From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 00:46:57 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: Capitalism and Human Nature 2nd try


> A brief reply to Mark who wrote:

> Therefore I do not agree with Dave that:
> 
> >There is nothing inherent in the 
> >commodity labour power that requires domestic/state 
> >production. This form of production happens to be a gift to capital 
> >from outside the law of value. The significance of the state cannot 
> >be derived from this economic function. 
> 
> Workers excluded permanently from the labour-process 
> have no use for these rights or therefore this 'human nature' 
> and capitalism has  no use for them or their rights.
> They are in for a Roman time of it, with bread and
> circuses to keep them quiet, but their vote and other nominal rights
> will be meaningless -- in their own eyes even before
> anyone else's (a majority in the US doesn't vote any more).
> The fact that capitalism needs a state to guarantee not just
> externalities but a fundamental, immanent condition of its own
> existence, namely the supply of the commodity labour-power, is also
> evidence for the correctness of Marx's thesis that capitalism is
> historically transient. Capitalism rushing blindly to deconstruct human
> subjectivity and its genetic substrate not
> only reveals the falseness and hypocrisy of Englightenment 
> conceptions of human nature, and its own anti-human dynamic,
>  it also puts a humankind it strives to render powerless in a 
> race against time, because it destroys its anthropological 
> basis while in the process creating a world
> inimical to and barely rescuable by humankind. 
> 
My general reply is that you talk in terms of  mechanical tendencies 
without reference to contradiction. The class struggle motivates the 
contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, and this will 
determine how far the capitalists go in destroying the forces of 
production before there is a socialist revolution. I don't see why 
the existence of a state in a class society renders it any more 
transient than it already is given its fundamental contradiction. It 
just means that the revolution will be political, the smashing of the 
state. That capitalism is in crisis and is now destroying the very basis 
of the forces of production is undoubted. 
But these forces are only one side of the contradiction.. So far you have only
 pointed to the negative aspects of capitalisms transience - turning itself into a
barbaric machine against humanity. For an historian, this is very 
abstract.  Maybe this is for you the most likely scenario after the greatest crime 
in history. But that crime was a class crime with a history of  betrayal. 
We need to make those responsible - the bosses, the stalinists and the mesheviks - 
accountable.  They are the problem, not some inexorable destructive 
future in which capitalism turns into barbarism. The working class 
for all its divisions and backwardness exists as a universal force 
able to oppose this destruction. We have to turn this potential into 
reality. For this we need an analysis, a programe and a party. Then 
we can act consciously and dialectically. Our programme would then 
guide us in every situation. How to turn the cynicism of US 
non-voters into support for a mass Labour Party which had the 
potential to be a revolutionary party.  What lessons from the recent 
Korean general strike? Trace the negotiated compromise to a weak 
bureuacratic leadership, advance a programme for rank and file 
workers control and a struggle for a united socialist Korea. And so 
on. On the  other side of  capitalisms  destructiveness is the creativity 
of the working class and its capacity to create a new socialist 
`human nature' by overthowing capitalism and planning a socialist 
society.
Dave. 
  
David Bedggood


     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---