File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/aut-op-sy.9710, message 39


Date: Sat, 04 Oct 1997 10:37:32 -0500
From: Michael Novick <mnovick-AT-laedu.lalc.k12.ca.us>
Subject: Re: AUT: Goldner on Bordiga


This analysis sounds very intriguing.  How do I get Goldner's essay?

Again, apologies for what at least some people have perceived as "bombing"
the list.  i don't understand why somebody didn't just say something
politely earlier.

--Michael

At 02:31 AM 10/4/97 -0800, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>I was happy to receive from Collective Action Notes Loren Goldner's essay
>"Communism is the Material Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today."
>
>The focus of this essay is that what is at the historical basis of
>bourgeois society--the capitalisation of agriculture and the release of
>free labor power the foundation upon which the generalisation of the
>commodity form ultimately depends--has been at the heart of what has passed
>for Marxism and Communism: the history of all hitherto existing Marxism is
>the history of the capitalisation of agriculture, so to speak!
>
> These regimes thus stand in the bourgeois statist tradition of enlightened
>despotism which has looted and expropriated the peasantry [there is a book
>on the theory of enlightened despotism by Leonard Krieger which I have not
>read.]
>
> For Bordiga then the "Soviet" Union was a transition form to capitalism, a
>stage (as it turns out) in the globalisation of capital.
>
>"In short, from enlightened absolutism in the 17th century to Communist
>Parties in the 20th century, the problematic is that of the extensive phase
>of accumulation--the transformation of peasants into workers. The ultimate
>implication of this is that a society is only fully capitalist when a
>trivial percentage of the work force is employed in agriculture, i.e. that
>a society is only fully capitalist when it has moved from the
>extensive/formal to the intensive real phase of accumulation. This means in
>short that neither Europe nor the United States in 1900 were as capitalist
>as the socialist movement thought they were., and that the classical
>workers' movement, in its mainstream, was first and foremost a movement to
>propel capitalism into its intensive phase...The connection between
>agriculture and intensive accumulation in industry is the reduction of the
>cost of food as a percentage of the worker's bill of consumption, creating
>buying power for the consumer durables (such as the automobile) at the
>center of 20th century mass production."
>
>1. Has what has passed as land reform in the post WWII "third world" also
>been a stage in extensive accumulation, freeing peasants to become workers.
>But then what of South Korea-- it is often argued that a redistribution of
>land created many small holders with sufficient purchasing power to create
>internal demand to stimulate industrial production. This has been the
>manifest intent of land reform in India, though its real content may be
>better understood as a form of extensive accumulation. I think Cyrus Bina
>has made such an argument about the nature of the Shah's land reform
>measures.
>
>2. More generally, what about these oppositions extensive/formal and
>intensive/real? Especially this idea of the significance of the reduction
>of the cost of food? How has this been really achieved. Are really so
>workers in the most advanced capitalisms engaged in the food
>sector--production of food maybe, but then why exclude the transportation
>and distribution of food? How are we to understand intensive accumulation
>as an epoch, no less?
>
>Comradely greetings,
>Rakesh
>
>
>
>
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>
>
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