Marx’s alternative to capitalism explains that it arises from the contradictory nature of capitalism. The simple and popular, but misleading, understanding of this is that it is primarily expressed in capitalist crises and class struggle, and although Marx had much to say about both, his alternative regarded these as arising from property relations, on which we based a large number of the previous posts in this series, and on his claim that communists put these to the fore in seeking social and political change.
We have noted the (one-sided) emphasis on resistance to capitalism – ‘anti-capitalism’ – and the impulse to state what you are against instead of what you are for, with what you are against being more concrete than what you are for. Concrete issues and instances of exploitation and oppression are often denounced by abstract claims for justice within the existing capitalist system.
It is worth emphasising the contradictory character of capitalism because many of those claiming adherence to Marxism find it difficult to fully appreciate that, for all the horrors of capitalism, what in the end is most important is that it provides the grounds for socialism. It is not a question of there being a good side to capitalism and a bad side such that they can be separated, except in the most superficial way of description, but that they are inseparable and that it is this integrity that involves contradiction and antagonism out of which a new society arises.
Even very informed views fail in this regard, so that there is a compulsion to emphasise the ‘bad’ while relegating the ‘good’ to some purely historical existence. As we have explained in the previous post, in a reproduction and critical commentary on ‘The Communist Manifesto’, China Miéville records Samir Amin writing that it was a ‘hymn to the glory of capitalist modernity’, and repeats the words of Joseph Schumpeter that ‘Never, I repeat, and in particular by no modern defender of the bourgeois civilization, has anything like this been penned, never has a brief been composed on behalf of the business class from so profound and so wide a comprehension of what its achievement is and of what it means to humanity.’
Miéville complains that if this ‘is an exaggeration, it isn’t by much’. The Manifesto ‘admires capitalism and bourgeois society and the bourgeoisie. It admires them too much.’ He quotes ‘a phrase from Neary, in another context, The Communist Manifesto’s “negativity is not negative enough”. ‘It does not hate enough’, exclaims Miéville. (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 176). We reviewed this request to ‘hate more’ in a general sense in the previous post.
This view not only does not consider the purpose of writing the Manifesto – for a particular organisation at a particular time – but also its status as the elaboration of a set of beliefs, principles and programme that has had lasting relevance.
In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx writes that:
‘Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.’
‘For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule . . . The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.’
‘The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.’
So, Marx’s praise for ‘bourgeois civilisation’, ‘capitalist modernity’, and even perhaps his ‘admiration’, insufficiency of ‘negativity’ and ‘hate’ are not unrelated to the grand forces of production created by capitalism that are to be wielded by ‘the modern working class’.
The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are not separate and attempts to keep the good ‘side’ of a phenomenon while discarding the bad are doomed to failure. Worse than that, many of those that promise to do so reject the development and resolution of the contradictions contained in the phenomenon – this ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’ – with the assurance that it can be maintained either with ‘reforms’; by asserting that the bad can be removed, while refusing to supersede the phenomenon as a whole, or by the rapid instigation of planning as if this was the alternative to capitalism understood solely as a market phenomenon.
To see ‘bourgeois civilisation’ and ‘capitalist modernity’ as simply negative or to belittle their power is thus also to call into question the power of the weapons to be wielded by ‘the proletarians.’ Ultimately, to question the revolutionary consequences of the rule of the bourgeoisie is to question the revolutionary character of the working class and its future rule.
It is thus not enough to say that ‘It’s OK to be angry about capitalism’, in the words of Bernie Sanders. Even in the citadel of world capitalism, in the United States, there is growing evidence of opposition to capitalism and sympathy with socialism, but it’s not enough to simply get angry or to hate. Recent events have demonstrated that there is no shortage of both. It is necessary to understand and to do this requires appreciation of capitalism’s contradictions.
Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 69
Back to part 68
Back to Part 1
Forward to part 70
Sráid Marx 