twc
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Thanks, moderator1, for your explanation and moderation.I made the suggestion because I had mangled something as important as the Party Declaration of Principles. However, on reflection, I am happy to agree that my post #116 should stand in its mangled form, and that the related discussion should stand.I made a mistake that others drew attention to. Yes, this minor episode on a major matter of principle deserves to stand in its naked unaltered form for any to see.twc
Perhaps moderator1 might kindly change “lure and wage war against” into “wage war against”in post #116?
gnome wrote:Agreed, except that the word 'lure' doesn't appear anywhere in our Declaration of Principles. 'Wage war against' most certainly, but the SPGB does not 'lure'.Sorry, in my copy/paste editing of our Declaration to reproduce his criticism of it alongside our original, I incorrectly pasted his word ‘lure’ in our original version, and unfortunately left it there.World time zone differences precluded me from reading, until now, what you immediately picked up. I’ve just read it, but I can no longer edit it, and so the shameful word ‘lure’ that we all know never disgraced the Party in its 111 years must stand in my abortive copying.Thanks, and humble apologies.
From the SPGB Declaration of Principles …[quote-SPGB] 7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.8. The Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement, therefore, enter the field of political action determined to lure and wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, … [/quote]Your “matriarchally” improved version insults the matriarchies that founded human society:
Steve-SanFrancisco wrote:7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must subvert every other party.8. The Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement, therefore, enter the field of political action determined to lure and seduce all other political parties, whether alleged labor or avowedly capitalist, …Such dishonesty, advocated in cowardly deference to your imagined “matriarchal” terminology, simply unmasks your duplicitous role here—to subvert, to lure and to seduce.I repeat. If you must, ply your disgusting deception elsewhere.
Can anyone supply a link to just the plain non-annotated statement of our Object and Declaration of Principles?As the banner we fight under, it is far superior.
Young Master Smeet wrote:This article stands up well:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1933/no-344-april-1933/rise-hitler-warning-workersFar, far better than simply ‘standing up well’…It is one of the greatest pieces of political analysis ever penned!It explodes the idealist/utopian fantasy that socialism can be achieved by any means other than democratic capture of political power by a society conscious of its class position.It defiantly refutes the passage to socialism by any means other than conscious comprehension of our Object and Declaration of Principles.It is the SPGB case: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/our-object-and-declaration-principlesTo all our opponents who claim to know another way we hurl, as always, the challenge: Refute this analysis!
Moderator1, I have reported it to the moderators!The difference being your insistence that I contravene your reading that I must report it to the moderators sneakily, out of sight, behind the back of the party being reported.What I will never do is report on anything or anyone in secrecy, privacy, anonymity…I discourage private discussion on forum matters. If it relates to the forum, it goes on the forum. No secret deals, pacts, connivances, factions in private on the free-and-open forum.In any case, I will not pursue my report to the moderators any further, while I hereby categorically refuse to respond to postings by the OP.
1. Robbo, exchange-value reduces use-values [otherwise incommensurable goods, services and labour powers] to a common abstraction—the money-form.You readily make that abstraction everyday when you bring use-values, as diverse and otherwise incomparable as pairs of shoes, iPhones and panel-beating, under a common mental conception—price.You are here arguing that such abstractions, in this case your unconscious abstraction of prices, arise in your imagination alone, which is what Kant effectively argues for every abstraction.But Marx, following Hegel—his avowed and admired mentor as thinker—both recognised that abstractions are never isolated, but stand or fall logically as interconnections. We reason abstractions into existence.Hegel gives his famous example of our abstraction of a bird-call that we connect by reason out of its temporal moments. This is the archetype of all abstractions, for Marx as for Hegel.Watch Marx, in the early chapters of Vol. 1, abstracting the persistent and the invariant out of the contingent and variable, by reason.Watch him abstract essence out of its [naive] forms-of-appearance, by reason.Talking of naive forms of appearance…2. LBird, as a soi-disant ‘democratic thinker’, pause your one-track tirade against us tyrants to explain why naive-realism—which you despise from your superior philosophical and intellectual height as contemptibly beneath your refined consideration—isn’t the most ‘democratic’ of all systems of thought?After all, the entire demos possesses it.Even the dogs of the demos manage pretty well by it.Why isn’t lowly base plebeian naive-realism the archetypal form of common ‘democratic thought’?Why, when judged on purely democratic grounds, isn’t straightforward naive-realism far more ‘democratic’ than your convoluted marshalling and militaristic dragooning of all mankind to commit to hourly ritual performance, as in Islam, of its socially imposed labour to become eternally proficient in, and to pass ultimate authoritative intellectual judgement upon, everything?Why so convoluted? … Because of the desperate need to resolve certitude in your evanescant uncertain-and-insecure Berkelean philosophy.In obeisance to your Berkelean insecurity and uncertainty about the world out there, you need to force mankind to ‘democratically’ pronounce upon the certain-and-secure truth-value of every external-world proposition, equation, theorem, statement, derivation, lemma and corollary in every disparate science from acarology to zygmotics,.In obeisance to your Berkelean insecurity and uncertainty about the world out there, you need to force mankind to ‘democratically’ censor the truth-value of every art-form from abstract-naiveism to zoological-depiction, in order to bring certainty and security back into your fraught Berkelean conception of the external-world, a truly mysterious realm that remains forever beyond your uncertain and insecure reach!It is you who desperately craves the certainty, security, fixity you falsely accuse others of.How much more simply understanable—your gold-plated criterion of exposition—is naive-realism than your sophisticated non-understandable variety? If not, why not?How much more ‘democratic’—your other gold-plated criterion of truth—is unforced ‘naive-realism’ than your socially policed thought-control? If not, why not?3. Steve, money has always been, and must necessarily be, under the control of the class-society state, from way back in its pre-capitalist emergence in ancient Ionia.Class struggles have been waged over control of the means of exchange. The capitalist class has now secured control of it.The Socialist Party does not seek to wrest control of the means of exchange from the capitalist class through class struggle.Why? Because there will be no means of exchange under socialism.Read our Object and Declaration of Principles.
Alan, Andrew Kliman proved there is no transformation problem.LBird, I wonder if you even know what’s going on.Robbo, ultimately value collapses into money M — C — M′. Sure estimation is integral to the phenomenon, as price, but it isn’t the essence of the process of valorisation. The bourgeoisie are at liberty to do whatever they please with their slice of the social surplus.
Alan, perhaps the following may help…His economic subjective-relative claims are analogous to those of the money crank who claims that bankers can create value at the stroke of a pen, or of a keyboard.The phenomenon that value and price diverge is fundamental to the market. It is what must be explained. Marx solves the paradox in Vol. 3.It ill behoves someone who claims that value is subjective to confidently pontificate on its objective magnitude. In practice, iPhones would be a lot pricier if their value were calculated in US labour power, which is objectively why they are produced in China. Rational subjectivity follows objectivity.
Sorry, AlanI chose to ‘fight’ like-with-like. Our author is an interesting fellow…He’s clearly a creative spirit, an abstract painter, an anarchist who’s hurling a manifesto at the world.His politics suggest that, for us, he is not comfortably submitting to our Marxian Object and Declaration of Principles which, for him, have no relevance in his changed [post]capitalist world in which the soft-totalitarian state governs us all by conceptual-commodity-value-management.It’s hard to miss the irony in his manifesto’s overt idealism (soft, cf. software) having the effect of ‘softening’ his assault on the state to ‘merely’ the soft-totalitarian one.
The author is a mixed-media abstract artist https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=G1NfBr-XzKQ.His “The Structural-Anarchism Manifesto: (The Logic of Structural-Anarchism versus The Logic of Capitalism)” is available from Amazon in paperback.This manifesto is published in faux impoverished 1970s typewriter format of the kind that flourished in the economic gap between the demise of hot-metal typography and its transcendence by computer-based typesetting.
Quote:“This book explores the complications and the complexities of the basic fact that we are increasingly living within the confines of a disciplinary surveillance society. The assumption is that surveillance and discipline is now total and their mechanisms never attain the light of public knowledge and scrutiny. As a society, western democracies have moved beyond democracy into a new socio-economic formation, the framework of the soft-totalitarian-state, i.e. democratic-totalitarianism.”For him, capitalism has moved beyond its classical era whose adequate conception was the political economy that Marx critiqued.Why? Because he perceives values are now going down while prices are now going up. Marx is passé.Instead he proposes ‘conceptual-commodity-value-management’ as the new adequate conception to comprehend our new post-classical capitalist socio-economic formation of the ‘soft-totalitarian-state’, as he conceives capitalism now functions, or fails to function.[His claim that we have entered a new capitalist socio-economic formation mirrors, and probably gains inspiration from, David Harvey’s assertion that money capital has come to dominate industrial capital since the 1970s, and we’ve entered what Harvey merely terms a ‘new capitalist era’ called “neo-liberalism”—i.e. liberalism for the money capitalists.]In any case, our author still adopts the familiar Marxian categories of value and surplus-value only to annihilate them—to trounce them—just as Prof. Samuelson did 40 years ago with his celebrated Marxian razor in the same socio-economic formation that we, not-up-to-date hidebound, socialists continue to call basically unchanged ‘capitalism’.He claims that the familiar Marxian categories have long since lost their objectivity. Everything is subjective and relative now.This universal dominance of subjectivity and relativity is, interestingly, taken as objective self-criticism of old capitalism by itself.It seems that familiar old capitalism managed to turn the objectivity of its universal economic categories inside-out, or upside-down, into the relative subjectivity of a few—their own privileged subjectivity—and so create our new terrifying socio-economic formation of the soft-totalitarian-state.In such a subjectively governed world, the materialist conception of history flies out the window. Forget the social base, it is the tyrannical social superstructure of subjective relative thought that now determines what capitalism is and does!Plekhanov took his famous monist stance against the 19th century neo-kantians who similarly advocated their analogous version of such a thought-controlled world.Before him, so too did the great 18th century French philosophes (whom Plekhanov deeply studied as Marxian forerunners). Thus Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists opposed their own 18th materialism to the late-feudal, totally analogous, idealist version that “opinion governs the world”.In our times of the soft-totalitarian state, our structural-anarchist author confronts us with his analogous conception that state-manufactured opinion pervades and tyrannizes our new post-capitalist socio-economic formation, before which the Marxian categories are impotent.What then, if anything, are we to make of our author’s subjectively determined non-Marxian value if it’s anything other than plain old neoclassical monopolist cartel price?So, as Marxian value flies out the window, ad rem…The theory of conceptual-commodity-value-management is founded on the ‘idea’ that the Marxian categories of value and surplus-value:are subjectiveare inherently arbitraryare independent of Marx’s labour power—i.e. now have nothing to do with how much labor-time is objectified in a commodityare ‘reified’ subjectively—i.e. established by decree—by network- and/or group-formationsare ‘stabilized’ and ‘standardized’—i.e. managed and controlled—by subjective manipulation and estimationall in accordance with money capital’s network and/or group common self-interests and self-image.
Quote:in reality, price, value and surplus-value are increasingly based on what someone will pay for a commodity and/or service etc., and what the sellers and middle men think is fair market value in their own minds. Consequently, these arbitrary prices and values are socially constructed through government institutions, branding, fashion trends, supply and demand manipulations, network-formations, cartels and/or the media, etc.The point about Nietzsche…Our author takes that hurt and disillusioned philosopher for an apostle in the genealogy of subjectivity-and-relativity—as mercurial Nietzschean thoughts that helped the capitalist class tighten its stranglehold on society.And so, by idealist argument, our structural-anarchist author proves to his satisfaction that Marxian categories cannot explain the state.And this is what sustains his anarchist faith in tyrannical [Nietzschean] subjectivity-and-relativity as the modern social force, i.e. as the modern social determinant.
