From: John Holloway (johnholloway@prodigy.net.mx)
Date: Sat Oct 19 2002 - 11:31:44 EDT
Mike, Allin, Jerry,
Many thanks for the responses. Mike comes closest to what I'm looking
for.
On Mike's question: Yes, I think part of the baggage of orthodox Marxism
is the assumption that the transition from capitalism to communism (unlike
the transition from feudalism to capitalism) cannot be interstitial. This
seems to me to be wrong, that in fact the only way to think of revolution is
as interstitial. This is not reformism or gradualism, but rather an attempt
to keep the concept of revolution alive and central to our thought.
John
----------
From: "michael a. lebowitz" <mlebowit@sfu.ca>
To: ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu
Subject: [OPE-L:7838] Re: Help with interstices
Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2002, 1:31 PM
At 12:38 17/10/2002 -0600, you wrote:
Does anyone know who said when and where that the transition from capitalism
to communism was fundamentally different from the transition from feudalism
to capitalism, in the sense that capitalism grew up in the interstices of
feudalism, whereas communism could not grow up in the interstices of
capitalism?
John
John,
There may be others who made similar points, but Evgeny
Preobrazhensky in his The New Economics (Oxford, 1965) in his argument for
'primitive socialist accumulation' argues 'that socialist accumulation can
begin only after the proletarian revolution, whereas the process of
primitive capitalist accumulation begins and goes on before the bourgeois
revolutions (116).' It's a very interesting discussion of a process of
contested reproduction-- marred, I would suggest, by the tendency to
identify socialism with industry (regardless of its productive relations)
and to miss the point that primitive capitalist accumulation for Marx
referred first of all to a change in productive relations within
agriculture. I suspect this latter question is not what interests you,
though. Are you proposing that, within capitalism, we can identify the
emergence of new, communist relations (and, thus, such a contrast is
incorrect)?
in solidarity,
mike
Michael A. Lebowitz
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Office: Phone (604) 291-4669
Fax (604) 291-5944
Home: Phone (604) 872-0494
Fax (604) 872-0485
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