Saturday, February 02, 2013

Part 3 of 6: The Political-Economic "Law of Motion" of Modern Society




Dear Readers,

Below is part 3 of my 6-part serialization of the Equitist Advocacy group’s essay "The Political-Economic Law of Motion of Modern, Capital-Based Society -- The 'Sociotaxis' Toward [State-]Capitalist Totalitarianism as Political-Economic Attractor".

As with my previous serialization, here, of their "Malady and Remedy" manifesto, I have felt free to add to and/or to re-write portions of the text which I felt needed updating, or other improvement(s).

The Equitist Advocacy group’s original essay can be accessed via the following URLs --

http://equitism.org/Equitism/Equitism-entry.htm

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/Theory.htm

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion.htm



Regards,

Miguel


The Political-Economic "Law Of Motion" of Modern, Capital-based Society --

The 'Socio-Taxis' Toward [State-]Capitalist, Humanocidal Totalitarianism as 'Political-Economic Attractor'



Part 3 of 6:   Toward a Marxian Theory of the Totalitarianism, and of the Totalitarian Self-Degeneration and '''Political-Economic Immiseration''' of Late/"Decadent"/"Real Domination" of Capital/World-Market Society

Conjecture
These implications amount to a prediction of the phenomenon of — what has come to be called, originally by non-Marxians and, often, by anti-Marxians — totalitarianism as a theoretical category of the critique of political economy, and as a core content of the predicted political-economic "immiseration" of the lives of the majorities of the human populations of late/decadent capitalist, or global-market, society, including especially those situated within the core nations of the world-market system of capitals.


This is the context within which, in the Marxian tradition, so-called "conspiracy theories" should be judged.

Groups within human society are continually attempting "conspiracies" of all kinds — as anyone experienced in the political life, of, e.g., opposition movements, including "Marxist" organizations, corporate life, or even family life can attest. 


Perhaps, almost invariably, these "conspiracies" fail to produce the full results intended by the conspirators.

In modern, commodity/money/capital-centered society, the potential degree of success of "conspiracies" is profoundly conditioned by the class position of the "conspirators", and by the changing, developing convergence of dynamics and conditions created by the praxis of the global human species as an '''exchange-value valuing''', '''exchange-value-centered/-pre-occupied" species — dynamics and conditions which Marx summed up under the phrase "the law of value".


The core of the failure of the majority of the post-WWI "Marxist" "Left" — its advocacy of the Stalinist "Soviet" Union as an exemplar and realization of "socialism" — is also its wholesale abandonment of democracy — of the extension of democracy, beyond the representative, political-only "democracy" of ascendant-phase capital-centered society, to encompass political-economic democracy


Yet that political-economic democracy is the only way to save any semblance of even political democracy — and to save humanity itself — from the core and global, multi-genocidal degeneration immanent in decadent phase capitalist society, a degeneration into a hybrid, private/state-capitalist, totalitarian, "Hell-on-Earth" nightmare, far more horrific than even its Stalinist and Hitlerist precursors.



The "State-Capitalist" Phase of the Development of the Capital-Relation, and of Capital-Value Accumulation, and the Phenomenon of Totalitarianism

Today's remnant Stalinoid, Lenino-Stalinoid, and Lenino-Trotskyoid ‘groupustules’ [the latter, the would-be successors of the original Stalinoids, successors who would trick humanity yet a second time into fighting for their dictatorship over the proletariat; for their dictatorship over the rest of humanity; into falling for their state-bureaucratic, totalitarian, world-wide concentration camp of state-capitalisms, One Big Gulag] — indeed, all Leninoids — reject the concept of "state capitalism" out-of-hand.


Big surprise, no?


Some do so on the grounds that, without the competition of capitals to enforce, as an external compulsion upon individual capitals, the immanent capitalist "law of value", there can be no capitalism.

If the state owns all capital — if there is only one capital, if there are no longer many capitals, constraining one another to obey the "law of value", which alone defines capital as capital, and constrains it to continue to "be" capital — then there cannot be any capital at all, even if the appearance of wage-labor, with workers selling their labor-power to the state in exchange for money-wages and/or for money-salaries, persists.


They have a point, but, in this argument, they also reveal their self-vitiating self-confinement within "national socialist" horizons. 


The world of humanity does not consist of but a single nation-state. 


No single nation-state, but only the world market, is the true totality-of-reference for the system of capitals, and "Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce" [Marx, Capital, Vol. II, page 470.]. 


A "pure", idealized" model of state-capitalism would envision the ultimate completion of conglomeration, of the "mergers and acquisitions" movement, within a given nation-state, a final "buy-out" -- "hostile take-over" or not -- by the state itself, creating a "national super-corporation", managed by the state bureaucracy, on behalf of, and subordinate to, at least initially, the dominant faction of the legacy bourgeoisie of private-capitalist hyper-plutocrats. 


Each such "single capital", consolidated on a national scale, to the extent that it lacked the potential for total autarky, would still import from, and export to, the world market, competing with other national and multi-national private capitals, as well as, perhaps, with other 'nation-[al]ized' capitals, or state-capitals, other 'national super-corporations', in export markets, on the basis of the joint pursuit of capital-profitability, together with that of something we might call 'power-profitability' -- unified -- through international trade, and, alternately, through '''inter-nation-al''', '''inter-[state-]capitalist''' war.   


Rather reminiscent, is it not, of the world-system envisioned by George Orwell in his seminal, novel analysis of the totalitarian degeneration of human society, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the three totalitarian, ‘oligopotent’, ‘meta-national’ social formations of the permanently-militarized empires of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are ever at war!


Such an un-hybridized, idealized "pure type" is unlikely to emerge in actual human history. 


What did emerge, but only in two territories vast enough, in land area, in resources, and in population, to have some potential for autarky — the vast territory of Russia and the vast territory of China — was proto-state-capitalism, never developed enough, in their "Department II", consumer goods making industries, to have much in the way of competitive consumer goods exports to the world-market, throughout their entire Stalinist periods, but having sufficient autarkic potential to partially "secede", for a while, from the world market, as a geographically gargantuan "command economy", similar, in some ways, to the non-market, intercontinental command economies that prevail inside today's "multi-national"/"trans-national" private super-corporations -- formations of private, and privatized, 'Corporate Stalinism'.


Though the autarkic potential of Lenino-Stalinist Russia and of Lenino-Stalinist China shielded them, to a degree, from complete rule by the capitalist world-market’s “law of value”, the essence of the imperatives of that “law” were transmitted to those two proto-state-capitalist nation-states by the industrialized military threat, to the rule of their state-bureaucratic ruling classes, by the imperial-colonial hyper-belligerence of the nation-states of the capitalist core toward these proto-state-capitalist formations. 


Either these new state-bureaucratic, totalitarian ruling classes would mount an effective, industrialized military defense against the core capitalist ruling class industrialized military assault against them, or those new ruling classes would be militarily subjugated, overthrown, and dissolved, and their countries re-assimilated to the already-burgeoning developmentally-suppressed, industrially-suppressed “Third World” of ‘servant-dictatorships’, manufactured by and subservient to the core capitalist ruling class.


Thus, the Stalinist state-bureaucratic ruling classes, in a desperate effort to preserve their rule, and all of its “perks”, against otherwise certain invasion and overthrow by the industrialized military power of the countries of the capitalist core, in order to create the basis of an industrialized military counter-power of their own, that could deter or successfully resist industrialized military invasion by the armies of the capitalist core, plunged desperately and hyper-violently into a hyper-accelerated, massive program of “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital, via the cannibalization of the peasant and urban  working classes, to fuel a forced industrialization that effectively reproduced, in essence -- if via different motives than those that prevailed in the original, private-capitalist industrialization of the capitalist core-region -- the social and institutional features, and the social relations of production -- the capital-relation, i.e., the wage-labor-relation, the dictatorship of factory management over factory workers, the impoverishment of the working-classes -- that the “law of value” also dictated for the rest of the capitalist world market terrain. 


This Stalinist "proto-state-capitalism/autarky" hybrid thus emerged in lands situated within a "semi-periphery" of the capitalist core, peripheral societies whose home-grown, late-to-emerge private capitalist classes were stunted, crippled, and crushed, in their development, between earlier-emerged, already strong, and aggressively imperial/-colonial private capitalist classes of the capitalist core, on one flank, and the still-unconquered, crypto-feudal «Ancien Regime» of their home-terrain on the other flank. 


These private-capitalist 'dwarf-classes' were consequently too weakened to lead a classical, bourgeois revolution against their ruling absolute monarchies/landed aristocracies/war lords. 


Instead, in the social collapse aftermath of inter-capitalist war, in the case of Russia, of  World War I, a state-bureaucratic dictatorship was formed out of the victorious «coup d'état» of the crypto-Jacobin, pseudo-Marxian insurrectionary party — a party which had, predictably, perverted Marxian theory into an ideology justifying the dictatorial rule of a new, would-be ruling-class. 


That is, a state-bureaucratic national dictatorship arose out of the pseudo-working-class pseudo-victory of a party of would-be/belated bourgeois social revolutionaries, stranded in a predominantly peasant society but with no effective, emergent bourgeoisie, or private-capitalist class, and with this crypto-Jacobin, pseudo-Marxian insurrectionary party forming the nucleus of the new, state-bureaucratic ruling class. 


Thus, these pseudo-Marxians prefigured the final, desperate resort to the state — to state-capitalism — still-to-come in the core regions of world capital;  in the core regions of the world-market system-of-capitals.

These crypto-Jacobin insurrectionists created proto-state-capitalism, but called it "socialism" -- “socialism in one country” -- ‘“national socialism”’


In the end, the dynamics of these statist regimes proved to exhibit nothing but a mere historical-transient, a transient trajectory in the development of the capitals-system’s world market, one that, at length, assimilates and consolidates vast portions of the former “semi-periphery” of the capitals world-system -- in this case, those of Eastern Europe, Russia, and China -- into the original core region of industrial capitalist development -- in this case, the Northern temperate zone region:  U.S./Canada/U.K./Western Europe.

   
That is, these statist regimes turned out to constitute just another, if new and novel, state-space trajectory, leading from one or another pre-capitalist state of society to the capitalist state of society.

   
They turned out to constitute just another pathway to the attractor of capitalism, a trajectory of return from quasi-autarky to the world market, one which only, initially seemed to veer away from capitalism and its world-market, but which never even got close to achieving social-evolutionary "escape-velocity" from the capital-relation-attractor.  


These statist regimes constituted, indeed, just a new form of the hyper-violent "primitive accumulation" of capital itself, accomplished, this time, not by the classical enclosure movements' collusion of landed property and incipient industrial capital, documented by Marx in Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII, but by the state-bureaucracy self-constituted as a “class-for-itself”, as ruling class, substituting for an absent/eliminated/mortally-weakened landed aristocracy and bourgeoisie.


But why does this new pathway of the “primitive accumulation” of industrial capital, as an historical-“economic process, take the political form of totalitarianism, whereas the core-region regimes of the private-capitalist ruling class, at least during the ascendant phase of the capitalist system, not only do not take the political form of totalitarianism, but even stake claims of promoting representative political democracy and liberty instead?




Note [by M.D.]:  A key feature of the “ultra-irrational” use of their ultra-concentrated, descendant phase political-economic power by the ruling faction of the capitalist ruling class still remains to be rationally, scientifically explained, in the sense of dialectical rationality.  The problem to be solved is this:  ¿Why do the descendant phase rulers of the capitals-system “lawfully”, predictably apply it to humanocide, to ‘‘‘eugenocide’’’ -- to the pursuit of catastrophic global human population reduction, under the cover of Neo-Malthusian, “[pseudo-]ecological”, “People Are Pollution” ideologies?  The Equitist Advocacy group’s solution to this problem will be set forth in Part 5. of this serialization.





































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