On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:47:44 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
>
> On Oct 28, 2011, at 4:48 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> > At 01:39 PM 10/28/2011, Eric Beck quoted:
> >
> >> A movement that began as a political response to economic
> injustice has become an economic response to capitalism.
> >
> >
> > I don't understand this at all. What is the economic response?
>
> The following passage:
>
> > Critics will say that while these small acts of communism are well
> and good, they will never be able to provide for the millions who
> depend on capitalism for daily bread (Doug Henwood said something to
> that effect on last week’s Behind the News). Two months ago, though,
> these same critics would have said that organizing even a single
> commune was an impossibility, that communes inherently fracture and
> fail, and would in any event be too geographically isolated to
> matter. Clearly the mayors and police departments of the occupied
> cities see things differently. In any event, the communes exist and
> can’t be wished away. They’ve already begun to attract the jobless
> and homeless and underemployed and will continue to do so for as
> long as the occupations keep going.
>
> Yeah, I did say that, because as wonderful as OWS et al are - and I
> think they're totally wonderful - they're not communes in any
> meaningful sense. Yeah, they've got nurses staffing clinics - but
> the nurses were trained in universities ( = prisons, of course), and
> they dispense things made in factories. Food is distributed, but
> it's grown and processed far away. Proceedings are livestreamed,
> using electricity generated by ConEd and fiber optics run by the
> likes of AT&T. Distributing goods & services produced elsewhere in
> small quantities is not "an economic response to capitalism."
I wonder how Doug thinks any sort of socialist revolution would proceed.
Such a revolution would be made by people who grew up in and are the products of a capitalist society. If they socialize any of the means of production, those means of production will have been the creations of capitalism. It is also quite possible, and indeed probable, that even after a revolution, we still will have a good deal of capitalism continuing on - with the expectation that in due course those remaining capitalist relations of production will eventually wither away.
>
> Doug
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