[PEN-L:32927] discussion about quotes from CAPITAL

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: discussion about quotes from CAPITAL

was: RE: [PEN-L:32916] Re: RE: Re: Re: United Airlines and market socialism

 Devine, James wrote:
> > Marx actually suggested both (1) that huge capitalist firms represented
> > an abolition of capitalism within capitalism (see chapter  27 of volume
> > III of CAPITAL, p. 438 of the International Publishers' edition)

Louis P writes: 
> But that is only a reference to capitalism as it functioned in earlier
> stages of its development rather than any kind of progressive movement
> toward socialism, as indicated in Bowman and Stone's paper.
> Marx says in fact that this development "reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a
> new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and
> simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by
> means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation.
> It is private production without the control of private property." That
> is not what we are shooting for.

of course not. But he says that the capitalist-as-entrepreneur was being abolished, being replaced by the capitalist-as- rentier, undermining one official defense of capital. The huge corporation acts as a miniature planned economy, too.

> > that workers' cooperatives were a precursor of socialism ("within the
> > old form the first sprouts of the new," especially by  showing that the
> > capitalist was "redundant" (chs. 27 & 23, pp. 440 & 387).

> But Marx never uses the word socialism when speaking about such
> cooperatives, only that they are another _expression_ of how credit is
> transforming capitalist production: "The credit system is not
> only the
> principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private
> enterprises. into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the
> means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises
> on a more or
> less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the
> co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional
> forms from
> the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with
> the only
> distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and
> positively in the other."
>
> Just because something is "transitional", it does not mean that it is
> transitional to socialism. Marx's formulations in this chapter are
> oblique, to say the least.
>
> > To my mind, this does not say that Marx emphasized planning
> (the basic
> > rule of the huge firms' internal organization) over workers'
> > cooperatives, as the apologists for the old Soviet Union
> said. Nor does
> > it say that he emphasized cooperatives over planning (as
> some "market
> > socialists" do). Rather, it says that Marx wanted _both_
> society-level
> > planning _and_ workers' control (overcoming the antithesis between
> > capital and labor) as complementary parts of the same
> socialist package.
>
> It says no such thing at all. You are just projecting your
> own idealism
> into Karl Marx.
>
> > Of course, this simply puts a major task on the agenda of
> socialists:
> > how can we merge and reconcile central planning and decentralized
> > democratic cooperatives?
>
> The major task on the agenda of socialists is how to organize
> protests
> to block Bush's war drive, not write blueprints for future societies.
>
>
>
> --
>
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