From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 17:35:38 -0500
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


On Mon, 4 Mar 2002 13:37:42 -0800 (PST), Saul Marsh wrote:
>thinking."  Just because there are no
>capitalists doesn't mean that there is no
>capitalism.  Look at Marx's definition of
>"capitalist" on p. 254 of Capital (Penguin ed.):
>"a capitalist, i.e., as capital personified and
>endowed with consciousness and a will."

I think it is a mistake to take Marx out of context. On the very page 
you quote from, he says that "the possessor of money becomes a 
capitalist". Taken literally, every wage earner would be a 
capitalist. In general, I find the approach of the aufheben type 
Marxists to suffer from a lack of engagement with the sections of 
Capital that deal with the *historical* emergence of a bourgeoisie. 
Once Marx had established his essential categories in the opening 
chapters of Capital, he piled mountains of detail together to show 
how capitalism developed as a system in England. This involves 
looking at the Enclosure Acts, etc. None of this engagement with 
social reality manifests itself in much of what I see here.

>Accumulation of capital by states did not exist
>in Marx's time.  But where the state acts as
>"capital personified and endowed with
>consciousness and a will," it acts *as* a
>capitalist.

This can simply not explain the difference between a state like Cuba 
and the Dominican Republic. I realize that such details are 
uninteresting when we are discussing philosophical abstractions, but 
they seem essential to people who are fighting to change the world. 
For the average Dominican, entitlement to free medical care, housing 
and education would be tantamount to paradise. That is what people 
fight for, not philosophical abstractions.

>The social benefits to Cuban workers that you
>mention, such as "free" health care, education,
>etc. may indicate that a lower rate of surplus
>value prevails in the cuban economy than in
>countries where property is mostly in private
>hands.  But a lower rate of surplus value does
>not disqualify Cuba from capitalist status.

No, what disqualifies Cuba from capitalist status is the lack of 
capitalists. 

>Capitalism is any situation where people work
>for longer than the time necessary to produce
>their means of subsistence (defined relatively
>as "what they get"), and where the division of
>labor requires the existence of commodities and
>their general equivalent, money.
> All of these conditions prevail in Cuba.

Marx understood that communism, including the abolition of money, 
could only arise on the basis of extremely advanced labor 
productivity and high technology of the sort that exists in G7 
nations. However, revolutions have tended to take place in the 
countries that get fucked by G7 nations. Your lofty philosophical 
stance entails telling Cubans and others that until they achieve G7 
status, they might as well stop trying to make revolutions. Kautsky 
said essentially the same thing.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3-AT-panix.com on 03/04/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org




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