Socialist Progressives
In reply to the discussion: Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ? [View all]joshcryer
(62,265 posts)But I don't know how what I said can be considered "a recent articulation of the age old hierarchical mode of production," perhaps from a totally reductive position where all non-possessive property relationships are see as capitalist, but I would rather reduce that to authoritarianism. Capitalism, sure, is but one manifestation of authoritarianism. I don't suggest that all forms of non-possessive property relationships are capitalist.
I don't suggest that technology is an emancipating force, because I explicitly state that organization is necessary to use a technology that way. This is in contrast to Marx who thinks that "new productive faculties" (this is called technology) will "change the economic relations." Objectively false, as proven by history. Technology can be emancipating, that's all.
My criticism of Marx is that he didn't write out a fundamental reason why capitalist production relations within the workplace are damaging to revolutionary action. Indeed, had he did that (after plagiarizing huge chunks of Proudhon including surplus value, which Proudhon was first to recognize), it would've rendered his entire critique one of authoritarianism and not capitalism, directly. All anti-authoritarians are anti-capitalist (capitalism is inherently hierarchical and authoritarian), but not all anti-capitalists are anti-authoritarian (some anti-capitalists are just after the productive faculties and not in fact for changing the way they operate to any substantial degree). Note: Marx did later back off his "steam mill = industrial capitalism" rhetoric, but it was never explicitly defined from what I've read of him.
The closest you get is Marx's critique of workplace alienation, which btw, he also copied from Proudhon. What he does is argue that the bourgeois class runs the work place and workers are alienated, but if the workers ran the work place, they wouldn't be alienated (this is a very generalized overview, you'll forgive me if it's not up to your standards). However, he doesn't say how those workers should manage the workplace. In fact, the implication, is that the workplace should be managed, due to the central production rhetoric in the Communist Manifesto, centrally, directly through capitalist-style management processes. Or, as a term I'm coining right now, the authoritarian mode of production. Where within the workplace there is a class system in and of itself because managers form cliques, cronyism is rampant, and those who want to better themselves are unable to do so without themselves being alienated. And guess what? Almost all implemented forms of Marxist Communism followed this model to one extent or another. The work place effectively became a state owned corporation which was ran by crony elites.
Proudhon spends a huge chunk of his writings explaining how the non-possessive workshop works, and Marx only mocked him, nevermind that workplace alienation was the entire reason Proudhon felt that workers should, as he mocked Proudhon, "make not only the twelfth part of a pin, but successively all twelve parts of it." To rid ones self of workplace alienation you must be involved in the totality of the process. Workers committees only go so far in that, if they don't allow individuals to be involved in the totality of the process, they are inviting the possibility for workplace alienation and inner-workplace cliques and quasi-class systems.