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Apparently, Google is finding it difficult to embed the comment form on the post itself. I've switched back to the old style of comments on a new page. Comments should be working now.

Reform, subversion and revolution, part 1

The $64 question: Reform, subversion or revolution? The answer: yes.

Even the most hard-core no-compromises revolutionary must admit that even the most dramatic revolution in state power will still inherit both the physical means of production as well as the psychological, social/sociological and political superstructure of a capitalist state. Capitalism has been shaping people's values and ethics for hundreds of years, and ruling class/working class politics have been doing so for thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of years. Not even the most brutal ideological repression can erase this millennial influence in a generation.

For this reason, every communist thinker and statesman, from Lenin to Mao, understands that a transition from capitalism to communism (i.e. the liberation of all humanity from all forms of exploitation and oppression) requires a transitional period of socialism. And socialism is differentiated from communism precisely in that socialism includes some capitalist features, including class distinctions (you can't have a dictatorship of the proletariat without having a proletariat distinct from the bourgeois), private property and private enterprise, money, and differences in standards of living. Even Marx said that, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," is the goal of communism, not the strategy of achieving it.

Measured against the ideal of real communism, any practically possible revolution must be incomplete, and therefore in an important sense will be a reform.

In addition, both reformism (and economism) and subversion can be used to to good effect as strategies and tactics for creating a revolution. I'll talk about this aspect in a future post.

Congratulations

I want to congratulate Barack Obama on his victory, and congratulate the American people on electing a black man as president of the United States, and dealing the forces of evil Republican party a substantial setback. These are both Good Things.

Tomorrow we can get down to the messy business of criticizing our new president and Democratic party rule, but for today, I'm just happy.

The "tragedy" of the commons

The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons:

The author of “The Tragedy of the Commons” was Garrett Hardin, a University of California professor who until then was best known as the author of a biology textbook that argued for “control of breeding” of “genetically defective” people (Hardin 1966: 707). In his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none. ...

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realise that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.

Author Ian Angus responds to criticism of the essay.

Socialism and free software

Why Socialists must learn from the Free Software movement:

So how can socialism use a similar method? How about working within Capitalism? Here’s a rough idea...

Say it ain't so

Say It Ain’t So, Capitalism?:

“This is nothing like Socialism at all”, Hudson proclaimed against the charges thrown at the bailout. “When you give away money to the wealthiest class, this is old fashion Kleptocracy and it’s a step back toward Feudalism. It is not a step toward Socialism at all.”

[h/t to db0]

Socialism is not enough

Socialism, the idea that the government should control property, especially absentee ownership, is a critical step on the road to communism, a step that cannot be omitted. On the one hand, just about any form of socialism, even regulatory capitalism, would represent a drastic improvement over the present dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism and imperialism that reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration. On the other hand, to a communist, any old form of socialism is not good enough.

There are two ways socialism can go wrong. The first, as we have seen in the US, is the too-weak socialism of regulatory capitalism. While Roosevelt and Johnson did improve the general welfare of a lot of the people, and broadened incredibly access to surplus value relative to the narrow concentration of wealth in laissez faire capitalism, this too-weak socialism leaves capitalists too much power to propagandize and brainwash the masses of people and destroy what little protection they have won by political means, and even convince them to actively support not just laissez faire capitalism but even blatant kleptocracy. As Göring noted,

... it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

The other insufficient kind of socialism is one that does not intentionally perpetuate class struggle. The most important lesson we have learned from both the Soviet Union and China is that socialism, while an important advance over communism, sets up a new ruling class. Socialism does not by itself end class struggle, it changes the class struggle.

It is possible to do worse than capitalism, and it is possible to do worse than capitalism while still maintaining the form and appearance of socialism. It is possible to reestablish feudalism under a nominally socialist society. Feudalism was, after all, in history the control of property by the government: it was explicitly the government of people who owned land, the critical property of that time.

I think this insistence on the right kind of socialism, as well as considerable disagreement on precisely what kind of socialism is truly the right kind, causes some friction between communists and socialists. "If socialism is better than capitalism," argue the socialists, "so shouldn't we get whatever socialism we can?" But socialism isn't necessarily better; some forms of socialism — not just governments such as National "Socialism" that just call themselves socialist — are worse than capitalism.

Even Marx has praise for capitalism. The establishment of "bourgeois right" under capitalism was an important innovation: it gave the bourgeois the power to struggle against feudal aristocracy by economic, political and ideological means rather than exclusively by violent, military means. And the need to first establish economic power independently of the political government (i.e. the proximate commanders of the army and the police) persisted even after the bourgeois won their class struggle, with at least some real separation between government coercion and economic activity. It's interesting to note that no capitalist country has ever created an explicit, direct plutocracy; even under the dictatorship of the bourgeois, the bourgeois still must act indirectly through propaganda and bribes campaign contributions to acquire popular legitimate control over the coercive apparatus of the state. Many capitalist countries — and all of the "advanced" capitalist countries of the West — have resisted for an amazingly long time even too-blatant indirect plutocracy.

This indirection, this institutionalization of political struggle and an external check on government power is one of the best innovations of capitalism and the bourgeois, and must, I think, be preserved and equally institutionalized in a socialist state even as the role of the private bourgeois as the primary opponent is eliminated.

Doomsday

Not my term, but that of Sequoia Capital, a premier venture capitalist company with perspicacious and prescient management, free of illusions.

Inside Details of Sequoia Capital’s Doomsday Meeting With its Companies

They are predicting a fifteen year recession... In other words a depression, one that will rival the Great Depression and the economic turmoil of the 19^th century.

One of the key components of this depression? Significant excess productive capacity. We are too wealthy, therefore the capitalist class must impoverish us all until they can make it profitable for them to put ordinary people to work.

There are no physical factors that are causing us to be impoverished. We haven't lost people. We haven't lost productive capabilities; indeed according to the capitalists themselves we have "too much" productive capability, thus driving prices down below profitability.

This depression is a failure only of imagination and will; there is no physical reason we cannot simply think our way out of it.

Credit

Part I: The definition of the village
Part II: Value and cost
Part III: The plow
Part IV: Material bottlenecks
Part V: Capital
Part VI: Credit


Credit is one of the most mysterious and yet fundamentally essential features of capitalism. It is fair to say that without credit you don't have capitalism, and that if you do have capitalism you must have credit. Credit is possible only when a society constructs the notion of ownership of money, and credit is the only way that an owner of money can derive value from his ownership.

Credit is not, in a global sense, "living beyond one's means" or "borrowing from the future." In a global sense, these ideas are not physically possible: one cannot consume in the present commodities that will be created in the future.

To understand how credit works in a capitalist system, we can use to good effect the invention of the plow in our toy model of Village Economics.

To recap: Under normal conditions, the socially necessary time to produce "life support", represented for simplicity as pounds of food, is one hour of labor for one pound of food. When we invent the plow, we can reduce the socially necessary time to produce a pound of food to 0.9 hours; the plow reduces the cost of food, therefore the plow has objective* measurable value (use-value). A plow also has its own cost: The socially necessary time to produce a plow is 90 hours, plus a one-time "start-up" cost of 10,000 hours.

*To be precise, an objective relationship to the subjective value of food.

The start-up cost forms the underlying justification for credit. The family learning how to make plows must be fed for a few years before they actually produce anything of value, so other families must produce that food and give it to our plow-makers. Furthermore, if only one family learns to make plows it will be about 900 days (about three years) before everyone has their first plow, so the introduction of the plow will initially create more inequality.

Credit is not physically necessary to fund the start-up costs and smooth out the inequalities of supplying the whole village with plows. Since there's slack in food productivity, the village can raise its average production by a little over 1%. Those who initially receive the first plows can distribute a portion of the extra productivity either to those families still awaiting plows, or can fund additional families to make plows to distribute the production. Since everyone benefits, there is no fundamental reason why the start-up costs need to be paid back. Everyone contributes to the start-up costs, and everyone is repaid by by getting actual plows.

When you add credit to the equation, though, and the ownership of credit, the situation changes dramatically. Credit is a symbolic representation of surplus value: It represents the actuality of more commodities than are required for equilibrium, or the ability to produce those surplus commodities.

In our village, we can assume that there's a normal distribution of productivity: Some families can produce more food per hour than others. So some families will work 11 hours per day (the maximum sustainable) to produce 9 pounds of food per day (the minimum sustainable); others might work 9 hours per day to produce 11 pounds of food. Even though there's a difference in productivity, and there are local surpluses, credit is still irrelevant. Those with surpluses have nothing they want from those without surpluses, and those without surpluses have nothing to give in exchange for others' surpluses.

But the invention of the plow changes the dynamic. Not everyone can raise their production even 1%: Those at the absolute limit of productivity don't have even 1% slack. If we make the uniform percentage 2%, there will be those who can raise their productivity only 1%. There is no single percentage that can be uniformly applied to all families, even all families that have some surplus productive ability. So we have to implement a progressive "tax" to finance the plow.

"But wait!" the half-dozen most productive families say, "We'll pay all the start-up costs, if you'll promise pay us back later for those costs. And not only can you pay us back later, we'll let you pay us only a portion of the extra production you'll get from the plow. It's a win-win situation all around: you don't have to work extra for three years, it's easy for us to increase our production 10% (and very hard for those at the lower end to increase production 1%). You'll be getting plows for free."

So the most productive finance the start-up costs, and sell plows for more than their socially necessary labor time to make up for the start-up costs. If these nascent capitalists are honest, fair people, concerned with good of their fellow villagers, they will ask only that the actual start-up costs be paid back; once they're paid back, acquisition of plows can be put on a direct equivalent basis (i.e. the farmer pays the plow maker as much food as he can produce (using a plow) in the same amount of time the plow maker takes to make a plow.)

But there's a hidden danger in this supposedly win-win deal: It requires promises, and for a statement to be a promise it must be coercively enforced. It makes no sense to just hand someone a plow if you can't make them give you even the actual cost of the plow, much less make them pay the start-up costs. It's not that everyone would refuse to pay, most people are honest, but it's entirely plausible that one person might refuse to pay... and it took real resources to make that plow, resources that everyone else then has to pay for, violating our intuitive moral sense of fairness.

Once you have this coercive structure in place, there are now a range of rational prices for a plow: from ~10 pounds of food, the minimum of the socially necessary time (including start-up costs amortized over the plow-maker's productive lifetime) to ~810 pounds of food, the the total surplus value a plow will produce. It's rational to demand any price within that range; it's rational to pay it; any price in that range is mutually beneficial.

It's not only possible but highly desirable for about a half dozen of these nascent capitalist families to do no additional work whatsoever and do so in perpetuity. By raising the productivity of the rest of the village by 10%, they can take 9% (or 9.5% or 9.9999%) of that surplus forever and still leave everyone else something more than they had before.

But this arrangement is possible only with a coercive apparatus. Once the start-up costs have been paid for (much less paid back), there's simply no incentive to continue supporting these non-working families.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

Jasmine brings to my attention The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein (from George Orwell's 1984).

But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. ... [T]he principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. ...

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

Orwell was a prescient and perspicacious writer. However, he made a fundamental, perhaps fatal mistake, which was to assert that the kind of 1984 totalitarianism was possible only by paying some lip service to socialism, by abandoning the notion of private property, concentrating property collectively in a ruling class.

It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called 'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

What Orwell failed to realize was that a capitalist class could do the very same thing, that bullshit "individualism" could serve just as well for totalitarianism as bullshit "collectivism".

The key to totalitarianism is not collectivism, but lies, bullshit and willful ignorance.

The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. ...

But by far the more important reason [to employ doublethink] for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.

This tendency to believe falsity (or willfully ignore the truth) can present itself even in "anarchic" capitalism as easily as in intentional collectivism. Perpetual economic warfare can serve just as well, or perhaps better than actual physical warfare.