Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2002 13:15:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


On Fri, 8 Mar 2002, Harry M. Cleaver wrote:

> This is elementary set theory. The problem with the above argument is that
> what the people here preoccupied with "commodity production" seem to mean
> by it is not only that commodities were produced in each case, but that
> one of those commodities was labor power as a result of the working class
> being stripped of control over the means of production through various
> processes of primitive and ongoing accumulation. If "commodity production"
> was present in both cases then it was not "a tiny organ" within widely
> different, much larger social bodies; it was a fundamentally structuring
> set of relationships that Marx associatd with capitalism.

And Karl Marx provided a mountain of data to show how this happened
concretely in Great Britain over a 2 to 3 century period. The enclosure
acts resulted in the creation of a class that could only subsist by
selling its labor power. Hunting was banned, firewood collection on the
lord's estate was banned, etc. Karl Marx became interested in the whole
question of how capitalism came into existence in the course of writing
journalism exposing the mistreatment of working people, newly stripped of
their self-husbanding capacities as peasants. Without this side of Karl
Marx, the rest of it would lack the power to convince as it does. This is
the fatal flaw of our autonomist friends. They repeat empty mantras drawn
from the early chapters of V. 1 of Capital, but are either too unfamiliar
with Cuba's social reality to describe an alternative vision to the one I
have been providing through the narratives of James O'Connor or Edward
Boornstein, etc., or being familiar with that reality understand that it
is irrefutable.

I suspect that this thread has come to a merciful end because my opponents
in the debate simply can not do anything except recite abstractions. For a
current that is supposedly so committed to the autonomous workers
movement, it seems astonishingly disinterested in the flesh-and-blood
reality of Cuban working people, who are mostly of African descent.
Eurocentrism? Racism? Perhaps...



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