Date: Fri, 20 Jun 97 11:42:08 EDT From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: M-I: Failure of imagination Andy, First, you have to understand that this was a response to Lou Proyect specifically. Comrade Lou is always touting his peasant rebellions as the model for modern socialism because he is a tired old man who thinks he is Che Guevara. Therefore he substitutes analysis of third world politics for a coherent theory of socialist revolution, because he and all his hippie ilk are failures in the modern industrial world. I am not by any means defending capitalism (except in the way that Marx himself acknowledges its positive aspects) only suggesting that asceticism, especially comfortable, academia-nourished asceticism, is a poor substitute for socialism. This 20-hour week nonsense, first proposed as an "answer" to France's problems might well be a boon to worker lifestyles. It is also simple reformism. Now it may be that enough reformism will make the capitalists mad and then they make the workers mad and so on, but it is not a very sophisticated plan of attack. Fundamentally, the short work week, high minimum wage and massive benefits plan are reformist redistribution. They are also things I support under capitalism. They are NOT socialism. Socialism is not simply a redistribution of goods, but a redistribution of rights. Welfare state socialism substitutes one bourgeoisie for another. I do not, by any means, think that socialism is the road to serfdom, quite the opposite. For that very reason I reject the shortened work week by edict as simple rationing. Socialism is bound to inherit the capital of capitalism without the tethers of surplus value extraction. This is an incredibly powerful commercial model. Lou Proyect, and others fear commerce because they don't understand it. Therefore, they immediately construct ways to kill commerce along with capitalism. They want to regulate it and calculate it to death because they fear it, and they fear giving actual economic power to the proletariat because the proletariat likes to shop and Walmart instead of natural food stores in Greenwich Village. Of course this kind of false asceticism has a long history under capitalism. I, on the other hand, envision giving workers direct ownership of their factories, and letting the chips fall where they may. That is because I see that our world does not so much suffer from what it lacks, but the disease that it has : capitalism. The cause of that disease is capitalist ownership. Therefore, I eliminate that first. This is not China in 1948. Redistribution should not be our first aim. We have the means at hand to create a first world, worldwide. We will not do it under capitalism, clearly. World socialism is the goal, clearly. It is also a philosophy used as a dodge by those who obsessively defend the great peasant rebellions in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc., as socialism. The very idea that socialism must somehow spring up everywhere with near simultaneity or it will not at all, is silly defeatism. Certainly the first socialist nations wil take their lumps, but if they are developed nations, they should survive. Then the model will spread because it is more appealing and also because it will take over the reigns of multinational corporations. I may be an iconoclastic socialist, and I may have to spend a lot of time here reminding my comrades of the revolutionary aspects of capitalism, but I am a socialist, nonetheless. peace --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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