Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South
> From: "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > The problem of debt, which you raise about Zim, is simply a red-herring. In > context, debt, though not trivial, is symptomatic rather than causal. Your > hopes about renewables are equally illusory. You're jumping around, comrade. But I agree with these two points. But not this: > Are you now supporting the MDC? Well, yes, you obviously are. No, same line: left civil-society critique. > Is that not > actually supporting a neoliberal solution in Zim? What do you think, > realistically, will happen when and if MDC come to power? More neoliberalism. (I think I made that clear in the article.) > Finally, the global problem capitalism faces is not over-accumulation, but a > capital shortage, desperate and bordering on famine. Ok, this one I will look forward to with interest, comarde.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Current implications for South Africa
>Lou, if I could do it with a wave of my hand, I would wipe MacDonalds >off the face of the earth. The institution of fast food is undoubtedly >vicious. But attacking _people_ rather than the institutions that >exploit them is just politically stupid. I don't really remember very >well the specific thread -- but I have very consistently on LBO attacked >generic attacks on people. This is not about attacking "people". It is about educating yourself and educating others on the nature of ecological imperialism. In the entire discussion about Macdonalds french fries on Doug's list which seemed to have gone on longer than the thread on Andrew Sullivan's sex life, nobody--including you and Yoshie--ever seemed interested in where the stuff came from. It appeared to be a debate with two contrary but inadequate positions. People who read Utne Reader, wore Birkenstocks and took vacations in Costa Rica versus people who concluded from an undialectical reading of Karl Marx that the inexorable process of capitalist industrialization paves the way for socialism. In fact the inexorable process of capitalist industrialization paves the way to ruin and nothing else. "All criticism of small-scale landownership is ultimately reducible to criticism of private property as a barrier and obstacle to agriculture. So too is all counter-criticism of large landed property. Secondary political considerations are of course left aside here in both cases. It is simply that this barrier and obstacle which all private property in land places to agricultural production and the rational treatment, maintenance and improvement of the land itself, develops in various forms, and in quarreling over these specific forms of the evil its ultimate root is forgotten. "Small-scale landownership presupposes that the overwhelming majority of the population is agricultural and that isolated labour predominates over social; wealth and the development of reproduction, therefore, both in its material and intellectual aspects, is ruled out under these circumstances, and with this also the conditions for a rational agriculture. On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an every growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. "If small-scale landownership creates a class of barbarians standing half outside society, combining all the crudity of primitive social forms with all the torments and misery of civilized countries, large landed property undermines labor-power in the final sphere to which its indigenous energy flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the vital power of the nation, on the land itself. Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil." V. 3 of Capital, "The Transformation of Surplus Profit into Ground-Rent" Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Carrol Cox: >My understanding of capitalism is that it _must_ grow, regardless of >consequences, and that it simply is not worth considering possibilities >for constraining growth under capitalism, however desirable or even >absolutely necessary that may be. Right now I am reading "The Last Ranch" by the late Sam Bingham, which deals with the disastrous ecological effects of cattle ranching in Colorado, including desertification. This is the reality that Marxists have to identify to the masses. Saying that MacDonalds fast food is some kind of "conquest" of the working class because it makes meat cheap and eliminates the need to prepare meals is just the kind of thing that we have no business saying. The fact that so many young people associate Marxism with this kind of vulgar "modernization" explains why the anti-globalization protesters often call themselves anarchists. While anarchism attracts the young, we are ending up with a movement that revolves around bizarre sects or annual conferences attracting the enlarged prostate brigade. At the last Socialist Scholars Conference, the last I'll ever go to, young people got up during the discussion period of a talk given by Bogdan Denitch on the "future of the left" and told him that he was completely out of touch. Denitch's social democratic business-as-usual left-Gompers trade unionism is based on the notion that working people in the USA should have a bigger slice of the pie, the rest of the world be damned. As long as Marxism is perceived in this manner, we are in bad shape. As Marxists, our message is not just about "more". It is about equity. Most people in the imperialist countries have to understand that the life-style we "enjoy" is unsustainable. In exchange for a more modest life-style, we will live in world that enjoys peace and respect for the individual. If people in the imperialist countries can not rally to this message, then they (we) deserve the fate that awaits us: war, urban violence, cancer epidemics, drug addiction, alcoholism, FOX TV, and prozac. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Doug Henwood earlier wrote [PEN-L:13799]: > >it's more of a 19th century slowdown than a post-WW II one, > with a financial hangover from the burst Nasdaq/tech bubble, and a > real sector one from overinvestment in gadgets. It's probably going > to take some time to work through it. Maybe Doug is right, and there is nothing wrong with the 'energy fundamentals' and the present 'slowdown' is similar to what happened in the 19th century. I don't believe this; some people are clearly in denial here. But Doug is right that there is a parallel with the 19th century. As Alan Freeman puts it: >>(e) History has seen two quite distinct patterns of recovery from generalised crisis. The industrial revolution, and the post-war boom, yielded high global profit rates under a single hegemonic power (the UK in 1845, the US in 1945) which fuelled a general expansion even of its rivals, yielding rising (if unequal) prosperity, relative peace, and political stability. 1890-1914 was different. The profit rate did not recover to previous levels, there was no clear hegemon, growing misery and barbarity over the immiserated parts of the world, and intense great power rivalry leading to the wars and revolutions that bestrode the twentieth century. I will argue that the evidence suggests the only possible basis of a new wave of economic expansion is a recovery of this second type, more comparable with 1890-1914 than 1945-1965. I call this a return to classical imperialism.<< [from HAS THE EMPIRE STRUCK BACK? NEW PARADIGM GLOBALISATION OR RETURN TO CLASSICAL IMPERIALISM?] Elsewhere, Freeman has argued that: >> General crisis is not final breakdown. Capitalism can recover from it and has done so. But the recovery requires an external, political intervention in the cases so far seen (the industrial revolution itself, 1848-1872, 1893-1914, and 1947-62), a complete re-organisation of the worlds markets and territories through extended war and barbarity to provide privileged spheres of operation for rival great capitals. So-called globalisation is not an automatic process but the outcome of a conscious political attempt to recreate these conditions for recovery. The Reagan-Thatcher restructuring of 1980 led to the dissolution of the USSR, the formation of the WTO, and the opening of world financial markets to US capital, opening a period whose closest historical analogy is 1893-1914, best described as classical imperialism. Unlike the 1945 re-organisation, this liberal imperialist re-organisation is unstable because there is no sufficiently productive hegemon; the advance of each great power is bought at the expense of the others. It leads to competition between the great powers which grows without limit, and it is by no means guaranteed that it can unleash a new expansion. This competition is, however, not the cause of the crisis but an effect of it. The growing polarisation of nations is likewise intrinsic to the capitalist market and, unlike general crisis, continues without limit. This, too, is a product of the market. It cannot be explained by specific cultural or historical conditions such as late or insufficient integration into the capitalist market; to the contrary, it only ever slowed down when nations partially withdrew from the world market in capital, and has accelerated more rapidly than ever now that the market has reached is greatest ever extent. The partial restoration of US profitability is not the result of a fundamental revival of the productive dominance which the US enjoyed in 1945, and far less the onset of a New Paradigm wave of expansion, as Greenspan maintains; it has been achieved by directly appropriating the surplus value of the third world, and of the USAs rivals, to finance US debt and compensate for its own competitive failure. << [from CRISIS AND THE POVERTY OF NATIONS] On the whole, whether or not you believe in Freeman's version of value theory, there is no doubt that the 19th century ended up in 1914. Mark Jones
