Similarly, it can be said that capitalism is not progressive compared to the range of fantasies that the petty-bourgeois dream up as more acceptable schemas of development. But, they are precisely that, Utopian schemas of development not based upon reality, and so reactionary. Of course, it can be said that capitalism/imperialism is not progressive compared to Socialism, but the obvious problem, here, is that Socialism also does not exist!!! This is directly comparable to the position of the Narodnik socialists of the 1870's, who complained that capitalism was harmful, and yet could only make this argument on the basis of a comparison with their Utopian schemas for an alternative path that not only did not exist, but could not exist, in the given conditions.
That is precisely the point that Marx and Engels made to them. After 1861, Russia was set on a path of capitalist development that meant that the village commune was doomed. The only thing that could have changed that would have been if workers in Western Europe had undertaken a socialist revolution. Then, that could have acted as a model of an alternative form of society for Russia. The workers in the West could have provided the Russian workers and peasants with the technology required, directly, so that they could avoid going through a capitalist stage of development.
But, the workers, elsewhere, had not carried through such socialist revolutions, and so this possibility did not exist. The only path available for Russia was then the same as that of Western Europe, North America and Japan. And, once started down that road, the faster it is travelled the better. That is what Engels sets out in his Letter to Danielson, explaining why this rapid capitalist development offered Russia “new hope”.
Similarly, absent socialist revolutions, still. It remains capitalism/imperialism that offers “new hope” to large swathes of the globe that remain economically undeveloped, and given that, in many of these countries, the main obstacle to development is lack of capital, the fastest route to the accumulation of such capital is via direct investment by large multinational companies. Opposition to such investment by the “anti-imperialists”, on the basis that it is “harmful”, and involves the “super-exploitation” of the recipients is a direct parallel to the arguments and theories of the Narodniks. It is Utopian, suggesting that there is some other “non-capitalist” route to development, for these countries, when, in reality, given current conditions, no such alternative path exists.
Indeed, after the revolution, Lenin himself put great store in trying to get the multinational companies of his day to invest in Russia, accepting the fact that this meant allowing them to to exploit Russia's resources and to extract surplus value from Russian workers. This was a price Russia had to pay for the low level of capitalist development, at the time of the revolution, compared to other developed capitalist economies. Trotsky made the same point in relation to Mexico.
“Despite all these advantages (enjoyed by the USSR, AB) the industrial reconstruction of the country was begun with the granting of concessions. Lenin accorded great importance to these concessions for the economic development of the country and for the technical and administrative education of Soviet personnel. There has been no socialist revolution in Mexico. The international situation does not even allow for the cancellation of the public debt. The country we repeat is poor. Under such conditions it would be almost suicidal to close the doors to foreign capital. To construct state capitalism, capital is necessary.”
(On Mexico's Second Six Year Plan)
Of course, if an international socialist revolution had spread across Europe, after 1917, then material conditions would be different. Non-industrialised, or less developed countries would than have been able to look to this socialist bloc as a model of an alternative path of development. The workers in this socialist bloc could have provided the advanced technology that workers and peasants in the industrialising nations required, in the way Marx and Engels had suggested. Indeed, the deformed workers' states did offer such an alternative, and its offspring was the Third World Movement. But, given the deformed nature of those workers' states, and the petty bourgeois ideology of Stalinism itself, it could never create anything other than a Frankenstein's Monster, in its own image. And, given that workers failed to carry through the necessary political revolution, to push society forward through its transitional phase, founded upon socialised capital, it was only a matter of time before a political counter-revolution took place, and the ruling class, now having assumed their mature form as rentiers, owners of fictitious capital, imposed their own political regime.
So, now, not even the dead-end of the bureaucratic, state-capitalist model of development based upon the deformed workers' states exists as an alternative to the market-oriented, capitalist model of development. For every country seeking development, it is this path of capitalist development that alone offers, in Engels' words, “new hope”. It is why it remains progressive compared to all of the modes of production it superseded, and compared to a so far non-existent socialism. Only when workers in Europe or North America establish socialism on an extensive international basis, does this material condition change, so that workers and peasants, elsewhere, have a credible and real progressive alternative path to follow.
“He does not understand that, by replacing the form of exploitation which tied the working man to his locality with one that flings him from place to place all over the country, the “bourgeois trend” has done a good job; that, by replacing the form of exploitation under which the appropriation of the surplus product was tangled up in the personal relations between the exploiter and the producer, in mutual civic political obligations, in the “provision of an allotment,” etc.,—by replacing this with a form of exploitation that substitutes “callous cash payment” for all that and equates labour-power with any other commodity or thing, the “bourgeois trend” strips exploitation of all its obscurities and illusions, and that to do so is a great service.” (p 384-5)
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