Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 18:55:39 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: A shameless plea


Yo Thaxalites!

Rob S supplicated about OzCom.

Here's a couple of ideas.

1. Go to town on the importance of communications as shown by Marx devoting
a whole book of Capital (Book II) to circulation and the need to speed up
and effectivize the mechanics of exchange. Emphasize Fred's practical
advice on the role of speed in communications in getting an edge on the
competition and realizing your commodity sales quicker.

2. I would stress the commodification of services in the imperialist
period, but that's a controversial topic, so I'd only recommend it to
people happy with the idea. Once accepted, it gives you an angle on the
scale and intensity with which services are targeted for rationalization.
It also highlights the gulf in our society between skilled services
attached to high-tech low-labour industries, and unskilled services used as
a value trough for more highly productive sectors to suck value from. It
also gives a dynamic view of the deskilling processes of capitalism as
formerly skilled services become deskilled and cheapened thanks to mass
educational efforts (as an example, we could take the multitude of cheap
programmers in India, or cheap Irish IT graduates.)

3. Perhaps the most immediately accessible perspective for the audience
would be that of the conflict between national boundaries and world market,
where the productive forces, in the form of worldwide communications demand
and infrastructure etc, clash head-on with the relations of production
embodied in the old nation states and their national monopolies. The
transition to the worldwide centrally planned system that impassionate
rationality requires is hampered by two main forces -- first the need to
maintain bourgeois class control of communications, which has hitherto been
looked after by the nation state but has to painfully stretch to
international dimensions now, and second the need for the multinationals to
maintain their control of the market and superprofits. These forces
together add up to *imperialism* in which the political interests of the
states and the economic interests of the multinationals are fused, while
each player despite this does their best to annihilate the others. Not a
pretty sight.

4. To kick the bastards in the chops, emphasize the total lack of
patriotism and the totally cosmopolitan character of the multinationals as
social subjects. Murdoch and so on. The nation state as a necessary (armed)
but despised  servant.

That enough??

Cheers,

Hugh


PS A *real* Marxist would not just interpret all this but go on to discuss
changing it, ie the prerequisites of class organization and party, and the
question of revolution.

Things being as they are, however, even a shamefaced quasi-Marxist could
indicate the overripeness of imperialism for a socialist solution by
mentioning the way more and more aspects of centralized planning and
cooperative production are forcing their way into society (ie usually into
the methods of planning and production used by the multinationals) behind
the backs of the relations of production, even though the nature of
capitalism twists and distorts these proto-socialist aspects of social
organization something rotten.




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