[PEN-L:201] Re: Re: Re: Left and Inequality

["Gar W. Lipow" <lipowg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> 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.


This kind of argument seems an all purpose attack about any kind of
long term thinking whatsoever. Why mention social ownership in the
point below?  This also "jumps the intervening time between now and
that time in the future". The answer is that thinking about social
ownership gives insights into reforms we can fight for now -- as does
thinking about redistribution.

>
> 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.
>

See above. Thinking about income and wealth inequality is also a rich
conntinuing source of insight about the flaws of capitalism, and what
we immediate opportunities we have to act against them.
> 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.
>

Oh come on, I could make the same argument about social ownership.
Social ownership under present circumstances (with Bill and Hillary,
the Pentagon and the Post Office as "managers") would be utterly silly
too. Non-governmental social ownership is also quite a leap under
current cirucmstances. We are not going to get any of the components
of socialism in next fifteen minutes -- not an end to ableism nor an
end to supremacy based on skin privelege, gender, sexual preference
transgender, not social ownership, not greater equality of wealth and
income, nor an end to environmental degredation. But any battles
against any of these evils are worth fighting. Or do you think battles
such as the fight for a living wage (clearly redistributionist more
than social ownership) are "throwaway" tactics?