As a conclusion to his series provoked by The Australian‘s “What’s Left” op/ed fest, Guy Rundle has proposed a positive vision of the future from the left. [For my previous LP posts on this theme, see here.]
I’ll post the whole piece over the fold (with permission), but I want to zero in on this point and add a few of my own thoughts:
Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions…
Read that together with another observation:
Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.
It’s precisely, I think, because a certain blockage to thought has now fractured with the Global Financial Crisis’ destruction of the legitimacy of ideological capital (and Slavoj Žižek may be right that this is the second ‘end of history’; the first being the implosion of Soviet Marxism), that we can begin to think a future outside the “no alternatives” terrain of both neo-liberalism and its anodyne Third way echoes. The term “social democracy”, in and of itself, doesn’t imply an economistic orientation, and it should not. What we’re actually seeing, I would argue (and more on this later), is a return of suppressed conceptions of value and values in the popular mind, which create the building blocks on which a vision of the future can be scaffolded, even if the foundation must rest on shards.
In short, and this was a theme of my doctoral thesis, what we need to do – collectively – is to revive our ability to imagine life otherwise. That works better if we allow critique its place – to render what appears natural strange – but also if we ground our thoughts of the future in what we can see around us, and orient our presents to a future hope. A certain utopian sensibility is required – but one which is open to the invention of utopias in a plural and a minor key.
Guy Rundle writes:
Okay for those who may have got bogged down in the thousand words or so about the Maoist-Eurocommunist struggle in the BLF in the 1970s in yesterday’s article on the left, a very brief recap of the last part:
1. Though a unified left has disintegrated, the challenges it spoke of – the structural contradictions of capitalism, ecological collapse from overconsumption, and the nihilistic effects of a civilisation subsumed under the rule of the commodity – have largely come to pass and are visible to billions of people.
2. In the East, capitalist development will not and cannot simply repeat that of Western capitalism, and enormous class struggles are in the offing.
3. In the West, an increasingly educated population, and a society where large sections have become implicitly self-managing has made a socialist framework immanent in everyday life. To look around and see an absence of political alternatives because of the absence of old style rank-and-file politics is to make an error of assessment. Post-capitalism is evolving within the increasingly ramshackle apparatus of capitalism.
That’s the “is”. But what about the “ought”? Why a society based on some other principle? And why haven’t we spoken of it before?
Those of us on the left are wary of expounding abstract alternative schema in the absence of movements wherein they would be actively discussed. That varies in time and place. In Latin America today, there is an enormous amount going on. Though the public face of it is the frequently irritating antics of Hugo Chavez, in every country save the corrupt redoubt of Colombia, new modes of distribution, co-operative production, intersection between intellectual life and everyday existence are being developed.
Drawing as much from Catholic traditions of “subsidiarity” as Marxist notions of anti-imperialism, the continent is leaping ahead of everywhere else in finding ways of doing things that promote equality without penalising initiative. There, different types of alternatives can be actively and concretely debated.
And in the West, from the 1880s to the 1970s, such debates could transfix an audience. In the 40s, pamphlets by either the Communist Party or the forerunner of the NCC (expounding Santamaria’s loopy Pol-Pot idea to evacuate the cities and create rural communes run by bishops) could sell 50-100,000 copies. In the 20s, people queued round the block for hours to get tickets to hear GK Chesterton and Bernard Shaw debate public control of central banking — presenting alternative schema that would seem identical to us today.
These debates will emerge again, when there is no choice but to have them. At that point, consciousness will change remarkably fast. The acuteness, intelligence and reflectiveness that people apply to running a sports club, a parenting group, the quasi-theological manner in which they discuss the pros and cons of a video umpire for a grand final, will be transferred to the management of the parts of their lives that are now held out of bounds, as “the economy”, once the bankers have budded and burst the next few bubbles, and f-cked everything up beyond the recuperable abilities of the current system.
That transformation can probably be called socialism when it starts happening — because by that time, the dour images of the last time around — Brezhnev and British Leyland — will have faded from memory. For the moment one can talk more about the ethical principles that underlie it.
Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.
A post-capitalist system reverses the current relationship between culture/society and market/economy so that the former determines the latter and not, as currently happens, economy dictating to society and culture.
As a rough schema that implies:
1) Social ownership of essential organisations. Anything that’s “too big to fail” — major banks, telecoms, utilities etc — should be majority-owned by the community. The share is held in trust, and represented by a “social board” parallel to, or mixed-in with the commercial board. The social board is elected, not appointed by the state.
Thus for example, the recent splitting of Telstra — a mild move to the left–– would see the wholesale arm of it acquire a social board, and pass into social ownership. The commercial arm could continue in the marketplace.
2) Relocalisation and decommodification — the current culture economy web of capitalism is based on an implicit social contract, that no-one ever signed up to. Under this contract you work longer and harder, while the price of essentials — especially home ownership — are ramped up into lifelong servitude to payment to institutions. The pay-off? Cheap consumer durables and entertainment services.
Forget the civilisational critique of this for a moment — on its own terms, it pitches the whole society into trembling economic fragility in which a whole way of life is based on Xmas sales, and shopping becomes an essential patriotic activity.
Of course this can’t continue — but the expectations it has raised in people cannot be assuaged by any shift to a harsher economy. A half-century ago, you could get people to work 48 hours a week for a weatherboard, a radiogram, a pub counter meal once a week and three course meal when their daughter got married. Any breach of the current contract — 50 hours in the office partition for $12 cocktails and DVD box sets — ain’t gonna fly.
Protestant capitalism cannot be re-established after consumer capitalism. And consumer capitalism cannot continue to sustain the Western economy. An economic-cultural crisis is in the works.
Such a crunch will necessitate a process of uncoupling notions of social progress from GDP growth, and a separation of the notion of freedom from consumer choice. As a social movement, the re-establishment of decommodified spheres of life, in everything from food production and house building to intellectual and cultural production. To facilitate this, the state will need to innovate and change tax scales and exemptions, land ownership systems, intellectual property laws — all to make more flexible and multiply-expressed forms of life possible.
The push for these things will occur en masse once the jerry-built, sellotaped-together and manifestly inefficient structures of global capitalism do not so much collapse as rust to a halt. Once that occurs, the culture itself will start to shift and change, to a more expansive idea of the human.
Just as the rise of liberalism and capitalism liberated a dimension of the human – our protean and promethean capacity — that feudalism had had to suppress in order to maintain itself, so a post-capitalist order will liberate what capitalism has to suppress, our capacity to shape our own lives through collective and communal dialogue about priorities and values (kidney machines versus jet skis, free time versus flat-screens).
Will that future be anything like the communism envisaged in the early Marx, or Lenin’s utopian State and Revolution? Emphatically not. Money, pricing, markets, wages will continue to exist — they simply won’t dominate existence. Social control of public institutions won’t end corruption, inefficiency, etc, but they will create a place where social debate and conflict over the running of society can be had in a genuinely democratic fashion. And it may not happen at all — or there may be rough times before it becomes possible.
Lethal global wars over resources, possibly encompassing a new generalised racism, coupled with violently repressive capitalist dictatorships, and a generalised victory of nihilism — such that we lose the capacity, for example, to see the moral horror of a free market in live organ transplants – may be the other result (anyone scoffing at this apocalyptic scenario should imagine they are reading it in 1909, in, say, Warsaw, by way of comparison). In that case, by the end of the century, the planet may be a giant charnel house. There is either going to be a victory of a genuinely democratic and human system, or a barbarism.
In that respect, a left vision grounds itself ethically on the notion — promulgated in the great religions, secularised by Kant – that humans should treated each other as ends, not means.
At a social level that decisively rejects any sort of classical liberal or neoliberal approach which is indifferent to economic relationships and equality in their conception of freedom. It subordinates property, etc to a wider conception of freedom. That someone can open a flower shop if they want to is an expression of freedom. That a bank owns our airports is an expression of its opposite.
At a cultural level, that implies that one has to stand up for a permanently decommodified areas of society — institutions such as childcare, crime and punishment, education (that does not rule out non-government education however) and so on. It implies not a defensive reaction to commodification, but a positive insistence that some things need to be outside of the market for there to be a culture, for the market to sit within the polis, and not vice-versa.
Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions – if the anodyne and idealess series of articles in the Oz over the past week is anything to go by.
As I noted, the choice appears to be deliberate — or maybe it is simply that the editors are as unimaginative and timid as the contributors they chose. Whatever the case, it’s clear that some of us are going to have to be more vocal and explicit about possible futures.
Mark, extremely thought-provoking stuff there. It is certainly hard to avoid both the Scylla of idealised utopias (“Decree #1: Lions shall become vegetarians and scorpions shall stop stinging frogs”) and the Charybdis of over-detailed blueprints (“No! No! Factory-based workers’ councils with power of immediate recall are not meant to emerge for another 6 to 8 months yet!”). You have made a great start with a big destination map that leaves room to swerve down Second Avenue if First appears blocked.
One point of interest… By “The social board is elected, not appointed by the state”, do you mean directly elected by the voters, as opposed to nominees of a Minister (or People’s Commissar or the like)? Is there a danger of a ve-e-e-e-ry long “long ballot” that makes voting onerous, and thus may even depress participation, because people are asked to vote for candidates for positions they don’t know or care about? (Any resemblance to UQ Union in the 1980s is quite intentional…)
My current (tentative) conclusion is that the best balance would be to retain appointment (by the executive, the legislature, or some combination of both) for the “technical” positions, but allow popular recall by petition, with a particularly unpopular appointee being removed (and disqualified from re-appointment for a period, say 4 years) if the majority vote no confidence in her or him.
Tom, just to clarify, the section below the fold is by Guy Rundle, not me. (Though in general terms I would wholeheartedly endorse what he has to say).
Guy can answer for himself, but a direct election wouldn’t be the only model. I think it would be important though, to transcend both cooperative or employee involvement/industrial democracy styles of governance to include a public component.
Incidentally, there’s some interesting stuff out there written on “democratic administration” – and to add to Rundle’s Latin American examples, there’s a lot more in OECD countries than we normally see discussed. I might try to pull some of that together at some point.
Just to name-drop…
One of the sociologists I am personally most interested in is Erik Olin Wright, a Marxist of the Analytical Marxism variety. For most of his career Wright has pre-occupied himself with examining the nature of class relations in contemporary capitalist societies. The culmination of Wright’s work in this area was the book Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis.
Since the publication of Class Counts, Wright has devoted much of his time to the Real Utopias Project. Here’s a short description of the project (taken from the previous link):
Several books have appeared in the Real Utopias book series, which is published by Verso. The most recent is Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor. Wright himself has recently completed the book Envisioning Real Utopias, which is scheduled to be published by Verso in 2010.
I’m just name-dropping really – but people interested in “left futures” could potentially be interested in this significant, interrelated body of intellectual work.
Stirring stuff, much to commend and some which might need careful exploration. Mark, thanks for the reprint. Hopefully Guy will drop by and respond to other ideas that might come up. One thing that worries me is this presumption that the capitalist system is dead in the water. It deserves to be, but from my perspective much of it still seems to be alive and kicking. My general question is how do we get to where we want to be, based on where we are?
Very enjoyable read Mark. Thanks.
Your comments remind of a sentence from Lester Thurow, The Future of Capitalism
“To flourish, human societies need a vision of something better.”
Perhaps we can reach the stage where the point is not reaching that something better but to always be striving towards something better. An ongoing problem I have with the “hands off” approach of the Right is that we typically improve our lot in life by being “hands on”. We can’t just wait for society to hopefully evolve towards something better. If you aim at nothing that’s what you get. At the personal and societal level it does seem that that the “vision thing” is important.
And importantly, John H, it’s not in retrospect, a bad thing even if the vision proves overly ambitious. The processes of creating the goal and trying to realise it are important too …
The notion that we should dare to dream of alternative futures should be obvious, but clearly it’s not.
The insistence of some on the right that the principles of market capitalism are an end in themselves – rather than a means to an end – is an odious one.
That said, I would like to mount a defence of economic efficiency, and throw a skeptical light on the notion of “social ownership”.
The feather-bedding in state-owned organizations like the old Telecom Australia, or the State Electricity Commission, might have been great for those employed there, but they were to the detriment of the rest of us. They represented a massive waste of collective human endeavour that could, and now is, redeployed to better uses.
To take another example, anybody arguing for the decommodification of food production has clearly never eaten from a student union owned catering outlet.
Perhaps it’s a fairly narrow and uninspiring view, but it seems to me that from the economic perspective, the biggest failing of the past few decades was letting the rich take an ever-greater share of the pie for themselves, without taxing it back again (and indeed, in many cases, reducing the share of tax they pay).
Share the wealth a bit more equitably, and other issues start to solve themselves.
Without going too techno-utopian, I think the long-term threat to corporatism is technological. The internet is gradually destroying companies whose business was toll-collecting on the distribution of the products of the human intellect. A similar revolution is brewing in the physical world too. While the Star Trek replicator is science fiction, its primitive antecedents exist today, and are slowly becoming more capable.
I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime, but sooner or later pushbutton manufacturing in the spare room may well become routine. The Industrial Revolution may just come full circle.
I’m pretty sure you’ll see this within a decade. Machinists are downloading code from the net for their CNC mills and lathes now. I think three things will drive it: the manufacture of illegal things like weapons or drug paraphanalia like processing machines for amphetamine manufacture, the ability to make things cheaper like a set of ‘arty’ cutlery for your dinner set , and convenience such as rather than your mechanic ordering a part for your car, they run the program on their mill and manufacture it themselves.
Robert@7:
“like the old Telecom Australia, or the State Electricity Commission, might have been great for those employed there, but they were to the detriment of the rest of us”
In what way? Am I getting a better deal as a consumer (leaving aside the fact that as a consumer I could also be an employee of the old SEC) from these private providers? All I know is that every few nights as I cook dinner and deal with the demands of young children, someone will ring me up offering me a putative better deal on my electricity bill. If I suggest I ring them back to discuss this at my leisure (ie. when I’m ready to make a choice between providers) I’m told this is not a possible way to proceed. What’s the point of this near constant harassment of me to make choices as regards my utility providers?
A very interesting series of essays by Guy Rundle. This is what I like about blogging. Its a great way to explore ideas and look for alternatives.
Liberty, Fraternity, Democracy…
Operating at the levels of the Individual (singular), social groups (plural) and the State (singular again). These three levels are abstractions, as each level depends on both of the others interdependently.
Liberalism is a radical ideal and it has the abstract Individual as a basic concept. It is still appropriate at this level of human rights and it is still radical. Neoliberalism was an attempt to take liberalism out of the level of individuals with their rights and freedoms and into the social (corporate) and state levels. Corporate entities wanted to assume rights and freedoms as if they were individuals, even while their collective financial power and connections with the state meant that they could manipulate and dominate the markets they were in. Neoliberalism is not liberal.
I think that liberalism is an essential part of modernity and the left. There are applicable limits to liberalism. It is not a cure-all. It works at the level of individuals but at a social level it may render groups unworkable. For groups you need some kind of common bond that members of the group agree to. Groups are very fluid and don’t seem that stable. Political parties and nuanced ideological debates see shifting alliances all the time.
At the state level we have different requirements. To keep state power within civil bounds we need a transparency of processes and an adherence to due process. We need a critical press and an opportunistic (and competent) opposition. We need the debate to be on the ideas and policies as much as possible and to steer away from personal attacks and invading the privacy of people who engage at that level.
Each of these three broad layers are dependent on the other layers. It is a system. I see an alternative to the current ennui as being able to visualise a structure that allows for the freedom of individuals, and that allows for the flourishing of diverse groups pursuing their own (non-violent) interests and a state that is transparent and rule based so that competing interests can have a fair say on contentious issues. It has most of the elements of modernity but the difference is the structure and that a different approach may be appropriate for the various layers.
There is also the danger that such a structure can be turned on its head, and you could argue that that is what happened in totalitarian states of the twentieth century. This is a very broad generalisation.
I think it would be a mistake for the Left to narrow its efforts to only the social. It needs, IMHO, to also look for the strengths and weaknesses of liberalism and know where its limits are, it needs to look at the strengths and weaknesses of socialism and social group activity (and I would include corporations in this category), and it needs to understand the way the state works for an understanding of how a state can enhance or diminish human potential. Its not utopian. The physical sciences are layered and one of the basic things to be aware of in science are the boundary conditions.
These are just my opinions and please excuse my pointed style. I am commenting in the hope that it sparks off debate about the issues and ideas that Guy has written about. I think these kinds of discussions are positive and constructive. And I hope to read more…
Opps,
That should have been “Liberty, equality, fraternity”
In some ways its about the question of how can be have equality in modern societies.
Anthony, there were tens of thousands of people employed at Telecom Oz, or the SEC, or for that matter the old banks, who weren’t actually necessary for the delivery of the products and services they provide.
Nowdays, the employment levels in all of those organizations are radically lower than they once were. However, unemployment levels are lower than they once were (though I acknowledge the problematic nature of comparing unemployment statistics across generations where the nature of who works has changed a lot). To grossly oversimply, the people who were doing unnecessary work at those enterprises are now doing something more useful.
While I take the point that economics is not the be-all and end-all, I will strongly defend the notion that it is important that resources be deployed to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. I further assert that in many circumstances market-based systems have demonstrated themselves to be the best way of achieving such that we currently know.
#11: “Liberty, equality, fraternity”
But what if b) ‘equality’ doesn’t arise spontaneously and through unanimous (and continuously sustained) acclamation? Well, then I suppose it will just have to encroach upon a) ‘liberty’. By force if necessary. Right? As somebody or other once said: La mort, sans phrases. (Or conversely, if liberty and equality are incompatible but liberty happens to win that particular arm-wrestling match, then what will become of equality?)
One down, two to go.
“Equality” by rights ought to render “fraternity” either redundant or irrelevant, yes? And if not, if for some reason fraternity must be enforced, then in what way is it genuine fraternity?
No wonder those guys had to invent guillotines, it saved them the trouble of thinking too hard.
Of course the real thing is that these particular big words, in that particular formulation, were a product of their specific time and context. Another reason not to paint them on banners, in that particular order, in this day and age.
“To grossly oversimply, the people who were doing unnecessary work at those enterprises are now doing something more useful.”
Are we talking “unnecessary work” like the maintenance of electricity poles and wiring systems? And important new employment in door to door sales harassment, from power companies, for overseas tourists?
Just to also oversimplify.
Have to agree that Anthony and Joe2 have points, Robert, even if I take yours also. I just wish there was some way not to be pestered by door-to-door salesmen trying to induce us to switch power utilities for what is usually a piddling saving on bills if they are paid on time. Sadly, those desperate enough to take on this work are mostly Indian and Sri Lankan migrants or students, adding to the general public prejudice against these groups.
Oh well, when I was young we suffered the same from encyclopaedia and insurance salesman – so maybe it is a hazard we must get used to. But you have to wonder how beneficial the difference is between utility providers when they have to resort to these tactics.
The situation with the telcos offering broadband and/or phone packages is perhaps not as desperate, but trying to make an informed decision becomes bewildering when nothing seems to be directly comparable.
I think Robert’s right that we do benefit from not employing so many clerks and storekeepers in tedious occupations. But if only we could redeploy all those salesmen to answering phone enquiries in place of those computerised push-button option things (which refuse to work with my cordless phone) we’d all be better off … even if that means a sing-song voice at the other end. I’d much sooner that than a recorded message anyway.
joe2, would you like to point me to supply reliability statistics that suggest that your power supply is less reliable now than it was in the days of the Slow, Easy, and Comfortable?
Hi j_p_z,
Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome don’t arise spontaneously. We all have our particular lives and experiences. The line about equality in Guy’s article mentions a Judeo-Christian religious idea of equality (men and women created in the image of God from the first chapter of Genesis) and he mentioned Kant’s notion of a limit to a categorical imperative (“that humans should treat each other as ends, not means”). That kind of equality addresses what it is to be human, human dignity and the recognition that some rights are inalienable.
I presume your rhetorical question is about a stronger agent taking the liberty to extract more than a fair share in an exchange with another hapless fellow, who has no power to do anything about that resultant inequality but who would in turn presumably exploit another person in a similar manner if he himself (assuming a gender) was given half the chance. Its a common problem that political theorists have grappled with. A classic contract theory approach is to start with a state of nature and then describe the benefits of civilised society, the rule of laws, a powerful state and a common culture that has a social contract embedded into it. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are some of the relevant social contract theorists. More recently, Rawl’s hypothetical Veil of Ignorance was another attempt to abstract some notion of equality as sameness. I’ve only studied the topic superficially though.
The state does have a role in promoting equality of opportunity through targeted programs, and especially through public education and health. In theory, services like legal aid and also the union movement were there to help people who were unfairly exploited. OH&S, fair wages and work conditions are preventative measures for people in the workforce. You’d know all this, and your statement was more a play on the history of the French Revolution, I presume.
Fraternity could be translated into Aussie as ‘mateship’. It translates as brotherhood. There are all the problems of exclusion, especially by gender, with the idea of Fraternity, but in a way, every social group by its nature has limits on inclusion into that group. That’s what groups are about. There are problems if power is vested in narrow groups and you would think that democracy – even with selecting the boards for publicly listed companies – can go some way in opening up the membership of powerful groups to people with more relevant criteria for the positions such as ability and public esteem. I think a notion that everyone should be everyone else’s mate is a bit weird. You get on well with some people, and with others you don’t so much – that’s life. You can still believe in human rights and the rule of law, but that doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be everyone’s best friend. Fraternity is at a social level and it is about groups of people who get on well with each other and exclude most other people for the purposes of that group. Fine. Think sport and footy supporters. The inclusion and exclusion is a consequence of there being social groups. This is a very difficult ethical topic, but equality at the social level may have something to do with allowing for the integrity of group processes and finding a fair way to mediate between conflicting groups that the relevant groups could agree to.
Equality and fraternity are not the same thing. Even within a fraternity you may not have equality since the group may recognise an authoritative hierarchy or pecking order within its ranks.
I’d say, No. Enforced fraternity? Perhaps you’re referring to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, but in a non-violent setting you couldn’t really have an enforced fraternity. Even in a workplace if a person is there to earn a living like most other people there, that counts as a binding reason to join the fraternity of that workplace – to use stifled language.
I used those three words to try to show that they refer to layers of life in a modern society that have different rules and modes of operation to the two other layers. The three main layers, however, don’t map cleanly on to the slogan from the French Revolution. Liberty is appropriate at the individual level, fraternity or allowing basic group processes (inclusion/exclusion) is for the social level while democracy, the rule of law and due process are for the state level. Equality pervades everything, but equality is expressed differently in each of the three main layers. There may be inconsistencies between the layers, but that only goes to show that you need a layered structure to describe the theory of equality for a person in the modern society. Anyway, that’s the idea…
@8
I can’t see the car part milling scenario working. Components for engines are more often than not not a single piece of machined steel. Think of a starter motor or electric window motor. Might be alright for a conrod by when was the last time you needed to replace one of those?
Not sure what you mean, but a single piece of machined steel is produced on a mill. That is kind of the point of a CNC mill, cutting things out of single blocks of metal.
It might not work for other reasons such as the car repair shop not having access to large chunks of pure metal, or not having a mill with an appropriatly fine level of tolerance. But there is nothing wrong with the idea in theory.
I can’t see the car part milling scenario working. Components for engines are more often than not not a single piece of machined steel.
You can manufacture multiple components from blanks of different materials and fit them together. The difficult part is normally getting things to fit together, if it’s done on a CNC machine, using validated code, with inbuilt quality assurance, then there shouldn’t be a problem for your mechanic, or indeed, your average joe. A programmable mill is just the beginning, and wasn’t designed with exactly this role in mind. When they do get purpose built they’ll produce things a lot closer to a finished product, like machines that produce custom built electronic black boxes – printing off an integrated circuit, combining it with other electronic components, programming it, putting it in a container, fitting the appropriate connectors, testing it, and making connecting cables. This technology exists today. It won’t be too long (< 10 years) before there's one near you. Also, as this maintenance methodology becomes more common, product manufacturers will start to engineer this type of maintenance into their maintenance regimes for their products, so your car will be designed and built to have certain components manufactured on your mechanics CNC mill as part of its inbuilt maintenance methodology, and then someone will make a cheaper mill which hobbyists can afford, and people will use these machines to customise their own parts and do their own designs…..and the process continues.
I think Patrick’s point is that things like a clutch assembly – or for that matter an electric motor switch – is not a single machined piece of metal.
I agree totally, and would not like to claim that the consequences I pondered are coming next year, or next decade.
But I reckon 50 years from now – something I’m hoping I live to see – desktop manufacturing might be increasingly common.
“Drawing as much from Catholic traditions of “subsidiarity” as Marxist notions of anti-imperialism, the continent is leaping ahead of everywhere else in finding ways of doing things that promote equality without penalising initiative.”
Market-socialism, ho hum. Look where it got Yugoslavia…
Chav, you’re implying that “market socialism” is responsible in large part for Yugoslavia’s demise.
Care to justify that, instead of the obvious alternative hypothesis that centuries-old ethnic hatreds were able to boil over once the Cold War went away and the Russians lost interest?
Ah, the old ‘centuries old ethnic hatreds’ that lesser races are constantly prey to once the ‘civilised’ turn their back…unless of course it was opportunistic politicians diverting attention from the crisis their economy was going through by consciously whipping up nationalistic fervour, the intervention of Western imperialist states who selectively sponsored one ‘nation’ over the other (German capital’s intervention in Slovenia is one example),the failure of the indigenous Left to pose an alternative to a system that delivered a falling standard of living and the failure of the Left in the imperialist countries to oppose the NATO intervention that worsened the situation…
Robert, as someone who travelled twice through Yugoslavia before its demise (once many years before) I can assure you it was a horrible place to live.
Last time, after crossing the border by train from Italy the locals on board were ruthlessly pounced on by the customs officials and made to pay all sorts of fines and whatnot for the ‘contraband’ they had snuck across the border. Pretty ordinary contraband at that. The whole place was miserable and we were glad to move on to Turkey.
What a surprise: the “post-capitalist” future is socialist. Nationalisation and “social” boards? Really? That’s the solution? Sounds like Germany in the 1970s to me, sans Bowie and Pop. And don’t get me started on the incoherent fairy-floss in the second half of that piece.
Rundle’s proposals are unoriginal, conservative and reactionary. Isn’t Teh Left supposed to be the “progressive” side? And yet all we get from the anti-capitalist crowd is this back-to-the-future historical materialism. Yawn.
“Will that future be anything like the communism envisaged in the early Marx, or Lenin’s utopian State and Revolution? Emphatically not. Money, pricing, markets, wages will continue to exist — they simply won’t dominate existence.”
This seems to be a misreading of the classical Marxists (Marx included!). None of them envisaged communism as appearing until after a long period of development, referred to as socialism, which in itself was pre-figured by a worker’s state, which in turn was the product of revolution. During this period commodity production and markets would still exist, the point was that as the working class had conquered state power (if they don’t, it will conquer them, there is no getting around this unfortunately) and reconfigured the state they would be able to use this far more democratic structure to move society beyond the need for markets, wage labour and commodity production. Eventually the state would cease to exist as we know it as everyone would be able say, “l’estat c’est moi”.
Chav
This is not a bad outline of the transition specified in Lenin’s State and Revolution though it omits the connection between the dissolution of class society and the achievement of material abundance on a world scale, which anticipates it. Plainly, at this stage there being no role for an arbiter between the interests of the contending classes, the state withers away.
I’m not sure about the Louis XIV reference though. L’état, c’est moi is an assertion of absolute power — an absence of frontier between the ruler, the remit of executive power and the claims of the citizenry. During the period to which you allude in the first phase of the transition to socialism, the old society — capitalism, a.k.a the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a society in which the usages of classes asserting their right to treat labour power as a commodity, is replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat a form of social organisation which suppresses the attempts of the old classes to reinstitute their form of class rule. Here, the workers might, if they knew French claim L’état, c’est nous.
“Here, the workers might, if they knew French claim L’état, c’est nous.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself Fran, which I clearly didn’t. Must be my bourgeois individualism asserting itself!
Proletarians … quelle nostalgie.
Australia long ago exported its proletariat to Taiwan and Japan. (It has since migrated to China).
However, our economy is second-to-none as a generator of the lumpenproletariat.
Not sure they are the ideal agents of the advent of Industrial Democracy.
Chavw said
or as Marx might have it:
Brumaire XVIII, being a proletarian involves a relationship to the means of production (and the service industries that enable that production), not wearing a pair of overalls…
Katz’s timing was brilliant though Chav … given the source of my quote …
So does being a lumpenproletarian…
@33. Touche` Brumaire, not…
Fydor@#25:
No one ever went broke by under-estimating Fyodor’s intellect or character. But I am reluctantly forced to agree with him on this score.
This 19th C era ideological debate over political economy looks a bit tired and thread-bare to me. Particularly when the underlying ontological assumptions are straight our of post-modern liberalism 101.
Capitalism and Socialism are both examples of modernist “corporalism” (institutional authorities). In the past generation we have overlaid post-modernist liberalism (individual autonomies) onto these structures. So its not surprising that the whole thing has ended in sparrows tears.
But History never stands still. We are at the advent of a century where the progressive action will move from the sociological to the technological realms. Make-overs will be of individual organs rather than institutional organizations.
Nowadays the real progressive action occurs outside “corporal” capitalist and socialist organizations. It has already moved inside “communal” organizations based on new technology. Think social networking, wikis, blogs, open source. These organizations are not driven by bottom-up liberal individualism or top-down “corporal” institutionalism. Rather they come come under the head of (what I suggest should be termed) side-to-side communal “interactionism”. Quiggin has pioneered theoretical (as well as practical) exposition of these forms:
Note that profit-driven capitalism and power-dominating socialism both come under fire in this approach.
But thats only looking at software side of things. Some time this century we will see real changes to human nature through the application and combination of genetics, “cytotics” and cybernetics.
So worrying about the composition of share-holder ownership or the degree of worker participation in management does seem a little old-hat. In the next hundred years the constitutional debates will be about the human personality, not polity.
The best analysis of Lenin is Levine’s The End of the State. More generally what about the positive freedom tradition from Marx to Green to Hobhouse and more recently Sen? Cass Sunstein and American ‘republicanism’? As for a non-capitalist future the burden of proof rests with the opponents of capitalism given the unhappy record of non-capitalist systems they have all failed to pass the Marxist test of maximizing productivity growth.
Robert @7 – I’m not convinced that the privatisation of telstra by itself has done anything for me personally and I also believe there is a net benefit to the australian public on the issue of publicly owned national infrastructure. This is a separate issue to managing such utilities properly but one that tends to be conflated (in my view). I’m quite happy to argue that point
RobV @ # 17 — Thanks for your thoughtful and complex reply.
Insofar as politics is famously “the art of the possible”, my quarrel was/is mainly with the sloganeering use of great big words on great big banners representing crudely (or at least inartfully) articulated demands — so much the worse when the particular great big words come loaded with a freight of pre-existing historical associations which are largely now irrelevant. Only disappointment or a (mistaken) sense of betrayal can realistically result. Which is why (one reason amongst many, really) I think it’s unhealthy and counterproductive to do it, regardless of how fine one’s own specific intentions are: it risks leading to unfulfilled imaginary promises, and the reaction to same etc etc etc. But at heart that’s really not your own problem, as you’ve skillfully shown.
None of this is meant to fault your own very carefully considered thoughts. If more people parsed their meanings as thoughtfully as you’ve done above, we’d have a whole lot less problems.
I’d have more to say about the whole thing but it’s increasingly tangential to the way this thread is tending. Cheers, though, and thanks for some thought-provoking matter.
Thanks for the compliment j_p_z.
Heh. Not that you haven’t tried. Keep the faith, Gino.
“As for a non-capitalist future the burden of proof rests with the opponents of capitalism given the unhappy record of non-capitalist systems they have all failed to pass the Marxist test of maximizing productivity growth.”
Actually the state capitalist regimes have achieved growth rates far higher than those of their Western rivals in various points in time. I’m thinking primarily here of the USSR just prior to and after WWII.
If the USSR failed any test, its that it wasn’t ‘Marxist’ at all after 1928…
And really, is it realistic to say, in the midst of the global economic crisis, with war and economic turmoil rampant throughout the globe, that the onus is on anti-capitalists to prove their alternatives? Is the choice now only between Stalinism and imperialist monopoly capitalism?
Timely to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
.
perhaps the future of leftist thought will be delivered in mandarin?
In the next hundred years the constitutional debates will be about the human personality, not polity.
That needs to happen right now because our understanding of human nature is still very much couched in religious and philosophical motifs some of which date back to the middle ages. Thus:
“Confronting this fact seems especially imperative at this time. Psychiatrists are frequently called on to prescribe quick treatments for a variety of social ills, such as the rising rates of crime and violence. Instead of appealing to the speciality of psychiatry to “fix” violence or reduce general unhappiness, all of us, as members of the human community, need to recognize that the sense of “self” in our post-turn-of-the-century worlds may be in need of repair. There has been a widespread move toward materialism, quick fixes, instant gratification, and a superficial sense of success, which is reinforced by the fast-paced cyberworld that we live in. The answer to our many current social problems must come from individual people, who must reappraise their sense of “self” and reach an appropriate perspective on what constitutes a sound moral compass and meaning in life. The need to search for a personal moral compass to guide our individual lives in the twenty-first century is a need that transcends medical intervention, but which has a very real impact on how we choose to employ medical science and what we expect from it. In the era of the genome, fraught as it is with a variety of crucial moral questions, we must all make an agonizing reappraisal of who we are, what life is, what life means, what we must do to help the other human beings who share our world with us, and what we can do to make it a brave new world.”
N. Andreasen, Brave New Brain, closing statement.
Actually, Chav and Fran, at the point which Chav was referring, the state would have largely withered away, so “L’état, c’est” nous would indeed have been eclipsed (in as much as “L’état” exists) by “L’état, c’est moi”, as the liberation of the individual from the state, and resultant genuine freedom, would make each individual a “state” in themselves.
“joe2, would you like to point me to supply reliability statistics that suggest that your power supply is less reliable now than it was in the days of the Slow, Easy, and Comfortable?”
I do not have those figures Robert and would be surprised they exist, given the likely propensity of those who have benefited financially from privatisation to obliterate any information that would suggest anything but a rosey experience for all. All I can talk about are my own impressions of what Victoria has been lumbered with since this drive to sell off every public asset available.
Power company sales representatives arrive at my doorstep on a regular basis, as others have also mentioned, selling schemes that they are not prepared to leave any details -sometimes with bribes actually in hand- if one is not prepared to sign up for straight away. A friend told me of his mentally impaired brother who has been cajoled into changing his contract five times in six months. On complaint to my local Labor M.P. the office worker told me that it is all about giving the consumer greater “competition”. “Show of competition”, I would say, with the expense of this madness passed on to the once owners of the asset and the profit to shareholders.
And yes, I believe, the service has gone backwards with fairly often ‘interruptions to service’. I gather this is due to the lack of maintenance since the end of “Slow, Easy, and Comfortable” was foisted on the public by the Kennett carpetbaggers. Poles and wireing etc have been left in dangerous and poor condition because work on that kind would damage the sacred ‘bottom line’. Too bad for those dealing with the fires caused by this shoddy, culpable, regime.
The service that once provided for reliable and fair working conditions for it’s employees also trained up the skilled tradespeople for which we now have a scarcity. Little wonder that any domestic callouts for an electrician is likely to send the ordinary wage earner bankrupt.
In short, Robert, we were sold a pup!
Robert Merkel @ 12,
“Nowdays, the employment levels in all of these organisations are radically lower than they once were. However, unemployment levels are lower than they once were”.
The first sentence is correct. But if you are speaking about the longer term, the second sentence is grossly incorrect. The neo-liberal era – precisely that in which these downsizings have occurred – has seen average unemployment jump to around 7.6%, up from an average of around 2.5% in the preceeding era in which full employment was deliberate government policy.
Further, the standard definition of “employed” – anyone who works one or more hours per week – has masked the high labour underutilization rate that has been experienced over the neo-liberal period due to a strong trend toward part-time, casual and temporary employment. Total labour underutilization currently stands at around 14%.
The downsizing of public sector employment has not been hithero matched by an identical increase in private sector employment over the term. We can argue about percieved definitions of “efficiency” until the cows come home but it remains a fact that at no stage in our history has the private sector ever displayed the capacity to utilize all willing labour.
What those two guys said.Thanks for bringing up the apprentice training angle, which is a real tragedy for our yoof which the neolibs / conservatives pretend to care about.
Gotta disagree with Robert Merkel with on this one. Like joe2, I don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest that the privatised market is better than the SEC. I would perfer one government controlled seller of basic services. I’d also prefer not to be pestered by people wanting to sell me ‘great deals’ on my electrivity service. I’d also like to see apprentices trained up properly. I’d like to see money poured into infrastructure, which we ain’t getting. All those things.
As for ‘slow, easy and comfortable’. My memory of the SEC is that they fixed stuff quickly and efficiently. And if there were a few more people than actually needed, I don’t care that much. Also remember, that numbers on the disability pension have ballooned, because that’s often where older unemployed workers are directed to, in the knowledge that they don’t have a chance of geting a job. And what joe2 said about unemployment figures.
Gotta agree with Helen and fine.
From a South Australian perspective, both our electricity and water supplies in Adelaide were superior and cheaper before privatisation, and problems got fixed quicker.
Electricity supply is one of those things where, like telephones, soap and toilet paper, I don’t want a fucking choice. Especially one that is guaranteed to cost me more for an inferior service than when I didn’t have a choice.
“Electricity supply is one of those things where, like telephones, soap and toilet paper, I don’t want a fucking choice.”
Me, I am more than happy to let private enterprise do the toilet paper and soap thingy. It keeps those darlings well occupied on tiny little flowers, scents, textures and wild claims.
Just let me have my electricity, gas, water and sewage away from mad people where profit is the main game.
“Just let me have my electricity, gas, water and sewage away from mad people where profit is the main game”.
I have posted on this forum a year or two ago about the debacle involving the privatized water retailer in Gladstone.
Briefly, a severe drought had pushed our resevoir down to critical levels. This forced the big industries who use most of our water to undertake alternative measures (recycling, desalination, seawater cooling).
When the drought ended and the resevoir filled, these big water buyers – having spent many millions of dollars on implementing such technologies – were not inclined to return to their previous purchase volumes. The private water board took the decision to make residents pay the shortfall, demanding price increases of between 300% and 1200%. They actually released a media statement to the effect “people need to understand that water is a business and business must profit”.
The resulting shitstorm forced the Queensland government to step in and sort the matter out, finding that the water board had “abused it’s monopoly position”.
So a situation had arisen whereby there was now far more water available than ever before – supply was massively in excess of demand – but the price was set to go stratospheric all because a monopoly provider of something that a community cannot refuse to use was sold to private for profit interests.
Perhaps there are special circumstances here that would not apply to most other places in the country (the fact that heavy industry used far more water than the town itself) but the principle remains the same – privatize an important public monopoly and fail to strongly and appropriately regulate, then it is futile to expect them to not abuse their position.
Utilities are better off left in public hands.
Wombo@45 claimed:
I think you’ve misread me. My l’état, c’est nous referred to the D of the P, not communism, and I merely drew Chav’s attention to the point you made trying to match the claim with the pertinent point in the development cycle.
I see your point about each person being a “state”, but this is a silly formulation in this context, since the state, for Marxists, is always an arbiter of class conflict.
How about ‘we are all bodies of armed men’ translated into French to sound posh. It sounds like something Tarantino would love to direct. “What do they call rendition in Paris?”. “C’est l’état”.
Nous sommes tous les organismes des hommes armés?
Of course, if we have achieved socialism we don’t need arms as there is nothing to fight over.
A more sympatheric and gender-inclusive translation of the concept might be:
Nous sommes tous la peuple en armes
allons enfants de la Patrie!
“nothing to fight over”…..
heh!
Returning to Robert Merkel,
I am curious to know for what purpose you would advocate an increase in taxation on the wealthy – you appear to not to favour an increase in social spending so it seems somewhat pointless. Taxing the rich will not by itself increase the income of the less well off.
I am also curious to know how you came to be under the impression that unemployment fell following the wave of privatization of publicly owned entities and the rise of neo-liberalism.
Further, I see no consistent pattern of increased success brought about by this – mostly just increased unemployment.