Doug Henwood:
> Staffed by whom? Volunteers? By randomly chosen
> citizens, like a jury? Would there be qualifications
> like technical expertise?
We are now entering cookshop of the future territory, but what the hell. I personally would think technical expertise must be a qualification. Would you want your subway train system designed by somebody who studied romance languages?
> For someone like me, who has no fundamental problem
> with representative democracy over the medium term,
> putting such a planning authority under the
political > control of elected officials would be ok.
But I'm
> guessing it's not for you, so I'd like to hear
more.
You are confusing my opposition to the state, a capitalist instance (and only a capitalist instance, it makes no sense to speak of states in non-capitalist class societies) with opposition to authority as such.
Maybe it's because my personal friends and political comrades all tend to be major Foucault followers (and shamefully, Foucault remains a major gap in my own knowledge), but I am more convinced of the inescapability of power, and I think it is useless tilting at windmills to oppose "power as such". However, I think it is eminently reasonable, and indeed essential for the survival of humanity, that we abolish two specific instances of power: abstract labor/money/general equivalent, and the state.
> Marx said somewhere that the allocation of time is
> the fundamental social problem
No, Marx says:
"It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products."
However, he also says in the Grundrisse:
"The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them."
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