reparations

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>But capitalism made possible the wealth and scientific knowledge that
>people struggled over, and the partial socialization of production
>that made socialism possible. This ambivalent attitude towards
>capitalism seems to me one of the distinctive features of Marxism -
>as opposed to romantic, moralizing, or utopian critiques of the sort
>that Marx savaged. If you're going to embrace a romantic, moralizing,
>or utopian critique, you might as well say so, instead of doing it in
>the name of a purer Marxism - purer than Marx himself.
>
>Doug

Doug's version of Marxism is obviously one based exclusively on the
Communist Manifesto, which has been appropriated in all the wrong ways by
opponents of socialist revolution. As I mentioned previously, Edward
Bernstein cited it chapter and verse against Rosa Luxemberg. The Communist
Manifesto was written in 1848. In the Preface to the Second Russian Edition
of the Communist Manifesto, written in 1882, there is already a clear
statement that an "ambivalent" attitude toward capitalism has already been
dispensed with.  Capitalism is described as a "swindle" and the final
sentence confirms Marx's emphatic defense of the peasant commune against
capitalist encroachment. "Communal land-ownership", rather than capitalism,
can "serve as the point of departure for a communist development." Nothing
very ambivalent here.

In any case, after the outbreak of WWI, the only figures who retain
"ambivalent" attitudes toward capitalism are the reformists who not only
condemn the 1917 revolution but find excuses for temporizing with
capitalism because its progressive possibilities have not been exhausted.
Rosa Luxemberg, Lenin and Trotsky--three of the key figures of this
period--have no "ambivalent" attitudes. Trotsky argues in favor of
permanent revolution that supersedes capitalist development. Lenin agrees
with him in his April Theses, against the Central Committee of the
Bolshevik Party which retains "ambivalent" attitudes, most especially
Stalin who re-introduces a whole series of "ambivalent" type programmatic
attacks on Marxism during the Popular Front.

Rosa Luxemberg, who dumped any "ambivalence" long ago during her debate
with the revisionists, is really quite unambivalent in the 1916 Junius
Pamphlet:

>>This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared
by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It
creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place
the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition
for the socialist world revolution. This alone constitutes the cultural,
progressive side of its reputed "great work of civilization" in the
primitive lands. For bourgeois-liberal economists and politicians,
railroads, Swedish matches, sewer systems, and department stores are
"progress" and "civilization." In themselves these works grafted onto
primitive conditions are neither civilization nor progress, for they are
bought with the rapid economic and cultural ruin of peoples who must
experience simultaneously the full misery and horror of two eras: the
traditional natural economic system and the most modern and rapacious
capitalist system of exploitation. Thus, the capitalist victory parade and
all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense only
because they create the material preconditions for the abolition of
capitalist domination and class society in general. And in this sense
imperialism ultimately works for us.<<

I wonder which Marxist thinkers of the 20th century Doug has in mind when
he refers to this "ambivalent" attitude. G.A. Cohen? Frank Furedi? John
Roemer? Certainly nobody whoever faced arrest or torture.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/