File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-31.182, message 72


Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 10:28:45 +0100
From: Lew <Lew-AT-dialogues.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-G: Re: M-I: LOV and state capitalism


In article <Pine.SOL.3.94.970330223250.27767A-
100000-AT-utkux4.utcc.utk.edu>, Andrew Wayne Austin
<aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu> writes
>
>Marx did allow for a worker's state with bourgeois forms, if you are
>prepared to accept the early writings of Marx. In the initial stage of
>communism, "primitive communism," later characterized as the socialist
>stage, Marx sees a world where "the category of laborer is not done away
>with, but extended to all men," and "the relationship of private property
>persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things." "In
>negating the *personality* of man in every sphere," Marx writes, "this
>type of communism is really nothing but the logical expression of private
>property, which is this negation. General *envy* constituting itself as a
>power is the disguise in which *avarice* re-establishes itself and
>satisfies itself, only in *another* way. The thoughts of every piece of
>private property--inherent in each piece as such--are *at least* turned
>against all *wealthier* private property in the form of envy and the urge
>to reduce to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute
>the essence of competition." He goes on to discuss the labor structure
>writing that, "The community is only a community of *labor*, and an
>equality of *wages* paid out by the communal capital--the *community* as
>the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an
>*imagined* universality--*labor* as a state in which every person is put,
>and *capital* as the acknowledged universality and power of the community."
>[All emphasis Marx]
>
>Andrew Austin
>
>

This is an example of the "crude communism" that Marx was in fact
rejecting.
-- 
Lew


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