For all but the first post the subject line should have been "Capitalism an Aberration?" And underlying that topic was the question of whether Progress was inherent in human history. I do not think either of those questions were adequately explored, and perhaps my new subject line will help to a sharper focus.
Below is the last post in the thread. My current comment will follow.
****** Marv Gandall Wednesday, November 24, 2010 2:05 PM
On 2010-11-24, at 2:16 PM, Eubulides wrote:
On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
The norm for humankind was the opposite - social solidarity and reciprocity - because it was essential for survival.
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What was so great about the forms of social solidarity and obligation in 13th century Europe or Yuan and Ming era China that they should be considered the norm on which to assert capitalism is an historical aberration?
[MG] Wojtek and Carrol are idealizing the relations which existed between masters and slaves, lords and serfs, in order to make their dubious point that the relationship between capitalists (deemed to lack any sense of paternalistic obligation) and workers is incomparably worse. The classless hunter-gatherer societies which preceded these modes of production may have uniquely exhibited social solidarity within the narrow confines of the clan or tribe, but fighting between clans and tribes over scarce resources was as common as later conflicts between capitalist nation-states.
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First, some needed qualifications. "Aberration," as I used it in the original thread, had no ethical implications, and I made (or did not intend to make) any ethical or qualitative judgments of different human epochs. (Certainly, it there is any "maximum misery" possible it was suffered by the slaves in the Egyptian gold mines.) One could cite endless examples and counter-examples of "quality of life" in in ancient & "modern" eras, and they would have no evidential value. That debate would be pointless.
The difference I wish to argue between capitalism and all non-capitalist societies is the absence of "internal relations" in all con-capitalist societies: their history was non-dialectical. I believe it has been suggested that pressure on the "barbarians" from imperial China contributed to the "barbarian" invasions of Rome, but that relationship would have differed fundamentally from commodity fetishism, or the internal relations by which factory workers in China determine the meaning of (say) store clerks in Paris. There is nothing in any non-capitalist society which is in any way similar to that essential attribute of capitalist economies, the Reserve Army of Labor. Nor did the intensity or laxness of exploitive coercion on one feudal estate have any _necessary_ impact on the intensity of exploitation on any other feudal estate.
I have no inkling of whether or not the cosmos is or is not dialectical; that is an interesting debate between Whitehead and Russell, but it is of little if any political significance. That the social relations of capitalism but NOT those of all non-capitalist societies are dialectical is fundamental for understanding the needs of anti-capitalist political theory.
Carrol
As Stephen Gould argued of biological history, there is no reason to believe that the tape of human history replayed would resemble the history we know.
For the original thread, go to
<http://search.lbo-talk.org/search/swish.cgi?query=RIP+Chalmers+Johnson&subm it=Search%21&metaname=swishtitle&sort=unixdate&reverse=on>