>However, where I differ from you is that you seem to want to reject that
>there is any progress under capitalism (only the basis of progress). But
>it strikes me that any social theory that sought to deny the real
>advances in material conditions for the mass of ordinary people, not
>just in the advanced world but in much of the developing world too,
>would prove itself redundant. Just choose any simple indicator, from
>literacy to life expectancy or the elimination of diseases and you can
>show that, however destructive the set-backs, there is a gradual
>improvement of human conditions, over, say, the last one hundred years.
>To deny that, it seems to me, is just self-defeating. Marx's critique
>does not rest upon an absolute immiseration of the working class, but on
>the difference between the potential for that development and the
>limitations that capital puts upon it.
This is baffling to me. If the only problem with capital is that ensures progress, albeit at a lower than 'potential' rate and with occasional set backs, it seems inconceivable to me that the working class would ever organize and undertake the risks to overthrow it. Jim, if this expresses your understanding of the laws of motion (and your understanding is in opposition to Grossmann and Mattick, your self proclaimed heroes), I don't see why you don't just throw in the towel, join the Manhattan Institute and help Peter Huber with his techno paeans (the one that appeared in the WSJ yesterday could have been penned by you).
I would like to consider the problem of need creation in what the situationists have called the society of the spectacle but have not yet read Anselm Jappe's bio Guy Debord, with a foreward by TJ Clark. Univ of California Press, 1999.
yours, rakesh