Re: : The "unique" English peasantry.

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown wrote:

>
>
> CB: Do you understand "inevitable" in the same sense that Engels and Marx use it in The Manifesto when they say ? :
>
> "The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. "

They say the fall of capitalism (after the development of modern industrialism) was
inevitable. I agree. They say the victory of the proletariat is inevitable -- they were
obviously wrong. But neither point has anything to do with the bizarre claim that
the rise of capitalism was inevitable. Haven't you just finished reading a book by
Foster the central point of which was that Marx & Engels learned from Epicurus
the immense role of contingency in history. That *no* specific event was
inevitable. Capitalism's internal contradictions establish its necessary
self-destructiveness. But *nothing* can establish the inevitability of any specific
positive result in history.

The CM was partly rhetoric. Back in the '60s the Vietnamese proclaimed (and
we proclaimed after them): "Because our cause is just victory is certain." But
they (and we if we weren't stupid) knew that was not literally truee. The people
in El Salvador proclaimed, People united will never be defeated. Defeated they
were.

It is a denial of history (and thus of marxism) to proclaim any social system as
inevitable.

Carrol