Working Class

Joe R. Golowka joeG at ieee.org
Mon Jul 1 23:25:35 PDT 2002


From: "Gar Lipow" <lipowg at sprintmail.com>
> To put it more concicesly and in more general form: the class interests
> of coordinators differ from workers in what replacements for capitalism
> it is in their self-interest to support. Coordinators, as a class can
> support extremely ineqalitarian forms of socialism - with a hughe
> distinction between order givers and order takers, and huge discrepenies
> in hourly compenstation. But if a fairly egalitarian socialism is
> proposed, with wages pretty much the same per hour, and enrichment of
> jobs to the point where as many manegerial functions as possible are
> distirbuted among ordinary workers, coordinators lose both income and
> power relative to what they have in capitalism. In short coordinators
> (as a group) are better off under capitalism than they would be under
> the more egalitarian forms of soicialism. Of course a lot of Marxists
> follow Marx in considering egalitarianism unimportant or even
> undesirable - which from my viewpoint reflects a Marxist tendency to be
> a coordinator

"I don't think Marxism looks at the economy from the point of view of the workers, from the point of view of the worst off. One part of Marxism I really like is the idea of taking an ideology and examining it to see whose interests it serves. When good Marxists do that with bourgeois economics, they look at the body of thought, and they recognize that neo classical economics isn't all wrong: it examines the world, but its world view leaves some stuff out, and the reason it leaves stuff out is to serve a certain ideological interest. It just rationalizes the economy we have; nobody uses neo-classical economics to run their business. Now suppose you use the same criteria to look at Marxism. You can pile up all the books on Marxism on the planet, and I defy you to find -- with very, very rare exceptions -- a vision of what they want for the economy that doesn't serve the interests of the coordinator class. There's never been a Marxist party, much less Marxists in power, who have ever proposed anything for the economy that was not in the interest of a new ruling class as opposed to workers. A Marxist would look at that and say, "That tells us something."" http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/canadian.htm



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