Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 18:15:36 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Red pom-poms (was POCMPPMP)


I wrote:
>
>>How about Private Ownership of the Means of Production for the Purpose of
>>Making a Profit (control is included in ownership)

and Doug had a fit:

>Heavens, Hugh, are you that unfamiliar with all the bourgeois intra-class
>struggles over ownership vs. control? The shareholder-manager fight? Agency
>theory? Properly "incenting" CEOs so they behave like owners instead of
>hired help? I know there's nothing about this in the Transitional Program,
>but still - these are problems that socialists should think about. State or
>worker ownership is meaningless without real control, and how to
>institutionalize that control is a real challenge if you want to get beyond
>your citational approach to politics.

Yeah, the managerial revolution. Talcott Parsons. Meritocracies. Dreary
crap. These are problems petty-bourgeois utopians can bust their balls and
ovaries on. And cynics, so it's right up Doug's street, too. Keep him out
of mischief. Oh and Marx has an interesting page or two on this very topic
in Capital.

Now of course, to lift all this on to a higher plane than Doug inhabits,
despite his Wall Street skyscrapers, we could agree that at a certain
dialectical point, control will subsume ownership, by physically wresting
possession out of the hands of the owners and refusing to return what is
owned to them. However, this will only be workable when the commanding
heights of the economy and the political nerve centres of society are in
the hand of the new controllers, ie in the shape of a socialist revolution,
as much experience of a good deal of workers' control lacking the vital
element of state power has shown -- from the Paris Commune to Allende's
Chile. Doug's utopian and cooperative solutions always end up on the
rubbish heap as long as the bourgeois state survives, and they usually end
in misery for the poor bastards who thought they could cheat the system.
They're either tortured, beaten and killed, as in Chile, or screwed by the
credit system and turned into debt-slaves.

I don't have to do Doug's rhetoric to ask if he's unaware of all this, cos
I know he is, and I know it doesn't matter a toss how often I repeat the
arguments, they won't sink in. No armour thicker than a p-b leftie who
wants more than anything to keep the revolutionary workers out. Funnily
enough this is also in the bit from the History of the Russian Revolution I
couldn't find off-hand yesterday.

Doug hasn't even got a sense of humour any longer. He can swallow camels to
get a crack in at some poor victim, but strains at a gnat to avoid
endorsing an easily memorized mnemonic for the essence of capitalism.

Cheers,

Hugh





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