Marta Russell:
> I'm not arguing for a better corporate run capitalism, I'm not for
> reforming it because it cannot reform.
Ian:
> >What's a better way of making automobiles, clothes, washing machines,
> >infant incubators, dental tools, textbooks, bobby pins and hair care
> >products etc. that embrace left 'values'? One word answers are not
> >allowed.
Marta Russell:
> A change of values is necessary to change the economic paradigm. This
> can only occur when enough people understand that neoclassical
> economics is nothing but a sham which justifies the loss of human
> life by expelling human needs and life choices from the calculous --
> and must (and can) be done away with because it isn't a law, it is
> man-created.
Various arrangements for replacing traditional capitalist modes of organization have been proposed, some of them rather detailed (parecon, for example). And in fact some of them exist in real life. It seems to me that the great problem of the Left is not a lack of ideas but a lack of people willing to carry them out personally. If most people do not actually want to organize themselves in a socialist, communist or anarchist manner, if they expect things to be done for them by great leaders, then anything that happens is likely to be a reprise of past elite-run systems. If they do, they ought to be able to subvert capitalist and even fascist institutions, or to evolve new relations and institutions within or beside them -- "building a new society in the shell of the old."
So I think the question is not how to organize the future but how to change minds to the point where more people will begin this process of subversion or move outside the system altogether -- that is, will start living the life. (This is not to say that the negative work of trying the throw wrenches and sand into the gears of imperial capitalism is not also needed -- but one must recognize that in itself it's not likely to go anywhere, to produce anything new.) I don't see much way of doing this but by exemplary action in the world -- hence my efforts to support Food Not Bombs. I've also made some proposal to start the experimental distribution of free food which almost no one was interested in. (I could do it alone, of course, and possible cajole others into the work, but I'm not interested in becoming a great leader. If it doesn't catch on, its time has not yet come.)
Needless to say, I don't think any exercise of State power, be it governmental, corporate or otherwise, will produce anything good except by accident. Peace, freedom and equality will not be achieved by war, slavery and hierarchy, any more than they have been in the past. Even when these have a social-democratic face, the boot is the same and eventually it comes out -- as we observe over and over again.
"Ian Murray" <seamus2001 at attbi.com>
> Sounds good. What happens when people, billions of them, can't
> agree on what those values should be and some of them have
> weapons of mass destruction? The problem is far bigger than
> the way some people think neoclassical economics is or is not
> being operationalized by corporate managers and government
> policymakers.
This is one of the reasons I think that the State has to be undercut, subverted, eventually abolished everywhere if one wants to get rid of it anywhere. But first the State has to be dealt with where one is. The hardest steps are the first.
-- Gordon