On Sep 2, 2010, at 12:24 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:
>
>
> DIE LINKE's draft party program reads like a Keynesian wish list
> addressed to Santa Claus: as if by means of regulation and a
> nationalized financial sector (under "democratic control") a
> capitalism can be created that reconciles all contradictions.
>
> Full: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/heinrich020910.html
The Heinrich article is a good example of abstract impossibilism. Nowhere does it offer a critique of the draft program as a whole, nowhere a formulation of concrete improvements to it. Instead a series of captious criticisms of phrases devoid of context, all in the name of some ultrapure Marxism. Which Marxism has very little to do with Marx, as exemplified in this typical phrase: "not much remains of Marx's insight that wages and profits have little to do with performance" while, to the contrary, Marx explicitly called piecework wages (payment in accordance with performance) "The form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production." And how could anyone, after Marx devoted so much exposition to the category of "relative surplus value," the main source of profit, claim that that profits (as distinct from ground and monopoly rents and interest) "have little to do with performance?"
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64