> One source of the 'problem' is the totalitarian nature of the isolated
> brain, which has complete control over its 'product.' Hence any attempt
> to plan (!) the future ends up with a potential totalitarian society.
> Sweezy's insight is crucial here: There cannot be a scienceof a
> socialist society because science can only be carried out by experts,
> and a socialist society must be a democratic society (in the original
> sense of democracy: rule by the _demos_). One of the earliest
> scribblings we have from Marx is the letter with the beautiful phrase,
> "recipes for the cookshops of the future," and whatever other changes
> his thought went through, I think he held to this perception to the end.
> I've read a page or twoo of Cockshott in past years and got bored at
> once. I agree commmmmpletely: "a remarkable waste of effort."
>
> For one thing, we have absolutely no idea whatever of what will be the
> conditions (and the prior history) under which a socialist movement
> would achieve power, and those unknowable conditions, including the
> preceding years of struggle within a vulnerable capitalist regime, would
> totally determine the range of options open to the members of that
> embryonic society. To even guess at those conditions is to claim
> possession of a crystal ball.
>
The problem with this line is that you're already drawing up recipes for future cookshops the minute you say: "Under socialism, there is no market"; or "Under socialism, there is no value production"; or "Under socialism, there is no wage labor"; or any other sentence starting "Under socialism..."
This emphatically includes a large number of implied sentences that are tacitly contained in statements like "Capitalism is defined by wage labor"; or "Capitalism is defined by value production," or whatnot, when those statements are uttered by people who "oppose" capitalism.
To say, "the final goal is everything" is also to draw up recipes for future cookshops. So if cookshop recipes are "totalitarian" then the only difference between saying "Let's struggle for socialism" and Cockshott/Cottrell's highly detailed plan is that "Let's struggle for socialism" is an underspecified version of totalitarianism.
SA