[lbo-talk] barbaric (was Marxism and religion)

Dmytri Kleiner dk at telekommunisten.net
Mon Mar 5 04:13:45 PST 2007


Doug Henwood wrote:
> Then there's the point made by Slavoj Zizek - that the productiity of
> capitalism depends on capitalist discipline, meaning that it's not so
> easy to carry over the technological achievements of this social
> system into a socialist one.

I have trouble with this theory.

Not only does it more or less discredit itself-- being based on a Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy-- but rarely is there any actual economic reasoning presented to back it up.

I do not have the citations handy, though I suppose many can be found in the 1970's publication "Worker's Control" which has contributions from the likes of David Ellerman, Daniel Bell and Andre Gorz.

The theory that a future socialism can only follow the supposed productive bonanza of Capitalism is refuted by facts such as:

- Shop floor studies often conclude that worker's are more productive when they have more control over their work environment.

- Studies of early Kibutzim and other co-operative enterprises have often shown far greater labour productivity and more efficient use of Capital.

- The commons-based "Cottage Industries" of the early industrial era produced more innovation and more product and in greater variety than their private factory counterparts.

- Issues such as management information asynchronousity and the principal-agent problem seem to make the likelyhood of a top-down hierarchical system based on property ownership being productive unlikely.

Etc, etc...

The fact is that Capitalism did not achieve dominance by any great suitability to productivity, but rather by using force and terror to monopolize the means of production by way of poor laws, enclosure laws, anti-combination laws, anti-socialist laws, and other acts of barbarism.

Economics 101 tells us that in a free market capital can never capture more than it's replacement cost. How then can a Capitalist class exist? Only by preventing independent access to the means of production by terrorizing the population.

As we know that the addition of capital greater increases the productivity of labour, in what way is limiting the availability of capital to labour in the interests of a parasitic class productive?

In what way is the often brutal, forceful destruction of commons-based production and subjugation of the proletariat in order to provide for the parasitic accumulation of the bourgeoisie not barbarism?

-- Dmytri Kleiner, robotnik Telekommunisten, Berlin.

dk at telekommunisten.net http://www.telekommunisten.net freenode/#telnik



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