Date: Sat, 16 Aug 1997 13:52:11 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-I: G.A. Cohen Interview in Philosophers' Web Magazine  


G'day James,

I appreciated both your report of Cohen's views and your own response to
it.  A  tentative observation, if I may:

Cohen does begin by saying:

   Well, I don't think my interpretation is particularly
   distinctive. To call a society socialist is to indicate the form of
   economy it has, a form of economy in which there is a kind of shared
   ownership of productive assets among all the people rather than
   private ownership of those assets by individuals.

So, I reckon he's not to be categorised as 'left-liberal' at all.  Cohen is
a socialist.  The conversation that follows meets with my irrelevant
approval because Cohen is clearly arguing for market socialism as a mode
that is historically legitimate (ms has at least not proven itself to be
incipient or actual tyranny and it is imaginable - if still profoundly
revolutionary - in the here and now).  The distribution stuff might fall
into a bit of context later in the discussion, I dunno - but I gotta go
with your reservation that it is,

> ... far from Classical Marxism.  Marx in his *Critique of the Gotha Program*
>criticized socialist critiques of capitalism that focused too much on
>>distributional issues.   As Marx put it:
>
>	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 principle stress on it ... Any distribution whatever of the
>
>       means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the
>       conditions of production themselves.  The latter distribution,
>however, >       is a feature of the mode of production itself.  The
>capitalist mode of
>       production, for example, rests on the fact that the material
>conditions >       of production are in the hands of non-workers in the
>form of
>	property in capital and land, while the masses are only
>	owners of the personal condition of production, of labor
>	power.  If the elements of production are so distributed, then
>	the present-day distribution of the means of consumption
>	results automatically.

I haven't read these blokes in depth, but I find myself wondering just to
what extent their critiques are actually based on a distribution fulcrum.

Cheers,
Rob.




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