----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 5:23 PM Subject: [PEN-L:23465] Re: Re: Suppression of Marx _______________________________________
Dear Melvin, before becoming a researcher, I was a worker and an Union leader, like you. And I believed in "historical materialism", too. I believed in it, because having not yet visited history by myself, I trusted Marx and Engels about the progressive evolution of society, the consciences, productive forces and superstructures altogether. But after more than 25 years of research, I know, now, that Marx and Engels had been mistaken. Like anybody in their century, they were impressed by the exploding "productive forces" of Industrial Revolution. And they concluded that if the development of productive forces was a cumulative process, so was the social development too. But it was a pure metaphysical reasoning, out of any historical material. Nevertheless, they got an important intuition: the intuition of something irreversible in human economy, the intuition of entropy. Rosa Luxemburg has begun to give this intuition an explicit expression, by showing the strictly exogenous origin of accumulation. The expansion within space (the geographical one and the sociological one) is concretely attested by historians from the very beginning of the known history, whatever be the "mode of production". The motor of this expansion is always the asymmetry of exchanges between the places of accumulation and the periphery of raw-material extraction and working-force exploitation (see Immanuel Wallerstein: "The modern World system", and Guillermo Algaze: "The Uruk World System"). That explains expansionism, imperialism, inter-imperialist competition, first and second world wars, then today's emergence of a single occidental imperialism and of its "globalization". The asymmetry of exchanges are reflected by a systematically negative balance of trade of the pole of accumulation. That is attested for Athens, Rome, 16th century Europe, England, France, Germany, then today's USA, that is for all imperialist poles of accumulation. Such is reality, and not a "class struggle" that has never been so deliquescent than now. Soviet Union has imploded. New Russia has become a source of raw material for the occidental empire. China, a source of cheap working force. All communist parties have been recuperated by social-democrat ones, or atomized. Marxism-Leninism is an historical defeat, because its theoretical base was wrong. We have to admit that, in order to "understand the world". Is accumulation endogenous or exogenous? That is the question. Marx's surplus value (the "absolute" one) postulates an endogenous accumulation. As it is included in the revenue per capita, it enables capital to endlessly make profit without any crisis other than wage earners going on strike. But that does not explain overproduction crises, expansionism, colonialism, imperialism. Actually, this so called "surplus-value" is not a surplus-value. It is indeed a tribute paid by labour force, but it is already included in the investment, as Keynes demonstrated it. It enriches the capitalists, but does not take any part in global accumulation of capital. That is to say globally cumulative profit comes from the multiplication of labour force, not from the individual exploitation. And then can be explained expansionism, etc. Marx and Engels have come up against a contradiction between their intuition of the "limit" and their theory of accumulation that is nothing but the classical-economy one which depends on the good will of the "saver". Rosa Luxemburg surpassed this contradiction, but Lenin did not. Don't trust people who continue talking about "class struggle" that they never experienced and that they only met in the books. Salute and brotherhood, Romain Kroës
