>>Engels wrote:
"This contradiction contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms
of today." The point is clear: the widening and deepening of capitalist
relations over time has turned capitalism into a near universal system, reduced
nearly everything that humans desire to the cash nexus and commodity form,
sucked
hundreds of millions into the web of wage labor, and generated new
contradictions, inequalities, hierarchies, and antagonisms on a more extensive
scale -
all of which constitute the material basis for socialism. Thus socialism
springs from the general logic of capitalist development.
A second observation is that the working class, because of its position in
the system of social production, is the gravedigger of capitalism. In their
view, no other class or social strata has the economic and political strength
to
successfully confront the capitalist power structure. They didn't rule out an
important role for allied forces, but by the same token, they did not see
them as the mainstay of the socialist movement. ( Socialism's Negation - A
Revisionist Distortion PT 5 by Mark Scott)<<
Comment
"A second observation is that the working class, because of its position in
the system of social production, is the gravedigger of capitalism."
Really.
This is Comrade Scott's observation not that of Marx. The working class - of
which Scott means basically the workers in their connection with capital,
("because of its position in the system of social production"), is NOT the
grave
digger of capitalism.
Let's examine what Karl Marx actually wrote:
"(1) The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the
bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; (2) the condition
for
capital is wage-labour. (3) Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition
between the labourers. (4) The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter
is
the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition,
by the revolutionary combination, due to association. (5) The development of
Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on
which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. (6) What the
bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall
and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
(Numbering added for simplifying.)
Pardon, but where does it says or implies that the workers are the grave
digger of capitalism? Scott cannot read or rather, imposes what he thinks over
what Marx states. Modern industry or rather the advance of industry, is the
grave
digger of capitalism . . . the victory of the proletariat is inevitable.
Scott states clearly:
"A second observation is that the working class, because of its position in
the system of social production, is the gravedigger of capitalism." This is
impossible because the two basic classes of a social system cannot - are not
free, to overthrow the system of which they constitute. It is impossible.
Mark also wrote:
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which
there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production
never
appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the
womb of the old society itself."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-a
bs.htm
Something else in history must happen to unravel the basis unity of a given
society and that something else is always the spontaneous development of the
means of production or a revolution in the mode of production itself. The
injection of a new qualitative ingredient into a system of production begins
the
process of destruction of that which made the existing social system what it
was.
Then . . . THEN!!! . . . begins a period of revolution and in our case the
communist revolution, rather than a continuation of the industrial revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat. What is negated by history is not
the dictatorship of the proletariat as a political form of transition, but that
which was defined as socialism, according to Lenin and Stalin's description.
Their socialism meant an industrial system and industrial society. This is not
the case with us and everyone on earth sense this.
The struggle between worker and capitalist is the same as the struggle
between the serf and nobility "in the system of social production." That is to
say
these struggle drive the system of social production through its various
quantitative boundaries of expansion. A new qualitative dimension to social
production must emerge, that creates new classes in order for a social system
to be
overthrown. In the case of feudalism it was the creation and emergence of the
bourgeoisie and modern proletariat. In the case of bourgeois production it is
the mergence of the communist class or the communist sector of the proletariat.
"(B)ecause of its position in the system of social production, (the working
class) is (NOT) the gravedigger of capitalism, but rather the advance of
industry, (a) which begins the destruction of the basis of social production,
(b)
which in this world and this reality was the industrial system, with (3) the
bourgeoisie and workers as the basis classes underlying the system of social
production.
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
