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> On 30 Sep 2015, at 11:18 PM, John Edmundson via Marxism > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Certainly there have been Marxists in the past, and I am sure there are > some today, who see these things in mechanistic and inevitable, rather than > dynamic and dialectical ways. That such people and views exist does not > disprove the LTRPF. This entire comment is good. To expand on what I wrote previously, I think the only sensible way to read Roberts is as a sustained effort at making brutally clear how mercilessly mechanical the capitalist system is *when considered in the absence of resistence* - i.e., in the terms of bourgeois economics. Keynesian tinkering might delay serious crisis - but only at the expense of ensuring the crisis, when it comes, will be even more severe. Roberts isn’t neglecting or de-emphasising the political; he is trying on make sure people understand the true nature of the political: that it has nothing to do with capitalist economics as such, even with a Keynesian blow-off valve, and that capitalist economics has nothing to offer any emancipatory politics, in the end. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t fight for better wages or working conditions; only that such fights merely sow the seeds of future crises for capitalism - future crises whose *effects* on working people are not mechanically fore-ordained, but will depend on forms and degrees of organisation that will have been achieved in the meantime, and on the responses of those organic wholes in the face of systemic challenge. That isn’t a comfortable message for people who are still looking for some theoretical deus ex machina that will sort everything out, if only we rub the relevant parts of the three volumes of Kapital together in the right way. But it isn’t necessarily pessimistic. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
