SPGB
- Thread starter Proper Tidy
- Start date
Proper Tidy
Arsed
This is sci-fi. Unlimited growth? The only way there could ever be unlimited growth under globalised capitalism is if their was an unlimited resource of workers, natural resources and 'new markets' to exploit - unless your guff about the universe leads you to believe that we will soon be enslaving alien races and mining kryptonite from shafts in the Eumenides mountains of Mars then surely even you can grasp that it just isn't sustainable!
A system that fundamentally relies upon economic exploitation can never and will never provide milk and honey for all. The majority of capitalists realise this, they're just looking after their own interests - but you evangelical so-called libertarian Chicago loons are a different breed. How do you fool yourself into this crap?
Capitalism can develop all the green technology it likes, but it is capitalism itself driving the exploitation of natural resources for economic gain not need, so it won't make a blind bit of difference.
Capitalism can provide all the aid, and loans, and charity it likes, but it is capitalism itself which exploits these same poor people in order to extract surplus value, or profit. Capitalism is the cause of inequality and poverty; capitalism cannot resolve itself.
Forget the Hayek shit and get in the real world.
You can have unlimited growth through recylcing as well, the same resources but the growth comes from constantly remaking and moulding them for new uses. We can allready travel in space, how long before we a mining the moon? It's not that far fetched, we get solar energy on space stations allready.
Of course Capital invests to make a profit, but it also focuses energy and resources into developing industry where there was none. Clothes, medicine and technology are all produced more cheaply for people so more people can gain access to them.
Nobody makes anything and then sells the things they haven't made on Ebay? Scams like or we all start dealing in 70's clothes and Star Wars figures. Can we measure the new global currency in Storm Troopers and Luke Skywalkers?
Space is ace. It's where Han Solo lives in the Millenium Falcon. I never had a Millenium Falcon although I did once get food poisoning after eating at Millenium Chicken but that isn't in space or on the internet but lots of places are. Ebaying Starwars figures and buying take away from web2.0 fast food joints in Uganda. It's the future.
Did Craig Venter come from space with his magic space market where profit isn't the motive for doing stuff but saving the world is? It's great if he has because otherwise if saving the world doesn't become profitable before it's too late to save the world then all the best ideas in the world won't be worth a Han Solo with original blaster.
Gravediggers
New Member
What most people understand to by our human nature is that we are hard-wired to be aggressive, greedy, selfish, territorial, possessive, etc. And they take these traits to present a barrier to obtaining socialism. If this was indeed the case how do we explain the other side of the coin so to speak? For there are plenty examples of humans being caring, co-operative, placid, sharing, etc. Obviously, our human nature is not fixed to the extent to what is being suggested and further it makes no distinction between our nature and our behaviour.
Depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in our behavioural responses are variable, flexible and adaptable to the specific situation. For instance, a study was carried out in the USA where students were given the roles of prisoners and guards in a disused local prison. Because of the harm the guards were inflicting on the prisoners the study had to be shut down early. The guards had formed the impression that in order to control the prisoners continual repression was the only solution.
Need I say more?
Proper Tidy
Arsed
But you are ignoring the basic nature of capitalism - this is la la land stuff. Capitalism is all about making a profit, whether the means of making that profit is useful, beneficial or sustainable, or not.
To use your example - clothes, medicine and technology are produced primarily to make a profit, not for their usefulness, which leads to pharmaceuticals jealously guarding their patents, leading to prices that are too expensive for the poorest people, who are denied access to treatment by their own economic conditions. The pharmaceuticals are just playing the game though; if profit is your primary motive then it makes perfect sense.
It's also the same reason so much labour, science and funding goes into developing cosmetics, when if profit were removed and judged objectively for social usefulness would be much better directed at finding cheap and plentiful medical treatments for the many diseases and conditions that kill millions of poor people every year.
Technology likewise is driven by the pursuit of profit; so those with the means of production put their research into making a smaller mobile phone - profitable, yes, but not the most socially useful of developments.
And clothing is produced so cheaply because it is made in sweat-shops by contractors to contractors to contractors to multinationals; and those workers are kept dirt-poor by undisguised wage-slavery.
This is fucking simple stuff. Saying capitalism can cure these ills is as silly as claiming we'll all be saved by scientology.
Gravediggers
New Member
If this was indeed the case how do you explain the 2 billion people who are not plugged into your global market. Those who live on less than $2 a day and are unable to afford a telephone call let alone a computer. What about the people who have no alternative other than to live and work on the local landfill site where their only access to global market is when they hand over their measly pickings to the gang-master of the tip.
How you arrive at the conclusion that monopolies are going to allow themselves to be undercut takes the biscuit. Monopolies by definition control the market on their specific product(s), they decide what is sold, how it is sold, where it is sold, how much is sold and who sells it.
Lets not get carried away for this research is still in its early stages and has yet to be peer reviewed before we can reach any conclusion on its application.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
just to clarify this statement... you're not tom cruise are you?
Proper Tidy
Arsed
just to clarify this statement... you're not tom cruise are you?
Yes I am
Gravediggers
New Member
Can I have your autograph?
Proper Tidy
Arsed
$100
Gravediggers
New Member
Whats the exchange rate on that and will I get a signed picture of you along side a cut out of Ron Howard? Smiling of course.
They're still part of the global market: where does the waste come from? What happens to the metal/paper/plastic collected? The number of people that genuinely exist outside global capitalist trade is statistically insignificant.
Gravediggers
New Member
Yes I agree they are part of the global market. The recycling of the global waste is a huge business employing thousands in the sorting and breakdown of the various products. And not without its obvious hazards regarding toxins and contamination.
The point I was making is that they have little access to the global market in the terms which moon23 stated. Their pockets are just not deep enough to enable them to buy the commodities he mentioned. In fact for all their efforts there are no guarantees they will get enough to eat alone a living wage. When I see doco's of people living and working and even being born on the rubbish tips of the world it not only makes my stomach turn but also makes me more determined than ever that capitalism must go!
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
If only the so easily duped working class would listen to your words of wisdom; set us free GD, set us free!
Louis MacNeice
p.s. While the glaring contradiction between your last two paragraphs, might be needed to hold together the impossibilist day dream, it doesn't cut it as a coherent argument.
Well, for starters I suggest you read Marshall Sahlins Stone Age Economics. the original affluent society Sahlins makes the pertinent point that there are two ways to affluence - producing more and wanting less. Hunter gatherer societies achieved affluence, argues Sahlins, by opting for the latter. All their needs were catered for with a mimnimum amount of labour and much leisure. In fact the accumulation of wealth was looked down upon as positively dysfunctional to a nomadic way of life. By contrast, the industrial prole lives a life of impoverished insecurity which all the anxious pursuit of mod cons and the latest gadgets cannot ever erase. Playing the catch-up game (keeping up with Jones' ) is futile in a society that not only bases itself upon , but celebrates, material inequality. Its a case of the snake trying to devour its own tail. More wealth does not neceessarily bring more happiness. It is our relationship to it that matters and this stems from our relationship to one another. The kind of society we live in.
Capitalism needs workers to feel incomplete and constantly unsatisfied. It is the whiplash that gets them not only to want to consume more (from which businesses profit) but also (as a consequence of having to pay for that increased consumption), to work harder and to put their noses more firmly to the grind stone to pay off the debt. Its a soulless treadmill weve got ourselves onto. In the early 20th century the US government sponsored large scale propaganda programmes urging people to consume more as a matter of "patriotic duty". The same thing is happening in China today.
Thorstein Veblen in his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) argued that in different kinds of societies you have diffierent ways of expressing status. In a hunter gatherer society it was the skill of the hunter or the environmental wisdom of the gatherer that attracted the esteem of others. In industrial capitalism, Veblen argued, it was the conspicuous consumption of wealth that matters and this stemmed from the nature of capitalism itself - its inner dynamic, its restless drive to expand without limit as a consequence of its economic competition. Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar observation in his Democracy in America talking about the role of money in democratic capitalist societies by comparison with old aristocratic societies of the ancien regime:
Men living in democratic times have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it...When all members of a community are independent of, or indifferent to, each other the co-operation of each of them can be obtained only by paying for it. When the reverence that belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition and profession no longer distinguish men or scarcely distinguish them; hardly anything but money remains to create strong marked differences between them and to raise some of them above the common level. The distinction originating in wealth is increased by the disappearance or dimunation of all other distinctions. Among aristocratic nations money reaches only to a few points on the vast circle of man's desires; in democracies it seems to lead to all
So to get to the point of your question I dont think human nature is a barrier to socialism. We havent much changed as a species since the time when we lived in small hunter gatherer groups (the vast bulk of humankind's existence). Our human nature is essentially that of being social animals. What has changed - dramatically - is the kind of society we live in. As Ive tried to demonstrate, different societies have different norms of behaviour, different yardsticks by which they value the individual.
In socialism individuals will have completely free access to the goods and services they need - there wil be no monetary or barter transaction mediating their appropriation of these things - and they will freely and voluntarily cooperate to produce these things. This fundamental change in our basic economic relationships will, I am convinced, totally revolutionsie our whole attitude towards material wealth and make greed pointless and silly (like I said , you dont drink more water than you need from a public tap just because its free and in abundant supply). The need to feel esteeemed and valued is a fundamental human need but in a socialist society when everyone has free access , the link between status and material consumption will be irretrievable severed. It would simply not be possible to claim that you are a better person than someone else on the grounds that you possess a posh car and a fancy house. The only way in which you can attract the esteem of your fellows is through your contribution to society , not what you take out of it.
Grreed is a symptom of scarcity and scarcity is a function not only of demand but also sipply. We can alter our demand for material goods by changing the meaning we attach to them - by no longer seeing them as indicators of social status in the way I suggested above. . But also we can increase the supply of useful material goods by inter alia eliminating the massive structural wastage of socially useless production that goes on in capitalism. As I said before, the elimination of money and all the kinds of occupations related to money will effectively mean far more resoruces, material and human, will become available for socially useful prodiuction, for directly meeting human needs.
In short , socialism will be an affluent society in the way that capitalism can never be. Capitalism requires us always to feel relatively impoverished. It can never permit us to feel that "enough is enough" since this would radically undermine the whole basis upon which its system of status diffenrentiation is based. Socialism on the other will mean we can comfortably want less as well as enabling us to produce more of the uselful things in life - until an eqilibrium of sorts has been reached.
Jean-Luc
Well-Known Member
But not for the reasons you think. According to Larry Gambone in his pamphlet The Impossibilists:
Footnote 1 is interesting as it introduces some of our familiar friends here:
Yes there is poverty, mainly in developing countries where an industrial capitalist society is still emerging. If you think that poverty would be removed under a Socalist system you are mistaken, people have suffered and starved in Socialist countries all over the world.
The profit motive best drives new technology and ways of doing things that bring people out of poverty. Sadly untill we learn to better harvest resources and research new types of energy production there are going to be some shortages.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
All of the above from the SPGB is religion, not politics. And it's classical pre-marx utopian socialism. Utopian to the core. Posit a new Jerusalem and say that's what we want, abandoning the present for the future in a way that makes time stop dead 110 years ago. Without some sort of insertion in the modern world there is no politics here only a pretence at politics. With no roots in the ongoing struggles you cannot have any sense of the possibilities they open, or indeed the dangers they present (see your complacent attitude towards historical fascism). I often think this is why the Socialist Standard features science so heavily, the SPGB sees no social forces capable of leading to the promised land so fall back on science proving their case. somehow
With no path from today to your mansion on the hill you're reduced to simply declaiming that it's possible and that you have the sole right to declare how it's possible. You don't, but what this does then allow you to do is to hide your apolticism behind ideas such as the transition to socialism must be democratic (a position not at all unique to the the SPGB no matter how often the suggestion is made) and (here's the really insulting bit) that it must be made by fully conscious workers - then you abrogate to yourself the role of both disseminator and judge of that consciousness.
It's genius piece of self-preserving dogma (it'll be denied the SPGB see themselves in this role, but the hostility clause and following paragraph of the declaration of principles gives the lie to this). Of course, every group needs its racket - this just happens to be the SPGB's one.
It's wrong though, it's quite clear from history - ongoing history, not history that stopped 100 years ago - that struggle transforms consciousness, there's no need to be 100% already formally signed up the SPGBs principles for your actions to help bring about change to both your social conditions and social understanding. The late Marty Glaberman put this best for me:
So, with that central strut of the SPGB's particular case kicked away i do hope you now do the decent thing, shut down your operation and re-enter into the lists of real life. Off the merry-go-round comrades. Off the merry-go-round.
With no path from today to your mansion on the hill you're reduced to simply declaiming that it's possible and that you have the sole right to declare how it's possible. You don't, but what this does then allow you to do is to hide your apolticism behind ideas such as the transition to socialism must be democratic (a position not at all unique to the the SPGB no matter how often the suggestion is made) and (here's the really insulting bit) that it must be made by fully conscious workers - then you abrogate to yourself the role of both disseminator and judge of that consciousness.
It's genius piece of self-preserving dogma (it'll be denied the SPGB see themselves in this role, but the hostility clause and following paragraph of the declaration of principles gives the lie to this). Of course, every group needs its racket - this just happens to be the SPGB's one.
It's wrong though, it's quite clear from history - ongoing history, not history that stopped 100 years ago - that struggle transforms consciousness, there's no need to be 100% already formally signed up the SPGBs principles for your actions to help bring about change to both your social conditions and social understanding. The late Marty Glaberman put this best for me:
So, with that central strut of the SPGB's particular case kicked away i do hope you now do the decent thing, shut down your operation and re-enter into the lists of real life. Off the merry-go-round comrades. Off the merry-go-round.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What's the point being made here?
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Open your eyes mate.
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
The points being to impose a particular definition of impossibilist and then co-opt supporters; it's not quite up there with the attempted 'dead Russians' trick tried earlier, by it has some of the same qualities.
Louis MacNeice
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
For profit.... What is profit??? Understand what profit is, you will understand the impossibillity of the above.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
You know Gambone is a proudhonist style mutualist, an individualist don't you? Careful how you read him. And you do know the groups he was referring to above were not the SPGB but those who rejected the SPGB's style purism - despite LG's attempt to run them together?
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
There is also the small matter of the historic specificity which Gambone touches on in the last paragraph; as far as I remember Clapham has lost its mines and lumber camps.
Louis MacNeice
The late Marty Glaberman put this best for me:
Quote:
It's essential to reject the idea that nothing can happen until white workers are no longer racist. I don't know what anybody thinks the Russian workers in 1917 were. They were sexist. They were nationalist. A lot of them were under the thumb of the church. But they made a goddamn revolution that began to change them. Whether there's a social explosion or not doesn't depend on any formal attitudes or supporting this particular organisation or that particular organisation.
That one worked out realy well didn't it Butch?
Quote:
It's essential to reject the idea that nothing can happen until white workers are no longer racist. I don't know what anybody thinks the Russian workers in 1917 were. They were sexist. They were nationalist. A lot of them were under the thumb of the church. But they made a goddamn revolution that began to change them. Whether there's a social explosion or not doesn't depend on any formal attitudes or supporting this particular organisation or that particular organisation.
That one worked out realy well didn't it Butch?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
You miss the point entirely - the changes that people brought about in terms of their own individual consciousness, social consciousness and social conditions. Those changes were brought about by self-activity and could have been defended and extended by further struggle (by aggressive defence of organs of w/c control and associated production). They didn't require people to be signed up SPGB members to take place. You can see the same process at work in the anti-poll tax campaign.
You really do need to crawl out of the wreckage of 1917 - the Bolsheviks aren't coming.
You really do need to crawl out of the wreckage of 1917 - the Bolsheviks aren't coming.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
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