Frank Girard reply to Alan Kerr and DLSC article

Frank Girard
reply to the letter from Alan Kerr
and to
the De Leonist Society of Canada article
Exploring the Gotha Program
***
reprinted from the Discussion Bulletin
Nov-Dec 2001 #110, page 29

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