On 4/12/2021 1:14 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
China, Cuba, Vietnam had revolutions that could not be shoehorned into the writings of Marx and Engels who did believe that "revolution was to occur when the productive forces of the old society had so outgrown its property relations as to burst the old social framework."
Am I misunderstanding where you comrades are going with this? /Why aren't anti-colonial revolutions consistent with this phrase above? /
From South Africa, where I write, the crisis in the 1980s that led to an anti-colonial - albeit ultimately neoliberal - transition <https://vimeo.com/442807417> was at least to some extent a function of over-accumulated 'old-society' productive forces (explained in this teaching video <https://vimeo.com/432061413> for about 5 minutes from minute 4:30), that had outgrown the old social framework, and that needed a democratic bandage (to quell bleeding from internal social protests), plus a major spatio-temporal fix so capital could escape its low-profit moorings within a stagnant South African economy. It had to reform, or die.
I don't know the conditions of accumulation crisis in the other three countries, but the colonial mode of imperialism Luxemburg described in 1913 - where super-profits were made by capitalist/non-capitalist interactions - obviously came under extreme pressure in such sites, to have such revolutionary commitments succeed. Why the hesitancy to include these revolutions within the schema of outmoded productive relations, from the /Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Poli Econ? /
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#7944): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7944 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/82013043/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
