> most people who worry, including you, are not socialists or even
> sympathetic to socialism. maybe they're into social democracy. you're
> very clearly a progressive Liberal who is often looking for a way to
> attack socialists.
You've said this before and I really don't know where you get this. I'm
not sure it's worth arguing about, but I always thought I was a
socialist, since I was maybe 14. I'm willing to hear why I've been wrong
- but then I guess you'd have to explain to me what socialism is. A real
mise en abîme we've got on our hands.
> there are a bunch of passages in marx that point to the
> anti-democratic character of blueprint drawing. here's the one i like
> most
I don't see where Marx says "blueprint drawing" is anti-democratic. He certainly dislikes specific aspects of the blueprints he's criticizing. But here, as I read him, he's arguing not that blueprint-drawing is undemocratic, but that it's counterproductive. ("[W]e wish to influence our contemporaries above all. The problem is how best to achieve this.") He's saying it would be more effective to demonstrate to workers and communists the implications of their own actual struggles. In other words, rather than saying "here's *our* blueprint," they should say "look, here's *your* blueprint - you didn't even know you were drawing it." But Marx still believes he knows what the blueprint is. Don't believe me?...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
> Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means
> of production, the producers do not exchange their
> products...Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from
> society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he
> gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of
> labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the
> individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual
> producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his
> share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has
> furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor
> for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the
> social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of
> labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in
> one form, he receives back in another.
>
> Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates
> the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal
> values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered
> circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because,
> on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals,
> except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution
> of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same
> principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a
> given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of
> labor in another form....
>
> But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist
> society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs
> from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic
> structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
Besides, even if it were true that Marx thought it was undemocratic to talk about "blueprints," don't you think it's relevant that he lived before 1917-1991 rather than afterward?
SA