[Marxism] re: The Duality of Marxism: is capitalism totalizing or inhibiting?

["M. Junaid Alam" <alam1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tony,

I see very clearly the validity of the point you are making. But I
suppose I am speaking in the abstract, because that is the only level at
which one can speak of socialist revolution right now - a not
insignificant fact which you essentially admit to in your description (
which I agree with) of capitalism's trends are at this historical juncture.

Marx put forward an idea - idealist or not - about how he envisages
history will unfold, according to his philosophy of dialectics. To
ground this discussion more concretely, let me try to pinpoint what I am
saying. Marx's earliest conception of the proletariat overthrowing
capitalism seems to be in 1844:

" Where, then, is the /positive/ possibility of a German emancipation?

/Answer/: In the formulation of a class with /radical chains/, a class
of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which
is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal
character by its universal suffering and claims no /particular right/
because no /particular wrong/, but /wrong generally/, is perpetuated
against it; which can invoke no /historical/, but only /human/, title;
which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but
in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere,
finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from
all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres
of society, which, in a word, is the /complete loss/ of man and hence
can win itself only through the /complete re-winning of man/. This
dissolution of society as a particular estate is the /proletariat/."

My concern stems from the fact that this dialectical dissolution of
contradictions via an all-encompassing agent of revolutionary change
appears to be an idealistic abstraction which Marx superimposed on the
rest of his analysis. It's almost as though he had this philosophical
script laid out in 1844, and filled it in later with the closest
available political actors. Obviously, there is no proletariat that
suffers "wrong generally" - there are workers in some places who benefit
or suffer at the expense of workers in other places, whether through war
or economic policy, whether consciously or unconsciously. The only way
this wouldn't happen would be if the proletariat was completely
homogenous, without 'racial', cultural, and national differences. Marx
proposed, in blistering prose, that all this stuff would be blown aside
by the imperatives of capitalism. Obviously that was far from the case;
capitalism mobilized these very differences to pit workers against one
another.

The point I am trying to get at is - Marxism is obviously not just a set
of predictions. But at the same times, Marxist analysis is not totally
separate from predictions. To what degree - and in what ways - do we
revise Marxist analysis to reflect the ground realities which *underlie*
the failure of some predictions to come true? The reason I see Marx's
'maximalist dialectic' as the core problem is because all attempted
Marxist thought after Marx dealt indirectly with this dialectic. First,
you had the Marxists who just accepted that revolution wasn't coming in
the West and turned social-democratic. Then, you had the Marxists who
decided that even though those most oppressed people were not also those
who were most potentially powerful as Marx had predicted (" 1. the more
the worker produces, the less he has to consume; 2. the more value he
creates, the more worthless he becomes;") (1844), revolution in the
poorer countries could surround or isolate capitalism.

More modern problems for socialists stem from basically the same
problem. Do we accept that Marx's dialectical conclusions, or
teleological approach to history, are wrong? Or does it only apply over
the really long-term? Depending on the answer, for instance, you could
look at Islamism as that movement which exists as a nationalist movement
for a part of the world where the strongest bond of identity isn't
nationhood, but religion. You could then view it as a necessary
formative ideology that will give Arabs political independence, prepare
them for 'normal' capitalist development, and homogenization into
integrated capitalism, which will be the starting point for a united
proletariat. Or, you could say the whole concept of a homogenized
proletariat is pure fantasy, and therefore Islamism represents a kind of
Marxism that exists in the real world, a fragmented and distorted
'socialism' for a world fragmented and distorted by non-class divisions.
Or, you could say capitalism has 'exhausted all progressive
possibilities', therefore any non-socialist movement represents a
retreat into barbarism, particularly one that involves beheading people
and shrouding women. People who call themselves Marxists have taken any
of these positions. All based on how they conceptualize the
sustainability and positive potential of capitalism.

The whole question of the progressive potential of capitalism is kind of
crystallized in this absurd statement Lenin made in 1916 wherein the
parenthetical note is like the asterik you find in a commercial for
cigarettes: "The difference between the democratic-republican and the
reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely
because they are both rotting alive (which by no means precludes an
extraordinarily rapid development of capitalism in individual branches
of industry, in individual countries, and in individual periods)."

If capital is both dead and alive, if it is both a friend of reaction
and a friend of progress, in other words if up is down and down is up,
then how the hell do you analyze or understand the world from this position?


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