karl marx, critique of the gotha program
(528): a critique of, specifically, the use of the 'bourgeois' notion of 'fairness'--here the scientific vs. utopian distinction is in evidence.
(530): at first, then, as socialist society emerges from capitalism, the principle is simple--"the same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receive back in another." ["Here, equal right is still in principle bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads..." -- exactly, bringing--for the first time--the bourgeois principles into existence.]
(530): but, of course, and this is critical--"it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."
(531): it is only in the "higher phase of communist society," once all the "nightmares of the past" are exorcised, can we say "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
(531): and here, a nascent critique of left-kenyesianism: "Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves." And then, "vulgar socialism... has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution."
(532): calling for a more measured, historically-specific attitude towards the other class, who the Lasalleans have otherwise denounced as "one reactionary mass." [though the fundamental ontology of his revolution is not at all upset, but re-confirmed]
(534): the "iron" law of wages being exposed for its Malthusian roots
(535): "consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more sever in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment." [the point about Marx believing in 'increasing pauperism' is simply not on--this, really, is the point, which--I'd argue--can be expressed in manifold ways, especially today]
(536): not at all willing to sanction the fetishizing of the State--fearing, we might say, any possibility of this State metastasizing into something outside of the proletariat ["as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeois."]
(537): KEY: "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it, and today, too, the forms of state are more or less free to the extendt that they restrict the 'freedom of the state.'"
(538): the dictatorship of the proletariat--"they are all demands which, in so far as they are nto exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have already been realized..." but, key, that this is NOT AT ALL the present-day state, at the same time: one cannot demand "things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism." must, in other words, SMASH this state.
(539-540): there is a very healthy skepticism of the State apparatus, here, that has implications for Marxist critiques of social democracy, and the soviet state, alike [this is "tainted through and through by the Lasallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles, or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism."]
(541): what is Marx saying, on child labor? confusing...
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
karl marx, the civil war in france
(620): from Engels introduction--on the bourgeoisie, and terror: "And then followed a blood-bath among the defenceless prisoners, the like of which has not been seen since the days of the civil wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what insane cruelties of revenge it will be goaded the moment the proletariat dares to take its stand against the bourgeoisie as a separate class, with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848 was only child's play compared with the frenzy of the bourgeoisie in 1871."
(621): again, they've never really minded dictatorship--from Napoleon III to Pinochet
(623): the guillotine was publicly burnt on the 6th of April
(626): composition: most Blanquists, but also some members of Proudhon's wing in the First International. Alas--they didn't sack the Bank of France--stood outside with "holy awe" [because they weren't scientific socialists, implies Engels]
(626): is this passable as an empirical statement, then?--that Paris, the city of artisans, had become a home of "large-scale industry." some concede that the workers were semi-proletarianized--what to say? [ONE GREAT UNION was announced, of course...]
(626-627): Proudhon's disciples learned the importance of "association"; Blanquists learned the pitfalls of "dictatorial centralization."
(627): could not put up with the "old state machinery," they learned--for one, representatives must be subject to immediate recall (i.e., the collapse of the elitist heritage of the logic of representation). [the 1800s, he's arguing, taught revolutionaries the increasing power of the modern State--and 1848-1851 saw this increasingly inflated repressive apparatus transform into the Second Empire]
(628): KEY--the current understanding of the State, Engels is arguing, recalls the nonsense of the Hegelian rationalization of Prussian autocracy--"In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than the monarchy..."
(629): and, by contrast, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (it looks like the Paris Commune, says Engels).
--- here begins Marx (section III and IV)
(629): the State, with its bureaucracy and whatnot, is not an empty signifier--inherited from the days of "absolute monarchy."
(630): important--"At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a pbulci force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief."
(631): "Bonapartism"--"...it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory... It was acclaimed throughout the world as the saviour of society."
(631): and here, an underdeveloped theory of imperialism as an extension--or the logical conclusion--of this increasingly powerful State (not talking about imperialism of the modern sort, but presumably expansionism within Europe)
(632): no 'separation of the powers' here--both "executive and legislative"; an 'electable' judiciary
(633): not anti-national, but nationalism of a higher sort: "The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence."
(634): two key abolitions--the end of the "standing army" and the end of "State functionarism" [throughout these pages there is an interesting reflection on the nature of the reforms pursued by the communards--well worth flagging] -- a "thoroughly expansive political form... It was essentially a working-class government... the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."
(635): "With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man..."
(635-636): "The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias... They know that in ordre to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending... they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes." [this is a process that cannot but proceed inside of history and struggle--this is the primary and most important objection to the utopian dreamers of many stripes. planning is fine, but practice is fundamental.]
(637-638): The commune and the peasantry--here he is suggesting that economic conditions and political advance is such that the peasant is no longer likely to be fooled; the State is trying to shift the war indemnities onto their backs, but the Commune promised to deliver them from this "blood tax." [noting, also, the steady proletarianization of the peasantry]
(639): interesting--Lenin adds a footnote, describing Haussman in the Russian translation...
(639): set in light of subsequent history, this is inspiring even if naive--the Commune was to "keep up all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace."
(645): Thiers struck a deal with Bismarck on the 10th of May--peace, indemnities in exchange for the release of the Army, and help, to crush the Communards.
(646): crushing of the Commune--"So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge... Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June, 1848, vanish before the ineffable infamy of 1871... A glorious civilization, indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over!"
(649): "...the vandalism of Haussmann, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!"
(651): "That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternise for the common massacre of the proletariat--this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society... Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national Governments are one as against the proletariat!"
(651): the bourgeois, democratic revolution is dead (i wonder, did Kautsky and Bernstein never read this?)--"there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce."
(620): from Engels introduction--on the bourgeoisie, and terror: "And then followed a blood-bath among the defenceless prisoners, the like of which has not been seen since the days of the civil wars which ushered in the downfall of the Roman republic. It was the first time that the bourgeoisie showed to what insane cruelties of revenge it will be goaded the moment the proletariat dares to take its stand against the bourgeoisie as a separate class, with its own interests and demands. And yet 1848 was only child's play compared with the frenzy of the bourgeoisie in 1871."
(621): again, they've never really minded dictatorship--from Napoleon III to Pinochet
(623): the guillotine was publicly burnt on the 6th of April
(626): composition: most Blanquists, but also some members of Proudhon's wing in the First International. Alas--they didn't sack the Bank of France--stood outside with "holy awe" [because they weren't scientific socialists, implies Engels]
(626): is this passable as an empirical statement, then?--that Paris, the city of artisans, had become a home of "large-scale industry." some concede that the workers were semi-proletarianized--what to say? [ONE GREAT UNION was announced, of course...]
(626-627): Proudhon's disciples learned the importance of "association"; Blanquists learned the pitfalls of "dictatorial centralization."
(627): could not put up with the "old state machinery," they learned--for one, representatives must be subject to immediate recall (i.e., the collapse of the elitist heritage of the logic of representation). [the 1800s, he's arguing, taught revolutionaries the increasing power of the modern State--and 1848-1851 saw this increasingly inflated repressive apparatus transform into the Second Empire]
(628): KEY--the current understanding of the State, Engels is arguing, recalls the nonsense of the Hegelian rationalization of Prussian autocracy--"In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than the monarchy..."
(629): and, by contrast, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (it looks like the Paris Commune, says Engels).
--- here begins Marx (section III and IV)
(629): the State, with its bureaucracy and whatnot, is not an empty signifier--inherited from the days of "absolute monarchy."
(630): important--"At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a pbulci force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief."
(631): "Bonapartism"--"...it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory... It was acclaimed throughout the world as the saviour of society."
(631): and here, an underdeveloped theory of imperialism as an extension--or the logical conclusion--of this increasingly powerful State (not talking about imperialism of the modern sort, but presumably expansionism within Europe)
(632): no 'separation of the powers' here--both "executive and legislative"; an 'electable' judiciary
(633): not anti-national, but nationalism of a higher sort: "The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence."
(634): two key abolitions--the end of the "standing army" and the end of "State functionarism" [throughout these pages there is an interesting reflection on the nature of the reforms pursued by the communards--well worth flagging] -- a "thoroughly expansive political form... It was essentially a working-class government... the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."
(635): "With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man..."
(635-636): "The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias... They know that in ordre to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending... they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes." [this is a process that cannot but proceed inside of history and struggle--this is the primary and most important objection to the utopian dreamers of many stripes. planning is fine, but practice is fundamental.]
(637-638): The commune and the peasantry--here he is suggesting that economic conditions and political advance is such that the peasant is no longer likely to be fooled; the State is trying to shift the war indemnities onto their backs, but the Commune promised to deliver them from this "blood tax." [noting, also, the steady proletarianization of the peasantry]
(639): interesting--Lenin adds a footnote, describing Haussman in the Russian translation...
(639): set in light of subsequent history, this is inspiring even if naive--the Commune was to "keep up all the decencies and appearances of liberalism as in a time of profound peace."
(645): Thiers struck a deal with Bismarck on the 10th of May--peace, indemnities in exchange for the release of the Army, and help, to crush the Communards.
(646): crushing of the Commune--"So it was. The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge... Even the atrocities of the bourgeois in June, 1848, vanish before the ineffable infamy of 1871... A glorious civilization, indeed, the great problem of which is how to get rid of the heaps of corpses it made after the battle was over!"
(649): "...the vandalism of Haussmann, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!"
(651): "That after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternise for the common massacre of the proletariat--this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society upheaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society... Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national Governments are one as against the proletariat!"
(651): the bourgeois, democratic revolution is dead (i wonder, did Kautsky and Bernstein never read this?)--"there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce."
karl marx, the eighteenth bumaire of louis bonaparte (citations without page numbers means excerpted from online edition)
----
timeline, excerpted from chapter 6
---
(preface to 2nd edition, Marx):" Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel."
(595-596): "But unheroic as bourgeois society is, yet it had need of heroism, of sacrifice, of terror, of civil war and of national battles to bring it into being." [and such heroism, of course, lends their world the illusion of the universal--when they confront post-revolutionary sobriety, of course, the 'icy waters' of bourgeois life reassert themselves]
(597): outstanding--the bourgeoisie has lost its fire, enter the proletariat, who have no time for the propaganda of the past: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase."
(597-598): how can you summarize the brilliance of this? the proletarian revolution, as one which will--for all the halting alliances with the bourgeoisie, for all the searching criticisms and tactical confusion--have to make the leap itself ["hic rhodus, hic salta!"]
(599): Delineating three main periods: (1) The February period; (2) The period of the Constituent National Assembly [May 1848 to May 1849]; (3) The period of the National Assembly [May 1849 to December 1851].
(599-600): The first period -- provisional, as "prologue." introduced, of course, the explicit spectre of the "social republic," which the proletariat was capable of "immediately realizing in practice." [reaching, this?]
(600-603): The second period -- the elections were "a living protest against the presumptuous aspirations of the February days and was to reduce the results of the Revolution to the bourgeois scale." From bourgeois monarchy to bourgeois republic, then--to which "the Paris proletariat responded with the June insurrection... the bourgeois republic triumphed." [no doubt, the homogeneity of the revolutionaries will be interrogated--"On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself."--Hobsbawm seems to prefer the term "labouring poor."]
(601): can equally be commentary on the non-viability of anarchist projects--after defeat, the proletariat sought "to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion [through cooperatives, exchange banks, etc.]" This is all merely symptomatic of its weakness and loss...
(602): it is this defeat, of course, that reveals that there are other questions, beside monarchy vs. progress. the social question is revealed unto the world--"the unlimited despotism" of the bourgeoisie.
[sections 2-6 not included in Tucker's excerpt]
----
(chapter 2): "On the other hand, what was clear as daylight to it, and was publicly acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is indeed the way with pure republicans, were already at the point of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans[80] when the February Revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government." [in other words, the seeds for the bourgeoisie's betrayal were in place, well before the suppression of the June insurrection--having said that, it must be noted that Marx and Engels didn't have this unambiguous a relationship to the "permanent revolution," in advance]
(chapter 2): "The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had conceived as the most revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life."
(chapter 2): "Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of “public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life." [splendid deconstruction of the bourgeois game of appearances--State terror is always unintended, exception, or--if all else fails--done with a heavy heart.]
(chapter 2): "The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people."
(chapter 2): this is all an excellent indictment of all that earnest nonsense that envelops scholars and activists of constitutional law: "he constitution, which, like Achilles, had its weak spot, also had, like Achilles, a presentiment that it must go to an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, as well as their own discredit, grew daily in the same measure as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art"
(chapter 2): ABSOLUTELY--the airy islands of bourgeois principle sit on seas of blood and terror: "While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence."
(chapter 2): "The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist." [remember, he is here, specifically, not even speaking about the bourgeoisie, in general--it is a specific section, the republican bourgeoisie, the most radical bourgeoisie, that comes in for scorn. most of the bourgeoisie were monarchists, of one and another sort (condensed into the Party of Order, who Bonaparte will cast aside later, from Dec 1848-Dec 1851]. it is the republicans--who have profited immensely from the rebellion of the proletarians, but then turn the State loose on them--that are here most deserving of Marx's righteous anger. and rightly so, for nothing was expected of the rest].
(chapter 2): "Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the legislative power, learned it by heart, and proved to the parliamentary royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He repeated their own catchwords against them" [absolutely--beaten by their own stick]
(chapter 2): "A motive that particularly actuated the party of Order in forcibly cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life was the organic laws supplementing the constitution, such as the law on education, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalists in coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown mistrustful." [again--then it becomes the big bourgeoisie's turn to learn the lessons it helped teach the republicans]
----
(603): reactionary role of the lumpenproletariat stands noted--relevant for our interests
(603-604): the bourgeoisie is betrayed, suffering on account of its own hesitancy and obduracy: "It suppressed every stirring in society by means of the state power; every stirring in its society is repressed by means of the state power."
(604): yet, of course, the parliamentary republic enshrines the bourgeoisie, at the same time
(606): even as they have, consciously, moved well past the bourgeoisie, they recognize the progressiveness of the parliamentary form they--for a brief minute--were willing to enshrine: "In parliament the nation made its general will the law, that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general will. Before the executive power it renounces all will of its own and surrenders itself to the superior orders of something alien, of authority."
(606-607): very fruitful pages here, for an analysis of the State -- under Napoleon III, Marx is suggesting, the State has finally metastasized into something autonomous from society. it has "made itself completely independent"--the outcome of a process of centralization. ["And yet the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class... the small peasants"]
(607): Bourbons were dynasty of landed elite; Orleans were dynasty of monarchy; and the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasantry, the mass of the French people [clearly, here, there is potential for relating this to analyses of fascism]
(608): CRITICAL: analysis of the small peasantry, whose dispersal and isolated nature (as well as the fact that they're more dependent on nature than exchange for their livelihoods) renders them a "great mass." "The great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes." They form a class, in the sense that they live under specific conditions of production, of course. But not a class in the active sense--they're incapable of representing themselves; they must be represented. "The political influence of the small peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself." [it is absolutely imperative to intervene, here, with "Peasant Wars of the 20th Century," if that's at all appropriate--we can state, in other words, the general thesis that this is a historically specific assertion Marx is making. but it must, also, be more specific. what is crucial, also, is that on the next page--pg. 609--Marx is immediately making a distinction between the "revolutionary" and "reactionary" peasantry. Bonaparte "represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasantry."]
(610): brilliantly put--"The bourgeoisie, to be sure, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses, as long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses, as soon as they become revolutionary."
(610): the untenability of the Napoleonic form of peasant property (presumably the small-holding)--the peasant does not see this as the cause of his own pauperism, but Marx is diagnosing it as such. the small-holder, obviously, cannot stay afloat--qua smallholder--for very long, in a market. it is a temporary, stop-gap measure--a temporary relief from feudalism, which will only deliver the peasantry, before long, into the lap of the urban usurer [this is relevant as we think back, and forward...]--"The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly arisen small holding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and marrow and throws them into the alchemistic cauldron of capital."
(611-612): it is this subordination of the peasantry to bourgeois capital which sets the stage, it seems, for a potential alliance between them, and the urban proletariat [this is critical, insofar as it complicates, already, the simple 'sack-of-potatoes' shibboleths]
(613): this small-holding, which is burdened by debts, isn't even vulnerable to co-option via religion, he's arguing--to naked is the nonsense being fed him
(613): same, too, goes for the Napoleonic army--it too has run its course [he has thus, traced the obsolescence of five Napoleonic ideas: the small-holding, the taxes, the bureaucracy, the priests, and the army]--"One sees: all idees napoleoniennes are the ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth: for the small holding that has outlived its day they are an absurdity."
(614): and, here, pointing again to peasant-proletarian unity, it is precisely this non-viability of the State machine built on a discontented peasant base that will lay the groundwork for the proletarian revolution--in all peasant nations it was, otherwise, a "solo song [which became] a swan song"
(614): brilliant--the bourgeoisie, realizing its fate with Bonaparte: "Only theft can now save property; only perjury, religion; only bastardy, the family; only disorder, order!"
(615-616): the question, raised again, of the "autonomy" of Bonapartism. lots up for discussion, here: "Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another."
----
timeline, excerpted from chapter 6
1. First period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal-brotherhood swindle.
2. Second period. Period of constituting the republic and of the Constituent National Assembly.
a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.
b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.
c. December 20, 1848, to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.
3. Third period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the Legislative National Assembly.
a. May 28, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.
b. June 13, 1849, to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry.
c. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.
(1) May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The Assembly loses the supreme command of the army.
(2) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power. The party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. It forms a coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.
(3) April 11, 1851, to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The party of Order decomposes into its separate constituents. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie becomes definite.
(4) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. The Assembly performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes. Passing of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire.
---
(preface to 2nd edition, Marx):" Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel."
(595-596): "But unheroic as bourgeois society is, yet it had need of heroism, of sacrifice, of terror, of civil war and of national battles to bring it into being." [and such heroism, of course, lends their world the illusion of the universal--when they confront post-revolutionary sobriety, of course, the 'icy waters' of bourgeois life reassert themselves]
(597): outstanding--the bourgeoisie has lost its fire, enter the proletariat, who have no time for the propaganda of the past: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase."
(597-598): how can you summarize the brilliance of this? the proletarian revolution, as one which will--for all the halting alliances with the bourgeoisie, for all the searching criticisms and tactical confusion--have to make the leap itself ["hic rhodus, hic salta!"]
(599): Delineating three main periods: (1) The February period; (2) The period of the Constituent National Assembly [May 1848 to May 1849]; (3) The period of the National Assembly [May 1849 to December 1851].
(599-600): The first period -- provisional, as "prologue." introduced, of course, the explicit spectre of the "social republic," which the proletariat was capable of "immediately realizing in practice." [reaching, this?]
(600-603): The second period -- the elections were "a living protest against the presumptuous aspirations of the February days and was to reduce the results of the Revolution to the bourgeois scale." From bourgeois monarchy to bourgeois republic, then--to which "the Paris proletariat responded with the June insurrection... the bourgeois republic triumphed." [no doubt, the homogeneity of the revolutionaries will be interrogated--"On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself."--Hobsbawm seems to prefer the term "labouring poor."]
(601): can equally be commentary on the non-viability of anarchist projects--after defeat, the proletariat sought "to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion [through cooperatives, exchange banks, etc.]" This is all merely symptomatic of its weakness and loss...
(602): it is this defeat, of course, that reveals that there are other questions, beside monarchy vs. progress. the social question is revealed unto the world--"the unlimited despotism" of the bourgeoisie.
[sections 2-6 not included in Tucker's excerpt]
----
(chapter 2): "On the other hand, what was clear as daylight to it, and was publicly acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is indeed the way with pure republicans, were already at the point of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans[80] when the February Revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government." [in other words, the seeds for the bourgeoisie's betrayal were in place, well before the suppression of the June insurrection--having said that, it must be noted that Marx and Engels didn't have this unambiguous a relationship to the "permanent revolution," in advance]
(chapter 2): "The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had conceived as the most revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life."
(chapter 2): "Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of “public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life." [splendid deconstruction of the bourgeois game of appearances--State terror is always unintended, exception, or--if all else fails--done with a heavy heart.]
(chapter 2): "The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people."
(chapter 2): this is all an excellent indictment of all that earnest nonsense that envelops scholars and activists of constitutional law: "he constitution, which, like Achilles, had its weak spot, also had, like Achilles, a presentiment that it must go to an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, as well as their own discredit, grew daily in the same measure as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art"
(chapter 2): ABSOLUTELY--the airy islands of bourgeois principle sit on seas of blood and terror: "While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence."
(chapter 2): "The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist." [remember, he is here, specifically, not even speaking about the bourgeoisie, in general--it is a specific section, the republican bourgeoisie, the most radical bourgeoisie, that comes in for scorn. most of the bourgeoisie were monarchists, of one and another sort (condensed into the Party of Order, who Bonaparte will cast aside later, from Dec 1848-Dec 1851]. it is the republicans--who have profited immensely from the rebellion of the proletarians, but then turn the State loose on them--that are here most deserving of Marx's righteous anger. and rightly so, for nothing was expected of the rest].
(chapter 2): "Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the legislative power, learned it by heart, and proved to the parliamentary royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He repeated their own catchwords against them" [absolutely--beaten by their own stick]
(chapter 2): "A motive that particularly actuated the party of Order in forcibly cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life was the organic laws supplementing the constitution, such as the law on education, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalists in coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown mistrustful." [again--then it becomes the big bourgeoisie's turn to learn the lessons it helped teach the republicans]
----
(603): reactionary role of the lumpenproletariat stands noted--relevant for our interests
(603-604): the bourgeoisie is betrayed, suffering on account of its own hesitancy and obduracy: "It suppressed every stirring in society by means of the state power; every stirring in its society is repressed by means of the state power."
(604): yet, of course, the parliamentary republic enshrines the bourgeoisie, at the same time
(606): even as they have, consciously, moved well past the bourgeoisie, they recognize the progressiveness of the parliamentary form they--for a brief minute--were willing to enshrine: "In parliament the nation made its general will the law, that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general will. Before the executive power it renounces all will of its own and surrenders itself to the superior orders of something alien, of authority."
(606-607): very fruitful pages here, for an analysis of the State -- under Napoleon III, Marx is suggesting, the State has finally metastasized into something autonomous from society. it has "made itself completely independent"--the outcome of a process of centralization. ["And yet the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class... the small peasants"]
(607): Bourbons were dynasty of landed elite; Orleans were dynasty of monarchy; and the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasantry, the mass of the French people [clearly, here, there is potential for relating this to analyses of fascism]
(608): CRITICAL: analysis of the small peasantry, whose dispersal and isolated nature (as well as the fact that they're more dependent on nature than exchange for their livelihoods) renders them a "great mass." "The great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes." They form a class, in the sense that they live under specific conditions of production, of course. But not a class in the active sense--they're incapable of representing themselves; they must be represented. "The political influence of the small peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself." [it is absolutely imperative to intervene, here, with "Peasant Wars of the 20th Century," if that's at all appropriate--we can state, in other words, the general thesis that this is a historically specific assertion Marx is making. but it must, also, be more specific. what is crucial, also, is that on the next page--pg. 609--Marx is immediately making a distinction between the "revolutionary" and "reactionary" peasantry. Bonaparte "represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasantry."]
(610): brilliantly put--"The bourgeoisie, to be sure, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses, as long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses, as soon as they become revolutionary."
(610): the untenability of the Napoleonic form of peasant property (presumably the small-holding)--the peasant does not see this as the cause of his own pauperism, but Marx is diagnosing it as such. the small-holder, obviously, cannot stay afloat--qua smallholder--for very long, in a market. it is a temporary, stop-gap measure--a temporary relief from feudalism, which will only deliver the peasantry, before long, into the lap of the urban usurer [this is relevant as we think back, and forward...]--"The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly arisen small holding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and marrow and throws them into the alchemistic cauldron of capital."
(611-612): it is this subordination of the peasantry to bourgeois capital which sets the stage, it seems, for a potential alliance between them, and the urban proletariat [this is critical, insofar as it complicates, already, the simple 'sack-of-potatoes' shibboleths]
(613): this small-holding, which is burdened by debts, isn't even vulnerable to co-option via religion, he's arguing--to naked is the nonsense being fed him
(613): same, too, goes for the Napoleonic army--it too has run its course [he has thus, traced the obsolescence of five Napoleonic ideas: the small-holding, the taxes, the bureaucracy, the priests, and the army]--"One sees: all idees napoleoniennes are the ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth: for the small holding that has outlived its day they are an absurdity."
(614): and, here, pointing again to peasant-proletarian unity, it is precisely this non-viability of the State machine built on a discontented peasant base that will lay the groundwork for the proletarian revolution--in all peasant nations it was, otherwise, a "solo song [which became] a swan song"
(614): brilliant--the bourgeoisie, realizing its fate with Bonaparte: "Only theft can now save property; only perjury, religion; only bastardy, the family; only disorder, order!"
(615-616): the question, raised again, of the "autonomy" of Bonapartism. lots up for discussion, here: "Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another."
eric hobsbawm, the age of capital (chapter 1: 'springtime of peoples')
(10): "There have been plenty of greater revolutions in the history of the modern world, and certainly plenty of more successful ones. Yet there has been none which spread more rapidly and widely, running like a brushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans."
(10): French Republic proclaimed February 24, 1848; German revolution(s), Italy and Hungary in March... "Within a matter of weeks no government was left standing in an area of Europe which is today occupied by all or part of ten states [France, West Germanyh, East Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakea, Hungary, part of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania] not counting lesser repercussions in a number of others."
(10): YET--"within six months of its outbreak its universal defeat was safely predictable, within eighteen months of its outbreak all but one of the regimes it overthrew had been restored, and the exception (the French Republic) was putting as much distance as it could between itself and the insurrection to which it owed its existence."
(12-13): Radicals, Hobsbawm's suggesting, had a simple model--a French revolution towards a "unitary centralized democratic republic of Germany, Italy, or Hungary or whatever the country happened to be..." But "moderates... were enmeshed in a web of complex calculations, based essentially on the fear of democracy which they believed to equal social revolution."
(13-17): "Their common characteristics:"
(1) "They all succeeded and failed rapidly, and in most cases totally..." (France counter-attack by April, when conservatives made it to the assembly en masse on the backs of a "politically-inexperienced" peasantry; and then the revolutionary workers were defeated in Paris, in June; Hapsburg reaction by June; in Germany and Austria the old regimes regained power "between the summer and the end of the year); remaining parts of Italy and Hungary recaptured by summer 1849). "There had been one and only one major irreversible change: the abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg Empire."
(2) "All the revolutions had something else in common, which largely accounts for their failure. They were, in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor. They therefore frightened the moderate liberals whom they pushed into power and prominence... at least as much as the supporters of the old regimes." Adding that though the communists didn't have a major role in events in Germany, events in France in February, where the 'leaders were socialists and communists and its provisional government included a mechanic,' frightened them. In sum, page 17: "Eighteen forty-eight failed because it turned out that the decisive confrontation was not between the old regimes and the united 'forces of progress', but between 'order' and 'social revolutions.' Its crucial confrontation was not that of Paris in February but that of Paris in June, when the workers, manoeuvred into isolated insurrection, were defeated and massacred... It is characteristic of the ferocity of the hatred of the rich for the poor that some three thousand were slaughtered after defeat, while another twelve thousand were arrested, mostly to be deported to Algerian labour camps." The revolution was strongest, Hobsbawm adds, where radicals were able to lead or do without the moderates--this was most likely in lands where national liberation was the point of unity (i.e., Italy and Hungary, which is where the revolutions lasted the longest)
(20): KEY: "As we shall see the reactionary 1850s were to be, in economic terms, a period of systematic liberalization. In 1848-9 moderate liberals therefore made two important discoveries in Western Europe: that revolution was dangerous and that some of their substantial demands (especially in economic matters) could be met without it. The bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force."
(20-21): discussing the role of 'intellectuals' and of the petty-bourgeoisie -- many of them, he's arguing, were important for the 'democratic left,' but certainly not 'foundational'. many of the youth of this class, in fact, would do very well for themselves in the reactionary years of the 50s and 60s.
(21): KEY: "As for the labouring poor, they lacked the organization, the maturity, the leadership, perhaps most of all the historical conjuncture, to provide a political alternative. Strong enough to make the prospect of social revolution look real and menacing, they were too weak to do more than frighten their enemies." The weaknesses, enumerated: (1) "numerical deficiency"--not always a majority in the cities, which were anyway counterbalanced by the weight of the peasantry; (2) ideological and political immaturity. "The most politically conscious and activist stratum among them consisted of the pre-industrial artisans... The poor and unskilled in the cities and, outside Britain, the industrial and mining proletariat as a whole, had hardly any developed political ideology as yet."
(22-23): KEY: even though he is noting their political non-organization, he is also arguing that "we should not underestimate [their] potential." in one sense, they were yet to be 'bought off' by capitalism, as their pauperism was very evident. moreover, they weren't able to concentrate on their economic demands; their demands had an invariably 'political' content, without which "no revolution is made." It was "organization, ideology and leadership" which were underdeveloped.
(24): "They ought to have been bourgeois revolutions, but the bourgeoisie drew back from them."
(25): important--a lasting consequence of 1848, Hobsbawm is arguing, was that it forced "the defenders of the social order... to learn the politics of the people." Absolutism for its own sake--or tradition for tradition's sake--no longer withstood popular scrutiny.
(10): "There have been plenty of greater revolutions in the history of the modern world, and certainly plenty of more successful ones. Yet there has been none which spread more rapidly and widely, running like a brushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans."
(10): French Republic proclaimed February 24, 1848; German revolution(s), Italy and Hungary in March... "Within a matter of weeks no government was left standing in an area of Europe which is today occupied by all or part of ten states [France, West Germanyh, East Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakea, Hungary, part of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania] not counting lesser repercussions in a number of others."
(10): YET--"within six months of its outbreak its universal defeat was safely predictable, within eighteen months of its outbreak all but one of the regimes it overthrew had been restored, and the exception (the French Republic) was putting as much distance as it could between itself and the insurrection to which it owed its existence."
(12-13): Radicals, Hobsbawm's suggesting, had a simple model--a French revolution towards a "unitary centralized democratic republic of Germany, Italy, or Hungary or whatever the country happened to be..." But "moderates... were enmeshed in a web of complex calculations, based essentially on the fear of democracy which they believed to equal social revolution."
(13-17): "Their common characteristics:"
(1) "They all succeeded and failed rapidly, and in most cases totally..." (France counter-attack by April, when conservatives made it to the assembly en masse on the backs of a "politically-inexperienced" peasantry; and then the revolutionary workers were defeated in Paris, in June; Hapsburg reaction by June; in Germany and Austria the old regimes regained power "between the summer and the end of the year); remaining parts of Italy and Hungary recaptured by summer 1849). "There had been one and only one major irreversible change: the abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg Empire."
(2) "All the revolutions had something else in common, which largely accounts for their failure. They were, in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor. They therefore frightened the moderate liberals whom they pushed into power and prominence... at least as much as the supporters of the old regimes." Adding that though the communists didn't have a major role in events in Germany, events in France in February, where the 'leaders were socialists and communists and its provisional government included a mechanic,' frightened them. In sum, page 17: "Eighteen forty-eight failed because it turned out that the decisive confrontation was not between the old regimes and the united 'forces of progress', but between 'order' and 'social revolutions.' Its crucial confrontation was not that of Paris in February but that of Paris in June, when the workers, manoeuvred into isolated insurrection, were defeated and massacred... It is characteristic of the ferocity of the hatred of the rich for the poor that some three thousand were slaughtered after defeat, while another twelve thousand were arrested, mostly to be deported to Algerian labour camps." The revolution was strongest, Hobsbawm adds, where radicals were able to lead or do without the moderates--this was most likely in lands where national liberation was the point of unity (i.e., Italy and Hungary, which is where the revolutions lasted the longest)
(20): KEY: "As we shall see the reactionary 1850s were to be, in economic terms, a period of systematic liberalization. In 1848-9 moderate liberals therefore made two important discoveries in Western Europe: that revolution was dangerous and that some of their substantial demands (especially in economic matters) could be met without it. The bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force."
(20-21): discussing the role of 'intellectuals' and of the petty-bourgeoisie -- many of them, he's arguing, were important for the 'democratic left,' but certainly not 'foundational'. many of the youth of this class, in fact, would do very well for themselves in the reactionary years of the 50s and 60s.
(21): KEY: "As for the labouring poor, they lacked the organization, the maturity, the leadership, perhaps most of all the historical conjuncture, to provide a political alternative. Strong enough to make the prospect of social revolution look real and menacing, they were too weak to do more than frighten their enemies." The weaknesses, enumerated: (1) "numerical deficiency"--not always a majority in the cities, which were anyway counterbalanced by the weight of the peasantry; (2) ideological and political immaturity. "The most politically conscious and activist stratum among them consisted of the pre-industrial artisans... The poor and unskilled in the cities and, outside Britain, the industrial and mining proletariat as a whole, had hardly any developed political ideology as yet."
(22-23): KEY: even though he is noting their political non-organization, he is also arguing that "we should not underestimate [their] potential." in one sense, they were yet to be 'bought off' by capitalism, as their pauperism was very evident. moreover, they weren't able to concentrate on their economic demands; their demands had an invariably 'political' content, without which "no revolution is made." It was "organization, ideology and leadership" which were underdeveloped.
(24): "They ought to have been bourgeois revolutions, but the bourgeoisie drew back from them."
(25): important--a lasting consequence of 1848, Hobsbawm is arguing, was that it forced "the defenders of the social order... to learn the politics of the people." Absolutism for its own sake--or tradition for tradition's sake--no longer withstood popular scrutiny.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
the communist manifesto, marx and engels
(470): "the practical application of the principles... will depend... on the historical conditions for the time being existing..."
(470): chastened by experience of the Commune -- the State is not an instrument that can be wielded, at least not naively: "One thing [that] especially was proved by the commune."
(472): interesting reflections on the necessity of the "bourgeois revolution" in Russia--"The only answer to [the question of whether it can go straight to "the higher form of communist common ownership] today is this:" world revolution. in other words, the argument is that a proletarian revolution in the West were to complement revolution in Russia, this accelerated transition could very well happen.
(474): the (in)famous claim that the "epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified the class antagonisms." the questions are obvious, and well-worn--while we must defend this charge against the aimlessness of the post-moderns, there are legitimate questions to ask about the homogeneity of the underclass, the probability of collective resistance, the euro-centrism of the expectation.
(475): "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"--see US treasury department, 150 years later.
(475): the notion of the progressive role of the bourgeoisie, which for us, raises questions but also offers a basic premise. the premise--that progress is invariably dialectical, that our apprehension of it needs to be framed by the structuring understanding of the fundamental irrationality of capitalism. and the questions, i think, relate very obviously to the pernicious questions of empire and dependent development--we must learn to re-write, rigorously, the divergent narratives of the national bourgeoisie.
(475-476): the contention here is that exploitation is more naked than before--but this does not mean, of course, that the bourgeoisie fails to cloak its own oppression in say-nothing sweet-nothings.
(477): here, underdeveloped reflections on China and the 'exportation' of bourgeois civilization. if this is used to point to Marxism as imperialism, one need only point to Marxist theories of imperialism.
(477): the "idiocy of rural life" [sack of potatoes, etc.]
(478): prefiguring the Frankfurt School--"Modern bourgeois society...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."
(478): an important page if we're to trace the Marxist theory of crisis--here sounds quite straightforward, with none of the complexity of Capital: overproduction followed by devaluation (or export of capital and pursuit of new markets, if possible).
(478-479): the gravedigger passage -- note to self--must write an essay on this question.
(479): a possible place where it is predicted that the "wages decrease" -- regardless, that silly objection to Marxism need only be set against the deep analysis of Capital and the concept of the reserve army of labor. [see also "pauperization" on 483)
(480-481): a wonderfully seductive teleology, of workers as scattered mass becoming active, cohesive agent--of local struggles becoming one, (inter)national struggle. if only (in that sense we have to remember that this is polemic).
(481): "...a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands..." [making space for themselves, of course--we can debate, i guess, the extent to which this is an important sociological intervention. the fixity of one's class identity was never relevant. but it is interesting, in light of the next twenty years of engels life, no?]
(481): and this, is interesting, insofar as we want to make it systematic it seems to come into conflict with the anti-elitism of the early work: "and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideolgoists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."
(482): all other classes are "not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary; for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests..." [brief mention of 'lumpen' elements, which are here derided as reactionary--so whereto for the informal working-class? is the objection re: soweto in order? it doesn't seem like that's satisfactory... but we are going round in circles trying to resolve this formally--PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE]
(483-484): 'point' of the Communists is 'unity' -- to represent the general interests of the proletarian movement as a whole. but much will hinge on the question of what 'representation' might entail.
(484): spelling out what the abolition of private property denotes, in a society ridden purely with the class antagonism between Capital and Labor (but, in hindsight, the question of the property of the small artisan, of the peasant--these are all critical questions); and insofar as we accept the premise, who could possibly refute this? "WE by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it."
(485): "In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer." CHECK! "In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." CHECK!
(486): "You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend."
(487): yes, the contingency of the bourgeois.
(487): "And your education! Is not that also social..."
(488): the nation as arena for battle -- "The working men have no country. WE cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word." [national as "false-consciousness"? at the very least the rejoinder has to engage the complexities of the perspective]
(490): the dictatorship of the proletariat
(490): amidst the ten-ponit plan--"a more equable distribution of the population over the country" (interesting--the end of the city? or the end of the mega-city? or what?)
(491): "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" CHECK!
(491): "feudal socialism" -- remember the history of the time, the Corn Laws and all this. noblesse oblige at its finest.
(492): Marx and Engels on Christian socialism (worth remembering that this is historically specific, of course--but can't help but think of the liberation theologians--I'm sure there's a better treatment of similar phenomena elsewhere in their work): "Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."
(494): in critique of German Socialism appropriating French, there's a wonderful criticism of academic irrelevance and self-importance: "The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome 'French one-sidedness' and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature..."
(496): ouch! Proudhon as "Bourgeois Socialist" -- they've had their feud by this point. "They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat."
(498): the critique of utopian socialists--perhaps most importantly, they have no political program (they appeal over the heads of the proletariat, to Society in the abstract). though Marx and Engels applaud, here, the critical achievements of this school. "Castles in the air" become irrelevant as the class war matures.
(500): "In Germany [the communists] fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way..." [not for much longer...] "But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat... in order that after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight with the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin." [this is important, insofar as it's not as simple as declaring that the failures and repressions of 1848-9 mark a stark rupture in Marxist thought--i.e., when the 'permanent revolution' was born. these ideas were always germinating, though the later experiences of course generated awareness of the extent of the ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie.]
(470): "the practical application of the principles... will depend... on the historical conditions for the time being existing..."
(470): chastened by experience of the Commune -- the State is not an instrument that can be wielded, at least not naively: "One thing [that] especially was proved by the commune."
(472): interesting reflections on the necessity of the "bourgeois revolution" in Russia--"The only answer to [the question of whether it can go straight to "the higher form of communist common ownership] today is this:" world revolution. in other words, the argument is that a proletarian revolution in the West were to complement revolution in Russia, this accelerated transition could very well happen.
(474): the (in)famous claim that the "epoch of the bourgeoisie... has simplified the class antagonisms." the questions are obvious, and well-worn--while we must defend this charge against the aimlessness of the post-moderns, there are legitimate questions to ask about the homogeneity of the underclass, the probability of collective resistance, the euro-centrism of the expectation.
(475): "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"--see US treasury department, 150 years later.
(475): the notion of the progressive role of the bourgeoisie, which for us, raises questions but also offers a basic premise. the premise--that progress is invariably dialectical, that our apprehension of it needs to be framed by the structuring understanding of the fundamental irrationality of capitalism. and the questions, i think, relate very obviously to the pernicious questions of empire and dependent development--we must learn to re-write, rigorously, the divergent narratives of the national bourgeoisie.
(475-476): the contention here is that exploitation is more naked than before--but this does not mean, of course, that the bourgeoisie fails to cloak its own oppression in say-nothing sweet-nothings.
(477): here, underdeveloped reflections on China and the 'exportation' of bourgeois civilization. if this is used to point to Marxism as imperialism, one need only point to Marxist theories of imperialism.
(477): the "idiocy of rural life" [sack of potatoes, etc.]
(478): prefiguring the Frankfurt School--"Modern bourgeois society...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."
(478): an important page if we're to trace the Marxist theory of crisis--here sounds quite straightforward, with none of the complexity of Capital: overproduction followed by devaluation (or export of capital and pursuit of new markets, if possible).
(478-479): the gravedigger passage -- note to self--must write an essay on this question.
(479): a possible place where it is predicted that the "wages decrease" -- regardless, that silly objection to Marxism need only be set against the deep analysis of Capital and the concept of the reserve army of labor. [see also "pauperization" on 483)
(480-481): a wonderfully seductive teleology, of workers as scattered mass becoming active, cohesive agent--of local struggles becoming one, (inter)national struggle. if only (in that sense we have to remember that this is polemic).
(481): "...a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands..." [making space for themselves, of course--we can debate, i guess, the extent to which this is an important sociological intervention. the fixity of one's class identity was never relevant. but it is interesting, in light of the next twenty years of engels life, no?]
(481): and this, is interesting, insofar as we want to make it systematic it seems to come into conflict with the anti-elitism of the early work: "and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideolgoists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."
(482): all other classes are "not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary; for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests..." [brief mention of 'lumpen' elements, which are here derided as reactionary--so whereto for the informal working-class? is the objection re: soweto in order? it doesn't seem like that's satisfactory... but we are going round in circles trying to resolve this formally--PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE]
(483-484): 'point' of the Communists is 'unity' -- to represent the general interests of the proletarian movement as a whole. but much will hinge on the question of what 'representation' might entail.
(484): spelling out what the abolition of private property denotes, in a society ridden purely with the class antagonism between Capital and Labor (but, in hindsight, the question of the property of the small artisan, of the peasant--these are all critical questions); and insofar as we accept the premise, who could possibly refute this? "WE by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it."
(485): "In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer." CHECK! "In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." CHECK!
(486): "You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend."
(487): yes, the contingency of the bourgeois.
(487): "And your education! Is not that also social..."
(488): the nation as arena for battle -- "The working men have no country. WE cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word." [national as "false-consciousness"? at the very least the rejoinder has to engage the complexities of the perspective]
(490): the dictatorship of the proletariat
(490): amidst the ten-ponit plan--"a more equable distribution of the population over the country" (interesting--the end of the city? or the end of the mega-city? or what?)
(491): "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" CHECK!
(491): "feudal socialism" -- remember the history of the time, the Corn Laws and all this. noblesse oblige at its finest.
(492): Marx and Engels on Christian socialism (worth remembering that this is historically specific, of course--but can't help but think of the liberation theologians--I'm sure there's a better treatment of similar phenomena elsewhere in their work): "Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."
(494): in critique of German Socialism appropriating French, there's a wonderful criticism of academic irrelevance and self-importance: "The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome 'French one-sidedness' and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature..."
(496): ouch! Proudhon as "Bourgeois Socialist" -- they've had their feud by this point. "They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat."
(498): the critique of utopian socialists--perhaps most importantly, they have no political program (they appeal over the heads of the proletariat, to Society in the abstract). though Marx and Engels applaud, here, the critical achievements of this school. "Castles in the air" become irrelevant as the class war matures.
(500): "In Germany [the communists] fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way..." [not for much longer...] "But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat... in order that after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight with the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin." [this is important, insofar as it's not as simple as declaring that the failures and repressions of 1848-9 mark a stark rupture in Marxist thought--i.e., when the 'permanent revolution' was born. these ideas were always germinating, though the later experiences of course generated awareness of the extent of the ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie.]
Thursday, October 1, 2009
the geopolitics of capitalism, david harvey
(313): the logic of the circulation of capital does not explain everything that happens under a capitalist mode of production. but it is the indispensable condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, itself.
(313): IMPORTANT--distinction between "infrastructures" being "functional" for the logic of capital, and being "broadly in support of".
(314): class as a loaded term, but one which can be deployed in the simplest sense--the "class relation" that opens up between buyers and sellers of labor power.
(314-315): similarly, "there are… innumerable other sources of tension, conflict, and struggle, not all of which can be directly reduced directly or indirectly to a manifestation of the capital-labor antagonism. But class struggle between capital and labor is so fundamental that it does infect all other aspects of bourgeois life.”
(315): “a central contradiction”—“The system has to expand through the application of living labor whereas the main path of technological change is to supplant living labor…” We can flag, again, the question of what exactly is explaining crisis, in Harvey; because this sounds like the orthodoxy (falling rate of profit), but it leads him directly to enumerate his (derided?) analytic of overaccumulation (twin surpluses of capital and labor as“manifestations” of this crisis). In short, it is not as simply incorrect as I understand it to be.
(316): KEY: “The historical geography of capitalism can best be viewed from the standpoint of the triple imperatives of production, mobilization, and absorption of surpluses of capital and labor power.” (identical to thinking about it through twin imperatives of ‘logic of capital accumulation’ and ‘logic of class struggle’?)
(317): this point is important for his later “accumulation through dispossession argument”—surpluses are, of course, generated from within the production process, but they also require the parasitism of the mode of the production as a whole (obviously recalls Rosa Luxemburg, this).
(318): given conditions of twin surplus (i.e., a crisis), Harvey wants to draw our attention to the effects on accumulation of those “spatial and temporal displacements” which postpone, but fail to permanently resolve crises.
(319): the possibility of “dynamic equilibrium” across time—i.e., investment in areas that take a long time to mature, precisely because they serve to facilitate the speeding up of other parts of the economy. A nice enumeration of the importance of time to his argument (but can pursuit of ‘turnover time’ be subsumed into the ‘pursuit of relative surplus-value’?)
(320): IMPORTANT—very concrete enumeration of the role of “fictitious capital”: “bonds, mortgages, stocks and shares, government debt and the like... What fictitious capital does is to convert a long-drawn-out circulation process… into an annualized rate of return. It does this by facilitating the daily buying and selling of rights and claims to a share in the product of future labor.” In other words, it enables capitalists to make a regular profit off of investments that would otherwise be unattractive (but which are still, from a systemic point of view, critical—both because it helps the absorption problem, but presumably also because it aids in the annihilation of time).
(321): he is saying that, because fictituous capital and credit make it possible for these “long-term” and “short-term” investment options to co-exist, the possibility of a dynamic equilibrium prevails. But does this not neglect the fundamental insight of Marx, in his reflections on Dept. I and Dept. II (which Harvey mentioned, earlier): you could conceive of equilibrium as a ‘theoretical’ possibility, but the fact that it is all being co-ordinated by the pull of profit makes that fanciful.
(322): regardless, he proceeds to focus on the fact that their displacement ultimately fails, simply because it postpones “obligations” into the future: “what happens, in effect, is that present problems are absorbed through contracting future obligations.”
(322-323): there are two forms this crisis can take: (1) the infrastructures help capitalist production, but the excess surpluses produced in the new cycle of reproduction meet with further absorption problems (since all you have done is displace them through time?) (2) the infrastructures proved useless—the relevant investments devalue.
(323): useful contrast between railroad building in the 1800s, and the post-WWII infrastructure boom: in the former, there were periodic bouts of devaluation, which ‘helped’ capitalism restart. In the latter, though, the State postponed the crisis by simply printing more money—this, of course, raised the spectre of inflation (which can, ultimately, only be combated by austerity measures, unless you’re the US of A! he is, of course, writing after the 70s, so when he mentions the difficulty of capitalism finding a way out, which it partly did (though he’s right to anticipate stagnation and devaluation, the latter has not happened at the scale one would have expected—and that’s Bob Brenner’s argument, of course). In sum: we do need to look more carefully at what is (and what was) transpiring). [see also 339]
(324): having considered the temporal fix (debt/fictitious capital formation), we turn to “space,” about which he will conclude: “The end-result… is that crises become more global in scope at the same time that geopolitical conflicts become part and parcel of the processes of crisis formation and resolution.”
(326-327): Lenin's answer to the 'space'-related lacuna in marxism is to add the "State"--but Harvey doesn't believe, rightly, that the questions about space in capitalism can be resolved into the national scale.
(327): important passage, trying to enumerate the specificity of space—“Is it possible to construct a theory of the concrete and the particular in the context of the universal and abstract determinations of Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation?”
(327-328): critical—we have to be specific about how “space” matters; i.e., we can prioritize “time,” whatever that means, but the real contradiction arises when we see that “spatial organization is necessary” to conquer “space.” It is to see how this unfolds, and its consequences, that we need the methods of a historical-geographical materialism.
(328-329): here, the concept of “structured coherence” enters, includes: forms and technologies of production; technologies, quantities and qualities of consumption, patterns of labor demand; and supply, and physical/social infrastructures—a certain, specific, coherent material-geographical arrangement of the prevailing relations and forces of production, in a given area (an alternative definition is, simply, a labor market/commuter range, it seems). A “regional space.”
(329): FOUR processes that undermine coherence: (1) accumulation/expansion builds pressures on capital to leave, labor to arrive; (2) revolutions in technology; (3) class struggle; (4) revolutions in capitalist forms of organization.
(332-333): “The result can only be a chronic instability to regional and spatial configurations... The inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes. ”
(333-334): more, then, on the “class alliance” that emerges to protect this “structured coherence.”
(334-335): is there a problem here?—he is trying to problematize the “national question” via his analytic of the “class alliance,” which seems derived from a very specific understanding of developed capitalism. Can we speak of feudal-hari alliance in Sindh in the same way? Maybe.
(337): his analysis of dependency, tested through India-Britain-US. Britain had an interest in tailoring India’s development to the needs of its own industry (but then, it encountered problems precisely because India didn’t work well as a site of surplus absorption). Certainly, there’s a lot missing from the analysis (consciously so, I suspect), but it’s not uninteresting.
(338): Marx’s “theory of overaccumulation-devaluation,” which reveals the “intense destructive power that lurks behind capitalism’s façade…”
(342): from depression to the Marshall Plan: “It was in fact the Second World War that brought full employment and reinvestment, but did so under conditions where vast amounts of capital stood to be physically destroyed, and many idle workers consumed as cannon fodder. And it was precisely the geographical unnevenness of that destruction that opened up new spaces in the postwar period for the absorption of surplus US capital.“
(343): “The bourgeois era has witnessed a growth in destructive force that more than matches the growth of productive force so essential to the survival of capitalism.”
(313): the logic of the circulation of capital does not explain everything that happens under a capitalist mode of production. but it is the indispensable condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, itself.
(313): IMPORTANT--distinction between "infrastructures" being "functional" for the logic of capital, and being "broadly in support of".
(314): class as a loaded term, but one which can be deployed in the simplest sense--the "class relation" that opens up between buyers and sellers of labor power.
(314-315): similarly, "there are… innumerable other sources of tension, conflict, and struggle, not all of which can be directly reduced directly or indirectly to a manifestation of the capital-labor antagonism. But class struggle between capital and labor is so fundamental that it does infect all other aspects of bourgeois life.”
(315): “a central contradiction”—“The system has to expand through the application of living labor whereas the main path of technological change is to supplant living labor…” We can flag, again, the question of what exactly is explaining crisis, in Harvey; because this sounds like the orthodoxy (falling rate of profit), but it leads him directly to enumerate his (derided?) analytic of overaccumulation (twin surpluses of capital and labor as“manifestations” of this crisis). In short, it is not as simply incorrect as I understand it to be.
(316): KEY: “The historical geography of capitalism can best be viewed from the standpoint of the triple imperatives of production, mobilization, and absorption of surpluses of capital and labor power.” (identical to thinking about it through twin imperatives of ‘logic of capital accumulation’ and ‘logic of class struggle’?)
(317): this point is important for his later “accumulation through dispossession argument”—surpluses are, of course, generated from within the production process, but they also require the parasitism of the mode of the production as a whole (obviously recalls Rosa Luxemburg, this).
(318): given conditions of twin surplus (i.e., a crisis), Harvey wants to draw our attention to the effects on accumulation of those “spatial and temporal displacements” which postpone, but fail to permanently resolve crises.
(319): the possibility of “dynamic equilibrium” across time—i.e., investment in areas that take a long time to mature, precisely because they serve to facilitate the speeding up of other parts of the economy. A nice enumeration of the importance of time to his argument (but can pursuit of ‘turnover time’ be subsumed into the ‘pursuit of relative surplus-value’?)
(320): IMPORTANT—very concrete enumeration of the role of “fictitious capital”: “bonds, mortgages, stocks and shares, government debt and the like... What fictitious capital does is to convert a long-drawn-out circulation process… into an annualized rate of return. It does this by facilitating the daily buying and selling of rights and claims to a share in the product of future labor.” In other words, it enables capitalists to make a regular profit off of investments that would otherwise be unattractive (but which are still, from a systemic point of view, critical—both because it helps the absorption problem, but presumably also because it aids in the annihilation of time).
(321): he is saying that, because fictituous capital and credit make it possible for these “long-term” and “short-term” investment options to co-exist, the possibility of a dynamic equilibrium prevails. But does this not neglect the fundamental insight of Marx, in his reflections on Dept. I and Dept. II (which Harvey mentioned, earlier): you could conceive of equilibrium as a ‘theoretical’ possibility, but the fact that it is all being co-ordinated by the pull of profit makes that fanciful.
(322): regardless, he proceeds to focus on the fact that their displacement ultimately fails, simply because it postpones “obligations” into the future: “what happens, in effect, is that present problems are absorbed through contracting future obligations.”
(322-323): there are two forms this crisis can take: (1) the infrastructures help capitalist production, but the excess surpluses produced in the new cycle of reproduction meet with further absorption problems (since all you have done is displace them through time?) (2) the infrastructures proved useless—the relevant investments devalue.
(323): useful contrast between railroad building in the 1800s, and the post-WWII infrastructure boom: in the former, there were periodic bouts of devaluation, which ‘helped’ capitalism restart. In the latter, though, the State postponed the crisis by simply printing more money—this, of course, raised the spectre of inflation (which can, ultimately, only be combated by austerity measures, unless you’re the US of A! he is, of course, writing after the 70s, so when he mentions the difficulty of capitalism finding a way out, which it partly did (though he’s right to anticipate stagnation and devaluation, the latter has not happened at the scale one would have expected—and that’s Bob Brenner’s argument, of course). In sum: we do need to look more carefully at what is (and what was) transpiring). [see also 339]
(324): having considered the temporal fix (debt/fictitious capital formation), we turn to “space,” about which he will conclude: “The end-result… is that crises become more global in scope at the same time that geopolitical conflicts become part and parcel of the processes of crisis formation and resolution.”
(326-327): Lenin's answer to the 'space'-related lacuna in marxism is to add the "State"--but Harvey doesn't believe, rightly, that the questions about space in capitalism can be resolved into the national scale.
(327): important passage, trying to enumerate the specificity of space—“Is it possible to construct a theory of the concrete and the particular in the context of the universal and abstract determinations of Marx’s theory of capitalist accumulation?”
(327-328): critical—we have to be specific about how “space” matters; i.e., we can prioritize “time,” whatever that means, but the real contradiction arises when we see that “spatial organization is necessary” to conquer “space.” It is to see how this unfolds, and its consequences, that we need the methods of a historical-geographical materialism.
(328-329): here, the concept of “structured coherence” enters, includes: forms and technologies of production; technologies, quantities and qualities of consumption, patterns of labor demand; and supply, and physical/social infrastructures—a certain, specific, coherent material-geographical arrangement of the prevailing relations and forces of production, in a given area (an alternative definition is, simply, a labor market/commuter range, it seems). A “regional space.”
(329): FOUR processes that undermine coherence: (1) accumulation/expansion builds pressures on capital to leave, labor to arrive; (2) revolutions in technology; (3) class struggle; (4) revolutions in capitalist forms of organization.
(332-333): “The result can only be a chronic instability to regional and spatial configurations... The inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes. ”
(333-334): more, then, on the “class alliance” that emerges to protect this “structured coherence.”
(334-335): is there a problem here?—he is trying to problematize the “national question” via his analytic of the “class alliance,” which seems derived from a very specific understanding of developed capitalism. Can we speak of feudal-hari alliance in Sindh in the same way? Maybe.
(337): his analysis of dependency, tested through India-Britain-US. Britain had an interest in tailoring India’s development to the needs of its own industry (but then, it encountered problems precisely because India didn’t work well as a site of surplus absorption). Certainly, there’s a lot missing from the analysis (consciously so, I suspect), but it’s not uninteresting.
(338): Marx’s “theory of overaccumulation-devaluation,” which reveals the “intense destructive power that lurks behind capitalism’s façade…”
(342): from depression to the Marshall Plan: “It was in fact the Second World War that brought full employment and reinvestment, but did so under conditions where vast amounts of capital stood to be physically destroyed, and many idle workers consumed as cannon fodder. And it was precisely the geographical unnevenness of that destruction that opened up new spaces in the postwar period for the absorption of surplus US capital.“
(343): “The bourgeois era has witnessed a growth in destructive force that more than matches the growth of productive force so essential to the survival of capitalism.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)