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Labor vouchers and radical democracy: is that the post-capitalist road to a human community?

A Critical Review of:

“LABOR-TIME ACCOUNTING AND THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE

Contributions to the critique of common misconceptions”

By David Adam

Published this year by Red & Black Books is a collection of essays by David Adam. The scope of his booklet is a defense of a transition from capitalism to communism as a political takeover of the bourgeois state by a proletarian power, which, during this transition, will self-manage its own labor.

In the first section, Adam sets out to defend the GIC’s text Fundamental Principles of Production and Distribution which describes a system of labor-time vouchers. To reassert the validity of such a system he directs his criticism to the writings of Gilles Dauvé who characterizes labor vouchers as a “wage in disguise.” For Adam this cannot be true since what is exchanged is “direct” labor-time that represents the concrete labor of each worker, as opposed to the exchange of abstract labor.

Louis on X: "https://t.co/WzneI7tEko" / X
Two things need to be said.

The first is that the notion of direct exchange between labor-time (represented by a voucher) and the corresponding distribution of wealth from a social fund, maintains the same principle that regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is an exchange of equivalents.  

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AN INTERNATIONALIST STATEMENT ON CAPITALISM AND WAR

Below we publish a statement on capitalism and war, adopted at an internationalist meeting in Arezzo, in which members of Internationalist Perspective participated. We will comment later on this and other pro-revolutionary internationalist meetings that ocurred this summer.

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While the global capitalist system is dragging the world into ever more war and misery, those who refuse to take sides in these wars and fight to end the system that causes them, are still few and far between. So it is a promising sign that this summer several extended meetings of internationalist revolutionaries from many different countries were organized in Europe. in early June, on the last day of the anti-war congress in Prague, we agreed on the need of a short statement on capitalism and war that expresses our common positions and can serve as a base for further networking and common action. This statement was drafted after the congress ended. It was discussed, amended and approved at the internationalist meeting in Arezzo where the hope was expressed that it will be further discussed by the participants of the Prague congress and those who will gather in Poznan later this month.

AN INTERNATIONALIST STATEMENT ON CAPITALISM AND WAR

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THE STUDENT PROTESTS: A MIXED SIGNAL

The solidarity of the students is welcomed in Gaza

The student protests are a mixed signal. On the one hand, it is heartening that students in more than 160 colleges and universities in the US are protesting the war in Gaza, and do so with passion and courage. They have inspired many others in other countries and continents to join the fight against this outrageous mass murder. As the New York Times wrote recently, they think not only about Gaza. For many of them, it’s also about racism, police brutality, climate change and other issues that are all symptoms of the current stage of capitalism’s decadence. They are beginning to connect the dots. They are a reflection of a broader mood of resistance that is brewing. Which is a good sign. We empathize with their resistance against the repression unleashed against them. Students have been ‘doxxed’, harassed, intimidated, surveiled, reviled, suspended, expelled, evicted, arrested, teargassed and beaten but this has not stopped them. Of course, the democratic state does not mind them protesting, as long as they do so politely, without creating any disturbance to the social order which causes these wars and which the legal system is designed to protect.  

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IN MEMORY OF LOREN GOLDNER

Our comrade Loren Goldner passed away on April 12th. His death represents the loss of a great militant and brings a great sadness for those who knew him.

Loren’s political life began with his arrest as a student at Berkeley amidst the sit-ins and anti-war riots of the sixties. In this context Loren was radicalized and turned to Marxism in search for a critique of Maoism, Stalinism and the New-Left that dominated the scene. For a while he joined the Independent Socialist Club, which eventually would become the trotskyist organization International Socialists (IS). But before that happened, Loren left Berkeley and the ISC behind and began traveling regularly to Europe attracted by the traditions of the Ultra- Left. In Europe he became familiar with Socialisme o Barbarie, the Situationist Iinternational, Invariance, Jean Barrot, Le Prolétaire and other elements of the Italian Left in exile. Important for his political formation was an encounter with Henri Simon who represented for Loren a definitive break with any idea of the Soviet Union being a “degenerated worker state” and a historical link to the internationalist orientation that he was to embrace.

By the seventies Loren had settled in New York City.  

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A debate on the IP-leaflet on Gaza

We recently published a leaflet denouncing the war in Gaza. The intention was to distribute it at demonstrations as a means of engaging participants in discussion. After it was published on our website, it was criticized by some of our members and by others in the milieu for not being clear enough about the fact that the inter-imperialist nature of the war in Gaza is paramount, and that only proletarian class struggle can impede and break the inter-imperialist conflicts and wars endemic to capitalism.

Whereas we agree on these last points, a revision of our leaflet has led to a disagreement centered on the role played by the increasing number of proletariats who have become superfluous to capital, in the unfolding of capitalist crisis and war; and this war in particular.

We believe that it is important to have political debates in the open and the reader may expect more articles on these subjects forthcoming.

In the meantime we publish a string of texts that were produced in the immediate wake of the leaflet. Our hope is that by making available our discussion and openly showing the nature of our debate, others will be encouraged to contribute.

IP

The Gazan Inferno

For revolutionaries, the two most important statements to be made about this butchery are: that this is but the latest murderous eruption of global inter-imperialist antagonisms, and that the only solution for the proletariat is through class struggle.  

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IP LEAFLET

No War in Gaza! Fight the Nightmare Which Haunts Us All!

War is the climax of the nightmare in Gaza. We hear the numbers rise every day, but the losses are immeasurable. Like many of the past 50 years, it is an asymmetric war, which in this case means that one side’s troops first enter a home to kill an entire family, while the other can rain down bombs to the same end. Asymmetry means that many more Gazans have been murdered than Israelis, as they are the collateral damage whose lives each army has written off as an acceptable cost. We call for an immediate end to the war, the release of hostages and prisoners, an end to the blockade. We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders.

We refuse the language of right to the land, of border legitimacy, and of national security. The rallying cries and waving flags hide the truth: we are being tricked, bribed, or forced into the wars of our masters. We refuse to excuse mass murder in the name of “justice”, “resistance”, or “defense”. War can never bring peace or freedom beyond the peace of a graveyard and the freedom to pillage the dead.  

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WARMONGERS LEFT AND RIGHT

The world watches in horror as one of the most advanced armies on earth is destroying a mostly defenseless enclosed urban zone, like shooting fish in a barrel. No wonder there is widespread outrage and a worldwide demand to stop this madness. But rather than to stop the war, many leftists want to continue it, on the side of Hamas. And they want us to ignore the violence against innocents committed by their side because it was done for a good cause. Was it?

The apologists of Hamas claim that its army are indigenous freedom fighters rising up against a colonial power and that the history of colonial wars shows that these conflicts are inevitably brutal, with many innocent victims on both sides. It is up to the ‘freedom fighters” to decide how they wage their struggle, they claim, and those who support the liberation of “the Palestinian people” should not question their methods. Especially not if they are white and living in countries which had colonies themselves. Shame about the past or present behavior of “their” countries should silence any critical thought on the tactics and goals of the “anti-colonial” struggle. They are not well placed “to hand out moral lessons to the resistance.”  

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CAPITALISM’S DEATH WORLD

A Banksy mural in Gaza

On the very first day of Hamas’ sadistic rampage, the Israeli authorities took to the microphones to declare to the world that this was Israel’s 9/11. And indeed, there are some striking similarities. Between the tactics and goals of Al Qaeda and Hamas, as well as between the imperialist opportunities their actions created for the US and Israel.

Both Al Qaeda and Hamas attacked civilians indiscriminately. Both are guided by an Islamist ideology1, based on myths of a glorious past and an even better future in heaven, feeding on the anger and resentment that poverty, repression, and discrimination amply produce. What do they want? A real state, a vast territory under their control, ruled not by “the people” but by themselves, a state that imprisons and tortures anyone who dares to disagree (as Hamas does in Gaza), claiming their authority cannot be challenged because it is sanctified by religious dogma. They have utter contempt for human life, including sometimes their own. They are a clear expression of the death culture that capitalism in this epoch produces. They are racist, not in the strict sense of classifying people on the basis of skin color, but in the broader meaning of dehumanizing people on the basis of their “otherness”, the conditions under which they are born, like their ethnicity or culture.  

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NAUSEA

Sculpture by Tania Font

We publish below a text that originally appeared on the French website Lundimatin. Not because we agree with everything its author writes: we reject in particular her biological-determinist view “that perhaps the root of the problem, and of all the violence that shakes the world, is masculinity”. But we share the nausea she so passionately expresses. Her voice must be heard.

Nausea

The Israeli government is a shameful entity, a shameless colonial and imperialist power that has been committing heinous war crimes on a daily basis for 75 years. It kills, humiliates and arbitrarily imprisons children and civilians whose only crime is to dare to be Palestinian. Nausea at every demand of the government, its army and its fanatics. Anger and grief at every Palestinian death.

The Israeli government and the massacres it has committed since 1948 are the real enemy, the criminal – and therefore the one that must be destroyed. THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT.

Now I’m feeling sick again. The assimilation of an entire population, within which class struggle, racial discrimination and political differences exist, as they do in every country in the world, the assimilation of this entire population to its government, to its ethnic identity, is fascist, harmful and murderous thinking.  

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HOT AND COLD WAR

1. THE STARK PRESENT

The summer of 2023 has drawn to a close. The pandemic is in the lull, ‘normality’ has resumed but the grim atmosphere has not disappeared. The climate crisis is getting worse, disasters attributed to “Mother Nature” dominate the news. But the economic crisis also proliferates. What both crises have in common is that they affect people very unequally. They show that we live in a class society.

The Dow Jones, the so-called barometer of the US economy, has been doing quite well. Those with a lot of money can still make it grow. The rest of us are doing less well. Inflation is eroding wages. Millions of Americans are currently losing their health insurance. There are increasing numbers of homeless people. The gap between rich and poor is widening in every country, but globally, the gap is deepening between countries capable of playing a competitive role in the ultra-productive information economy and all the others.

Mass flight from poorer countries is the result. The information revolution has unified the global economy but at the same time it is expelling many. The deeper the global crisis sinks and the more the information technology increases productivity, the more ‘superfluous’ people there are.  

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