From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: M-I: Oblique view of "What will socialism be like"
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 10:30:55 -0600 (CST)


    It occurred to me as I read Louis P's latest response to Justin
(Sat. 11 jan 1997 17:31 est) that just perhaps an account of my
*pre-political* encounter of *Capital* I might be obliquely relevant
to the debate.

    The xmas vacation after finishing my ph.d. (when I was still
a happy cold-war liberal) I started to indulge in a self-defined
literary genre of "big books," defined as books that were (a) long
and (b) made the reader wish they were even longer. (Burton's *Anatomy
of Melancholy*, Pound's *Cantos*, Byron's *Don Juan*, Korzybski's
*Science and Sanity*, Kenneth Burke's *Grammar of Motives*, Swift's
*Tale of a Tub*, Augustine's *City of God*, etc.) The book I chose
first was *Capital* I. I read it through in about 5 days and was
enthralled (as a petty bourgeois literary-trained reader); I was
also really struck by the argument, but in a way fully consistent
with my happy cold-war liberalism: it proved to me that the world's
only chance was a retreat to some form of feudalism, a breaking up
of the large capitalist nation-states and empires.

    Now the two examples that Louis gives of socialist states that
look promising are both *small states*. Let us say that Mark Jones
is right about socialism needing to be WORLD SOCIALISM; but let us
also consider the possibility that neither a market nor a plan
will work within a nation state as large as the U.S. or Russia--
or even as large as the United Kingdom; perhaps not even as large
as England or Scotland. Both plannng and direct working-class power
would work within those small states; and the triumph of socialism
plus the disappearance of central control over really huge natural
resources and populations would make any sort of imperialism
impossible. Hence a sort of "world market" could operate that would
be totally different in kind from any market we know of or could
even construct as a model today.

    This is off the top of my head, and I won't defend it against
any attacks or try to develop it further; it's merely a sort ofs
heuristic one might chew over a bit.
    Carrol





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