Doug writes:
>I don't think capitalism will collapse, though anything is possible. The
>more likely end to capitalism, if there ever is one, is through political
>organization and expropriation of the expropriators. I think there are a
>lot of people who are now using ecological crisis as a substitute for
>underconsumption/overinvestment/realization crisis theories of collapse.
I agree.
Given the world-wide competitive effort by capitalists and their
governments to push wages down relative to labor productivity, it's quite
possible that capitalism will collapse, in the sense that it did in the
1930s. But such a collapse eventually creates forces that allow the revival
of capitalism. The most spectacular in the 1930s was the intensification of
warlike contention between nation-states (including the acceleration of the
rise of Hitler), which led to World War II, which not only created the
needed demand-side stimulation (military Keynesianism or the Permanent Arms
Economy) but restructured industry and society, allowing a long period of
accumulation (the so-called "Golden Age"). This kind of collapse doesn't
encourage the rise of socialism unless there's a large social movement to
cause such a rise. The "worse" (economic collapse) doesn't make "better"
(socialism) automatically but can make even worse (fascism and war) and/or
a different kind of better (a revived capitalism).
Capitalism might also collapse due to ecological causes. But I think that
there's likely to be an uneven development process that messes things up.
Some areas (south of the US-Mexico border, etc.) will go the way of Haiti,
whereas the rich countries will dump as many costs as possible on those
south of the US-Mexico border, etc., "solving" the ecological crisis north
of the border. The division between the "ecological" North and the
"ecological basket case" South is not good for the prospects of socialism,
just as the center/periphery distinction that is part and parcel of
capitalism since its beginning hasn't promoted socialism. It instead
promoted a division between the socialism of the poor and dominated
countries (a.k.a. "Stalinism," "the non-capitalist road to development,"
etc.) and the socialism of the rich and dominating countries (a.k.a.,
social democracy, seen in an attenuated form as New Deal liberalism in the
US).
Even to the extent that the crisis is global -- as with global warming --
it imposes strict constraints on people's lives. But this kind of poverty
doesn't automatically produce socialism. Likely it would cause some sort of
"ecological emergency government" to deal with the new rise in insecurity
and poverty. This kind of eco-fascism doesn't help the prospects for
socialism. (It instead makes me think of an old novel by Philip K. Dick.)
In order to make this kind of crisis of capitalism produce socialism, there
needs to be a mass social movement for socialism.
Obviously, part of the process of building such a mass movement would be
defending the peoples of the world from the economic and ecological ravages
of capitalism. Two key elements are (a) the need for government to shackle
capitalism's drive to exploit people and to permanently damage nature and
(b) the need for democratic control of the government from below (rather
than by some "enlightened" elite of ecologists -- or economists). It's more
likely to grow out of actual, concrete, struggles by working people and
other oppressed groups than from apocalyptic slogans.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
