Is the concept of monetary capitalism now holding us back?

[littlebabyjesus]

Almost like a dialectical relationship!

Which is why making the case for something is a part of making it happen, surely?

 

[revol68]

Almost like a dialectical relationship!

Almost...

 

[Blagsta]

Which is why making the case for something is a part of making it happen, surely?

How is you making a case on here, influential?

Given that the working class is in retreat and has been for 30 years, how is this process gonna happen by "making a case" on the internet?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

How is you making a case on here, influential?

In a very minimal way, given that only a dozen or so like-minded individuals are likely to read it. Where have I claimed otherwise?

This particular forum on here is something I personally find useful to explore ideas rather than as a platform for proselytising.

 

[love detective]

For instance, in the Great Depression and after WW2, Keynes's ideas were adopted by national governments. The conditions were right for the ideas to be adopted. Where capitalism falters, ideas about how to change things are listened to.

couple of things on this

it suggests that history is made by ideas & great men who have them - the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of ideas & great men -

secondly is it any wonder that people who wanted to save capitalism implemented things that were about trying to save capitalism and proposed by people who wanted to help save capitalism (and in the end, it was world war 2 that did the trick, there's no way of telling how much these ideas would have actually ended up saving capitalism from itself anyway without ww2) - there was a material necessity to do what was done back then, it wasn't just an idea that sprung from nowhere

you may be aware that capitalism is a pretty big common denominator issue in all the problems mentioned in the OP - so it's worth having a think about what kind of response you and your big book of ideas would get when you run them past the combined forces of capital

it's almost adorably naive that you think along these lines

 

[Blagsta]

In a very minimal way, given that only a dozen or so like-minded individuals are likely to read it. Where have I claimed otherwise?

This particular forum on here is something I personally find useful to explore ideas rather than as a platform for proselytising.

Its completely pie in the sky.

What will make a difference is getting involved in real concrete struggles, anti-cuts, workplace organising, that sort of thing.

 

[butchersapron]

Ideas become material forces when they grip the masses - aware i/we may be overdoing the Marx here, but that's that's the size of it really. (Edit: and it should go without saying that these ideas come from collective struggle with material conditions).

 

[littlebabyjesus]

it suggests that history is made by ideas & great men who have them - the history of all hitherto existing societyis the history of ideas & great men -

I don't believe this. Nothing close. But ideas still have to come from somewhere. It's not an either/or situation.

 

[Blagsta]

I don't believe this. Nothing close. But ideas still have to come from somewhere. It's not an either/or situation.

Ideas come from material conditions and in turn influence material conditions. Dialectic.

 

[revol68]

Ideas come from material conditions and in turn influence material conditions. Dialectic.

yeah but it's like the chicken and the egg, neither comes first.

 

[Blagsta]

yeah but it's like the chicken and the egg, neither comes first.

Isn't that what I said when I said "dialectic".

 

[revol68]

Isn't that what I said when I said "dialectic".

yeah but the post structuralist fag in me was concerned that whilst we say that, we consistently put the material conditions first in our wording.

 

[love detective]

something has to exist before it can have an idea no?

 

[revol68]

something has to exist before it can have an idea no?

I knew some smart arse would take it back to the pre societal.

Yeah it's useful to keep that in mind, well if you don't want to end up like Phildwyer, but in terms of human society, they are inseparable, like the chicken and the egg.

 

[jusali]

yeah, but something also has to be wrong with it for ideas to improve it, take form.
We all know there's something fundamentally wrong, however working out just what is it, that is wrong, is the first step. i.e. shareholders vs customers/clients being a good starting point?

 

[sptme]

We all know there's something fundamentally wrong, however working out just what is it, that is wrong, is the first step. i.e. shareholders vs customers/clients being a good starting point?

How about people who earn a wage vs people who pay others to work for them.

I think there is a danger in seeing your power lying in being a consumer (although the mainstream media likes to keep telling us that). We are much more powerful collectively as producers of good and services.

 

[camouflage]

How about people who earn a wage vs people who pay others to work for them.

Um... is that wrong?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

it's almost adorably naive that you think along these lines

I'm nowhere nearly as naive as you think I am. I knew exactly what you and butchersapron and others would say in response to my posts. I'm not unaware of the arguments, indeed I agree with a lot of them.

But ideas do matter. Setting out where 'there' is and laying out possible paths towards that place is important. Such things are totally lacking from mainstream political debate at the moment. It is devoid of underlying principle. And that matters. But as I'm sure you would agree, we are not passive participants in this. We are active agents, all of us. I don't lay claim to any ability to do anything particular. Others do far more good than me. And ideas are most certainly products of material circumstances - tautologically so. So what? That says nothing at all about whether or not they should be expressed, or whether or not we should try to put those ideas out there if we have them.

Recognising the fact that the ideas are themselves a product of material conditions ought, if anything, to make those who have those ideas more determined to put them out there as effectively as they can. There may be a case for saying that those of us who are better able to articulate the ideas have a duty to do so, as we are only saying what loads of other people think, but we have certain mundane skills that allow us to express them in a forceful manner that gets noticed, and that may be our humble contribution.

 

[camouflage]

An alternative might look like what I described, tbf. I agree with the point about 'production of use values is carried out, not as an end in itself, but purely as a means of producing surplus value'. That's shareholder capitalism - that's profit. And that is something that businesses that are incorporated as worker-owned cooperatives of some kind don't do.

So yes, my first sentence above isn't quite right - ownership matters, of course. However, I can see a different situation in which wage labour still exists, in which, for the short-term at least, inequalities still persist. It isn't an ideal, but so what, as long as it is an improvement on now. There is no utopia.

If we lived in a system where money production is nationalised, we could operate markets underneath that in non-essential services, allowing for innovation, for instance, and allowing for people to establish companies through borrowing money. Such companies, as a condition of their loan, would have to be incorporated as worker-owned as soon as they start to employ anyone, but that could just be a John Lewis-style arrangement. How the money made by the business is distributed among its workers would be down to them to work out (with certain legal protections, of course). Currently, working for the John Lewis partnership is slightly better than working for Tesco. But if every business were a JL-style partnership, working for them would be markedly better than working for JL today - JL after all can get away with worse treatment as this is what people expect, and being treated a bit better at Waitrose than at Tesco is enough to keep workers happy. In a world where every place is a JL partnership, workers could demand a lot more, in particular, demanding that wage differentials be reduced.

But we can all outline ways in which things would be better if only we could change the pattern of ownership. The key question is how to get from here to there. And with this question, nationalising the money system is, imo, a possible first step. From there, erosion of shareholder capitalism becomes possible for the simple fact that John Lewis style partnerships have a competitive advantage over shareholder-owned companies, because they do not have to pay out to shareholders. They have eliminated what is essentially a leeching class of profit-takers.

Shareholder vs Stakeholder capitalism. Employees, customers, neighbors, suppliers...

I agree with the concept, and I don't think it's all about owners versus wage-earners. I think it's about agents too. In a system where money was managed by a non-profit orientated agent of the people, the managers of that agency would still have the power to skew things to their own favor.

 

[butchersapron]

Let's see that boy roar. Yeah, look at it go.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

There was a very good comment made by another poster on the budget thread.

The budget calculator left them better off. But what is better off. With libraries, national heath and other public facilities in ruins. The quality of my life does not revolve solely around how much money I have.

Everywhere I look it is all about consuming and buying, getting the best car, the latest clothes.
It's like I am living that film 'They Live' spiced with 1984.

 

[camouflage]

I've always felt the political commentary of They Live was brilliantly done, so spot on even today... for instance the tent city, and the bad-guys cheery indiference toward human society. It can also be seen as the rampage wank-fantasy of every quietly simmering gun-nut with a grudge against the shady international cabal known simply as Them.



Excellent film.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Let's see that boy roar. Yeah, look at it go.

I'm being slightly absurd, no doubt. And you're being what?

 

[teahead]

Ideas come from material conditions and in turn influence material conditions. Dialectic.

Not dialectic, recursive. Dialectics inevitably implies connotations of difference (anti-/thesis) and conflict, provoking the kind of discursive materialism that generates dead-end discussions about class war. Of course that's a legitimate perspective - exploitation of people and resources is an inevitable consequence of market capitalism - but what the perspective of recursion offers is the prospect for consideration of cultural development. Beyond synergies between ideas and material conditions, it's important to consider that neither of these are necessarily unlimited fields of possibility. In principle they might be, but there's an issue of consciousness-through-reflection. The binaries of dialectic materialism belong to simpler times when linear progression was considered as the simple outcome of opposition between two opposing forces. Complexity theory highlights the much more fuzzy overall outcomes generated by multiple factors, producing a variety of pressure points at different rates. Dialectics is essentially a representational model. We're now much more sophisticated (as the OP says) in predicting and mapping the determinants of change. Seems a shame to bring it all the way back to class war.

In any case, surely the problem is that it's very difficult to generate new ideas between the interplay of ideas and material conditions because present culture tends to dictate the determinants - the language? - in which ideas are articulated. This is perhaps one reason why some marxist theorists consider Marx's view of progress to be something that moves very slowly, rather than by revolutionary incidents causing change.

Perhaps this is one cause of the difficulties in the 'process of identification' love detective is describing here

this process of identification of, and revolt against, the essential nature of the system to be replaced would then lay the foundations for whatever system that replaces it, through its own negation - only then would I say that the process of mapping out what an alternative might look like could purposefully and democratically begin to happen - and it would belong to the mass of people involved in such an activity to decide how they want to arrange things, not us who would be dinosaurs from another age, holding them back

 

[kittyP]

Once upon a time we needed trade and money in order to make a living and create tools that would help us in these tasks. Nowadays however trade and money only seem to complicate this process.

We need continuous monetary growth in order for our economies to grow, yet that is totally at odds with our environmental impact. How can you extract growth from an environment that is in decline?

We have enough food and clean water to feed everyone happily yet the monetary process ensures that we have constant war and famine in order to excite competition?

We have ever more intuitive and productive software and systems negating the need for human interaction yet want full employment?

We have to produce products that have built in obsolescence in order to sell more, hell, my oven has only lasted 4 years yet my parents one bought in the seventies lasted 20+.
We upgrade our phones nearly every 2 years in order to get the latest technology, yet the latest technology is stifled in order to create yet more demand.

It's doing my head in and it seems the time has come to ask these questions surely?

All I can say to this is that it genuinely fucks my head up too.
There is no sense just drestruction and decline.
I am not in a good place mentally so melancholy and dispare is my thing right now.

But, something will have to give eventually but I just hope it doesn't mean

 

[kittyP]

Sorry, reading back you guys are so much better educated and eloquent than me but, even if my last post sounded glib and maybe even down right dumb, that's how I feel right now.
Sorry

 

[phildwyer]

something has to exist before it can have an idea no?

Not "for us," no.

 

[phildwyer]

I don't see any alternative to money, tbh. Money is a pretty good idea, all things told. The problem isn't money per se, but who controls it, imo. The problem isn't money, but ownership.

No, the problem is usury, as Jusali said.

 

[butchersapron]

Not dialectic, recursive. Dialectics inevitably implies connotations of difference (anti-/thesis) and conflict, provoking the kind of discursive materialism that generates dead-end discussions about class war. Of course that's a legitimate perspective - exploitation of people and resources is an inevitable consequence of market capitalism - but what the perspective of recursion offers is the prospect for consideration of cultural development. Beyond synergies between ideas and material conditions, it's important to consider that neither of these are necessarily unlimited fields of possibility. In principle they might be, but there's an issue of consciousness-through-reflection. The binaries of dialectic materialism belong to simpler times when linear progression was considered as the simple outcome of opposition between two opposing forces. Complexity theory highlights the much more fuzzy overall outcomes generated by multiple factors, producing a variety of pressure points at different rates. Dialectics is essentially a representational model. We're now much more sophisticated (as the OP says) in predicting and mapping the determinants of change. Seems a shame to bring it all the way back to class war.

In any case, surely the problem is that it's very difficult to generate new ideas between the interplay of ideas and material conditions because present culture tends to dictate the determinants - the language? - in which ideas are articulated. This is perhaps one reason why some marxist theorists consider Marx's view of progress to be something that moves very slowly, rather than by revolutionary incidents causing change.

Perhaps this is one cause of the difficulties in the 'process of identification' love detective is describing here

This new idea sounds remarkably like old toss that was dead before Marx even started writing.

 

[Blagsta]

Not dialectic, recursive. Dialectics inevitably implies connotations of difference (anti-/thesis) and conflict, provoking the kind of discursive materialism that generates dead-end discussions about class war. Of course that's a legitimate perspective - exploitation of people and resources is an inevitable consequence of market capitalism - but what the perspective of recursion offers is the prospect for consideration of cultural development. Beyond synergies between ideas and material conditions, it's important to consider that neither of these are necessarily unlimited fields of possibility. In principle they might be, but there's an issue of consciousness-through-reflection. The binaries of dialectic materialism belong to simpler times when linear progression was considered as the simple outcome of opposition between two opposing forces. Complexity theory highlights the much more fuzzy overall outcomes generated by multiple factors, producing a variety of pressure points at different rates. Dialectics is essentially a representational model. We're now much more sophisticated (as the OP says) in predicting and mapping the determinants of change. Seems a shame to bring it all the way back to class war.

In any case, surely the problem is that it's very difficult to generate new ideas between the interplay of ideas and material conditions because present culture tends to dictate the determinants - the language? - in which ideas are articulated. This is perhaps one reason why some marxist theorists consider Marx's view of progress to be something that moves very slowly, rather than by revolutionary incidents causing change.

Perhaps this is one cause of the difficulties in the 'process of identification' love detective is describing here

I never have a clue what you're on about. Can you talk normally? What makes you think class war is irrelevant? It's the main event!