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I think the proposal below reflects theoretical lacunae that led to syndicalism on the one hand and utopianism on the other, 'tho lessons on the art of proletarian solidarity building were gleaned from both. For capitalist surplus value to be transformed into socialist social value*, State power remains necessary to tax a portion for the general welfare or human societal services the most "productive" proletariat (exchangers of their labor power for the means to reproduce it) may not consider essential, certainty not in the early stages of unconscious transition, especially where labor is "slicing and dicing, manufacturing, packaging and delivering loans to sell lenders. As the president said, when running in March 2008, when the measure of our Gross Domestic PRODUCT is more determined by the sales of derivatives than steel I beams, you know something is wrong. Or words to that effect which persuaded me the man understands. Some of us might have preferred production of commodities we deem more humanizing, or more free time instead of triple over time in exchange for lay offs and declining union memberships, but we did not have state power nor determine use value. Limiting our understanding of surplus value to the context of the exploitation of labor to extract maximum growth in what we can see today may as well be called "privatized monetized world average surplus time, social surplus, or social value" and learning to explain it only in the context of organizing industrial workers' wages and projected sale prices of the products of their particular industry, was a function of the historic mode of production in which we organized and the form in which data were available to us. However it blinded us to fully utilizing what Marx and Engels bequeathed us to strive(much less stride) toward socialism. In mho that is, and based of course on my limited practice. I thought of going back and changing "our" "us" and "we" to "I my and me" so as to not appear to be speaking FOR others, but it is my opinion from the practice of all other, and far better than I, organizers I've observed. * definition of social surplus: "difference between world average time we workers add to products of same kind minus that that others put in what we have to pay for to work another day" cf: www.peggydobbins.net/dwellingintents/epilogue.HTML to tune of Solidarity On Nov 20, 2010, at 12:50 PM, Greg McDonald <gregm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Instead of their typical capitalist structures that split employers > from employees, a post-capitalist structure would position workers as, > collectively, their enterprise's own board of directors -- Marx's > "associated workers." The era of capitalist employers (e.g., corporate > boards selected by and responsible to major private shareholders) > would then have come to an historic end. The capitalist class > structure of production would have been superseded by such a > collectivization of surplus appropriation inside enterprises (Wolff > 2010). > > For example, consider enterprises newly structured such that the > workers produce outputs in the usual way Mondays through Thursdays, > but on Fridays, assembled in both plenaries and subgroups, they make > decisions previously taken by boards of directors selected by (major) > shareholders. That is, the workers democratically decide what, where, > and how to produce and how to distribute their realized surpluses. > They decide when and how to expand and contract. But they do not do > that alone. They enter into co-respective power-sharing agreements > with the local and regional communities where their physical > production facilities are located. The workers participate in the > residential communities’ decision-making processes and vice-versa.[8]" > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
