>>> <JKSCHW at aol.com> 01/31/00 10:24PM >>>
In a message dated 00-01-31 17:48:01 EST, you write:
<< Just a thought. OK , Marx is not being dialectical, or there is no valid method such as dialectics. It's just an excuse he uses to coverup his mistakes. He is just wrong, and Justin found him out.
You are so smart , Justin. Smarter than Marx even.
>>
No, I'm not smarter than Marx. But I don't have to be smarter than Marx to be able to conclude that he's wrong about something. After all, Charles, you are not smarter than, among others, Nozick, Hayek, Friedman, Mises, and a number of other brilliant anti-Marxist pro-capitalists, but that doesn't stop you from being able to formulate potentially valid objections to their work.
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CB: Why do you say I am not smarter than them ? :>)
Well, to stop being a smarty pants for a moment , let me say, straightforward, that I am not willing to dismiss Marx's claims that dialectics are a valid method, and it seems likely that some of the "inconsistencies" you mention are evidences of that. This doesn't mean Marx is never wrong ,as you replied to what I said ( nor as further implied that I treat Marx as infallible). But I don't mind treating Marx as correct more than most people, and certainly I don't mind defending him against a conclusion as implied in your statement that he was inconsistent, in the sense of drawing invalid conclusions, in some of his most fundamental and important formulations, such as the complex of determinations among the forces and relations of production in the history of class societies.
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Of, if you want someone in the same league as Marx, how about Hegel, eh?
However, Charles, since you are smart enough to see through Hayek and Hegel, you are certainly smart enough to explain to us just how Marx dialectically reconciles his class struggle theory of history with his productive forces account, while explaining, while you are at it, how the priductive forces account can possibly be right as an explanation of the rise of capitalism when there was no real significant technologiacl change in the emerging capitalist countries, mainly England, from 1450 to 1750, precisely the years that wage labor became the dominant form of economic relations. The big technological push doesn't come till the turn of the 19th century. Marx, of course, knows this. So get out your dialectical stuff and reconcile away.
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CB: Well, technological change would be in the forces of production. And the forces of production include the working classes. And the bourgeoisie were a mixed exploiting and exploiting class in the period you mention. So, the change in the forces of production that occurred in the period that you mention was in the bourgeois class, in bursting out all over the world ( See The Communist Manifesto). And the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation ( See _Capital_ vol. one) was the colonialism and slavery that was this bourgeois bursting all over the world. And then another force of production, the peasantry of England, was removed from the land, and turned into a proletariat, a new force of production. So, these changes in the forces of production caused the change in mode of production from feudalism to capitalism.
Perhaps we would say that the dialectical contradiction here is that the working classes are both a force and in a relation of production.
The dialectics also enter in in the struggle between the classes. This struggle is, not surprisingly, contradictory, and it is an engine for generating changes such as the change that occurred in the bourgeoisie in the period in which you ask.
Another "inconsistency" or change would be in the classes involved. The "bourgeoisie" of feudalism are not really the same as the "bourgeoisie"in capitalism. Similarly , with the other classes. And the whole mode of production changes or becomes inconsistent with its old form.
QED
So get out your hanky and weep.
CB