Category: Pondering Infinity

A Taste of my mind. Anything from Sociopolitics to Religion to Philosophy in general goes.

Why I am opposed to State Socialism

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A big socialist state led by the enlightened leaders is a recipe for disaster. The only way should be through worker activism. Through Self-emancipation.

Fatherland, Socialism or Death
Image by Nicholas Hall via Flickr

State socialism is the idea that we need to strive and implement a system where coercive power resides in the hands of a state mechanism who (ideally) uses it to progress to further stages towards communism by taking measures such as installing a democratic government and suppressing the capitalist class.

I consider that putting this as an immediate goal is a mistake. Relying on state power to handle the progression towards communism has two very mortal perils: The subdual of the activist feeling of the working class and the danger of the state leadership appropriating the power.

The revolutionary working class

By having reached the point of even considering State Socialism it means that a society has achieved a revolutionary victory over the bourgeoisie. This has obviously happened as a result of popular proletariat action. Strikes, marches, occupations etc. It has not and it could not have been achieved through the actions of an enlightened leadership as proven by the miserable failure of reformism to deliver even miniscule results in the last century. As a result installing state socialism would require the activist workers to willingly deliver coercive power to a new enlightened elite who will then guide society.

Putting aside for a moment the likeliness of this happening without external coercive factors, lets consider for a moment that this comes to pass. The immediate loss of such a setup would be the activist spirit of the working class. Where before all the gains, up to and including the revolution have been because of mass action which led to more and more revolutionary consiousness and camaraderie, now all that is required from the proletariat is continued subservience to the leadership of the state.

Even were I to grant that the state is benevolent, because the worker (and his own institutions – councils and the like) is not required anymore to strive for his own gains and progress, he is more and more losing his feeling to do it and simply learns to get along with what the state instructs him to do. Such a loss is immeasurable as this is the main reason any potential dictator can disrupt the movement towards Communism and instead turn the whole thing towards his own benefit. As the workers are now not anymore used to thinking and taking decisions for themselves but rather have to judge which of their leaders is actually on their side, it’s only a matter of propaganda before this happens.

Hijacking the State

By far the biggest threat going in the path of State socialism is that the people who have been chosen to defend the insterests of the Proletariat will turn against them. Indeed it has often been the case that the main reason why State Socialism was implemented was specifically for this purpose, as we can see by looking from Stalin’s rise to power. It was named “State Socialism” when it was actually State Capitalism.

By looking at the situation before this State setup was brought forward, we will see a surprisingly libertarian working of society, where workers councils were taking the decisions and the power was federated and controlled from its own distribution.

Once you replace the distributed and necessarily democratic organization of worker’s councils with centralized state power, you setup the base for the Socialist’s undoing. All a tyrrant needs to do is parrot the socialist rhetoric until the worker’s activism is sapped (see above) and then slowly roll back all the benefits achieved by discovering emergencies and necessities to do so. From one year to the other, the workers are back where they started, only now their leaders call themselves socialist as well.

No, state socialism is absolutely the wrong path to take. The only way to proceed towards communism is by letting the workers emancipate themselves. This can certainly include making use of the state mechanism in order to defend against counter-revolutionary attempts or to keep providing other necessary services (such as healthcare), but it should not be used for leadership or anything else that has the capability to remove the power from the workers or make them into simple passive tools.

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Quote of the Day: Obsolete class struggle ideas

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A quote about the constant resurgence of class struggle.

Quoth Corey Oakley

Perhaps – for once – they [the conservative columnists] have learnt at least one lesson from history. That is that time and time again, just when the ruling classes relaxed, working class struggle has suddenly appeared to declare, in the manner of Mark Twain, that rumours of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

How does distribution of wealth work in a socialist society?

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A Libertarian Socialist explanation of how a future such society would deal with people who do not want to work and laziness

think about justice (portrait)
Image by Trinifar ! via Flickr

A redditor recently made the following question

how would a socialist society deal with members who do not want to work, yet still claim to be entitled to the fruits of other people’s labor? Also how would under performing or laziness be dealt with?

I’ve dealt with the similar concept of stagnation in a previous post but to this question, another redditor gave a very well thought out response that I believe should not be lost in comment history.

UPDATE: I’ve been informed by a commenter that this was actually lifted from the Anarchist FAQ. That’s why you should give attribution people…

Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism) is based on voluntary labor. If people do not desire to work then they cannot (must not) be forced to. The question arises of what to do with those (a small minority, to be sure) who refuse to work.

On this question there is some disagreement. Some anarchists, particularly communist-anarchists, argue that the lazy should not be deprived of the means of life. Social pressure, they argue, would force those who take, but do not contribute to the community, to listen to their conscience and start producing for the community that supports them. Other anarchists are less optimistic and agree with Camillo Berneri when he argues that anarchism should be based upon “no compulsion to work, but no duty towards those who do not want to work.” [“The Problem of Work”, in Why Work?, Vernon Richards (ed.), p. 74] This means that an anarchist society will not continue to feed, clothe, house someone who can produce but refuses to. Most anarchists have had enough of the wealthy under capitalism consuming but not producing and do not see why they should support a new group of parasites after the revolution.

Obviously, there is a difference between not wanting to work and being unable to work. The sick, children, the old, pregnant women and so on will be looked after by their friends and family (or by the commune, as desired by those involved). As child rearing would be considered “work” along with other more obviously economic tasks, mothers and fathers will not have to leave their children unattended and work to make ends meet. Instead, consideration will be given to the needs of both parents and children as well as the creation of community nurseries and child care centers.

We have to stress here that an anarchist society will not deny anyone the means of life. This would violate the voluntary labor which is at the heart of all schools of anarchism. Unlike capitalism, the means of life will not be monopolized by any group — including the commune. This means that someone who does not wish to join a commune or who does not pull their weight within a commune and are expelled will have access to the means of making a living outside the commune.

We stated that we stress this fact as many supporters of capitalism seem to be unable to understand this point (or prefer to ignore it and so misrepresent the anarchist position). In an anarchist society, no one will be forced to join a commune simply because they do not have access to the means of production and/or land required to work alone. Unlike capitalism, where access to these essentials of life is dependent on buying access to them from the capitalist class (and so, effectively, denied to the vast majority), an anarchist society will ensure that all have access and have a real choice between living in a commune and working independently. This access is based on the fundamental difference between possession and property — the commune possesses as much land as it needs, as do non-members. The resources used by them are subject to the usual possession rationale — they possess it only as long as they use it and cannot bar others using it if they do not (i.e., it is not property).

Thus an anarchist commune remains a voluntary association and ensures the end of all forms of wage slavery. The member of the commune has the choice of working as part of a community, giving according to their abilities and taking according to their needs (or some other means of organizing production and consumption such as equal income or receiving labor notes, and so on), or working independently and so free of communal benefits as well as any commitments (bar those associated with using communal resources such as roads and so on).

So, in most, if not all, anarchist communities, individuals have two options, either they can join a commune and work together as equals, or they can work as an individual or independent co-operative and exchange the product of their labor with others. If an individual joins a commune and does not carry their weight, even after their fellow workers ask them to, then that person will possibly be expelled and given enough land, tools or means of production to work alone. Of course, if a person is depressed, run down or otherwise finding it hard to join in communal responsibilities then their friends and fellow workers would do everything in their power to help and be flexible in their approach to the problem.

Some anarchist communities may introduce what Lewis Mumford termed “basic communism.” This means that everyone would get a basic amount of “purchasing power,” regardless of productive activity. If some people were happy with this minimum of resources then they need not work. If they want access to the full benefits of the commune, then they could take part in the communal labour process. This could be a means of eliminating all forces, even communal ones, which drive a person to work and so ensure that all labor is fully voluntary (i.e. not even forced by circumstances). What method a community would use would depend on what people in that community thought was best.

It seems likely, however, that in most anarchist communities people will have to work, but how they do so will be voluntary. If people did not work then some would live off the labor of those who do work and would be a reversion to capitalism. However, most social anarchists think that the problem of people trying not to work would be a very minor one in an anarchist society. This is because work is part of human life and an essential way to express oneself. With work being voluntary and self-managed, it will become like current day hobbies and many people work harder at their hobbies than they do at “real” work (this FAQ can be considered as an example of this!). It is the nature of employment under capitalism that makes it “work” instead of pleasure. Work need not be a part of the day that we wish would end. As Kropotkin argued (and has been subsequently supported by empirical evidence), it is not work that people hate. Rather it is overwork, in unpleasant circumstances and under the control of others that people hate. Reduce the hours of labor, improve the working conditions and place the work under self-management and work will stop being a hated thing. In his own words:

“Repugnant tasks will disappear, because it is evident that these unhealthy conditions are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can submit to them, but free men create new conditions, and their work will be pleasant and infinitely more productive. The exceptions of today will be the rule of tomorrow.” [The Conquest of Bread, p. 123]

This, combined with the workday being shortened, will help ensure that only an idiot would desire to work alone. As Malatesta argued, the “individual who wished to supply his own material needs by working alone would be the slave of his labors.” [The Anarchist Revolution, p. 15]

So, enlightened self-interest would secure the voluntary labor and egalitarian distribution anarchists favor in the vast majority of the population. The parasitism associated with capitalism would be a thing of the past. Thus the problem of the “lazy” person fails to understand the nature of humanity nor the revolutionizing effects of freedom and a free society on the nature and content of work.

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Quote of the day: Tyranny of structurelessness

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A quote about how an unstructured movement might be tyrannical.

Quoth Socialist Action

Often anarchist movements are much more undemocratic than socialist parties, because they lack the democratic procedures to make majority decisions. Instead you get the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ – where the best speakers (or the loudest!), those with the best informal clique links, are able to manipulate and dominate the movement.

Leadership has a way of always enterring into the equation wether you want it or not. The trick is of course to recognise that it will be there and find ways to make it accountable.


How to save the economy the Austrian way

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A socialist’s refutation of a recent Mises.org article where the author was asking the Obama administration to basically leave everything to the Free Market.

(The Depression) The Single Men's Unemployed A...
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Everytime a Mises.org article happens to fall into my field of vision, I am usually either stunned by the idiocy displayed or I simply burst our laughing at the absurdity and this latest one which even claims to be watered down in order not to be considered “unserious” by the current US Administration, is no break from this rule.

So after the introduction which attempts to claim the high ground of consistency and morality, we get an attempt at an analogy, which of course is made to showcase the Austrians as the rational good guys

If an allergic man has been stung by a bee, I don’t know what to do except rush him to the hospital and maybe scour the cupboards looking for Benadryl. But I’m pretty sure drawing blood from his leg, in order to inject it into his arm and thus “stimulate his immune system,” is a bad idea on numerous accounts

Unfortunately this analogy can easily be turned around to put the Government in the place of the hospital and whoever you don’t like in the place of the crazy ad-hoc injection doctor. If anything, one would see how this analogy would be to the detriment of the Austrians, as one could imagine that their reaction in this case would not be to do fucking nothing. After all, you shouldn’t be helping someone who took such risks and his death would imrpove the gene pool.

But hey, as long as the author is so proud of his metaphors, who am I to complain. Moving right along to his actual (*shudder*) recommendations.

After the mandatory fault blaming on the Gov’ment and declaration of his undying faith that were the state to go away everything would turn into pink bunnies and unicorns by the magic of the free markets, we get to the “serious” proposals:

Eliminate the personal and corporate income tax

And just to show everyone that he’s not joking around, he complements this with his very modest proposal to “blow up the IRS building”. ‘Cause that’s how he rolls, dawg!

Aside from the silliness of blowing up buildings, he doesn’t really explain to us why that is a good idea. I suppose that we need to take him as his word that it’s all in our best interests and it will not simply lead to public resources being wasted since there would be no money to repair them. No, the free market would find a way.

Also look forward however to the rise of epidemics of easily preventable diseases through vaccination. But hey, as long as the rich are protected, let the rabble die. It would certainly thin out the labour supply and increase their minimum wage (more on that below) so it’s all good eh ?

Unfortunately, dismantling the Social Security system will have to wait

Not that would do much good without any funding behind it. We’re going to go back to the good ol’ days where being poor means staying poor and you’ll be lacking any means to get back on your feet. Look forward to no security at an old age, no matter how hard you’ve worked the rest of your life. All wonderful stuff that people were struggling to fix a century ago but nowadays, they have become obsolete for the Austrians through the free market.

The author continues

The loss of some $1.5 trillion in annual tax receipts sounds absurd, but the actual figure would be lower, because of “supply-side” effects.

What could be better than supply side economics. This wonderful myth that has proven to not work anywhere but is still touted around on faith. But yeah, apparently removing tax incomes would provide a “stimulus to the economy”, as with the money injection to the banks I guess. Ah faith. What a wonderful thing.

Auction off all government assets progressively

Because we all know that private owners always do things better for the public than the government. Just look at Enron and General Motors. And privatizing things like water has always turned out for the best right?

At this point, I am starting to get quite annoyed at the author simply proposing random “free market” moves (Very similar to the ones the US has been taking for the last 30 years) and asserting that it will be for the best, at which point you think that we are supposed to trust him or be already convinced of the Austrian theory’s validity.

Eliminate the DEA and the SEC.

The author cites as an example Madoff who was not caught by the regulations and thus this proves that they are worthless. Nevermind that their powers to regulate Wall Street have been frowned upon, reduced and/or taken away by the US neoliberal politics. Basically the author is saying “The Agencies that we had to prevent this kind of thing failed after we limited their ability to do so, so the best thing to do now is to remove them altogether.”

Of course the continued existense of Madoff and the rest of the Wall Street implosion pretty much proves that the self-regulation of the markets is nothing more than a fairy tale. Expect the Madoffs to multiply in the future once there is not fear of being caught at all.

It is especially funny to see his proposal about drugs. Although I am one of those who would say to dismiss the war on drugs because it is counter-productive, restricts freedoms and it’s main purpose is to simply increase the prison slave labour, the author’s argument is that simply a stern talk and a watching of Requiem for a Dream will make people “just say no”, and even if they don’t, well, who cares.

Cut the Pentagon budget in half.

Finally, one of the few things that I think he’s not going far enough. Of course the military/imperialist budget is not necessary but not because it’s more than enough to protect US Americans from “Iranian Tanks” as the author uses as an argument, but because the reason for the budget is simply to enrich the war lobby. Which incidentally is privately owned, so where’s this trickle down effect I’ve been hearing so much of? His arguments once again display the authors half-assed understanding of how the world works.

Eliminate the Department of Education

Oh just brilliant. Because what we need right now is more unskilled workers. We can never have enough MacDonald servers afterall and having so many of them will certainly help keep the wages high..oh wait. No it won’t. If there’s one thing that will happen through the destruction of education opportunities is another descent into mysticism and religion and the destruction of the high level job market.

The authors argument is that not everyone deserves a higher education (only the born rich I guess) and hey, we’re saving money in the short term aren’t we? When has the short term been a worse investment than the long term?

Cancel all the pending “stimulus” and other bailout packages

Although I agree that the current “solution” implemented is wrong, the author presents this act for all the wrong reasons. He simply wants to “wipe the state clean” and let everything rebuild. He does nothing more than take the stand the liberals had as the Great Depression struck and they refused to save the banks. That of course turned out just dandy in the long term and only the banks suffered, right?

Of course the authors greatest failing is that he simply considers the bank itself, not the people who have their money saved in it. The folding of the major banks would mean that millions would lose all their life’s savings, loans would grind to a halt (even moreso than now) and a long period of rebuilding would happen while the economy reconstructed. Untold suffering for millions is what the author’s proposal is promising but as long as we stick to free market principles, I guess it’s worth it.

Allow unrestricted immigration

Hey, one thing I agree with. Oh wait, it was too good to be true…

So long as the incoming folks had a secure job in which the employer (a) paid three years in advance on any state and local taxes that would accrue from the employment and (b) bought at least a $100,000 house for the immigrant and his or her family.

Aaaahahahaha. Right. So basically the point is moot from the get go, as such wealthy or prestigious immigrants are probably allowed in now anyway. But hey, as long as it helps to “sell the package somehow”…

Abolish the minimum wage.

Wait, you need to read the whole quote

That — coupled with the elimination of the income tax — will take care of unemployment within 6 months.

If your goal is simply to “take care of unemployment” then this might be true but if you goal is to have people employed with a wage they can live a decent life instead of 3rd world situations, then you’re probably going to fail. Sure, you’ll get more employment but it’s going to be the employment of a bare subsistence wage, if that at all.

And with that the author finishes his proposal. Of course all of this is generally the kind of delusion the Austrians promote, that somehow anything can change by pleading with the Government to implement their “moderate proposals” which are generally watered down versions of their positions. Centuries of the same thing have proven more than enough already that nothing changes through such requests, especially not when the State is there to protect and support those at the top.

Watered down Socialism becomes Social Democracy and watered down Austrianism becomes Neoliberalism. Both in the end don’t achieve what they set out to do but rather betray their principles in order to retain their positions. You cannot reason with a system who’s continued existence relies on being “unreasonable” to your ideas.

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What is Socialism?

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Did you know that there is more than one type of Socialism? The welfare state is just one (popular form). The revolutionary from-below socialism is another.

If there’s one thing that has been as misunderstood and misrepresented as Communism, that must certainly be Socialism. What it means to be a socialist nowadays, for most people, has very little to do with how the term was used in its origins of the 19th century. There’s not much point in rehashing the history of why this happened but I do want to point a few things about it.

First a very basic definition. At the very core, Socialism means the public or collective ownership of the means of production and a general attempt towards egalitarianism.

There have certainly been a quite a few currents towards Socialism, each attempting to bring it about in a different way. From escapism to revolution and, the most popular one, through reformation of Capitalism. The latest one is how most people today understand Socialism indeed, and that is in the form of a Big Government of “enlightened leaders”.

But just because one current is popular does not mean that it’s the only one and this is why it is disconcerning when I see otherwise smart people writing about Socialism in general as if it conflates with Social Democracy and then attacking flaws of Social Democracy as flaws of Socialism. This denotes either ignorance or laziness and in either case it promotes misinformation.

Certainly, there are enough flaws in Social Democracy or Fabianism to make the whole system fail in regards to Socialism (that is, to achieving collective ownership of the means of production and egalitarianism). What Social Democracy does manage to achieve is rather to alleviate some of the most obvious suffering (mainly by offshoring it or displacing it in time through debt) and thus serves as a palliative to the disease that is Capitalism, preventing societies from ever actually progressing towards Socialism. The fact that many Social Democratic ((The obvious exceptions are the US American parties where the MacCarthian era has hopelessly screwed the usual names. Social Democrats are ‘Liberals’, Liberals are ‘Libertarians’ and Far Right Imperialist Theocrats are ‘Conservatives’ )) parties call themselves ‘Socialist’ is simply the insult to the injury.

But there is another much more important distinction between currents of Socialism which neatly separates the way each tries to achieve it. It’s the distrinction between ‘Socialism from Above’ and ‘Socialism from below’ ((For more information on this, I wholeheartedly suggest you read Hald Drapers “Two Souls of Socialism” which explains it much better than I ever could and I consider it one of the most important pieces on this subject)). The former is the classic kind of “Socialism” where the few enlightened leaders at the top try to bring about and sustain Socialism without needing any action from the general populace either than their unconditional support and submission to their ideas. This is the way that both USSR, and Social Democrats work and it suffers many of the problems that the Atheist Ethicist mentions.

The later way, which incidentally is the one I propose as well, is supposed to be achieved through the acts of the vast majority of people themselves (and not through some form of government).  The most popular currents of this type is Marxism and Anarchism and these methods have none of the same failing as ‘Socialism from Above’. It is because of this distinction, that talking of Socialism as if it only means Social Democracy is plain insulting to quite a few Socialists.

So please, if you’re going to talk about Socialism, either criticize what Socialism itself is trying to achieve, or criticize a particular method of achieving it (as in Marxism or Social Democracy). Those two are not the one and the same.

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SeaSteading or how rich guys want even more freedom and privilege

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The Sea is mostly free right? So why not turn it into property where the rich can have even more luxury? Fuck the rest of the world.

I am annoyed. I get annoyed when I read shit like this, telling us how some rich white guys are not happy enough with their (really well-off) lot in life, and just need some way to escape all their (multi-million) misery by founding their own nation of absolute freedom.

What a load of dicks!

When we have a world that is fast going down the drain, with millions of children starving every year, with hudreds of millions of workers surviving in subsistence wage and 16-hour workdays, with all the shit that is happening around us, creating untold misery and suffering, these amazingly lucky and  privileged people can only think of how to make their life even better.

Fuck the rest of us. It’s not like their wealth had anything to do with the rest of society. It was all created from the sweat of their brows.  So they have every right to take their ball and go (make a new) home.

For someone like me, who would like to see everyone in the world be better off, this kind of attitude makes me want to punch some rich geeks in the face. It makes me ashamed to even be in the same sector as them.

As always however it shows us that the ones who really support this bullshit ideology are the minority of lucky people who are quite better off than the vast majority of humanity and are quite happy to never help the rest. What else can you expect from shameless individualism of course. This is why the classic attempts they make are always escapist. From building new land they can use, to floating cities to taking over states.

But there’s also one more thing that bugs me about this Seasteading which goes back to the Libertarian right core concept of Homesteading that is necessary to avoid moral implications for their accumulation of wealth. The idea that one has the right to claim any territory that is not already claimed by anyone else. Can someone explain to me from where this right comes from and why I should accept it?

Anyway, I just needed to rant a bit after reading on how the rich feel so oppressed that they have to throw parties on floating restaurants to discuss how to escape their tragedy. And then they go for a fucking kayak trip.

The freedom to amass Capital breeds inequality and exploitation

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Allowing people to accumulate is one of the main reasons why there is such a difference of power in the world. You’re granting the freedom to take freedom away.

Accumulation
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A new member of the audience has asked me to expand on a previous comment I made where I mentioned in passing the phrase that is the title of this post. I think this warrants some expansion.

When we are talking about Capital we are talking generally about non-trivial means of production, factories and the like. These are things which the owner has no capability to use himself but has rather used the laws of private property to prevent others from using themselves.

The sole reason why any person would ever want to withhold a productive facility from being used freely, is if he wishes to force the people who would work there, to be exploited. What, in effect the Capitalist is doing is preventing the use of the factory which creates the passive coercion necessary for people to accept exploitation. To simplify this example, think of it as a person moving into an oasis and buying up the land the water rests in. That person then gives the people who live around the oasis the choice to either work 16 hours per day for him in the nearby coal mines or die of thirst.

Giving people the freedom to “buy the water” so to speak, is what allows them to exploit other people.

The inequality of this accumulation rises naturally in this situation. Under Capitalism money is power and Capital is the only way to turn money into more money. The more Capital one owns, the more money one makes. And when one has more power over other humans, this is inequality. This inequality is what skews all market exchanges and makes them unfair. Unfair to the benefit of those who have the Capital of course. There is a reason why the poor get poorer and the rich, richer and this is it.

It is this inequality that creates the misery in our society, not the bogeyman of the state or the caricature evil of organized religion. Both of these are toothless if no person in life has power over another person. Take away the state and leave the relations of Capitalism intact and almost immediately, new lords will arise, either through force of arms, or through force of ownership.

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