A number of MDF participants have started a discourse on the mailing list about this question. Both Bookmark and Steve S have expressed views. Perhaps this blog could be a good place to allow them and others to outline their positions.
I haven't looked at your article but I do know that the SPGB have a very romantic idea of how easy the change from capitalism to communism can be -persuade everybody about the benefits of socialism and then everything else falls into place easy peasy. Is this what you are saying and is that why bookmark suggested a transition period is untenable?
I have just posted this on a Facebook site "ultras vs talkies" (Devrim participates) to see what the response is. Ithink it illustrates I am not emulating the SPGB position even if it has some relevant points:
I have great appreciation for the communist left, but recently I have been questioning the adherence to the concept of the transitional period. I am aware that there will be features of the process which will fade away, particularly questions of force, violence. But what I question is the idea that distribution will be based on individual input. In my mind needs will have to be met. Even under capitalism, there are many ways in which consumption is decoupled from individual input. This impacts on concepts such as labour time vouchers and currencies. Production geared up to products for individual consumption will reproduce capitalist relations. Rather we need public facilities. Canteens, schools, hospitals, accommodation, clothing freely available. The fundamental motivation to engage in production has to arise from a conscious awareness of the stakes. A blind majority directed by a minority functions to a certain extent for capitalism which relies on egotistical motivation. But this has no place in the post insurrectionary society which will be communist from the outset.
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels - The German Ideology
++at least the question arises; do the conditions of the future correspond to those which prompted Marx to advise on the lower stage of communism.
Reading Marx like a toolbox where the answers are ready made and waiting to be applied seems to me to be a version of intransigent invariance, defending the past, the orthodoxy.
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1984/no-955-march-1984/transition-period-socialism
ReplyDeleteI haven't looked at your article but I do know that the SPGB have a very romantic idea of how easy the change from capitalism to communism can be -persuade everybody about the benefits of socialism and then everything else falls into place easy peasy. Is this what you are saying and is that why bookmark suggested a transition period is untenable?
ReplyDeleteI have just posted this on a Facebook site "ultras vs talkies" (Devrim participates) to see what the response is. Ithink it illustrates I am not emulating the SPGB position even if it has some relevant points:
ReplyDeleteI have great appreciation for the communist left, but recently I have been questioning the adherence to the concept of the transitional period.
I am aware that there will be features of the process which will fade away, particularly questions of force, violence.
But what I question is the idea that distribution will be based on individual input.
In my mind needs will have to be met. Even under capitalism, there are many ways in which consumption is decoupled from individual input.
This impacts on concepts such as labour time vouchers and currencies.
Production geared up to products for individual consumption will reproduce capitalist relations.
Rather we need public facilities. Canteens, schools, hospitals, accommodation, clothing freely available.
The fundamental motivation to engage in production has to arise from a conscious awareness of the stakes. A blind majority directed by a minority functions to a certain extent for capitalism which relies on egotistical motivation.
But this has no place in the post insurrectionary society which will be communist from the outset.
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels - The German Ideology
ReplyDelete++at least the question arises; do the conditions of the future correspond to those which prompted Marx to advise on the lower stage of communism.
Reading Marx like a toolbox where the answers are ready made and waiting to be applied seems to me to be a version of intransigent invariance, defending the past, the orthodoxy.