< < <
Date Index > > > |
Re: the Communist Manifesto: critique by kjkhoo 17 March 2002 05:46 UTC |
< < <
Thread Index > > > |
At 12:10 PM -0600 16/3/02, Paul Gomberg wrote: >I would like to echo and reinforce kj khoo's comments. > >When Marx and others denounced capitalism, the denunciation centered on a >communist vision, a world where human relationships would be unmediated >by money and markets, where production and human society generally would >be oriented toward the needs of the working class. Of course, it is >unfashionable to defend this vision now, but so what? > >I take it that those who reject the word "capitalism" also reject this >communist vision of how we could live together. What do they propose to >put in its place? I do not have any proposals to make, just comforting myself in ameliorating the life of a person, a family, sometimes even a village (rarely if ever), here and there, now and again, but just as often doing more damage than good, because of the very messy facts of everyday lives and relationships. But no, I don't think it would be valid to conclude that rejection of the term "capitalism" necessarily implies rejection of a vision of a more humane society, of which the communist vision was an instance, but one which didn't come close to realising its own vision, not even in its homelands. In comparison, "capitalism", too, might be considered as another vision of a more humane society which was thought in contradistinction to what came "before" it, what its thinkers set their face against, fictional or otherwise, but thought and experienced to be real enough. In its favour, at the places of origin of where it was thought, in its homelands, capitalism has had relatively more success in realising its vision (and as "proof" of that, one need perhaps go no further than some of the quotes that G Kohler recently posted from that book on Transnational Terrorism from a World Systems Perspective), although surely relative success in its homelands/core/whatever and mostly abject failure elsewhere has surely had and must have a corrosive effect on it, at least on its habitues; a sort of barbarians at the gate effect. Not least because that polarisation is, it would appear, product of a single process; at least that, as I understand it, is the argument of the various W(-)S perspectives. I do think that the idea of all relationships being _completely_ unmediated by money and markets can never have any realisation. At best, it can serve as a utopian vision, a beacon and a measure of whether we are going forward or backward (if notions of forward and backward have some meaning); for that reason alone we need utopias. But at worst, utopias can have a most pernicious effect, if mistaken for a goal to be ever realised in actuality. Some relationships are, even now, at least where I am, unmediated, at least relatively so (thank goodness); others are not, and have never been. Money and markets, in one form or another, have been with us for a long, long time. But the form we have it in today, and for some time now, does, I think, seek to swamp all other forms of relationships, at the very least to colour them severely in its own shades. I guess I have yet to be convinced, hence am retrograde in that respect, that the form of the market(s) we have today, while obviously having a history, is of a piece with the forms we have had previously. Do we have another term for this form? Don't we need a term to distinguish it? Or should we just put it all under the same rubric as that night in which all cats are grey, the only distinguishing criterion being whether one cat or another catches the mice? Finally, even if we take it that "capitalism" was a conjuring trick of the communists and marxists and the soi-disant, having been conjured into existence, and having triumphed over its conjurors, it cannot be so easily conjured out of existence. It (yes, a reified representation, but a shorthand for the fact that it has its spokespersons, its intellectuals, its carriers and ideologues, and its denizens) now has a self-image, and a powerful one at that. Having painstakingly and very successfully built up a whole infrastructure, particularly in that place where most of you are, they (another reified notion?) are not about to let the sorcerers, or would that be the sorceror's apprentices?, snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat by the "discovery" that there is no such reality as "capitalism". But, some may already have anticipated such a move when earlier on, in rejection of the then left's characterisation, they either suggested it was human nature, or else that it was everywhere capitalism ever and anon showing how each and every allegedly distinguishing characteristic is not new, just more sophisticated; and so it has been with what some contend to be the great innovation from the 1970s, derivatives, now being discovered in ancient societies. I suspect that they would be prepared to dispense with the term, and simply conclude that that's history ever and anon, knowing full well that for all the storm in the clouds, on this earth, the conjured up "capitalism" has indeed triumphed, except for the TnT. The one consolation -- that under their present political and intellectual leadership, they appear to be about to snatch defeat out of the jaws of (perhaps temporary) victory in not being able to resist the spread of the War on Terrorism, and in so doing, inadvertently declare war on a billion of the world's population. kj khoo
< < <
Date Index > > > |
World Systems Network List Archives at CSF | Subscribe to World Systems Network |
< < <
Thread Index > > > |