Saturday 18 July 2020

What The Friends of The People Are, Part III - Part 15

But, even having been forced into these correct conclusions, having failed to analyse the actual extent to which capitalism now pervaded the economy both in industrial production, and now also in agriculture, Krivenko cannot accept the conclusion, which flows from that. The idea that this exploitation and spread of capitalist relations was “natural”, Krivenko says, was the view of “some people”. He means the bourgeois proponents of capitalism, on the one hand, and the Marxists on the other. For the Marxists, of course, the question of natural and unnatural was irrelevant, because they began from an analysis of what is, and not what ought to be. The Narodniks, however, could not accept such a conclusion, because it contradicted their moral perspective of how things should be, and their subjectivist sociology and schemas for the natural path of development. Krivenko says, 

““We look at the matter somewhat differently. Capitalism undoubtedly does play an important part here, as we pointed out above” (this refers to the remark about the school of blood-suckers and farm labourers), “but it cannot be said that its role is so all-embracing and decisive that no other factors are responsible for the changes taking place in the national economy, and that the future holds out no other solution” (p. 160).” (p 231) 

This is the same methodology today employed by those who want to portray capitalism as being in terminal decline, a desire whose main source appears to be a dogmatic insistence on trying to defend the assumptions and conclusions set out by Lenin in his 1916 polemical pamphlet, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”. Those that do this in turning the pamphlet into holy writ, betray the very method of Lenin and Marx. Those who today purvey this nonsense actually desert Marx's analysis of capital and the source of surplus value

In fact, they even revert to a level of understanding prior to Adam Smith, back to the Mercantilists. On the basis of their dogmatic insistence that capitalism is in terminal decline, a concept that is often linked to an insistence on the primacy of the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and its role in causing crises of overproduction (a role that Marx never ascribed to it), and now incapable of being in any way progressive, they find themselves in a similar bind to that faced by the Narodniks. 

If capitalism is in terminal decline, as Lenin assumed in 1916, then, how come, in the 1920's, and 1930's, it once again massively revolutionised production? How come, in the post war period, on the back of that revolution in production, it created whole new industries, brought about massive rises in productivity, and raised living standards more than at any previous time in history? And, yes, that particular boom came to an end in 1974, as a period of crisis began, but that period of crises of overproduction, in turn, provoked a new period of technological revolution to replace labour. The technological revolution it evoked was again greater than any previously seen in history, unleashing the power of the atom and the microchip, which, in turn brought revolutions in genetic engineering, micro-biology, space technology, material science, and telecommunications. It created the basis for the start of a new long wave uptrend that began in 1999. And, the extent of this technological revolution is expressed in terms of the volume of production. Of all goods and services produced during Man's entire existence, 25% of them were produced in the first decade of the 21st century. 

And, whilst the Narodniks were faced with the problem of explaining where large-scale capitalist industry, in Russia, came from, whilst denying the existence of capitalism in “people's industry”, and agriculture, so, today, those that proclaim that capitalism is in its death agony have a similar problem in explaining, not only the continued vitality of capitalism, but also its repeatedly new vigour, and its expansion to ever new regions of the globe. And, like the Narodniks they try to explain this by essentially exogenous factors. 

So, the post war expansion is explained by imperialism and a super exploitation of colonies. When its pointed out that the post war period was also a period of decolonisation, itself insisted on by the US, then its responded to by the claim that decolonisation is a fraud, and that the politically independent former colonies are essentially still neo-colonies, subordinated to their former colonial masters. Yet, of course, the reason the US insisted that the Europeans decolonised was precisely to ensure that such domination was ended, so that US multinational capital could supplant them! The whole point about this development is that, unlike colonialism, which did extract surplus on the basis of unequal exchange, via merchants profits, and by the extraction of rents and interest, imperialism is a system based upon the dominance of industrial capitalism. Industrial capital extracts surplus value in production, and that is precisely what multinational capital does. Such a process is inextricable from the process of development of capitalism, of the creation and expansion of a domestic market, the expansion of commodity production and exchange, the creation of a large domestic working-class and bourgeoisie, which concentrates and centralises means of production as capital, to produce commodities for the expanding domestic market. In all these ways, imperialism/capitalism fulfils a progressive function

So, the proponents of the idea that the continued survival of capitalism in the imperialist heartlands is due to this super-exploitation of less developed economies, not only abandons Marx's analysis of capital accumulation, it also fails to explain how the imperialist heartlands can continue to prosper by draining even more blood from the stone that is the poverty of those super-exploited economies. What is more, they fail to explain why significant numbers of those economies, rather than being driven into greater and greater degrees of misery, as a result of such super-exploitation, and a “development of underdevelopment”, have instead become developed capitalist economies themselves. 

China has become the third biggest economy after the EU and US. India is now a larger economy than its former colonial master, Britain. Large Indian conglomerates like Tata and Mittal own large parts of the British economy, such as its steel industry, Jaguar Land Rover and part of the former ICI. With Britain outside the EU, its economy will soon be smaller than those of Mexico, South Korea and other rapidly developing economies.

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