define capitalism

[noble brown]

What r the defining characteristics of capitalism. Its been around for some 800 hundred years. What makes capitalism capitalism?

[Property Is Robbery]

I googled the title of you thread. Capitalism: An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.

[AnonymousOne]

I googled the title of you thread. Capitalism: An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.

Also, wage labor. In fact I'd say that the biggest hallmark of capitalism is the existence of wage slavery, where the worker is exploited by the capitalist.

[noble brown]

So could we boil it down to "private property for profit"? Would that cover it

[CommunityBeliever]

Capitalism is an economic system in which most work is done by proletariat with the products and means of production owned by the bourgeoisie.

[noble brown]

Also, wage labor. In fact I'd say that the biggest hallmark of capitalism is the existence of wage slavery, where the worker is exploited by the capitalist.

Wage slavery seems more of a symptom of capitalism then anything. Because it would seem that labor is always required to create value whether its exchange or use value.

[Tablo]

I think it is best to define economic systems by labor relations. In capitalism the primary labor relationship is that between the worker and the owner.

[robbo203]

I googled the title of you thread. Capitalism: An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.


No, its not essentially to do with "private" ownership and profit. This is misleading. This idea that capitalism rests on de jure legal ownership of capital by private individuals is essentially an idealist notion which defines a mode of production in terms of its legal superstructure. Engels long ago disposed of this idea in his Socialism Utopian and Scientific in which he noted how far capitalism has evolved away from the model of individual ownership of the means of production by private individuals with the development of trusts and so on. One of his more memorable quotes from that book is this


The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.

This does not seem to be compatible with the notion of "private profit" or ownership by private individuals but, clearly, what Engels is saying here is that state ownership is still very much capitalism

[Jose Gracchus]

One must accept that there was no antagonism between employer and workers in the British Coal Strike, where the employer was in fact the National Coal Board, and thus not a privately-owned enterprise engaging in wage labor and production of commodities for private profit.

One will find that revolutionaries have a different view from Friedrich August von Hayek, but oddly enough in this epoch of reaction, many soi-dissant revolutionaries adopt essentially the Hayek-Friedmanite conception of capitalism.

[Apoi_Viitor]

An economic system based on the production of goods for value.

[Blake's Baby]

Generalised commodity production and wage labour.

Unlike previous economic forms (eg slavery, serfdom), capitalism derives surpluses directly from the labour power of the working class, but pays the workers from the profits of the goods manufactured. This requires the sale of the goods to derive the profit; this is commodity production. It didn't exist very much in previous epochs, most goods were produced for direct use. Agricultural surpluses might be sold, or they might not (because there might not be a surplus), but the purpose of agricultural production was food, not money.

Most labour for the ruling class was not wage labour either - in the Middle Ages in Europe, for instance, extraction of surplus value was primarily a matter of dues and services, for instance peasants needed to work a certain number of days in the lords' fields, give a certain portion of their produce to the Church, etc. It was only as capitalism began to devlop that these dues and services were increasingly rendered into cash payments. Of course, this is a dialectical process, capitalism is able to develop because of cash payments, cash payments (increasingly becoming wage labour and a commodity economy) increase because capitalism is developing. This is the 'generalising' part of the process. Earlier social forms had capitalists, but they didn't have capitalism as a generalised form, because most production was not organised via wage labour for commodity production. Some was, hence the existence of capitlists, but these capitalists couldn't 'create' capitalism as a generalised form, instead capitalism creates capitalists. This is why, even if all the capitalists are expropriated, if wage labour and commodity production persist, capitalism hasn't gone away.

Capitalism is also characterised (but not defined) by socialised production and individual expropriation. Though this seems obvious (workers work together to produce something for owners that take it off them), it's not the only way to organise production - for instance it can be argued that in the Middle Ages production was individual (small peasant farmers) and expropriation was individual (lords taking the produce), whereas in Ancient Sparta, for instance, the Helots (small peasant farmers again) were individual producers and were collectively expropriated by the Spartan Citizenry, who were a ruling class that practiced a form of communism among themselves.

[Teacher]

I agree with Ellen Meiksins Wood, more or less:


Capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange,where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market. This is true not only of workers, who must sell their labour-power for a wage, but also of capitalists, who depend on the market to buy their inputs, including labour-power, and to sell their output for profit. Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the mean of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on "extra-economic" powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion -- such as the military, political, and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants -- but must depend on the purely "economic" mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental rules of life. Because of those rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labor by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society's work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself.

The definition of "capitalism" is one that is not agreed upon, not even by Marxists. Some historians think it is not even a useful concept. I mostly agree with the above definition though.

[Jose Gracchus]

That's a terrible definition, it excludes the primitive or original accumulation of capital (which, in fact, is continuously on-going) by definition, which certainly does rely upon those purportedly anti-capitalist "'extra-economic' powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion -- such as the military, political, and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants".

It also suggests that wartime economies are somehow "less capitalist" in essence, and of course contains within it (like all definitions which jettison the Marxian concept of capital (http://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience) with auxiliary assertions that capital must be individual in character and must be based on a 19th c. liberal conception of markets*) the special pleading for that bugaboo of Second International "socialism" whereby state ownership in itself is asserted by definition to be antagonistic to capitalism, regardless of the character and dynamics of the state. In particular, whether the state in question can be reasonably said to be identifiable with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the carrying out of the invariant communist program. The more I read this kind of thing, the more I am convinced Bordiga was very much on to something.

*In my opinion such auxiliary, quasi-Weberian "ideal type," assertions of empirical traits are there to serve no function other than to keep us trapped in Kautskyite social democracy, with its belief that where the 19th c. liberals' market and 'private ownership' is interfered with, here there be socialism. It is a slippery form of argument whereby the Kautskyite (whether at first-, second-, or third-hand--I'm looking at you Hilferding fans, Sweezyites, and other supporters of "Marxist" productivism, statism, and developmentalism) slips in a tautology whereby this statist "Marxism" is anti-capitalist by virtue of the fact that the opposite of its traits are attached to the definition in the first place. What profound argumentation on behalf of their philistines.

[Agnapostate]

As defined by Ernesto Screpanti, "capitalism is an economic system in which surplus value is extracted in the production process by using wage labor and utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation." In my own view, formed by a general consensus summary of the majority of existing views, especially among radical economists, capitalism is an economic system characterized by the following three attributes:

1. Private ownership and management of the means of production and distribution. The means of production include natural productive resources and the capital goods employed to create consumer goods with said productive resources. The means of distribution are the mechanisms used for allocation of those resources. The phase of primitive accumulation of capital (physical capital and the financial "capital" used as a means of acquiring more capital), which was "written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire," culminated in the vastly unequal allocation of wealth and resources among the population, with a numerically small upper class of capitalists controlling the means of production and distribution that affect the day-to-day lives of the vast majority of the population.

2. Regulated market exchange as the primary mechanism of resource production and allocation. Production and distribution of goods and services is not cohesively coordinated by public planning, either de jure or de facto. While capitalism has traditionally been depicted as defined by decentralized individual planning that forms a beneficial social network through the design of an "invisible hand" in laissez-faire free markets, centralized authority has been an integral facet of the capitalist economy in several regards. Firstly, there is state regulatory structure intended to protect the exhaustion of mutually beneficial exchange, prevent the occurrence of force and fraud, and correct market failures such as generation of negative externalities, asymmetric information, excessive market concentration, and insufficient provision of public and merit goods. Secondly, most major industries are dominated by oligopolistic cooperation between a small number of powerful firms. Thirdly, the internal structure of orthodox capitalist firms are both de jure and de facto strictly hierarchical, with an authoritarian chain of command that would be condemned as dictatorial were it a government of a nation-state.

3. Hierarchical wage labor with surplus value extraction. Wage labor in the capitalist economy involves a hierarchical organization model. This is a necessary (though not sufficient) criterion of surplus value extraction. The extracted surplus value is subsequently utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation, to borrow Screpanti’s phrase. The natural tendency of capitalism is to exacerbate inequalities as a result, since preexisting differences in initial endowments determine placement in the hierarchical internal structure of the orthodox firm.

[Jose Gracchus]

Again, all of this departs from Marx's necessarily historicized, dynamic model. Instead we seem to live under the deep shadow of bourgeois thought, and this model is more like an arbitrary agglomeration of empirical characteristics, without any intrinsic logic that says "You should prefer my family of traits to anyone else's for some reason". It has much more to do with Weber in my eyes than Marx or revolutionary thought more broadly.

It is especially weak where it does not give us any clear understanding of economies outside the traditional industrial core; the Saudi economy is based on a state-owned and bureaucratic resource-extraction apparatus, whereby a pre-modern sheik-monarchy is translated into a modern ruling class, subsisting off of rents on world energy use. While in the big picture it is hard to argue it is not capitalist, it certainly does not lend itself easily to the arbitrary family of tradition Western traits that many leftists lean on to understand capitalism in of itself.

[Die Neue Zeit]

One must accept that there was no antagonism between employer and workers in the British Coal Strike, where the employer was in fact the National Coal Board, and thus not a privately-owned enterprise engaging in wage labor and production of commodities for private profit.

One will find that revolutionaries have a different view from Friedrich August von Hayek, but oddly enough in this epoch of reaction, many soi-dissant revolutionaries adopt essentially the Hayek-Friedmanite conception of capitalism.

Not at all. The neoliberal definition of "capitalism" is quite different from the more mainstream conception of capitalism.

Your example is faulty because it describes a section of the economy and not the economy as a whole.


As defined by Ernesto Screpanti, "capitalism is an economic system in which surplus value is extracted in the production process by using wage labor and utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation." In my own view, formed by a general consensus summary of the majority of existing views, especially among radical economists, capitalism is an economic system characterized by the following three attributes

In shorter form, this bourgeois society is characterized by consumer goods and services markets (2), labour markets (3), and capital markets (1).


Again, all of this departs from Marx's necessarily historicized, dynamic model. Instead we seem to live under the deep shadow of bourgeois thought, and this model is more like an arbitrary agglomeration of empirical characteristics, without any intrinsic logic that says "You should prefer my family of traits to anyone else's for some reason". It has much more to do with Weber in my eyes than Marx or revolutionary thought more broadly.

It is especially weak where it does not give us any clear understanding of economies outside the traditional industrial core; the Saudi economy is based on a state-owned and bureaucratic resource-extraction apparatus, whereby a pre-modern sheik-monarchy is translated into a modern ruling class, subsisting off of rents on world energy use. While in the big picture it is hard to argue it is not capitalist, it certainly does not lend itself easily to the arbitrary family of tradition Western traits that many leftists lean on to understand capitalism in of itself.

Why, then (and I ask again), did Marx limit maximum program agitation in his writings to the abolition of private property relations and the institution of production for use and not for profit? Common in the economic programs of all tendencies in the "socialist family" (and not "social-democratic family") are these two planks.

[robbo203]

As defined by Ernesto Screpanti, "capitalism is an economic system in which surplus value is extracted in the production process by using wage labor and utilized in the circulation process to sustain capital accumulation." In my own view, formed by a general consensus summary of the majority of existing views, especially among radical economists, capitalism is an economic system characterized by the following three attributes:

1. Private ownership and management of the means of production and distribution. The means of production include natural productive resources and the capital goods employed to create consumer goods with said productive resources. The means of distribution are the mechanisms used for allocation of those resources. The phase of primitive accumulation of capital (physical capital and the financial "capital" used as a means of acquiring more capital), which was "written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire," culminated in the vastly unequal allocation of wealth and resources among the population, with a numerically small upper class of capitalists controlling the means of production and distribution that affect the day-to-day lives of the vast majority of the population.

This is fine providing one acknowleges that state ownership of the means of production is itself a form of private ownership

As Engels points out state ownership is fully compatible with capitalism

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

With state ownership your have in effect collective ownership by the capitalist class via their control of the state apparatus itself.

From the point of the view of the worker it makes absolutely no difference whether their employers is the state or a "private" business. From the point of view of the consumer too state property is private property and for which reason a payment is required

[Jose Gracchus]

Not at all. The neoliberal definition of "capitalism" is quite different from the more mainstream conception of capitalism.

Not in its essence, which is an apotheosis of 19th c. vulgarizations of liberal thought on markets and individual property and profits. Of course you use a totally inscrutable and meaningless term which you may define at will such as "the more mainstream conception of capitalism", which is both an argumentum ad populum (argument from popularity) and wrong. The neoliberal conception of capitalism is certainly what is dominant today, in society at large, the academy generally, and the economics and social science profession in particular.


Your example is faulty because it describes a section of the economy and not the economy as a whole.

Idiotic. So the Coal Board osmotically absorbs "bourgie vibes" from the private capitalists in the national economy? You're ridiculous. The drive for exploitation emanates from within the enterprise and "section of the economy" even on its own, and to reify a distinction between this-or-that section of the economy and the economy as a whole is a bourgeois mystification, not revolutionary thought. But judging from your politics, I'm sure that's something you feel totally warm and snuggly in.


Why, then (and I ask again), did Marx limit maximum program agitation in his writings to the abolition of private property relations and the institution of production for use and not for profit? Common in the economic programs of all tendencies in the "socialist family" (and not "social-democratic" family) are these two planks.

Uh, that's wrong, the maximum program is not some reified set of policies which would or could be implemented by any social force (your 'innovations' notwithstanding). They necessarily imply and require the formation of the working class into a class for itself, and the capture of political power, which is the sole criterion by which the suppression of private property relations (which in Marx signifies "class property" and not simply "individual property" in the sense of bourgeois political economy) and production for use can be realized. You can't just dice up Marxism into a set of bourgeois public policy proposals, which is the conceptual dynamic by which you approach anything.

[Die Neue Zeit]

This is fine providing one acknowleges that state ownership of the means of production is itself a form of private ownership

As Engels points out state ownership is fully compatible with capitalism

Engels also wrote in that same text that state ownership is compatible with both private property relations and societal property relations, something about nationalization containing the seeds of a solution. So, Soviet-style property relations or even actual state capitalism like those of most "People's Democracies," while by no means the post-monetary lower phase of the communist mode of production, contains the seeds of a solution.


Not in its essence, which is an apotheosis of 19th c. vulgarizations of liberal thought on markets and individual property and profits. Of course you use a totally inscrutable and meaningless term which you may define at will such as "the more mainstream conception of capitalism", which is both an argumentum ad populum (argument from popularity) and wrong. The neoliberal conception of capitalism is certainly what is dominant today, in society at large, the academy generally, and the economics and social science profession in particular.

Idiotic. So the Coal Board osmotically absorbs "bourgie vibes" from the private capitalists in the national economy? You're ridiculous. The drive for exploitation emanates from within the enterprise and "section of the economy" even on its own, and to reify a distinction between this-or-that section of the economy and the economy as a whole is a bourgeois mystification, not revolutionary thought. But judging from your politics, I'm sure that's something you feel totally warm and snuggly in.

Uh, that's wrong, the maximum program is not some reified set of policies which would or could be implemented by any social force (your 'innovations' notwithstanding). They necessarily imply and require the formation of the working class into a class for itself, and the capture of political power, which is the sole criterion by which the suppression of private property relations (which in Marx signifies "class property" and not simply "individual property" in the sense of bourgeois political economy) and production for use can be realized. You can't just dice up Marxism into a set of bourgeois public policy proposals, which is the conceptual dynamic by which you approach anything.

Mere labour disputes and generic political struggles may be "spontaneous," but actual class struggle (based on genuine political or "politico-political" struggle) and social revolution must be programmed. Also, you totally overlooked one of my posts on the maximum program in Paul's thread re. juridical stuff:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/socialism-and-its-t157035/index.html?p=2155721


Notwithstanding Real, Radical Bourgeois Socialism (Left Ricardianism / Economic Republicanism), Petit-Bourgeois Socialism (ranging from Distributism to Third World Caesarean Socialism :D ), True Socialism, Proletarian Socialism, etc.

All tendencies that like to scream "state capitalism," including the Marxist-Humanists, conveniently ignore how the programmatic works of "Late Marx" emphasized the abolition of "juridical private property" - in turn tied much more closely to class relations than approaches tackling generalized commodity production directly - and also replacing "production for profit" with higher production relations (read: central planning), before any sort of lower or higher communist production was considered.

Just read the Programme of the French Workers Party (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm)!

Where do "Late Marx" and Guesde write of non-circulable labour vouchers (forerunners of proposed electronic non-circulable labour credits)? [Nowhere.]

Where do they write of private property? ["That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production [...] this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat - organized in a distinct political party [...] in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production [...]"]

The fault of the Second International onwards was the bastardization of Marx's approach to generalized commodity production ("the lower phase of communism has generalized commodity production" a la Stalin or "generalized commodity production = consumer, labour, and capital markets" a la Trotsky), and this in turn allowed coordinators to seize political and economic power and establish their own Coordinator Socialism. This has led, in turn, to the flip-side fault of screamers of "state capitalism" basically saying that there's no such thing as non-capitalistic generalized commodity production, even going so far as to stretch the definition of "markets" (such as the alleged Soviet "labour market").

[Kiev Communard]

Engels also wrote in that same text that state ownership is compatible with both private property relations and societal property relations, something about nationalization containing the seeds of a solution. So, Soviet-style property relations or even actual state capitalism like those of most "People's Democracies," while by no means the post-monetary lower phase of the communist mode of production, contains the seeds of a solution.

Respectfully, I have to disagree. The experience of the 20th century showed profoundly that state-capitalist regimes are inherently unstable and unvariably lapse back into "traditional" capitalism as soon as extreme circumstances dictating their emergence disappear (in fact, in Soviet history this happened twice - first, with a fiasco of "War Communism" and transition to the NEP, second, with the gradual dissipation of the Stalinist total state-capitalist monopoly in the 1960s to 1980s, which ended in a 'traditional' privatisation). So I would say that state-capitalism is not a solution, but a diversion from the path towards the communist mode of production's construction.

[Jose Gracchus]

Namely, once they have a.) completed the extent possible of the primitive accumulation of capital and/or b.) relieved their autarchic isolation, they return to the conventional fold. It is a regime in extremis for resolving particular bourgeois-national developmental tasks, where backward national capitals were left in the second-tier by their weak original bourgeoisies and (typically) pre-modern states and ruling cliques (Tsarism, Qing China and the KMT, etc.).

The great delusion behind those who offer apologetics for the Soviet-type societies is that they might be duplicated again anew in this historical phase of capitalism, and might represent something reaching beyond capitalism and value (this delusion shared by everyone from the Cliffite Trots to Marxist-Leninists), when in fact history bears out the opposite view: this is something which comes before private, globally-integrated capitalism and a modern state, not something more advanced or attempting to supersede it, and it is specifically a symptom of 19th century combined and uneven development. It is the historical mission of Stalinism to build a modern capitalist power where the 19th c. failed to produce anything but backward regimes where there were once old powers.

The mainstream Leninist program is a historical corpse, and that's why none of them seem to have anything to do nowadays but wander around looking for Third World Bonapartes with token nationalizations to whom they may pay fealty. It is a tool in search of the 1910s, forever consigned now to the "dustbin of history".

[Luís Henrique]

What r the defining characteristics of capitalism. Its been around for some 800 hundred years. What makes capitalism capitalism?

I has not been around for 800 years, by no stretch of imagination. It has been around for about some 250-350 years, depending on where you put its actual starts.

The best short definition would be that of Piero Sraffa: "production of commodities by means of commodities".

A bit more expanded would be this: capitalism is when capital takes hold of production, and capital is self-reproducing money.

The "commodity" part in capitalism requires private property, otherwise exchange would be unnecessary, and things would be decommodified. Now, private property is a social concept, not a juridical one, so it can in fact exist even where the juridical system doesn't recognise it, as it was the case of the Soviet Union and similar systems (this is the reason why the concept of "state capitalism" is misleading, as it seems to imply the existence of one only capitalist).

Luís Henrique

[robbo203]

Engels also wrote in that same text that state ownership is compatible with both private property relations and societal property relations, something about nationalization containing the seeds of a solution. So, Soviet-style property relations or even actual state capitalism like those of most "People's Democracies," while by no means the post-monetary lower phase of the communist mode of production, contains the seeds of a solution

No I dont think that was what Engels said at all . Look at the quote again

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

Seen from this perspective , "soviet style property relations", as you call them, are none other than a form of (state) capitalist property relations. That much is pretty clear. Engels is saying in no uncertain terms that the modern state no matter what its form is a capitalist state. The Soviet state is one form of the modern state and by Engel's reckoning must therefore be considered a capitalist state

You refer to Engels suggestion about state ownership of the means of production containing the seeds of a solution to the confict. This occurs immediately after the quote above as follows

The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.


Engels is not saying what i think you are trying to suggest he is saying. What he is saying is that by bringing the scattered means oof production under state ownership this will facilitate the transformation of these means into common property. So instead of having to deal with many separate individual capitalists we would have only to deal with the "national capitalist" as it were. This is what I thiink is meant by the "technical conditions" Engels speaks of - the centralised structure of decisionmaking that socialism would inherit from (state) capitalism

As an opponent of central planning I would disagree strongly with Engels on this particular point. Neverthless, Engels is clearly NOT suggesting that state ownership of the means of production , even though it faciilitates centralised decisionmaking (which he seems to have thought would be important and useful for a socialist society) is anything other than a form of capitalist ownership....

[syndicat]

core characteristics of capitalism:

1. relative monopolization of ownership & control of the means of production (and assets that can be used to obtain means of production) by a minority of private owners (individually and/or collectively via corporations)

2. a large class of people who have no independent means to a livelihood and must seek jobs from the private capitalists' firms or the state in order to live and submit to the managerial regimes which the capitaliists set up to control production.

3. a relatively decentralized economy made up of relatively autonomous actors who enter into relatively uncoerced contracts and agreements but in which there are great differencces in bargaining power. thus the economy is characterized by market exchange and competition between businesses, which drives each firm's search for ever more profit.

4. a territorial state which has a relative monopoly over deployment of armed violence and functions to protect and sustain the existing social arrangement, and in particular, the interests of the dominating classes, and which also exists to mediate conflicts and disputes, both internal to the dominating classes, as well as between the dominating classes and the working class, and thus maintain a semblance of legitimacy for the reign of the existing system. there is also a form of competition between territorial states where some states are more powerful than others and use their economic and military power to dominate and exploit the labor and resources of other countries.

[Teacher]

Namely, once they have a.) completed the extent possible of the primitive accumulation of capital and/or b.) relieved their autarchic isolation, they return to the conventional fold. It is a regime in extremis for resolving particular bourgeois-national developmental tasks, where backward national capitals were left in the second-tier by their weak original bourgeoisies and (typically) pre-modern states and ruling cliques (Tsarism, Qing China and the KMT, etc.).

The great delusion behind those who offer apologetics for the Soviet-type societies is that they might be duplicated again anew in this historical phase of capitalism, and might represent something reaching beyond capitalism and value (this delusion shared by everyone from the Cliffite Trots to Marxist-Leninists), when in fact history bears out the opposite view: this is something which comes before private, globally-integrated capitalism and a modern state, not something more advanced or attempting to supersede it, and it is specifically a symptom of 19th century combined and uneven development. It is the historical mission of Stalinism to build a modern capitalist power where the 19th c. failed to produce anything but backward regimes where there were once old powers.

The mainstream Leninist program is a historical corpse, and that's why none of them seem to have anything to do nowadays but wander around looking for Third World Bonapartes with token nationalizations to whom they may pay fealty. It is a tool in search of the 1910s, forever consigned now to the "dustbin of history".

I have lurked this forum for a long time and I think I can say confidently that you are the biggest pseudo-intellectual I've ever encountered on the internet, which is saying something.

My guess is that you're about 25 years old, have been involved in radical politics for no more than two years and are a former reactionary (if not a closet one). 99% of your political activity is probably confined to the internet.

You reference books you obviously haven't read. You pretend to be well versed in topics that you are only barely familiar with or are researching on the fly.

Sorry to derail this thread but I just had to say this.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Namely, once they have a.) completed the extent possible of the primitive accumulation of capital and/or b.) relieved their autarchic isolation, they return to the conventional fold. It is a regime in extremis for resolving particular bourgeois-national developmental tasks, where backward national capitals were left in the second-tier by their weak original bourgeoisies and (typically) pre-modern states and ruling cliques (Tsarism, Qing China and the KMT, etc.).

The great delusion behind those who offer apologetics for the Soviet-type societies is that they might be duplicated again anew in this historical phase of capitalism, and might represent something reaching beyond capitalism and value (this delusion shared by everyone from the Cliffite Trots to Marxist-Leninists), when in fact history bears out the opposite view: this is something which comes before private, globally-integrated capitalism and a modern state, not something more advanced or attempting to supersede it, and it is specifically a symptom of 19th century combined and uneven development. It is the historical mission of Stalinism to build a modern capitalist power where the 19th c. failed to produce anything but backward regimes where there were once old powers.

The mainstream Leninist program is a historical corpse, and that's why none of them seem to have anything to do nowadays but wander around looking for Third World Bonapartes with token nationalizations to whom they may pay fealty. It is a tool in search of the 1910s, forever consigned now to the "dustbin of history".

This historical phase may have seen more globalization, but that buzzword is overrated in terms of integration. The national form may be gone, but there's no reason why a large regional or continental equivalent of, to quote Engels (thanks Robbo for bringing up the exact quote), "State ownership of the productive forces" cannot "concea[l] within it [...] the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

[Die Neue Zeit]

You refer to Engels suggestion about state ownership of the means of production containing the seeds of a solution to the confict. This occurs immediately after the quote above as follows

The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

Engels is not saying what i think you are trying to suggest he is saying. What he is saying is that by bringing the scattered means oof production under state ownership this will facilitate the transformation of these means into common property. So instead of having to deal with many separate individual capitalists we would have only to deal with the "national capitalist" as it were. This is what I thiink is meant by the "technical conditions" Engels speaks of - the centralised structure of decisionmaking that socialism would inherit from (state) capitalism

As an opponent of central planning I would disagree strongly with Engels on this particular point. Neverthless, Engels is clearly NOT suggesting that state ownership of the means of production , even though it faciilitates centralised decisionmaking (which he seems to have thought would be important and useful for a socialist society) is anything other than a form of capitalist ownership....

What I am saying is that, without "state ownership of the productive forces," you cannot have "the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

This is quite evident, for example, in who has power over any given country's money supply. Without a public monopoly on financial services, you cannot have the appropriate "technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

Another example is in land: without public ownership and rental tenure (so no iffy leasing deals) over all land, you cannot have the appropriate "technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

Yet another example is in food production: without the full imposition of non-private wage relations in vertical or non-vertical farming (sovkhozy or state farming, not kolkhozy), fisheries, food processing, etc. you cannot have the appropriate "technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

[Jose Gracchus]

This historical phase may have seen more globalization, but that buzzword is overrated in terms of integration. The national form may be gone, but there's no reason why a large regional or continental equivalent of, to quote Engels (thanks Robbo for bringing up the exact quote), "State ownership of the productive forces" cannot "concea[l] within it [...] the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."

I'm not going to reply to you further should you quote me because you participate in these discussions not to genuinely debate the conceptual and empirical questions, but merely to have a pretext to assert and propagandize your pet theories. I have no interest in collaborating with you in that, and will desist from doing so until and unless you participate in good faith. If you quote this and do not give a reason, logical argument, and factual evidence to persuade why your view is correct and why it should be adopted, I will put you on ignore.

As pointed out before, the question of the formation of a class-for-itself as a participatory democratic and managerial dual power is a prerequisite for the assumption of collectivist ownership. It is simply not a matter of decreeing "all is owned by the state". The working-class must fashion its own organs (soviets, factory committees, communes, whatever) capable of breaking down the law of value and assuming control of production and implementing the communist program.

Only a clown who has never worked a grunt job would act as if for the laborer there's some magical difference in terms of point-of-production productive relations cares two fucks if the wagedom is "private" or not.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Alright, perhaps I was exaggerating there. I see other means, most notably a less parliamentary application of DeLeonist strategy. The bureaucracy of the syndicalist half of that dual strategy was sufficiently centralized to have "the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution." Some form of action by a mechanism with taxation powers and the greatest ability to use force ("government") is necessary to have those conditions Engels wrote of. That's why I wrote in the UK left thread that the eight-hour day for Russian workers came about by Sovnarkom decree and not by mere labour disputes or a collection of those.

This is my equivalent to comrade Kiev's "respectfully I have to disagree" remark.

[Wanted Man]

I have lurked this forum for a long time and I think I can say confidently that you are the biggest pseudo-intellectual I've ever encountered on the internet, which is saying something.

My guess is that you're about 25 years old, have been involved in radical politics for no more than two years and are a former reactionary (if not a closet one). 99% of your political activity is probably confined to the internet.

You reference books you obviously haven't read. You pretend to be well versed in topics that you are only barely familiar with or are researching on the fly.

Sorry to derail this thread but I just had to say this.

If you're going to apologise at the end, then you're probably aware that this isn't a useful post. Attack the argument and not the person. People who want free room to do ad-homs need only scroll upwards in the index and click "Politics".

EDIT: sorry for the bump, I didn't realise it. I was responding to a report.

[syndicat]

No, its not essentially to do with "private" ownership and profit. This is misleading. This idea that capitalism rests on de jure legal ownership of capital by private individuals is essentially an idealist notion which defines a mode of production in terms of its legal superstructure.the base/superstructure distinction is merely a vague metaphor. the state administration and military and police forces -- a social base for the bureaucratic class -- are as much material powers in society and over the economy as the forces of production owned by the capitalists. but the state is supposed to be part of the "superstructure." oh well. so much the worse for that distinction.

anyway, one can always say that corresponding to the legal rights of ownership of productive property are various actual powers exercized by the owners, that is, the possessors of that power, the capitalists.

i would say that capitalism has 3 essential features:

1. a relative monopolization of ownership (a set of rights) of productive property, that is, buildings, tools, land and anything else that can be used by humans to produce goods and services, and assets that can be used to acquire such.

2. a large class of people who do not own productive property with which to earn a livelihood and are thus forced to see employment from employers, who do own productive property, and are thus forced to work under the some kind of managerial regime which the owners have a right to establish (that's one of the rights of ownership)

3. a relatively uncoordinated set of economic actors who enter into generally uncoerced ("free" in liberal ideology) contracts and exchange relationships, that is, a market relationships

Because firms are relatively autonomous actors and the economy is relatively uncoordinated, each firm is under competitive pressure to seek to reduce its expenses and seek out more revenue, that is, to seek a surplus of revenue over expenses. to the extent a firm has less income, it has less ability to take advantage of new market opportunities, expand production and act in ways that in general defend its relative market position against competitors.

thus the search for profit is a consequence of the more basic features of a capitalist arrangement.

we can put this another way by saying that the possesors of capital (a certain social power) (the group in 1 above) can go out onto markets for factors of production and buy or rent what they need to produce commodities -- hire workers and managers, obtain equiupment, buildings, land, and their firms are the claimants of any residual of revenue over expenses.

[WorkingClassGirl]

Capitalism is the society wherein the purpose of all production is the accumulation of capital. This is caused by the private property guaranteed by the state's monopoly on force.
Because of the competition every capitalist tries to get a monopoly.
However monopolization is something a bourgeois state tries to prohibit. Because the prupose of a bourgeois state is competition.
To understand what I mean you can read:
Capitalism:
http://icritics.blogsport.de/category/english/

Bourgeois state:
http://www.gegenstandpunkt.com/english/state/toc.html