[Marxism] How Capitalism Destroys the Young

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm sure we all share your concerns, but isn't it a bit facile to blame it
all on capitalism? For instance, if you look at the incidence of infantile
HIV infection in UNICEF data, the bulk of it occurs in Africa, but most of
the countries involved don't really have much capitalism (i.e. an
agricultural labour force of 80% or so), and insofar as they do have it
(e.g. South Africa), it's not clear to me that capitalist market economy as
such is the direct or main cause. So at most you could say that it's a
preventable disease that is within the technical capacity of the developed
countries to help these people solve, but that insufficient priority is
attached to health programs, or that patents get in the way of distributing
medicines etc. Suppose that you are correct though and that capitalism
really is the problem here (insofar as it had eroded traditional social
structures etc., neo-colonial exploitation) then how would we do things
differently so that a better result was obtained?

This thought kinda links to the Petras article cited by Calvin, where Petras
demarcates ideologically in a rather simplistic, schematic and sweeping way
between Marxist and post-Marxist, so that by implication you are either
Marxist or, if post-Marxist, anti-Marxist and anti-socialist - everything
short of revolution aids oppression and exploitation. Seems to me this
ultra-left stance is a little unfair to many post-Marxists, who might share
with Marxists the same ideals, but actually attempt to do something
constructive in the here and now, within or outside NGOs.

There's no doubt of course that "doing something constructive" usually
requires funding, and this sense post-Marxists would be limited by the
political concerns of the funders (with the concomitant "you don't bite the
hand that feeds" dynamic). Even so, I would think that many of these people
are very valuable, insofar as they're thinking practically about how you
would actually do things differently, beyond abstractly blaming capitalism.
I think that's important, insofar as I think most people aren't politically
persuaded by anti-capitalist rhetoric, but rather by credible positive
alternatives (Petras mentions only municipal socialism in Porto Alegré).

Quite possibly many post-Marxists are driven to their position by the
absence of positive alternatives offered by Marxists. From Petras's article
though you can only really conclude that "post-Marxists ought to be
Marxists", but this strikes me as a little idealist, because it doesn't
explain satisfactorily why post-Marxists have dropped Marxism. You need to
consider not just changes in political beliefs here, but also the social
realities which give rise to the beliefs. Presumably the political reason
for talking about the "problem of post-Marxists" is either to brand them
"enemies of the people" or else to find ways of bringing them back into the
Marxist fold, but Petras really does neither. He might be 100% politically
correct, but the question is whether he gets people on board with what he
says.

Jurriaan


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