- 10 Feb 2018 03:08
#14887655
This is still sort of the big question.
The argument, on both sides, is that Marx didn’t see an imperialist world with a fully integrated global economy.
On the one hand, that this development will be a little more peaceful, as you wonderfully laid out:
The idea being that all the big imperialist countries will realize that their best interest is in a single global market that they rule jointly together, crushing down dissent in the occupied countries and so on and so forth. From this globalized single ultra-imperialism a joint revolution may take place as people of Rarth rise together against their oppressors, maybe in an ideological way with little violence, and blossom into a better system.
Then you have the other big voice from a century ago:
That is to say, capital continues to need to always expand. At a smaller level, we know a board of directors will never look at making the same profits as the year before as a stunning success, but instead as a miserable failure. If nothing else, as they are in competition. The same applies, in this theory, to imperialist nations which will always compete with each other for more of the globe.
In this version a violent upheaval is assured, and at the right moment (like after a World War) the system becomes vulnerable and violent revolution is virtually assured.
It seems to me that the latter is more demonstrably true. We have seen that repeated over and over, while we have yet to see a big global federation set up that can easily translate into anything like a peaceful transition of power to the proletariat.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
Tainari88 wrote:@The Immortal Goon I think Marx discussed how the material conditions determine how humans go about their social and economic relations. As such? Property and how it becomes the essence of power relations between social classes is very clear and unequivocal in Marxist thought. The bottom line is feudalism had to be replaced because the economy was restructured and that social/economic relationship of feudal lord and his serfs was no longer valid and or functional for capitalist economies.
Then the hybrid between capitalism and socialism evolved out of the need to stabilize capitalist boom or bust economic structures that created mass instability and threatened to change socioeconomic relations and power relations again. There will be the next stages in which the wealth and the productive harnessing of labor and information and technology and land and property will again have to be restructured to conform to changing material conditions.
In that? It all is following a smooth pattern. The argument then becomes if it will be fairly fast transition or a gradual one. I think it will happen quickly. The old structures will just bottom out due to the wealth inequality being so massively extreme that everything is explosive and change will be forced to come fast just to avoid catastrophe. What is your opinion?
This is still sort of the big question.
The argument, on both sides, is that Marx didn’t see an imperialist world with a fully integrated global economy.
On the one hand, that this development will be a little more peaceful, as you wonderfully laid out:
Kautsky wrote:What Marx said of capitalism can also be applied to imperialism: monopoly creates competition and competition monopoly. The frantic competition of giant firms, giant banks and multi-millionaires obliged the great financial groups, who were absorbing the small ones, to think up the notion of the cartel. In the same way, the result of the World War between the great imperialist powers may be a federation of the strongest, who renounce their arms race.
Hence from the purely economic standpoint it is not impossible that capitalism may still Jive through another phase, the translation of cartellization into foreign policy: a phase of ultra-imperialism, which of course we must struggle against as energetically as we do against imperialism, but whose perils lie in another direction, not in that of the arms race and the threat to world peace.
...From the purely economic standpoint, however, there is nothing further to prevent this violent explosion finally replacing imperialism by a holy alliance of the imperialists. The longer the War lasts, the more it exhausts all tile participants and makes them recoil from an early repetition of armed conflict, the nearer we come to this last solution, however unlikely it may seem at the moment.
The idea being that all the big imperialist countries will realize that their best interest is in a single global market that they rule jointly together, crushing down dissent in the occupied countries and so on and so forth. From this globalized single ultra-imperialism a joint revolution may take place as people of Rarth rise together against their oppressors, maybe in an ideological way with little violence, and blossom into a better system.
Then you have the other big voice from a century ago:
Lenin wrote:There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.
Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America, who have been badly done out of their share by the present partition of colonies, and the increase of whose might during the last fifty years has been immeasurably more rapid than that of backward and monarchist Europe, now turning senile. Compared with the United States of America, Europe as a whole denotes economic stagnation. On the present economic basis, i.e., under capitalism, a United States of Europe would signify an organisation of reaction to retard America’s more rapid development. The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe alone have gone for ever.
That is to say, capital continues to need to always expand. At a smaller level, we know a board of directors will never look at making the same profits as the year before as a stunning success, but instead as a miserable failure. If nothing else, as they are in competition. The same applies, in this theory, to imperialist nations which will always compete with each other for more of the globe.
In this version a violent upheaval is assured, and at the right moment (like after a World War) the system becomes vulnerable and violent revolution is virtually assured.
It seems to me that the latter is more demonstrably true. We have seen that repeated over and over, while we have yet to see a big global federation set up that can easily translate into anything like a peaceful transition of power to the proletariat.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!