Comment:
Alan Kerr raises a specter that hadn't occurred to me. It is
possible, I suppose, that some members of a dying capitalist
class, seeing their advantages and wealth slipping away, might
decide in a suicidal frenzy to pull the whole edifice down,
sabotaging resources including those devoted to the production of
goods and services. That eventuality seems unlikely to me. For
one thing our masters are so divorced from useful production they
wouldn't know how to sabotage it if they wanted to. And also
production is where our class has its greatest strength. We are
the producers and can control it from top to bottom. True they
might be able to pull the stock market down around their heads or
the banking system. I think, though, that Alan is right in
suggesting that any kind of eventuality that created a shortage of
necessities would require some kind of rationing. The question
would be whether LTVs would be the best method. There are other
possible shortages that will almost certainly occur that I haven't
seen discussed in the journals of the World Socialist Movement.
For example, will a socialist world try to provide a car for
everyone? As for the need for administration, I think, as Alan
suggested, that computers will take care of that-computers and the
organization provided by the socialist industrial unions.
It seems to me that the De Leonist Society of Canada's criticism
of Dr. Who 's and my willingness to scrap some of Dr. Marx's
Gotha Program raises more questions than it answers. What the
DLSC seems to be saying is that humanity has been so corrupted by
capitalism that it will not be able to function in a socialist
society. The question then becomes who or what will educate us to
the point where we can live under socialism. Who or what will
determine the rules of proper socialist behavior and enforce them?
Who or what will run the re-education institutions, not to mention
the old pre-revolutionary prisons. We know the Leninists' answer.
The history of the past century-had he been able to see it-might
have changed Marx's thinking. What is the DLSC's solution to the
problem? As DeLeonists I thought our hope for the future was the
education of the working class before the revolution.
- Frank Girard
