[PEN-L:12009] Re: Re: Lumpers and Splitters

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 17:43 29/09/99 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

>Marx was a splitter in the sense
>that he was a dialectician and saw processes as
>involving quantitative change turning into
>qualitiative change. There was a leap into
>capitalism, by his analysis, a discontinuity,
>a revolution, not just an evolution.


To take this as a general theoretical point, I would comment that the
capitalist revolution was a very long process of many reformatory steps,
whose relevance was often not understood consciously. Indeed the capitalist
revolution is not over in many parts of the world. Different forms of
exchange of products of labour coexist in many societies.

A political revolution is a dramatic event where there is no doubt that one
body overthrows the power of another body by force. But after the
revolution it is debatable how much has changed in essence. Lenin's article
"on Cooperation" 1923 signals an awareness that it might take a generation
to learn socialist economic methods.

While I agree with Charles' commitment to dialectics, I think we need
explicit awareness of the Marxist method of abstraction which takes the
essence out of the concrete context only the better to understand it back
again in its particular context.

Those who eschew all reforms fail to understand that the contradiction
between capital and labour manifests itself in many different ways,
including internationally, and will do so still in 50 years time.

It is a paradox of Marx's method of abstraction, but I suggest true, that
the human race may get to our destination without realising we are being
consistent with Marx's perspectives.

Social production controlled by social foresight, is not obviously a
Marxist slogan, but it will take us a very long revolutionary way in terms
of the processes defined by Marxist abstraction, even without a dramatic
political revolution.

I am saying that the qualitative changes of a political revolution are more
sudden than the qualitative changes of a truly revolutionary change in the
mode of production, if we understand the dialectical method of abstraction
in Marx correctly.


Chris Burford

London