Re:Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated
by vidarh on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @07:13AM
(#15448797)
Marx agreed with you:
> For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced
(The German Ideology, first chapter, section 5)
Though he was writing about the pre-conditions for socialist revolution, a central tenet of his writings was this idea that redistribution in any form first becomes tenable under advanced capitalism, because never before have we been close to be able to produce so much that we could conceivably reach a stage where redistribution doesn't simply make everyone poor (or feeling poor).
And unfortunately we got to see the consequences of ignoring that warning many places where attempts at forcing through socialist revolutions in places that did not meet the preconditions failed spectacularly.
> For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced
(The German Ideology, first chapter, section 5)
Though he was writing about the pre-conditions for socialist revolution, a central tenet of his writings was this idea that redistribution in any form first becomes tenable under advanced capitalism, because never before have we been close to be able to produce so much that we could conceivably reach a stage where redistribution doesn't simply make everyone poor (or feeling poor).
And unfortunately we got to see the consequences of ignoring that warning many places where attempts at forcing through socialist revolutions in places that did not meet the preconditions failed spectacularly.