Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 18

Just as, in relation to the state, Marx was closer to the anarchism of Bakunin than to the statism and reformism of Kautsky, so too he and Engels were closer to the cooperative communism of Owen than they were to the statism of Lassalle. Unfortunately, it has been that statism of Lassalle, and the Fabians that has had the dominant effect on the ideas of the labour movement, over the last century.

The problem with Owenite communism, as with the other utopian socialists, was that it clung to the rationalist ideas, and a belief that it could simply set out these schemas of a future society, and that reason would prevail; the other bourgeois would see what Owen, also, saw. But, that was never going to happen. The existing capitalist society created great wealth and power for the new industrial bourgeoisie, and, increasingly, for the financial bourgeoisie. Why would they, in aggregate, as a class, give that up, in the present, simply on the basis of a vision of some future utopia?

At root, industrial capitalism is based on the same competitive principles of commodity production and exchange that existed for centuries before it. Its why those ideas of the petty-bourgeois commodity producer continue to dominate the thinking of not only the small, private capitalists, but even some of the larger capitalists, as their capitals have grown. It is most apparent in those larger capitals that remain family owned concerns, for example.

As noted earlier, because the ruling-class, today, is not a class of industrial capitalists, but a class of rentiers and speculators, whose immediate interests are antagonistic to, and in contradiction to the interests of industrial capital, still less are they constrained by even those longer-term concerns set out by Owen et al, about the maximisation of industrial profit. They are concerned not with the maximisation of industrial profit, and capital accumulation, but with the maximisation of “shareholder value”, i.e. the maximisation of their interest/dividends, rents, and capital gains.

But, inevitably, as Marx describes in Capital III, because those revenues depend, in the end, on industrial profits, which depends on real capital accumulation, that contradiction always ends in a financial crisis.

“It would be still more absurd to presume that capital would yield interest on the basis of capitalist production without performing any productive function, i.e., without creating surplus-value, of which interest is just a part; that the capitalist mode of production would run its course without capitalist production. If an untowardly large section of capitalists were to convert their capital into money-capital, the result would be a frightful depreciation of money-capital and a frightful fall in the rate of interest; many would at once face the impossibility of living on their interest, and would hence be compelled to reconvert into industrial capitalists.”

(Capital III, Chapter 23)

Coming later than Fourier and Saint-Simon, and seeing the creation of the new classes – the industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat – Owen had a clearer view of the road ahead.

“His advance in the direction of communism was the turning-point in Owen’s life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing but wealth, applause, honour, and glory. He was the most popular man in Europe. Not only men of his own class, but statesmen and princes listened to him approvingly. But when he came out with his communist theories, it was quite another story. Three great obstacles seemed to him especially to block the path to social reform: private property, religion, and marriage in its present form. He knew what confronted him if he attacked them — universal ostracism by official society and the loss of his whole social standing. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen came to pass. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, and ruined by his unsuccessful communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working class and continued working in their midst for thirty years.” (p 338)

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 17

“To the working-class, therefore, the fruits belonged too. To Owen the newly created gigantic productive forces, which had hitherto served only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered the foundations for a reconstruction of society and were destined, as the common property of all, solely to work for the common good of all.” (p 338)

Although, today, social-democrats and reformists (Menshevists) emphasise Owen's role as the creator of the cooperative movement, Marx and Engels had no hesitation in calling him what he was – a communist.

“Owenite communism arose in this purely business way, as the outcome, so to speak, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in Ireland by communist colonies, and drew up complete estimates of initial costs, yearly expenditure, and probable revenue. Similarly, in his definitive plan for the future, the technical working out of details is managed with such practical knowledge [plan, elevation and bird's-eye view all included -] that once the Owenite method of social reform is accepted, there is little to be said against the actual arrangement of details even from specialist's point of view.” (p 338)

Today's social-democratic and reformist co-operators are a million miles from the likes of Owen, and are horrified at the idea of any connection between cooperation and communism. Yet, for Marx and Engels, their vision of communism is inseparable from the idea of cooperation and cooperatives. They frequently describe communist society as being “The Cooperative Commonwealth”.

It is, of course, also, not what the statists desire to hear, as their view of socialism/communism is not one of a bottom-up, self-emancipation of the working-class, asserting its rightful, democratic control over its collective property, but is of the state exercising that control from above, which, also, involves, here and now, denying the reality that this socialised capital is, already, the collective property of the associated producers, and, instead, clinging to the idea that we are still in the conditions of the early 19th century, of the monopoly of private industrial capital that must be expropriated from the capitalist owners.

The position of the statists is the same as that of the Lassalleans attacked by Marx in The Critique of The Gotha Programme.

Lenin, in State and Revolution, noted that Marx's position, in relation to the state, was far closer to that of Bakunin than that of Kautsky. It emphasised that, prior to the revolution, the working-class could place no faith, have no reliance on the state, because that state is a class state, the state of the bourgeoisie, and, as such, represents the concentrated power of the ruling-class, mobilised against them. It is their greatest enemy, not their saviour. As Marx sets out in The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Civil War in France, and elsewhere, the workers seek not to appeal to that state, not to engage in a Quixotic endeavour to capture it, by means of bourgeois-democratic assemblies, but to smash it. In order to smash it, they must build their own, alternative, organs of democracy and state power, themselves corresponding to the new, socialised cooperative forms of property that capitalism itself has created as transitional forms of property, be they the cooperatives themselves, or the joint-stock companies (corporations).

The social revolution, the transformation of the old bourgeois forms of property, based on the monopoly of private capital, and free market competition, is now, in the rear view mirror.  It is the political revolution that the working-class must now accomplish, just as did the bourgeoisie, in the past.  The bourgeoisie, over a long period, did that by concentrating their political offensive where they dominated, in the urban boroughs, until such time that they could confront the political power of the landed aristocracy. The workers have to do the same, to build organs of direct democracy in their strongholds, in the workplaces, and workers communities.

Those organs cannot simply be talking shops, continually being overridden by the bourgeois state, but must be both legislative and executive in nature. In short, the form that arose, in embryo, with the Paris Commune, in 1871, and took shape with the soviets/workers' councils, of 1905, and matured in the soviets of 1917.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 16

Owen recognised that welfarism, the improvement of the condition of his workers was not enough.

““The people were slaves at my mercy.” The relatively favourable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing an all-round rational development of the character and of the intellect, much less the free exercise of all their faculties.” (p 337)

Owen's insight contrasts well with those, today, who proclaim that, because workers live a few years longer, beyond their retirement, it is necessary to extend the retirement age, so as to protect pensions, i.e. to ensure workers never get the pension they have paid for! That, despite the fact that the rise in the productivity of labour, since the retirement age was set at 65, is, proportionally, far greater than the rise in life expectancy, and so what workers produce, during their lifetime, to cover what they consume in retirement, has increased massively. To quote Owen, therefore, we might ask where that difference in additional output has gone?

“And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society, as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?” (p 337)

In the case of New Lanark, it had gone to pay the proprietors “5% interest on their invested capital and in addition a profit of over £300,000.” (p 337) The increase in productivity, in Britain, has been even greater, more than enough to cover not just the requirements of pensioners living a few more years, but to enable them to retire earlier not later, and that applies across the globe. The difference has gone to fund increasing amounts of interest/dividends to the ruling-class, as its share of profits has gone from 10% in the 1970's to over 70% by the early 2000's. It has used those increasing amounts of interest/dividends not to invest productively, so as to increase output, but to finance its own conspicuous consumption, and its gambling addiction, as it ploughs money back into the purchase of existing speculative assets, i.e. existing financial assets and property, on the expectation of speculative capital gains.

Owen noted, in his day.

“If this new wealth had not been created by machinery … the wars ... in opposition to Napoleon and to support the aristocratic principles of society, could not have been maintained. And yet this new power was the creation of the working class.” (p 337)

And, the same is true, today. It is not workers living longer that causes the capitalist state to demand they work longer before retiring, but the fact that, although workers have increased production, massively, to cover their needs in retirement, that additional production has been squandered, by the ruling-class, and its state. It has asset stripped companies, to pay dividends; failed to invest profits in capital accumulation; given increasing amounts in interest/dividends and rent, which is used unproductively; bailed out financial gamblers when their actions caused financial bubbles to burst, and spent billions on wars and weapons, draining the potential for economic growth.

Workers themselves are slowly recognising this truth that has been hidden from them by social-democracy, and by the distractions of the likes of Trump, Farage etc., who would have them believe the problem lies with other workers.

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SNNS 55

 

Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 15

Owen, of course, was not the only industrial capitalist to identify that, increasingly, the labourer was the most important element of production, and that ensuring the welfare of their workers represented enlightened self-interest. Some of that enlightenment stemmed from religious beliefs, such as with the Quakers. Families such as the Frys, Cadburys, Rowntrees, Levers, and so on, saw that providing their workers with decent houses, schools, and so on raised the productivity of those workers, and so, also, raised their profits. Firms in the US, also, engaged in similar acts of company welfarism, adopted, also, by Ford.

As Lenin noted, in his polemics against the Narodniks, even in Russia, this same paternalism and philanthropy was to be found. It did not change the fundamental class relations. In Prussia, it was the state that undertook this role, even in the early 19th century, and, as Chancellor, Bismark introduced the same ideas of welfarism and National Insurance.

Owen was the precursor of the later functioning capitalists. He was a professional manager, and, in that role, applied his theories, much as happened, in the early 20th century, with the Taylorists.

“He had already tried it with success in Manchester, as the manager of a factory with 500 workers. From 1800 to 1829, he directed the great cotton-mill of New Lanark, in Scotland, as managing partner, along the same lines, but with greater freedom of action and with a success that won him a European reputation. He transformed a population, which originally consisted of the most diverse and, for the most part, very demoralised elements, and which gradually grew to 2,500, into a model colony, in which drunkenness, police, magistrates, lawsuits, poor law relief, and any need for charity were unknown. All this simply by placing the people in conditions worthy of human beings, and especially by having the rising generation carefully brought up. He was the inventor of infant schools, and first introduced them at New Lanark. From the age of two the children came to school, where they enjoyed themselves so much that they could scarcely be got home again. Whilst his competitors worked their people thirteen to fourteen hours a day, in New Lanark the working-day was only ten and a half hours. When a crisis in cotton stopped work for four months, his unemployed workers received their full wages all the time. Yet the business more than doubled in value, and to the last yielded large profits to its proprietors.” (p 336-7)

The point, here, was that these factories were still the property of private capitalists, and the measures introduced to improve the lot of the workers, which raised their productivity, were still for the benefit of those owners. It illustrates the material basis of social-democracy and welfarism. When these same welfarist measures are undertaken by the capitalist state, the purpose remains the same, i.e. to raise productivity and efficiency, to regulate the supply of labour-power, and, thereby, to boost profits and the accumulation of capital.

By the mid 19th century, a number of factories had failed and been taken over by their workers, who ran them as cooperatives. The former private owners were often employed by the workers as managers on salaries a fraction of what they previously paid themselves. Yet, as Marx describes in Capital, these cooperatives were, generally, more efficient and profitable than equivalent privately owned firms. As a preview of what was to come, however, these cooperatives were charged higher rates of interest by banks, when they borrowed. Increasingly, as the private capitalists retreated from their functional role in production, and became merely money-lending capitalists, the more this became the means of the ruling class obtaining its revenues. It relied no longer on industrial profit, but on interest.

The significance of that change cannot be overstated, given the antagonistic and contradictory interests of industrial capital as against that of interest-bearing capital (fictitious-capital).

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Northern Soul Classics - A Lot Of Love - Homer Banks

 

The Hypocrisy of NATO's Illegal War On Iran - Part 24

Trump offered Saudi Arabia its own nuclear deal, itself exposing his hypocrisy in relation to Iran's nuclear programme. But, immediately, the Zionist state baulked, and Trump folded like a cheap suit. He quickly farted on his Trump Social platform that, of course, his “deal” with Saudi was conditional on Saudi signing the Abraham Accords, and recognising Israel. Saudi, for the reasons set out earlier, can do no such thing, without the Zionist state stopping its genocide, and committing to real measures for the creation of a viable Palestinian state, which, in turn, it cannot do.

The Zionist state, in Israel, has done exactly what I predicted. It has flattened Gaza, and it has stepped up the pace of its annexation of the West Bank; it has annexed a large part of Southern Lebanon, as well as extending its annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria. This is the solution that is being promoted by US imperialism, and its subordinates within the NATO imperialist alliance. It is the basis of the illegal war being conducted by NATO imperialism against Iran. NATO proclaims, of course, that it is not involved in that illegal war being conducted by US imperialism and its Zionist ally. But, claiming that, for example, Britain is only allowing US planes to fly out of UK bases for defensive missions is truly ridiculous.

Two years ago, I thought that US imperialism and the Zionist state would not need to engage in an all out war for regime change in Iran, so long as Iran was cowed enough to enable NATO and the Zionist state to get on with the job of creating the Greater Israel, required as the hub of the projected new MENA politico-economic bloc, as basically set out in The Abraham Accords. I still think that is the case, despite the current illegal war against Iran. What that war has done is to distract attention from the continuing genocide against Palestinians, and annexation of territory as described above, in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.

The day to day phenomenal forms of this underlying process are simply a reflection of the political dynamics. In particular, Trump and his political regime are led to adopt the same ultimate path as US imperialism, just as was Biden's regime, but Trump does so, in a typically more crude and vulgar manner, a consequence of the reactionary, petty-bourgeois, MAGA constituency he still relies on, but which is, itself, disintegrating under the strain of contradictions. Some of the elements of that regime reflecting, also, the fact that it relies on the support of Christian Zionists, who have made clear, not only that they want to turn the US into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist state, but, also, that they want the US to facilitate the creation of a Zionist state in more or less the whole of the Middle East.

NATO imperialism can probably accept some kind of agreement between Iran and Oman over the charging of tolls/fees for use of the Straits of Hormuz, at least for now, so long as Iran is sufficiently cowed and quiescent, as the Zionist state, continues its final solution against the Palestinians, so that having exterminated them, it is free to proceed with the Abraham Accords. But, again, the moral socialists are wrong in assuming that US imperialism has lost the war with Iran, or is out of options.

The path is clear that, at some point, the US can undertake military intervention in the Straits, and, when it does, it will only need to clear a section of the Iranian coast. Much as with Russia's annexation of Eastern Ukraine, there is no requirement to occupy the whole country, and, indeed, doing so is not possible, as I pointed out in relation to Ukraine. If the US staged a massive military operation in the Gulf, its inconceivable that it would not do so having long prepared the basis of it, including the propaganda work of lining up the basis of involvement of its NATO allies.

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