From: michael a. lebowitz (mlebowit@sfu.ca)
Date: Fri Oct 18 2002 - 15:31:55 EDT
At 12:38 17/10/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>Does anyone know who said when and where that the transition from capitalism
>to communism was fundamentally different from the transition from feudalism
>to capitalism, in the sense that capitalism grew up in the interstices of
>feudalism, whereas communism could not grow up in the interstices of
>capitalism?
>
> John
John,
There may be others who made similar points, but Evgeny
Preobrazhensky in his The New Economics (Oxford, 1965) in his argument for
'primitive socialist accumulation' argues 'that socialist accumulation can
begin only after the proletarian revolution, whereas the process of
primitive capitalist accumulation begins and goes on before the bourgeois
revolutions (116).' It's a very interesting discussion of a process of
contested reproduction-- marred, I would suggest, by the tendency to
identify socialism with industry (regardless of its productive relations)
and to miss the point that primitive capitalist accumulation for Marx
referred first of all to a change in productive relations within
agriculture. I suspect this latter question is not what interests you,
though. Are you proposing that, within capitalism, we can identify the
emergence of new, communist relations (and, thus, such a contrast is
incorrect)?
in solidarity,
mike
Michael A. Lebowitz
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Office: Phone (604) 291-4669
Fax (604) 291-5944
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