Cross-posted from the World Socialist Party of the United States website
This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism.
I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to arrive at an anti-capitalist position. Life under capitalism is negative advertisement enough for that social system.
Who knows, there may have been a budding capitalist at some point in time who mistook Capital for a how-to guide, and part-way through reading it saw the error of his ways and converted to socialism. But it is not a polemical work aimed simply at fostering a hatred of capitalism (even though there are memorable passages throughout that attest to Marx’s own steady-burning hatred for this class-divided system).
Capital is not a book in which Marx simply lists up a bunch of social problems under capitalism to stir up the reader’s moral outrage against that system. Rather, he clarifies how problems (for workers) emerge inevitably from the fundamental nature of capitalism; from its irresolvable contradictions and insurmountable limitations.
One might wonder, though, why socialists would need to exert such effort to better understand a social system they are seeking to replace? Doesn’t it make more sense to concentrate on explaining socialism than wasting time analyzing capitalism?
Certainly it is true that some Marxian economists have carved out a nice career for themselves as experts on capitalism, to the point where they might even be reluctant to bid farewell to that object of study. Revolutionary socialists do not necessarily share the mania of some academics for examining capitalism in its minutiae; nor do they think that such scholarship offers tremendous benefits to the revolutionary movement.
Yet socialists do need to have the clearest understanding possible of the nature of capitalism as one historical “mode of production” among others that have existed up to now. This is because once we have arrived at a deeper understanding of the capitalist system of production, to the point where we have a clear idea of its essential limitations, we will be well on our way to a better understanding of what socialism means and how this new form of society resolves problems that can never be resolved (even though reformists never give up trying!) under capitalism.
So it is not a question of choosing between examining capitalism or explaining socialism — the two tasks are completely interrelated. This series will attempt to examine and explain some important aspects of Marx’s analysis of capitalism presented in Capital as a means of arriving at a better understanding of what socialism means, how it is a realistic possibility, and why it is so necessary.
Michael Schauerte
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