h.moss@swansea.ac.uk
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Yes, the ‘Place Where I Live’ articles really are worth a read. I’d forgotten about them, but the are all, among other things, so well written and so well observed.
Yes, Michael Roberts’ politics truly are all over the place. Among other things, like other so-called ‘Marxists’ (e.g. Richard Wolff), he has a soft spot for China imagining its authoritarian form of state capitalism as somehow less dire than that of the West and therefore not to be wholly condemned. In fact here he’s even saying that China is not capitalist at all.
I’m not going to watch this video of Richard Wolff, because I’ve watched too many of his in the past and know that, despite being an ‘intellectual’, his take on socialism is to be seriously avoided – if, for nothing else, because he’s got a serious hard-on for state capitalist China.
A lot of their stuff seems pretty good with many things we can agree with. But suddenly you get this:
Most of all we celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China – Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been making a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivations or stock options. Following the Chinese great Belt Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other, in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures like roads and trains as well as agricultural products, as well as military defense. The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa has been set up as an alternative the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As socialists we support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist.
1 With the best will in the world, it’s one hell of a stretch to see what’s happening in Germany at the moment (ugly as it is) as some kind of Nazism.
2 When we’re hypothesising about what might happen if there’s minority opposition to socialism when the vast majority want it, we’ve got to see it in terms of a majority will imposing itself in the way that seems best at the time. Nothing to do with a state, which is the expression of a property owning or controlling minority’s interest.
The kind of Fascism existing in Germany and Italy (and Spain) in the 30s and 40s is pretty unlikely to re-occur in advanced capiatlist countries. It’s largely an expression of either remnants of pre-capitalist societies or a backward form of modern capitalism which simply couldn’t be revived – at least not for any length of time. Governments in the West that are often called fascist or neo-fascist nowadays (e.g. Italy, Hungary) are not the politically repessive type that existed in earlier times.
Then as someone has said, socialism will not come out of nowhere. Before it can be established, socialist consciousness will have to have spread over large parts of the globe, and if, when a large majority decide they can establish it, violent opposition from opponents (which would be manifestly undemocratic) will have to be dealt with (by force if necessary – but hopefully not). If the socialist majority decide they have to set up a police force or some other body of coercion (e.g. army) to do this, then so be it. Only when sopcialism is fully established with more or less universal cooperation can we say definitively that coercion will definitely be out of nthe question.
I don’t think that you should equate what you’re suggesting to what happened with the ‘Workers’ Party’. They were never ‘massive’, even when Galloway won his seat and they’ll now fade into oblivion, just as has happened with the other parties and causes associated with Galloway. I agree with you that we’re not gaining members at the moment (the opposite in fact) and that we should do our best to make ouselves visible in that way. But we are making efforts. For example, South Wales branch had a short online ad on Welsh media websites recently with a link to our website and the results are below (quite encouraging actually):
‘Please see below the results of your Wales campaign -your advert was seen just shy of 30,000 times and 166 people were interested enough to click and find out more – a simple campaign but it really reaches people at a local level. We can replicate this in other areas across the UK too if you ever wanted to explore this.’
27,914 viewable impressions
59,191 impressions
166 clicks
0.59% viewable ctrGood result!
Many thanksAmanda Beynon
Key Accounts Director
m. 07920 473089 | e. amanda.beynon@reachplc.com |
w. reachsolutions.co.ukI detect a certain over-optimism in the idea that supporting a mass strike in favour of Palestine will get us noticed. It’s true that the more our ideas come to public attention, the more it’s likely that people who are ‘ready’ for socialism will come over to us. So it might get us a bit of attention, but broadly speaking we’d be swamped by all the other organsations who were part of it and were putting forward reformist and easier-to-digest ideas. In reality there isn’t a ‘magic bullet’, just a slow grind, and the more of us that can be part of that the better, and the less slow the grind will be. It’s frustrating, I know. I’ve been frustrated for years, but there just isn’t any other alternative. But it’s also satisfying putting across a case that can’t be faulted for coherence and constant verification from what happens in capitalism.
I can only agree with Actual Socialist 10 that it is extremely difficult for people to conceive of a system without money. It is such an integral part of their lives that it seems unimaginable to them. However, so it always was with a ‘new’ idea, but that hasn’t prevented it happening and people then regarding it as normal. Who, for example, could have imagined in times past, when religion was so all-prevailing that you could be punished by stoning or even death for not attending church on Sundays, that belief in religion would in the future become very sparse indeed and attending Church would be a strictly minority activity. And more widely, as Ursula Le Guin famously said, ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable, but so did the Divine Right of Kings’. So, though this seems ‘impractical’ to a lot of people, that will change with time – even if perhaps not too quickly, and evidence of that is that groups all around the world are now evident on the internet putting a similar idea (e.g. ‘Moneyless Society’, ‘World of Free Access’, ‘Yenomin’, Zeitgeist’, ‘Money-free Society’). Yes, they represent a very small minority of people at present, but idea do change and develop. If history shows nothing else, it shows that. When people react to our idea with responses like ‘that’s insane’, as our comrade has found, well that’s to be expected (it’s how I reacted initially), but we shouldn’t be put off but simply persist, in the knowledge that the view of the world we’re putting across and our solution to the crisis-ridden society we live in are sound, even if it’s not going to happen immediately. I also agree with the idea of ‘getting personal’ and it’s something I personally always try to do when putting across socialist ideas. But what we shouldn’t be doing is joining in with the Left in their attempts to try to solve the problems of capitalism within capitalism. We know it can’t work. You can’t use the system to fix the system. Even if somehow, we, or workers generally in Britain, were able to do sommething to stop the Gaza mayhem, we’d still be left with the 60-odd other conflicts taking place in the world – and some actually worse than Gaza (e.g. Sudan). So, even if I’m not agreeing with Actual Socialist 10 on his Gaza point, there’s no question that the more we have comrades like him/her looking for ways for us to be active and above all to become visible, the better for us and the more our organisation is likely to grow and our ideas to spread.
We don’t tell them they have to ‘become materialists’. We simply ask them to accept that religious belief is irrational.
