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en:subsumption [2011/10/31 11:33]
titorelli |
en:subsumption [2015/04/12 21:08] (current)
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| >We have seen that the methods that have been explored by generations of revolutionaries … have had as a common feature to be impasses, or worse: ways to increase domination. … [T]he world is more capitalist than ever. All the spheres in society are now more or less integrated within the logic of value. (//Dissident// no. 3, p. 6) | >We have seen that the methods that have been explored by generations of revolutionaries … have had as a common feature to be impasses, or worse: ways to increase domination. … [T]he world is more capitalist than ever. All the spheres in society are now more or less integrated within the logic of value. (//Dissident// no. 3, p. 6) |
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| These assertions could have been taken from "Communism of attack and communism of withdrawal" and it was this very scepticism towards the communist potential of class struggle that induced its author to take refuge outside. In 2005 the outside was regarded as the rescue since it stood free from and didn’t reproduce the capital relation. Three years later, as we just saw, even this outside has fallen back into the capitalist cogs and become a part of its dynamic, "a strengthening of the capital logic", if only "in the worst case". They still place their hopes in the outside because it is seen as just as reactionary as class struggle only sometimes, when this concerns "sporadic attempts and isolated events", that is when the outside doesn’t become generalised. | |
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| ===== How has the world become more capitalist? ===== | ===== How has the world become more capitalist? ===== |
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| Let’s put the outside aside and dwell a while upon the question of why the world has indeed become more capitalist. Here Dissident is right concerning one thing: that class struggle has all along been at the centre of this development. This insight goes beyond the vulgar objectivist Marxism which conceives of capital as something separate from class struggle, as an external force that, like a gang of bandits on the rampage, tries to lay its grubby hands upon the products of the workers. As this happens, the workers need to hold their own and to defend themselves by means of a class struggle that mitigates the ravages of the capitalists and restrains their desperate strive for profits. According to this view the relation between capital and labour is a tug-of-war where one of the sides can be strengthened at expense of the other’s and where the possible outcome becomes a question of relative strengths. On this point, Dissident has drawn the same conclusion as riff-raff, that the pole of labour can never be anything without its opposite pole capital, i.e. that both of them form a unity, from which follows the understanding that an affirmation of labour does not mean the suppression of capital. | Here Dissident is right concerning one thing: that class struggle has all along been at the centre of this development. This insight goes beyond the vulgar objectivist Marxism which conceives of capital as something separate from class struggle, as an external force that, like a gang of bandits on the rampage, tries to lay its grubby hands upon the products of the workers. As this happens, the workers need to hold their own and to defend themselves by means of a class struggle that mitigates the ravages of the capitalists and restrains their desperate strive for profits. According to this view the relation between capital and labour is a tug-of-war where one of the sides can be strengthened at expense of the other’s and where the possible outcome becomes a question of relative strengths. On this point, Dissident has drawn the same conclusion as riff-raff, that the pole of labour can never be anything without its opposite pole capital, i.e. that both of them form a unity, from which follows the understanding that an affirmation of labour does not mean the suppression of capital. |
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| This was something we saw an example of in Russia, after the proletariat's seizure of power in 1917. Even though the structure of property was shaken at its very foundations, the proletarian dictatorship never led to the destruction of capital because as soon as the private capitalists were gone, it fell upon the party of the workers, i.e. the Bolsheviks, to resume production, which became reorganised under state control. Henceforth, the main task of the party was to make sure that an increased surplus product was exacted from the workers and that the peasants became proletarianisied into this working class. We could also take Swedish social democracy as an example: gradually, the great organisational gains and their growing importance to the whole of society made it into a force which came to influence social progress. Over time, the social democratic leadership became aware of the fact that labour can’t be strengthened at the expense of capital; with great power there must come great responsibility and thus the workers’ movement should make sure that business prospered, the profits of which would indirectly also benefit the workers. In this spirit great social projects such as the construction of a public system of child care, which facilitated the entrance of women into wage labour, were to be worked out in the interests of the workers as well as the industry. In this way, sphere after sphere became "integrated within the logic of value", with the help from the workers’ movement. | This was something we saw an example of in Russia, after the proletariat's seizure of power in 1917. Even though the structure of property was shaken at its very foundations, the proletarian dictatorship never led to the destruction of capital because as soon as the private capitalists were gone, it fell upon the party of the workers, i.e. the Bolsheviks, to resume production, which became reorganised under state control. Henceforth, the main task of the party was to make sure that an increased surplus product was exacted from the workers and that the peasants became proletarianisied into this working class. We could also take Swedish social democracy as an example: gradually, the great organisational gains and their growing importance to the whole of society made it into a force which came to influence social progress. Over time, the social democratic leadership became aware of the fact that labour can’t be strengthened at the expense of capital; with great power there must come great responsibility and thus the workers’ movement should make sure that business prospered, the profits of which would indirectly also benefit the workers. In this spirit great social projects such as the construction of a public system of child care, which facilitated the entrance of women into wage labour, were to be worked out in the interests of the workers as well as the industry. In this way, sphere after sphere became "integrated within the logic of value", with the help from the workers’ movement. |