Move Over Jacko, Idea of Communism is HOTTEST TICKET in Town This Weekend

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Move over Jacko, Idea of Communism is hottest ticket in town this weekend

* Duncan Campbell
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 March 2009 18.03 GMT

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

-Karl Marx's 1859 Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

The hottest ticket in London this weekend is not for a pop singer or a football match but for a conference on communism which brings together some of the world's leading Marxist academics. The international financial crisis has led to a resurgence of interest in a philosophy that many claimed had been buried with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Such has been the interest in the conference, entitled On the Idea of Communism, being staged at London university's Birkbeck college from tomorrow, that the venue has been changed three times to accommodate the extra demand and is sold out. Participants are flying in from the US, Latin America, Africa and Australia to hear from some of the world's big hitters on the subject.

One of the organisers, the Slovenian philosopher and writer, Slavoj Zizek, has emphasised that the purpose of the gathering is not to "deal with practico-political questions of how to analyse the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organise a new political movement". He added: "more radical questioning is needed today – this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, communism is the only political idea worthy of a philosopher."

Although the conference seems particularly timely, it was planned last summer, well before the scale of the current economic collapse had become apparent.

<snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/12/philosophy/print

[blindpig]

1. 150 years of red-baiting can't keep a good idea down.

Timely ain't the word for it.

K&R

[originalpckelly]

6. Actually, they tried this shit before.

It didn't work. FAIL.

[blindpig]

7. Under the most disadvantageous conditions,

beset by a host of relentless enemies, instituted in the most backward of nation states. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did.

Here in the triumphant West you never hear of the many great accomplishments, the huge strides in the human condition. Those are ignored in favor every failure, often grossly exaggerated, and heaps of flat out propaganda, often taken wholesale from the Nazis.

And given the hideous disproportion of wealth which we endure, the ransacking of our planets resources for momentary gain, the misery of the planet's great majority, it is an idea which must be revisited again and again until it endures.

[DrCory]

24. Ooooh...I Can't Wait...

To be ruled by folks who believe such things as this:

"Jokes against the party constitute agitation against the party" - M.F. Shkiriatov, CC plenum 7-12 January 1933.

[rug]

10. Capitalism took more than 300 years to replace feudalism.

History grade. FAIL.

[originalpckelly]

39. Capitalism didn't replace feudalism, it's just feudalism 3.0.

Instead of sending military units to a king, the modern tenants-in-chief send political campaign donations and soft money to a President/Governor/Senator/Representative.

[rug]

57. Where to begin?

On second thought, maybe I'll just cut and paste this to one of the teachers' threads.

[TBF]

17. Sure it can. I've been doing some reading about Cuba. It's their 50th anniversary -

despite the best attempts of our CIA.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

23. Yeah, and no one ever tries to escape from there......

....oh, wait.

[blindpig]

25. Not that simple

There will be malcontents, the weight of US propaganda will take it's toll. Cuba has been more than willing to let those people leave and there has long been legal mechanism for doing this. The problem being that only a handful are allowed to emigrate due to US obstructionism relative to the quota. It's a propaganda coup every time, and Cuba has no control over it at all.

[originalpckelly]

40. Why would someone want to leave Cuba so bad they'd risk their lives to do it?

How are those people malcontents? WTF is wrong with you?

[blindpig]

51. Contrast and compare

the millions who flee our semi-colonies to the south through the Sonoran and Chihuahua deserts to the handful who take to boats from Cuba. The mere handfuls who make for the states to get access to stupid bling or to join family members hardly negate them millions who strive to make a better society.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

52. Wow....

"Malcontents"......looking down on those who want to join family members here......how very progressive of you.

[Marr]

56. Why do people compare Cuba to the United States?

It should be compared to a nation similar in size and resources-- ideally one that's uses the US system, or more precisely-- is a piece of it. No one ever wants to compare a country like Haiti to Cuba, for some reason. Is the average Haitian better off than the average Cuban?

By the same note, the USSR really shouldn't be compared with the US, if we're talking about communism as a system for developing infrastructure and so on. The US already had all that in place when Russia was an undeveloped backwater. It was just a exploitable labor/resource pool for Europe when it began it's experiment in communism, and in a matter of decades was one of two world superpowers. Not bad, in that light.

I'm not a proponent of communism myself, as I think it doesn't mesh with human nature very well. However, we should at least be able to look it objectively.

[originalpckelly]

61. Planning can provide many short term gains, but in the long run the lack of individuality...

due to collectivism inhibits the profit motives behind innovation.

[lxlxlxl]

2. DU doesnt really care does it?

Seems like the rest of the world is capable of thinking about something other than celebrities, political gaffes, and our own brand of popular political discourse that has nothing to do with ideas or philosophies but a series of tit for tats that work well on tv. its tv nation over here...nothing else.

america is incapable of talking about slavoj, hardt, delanda, or deleuze...i wouldnt even bother.

[dysfunctional press]

9. "i wouldnt even bother."

then don't.

:eyes:

[tigereye]

3. Zizek is so cool!

[malaise]

4. Wish I was there

I'm sure Ellen Meiksens-Wood will be speaking.

[originalpckelly]

5. Red bull(shit) gives you hammers and sickles!

1. Collective ownership is not a normal human behavior between strangers, it is between family members with an emotional investment in one another, but even in those situations relatives can fuck one over for their greed.
2. Even in a situation of collective ownership, there is haha, get this, the principle of private property. I'm laughing my ass of at this one. :rofl:

Was theft illegal in the Soviet Onion? It probably was, after all, comrade, you're taking more than your allotted share of the pie.

Doesn't theft imply violation of private property rights?

3. In practice collective ownership is ownership by the oligarchy that controls a country, not the people. In reality, nebulous ownership of everything by everyone doesn't actually work. There has to be someone who decides where things go. That's called planning. The people who make plans control everything. So planning would be wrong if it were efficient...

4. That brings me to this point, planning saps the productive power of an economy, by making the people who actually do work, work to support the people who plan, instead of actually being productive. You want to know what's really fucking hilarious? The very capitalists who communists claim to fight against, are doing the same thing.

5. Corporatism is communism, just communism light. Instead of a government controlled monopoly, there is non-market planning by corporations, and a few of them at that, which makes them oligopolies. The owners of the corporations control government by controlling the machine of publicity: money. Workers don't receive compensation based upon their actual productivity, but a reactionary planned compensation, which doesn't allow for bursts in productivity to be rewarded. People must spend more of their lives at work just to receive the pay for work they may be able to do in one hour. This is collectivism, because people work and work and only if the whole company does well, will they receive some type of bonus. One can be totally productive, but working for a company of total lazy asses, and unfortunately, just like in an admittedly collective system, the benefits of that work are evenly distributed, or at least not distributed based directly upon productivity.

What we need is a system that directly compensates workers for their work, rather than letting the money go to corporations, then to employees.
We need to free people from the constraints of the modern America, which is a gigantic company town, a system that's inescapable due to debt obligations.

MY LIFE IS NOT SOMEONE ELSE'S PROPERTY, IT IS MINE! It doesn't matter if it's someone else's through corporate debt bondage or collective ownership, it's all fucking wrong.

What we need is a free market workers revolution, to create private ownership of the means of production by workers. If you use a sewing machine to do your work, it should be yours, not the property of an investor or all of society (or in reality, as I said before, the property of the planners.)

Wealth should redistribute evenly if there is not a class of people stealing from workers via a coercive system like a corporation, a rental unit, a mortgage, or through property taxes.

No one talks about the investors/planners (aka mangers) tax on the rest of us, now do they? It's time we had a permanent tax cut from the investors/planners.

[blindpig]

8. Weird, convoluted quasi-libertarian rambling

1)Collective ownership of the means of production, be they a hunting territory or communal garden was the arrangement for the vast proportion of human existence.

2)You're pretty slow if you can't differentiate between the means of production and personal property. Human frailty will probably always be with us is but that's no reason to institutionalize it.

3)How is that so? How is it that you assume oligarchy? Is not planning work? Assuming that planning leads to the most rational deployment of resources for the best meeting of human needs I'd say that a planners work can be valuable, indeed.

4)What Chamber of Commerce bullshit. To be sure, lack of planning has lead to a tiny minority getting richer than god and a slightly greater number, the enablers, to live very comfortably. And in the meantime the masses are reduced to the most miserable conditions, the planet is raped and trashed, the climate is corrupted. A very bad deal for us all.

5)Terribly confused. Best I can make of it is that you want to live the life of fully developed communism but hate the sound of it.

[rug]

11. I would just put a period after weird.

[JoseGaspar]

13. Salud.

Excellent summary.

[originalpckelly]

37. 1. Did the people in historical communal settings know each other?

Doesn't that appear to suggest that one must have a relationship with other members of the collective? How is that possible in a modern city with even a hundred thousand people? The probability of conducting a transaction with a stranger would seem to be fairly high in those situations, wouldn't it? Do you tend to care about strangers in the same way you care about people you know? If you do not have the same emotional investment in a strange person, would you treat them the same way as if you knew them and had one. In other words, would you feel as bad if you screwed them over as you would if you screwed over someone you know?

Emotional investment sets up a self-regulating system that I posit dramatically increases the probability of altruistic action.
I also suggest that in situations where people do not have such emotional investment, the probability of non-altruistic (aka greedy) actions increases.

Is it really that unreasonable to say that?

2. No, they're one and the same, everything can be seen as furthering production. Clothing, often considered one of the basic pieces of private property, can serve a business purpose. If I'm an office worker, I might need to wear suits instead of jeans and T-shirt to work, right? To one person a computer might be seen as private property, but to someone who works with computers for a living, writing programs, it can be seen as a means of production. Your distinction between means of production and private property fails in these situations, doesn't it? The proposition is therefore invalid.

3. If I'm a garment worker, I need to use a sewing machine to do my job. Who decides who uses a sewing machine at what time? In communism it's the group, but when it becomes impossible to have a group vote on the use of every single item, the system must appoint executives/representatives to make the decision. The problem with communism is scalability. It doesn't scale up well to handle larger situations where the basis of interactions becomes greed, rather than altruism. Planning is work, but work that isn't productive. It is work that can be done by the producers themselves, in a free market.

4. It's simple math:
productive work - planning cost = net productivity

People who provide a good or service are productive workers, the people who organize the people who provide a good or service live off the productivity of the people who make/do things. Workers in both a corporate system and communist system work in either largely or fully planned economies, and this means they have to work to support not only themselves, but the people who organize their work. Investors and managers and bureaucrats all are doing the same thing: planning.

If a plan is not updated frequently, then too much or too little of a good or service will be provided. It was the case in the Soviet Union that this required lots of people to work and manage the economy. Today, the advent of advanced information technology, such as is used by Wal-Mart, allows planning to go on, but with a greatly reduced cost.

Unfortunately, what that means is that planners can drive an economy further off a cliff than before, because part of what's wrong with planning is human fallibility. Even with the best information, people can and do make mistakes. This is one of the reason's America's economy is in the shitter.

I have concluded from a history that the vast majority of people will make better decisions than a few people, two heads are indeed better than one.

By the way, your snark about the US Chamber of Commerce is funny, as I'm criticizing central planning, which occurs both in corporatism and communism.

5. I realize that Marx was right in some of his criticisms of corporate capitalism, as some capitalists are right in their criticism of systems descended from Marxism. The idea of science is to take information and form new theories if the old ones fail to hold true in experimentation. Marxism and corporatism are forms of economic theory that are akin to Newton's ideas about kinetic energy. They hold true for certain situations, but do not scale one way or the other very well. Just as Einstien's equation for kinetic energy is more accurate and holds better to the observed trend than does Newton's, so too do the things I'm trying to formulate hold better to evidence than do the idea of Marx.

I used to be a communist, but then I grew up and stopped believing in fairy tales.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

15. Reactionary rubbish

I do give you credit though as that is one of the most convoluted political-economic diatribes I've ever read.

Ultimately you are defending the status quo and parroting the disinformation of the ruling class' propaganda machinery.

[originalpckelly]

38. No, I'm not.

The USSR did not fail because the owners of America controlled it.

[newtothegame]

16. I don't quite understand? If you use a sewing machine to do your work, "it should be yours"?

So buy one. Are you implying that you inherit someone elses property if you work on it? If the mechanic walks in my garage and changes the oil, the car is theirs?

ed for sp

[originalpckelly]

41. Are you high?

People should own the things they use to do their work, not exploitative investors who manipulate their property to exact a tribute from the worker.

[Naturyl]

29. Neal Boortz, is that you?

[originalpckelly]

42. Rather than actually debate me, you'd rather just call me a name.

What a shallow mind you have.

[leftstreet]

12. "There is a sense that we have to start thinking again."

No shit!

The response has taken us by surprise," said Costas Douzinas, director of the Birkbeck institute for the humanities, which is hosting the three-day event. "It must be related to the wider political context. There is a sense that we have to start thinking again."

He said that the gathering was about the meaning of communism and speakers had indicated that they would be very critical of the Soviet model. Among the questions to be addressed is whether "communism is still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects".

Thanks for posting.
:thumbsup:

[DonCoquixote]

14. Absolutes

"from Plato onwards, communism is the only political idea worthy of a philosopher."

Anyone who thinks their ideas are the "ONLY" ones worth contemplating are dangerous.

Yes, Communism may have some useful ideas to contribute, as does Capitalism, but, just like in nature, when you remove an opposing force, then the whole mess goes out of balance. The problem in any one idea, as much as it is the authoritarian instinct in people that feels they do not have to make their idea appeal, but can instead commit atrocities for the "greater Good."

Of course, the irony is, both left and right argue they do what they do for the greater good, even if those of us in the center wind up suffering.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

22. Bingo

Good post.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

26. Centrism is code for conservatism

Debunking 'Centrism'
By David Sirota

This article appeared in the January 3, 2005 edition of The Nation.
December 16, 2004

Looking out over Washington, DC, from his plush office, Al From is once again foaming at the mouth. The CEO of the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council and his wealthy cronies are in their regular postelection attack mode. Despite wins by economic populists in red states like Colorado and Montana this year, the DLC is claiming like a broken record that progressive policies are hurting the Democratic Party.

From's group is funded by huge contributions from multinationals like Philip Morris, Texaco, Enron and Merck, which have all, at one point or another, slathered the DLC with cash. Those resources have been used to push a nakedly corporate agenda under the guise of "centrism" while allowing the DLC to parrot GOP criticism of populist Democrats as far-left extremists. Worse, the mainstream media follow suit, characterizing progressive positions on everything from trade to healthcare to taxes as ultra-liberal. As the AP recently claimed, "party liberals argue that the party must energize its base by moving to the left" while "the DLC and other centrist groups argue that the party must court moderates and find a way to compete in the Midwest and South."

Is this really true? Is a corporate agenda really "centrism"? Or is it only "centrist" among Washington's media elite, influence peddlers and out-of-touch political class?

<snip>

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050103/sirota

[DonCoquixote]

27. Centrism = Conservatism?

Do not confuse the way certain Blue Dog Democrats have been abusing the term "Centrism" as a substitute for centrism. Simply put, to be somewhere in the center means that you do not believe in 100 percent of what either side says, regardless. In other words, you do not want too much power to be in the hands of anyone WITHOUT some means of holding people to account. It does not matter if you have an elite made up of Xtians, Marxists, Muslims, Scientologists, or (insert group here), if they get power WITHOUT a means of being held accountable, they abuse it, and try to make others who do not belong to that group the outsider.

To be honest, I am somewhere to the left of Obama, right of Kucinich (Edwards was my fave.) However, I do think that when anyone starts saying "their way is the ONLY way" to think, they set themselves up for pitfalls. I also think that there will always be the extreme left or right in any nation, they key is, who defines the center, where most people are, does the center move left, or move right? I think Obama is trying to move the center of the country leftward, in other words, to make it so that Joe sixpack will lean towards the left.

[anaxarchos]

32. Don't you get tired of repeating...

...platitudes like those with a straight face?

If you would have said, "Zizek is kinda an asshole and a terrible 'philosopher'", I couldn't help but agree. He is a pretty shitty "communist", too.

But then, you got to ruin it with incredible horseshit like your third and fourth paragraphs... Not only could you not logically define, explain, or defend a single word you have said, but I would put down a sizable bet that you adopted that tripe, from "an external source or sources", without actually considering any of it.

You just turned Zizek into the King of Philosophy with that shit...

[TBF]

18. K&R n/t

[cali]

19. Communism will invariably place too much power in the hands of government

bureaucrats, just as capitalism places too much power in the hands of the corpororate class.

the answer is a mixed economy with some services and utilities owned and run by the gov't and strong regulations as well as strong support for small business.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

28. social democracy

[originalpckelly]

43. Social democracy is an argument against communism.

So far, it appears social democracy is the best system of economics/government found. There are problems with it though. The biggest of which is how the fuck do you get one in a nation with unequal wealth distribution? It's good at keeping the status quo, but not changing it.

Taxing the rich, then giving it back to the poor/middle class, is a back door check and balance on their taxing of labor. It costs an economy more than just eliminating the tax on labor by the investors/planners/managers in the first place.

But if that cannot be done, it is the best system.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

53. perhaps we can learn from others with social democratic governments?

at least make a start

[lxlxlxl]

34. I dont think you understand what Communism means in the context of the article

The ideas that the above-mentioned people are talking about is not absolute ownership by individual states. Serious people do not believe in state run USSR style central management as a cure all as they did in the past. Unlike the caricatures of "communists" we deal with there arent a bunch of stalinist holdouts holding meetings to discuss the inevitability of the working classes triumphantly seizing the means of production.

The conference is about what it means to resist against hyper-global capitalism, the failures of previous attempts, questions of violence/nonviolence, and the role of capitalism in environmental and bioethical matters.


Economic theory from the left has gone far beyond what you seem to think it is, and is closer to what you are talking about.

[originalpckelly]

44. It's interesting how little non-political semi-religious study of collectivist ideas there has been.

I think it is due to the fact that when one gets serious about doing the math and logic proof of a collective system, it becomes quite apparent that it is doomed to fail eventually, due to all the costs of accurate planning and the mistakes of planners.

[readmoreoften]

20. Oh Badiou...

:loveya:

[blindpig]

21. a little kick, and out the door.....n/t

[Odin2005]

30. Calling Karl Popper, there are some ideologues that need re-pwning.

And somebody tell this Zizek character that Plato was a proto-Fascist.

[Naturyl]

33. Popper, eh?

Criteria of falsifiability is a great contribution to epistemology and philosophy of science, but Popper's political views left a great deal to be desired. He hated Hegel without understanding him, for starters.

[blindpig]

36. He was a pompous, insufferable ass. n/t

[Odin2005]

46. He was a CORRECT pompous ass.

[blindpig]

48. He was a fuckbubble.

His politics were reactionary.

He had no understanding of historical determinism.

He was completely out to lunch concerning Darwin.

He made my Philosophy of Science course miserable.

[Odin2005]

49. He was center-left and historical determinism is complete, unscientific nonsense.

[Odin2005]

45. Hegel was a crank and a reactionary mouthpiece for the Prussian monarchy

Hegel is to Kant what Plato was to Socrates, reactionaries whose bastardized the philosophy of their "teachers", because of their reactionary politics. In the last years of his life Kant was really pissed off by right-wing nitwit proto-fascists twisting what he said.

[Naturyl]

59. Those are inaccurate and biased views of Hegel.

You might be interested in the "Hegel FAQ," found here:

http://www.hegel.net/en/faq.htm

[C......N......C]

31. There is no one solution

and that means a collaboration. And a collaboration won't be hosted by the powers that be. For instance, the AIG hearing fiasco allowed anger to be vented and it was hosted by a group that had as much to do with the problem as the AIG officials. Everybody in control can't plead ignorance.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

35. Kicking

[iamthebandfanman]

47. i disagree with the premise that the soviet union

was communist at the time of its collapse, beyond calling themselves the word.

[scarletwoman]

55. It was pretty obviously a totalitarian oligarchy. (nt)

[iamthebandfanman]

58. stalin made sure of that n/t

[Overseas]

50. They may be people like me who thought their Marxist pals were too extreme

in their forecasts years ago, but have then watched many of those predictions come to pass.

We've watched Trickle Up Economics destroy our country.

We've seen the widening gap in income between corporate leaders and the workers. With productivity increasing and real wages declining. When the leaders had told us that increased productivity would "lift all boats."

And here we are bailing out thieves who peddled inflated financial products to enrich themselves at our expense through legal loopholes the legislators we elected (but they had funded) wrote into (or removed from)our laws.

Not to mention the heaps of scandals in international affairs we have lived through and continue to witness.

So if I were in London I'd surely be there.

We've opened our minds and wallets to free wheeling anti-regulation capitalists for decades now, so I'd be intrigued to hear some other ideas about how to build a more equitable, sustainable future.

[scarletwoman]

54. kick -- sorry I saw this thread too late to recommend. Interesting discussion.

Can't really add anything, I never studied Marx... or Hegel... or Zisek... or Popper... or whomever.

I studied Art, Geology, Archaeology, Anthropology, American Indian Culture, Yoga, Hindu Philospohy, Tibetan Buddhism, Belly Dancing, Herbalism, took massive amounts of LSD in the 60s and worked in various Peoples Collectives in the 70s.

I'm a simple soul with simple ideas. That capitalism sucks seems quite self-evident to me.

sw

[blindpig]

60. The one thing all real leftist can, must agree on:

Capitalism sucks.

It's gotta go, no compromise, no reformism, no fuckin' 'third way'.

We can work the rest of it out later. Much will be self evident.

[scarletwoman]

62. My ideal would be to build up alternative economies and institutions

in the "shadows" so to speak, so that there are structures already in place as capitalism crumbles of its own rotten weight.

Another essential component is rebuilding our ability to make our own stuff, with worker ownership of the means of production. We can not free ourselves from corporatism unless we can create our own economic sovereignty. There is no reason why the U.S. can't be completely self-sustaining and self-sufficient in most, if not all, of the necessities of life. That is: food, shelter, transportation, and energy.

sw

[blindpig]

63. I think that's a viable approach.

Organizing on the community level would provide immediate benefits to the people. The Black Panthers and Hezbollah(let's ignore the 'military arm' for jut a sec) are good examples of how it's done.

Of course, that's the sort of thing which the man seems to fear most, witness the fate of the Panthers, or the 'people's gardens' of LA, or the back to the land movement for that matter. The example of disengagement from the machine is not to be allowed, we should anticipate that.

[Blue_Tires]

64. was there a follow up to this preview story?

[olegramps]

65. Unbridled Capitalism isn't the solution either.

We need socialism to accomplish common goals that benefit all the citizens. We know that the type of socialism that was imposed on the Soviet citizens and in China was a failure. Of course it was never the communism that Jesus or Carl preached. It was a brand of socialism that in reality was really not that much different than the early industrial era that Marx abhorred in which there was no hope for upward mobility.

Capitalism offers upward mobility as long as there are restraints to check its normal tendency to concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer families. Firstly there are government regulations that oppose monopolies and fair trade practices for example. But one of the most effect checks is organized labor that can collectively demand a fair share of the profits of their labor. The type of capitalism that the wealthy Republicans have striven for with their opposition to both regulation and unionism results in nothing more than the replacement of the aristocracy of born rights with an aristocracy of the wealthy. Isn't that what the situation is today? It is too bad that far too many people swallowed the managements propaganda that they would be well taken care of and that unions were just ripping them off. Well, they have taken damn good care of the workers, their jobs out sourced, pensions cut and health insurance cancelled.