Hey everyone.

7 of my comrades and I are collectively studying and educating ourselves on Marxism-Leninism. We’re following a modified version of @Cowbee’s advanced reading list and using it as a scaffold to build our own curriculum to become politically educated. Four of us have never read any theory before this, while the rest of us have read some, but no one is an expert. One of my comrades recently posted a question in our digital space and I’m wondering if anyone would be willing to give it a read and provide some feedback or an answer.

Their question is:

"I keep thinking about the point we touched on in class a few weeks ago about the qualitative change from capitalism not necessarily being one that moves us towards socialism and craving literature/discussion that offers something more concrete about why socialism is the next stage of social development. I can see why that claim is made by socialist countries and also struggle to see why that would naturally be the next phase of social development.

There was a feeling i got from the last reading/listening to the Rev Left podcast on how humans evolved to perform labor and labor created humans that finally cemented my understanding of why Labor is a core aspect in MLism. I want to better understand how socialism spawns from capitalism as a next step in social evolution."

  • freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s useful to understand how capitalism created the socialization of production. If you look at subsistence farming and cottage industries, these organizations keeps the work being done to a size that could be handled by a single person, a family, or a couple people with an apprentice. Large scale work either required guilds or slaves, and was usually civic in nature (think architecture and infrastructure).

    Capitalism emerges as private economic works become too large to be done by small private individuals or families and instead become social endeavors. Factories staffed with anyone that that can do the work, all working together, no one person being able to produce a single product end to end. That’s social.

    So in this way capitalism already produced a transformation from private to social. It’s just not totalizing. Profits and ownership are still private despite the actual production being social.

    This is contradictory for all the reasons Marx and Engels detail. The system (society) moved to a new form via capitalism, and in this new form had massive amounts of untapped potential and unexplored capacity. This capacity allows for the buffering of contradictions to avoid system transformation (whether collapse or transcendence). But the contradictions exist and they apply pressure to the system to transform. As capitalism runs out of untapped buffer, it becomes less and less able to resist transformation. The problem for all of us is that the untapped buffer of capitalism is so massive it involved our planetary ecosphere. If it goes in much longer it will also include the moon. We have a real possibility of capitalism resisting transformation at the cost of the very systems that allow humans to exist at all (which will lead to collapse, not maintenance nor transcendence).

    So it’s not exactly inevitable that capitalism will lead to socialism. It could lead to extinction. But if it doesn’t lead to extinction, it’s not really possible for capitalism to maintain itself because of the contradictions that are present therein. And that’s important because the contradictions that exist in capitalism are there because of the way capitalism tried to solve the contradictions in feudalism. Thus, when we look at how feudalism inevitably led to capitalism, we see also that the same structural reasons for that transcendence apply to capitalism. Capitalism will be forced into transformation by its own workings just as feudalism was. And if we don’t suffer total ecosphere catastrophe as a result, the only system that can emerge from transcending capitalism is socialism, and if this position is questioned it’s critical to make the attempt to design a theoretical system that transcends capitalism but isn’t socialism. No one has been able to do that yet.