>>> Louis Proyect writes
Marx did not predict, as Professor Mike wrote here the other day, that there was an "inevitability" for the system to self-destruct. This straw-man is easy to knock down. What Marx wrote, and what Mandel spent his entire career explaining, is that capitalism is a contradictory system which can only resolve its contradictions through violent and barbaric measures. It would never "self-destruct." Instead it would condemn humanity to global economic inequality, periodic depressions, wars and fascism in order to resolve its own contradictions. We would pay with our own blood for capitalism's tendency to fuck itself up, a prospect that is staring us in the face now.
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Charles:
In _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ Marx and Engels say:"What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave- diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
So in some sense, Marx does say that the fall of the bourgeoisie is literally "inevitable." That fall might "fall" short of socialism with a decent into barbarism, but Marx's position is that the end of capitalism is inevitable. The working class will not be fooled forever.
This is not the same thing as the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system "self-destructing". It other-destructs, in that the working class grave diggers must affirmatively carry out the destruction. The revolution is not mechanical and objective like a clockworks, but must have a mass subjective factor. It is not impersonal system contradictions that destroy the system by themselves but only as spurs to people factor in the system.
Thus, the improvements in objective economic analysis that Keynes or other bourgeois economists might make lack an essential qualitative characteristic: the subjective intervention of the working class to get rid of the system.
Charles Brown
Detroit
Workers of the West, it's our turn.