Comments on Our Main Man's Exile

[flyby]

redstar writers: "No one questions the need for structured decision-making...but why does Avakian balk at the principle of the "town meeting"?"

Well, the answer is materialism. You can run a rural commune with town meetings. You can run a small town with town meetings. But how exactly do you make global decisions with a town meeting? You can (and should!) debate global issues in town meetings, and factory meetings and dorm meetings.

But you can't have the locus of decisionmaking for global decisions at the town level. Right?

Redstar writes: "Even if it's held on some more advanced version of the internet and a million or a billion people attend and participate?"

I don't think the issues of a global economy and an ongoing conscious and rapid human transformation can be decided by online plebicite. Or rather, I think that form of deciding things (if it were ever tried) could not be other than a reflection of the "public opinion creating process" that preceeded it. And as we know, in the U.S. (or should know!) you can heard everyone in to vote on Bush or Kerry, or "should immigrants drive?" or whatever... and the form of voting does not guarantee that the people's interests (or even their will!) gets carried out.

Redstar writes: "No one questions the need for a division of labor (Marx did...but that was clearly a utopian element in his thinking)...but why does Avakian want to keep the division between "leadership" and "led"?"

Communism will have tremendous changes in the conscious activism of people in their billlions. There will need to be many loci of decision-making (not just central ones of course!), and yet policy at many levels has to be coordinated too -- so that local decision initiative also operates in line with larger frameworks that (in aggregate, up to the global level) reflect the continual transformation of human society forward.

[flyby]

redstar writes: "Do we want a society in which Cubans grow sugar and Arabs pump oil and Californians write software...period? Would that be "a good world" to live in?

Some forms of regional specialization are clearly unavoidable. The oil is in a few places and is needed everywhere....

What bothers me about the "principle" of global "division of labor" is that it would tend to preserve the division between Northern hemisphere "town" and Southern hemisphere "country". People "down there" would be permanently reduced to rural toil for the purpose of supplying people "up here" with various and sundry agricultural goodies.

Did we misunderstand each other?

I completely agree. And this is exactly the discussion about "bananas in Europe" I was talking about.

There has to be divisions of labor -- in a global economy (or else you would not HAVE a global economy, or trade -- obviously).

But there will be struggle and huge issues involved in "what should this division of labor be?" and "how do we prevent such differences within the world economy to reproduce or recreate the exploitative relations of imperialist capitalism?"

In other words, these issues are exactly what we are raising!

And my question is, how do you expect to have trade without some level of political decision-making? How can trade avoid becoming a market, and a market avoid becoming commodity exchange, and commodity exchange give rise to new global inequalities? How can all of that happen unless the law of value is consciously and increasingly "restricted" -- and how can such restriction happen without conscious agency.... and specifically the conscious agency of highly political planning and decisionmaking (and all the accompanying debate, public discussion, vetting, experimentation, etc. that is required)?

This will not be a state, but it will include elements of leadership and political representation.

[redstar2000SE]

Flyby wrote: This will not be a state, but it will include elements of leadership and political representation.

I find this extremely "murky" and open to a wide-range of interpretation...or mis-interpretation as the case may be.

You can say that "this is not a state"...but how am I or anyone supposed to tell what it is?

If there are still "political representatives", how are they selected? And to what? Obviously, they must be members of some sort of "body of representatives", right?

And this "body" will "make decisions", right?

And those decisions must be enforced, right? (Otherwise, they'd just be recommendations and people would feel free to disregard them if they thought them mistaken.)

So that means a repressive apparatus must be required, right?

And we would still have leaders...though it's not at all clear what their role would be, how they would be selected, and, most importantly, how they would be held accountable by the masses. Or even if they would be held accountable.

This sounds like a state in everything but name.

And all in service to the "need" for a "globally planned economy".

Flyby wrote: There has to be divisions of labor -- in a global economy (or else you would not HAVE a global economy, or trade -- obviously).

Yes...but should our perspective be to encourage that or discourage that?

Avakian seems to view global communist society has a really gigantic "USSR"...where Cubans grow sugar, Arabs pump oil, and Californians write software, etc. The complexities of such an arrangement would indeed necessitate a permanent state apparatus and a very large one...only experts need apply!

("Political leaders" in fact would be entirely "at the mercy" of the experts...who would tell them what could and could not be done, period.)

It's my view that this is "not the way to go". Not because it wouldn't "work" (the USSR "worked")...but because it would generate further inequalities that would, in turn, give rise to a new ruling class.

I think regional self-sufficiency is the "way to go" here -- a region being defined as the smallest land/population mixture where self-sufficiency is practical.

That doesn't mean there would be "no" global exchange...it just means that we would discourage it and, over time, try to reduce it (except for ideas, of course).

It would be "better", for example, if a region located far away from any oil or coal deposits, figured out other ways to generate the energy it needed, than to import trainloads of coal or tankers of oil. It would be "better" if that region built its own vehicles rather than import them from thousands of miles away. It would be "better" if it grew/raised most of its own food rather than importing it from distant locations.

One of the important reasons it would be "better" is that it would eliminate the need for a "global economic authority" or anything resembling a distant and bloated state apparatus.

With all major decisions reduced to a regional level, the masses could be involved in "town meeting"-style assemblies...even if some people might still assume "leadership" roles and some "state-like" structures continued to endure. Regional autonomy also provides more opportunity for innovation and experimentation...something that a global authority would probably be very poor at ("don't risk screwing up the PLAN, dammit!").

I don't mean to suggest that "regional communist" societies would not also have difficulties to overcome and ambiguities about the dispersal of power to resolve.

But they would be "on a human scale" and thus "within the grasp" of the ordinary person in a way that would be impossible for an integrated global communism.

redwinter wrote: Much of the southern hemisphere has in the last few decades already been developing its own kind of "urban society" - huge megacities of tens of millions of people with sprawling shantytowns surrounding them for miles around into the countryside.

I agree. What they really are is cities of a million or two people completely surrounded by what amounts to refugee camps full of displaced peasants. If those countries had a viable native bourgeoisie (or a Maoist regime), those refugees would be proletarianized. As things stand, they are left to rot while the land that once supported them is now used by agricultural corporations to grow cash crops for the world market.

Those countries desperately need domestic industrial development to produce for their own needs...and not the "needs" of imperialism.

But that remains a dream until the imperialist yoke itself is broken.

[flyby]

redstar writes: "Avakian seems to view global communist society has a really gigantic "USSR"...where Cubans grow sugar, Arabs pump oil, and Californians write software, etc. The complexities of such an arrangement would indeed necessitate a permanent state apparatus and a very large one...only experts need apply!'

This is exactly the opposite of what avakian is saying.

And, again, i urge you to read what is actually said in the Conversations book on exactly this issue.

This discussion would be on a somewhat higher plane, if it was not bogged down in unraveling some obvious misunderstandings (which can be cleared up just by reading, for example, what the RCP's program on international economy and trade are!!

these two sections are particularly sharp on the issues (though they relate to the controversies over socialism, and how it builds toward a communist world, not communism itself)

rwor.org/margorp/a-socec1-e.htm (in particular the sections "II. Reconfiguring a Formerly Imperialist Economy"

That sections starts with these words "A genuine socialist economy cannot be built in a country like the U.S. without shattering its former international economic relations. Nor can it be built without bending every effort to promote and support the struggle to remake the world as a whole through revolution." and then draws out a discussion of methods, plans, and implications.

rwor.org/margorp/a-socec2-e.htm

but i want to note: the conversations book goes even further, and discusses communism itself in that light. So this "draft" (!) programme is a snapshot of the thinking at one time, and there has clearly been some further struggle and thnking about just these questions.

[redstar2000SE]

I find myself in sympathy with the "Self-Reliance" section of the RCP Draft Programme...I think it shows the "right attitude".

Note however that it's also based on the assumption of a very large and unitary formation...something like the United States or even the U.S. plus Canada. There's no suggestion of breaking up the sprawling territorial empire in North America that we will have inherited from the old bourgeoisie.

This will be a aggregate of 300 million to 400 million or more people. To bring these people together with the means of production on a centrally-planned basis will require an enormous state apparatus.

There does not seem to be any adequate way for "town meeting" democracy to function in such circumstances...although frequent plebiscites could be held on the internet. But the turnouts will be small unless the issue to be decided is very controversial.

Centralized economic planning on a global scale is even more daunting -- now we're talking about 8 to 11 billion people.

A simple plebiscite would take weeks to conduct...and probably enough on-line servers to completely fill up the old pentagon.

Impractical.

So we have this trade-off (you would call it a "contradiction").

1. Centralized planning is "more efficient" if the planned economy is as large, integrated, and specialized as possible.

2. But the larger it is, the less voice the masses have in it and the greater the reliance on a relatively small number of experts to deal with its complexities.

3. And finally, the larger it is, the more likely it is to perpetuate existing inequalities and generate new ones. If you attempt to consciously oppose this trend, your experts will berate you for creating "unnecessary" inefficiencies. And, in a technical sense, they will be right.

Avakian throws up his hands in despair and says "no town meetings...we just can't do it".

But then what do we have? If everything of substance is decided "for us", regardless of the motivations of the decision-makers, where does that leave us?

We'd still be, pardon the expression, consumers! We'd enter something very much like a market with a wallet full of "labor-certificates" (money) and choose from whatever options were available...just like we do now.

And if we didn't like any of the options, then, I guess, we'd write a letter to our "political representative" and receive a form-letter back...just like we do now.

It seems to me that in such a society (whatever it might be called), the masses would remain children and develop, over time, an attitude of "father knows best".

Thus my emphasis on regionalism (and city-states); I want to get these decisions down to the level where any ordinary person who wants to participate in the decision-making process can do so...directly.

I think that's at the heart of any reasonable definition of either socialism or communism.

Without that, what remains is just "welfare-ism".

[celticfire]

Just to mention something about oil and the need for it...
I think it will possible for new resources to come forward after the establishment of socialism by liberating science and technology from the commodification of capitalism. Oil wil still be used (realistically) for decades more, but alternatives are already on the table but go unexplored because of there unprofitablility.