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

Dissenting Wren dissentingwren at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 3 17:20:16 PDT 2011


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 ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list