From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no> Subject: Re: AUT: What could "proletarian socialism" possibly mean? Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 10:32:11 +0100 Greg; I will get back with a reply to your earlier post, but I just could not help comment on this here and now .... "The pedagogical imperitive in the Gotha piece is very important, in a sense he is hammer home some really basic stuff and this seems more to the point of drawing the distinction he has made. Mind you even if Marx had not uttered a word on this subject we still would have to come to the same conclusions. ..." So to the "Critique of the Gotha program": "What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form." First I think Marx should have read some Marx before writing this. There is no way you to reckon exactly what the "individual producer" has "given to society". On the other hand it does not take much of a phantasy nor historical knowledge to imagine what a bureucratic nightmare trying to put somthing like this into effect would produce. Added to this, even in this day of neo-liberalism, most politicians in the traditional business party here would not even dare to suggest the full consequences of following such a principle in social terms. Now, I am probably reading Marx a bit too literally here (as he almost always read other though, often if not always also producing insights and an increased degree of clarity while doing this). He surely thought of partially underming his wonderful principle through the "social fund" which would not make this reckoning any less complex and hopeless adventure. The fact is that the only way such a system can function is through the invisble hand of the market, but also then only on a general level and not on an individual one. Anyway, apart from creating new real-life inequalities, it would also maintain, in particular on a global level, old ones. To compete on the basis of one starting out with sword and the other one with a machine gun, is not quite fair. I do not think Marx turn to the economical thinking of Proudhon was a very good idea. A bit for utopian for me. Harald --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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