[Marxism] The Duality of Capitalism

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I try to catch up to this debate, I thought I would supplement
Junaid's textual example of 'maximal dialectics' with this quote from the Holy
Family written by Marx around November 1844:


Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. 
They are both creations of
the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies 
in the antithesis.
It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.

Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain 
itself, and thereby its
opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the 
antithesis,
self-satisfied private property.

The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself 
and thereby its
opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it 
proletariat. It is
the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, 
dissolved and
self-dissolving private property.

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human 
self-estrangement.
But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, 
it recognizes
estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. 
The class of the
proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own 
powerlessness and the reality
of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement 
the indignation at
that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the 
contradiction between its
human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and 
comprehensive negation
of that nature.

Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative 
side, the
proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of 
preserving the antithesis,
from the latter the action of annihilating it.

Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own 
dissolution, but
only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious 
and which takes place
against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only 
inasmuch as it produces
the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and 
physical poverty,
dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore 
self-abolishing. The
proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by 
producing the
proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on 
itself by producing
wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, 
it by no means
becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing 
itself and its
opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which 
determines it, private
property.

When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it 
is not at all, as
Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as 
gods. Rather the
contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all 
humanity, even of the
semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of 
the proletariat
sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; 
since man has lost
himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained 
theoretical consciousness of
that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, 
absolutely imperative
need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt 
against this
inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But 
it cannot
emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot 
abolish the
conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of 
life of society today
which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the 
stern but steeling
school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or 
even the whole
proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the 
proletariat is, and
what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. 
Its aim and
historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life 
situation as well as in
the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain 
here that a large
part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic 
task and is
constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.

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