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

["Tony Lawless" <lifesunquietdream@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Junaid,

A very useful book dealing with the issue of how Marx became a Marxist is
Michael Lowy's The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx. I think this book
is worth reading because of what you quote from Marx, where he is still
settling accounts with a philosophical legacy. Lowy describes his book as a
Marxist study of how Marx became a Marxist.

Perhaps we could say in a nutshell that what Lowy says is that when Marx and
Engels first met, Marx said to Engels, I have solved the riddle of
philosophy and the answer is the working class, and Engels said, I've just
finished work on a sociological study of the English working class and I
agree with you.

A parallel you may or may not find helpful: Einstein's work, which had real
world applications, also began as a series of thought experiments. Perhaps
we should take the dialectic back here a bit though: Why these thought
experiments? Well -- that was reality imposing itself on the shape of
Einstein's thought experiments.

At any rate, as far as the rest of what you say goes, Carroll is right and
Yoshie provides the best analogy.  If you take the country that you live in,
the United States, it is possible to say that capitalism is BOTH totalizing
AND inhibiting -- but for the different classes, groups and individuals
living there right now.  If you are one of the families that benefit
directly by Republican rule, things are the best they have ever been (seeing
that it's impossible to go back to the 50s or the 20s). If you are one of
the poor black victims of Katrina, things are looking down. If you are
someone in the middle, the next few years will tell!

The same is true by extention to the relations among the classes, nations,
regions and blocs at the global level. Some areas are dominant (US and
Western Europe); some areas are advancing (particularly the areas that have
resisted the ideology of globalization like China or, more complexly, South
Korea); some areas are trying to reassess their economic strategies on the
basis of mixed results (South America); some areas are the sites of enormous
battles to ensure that they do not emerge as independent actors (the Middle
East); some areas are stagnant or actually regressing, often too because of
imperialist design (large parts of Africa) and so on.

I have already stated on this list my answer to your other puzzle: It is
necessary for the Trotskyist movement to rejoin the social democracy as its
left wing because of the failure of the first extended attempt to break with
capitalism, the demise of the Soviet Union. The period from 1914-93
constitutes a distinct phase of the struggle to go beyond capitalism, which
contains a complicated set of directives for the future. But in order to go
forward, the left of the left must first go backwards -- to rejoin the mass
parties of the working class and work on their political agendas within a
viable arena. (This does NOT mean rejecting anti-war work, community
organizing and so on. It means trying to reinject these concerns into mass
politics.)

At any rate, the mass of the working class in the West has not yet gone
beyond social democratic political consciousness. All the time that
Trotskyists or other ultaleftists ignore this and try to organize to the
left of the social democracy, they will fail. This is because to build
something massive to the left of the Social Democracy is not on the cards at
the moment.

I also think it is necessary for Marxists to study the actual breakdown of
the planned economies in the East rather than just denouncing them as
"bureaucratic" and "undemocratic" -- never mind "Stalinist".

This is because we will need to discover viable and democratic non-market
mechanisms if we want to build a genuine socialist democracy and not repeat
past mistakes.  I also think the reason that Trotskyists have hitherto NOT
done this is linked to their rejection of social democracy and Stalinism,
both of which they believe are therefore not worth studying. This kind of
Trotskyism, as I have said before, is no better than various kinds of right
wing social democracy.


Tony

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