"But I think the objective factors, the infrastructure for socialism and socialist revolution have been ready in the U.S. and Europe (not just Russia) since 1917 at least but really before."
KL: Capitalism has been historically reactionary since at least 1848 (i.e, the world has been capable of giving birth to socialism), if not earlier. But that is not to say capitalism has reached its outer limits; obviously it hasn't. By definition, it could not exist beyond its outer limit. The declining rate of profit, below a rate sufficient to sustain the system, IS an outer limit, if that prediction of Marx's is accurate.
CB: We have seen enough of capitalism's outer limits - crises and wars ,. permanent mass unemployment, poverty, crime, racism, etc., etc. -to get the hint that it has got to go.
KL: Those are terrible things, but they are not outer limits.
CB: There is no qualitatively different capitalist crisis than the ones and types we have seen already that Marx predicts will come and automatically be the one that people can't resist and then make a rev. or blow the whole world up into barbarism and ruin of the two contending classes.
KL: Not true, in my opinion. Alfred Sohn-Rethel's description of the difference in quality between capitalism based on relative surplus value ("free" wage labor) as against [Nazi] capitalism based on absolute surplus value (slavery), in his discourse on the relative powerlessness of Siemens and other modern industrial trusts as against the flourishing power of Krupp and other historically backward sectors in Weimar Germany, is one example of the distinction.
CB: The objective factors and crises are overripe. It is refusal to see that the solution is socialism and the teachings of Marxism that stands in the way.
KL: I disagree. By this standard, the proletariat needs only to read Marx and agree; and revolution is an act of will. This is refuted best in Marx's Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, as well as in Gramsci's insights on hegemony.
CB: Yes, Lenin's formula is elementary. But not being able to live in the old way is subjective and objective. There is no mechanical formula as to the level of poverty or deprivation that people will not put up with.
KL: That isn't the distinction. These are not mystical categories. Whether one is or isn't subjective is determined by whether the parties to the condition do or do not have choices. When the choice of continuing in the old way no longer exits -- which today is not the case -- that reflects a qualitative change in objective reality.
CB: But at this point in history the objective factors have been ripe for many,many decades.
KL: Not such as to deny the choice of continuing "normal" capitalism.
CB: The subjective factors have actually atrophied while the objective factors are more ripe than ever, overripe. What in the objective factors do you see that might arise that is new and more likely to generate revolution ? We have seen it all, haven't we ?
KL: No. Sohn-Rethel's (objective) example is just one. At the opposite (subjective) example, Gramsci's observation of the worker (and following on this insight, the class), often individually and subjectively incapable of articulating class interest, nevertheless after being firmly convinced once, doesn't require renewed confirmation, and thenceforth can only be denied by total defeat. Today's workers have not been vanquished, but haven't yet been "convinced" in the Gramscian sence. Gramsci's "organic intellectuals" are convinced by the ideas themselves, but his masses are convinced only by the exercise of class power, thus the essential subjective ingredient of dual power (as in Gramsci's pamphlet Soviets in Italy), and the need of Marxist strategy to aim at that above all else. All the rest is simply (continuing) defensive or offensive class struggle, but not revolutionary struggle.
Ken Lawrence