Re: OPE-L Paresh Chattopadhyay CAPITAL, THE PROGENITOR OF SOCIALISM: PROGRESS AS THE DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY

From: Paul Bullock (paulbullock@EBMS-LTD.CO.UK)
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 17:12:50 EST 

Michael,
why have you sent this? what was the point of the paper in relation to Cuba now?

Paul B.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: michael a. lebowitz 
  To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU 
  Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 2:50 AM
  Subject: Re: OPE-L Paresh Chattopadhyay CAPITAL, THE PROGENITOR OF SOCIALISM: PROGRESS AS THE DIALECTIC OF NEGATIVITY


  Apropos, here's the abstract for the paper that Paresh wrote for this year's Marx conference in Havana. You'll note his closing line re the Soviet experience--- "Marx, indeed, had the last laugh."

                                       Two Approaches to Socialist Revolution :Marx vs.Lenin-Trotsky
                                                                         Russia 1917
                                                                           Abstract
   
  Following Marx,a society of free and associated producers---socialism---is a product of history,not of nature or arbitrary will.Individuals cannot bring their own social relations under their proper control before having created them.Indeed,new,hier relations of production do not appear  before its matériel conditions of existence have already been hatched within the womb of the old society itself.And if in the existing society we do not find in a latent form the matériel  conditions of production and corresponding relations of circulation for a classless soceity,all attempts at exploding the present society would be don Quixotism.These conditions are basically,first,the existence of the proletariat---« the greatest productive power »----occupying at least a significant position in society,and,secondly,the universal development of productive forces and socialization of labour and production.Given these conditions,socialist revolution begins when capital has reached a situation where the productive powers it has generated---including its « greatest productive power »---can no longer advance on the basis of the existing relations of production.Socialist revolution itself is seen as an immense emancipatory project---based on workers' self-emacipation leading to the emancipation of the whole humanity---whose very first step is the « conquest of democracy »,
  the rule of the immense majority in the inter est of the immense majority.
      Against this profound materialist perspective Lenin(and Trotsky) avanced the thesis that socialist revolution could(would) break out where the chain of world capitalism­subject to the law  of unevenand combined development­has its  weakestlink,that is,its productive powers  are least developed .This 'weakest link' thesis became a canon of the dominant Left as well as of those sympathetic to the Bolshevik regime. However,they were dismissing Marx too rapidly.Lenin soon real ized that a largely pre-capitalist country with a low level of productive forces and a backward working class required the development of capitalism­of course under a 'proletarian' state­in order to reach socialism later.This is seen in Lenin's own pronouncements of the post-1917 period as well as the corresponding measures undertaken by the new regime.It need not be stressed that the development of capitalism is not the task of a    SOCIALIST REVOLUTION.
  Similarly,far from inaugurating a socialist revolution as a self-emancipatory act of the toilers themselves,'conquering democracy' as a 'first step',October 1917 saw the seizure and monopolisation of power by a tiny minority in the name of the toilers independently of and,in fact,behind the back of their already established organs of self administrstion,putting a définite brake on the immense pluralist and democratic process started by the spontaneous revolutionary upheaval of the entire mass of the Russian toilers,,rapidly destroying in the process thetoilers own organsof self-rule.In the event,never able to suppresscommodity and wage relations,the regime,particularly after the civil war,took conscious measaures to widen them rapidly and in the process consummateda bourgeois non-democratic  revolution.Marx,indeed,had the last laugh.
                                                                                    Paresh Chattopadhyay
                                                                                      University of Quebec at Montreal



  ---------------------
  Michael A. Lebowitz
  Professor Emeritus
  Economics Department
  Simon Fraser University
  Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
  Office Fax:   (604) 291-5944
  Home:   Phone (604) 689-9510

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