pre-distribution of wealth?

A strong communist government would not be totalitarian or repressive at all. In fact with the oppressive force of capital taken out of the system, people would be freer, more autonomous, more democratically empowered and- ironically- more free to develop themselves as individuals, but with the added advantage of the supportive framework of a community administered by a democratically elected assembly of your peers. All the things the capitalist political system promises to deliver, but of course does not, nor ever will. The fact that a communist system WOULD actually deliver this, is a reality the capitalist elite are at all times, desparate to keep from public awareness :)))

Your thoughts are clear enough, Zip Domingo. But your resolve is weak. Typically, the capitalist system makes use of trends and revolutions of a modest character, which is what happened to the last pitiful batch of strikes and revolutionary acts in France, in 1968. Unless a revolt is willing to be ultra violent, it will be taken over by capitalism, without question. Capitalism, in fact, will thrive from this opposition to itself.

A revolt has to be unafraid, in order to succeed, to find and then smash the nexus or knot around which the capitalist system lives and gains power.

It is also a mistake, I believe, to equate 'the capitalist' system with 'the elite', as if they were a group of people, or a set of individuals. They are not, but rather, capitalism is a movement which scoops up some and throws aside the many. It could be likened to the World Spirit, and for this reason, while being 'ultra violent' in the revolt which is necessary, unbearably violent and destructive, and mindless, the revolt need not necessarily be murderous.

The revolt more or less must be 'mindless'. If not, it will abjure itself and compromise for some foreseen result. A revolution need not have an aim in mind when it starts. Having an aim will tie it down. Rather, the aim must be worked out in the strenuous efforts in the aftermath of the takeover, during which time capitalist liberalism will tend to reassert itself, and during which the revolt will have a period in which to discover the way ahead.

--

Robespierre was a decent calm person, a rational man. One who, for the sake of universal justice, had to remove entirely those who objected so obviously to universal justice. As enemies of it, they were shown no mercy at all. Is it kindness to spare the enemies of justice? or is that an abhorent and evil weakness? I suppose that only people who are prepared to be coldly on the side of absolute justice are capable of starting and succeeding in a revolution.

My feeling is that there would not be a need for such a revolt unless there were also the obvious danger that capitalism is going to not just ruin us financially, but wipe out our species.

There has never been a peaceful transition from one system of culture and politics to an other totally different. This is why the hippies were totally useless in their dreaming, and we have inherited nothing from their generation but a deeper entrenchment of global caplitalism.

You've contradicted yourself
First of all you talk about a revolt being strong in resolve in order to succeed and then near the end you say we don't need a revolt after all, Capitalism might ruin most of us financially and put us back in the dark ages so we are all better letting it do that anyway according to you!
Zip Domingo has laid it out squarely and although I don't share his optimistic outlook on the way society will progress I think he has the right idea on what society should evolve into.

The West's system of aggressive acquisition by means of war has always been cautious: our armies are rarely very big. But some day there might be a general war, and that will bring about the end of Capitalism in the following way: Our revolution will, like the October Revolution, probably come about like the (disgraceful and half-hearted) Nazi one. (The Nazi revolt was half-hearted and that is why it was also Evil.)

It came about when a generation of demobilised soldiers came home shell shocked and familiar with death and 'victory at all costs'. Such damaged or purified people are perhaps alone capable of enacting a true takeover and then defence of their ideals. War reveals who are kings, who are slaves, who are gods and who mortals. The gods love those who die in battle, etc etc. That is, the high point of human existence is found in battle, and life expresses itself through us in its highest form in strife.

Most anti-liberal (liberal in the sense of Blair's liberalism, and Bush's freedom of the free and liberated democracies), most anti-Caplitalist philosophers, have sought out and found the alternative to Capitalist consumption and delusion in The Event, the mysterious meeting of the noumenal with the phenomenal. That Event usually turns out to be an act of revolt by the idealist citizen, a near relation of combat in wartime by a soldier.

No. What I mean is, and what I say is, Caplitalism will ruin us - so there must be a revolution. The revolution would only succeed if there were the resolve to begin, and the resolve to defend it.

Well I'm pleased to hear it Jason, there has to be change otherwise the system we have now will stagnate and probably sooner rather than later implode.

Zip: I doubt if the British will mind, in the first instance, putting up with a totalitarian state so long as they have telly, football, fashion and lots of other distracting pastimes to keep them occupied.

Tinkering with and changing the system we have now is exactly what we do not want, Brian. That is the whole point I am making: that half-measures just make things worse, always make capital stronger.

The system will implode if it is left to itself: but I am not going to add some zest to it with a bit of protesting and some energetic new ideas for liberation.

The system will possibly kill us all if it is left to itself, and if it is given some more zizz by romantic idealists and bleeding-heart anarchists. How? All the vanguard ideas of the Left, the young, the generation without history, are complimentary to global capital:

charitable interventions
welfare handouts derived from state taxation
further scientific advances and technologies
more freedom of expression along lines dictated by an increasingly empty sense of selfhood
more freedom to exist free from any harm (and therefore, more restrictions on other people coming near me - more restrictions, that is)
more education at our universities

All of these, and more, are things the majority would never give up on. And so, they just want little changes. There is no way out from this. There is no alternative.

Or, there is an alternative, but we are too afraid to admit it, or do it. The odds against a revolt are impossibly great. The less likely the better, I suppose, since the more impossible it is, and the more repressed we are, the more likely it is that it will actually happen.

Revolutions don't belong to the linear course of history, or the everyday plausibilities of normal life.

Perhaps we could have reforms along the lines of the OT Year of Jubilee, in which all debts were supposed to be forgiven. Now-a-days reduced would do. Then again, the filthy, greedy rich won't give up a farthing, except where their own self-interest is involved.

Thanks to the more serious posters here who have responded in adding to the discussion, unlike our two troll friends, Itchy and Scratchy.

Gille, thanks for the thumbs up, I thought this was an important speech from Miliband, but is it just him doing a Nick Clegg in promising something he knows he can never fulfil? I asked the question was there any difference in the use of terminology, I'm not sure I thought it was the same thing. Predistribution means apportioning the "cake" as it is at the source, rather than after the wealthy have had often years before they actually pay their taxes, and after they have managed to eek legal proceedings out long enough that the Exchequer is happy to accept whatever they can get out of the bustards. Vodaphone for example. £6bn isn't it......still waiting for the money. By the time we do get just some of what they owe, the country has gone bust, and people will have been kicked off benefits, out of their houses, and left to starve in the streets.

Christine Legarde told the greeks, that she didn't care about people being forced into that situation, she just wanted them (the poor not the rich), to pay their taxes. Now another Eurocrat has told them they will have to work longer .....
i.e. 6 days a week, for much less money, and very few public services, that's assuming anyone over there has a job anymore, or they get no more bailouts. I think their rate is now 25%. Well I suggest, that we, the great unwashed, all demand instead that the Eurocrats, Technocrats, Tax Haveners and Banksters, those who comitted the crimes of economic fraud are taken by force and locked in a bleak room, bread and water only, 24/7, for however many weeks, months, even years, it takes, and not be let out until they find the solution, perhaps by coughing up the money they are hiding in offshore accounts, until they come up with the answer to the problems THEY created. I mean that they finally admit it is they who have perpertrated the biggest financial fraud in human history.

Then all they have to do, is pay back all the money they've stolen from the people, and we lock them all up forever and throw away the key. Then we all start again, afresh, and wait and see just how long it takes for it to start all over again.

Molly: Great ideas, but the problem is that it's the Eurocrats, Technocrats, Tax Haveners and Banksters who also have the power. There will be no locking them up in a bleak room...

Unless we all turn out at the next general election and vote for a radically different kind of political party. But that won't happen whilst people have their distractions and pastimes.

Hi Jason many good observations in your previous few posts and I'll try and touch on a couple here...you are obviously a fan of Slavoj Zizek :)

Like Zizek though, in his quest for a 'purity' in revolution, there is a tendency to get caught up in contradictions and although the simplicity of ultra-violent revolution wiping the slate clean is admirable, I think it eventually stumbles though, through its own inherent insecurities and unpredictabilities -you said yourself you were not sure whether it will or will not happen- and for all its posturing is a fragile thing. As such, without a firm foundation in the society it is intent on changing, such a revolution IMO would go the same way as the Russian one. It's an admirable if idealistic position to take though, and one that I am not wholly unreceptive to.

I believe the road to viable communism however is an incremental process, jump-started a certain points by revolution where the opportunities arise. It can be peaceful, or violent. The aim [and hope] for peaceful change is not some 60s hippy unrealsitic dreaming; vast change in Europe happened in the late 80s/early 90s totally unexpectedly and swiftly with hardly a shot fired. There is no reason great change cannot happen again in advanced societies, the same way. I am a realist as well though and admit that violent change may well be on the cards, as a perfect storm of economic collapse, climate change and resource depletion hits us head on over the next couple of decades. In these circumstances, your great cleansing revolution will become a very attractive proposition; I think it's debateble however, how sustainable it would be in the long run if it ever came about though.

I take your point about the capitalist sytem being something akin to a 'world spirit.' It is insidious, all-pervading, and self-serving. I don't think it is a mistake to equate the system with an elite group of people though at all; capitalism is an elitist project, it IS headed by an elite group of individuals- the capitalist class- aided and abetted by a larger, complicit but less powerful bourgeoise. This is the very basis of Marxist thought. This is no more apparent than today, where a small group of globally active individuals control a huge amount of the world's resources. Neoliberalism has promoted this myth that 'we are all capitalists now.' We are of course, nothing of the sort.

That elite however, is surprisingly very weak. It has a fragile power base, because that 21st century elite is short-termist, largely ideology-free, individualistic and rootless. Members of that elite have no wider vision for the world [or their own self-interest group for that matter], other than their own personal enrichment.

This is a huge weakness that once challenged- whether by man-made economic disaster or the hand of nature- will see that elite standing on very shaky ground. It is that weakness any 'active' revolution will have to exploit, building on the incremental socialist achievements prior to it. Overall the revolution will be more of an uneven, lengthier process of change punctured no doubt by sudden [probably violent] activity, but unless the West falls apart and descends to third world levels of poverty [which is highly unlikely], mass, ultra-violent uprisings are not going to happen. Unromantic and boring I know, but realistic :)

Hi Molly great thread although a couple of us seem to have hijacked it to debate the finer points of communism- still vaguely relevant though I think :)))

Ed Miliband is a very interesting politician to my mind and you get hints at what he is developing in his thinking. The fact that he is actually reading, thinking and listening is a good start in itself, things the Tory Party as a whole, not just it leadership, seem to have now rejected as wholly unnecessary.

The idea of pre-distributive taxation is an interesting one and he may well be onto something here; I just hope he has the conviction to see some of his more radical ideas through and doesn't succumb to the still powerful new Labour pressure to water everything down to appeal to this mythical Middle England demographic.

In a funny sort of way this seems to me a Thatcher moment in history, a bit like the late 70s. She was vague about her radical ideas before election and viewed as 'awkward' presentation-wise, but once in No. 10, went full flight into practising her ideology and finding her own strong, political voice. It may well happen again, but at the other end of the political spectrum :)

Zip Domingo

You are a clever person. Your explanations of what will happen and what you would like to happen are common sense and people agree. You possibly can hear some segment of yourself telling you that it is actually you yourself which is the bulwark of capitalism. We are not all capitalists, but we are all bourgeois.

Happily, you are wrong about Marxism, and it is not bourgeois attitudes that are the problem.

Surely it is today ridiculous to think that democracy and doing any voting is going to have any significance at all on anything. It is dreadful wishful thinking. Anecdotal evidence about the results of elections over the past few decades is not necessary. It is perhaps more necessary to point out that there is not one person, even on here, who thinks that more growth and more investment in this collective of ours is actually a bad thing.

You express a common sense view of things, and tell me that the heart of Marxist thought is something like: the elite backed up by the middle class, vs, the rest of us.

This is not so. Marxism is a system of philosophy. That is, it is the enemy of common sense. When we point out that, in Hegelian thought, there is a pattern of 'the identity of opposites' throughout history, we can see it happening - though it flies in the face of common sense. You vote for Labour and Blair, you get the opposite: Thatcher. They are the same. History always sees to it that opposites are identical.

History works by the 'negation of the negation'. You negate the bourgeoisie. And then you MUST negate that negation, and you must reach this deathly destructive new synthesis which is the bourgeoisie in a new form.

Mao negates Western Imperialism and capitalism. Then he negates the negation and gives birth to the greatest explosion of caplitalism in history.

--

Let's face it: the essence of Marxism is the eradication of private property.
Essentially, the poor do not have property, they have only their bodies, for a certain time of the day. They do not have their own bodies, so they have only their own subjectivity. And this subjectivity is an empty void which weighs heavily on them since it has no world.

Philosophers have no need of private property. Marxism is the politics of philosophy. It is the anthropic putting into human terms of philosophy.

To reduce things down to common sense terms and expectations is a betrayal.

--

Drifting free of private property is the ideal that the Left should follow, but will not. It would have to be enforced; it would change everything. Private property is an offence against Virtue, and only virtue could police its eradication.

So, when 'people' like Ed Milliband propose nothing of this kind, and attempt to lead a country which has entirely discreditted Virtue, you can easily see that Democracy and these fake empirical common sense leaders of it are never going to be able to stop Capitalism and the devastation of the Earth and of the future.

It is only the human personality, the Will, the urges of possessiveness AND actually possessing things, which distinguishes the rich. The non-rich are the same people, but they do not actually possess anything. In themselves, the rich are as human as us, and no different. they are not essentially 'an elite'. It is the Market, and the system of exchanges which are the real enemy, and these are based on everybody's acceptance of this 'private property', not on some ruling elite's control of things.

As you said, Marx himself brewed up the problems which followed the October Revolution. The problems were internal to his system and his work. This is so by the nature of all propositions for something new. If I propose no private property, this proposition will have in its turn to be negated. There will be Terror, and resistance. But whether the virtuous are part of the new synthesis following it: that will require people who recognise the Spiritual nature of reality, and who are prepared to see it through to the end, whatever the cost - to echo Winston Churchill.

It is also wierd, don't you think, that you say that great changes can happen as they did in Europe in the 80s and 90s, without a shot fired.

That is, you welcome as a victory the end of communism. And you seem also to recommend communism! What is the underlying logic of this position you take on the great changes you would like to see? What? More Western 'democracy', more, for instance 'Operation Iraqi Freedom', or, more of the free market non-interference which gave us modern Russia, modern Poland?

The peaceful revolutions you have described as evidence of change in the right direction are actually deeper embedding of capitalism and liberalism. You are free to admire these things. But, if these are meant as proofs of the inadequacy of upheaval and revolt, and proofs of the adequacy of peaceful change in a socialist direction, then you have made a mistake in your thinking.

People motivated by resentment, envy, anger, and distress about global catastrophe are going to be receptive to communist ideas?
This is what some people, in a forgiveable self-delusion, believe will bring about some sort of economic change in the future.

How, then, are savage and badly motivated people, enjoined to act because of their bad tempers and their vices, going to make any revolution, or make any decent change at all? I don't think this is remotely plausible.

We, when we have made change in history, have done so on the basis of thought and decision. Being pushed into murdering your boss because he bullies and pays himself more money than you get is not a revolt. It is a petty and insignificant outburst of temper which will lead to regret. Voting for the 'kind party' en masse after a decade of the 'nasty party' is little different.

--

Forgive me for being dedicated to this idea. I have spent a lot of time meditating on Heidegger's notion of the desertification of being by technology, capitalism and liberalism. On the level of ontology and Being, this ruin of human and environmental existence has been going on for a long time. But it is getting to the point that on the reality and ontic level, the ruin is becoming obvious too, and perhaps the time has come to face up to the responsiblity of being able to think and decide and work together.

Imagining that things will only get better and that some (non existent?) examples of peaceful revolution are going to do the job for us piecemeal is not the way.

Sport being the opium of the people will suffice I daresay. It's worked this year, what's happening next year I wonder. Government dreaming up plenty of more celebration diversions? I wonder what 2013 is the anniversary of...............1913, 1813, 1713, 1613?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1913

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2013_in_sports

the really stupid thing is the government and big businesses can do as they like but if people dont have money in their pockets to spend they arnt going to get any business and thats that, so the government stupidly are basically taking everyone's money out of their pockets directly through tax and service cuts to prop up this stupid system.

Jason: some very good points again with lots to think about and I would respond [as succinctly as possible!!] to a couple in this way.

I understand the theory of negation of a negation and it has some validity- there are a number of historical examples- but I would go out on a limb and say they are cursory ones and that there are more complex, pragmatic and politically 'dirty' aspects to their nature than pure philosophical abstractions [Mao's China a case in point].

Such reductionism also in the end, leads nowhere practical. Such a philosophy ends up eating itself. To my thinking it is an interesting mind game, but to adapt CJ's observations from Reginald Perrin, that never got the washing up done. There comes of course a point where you have to make a stand and nail your colours to the mast and say- practically- this is what we want at this precise time in our history. It may not be perfect or philosophically pure, but it is [for the moment anyway] the only way we can make sense of and improve human society.

Negation of negation beliefs IMO lead to inevitably to chaos; now this may be the end result you personally wish for in your philosophy, and there's nothing wrong with that, as I also sense you have a 'spiritual' drive to your beliefs, which may well make sense [or even welcome?] that chaos, but I do not belief it is a viable way to shape human society, nor has it ever proven to effective. Nor in fact, has it ever really been practised, as human societies without fail, always go in the direction of social complexity and structured civilisation, DESPITE the evidence of some degree of negation being at work politically.

I have to of course disagree with you that we are all bourgeois- we aren't. You yourself also contradict yourself later in the post saying that there are poor amongst us who do not have property [and by extension power]. By definition they cannot be considered bourgeois. I think it's interesting though the way you describe the rich as being so through their own urges of possessiveness [and as such power seeking]. This smacks of social darwinism to me- as if the poor are such because they lack the desire to be rich. This of course does not take into account the unequal distribution of resources and opportunity, the legal structure rigged by the already rich in favour of the rich, and the ever entrenching power base of those already rich [riches almost exclusively acquired by good fortune and accident of birth] across all of our culture, and which are endemic in any advanced society. I can see how in a spiritual sense we are all equal- and I would agree- but outside of the metaphysical, the world really doesn't work that way :)

Jason: I don't think the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe are celebrations of the toppling of communist states at all, because of course, they were not truly communist states at all, were they :)

They were proof though that in advanced nations, great change can be achieved peacefully, which all thing being equal, has to be acknowledged. Yes they did lead to capitalism and liberalism [but not interestingly, to consistent levels of democracy], but the previous autocratic system had become so ineffective, decrepid and out of time, that it was inevitable a period of liberal capitalism would establish itself after its demise.

Whatever, I don't want to get hung up on the virtues of peaceful revolt. I haven't actually held such a process up as the only desirable [or effective] way of achieving change, and I believe a more 'violent' route to societal change will be more likely than not. There are no signals at all that we are entering a world that is going to become more peaceful, and every indication of the opposite [although we can only of course judge the world from the present moment in time, as we experience it right now, which by human nature is a myopic viewpoint, so non of us can truly tell what the future will bring :)]

In your earlier post you mentioned that I may well myself be a 'bulwark of capitalism' which is an interesting point I'd just like to pick up on. You are right of course- in our current society, we are ALL part and parcel of the capitalist system and complicit in it workings. The rivets in bulwarks do of course though loosen, and the whole structure eventually wears and rusts :)

There is however nothing peculiar or disabling about that condition. Capitalism, particuarly as it starts creaking and losing it's effectiveness, has to be changed from within. Capitalism is undeniably a very dynamic force, but it is also a very destructive one- both to the world around it and, eventually, itself. The challenge is to work effectively within it, to ensure a more democratic and sustainable system follows it. This 'natural' progession from liberal-elite capitalism to democratic communism is a vital process for it's success to my mind, and one of the reasons initial communist ideas and systems set up in Russia and Eastern Europe [and to a large extent China too] have eventually failed.

The Talking Eds have been blathering on about "predistribution" of wealth, a concept they've had all summer to come up with. (We've had it for donkeys years by the way lads. It's called capitalism and it is achieved by having a small state.
I would have thought that was obvious.

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the problem is we dont live in a capitalist society, its already communist. If some banker sticks money on red and it comes up black and makes a massive loss then goes to Mr government to take money out of the pockets of every other man woman and child in the country to pay for it, thats communism :)

oh and theft :)

Mr DL Martin: Capitalism isn't interested in redistributing wealth, either pre or post taxation. Capitalism's only concern is the accumulation of capital in areas of the economy strong enough to exploit their position. Capitalism is amoral and rewards those who do so at the lowest cost [and therefore highest profit] and if this was practicable through slave labour-i.e. at zero labour cost- then so be it.

A small state also achieves nothing and liberal capitalism certainly does not believe in a small state. As I said I think in an earlier post, when the Right talks about a small state, they are smokescreening their real intent- that the state is actually managed for and by the capitalist class for its own ends, not the wider population. The American Republicans don't even support the idea of a small state; they may blather on about one, but will in reality continually push up defence spending and- of course as with other western governments- not hesitate to support capitalism with taxpayers money as and when required, and of course critically, when everything starts crashing:))