interview with Istvan Meszaros

Maureen Therese Anderson manders at midway.uchicago.edu
Sun Sep 26 21:54:49 PDT 1999


Michael Yates wrote:


> Meszaros appears to see
>capitalism as more or less the logical culmination of all class
>societies. He speaks of the capital system, of which capitalism proper
>is just the final end (he seems to think that the Soviet-type systems
>are part of this capital system though not capitalist and not able to
>stand up to capitalism proper). He seems to say that prior class
>societies such as feudalism and slavery are just rather primitive forms
>of the capital system, but that their logic leads ultimately to
>capitalism which is the most refined form of exploitation ever devised.

Don't know Meszaros, but the idea that other kinds of stratified societies are just primitive forms of capitalism seems a very wrong-headed way to go. No end of nonwestern counter-examples to this, but just sticking to the west: what about antiquity? It's not that there were any "objective" impediments to the development of capitalist competition in antiquity (no state tarrifs or monopolies, etc.). Seems like capitalism didn't evolve there because people lived and thought about things very differently. The idea of "buying someone's time" would have been utterly foreign (as it was for most of European history), and the slave-owning elites of antiquity looked down on trade as such as a rather base endeavor; acceptable enough for resident outsiders, but beneath the aspirations of well-situated citizens.

Instead the elites idealized the self-sufficient agrarian household ("economics," oikos + nomos, the management of households, etc.). And that self-sufficiency ideal, as you probably know, has been shared by many so-called peasant societies in more recent times. Much to the annoyance of generations of colonial administrators and economists. Those annoyingly irrational peasants: when forced to produce some monocrop on the world market, they'd go and produce less rather than more as soon as the price went up. Imagine that! wanting to spend more time actually living their lives rather than accumulating a pile of exchange value!


>His conclusion is that the capital system must be thoroughly rooted out
>if humanity is to have any chance to survive.

Well, he might well be right on this one. But if so, why give capitalism more power than it deserves by casting it as some natural progression, incipiently rearing its ugly head at every historical turn? Seems like those arguments play into the hands of those ubiquitous neoliberal ideologues with their end-of-history teleologies. I don't think we should be doing their work for them. Capitalism (not trade, not exploitation, not hierarchy, but capitalism) is relatively recent and historically unique, based on premises and social arrangements that would have seemed utterly bizarre to members of the overwhelming majority of societies that have existed across time and space.

Maureen



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