[Fogel's] newest book reviewed below essentially
makes the same kinds of arguments made by Brad DeLong and the Furedi sect-cult in various venues. It states that capitalism unleashes the power of technology, which leads to the gradual improvement of all our lives.
Didn't Marx say the same thing? With more recogniztion of the down side of course.
There are a few formulations in the Communist Manifesto that jibe with this, but towards the end of his life Marx was urging the Russian left to prevent the spread of capitalism into the rural communes using arguments that ran counter to what he wrote in 1848. Furthermore, you find nothing like this in Lenin, Trotsky or any of the other major Marxist revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century--especially in the aftermath of WWI. Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the Junius Pamphlet:
The expansionist imperialism of capitalism, the expression of its highest stage of development and its last phase of existence, produces the [following] economic tendencies: it transforms the entire world into the capitalist mode of production; all outmoded, pre-capitalist forms of production and society are swept away; it converts all the world's riches and means of production into capital, the working masses of all zones into wage slaves. In Africa and Asia, from the northernmost shores to the tip of South America and the South Seas, the remnant of ancient primitive communist associations, feudal systems of domination, patriarchal peasant economies, traditional forms of craftsmanship are annihilated, crushed by capital; whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened. All are supplanted by profit mongering in its most modern form.
This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition for the socialist world revolution. This alone constitutes the cultural, progressive side of its reputed "great work of civilization" in the primitive lands. For bourgeois-liberal economists and politicians, railroads, Swedish matches, sewer systems, and department stores are "progress" and "civilization." In themselves these works grafted onto primitive conditions are neither civilization nor progress, for they are bought with the rapid economic and cultural ruin of peoples who must experience simultaneously the full misery and horror of two eras: the traditional natural economic system and the most modern and rapacious capitalist system of exploitation. Thus, the capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense only because they create the material preconditions for the abolition of capitalist domination and class society in general. And in this sense imperialism ultimately works for us.
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