Dmytri Kleiner: If you would like to use a kibbutz as your example, that would be ok, so long as you demonstrate how class inequality can arise out of free exchange without the use of force.
Remember that a kibbutz operates within a capitalist system, so the moment it alienates labour, by hiring wage workers for example, it is implicitly employing the force of the State, which is what guarantees it the right to appropriate the product of these workers. *******
MB: What I'm indicating is that classes and a State have always developed out of commodity production, no matter how much good will is being employed.
MB:
> Can small efforts at creating semi-communist social relations within a sea of
> generalized capitalist social relations outside of the enclave work? Most
> especially, have they EVER worked yet? They've been tried and each time with
> some semblance of commodity production.
Dmytri Kleiner: I think they can. I agree their have been more failures than successes in the past. The project of creating a viable program for mutual capitalization has not been realized yet. ***************
MB: Can you point to historical successes? [...]
> You implied that I was skirting that question e.g. "to be
> evaded, or the answer shrouded in incomprehensible allusions and
> mystification."
> I'm trying to be clear. IMO, commodity production will lead where it always
> has historically: to the social relation of Capital.
Dmytri Kleiner: Yes, it is not that you are not being clear about your belief, it is that you are not being clear in presenting the reasoning for your belief.
As free exchange depends on the consent of both parties, how can inequality arise out of it unless one side has recourse to force? *****************
MB: What I'm saying then is that mere good will cannot not hold this kind of
project together. There is someting about the excahnge of private property
which propels some people to accumulate more than others and as that happens
there are other people who will feel unjustly treated and want some of the
other's accumulated wealth and that's where you get the protection racket/force
known as the State arising, to separate the classes according to the wealth
which they are accumulating or not, as the case may be.
> Once surplus (exchange)-value is eliminated, the associated producers can get
> on with life without classes and create the use-values they need for
> themselves.
*************
Dmytri Kleiner: Without free exchange, how is production directed? Scientific Management? How is the output distributed? These issues have never been satisfactorily answered. ***************
MB:
Warning: proletarian pipe-dreaming time coming up. I can envision a society where there is no exchange-value, where social production is carried on for use and need and where free-time outside necessary production time is considered to be one of the most useful things to have. There could be "social stores" set up where people take goods and services from the "shelves" on the basis of how much time they've put into social production. Inventories of what is being taken out of the social store can be measured as an indicator of what production needs are.
> They can turn the mystification of "the market" and its "invisible
> hand" on its head i.e. into the registration/mutual recognition of what they
> desire.
Dmytri Kleiner: Free exchange already does that, it is free exchange that delivers Capital and commodities at cost to labour, which is the lowest possible price.
The "Scientific Management" of production is what you have now, under corporate Capitalism. Do you like it?
Does Fordism-Taylorism work much better when it is operated by a workers-State, i.e. the USSR, the PRC, etc, rather than a Capitalist State like the USA? A little, maybe, but not really, IMO. *********** MB:
Again, I don't want Capital as a social relation, so these examples are not relevant to my class interests.
Dmytri Kleiner: Also, keep in mind that use-value is always _higher_ than exchange-value, (otherwise nobody would ever buy anything) so careful what you wish for, it is exactly the difference between use-value (marginal utility) and exchange-value (reproduction cost: wages + rent) that allows for the existence of surplus-value.
****************** MB: I'm aware of the fact that people have to perceive that something is useful before they will buy it. What I'm concerned with is stripping exchange-value away and leaving only the use-value of the good or service as a deciding point as to whether one wants to spend one's labour time producing said good or service.
Mike Ballard wrote:
> Anyway, I guess, we have been reading different history books. My
> understanding is that primitive accumulation has *always* been
> accompanied by force. That's the point. Political power is force; it
> is top down power.
Dmytri Kleiner: Yes, so why should I conclude, given we know the role of force, that _exchange_ itself is the cause?
MB: Because the history of commodity production has always given rise to classes, property in the means of production and the State.
> Political power grows out of the need to protect by force your
> ownership of your commodities so that others don't appropriate them by > force. The governing structure of class society, the State, was born
> of this necessity.
Dmytri Kleiner: No, that is not true. Self-defense is adequate for the protection of my personal possessions. And as self-defense is a common need, it lends itself well to mutualisation. "Banding Together." Respect for people's possession is quite common in most societies, past and present. Social exclusion and retribution being enough of a deterrent to direct theft.
******* MB: I think, you're expecting that there will be just self-defense (karate or guns, knives allowed or not?) no prisons or police or hired security guards because of the good will of the participants in your project and I'm saying that has never happened, that different urges are at work once you institute the processs of commodity production and private ownershp of same. What I'm saying is that alienation of goods and services into separate enclaves breeds alienation within the human community.
Dmytri Kleiner: It is when I want to appropriate the product of _other_ workers by way of alienated ownership of the means of production that I need political power to guarantee my right to control that which is not in my personal possession and appropriate that which is made by others.
*********
MB: I get the point about you're wanting to see that each means of production is owned by the whole of society somehow, although I'm not sure how you proposed to organize that...BUT....Made is the key word. Who makes goods and services? Will a neurosurgeon want to be given the same amount of money for what she does to buy her commodities on the market as a prostitute? Labour power itself is a commodity--it has a certain amount of labour embodied in it and it sells for this or that price on the labour market. It's not just the means of production or land which are now commodities. Or will the land be an exchangeable commodity in your proletarian pipe-dream?
Commodity production and exchange is a corrosive which will wear people down and make them into just what you don't want, competing, jealous and desiring of having the power to tell others where they can get off when it comes time to divide the loot which labour produces or which is just there in Nature. The history of the utopian socialist projects of the 19th Century alone, tell us this. Human history as a whole tells us more.
Best, Mike B)
http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
Skype mike.ballard66
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