From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Fri Mar 30 2007 - 11:39:40 EDT
Jerry, Trotsky doesn't explicitly refer to "the subjective factor" as such although Trotskyists do. The relevant article by Trotsky is "The curve of capitalist development". http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm The problem with the idea that economic conditions *cause* a certain consciousness among people is that people themselves are part of these economic conditions, and therefore few useful *general* causal statements can be made, unless things are understood in their specificity. And that is really precisely what Trotsky recommends. He does not say that a specific economic situation directly *causes* a specific intellectual school of thought, but rather that we can observe the co-existence of both, and then the task is to explain why they co-exist, by studying the historical interactions involved. But this requires integrating the response of people to their situation in the analysis, and this response is not predetermined. Towards the end of his life, Ernesy Mandel proposed a "parametric determinism" in human history, which I have tried to explain simply here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_determinism Karl Marx did not have any substantive theory of capitalist collapse as far as I know. What he did suggest is that a capitalist economy is unable to sustain the conditions for balanced economic growth, giving rise to recurrent economic crises of increasing severity, heralding its eventual demise. This is no small matter because according to the "price mechanism" of official economics, as Lester Thurow observes, "Theoretically, capitalism should not have business cycles at all. As demand falls or rises, prices and wages, not output, should fall or rise. Supply and demand should ensure that all of the productive factors that want to be employed are employed. (...) However, markets, especially the labour market, just don't seem to quickly and easily clear by lowering wages or prices. Output adjusts more quickly than either wages or prices - exactly the reverse of what should happen." (Thurow, The Future of Capitalism, p. 213). Capitalism I think collapses only if it becomes impossible to maintain capitalist property relations for some reason, but that is unlikely to be simply the outcome of an economic process. If for instance markets collapse, this does not mean automatically that the institutions of private property relations collapse altogether (cf. e.g. Argentina). Private property relations collapse, only if it is no longer possible to enforce/secure property rights, and if people seize property which does not legally belong to them. But that is as much a question of power relations as anything else. In New Zealand, the NZ Herald recently ran an interesting editorial, commenting on a new book edited by Prof. Stephen Levine, "New Zealand as it might have been": http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=00071CC7-B5EE-15A9-B1CD83027AF10110 http://www.ipgbook.com/showbook.cfm?bookid=0864735456&userid=62CEDFBF-803F-2B7A-70C480808D78494C The editorial concludes: "The benefit of this exercise is to be reminded that nothing in history was predestined, no decision was cast in stone and nor is it still. Drastic corrections are always possible if need be. To recognise that fact is to take responsibility for the course we have maintained. We are not helpless products of our past, or carried along by currents we cannot control. We can change the decisions of our forebears and if we do not it is because they were right at the time and, all things considered, they are still right. On balance, the country is better than it might have been." From a Marxian point of view, this bends the stick too far in the direction of subjectivist voluntarism, namely, as Marx commented, ""People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." This means that some things in history are "predetermined" insofar as they constitute given, objective conditions that cannot be changed and must be worked with, even although many other things *can* be changed. Ironically, the NZ Herald's conclusion that "On balance, the country is better than it might have been" is precisely what doesn't follow from (and is not entitled by) the perspective that "that nothing in history was predetermined". Because if "nothing in history was predetermined" then we simply cannot know or evaluate whether the country could have been better or worse, and it might well have been, who knows! By fudging what can and cannot be changed, an ideological attempt is made to reconcile people to the conditions of the present, and make them take responsibility for it. Yet "we" cannot take responsibility for all those conditions, precisely because "we" did not make them. So really the argument achieves the exact opposite of what it aims at - by fudging who is responsible for what, it tries to make people responsible for things they cannot take responsibility for, rather than explicate what they are responsible for. Jurriaan
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