From: "FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za> Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 13:49:39 GMT + 2:00 Subject: Re: Economics of Communist Society Graeme Imray wrote: > I am somewhat disappointed at the turn this thread has taken in so far as > it has retreated slightly from an attempt to confront the of question the > nature and form of a communist economy and turned into a somewhat sterile > discussion of what we all acknowledge was a FAILED attempt by the working > class to socialise the economy in the post First World War period. I totally agree with this. One of the flaws of this thread, where I was only marginally involved, I must say, was precisely the over- emphasis (again!) placed on the elaboration of retreats. Probably this was due to the fact that a substantial amount of Communist tradition (I would say the "preservers of the Holy Grail" Graeme talks about) finds, in the absence of successful examples of "transitional stages", in the memory of the defeat a major reason for stimulation and excitement when discussing revolutionary politics comes to the fore. Of course, the danger here is to exchange memory and strategy, making archeology out of politics. Maybe it would be nice to put on the list the "apology of the absence of memory" written by Negri in 1981 ("the memory of the proletariat is the memory of the past estrangement, only the absence of memory is revolutionary"...). I think Steve has it, even if I'm not sure he agrees with it (I find it a very suspect text myself indeed, given the climate of political "dissociation" when it was written, but this is another story). It's true that one of the merits of this thread has been to stress the importance of "anti-bolshevik" trends inside Communist theory and practice. However, this did not lead to a discussion historically rooted in the, concrete and often tragic, separation between self-organised understanding of the Communist movement, and party-state centred ones (the great theme of Karl-Heinz Roth's "Die 'andere' Arbeiterbewegung). I think that the forms in which this division has developed has led to such real horrors in the name of the party (from post-revolutionary Russia to 1977 Italy) that they can be hardly healed by restoring the concept of the "transitional" party-state to a supposed pristine "purity" (maybe preserved by some little group) inscribed in theory and yet violated in practice. I think the fundamental point of this disjuncture lay in the first years of the CPSU, as ambiguously based on the need to give a political expression to a class composition identified along the lines of Lenin's analysis of incomplete but accelerating capitalist development in Russia, and the need to use the party state to bring that composition to a (capitalist) modernization inside the revolutionary process (Taylorism+productivity deals disguised by the "socialist" character of the state). On this fundamental ambiguity I still think that Bologna's article on the "theory of the party" is immensely helpful, and that, regardless to some historical inaccuracies and omissions, it has been too hastily dismissed by someone. > So, to bring the discussion to its present point, there appear to be no > 'takers' for Mauro and Jock's [CWO/ICP] view that it will be necessary > during a period of transition of indeterminate length for the economy to > work according to the principle of 'from each according to his abilities to > each according to his work'. I agree with Graeme also in his critique of the notion of socialising "transitional" state based on a continuation of waged labour as "emancipatory" force through the continuing relevance of productivity deals in the so-called "socialist state". This notion implies, a point I already raised in my reply to Harald that the pattern of technological and political forms of domination in a capitalist society are essentially neutral. That is to say that the same configuration of the forces of production and the state itself can be optimally utilised to redistribute resources "according to everyone's work" once freed from the fetters of capitalist production. This ignores to what extent technological development was a response to worker resistance and a way to fragment the class, making the satisfaction of needs dependent no longer on the old politically defined productivity deals of the welfare state, but on the impersonal rationality of intra- and inter-firm competition dictated by the capacity to "flexibly" adapt to new technology itself. But this fragmentation implied a fragmentation of identities and *needs* as well, needs involving not only commodities but also self- management of time, sociality, desire. Laura is quite correct in emphasizing this point. I agree that the development of struggles by working class and "new social subjects" in the last thirty years emphasize not the class' aspiration to new productivity deals in a "socialist" state, but rather the necessity to define organizational forms to re-appropiate the means of satisfaction of needs in this broad meaning. This takes into account that it is not "technology" that is at the heart of the current increases in productivity (being rather at the heart of the unequal distribution of its fruits) but it is the power of social cooperation in the workplace and the territory. The problem here is precisely how to use that social cooperation, and not myths of a socialist state to rationally utilise the capitalist technology, as the core of a revolutionary strategy, and not as the core of proletarian exploitation, as it now. Then, the problem of the "economics in a communist society" shifts from the rational organization of production in such a society to the politicization of struggles over needs, distribution and quality of living in order to *eliminate* the question of transition altogether, shifting social balances of forces in a way to liberate the potentialities of communism in the presently increasinly ungovernable global capitalism. > As to the question of whether we are paid in money or labour vouchers, it > makes no difference. If our 'work' is a measure of our consumption, it > still confirms our status as wage labourers, separated from the means of > production and the product of our labour. That is we are still alienated > from it and therefore we are forced to conclude that, despite outward > changes in the state form - nothing in its essentials has changed for us. I agree, and I think it substantially confirms what I wrote above. > Either the bulk of individual consumption is free from day one Exactly... Franco Franco Barchiesi Sociology of Work Unit Dept of Sociology Private Bag 3 University of the Witwatersrand PO Wits 2050 Johannesburg South Africa Tel. (++27 11) 716.3290 Fax (++27 11) 716.3781 E-Mail 029frb-AT-cosmos.wits.ac.za http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm Home: 98 6th Avenue Melville 2092 Johannesburg South Africa Tel. (++27 11) 482.5011 --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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