[lbo-talk] The state

[Mike Ballard]

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Mike Ballard wrote:
>
>> A classless society would not have a State, but would have all the
>> self-governing structure it needed--perhaps an 'administration of
>> things' by an 'association of producers'.
>
> Having just watched the aut-op-sy list (autonomists, libertarian 
communists, 
> etc.) just fall apart because of weenie-wagging and flaming, I'm more

> skeptical than ever that this would work. If a small group of people 
who fall 
> under the same political taxonomy can't keep a listserv going, 
they're going 
> to organize society? Sure.
>
> Doug
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As long as proles cannot organize to emancipate themselves, they will
live under the domination and organization of a ruling class who will
appropriate the social wealth the workers create and thereby retain the
material power to dictate the terms of the society within which the
producers will live.

"Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that
the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the
encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best
of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did,
they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past
salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard
of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in
99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at
maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of
debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition
of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in
their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify
themselves for the initiating of any larger movement."
Marx, "Value, Price and Profit"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm
 

****************************************************************** 
Live in harmony with the Earth.  Abolish the wages system.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

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