planning (and the side issue of nazism) - was lots of other silly headers

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu Aug 26 16:06:55 PDT 1999


In message <010c01beefed$dbd96e20$ace13ecb at rcollins>, rc-am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> writes
>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.

So, a meaningless comment, then


> but how, if the state is already constituted by
>alienation is it capable of the suppression of this alienation?

It's not.


> 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?

no.


> 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?

I don't understand what that means


>
>> 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 appropriation of the social product as surplus value in capital 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.

No.

I am saying that foreign rule is the form that alienation 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?

No.


>and, the
>option does not strike me as between military occupation by a 'foreign
>power' and national planning.

Nor me, but I can imagine that for an oppressed people it might well.

all the best -- Jim heartfield



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