History Hub

Cass

He seems to have believed in industrialization and the Capitalisation of the productive, distributive and commercial functions that went along with it. To that extent the State Capitalism of the Soviet Planning system that mirrored the gigantic US Capitalist building of what Kenneth Clarke called Heroic Materialism was a logical application of Marxism.

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Marx's crackpot theory - excuse me for expressing myself freely, but as far as I am concerned the preponderance of evidence is evident - revolved around the ownership of the means of production. In this sense you're on to the paradox. Somehow it is believed that seizing the said means of productions from the "Capitalists" and turn it over to the "State" would fix everything. The State? Yes. What is the State? That would be the Government. Why would the Government be the better custodian of the means of production? Presumably, because the Government is morally superior to the Capitalists. Although, honestly, I haven't seen any evidence of that anywhere.

In the recent past we have seen several countries, that had long been in the Stalinist mold, change to Capitalism. And then typically these countries got into a morass of Corruption and adopted aspects of totalitarianism, throwing away the baby with the bathwater. One such case is Russia itself.

Has there ever been a successful conversion from a "Communist society to a Capitalist one? What aspects of a modern Western Capitalist society are worth emulating and what are not?

Tas

Marx's crackpot theory - excuse me for expressing myself freely, but as far as I am concerned the preponderance of evidence is evident - revolved around the ownership of the means of production.

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I thought AJP Taylor made the best comment on Marxism.

According to him, it was just a minor variation on the old theme of "strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest". Marx's only original contribution was to propose that the last capitalists (and by his theory these would be few) should be garrotted at the same time. What he never explained was exactly why this curious operation should lead to a utopia and a classless society. Probably because whatever philosophe he studied under said so.

Marx was not necessarily a crackpot- apart from possibly believing that there is any point in postulating the inevitability of History. This seems to lead naturally- as with predestination- some people claiming to be able to know the course of history in advance, and/or spending their time second-guessing in a rational expectations way.

Thus for example Michael Moore, at the end of "Stupid White Men", in which the main target for his ire is George Bush Junior, reveals that HE himself had been the truly stupid white man.

He was so convinced that Al Gore would win the Presidency, and was only worried that Gore would have too great a mandate, that he used all of his campaigning skills to make sure that there would be a third candidate- for whom he campaigned with vigour. The result was that Gore lost- partly as Moore shows through naivity when it was necessary to get down to really dirty business. The inconvenient truth, however, is that governments can not always be squeaky-clean all of the time- which is why the most sensible option is to use governments only to deal with the nasty business that they were evolved to handle.

But this is where Marx came unstuck.... Perhaps like Professor Nutt he believed that events should be guided by science- in his case the science of history- but actually politics is not a science but the art of the possible, which makes it much more flexible.

As I have explained in the pieces that I put links for, German historians like Niebuhr, at the moment of Prussian/German humiliation by Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, envied the strength of the English State and modelled the Prussian Revolution on the English system. Then Germany went further in the development of the Big State thanks to historical research into the Medieval German Empire and the Roman Empire.

Britain post-1815, on the other hand, favoured small independent states like the new Latin American republics, Greece and Belgium, against the Three Emperor's League- and Metternick's police state, which forced Marx into political exile in Britain.

But, German history made the prospect of a newly powerful economic, military, and then political entity that could/should keep it safe in future attactive to many. The horrors of the Thirty Years War across the German plain would never be repeated.

So, as in the quote that Thomas B lifted, it seemed obvious to people like John Ruskin by 1869 that Britain had to go along with the development of state power- or alternatively, as Matthew Arnold put it, decline into the condition of a "Greater Holland".

By this time a number of rich industrialists/merchants/financiers were becoming active in politics- especially those with an evangelical Christian upbringing, even if like Gladstone the family had embraced the Church of England the evangelical blood came through.

In Gladstone's case this included walking the streets of an evening and picking up prostitutes to bring home to tea in Downing Street where the Gladstone's tried to save them.

Even more important was Joseph Chamberlain who developed Municipal Socialism in Birmingham, as well as a really effective Liberal Party political machine. Chamberlain's second wife might have been Beatrice Potter, daughter of a great railway financier, who disagreed with Chamberlain's ideas about helping the poor. Their relationship ended. But she later espoused Socialism and Sidney Webb, and became one of the great architects of the Labour Party.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, in a world of great powers such political figures in Britain decided that only state action could tackle the economic and social problems of the day; and writers like the Fabian Socialists developed the idea of moderate and gradual British Socialism.

But the issue of Home Rule for Ireland split the Liberal/Progressive caucus, so that the Tory Party tended to monopolise power. At the same time the Lib-Lab interest and the Labour Movement became increasingly interested in political representation. This would at least to help the Trade Unions, the Friendly Societies and the Self-Help movements-notably the Cooperative Movement that achieved a great deal in terms of "worker ownership".

In fact the first beginning of State Welfare- set up by a brief Liberal Government- elected on the basis of a Liberal/Labour deal to cooperate-led to a huge increase in trade union membership.

Trade Unions were accepted as the kind of "approved societies" that everyone had to belong to in order to access benefits, which increased their friendly society role exponentially. But this increased capacity of the ordinary citizens to cope with the new economic and industrial situation was drastically undermined by the sweeping State intervention during First World War.

As an educated working man like D.H.Lawrence could see, by this time state elementary schooling had drilled working people into Marx's industrial armies and they volunteered to go and fight under military orders in unprecendented numbers. Working people were thus programmed into losing their individuality and capacity to think for themselves and cope with life in a rounded way; and the economic effort behind the war persuaded many of the benefits of Nationalisation in the form of ownership of economic assets by the Government and not by the Nation.

What G.D.H. Cole called "the Gospel of British Socialism" along with the Syndicalist idea that the trade unions were THE essentially democratic machine played into the idea of group consciousness, rather than individualism, that was an accepted feature of the age- leading to the general use of collective identities like nationality, race, class, gender.

The woprkers could be told that the Middle Class had been able to dominate politics and use the powers of the State for its own "class interest", and now it was the turn of the "working class" to do the same. But inevitably, as the Victorian aristocracy had found, the working the new British Constitution was based upon Middle Class skills and competence.

But money and energy from the workers went into fighting through this essentially Middle Class machinery rather than making both the Society and Economy work for them as they had begun to do before 1869-70.

Cass

Plotinlaois

No. As I said Beatrice Potter married Sidney Webb and became Beatrice Webb.. I know it is confusing, but she is not to be confused with Beatrix Potter.

Cass

Plotinlaois,

Well my wife tells me that I never admit that I am wrong even when I am.. And that was a very likely mistake.

The Beatrice Potter story as she tells it in "My Apprenticeship" gives a very interesting insight into the Victorian Middle-Class and the emergence of the left-wing from that class.

I may have mentioned in a post that her grandfather- I think "Potter"- one of the founding activists in the creation of University College London,said that being thrown out of the Garden of Eden was the making of Humankind; otherwise we would have carried on living like pigs in an orchard..

As a child Beatrice and her sisters were taught by their mother to deal with the domestic staff for her, obeying the law of the market that said that you should never pay more than the market price. Her row with Joseph Chamberlain was over the question of whether such low-paid workers should be helped by the State. At the time he was in the Cabinet, and she vehemently opposed such ideas that went against her dead mother's precepts.

On her mother's death her father looked to her to run the house, and, as he became increasingly crippled- came to depend on her in all of his business trips. He was a major investor in the growth of the railways across the USA. As she looked like never marrying, he even offered to make her his business partner.

On his death she seems to have transferred some of her caring role to that strange genius Herbert Spencer- inventor of evolution and life-long friend of her father. Spencer also became crippled.

After his death she was volunteered to work for Charles Booth, the wealthy ship-owner, who set out to prove that poverty was being exaggerated. She went to work "underground" in London sweatshops. But I suspect that she fooled nobody, and seems to have been clearly "taken for a ride".

The things that the "girls" told her started up the whole modern study of incest, which she found was very common- according to the sweatshop girls ; and her inclinations were tending towards Socialism before she met "The Other One"- Sidney Webb.

Interestingly in view of Grandpa Potter, the Webbs were very largely responsible for the creation of the London School of Economics which they intended as a think tank for left-wing ideas.

I think that Mick Jagger got out in time.

Cass

PaulRyckier,

"Quebec" yes quite interesting I saw it on the computer with the ARTE 7+ and a second time in TV again. Quite interesting and for a German documentary perhaps less biased than some Canadian, French and British sources. I did during the years quite some research for "why North-America not French" and to say that I never heard about the Plains of Abraham to start.

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Is this that doc?

www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Message 74.

White Camry,

no I don't think so. But with the research sparked by your question I came to the documentary: "La fin de la Nouvelle-France" (The end of New-France) France, Canada 2009, 86 min. by Brian McKenna and Olivier Julien.

"Quite interesting and for a German documentary perhaps less biased than some Canadian, British and French sources"

White Camry, doom on me It's a French?, Canadian? documentary. At the end I will sound as my Greek friend. Normally I do research for the authors, but not this time. And it is not an excuse, but by hearing the documentary one has the choice between the French (normally I take French)and the German language and they both interfere in the English spoken parts. (in some countries as in Belgium and more and more on other broadcasters they give the original language with subtitles. But in any case that's not an excuse for my biased "thoughts" that a Canadian, British or French documentary would be more biased than a German one

To make it "good" again I did some research for the filmmakers. And for Brian McKenna I found:
www.rabble.ca/taxono...
I think that's the guy.

But for Olivier Julien I was less lucky, even with French words in Google. He made documentaries about the environment, about history and so on... But I didn't find anything about the person himself except that he did three campaigns at Aratta in Iran and that subject I discussed with lol beeble and Nordmann on the "Ancient and Archaeology". When finished this message I will do another research about the person in connection with the Aratta documentary.

White Camry, if you want to see the episode about the battle in comparison with your Part 15 of your documentary on you tube, coincidentally there is a "Part 3" from "my" documentary on you tube which refers to exactly the same as your Part 15. I had yesterday already enough trouble, I can only lead you there with "Type in Google": La fin de la Nouvelle-France arte (the end of new france) and you will find the three excerpts I mentioned (some passages are in English dubbed with some retardation in French). (For someone knowing the two languages not easy to follow).

Warm regards and with esteem,

Paul.

Dear Paul,

Thank you very much for the links with the recommended books. I´ll try to get some of them within the next months.

And some conspiracy theories taht I learned from a quick search in French. As the femme fatale, who betrayed him, and also as a mistake of the OSS? the former CIA...

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What I know about Jean Moulin is mostly from that two part film, screened on ARTE-TV last year. Although it has been mentioned in the films that it is an mixture of facts and fiction, it was more that some of those who has been first in the Resistance and then captured by the GESTAPO, has managed it to betray Moulin. But I might re-read the prints from that website about Jean Moulin which I´ve mentioned before. These website is an very good one and spots very close on the biography of Jean Moulin, even because it has been created by an Non-Frenchmen.

"I think that they have done the same like the grown up´s and seeked to move forward, forgetting about the past (some one more others less)." It looks logical especially in the BDR, but as you mentioned about the DDR there was not that much change. That was also the opinion of someone on the French forum, who had family in the former DDR.

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The problem is, that each society has to deal with people from their own which served to an oppressive regime. When you think about those short years after WWII in which that so called "Dis-Nazification" in Germany and Austria took place, the effords by the Allies got the more reduced the more the cold war has become more seriously.

I think that the people in the Soviet Occupation Zone might could have guessed in what kind of state they would be transferred. The militarisation of the society was similar in the USSR and the Third Reich. As long as some people has not been judged for war-crimes, they served as well in the MfS as former in the GESTAPO. Simply because the Soviets used their know-how.

And, Thomas, thank you very much for your friendly words that I estimate the more why I know from where they come.

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You are welcome.

See you the next time.

Best Regards.

Thomas