Post by dodger on Aug 9, 2013 5:55:13 GMT
imarxman.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/on-your-marxhistory/
On Your Marx…History
Posted on August 8, 2013 by imarxman
Many people have written and said damning things about capitalism. However, Marx went further by asking questions such as:
How was present society formed?
Are there historical laws and how does history operate?
Marx spent little time speculating about the future. He drew up no grand plans or blue prints for communism, but demonstrated the way society develops and creates the possibility for communism to be realised.
The most profound notion Marx had was capitalism had not always existed and, therefore, was unlikely to continue to exist forever.
Economic and social injustice produces critics, but if people basically believe there can be no significant alternative to the prevailing system, then criticism does not bring about profound change.
There may develop movements to bring about reforms to counter the worst effects of a system, but these are appeasements and assist that system in prolonging its existence. The idea of opposition becomes diluted.
Marx demonstrated that capitalism, far from being an eternal disposition of nature, was just the current social form arising at a particular time according to identifiable reasons. Far from unchanging, capitalism was constantly in flux and contained the seeds of its own decay.
Capitalism came into being when the capitalist class became the economic force in society. During the medieval period merchants had become an increasingly important economic group.
This was feudal society dominated by landowners, barons and lords, with the monarch at their head. Land was the source of wealth when it was worked by the peasantry. Barons were rich because their martial power enabled them to extract wealth from the labour of their tenants.
Marx showed the feudal ruling class did not accumulate wealth in the form of capital. This is why they had little interest in improving agricultural techniques, the main methods of production in those days.
In 500 years of feudal society there was less technical development than in any 50 years of capitalist society.
During that era, though, merchants played evermore significant parts in the economy. They prospered, as did the growing towns until, by the 1500s, they’d become the economic centres.
These merchants were known as burghers, those who lived in boroughs, or in French, bourgeois, the word Marx adopted for the capitalist class. The bourgeoisie were different to the feudal landowners in that they accumulated money-wealth, capital, through trade, and the manufacture and sale of commodities.
Eventually, these merchants were powerful enough to rival the feudal landowners as was seen the 17th century civil war. Although the monarchy was restored in 1660, the beheading if Charles l signalled the end of feudal society. This was the bourgeois revolution.
Fundamentally, this was an economic revolution which changed the way production was carried out. There were concomitant revolutions in politics and ideas as capitalism took over not only the economy, but the entire state, the organisation of government.
Individualism – that each person is independent and responsible for them themselves alone – reflected the capitalist notion of the individual producer owning his own property and developing its profit making potential in competition with other producers.
The bourgeoisie revolution was the culmination of a struggle between two antagonistic classes. In “The Communist Manifesto” Marx and Engles wrote, ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’
Class struggle must continue to happen for as long as classes, defined according to their relationship to the means of wealth production, continue to exist. It is not a matter of class struggle being desirable or not.
Marx was not making moral judgements over the power of productive processes being in certain hands. Indeed, he recognised that capitalism had been a major progressive force in history.
Neither Marx or Engles suggested class struggle was a simple, straightforward business, a fight between the goodies and the baddies. The issues become blurred and obscured over time, complications and false ideas arise.
There are periods of open class hostility, then others of apparent class quietude. However, the contradictions between the classes, capitalist and working in the present era, are not resolved.
Until, that is, the merging, revolutionary class begins to realise its own potential and the regressive nature of the old dominant class. All ruling classes, as with all economic systems and the social order they requires, eventually decline.
As the once progressive economic system begins to fail the dominant class seeks to extract ever greater amounts of wealth from its opposing class. That class, the working class, finds the few advances it has made being taken away.
It is at this point the working class needs to realise its interests can never be met under capitalism and that no system is permanent. Then it can emulate the bourgeoisie revolution through a revolution of its own and found an economic system that serves its own interests. At this point communism might be realised.