[lbo-talk] How we got from there to here

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jul 13 17:34:29 PDT 2011


After writing my last post (sorry about the doubling) I began to think more about that paragraph I added on capitalists not fearing revolution.

I think increasingly for several years now what almost all my posts carry as a sort of implicit sub-text concerns the terrible resiliency of the capitalist system, its capacity to not only survive disasters to any one capitalist regime, discrediting of any one capitalist class, but the very vigor it derives from such disasters. That is, I think, why I have grown increasingly impatient with "criticism" of capitalism. Nothing anyone can say about how bad capitalism, or the u.s. capitalist class, or banks or this or that capitalist politician is of the slightest risk to capitalism. Joanna writes that WW 1 "discredited" the capitalist ruling classes. Perhaps, in the eyes of a scattering of intellectuals and of various revolutionary parties and movements. But it didn't make any real difference to capitalism The Great Depression and WW2 really revived world capitalism and established it on stronger foundations than ever.

It is really almost laughable to think that capitalists are actually afraid of revolution, of communism. What they are afraid of, what makes them climb the wall in a frenzy, is any interference at all with how they do business. Remember the capitalist Marx refers to who would rather throw his property into the English Channel that let anyone tell him how many hours a day he could work children to death. That gives you the essence of capitalist "fear." Marvin notes (correctly) that the reentry of the SU and China into the world capitalist system gave capital much more power over labor (it increased the industrial reserve army; it also increased absolute surplus value, and relative surplus value can't exist except in the presence of a the creation of absolute surplus value). That increase in the industrial reserve army meant FREEDOM -- not from revolution but from bothersome restraints on how they handled their labor force.

Carrol



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