Re: Venture Communism

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 02:38:53PM -0700, sartesian wrote:

> 1.  The fallacy in this type of proposal, "venture communism," has been
> examined and exposed many times before you have re-proposed an essentially
> archaic notion.   Marx demolished this notion in many of his works-- and
> took Proudhon apart in The Poverty of Philosophy.  You will need to
> familiarize yourself with that work if you want to make sense of and in this
> discussion.

Once again, thanks for the pointers, I will do my best to undertstand the
works you recommomend. However, you can not call something a fallcy by
mere allusion to unstated references, you ought to be able to demonstrate
the fallacy.

> 2.  You propose a false "strategy," of workers either "doing nothing" or
> engaging in hedge-fund socialism.  Rather than pursue self-capitalist
> alternatives, the real struggles of the class are "what the workers should
> do."

No, I ask what you would have me do with my labour instead. Currently my
labour enriches capitalists. If I stop doing this then my family faces
poverty. Should I feed my child Das Kapital instead of food? If you want
to discourage me from starting Venture Communes, what would you have me do
instead? I am not creating false delemas, I am trying to understand what
your alternative recomondation is. What should I do with my labour?
Starting now, not at some future hypothetical time of Capitalist crisis.

> 3. Yes capital can be purchased.  But it's still capital.  Purchase is not
> expropriation.  Expropriation means the emancipation of labor and the means
> of production from the constraints of profit, of private property.

There is nothing wrong with Capital! The problem is Capitalism. The idea
that one can have soveriegn property rights; that is the problem. If the
capital is "owned" collectively, the problem is solved, regardless of
whether it was purchaced or seized.

> 4.  Oh yeah, it's a trick all right, the sharing of profits "equally," so
> much of a trick that it doesn't, can't, won't exist in anything other than a
> Ponzi scheme.

This is an out of hand dismissal. I would like to know _why_ it doesn't,
can't, won't exist. Please explain your reasoning.

> 5. How so?  Because in order to purchase material from the "non-venture
> communist" world, the medium of exchange, money, will have to be absorbed
> into your hedge-fund utopia, and with money, debt, and then production
> becomes organized necessarily, for the service of money, and the servicing
> of the debt.

Money is abstracted value, nothing more, nothing less. It is an artificat
of the environment.

> 6. Glad to hear of your religious belief in your venture communist
> corporations.  Let me know when the comet comes.

Ok. Whatever.