Women's Class Struggle Re: Abortion, Russia, birthrate

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sun Oct 13 15:21:38 PDT 2002


Gordon:
> "However, I don't think that declining population necessarily
> presages a crisis for capitalism. Part of the genius of
> capitalism is its ability to exploit practically anything,
> including social problems. To take an example from another
> realm, one might have looked at the dark Satanic mills of an
> earlier day and decided that environmental destruction was
> going to create a crisis; but instead, some capitalists began
> to exploit pollution and environmental degradation in various
> ways so that, while some made money out of creating it, they
> made money out of reducing or eliminating it. The point is,
> after all, merely to keep production-consumption going along
> and getting bigger all the time; the production and consumption
> can be more and more metaphorical or abstract, as long as they
> lead to the exchange of money and the acquisition or preservation
> of social status and power for the capital manipulators. So,
> if the population ages or declines, I expect to see somebody
> making money out of it, possibly with the assistance of the
> State. (EDS might be a forerunner.) The crisis will come
> when a sufficient number of people realize the fandango of
> prod-con is about nothing they want enough to enslave
> themselves for, and start to do something else.

Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> A crisis in capitalism is not engendered by virtue of the fact that
> individuals "realize" on some abstract, heady level that wage labor is
> slavery, i.e., by consciousness alone. If so, all folks like Gordon would
> need to do is sufficiently propagandize the "people" (whatever that means;
> supposedly he is referring to Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice just as much
> as wage workers and poor) to think a certain way. Unfortunately, groupthink
> is not the answer here, especially considering the iron grip that
> class-conscious capitalists have on the mass media today. Objectively, a
> "crisis" in capitalism can only emerge when a critical mass of workers are no
> longer able to survive on decreasing wages and increasing work hours, when
> the capitalist economic system can no longer increase the standard of living.
> In other words, there must be a material basis, not just a bookish
> ideological one which hinges on a moralist Christian conceptualization of
> Epiphany, or seeing a vision of the savior and "realizing" what one as an
> individual must do.
>
> Read what Marx wrote in "The German Ideology": (ch.1a) ...

First of all, you didn't read what I wrote very carefully -- you seem to have skipped over the "and start to do something else." I think of the (r)evolution of thought and of action as occurring together, actually, in fact, as two aspects of one thing. It is necessary that people work this revolution out in practice, because there is no book that can tell them how to do it.

Now, according to what you write above, and to what I have been told is Marx's conception of the end of the game for capitalism, the working class must be immiserated by the inexorable process of capitalist development, or as you say, "a 'crisis' in capitalism can only emerge when a critical mass of workers are no longer able to survive on decreasing wages and increasing work hours...." But this is not what's happening at the moment, and there don't seem to be many prospects for it in any foreseeable future. I think the capitalist system has provisionally solved the problem of overproduction, through a variety of means including good old war, imperialism and waste, but also through abstract production and consumerism, the employment of the working class to work hard at using up the stuff they produce. The working class is even taxed to provide Welfare so that yet other people can also work at consuming, thus preserving the scarcity necessary to the capitalist superstructure. As an added benefit for the ruling class, Welfare, coupled with a broad, inclusive prison and parole system, helps almost everybody under continuous bourgeois supervision.

I think the underlying tension in the present arrangement is between the way people might live and the way they do live under the capitalist production of artificial scarcity. But the exploitation of this tension would have to lie in the raising of consciousness, not in waiting for certain material conditions to develop which are not already present. Fortunatly humans, for all their faults, appear to be moderately intelligent rather than mere reactive lumps of protoplasm, so it's possible that some of them might be inspired to think and so to revolt or evolve or whatever you want to call it. I think we have to put some trust in this dubious talent, because, as the history of the 20th century shows, when things turn sour in capitalist states, the uninformed masses may well turn not to socialism but fascism as the answer.

-- Gordon



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