>But to say this is to say that productivity is a purely bourgeois concept.
Yes, it is.
>Which is crap.
No, it isn't.
>The whole driving force behind history according to Marx's perspective is
>the development of the forces of production bursting the fetters placed
>upon them by the various relations of production they operate within --
>with each new change of skin, the creature growing apace (human social
>production) is able to move a bit more freely and live a bit more richly.
>But as the new skin (the most recent mode of production) grows tighter and
>tighter -- failing to expand with the growth of the creature inside it --
>then the freedom and wealth become more and more contradictory, until this
>restrictive skin bursts in its turn. Capitalism has proved to be a more
>flexible skin than slavery or feudalism, but at the moment it's about as
>conducive to human happiness as a condom the size of a thimble or a tight
>bra with spikes lining the inside of the cups. So to speak.
Well, without being quite so rude to any thimble-dicked Thaxists who might
be listening, I'd agree with all that, but I don't see what this has to do
with intensifying exploitation, Hugh. And who's going to handed the
responsibility and power to drive us that bit harder, anyway?
>Talking about productivity is not giving ground to bourgeois economics,
>it's removing the mat from under the feet of the utopians, who think that
>we can just proclaim joint ownership, democratic management and fairly
>planned production and have done with it. I thought that's what the lessons
>of the Soviet twenties were all about. Stalin and Bucharin thought they
>could *proclaim* Socialism at a snail's pace, but then discovered they
>were being given no time at all to do this by the resurgence of commodity
>relationships as the NEP affected more and more of Russian society and
>began to encroach on the commanding heights of the centrally planned
>economy. That was a *proclaimed*, utopian zig. To be followed by an
>equally *proclaimed* utopian zag -- forced collectivization -- more in tune
>with the needs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to be sure, but
>carried out in a way that did nothing to develop the voluntary associative
>relations of production needed if the new proto-socialist economy was to be
>coaxed along till it could stand on its own two feet against the hostile
>pressures of the world market. These hostile pressures, in one simple word,
>were productivity. Preobrazhensky's book on the New Economics makes this
>abundantly clear.
I don't see how a situation in which the bourgeoisie has already been
expropriated, should be one in which we are to be made to work harder.
>Commodity production is historically speaking a very efficient way of
>getting things made for less and less cost in terms of materials and
labour.
In my humble opinion, it's the most efficient way there'll ever be. As long
as you confine yourself to their way of measuring stuff. What's cost for
them? Money. What's efficiency for them? Exploitation. What's a product
for them? Anything from a depleted uranium round to nose-hair clippers.
Cost for us should be infingements on people's freedom. Efficiency should
be about the balance between self-fulfillment and meeting the needs of
physical social self reproduction. And products should be about doing
somebody somewhere a bit of good.
What's inefficient about capitalism is that it takes our time and energy
away and makes us produce a heap of shit we don't need.
>The only possible way for a mode of production to supersede any mode of
production
>based on commodity production is to outproduce it, otherwise it'll be
discarded.
That'd be true if we were talking about socialism-in-one-country, coz then
we'd have to match a system bent on beating us down. If we're not talking
about that, who'd give a shit? Most of us would be getting more (balancing
the benefits of free time and of course goods) than we had before anyway!
And I reckon we could live without a few things, too. Better for it, in
fact. That said, one contribution to productivity would be assured merely
by drawing the unemployed back into society's bosom (that is, if we evaluate
'productivity' such that this would appear productive.)
>But the Soviet experience shows that it's the
>aggregate productivity and the total response of the economy to people's
>needs that is important, not just productivity in one or two branches of
>industry --
'People's needs' is a hard one, I'll admit. But time to live a life is one
such - I'm sure of that.
>otherwise the Soviet Union would never have survived as it did.
>Nor would Cuba or China, for instance, have put up such resistance as they
>have to capitalist restoration, regardless of the avarice with which their
>bureaucracies are heading in that direction.
I don't reckon socialism can beat capitalism in a productivity race, Hugh.
Productivity as a high priority necessarily reduces people to a low
priority. Socialists would still innovate, I'm sure, but they'd innovate
towards allowing people to do necessary work as quickly and easily as
possible - not towards making their fixed non-negotiable work hours more
productive. People might decide to go on with their sixty-hour weeks, but
I've some polls somewhere that suggest different.
>Rob points to the importance of the historical subject here, and I thought
he was an anti-party man!!!
I never rejected the notion of the historical subject. I just don't see how
it should follow that this makes me a 'party man'. Incipient
substitutionism, I reckon.
>First you need to disarm and disable the bourgeoisie politically and
>economically, and you need a political subject to do that -- ie the masses
>following a coherent programme prepared and promoted by the party, ie the
>politicized working class seizing power at the head of an unstoppable
>rebellion by all the poor and working masses and aided and supported by the
>bulk of the not so very privileged intermediate strata (such as Rob, for
>instance).
Is it not thinkable that people might decide along the way what must be done
in the moment? I reckon parties, or something very like them, would surface
in such volatile times, but one which offered more sixty-hour weeks wouldn't
get far. If you want that kind of input out of people, I reckon you'd get
further with some sort of market socialism plan, where people would at least
feel the immediate ownership of their work, than you would with a programme
effectively transferring the old boss's coercive and planning power to an
entity which doesn't even offer lessened work time.
>Then, once you've set up a dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, a
>society where the direct producers are able to plan and produce
>cooperatively without the bourgeoisie forcing them to produce shit for the
>profit of others -- and without such a society you'll never get to be in
>this position -- you need an economic subject.
So you do. But we differ as to what the self-rule of direct producers would
look like. I'm either a rightish market socialist or an infantile leftish
Kollantai-type on this, I don't know what I am yet. But I do think the
Leninist model gets you something too like the Soviet Union.
>Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme makes this very clear with biting
>polemics against utopians who think there will be no intermediate,
>transitional stage between capitalism and full-blown communism.
Why can't market socialism be that transitional stage? If your transitional
stage has a powerful centre in it, you'll transit to something a powerful
centre would like, replete with widening gaps in material interests and
tendencies towards bureaucratic centralism.
>First we'll
>have to do a political job of cleaning away the blood and gore from every
>pore of society, and we'll have to distribute labour using methods of
>compensation based on returns for labour contributed rather than returns
>for need. This needs a politically and economically conscious leadership in
>society, it won't happen spontaneously of its own accord.
As above.
>If you like, we'll be exploiting our own labour for a while (what
>Preobrazhensky called Primitive Socialist Accumulation), but once our new
>economic entity as a whole supersedes capitalist world productivity IN
>RELATION TO THE GLOBAL NEEDS OF HUMANITY, we'll be there, and can start
>dismantling the repressive elements of social persuasion we needed to
>retain as long as capitalism still represented a threat.
Very happy with the IN RELATION TO THE GLOBAL NEEDS OF HUMANITY bit. But
'dismantling the repressive elements of social persuasion we needed' sounds
dodgy to me - even idealist. I don't say we don't need some hierarchies in
revolutionary times, but we have to make sure checks and balances are there
from the off (which is why I write of hierarchie*s*), otherwise the only
force capable of dismantling the apparat would be the apparat itself (which
its already particular interests would not have it do for, oh, 73 years or
so - and would, when finally pushed, do on purely its own terms)
>We will have to live in the shadow of the Law of Value for a while even
>under a proto-socialist system. Escaping from this shadow will be the
>greatest challenge of the early years of the new society. We won't be under
>the tyranny of abstract labour, but we won't be able to ignore it, either
>-- wherever it can produce faster and cheaper than our concrete social
>labour in its planned allocation it'll have its thumb in our eye.
Again, we come up against what constitutes 'cheaper'. On bourgeois
counting, capitalism will always do it cheaper, I reckon. On what I take to
be a socialist reckoning, socialism would be cheaper. See above.
>Stalinism wasn't state capitalism, it was undemocratic bureaucratic
>mismanagement of a proletarian dictatorship, and it only gained control by
>a prolonged political struggle whose counter-revolutionary elements emerged
>more and more clearly as time went on
Fine. Now have another look at what you just wrote, and think about what
I've been going on about. Don't I have a point?
>There's *no* scarcity.
It's down to what we produce - and down to the difference between need and
'effective demand', I suppose.
>it's the single biggest argument for the fact that bourgeois relations of
>production have outlived their usefulness for the development of the forces
>of production.
With you there, comrade.
>You mean our official work time under capitalism???
Nope. Under capitalism we produce what we have to produce to cop our wage.
I meant our whack as democratic producers under socialism.
>Dream on, Rob!
I do ... I do.
>First we have to take political and social power, then we will be able to
decide
>what we need to produce and get on with the job. Until then any sensible
>use of our time and resources will be enclave stuff locked into utopian
>marginality as far as the great human needs you've been talking about are
>concerned.
Yep.
>It sounds as if you think it's not far *ahead* of us. In fact it's quite
>some ways behind us already. For Marx in the mid-19th century we'd already
>passed this point -- as you'll see if you reread the Manifesto (do it with
>a friend -- it'll cheer you both up as autumn encroaches!).
Well, it's a moot call. Needs change as all things change. And Canberra's
Autumns are the very best thing about the place.
>The trouble is that if you mean by "transcend", do away with, then the
>forces of production won't do this by and of themselves. A midwife is
>needed to end this particular pregnancy. Every day that the forces of
>production outstrip the relations of production makes the transition that
>bit easier of course -- except that, the world being the dialectical thing
>it is, if the birth doesn't take place soon, the infant will die and the
>disgusting result will be barbarism -- the carcasse of capitalism torn
>apart by the tensions within it, and the only things remaining alive being
>the worms and the phosphorescent bacteria -- and maybe one or two jackals
>and hyenas, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I'd bet on it if I were a jackal or a hyena. But we gotta do our best.
'Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will', and all that. Anyway, I
pretty much agree with you here.
>The mass leadership of the working class is at present in the hands of
traitors ...
As it was in Russia by the mid-twenties.
>Well, I've tried to clarify a bit what I think the position is on this.
And much appreciated it was, too.
>Market socialism is a cowardly utopian cop-out. Anything to avoid the
>life-and-death confrontation with the bourgeoisie that creating the
>preconditions for real socialism will involve.
Market Socialism ain't gonna come about without fundamental and traumatic
social change, Hugh. And it might just be a promising candidate for just
the precondition of which you speak.
Nice to be convivially disagreeing with you (and just about evberybody else
here) again!
All the best,
Rob.
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