This is in response to Bill Bartlett's last posting. So far as updating
people on the Liverpool Docks dispute is concerned, I wrote a series of
reports / comments which have been published in a number of agitational
papers. With the help of people whom I have never met, but thanks to this
marvellous technology, they have been gathered together at a web site as
follows.

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/dockhome.html

The reports reflect as much my attempts to understand what is novel and
important about this dispute as much as a chronology. However they stopped
around early 1996 as circumstances in my life conspired to prevent me from
carrying on.

Only lately have I found some time and energy to come back to this dispute
and to find the people I left over 12 months ago still committed, active
and in struggle. I hope to resume my reports which hopefully will be posted
to the same site. If however people would like me to send them direct I can
do that if e-mail addresses are sent. Alternatively people may want to
subscribe to the Autopsy list
<http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/~spoons/aut_html/> which I have
found the most stimulating and on which my reports are also posted.

Sorry for the 'plug' - and I still cannot fathom out why the  'intellectual
property'  discussion went on for so long. In capitalist society all things
become commodified, to be commodified they have to be alienated, to be
alienated [or stolen] they must be capable of being sold, that is passed
from one set of private hands to another. And from the point of view of the
worker [intellectual or not] the state is still 'private hands' [ask any of
the few miners that are left in this country if 'nationalisation' of the
mines altered their status as wage workers]. To abolish or get rid of
commodity production you must also get rid of the means by which
commodities are produced - wage labour, which is the expression of the
supreme commodity form, and institute a system of collective ownership AND
destroy the way in which commodities are circulated - money, markets,
prices, contractual relationships and so on. That is we have a completely
new relationship to 'work' [and one another]. Anything less is still
capitalism - whether you call it socialism or not.

If you continue to debate 'intellectual property' then you assume the
continued existence of capitalism. That's ok by me, but then it becomes an
academic exercise for lawyers, and an issue to be tried in courts and by my
definition above I can't see a role for lawyers and courts in a communist
society.

As for economics . . . I spent too many years of my life defending /
elaborating 'crisis theory' - over/underconsumption etc, etc, . I've
grappled with Mandel, Grossman, Luxemburg and even the three volumes of
Capital. The fact is, I do not know and I don't pretend that I have
answers. To be a communist I do not need to believe in the 'invevitability'
of capitalism's breakdown. I rely instead on the reality of the class
struggle I see all around me and the attempt by workers to make some sense
of the world as they and I, experience it.

. . . .and I still haven't come to grips with Chomsky's ideas.

Sorry for the rant

Gra