Admin. Access to the forum
Admin. Access to the forum has been flakey over the past days. At last I’ve been able to connect before being timed out.Stuart. I’m letting you call the shots and answering point by point.
Correct. Capitalists first needed to take possession of the means of production and to dispossess their future working class. Morality was completely subservient to achieving this. It is a long process of necessarily deliberate human degradation.
False.I said exactly the opposite. Morality has everything to do with “primitive accumulation”, whose moral function, as distinct from (and consequent upon) its economic function, is to reshape pre-capitalist morality into capitalist-class morality.Capitalist-class morality, both as agent and product of primitive accumulation, is absolutely central to the process. Primitive accumulation is a horribly protracted process of moral attrition.In its formative stage, as an agent for bringing capitalist production into being, capitalist-class morality must be nakedly brutal towards its future working class as it shapes its future wage-slave to its exploitative needs.In its formed stage, as a product of brutal primitive accumulation, capitalist-class morality masquerades as benign towards its working class. But this new-found condescension towards the working class is no expression of universal deep-seated social connection, but of the necessary papering over of its duplicitous opposite, universal social division.I carefully chose “primitive accumulation of capital” because it is the absolutely necessary precursor to capitalism, upon which capitalism alone can rest, and without which it cannot function.Even from your opposing stance, it must be apparent to you thatsuch an historical process of proletarianization is indispensable for capitalism to function as capitalism;(ii) proletarianization can only be the dispossession of a potential, or future, working class of its private means of production;(iii) the dispossessed working class must become “morally” resigned to its absolute dependence upon the capitalist class.
False. I have never ever been so cruel as to state that “wooly minded idealists and religious nutjobs shouldn’t stand in the way of the march of history”. I have never told people how to behave. However, I would ask you to reconsider whether your own forced hysteria, “you send shivers down my spine”, is an affectation designed precisely to tell other people how they should behave.
False.And you know it to be false. The communists are communists precisely because they claim to be able to thwart “primitive accumulation of capital” but can bypass it directly to some form of communism. Thus, they purported not to agree with it.The standard SPGB case since the 1920s, which you’ve defended ably elsewhere, has been that(i) economic necessity predetermined that the bolsheviks would have to build capitalism by “primitive accumulation” whatever their morality and whatever they “believed”;(ii) bolshevik primitive accumulation of capital could not escape being implemented by “moral” brutality;(iii) the “moral” outcome of bolshevik primitive accumulation could not escape being a “morally” capitalist working class.Show me where the SPGB case is now wrong.
Oh come now. We don’t have to imagine that. Primitive accumulation uses the gun (state power) in its hands everywhere it operates. And it is operating all over the world. If the actuality of primitive accumulation isn’t chilling enough, its almost total demolition of your favourite deep version of morality should be.If you don’t acknowledge the power of Marx’s materialist explanation of social conditions determining morality appropriate to social needs, please explain primitive accumulation in your terms.