robbo203
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
“Bijou calls the war between Ukraine and Russia a “gangster turf war”, likening it to the war between Al Capone and Bugs Moran, thus continuing the line of argument put here consistently by SP members: that there is no essential difference (no difference that matters) between Russia and Ukraine, thus wiping out any distinction between the invader and the invaded or between aggressor and the victim”
___________________________________________________________PGB, We are talking about the essential nature of these regimes. Both are corrupt, revolting, authoritarian, right-wing capitalist regimes administered in the interests of their respective oligarchies. No one even pretending to pay lip service to socialist ideas would touch other of these regimes with a bargepole, let alone legitimise the toxic nationalism that props both of them up
Quite simply, socialists don’t recognize or lend support to that preeminently capitalist institution – the nation-state. Differentiating and taking sides between capitalist states, defining one as the aggressor and the other as the victim is to unintentionally succumb to the ideological paradigm that upholds the nation-state as a preeminently capitalist institution and by extension capitalism itself
Even the most pacific and isolationist capitalist state is founded upon the aggression of class rule and its victims are the working class. We draw a veil over this every time we support one capitalist state against another in their belligerent commercial rivalries called war
“The world really is populated with goodies and baddies”
Does TS really believe that a scumbag sociopathic capitalist like Putin who heads a corrupt far-right authoritarian imperialist state like Russia is a “goody” worth supporting? True, there is not much to choose between this regime and the obnoxious Ukrainian regime but then the SPGB on principle does not support either side in this sordid capitalist squabble. TS does and in his craven support of the Russian capitalist state and its imperialist ambitions, he demonstrates just what an anti-socialist he truly is. True Scotsman = True nationalist = True apologist for capitalism!
An interesting slant on developments: “Putin and OPEC Join Forces to DESTROY the Liberal Globalist Order”. The basic thesis is that a new commodities-based world order with Putin and others at its head is coming into conflict with and threatening to bring down the current currency-based or financial world order controlled by a cabal of western states
Here’s the clip if you can access FB
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=616636793535088&extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-IOS_GK0T-GK1C&ref=sharing
Relatedly there’s this link too:
One of the very few capitalist politicians one can regard with some respect. I’ve seen clips of her before. She stands head and shoulders above the warmongers on both sides, the apologists for the odious regimes of Putin or Zelinsky. A plague on both their houses! War is never in the interests of the working class
“I would posit that it is nowhere near the same. Ukraine on the other hand does share many similarities. I.e., all the Nazis.”
_________________________________________________________________TS There are full-blown Nazis around in Ukraine and in the regime. But it is absurd to say the regime itself is Nazi-run. That’s just stretching the term “Nazi” to the point of being meaningless. Ukraine is undoubtedly a corrupt authoritarian obnoxious regime but that is not the same thing as saying it is a nazi regime. Do you even understand what is meant by the term Nazi?
_____________________________________________________________________
““But while there are differences there are also very substantial commonalities- a point you seemingly willfully choose to ignore”And what would those be exactly? Do enlighten your audience.”
___________________________________________________________________I have already done so. Both regimes are obnoxious capitalist oligarchical regimes. Both are authoritarian and oppressive, Both are highly corrupt – amongst the worst in the world according to the transparency index. Need I go on?
_________________________________________________________________
“What you have failed to mention is that Ukraine is a proxy for the US and EU. The core of world imperialism. Arguably the greatest purveyors of violence and tyranny in all of world history.”
____________________________________________________________________Russia is an imperialist power too. Does that mean we must support one imperialist power against another? How does that amount to combating imperialism? Apart from which, imperialism is only an outgrowth of capitalism and capitalism is global. It is capitalism that is the problem and imperialism is just an invitable symptom of the problem. You have no interest in getting rid of capitalism (on the contrary you endorse various state capitalist regimes). By extension, your actions do nothing to combat imperialism but on the contrary help to support a support a system whose very dynamic is imperialist
____________________________________________________________
“I am neither a nationalist or pro-capitalist. And nor am I a fanatic. That is what you and the Socialist Posers Guardian Bros are. You see, you don’t live in the real world. You live in the world of fantasy and bad ideas. In the real world the imperialist core’s actions cause untold misery and grief to targeted nations whether capitalist, socialist or more likely, a mix of both. That is why I support Russia. It’s why I support Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and China to name but a few of the nations targeted by the empire and its lackeys.”
___________________________________________________________________LOL TS you talking about living in the real world but you don’t even grasp the obvious fact that the kind of anti-socialist and pro-capitalist ideas you espouse give succour to the various obnoxious capitalist regimes you refer to. You don’t see this because you don’t understand what socialism is about – at all. Do you seriously imagine that the actions of an imperialist power like Russia does not also cause untold misery and grief to a targeted nation like Ukraine? Russia may not be the world’s most powerful imperialist power but that does make its military adventurism any the less repugnant. Or perhaps you dont see anything repugnant about Russian missiles killing civilians or Russian soldiers executing civilians. As for your jibe about the SPGB, to the contrary, I believe the SPGB (along with a few others) has taken the ONLY realistic position one can take in this whole sordid business by declaring that not a drop of working-class blood is worth shedding to perpetuate this senseless carnage
_____________________________________________________________
“And there we have it. This is the reason for your fanaticism. It makes you feel morally superior. You trash all existing and ever existing socialism. You are not socialists. You are the enemy of socialists. Your propaganda has not and never will make purchase in the working class. If they ever listened to your propaganda they’d be horrified by the idea of socialism as you present it and would become useless, feckless liberals. Which is what SPGB members actually are. Liberals.”
___________________________________________________________________Again LOL LOL LOL TS, You talk of “all-existing socialisms” thereby demonstrating that you understand nothing of socialism and indeed exhibit the same misunderstanding of socialism as the liberals you claim to oppose have in equating it with the various state capitalist regimes you support. Liberals by the way tend on the whole to support Ukraine in this war. The SPGB by contrast adamantly refuses to take sides in supporting one capitalist power against another. Get your facts straight
___________________________________________________________________
“I will never be ashamed of supporting a righteous victim of imperialist aggression.”
____________________________________________________________________Tell that to a Ukrainian family that has just witnessed its home being demolished by a missile launched by the imperialist forces of the Russian military
It is extremely difficult to predict what the outcome of the war will be but if things get much worse for the Russian military – and, in particular, if Ukraine retakes Crimea – it’s hard to see how Putin could hang on to power. In the meanwhile all power to our fellow workers, Russian and Ukrainian, alike who refuse to be drawn into this sordid capitalist squabble or succumb to that mental disease called nationalism
A plague on both their houses and their respective nationalist camp followers.”
Right, because there’s no difference between a state run by literal Nazis, and any other state. They’re exactly the same don’t you know? So Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia – exactly the same.
_____________________________________________________________________Of course there are differences between different capitalist states, TS. Hitler’s Germany is not exactly the same as Putin’s Russia. But while there are differences there are also very substantial commonalities- a point you seemingly willfully choose to ignore
Whether Ukraine is a state “run by literal Nazi” is a moot point. There may be literal Nazis in the regime but that is not the same thing as saying the regime is run by Nazis. In any event, what cannot be doubted is that Ukraine is a thoroughly obnoxious authoritarian and corrupt capitalist regime run in the interests of its oligarchic capitalist class. But what is equally not in doubt is that Russia too is a thoroughly obnoxious authoritarian and corrupt capitalist regime run in the interests of its oligarchic capitalist class
You, TS, as a nationalist and pro-capitalist opponent of socialism choose to side with one of these obnoxious capitalist regimes against the other. Protest all you like that the obnoxious capitalist regime you support – Putin’s Russia – is somehow morally superior in some way to the obnoxious capitalist regime you oppose – Zelinsky’s Ukraine – but that does not get around the fact that what you are apologising for is precisely the disgusting capitalist regime of Putin. You should be ashamed of yourself!
“More than 70,000 Russians have volunteered for the armed forces since September 21st. That’s more than Australia’s total military manpower. The poor Ukrainian Nazis, they don’t stand a chance”.
______________________________________________It looks like the military balance is shifting decisively in favour of the authoritarian oligarchic regime in Ukraine and away from the authoritarian oligarchic regime in Russia. A plague on both their houses and their respective nationalist camp followers. As ever, the real losers in this sordid little capitalist squabble over territory, resources, and spheres of influence are the workers on both “sides” of this conflict.
Well, for what it’s worth one factor that figures prominently in our lack of progress is our own small size. It makes for inertia. We remain small because we are small. Irrationally, (and we are all irrational as well as rational, beings), people assess the credibility of a political organisation in terms of the number of adherents it attracts. Greater credibility entails breaking through a numerical threshold – and we can speculate on what this might be – when this factor that has for so long worked against us might finally begin to work in our favour. The snowball effect.
If this analysis is correct, then we have to think of the problem in more rigorously strategic terms. DJP contends that “FWIW The SPGB is virtually invisible online, as well as off. Nobody knows who you are”. That may be true for the online community in general but there are little corners of that community where it is not quite true – such as various Facebook groups, one or two of which are quite large, where the SPGB had acquired a presence or sorts. These are groups where you are likely to find people more on our own wavelength – like the “Moneyless society” FaceBook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1299924940356627) devoted to “obsoleting money” which has 23.8K members. We may be practically invisible on the internet in general but we can and, to some extent, do make an impact in groups such as these, though not nearly enough
The repetition or reinforcement effect of different members contributing to these kinds of groups and posting links to our literature could make a significant difference at very little cost in terms of effort expended and could engage even the most physically isolated member in the collective enterprise of spreading socialist ideas. Yet we don’t really exploit the opportunities such an approach offers. It is so do-able
TM:”And every homeless man i’ve met has boasted of his military exploits and told me we need the draft back.”
OK but how can we effectively address such reactionary and irrational sentiments? Clearly, responding to these sentiments in purely rational terms, though necessary, has proven to be far from sufficient or adequate. The proof of this lies in the complete lack of progress we have made thus far.
Paradoxically, as “scientific socialists” (I don’t really like this term) we need to transcend – or go beyond – our scientific or ultra-rationalistic approach to changing society if we are seriously intent on making progress. In short, we need to adopt a more eclectic approach.
As I have suggested, to discuss this it would be better to start a completely new thread. Personally speaking, I would want to steer well clear of the kind of approach advanced by some on the left that things need to get significantly worse in order for the working class to develop a revolutionary outlook (the history of the rise of the Nazis decisively refutes this claim!) or that there is something about the nature of socialist ideas that condemn them to be the province of only a small minority and therefore inherently unrealizable (the Walsby Society et al).
Arguably this is is the most important discussion we socialists should be having at the present time: how to break through the barriers of irrationalism that prevent our ideas from being seriously considered at the present time. In that regard our ultra rationalism has proven to be a blunt tool
TM: “It isn’t that everyone doesn’t have the rational tool for it, but I don’t see it being used, because reason isn’t master, and I think the party is naive in its, well, 18th century-like view of the primacy of reason”.
There is some truth in that Thomas but what is the alternative? We cannot abandon a rational analysis of capitalist society but we can perhaps supplement – or complement? – it with other methods of promoting socialism or, at any rate, values consonant with a socialist outlook.
Perhaps we need a new thread devoted to exploring what these methods might be
“Evidently, the German Angry Workers’ view that ‘wage labor’ happens to be ‘the precondition for value’, which implies that non-wage labour cannot create value, sounds absurd.”
How then would you go about determining the relative contribution of different kinds of labour – skilled or unskilled – to value if labour power itself was not assigned a market price in the guise of a wage? This is the reduction problem in Marxian economics. In theory, skilled labour is reducible to units of simple or unskilled labour – the ratios of their respective contributions to value being reflected – in the long run – in the differential wages they attract. Money wages are thus a kind of rough proxy indicator of differences in the value of different kinds of labour-power and what is required to produce and reproduce such labour power. But in the absence of wage labour how would you tackle the reduction problem?
A further point is that the generalisation of commodity production upon which the law of value is dependent has to imply the generalisation of wage labour. Non-wage labour tends to imply that a substantial portion of what the worker consumes does not take a commodity form – for example, the self-provisioning farming of the peasant in which food is grown for direct consumption not for market sale. Agricultural surpluses may be sold under these circumstances but the connection with value (or socially necessary labour time) becomes tenuous if not impossible to determine
Yes but that is not what is strictly meant by society-wide planning, YMS. Building a railway across the Bering Strait is certainly a very big project involving large-scale planning. Undoubtedly an element of this will be needed in a socialist society although I am bit wary of the big-is-beautiful school of thought. Big dam projects, for example, have often turned out to be ruinous for displaced people and ecologically disastrous.
But that is something different. Society-wide planning means the suppression or elimination of all independent planning below the level of global society and the replacement of a polycentric planning system with a unicentric planning system and a single society-wide plan. Pieter Lawrence’s model certainly did not envisage this but a spoke instead of a tiered (i.e. polycentric) system operating at global, regional, and local levels.
I understand the point you are making but we should be careful about not using terminology that might convey a completely false and misleading idea of what we are talking about. “Society-wide planning” is one of those terms….
So far I have just looked at the introduction to this piece (which I agree is worth studying). I noted straightaway that it seems to repudiate the concept of a posteriori feedback as a means of spontaneous coordination and so, by implication, is advocating for an idealised system of society-wide planning. This is apparent in this comment:
“In capitalist society, characterized by the private ownership of the means of production, conscious coordination is non-existent and organization occurs at the atomic level (in companies). Capitalist planning, in spite of how much it has been technified in the last decades, occurs only within individual companies and, more importantly, it is fundamentally oriented towards profit expectations. Between different private companies, it is no longer that there is no harmonious planning, it is that there is no planning at all. Only a posteriori, and according to the logic of blind and impersonal market
automatism, can the different productive units be coordinated to supply the demands of the people. These demands (which are sometimes the most basic human needs) will be satisfied, or not, exclusively according to the level of income of each person and the availability of goods that each country has in the global supply chain.”Yes, as YMS rightly says, their work seems to be influenced by Cockshott and bears the same muddled thinking on the matter that Cockshott displays in his writings. Cockshott, on the one hand, seems to want a system of society-wide planning yet on the other, talks about his system being able to accommodate feedback or a posteriori decisionmaking
The logic of society-wide planning calls for a globalised input-output matrix in which the supply and demand for every conceivable good are matched up through a process of material balancing. It’s a sort of general equilibrium model of the production system. To talk of “clearing houses” in the context of such a model implies the application of feedback which is not really compatible with the idea of society-wide planning.
Input-output matrices are what is called a consistency model. In idealised terms, they eliminate waste by ensuring consistency in supply and demand in every case. This is different from linear programming which is an optimisation model in the sense that it plots a course of action that ensures maximised output or alternatively minimised costs (or both).
Linear programming can operate at different scales – from the small scale to the large scale involving thousands of variables (for example by identifying bottlenecks in a complex transportation system like the London Underground to increase the overall efficiency of the system). But that is far removed from society-wide planning
It always puzzles me when people like Cockshott and others seem to put forward arguments that appear to advocate for society-wide planning while repudiating spontaneous coordination or feedback (which they quite mistakenly equate with the market – the market is just one example of this but you can equally have non-market examples).
Perhaps, the greatest failing of these people is that they approach the whole question of a communist or socialist society from a thoroughly technocratic perspective. They don’t take as their starting point, the kind of social relationships that will pertain to such a society
To me, it is as clear as daylight that what they are advocating is fundamentally incompatible with the nature and entire ethos of such a society. They talk vaguely about the democratisation of planning but how is that remotely possible given the immensity of what needs to be planned under a system of society-wide planning?
While there is a certainly a role to play for planning tools like input-output matrices or linear programming we should be very wary of fetishizing these procedures
“Thus, both slave labour (i.e. the labour of a human slave) and half-slave labour are capable of producing value too, aren’t they ?”
No, I don’t think so. As I understand it the law of value only comes into effect in a fully commoditised society and above all one in which labour-power is itself transformed into a commodity. Otherwise how else does the notion of “socially necessary labour time” acquire significance? That presupposes the more or less general transformation of all goods- both producer goods (including labour-power itself) and consumer goods into commodities – in order to assert a relationship between the quantity of abstract labour embodied in a commodity and its price. For that relationship to exist (even if only in an ultimate sense since in practice the prices of specific commodities cannot equate with their value) labour-power has to take a commodity form bearing a price tag in order to enter into the equation at all
True, you cannot measure abstract labour in the way that you can concrete labour. Slave labour is concrete labour but only wage labour can form the basis of abstract labour (and hence value) even if wage workers obviously perform concrete labour as well. Value is an economy-wide phenomenon and presupposes the economy-wide transformation of labour power into a commodity
