Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism? March 2012
Dear
Students and Fellow Workers,
This
is to recover and expand the class discussion where student photos
demonstrated to me that my handwriting needs some assistance. It’s
not an assignment, but an invitation to review some of the key things
we have addressed.
We
were talking about two things: dialectical materialism (the
philosophy of how things change), and historical materialism (the
background of how society has changed in the past).
I
have argued that history studies the social relations that people
create in order to struggle to produce, reproduce, learn what is
true, and be free.
Social
relations involve classes, race, culture (religion), nations,
sex/gender, etc. This analysis focuses mainly, but not only, on
class. Freudian analysis, for example, is not in this picture, but
perhaps it should be.
This
is a link that summarizes what dialectical materialism is: http://richgibson.com/diamatoutline.html
As
we apply that philosophical (and actually scientific) view to
history, we can see that Feudalism gave birth to Capitalism which in
some instances lay the ground for Socialism.
Socialism,
I believe, failed because, in very brief, it was little more than
capitalism with a party, promising benevolence, at the top. That
party, in each instance, became a new class with interests, not for
the majority, but for itself.
Communism
has never existed except, to a degree, within some social justice
movements but communism never ruled a government, a state.
Feudalism
is characterized, at the top, by Kings, Queens, Knights, Priests, and
as we work our way down the ladder, small artisans, peasants
producing for their own consumption as well as for the Lords, and
some surplus production is offered for sale. Those at the top of
feudalism have an interest in keeping things as they are, ruling by
grace of God. Successful feudalism, if there is such a thing, freezes
societies (the Spanish empire over Mexico).
Inside
feudalism grows an embryo of producers, bankers, explorers,
technicians, scientists, artists, etc., who have an interest in
change. Over time, a long time, a working class is born–people who
are dispossessed from the land, who must sell their labor to live.
Within
the contradiction of feudalists and the growing classes who oppose
it, goods are beginning to be produced, not for use, but for sale:
commodity production. As this form of production develops, more and
more people are displaced from the land, becoming a early form of the
working class.
Again,
over time, the feudalists (Kings, Queens, etc) resist the changes
that are inherent in the growth of commodity production, exchange,
science (Galileo), etc. They have an interest in keeping things
exactly as they are while the growing class beneath them, both
workers and budding capitalists, have an interest in getting the
feudalists out of their way. This, at base, is a contradictory
relationship and quantity, capitalists and workers vs feudalists,
eventually becomes a qualitative change.
Bourgeoisie
(capitalist) revolution: France 1789. The French revolution is seen
as the baseline of all future revolutions although it was, in part,
propelled by the American revolution which declared that “all men
(sic) are created equal,” that oppressed people have a duty to lay
out their grievances in detail and, once that is done, the right to
make a revolution (Declaration of Independence).
The
French revolution swept across Europe, taking different forms in
different areas, but the French armies were powerful. Capitalism is
born in violence.
In
England, actions for reforms from capitalists and workers alike set
the Feudalists aside, made them something like ornaments.
Capitalism
is a revolutionary system demanding new technology, science,
exploration, etc. Culture is commodified and sold, just as all
production is designed to create commodities for sale and then for
profit, more specifically, for surplus value.
Surplus
value is, in very brief, what is left from profits after taxes are
paid, investments are made for new machinery, facilities,
exploration, research, etc. Surplus value is like gasoline to cars,
it is what makes capital move.
Within
capitalism (see the negation of the negation in dialectical
materialism) grows a working class which has contradictory interests
to the capitalists (who personify capital and think they run it, but
they do not–they run after it).
The
working class is more and more dispossessed from the land, often by
violence (Uganda today for example, but England two hundred years
ago).
Inside
capitalism we see a variety of contradictions:
*Production
is socialized (thousands of workers in plants making commodities) yet
appropriation and exchange are private: profits go to the
capitalists.
*Finance
and industrial capitalists are both united and at odds with each
other.
*While
capitalists formally resist government interference, they come to
rely more and more on the government which, over time, becomes their
executive committee and armed weapon: bailouts for finance and
industrial capitalists; imperialist wars. The corporate state
evolves.
*Big
capitalist fish eat little capitalist fish and monopolies rise up,
fast (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, etc).
*Anarchy
exists in production and exchange (more and more commodities are
created for sale, to the point of a crisis of overproduction,
realized when workers can no longer buy what they produce).
*An
excess of laborers grows; no jobs due to overproduction crises.
*Wars
between empires (imperialist wars) for cheap labor, raw materials,
markets, and regional control.
*As
per the Industrial Workers of the World (anarcho-syndicalists), “the
working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
(Actually, they do: contradiction).
*Feudalism,
or its appearances, still exists within capitalism: the Church.
*Capitalism
requires rapid, even astonishing advances in science (the Moon trips)
but retains interests in preserving unscientific ideologies that are
profitable divide and rule tools (racism).
*Capitalism
commodifies sexuality (pole dancers abound) but, of course, requires
it.
Socialism
presumes a revolution happened, upending the social order (fanshen–a
shovel turning over the earth, or, withdrawing the mandate from
heaven).
Socialism
presumes the working class will recognize its own interests, develop
class consciousness, and use its might to defeat the old ruling,
capitalist, class.
Under
socialism, the government continues to exist as a weapon of the
majority of people, a dictatorship of the proletariat. It is there to
promote greater equality, to organize production and exchange, to
defend against internal and external enemies, etc.
The
common slogan of socialism: from each according to their work, to
each according to their need.
In
the three prime examples of Socialism, Russia (later the USSR),
China, and Cuba, parties that led the revolution felt they had to
restore capitalist elements of production and science in order to
fend off external enemies–which were very real: invasions by the
capitalist world, internal enemies, etc.
In
the USSR, this return to capitalism was called the New Economic
Policy (which later morphed into a series of tragedies as the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union decayed).
In
China, the return to capitalism was called New Democracy. This was
followed by the Cultural Revolution which was, ostensibly, to reverse
the privileged rule of the party and, after nearly a decade of
struggle, was ended by the Red Army, “to restore order,” that is,
inequality.
In
Cuba, the resumption of capital has been systematic and openly
announced recently.
In
each case, Russia, China, and Cuba, life improved a good deal for the
majority of people, at great cost, and the improvements also became
elements of the capitalist reversal.
Socialism
has been seen as a stage on the way to communism.
Communism
assumes that sufficient equality exists that there is no need for
government. “From each according to commitment to each according to
need.” External enemies are defeated. The world is united. The
divisions of labor are gone (mental/manual; town/country, etc).
People can live in harmony, each developing his/her talents in
freedom, to their fullest extent.
There
are problems with socialist and communist patterns of thinking. Some
are noted above. One key problem: class consciousness. What is it
that would make the dispossessed recognize their own interests and
make a revolution, or, from the other angle, what keeps them in
place? Further, why, after making a revolution, has it been possible
for socialist parties to reverse the sacrifices made, and restore
capitalism–presuming that it’s not human nature?
Chalmers
Johnson did the best work on these issues, criticizing Marxist
theory, in all his writing but, in my view, some of the finest comes
in his book of the 60's: “Revolution.”
The outline above draws from the work of Karl Marx and his lifelong co-worker, Engels.When they wrote, about 150 years ago, they changed the world. The idea that being determines consciousness, which then reflects back on being, upended both the way philosophy and history were done---and that idea remains a battleground. They established new terrain for the fight over why things are as they are.
We can see that today in, for example, competing analysis of US' wars. One side would argue that the wars are for democracy, freedom, and humanity. The other side would say: cheap labor, raw materials, markets, regional control--profits. Or, in different views of the banking crisis: the bailouts were for the common good, to save the US and world economy. The other side would argue the bailouts were a simple example of class rule, via a government that serves a few, not the many.
How you see that is your choice: decide who you are in relation to others, using history and all the other disciplines, and they decide what to do.
Below is the classic summation of dialectical and historical materialism (how things change in the real word).
"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm