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Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2020 17:22:03 GMT
The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes BY MATT BRUENIG Here’s an idea: we should redistribute wealth from the largely white 1 percent to the poor and working class of all races — tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously. jacobinmag.com/2020/07/racial-wealth-gap-redistributionIn light of the recent resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests, there has been renewed discussion of the racial wealth gap and how to close it (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Annie Lowrey). I have written on this topic many times in the past (I, II, III, IV). One thing I have tried to emphasize over the years, which I will do again here in a different way, is that due to the extremely concentrated wealth distribution in the United States, the racial wealth gap is almost entirely about the upper classes in each racial group. I say this not to imply that it is unimportant, but rather because this fact must be grappled with upfront if we are going to make a serious effort to close the racial wealth gap. If you take the net worth of all white households and divide it by the number of white households, you get $900,600. If you do the same thing for black households, you get $140,000. The difference between these figures — $770,600 — is the best representation of the overall racial wealth gap. That is how much more wealth black people would need per household to have as much wealth as white people have per household.
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Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2020 17:28:06 GMT
Trump rails against Marxism and “international socialism” By Patrick Martin 6 July 2020 In his two speeches on July 3 and July 4, marking US Independence Day, Donald Trump launched into new diatribes against socialism and Marxism, appealing to his ultra-right supporters on an increasingly fascistic basis. In his speech Friday night at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, Trump sought to take advantage of the confusion spread by attacks on the statues and monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and other heroes of the Civil War, as well as leaders of the American Revolution like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, by posturing as a defender of the leaders of these two democratic revolutions. But the substance of his appeal was diametrically opposed to the liberating democratic principles of the American Revolution and Civil War. His remarks were delivered barely a month after Trump went on national television to urge that the military intervene to suppress the mass protests against the police murder of George Floyd, in effect demanding the establishment of a military dictatorship in the United States, headed by himself. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/06/uspo-j06.html
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Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2020 11:25:50 GMT
Class Rules Everything Around Me BY PAUL HEIDEMAN The socialist emphasis on the centrality of class isn't about ignoring racial inequalities, but about crafting a politics capable of ending them. jacobinmag.com/2019/05/working-class-structure-oppression-capitalist-identityClass politics are on the rise. Insurgent teachers have brought the word “strike” back into the political lexicon, and Bernie Sanders is attracting millions with his jeremiads against the “billionaire class.” Some liberals, however, insist that there is nothing new to see here — that “class politics is just another form of identity politics.” The writer Jill Filipovic recently laid out this stance in a series of tweets, arguing “‘Working class’ is an identity. ‘Worker’ is an identity … None of these are neutral, universal defaults. Running on them is also identity politics.” Filipovic’s argument, directed against “red rose twitter,” has obvious roots in the split between Sanders supporters and the rest of the Democratic Party. In the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton sought to undermine Sanders’s claim to represent the left of the party by attacking him for supposedly ignoring issues of race and gender oppression. As she put it in one infamous sound bite, If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight? The argument that class politics is simply another kind of identity politics is, in essence, a continuation of this polemic. More fully articulated, it goes something like this: class is an identity like race or gender, but socialists wrongly think it’s the most important identity. So when they claim to be against liberal “identity politics,” they aren’t actually rejecting it, but simply promoting their favored version of it — while denigrating the fight against racial or gender oppression. This is a powerful and effective argument, for a few reasons. First, given the continuing salience of racial, gender, and other forms of non-class oppression in the US, any politics that doesn’t have a clear strategy for destroying them has no claim to the loyalty of the Left. Second, if one starts from the prevailing understanding of class in American liberalism, encapsulated in the social science term “socioeconomic status,” the argument is hard to disagree with.
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Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2020 17:28:55 GMT
As the world’s premier Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s intellectual range was unrivaled. Never one to pander to conventional politics, he was often a brave voice of dissent. Today more than ever, Hobsbawm’s work deserves serious examination. Eric Hobsbawm’s Century BY BRYAN D. PALMER jacobinmag.com/2020/07/eric-hobsbawn-life-history-richard-evansWere the British Marxist historians a coherent lot, congealed in the sameness of their affiliation to historical materialism? How like-minded were Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Dorothy Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Maurice Dobb, George Rudé, John Saville, Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, Dona Torr, and Margot Heinemann? Conventional wisdom tends to lump these figures together; recent discussion gestures lightly toward differentiation. There was, of course, mutual regard among these dissident historians. All shared a certain outlaw status during the Cold War years in which their research and writing largely first appeared. Commonality registered in their project of injecting a strong dose of class inequality into the weak tea of High Table histories preoccupied with the bland fare of one-class societies and their longue durée continuities. But to assume that the British Marxist historians produced histories out of some common template obscures important distinctions relating to research methods, stylistic sensibilities, and analytic orientations. The Marxisms of these distinguished practitioners of historical materialism parted ways intellectually and, over time, politically. Many left the Communist Party in 1956; some did not. Contentions simmered below the surface of an apparent, always uneasy, consensus. First among equals in this extraordinary Marxist contingent was Eric J. Hobsbawm. Widely recognized as the world’s premier Marxist historian, Hobsbawm’s intellectual range was unrivaled. Never one to pander to prevailing considerations, he was often a brave voice of dissent challenging convention. Well received throughout the Global South, where his writings were eagerly translated and sold exceedingly well, Hobsbawm’s influence and regard was resolutely international. There were few Marxists accorded the respect Hobsbawm garnered in distinct layers of the literary marketplace; his histories were embraced by disparate publics, among whom were many not especially committed to a radical reconstruction of the status quo.
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Post by Admin on Jul 10, 2020 15:03:05 GMT
Democratic socialism is a living political tradition that emphasizes the need to weaken the grip of capital, empower the working class, oppose authoritarianism, expand democracy, and shift our economy and society away from private profit and toward the fulfillment of social needs. It’s a vision worth debating — and defending. jacobinmag.com/2020/7/what-is-democratic-socialism-politicsDemocratic Socialism Is a Living Political Tradition
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Post by Admin on Jul 10, 2020 17:43:35 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2020 17:00:29 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2020 17:42:10 GMT
According to establishment pundits and politicians, countries have “national interests” they carry out in the international arena. But “national interests” is just another phrase for ruling-class interests. The old socialist argument is true: workers of all countries have more in common with each other than their respective countries’ ruling elites. There’s No Such Thing as the “National Interest” BY JOHN CARL BAKER jacobinmag.com/2020/07/us-foreign-policy-national-interest
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Post by Admin on Jul 12, 2020 18:02:37 GMT
Will the work ethic decline under socialism? No — socialism empowers ordinary people to be active participants in shaping the economy. And that’s a lot more motivating than fear of losing your job. jacobinmag.com/2019/10/work-ethic-socialism-bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-corteze’re lucky to be living in a time when the word “socialism” is not anathema in the United States, the beating heart of global capitalism. A new poll by the Pew Research Center reveals that 42 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism. Those who have a negative view still constitute a majority, but a slim one: 55 percent. Other surveys have turned up similar results in the last few years, ever since Bernie Sanders first ran for president as a democratic socialist and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won office calling herself the same. This poll is particularly interesting, though, because respondents were also asked to identify reasons they liked or didn’t like socialism. Of the 55 percent of respondents who had a negative view of socialism, the top reason they gave was that it “undermines work ethic.” This invites a discussion about the nature of work today, and what it could become. Work ethic is a value that Americans have always held close to their hearts — a mixture, as many have pointed out, of both early Protestant and capitalist ideologies. There are exceptions, of course, but many Americans believe that there’s something inherently virtuous about working like a dog; and we do. At least 134 countries have laws establishing the maximum length of the work week, but the United States doesn’t. And, unlike many other countries, US workers aren’t federally entitled to paid holidays, vacation days, sick leave, or parental leave. As a result, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.” Every hour worked is an hour that can never be retrieved. It’s also an hour from which economic elites profit, and they aren’t sharing those profits. The ideology that places a premium on “work ethic” helps keep this unequal system in place. It shames workers for being lazy if they register an objection to how hard or long they’re expected to work, and it also rewards workers with a sense of pride if they spend their days making profits for somebody else without grumbling (think of that pride as a sort of consolation prize). It therefore benefits a tiny wealthy minority at the expense of the vast majority of people. We should dispense with “work ethic” as it’s currently understood, and we should replace it with something way better: taking pride in and deriving meaning from the nature of our work itself, not from the mere ability to perform it without complaining. Under capitalism, lots of workers hate their jobs, but they have to perform them anyway in order to afford the basic necessities of life. Karl Marx was concerned about the way that capitalism “alienates” labor, or turns the worker into a drone detached from the goods they’re producing or services they’re rendering, with no control over how they spend the majority of their waking hours and no clear sense of purpose. Marx concluded that alienation of labor is a natural consequence of a system where work is allocated not based on what society needs but on what’s profitable for a few. Under capitalism, everything firms do is to make money — and that’s it. The result is a proliferation of jobs that are as socially useless as they are demanding, and billions of people around the world performing those jobs with no input or sense of connection to the work itself. Socialists propose to completely change the nature of work. In a truly democratic socialist society, no longer would anyone be allowed to make a profit without lifting a finger themselves and to use their wealth and power to set the terms and conditions of everybody else’s workday. Instead, people would come together democratically to decide what kind of society they want to see — what needs should be met, what problems ought to be solved — and would work backward from that to identify what kind of work needs to be done to make our collective dreams a reality. This society would then empower democratically accountable planning agencies to figure out how to go about training and attracting people to these jobs. Once hired, workers would have the ability to make decisions collectively about how firms operate, including how much they internally compensate for what type of work. This would be much less chaotic and more logical than the current arrangement, where the vast majority of decisions about the economy and production are made by people with wealth who are driven by the sole ambition of acquiring more wealth. It would also be much more empowering to workers themselves, who would truly operate like a team — a feeling that corporations today try hard to mimic with management clichés, always laughably falling short. Of course there will be work under socialism — though surely less of it — and we want people to feel motivated to perform it and to take pride in it. But rather than guilting workers into breaking their backs for somebody else’s profit and castigating them for not finding that particularly fulfilling, we should endeavor to deliberately create an economic and political system that motivates workers by empowering them as decision-makers, both in the civic sphere and in the workplace. Our goal should be to foster a whole new type of “work ethic,” one that doesn’t just translate to grin-and-bear-it stamina, but instead to a hunger for active participation and avenues to exercise agency. Under democratic socialism, workers would not only be able to explain how their work contributes to society, but also endeavor to make change if they find the rationales insufficient — pathways that are completely blocked for most workers today. Considerations about people’s relationship to work need not turn people off socialism. On the contrary, they ought to excite people about socialism’s potential. Under capitalism, too many people are simply biding their time, watching the clock, working for the weekend. We can have a new type of society, one in which people work not just to survive while the bosses live in luxury, but in which we work to meet our collective needs instead — and find much greater fulfillment in the process.
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Post by Admin on Jul 12, 2020 22:25:21 GMT
"A program for combating the climate crisis and lifting millions of working class and poor people out of poverty, debt and misery requires that we look beyond the “possibilities” capitalism offers. We need democratic control of our economy right now. Climate change will strengthen capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward barbarism. There is simply no time to put our hopes on small reforms and “market-based” solutions that accomplish nothing." A Green New Deal Can’t Save Us. A Planned Economy Can. Capitalism has put humankind and much of the Earth at the brink of catastrophe. But there is a way out. The solution isn’t a green new deal. It’s a communist, democratically run planned economy www.leftvoice.org/a-green-new-deal-cant-save-us-a-planned-economy-can
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Post by Admin on Jul 13, 2020 16:32:32 GMT
The 1 Percent Are Cheating Us Out of a Quarter-Trillion Dollars in Taxes Every Year BY DAVID SIROTA As the social safety net is shredded, new data show that billionaires and corporations are refusing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars of owed taxes every single year. It really puts all the hand-wringing about “looting” into perspective. jacobinmag.com/2020/07/irs-tax-havens-evasion-revenue-trump-budget-office"The next time you hear conservative politicians insist they want “law and order,” hate “looting,” and believe America can’t afford new government programs, show them two landmark reports that emerged in the last twenty-four hours. The data in those analyses tell the story of conservative politicians letting billionaires and corporations brazenly evade laws and effectively loot hundreds of billions of dollars from the public treasury — all while those same politicians plead poverty to justify cutting the social safety net during a lethal pandemic. The first report came from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that between 2011 and 2013, $381 billion in taxes went unpaid every single year. Couple that data with recent Harvard University research showing that the top 1 percent of income earners are responsible for 70 percent of the tax gap, and you see the full picture: The wealthiest sliver of the population is depriving the American public of about $266 billion of owed tax revenue every year. That tax gap didn’t just magically happen — it is the result of conservatives’ huge cuts to the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement budget, which resulted in a particularly precipitous decline in audit rates for the superrich. In fact, the $266 billion figure could be an understatement, because the congressional budget analysts were estimating the tax gap that existed before those IRS budget cuts."
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Post by Admin on Jul 13, 2020 16:41:27 GMT
What did Marx mean by ‘abolish the wages system’? The exploitation inherent in the wage system was more obvious in Marx's time, but has essentially remained the same — and today it's far easier to imagine a world without wages entirely, where goods and services are free, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/what-did-marx-mean-abolish-wages-system"There are two questions here: how that abolition might be achieved and what a society that replaces it might look like. But before suggesting the answers, let’s first examine in more depth what the “wages system” is. For Marx’s readers the answer would probably have been obvious — the “wages system” is another word for capitalism, a situation in which capitalists own the means of production (raw materials, machinery, factories, means of distribution and exchange), exploit the “labour power” of workers, extracting more from them in the way of work than the workers themselves receive in wages (their “surplus value”) and then sell the commodities they produce on a market, realising that value as a profit. Today the answer would be a little more complicated. With the decline in manufacturing — in Britain at least — the process of extracting surplus value is often distanced from the manufacture of commodities. Facebook, for example, makes its profits by advertising goods and services that are produced by the labour of workers all over the world. Financialisation of the global economy has meant that the creation of profit is often based on what Marx called “fictitious capital,” distanced from the production of physical goods and services. In parallel the nature of the “labour market” (how capitalists secure labour power) has changed. There has been a huge rise in genuine as well as bogus self-employment, in agency working, zero-hours contracts and in what used to be called “piece-work” — no longer so much in the production of physical products, but (for example) in sales and delivery work. Wage differentials have increased enormously as has the division of wealth in our society. And, despite four decades of vicious attacks on public services, the “social wage” — including education and (as the Covid-19 pandemic has brought home to anyone who was unsure of it) the NHS and other welfare provision — is still vitally important to the lives of everyone. But the fundamental nature of exploitation remains the same as in Marx’s day. Today, as then, “the wages system” is a kind of shorthand for the often complicated processes whereby surplus value is extracted from ordinary people. Its abolition — ending exploitation — will involve democratic popular control of what Marxists call the “means of production, distribution and exchange.” Marx and Engels continually asserted that piecemeal reforms could never achieve the transformation to a non-exploitative society and that slogans such as “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” were actually counterproductive because they tacitly accepted the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism. History seems to have borne out that prediction, particularly in Britain under successive governments, both Labour and Conservative. In a speech to the International Working Men’s Association, June 1865 (later published as a pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit) Marx declared “Workers ought not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. […] Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” So the slogan “abolish the wages system” was advanced in opposition to those who (like most social reformers today) argue for modest changes to the existing system to reduce inequality. It is a challenge to the idea that it is somehow possible to retain a capitalist mode of production and superimpose on it socialist policies of distribution. Incidentally, the slogan was also advanced against those who thought (as some do today) that capitalism would disappear of its own accord or that it could be transformed by appeals to common sense or by proposals for utopian schemes including those based on earlier forms of commodity exchange such as barter. Capitalism, inherently exploitative and oppressive, had to be ended. Limited advances are possible within capitalism. In the decades immediately after the second world war a strong labour and trades union movement was able to secure a huge growth in the “social wage,” particularly in health and welfare services and in education. Today much of that has been reversed, through privatisation and outsourcing as well as direct cuts. The full impact has yet to be felt as the economic consequences have been hidden through the selling off of public assets, particularly land, housing and transport and other infrastructure. Labour’s 2019 manifesto was far from a fully socialist programme. In many ways it would have of itself secured little more than a partial return to what used to be called the “mixed economy” which the organised left had managed to secure in the three decades after 1945. But — had Labour been elected — it would have been an important first step in the advance to socialism in Britain, bitterly resisted by those whose interests it threatened and therefore requiring further measures — particularly in relation to financial capital — if the benefits of people’s labour were to accrue to society as a whole rather than to “the few” who currently control our lives. Ironically, some of the manifesto’s proposals — unthinkable before the Covid-19 pandemic hit — have become “the new norm” at least during this crisis. Other elements of the manifesto — such as the provision of free broadband — could have become part of a programme of provision of universal basic services which would have improved life for “the many” and contributed to the reduction of inequality, although they would not have altered the fundamentally exploitative nature of capitalism. Luxembourg (for example) has recently, along with around 100 towns and cities worldwide, made its public transport system free to everyone. But the wages system still exists; many of the transport networks are operated by private, profit-making companies and the system is subsidised from taxation — in the last analysis a charge on the value produced by working people. However — like the NHS in Britain — it provides a glimpse of what might be possible within a truly socialist economic system." Rest in Link.
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Post by Admin on Jul 13, 2020 17:46:20 GMT
Socialism’s DIY Computer By Michael Eby The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple – to make technology available to everyone. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/make-your-own-self-managed-socialist-microcomputer"The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a political anomaly. Ruled by a Communist Party but spurned by the Eastern Bloc following the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, this federation of six republics was held together under Tito’s banner of an inter-ethnic, inter-religious, and international “brotherhood and unity.” Subsequent to its repudiation by the USSR, Yugoslavia bootstrapped its geopolitical precarity into a Herculean effort to chart a middle course between the two world superpowers. Along with Egypt, Ghana, India, and Indonesia, the country founded the “non-aligned movement,” a patchwork of developing nations aspiring to chart a decolonial “third option” of formal neutrality during the Cold War. This constituted one of the few genuine anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial international alliances of the twentieth century. Yugoslavia’s unique geopolitical situation and its infrastructural autonomy constituted the fertile ground upon which the seeds of the country’s national identity were planted. The fast-track growth of defense stockpiles and industrial facilities after the war, and especially after Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in 1948, necessitated nothing less than a logistics revolution. Robust calculating machinery was essential for the comprehensive real-time monitoring of vast quantities of commodities in production and exchange. Moving to fill this demand, a local computing industry began to bloom. Dr. Rajko Tomović—a roboticist instrumental to the invention of the world’s first five-fingered artificial hand—worked alongside teams of mathematicians and mechanical engineers at the Institute for Nuclear Sciences, Vinča, and Belgrade’s Telecommunication and Electronics Institute, Mihajlo Pupin (later the Mihajlo Pupin Institute) to develop manufacturing techniques using local instruments and local parts. The rise in living standards throughout the 1960s and 1970s introduced a need for the ever-more widespread adoption of bookkeeping computers in bureaucracy. Yugoslavia became a technological pressure-cooker, incubating an idiosyncratic computer culture that flowered due to intense institutional support. But computers were expensive. The average price of an Iskradata 1680, Sinclair ZX81, or Commodore 64—standard consumer-grade systems, found across the country’s government offices, accounting firms, and university science labs—exceeded by many times the monthly salary of the average Yugoslavian worker. Compounding this hurdle were the tight restrictions imposed by the country on imports of any item costing greater than 50 Deutschmarks; that limit was well under the amount needed to buy an 8-bit microcomputer produced anywhere on the continent. As a result, throughout the 1970s computer ownership, experimentation, and programming were the domain of an educated and well-to-do select few Yugoslavian youth. Often, members of local art, music, and literary movements like the New Tendencies, the Novi Val (New Wave), and science fiction scenes would pool their money in order to collectively acquire a machine. But Yugoslavia’s cultural tradition of self-taught expertise endured. While on holiday in Risan, Montenegro in the early 1980s, amateur radio and digital electronics enthusiast Voja Antonić devised the basic conceptual schema for an elementary microcomputer. Antonić was already a reputed engineer; in the past, he had developed Arbitar, an official timing system used on several Balkan ski contests, as well as an interface for transferring frames from monochrome monitors to 16mm film. On his Montenegrin vacation, Antonić read the application manual for a new line of single-chip CPUs produced by the RCA Corporation. It gave him an idea. Rather than using a sophisticated and pricey video controller, Antonić wondered if it might be possible to construct a computer whose 64×48 block graphics were wholly generated using just a cheap Zilog Z80A microprocessor—a CPU readily available in electronics stores throughout Yugoslavia. Upon returning home, Antonić tested his idea, finding it worked nicely. The effect of his critical intervention was twofold: it reduced the computer’s overall price and streamlined its design. More importantly than this, though, was the fact that the schematic was so simple, users could assemble the computer themselves." Rest in Link.
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Post by Admin on Jul 14, 2020 1:46:00 GMT
"A common misconception of anarchism, socialism and communism is that under any of the aforementioned ideologies, you won’t be able to own your own pants, toothbrush, car and so on. The nasty commies will take it all away and you’ll have to make do with drab grey overalls, inefficient and delayed public transport, communal toothbrushes (not that you’ll have much to eat in the United Socialist States of America) etc. Often, this is a genuine error on the speakers part. However it does bring into question whether those arguing against these economic and social systems should be doing so without at least a smidgen of an idea about what private property really is. The intention of this article is to arm you with more knowledge about what type of property is ‘theft’ and the difference between property and possession in the hope for more intelligent debate. Apart from a few passing comments, I don’t intend to provide a comprehensive justification for abolishing private property, nor will I lay out the alternatives to private property and the capitalist economic system; as again these are subjects for a whole other article." Property vs. Possession & why communism won’t take your toothbrush medium.com/@storpip/property-vs-possession-why-communism-wont-take-your-toothbrush-917c4508
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Post by Admin on Jul 14, 2020 18:42:08 GMT
Yes, the French Revolution was necessary – and its spirit should animate us today. www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/yes-the-french-revolution-was-necessaryWhat is at stake here is a choice between two contrasting views of the French Revolution. For a whole lineage of historians stretching from Alexis de Tocqueville to François Furet, the substance of the revolutionary upheaval was already under way, if not completed, by the end of the ancien régime. An American-style revolution, calm and democratic, would have led to the same end result, while avoiding sound, fury, and the guillotine: “The Revolution finished off suddenly by a convulsive and painful effort, without a period of transition, throwing caution aside and without any consideration, what would have automatically been finished gradually and by slow degrees.” In his commentary on Tocqueville, Furet argues that the ancien régime was already dead: “The revolutionary consciousness, from 1789 on, was informed by the illusion of defeating a state that had already ceased to exist.” He reaches the following verdict: “nothing resembled French society under Louis XVI more than French society under Louis-Philippe.” Tocqueville explains how centralization was established on top of “a diversity of rules and authorities” that were the debris of the feudal order. At the summit was the royal council, which was the supreme court of justice as well as the higher administrative authority, and “subject to the king’s approval [had] legislative powers; it could debate and propose most laws; it fixed levies and distributed taxes.” Internal affairs had been entrusted to a single individual, the controller-general, who “gradually monopolized the whole public administration.” In the provinces, in parallel with the governors — an honorary and remunerative office — the intendant was “the sole representative of the government” in his sphere. In short, “we owe ‘administrative centralization’ not to the Revolution or the Empire, as some say, but to the old Regime.” How could such a well-oiled administration disappear at the first shock, evaporating without resistance in the summer of 1789? Elements of an answer can be found in the picture drawn by Albert Mathiez: Confusion and chaos reigned everywhere . . . The controller-general of finances admitted that it was impossible for him to draw up a regular budget owing to the absence of a clearly defined financial year, the vast number of different accounts . . . One minister would protect the philosophes while another was persecuting them. Jealousies and intrigues were rife. . . The interests of the public were no longer protected. The divine right of absolutism served as an excuse for every kind of waste, arbitrary procedure, and abuse. In describing French society of the 1780s, it is customary to follow the divisions made in the Estates-General — nobility, clergy, and Third Estate. This has a certain logic, provided we keep in mind that these “orders” were not compact and homogeneous blocs, as the train of events would very shortly demonstrate.
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