From: "Greg Schofield" <g_schofield-AT-dingoblue.net.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: highest form of capitalism
Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 13:09:04 +0800


Well I will disagree with your assessment on Lenin and as for the weakness in identifying causes I cannot understand what you mean, I thought the book itself was an elaborate and detailed identification of such causes.

If you mean that disregarding the very simple and straightforward translation problem Carrol point out with the title that this still infers some theory of decadence - well, I suppose it does, on this basis so does much of Marx and something of the entire corpus of socialist writings. 

These may be your strongly held opinions but I cannot see there is much argument in them. On the other hand you distinguish a difference between nationalising the means of production and socialising them, moreover that private property can be "socialisilised" for a section of society and hence retain its private nature as against full (conscious, I presume) socialization.

I will not split hairs over whether netionalising is the same as socialising it seems pedantic, there are after all many ways to skin a cat, there are I think many ways to socialise the means of production.

On your second point that socialising the means of production amongst a section of society still retains something of its private nature - well comrade THAT WAS THE POINT I WAS TRYING TO MAKE!!!!!! it still socialization - think about it for a minute and you will see that its private appearance is but a shell, it is an expression of class dominance when the relations of production have long broken past being predicated on a private relationship of direct ownership - you still have the bourgeois, capital and labour and all the rest, it is not a better system but a more developed one.

I have not read  Paresh Chattopadhyay, but based on this I dare say I might find mys self in agreement. I suppose I am really getting annoyed in that you have read so much into my small posts and replied on matters that I have not even touched on (Trotsky for God's sake). Then you carry on as if I am a Leninist - what is that when it is at home? I own only ever to be a student of Hitsorical Materialism and a life long communist and in that time spent most of it as a dissident - so I strongly object to you badging based on a few quotes.

Lenin is the authoritive text on imperialism, you can't talk about with out reference to it - so of course I refer to it - then I am told I am a Leninist - Comrade please reply to an posting for what it has said instead of what you might think it represents. The former leads to good discussion the latter to unproductive bum-fights.

Now I wont be rude about the periphery/center approach (ahistorical nonsense if you ask me) or the haphazard use of pre-capitalist relations and something about US slavery (I will put this down to a slip of the pen).

Look can we begin again somehow, I mean really this comes down to having a reasonable debate and I don't really see how I can say anything reasonable faced with such a barrage.


--- Message Received ---
From: cwright <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 19:51:50 -0600
Subject: Re: AUT: highest form of capitalism

I think that the Aufheben discussion of this is very important
http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/.  Regardless of how one reads the title,
there is a definite tendency in Lenin towards a 'theory of decadence'.
Lenin's imperialism also has tremendous problems when it comes to explaining
the moving force behind imperialism.  Lenin's notion is not driven by class
struggle, but by a combination of capitalist competition and
disproportionality.  This is weak, to say the least.  Also, Lenin is
completely tied to a form of analysis that reifies the nation state.

As for pushing things 'back', obviously we are not going back to something
like 1912.  Wouldn't that be a really silly idea?  It may be a convenient
straw man, but the problem is that property in Russia was not 'socialized'
by the Russian Revolution.  It was nationalized.  Attempts at socializing
it, at destroying the previous relations of power, we undermined by the
Bolsheviks in their attacks on the factory councils and soviets, ie on
workers' transformation of social relations.  For a variety of reasons,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks always thought of the immediate post-revolutionary
society as a question of who controls the means of production (they were not
alone in this, as the council communists and the entire generation brought
up in the Second International had this notion to some degree), not one of
the immediate transformation of social relations which would mean
immediately beginning to destroy the old daily life in production and
everywhere else.

Some of the confusion on Russia relates to the failure to grasp what Marx
means by 'private property'.  He uses the term in two ways: the 'normal'
way, as individual private property, but in a second, more important way, as
the appropriation of value by the capitalist class, property as the private
property of a section of society rather than the total society (socialized
property properly speaking.)  Paresh Chattopadhyay has a refreshing
discussion of this in his book "The Marxian Concept of Capital and the
Soviet Experience".

I am pasting something from an earlier post I hope you find thoughtful.

"I highly recommend the work done by Massimo de Angelis on trade, export,
etc.  http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/M.DeAngelis/writing3.htm

Trade and capital export certainly play a big role under capital, but one
key thing you can raise with the Leninists, which will generally drive them
buggy, is that Lenin provides no means of grasping WHY does the export of
capital happen, what is its 'law of motion' so to speak.  You can also ask
them why Lenin never discusses the transformation of the relations of
production, but speaks of export of capital in a really mechanical way.  The
autonomist discussion of class composition shows its absolute superiority in
these areas (see the Aufheben discussion of Theories of Decadence, for a
great discussion of some other aspects http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/.)

My approach to this falls within Massimo's approach, broadly.  I think that
class composition changes, that it is driven by class struggle.  But one
aspect of class composition is the presence of multiple class compositions
internationally.  When labor forces capital to try to find a new
composition, it is never simply in the developed countries.  Capital may
still need the goods, services, raw materials, etc produced by the old class
composition.  IMO, capital exports this class composition of capital to
other countries.

Where the tendency in the developed capitalist countries was the real
subsumption of labor to capital, the tendency at first in the less
developed/non-capitalist countries was to impose the formal subsumption of
labor ie old, pre-capitalist forms of labor, to the capitalist market.  This
in part resulted from the loss of struggles against slavery in the US which
pushed European capital to look towards India and Egypt for cotton, without
necessarily transforming the relations of production.

This meant that what the Leninists call imperialism is really the transfer
of an older class composition from the center to the periphery (creating the
periphery in fact), hence the tendency towards exporting agricultural and
raw material production, and some industrial production.

Now, Trotsky recognizes correctly that capital transfers the newest means of
production, not the oldest.  He does not grasp, however, that they are the
newest means of production available to the previous class composition.
This has two impacts.  First, the periphery never catches up to the center,
creating the process that people like Walter Rodney recognized as the
perisitent underdevelopment of the so-called Third World.  Second, the class
composition exported does not look exactly the same as it did in the
developed countries for several reasons.  A) the means of production used
are as advanced as the current class composition in the center, so that
Russia gets the most advanced large scale factories employing THE
PROFESSIONAL WORKER, while the mass worker begins to dominate in the center
(Ford did not export Fordism to Russia, that required post-1917 capitalism.)
B) the class struggle in those places is not the same exactly because the
capital-labor relation is developed by individual capitals who specifically
are trying to develop them only as far as is necessary, putting a deformed
developmental process in place.  Hence colonialism is in fact necessary as
the means of enforcing formal subsumption.  The anti-colonial revolutions
involve, at least in their aftermath, the imposition of the real subsumption
of labor to capital, negating the need for an external imposition of market
discipline.  C) The history is not the same.  Period.  Diffeent people,
different prior social relations, different material history.  Simple
enough.

As such, Trotsky's notion of permanent revolution is both right and terribly
wrong, having no grasp of formal vs. real subsumption and class composition.
Lenin is even less meaningful because he never grasps what Trotsky does and
at the same time never understands class composition.  This does not mean
that anyone does much better than Lenin at the time and we would have to
explain why (in fact, Pannekoek and others rather liked Lenin's imperialism
from what I can see.)

I know this is very sketchy, but it gives us the beginnings of an alternate
dynamic which also engages with the actual interconnection of center and
periphery.  Needless to say, as we face the 21st century, we have a
multiplicity of class compositions, arranged hierarchically, across the
world.  The social worker or Multitude or Global Value Subjects (ugh, that
is a really ugly phrase, even if it is correct, comrade Dyers-Witherford)
exists alongside the professional worker, the mass worker (the basis of
industry in Argentina, South Korea, the Asian Tigers, Brazil, Mexico, India,
etc.), and some pre-capitalist social relations as well.  This is a complex
picture that goes well beyond anything the Leninists can grapple with and
leads to thinking about new social subjects, hence my discussion (mirrored
by the Nick Dyers-Witherford piece, which is excellent in many ways, and the
piece on class struggle anarchism, which is excellent, if a bit muddled on
Marx at times) of the transformation of the notion of the central social
subject which no longer places us as a purely class subject with race,
gender and sexuality as subsets of class.

Greg Schofield
Perth Australia
g_schofield-AT-dingoblue.net.au
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________

Use LesTecML Mailer (http://www.lestec.com.au/)
* Powerful filters.
* Create you own headers.
* Have email types launch scripts.
* Use emails to automat your work.
* Add comments on receive.
* Use scripts to extract and check emails.
* Use MAID to create taylor-made solutions.
* LesTecML Mailer is fully controlled by REXX.
* A REXX interpreter is freely available.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________




     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---