the question of how to organize an economy is a problem for all political movements. the way labor unions run their political organizations couldn't run an economy either. no political group that we've ever seen has run itself in a way that could be scaled to the organization of an economy.
marx's whole point was that you really couldn't match capitalism for what it can accomplish because of this division of labor. he wouldn't have quarreled with smith about that at all: yes indeedy, capitalism makes even the factory hand richer than the king of an african tribe (to paraphrase Smith)
I doubt Marx would have been deterred by some silly criticism such as "Oh goshes, Marxy boy, you don't have an alternative way to organize the economy in your political practice. Go back to the drawing board and hash one out before you dare try to do anything about the conditions under which people are living! Bad Marxy boy! Bad!"
> On 10/3/2011 7:15 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, 3 Oct 2011, SA wrote:
>>
>>> Organizing the *provision* of food, tents, blankets, information,
>>> etc., to a few thousand people is a problem of a completely
>>> different
>>> order from manufacturing food, tents, blankets, cameras, computers,
>>> etc., -- and all their inputs, raw materials, and long-distance
>>> transport -- for several million people.
>>
>> With that last phrase -- for several million people -- you've
>> defined
>> prefigurement as impossible. Which is a position you can take:
>> prefigurement is bunk. Is that what you want to say? That it's
>> stupid for small groups to say they are, in any way, the society
>> they
>> want to achieve?
>>
>> If it's anything, prefigurement is the embodiment of a vision, not
>> the
>> display of working scale model.
>
> No, I disagree. Go ahead, change it back to thousands, or even
> hundreds.
> You can't manufacture computers in any feasible, usable, practical way
> by twinkling and consensus. Mine the rare earth metals; build the
> industrial drills to do the mining; synthesize the chemicals for the
> plastic; create machine tools to form the molds; build precision
> components like hard drives and LCD monitors, etc. And coordinate all
> of
> that in such a way that you can reliably churn out new,
> quality-controlled units every day. Any vision that claims to be a
> prefigurement of such a thing is an illusory vision. It's like saying
> if
> I dig a hole with a spade in my backyard, it's a prefigurement of my
> one
> day digging the Hoover Dam with the same spade.
>
> SA
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>
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