Re: [Pen-l] Walden Bello on the coming capitalist consensus

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Patrick Bond wrote:

> Charles Brown wrote:
> > CB: Generally, Marxists see "globalization" as laying the  
> > groundwork for socialism, just as capitalist monopoly lays the  
> > groundwork in another way. Marx conceived of  Communism as a world  
> > system, a "centralized" or holistic world economy and as retaining  
> > the One World, One Species aspects of "capitalist globalization" .
>
> Can I try this, instead?:
>
> Generally, Marxists see "globalization" and "imperialism" as  
> delaying the groundwork for socialism, just as globalization delays  
> the establishment of a "One World, One Species" capitalism, thanks  
> to uneven and combined development, which immiserises by maintaining  
> aspects of the non-capitalist world that are profitable for  
> superexploitation. According to Marx,

As I've pointed out before, this misses the essence of Marx's  
understanding of historical "development", that essence being that  
what develops is "free individuality".

The "stages" in this process are constituted by conditions more or  
less conducive to such development.

One aspect of this is the development of the "passions", the motive  
forces dominant in each stage and productive of the transition from  
one stage to another.

On the one hand, these "passions" are inconsistent with fully "free  
individuality", with fully rational feeling, thinking, willing and  
acting.  On the other, they contribute positively to the creation of  
conditions more conducive to the development of such individuality.

Thus Marx describes the "passions" behind "primitive accumulation" as  
"the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly  
odious."

"The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with  
merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most  
infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious."

The substitution of capitalist private property for "the private  
property of the laborer in his means of production " was, however,  
progressive.

"This mode of production ['petty industry'] pre-supposes parcelling of  
the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it  
excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it  
excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process  
of production, the control over, and the productive application of the  
forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social  
productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production,  
and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds.  
To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, 'to decree  
universal mediocrity'."

Engels makes the same points about the "breaking" of "the old  
classless gentile society".

"The gentile constitution in its best days, as we saw it in America,  
presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore  
an extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to  
nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange  
incomprehensible power, as is reflected in his childish religious  
conceptions. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to  
strangers from outside the tribe and to himself; the tribe, the gens,  
and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a higher power  
established by nature, to which the individual subjected himself  
unconditionally in feeling, thought, and action. However impressive  
the people of this epoch appear to us, they are completely  
undifferentiated from one another; as Marx says, they are still  
attached to the navel string of the primitive community.  The power of  
this primitive community had to be broken, and it was broken. But it  
was broken by influences which from the very start appear as a  
degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile  
society. The lowest interests—base greed, brutal appetites, sordid  
avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth—inaugurate the new,  
civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means—theft, violence,  
fraud, treason—that the old classless gentile society is undermined  
and overthrown."

Marx makes them about English imperialism in India.

"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was  
actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of  
enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can  
mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the  
social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of  
England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that  
revolution."

"Globalization", the development of the "world market", is given an  
essential role in generating "the degree and universality of the  
development of wealth" where fully "free individuality" "becomes  
possible".

The "universality" of globalized "production on the basis of exchange  
values" "produces not only the alienation of the individual from  
himself and from others, but also the universality and the  
comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities."

"In the case of the world market, the connection of the individual  
with all, but at the same time also the independence of this  
connection from the individual, have developed to such a high level  
that the formation of the world market already at the same time  
contains the conditions for going beyond it. ... It has been said and  
may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it:  
this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism  
which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and  
which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And,  
certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any  
connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or  
on primeval, natural or master-servant relations. Equally certain is  
it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social  
interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid  
notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous,  
natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their  
nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This  
bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a  
specific phase of their development. The alien and independent  
character in which It presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves  
only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the  
conditions of their social life, and that have not yet begun, on the  
basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to  
individuals within specific and limited relations of production.  
Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their  
own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated  
to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of  
history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth  
where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the  
basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality  
produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and  
from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of  
his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the  
single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not  
yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as  
independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as  
ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness [22] as it  
is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a  
standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this  
antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore  
the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its  
blessed end."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm>

"the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on  
the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate  
individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers,  
be brought into practical connection with the material and  
intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to  
acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole  
earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form  
of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be  
transformed by this communist revolution into the control and  
conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on  
one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers  
completely alien to them."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm 
>

"the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being,  
production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because  
rich in qualities and relations—production of this being as the most  
total and universal possible social product, for, in order to take  
gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many  
pleasures [genussfähig], hence cultured to a high degree—is likewise a  
condition of production founded on capital."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.htm>

The "universality and comprehensiveness of his relations and  
capacities" constitutes "the integral development of every individual  
producer."  Contributing to such development is one of the two  
essential ways in which capitalism "begets its own negation" by  
creating "the elements of a new economic order".

“the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus:  
That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which  
governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the  
elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at  
once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral  
development of every individual producer.”  Letter from Marx to Editor  
of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky 1877 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm 
>

Ted



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