Durant wrote:
> I asked for a contribution in the above themes from a friend of
> mine who happens to be hungarian, married to an
> English chap and a socialist, quite like me...
> Be sure - there are more useful work-related information
> here that in a lot of other posts!
> For some reason she started in Hungarian, my english summary
> follows these first paragraphs. Eva
>
> (snip the Hungarian but it was fun to say)
Öszi délben, öszi délben,Oh be nehéz kacagni a leá nyokra.REH:
Just a point about the way that I write since there is always an issue of whether
you got the "gist" of it or not. I am an oral person so my words are more easily
understood if you say them out loud. I never have appreciated the simplicity of
literacy. This was quite a journey. I thank you both and for anyone who has a
short attention span just delete. As for me I enjoyed the thinking.
Julianna said and Eva translated:.
> (Ofcourse there is no link with moral norms. The contradiction is
> based on the working class producing the goods, but the employers
> only paying back as much as the workers need to survive.
REHThe workers transformed the material into something that may or may not have
been good and useful. I don't find that separation into "exploiters" and
"exploited" serves much purpose in our situation, unless the exploited are artists
but everyone exploits us. Such thoughts in economics considers orchestras to be
"workers" and from there they go to being the same as plumbers. This is a grim
situation:
Hallotátok már?
Öszszel, amikor kavarog a köd,
Az éjszakában valami nyöszörög.
Julianna continued:
> This is the wage; only pays for the worker, not for the work done.
> The amount of the wage depends from the markets, from the strength of
> the unions, from the level of unemployment, etc, etc, but never from
> the value produced.
REHDefine "value." Value according to most economists is money. According
to many of the Scots it was "usefulness." What is it according to your system
of thought? Value of course to an artist is quite another thing and has to do with
truth and beauty.
Valami dobban.
Valaki minden jajt öszszelopott,
Julianna continued:
> This is never returned, as then the employer
> would have no profit and would have to close the workplace.)
REHAre you saying that the employer deserves no pay for his/her investment as well
as her/his labor?
==========================================
more long lovely Hungarian phrases but with no umlauts or accents? Very few
words that are familiar to me
but does Hungarian not use the (e) following a letter that has an umlaut that
cannot be written on your computer? For example in English Krüger would be
written Krueger but pronounced the same. For example would özszelopott be written
on the computer as oeszelopott?
==========================================
> (snip) perhaps you might translate for us these lovely phrases:
Valaki korhadt, vén deszkákon kopog.
> Julianna via Eva:
> (One of the most basic contradiction is, that if the worker only gets
> back a very small portion of the value he produced, than he has not
> enough money to buy the necessities to live, sold by the owners of
> the factories etc, so these owners cannot make the profits and have
> to close down.)
REHSounds like a dumb owner and herd like workers. Now I like the New York
Philharmonic as a group of workers. They can scare the b'geezis out of anyone who
would take advantage of them. And 802 the Musician's Union is formidable. They
can even get a producer to hire musicians based not upon the orchestration but how
many musicians the pit will hold. So if they only need eight musicians to play in
a sixteen piece pit, the other eight musicians are hired to stand in the wings and
watch. Then there is the Stage Workers contract for the Kennedy Center in
Washington. Your poor dumb beasts are nothing like these smart workers. But the
best of all is the movies. Julianna, you should come to the big city and see
how the Screen Actors Guild negotiates with producers. The modern "virtual
company" founded upon the movie company model is really a "Model T" flexible
contract when compared to movie salaries. What I see is incompetence all around.
Your statements are hopelessly old fashioned and most of the companies of the world
are as well. For many years America's greatest exports have been in the Arts
and Entertainments areas primarily the movies. They can fake a Nike plant in
Hong Kong or Thailand but not a movie. That is the biggest area of battle these
days between the UK and the American Unions. The UK salaries are inadequate but
the U.S. is restraining trade through their labor practices. On the other hand
where America will hire a "British accent" easily due to the multi-ethnic society,
the UK will only cast Americans in American parts which means that there are few
jobs for Americans in the UK even though the labor practices are not restricted by
the Union.
> (snip more lovely sounds but with accents, Eva please share the beauty of the
> following.)
Öszi éjben, öszi éjbenÓh be nehéz, fölnézni a csillagokra.
Öszi éjben, Öszi délben,
Óh be könyü sirva, sirva leborulni.
Julianna via Eva:
> (An other contradiction is that the system started to collapse,
> because there is a tendency, that more and more investment was
> necessary for less and less profit, thus "The tendency for the rate
> of profit to fall". This happens, because: )
>
> the means of production (e.g. tools, land etc.)
> and labour. It is the interaction of these two that create
> new goods and the capitalist's profit.
REHInteresting. This does not square with what is happening here. Technology
saves on the cost of labor thus "freeing" the worker to exist on his own without
salary or welfare. The problem with Orchestras (labor or "productivity lag") is
that there is no savings possible in the skilled labor because it cannot be
"technologically" replaced and cutbacks don't work because orchestrations are
defined by composers. So an orchestra costs as much today as it did in 1900 where
the cost of labor in other situations has gone down. So have the number of
orchestras and opera companies.
Julianna via Eva:
> However, because it is only labour that creates profit, only
> labour that adds surplus value, in the modern epoch when more and more has
> to be spent on modernising the means of production, less and less will be
> produced in terms of profit for the same amount of investment.
REHOur experience was not that we needed to compete but that we were being
creative. Creativity demanded that things change at the speed that they were
invented. That tempo far outran the ability of the publishing companies to tool
their presses or sell their product. That created a problem with over production
but only because the new sold and the old was out dated. I have said all along
that neither socialism or capitalism is really equipped to deal with creativity
i.e. that which effects and changes an entire domain of a particular profession.
Julianna via Eva:
> Crudely
> put: if every year you have to spend more and more on throwing away
> perfectly good machinery and buy new one, because that is the only way you can
> keep ahead of your competition, and therefore you pay less and less to your
> workforce, the organic composition of capital will shift in favour of the
> means of production, of capital goods and away from labour.
REHSee above. This seems like a strawman and it is "fixed" by an economie of
scale but you do have a point with the computer industry where waste is rampant and
the excesses of youth are almost criminal. Eventually there will be someone who
will synthesize the various strains and sanity will set in, I hope. The computer
business is all about creativity and obsession at this point with a little
government nonsense thrown in just to keep the kid from turning into a
psychopath. Who knows whether it will work.
Julianna via Eva:
> However, it is
> only labour that produces the pofit, so you will rake in less and less.
REHLEAN manufacturing works 24 hours a day with a core group of six workers to
check the machines where 2,000 once worked. Labor doesn't produce the profit,
but there must be other reasons for labor's existence than what you are saying.
That was what the Taylor paper was all about. I would suggest you read it. It is
under Sally Lerner. Eva can get it for you.
Julianna via Eva:
> I know that this is a very difficult concept to grasp, but if you look
> around that is what is happening to British Industry. They have not
> invested and they are being left behind. But if you look at Japan, which
> has invested heavily, they are still in crisis, because they were tied to
> the US dollar and their major market was in the Tigers which collapsed, but
> the other reason is that the rate of profit has been falling precisely
> because the organic composition of capital in Japan was shifted a long way
> towards capital goods and the means of production.
REHPerhaps you could explain why a country the size of the State of California with
the second largest GDP on earth and no natural resources and an unemployment figure
below 4% is in such trouble? I realize that the work force is going nuts over this
and people are questioning their presumptions as the old ways knock heads with the
prevailing winds in Trans National Corporations but why does such a small country
have such a large GDP? Only the U.S. which occupies a continent and constantly
steals everyone else's intellectual capital is doing better. But not if you
consider that a United Europe could bury us with their combined economic power.
But still it seems gratuitous to talk about the Japanese in such a fashion. A
little old fashioned White woman's envy for the Yellow Peril perhaps?
Egy régi ember.
Mig élt, sose volt csillag az egén s most vágyna,
S most vágyna egy kicsit szétnézni szegény.
Julianna via Eva:
> Talking of the Far East, you know we always said that the fundamental cause
> of capitalist crisis, the ultimate inherent contradiction is that because
> the capitalists produce for profit, not for need, there will always be
> crises of overproduction.
REHI hear there was a big problem with toilet paper in the Warsaw Block. Is it
true and why?
Julianna via Eva:
> When the goods are sitting there, and even if
> they are badly needed, the populus cannot afford to buy them and therefore
> there will be wholescale destruction of the productive forces, until it
> picks up again etc.,etc. and the concomitant human misery that goes with
> all that.
REHThose who have been on this list as long as I know that I have, because of my
work with many wonderful Russian and Hungarian musicians trained in the Communist
schools, argued for a qualitative exploration of the successes of the Communist
system. That does not mean that we have to accept their failures or Marx's "old
rotten planks" either. The competition you decry is between larger and larger
entities in the situation you describe. It doesn't go away it just gets placed in
the military and makes absurd situations like the Cold War where we each carried
our 10,000 lbs of TNT for every man woman and child on the planet.
Julianna via Eva:
> Well, if you look at the Far East tdoay, the real underlying
> reason for all their problems is overproduction.
REHSounds like Bill Greider.
Julianna via Eva:
> They all went for the quick
> buck and overreached themselves. I know that the crisis as such is masked
> by all the rhetoric about currency crises and so on, but it is a classic
> case of overproduction as Marx described in Das Kapital and a score of
> other places.
REHI'll let others deal with this. How about a song?
Óh ágyam, Óh ágyam, tavaly még más voltál.
Más voltál: álomhely,
Álomhely, erökút
Erökút, csókcsárda,
Csókcsárda, vidámság
Vidámság.
Mi lettél? Mi lettél?
Koporsó, Koporsó.
Julianna via Eva:
> Now to answer the second question of how can there be successful production
> without competition? Of course under capitalism there cannot be. The
> Meriden co-operative in the Midlands and scores of other co-ops prove it
> that you cannot have a socialist island in a capitalist sea.
REHAre you suggesting genocide?
Julianna via Eva:
> That is only
> possible under socialism. I am assuming that your debater is saying that
> people would just laze around and do nothing if they didn't have to
> compete, or is he saying that the capitalists would not invest if it wasn't
> for competition? I am not quite clear what you mean here. However, I
> would answer the age old (and extremely boring) argument of competition
> against co-operation first with some anthropology. It is now generally
> accepted that once we came out of the trees, stood up on the savannah and
> started congregating in groups it was labour (i.e. co-operation) that made
> us human. Language, which is the sole prerogative of humans came about
> through living in a society where you neeeded to co-operate in order to
> produce the necessaries of life and to survive. Homo sapiens is basically
> co-operative, because without co-operation we would still be animals. It
> is only when the surplus created by increased productivity was beginning to
> be expropriated by a layer that eventually became the rules and then formed
> the ruling class (i.e. class society) that individualism, private property,
> womens oppressions, exploitation of the many by the few came and the ruling
> ideology of society started to be based on competition.
> Partly competition
> by the rulers to do each other over in the hunt for more profit, and partly
> by the have-nots to outdo each other for the meagre resources in order to
> survive. Humans existed for 3 million years, human society for a few
> 10,000's of years, but class society only for a fairly short while. It is
> inherent in humans to co-operate at every stage and it is total bunkum to
> say that their initial instinct is to outdo each other.
REHI happened to agree with you about cooperation but I don't find your attitude
non-competitive. I don't know you. Who are you? Where do you teach? Where
did you study? What practical knowledge do you have? What are your successes
your failures? You don't make the case for cooperation but for competition.
If you believe cooperation is the way then why are you here in this way and why are
you using the aggressive language and why did the opening of the Communist
Manifesto sound like Bill Gates writing his e-mails to do in Netscape?
Naponként, Naponként jobban zársz,
Jobban zársz. Ledölni, Ledölni, rettegve,
Rettegve felkelni,
Felkelni rettegve,
Rettegve kelek fel.
Fölkelni, szétnézni,
Szétnézni, érezni,
Érezni, eszmélni,
Eszmélni, meglátni,
Meglátni, megbujni,
Megbujni, kinézni,
Kinézni, kikelni,
Kikelni, akarni,
Akarni, búsulni,
Elszánni, Letörni,
Szégyelni.
Óh ágyam, Óh ágyam, koporsóm,
Koporsóm, be hívsz már
Be hívsz már.
Lefekszem.
Julianna via Eva:
> Every baby is born
> to please, to learn and to discover the world. It is only when the world
> around them start affecting them with its crises, parents tired,
> overworked, proverty etc. that inidividulaism in the form of "me first"
> comes into it.
REHOne right, one wrong. Never seen any sibling rivalry there?
Julianna via Eva:
> Now under a socialist plan of production there would be no need to compete
> with anyone. People would elect their representative to all the bodies
> that decide on what to produce, for how much, how much of it and because
> these people would be subject to instant recall and would only receive the
> average wage of the people they represent, they would be likely to do what
> the people who sent them there want. Initially, I think there would be
> somel trial and error in this process, but most people know a hell of a lot
> about their industry, their field of production, service or whatever, so if
> you had a system in which they felt that their knowledge is appreicated
> and listened to they would contribute their utmost and the plan would
> likely to be very effective. It would also be very flixible and subject to
> change with minimal fuss, should it deemed to be necessary. I am positive
> that it is only the fact that you work 60/70 hours a week and you are dog
> tired, that your ideas would only be nicked by the boss, if you came up
> with them which creates the impression nowadays that workers are thick and
> lazy and have no ideas.
REHI don't happen to think that Capitalism is the most efficient, or the way of the
future, but I don't believe the above is either. The reason has to do with the
need of individuals for games and a hierarchy of skills as well as the complexity
of modern life. As one at Los Alamos told me about Nuclear Power. He said they
could design the system that worked but they couldn't design the humans to be able
to handle the complexity. Romantic optimism is no answer. But there were many
successes in the old Soviet Union.
At least the old Soviet Union tried to deal with some of the economic issues in
their Art's management. They did however have no less of a problem with creativity
than the rest of the world. Eva, for you to deny their authenticity not only
seems strange but cuts you off from their successes as well. Some of these were
their science, their space program, their enlightened attitude towards their
native populations who wanted to continue their traditions as well as their
educational system and the general level of artistic complexity. They developed
whole new cities in giant examples of Urban planning that will become even more
apparent as people visit these places. On the other hand their pollution issues
were no less great than even the most crass capitalist enterprise.
Julianna via Eva:
> If your correspondent comes up with the: Oh yes, but people will always
> want more than their neighbour! You can alwyas quote Ray Apps's famous
> example about the wheelie bin full of bread by the bustop. If you had a
> society where you had no shareholders to pay and you freed the creativity
> of all people, you would end up with harmonius production which would
> produce enough for all.
REHThis is so simple as to be wrong headed. Maybe we should just say old
fashioned and out of date. Locke was funny in his pomposity but the followers of
his competition are no less so. Why does this sound so much like the style of
the far right here in America?
Julianna via Eva:
> Then if you put a large bin full of bread at the
> bus stop every morning, the first morning everybody would take dozens,
> because it is free, but after a few weeks, when they can be sure of the
> bread being there every morning they would only take what they needed.
> What is the point of hoarding bread going mouldy in your cupboards when you
> can have a fresh loaf every morning?
REHAll of life is not as easy as baking and you prove nothing with a story proven
wrong by the newspapers in New York who are trying giving away their products. Or
I could give you a whole list of sites on the web for free Internet bread. And
then there is the complexity of science that simply doesn't give way to such simple
thoughts. Neither does trying to write a great work of art.
Julianna via Eva:
> Will all this do? Or do you need any other points? Having said that, I
> still can't see what is the point of arguing with hopeless morons on the
> Internet, you could spend your time much more profitably by starting to
> read the Marxist classics again and then get involved in the movement.
REHSounds like church to me. I would suggest that a better way than the two
described above would be to limit communities to manageable sizes and develop the
Elders in the community. Have the male leaders elected by a council of female
Clan Mothers. Make war only declarable by a highly respected fierce woman.
Make the children belong to the Mother's Clan and most of all...... observe the
Law of Blood. But that's not easy and can't be put down in 2,500 pages of
anyone's analysis. That is, however, the reason that Italy is the art museum
of the entire Western world.
Thank you Julianna and Eva for your translations.
Dalol a tenger és dalol a mult,
Dalol a tenger és dalol a mult.
REH
