Re: [A-List] YOU DELETE my capitalist crisis WITH MY APOLOGIES

[Andre Gunder Frank <franka@xxxxxxx>]

does that mean its the end or yu swanna do it later?
of course, if othr followed my advice to just delete it, thn its all
nefer mind -
thihgh you could send mE your reactins spome tome.
g/On Wed, 2 Jan 2002,
Mark Jones wrote:

> Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 19:47:46 +0000
> From: Mark Jones <mark.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [A-List] YOU DELETE my capitalist crisis WITH MY APOLOGIES
>
> At 02/01/2002 16:22, Gunder wrote:
> >i did not say ''might''.i said should/could not be entirely excluded.
> >if you read again, i have NO staging of history. in fact i come out
> >AGAINST the stages we have been told about, and personally I am
> >quite against any and all staging and even against periodization.
> >i can send mine in a discuss elsewhere on that.
> >gunder
>
> I didn't do justice to Gunder's comments but that's because I'm away from
> home and have a bad connection, sorry to him and everyone else, and sorry
> for being boorish to Nestor too. Happy New Year everyone.
>
> Mark
> PS The main question Gunder Frank raises in my opinion is: does  the
> Capitalist Mode of Production exist or not? The marxist answer is that what
> specifies capitalism is accumulation for its own sake, which was not the
> case with previous historical formations. Ie, the pursuit of profit got
> embedded into the production process, such that for capitalism the end goal
> is not the production of commodities but the production of more value, and
> this law confront the capitalists themselves as an external, objective
> necessity governed by the iron laws of competition in the market. Thus,
> capitalism, on its specific basis, produces specific and
> historically-unprecedented forms of crisis. These are social crises pure
> and simple, which however confront the individual with all the elemental
> force of the natural crises which dominated the historical rhythms of
> pre-capitalist social formations.
>
> This marxist schema fits with Rostow's conception of technological progress
> becoming an imperative, and both help explain the malthgusian breakout of
> 1789-1830. These are undeniable empirical realities which do seem to set
> apart the capitalist epoch from all its predecessors, and the marxian
> narrative of a law-governed process with its own internally coherent inner
> logic seems to complement the empirical realities and together make it
> valid to speak of not only a capitalist era but also of a capitalist mode
> of production. The addition to this theoretical conspectus made by Lenin
> consisted in the argument that "imperialism" was not just a policy but a
> fundamental attribute of capitalism which organically derives from its own
> immanent laws of motion.
>
> It is obviously true, as Gunder Frank argues, that imperialism was actually
> not only a long-term outcome, but also a permanent coexistent of
> "capitalism", and even a condition of its existence (altho Gunder denies
> that capitalism exists). It is also true that there are many survivals of
> past social formations and anticipations of post-capitalist formations
> which are complexly articulated into the totality and that these survivals
> may also be conditions of existence of capitalism, which fact or notion
> seems to undercut the idea that capitalism is law-governed and holistic.
>
> Nevertheless, I personally believe and am prepared to try to argue at
> length, that there are stages in history, and that capitalism is one of
> them, ie, the highest stage of commodity-production and possibly the last.
> I also believe that the Malthusian break-out was pretty illusory, depending
> as it did on the use of non-renewable and highly finite fossil energy and
> on the release of unsustainably entropic processes, and therefore I agree
> that the Frankian dismissal of capital-ism has a lot of force and has to be
> reckoned with. In brief, we shouldn't fetishise it or absolutise it but at
> the same time we should grant the possibility that the system, once it
> began in/thru the Industrial Revolution, did acquire certain internal
> logics and self-reinforcing feedback processes which have governed its
> development and which can be called laws and even immanent laws. Marx and
> Engels started out as puzzled chaps trying to work out why the revolution
> of 1848 failed. They didn't start out believing that capitalism was
> eternal, immutable and indestructible, quite the contrary. They had a
> wholly Frankian contempt for capitalism and did not believe it could
> survive for more than a few years or decades. Only bitter political
> setbacks plus protracted theoretical studies drove Marx unwillingly to the
> conclusion that capitalism was a discrete and self-energising formation, a
> concrete mode of production which was highly specified, self-consistent and
> hideously dynamic and adaptive. If we abandon that view of it, I think we
> are both politically and theoretically impoverished. Nevertheless we have
> to reckon with the obvious lacunae and glaring deficiencies in the corpus
> of ideas and work-in-progress bequeathed by Marx (not to speak of the other
> holy fathers of the Marxian church).
>
> Even Rostow was a closet marxist. You cannot think our world without the
> use of marxist concepts, but you cannot think it without the use of
> Frankian concepts either. You cannot talk as we do talk, about development
> and its other(s), and about the deeper cycles of historical time, and about
> the world as a system, without acknowledging a big intellectual debt to
> Gunder Frank and I am glad to acknowledge that debt now.
>
>
>




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                    ANDRE  GUNDER  FRANK
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