Saturday, November 25, 2006
(9:40 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Necessity of Marxism
Marxist analysis continues to be necessary. To be sure, endless exegesis of Marx himself is not likely to be very productive -- he was dealing with a very early phase of capitalism and in any case was unable to complete his full projected work of political economy, meaning that certain topics are treated only very briefly or unconvincingly, most notably finance capital. But if Marx fundamentalism is untenable, nevertheless it seems that his core insights into the internal contradictions of capitalism are correct. Capitalism, "left to itself," tends toward self-destruction, and the rolling disaster that we call the history of capitalism is finally nothing but a series of attempts to buy more time. Even the most robust of those measures, namely Fordism-Keynesianism, could not even sustain itself for a full thirty years.All this implies that the point of Marxism is to understand capital. Yet Marxism is normally understood to be, "in the last analysis," a theory of revolution, a theory that will allow the proletariat to recognize the time for revolution and perform its world-historical duty of seizing the means of production in order to abolish all classes by abolishing itself. I have suggested that the moment has actually already passed, but in any case, such a moment does not seem to be immediately forthcoming. Yet is it really a matter of waiting for the right moment? It is not entirely clear, for instance, whether Marx and Engels envision the dictatorship of the proletariat as necessarily coming after a total crisis, or whether more benign means such as parliamentarism are possible -- the latter hope was abandoned, but apparently for pragmatic rather than principled reasons. The dictator takes power in an emergency -- yet what is capitalism except a protracted emergency? (This concept of dictatorship as it applies to the proletariat requires more attention.)
If Marxism isn't to be a theory of revolution, then what is it to be? Perhaps it is the case that ultimately only Marxists can save capitalism -- and in fact only Marxists would want to save capitalism. Communism comes not to abolish capitalism, but to fulfill it. All of the main features of capitalism, particularly the drive toward growth, are present, yet it is hoped that the elmination of class conflict would produce a type of capitalism that would somehow finally manage to correspond to itself. The Marxist doesn't hate capitalism -- in fact, capitalism is the greatest thing ever to happen. (Even reading something as heart-wrenching as the account of the garbage dump in the Phillipines in this month's Harper's, one marvels at the sheer overabundance of capitalism, such that a whole population can support itself by living off of its waste.) Rather, the Marxist wants to control capitalism. Communism is capitalism -- just a little different.
