Julio, again, I agree with virtually everything you said with a minor difference at the end of your post, which is reprinted below. Of course, Marx and Michael Lebowitz are correct. We would not expect the new socialist society to just bulldoze all of the Walmart stores in order to build a new socialism. What would be different in the post-Walmart Walmart would be the social relations. I only wanted to emphasize that the concepts, such as abstract labor, were relevant only to capitalism. Progressive discourse already recognizes the need for a new categorization, for instance, in protesting of density way that capital ascribes no value to household labor, or the way Nancy Folbre protests about the low value generally ascribed labor involved in caring.
I still think were saying the same thing; that our differences are merely semantic. I apologize for caring this on too long. On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 6:24 AM, Julio Huato <[email protected]> wrote: >> I hope that socialism would not attempt to replicate corporations. > > That will be the point of departure, of course. Unless we believe > that working people will just pop out fully developed as a scientific > self-managed productive force off the head of Jupiter, capitalism will > be the training ground. All historical attempts to build socialism > show that a first step is to try and keep the damn economy together as > new management takes over and begins to tweak things, given how hard > the old management resists the eviction. > > As Michael Lebowitz argues in his book on socialism, even capitalism > starts by appropriating as is the productive force that pre-exist it. > Although, instead of "the point of departure" I should say "one point > of departure," since there will be many other experiences by then that > will be more immediately relevant. I was once asked by a colleague to > comment on a course on finance for non-profit organizations and review > a few textbooks on the subject, and it became obvious to me the many > ways in which workers would benefit from such training. > > More on how training may help, regardless of the intentions of those > who provide the training: > > http://tech.nycga.net/2012/03/25/reportback-the-99spring-training-for-trainers-and-the-plot-to-coopt-occupy/ > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
