In an article " Solidarity:Not So Solid" in the February 1969 Socialist Standard (see previous post) and in another piece from 1973 on “Solidarity, the Market and Marx” that SOYMB re-published here , we criticised the author of the Solidarity pamphlet The Meaning of Socialism , which outlined a blueprint for “workers self-management” of a market economy, for in effect advocating the self-exploitation of workers. This was a translation of part of a 1957 article in French in “Socialisme ou Barbarie” by Cornelius Castoriadis writing under the pseudonym of “Paul Cardan”. The 1973 piece drew attention to the fact that the English translation had deliberately watered down the market aspect of Castoriadis’s scheme.
We have now learnt that in 1991 in a "Response to Richard Rorty" Castoriadis (by which time he had become a French “public intellectual”) asked: "Why did Marx have his head in the clouds when he talked about the abolition of money, commodities, and so on?" And that in an interview in 1990 in Radical Philosophy 56, he had made this point in more detail. Here is what he said about money and the market:
“Marx was certainly wrong in thinking that all impersonal mediations have to be abolished. This appears in his critique of the commodity, and also of money. I repudiated this as early as 1957 in a text called 'The Content of Socialism' which is in my Political and Social Writings. For me, it’s quite obvious: you can’t have a complex society without, for instance, impersonal means of exchange. Money has this function and is very important from this point of view. It’s another thing to deprive money of one of its functions in capitalist and precapitalist economies as an instrument for the personal accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of means of production. As a unit of value and as a means of exchange, money is a great invention, a great creation of humanity. We are living in societies; there is an anonymous collectivity; we express our needs and preferences by being willing to spend that much on that item, and not on anything else. This doesn’t, to my mind, create any problem. The real problem starts when you say 'market'.Again, in this text from 1957, I said that the socialist society is the first society where there’s going to be a genuine market, because a capitalist market is not a market. A capitalist market is not a market, not only if you compare it with the manuals of political economy, where the market is transparent and where capital is a jelly that moves from one field of production to another instantaneously because profits are bigger there—all that is nonsense—but because prices have nothing to do with costs. In an autonomous society you will have a genuine market in the sense of both the abolition of all monopolistic and oligopolisitc positions and a correspondence of the prices of goods to actual social costs.”
In other words, our criticism of him and Solidarity has been fully vindicated.
2 comments:
A technical hitch stopped a visitor leaving this comment so i will post.
" Geez, Adam. I sent you this information about Castoriadis's subsequent articulations and clarifications concerning money, the market, etc.(in response to your having kindly sent me some information) and I suggested politely that you might have something new to say, dealing with the substance of the issues at hand. All you seem to want to do is claim retrospective "full vindication" (which, at best, can only apply to the issue of how Solidarity altered, for its own purposes, Castoriadis's original formulations from 1957, and not to what Castoriadis said later on, including in these two texts but also in many others). What's the point of that? How does that advance the discussion today? You don't even take into account the point that I explicitly made to you (via e-mail) that his 1957 cannot and should not be taken as a "blueprint." You simply repeat what I consider your error of appreciation, which seems to me to indicate a propensity on your part to ignore or misread what is written."
Another tech hitch stopped the contributer from posting this comment
"Please note that the point made above about how Cornelius Castoriadis/Paul Cardan’s “On the Content of Socialism” is not to be taken as a completed “blueprint” has been picked up now in note 43 (p. xxxiii) of the Translator’s Forward to the new electro-samizdat Castoriadis/Cardan translation, Postscript on Insignificancy, including More Interviews and Discussions on the Rising Tide of Insignificancy, followed by Five Dialogues, Four Portraits and Two Book Reviews, available at http://www.notbored.org/PSRTI.pdf since March 18, 2011 (the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune, as the post-situ ’zine Not Bored!, which posts this book “translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service,” mentioned in its announcement). "
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