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Before wallowing in selective sentiment, previous writers might pause to consider what the socialist message must only be.Capitalism is driven by the expansion of capital, which is necessarily indifferent to collateral suffering.That is our case for striving to change capitalism for socialism.The significance of this crisis is that it forces European capital to demonstrate to the world its response to unmistakable human suffering.Before falling for capitalist “humanitarianism”, previous writers might pause to consider how mercenary capitalist “humanitarianism” must necessarily be. How ineffectual to solve the problems the expansion of capital has thrown up and must continually throw up!Previous writers might pause to consider how more ineffectual a gesture of socialist “solidarity” with non-socialists must appear, and how ultimately detrimental to our anti-capitalist case.These judgements may seem harsh, but the situation and its capitalist “humanitarian” remedies are harsher.To presuppose that a gesture of ours will be effectual is tantamount to denying our case. It descends to the level of every sentimental anti-socialist moralist reformer of capitalism.In the past the party has wisely left capitalist “humanitarianism” to the willing occupation of those capitalist supporting organisations—and they are legion—that openly promote the delusion that capitalism can be reformed in working class interests.We do not hold that illusion. It is the antithesis of the very thing we claim to be the only mode of actuating genuine humanitarianism.I see the above proposal as a token stimulated by a desire that we must get in on the action. Quite so, as long as the socialist case is forefront.
Here is the section of Engels 1895 Introduction to “Class Struggles in France” that describes the vulgar democracy.
I give a free translation because I’ve lifted this section from its immediate context.
Engels, 1895, wrote:After the defeat of the revolution in the year 1849, Marx and Engels did not share the illusions of the vulgar democracy that grouped itself around the upstart provisional governments in partibus, [i.e. the post-revolutionary governments then emerging throughout Europe during the immediate reaction].This vulgar democracy deluded itself on an imminent decisive victory of the “people” over the reactionary “usurpers” of the revolution.
We, however, foresaw a long struggle, after the removal of these reactionary “usurpers” of the revolution, between the antagonistic groups now concealed within this supposedly united “people” itself.
The vulgar democracy confidently expected renewed outbreaks of the revolution every day.
We declared as early as the autumn of 1850 that the first chapter of the revolutionary period was now closed, and that nothing further was to be expected until the outbreak of a new world crisis.
For this reason we were excommunicated—as traitors to the revolution—by the very people who later, almost without exception, rushed to make their peace with Bismarck—so far, of course, as Bismarck found them worth his trouble.
Even drinking distilled water “ain’t necessarily absolutely harmless”.Its zero mineralisation, neutral pH, different osmotic pressure, etc. will change the conditions under which biological processes operate at the cellular level. While these processes are necessarily tolerant, conditions that depart from slightly alkaline pH, trace mineralisation, etc. might well have long-term biological consequences.It would not be surprising if demineralised water tended to leach minerals out of bodily cells, etc.
YMS wrote:his goals are to take he wages system to its own breaking point: in that light his policy suggestions are eminently sensible, from what I can see.If so, then his policy derives from all past communist-inspired attempts to trash the existing system—which system he acknowledges to be a nonlinear complex adaptive system.He must realise that, if he takes the complex system's nonlinear adaptability seriously, the system will react against destabilisation to break its assailant in unexpected ways.Sabotage directed against such a system that is not directed against its foundation—the social base of class ownership and control of the social means of life—will prove ultimately powerless to achieve its goals.In practice, the system responds by forcing upon its assailant the awful recognition that society must, and will, continue to find a way to function.To save his political skin, the failed system assailant is forced to backtrack—like the social democrats and the leninists have been forced to backtrack over the past century—repudiating the very tactics they hitherto trumpeted to the world, and shamefacedly falling back on hitherto despised Plan B.Such is the archetypal road to political annihilation and continued working class defeat. This “cunning plan” has nothing rational to recommend it.So, you claim that Paul Mason is apparently recommending people should actively seek to reduce their wages to zero—perhaps going on hunger strikes—in order to undermine the wages system, but never ever recommending them to directly abolish it. And this undermining is fondly supposed to take place under a protected market system where profit taking is recognised as the legally sanctioned “motivator of entrepreneurship”.What, if anything, is socially sensible or implementable about that? What, if anything, is socialist about it? Such a duplicitous hair-brained enterprise merits our total condemnation.
Alan, that is rich coming from someone who periodically goes out of his way to foment on this forum the bloodsport of opposition to the party platform for its own salutary sake.
Stuart, I have been naively scientifically open about Paul Mason’s case. One could hardly present it more clearly in limited space.Perhaps you take offense at my sheeting home the blame for world-wide social confusion about world socialism onto the Bolsheviks and especially their unscrupulous Western politico followers.Or perhaps, oh dear, oh dear, you do maliciously agree with Paul Mason that Walmart should be forced to tell its workers how to increase their wages, etc., etc., along with the other 43 different varieties and flavours of Paul Mason’s wish list.Or perhaps you might explain why his market reform agenda is not at all foolish and utterly impossible, but is actually brilliant and totally implementable.I cannot help it if the appropriate epithet that involuntarily springs to mind is the one that Marx applied to the declarations of Henry George—they reveal the unmistakable sign of the ass’s hoof.If you, instead, perceive in them the lion’s paw (as Bernoulli detected in Newton’s unsigned proof of the brachistochrone problem) then tell me so.So, please tell me what you are really desperate to say against me in your veiled criticism?
Socialists agree with these objectives.What socialists disagree with is that Paul Mason’s market economy, with all its attendant legislation (as listed above), is any way a post-capitalist society. It is not the society of our Objective.
Quite happy. I imagine you’ll eventually read the book. I did so in a single sitting, initially encouraged, but ultimately appalled when I reached the final chapter. I assume that you'll agree with my assessment. In any case I’m happy for you to edit and shorten my review to make it appropriate in tone and size for the Standard.
Paul Mason explains the periodic growth and contraction of the capitalist economy by Kondratieff wave theory.Kondratieff waves are named after the soviet economist who imagined a 50-year periodicity in capitalist economic activity, and who then concluded that each economic cycle reflected the advent, adoption, flourishing and demise of its age’s defining technology.Kondratieff’s waves operate on a timescale midway between the epochal transformations of social systems, based on changing class ownership and control of the social means of production, and the Marxian economics of nature-imposed social reproduction under the capitalist social system, based upon its characteristic mode of class ownership and control of the social means of production.Scientifically, one would seek to explain Kondratieff’s apparent wave phenomena in Marxian terms, i.e. in terms of the social system’s essence—capital—but such attempts have so far failed to convince (which is not surprising given how contemptuously Marx’s Capital is now treated) and this intriguing problem for Marxian theory remains unresolved.However, for the purposes of Paul Mason’s argument, capitalist society has now started to ride the information technology Kondratieff wave. For Paul Mason, information technology is the surfboard that took us out to the wave and, once we master it, it will be the surfboard that rescues us from the capitalist depths and carries us to the post-capitalist shore.Our ride will take one Kondratieff period of 50 years. But we should not take Paul’s mathematics seriously. His absurd definition of the mathematical sine wavefunction betrays his amateurism—he really should have limited his ratios to the opposite and hypotenuse of right-angled triangles.So what characterises the Kondratieff IT wave we are now on?The IT wave has already established its essential characteristics through the emergence of free Open Source software, free creative commons internet resources, free Wikipedia collaboration, etc.The IT wave’s free goods are premised on the assumption that IT development and IT maintenance require a vanishing amount of human labour, and that consequently IT software products and IT firmware-based technology possess a vanishing marginal cost (i.e. can be replicated for everybody for free). And IT technology will invade everything we produce.Paul’s point is that this characteristic invariant of the IT wave—free technology and its technology-based products—is totally subversive of capitalism, since the indispensable compulsion for a capitalist ruling class to withhold ownership and control of the means of production from the working class, thereby forcing the working class to work on its terms, will no longer serve its capitalist purpose once everything is free. The means of production might just as well be owned by everyone or by no-one.That, in a nutshell, is his argument. IT will issue us into an Age of Abundance—the necessary precondition for post-capitalism to succeed.Post-capitalism will be characterised by renewable energy, neutral carbon, zero socially necessary labour time, and zero marginal cost.So far, so good, up to a point. Some interesting socialist (in our sense) arguments, entertainingly and intelligently told, including a good discussion of the economic calculation pseudo-problem, etc.But Paul’s argument, such as it is, is grossly tainted by anti-socialist stuff (in our sense), because it is overtly saddled with Paul’s serious acceptance of duplicitous soviet and Leninist assertions that the soviet Russian economy was in any way socialist.But much worse is to come—Paul Mason’s apology for gradualism and the reformist transitional plan…Paul wants post-capitalism to preserve the capitalist state apparatus—its legislature, its judiciary, its law enforcement coercion, its commercial banks and its market. He wants to preserve all of the capitalist social superstructure without realising that the capitalist social superstructure is a consequence of the capitalist economic foundation—ownership and control of the means of production by the capitalist class.You’d think that if he were a consistent Marxist he’d comprehend that.But, in fact, it turns out that Paul Mason is quite consistent because, despite himself, he does want to preserve capitalist relationships of ownership and control of the means of production after all. Paul is prepared to submerge the Marxian objectivity of the social organism that is capitalism beneath the epiphenomenal subjectivity of the Kondratieff wave. Consequently, he offers us all sorts of wonderful reforms that have no chance of succeeding in the world of Marxian objectivity, but have every chance of succeeding in his uncomprehended phenomenal world.The only Marxian answer to Paul’s reform agenda is that, while capitalist social relationships exist, his wonderful reforms have no chance of succeeding. Once a socialist majority consciously abolishes capitalist social relations of ownership and control of the social means production, Paul’s wonderful reform agenda becomes redundantly unnecessary and effectively meaningless.If this seems an unnecessarily harsh judgment on Paul Mason, judge for yourself from the legislation, and the prevailing social relations under which it is to be promulgated, that he wants society to pass while in its IT Kondratieff wave.Here is Paul’s list…Keep the market (oh dear, oh dear, oh dear)Only suppress market forces for energySuppress all monopolies (oh dear, the free market nirvana)Regulate the rate of profitEnforce profits to be plowed back into social justice (oh dear, “profits for social justice”)Force McDonalds to induct employees with a one-hour course in trade unionismForce McDonalds to stop dispensing promotional plastic toysForce Walmart to advise employees how to increase their wages (oh dear, what planet is he on?)Make WiFi free to break up the telco monopoliesOutlaw price fixing (except by the government)Break up Apple/Google by public ownershipCheapen the cost of basic necessities (oh dear, the capitalist’s desideratum)Produce more stuff for freeSell water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecommunications and education at cost priceShrink (national and personal) debtDestroy market forcesForbid monopoly pricesEuthenase the renter (or perhaps the rentier)Reward creativity—the market will reward entrepreneurship and genius (which he utterly misconstrues as Keynes’s “animal spirits”)Reduce the time for holding patent and intellectual property rights, e.g. 25 yearsIncrease the use of creative commonsIncentivise investment in renewablesSupport local power gridsLet communities keep their efficiency gains (Oh dear, there’s “socialisation” out the window)Punish energy inefficiencyCreate cooperatives like Mondragon, who exploit with a social conscience (oh dear, exploitation is fine if your conscience is clear)Socialise the financial system (oh dear, it is nationalised below)Socialise financial rewards on the grounds that we already socialise financial risks (oh dear, what a howler)Increase the velocity of money to “tame” speculationNationalise the national central bank Set a high inflation rate to stimulate sustainable growth (oh dear, Keynesian stimulus!)Elect bank bosses democratically, and scrutinise their financial behaviour (oh dear, this is a pure gem!)Make the state the lender of last resort, but cap its profit rates (oh dear, à la soviet Russia)Track down and suppress (just as the West did to Al-Qaeda [sic]) all off-shore tradingMake it unethical for a chartered accountant to propose a tax avoidance scheme (oh dear, laws establish ethics!)Preserve fractional reserve banking at all costs [sic]Issue fiat money to kill neoliberalism [sic]Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! If anyone wanted proof of the imbecility inflicted by exposure to Leninist indoctrination, it is here on display. What an incalculable service the bolsheviks and their thuggish supporters have rendered the world’s capitalist class if one of the better survivors thinks—actually fails to think—like this! The bolsheviks and their lickspittles must answer for world-wide social confusion.Now listen to his justification for his shopping list of social goodies. We can do all of the above because “we” did it once before for slavery and child labour. (Oh dear!) Yes, “we” simply regulated slavery and child labour out of existence. This imbecile justification is all the evidence we need that the man is intellectually crippled by his Leninist past.His noble aim is to promote the transition to an economy where many things are free, but where profit is paramount, and profit is both monetary and non-monetary—that is Paul Mason’s conception of post-capitalism.The post-capitalism of Paul Mason’s book’s title turns out to be a fantasy hybrid world of his Leninist crippled dreams.It is a confused imaginary landscape in which one happily extends the (non-functioning) carbon trading model to trade in other commodities, in which one quite happily “socialises” energy and banking, in which one simply breaks up monopolies and imposes huge constraints on public-sector outsourcing, all by legislative decree.It operates an illusory economy in which everyone is guaranteed a basic wage, in which market and behavoural information is forced to flow back from its commercial monopolisers (Amazon, Google), so that present-day information asymmetry becomes artistically symmetric.It is populated by fairy-tale personages in which the magical kiss of legislation enthuses managers, trade unions and industrial system designers to collaborate in networked modular non-linear teamwork because apparently that “can be less alienating—and deliver better results” [sic].And best of all, there’s wonderful news for the 1%. Paul’s post-capitalism will apparently liberate the 1% female surfers in lycra who jog Bondi beach. The “99% are coming to their rescue”.
I will put the same challenge to you, ajj, as I put to Stuart:
wrote:show us one—only one instance is necessary—just one diversion of the social surplus from its rightful owners, the capitalist class, that didn’t find its way back to its true social destination.If you can’t demonstrate one instance—only one—over the past 111 years since the Party was founded in 1904, then the two of you are spinning populist delusion, like Brand.
Stuart wrote:not everyone who disagrees is a fool or a knave.Quite so, but you have proved that you are one of those who is a fool and a knave.You are not escaping so lightly by clinging to such a miserable subterfuge.Fool. Your ostentatious pride in “making a difference” by voting Labour—the same bunch of fools and knaves that were humiliated in the polls beyond your wildest dreams and most confident fantasies.Your party is not expected to “make a difference” in the sense you imagined for another five years. Well done!On this very forum, you turned your personal disappointment and frustration over socialism into supercilious mockery aimed at demoralising the political efforts of your erstwhile colleagues.Well, you foolishly set yourself up. And the proof of the pudding reveals yourself to be a self-proclaimed totally willing fool of capitalism.Knave. You took great malicious pleasure in mocking the small socialist party for sticking to its socialist anti-capitalist politics of over a century.You constantly sought to emotionally bolster your socialist renegacy by demoralising the very working men and women who hold the socialist conviction that you no longer can. Such is an act of political and emotional malice.You crave sympathy for your own highly important—to you—emotional disillusionment. Stuart, capitalism is not about you! If you are so deluded as to think it is, you are seriously deranged beyond being a mere fool.I do not know you personally—only impersonally—but to me you are simply the ordinary fool and petty knave that you have ably demonstrated yourself to be here on this forum.2nd warning: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.
Stuart wrote:Capitalism is not a thing. It can’t do anything.Capitalism is a thing. Capitalism does everything.It is only the philosophical mindset that gets hung up by such hairsplitting. The distinction you wish to make proves nothing, except that you refuse to recognise social systems as such, and so—as a good Labourite—proudly repudiate Marx, as a dead dog.Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means for reproducing daily life with a view to consuming the social surplus. The social surplus belongs to the owners by right of possession of the means that create it—human labour [power] and the raw materials.You, as mere supplier of labour [power] are merely a part of the means for reproducing daily life. You are therefore owned, just like the raw material. As such, what right do you possess to the social surplus when you have already forfeited your right to possession of your own labour [power]?From the start, every working day of your life, you willingly allow yourself to be dispossessed of the social means of production, and willingly become the possession of the capitalist class. And yet, you fondly imagine that by advocating for the Labour Party, Stuart can magically withdraw from the rightful ownership of the capitalist the proceeds of the surplus labour he has legally forfeited to the capitalist.The delusion of capitalism could not be more complete than in the mind of Stuart.Stuart, your daily consumption is not siphoned from the social surplus, like that of the capitalist class. Your meagre daily consumption is simply that paid portion that is necessary to reproduce the social surplus for the owners of your labour [power]. Unlike the social surplus itself, your consumption is not an end in itself, no matter how real that illusory end bulks in your deluded mind.Similarly, our general communal needs are only met insofar as their general neglect might impact adversely on the privileged consumption of the social surplus by the capitalist class. Nothing can be permitted to impede that social imperative. That’s what capitalism—the thing—is all about, and only about. Just look at the present desperation of the capitalist class world wide.Capitalist society is there solely for the capitalists, to serve their consumption of the social surplus. Society is subservient to their consumption of its surplus product. Our consumption is incidental, merely necessary to theirs, and is getting less so when it can be obtained more cheaply in foreign markets. We are becoming a burden to privileged consumption of the social surplus. Something will have to give.Their social right to consumption of the social surplus is backed by might. This “non-thing” capitalism is very brutal for the non-thing you “philosophically” claim it to be.Of course, Stuart, capitalism is not a thing for you. You are a thing for it. That may be the source of your dim satisfaction in making vapid philosophical hairsplitting distinctions over “thingness”.You, as a thing for capitalism, are compelled deterministically to live out your stunted daily life by reproducing the social surplus for private consumption of the class of possessors of the means of daily life—for the class that you freely permitted to possess your labour [power] and everything it produces. Sorry, dear thing, you get back your wage, and that’s as fair as it should be.Of course, you are perfectly free to withhold your labour [power] on principle, as being too proud to be owned along side, and classed with, mere raw materials. But if you refuse to play the ignominious part of a possessed means of production, you are perfectly free to starve with honour.But far worse for us socialists, whom you take immense pride in mocking, you, as Labour praiser Stuart, do the capitalist class—presumably a “philosophical” thing that doesn’t exist in your book—an incalculable service in their interest by agreeing to keep their deterministic ownership relation in tact when you blindly attempt the impossible—to divert by Labour Party legislation their legal consumption of the surplus to yourself. Oh folly, a thousand times over!The Labour Party only has an imaginary right to the social surplus, and that real thing, capitalism, will put it right on that score, now, and in the future, as it always has in the past. Stuart, the mocker of socialism, has failed to see through its greatest political smokescreen, the Labour Party.Try as you might, oh mighty Labour campaigner Stuart, the system of capitalism is deterministic—just as our Declaration of Principles state—and negative feedback in the thing, capitalism, simply brings private consumption of the social surplus back on track to its rightful destination. Homeostasis deterministically returns the social surplus, stolen from the capitalist class, back to its rightful owners, the possessors of the means of reproducing daily life. That is determinism.The history of the 20th century proves this determinism.Every well-intentioned, Labour-inspired diversion of the social surplus away from its rightful social owners has found its way back to them. The challenge to you, oh Labour idolator Stuart, is to show us one—only one instance is necessary—just one diversion of the social surplus from its rightful owners, the capitalist class, that didn’t find its way back to its true social destination.The thing, capitalism, does not work—as you Labourites misconceive it—in the social interest. You, a willing Labourite, are compelled to eke out your daily working life till your last gasp labouring to ensure the social surplus arrives exactly where it should. You, my proletarian, have no other social function under the thing capitalism.If that’s not a thing—and a deterministic thing—then nothing is.If capitalism does nothing—as you claim—then neither does a hurricane of raindrops, nor a tornado of air molecules, nor an earthquake of shifting rocks, nor anything that humans conceive of collectively or hierarchically. By the way, that happens to be everything we conceive of.But dogmatic shallow idealists, like you, conceive the world, as Marx put it, trapped within a philosophical mindset:
Marx, Grundrisse wrote:Let us now consider how all of this is misconceived by the kind of consciousness—and this is characteristic of the philosophical mindset—for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only real world.There, to satisfy your bleating, I've made no mention of the words ‘reform’ or ‘revolution’. But they lurk as opposites in everything I’ve written.We want, as always, common ownership and democratic control of the means for reproducing daily life. Nothing, my deluded Labourite, has changed.The issue is exactly the same as Marx and Engels formulated it. Exactly the same as the founders of World Socialism formulated it in the Declaration of Principles and Object over a century ago in 1904. The solution is exactly the same. Until people comprehend what capitalism is about, they will remain totally powerless to implement socialism.First warning: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.
Dave B wrote:I think Honeywill would have been unwise not to have put something like that on the back of his book anyway.Unsure how well this protects him under Australian defamation law.
Dave B wrote:But if the establishment are going to make an example of someone and take them down it is always best to select an otherwise ‘unpopular’ individual.The medieval church acted otherwise over heliocentrism.If staff ‘popularity’ is a key point—and Steele, as activist, apparently made himself unpopular with many colleagues and thorn in the side of management—this still doesn't prove that his neo-Lamarckian science was the intended target.
Dave B wrote:I don’t dispute that the establishment was upset at the erupting ‘soft marking’ debate the details of which don’t concern me too much; even if it has been a bit of a cause célèbre in its own right.I don’t deny that capitalist administrators seek pretexts for getting around trade unions and legal terms of employment in order to dismiss “uncooperative” staff. I therefore can’t deny your story but, without direct evidence, it remains for me a just-so-story.It’s inconceivable that Steele himself didn’t table documentary evidence and testimony for a neo-Lamarckian “scientific” vendetta out to sack him—such “evidence” and “testimony” appears to be nil.Additional such evidence seems never to have been committed to writing, or has been destroyed by others, or languishes out of sight under a suppression order, and so remains conjectural.On the other hand, Honeywill provides ample evidence of Steele’s non-reengagement by places other than Wollongong on the grounds of his neo-Lamarckian science.For example, Honeywill’s Chapter 21 describes a desperate down-and-out Steele accepting term employment at the Australian National University on condition of not pursuing his neo-Lamarckian science. His term was quietly extended, although he broke the impossible injunction imposed upon him.Nevertheless Steele knew he was under pressure to seek permanent tenure elsewhere and, as it turned out, at Wollongong. It’s possible that the false security of “permanent tenure” played its part in fuelling his devil-may-care assault on management’s judgement and integrity.When the axe fell, he was struck by utter disbelief. Like Bligh in the NSW Rum Rebellion, though in the right, he bore the inviting stigma of one who had been rolled before.Whatever the case, Steele’s scientific passion exemplifies that of the revolutionary scientist.Science is the most subversive practice that humans engage in.In the long run, nature exacts her cruel vengeance on all mere human injunctions upon scientific enquiry, and defeats all vain attempts to gag scientific thought.
Hi Dave,I comprehend, but still stand by my claim.I’ve just devoured Ross Honeywill’s racy “Lamarck’s Evolution”. It is really about Ted Steele, and is obviously sympathetic towards him.Even so, in Chapter 24 on the university dismissal, Honeywill makes it absolutely clear that the substantive issue was Steele’s going to the external press with a specific “whistle-blowing” allegation against the University that it had upgraded two honours students by “soft marking”—with the unstated implication of mercenary financial motives.As I said above, Steele’s public accusation was sufficient—on its own—to force the University’s hand, quite independently of his neo-Lamarckianism.Honeywill’s account is problematic in ways that whistle-blower advocate Brian Martin’s isn’t. Honeywill claims his own account is not entirely factual, which leaves the reader in the dark over who said what and whether they even said it. This is the journalistic writer at work on science and history.
Ross Honeywill wrote:While some incidental characters have been imagined, they are not central to the story and amplify, but in no way alter, factual events. Some plausible conversations between real people have been assembled using real events, with every endeavour made to ensure the dialogue is factually correct.Nevertheless, Honeywill’s book contains fascinating secondary material on the remarkable scientific, personal and financial encouragement Steele gained from erstwhile anti-Darwinians Karl Popper and Arthur Koestler, who naturally had stakes in the demolition of strict Darwinism.It also contains unflattering material—as seen from Steele’s viewpoint—on his rough treatment by aging Darwinian Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar and [that lesser light] Nature editor Sir John Maddox.[Among the popular media, “the BBC was out to set him up”, while New Scientist, which often thrives on iconoclasm, was generally supportive of Steele.]
