On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:07:42PM -0700, Ian Murray wrote:
>
>
> > Ian Murray wrote:
> >
> > >"The problem...of restraining corporate and individual combinations
> > >and monopolies,
> > >is the problem of restraining a species of communism; it is communism against
> > >communism, and the question is, how far communism ought to go in restraining
> > >communism. The general rule is that it ought not to go at all. The
> > >general rule is
> > >that commerce should be free...
> > >[Judge Seymour Thompson, 1891]
> >
> > So restraining the corporation is a bad thing, right? A kind of anti-communism?
> >
> > Doug
> ****************************
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm
> Three cardinal facts of capitalist production:
>
> 1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as
> the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities.
> Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the
> trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship.
>
> 2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division
> of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences.
>
> In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and
> private labour, even though in contradictory forms.
>
> 3) Creation of the world-market.
>
> The stupendous productivity developing under the capitalist mode of production
> relative to population, and the increase, if not in the same proportion, of
> capital-values (not just of their material substance), which grow much more rapidly
> than the population, contradict the basis, which constantly narrows in relation to
> the expanding wealth, and for which all this immense productiveness works. They also
> contradict the conditions under which this swelling capital augments its value. Hence
> the crises.
>
> **************************
> 1] says it all, change the forms of trusteeship; there are folks like Peter Brown and
> Edith Brown-Weiss that look at the idea of global trusts in novel ways. Brian Barry
> has some interesting ideas in the last part of Democracy Power and Justice that are
> very intriguing as well. Let's do some hard utopistics on this stuff. We don't need
> to run away from organizational ecologies that have 200,000 people working in them by
> any means. Whiskers clearly thought they harbored within themselves a propensity for
> different forms of asset ownership/stewardship as well as governance. And with the
> capitalists already showing a willingness to abandon those aspects of the
> nation-state they don't like we should one-up them with different models. Hell the
> world market is consolodating itself and with citizens mobilizing across time and
> space a lot of shit is up for grabs again; there is enormous opportunity.....
>
> Ian
>
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu