Proposals for Collective Resolutions of Perspective
Eight Theses
on the
Revolutionary Transition
to
Global, Comprehensive, Political-Economic Democracy


by
CAPITALIST CRISIS STUDIES



0.   Introduction
1.
  The Law of Motion of the Revolutionary Movement

2.   The Role of the Revolutionary Organization

3.   The Nature of Socialist Politics
4.   The American Bi-Centennial

5.   Our Policy Concerning WAR

6.   The Socialist Renaissance

7.   Humanity and the Biosphere: The Ideology of Ecologism

8.   Socialist Programmatics: The Method of Discovery
A.   Appendix A
B.   Appendix B
C.   Citations
D.   Annotations
E.   Graphics Credits
F.   Post-publication Notes
G.   Release History
H.   Contact Information



0.    Introduction

    Concerning the concept of resolutions of perspective, Id like to propose such resolutions or statements of policy as a method of organizing our creative work at these conferences, of building up a common base of understandings -- of registering the syntheses we accomplish by means of the various processes of deliberation that go on here. Resolutions of perspective are one of the kinds of result or tangible product Id like to see come out of the productive activity of these conferences. We can use them to publicize our existence and our developing content as a tendency -- if such we are becoming -- to others who we wish to invite into our deliberations.

    Concerning the eight draft
resolutions of perspective herein contained in particular, I would like to say that there is no need to rush in getting to their consideration. They are offered as provisional theses only, drafted primarily by one person, so that it is not likely, especially at this early stage in our discussions, that they could represent any consensus within the assembly. They are intended to stimulate discussion on some of the fundamental problems confronting the Socialist movement today, not so far systematically treated in our meetings.

    I put them forward, humbly requesting your help in improving and correcting them, and thus also as instruments of learning with respect to my own development.
 

1.    The Law of Motion of the Revolutionary Movement



Sir Issac Newton was partly correct: the external force is dialectically internal


    I would like to put before you, as an hypothesis regarding the crux of the issues confronting this conference the statement below, posited as a law of motion for working class movements in capitalist society. The statement is an attempt to frame a basic law of practice for revolutionary practice, and a unitary formulation of the subjective and objective moments of the revolutionary process, as they pertain to the capitalist epoch. As a
putative ‘law of practice, it is meant as a guide in our efforts to help construct the class-for-itself, a basis of action which we can reasonably expect to lead to success, defined as the emergence of large and powerful international organizations of the working class potentially capable of midwifing the transition to a world socialist society.

    I strongly suspect that this law is general for this epoch; valid for all capitalist time, and further, that it explains both the failures of the revolutionary working class movement to date to realize socialism, and also the reason why we of it have a possibility of realizing socialism in the not distant future.

    Without going into how or why it holds, in my opinion, I will simply state the hypothesized law, together with its three immediate corollaries, leaving elaboration to our discussion:
LAW OF SOCIAL-REVOLUTIONARY MOTION (Proletariat): The revolutionary working class movement can complete its movement, or realize its essential tendency -- the establishment of socialism -- ONLY by becoming the unique social force which embodies the interest of the world working-class as a whole, and of the human species as a whole, that is, once and only once it self-consciously becomes the single social agency capable of and interested in carrying through those social measures which are necessary to the reproduction of the human race by that stage in historical evolution. The totality (system) of these social measures is known as the communist program .

(first corollary). The discovery of this program, which is the
solution-set, as it were, for that crisis of human evolution which capitalist decadence IS, constitutes the primary and praxis-orienting theoretico-practical task of communists, and the results of this task give content to the formal, otherwise formalistic, organizational questions.

(second corollary). Implicit in this formulation is a theory of social power, or what social power IS, and of how various social formations, classes, etc., gain and lose it: a theory of consent, and the production of consent; a theory of hegemony in general, and of the working-class ascent to hegemony in particular; a theory of how people are won over to socialism (i.e., to themselves; to their own true interests); of how the proletariat evolves within capital, from being the lowest of the low, the nigger of capitalist society, at its beginnings, to being, by its end, the epitome of social
moral hegemony, the repository of social responsibility, and the master of the vast, developed creative forces of the human species, just before merging with, and dissolving in, that species as a whole. This theory will have to be made explicit.

(third corollary). The becoming-hegemonic of the proletariat also implies the unbecoming-hegemonic, the self-discrediting, of the bourgeoisie(s), and the impossibility of any of the capitalist bureaucracies becoming the global class-for-itself -- all this evidently as a reflux of capital accumulation itself.

Premise:
No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed.c1

2.   The Role of the Revolutionary Organization



Revolutionary midwifery to generalized self-management

The Communist International: Midwife of the Transition to Socialism

    We believe that the emergence of an international socialist organization or party of the world working class is an indispensable moment of a revolutionary process transitional out of capitalist decay and into global socialist society. But we disagree with the presently prevailing attitudes concerning the nature and role of such an organization.

    The best metaphor we know for the whole activity of the world Party is that of midwife. The communist international is midwife to the birth of global socialism from the womb of global capitalism. That Party does not, essentially, lead, embody, exemplify, prefigure, represent, manage, command, or dictate to the baby!

    It does not simply lead the class-for-itself. Rather, it is itself led by its own acute reflection of the real dynamics of the immediate revolutionary process, and of the real movement of humanity as a whole. Its deep-rooted theoretical discernment of the needs of human evolution, of the laws of that whole immanent movement of cosmological evolution, within which human evolution is a latest and leading bud, is its guide. The Party is led, in its interventions within its class aimed at insuring that humanity takes the right road, by its ever deepening grasp of the law of the Necessity of Freedom.

    It does not embody the socialist movement, or socialism as a quality of social relations, in any exclusive sense whatever -- how could it? The socialist movement, the movement toward socialism -- which is simply the real movement of human evolution at the present time -- is omnipresent in the world today -- in the whole human race, the world over. It is omnipresent in the world-wide network of production and distribution, of objectively socialized, cooperative wealth-creative activity -- the global division of labor -- which is now the practical, material premise upon which rests the existence of virtually every locality on the planet. This vast international organization of social-reproductive activity has grown up unconsciously as a whole, and behind the form of the world market -- the international competition of capitals -- but as its secret content, increasingly undermining and outgrowing that form. It renders the life of each individual alive today a world product; the material and spiritual product of the whole species, past and present -- giving each individual a manifest self-interest in society as a whole, and in its global production. For said individual cannot properly be conceived to exist, to have self, apart from that great whole of selves which is society, the species. This living global fabric of reproductive activity, the very epidermis of the biosphere, is the pre-natal body of socialism.

    The socialist quality of social relations simply cannot subsist in any smaller grouping; cannot be expressed by any lesser whole, or be reproduced on any local basis taken as isolated from this necessarily global process of the reproduction of that quality -- the lesser whole which is the revolutionary Party most decidedly included. For this global totality of the species is the real interior of every individual, every locality, every particular social formation contained in it, however external and far away it may appear to undialectical thought.

    The lives of those who make up the revolutionary Party are themselves but one organ of the present self-pregnancy of society, and of the labor of birth which has begun -- part of the baby -- and cannot pretend to be the baby already, delivered in advance.

    Who belongs in the revolutionary Party? Not those who desire private power and personal glory. This time, they will not find it there. Not those who crave destructive violence for the sake of revenge, or as an end in itself. Rather, those who have already begun to see over the capitalist horizon, to feel the birth pangs and labor pains all around them -- those who find fulfillment in contributing this service -- of midwifery -- to humanity.

    Rather also, those who understand the terrible social cost, in suffering and loss, of mass violence, just as they know the undeferable urgency of the birth of socialism, which cannot survive delay, and who would thus minimize the agony of that birth, and maximize its joyfulness.

    In the revolutionary Party belong all those who find their glory in beholding the drama, the adventure, the grandeur, the romance, and the beauty of the Dawning of Humanity, even while participating in, and humbly contributing their vital part to, that great unfolding in which they are inextricably included.

Create the Communist International, Midwife to the Revolution!
Not Bureaucratic Power, but loving service to human evolution, is its watchword.
Workers of the World, Unite!


3.   The Nature of Socialist Politics



Paris Commune, 1871

What is
Socialist Politics?

1. The transition out of politics

   
Socialist Politics can only mean the politics of the revolutionary transition to world socialist society, that is, the transition to the end of the political state as a separated sphere of alienated social activity, and therefore also to the end of politics as the name of that alienated (unfree) activity. Socialist political activity is thus political activity in the process of overcoming itself, of re-merging into social activity, into universalized social praxis -- socialist practice, or the social practice of socialist society, i.e., of a truly social, actualizedly social activity: socialized humanity [Marx].

2. Social politics

   
Socialist Politics are social politics. They begin when the working class begins to deliberate upon, within itself, and to intervene in, the realm of social policy -- of social-reproductive decision-making -- that is, when the proletariat begins to contest the hitherto unchallenged monopoly of the capitalist class in the realm where the destiny of the human race as a whole is decided: to place before society its social program, in competition with that of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy.

    Since the collective personality of the capitalist ruling class is constrained by the global law of value -- as enforced upon them
pseudo-externally by the competition of capitals -- to incarnate the personality of capital, and since the period of capitalist decadence is the period when capital has openly entered into fatal contradiction with itself, that personality can only be an increasingly split personality, deeply in trouble within and at war within itself. The capitalist class is thus constrained to act in ways which discredit it, and increasingly win it the enmity of the worlds peoples. The programmatic working class thus has every chance to win out in the competition if only it can, with positive programmatic accomplishments, prove itself -- to itself, as well as to the other classes (Third World peasantry, etc.) -- that is, if only it can unite with itself.

    When the working class begins solving, by collective thought and deliberation, by class-wide organization, the unsolved and urgent problems of the species, the problems of collective human reproduction at the present critical evolutionary crossroads -- then and only then has it begun to practice socialist politics. And when, thereby, it becomes increasingly, through collective intelligence, and collective, international action, applied to enforcing the implementation of its solutions, the
associated deciders of the disposition of a growing part of the global productive forces -- then and only then has it entered onto the road of socialist practice. For this power of disposition over the productive forces is the beginning of the holistic expropriation of capital, and of the formation of socialist property; the beginning of democratic global social planning. And finally, when, by its programmatic successes, the working class renders itself the hegemonic influence, the decisive decider -- in the whole domain of social reproduction, the only social force capable of effective intervention in that domain -- it then arrives at the end of that road: it has become the world-wide ruling class. That is the content of the transitional-process to socialism. It can take many variations of form.

3. Social labor: work on society

    Socialist politics is also one of the higher forms of productive labor and of social self-activity. It is direct, deliberate work upon social structure and upon social consciousness; intensionally undertaken, evolutionary bildung of the social material. It is social creativity -- society-creative activity -- the activity of creating a new, a socialist, social order. It is conscious social design, and conscious social production, as they first take shape in the final turmoils of human prehistory. It is work upon, accomplishing working-up of, the social relations of production.

    It is the specific form of concrete labor aimed at yielding the new social self-identities; aimed at producing the new social individual, who is congruent with socialist society. This political work is the construction of the class-for-itself.

    Socialist politics is the method of social psycho-therapy -- not to be confounded with bourgeois (individualistic-atomistic) psychotherapy.

    Socialist politics has scarcely begun.

    If the decadence of capitalism, necessitating socialist liberation, is the product of technodepreciation a1 -- that is, of the net effect of the growth of the productive forces on the value of accumulated core capital, once dead labor has become the preponderant constituent of that accumulation a2, then technodepreciation likewise characterizes the entire decay process, the decadence of capitalist society as a whole, the level of the cultural superstructure included.  The forms and institutions of capitalist ideology likewise become obsolescent with respect to the attained and attainable level of the productive forces, i.e., of the (self-)creative forces of humanity.

    Working class,
socialist agitation -- social(ist) politics -- are but the final extension of this techno-obsolescence or technodepreciation, at the level of the political and institutional superstructure of capitalist society. The social(ist) programme of the working-class-for-itself embodies the social technology which renders obsolete the entire capitalist edifice, the entire CAPITALIST TECHNOLOGY OF THOUGHT, or mode of (self-)consciousness. This obsolescence evaluation applies not only to the credibility and hegemony of the capitalist political state, and to its theory of social govern-ment, but to the whole palace of capitalist spiritual life, up to and including the citadel, science itself, which is also, toward the end, revealed to be an ideology of capital -- one in fact very near to its psycho-ideological core.

    It is the whole technology of thought -- individualistic logic, the very logic of social alienation and atomization -- which is being rendered obsolete relative to the colossal growth of the socialized productive forces. In science, in psychology, in art -- everywhere the products of atomistic thinking and atomistic identity reveal their crisis and their inadequacy.

    In natural science, the mathematics founded upon the atomistic set concept and its form-al logic project alienated social identity onto all Nature -- making (logical-set-theoretical) paradoxes c2 out of even the simplest analogs of the self-reflexive (dialectical) subject-object relations that abound in Nature, and cannot even symbolize c3 or cannot themselves solve a3, where they can symbolize, even the simplest realistic aspects of especially biological and societal, living and self-conscious, systems. They have failed to make a major breakthrough into these areas of comprehension of Nature ever since their originating spectacular breakthroughs into the calculus of mechanical systems (called mechanics -- i.e., machine-ics; mechanometry) starting in the late 1600s, for they have sought exclusively after a simply-connected, linear extension of the languages and methods developed for that more mechanistic, more atomorphic realm, to realms of Nature which are beyond their scope -- stubbornly and incorrigibly clinging to their deep-seated atomistic biases.

    Thus, capitalist science and its logico-mathematical language are inherently and predictably inadequate to serve as the mental technologies for modeling, democratically planning, and democratically (self-)managing global social reproduction and the reproduction of the planetary biosphere -- the natural base (Marx) of social reproduction -- at a time when such are so urgently required for the continuation of our species. The capitalist relations of thought can no longer manage the problems of social production theoretically, due to individualistic logic, and the capitalist relations of production can no longer manage them practically, due to individualistic interest -- for the capital-interest now points in the direction, no longer of progress of the productive forces, but in that of their perversion -- indeed of that of very inversion -- looting, and cannibalization.

    Both the theoretical and the practical sides of the task of democratic global social management thus fall to the programmatic working class, wielding its socialist technology of thought -- dialectics. It is not only capitalist property, but the entire atomistic organon, which social practice has outgrown; which is being rendered fictitious intellectual capital by the recent growth of human praxis -- that is, of the human societal self-productive forces, i.e., the human-society-creative power of social[ized] humanity.

    The final, and total,
technodepreciation of capital; of the capitalist totality or historic World in Hegels sense -- including of all of its forms of false consciousness, of psychology or self-identity, and even of perception or perceptual structure, which belong to it (are properties of it) -- takes place this time not through the competition of capitals among themselves, but rather through the competition of capital as a unit with the socialist program, the programmatic working class movement, incubated inside the World of capital and which surrounds that World from within. This movement can prove its superiority for social practice, and win out in its struggle for social legitimacy and hegemony, only by its theoretical and practical successes. This competition with the bourgeoisie and (its) bureaucracy is, centrally, a contest for effective authority over the disposition of the means of production -- over the uses to which global human living time and the productive agencies of humanity are to be put. It is the struggle of incipient social and socialist planning against the anarchic plans of the global confab of private-capitals and state-capitals. Thus, the proletarian movement must win effective control of and disposal over critical sub-complexes of these global productive forces before it can expect to be capable of holding, and of holding on to, political power in the form of an anti-state, internally-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, and considerably before producers association(s) as the de facto new leading social relation of production can come to be formally recognized as the new, nascent form of [socialized] property.

    These successes are necessary, in order for the class-for-itself to, layer-by-layer, erect itself; in order to build its strength, in both material and moral (including in morale) terms. These successes are necessary in order to avoid at all costs the slow death of passively -- or with only sporadic, uncoordinated -- i.e., unprogrammatic,  and therefore easily defeated resistance -- waiting out the severe attrition (to both aspects of its strength) exacted by capitalist austerity and looting, until the whole class gets fed up and ready for revolution. These successes are needed to begin repairing the many-years-now of intensifying worldwide damage to humanity (and to the biosphere, its natural basis) wrought by decadence, and now by acute decadence (societal auto-cannibalization). Finally, these self-testings and self-provings are necessary -- and rightfully so -- to create the self-confidence and reputation (especially among its own!), of the class for-itself, and for it to learn social mastery.

    This is socialist primitive accumulation -- the original accumulation of social(ist) property -- mediated by the planet-wide process of social(-programmatic) politics.

    In the context of a social-reproduction crisis in developed capitalism, such as the present one, caused by the continued growth of the productive forces after the fixed-capital-to-circulating-capital value-ratio (for core world-market capital) surpasses unity -- a crisis which the capitalist classes are not only
congenitally helpless to resolve, but moreover constrained to worsen by virtue of their capitalist personality, their capital self-interest and their capital self-identification -- the continuum of social reproduction necessitates that capital as a whole be expropriated by the world proletariat, because capitals whole social-reproductive use-value (use-value for expanding social reproduction) as capital is, by that stage in the expansion of human creative praxis, asymptotically approaching devaluation to zero. That is, the means of production cease to be -- or to be possible as -- capital. All of capital in this last surge of technodepreciation thus becomes, and must become, fictitious capital, on the eve of its historical dis-appearance! And the appearance of programmatic consciousness within the working class is already capitals Gotterdamerung.

    The programmatic working class, or proletariat-for-itself, has the edge in this competition within self-terminal capitalism, because its social mass and position give it (potentially) the (class-for-itself) interest and the theoretical tools -- interest in the expanded reproduction of labor-power, key to expanded reproduction of society as a whole, and the theoretical tool of
solidarity logic, or of communal individualism -- that is, the tool of dialectical (or, simply, of social) consciousness; of dynamical-totality-thinking; of self-reflexive logic -- necessary to solve the otherwise fatal problems of human social existence at its present stage.

    Industrial capital -- production equipment, and capitalized means of social (profit) production in general -- constitute the central
(recognized) form of wealth for capitalist society. Society itself -- or, identically, the creative social individual (self-creativity or productive force itself), in the (inseparable) societal contexture of other creative social individuals -- is the recognized central form and fount of social wealth and health -- of social prosperity -- in social-ist society.

    The
Last Competition of Capital, in which capital as a whole is received into its final bankruptcy, via the trusteeship of the global proletariat, is not simply one more competitive surge among different individual capitals;

capital # capital

where # is being used as the competition sign. It is rather in the competition of capital en bloc with the new and deeper form of wealth that had been emergent within it, that capital finally loses out;

capital # social

where soci-al refers to the social(ist) wealth form -- society (recognized) as wealth -- spoken of above. Soci-al stands for the fabulously reticulated contexture of objectively socialized creation and appropriation; the global grid of social synergy, non-linear energy, or cooperative power which has grown up beneath and still hides behind the exoskeleton of the World Market = Capital as social totality. It stands for the nöosphere-in-itself. Socialism, the socialist movement, is simply the self-discovery and self-beholding -- the becoming-self-reflected or for-itself -- of human-soci-al: of the real source of wealth.


4.   The American Bi-Centennial



Declaration of Independence of the United States of America


The Coming American Revolution

    The original creation of the United States of America was, in balance, a major achievement in the evolution of the human species, in the self-construction of humanity, on this planet. However, since then, especially since World War I, this fact has reversed itself to a growing extent, as facts often tend to do, and the United States has become, in balance, an increasing brake upon human development throughout the world, at home included. While still -- and even more than ever before -- capable of vast contributions to the enrichment of human life -- in electronics, in agriculture, in medicine, in social knowledge- and social praxis-technologies, in general -- these potentials can less and less be realized as constructive forces within the existing system of social relations (capital). Rather, these potentials are more and more realized as destructive forces -- as means of repression, as means of imperialist looting, as military goods -- and turned against human evolution in the form of massive technological assault upon every embryonic emergence of the Socialist movement at home and around the world -- in Vietnam, in Chile, in Portugal, in Angola, and on the home ground of advanced capitalism where alone the socialist potential of these other revolts could be actualized -- taking a terrible toll in valuable lives, in misery and retardation.

    But the fact remains: the original creation of the United States marked a major
step forward in the realization of human freedom. Likewise will its Socialist re-creation. The building of America has been in fact a project of all humanity right from the start, however consciously or unconsciously. The higher wages made possible by the great natural and social wealth of the land, the shortage of labor, the dynamism made possible by a social landscape relatively free of feudal and archaic debris, and the promise of escape from wage-slavery into the more self-managed, more independent life of a landed farmer, attracted workers from every corner of the globe into the swelling ranks of the American proletariat as it built up the continent, raising a throbbing industrial society out of a continent-spanning natural and social wilderness, though also at the cost of a genocidal extermination of the prior, aboriginal inhabitants of that landscape.

    In the world socialist revolution and the socialist renaissance, which has already entered its opening stages, the colossal forces and creative powers of the American proletariat, in overcoming itself as proletariat, will join those of the rest of the human race in building a world society, a culture, and a prosperity the like of which the history of humankind has not recorded, nor scarcely even dreamed of before, on this planet, and beyond it as well.


    It is in this spirit that we enter as socialists into the celebration of the American Bicentennial. For we know that its real spirit is our own. For the progress of past human striving is now safe only in socialist hands. Only the socialist vantage reveals the continuum of real human advancement whereon the past social greatness of North America can be positively located, in the context of its future greatness as a vital organ of prospering humanity as a whole -- and this without being dragged down in demoralization over its present balance of destructiveness and decay. For socialists know that the world working class, become the human race, the associated producers, will be the inheritors of that greatness and that wealth, and, what is even more important, its renewers and continuators as well.


5.   Our Policy Concerning WAR



War that does not supersede its pre-conditions is generalized self-mutilation



On the Evitability of World War III

    In decadent capitalism, the colossal magnitude of the developed productive forces of society expresses itself -- quite lawfully and predictably -- as the colossal destructive power of the means of war. The further growth of the potential productive forces -- of social self-knowledge and knowledge of Nature, called science and technology under capitalism -- continues, but it can less and less be realized as productive force (meaning force of expanded production of society; force productive of social expansion; both intensive and extensive, both qualitative and quantitative), i.e., as the growth-force of society.

    Instead, this potential is increasingly shunted away into the ever-expanding production of the military means of social destruction -- the fusion bomb, napalm, anti-personnel bombs, poison gases, synthetic germs, gigantic missile-carrier boats, and the like, as well as other forms of social waste -- that is, this vast potential expanded-life-reproductive force is increasingly realized as social destructive force. The productive forces increasingly become negative; anti-growth or contractive forces of society, applied by global human society itself, to  global human society itself. Their negative state represents an actual gradual depletion of social resources, and an accumulating potential for sudden realization as catastrophic negative growth, or self-accelerating contracted reproduction (self-unproduction) of the global humanity which their ascendant, positive state had only just recently brought into existence.

    But it is only, by now, in this destructive and finally self-destructive form that capital can any longer accumulate its advancing productive forces as capital -- that is, profitably, and without eating fatally into the exchange-value of the historically accumulated proprietorship or equity account on its balance sheet. The constructive realization of the collective productive force of human society today, under the reign of the capital-relation, would mortally wound the entire superstructure of carried-forward fixed asset valuations (the very liquidity-equity base needed to pay off debt obligations) and accumulated debt obligations -- that superstructure which IS accumulated capital itself -- through the massive technological obsolescence, and extinguishment of capital-value, that it would entail, at a stage in the self-evolution of the capital-relation when fixed asset valuations and capitalized past debt, rather than the value of current product, forms the major portion of core-capitalist-owned exchange-value (the opposite of what was the case during capitals ascendant phase).

    War itself is the acute phase of the general in-growing and impaction of the productive forces in decadent capitalism -- the veritable self-implosion of social reproduction. The social state called war makes violently visible, in the red glow of gutting fire, the negative sign which increasingly but stealthily hovers over the unprecedented magnitude of the productive forces throughout the decadent period of the capitalist mode of human-societal self-production.

  The social self-force, the force of social evolution, ordinarily oriented timeward and self-ward (pro-self-development; pro-essence-realization) reverses; becomes
ante-time (reactionary) and anti-self (self-obliterative). In this negative state, the productive forces devour themselves, like the Worm Orobouros, hurling human society askew on a trajectory toward barbarism and extinction.

    Capitalist war -- inter-capitalist war, inter-nation war, or, really intra-capitalist war; intra-world-market war -- is an explosive manifestation of the self-contradiction of capital, of its enfetterment of its productive forces. War is the self-devastation of society, and of the biosphere, which is societys real body. It is the realization of fictitious capital, of negative use-value, of anti-wealth. Socialists, who by definition belong to the tendency of the positive abolition of capital, must do everything in their power to preclude the capitalist solution to capitals crisis -- viz., the negative abolition of capital, its self-annihilation, taking not just capitalist society but society in general down with it. The twin moments of this capitalist solution are war and depression, self-cannibalization of humanity by war and self-cannibalization of humanity by austerity.

    But the only value such diverse efforts may yield depends upon, and will lawfully be in vain without, the renascent social climate that only the programmatic thrust of a world socialist movement can create. This programmatic thrust has to be based upon the socialist scientific discovery of the socialist program for this era. That means a program that can solve the present sharp economic crisis as part of ending the whole period of capitalist decadence (of which the present crisis is only an acute moment), which has brought pauperization, looting, and decay to the majority of the worlds populations, solving that crisis by restarting the positive development of the productive forces -- realized as expanded social reproduction -- on a world scale, for the inter-mutual and resonant benefit of all peoples -- inaugurating a new era of global prosperity in the total sense of that word: the Socialist Renaissance, the opening chapter of human post-prehistory on this planet.

    This must be a program around which the working classes of the whole planet can rally in international unison, and for whose step-by-step implementation the socialist movements everywhere can press and agitate.

    Such a programmatic movement -- and its successive-approximation realization as a transition to global socialism -- is the only lasting preventative to war. It is the beginning of the conscious, deliberate ending of capitalist society by capitalist society itself, at the undeferable insistence of its decisive internal negate-ive pole, the world proletariat.

    Apart from such a programmatic thrust and content, the socialist movement can only be, as it is at this moment, a dim shadow of itself, a fumbling, floundering holdover from past tradition that can
t quite seem to remember its real mission, or the real essence of the motives and conceptions of its many founders, who could and did. Apart from such programmatic pith, the socialist movement is doomed to remain a hollow formal shell of, at best, mere ethical idealism; at worst, sordid brokerage of bureaucratic power -- and as either, a shallow, ineffectual pushover for -- or inadvertent tool of -- Fascist Barbarism.

    With respect to the task of discovering the socialist program of our times, Marxs most abstruse and abstract conceptions could not be more relevant, helpful, and concrete. Theory could not be a more vitally practical value. For a sound socialist program can come about only as the fruit of a dialectical-scientific human self-comprehension of the actual process of global human social self-reproduction ongoing at this very moment; the comprehension by humanity of the self-creative praxis of humanity.

    The choice is clear : War, Barbarism, and Extinction, or the practical collective self-mastery of self-expanding human social self-re-production -- necessarily also containing its theoretical mastery -- by the associated producers.
 
6.   The Socialist Renaissance



Renaissance of [human-]self-expanding marvels


no text available


7.   Humanity and the Biosphere: The Ideology of Ecologism



see Crises by Nature: How Humanity Saved the Biosphere

8.   Socialist Programmatics: The Method of Discovery

Productive forces and social relationships -- the two different sides of the development of the social individual -- appear to be, and are, only a means for capital, to enable it to produce from its own cramped base. But in fact they are the material conditions that will shatter this foundation. c4
    We are not at that stage in our knowledge and research where we can contribute a dialectical-scientific hypothesis as to the socialist program for the present time. We can however, offer a description of what we believe to be the valid method for arriving, at length, at such a programmatic determination.

    The method of presentation of the Socialist Program we are seeking would presumably involve the serial display of a multiplicity of distinct and detailed
planks or points. Were such a program already before us, it would be helpful, in a attempting to comprehend its diverse provisions -- as formulating not a set of discrete, independent, isolatable demands, but a totality; a system of proposed social measures, within which each separate provision functioned as a unique and indispensable vital organ of the whole organism of proposals -- if we could locate the unity of this program. And, should we discover this unity in advance of knowing the program in detail, we might be in a position to spin out the whole programmatic web via the guidance of this unitary formulation, serving as template. That is, once we can write down the whole program in a single premise or ground, an all-in-one provision or proposal, we should then be able to progressively grow the other moments of the program by immanent expansion of this singular formulation or singularity.

    That single formula, which, since we will be expressing it as an ideogram, we will call -- if we may be allowed the liberty to so dub it -- the
pro-gram, is:

!

   
Where the ascending arrow
denotes increases, where , denotes an index of the level of the social forces of production a4, measured on global society ( f = total social surplus product, measured in human labor-time units, n = total social necessary product, measured in human labor-time units; thus  = the ratio of the potential social realm of freedom to the social realm of necessity each measured in human life-time-volume -- the freedom-rating of society), and where ! denotes the imperative mode [not the mathematical factorial operator]. Thus this ideogram asserts: increase the productive forces! As the unigram of the Socialist Program, it asserts that the central intension of that program is to continue the evolution of the social forces of production.

    We are asserting, via this unigram, that the hub of the Socialist Program is to get the productive forces growing again; to break through their enfetterment by the capital relation; to terminate capitalist decadence. But what about Socialism? you may ask. This brings us to a point which could not be more fundamental -- one which ranks as the first law of the Marxian theory of social evolution. The further growth of the productive forces, at this stage in their development, already contains and implies socialist social relations of production as their only possible social form; as the only quality of social relations compatible with that range of magnitude of the productive forces. That is, the institution of social property, and the abolition of the capital-relation, is the inescapable result of any further sustained real growth in the productive forces, once the capital-relation has become decadent. Conversely, expropriation of capital, and global social(ist) democratic planning, are the only possible means to break the enfetterment by capital and restart the positive growth of the productive forces, once the capital (world-market) relation has become obsolete as the form of social praxis, i.e., decadent. Furthermore, a sharp upsurge in the rate of social reproduction, a renaissance of the productive forces, is the only way out (i.e., other than barbarism) of the final depression-collapse of the capitalist system, which collapse is the sand pit or potential well dug deep by years of damage and decay, by years of capitalist decadence.

    Beyond a definite limit, growth of the productive forces is irrecuperable for a given system of social relations [of production]. This is one of Marx
most fundamental discoveries. Were it not so, perhaps we today would still be groveling before clan totems, instead of pro-gram-ming a socialist revolution.

    In his Preface to A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, published 1859, Marx propounds an extremely concentrated summary of the laws or invariants of social evolution he had been uncovering. A key passage from that summary is displayed below, from which we will draw two implications of direct bearing on the content of the Socialist Program.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. ... At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production ... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution ... No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new, superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. c5
    This implies, first, that it is the growth of the productive forces beyond a definite lower limit which, to begin with, gels (as) a given totality of social relations; precipitates it into existence, and furthermore, which through continued growth in or under that form, beyond a second limit, brings down that totality in the process of congealing (as) a new, higher [more inclusive] one. The growth of social productivity is thus the evolutionary continuum which connects the various distinct and successive qualities of social relations [of society-self-re-production], or forms of society.

    Secondly, this implies that capitalism can be destroyed, in a pro-evolutionary way, only by the growth of social productivity beyond the saturation point of capital for profitable use of that growth, and furthermore, that capitalism cannot be revolutionized (in any progressive way at least) until that saturation point -- or decadence -- is reached. The growth of the productive forces will push the old social order over the edge, but only once it has brought, and has been brought by, that social order, up to its brink. All this we call Marxs First Law of Social Evolution, here as applied to the capitalist stage of social evolution. It is further clarified by the following extracts showing Marxs application of the concept to pre-capitalist, tribal, primitive communistic stages of social evolution:
The community itself appears as the first great force of production. ... In the last instance the community and the property resting upon it can be reduced to a specific stage in the development of the forces of production of the laboring subjects -- to which correspond specific relations of these subjects with each other and with nature. Up to a certain point, reproduction. Thereafter, it turns into dissolution. ... The evolution of the productive forces dissolves them (CCS: these forms of community), and their dissolution is itself an evolution of the human forces of production. c6
    If it is the growth of the productive forces which brings to a close every successive historical formation of the social relations of production, then it is the growth of the productive forces that will bring capitalism to a close, and must be the intent and content of every moment of the Socialist Program. The socialist revolution is itself an evolution of the productive forces c7, as well as being the rescue of the accumulated productive forces from cannibalization and barbarous ruination at the hands of Fascist capital.

    The ultimate reason why growth of the productive forces is so central to the Socialist Program, and to Marxian theory in general, is that it is simply the impersonal name for the development of the self-powers of the social individuals, for human development, and because only social individuals who are developing in themselves higher creative capacities can attain and sustain (reproduce) higher social relations; a higher quality of social life.
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society, and the cultural development conditioned by it.c8
The whole point of that renaissance of the global productive forces which is so indispensable to the success of the Socialist Revolution is not the filment of the world to the brim with a bounty of brand new objects of wealth, which it will, however, entail, but the subjective development -- the development of human subjects and of human subjectivity, subject-ness, or subject-hood -- which will necessarily stand behind that fulfillment.
Suppose, for instance, that productivity could be increased without increase of territory, by means of a development of the forces of production. ... This would imply new methods and combinations of labor, the high proportion of the day which would then have to be devoted to agriculture, etc., and once again the old economic conditions of the community would cease to operate. The act of reproduction itself changes not only the objective conditions -- e.g., transforming village into town, the wilderness into agricultural clearings, etc. -- but the producers change with it, by the emergence of new qualities, by transforming and developing themselves in production, forming new powers and new conceptions, new modes of intercourse, new needs, and new speech. c9
Hitherto, historically, the growth of the productive forces; the degree of achievement of the real, all-round prosperity of society, has been the irreducible index and indispensable accompaniment of the spiritual progress of mankind, of the all-sided or holistic development of the social individual -- in a word, of the unfoldment of human subjectivity inside the rest of Nature.

    Moreover, not only is it empirically observed
that the productive forces have grown in periods characterized by evolution (as opposed to degeneration) in the quality of human social relations, and that, generally, they have tended to grow since the Pleistocene, when homo sapiens first comes into focus for our best available historical retroscopes. Not only is it nice, or merely subjectively necessary that they have done so. Certainly, since productive force is only another name for human self-creativity or the self-productivity of humanity, quantitative and qualitative; for the rate of reproduction of the species, or rate of creation of sociomass ( biomass) a5, its growth is a manifestation of, and a spur to, accelerated social, and  individual, evolution; an increase in the self-force of social evolution. It means the awakening of humanity to its slumbering powers, the growth of our capacity for freedom -- that is, for self-determination -- as opposed to alienation; alien-determination, other-determination (e.g., rest-of-nature-determination; or law-of-exchange-value-determination; capital-determination & spectacle-determination, of human life). It means the growth of our capacity for self-fulfillment and self-realization.

    But this is not all. It has been argued that, within definite, well-delimitable intervals of historical time, growth of the productive forces or of social productivity is objectively necessary as well: necessary to the continued existence of the human species and also of the totality of inter-sustaining species, the biosphere, as possible states of matter. This might be named LaRouches Law of Social Evolution c10, although there are some grounds for arguing that Marx understood this as well, and that, in any case, it is implied in his First Law (Law of the Productive Force).

    The idea is that
every social productive force, or means social livelihood, is but the (creative) human appropriation or detournément of a definite natural force or resource, one which is always a relatively finite aspect of infinite nature as a whole. Being finite, this natural force or resource is slowly depleted, as one usable for society, by its social consumption. Unless, during the time leading up to when this depletion becomes absolute, the social surplus product (fundamentally, this consists of surplus living human time, f -- new human lives: disposable time for priesthoods, scientists, creative workers in general, i.e., time for universal labor), itself yielded via the socialization or social internalization of that aspect of nature, has been, in sufficient quantity, invested in new development, up to the point of innovating a replacement, involving an expanded appropriation of nature and human nature by humanity, unless this has been accomplished, the society will die. It will have doomed itself to a gradual but accelerating decline as its natural base -- the natural foundation of its staple productive force -- is exhausted. The societys characteristic and defining social relations of production will come undone, and become extinct, and its human remains will fall back into inferior relations, if this is possible, or disappear altogether.

    Today, the outstanding example of this hypothesized general law is the depletion of
the natural resource base of molecular power (chemical-reaction energy), that is, of fossil fuels, the yolk of the earth, and the dire need to resort one-rung-down on the evolutionary helix of the forms of cosmic mass-energy for a new source of physical energy: to reach down past molecular power to some form of atomic powerAnd: to have this new means of production of energy deployed and ready to go by the time the fossil fuels base of the world economy is fully eroded, which means converting the entire useful industrial capacity of the globe to compatibility with this new atomic energy source.

    This aspect of the growth of the productive forces, its objective necessity, locates the universal value and urgency of the Socialist project in a manner irreducible to matters of alienated (false-conscious) subjective taste. Since decadent capital is congenitally incapable of developing the productive forces in the area of energy, as we shall see, the discovery and implementation of the Socialist Program, which is so capable, is nothing short of an historical emergency for the entire human race!
 
    The full elaboration of the pro-gram into a programmatic hypothesis, especially with respect to its strategic dimension, requires detailed knowledge of the actual reproduction-praxis presently in-process, including knowledge of its spatial deployment and the pattern of its kaleidoscopic, interflowing reticulum: the global physical circulation of the social product. We need to develop a model capable of displaying the geographical anatomy and physiology of the global social metabolism (including its ecological aspects), locating the roles of various continental regions as specific organs in the planetary econo-ecology.

    A convenient form of this model, for each annual social reproduction cycle, or, better, social reproduction helix (gyre), is a geographically de-composed (3-dimensional, regionally layered), double-entry, input-output table c11 of product-categories. This is, in effect, a product-recipe table or global social cookbook, with all ingredients listed twice, on the edges of the table, once horizontally and once vertically, once as input and once as output, and measured, for our purposes, mainly in units of estimated human labor-time. This table would hopefully be developed in dialectical or self-reflexive ( impredicative) form, that is, with human labor-power entered as both the particular product or output which is the product of all products, and also as a necessary ingredient input into all other social products as well, i.e., into itself included. (See Appendix A).

    But, short of that, we can begin by looking around for ways to increase the productive forces which are possible but, for some reason, untried. This means: looking around for ways to create social prosperity. And we need not limit our horizons, in this search, to the social economy as abstracted (mentally extracted) from the rest of the planetary eco-system. We can, and should, look for ways to increase the prosperity of the biosphere as a whole. And here it is that a series of amazing coincidences shows up. Looking around for neglected ways to establish social prosperity turns out to be a quick method for determining (1) exactly where capital has been holding back and diverting the productive forces, and (2) what the immediate technical basis, immanent in late capitalism, for socialism, turns out to be. These surprises are, in fact, just what Marxs (and LaRouches) Law of the Productive Forces would lead one to expect.

    To summarize, the general method is as follows: we start from the unigram , which is also a prediction, a pre-gram (abstract prefigurement) of the content and intension of the totality of the not yet determined Socialist Program. We then operate upon information concerning the actual state of the world, using the pregram, in an effort to generate thereby its extension: the Programs fleshed-out form.

    Now, what would it mean, the prosperization of the biosphere? Evidently, the flourishing of plant and animal life, a sharp uprising in the self-productivity of the planetary biomatter; increase in the standing crop or maintained level of the tissue of the outer skin of living matter enwrapping the planet. This is the index of biological prosperity. It would require augmenting the degree of biotic utilization of the energy flux, primarily solar, incident into the biosphere, in the major way that this is possible: increasing the rate and mass of the photosynthesis of biomatter. Photosynthesis is the ecological base of the biosphere, the root process of free energy fixation, and the originating mode of production of virtually all biomatter, which is only later-up-the-food-chain converted into other, non-botanical, forms.

    How could human action bring about such a result? Evidently, by reversing the global trend toward desertification which set in ever since roughly the earliest known appearance of homo sapiens, in the aftermath of the last great world glaciation, whose icy blades slew the magnificent Arcto-Tertiary Forest that once circled the entire Northern hemisphere -- the last of the great transcontinental forests -- leaving behind vast reaches of devastation, and a transformed global climate. c12 That is, by means of the greening of the Sahara, of the Gobi, and of the American Southwest!

    This measure would increase the mass of global photosynthesis.

    And here we come across one of those coincidences! If this greening were to take the form of agricultural cultivation, the resulting biological boom, or bloom, would just happen to be the exact ingredient required for a socio-economic bloom as well. The development of the vast creative potential, or productive force, and thus also the prosperity, of the great human populations of Asia and Africa, both situated directly adjacent to major arid regions, is being retarded most fundamentally by a drastic deficiency of nutrition, by relative starvation!

    Of course, the sowing of the deserts would require fabulous amounts of fresh water, monumental works of irrigation, and new methods of large-scale and small-scale farming, beyond the rapacious techniques recently developed with a view, rather exclusively, to exchange-value productivity, in contradiction to use-value productivity, which presently dominate capitalist agribusiness.

    How could water in such vast amounts be obtained at a feasible social(ist) cost (with ecological and pollution-reparation costs most decidedly included in total social cost, as part of the cost of maintaining the objective equipotential for econo-ecological reproduction)? Desalination of ocean water at the coastal peripheries of these great deserts, and its pipe-transportation inland, would be prohibitively expensive in labor-time -- unless that ocean water itself were the fuel driving the engines of desalinization! There are two basic sources of the new thermo-atomic power-form which must replace fossil fuel: reactor-fusion power and solar-fusion power -- two different ways of bringing the sun down to earth. By bringing the suns energy down within reach in the form of an optimal commingling of solar and reactor fusion plants, coastal desalination fresh water factories could provide, by socially-mastered stellar fire, and in a multi-purpose facility or unifactory context, the great outpouring of aqua pura needed for drinking, irrigation, hydroponics, etc.  And in the very process of extracting from it the heavy-water fusion-fuel needed everywhere, they could at the same time generate a surplus of electrical and optical (laser) current for the world grid, and for energizing the fabrication and communication processes in the agro-industrial nuclei of the new communities that would begin dotting the formerly desert[ed] sands.

    The earth was once a garden-planet, in the first great bloom of photosynthesis, the Carboniferous Ages -- to which the vast yolk of coal, oil, and natural gas bear a monumental, if mute, testimony. So will it be again, but this time through the unimaginable hand, eye, and mind of realized humanity -- and under its watchful guardianship.

    The above pertains to the mass of planetary synthesis of living substance. What about the rate of this synthesis? The rate of worldwide photosynthesis could be most directly stimulated by sharply increasing the parts-per-million of CO2 in the planetary atmosphere, whose present rarefaction in this regard is known to be a prime limiting factor on the velocity of this fundamental biochemical reaction for many extant plant species. c13 This, in turn, could be accomplished by accelerating the burning of fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas. Here looms another of those coincidences. For such a process would be necessarily associated with any accelerated global program of social(ist) investment, of expanded production of advanced means of production and their installation around the world (but especially in the most underdeveloped -- i.e., in the most looted -- and means-of-production-poor areas). Such an accelerated investment program, in turn, would be a necessary part of any plan to promote a rapid upswing in the standard of real productivity, and thereby in the human standard of living, the world over. But, such a rapid depletion could be risked only if an international crash program to develop, mass produce, and deploy fusion reactors, and other post-fossil-fuel energy devices, were concurrently underway.

    Thus, on two prime counts, agricultural, and industrial renaissance, the development of the new productive force known as fusion power would seem to head the most-urgent list on humanitys technological agenda. Fusion power should be relatively socially inexpensive. Its fuel is derivable from ocean water. Its invention would render Hydrogen, the 90+%-by-mass constituent of cosmic matter, a resource for humanity, not likely to be soon exhausted.

    Fusion power shows potential to be less polluting than either conventional combustion or fission power, not only in terms of chemical and radioactive waste products, but in terms of thermal pollution as well. Models of fusion reactors which try to capture the stellar process at its early, birthing phases, rather than at its later, full-blown-blaze stage -- utilizing the phenomenon of a masing plasma (or plasma maser); self-contained and governed by its own microwave output setting up a standing wave with the reactor-chamber walls; and generating electricity directly, without heat-transfer (steam, etc.) mediation, from microwave drain-off -- have been tested by a private corporation set up for the purpose in northern California. The project was headed up by a renegade from the restrictiveness of the Federally-controlled fusion-power project at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory. Such direct-converters might have heat/usable-power ratios orders of magnitude lower than an ordinary oil-to-electricity plant. The goal of a sharp increase in the worldwide standard of living, and the necessity for a safe, economically and ecologically sound replacement for the dying dinosaur-technologies of fossil-power, would seem to indicate cheap, fuel-abundant and minimally-polluting fusion-power as a prime candidate for crash development.

    All of the above begs the question why so little has been accomplished in the area of fusion-development to date. There are two principal reasons for the snails-pace progress.

    First, the use-value rationality which would select for fusion-development runs headlong into the exchange-value rationality of the dominant factions of capital, which contradicts it. The premise of the latter rationality is the capitalists proprietary interest in maintaining the value of the vast capitals sunk in the older energy technologies based upon coal, natural gas, petroleum, and uranium. Ocean water as fuel would thoroughly and rapidly technodepreciate most of the proprietary holdings in these fuel resources, as well as most of the capital equipment associated with their discovery, extraction, processing, and distribution -- geological laboratories, drilling rigs, pipelines and oil tankers, refineries, service stations, public utilities, etc. Some of the strongest factions of the international bourgeoisie have their assets concentrated in just the branches of industry which would be most adversely affected (e.g., Standard Oil). Fission power is much more exchange-valuable than fusion power would be from their points-of-view. Establishment and enforcement of exclusive private property rights to the oceans waters might constitute a difficult police problem for them. Whereas, uranium is scarce, easily monopolized, and its refining -- the separation of fissionable U-235 from relatively unfissionable U-238 from unfissionable U-238 -- requires a process which may be the most capital-intensive in the history of industrialism. a6 The oil companies have already bought up the lions share of that portion of the worlds uranium reserves that were politically accessible to them.

    Only one problem: fission reactors are not very use-valuable. In fact, they are negatively use-valuable. Fission reactors are a good non-military example of self-contracting use-value, or negative productive force; of the non-obsolescence variety of fictitious fixed capital. When the estimated social costs of discovery, refinement, pollution-reparation, and probability-cost of loss/damage due to accidents are figured in with the social benefits of the energy yielded by uranium-fission, this becomes clear. In my present opinion, and that of many others a7, the existing forms of fission-technology constitute a net socially-wasteful -- a net social loss-form -- of social energy. The operation of fission reactors consumes more social use-value than it supplies. The capital accumulated in the fission power industry represents social dis-accumulation. From the social-reproductive stand-point, capital investment in fission power is negative investment. That is, the presently-constituted fission-power technology is objectively Fascist.

    Only state-capitalist measures, such as government subsidy (example: the Oak-Ridge uranium refinery) and legislated waiver of full damage liability insurance costs, has allowed this malignant technology, this social entropy masquerading as energy, to develop as far as it has, by means of a government-backed pseudo-profit.

    Thus the drag of already-fictitious or potentially-fictitious capital in the fossil and fission fuel industries politically and economically blockades the development of the new and vital productive force called fusion power. Fusion research programs are given pitiful budgets and held under tight bureaucratic rein by a federal [AiD: and, now, by a global multi-nation consortium] energy bureaucracy (in the U. S., virtually the only Western country with the resources to by itself pursue the matter) wholly prostituted to the fission and fossil fuel industries. But this is not all. There is a second, and deeper, ideological barrier to the development of fusion power.

    Present-day physics, and its mathematical language, shot-through with atomistic pre-assumptions, are incapable of fruitfully describing fusing plasmas. This incapacity involves the long-standing intractability of the (non-linear) N-body problem in general form for N > 2. The total physical interaction for even 3 bodies cannot be described (i.e., solved or explicitly formulated) in the prevailing mathematical language of integro-differential calculus. c14 Whereas, a fusion-reactor plasma might involve on the order of 1011 (100 billion) bodies or particles. Thus, various kinds of aggregate and continuum models -- field, energy, superparticle, sheet, sheath and (even) waterbag models -- have been tried out, as attempts to model a plasma as a whole, or at least as an assemblage of larger, fewer, subsystems. But at-all-realistic versions of these almost invariably involve non-linearities which render them insoluble in general form by use of the analytic (deductive) method. Only the method of computer simulation (a version of the method of phenomenology c15) or numerical solution of particular cases is presently available for their treatment.
For an understanding of evolutionary and non-linear processes we let the computer show us the way. Simply watching the movies has already provided much insight and qualitative explanation of phenomena. In due course it will lead to the birth of a new mathematical language with which we can then operate quantitatively.c16
The (4-dimensional, or space-time) description of even a single charged particle moving in a space cut by electric-magnetic field-lines of force gives rise to self-action or self-force (impredicative-force) terms- in the equations of motion, and infinities in the form of divergent or runaway solutions, concerning which confusion still reigns in physics to this day. c17 And a fusion-plasma is of the fourth phase of matter, beyond the more familiar solid, liquid, and gas phases; a charged state of matter made up exclusively of moving, accelerating and decelerating, therefore field-generating charged particles. In it, the distribution of the particles determines their total field. But, their total field (in union with any external fields) determines their distribution. What have we here -- a self-distribution constantly re-determining/re-distributing itself through time? A self-determining evolution-process? A self-reflexive function, or self-function? Such as this, only dialectics can handle (but this first requires that socialists turn dialectics from a revered but moribund tradition among themselves, into a living organon).

    These two, interconnected examples, of world agricultural development/ecological reconstruction, and fusion power, are but a sampling from the array of converging trajectories of programmatic insight to which thought is led by the methodical and creative expansion of the programmatic unigram . Further implications of what has already been posited are not hard to discern. For example, the production, to the scale of global demand, of fusion reactors and reactor-housings, irrigation and controlled-environment agriculture systems, fertilizer and nutrient solution recycling plants, solar power units, world power-grid components, and the like -- all already involved in merely the expansion of food production in the Third World -- would quickly provide all the orders that the depressed, business-starved Dept. I sector (production of means of production industries) in the advanced countries, and all of their unemployed and furloughed workers -- for whom the recovery has so far been elusive c18 -- could possibly handle. This real expansion of the (food-)productive forces would provide the scope for expansion and technological upgrading of the largely obsolescent, dilapidated capacity of this basic sector of industry -- plus the means and the justification for a rapid upgrading of the quality of labor-power, the skill-level of the working-class. Whereas now, on the contrary, highly trained scientific and technical cadres are often found languishing in un- or under- employment, and the value of -- hence the demand for -- for example, university education (i.e., for their reproduction, even such as it is given contemporary pedagogy) is falling rapidly. c19

    That is, in the resurgent context of world reconstruction, global depression and the social rot of decades of decadence would quickly turn into a global boom, albeit one of a new type, transitional to socialism, and to sustained human advancement, not a capitalist boom, inevitably followed by bust. In such a context, the present vast unemployment and massive mal-employment of  productive forces -- both of potentially creative human beings, and of instrumental means of production -- would rapidly become a relic of a bygone era: human prehistory [in Marxs definition].

    Otherwise, capital will arrange its recovery. That presently unemployed capacity will be pressed into the service of a massive armaments boom -- a massive, and ultimately hyper-inflationary, squandary of productive forces -- that is, into the service of the production of means of looting, means of production of loot; the fixed capital of cannibalization -- and thence to intensified global looting, lawfully leading up to a third World War. In the meantime, negative rates of social reproduction will work their inevitable ecolo-epidemiological consequences.

The necessity, most decidedly including subjective necessity, of programmatic provisions such as the world agricultural expansion example, is amply evoked in the subject, via contemplation of the alternative -- provided that in said subject the narcotic effect of acute decadence is not too advanced -- namely, the capitalist program for the future of world agriculture. Evidence of this program -- both of its existence and of its hideous content -- is exhibited here as Appendix B, in the form of a news clipping from the Wall Street Journal. This article, politely worded, though characterizable with scientific precision by the term vicious, projects what capital imagines itself to have in store for humanitys palate, in a future governed by protracted social decline. Let them eat cake becomes, this time, in the culminating paroxysm of class society: let them eat flesh!

    Only a powerful worldwide programmatic movement can intercept the capitalist program, both conscious and unconscious, for species-suicide, and implement a real recovery. Only such a social momentum can turn the productive forces around from self-destruction toward human development once again. We suspect that the way to do this involves a rapidly self-deproletarianizing working-class enforcing and controlling an international moratorium on Third-World national bank-debt, complemented by the foundation of a new international monetary system, geared specifically to issuing credit for development -- instead of, as at present, for armament, speculation, and imperialist looting, on both foreign and domestic human terrains -- and also dominated by class-for-itself forces. c20 Debt moratorium is only a juridical formalization of the real process of illiquidation and default, which is immanent in the capitalist crisis-movement itself anyway. We propose only to insure that this international spasm mortis of default -- inevitable anyway in some form and to some extent -- have a pro-working-class, pro-humanity, in short a socialist, as opposed to a Hobbesian, barbarous, content. We propose that the class-for-itself forces appropriate the transitional handles which the immanent organic structure of capitalist crisis presents to it.

In any case, we believe that only the prodigious human energies unleashed (i.e., dis
-repressed and dis-impacted) by socialist-initiated, globally coordinated economic development can provide the indispensable binding force and coordinating energy necessary to synchronize and unify the world revolutionary process. The opposite conception, of a global uprising timed spontaneously” --  one fine morning, when everybodys had enough’ -- is a crude and fallacious abstraction, indefensible in theory and cruelly disastrous in practice.

To achieve socialist political-economic success, we believe, it will be discovered that the multi-centric, dialectical dia-logue, or
multi-logue, about the revolutionary program of transition to comprehensive, Political-Economic Democracy -- with contributions of global program elements from organizations and movements distributed all over the planet, and with ongoing, omni-central, world-wide debate --  will have to precede revolutionary practice. This is necessary, we hold, precisely in order as concretized theory, to be available to be controlled, corrected, modified, and developed by that practice -- but also in order to for that program of transition to guide that practice. That is the nature of dialectical-scientific socialist practice. Otherwise, no socialist practice, as such, can be said to exist -- only chicken-spasms post-decapitatus.

In summary, may we only point up the fact that programmatics is the proof of the pudding wherever the practical truth of Socialist theory is concerned. The historical validation of the socialist premise-concept as to the ideological or false-conscious character of capitalist ideas, including of capitalist (formal and mechanical-atomistic) science, along with that of the rest of the immense capitalist superstructure, rests upon the congenital inability of the capitalist ruling class, as such, to resolve the problems which come up immanently, in their own social praxis, at a certain stage in their development. Manifestly, these unsolved problems of social praxis today include the problem of economic crisis and stagnation; the problem of inter-capitalist war; the problem of the cannibalization of the natural and social bases of the productive forces in general, and of the working-classes of the (especially Third) world in particular; and the problem of innovating and deploying post-molecular energy technologies.

But this validation of the premises of the Socialist critique of capitalism rests conjointly on the superior ability of socialist dialectical-science; on the ability of applied socialist theory to conceptually solve the crisis of the species, to determine the practical program of this theoretical solution, and to construct itself as the
class-for-itself subject capable of materializing this solution -- to pick up the thread of human advancement where capitalist decadence left it off. Such this-sided historical ability is the only scientific confirmation or experimental verification of the Marxian concepts which is recognized within those concepts themselves. c21






B.   Appendix B

 





C.   Citations

c1    Karl Marx; Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. [AiD: note the linked text uses the phrase perishes before rather than disappears before and Maurice Dobbs 1964 translation (published in 1970 in English in Moscow by Progress Publishers) uses the phrase (on page 21) is ever destroyed before.]

c2    Robert Rosen; Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics; 21 (1959); pages 387-394.

c3    D. W. Sciama; The Physical Foundations of General Relativity; Doubleday & Co. (New York: 1969); page 57.

c4   
Karl Marx; Grundrisse; translated by McLellan; (NY: 1971); page 143.

c5   Karl Marx; Preface to Zur Kritik... (a.k.a. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”); International Publishers (NY: 1970); page 21.

c6    Karl Marx; Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations in Grundrisse; translated by Hobsbawm; International Publishers (NY: 1965); pages 94, 95, and 97.

c7  
Karl Marx; Writings on the Paris Commune; edited by Hal Draper; Monthly Review Press (NY: 1871); page 154.

c8    Karl Marx; Critique of the Gotha Program in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy; edited by Lewis Feuer; Anchor (Garden City: 1959); page 119.

c9    Karl Marx; Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations in Grundrisse; op. cit.; page 93. Also see pages 95-96.

c10
   Lyn Marcus (pseudonym of Lyndon LaRouche, Jr.); Dialectical Economics;
D. C. Heath and Co. (Lexington: 1975); pages 61 and 47.  

c11    See Wansily Leontieff; Input-Output Economics; Oxford University Press (NY: 1966); cf. especially chapter 11, pages 223-257.
For one method of estimation of labor-time values from price data, see:
  • Bill Gibson; The Imperialism of Free Trade; Ph.D. Research Essay; Agricultural Economics Department, University of California (Berkeley, CA).
c12   W. D. Billings; Plants and the Ecosystem; Wadsworth Publishing (1968); pages 65-73.

c13   Billings; ibid.; page 88.
See also:
  • BSCS; Biological Sciences: Molecules to Man (blue version); Houghton-Mifflinn (Dallas: 1963); pages 448-449.
c14    Keith R. Symon; Mechanics; Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (1964); pages 185, 188.
See also:
  • Misner, et. al.; Gravitation; W. H. Freeman & Co. (1973); page 1211.
  • Sciama; The Physical Foundations of General Relativity; Doubleday (1969); page 56.
c15    Cf. Lyn Marcus (pseudonym of Lyndon R. LaRouche, Jr.); Dialectical Economics; op. cit.; page 243.

c16     O. Buneman; Introductory Address at Symposium on Computer Simulation of Plasma and Many-Body Problems; NASA: 1967; page 1.

c17    Misner, et. al.; Gravitation; op. cit.; page 474.
See also:
  • P. C. W. Davies; The Physics of Time Asymmetry; University of California Press (1974); pages 123, 125-127, 178, and 181.
c18    staff; “Value of New Orders Jumped in January; San Francisco Chronicle; March 4, 1976; page 47.

c19    staff; Value of College is Slipping; San Francisco Chronicle; August 18, 1975; page 10.

c20    For one possible version, see:
  • Lyndon LaRouche, Jr.; How The International Development Bank Will Work; Campaigner Publications, Inc. (New York: 1975).
c21   Karl Marx; thesis 2 in Theses on Feuerbach.

 
D.   Annotations

a1  Techno-depreciation: The loss of exchange-value to capital equipment and its commodity-capital output owing not to physical wear-and-tear, but rather to the cheapening effects of the growth of the productive forces, the increasing productivity of labor, or technological progress. Identical but newly produced batches of a given line of equipment will sell for less than earlier batches, and technically-superior new versions of an old line will appear, causing in either case a fall in the rate of return on investment for the holders of the old equipment, due to price competition from new entrants using the cheaper, or better, equipment. Techno-depreciation manifests empirically -- sometimes, particularly in ascendant-phase capitalism, where prices converge more on values -- as the discrepancy between original cost and replacement cost of means of production, and more often, particularly in decadent capitalism, with its fictitious-value-ridden price structure, as accelerating inflation and bank-indebtedness. At the root of inflation -- of the prices of commodity-capital output -- is this steady but invisible inflation of fixed capital, the paradoxical result of unrecognized and unrecognizable techno-DE-flation of capital-values: the generation-process of the most fatal kind of fictitious capitalRegarding this process,
See for example:
  • Karl Marx; Grundrisse; translated by Martin Nicolaus; pages 317, 423, 446, and 543.
  • Karl Marx; Capital (Volume II); pages 170, 185-186.
  • Karl Marx; Capital (Volume III); pages 113-114.
  • Karl Marx; Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, in Capital (Volume IV); page 128.
Also see:
  • A. Milne and J. C. Laight; The Economics of Inland Transport; Issac Pittman & Sons (London: 1965); pages 191-192, 232n., 229-232, 108-150 passim.
  • Lyn Marcus (pseudonym of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.); Dialectical Economics; D. C. Heath & Co. (Lexington: 1975); pages 9-10, 112, 295-300, 368-373.
  • Horace H. Robbins; Fictive Capital and Fictive Profit: The Welfare-Military State, A Political Economy Based on Economic Fictions; Philosophical Library (New York: 1974); page 415.
For an accountants-eye view, see:
  • Anderson and Schmidt; Practical Controllership; Irwin (1961); pages 181, 352-351, 488-489, 494, and 499.
Cf.:
a2    ...so that increases in productive force thereafter destroy/obsolescence-devalue more fixed capital value than they (2) create/add. The capital-value created/added by the use of the -- fixed-capital-embodied and workers-skills-embodied -- productive forces to produce commodities accrue in the form of higher profits, i.e., retained earnings -- reinvestable new relative surplus-value increments, which, although formed in production-process, by the objectification, in the commodities produced, of fresh living human labor-time, and come back, as realized, from circulating capital/commodity market sales proceeds, whose net expansion is also caused by the self-same productive force increase. This makes further progress of the realized productive forces a net-loss proposition for capital.

a3    I refer, of course, to the whole class of non-linear differential equations.
See for example:
  • Hans Bremerman; Quantitative Aspects of Goal-Seeking Self-Organizing Systems in Progress in Theoretical Biology; Academic Press (1967); pages 59-60 and 69.
See also:
  • W. Grey Walter; The Living Brain; W. W. Norton (1963); pages xiii-xiv.
  • Marvin Minsky; Semantic Information Processing; MIT Press (1970); page 3.
  • Norbert Weiner; Cybernetics; MIT Press; page viii.
  • Albert Einstein; Autobiographical Notes in Paul Arthur Schilps Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist; (Harper & Row: 1959); pages 79-89.
a4     Another name for  is the rate of social reproduction.

a5   The ideogram means here is analogous to.

a6   However, a recently reported technique may modify this picture considerably:
See:
  • William Metz; Laser Enrichment: Time Clarifies the Difficulty; Science (19 March 1976); volume 191, page 1162.
a7    A Project Survival handbill, entitled Whats Wrong with Nuclear Power”, quotes 28 such opinions of prominent citizens, including a statement signed by over 2,300 scientists, including 9 Nobel Prize winners, presented to Congress on August 6, 1975. Unfortunately, lacking a socialist programmatic perspective, Project Survivals proposed alternatives to fission power devolve on mere conservation of ever more scarce energy resources, or exclusive reliance on solar devices, plus a return to labor-intensive modes of production, thus reproducing the exact program of capitalist austerity (Project Survival; 366 California Avenue; Palo Alto, CA).


E.   Graphics Credits
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F.   Post-Publication Notes
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G.   Release History

Release
Date
Released By
Format and Features
v1.0
March 21, 1976
Capitalist Crisis Studies (Berkeley, CA USA)
Paper-published original text.
v2.0
October 5, 2006
Adventures in Dialectics (USA)
HTML onto the internet; corrections; author modifications.


H.   Contact Information


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(e)Published by
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