File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0007, message 50


Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 11:26:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Ben B. Day" <bday-AT-cs.umb.edu>
Subject: Re: VS: PLC: Marxist Propaganda


On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Howard Hastings wrote:
> (But you are not from an East Bloc country, right? You are from
> Tito-land?) 

Those were my first two guesses, as well. But I guess I can't really
imagine any of these being considered "models" of success... I wasn't
aware that any of the Scandinavian countries are (or were) considered
"Marxist."

> Both also recognized that economic terms like "capitalism" and historical
> periodizations were abstractions having no content apart from concrete
> analyses.  They understood their theories to be as much a product of their
> own time and as open to revision as any other kind of
> "wissenschaftlich" theory.  If some Marxist ideals get frozen into
> timeless truths in places where they become part of the legitimation of
> a state apparatus, well, that should come as no surprise to any reader of
> the German Ideology or the 18th Brumaire, among others.

I would generally agree with this w.r.t. Marx, but probably not Engels,
who was rather dogmatic. The 18th Brumaire - which you mention above - is
an interesting example of Marx's general flexibility, in his description
of the relative autonomy of the State (something that would be precluded
by a strict base-superstructure model, as the second international came to
promote).
I've been doing a bit of reading, recently, on the last decade of Marx's
life, during which he published nothing but wrote - get this - over 30,000
pages of notes on the Russian situation. He even taught himself Russian at
the end of his life so he'd be able to gain access to enough direct source
material (his wife wrote at the time that he was studying Russian as if
his life depended on it). The major conclusion to come out of this last
furious stretch of research? That capitalism wasn't a necessary stage that
had to be passed through in /developing/ countries. Russia was really the
first case of what we today call a developing country, and Marx came to
fully embrace the approaches of uneven development and mixed economies,
and saw the possibility of peasant communes developing into an advanced
communism if the technology developed by other advanced capitalist
countries could be appropriated. In short, he threw the strictly
determinist model out the window.
Unfortunately, after he died, his notes went unpublished and many of his
letters - indicating his altered approach - were actively suppressed.
Daniel'son - Marx's Russian translator (he translated Capital years before
it ever made it into English) - had been Marx's closest consultant on what
was known as "the peasant question" (i.e. whether the peasant class had to
be wiped out and replaced with bourgeois-proletarian relations in order to
bring about a communist revolution). He had received most of his empirical
information and Russian literature through Daniel'son, who also influenced
him in the direction of a pro-peasant position. After Marx died, though,
Engels spurned Daniel'son and took up relations with Plekhanov and
Kautsky. And these three are probably the source of what today is known as
"Marxist orthodoxy." If you look at Engels's writings after Marx, you'll
find that all of Marx's qualifications and exceptions (States with
relative autonomy, the "Asiatic" mode of production, etc.) are completely
absent, and a very mechanistict, deterministic, black and white portrait
is offered. Since Engels became Marx's "official interpreter" after his
death, this really did in much of his best work. When his last notes were
finally discovered, his first interpreters offered the theory that Marx
had suffered from mental infirmity in his last years and so shouldn't be
taken seriously! Such was the influence of the "general line" orthodoxy.


> It does seem to me, however, that the tendencies of capitalist development
> do still follow Marx's analyses.  I believe he was the first to discern
> the problem of over-accumulation and link this to business cycles of boom
> and bust. Also, his theory of value still seems to explain pretty well
> modern business trends like the location of labor-intensive work in 3rd
> world countries, not to mention the development of "flexible" management
> in first world countries.  Control of the work day is still a pretty big
> issue worldwide, as is control over the production of profitable
> knowledge and trained manpower, so then there is the connection he makes
> between competition and the development and and control of technology, and 
> his point about the speed of turnover of Capital, which seems especially
> relevant to a wired global economy.

Indeed, it's easy to forget the simple fact that Marx put wage-labor
relations at the center of his economic theory. His predecessors, such as
the physiocrats, Smith, Ricardo, etc., had all focused on a largely
agrarian economy with an emerging class of independent producers. Less
than a third of the population in mid-19th century was engaged in
"capitalist" relations. By mid-20th century, it was about 4/5ths of the
population. By the early 1970s, about 9/10ths. Today, nearly everybody.
So, in one way, it is only now that the world has "caught up" with Marx's
analysis. On the other hand, though, the composition of this working class
is vastly different from that of Marx's time, requiring a serious
evaluation of what exactly the "proletariat" is today, and how meaningful
this classification is.

----Ben




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