[lbo-talk] lbo-talk Digest, Vol 1618, Issue 1

[Dissenting Wren]

There's a long history of entering the market, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it.  Consumer cooperatives, community credit unions, union-owned financial institutions, producer cooperatives.  Hell, Cornelius Castoriadis was an economist for the OECD, Harry Magdoff worked for the Department of Commerce, Michael Tanzer worked for Standard Oil, and even our distinguished host is a man with a past.  You can learn something about the real workings of the market this way, the things you learn can be put to use your employers never intended in later life (not so much while you still work there), and alternative market institutions can make a marginal difference.  But if your real aim is to do away with an economic system based on capital's hiring of wage labor and its attendant exploitation, alienation, wage-slavery, etc., none of this is going to get you there.  Since no one has a road map for getting there, I repeat that there is no good

 reason not to use any of these routes to explore the market's limits, but if you go in with grandiose expectations you are bound to be sorely disappointed.

________________________________
From: John Glastonbury <jglastonbury at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Sunday, July 3, 2011 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] lbo-talk Digest, Vol 1618, Issue 1

Thank you; it's not easy doing what I need to do; especially not out in the
political wilderness...

Do you have a 401k? Or any assets in the stock market? If not, I'm sure
there at least a few marxists who do, especially academics with 401k plans
and the like. We will all need to retire, or at least we all deserve to have
that right... and it seems wise both financially, and politically, to try
and enter the 'arena' of the market; not just to get better returns (which,
I would think that marxists would be able to do, as they tend to understand
capitalism MUCH more clearly than the typical i-banker or asset manager) but
to also build workable prototypes of socialist banking, and 'liberate'
capital, especially our hard earned capital, from those who use it to do us
harm.

Haymarket doesn't give away their books for free; and, yet they're still
serving a public good even if they charge for them, a much higher good than
other publishers who disseminate right wing ideas, but they need to make
enough money to continue surviving.

Or, perhaps, the pre-1914 SPD in Germany; it had services like gymns and
cinemas that charged money, but not just to make money, not just for the
sake of profit.

More broadly, I think that we need to take our economic fate into our hands
in ways that unions and political reformism haven't done for us in a long
long time. If that means marxists small business people or bankers, then so
be it.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: 123hop at comcast.net
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 02:37:37 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] first steps
Congratulations on making it through some tough years.

Can you say something more about the above?

What would be the point of using capitalist notions and structures to build
a socialist society? Why would Marxists want to buy and sell stocks?

Thanks,

Joanna
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