From: Doğan Göçmen (dogangoecmen@aol.com)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2008 - 11:27:24 EDT
Ian, the concept of dictatorship you ascribe to Marx and Engels is a too narrow one. I am not sure whether you ascribe to Marx and Engels a concept which we developed in the face of our experiences in the 20th century. What Marx and Engels describe as dictatorship is just the political domination of one class upon the rest of society. In that sense Marx and Engels talk about the necessity that working classes must take power to start establishing socialism. This idea is present right from Communist Manifesto. I agree however that they changed their mind in terms of how and by means of what the power has to be taken over. I think you do not do much justice to Bolsheviks. If you study carefully October Revolution and what Lenin and Bolsheviks tried to you may find that they never intended to come into power as the sole party. Other Parties including Mensheviks rejected to join. Only Social Revolutionatries and that did not last long at all - the split between the right wing and left wing Social Revolutionaries was the result. (See E. H. Carr) To the rest you say below I have nothing to say but this: to understand that "market socialism" a contradiction in terms (socialism is the negation of market relations as such) you have to pose the question about the very nature of exchange relations. Hobbes defined them as war of all against all. Smith defines them as power relations and so on......... Marx and Engels followed this line of thought. I repeated many time on this list. To understand what market relations are (they are relations of mutual negation, whereas socialism is about establishing of social relations of mutual recognition) one has to study very carefully the first chapter of the first volume of Capital. So market socialism is nonsense, nothing but nonsense. Cheers, Dogan ---------------------- Doğan Göçmen Author of The Adam Smith Problem: Reconciling Human Nature and Society in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, I. B. Tauris, London&New York 2007 -----Original Message----- From: Ian Wright <wrighti@acm.org> To: Outline on Political Economy mailing list <ope@lists.csuchico.edu> Sent: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:51 Subject: Re: [OPE] Advice to a postgrad (Thomas More Relies to market socialism) Dogan In Marx and Engels' time the word "dictatorship" referred to a temporary emergency institution during transitional crisis, not the idea of a continuing dictatorship. The meaning of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" was abused to justify the wresting of power from the working class by the Bolsheviks. In all Marx and Engels' voluminous writings the term "dictatorship" is linked to the working class a total of only 16 times. Many of these instances were used when Marx and Engels' were working in a united front with the Blanquists, and functioned as a compromise slogan. Others instances were employed to differentiate and distance Marx and Engels' ideas from the Blanquist conspiratorial approach. Other instances were employed to distinguish themselves from the anarchist idea of immediate dissolution of the state. The "dictatorship of the proleteriat" is very far from the "very essence of Marx's teaching" as Lenin would have it, and it emphatically did not mean continuing rule by a totalitarian one-party state. On this issue, Richard Hunt's "The political ideas of Marx and Engels", volumes 1 and 2 (1974), is a tour-de-force. He recovers Marx the radical democrat from the totalitarian tradition. I think the litmus test of a socialist economy is democratic control, including such things as control in the workplace, and control over the allocation of surplus-labour to either new production or a reduction in the length of the working day. In a one-party state there is no democratic control of this kind. The internal constitution of the single party becomes the de facto constitution of the whole social organism. You at least need multiple competing parties. > So this is the characterisation of a capitalist society and challange to > your illusionary concept of socilism: "when everyone's entitled to get > as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much > there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, > which means that everyone else is poor." How are you going to face this > challange. Markets of large numbers of people by definition have weak micro-level coordination. This means they tend to enter states of statistical equilibrium which have maximum entropy subject to any macro-level constraints. So More is quite right: wealth gets scrambled and moves toward an inegalitarian distribution, and this in many ways can be considered a "natural necessity". But the distribution of wealth that we see in capitalism is of a distinctive kind. There's a long power-law tail due to capitalist profit-income. If a society had different rules that controlled the distribution of income -- in other words different macro-level constraints -- you would get much more egalitarian distributions of wealth even with markets. So market socialism does not necessarily entail capitalist inequality. To get a perfectly equal distribution of wealth the society would need to formulate and enforce rules that tightly constrain the economic activities that people can engage in; in other words, you'd need a powerful mechanism to prevent the increase of entropy. In the past, so-called Marxist states have employed a large bureaucracy to achieve this aim. I welcome Alejandro's perspective on these issues. And the history of the working class movement, including its theory and practice, is not exhausted by a certain kind of interpretation of Marx. The tradition is richer and more contested than that. -Ian. _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope ________________________________________________________________________ AOL Email goes Mobile! You can now read your AOL Emails whilst on the move. Sign up for a free AOL Email account with unlimited storage today. _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
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