Rifkin, Mason, Townsend … Reynolds!
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Ben Reynolds: The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st Century. (2018)The following is all I know about the book. It makes me think of Rifkin, Mason, Townsend, and maybe Cleaver as well:According to an enthusiastic review on Amazon.co.uk:‘An amazing book which carefully and extensively sets out its thesis, from an explanation of value to the current climate catastrophe. It asks the three important questions: can we continue with this capitalist economic system? (No) what is the alternative? and how do we get there? [….] Where other books just prophesize doom and gloom, The Coming Revolution gives us a guide for how we may start to take control, turn things around and together create another world.’Maybe the book would be worth getting and reviewing in the SS.Here, discussion on the book includes intervention by Reynolds himself:A discussant there understood his book to mean ‘Given all the gee-whiz technology of small-scale automated production (like “3-D printers” for plastic goods) — perhaps people will choose a deliberate reformation of social relations.’But Renolds says no:‘I […] do not argue that people will simply choose to abandon capitalism and the wage labor system in favor of distributed production on a communist basis. I instead argue that the communistic tendencies inherent in new forms of production are trapped within the fetters of the old system, much as capitalism’s full flowering required a transformation of the entire society. This is why the recommendation in my book is not for people to buy 3D printers, but to organize for social revolution.’
Here is Reynolds’ book’s table of contents:
Unrelated to that, the table of contents to (finally published) Gilles Dauvé: ‘From Crisis to Communisation’:And then there’s this coming out in June:
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
I would imagine that this is more likely way socialism could come about than through a fear of some ecological catastrophe produced by capitalism, but who knows?
Just finished reading his book. Reynolds is an anarchist with a good grasp of Marxian economics and makes the case that technological developments within capitalism are paving the way for
“A state of society in which wage labour and the production of value have been abolished. Each person contributes what they can according to their abilities and each person receives goods according to their needs.”
He calls this society “communism” and says further of it:
“a communist society would not compel its members to work for a wage. It would provide goods to its people for free, allowing them to fulfil their needs without having to worry about artificially produced scarcity. Production would be carried on entirely through voluntary work and would be defined by a cooperative spirit.”
Good stuff. The trouble is that, despite aiming to show that because of technological developments (3-D printers and automation where those who lose their jobs won’t be able to find employment in some other or new section of the economy as with past automation) production based on labour-value will collapse in the course of this century, he doesn’t see such a society as being the immediate aim.
Instead, disappointingly, he sees what he calls “socialism” as the immediate aim as a transition to a communist society. Defined as “a socio-economic system where the means of production are owned by, controlled by and operated for the benefit of the working class”, it turns out to be production for the market organised by workers’ cooperatives aiming to cover their costs. As he himself points out:
“It still requires forms of money, coercive taxation and meaningful scarcity to function.”
Proudhon’s “People’s Bank” is even to be revived.
Disappointing indeed, but nevertheless a straw in the wind that (real)socialism/communism is back on the agenda as an item for discussion amongst critics and opponents of capitalism.
Here’s another book from the same stable (spotted by comrade Imposs1904):
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/05/walmart-without-capitalism.html
We gotta review it. Bound to better, as the reviewer says, than the hair-shirt stuff and people scratching around for potatoes that we’ve been hearing about.
I recall that in his original book on state capitalism in Russia Tony Cliff did liken the USSR to Ford, i.e. as a single capitalist entreprise without internal competition or market links between its sections. Not sure, though, that the USSR was like that as there were market links between the legally-different state enterprises.
How fitting that the article in the link appears to be by none other than Cory Doctorow, author of the communistico-futurist novel ‘Walkaway’.I don’t think I have ever read a piece of fiction whose readability is of such low uniformity. Around the middle, I nearly deleted it, but at the other extreme, there may be as much as a fifth or more of it of it that I can say I liked well enough that I don’t regret having read it.What’s the content? Society is divided into two parts: a) The ‘Default’ (ie mainstream, normal propertarian society); b) the Walkaway zone (or zones).What kind of things are in the story?1) Personalistics; 2) Technology sufficiently advanced (it’s c. 2070) that a group of people can fairly easily DIY anything. (Not too clear why this is not done much in ‘Default’. I suppose because of property / patent enforcement. ) The Walkaway zone is then a society of free-access material abundance, or potentially so. 3) A lot of talk about cybernetics and the web, plus discussion of, and practice of, life-extension; 4) military assault by ‘Default’ against the Walkaway zone(s); ( and sometimes fraternisation of the assaulting military). There much much much too much of (1), a lot of it quite idiotic.(If I remember correctly there is some conflict between free-accessors and a small minority who who believe in ‘remuneration’ (in kind?) based on labor-perfomed/recorded.)A review of that book by Doctorow has been lined up for the April Socialist Standard.
In the meantime I’ve tracked down a quote from Tony Cliff and Russia and Ford:
About the second argument, that in Stalinist Russia there is a planned economy, while under capitalism there is no plan. Not correct. The characteristic of capitalism is that there is a plan in the individual unit, but no planning between units. In the Ford factory there is a plan. They will not produce one and a half engines per car, nor three wheels per car. There is central command about how many engines, wheels, etc they produce. There is a plan, but there is anarchy between Ford and General Motors. In Stalinist Russia there was a plan for the Russian economy, but there was no plan between the Russian economy, and, let us say, the German economy.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/millennium/chap05.htm
Excellent. But a trigger-warning to the reviewer: this book contains long sex scenes as well as neo-genderal phenomena. This can be distressing to certain older readers.
Reply to ALB #184090:
‘People’s Republic of Walmart‘ is out now. Is someone going to get, read and review it?
The People's Republic of Walmart
Aside from the plugs for it on that page, there are also comments or ‘customer reviews’ in the following two links:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38914131-the-people-s-republic-of-walmart
Don’t know why that second link turned out like that; had nothing to do with kindle.
Just access www.amazon.com and then put in ‘republic of walmart’ and it will get you to that page.
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