Re: [OPE-L] History as Spiral

From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Fri Dec 08 2006 - 22:05:31 EST


> you mean my wonderful old friend Robert Owen, right? I have 
> older Friends who are equally important in tis matter. 

Dogan:

No, not that old.  The person referred to below by Engels in 
_Anti-Duhring_   was born the year after Owen but died many 
years before him.

"The contradiction between socialized production and capitalist
appropriation now presents itself as *an antagonism between 
the organization of production  in the individual workshop, and the
anarchy of production in society generally*.
   The capitalist mode of production moves in these two forms of
the antagonism immanent  to it from its very origin. It is never
able to get out of that 'vicious circle' which Fourier had already
discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that
this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more
and more a SPIRAL, and must come to an end, like the movement
of the planets, by collision with the centre. It is the compelling
force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more 
and more completely turns the great majority of men into 
proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who
will finally put an end to anarchy in production" (capitalization
added, JL)

Is it, though, the anarchy of capitalist production -- or some other
tendency -- which causes proletarianization?

And, can this social process be compared to the movement of the
planets?

And did Engels interpret Fourier correctly in this section of 
_Anti-Duhring_?

In solidarity, Jerry

< http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Rt7SjJnEkN8J:www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm+%22spiral%22+site:www.marxists.org/archive/marx/&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8


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