Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 00:58:17 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: How and what we should debate


Mark wrote:
>[snip]
> Surely the way to contextualise the debate about planning is to
> historicise  it more than any of you are doing (come on now, get pissing, chaps!).
> Why  are people wondering about what a socialist economy, or socialism per
> se,  will look like? It will look like our own debates, on a planet-wide
> scale, with guns. Or it will (more properly) look like a civil war like the one
> in  that first Schwarzenneger Back From the Future film. So arguing pro or 
> contra different views about the functions and form of 'the socialist 
> economy' look a bit redundant ab initio. Weapons training is more
> useful. 

No, I think the point of the debate is that if market versions of socialism 
prevail there will be no socialism full stop. In that sense the debate it is 
contextualised in the contemporary class struggle. 
Before workers rise in revolution they will have to become 
conscious of the need for it. Market socialists undermine and weaken 
that consciousness by sucking workers into the politics of reform. 
Therefore it seems to me that winning the battle 
against the ideology of the market is a pre-condition for revolution. 
Not the only one obviously;  contradiction and class struggle exposes 
the anarchy of the market  etc. but it doesnt necessarily generate a 
revolutionary conciousness.

>  More importantly Socialism, as Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin agreed, is a
> stage of class struggle precedent to communism, where there will no longer be 
> alienated labour or the commensuration of labour-time, by commodity 
> exchange or input-output analysis or any other method. And since as we
> all  know 'the economy' is just the way in which the mass of undifferentiated 
> social labour-time is divided, there won't actually be an economy to
> talk about. 

But we have to get there first. Which is why I support your proposal to 
build  a new communist international.  However, on what 
methodological, programmatic or ideological basis?  I thought your point 
about Leninism being superior to capitalism in an earlier post was a good 
starting point.  But for me this would include taking a position on 
the  role of the  market in the USSR.
[snip]

> It is imperative that humankind ends commodity-production within a 
> foreseeable future, if there is to be a future. In any case, capitalism
> is  finished because the transcending of anthropomorphic limitations
> *entails* (logically, causes and is a consequence of) the ending of social 
> *production*, which is first and foremost am anthropomorphic category or 
> existent, and therefore the ending of the social division of labour, of
> the  commodity-form, of social classes, of false consciousness and all the
> rest of  the garbage. Please, comrades -- stop wasting time on arcana such as the 
> fate of the industrial working class -- a transient product of a Kantian 
> division of labour already superseded half a century ago and no longer
> an object of theoretical interest. But begin instead to debate the form
> which the Party can and must take *in the absence of a division of
> intellectual and  manual labour*.

I don't understand some of these points.  Is capitalism finished now, 
or as the result of the ending of social production?  I agree that the 
"industrial working class" is no longer an adequate term to describe the 
working class today.  But those who think it is, use this  as an 
argument against working class revolution.  Unfortunately this 
 argument wont go away just because we say its no longer of 
theoretical interest.  I'm for building a new Leninist-Trotskyist 
International based on a transitional programme for today which acts 
as a guide to action for workers to go from basic defensive struggles 
to the seizure of power.

Dave. 


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