Including a Symposium on Robert Heilbroner At 100 by Fiorito Luca;Scheall Scott;Suprinyak Carlos Eduardo;

Author:Fiorito, Luca;Scheall, Scott;Suprinyak, Carlos Eduardo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

* A briefer version of this chapter lacking the Marx–Mill relation was presented in a Valedictory Address on June 20, 2018, at the Marx Bicentennial Conference held in Patna, India, under the auspices of the Asian Development Research Institute.

1. For a discussion of Engels on this and related matters, see Hollander, 2011, pp. 328–336.

2. Some might wish to call a policy “reformist” if it tries only to improve the basic system. reserving “revolutionary” for a policy designed to change the system fundamentally. But all then becomes a matter of degree and on that definition one might properly designate Mill as “revolutionary” since his reform proposals amounted to a design far removed from contemporary capitalism.

3. Hobsbawm refers to “the irrelevance as well as the absurdity about whether Marx at any point ceased to a revolutionary and became a gradualist” (Hobsbawm, 2011, p. 62). He does not say the same with respect to Engels. On Engels, see further Hollander, 2011, p. 19.

4. The transition from the first to the final stage of communism raises special issues that must be left for another occasion.

5. Marx commends Richard Jones as the first since Sir James Steuart to convey “a sense of the historical differences in modes of production” (MECW 33: 320); for showing “how different stages in the development of the productive power of social labour correspond to […] different production relations” (p. 321); and for going some way at least in defining the characteristics of the capitalist mode of production, and conspicuously for denying that capitalist relations are “eternal,” insofar as (in Jones’s terms) “a state of things may hereafter exist […] under which the labourers and the owners of accumulated stock may be identical” (p. 345). For Jones “states quite explicitly that capital and the capitalist mode of production are […] a transitional phase in the development of social production […] by no means the end result” of the evolutionary process, pointing in fact to “higher relations in which the antagonism on which [bourgeois production relations] are based is resolved,” and opening up the prospect “of a new society, a new economic formation of society, to which the bourgeois mode of production is only the transition” (pp. 345–346). He showed, furthermore, “how the (economical) relations and consequently the social, moral and political state of nations changes with the change in the material powers of production” (p. 353).

6. A counter-tendency however reduces the work required of machine-minders to one and the same level (MECW 35: 422–423).

7. For an elaboration of Marx’s opinion that there could be no transition to communist organization based directly on the rural commune, see Hollander, 2011, pp. 368–370.

8. For a valuable account of the issues involved, see Bober, 1965[1927] especially pp. 262–268.

9. Marx’s stated “goal of democratic revolution” during the Continental upheavals of 1848 intended, Stedman Jones points out, referred to a “bourgeois” rather than a proletarian revolution and was a “formal” matter only, for what Marx “meant by democracy, in that context, was a re-enactment of the activities

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