[PEN-L:430] Re: Understanding capitalism dialectically

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Louis,
     When are you referring to when you say that West 
Germany "started out" as more industrialized than East 
Germany?  They were about even in 1939, with, if anything, 
the East slightly ahead of the West.  The point in time at 
which there was a big difference was about 1953 after 
Marshall Plan aid to the West (and demand for German goods 
during the Korean War) had propped it up and at the end of 
the time that Stalin was punishing the East for Hitler and 
the removal of capital stock and general downgrading of the 
East by the USSR came to an end.
Barkley Rosser
On Wed, 07 Oct 1998 10:54:53 -0400 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> A while back, on both PEN-L and Doug Henwoods's LBO-Talk list, I tried to
> explain how impossible it is to evaluate the performance of capitalism in a
> single country in comparison to a socialist country. The 2 Koreas and the 2
> Germanys in the 1960s and 70s often were compared one against the other,
> for example. The problem with this is that unless you include the full
> totality of political and economic relations that the countries have
> globally, then the comparisons become meaningless. South Korea was the
> beneficiary of huge credits from the West, while West Germany started off
> as much more industrialized nation than the East. The analogy I used was
> that of a fishbowl. A country is not a fishbowl and advice that North Korea
> suffered because of a planned economy was advice that approximated
> observations such as you need to change the water more often, or you need a
> more powerful filter.
> 
> This was my homespun way of calling for a more dialectical approach.
> Although in recent months I had taken to bashing David Harvey, he does
> remain one of my favorite thinkers with respect to the need to see things
> dialectically, especially from the spatial perspective. In the chapter on
> Dialectics in "Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference," Harvey says:
> 
> "Dialectical thinking emphasizes the understanding of processes, flows,
> fluxes, and relations over the analysis of elements, things, structures,
> and organized systems. The citations already given are quite explicit on
> that point. There is a deep ontological principle involved here, for
> dialecticians in effect hold that elements, things, structures, and systems
> do not exist outside of or prior to the processes, flows, and relations
> that create, sustain, or undermine them. For example, in our contemporary
> world, flows of capital (goods, and money) and of people give rise to,
> sustain, or undermine places such as factories, neighborhoods, and cities
> understood as things.. Epistemologically, the process of enquiry usually
> inverts this emphasis: we get to understand processes by looking either at
> the attributes of what appear to us  in the first instance to be
> self-evident things or at the relations between them. We typically
> investigate flows of goods, money, and people by examining relationships
> between existing entities like factories, neighborhoods, and cities.
> Newton, likewise, did not start with gravity, but with the apple, his head,
> the earth, and the moon."
> 
> Since Harvey is a geographer by trade, he naturally tends to focus on the
> spatial dimensions of the dialectic. I, of course, agree with this. What
> has to factored in, however, is the temporal dimensions, especially with
> respect to the current economic mess capitalism is in.
> 
> This has been driven home to me as I continue reading Harry Shutt's superb
> "The Trouble With Capitalism" (Zed, 1998) which essentially makes the point
> that the capitalist system is dealing with insoluble contradictions related
> to the failure to deliver growth at the same rate as the post-WWII years of
> the 1950s and 60s.
> 
> Going back in time, you will of course recognize that WWII was a response
> to insoluble contradictions that were posed by the Great Depression. The
> Great Depression itself was ultimately caused by the failure of economic
> policies of the roaring 20s that were themselves a product of the
> particular outcome of WWI. You would have to trace all this back to the
> growth of imperialism in the late 1800s, which were prefigured by the
> explosive growth of Western European capitalism in the industrial
> revolution. Which goes back to the mercantile system of the 1500s and
> 1600s. Which is rooted in the "discovery" of the Americas.
> 
> The reason that it has been so difficult for socialists to take stock of
> the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rather ersatz victory of
> capitalism Fukuyama-style is that we have tended to not see this event
> dialectically. Instead of understanding the underlying weakness of the
> capitalist system, we only saw its "invincibility." If we had taken into
> account both the spatial and temporal aspects of the full dialectic, we
> would have understood that capitalism was entering the deepest crisis in
> its crisis-ridden history.
> 
> Returning to the historical dialectic, the most challenging problem for us
> becomes one of how to assess the prognosis of such a system in crisis. We
> know from historical experience that war is one way that capitalism uses to
> resolve its contradictions, as the evidence of the 20th century gives ample
> testimony to. So, as socialists, how do we respond. I would understand if
> many of us, including those inclined to social democracy, would go into a
> state of denial, ostrich-like. But if we are facing the possibilities of
> war, fascism and revolution, it is incumbent on those of us who take
> Marxism seriously to steel ourselves to the task. Most of all, this means
> making an intellectual adjustment, which for intellectuals is the hardest
> thing to do. But necessary.
> 
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]