Wallerstein - reply to Renato

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, if capitalism is without limits, there is no hope in making ethical
vituperations against it. We have to search for material ways of destroying
capitalism. To condemn capitalism is no way of attaining this goal.
Renato Pompeu

Your curt comment is a bit general, and it is difficult to know what to make
of it. Of course, as e.g. David Harvey would acknowledge, there are limits
to capitalism, both internal and external to the system, and Marx and his
school spent a lot of time spelling them out. Marx himself notes that the
ultimate barrier to capitalism is capital itself, i.e. the system contains a
system-immanent crisis potential which is sufficient to cause severe
economic crises and death, an eventuality which prompts people automatically
to search for, and invent, alternative ways to ensure human survival which
break with the logic of capitalism to a greater or lesser extent.

When you say "We have to search for material ways of destroying capitalism"
I don't know what you mean exactly, but certainly political and cultural
activity takes money and material resources. I personally take the view that
ethical vitupirations against capitalism can sometimes be helpful in
specific contexts, simply by suggesting an ethics which goes beyond
capitalism, i.e. an ethic based on human values rather than bourgeois
values.

Likewise, "condemning capitalism" implies a recognition of what it is, and
might be a first step to replacing it with a better system for allocating
resources. But, I would suggest, general disquisitions about capitalism
probably are not very much use outside of the university and outside of
social sciences.

Strictly speaking, capitalism doesn't exist in the external world, it is a
way of describing the system of money-making as a whole, generalised
commodity production, production which has sale at production price as the
minimal condition for supply. In other words, we are expressing a mental
abstraction which summarises a complex socio-economic totality. What exists
in reality are real, living people within a web of social relations mediated
and shaped by prices, legislation, etc., who trade in products, labour,
money and assets, and thus ensure the wherewithal to sustain their lives.

The theory of capitalism is supposed to provide us with scientific insight
into how those people might change themselves and their circumstances, and
how they might change their social relations. But if we are just talking
about "fighting capitalism" then we are just battling with our own
intellectual construction, whereas, in reality, what we have to confront is
specific manifestations of the system; the theory is just an aid here, to
understanding how these specific manifestations relate to the total picture.

But it is true, that no economic crisis will automatically cause the demise
of the capitalist system and its supersession, this is must be the active
work of people who have the will and the capacity to change the social
institutions of their society in a radical way, bring the investment process
and the allocation of resources under public and political control, and
changing their social relations.

When Lenin made his famous remark to the 2nd Congress of the Comintern about
there being "no absolutely hopeless situations for capitalism", he was just
referring to the fact that the abolition of the capitalist system is a
political act, which must be consciously carried out by real people, and
that it doesn't simply result automatically from an economic crisis, however
severe, since, so long as private property relations dominate the production
process, there is always a basis for reviving the private accumulation
process on the basis of producing things for sale.

Leon Trotsky added to this, that people do not make a revolution which
transforms the socio-economic structure of their society simply because they
want to, but more because they have to, because their survival and
prosperity is at stake. And if you examine how the insurrection in 1917 (86
years ago) actually happened, for instance, you will see that it happened in
the context of a war, on the basis of three simple slogans, namely peace for
the soldiers, land for the peasants and bread for the workers. In other
words, Lenin never talked much explicitly about fighting capitalism or
overthrowing capitalism, he talked about specifics and declared at a certain
point "we shall now proceed to build the socialist order" (even though he
did not have much of a clue at that time what that socialist order would
really look like, he was making it up as he went along; I have a pamphlet of
his at home called "Can the bolsheviks maintain state power ?" suggesting
that even ""building the socialist order" was not a foregone conclusion for
many years).

A great deal of damage to the credibility of socialist politics has been
done by people who want to apply Marx's analysis of capitalism, pitched at a
high level of abstraction, directly to social reality, without any
mediations and specifications, whereas the real task is one of specifying
applications and discovering the mediations. This malabstractive process I
am talking about is a bit like saying that by smashing one cup, I can cause
all cups to be smashed, or that I thereby smash the concept of a cup, and
this is obviously more reminiscent of the tales of Cervantes, in which Don
Quixote attacks windmills.

If the Marxist movement has severe political problems as such, it is
precisely because it cannot specify a meaningful political project, only a
Quixotic project based on malabstractions, in continually confuses abstract
concepts with specific realities, such that it imputes a real existence to
abstract concepts in the external world rather than linking abstract
concepts to specific realities. This is what we might call the reification
of Marx's idea, or alternatively a retreat to neo-Hegelianism.

In the Dutch Socialist Party, people do not talk Marxist rhetoric anymore,
because it just causes confusion, it refers to an old language, we should be
using that language and the concepts which that language provides, to shed
light on the political problems of the present day which are expressed in a
different language, and create a new language adapted to our purposes as
socialists. You can of course fully admit the validity of many of Marx's
concepts and theories, but that does not mean that you can necessarily
immediately apply them to what is happening around you.

An excellent example of this is Marx's concept of social classes, which may
be used very abstractly in an objective, social-structural sense (for
example, Marx's analysis of the class struggles in France), or very
specifically, in reference to the living cultural or psychological
expression of class relations, but the temptation is for Marxists to operate
this concept in a reductionist way, and seek to infer all sorts of things
from the objective class position of an individual, whereas those inferences
may often be false, because they contain malabstractions.

The confusion between the linguistic expression of reality, and reality
itself is a very insidious process, which I illustrated recently with an
anecdote on PEN-L. I will repeat the text here, for your consideration:

One day, psychologist Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) was giving a lecture to a
group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to
retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase.
He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on
the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few
students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think", said Korzybski,
while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then
Korzybski tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the
original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words
"Dog Cookies". The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of
them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths and ran
out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen",
Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that Americans don't just eat
food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by
the taste of the latter."

Jurriaan




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