Re: Economics of Communist Society

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Graeme Imray wrote:

> I am somewhat disappointed at the turn this thread has taken in so far as
> it has retreated slightly from an attempt to confront the of question the
> nature and form of a communist economy and turned into a somewhat sterile
> discussion of what we all acknowledge was a FAILED attempt by the working
> class to socialise the economy in the post First World War period.

I totally agree with this. One of the flaws of this thread, where I
was only marginally involved, I must say, was precisely the over-
emphasis (again!) placed on the elaboration of retreats.
Probably this was due to the fact that a substantial amount of
Communist tradition (I would say the "preservers of the Holy Grail"
Graeme talks about) finds, in the absence of successful
examples of "transitional stages", in the memory of the defeat a
major reason for stimulation and excitement when discussing
revolutionary politics comes to the fore. Of course, the danger here
is to exchange memory and strategy, making archeology out of
politics. Maybe it would be nice to put on the list the "apology of
the absence of memory" written by Negri in 1981 ("the memory of the
proletariat is the memory of the past estrangement, only the absence
of memory is revolutionary"...). I think Steve has it, even if I'm not
sure he agrees with it (I find it a very suspect text myself indeed,
given the climate of political "dissociation" when it was written,
but this is another story).

It's true that one of the merits of this thread has been to
stress the importance of "anti-bolshevik" trends inside Communist
theory and practice. However, this did not lead to a discussion
historically rooted in the, concrete and often tragic, separation
between self-organised understanding of the Communist movement, and
party-state centred ones (the great theme of Karl-Heinz Roth's "Die
'andere' Arbeiterbewegung). I think that the forms in which this
division has developed has led to such real horrors in the name of
the party (from post-revolutionary Russia to 1977 Italy) that they
can be hardly healed by restoring the concept of the "transitional"
party-state to a supposed pristine "purity" (maybe preserved by some
little group) inscribed in theory and yet violated in practice.
I think the fundamental point of this disjuncture lay in the
first years of the CPSU, as ambiguously based on the need to give a
political expression to a class composition identified along the
lines of Lenin's analysis of incomplete but accelerating capitalist
development in Russia, and the need to use the party state to bring
that composition to a (capitalist) modernization inside the
revolutionary process (Taylorism+productivity deals disguised by the
"socialist" character of the state). On this fundamental ambiguity I
still think that Bologna's article on the "theory of the party" is
immensely helpful, and that, regardless to some historical
inaccuracies and omissions, it has been too hastily dismissed by
someone.

> So, to bring the discussion to its present point, there appear to be no
> 'takers' for Mauro and Jock's [CWO/ICP] view that it will be necessary
> during a period of transition of indeterminate length for the economy to
> work according to the principle of 'from each according to his abilities to
> each according to his work'.

I agree with Graeme also in his critique of the notion of socialising
"transitional" state based on a continuation of waged labour as
"emancipatory" force through the continuing relevance of productivity
deals in the so-called "socialist state". This notion implies, a
point I already raised in my reply to Harald that the pattern of
technological and political forms of domination in a capitalist
society are essentially neutral. That is to say that the same
configuration of the forces of production and the state itself can be
optimally utilised to redistribute resources "according to
everyone's work" once freed from the fetters of capitalist
production. This ignores to what extent technological development was
a response to worker resistance and a way to fragment the class,
making the satisfaction of needs dependent no longer on the old
politically defined productivity deals of the welfare state, but on
the impersonal rationality of intra- and inter-firm competition
dictated by the capacity to "flexibly" adapt to new technology
itself.

But this fragmentation implied a fragmentation of identities and
*needs* as well, needs involving not only commodities but also self-
management of time, sociality, desire. Laura is quite correct in
emphasizing this point. I agree that the development of struggles by
working class and "new social subjects" in the last thirty years
emphasize not the class' aspiration to new productivity deals in a
"socialist" state, but rather the necessity to define organizational
forms to re-appropiate the means of satisfaction of needs in this
broad meaning. This takes into account that it is not "technology"
that is at the heart of the current increases in productivity (being
rather at the heart of the unequal distribution of its fruits) but
it is the power of social cooperation in the workplace and the
territory. The problem here is precisely how to use that social
cooperation, and not myths of a socialist state to rationally utilise
the capitalist technology, as the core of a revolutionary strategy,
and not as the core of proletarian exploitation, as it now. Then, the
problem of the "economics in a communist society" shifts from the
rational organization of production in such a society to the
politicization of struggles over needs, distribution and quality of
living in order to *eliminate* the question of transition altogether,
shifting social balances of forces in a way to liberate the
potentialities of communism in the presently increasinly ungovernable
global capitalism.

> As to the question of whether we are paid in money or labour vouchers, it
> makes no difference. If our 'work' is a measure of our consumption, it
> still confirms our status as wage labourers, separated from the means of
> production and the product of our labour. That is we are still alienated
> from it and therefore we are forced to conclude that, despite outward
> changes in the state form - nothing in its essentials has changed for us.

I agree, and I think it substantially confirms what I wrote above.

> Either the bulk of individual consumption is free from day one

Exactly...

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
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