PEN-L message, Re: Soviet

In a message dated 11/29/03 12:23:52 AM Pacific Standard Time, bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

Perhaps you could argue that all industrialisation up till now has been forced, even so, (1) there is a big difference between free wage labour, forced labour, prison labour and slave labour, and (2) future industrialisation might have quite a different pattern. Let me put it this way: there are a number of branches of industry now where one corporation operating in one or a few countries can produce the output requirements of the entire world at a level of productivity that's difficult to beat. That changes the whole pattern of industrialisation for newly industrialising countries by that fact alone. At stake is the amount of freedom and development opportunities which the worker actually has. Basically Soviet industrialisation was achieved to a large extent at the expense of workers' consumption and civil rights, causing not only a large amount economic irrationality and waste, human misery etc. but also terrible ecological problems; i.e. maximising popular democracy isn't simply a luxury, but essential to wellfunctioning social planning and a population motivated to improve society. Socialism in my view isn't simply about property relations, it's about creating a society fit for people to live in, optimising human development and raising the cultural level of humanity.

J.

All industrialization is achieved at the expense of the humane and the workers consumption rights, which actually is a social contract that determines such rights in the first place. The political form of property does not change this. The industrial process does not grow out of politics, although in real life this is the appearance.

Posing the question as forced collectivization begs the question what is unforced collectivization? In my opinion the entire reality is missed because one is taking about agriculture as a property relations - a class configuration, and not an abstract mobilization of the produce of the land. In America the sharecropper and small farmer were not forced into political forms such as the "collective," but liquidated as a class. They simply no longer exist as a material class - in the main. But then again this is probably my Stalinism. :-)

The changing pattern of industrialization in my estimate is not a changed pattern of industrialization, but rather a revolution in the technological underpinning of what is generally called the mode of production in material life. The mode of production and its material power is spoken of because the production of the means to support human life, and next to this production, exchange of things produced is in the first and last instance the basis of all social structures, up until this time. That is to say all of human history - up until now, has been a reaction to the struggle against scarcity. Scarcity does not mean the lack of a Jeep or products for that matter. Scarcity means that, which is needed to sustain life, which in the first and last instance is nutrition.

In the main society has not figured this out yet. The society of abundance means meeting our nutrition needs and not a car in every garage. This sounds petty but is the simple truth.

Society is by definition in motion or always going somewhere. The Soviet form cannot be reproduced in America if everyone wanted to reproduced this form. There is no basis in our social life for the state to own property because our material state of development does not require property. There is no basis in our social life for a bureaucratic order.

I respect the fact that socialism for you means "optimizing human development and raising the cultural level of humanity." Is not the basis of all culture eating, what is eaten and why it is eaten and how the things that are eaten are distributed? Communism is the absence of property. Property is not a thing. Property is a social force that has shaped and given depth to accumulated productive forces.

The difference between what I understand socialism to mean and communism is property. I have zero interest in the workers owning production, because we do not need owners. This issue of owning - workers control of production, only arises at the early phase of the industrial curve. That is to say the conception of workers control is an industrial concept called syndicalism that arose in our history about one hundred years ago, when earth was passing from agriculture to industry.

What blocks our progress as a species is the property relations and ignorance of the metabolic process and what is fundamental to sustaining human life. This is why we face the environmental crisis. We cannot survive as a species eating everything edible - really. The property relations is the basis on which reproduction is shaped. What is being reproduced is a mass of goods that bring us no pleasure. This mass of products - commodities, are being reproduced because production is run for production sake - the quest for profit, or the value relations or production on the basis of the property relations.

The solution is not changing the form of ownership but the abolition of the property relations.

The barrier the Soviets hit was property and the same barrier we have hit. America is not a society fit for humans to live in. Each year we become more insane.

I know a little bit about popular democracy, which is not as popular as we might think. In America we face a very real danger.

In respects to the Soviet Union it was a highly militarized society where the average citizen was considered and treated as a soldier. One balked at taking orders at their own risk. America is a country that issue orders to the world people. The solution is not to democratize the orders being issued but abolition of giving orders.

Melvin P.