On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:23:41 +0200, "Tahir Wood" <twood at uwc.ac.za> wrote:
> If only because of no. 5, we should surely be talking (at least
> occasionally) about the possibility of a different world system and how
> we might get from here to there. Surely one can agree with these
> propositions, even if one is not a communist, but any sort of leftist at
> all? But apparently not? Apparently we would rather 'root' (one of my
> least favourite Americanisms!) for our favourite side. Home run!
> Touchdown! Blam! Blam! Aaargh!!!
Hi Tahir,
I agree very much with what you are saying, as my interest is exactly "how we might get from here to there," I am often baffled by a lack of interest in any actual transitional strategies.
My "Venture Communism" project has led me to consider these questions at length, and experiment with some of the resulting ideas.
The first major insight that I had after I begun my independent studies in politic economy 5 or so years ago (I am a software developer, not a scholar), is expressed in this passage from "What is Venture Communism?"
--- snip ---
"In the Capitalist mode of production, the provider of Property owns the product, therefore the Dominant input is Property, and the price of Labour is driven toward its cost, which is its subsistence, while the provider of Property takes a share of the product that is greater than its costs. As a result, owners of property are able to accumulate wealth, while workers can only earn a subsistence income by continuing to work, and are unable to accumulate wealth.
Control and influence of the institutions of power within a society, those that create and enforce the rules, require the application of wealth. Political power is an extension of economic power."
Therefore a mode of production where the worker earns only subsistence, while property earns the remainder of the productive output will be a society where the interests of the Property owner will be reflected in the social institutions and the interests of the worker subjugated.
"As long as they operate within the Capitalist mode of production, they can not change society politically, because whatever wealth they can apply to influencing social institutions must come from the share of the product that they retain, and thus will always be smaller then the share of the product that can be applied by Property to prevent this change.
Any political change is dependent on a prior change in the mode of production which increases the share of wealth retained by the worker. The change in the mode of production must come first, this change can not be achieved politically, not by vote, nor by lobby, nor by advocacy, nor by revolutionary violence.
Not as long as the owners of property have more wealth to apply to prevent any change, by funding their own candidates, their own lobbyists, their own advocates, and building up a greater capacity for counter-revolutionary violence.
Society can not be changed by a strike, not as long as owners of Property have more accumulated wealth to sustain themselves during production interruptions.
Not even collective bargaining can work, for so long as the owners of Property own the product, they set the price of the product, thus any gains in wages are lost to rising prices.
So how can workers change society to better suite the interests of workers if neither political means, nor strike, nor collective bargaining is possible?
By refusing to apply their labour to property that they do not own, and instead, acquiring their own mutual property.
This means enclosing their labour in Venture Communes, taking control of their own productive process, retaining the entire product of their labour, forming their own Capital, and expanding until they have collectively accumulated enough wealth to achieve a greater social influence than the owners of property, making real social change possible."
--- end ---
Now, some of this may be banal (not to mention the text is rather old now), and may lack the theoretical precision of some of the more studied members of this group, but the essential point is, in my opinion, unavoidable and irrefutable: Social change can only follow economic change, which, for socialists, means a change in the mode of production must come before any other change is possible .
The only way to achieve this goal is to organize industrially. To form mutual capital for the fight against private capital by directly organizing production. There is no other way.
I am not an expert on Marxist history, but it seems to me that in order to avoid this fact many in the socialist movement have clung to two other prospects, 1) Worker's States such as the Soviet Union defeating global Capitalism and whithering away, it seems few still cling to this belief. 2) A falling rate of profit causing the capitalist class to atrophy, while a growing proletariat grows in strength until it becomes the dominant class. The second prospect also seems more and more unlikely, for one there seems to be no falling rate of profit, only perhaps a falling rate of interest as capital inputs become themselves commodity, which tends to be absorbed by rents, not wages, and thus exasperate, not counteract, wealth concentration. Second, for wages go have any hope of capturing available wealth from falling interest in a globalised world, labour must be scarce. The reserve army of the unemployed includes billions of potential workers, to bring enough of them into production for labour to actually be scarce would likely require higher levels of consumption than we could environmentally sustain, thus environmental catastrophe seems a more likely outcome of growing proletarian wealth than socialist revolution. Personally, it seems to me that an environmental catastrophe is a likely road to despotism, not socialism.
Yet, millions of leftists have keen interest in everything from the relative merits of competing capitalist nations to the idiosyncrasies of the Marxian theory to the arcane details of socialist history, all interesting topics in there own right, but where is the effort to actually directly organize production and create a worker's economy able to produce wealth to apply to social and political struggle?
The only way to "get from here to there" is to change the way we produce and share, to form worker's capital, and yet, the number of such worker's collectives with expressly political intent is small, and the number of leftists who even care or support these few is so tiny as be irrelevant. The real crisis that socialism must overcome is exactly this inaction. The most prominent voices on the left are content to be detached observers, commenting from a leftist position on world events, history and theory. If some of you would help promote worker's organization of production as an ideal, and actually promote organizations attempting this, perhaps you could actually make a difference outside. Instead, by focusing on analysis and theoretical discourse, the audience power you build (and squander) does more to increase the profits of google and amazon.com than fill the war chest of any worker's movement.
Cheers.
-- Dmytri Kleiner editing text files since 1981
http://www.telekommunisten.net