on doug's question, i think that's a cue for rob to give lazy people like me a run down on Albert & Hahnel -- it sits there on my shelf largely unread i'm ashamed to say. maybe rob can inspire me to pick it up.
but doug: leaving aside the issue over models, i actually think your previous comments on pushing the boundaries was much better. this at least places the focus on class struggles and opening up spaces which are decommodified, spaces of free association, etc, rather than on any plan.
jim:
>I'd suggest, no, clearly, the state, being itself an expression of
alienated human relations, could hardly be an instrument of their
supercession. The state is important as an instrument for the
suppression of the capitalist class, but exhausts its positive role in
that.<
so a two-step, then. but how, if the state is already constituted by alienation is it capable of the suppression of this alienation? doesn't this assume that an assault on capital (the form of value and the form of the state, both of which are interlinked) is the same thing as an assault on capitalists using the power of the state? you're more familiar with the endless permutations of theories of state capitalism, so i venture into that term without those accents, but isn't this the result of such a distinction?
> But planning - if it is a truly conscious appropriation of the
social product - implies that it does not come from the outside.<
i don't know what this means, especially why or how you'd use the term 'truly conscious'. isn't the implication then, that the appropriation of the social product as surplus value in capitalism is 'unconscious'?
>The question of national sovereignty is quite different. As long as
capitalism assumes the form of national oppression, one could hardly
abstain from the question of whether or not military occupation is
acceptable. Supporting national self-determination hardly implies that
you believe that that is all that is needed. But it is clear that a
country whose political and economic future is determined outside its
borders will not be planning anything.<
leaving aside the issue of national self-determination, which requires a whole other post of posts past, so you are saying that the nation-state is the form that the plan takes. isn't this precisely the problem with social democracy, that it requires a determined forgetting of the rest of the world, including the rest of the world's working class? and, the option does not strike me as between military occupation by a 'foreign power' and national planning.
christian:
>Nazism--fascism of a German variety--wasn't characterized
simply by the overweening ambitions of the state. It was characterized
by
the aestheticization of the state--and politics in general. It was a
political ontology that enshrined a national _Gesamtkunstwerk_ as its
truest
expression. <
never said nazism was characterised by an over-ambitious statism; rather, i pointed to the historic connection between biology and economics in the nazi state. if you raise the notion of socialist planning as the planning for the satisfaction of biological givens, as yoshie did, then to me, you'd have to address precisely this history of that synthesis and how that is to be distingushed from the notion of socialist planning in the aforementioned terms.
on the issue of nazism as the aestheticisation of politics, another post, because it's interesting but not entirely connected i think.
Angela _________