6/8/06 I recently came across an outline of the six systems of Indian philosophy, and the third, called Samkhya (dating from c. seventh century B.C.) so much resembles the ideas I have called pattern, and also Sheldrake’s conceptions, that I decided to put the entry on this system up here, as part of the philosophical basis for a design for revolution.
6/4/06 Ideas which could be the makings of a new (organic rather than mechanistic) paradigm are hogged by their originators, who are begging to be let back in to the Science Church/Club.
“We commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many ‘world outlooks’. Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g. ‘believe’ in God, Duty, Justice, etc. …), we admit that the ideology we are discussing from a critical point of view, examining it as the ethnologist examines the myths of a ‘primitive society’, that these ‘world outlooks’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not ‘correspond to reality’.”
(From Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970).)
25/2/06
Is the language of class conflict anachronistic? (WiC discussion)23/2/06
A (revised) open letter to Rupert Sheldrake.
And see below.
22/2/06
Can democratic socialists get together? (Letter by TB)
17/2/06
There has been a discussion at World in Common of the idea of a convergence of marxism and anarchism.
MO says: ‘I think it is a distinct possibility that the firmly “class struggle” anarchists and non-Leninist (non-authoritarian, non-vanguardist) marxists can find a lot of common ground. For instance, check out:
The Convergence of Marxism and Anarchism?
In Defense (kinda) of Anarchism
Leninism vs. Anarchism
The website www.revolutionaryleft.com is also a great place where anarchists and marxists (of many shades—some Leninist and authoritarian, many not) get together and discuss things.’
and another on Leadership
4/2/06
Do we need a new paradigm? and does Rupert Sheldrake have an alternative which socialists (as rationalists) could take seriously? (Or not? — But then again... — And there’s my own version of these ideas, which I call ‘Pattern’) (See also my open letter to Rupert Shelrake, 23/2/06)
31/1/06
An email to world-in-common people following some live chat.
22/1/06
I’ve tried to be constructive on this page, but one has to be realistic and recognise the obstacles too. This was a message I posted to the world-in-common discussion group:
Hi there,
If we bring it off this evening & get to Chat, what are we going to talk about?
What’s on my mind right now is how to bring people together, i.e. people who are concerned about the state of the world. BUT the latter are such a disparate bunch: from those who theorise abstractly, those who are just loftily cynical about it all (maybe seeing hope in the imminent collapse of capitalism and/or planetary ecology), those who are vaguely left and reformist, those who still hope for a global proletarian revolution and do TU stuff, those who drop out and live differently, and the wacky New Age lot.
The last two are often coupled together. A few days ago I met up with a permaculture teacher/designer I’ve a lot of time for and – won’t go into ‘how come’ – he gave me a lesson in ‘dowsing for geopathic stress’, using methods devised by a guy called Slim Spurling. This was all new to me so back home I did a Google and, amongst other strange stuff, came up with this article: ‘earthchanges’.
Good for a laugh. But, seriously, how is it possible to address world problems in a serious revolutionary way, when the worried folk are all going off in different directions?
See you later, I hope, love, Chris
11/1/06
Peak Opportunities?
Spreading doom and gloom may not be not the best way to encourage change. The choice is:
- focus on the threatening prospect of Peak Oil, and World War III breaking out (or already underway) over what’s left of the resources essential to galloping capitalism (see ‘dollar imperialism’ (but beware wacky stuff behind this article!) (12/1/06)), or
- turn all that on its head by identifying the ‘Peak Opportunities’ opening up at this point of human history.
to be continued...
28/12/05 ‘Rationing?’ – the gap between permaculture/ecovillage thinking and socialist thinking.
27/12/05
Where now?
A new year beckons – or is already begun, if one feels the winter solstice is more significant than January 1st – so perhaps something about where I’ve got to on my ‘design for revolution’ is called for. I’m glad I called this page ‘design ideas’ because I’m nowhere near the design as such. Next year, and perhaps for several years after that, maybe for the rest of my life, I am going to be engaged in research into the writing and ideas of Rabindranath Tagore (not full time, of course). In 2006, this is going to be for the dissertation to complete my MA in Literature. After that, maybe a PhD? I resumed the MA course after a year out because of a lull at PAB, when the Business Plan was abandoned in favour of a members’ consultation. I didn’t expect the course to be relevant to des4rev, so it got a place on the site only under ‘priorities and distractions’. But in the process, and through working on the archive, I discovered Tagore, and one ‘design idea’ deserves to be recorded here. Much of the interest in Tagore amongst academics and others is about his criticism of nationalism. The dual focus of his life and work was the local: the village, and the global: universalism, nothing in between. So in a design for revolution, what, if anything, will come in between? If the nation state causes exploitation, conflict, inclusion/exclusion, prejudice, can it just be abolished leaving nothing in its place? (Has it gone already, displaced by something perhaps worse in the form of poorly – not humanely or justly – regulated globalised capitalism?) On what basis might the design/plan include a layer, or layers, or nodes, of places and people, between the village and bioregion and the whole planet?
22/12/05 The key to a possible world?
24/11/05 I was unsure whether the following discussion came under ‘Realities’ or here in ‘Design Ideas’, so it’s going in both:
Will there be sport under socialism?
7/11/05 I wrote a piece for the Permaculture Association (Britain) newsletter, Permaculture Works, entitled ‘People Need People’ on Community Building
29/10/05 I’ve had some interesting exchanges on various fora recently, which I gathered together for the World in Common discussion group.
10/10/05
When I began this page of the site on 10th April 2005, I was feeling discouraged and distracted, seeing problems rather than positive ideas. Six months on, things are looking up on the permaculture front – see the PAB web site – but down where socialism is concerned, my local group, Exeter Socialists, having ceased meeting, and interest in leftie ideas seeming to be at an all time low – although World in Common is still going, and the latest issue of Common Voice has been published. I have been heavily distracted by studies for an MA in Literature with the Open University, but with the final, dissertation, year in prospect, an avenue is opening up concerned with identity politics, which looks very relevant to design for revolution, see the Afterword: Socialism And The Politics Of Otherness from Patrick Hogan’s book:
Patrick Colm Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean ( New York: State University of New York Press, 2000)
24/8/05 Common Voice Issue No. 3 is finished, my article (on this site) is:
‘What Future for Socialism/ Communism?’ by Chris Marsh (5 July 2005) MS Word
24/8/05 WiC discussions on secularism and ethics. A key question still outstanding is: ‘Do marxist ethics fully take account of ecological concerns?’
24/4/05 A message on worldincommon discussion group, JP suggested this link:
http://www.abolishmoneynow.com/ by Ernie Reynolds
17/4/05
From RC
I think it is important to concentrate more on the demand side of a socialist economy although I am [not?] suggesting we shold forsake the supply side altogether! There are some very useful things we can say about the latter as well - above all, the implications for output arising from the elimination of capitalism’s ever burgeoning structural waste and how the materials and labour tied up with this could be diverted into socially useful production. Nevertheless, focusing unduly on the supply side of things can I think create a misleading impression of socialism as some kind of cornucupian consumerist paradise in which we could take what we wanted without any kind of constraint or sensibility towards others or the environment. This is sometimes coupled with a fondness for hi-tech fixes and I have noticed that within the SPGB for example there is a distinct hi-tech faction who revel in the marvels of modern technology; on the other hand there are others like the late Cde Hardy who i think had a more realistic outlook and emphasised the need for demand constraints.
An excellent book BTW on the whole subject - which you have no doubt read - is Marshall Sahlins Stone Age Economics. In it he makes the point that thereare two routes to affluence - by increasing supply or by reducing demand. Problem is that capitalism with its competitive ethos of production for the sake of production is never going to get us to that blissful state of satiation - no matter how much it increased output. It needs us to believe that our demands are insatiable.
16/4/05
Comments received on ‘potential abundance’:
From RC:
I think the emphasis on potential abundance can be misleading and in fact plays into the hands of bourgeois consumerism. It is supply side oriented whereas we should be looking at the demand side of things much more. Although having said that one should not over-dichotomise. In socialism we will have to produce more useful wealth overall (with the emphasis on useful) and this increase will very largely if not entirely come from the redirection of labour and materials away from socially useless economic activities whose raison d’etre today is entirely connected with operating a capitalist mode of porduction e.g. the financial sector, armaments, retailing etc. But the sense of security that will come with providing a reasonable level of welfare is important to underpin a reasonable level of demand. It is the insecurity that comes from gross material deprivation that hegemonically - and ironically - helps to fuel consumerist aspirations today.
From DP:
My thinking is based on a combination of a reading of Rosa Luxemberg, Lenin (Imperialism)
and Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development (see “Results and
Prospects” and “Permanent Revolution”).
‘Accumulation of Capital ’ - Rosa Luxemberg
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/index.htm
It is a very long work which I read over a decade ago. Glancing through the chapter headings this one looks like it touches on the theme I was trying to explain, see:
‘The Struggle Against Natural Economy ’
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch27.htm
On the subject of Historical Materialism - this is not bad if I remember rightly.
‘On Historical Materialism’ - Franz Mehring http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1893/histmat/index.htm
In a World in Common discussion, I said this, which seems relevant:
(On ‘having an axe to grind’ with respect to the SPGB:
I’m very grateful to the SPGB for providing me with a sound Marxist education, expressed in short and simple terms, and an approach to Revolution which disdains the armed struggle in favour of education and the ballot box(&post), and also rejects vanguadism and (I think?) any dodgy period of transition between capitalism and socialism proper. My disagreement with the Party was always around the refusal to ‘draw up a blueprint for socialism’, when the inevitable question from someone interested in the ideas is ‘what would socialism be like?’ I now have this concern that in the process of combing out the remaining tangles of ‘natural economy’ (see http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch27.htm) we will not only exhaust important mineral resources, esp. oil, degrade all the good cultivable land by industrialised agriculture, and - importantly - have lost useful indigenous/peasant knowledge about how to cultivate sustainably, and also most of the varieties of useful species selected and bred over 10K years.
This is serious!
By the way, I may be being unfair on the SPGB for picking on this ‘potential abundance’ thing, but hunting through their web site - there’s no search, frustratingly - I found a piece about oil but it focussed on pollution, nothing about running out...
love, Chris
13/4/05
Potential abundance?
At a meeting of the Exeter Socialists group (part of the Socialist Alliance Democratic Platform) we were bemoaning the fact that interest in the Left (not just our group) has dwindled to a pitifully low level, and pondering what we could do to get it going again. ‘We don’t have any vision to offer,’ was the issue, someone said. I mentioned the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) idea of ‘potential abundance’, brought about through capitalism, making the transition to socialism possible, even inevitable, but that this looks nonsensical now that the best of the oil has gone, and natural resources generally have been squandered. A young member of the group has been studying Marx avidly, and wanted to understand the ‘materialist conception of history’ and how the ‘potential abundance’ thing fits into the ‘last stage’ of that process. So the following is for his benefit, as well as indicating the first step towards developing an alternative vision.
The ‘materialist conception of history’ uses the superstructure and base model whereby any stage of human development depends primarily on the stage reached in the means of production or economy. An administrative, legal, control etc. superstructure develops to support the economy. As the economy develops its full capabilities, the potential for the next stage forms within it. The next economic stage is held back for a while by the superstructure supporting the earlier stage, but eventually there is a revolution to overturn the old superstructure and replace it with one suited to the new means of production. The stages human development have progressed through are primitive communism, chattel slavery, feudalism and now capitalism. The next and last stage will be socialism, the ‘potential’ for which has been built up within capitalism through highly advanced technology, whereby we can produce all we may need and desire with the minimum of effort once the ‘useless jobs’ associated with finance, money and property are made redundant.
The ‘materialist conception of history’ is a linear process in time, but it does not progress in a simultaneous way all over the world, so that earlier stages continue in some parts of the world after the revolution to the latest stage has happened in other parts. For example, in India today there is still some primitive communism, perhaps a little of what is effectively chattel slavery, and certainly feudal systems in regional village clusters (70% of Indian people still live in villages growing much of their own food). At the same time India is ‘developing’, capitalism and the proletariat are expanding rapidly, with industrialised ‘green revolution’, monocultural agriculture providing food for wage earners and raw materials, manufacturing expanding, plus the ‘call centres in Bangalore’ phenomenon. To some extent the old systems hold capitalism back. Gramsci wrestled with this issue in his paper on the ‘Southern Question’. In Italy the North developed first, but peasant communities continued in the South and did not join the proletariat and engage in the class struggle.
The underlying assumption that the SPGB and other revolutionary socialists make is that the revolution to socialism will happen once all the world has become capitalist, because then there will be but two classes in a highly technologically advanced industrialised world. The working class will slough off the capitalist class like a snake shedding an outgrown skin, and everybody will be happy. That makes the argument sound naïve, and it is in a sense, but it can be made to seem sophisticated by citing Marx, and showing how he anticipated all the complexification of the capitalist system, while still insisting that socialism is inevitable.
BUT we’ve squandered raw materials, especially oil. At last night’s meeting, a comrade said: ‘We’ve just used up the cheapest oil,’ and it is significant that he put it that way, demonstrating that even socialists think in capitalist terms. By the ‘labour theory of value’, oil in the ground is not just ‘cheap’, it is free, value-less. But the oil that has been squandered was readily accessible and took little labour to extract, enabling ready profits to be made. It is virtually inevitable under capitalism that the easy to get at raw materials will be used up first, so that the mineral ores now remaining have a very low percentage of metal compared to the stuff the ancient Romans were using, for example, and will require proportionately more energy to extract. It is actually urgent that all remaining fossil fuels should be used very frugally to prepare for the time they are effectively exhausted. ‘Energy descent’ is the term that’s used for the transition to a system sustained by renewable energy. The hope is that a future society could still enjoy the modern technologies that require little energy to run, such as electric light and computers. But a gentle energy descent will not happen under capitalism. It is more likely that World War III will be waged over access to the last remaining resources in the world, after which it will be ‘back to the Stone Age’ at best, or the end of human life (maybe any life) on earth, at worst.
So the challenge is to create a vision of back-to-the-land, sustainable, locally self-reliant socialism, and persuade people that this would be as good a life, or better, than the SPGB’s ‘potential abundance’. Suggesting this at the meeting got the response: ‘People don’t want to go back to the land,’ to which I’d say we’re going to have to to survive. It’ll either be mobs fighting over bunches of turnips or pleasant communities cooperating to provide a good quality of life. Also children love growing food.
On 11/4/05 I sent the following to the World in Common discussion group:
Hello comrades,
Went to a ‘Socialist Workers Forum’ (aka ‘Marxist Forum’) discussion last night on ‘How Can We Make Poverty History?: Debt, Trade and the G8’. Very poorly attended – only 7 including speaker and organiser – despite a notice to 450 folk on the Exeter Stop the War email list; 2 people responded to that. Any surge of interest in the Left apparently brought on by the Iraq War protest seems to have disappeared. Indeed Party political activism has dwindled in favour of issue-directed campaigning. The Make Poverty History thing is a case in point, apparently getting huge public response countrywide. The speaker said that this suits Blair & Brown because it’s a distraction from continuing public angst re Iraq. (And it seems to me that B&B can declare their support without having to do a thing.) The SWP/Respect speaker – a local activist – on ‘solutions’ said: ‘I’m a revolutionary but we want reforms, and it’s not impossible to get them,’ sparking off some discussion about whether socialists should agitate for reforms. In my SPGB days we were told not to because ‘reform’ only happens when it suits the capitalist class, and activists’ energies are wasted campaigning for them instead of educating (not, of course, leading!) the workers on overturning capitalism. I still incline that way. What do Commoners think?
love, Chris
10/4/05
I started this web site on 7th July 2004. I set myself an ‘Observation and interaction’ stage of at least six months, during which I would collect stuff that seemed to belong on the plot, an important criterion for inclusion being that I was interested in it, in either sense of the word. During that time I was also engaged in things that didn’t seem part of the plot, so I put those on a new page called ‘Priorities and distractions’. And now, on 10th April 2005, I’m going to begin to put together some ‘Design ideas’, which sounds positive and constructive, but it is inevitable with ‘Designing for Revolution’ that I have to start with problems.
First problem
Permaculture in Britain (PIB) lost its way about 20 years ago. I am convinced that permaculture could have got a strong mainstream following in Britain by concentrating initially on the gardening: children would be learning it in school by now, the community/neighbourly thing would follow and gradually energy descent and all that – but a bunch of crusties (aka alternatives) took it up and most didn’t have gardens – which is terribly sad. But there are permaculture pioneers who feel the same, and we do have Permaculture Magazine which has kept going throughout by ignoring the exclusive crusty edge and publishing the best of what is being achieved. The publishers believe that people will use the material, but not join the club.
Second problem
The Left in Britain (LIB) has also lost its way, and broken up into tiny political parties and other groupings with various angles on how to proceed and conduct themselves, with fingers pointed at other parties and groups who’ve got it wrong. What saves the Left from utter hopelessness is an enduring comradeliness, and a taken-for-granted understanding about what’s wrong with capitalism and that it can and will be transcended. So the Left is still ‘home’, and a welcome refuge, away from people who are taken in by the ‘our country at least is free and fair; you can say what you like, if the government got like a totalitarian state or a dictatorship, we could vote them out of office’. (What’s wrong with/ untrue about that? Well, the best way to control people is by getting them to think it’s with their consent.)
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