File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 135


Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 13:04:38 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re:  Red pom-poms (was POCMPPMP)


Hugh Rodwell wrote:

>Well, it means you run the state, which means you've got to have a
>successful socialist revolution first, which is what me and my citational
>friends are working for while Doug is telling us that ownership in a
>bourgeois state matters less than workers or managerial control.

Hugh, you're obviously not a stupid guy, so why are you so fucking
thick-headed? I said that there's no easy equivalence between ownership and
control, and gave two concrete examples, the Soviet enterprise (which
conferred formal ownership on the workers through the agency of the state,
but gave them no control) and the modern capitalist enterprise in America
(where the shareholders have spent the last 20 years trying to turn their
formal control into actual control). How do "you run the state"? Who
exactly is "you" and what exactly is "the state"? If by some miracle all
the people who work for the U.S. government today were replaced by
committed socialists tomorrow, would that be enough? Or do you change the
structures and mechanisms of the state too? If so, how?

I know you won't or can't answer these questions, but they're worth asking
anyway.

Doug





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