[lbo-talk] Understanding _Capital_ (Was Re: barbaric)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/7/07, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >Marx wrote in Capital: "The advance of capitalist production develops
> >a working-class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the
> >conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature.
> >The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully
> >developed, breaks down all resistance."  One mystery is, though, how
> >Marx squared this thought with another idea he also held: transition
> >to socialism is most likely in advanced capitalist society.  If the
> >former is true, the latter can't be.
> >
> Did he say it was most likely? I thought he said it was most likely to
> succeed -- due to the absence of scarcity, due to the fact that
> technology had been sufficiently developed to support the population
> without there having to be a struggle for the means to live.

Both.

But he was probably wrong on both counts.  Imagine a socialist
revolution in Japan, a country that is very much technologically
advanced but lacks many natural resources, most crucially fossil
fuels, and heavily dependent on food imports.  If workers of Japan
ever pull off anything like that, they will be very much vulnerable to
an embargo, just like Cuba was between the end of the USSR and the
beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution.

It seems to me that the idea of "the more capitalist development, the
better for the prospect of transition to socialism" is contradicted by
reality.  The process of proletarianization (dispossession and
displacement, material and cultural) -- especially when it is imposed
by foreign powers or the local ruling class whom the populace regard
as servants of foreign powers -- tends to make people rebel (sometimes
all the way to socialist revolution) more than the state of being
proletarian for generations.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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