> Gareth Stedman Jones
> Monday August 12, 2002
> The Guardian
>
> abolition. But whether Marx - theorist of a post-capitalist order of
> communism, rather than sustainable development
Simply not true. Marx rightly abstained from *any* real characterization of what a post-capitalist society would look like. "Capital" was the first great theory of capitalism as a mode of production; other theorists would follow (Benjamin, Lukacs, Adorno, Sartre, all the way to Jameson and Bourdieu).
> compatible with a broad range of political regimes. Yet what Marx initially
> promised was a post-capitalist society. It would be as dynamic as
> capitalism itself, but no longer subject to an arbitrary market, freed from
> scarcity and its class-bound polarities of wealth and poverty.
Marx promised nothing of the sort. A utopian society might be remarkably static instead of ceaselessly dynamic, at least in the sense that *we* understand dynamism; we just can't say, because we're not there yet. Doesn't anyone actually *read* "Capital" these days?
> in the first place. The practical failure of 20th-century communism was
> preceded by Marx's theoretical failure to create a viable conception of
> modern communism.
Once again, the hoary Cold War ideology that Marx = the Left = the gulag. Communism was peasant-autarkic industrialization, period, and it mostly succeeded in turning peasant countries into industrial ones -- whereupon the thing disappeared, or spawned new types of developmental states, geared towards multinational accumulation.
-- Dennis