Re: [Pen-l] Questions about the film Capitalism Hits the Fan

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rick Wolff wrote:

> 	If workers became their own board of directors - such that every job
> description specified both the usual specific work assignment PLUS
> participation in decisions about what, where, and how to produce and  
> how to
> distribute the surplus - our economic history would have been and  
> would
> henceforth be very different. If workers do their usual tasks Monday  
> through
> Thursday but on Friday gather to function as their own board of  
> directors
> (much as happens in many worker coops, in small hi tech firms across  
> the US,
> and elsewhere as well - it is not some utopian ideal but a practical  
> reality
> with a concrete and important history), here are some different  
> outcomes we
> might contemplate. First, in the 1970s such non-capitalistically  
> organized
> firms would NOT have stopped the historic rise of real wages in the  
> US,
> would thereby not have pushed workers to raise their consumption by
> exhaustive labor hours and unsustainable debts (among the causes of  
> the
> current crisis). Second, such firms would fundamentally alter the  
> ongoing
> relationship between enterprise and community. Third, the attitude  
> of such
> firms to many "costs" of enterprise that capitalists have infamously  
> not
> counted (effects on workers' health, family life, artistic experience;
> impacts on environment; etc.) would be to count them resulting in very
> different calculi of what is "efficient", etc. In short, economic  
> events
> would vary significantly.


Proposals such as this ignore the key feature of Marx's "historical  
materialism" to which I've been pointing.

"Relations and forces of production" are internally related to "the  
development of the human mind".

According to Marx, this development is necessary both for these  
relations and forces to be perceived as issuing from and alterable by  
human agency (as opposed to "fetishized") and for them to be  
"appropriated" as such products.  Such "appropropriation" can only be  
acconmplished by individuals with the degree of "all-round  
development" - of "integral development" - of "enlightenment" -  
embodied in the relations and forces to be "appropriated".

“private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round  
development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of  
intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and  
only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can  
appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of  
their lives.”
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03o.htm 
>

Apart from the fact that this is Marx's idea of what the "abolition"  
of private property requires, it's also true.

The "individuality" looking out from the postcards collected at the  
url below, for instance, lacks the required degree of "all-round  
development".

<http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/>

There's also the other fact, pointed to by Marx, that where exsting  
relations and forces issue in an "individuality" characterized by  
significatn "superstition" and "prejudice" (as opposed to  
"enlightenment"), they create a fertile soil for "despotism".

Ted





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