John Lanchester: Marx at 193

6079_Smith_W wrote:

But it is also true that in some things private business is far more flexible when it comes to moving on opportunity, and adapting to change. I think both systems will always play a role. That's why I bring it up; not as a slam against public ownership so much as an argument for a middle way.

I think you will find few socialists who will disagree with you on the effectivenss of markets to create "wealth" and distribute goods and services most efficiently. 

But capitalism and especially the new liberal capitalism of the last 30 years has worked to consume the world's natural resources at an unprecedented frenzied pace. World wildlife preservationists and scientists are pointing out to us that capitalism is run amok. With neoliberal capitalism we are ultimately reducing future choices for humanity with respect to everything from threatened extinction of hundreds of types of mammals to poisoning and destroying the environment of which all life on earth depends. It's as if self-interest in its most extreme form, greed, has been unleashed on the world. There is no incentive to conserve anything within a system driven by profit.

Essentially socialists say that human beings are capable of so much more than just self-interest. We can be motivated in other ways to achieve good things. We are capable of working toward a greater good and not just for the sake of the richest one percent.

Catchfire wrote:

I don't think this is accurate, actually. I think, on the contrary, that capital's capacity to relentlessly revolutionize the means of production is essential to Marx's critique. 

Today's CEO can just as easily become tomorrow's revolutionary figure, and the case of Russia at the end of the Soviet era and today's China provides for the reverse.  I don't know if the critique can be said to describe the ability of capital to revolutionize to that extent, to doff the top hat in favour of the beret, because if it is, what we'd have laid out in detail is a rescue plan for those occasions when the workers rise up, and a great way for cut throat business competitors to rid themselves of the other.  Perhaps a caveat or two might have helped to inform Lenin's writing of the 'What is to be Done' pamphlet.  I think revolutionizing the means of production deals with efficiency and re-invention from the perspective of traditional ownership.

ETA:  We see elements of the previously unrecognized problem today.  If we can't have socialism, here's social democracy instead.  You can even have your own wing where all the old revolutionary penchants can be maintained on life support.

We can certainly be grateful to Marx for setting into order the random thoughts of the working class of his era.  I'm not so sure if his brand of romanticism as a foundation stone for what followed; the various traditional movements against capital from the late 19th Century onwards that is; constitutes an adequate response in today's circumstances.  In the labour forum I posted an extract relating thousands of incidents where leaderless Chinese workers are rising up over their conditions without the benefit of a union to represent them, and getting what they want.  Incidents that barely receive attention in the western press, and probably for good reason against the backdrop of the occupy movement.  Certainly that particular working collective would know that sending forth an appointed leader of the disturbance to speak on everyone's behalf is the quickest way for everything to unravel.  If you can't hold any one person responsible, or any group within the whole responsible, then power would have to consider everyone a threat and react accordingly, or submit to the demands.  It's when power submits in those instances that a way forward might be revealed, because a closer analysis may reveal that power itself wears no clothes except for what the collective dresses it in.  I think even a cursory review of the historical binary play between power constituted as an economy and subjects of the economy can remind us of a few characteristics that impact on the present.  The Roman citizen turned to the early Christian dialectic as a literal means to escape it's lot, after which it didn't matter so much how power reacted against them.  Constantine eventually succumbed to it himself, or perhaps co-opted it once the ideology had gained critical mass despite all attempts against it, and it was found they were needed after all in order to maintain the empire itself.

ETA:  Today we're not exactly operating from an absence of explicit data where it concerns the study of an economic model under Capitalism vs the study of an economic model by applying a Communist treatment.  What we seem to be lacking is a situational assessment of how the respective models would ultimately differ, that doesn't have to be gleaned and interpreted from out of the haystack of obscure material relating to the subject.  It's almost as if the binary problem we're encountering has been left intentionally unresolved as far as the public domain is concerned.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

As if all you have to do is drop a dollar in the hands of these poor mom and pops and they turn in to soulless capitalist monsters.

In response, I give you Harland David Sanders.

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.

Don't be blaming me for your demonstration.

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.

"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.

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.

I'm interested in what this excerpt from The German Ideology means:

Quote:

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.

Read naively, it seems to imply that division of labour is the same as private property, especially in conjunction with this passage:

Quote:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

But that can't be right, since every modern society, whether it calls itself capitalist or not, has some form of division of labour.

Catchfire wrote:

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.

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.

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.

@ 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.

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.

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 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.

Mike Stirner wrote:

(its no accident paradises like north korea have a kind of fuedal tone)

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.

Mike Stirner wrote:

The new world in this world is impossible but nessarary.

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.

I didnt read in between here and the opening post.

Surplus value was a brilliant concept, and extremely useful and productive as a thought project.

Attempting to give it bounded definition, to systematize and track it, has been an unfortunate distraction that refuses to die.

SAt least for the last number of decades the distraction the distraction has been limited to the academicaly inclined margins.

Mike Stirner wrote:

Also centrally planned leninist states pretty much stop planning communism within 5 years of trying fidel, n korea sucked as much in the 90s and it does now compared to its southern counterpart.

I think it's a matter of perspective. What we think of as a poor standard of living in various countries is probably sustainable by current agricultural and scientific standards. If Soviet communists were not guilty of one thing it was that they never promised the people anything more than universal education, jobs, and socialized medicine. That's it. Meanwhile state capitalists made wild promises for everything from widgets and baubles to an integrated and finely tuned globalized economy.

But this, what we have here in the richest countries, is not sustainable. Middle class capitalism based on consumption of oil and its derivatives will never be globalized as propagandized during the cold war. It is a physical impossibility according to scientists themselves. Now that Soviet communism is gone, capitalists must work towards lowering expectations and standards of living around the world if they are to continue extracting standard minimum profit margins of 12 percent or more from labour and the environment. They've made some big promises, and they just aren't able to produce the goods. Not without military interventions and full force of the state. Capitalism and market ideology was never natural. 

I think that there are a few things to be said about state socialism in the former USSR. Yes it resembled state capitalism and not the real deal socialism everyone wanted. But they were forced to operate under a number of constraints that the other two-thirds of the "free world" were not limited by. Citizens of the former USSR did not own the means of production, for one thing. But they owned their jobs, and they understood that the state was obligated to create jobs and guarantee certain necessities of life. The western world adopted a number of socialist reforms and ideas as a result of the "red menace" in appeasing working class citizens yearning for a better way. 

But in brief the cold war could not go on. The Soviets stabbed US hawks in the back when they ceded the cold war. Now it's the "terrorist threat" and anything to prod American taxpayers into supporting massive corporate welfare programs year after year.  The USA has become a kind of USSA practicing upside-down socialism and far surpassing the former Soviet Union WRT  military spending and social welfare programs for a handful few superrich people. Half a dozen former world empires disappeared last century. One more to go.

The much propagandized Soviet threat does not exist anymore. They were only ever a group of developing nations trying to exist outside western world sphere of influence. If history is a reference, then any alternative system and people's revolution would face similar western aggression. Economic warfare, "Gladio", and military aggressions would occur all over again to stem the evil tide. The ideal socio-economic system would be forced to arm itself and raise an iron curtain similarly at some point.  

I think we have to try and avoid WW III in the near future. Atlantic Alliance militaries are now operating a long way from home and pushing eastward. RAND Corporation once advocated for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the former USSR. If we learnt anything from the cold war, it's that nuclear weapons can have no legitimate purpose.

Real history is a lot more interesting. Russia was a basket case in 1919. My grandfather in England was asked to go to Russia after the war. He declined and said the Russian revolution was none of their business. He'd had enough of running around France trying to murder other working class slobs like himself. He said he'd never lift another finger for the army unless the enemy came busting down his front gate. 

Western countries are surrounding Russia and China militarily again. The Gladio gang/Murder Inc dream of war. It's what they do.