> CB: Better to say a capitalist economy cannot be "fixed" in the sense
> of ending the business cycle and never having depression or crises or
> low growth or shrinkage of the GDP. There will always be crises with
> capitalism
Right. I don't mean the capitalist economy. The capitalist economy is the economy for the capitalists. I don't mean to fix the economy for the capitalists. We are talking class struggle here.
We have to learn from each other. I think I've learned this from Michael Lebowitz. Our social formation is not -- repeat, not -- the abstract capitalist society that Marx described in Capital. That is a one-sided account of it. That description is good as a preliminary stage in the study of concrete capitalist societies. But working people are not chopped liver. We are pushing back and every existing social structure is an arena of this class struggle. For example, the state is not simply the political apparatus of the capitalists. It's more complicated. Cf. the essay on the state in Michael's Following Marx. I truly recommend it.
Regular people understand this. I yawn when people pretend that the essence of socialist indoctrination is to have people realize that "capitalism" is impossible to reform. Basically, we are saying, I define capitalism as a society of markets where the bulk of productive wealth is held by a small group of the people and the rest must work for them. (And please note that I do not object to a definition of this kind. It is a useful abstraction, but it is an abstraction!) *This* society will be subject to conflict, instability, and turbulence; working people will be crushed (under the implicit assumption that they remain passive), and the whole planet will go to hell. *This* society cannot be reformed. Well, of course! That follows almost immediately from the definition.
But modern socialism is the necessary response to these conditions. It starts *in* these conditions, it starts when these conditions emerge and it co-evolves with them in a sort of arms race. As Engels says in Anti-Duhring, moral indignation against the superficial effects of capitalism (e.g. a financial crisis, a natural/human-made disaster that exhibits the incapacity of the economy and the government to work for us, etc., the sense that this society is not for us but largely against us, is the beginning. Socialist agitation builds on that moral indignation, which our society exudes constantly.
The problem for socialists is that moral indignation can fuel spontaneous but rather brief eruptions of social discontent, when what we really need is a "democratic revolution in Permanenz" (cf. Lars Lih's piece in the latest S&S issue). Socialists are not in the business of indoctrinating people so they all come to parrot that capitalism (as defined) is not reformable. Socialists are in the business of helping working people build new social structures and that means effectively to overthrow the social structures that exist, because they are not working for them.
I mean to fix the economy for us, regular working people. It is about making our society (our social mediations) work for us. I truly appreciate that Carrol reads my blog. That is really nice. But he may want to go and re-read what I wrote. Each of the measures listed is -- in Trotskyist jargon -- a "transitional demand." And I'm not being original at all. I'm just adding my voice to many others.
Carrol wrote:
> The phrase, "fix the economy" is utterly absurd:
I respectfully disagree. Of course we can fix our social relations. We are human beings. If we find something important to us broken (e.g. our social relations), then we feel compelled to fix it. Our social relations are objective and, in the case of capitalist relations, they are also alienated. One thing is objectification and another thing is alienation. If we fix our social relations and make them function for us, then they are no longer alienated. They remain objective though. Society is objective.
* Reflecting a bit on this, I don't think I like the term "reification" to refer to alienation. Because the literal meaning of "reified" is "thingified," and our society is, has been, and will be thingified regardless. Even a perfect communist society will be a thing. But then, if communist, it'll be a thing in which its individual members will be free and in control of it.