A remark on Jerry's "Re: Hello and Kliman's cat":
Gerry, commenting on Paul C.'s characterization of the National Health
Service says:
>As for
>"communist elements" (Paul C's term), I don't think that reforms won by
>the working class under capitalism and reluctantly granted by the
>capitalist state signify the existence of communist relations in embreyo.
This made me wonder. I agree with your vision earlier in this post of a
social formation as a kind of "palimpsest" (a manuscript on which many
different texts have been written, one over the other), encoding bits and
pieces of all past modes of production. Why shouldn't it include future
modes of production, in principle? This seems more dialectical, somehow.
Maybe we need to be more interested in "reformist" structures that express
class interests. I think the all-or-nothing approach to social change
hasn't proved itself historically.
Cheers,
Duncan
Duncan K. Foley
Department of Economics
Barnard College
New York, NY 10027
(212)-854-3790
fax: (212)-854-8947
e-mail: dkf2@columbia.edu