A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories within them would fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert or they might find some themselves into stock companies, other transitional form of property – one, for example, in which the workers should participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.
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Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter 9 Social Relations in the Soviet Union, 2. Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class? (via arielnietzsche)
This sounds like little more than empty assertion to me. He’s basically saying the bureaucracy is bad, but without it, the Soviet Union would fall back into capitalism, and then rather foolishly advocates for a “new socialist power,” a new vanguard party to lead the masses. Vanguard or no vanguard, the only way capitalism could have reappeared in the absence of the bureaucracy would have been if the masses went back to it of their own accord, so he appears to be arguing that the people don’t have any revolutionary potential outside of Party leadership.
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That is the crisis, a lost faith in an inhabitable future, that the work ahead is as limited as the work in place now: the absent future, the dead future, the unemployment, the anxiety. For an economy that so often drains meaning from the immediate present for an imaginary future, a loss of faith is crisis. A surplus population of students, writers, photographers, freelancers, philosophers, social theorists without a doubt—but also increasingly of engineers, scientists, lawyers, businessmen, politicians. The economy that animates the university is an engine that produces irrelevance. That the economy itself provokes such a crisis of faith is testament to its own inner operating procedures, and perhaps to its own grinding contradictions.
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Anti-Capital Projects, No Conclusions When Another World is Unpopular
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antisocial-socialist:
ofmiceandtransmen:
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!
— Ludwig von Mises
What sort of shitty socialist calls themselves a liberal?
You mean like how the vast majority of people have to subordinate themselves to a boss for a third, if nor more, of their day for five days a week (if they’re lucky enough to have a full time job) under capitalism? It’s funny how capitalists are quick to attack other economic systems with accusations of authoritarianism, but conveniently leave out the despotism inherent in the system of private property. Also, since when are Progressives “revolutionaries”?
Five Capitalist Realizations Leading to Mutualism
blazingtruth:
Five Capitalist Realizations Leading to Mutualism
ARTICLE LOCATED HERE: http://www.blazingtruth.com/mutualist-anarchism/
This is a followup to my post “Taking the Moral High Ground“, in which I indicated that my shift away from objective morality towards a more consequentially minded approach would have some consequences in my political beliefs. As such, I would like to outline five realizations that led me to mutualism, namely:
1. Moral Non-Cognitivism,
2. That Property is a Social Construct,
3. Adopting a More Cooperative Cultural Ethos,
4. That the State May Be a Tool, and
5. That ‘Anarcho’-Capitalism Relies on Socialism
My hope is that in describing what it was like for a previously pro-capitalist thinker to lose belief in capitalism, that this article may incite others to notice or consider the weaknesses of Lockeanism in particular.
This article is thus written from the perspective of mutualism, which is in four words: free market anti-capitalism.
People who say they hate capitalism but refuse to move out of America.
iwanttheairwaves:
thisairwebreathe:
That simple you guys. Everyone can go home… or make a new one if they so wish.
The “why don’t you go elsewhere” argument is a stronger argument against capitalism than for it. Capitalism creates a laboring class who a)will have to work for years if not a lifetime in order to be able to afford to leave, b)will then be subject to government immigration policies, and c)will (due to their proletarian status) be forced to restrict their movement to areas where there is either a demand for labor or some alternative means to secure their existence.
The state is characterised by its separation from society. It
does not establish the social cohesion, but acts as a necessary
complement to the establishment of that cohesion through
the process of exchange. It is a derivative form of abstract
labour, constituted by the abstraction of doing into labour. The
constitution of the state is at the same time the constitution of
the economic and the political as separate spheres, from both of
which the abstraction of doing into labour, the transformation
of our being-able-to into a power-over us, disappears from view.
The political draws our fire, distracts our attention from the
fundamental question of our power-to-do. The state, by its very
existence, says in effect, ‘I am the force of social cohesion, I
am the centre of social determination. If you want to change
society, you must focus on me, you must gain control of me.’
This is not true. The real determinant of society is hidden
behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our
everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing
to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money,
profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very basis
of the existence of the state. If we want to change society, we
must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour,
do something else.
Why is it that we must choose an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the most inhuman? Because, we’re told, that’s just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we’re told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest. So, the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behavior, people often act that way. Doesn’t that seem just a bit circular?
Wage-labour itself has been an absurdity for several decades. It forces one part of the workers to engage in exhausting factory work; another part, which is very numerous in countries like the US, works in the unproductive sector; the function of this sector is to make sales easier, and to absorb workers rejected by mechanisation and automation, thus providing a mass of consumers, and being another aspect of “crisis management”. Capital takes possession of all the sciences and techniques: in the productive field, it orients research toward the study of what will bring a maximum profit; in the unproductive field, it develops management and marketing. Thus mankind tends to be divided into three groups:
-productive workers, often physically destroyed by their work;
-unproductive workers, the vast majority of whom are only a source of waste;
-and the mass of non-wage earners, some of them in the developed countries, but most of them in poor countries: capital cannot integrate them in any way, and hundreds of thousands of them are periodically destroyed in wars directly or indirectly caused by the capitalist-imperialist organization of the world economy.
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Capitalism and Communism, Gilles Dauvé
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Just found this in the New Books section of my college’s library. Apparently, capitalism can save and/or fix the environment.
Are you not compelled to work for an employer? Your need compells you, just as the highwayman’s gun. You must live, and so must your wife and children. You can’t work for yourself, under the industrial capitalist system you must work for an employer. The factories, machinery, and tools belong to the capitalist class, so you must hire yourself out to that class in order to live…
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Alexander Berkman, What is Communist Anarchism?
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I actually see socialism, communism, and capitalism as all valid economic philosophies. In fact, the best system is probably a cross between all 3. They would be very weak standing on their own.
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transhumanisticpanspermia
The first person to explain to me how these systems could be mixed together shall be awarded one internet.
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