Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Julio Huato wrote:
>
> > there are practical political tasks that do require the
> > understanding of commodity exchange as the metabolism of social labor,
> > namely building a workable communist society.
(If I followed it correctly, I substantially agree with Ted's commentary on this, only needing to point out that _none_ of this nor of other passages of Marx Ted has quoted over the years, gives us the slightest hint of how to get from here to there. It only tells us that we _must_ get there, somehow or other, or human society will die.)
Now, on this passage from Julio. We have a problem. Julio is obviously spouting nonsense, BUT, from the point of view of building [*] the mass movements _out of which_ (given conditions which we cannot even describe in advance let alone prescribe) forces to overthrow the capitalist regime might emerge...from that point of view many, perhaps a majority, of those who constitute such a movement would, so far as they thought in "economic" terms at all, more or less agree with Julio. The position he expresses here is close to the heart of bourgeois ideology, which would begin _seriously_ to crumble only within a regime generated by the overthrow of capitalist power. That is, the mass (including much of the leadership) of the movements which might develop into an overthrow of capitalism will be operating within the constraints of much of bourgeois ideology, ideology which cannot be refuted abstractly (hence the pointlessness of "persuasion" as a major political practice) but only 'dissolved' in practice which is incompatible with it.
So we have problems, problems not subject to theoretical resolution.
Carrol