Re: Capitalism as an accident and freak of nature

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 26/06/01 16:03 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:

> >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."

I was really giving an initial reaction to the theme, but it was a bit more
than musings. As the intensity of class struggle recedes as the main
mechanism for overthrowing capitalism, it is worth looking at what
capitalism is, and considering major issues like the effects on the
environment and the quality of human life.

Its historical emergence is in a sense a freak, and it has to do with the
particularity of contradiction. IMO the long debate about the origins of
capitalism showed that there are indeed particular features to the early
emergence of capitalism which are particular but do not detract from the
history of oppression and exploitation with which it is associated (like
other societies).

As we look back there are some strangely unique features about how it
emerged in a particular place at a particular time. This is rather like the
strange perspective in cosmology that realises that if certain variables
did not have the exact value we believe them to have, we would not be
sitting here now.

This is the anthropic perspective and is an artefact of looking backwards
through a unique history from a vantage point that has produced us as
observers. But it does not deny that there were other possibilities. Indeed
to make sense of the riddle we have to realise that there must have been.

Writings which some consider classical in the marxist tradition, do not
explicit take on board probabilism in the interpretation of historical
materialism. But it can be incorporated quite easily without doing violence
to the broad outlines of historical materialism. It just undermines any
idealist representation of HM as a simple onward march. But it gives us
plenty of cause for hope.

Moche Machover was the first to apply to a probabilistic approach to
marxian economics.

Philosophically the particularity of contradiction is the crucial thing
here. Every form of motion contains within itself its own particular
contradiction. This particular contradiction constitutes the particular
essence which distinguishes one thing from another.

To say capitalism is a sort of freak is merely to say that it is a highly
particular form of contradiction that was similar to others in some
respects but in its particularity it was unique. Once emerged, it affected
all other possible developments in contact with it.

I was also resonating to the image of it as a freak, a monster, a cancer.
It is very like a cancer as a variant of human social behaviour which
expands with great aggression in its surrounding environment, but has its
own seeds of decay within it.  Emotionally of course the universe does not
care if capitalism is a freak or a monster. In the short term for us it is
like a monster. In the longer term it is a paper monster which should be
regarded with a degree of disdain.

Chris Burford

London