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

[Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown wrote:
> ...the
> relevant section of Marx on capitalism's positive contribution is here:
>
> As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed
> the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned
> into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the
> capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further
> socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other
> means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means
> of production, as well as the further expropriation of private
> proprietors, takes a new form.

'as soon as ... as soon as ... as soon as ... ' as if this is a linear 
process. You have chosen to pull from Marx a moment within capitalism, 
in a pure form, and you fail to acknowledge that the maintenance of 
neocolonial systems - like migrant labour in this part of the world - 
and the articulation of modes of production mean that 'as soon as' is 
waiting for Godot. If capitalism develops in an uneven/combined way, 
then expecting the capitalist system to generate the forces and 
relations of production for socialism in places like Southern Africa is 
myopic. Instead, the multiple oppressions capitalism-in-the-periphery 
visits upon a wide range of social actors have to be taken on board. 
We've had a very dubious run of 'neoMarxist' political economy in South 
Africa since the 1960s or so, because the multiplicity of surplus 
extraction methods (beyond the point of production, in primitive 
accumulation at the expense of black households, women, the environment, 
etc) was never taken sufficiently seriously.


> CB: Concretely, this aspect is not to the fore right now if the
> reference to "violence" is to use of violence by the special repressive
> apparatus, the state ( In Luxembourg and Lenin's day WWI was the
> expression of the imperialist crisis that was to the foreground) The
> crisis and "convulsion" right now in almost 2009 is in the "peaceful"
> realm of Wall Street, in the very House of the Financial Oligarchy. That
> is where imperialism's contradictions are erupting most drastically at
> the moment The capitalist crisis is in finance capital not militarism.
>   

But there's a crucial link, which Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine does 
quite a bit to reveal. Simply, capital in crisis turns to extraeconomic 
coercive processes.


> ^^^
> CB: All very true. Bravo Red Rosa. But right now the pertinent classics
> are those that examine the elementary structures and crises in the
> _financial sector_, not the military, or even the colonies and
> neo-colonies. There is no crisis of colonial debt repayment _right now_.
>   

Of course there is, looked at from this side of the equator. The Third 
World is still getting screwed by paying interest on interest.

> There is a crisis and _bankrutpcy_  among Biggest Banks,  the Monopoly
> Creditors, the Financial Oligarchy. The Emperors themselves are naked.
> The "free" market is exposed as a monopoly system, dependent on
> "government" largesse, really large.  The economic objective  state's 
> ends are not meeting. These objective tendencies of capitalism toward
> socialism, these "immanent laws of capitalism itself" are leaping to the
> fore. Ironically. it is US bourgeois politicians and media commentators
> who have suddenly in the last few months  seen the return of  the
> "Spectre of Socialism" in the explosions in the financial sector. And
> the US government _objectively_, through the operation of an immanent
> law of capitalism itself, by  nationalizing some of the biggest banks
> _is_ laying the groundwork for socialism. 

I think this is really dangerous wishful thinking (similar to 
Hilferding's mistake in Finance Capital: "You take over the six Berlin 
banks and you'll control all of German industry"). Here's a recent 
argument against this kind of hubris, comrade Charles: 
www.counterpunch.org/bond12262008.html


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