Rob Urie: Will It Be Socialism or Barbarism for the Twenty-First Century?

Yves Smith reposts Will It Be Socialism or Barbarism for the Twenty-First Century? by Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

Illuminating the depravity of late-stage capitalism is a fools errand without alternatives. The US— Left, Right, and Center, is beholden to the logic of capitalism. The ‘Left’ response to the failure of Covid-19 mitigation policies has been libertarian, not ‘Left.’ Lest this come as a surprise, libertarianism is the ethos of capital that claims that corporate executives and oligarchs should be ‘free’ to exploit labor, pollute with impunity, and cheat on their income taxes. It is the ethos of unaccountable power. It is approximately as compatible with Left politics as European fascism of the twentieth century was. The point: the US desperately needs Socialist and Communist political alternatives. Deference to libertarianism will leave fascism as the only ‘logical’ alternative.

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Capitalism desperately tries to maintain the myth that there is no alternative to itslef. This is why every supporter of Capitalism repeats the mantra that "Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried."

With the maintenance of Capitalism, the political spectrum becomes Libertaianism to Fascism. Both ends fails because they rely on Capitalism. The difference is the amount of state involvement.

This also explains why some supporters of Capitalism conflate Fascism and Socialism as they believe that government control is identical to Socialism without considering the underlying economic relations. Those economic relations are about who controls the means of production: Capitalists or workers. One could characterise Anarchism as Libertarian Communism (no state, only a confederation of worker and resident collectives).

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Seth Godin: The Paradox of Insular Language

Seth Godin discusses The paradox of insular language

Language only works when other people know what you’re saying, but once they know, it’s likely that the others can figure it out.

So why bother?

It turns out that vernacular elevates those that are using it as much as it isolates the ones who don’t understand it.

When we speak as insiders, we become insiders.

A practical way to create tribal affiliation is to amplify insular language.

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We Communists are especially guilty of this. We have a specialist technical language based on what Marx wrote. But we need to communicate with other workers in order to build the workers' movement.

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Seth Godin: The Big-O conundrum

Seth Godin discusses The Big-O conundrum

There are Big-O problems in marketing, in sales, in customer service, in finance, in production and in compliance. There’s nothing wrong with winging it–until there is.

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The main difference between Anarchists and Leninists is the amount of centralism that is needed for a Communist society to operate. The problem is that a Communist society needs an advanced industrial base to suceed. That base was built by Capitalism.

A Capitalist system operates as an aristocracy of managers for large organisations, and as a monarchy for smaller organisations. As organisations grow, they have to migrate from a monarchy into an aristocracy. The primary driver for this transition is the span of control that a person is capable of managing effectively. One could view an aristocracy as a confederation of local lords—in other words, feudalism.

The Capitalist state oversees the Capitalist organisations through a bureaucracy. The state has the necessary force to ensure compliance. In reality, the state is a battleground among Capitalists to advance their own interests. The state is not a neutral actor in a Capitalist society.

Anarchists believe that a loose confederation of communities can function for an advanced industrial civilisation. Maybe the samller organisations could transition to direct worker democracy without much problems as the workers are all known to each other, and have been exposed to the overall operation of the business. This model will fail for larger organisations as specialist functions need to be coordinated.

The Leninist model of Democratic Centralism is the best model for a post-Capitalist society in managing the large organisations. Instead of decomposing the large organisations into a confederation of direct worker democracies, the structure and efficiencies of the large organisations need to be preserved but brought under worker control through an executive committee that answers to the workers on a regular basis.

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Jerry Harris: Marxism and Ukraine’s struggle for independence and self-determination

Jerry Harris discusses Marxism and Ukraine’s struggle for independence and self-determination

Determining the principal contradiction has important practical results that reveal splits in the left. If the principal contradiction is between Ukraine and Russia, then Ukraine has a right to self-defense and the right to obtain arms. Just as Vietnam had the right to obtain Chinese and Soviet arms to defend itself against the US invasion. In fact, an international boycott of arms to Ukraine would only result in their defeat and a successful annexation by Russian forces. On the issue of ending the war, Ukraine must be the primary negotiator over its own fate, and the leading voice in the determination of its own future.…

Understanding US/Russian tensions as a secondary contradiction does not mean ignoring the reality of great power competition. It still means that the US needs to be part of the negotiations, that the US did meddle in the Maidan uprising, and that NATO was aggressive in its push eastward. But it does not obscure the Russian invasion as the principal problem, nor relegate Ukraine to a secondary role and its full independence to a secondary question, to be determined by an agreement between great powers. Lastly, when left realists accept Russian security concerns as the motivation for the invasion, it weakens our ability to convince people to take an anti-war stance when the US declares the exact same security reason for its next invasion. Reaffirming the long-standing principle of independence and self-determination must be maintained as the clear dividing line between socialist and imperialist worldviews.

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What Harris misses in his analysis is whether the people of the Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Lviv, and Zaporizhia, have the same rights as Ukrainians in general for self-determination. Harris fails to mention that a pretext for the invasion by the Russian Federation was given by President Putin at the Security Council meeting on 22 February 2022:

Those people declared that they were establishing two independent republics, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic. This was the point when the confrontation started between the Kiev officials and the people living on that territory.

In this context, I would like to point out that Russia initially did everything it could to make sure these disagreements could be resolved by peaceful means. However, the Kiev officials have conducted two punitive operations on those territories and, apparently, we are witnessing a third escalation.

All these years – I want to stress this – all these years, the people living on those territories have been literally tortured by constant shelling and blockades. As you know, the people living on those territories, close to the front line, so to speak, were in fact forced to seek shelter in their basements – where they now live with their children.

A peace plan was drafted during the negotiating process called the Minsk Package of Measures because, as you recall, we met in the city of Minsk. But subsequent developments show that the Kiev authorities are not planning to implement it, and they have publicly said so many times at the top state level and at the level of Foreign Minister and Security Council Secretary. Overall, everyone understands that they are not planning to do anything with regard to this Minsk Package of Measures.

Nevertheless, Russia has exerted efforts and still continues to make efforts to resolve all the complicated aspects and tragic developments by peaceful means, but we have what we have.

Our goal, the goal of today’s meeting is to listen to our colleagues and to outline future steps in this direction, considering the appeals by the leaders of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic on recognising their sovereignty, as well as a resolution by the State Duma of the Russian Federation on the same subject. The latter document urges the President to recognise the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic.

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Various other authors have dismissed the legitimancy of those oblasts' claims to sovereignty as merely Russian machinations.

The sovereignity of Ukraine is counterpoised against that of Donetsk and Lugansk.

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Daniel Little: A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968

Daniel Little discusses A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968

This event illustrates the workings of oppression involving both caste and class. The landless workers were predominantly dalit — the lowest caste. And they were the poorest of the poor, with very little power to assert a fair share of the harvest. Land owners were in a position to resist increases in wages (the primary demand of the workers in this dispute), both through their structural advantage within the property system (land ownership) and their coercive power (through their ability to call upon armed thugs to carry out their violence against the dalit protests). A solution for the property disadvantage for the dalit workers is land reform, and during the years following the Keezhvenmani massacre there was a reasonably strong organization dedicated to land reform and dalit land ownership, the Land for Tillers Freedom (LAFTI). However, land reform based on NGO activism is likely to remain small-scale, in comparison to state-wide land reform programs.

Kanagasabai quotes V Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran in the introduction to Mythily Sivaraman's Haunted by Fire (2013):

That episode and visit brought home to Mythily the starkness of life in this grain rich part of Tamil Nadu… She realised that the price for dignity, for daring to declare oneself a communist was very high in these parts – many had paid with their lives… Unsurprisingly, in her subsequent reflections, she refused to concede that the monstrous incident at Kilvenmani was only a wage dispute gone wrong, and argued passionately for it to be recognised for what it was: class struggle in the countryside. (Geetha & Karunakaran, 2013)

Class struggle in the countryside, indeed — landlords exercising horrendous violence against landless workers.

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Without the control of the means of production (in this case, land), workers are unable to defend themselves against the violence of others. The state only defends the interests of the ruling class (in this case, landlords). Little cites examples of the courts and police siding with the landlords against the farm workers.

Little acknowleges that this is an example of class war with the resolution lying in the control of the means of production by the workers.

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Alex Bainbridge's interview of Sam Woripa Watson: ‘Sovereignty is about controlling what happens on your land’

Alex Bainbridge interviews Sam Woripa Watson: ‘Sovereignty is about controlling what happens on your land’

Watson is part of a large cohort of progressive, militant activists who oppose the Voice in favour of measures to support the genuine sovereignty of First Nations peoples.

“We don’t support a powerless body of bureaucrats (whether they’re Black or not) giving their opinion to parliament and then parliament doesn’t have to do anything,” Watson said.

By contrast “we support Aboriginal rights and we support sovereignty and self determination, but that doesn’t mean voting ‘yes’ for this Voice.

“What it actually means is land rights and community-controlled organisations and reparations.”

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Watson believes that a successful YES vote for the Voice referendum will hobble the progress to recognisation of Aboriginal sovereignty. Watson defines that as:

Sovereignty is the ability to control what happens to your people on your land.

That sovereignty had never been ceded. We settlers need to recognise this fact in order to really move towards reconciliation.

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Luke Pearson: The Voice to Parliament: Beyond yes or no…

Luke Pearson discusses The Voice to Parliament: Beyond yes or no…

Sadly, I know that there is like a common enemy to put aside our differences and band back together, and whether or not the referendum is successful you can be sure we will have many days ahead where there will be much less room for debate or division about who that enemy is or what we need to do in response to their attacks. There will be many more days when we start a conversation but end up becoming the object of debate, sacrificed on the altar of white people asking yet again ‘How do we solve the Aboriginal problem?’ not realising that it is not us who are the problem but them.

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Pearson correctly argues that the Voice Referendum is about white people, not Aborigines. His worry is that the debate about the discussions about the 2023 referendum will harm the cause of Aborigines by making Aborigines an object of white concern.

The Autralian Constitution was originally written to exclude Aborigines. The results of the 1967 referendum partially corrected that. Aborigines are still struggling to assert themselves into a foreign legal document, instead of the legal document struggling to adapt to an Aboriginal way of thinking.

Without a clear direction from the diverse Aboriginal communities about this referendum, I would find it hard to choose the proper vote to cast. The Aboriginal communities has far more serious issues to deal with rather than allowing white people to feel better about themselves with a cosmetic change to the Australian constitution.

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