Re: marxism & (under)development

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 10 Apr 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> But I'm not talking just about politics - I'm talking about the technical
> and managerial skills required to run an advancing economy. Marx spoke of
> the socialization of production under capitalism as the prefiguration of a
> socialist future, and also spoke of the material abundance and labor
> productivity characteristic of advanced capitalism as prerequisites for the
> overcoming of private appropriation of the social surplus. While his word
> certainly isn't the last on the matter, historical experience suggests that
> it's worth thinking about.
>

Louis: I thought about it all the time when I was organizing Americans to
go to Nicaragua to provide training in technical, administrative and
mechanical skills. Of course, Tecnica was a small, underfunded volunteer
organization trying to do some work in a country at war and facing
economic blockade. But you are right on the general point. Lenin's
"Better fewer, but better", written just before his death, goes into
great deal about the problems of trying to build socialism where the
cultural and technical skills were so low. The problem is that
revolutions have tended to occur in places where these skills are low,
because where they exist in profusion (Sweden, Japan, Germany, USA,
etc.), there has been no objective necessity to overthrow the capitalist
system. Now that the living standards of workers in these countries are
being driven down, that may all change. The tempo, of course, can not be
predicted.


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