This was written in the Fall of 2010. Although the complete series will remain unfinished for some time, I am publishing these finished sections because when you put hundreds of hours into something, it makes more sense to share what you’ve produced than to keep it in the closet forever. [alex]
Why Marxism Has Failed, and Why Zombie-Marxism Cannot Die
Or My Rocky Relationship with Grampa Karl
by Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com
Part 3.1 – September 19, 2011
This is part of an essay critiquing the philosophy of Karl Marx for its relevance to 21st century anti-capitalism. The main thrust of the essay is to encourage living common-sense radicalism, as opposed to the automatic reproduction of zombie ideas which have lost connection to current reality. Karl Marx was no prophet. But neither can we reject him. We have to go beyond him, and bring him with us. I believe it is only on such a basis, with a critical appraisal of Marx, that the Left can become ideologically relevant to today’s rapidly evolving political circumstances. [Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.]
What Marx Got Wrong
“Marxism has ceased to be applicable to our time not because it is too visionary or revolutionary, but because it is not visionary or revolutionary enough” – Murray Bookchin, “Listen, Marxist!”
Although Karl Marx provided us crucial and brilliant anti-capitalist critiques as explored in Part 2, he also contributed several key theoretical errors which continue to haunt the Left. Instead of mindlessly reproducing these dead ideas into contexts where they no longer make sense, we must expose the decay and separate it from the parts of Marx’s thought which are still alive and relevant.
I have narrowed down my objections to five core problems: 1. Linear March of History, 2. Europe as Liberator, 3. Mysticism of the Proletariat, 4. The State, and 5. A Secular Dogma.
I submit that Marx’s foremost shortcoming was his theory of history as a linear progression of higher and higher stages of human society, culminating in the utopia of communism. According to Marx, this “progress” was manifest in the “development of productive forces,” or the ability of humans to remake the world in their own image. The danger of this idea is that it wrongly ascribes an “advance” to the growth of class society. In particular, capitalism is seen as a “necessary” precursor to socialism. This logic implicitly justifies not only the domination of nature by humanity, but the dominance of men over women, and the dominance of Europeans over people of other cultures.
Marx’s elevation of the “proletariat” as the agent of history also created a narrow vision for human emancipation, locating the terrain of liberation within the workplace, rather than outside of it. This, combined with a naive and problematic understanding of the State, only dispensed more theoretical fog that has clouded the thinking of revolutionary strategy for more than a century. Finally, by binding the hopes and dreams of the world into a deterministic formula of economic law, Marx inadvertently created the potential for tragic dogmatism and sectarianism, his followers fighting over who possessed the “correct” interpretation of historical forces.
(These mistakes have become especially apparent with hindsight, after Marxists have attempted to put these ideas into practice over the last 150 years. The goal here is not to fault Marx for failing to see the future, but rather to fault what he actually said, which was wrong in his own time, and is disastrous in ours. In this section I will limit my criticisms to Marx’s ideas only, and deal with the monstrous legacy of “actually existing” Marxism in Part 4.)
Capitalism is "advancing" us right off a cliff.
1. Linear March of History
“Rooted in early industrialization and a teleological materialism that assumed progress towards communism was inevitable, traditional Marxist historiography grossly oversimplified real history into a series of linear steps and straightforward transitions, with more advanced stages inexorably supplanting more backward ones. Nowadays we know better. History is wildly contingent and unpredictable. Many alternate paths leave from the current moment, as they have from every previous moment too” – Chris Carlsson, Nowtopia (41).
Much of what is wrong in Marx stems from a deterministic conception of historical development, which imagines that the advance and concentration of economic power is necessarily progressive. According to this view, human liberation, which Marx calls communism, can only exist atop the immense productivity and industrial might of capitalism. All of human history, therefore, is nothing but “progressive epochs in the economic formation of society,” as Marx calls it in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production… the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism [communism].”
The idea that history marches forwards along a linear path was not an original of Marx’s – as Bookchin writes in The Ecology of Freedom, it stems from “Victorian prejudices” that “identify ‘progress’ with increasing control of external and internal nature. Historical development is cast within an image of an increasingly disciplined humanity that is extricating itself from a brutish, unruly, mute natural history” (272).
Marx absorbed this framework through Hegel, who theorized a pseudo-spiritual development of humanity towards the idealization of “Absolute Knowledge,” or God. The underlying logic of this divine movement is the attainment of higher levels of “Reason” – the human mind is increasingly able to detach itself from both the human body and from nature, and thereby exist “for itself.” In this way Hegel imagined that civilization had been evolving in a long dialectical process whereby humanity had become increasingly capable of conceptualizing freedom, and through events such as the French Revolution, was realizing that freedom in actuality.
Encoded in the word “teleology,” the linear march of history is a simplistic storyline whereby human history has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Along the way, the plot progresses and advances rationally through successive stages, inevitably reaching its predetermined destination. The famous “end of history” that Francis Fukuyama claimed had been achieved in 1989 with the downfall of the Soviet Union and the global dominance of Western capitalism was a distinctly Hegelian proposition. “Rational” capitalism had proven itself superior to “irrational” communism. The End.
Marx, like Fukuyama, inherited this Hegelian logic and succumbed to its tantalizing promise of unfolding destiny.1 However, Marx’s teleology was not concerned with the advance of philosophy or ideas, but was only meaningfully realized in the emancipation of humanity from class oppression. According to Marx, humanity becomes “for itself” through the advance of economic forces, which will free humans from “material want” and thereby eliminate the need for the division of society into rich and poor. Communism is forecast as the final stage of the storyline, when humanity will achieve its end in classlessness and material abundance. In his “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy” (1844), Marx explains this end:
“[Atheism and communism] are not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. They are rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization, of man’s nature as something real” (Bottomore 213).
The core problem is Marx’s understanding of human liberation, which is posited as dependent on economic development. Instead of humanity possessing an innate and natural capacity for freedom, Marx delays “the first real emergence of man’s nature” to the end of history. Concerning himself with the “material conditions” for freedom, Marx fails to appreciate that people are constantly producing these conditions themselves in their own communities (taking care of one another, creating tools to accomplish work more efficiently, etc.), and that class systems like capitalism exist by leeching off those efforts, or impeding them to eliminate competition for institutionalized solutions. The development of massive industrialization and the emergence of powerful States do not bring with them the potential for liberation, but are that which humans must be liberated from.
This is not a question of technology, but of power. I fundamentally do not believe that liberation can be built on a foundation of oppression. Power must not be concentrated, but dispersed. Contrary to Marx, the imposition of class society does not enable progress, it obstructs progress.
Marx Against Nature
Marx’s mistaken logic is repeatedly manifest in his ambivalent attitude towards capitalism. Not understanding capitalism’s constant need to perpetuate terrible violence against the planet, and as Silvia Federici adds (below), against women, Marx assigns a beneficial and essential role to capitalism in his grand storyline. Although terrible for its social injustice, the system is simultaneously hailed as a necessary “advance” by virtue of its unprecedented “development of productive forces.” In Capital, Vol. 3 (unpublished at his death), Marx argues:
“It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it enforces this surplus labour in a manner and under conditions which are more advantageous to the development of the productive forces, social relations, and the creation of the elements for a new and higher form than under the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc.” (Marx-Engels Reader 440).
Today we know that capitalism threatens the very survival of the human species, and perhaps of the Earth itself. The billions of commodities pumped out by capital’s factories for rapid consumption and waste correspond directly to unprecedented damage to the world’s ecosystems. The clear-cutting of forests, the collapse of the ocean’s fisheries, the creation and spillage of toxic chemicals, the exhaustion of the fresh water supply, and the immense pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases – with its corresponding destabilization of the climate – all call our attention to the ecological violence carried out by overdevelopment. Simply put, human economy is exploiting the world’s resources at a drastically unsustainable rate. In this context, any talk of capitalism today as a “higher stage” of development is simply ecocidal.
In Marx’s era, ecology as a science did not exist, and his comments on nature were few and far between. Obviously he could not have foreseen the predicament we are in today. However, there is a dangerous anti-ecological sentiment built into Marx’s linear march of history, which we reproduce at our own peril. It is not simply an academic question of “what Marx really believed.” If freedom is conceived of and built by extending capitalism’s “progress,” Marxists will (have and are) seek to further industrialize and “develop,” at the expense of the planet. Achieving a sustainable economy means not only breaking with capitalism for its mass production and industry, but breaking with a Marxist teleology that ignores humanity’s place in the larger web of life.
Opposing this view is an increasing push by some Marxists to discover an ecological wisdom in Marx. As I was writing this essay, I received an email by the Marxist magazine The Monthly Review, telling me that a new book is coming out by John Bellamy Foster, author of numerous books on this subject, including Marx’s Ecology. The aim of Foster’s writings, and others of the same thought, seems to be to locate any and all passages in Marx and Engels’ huge body of work that suggest at least an ambiguous or vaguely positive view of nature, then weave them together to create a picture of environmentalism. I find this endeavor unconvincing for several reasons – the comments cited by Foster and others are typically tangential to Marx’s main arguments and are often vague in content. On the contrary, Marx’s core argument about historical development is based on directly anti-ecological assumptions, which can only be explained away by performing intellectual gymnastics.
The key issue regards economic growth, or in Marx’s phrase, “the development of productive forces.” In “Wage Labour and Capital” (1847), Marx speaks of production as “action on nature,” revealing his awareness of the ecological basis for human economic activity (M-ER 207). However, rather than speaking of the need to transform economic activity so as to benefit humanity and nature together, Marx speaks simply in terms of quantity of production, to take as much as possible from the Earth. He repeatedly claims that what is needed is to develop the “modern means of production,” the industrial technology and centralization of capitalism.
“Only under [capital’s] rule does the proletariat… create the modern means of production, which become just so many means of its revolutionary emancipation. Only its rule tears up the material roots of feudal society and levels the ground on which alone a proletarian revolution is possible” (588, “The Class Struggles in France” 1850).
This celebration of the advance of industry reflects Marx’s belief that communism will be more capable of rapid industrialization than capitalism. Capitalism is expected to develop the “productive forces” too fast for its own good, leading to crises when production is “fettered” by the irrational organization of “bourgeois property.” From the “Communist Manifesto” (1848):
“The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society… The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them” (478).
Communism is supposed to replace capitalism because its greater rationality will allow it to fully develop the means of production. Therefore, Marx’s historic mission for the proletariat is to seize control of the economy, not to slow down or decentralize industrialization; instead industrial growth is precisely the goal. The “Communist Manifesto” delivers one of Marx’s most important strategic statements:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible (emphasis added)” (490).
The key phrase “increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” reveals much, but could be misinterpreted due to its vague character. Luckily, the same document fleshes this statement out a bit. Marx’s immediate goals for “the most advanced countries” (i.e. Europe) include, “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State,” “Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands,” and “Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture” (490).
The idea that industrialization will bring freedom is laid bare here. Apparently Marx was not aware of, or concerned with, the destruction industrial agriculture would inevitably reap on so-called “waste-lands,” which today we know as the marshes and flood-plains that sustain some of the most diverse ecosystems on land. Protecting precisely these areas from “development” has been one of the primary aims of environmentalism.
In Capital, Vol. 3, Marx makes plain his “Victorian prejudices.” The purpose of developing industry “as rapidly as possible,” is for humanity to succeed in what he sees as its battle with a hostile Nature:
“Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man… Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature” (M-ER 441).2
Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator, was even more blunt on the matter. Engels’ 1880 pamphlet “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” was one of the most important works for popularizing Marx’s theory. The pamphlet was published while Marx was still alive and even included an introduction by Marx, so it is very unlikely that Marx did not give his personal approval to its representation of the pair’s views. The essay explains the view that historical development is a process wherein humanity is liberated from Nature and comes to dominate it. It reaches a climax in this passage explaining the significance of “the seizing of the means of production” and the emergence of communism:
“[F]or the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature… It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” (Marx-Engels Reader 715-6).3
Marx and Engel’s communist utopia, to the extent that they elaborated it, is conceived as a highly developed industrial paradise, where machines produce massive outputs of goods and services with the least amount of labor. Standing atop this virtually unlimited material abundance, humans should theoretically have no reason for competition or division into classes. They will stop acting like “animals” and start behaving “rationally.” Social peace is to be achieved through a cooperative war against nature. As Murray Bookchin summarizes, “In this dialectic of social development, according to Marx, man passes on from the domination of man by nature, to the domination of man by man, and finally to the domination of nature by man.”
Ecology is based on the fact that humans are just as much a part of the fabric of life as any other animal or life-form, and therefore the interests of humanity and nature are not in opposition, but the same. Marx and Engels’ “lord of Nature” statements are not exceptions to their overall theory of social development, but its inevitable end. A linear march of history, whereby “progress” is narrowly understood as stemming from economic growth, cannot be compatible with an ecological perspective.
One may rise to the defense of Marx and Engels and point out the terrible social misery and poverty of 19th century Europe, which would justify the demand for economic growth. In fact, this echoes the thinking of much of the American Left today, living in the most affluent economy that has ever existed, but which still de-prioritizes ecology in favor of the short-sighted demand for investment to “create jobs.” The error of this logic is not that it calls attention to the need for economic resources, but that it places such need in opposition to the needs of the planet. Instead of downscaling and decentralizing the economy so that people can meet their material needs in an ecologically balanced way, capitalism is understood as “necessary” precisely for its immense centralized structures of production and distribution. Critiquing only the distribution and not the production, shallow Leftist politics seek to give more resources to the poor by exploiting the planet to a greater degree.
Now that industrialism threatens to destroy the Earth’s biosphere itself, the bankruptcy of this position should be obvious. One hundred and fifty years after Marx wrote his masterwork Capital, we can now see quite viscerally that capitalism is “advancing” us off a cliff.
Capitalism: A Historic Setback
Marx’s linear march of history not only leads to a dead end, it confuses its beginnings. Specifically, Marx fails to give full weight to the terribly violent origins of capitalism and ultimately justifies these horrors as necessary to reach a “higher stage” of development. However, as Silvia Federici points out, capitalism did not bring social progress with its emergence. On the contrary, it is better understood as a global system of abuse, which for the last 500 years has perpetuated itself through violence against the poor, women, people of color, rural communities, and the planet itself. In this view, “It is impossible to associate capitalism with any form of liberation” (Federici 17). Capitalism is better understood as a historic setback, from which we must recover not by “expropriating” it, but by abolishing it.
Marx does devote space in Capital (1867) to the brutal violence that created the landless European proletariat and launched the capitalist system into dominance over Europe. He refers to these violent beginnings as “primitive accumulation,” or the “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx-Engels Reader 432). What this meant in lay-men’s terms was primarily the driving of Europe’s small farmers and peasants from their land and homes, and forcing people into the wage labor market. In contrast to the “bourgeois historians” who wash over these “enclosures” as merely a matter of “freeing” the workers from serfdom, Marx points out,
“[T]hese new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (433).
Only by eliminating the self-sufficient communities which made up Europe’s working class during the 14th and 15th centuries could capitalism take shape, because it is precisely the existence of a class of laborers who have nowhere to go and no way to provide for themselves asides from working for a wage that distinguishes capitalism from other systems of domination.
Marx also notes the “extirpation” of the American Indians, as well as the enslavement of millions of Africans, as necessary building blocks in the process of primitive accumulation for bringing immense wealth to the emerging European capitalist elite. He concludes: “capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (435).
However, none of this shocking horror prompts Marx to rethink his linear march of history paradigm. Capital, Vol. I ends with a weak and abstract justification for how displacement, slavery and genocide could be compatible with historical progress. For this, Marx returns to Hegel, and suggests that capitalism’s “expropriation” of the world’s population is only paving the way for is negation, communism:
“But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation… the expropriators are expropriated” (438).
Discrediting these meaningless phrases, Silvia Federici – Italian autonomist and feminist – boldly asserts: “Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women (emphasis added)” (12).
Federici has done a great service by making visible the hidden history of “primitive accumulation” through her book Caliban and the Witch. The value of this book is not only that it fills in huge gaps in our knowledge of the origins and continuing bloody nature of capitalism; it also specifically illuminates the attacks on women, queer and trans people necessary for the creation and propagation of this social system.
Caliban and the Witch focuses on the long-ignored topic of the Great Witch Hunt. From the 15th to 17th centuries, being female in Europe was a risky proposition. If someone didn’t like you they could denounce you as a witch, and there was a real chance you would be rounded up by the authorities, accused of copulating with the devil, casting evil spells, consorting at Sabbats after dark, etc. You would most likely be tortured, then executed in the public square in front of relatives and children. Witch-hunting spanned both Catholic and Protestant nations, and the practice was carried out primarily at the hands of Church and State, not by the common person in the street.
The sheer scale and scope of this horror leads Federici to conclude that it was not accidental, but instead locates it as a key form of primitive accumulation:
“Hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries. It should have seemed significant that the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [and] the beginning of the slave trade” (164-5).
The identities of the women targeted by the witch hunts reveals much about the purpose of this campaign of murder. In most cases, their “crimes” were of a sexual or economic nature. The most common offenses were infanticide, abortion, inability or unwillingness to get pregnant, the sterility of a husband or other male, cheating on a spouse, sex of an “unproductive” nature (i.e. non-missionary), as well as theft, the death of livestock, or other misfortunes.
“[T]he witch was not only the midwife, the woman who avoided maternity, or the beggar who eked out a living by stealing some wood or butter from her neighbors. She was also the loose, promiscuous woman – the prostitute or adulteress, and generally, the woman who exercised her sexuality outside the bonds of marriage and procreation. Thus, in the witchcraft trials, ‘ill repute’ was evidence of guilt. The witch was also the rebel woman who talked back, argued, swore, and did not cry under torture” (184).
In short, the witch hunt was primarily a war against female sexuality and female economic independence. Whereas before capitalism, many European women had enough independence to support themselves as healers, midwives, herbalists, gardeners, prostitutes, fortune tellers, etc., the witch hunts eliminated most of these opportunities. By the 17th century most European women had become restricted to the roles of housewife and mother (24-5). As this work of taking care of men and children, which Federici calls “reproductive labor,” was unpaid, while males could hold waged jobs and earn an income, a “new sexual division of labor” was constructed whereby women became dependent on men for economic survival (170).
Another hidden aspect of this history is that the witch hunt also targeted homosexuality and gender non-conformity. Silvia Federici reminds us that among the “unproductive sex” demonized during this time was any sex other than that between one male and one female. Across much of Europe up to that point, homosexuality had been accepted and even celebrated. In the town of Florence, for example, Federici asserts,
“[H]omosexuality was an important part of the social fabric ‘attracting males of all ages, matrimonial conditions and social rank.’ So popular was homosexuality in Florence that prostitutes used to wear male clothes to attract their customers” (58-9).
In the new patriarchal order of capitalist Europe, which was obsessed with controlling reproduction, non-conformity of gender or sexuality were seen as threats to monogamous marriage. An unknown number of queer and trans people lost their lives in the witch burnings, but Federici points out that the word “faggot” remains in our language as a reminder of the terror that converted human beings into kindling for the flame (197).
Silvia Federici’s argument is not that feudalism was a wonderful or idyllic system either – it was still a class society. Instead, she points to the enormous peasant movements and heretical movements active in Europe during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries as indications that in the breakdown of the feudal system, other worlds were possible. In place of Marx’s deterministic formula for “progressive epochs in the economic formation of society,” we can understand that human beings make their own history, either by submitting to systems of oppression and authority, or by working together for collective liberation. There is a constant struggle between those in power and those against it, and the future can go in any direction as that struggle shifts, moves, and evolves.
In this light, Federici argues the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism was not an “evolutionary development” of economic forces, but rather a brutal “counter-revolution” carried out by the old feudal elites and emerging merchant class (21).4 Most of the Crusades, as well as the Inquisition, were levied against Europe’s internal enemies: the poor and working classes. The goal of the repression was to stop the social revolution that was spreading out of control, and spilling over into “national liberation” struggles such as the Peasant’s War of Germany or the Hussite rebellion in what is now the Czech Republic. Recovering the hidden history of these epic clashes embarrasses the view of capitalism as an “advance,” showing that it has only “advanced” over hundreds of thousands of dead peasants and proletarians, destroying their rebellious attempts to create a non-feudal, non-capitalist world.
In the face of this bloody history, it seems no longer morally acceptable to justify the violence of “primitive accumulation” as necessary for historical development. Capitalism did not move us forwards, but backwards. Federici concludes that the creation of capitalism not only reduced human beings to landless proletarians, but introduced new sexual, gender, and racial hierarchies to divide the working class and make revolution significantly more difficult.
“[Primitive accumulation] required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the ‘witches.’ Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress. On the contrary, capitalism has created more brutal and insidious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions – especially those between women and men – that capitalist accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet” (63-4).
Women, queer and trans people, and other oppressed groups in the Global North have all made tremendous strides towards equality and recognition in recent decades. However, Silvia Federici reminds us that “primitive accumulation” did not just launch capitalism, it has accompanied the spread of capitalist relations across the world. At the same time that Northern society has opened up for women and minorities, capitalism has exported more vicious patriarchal violence to much of the Global South, devastating the social fabric. Today we can see it most horrifically in the mass rapes, child slavery and ethnic cleansing of the Congo, where various factions and government armies fight over access to minerals like coltan. The global market for minerals used in laptops, video games and cell phones relies on the cheapening of these resources, and also the cheapening of African lives. With arms money pouring in, some five million Congolese have died in the last eight years. The despair of the Congolese is not natural – it is being manufactured through brutal capitalist enclosures on their self-sufficient ways of life.
In order to uphold Marx’s linear march of history, we would have to ignore, deny, or rationalize these realities of social and ecological trauma. By shelving all “pre-capitalist” cultures as “lower” forms of social development, Marx unfortunately justified the violent imposition of capitalism on his European ancestors (and the rest of the world as I will explain in the next section). As Silvia Federici makes visible, this campaign was directed especially against women, homosexuals and gender non-conformists through the witch hunts. While Marx himself was apparently unaware of the sexual nature of “primitive accumulation,” such ignorance is much harder to justify in our current age of global information.
Postmodernism was largely a response to the failure of Marx’s deterministic narrative. It argued that there is no one single narrative – a thousand ways of understanding the same events are all valid. We don’t have to follow this backlash to its extreme and declare, as some do, that big-picture narratives as such are oppressive. Instead, critiquing the linear Marxist narrative provides an opportunity to generate a more liberating narrative of human history.
A liberating narrative would be one that sees, for example, the autonomous nature of human freedom, being something that people create in their own communities, on an egalitarian basis, in communion with nature and not against it. Class, the State, patriarchy, and all oppressive systems would have to be cast aside as fundamentally destructive, and the impossibility of achieving liberation through the advancement of these forces should be clearly stated. The fortunes of the movement(s) for human emancipation would be understood to go through ups and downs, and although the capitalist epoch has been the most destructive towards humanity and the planet, its end opens up a wide range of possibilities for alternative systems of production and reproduction. As Chris Carlsson pointed out in the quote at the start of this section, there is no single path to liberation, and we cannot demand the entire world follow one.
Because capitalism’s continued assault on the world has proven Marx’s linear march of history untenable, many clear-thinking Marxists have abandoned this theory and are specifically incorporating ecological and feminist wisdom into their politics of class struggle. However, undead notions of “progress” and “development” remain in the muddled thinking of many, reproducing outdated and destructive politics which continue to damage the relevance and moral character of the Left.
In 2010, certainly the worst case of such developmentalist logic shuffles along in the Chinese Communist Party, which in Marx’s name is turning China into a mega-producing and mega-consuming industrial capitalist powerhouse – with dire consequences for the ecosystems of China and the planet as a whole. China is now the second-largest consumer of oil in the world behind the United States, and at Copenhagen last year allied with the U.S. to sabotage a meaningful climate agreement. Now as the Cancun climate talks approach, China’s Zombie-Marxism will likely continue to play a disastrous role, preventing the world leaders from seriously tackling global warming.
Here is an outline of the entire [unfinished] essay.
- Introduction
- My Encounter with Grampa Karl
- What Marx Got Right
- What Marx Got Wrong
- Linear March of History
- Europe as Liberator
- Mysticism of the Proletariat
- The State
- A Secular Dogma
- Hegemony over the Left
- Zombie-Marxism and its Discontents
- Conclusion: Beyond Marx, But Not Without Him
1. Engels summarized the value he and Marx found in Hegel’s “gradual march” of history in his 1880 pamphlet, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”:“In [the Hegelian] system – and herein is its great merit – for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgement-seat of mature philosophical reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena” (M-ER 697).
2. This domination of nature theme was expounded further in an article Marx wrote for the New York Tribune in 1853: “The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world [including] the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies (emphasis added). Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”
3. Engels goes further when he writes, “[If] division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces… The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself (emphasis added)” (M-ER 714-5).
4. Here is Federici’s full quote: “Only if we evoke these struggles [of the European medieval proletariat], with their rich cargo of demands, social and political aspirations, and antagonistic practices, can we understand the role that women had in the crisis of feudalism, and why their power had to be destroyed for capitalism to develop, as it was by the three-century-long persecution of the witches. From the vantage point of this struggle, we can also see that capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the older order. Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave ‘all the world a jolt.’ Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle – possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled” (Federici 21-22).
The End of Capitalism 
17 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 20, 2011 at 2:42 am
Marie Marshall
Fascinating from beginning to end, Alex.
Okay I am going to get on my hobby-horse again. I picked up on Federici’s analysis of the shift in women’s economic position, which came with the onset of capitalism, to one of ‘unpaid’ (i.e. domestic) work. As a person who does both salaried work and unpaid domestic work I know that both are work. In the case of the first I am ‘rewarded’ by being paid the price that a capitalist society has fixed for my paid employment. In the case of the second, although I may not accept the idea that I am the sole domestic drudge in the household and therefore in any way subservient to other members of the household, I am ‘rewarded’ by the satisfaction of the mutual benefit involved.
Here, I believe, lies some of the philosophy needed to liberate ourselves – the basic proof of the social value of work as opposed to its supposed commercial price. I have commented on these lines before. We need to recover that sense of work’s social value if we are to break the bonds of ‘price’. As I said to someone recently when briefly summarising my idea of how work could be viewed: “the principle [is] that if a community makes shoes everyone eats, and if a community makes bread everyone is shod” (see the note below about my blog entry – that’s where it came from I now recall, having read through it again).
Not too long ago I wrote a short blog entry arguing that “what should replace money is the social value of mutual aid”, and I included as ‘money’ any form of ‘currency’, even the vouchers and barter which were used in 1936 in revolutionary Catalonia. http://mairibheag.blogspot.com/2011/07/translating-jaw-dropping-naivety-into.html This post was a wee bit dewy-eyed, though, I have to confess.
I’ll dismount from my hobby-horse now and thank you once again for a fascinating series of articles. I can’t wait to read the next. I am glad to see your appreciation of the late Murray Bookchin, one of the most lucid thinkers of the 20c.
M
September 23, 2011 at 10:50 pm
alex
hey marie!
thanks for being my most consistent commenter!
i agree with you completely about the “social value of work as opposed to its supposed commercial price.” i think this is fundamental and necessary for moving to a world in which we are not dependent on wages for our survival.
however, there are a number of questions arising from this. one is, if we don’t earn a wage for a work, how can we sustain ourselves? this, i think, requires the retaking of land and public space, so that there is a means for subsistence.
also, if we have the choice of doing what work we see as socially valuable, and not just what is “valuable” according to capitalists, what sorts of work would we continue to engage in, and what wouldn’t we? because i believe that a majority of the work done in a capitalist society is largely socially useless, or even harmful.
the related question which Silvia Federici and other women coming out of the Marxist feminist perspective have raised is, how should care work or “reproductive labor” be organized? because currently, individual(!) women are largely burdened with a tremendous amount of this unpaid labor, now in addition to the wage labor they usually have to engage in as well to support their families (thanks, Second Wave feminism!)
i’m kidding a bit, but it seems clear to me that women’s labor (raising children, cleaning, cooking, etc) undergirds the entire society, which would crumble immediately without it, yet this labor is almost entirely unrecognized, while men are compensated for everything from designing useless software to building bombs.
keep it up!
alex
September 24, 2011 at 2:22 am
Marie Marshall
I think there is a difference between the ‘social value of work’ and doing work that is ‘socially valuable’ – it’s a subtle difference, but it’s there. The latter seems a little like making one’s priority sitting down and studying work, and then deciding whether task ‘A’ benefits the community and task ‘B’ doesn’t. It’s an ‘ends’ philosophy. Talking, as I do, about the social value of work is more a ‘process’ philosophy, it starts from the premise that activity has an intrinsic value. Of course sooner or later we have to look at the ‘end’ of a particular activity – in Marx’s day no one was an ecologist; equally in Marx’s day no one was a marketing consultant, these are modern concepts. I say Marx, I could as easily say Bakunin and Kropotkin, in fact I ought to as both B and K are more relevant to my own political philosophy. Nevertheless back in their day mining for resources, industrial production, etc, were simply activities which the workers did and which made the owners rich, and the problem was seen more as how to end the inequality and injustice and make a fairer society, less as whether the activities were harmful in themselves.
This ‘intrinsic value’ of activity is one reason why I often cite the example of helping someone carry their shopping, and compare my doing so for nothing and a porter doing so for a wage. The difference is not in the activity but in how we view it. The same can be said for what you call ‘women’s labor’; the fact that it is unpaid is not the problem, the fact that it is, or can be, unrecognised (I would say ‘unvalued’ rather) IS a problem. However the fact that it is there gives us an important, constant example of work which has a clear social value. Is it in fact ‘unrecognised’? Well, capitalism employs kindergarten staff, nannies, au pairs, cooks, domestic cleaners, housekeepers, etc etc, and it pays them wages, and therefore there is a recognised marketplace ‘price’. The same work done by a ‘homemaker’ is unpaid, but the actual work nevertheless has tremendous social value. There’s where we can turn to for our fundamental example of the whole concept of social value. There’s where we can base our whole (small ‘r’) revolution. A revolution in our attitude to work.
No one has a precise window on the past, but it is my best guess that in ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer communities there must have been individual activities and gender-specific activities but that the communal, societal life was such that everyone was entitled to the food and everyone was entitled to sit at the fire. Thus the activities done by the individual hunter, fire-tender, etc had a clear social value.
Nevertheless it is true that as we develop our hoped-for community which is no longer based on capitalist principles, many activities would drop away as ‘useless’ or ‘harmful’. Here I’ll add a caveat. You cited software and bombs. Don’t knock software when you and I would not be communicating as we do without it. I can see many uses for software in our putative New Jerusalem! Bombs – you and I could do without them, but someone else could still make strong arguments, albeit probably based on a whole stack of statist/capitalist premises with which we disagree, why ‘national defence’ and therefore the production of armaments is useful. I could even imagine my comrades of a previous generation, trying to hold a hopeless line against the advancing army of Franco, cursing me and my pacifism for not providing them with a few more bombs. But this is by-the-by.
Anyhow, assuming that many activities (I would assume those directed towards consumerist consumption in ‘created markets’) would fall away, two things would happen. Firstly a large number of people would be released to be re-engaged in work which would sustain society as a whole. Put it another way, if you like – we would have a lot of unemployed! Okay, as a community we would look after such people while society re-jigged itself. Oh gosh this is beginning to sound like an anarchist version of the ‘great invisible hand’…
Let me come at this another way, then. I can remember that decades ago, as technology began to make light of tasks which had previously been done manually – everything from assembly line work to record keeping – the question was asked “What are we going to do with all the leisure that technology is going to give us?” No one foresaw (though someone should have!) that what would happen was that the guys in suits would all demand that we packed more and more work into the available time, and that leisure would in fact become more and more scarce. My hope is that with the simplification of work, once the ‘useless and/or harmful’ activities under capitalism fall away, leisure will increase. My hope is that we would be able to sustain ourselves, and that the sharing of the work of doing so would lessen its burden. My hope is – just look at my own métier of poet, Alex – that we would become singers, musicians, storytellers, dancers, and artists, that some of us would be needed to teach those skills, thus providing more work of social value to be done, and that the rest of us would sit around and enjoy the songs, the poems, the stories, and the dancing. Idyllic and idealistic? Yes, probably.
At present, Alex, my ideas are higgledy-piggledy. Maybe one day I shall sit down and get them into a book, in orderly fashion. Meanwhile your blog continues to stimulate my thoughts.
I’m going to continue here with some extracts from a comment I made to someone’s blog a few days ago. Their entry was extolling the virtues of hard work, its thrust was the old ‘American Dream’ idea that if you work hard you get on. I advanced some counter arguments. Four days later, notwithstanding that scores of admiring comments have been posted, my counter-arguments remain unmoderated. I wonder why? LOL. I adsmit that a lot of what I wrote was a re-hash of Murray Bookchin’s 1985 lecture ‘Forms of Freedom’, but nevertheless I thought you would be interested:
“The truth is that all work is hard work. The myth is that if you work hard you will get on. No, if you work hard you will get tired. The lure is ‘reward’, and this is where we fall down, not the individualism of the West nor the structured approach of the East. Slice it any way you want but only a small minority (within a capitalist system) can control wealth and power; largely these are either people who had a start or people who – yes – have worked hard. BUT the latter are themselves a minority of the strivers – the ones who got the breaks. Luck does come into it.
However, while this kind of socio-economic system persists we will continue to drive a wedge between those who do have wealth and power and those who do not, and it will have nothing to do with whether those on either side of the divide work hard. By and large they do. It will have nothing to do with whether one side ‘deserve’ their wealth and the other their relative poverty. It will have nothing to do with the supposed virtues which we pin on the ‘successful’ by virtue of their success. The wedge, the existence of advantage, crushes the whole idea of freedom.
We have seen how one answer to this injustice panned out. We saw Bolshevism fail, we saw it replace one set of injustices with another. But we do need an answer because the world may well be running out of the kind of resources that drove capitalism when they were plentiful, people may be (I repeat ‘may be’ not ‘are’) creating more problems in our environment than capitalism can solve with its technology and its enterprise. The latter is too concerned with making and consolidating wealth. So where to look?
To my mind, we need to think right outside the box, to dare to think that our national and corporate structures are harmful to us and not our benefactors, that they guarantee not our liberty but our bondage. We need to make democracy local, free, and open; and we need to cease to regard ‘reward’ (or more properly ‘price’) as the goal of work. We need to replace the commercial, capitalist idea of work as a commodity to be sold with the philosophy of the social value of work. Evolution teaches us that societal species survive hard times better than competitive species, and that therefore mutual aid is a better philosophy than individual success…. . In a community which accepts the philosophy of mutual aid all work becomes work of social value rather than of commercial value. As I put it in an essay elsewhere, ‘if a community makes shoes everyone eats, and if a community makes bread everyone is shod’.
Along with this concept of mutual aid should go a devolution of democracy down to the lowest possible level – a confederation of cooperating communities (forgive the alliteration, I’m a poet) each one based on face-to-face democracy in open meetings where everyone has a voice. Bad news for capitalism and bad news for statecraft, but it needs to be done. These are not unfamiliar, alien concepts, by the way. These are not something foisted on us by Bolshevist ideologues hungry for power. These are things which are there in our histories and cultures, often buried deep, often suppressed by the power of political orthodoxies, but they are our heritage and they should be familiar to us. For an American, for example, the analogy would be the town meetings of New England (which were suppressed when the constitutional framework of the USA was set in stone and power devolved away from the people)…
… Of course in societies like ours, where we have become used to a certain level of affluence, the thought that we are not free hardly occurs to us. We never consider the fact that the state and the corporations that govern our lives so completely are not actually our friends. Our state tells us it protects our freedom, our corporations sell us neat stuff. Setting up communities based on mutual aid, where work has social rather than commercial value, would be one hell of a wrench. We would have to give up a lot of our ‘neat stuff’. I look at it this way: I never had a private jet, so if I never get the chance to have one I won’t miss that; the only difference between giving up that private jet and a handful of ‘luxuries’ (‘neat stuff’) I do have is that I’ll miss them. For a while. So what? I’ll gain freedom, and my work will have a value beyond what it currently has.”
Thanks for giving me the continued opportunity to sound off.
M
September 24, 2011 at 10:27 am
alex
hey marie,
i agree with everything you’re saying, and it is well stated, not “higgledy-piggledy”. :)
i didnt mean to suggest that all software and all bombs are necessarily useless and destructive, only that the majority of software produced for the corporations which control the software is socially useless, and the entirety of the bombs produced for the State is socially destructive.
and again i agree that people should see the social value of work, especially housework. the only problem is that as long as we live in a capitalist society, or a neofascist society or whatever it becomes, where we are excluded from the means to sustain ourselves and our communities, like it or not we ARE dependent on wages for survival. so in this system it matters quite a lot whether you get a wage for your work, and for what work, because that wage is equivalent with your individual means to sustain yourself and family, and not be dependent on someone else. like a housewife being dependent on her wage-earning husband, which keeps her from being able to leave him when he is abusive, to use a classic example.
the flip side is mutual aid, which will hopefully eventually replace the wage system, and it does exist of course in all our communities. i’m not paying you to discuss ideas with me, but it benefits me. and people even feed and house one another (usually temporarily) without expecting compensation. but if capitalism was gone tomorrow and we had to completely sustain ourselves off mutual aid, the vast majority of us would actually die, without access to land.
so as unfortunate as it is that people only do work expecting a wage (like your porter and groceries example), at base it is only a necessary reaction to the fact that without a wage that poor porter could wind up homeless and starving.
i think we’re about as far away from a mutual-aid based society as any human society in the history of the world. so it’s probably going to take a long while before we get back to that. i am hopeful, however, that we will get there.
alex
September 24, 2011 at 11:48 am
Marie Marshall
“i’m not paying you to discuss ideas with me, but it benefits me.”
Well that gives me a rosy glow, Alex, and no mistake.
I can at the very least talk to people about these things, raise awareness. I do realise that the thought of ‘letting go’ of all the assumptions that they have (let’s face it, I probably cling on to them too in a way, being Northern Hemisphere and middle class) is a very frightening prospect. There is risk in any ‘revolution’ and I’m just as scared as anyone else. Hopefully my/our being able to talk about such things will have some kind of effect.
I am given pause by something I read on a right-wing American blog. I was following what was an arguable thesis about the value of the Constitution of the United States, the blogger was articulate and had set out his views in a logical and forthright manner. All that there was to quarrel with was some basic philosophical assumptions. But he said something which I thought was valid – I make no comment as to whether it was ‘sound’ on top of that. He pointed out that whilst the revolutionary leaders in every other revolution he cited, such as the French and the Russian, had nothing to lose, the men who led the American revolution and who framed the Declaration of Independence etc had everything to lose. They were wealthy land-owning men. I only mention it because I want to draw an analogy with my – maybe our – position of relative affluence. That’s what makes taking the steps necessary to liberate ourselves so frightening – the possible loss of comfort and privilege. I have to admit it, it IS comfortable. What isn’t comfortable is my conscience at the thought of being part of a Kyriarchy.
September 24, 2011 at 9:10 pm
alex
that’s my first encounter with the word kyriarchy, which wikipedia happily explained. i think this rapid access to information is the only comfort i might miss in a non-capitalist, non-hierarchical world. it’s great to have tons of knowledge about everything going on around the world, i’m not scoffing at it. but does it compare to having actual freedom, actual democracy, actual community, actual sustainability, actual healing? not a chance. not for me.
i feel in my bones that we have nothing to lose but our chains. i dont consider myself middle class, but working class. i’m deeply in debt and have no significant income. but i dont mean to complain, because i am pursuing the things which are important to me, and money is not one of them.
on the American revolution tip, check out the book The Many Headed Hydra, if you havent. the “Founding Fathers” sold out the real revolutionaries, which Rediker and Linebaugh call the “motley crew” of slaves, sailors, women, immigrants, and the poor. the folks who actually had nothing to lose were/are always at the front, the spokesmen sit comfortably in the rear of events.
alex
September 25, 2011 at 12:01 am
Marie Marshall
Hi Alex.
“The ‘Founding Fathers’ sold out the real revolutionaries…”
Why am I not surprised?
October 15, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Ben
I’m guessing, based on your Outline Links at the end of this Post… that you are not done with this Essay.. You will updates the links when you’re finished with each section, right? Thanks
October 16, 2011 at 3:47 pm
alex
hey ben,
absolutely. i am not done, although it may be quite some time before i get around to finishing it. thanks for inquiring.
alex
October 16, 2011 at 11:57 pm
Ben
Alex,
Well I understand that it can take a while to completely finish, however, if not asking too much, I am most interested in the specific section of “Mysticism of the Proletariat”.. I am very interested to see the “alternative-socialist” point of view of that. If you could point me in the direction of some other resources, perhaps by Murray Bookchin or something similar, that might help explain the mysticism surrounding the proletariat… and so that I can understand ahead of time.
Any response will be gratifying,
Thanks!
December 9, 2011 at 2:01 pm
david tarbuck
Karl Marx as per the historians, economists and philosophers that proceeded him and whose ideas he absorbed and critiqued was An ARROGANT WHITE EUROPEAN!
None of the above ever gave due credit to the Islamic scolars of Alexadria, Syria and Persia ithout whom thwere could not have been a Renaisance or Enlightenment.
Ibn Kaldehn in the 14th century developed a theory of labour value and the reason for growth of cities; this was more than 300 years prior to “Wealth of Nations”. One might suspect plagarism but more likely it was just neglect due to NARROW MINDED WHITE EUROPEANS ignoring contributions from outside of Europe.
December 9, 2011 at 2:14 pm
david tarbuck
Alex,
When Marx or you and I refer to “The Linear March of History” it should be remembered that he/we come from a Judo-Christian background which sees us all as groups and/or individuals sliding down toward the gates of hell before being redeemed.
Transfer this ideology to his materialism and what do we see???.
January 22, 2014 at 12:47 pm
Stefan
Fantastic analysis Alex. I thought I would lend support to the hypothesis that human progress has not been one linear improvement; it seems Hunter-gatherer’s had an egalitarian society which was continent-wide and endured most of human history.
http://information-revolutions.com/chapter01/
January 22, 2014 at 2:44 pm
alex
thanks a lot stefan!
February 10, 2016 at 12:13 pm
alan2102
Yes, HG societies were egalitarian. But things have changed since then. There are now ~100X more of us than could possibly be supported by hunting and gathering. The objective now has to be finding a way to re-egalitarianize society in the context of industrialization and modernity.
Alex’ essay was interesting but flawed.
For one example: “the comments cited by Foster and others are typically tangential to Marx’s main arguments and are often vague in content.” No, not all that “vague in content” if you pay attention. But for the sake of argument, let’s grant what you are saying, in which case I say: Well, yes, of course! What do you expect for 1850? A complete description of modern (circa 2000) environmentalism? Marx did a damned GOOD JOB for 1850!
Damned good job for 1850 — and 1950 too, I would say. Marx’/Engels’ environmentalism was quite forward-looking and prescient, and it is grossly unfair — or perhaps blind — to dismiss their views as “too vague”. Here’s Engels: “Let us not…flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places, it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first… Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature–but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst” end quote
Those words could well have been written by a radical environmentalist of 1980, or for that matter 2015. Where’s the vagueness?
I could give other examples but I don’t have time to write an essay… except to say:
Marx was correct that the productive forces did need to be multiplied many fold; industrialization was critical. Where we slipped up was in not putting together an international revolution in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, thereby bringing industrialism under rational, human needs-oriented guidance and control. Instead, we got industrialism *run amok*, industrialism producing wild excesses of military hardware and a wide variety of other unneeded crap — at, of course, great environmental cost. The problems of industrialization are not problems of industrialization *per se*; they are problems of industrialization as refracted through unchecked capitalism (and now neoliberalism), contemporary corporatism, and the whole onrushing global neofascist/neofeudalist project, which represents a marching backward (contrary to Marx) in human social development. Marx’ big error was in the historical inevitability idea, and perhaps as you say in his linear view which took capitalism to be a necessary step. Regardless, the amplification of productive forces by industrial modernity was and still is essential to the provisioning of a becoming life for everyone on the planet.
To make a wild guess: perhaps 20% of existing industrial capacity would be plenty. That 20% IS truly essential; the other 80% is waste which is maintained by the current (irredeemable) order, and which is wrecking the planet.
May 8, 2016 at 9:18 pm
alex
I like your idea that about 80% of industry simply produces waste. It may even be more than that. But why do you say “the productive forces did need to be multiplied many fold”? For what purpose? Doesn’t industrialization, under whatever regime, mean not only more waste, but more work, more dehumanization, more specialization, and therefore more hierarchy?
August 7, 2015 at 9:37 am
Angad Patwardhan
Hey Alex,
I first got introduced to your website about 3 years ago through this very article (Part 1 then). I have been associated with a radical group of youngsters in Pune, India for a few years who work on various socio-poilitico-economic issues ranging from the local to the international level, as resources & “human-power” permit.
Although most of the members there are college students & young professionals under 35 years of age, the founders & “guides” are a handful of people who’ve been in various Left movements for 3 decades or so. Thus I sometimes find Zombie-Marxist ideas (as you put them) creeping into the thought process, although I must say that this is a really progressive & democratic group that I have come across & continues to be so.
I was extremely intrigued by Part 3 of this essay as it’s very hard to come across a Leftist who would critique Marx’ work. (Like you said, most Leftists just take his word as the Gospel & often just turn a deaf ear to critiques!) And although I admit I’ve not been a regular follower of your website, I urge you to complete this last bit at the earliest. I totally understand that this might take up a considerable amount of your time, so if it helps, I would like your take on at least 2 of the sub-topics (in that priority):
1. A Secular Dogma
2. Mysticism of the Proletariat
[This is just a preference, if it takes up less of your time, though I know you’d like to complete the article and in the order you’ve decided :-) ]
Please do finish it when you get time. Thanks!!
Regards,
Angad