A question I don't know how to answer
I've always picked books up off the street when people are giving them away. It's one of the many small joys of life. In college one time I picked up a book that asked leading intellectuals and professors to describe a question they didn't know how to answer. It was a neat conceit, very engaging, with punchy writing that came from the tips of these arcane minds.
I've been thinking about a question like that recently and I thought I'd write about it. The question is: How important will changes to the means of production be for unlearning our current relations of exploitation? Will it be sufficient? Will it be both necessary and sufficient? Or neither? Let me explain a little.
Means of production are the stuff of making a livelihood: money, technology, infrastructure, labor. On a stereotypical farm, the means of production are silos, barns, tractors, farmhands, domesticated animals, fields, water, seeds, etc. It's the stuff you need to run the farm successfully.
The means of production are different than the relations of production. Relations of production are how people interact with one another and the environment to make their livelihoods. The relations are roles you play, polices you follow, positions you occupy, protocols you use as you make your livelihood. For instance, feudal serfdom is a relation of production where a lord lets you live on their lands and use their means of production with which you produce stuff for them that they take. Subsistence is a relation of production where you try to control and make your own means of production and consume everything you produce.
Capitalist exploitation is a relation of production where you get paid a wage or salary for your work and someone else, the capitalist, owns the means of production, profits created therewith, and makes decisions about all of it, buying and selling and making deals with the rise and fall of market trends. The exploitation is always super-exploitation, lived and fought through racialization, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. These relations are super-expropriative as well, where working class resources get commandeered outside the firm as well as at the site of work itself.
And socialist cooperation is yet a different relation of production where workers who do that labor control the means of production and make decisions with it and about it rather than singular private individuals. These groups of workers cooperate across the differences just mentioned and try their best not to expropriate or exploit.
Means of production and relations of production are two of the most basic terms of marxism. When you put relations of production together with means of production you get a mode of production, or the economy, from and out of which and towards governments and cultures swirl and globulate together.
Various theories of marxism have tried to argue whether and how these different relations of production come about. The goal usually being something like the encouragement and cultivation of socialist relations of production amidst the mess of capitalist relations of exploitation. Some people think that the relations go in a linear development model where socialism comes after capitalism which came after feudalism which came after subsistence, etc. This is pretty outdated and doesn't make much sense when we look at history and anthropology, but it's hard to get it out of one's head.
The alternative is to think of relations of production shifting in and out of different arrangements, all of them happening at the same time, but only some being predominant in a given time and place. This shifting is conflicted and contingent, depending on how events play out, including how people organize themselves to demand certain realities in the face of others who don't want those realities.
Okay, now here we can start to see the question I don't know how to answer. Let's say the predominant relations of production in our moment are relations of capitalist super-exploitation. Let's say our goals as socialists is to cultivate, encourage, and generally work for the shift of those relations towards relations of socialist cooperation. My question is an educational question in the largest sense possible. How do we--the general we, the whole social formation--unlearn the capitalist relations of exploitation and learn socialist relations of cooperation? How do we teach that shift? Who teaches the shift and how?
One way to teach and learn socialist relations of cooperation is to work on the relations of production directly by talking about them, thinking about them, changing laws and cultural practices so they are more socialist-cooperative than capitalist-exploitative. Could socialists form political parties that find their way to state power and use governments and laws to change the relations of production? Could unions strike and then take over whole industries, demanding the capitalists sell the companies to the unions, who then turn into worker councils who own and control them, and then change the laws? Could groups and communities form syndicates together that use socialist-cooperative relations of production and through the power of their collective alternative political economy, challenge and unseat the dominant relations of capitalist exploitation?
These are all ways to work directly on the relations of production to shift them, unlearn them, and teach new relations of production. But what if working directly on the relations of production won't get us there? What if changes to the relations of production rely to some degree (and the degree matters!) on changes to the means of production, by which I mean technological and infrastructural advances? What if the way to shift the relations of production is to intervene in the means of production? What if there's some form of artificial intelligence, fusion fuel production, accounting software, or water management system that makes such a difference in our material livelihoods that relations of socialist cooperation are more likely, or even obvious?
These two paths are very different. One mundane but telling difference is to think about them in terms of academic disciplines. The academic disciplines involved in working directly on the relations of production involves political science, sociology, economics, history, literature--what my old professor Peter Caws called the Human Sciences. But the indirect path, the one that focuses on means of production, involves what we tend to call the Natural Sciences like engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, mathematics, etc.
When I started writing this newsletter, my general concern was coming to understand the nuts and bolts of education finance policy to be able to imagine, propose, and fight for the passage of socialist education policy. But what's more important in the process of winning that kind of policy and its accompanying social world: getting the policy passed, or inventing and proliferating some kind of technology that would pressure the old relations of production so much that new, better ones would have to emerge?
I think the answer has to be both to some degree. But everything comes down to those degrees. Which degrees are they? And are socialists working on the means of production enough to influence that side of things? How many socialists do you know are working in laboratories, developing new technologies, and trying to distribute those technologies? How many go into their natural sciences training with the overall ideological project of shifting relations of capitalist exploitation to socialist relations of cooperation? How many natural sciences programs incorporate ideological aspects in their training? I don't know that many. (I know a lot of tech people in socialism, I guess--but they usually help out with campaigns and elections.)
Anyway, this is the question I don't know how to answer. How do we teach and learn socialist relations of cooperation while living in capitalist relations of super-exploitation--with an emphasis on the relations themselves or the means of production? Both? To what extent?