[edw]

It is irksome that people lay all of the horrors of the world at the door of “Capitalism” when people have been scamming, exploiting, and generally screwing each other over since the beginning of time. Capitalism is something that emerged in the Eighteen Century. The word means something and to ascribe every immoral or amoral act that aggrandizes someone to Capitalism is an act of intellectual vandalism. And to forstall the karma-harvesting mosquitos about to descend on my comment with a smug “But Capitalism is not therefore an unalloyed good!” reply, I’m not saying Capitalism isn’t without its problems.

[claudiawerner]

That's not a very charitable interpretation of the position, which I see to be along the lines of the fact that the economic mode of production in any given period reaches past mere individual transactions and into our whole mode of being, influencing everything from politics to art to religion.

The criticisms of capitalism, at least from a scientific standpoint, are not that people under capitalism are doing bad things, it's either that (i) under previous or potentially future modes of production there would be little or no incentive to do those things, (ii) capitalism has exacerbated the degree to which the behavior persists. The second part of the criticism is that capitalism is a class society, and thus rife with the antagonism that comes with class society in the form of "contradictions", which manifest themselves in capitalism as the contradiction of abstract and concrete labour, use-value and exchange value, capital and labour, price and value, culture and the commodity etc.

[zozbot123]

> The second part of the criticism is that capitalism is a class society

The modern middle-class society of the present day would quite simply be utterly unrecognizable to 19th-c. theorists of "capitalism [as] a class society". In fact, they would find that most, if not all, of the policy goals that they originally set for themselves have been achieved, in a market economy! The Chinese leadership understands this quite well, BTW; the above consideration plays a significant role in their understanding of what a "socialism with Chinese characteristics" should look like.

[claudiawerner]

On the other hand,

The fact that the class structure has been complicated does not mean it has disappeared, nor does the increase in class mobility mean that classes have disappeared. It's worth noting that it's not only the 19th century theorists who thought of capitalism as class society, but relatively recent ones too. The notion that the "concrete aims" of Marx and company (if you're referring to them) have been fulfilled is farcical - they didn't only call for an increase in living conditions for non-capitalists, they called for a society different in kind, not just degree. I'd be interested in how core ideas such as "abolition of the value-form" play into a system to which they are antagonistic (market economy).

A lovely quote from the 60s:

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” (Herbert Marcuse)

And from the same person:

“Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”

[zozbot123]

> "abolition of the value-form"

Isn't that a feature of only the final stage of social evolution according to Marx? The one that Marx calls "communism" (not to be confused with e.g. "communist countries" or "communist parties", as a reference to their politics). A close relative to the communist stage wrt. the theory of market economies would be what we call a "post-scarcity economy" - except that it's not really a 'core idea' in any sense. It might or might not happen at some point in the future, but a market theorist has no need for that hypothesis.

I'd love to comment about the remark you quote regarding the "preservation of the Establishment" and how ironic it sounds today, but to do that I'd have to mention some quite uncomfortable facts about present-day political dynamics, which would take us very far from the subject, and deep into partisan controversy. Sorry!

[AnimalMuppet]

> ... capitalism is a class society

So? What came before capitalism? Feudalism. That was a class society at least as much as capitalism is.

[claudiawerner]

That was what I was trying to say; capitalism isn't distinguished by the fact of contradictions, it is distinguished by a new set of contradictions.

[AnimalMuppet]

A new set because, while class isn't new, the specifics of the class structure are?

BTW: Why "contradiction"? It looks like Marx chose that word in order to make the fall of capitalism look inevitable - it has contradictions, so it must be self-inconsistent, so it must fall, right? But it looks to me that what Marx is describing is just the differences that occur in any society. In what way are they truly contradictions (in the normal sense of the word)?

[claudiawerner]

A new set because history has developed in such a way to generate new contradictions - but yes, the new class structure is at least partially a result of changes in technology (though some Marxists disagree with me on this).

Contradictions doesn't mean internally inconsistent in dialectical sense; Marxism is famous for its application of dialectical logic, in which opposites oppose each other while maintaining unity which must resolve itself, rather than a binary opposition (i.e we must have one or the other) or a binary inclusive-or (which has no potentiality for resolution).

The point of contradictions isn't to say that society will fall because of them (that would be a vulgar reading of the concept and a scientifically untenable one) but rather that any new society must in some way answer to the contradictions, or arise out of their development or increase in intensity. For instance, the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is only heightened with capitalism, but the contradiction between capital and labour is obviously new with capitalism. By specifying contradictions, they can be thought of (philosophically speaking) and potentially overcome (practically speaking). One such contradiction which has been present in all societies thus far is between freedom and necessity, which Marx claimed would be resolved with the advent of Communism.

I can't speak for the impression Marx wanted to give about the downfall of capitalism from his word choice, but I can say that the dialectical mode of presentation was admitted by Engels to have been rather outmoded even by the time Capital I was published. Contradiction in the dialectical sense doesn't imply inconsistency, it implies the functioning unity of opposites. At best, Marx's use of contradiction implies the possibility to overcome, but I don't know about the necessity. Herbert Marcuse, a renown dialectician, didn't seem to think that the contradiction would be resolved, and Adorno didn't seem to think that the contradiction would resolve positively.

Either way, I'm not going on the defensive here, since Marx's commitment to the scientific method should be reflected in Marxism's ability to be self-critical. Few other "sciences" would be so happy to cast doubt on the logical axioms under which they operate.

[AnimalMuppet]

Why is there a contradiction between use-value and exchange-value? Exchange-value is just other peoples' use-value (with some exceptions like money itself).

> ... I can say that the dialectical mode of presentation was admitted by Engels to have been rather outmoded even by the time Capital I was published.

Is there a Marxism that doesn't depend on the dialectic? Or just on the dialectical mode of presentation? It has always annoyed me that if you don't believe the dialectic, there seems to be no way to even talk to a Marxist. Am I mistaken?

More generally, it seems to me that Marxists would communicate much more effectively if they used technical words much less in the process of presenting their ideas, at least in non-academic settings. Most people don't want to have to learn a bunch of technical jargon in order to understand the ideas of some group - especially a group that they consider to be not only fringe, but almost certainly already refuted. Few people have enough time to willingly take on such a task.

[coldtea]

>Capitalism is something that emerged in the Eighteen Century

More like 15th century, is the widely accepted chronology. And it did bring with it a totally different kind of horror, including colonialism...

[AnimalMuppet]

Here is one definition of capitalism: Reinvesting the profits in the enterprise, to make it more efficient, larger, or better in some other way. That started in 12th Century Italy, and perhaps also in China's 11th Century Industrial Revolution.

(China could have had an iron-based industrial revolution long before Europe. But the mandarins saw that some lower-class people were getting rich, and so they shut it down by force.)

Also: Colonialism is an evil of capitalism? The Roman Empire did something very like colonialism. The Spanish in the 1500s weren't exactly capitalists, either.