Doug Henwood asks whether the LTV debate is relevant to political
strategy. Yes, I think so. Developing an effective strategy for
overthrowing capitalism in favour of democratic socialism - which I
take it we all want to do - requires us to understand as well as we
can the nature of capitalism. This is especially so since, as Marx
and Engels argued in their critique of utopian socialists, it is very
difficult to design our political strategy around an as yet untried
form of social organisation. I have always taken this to mean that
our intellectual efforts at understanding capitalism - e.g..by
clarifying the LTV - aim to provide a map to guide our political
struggles.
For my part, I can give some examples of how this map looks to me.
First, it emphasises that in capitalism the market - a.k.a. the law
of value - tends to provide the dominant form of social nexus, i.e.
it is what holds society together. This is very relevant to ongoing
debates on 'post-communism', etc.: it should make us question very
closely any political strategy that centres on the idea of 'market
socialism'. Here it would be useful to draw on Polanyi's distinction
between 'market' and 'market society': the market element in 'market
socialism' has to be very fully subordinated to democratic non-market
processes.
Secondly, the debate over the LTV (I mean ever since Marx) has often
centred, implicitly or explicitly, on the class nature of capitalism.
Marx's theory exposes the exploitative character of the system in a
much more fundamental way than the Ricardian theory. The
original Ricardian socialists, for example, argued for workers to be
given the full value of their labour. Marx argued that this could
not happen without the abolition of capital as a social relation and
the subordination of accumulation to social need.
That's all I have time for at present. I don't believe for a moment
that Marx provides all the answers, since only social practice can do
that. But I do think that discussing his work continues to be very
useful.
Best wishes,
Hugo Radice
P.S.: The pen-l mail does pile up if you go away...I've had 124
items to work through. I endorse the view that it would be handy to
be able to 'reply-to' the individual as easily as to all of you.
About 12 of those messages were requests for one particular document!
