From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2006 - 14:26:00 EDT
A useful corrective by Michael Hoover, on Marxmail: (http://www.marxmail.org/msg16399.html) Those who suppose that Marx emphasized only the negative features of capitalism such as alienation, crisis, and exploitation are mistaken. Indeed, throughout his intellectual career - in his philosophical, journalistic, historical, and economic writings - Marx consistently stressed the creative and progressive features of capitalism. His social theory makes no sense unless this essential duality is retained. For Marx, capitalism is creative and progressive with respect to the past (pre-capitalist societies), the present (capitalism itself), and the future (post-capitalist society). First, capitalism has "revolutionizing properties" in transforming all past social, economic, and political relations, thus creating conditions for the consolidation and universal development of capitalism. Marx regarded this revolutionary abolition of the past, which he ascribed directly to the bourgeoisie, to be a more protracted, violent, and difficult process than would be the transformation of capitalism into socialism. Second, capitalism has "universalizing properties". That is, commodity production promotes the internal (intensive) and external (extensive) development of capitalist relations of production through space and time, drawing all people into a web of economically-based social contacts and dependencies. Universalization thus implies a constant revolutionizing of the present as capital strives to overcome all obstacles to its general development. Third, capitalism has "industrializing properties". The logic of accumulation initiates and sustains an industrial revolution that constantly develops the forces of production, thus radically enhancing the power of social labor. Fourth, capitalism is said to have "liberating properties" in that the revolutionizing, universalizing, and industrializing tendencies establish the oberjective and subjective conditions for the transition to socialism. Development of the productive powers of the economy provides the material abundance that without which socialism would necessarily remain a "struggle for necessities". Moreover, the tendency of the system to maximize surplus labor time relative to necessary labor time holds out the promise of the appropriation of that surplus time as leisure or free time for the producing classes, thus allowing for the universal extension of civilization, and the development of humanity as a rich individuality. Most importantly for Marx, capitalist development generated the proletariat as a universal class, universal in the sense that in pursuit of its particular class interests (abolition of oppression and poverty) it promotes the general interest (abolition of private property, hence, of capitalism). In addition, capitalist industry socially organizes this class in production, the basis for the realization of class consciousness as praxis (i.e., the revolutionary transformation of capitalism). Finally, in connection with its liberating potential, Marx held that capitalism demystified, rationalized, and secularized human culture and action, freeing the human mind from that "smallest compass" of superstition, idolatry, religious and political illusions, and, through its development of science and materialism, extended human mastery over nature and developed arts, faculties, and achievements in a world- historic sense. Michael Hoover
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