@@paulcockshott8733do you sometimes speak to young computer scientists through video calls? Every week you should speak personally to some young boy who's at college now. Without putting it on UA-cam. I think this personal contact will inspire them
Many local government salaries in my former home of the United States are indeed at or even far below working wages. Many local governments in non-major cities (where most people live) pay below $2000 per year to elected officials. But these officials are not the actual ones running things. They are, like Lenin observed in his own country and others in "State and Revolution", not the ones carrying out government policy. Much of the executive branch at the local level is entirely divorced from the legislative branch, with the legislators simply working as hiring and firing staff for city managers and other bureucrats actually doing the governing. All this is to say: It is important that the elected officials being paid workingman's wages are also the ones doing the actual work. The ones actually governing should also be paid workingman's wages. An idea that was common in the US after WWI was to impose a general pay scale for all government employees. This actually exists in the US and is quite a bit more level than anything in the private setting, but it is still a major divide. A concrete proposal for any American comrades would maybe be to fight for combining the General Schedule pay scale with minimum wage legislation. A two birds one stone situation which could avoid arguing over fairness with middle class (but working class) people who make above the minimum wage. Great video Prof. Cockshott.
We must remember that Greek had two words for Poor, and when Aristotle uses the term poor, he means those that have to work for a living. A better definition employed is democracy as the rule of the hoi aporoi, those without resources.
Democracy is when those who make decisions on your behalf have the duty to ask for your consent first. Today's republics are actually modern oligarchies where the interest groups of the rich are arbitrated by the people, that is, you can choose from which table of the rich you will receive crumbs. The "fatigue" of democracy occurs when there is a big difference between the interests of the elected and the voters, thus people lose confidence in the way society functions. As a result, poor and desperate citizens will vote with whoever promises them a lifeline, i.e. populists or demagogues. The democratic aspect is a collateral effect in societies where the economy has a strong competitive aspect, that is, the interests of those who hold the economic power in society are divergent. Thus those whealty, and implicitly with political power in society, supervise each other so that none of them have undeserved advantages due to politics. For this reason, countries where mineral resources have an important weight in GDP are not democratic (Russia, Venezuela, etc.), because a small group of people can exploit these resources in their own interest. In poor countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, etc.) the main exploited resource may even be the state budget, as they have convergent interests in benefiting, in their own interest, from this resource. It is easy to see if it is an oligarchy because in a true democracy laws would not be passed that would not be in the interest of the many. The first modern oligarchy appeared in England at the end of the 17th century. After the bourgeois revolution led by Cromwell succeeded, the interest groups of the rich were unable to agree on how to divide their political power in order not to reach the dictatorship of one. The solution was to appoint a king to be the arbiter. In republics, the people are the arbiter, but let's not confuse the possibility of choosing which group will govern you with democracy, that is, with the possibility of citizens deciding which laws to pass and which not to. The solution is modern direct democracy in which every citizen can vote, whenever he wants, over the head of the parliamentarian who represents him. He can even dismiss him if the majority of his voters consider that he does not correctly represent their interests. It's like when you have to build a house and you choose the site manager and the architect, but they don't have the duty to consult with you. The house will certainly not look the way you want it, but the way they want it, and it is more certain that you will be left with the money given and without the house. It is strange that outside of the political sphere, nowhere, in any economic or sports activity, will you find someone elected to a leadership position and who has failure after failure and is fired only after 4 years. We, the voters, must be consulted about the decisions and if they have negative effects we can dismiss them at any time, let's not wait for the soroco to be fulfilled, because we pay, not them. In any company, the management team comes up with a plan approved by the shareholders. Any change in this plan must be re-approved by the shareholders and it is normal because the shareholders pay.
Very interesting propositions. However, according to structural Marxists, capitalist hegemony isn't (solely) upheld by government but continuously justified manner through media, culture, and the educational system. How can we prevent the pervasive bourgeois ideology from influencing the majority through the superstructure, since the ruling class has the resources to maintain THEIR common sense"?
@La_Plata-u2f Capitalist run societies are also a product of social engineering. Human nature is plastic and adaptable. Revisionism (which means adding capitalist concepts to Marxism) is the real reason for the illegal adjournment of the Soviet Union and why China is a capitalist country pretending to be a socialist one.
@La_Plata-u2f There has been many other socioeconomic systems through human history (one of them particularly, communist primitivism, lasting for at least 95,000 years before the Neolithic Revolution; others, like slave societies, lasting for 3,000 years in some places; and feudalism lasting for at least 1,000-1,300 years in Europe). All of them were as product of our "human nature" as capitalism currently is. How do you explain such different forms of organizing society if our "human nature" is supposedly fixed to one single form who funnily enough just appeared 200-500 years ago?
@La_Plata-u2f WTF is "cognitive revolution"? Humans have been aware of themselves at least since the Paleolithic (you can see this through the cave paintings and rock art in general). Neolithic revolution had to do with the transition from nomad hunter-gathering communist primitivism towards a sedentary agricultural class society, not with some king of esotheric "self awareness" or whatever.
The question of the remuneration of members of a Democratic Parliament is simple: the members for a year receive their current income for a year, then go back to their old job ( much as currently with those women who get paid maternity leave).
I think while it's good to build up support amongst smaller third parties and independents, ultimately while locked in our duopoly it's the Labour party that has to be changed. It's happened before and I think it can happen again. The authoritarian control of the right over the party may seem absolute at the moment, but the brutality of their tyranny to me suggests their control is actually quite weak. They know the membership doesn't support them, that's why they had to lie their way into power. I think if Starmer can be replaced by a soft left leader they may then re-democratise the party such that it's once again possible for a socialist to become the leader, and hopefully they then learn from the mistakes Corbyn made in not decisively dealing with the right of the party.
Perhaps a better system would be to randomly draw up a number of small groups of people from around the country each putting forward one of their number based on a discussion amongst themselves. This is repeated with the new selection until we get down to the required number.
My main concern with this is the issue of geopolitics. In the initial stages of the socialist transition, how do you ensure that the proletariat is aware of the challenges of international relations in a world governed by Anglo-Germanic hegemony? The vicissitudes of foreign policy often require taking measures that, in principle, may seem to go against the interests of the proletariat. But in the long run, of course, prove to be crucial for the formation of a powerful state that can promote the implementation of socialism abroad (through the plans and programs of its ruling class). Or, at least, not collapse back into liberal capitalism.
@paulcockshott8733 If nothing else is scheduled Mr. Cockshott, Could I request a video or some sort of comment on the ongoing (self-declared) ‘Anarcho-Capitalist’ experiment in Argentina and any problems you perceive in the economic or philosophical works of the ‘Libertarians’/‘individualist-anarchists’ such as Friedman, Rothbard and Rand etc
Great video - I've seen the contemporary reading list on your blog, and have read through a fair portion of it; I understand you drafted it a while ago, and was wondering if you have any further reading/author reccomendations since you produced it?
Supposing those in government were genuinely representative of the people, demographically speaking, how do we stop them from acting as mere spokespeople for the capitalist class? Selection by lot would solve the problem of campaign funding, but we would still have to deal with bribery and the influence of the capitalist media.
The answer to that is term limits. Only allow one year term in office. No time to build up the network of lobbyists funding that professional politicians have.
@@paulcockshott8733 Doesn't this have the drawback of restraining long term planning, strategic thinking..etc? Moreover, what of the question of competence? Should there be a bare minimum of requirements placed on public office prospective appointees?
@@Bredafromdejungule How many things can one be competent in? I cannot imagine more incompetent people than we had here in the UK under the last Government. A Democratic Government takes advice from experts in their various fields, e.g.nuclear power or economic planning. Why would a Democratic Government abandon long-term plans that the people had voted for and were seen to be working Further, such a government, coming to power after the previous one's one-year term of office had expired, could quickly abolish plans that were seen not be working. As with candidates for local government in the UK, candidates for the House of Democrats would be required to have their application form signed by ten citizens who attested their mental sanity and moral status. Note that democracy would eliminate the possibility of a Hitler.
As Paul affirms below democracy is the best banner under which to fight for socialism; moreover, in those states such as Poland where socialism is banned, Marxists can fight for socialism by advocating democracy, for the bourgeois mode of production can only support limited concessions to democratic practices. Recall that by determinism Marx embraces the concepts of setting limits to and determinatio est negatio.
There is a wretched pre-was novel (Ann Bridge, ''Peking Picnic'' 1932), wherein the heroine asserts that, "A rickshaw is the most delightfully civilised form of locomotion. Seated in a well-sprung bath-chair...his view is unimpeded...there is nothing to prevent his holding up a sunshade in comfort'' ( Pp16-17).Such of course assumes that one is lolling in the back and not toiling at the front. The image however captures the sad history of the International Workers' Movement, for its history emphatically demonstrates that when the erstwhile revolutionary, socialist, trade unionist, communist ascends from toiling at the front to lolling at the back their view of the world changes. Two egregious examples will suffice: Friedrich Ebert, one of the nine children of a poor tailor, who had been unable to go to University because of the family's poverty, and who married a servant girl, succeeded August Bebel as Head of the German Social Democratic Party. At the 1912 Basel Congress the Social Democratic parties of Europe affirmed that they would not go to war for the sake of capitalism. When War did break out Ebert lead the SPD almost unanimously to support the Imperialist War and to vote in the Reichstag for War Credits and to argue that the War was a defensive, patriotic one against the autocratic Tsar. In fact Germany waged the War to realise quite precise imperialist ambitions ( cf Fritz Fischer, ''Germany Aims in the First World War''2007). Later, Ebert unleashed the Freikorps, the precursor of the SS, in suppressing the revolutionary uprising of the German workers and gave the go-ahead for the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. There is a photo of him in his frock coat and top hat: no doubt his father would have been impressed. A second case is Deng Xiaoping. Purged as the Second Person taking the Capitalist Road during the Cultural Revolution, he wrote two letters to Mao denouncing his attempted assassination by Lin Piao and promising never to practise Revisionism again. Once Mao died Deng came to power and claimed Marx was out-of- date, there was no class struggle in China, banned strikes, abolished the Iron Rice Bowl ( i.e. workers rights to jobs, pensions), prohibited playing the International, and trashed hundreds of thousands of copies of the Marxist classics. He invited Milton Friedman to China and announced that 'some must get rich first'! Now was the Deng family among the first or the last? The Deng family are billionaires. His granddaughter and her man hurl round Beijing in a red convertible RollsRoyce. Those close to Deng also made it big.Consider the views of the two Deng originally intended to lead the CCP and Chinese State. Here is Zhao Ziyang on the US :'' It is prosperous, developed..its leadership passes power peacefully...It does not expand its territory; it does not practise colonialism; all it does is carry on free trade....Its national interest is the same as the interest of human kind...to promote freedom, democracy and human rights....If we need a leader human development, that leader is better to be the USA,,,because it is not colonialist.'' Deng's other protege, Hu Yaobang, onetime put in charge of the CCP, claimed class struggle in Tibet had been Mao's terrible mistake, and the Dalai Lama should be worshipped instead (Mobo Gao, ''Constructing China''2018 Pp79-80). There is a revolting photo of Zhao dressed in foully expensive sartorial elegance, actually holding hands with President Reagan! We see then that when such ''Comrades'' ascend to the back of the Rickshaw, they abandon all democratic sympathy and fervently embrace its opposite. But what is the opposite of democracy? Bourgeois ideologues propagate dictatorship; but such is historically and conceptually absurd. Democracy is a constitution from 5th Century Athens. Dictatorship is a much later Roman institution and referred to the appointment of short-term officials to perform specific tasks e/g. dealing with 'sedition'! The opposite of democracy ,as Aristotle expounds in his ''Politics,'' is oligarchy, the rule of the few. But as he argues, it is quite misleading to define democracy as the rule of the many and oligarchy as the rule of the few; rather democracy is the rule of the hoi aporoi, those without resources, being the majority, while oligarchy is the rule of the rich, being few. The mark of a democracy is selection of the government by lot, no member to serve for longer than a year, all laws to be put to the assembly of the people to vote on. The mark of an oligarchy is election by ballot, which the rich will normally win thanks to their superior wealth and education. Currently, Musk has given $40 million to Trump, while Harris boasts of having raised $200 million.The original institution of democracy was well-known to the early bourgeois ideologists. Thus, Madison, the fourth US President and "father of the Constitution,'' writes, " a pure democracy..who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction....such democracies have ever been spectacles od turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with the...rights pf property......The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are first:,the delegation of the government in the latter to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater share off country over which the latter mat be extended''( Madison, "Federalist Papers'' NumberX). Thus the US became a Republic on the Roman model. So at the beginning of the 19th Century democracy was still a despised idea, but with the rise in class struggle the ruling oligarchies, following Aristotle's advice that the better to maintain themselves in power oligarchies should make political concessions to the poor, such as holding minor offices or serving on juries, 'democracy' was gradually introduced in the UK and US, as we were taught in school. Note the use of the passive voice permits the elision of the agent of such introduction. Revert to the active voice and we readily discern that the agent was the oligarchic state, and the same people were in power before as after. It is quite fallacious for those who identify as Marxists to imagine that they make some profound distinction by prefixing democracy with 'bourgeois,' as if permission by the state to exercise the franchise were equivalent to the exercise of power in some way. It is of interest to raise the question of why Lenin never permitted the democratic rights he advertised in ''The State and Revolution.'' Bourgeois scholars assert that this was because in 1923 the Bolsheviks would have lost any free elections, and this is surely right. Consequently, Lenin falsely asserted that Russia was a dictatorship of the proletariat But let us move forward to 1950: It is certain that Stalin, Mao Ho Chi Min, Kim Il Sung etc, would have won by landslides. The US was quite open that its genocidal invasion of Vietnam was to prevent just such a history by Ho. So why did elections not take place" In fact, Mao somewhere affirms in his ironic way that he did not believe in elections as they were too expensive; and moreover here Madison's argument of geographical extent had some validity. The Soviet Union, China etc were just too large and technically backward to allow of democracy, even if Stalin, Mao and co. had been aware of the concept. But this is no longer the case, and all genuine left -wing parties need to have writ large on their banners that they do not aim at power for themselves but to introduce a democracy, and such a genuine democracy would be analogous to what Marx envisaged as the dictatorship of the proletariat. What is certain is that a political party will never deliver socialism. In his 'Left-Wing Communism'' Lenin argued that societies are divided into classes, classes are lead by parties, and such parties by stable groups of leaders; but history demonstrates that within even communist parties in time such leaders constitute themselves as a new bourgeoisie, for they have risen to the back of the RICKSHAW! It surely demands little insight to perceive that political parties crystallise in the Uk in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism, spread to Europe in the 19th and to the rest of the world in the 20th with the further development of capitalism, and are an institution that corresponds to the imperatives of the bourgeois mode of production. The Leninist Party cannot deliver socialism; we need democracy and in the UK we might start by demanding a referendum on replacing the House of Lords with the House of Democrats.
Oligarchy is certainly the rule of the rich, but it is supported by various strata that can in no way be described as rich. The metaphor of the Rickshaw applies even to Marxists. Ascending to the back is not only a question of comfort, but induces a different outlook on society, for from such an elevation one evidently gains a feeling of superirity and then entitlement. I used to wonder why socialists could they not grasp the nature and purpose of democracy? Fnally I realised that it was not the result of feeble intellectual grasp, but of a fundamental hostility to democracy. We find so0called socialists arrogantly claiming that referenda were too compicated for the mass of citizens to take part in, asserting that would have citizens voting whose ideas were determined by the mass media i.e. the pair of them were bound to an oligarchic ideology, namely the people had to be led by superior comrades i.e. the Leninist syndrome. The alternative to capitalism is communism, but how to defend it when the communists turn out more capitalist than the capitalists? Recall Mao's paradox:'' The bourgeoisie in China sits on the Central Committee of the Party'' ( this might incidentally be a could introductory captatio). You spent time examinig what all do not really need to be persuaded of , namely that the British Cabinet consists of people much richer than the average citizen; but their wealth is peanuts compared with the leading members of the Chinese CP. I refer to the account of the Panama papers in the Guardian. So many of them have millions stashed away in offshore accounts. They must fear a rerun of the Cultural Revoultion. Let us the case of Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former Premier Li Peng, whose father was killed by the Koumintang. LI was adopted by Zhou Enlai and his wife and became Premier under Deng. His daughter's fortune has been estimated at $550 million Her man and she have accounts with $2.5 million stashed in Swiss banks. She turned up at a 'business' meeting wearing a £1,300 suit, enough to have provided 200 warm overcoats for poor children. Others involved were XI's brother-in-law and the son of the HuYaobang. The Chinese authorities diid all the could to suppress the exposure. Now, Xi to be sure has reacted with anti-corruption campaigns and demands to avoid conspicuous consumption, lest the resulting indignation gets out of hand; but then so did the Emperor Augustus with a great deal more sincerity, since he wore garments homespun by his wife, who also avoided costly clothing and ornamentation. In fact, Augustus encouraged the poet Horace to write poems denouncing the flaunting of conspicuous wealth. One of my favourite lines runs: ''The pallor of death beats no less insistently on the doors of aristocratic mansions than on the hovels of the poor."
@@johnlowrie6456never ever trust a dengist or a trotskyite. Revisionists are more dangerous to Marxist Leninist movements than open capitalist bootlickers and fascists.
Communists shouldn’t ignore struggles for democracy, and obviously we have an interest in pushing for a more truly democratic system. But the whole thrust of Marx is to go beyond mere political democracy and to extend democracy into the hitherto forbidden realm of bourgeois “civil society” and to replace it with a system of freely associated producers. That was Marx’s point in The Jewish Ideology, that mere political emancipation is never enough to effect what he called human emancipation. Socializing the means of production and establishing popular control over the economy goes beyond even the most radical democracy limited to the political sphere. As a lesser side note, saying that the rule of democracy is the rule of proletariat because Aristotle said it was the rule of the poor doesn’t seem very rigorous. Proletariat =\= “poor,” it is the modern working class that sells its labor power for wages. At any point in the history, the “poor” can be peasants and poor artisans, and their “rule” by “democracy” will not by any means imply socialism. And how can we be so absolutely sure that majority rule will necessarily evolve towards socialism? Bourgeois ideology is deeply entrenched, and a there’s no reason to believe that an amorphous democracy limited only to the political sphere will evolve toward socialism. Engels also criticized those who “saw the millennium in the democratic republic” instead of the last phase of bourgeois society where the class struggle is to be fought to the finish.
You are right that democracy does not equal socialism, but it provides the best environment for the future struggle for socialism. It also puts huge obstacles in the way of the ruling class when they want policies that directly harm the working class. Do you think that policies like the Poll Tax in the 90s or the privatisation of the Post Office in the 2010s would have gone through a House of Plebs? The ruling classes want elite rule not democracy.
@@paulcockshott8733 Sadly, I think yes, privatisation would've been approved. With the right media/social media environment a house of plebs is absolutely susceptible to falling for that kind of stuff. Also, as soon as political groups in favor of privatisation and similar things are openly proposing their ideas in parliament, that battle is pretty much lost. It usually means they have the political momentum. It's not the same, but look at the argentinian lower and upper houses, both of which are elected with a proportional representation system. It took just a few months before most of them aligned themselves with the current government. When one political force becomes dominant (even if not particularly strong) they can shape the agenda and present ideas as "the only valid way forward"; I don't think a house of plebs would be sufficiently resistant to this. I think a lottery based house of plebs is a great idea, but it's likely that it would be a mainly reactive house, meaning that yes, it can defend proletarian interests but it's unlikely that it will be setting the agenda. Agenda setting power is absolutely needed. If anything, I think a house of plebs would make even more sense in a single party system, where the vanguard party has the ability to define the roadmap but the house of plebs acts as a check and means of political representation outside of the party, perhaps even being able to shake up the party if it's failing to accomplish goals and/or if it's ideologically hijacked.
@@narmuzz2750 Thank you for your awesome comment, I completely agree. I also like Paul's system of selection by lot, but by itself doesn't ensure that democracy will work in favor of the proletariat or socialism. Ruling class ideology is deeply rooted in society after centuries of bourgeois rule, and masses of people vote against their material interests all the time. Yes, I do think that it is totally possible that a House of Plebs (I'd prefer "House of Proles" since the bourgeois was also plebian at one time) would implement privatization and other pro-capitalist measures if the masses believe that they are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And under capitalism, this is what our entire cultural and state apparatus drills into the heads of workers. I also agree with what you say about the need for a vanguard for agenda setting and ensuring that democratic bodies don't transgress the interests of socialism, assuming a proletarian state and not yet a stateless communist society. For example, trade unions are absolutely necessary as democratic organizations of the working class, and they should become "organised agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule" as Marx said. But trade unions can call for racist strikes, or can over-prioritize consumption over accumulation, or engage in all kinds of other reactionary activities, and a vanguard educated in historical materialism and communist principles will need to be able to correct this. Of course, conversely there must equally be channels by which non-party people can check or remove Party members, and governing bodies shouldn't be exclusively made up of Party members. But I think they should have something equivalent to constitutional review. The ideas of the ruling class are deep rooted and it will take a great deal of time for a workers' democracy to fully overcome it, as overcoming bourgeois prejudices requires the material and cultural benefits that would come with a fully communist society. paulcockshott8733, again I'm not saying that communists shouldn't fight for the most democratic of bourgeois democratic reforms, we absolutely should. But no, there's no guarantee that a democratic body-without some system of proletarian controls and a direct connection with the production process-will approve anti-capitalist measures. Of course, that's true about proletarian democracy as well, but at least it has more guardrails and is more adapted to the needs of socialist planning than "pure" bourgeois formal democracy, even the most participatory. Many people have indeed learned to 'love their chains' and it will take generations of painstaking political, economic and cultural work by a proletarian vanguard to change this. And finally, yes, it is far more convenient for the ruling class to have an elitist constitution than a democratic one. But the bourgeois class-which unlike other classes doesn't formally hold political power directly, nor does it need to so long as it owns the MOP-will rule in whichever way is most expedient for the preservation of capital. Bourgeois rule can take a fascist or a social-democratic form, and this depends not so much on what the ruling class desires as much as what it is able to do in the face of proletarian resistance (or lack thereof). To a certain extent, political democracy is the ideal of bourgeois society because it helps vindicate the myth of bourgeois equality which is so crucial to commodity exchange as well as law (think of Pashukanis here). Remember, Marx argued for example that the property qualification for voting was a pre-bourgeois measure, because it still symbolized the direct representation of civil society within the state, whereas fully bourgeois relations only developed when these spheres were totally separated, which is what the democratic reforms abolishing the property qualification did. This reform was rightly pushed forward by the working class-like the Chartists-against the bourgeoisie, but this did not stop the result being one that strengthened bourgeois society.
Why does Paul Cockshot never speak up? His books are way easier/exciting to read if you have focus/ADD issues than listening. I really recommend 'How the World Works'.
Why do you insist on using a Weberian definition of class rather than the Marxian one? Education isn't class, and neither is income level. Even if you try to create a "middle" class out of higher earners, you must also account for the higher value of educated labour power. Similarly, labour power located in London is likely of higher value than labour power elsewhere in the UK, because the cost of living is higher in London. We could of course work to level such differences in the value of labour power, as for example the USSR did. This also isn't so say that giving MPs a wage lower than their value wouldn't be useful - it would certainly spur them to adopt levelist policies.
Income is important. None of the politicians are working class in the Marxist sense, since none of them sell their labour power to capitalists in order to live. They are all supported out of the surplus raised in taxation. Given, that by social position politicians are unproductive, a key way to make them identify with the life of the mass of people is to ensure that they earn no more than an average employee.
Given that capitalist hegemony isn't (solely) garded by government but continuously justified through media, culture, and the educational system, how can we prevent the pervasive bourgeois ideology from influencing the majority through the superstructure, since the ruling class has the resources to maintain THEIR common sense?
@@paulcockshott8733 Perhaps, but that applies also to a House of Plebs, and to all public employees. Are nurses not working class? And it also isn't what I'm talking about. You say around 8:00 that there is such a thing as a "professional middle class". What is this middle "class"? How are their relationship to the MoPs qualitatively different from the proletariat and from the bourgeoisie? Does a geologist working for an oil company not work for a wage in the private sector? And ditto for a programmer working for a game studio? These people are working class.
@@paulcockshott8733I think assuming we need absolute democracy and equitable representation is a flaw, I favour a mixed system of direct democracy, technocracy and meritocratic representation. I don't think that a person without a degree represents the interests of the people without a degree necessarily.
CyberSyn was a technological tool for economic planning, but it didn't substitute institutions for decisionmaking. Even in a cybernetic planned economy, political decisions should be taken during the planning process (to set the targets of the plan, the ecological constrains, etc) and those political decisions should be organized and held by a political body.
What if an actual socialist government would be a government of highly educated workers? With lower levels of people working as industrial workers and rise of knowledge capitalism, maybe the actual revolutionary class will be the highly educated but also highly exploited, in a union with less educated workers, just like workers united with peasants (now a non existent class in developed countries) to power the October revolution. Surely you would need educated workers to power a socialist country which by definition is a higher level of social organisation.
That is a description of what existed in the USSR from the 1980s, that was the Gorbachev generation. The problem is that those with a high educational level actually had somewhat different long term interests from collective farmers and manual workers. They could potentially benefit from the higher differentials that existed for the intelligentsia in the West.
@@paulcockshott8733 Thank you for your response. I will try to develop this idea further because: a) modern left-wing parties in Europe often have an overrepresentation of people with higher education b) there is no 'permanent revolutionary class' as Michael Heinrich pointed out c) there is consistent decrease in the numbers of industrial workers (similar to a decrease in the number of agricultural workers) in modern capitalist factories/enterprises (as shown most vividly by the new Xiaomi car) d) industrial workers sadly often do not seem to be interested in progressive social change (are at risk of capture by the right) e) as noted by Peter Turchin, it is the highly educated (he mentions e.g. prominent law graduates - Lenin, Castro) who led regolutionary parties in the past. As cognitive capitalism intensifies and more educated people become 'proletarianised' (we get exploited not just by the employers but also by the landlords, price gouging businesses, hence the high MP pay you quote - all MPs are based in London which is markedly more expensive than the rest of the UK), with no 'affluent Western capitalism' left for people to long for as it was the case in the Eastern Block (as you point out), this will create social unrest among the so called 'counter elites' (Turchin), unless there are concessions, which then will hurt profitability and/or stability of the debt-based system which could well be the catalyst for the next crisis as pointed out (even recently) by the excellent economist Michael Hudson (and Michael Heinrich points to Marx actually having a credit crisis theory rather than profitability-crisis theory in capitalism).
Without mass expropriation, all the suggested measures would be akin to the Roman plebeian tribunes and would only pave the way for the populist (pseudo-leftist) constitution of a military dictatorship that would still cater to the interests of the oligarchs.
Very well said. None of the worshippers of political democracy have ever made a convincing rebuttal to this, nor have they shown why simple majoritarian rule would necessarily lead to socialist outcomes. The point is to extend democracy into “private” civil society through expropriation and its replacement with what Marx called associated labor.
@@paulcockshott8733 - They did it in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and probably other places. Broadly speaking that's how, the exact details may vary (we don't live in less developed countries under Fordism but in developed ones under Toyotism rather). Engels himself, whose political view I pretty much spouse myself and who I imagine strongly aligned with someone like Corbyn if alive in our time, thought (as far as I understand) that the electoral facet of class war had to be fought but that, when the proletarian party became strong enough, then the burgeoisie would impede it from actually reaching power by force. Then, he imagined, the real clash war (emphasis on "war") would ensue and, he hoped/expected, that the proletarian party would be so strong by then that could not be defeated. He was probably a bit too optimistic but his broad analysis stands IMO. Whatever the case the working class needs to become truly conscious (and I believe your video hints at that process happening now again even if largely in a negative "disenchantmet" sense that is IMO not enough) and organized and then revolution will become unavoidable. Britain in fact was quite close to that with the rise of Corbynism but Brexit first (the timeline is suspiciously coincident with the rise and fall of Corbynism, it was IMO promoted to polarize voters on a lesser issue and disrupt the threat of radicalized Labour) and the Zionist takeover and subsequent massive purge, together with an undecided leadership by Corbyn himself (who only now has left Labour but has not attempted to build a new party) made all that quasi-revolutionary movement to fail ultimately. It's a very important experience on which to rebuild.
@@johnlowrie6456 - Technically the Senate had only advisory powers (they were very influential but did not enact laws as such). Watch or read something on the Gracchi brothers and how they actually tried to use the pseudo-democratic Roman assemblies to get their reforms ahead. They failed but they had to be killed, one after the other. I recently watched a great "lecture" video on Gaius (the elder Gracchus) that was very interesting: "The Problems with the Roman Republic: Tiberius Gracchus" at Generic History Videos channel (much better than the silly channel name suggests and also clearly leftist, which is a plus). As for your first question, I just replied to Paul in this same thread asking the same thing, look it up please. It's a good question indeed: the answer is not easy but it's something that has been done before and I expect will be done again soon because the system is pretty much imploding as we speak (and ultimately Capitalism cannot be ecological, so the human survival solution can only be socialist, radically so).
Making government salaries average might work for civil servants but not for elected officials since they make most of their money by exiting politics and becoming lobbyists
Prof, what other thinkers out there do work on the technical aspects of theory other than your co-authors, Dr Shaykh and Ian Wright? It just seems everyone is just wasting time on postmodern Frankfurt verbiage.
The problem is the 40% who didn’t bother to get up off their arses and vote. If you didn’t vote or those who you think you represent didn’t vote you can have no complaint.
This analysis also works well for the United States. Comparing the Trump and Biden cabinets, the only differences are that the Trump cabinet had two billionaires in it. The net wealth of the Biden cabinet is also exceptionally low given an American Indian with no reported net wealth and Biden being only a millionaire not multi-millionaire like the Clintons.
I think the salient point is not how much wealth the members of the Government have but how much they are dependent on the wealth of others to get elected. As Aristotle points, out the mark of an oligarchy is election by ballot, which the rich will normally win thanks to their superior resources. An democracy was the rule of hoi aporoi, that is those without resources, which would be analogous to the proletariat in the broader sense the concept originally expressed.namely those with only their own and children's labour to make a living.
the audio has improved
thanks paul
I bought a new mike but perhaps I still speak too quietly, that is so as not to disturb the rest of the family
@@paulcockshott8733do you sometimes speak to young computer scientists through video calls? Every week you should speak personally to some young boy who's at college now. Without putting it on UA-cam. I think this personal contact will inspire them
Many local government salaries in my former home of the United States are indeed at or even far below working wages. Many local governments in non-major cities (where most people live) pay below $2000 per year to elected officials.
But these officials are not the actual ones running things. They are, like Lenin observed in his own country and others in "State and Revolution", not the ones carrying out government policy. Much of the executive branch at the local level is entirely divorced from the legislative branch, with the legislators simply working as hiring and firing staff for city managers and other bureucrats actually doing the governing.
All this is to say: It is important that the elected officials being paid workingman's wages are also the ones doing the actual work.
The ones actually governing should also be paid workingman's wages.
An idea that was common in the US after WWI was to impose a general pay scale for all government employees. This actually exists in the US and is quite a bit more level than anything in the private setting, but it is still a major divide. A concrete proposal for any American comrades would maybe be to fight for combining the General Schedule pay scale with minimum wage legislation. A two birds one stone situation which could avoid arguing over fairness with middle class (but working class) people who make above the minimum wage.
Great video Prof. Cockshott.
We must remember that Greek had two words for Poor, and when Aristotle uses the term poor, he means those that have to work for a living. A better definition employed is democracy as the rule of the hoi aporoi, those without resources.
Democracy is when those who make decisions on your behalf have the duty to ask for your consent first. Today's republics are actually modern oligarchies where the interest groups of the rich are arbitrated by the people, that is, you can choose from which table of the rich you will receive crumbs.
The "fatigue" of democracy occurs when there is a big difference between the interests of the elected and the voters, thus people lose confidence in the way society functions. As a result, poor and desperate citizens will vote with whoever promises them a lifeline, i.e. populists or demagogues.
The democratic aspect is a collateral effect in societies where the economy has a strong competitive aspect, that is, the interests of those who hold the economic power in society are divergent. Thus those whealty, and implicitly with political power in society, supervise each other so that none of them have undeserved advantages due to politics. For this reason, countries where mineral resources have an important weight in GDP are not democratic (Russia, Venezuela, etc.), because a small group of people can exploit these resources in their own interest. In poor countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, etc.) the main exploited resource may even be the state budget, as they have convergent interests in benefiting, in their own interest, from this resource. It is easy to see if it is an oligarchy because in a true democracy laws would not be passed that would not be in the interest of the many.
The first modern oligarchy appeared in England at the end of the 17th century. After the bourgeois revolution led by Cromwell succeeded, the interest groups of the rich were unable to agree on how to divide their political power in order not to reach the dictatorship of one. The solution was to appoint a king to be the arbiter. In republics, the people are the arbiter, but let's not confuse the possibility of choosing which group will govern you with democracy, that is, with the possibility of citizens deciding which laws to pass and which not to.
The solution is modern direct democracy in which every citizen can vote, whenever he wants, over the head of the parliamentarian who represents him. He can even dismiss him if the majority of his voters consider that he does not correctly represent their interests.
It's like when you have to build a house and you choose the site manager and the architect, but they don't have the duty to consult with you. The house will certainly not look the way you want it, but the way they want it, and it is more certain that you will be left with the money given and without the house. It is strange that outside of the political sphere, nowhere, in any economic or sports activity, will you find someone elected to a leadership position and who has failure after failure and is fired only after 4 years. We, the voters, must be consulted about the decisions and if they have negative effects we can dismiss them at any time, let's not wait for the soroco to be fulfilled, because we pay, not them. In any company, the management team comes up with a plan approved by the shareholders. Any change in this plan must be re-approved by the shareholders and it is normal because the shareholders pay.
Democracies are a meme anyway. Working people or the general public don't vote, it's the ruling class who votes.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Ha! Ha! Very good joke!😄
Very interesting propositions. However, according to structural Marxists, capitalist hegemony isn't (solely) upheld by government but continuously justified manner through media, culture, and the educational system. How can we prevent the pervasive bourgeois ideology from influencing the majority through the superstructure, since the ruling class has the resources to maintain THEIR common sense"?
The human nature argument reinforces bourgeois thinking
@La_Plata-u2f Capitalist run societies are also a product of social engineering. Human nature is plastic and adaptable. Revisionism (which means adding capitalist concepts to Marxism) is the real reason for the illegal adjournment of the Soviet Union and why China is a capitalist country pretending to be a socialist one.
Ok
@La_Plata-u2f There has been many other socioeconomic systems through human history (one of them particularly, communist primitivism, lasting for at least 95,000 years before the Neolithic Revolution; others, like slave societies, lasting for 3,000 years in some places; and feudalism lasting for at least 1,000-1,300 years in Europe). All of them were as product of our "human nature" as capitalism currently is. How do you explain such different forms of organizing society if our "human nature" is supposedly fixed to one single form who funnily enough just appeared 200-500 years ago?
@La_Plata-u2f WTF is "cognitive revolution"? Humans have been aware of themselves at least since the Paleolithic (you can see this through the cave paintings and rock art in general). Neolithic revolution had to do with the transition from nomad hunter-gathering communist primitivism towards a sedentary agricultural class society, not with some king of esotheric "self awareness" or whatever.
Banger video
The question of the remuneration of members of a Democratic Parliament is simple: the members for a year receive their current income for a year, then go back to their old job ( much as currently with those women who get paid maternity leave).
good analysis
I think while it's good to build up support amongst smaller third parties and independents, ultimately while locked in our duopoly it's the Labour party that has to be changed. It's happened before and I think it can happen again. The authoritarian control of the right over the party may seem absolute at the moment, but the brutality of their tyranny to me suggests their control is actually quite weak. They know the membership doesn't support them, that's why they had to lie their way into power. I think if Starmer can be replaced by a soft left leader they may then re-democratise the party such that it's once again possible for a socialist to become the leader, and hopefully they then learn from the mistakes Corbyn made in not decisively dealing with the right of the party.
Good video. I was excepting some bullshit but it was really informative and interesting.
Perhaps a better system would be to randomly draw up a number of small groups of people from around the country each putting forward one of their number based on a discussion amongst themselves. This is repeated with the new selection until we get down to the required number.
My main concern with this is the issue of geopolitics. In the initial stages of the socialist transition, how do you ensure that the proletariat is aware of the challenges of international relations in a world governed by Anglo-Germanic hegemony?
The vicissitudes of foreign policy often require taking measures that, in principle, may seem to go against the interests of the proletariat. But in the long run, of course, prove to be crucial for the formation of a powerful state that can promote the implementation of socialism abroad (through the plans and programs of its ruling class). Or, at least, not collapse back into liberal capitalism.
Could you please elaborate further, comrade?
@@gwynbleidd1917 Well, of course I can! What would you like me to elaborate on?
@paulcockshott8733
If nothing else is scheduled Mr. Cockshott, Could I request a video or some sort of comment on the ongoing (self-declared) ‘Anarcho-Capitalist’ experiment in Argentina and any problems you perceive in the economic or philosophical works of the ‘Libertarians’/‘individualist-anarchists’ such as Friedman, Rothbard and Rand etc
@@Psychonaut1001 I have done stuff on Hayek
Great video - I've seen the contemporary reading list on your blog, and have read through a fair portion of it; I understand you drafted it a while ago, and was wondering if you have any further reading/author reccomendations since you produced it?
Supposing those in government were genuinely representative of the people, demographically speaking, how do we stop them from acting as mere spokespeople for the capitalist class? Selection by lot would solve the problem of campaign funding, but we would still have to deal with bribery and the influence of the capitalist media.
The answer to that is term limits. Only allow one year term in office. No time to build up the network of lobbyists funding that professional politicians have.
@@paulcockshott8733 Doesn't this have the drawback of restraining long term planning, strategic thinking..etc?
Moreover, what of the question of competence? Should there be a bare minimum of requirements placed on public office prospective appointees?
@@Bredafromdejungule How many things can one be competent in? I cannot imagine more incompetent people than we had here in the UK under the last Government. A Democratic Government takes advice from experts in their various fields, e.g.nuclear power or economic planning. Why would a Democratic Government abandon long-term plans that the people had voted for and were seen to be working Further, such a government, coming to power after the previous one's one-year term of office had expired, could quickly abolish plans that were seen not be working. As with candidates for local government in the UK, candidates for the House of Democrats would be required to have their application form signed by ten citizens who attested their mental sanity and moral status. Note that democracy would eliminate the possibility of a Hitler.
As Paul affirms below democracy is the best banner under which to fight for socialism; moreover, in those states such as Poland where socialism is banned, Marxists can fight for socialism by advocating democracy, for the bourgeois mode of production can only support limited concessions to democratic practices. Recall that by determinism Marx embraces the concepts of setting limits to and determinatio est negatio.
There is a wretched pre-was novel (Ann Bridge, ''Peking Picnic'' 1932), wherein the heroine asserts that, "A rickshaw is the most delightfully civilised form of locomotion. Seated in a well-sprung bath-chair...his view is unimpeded...there is nothing to prevent his holding up a sunshade in comfort'' ( Pp16-17).Such of course assumes that one is lolling in the back and not toiling at the front. The image however captures the sad history of the International Workers' Movement, for its history emphatically demonstrates that when the erstwhile revolutionary, socialist, trade unionist, communist ascends from toiling at the front to lolling at the back their view of the world changes. Two egregious examples will suffice: Friedrich Ebert, one of the nine children of a poor tailor, who had been unable to go to University because of the family's poverty, and who married a servant girl, succeeded August Bebel as Head of the German Social Democratic Party. At the 1912 Basel Congress the Social Democratic parties of Europe affirmed that they would not go to war for the sake of capitalism. When War did break out Ebert lead the SPD almost unanimously to support the Imperialist War and to vote in the Reichstag for War Credits and to argue that the War was a defensive, patriotic one against the autocratic Tsar. In fact Germany waged the War to realise quite precise imperialist ambitions ( cf Fritz Fischer, ''Germany Aims in the First World War''2007). Later, Ebert unleashed the Freikorps, the precursor of the SS, in suppressing the revolutionary uprising of the German workers and gave the go-ahead for the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. There is a photo of him in his frock coat and top hat: no doubt his father would have been impressed.
A second case is Deng Xiaoping. Purged as the Second Person taking the Capitalist Road during the Cultural Revolution, he wrote two letters to Mao denouncing his attempted assassination by Lin Piao and promising never to practise Revisionism again. Once Mao died Deng came to power and claimed Marx was out-of- date, there was no class struggle in China, banned strikes, abolished the Iron Rice Bowl ( i.e. workers rights to jobs, pensions), prohibited playing the International, and trashed hundreds of thousands of copies of the Marxist classics. He invited Milton Friedman to China and announced that 'some must get rich first'! Now was the Deng family among the first or the last? The Deng family are billionaires. His granddaughter and her man hurl round Beijing in a red convertible RollsRoyce. Those close to Deng also made it big.Consider the views of the two Deng originally intended to lead the CCP and Chinese State. Here is Zhao Ziyang on the US :'' It is prosperous, developed..its leadership passes power peacefully...It does not expand its territory; it does not practise colonialism; all it does is carry on free trade....Its national interest is the same as the interest of human kind...to promote freedom, democracy and human rights....If we need a leader human development, that leader is better to be the USA,,,because it is not colonialist.'' Deng's other protege, Hu Yaobang, onetime put in charge of the CCP, claimed class struggle in Tibet had been Mao's terrible mistake, and the Dalai Lama should be worshipped instead (Mobo Gao, ''Constructing China''2018 Pp79-80). There is a revolting photo of Zhao dressed in foully expensive sartorial elegance, actually holding hands with President Reagan!
We see then that when such ''Comrades'' ascend to the back of the Rickshaw, they abandon all democratic sympathy and fervently embrace its opposite. But what is the opposite of democracy? Bourgeois ideologues propagate dictatorship; but such is historically and conceptually absurd. Democracy is a constitution from 5th Century Athens. Dictatorship is a much later Roman institution and referred to the appointment of short-term officials to perform specific tasks e/g. dealing with 'sedition'! The opposite of democracy ,as Aristotle expounds in his ''Politics,'' is oligarchy, the rule of the few. But as he argues, it is quite misleading to define democracy as the rule of the many and oligarchy as the rule of the few; rather democracy is the rule of the hoi aporoi, those without resources, being the majority, while oligarchy is the rule of the rich, being few. The mark of a democracy is selection of the government by lot, no member to serve for longer than a year, all laws to be put to the assembly of the people to vote on. The mark of an oligarchy is election by ballot, which the rich will normally win thanks to their superior wealth and education. Currently, Musk has given $40 million to Trump, while Harris boasts of having raised $200 million.The original institution of democracy was well-known to the early bourgeois ideologists. Thus, Madison, the fourth US President and "father of the Constitution,'' writes, " a pure democracy..who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction....such democracies have ever been spectacles od turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with the...rights pf property......The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are first:,the delegation of the government in the latter to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater share off country over which the latter mat be extended''( Madison, "Federalist Papers'' NumberX). Thus the US became a Republic on the Roman model. So at the beginning of the 19th Century democracy was still a despised idea, but with the rise in class struggle the ruling oligarchies, following Aristotle's advice that the better to maintain themselves in power oligarchies should make political concessions to the poor, such as holding minor offices or serving on juries, 'democracy' was gradually introduced in the UK and US, as we were taught in school. Note the use of the passive voice permits the elision of the agent of such introduction. Revert to the active voice and we readily discern that the agent was the oligarchic state, and the same people were in power before as after. It is quite fallacious for those who identify as Marxists to imagine that they make some profound distinction by prefixing democracy with 'bourgeois,' as if permission by the state to exercise the franchise were equivalent to the exercise of power in some way.
It is of interest to raise the question of why Lenin never permitted the democratic rights he advertised in ''The State and Revolution.'' Bourgeois scholars assert that this was because in 1923 the Bolsheviks would have lost any free elections, and this is surely right. Consequently, Lenin falsely asserted that Russia was a dictatorship of the proletariat But let us move forward to 1950: It is certain that Stalin, Mao Ho Chi Min, Kim Il Sung etc, would have won by landslides. The US was quite open that its genocidal invasion of Vietnam was to prevent just such a history by Ho. So why did elections not take place" In fact, Mao somewhere affirms in his ironic way that he did not believe in elections as they were too expensive; and moreover here Madison's argument of geographical extent had some validity. The Soviet Union, China etc were just too large and technically backward to allow of democracy, even if Stalin, Mao and co. had been aware of the concept. But this is no longer the case, and all genuine left -wing parties need to have writ large on their banners that they do not aim at power for themselves but to introduce a democracy, and such a genuine democracy would be analogous to what Marx envisaged as the dictatorship of the proletariat. What is certain is that a political party will never deliver socialism. In his 'Left-Wing Communism'' Lenin argued that societies are divided into classes, classes are lead by parties, and such parties by stable groups of leaders; but history demonstrates that within even communist parties in time such leaders constitute themselves as a new bourgeoisie, for they have risen to the back of the RICKSHAW! It surely demands little insight to perceive that political parties crystallise in the Uk in the 18th century with the rise of capitalism, spread to Europe in the 19th and to the rest of the world in the 20th with the further development of capitalism, and are an institution that corresponds to the imperatives of the bourgeois mode of production. The Leninist Party cannot deliver socialism; we need democracy and in the UK we might start by demanding a referendum on replacing the House of Lords with the House of Democrats.
Oligarchy is certainly the rule of the rich, but it is supported by various strata that can in no way be described as rich. The metaphor of the Rickshaw applies even to Marxists. Ascending to the back is not only a question of comfort, but induces a different outlook on society, for from such an elevation one evidently gains a feeling of superirity and then entitlement. I used to wonder why socialists could they not grasp the nature and purpose of democracy? Fnally I realised that it was not the result of feeble intellectual grasp, but of a fundamental hostility to democracy. We find so0called socialists arrogantly claiming that referenda were too compicated for the mass of citizens to take part in, asserting that would have citizens voting whose ideas were determined by the mass media i.e. the pair of them were bound to an oligarchic ideology, namely the people had to be led by superior comrades i.e. the Leninist syndrome. The alternative to capitalism is communism, but how to defend it when the communists turn out more capitalist than the capitalists? Recall Mao's paradox:'' The bourgeoisie in China sits on the Central Committee of the Party'' ( this might incidentally be a could introductory captatio). You spent time examinig what all do not really need to be persuaded of , namely that the British Cabinet consists of people much richer than the average citizen; but their wealth is peanuts compared with the leading members of the Chinese CP. I refer to the account of the Panama papers in the Guardian. So many of them have millions stashed away in offshore accounts. They must fear a rerun of the Cultural Revoultion. Let us the case of Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former Premier Li Peng, whose father was killed by the Koumintang. LI was adopted by Zhou Enlai and his wife and became Premier under Deng. His daughter's fortune has been estimated at $550 million Her man and she have accounts with $2.5 million stashed in Swiss banks. She turned up at a 'business' meeting wearing a £1,300 suit, enough to have provided 200 warm overcoats for poor children. Others involved were XI's brother-in-law and the son of the HuYaobang. The Chinese authorities diid all the could to suppress the exposure. Now, Xi to be sure has reacted with anti-corruption campaigns and demands to avoid conspicuous consumption, lest the resulting indignation gets out of hand; but then so did the Emperor Augustus with a great deal more sincerity, since he wore garments homespun by his wife, who also avoided costly clothing and ornamentation. In fact, Augustus encouraged the poet Horace to write poems denouncing the flaunting of conspicuous wealth. One of my favourite lines runs: ''The pallor of death beats no less insistently on the doors of aristocratic mansions than on the hovels of the poor."
@@johnlowrie6456never ever trust a dengist or a trotskyite. Revisionists are more dangerous to Marxist Leninist movements than open capitalist bootlickers and fascists.
Communists shouldn’t ignore struggles for democracy, and obviously we have an interest in pushing for a more truly democratic system. But the whole thrust of Marx is to go beyond mere political democracy and to extend democracy into the hitherto forbidden realm of bourgeois “civil society” and to replace it with a system of freely associated producers. That was Marx’s point in The Jewish Ideology, that mere political emancipation is never enough to effect what he called human emancipation. Socializing the means of production and establishing popular control over the economy goes beyond even the most radical democracy limited to the political sphere.
As a lesser side note, saying that the rule of democracy is the rule of proletariat because Aristotle said it was the rule of the poor doesn’t seem very rigorous. Proletariat =\= “poor,” it is the modern working class that sells its labor power for wages. At any point in the history, the “poor” can be peasants and poor artisans, and their “rule” by “democracy” will not by any means imply socialism. And how can we be so absolutely sure that majority rule will necessarily evolve towards socialism? Bourgeois ideology is deeply entrenched, and a there’s no reason to believe that an amorphous democracy limited only to the political sphere will evolve toward socialism. Engels also criticized those who “saw the millennium in the democratic republic” instead of the last phase of bourgeois society where the class struggle is to be fought to the finish.
You are right that democracy does not equal socialism, but it provides the best environment for the future struggle for socialism. It also puts huge obstacles in the way of the ruling class when they want policies that directly harm the working class. Do you think that policies like the Poll Tax in the 90s or the privatisation of the Post Office in the 2010s would have gone through a House of Plebs?
The ruling classes want elite rule not democracy.
@@paulcockshott8733 Sadly, I think yes, privatisation would've been approved. With the right media/social media environment a house of plebs is absolutely susceptible to falling for that kind of stuff.
Also, as soon as political groups in favor of privatisation and similar things are openly proposing their ideas in parliament, that battle is pretty much lost. It usually means they have the political momentum. It's not the same, but look at the argentinian lower and upper houses, both of which are elected with a proportional representation system. It took just a few months before most of them aligned themselves with the current government. When one political force becomes dominant (even if not particularly strong) they can shape the agenda and present ideas as "the only valid way forward"; I don't think a house of plebs would be sufficiently resistant to this.
I think a lottery based house of plebs is a great idea, but it's likely that it would be a mainly reactive house, meaning that yes, it can defend proletarian interests but it's unlikely that it will be setting the agenda. Agenda setting power is absolutely needed.
If anything, I think a house of plebs would make even more sense in a single party system, where the vanguard party has the ability to define the roadmap but the house of plebs acts as a check and means of political representation outside of the party, perhaps even being able to shake up the party if it's failing to accomplish goals and/or if it's ideologically hijacked.
@@narmuzz2750 Thank you for your awesome comment, I completely agree. I also like Paul's system of selection by lot, but by itself doesn't ensure that democracy will work in favor of the proletariat or socialism. Ruling class ideology is deeply rooted in society after centuries of bourgeois rule, and masses of people vote against their material interests all the time. Yes, I do think that it is totally possible that a House of Plebs (I'd prefer "House of Proles" since the bourgeois was also plebian at one time) would implement privatization and other pro-capitalist measures if the masses believe that they are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And under capitalism, this is what our entire cultural and state apparatus drills into the heads of workers.
I also agree with what you say about the need for a vanguard for agenda setting and ensuring that democratic bodies don't transgress the interests of socialism, assuming a proletarian state and not yet a stateless communist society. For example, trade unions are absolutely necessary as democratic organizations of the working class, and they should become "organised agencies for superseding the very system of wages labour and capital rule" as Marx said. But trade unions can call for racist strikes, or can over-prioritize consumption over accumulation, or engage in all kinds of other reactionary activities, and a vanguard educated in historical materialism and communist principles will need to be able to correct this. Of course, conversely there must equally be channels by which non-party people can check or remove Party members, and governing bodies shouldn't be exclusively made up of Party members. But I think they should have something equivalent to constitutional review. The ideas of the ruling class are deep rooted and it will take a great deal of time for a workers' democracy to fully overcome it, as overcoming bourgeois prejudices requires the material and cultural benefits that would come with a fully communist society.
paulcockshott8733, again I'm not saying that communists shouldn't fight for the most democratic of bourgeois democratic reforms, we absolutely should. But no, there's no guarantee that a democratic body-without some system of proletarian controls and a direct connection with the production process-will approve anti-capitalist measures. Of course, that's true about proletarian democracy as well, but at least it has more guardrails and is more adapted to the needs of socialist planning than "pure" bourgeois formal democracy, even the most participatory. Many people have indeed learned to 'love their chains' and it will take generations of painstaking political, economic and cultural work by a proletarian vanguard to change this.
And finally, yes, it is far more convenient for the ruling class to have an elitist constitution than a democratic one. But the bourgeois class-which unlike other classes doesn't formally hold political power directly, nor does it need to so long as it owns the MOP-will rule in whichever way is most expedient for the preservation of capital. Bourgeois rule can take a fascist or a social-democratic form, and this depends not so much on what the ruling class desires as much as what it is able to do in the face of proletarian resistance (or lack thereof). To a certain extent, political democracy is the ideal of bourgeois society because it helps vindicate the myth of bourgeois equality which is so crucial to commodity exchange as well as law (think of Pashukanis here). Remember, Marx argued for example that the property qualification for voting was a pre-bourgeois measure, because it still symbolized the direct representation of civil society within the state, whereas fully bourgeois relations only developed when these spheres were totally separated, which is what the democratic reforms abolishing the property qualification did. This reform was rightly pushed forward by the working class-like the Chartists-against the bourgeoisie, but this did not stop the result being one that strengthened bourgeois society.
Why does Paul Cockshot never speak up?
His books are way easier/exciting to read if you have focus/ADD issues than listening. I really recommend 'How the World Works'.
The audio here is much better than his previous old videos so i think your audio might be the problem her
Why do you insist on using a Weberian definition of class rather than the Marxian one? Education isn't class, and neither is income level. Even if you try to create a "middle" class out of higher earners, you must also account for the higher value of educated labour power. Similarly, labour power located in London is likely of higher value than labour power elsewhere in the UK, because the cost of living is higher in London. We could of course work to level such differences in the value of labour power, as for example the USSR did. This also isn't so say that giving MPs a wage lower than their value wouldn't be useful - it would certainly spur them to adopt levelist policies.
Income is important.
None of the politicians are working class in the Marxist sense, since none of them sell their labour power to capitalists in order to live. They are all supported out of the surplus raised in taxation.
Given, that by social position politicians are unproductive, a key way to make them identify with the life of the mass of people is to ensure that they earn no more than an average employee.
Given that capitalist hegemony isn't (solely) garded by government but continuously justified through media, culture, and the educational system, how can we prevent the pervasive bourgeois ideology from influencing the majority through the superstructure, since the ruling class has the resources to maintain THEIR common sense?
@@paulcockshott8733 Perhaps, but that applies also to a House of Plebs, and to all public employees. Are nurses not working class? And it also isn't what I'm talking about. You say around 8:00 that there is such a thing as a "professional middle class". What is this middle "class"? How are their relationship to the MoPs qualitatively different from the proletariat and from the bourgeoisie? Does a geologist working for an oil company not work for a wage in the private sector? And ditto for a programmer working for a game studio? These people are working class.
@@paulcockshott8733what do you think about 1Dime's newest video ? It also talks about the state under capiralism
@@paulcockshott8733I think assuming we need absolute democracy and equitable representation is a flaw, I favour a mixed system of direct democracy, technocracy and meritocratic representation.
I don't think that a person without a degree represents the interests of the people without a degree necessarily.
Why not use a cybersyn instead of traditional obsolete institutions without requisite variety cybernetically speaking Paul
In this video he's clearly speaking about the possible reform of existing institutions. That doesn't mean that he supports them.
CyberSyn was a technological tool for economic planning, but it didn't substitute institutions for decisionmaking. Even in a cybernetic planned economy, political decisions should be taken during the planning process (to set the targets of the plan, the ecological constrains, etc) and those political decisions should be organized and held by a political body.
What if an actual socialist government would be a government of highly educated workers? With lower levels of people working as industrial workers and rise of knowledge capitalism, maybe the actual revolutionary class will be the highly educated but also highly exploited, in a union with less educated workers, just like workers united with peasants (now a non existent class in developed countries) to power the October revolution. Surely you would need educated workers to power a socialist country which by definition is a higher level of social organisation.
That is a description of what existed in the USSR from the 1980s, that was the Gorbachev generation. The problem is that those with a high educational level actually had somewhat different long term interests from collective farmers and manual workers. They could potentially benefit from the higher differentials that existed for the intelligentsia in the West.
@@paulcockshott8733 Thank you for your response. I will try to develop this idea further because:
a) modern left-wing parties in Europe often have an overrepresentation of people with higher education
b) there is no 'permanent revolutionary class' as Michael Heinrich pointed out
c) there is consistent decrease in the numbers of industrial workers (similar to a decrease in the number of agricultural workers) in modern capitalist factories/enterprises (as shown most vividly by the new Xiaomi car)
d) industrial workers sadly often do not seem to be interested in progressive social change (are at risk of capture by the right)
e) as noted by Peter Turchin, it is the highly educated (he mentions e.g. prominent law graduates - Lenin, Castro) who led regolutionary parties in the past.
As cognitive capitalism intensifies and more educated people become 'proletarianised' (we get exploited not just by the employers but also by the landlords, price gouging businesses, hence the high MP pay you quote - all MPs are based in London which is markedly more expensive than the rest of the UK), with no 'affluent Western capitalism' left for people to long for as it was the case in the Eastern Block (as you point out), this will create social unrest among the so called 'counter elites' (Turchin), unless there are concessions, which then will hurt profitability and/or stability of the debt-based system which could well be the catalyst for the next crisis as pointed out (even recently) by the excellent economist Michael Hudson (and Michael Heinrich points to Marx actually having a credit crisis theory rather than profitability-crisis theory in capitalism).
Without mass expropriation, all the suggested measures would be akin to the Roman plebeian tribunes and would only pave the way for the populist (pseudo-leftist) constitution of a military dictatorship that would still cater to the interests of the oligarchs.
Very well said. None of the worshippers of political democracy have ever made a convincing rebuttal to this, nor have they shown why simple majoritarian rule would necessarily lead to socialist outcomes. The point is to extend democracy into “private” civil society through expropriation and its replacement with what Marx called associated labor.
Yes, but how to get to mass expropriation? Moreover, it was the Senate in Rome that in fact decided that nature of legislation.
How do you get mass expropriation?
We have been waiting nigh on a century for a Labour government to enact Clause 4.
@@paulcockshott8733 - They did it in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and probably other places. Broadly speaking that's how, the exact details may vary (we don't live in less developed countries under Fordism but in developed ones under Toyotism rather).
Engels himself, whose political view I pretty much spouse myself and who I imagine strongly aligned with someone like Corbyn if alive in our time, thought (as far as I understand) that the electoral facet of class war had to be fought but that, when the proletarian party became strong enough, then the burgeoisie would impede it from actually reaching power by force. Then, he imagined, the real clash war (emphasis on "war") would ensue and, he hoped/expected, that the proletarian party would be so strong by then that could not be defeated.
He was probably a bit too optimistic but his broad analysis stands IMO. Whatever the case the working class needs to become truly conscious (and I believe your video hints at that process happening now again even if largely in a negative "disenchantmet" sense that is IMO not enough) and organized and then revolution will become unavoidable. Britain in fact was quite close to that with the rise of Corbynism but Brexit first (the timeline is suspiciously coincident with the rise and fall of Corbynism, it was IMO promoted to polarize voters on a lesser issue and disrupt the threat of radicalized Labour) and the Zionist takeover and subsequent massive purge, together with an undecided leadership by Corbyn himself (who only now has left Labour but has not attempted to build a new party) made all that quasi-revolutionary movement to fail ultimately. It's a very important experience on which to rebuild.
@@johnlowrie6456 - Technically the Senate had only advisory powers (they were very influential but did not enact laws as such). Watch or read something on the Gracchi brothers and how they actually tried to use the pseudo-democratic Roman assemblies to get their reforms ahead. They failed but they had to be killed, one after the other. I recently watched a great "lecture" video on Gaius (the elder Gracchus) that was very interesting: "The Problems with the Roman Republic: Tiberius Gracchus" at Generic History Videos channel (much better than the silly channel name suggests and also clearly leftist, which is a plus).
As for your first question, I just replied to Paul in this same thread asking the same thing, look it up please. It's a good question indeed: the answer is not easy but it's something that has been done before and I expect will be done again soon because the system is pretty much imploding as we speak (and ultimately Capitalism cannot be ecological, so the human survival solution can only be socialist, radically so).
Making government salaries average might work for civil servants but not for elected officials since they make most of their money by exiting politics and becoming lobbyists
Prof, what other thinkers out there do work on the technical aspects of theory other than your co-authors, Dr Shaykh and Ian Wright?
It just seems everyone is just wasting time on postmodern Frankfurt verbiage.
The problem is the 40% who didn’t bother to get up off their arses and vote. If you didn’t vote or those who you think you represent didn’t vote you can have no complaint.
First and potentially last.
This analysis also works well for the United States.
Comparing the Trump and Biden cabinets, the only differences are that the Trump cabinet had two billionaires in it.
The net wealth of the Biden cabinet is also exceptionally low given an American Indian with no reported net wealth and Biden being only a millionaire not multi-millionaire like the Clintons.
I think the salient point is not how much wealth the members of the Government have but how much they are dependent on the wealth of others to get elected. As Aristotle points, out the mark of an oligarchy is election by ballot, which the rich will normally win thanks to their superior resources. An democracy was the rule of hoi aporoi, that is those without resources, which would be analogous to the proletariat in the broader sense the concept originally expressed.namely those with only their own and children's labour to make a living.