From: <james at communistbanker.com>
James: I agree with this.
CB: Always glad to do that, comrade.
But Charles continues:
"Communism is supposed to harness capitalism and its technology, not just let her rip. Within this approach there is room for appeal to the masses of workers that their decisions about what they "need" over the last 100 years may have been skewed a bit by influence of the ruling ideas of the era, which are the ideas of its wild-ass ruling class, the bourgeoisie."
James: What do you mean by 'ruling ideas of the era' skewing people's decisisons about what they need? I need a car to get to work, a TV to watch gameshows on, air conditioning because summer is too hot and, well, just about whatever else happens to take my fancy. How is this bourgeois ideology? I think more important has been ideology of self-sacrifice, of make and mend, of putting up what's offered instead of demanding what's needed.
CB: There is some poetic license I took there, but I'm thinking, we can't just look at a snapshot of the present. We have to look at a longer historical period in which , say with respect to cars, GM bought the other forms of mass transit in Detroit and Los Angeles and then ripped up all the tracks of the system. So, the ruling class ideas on what the system of transportation will be has _made_ a car instead of a trolley ticket a necessity to get to work. There are certain aspects and the want structure of the working class's thinking that are the result of the corporations decisions as to how they can make the most profit. You know the whole thing that corporations create demand in many ways. It is significantly false that your dollar is your vote in the market.
CB: Having an average material standard of living with a material kit roughly like that of an employed working class family from the 1950's would not be exactly austerity,hairshirt or barracks communism, pursuit of noble savagery.
James: Actually, that's exactly what it would be. Here in the UK we even had rationing into the 1950s. Arguing for the benefits of the 1950s is savagery, but there's no nobility about it. The bottom line is this:we need to 'let rip' with the means of production to create more use values in less time, so that we can free up our time to pursue whatever the hell we want to. Sorry for the old-fashioned language, but I offer no apology for the old-fashioned defence of human emancipation.
^^^^ CB: Apologies for my speaking like a Yankee chauvinist on this one. We were in the Golden Age. I am saying a U.S. employed working class standard of living for UK too.
But I was thinking that a criticism of what I said might be that in some ways we are polluting less, perhaps, with new forms of pollution control. There may be more plastics in use today than in the 1950's. It would take a systematic comparison of use-values.
What I have a thought about is that if we compare U.S. today and U.S. in the 1950's one doesn't feel that every new thing the corporations have come up with makes life that much better. I can't remember my life in the 60's and 70's as materially deprived compared to my life today.