socialism

Nationalise the succesful companies, not the failures

economic crisis, socialism
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As someone who had been saying for the past few years that things like Nixonian wage and price controls would be considered beyond the pale in a world that, I thought, understood and appreciated some basics of free markets more than it did 35 years ago, well, it’s a good thing my jaw has dropped so much on the past week’s news that I have room to fit a lot of crow.

Is there anything more sad than a disillusioned libertarian once he discovers his beloved mistress capitalism isn’t as pure as he thought she was, but is quite willing to undergo intervention if that suits her interests? Well, yes. Brian Doherty’s discomfort is after all safely theoretical, a vague unease that the economic laws to which he dedicated his political life are being overturned now capitalism has failed again and the people responsible need the help of the state to bail them out, again. Unlike like many of the people who’ve lost their jobs, their houses or both in the process, Brian’s safe. Capitalism always needs its useful idiots.

One such useful idiot is the near-mythical taxpayer, who is going to pay the costs of all those emergency nationalisations and bailouts their governments have committed themselves to, from Northern Rock to AIG. Because it’s never the strong, succesful companies that are taken over, but the wrecks left behind once the shareholders and executives have sucked them dry. Not that there’s anything new to this pattern. Remember Railtrack?

Or, further back, look at which industries were nationalised by the great social democratic governments of Europe in that great wave of nationalisations after World War II, especially in Britain. The railways, coal mines, British Leyland, all industries that were in trouble, losing their profitability anyway, to the point were state interference is welcomed as much as resented. And it then fell to the state to dismantle these industries and deal with the fallout of this, like a eneration of unemployed miners after the 1984 Miner Strike. Even those industries that were re-privatised by succesive Tory and Labour governments still leaned heavily on government support, directly or indirectly.

Which is whay nationalism this way isn’t a victory for socialism or even social democracy, but just another way in which profits are privatised but risk nationalised. What we need is not the propping up of empty husks, but the nationalisation and put into the public trust of all key industries, a reworking of society in such a way that cooperation, not competition is its central
organising feature, where “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities” is its motto. To do anything else is just keeping capitalism alive to cause more disaster.

Marxism 101

socialism
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Lolmarx

There has been a resurgence of interest in Marxist theory recently in the socialist blogosphere, specifically in the teaching thereof. Few people after all become socialist by thoroughly examining and comparing political ideologies, but rather through a short of gut feeling that socialism is right; I know I did. The root ideas of socialism are dead simple and can be understood by anybody. They haven’t changed since Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, which is still the best thing to read if you want to get to know those ideas quickly. Following on from that, Hal Draper’s The Two Souls of Socialism describes the existential struggle within socialism in how to realise its goals: through reform or revolution, top-down or bottom-up?

If you read those two pamphlets I feel you have a good idea of the essence of socialism, but what if you want to dig deeper into Marxist theory? There’s always been the Marxists Internet Archive in which all the great and not so great theorists of every concievable socialist tendency are available in perfect brotherhood, but it’s a daunting challenge to pick out the bits relevant to your interests. You could of course also read Marx’s own book of theory Das Kapital, but it’s hardly the sort of work you speed through in a day’s beach reading.

But have no fear, help is available if you do want to read it. Via The Soul of Man Under Capitalism, comes David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, in both video and audio form. There’s also an accompanying discussion space, Reading Capital.

More interested in a general overview of Marxism? Louis Proyect has put together a series of articles on his blog to form a introduction to Marxism, examining and discussing various classic Marxist works and subjects. There’s also a mailing list.

Want to focus on Marxism in an economic context? Marxist Economics is the place for you, set up by the International Socialist Tendency, which also runs the In defence of Marxism site.

Know more interesting Marxist or socialist theory sites we should be aware of? Bung em up in the comments.

A storm in a socialist teacup

Activism, British left, socialism
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Over at Lenny’s Tomb, Roobin set the cat amongst the pidgeons with his post on “the just-about-Gramscian theory of successful rioting” last Saturday, with both Louis Proyect and Andy Newman ridiculing it for sections like the one below:

The good news is, given preparation (the opportunity for which, of course, is normally denied), the average citizen can match a police officer blow for blow. A police officer has access to hand arms, in particular clubs, but the ordinary citizen can get and/or easily improvise these. The same is true of body armour and self-defence. The police have roadblocks, the people barricades. The police can use sturdy, powerful vehicles, so can the public. The police can use tools such as water cannons to disperse a crowd but a resourceful crowd can use similar devices to reverse effect. The police can use small firearms. Even in Britain it is not impossible for a member of the public to get hold of some. Any weapons won from the police in battle can immediately be used against them.

At first glance it does sound bad, the worst sort of pseudo-anarchist posturing, or “squadist juvenilia, as Andy called it. Louis Proyect was equally scathing, dismissing it as “complete idiocy”. And they would be right to do so, if it were not for one tiny detail: Roobin isn’t actually calling for fighting the police on their own terms, as the next paragraphs of his post makes clear:

he point is the police rely upon superior organisation and centralised control, not firepower. There are relatively few police officers in any country, never enough to deal with a general movement of people. This is one of the reasons why movements should be as numerous and broad as possible, to reduce the harm to life and limb to a minimum. When 2 million people are intent on using Hyde Park for a demonstration there is nothing the state can do to stop them (without seriously upping the ante).

When 125,000 miners go on strike (in albeit heightened circumstances), and are hung out to dry by union bureaucracy, the state is able to shift thousands of officers to mining areas to attack pickets and lay siege to villages, concentrating its all its power on its scattered, isolated
opponent.

In context it all sounds a lot less silly, doesn’t it? Roobin is making a quite uncontroversial, even obvious point here, which is the opposite of what Andy or Louis accuse him off. He’s actually arguing that you can’t use socalled black bloc
tactics against the police or the state, as they are better organised, better trained and have a greater legitimacy in using violence; instead socialists should organise en masse. Granted, the point could’ve been argued better, but I don’t think Roobin deserves this scolding from Andy and Louis, the more so because they seem to respond more to what they want to read, than what Roobin has actually written.

The Communist Manifesto

socialism, video
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Originally written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the revolution year of 1848, The Communist Manifesto is not so much a theoretical treatise on communism as a call to arm. Dated in parts, but still very relevant in general principles. You can read the 1888 English edition on this very website, but perhaps you’ll like it better in cartoon form? Proof positive that you can do more than just “Jive Bunny” with stock cartoon footage, here’s the Disneyised version of the Manifesto:

Further thoughts on Cuba

socialism, US foreign policy, wingnuts
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(I posted the comment below first at Unfogged but it was too good to just waste on those ingrates.)

What you need to keep in mind when judging Castro is that the man has stayed in power for almost fifty years and is only giving it up because his health has detoriated. This despite enormous odds against him, what with a certain superpower not a hundred miles away not liking him much. Unlike the Eastern European socalled socialist countries, his regime did not crumble once Soviet support was withdrawn, nor did Cuba go the Chinese or Vietnamese way of economic but not political freedom. At the same time his regime has been repressive, but it hasn’t engaged in mass murdering opponents in the same way US backed dictatorships in central America have done, or even (afaik) in the kind of repression that China went through.

That suggests to me that the reason Castro has survived so long in the face of so much difficulty is because the Cuban people want him to and believe he is their legitamite leader, despite some of the nastier features of the system he built.

What might help with this acceptance is the example of neighbouring countries like Haiti, with its history of brutal dictatorships, short periods of democracy undermined by Uncle Sam and civil wars/chaos…

Cuba is poor, but doesn’t have the extreme inequality of many Latin American countries, has free healthcare and school system for all its citizens annd has been able to go its own way despite superpower pressure. Would Cubans want to give up these hardwon achievements in return for the often dubious freedoms of liberal democracy as defined by US foreign policy?