From Philosophical Research
- Socialism is Subjects having means of production [1] / Socialism is when people own means of production (Richard Wolff) / Marxism is when people own a co-op (cooperative; Wolff) ->
one of those propositions that's obviously dumb on its face but takes a long time and a lot of knowledge to properly unpack to know how to teach people that it's wrong. where it really seems to start is reverse-engineering the Soviet Union and China and realizing they had co-ops once the people were freed, and trying to work backward and forward from capitalism to that. and at that point it isn't obvious where the error would have come from. that's Materialism, isn't it? but the problem would seem to be that it isn't historical materialism or dialectical materialism. materialism it "just is". so why did Wolff think you can have Marxism without either of the interesting materialisms?
and here's what I think is the problem. people like Wolff confuse "The People" with "people — several persons each separately in parallel". they don't know the difference between individual person-objects and groups-of-people objects, much less how to categorize groups-of-people objects as class-structures and separate the workers from the owner. there is a critical gap in Marxism as it's been taught to people where they aren't taught the missing piece that allows them to properly distinguish between a workers-object and an individual-worker object standing next to an individual-owner object that each look identical. but beyond that error made by Marxist theorists in communicating Marxism, it's also fair to say Wolff ate up the old Liberal-republican idea that three individuals can be the majority of all people just because all people are tent of freedom poles with "the same freedoms limited by equal freedom of others". that isn't how Marxism goes. Marxism is based on a literal group of millions and millions of people all actually being able to do stuff because they're physical people; literally, people say Marxism happens "on paper" but the point of Marxism is that it happens exactly because it operates directly off stuff that isn't on paper. ...
- Marxism is when people own a co-op (cooperative; Wolff) -> one of those statements that's obviously dumb on its face but takes a long time and a lot of knowledge to properly unpack to know how to teach people that it's wrong. by now, I think one of the major errors here is in not defining Marxism first of all as historical materialism and subsequently accepting that people who don't even hold to general-sense historical materialism are not Marxists.
beyond that... whew. where it really seems to start is reverse-engineering the Soviet Union and China and realizing they had co-ops once the people were freed. you could attribute this plan to an attempt at a charcoal transition. but understanding the actual logic of how that is "Marxism" is what's truly complicated. it isn't dialectical materialism. it isn't specific-sense historical materialism. you can make a weak, rather watery argument that it's general-sense historical materialism, but you'd be really reaching there, because general-sense historical materialism can argue for Kamehameha to unify the local states of Hawaii into a kingdom; while that arrangement could be better than before you are totally not to Marxism yet. I became convinced for a little while that Wolff was trying to reverse engineer Deng Xiaoping Thought and figure out how the United States could transition directly to that. but I am not sure of that explanation any more, nor do I remember why I found it convincing. I mean, if we go from the hypothesis that Deng Xiaoping Thought is trying to get to Marxism starting at the most concrete levels of survival before trying to build the Leninist or Bolshevik process, you could get from there to co-op. but it still leaves open the question, hey, what about the workers?? why do all Wolff's talks not frame everything as co-op being a way for theorists to survive so they can aid the majority of workers, and why do they oddly frame themselves like being a worker is bad while co-op is the future? you'd think his talks are an Existentialism or something.
- Socialism is Subjects having means of production / Socialism is when people own means of production (Richard Wolff) -> you have to look closely at it. it's all in the inflections and articles. people like Wolff confuse "The People" with "people — several persons each separately in parallel". so in some ways it's really necessary to talk to the kind of people you find in the United States in a different way. you have to actually teach them what populations are and what social graphs are. because people genuinely don't know the difference between five separate people and a team of five people. we vulgarize the word "organize" into collecting 100 separate people instead of creating a team of 100 people. we vulgarize the word "we" into always being 100 separate people instead of a team of people. (that sentence is a wonderful example of how almost every English sentence spoken in the United States abuses "we" to refer to the concept of "Is, pluralizing I".) so you need this unreal level of precision. I'm not talking about organizing where you just assemble people, I'm talking about filtration where you actually put people into a structure. I'm not talking about revolution where people are suddenly in a conflict, I'm talking about unifying people together into a structure to end perpetual cold war that everyone has to stay in until it can actually defend itself. I'm not talking about classes, where person A and person B are workers, I'm talking about capable subpopulations of people linked together that are harder to break apart than to negotiate with.
interesting to note: anarchists don't really talk about "means of production" in this same sense. Lenin did, assigning a different owner to them than Western-Marxists, but anarchists don't. anarchists frequently talk about peasant life or tribal populations or some imaginary Kropotkinist city which is holistic but they don't really fixate on the concept of corporate or government social structures as they exist in Liberal republics and rearranging those exact structures to create something better. that seems to be a major divide between anarchists and Existentialists. Existentialists do hijack the concept of means of production or "institutions", usually because they're copying Liberalism, but that may not be true in every case.
