One last time: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dmytri Kleiner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, July 18, 2004 4:28 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Venture Communism
> On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 10:20:34PM -0700, sartesian wrote: > > > I don't just allude to a reference, I pointed out the historical failure of > > such notions as "venture communism." -------------------------------------- I pointed to the historical failures of these attempts and the failures of social revolutions that in fact did not complete the "violent" process of expropriating the bourgeois system on an international scale. Violence seems to be your numbe one fear . What you propose is not different that Owenism and a new New Lanark. At core your proposal is "Create 2, 3, many Amanas." _________________________________________ > What does this have to do with Voluntarism? Do you not believe that my > labuor can be assest to the struggle of labour against property? Whithout > Venture Commmunism, my labour is an asset to the enemy. The surplus value > of my labour helps fund the guns and prisons and rents that support the ruling > class. Why are you against my effort to take this surplus value away from > them and put it instead towards the accumulation of democraticly controlled > communal wealth? __________________________________ Your response is proof of the voluntarism. 'Taking surplus value away from them and put it instead towards the accumulation of democratically controlled communal wealth?' Workers don't have that choice. Plain and simple. They sell their labor power out of necessity. That same necessity creates the potential, the necessity, for social, even violent, revolution. You think the workers who worked at the Ypsilanti, Michigan M-16 factory waiting to be drafted during Vietnam War did it out of choice? Was there a choice? Well, sure, you could go to Canada or Sweden; you could do a number of things and even get support. But almost everyone worked and waited. That's called necessity. And many upon return, if they did return, could consider, not alternative democracies, but immediate struggle for radical transformation, in class vs. class terms. _______________________________ There is no me-ism here, all workers are faced with the same question. > Venture Communism provides an answer, ___________________________ Workers are not at all faced with the 'same question.' They face this reality, this struggle with this social organization, not the question of whether to sell their labor to Ford, or 'share' it in New Amana. Choice has absolutely nothing to do with it. ______________________________________________________________ > How are we ever to overthrow the class relation while making the ruling class more powerfull with our own labour? Please explain how overthrowing the ruling class will come about. It seems you believe that we can overthrow them by reading history book alone. _________________________________________ News flash: it, overthrowing the ruling class, has been attempted, and even had some success. None of the attempts or success involved venture communism, democratically shared profits, etc. They all did involve a certain amount of violence, and a class, not individuals, that utilized that violence in defense of that social revolution. Nothing wrong with that, although, again, that seems to be your greatest fear. _____________________ > > > What do I propose workers do? That's a voluntarist question which has > > nothing to do with the actual concrete reality. What people //do// has nothing to do with reality? Are you serious? ______________________________ What people do has everything to do with reality. Proposing Owenism for social emancipation has nothing to do with reality. Providing "do be" and "don't be" lists has nothing to do with the actual development of social struggles. Would you propose that African-Americans would have been better off by not demanding, not entering employment as industrial workers? Is it not more accurate to say that capital's requirement of access to labor triggered the civil rights movement and only by engaging that demand, the real class content of African-American emancipation was made manifest? _______________________ > The more they provide their surpluss value to the Capitalists, the more > they build their own prisons. ______________________ You got your dialectic ass-backwards. The contradictions are in capital. Capital sows the seeds of its own destruction. We are not discussing alternatives. There are no alternatives to the struggles of workers in and out of the workplace against the ruling structure, class, and organization of capital. _____________________ Finally, your inability to see capital (and money-capital) as class relations says all that needs to be said about your "alternative," and your democracy. Capital is not just the accumulation of dead labor, it's the accumulation of expropriated, alienated, social dead labor. It requires both expropriated and expropriators to exist. And money is not an invention of a political system. The establishment of a uniform currency measures the consolidation of power under, and the consolidation as a class, of the bourgeoisie. You think you will pay your suppliers like any other organization? You sure will, the banks will see to that. And like any other organization, you will pay the banks by expropriating labor more intensely, by being a little less democratic, and with a lot less profit to distribute.
