
I think that for Marx, who argued for both democracy and for the control of social production by the associated producers themselves, that the only answer to this question of ‘supreme power’ must be ‘the social producers themselves, employing democracy’.
That is, if disbandment of any lower body of power is deemed necessary by this supreme power, the lower body is disbanded.
None of your “local communities/individuals/particular spatial levels of decision making/polycentric [bodies]/decentralised [bodies]” will have the final say on the issue of their existence.
If you disagree with me, and argue that there will be no ‘final authority of appeal’, that’s a political answer that I would disagree with.
How does your family choose what’s for dinner, Lbird? I’m sure a form of democracy , of give and take, of compromise, is practiced. But as Matt says is it politics?
If there is any dispute between “local communities/individuals/particular spatial levels of decision making/polycentric [bodies]/decentralised [bodies]”, who will have the power to override either/both/all the disputants, and, if necessary, disband a disputant?
LBird , it is very significant that you can even talk of “disbanding a disputant” in this context. So in your view this could mean a local community in socialism being stripped of the power to make any local decision that affects local people. I find that actually quite a sinister train of thought and it begs the question of how this is ever going to be enforced in a socialist society, anyway.
More to the point it implies a separation between the “social-producers-in-general” and local communities in socialism, thereby overlooking that every social producer is at the same time also a member of some local community. There is no separation just as there is no separation between producers and consumers in socialism. Producers are consumers and vice versa. It is capitalism that generates these kind of artificial divisions, not socialism.
Of course, I dont deny there will occasional conflicts and tensions in socialism between different communities and between different spatial levels of planning – local, regional and global. But that in itself implies a polycentric system of decision-making which you seem to be intent on suppressing. In effect you are saying that a local community should say nothing if the regional authority has decided to build a whopping great nuclear power station in its backyard because, well, that is democracy.
But that is not democracy! Democracy is not about submitting to some higher authority dressed up as the voice of the “social-producers-in-general”. Rather democracy is about resolving conflicts that arise precisely out of and presuppose, a polycentric system of decision-making in the first place which, as I said, you seem intent upon denying or suppressing. This is why your whole approach is based on a fundamental contradiction. You want democracy but you dont want the material circumstances that call forth democracy and make it necessary.
Of course democracy means the will of a majority must hold sway in the end but that does not mean “disbanding” the minority, for heaven’s sake, with all the authoritarian anti-socialist connotations this holds. Normally the majority will seek to appease or make some concessions to the minority. People have to live together in a democratic society, after all. This would be particularly true of socialism which will need to focus on building consensus, not deepening divisions
Moreover, and this is a point you overlook, most decisions made by a local community would NOT, in the normal run of things, come into conflict with another community or with some higher regional authority. Though the decisions will doubtless be made democratically within the local community , there is no conflict involved as far as these decisions concern other communities. Therefore there is no need to invoke “democratic decision making” with respect to these other communities.
Democracy only becomes relevant where significant differences of opinion or interests arise. The great bulk of decisions made in a socialist will not be of this nature. So to give the example that Marx offered which I referred to in my previous post – what kind of work I do is a decision I alone will make in a socialist society. Marx hated the compulsory division of labour, as he saw it, in capitalism. He wanted the individual to be free to express her own creativity in whatever she chose in socialism. It benefits everyone to allow individuals to chose to do what they most want to do.
This, as I said, is another example of the need to place limits on democracy in order to ensure it is most effective. Too much “democratic decision-making” stifles a society and paradoxically undermines democracy itself
In this, as in other matters, there is always a “Golden Mean”
“In this, as in other matters, there is always a “Golden Mean” ”
New to the expression. I assume it is related to the Buddhist “Middle Way”
robbo203 wrote: “…the need to place limits on democracy…”
I suppose this is the closest that I’ll get, to an answer to my political question! 🙂
But if we were in a debate being listened to by interested workers, who wanted to know if they would have power within the two versions of ‘democratic socialism’ which the pair of us were alternatively putting forward, I’d point out that my debating partner is arguing for a ‘limiter’ of them, who (or what) they themselves don’t control.
I’m sure they’ll be keen to hear more from you about this supreme ruler, the ‘Golden Mean’.
‘Limits on democracy’, eh?
You’d be more accurate to name your version ‘Limited Democratic Socialism’, robbo, and I’ll stick with ‘Democratic Socialism’, and mean it.
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