Julien to Tahir, again.
I've added my answer to Tahir on the thread "a defintion of wage" to reduce
volume. We were drifting anyway.
>>>Every civilised economic system IS capitalist.
>
>>now you're coming saying that capitalism dates back at least
>>to the bronze age...
>
>No, capitalism developed some 300-400 years ago and now the
>whole ("civilised") world is capitalist.
Are you trying to confuse me? Are you saying that civilization began 300-400
years ago???
>I'm not especially optimistic in the shorter term - that's
>why the demand for a "solution" by next year just sounds
>puerile to me.
I have NOT done that. Please, read in context. I was doing a thought
experiment to say that someone could keep his dismissive "newsbulletins" for
himself... or something that started with that. I have said plenty of times on that
thread that it was NOT realistic.
>The only thing that will save something of
>civilisation from the meltdown of capitalism is a large
>...
Now you want to save civilization while you identified it with capitalism. I'm lost.
>I'm clear that this planetary
>community cannot be based on commodity production. Agree or
>not?
We had discussed the commodity earlier on CL-talk and my requests for
clarification were not answered. I await an explanation of what commodity
production means to you to answer. But my spontaneous thought is that we are
burdened with too much "cannot"s.
Anyway, I disagree with the internationalist TINA which says that any solution
must be global.
>Sure, but which reforms are going to save this planet, the
>human race and civilisation? See you argue carefully now!
>...
>Most people on this list could lecture you on how to save
>it
>partially without overthrowing capitalism completely if they
>cared.
>
>"If they cared"? But what else is this list about?
Well, many don't want to have anything to do with reforms while if they cared
most people have partial solutions.
>And what
>does saving it partially mean?
It means not saving it but slowing the pace of its destruction.
>I want to give up being a marxist and any convincing
>explanations here will do it for me.
Please! Can't you understand living in a society where people are different
then you means compromises? You don't have to give marxism up to support
something else.
>But how can you agree and then still argue for money? ...
I don't argue for money. I just happen to think that having money, while
probably not the best solution, is not the straight way to hell.
>>>Money means wage labour means markets means capitalism means the
>>>state.
>>
>>[my disagreement]
>
>You can have all of these things separated in a purely ideal
>and conceptual universe, but historically your separations
>are nonsense.
No. Historically money came into beign much earlier than capitalism (you said
yourself it began a few hundred years ago). There were also many cases of
states with markets but not wage labour. They were also cases of stateless
people trading. I guess I don't need to give you precise examples as you can
probably come up with dozens yourself if you think a bit. They were also
probably cases of states without money a long time ago depending on your
definitions.
>States as we know them came into being to
>regulate class conflicts, to protect markets, private
>property, trade routes, etc. Why else?
For example to satisfy the hunger for power of a monarch. Or to settle forcefully
reglious disputes. Or to beat aggressive foreign states at their own game.
Among other examples. Your vision of the world is too partial IMO. There's no
use to try to squeeze everything in a simple theory.
>As for capitalism, it
>is just the logical extension of commodity production
>throughout society, for which development you need money and
>wage labour.
Lots of people would disagree with that. But again, maybe it's only a
definition problem.
>Yep, take a look. If you had done so before, you would have
>known that I was arguing solidly within the marxism of Karl
>Marx ...
Well, what I've read of Karl was not very convincing and also boring. I must
have picked the wrong bits. Maybe I have read mostly the stuff published after
his death. I don't know. What is certain IMO is that he said many silly things.
Anyway, I can usually make more sense out of commentators and
contemporary marxists.
>and economists like yourself..
I don't have that title. As I told Mark, you don't need economists to do
economics. They're usually so [censored intemperate language].
>Money, because it involves an abstraction from the
>production and distribution of use values can be accumulated
>as capital.
When the means of production are not held privately? No!
>You would not need to "forbid"
>people from accumulating.
Exactly. So let there be money and trading of private items and services.
What's the problem?
>And if you didn't want to accumulate it as
>capital what would it be for?
For plenty of things. Money has many faces (apart from the one of the boss :-).
You can notably use money as a unit of value, as a means of exchange, and
as a store of value (even socialism won't make all movements of goods and
services simultaneous). More pratically, people will use it to trade their
personnal items and to buy services to each other. It would be superior to
barter. It will make the life of people wanting to live out of an unofficial
economic niche easier. People will also want to play poker and other games
of this sort. They could use it for hoarding but you can fight this tendency with
inflation if it's undesirable. Of course this list is not exhaustive.
>As for your reference to
>"non-labour value" (where you insist on including "capital"
>- hello!!!), by which I suppose you mainly mean natural
>resources, surely it is not beyond us to devise a system of
>distributing these according to need and through a system of
>arbitrary equivalences with the value that has been rpoduced
>through labour.
Surely. But then we might as well realize that while we're doing arbitrary things,
we might as well forget computing labour times... at least it seems so at first
glance. The problem is that unless you're lucky and have the right
equivalences, some people will not be able to buy what they want with their
"labour tokens". And even if you have the right qquivalences, you'll still be left
with unavoidable short-term imbalances. So I think that a simulated market
process (or a real one) which would determine the "prices" of items and
services would be useful to balance supply and demand.
You might think that this is hair-splitting but if you do not allow for the dynamic
corrections we're talking about, you'll be unable to take any kind of ecological
reform of your economy without creating shortages. With pure labour-time
determined "prices", you will have to overexploit the earth if you want no
shortages. The "prices" of items with heavy "ecological footprints" have to be
set higher if you want your brand of socialism to do any good.
As to your hello!!!, you can bring everything down to the labour used to
develop (wide meaning of the word) it. But in the real life labour alone doesn't
deliver. Capital is of course the product of old labour but not only of that.
Resources have also been used to create the capital. Besides, you can't
bring capital into existence instantaneously just by "spending" the amount of
labour necessary to produce it and even if you could there's usually an
enormous difference between that amount and the amount that you would
include as "value of dead labour" or whatever in your calculations for each
given planning period during the life of that bit of capital. There is therefore a
scarcity of capital different than the scarcity of labour and therefore a value of
capital of a different nature than the value of labour.
>The fact is that only under capitalism is it
>possible for someone to accumulate huge resources without
>any labour, just by virtue of ownership. [...] And
>this is because commodification has been generalised to
>every corner of social life under capitalism and there is no
>way of putting the genie back into the bottle.
I'm still not convinced that it's a sufficient cause and I'm quite sure that there
are ways to put the genie back into the bottle. It's possible to drive profits
underwater either through unionism or taxes, f.ex.
>As I said, if you want to lobby your
>politicians wherever it is that you are, fine, but we can
>talk a year or two from now and see what that has yielded.
I did not pick it up, because it was quite bizarre. Lobbying? me? Writing letters
for Amnesty Intl. cases and stuff like that is OK, but would politicians listen to
me on issue where something important is a at stake? Anyway, there's a better
way than lobbying in countries with decent democraties (not the US): vote
against them. The politicians I've voted for didn't need lobbying to act
decently... until now. OK, most didn't get elected at the national level because
the party is too marginal.
It will probably have yielded nothing in a year or two. What had and will have
yielded more however is direct democracy. You'll probably consider those
petty advances (or defenses) but had the victories we have had here
happend in the USA, you would surely be impressed. And if the left did ont
leave populism to the right, there would be a lot more action.
>But I think those kids and workers on the streets of Seattle
>and London and the other instances that will follow soon
>have a better sense - that the struggle is anti-capitalism,
>not just anti-imperialism or anti-fascism - they just need
>some guidance that's all.
I heard that they were shouting "Capitalism? No thanks. We will burn your
fucking banks!" That looks good enough for me.
Seriously, I don't think they need guidance. Stop beign patronizing.
Cheers too (whatever that means),
Julien
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