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I've always found the private/personal property distinction to be needlessly confusing, especially since it was coined in the 1800s as a way to describe what for many was the new mode of ownership (capitalism) which was replacing most of the older forms. Factory ownership was called private ownership because unlike clerical estates or aristocratic titles in theory any private citizen could own it hence private. This is also why private schools in the UK are called public schools because they're open to the public provided they can afford the fees. But now, even in countries with nobilities and the church as a landowner, the capitalist form is the one most of us are all familiar with so it doesn't really serve much of a purpose for distinction. It's also created another problem in that by associating capitalism with private ownership it means we have a lot of left wing thought and ideas that just replace the individual owners and then carry on in the exact same fashion and with the same profit motive and relationship to the labour force. I think we'd be better off calling it capitalist property and personal property for things you can own that don't give you control or leverage over others.
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Nov 11, 2020 23:25
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Acerbatus posted:
Well that sounds a lot like the anarchist criticism of both capitalism and state roads to socialism. You might want to look at the anarchist movement for alternatives. I can give some recommendations if you'd like.
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Nov 11, 2020 23:57
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OwlFancier posted:Or even just... an old marxist position, the whole stuff about having a revolution to install your own government with general secretaries and five year plans post-dates him. His views as far as I know were quite centered in democratizing things from the bottom up, pushing out the old hierarchies by the creation of new organizations centered in direct worker power. What can the government do if everyone is unionised and they decide not to cooperate? That's broadly the idea of syndicalists/industrial unionists etc. Um, not in Marx no, aside from civil war in france which was written after the Paris Commune, Marx was a life long believer in the road to socialism lying with the conquest of the state. Besides the manifesto of the Communist League Marx spent his life supporting bourgeois revolutions in France and Germany and participation in elections in the more democratic states that existed in his day. He was a supporter of the early German social democratic movement, argued the First International should prioritise political action (this was the row which destroyed it) and spent much of his time actively criticising Proudhon and Bakunin and others for their "economism" and faith in direct worker power. Marxism had very little influence in syndicalism, which was built out of the old Proudhonist labour movements in France and Spain, the two main Marxist syndicalists Deleon and Sorel (well before his turn) were minor figures with very little influence and were quickly sidelined once syndicalism grew in power.
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Nov 12, 2020 00:15
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Acerbatus posted:
No idea, some conversation in this thread past me by. That being said that isn't the definition of a state as far as anarchists are concerned, that's the one used and popularised by Max Weber. I've seen some anarchists use it but that's because its pretty concise compared to most political theory and its part of the rejection of all monopolies of power.
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Nov 12, 2020 00:40
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I dunno the difference between the state and a state. The closest comparable situation I can think of is the Aragon collectives in the Spanish revolution. I recommend this account of how many of them operated. https://libcom.org/history/peasants-aragon Well the villages of Aragon in 36 found themselves in a pretty dire situation, years of lack of development, refugees and war and daily artillery bombardment. And despite all that they were able to collectivise, build schools, link up with each other and agree on boundaries, share surpluses for needs, and also support a war effort and the advances into fascist territory. They weren't perfect, they made mistakes, some were more collectivised than their neighbours, some had more capabilities etc. But in general they accomplished a lot in very trying circumstances. Then afterwards they were incorporated into a centrally planned republic, staffed with experts from all over Europe, and across the board everything collapsed. The co-operation, the productivity, the infrastructure projects, the ability to support the war all evaporated, and the fascists soon found themselves making many advances as the government fled to Valencia.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:17
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Purple Prince posted:Foucault would have a thing or two to say about this. Well hopefully Foucault would've read how the Aragonese collectives operated, which you clearly haven't. They didn't centralise decision making they did the opposite. And no in the UK most services I directly interact with are run by private often national or even global in scale businesses. Local Council's outside of a handful have very little input into how services are run, and what power they do have comes to them from the central government which can be revoked. Over the years there have been many situations where a council simply has to vote in favour of a policy, because if they don't they will be breaking the law.
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Nov 12, 2020 01:45
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Well the Mexican town of Cheran, famously found itself beset by cartels, corrupt police and politicians, and the forests were being devastated by illegal logging, to the point the local water sources were in danger of disappearing. So with no help from above they rose up, chased out the police, politicians and cartel and run their community by themselves, and have been steadily replanting the forest. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37612083 And in Rojava they're very interested in experimenting with what they call Democratic Confederalism which is really heavily into repairing environmental damage and enabling humanity to live sustainable. https://makerojavagreenagain.org/ I'm not as familiar with the effects of this, but they seem to be dedicating themselves to it even while in the middle of a war.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:13
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Purple Prince posted:
I'm not British I just live there and was also at one point on a council, they are not responsible at all for any of those things unless they kept them since the 80s. The most responsibility a council has is tendering to bidders, once a contract is available, and serving as an auditing and accountability service for them, but that's mostly done by the council staff, with at most a report delivered to a council meeting which may or may not be voted on. They have no say whatsoever on the police, police forces in the UK don't even correspond to local council jurisdictions so I have no idea how they could run them and there pay and conditions and the laws they enforce is determined by the national government. Or the Scottish parliament in Scotland. And again what little a council can or can't do is determined by the central government. There is very little the elected part of a council can do besides negotiate rates within boundaries determined by the government, or it acts as another enforcement arm for the central government.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:45
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mila kunis posted:This seems to be wrong and not actually answering the question asked. A few points: Well probably in a similar way they dealt with Cholera epidemics https://crimethinc.com/2020/05/26/the-anarchists-versus-the-plague-malatesta-and-the-cholera-epidemic-of-1884 Also regarding COVID-19, back when it first made headlines one of the few groups to study it and come up with a guideline for what to look out for and how to limit risk of exposure and if that failed what you can do about it was the anarchist doctors who made an open source epipen for diabetics. https://archive.org/details/2019ncov
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Nov 13, 2020 00:36
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Acerbatus posted:I mean, isn't the government doing gently caress all to actually enforce it - or in other words, anarchy - basically what's happening right now and not working? Government's are doing plenty, they're just prioritising keeping the economy going which is why so many of them are doing so badly at containing the spread, the main points of infection are in the workplaces or in the schools, and the schools have to stay open so the parents can go to work.
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Nov 13, 2020 02:17
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Re:kunis Well in practice that was rendered impossible with the dismantling of capitalism. It turns out you can't hoard all that much using your own individual means of "hard work" it takes a whole economic structure to achieve that. I notice you keep framing your conception of anarchism as some kind of theoretical, when most of your criticisms were addressed by anarchists in practice fairly conclusively.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:31
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VictualSquid posted:We were discussing book recs recently. Here is the anarchist review dog and a Vietnamese communist recommending that the Critique of the Gothaer Program is one of the first things a socialist should read. I would also recommend that readers of Marx's criticism of the gotha program follow it up with Bakunin's criticism of the social democratic program which goes beyond the Marx/Lassalle divide and assesses the movement as a whole. https://archive.org/details/acritiqueofthegermansocial
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Nov 14, 2020 16:39
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DrSunshine posted:I'm working on a piece which takes on the topic of existential risk and effective altruism from a socialist, leftist standpoint. I want to argue that the best way to reduce existential risk and support long-term flourishing would be to adopt socialism. What arguments can be made which support this view? Can Marx's theory of crises and contradictions in capitalism be applied to analyses of long-term existential risk? I feel like I have the beginnings of this in an ecological argument based on the current progression of climate change thanks to unchecked liberal capitalism, but I was looking for more solid theoretical foundations. Sounds like you're trying to recreate Bookchin's ideas from scratch. I think you'd benefit from looking at his Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, and Post Scarcity Anarchism
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Nov 14, 2020 18:16
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Falstaff posted:Most of what I know about the Shining Path comes from this video which, if accurate, seems less than great. After Guzman or Comrade President Gonzalo as he prefers to be called was imprisoned I remember at least one of the surviving(at the time) factions of the Shining Path demanded his immediate release and hand over to them, so that they could execute him for the massacring of multiple villages. And when one of the other factions finally surrendered their leading commander defended himself in court by admitting that yes he and his cadre had carried out murder and terrorism, but most of the victims were collaborators and homosexuals and not normal citizens. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/shining-path-leader-confesses-to-killings-denies-drug-crime/ I also remember watching a documentary on Coca growers in Peru whose village was a frontline during the civil war, a police barracks in the middle of village complete with torture chamber which villagers disappeared in. And a Shining Path base on a nearby hillside where villagers also disappeared in. At least one family interviewed had members abducted and murdered by both groups and one told of how once they couldn't collect water from the river because the Shinning Path had purged its organisation and thrown their bodies in the river. Given how brutal and repressive the Peruvian government was and is and the actions of the other guerrilla movements that whole period seems like a non stop nightmare for the rural population. Baka-nin fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Nov 21, 2020 |
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Nov 21, 2020 01:11
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:This is a dumb question, probably for Crumbskull in particular. I know I could just The big three of the socialist co-operative movement were Robert Owen, Pierre Proudhon and William Morris, they all went in different directions but the initial source for the first co-operatives come from pooling the resources of the members, this gave Owen a massive head start since he was already a successful industrialist and William Morris and his circle of friends were also quite wealthy. For the workers of Paris though they often had to take shortcuts like just taking over workshops that had closed down and force the authorities to grant them ownership. For Proudhon believed that once the first worker enterprises were established they could then federate and assist other workers to get started and so on, but in order to transform an entire economy at some point it would be necessary to compel the government to establish a People's bank paid for by taxation of the remaining establishments owned by the capitalists. This would require an incredibly strong and motivated labour movement, he made the proposal during the 1848 revolution in France when the workers were armed and had successfully brought down a monarchy and looked like they could topple the conservative republic. There's an interesting and very thorough analysis of is economic ideas online, chapter V onward deal more directly with his ideas on banking and credit. http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/proudhon/dana.html
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Nov 26, 2020 06:56
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Beefeater1980 posted:Can you elaborate on this? In my dumb mind, open source software is a resource available to everyone and therefore intrinsically more useful than privately owned code. A lot of the big tech companies relied on the discoveries of open source and free software in one way or another as either free R&D or as the foundation for their own proprietary alternatives. The problem with Thotsky's logic is that without open source and free software we'd still be stuck with giant tech companies since they were setup by government funding, or by capital firms expanding into new fields. And to be honest recuperation by capital is a feature that has effected everything under the sun so we may as well pack up and go home with that attitude.
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Nov 27, 2020 19:12
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Speaking of software being evil or good I'm watching this video by Sub.Media about hacking and the internet that covers how the internet is used by governments and corporations and how its being used to subvert them. https://kolektiva.media/videos/watch/f0c80ab8-aa46-49d4-b662-5c7b6060a2d4
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Nov 27, 2020 20:03
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Are the Amish an example of a successful anarchist or possibly communist community? I don't know enough about anarchism, communism, or the Amish to know for sure whish one it would be. No, they're a patriarchal cult and do not live independently of the state at all in reality. They're so closely enmeshed into the US that banks setup near their villages actually have special drive ways built for the buggies that come to deposit their earnings. They have a very strong community ethic and their rejection of technology isn't as simplistic as its often lampooned, but its also dominated by the older men of the community. They also unlike many other Christian alternative life style movements still vote in state and federal elections, they were big Trump supporters in Pennsylvania.
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Nov 28, 2020 03:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:
Not quite, Bakunin believed it was important to demolish religious power structures along with the rest but didn't beleive it was necessary for the socialist movement to be made up solely of atheists and opposed making it a requirement for membership to the International, since that would effectively doom it to a minor club with no presence in the working masses of much of the world. He like Marx Opiate qoute believed religion was popular amongst workers as a way of making their lives more tolerable, the other two being the wineshop (meaning all minor distractions) and social revolution. His solution to the God question was to work for the social revolution and prove it is a viable alternative to both. And given how the two nations Italy and Spain where he had the most sucess in building the workers movement are both famous for a strong and powerful Catholic church it seems to have been on the correct path.
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Nov 28, 2020 17:38
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Cpt_Obvious posted:There are plenty of anarchists that ascribe to Marxist theories. Many of them point to the idea that material realities guide history, not a dead man's predictions. Seizing the state may be the path to socialism for some countries at some point in history in some parts of the world, but it may different in others. No, Anarcho-communism specifically rejects that, communism predates Marxism and the two labels weren't considered synonymous until after the russian revolution. Anarcho-communism was pioneered in the 1850s in France, and then took off in Italy in the 1870s while Marx and the Marxists were focussing on German social democracy. Very little overlap. There are Anarchists who find value in some of Marx's ideas and some other marxist thinkers, just like some Marxists and Karl Marx took inspiration and ideas from anarchists (though they usually rather bite their own leg off than admit this). There are currents in marxism that are called by some to be libetarian or autonomous, the big names associated with it are council communism though most of its theorist moved away from associations with marxism, the Situationists (who also broke quite radically with marxism) and Antoni Negri and autonomous marxism developed in the 80s (again incorporating a lot of ideas and history from other groups). Socialism or Barbarism (the french group) were former trots who criticised the authoritarianism prone to Marxism and would eventually move away from it. Theres also Deleuze and Guattari and other isolated theorists who say they're marxists but also rejected dialectics, so i don't really see whats left of Karl Marx's thought and analysis if you reject the framework. But I'm not a philosopher. Those are the ones I'm familiar with. Though just like every other type of Marxism___ there is a very bitter debate about how much any of them count. Baka-nin fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 06:39
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They could mention them but associating anarchosyndicalism or democratic socialism with marxism is pretty useless unless you use marxism as a catch all term for opposition to capitalism. Left communism grew out of the marxist movement. But plenty of ledt communists are perfectly fine with powerful commanding parties and committies and are more than happy to support terror policies so long as they were the one's in charge and got to pick the victims. There have even been groups like the Bordigists who have declared war on democracy in all of its forms, hoped the Axis won WWII and denounced holocaust remembrance as a liberal anti-fascist plot to obscure the real revolutionary struggle to put them in charge of the planet with absolute power over all the people's of the world. The explicitly anti-authoritarian left communists like Karl Korsch, Otto Rühle and Pannekoek had to realign and open themselves to a lot more socialist ideas and theories and reject large parts of marxist orthodoxy.
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Dec 12, 2020 03:39
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Could you expand on this? I don't know much about anarchosyndicalism, but I was under the impression that democratic socialism acknowledges Marxist theories such as class struggle and labor theory of value (yes, yes, I know. But if you're pushing labor value these days, you're a Marxist). Obviously, they reject some of its conclusions such as revolution as the only path forwards. Class struggle as an important component of socialism predates the birth of Karl Marx by quite a lot. Class struggle is not a marxist theory, its a theory that Marx came to accept in his own political development as he moved away from German enlightenment liberalism. He wasn't even the first young hegelian to accept the idea of a society built on struggle between the classes. Marx's theory of value is not universally accepted and many who do accept are not remotely marxist in their own words or framework. Carlo Cafiero was considered by Marx to be the author of the best introduction to Capital he ever read, Cafiero was still expelled from the international with the anarchists and remained a critic of marx other political and economic conclusions. Democratic socialism has a marxist current but its one of dozens of currents and outside of pre WWI Germany it did not become the dominant school of thought. The UK labour party, was dominated by the Fabians, the french socialist party was split amongst multiple thinkers, the majority of the Italian socialist party rejected marxism, the Japanese socialist party was founded by christian socialists etc. The US Socialist party of Eugene Debs was a strange mix of about three or four almost equally powerful tendencies which is a big reason it collapsed under its own weight. The reason why so many marxists in the social democratic and democratic socialist movements left to setup rival Communist parties in the aftermath of the Russian revolution was because they were too marginal to control them. Even in Germany when the split happened the majority stuck with the increasingly non and anti-marxist SPD.
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Dec 12, 2020 04:41
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Can you expand on this bit? Collapsing under its own weight seems to suggest a problem of size, but I’m not sure why increasing size would be a problem for a political party. As is probably obvious from the question, I know jack poo poo about the US Socialist party. The SPA was a lot like the French socialists before the First World War in that it didn't have a truly dominant ideological current but several not quite equal but still very powerful groupings, and a lot of dominating personalities. On the one hand this meant the SPA was a lot more open to ideas and tactics that the more uniform socialist/social democratic parties weren't, but it also meant that every change and policy shift pissed off a lot of its members, and after a year or two the balance of power would change so the party would shift its priorities. It was never able to find a balance even under Eugene Debs who managed get along with most of the main partisans of all the factions and even many of the groups outside the SPA. He was on good terms with Emma Goldman and Berkman and remained in contact with the IWW even after the SPA voted to withdraw from it. When it finally started to collapse, its leadership often couldn't agree on anything, the "Left" of the SPA was split in many ways with at least two separate groups calling themselves Communists, one of which tried to convert the SPA and was eventually kicked out, the other abstained. Both formed rival Communist parties until the Bolsheviks got sick of humouring them and pressured them to merge into the CPUSA to give just one example of this dynamic.
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Dec 12, 2020 17:33
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thotsky posted:I have asked this before in another thread I think, but I never found a satisfactory answer (that might be on me). Why is Trotskyism/Trotsky/trots still considered "bad" by many modern, western leftists? Orthodox Marxism, Internationalism, Anti-Stalinism... These things do not seem very controversial among young leftists these days... So why? Well aside from Trotskyism differing very little from other strains of vanguardist communism, to the point where several Trotskyist groups abandoned it once they started researching the movements history in detail, also my favourite anecdote from Ante Ciliga meeting Trotskyists in the Soviet prison system. Not only did they have no problem with the prison colonies and the mass arrest of dissident groups, -their one complaint was that they were being rounded up too!- they weren't worried and were convinced they would be released soon, since Trotsky had spent so much time building the Soviet police system many officers in the NKVD owed their positions to him, so it was only a matter of time before a counter-coup took care of Stalin and his nonsense. https://libcom.org/library/russian-enigma-ante-ciliga its also not remotely Orthodox marxist, the actual orthodox marxists came out of the social democratic movement and their members in the Russian empire had a bad habit of being killed or tortured by Trotsky's red army, especially the Georgians, so a very large number of ortho-marxist criticisms of the early soviet union focussed on him. I also don't believe they're anymore internationalist than many of the other socialist groups which is to say not internationalist at all, I can't think of a Trot group that doesn't operate on a national basis and prioritises the path to power in that nation. I can however think of many large Trot groups who take sides during international conflicts, the SWP supported Iran, Militant supported the UK against Argentina etc. In the UK, Ireland and France (the three I'm most familiar with) virtually every Trotskyist party has been very active in wrecking many important workplace struggles and activist movements, essentially because they think they can benefit from the fallout. And despite some differences between say Healyites and Cliffites, or orthodox and heterodox groupings they've all shown themselves to be manipulators and a danger to anyone trying to get things done. Many parties also have very ugly histories of exploiting, bullying and harassing their own memberships and in recent years a rather large number have been broken up by sexual assault scandals by one or more leader with the rest of the leadership circling the wagons to protect them. There's a mountain of criticism of trotskyism and trotskyist thinkers and groups from nearly every angle. Given how small the currents are it boggles the mind how much terrible nonsense and damage they've managed to do. this list contains a lot of reasons trotskyism and trots are still so reviled today, including my own personal dealings with several of them. https://libcom.org/tags/trotskyism Ferrinus posted:Well, whether he wanted to or not, Trotsky ended up making huge contributions to the western anticommunist playbook such that you get avowed "internationalists" explaining that whatever third world country is not socialist, but merely bureaucratically collectivist, and in fact the true revolutionary action would be to support those who oppose both Maduro and Guaido or whatever. How do you define "neocon"? A Trotskyist with a teenaged daughter. Eh, Trots were in Chavez's governing coalition, back in the day you used to find Stalinist websites warning people not to be lured into the Bolivarian snare because _minister was a Trot party member, or because Chavez made pro Trotsky remarks on the anniversary of the russian revolution etc. Its only this September that the Trots and the Venezuelan communist party have pulled out of supporting Maduro, and that's less to do with ideology and more because he tried to hijack their party leaderships through court orders and police surveillance.
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Dec 20, 2020 07:01
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thotsky posted:
 those "historical reasons" are still happening to this day in my town, and those British dudes are the main theorists of trotskyism globally, virtually every active Trot party in existence in the English speaking world is descended from Cliff or Healy ,so yeah sorry looks like you're stuck with them.
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Dec 21, 2020 12:46
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Plan Z posted:I currently work at a factory in State College, PA. I work 12 hour day shifts 3 days on 3 days off. I make $11.50/hr. in (this is average in our area- it's meant to make people want to work overtime for $15 or to pull in the more rural people). Rent prices here are comparable to Philly or Pitt. Due to horrendous mismanagement, the head of our department is now pressuring us 12 hour shift workers to work additional shifts as well as 24-hour shifts. He seems to think we're on some kind of rush hour at a restaurant where the problem meeting our deadlines is that there aren't enough people, and they're not working fast enough. The issue is that the engineers are also the plant management, and they all have more interest working as engineers, so we get to the end of a month and they all panic like a sixth-grader doing their homework on the bus. He's pulling people off of their paid vacations while he himself is on vacation, and we're the type of company with bankable PTO, so those people being pulled in will completely lose that PTO forever when January hits. Unless the dept of labor has a reputation for being activists or interventionists it won't amount to much, best advice is to make a complaint with as many co-workers as possible to scare off retaliation and hopefully force management to consider at least some concessions. At my current employer just two workers myself and another filing a joint request for a reduction in hours forced the company to cave and reduce us from 72 hrs per week to 48 on average. Can't really give specific advice not knowing your workplace but this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvrldZlUwe0 was made as a general primer. The IWW has several branches in the area who can be contacted for more specific advice and possible support https://iww.org/directory/union_category/pa/
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Dec 22, 2020 02:41
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I think that the reversion to capitalism is due to the fact that capitalists currently run the world and are incredibly hostile to non-capitalist countries. I hate to keep bringing them up, but Vietnam made a very real attempt to go full blown space communism and was strangled to death by exclusion from the market. As a result, Vietnam adopted aspects of capitalism out of necessity: If they didn't open their markets, they were going to starve because the capitalists who owned all the poo poo refused to do business with them. At no point did the VCP ever attempt "Space communism" it stuck very closely to the "National-democratic" economics of marxist-leninist planning, one of the arms of the star on the flag represents the nation's business community, along with intellectuals, peasants, workers and military. With all the strengths and weaknesses that came with it. That system broke down quickly because in addition to rebuilding from war and incorporating the south in ways that could be brutal and messy (driving most of the Chinese minority out) it had to keep a strong border force in the north to deter China who even after the failed invasion didn't stop provoking them until 1992, prop up governments in Laos and Cambodia and keep fighting that brutal civil war with the remnants of the royalists and Pol pot fighters, all while facing a blockade from the USA, ASEAN, China and all of the nations friendly to them. Its isolation in the 70s-80s had nothing to do with capitalism versus communism, it was completely over geostrategic concerns the US was trying to save face after losing militarily by isolating Vietnam, Mao was convinced Vietnam would be a Soviet outpost and this was shared by his successors, ASEAN were convinced Vietnam was building its own regional empire with its military mission to Laos and invasion of Cambodia. Before the invasion of Cambodia Vietnam did have trading relationships with most nations apart from the US, the five year plan was planned in part based on their trade and investment predictions. After troops cross the border China breaks off completely and then attacks, while most other nations defer either to the US, China or the ASEAN economies boycotts. Nations started trading with Vietnam again once it withdrew from Cambodia, the Doi Moi reforms largely just stimulated the growth of a domestic market, it wouldn't play a part in international investment until the mid 90s.
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Dec 27, 2020 15:26
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Thanks for sharing, I hadn't read about this aspect of lower-phase communism/socialism before. Not gonna lie, my immediate reaction on reading that and watching the youtube is, sounds fine on paper but impossible to implement. To me the sticking point is how value is assigned to the vouchers. The video brings up the idea of two individuals who have the same labor output, but one of them has 4 children so would need to receive more vouchers despite the same labor output, but then the video just kind of dismisses this as a "minor" complication that would sort itself organically. This seems like a massive complication to me, and I have hard time envisioning how this system would be implemented at scale. Its not a minor complaint at all, its one of the many serious problems with this labour voucher system Marx was fond of in his later years. Another serious issue with the scheme is the whole "non-circulating" part. How exactly can you stop people from circulating vouchers without a very active policing force of some kind and who would be in charge of that? etc. There are many problems with this scheme which essentially means either a permanent rationing system with the controls in the ends of some nebulous authority, or just another version of money. These usually are just shrugged off like in that video. The only marxist theorist I know of who dedicated a lot of time to trying to solve all of these problems was Bordiga, and his conclusions were that for it to work the party leadership would be made up of the greatest scientific experts who would plan out every aspect of the lives of the entire global population in a totalitarian (his word) system of scientific planning were the individuals would own nothing and would be subject to this regime. This was a good thing in his mind. Personally I don't think its a coincidence that Marx mostly talked about labour notes/vouchers when he was criticising his rivals economic plans. It looks a lot like he didn't have a complete system thought out himself but needed some grounds to base his criticisms on so just used some sketches he had. He did that a lot which is why a lot of his writings weren't published during his life time.
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Jan 21, 2021 10:59
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OwlFancier posted:I guess nowadays you could probably invent some sort of technological solution to try to make voucher transfer at least very difficult if not outright impossible. If you really wanted to. Indeed as China's experiments with cashless economy shows you can. But it also shows us that to do so requires a powerful and invasive policing mechanism in the control of a powerful group with the muscle to back its decisions up and determine arbitrarily the value of goods and currency.
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Jan 21, 2021 11:09
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OwlFancier posted:I mean that's certainly a technological solution but I mean, like, presumably if someone was actually inclined they could invent some sort of local biometric authentication or something, like a credit card you need a fingerprint to charge/use, but rather than storing the fingerprint data centrally you store it locally on the card like how PINs work. No need for a major central authority, just limits your ability to spend money to places you personally can take your card. Umm yeah you would, someone has to make those things, someone has to distribute them, someone has to handle replacements, someone has to make sure they're serving their intended purpose, someone has to take them out of circulation when no longer needed etc. Then there's the calculations of how much each card can actually use otherwise the system is completely pointless. You haven't changed anything or solved any of the problems, your just adding extra steps.
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Jan 21, 2021 12:00
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The Oldest Man posted:You're treating labor vouchers as if it's a transferable stored value instrument, which it's not. A limited black market will certainly treat them that way but being unable to conduct any officially recognized transaction that way prevents accumulation. See this discussion keeps going back in the same circle. Officially recognised transaction can only exist with an official body with the responsibility to determine what is official and what isn't and to prevent accumulation or any other unauthorised usage it would need the force required to prevent or at least limit unofficial usage. That's just the germ of a ruling class its neither revolutionary nor transitional. I'm not a fan of the marxism of socialist party of great Britain (SPGB) indeed I'm probably one of their most vocal critics, but I do find many of their objections to labour vouchers hard to dispute. "Labour vouchers imply that someone must police who takes the goods produced by society. In other words there must be people who spend their time ensuring that other people do not take things without paying for them. That is normal in a profit oriented society, but a waste of human labour in socialism." https://web.archive.org/web/20130512215413/http://www.worldsocialism.org/articles/labour_vouchers.php
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Jan 22, 2021 19:49
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namesake posted:I don't like non-transferable vouchers but that's a utopian critique. Unltil we can produce more than enough for the population without even thinking about the practicalities of it (i.e. communism) then we have to spend time on distribution and at some point that will appear to be gatekeeping as someone will say that someone cannot take more of something because it is needed by someone else. That's not the germ of a ruling class (inherently) as you're saying, it's just the core of a system with effectively limited amounts of real things. It is the socialist state. Missed this since the thread died, but this is simply nonsensical. We already have the ability to fulfil the needs of our current population and have done for many years, we in fact over produce and a large part of the global workforce is committed to tasks that serve no practical function from the point of view of servicing needs or producing needed goods. The issue isn't production nor is it really an issue of distribution its the reason for production and the relationship that governs production how what is produced can be accessed which is the issue with capitalism as a resource and wealth allocator. You've framed this as being a response to scarcity but that's a precondition you have assumed, but even if it were the case in the future, that's not the core of a socialist state* as you're saying, just a society with scarce resources and an authority (of some nebulous kind) over the productive forces. You haven't responded to the criticism at all, you've just called it utopian and tried to dodge it with an assertion of faith. *Which apparently just means rationing.
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Mar 5, 2021 06:41
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