[lbo-talk] [pen-l] Historical materialism and social revolution

Ralph Johansen mdriscollrj at charter.net
Fri May 26 02:35:55 PDT 2017


I offer a friendly amendment.

While we have no crystal ball, there are things that we know from reading Marx. We do know that the system of capital accumulation by expropriation and exploitation of surplus labor rests on a fundamentally antagonistic premise, and with the other problems below, to unsustainable systemic crisis. We also know, and Marx devoted space to it in the Grundrisse, that with inexorable, increasing automation of production due to competition for market share and corporate alternative of growth or extinction (even now in China and Brazil), labor becomes increasingly, unsupportably redundant with the resulting prospect of spreading destitution, a planet of slums in an economic, social and ecological sense, even with whatever possibilities for countervailing expansion remain. In that context we know, given the corresponding increase in the organic composition of capital, the progressive displacement of variable by constant capital and therefore the reduction in surplus value, that the prospects for investment in productive capital are permanently foreclosed, and no relief to the system's problems of imbalance is present: permanent stagnation or worse in the sense of collapse of system becomes the only reasonable expectation. Also, we have no doubt that the problems presented by the sixth extinction are not solvable within the logic of capital accumulation; the mystification of capital, the concealed nature of capital deriving from the sale of labor power, cannot carry it much further on a course having legitimacy and consensus, hence reproduction; and that we therefore ineluctably face compulsion to move to a sustainable system and a new sense of what's to us common sense - which is our sense, after all conceivable, imaginable alternatives are tried and wanting, of our unavoidable commonality and need for solidarity superseding competition and class rule. We also know that we as a species have enormous unrealized potential and an awesome track record of accomplishment so far on which to advance. All of which may seem ridiculous in the face of capital's current rampant roughshod routing of labor and its march toward two cars in every driveway in China, India, Mexico, Brazil and wherever, which can however in a more epochal sense be seen, in its growing inequality, exhaustion of its sustainable base in nature, its extravagant excess and absence of program, the growing alienation and disillusionment with system, as prefiguring fundamental change. Fetters proliferate; social existence determines consciousness.

So crystal ball no; palpable basis for hope yes. Not a prediction but an estimation.

Do I hear a second?

On 5/25/2017 5:25 PM, Cox, Carrol wrote:
> [LBO readers. Marv only sent this to pen-l, but I think it perhaps more appropriate to lob-talk.]
>
> Marv, I sort of agree, for the most part, with your closing sentence; it is, _really_ , iffy whether humanity will survive capitalism. Moreover, nothing in Marx's Critique of Political Economy justifies any serious optimism. I offer a preliminary anecdote.
>
> I first read Capital I shortly before I became involved in any political activity. It impressed me, but my response at the time was, something on the order of, "Perhaps what we need is a return to feudalism." That is, a reading of Capital while I was still a Cold-War liberal, did convince me that capitalism was impossible but did not in the least lead me to any sense of the need (or even possibility) of resisting it, and it certainly did not attract me to socialism --- that did not even enter my head as a remote possibility.
>
> I think that 'reading' of Marx's Critique of Political Economy (esp. Grudrisse & Capital I) is in part correct, and that the passages you quote don't even hint on that points to the incoherence of the passages you quote. The metaphors of (1) base & superscription and (2) of birth simply don't work and encourage right-opportunism. Moreover (as we now know) it was absurd to see social revolution (of the magnitude needed) as occurring when capitalism itself was still confined to England (with a few spots in France, Germany, and the U.S). It was that premature hope for social8ist revolution that became the core of _real_ Eurocentrism (as opposed to Jim Blaut's arrant nonsense on the topic .)
>
> Carrol
>
> P.S. Contingency rules. We cannot know whether socialist revolution is possible. We cannot know whether socialism we do KNOW (Know, not just think) that revolution is the only alternative to destruction of organized human life. We have no crystal balls.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu [mailto:pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Marv Gandall
> Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2017 4:53 PM
> To: Pen-L Economics; Socialist Project; LBO
> Subject: [pen-l] Historical materialism and social revolution
>
> In his Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx famously summarized “the guiding principle of my studies” as follows.
>
> “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.
>
> "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
>
> "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
>
> "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
>
> "From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
>
> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
>
> The issue is to what extent the current capitalist relations of production are acting as “fetters” on the development of capitalism’s productive forces. That the most developed capitalist countries have only fitfully recovered from the financial crisis, which has worsened relations between the classes, is indisputable.
>
> But whether the system is fettered to such an extent that we’re on the cusp of “an era of social revolution” is another matter. It’s equally possible - with the calamitous decline of the trade unions and socialist parties and the rise of right-wing forces - that we’ve entered an era of reaction and barbarism. Given current political demography, I suspect and hope we’re witnessing the wrenching dying of an old order while a new one is struggling to be born, but that seems far less apparent than it did to Marx more than a century and a half ago.
>

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