robbo203
28th April 2011, 20:51
Check this out....
http://andycox1953.webs.com/
The way ahead.
The notion of a moneyless world in which the Marxist slogan, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need’, would be realised is one that has an old lineage. Yet it is a notion that elicits almost universal incredulity, and consistently fails to establish any sort of presence in mainstream political consciousness. Why is this, and what can be done to ratchet up its credibility and salience? To my mind, the urgency of this project has never been greater: On the one hand, technology is increasingly rendering feasible the prospect of a veritable ‘heaven on earth’. On the other hand, humanity’s depredation of the planet is leading us down the road to hell. How these tendencies will play out is anyone’s guess; nothing is pre-ordained. For, barring some irreversible tipping point being reached leading to a runaway natural calamity (and I don’t for one moment discount this possibility), it is still within our gift as a species to broadly determine our future. However, as I’ve hopefully demonstrated in my Point of View essay, if we choose to stick with our existing mode of producing the things we need in order to exist at all, then the outlook will be bleak. Because there is remorseless logic in the manner in which this capitalistic system operates. The driver behind it is the need to realise a profit, and this has all sorts of bizarre and adverse consequences: For example; despite there being something like 18 million empty homes in the US, there are probably around a million homeless Americans. Despite millions going hungry, agricultural ‘set-aside’ policies are implemented and ‘excess’ produce is often junked rather than given away. Despite global awareness of the many deleterious effects of destroying virgin rainforests, such destruction proceeds ineluctably apace. These contradictions stem directly from the fact we live in a world of commodity production where goods and services are produced almost exclusively in order to be sold so as to realise a profit, and if there is no prospect of this happening, then, of course, they’ll not find their way to the market. Capitalism’s weird logic fails to acknowledge the need of the hungry for food, for instance, because their lack of purchasing power means that their hunger cannot adequately manifest itself as ‘demand’.
It is not my intention here to embark upon another critique of capitalism. Rather, I would like to consider why it is that the sane, rational alternative, communism; which incidentally, has nothing to do with state capitalist regimes such as Cuba or North Korea; fails lamentably to grab the imagination of the vast majority of people. I would also like to consider what might be done to rectify this situation, and what might facilitate the uptake of this ‘utopian’ idea.
Undoubtedly, a major obstacle to widespread acceptance of this idea is what has been termed ‘ideology’; in my understanding, a disparate set of notions that is foisted upon the ‘masses’ by various agencies – such as religion, schools and the media – which promotes ways of thinking, feeling, and believing conducive to the continued existence of the current social system. Thus, religion may serve to ameliorate social discontent by encouraging people to focus rather upon otherworldly (and therefore necessarily non-collectivistic) concerns, schools may promote social conformity by extolling civic responsibility and encouraging youngsters to gear themselves up for a life of wage slavery, and the media, with their flag-waving, sanctimonious editorials about the need for everyone to ‘pull together’, may obscure or play down the divisive nature of society. Obviously, the situation is more complicated than this: Ideological agencies don’t all sing from the same song sheet, and the individuals involved in their operations may well baulk at the thought that they are somehow helping to preserve the status quo. Moreover, to describe these agencies in terms of an assumed opposition to communism is absurd. This is a notion well below the radar for them (though I suspect some of these agencies may well decide to train their big guns on proponents of resourced based living when/if this idea gains more ground). For all this, however, ideology does play a part – sometimes unwittingly and indirectly in so-called democracies and sometimes more directly in more authoritarian regimes – in the formation of social attitudes not exactly inimical to the status quo. Typically, ideology obfuscates the fault lines running through society; promoting instead the model of a patriotic citizenry and encouraging various degrees of disdain towards elements within the country perceived to be ‘rocking the boat’, as well as towards assorted foreigners beyond its borders for other reasons.
Assumptions about human nature, however derived, can also act as formidable deterrents to embracing the idea of a free access society. Ideology itself is often the font of many such contentious suppositions, or at least disposes people to such ways of thinking. One widespread assumption about human nature is the belief that people are inherently lazy and can only be goaded into ‘work’ by some form of financial inducement. This obviously goes to the very crux of the communist case, challenging as it does the idea that people might selflessly and voluntarily contribute towards the common good. However, such cynicism is almost certainly informed by the reality of work and employment in contemporary society, where there is an intrinsic conflict of interests between workers and bosses over what is expected of the former and the remuneration workers receive in return. Additionally, for most people, attitudes towards work as such are often coloured by disagreeable ‘conditions of employment’ that can render the whole experience deeply stultifying and stressful. One has only to contrast the frisson of pleasure and release felt by most as the weekend beckons with the gloom that awaits them when Monday inevitably comes around to comprehend the depressing reality of this observation. Moreover, the ‘inherent laziness’ assumption begs question about the value attaching to work: Rather than revering the braggadocio of bankers and brokers simply because they make wads of money, a future communist society will undoubtedly witness a completely different sort of value system in which status, insofar as it has significance, will most likely correlate with one’s actual contribution towards society, with those undertaking the most difficult or onerous work being highly regarded. Many other arguments can be marshalled against the disparaging assumption that human beings are inherently lazy (and by implication unsuited to resource-based living); to wit, the fact that only a fraction of the global workforce today would be required to produce the goods and services actually needed in a communist society (and hence the ‘goodwill’ required of people to contribute would be minimal), the fact that present day capitalism is unbelievably wasteful in the manner in which it operates, the fact that millions of people around the world actually engage in voluntary unpaid work even in today’s avaricious social climate, and the fact that in a truly communistic society technology could be deployed without restraint to automate nearly all jobs considered dangerous or ‘undesirable’. Collectively, these arguments simply eat away at the ‘inherent laziness’ objection.
Another very questionable assumption that prevents people from accepting the idea of communism– in many ways the terrible twin of the afore-mentioned assumption that human beings are inherently lazy - is the view that people are inherently greedy, and would take all they could get if goods and services were freely available. Again, such a view is very much entrenched in the consumerist zeitgeist of modern capitalism, which incessantly bombards people with prompts to buy things regardless of whether these things are really needed. Moreover, status often attaches to the acquisition of certain categories of goods and services – such as the luxurious or fashionable – creating powerful secondary reasons to purchase such goods and services. No doubt, given that capitalism is concerned only with maximising profits and not with meeting human needs, a massive surge in demand for all sorts goods and services would accompany the initial establishment of communism. But it is wholly reasonable to expect that once the deficits of capitalism had been made good that ‘demand’ – in this instance, genuine demand, unmediated by money – would ‘plateau’ out. After all, there are only so many punnets of strawberries you can eat in a day. Certainly, there will be shortages from time to time. But these will be dealt with in a rational, consensual manner. What would disappear altogether is the intractable grinding poverty found all around the world today, along with homelessness, hunger, and much else that characterises a society based on commodity production.
A third factor that seemingly impedes uptake of communism is what I might call censorship. By this, I don’t mean that this idea is formally suppressed (although it’s possible that this does/could occur in some parts of the world). What I mean is that the idea is often dismissed as a legitimate topic of discussion or not allowed an airing, simply because it is considered too quirky and eccentric, too lacking in support, to merit attention. Much of the accompanying critique of capitalism informed by this perspective therefore fails to penetrate political discourse. We are left instead with the tedious spectacle of career politicians spouting the same old crap, constantly thinking wholly within the box, recycling the same old formulae. It’s no wonder that people feel alienated, indifferent, or even hostile towards anything of a political nature. Unfortunately, such attitudes may then also be directed at the free access proposition because it too is packaged as a political idea. Some consolation may, however, be had from the near certainty that were this idea to take off, it would do so exponentially: the more people accepted it, the more people would accept it, and the rate of increase in adherents would dramatically rise; a tendency that would facilitated, no doubt, by the sheer novelty value of this radically different idea, One might speculate that a sort of ‘resonance effect’ would come into play as more and more people spoke out for a world of free access, and did so with increasing confidence and without fear of being considered eccentric. Simultaneously, the ‘message’ would become richer as it became increasingly backed up by serious research and academic study of the subject. Material support would grow too. Additionally, the critique of contemporary society that inevitably accompanies advocacy of free access would encourage people to increasingly relate the woes they face in their everyday life to the manner in which society is organised as acceptance of the free access proposition spread, and this too would help to engender support
Fourthly, there’s probably an element of not wanting to stray too far from one’s intellectual comfort zone in all of this. The very notion of a moneyless, propertyless world is, after all, one that’s often likely to elicit derision and scorn. Moreover, taking on board such a notion is likely to call into question a whole host of existing assumptions. Mind shifting can be an exceedingly tall order.
A fifth factor, one that has exerted a pernicious influence on the uptake of communism, is the lure of reformism, the temptation to go for the quick fix and put the entire communist project on the back boiler. What this approach signally fails to take into account is the complex, interconnected, shifting nature of capitalism, in which attempting to resolve one problem can lead to unintended problems cropping up elsewhere. For example, attaining improved wages and working conditions in one country may result in a flight of capital to some other country less fastidious about the plight of its working class, and thus may lead to lay-offs and factory closures in the former. This is not to say that certain reforms are not desirable in themselves – the attainment of democracy and the right to free expression, for example, must surely be counted as desirable ends. However, reformism has its limitations, and where it runs counter to the first principle of capitalism; viz that nothing should stand in the way of maximising profit, it is ultimately doomed to failure, or, at most, negligible success. It should also be noted that, given the right set of circumstances, the powers that be may choose to back-peddle in regard to some hard-won reforms. Yet those advocating specific reforms sometimes go further and contend that capitalism as a system can be reformed to the extent that can be somehow made to work in the interests of the working class. This is pure fantasy: Such a belief completely overlooks the fact capitalism is about profit. However, this is precisely what various groupings on the left – from neo-Fabians to Trotskyites – advocate in their tireless campaigns to up the ante in the conflict between labour and capital. Why they don’t just call for the immediate abolition of the wages system instead of insisting upon the chasing the Holy Grail of a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ is beyond comprehension, particularly as even modest movements in this direction can be undone by the economy suddenly lurching into recession.
Finally, we come to the Orwellian manner in which the very language of discourse about the idea of ‘communism’ has been warped out of all recognition. It goes without saying that the terms ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ have come to signify something very different from the moneyless, stateless, propertyless society of free access and common ownership of the means of production envisaged by Marx and Engels. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ states the position concisely. (See Wikipedia for more on this). Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, regimes of various hues have attempted to cloak themselves in communist or socialist raiment to enhance their standing and legitimise themselves internally and externally. Should we therefore pragmatically relinquish this older terminology, and search for some new form of words? Whilst it might it may be tempting to do so, I think this should be resisted for two reasons: Firstly, to do so would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater as the case for Marxian communism goes hand in hand with an insightful Marxist critique of capitalism and it would be foolhardy to jettison this simply for the sake of having an untarnished label. Part of the approach to presenting the communist case is to demonstrate how and why certain undesirable phenomena happen in our world today, and thereby show that these would not occur in communist society. Take a trivial example: The printer I use does not enable cartridge re-cycling and barely tolerates compatibles. Yet it wastes an inordinate amount of ink, and each cartridge costs a fortune. In a communist society, or what is sometimes called a society of ‘resourced based living’, there would be absolutely no need at all to design printers simply in order to commit customers to forking out for expensive cartridge replacements. The phenomenon of planned obsolescence in general, from batteries to toasters, is something that only makes sense in a society geared to selling things, and would have no place in a future communist society. A second reason for not abandoning the old nomenclature is that to do so is to implicitly acknowledge that regimes which describe themselves as communist or socialist are precisely that. This is the Big Lie. Whilst there is any political mileage in the terms at all, to become complicit in this lie will simply add to the confusion and set the cause back for generations.
To conclude this essay, I would likely to briefly consider what can be done about this sorry state of affairs. How can like-minded people around the world push the agenda for revolutionary change? Much has already been suggested in the foregoing. But it may be helpful to tie everything up and end with a concisely worded list of proposals. So here they are:
Primarily, it is vital that we don’t become sidetracked by the issue of reformism. For the reasons I’ve outlined above, we need to hold fast to bringing about communism on a global scale as soon as possible. A bold and resolute ‘
http://andycox1953.webs.com/
The way ahead.
The notion of a moneyless world in which the Marxist slogan, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need’, would be realised is one that has an old lineage. Yet it is a notion that elicits almost universal incredulity, and consistently fails to establish any sort of presence in mainstream political consciousness. Why is this, and what can be done to ratchet up its credibility and salience? To my mind, the urgency of this project has never been greater: On the one hand, technology is increasingly rendering feasible the prospect of a veritable ‘heaven on earth’. On the other hand, humanity’s depredation of the planet is leading us down the road to hell. How these tendencies will play out is anyone’s guess; nothing is pre-ordained. For, barring some irreversible tipping point being reached leading to a runaway natural calamity (and I don’t for one moment discount this possibility), it is still within our gift as a species to broadly determine our future. However, as I’ve hopefully demonstrated in my Point of View essay, if we choose to stick with our existing mode of producing the things we need in order to exist at all, then the outlook will be bleak. Because there is remorseless logic in the manner in which this capitalistic system operates. The driver behind it is the need to realise a profit, and this has all sorts of bizarre and adverse consequences: For example; despite there being something like 18 million empty homes in the US, there are probably around a million homeless Americans. Despite millions going hungry, agricultural ‘set-aside’ policies are implemented and ‘excess’ produce is often junked rather than given away. Despite global awareness of the many deleterious effects of destroying virgin rainforests, such destruction proceeds ineluctably apace. These contradictions stem directly from the fact we live in a world of commodity production where goods and services are produced almost exclusively in order to be sold so as to realise a profit, and if there is no prospect of this happening, then, of course, they’ll not find their way to the market. Capitalism’s weird logic fails to acknowledge the need of the hungry for food, for instance, because their lack of purchasing power means that their hunger cannot adequately manifest itself as ‘demand’.
It is not my intention here to embark upon another critique of capitalism. Rather, I would like to consider why it is that the sane, rational alternative, communism; which incidentally, has nothing to do with state capitalist regimes such as Cuba or North Korea; fails lamentably to grab the imagination of the vast majority of people. I would also like to consider what might be done to rectify this situation, and what might facilitate the uptake of this ‘utopian’ idea.
Undoubtedly, a major obstacle to widespread acceptance of this idea is what has been termed ‘ideology’; in my understanding, a disparate set of notions that is foisted upon the ‘masses’ by various agencies – such as religion, schools and the media – which promotes ways of thinking, feeling, and believing conducive to the continued existence of the current social system. Thus, religion may serve to ameliorate social discontent by encouraging people to focus rather upon otherworldly (and therefore necessarily non-collectivistic) concerns, schools may promote social conformity by extolling civic responsibility and encouraging youngsters to gear themselves up for a life of wage slavery, and the media, with their flag-waving, sanctimonious editorials about the need for everyone to ‘pull together’, may obscure or play down the divisive nature of society. Obviously, the situation is more complicated than this: Ideological agencies don’t all sing from the same song sheet, and the individuals involved in their operations may well baulk at the thought that they are somehow helping to preserve the status quo. Moreover, to describe these agencies in terms of an assumed opposition to communism is absurd. This is a notion well below the radar for them (though I suspect some of these agencies may well decide to train their big guns on proponents of resourced based living when/if this idea gains more ground). For all this, however, ideology does play a part – sometimes unwittingly and indirectly in so-called democracies and sometimes more directly in more authoritarian regimes – in the formation of social attitudes not exactly inimical to the status quo. Typically, ideology obfuscates the fault lines running through society; promoting instead the model of a patriotic citizenry and encouraging various degrees of disdain towards elements within the country perceived to be ‘rocking the boat’, as well as towards assorted foreigners beyond its borders for other reasons.
Assumptions about human nature, however derived, can also act as formidable deterrents to embracing the idea of a free access society. Ideology itself is often the font of many such contentious suppositions, or at least disposes people to such ways of thinking. One widespread assumption about human nature is the belief that people are inherently lazy and can only be goaded into ‘work’ by some form of financial inducement. This obviously goes to the very crux of the communist case, challenging as it does the idea that people might selflessly and voluntarily contribute towards the common good. However, such cynicism is almost certainly informed by the reality of work and employment in contemporary society, where there is an intrinsic conflict of interests between workers and bosses over what is expected of the former and the remuneration workers receive in return. Additionally, for most people, attitudes towards work as such are often coloured by disagreeable ‘conditions of employment’ that can render the whole experience deeply stultifying and stressful. One has only to contrast the frisson of pleasure and release felt by most as the weekend beckons with the gloom that awaits them when Monday inevitably comes around to comprehend the depressing reality of this observation. Moreover, the ‘inherent laziness’ assumption begs question about the value attaching to work: Rather than revering the braggadocio of bankers and brokers simply because they make wads of money, a future communist society will undoubtedly witness a completely different sort of value system in which status, insofar as it has significance, will most likely correlate with one’s actual contribution towards society, with those undertaking the most difficult or onerous work being highly regarded. Many other arguments can be marshalled against the disparaging assumption that human beings are inherently lazy (and by implication unsuited to resource-based living); to wit, the fact that only a fraction of the global workforce today would be required to produce the goods and services actually needed in a communist society (and hence the ‘goodwill’ required of people to contribute would be minimal), the fact that present day capitalism is unbelievably wasteful in the manner in which it operates, the fact that millions of people around the world actually engage in voluntary unpaid work even in today’s avaricious social climate, and the fact that in a truly communistic society technology could be deployed without restraint to automate nearly all jobs considered dangerous or ‘undesirable’. Collectively, these arguments simply eat away at the ‘inherent laziness’ objection.
Another very questionable assumption that prevents people from accepting the idea of communism– in many ways the terrible twin of the afore-mentioned assumption that human beings are inherently lazy - is the view that people are inherently greedy, and would take all they could get if goods and services were freely available. Again, such a view is very much entrenched in the consumerist zeitgeist of modern capitalism, which incessantly bombards people with prompts to buy things regardless of whether these things are really needed. Moreover, status often attaches to the acquisition of certain categories of goods and services – such as the luxurious or fashionable – creating powerful secondary reasons to purchase such goods and services. No doubt, given that capitalism is concerned only with maximising profits and not with meeting human needs, a massive surge in demand for all sorts goods and services would accompany the initial establishment of communism. But it is wholly reasonable to expect that once the deficits of capitalism had been made good that ‘demand’ – in this instance, genuine demand, unmediated by money – would ‘plateau’ out. After all, there are only so many punnets of strawberries you can eat in a day. Certainly, there will be shortages from time to time. But these will be dealt with in a rational, consensual manner. What would disappear altogether is the intractable grinding poverty found all around the world today, along with homelessness, hunger, and much else that characterises a society based on commodity production.
A third factor that seemingly impedes uptake of communism is what I might call censorship. By this, I don’t mean that this idea is formally suppressed (although it’s possible that this does/could occur in some parts of the world). What I mean is that the idea is often dismissed as a legitimate topic of discussion or not allowed an airing, simply because it is considered too quirky and eccentric, too lacking in support, to merit attention. Much of the accompanying critique of capitalism informed by this perspective therefore fails to penetrate political discourse. We are left instead with the tedious spectacle of career politicians spouting the same old crap, constantly thinking wholly within the box, recycling the same old formulae. It’s no wonder that people feel alienated, indifferent, or even hostile towards anything of a political nature. Unfortunately, such attitudes may then also be directed at the free access proposition because it too is packaged as a political idea. Some consolation may, however, be had from the near certainty that were this idea to take off, it would do so exponentially: the more people accepted it, the more people would accept it, and the rate of increase in adherents would dramatically rise; a tendency that would facilitated, no doubt, by the sheer novelty value of this radically different idea, One might speculate that a sort of ‘resonance effect’ would come into play as more and more people spoke out for a world of free access, and did so with increasing confidence and without fear of being considered eccentric. Simultaneously, the ‘message’ would become richer as it became increasingly backed up by serious research and academic study of the subject. Material support would grow too. Additionally, the critique of contemporary society that inevitably accompanies advocacy of free access would encourage people to increasingly relate the woes they face in their everyday life to the manner in which society is organised as acceptance of the free access proposition spread, and this too would help to engender support
Fourthly, there’s probably an element of not wanting to stray too far from one’s intellectual comfort zone in all of this. The very notion of a moneyless, propertyless world is, after all, one that’s often likely to elicit derision and scorn. Moreover, taking on board such a notion is likely to call into question a whole host of existing assumptions. Mind shifting can be an exceedingly tall order.
A fifth factor, one that has exerted a pernicious influence on the uptake of communism, is the lure of reformism, the temptation to go for the quick fix and put the entire communist project on the back boiler. What this approach signally fails to take into account is the complex, interconnected, shifting nature of capitalism, in which attempting to resolve one problem can lead to unintended problems cropping up elsewhere. For example, attaining improved wages and working conditions in one country may result in a flight of capital to some other country less fastidious about the plight of its working class, and thus may lead to lay-offs and factory closures in the former. This is not to say that certain reforms are not desirable in themselves – the attainment of democracy and the right to free expression, for example, must surely be counted as desirable ends. However, reformism has its limitations, and where it runs counter to the first principle of capitalism; viz that nothing should stand in the way of maximising profit, it is ultimately doomed to failure, or, at most, negligible success. It should also be noted that, given the right set of circumstances, the powers that be may choose to back-peddle in regard to some hard-won reforms. Yet those advocating specific reforms sometimes go further and contend that capitalism as a system can be reformed to the extent that can be somehow made to work in the interests of the working class. This is pure fantasy: Such a belief completely overlooks the fact capitalism is about profit. However, this is precisely what various groupings on the left – from neo-Fabians to Trotskyites – advocate in their tireless campaigns to up the ante in the conflict between labour and capital. Why they don’t just call for the immediate abolition of the wages system instead of insisting upon the chasing the Holy Grail of a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ is beyond comprehension, particularly as even modest movements in this direction can be undone by the economy suddenly lurching into recession.
Finally, we come to the Orwellian manner in which the very language of discourse about the idea of ‘communism’ has been warped out of all recognition. It goes without saying that the terms ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ have come to signify something very different from the moneyless, stateless, propertyless society of free access and common ownership of the means of production envisaged by Marx and Engels. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ states the position concisely. (See Wikipedia for more on this). Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution, regimes of various hues have attempted to cloak themselves in communist or socialist raiment to enhance their standing and legitimise themselves internally and externally. Should we therefore pragmatically relinquish this older terminology, and search for some new form of words? Whilst it might it may be tempting to do so, I think this should be resisted for two reasons: Firstly, to do so would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater as the case for Marxian communism goes hand in hand with an insightful Marxist critique of capitalism and it would be foolhardy to jettison this simply for the sake of having an untarnished label. Part of the approach to presenting the communist case is to demonstrate how and why certain undesirable phenomena happen in our world today, and thereby show that these would not occur in communist society. Take a trivial example: The printer I use does not enable cartridge re-cycling and barely tolerates compatibles. Yet it wastes an inordinate amount of ink, and each cartridge costs a fortune. In a communist society, or what is sometimes called a society of ‘resourced based living’, there would be absolutely no need at all to design printers simply in order to commit customers to forking out for expensive cartridge replacements. The phenomenon of planned obsolescence in general, from batteries to toasters, is something that only makes sense in a society geared to selling things, and would have no place in a future communist society. A second reason for not abandoning the old nomenclature is that to do so is to implicitly acknowledge that regimes which describe themselves as communist or socialist are precisely that. This is the Big Lie. Whilst there is any political mileage in the terms at all, to become complicit in this lie will simply add to the confusion and set the cause back for generations.
To conclude this essay, I would likely to briefly consider what can be done about this sorry state of affairs. How can like-minded people around the world push the agenda for revolutionary change? Much has already been suggested in the foregoing. But it may be helpful to tie everything up and end with a concisely worded list of proposals. So here they are:
Primarily, it is vital that we don’t become sidetracked by the issue of reformism. For the reasons I’ve outlined above, we need to hold fast to bringing about communism on a global scale as soon as possible. A bold and resolute ‘