Carrol Cox wrote:
> The odds against humanity surviving capitalism are great, and wishful
> thinking, is a major weakness among those opposed to it. Effective
> opposition must be grounded in profound pessimism of the intellect.
These claims may be true, but the grounds you offer in defence of it, if I'm remembering them correctly, are too negative.
These, in sharp contrast to Marx, construct capitalism undialectically as wholly negative. You don't even seem to acknowledge the development of social productive forces as in any way positive.
------- I'm trying to work out a non-quibbling response here.
Obviously those productive forces (especially those embodied in human knowledge and skill) can be used for purposes most humans could agree on. And the struggle which I characterize as at best shaky is precisely a struggle to enable theose 'forces.'
That there is a But here is, I think, imlied in your "IN ANY WAY positive."
The cost of that development has been terrible beyond imagining (if you look at it from a global perspective and the perspective of those who now enjoy at least some of the benefits. Europe's explosion around the globe constsitutes the greatest plague in human history. And only of the the most freakish non-capitalist societies can one say anything like that. And as long as that plague continues unabated, it's hard to sum up the "positives" and "negatives" of the "productive forces" thereby used and created.
But (ne but after another as in some child's game.) All that is just the world we live in now -- that clock can hardly be turned back. And I agree that Marx saw the human potential in that development of productive forces, and it was in part in seeing that that he crafted his backward look on capitalism from a hypothetical socialist future.
But one of the barriers to _achieving_ that hinted possibility is the bourgeois doctrine of Progress. (Gould points out in his last book that Darwin clearly did not believe that "evolution" was "progressive," but being a Victorian gentleman "progressive scraps seep into his writing ever so often. We must remember that Marx too was a Victorian Gentleman.) And that belief in Progress as the structure of history was just as much a product of capitalism as the productive forces you cite.
And that brings us, or at leas me, back to where we started: Capitalism, a historical aberration, opened up immense possibilities but only through the destruction of capitalism can those speculative possibilities become a material possibility (the future is never certain), and the widespread belief in the givenness of Progress endlessly hampers that struggle.
And note in this connection how the "progress" in China, being achieved at immense human cost, fuels the ability of at least one person to wallow in happy fantasies of those "developmental states" as the human future. That is just a particularly virulent and offensive form of the Myth of Progress.
Carrol
P.S. Caterwauling about this or that terrible feature of u.s. culture is NOT the pessimism of the intellect I call for; it is merely spoiled optimism.