From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: highest form of capitalism
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 21:22:04 -0600


Greg,

I never called you a Leninist or associated you with Trotsky.  How odd.  I
did say that Lenin had serious problems around this and your defense of
Lenin's idea of imperialism is problematical, but that's it.  The piece I
pasted in was from another post addressed to someone else, not to or at you.
Sorry if that was unclear.

> 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.

Chris: no, it doesn't.  Marx's discussion did not imply that capital would
eventually become decrepit and fall apart of its own accord or that 'highest
stage' could be meaningful.  Lenin aped this from his training in the Second
International and their evolutionist theory.  You like to present people's
disagreements with you as based on their blatant inability to grasp the
obvious, btw, which is really obnoxious.  Lenin (and Hilferding, Grossman,
Pannekeok, Luxemburg, Engels, etc.) seriously differ from Marx on this.

> 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.

Chris:  That you cannot 'see it' is neither my fault nor my problem.  That
you do not distinguish between nationalization and socialization is more
interesting to me.  If we remove that terminological difficulty, then I
don't think we disagree, but I take socialization to mean something
different from nationalization.  Consciousness has nothing to do with it,
but the actual transformation of the social relations between people, the
elimination of wage labor, the capital-labor relation, exchange (in the
specific sense used in Capital), etc.

> 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.

Chris:  Then we use socialization in a completely different way.  For me
socialization involves the transformation of the relations of production,
not simply changing hands between individual capitalists and the nation
state.

> 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).

Chris:  Greg, you have already been rude.  Why the nasty tone around this
stuff?  And now you may feel obliged to have read too much into something.
I am not using center-periphery in the way that the 'Center/periphery'
school would use it.  And you need not put my point about slavery down to
the slip of a pen.  Its a question which remains far less absolutely
resolved than your snip implies.

> 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.

Chris: I think that is up to you.  For my part, I disagree with your
understanding, but I liked your post about changes in the world.  Maybe we
should just start over from there.

Chris





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