[lbo-talk] The State and Capitalism

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Fri Mar 7 01:43:48 PST 2008


IMO, the classwide organisation for shorter work time is the tactical key for getting to the abolition of wage-labour, classes and the State. As the organisation, power and demands for more freetime emerge, the constriction of the class power over the workers weakens their opponents. Eventural social ownership of the means of production eliminates the capitalists as a class. Social ownership of the land gets rid of the landlords as a class. When those two classes are eliminated because their ownership and source of wealth--wage labour-- is no longer in existence, you have a one class in society--the producers, IOW a classless society. With a classless society, you no longer have a class political dictatorship over other classes and therefore, no State.

The associated producers can certainly employ governing structures as needed, centralised or decentralised as they see fit.

******** The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. (N.B. get out your blackberrys, cell phones and endless hours at the office, MB)*Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.*>

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm#p708

Mike B)

http://www.iww.org.au/node/10 "Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.iww.org/en/join

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