On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Jamie Stern-Weiner <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't know what his political program is. But I don't think it's an unimportant question whether or not significant reductions of working hours, and social democratic policies more broadly, are compatible with capitalism over the medium- to long-run. One can try to answer that question in its own right, in isolation from (related) questions of political strategy. Indeed, but then the answer to the question is speculative, removed from the political motion of actual working people. Speculatively, the answer to that question is that capitalism can assimilate any change that is not a generalized change in the social relations of production, including a reduction of working time over the workers' life times. That is the answer consistent with the historical record. To paraphrase Gorbachev: capitalism doesn't need to be built. It is "self organizing," zombie-like, Therminator-like, etc. It builds itself spontaneously, around all sorts of historical obstacles and reversals, whatever the cost to working people. It is socialism that needs to be built and rebuilt mindfully. > That said, since you raise it, I've a question regarding the political strategic implications of Kliman's economic argument. If it's the case that post-work and many other social democratic aspirations are unsustainable under capitalism, some here have said that they should be struggled for nonetheless, as a process by which workers (and others involved) may come to feel their power and perceive, by pushing up against them, the limits of what capitalism as a system can accommodate. > > OK. My question is, should people organising a struggle for one of these limited and unsustainable-under-capitalism reforms, e.g. radically reduced working hours, be open and frank about the fact that achieving said demand in any long-term way isn't consistent with the current economic system, and hence would if insisted upon lead to a major crisis? > > If the answer is 'yes', the problem is that I doubt many would sign up to measures sold as having the potential to induce economic crisis, at any rate in the absence of a confidently-held vision of a comprehensive alternative political-economic model. If the answer is 'no', that would be dishonest (and, in time, exposed as such). As a rule, a mass of people divided under the pressures of day-to-day capitalist life won't struggle for or against abstractions. People struggle to meet concrete needs, as they perceive them in the given context. This is the paradox: Socialists are not the dog, but the tail. It is when they understand this well that they become an effective leading force. It is only then that the tail gets to wag the dog -- and under exceptional (yet decisive) circumstances.
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