[Marxism] To Contemporary Analysis of Marxism

[S. Artesian]

I agree with almost all of Melvyn's critique, although I do think Marx 
states pretty near explicitly in works other than the CM that the 
expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat creates the basis for 
the creation of a society of emancipated "natural and social beings."

Marx uses the words "free association of producers," but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the rest of Simonovic's analysis is pretty unoriginal, 
embodying the notion of the worker as consumer, bought off and made 
"one-dimensional" by the expanding wealth of  capitalism, when in fact that 
sort of Marcusian, or neo-Marcusian, analysis, was dead on arrival, and 
certainly dead as a the proverbial doornail by the time of the Thatcher and 
Reagan.  And now we supposedly at the end of that period?  Comrades, comrade 
Ljubodrag is 30 years late.

Look, the bourgeoisie have been on the offensive ever since 1973, and they 
haven't been, aren't, and won't be kidding.  This is a class that cuts 
throats for a living, and enjoys it.

As for the bourgeoisie as revolutionary, what was revolutionary was not the 
class, the bourgeoisie, but the enduring, inevitable, expanding conflict 
between means and relations of production, the conflict made more acute with 
each metamorphoses of M-C-M'  between use and exchange, between productive 
FORCE and private property.

That dynamic does not disappear because the bourgeoisie foul the oceans and 
the atmosphere; damage the land, the rivers, and health of any and every 
breathing thing.  They, the bourgeoisie, have always done that, and Marx and 
Engels were always aware of that.

The revolutionary kernel is the conflict with private property, all forms of 
private property in production, which are compressed in capital's need to 
aggrandize and expel wage-labor.

In actual revolutionary struggle, in the Great French Revolution of the 18th 
Century, in the great, and destroyed, moment of Radical Reconstruction in 
the 19th century, in the Revolution in Mexico 1910-1920, revolution itself 
only becomes bourgeois in its defeat.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Waistline2 at aol.com>
To: <sartesian at earthlink.net>
Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2009 9:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] To Contemporary Analysis of Marxism