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

[Bill Lynch <billlynch970@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

M. Junaid Alam wrote:

> 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:
This Hegelian inversion--a sort of secularized transformation akin to Jesus' death on cross saving 
the world--had always seemed to me the root of the quasi-religious element of Marxist eschatology 
that led me to see Marxism as misguided, and led me to focus on the "early Marx," as a 
useful guide to critique rather than a foundation for scientific politics. But setting aside this 
metaphysical overlay (and getting beyond the old, misleading early/late Marx and 
base/superstructure dichotomies), and looking at Marx's analysis in _Capital_, vol. 1, I was struck 
by the fact that there was a quite concrete, historical argument at its core: capitalists were 
primarily interested in lengthening the working day to gain absolute surplus value until forced to 
by political (if reformist?) class struggle limiting the working day and somewhat consistently 
enforcing it. Only then, does the "dynamic" character of capitalism with its introduction 
of machine technology develop, with its endless struggle to overcome other capitalists by lowering 
labor costs yet further.

Of course, this could also be overlain by the idea that the growing organic 
composition of capital necessarily would doom capital (and that imperialism is 
a temporary fix). But to me, it seemed more useful to envision emulating his 
style of analysis and look to see what the conditions of class struggle and 
capitalist competition were at any particular moment or component part of the 
world market to see how capitalists would decide best how to accumulate (and/or 
how workers would force them to find new solutions, as per autonomous marxism, 
if you prefer). In short, where capitalists can get away with increasing 
absolute surplus value (read: backward and tending towards virtual slavery), 
they would. Where they needed to (or could benefit from) increasing relative 
surplus value through technology, training, and increased labor productivity), 
they would.

Where this puts Junaid's general worry about the tendency to oscillate between belief in necessary collapse 
and revolution or in the impossibility of revolutionary change (a worry I share), I don't know. But it does 
suggest to me that Marx's ostensibly "scientific" analysis can handle it precisely because, read 
properly, it doesn't imply the imposition of a formal, abstract philosophy of history. That's not to say that 
it is "theory-neutral" or positivist: one still sees class struggle and capitalist competition as 
the driving forces, but with an insistence that these are not "independent variables" in the social 
science sense, but themselves shaped by contextual, contingent developments (e.g. what if the English 
chattering classes and the government had not got so exercised about child labor and the like to commission 
all those inspections and reports that Marx relied upon?--that's certainly not given by the logic of 
capitalism or truly proletarian struggle per se). I'd like to see this kind of analysis of the current global 
system, which I agree is not uniformly globalized at all, applied without the overlay of base/superstructure 
analogies, formal, decontextualized models
of the global economy, or echatalogical invocations of crisis that will finally 
force the proletariat to behave as we want, or in a word, exist as such.

Just my own reaction--I look forward to any thoughts on this.



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