Dave B
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
There is an article by our theological friend Chris Hedges on the Greek crisis, plagiarising JC’s worshipping of money, with his ‘Corporate profit is God’. At least he places the perspective for the working class in general as one of ‘international solidarity’ ? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42357.htm And one from John Pilger who has clearly picked up the “the dung of the devil” quotation via the WSM forum. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42358.htm
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1890Engels to J. BlochIn Königsberg According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany. In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it. I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparteis a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusions to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Scienceand Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism which, as far as I know, exists. [The German Ideologywas not published in Marx or Engels lifetime] Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too…. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm
A golden thread links Pope Francis to Oscar Romero, the murdered archbishop whose beatification the Pope ordered to take place last weekend, to the rapturous acclaim of the people of El Salvadorand the wider world.The thread is that of liberation theology, the movement that swept through Latin America, and then other parts of the world, 40 years ago. It maintains that the Gospel contains a preference for poor people — and insists that the Church has a duty to work for political and economic as well as spiritual change.Conservatives in the Catholic Church do not like this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-vallely/pope-francis_2_b_7443834.html http://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/dec/07/italy.theobserver Also Pope excommunicates Italian Mafia members http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/21/world/pope-mafia-excommunication/ the pope is probably positioning himself somewhere around the rightwing of the second century early christianity. Ie Tertulian’s AD 195 Apologeticus. With its ‘leftwing’; ………or because our brotherly love continues even to the division of our estates, which is a test few brotherhoods will bear, and which commonly divides the dearest unions among you……….But we Christians look upon ourselves as one body, informed as it were by one soul; and being thus incorporated by love, we can never dispute what we are to bestow upon our own members.Accordingly among us all things are in common,1excepting wives ; in this alone we reject communion.. http://www.tertullian.org/articles/reeve_apology.htm and the rightwing position summarised in wiki. ……for it is not in their power to give Caesar health, wealth and power. What they can offer to him they do through the use of prayer, because only God has absolute power and from him comes the emperor. He alone brings up empires and takes them down and only he is responsible for granting Caesar power, health and wealth; "We ask for them [emperors] a long life, undisturbed power, security at home, brave armies, a faithful Senate, an upright people, a peaceful world, and everything for which a man or a Caesar prays".[17]Tertullian affirms that by praying for him, Christians are effectively putting Roman interests in God’s hands as well as commending Caesar to God. In no way do their meetings endanger the state, nor do they involve plotting against the emperor, the senate, or the empire. Their treatment of the Roman Empireexhibits the same respect and well wishes that they display upon to their neighbor. Any other behavior would not be the sign of a good Christian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologeticus Although obviously all ‘christian’ writers of the 2ndcentury were of bourgeois origin just by the fact that they could write and afford to publish- the cost of writing material then was quite astonishing. I seem to remember that in certain places and time (blank) ‘paper’ was used as a money commodity, talk about it not being worth the paper it is written on! The leftwing of the 2ndcentury early christianity seemed to be arranged around Marcion of circa 145AD. We probably know just as much about this Marcion person as we do about any other individual of the period thanks to the record of the obsessive interest of the more orthodox ‘early church fathers’. Perhaps strangely Marcion was a classic example of a 2ndcentury capitalist, or son of; a fleet of ship owner and thus de-facto merchant capitalist. He was clearly loaded anyway. [Fred said somewhere that if you wanted to look for examples of pre first millennia proto capitalism that was a good place to start.] The ‘Marcion’ kind of position was that an ‘evil’ or ‘flawed’ demiurge ruled the world and economic and political powers were in the control of his delegates and JC’s dad had nothing to do with it anymore that than shit that went on in the old testament in God’s name. Thus I think this Marcion like ‘dung of Satan’ thing never really totally went away until after 600AD. It is interesting reading this stuff because Tertullian in 200AD in attacking Marcion material written circa AD145 gives us an unusual perspective on the historical reliability of the gospel material. Apparently, according to Tertullian, the gobshite Marcion said that the gospels had been politically and ideologically meddled about with and thus John, Matthew and Mark could not be trusted and that Luke was better but still needed a more authentic and cleaned up version which Marcion provided. You can imagine Marcion’s positive take on Luke with its unique and ideologically important take on things re its temptation of christ and Satan being the dispenser of political and economic power. The dramatic opening chapter of John probably runs against formal gnosticism; textual analysis by Greek reading intellectuals suggest that that was added later as a preface. The last of the ‘orthodox’ Marcions were probably the cathars who were wiped out in another or even first holocaust.
“And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called ‘the dung of the devil’ – an unfettered pursuit of money”, the Pope said.When money becomes a person’s god, he said, greed becomes the chief motivator of what people do, permit or support. In the end, he said, “it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home.”The Pope and the Catholic Church do not have a programme or “recipe” for solving the problems of injustice and poverty in the world, he said. But it is clear that the economy should be “at the service of peoples. Human beings and nature must not be at the service of money.” Pope Francis said the goal must be the creation of “a truly communitarian economy,“………..an economy where human beings, in harmony with nature, structure the entire system of production and distribution in such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual find suitable expression in social life,” he said. http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2015/07/10/capitalism-driven-by-greed-is-enslaving-the-poor-and-harming-the-earth-says-francis/
I think the ‘basic’ problem is that the Greek government is caught in a debt spiral how it got there is a slightly different matter. It doesn’t just have one ‘debt’ but a whole series of them or a collection of IOU’s or government bonds that are continuing to come in as payable. When an $85 IOU comes in it has to raise the money by writing out another $100 IOU and ‘selling’ it for $85 cash. EG; http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Government-Bond-Spreads so it's debt is increasing at a rate of 15% That means the national debt to gross domestic product increases http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/government-debt-to-gdp And as the national debt to gross domestic product ratio increases so does the bond spread etc. And as the more precarious you economic situation is the ‘interest’ you have to pay on loans go up; so now they are at the mercy of the international pay day loans people. I suppose if in the long term effect you are paying out 15% interest on your GDP and your debt to GDP ratio is about 175% you are having to set aside about 25% of your GDP to service loans. Which is completely unsustainable especially with an austerity driven shrinking GDP. Not an unusual equivalent for many workers who probably have to pay even more than that out of their ‘income stream’ to the money lenders; much of it being de-facto rent money otherwise considered as merely interest only payments on mortgages etc. What might be interesting, ‘superficially’, is Japan that only has to pay 0.5% interest on bonds whilst it has a much higher debt to gross domestic product ratio of circa 230%. Anyway it only has to pay about 230/100 x 0.5 = 1.2% interest on GDP. There are other Stats that need to be looked at though; like the ability, or potential, of a government as an economic entity to generate more revenue that it expends.
What is the point of a straw man attack on orthodox Christianity when the poster implies he isn’t one? Were not Stalin, Pol Pot and Lenin Marxists and communists? We could start off with something simple like. Paul Scivier; do you believe in a non interventionist god, or in other words does the universe unfold according to immutable physical laws and are humans ultimately responsible for their own socio-economic situation and ‘history’?
Hang on a minute djp Metaphysics wasn’t part of the opening thread and the discussion in hand what we are talking about…was it?
I think you could make the argument that the enlightenment Bentham and his utilitarianism and the related consequentialism was materialist. And even ‘philosophical materialism’? However it started from the position of the greatest good for all; and you can possibly logically ‘arrive’ at communism from that ‘moral’ or ‘philosophical’ position even if you didn’t anticipate it. And I think Karl and Fred did, before 1844 and Stirners Ego and his Own? A position Fred later described as their ‘erstwhile philosophical conscience’; in connection to their rethink of German Ideology which in itself was a response to Stirner. Afterwards their materialism became egocentric, as opposed to in theory the, collective greater good ‘moral’ or ‘philosophical’ materialism Bentham. And thus the greater good of communism just dropped out as a ‘natural consequence’ of egotistical materialism, as opposed to the ‘moral greater good’ being an end of itself, objective and philosophical ‘predicate’. Or in other words the working class and 99% are being unselfish in tolerating capitalism. Etc etc The following document is a really important historical one I think and without wishing to further prejudice the debate needs to be read in its entirety. And covers Bentham, the greater good materialism etc etc. 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. https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_11_19.htm Utilitarianism was done recently on radio 4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xhwqf
There was another interesting quotation from the pope recently; which I think introduces another theological problem that split the early Christian church in the middle of the second century. Thus the pope comes out with the following; “We have tried so many times and over so many years to resolve our conflicts by our own powers and by the force of our arms. How many moments of hostility and darkness have we experience; how much blood has been shed; how many lives have been shattered; how many hopes have been buried. … But our efforts have been in vain. Now, Lord, come to our aid! Grant us peace, teach us peace; guide our steps in the way of peace. Open our eyes and our hearts, and give us the courage to say: ‘Never again war!’; ‘With war everything is lost.’ http://ncronline.org/blogs/francis-chronicles/pope-s-quotes-never-again-war Thus we are faced with this god who we are appealing to ‘to teach us peace and guide our steps in the way of peace’. And the other serial war criminal one in the old testament where Joshua under the instruction of god ……..utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. Joshua 6;21 http://biblescripture.net/Joshua.html In this repeated bloody rampage god also instructs Joshua to break the 4th, 6th, 8thand 10thcommandments. Although all you have to do is to randomly dip into the old testament to find real crap. I think for the lazy bible student a brief read of the book of Joshua is sufficient as an old testament seminal read; just as much now as it was in AD150. This issue was bought up by Marcion in 150AD, drawing on Joshua as a theological example; ie was god a Ghandi or Genghis Khan? Marcion and the Marcionites, a major current in early Christianity that persisted into the 4thcentury, decided that the old testament rampaging war criminal god was a shit and an irreconcilable anathema to the one in the JC gospel material. Modern old testament Christians obviously want to have Joshua cake and eat the flesh of the ideology made real of the ‘blessed are the peace mongers’ JC. ( I owe that one to a Rosaquotation- on the 2ndinternational, imperialism and the first world war )
It is likely that they are being used a proxies in a wider and somewhat complicated geo political contest by various sections of the international ruling class. There has been a series of articles on this at informationclearinghouse; just a recent example being; http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42031.htm
MondragonContradictions in Paradise; When workers Become Boses.http://www.cooperativeconsult.com/blog/?p=490
I think calling him a bluffer is also a bit unfair. As I think I said earlier he seems to be listening to Leninists and I suspect a lot of this stuff is part of the financial imperialism stuff of around 1910 as well as some of Rosa’s material. Some of Hedges stuff is ‘OK’ eg; “Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development………” I mean that is part of more orthodox Marxism that until very recently was heretical to vulgar neo-Leninism. I suspect that there is a lot of again of 1910 style Bernstein-ism, Bauer and Kautskyism mixed in with the dog’s dinner as well. We do have a problem with this kind of approach as there are sort of grains of truth in what they are saying that are being twisted about to fit their position. Thus we have Karl on co-operatives, and we must have done this twenty times as could remember exactly where is was and it looking like a very dog eared grubby page now. “The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm (That quote is also surrounded with stuff in the role of credit etc.) This was part of a deeper argument and trend projection that the capitalist class would increasingly become hands off as regards production. Creaming off surplus value only through the mere ownership of capital ie finance capitalism and shareholding etc. (Eg Karl had noted a very early and nascent trend of workers borrowing money from finance capitalist to buy out functioning capitalists or profiteers of enterprise to form co-ops.) The surplus value from such co-ops would then accrue to the finance capitalists as and in the form of interest. Thus they would organise there own production, and exploitation for the interest bearing capitalist class. Well it hasn’t happened really. Although, as with the associated argument of joint stock companies, the capitalist, now mostly financial, class are becoming increasing divorced from the production process itself. Ie many probably don’t even have any clear idea of what they own, where it is or what it does, and what they do own probably changes on a daily basis anyway in high frequency trading on the stock market. The CEO’s function, being somewhat closer to the coal-face, is to make sure that the general principal, objective and algorithm of maximisation of profit is followed. Somehow I don’t think Hedges and Wolff are suggesting that we run to Goldman Sachs for cash to buy out General Electric and run it as a Co-op, but who knows. What happens to successful co-ops and unsuccessful ones? The members of the former employing the latter, and others, as wage workers? Eg Kibbutz co-ops and Mondragon in Poland? I thought Wolff’s surplus theory analysis re who controls owns, controls and determines the rate of surplus value was an intriguing perspective. I guess some of these workers enterprises might democratically decide to increase their own rate of surplus value to accumulate more productivity enhancing means of production and screw the competition in the market place.? So lets throw the monopoly board over when we start to loose and start an new game with the same rules? where we end up is the communism (and socialism) that dare not speak its name? V. I. Lenin, From the Destruction of the Old Social System, To the Creation of the New Communist labour in the narrower and stricter sense of the term is labour performed gratis for the benefit of society, labour performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and legally fixed quotas, but voluntary labour, irrespective of quotas; it is labour performed without expectation of reward, without reward as a condition, labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good, and because of a conscious realisation (that has become a habit) of the necessity of working for the common good—labour as the requirement of a healthy organism. It must be clear to everybody that we, i.e., our society, our social system, are still a very long way from the application of this form of labour on a broad, really mass scale. But the very fact that this question has been raised, and raised both by the whole of the advanced proletariat (the Communist Party and the trade unions) and by the state authorities, is a step in this direction. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/11.htm
I think there are also some other interesting people out there who are hitting the airwaves; and I think alot more people are reading informationclearinghouse and watching people like Hedges and Richard Wolff on RT. As below, Wolf and his friends, after making a quite acceptable analysis of Russian and Chinese State Capitalism etc from the beginning; ends outlinning what is communism and what is not. Looking at it from a perspective distribution of ‘surplus’ might look a bit odd but it sort of drops out from their previous analysis of capitalism and state capitalism in terms of ‘surplus value’. Although actually Karl in one of his very rare excursions into what communism would look like in Volume III also briefly talked about it in economically formal terms. RE the production of surplus’s by the working members of society to expand productivity enhancing means of production and to support members of society who could not work etc eg children, the old and the disabled etc etc Anyway;A Postscript on the USSR, the PRC, and Communism “ What might an actual communist alternative have looked like within the USSRand the PRC? Within our surplus framework, a communist class structure is defined as anarrangement of production such that the workers who produce a surplus are also, collectively, the persons who receive and distribute that surplus. This collectivity of workers presumably distributes their own surplus in ways aimed to secure the conditions for this communist class structure to survive and grow. Such a communism’s contrast with state capitalism and state feudalism is stark and clear. While the collectivity of workers produces surplus alike in capitalism, feudalism, and communism, only in communism does that same collectivity also receive and distribute the surplus. Perhaps we can conclude by reposing and answering this basic question: do examinations of the class histories of the USSRand the PRC show that the collectivity of their productive industrial workers received and distributed their own surpluses. We find clearly that they did not. Hence communism did not exist there on a society-wide basis, despite the contrary claims made throughout the decades by friends and enemies alike. http://www.academia.edu/9713101/State_Capitalism_vs_Communism or http://www.rdwolff.com/content/state-capitalism-versus-communism-what-happened-ussr-and-prc What I quite like about Wolff is that he makes the effort to de-intellectualise everything and give practical examples that people are familiar with of the manifestation of theories and abstract analysis. Eg http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42000.htm Clearly I hope non of that involves a carte blanc endorsement of everything he says.
