A cultural revolution and ecstasy (not China, not drugs ;-)

Kitty Empire wrote a review of the Rolling Stones concert in London the other night.
Guardian Stones O2 concert review

There were a lot of unappreciative and blind comments. So I wrote:

What happened in Britain in the sixties (building on the US fifties) was a cultural revolution - and real revolutions generate an energy that smashes the old and galvanizes everything for decades! I mean just take the three big British bands - Beatles, Stones and Who. Original stuff poured out of them like lava! And the Who is being appropriated with a straight face by prime time Hollywood  (CSI) for where we are now contemporary feeling.
And the Stones are still filling arenas - not like some Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry memorial but with a straight face. Overlaid with the historical glory.
This is a great review cos it gets the thrill. The "gimlet-eyed professionalism of the Stones" is noted - and how would they have survived otherwise? - but then the volcano belches and we get "a frisson that goes beyond the enduring thrill of hearing the ancient tablets of the rock law played aloud by their inscribers". Florence gets it, and is alive and quivering with the moment - alive, now.
Revolutionary music (any kind - Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Little Richard, Velvet Underground, Verdi, Violeta Parra) transfixes you, shoots a spike through you to an eternal present of living fire.
Pseuds' Corner is a graveyard full of broken tombstones to ecstasy. "Here lies ecstasy. RIpppppppp" Fail every time... Kitty E isn't trying to entomb ecstasy. She knows it ;-)
The review acknowledges its presence - and the way the Stones have done their bit to liberate it from convention and petrifaction despite their shitty Tory shtick. Despite the union jacks and the gimlet eyes.

Revolutionary priorities - human rights and combating bureaucracy?

On my translators' discussion list, PF replied to me:

You use the word red herring a little too liberally. If the protection
of human and individual rights and preventing the abuse of power by a
ruling party/bureaucracy are not to be the _first_ priorities in a
socialist revolution, you can revolute without me.

And I responded:

There's a place for people who have priorities besides state power in revolutions. Obviously. And obviously everybody chooses how to get involved - it can be purely political - you can be for the new regime or against it, or socio-economic too - for the new state or against it. And you can choose to keep your head down and your fingers crossed, as Stalin did during October when he was skulking in the editorial offices of Pravda preaching conciliation with the Provisional Government. And you can scoot off to your dacha and sit it out. 

Revolutions happen, almost regardless of our priorities and wishes. You can't prioritize or wish a revolution into being. And you can't wish away the violence involved. As a worker you'd be mad to be a pacifist while the counter-revolutionary white guards are shooting at you. 

The organization, vitality, democratic health and programmatic clarity of the forces involved are what determines the fate of issues like human rights during a period of revolutionary upheaval. In general, revolutionary armies have codes of conduct requiring humane treatment of civilians and enemy combatants -  often on pain of death for violations - while counter-revolutionary armies behave despicably. Pissing on enemy corpses, mocking enemy cultural values, raping and stealing, etc. Chiang Kai Shek and the Kuo Min Tang reactionaries are perfect examples of this.

When it comes to post-conflict social life the same goes. If there is a low level of organizational vitality, democracy and programmatic clarity in the leading political forces, you're in for trouble. Sometimes regardless of your priorities and wishes. It is ridiculous and unhistorical to foist the blame for the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party in power on Lenin and Trotsky. Neither creating an intelligence service nor putting down a serious mutiny are exceptionable matters in a situation of extreme social tension, let alone a war. When you have a series of deliberate constitutional changes aimed at reducing broad popular participation and increasing the power of a bureaucracy and executive working in cahoots, then you have an exceptional threat to popular rights and the healthy exercise of power. In the final year of Lenin's life it is very clear from his writings that he regarded the bureaucratic cancer creeping over the government and party-political and social life as a very high priority. In his "testament" he warns explicitly of Stalin's flaws.

Creating and maintaining a healthy political regime in a political party isn't easy. It doesn't get any easier if people with healthy instincts turn their backs on politics because it's hot in the kitchen and pots go flying. Parties (despite what Tomás claims) are where politics are forged. The heat and steel come from the masses and their interests, but the weapons (programme and strategic plan) and leaders come from the parties. 

Like I said, revolutions happen. We can choose to revolute along with them, or against them, or stand and watch. They are mass events. Mass mobilizations. You don't have to go around knocking on doors to get people out to make a revolution. That's the whole character of them - they are social eruptions. If I have a programme and leadership to offer for a revolution, then the masses in their assemblies will decide whether to take them or not. As happened throughout 1917 in Russia during the revolutionary upheaval between February and November, when the Soviets were massively democratic assemblies of workers, peasants and others who thrashed over a huge number of political and organizational matters. The victory of the Bolshevik programme and party was in no sense a manoeuvre or a coup. The Soviets were the great centres of mass decision-making where the weapons and leaders of the revolution were selected in open competition. The Mensheviks screwed up and were rejected (as was Stalin's conciliatory line towards them).

Plenty of Mensheviks ran away from the revolution when they lost favour. But it was no great hardship for many of their leaders, they just exchanged an editorial office in Moscow for one in New York and got lionized by the imperialists (Kerensky, for instance). 

There is ample prima facie proof of the popularity of the Bolshevik leadership of the revolution with the Russian people in the mere fact that over a hundred million Russians followed them in war and faced extreme hardship for three years to chase out and keep out Russian (Ukrainian etc) reactionaries and imperialist invaders. There were never enough Bolshevik commissars to whip the peasants into doing this by brute force - the Tsarist knout was a thing of the past. The peasants and peasant-workers in the army, for Christ sake, had thrown down their weapons and deserted from the Tsar's army only the previous year! And yet they took up arms again and followed Trotsky's strategic guidance and fought successfully!

Please, Paul, try and get some perspective into this period of Russian history. If the not-even-socialist half-measures of Allende and the popular upsurge of his day in power are inspiring, before Kissinger and Pinochet smashed them, then surely the real social and economic changes that took place between 1917 and 1920 in Russia are even more inspiring, especially since the many Kissingers and Pinochets of the time were soundly thrashed and sent home whimpering with their tails between their legs.

Some discussions prompted by Einstein's 1949 essay "Why Socialism?"

My translators' discussion list is grappling with some fundamentals of social development and history at the moment. The perspective is lost in a fog of confusion - appalled at the lies and brutality of power in general, especially in the overt cruelty of authoritarian regimes in the small hangers-on of imperialism (like Eritrea, for instance), but unable to differentiate between societies in different stages of historical development (the US versus China versus Cuba, for instance), and totally unwilling to look beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy for a way forward. Totally unwilling to see any difference between the valuable aspects of bourgeois democracy (due process and freedom of association and expression, for instance) and the criminal abuse of power by bourgeois democratic governments who would dearly love to do away with due process and freedom of expression.

PF posted Albert Einstein's excellent essay  Why Socialism? Monthly Review 1, May 1949  to stir the flames a bit. He introduced it with some remarks that reappear later in this post.

The article is quite stunning in its historical context of postwar US paranoia and disbelief in relation to the growth and to the bourgeoisie inexplicable resilience and strength of the non-capitalist world. Written in the year of the victory of the Chinese Revolution in Asia and just a few months before the outbreak of McCarthyism in the USA, it is very simple, very clear, and very restrained. 

I made the following comment. 

The beauty of this beautiful essay is that Einstein starts from first principles. He doesn't argue from authority. He tries to describe the way human society works in terms of things we can see if we look where he points. He mentions one name - Veblen - to emphasize that humanity is still in a "predatory phase" of development. Wealth - in land or goods - goes to those who own the means of producing it, and that ownership is gained and maintained by conquest and coercion, not free voluntary informed consent. 

His goal is a society run by mutually consenting human beings, consciously planned for the benefit of all. 

To achieve this he wants a "free and unhindered discussion of these problems", which was (and still is to a huge extent) "under a powerful taboo". Which is why he agreed to write this essay for the first issue of the Monthly Review.

P, we should note that he doesn't discuss socialism in the terms you start off with - "never been realized", "never been given a chance", "a de facto failure". He discusses it in the terms of how society works when it produces wealth and in its political management of this wealth. He points to factors here that should be redressed if commonly celebrated human and social values are to be upheld. Part of the free and unhindered discussion involves describing the way different societies and mass movements and parties work in relation to these factors. Basically, is a society good, and how? If not, why not and to what degree? If something needs changing, how can this be done? Notice that Einstein doesn't ask if the predatory aspects of society should be changed. He takes that for granted as a matter of first principle - unlike the man he quotes who is indifferent to the well-being and even survival of humanity.

I've got a question. What actual impact can an essay like this have in changing the world (human society) for the better?

 DV raised the issue of central planning. I decided to whack this bogey on the nose, even if it's more of a conditioned reflex than a reasoned objection (or perhaps - given the character of the discussion and its context - precisely because it's a thoughtless automatic defence response). I wrote: 

Central planning is what every capitalist applies with extreme rigour within his own sphere of control. Ever heard of "synergy"? That's benefits of central planning. 

If central planning is applied to a whole society, we get the ultimate in synergy. There are no "externalities" distorting social costs in relation to company costs. All the life-cycle and indirect costs of say the automobile or nuclear industries are computed directly within this sphere of production. It makes a big difference to the calculations, and the kind of decisions taken. (This is not quite true, actually, unless "whole society" is the world economy - until we get there, there will be some externalities between different societies.)

Rejecting "central planning" as a communist evil is pure shibboleth. Utterly meaningless. If a single mother refuses to "centrally plan" her resources, she will not only suffer and watch her kids starve, but she'll be attacked viciously by the goons who police the behaviour and morals of poor people.

A central plan decided by free universal participatory democratic means is a good idea.

It should also be obvious by now to everybody that capitalist anarchy (ideologically rigid adherence to NO rational democratic central planning) is a catastrophic failure, that not even capitalists believe in any longer. They all scream out for planning (except the Economist which believes in Adam Smith's hidden hand the way the Archbishop of Canterbury believes in Jesus) - but it's always planning that serves their interests. And as we see in the EU, this is a ludicrous delusion.

Einstein is worth taking seriously.

 D insisted: 

So how to go about centrally planning, to use one specific example, home washing machines?

Or do we centrally decide no one needs their own washing machine, a horrible waste of resources?

Or do we centrally plan creating thousands of competing models?

Or a Ford-style, East German-style, you can have any color you want, as long as it is black?

What centralized democratic process can make this specific decision?

How much does my washing machine cost me? How do you determine the price? (You could measure in worker hours, but the number of unit-hours will depend on centrally-planned quantity.)

I think you'll probably steer me towards some vague everything-will-work-out-after-the-revolution answer. I don't need "the" answer. But I would like some idea of how this central planning "could" work in a very specific case.

I responded:

First you see how urgent various things are. Once you've decided priorities together, you get down to tackling them.

And you don't look at the techniques or machines before you look at the problems you have to solve. If you have a big problem (a priority) then you throw it out to be debated and sorted out at meetings, conferences etc at all levels, from street to neighbourhood to workplace to city, region, etc. 

Washing clothes might be such a problem. Brainstorming will have produced preliminary approaches and proposals and perspectives. Water usage, energy consumption, chemicals, health issues, location issues etc will have been considered, and will be thrashed out further.

Assuming a residential area with largish households (4+) and small dwellings it's very likely that a system of communal laundry facilities would be alternative number one. In Rinkeby in Stockholm there's a world-famous laundry facility with dozens of excellent modern machines for fast, efficient washing and drying, generous booking parameters, a cafe, a shop, several attendants, etc. It replaced a system of smaller, reasonably efficient but not very pleasant or friendly laundry rooms, that could get run down and messy and cause conflicts. In addition to such facilities, some heavy-duty washing (sports, work) could be managed by providing on-site laundries.

Assuming there's a case to be made for individual machines (convenience, space, plenty of water and energy) then the task would be designing a range of machines to a range of specifications. For this committees consisting of producers, consumers, etc would thrash out some alternatives. There would quite likely be several machines ready for production - by different producers, in different regions, say - so these could be thrown on a market and consumer choice deployed to whittle things down to a manageable selection. 

It's likely that a lot of consumer requirements could be met by just varying colours on offer for one type of machine. Or variable spin speeds in one machine.

The big thing will be that the process is far less blind than it is today. And since today is secretly socialist under the scabby capitalist skin anyhow, what with planning and consumer/stakeholder consultation in many cases, then the cultural dislocation won't break anyone's neck (еxcept the profiteer's). 

But we really don't have to give orders to freely cooperating people as to how they settle on solutions or decide things. We know how we would like to do it, and our job is to ensure it happens the way we think is best.

Whenever people have been liberated from traditional oppressive constraints regarding how to improve living conditions and make a neighbourhood better to live in, however, the results have always been above expectations - inspirational. Examples like improving the slums in Santiago de Chile under the short-lived Allende regime, for instance, which wasn't even socialist, but liberated an awful lot of creativity and constructive activity on the part of young people. Public hygiene, elementary sewage facilities, literacy campaigns, schooling, public murals...

What far too many "non-political" people worry about as consequences of socialism are as often as not consequences of capitalism. We project our own nightmares on to others - this is the basic situation of US culture today as seen in horror movies, dystopias and the kind of behaviour the films make the bad guys do but that the writers have learnt all about here at home. 

They're also the consequences of the rule of counter-revolutionary thugs who have usurped non-capitalist systems - the Stalinist and Maoist bureaucracies, for instance. Nothing to do with socialism.

Or the antics of bourgeois union leaders (Jimmy Hoffa or whoever) who use classical authoritarian domination strategies to strangle democracy and socialism.

Given the difficulties of preparing for freedom in advance (most people are very empirical and will dismiss the possibility of freedom as utopian until it bites them in the arse) then David's "everything-will-work-out-after-the-revolution" answer is quite likely the most adequate one. I mean, I could carve what I've just written in gilded letters on tablets of stone and insist that everyone obeys me after the revolution, couldn't I? And they all would, wouldn't they :-D

 P returned to his introductory remarks: 

If Einstein is worth taking seriously, then the questions he chooses
to end his essay with are worth taking seriously: "how is it possible, in view 

of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to

prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How
can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a
democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"

Your response to this essay passes over these key questions. And from
an empirical point of view, the issues I introduced the essay with,
namely that some argue that socialism has never been practiced and
others that wherever and whenever it has been practiced it has proven
to be a failure are of crucial importance. The question of central
planning is closely related to that of the "centralization of
political and economic power" mentioned by Einstein and also to the
danger of an "all-powerful and overweening" bureaucracy that tramples
the "rights of the individual" also mentioned by Einstein at the close
of his essay.

I wrote: 

Bureaucracies flourish in periods of decline and stagnation, politically speaking. When masses are mobilized and fighting for shared demands, bureaucrats are like fish out of water. So the best answer is to never stop fighting for shared demands. This way those best at fighting for the demands will take the lead (by example, selection, re-selection etc) and bureaucrats will organize things like printing leaflets and handing them out.

If conditions lead to an ebb in mobilization and momentum is lost, then there is a period of conflict between healthy democratic leadership and bureaucratic leadership. This is a sensitive period and we have very very little experience of dealing well with its challenges. 

A classic measure that always works, however, is to make every elected position subject to the right of instant recall. You screw up, you get replaced. An even more powerful measure is to restrict the payment made to elected officials to an average experienced worker's income. Nothing deters careerists more than an absence of privilege and the possibility of being knocked off the ladder.

However, these measures must first be put in place to work. And careerists and bureaucrats hate them, so getting them in place isn't easy. And careerists and bureaucrats work non-stop to dilute or remove them.

In bad times, bureaucrats and careerists will have been in control for ages and their privileges and routines of organizational control will be deeply entrenched. And it is very difficult to make any progress during such periods, of course. 

I did deal with the question of socialism in practice in relation to Einstein's essay. He looks at real-life, currently existing social practice and whether it's acceptable. He thinks it isn't, and needs replacing. Current practice in his essay is overwhelmingly capitalist. The world system. He sees it as systematically coercive and unjust, separating privileged individuals from human society as a whole. For him there is no alternative to abolishing capitalism if we want a just, cooperative society. And socialism is the planned, democratic alternative. Public ownership of land and production, democratic, cooperative planning and work.

We can't just sit back and let others build socialism for us, though. If we don't get stuck in, others will, and their interests will trump ours. 

Above all we can't accept imperialist capitalism as a natural and inevitable condition we have no control over. We make our own history. But not in conditions of our own choosing. Our job is to make our conditions as favourable as possible for realizing our desires. 

Bureaucratic counter-revolutionaries like Stalin and Mao didn't rise to power by magic. Every step they took resulted from a struggle between competing interests and group decisions. Their interests were narrow and not very attractive, and the decisions were all hard fought. It didn't have to happen the way it did.

Today there is a dual challenge facing humanity.

Socially the great challenge is capitalism. Remove it, and society immediately becomes viable and beneficial.

Politically the great challenge is the non-socialist leadership of the great masses of humanity - the working class especially. Remove the Social-Democrats and Stalinists (including Maoists) from the leaderships of labour parties, trade unions, and non-capitalist states, and the strength and energy of the working people will be channelled into removing capitalism.

Einstein was writing about the social challenge above all. If you don't accept the need for a socialist human society there's no point in even considering the political questions relating to bureaucracy and the trampling of human rights. You can whinge about injustice and arrogance etc, but the history of the past seventy years (say since world war 2) shows that you're pissing into the wind for all the good it does.

Next P raised the question of "free lunches" and "getting people to work and live

together without monetary incentives and private ownership".

I continued:

The strong force that binds human society together is the quid-pro-quo. When it comes to producing stuff we need to live, all day every day (and a lot else), the four fundamental formulas of Roman Law hold:

Do, ut des -- I give that you give; 

Do, ut facias -- I give, that you do; 

Facio, ut des -- I do, that you give; and 

Facio, ut facias -- I do, that you do.

If we do something and don't receive an equivalent back, we get extremely pissed off, and can kill people. If someone takes without giving back, the same goes. There is absolutely nothing wishy-washy or fluffy about human interchange when it comes to creating and exchanging wealth (necessities plus surplus). 

Each society has its own norms of value to judge equivalence by, and these norms are rooted in the economic and cultural level of development of society, and its hierarchical structure. They are stronger than most taboos. 

This is why only Marx has been able to grasp the whole process of economics as a system of organizing the production and distribution of wealth from nomadic family groups at the mercy of extreme scarcity and necessity through tribal forms to agriculture and urban civilizations, slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and projecting forwards to socialism. 

This is one of the reasons for calling Marxism scientific socialism. It sees the workings of a mode of production in precisely the most elementary fundamental terms required. Work and reward, in terms of equivalence. In bourgeois society the equivalence is measured in terms of value, more precisely exchange value - the amount of labour expended in society to produce the commodities it needs to consume in order to survive and reproduce itself, and to accumulate. You can't produce more value than the total work done by humanity in a given period of time. If you produce more goods in a given period, they have correspondingly less value each.

Basing himself on insights in Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx showed how these fundamentals gave rise to the whole system of capitalist economics - and how the process was irreversibly moving towards its own dissolution. The profit drive spurring capitalist production proved to be a more powerful stimulant to production than the various kinds of greed for power or goods under slavery and feudalism, so the capitalist system outgrew them and swept them aside. And produced productive capital on such a scale that it became impossible to employ it fully and retain a sufficiently high rate of profit to stimulate further investment. Marx knew this, and observed and described the process in the mid-1860s, writing the third volume of Capital. The greater the capital employed, the smaller the rate of profit in any surplus value generated. Remember - the value in a society (economy) is ever and always the total of useful human labour expended. In other words it's damn near constant. The capital used, however, which represents lots of old, used labour (big machines lasting many years) grows and grows. Profit is measured by surplus value in relation to capital. Profit has to shrink. Unless you reduce the capital - by destroying it - which means devaluation or war.

Now, class society has given rise to the bourgeois political set-up - society is run by the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, in its own interest (maximizing profit) against  the antagonistic interests of the proletariat, the working class (whose main interest is to own what it produces so it is no longer just dependent on selling its ability to work, its labour power, to stay alive).

And since society - always based on the exchange of equivalents - has developed to a point where the profit motive is acting against the interests of humanity as a whole - ie the production and exchange of wealth is deliberately held back by a few to the detriment of the many - a rage is rising in humanity at the violation of the taboos of equivalent exchange. Humanity wants to produce, and it finds itself frustrated - by unemployment, lack of material opportunity, etc - and it wants to exchange its produce for a variety of useful equivalents, in which it is also frustrated. 

However, the rage of the billions of producers (whose labour is being exploited or deliberately prevented) against the tiny percentage of owners of wealth (exploiters and suppressors) runs up against the resistance of these owners, who use their wealth to arm huge forces of killers and slave-drivers against their unarmed class enemy.

And this is where we're at, politically speaking, today.

The bourgeoisie looks very strong, because it is armed to the teeth and because its opponents are unarmed (just watch the news any night - from Greece, say - to see half-a-dozen heavily armed and armoured cops kicking and beating a single unarmed opponent, or in South Africa, shooting unarmed opponents down in cold blood in Marikana). It also has a virtual monopoly on public debate regarding how society works, what justice is, what history is, and so on.

If you consider how much money and how many people and how much effort is expended to keep these mind-forged manacles in place, however, or to keep the lid on the boiling pot to stop it boiling over, you'll agree that the bourgeoisie is getting a very bad deal for its money. So far it has been able to keep the lid on the pressure cooker, just about. But it's less and less a pressure cooker and more and more a huge steel boiler at a power plant that's already glowing red hot and is trembling ominously.

It's about to rupture, historically speaking. You can see the steel bulging and weakening, so to say, in North Africa and the Middle East. Ruptures have previously occurred in other parts of the plant (Russia, 1917, Yugoslavia 1945, China 1949). Cracks have appeared throughout the colonial world since world war 2 - in Africa and Asia in particular. 

Human society cannot operate on a systematic basis of non-equivalence for any great length of time. A greater degree of inequality has regularly been exchanged (after a period of violent change) for one of less apparent inequality. And when this in turn becomes intolerable it in turn is replaced. 

Someone once described Soviet citizens as ferociously egalitarian. I think this applies to the whole of humanity. Not stupidly equal as in "everyone must have one green jacket and two pairs of red jeans", but deeply equal as in "all men and women are born equal", or  "I do my bit, and it helps you. Now you do your bit, so it can help me."

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" represented a tremendous advance of egalitarianism in relation to feudal economic relations. He was part of the Enlightenment's great battle for justice and knowledge and prosperity against the aristocracy and religion. Once the aristocracy and the church were smashed as ruling forces in society, the weaknesses of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie in relation to universal equality became painfully obvious, and the bourgeoisie was no longer the leading force for progress, as became clear in the revolutions of 1848. 

So, all in all, the way to grow past the destruction and crippledom of our present bourgeois society is NOT to think up utopian enclaves of small farmers and craftsmen minding their own business far from the madding crowd. What we need to do is to break the chains binding us as a class. We are like the slaves rowing a galley for some Roman general and slave-owner. If we break our chains we can throw the slave-owner and his slave-drivers overboard (or put them to work alongside us) and take the ship where we want, to do the carrying we need. 

The capitalists have the power, and are abusing it, demeaning us and covering humanity with blood and filth. We need to take this power from them, clean away their mess, and use the power to make ourselves a world of creative abundance. 

 P insisted some more:

the question of bureaucracy and human rights is
the first to be tackled by anyone purporting to build socialism. Every
de facto attempt to build socialism has been a dismal failure

And I wrote:

Unfortunately for your perspective, Paul, these questions are not the first on the agenda of anyone involved in revolutionary upheavals. The first questions are whose side are you on, and what are you doing to defeat the enemy? 

Your questions are important, and grow in importance as the big questions of power and who holds it and for whose benefit are settled. But they are not the first. The documented history of the October Revolution shows that both Lenin and Trotsky were well aware of the dangers for socialism of bureaucratic despotism. But awareness of a problem doesn't automatically translate into capacity to implement a solution. 

The Cheka, and Kronstadt for that matter, are both red herrings in this regard. Presenting your naked throat to an enemy wanting nothing better than to slice through it is not a policy anyone in a life or death struggle will opt for. 

The forces encouraging the growth of bureaucracy and injustice in the Soviet Union after the end of the civil wars and the repulsion of the imperialist invasions were stronger than the forces operating against them. And they led to a bureaucratic victory that instituted a counter-revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union,  despite the non-capitalist economic foundations. Which in turn distorted the development of the revolutionary workers movement in the world. Leading to innumerable defeats in revolutions (China in the late 20s, Germany and Spain in the 30s, Italy, France and Greece in the 40s, Indonesia, Chile, Iran, etc etc) and in particular the distortions in the regimes running the non-capitalist states that were created in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959. 

The record of de facto non-capitalist societies so far is no indication of any necessary bureaucratic character inherent in any non-capitalist society. The very first thing to note is that none of these de facto societies represents a genuine attempt to build socialism. A non-capitalist economy, yes, a socialist society, no. 

We should at least give a new mode of production as much slack as its immediate predecessor. In the case of socialism, that means capitalism, bourgeois society. In terms of time this would mean roughly a couple of centuries if we take the late medieval city-states of southern Germany and northern Italy as early examples of bourgeois societies. A century hasn't yet passed since 1917.  

The second thing to note is that socialism by generally accepted definition is a worldwide mode of production predicated on a level of production and productivity equal to developed capitalism. We are not there yet, so all non-capitalist states so far have been based on a material foundation inadequate to to socialism. We can speak of proto-socialism, but not socialism as such. It's a bit like expecting a computer using vacuum tubes to perform as well as one using transistors. It can carry out the same operations, sure, but it is slow, inefficient, and frustrating. It doesn't show us what computers are really capable of.

Socialism is the road to the future of humanity. Not seeing this is blinding yourself to the future of humanity. Groping in the dark. And incidentally tying yourself (reluctantly or not, as the case may be) to the coat-tails of imperialist capitalism. In other words flapping around with a close-up view of the Devil's arse.

Alan Watts, beatnik-style enlightenment and liberation today

On FaceBook a video by Alan Watts ("What If Money Was No Object?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=siu6JYqOZ0g ) was recommended. This was the second time I'd seen this happen in a few weeks, so I wrote something caustic about it. This prompted a defence or two, and the following sensible question:

So what do the politicoes have to offer, Choppa? True, it is an illusion fostered by people who have found exactly what they want to do in life that 'you can do anything if you really want to' - an illusion which provides a very convenient explanation for any kind of social deprivation. But the central message of the importance of disregarding society's expectations if we are to get off this pathway to hell on earth - that still rings as true now as when I first heard Watts and others say it. I'm still very glad I got off the treadmill.

Since this illustrated the liberating effect of positions like Watts's back in the 60s, as far as rejecting the demands of established oppressive imperialist bourgeois values and imperatives is concerned, I made the following comment:

The freer you are, the better the choices you make. Feeling trapped is a good start - without it you won't want to be free or care about freedom. Back after ww2 a lot of us kids in the imperialist West felt very trapped and looked for ways out. This became the youth revolution. It started off quite some distance from the search for freedom the working class had been engaged in since the early nineteenth century. In the fifties and early sixties the individual aspects were paramount and the main thing was shaking off the leaden blanket of repression and hypocrisy in relation to social hierarchy and sex - a lot of it was cultural, music, books, poetry. The military religious oppression was combated with pacifism and non-Christian beliefs. Black priests were reviled, unquestioned authority was rejected. The easy solutions were the first big ones -  playful celebrations of individual self-expression. Peace and Love, flower power. Buddhism and the East.

In 1968 the two great lines - negative (reactive) youth revolt and positive (demanding a clear alternative) class revolt converged in the explosions of the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the May rebellions in Europe. Tet bloodied the nose of the US imperialist government, and May 68 severely shook European governments, both imperialist and stalinist.

The explosion was too formless to lead to much constructive change - imperialists and stalinists alike regrouped and a period of immense reactionary pressure began. The 1970s were full of conflicts during the regrouping and working out of the forces unleashed - the US was ejected from Vietnam, the Iranian revolution spat out the imperialist lickspittle Shah, Nicaragua arose against the US, but at the same time ABBA glam and disco sidelined rocknroll, the petty-bourgeois individualist rebels found their own little utopias or succumbed, and after a bumpy ride (winters of discontent, Nixon's impeachment) Thatcher and Reagan came to power and initiated the era of neo-liberal brutality whose fanfare was the Pinoshit coup against Allende's braindead utopian reformism in Chile in 1973.

Since then both the workers movement and the cultural rebellion have been burgeoning but formless - too powerful and too free to stuff back in the bottle, but too dispersed and disorganized (as well as too caged and reined in by false leadership) to create a strong explicit social alternative able to inspire the world.

We're still in a situation of stalemate in a lot of ways. In Lenin's words: "for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the "lower classes" do not want to live in the old way and the "upper classes" cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph." The unstable equilibrium between the unwillingness of the oppressed to continue being oppressed, and the capacity of the oppressors to continue oppressing them, is becoming more and more unstable. There is less and less equilibrium.

There is no symmetry between the efforts of the oppressors and the efforts of the oppressed, though. The "upper classes" are organized and very focused in their repression. Wikileaks reveals the truth about their activities and they deploy thousands of functionaries and millions of dollars to smash Wikileaks as an organization and break its operations, with total disregard for laws and rights enshrined in their own constitutions and legislation. For instance. The "lower classes" are disorganized, split into a thousand different tendencies and focused on a thousand different issues in a thousand different ways.

However, the incapacity of the oppressors is more and more obvious, and the focus of the oppressed is slowly improving, as we have recently seen in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The rage at being trapped is overcoming the fear of the whip. Sufficient organization is present to create an alternative that can run things when the immediate target of the rebellion is brought down. The incoherence of the process makes it a bit like peeling an onion - one layer of oppression is removed to reveal a new, softer one beneath it.

Some constants can be seen between the rebellion of the postwar period and now - the longing for peace, freedom of expression and freedom from sexual and emotional slavery, but more and more politically and economically oriented, and less and less "timeless", ivory tower, and individually isolated. As long as the ruling classes are organized politically and economically the masses of young and working people longing for freedom will get nowhere without stronger organization based on their own economic and social interests. And people like Alan Watts offer nothing in this respect. And that benefits the ruling class, not us.

When did the USSR turn its back on Marxism?

On a discussion list I presented a mainstream of Marxist development this way: "Marx and Engels in the 1840s through the Paris Commune to the October Revolution in 1917 and on to the Left Opposition and Fourth International - it's Bolshevik-Leninist built on rock-solid Marxist (and that's Marx and Engels) foundations".

DV asked me: "So at what point does your allegiance split off (or maintain the true centre) of that line, later in the SU? And why?

And I replied:

The change in the political character of the USSR can be located most simply in the year 1924. Lenin died in January, 1924, and during the year Stalin was able to consolidate his power in the Bolshevik party apparatus, principally by opening the floodgates to new members with interests that were bureaucratic and careerist rather than class-based and socialist. The struggle against this development can be traced in the history of the Left Opposition to Stalin and the bureaucracy, which Trotsky founded in 1923 while Lenin was still alive, albeit incapacitated.

Evidence of healthy working-class socialist internationalism is abundant in the records of the first four Congresses of the Third International (ie before 1924). After 1924 the politics of the Soviet government turn against  all the principles of the Bolshevik party that carried out the October Revolution and led the successful defence of the new non-capitalist workers state against the imperialists and reactionaries of the surrounding world and Old Russia.

The best brief account of the general development can be found in Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed (1936)  (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm)

The Stalinist bureaucracy instituted a new regime in the Soviet Union that Trotsky and the Left Opposition characterized as politically counter-revolutionary, although on a non-capitalist economic foundation. In other words, the USSR remained a workers state, but was run by a degenerate and counter-revolutionary regime

The catastrophe of the Nazi capture of power in Germany in 1933, resulting largely from the appalling anti-Marxist leadership provided by the German Communist party following orders from Moscow - Social-Democracy was called the main enemy of the German working class, rather than Nazism - drove Trotsky and his comrades to conclude that the Third International was beyond recovery and led them to prepare the foundation of a new working-class socialist international - the Fourth International. This was achieved in 1938, and the founding document - the Transitional Programme, "The Death Agony of Capitalism" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm)- is the best short presentation of modern Marxist perspectives in the imperialist world after the victories of Stalin and Hitler. That is in a world dominated by counter-revolutionary regimes from the US to the USSR. At the same time as the world was split into two antagonistic economic camps - capitalist-imperialist in the US and Europe, and non-capitalist  (what we could call proto-socialist) in the Soviet Union.

"No one's ever shown us a long-term working alternative to capitalism"

On a discussion group GA just wrote:

"nobody has hitherto managed to show in practice an alternative to a society harnessing the forces of capitalism that works, works in the long run, and works without serious side effects like dictatorship or other disproportionate limitations in the freedom of people to lead their lives"

I replied:

Well, it's not surprising, really, cos the history of human society doesn't work this way. The place of experiment has to be taken by real life commitment, on a huge scale. Comparing results needs an appropriately huge perspective both as regards time and place. 

We have seen perfectly clearly however that capitalism - as a long-term mode of production - does not work smoothly or beneficially for the mass of humanity. It proceeds from crisis to crisis, and the trade-offs in terms of health and well-being versus riches and technical advances are not worth making - from the point of view of the massive majority of people who merely produce the wealth rather than get to own and enjoy it. If today, after all these centuries, capitalism can do no better for the less well-placed than it's doing in Greece and Spain, let alone Haiti or Honduras, or South Africa or Rwanda, then it's an obvious failure. It is also totally incapable of systematically making use of the benefits of planned cooperation to apply available knowledge and techniques for the betterment of the majority of humanity. It can't even do this in the US (South Bronx, East LA), or the EU, let alone West Sahara or Eritrea. 

We have seen that certain important aspects of social progress - infrastructure, literacy, education, general (if basic) provision of health and education are much better managed in non-capitalist states, like the USSR, Yugoslavia, or China. This is quite amazing, historically speaking, given that the advantages became apparent so very rapidly. And given that the disadvantages inherent in the genesis and life of these states (non-hegemonic economic status, undemocratic governance removing the vast mass of the working people from planning and decision-making) are so very destructive and make them so vulnerable to aggressively hostile policies from more powerful capitalist rivals.

The road to social and  economic change and improvement will be created not by a small group of technocrats in an editorial office or library but by ordinary people getting together to run their own affairs free of exploitation and slave-driving, using free open cooperation with anyone they want using any ideas and techniques they want regardless of profits or patents. To do this, people will need ideas regarding political and economic and social organization, and they will have to fight to get their hands on these, since one of the major preoccupations of capitalism today is the stifling and extermination of these ideas and the organizations bearing them.

So, if you want a pre-validated successful non-capitalist society, you can forget it. Which means you either sigh, sit back and drink a resigned toast to really existing capitalism - Here's to Bhopal, Marikana, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan! - or you get stuck in to making better alternatives than the ones that have half-worked in really existing (but far from optimal) non-capitalist societies. Or get swirled about in the wind with the sands on the bank of the Styx - a fate Dante wished upon the congenitally indecisive trimmers who never made a choice and never took sides. These poor sods never even got let into Hell - Charon felt too much contempt for them. Blowing through cold, dark, empty streets for all eternity. 

Teenagers and old literature: The Princess of Cleves

YL posted this on FaceBook:

«La Princesse de Clèves, premier roman moderne de la littérature française, est le personnage central du film. Manel, Aurore, Mona, Abou et les autres lui prêtent leurs voix, leurs visages. Ils sont élèves du Lycée Diderot de Marseille, un établissement difficile des quartiers nord de la ville, et leur professeur a décidé de leur faire étudier ce roman. Jeunes Français pour la plupart d'origine étrangère, ils sont souvent stigmatisés, caricaturés. Aujourd'hui, certains s'interrogent sur l'opportunité de leur faire découvrir les grands textes de la littérature française. Quelle en serait l'utilité sur le marché du travail qui les attend? Quel intérêt pour les jeunes que ces vieilles élucubrations du XVIIe siècle? Ensemble ils s'emparent du roman, de ses représentations, des questions qu'il pose. Objet transitionnel. C'est à leur univers que ce roman du grand siècle nous donne accès»

Translation:

The Princess of Cleves, the first modern novel in French literature, is the central character of the film. Manel, Dawn, Mona Abou and the others lend it their voices, their faces. They are students at the Lycée Diderot, a tough upper secondary school in the northern suburbs of Marseille, and their teacher decided to get them to study this novel. They are young French people, mostly of foreign origin, and are often stigmatized and caricatured. Today, some are questioning the use of being introduced to the great works of French literature. What would be the point in the job market facing them after school? What interest can young people have in these seventeenth century ramblings? Together the students took possession of the novel, the reflections it provides, and its questions. It's a transference object. The students' world is opened up to us by this novel from France's Great Century.

Nous, princesses de Clèves

www.cinemovies.fr

Réalisé par Régis Sauder Durée : 1 h 9 Date de sortie : 30 mars 2011 (FR) Distributeur : Shellac Genre : Documentaire Pays d'origine : France

I commented:

Good literature gives us access to other minds that see, act, think and feel in ways we can empathize with. Takes us behind the barbed-wire fences and locked doors of our social fronts. It puts a key in our hands, and says: "Open my door - welcome in!". This is something that happens less and less with people we don't know in our world today. To some extent, if we're lucky, it can happen on the net, and in that way the net is fusing into a general cultural phenomenon that includes literature.
So good for these kids, and good for Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette.

Local democracy

Mary Beard writes about electing the head of a local police authority in her blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/10/who-shall-i-vote-for-a-police-and-crime-commisioner.html

I commented:

Democracy is a decision-making technique that works well when the decision-makers hold power and have a consensus on how to use it. So you get slave-holding democracy, feudal democracy, municipal/city-state democracy, etc, all working well until the hold on power is challenged and the consensus is shredded.
In the transition to a new power-sharing consensus power becomes the unvarnished exercise of force it always is in essence. We're living in a transitional epoch (capitalist to socialist ie non-capitalist  mode of production, a free universal association of working people) and none of the big historical events we live through can be assessed on the basis of formal democracy.
So we need to get real about the possibilities, limitations and risks of the vote as a problem-solving mechanism. Before any proposal is put to a vote for decision, it has to be devised and formulated by people with an interest in pushing it through. This process is real politics, and the conditions determining whose interests are served are what allow us to judge the adequacy of any claimed democracy. Good for slave-holders? Slave-holding democracy. Good for ruthless, murderous (think Bhopal, or Marikana for that matter) capitalists? Bourgeois democracy.
And it's the big picture that counts even in tiny local decision-making. If the arteries don't work, the capillaries clot up and gangrene ensues.
Sounds pretty much like gangrene setting in in the local organs of police power in Britain ;-)

The state of affairs at the moment

On a mailing list, GA posted the following, linking to an article in a Swedish daily ("We are living in the biggest bluff in history"):

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/vi-lever-i-historiens-storsta-bluff_7636778.svd#xtor=AD-500
One highlight from the article (translated on the fly):
"The IMF calculated the other year that the group of Americans that turned 65 in 2012 can count on the state paying out 333 billion dollars more than they paid in taxes. This jackpot is 17 higher than what those 25 year old at the time will have to make do with.
Europe isn't any better. A report issued by the EU Commission shows that with the welfare systems intact, the average member country's state debt will amount to 477% of the gross national product in 2060."
FWIW. Sorry I don't have the time to translate the rest. I hope GT will make a halfway decent job of it.

BR

GA 

I commented:

In other words -  either capitalism survives, or we do...

And capitalism is no bluff. It's very real. Its alleged benefits are all a bluff, but that's another matter altogether. 

What it really does is condemn most of humanity to a daily life of misery and pain and anxiety and insecurity. And that's those of us with work and an income. Shit, it can't even keep translators feeling bubbly, let alone people working in a factory or a sweatshop or a mine. Or scratching at debt-ridden soil. 

Meaningful daily activities, food, shelter and health - forget it. Food and shelter if you're lucky, maybe. If you're displaced or unemployed, tough luck.

What capitalism does do is waste an awful lot of the wealth produced by those working for it (let's call them "workers" :-) on things that are directly intended to repress, enslave and kill these workers. Armies and weapons. Not only intended, either, but doing it all day every day throughout the world. It also wastes an awful lot of our wealth on things intended to deceive us and brutalize us - advertising, media garbage (films, radio, tv, press).

It directly engenders its mirror image in mass organized crime - the arms, drugs and sex industries. No capitalism in America, no drug wars horrors in Mexico or Colombia. The freer a country is from US/imperialist influence, the freer it is from the arms drugs and sex industries..Just compare Guatemala and Cuba.

Capitalism is now so over-ripe and rotten it's liquefying. It still stands because it and its treacherous (for the workers) henchmen Social-Democracy and Stalinism have deliberately and brutally smashed anti-capitalist working class political and economic alternative leaderships. Capitalist China in 1948, for  instance, was as flimsy (as Peng Shuzi wrote) as a wooden house full of dry rot - one good kick and it would fall. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao was still capable (despite the counter-revolutionary orders/advice it received from Moscow) of delivering such a kick, and it did. Castro's army did the same in 1959 in Cuba. But since then mass mobilizations have kicked out regimes (Nicaragua and Iran in 1979, Spain and Portugal in the mid-80s, Egypt and Libya today) but they have been leaderless with regard to the economic system which is at the root of all the trouble. So fascist and comprador regimes have been replaced by still bourgeois, still capitalist regimes with little hope to offer the workers for a qualitatively better life, including political, cultural and economic power. The same process but in an even more perverted fashion took place in the Soviet bloc in 1990, when the rage of the masses flung out the oppressive Stalinist regimes - and simultaneously destroyed the non-capitalist foundations of the state. Bringing in equally or more oppressive regimes, along with new and horrific economic and cultural inequalities and destitution.

So that's the state of affairs at the moment. And the multiplying newspaper reports like this one just rub it in a little bit more painfully with every new day it's allowed to continue.

As Marx said, we don't make history in conditions of our own choosing, but we do make our own history - and it's time we started doing it again and with a sense of purpose. 

And that purpose should be: 

Out with capitalism 
In with socialism.