But there is surely much that is correct in Engel's analysis. The capitalist
system is a fetter upon the very production forces it has created. The reason
that there cannot be decent accomodation and nutrition for everyone is not
because the means of production are not adequate to achieve this it is that
there is no way that doing this can produce a profit. Houses are foreclosed and
boarded up even when they are quite liveable because there is no way within the
system they can produce a profit so the people who were using and enjoying them
are tossed out on their fannies. The condition of enjoying adequate housing is
not that one needs it but that one can afford it. Even though the forces of
production developed by capitalism are capable of providing for these needs the
capitalist mode of production serves as a fetter.
Cheers, ken
________________________________
From: Sandwichman <[email protected]>
To: PEN-L list <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 4:31 PM
Subject: [Pen-l] Roubini: Marx was right: Negation of the negation
Question: Thus Engels in Anti-Duhring:
But what role does the negation of the negation play in Marx? On page 791
and the following pages he sets out the final conclusions which he draws from
the preceding fifty pages of economic and historical investigation into the
so-called primitive accumulation of capital. Before the capitalist era, petty
industry existed,
at least in England, on the basis of the private property of the labourer in
his means of production. The so-called primitive accumulation of capital
consisted there in the expropriation of these immediate producers, that is, in
the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. This
became possible because the petty industry referred to above is compatible only
with narrow and primitive bounds of production and society and at a certain
stage brings forth the material agencies for its own annihilation. This
annihilation, the transformation of the individual and scattered means of
production into socially concentrated ones, forms the prehistory of capital. As
soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their conditions of labour
into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own
feet, the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the
land and other means of production, and therefore the further expropriation of
private proprietors, takes a new form.
>“That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the
labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers.
This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of
capitalistic production itself, by the concentration of capitals. One
capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or this
expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale,
the co-operative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical
application of science, the methodical collective cultivation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only
usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as
the jointly owned means of production of combined, socialised labour. Along
with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp
and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass
of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too
grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers,
and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of
capitalist production itself. Capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.
Concentration of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last
reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.
This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property
sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” And now I ask the reader: where
are the dialectical frills and mazes and
conceptual arabesques; where the mixed and misconceived ideas according to
which everything is all one and the same thing in the end; where the
dialectical miracles for his faithful followers; where the mysterious
dialectical rubbish and the maze in accordance with the Hegelian Logos
doctrine, without which Marx, according to Herr Dühring, is unable to put his
exposition into shape?
>
Answer: "but with this too
grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers,
and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of
capitalist production itself." Maybe not "dialectical rubbish" but perhaps
wishful thinking as to the logical inevitability of the "very mechanism of the
process of capitalist production itself" disciplining, uniting and organizing
the working class for the revolt to expropriate the expropriators.
--
Sandwichman
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