I owe Michael an apology. In retrospect, I think I should have submitted my comments to him privately first, to give him a chance to clarify things I might have misunderstood from his essay. I have no excuse. Anyway, to judge by his reply, things didn't turn out too bad. I appreciate Michael's taking the time to reply in the midst of his busy schedule. His reply does clarify points and helps isolate areas of possible disagreement.
> The capitalist relation of production [as in the mere formal > subsumption of labour] precedes the specific forces of production > developed within that relation [and reflecting the character, > contradictions and class struggle within that relation]. In other > words, those productive forces cannot be neutral, they are > 'shaped'-- there is a reason why Marx can talk about how the > specific productive forces developed within capitalism produce > misery. Grasp this and you understand immediately the problem in > embracing 'one-man management', taylorism, the 'highest > achievements of capitalism'. I do not believe -- nor have I claimed at any point -- that the productive forces can be neutral. In case it wasn't clear in what I wrote: The productive forces -- productive physical wealth (to the extent is not just given to us by nature) and the productive power of labor -- are themselves products of human purposeful activity. The productive forces are produced. Obviously, they are produced in specific social contexts. They bear the imprint of the social context in which they are produced. In that sense, they are not neutral. So, *to some extent*, they embed (and inherently lock in) the concrete existing production relations in the society that engenders them, as well as all other social conditions, including even -- as I mentioned before -- the aesthetics of such society. More to what seems Michael's main concern, the hierarchical, authoritarian organization of production -- wasteful of our humanity and our natural environment -- that characterizes capitalism is *to some extent* embedded in the technology engendered under capitalism. And, naturally, the way production is organized under capitalism reinforces the capitalist production relations, etc. Function and structure go hand in hand. So there's no disagreement here... except for the fact that I deliberately stress the clause "to some extent." Why? Clearly, the imprint of pre-socialist conditions is less rigid in some elements or aspects of the productive forces than in others. It may be in the nature of the use of a particular technology. And in other cases, the economic and political resistance of workers may counter-weigh some of the worst traits of capitalist technology. I could allude to a large portion of existing mathematical or physical knowledge, areas that have been expanded dramatically under capitalism, to illustrate the softer case. The Pythagoras Theorem, an element of the existing pre-socialist productive forces, originally engendered in an ancient society powered by slave labor, barely needs re-fitting before it can be deployed to some productive end under a hypothetical, advanced communist society. A regular knife can be used to stab people, but also to slice tomatoes. The existing Internet can be used to advance capitalism, but also (within limits) to erode it. It's obvious that they layout of factories, the design of machines, a country's communications and transportation infrastructure, the architecture of a city, etc. tend to embed in very rigid ways capitalist norms. "Management," or economics, or finance, or even accounting, on the other hand, are also insidiously far from neutral. Etc. Clearly, a socialist society cannot just limit itself to using the same productive forces that capitalist societies or, more generally, pre-socialist societies developed. It needs to re-generate the productive forces on its own basis, to fix in them its own imprint, to enable, lock in human solidarity, cooperation, the full, universal expression of our human potential. That's a matter of course. However, can socialism be built -- or, to be more precise, *begin to be built* (nowhere are we past that point yet) -- on the basis of productive forces developed under pre-socialist social conditions? The answer, I believe, is absolutely yes. If my memory serves, the passages in Marx's Grundrisse and Capital that Michael refers us to are full of references to the notion that, at first, capitalist production took the production and labor processes, the existing productive forces, *as they were*, as they had developed in pre-capitalist conditions. It's only after capitalism stood upright, on its own footing, that the conditions of production acquired their specific capitalist characteristics. Historically, capitalism took over and revolutionized the conditions of production. In turn, socialism will take over and only then will it re-generate the conditions of production to suit its new, more advance mode of life. But, at first, before its own self-sustaining basis has been erected, the edification of socialist relations can and will proceed on the basis of the existing productive forces -- productive forces that necessarily have the imprint of the old societies that engendered them. There is no way around that. Michael's emphasis is welcome, because it stresses the need of not just taking the old productive forces, superficially re-fitting them to serve socialist goals for which they were never intended (actually, if anything, they were intended to preempt socialism), but the need to develop properly socialist productive forces, i.e. productive forces that embed workers' solidarity and all the norms and values of a more advanced society. That's a key aspect of the challenge of building socialism. Michael is also absolutely correct in noticing that, to the extent, the productive forces have not been re-generated under socialist conditions proper, bearing the imprint of socialism, the danger of a reversion to the "old filth" is always there, and that this danger increases whenever we pretend otherwise. However, we should not bend that stick to the point of thinking that no worthy productive forces can ever be conceived or developed until and unless engendered in and through socialist structures, until and unless socialist relations have been firmly implanted. > Further, my argument is certainly not a suggestion that the > development of productive forces is a Bad Thing as such for the > development of the new society. Rather, it is saying that you must > develop those new socialist relations FIRST [ie., that cooperative > society based upon the common ownership of the means of production] > and then within THAT framework, the new productive forces are > created which are consistent with those relations and develop all > their latent potential; so, a process of becoming in which there is > the development of a specifically socialist mode of production > [which is necessary for building socialism]. In contrast, a > different set of relations leads you in a different direction. All > of this is something I'm developing in the book I've promised to > get to MR by November, 'The Socialist Alternative: Real Human > Development'. You can see a bit of this from this opening of the > chapter, 'The Becoming [and Unbecoming] of Real Socialism' [although > the template is developed further in an article a few years back in > Herramienta]: If the new socialist relations have not been implanted first, are the existing productive forces useless because they've been the product of capitalism or markets or, more generally, pre-socialist conditions? If the answer is no, then they can be used -- at first, taking them as they are and inserting them in new economic structures with which they will eventually conflict, and then gutting them out and replacing them with the productive forces produced under socialist conditions, bearing the socialist imprint. Not that they will perfectly fit the purpose of socialist construction. In some cases, the existing productive forces may carry too much baggage and will need to be scrapped, but in many other cases they may be re-fitting more or less successfully. Perhaps more to the point discussed by Fred and Michael, what if the pre-existing productive forces, those inherited from capitalism, are meager -- as it's likely to be the case in poor countries where people may and will set out to build socialism from whatever their starting point? Should the basic consumption needs of people be left unmet until and unless proper socialist structures are implanted to develop the productive capacity to fully or at least reasonably meet those needs? Should (in the cases where this is a need, e.g. Venezuela) the basic infrastructure of a modern industrial society be postponed or skipped altogether until and unless proper socialist structures are implanted? Should a policy of, not only tolerating, but of enabling the partial, politically constrained development of non-socialist structures (i.e. markets or even capitalist relations a la NEP) be excluded or viewed as a betrayal of socialism? I think the answer to these questions depends on concrete political conditions. I'm sure there are people who hold naive views of the kind Michael is warning us against, but my strong impression is that -- at least in the case of Cuban economists I know who have been advocating the (politically-constrained) expansion of markets and capitalist relations in Cuba -- are undoubtedly on the side of the revolution and much less naive than Michael seems to think. My strong impression is that at least some of them view those policies as a sort of Faustian bargain forced upon the revolution by conditions they didn't choose. Moreover, as I said before, my strong impression is that the people of Cuba, massively, have their needs aligned in that same direction. For the record, I did not call Michael a "voluntarist." I don't think Michael is a voluntarist. I said that the remarks in his essay, specifically those downplaying the importance of Marx's Preface, lead to voluntaristic conclusions. However, based on his reply and clarifications, I am willing to downgrade the terrible accusation I leveled against his remarks by a notch. Still, I await a satisfactory response (e.g. one admitting that he was wrong or another one convincing me that I was wrong) to at least some of my questions above before I absolve Michael's views entirely and allow them into Marxist heaven, of which I have vested myself as official guardian. And, of course, Michael and anybody here can call me anything they please. God knows "Menshevik/Stalinist stagist" is not the worst I've been called. :) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
