The argument seems to have continued over at Mil’s: http://www.21stcenturyfix.org/2009/10/on-not-being-socialist.html

People come to Dave’s site on the understanding that if he things your argument is flawed, he will give no quarter. Or at least, people who decide to come for a second time come on that understanding. Mil knows that, not least from membernet days, and he respects the approach Dave takes. Tha’s clear from what he’s written at 21st Century Fix about this latest engagement. He leaves the arena battered and bruised, but with a whole knew set of things to think about, which is why he came. As Dave has said elsewhere, most comments threads end up simply dying off because the next OP piece is up and life has moved on, but the arguments and positions taken end up coming back round in other threads and in the end the overall argumentation is enhanced in quality and (slowly but pretty steadily) in reader/commenter numbers. Actually, not that slowly in terms of readers – site visit are up fourfold in four months.

This approach makes it pretty different from anything else out there in the blogosphere, and means that while comments might not come in huge numbers, what does come tends to be thought through and pertinent to debate. At least two bloggers have made reference recently to the fact the comments threads are as valuable a read as the OPs, because the OP is added to with new information and different angles of analysis.

So if I am harsh, there are my reasons.

People have different ways of reasoning. People are motivated by different impulses, too. A scientific Marxist analysis is enormously useful in, well, analysing stuff. But I’m not sure it’s a lot of use in movement-building, for example.

I recognise the value of your style of reasoning, but personally speaking, my way of reasoning is a lot more emotional – it’s about a connection with particular people in particular circumstances and an almost-tribal affinity based on empathy. To be fair, that’s not particularly “useful” in analysing the role of the EU, but it does give me an intuitive understanding of class relations and help me prioritise struggles.

In the meantime, you’re obviously a socialist – you’re just not a materialist. Your brand of socialism is technically older than mine, it’s just a lot less useful and it died a death about 90 years ago in the mouths of Avenarius, Mach etc, having never served any useful purpose.

But maybe what all this tangential and unproductive debate really reveals is that I’m not the socialist I thought I was after all – whereas you clearly are.

Methinks I’ll have to be looking sharpish for some other label.

Not some other party, mind. Just some other label.

First the analogy is bogus. If the postulate that there is a god (theism, not Christianity) entails a conception of the opposite by virtue of the postulate in the first place, then every positive contention entails its opposite.

Anything you propose will be constrained by whatever it is opposed to, as though that is a bad thing. But all of this is just word-play. It doesn’t mean anything beyond the abstract.

In the real world, being born of the previous system is not a constraint. If the classical society grew out of the primitive, if the feudal society grew out of the classical and if the capitalist grew out of the feudal then history has demonstrated beyond doubt that successors outgrow their predecessors, that the “opposite” exceeds the original predicate. In the same way socialism will exceed capitalism.

This enumerates one of the organic laws of history, which Marx conceptualizes as the dialectic.

The truth is, what else can any system grow out of other than what comes before? For everything that is in the here and now was inherent to the past, to the previous organization of society. This is as much true of the material as of ideas. Plants don’t grow from soil without seeds; political ideas are merely the exposition of a systematized worldview of the present, potentially expanded to consider future developments.

To attempt to have political ideas without considering the current reality is to wish for plants without having sowed any seeds. Or, put another way, abstract conceptualization about society is well and good but is as much use as thinking about unicorns for all it bears a relation to what is and what can be.

This is what your brave new world amounts to.

By all means, you can argue to the contrary, that your “something new” really does base itself on understanding the forces and relations that underpin modern society, the motors which drive change whether positive or negative, and postulate a way to get from A to B, but you haven’t done that. Or you can argue that actually something other than forces or social relations drive change, but that’s a nonsense.

Finally, and most childishly, socialism does not start from the same point of view as capitalism. Socialism and capitalism may each promise a better world where behaviour and processes are more favourable to the individual, but that is peripheral to the actual operation of capitalism and to the theorized operation of socialism and is thus a meaningless concept whereby to analyze either.

So get frustrated all you want, but I think your frustration is because you are ignorant of the history of philosophy, of the deep cleave between the concepts of materialism and idealism and because at some level you must realize that by your idealist posturing, you’re standing on the wrong side of that history.

What is, is all there is. Ideas are not formed independently of what is; they are merely a part of it. If we wish to change what is, we must understand it, all of it, and particularly those things which are central to what is. By a Marxist reckoning those are the class system, the means of production, capital and so on.

You can argue that those aren’t central, that something else is, but that’s a different argument to the one we’ve been having, where your frustration is simply an expression of your inability to escape the reality that ideas do not exist outside of what is.

As Christianity begot atheism, and atheism in many senses is the mirror image of Christianity, unable altogether to escape its clutches of faith in its belief in something that cannot be proven, so capitalism has begot socialism and defined its reach, to the extent that we cannot understand a world where capital is not the key. Thus we argue about its ownership, the means of production – rather than trying to create a completely different way of thinking. In this sense, socialism just tinkers with capitalism – starting as it does from the same point of view, a belief in a much-promised but never delivered pecuniary paradise of behaviours and processes, it simply fails to describe any brave new world at all.

I’d like a brave new world, not a rehash of the existing. That is something I’d truly like to analyse.

(That was one longish paragraph and two short sentences. Oh well.)

On the Lisbon Treaty itself – it is being regarded either asa symbol of a generalised loss of democracy etc (by rightwing opponents) or as a relatively unimportant as tying up of loose ends by supporters, and the real dangers in it – the EU’s executive control of monetary policy, and the institutionalistion of neolliberal norms by that route (as well as by fuller control of trade policy and the rules governing the internal market) are the real dangers that are being overlooked. While I can’t obviously be certain, I’m pretty confident that a Europe under the Lisbon Treaty would have had greater trouble applying the fiscal stimulus that it did manage, and the pain inflicted on the working class of the bankers’ recession would have been even greater (it may still turn out to be).

This should of course be a concern to all Labour members who happily supported the UK fiscal stimulus, but it’s difficult to get that kind of anti-EU message over, when there’s so much shouting from the right about loss of liberty etc etc.. To that, and the more general problem of getting a leftwing anti-EU message heard above the reactionary shouts of the right, I have no immmediate answer.

Then we could contemplate the Hieroglyph of the Giraffe in all its glory.

More on track: good fucking article.