Can Capitalism grant meaningful reforms today? Is Decadence
Jul 20 2006 18:36
#182
Catch wrote:
Everything you say that is supposed to be unique to either the ascendant or decadent periods can usually be applied to both, at best it's a matter of degree.
Catch, as you rightly point out, it's not a question of "all-or-nothing". As a revolutionary class, the proletariat was bound to make insurrectionary attempts and nowhere have I denied this. The question is what these attempts could achieve until the fundamental foundations of capitalism were laid. I made points about this earlier in the thread when I mentioned the Paris Commune.
Similarly, in decadence, the defensive struggle of the proletariat doesn't just stop. But again, it's emphasis shifts from a struggle for long-lasting (as we don't like permanent 
) to that of struggling to keep what it has. Nonetheless, the form of this struggle changes, taking on revolutionary form because even the proletariat's defensive struggle challenges the very roots of the system in a far more profound way than it did previously.
It's self-evident there hasn't been a successful revolution - but the proletariat had a go in 1917, did it not? In any case, just because the objective conditions are in place resulting in a collision between the two classes doesn't mean that this will inevitably happen or that if it does that the proletariat will automatically succeed. Marx makes it clear that this is not an automatic process as early as the Manifesto.
The points you make concerning the recently proletarianised being more revolutionary seem to be true on the face of it. I think, though, that this conflates the problem of "revolt" - any exploited class can revolt - and "revolution". For Marxists, a revolutionary class is one that can build a new society. In decaying feudalism, the peasantry revolted on a frequent basis - but it had no historical perspective to offer. It was the bourgeoisie that bore the seeds of the new society.
There are many questions here: the nature of class consciousness; what makes a class revolutionary or not; class struggle in the developed and developing countries; and the question of revolt vs revolution is probably fundamental to the difference between the marxist method and the anarchist. I suggest we tackle these on another thread - this one seems to be growing faster than my desperation for a holiday!
Jul 20 2006 18:47
#183
Hi
The development of the discussion is certainly helping to clarify the question. However, as afraser underlines, it is important that those who disagree with the ICC theory of decadence (and for us a central part of the historical materialist method), develop a more coherent theoretical alternative to that of the ICC. It would be very useful they some of whose who disagree respond to afraser's post
Afraser, which of the databases are you using from the http://www.historicalstatistics.org/ are you using. If you could link to them, it would help the discussion.
Glad we are agreed on the monsterous growth of state capitalism. It would be helpful if others could state their opinion on this, because it is a fundamental aspect of the analysis of decadence
You also clearly state your rejection of the marxism's historical analysis, which allows the discussion to continue on a clearer basis,:
The stagist classical/slave -> feudalism -> capitalism analysis does not hold water. NW Europe was only striuctly feudal, rather than capitalist, in the Dark Ages and then temporarily because of it was experiencing failed state syle negative sense anarchy. That was a temporary failing in one very small and (then) unimportant segment of the capitalist world. I am saying that classical Marxist historical analysis is worthless.
Quote:
What is your alternative explanation of the growth and development of class society?
Jul 21 2006 14:22
#184
Hi
Quote:
What is your alternative explanation of the growth and development of class society?
Just as with the creation of the universe, there is a set of plausible models. My current, rather naïve, theory is that in early tribal history we engaged in a series of unplanned experiments in social organisation. We made a fatal error in deferring decisions to elite “managers”; by the time we realised it was seriously impoverishing a “working class” the elite had configured capital in a way that locked-in their power despite the appalling quality of their decisions.
Love
LR
Jul 21 2006 16:06
#185
Jef Costello wrote:
I don't see any real difference between a serf who is given land only on condition that he provides a fixed sum to his lord as much more different than the rest of us busting a gut to pay rent/mortgages. It's a different method of control but the fundamentals are little different.
A farmer given land on the basis of rent payments only would I think be a tenant farmer, rather than a serf. The difference is in legal status: serfs were not free to leave the land at will, but tenant farmers are, can switch from one landlord to another or even leave farming altogether and take up another job. The second status is obviously the preferable one, although both in the end, in the fundamentals, involve landlords appropriating surplus. This didn't just happen in agriculture - Scotland used to have serfdom for coal mining, where the miners and their descendents were tied to their mine and could not leave it to take a better offer of employment elsewhere without committing a criminal offence.
ernie wrote:
Afraser, which of the databases are you using from the http://www.historicalstatistics.org/ are you using. If you could link to them, it would help the discussion.
I picked the Swedish stats since I reckoned they should be the most reliable, but US, UK, or any other country seemed to show similar trend when I glanced through them. I went and graphed one of the Swedish data sets, but have lost that file, will redo it and post the image here when I get a chance. Essentially shows sawtooth growth, each recession/crisis causing a small drop, but the overall trend continuously upwards.
ernie wrote:
What is your alternative [to classical Marxist historical analysis] explanation of the growth and development of class society?
Class society has been with us since the first establishment of settled urban life, around 5000 or so years ago. It hasn't so much grown and developed, as been subjected to raging class war, with the advantage tending at some times and places to the side of egalitarianism, and at other times and places to some cocktail of class rule. Examples are the Reforms of Solon in ancient Athens, the land movement led by the Grachhi brothers in Republican Rome, and so up until the present day. At times: successes for egalitarianism; at other times: the opposite. The abolition of slavery in the Caribbean had a lot to do with an endless series of slave revolts and desertions, rather than some predestined transition from one mode of production to another – the plantation owners lost out big when they had to start paying wages. Slavery and serfdom would be back in an instant if people were daft enough or timid enough to allow it. Hitler and Stalin both re-introduced those for a while 60 years ago. Perhaps the real driver has been the spread of literacy and knowledge – Pharaoh would have found it less easy to persuade the fellahin to toil for him and the temple gods, had they been educated to college level. Womans’ liberation seems to be following that pattern. But that explanation seems overly simplistic to me, and I’m not suggesting it as an replacement for Marxist theory of history for something as complex as class struggle movements. Leadership might even come into it too, from both sides.
Although I suggested Capitalism has been with us since the first cities 5000 years ago, agriculture has never, even now, used all that much wage labour – has instead used slavery, serfdom, and tenant farming (both cash rent and sharecropping) – and agriculture in earlier times has consumed a far higher proportion of the workforce. But that masks the fact that manufacturing, including the always important textile industries, has been dominated by wage labour in most all times and places. The exceptions were limited and partial – classical Rome used some slaves in manufacturing, but alongside large numbers of free wage labourers; medieval craft guilds sometimes succeeded in bypassing the big employing merchants – and did not fall in a time sequence of stages of modes of production. Rather, it is technological advances in agriculture that have been reducing the proportion of the workforce in agriculture, and so increasing the proportion available for urban wage-labour-friendly work. But just as farm workers do not have to be slaves or serfs, urban workers will I hope not have to be wage labourers.
Jul 21 2006 17:02
#186
Hi
afraser wrote:
The abolition of slavery in the Caribbean had a lot to do with an endless series of slave revolts and desertions, rather than some predestined transition from one mode of production to another – the plantation owners lost out big when they had to start paying wages. Slavery and serfdom would be back in an instant if people were daft enough or timid enough to allow it. Hitler and Stalin both re-introduced those for a while 60 years ago.
I’m not so sure. I’ve done a few rule of thumb calculations and the cost of feeding, clothing and sheltering your prize slaves to the standard required by (even pre-Victorian) bourgeois regulation seems more draining on the capitalist coffers than paying someone minimum wage and leaving them to their own devices.
Love
LR
Jul 21 2006 21:18
#187
Lazy Riser wrote:
Hiafraser wrote:
The abolition of slavery in the Caribbean had a lot to do with an endless series of slave revolts and desertions, rather than some predestined transition from one mode of production to another – the plantation owners lost out big when they had to start paying wages. Slavery and serfdom would be back in an instant if people were daft enough or timid enough to allow it. Hitler and Stalin both re-introduced those for a while 60 years ago.I’m not so sure. I’ve done a few rule of thumb calculations and the cost of feeding, clothing and sheltering your prize slaves to the standard required by (even pre-Victorian) bourgeois regulation seems more draining on the capitalist coffers than paying someone minimum wage and leaving them to their own devices.
Love
LR
I think Lazy's right on this one - I remember doing a course on the economic history of nineteenth century america at uni (yes, it was as boring as it sounds) and the lecturer spent ages going on about how his latest research had demonstrated that slavery wasn't as profitable as wage labour was in the north.
Jul 21 2006 21:23
#188
the yes men made the same point whilst pretending to be from the WTO, though it was meant to be a joke.
Jul 21 2006 21:48
#189
Hi
I seem to remember Marx himself suggesting that the North's victory in the civil war was down to the greater economic power of industrial automation compared to slavery.
Love
LR
Jul 21 2006 21:52
#190
Joseph K. wrote:
the yes men made the same point whilst pretending to be from the WTO, though it was meant to be a joke.
Sorry, which "yes men"?
I don't get it 
Jul 21 2006 21:55
#191
Just been reading a book on the history of gospel music which has a section about slavery. In "1807, the United States passed legislation prohibiting the direct importation of slaves into the country... In the United States, a general consensus emerged that it was simply cheaper to encourage slaves to produce more children than to import additional slaves." P. D. Curtin's "The Atlantic Slave Trade" is said to be the most comprehensively researched book on the subject; "His rough estimates...range from ten to twenty percent known slave losses per voyage. This is an important point, he adds, when historians consider the number of ships that simply vanished. Ironically, mortality rates among slave ship crews was also about twenty percent..
In the end, Curtin believes that the costs of slavery, which were catastrophic in Africa, were also unacceptable in Europe..."
Quote:
If the African disease environment claimed the life of half the European merchants, factors, officials and soldiers sent out to man the slave trading posts, the social cost was already high. If, in addition, the slave trade cost the life of one sailor out of five, each voyage: and if the West indian disease environment killed about 130 per thousand per annum among the newly arrived soldiers and planters (as British military surveys of the nineteenth century indicate), then the cost to European society was indeed considerable.It is nevertheless significant that the South Atlantic System was a cruel and wasteful operation - most damaging for the slaves themselves, but deadly even for those who were free and voluntary participants. (Philip D.Curtin)
So, though fortunes were made by entrepeneurs and Companies, the total social cost, losses in terms of population, skilled labour etc, was high.
Jul 21 2006 21:59
#192
davethemagicweasel wrote:
Joseph K. wrote:
the yes men made the same point whilst pretending to be from the WTO, though it was meant to be a joke.Sorry, which "yes men"?
I don't get it :(
sorry ... these guys - activist pranksters who set up a spoof WTO website for a laugh and then got booked to speak at corporate conferences with hilarious(ish) consequences. Theres a Yes Men movie you can find on peer to peer networks.
Jul 22 2006 00:39
#193
Demogorgon303 wrote:
The points you [Catch] make concerning the recently proletarianised being more revolutionary seem to be true on the face of it.
No, not just on the face of it. Surely a 'materialist' analysis of revolutionary struggle would make a little more of it than that. As historians like Bookchin put it (yes, me too. ), from 1848 to 1938 'revolts' or potentially revolutionary situations involved not merely a convenient core of industrial workers but, in major part, the less Marx-kosher social forces; namely the lumpenproletariat-unemployed, peasants etc. Then even the traditionally defined proletariat themselves, as has already been mentioned, would be existing in flux as the immediate generations of drastic changes. This was the great subsumption, the spreading of capital domination and that's why we were able to see a conscious but already fragmented and uncertain resistance n the first place. Your point that, "It's self-evident there hasn't been a successful revolution - but the proletariat had a go in 1917, did it not?" falls under precisely the same interpretation, as does the Spanish Revolution. And ofcourse, the nature of these happenings and those carried out by the declasse elements cannot be shrugged off by limiting to them as 'revolts' because infact they were characterised by an extremely conscious nature as well as being often the most revolutionary activity in their respective times. Who was it that built the Parisian barricades (to name just a very symbolic instance of 'working class' struggle)?
Quote:
For Marxists, a revolutionary class is one that can build a new society.
For modern 'Marxists', it shouldn't be in the least surprising that the most radical elements are to be found not in the 'heavily integrated' work places, the factories, large employers and so on but in those social areas which allow for a clear position of disjointed, dissatisfied discomfort. The youth, the idealists, the mass unemployed, migrant labour, the remnants of peasant communities and the rural poor. That's not to say the woman working in a sweatshop most of her life can't be described in the same way but all these groups are being forced, and reluctantly, to integrate themselves whereas as she is already there (Why would she devote her energy to anything else than in keeping going, why would she challenge the vital employment she has?). Of course, these are the classic marginal forces in society but precisely because of this they're also the most radical and couldn't possibly be excluded from the concept of the revolutionary class. Historically this is obvious.
The traditional Marxists never tried to understand the effects of increasing commodification on the revolutionary subject. The expansion, ie. progress, of capital means in essence the concomitant enlargment of the proletariat - the magnification of its contradictions, right? Unfortunatly this hasn't led to the increase of revolutionary struggle but, in the immediate sense, very much the opposite. Struggles exist and always have but they don't represent any Hegelian tendency of negation in itself, more of a blind re-organisation and re-integration, a compromising that's always however weighted in capital's favour. If this is true and if we don't actually know the systematic plan of 'crisis avoidance', where does it leave the concept of economic stagism? Was Marx unbelievably correct in supporting his assortment of bourgeoisie and his idea of the unravelling of class contradictions or was he in fact understandably wrong, if naive?
Decadence is bunk (and for a lot more than that).
Jul 22 2006 01:37
#194
Lazy Riser wrote:
the cost of feeding, clothing and sheltering your prize slaves to the standard required by (even pre-Victorian) bourgeois regulation seems more draining on the capitalist coffers than paying someone minimum wage and leaving them to their own devices.
Nah, not according to the plantation owners at the time (and they would really have done the financial calculations). When slavery was abolished in Jamaica, they lobbied successfully for a 17 year semi-slavery apprenticeship status, details below. They reckoned that even that was better financially than paying wages. The ex-slaves agreed, staged a series of revolts against this until they eventually got it ended two years early.
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In 1823, the historic Abolition Act was passed, and it ended slavery in August of the following year. Agricultural workers would be required to work for their former masters until 1840, but domestic staff would only have to work until 1838. They would be allowed to buy their own freedom at any time.
The former slaves would be given food, clothing, lodging, and medical care, and in return they would give 45 hours per week of unpaid labor. They could also work on their own, for pay, during their free time, and Britain sent special magistrates to settle any disputes. However, full abolition came about somewhat earlier than planned, in 1838.
[http://caribbean-guide.info/past.and.present/history/abolition/index.html]
Jul 22 2006 11:57
#195
Hi
afraser wrote:
Nah, not according to the plantation owners at the time (and they would really have done the financial calculations). When slavery was abolished in Jamaica, they lobbied successfully for a 17 year semi-slavery apprenticeship status, details below.
Fair enough. I have to say I remain attracted to the idea. If the quality of financial decision making then is as high as it is now, I’d imagine plantation owners would have produced figures to support their personal preference for slaves as status symbols.
What I’m interested in pointing out here is that to keep a slave population today would require the same kind of resources as our prison system, which costs about £18K per prisoner-year, I think. The average salary in the part of the world where I sit this morning is £15K.
afraser, let me get a terse summary of your position please. Are you saying that campaigning with regard to official reformist political frameworks is in the best interests of the working class?
Love
LR
Jul 22 2006 12:02
#196
afraser wrote:
A farmer given land on the basis of rent payments only would I think be a tenant farmer, rather than a serf. The difference is in legal status: serfs were not free to leave the land at will, but tenant farmers are, can switch from one landlord to another or even leave farming altogether and take up another job. The second status is obviously the preferable one, although both in the end, in the fundamentals, involve landlords appropriating surplus. This didn't just happen in agriculture - Scotland used to have serfdom for coal mining, where the miners and their descendents were tied to their mine and could not leave it to take a better offer of employment elsewhere without committing a criminal offence.
It simply means that the bourgeoisie competes with itself in slightly different ways. You do not leave your job and decide to no longer be a part of the system, you leave your job for another one. We may have a choice to where to work but we do not have a choice to not work. Serfs were expected to provide fixed incomes according to the land they were given, this is no different to a rent. In fact as the lord will have more trouble replacing serfs than tenants he may even treat them more leniently.
Jul 26 2006 23:32
#197
Hi This post was written just as the forums went down, but it is still relavent, hopefully Thanks for the detailed reply afraser, it has helped to push forwards the discussion, however, one has to agree with many of the replies about the end of slavery. The point that you are trying to make though is important, i.e., it is not a question of some form of fatalistic mechanical transition from slavery to capitalist production. On the historical context slavery as a mode of production was totally uneconomical compared to the furious rates of exploitation possible under capitalism, and it was not necessary for the factory owner to feed, house, breed or capture the slaves: they came to them as wage slaves. The way that the contradiction between the present historical limitation and the potential future development plays out is in various ways in involving the class struggle. Thus in the case of Haiti, the massive and inspiring slave revolt there certainly accelerated the process (CLR James the Black Jacobin's is a masterful analysis of this revolt, as far as I remember). The British slave holders on Jamiaca were terrified by the revolt and by revolts there, though I do not know the way that slavery was ended there -could anyone enlighten us-. On your general thesis, that there has been raging class war, but it is literacy and knowledge that have pushed humanity forwards, this is very interesting and needs thinking about. However, I do not think there is an abyss between what you say and historical materialism:
Quote:
The history of all hitherto existing society2 is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master3 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
(The Communist Manifesto) I apologise for the long quote, and the one to follow but it is important that we are very clear concerning what we mean by historical materialism - there are rather a lot of vulgar ideas around about what it or claiming to know what it is -.
Quote:
The initiators of the materialist interpretation of history never advocated that crudely mechanical form of materialism, according to which the motive force of history is exclusively derived from the dead materiality of things, so that there can be no place in the world of happenings for the functions of the mind. On the contrary, Marx vigorously opposed the misleading half-heartedness and the metaphysical spurious enlightenment of so-called naturalism—as we see, in especial, in the Theses on Feuerbach. He always insisted that, not lifeless things, but living met are the sustainers of the evolutionary process. Those who advocated the materialist interpretation of history never denied the influence of the mind, never ignored the power of ideas, never under-estimated the importance of the mental or spiritual factor in the course of history. On the contrary, when recognizing that history is made by human beings, they recognized in these human beings the importance of all human attributes, including, therefore, mind, intelligence, consciousness, and ideas. What they were up in arms against was the notion that the phenomena of a purely mental world, as set apart by German ideologists in the form of an “absolute idea,” a “moral ego,” or something of the kind, should be regarded primarily and abstractly as the essential factor of historical evolution. In their view, neither, the idea nor matter was “in the beginning.” For them, all life was an inseparable and eternally mobile interweaving and mutual conditioning of force and matter, combined into an integral unity. And the human being who constituted the core of this living whole was for them a social human being, one who had countless interrelations with his fellows
(Otto Rule, Karl Marx his life and work. http://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1928/marx/ch07.htm Afaser hopefully, you will not feel you are being beaten over the head with quotes, there there is more agreement with historical materialism in your outline, than you probably think
Jul 28 2006 05:40
#198
I have watched and read the first bit of this discussion, as I was named in the beginning personally.
It has been odd to watch. The debate seems to have a few aspects:
1) Reforms are no longer possible. This has broken down into what constitutes reforms (their "reality", their "duration", etc.) Its been a bit metaphysical.
2) Should we or should we not fight for reforms?
3) with specific reference to whether or not the right of homosexuals to marry is a "good reform" or whether it is merely recuperative and a bourgeois reform that costs capital nothing.
On the first point, it is one reason I find decadence theory useless. It breaks capital into different phases, one of a good capital that expanded the forces of production and increased the size and strength of the working class, it splits capital into a positive and negative or moribund at least, phase.
I think Revol asked the apt question: does that mean the working class wasn't really revolutionary before 1914? It sure does, no matter how much you want to deny it. It means that every time Marx said that the working class is the revolutionary class, that it is revolutionary or it is nothing, he meant "of course, in the future, but not now." As Ret pointed out, he did in fact act that way in some moments, though weeding out those things is not so simple on the surface. Marx did have a fare share of anti-Slavic racism, though I think that merged with his hope that the social struggles of the Poles and the Irish would ignite the proletariat of Europe and I also think that he began to change his views at the end of his life, specifically his writings on the Russian mir.
But yes, it does split capital, rather crudely and undialectically, into a progressive and regressive period that either is moralistic or that relies on a crudely economistic determinism (no more innovation, once the ICC's analysis), or the permanent growth of c (constant capital) over v (variable capital) (International Perspective holds a rather sophisticated version of this idea), but capital is progressive in the same moment and in fact through its negativity. The revolutionary character of the proletariat is inscribed in the forms of social relations, in the production of a class with radical chains, not in the ratio of c/v. The proletariat is revolutionary because it is a class stripped of property and properties, a class with no interests as a class in this society and no prospect of becoming a new propertied class. Either this was true in 1848 and is true today or it was never true.
It mistakes that the central issue for capital always is and always will be the process of valorization/devalorization. it is not the increase in the means of production or c/v or anything else. Capital can rework the relation of c/v by massive desatruction.
What is more, it seems assinine to me to claim that only economic reforms are real reforms, the implicit point.
But more importantly, and this is where both sides of the discussion have shared the same essential perspective: the issue is not whether or not we support or demand reforms. We support the struggle of the proletariat to become a class capable of seizing social power and wiping out class society. Our perspective starts from communism, not from capitalism.
Our obligation is to help each struggle of which we are a part to develop the strength, self-confidence, self-consciousness of our class as a whole. Our object is not to win reforms nor to reject them because communism, not reforms nor immiseration, is our objective.
how can we reject when people demand to be treated less inhumanely, even if it is within the confines of this society? What we reject is that that is enough, that it is impossible to be treated humanely and with dignity in this society, that no reforms will grant us what we need, the abolition of all relations in which humanity is treated a thing, an object, a despised and degraded mass, an abstraction. As such, we embrace the fight, not the reform. Our end is not a reform, it is to help clarify and unify our class to abolish capital. Period.
This does not preclude taking part in struggles that have a limited perspective, but it precludes us claiming those limited ends as our own even as we defend and take up that struggle. It means refusing to take positions that compromise us just because we think it is only a "tactical" decision or "strategic". We have no tactics or strategy outside of a struggle. We have no fancy maneuvers and shortcuts. Nor do we have a reason to become a part of this or that apparatus that is an outgrowth of capital or which has been recuperated by capital.
If you take serously the idea that communists have no ideology or demands of their own, then you understand that for us we are guided by what the struggle does to the class, not whether or not it wins this or that always, always partial reform that improves things for one section or another of the class. If it is a reform, it is as much a partial defeat as a partial victory, but every struggle has within it the antagonism. When the struggle is over, if it is settled in a reform, it may indeed make some, even many, workers' lives better, make our lives better, but it is also the fixing, the freezing of that struggle at a limit that allows capital to live. Many such struggles will happen and must happen, but we are the not best reformists, as the Trotskyists say, we are the best fighters, reform or not, victory or not, or we are of no use to our class.
As for gay marriage, the issue is not the right to it or not. What the argument ignores is that on the one hand sexuality in this society, no matter what we do, is gonna be fucked. Relations between sexes and within sexes and the very definition of human beings by sex as if it were so damn meaningful, is likely some fucked up shit.
I'm not against the right of homosexuals who to get married because to oppose it is to stand with the bigots. I am not for it, however, in the sense of seeing it as an end. It will be a way to re-impose the bourgeois family in its own fashion. I am for the fight, if there is one and for making a hell of a fight of it. But if it is legislative maneuvering and a few demos, please explain to me what our role in it is besides the critique of bourgeois sexuality and sexual relations and the family? The best part about it is the real threat is does pose to the bourgeois family, and I refuse to defend the argument that gays ought to have the right to be normal.
So as seems to be the case these days, I mostly feel at odds with the lot of you because the so-called Left Communists and the so-called anarchists seem to me to share the same presuppositions, they just take a different sides of the coin.
I need a smoke. And a drink. I guess I'll get that at the gay wedding (ceremonial, not legal) I am going to this weekend in Chicago!!
Chris
Jul 28 2006 11:36
#199
Hi,
Apologies for cross-posting, but I made this post on the thread about the Middle East crisis on the Current Affairs forum, which developed quickly into a discussion of decadence theory, so I thought it would be more suitable as a contribution to this discussion.
[RedTwister's post has raised some important points, which I'll take up in a post later on.]
I was replying to Revol who had asked,
revol68 wrote:
Quote:
but what does decadence mean? that as the productive forces under capitals irrational control grow, the potential for destruction rises too. Seems quite obvious to me, but that's a million mile from Decadence Theory which posites a capitalism in the ascendency and descendency and therefore implies a pinnacle of capitalism, the ideal. This is absurd.Hmm who wrote that? Oh it was me.
The point being that to be able to define capitalism as ascendent and then descendent, you have to have an ideal concept of what capitalism, which is absurd as capitalism is a process of struggle.
Revol, I still don't understand what you mean by an 'ideal' concept of capitalism. Could you explain? Personally, I don't see a problem with implying that capitalism reached an apogee and then began to decline. Do you agree with Marx that,
Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy wrote:
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm
This is all we're saying really: that capitalist social relations became fetters on the further development of the productive forces. This doesn't mean that development comes to a stop, that advances in science and art are impossible. It just means that little things like world wars, national borders, unemployment etc. tend to get in the way of the healthy development of the productive forces. But it doesn't stop there.
There seems to be a commonly held opinion amongst many here that capitalism can quite happily continue to exist for several more centuries. This is a serious underestimation of how bad things are. Take a look at Iraq. I'm sickened by the now almost daily reports of suicide attacks and pogroms that wipe out 50 or so people at a time. 23 bus drivers waiting to go to work were rounded up and shot. In another attack 50 or so day-labourers were lured close to a minibus by an offer of work only to be blown to pieces. This is the future for the rest of the planet. You can laugh all you want and call us doom sayers, but this shit is happening in front of our eyes.
Is the continued existence of capitalism is undermining the very foundations, the very possibility of communism or not?
B
Jul 28 2006 22:40
#200
Hi Redtwister,
I agree with your comments on relating to reforms. I'd add that many things that began as reformist struggles/demands have become radicalised. I sometimes wonder how it is expected that radicalisation occurs, except thru a process.
On Marx; I was asked to provide evidence of Marx/Engels' 'worst determinism'. I agree Marx later changed his views somewhat via study of the Russian mir (peasant commune) and thought it might be possible for Russia to avoid the same stages of development as advanced European capital, using the mir as a springboard to leap directly to communism, if there was a victorious West European proletarian revolution.
On gay marriage; you say
Quote:
"I'm not against the right of homosexuals who to get married because to oppose it is to stand with the bigots. I am not for it, however, in the sense of seeing it as an end. It will be a way to re-impose the bourgeois family in its own fashion. I am for the fight, if there is one and for making a hell of a fight of it. But if it is legislative maneuvering and a few demos, please explain to me what our role in it is besides the critique of bourgeois sexuality and sexual relations and the family? The best part about it is the real threat is does pose to the bourgeois family, and I refuse to defend the argument that gays ought to have the right to be normal.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here - if, as you say (and I agree) "It will be a way to re-impose the bourgeois family in its own fashion" do we not oppose it on that basis, as part of the critique of bourgeois sexuality etc? I can understand that gay marriage will be perceived by the bigots as a threat to bourgeois marriage, but obviously that doesn't make it true. It seems the critique of sexuality that was originally part of gay politics has disappeared and been largely replaced by demands for integration and normality. Isn't to support bourgeois gay marriage to stand with gay conservatism against straight conservatism, no? I mean, I'll go to a wedding if I'm invited, (if possible just the reception afterwards - though it rarely happens cos most people know what a cynic I am) but indulging your friends' idiosyncrasies for the sake of a good party is different from a social analysis.
Enjoy Chicago, they say it's a wunnerful town.
Jul 30 2006 22:51
#201
Lazy Riser wrote:
afraser, let me get a terse summary of your position please. Are you saying that campaigning with regard to official reformist political frameworks is in the best interests of the working class?
Yes.
(Can't get much terser than that)
Lazy Riser - British prison system costs closer to £36k per prisoner-year, I think. Slave systems were much cheaper due to much less oversight than prisoners get. In practice “slave” was almost a misnomer, worker without right of resigning from employment might be a closer description. In classical factories, distinguishing between slave and waged worker was impossible to an outside observer without asking for details from the workers concerned. And contra conventional economic wisdom, slavery/serfdom was very good financially to employers - without a competitive labour market, employers could (can) better drive down wages/slave subsistence costs.
Ernie – yes I appreciate Marx himself was not a proponent of crude stagist historical materialism, but still I unlike him reject the idea that there have been different epochs, really I think there have always been bourgeoisie and proletariat and an increasing capitalism for 5000 years. Any kind of extra-European study would show that – Western Europe was in mediaeval times underdeveloped, the third world of its day.
Redtwister – a good summation. I apologise for imagining your views on decadence/reforms wrong. Your view on how and why we support reforms is inspiring, except is reminiscent of the “Myth of non-reformist reforms” that Robin Hahnel (no idiot) demolishes at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7520 .
You sound like you are endorsing a Camus ‘La Peste’ style ‘struggle for the sake of struggle’ approach to reforms. I worry about that because it can lead to activistoidism. I’ve seen Trotskyist interventions in obviously unsuccessful campaigns that appeared to be purely for recruitment purposes. Having grown tired of loosing in glorious defeat, I’ve later involved myself in some winning campaigns, but they, inevitably, become non-revolutionary, reformist, leftist, shortly after that victory. Perhaps the best hoped fate of a revolutionary is to kick start successive victorious campaigns, floating onto the next as the last turns reformist?
The dangers involved in playing with reformism are huge.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Gaze not too long into the abyss of leftist reformism, for it has eyes also, and they look back at you with longing. A revolutionary should dance around the edge of that abyss, taunting it, while taking care to avoid falling in.
The Hippocratic teaching: ‘first, do harm’, should be remembered when seeking to treat the disease of capitalism through reforms:
Hippocrates of Cos wrote:
The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm
http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/epidemics.1.i.html
It is no simple task to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future; yet such is required of us for right action.
Aug 1 2006 20:04
#202
I am not even replying to things. I am just apologizing for having a rather belligerent bug up my ass the other night.
Sorry.
Aug 1 2006 20:36
#203
afraser wrote:
Redtwister – a good summation. I apologise for imagining your views on decadence/reforms wrong. Your view on how and why we support reforms is inspiring, except is reminiscent of the “Myth of non-reformist reforms” that Robin Hahnel (no idiot) demolishes at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7520 .You sound like you are endorsing a Camus ‘La Peste’ style ‘struggle for the sake of struggle’ approach to reforms. I worry about that because it can lead to activistoidism. I’ve seen Trotskyist interventions in obviously unsuccessful campaigns that appeared to be purely for recruitment purposes. Having grown tired of loosing in glorious defeat, I’ve later involved myself in some winning campaigns, but they, inevitably, become non-revolutionary, reformist, leftist, shortly after that victory. Perhaps the best hoped fate of a revolutionary is to kick start successive victorious campaigns, floating onto the next as the last turns reformist?
Indeed, I was worried later the next day that it came off that way.
My intention was not to state that we ought to be activists, but that if and when we find ourselves involved in a struggle, our orientation is to the struggle and viewing it from the point of view of how it increases the strenthg, consciousness and solidarity of our class, not from the point of view of reforms.
In those situations where it is impossible to play anything other than the role of the best reformists, where a communist perspective is impossible, we may still participate, but not in any leadership role. I have no innate need to lead regardless of the politics under which I can lead. I've been there and it is a very bad thing. Better to be a fellow worker getting screwed than a new boss.
There are times in which nothing can be done unless one wants to become an agent of capital...
Chris
Aug 1 2006 20:51
#204
Ret Marut wrote:
I'm not quite sure what you mean here - if, as you say (and I agree) "It will be a way to re-impose the bourgeois family in its own fashion" do we not oppose it on that basis, as part of the critique of bourgeois sexuality etc? I can understand that gay marriage will be perceived by the bigots as a threat to bourgeois marriage, but obviously that doesn't make it true. It seems the critique of sexuality that was originally part of gay politics has disappeared and been largely replaced by demands for integration and normality. Isn't to support bourgeois gay marriage to stand with gay conservatism against straight conservatism, no? I mean, I'll go to a wedding if I'm invited, (if possible just the reception afterwards - though it rarely happens cos most people know what a cynic I am) but indulging your friends' idiosyncrasies for the sake of a good party is different from a social analysis.
Enjoy Chicago, they say it's a wunnerful town.
I am from Chicago, actually. 21 years. Now I loathe going back if I have to do any driving. It is an increasingly hostile, miserable town. I love many things about it, but it has become a truly viscious place on a day-to-day level.
anyway...
I am unsure what standing against gay marriage can mean besides supporting attacks on gays. As I said, I am not for gay marriage as I am not for marriage, but if I would not spend energy supporting it, why would I spend energy opposing it beyond the somewhat banal statement that in making gay marriage, it will merely play a role in turning gay sexuality into another acceptable state of bourgeois society.
But I can hardly begrudge friends of mine having legal rights to stay in the hospital with a sick partner or to have legal standing against the family, etc. It is not communist, but it certainly would improve things for many people.
Still thinking...
Chris
Aug 1 2006 21:32
#205
Ok, thanks Chris - I understand your position better now.
Hi
Lazy we are simply trying to understand where Ret is coming from in order that we can develop the discussion on the clearest possible basis. We are interested in Ret's position, not only because it is his position and we need to understand it, but because similar positions are expressed by others. After all discussion is the name of the game on libcom, is it not?