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That would be one person and one business, SJ.
How about something a little more complex, like the struggle around single desk marketing of grain, or approaches to marketing and copyright in the music industry, the software industry, or the media and publishing.
Not quite so simple or unanimous . But then how could it be in comparison to a single person and his business model (actually one invented by Ray Krock, if I remember correctly).
And Sanders probably isn't the best example. He sold his entire U.S. operation for $2 million, and thereafter ran his Canadian business
/drift
Your small business approach doesn't float as an argument in the circumstances of today, not with the many examples we could bring forward. Sanders company led to industrial farming on a massive scale with all of the consequences against the humane treatment of animals, along with complicity in the destruction of rainforests in their association with Cargill. And another thing; when just the one example is brought forward, you shouldn't take it to mean that's all there is.
Yes, but SJ, his model is not the only approach to restaurants, or agriculture, or any kind of private business, for that matter. If you don't want to see that, there's not much I can do about it.
Carry on with your campaign to wipe if off the face of the earth, and thank you for helping me with the demonstration.
Don't be blaming me for your demonstration.
I don't really think this thread is about small businesses (?), or whatever benevolent fantasies you have about how much better it is for one or two people to exploit the labour of a couple of working people rather than a thousand. The thing about capitalism is that everyone is implicated--from the worker to the CEO, including (yes) small business owners. The point is that you can't opt out. There are of course all manner of insurgent strategies at play that are trying to work through capitalism, but it's impossible to escape, ultimatley. Capital will always find you, prole. I can say that any for-profit small business model is not one of those insurgent strategies, and any attempt to say otherwise needs to take a long, hard look at Capital.
@SJ, I agree, I think, with #57, but not quite with #55. The Eighteenth Brumaire rather looks at that. Social Democracy strikes me as akin to the farcical return of socialism. Marx, more than anyone, recognizes that the revolutionary capacity of capitalism is breathless. There is nothing it can't co-opt, etc. Many subsequent Marxist scholars have taken this observation as proof that if socialism is truly to become our governing system, it will need to be far more complicated and complex than capitalism, not less.
That's ok about #55 CF. I'm a suspect after all, not an expert, positing opinions only. A more complicated socialist structure could quickly find itself out of the common reach just like the arbitrary whims of the daily market escapades.
I'm not just talking about small business CF, as if it is something that is benign only because it is smaller. And I am hardly talking fantasy, but rather calling for someone to ante up and square the theory with how communities and economies function on a macro and micro level.
And you speak about the prospect of capitalism being replaced by something else, so I guess my inference is correct and it is in fact on the table, whether the source was the old man himself, or not.
But then I have read enough opinions about how this should be applied to environmentalism and other issues that I know that already.
And really, it is because of claims like that, not any doubts of Marx, nor wanting to be a cheerleader for free enterprise (because I am not, actually), that I am asking for someone to show me the money.
And I don't mean being told to go and read the book and I will understand. I can get that in church. If there is an argument, surely it can be made in simple terms. And if it's not something that people can understand, or which is not durable enough to withstand a bench test, it hardly matters how perfect it is, does it?
Sorry if I seem like a complete pain in the ass, but I think I am actually doing you a favour, because it is people like me who need to be communicated with if anything like you want is going to come about.
The subject is the relevance of Marx, right? On that question there are tougher audiences than me.
"Every giant presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine."
Never having been in Italy, I hear that up until now they haven't gone in for big box retail, restaurant and convenience store chains the way most other western industrial nations have. They have a stingy and protective bureaucratic system that must also contend with even stingier worker guilds when it comes to granting business licenses. This is all now set to be put up on the chopping block apparently, along with an entire way of life spanning many centuries. As it stands, it's my understanding that one is not easily granted permission to open a restaurant for example, and compete with something similar that had already been in the vicinity for years. You can't disrupt an existing livelihood in other words; you must establish your own market. I was reading a story the other day about Italy and its taxi drivers in this context. There's no printing press at the business registrar's office churning out individual taxi licenses because it's not permitted. You'd have to convince the authorities and the existing taxi guild members that the streets are packed with people waiting their turn for the few taxis permitted to operate. Here in Canada our patience wouldn't tolerate such a system. We want our taxi and we want it now, which is a huge part of the problem involving every commodity exchange we might think of.
I don't know, Winston, it's hard to discuss (or rather, answer your demands) with someone whose M.O. is essentially: "I have read enough opinions about..." I'm not even sure what you're asking. How do we achieve socialism? Well that is what I, for one, and what in my dreamiest of dreams, babble, are trying to figure out.
In Marx, the closest that comes to mind is his "community of free individuals" (also translated as "association of free men") in Chapter 1, Section 4 of Capital, in Marx's example of Robinson Crusoe:
It's worth reading in full to get the whole analogy.
The idea is to ensure that no one is profiting off of the labour of someone else, and that all use values produced by this community/association are shared equally. There are lots of models which try to achieve this, including co-operatives. babbler laine lowe introduced me to the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region, which seems to be one of the more successful models out there. Of course, because of capitalism's totalizing impulse, at some point you will have to implicate your self in the exploitation of labour, but the idea is to minimize that or hold it off for as long as possible.
It's not all that different. It isn't that easy, for example, to sell a potato in Manitoba, just like some people went to jail there for selling dentures. And if I am not mistaken, Italy would be the country with also produced fascism on the one hand, and the mafia on the other. So business, like water, is going to find its own channel, attempts to dam it up notwithstanding.
@ Catchfire.
Thank you. I will read it, while I am at work today (or not-work, if you will).
Again, I am sorry to be a bit of a hard-ass about it, because on a lot of this I don't disagree with you. I have been a member of plenty of cooperatives, including several cooperatives of businesses, if that makes sense. In any case, I do appreciate the appeal, because really, I believe in a way of doing things similar to what you describe.
That is part of the reason why I am critical of this single analysis, and what seems to be a single solution, as well as what seems to be, paradoxically (since we are talking about the workers empowering themseives), a fairly elite school of thought. That's the main reason why I am insisting that you speak my language. Not because I think I can't understand (although I know I don't agree entirely), but because if it can't be explained to someone like me, what hope is there?
Or at the very least, trying to explain it to me will give you a bit of practice for those who will listen.
And yeah, I do think this whole ecosocialism thing is a bait and switch. I may not know Marxism, but am smart enough to spot some con artists - the second-rate ones, anyway.
I'm interested in what this excerpt from The German Ideology means:
Read naively, it seems to imply that division of labour is the same as private property, especially in conjunction with this passage:
But that can't be right, since every modern society, whether it calls itself capitalist or not, has some form of division of labour.
I have read how small business owners sided with the state against peasants throuhout history. But with the new liberal capitalism, even small business owners are eaten by larger fish. With neoliberalism, for example, the individual farmer is being forced to either get big themselves or sell up to big agribusiness. There is no happy medium with the new liberal capitalism. It's get big or go home. With the new liberal capitalism, the economy is central to everyone's lives like no other time in history. We have never been so close to a market driven society, and it is working about as well as it did by 1929 and as well as it did for General Pinochet by 1985.
Various experiments in market driven capitalism have failed since about 14th century Italy. Communism, OTOH, is a relatively new socio-economic ideology lasting about 70 years in the last century. I think that logic says we should explore the least developed of the two systems, which would would be communism. People's communism. Jesus' communism.
The key word in the first passage is "expression," I think. Marx isn't saying that private property and the division of labour are identical, he says they are identical expressions of the same thing: the internalized contradictions of capitalism. For example, I cannot enjoy the fruits of my own labour under capitalism, since I'm alienated from it; yet at the same time, I am expected both to consume and to produce. Private property (in which I own someone else's objectified labour) and the division of labour (in which labour I don't necessarily wish to do is foisted upon me through various mechanisms of necessity) both "express" this relation.
The German Ideology does seem to contain a utopian wish that the division of labour can be transcended under socialism. There's a part at the end of the third volume of Capital which I think throws this into question, but I can't recall the citation right now. There's also Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (cited above) which supposed that the division of labour as a system of oppression may not have always existed as such.
ETA. I should add that emphasizing "expression" is not an exercise in semantics or sophistry--Marx's usage of the word is regular and distinct. For example, he says that money, or the money-commodity is an "expression" of value; not, emphatically, its synonym or equivalent.
... and regarding the notion that it already existed, it makes sense, because certain people are going to have certain skills, and in some circumstances, the even the gender division of labour makes sense (though it is certainly not absolute). It only becomes a problem when abuse and exclusion come into play.
Thanks, Catchfire. Does the passage then imply that a communist society won't have either private property or a division of labour? I think it's hard to do without a division of labour in a modern society. Perhaps as you say this statement is retracted or refined elsewhere in Marx's writings.
Put slightly flippantly, I'm willing to eat other people's cooking, but reluctant to let a random passerby be my dentist, and definitely wouldn't pick one as my brain surgeon.
A once and for all end to the misappropriation of individual use-value would be a good start. After that, some type of formula similar in concept to what they employ at Mondragon would be a far cry from the traditional division of labour thrust down to the worker, organized or not, as pure exploitation by the market.
Quite right, SJ. The division of labour as I understand it doesn't just mean that jobs are distributed amongst people, but that there is an actual division between the worker and her labour because she doesn't own the means of production. That said, Marx wasn't much for imagining an alternative to capitalism--there are only a handful of passages which even allude to what such an alternative would feel like, and I think the passage ygtbk refers to is one of the moust ebullient. Marx is first and foremost a critic (and admirer) of capitalism. Visionary socialism was taken up by others--Lenin being one the most famous writers in that vein, although I don't know much about his work.
But to answer your question, ygtbk, yes, in that passage, I think Marx is saying exactly that--that under socialism, private property and the division of labour would be abolished (or transcended).
Many brilliant political archeologists have avoided laying down a schematic to try and detail what people should do as an alternative. They simply relate to what is evident of the given circumstances, which is quite often a monstrous undertaking in itself to comprehend what is before their eyes. It's the job of others intent on designing something different to lay out their wares so that the people may make their comparisons accordingly.
On a slight tangent, anyone happen to catch CBC Ideas last night?
One of the things that was discussed was Derrida's statement that he wasn't really interested in things which people thought might be possible - he was more interested in looking at the impossible.
The show drew parallels with christianity (some of them mor accurate than others, IMO). But it did remind me of this conversation, because near as I can see we are talking about a utopian ideal.
Question is, is it something which will ever exist in a pure form, or is it an ideal which will always be there as a way of looking at the world (speaking of religious allusions)?
Personally, do not think there will ever be a world in which things like de facto private property and power imbalances do not exist. That is not to say that these ideals mean nothing, nor that then cannot be used to change our world in real ways.
But there are certainly some who see any transformation in more literal and absolute terms than I do. I'm not saying I am right; just that there are differing schools of thought about it.
It's that ‘something' where every means of achieving it exists, except for the collective will at present. We only have two clear choices really; being an undertaking as close as we can get toward a humanistic ideal such as many of us have imagined, or an ever accelerating trajectory toward extinction if the current management practices are left to preside over everything.
@ SJ
Keep in mind that I think the ideal has and will continue to change the world, as I said. My question is how close to that perfect ideal will reality ever come?
As I said, I don't see it as something that can be achieved; the struggle will always be there.
As I said before, I don't know. No one can be certain, because if they say they are they belong in a circus telling fortunes. My thinking is that things need to start right away in any event.
Wanna know why marx sucks, he could never make up his mind in being a full blown critic or some bourgieos modeler, good examples of former and latter would be Max Stirner on the one hand and Pierre Proudhon on the other, Stirner is the true post hegelian in that he took the proper internal consistent course as far as post hegalian discourse goes, Pierre Prodhon is a later modeler of bourgieos ideology and ulike Marx he actually has models that could actually work. In essence your choice is either the old classical models that we still use as a base with Keynesian refurbishment, or the Proudhonian model which represents a solid hybrid of use and exchange, no Marxian non starters of Austrian marginalistic atavisms.
The 20th century is littered with failures partly having to do with the contradiction of marxism and economics, partly tied to the hegomony of use value by hard leftists, if we are going to operate alienated value systems then we have to admit that exchange value is tha base and use value is periphery. Exchange value is a much better reader of human excess right now then the prestrictive tone of use valuation which has more in common with feudal era relationships then with anything wild communal and primitive(its no accident paradises like north korea have a kind of fuedal tone) True communal relationships are orgiastic and will enframe new human relationships that obsorb exess and are driven by human individuation-society be damned. A world beyond value, this of course will not be a political solution, but technological(in the old way technic is defined)
The new world in this world is impossible but nessarary.
Well I guess that takes care of that!
Still... "impossible but necessary" is a more inspiring slogan than the one which animates much human activity in our current society: "Unnecessary, but possible."
It's a play from the situationists quote, and I wish it did take care of that, still alot of people will give marx the rating he doesn't deserve
It's a common misconception to fuse Marx's work with the Bolschevik experience and end up muddying everything. Sometimes the misconception goes all the way toward the Paul Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, North Korea combination argument, extrapolated to demonstrate a certain continuity between them and any trace of today's mildly progressive mainstream discourse; routinely trotted out by opponents of universal health care, abortion rights, having the rich pay a little more, or what have you. As I understand it, once one insists on managing everything through the use of executioners and genocide, one ceases to be part of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is dictatoral only in the sense of being entirely communal and transparent. Decisions are already rendered before any one decides; as opposed to the reverse, which was the function of the Soviet era as it is with Capitalism. It's not entirely precise to blame a piece of philosophy for what people wind up doing with it on their own. And that's before addressing external challenges.
The problem slumber is that no practice of power is truly communal or transparent, communal relations only work if there is a sense of human scale which there is not when rescesitating a state. The inherent problem with DicPro is that you have to star formaly defining who is a prole and who is a capitalist, that gets messy especially considering that capital as such is antrhopamorphised in human behavior. As for Marx's relationship to the bolshiez, this is largely due to the fact that Marx was a use value ideologue who believed in positive liberty driven prescriptions. I believe that we need a new libertarian discourse that absorbs the human execceses of today and finds a new channel of valuation. I see this as happening through intense degrees of individuation within the human species, untill such a time just admit that use value and exchange value have to get along and exchange value as of now is the base of the 2 value forms, use value and need make sense on human scales, but on a general level we have no answer for how you deal with excess beyond the exchange form we have today, and you WILL have to deal with non planned human excess unless you want a stalinist control system, humans and their desires do not do well being centrally planned or bottom up prescribed.
I tend to think that the negative liberty of classical liberalism has held up better then its challanger. The true sequal to liberalism is anarchism, unfortunately the 1st wave russian strains ended up giving use value to much of a supremacy and they also were somewhat of a conduit for some bolshevik ideas. As of right now, we should just admit that marx and the positive liberty types got it wrong and find a different path, I think that something like mutualism would be a good start.
I think North Korea stopped pursuing communism by the 1990s and are now simply striving to remain independent from western world hegemony, military threats and nuclear blackmail.
The future will be either a technically advanced civilization and one in which predatory capitalism fades away to a footnote in history, or the destruction of civilized society followed by renewed cycles of technical and cultural evolution started over, one or the other. Actually existing capitalism despite controlling two-thirds of the freely trading world during the height of cold war and now an even greater percentage, is proving to be a dead end, though. Unfettered capitalism of the last 30 years has been an experiment in unprecedented greed unleashed on the world and the biggest threat to living things in general since the Yucatan asteroid.