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The 6 million dollar issue of precondition and result with precondition once existing as a result, with result becoming a precondition. Capitalism did grown out of feudalism, but what have haunted me for the past twenty years is the industrial system proper, which is an abstraction. This line of reasoning has been my undoing for many years and has had me opposing certain formulations by Marx - as political doctrine, that I actually believe are valid concerning value as an _expression_ of abstract labor or viewed from a philosophic standpoint.
Politics and theory tend to collide with philosophy, with many believing such a division is unwarranted. In a strict sense one is not "wrong" to limit value to capitalism and tailor 'labor' to capitalism for definition. Somewhere Marx wrote that value as a historical abstraction could only be adopted or emerge as a universality and material act on the basis of a particular economic development of society.
Perhaps seven years ago I stopped talking about capitalism as such and called what has been our system of production "the industrial system of production on the basis of the bourgeois property relations." The problem was defining what constitutes the primary properties of the industrial system (an abstraction) as distinct from and in contradistinction to the previous system of production, property relations and a probable future system of production. The reason was to "find ones place in history" - which is another abstraction in relationship to the future.
I am very alone in this approach but believe the industrial system has to be treated as a mode of production - with the property relations within. This line of reasoning has gotten me in trouble.
These ideas did not simply come to me but arose during a discussion with my second wife. At that time we were living in Georgia and hanging out extensively in Mississippi and Alabama. She was a former editor of the Guardian under Jack Smith and had conducted numerous tours to Cuba and China and she would always say, "the Cuban comrades said they had not and could not prove that socialism was more productive than capitalism." Her numerous tours to Cuba and China informed her vision. (Yea, she cut sugar cane and messed up her ovaries working to hard.)
Growing up in Detroit and working in the factory system meant having a very pragmatic understanding of industrial production. At the time - 1982, we were living in the South and traveling extensively through the South as a region. I understood that a certain material "stage" in the development of industrial implements - system, is measured by its previous stage, where the current stage is more productive than a previous stage. This is due to rationalization of production, technological development and in the political arena appeared as the contract fights over how many were to be displaced, due to the advance of technology. The problem had always been determining a stage or distinct boundary in a process.
The South has always been more rural with small industrial and "small" manufacturing facilities and utterly backwards (the deep South) in relationship to how I had lived all of my life. In 1982 I had written a small article about the turmoil in Poland (Southern Advocate) and commented on the turmoil in the agricultural sector, while stating that "Electronic capitalism was higher and more productive than industrial socialism," but this was an instinct and pragmatic understanding of production relations. Later, Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" would affect me greatly. Scores of problems followed, because production relations had been severed from property relations and the dialectic of mediation; not to mention that "value" had been obscured.
Yet, I could not dispute a process that I was experiencing and would directly experience for the next twenty years. That is I could not understand Marx outside of my life experience and the politics of Engels.
The question deepen because capitalism is not the industrial system but emerged as a universal law system of production on the basis of the ascendency of the industrial system. But then production is concrete, a physical act, that becomes "production" or social only at a certain stage in the economic development of society. So I tried to get a better understanding of reproduction and what is reproduced and why. This could only really be done on the basis of believing or understanding the Soviet system of production as being an industrial form of socialism. Politics and ideology absolutely governs exposition and conception.
This brought to the fore another problem because accumulation of "wealth" as a social power has its mode of _expression_ in money possession, state control and authority by individual that in turn constitute themselves as - minimally a class or fragment of a class stratum. (Wealth not in the sense and meaning of "worth" but privilege and control of scarcity).
The question "what is capitalism" in contradistinction to "the industrial system" remained and how one impacts the other and becomes the precondition and result of their interactivity. Another problem arose from being a precondition and result of the process being described. Life style and practical politics ran counter to approaching the question as Marx did when he said - "value is the abstract form of bourgeois wealth," and "value is labor." It is "materialized labor in its social form."
I did not disagree but understood these categories as being inseparable from control of social functions or politics.
I pondered Marx words seriously: "Why is labor represented by the value of its products and labor time by the magnitude of that value." To solve "the dilemma" as an individual, the philosophic conception of value and capitalism was placed in the background and value became simply the amount of socially necessary labor embodied in products, or rather commodities. Commodities became a form of product realization based on buying and selling of human energy - labor power, deployed in production.
Southern slavery was a system of mass production of agricultural products that became commodities on the basis of being drawn into the vortex of world exchange riveted to the bourgeois property relations. The slaves were not free, in the double sense, because they were slaves, but they most certainly had been separated from means of production, as owners and their laboring energy was in fact sold to owners of capital as owners of money and agents of a social relations of production. This form of bourgeois production was an anomaly in relationship to free labor and the concept of "proletarians in chains" has been deployed from time to time. (A historically impossible concept as an abstraction of capitalism and extremely awkward.)
Force - armed force and the state, maintained this form of the laboring process which ran counter to the direction of the development from manufacture proper to industrial forms of the laboring process. Pre-bourgeois form of the laboring process is an abstraction or conceived as an abstraction in explaining the separation of the producers from their means of production and the emergence of the value relations as a dominant form of labor governing species behavior. Yet it was slavery that gave impetus - precondition and result, to the emergence of the "capitalist mode of production" and value realization in shipbuilding, iron works, food preservation, navigation, science, logging and an endless series of products and events.
I believe it was a Hungarian author, Polany (I forget the name of the book at this time, something Transformation) who wrote that national markets are the product of state coercion as opposed to a "natural" inclination for local centers of trade and exchange to "harmonious morph" and magically "leap" into national production and distribution centers/units.
Then things get really strange in imparting a concrete meaning to social relations of production ("what I call social property relations--as entailing not just vertical relations of class, but also horizontal relations of exploiters with one another and producers with one another.") What of industrial social relations of production, with the property relations within? Are not industrial relations of production "social" by definition? Have not production relations, at least in all the advanced bourgeois countries, been social production or social relations of production for well over a century? . . . when defined on the basis of the growth of manufacture in relationship to handicraft.
Marx speaks extensively to the transition from handicraft to manufacture to industrial factory system - machinery with different motive power. This raises another series of issues where one could distinguish between capitalist rules of production - the actual shape that the historical process assumes, and industrial rules and law systems of production. (This theory conception sat at the base of Lenin's dispute over the Taylor system and "state capitalism." Lenin resolved - not solved, the issue by stating anything is better that what we have because we have nothing and very little of that. For a section of Marxists and communist industrial laws appear as capitalist laws and rules, because machinery and instruments were shaped on the basis of bourgeois property).
Capitalism does not create machinists, if one is isolating the extensive and intensive development of instruments + machinery + motive force + human energy, as an abstraction or not on the basis of their historically specific shape/function. But then again, capitalism does and did create the machinist in the real world. Nevertheless, the machinist or industrial machinists had the potential to outlast bourgeois property.
Yet there are law systems existing outside the field of property relations governing machinery and technology. The law system inherent to industrial production creates or evolves with machinists as a precondition and result of a certain technological development, in the same way that soft ware programmers could not exist before software existed and the "hardware."
The point for me was how did I distinguish myself as an autoworker in bourgeois America from the autoworker in the Soviet union, in say 1978, deploying and using similar instruments and machinery in the process of production? Both of us personified industrial production relations but different "social relations" in the sense of property relations or specifically the ability of means of production to pass into the hands of individuals.
It seems to me that politics determines what one sees in Marx. Is in fact the industrial configuration of productive activity a natural outgrowth of the system of manufacture? Or is the industrial configuration of productive activity a natural outgrowth of the system of manufacture, with the bourgeois property relations within? The former is the potential and fact. The latter is the truth of the matter.
The point? It seems that Marx was analyzing "late stage" development of capitalism - the bourgeois property relations, as he witnessed it, while the industrial system was still in ascendancy. It is "late stage" development of the bourgeois property relations in as much as Marx speaks of the advance of industry displacing the capitalist as capitalist or rendering their social function obsolete. I believe he speaks to this extensively in his writing on the system of credit capitalism and calls this the negation of the capitalist within the bounds of the industrial system as the bourgeois property relations. The property relations remain without the capitalist and the proletarians become "capitalist" in the sense of taking over their social function in the process of production.
I of course do not believe in such a thing as an "objective view of Marx" or Capital or any of Marx and Engels writings. My political and ideological inclination and tendency is towards an industrial mode of conception of the industrial system, with the property relations within. This have been my undoing but seems vastly superior to points of views that run revolutionaries into the state in front of the working class.
I therefore have come to the point of view that communist revolution was and is impossible before the emergence of a communist class and the industrial working class is the industrial working class and not a communist class. This of course does not mean that Marxists and ideological communists should not have fought to change the shape of our development and for the ideas of communism, even when such was not possible.
One cannot reach communism on the basis of the industrial system and all the Bolsheviks were historically in error and could not see their error as agents of change. What the Bolsheviks saw was what was in front of them while we are looking at what is behind us.
After one "admits" to Marxism its all politics. "Correct politics" are justified on the basis of philosophic and theory excursions and debating the butterfly effect. Politics - human will, determine the shape of events and history, with "shape" being an abstraction before its realization.
Therefore my politics and theory conceptions of what I imagine to be Marx meaning is radically different from the focus of this thread and something as innocent as "social relations" become suspect. Nor do I believe the divergence rivets on Stalin or Trotsky or Lenin for that matter. The divergence rivets on defining this second stage in the transition in the industrial system, as it grew out of manufacture. From this standpoint, the question of the peasantry cannot be solved in the realm of politics or political will. One can only politically resolve the peasant question. Our own history contains the key. The sharecropper - our roughly equivalent of a peasantry, was liquidated not by a political act or resolution but the advance of history, technology. Politics was involved but that is the controversy.
Melvin P.
>>There is a lot of evidence in Capital -- there is also counter evidence -- that capitalism arose as a natural consequence of economic evolution in that justice naturally it will evolve into socialism. Part of his reasoning may have been political. Some people [eg Bakunin] wanted to rush into revolutionary activity in a way that would bring retribution to the left without any positive consequences. <<
<<On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 10:04:11PM -0500, Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: For Marx, capitalism grew out of feudalism more or less naturally -- at least until his later years when he acknowledged the potential for going directly from communal life to socialism. I am not sure when the late letters were first made public, but just reading Capital, especially the intro "It is of you the story is told, one could easily get the impression that capitalism was natural for Marx.
Natural? What's that mean in human social life? This is a weird antithetical pair, "anomalous" and "natural." Capitalism happened, for whatever reasons, but it's been centuries and it's changed everything on and near the planet earth. If it's an anomaly, what's the norm?
Doug >>
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