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We are screwed and I am scared. Not scared in the sense of my personal well being. I suffer from congestive heart failure back in 2008, got a pace maker-defibrillator and subject to croak any moment. The discernible tremble that is source of my fear is the path of the social and political revolution, the development of a mass uprising and believing the American people can always be pulled from the brink of disastrous thinking and support of the ruling class. I am not sure how to characterize the American state. It is perhaps easier to describe different sides and aspects of the American state during different periods of history. I don’t particularly care for the word fascism, but we (revolutionaries from an era and epoch gone by) seem to be stuck with the word. On a side note I am the proud owner of your “The Antebellum Crisis & America’s First Bohemians” and “Race and Radicalism in the Union Army” and find both works to be a master stroke, reading with the touch of a mystery filled novel. Finally, I have just read the Introduction, first three chapters, chapter 10 and all the footnotes of Michael Heinrich’s “An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. Then I just downloaded and read his “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s” from Monthly Review. I found the last paragraph in Chapter 10 disturbing. Referencing Marx Capital Vol. 1 Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm Professor Heinrich writes in part, “In the passage excerpted above, Marx drew conclusions amount to a sort of historical determinism that are not justified by his categorical depiction. To that extent, the passage is more an expression of hope than analysis; revolutionary enthusiasm triumphed over the cool scholar. However, the depiction of the capitalist mode of production itself is not dependent upon these questionable conclusions. Capital (meaning the book ed.) still offers the best contribution to understanding the capitalist mode of production. But how and whether this mode of production will reach its end cannot be determined in advance. There are no certainties here, merely a struggle with a conclusion that is up for grabs.” “But how and whether this mode of production will reach its end cannot be determined in advance. There are no certainties here, merely a struggle with a conclusion that is up for grabs.” Did not Marx and Engels collaborate and write out for all to see, the general law of social revolution or stated better, the law system that governs the rise and decay of all modes of production in the 1859 “Contribution to a Critique of political Economy”? No one within Marxism of my - our – generation, question the ultimate and historical decay of the bourgeois mode of commodity production must take place, because production and distribution of the social product in a historically evolved mode of production is governed by a law system that says “changes in the building blocks of the technology regime and the environment of human development” causes a leap from one mode of production to the next. What has been questioned and debated is identifying the dynamic of causality defining the moment and specific properties compelling a leap (transition) from one mode of production to the next. Computers or the semi-conductor as architecture and motive force at the foundation of the building blocks of means of production is to industrial society what industrial society and the steam engine (and the technology regime implied in the steam engine) was to the society of manufacture. Further proof we have entered a new epoch of social revolution is the universal reevaluation and updating of Marx’s law systems outlining the general behavior of mode of production and the basic components driving growth, development and qualitative transition. The form of dialectics, pardon, materialist dialectics change with changes in our understanding of the movement of matter. What has this got to do with Ferguson and the murder of Michael Brown? Everything. Actually, Heinrich’s Chapter 1, “Capitalism and Marxism” avoids definitions and leave the reader wondering what is capitalism and Marxism. Personally, I would call capitalism the bourgeois mode of commodity production and then quote Engels explaining when the word capitalism became popular. Then, after quoting Engels, I would define Marxism as the “science of society” because that is what Engels called it in his “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Part 2: Materialism.” Read it for yourself (not you personally): “Secondly, Feuerbach is quite correct in asserting that exclusively natural-scientific materialism is indeed “the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge, but not the edifice itself”. For we live not only in nature but also in human society, and this also no less than nature has its history of development and its science. It was therefore a question of bringing the science of society, that is, the sum total of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences, into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon. But it did not fall to Feuerbach’s lot to do this.” (My emphasis added) It’s Friday and I am going somewhere to get in trouble. Perhaps a good poker game. WL -----Original Message----- From: Mark Lause <markala...@gmail.com> To: waistline2 <waistli...@aol.com>; Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> Sent: Thu, Aug 21, 2014 10:58 am Subject: Re: [Marxism] Another shooting in St. Louis -- caught entirely on video The bourgeois republican version of the state was never really that republican. I wonder how totally screwed we now are, though, eh? ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
