This is really more of an addendum to last post, but I would like it for myself to be easily visible for re-finding at a later time.
Citizen B asked how or if we could see the socialist mode of production emerging within the capitalist, and regards this as a potential theoretical problem. After thinking about it, I have come to some conclusions.
First, I have always understood the socialist mode of production to be much leß of a radically technological or tangible break than any other mode, exempli gratia the completely different form of capitalist production compared to that of feudalism. Socialism is a much more subtle change, and one might even call it a variety of capitalism. The socialist mode of production's biggest difference would probably be the planned economy substituting the market as determination mechanism for sale, distribution, and production, yet this arises only after the socialist revolution has been soundly entrenched (and so does not satisfy Citizen B's criteria). The second biggest difference would be the political leadership over the means of production, but this does not fundamentally alter the mode of production.
However, I do have a suggestion as to some manifestation of the socialist within the capitalist. There is of course the collectivisation of agriculture under capitalism, by the likes of the agricultural and grocery conglomerates. But this is itself a symptom of the most important development: the consolidation of ownership of the means of production by fewer entities, and the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. I would argue that this causes said entities to function practically as parts of the state, or inverse. The bourgeois government does not really need to demand immediate and total control over the means of production at the moment, but importantly, provides them funds to prevent bankruptcy (the banks) and to switch production when required (vaccines and masks). Perhaps this might qualify as the socialist mode of production Citizen B seeks in capitalism?
If Citizen B is instead falling into the erroneous aßumption that the way production is organised on the outside will change, I will quote from Dialectical and Historical Materialism by J V Stalin:
'In place of the handicraft workshops and manufactories there appear huge mills and factories equipped with machinery. In place of the manorial estates tilled by the primitive implements of production of the peasant, there now appear large capitalist farms run on scientific lines and supplied with agricultural machinery.
The new productive forces require that the workers in production shall be better educated and more intelligent than the downtrodden and ignorant serfs, that they be able to understand machinery and operate it properly. Therefore, the capitalists prefer to deal with wage workers who are free from the bonds of serfdom and who are educated enough to be able properly to operate machinery'.- Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J Stalin, P 36-37
If Citizen B is expecting this picture to look radically different, rather than new managers, a new method of daily operating said factories and farms, and a new mechanism for determining production and distribution, then I fear he has erred in combining the technological with the socio-political, and in understanding exactly what the problem with/in capitalism is. The steam engine and cotton gin only arose by chance in the period of the capitalist epoch; and to think, should the technology have been ready to construct factories in the feudal epoch, that this technology would not have been utilised in feudal production in any, even a minor way, is highly improbable. As to whether the 'new Soviet man' can be considered a separate form of labourer claß to the wage-labour proletariat, I think, is a valid question without yet an answer, at least not one from me. I am, though, more on the side of socialist labourers still being wage-labourers, except that they receive ration cards for various product categories as opposed to a check with currency.
I would post-face this that I did not come to Marxism from an economic road, so whilst I felt it reasonable to contribute the above to the discußion, I by no means intend to quicken the end of the discußion. Ideally, some time in the future the Club will read a text on the subject and pose this amongst other questions as the final-week-discußion topic. Citizen B's basic question is valid; I simply feel that it is prompted by a few inaccurate presumptions (which, if true, would obviously be good to discover and remove, it being an obstacle to producing a real answer to the very real question). I have seen many Leftists of late, in hopeleß anguish on the state of the Left, confuse polemical propaganda with political practise. We all know as Leftists that capitalism has led to misery and poverty, but to treat it as some mythical monstrous beast even in theoretical discourse obscures the actual reasons why capitalism does as it does, and why we thus oppose it as an outmoded system. This would then harm the ideal, scientific implementation of socialism.
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