Socialism Debate Notes

4/16/15 2:23 PM

The question, What is socialism?, can only be addressed properly by first addressing
the question, What is capitalism?
What is capitalism?
Capitalism is a contingent, historically-specific mode of production
characterized by the private ownership of the means of production
Other characteristics of capitalism include the profit-motive, the institution of
private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, competitive market
exchange, and the state apparatus which maintains these social relations and
defends these institutions
Capitalism is NOT eternal, metaphysical, the alignment of political economy
with human nature, free enterprise, free markets, Robinson Crusoe on an
island, or some vague notion of trading between producers of the products of
their labor
The coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with Modern Imperialism
Lenin If its human nature then why has it only developed in the past few
centuries, and in most places in a mangled and backwards form?
The Enlightenment and Liberalism
Liberalism
o An ideology founded on the ideas of liberty and equality (ex. Freedom
of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil
rights, democratic societies, secular governments, and international
cooperation)
o Liberalism rejects hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute
monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings
Ren Descartes and the Cartesian Dualism
o Cogito Ergo Sum
o Cartesians view the mind as being wholly separate from the corporeal
body. Sensation and the perception of reality are thought to be the
source of untruth and illusions, with the only reliable truths to be had
in the existence of a metaphysical mind. Such a mind can perhaps
interact with a physical body, but it does not exist in the body, nor
even in the same physical plane as the body.
o Is the Cartesian subject really without properties?
! If no, then these is problematic and reactionary

If yes, then does its radical universality ignore the concrete

social processes that shape the subject?
" If no, then were good (maybe)
" If yes, then the fetishism of reason as an ideal creates a
consciousness, which ignores the material forces which
act upon and form the subject
John Locke (The Father of Liberalism)
o Natural Rights to Life, Liberty, and Property
o Government must not violate these rights based on the social contract
Jean-Jacque Rousseau Discourse on Inequality
o You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to
us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
o Attempt to unite what right allows with what interest demands, so
that justice and utility dont at any stage part company
o Let us agree that force doesnt create right, and that legitimate powers
are the only ones we are obliged to obey.
o Freedom as a natural right
o War is constituted by a relation between things, not between persons
o Slavery cannot be justified by killing and vice versa
The Bourgeois Revolutions
o Declaration of Independence as liberal propaganda: We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right
of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness
Thomas Paine
o Welfare state, abolition, equal rights for women
!

o Story about almost getting executed in France (correct application of

opportunism)

The Wealth of Nations and Classical Political Economy

Adam Smith and David Ricardo
o Division of Labor and how Capitalism undermines the liberal virtues it
espouses
o Capitalism as rapidly increasing technology and producing wealth
o Labor Theory of Value and Labor Theory of Property (Locke)
John Stuart Mill
o On Liberty and the Subjection of Women
Utopian Socialism
Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier (originator of the term Feminism),
and Robert Owen
Focused on imagining future ideal societies based upon the thrust of positive
ideals and moral criticisms of capitalism
Not grounded in the material conditions of capitalism; no conception of class
struggle; peaceful, gradual progress (origin of Social Democracy in my view)
Anarchism
Opposed to all hierarchy and rulers (NOT rules)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
o What is Property?
o If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and
I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be
understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show
that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the
power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder.
Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise
answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood;
the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the
first?
o Direct challenge to liberal conceptions of property
Peter Kropotkin
o Mutual Aid and The Conquest of Bread
o The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the
product should be the collective property of the race. Individual
appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All

things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men
have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and
since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of
the world's wealth. All things are for all.
Mikhail Bakunin
We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and
that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

Marxism (Scientific Socialism)

Hegels Idealist Dialectics vs. Marxs Materialist Dialectics
o Both agree that there is a dialectic between ideas and material forces
o Idealism posits that ideas over determine the material world
o Materialism posits that material forces over determine ideas
o Social Democrats, Utopian Socialists, and, to a certain extent,
Anarchists as Idealists
Marx and Engels
o Capital, The German Ideology, Wage Labour and Capital, The Origin of
Family, Private Property, and the State, Socialism Utopian and
Scientific, Anti-Drhing, The Communist Manifesto, etc.
o Marxs LTV (compatible with STV)
o Alienation
o Reification
o Forces and Relations of Production
o Base/Superstructure
o The Contradictions of Capital (class conflict)
o Liberalism and False Consciousness
The International Workingmens Association - The First International (Marx vs.
Bakunin)
Anarchists and Marxists split over the question of the State and the First
International was dissolved
George Bernard Shaw Fabian Society

The poor should have access to baths, not for their sake, but for mine
The distinction between altruism and self-interest is illusory

Imperialism and the First World War

Rosa Luxemburg Reform or Revolution (Revolution because of dialectical
analysis of material conditions of capitalism)
Nikolai Bukharins dialectic of imperialism (Imperialism and World Economy)
o Thesis: Capitalist competiton leads to the concentration and
centralization of capital. His process leads to the merging of capital
and the state in state capitalist trusts as the state must increasingly
involve itself in managing the economy domestically.
o Antithesis: The tendency for production, trade, and investment to
break out of national boundaries and to become organized on a global
scale.
o Synthesis: Economic competition between capitals increasingly tends
to take on the form of geopolitical competition (i.e. political and
military rivalries between states for territory, influence, and power).
Karl Kautsky (former Marxist turned Social Democrat)
o Globalization would make war obsolete and imperial powers would
consolidate their interests and form political alliances (League of
Nations; UN; NATO), however the fluctuating power of capital would
prevent such cooperation from happening according to Lenin
Woodrow Wilson (in private): Since trade ignores national boundaries and
the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his
nation must follow him, and the doors of the nationals which are closed
against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must
be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling
nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in
order that no useful cover of the world be overlooked or left unused.
Vladimir Lenin Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism
o Modern imperialism is a fundamentally economic phenomenon
o It is distinct from previous forms of empire and colonialism
o Five Features
! 1) The concentration of production and capital developed to
such a high stage that it created monopolies, which play a
decisive role in economic life.
!

2) The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the

creation, on the basis of this finance capital, of a financial
oligarchy

3) The export of capital, which has become extremely important

as distinguished from the expert of commodities
! 4) The foundation of international capitalist monopolies, which
shape the world among themselves
! 5)The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest
capitalist powers is completed
(Note: borders which separate the First and Third World are
constantly subject to debates about immigration)
(Note: The IMF)
The Labor Aristocracy
The State and Revolution
! State: a special organization of force: it is an organization of
violence for the suppression of some class.
! Dictatorship of Capital vs. Dictatorship of the Proletariat
! When old revolutionaries die, the bourgeoisie are not content
with labeling them enemies of the state, because that would
attract political radicals, so they attack the revolutionaries
theoretic writings by ascribing to them an anti-revolutionary,
social-democratic mediocrity contrary to the revolutionary
nature of Marx
!

o
o
o
o

The Second International (Socialism vs. Social Democracy)

Founded International Workers Day (May 1) and International Working
Womens Day (March 8)
Tensions between revolutionary socialists and social democrats over the
question of defending the homeland intensified during WWI until the Second
International was dissolved
USSR

Womens Rights
Race
LGBT rights (and relapse due to the conception of homosexuality as
bourgeois decadence)

What is Fascism?
Amalgamation of left and right political ideals

Populist, radical, authoritarian, nationalist

Opposed to liberalism and socialism (Third Way)
Capitalism in Decay
WWII - Socialism vs. Fascism vs. Military Keynesian liberal democracy
Why did German Social Democrats side with Nazis in the early 20s?
o Execution of Rosa Luxembourg and the throwing of communists and
socialists into concentration camps
o There is a latent chauvinism imbedded within the social democratic
project, which social democrats ignored due to pragmatic solutions
(must preserve the nation in the face of World War)

What is Social Democracy?

Political movement which seeks to establish democratic socialism through
gradual reforms
Or, Welfare State (capitalismo con cara humana)
U.S./CIA interventions during this period (1945-1980)
o 1949 Syrian coup dtat
o 1953 Iranian coup dtat
o 1953 Guatemala coup dtat
o 1955-1970 Tibet
o 1958 Indonesia
o 1959 Cuba
o 1960-63 Iraq
o 1960-1965 Democratic Republic of the Congo
o 1961 Dominican Republic
o 1963 South Vietnamese coup dtat
o 1964 Brazilian coup dtat
o 1966 Ghana
o 1970-73 Chile
o 1976 Argentina
o This is all PRE Reagan/Thatcher and only by US
Neoliberalism and the destruction of the welfare state

Current day oscillation between austerity and the welfare state in response to
the inevitable periodic crises of capitalism

Rise in crime, poverty, imprisonment of African Americans, foreign

intervention to open markets and export liberalism and democracy

Ideology, Moralism, and The Debate Over Property

Personal Possessions vs. Private Property
Contradiction between Life and Liberty and Property
Contradiction between Freedom to Sell Ones Labor Power and other
freedoms
David Graeber
o Debt: the First 5,000 Years
o Exchange demands political equality
o Thus Debt relations require the assumption of equality
o Thus, discussions of debt become clouded by the moral confusion
between debt as a purely economic category and debt as a particular
form of moral obligation
Angela Davis
o Accept the things I cannot change
o Change the things I cannot accept
o Accept the things I can change (Social Democracy as class warfare)
o Black Panthers, Malcolm X, and MLKs Nonviolence
Slavoj iek
o Anti-Semitism, Immigration, Women, and the Other
o Lacan The King and the Mad Man
o At some point the perception of property moved from a social relation
between persons with respect to things towards a material relation
between persons and things
o Reification The bourgeois property owner and the proletarian
espouser of liberal values
Oscar Wilde
o The Soul of Man Under Socialism
o Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their
slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by
those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated
it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most
harm are the people who try to do most good.

o Charity: There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private

property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the
institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
o The rich and the poor are equal as both have the equal right to sleep
under a bridge, go hungry, watch their children starve, etc.
Merits of Social Democracy
Pragmatic
Internal stability
Genuine progress
Addresses inequality
Final Criticisms of Social Democracy
Imperialism
Reform is impossible
Lenin
o Freedom for whom? Freedom to do what?
o What is to be done?
Helen Keller
o Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr.
McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle At the time the
compliments that he paid me were so generous that I blush to
remember them. But now that I have come out for Socialism he
reminds me and the public that I am deaf and blind and especially
liable to error. The Eagle and I are at war. When it fights back, let it
fight fair. It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and
others that I cannot see or hear.
Che Guevara
o At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true
revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to
think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.