Before myself and Mr. Stoller finally start chasing each other's tails, I'd like to chance of at a vague tangent on some important points raised in one of Mr. Stoller's Missives, that I felt were deserviung of closer detail...: * The project of behaviorism has pointedly advocated 'deaffluentizing' while it addressed the concern of how to minimize consumption in society (without punitive or constricting measures). Marxists traditionally approach the issue of ecological providence by asserting that people will become ecologically provident once they collectively own the means of production. Ignoring for the moment that this is mere speculation (and none of the thirteen Marxist countries that 'got Marxism wrong' were ever considered ecological
leaders)
They did not 'get marxism wrong' they were not Marxist, most of the feattures associated with them bear striking resemblances to industrial development in teh non 'marxist' free world.
That it has never been proved is not in dispute, but then, there has never been a behaviourist state niether, and a few communes carefulyl tailored to teh task do not quite provide proof enough that enforced scarcity is teh best way to advance...
:this assertion fails to acknowledge that most people would want control of the means of production in order to 'improve' their standards of living (i.e. to consume more, not less).
We've never said anything less, we admit that at first would be required a 'spurt' in growth, to reach a level of a stable state economy where growth would no longer be required. Also many people would not need to consume more- the vast majority of British workers slave themselves into the ground to maintain a reasonable degree of comfort, there is no reason why they should push this comfort level higher.
Again the issue is a temporal one, not an political one, and behaviorism has demonstrated the empirical prowess to 'shape' ecologically provident behavior.
Prooving it with Lab rats is very different ot prooving it with humans, the literature of the dead society woudl provide sufficent examples of oppulance and what french Thinker George Bataille calls 'sovreignty' for a desire for more to be enkindled. Also, I would submit that scarcity is teh cuase of class struggle, and that through enforcing scracity you would be laying the seeds for the ending of your behaviourist project, its breakup into aquisitive factions, or into a quasi totalitarianism, with an 'ideal' state (akin to Frueds totem father in his incest myth) suppressing the consumptive drivcs of the people.
It don't sound much like liberation to me...
: 2. 'Without the guidance of experts in the various fields of knowledge, technology and experience, the transition to socialism will be impossible, because socialism calls for conscious mass advance to greater productivity of labor compared with capitalism, and on the basis achieved by capitalism.'
Actually, a large part of the poibnt of teh socialist case is that it is capitalism that creates abundance, and then tries to abolish it, enforce artifical scarcity, because abundance is the undoing of the capiotalist mode of co-ercion (and let there be no doubt, enforced scarcity and working for rations is coercive and is a punitive state, even the removal of privelleges amounts to punishment, and a failure to attain a reward can be seen as a removal of that reward from certain lights...) because once things become cheaply available the whole point of money as a barrier to allocate rare items (which is what it was initially used for) ceases to be, along with teh incentives to work for pittances.
None.
