MARX AND HIS POSTERITY
Admittedly the founder of what has been the working-class movement shares
some responsibility in the confusion of the thought that is meant to be
Marxist or Marxism-related. But he did not deserve to get zealots completely
lacking of critical judgment as heirs. Marx experienced as a genuine
intellectual the throes of the contradiction that let its work unfinished
fourteen years before his death. As soon as he came up against it, far from
denying it as his epigones today do, and despite a lot of other sufferings,
he looked for resolving it, while refusing to publish anything as long as it
would not be overcome, going as far as hiding his manuscripts from his close
relatives and friends. Engels's and Lafargue's accounts are in this respect
quite definite.
Only Rosa Luxemburg, another great intellectual, was not afraid of
confronting this contradiction, while opening moreover a track to its
solution. Then, Marxism was made up of two intellectual streams, each of
them issuing from one term of the contradiction. One of them was based on
the metaphysic of absolute "surplus value". The other one, without formally
rejecting that metaphysic, took root in the scientific part of Marx's work,
the "trending profit rate to fall", which the so-called absolute
surplus-value plays no part in.
The so-called "absolute surplus value", issuing mysteriously from the work
of each wage-earning, suggests a mechanism of endogenous accumulation that a
priori excludes any limit to the process. In other words, "capitalism" could
be considered as being enabled to regenerate by itself indefinitely. What
lead, within the surplus-value stream, to a break between a reformist
secondary stream and a revolutionary one, the one concluding that socialism
had to fit into the scheme of an almost eternal capitalism, the other that
it had to put an end to capitalism, and that the only way of doing it was
the subversion of the bourgeois political power. The first ones have kept,
until today, the appellation of "social democrats", the second ones the
appellation of "Marxists-Leninists".
As for her, Rosa Luxemburg, although she hoped and prayed for the
"proletarian revolution", had understood that the accumulation could not be
endogenous and on the contrary needed an expansion within space, what was
attested by colonialism. She logically concluded that this expansionism was
necessarily to come up against a deadline, should it be in last resort the
planetary one. In other words, "capitalism" was necessarily to one day enter
a crisis of which it could not getting out. This thesis had to experience a
censorship and a purgatory that are continuing.
First, social democrats pilloried it after its printing. After what the
Leninists took over them. Today again, the ones and the others maintain Rosa
Luxemburg's main work (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals, 1913) under a burden
of ignorance, of silence and of contempt. This attitude is quite coherent
with the vocabulary that gathers now the enemy brothers: development,
progress, democracy, fight against inequalities, citizenship. A vocabulary
which is quite out of step with reality, but which can be understood as
being an exorcism against the fear of future. And this infantilization of
thought does not allow neither social democrats, nor residual Leninists to
admit that history has agreed with Rosa Luxemburg, against them.
Social democrats saw a stable world in which democracy and progress should
settle all conflicts. As for him, Lenin saw a world forever divided by the
conflicts of interests between the various empires, continuing at the
planetary scale the class conflicts of within each of them, and that only
the dictatorship of the proletariat was able to unite and pacify. For her
part, Rosa Luxemburg saw an indistinct imperialism relentlessly continuing
the colonizing process, out of necessity. A necessity from accumulation.
Between this two conceptions, history has decided. The dictatorship of
proletariat is a failure and a persistent after-tragedy, and the USA have
put an end to the conflicts between imperialists, by exerting a leadership
with which all of them have agreed totally (except general de Gaulle's
interlude) and have even demanded. Finally, under IMF's management, the
"globalization" is restoring the colonialist subjection and even extending
it, as a trend, to all countries.
But of the two original Marxist streams, it is the weakest, the most
disconnected from reality, which today continues Marxism. Really, the author
of Capital deserved another posterity.
Romain Kroës
Karl Marx "Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy," states the following:
"Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather form the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
"In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising form the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close.
"Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, arrived by another road (compare his History of the Working Class in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience."
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself."
"for which there is room" = completion of all the quantitative boundaries.
As I have come to understand matters this is not a description of the external limits of capital - the planet earth, or in the context of your statement ("an expansion within space) or colonialism but a theoretical description of the processes of a mode of production crossing over or in transformation to another mode of production. Rosa L. could not define "an expansion within space" concretely because the processes within the mode of production had not unfolded."
The capitalist mode of production, from my particular point of view, contains boundaries related to the production process and how living labor is utilized in the production process on the basis of a given technical state of development of the "properties" utilized in the production of commodities. Mine is not a criticism of Rosa, although I have not read "The Accumulation of Capital" or picked up the book or looked at it in over twenty years. It is somewhere in the basement. Nor do I see Lenin and Leninism as "wrong" because Leninism is a political doctrine of insurrection and how to win state power amid a crisis on the basis of an alignment with various class forces. Lenin was primarily a general and Marx a philosopher and economist although these are not mutually exclusive categories. Leninism as a doctrine arose on the basis of an acute political crisis within the capitalist system.
Within the framework of the era of Lenin and Leninism I have come to understand that the crisis in capital, wherein the barrier within the market prevents the continuous absorption of all the products produced, leads to a crisis - interruption, creates the political conditions in which the Leninist won political power. This crisis is not what Marx is speaking above in the above quote.
Perhaps you can direct me to any author(s) who has written about the quantitative stages in the mode of production and the qualitative enhancements that clarifies the boundaries - outside of the Marxist in North America. Surely a body of literature exist somewhere, I am unaware of it and would love to see what others think. If I had to guess, I would pick Japan as having such literature.
"Frederick Engels, . . . arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) at the same result as I,"
Different people arrive by different routes to seeking a less absurd description of the economics of our lives. I arrived at studying Marx by reading Ludwig F. and the End of Classical German Philosophy at age 17 and only later studied Marx economic theory. I have not yet been convinced that "The Law of the tendency of the rate of profit to Fall" - not the "falling rate of profit" but the law of the tendency, is not important and a fundamental aspect of rendering greater portions of living labor superfluous to the production commodities.
In my mind eye I can see a ruthless movement of technology reconfiguring the productive infrastructure and the human beings that give it a reality. New sources of energy, electro-mechanical to electro-digital processes; modes of expression of value, i.e. money, talking on a life of its own increasingly divorced from production; economist in the death fight to track and correctly describe the process; politicians desperately attempting to articulate the process to millions and a world trying to figure out the next step in human happiness - all is like a motion picture, whose plot needs to be more fully defined. No matter how one describes it - which is the arena of engagement, the application of science and electronic digital processes impacts the amount of living labor in the production process.
I tend not to lump everything together because Lenin won, which is why this political doctrine of the class struggle was studied and became universal in a sense. Nor do I attribute the overthrown of the Soviet State to a failure of the doctrine of Lenin, which is how to win in the era of which he was a part. Although I have no intention - at this point, of digging through mountains of books for The Accumulation of Capital and unwilling to read it on a monitor, she as was Lenin are limited by the boundaries of a specific quantitative development within capital.
This is why we debate. To less absurdly unfold present day economics. I do not dispute a certain infantile attitude on my part (your comments were not taken personally, but there is a price to pay for generalization). I entered the arena as a general; won elections in union and civic organizations all of my life (lots of organizations) and continue to seek out a better understanding and explanation of what is taking place in society and the world in which I live.
Under intense pressure for a lifetime I have never repudiated the revolutionary conclusions drawn by Marx and Engels. Perhaps you can enlighten me on the quantitative boundaries in capital and the impact of the new technology; the emergence of a qualitatively different mass of unemployed and marginally unemployed peoples unable to sell their labor for an amount of values to sustain their family.
By the way it is not possible to do away with the conflict within capital or imperialism, in my opinion. The outbreak of war on the basis of blocks of imperialist is another question. I cannot say at this point if wars against capitalist states - as opposed to blocks, can be ruled out when "my" imperialist have never stopped warring against capitalist states. Iraq suppose to be next. Various "European" countries with distinct import/export interest in the so-called Middle East has something to say about this and will alter the political setting and alignments.
Finally, I believe that history has decided nothing and is measurable in hundreds of years. - or rather history has shown what is the consequence of being wrong in the political sphere and in economic policy. The Soviet power was overthrown after years of stagnation in the economy and then decline. Capitalism has gone through perhaps 700 years of emergence and development. Eighty years is relatively short. In other words if a political crisis unfolded in America that allowed property relations to be changed, an intense political debate would open up on how to actually reorganized production on a more humane basis. The debates we have now would be nothing in comparison to a debate on what to do next.
And 100 years from now someone would speak of how foolish and naive we were. Such is the boundary of limitation everyone faces. From the absurd to the less absurd (the infantile to the less infantile) is the apparent logic of history or a progreesive move to "fill in the space."
Hey, "space is the final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship I-Pen, on its continuing mission to figure out what the hell is going on."
Can anyone achieve adulthood without being an infant-ile?
Melvin P.
