Young Master Smeet
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Interesting:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26007057State power in action:
Quote:Solicitors for residents near Fernhurst, in West Sussex, have written to Celtique Energie and the Energy Secretary Ed Davey to explicitly deny permission to drill under their land .It comes after the government said it may alter trespass law to make drilling under property easier for companies.[./quote]So, whilst some appear to be trying to assert their eternal right to property, the capitalist state, in the interests of wealthy extraction firms (and also strategic 'national interest') is preparing to override that (what is Cameron, a communist?).Quote:What we can say with more confidence is that those many forms of sex and child abuse based on obsessions with power would find no nourishment in socialism because the structures of oppression, dominance and impotence would no longer exist.Be that as it may, if a problem existed socialism would have to deal with it, and the first priority would be to protect children. Studies suggest that many paedophiles have no desire to hurt children but a minority do, and there seems little room for doubt that in socialism dangerous paedophiles would, like any dangerous and out of control individual, have to be kept under restraint for the common good, though not for the purpose of punishment but in order that a successful and humane treatment could be found. For the rest, there would have to be a democratic debate about what was acceptable sexual preference and what was unacceptable medical condition. It could have implications for civil liberties, freedom of movement, sexual licence, levels of supervision of children, equality status of individuals. We can’t say today how it would proceed or how it would turn out, but it would be an informed hunt for solutions, not an inflamed hunt for witches.My heart sank when I saw the subject of this article, not because it doesn't need discussing, but because (as it notes) this is a dangerous topic to even discuss. Other journals often end up running into dangerous libertarian waters, of the sort that would tarnish an organisations reputation if they're not careful.Of the two paragraphs above I think we're stronger on the second than the first (and we can add that since so much of law enforceement that goes into up-holding class power would be rendered unnecessary, we could devote more time and effort to dealing with genuinely dangerous individuals. The reason I think the first is weak is because there are so many people; it only takes a tiny percentage of people who "deviate" from norms for there to be a lot of pain in the world. If 0.0000001% of people are dangerous paedophiles, that would leave 70 in the UK alone.
Although partisan, I think he is right on the question of the power of local networks or privillege, and the need for discipline in office (although I agree we would go to referendums much more vigorously, although 'Town Hall' meetings of the US type might be more our bag, since that would give greater input to active groups who can turn out regularly and nullifies some of the media power of local wealthy types. I'd assume we'd allow 'Open voting' at our branch meetings, or something, for mandating our council delegates…
This is a critique from a hardened Labourist eprspective:http://notesbrokensociety.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/no-confidence-an-epitaph-for-green-politics-in-brighton-and-hove/
Quote:And finally, the Green Party’s internal structures – or lack of them – are symptomatic of a failure to move beyond the politics of personal indulgence. As I’ve blogged before, those who wield power and wealth are organised and united by networks that are often largely informal and massively pervasive. To take on that power – and effect real change – you need organisation and discipline. When you’re dealing with an entrenched establishment, one that is rapidly moving beyond even paying lip-service to democracy, they’re all you’ve got. Anything else is basically fancy dress outside foie-gras restaurants; picturesque, liable to produce a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, and utterly incapable of shifting the balance of power. Greens seem incapable of submitting to collective rules and discipline – they resent structure. And, internally, that lack of structure means that power relations inside the party mirror rather than challenge those outside. It is rumoured that this is the root cause for the mediation proposed last summer. Most extraordinary of all, a Green councillor who sought to enrol the help of the Labour leader in an attempt to oust her own Group Convenor is hailed in some Green corners as a hero. There is at the heart of all this, as I and others have written before, a basic culture of Thatcherite individualism: a reluctance to understand that politics is, at its heart, a collective enterprise.We need to look at, and learn from this experience. Should we ever get a chance to be a force in local government, we'll need answers to these problems. the failure seemss to be that whilst the Greens in their mind rejected the power structures of local government, in practice they were in thrall to them, hence why their councillors started to oppose their own 'administration'….
Short version.There is no socialist position on screw drivers.So too there is no socialist position on fracking.Fracking is not a political question. The political question is who rules? Once we've sorted that one out, then we can start arguing about fracking.
I don't understand that stance: come what may, the spending has to come from some taxes somewhere. Although council tax is not the most progressive tax, it shouldn't be hard to assemble a propertyless majority to push it up. As ALB says, when accompanied by sound industrial action it could work. Especially as part of the government strategy I to impose cuts through councils, while maintaining politically popular spending nationally to protect their own position.
On a quick skim I'd hazard that if the borrowing figures in those tables aren't inflation adjusted (and they look like they waren't) then about 90% of that article is bunkum (some of those graphs would be considerably smoothed).Even if they are, then Governments are immortal, the only thing of concern is how much income they have relative to debt repayment. If the government can afford the repayments at a comfortable taxation level, then it doesn't matter how many times the worth of the economy the debt is, it can always roll it over and re-finance.The interest rates the public get are usually higher than state debt, since state debts are practically an assett rather than a liability, they are so (generally) secure.All that's happebned, as happened under Thatcher as well, is that tax revenues have fallen due to holding tax rates down and also a slow down in economic activity.Also, I'd note those falling UK interest rates are also in a context of falling inflation.
LBird, my point was, though, to go closer to your own example, if people already have a mystified explanation for television, so you explain about components, structure and emergent properties, and then they go: "Ah, so that's where the pixies come in".I suppose my point is we're not explaining things ex nihil, but in competition with a widespread set of beliefs that people don't know they have assimilated, so it's not a question of finding ever more simplistic ways of explaining, but of understanding the dominant paradigms and noting weak points and matching our explanations to the narrative.At some point though, if people don't want (or feel a need) to give up the Faeries…
LBird,the actual anaology, though, is rather like the people who believe that when their telly goes on the blink they need to say a prayer to God, spin thrice widdershins and then give the box a good thump on the right side. Trying to explain to them that it is a loose connexion that can be simply fixed would be met with a plaintive cry of 'But where God come into that solution?' Try telling them that they can thump it on the top or the left side would be met wiuth incredulity too.
LBird wrote:Yeah, you're right, but that happens because the 'audience' doesn't understand the terms/phrases/concepts that are being used to explain 'value', for example (but this applies to all of Marx's ideas). So, they 'split hairs', or introduce 'complex concepts' (but these are often simpler, in fact, for the audience) in a (usually) forlorn bid to try to understand what they're being told.Yes, they are simpler, because they are part of the obviousnesses of everyday life. To take a non-economic example. Someone had to invent the paragraph. If you told people that it was the joint work of Bob Para and Andy Graph, they'd be confused, since paragraphs are so natural to anyone used to reading or writing. So to if you pulled out a copy of Locke and showed them the very sentence that introduced to the world the concept they cite as if they thought of it for themselves, they'll look a bit confused. That they might not understand the sentence from Locke, or see how it relates to the concept they've just expressed is neither here nor there.that's what I meant by 'complex ideas' some very complicated economic theories are widely held (if not thoroughly understood), and appear natural. Sometimes we can't get our ideas across by simplifying them, because they conflict with these widely held beliefs: both sides of an exchange gain (so exchange isn't equal) people exchange naturally. I own what I create. I own myself (bleagh). Supplly and demand. People just pay what they believe it is worth. etc.What everyone can understand is the slice of the cake analogy. That's why liberal ideologues like to deny that there is a cake.
I think the simplest way to get "Value" across is to say that at any given time there is only so much human effort available to get things done. That leads to the Robinson Crusoe example (OK, technically at this point it's only labour, not Value, but it is the necessary precursor to explaining that the amount of labour in a given product is the only universal comparable characteristic on which to base exchange judgements).TBH, it's normally the audience who make it over complicated by starting to split hairs, or introducing complex concepts that have been universally assimilated (things like barter lead to money and that sort of thing).
ISTR Hardy on one tape discussing the decline of rate of profits as a very long run thing, there are plenty of causes (among those listed by Marx) which off-set it (that many of them are political, such as colonialism and taxation) suggests that a capitalist 'heat death' is only a sort of imaginary model, not a realistic possibility. of course, the political nature of the off-sets indicate how important it is as a trend, not an accomplished fact.There is still scope for non-capitalist accumulation (primary accumulation, or what I believe Harvey calls Accumulation by expropriation). Taxation and rent slow the decline down too (and I believe that is why, many years ago, IIRC, I explored rent seeking behaviour of capitalists in a standard article, also in my stuff about robots).
DJP,The time I did a talk about this I managed to link it back to Ancient Rome and the Silk Road (Silk Road leads to merchants, merchants Lead to Bankers, Bankers lead to Edward I's war debts, War debts lead to clearing land for wool production, Clearing Land for wool production leads to landless workers, Landless workers lead to proletarians, etc).Rome never hit capitalism because of slavery and because there was no outlet for investing capital, any surplus was spectacularly consumed by the ruling elite (bread and circuses).Obviously, any full acocount needs to take on the dissolution of the monasteries, which was as political as it was economic.
Admice,in terms of wage labour, the first proto capitalists will have been the guild masters who would take on apprentices to work for them. There were also the merchants, going back centuries (some of these ancient guilds still survive in London (link)). Eventually they threw off the shackles limiting the numbers of journeyumen and apprentices they could have.The modern factory system is credited to Richard Arkwright – the creation of the cotton industry was a combination of the likes of him and the merchants.That's a very short answer. Hope that leads you in roiughly the right direction.
To return to the original question. ISTM that the whole point is that the wage relationship is entirely moral. The two participants confront one another as equals, one as the owner of commodity money, the other of commodity labour power. They meet, arrange the contract and exchange goods at as near to the fair and correct price(/ratio) as they can. It is not the fault of the owner of commodity money that the owner of commodity labour power has no other access to the means of living, and from their perspective, it is no different to buying and using a spanner or a screwdriver to perform some work. No one says that a spanner has a right to the value of the goods it produces, do they?That this involves an inequality of real power relations, alienation and objectification of human ability to work is not a moral but, to my mind an existential and aesthetic matter. The worker strives to be more than an object (and feels themself to be so). That is the heart of class struggle.
