Jurriaan and others, In my view, Marx's oraculous pronouncement, that mankind only sets itself such tasks that it it is able to solve, stems from Marx's belief that all relevant contradictions are internal contractions. This is one of the legacies from Hegel which he didn't manage to rid himself of sufficiently. Let's look at the English factory legislation limiting the length of the working day, which was analyzed by Marx. The problem was: capital destroyed its own working class by overworking them. Market forces did not stop it because there was a fresh influx of labor from the countryside. I think Juriaan would argue: the solution was possible because this is a man-made problem and therefore these same economic agents can also unmake the problem. In other words, the capitalists themselves would eventually have to come to their senses and say: "this is absurd, we cannot destroy our own working class." Juriaan, would you agree that what you wrote would have to be applied in this way to the situation of the working-day? Now Marx explicitly ruled this out as a possible solution. He wrote that capital is not moved by the prospect of depopulating the earth any more than by the probable fall of the earth into the sun, and he wrote repeatedly that without the resistance of the working class this legislation would never have been passed. By the way, Marx also never even hinted at a kind of solution which you find often among today's Marxist debates: namely, to say, we have to solve this problem by abolishing capitalism. There is no way capitalism could have been abolished in time for the English working class to be salvaged from the ravages of capitalist profit-making in the 1800s. I don't think Marx would have considered it as a possible solution to the problem. Well, what *was* the solution? The solution was that capital had socialized production so much that it had become necessary for the interest of the ruling class itself to heed, to some extent, the interest of the working class. This is the principle which was so famously victorious. The same socialization of production which gave the capitalists unlimited economic power over the workers, by their ability to replace workers with machines, also forced them to let the working class have a voice, because without this voice, the capitalists themselves, only following their class interest, would run capitalism into the ground. They didn't give this voice voluntarily, this would have been against their class interest, but the working class fought for it. The problem arose with the means for its solutioin because the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class is an internal contradiction. They are interdependent and they are both political and economic actors in the same society, this is why the working class could achieve a shortening of the working day without overturning capitalism itself. (Of course, Marx hoped that the workers now would have enough time at their hands that they would achieve the latter goal too.) Unfortunately, things are much more sinister if you are talking about external contradictions. Marx did not believe that capitalism would be brought down by external contractions. He thought capital would be able to resolve all external contradictions in its favor and then would succumb to its internal contraditions. But the limitedness of the resources of our planet, which is now an external barrier to capitalism, is a task which has arisen *without* the means of its solution. Dolphins and rain forests do not have political clout, and those who would have political clout, the working class, do not suffer immediately enough to be stirred into a fight. Hans G. Ehrbar
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