Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 01:03:53 -0800 From: jones/bhandari <djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: Unequal Exchange > Boddhisatva defended small firms as closer to socialism, >perhaps as embroyos of socialism. About this--and in a very Luxemburgian way-- >Mattick has written: "Capitalistically inclined social strata that are the victims of monopolization cannot be won over to socialism because their special social positions would be destroyed even more rapidly and thoroughly under it than under monopoly capitalism. At most they can be won over to a capitalist program that caters to their special interests, in a word, an anti-socialist policy. Thus behind the slogan of a struggle against state-monopoly capitalism lurks the proclamation of a counterrevolutionary policy directed against socialism "It is however conceivable that as monopolistic pressure intensifies, driving segments of the petite bourgeoisie into the proletariat, some of these petit bourgeois layers will be persuaded that their last chance lies with state capitalism, wich they hope will throw open the gates to the career monopoly capitalism had barred to them; one glimpse into the 'socialist countries' is sufficient to confirm their optimistic expectations. However, for the workers the same glimpse gives a somewhat different picture. They have no burning desire for this kind of socialism. Therefore for them communist policy, in countries where it carries some weight, e.g., in France or Italy, does not represent the embodiment of the desire for the revolutionary transformation of state-monopoly capitalism into state capitalism, but their only immediate iterests within the existing social system. The function of the communist parties are reformist, not revolutionary, and ultimately, therefore, they serve to sustain the continued existence of state monopoly capitalism" Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation, p. 86 So it is not only the Gramm's and reactionary republicans who can lead a petty bourgeois politics; Communists have done it before, and in either variant such politics pose a threat to the struggle for a classless society. and Boddhisatva asked me about division I goods or producer, as opposed to consumer, goods, to which I pointed because as opposed to underconsumption theory which predicts an excess of consumer goods because of depressed wages, it is by the overproduction of Div I commodities that crises often break out. See Chapters 8 and 9 of Mattick's Marx and Keynes, esp. p. 84; these chapters are a very clear critique of underconsumption theory, which boiled over into the famous exchange between Sweezy and Cogoy republished in the International Journal of Political Economy, v 17, no 2. > ------------------
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