Young Master Smeet

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  • in reply to: The long awaited Primitive Communism thread… #94012

    Going, roughly by the quotes I mined up, it wouild seem that primitive communism = pre-commodity society: so we're not looking at any specific model of organisation, but a retrospective relationship between commodity relations and non-commodity relations.  So, it actually would encompass many different forms of organisation identified by later anthropologists.

    in reply to: Why hasn’t quantitative easing caused inflation? #93946

    I thought the reason was that it was creating inflation: when they started, it looked very like a catastrophic fall in prices would occur, so falling prices plus inflation means actual prices retaining the same denomination.  And inflation certainly did run up above the 2.5% mark (up to about 3.6% IIRC), and considering that inflation remains higher than interest rates, it seems we have a slow destruction of capital going on.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93821

    I'm reminded of the story Werner Herzog tells of when he was filming Fitzcarraldo : Klaus Kinski was throwing tantrums on set (at least partially provoked by Herzog, it has to be said), and one of the Indian chiefs they were working with went up to Herzog and said: "Shall we kill him for you?"  They were prepared to kill him for being annoying and ego maniacal.I'll just add, that one of the features of their society is the small size of the their groups, the pressures of complexity don't exist, and they are more likely to strike off in a new band than build a big community.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93819
    ALB wrote:
    4.  A society without a State, i.e without any body of armed men to enforce social discipline (i.e, to stay strictly on topic, without a "police force"). In fact an alternative name amongst anthropologists for such societies is "societies without a state".

    Well, there would have been a body of armed men, known simply as 'The Men'.  They would have enforced discipline, such as it was.And this brings us to the point, the capacity for the use of force will not disapear in socialism, the point is that no section of society can monopolise it it for their own interests.  Hence why I stated, as a pretty cold reading, that whatever form of organisation society takes to defend itself, it can't be based on special powers or unique rights, much like the current English common law power of arrest.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93807
    SocialistPunk wrote:
    YMS supports this view in the above quote. What he fails to grasp, is that those values need be encouraged within a socialist space.

    I don't know how that can be said, when I haven't made any comment on that topic.As for socialism, obviously, the values of people in socialist society (and it's structures) will be different 100 years from the revolution, and again 300 years.  On the eve of the revolution people will have a set of values built on and closely resembling, those they have today.  What will drive the change is necessity and the inherent skills of humans to negotiate their social space.  I should certainly hope their values will be fettered and shaped by socialist society.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93803

    Capitalist ideologues, in their utopian mood, offer freedom and equality for all: universal human emancipation.  Individual responsibility, dignity for labour, all sorts of lovely goodies.Even in twenty years, most of the people in socialism would be the people who are around now, and they will have to change their minds (certainly) to get to socialism, but but that will be a process of adapting existing attitudes, rather than wholesale implanting entirely new ones.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93801

    I do hope the positive values in socialism won't include the use of the exclamation mark.  I don't know what values will be needed for socialism, I can only say they will be those compatible with a a society freed from waged labour and based on common and democratic ownership and control of the wealth of the world.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93799

    SP,exactly, Marx reacted to and understood the world around him (and even changed his ideas from those of radical democracy to Communism in the light of his interaction with the existing workers movement).  People make history, not in conditions of their own choosing (as he said) and they can conjure up and imagine any sort of society, but can only realise the possible ones before them.  Capitalist ideologues espouse freedom, justice and equality before the law, noble values, but they cannot realise them. We have to start with people as they are, not how we'd like them to be, and go from there.  As Alan has demonstrated, much of the time socialism does espouse the same values as capitalism, but it focuses on the practical mechanism to realise them.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93795

    Starting from values and ideas is the utopian approach (and a very dangerous one, I might add).  Starting from the world as it is is the materialist approach.  Yes, even now there are signs of human empathy, solidarity and the need to help one another, but for every one person, say, who gives to a beggar, there are a thousand who simply don't.  For every one person who might shout at a group of kids playing silly buggers, there are many too frightened, or too busy, or determined it's not their business.Indeed, capitalism relies on bonds of human solidarity as an externality it can slough its costs off onto, and many of those acts of kindness are a necessity to simply live.Like I said, the people who live now, with their attitudes, temprements and ideas are the ones who will exist in socialism, not some abstract 'pure' new people, so if the capacity doesn't exist in the here and now it won't happen at all.But, take the example of parents.  Parents who are holding down jobs all day, and come home tired don't have the same time and energy to play with their kids and give them attention as someone with a bit more free time.  With the best will in the world, no no less love, the former is more likely to snap and appear to be an ogre of a parent compared with the latter.

    in reply to: ‘Surplus Theory’ versus Marxian Theory #93625

    Just discovered that Kevin Carson (of anti-capitalist free markets fame) has made his work on anarchist organizational principles free to air:http://mutualist.org/id114.html"Studies in the Anarchist Theory of Organizational Behavior"Chapter 7: Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth (the Corporation asPlanned Economy)Is quite interesting, as he 'goes through' (to use the academic jargon) the calculation debate to show how large capitalist firms are just as subject to the problems of calculation as the 'socialist commonwealth'.  It's worth reading, because at the least it is suggestive of the necessities of what socialism proper will require (the active engagement of those doing the work in planning the work, open aaccounting and free information, etc,); and because it's kind of fun to see the tables turned.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93789

    It's not mechanical versus values, but materialism versus utopianism.  The values of society will be those that it is capable of in its material conditions.  As one of our speakers is fond of saying, at the moment we're so busy taking care of business, we don't have time to take care of ourselves: when we have a society run in the interest of all human beings (with the human being at its centre) we will have the capacity to deal with one another in depth.I agree that the means must be commensurate with the ends.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93786

    I don't think I overlooked "values"; what I stated was a materialist approach which says that values don't just drop down out of the sky, but are a function of the time and effort we can afford to put into them.  Thus, bizarrely, our first response to the question of crime is to discuss cutting the working week (coupled with meeting everyone's material needs).  Once freed from the necessity of wage-slavery and poverty, we can find out what humans are really like.  If we're robbing, murdering cads, that's what we are, and we'll have to relate accordingly.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93783

    SP,in socialism, people who refuse to comply with health and safety policies will be removed from workplaces.  People who disrupt theatre performances will be kicked out.  There wouldn't be a lot of time for empathy, and discussion with someone putting their own or their colleagues' lives in danger.  Yes, cutting the amount of time we work so we have more time to build alliances, to discuss and encourage will help in the longer term; and removing the existential threat of the loss of means of subsistence means people may well be more willing to comply (or have less incentive to flout rules).  But, as William Morris said, Peter sober needs protecting from Peter drunk.

    in reply to: Would the police force exist in a Socialist world? #93774

    ISTR Bernard Shaw thought there could be a socialist death penalty, but to avoid cruelty he felt the criminal should be secretly tried and then put to death in their sleep with no warning.  Not remotely terrifying then (he felt that a life sentence was a form of cruel punishment so heinous you might as well kill them).The death penalty has many problems, from a political angle, do we want to have any machinery in our society that can have us killed?  It's a pretty effective way for a minority who can control that machinery to come to dominance.Of the philosophies behind punishment, ISTR watching an old Open University programme that discussed retributivism and utilitarianism.  Retributivist philosophy is that the punishment should be scaled to the crime (which is plain nonsnse, the death penalty for killing one person is the same as for killing ten, there is no metric to make a punishment actually match the harm, and any action comes with the added fact of the deliberateness of the public body inflicting the harm).Utilitarian punishment would be a deterrent: however, logically, that means the death penalty for parking offences but not for terrorist offences (killing a terrorist wouldn't deter them, so it would be inhuman to do that).The basic problem with the death penalty is it inflicts the self same harm that it purports to punish.And, while we're quoting:

    Uncle Charlie wrote:
    Plainly speaking, and dispensing with all paraphrases, punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of society is that, which knows of no better Instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims through the “leading journal of the world” its own brutality as eternal law?

    (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/02/18.htm)Also worth reading is: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/economic/ch33.htmI suspect he may be taking the piss…

    in reply to: ‘Surplus Theory’ versus Marxian Theory #93606

    I was just flicking through a book, yesterday:ISBN1137277742 (hbk.)TitleCooperatives and socialism : a view from Cuba / edited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker.ImprintBasingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Collationxii, 351 p. ; 23 cm.The chapter on the legal framework for co-operatives in Cuba didn’t enthral me, and described situations very much like what Wolff seems to envisage (co-operatives are sanctioned state patrimony, with usufruct rights of land and resources, where workers get wages and a cut in the profits).But, the first chapter on Marx, Engels and Lenin on co-ops was interesting. Marx’s view was that co-ops were a progressive, powerful force, showing workers could run their own industries without capitalists, but that they could also become the workers exploiting themselves within the market system.We don’t need clever exegesis to work out what Marx thought of co-ops, he expressed himself pretty clearly.

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