From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: What could "proletarian socialism" possibly mean?
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 10:13:22 -0600


> So to my banality, at least I think it to be one, although not
> all would agree me in this. Essentialist it may be but I see
> no reason why people living 200, 500 or a thousand years
> ago should have been born with less human potentials
> for  bringing about communist relations than we are. That
> concrete, historical, socio-material conditions, containing
> the ghosts of the past, in different periods put up greater
> or lesser obstacles is another matter, and the difficult part.
> But communism was always possible. Likelyhood is
> another thing all together.
>
Ok.  I'm still not sure wha this really means, however.  For example, I
don't think it was possible to achieve a communist society without
possibility for abundance and the changes in human consciousness.  I am not
sure that people 1,000 years ago were actually really the same in a
psychological sense and the material preconditions were certainly not there.
Anyway, fine.  I also agree that bandying about everything Marx said which
may have been relevant then as relevant now is not meaningful.

BTW, I really have problems with the two stage thing <given where our world
is at and in light of 125 years of subsequent experience>.  I am however
opposed to the idea that it meant that Marx had some authoritarian vision of
'state socialism' because he didn't and because I refuse to give Marx over
to the authoritarian/state capitalists on this point, especially Lenin in
'State and Revolution'.  That's mostly why I make a big deal about it.
>                                         * * *
>
> In a comment to Greg, you write: "This is very clearly not
> about a state within communist society, although contra
> Harald, Marx prolly did suspect that larger means of
> organization would exist for coordinating certain social
> functions on a global and regional scale."
>
> I will at this point leave it to others to argue whether Marx
> did or did not think of the first phase of communism
> organised as a state. He is not on the list to contribute
> anything further on this matter. More intersting is the
> question surrounding "larger means of organization ... for
> coordinating certain social functions on a global and
> regional scale."  I consider forms of co-ordination on
> regional, continental and global scale to be an absolute
> condition for the creation of communist social
> relations. But if these are gonna have the force needed
> both in functional and emotional terms, and not to immediately
> undermine our ends, this whole cannot exist as the
> fragility of centralised power but must glued to together
> at numerous points on the social basis of decentralised
> power, which is the only form in which
> collective power can maintain itself.
>
Cool.  Works for me.
>                                             * * *
>
>
> My  rejection of "two stages" does not involve any belief
> in  a sudden transformation to a world free from every
> conceivable "sin" of the past. There will be problems and
> challenges enough to go around.  And the poets will still
> be able to write down those words about young and old
> broken hearts.

See note above.
>                                             * * *
>
>
> "Labor certificates have nothing to do with money, " you
> say. I would rather say they are a primitive form of money,
> and as such also pretty useless if you do not tend to be
> restricted in one small community for the rest of you life.
> On the other hand, if they are generalised, and I have
> hard to imagine that marx thought of anything else, they
> will soon aquire every aspect of what we know as money
> and a life of their own, with a full blown bureaucracy, means of
> coercion  and radical alienation attached. It is all to easy
> to imagine the fruit of the first phase scenario in "The
> Critique of the Gotha Program" as state capitalism, with
> wages, income taxes, a state bank, etc, or to put it other-
> wise, as what is outlined in more detail in the
> Communist Manifesto.
>
> In your reply to Greg, you write . "Nowhere in this whole discussion
> does there exist a place for the capitalist, for the expropriation of
> alienated labor.  Nowhere does alienated labor exist in Marx's
> entire discussion here.  I can only suspect that anyone defending
> the idea that 'labor certificates' or 'tokens' equal wages or money
> does not understand that money and wages are FORMS of the
> capital-labor relation, not 'things'."
>
> "Nowhere in this whole discussion" does not mean there would no
> place for such as a consquence of they operating in the world
> outside Marx' letter. Nowhere in Proudhon's entire discussion on this
> topic, as far as I can remember did there exist a place for the
> capitalist either, but none the less the fruit, as somebody argued ...
>
> Now we can imagine labour certifcates in the form of rationing
> cards or food stamps. This card give so and so the right to
> recieve such and such amount of these specified things, and as
> with any cheque there would have to exist the possibility to cheque
> the authenicity of the card at those who issued it. Even if electronic
> credit cards might be closer to what Marx had in mind. With
> tokens, let us call them Freedoms, things become clearer, as
> no personal names are stamped on them. The only thing that
> could make thwwwem somewhat differ from the money we know being
> would be if they were made incovertible, the use of Freedoms
> being made geographically restricted.

Up to this point, nothing you have said is applicable to Marx's critique of
money, which is a form of social relation which depends upon the lack of
transparency of social relations, on relations between people appearing as
relations between things.  The commodity form could not exist under
conditions where each person's labor is directly social, tokens or not.  As
such, there is no exchange of Value, and this is Marx's main point, that
distribution would not be capitalist distribution because it would not be
capitalist production and we, the producers, would not have a fetishized
consciousness, therefore able to see that the labor we expend is the source
of everything we produce.  No longer alienated from our own self-activity,
there would be no need to have a mediating form.

And again, since none of this can buy another person's labor power or means
of production, exactly how is it money?  Money has no relation outside such
things.

However, this whole question revolves around the question of whether or not
we could achieve 'from each... to each'.  In a lot of the world, I doubt we
could do that terribly quickly.  That will mean that, tokens or no tokens,
who decides who gets and who does not?  Lack always produces people trying
to find alternative means.

> There are some quite obvious complexities involved. How much is
> an hour of work to be worth? And who decides the bank or the
> market? You would protest, and say, there is no mention of any
> market in the text. But if each hour of work is to have the same
> value, regardless of what is actually produced within that hour, a
> black market and a merchant class would soon appear. On the
> other hand, if the "real value" of each hour was tried sought out
> by other means, what a hell.  I could continue ...

Actually, Marx specifically says that unequal labor will produce unequal
results and unequal personal 'income'.  So clearly Marx has in mind the
tracking of real labor expended, which may be difficult for us to see, but
which may be rather simple in many contexts.  I don't have an answer,
really, though.  Its a bit speculative, all this.  I am simply arguing that
you misconstrue the nature of commodities and money in the way you argue the
point.  that's my real argument with you and Greg, at least the one I am
more vested in.

Even Marx rather reasonably said:
"I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of labor, on
the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair distribution", on the other,
in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on
our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning
but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the
other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into
the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological
nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and
French socialists.

Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to
make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on
it."

Maybe this is the wisest approach.  As I said, I am not sold on the 'two
stages' notion since we live in a vastly different world.  What may have
made sense 125 years ago may not make sense today.  And in either case, the
problem of distribution will be largely resolved by how communist society
develops and on what material basis, which today is much higher than that of
125 years ago.

> Personally, I also always imagined that going beyond capitalism
> would further blur the borders between labour time and free time,
> not make them appear more self-evident, which would tend to
> indicate that the former was still a pretty saddening affair.

Sorry, I expressed that poorly.  The self-evidently social nature of labor,
ie the end of alienated labor and its fetishized appearance, would exactly
eliminate the difference between free and labor time.  However, there would
still be labor time which involved the reproduction of our means of
subsistence, which would decrease, compared to labor for non-subsistence
purposes.

There is
> another far more sympatic way around this outlined by Ilan on the
> background of experience  but there within the radically different
> framework of "from each according to ... to each ... needs"   where
> labour could be said to be defined by the hours each of those so
> capable have to put into provide for the collective needs of the
> community.  What is unclear fro me here is what happens when
> you go outside of the community.

Yeah, hard to say.  But all of this is rather speculative and Ilan's
perspective has to take into account the subsidization by a capitalist state
and a host of other issues, so it is a complicated 'example'.

> To me it is obvious that the communist principle must apply globally
> and must become the dominant practical principle from the very
> beginning. Some pockets here and there locally putting into force
> some degree of accountancy morals, will not do much harm but
> there is no way around that all-superior currency called "a degree
> of mutual trust (and interdependence)" if we are to
> move beyond capitalism.

Hmm...  Won't get rid of capitalism without that last bit anyway, I think.
But true enough.

Cheers,
Chris



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