From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Tue May 11 2004 - 14:52:30 EDT
On Tue, 11 May 2004, Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
> > "Marx's own text proves beyond any doubt"... uhm? Reads like a dogmatism
> > to me. Anyway, if I thought "Capital" and Marx's total work does not have
> > the specific social relations of the production in the capitalist mode of
> > production as capital's basic meaning, I'd close up shop.
>
> If you wish to accuse me of dogmatism, then prove your case,
How about "proves beyond any [sic] doubt" compared to "De omnibus
dubitandum" [doubt everything -- Marx, 1865]?
Anyway, my wording was a milder "reads like a dogmatism".
> I think you ought to "close up shop"
No thanks.
> Mark Jones was not a Stalinist, although sometimes he apologised unduly
> for Stalin's policies, in the sense that he believed that brutal policies
> were inevitable and necessary under the circumstances, even if the
> evidence suggests other options existed, and could easily have been
> taken. His argument was specifically that if we are serious about
> wishing to create a socialist economy, we must realise that the Soviet
> experiment revealed many important lessons in this regard, and that any
> future socialist experiment would contain at least some features which were
> pioneered in the former Soviet Union, because there is simply no
> other way to do it.
Reads like a Stalinism to me, and any specific brutality can be mistake,
or not a mistake ("inevitable and necessary under the circumstances"). A
Tukhachevsky deserved the brutality he got, or did not deserve. 90%
deserved the brutality they got or "only" 10% did (but "we" missed 5%).
> ... But you cannot simultaneously say that the
> social relation is "the basis of capital" and also that it IS capital.
> That does not make sense, at least not for a true scholar.
You got me there.
> ... Your statements are not supported with
> any cogent argument, it is in my opinion equivalent to an
> alchemist talking about phlogiston.
> ... I will desist for now and
> concentrate on other topics. I do not wish to go endlessly
> over the same thing. If you always do the same thing, you
> always get the same result, and that becomes ineffectual.
Me too. Paul
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