Capitalism Can’t Remember Where I Left My Keys

Fraser’s book was more interesting the closer he got to the end of the Long 19th Century. I read it after reading Richard White’s Railroaded and was pretty unimpressed with his historical writing on the 19th century.

The disruption, though, was definitely there in both, although I think it was not about “remembering a pre-capitalist past” so much as the erosion of the autonomy and privilege of local farmers and merchants in the way of a rapidly integrating national economy with gigantic firms – early 19th century America was incredibly commercialized and capitalistic already, well before the Gilded Age. Fraser asks why there hasn’t been as big of a mobilization in the 21st century as in the late 19th/early 20th century, and I honestly think it’s because the disruption isn’t really there yet. There hasn’t been as much of a rupture yet with the pre-existing system that depended on a kind of corporatism and full-time jobs for one company, at least in the US (precarious/temporary work is much more common in western Europe). The systems that exist to buffer the instabilities and turbulence of our economy are still more or less intact, if never perfect and never funded to the degree they deserve.

Speaking of religion, I thought I was reading the thread on diminishing populations of non-believers @1. If we want to know what happened to all those true believers, here they are. They didn’t die out, they adapted. As Frank Kermode long ago noted, consumer society picked up were churches left off – choose your venue and value system or it chooses you. Which ain’t so bad. The form of socialism I encountered respect was left-over prairie bible-thumping co-operative organizers. We still shop at co-ops where we can and I keep an account at a credit union. My American pals love to sneer at Evangelists and, hell, why not? Bob reminds that there are many kinds of theocracies. Loved the part about breaking down the Berlin walls that balkanize blah-blah. Wonderful alliteration, but where and when has this ever occurred? Certainly not during the Commune. Recall the line from Marat-Sade ‘I believe only in myself.’ Theocracies abound, it’s clear. Perhaps we should take that topic a little more seriously. Just saying.

4: HTML fail; everything after 1st paragraph is Steven Fraser

This post is completely misreading the history of the socialist movement. Let’s start with the Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.” There are no Morrisists in the world, but in every city there are Marxists. Why is Morris, not Marx, part of the picture here?

In 1917 the Bolsheviks attacked the SRs. Who were the SRs? They were the peasant party that wanted to establish farming collectives and return to the idiocy of rural life. Of course, the letter to Runge can only be understood with the past meaning 1776, not medieval life: Marx was after all about continuing the logic of capitalist revolution and overcoming its contradictions, not reactionary thought against it. Rosa Luxemburg was betrayed by the peasants, who later supported Hitler because of their desire for a backwards past.

@ 4 @ 6 @7 Apologies. I should try to read. I don’t. It’s so me. ‘Nuff said.

Again I feel, as often on CT, that the focus on capitalism leaves out other important aspects of power and privilege the left should be concerned about. (I’m not saying capitalism isn’t important, just that there’s a lot more to systems of power and privilege than capitalism alone.) But given that my attempts to talk about this aroused a lot of tut-tutting on other threads, maybe I’ll just refer to some recent posts by Lori Gruen.

http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/disability_and_disadvanta/2015/07/lori-gruen-on-her-recent-al-jazeera-america-article.html

Gruen is talking about issues raised by the killing of Cecil the Lion, but uses this to go to much broader arguments about privilege. She doesn’t (here at least) use the term patriarchy, but talks about a system that allows “certain humans (white, male) … to maintain their power”. This is similar to what I am talking about when I use the term patriarchy, but it’s obvious ‘patriarchy’ is a red flag word to some people here, so maybe Gruen’s formulation will make more sense to them.

Of course people may see flaws in Gruen’s arguments (I think there are some, but maybe it’s just because she is writing short pieces and has to simplify), and the relevance to the OP may not be immediately clear. I’m happy to explain further why I think it’s relevant, but I don’t want to write too much lest I be accused by Bianca again of being ‘J Thomas’, or JanieM of overly influencing threads (by my devious powers of witchcraft, presumably, though if people think these issues aren’t relevant to the thread, they are in fact free not to respond).

So to keep it (fairly) short, the key point is there’s an intersection of forms of power (gender, class, race, imperialism, ‘speciesism’) that act to maintain hierarchies in which white men are usually at the top.

My read on the history is that a big part of the left did embrace capitalism…when it was seen as a solution to mercantilism and what remained of feudalism. The right, defending the interests of those who benefitted most from those systems was anti-capitalist at the time. Later, as the inequality brought on by unrestrained capitalism became manifest, the left became far less favourable to capitalism, while the right now was in favour of it, again defending the most powerful who had become so under it.

Capitalism was only a means for both sides. Now conservatives make loving capitalism an explicit part of their ideology, but I suspect if they found a better system for concentrating wealth and power, they would switch to supporting that.

>but I suspect if they found a better system for concentrating wealth and power, they would switch to supporting that.

Well, their new system would also have to produce more tears from orphans, otherwise wages the point, right?

satirist, assuming everyone who disagrees with you is evil or stupid is a childish habit you would do well to outgrow.

Cassander: The individual motives of conservatives vary, but the cumulative effect of the policies they choose is quite clear. Smart people get duped, and good people can do evil. But yes, I think conservativism is a great evil and don’t care if you think that is childish.

Speaking of capitalism, did Salon ever recognize the staff’s unionization?

Speaking of capitalism, did Salon ever recognize the staff’s unionization?

Yes, it seems. I think SEK had something on this at LGM as well, but I was only scanning headlines on my RSS feed, so not totally sure.

Corey,

Good article. I recently read the Ross book, which is excellent, though much too short. Wish I had done so prior to some of our discussions here regarding communism, socialism, etc. etc. It’s striking to read about Morris, Kropotkin and Reclus, especially, talking about “anarchist communism” . . . and Morris’s tendency to use that and “socialism” almost interchangeably. They couldn’t even conceive of a communism that involved a state apparatus. Far, far from it. Theirs was a communism of “small is beautiful,” connected to other small is beautiful communes in a federation . . . internationalized, without borders, without states. No borders, no states!! An echo of No gods, no masters!

Morris used the term “anarchist communism” frequently, and it seems that most 19th century anarchists considered themselves “socialists” too. Communists and socialists . . . There were very, very few left-wing “statists” in those days, with a solid majority wanting an end to the state. It’s a tragedy that all too many people today think of Stalin when they think of the left, and all too many right-wingers have this perverted and distorted idea about left and right. To them, the right is supposedly the champion of “small government” and “freedom,” while the left is ferociously statist. In reality, the largest left-wing stream, traditionally, has been anti-state, stridently anti-authoritarian, on the road toward no state at all . . . . which easily makes right-libertarians look far more like Stalins in comparison. The right is very, very selective when it comes to who gets to be “free.” The left, OTOH, is radically inclusive on the subject.

Adding to the above. Watched a fascinating TED talk the other day. A must see, IMO, for everyone, and it connects into Ross’s book in this way. She mentioned that Russian evolutionists, contrary to Darwin and his children, saw the rise of humans via cooperation, mutual aid — as did Kropotkin, Morris and Reclus. Yuval Noah Harari tells us that what really separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom was and still is our capacity to cooperate and work together with large numbers of our fellow human beings. And he says perhaps THE galvanizing force behind our cooperation is our ability to create fictions and believe in them on a large scale. The chief fictions being nation-states, religion, capitalism.

https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans

Timothy @25,

I think Marx got the persistence of Primitive Accumulation wrong, too. Though he wasn’t really definitive about this, he seems to have believed it was a stage. In reality, it has been ongoing, as Michael Perelman shows in The Invention of Capitalism, and as David Harvey demonstrates in pretty much all of his work. The current lust for privatization is one major element today, with Greece, perhaps, being the latest tragic implementation.

The destruction of the commons is a tried and true method of primitive accumulation. Ironically, Lenin used this in an attempt to propel Russia into the 20th century . . . . which is yet one more proof of the Soviet Union being a “state capitalist” society, and by no means “socialist,” much less “communist.”

If the private sector does this via the state, or it’s done by the state alone, it’s still Primitive Accumulation. And with the advent of neoliberalism, the merger of corporate and state power is nearly complete, and there has never been such a concerted effort, worldwide, to privatize the commons. Most of the world’s most powerful economic organizations are extremely aggressive in pursuit of this . . . To me, this is monstrous and despicable.

@plume

>The destruction of the commons is a tried and true method of primitive accumulation. Ironically, Lenin used this in an attempt to propel Russia into the 20th century . . . . which is yet one more proof of the Soviet Union being a “state capitalist” society, and by no means “socialist,” much less “communist.”

Once again, you play the old game of redefining the failures of socialism as capitalism. Don’t you ever tire of repeating cliches that were tired before you were born?

regardless of your tastes, however, you’re factually wrong. Lenin, eventually, largely let the peasants do what they wanted with the land because he lacked the ability to stop them. It was stalin who took the land back. But I suppose, somehow, you’ll manage to come up with some convoluted theory that makes both of these opposite policies the result of the ever crueler machinations of capitalism.

The comment that conservatives are really better described as hierarchicalists in the OP reminds me of Dan Kahan and the guys at the Yale Cultural Cognition project … they don’t talk about Left vs Right views and predispositions towards climate change, but ‘Hierarchical individualists’ vs ‘egalitarian communitarians’. (Actually those are 2 of 4 possibilities based on two axes of ideology).

Don’t agree with everything they write, but how people’s worldview and ideology interacts with their apprehension of science and policy is important work.

http://www.yalescientific.org/2011/05/cultural-cognition-and-scientific-consensus/

” The reason they could see a utopia beyond industrial capitalism, says Fraser, is that they remembered a reality before industrial capitalism. Their vision of the future was fueled by a memory of the past.”

I don’t know whether this is you or Fraser, but there appears to be an implicit assumption here that this pre-industrial utopia actually did exist. Regardless, that is a fairly ridiculous premise, especially when made by a historian. I guess we could posit that these workers were looking back to the pre-Neolithic age, when perhaps some kind of utopia-like state actually did characterize human existence, but that would be ridiculous in another way.

I don’t care how “preeminent” Fraser is, this little story doesn’t even a basic common sense test.

This is a different way of saying something like Watson Ladd in #6.

@The Other DSCH

>Whether you think it’s a cliche or not, there is no Marxist sense in which the USSR could be considered socialist, since the exploitation of wage labor continued as the basis of the economy. “Socialism” as merely a centrally-planned capitalism is Stalinist nonsense.

If it’s nonsense, it isn’t Stalinist nonsense, but Marxist. The dictatorship of the proletariat was intended to be exactly that, centrally planned socialism that would produce so much abundance that communism would emerge.

@Plume

>It had virtually nothing in common with two centuries worth of socialist theory or practice.

Once again, you don’t get to define failures of socialism as capitalism. Lenin was unquestionably a committed socialist, he tried to set up socialism, he achieved nothing but misery. This was not capitalism, and it is certainly not a failure to try socialism, it was a failure of socialism to work as predicted by those two centuries of theory, because socialist theory is wrong. Lenin differed from those attempts only in that he was more fervent, and consequently more bloody, than average.

>Again, they and Marx saw the state as the engine, the means, the power structure, for the ruling class to dominate, exploit and oppress the working class.

Yes, which is why he wanted the working classes to seize control of that apparatus and use it for their own purposes, which is precisely what Lenin did. Once again, this failure is evidence that socialism doesn’t work, not that it hasn’t been tried. Socialism cannot, and never will, work at any meaningful scale because it desires things that are inherently contradictory.

Heck, there’s even this amazing passage in which Marx explains how he imagines the remaining, useful state functions being carried out in a Commune society:

Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly.

Running government like a business! Donald Trump would be proud.

Cassander,

The dictatorship of the proletariat was intended to be exactly that, centrally planned socialism that would produce so much abundance that communism would emerge.

No. This is absolutely incorrect. Beyond absolutely. It’s Fox-dumb nonsense. And as DN mentions above, along with traditional leftist support for DEcentralization comes essential, core advocacy of participatory democracy. Full on democracy, including the economy — small is beautiful, a federation of small is beautiful, an internationalization of that federation, etc. etc. . . . That’s what they promoted. No borders. No classes. No gods, no masters. The percentage of leftists advocating for a strong, central state is too tiny to care about over the course of those two centuries, and it didn’t include Marx.

Again, we have two centuries of socialist and communist theory and practice that 100% contradicts your absurd views. Including Marx. It was very, very rare among actual leftists to find one who promoted any kind of centralized power or centralization of power. Virtually all of them promoted the opposite. The left was all about flattening hierarchies, breaking up power centers, dispersing power equally to all individuals. It is the political right that has always stood for strong, central governments, Big Church, a dominant ruling class, and major hierarchies of power, wealth and privilege. The left has always been dedicated to fighting this. The only reason the right ever talks about wanting “smaller government” is so there is nothing standing in the way of corporate power — not that government is in the way. American government has always been the biggest benefactor of business and the rich and it’s not close.

Seriously, please read actual leftists, and stop trying trying to discuss a topic you clear knowing nothing about.

Magistra,

This is true to an extent. In that sense, capitalism is “amoral.” But in most ways, it is deeply immoral, because it’s based on the premise that a few humans can own most humans — own their production, their blood, sweat and tears, appropriate everything they create, etc. etc. Call the shots for everyone else. And, follow them home after they’ve done all of that. “Mature capitalism” is just a very sophisticated form of slavery, one that helps itself along with incredibly effective psych-ops (marketing) designed to make workers forget they’re slaves.

What do they care if the richest 400 are “diverse” to some extent? As long as they maintain the slave state/markets/infrastructure/networks . . . . they don’t. Which is why it’s really always been a mistake to concentrate solely on elevation via ethnic/sexual/gender-based minorities, if this also ignores class. When this happens, etc. You basically just wind up with a more “diverse” economic apartheid . . . That ruling class is more than willing to have its tokens, as long as they can keep the vast majority of everyone else sweating in the societal boiler-rooms.

If women, for instance, make “gains” in becoming corporate CEOs, hedge fund gazillionaires, corporate raiders and the like, one can hardly call that “progress.” All that really means is that a few women turn tables and now get to oppress the shit out of their new-found “inferiors.” At the same time, ending certain discriminatory practices in order to open up rotten jobs to a more diverse workforce . . . . . Uh, we need to just end economic apartheid altogether. That ends the vast majority of the ethnic, gender, sexuality discrimination along with it. It goes hand in hand.

It’s not the end of the story, of course, as discrimination will still exist and must be fought ferociously. But it gets us much further along to “fair.”

[Note: the following is somewhat OT with respect to OP. It is more a suggestion for future posts.]

In regard to other of your posts and the quote “because there was a past in which it [capitalism] did not exist there might be a future when it would cease to exist”, my first question is:

a) would you like a future where the capitalism does not exist? It seems yes to me but I am not sure.

b) If yes, I would be interested in hearing more about such future. How does it look like? Is there a reference you would endorse on the subject? Or a country that comes, or has come, fairly close to it?

I read always with interest your criticism of existing economic arrangements (e.g. my favorite is about freedom on the workplace) but I am not sure from what angle, if any, these points are raised. Is the goal some form of social-democracy (say, e.g., Sweden) but where private property still remains an essential feature of the society? Or is it something else where private property is abolished?

> Beyond absolutely. It’s Fox-dumb nonsense. And as DN mentions above, along with traditional leftist support for DEcentralization comes essential, core advocacy of participatory democracy.

Bullshit. People are to be judged by what they do, not what they say. The left loves to go on about decentralization in theory. they almost always fail to implement it in practice. And Marx was definitely not a decentralizer. Communism was to be decentralized, socialism manifestly was not. the words “dictatorship of the proletariat” were not used by accident, he meant them in their roman sense.

>Again, we have two centuries of socialist and communist theory and practice that 100% contradicts your absurd views.

We have two centuries of leftists preaching about decentralization and then setting up the most centralized, bloodthirsty regimes in history. That is not what I would call a good record, nor does it contradict my views. Where are all these leftist oases that you claim are decentralized?

> The left was all about flattening hierarchies, breaking up power centers, dispersing power equally to all individuals.

In theory, sure. Unfortunately, I don’t live in theory, I live in reality, and in reality, the leftists smashed hierarchies only to set up new, steeper hierarchies with themselves at the top. You have done nothing but repeat robespierre over and over again, why won’t you learn?

>because it’s based on the premise that a few humans can own most humans — own their production, their blood, sweat and tears, appropriate everything they create,

No, that would be the marxist theory, the theory that the workers have the right to expunge anyone who isn’t one of them. It is the right, or more particularly the capitalist, that objects to expropriation on principle.

@Magistra

>Capitalism may have originated to benefit a certain class of European males, but preserving other hierarchies isn’t innate to it: if there is more money to be made in chasing the pink pound than in catering to homophobes that’s where mainstream capitalist companies will go, and the same applies to other hierarchies.

This is precisely the beauty of capitalism.

I am of the right, I believe that society needs hierarchies to function. The trouble isn’t just building a good hierarchy, though that’s hard enough. The trouble is that even if you build a good one, it’s bound to decay over time. the reason capitalism succeeds is that it’s constantly erecting healthy new hierarchies while tearing down old ones that have decayed. By letting people choose which hierarchies to associate with, it gives them massive incentive to deliver to people what they want. Capitalism does not transform the world into masters and slaves, as plume would claim, it transforms everyone into everyone else’s willing servant. The people at google work day in and day out to make me a better search engine, and as long as they stay the best at it, they’ll keep making money, which is good for me, and good for them. the only people who lose are those who are bad at making search engines, and that’s precisely who we want to lose.

correction:
leave it at that.

I agree with LFC. It is one of the least attractive features of Marx and Marxism and it seems deluded, if not almost insane.

Cassander,

Marx didn’t invent the phrase, “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Joseph Weydemeyer did. And just because you can use it in a sentence doesn’t prove you know what it means, what Marx means when he says it, or anything else for that matter.

This is the basic meaning, in a wiki snapshot:

In Marxist socio-political thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class, has control of political power.[1][2] The term, coined by Joseph Weydemeyer, was adopted by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the 19th century. In Marxist theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the intermediate system between capitalism and communism, when the government is in the process of changing the means of ownership from privatism to collective ownership.[3]

Both Marx and Engels argued that the short-lived Paris Commune, which ran the French capital for over two months before being repressed, was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

According to Marxist theory, the existence of any government implies the dictatorship of a social class over another. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is thus used as an antonym of the dictatorship of the proletariat.[4]

Rosa Luxemburg, a Marxist theorist, emphasized the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the rule of the whole class, representing the majority, and not a single party, characterizing the dictatorship of the proletariat as a concept meant to expand democracy rather than reduce it, as opposed to minority rule in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the only other class state power can reside in according to Marxist theory.[5]

In other words, Marx and Marxists are saying that any class controlling political power is engaged in “dictatorship.” They don’t mean it in the sense you think they do.

Beyond that, you have a truly terrible habit of making a few leftists stand in for every leftist. Which, of course, you avoid like the plague when the shoe is on the other foot. All the more ironic because your team has had a far bigger impact on history as far as ruling classes go, dominating the scene to a far greater extent. It’s not at all close.

As in, the number of times that leftists have controlled governments can be counted on one hand. The number of times that righties have? A “conservative” number puts that into the many hundreds. In fact, it’s the norm for governments to be controlled by conservatives. That’s beyond typical. It’s less than rare for leftists to control them.

And this?

The interesting phenomenon is not rightists claiming deeds trump words, but those on the left who claim to be Marxist, but then reject not just the deeds of their fellow Marxists but the words of Marx himself.

The interesting phenomenon is that rightists almost always hold leftists to far greater standards than they hold themselves. You want us to take responsibility for the deeds of a few, when we have already made it abundantly clear they don’t believe what we believe, and that we’re absolutely opposed to what they may have done. But you avoid doing the same for your own side of the aisle as if it were the plague. You won’t own up to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Suharto, etc. and the vast capitalist machinery that has slaughtered, enslaved, exploited and oppressed billions — literally billions of human beings. Upthread, in fact, you were praising capitalism to the skies, even though its history is far, far more deadly than that of all the leftist regimes combined throughout history. And it’s not close.

First thing you need to do, Cassander, before you start preaching to the side of the aisle whose diverse philosophies are vastly superior to your own, vastly more moral, ethical, logical and humane . . . . is to admit that you back the most immoral and destructive economic system yet conceived of or implemented on this planet. Admit to its history of destruction and the inevitability of our ecological collapse if we don’t get off its despicable train. Do that and then let’s talk about the sins of the left.

> characterizing the dictatorship of the proletariat as a concept meant to expand democracy rather than reduce it, as opposed to minority rule in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the only other class state power can reside in according to Marxist theory.[5]

This is laughable. rule by the bourgeoisie over the workers is tyranny, but the workers over the bourgeoisie is expanded democracy? And that’s even before getting into marx’s frequent and complete denunciations of the social democratic movement that actually sought to expand, and work through, democratic means.

>Beyond that, you have a truly terrible habit of making a few leftists stand in for every leftist.

No, I make you a stand in for marx because you literally recite the trotskyite party line. If you don’t want to be compared with his ilk, stop saying the things he did.

> You won’t own up to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Suharto, etc. and the vast capitalist machinery that has slaughtered, enslaved, exploited and oppressed billions — literally billions of human beings

Well, except for Pinochet, none of those people were capitalist. They never claimed to be capitalist, other capitalists never called them capitalist, and they all repeatedly, often, and loudly denounced capitalism> but I love the chutzpah of you talking out one side of your mouth claiming that I deserve to be associated with people who never called themselves capitalist, while you disclaim all relationship people who called themselves communist, and were embraced by communists around the world as fellow communists. Even by your usual standard of duplicitous, that’s an impressive double standard.

>The interesting phenomenon is that rightists almost always hold leftists to far greater standards than they hold themselves.

Seriously, how you type those two things back to back with a straight face?

>. is to admit that you back the most immoral and destructive economic system yet conceived of or implemented on this planet.

again, plume, that would be you, not me. It was your friends, not mine, who wrecked russia, china, vietnam, cambodia, and cuba, your friends who piled up the largest mountain of corpses in history then lied about it for decades. My friends just quietly went on raising standards of living whenever they were allowed to.

>How about the movements of decolonization, Cassander? Sounds like “decentralization” on a massive scale, and most of it led by leftists.

in some ways yes, others no. I’m not aware of any anti-colonial movement that was a decentralizer on principle. Virtually all post-colonial regimes set up systems within their countries that were far more centralized than those run by the withdrawing power. Virtually all were nationalist, many were explicit 5 year plan style socialists, and many that were not that explicitly (for cold war reasons) were that in practice.

>Or what about the U.S. civil rights struggle, remind me of all the fine capitalists fighting against legalized racial hierarchy

You mean like the East Louisiana Railroad that supported Plessy because it didn’t want to pay the cost of running extra rail cars for blacks and whites? Why, I agree that’s an excellent example of capitalism achieving exactly what I claim it does.

>Or what about the anti-apartheid movement? That involved bringing down a hugely “centralized” state apparatus, complete with a secret police that would murder dissidents like Ruth First

I see no evidence that the modern SA state is any less centralized than the pre-apartheid one.

>Is it not worth noting that, whatever his many faults, Robespierre abolished slavery in the French colonies? That’s 500,000 people just in Haiti. Surely the literal ownership of a human body counts as centralized authority

Yes, and good for him. Now weigh it against the tens of thousands he executed in the terror, the million and a half he conscripted into the army, and so on.

>Sure, the railroads were opposed to it–until the case law was established, and then they were happy to go along with segregation, because it was in their interest to follow the law.

So, you think that corporations should feel free to violate whatever laws they feel like? interesting theory.

>Not a very successful strategy for social change you’ve got there.

No, the state is most definitely mightier than the corporation. Glad to know that you’ve accepted that.

>Luckily, the people who actually got the laws to change 70 years later had a strategy that didn’t depend on friendly Mr. Pennybags and his corporate philanthropic mission (if only we could say the same today).

Which part of “not from the benevolence of the butcher” did you have trouble with? Who over the age of 10 thinks that intentions matter? They don’t, results matter. It wasn’t capitalism that desired jim crow, it was racist voters who knew that if they left things to capitalism, blacks would soon be treated as equals. Not out of any good intent, but because capitalism only cares about the color green, and that’s a good thing in the long run.

It is no accident that democracy follows in the wake of capitalism and not the reverse. Once you accept that your one man’s money is just as good as anyone else’s, it’s hard to deny him equal rights and keep a straight face. Most people are not plume, and lack the chutzpah required to openly proclaim that some animals are more equal than others without feeling somewhat guilty.

> I’ve come to realize that I don’t know what you mean by “centralization” if the oppressive apparata of a police state don’t count.

You know what I mean, you just don’t like that I could all state oppression, not just oppression in service of goals I don’t share. Most post colonial states were more oppressive and less competent than what they replaced, not less.

>I haven’t seen you give a straightforward definition of what you think capitalism is,

Well, I didn’t think such a thing was necessary, private ownership and control of the means of production isn’t bad, thought a bit outdated. the absence of restrictions on voluntary exchange is better, but less elegant.

rule by the bourgeoisie over the workers is tyranny, but the workers over the bourgeoisie is expanded democracy?

Ummm that’s actually pretty much the definition: rule by the people

Another aspect of the DOTP. With Marx and every other socialist theorist who wanted to use the state to get to communism — the absence of the state — it was always meant to be temporary. That Lenin and others betrayed this can’t be blamed on those theorists, including Marx. Though some might say that the large contingent of leftists who argued against Marx and Marxists about this temporary stage . . . . they could say, “See, we told you! You can’t use the state to make the state obsolete!” Those left anarchists . . . or, as Morris, Reclus and Kropotkin sometimes called themselves, “anarchist communists,” believed it was necessary to make the state obsolete from the get go, skipping that stage entirely. That was really their only riff with the Marxists of any import. They wanted to begin with a classless society. Marx and company thought this had to be done in stages.

But they had the same goal.

@The Other DSCH

>Your beloved captains of industry did not succeed in preventing or ending segregation;

When one accuses someone else of misrepresentation, it generally does not behoove them to then immediately misrepresent said person. There are a few people who celebrate capitalism for love of titans of industry, but not many. Rand falls into this group.

More to the point, though, I dispute the notion that capitalism did not help end segregation, more on this later.

>the one instance you cited was a paltry effort and complete failure that, indeed, established the legal precedent for segregation for seventy years to come

Since when is fighting a noble battle and losing considered a character flaw?

>Not to completely dismiss intra-class conflicts, but for most businesses, especially southern agriculture, it was quite beneficial to have a pool of cheap black labor; this was the function of segregation.

Cheep black labor was not the purpose of segregation, white social supremacy was. If what you claim was true, then one would have expected the southern economy to outperform the northern, at least for whites. It didn’t. Southern economic growth and living standards lagged behind northern for a century after the civil war, something the southerns excused by blaming General Sherman and denigrating northern culture. Since the end of segregation, southern economic growth has significantly increased, and the gap between north and south dramatically narrowed.

Segregation was a colossal effort by southern whites rejecting capitalism in favor of racism, not a capitalist plot to get rich. Indeed, capitalism unquestionably helped end segregation in several ways. Most directly, the great migration, fueled by work in northern factories, drew nearly half of the blacks out of the south. This not only freed those individuals from Jim crow, but by moving from where they couldn’t vote to where they could, created a powerful new political block that was anti-segregation.

>You seem to think that “only seeing green” leads to some sort of intrinsic fairness, which is absurd (and anyway, look who’s talking “intentions” now).

I said nothing about intentions. Capitalist do not set out intending to see everyone equally, then end up seeing them all equally because that makes them the most money.

@engels

>Ummm that’s actually pretty much the definition: rule by the people

Bourgeoisie aren’t people?

@Plume
cassander,

>As for dictators I mentioned. They were specifically right-wing dictators. Your side of the aisle. Right wing. And they were very, very good to capitalists in the process, and slaughtered, imprisoned, tortured and, at best, exiled countless leftists.

Right wing is not capitalist. I defend capitalism, not the right. But even if you add in the total of anyone vaguely on the right, the total adds up to dramatically less than the total on the left. the worst of the white terrors were orders of magnitudes less bad than the worst of the red.
>Another aspect of the DOTP. With Marx and every other socialist theorist who wanted to use the state to get to communism — the absence of the state — it was always meant to be temporary.

Once again, intentions don’t count, results do. The magical wishing away of the tyrannical state Marx deliberately sought to create is perhaps the laziest and least defensible part of Marxism.

>That Lenin and others betrayed this can’t be blamed on those theorists, including Marx.

You would never accept, let alone argue that “the fact that some employers mistreat their employees cannot be blamed on those theorists, including Friedman”. You would say that they are responsible because the logic of the system they create ensures that employers will mistreat their employees to get ahead. And you would be right. The problem is that you refuse to turn that lens on yourself.

Lenin did not betray the marxist model, he implemented it. The problem is not wreckers, the problem is that the marxist model does not produce communism, it produces stalinism. We know this because literally every time someone has tried the marxist model, the result has been stalinism. the number of killings and imprisonings ranged from the tens of thousands to tens of millions, which is not an insignificant difference, but the forms were always the same, every time, without exception.

>Which is why it was so great for slavery, and gave it a major second life in America with the advent of the industrial revolution. I’ve linked to several studies and essays showing this many times before. Slavery was dying in the states prior to the rise of capitalism. Capitalism gave it an additional century of life, at least.

There are thousands of years of pre-capitalist human history, and in none of them was there ever a concentrated, sustained effort to abolish slavery. Slavery was a ubiquitous fact of human life before around 1750 or so. Over the next 150 years or so, this universal human institution was, for the first time in history, attacked on principle, made broadly illegal, and, eventually, became subject to universal moral sanction and opprobrium. It takes an impressive amount of myopia to miss that this unprecedented movement not only occurred at the same time as capitalism, but was spearheaded by the elements of society that were the most capitalistic. If we could harness the power of double think required to not just ignore that correlation, but to proclaim that capitalism was an engine for a social arrangement that preceded it by thousands of years and died as it spread, we could light up a city.

>Mature capitalism is just a very sophisticated form of slavery, without physical whips and chains — in most cases. But whips and chains are there in other forms, and most of a worker’s day is spent working for free.

And once again, you simply beclown yourself with absurdities and laughable falsehoods.

>He never talked about how a state apparatus would look in the new socialist world.

yes, he did. to quote.

“The constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social-democratic, the Red Republic, is the dictatorship of his allies.”

“Every provisional state setup after a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that. From the beginning we reproached Camphausen for not acting dictatorially, for not immediately shattering and eliminating the remnants of the old institutions. So while Herr Camphausen lulled himself with constitutional dreams, the defeated party strengthened its positions in the bureaucracy and in the army ‒ indeed here and there even ventured on open struggle.

“… if the Assembly had been possessed of the least energy, it would have immediately dissolved and sent home the Diet ‒ than which no corporate body was more unpopular in Germany ‒ and replaced it by a Federal Government, chosen from among its own members. It would have declared itself the only legal expression of the sovereign will of the German people, and thus have attached legal validity to every one of its decrees. It would, above all, have secured to itself an organized and armed force in the country sufficient to put down any opposition on the part of the Governments.”

Marx spoken openly and often of his desire for a revolutionary, dictatorial government. That you deny this speaks either to your dishonesty or your ignorance.

> Thing is, you’ve never even attempted — and can not possibly — demonstrate that his so-called “system” was used, anywhere, ever

we have nearly 100 years of marxist governments, that is governments by people who called themselves marxist, weer called marxists by other marxists, who set up governments everyone called marxist. Everyone turned stalinist, without exception. That means at least one of three things. 1, Marxism is a recipe for stalinism. 2, marxism has an intense traction to would be stalinists who use the ideology to their own ends. 3, marxism has an intense attraction to people too stupid to know what marx really wanted and get manipulated by group 2. Now, any ideology has plenty of adherents that are stupid and/or power hungry, but your claim that every successful marxist movement in history has been filled entirely with the stupid and stalinism is more damning criticism than I could ever put forth. That you embrace such a theory openly shows how desperate you are to believe.

>The vast majority of Marx’s writings consist of deep analysis of capitalism, and there is nothing that describes a future socialist state.

once again, you repeat the lie.

>Nothing Jesus said, as far as we know, was ever remotely like the organized Church bureaucracy that developed hundreds of years after his death.

and if every single christian community ever established ended up with a bloody inquisition, you might have a good point. Because that is the record with marx.

> It is generally better to discuss the companies that didn’t make a mint because of it then those which did, because the former is the exception to the rule.

Let’s stipulate that this is true. It’s not, but whatever. So around 1800, capitalists are making out like bandits. enslaving people left and right. then why, over the next century, did slavery get largely eliminated? Capitalists, according to you, loved it. and according to you, they were running the show.

Now, you can make an argument about evolving moral norms, but that begs the question as to why norms were evolving, which brings us back to the argument I made about capitalism bringing an egalitarian sense. You can make the argument that wage slavery was more efficient, but that belies the notion that capitalists were making out like bandits because of slavery. You can argue that capitalists tried to keep it and lost, but it was the most capitalist places that banned slavery first and most vigorously, so that undermines your whole narrative about capitalists lording it over everyone. There is no argument that you can make that does not contradict your other arguments.

And you know what, you don’t care. You’re like some young earth creationist desperately spinning stories about how fossils “prove” the earth is only 6000 years old. You have your holy book with all the answers, and that’s good enough for you.

@Val

>you can’t blame Marx for what communist countries did after he was dead – still stands.

We either should, or should not, blame philosophers for the crimes of their followers. Plume has no hesitation blaming, say, Milton Friedman for the crimes of capitalists. Admittedly, plume has no hesitation in blaming friedman for the crime of avowed anti-capitalists, but we can put that aside for now. By the standard he applies to Friedman, Marx has orders of magnitude more blood on his hands. Frankly, I have little interest in debating the guilt or innocence of philosophers, I think reasonable arguments can be made on both sides. All I want is consistency. What Plume wants is to be able to blame Friedman for working conditions in modern china, but cry foul when I point out the far more direct connection between Marx and the gulags.

Val,

I never said inequities began with capitalism. My point has always been that it is simply the most effective and efficient producer of those vast inequities, that no other economic system to date has been as successful in creating mass poverty, inequality, pollution, the destruction of ecological systems worldwide, etc. etc. . . . Capitalism is the king of the hill when it comes to producing wildly unequal results, radically increasing hierarchies, privilege, separation of classes, etc. etc.

True socialism, which has never, ever been tried on any national scale, is its antidote.

Ah, but is the True Socialist — refuse all imitators! — also a True Scotsman?

Inquiring minds . . .

Bruce,

No. It has nothing to do with the vastly overused “true Scotsman” test.

It’s not about “purity” in the case of real world examples of the misuse of the term. It’s almost always a case of a 180 degree divergence from the entire history of socialist thought, action and small-scale implementation.

As in, none of this should be difficult for anyone to figure out. None of it should be controversial. I’ve posted it before, but Chomsky, in just a few minutes, puts it very well (on YouTube):

Chomsky on Socialism

“accepting nothing less.”

Bruce,

Not so. At all. I fully realize that it has contradictions, as does every single system/variation we could possibly conceive of. And I’ve never claimed that it isn’t problematic. You’re simply confusing my arguments against specific objections with some totalizing argument against any and all objections. I’ve been “at pains” to debunk the former. I have never tried to push the latter.

In other words . . . yes, it has problems. And, yes, it has contradictions. But its actual problems and contradictions aren’t being raised by critics here. Instead, they’re raising objections to a phantom projection of some perverse distortion of “socialism” they’ve either invented or accepted from other inventors. Chomsky is exactly right in his short video about that.

Think about the difference in criticism regarding Obama . . . from his left and from his right. From my POV, the left is generally quite accurate in its (oftentimes harsh) critique and analysis of his failures . . . . but the right tends to criticize a phantom projection of Obama, one from their deepest, darkest Id. They see a wild, wide-eyed Maoist insurgent, not a neoliberal, mainstream politician. If a person argues against the critique of the phantom Obama, is he or she being “manic” or falling for the True Scotsman fallacy?

Uh, no.

Watson Ladd @6: There are no Morrisists in the world

There may be few people who call themselves Morrisists, but if you mean that Morris’s vision has faded without leaving a trace, you’re mistaken. A great many people enthusiastically admire the spiritual successor of News from Nowhere: Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. And a great many more are deeply dissatisfied with mass production and consumerism, even if they see no plausible alternative at the moment.

geo, Marxists made the Russian revolution. They did so in the face of massive state repression. How does one make revolution without mass parties and bodies of men and women willing to kill for power?

Watson@78: How does one make revolution without mass parties and bodies of men and women willing to kill for power?

Feminists seem to have done a good job of it. Consciousness can be raised, with a little help (sometimes) from technology.

jch@79: Yes, agreed, but those problems of coordination and coercion are not specific to democratic socialism, not a demonstration of its distinctive “contradictions.”

78 Um, wasn’t the Russian revolution made by the Mensheviks?

Plume: You’re simply confusing my arguments against specific objections with some totalizing argument against any and all objections.

Geo: This certainly rolls easily off the pen, Bruce, no doubt because anything at all could be substituted for the word “socialism.” . . . but those problems of coordination and coercion are not specific to democratic socialism . . .

You believe in a type; I don’t believe in the typology. This is a difference between us.

Another all too frequent mantra we hear, especially from the right, is that if we ever try a socialism again, there can be only one outcome. That it must repeat the scenario in Russia, China, NK, etc. etc.

This, to me, crosses over the line of absurdity and is all to close to insane. Aside from the fact that “socialism” was never attempted in those countries, to believe that the same thing would occur, regardless of context, is one of the most illogical of thoughts . . . as if context makes no difference, has no impact on events, counter-events, their counter-events, and so on.

America in 2015, for example, is absolutely nothing like Russia in 1917, and no system here, put in place now, would bear the slightest resemblance to anything done there, then. It boggles the mind that all too many people have taken it as an article of faith that the results would be the same . . . . both because no “socialisms” were attempted in those nations, and the new context would be so radically different.

Perhaps the key factors few want to think about? As horrible as Lenin and Stalin’s actions were, they had a context too. I have zero doubt that if the world had embraced their nascent revolution right off the bat, during WWI and afterward, instead of trying to destroy it from the outset, things would have been radically better for the Russian people. When a nation is not under attack from all sides — as it was from the West — it tends not to turn so violently toward autocracy and repression. We know this because in every war, even the so-called “Western Democracies” instituted severe repressions on their populations, which included basically tossing their respective constitutions/civil law frameworks for the duration of that war. The West (with America in the lead) waged a permanent war from Day One against every leftist insurgency, embargoed them, excluded them from the world economy, directly and indirectly sought “regime change” as a permanent policy, etc. etc.

Take away all of that and you undoubtedly get a massive reduction, if not a complete end, in internalized state repression, and the world breathes far more easily in the bargain.

In short, it takes two to tango. More than two, when it comes to these things. We Americans, and all too many Europeans, have been brainwashed into believing that these leftist insurgencies did what they did based solely on some “inevitable” outgrowth from leftist teachings, instead of viewing them in context and seeing them in all their complexity. Not only are they wrong about the logical continuum from those leftist teachings. They’re just being ridiculous when they assume the same thing must always reoccur, despite vastly different contexts, actors and circumstances.