>>> "Julien Pierrehumbert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/08 7:24
PM >>>
J
Are you trying to confuse me?
No you're confused enough already.
I'm lost.
No!!!! Really?
Well, many don't want to have anything to do with reforms
while if they cared
most people have partial solutions.
No doubt this sentence is in a secret code which you and
your friends understand.
It means not saving it but slowing the pace of its
destruction.
Yep let's all get into slow destruction.
You don't have to give marxism up to support
something else.
Hey that's a good idea. I'm gonna be a marxist who's
seriously into capitalism Thanks Julien, this could change
my life!
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.
Now this fits really well with your point below about
burning the banks doesn't it?
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.
Getting a bit vague here aren't you?
>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.
Yeah you're right - the above theories are much, much more
sophisticated.
>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.
A problem you seem to suffer from quite a lot.
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.
But you can't quite remember any of them can you? (I'm sure
it will come back to you soon though)
Anyway, I can usually make more sense out of commentators
and
contemporary marxists.
Why not share some of that sense around then?
When the means of production are not held privately? No!
Oh yes! It's called state capitalism, for want of a better
term. This is not rocket science: the state owns the banks;
the bureaucrats control the state; the bureaucrats are a
bureaucratic capitalist class. Capish?
Exactly. So let there be money and trading of private items
and services.
What's the problem?
Er I forget, something or other about a crash.
>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.
No you left out the one important bit - you can accumulate
it as capital and then have other people work for you while
you sit next to your swimiing pool playing poker.
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.
And at second 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".
You can't always get what you want, but if you try some
times ...
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.
I'm familiar with this viewpoint. It's the chimera of a
libertarian capitalism. We need "the market" to signal
things to us. But human beings are highly evolved - they can
come up with other semiotic systems.
With pure labour-time
determined "prices", you will have to overexploit the earth
if you want no
shortages.
How about trying to inter alia reduce the population?
The "prices" of items with heavy "ecological footprints"
have to be
set higher if you want your brand of socialism to do any
good.
We could just agree on a ceiling for each person's
consumption of these items.
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.
Sorry I got a bit lost with this one. Is the above ramble
supposed to be a clever refutation of one of my points?
>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.
So who's going to invest in anything with no profits?
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.
A lot of ifs and buts here. And IF you were at the point of
voting the bad capitalists out of power, guess what would
happen. (Here's a little clue: study the history of Spain
circa 1936).
>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.
I thought you were into money. Imagine it all going up in
smoke like that!
Seriously, I don't think they need guidance. Stop beign
patronizing.
So what will they do just after they've burnt the banks? Do
you know?
Cheers too (whatever that means),
Julien
Your definition problem again?
Ciao
Tahir
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