C. Heartfield writes:
"'dlaw' smuggles all of the relations of capitalist exchange into his 'communist' conundrum. Dollars, lending, property, rationing, the state and so on. And then he says 'solve that without reference to the law of contract'. Well, obviously I can't, which is just another way of saying that he is not describing a communist society (and let's face it, who could?)."
No, I just used familiar terms which I have now corrected (see below), although I daresay you will find yourself no closer to a solution without law. There is no rationing in the example I gave, only the very obvious statement that big, complex tractors don't grow on trees. There is a shortage of technicians in the example because that must be expected in any system, particularly one with as much and as diverse production as we all imagine under communism. People get sick, go fishing, move to new places.
C Heartfield continues:
"But of course it is a failure of imagination to think that all questions are subject to the law. What is role of lawyers in deciding whether the earth goes around the sun, or vice versa? None..."
None indeed. Lawyers also don't have magic wands or the ability to pull rabbits out of empty hats, either. They are subject to the laws of Nature as are we all, except in imagination, but since communism is the product of man and not Nature, what the hell does it matter?
Comrade Heartfield says "When I need to fix my car, I don't consult a lawyer."
When your neighbor borrows your car, smashes it and refuses to pay for the repair, who are you going to call? Harry Potter?
C. Heartfield writes that:
"In other forms of social organisation, people will not need a lawyer to fix their allocation of resources. Lawyers and the law only exist because of the failure of capitalist society to spontaneously reproduce the conditions of human existence."
No, Nature herself is to blame for failing to spontaneously produce a living for us. Either that or Merlin the Magician has been slacking off on the job. Maybe Stephen Hawking is to blame for pointing out that cars only smash against light poles, they never un-smash. Car repairmen un-smash cars and they don't just do it for laughs so we need to compensate them and so on until we have an economy. But who is *responsible* for that car repair. The neighbor says it's your car but you point out that you didn't smash it. How do we resolve this? Do we just have endless car repairmen and endless people smashing endless cars without a thought to the consequences?
Heartfield says that "we will no more need [lawyers] under a different form of social organisation than we would need Shamans or Totem poles."
Shamans we got. They're called "scientists" and "philosophy graduate students." I know a guy who does a brisk business in totem poles, too. People out here in Seattle love 'em. And when a scientist's neighbors borrows his car and smashes it and the totem pole guy gets stiffed for a new twelve footer, they call lawyers. Do you have any reason to believe this wouldn't happen under communism and, if not, what would they do in your system?
Finally, Heartfield says: "You say opposing lawyers is populist. I say its popular."
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
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Solve this:
Rural collective A shares a tractor with collective B, which vehicle disappears and is then found fifty miles away, wrecked against a tree. The troubled son of collective B's manager had either returned that night and gone missing again or had not returned from a three-day trip to the city where it is believed he may have been satisfying a drug addiction. Retrieving the tractor, the comrades find that is a total loss. In addition to the crash damage, the engine is seized, the valves destroyed and sucked into the cylinders because the tractor was run with a broken timing chain and almost no oil in the crankcase.
It turns out the comrade in charge of vehicle maintenance at collective B (who usually works at collective C, but is here due to a shortage of technicians) was changing the oil, had drained the crankcase and put just two quarts in when she got a call from her husband that their new baby, Vladimir, had a fever and she sped home. She says that she was going to be the one to drive the tractor the next morning and she would have re-filled the crankcase before going out if she did at all, because she'd heard a noise from under the valve cover she didn't like. She also may or may not have left the keys in the tractor. She says she's sure she put them on the key rack in comrade manager's office but comrade manager says different.
It also turns out that the comrade in charge of vehicle maintenance at collective A - contacted while on vacation - says he would never have shared that particular tractor because he suspected a bad timing chain and that he had told collective A's manager as much. He says he suspects comrade manager offered the tractor as a pretext to chat up a particularly fetching comrade at collective B for whom he had swooned completely, forgetting his reason. Comrade manager, for his part, says the vehicle had a clean maintenance report, that comrade vehicle maintainer also had a thing for the collective B hotty and that he was consumed with jealousy to the point of malice.
When contacted for "distribution" of a new tractor the tractor factory manager tells these collectives to forget it, that they've heard the story and manager B should get his son into treatment, that less irresponsible people could use that new tractor and that they can jolly well go and find someone else to share a tractor with, if anyone is fool enough to do so with a thieving drug addict roaming around and no vehicle technician on premises (the woman from collective C has left, incensed at the accusations and missing baby Vladimir). Manager B says it is not clear that his son stole the tractor and that even if he did the main damage to the $100,000 value/hour equivalent machine came from the broken timing chain and lack of oil. An expert inspector is of the opinion that the timing chain was defective.
Now, since there are no contracts in this world because the need for them has been "transcended," let's see if we can decide who is responsible, for how much, and who is obliged to do what. Remember, this is a $100,000 value/hour equivalent machine (they don't grow on trees) and harvest time is here.
Marx said "to each according to his need" but what if that need arises out of irresponsible or malevolent behavior?