--- Dmytri Kleiner <dk at telekommunisten.net> wrote:
> > It isn't free, it is coerced. However the point
> "Andie" is making is
> > that capitalism uses economic coercion (work for
> us or starve) rather
> > than political coercion (work for us or we'll
> shoot you).
>
> Yes, but this ignores the fact that I have
> repeatedly clarified that the
> force I am talking about is not necessarily applied
> directly to getting
> people to work, but rather in maintaining unequal
> property relations.
Mostly unequal work relations are kept in place by the facts, that in the normal course of things are not due force or threat of force, that workers lack property, resources, and organizational opportunities, and must scrabble work to survive, and also to ideologically created consent and commodity fetishism. This answer your question about externalities too -- I mean CF -- they just seem to "happen" "naturally," and therefore no one except a few greens or other malcontent complains about them.
> As force is not required for
> Socialism, thus it is mutual
> productive capacity that Socialists need to form,
> not the capacity for
> force.
Well, Marx, anyway, thought that just working in a capitalist environment would teach workers how to run things -- he was certainly overoptimistic about this -- but that since at the margins, as Yoshie has been hammering away at in in her one-note way, when there is resistance, capitalist productive relations will be maintained with force in the end, workers (he thought) do need the capacity for force.
>
> Political power is an extension of economic power,
> if you achieve
> economic power, political comes along with it.
This is the pattern,a according to Marx, of the bourgeois and not the socialist revolution. See the Manifesto for a precise. He might have been wrong, of course. But I would like to know how workers are get economic power without political power.
>
> Therefor my focus is on worker self-organized
> production and obviously,
> the question of the suitability of free exchange as
> a component of
> Socialism is crucial in the organization of
> worker-controlled enterprises.
I'm all for worker self-management. But the fact is that worker self-managed enterprises (WSM) have not, over the course of a century and a half, anywhere even threatened a little bit to supplant capitalist organizational forms as the dominant form of business organization. Those of us who like WSM have got to explain why. (I have a draft paper, now quite old, and will ultimately get around to a publishable version, on this point.)
>
> > Even if you could defeat what is ultimately an
> economic dictatorship
> > by taking up arms, it is doubtful such a strategy
> can achieve
> > economic and political freedom.
Probably true.
Bill:
> I fully agree with this. In fact, I go much further
> here and say that
> insurrectionist revolution can only end in terror.
Actually today more likely in Paris-Commune-like self-immolation.
> The important thing to understand is that Capitalism
> is not an efficient
> mode of production, and therefore it can be defeated
> economically.
Efficient compared to what? The empirical evidence is that WSM is no less efficient than capitalist wage labor, but also not, on average, more. And capitalism certainly is voraciously productive in raising GDP, as James H has been insisting. Insofar as this has to do with market discipline and economic dictatorship, as Doug (and in fact Marx) have suggested, there is a big question about whether WSM, especially if it is nonmarket, could do better, or whether we'd get a political choice for a far more leisurely, less affluent life. That might be a good thing, but it would not show that WSM socialism is as efficient as capitalism in the terms that capitalism sets for itself.
____________________________________________________________________________________ No need to miss a message. Get email on-the-go with Yahoo! Mail for Mobile. Get started. http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail