[Was: : [PEN-L:23525] Re: Re: Re: Re: Wade vs Wolf ] Doug writes
>[Capitalism is] awful, but I guess it beats slavery or feudalism. But it's also >a deeply contradictory system, producing wealth and possibility >alongside poverty and oppression. A friend of mine who spent a few >years as a reporter in Vietnam interviewed Nike workers who told her >that they prefer their sweatshop jobs to what they would have been >doing otherwise - things like chasing rats in rice paddies (not much >fun to be a woman on the farm). Anticapitalists - and I'm one - often >overlook that sort of thing. And capitalism often produces great >booms, though PEN-Lers seem to prefer talking about busts. Which kind >of begs the question of just how capitalist China is, and what >lessons it might hold for other poor countries. I think this is an important point, with critical implications for theory and praxis. Marx's "scientific" case for socialism and communism argued that these were reached *through* capitalism, which acted, in historical perspective, as a progressive engine for developing the forces of production and, he argued, class consciousness. But it is also a contradictory system, and these contradictions rebound on those who are active in opposing its oppressive tendencies. Consider the case of political action against sweatshop labor. On one hand, sweatshops abuse and exploit workers. On the other, they often offer opportunities that are superior to the even more abusive and exploitative alternatives many workers face (I say this fully aware of the fact that workers are often coerced or misled into sweatshop labor). Sweatshops also typically (though not always) operate at low margins of profit. So suppose that anti-sweatshop regulations designed to curb their abuses drive many out of business. Is that good or bad, on balance? I think there is a coherent progressive stance that would involve neither laissez-faire nor attempts to ban sweatshops outright. But the point is that the contradictory nature of the system seems to dictate nuanced, "middle ground" responses to certain capitalist excesses, so long as the responses aren't calculated to overthrow the system itself. Another critical point touched on by Doug's comment concerns the connection between contradiction and capitalist crisis (wow, what alliteration). It is traditional in Marxist analysis to read the system's contradictory nature as translating into ever more destructive crises--the other half of Marx's "scientific socialist" vision. But, at least so far, the historical record is far from decisive on this point. Is U.S capitalism weaker than it was before 9/11? Before 1980? Before 1932? Is global capitalism weaker than it was in the early 20th century? What if the traditional thesis is not true, and instead the system's contradictions translate into a non-tendential series of crises and at least temporarily adequate systemic adaptations to same? Does this destroy the possibility that capitalist laws of motion create a revolutionary class? Gil
