Chomsky on democracy and fascism

This is a brief discussion on the validity of using "fascism" to describe modern society. From FaceBook where S posted the following image of Chomsky and its quotation:








I objected briefly to using fascism in this way, and S responded like this:

S: Firstly, and to be fair, Chomsky makes a distinction between economic and political fascism. He may be appropriating the term to (unhistorically?) characterise a set of socio-economic conditions that do not wholly correspond to those in pre-war Italy, Germany and elsewhere. e.g. the persistence of (almost totally ineffective, corrupt) democratic institutions. Even so, he's not far off the mark. One of the defining characteristics of fascism is corporatism, and there can be no doubt that the US is a corporate-colonial economy. Add the rapidly expanding encroachment on individual freedoms, civil and human rights, an authoritarian regime, compliant courts, controlled media, burgeoning police powers, brutality and impunity, a militarised state that spends more on 'defence' than next 13 countries combined, perpetual war to protect 'national' interests, and you have most of the elements that go to make up what looks very much like an ongoing transition from advanced capitalism to fascism, albeit in a more modern guise.

To which I replied:

Yes, Stuart - lots of facial fuzz, but not yet a full-fledged beard. 

"Ongoing transition" is exactly what this is all about, and in that case the fundamental historical tradition is from capitalism to socialism - from one historical economic mode of production to another. The slave-owning mode of production morphed into the feudal mode of production over hundreds of years with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of smaller, more flexible states based on feudal relations of vassal fiefs and serfdom. The workers weren't just cattle any more. They were human, but chained to the land and were forced to labour on the lord's land for free besides scraping a living off the plot of land they were tied to.

Then feudalism morphed into capitalism over hundreds of years, starting with the ex-Roman municipalities in Italy and Germany, then magnificently and irrepressibly in the English Revolution of 1640 and onwards (high point 1649 with the beheading of Charles 1 and the setting up of a republic) and the French Revolution of 1789.

These revolutions (as Marx frequently says) borrowed lots of props from the past, especially Rome, but they weren't a revival of the Roman Empire or Republic. 

In the same way, today the world is morphing into socialism. Individual, free enterprise capitalism was dying in Marx's day and he saw it and wrote about it in Capital. All production and distribution is thoroughly socialized and collectivized and we're all inextricably linked to each other through great national and international institutions of circulation like banks and credit card companies and social media. The only capitalist thing remaining is the relation of ownership - but that's enough to make the world the horrifying place it is under imperialist domination.

The capitalist ownership relation was broken definitively by the Bolshevik Revolution and its successful expropriation of the land-owners and capitalists in Russia in October 1917. That model has since been successfully followed in huge parts of the world - Vietnam and China, Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Due to the persistence of capitalist ownership and huge material (military) power in the biggest imperialist countries (the US, Britain and France in particular) political pressure on the ruling groups in these countries has been enormous, and some of the non-capitalist countries have been dragged back into capitalist social relations, primarily Russia and the old Eastern Bloc. But they are all dismal failures when it comes to advertising the historical superiority of capitalism that was so deafeningly trumpeted in the 1990s after the capitulation of the Soviet bureaucracy to imperialism. When they have remained independent of US or EU imperialism - like Russia - they have created a post-capitalist capitalism you might call it, a state capitalism where huge oligarchical control of production is mediated through equally centralized political control in a very authoritarian form.

But this is a process foreshadowed in the fate of the post-colonialist countries, too - throwing out the colonialists but not the capitalists has led to all kinds of bizarre authoritarian political set-ups, from ostensibly democratic India, via the stinking corruption of Mandela's non-apartheid South Africa to the familiar dictatorships of Zaire, Zimbabwe, Libya, Saddam's Iraq, Assad's Syria, etc. 

In fact, authoritarian political control coupled with capitalism generates many fascist features, but the process is much more general than what surfaced in Italy and Germany between the world wars.

The truth of it is that modern capitalism - ie decadent, rotten imperialism - is a dead-end, literally dead, necrotic, for human society, and all these "fascist" phenomena worldwide are symptoms of its necrotic decay. If they are allowed to develop unchecked, they will produce barbarism - unchained brutality and destruction of people and the environment in the service of profit.

The only alternative is socialism, that is, a non-capitalist economy and society run on democratic, collective, universally and coherently planned principles by the actual workers producing the wealth in voluntary association with full political empowerment.

This historical alternative, just under the surface, remains invisible to everyone not grasping Marx's scientific explanation of the underlying economic forces shaping human history. And today that means just about everybody. It's not just unfortunate, but a great tragedy that Marx never got round to writing the political part of his work on bourgeois society. He was able to complete the economic part, in Capital and its companion books, but the political part is missing and needs to be worked out by us on our own using his separate historical and political writings - such as the 18th Brumaire, his work on Palmerston, his comments on various countries and their historical development, like Ireland and India and the US, his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and so on. Only Lenin and Trotsky (and to a lesser extent Rosa Luxemburg) have successfully continued this political work and pulled the threads together for us. Most notably Lenin in The State and Revolution, and Trotsky in Results and Prospects, The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed.

It's clear as the noses on our faces that both Lenin and Trotsky (following Marx) weren't just theorists, either, but totally committed to the practical task of organizing a revolutionary socialist party and overthrowing the power of capital, consummated in the successful anti-capitalist revolution in Russia in October 1917.

What I have just written shows the perspectives in which we need to judge what's happening around us, and they have little to do with labels like "fascism" or "corporativism", which scratch the surface of imperialist society with penetrating very deeply. The same goes for "colonialism". They provide a handy way of describing some of the symptoms of our world, but they don't explain anything much, and they certainly don't help us change it.

Snowden isn't alone

This is a very general comment I made on FaceBook about the Snowden debate:

What scares the US imperialist government is that Snowden (and Manning and Assange and and and) aren't alone. They represent millions of people. They alone did what they did, but not in social or political isolation. They are the tip of a huge iceberg. In the old days it was the mass struggle for bourgeois democracy (aka civil rights, freedom from arbitrary government intrusion and oppression), these days it's for a much wider and broader goal including human rights like health education and welfare for all and economlic equality (aka socialism). This is a war (we can call it class war, between the class of those who own the factories and facilities we need to make and do things and the class of those who don't own shit but are forced to work hard for these others just to stay alive).
And this class war and the representative role of Snowden etc is why the scandals and political fighting don't just evaporate despite all the efforts of lickspittle apologists for tyranny to belittle, criminalize and intimidate.
The big problem for most people today is that the official surface discussion in the US and other states around the world is one big lie never ever naming things by their real names or explaining what all the drama is about. So some people really get hung up about Snowden's girlfriend being a pole dancer or about the fact not that he had to run for his life from the "land of the free TM ha-fucking-ha" but that he ran to this or that other country where he was able to find shelter.

The NSA's totalitarian surveillance and the US Constitution

An article in the Register tries to deal with the ongoing massive violation of private individuals' lives and integrity by the NSA by invoking the principles underlying the US Constitution.

Trevor Pott: NSA Prism - boycott US tech


I commented:

Let's think historically, since the Enlightenment and Hammurabi have eased the way for us here.
The productive forces of human society are enormous and constantly growing, and one of the things they are doing is connect us all up so we know what's happening to everything everywhere, as in automatic inventory, just-in-time production and delivery etc. We also know who's where and doing what.
Now, the last time the productive forces of humanity took a huge leap forward in world-changing historical terms was when the merchants and bankers turned themselves into manufacturers, and the city took over from the land. Aka the origin of capitalism. This took centuries, but gradually, from the Reformation around 1500 to the French Revolution around 1800 via the English Revolution of around 1650, feudalism as a mode of production and fundamental form of social organization was ejected, violently, and replaced by capitalism. This happened because the productive forces were tied down and being strangled. Workers under feudalism weren't free but tied to the land as serfs, to guilds as apprentices and journeymen, and to lords and masters as servants, and the same went for the means of production. Capital couldn't be bought or sold or moved at will, but was locked into traditional and inefficient niches. The battle for freedom for capital and labour freed them up, and with them the productive forces.
This is happening today only now it is capitalism that is tying everything down and holding everything back in the name of private ownership of the forces of production and the profit this must generate. We can now produce everything we need to feed, clothe, house, educate and thrill everybody. We have the physical means in the machines, the agricultural capability, and above all the science and technology to manage, develop and plan worldwide deployment of production and the requisite skills. However...
The feudal constraints on business, movement, thought, etc are now parallelled by capitalist constraints on the free exchange of ideas or of scientific and technological discoveries, in the form of copyright and patents, and on a more and more bizarre insistence on holding back production to protect profits. Housing construction for instance only occurs when a) it doesn't threaten rent incomes, and b) it not only generates a surplus over labour and materials input, but a whopping great ten percent more in money terms that is pocketed by the owners of building companies to consume as they and only they see fit. Diamond-studded dog collars and all.
Not to mention the boosting of private profits by a) taxing workers' incomes to subsidize corporations (corporate welfare) and b) shovelling huge amounts of the surplus we produce into totally unproductive branches of industry (death and destruction in the military, and misery and ignorance in addiction, sex industries and gambling).
Anyway, the crises we are going through right now and the surrealistic abuse of advances in science and technology perpetrated by governments like the US, are all part and parcel of the age of transition between an outworn mode of production, capitalism, and a mode of production more appropriate for the productive forces of human society, socialism.
One of the things capitalism is doing in its death throes is throwing off a spectacular display of sound and fury and phosphorescing lights claiming that it is the end product of human history and that there is no alternative to its methods and traditions. This has been pretty successful at fooling "public opinion" that history doesn't exist and that socialism is an impossible illusion.
One of the things the present crisis is doing, however, is to show us precisely the historical incapacity of capitalism not only to solve the problems of humanity, but even to solve its own selfish problems of making stuff and selling it. And it also shows us to just what brutal and destructive lengths capitalism in government is prepared to go to preserve its monopoly of power and wealth. Perverting all its own proud revolutionary democratic principles from the struggle against feudalism (eg the US Constitution) in the process.
Capitalism in its current form is inseparable from oppression, war and the abuse of power. It's utopian madness to dream that there is a good capitalism underneath all the scabs and putrid sores. Just as it was utopian to dream of a good feudalism underneath the boils and gangrene of the Old Regime.
Think historically, and there are solutions.
Ignore history, and you'll be trapped in your own nightmare for ever.

Re sub-imperialism

Fred Feldman posted a contribution to the Green Left discussion group on Yahoo on the use of "sub-imperialism" to characterize a number of countries today, such as China, Russia and India.

I replied as follows:


--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "Fred Feldman"  wrote:

> Actually, if Green Lefters defend China as an oppressed nation against
> imperialism (not just "oppose an attack" but SOLIDARIZE WITH CHINA against
> an attack), that would be adequate since there is a basis for reasonable
> Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state. But in fact the
> trend seems to be toward proclaiming China an imperialist power (perhaps
> with the highly subjective category of "sub-imperialist" as a transitional
> characterization), which clearly implies no defense against anybody anytime.
>
> Thus a war between China and the United States or China and Australia would
> be an inter-imperialist war with "a plague on both your houses" as the
> indicated political stance.
>
> If Green Left's Marxism still includes "revolutionary defeatism" in a war
> between China and Australia, that would mean considering the defeat of
> Australia as the lesser evil in a war with China from the standpoint of
> making a socialist
> revolution in Australia.  From this standpoint, Chinese revolutionaries
> would be expected to take the same stand - defeat of their "imperialism" as
> the lesser evil.  Chinese people who took the side of their country against
> US, Japanese, and/or Australian imperialism would be regarded as traitors to
> socialism.

This shows how important the question of the character of the Chinese state is to revolutionary Marxists. Because it's so important it's crucial not to play fast and loose with the terms in which the characterization is made. To speak of a "trend" towards considering China imperialist while at the same time claiming that "there is a basis for reasonable Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state" is to play fast and loose with terms like "imperialism" and "Marxism", not to mention "reasonable".

Marxism would not "trend" towards a characterization in this way. Some Marxists might, but then the question would be how far a trending impressionist agrees with Marxist economic analysis, and whether this is "reasonable". Let's be clear. There is disagreement, even among serious revolutionary Marxists, about the class character of the Chinese state. But so far this has not been the subject of any serious large-scale debate. A key issue for those who originally held with the characterization of Deformed Workers' State seems to be how far the reforms of 1979 constitute a restoration of capital. But the bullet in this debate hasn't yet been bitten.

Why was the situation different in the mid-1930s regarding the Soviet Union? For this argument it's enough to say there was a revolutionary Bolshevik current in the USSR and the world that was strong enough and confident enough in its Marxism and place in the class struggle to bite the bullet and consider the hugely contradictory situation that had arisen after October succeeded in overturning the capitalist state of Tsarist Russia, but where this new non-capitalist state had either become capitalist once more or remained non-capitalist while displaying blatantly anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary characteristics.

I'm referring, obviously, to the Left Opposition and the embodiment of its Bolshevik leadership in Trotsky and those closest to him.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came down firmly, Marxist-style, on the side of the most contradictory alternative - a state which was at the same time non-capitalist, anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary. He did this because it best fitted the facts, and his presentation of these facts and his reasons for interpreting them as he did convinced the non-Stalinist revolutionary left that was moving towards the foundation of the Fourth International after the catastrophic defeat of the workers movement in Germany.

The closest thing this movement has had to a similar decisive intervention concerning the character of a state is Peng Shuzi's work on The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party (www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm) and the debate leading to the characterization of Deformed Workers' State.

Neither Peng nor the Fourth had the theoretical or organizational authority of Trotsky or the pre-war Left Opposition, so there was little to deter impressionist non-revolutionary Lefts like Tony Cliff from proclaiming early in the 50s that The Revolution Betrayed had been mistaken, that the USSR was capitalist and that China was too. Their Marxism couldn't stand up to the combined pressure of bourgeois witch-hunting and Stalinist propaganda.

The problem for us today is that this has been happening by default within the genuinely revolutionary tradition of the Fourth and closely allied movements. The bitter contradictions digested in The Revolution Betrayed have not been understood as such. It could even be argued that the bitterness and scale of the contradictions inherent in the Chinese state and regime are even greater than those in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the case, the contradictions have not been confronted openly and massively, so the trial is not just not over, it hasn't even started.

Which presents us with a huge and responsible task.

Including the main reason for my present contribution, which is to disagree flatly regarding the term "sub-imperialism".

Fred declares that the category is "highly subjective" and used as a "transitional characterization". Maybe he meant "impressionistic" - in which case he should have said so. But "subjective" can be compared to "objective" and related to facts, which Fred doesn't do. As for "transitional", well, things change, powerful states and economies become weak and vice versa, so there is a case for terms describing such change to be labelled transitional. Trotsky and the Fourth labelled their programme "transitional" for good reasons.

Fred writes:

> The sub-imperialist category is misleading because it effectively eliminates
> the qualitative distinction between imperialism and not-imperialism,
> oppressed and oppressor nations, and it is infinitely expandable and
> basically un-scientific. If China is imperialist or sub-imperialist, why not
> Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, or even Vietnam? If India is imperialist or
> sub-imperialist, why not Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia?

But this is not so if sub-imperialism has been defined clearly in terms of transition from less powerful to more powerful, and its preconditions have been set out. In the first place, it is misleading to lump together "imperialism and not-imperialism,
oppressed and oppressor nations", simply because imperialist oppression is not the same as any old oppression of one nation (or entity) by another. So we'll ignore that, although it forms the basis of most of the arm-waving examples Fred gives. It is not in the least intrinsically "infinitely expandable", as that depends on the definition and preconditions.

For instance, sensible definitions of sub-imperialist would have to include such empirical qualities as great size, great population, and economic and military viability on a grand scale. The military viability would include things like complete impossibility of total invasion and occupation. The history of Russia gives an indication of the kind of countries that might come into consideration here. The "sub" would have to include the transitional element of not yet big enough and ugly enough to face down the US in an open confrontation, despite a desire to do so and probable capacity to put up a good fight.

There is nothing strange about any of this, and in fact the definition would enable a good description of the relative strength of such acknowledged imperialisms as Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, etc.

Lenin takes relative change between imperialist countries for granted when he writes of "aspiring imperialisms" such as Japan and Germany and compares them to the old established imperialist powers of Britain and France. And in 1900, the US was the biggest aspiring "sub-imperialism" of them all.

And the definition given here, preliminary as it is, would be able to handle the status of Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia without pausing in its stride.

Fred concludes by writing:

> The tendency is to envision an almost exclusively imperialist world - one in
> which almost every state not directly controlled by imperialism economically
> and politically like the Marshall Islands or Puerto Rico or Chad tends to
> "rise" to imperialist or subimperialist status, becoming a challenger to
> "old" imperialist powers for re-dividing the world (like Germany in the two
> world wars) and thus one of the driving forces toward world war.  This is
> not theoretically impossible, but highly improbable in anything like the
> near future.      

Which of course is as impressionistic as the approach he is criticising. Much as most governments would dearly love to elbow their way closer to the fleshpots and bury their snouts in the trough with the US, it is farcical for them, or us, to dream of such a thing, let alone "envision" it. Put this generally, it is in fact "theoretically impossible" - at least for a Marxist Marxist - and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not one or two of the most powerful and expansive non-acknowledged imperialist countries (say Russia and India, leaving China and Brazil aside for the moment) are in a position to challenge or actually even in the course of challenging the currently hegemonic imperialist power(s).

As I understand it, "sub-imperialism" refers to imperialist potential in a country that for a variety of reasons is still clearly 'sub'ordinate to the leading imperialist countries. Some countries might make it all the way, and watch once leading countries eat their dust as they fall by the wayside. Some might just hover mid-league for ever, so to say. But we have to acknowledge change as it happens, and do our best to grasp what's going on and why. That is our duty both to the working class as revolutionary socialists and to science as thinking citizens.

Market failure, creativity, and online gouging

Cory Doctorow has written an article in the Guardian entitled "Just because everything has value doesn't mean it has a price". Cory Doctorow: Charging for everything kills creativity About the implications of charging for every little bit of imagined use that can be extracted from an online offering. It's part of a series called "Digital rights, digital wrongs". It's interesting because of its focus on something that capitalism just can't handle, namely "externalities". Better otherwise known as "market failure". His line is that charging for everything will kill creativity.

I commented:

We're back with the problems Marx faced trying to work out the relationship between social production and private appropriation, value, price and profit, and the inadequacies of Adam Smith and Ricardo's attempts to resolve them.
Nothing of value is produced without our labour. So it's natural to expect an equivalent return for it. The problem is a) what is a true equivalent, and b) who will determine this and implement it in society.
Marx resolved the problem of "true equivalence", so problem a) is taken care of. But problem b) is in complete contradiction to the findings of a), since the people determining and implementing equivalence exploit most of us (wage-earners) by creaming off what we produce above and beyond survival (keeping body and soul together at the normal standard of living for our society) and making it their private wealth instead of our shared social wealth.
Cory D ignores this, and ends up arguing for Utopia, since he implies there's a way of accommodating a) with b). This is nonsense, cos ownership is all in our society, and ownership of capital (control of other people's work) is a class monopoly.
This is a pity, cos the main thrust of his argument goes some way along the constructive realistic road discussed seminally by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
The thing is that the whole of capitalist production today is a market failure. In other words the traditional (or post-traditional, imperialist) market is a useless mechanism for coordinating and eliciting socially useful effort. Market techniques can be very useful in some kinds of distribution, in that they provide spontaneous feedback and self-organization, but they're no good when it comes to deciding social priorities at the limits of resource availability, and they're disastrous in relation to the inevitable necessity of disaster management.
Production and distribution today is a huge social problem worldwide, and some of its most glaring effects are in the realm of ideas and culture. But the solution isn't going to come from economic measures but from political measures that affect the economic foundations of our society.
Till we introduce socialism (non-capitalist ownership and control of production) there will be no solution and Cory will have to keep repeating himself and running on the spot (not to mention the idiots who claim that locking everything down and charging us for the air we breathe is the right way to go).

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.

"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. 

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.