[PEN-L:199] Re: Re: Left and Inequality

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I agree with what seems to be an evolving consensus: redistribution is not
> the entire story, but it is a non-trivial component of socialist strategy.
> The case for socialism, and its related political reality (the moment when
> "its time has come") depends on redistribution driving empowerment, and
> empowerment driving development.

This seems off the radar screen to me for three reasons:

1. It seems to jump the entire intervening time between now and that time
in the future in which a socialist regime would be in position to think
about "redistribution," and since such an interval would necessarily have
torn the society apart, one cannot now even begin to guess vaguely at what
kind of conditions would condition the policies a working class would
develop under those conditions.

2. "Redistribution," as it was used in some earlier posts on this thread ,
seemed to serve something like the purpose of factory exposures: a way of
making vivid to people what they already know, a speculative
redistribution for metaphorically dramatizing the structure of capitalism.
But as such it hardly seems worth pursuing or elevating to the level of
"socialist strategy." It is something to use once and throw away.

3. Finally, serious use of this metaphor utterly obscures the fundamental
fact that control of the means of production, not the modes of
distribution already predetermined by production relations, is the the
core of the socialist project. As every post which (in effect) regarded
the question of redistribution as an agitational metaphor clearly showed,
a redistribution under present circumstances would be farce; but change
present circumstances (replace them with either a mass struggle to replace
them or an actual socialist triumph), and all speculation on distribution
becomes moot. The question would reappear, but in forms on which it is
silly to speculate now.

Carrol