STRANGE TIMES

The Hitch is still fighting despite cancer

Christopher Hitchens, witnessing the Portugal 1974 revolution:

It was the last fall of the curtain on the last act of the 1968 style, with its “take your desire for reality” wall posters and its concepts of work as play. For me it was also the end of the line with my old groupuscule. I had developed other disagreements, too, as the old and open-minded “International Socialists” began to mutate into a more party line sect. But Portugal had broken the mainspring for me, because it had caused me to understand that I thought democracy and pluralism were good things in themselves, and ends in themselves at that, rather than means to another end….

… Conor Cruise O’Brien had phrased it better than I could then hope to do:

“Are you a socialist?” asked the African leader. I said, yes.

He looked me in the eye. “People have been telling me,” he said lightly, “that you are a liberal…”

The statement in its context invited a denial. I said nothing.

And yet, as I drove home from my interview with the leader, I had to realise that a liberal, incurably, was what I was. Whatever I might argue, I was more profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom – freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgment and independent judges – than I was to the idea of a disciplined party mobilising all the forces of society for the creation of a social order guaranteeing more real freedom for all instead of just a few. The revolutionary idea struck me as being more immediately relevant for most of humanity than were the liberal concepts. But it was the liberal concepts and their long term importance – though not the name of liberal – that held my allegiance.

George Galloway during a furious debate about the Iraq war, in 2005, famously called Hitchens “a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay” (link). Drinked soaked, yes by his own admission, but a Trotskyite, not for long. Hitchens flirtation with the IS (International Socialists) may have served to prejudice him against Mao (how uncontrarian for such a contrarian to be against the Cultural Revolution without any analysis whatsover) but his far deeper attachment to freedom enabled him to break from the Trotskyite inclination of sabotaging united fronts. So he ended up supporting the liberation of Iraq (which required a very broad united front) and modernity in general. Hitchens is the iconic modern man. His warts and all bio, Hitch-22, is a mixed bag but contains some wonderful anecdotes and analytical gems.

This is a rather clunky attempt to present some thoughts on the immediate and longer term programs for a radical party whose aim is to move to a society based on the social ownership of the means of production. The immediate program would have to be relatively limited in its objectives because change takes time and you do not want to bite off more than you can chew.

Grabbing the commanding heights of the economy would be the main job at first. This means nationalizing the large public companies. It has been suggested that the best way to handle this would be to allocate shares in these companies to government owned hedge funds. Hopefully, the well paid managers of these funds together with the nationalized banks would continue to invest as if nothing had happened. Likewise for senior management of enterprises. No doubt it will not work out quite as smoothly as we would like.

At the same time, arrangements will need to be made to ensure that people who previously owned shares in the nationalized companies – particularly the non-rich – continue receiving regular compensation payments.  Foreign investors may or may not be a tricky issue. It would depend on the political circumstances.

Smaller scale business would be left untouched. (I don’t know where you would draw the line.)

While these minimalist arrangements are being put in place, hopefully a lot of stuff is happening among the middle and lower ranks (the “masses”).  Generally they will be busily sticking their noses in where they previously did not belong. In many of the enterprises that are still private there will be calls for socialization. Policies will need to be developed on how and when this occurs. Continue reading ‘Post-capitalism — day one and longer term’

Right-wing conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt, has perplexed some of his followers by putting on his site a youtube clip of Woody Guthrie singing “This Land is your Land”. Another right-wing site, Just Grounds Community , has commented on those conservatives who do not have the knowledge of history or the “empathy” to understand why and how Guthrie supported socialism and sympathized with communism during the 1930s. I’m not precisely sure where JGC is coming from but they certainly make sense in their understanding that Woody Guthrie would not have been impressed with the pseudo-left of today – “the two bit hustlers… the present day chancers and fuzzy thinkers who would claim his endorsement”.

I sometimes wonder how many people identify with the right – the libertarian right in particular – because what passes for ‘the left’ is so appallingly unworthy of support.

Continue reading ‘This website kills fascists!’

Cuba definitely deserves our special attention because the hideous regime there calls itself socialist and people believe it. Current developments mean that things may start to get a bit more interesting. The current economic “reforms” are in full swing. Basically they are sacking about a million government employees while allowing them to set up small businesses and “cooperatives”. Also the fibre optic cable connection to Venezuela is complete and the government will now endeavor the tricky task of trying to manage wider use of the internet which is presently very limited.

Being basically a mix of feudalism and state capitalism, “socialism” in Cuba is a total disaster and needs a massive injection of “normal” capitalism to get any growth from its economy. Vietnam and China managed to get a lease of life from doing this. It will be interesting to see if Cuba can pull off the same trick. Any sort of socialist trajectory of course is out of the question because the privileged strata would suppress it and the populace at large are not subjectively equipped for the task, in any way shape or form.

I’ve got some books about Cuba on my Kindle which I have started to plow through. The first one is Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution by Jorge Edwards who was Chilean Charge d’Affaire in Cuba under Allende and is a famous novelist. Here are some interesting quotes from the book followed by a few comments. Continue reading ‘Cuba: Viva la dissolution’

Marxists are often accused of doing a lousy job of explaining how socialism would do consciously what the capitalist market system can do without anyone being all that aware of what is going on.

But that’s OK, because the efforts of bourgeois economists more than make up for this. Their mission has been to show how capitalism is good at allocating resources efficiently (if sometimes with a bit of restrained government tweaking). But in the process they have had to explain what this means and the role of a price system in achieving  it. Thank you chaps. The revolution will be forever grateful.

We just need to drive home how a system of social ownership will be able to avail itself of this unintentionally provided wisdom. Making the case is fairly easy. Debunking the “calculation debate” is particularly easy. (More on that in a few months but in the meantime see here.)

The hard job for people like me will be (1) convincing ourselves and others that we really can transcend the profit motive and rely instead mainly on intrinsic motivation and (2) developing a transitional program given that it will take time for people to take on the abilities, habits and inclinations needed to make social ownership viable.

By the way, I now find it easier to tell people what I am working on without being put on the defensive. I usually say something to the effect that it’s been a bit unfashionable for quite a long time but now that capitalism is collapsing all around us I am expecting a bit more interest. This is generally greeted with a nod.

I’ve just revised the sections on investment, money and public goods in the main article at my Economics of Social Ownership website. I have cleared out all mention of quasi-public goods and removed all the murky speculation from the money section. The old versions of these sections are stored here purely for reference.

I’ve just read a review of a book about Engels entitled The Frock Coated Communist (due to be released on May Day).

Having not read the book itself,  I can’t really comment on it.   But the review prompted me to want to write something about Engels because he is so often overlooked.

The review opens  by saying  “It is a truth now universally acknowledged that capitalism’s most insightful philosopher is Karl Marx.” and the first paragraph ends with “Today, in the midst of a once-a-century crisis of capitalism, Das Kapital has raced to the top of the German bestseller lists and even President Sarkozy has been caught leafing through its pages.”   The rest of the article is an account of the importance of Engels in the development of Marx’s economic views.

Continue reading ‘Let’s not forget Engels!’

How would prices be established in the absence of a capitalist market?  This question has come up in the Who Needs the Owners? But What’s the Alternaitive?” thread.  Arthur pointed out proper discussion of this issue could get quite technical and therefore  deserves a thread of its own.

The question of pricing arose via comments from Jad, who has been arguing in favor of “technocracy” as an alternative to capitalism.

(It’s worth perusing that other thread in order to see how that discussion evolved, before jumping in here.)

I’ll republish the comment from Jad which prompted Arhur’s call for a new thread, followed by Arthur’s reply, and we can take it from there.

________________________________________

Jad:

Hi Again, A bit more on technocracy, after having looked at “Bright Future”.

I agree that the technocrats are hopelessly Utopian in that they offer almost no practical steps regarding how their proposed system can be arrived at, but I think a similar criticism could be made of Bright Future. In any case, I don’t think small doses of crackpot, utopianist speculation now and then do any permanent damage, so I thought I would offer some comparisons between the resource allocation model in Bright Future (BFM) and the Energy Accounting Model (EAM) model of the technocrats. ( By the way, although I’ve only been seriously investigating Marx for a couple of years and was in nappies in ‘68 when some of you folks were stomping the streets, unfortunately I no longer consider myself very young!).

In relation to the determination of what is produced, for both BFM and EAM, this is dependent on consumer demand. To measure demand, BFM would rely on things such as past consumer behaviour, consumer surveys and demographic predictions, whilst EAM emphasizes the electronic recording of all purchases made. There is no difference of any substance here. Of course, both EAM and BFM recognise that supply will never be perfectly matched to demand, due to changes in consumer preferences.

In relation to individual’s consumption rights, under EAM all individuals would have the same consumption entitlement (which is based on the premise that without the waste of private ownership aggregate supply capacity would exceed aggregate demand), whereas under BFM, initially at least, consumption entitlements would depend on the amount and quality of work performed.

I agree that EAM, whilst more communistic, is unrealistically utopian here in not recognising that it would take time for people’s consciousness to change and that it is not just the technical aspects of the production system that are relevant.

Both EAM and BFM see factors such as prestige, enjoyment and intrinsic reward as becoming more important than material reward as a motivating factor for work. The major difference between EAM and BFM is in relation to the pricing of goods and services. Under EAM the cost and price of goods and services is determined by the energy required for their production. Under BFM allocation of resources to production units is dependent on demand for consumer goods, and consumer goods are exchanged for work. I presume that the price of consumer goods would therefore be dependent on the socially necessary labor time necessary for their production, in an application of the labour theory of value.

I think the EAM method and theory of pricing is superior to BFM for two interrelated reasons.

Continue reading ‘Price Systems’

Over the years I’ve done a lot of talking with people, friends and workmates in various workplaces, about the idea of the workers ‘taking over’ and running things for ourselves. It’s an idea that holds great appeal to me, so I advocate it. Most times, people respond by rolling their eyes – they generally think the system can be fixed so that it functions more fairly. I then try to point out that the system ain’t broke – unemployment, alienation and periodic crises is precisely capitalism functioning. Fortunately, people are skeptical and therefore willing to listen to new ideas. Some ask what the ‘workers taking over’ would actually mean, how would it be different/better, what would it look like?

I then point out that, in most situations, the workers ‘run’ things anyway – this happens on a day-to-day basis. Who in a workplace ever sees the boss – I mean, the real boss, the owner of the industry or service-provider? Sure, we see our foremen and managers, who – like us – need their weekly wage to survive. But the big boss, the owner? So, things day-to-day are pretty much done by the workers on the ‘floor’. While most people I’ve talked with reckon we need the foremen and managers, no-one has ever stated that we need the owners. No-one has declared: “Oh no! Without the owner of our industry, everything would collapse!”. Under the current economic crisis, the reality is that, with the current owners of industry, etc. in charge, everything is collapsing.

Continue reading ‘Who needs the owners? But what’s the alternative?’

Getting out there and defending social ownership has numerous challenges. One of them is the need to disown various past and present regimes in Third World backwaters that give the idea a bad name. There hadn’t been any new ones for a while, and then along came Hugo Chávez in Venezuela with his “Bolivarian Revolution” and “21st Century Socialism”.

This “process” has two main features – limiting democracy and freedom both for opponents and adherents, and using oil revenue to buy support. There are also various bits of window dressing but these are of secondary importance. Continue reading ‘Saying No to Hugo Chávez’s Baloney Revolution’

I have just presented a short talk on Australian ABC Radio National entitled “Should the financial crisis prompt another look at social ownership?”. Here is the podcast and transcript.

The ownership I am referring to relates to the means of production, the physical assets of  businesses. A system where such a form of ownership dominates ought I think be called socialism, although this does require wresting the word back from the right and pseudo left for whom it means government meddling with capitalism. There are two main take home messages from the talk.

The first is that the conditions of advanced capitalism in places like Australia, USA and western Europe are vastly more conducive to the success of socialism than the backward conditions that prevailed in places where it had previously been attempted and failed. Transforming Czarist Russia, Manchu China and agrarian fascist eastern Europe into socialist societies was a big ask.

Continue reading ‘Radio National Talk on Socialism’

You cannot avoid being allied with right wingers. It is just a matter of who and when. The people we describe as pseudo-left are in alliance with Pat Buchanan, The Cato Institute and The Independent Institute in opposing the US liberation of Iraq. On that matter we side with Bush and the neo-cons. We have written a lot on the question both here and at our parent site. We see it as a switch in US foreign policy from supporting “stability” in the region to supporting democracy and “draining the swamp” in which all sorts of creepy things fester.

Many pseudos in the US would side with Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter on trade protection. We would ally with Cato and support free trade. Both we and the pseudos would side with The Cato and The Independent Institutes on a range of civil liberties issues and on ending the embargo on Cuba.

But we must ‘fess up. We are doing more than our share of fraternizing and endorsing.

Continue reading ‘Allying with the Right’