Date: Tue, 9 Dec 97 22:04:07 EST From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com> Subject: Re: M-I: Against Nature Mr. Jones, All right, let's stipulate petro-scarcity. So what? You are talking about *global* redistribution. Why are you wasting peoples' time with that kind of talk? You can't even get local redistribution. I can't seem to scare up a copy of Living Marxism, but from reading Heartfield's notes I would say that he does not promote capitalist development but industrial development. The question is how to get industrial development - a necessity for even a strict redistribution scheme - to the third world most effectively, cleanly and justly. Redistributionist, statist strategies have no political basis for support and so many economic problems that it doesn't even do to get into them. The problem for the modern Marxist is to develop socialist strategies for industrial development based on real worker control of the means of production. To that end, talking in terms of state mandated de-industrialization is preposterous. The reality is money, markets, and industry. The question is how to form that into socialism. It won't be through statism (which is clearly implied by radical redistributionism) because statism does not revolutionize capital, but is merely the logical extreme of reformism. It really doesn't matter how much oil there is because it is the proletariat's to squander if they choose. It is our job to put them in a position to choose through socialist economic empowerment. I understand that our planet has limits, and I am not at all comfortable with how close we are to those limits, but the scarcity-requires-rationing-requires-state socialism equation is a bogus one and no blueprint for revolution. peace --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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