If Marx said that capitalism creates the conditions for socialism, does that mean...

[CynicalIdealist]

...that Marx thought despite the barbarity of European colonialism, that it was a net good thing because it created the preconditions for socialism?

Was European colonialism a material inevitability, or could capitalism have been developed through other means?

EDIT: I guess the larger question I'm asking is if the regressions that capitalism brought were really necessary in the development of capitalism, such as land going from being collectively owned to privately owned.

[S.Artesian]

Yes, those things were necessary for the development of capitalism; no those things do not amount to "progress." Marx wasn't measuring the "net" result, and despite the tendency to occasionally get carried away with the "productive power" of capitalism, to refer to pre-capitalist societies as savage, Marx's critique of capital is historically specific, and socially focused. It eschews separating the "positive" from the "negative" aspects of capital.


The basis for capitalism in England was the particular organization of land as a means of social production, of production for market rather than subsistence, where the survival of the producers depended upon the profitable exchange of the commodities.

For capitalism to actually move beyond agricultural capitalism, two things are required-- the creation of the domestic market, and the expansion of the world markets. Both require the dispossession of labor from the means of subsistence.

Doesn't make it good, decent, right, inevitable, or progressive. Does make it necessary for capitalism to develop the way it did.

Where's the progress? In the overthrow of capitalism as it has developed, the social conditions for which are created in the very terms of its hideous expansion and longevity.

What is "positive" for Marx is in fact the negation of capital as that is the only way to emancipate human labor, and the labor process; where the labor process now is able to support and satisfy human beings in their full social creativity, awareness, and interrelatedness.

[CynicalIdealist]

I guess I'm also asking if there a way for capitalism to develop without such barbarity.

[S.Artesian]

I guess I'm also asking if there a way for capitalism to develop without such barbarity.

No.

[CynicalIdealist]

No.

So you couldn't have one country develop capitalism (say France through the French Revolution) and then go to country #2 and say, "Lookie here, we discovered how to make a steam engine!" with country #2 adopting the steam engine and working on it?

I dunno. I find it weird that in order for an ideal society to be realized that all of the shit we went through was necessary.

[S.Artesian]

No, you couldn't have capitalism develop that way. You could have uneven and combined development where the international expansion of capitalism plops down enclaves, areas of advanced technical capitalist production in the midst of seemingly "backward" "semi-feudal" relations, particularly of agricultural production... but first, that's still capitalism; second there's no shortage of brutality in such uneven and combined development; third on closer inspection you'll see that the "backward" agricultural relations are in fact relations formed in production for the world markets, for capitalism, and as such the "undevelopment" is fundamentally linked to advanced capitalist development.

Can you have socialism without having capitalism? You can't have urban, industrial production based socialism without capitalism. You can have rural communes; little zones of "pocket socialism"-- but they won't last too long anyway.