After several days of not having had a chance to open
messages I have now skimmed through this correspondence
between Tom and Julien with a sense of disbelief that my
question about what the overthrow of capitalism might mean
has led to this. But the question is not answered, is it?
Apart from the attempt to ban Marxists from the list and a
rather masturbatory debate on economics which took us
precisely nowhere. The question really is about what an
overthrow of capitalism would look like. If this question
overtaxes your imaginations then so be it.
The processes which have led to this point ("the crash",
ecological disaster) are all about what has happened under
capitalism. No marxist of any intellectual standing believes
today that the economies of USSR, China, etc. were based on
"socialist economics". A lot of marxists (including myself
for some time) supported those regimes because it was
thought, amongst other things, that (a) this might be a
stage of development that could be pushed further to
socialism, and (b) that here we at least had a strategy for
development that showed how to break out of the stranglehold
of "imperialist underdevelopment".
What is needed instead of this mistaken notion is a
restatement of the socialism that is entailed in Marx's
critique of capitalism. It means finding a way to create a
world not based on commodities, money, wage labour and the
state. I think that there is a movement internationally in
this direction. It consists right now of a motley crew of
anarchists, marxists, green activists and others who are
fighting it out with one another to achieve some kind of
common programme and understanding. This is not "dead
marxist theory"; what is dead is bolshevism and its academic
apologiae. One example of this is precisely the project of
promoting national independence and an international system
where one capitalist country doesn't exploit another. This
can never happen. All that it does is strengthen the
internally repressive powers of third world and "socialist"
regimes.
The fact is that if an overthrow of capitalism is the only
salvation of this planet - and I don't see any of the
protagonists coming up with an alternative vision - then it
must really entail a return to use values as the basis of
production. Money means wage labour means markets means
capitalism means the state. Marx was right - you can't
separate these. An "overthrow" of capitalism that still
talks about markets and wages, etc., is just rubbish. If
that were marxism then I would be happy to trash it. But
that is not marxism. And if the vision doesn't lead to a
real anti-capitalist movement of the kind that I'm referring
to, then we must resign ourselves to a vision of a
nightmarish, barbaric post-capitalist survival society set
against, shall we say, a rather desolate landscape as
backdrop.
It is as Marx knew, a political question far more than an
economic one. What do you want to do here? Debate the finer
points of economics and then lobby your congressman or MP?
Give me a break.
Tahir
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