On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Rod Hay wrote: > > RH: But individuals exist and they do sometimes act selfishly (in fact in > capitalism selfish activity is strongly encouraged. The social relations of > production would not make any sense if there is not something to relate. > I.e., how do individual relate in production. Again we are dealing with a > particular distortion of Marxism pushed for political reasons. What we want > is a dialectic of the individual and the group. Neither is prior to the > other and neither makes any sense without the other. The denial of the > individual is just the sort of philosophy that would allow the sacrifice of > the individual to the "necesities of history". I would imagine that most of > us would want to avoid that. Even if it is a "Western value". Actually postcapitalist societies have grappled with this problem every minute of their existence. One might even say that Mao's Cultural Revolution was a stubborn attempt to transcend the persistence of individualism in such societies, a utopian hope perhaps. The NEP was a conscious attempt to make socialism feasible by allowing peasants to "enrich themselves". Lenin recognized that it was impossible to motivate them to cultivate the land unless there were material incentives. Those by definition could only come through the marketplace. Bukharin's mistake was to go overboard and tolerate the capitalist impulses of the rich peasants. Stalin, who became alarmed by the threat such peasants posed to Soviet hegemony, lurched in the opposite direction and made war in the countryside. All agriculture was collectivized and the results were catastrophic. In the 1950s and 60s, Soviet economists experimented with individual incentives. "Liebermanism" became widespread in Eastern Europe. Yugoslavia, which had its own unique history, granted factory workers the right to make their own decisions at the plant level so as to maximize profit and, hence, efficiency. Cuba seems to have been the lone hold-out against individual incentives, but the collapse of the Soviet Union has forced it to adopt all sorts of NEP-type mechanisms. As I reported a couple of months ago, they seem to have been able to withstand imperialist pressure to transform their economy along capitalist lines. All these practices represent the dialectical interaction between Marxist theory and objective conditions. What needs to be preserved, however, is the SOCIAL basis of socialism which has been under attack from all quarters in recent years, especially from post-Marxist currents. The underlying core of such beliefs is that the individual supersedes society. Nietzschean ideology, channeled through pomos such as Deleuze-Guattari, views the socialist project as one of self-liberation. Structural, economic tasks fade into the background. When all is said and done, the post-Marxists really represent a highly sophisticated version of social democracy which has also tended historically to put structural, economic tasks into the background. Classical social democracy has looked to other philosophical currents for inspiration, such as John Dewey but the newer versions need newer and more exciting ideas to bolster what is essentially a very timid outlook. Louis Proyect
