Re: Capitalism as an accident and freak of nature

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> cburford@xxxxxxxxxx 06/26/01 03:53PM >>>
At 26/06/01 10:05 -0400, you wrote:
>Carrol Cox:
>
> >Characteristically, in a slave system, the overseer,
> > master, would tell the slaves: collate those newsletters. Period! ....
> > This is incidentally key to what Yoshie and I and others are currently
> > battling out with Mark and Lou. Capitalism is _different_; it is very
> > near to _unnatural_, a freak, an accident which very well might not ever
> > appear were the tape of human history (using Gould's metaphor) to be run
> > over again.
>
>(((((((((
>
>CB: So, will socialism be an accident and freak of nature ?  What was the
>natural course of history , had the freak accident not occurred causing
>capitalism ?


Yes there is something freakish about it. It is a successful social system
at a particular stage of the technical development of the means of
production, which is highly social but *appears" to be the work of
individual owners.

((((((((

Charles B: Well, if you want to say it is contradictory, I agree. But contradiction is not freakish. On the contrary, contradiction is universal. Everything is a contradiction. As you say below ( after interesting musings)

"But is the smoothest course of history the most 'natural' one? Perhaps the
struggle of contradictions is inseparable from change and development."


(((((((



It arose, oddly, out of cooperative, even almost communistic, guilds of
merchants and miners. Its progress is inseparably associated with the rise
of codes of legal rules that could be applied to individuals in abstract,
bourgeois right. It was greatly helped by conditions in certain parts of
Europe, dare I say it, particularly England, where the rise of the monarchy
created an associated legal intelligentsia which was not purely clerical.

Contrast the mandarin stratum in China.

As a social mutant it is like a cancer: extremely invasive, extremely
quickspreading. Because it has no inherent limits that it can address
consciously (except to a limited degree by cartels and monopolies) it grows
rapidly, apparently taking over the whole social life process. But this
also predicts that it will be relatively very short lived in the span of
human existence on this planet. Commodity exchange is longer, but even that
stretches over less than 1% of human existence.

The way socialism comes about will be uniquely determined by its
prehistory, but as a society consciously regulated by its members, it will
be a reversion to a more balanced, less cancerous, pattern of human existence.

The whole debate about the origins of capitalism I suggest has forced
everyone to consider that there may often be a mixture of coexisting
relations of production in a society, but one is usually hegemonic.

A more 'natural' course of history would be a more slowly accumulating
complexity of the means of production in a society capable of expanding its
surplus more slowly. Again compare China, which had considerable
technological developments, and there is no reason to think they would have
stopped.

Note that Schweickart in Against Capitalism, accepts that under market
socialism economic growth will recede in importance.

But is the smoothest course of history the most 'natural' one? Perhaps the
struggle of contradictions is inseparable from change and development.

That at any rate, would be my response.

Chris Burford

London