Democracy and transition

I'm continuing last week's talk on ideas of democracy and socials transition now in that talk I talked about the ideas of democracy in the Communist Manifesto in early social democracy and then in the views of the Russian revolutionaries and Russian Social Democrats and we know that in the end the Russian Revolution although it held on to power for a long period collapse back into commoners ain't a capitalist and that's not so different from what happened in the bushel revolutions we know that the English revolution and the French Revolution set up Republic's but collapse back into monarchy and we may look at the in the future we may look back at their Russian Revolution in the same way that it was an experiment that failed to form the type of state that was capable of sustaining socialism in the same way that parliamentary government provides a stable platform for capitalism but to find the appropriate form of state we're going to have to look beyond the immediate historical experience of the 19th and 20th centuries this looking back isn't new Marx longer remarked that the American French and British revolutionaries look to the ancient world for their models that the revolution of Cromwell used the language of the Old Testament the revolutions in France and in America used the language of the Roman Republic now why did they look back to the Roman Republic well the Roman Republic appealed to them because it appealed to their class interests the Roman Republic appeared to be the best form of collective rule for a slaveholding aristocracy that was bent on Empire people often say that the American Revolution is a Porsche revolution it wasn't really the dominant class in it with the slaveholding aristocracy of the south and the form of state they created was the form of state that the Roman Empire had one of the Roman Republic and then their own empire which was a state which was a senatorial aristocracy and there was another model in the ancient world Athens but that really only had support in some of the northern colonies where there was not the large scale development of slaveholding now why might a thens have appealed well it's because in slave society there is a conflict not just between slaves and slave owners but also between the slave owning aristocracy and the free artisans and free peasants who are threatened by competition with slave production and this is the dominant form of political class struggle in the ancient world you get military class struggle between the slaves and the slave owners in the form of slave revolts like that led by Sparta --ss but the politics doesn't involve the slave since they have no political rights politics involves a class struggle between the free citizens who are peasants and artisans and the slave owning aristocracy yeah the unique feature of the ancient Greek democracies was that all political decisions had to be taken by the citizens as a whole now obviously the citizens as a whole Hiler a relatively restricted definition compared to the modern world but they had to be taken by the citizens as a whole in a plebiscite and this is exactly what the effort program of early social democracy was demanding they were demanding that in Germany all main the political decisions about legislation war at peace etc had to be taken by popular vote the other key feature was the executive functions of the state were not carried out by an elected body they were carried out by a randomly selected body now Aristotle argued that those states which had elected bodies to govern them always turned out to be oligarchies aristocracies basically because the wealthy are the only people who hired the funds to afford to get themselves elected and we know that that is exactly what happens in the United States instead the Athenian model was to randomly select ordinary citizens to form an executive body which lasted for a relatively short period of time a year and that body made the main executive decisions of the state and it also decided on the agenda of things which were going to be put to the big mass meetings and thus put to the popular vote and control of the agenda was absolutely critical if you read parentis book on the assassination of Julius Caesar he brings out how important it was for the aristocracy in Rome to be able to control the agenda of plebiscites in Rome now note that random selection like the Athenians used is what every modern polling organization uses no polling organization with any credibility would go and try and find out public opinion by asking the elected body of that country what should be done on what its views were you don't find out public opinion by going and asking the members of the House of Commons you find out public opinion by polling and sampling the general public if you had this kind of political structure in a socialist country you don't say have a very different role for political parties from that which exists where they are explicitly the ruling party political parties would no longer be in existence in order to mobilize support for politicians for elections nor would they administer the state they would have to work to mobilize public opinion there will be much more ideological much more overt struggle between different ideologies people would be in the political parties because of political conviction not of because of Korea calculations I should be stating the obvious here but perhaps it still needs stating that a socialist movement can only have an impact if it has a concrete strategy on how it wants to change the economic system and a constitutional strategy on how it wants to change the physical system you can't understand Lenin's book what is to be done unless you realize that what he's talking about there is how important it is to focus on a political strategy to change the structure of the state that overrides everything else in his view now let's look at the issues of political change classical social democracy is organized around elections but we need to go beyond that we know that over time there's an increasing use of referenda the the popular pressure leads to this and these can lead to real conflicts between what the population wants and what the ruling class population politicians want and in these conflicts colonists must consistently stand with what the popular voters decided this become particularly evident in Britain after the vote to leave the European Union we should fight for referenda to be easier to call and a couple more issues for example covering both expenditure and taxation we should be agitating for the replacement of elected bodies by randomly selected bodies the fight about this is a randomly selected Parliament would automatically be drawn in the main from poorer or working-class people just because of the class composition of the population and another key democratic objective which was in the air foot and our stlp programs is the replacement to the standing army by militias the only country which really effectively did that was Yugoslavia and a point about this is that without a generally armored Polish population democracy is permanently threatened by military cooze the kind of coup which occurred in Chile would have been impossible against the government of Tito for example because of the general arming of the newest large population now in a multi-national state like Yugoslavia this creation of armed local militias potentially had dangerous because when separatist views gained support it could lead to a war of separation but that is a separate issue how you deal with nationalist contradictions within a state and the Democratic way of dealing with that I'm not wanting to talk deal with that just now but the key point is that the type of defense system that Yugoslavia had is the model that socialists should be pressing for other states to have then about economic measures what economic policies should we be saying that a socialist government should immediately put into practice and what should we be agitating for in this context now our first priority has to be democratic control over the central bank if you look at the Communist Manifesto it calls for the nationalization of the central bank while most countries that has been achieved but the nationalized central bank actually remains in the control of representatives of the finance capitalist class what I suggest one we demand is that you have a central bank run by a value policy committee made up both of economists nominated by Parliament and a Citizens jury a mixture of those two and the second set of steps you've got to do is to deal with the tyranny of finance Carolyn we should be calling for a general cancellation of debts a debt Jubilee cancellation of all personal debts not just the public debt there should be an outlaw on the charging of interest charging interest is clearly a form of exploitation a form of surplus-value that should be banned the central bank should be placed under a legal obligation to stabilize the currency in terms of the true source of value which is labor the unit of currency worth at the Dollar Euro Pound should initially be over printed with the equivalent amount of time that a pound represents a pound represents I think something like three minutes of labour the point about that is that as angles remarked doing that would amount to a incitement to economic revolution because it immediately reveals the inequality of the exchange relation involved in wage labour everyone would see how much they're being exploited as soon as that happens they would find that they are working for eight hours a day and they're getting back banknotes worth four hours the exploitation relation becomes transparent in the longer term you want to move to a non-transferable system of electronic labour credits with work being only the the only legitimate form of income but in a transitional stage you would still have notes circulating but the note circulating have to be ones which demystify the relationship involved in the wage contract now how do you get rid of the exploitation of wage labor the old answer was to say that you nationalize everything but that in essence just transfers the surplus value to the state and whilst that may be used as a way of reducing taxation it has a lot of disadvantages which I've gone into in my writings on socialism there are also political disadvantages to doing that in that it involves an explicit expropriation of private property I think a better way to do it is instead of a vertically attacking property rights to assert human rights which are currently being violated by those who live off the proceeds of wage slavery historical precedent should be the process by which Lincoln abolished slavery in the United States which is quite different from the way slavery was abolished in the British Empire and Lincoln had a lot of sympathy for the basic labor theory of value position Lincoln said labor is prior to an independent of capital catalyst only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not existed first labor is superior to capital and deserves much higher consideration now what did Lincoln actually do he just declared that the slaves were free there was no question of compensation for the slave owners as there was in the British Empire so the equivalent to that in the case of wage labor is simply to declare that the relation of wage labor is illegal exploitation and is no longer legally recognized the more must recognize labor as a sole source of value and that employees collectively have the right to receive the full value added the full value that's created in a company collectively belongs to those who create it that has to be enshrined in law rather than the capitalist law which says that the owners of capital have the prior ownership of all values craft in the company and only paid out paid back out some of that to the workers and to do this you need labor courts and these labor courts should be once with juries made up of workers and ideally judges elected by employees now if you set up a legal system in which the workers have the right to the value produced clearly they have to have representation on the the boards so there you have to have the right to elect the majority of the the board in any company now whilst it's possible that a worker elected board might choose not to pay out the value created by the workers to themselves and might choose to pay some to the shareholders this is unlikely in effect they're going to substantially squeeze dividends and mayst cease dividends Oh altogether so this kind of legal change amounts to the substantial abolition of exploitation but by itself that wouldn't totally abortion why then do we have to cancel debts well the excessive extension of debt is the immediate cause of crisis like the crisis of 2009 at which point the state has to make a choice is it going to bail out the banks which have over Lent or isn't going to let them fail now if you carry out a bailing out of the bank you are protecting depositors but whose deposits are you really protecting the ordinary depositor at least in Britain has a protection of up to 30 thousand pounds is guaranteed in the event of the bank going bankrupt the state will meet 30 thousand pounds worth of obligations so when the banks were actually bailed out it wasn't ordinary people with up to thirty thousand in the bank and not many ordinary people have thirty thousand in the bank it was people with millions in the bank people with billions in the bank whose deposits were being protected so the bailout actually amounted to a means of protecting the deposits of those who had very large deposits when you have this large excessive extension of debt devaluation of the debt burden becomes an objective necessity the way it was done after the last crisis was quantitative easing to create money out of nothing and that resolved it temporarily but the tendency of debt to increase in a capitalist economy means that this will be needs to be done repeatedly instead of Gordon Brown's strategy of bailing out the banks so she should be calling for the cancellation of all debts public and private other than a very small category of debts which is worth keeping one is back wages owned by firms you should keep the provision that people's ordinary people's relatively small deposits in the banks are protected and you don't cancel back taxes that firms of people to the state in a crisis what are the benefits of a chilly general cancellation of debt well clearly the first thing is that heavily burdened firms are able to resume activity firms with heavy debt burdens are freed from those and these firms in view of the other legislation that I was talking about earlier would now be worker controlled firms singly restore solvency to state finances by getting rid of the public debt thirdly consumers are freed from their mortgage and credit card debt and are able to resume spending and the banking system becomes greatly more much more liquid and the power of the Ron TA class those who have the really large deposits with the banks is broken the things I've been talking about in this are not entirely new they're part of the lost memory of the Socialist Movement the struggle for direct democracy was there in the founding days of German social democracy but we have to recognize that these are things we have to go back to these basics we have to be very critical of the historically existent forms of parliament and Soviet republics because in the end these are not acted as forms of democracy we have to win the battle for democracy in the original sense of the word

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 2,932

Rating: 4.9225807 out of 5

Keywords: democracy, socialism, debts, jubilee

Id: EjKYVQd4r9E

Length: 23min 46sec (1426 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018

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[u/kavabean2]

Excellent talk. I'm a big Paul Cockshott fan.

His latest book "How the World Works" is excellent.

I also recommend "Towards a New Socialism" which lays out a methodical approach to a planned economy. Fascinating stuff.