It is necessary to grasp the perspective of the market, the immanent standard of the capitalist mode of production, when it comes to _analysis_ of what makes capitalism what it is, unlike other modes of production. But that perspective is not what _moves_ people to act in such a way as to overcome this mode of production and establish a new one that better serves the interest of "the survival of civilization, perhaps of human life itself."
As for inner contradictions of capitalism, they are certainly a barrier to human development, but they themselves do not automatically doom this mode of production.
On 9/20/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> To be fair, Doug, Yoshie did specify the sort of
> liberalism she had in mind, the sort who invoke
> "Liberty, Equality, Property, and Bentham" (to justify
> capitalism?)
That's the dominant ideology, most in keeping with commodity fetishism, and, promoted by the powerful and accepted by many, it puts pressures on all less than or other than Anglo-American liberal states to conform to it. The recent French and Swedish elections are examples of such pressures inside the global North. Pressures are greater outside it.
> No one would seriously suggest that capitalism could
> be usefully evaluated from a medieval perspective
> involving the divine right of kings. No one here would
> think that fascist values would likely be an
> especially illuminating way to appraise capitalism.
> Few here would suggest that a Stalinist framework
> would be helpful. Probably only you, Yoshie,
> here,anyway, would say that an Islamist appraisal
> would be useful for much more than understanding how
> Islamists think. So you have to be specific about your
> alternative and the reasons for adopting it as a point
> of view and what purpose it would serve to do so.
Before evaluating anything, one has to know what it is. What is the essence of capitalism and how do working people come to understand it, criticize it, and resist it?
Most people in the world do not come to learn the logic of capitalism by reading Marx's Capital or any other book; nor do they understand it by experiencing wage labor, for experience of wage labor alone tends to give "Liberty, Equality, Property, and Bentham" an upper hand in the end, leading people to demand "A Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work!" except perhaps in moments of major economic crises like the Great Depression that are accompanied by political legitimation crises, rare events.
And yet, major revolts and revolutions have happened many times in history. How and why? I think that, when working people are moved to resist the logic of capitalism, they do so because of subjective contradictions between the dominant structure of feeling generated by the capitalist mode of production -- "Liberty, Equality, Property, and Bentham" -- on one hand and a combination of residual and emergent structures of feeling on the other hand (to take Raymond Williams' terms).
Doug says he is in favor of "the ruthless criticism of all that exists." The letter in which Marx advocated it is instructive. He wrote it at a time when "The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. For although no doubt exists on the question of 'Whence,' all the greater confusion prevails on the question of 'Whither.' Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be" -- not unlike our time. What did he set out to do? "In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to." That is a perspective that we should bring to understanding Islam, the main ideology to which people have turned in the Middle East in resistance to the US-led multinational empire's attempt to make the logic of capitalism prevail everywhere, and other ideologies of struggle elsewhere.
While understanding "the world's own principles" takes far more than understanding the small parts of them that are expressed in the ideas of intellectuals, one can't remain totally unfamiliar with them either. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam wrote that the "intellectual archives" and records of activism of "al-Afghani, Ridha, al-Husri, Aflaq, al-Banna, Shariati," and "the political philosophy of Ibn Taymiyya or Ibn-Hanbal," are "part and parcel" of the "historical consciousness" of peoples of West Asia (<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/aam170907.html>). Surely it is incumbent upon Marxists to learn about them and more.
Beyond that, any ideology cannot be understood fully unless it is compared and contrasted with others, just as a word takes on its meaning only in relation to other words, as they are actually used by people. Stanley Fish and Mark Lilla, among others, understand this point: their encounters with Islam clarified for them what liberalism, secularism, the "West," and their problems are (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070917/017539.html>).
If only Marxists would do the same for their own ideology as well as for liberalism and secularism.
> Some people might still defend Marx's officially
> relativist claim, described (defended?) by Shane that
> there is no framework other than capitalism's own for
> evaluating it. Allen Wood and (formerly?) Richard
> Miller have espoused this view. It's far from dumb,
> but I don't think it's defensible and I I don't think
> it's properly motivated even if you agree with Marx
> and Hegel and Dewey and Rorty that all effective
> critique is immanent, that you have to start where you
> are, and this is where we are; that we cannot fully
> or, probably, accurately imagine what values people
> would have under future arrangements that have never
> existed.
>
> Still, Marx seems to slip back and forth, without
> recognizing that he is doing this, between an official
> view that there One Capitalist Value Framework
> (liberalism qua liberty, equality, property, and
> Bentham) that is possible as a way to think in
> bourgeois society, and the recognition that capitalist
> society is contradictory and involves many possible
> perspectives, some highly critical of capitalism --
> including a standpoint of the proletariat or of (as he
> puts it in a rare moment of explicitness on this) of
> what he calls in the Theses on Feuerbach, of humanity.
> The second view has to be right, or more right than
> the first. because otherwise Marx's own critique of
> bourgeois society seems totally impossible.
I agree with you on these points. -- Yoshie