If we take capitalism, then, Marx sets out that it is the most progressive form of society ever seen, because it has brought about these changes on a far greater scale, and at a faster pace than anything that went before. But, along with it goes all of the horrors too. In addition, goes the role of the capitalist in seeking to maximise the exploitation of the worker, i.e. to maximise the rate of surplus value, and, when the workers respond by forming unions, and taking strike action, it includes the role of the capitalist state in trying to break these strikes. The actions of the capitalists, and of their state flow inevitably from the drive of capital to maximise exploitation and accumulation, which is precisely the basis of the progressive nature of capitalism!
To pose the question of whether this action by the capitalist and the state is, also, then, progressive is to adopt the same moralising approach as Sismondi and Proudhon. The two things are inseparable. For so long as the workers are not strong enough, the forces of production not developed enough, to overthrow capitalism then they have to accept both aspects of capitalism, and, indeed, its most rapid development is, also, thereby, in their interest, as Marx notes in Wage Labour and Capital, and Lenin notes in Two Tactics of Social Democracy.
“And from these principles it follows that the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary. In countries like Russia, the working class suffers not so much from capitalism as from the insufficient development of capitalism. The working class is therefore decidedly interested in the broadest, freest and most rapid development of capitalism. The removal of all the remnants of the old order which are hampering the broad, free and rapid development of capitalism is of decided advantage to the working class.”
And, the same is rue of imperialism, the highest, most dynamic, and rational form of capitalism. It creates the world economy, and drives towards a single world market, free from the restrictions of borders, and so also creates a global working-class, as opposed to a series of working classes, divided by nationality. But, the drive to abolish those national borders, progressive in itself, is done via wars and annexations, as one nation state seeks to impose itself.
In the same way, therefore, the historic mission of imperialism is objectively progressive, but that does not mean that we have to see that role of militarism, and imperialist war as progressive, any more than we must see the role of the state, and its police and army, in breaking strikes, as progressive. What is progressive is the socialist opposition to such wars, and the alternative to it that such opposition engenders. Nevertheless, as Trotsky pointed out, so long as we are not able to overthrow capitalism, and its state, we will have imperialist wars and militarism, as the cost of that progress.
“Imperialism is the capitalist-thievish expression of this tendency of modern economy to tear itself completely away from the idiocy of national narrowness, as it did previously with regard to local and provincial confinement. While fighting against the imperialist form of economic centralization, socialism does not at all take a stand against the particular tendency as such but, on the contrary, makes the tendency its own guiding principle.”
It does not require socialists to acquiesce in it, any more than in the strike-breaking activities of the police, but to simply bemoan both, without explaining their necessity, under capitalism, and so the need to overthrow it, is just bourgeois moralising.
“The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category.
The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad.” (p 103)
As Lenin describes, this was also the method of the Narodniks. They wanted the aspects of Russian feudal/Asiatic society they considered “good”, such as independent small commodity production, labour-service, rather than money economy, and village production, but without the landlordism and so on that was the “bad” side of that society, but which was equally inseparable from it. What is more, as Lenin describes, the small commodity production they sought to defend leads inevitably, via competition, to money economy, to differentiation into bourgeois and proletarians, and, thereby, to the capitalism they believed was some kind of abnormal path of development for Russia. The same reactionary ideas can be seen in the arguments of “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists” today.
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