[Marxism] The historical limit of capitalist production

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"In these crises, 
 
the contradiction between socialized production and capitalist  appropriation 
ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is,  for the time 
being, stopped. 
 
Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. 
 
All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside  
down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. 
 
The mode of production is in rebellion against 
 
the mode of exchange." 
 

When Marx imbue Engels standard English literary prose, the dance of  the 
dialectic emerges. 
 
The advancing revolution in the productive forces as a material power,  
denied for a full twenty years, can no longer be denied. Roughly 9 years ago  
this 
very same issue was debated on Marxism as the "event horizon" of the  
capitalist mode of production. 
 
Feudalism had a historical limit. So does Capital-ism. The historical limit  
of feudalism was bound up with changes in the form of wealth that began the  
break up of the landed property relation, precisely as a relations of landed  
property. Value production is the Alpha and Omega of bourgeois production. 
 
The new world order arrived some time ago as increasingly valueless  
production or production below the cost of reproduction of the working class. 
No  an 
image of nobody working in a hideous society of all machines. 
 
The vision and image is of value production and the law of value  facing the 
barriers of its own making. Universal production  below the reproduction cost 
of the workers as a class. Thus, value can  fall below zero.  
 
The new technological regime makes financialization possible by making  CDO's 
track able. Collateral debt obligation, which are bundles of mortgages or  
debt obligations, drawn from millions of debt holders and packaged as bundles  
with a value, are bid upon, sold and resold. Last night on CNBC was an hour 
long  program called "House of Cards" which tracked the current financial 
crisis 
from  the standard of the creation of these new financial products with Wall 
Street  representing a "financial factory" and the originators of these loans 
and banks  serving as intermediaries, to varying degrees. The program placed 
the blame on  the mortgage holder and impersonal "greedy" people and Wall 
Street 
bankers,  rather than bourgeois property. 
 
This is to be expected. 
 
World productive forces have never been greater. Moore's law is going to  
kick in because it is a law. Then Murphy's law and the Peter Principle, drives  
men to greater madness, as they are productively active and non-active. The  
general tendency is to apply new technology at the bottom of the crisis/cycle,  
rather than at the top, as the means to return to profitability. This requires 
 the extension of the very same credit, that sets the stage for the  next 
financial crisis.  
 
The inability of the masses to consume that production has never been so  
widespread. Today, almost half the world over 3 billion people live on less 
than  
$2.50 a day. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor 
 Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world's seven  
richest people combined. One billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 
children  in the world). Six hundred forty million live without adequate 
shelter, 400 
 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health  
services. Around the world, some 26,500 children die every day, almost 10  
million every year. (For these and more world poverty statistics, see  
Globalissues.org). 
 
"The fact that the socialized organization of production within the factory  
has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of  
production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is  
brought home to the capitalist themselves by the violent concentration of  
capital 
that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still  greater 
number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode  of 
production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own  
creations." 
 
Poverty is rising. For example, today one third of the Russian people exist  
on a dollar a day. 
 
The acceleration of production in the advanced countries only deepens the  
poverty in the rest of the world. It is only a matter of time until this 
extreme 
 economic polarization is reflected in the breaking of the ties that bind the 
 social poles together and creates the ideological foundations of revolution. 
A  leap occurs and the previous unity of labor and capital reveals itself in 
the  exact same dialectical logic that polarizes and separates production from 
 distribution. The social bond holding capitalists to capitalist with worker 
to  worker, as the living capital, as class, now find/first rupture within 
"the  unity" that is competing capitalist to capitalist and competing worker to 
 
worker, with sectors of capital now facing sectors of workers in external  
collision. 
 
Competition is the entire environment of capital. 
 
Capital rest exclusively competition of the workers as wage laborers. 
 
 
The workers is a unity opposed to himself and capitalist. Capital is also a  
unity opposed to itself and the workers as the subjective capital; with  
neither subjectively creating this "externalizing" of class;  . . . but  rather 
the 
impulse is a combination of the property/revolution in the productive  
forces, creating the breach, and the then . . . . then, the compulsion of the  
state 
to enter the social process and stabilize the unity of productive forces  and 
social relations,  . . . . effects the leap. 
 
Society moves in class antagonism. 
 
In the desperate search for markets the U.S. is turning to this poverty  
stricken half of humanity. Clearly, the necessary infrastructure to turn this  
group into consumers does not exist. The arms industry is the only way out and  
it cannot exist without constant war. The deepening financial crisis is  
liquidating huge sections of the world's wealth, exacerbating the antagonism  
between wage-less or near wage-less production, and distribution for money. 
 
The historical limit becomes visible. 
 
Marx theoretically presents the issue. Fully understanding that the  
historical limit of value production is better ushered in on the basis of the  
dictatorship of the proletariat, rather than the dictatorship of the  
bourgeoisie, he 
and Engels armed the workers with a theoretical capacity to  face the last 
battle. Lenin retreated in the face of the law of value, which  cannot be 
surmounted on the basis of will power, because the material power of  the law 
of 
value rests upon and is rooted in the division of labor. Not just  pigmy like 
peasant production with the subjective producer unable to alienate  his product 
on any other basis other than exchange. Value. 
 
"Come back baby, come back." Then Lenin lamented. 
 
"The necessity of this transformation into capital, of the means of  
production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the workers. 
It  
alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of  
production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers 
to  
work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production  
stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive  
forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing  
energy, 
press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the  abolition 
of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their  character 
as social production forces." 
 
"This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more  
powerful, against their quality as capital,  . . . . ." 
 
Economic communism negates the value relations. 
 
reprint from Marxist Debate. slight editing. 

WL. 
 
 
 
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