Dave B
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iWell one answer is in Star Trek The Next generation. [The federation of planets is communist.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilY4hRgfC2Q There is the prime directive which forbids the interference with intelligent life forms at a lower level of development which is explored more seriously in many episodes of The Next Generation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive In The Next Generation there are capitalist cultures like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi In that there is excellent analysis of the idea of economic base ‘reflected’ in superstructural and in particular religious ideology. Open contact with other cultures is generally opened with the discovery warp drive or faster than light travel for what it matters. With us it was the Vulcans that contacted us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_First_Contact The so called Fermi paradox seems to have become more paradoxical over the last 10 years with the discovery of detectable planets everywhere the look for them Planets around other suns was a big unknown when it was constructed. The first ones they were able see were stupid ones Jupiter sized ones in close orbits to stars or suns. But they are starting to be able to detect potential earth like ones now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox There has been some very recent further discussion on the Fermi paradox, as in the last few months. The life on Mars thing is also firming up a bit, recent announcement by NASA and Mars rover data a few weeks ago. And there is the stuff about seasonal methane emissions on Mars that looks as it might be the result microbial activity. It looks like life got going on earth as soon as it could or it cooled down enough which is the biggest paradox of all. The interplanetary transmission of microbes is a theory; possibly from Mars. They know it is possible as the brought back a bit of Junk from a previous moon landing. They were just interested in metallurgical effects of cosmic rays and micro meteorites and shit like that. When they put a piece of metal under a super electron microscope or something like that they found some snot on it with staphylococcus aureus on it. It is what makes your snot go green. They managed to get it to kick back into life and it is not toughest of microbes when it comes to things like that. They were confident it wasn’t post contamination as it was bagged up on the moon and the handling of it carefully documented. They have also been sending high flying balloons up recently hovering up bugs from the stratosphere etc. It is an old idea that looks like is firming up as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia There are arguments that have also firmed up recently that advanced organisms. By which we mean Eukaryotes which are just originally a more advanced type of microbe took a long time to develop ie about half way through. Eg 2 million years ago with life having started 4 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote Again recently as in less than 5 years mitochondrial analysis all that stuff seems to suggest that it happened once after 2 million years of nothing exciting. So there is talk about that being a freakish accident. Being whacked by massive asteroids every 50,000 years or less is another unknown which would put a crimp on things. Another one is that they develop capitalism like we do and trash the planet or blow themselves up like we are on course to. I mean why not?
iFYI This; …..Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third….. Goes back to Greek logic. The first person to have a bash at this was Plato in 400BC in his The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico048.htm Just needed to add that money or gold was a commodity produced by labour power etc. And labour power could be bought and sold liked beds and houses? Karl gives Plato credit for making a start on it in volume one; after Karl is finished with it. the first reference to SNLT was circa 1740 9.“The value of them (the necessaries of life), when they are exchanged the one for another, is regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required, and commonly taken in producing them.” (“Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, and Particularly in the Publick Funds, &c.” Lond., p. 36) This remarkable anonymous work written in the last century, bears no date. It is clear, however, from internal evidence that it appeared in the reign of George II, about 1739 or 1740. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm From Rubin; ……….For the simple commodity producer, the difference in the conditions of production in two different branches appear as different conditions for the engagement of labor in them. In a simple commodity economy, the exchange of 10 hours of labor in one branch of production, for example shoemaking, for the product of 8 hours of labor in another branch, for example clothing production, necessarily leads (if the shoemaker and clothesmaker are equally qualified) to different advantages of production in the two branches, and to the transfer of labor from shoemaking to clothing production. Assuming complete mobility of labor in the commodity economy, every more or less significant difference in the advantage of production generates a tendency for the transfer of labor from the less advantageous branch of production to the more advantageous. This tendency remains until the less advantageous branch is confronted by a direct threat of economic collapse and finds it impossible to continue production because of unfavorable conditions for the sale of its products on the market…….. In the labour power commodity market if lorry driving work and graft get less than computer programming then lorry drivers become computer programmers if they can. Skilled or specialised ‘concrete’ labour power puts a bit of a crimp on the assumption of the “complete mobility of labor in the commodity economy”.
iI am sorry Steve But you post looks too complicated for me to trawl through. Marcos is correct after a fashion Obviously merchants make a profit but it doesn’t mean necessarily they are exploiting workers. According to Marx; and he dedicated big chapters on it in volume III. The manufacturing capitalist class will make stuff which say costs them $50 but which has a labour time value of say $100. The exploitation has happened there. Manufacturing capitalist class will however have to sell it $100 product to the capitalist supermarkets for $90. Who will sell it a $100. Thus they make $10 profit on the sale. $10 profit on the sale remains however a slice of manufacturing capitalist class surplus value; generated at the point of production. The supermarket profit or rate of profit has to be normal. The supermarkets have ‘non-working’ capital as a permanent stock, albeit rolling over, of commodities As well as buildings and sales infrastructure. The obvious problem of supermarket workers and the variable capital of the merchant capitalists is a bit difficult. Or in other words do they add or create value out of which the merchant capitalist class can take a cut. Or in other words do supermarkets workers produce something socially useful, albeit possibly abstract as a service? The answer to the question would workers still be doing some of that in free access communism. Clearly workers wouldn’t be scurrying around all over the place picking stuff up from factory gates. However! It is possible for the merchants to act as the de-facto ‘disguised’ employers of workers. Who may have a nominal employer (or not) but who in reality may actually just be supervising the work. Or as with small farmers say eg dairy they could be essentially making stuff for the supermarkets who are in essence their indirect employers and exploiters Thus; Capital Vol. III Part IVConversion of Commodity-Capital and Money-Capital into Commercial Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant's Capital)Chapter 20. Historical Facts about Merchant's Capital This system presents everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production and goes under with its development. Without revolutionising the mode of production, it only worsens the condition of the direct producers, turns them into mere wage-workers and proletarians under conditions worse than those under the immediate control of capital, and appropriates their surplus-labour on the basis of the old mode of production. The same conditions exist in somewhat modified form in part of the London handicraft furniture industry. It is practised notably in the Tower Hamlets on a very large scale. The whole production is divided into very numerous separate branches of business independent of one another. One establishment makes only chairs, another only tables, a third only bureaus, etc. But these establishments themselves are run more or less like handicrafts by a single minor master and a few journeymen. Nevertheless, production is too large to work directly for private persons. The buyers are the owners of furniture stores. On Saturdays the master visits them and sells his product, the transaction being closed with as much haggling as in a pawnshop over a loan. The masters depend on this weekly sale, if for no other reason than to be able to buy raw materials for the following week and to pay out wages. Under these circumstances, they are really only middlemen between the merchant and their own labourers. The merchant is the actual capitalist who pockets the lion's share of the surplus-value.[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch20.htm
iI think you can get some idea of what the bundists were from the following from 1918? The imaginary dictatorship of the proletariat has definitely turned into the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, which attracted all sorts of adventurers and suspicious characters and is supported only by the naked force of hired bayonets. Their sham socialism resulted in the complete destruction of Russian industry, in the country's enslavement to foreign capital, in the destruction of all class organisations of the proletariat, in the suppression of all democratic liberty and of all organs of democratic State life, thus preparing the ground for a bourgeois counter-revolution of the worst and most brutal kind. The Bolsheviks are unable to solve the food problem, and their attempt to bribe the proletariat by organising expeditions into the villages in order to seize supplies of bread drives the peasantry into the arms of the counter-revolution and threatens to rouse its hatred towards the town in general, and the proletariat in particular, for a long time to come. . . . In continuing the struggle against the Bolshevik tyranny which dishonours the Russian revolution, social democracy pursues the following aims : To make it impossible for the working class to have to shed its blood for the sake of maintaining the sham dictatorship of the toiling masses or of the sham socialistic order, both of which are bound to perish and are meanwhile killing the soul and body of the proletariat ; To organise the working class into a force which, in union with other democratic forces of the country, will be able to throw off the yoke of the Bolshevik regime, to defend the democratic conquests of the revolution and to oppose any reactionary force which would attempt to hang a millstone around the neck of the Russian democracy. . . . Forty delegates elected by workmen of various towns, to a con- ference, for the purpose of making arrangements for the convocation of a Labour Congress, have been arrested and committed for trial by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, created to pass death sentences without the ordinary guarantees of a fair trial. They are falsely and calumniously accused of organising a counter-revolutionary plot. Among the arrested are the most prominent workers of the Social Democratic Labour movement, as, for instance, Abramovitch, member of the Central Executive Committees of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and of the " Bund," who is personally well known to many foreign comrades ; Alter, member of the Executive Committee of the " Bund " ; Smirnov, member of last year's Soviet Delegation to the Western Countries ; Vezkalin, member of the Executive Com- mittee of the Lettish Social Democratic Party ; Volkov, chairman of the Petrograd Union of Workmen's Co-operative Societies ; Zakharov, secretary of the Petrograd Union of Workmen of Chemical Factories ; and other prominent workers of the trade union and co-operative movement. We demand immediate intervention of all Socialist parties to avert the shameful and criminal proceeding. (Protest of the Social Democratic Labour Party and of the Jewish Socialist Party sent to the Executive Committees of all Socialist Parties of Europe and America, August, 1918.)
i I got my understanding of the ‘Bundists’ from reading the Lenin archive particularly the circa 1905 stuff re the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and some time ago discussed it on rev-left with the anticipated outrage. They were an important part of the formation of the pre Menshevik –Bolshevik split Russian SDP. In fact most of the real workers in the party were prior to and circa 1905 were so called ‘Bundists’; which were non or anti religious and nominally or categorized ‘Jewish’ and invariably Yiddish speaking. They were in 1905 third generation proletarians and emerged as a cultural/ecomomic group from non landowning artisan type community. In 1905 they wanted to maintain there own section within the SDP because as far as they were concerned they had their own issues due to highly institutionalized and legalized racism in the Tsarist state. There was a kind South African Apartheidpass law system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_laws eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement And as far as they were concerned they had already had their own established communistic type literature before the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came along. An example would be the left internationalist Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch Rein who continued to write in Yiddish after his eventual escape from Leninist Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Abramovitch Lenin and his Bolsheviks in their demand for centralized control wanted the Bundists eliminated as an independent section. They were not accused of being religious ‘Jews’ or being non internationalists or Zionists. I think they walked out of the split conference handing the Bolsheviks a more majority vote. There were I think other ‘Jewish’ ‘communist’ workers parties including non religious Zionists and ‘communist’ religious Zionists‘communists’ ; If you wanted to separate them out. [and if you can make sense of that]. There is quite a vocal and active group of ultra orthodox ‘Jews’ in Israel that are implacably opposed to the idea of a ‘Jewish’ state and thus Israel until the return of the real messiah.
iHello Steve francisco I am bit reluctant to post on a thread when a principal participant can’t respond. Even if they were engaged in constant repetition with contradiction; and refusal to engage in and ignoring the counter arguments. We or I had a similar debate on value in communism etc. But at least the people who disagreed with me engaged with my argument and I with theirs I think. Discussing value and surplus value in communism with no exchange and free access premised on one class only and collective democratic production with voluntary labour etc. Like Karl and Fred did? Is qualitatively different from the perspective/ premise that of the selfish I for myself ‘bourgeois limitations’. Which invariably involves and is based on the jealous exchange of value or labour time. I think Prakash is a fraud or very stupid has he clearly wasn’t prepared for the Gotha Programme quote which is widely known and discussed. He also could have used the infamous volume II quotation if he knew of it? Karl didn’t like labour the vouchers argument as with ……..Now, it might be thought that the issue of time-chits overcomes all these difficulties. (The existence of the time-chit naturally already presupposes conditions which are not directly given………… https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm The ‘bank’ here, I think, is like giant mono one stop store of communal goods which buys products from producers, which may be individuals or co-operative producers with labour chits or vouchers and sells back to them the products of other individuals or co-operative producers. Even the infamous gobshite and fraud Mandel understood the final stage of from each according to ability and to each according to need and its later historical context etc. Ernest MandelCommunism(1990) Marx, Engels, Lenin and their main disciples and co-thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Bukharin et al. – incidentally also Stalin until 1928 – distinguished successive stages of the communist society: the lower stage, generally called ‘socialism’, in which there would be neither commodity production nor classes, but in which the individual’s access to the consumption fund would still be strictly measured by his quantitative labour input, evaluated in hours of labour; and a higher stage, generally called ‘communism’, in which the principle of satisfaction of needs for everyone would apply, independently of any exact measurement of work performed. Marx established that basic difference between the two stages of communism in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, together with so much else. It was also elaborated at length in Lenin’s State and Revolution. https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/19xx/xx/communism.htm We and I or course think the transition stage thing sucks but at least we share common ground with most self described Marxists about the ultimate aim or end of economic evolution. Or return to the beginning if we take the 1844 Karl thing on self estranged human essence. It was just beginning to get interesting as well and I was starting to warm up.
i Your argument again is a Gish galloping composite of several different strands; To take one point and this doesn’t matter if you are a Marxist or not; …….The point is the view of communism premised on Marx's principle of ' From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs ' is plain wrong as it contradicts, as I've shown already, the very idea of the classless order premised on Marx's theory of communism…. What that seems be saying is that Karl came to a false conclusion based on his own work and made a mistake that only you can fathom? Which could be true of course but it is an extraordinary position that requires extraordinary proof that you have not provided in my opinion. Incidentally “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, to be written on banners etc, was up to the 1920’s the standard interpretation by all of the ultimate or projected kind of society anticipated as it progressed out of capitalism, based on Karl’s own theoretical work etc. So according to Prakash everyone was wrong; including Karl himself. You must need an astonishing amount of ‘intellectual’ conceit to or be dull- witted to confidently hold that position. It is not even as if that people like Trotsky in 1937 , with his former compelling ‘Militarization of Labour’ and ‘Communism or Terrorism’, had a stubborn prejudice against voluntary labour. Actually the position you are proposing is a more reactionary and limited version of the Deleonist one. Prakash no doubt believes that he is astounding us with a novel ‘Marxist’ idea and interpretation. However we have in the past we have had long running debates on the less reactionary and limited and limited version of the Deleonists. They were much more sophisticated than your own. However they did not pull up short of the end point like you do, thus; http://www.deleonism.org/text/91092101.htm The Deleonists, like Kautsky later, went to the mountain top and had seen the promised land of From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. But thought there was journey that would include in the mean time to each according to work done. But it was a journey of transition not the destination. A possible exception was the later Bernstien. With his; ….My proposition, “To me that which is generally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything”…. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/ch04-conc.htm Which was let things pan out as they will which may or not exclude to each according to work done. Even though Bernstien himself rediscovered Whinstanley with his. "The earth is to be planted and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and storehouses by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or other provision, they may go to the storehouses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers, and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money." Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness(1649) But we can still of course hand wave all that away as confusion and miss-understanding. ……………………….. Going back to dull-witted basics there are two predicates from which everything else flows. It is the bourgeois and Prakhash ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. Versus the ‘boarding house’; We and the us. So on a weekend out in a hired cottage and a planned walk this isn’t as trivial as it sounds, it is seminal and serious. The cook cooks. Non cooks chop vegetables lay tables and wash dishes. The route planner for the walk recommends the scramble up Pen-y-ghent rather than down [my appreciated call, which was valued above my dish washing] The driver drives. And we agree that it is cruel to have a few beers after the walk whilst the driver wants to down some booze like the rest of us. And the electrical engineer resets the trip switch when the lights circuit trips out. Rather than individuals exaggerating the value of their contributions there is a serial self deprecating analysis of others appreciation of what each individual has ‘contributed’. But that is abnormal bourgeois man In fact part of the condition of social animals eg division of labour or diversity of skills. You only need one cook and one electrical engineer and not how many electrical engineers do you need to put the lights back on or cook a meal to make it work. Although there can be in these situations some perverse and crafty individualswho makes out that the poetry reading or guitar playing was the most put upon and under appreciated and valued contribution. Or it might be, as it often equally is, and under valued intellectual contribution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcBYZ-rpO-Y I am actually of a predisposition of wanting to have a rough idea of what I am putting in and what I am getting out but only to make sure I am not ‘exploiting’ others rather than am I being exploited. But it won’t work according to Prakash who worships at the vomitorium temple of conspicuous consumption.
iWhat you are proposing with your system of remuneration according to work done for people who operate on a basis of I for myself and hence potentially lazy and work shy. Is a ‘useful’ or necessary system for bourgeois men as you find them now or what they have been turned into, as a reflection of the ruling bourgeois ideology. Or a ‘nature’ modified by that historical epoch. 50.Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. ……………Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm
i Dear PrakashAs you consider yourself as an intellectual of noble laureate standard.You might want to start with looking at the ideas below on lazy egotistical man just to get a handle on some of the ideas circulating around before Bentham?Which pulls in pre Darwinian ideas from the likes of Hume and mill etc.Just spoon feeding a lazy intellectual here nothing more. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bentham/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/ https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/diss-disc/bentham/bentham.s03.htmlThen you could look at the so called communistic Mir system which was a favourite of Kropotkinist communism. Kropotkin used it as a central example in his book Mutual Aid to refute your bourgeois ideology and limitations.And eg Stalins`s 1906 we are Kropotkinist too; and anything suggested otherwise is ‘tittle tattle’ . It became a bit of a headache for the European Marxist’s as the Russian ‘Slavophiles’ said that the cultural salt of the earth Russian peasants were already communists and didn’t need to go through the crappy European Marxist stagiest model of Mir primitive communism to feudalism to capitalism and then modern technologically advanced communism.And then if there was a communist revolution in technologically advanced Europe post capitalism then the ‘primitive communist’ Mir peasantry could be simply absorbed into it as they were already culturally and ideologically there as regards non bourgeois co-operative behavior. Or in other words we could sell our SPGB type ideas easily to the San and the Anutan and wouldn’t get push back about what you would do about the Lazy and the work- shy?As that idea would be a bit alien to them? A lot of the Russian workers in 1918 were second generation Mir peasants and their perhaps loose woolly minded notions of communism were vaguely familiar?I think that this stuff with third world countries being ‘nominally’ more radical and anti capitalist is probably a hangover from prior more ‘communistic’ ways of doing stuff?Engels suggested I think that Robert Owen’s success in Scotland was partly a result of a hangover from the Scottish ‘clan’ variation of the Mir system.That remarkably persisted in 1930’s at Saint Kilda; a remote Island of the West Coast.Likewise they seemed to have no understanding or problem with the lazy and work-shy freeloaders. http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/draft-1.htm What happened was some kind of pseudo anthropologist wrote a book on the Russian Mir system around 1860 ish I think. It wasn’t easy at the time to get intellectual access to that kind of thing out of Russia. So it was a bit idealised and romanticised, as one source. Apart from being straw sucking redneck Hillbillies who thought that the Tsar was a Demi God who loved them really and was miss-led by grasping intermediaries. The Mir peasants organised and were left to their own Feudal Monday to Wednesday necessary labour time communistically or co-operatively. And did the Thursday to Friday stuff the produce of which went to the aristocracy. Actually the Thursday to Friday stuff was organised communistically as well. It would be a bit like a workers co-operative working with loaned capitalist capital. Monday to Wednesday ‘pays the wage’s’ and the Thursday to Friday stuff pays the interest for the finance capitalist’s capital. There is a Karl quote on that in vol III It is a great system really as the exploiters don’t have to do anything at all excluding the expense of whip lashers. On superstructure and economic basis? Whatever you are doing or where you are at you have to make up ideology to fit in with it. In psychoanalysis they call it ‘rationalisation’ but that doesn’t mean it is rational. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm
i Prakash’s arguments has two strands. One is that man’s ‘mundane’ wants are insatiable, although they may expand, and therefore enough is never enough and therefore there can never be abundance or enough available. Which wasn’t Karl’s position thus; In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm For Prakash there is no consideration of the cultural and ideological capitalist encouragement of decadent and corrosive consumerism through advertising for instance. And you are what you own. And nobody is going to be satisfied until they have there own exclusive use of big house’s yachts, five thousand pairs of shoes and swimming pools in the back garden that they don’t have the time to use etc. Far from being normal I think it is psychologically dysfunctional as well as being irrational. That is not sour grapes or anything I earn 30K and have more than enough, not being saddled with debt and interest payments etc. It is also quite offensive to half the population living off far less than $20 a day. My attitude with regards this kind of bling like gold toilet seats is that it just wouldn’t be made available or produced to, crave for. Prakash repeats the work shy argument. So what is is it. Congenital and natural? Culturally conditioned? Or a rational egotistical decision based on an idea that productive labour and being useful, as a general condition, is against the egotistical well being of the individual? What would you say, as a queer bourgeois little man, to the San and the Anutans? To pick two peoples from totally different environments and geography. That they are queer, abnormal and unnatural bourgeois men? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anuta I think you are sick.
iWell Prakash. There were, or used to be before, several strands to your argument. One of yours was that the correct interpretation of Karl’s work was that the higher phase of communism was unobtainable. I had hoped that by drawing in material from Stalin, Lenin, the Mensheviks and Trotsky, amongst others, would demonstrate that that was not the orthodox interpretation of Marx from say 1905-25? [If you want to continue to pursue that narrow part of the argument we could draw in another extended passage from Karl on the impractical possibility of using a labour voucher system.] You talk about ‘bad’ people and the congenital or ‘naturally?’ work-shy. If you like to continue with that and expand on it a bit we could discuss that? Your so called ‘gratis labour’ as surplus labour in capitalism isn’t gratis of voluntary it is compelled and involuntary. It is used to provide a consumption fund for the work-shy. And to accumulate and expand their ownership of the means of production which they use to extort further involuntary labour from the working class. In the higher phase of communism the working class collectively will perhaps work longer than necessary to increase the means of production in order to reduce the working day in the future. They will democratically be in control of that and determine it rate of accumulation to whatever they regard as acceptable. Unlike in capitalism were maximized or taken to its limit according to how long a worker has to work to reproduce his labour power and maximum length of the working day etc. What you seem to be suggesting is a system that is useful to your queer bourgeois normal man, like yourself no doubt [which would be ‘projection’] With his ‘limitations’ and which consequentially applies to past, present, and future. If that looks like another Karl quote in the pipeline, well it is!
i The idea of the $ token money being displaced is interesting albeit it gets very complicated mathematically. It is being picked up by more orthodox capitalist economists from all strands as well which probably means they understand it as well. The following link is interesting as well because it now pulls in Karl and that wasn’t there before or a few years ago. I know because I was looking at it then and protested about it on several forums. Karl himself, like he did credited, the basic idea to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money The idea is that if you had like local market in town on a hill kind of thing. And they were using tokens or even to make it simpler one token to exchange stuff. And to make it simpler or easier to understand, as a scientific model, that all items exchanged had the same labour time value, lets say a weekly 40 hours of labour in goose eggs and coats. [And a fixed number daily exchanges; to bring in the velocity of money thing lets say for the sake of argument,20] Start off with the absurdly simple; then work your way up. Then the value of the token is must be equal to 40 hours labour time. Introduce another token then 2 tokens = one coat. And you have inflation. However if you double the amount of transactions; not the speed of transactions; Then one token still equals one coat and you have no inflation. If you had an expanding economy using these tokens you could slip another in without causing inflation and the producer of the token would get something for nothing. Thus if the token of choice is the $ then the FED can generate them throw them into the market place by buying stuff or whatever without causing any obvious problem. Conversely if the economy using the $ token falls or people start using other peoples tokens in a different market place on another hill. The residual $ tokens become too much and 2 tokens exchange for one coat and you get inflation as well no longer being able to feed new ones in without making it worse. And the new token generators can start to play the game. What you really need for a token money system to work is a guaranteed end exchanger for the token. Something that is universally desirable and has value and certainly a ‘use value’. If you had little green stones or sharks teeth and you could pay your electricity bill with them or a mobile phone or Microsoft stuff or state taxes. Then you would have no worries about getting loaded up with something worthless as if you might not need them for that kind of thing there are plenty around who do. As in the international trading system $ have a guaranteed end user in fossil fuels, or deferred electricity bills, with the Gulf States which isn’t insignificant. If people like Lee Camp thinks there are legs to this kind of thing then I think we can. As below which is a write up of something he did on Redacted Tonight on RT news. He is quite entertaining and more radically left than anything else you can watch on TV. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/i-know-which-country-the-u-s-will-invade-next/ Also the banks are loaded up with something far worse that token money and that is they are in possession IOU funny money notes which are payable in 2,5, 10 or 20 years. Called bonds. So in 10 years they will get their funny money back plus funny money interest that won’t buy a bag of crisps. That is not as much of a problem as knowing that they won’t buy a bag of crisps in twenty years. As then the race is on to sell the IOU’s on the first suckers you can find and their selling price and fictitious value collapses. The Wikipedia entry sites volume one but the one below goes into it in more detail I think. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02_2c.htm Additionally; If you introduce more tokens into the market someone who is generating surplus value can take them back out again by exchanging surplus value for those tokens and hoarding the tokens under a mattress in the floorboards. Like simple commodity producing Silas Marner did; with gold admittedly. Simple commodity producers can produce more than the need to exchange for necessities or work longer, surplus labour, than necessary. And thus nothing seems to change. The money is there but it isn’t circulating. Or its so called velocity drops. [George Elliot was very good at this kind of thing and elsewhwhere made Karl’s differential groundrent transparently simple- she mixed in the same circles.] However if you are literally sleeping on a pool of paper which you might do at 0.5% interest, so it could be in bank. I things start to go pear shaped as to what it can buy now and what it will you are going to want to get rid of it for something of real value. Which will make things worse.
iProbably the Golan Heights is more or just as important to the Israelis for its water resources. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-occupied-golan-heights-how-israel-thrives-from-syrias-natural-resources/5500214 They have had long interest in southern Lebanon for access to the Litani river. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litani_River Water is a big problem in Israel and they can’t just keep pumping it out of the ground as the aquifers are already low and they have potential geological problems the salt water leeching into it if they let the levels drop anymore. There is an additional problem now with the discovery of even larger oil and gas fields in Lebanese’s territorial water eg; https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/lebanon-set-oil-bonanza# Which will stir things up a bit. I think the Iran thing is more complicated and is probably an error to think of it one thing or another rather than a combination of separate interests. I think for the Saudi’s and other Gulf states Iran represents a political threat as an alternative state capitalist economic model, particularly as regards the surplus profits from oil extraction, as well as paying lip service to democracy. So the Arab street as they say maybe interested in an idea nationalising the Saudi oil industry using it to fund a kind of Norwegian style sovereign wealth fund. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway And I think you follow that more serious money into interfering with the US political process it is not a new idea eg ‘Arab Socialism’ ; …..The party constitutionof 1947 called for a "just redistribution of wealth", state ownershipof public utilities, natural resources, large industry, and transport, state control over foreignand domestic trade, limiting the agricultural holdings of owners to the amount the owner could cultivate, an economyunder some sort of state supervision, workers' participationin managementand profit sharing, respected inheritance and the rights of private property……… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_socialism The petty bourgeoisie as with the so called Iranian Bazaari in 1979 would have had an interest in that to fund the general paraphernalia of the state and infrastructure development etc rather than it being used for a decadent consumption fund for the Shah and his cronies as in Iran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaari As with potentially Saudi and the other Gulf States. It can be quite curious to listen to the rantings of the Iranian leadership. Eg ….Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says capitalism 'in decay' as he meets the Castros in Cuba Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad slammed capitalism as bankrupt and called for a new world order on Wednesday on a visit to Cuba… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9009165/Irans-Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-says-capitalism-in-decay-as-he-meets-the-Castros-in-Cuba.html To all intents and purposes it looks like theocratic bolshevism mixed in with a bit of NEP. They say history repeats itself with the actors in slightly different costumes? I don’t think it is that straightforward trying to work out what the American capitalist class actually want or expect. Nominally the neocon ‘crazies in the basement’ want regime change in Iran, and Russia and presumably privatise the oil industry and open it up to more orthodox capitalist exploitation. But is difficult to believe that the capitalist class really think that is a possibility. I think it is more likely a matter of defy us and we will bomb you into the stone age and if we can’t have it nobody will. And the domino effect of recalcitrant nation [capitalist] states pursuing their ‘national interests’ and refusing to pay protection money. The protection money funds the considerable US military industrial complex and its facilitators, or ‘deep state’; and they must clearly have their own interests to be concerned about. I don’t think that the Israeli AIPAC has taken over the US government like some people think. I think it is more likely that the Israeli AIPAC is fused with the US deep state and its separate interest and narrow interests of the frontline protection racket side of the business. The FED banking sector and the Bank for International Settlements will also have an interest in maintaining the income from the production of counterfeit money or as the international reserve currency backed by the gulf state petro dollar system. There was a time when stumbling across a method of generating money, or a good gold mine was considered a dream. The more fantastic dream would be a limitless green paper money mountain. It looks like the Shia Muqtada al-Sadr has surprised everyone and might be doing well in the recent Iraqi elections, in alliance with the communist party! …He leads the al-Sairoon Coalition (The Marchers) that brings together his Sadrist Movement and the Iraqi Communist Party. The coalition has pushed an anti-corruption and anti-sectarian campaign…. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/iraq-vote-initial-results-show-pm-abadi-muqtada-al-sadr-leading-180513200426674.html Although I believe he is an Arab chauvinists and hates Persians, but there is nothing historically extraordinary about national hostility between co-religionists. There is a historical link between Shia theology and ‘socialism’. Thus; Muhammed Nakhshabis credited with the first synthesis between Shi'ismand European socialism.[8]Nakhshab's movement was based on the tenet that Islam and socialism were not incompatible since both sought to accomplish social equality and justice. His theories had been expressed in his B.A.thesis on the laws of ethics.[9]In 1943, Nakhshab founded the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists, one of six original member organizations of the National Front.[10]The organization was founded through the merger of two groupings, Nakhshab's circle of high school students at Dar al-Fanoun and Jalaleddin Ashtiyani's circle of about 25 students at the Faculty of Engineering at Tehran University. The organization was initially known as League of Patriotic Muslims. It combined religious sentiments, nationalism and socialist thoughts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_socialism I suppose one could think it in terms of early British Methodism versus Church of England.
iWell I suppose I will have to do this again! Prakash’s argument is a bit garbled and lacks scientific precision. And I am going to have to deal with the argument and place it in the historical context of the development of Karl’s and Fred’s thinking. To summarise Prakash’s argument and place it on a more formal basis it goes along the line of humans are part of nature etc and nature is; 'Red in tooth and claw' thing. It is egotistically predatory and all about selfish genes of individuals taking advantage of others when they can. We are all familiar with the argument I think? What we loose sight of is this is an interpretation was given a theoretical justification from Darwin’s first book of 1859. Darwin refuted that interpretation in his second book of 1871; but we will come to that in a bit. Anyway 1844 was before Darwin so we could start there. In 1844 Karl took the pre second Darwin book Fuerbachian position. That human beings were naturally social and co-operative animals, for some reason, and that was their human nature or essence. So we are talking primitive communism here really as a natural state. With feudalism and capitalism etc which came along for various artificial reasons we were thrown out a way of life to which we were naturally conditioned. Exiting that ‘private property’ unnatural system and returning to non primitive communism would be ‘natural’. Which is what the following blather means, thus; Karl MarxEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Private Property and Communism (3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this.. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm Just to help historically understand how the argument went then, Feuerbach asserted that early or ‘authentic’ Christianity was a sublimated expression of this communist ‘social instinct’ finding expression or manifesting itself in a metaphysical/religious ‘form’. It was a projection of a social instinct. As things turned out Feuerbach was well ahead of his time as regards the tick cyclists and Darwin’s second book. Then at the end 1844 Stirner wrote his famous book which was what the unpublished German ideology was a response to. Stirner wasn’t doing a pre Darwinian; 'Red in tooth and claw' thing as such. He just basically said that looking after number one was the logical rational premise of everything. And anything else, like a-historical social instinct or communist human essence was just transient bubble headed nonsense without any natural justification or argument. Karl and Fred actually took that on the chin, then. So Fred says this at the time which is interesting. Basically it is in the egotistical interests of the individual to have communism and make it work; Letters of Marx and Engels 1844Letter from Engels to Marxin Paris This egoism is taken to such a pitch, it is so absurd and at the same time so self-aware, that it cannot maintain itself even for an instant in its one-sidedness, but must immediately change into communism. In the first place it's a simple matter to prove to Stirner that his egoistic man is bound to become communist out of sheer egoism. That's the way to answer the fellow. In the second place he must be told that in its egoism the human heart is of itself, from the very outset, unselfish and self-sacrificing, so that he finally ends up with what he is combating. These few platitudes will suffice to refute the one-sidedness. But we must also adopt such truth as there is in the principle. And it is certainly true that we must first make a cause our own, egoistic cause, before we can do anything to further it – and hence that in this sense, irrespective of any eventual material aspirations, we are communists out of egoism also, and it is out of egoism that we wish to be human beings, not mere individuals. http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_11_19.htm Now admittedly this changes things a bit because ‘social instinct and communist essence’ then becomes somewhat cerebral and rational. And is going to get some push back from some short term individual and ‘rational’ opportunistic egotism, trust in others to play the game and presumably maybe instinctive egotism? Even if communism would be a successful strategy. In fact to make it work [better] you would need a social instinct. Now enter Darwin again with; if there is a problem with the success of a species maybe nature will find the solution? So what Darwin is saying here is that the adoption co-operative behaviour in animals can be a successful strategy and for it to succeed requires the development of an appropriate social instinct. And we would experience that as some kind of morality; not of the eating fish on Friday thing, but more of a Kantian kind of thing. Thus; Darwin, C. R. 1871. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray. Volume 1. 1st edition The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts,5 would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. The services may be of a definite and evidently instinctive nature; or there may be only a wish and readiness, as with most of the higher social animals, to aid their fellows in certain general ways. But these feelings and services are by no means extended to all the individuals of the same species, only to those of the same association. Secondly, as soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction which invariably results, as we shall hereafter see, from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise, as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature, nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are in their nature of short duration; and after being satisfied are not readily or vividly recalled. Thirdly, after the power of language had been acquired and the wishes of the members of the same community could be distinctly expressed, the common opinion how each member ought to act for the public good, would naturally become to a large extent the guide to action. But the social instincts would still give the impulse to act for the good of the community, this impulse being strengthened, directed, and sometimes even deflected by public opinion, the power of which rests, as we shall presently see, on instinctive sympathy. Lastly, habit in the individual would ultimately play a very important part in guiding the conduct of each member; for the social instincts and impulses, like all other instincts, would be greatly strengthened by habit, as would obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community. These several subordinate propositions must now be discussed; and some of them at considerable length. 5 Sir B. Brodie, after observing that man is a social animal ('Psychological Enquiries,' 1854, p. 192), asks the pregnant question, "ought not this to settle the disputed question as to the existence of a moral sense?" Similar ideas have probably occurred to many persons, as they did long ago to Marcus Aurelius. Mr. J. S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, 'Utilitarianism,' (1864, p. 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality;" but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain (see, for instance, 'The Emotions and the Will,' 1865, p. 481) and others believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his lifetime. On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable. http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/darwin/descent/dom07.htm This even, if you want to take it or leave, it provided the scientific basis for the 1844 Fuerbachian position that missing then. This was taken into consideration by Fred; Marx-Engels Correspondence 1875Engels to Lavrov12 November 1875 (6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the war of every man against every man was the first phase of human development. In my opinion the social instinct was one of the most essential levers in the development of man from the ape. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_11_12.htm Marxists then revisited Fuerbachs 1844 idea of early Christianity being a perverted expression of instinctive communism. And we had this; Works of Frederick Engels 1894On the History of Early Christianity https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/index.htm And then everybody jumped on that bandwagon eg Kautsky and Rosa. And back to 1844 and Fred; …….human heart is of itself, from the very outset, unselfish and self-sacrificing…. Neo Marxists later went back to the idea that modern corrupt Christianity never developed from an earlier form, like Marxism developed into Stalinism. Admittedly my non scientific SPGB friends hate this kind of idea but it was the also position of theorists who had some kind of non political scientific credentials like Anton Pannekoek and Kropotkin. So the point is how natural or unnatural are your people with bourgeois limitations?
