[lbo-talk] Re: Political Cartography

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Mon Nov 22 20:26:30 PST 2004


On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Jon Johanning wrote:


> On Nov 22, 2004, at 11:53 AM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> > We don't need to think up anything new: if you need a positive
> > description of how socialism works, look at the funding of public
> > libraries, university research, credit unions, open-source software,
> > etc. Many working models. Why the hand-wringing here?
>
> These are all models in rather small fields. Can they be generalized to
> a whole society, or major parts of it? For example, could the entire
> agriculture and food processing industry, on which we depend for what
> we put in our mouths, be operated by control by "the people"?

You're setting the bar too high. In supposedly "capitalist" societies, a significant portion of the necessary goods and services are provided outside the capitalists' commodity system. --e.g., household labor: reasonable estimates place the economic value of household labor at about half the value of the GDP in the U. S. every year. If you define the U. S. economy in a practical sense as the goods and services produced, distributed, and consumed, the capitalist system clearly does not provide for the "whole society", or even "major parts of it". Why demand that socialism should?

Turn it around: what would a truly capitalist society look like? Could it be generalized to the whole sphere of society, including all breastfeeding of infants, all yard work, all dishwashing? (In your socialism example and my parody above, the problem is that the premise of the question is flawed, and thus it's not very useful to agonize over the answer.)

Miles



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