Scrabble and Metaphors for Communist Revolution in the 21st Century

In my household, when we play Scrabble, we have altered some of the rules to make the game better and more enjoyable. It is recommended other households modify the rules in a way they see fit as well. Because the point of a ‘game’ is that it is enjoyable to play and not frustrating. So…

1) We use the larger board from the version “Super Scrabble”. This larger board means there is far more space in which one can play a seven letter word if one has created one, whereas the traditional board is so squeezed, having created your seven often runs into the pitfall there is nowhere to put it. That is frustrating, so stands in need of abolition. The defect of “Super Scrabble” is they also doubled the number of letters, so Super Scrabble, runs into the same problem after the midpoint of the game. The remedy is to use the same letters from the traditional game, but with the larger board from the newer version. Flexibility. Freedom. Flexibility and freedom are good watchwords.

2) If you are unlucky enough to have picked 7 consonants or 7 vowels, we have decided to permit the option you can change one of those letters for the alternative type.

3) We have not implemented these changes yet, but my recommendations to the Central Committee are working on it. It revolves around alterations to the Law of Value: value of J to be increased to 10 points, value of U to be increased to 2 points, value of Y to be increased to 5 points, value of Z to be reduced to 9 points given the dictionary now allows “Za, Ze, Zo”, Z is almost as easy to play as X, so its value ought to reflect that versatility which wasn’t there when Scrabble was initially designed in the 1930s. We also regard the failure by the dictionary gods to legitimate the word “OK” as absurd. OK should be allowed as it is used extremely commonly.

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Conscious control. Changing the rules to better suit our needs. Sound familiar?

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The way the economy works can also be changed. It is not an imposition by God. It is made by the way society is organized, and that is something which can be changed through democracy.

In capitalism, commodities are exchanged at their values rather than anything to do with volition. These values are representations of an overall world-comparison of the quantity of socially necessary labour time embodied in them. Obviously any economy is going to need some way of comparing things – because no society can operate without some kind of economic principle. However, the determination by ‘abstract labour’ makes man the object, and his abstract labour the subject. So we get dominated by forces of our own making, and the economy is experienced as like a force of nature.

This becomes a huge problem when one considers the compensation for labour is the wages system. This is only a portion of the total value produced at work, not the whole thing. And the wage rate is determined by how much you need to get by and is unrelated to how hard you work. The bit of value that gets siphoned off takes the form of profit. But if the wage is fixed beforehand contractually, it means the harder you work the more profit you are producing. Given that poverty is a relative rather than absolute distinction, it means that in this society, the harder you work, the poorer you get. The harder you work, the richer becomes the capitalist, and in relation to him, you have become poorer. So, over time, society becomes more and more unequal, and this is a defect which cannot be remedied without getting rid of capitalism.

In order to change the rules of the game, and replace abstract labour with voluntary conscious control over our products, it is first necessary to get rid of capitalism through a social revolution against the capitalists. Their profit must be seized – expropriate the expropriators, as part of the process of a seismic economic alteration. Once a classless society has been created, it becomes up to us to determine the economic principles that govern the worlds of work and exchange and the economic forms these take (e.g. money), because at that point in history, we would now have the freedom to make those decisions. Under a class society, that freedom does not exist at all.

It is only possible for a household to change the rules of the way it plays Scrabble because the participants are equals and converse with each other and can agree sensible ways to make the game better for everyone. So it is with the economy – if there is a jackboot on your neck, there can be no hope of ever improving anything. Eventual end result of that? Bye bye, human race.

Seismic Social Change In Anglo-America In The Twenty-First Century

Studies show younger generations are having less sexual intercourse than their parents may have done at the same age. People are not, however, having less orgasms. Whilst intercourse itself has declined, other forms of sexual practise such as oral sex or masturbation have increased. The Far Right fret this is evidence of a corrosion of social relations, but really it can also signify their increasing closeness. Unless sex is completely consensual, one partner can feel uncomfortable, under-perform, and ultimately that relationship will be more prone to degeneration. So, the decline in intercourse can be read as an increase of freedom and self-control without ever implying a miserable celibacy. The quantity may have declined, but the quality may have increased. Internet porn websites are the most popular sites online, and gone are the days when shyly and in embarrassment one would buy a magazine wrapped in brown paper from a newsagent’s top shelf, which could never be as good as video. The decline in heterosexual intercourse therefore does not contradict what we perceive to be an overwhelming increase in general sexual freedom, manifested elsewhere as the massive expansion of LGBT tolerance and celebration. Nevertheless this way of doing things signifies a break with the traditional image that the bourgeoisie liked to promote.

The best selling politics magazine in the UK meanwhile, is Private Eye, which incessantly mocks the ruling class. Here, we are defining “ruling class” as a motley assortment of uber-capitalists, monarchy, and right-wing media. We do not, for example, endorse the position of sp!ked-online that the guys in charge are Woke Liberal Cultural Middle Class Guardian Reading Remoaning Metropolitan Elite. To do so would be to daftly think one is oppressed by one’s doctor. In actual fact, professionals are just highly skilled members of the proletariat in its widest sense. They do not own means of production and they sell their labour in order to survive (albeit survive well), which is the central characteristic of a wage-labourer from a materialist perspective. The real ruling class oppose social reform, and control the purse strings, which is why politics is rarely a smooth affair, but has to involve struggle and threats. That Private Eye’s sales have overtaken the dour publications, shows there is a rebellion taking place in society.

As a third and final example, the music on BBC Radio 1 is faster, louder, and angrier than ever before, reflecting a greater degree of energy in the youth scene than has existed for decades. Last night, between 10 and 11pm, they were playing Kendrick Lamar who swears frequently. His music is regarded as expressive of the political movement ‘Black Lives Matter’. Although ‘potential offense’ was warned about prior to the show, I heard the word “fuck”, “fucking”, “fucker”, or “mother-fucker” over 10 times during this hour. This, on a BBC radio station! It reveals changing times. Anyone who says culture is becoming more censorious is just harking back to an era when the BBC really was more controlling over its content. It’s not offensiveness per se the youth do not like, it’s anything associated with the old bourgeoisie. So long as the bourgeoisie is not suppressed by the state itself, it is entirely legitimate to undermine their previous absolute but now-waning control over society through a culture war.

Society is in a process of anti-bourgeois rebellion. A little like ‘rock n’ roll’ was in the late 1950s and 1960s. But it is running far deeper. It is not yet coherently “anti-capitalist” which is why the Left have been slow to tune in, turn on. Does the absence of an economic analysis really matter? Human history’s advances have never been predictable and the idea “the Revolution” is one quick flash is a Leninist conceit. Leninism doesn’t work, but human impulses will always find new ways to operate. As was said in the movie Jurassic Park, “Life is the most powerful force in the universe. Life will always find a way”.

The process of change is not a simple issue of conquering state power. On the contrary, and this is closer to what Karl Marx actually said, the key is the constitution of a new body-politic. Freedom-for-all relies on the creation of a classless society. Given all prior attempts at a direct confrontation with the bourgeoisie have failed, a new approach was needed, and now we have one. Discrediting and shaming conservative moral values is the way we are gaining freedom today. Moral coercion against the ruling class from the bottom-up will collapse the identity of the bourgeoisie, until such a point they surrender to whatever economically anti-capitalist force has emerged, then we may even find they co-operate in the process of dismantling capitalism as an aspect of their redemption.

3 Million Light Years From Earth – BT Phone Home: In Conversation With Striking Telecom Workers

British Telecom (BT) workers walked out on two days last week, with more strikes in the pipeline until their demands are met. Their trade union, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) balloted for strike action and 95.8% of engineers voted in favour. Picket lines were formed in dozens of locations up and down the entire UK. I visited one in Chelmsford, Essex, on Friday July 29th 2022, and had a highly stimulating conversation with strikers there.

BT has offered workers a flat-rate bonus of £1,500 to ‘help’ with the cost-of-living crisis which is clearly pathetic given that inflation is over 9% and energy bills have nearly doubled over the past year.

David told me that highly skilled workers do not expect to be eating Asda Smart Price rice in a bedsit as a ‘reward’ for their hard work. He said BT workers were rightly applauded as key workers during the Covid pandemic when telecommunications were absolutely vital for mitigating the social isolation of lockdowns. But now they are being treated like dirt. “But we are the good guys”, he insisted.



Nigel said they had absolutely no faith in the ability of central government to mediate the dispute. They’re all corrupt right-wing nutters, it was said, and the Labour Party is a pile of crap. The strikers clearly hated official politics and did not want to vote for any of the currently existing crop.

The CWU are not alone. They have had strong support from other unions who find themselves in the same pickle. Indeed, there is currently a wave of strike action in the UK involving, among others, railway workers, postal workers, airport workers, civil servants, doctors and nurses, journalists, teachers and lecturers, and even barristers.

Given the inept character of central government and senior management digging their heels in (and perhaps their graves as well), the question posed by the new wave of class struggle is whether the only way we can obtain some social justice is by way of creating a fundamentally new form of economy.

The question raised by strikes of this character is why do companies need to be solely orientated to making a profit in the first place. Currently, the purpose of profit is to reward shareholders for their courage in investing in a particular industry – a reward for their risk, and also to reward senior management for disciplining the value producers – those who do the nitty gritty – in terms of restraining their pay (the so-called ‘fat cats’ are generously rewarded for finding new ways in which to manage pay restraint). But it does not have to be like that.

BT made a profit of £2bn in 2021. If that money were equally divided amongst the producers of that value, each worker (and BT employs just over 100,000 of them, 90% in the UK) could receive a pay bonus of £19,000, in relation to that year, with varying fluctuations according to company performance in subsequent years. That would be more than enough to compensate for the cost-of-living crisis, and allow workers perhaps to pay off their mortgages sooner, or pay university tuition fees for their offspring, or whatever they choose. The strikers in Chelmsford seemed excited by this proposal.

What is more, from the point of view of other workers in other sectors, strikes in one area benefit other areas as well. If successful, a victorious strike, or patchwork of industrial action, will drive up wages for all workers, not just the brave strikers. When wages are higher in one sector, the bargaining power of the whole working class is improved because individuals can retrain for work in the dynamic sector, forcing a retention crisis is companies that do not pay fairly. Nevertheless, there will always be an element of vulnerability whilst the profit system persists, so it is worth thinking about whether class struggle could lead to the more permanent solution of regime change: a new idea of workers receiving the full fruits of their labour, bypassing the central motivation of profit altogether.

In order to achieve such a reformed economy with new economic priorities, workers will find they fundamentally have to run the company themselves. Their collective elects supervisors, of course, paid at the average for a skilled worker, to oversee the day-to-day running (one cannot expect a busy engineer to also do the accounts). But everyone gets rewarded in relation to the overall company performance, rather than being paid a fixed wage which under the profit system, is always going to be under threat. The new system, whilst being more rewarding, would also logically create a greater sense of pride in one’s work and incentivize best practice, innovation, and creativity. Perhaps our current economy is so sluggish only because workers are treated badly. The majority needs to feel like they have a real stake in society, a proper sense it is worth doing what they are doing.

However, none of this is anything any elected Member of Parliament can usher in. Really an idea of worker’s control can only come to fruition by their actions in the workplace itself. Which is why it is so important to back their side in the class struggle, thereby to accelerate their potential for success.

Who Killed The Working Class? Towards A Battle of Populisms

The early history of the 20thC panned out much along the lines Karl Marx anticipated. The human bloodbath of World War One exposed capitalism as a dreadful system, and a great many political struggles took place from outright revolution in Russia to lesser fights in Germany and Britain’s women successfully won the right to vote. In Britain 1926, millions of working days were lost to the capitalists by a colossal wave of strike action. The legacy of all these battles is still felt today, albeit with a touch of nostalgia.

The degeneration of the Soviet Union into state-capitalism was very costly. It made people think revolutionary ideology was dangerous – nevertheless, struggles persisted in all countries for several decades, particularly after the Right was discredited through a reaction to all the policies of racism of the imperial powers, the worst of which was of course, the Nazi Holocaust.

But the knock-on effects of all the defeats, the failure of new intellectuals to match up to the stature of a Marx or Lenin, was gradually taking its toll. The working class were increasingly losing – but nevertheless, they kept up the struggle as if their lives depended on it. But from the 1970s onwards, workers found they faced a new threat. No longer was it just the capitalists and their state they had to fight. A curious new strain of thinking had grown up in left-wing circles, which we now have come to know as ‘political correctness’.

Instead of your trade union being an unequivocal friend in battle, now they were issuing speech codes and telling you off for a joke deemed to be ‘offensive’ to a minority. No wonder trade union membership began to falter from the 1980s onwards in the imperial countries – workers were losing their allies on the politically active left, particularly those allies that were now bastard students.

A weakened left stood no chance against the onslaught of Margaret Thatcher during the mid-eighties Miner’s Strike in Britain. However, in earlier times, such defeat at the hands of police who were literally beating up striking miners, could have been fixed. In earlier times, state violence merely suppressed one protest at a time. But people would regroup, learn from their own mistakes, get stronger, and go on to win. What was unique about the precarious position of miners in the 80s was that the left was also against them too, despite crass lip service paid to the cause. The unions and the Labour Party were constantly trying to correct bad manners and such among the workers. It was no surprise then that Margaret Thatcher won a landslide in 1987.

Fast forward to the period 1990-2016, workers are subdued in all the imperial countries. Political correctness without many speaking out against it, has become a form of mind control. The working class in this period resemble beaten down drones, struggling to survive, often behaving like rats fighting over a piece of courgette that has fallen into a urinal. In this period, workers even snitched on their cohorts for breaching a code of conduct – it was the only sense of power they could get. Their own character, never mind the surplus value they were producing, was also now being torn away from them by a capitalism in an acute crisis.

However, nothing stays the same for long, thank god! The 2016 European Referendum in Britain showed workers revolting to the extent they wanted to shut down that aspect of Imperialism known as the European Union. In the same year in the USA, Donald Trump, the populist candidate, gained the Presidency.

Obviously these developments are very complicated and more analysis is required. But it seems there is a new populism out there, workers are finding ways to circumnavigate right and left in a desire to rescue their own character and attachments. Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, remain steeped in a barren landscape – the old ideology of the right, so this blogger has no doubt these repulsive creatures will fade away. Nevertheless they have done a service of at least putting a light at the end of the tunnel. The struggle henceforth will be entirely about how much input we can inject into populism and preferably steer it in the direction that all of humanity wants.

How To Create A Classless Society: Abolish Profit!

“Don’t look at me!  – get back to work!”

 

Why is it important to create a classless society?

 

All of the social problems we face emanate originally from the division of society into two warring classes: capitalist, and proletariat.  These problems develop in manifold ways according to their own internal logic, or lack of, and alienate and oppress humanity.

 

Civil libertarians need to urgently realise the class basis to their causes.  The state is the primary organ through which the ruling class exert their control over society.  Whether your cause is a beef against parenting classes that undermine parental autonomy, smoking restrictions, or drinking restrictions, the ban on drugs, police harassment of ethnic minorities, immigration controls, whatever – all this stems from the state that is hungry to crush liberty, and itself is the primary organ through which the ruling class exert their control over society.

 

Those worried about the problems of work being unrewarding and causing of suffering in a capitalist society are also concerned about the class division.  The character of our whole society is affected by the class division.  Indeed, the project of human liberation gets nowhere until it confronts class.  The civil libertarians are necessarily on a losing streak until they confront class, because the state will keep on coming back and back at them.  Any victory for civil liberties tends to be short-lived.  Therefore, this blog seeks to unite everyone who has a problem with the way contemporary society is by locating the base problem in the fundaments of class society that creates the state.  It is that which must be done away with.  To get rid of the state presupposes we must get rid of class division.

 

How to create a classless society

 

The capitalist class are only reproduced by the existence of profit.  It is their ownership of profit that distinguishes them from even the wealthiest middle-class worker.  The ownership of profit gives them command over the way society is run, allows them to control the media in their own interests, and generally inhibits freedom for the majority.  Where the capitalist has profit, the worker has his wage.  These are quite different categories.

 

The wage represents the value of everything needed to reproduce and sustain the worker at a socially acceptable level – all the food, housing, childcare costs, occasional holiday, etc.  What it is not is an adequate compensation for work expended.  The worker generally produces more in a week’s work than he or she takes home as the wage.  But they are not paid for the quantity of goods they produce, they are paid as to what can reproduce them for the next round of work.  So, there is a discrepancy between worker’s pay and what workers have produced.  That quantity of value is what constitutes profit, the lifeblood of the capitalist.

 

Therefore, to create a classless society requires a new approach to wages and profit.  In fact, profit has to be done away with entirely to get rid of what reproduces the capitalist class.  How do you get rid of profit?  By abolishing wages.  Instead of paying the worker a wage that only represents what is necessary to sustain and reproduce him or her, instead workers-in-control pay themselves the full value of their produce.  If workers received an equivalent value to the work they have put in, then there is nothing left over, there is no profit any more.  Therefore, the capitalist class cease to exist, and you have a classless society.

 

The technology used in production could still be reinvested in by workers contributing part of their new earnings to it as part of the collective within the enterprise.  But without a capitalist owning the place and an army of managers and sergeants watching over them, then work suddenly becomes far more rewarding, especially knowing you will take home more than under capitalism.  Furthermore, you are now a real stakeholder as opposed to the bullshit use of this term by capitalistic politicians.

 

The worker would of course still pay some form of taxation – to fund schools, welfare, etc.  But given they have just received a 50% pay rise, they probably wouldn’t grudge that.  Also, they have an equal say over how the social fund from taxation is deployed, so would feel enriched by this.

 

Without the existence of profit, the post-capitalist economy loses capitalism’s tendency towards crisis, meaning the whole of society greatly improves in all dimensions, including morally.

 

It could be said that this is just a sketch of a worker’s co-operative.  It isn’t because I would advocate the model on a worldwide scale to get rid of capitalism in its entirety.  It should also be added that new participatory democratic structures would need to be called forward to co-ordinate the production of goods to unleash the already latent social dimension to production.  As people learn to co-operate more and more, they will swap jobs over with each other, to try new things, and develop their all-round capacities.

 

To summarise: the creation of a classless world unfetters a profound human liberation.