[lbo-talk] new spirit of capitalism

Lajany Otum lajany_otum at yahoo.co.uk
Wed Oct 10 09:38:58 PDT 2007


On Oct 9, 2007, at 7:45 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:


> OF COURSE THEY STRENGTHENED CAPITALISM, as all the
> gains of the working class for 200+ years have done.

It being the case that gains for the working class have always strengthened capitalism, the ruling class ought to have nothing to lose from reforms that favour the working class -- indeed they ought to dish them out all the time, rather than expend considerable resources that they have in trying to roll them back.

What's more one might ask why were Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral and Che Guevara murdered at all? After all, in their struggle to improve the lot of the working class, they were, if we follow the tortuous logic of Furuhashi and her followers, among the best weapons in the arsenal of the ruling class for the strengthening of capitalism.

Most of the arguments offered to bolster the case that reforms inevitably strengthen capitalism are an idiotic fallacy that takes correlation for causation: capitalism emerged stronger after the 30 year wave of anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles that that began after WW2, ergo the struggles themselves were responsible for the strengthened capitalism.

This nonsense only becomes "sense" if we obviate the wider context in which capitalism was able to rebound, namely not by dishing out more reforms in order to "strengthen" itself -- such reforms as the long forgotten "New Economic Order" proposed by the G77 in the mid to late 1970's were rapidly torpedoed by the centers of capital in New York and London -- but by going on a counteroffensive against the poor in the capitalist countries and against the third world. Thus the order of business was to decapitate the black liberation movement in the US, and to neutralise the effects of the civil rights struggles by criminalising the black working class and incarcerating them in a newly constructed prison--industrial complex; second to decapitate the radical wing of the anti-colonial movement and to fracture the Arab and African polities and society through economic pressure here and military action there, a process in which the apartheid states in West Asia and in Southern Africa respectively were crucial; next to go on the offensive against the domestic working classes at home and the Soviet Union and its allied states.

In all this, capitalism has been able to overcome its challenges by politico-military struggle and by securing new bases for accumulation. In other words, the people of the third world did not become victims of neocolonialism and neoliberalism today as a result of any success in their struggles against racism and colonialism, any more than the prison industrial complex in the US today is a direct product of the civil rights movement. On the contrary, we are suffering today because of an objective weakness relative to the ruling class which was able to regroup and recover from the blows struck against it during that historic period of struggle.

Lajany Otum

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