The death agony of capitalism

[Hugh Rodwell <m-14970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug writes:

>Capitalism is *not* in its death agony.

What he means is just that capitalism isn't dead yet. Which isn't the same
thing.

And why do Marx, Lenin and Trotsky so consistently write that capitalism
has outlived itself and that socialism is on the agenda? Why do both Lenin
and Trotsky characterize our epoch as the epoch of transition to socialism?

>...the terminal crisis is always just around the corner.

This is just cynical and unhistorical. The kind of attitude that would have
laughed at Lenin's April Theses in 1917: 'Oh yeah, ultra-left crap, the
revolution's always just around the corner ...'



>As Marx said, comparing Sismondi and Ricardo in the
>Grundrisse, those like Sismondi who always emphasize the barriers to
>capital understand its inner nature less well than those like Ricardo who
>emphasize the overcoming of barriers.

This is specious. Marx was overwhelmingly emphatic about the *historically
inevitable inability* of capitalism to overcome its inherent barriers:

        The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet
        the  very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
        products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its
        own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are
        equally inevitable.

        Manifesto, 1848

And:

        The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production,
        which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it.
        Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of
labour at
        last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist
        integument [=shell, protective covering]. This integument is burst
        asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The
        expropriators are expropriated.

        The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode
        of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first
        negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour
of the
        proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of
        a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation.
        This does not reestablish private property for the producer, but gives
        him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist
era:
        i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of
        the means of production.

        Capital I, 1867

You can't get more emphatic than that!

Deny what Marx says here, and you're denying the very core of revolutionary
Marxism.


>The transformation of capitalism will
>probably not occur through its spontaneous collapse; it has to be done
>politically.

Nobody claimed this, as far as the transformation into socialism is
concerned. The orthodox Marxist perspective allows for either a spontaneous
collapse into barbarism, through admittedly politically motivated wars or
irreversible environmental destruction, for instance, or a revolutionary
transformation into first a dictatorship of the proletariat and then
socialism, by the political instrumentality of a revolutionary
internationalist Bolshevik-Leninist party.


Cheers,

Hugh




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