joanna bujes wrote:
>
>
> I would like it to be possible to use words like
"theft" with
reference
> to our experience of wage labor rather than with
reference to the
> Marxist cannon.
>
It's not so much that it is in the canon as that Marx happens to be right here. (We have another instance of Che's point that it is not his fault that reality happens to be marxist.)
Or let me put it a bit stronger. It was this point in Marx, his radical historicizing of reality, that drew me to marxism and away from any sort of anarchism. I don't believe this because Marx said it. I believe Marx because he said this. Or to put it more strongly yet, my whole hope for socialism is grounded in seeing capitalism as a historically limited mode of production. But if you call exploitation theft, you have dissolved history into an endless struggle between good people and bad people. And it is fairly obvious that if this is the case, bad people are going to keep on winning. And we are left only with the consolation that we are better people than "they" are.
When you say "I would like it to be possible" to call exploitation "theft," you seem to be retreating in despair precisely to this consolation of "I am better than they are even if I can't do anything about it." I would prefer to have a somewhat more cheerful view of the possible. If all the shares of Sun were turned over to you tomorrow morning you would have to go on exploiting your workers or else you would soon go bankrupt and someone else would exploit them. In other words, calling exploitation theft blinds us to the real nature of capitalist exploitation, and that blindness on our part helps to continue the grip of capitalism on the human species.
Carrol ******************************************************
Try reading your proposed situation from a radical historical point of view by replacing the Sun corp with the word Plantation, located say in Georgia circa, 1847. Think of the chattel slaves who would have to be exploited in order to keep the Plantation going. If Joanna didn't keep exploiting them, someone else would, right?
Chattel slaves were subject to wholesale theft of their lives and the wealth they created. We can safely pass judgement on that episode of history now. But we cannot call wage-slavery robbery because society has not come to that conclusion yet?
Best, Mike B)
===== To the fervent proponents of ruthless corporate capitalism I say: make a millionaire CEO live as a poor sweatshop worker in Indonesia for one month and then ask him about the merits of the world economic system.
-- Vassilis Epaminondou http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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