: Efficiency (i.e. material abundance) is a fundamental precondition FOR freedom. When there's only enough surplus for a few, then usurping minorities are obliged to appropriate the limited surplus (see history).Only if you permit (see I can copy that!!) them, if your fool enough to allow that.
:When abundance becomes available for all, then equality becomes possible. Only capitalism's mode of production can provide the abundance neccessary for socialism;
Hmmm, so there where no 'primative communists' I think Mr. Marx would disagree. Also seeing abundance as how many commodities you can amass is very possessive or capitalist, I'm not saying I entirely innocent but if it takes a lot longer for the latest entertaining games etc. to make it to the market because freedom has to be permited I can live with that.
:what MUST CHANGE are the social relations of capitalism. Obviously industrial production can provide amply; it's only the profit-motive and the anarchy of the 'free [read: unplanned] market' that prevents this ample production from actually reaching people's real needs.
Not bad but expecting capitalist management methods to produce a new form of social relations, especially the ones you want, is like thinking a little tree that has been made into a club will put out leaves.
: Stoller [sarcastically]:
: OK, let's do away with efficiency and go back to the middle ages...
: : Or perhaps we could do away with capitalist conceptions of efficiency and have freedom.
: Here is something so basic that even Frenchy can fill you in. Without abundance, no worker is going to give a damn about revolutionary change. You want to offer working people pie-in-the-sky preindustrial scarcity and poverty and they'll laugh at you. Hell, I'll be laughing, too.
That's pretty nasty. Consider Russia now did Lenins taylorism etc. resolve scaricity no his all controlling bureacracy lead to a situation in which he had to allow capitalism to return a la New Economic Policy.
By the way if I wake up on day two of the revolution to find in my work place that I'm dealing with the same dog with a different color I'm making a new revolution, even if I do it alone damnit!!
:What (Marxist) socialism offers working people is BOTH abundance AND real democratic control of the workplace and state.
Token democracy and authoritarian management.
: What you offer is... well, it's rather hard to tell... mainly fine-sounding slogans without much detail...
I offer trial and error design and planning once the class war has been understood by all and resolved, all else is utopia and utopia ends in Murder (see history).
