Proletarian internationalism

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarian_internationalism

Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.

Proletarian internationalism was strongly embraced by the first communist party, the Communist League, as exercised through its slogan "Proletarians of all countries, unite!", later popularized as "Workers of the world, unite!" in English literature. This notion was also embraced by the Bolshevik Party. After the formation of the Soviet Union, Marxist proponents of internationalism suggested that country could be used as a "homeland of communism" from which revolution could be spread around the globe. Though world revolution continued to figure prominently in Soviet rhetoric for decades, it no longer superseded domestic concerns on the government's agenda, especially after the ascension of Joseph Stalin. Despite this, the Soviet Union continued to foster international ties with communist and left-wing parties and governments around the world. It played a fundamental role in the establishment of several socialist states in Eastern Europe after World War II and backed the creation of others in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The Soviets also funded dozens of insurgencies being waged against colonialist governments by leftist guerrilla movements worldwide. A few other states later exercised their own commitments to the cause of world revolution. Cuba frequently dispatched internationalist military missions abroad to defend communist interests in Africa and the Caribbean.

Proponents of proletarian internationalism often argued that the objectives of a given revolution should be global rather than local in scope—for example, triggering or perpetuating revolutions elsewhere. Proletarian internationalism is closely linked to goals of world revolution, to be achieved through successive or simultaneous communist revolutions in all nations. According to Marxist theory, successful proletarian internationalism should lead to world communism and eventually stateless communism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Proletarian internationalism is summed up in the slogan coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Workers of the world, unite!", the last line of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. However, Marx and Engels' approach to the national question was also shaped by tactical considerations in their pursuit of a long-term revolutionary strategy. In 1848, the proletariat was a small minority in all but a handful of countries. Political and economic conditions needed to ripen in order to advance the possibility of proletarian revolution.

For instance, Marx and Engels supported the emergence of an independent and democratic Poland, which at the time was divided between Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Rosa Luxemburg's biographer Peter Nettl writes: "In general, Marx and Engels' conception of the national-geographical rearrangement of Europe was based on four criteria: the development of progress, the creation of large-scale economic units, the weighting of approval and disapproval in accordance with revolutionary possibilities, and their specific enmity to Russia". Russia was seen as the heartland of European reaction at the time.

First International

The trade unionists who formed the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), sometimes called the First International, recognised that the working class was an international class which had to link its struggle on an international scale. By joining together across national borders, the workers would gain greater bargaining power and political influence.

Founded in 1864, the IWA was the first mass movement with a specifically international focus. At its peak, the IWA had 5 million members according to police reports from the various countries in which it had a significant presence. Repression in Europe and internal divisions between the anarchist and Marxist currents led eventually to its dissolution in 1876. Shortly thereafter, the Marxist and revolutionary socialist tendencies continued the internationalist strategy of the IWA through the successor organisation of the Second International, though without the inclusion of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements.

Second International

Proletarian internationalism was perhaps best expressed in the resolution sponsored by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg at the Seventh Congress of the Second International at Stuttgart in 1907 which asserted:

Wars between capitalist states are, as a rule, the outcome of their competition on the world market, for each state seeks not only to secure its existing markets, but also to conquer new ones. In this, the subjugation of foreign peoples and countries plays a prominent role. These wars result furthermore from the incessant race for armaments by militarism, one of the chief instruments of bourgeois class rule and of the economic and political subjugation of the working class.

Wars are favored by the national prejudices which are systematically cultivated among civilized peoples in the interest of the ruling classes for the purpose of distracting the proletarian masses from their own class tasks as well as from their duties of international solidarity.

Wars, therefore, are part of the very nature of capitalism; they will cease only when the capitalist system is abolished or when the enormous sacrifices in men and money required by the advance in military technique and the indignation called forth by armaments, drive the peoples to abolish this system.

The resolution concluded:

If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.

In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.

However, Luxemburg and Lenin had very different interpretations of the national question. Lenin and the Bolsheviks opposed imperialism and chauvinism by advocating a policy of national self-determination, including the right of oppressed nations to secede from Russia. They believed this would help to create the conditions for unity between the workers in both oppressing and oppressed nations. Specifically, Lenin claimed: "The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression and it is this content that we unconditionally support".

By contrast, Luxemburg broke with the mainstream Polish Socialist Party in 1893 on the national question. She argued that the nature of Russia had changed since Marx's day as Russia was now fast developing as a major capitalist nation while the Polish bourgeoisie now had its interests linked to Russian capitalism. This had opened the possibility of a class alliance between the Polish and Russian working class.

The leading party of the Second International, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, voted overwhelmingly in support of Germany's entry into World War I by approving war credits on 4 August 1914. Many other member parties of the Second International followed suit by supporting national governments and the Second International was dissolved in 1916. Proletarian internationalists characterized the combination of social democracy and nationalism as social chauvinism.

World War I

The hopes of internationalists such as Lenin, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were dashed by the initial enthusiasm for war. Lenin tried to re-establish socialist unity against the war at the Zimmerwald Conference, but the majority of delegates took a pacifist rather than a revolutionary position.

In prison, Luxemburg deepened her analysis with The Junius Pamphlet of 1915. In this document, she specifically rejects the notion of oppressor and oppressed states: "Imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will".

Proletarian internationalists now argued that the alliances of World War I had proved that socialism and nationalism were incompatible in the imperialist era, that the concept of national self-determination had become outdated and in particular that nationalism would prove to be an obstacle to proletarian unity. Anarcho-syndicalism was another working class political current that characterised the war as imperialist on all sides, finding organisational expression in the Industrial Workers of the World.

The internationalist perspective influenced the revolutionary wave towards the end of World War I, notably with Russia's withdrawal from the conflict following the October Revolution and the revolt in Germany beginning in the naval ports of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven that brought the war to an end in November 1918. However, once this revolutionary wave had receded in the early 1920s, proletarian internationalism was no longer mainstream in working class politics.

Third International: Leninism versus left communism

Following World War I, the international socialist movement was irreconcilably split into two hostile factions: on the one side, the social democrats, who broadly supported their national governments during the conflict; and on the other side Leninists and their allies who formed the new communist parties that were organised into the Third International, which was established in March 1919. During the Russian Civil War, Lenin and Leon Trotsky more firmly embraced the concept of national self-determination for tactical reasons. In the Third International, the national question became a major bone of contention between mainstream Marxist-Leninists and "left communists".

By the time World War II broke out in 1939, only a few prominent communists such as the Italian Marxist Onorato Damen and the Dutch council communist Anton Pannekoek remained opponents of Russia's embrace of national self-determination, while the left communist Amadeo Bordiga remained in support of national determination for regions that had not yet moved past their pre-capitalist modes of production. Following the collapse of the Mussolini regime in Italy in 1943, communists in Italy clandestinely regrouped and founded the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt). The first edition of the party organ, Prometeo (Prometheus), proclaimed: "Workers! Against the slogan of a national war which arms Italian workers against English and German proletarians, oppose the slogan of the communist revolution, which unites the workers of the world against their common enemy — capitalism". The PCInt took the view that Luxemburg, not Lenin, had been right on the national question, though the Bordigists would later split in opposition to this view among others in 1952.

Socialist internationalism and the postwar era

There was a revival of interest in internationalist theory after World War II, when the extent of communist influence in Eastern Europe dramatically increased as a result of postwar military occupations by the Soviet Union. The Soviet government defined its relationship with Eastern European states it occupied such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary as based on the principles of proletarian internationalism. The theory was used to justify installing "people's democracies" in these states, which were to oversee the transition from fascism to Communism. By the early 1960s, this thinking was considered obsolete as most of the "people's democracies" had established cohesive postwar communist states. Communist ideologues believed that proletarian internationalism was no longer accurate to describe Soviet relations with the newly emerging Eastern European communist bloc, so a new term was coined, namely socialist internationalism. According to Soviet internationalist theory under Nikita Khrushchev, proletarian internationalism could only be evoked to describe solidarity between international peoples and parties, not governments. Inter-state relationships fell into a parallel category, socialist internationalism.

Socialist internationalism was considerably less militant than proletarian internationalism as it was not focused on the spread of revolution, but diplomatic, political and to a lesser extent cultural solidarity between preexisting regimes. Under the principles of socialist internationalism, the Warsaw Pact governments were encouraged to pursue various forms of economic or military cooperation with each other and Moscow. At the Moscow International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in June 1969, seventy-five communist parties from around the world formally defined and endorsed the theory of socialist internationalism. One of the key tenets of socialist internationalism as expressed during the conference was that the "defense of socialism is the international duty of communists", meaning communist governments should be obliged to assist each other militarily to defend their common interests against external aggression.

Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was an even more outspoken proponent of both proletarian and socialist internationalism. In 1976, Brezhnev declared that proletarian internationalism was neither dead nor obsolete and reaffirmed the Soviet Union's commitment to its core concepts of "the solidarity of the working class, of communists of all countries in the struggle for common goals, the solidarity in the struggle of the peoples for national liberation and social progress, [and] voluntary cooperation of the fraternal parties with strict observance of the equality and independence of each". Under Brezhnev, the Soviet and Warsaw Pact governments frequently evoked proletarian internationalism to fund leftist trade unions and guerrilla insurgencies around the globe. Foreign military interventions could also be justified as "internationalist duty" to defend or support other communist states during wartime. With Soviet financial or military backing, a considerable number of new communist governments succeeded in assuming power during the late 1960s and 1970s. The United States and its allies perceived this as an example of Soviet expansionism and this aspect of Brezhnev's foreign policy negatively affected diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the West.

Internationalism in Cuba

Main article: Cuban military internationalism

See also: Cuban medical internationalism

Outside of the Warsaw Pact, Cuba embraced its own aggressive theory of proletarian internationalism, which was primarily exercised through support for leftist revolutionary movements. One of the fundamental aspects of Cuban foreign policy between 1962 and 1990 was the "rule of internationalism", which dictated that Cuba must first and foremost support the cause of international revolution through whatever means are available to her. At the founding of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America in 1966, Cuban President Fidel Castro declared that "for Cuban revolutionaries, the battleground against imperialism encompasses the entire world...the enemy is one and the same, the same one who attacks our shores and our territory, the same one who attacks everyone else. And so we say and proclaim that the revolutionary movement in every corner of the world can count on Cuban combat fighters". By the mid 1980s, it was estimated that up to a quarter of Cuba's national military was deployed overseas, fighting with communist governments or factions in various civil conflicts. The Cuban military saw action against the United States while fighting on behalf of the Marxist New Jewel Movement in Grenada. It was also instrumental in installing a communist government in Angola and fighting several costly campaigns during that nation's civil war.

Proletarian internationalism today

Communist Party of the Philippines theorist and activist Jose Maria Sison writes that while every proletarian party and state must be guided by proletarian internationalism, “this does not mean that revolution can be imported or exported from one country to another. Rather, revolutionary struggles must first take a national form."

Some political groupings such as the International Communist Party, the International Communist Current and the Internationalist Communist Tendency (formerly the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, which includes the PCInt) follow the Luxemburgist and Bordigist interpretations of proletarian internationalism as do some libertarian communists.

Leftist opposition to proletarian internationalism

In contrast, some socialists have pointed out that social realities such as local loyalties and cultural barriers militate against proletarian internationalism. For example, George Orwell believed that "in all countries the poor are more national than the rich". To this, Marxists might counter that while the rich may have historically had the awareness and education to recognize cross-national interest of class, the poor of those same nations likely have not had this advantage, making them more susceptible to what Marxists would describe as the false ideology of patriotism. Marxists assert that patriotism and nationalism serve precisely to obscure opposing class interests that would otherwise pose a threat to the ruling class order.

Marxists would also point out that in times of intense revolutionary struggle (the most evident being the revolutionary periods of 1848, 1917–1923 and 1968) internationalism within the proletariat can overtake petty nationalisms as intense class struggles break out in multiple nations at the same time and the workers of those nations discover that they have more in common with other workers than with their own bourgeoisie.

On the question of imperialism and national determination, proponents of Third-Worldism argue that workers in "oppressor" nations (such as the United States or Israel) must first support national liberation movements in "oppressed" nations (such as Afghanistan or Palestine) before there can be any basis for proletarian internationalism. For example, Tony Cliff, a leading figure of the British Socialist Workers Party, denied the possibility of solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis in the current Middle East situation, writing that "Israel is not a colony suppressed by imperialism, but a settler’s citadel, a launching pad of imperialism. It is a tragedy that some of the very people who had been persecuted and massacred in such bestial fashion should themselves be driven into a chauvinistic, militaristic fervour, and become the blind tool of imperialism in subjugating the Arab masses".

Trotskyists argue that there must be a permanent revolution in Third World countries in which a bourgeoisie revolution will inevitably lead to a worker's revolution with an international scope. This can be seen in the October Revolution before the movement was stopped by Stalin, a proponent of socialism in one country. Because of this threat, the bourgeoisie in Third World countries will willingly subjugate themselves to national and capitalist interests in order to prevent a proletarian uprising. In a 1936 interview with journalist Roy W. Howard, Stalin articulated his rejection of world revolution and stated that “We never had such plans and intentions” and that “The export of revolution is nonsense”.

Internationalists would respond that capitalism has proved itself incapable of resolving the competing claims of different nationalisms and that the working class (of all countries) is oppressed by capitalism, not by other workers. Moreover, the global nature of capitalism and international finance make "national liberation" an impossibility. For internationalists, all national liberation movements, whatever their "progressive" gloss, are therefore obstacles to the communist goal of world revolution.

Critique of work

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_work

Since 1870 the amount of hours of waged work have decreased and GDP per capita has increased.

Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, and wish to abolish, work as such, and to critique what the critics of works deem wage slavery.

Critique of work can be existential, and focus on how labour can be and/or feel meaningless, and stands in the way for self-realisation. But the critique of work can also highlight how excessive work may cause harm to nature, the productivity of society, and/or society itself. The critique of work can also take on a more utilitarian character, in which work simply stands in the way for human happiness as well as health.

History

Many thinkers have critiqued and wished for the abolishment of labour as early as in Ancient Greece.^] An example of an opposing view is the anonymously published treatise titled Essay on Trade and Commerce published in 1770 which claimed that to break the spirit of idleness and independence of the English people, ideal "work-houses" should imprison the poor. These houses were to function as "houses of terror, where they should work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete."

Views like these propagated for in the following decades by e.g. Malthus, which led up to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Paul Lafargue

Bertrand Russell, writer of In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

The battle of shortening the working hours to ten hours was ongoing between around the 1840s until about 1900. However, establishing the eight-hour working day went significantly faster, and these short-hour social movements aligned against labour, managed to get rid of two working hours between the mid-1880s to 1919. During this epoch, reformers argued that mechanization was not only supposed to provide material goods, but to free workers from "slavery" and introduce them to the "duty" to enjoy life.

While the productive capacity rose enormously with industrialization, people were made busier, while one might have expected the opposite to occur. This was at least the expectation among many intellectuals such as Paul Lafargue. The liberal John Stuart Mill also predicted that society would come to a stage where growth would end when mechanization would meet all real needs. Lafargue argued that the obsession society seemed to have with labour paradoxically harmed the productivity, which society had as one of its primary justifications for not working as little as possible.

During 2021, the anti-work movement has experienced rapid growth online, especially on the subreddit r/antiwork which uses the slogan "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!". As of July 2022, the subreddit has 2 million members, and has aided workers in the 2021 Kellogg's strike.

Paul Lafargue

In Lafargue's book The Right To Be Lazy, he claims that: "It is sheer madness, that people are fighting for the "right" to an eight-hour working day. In other words, eight hours of servitude, exploitation and suffering, when it is leisure, joy and self-realisation that should be fought for – and as few hours of slavery as possible."

Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily have reduced working hours to three or four hours a day. This would have left a large part of the day for the things which he would claim that we really want to do – spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, be lazy. The machine is the saviour of humanity, Lafargue argues, but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. It can be, it should be, but it rarely has been. The time that is freed up is according to Lafargue usually converted into more hours of work, which in his view is only more hours of toil and drudgery.

Bertrand Russell

Russell's book In Praise of Idleness is a collection of essays on the themes of sociology and philosophy. Russell argues that if the burden of work were shared equally among all, resulting in fewer hours of work, unemployment would disappear. As a result, human happiness would also increase as people would be able to enjoy their newfound free time, which would further increase the amount of science and art. Russell for example claimed that "Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish".

Contemporary era

David Graeber

The anthropologist David Graeber has written about bullshit jobs, which are jobs that are meaningless and do not contribute anything worthwhile, or even damage society. Graeber also claims that bullshit jobs are often not the worst paid ones.

The bullshit-jobs can include tasks like these:

Man with sign that roughly translates to: Bullshit job example from nature: President of the Republic of Slovenia

• Watching over an inbox which received emails merely to copy and paste them into another form.
• To be hired to look busy.
• Working with pushing buttons in an elevator.
• Make others look or feel important.
• Roles that exist merely because other institutions employ people in the same roles.
• Employees that merely solve issues that could be fixed once and for all, or automated away.
• People who are hired so that institutions can claim that they do something, which in reality they are not doing.
• Jobs where the most important thing is to sit in the right place, like working in a reception, and forwarding emails to someone who is tasked with reading them.

Frédéric Lordon

In Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, the French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon ponders why people accept deferring or even replacing their own desires and goals with those of an organization. "It is ultimately quite strange", he writes, "that people should so 'accept' to occupy themselves in the service of a desire that was not originally their own." Lordon argues that surrender of will occurs via the capture by organizations of workers' "basal desire" – the will to survive.

But this willingness of workers to become aligned with a company's goals is due not only to what can be called "managerialism" (the ways in which a company co-opts individuality via wages, rules, and perks), but to the psychology of the workers themselves, whose "psyches… perform at times staggering feats of compartmentalization." So consent to work itself becomes problematic and troubling; as captured in the title of Lordon's book, workers are "willing slaves."

Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Franco Berardi, an Italian Autonomist thinker, suggests in The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, that capitalism has harnessed modern desires for autonomy and independence:

No desire, no vitality seems to exist anymore outside the economic enterprise, outside productive labour and business. Capital was able to renew its psychic, ideological and economic energy, specifically thanks to the absorption of creativity, desire, and individualistic, libertarian drives for self-realization.

Knowledge workers, or what Barardi calls the "cognitariat" are far from free of this co-option. People in these jobs, he says, have suffered a kind of Taylorization of their work via the parceling and routinization of even creative activities.

George Alliger

In the 2022 book Anti-Work: Psychological Investigations into Its Truths, Problems, and Solutions, work psychologist Alliger proposes to systematize anti-work thinking by suggesting a set of almost 20 propositions that characterize this topic. He draws on a wide variety of sources; a few of the propositions or tenets are:

• Work demands submission and is damaging to the human psyche.
• The idea that work is "good" is a modern and deleterious development.
• The tedious, boring, and grinding aspects of work characterize most of the time spent in many and probably even all jobs.
• Work is subjectively "alienating" and meaningless due to workers’ lack of honest connection to the organization and its goals and outcomes.

Alliger provides a discussion of each proposition and considers how workers, as well as psychologists, can best respond to the existential difficulties and challenges of work.

Guy Debord

One of the founders of the Situationist International in France (which helped inspire the student revolt of 1968), Guy Debord wrote the influential The Society of the Spectacle (La société du spectacle). He suggested that since all actual activity, including work, has been harnessed into the production of the spectacle, that there can be no freedom from work, even if leisure time is increasing. That is, since leisure can only be leisure within the planned activities of the spectacle, and since alienated labour helps to reproduce that spectacle, there is also no escape from work within the confines of the spectacle. Debord also used the slogan "NEVER WORK", which he initially painted as graffiti, and henceforth came to emphasize "could not be considered superfluous advice".

Anti-work ethic

"Anti-work" redirects here. For the subreddit, see r/antiwork.

History

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche rejected the work ethic, viewing it as damaging to the development of reason, as well as the development of the individual etc. In 1881, he wrote:

The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of 'work' and the tireless talk of the 'blessings of work' I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late—that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.

Buckminster Fuller

The American architect, philosopher, designer, and futurist Buckminster Fuller presented a similar argument which rejected the notion that people should be de facto forced to sell their labor in order to have the right to a decent life.

Contemporary era

Particularly in anarchist circles, some believe that work has become highly alienated throughout history and is fundamentally unhappy and burdensome, and therefore should not be enforced by economic or political means. In this context, some call for the introduction of an unconditional basic income and/or a shorter working week, such as the 4-day workweek.

Media

The Idler is a twice-monthly British magazine dedicated to the ethos of "idleness." It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and Gavin Pretor-Pinney with the intention of exploring alternative ways of working and living.

The largest organized anti-work community on the Internet is the subreddit r/antiwork on Reddit with (as of November 2023) over 2.8 million members, who call themselves "idlers" and call for "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!".

In art

The Swedish Public Freedom Service is a conceptual art project which has been running since 2014, promoting an anti-work message. One of the artists involved argued in relationship to the project that "changes in the last 200 years or so have always been shifts in power, while not much that is fundamental to the construction of society has changed. We are largely marinated in the belief that wage labour must be central.

Why Socialism?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F

 

"Why Socialism?" is an article written by Albert Einstein in May 1949 that appeared in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review. It addresses problems with capitalism, predatory economic competition, and growing wealth inequality. It highlights control of mass media by private capitalists making it difficult for citizens to arrive at objective conclusions, and political parties being influenced by wealthy financial backers resulting in an "oligarchy of private capital". Einstein concludes that these problems can only be corrected with planned economy which maintains a strong democracy to protect the rights of individuals.

Contents

According to Einstein, the profit motive of a capitalist society, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, leads to unnecessary cycles of booms and depressions, and ultimately encourages selfishness instead of cooperation. In addition, the educational system of such a society would be severely undermined because people will educate themselves only to advance their careers. This results in the "crippling of individuals" and the erosion of human creativity. Unrestrained competition in a capitalist society leads to a huge waste of labor and causes economic anarchy, which Einstein denounces as the real source of capitalism's evil:

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.

Einstein predicted that under such a capitalist society, political parties and politicians would be corrupted by financial contributions made by owners of large capital amounts, and the system "cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society". The essay concludes with Einstein's analysis on how to solve these problems through a planned economy:

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.

Einstein asserts that a planned economy that adjusts to production would guarantee a livelihood to every member of society:

In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

In his final words, Einstein cautioned that "a planned economy is not yet socialism", since it may also be accompanied by an "all-powerful" bureaucracy that leads to the "complete enslavement of the individual".

Motivation

Regarding his motivation for publishing the article, Einstein believed Monthly Review would be a good forum for socialist ideas:

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine [Monthly Review] to be an important public service.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Utopian socialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism

Phalanstère, a type of building designed by Charles Fourier 

Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.

The term utopian socialism is most often applied to those socialists who lived in the first quarter of the 19th century by later socialists as a pejorative in order to dismiss their ideas as fanciful and unrealistic. A similar school of thought that emerged in the early 20th century which makes the case for socialism on moral grounds is ethical socialism.

Those anarchists and Marxists who dismissed utopian socialism did so because utopian socialists generally did not believe any form of class struggle or social revolution was necessary for socialism to emerge. Utopian socialists believed that people of all classes could voluntarily adopt their plan for society if it was presented convincingly. Cooperative socialism could be established among like-minded people in small communities that would demonstrate the feasibility of their plan for the broader society. Because of this tendency, utopian socialism was also related to classical radicalism, a left-wing liberal ideology.

Development

The term utopian socialism was introduced by Karl Marx in "For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything" in 1843 and then developed in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. The term was used by later socialist thinkers to describe early socialist or quasi-socialist intellectuals who created hypothetical visions of egalitarian, communal, meritocratic, or other notions of perfect societies without considering how these societies could be created or sustained.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx criticized the economic and philosophical arguments of Proudhon set forth in The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx accused Proudhon of wanting to rise above the bourgeoisie. In the history of Marx's thought and Marxism, this work is pivotal in the distinction between the concepts of utopian socialism and what Marx and the Marxists claimed as scientific socialism. Although utopian socialists shared few political, social, or economic perspectives, Marx and Engels argued that they shared certain intellectual characteristics. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote:

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.

Marx and Engels associated utopian socialism with communitarian socialism which similarly sees the establishment of small intentional communities as both a strategy for achieving and the final form of a socialist society. Marx and Engels used the term scientific socialism to describe the type of socialism they saw themselves developing. According to Engels, socialism was not "an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes, namely the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historical-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict". Critics have argued that utopian socialists who established experimental communities were in fact trying to apply the scientific method to human social organization and were therefore not utopian. On the basis of Karl Popper's definition of science as "the practice of experimentation, of hypothesis and test", Joshua Muravchik argued that "Owen and Fourier and their followers were the real 'scientific socialists.' They hit upon the idea of socialism, and they tested it by attempting to form socialist communities". By contrast, Muravchik further argued that Marx made untestable predictions about the future and that Marx's view that socialism would be created by impersonal historical forces may lead one to conclude that it is unnecessary to strive for socialism because it will happen anyway.

Social unrest between the employee and employer in a society results from the growth of productive forces such as technology and natural resources are the main causes of social and economic development. These productive forces require a mode of production, or an economic system, that's based around private property rights and institutions that determine the wage for labor.  Additionally, the capitalist rulers control the modes of production. This ideological economic structure allows the bourgeoises to undermine the worker's sensibility of their place in society, being that the bourgeoises rule the society in their own interests. These rulers of society exploit the relationship between labor and capital, allowing for them to maximize their profit. To Marx and Engels, the profiteering through the exploitation of workers is the core issue of capitalism, explaining their beliefs for the oppression of the working class. Capitalism will reach a certain stage, one of which it cannot progress society forward, resulting in the seeding of socialism. As a socialist, Marx theorized the internal failures of capitalism. He described how the tensions between the productive forces and the modes of production would lead to the downfall of capitalism through a social revolution. Leading the revolution would be the proletariat, being that the preeminence of the bourgeoise would end. Marx's vision of his society established that there would be no classes, freedom of mankind, and the opportunity of self-interested labor to rid any alienation. In Marx's view, the socialist society would better the lives of the working class by introducing equality for all.

Since the mid-19th century, Engels overtook utopian socialism in terms of intellectual development and number of adherents. At one time almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed to be Marxist. Currents such as Owenism and Fourierism attracted the interest of numerous later authors but failed to compete with the now dominant Marxist and Anarchist schools on a political level. It has been noted that they exerted a significant influence on the emergence of new religious movements such as spiritualism and occultism.

Utopian socialists were seen as wanting to expand the principles of the French revolution in order to create a more rational society. Despite being labeled as utopian by later socialists, their aims were not always utopian and their values often included rigid support for the scientific method and the creation of a society based upon scientific understanding.

In literature and in practice

Utopian socialist pamphlet of Swiss social medical doctor Rudolf Sutermeister (1802–1868)

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) published Looking Backward in 1888, a utopian romance novel about a future socialist society. In Bellamy's utopia, property was held in common and money replaced with a system of equal credit for all. Valid for a year and non-transferable between individuals, credit expenditure was to be tracked via "credit-cards" (which bear no resemblance to modern credit cards which are tools of debt-finance). Labour was compulsory from age 21 to 40 and organised via various departments of an Industrial Army to which most citizens belonged. Working hours were to be cut drastically due to technological advances (including organisational). People were expected to be motivated by a Religion of Solidarity and criminal behavior was treated as a form of mental illness or "atavism". The book ranked as second or third best seller of its time (after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur). In 1897, Bellamy published a sequel entitled Equality as a reply to his critics and which lacked the Industrial Army and other authoritarian aspects.

William Morris (1834–1896) published News from Nowhere in 1890, partly as a response to Bellamy's Looking Backward, which he equated with the socialism of Fabians such as Sydney Webb. Morris' vision of the future socialist society was centred around his concept of useful work as opposed to useless toil and the redemption of human labour. Morris believed that all work should be artistic, in the sense that the worker should find it both pleasurable and an outlet for creativity. Morris' conception of labour thus bears strong resemblance to Fourier's, while Bellamy's (the reduction of labour) is more akin to that of Saint-Simon or in aspects Marx.

The Brotherhood Church in Britain and the Life and Labor Commune in Russia were based on the Christian anarchist ideas of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) wrote about anarchist forms of socialism in their books. Proudhon wrote What is Property? (1840) and The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1847). Kropotkin wrote The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1912). Many of the anarchist collectives formed in Spain, especially in Aragon and Catalonia, during the Spanish Civil War were based on their ideas. While linking to different topics is always useful to maximize exposure, anarchism does not derive itself from utopian socialism and most anarchists would consider the association to essentially be a marxist slur designed to reduce the credibility of anarchism amongst socialists.

Many participants in the historical kibbutz movement in Israel were motivated by utopian socialist ideas. Augustin Souchy (1892–1984) spent most of his life investigating and participating in many kinds of socialist communities. Souchy wrote about his experiences in his autobiography Beware! Anarchist! Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) published Walden Two in 1948. The Twin Oaks Community was originally based on his ideas. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) wrote about an impoverished anarchist society in her book The Dispossessed, published in 1974, in which the anarchists agree to leave their home planet and colonize a barely habitable moon in order to avoid a bloody revolution.

Related concepts

Some communities of the modern intentional community movement such as kibbutzim could be categorized as utopian socialist. Some religious communities such as the Hutterites are categorized as utopian religious socialists.

Classless modes of production in hunter-gatherer societies are referred to as primitive communism by Marxists to stress their classless nature.

Profit motive

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_motive

 

In economics, the profit motive is the motivation of firms that operate so as to maximize their profits. Mainstream microeconomic theory posits that the ultimate goal of a business is "to make money" - not in the sense of increasing the firm's stock of means of payment (which is usually kept to a necessary minimum because means of payment incur costs, i.e. interest or foregone yields), but in the sense of "increasing net worth". Stated differently, the reason for a business's existence is to turn a profit. The profit motive is a key tenet of rational choice theory, or the theory that economic agents tend to pursue what is in their own best interests. In accordance with this doctrine, businesses seek to benefit themselves and/or their shareholders by maximizing profits.

As it extends beyond economics into ideology, the profit motive has been a major matter of contention.

Economics

Theoretically, when an economy is fully competitive (i.e. has no market imperfections like externalities, monopolies, information or power imbalances etc), the profit motive ensures that resources are being allocated efficiently. For instance, Austrian economist Henry Hazlitt explains, “If there is no profit in making an article, it is a sign that the labor and capital devoted to its production are misdirected: the value of the resources that must be used up in making the article is greater than the value of the article itself." In other words, profits let companies know whether an item is worth producing. Theoretically in free and competitive markets, if an individual firm maximizes profits, it ensures that resources are not wasted. However, the market itself, should minimize profits as it is the cost to the value chain. Competition is the key tool by which markets overcome the individual firm's profit maximization incentive. The profit motive is a good of value to the economy. It is needed to provide incentive to generate efficiency and innovation. However, over-remuneration of the profit motive creates profit inefficiency. With massive reductions in competition in many industries due to consolidation and mergers, the US economy has become profit inefficient, with record profits occurring in recent years. This creates a deadweight loss to the economy.

Criticisms

The majority of criticisms against the profit motive center on the idea that profits should not supersede the needs of people or the environment. Michael Moore's film Sicko, for example, attacks the healthcare industry for its alleged emphasis on profits at the expense of patients. Moore explains:

We should have no talk of profit when it comes to helping people who are sick. The profit motive should be nowhere involved in this. And you know what? It's not fair to the insurance companies either because they have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as they can for their shareholders. Well, the way they make more money is to deny claims or to kick people off the rolls or to not even let people on the rolls because they have a pre-existing condition. You know, all of that is wrong.

Another common criticism of the profit motive is that it is believed to encourage selfishness and greed. Critics of the profit motive contend that companies disregard morals or public safety in the pursuit of profits.

Socialist Theory

Socialists claim that producers can and should profit from their own labour but object when some in society profit from others' labour. Socialists oppose the capitalist form of profits which involves accumulating and reinvesting ever-larger amounts of capital while expecting the same rate of profit as before and while the purchasing power of society does not increase in proportion. Socialists claim this is a contradiction or "the Achilles Heel of capitalism".

Counter-criticisms

Free-market economists argue that the profit motive, coupled with competition, often reduces the final price of an item for consumption, rather than raising it. They argue that businesses profit by selling a good at a lower price and at a greater volume than the competition. Economist Thomas Sowell uses supermarkets as an example to illustrate this point: "It has been estimated that a supermarket makes a clear profit of about a penny on a dollar of sales. If that sounds pretty skimpy, remember that it is collecting that penny on every dollar at several cash registers simultaneously and, in many cases, around the clock."

Economist Milton Friedman has argued that greed and self-interest are universal human traits. On a 1979 episode of The Phil Donahue Show, Friedman states, "The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests." He continues by arguing that only in capitalist countries, where individuals can pursue their own self-interest, people have been able to escape from "grinding poverty".

Author and philosopher Ayn Rand defended selfishness on ethical grounds. Her nonfiction work, The Virtue of Selfishness, argues that selfishness is a moral good and not an excuse to act with disregard for others:

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

Office of the future

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_the_future 

History

In a 1920 advertisement, Art Metal company boasted of its contribution to the office of the future—steel office equipment. In a 1928 advertisement for typewriters, Remington Rand described "the business office of the future", using its "Quiet Typewriter", as quiet, open, scientifically arranged, and efficient. In 1935, the Marquette Building in Chicago created a model office of the future to show prospective tenants. This featured high-intensity lighting, "color…to give the impression of great roominess", an "efficient" layout. The Johnson Wax Headquarters, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1939, featured "many advanced structural, lighting, heating and equipment ideas. A follow-up article touted the productivity improvement due to air-conditioning. On "the hottest day of July" the reporter found "work there proceeding in air-conditioned comfort with no apparent let-down of any kind," as opposed to other offices visited the same day, which experienced a 40-50% let-down.

Memex desk and related machines

The first practical modern office of the future concept was probably the series of machines which were presented in Life magazine in September 1945. Life magazine hired an illustrator from Sperry Rand, Alfred D. Crimi, to make drawings of the concepts Vannevar Bush had presented a few months earlier in The Atlantic Monthly magazine under the title "As We May Think."

The Memex article in The Atlantic is most often cited because of its longer text which details the proposal of a system of shared microfilm based hyperlinks which could be considered as a precursor to the World Wide Web. "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them." Those citations tend to overlook the massive organization it would have taken to mail all those microfilm reels between scientists, and eventually between any knowledge worker, in order to make the system work. The citations also tend to overlook that Memex was an entire system, composed not only of a massive desk which housed the microfilm hyperlinking equipment, and the microfilm library but also of a speech activated typewriter (also capable of speech synthesis from normal paper text) and other accessories. Also overlooked is the difficulty of making large volumes of printed material readable by machine through optical character recognition.

Bush's predictions are notable for the fact that many have now become reality: the wearable camera ("Cyclops"), xerography ("dry photography"), speech-to-text ("vocoder"), and computers ("thinking machines"). Only microfilm has become obsolete, and the desk-size "Memex" is now a device as small as a smart phone or tablet.

Many concepts for future computer systems were presented in the 1960s and 1970s, but none really touched office work as much as the Memex or had such a lasting impact.

Xerox

In 1970, under Chairman Joseph C. Wilson, Xerox founded the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to conduct basic research and develop the technologies for the office of the future. Among other advances, PARC developed the first personal computer, the Alto in 1970, the first tablet computer, Alan Kay's Dynabook in 1972, and the first laser printer in 1973. "The Alto was a wild departure from the computers that preceded it. It was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user."

"Despite [the Alto's] age, using it feels so familiar and natural that it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate just how extraordinary, how different it was when it first appeared." The user can interact with the computer by pointing and clicking with a mouse and typing on a keyboard. … [U]sing a word processor with the core features and functions of Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or LibreOffice’s Writer, along with an email client that could be mistaken for a simplified version of Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, or Mozilla Thunderbird.… Its networking capabilities can link me to other computers and to high-quality laser printers." "[T]he Alto came to shape our lives with computers a half century later."

Alto with CPU (under desk), display, keyboard, and mouse

In 1977, Xerox introduced the Alto to the world at the Xerox World Conference in Boca Raton. At that point, Xerox was already running some 400 Altos internally. Bob Taylor, head of PARC's Computer Science Laboratory demonstrated the machine that he believed "would be transformational, eliminating much of what he called the 'drudgery of office work' and freeing office workers “to attend to higher-level functions."

In 1981, Xerox introduced the Xerox 8010 Information System (Xerox Star), in an attempt to capitalize on the Alto's technology. The Star was originally sold as part of an integrated Xerox "personal office system" that also connected to other workstations and network services via Ethernet. Possibly because of its high price, and the high buy-in cost of a complete office system, the Star was not a commercial success.

Dynabook prototype

the Dynabook idea (presented by Alan Kay and the Xerox PARC) proposed a portable slate-like personal computer which could have been used in an office but which was really an extremely personal exploration tool, meant more to draw art, compose music or invent new algorithms than to write a business letter. The tablet idea was slower to catch on, and the popular Apple iPad was only introduced nearly forty years later, in 2010.

Starfire video prototype

Sun Microsystems presented a complete office of the future concept when it made its Starfire video prototype public in 1994. Like the Memex system, The Starfire prototype has been sometimes touted as predicting the birth of the World Wide Web. While it is true that we see the heroine "navigating" what the narrator describes as a "vast information space" this takes up but a few seconds at the beginning of the 15 minute Starfire video.

The Starfire is much more than a Web navigating machine. The Starfire video shows in the rest of the 15 minutes a large panoply of hardware and software concepts such as a gestural interface, total integration with public telephony and other innovations. Like the Memex system the Starfire has a large, massive desk as its central feature, and proposes compatible devices in complement to the desk, such as a laptop with a chorded keyboard and advanced videoconferencing. Bruce Tognazzini was the principal driver behind the project, with the collaboration of many other Sun alumni including Jakob Nielsen, and the help of external consultants.

Microsoft and IBM prototypes

The two most recent integrated visions of the digital office of the future have come from Microsoft and IBM. In a way they are in interesting opposition. The D# screen and its Broadbench software look like an informatician's dream workspace, betraying the computer science or software developer culture prevalent at Microsoft. The Bluespace prototype seems like the perfect environment for an ambitious young IBM salesperson, thus betraying the salesperson-centric culture prevalent within IBM.

The D#-Broadbench curves around a single user, making physically close collaborative work difficult. The gentle curve helps to enhance concentration, while its massive size makes it unsuitable for the typical cubicle and perfect for a small closed office, like the one each and every software developer has at Microsoft.

The Bluespace prototype is filled with enhancements meant to manage and control the flow of disturbances coming to a user but not to completely stop them or discourage them in any definitive way. All of the elements are small enough to fit into a typical cubicle or even a smaller one than the norm. While the screens and other devices surround the user, they are flexible enough to permit physical teamwork between two or three more other users coming into the cubicle.

Both prototypes require considerable work to be adapted to what most managers or professionals consider a "real" desk, that is a pedestal desk, located in a closed office. They would also require rework and re-think to be adapted to the types of desks which are found in home offices or small business offices, such as the armoire desk.

Teams at IBM Research and Microsoft Research are currently working on perfecting these prototypes.

Art and beauty

At the beginning of the year 2001 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York city presented a 3 month long exhibit called "Workspheres", which explored the role of industrial designers in creating what were intended to be effective and aesthetic solutions to present and future office environment issues.

Among the 151 objects or ensembles presented there were 6 works commissioned specifically for the exhibition, from experienced industrial design companies like IDEO. While some of the works had practical aspects, they were all chosen for their artistic impact. A complete catalogue of the exhibition was produced and a special website, with its own distinctive artistic interface, was put on line.

"Office of the Future" is also the name of an ongoing research project (based at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) which began among a consortium of universities sponsored by the National Science Foundation.