Capitalism versus the Alternatives

Carrol Cox cbcox at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Sun May 3 10:52:39 PDT 1998


To my delight, discussion on this list seems to be proceeding along a number of threads which simply exist in different worlds (for discourse-fanatics, different realms of discourse). Or, as Ezra Pound once put it, "Different lice live in different waters." There can be important cross-fertilization between such threads, but I don't know whether debate across some lines is even possible, let alone fruitful or desirable. I take the following passage from William Hummel's post as my example:


> Capitalism seems to be the bad boy on this list. So let's look
> at the alternatives.

This merely states a premise, not an arguable conclusion, as does the opposite (my own) to it. Though I came to marxism late (around age 40), I now simply take it as a given, in Rosa Luxemburg's words, that we confront socialism or barbarism. (M/E make the same point 150 years ago in the phrase, the "mutual ruin of the contending classes.") The question for me, then, has long ceased to be "Whether?" I am only concerned with "How?"

(This is not dogmatism. Has anyone on this list seriously, deeply, and undogmatically without prior assumptions considered the possible truth of Homeric religion? It is far less irratonal than Christianity. One cannot throughout one's life endlessly go back to the beginning and start over again.)

But Hummel's post serves as a useful memo to the most deeply intrenched assumption of bourgeois ideology: That social systems are like brands of canned chile beans, which one dispassionately examines, then (choosing freely and in abstraction from the material content, meaning, of the choice) selects one of them. "Men [sic] make their own history, but not under...." (Eighteenth Brumaire). It is the silent incorporation of this illusion into Marxist thought that partly (mostly?) underlies the flame wars ignited by sectarians on the various marxism lists. They too, despite their passionate rhetoric, assume that "revolutionary strategies" are merely commodities on a department store's shelves, to be selected among by each individual by a free (i.e., free-floating, unanchored, meaningless) act of choice. One can therefore identify "revisionists" by the list of ingredients on the label. And so forth.

Oh yes, I'm serious on one point. I wouldn't dream of debating Mr. Hummel on the virtues of the various "alternatives."

Carrol Cox



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list