sc4r
15th July 2003, 01:32
Part 1 – The Problem
150 years ago a man spent his time analysing what was wrong with human societies, producing a vision of what a much more ideal society should look like, and predicting how this better society would be achieved.
In effect he described a goal and described the strategy he thought would achieve it. Rather a lot of this strategy alluded to the inevitability of certain conditions arising and of socialism resulting from them.
The trouble is, they simply don’t seem to have. We can play at 'giving it more time' forever but frankly I would have thought a century and a half was plenty. It has been 50 years since the last major 'socialist' take-over took place, and lets face it all of the surviving ones are looking precarious for one reason or another.
The reality is that the world does not look like it did when Marx was alive. There are far more people, The 'workers' in western states are far more prosperous, They have more apparent say in how their lives are controlled, the military weapons of state control are far more advanced, the weaponry available to put down socialism in foreign nations is far more advanced, the psychological control mechanisms are both far more advanced and far more deeply ingrained, there is a much deeper divide between the conditions of 'workers' in the first world and those in the third world.
The second reality is that many (most?) first world workers accept as gospel the statement that ‘communism has been tried and failed’. It will take one hell of a push now to get them to unite under such a banner. This perceived failure is something Marx definitely did not predict.
In no other endeavour would such an outdated plan be treated as still valid. It is past time to re-evaluate his 'plan' for how his vision would be realised.
.
.
The essential problems include:
Workers in the first world have no obvious selfish motivation to wish equality for those in the third world or much fellow feeling towards them. Anyone who thinks that such a wish is commonplace needs to spend some time on a factory floor. You will hear more overt racism and national protectionism than you ever will in a boardroom.
Workers in the first world in fact have a stake in capitalism. Indirectly they are all capitalist beneficiaries of third world exploitation. In other words they are all bourgeois or petit bourgeois themselves.
But contrary to Marx’s vision these ‘very petit bourgeois’ do not depend upon their proletariat (the third world) for mere survival.
Nor is there any obvious way in which a mass of the actual proletariat (the third word) could unite in sufficient numbers to swamp the first world ‘capitalism’. National boundaries and divisions would see to it that the movement was relatively weak while the fact that capitalism itself is now global would see to it that the opposition was both strong and organised.
Any new mass movement in a single undeveloped country to organise the proletariat will be stomped, but good, by the now very effective first world methods of control in the name of security.
Any revolutionary movement in the first world is going to receive little support for two reasons even beyond the fact that workers there are actually pretty comfortable. A) Because the illusion of possible change through representative democracy makes aggressive militancy far less urgent or apparently attractive; B) Because the shrinking of distances and improvements in security technology make it far less easy to organise an effective militancy. The anarchist and militant strikes against capitalism are pinpricks nothing else.
There is little prospect even of a major disruption like a world war between capitalist nations to provide a distraction. While the most important players on the world scene were still essentially almost feudal this might have been possible (hardly desirable of course even then, but perhaps possible). Now it’s most unlikely. Large Liberal Democracies don’t want to fight each other, they don’t have the irrational personal egos at play and in command that existed back in the early and even mid 20th century.
A huge problem like actually running out of oil or global warming might provide the necessary impetus for a socialist movement to take hold but more likely a return to feudalism or Fascism would be the result. Personally I’m not keen on having these things happen anyway, I’d rather see a socialist world order do something about them before they fuck up our lives for god knows how long.
.
.
Simply put Marx’s crisis is not going to occur in such a way that workers will revolt against the ‘bourgeois bosses’ and win. More likely workers in the first world will collude in exploiting the third even more than at present. Because of their numbers, military force, and isolation together with a degree of self sufficiency at a push they are likely to be a much tougher nut to crack than the bourgeois of a country in Marx’s day would have been.
Part 2 – Some Solutions
So, assuming that one does see Marxism’s GOAL as desirable (which I certainly do), how does one change the situation so that it is likely to be achieved? What does one actually do?
1.Make an effort to educate people into what socialism really means, and in particular show people that they will be better off for adopting it. This should almost go without saying. However, by itself it won’t be nearly enough, because the people to whom the ‘it will benefit you immediately’ part applies are not going to have much power to change things.
2.Get committed people in the first world to try and sabotage capitalism. To me it seems like a joke to think this is going to achieve anything. All it will do is give Liberal democracies an opportunity to denounce socialist as terrorists and repress their message even more than they do now.
3.Find a way to take control of capitalist enterprises and introduce socialist principles gradually to the economy. Such enterprises will have to compete on an economic basis with others and will have to be run efficiently. This inevitably means that they wont produce full socialist benefits of course. This idea has the additional benefit of making the task of any newly formed socialist regime a little less difficult since at least some of owners of ‘the means of production’ will give them up willingly.
4.Organise revolutions in the third world. I think these will be crushed. Easily.
5.Organise Democratic opposition within the framework of Liberal democracies. To do this effectively you have to have a party which is recognisably the ‘socialist movement’ as a whole not 10 or a dozen groups fighting for a share of the vote. This means the more extreme idealistic groups (Like Communists and Anarchists and all the various other types) putting aside their particular desires until the desires common to all are satisfied.
6.Until recently I think most people within the UK saw point 5 as being broadly satisfied by the Labour party. Personally I don’t think it’s true anymore and I’m fairly sure the Labour party would expel anyone who tried to turn it back into a genuine socialist party with essentially Marxist leanings.
7.Establish a communication and alliance with the labour unions. This is easier said than done because Labour unions are for their members, not really for the generality of all workers even within a single country let alone having any care for 3rd world workers. But it’s something to be worked on. Again Anarchist and extreme communist types wont help much here. Because all unions are actually concerned with the question ‘What is in it right now, or in the very near future for our members’. Waffly idealism will cut exactly zero ice.
The best of all worlds would be to find a way to establish socialist trade with the 3rd world in such a way that both socialist members and workers in the first world and those in the 3rd benefited while excluding non socialist enterprises from such a trade together with an organising party which pushed for greater parliamentary influence and used this power to benefit the socialist enterprises and the success of the socialist enterprises to attract more support. I don’t know how this could be done, but I suspect it could be with enough willingness.
To the objection that socialist are not interested in business I would say 1) hogwash and 2) If socialist cannot run businesses profitably then we cannot run an economy; in which case the cappies are right and we might as well quit now.
To the objection that it would corrupt the ideals of a socialist movement to run a business within a capitalist framework I would say that it should be possible to set up articles and controls to ensure it did not. Again if this is beyond us I kinda think we are going to struggle to maintain a socialist country in the face of world opposition anyway.
To my mind if you want socialism you should not be content to talk about it and hope that Marx’s 'crises' inevitably bring it about. In my view they wont do anything of the sort because capitalist apparatus for dealing with such problems is very different and more advanced than Marx foresaw.
If you believe Socialism is a fairer better way for people to organise their lives you should want it and be prepared to look for ways to hasten it. This definitely means giving up on the more extreme demands in order to achieve some progress in the right direction. All of history shows that lasting change tends to evolve, not to be ushered in one fell swoop.
The time to push for your own specific notions is when we reach the fork at which paths diverge not at the outset when all of our goals lie along the same path.
The bottom line is that nearly always to gain something you must give up something. What we must give up in the immediate future is making noises about what we want in the very long term. Because we are not agreed upon that.
Leaders in such a movement will emerge. Leaders always emerge in any movement even if they are not identified as such with titles and rewards. Live with this, but build in controls to ensure that they cannot exploit their position for personal gain or subvert the movement.
What we need is a start. We need some people prepared to invest their lives in such a movement and accept that they personally will suffer somewhat as a result. They will not gain the rewards that they would by submerging themselves in the Liberal system and merely talking about Socialism.
Do you think anyone is ready to make such a commitment? Or to add other ideas beyond a vague 'educate'.
(Edited by sc4r at 1:35 am on July 15, 2003)
150 years ago a man spent his time analysing what was wrong with human societies, producing a vision of what a much more ideal society should look like, and predicting how this better society would be achieved.
In effect he described a goal and described the strategy he thought would achieve it. Rather a lot of this strategy alluded to the inevitability of certain conditions arising and of socialism resulting from them.
The trouble is, they simply don’t seem to have. We can play at 'giving it more time' forever but frankly I would have thought a century and a half was plenty. It has been 50 years since the last major 'socialist' take-over took place, and lets face it all of the surviving ones are looking precarious for one reason or another.
The reality is that the world does not look like it did when Marx was alive. There are far more people, The 'workers' in western states are far more prosperous, They have more apparent say in how their lives are controlled, the military weapons of state control are far more advanced, the weaponry available to put down socialism in foreign nations is far more advanced, the psychological control mechanisms are both far more advanced and far more deeply ingrained, there is a much deeper divide between the conditions of 'workers' in the first world and those in the third world.
The second reality is that many (most?) first world workers accept as gospel the statement that ‘communism has been tried and failed’. It will take one hell of a push now to get them to unite under such a banner. This perceived failure is something Marx definitely did not predict.
In no other endeavour would such an outdated plan be treated as still valid. It is past time to re-evaluate his 'plan' for how his vision would be realised.
.
.
The essential problems include:
Workers in the first world have no obvious selfish motivation to wish equality for those in the third world or much fellow feeling towards them. Anyone who thinks that such a wish is commonplace needs to spend some time on a factory floor. You will hear more overt racism and national protectionism than you ever will in a boardroom.
Workers in the first world in fact have a stake in capitalism. Indirectly they are all capitalist beneficiaries of third world exploitation. In other words they are all bourgeois or petit bourgeois themselves.
But contrary to Marx’s vision these ‘very petit bourgeois’ do not depend upon their proletariat (the third world) for mere survival.
Nor is there any obvious way in which a mass of the actual proletariat (the third word) could unite in sufficient numbers to swamp the first world ‘capitalism’. National boundaries and divisions would see to it that the movement was relatively weak while the fact that capitalism itself is now global would see to it that the opposition was both strong and organised.
Any new mass movement in a single undeveloped country to organise the proletariat will be stomped, but good, by the now very effective first world methods of control in the name of security.
Any revolutionary movement in the first world is going to receive little support for two reasons even beyond the fact that workers there are actually pretty comfortable. A) Because the illusion of possible change through representative democracy makes aggressive militancy far less urgent or apparently attractive; B) Because the shrinking of distances and improvements in security technology make it far less easy to organise an effective militancy. The anarchist and militant strikes against capitalism are pinpricks nothing else.
There is little prospect even of a major disruption like a world war between capitalist nations to provide a distraction. While the most important players on the world scene were still essentially almost feudal this might have been possible (hardly desirable of course even then, but perhaps possible). Now it’s most unlikely. Large Liberal Democracies don’t want to fight each other, they don’t have the irrational personal egos at play and in command that existed back in the early and even mid 20th century.
A huge problem like actually running out of oil or global warming might provide the necessary impetus for a socialist movement to take hold but more likely a return to feudalism or Fascism would be the result. Personally I’m not keen on having these things happen anyway, I’d rather see a socialist world order do something about them before they fuck up our lives for god knows how long.
.
.
Simply put Marx’s crisis is not going to occur in such a way that workers will revolt against the ‘bourgeois bosses’ and win. More likely workers in the first world will collude in exploiting the third even more than at present. Because of their numbers, military force, and isolation together with a degree of self sufficiency at a push they are likely to be a much tougher nut to crack than the bourgeois of a country in Marx’s day would have been.
Part 2 – Some Solutions
So, assuming that one does see Marxism’s GOAL as desirable (which I certainly do), how does one change the situation so that it is likely to be achieved? What does one actually do?
1.Make an effort to educate people into what socialism really means, and in particular show people that they will be better off for adopting it. This should almost go without saying. However, by itself it won’t be nearly enough, because the people to whom the ‘it will benefit you immediately’ part applies are not going to have much power to change things.
2.Get committed people in the first world to try and sabotage capitalism. To me it seems like a joke to think this is going to achieve anything. All it will do is give Liberal democracies an opportunity to denounce socialist as terrorists and repress their message even more than they do now.
3.Find a way to take control of capitalist enterprises and introduce socialist principles gradually to the economy. Such enterprises will have to compete on an economic basis with others and will have to be run efficiently. This inevitably means that they wont produce full socialist benefits of course. This idea has the additional benefit of making the task of any newly formed socialist regime a little less difficult since at least some of owners of ‘the means of production’ will give them up willingly.
4.Organise revolutions in the third world. I think these will be crushed. Easily.
5.Organise Democratic opposition within the framework of Liberal democracies. To do this effectively you have to have a party which is recognisably the ‘socialist movement’ as a whole not 10 or a dozen groups fighting for a share of the vote. This means the more extreme idealistic groups (Like Communists and Anarchists and all the various other types) putting aside their particular desires until the desires common to all are satisfied.
6.Until recently I think most people within the UK saw point 5 as being broadly satisfied by the Labour party. Personally I don’t think it’s true anymore and I’m fairly sure the Labour party would expel anyone who tried to turn it back into a genuine socialist party with essentially Marxist leanings.
7.Establish a communication and alliance with the labour unions. This is easier said than done because Labour unions are for their members, not really for the generality of all workers even within a single country let alone having any care for 3rd world workers. But it’s something to be worked on. Again Anarchist and extreme communist types wont help much here. Because all unions are actually concerned with the question ‘What is in it right now, or in the very near future for our members’. Waffly idealism will cut exactly zero ice.
The best of all worlds would be to find a way to establish socialist trade with the 3rd world in such a way that both socialist members and workers in the first world and those in the 3rd benefited while excluding non socialist enterprises from such a trade together with an organising party which pushed for greater parliamentary influence and used this power to benefit the socialist enterprises and the success of the socialist enterprises to attract more support. I don’t know how this could be done, but I suspect it could be with enough willingness.
To the objection that socialist are not interested in business I would say 1) hogwash and 2) If socialist cannot run businesses profitably then we cannot run an economy; in which case the cappies are right and we might as well quit now.
To the objection that it would corrupt the ideals of a socialist movement to run a business within a capitalist framework I would say that it should be possible to set up articles and controls to ensure it did not. Again if this is beyond us I kinda think we are going to struggle to maintain a socialist country in the face of world opposition anyway.
To my mind if you want socialism you should not be content to talk about it and hope that Marx’s 'crises' inevitably bring it about. In my view they wont do anything of the sort because capitalist apparatus for dealing with such problems is very different and more advanced than Marx foresaw.
If you believe Socialism is a fairer better way for people to organise their lives you should want it and be prepared to look for ways to hasten it. This definitely means giving up on the more extreme demands in order to achieve some progress in the right direction. All of history shows that lasting change tends to evolve, not to be ushered in one fell swoop.
The time to push for your own specific notions is when we reach the fork at which paths diverge not at the outset when all of our goals lie along the same path.
The bottom line is that nearly always to gain something you must give up something. What we must give up in the immediate future is making noises about what we want in the very long term. Because we are not agreed upon that.
Leaders in such a movement will emerge. Leaders always emerge in any movement even if they are not identified as such with titles and rewards. Live with this, but build in controls to ensure that they cannot exploit their position for personal gain or subvert the movement.
What we need is a start. We need some people prepared to invest their lives in such a movement and accept that they personally will suffer somewhat as a result. They will not gain the rewards that they would by submerging themselves in the Liberal system and merely talking about Socialism.
Do you think anyone is ready to make such a commitment? Or to add other ideas beyond a vague 'educate'.
(Edited by sc4r at 1:35 am on July 15, 2003)