Brad > Recent Status Updates

"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle." - V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16

All that's left is the Transcendental Doctrine of Method.

I have better sense, now, of just how truncated my undergrad courses' explorations of Kant were, and I can understand why.

Finally, in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant oh so graciously offers, "I shall try to make this clearer."

Firstly, thanks to those who recommended Robert Paul Wolff's lecture series on this epistemological juggernaut. They've helped immensely.

...That said, I'm six lectures in, and because he doesn't go into it beyond a passing remark or two, I'm not exactly sure why Wolff disdains any mention of Hegel.

The ghost of Schopenhauer is definitely smirking regardless, but pessimism doesn't strike me as Wolff's angle.

Social disharmony is necessary for the functioning of the system.

Dialectics in a nutshell.

Each developed country has created within itself its own underdeveloped country...It follows that even if the concept of the labour aristocracy, in the Leninist sense, has now been overtaken in reality by more complex differentiations, the concept of aristocratic nations conceals these complex differentiations.

And so, pockets of the periphery in the core complicate certain crude narratives.

In general, however, state bourgeoisies have never eliminated private bourgeoisies but have been satisfied with absorbing them or merging with them.

The state's relationship to private capital and civil society, respectively, in the context of achieving political independence, is naturally influenced by the degree of accumulation possible in the colonial era.

Gradually, the Palestine problem became the pivot of the 'Arab question', the test of capacity for the various social classes that aspired to lead the anti-imperialist national movement. It was on this test that there came to grief both the comprador, latifundia-owning bourgeois generation and then the petty-bourgeoisie.

None of the features that define the structure of the periphery is thus weakened as economic growth proceeds: on the contrary, these features are accentuated. Whereas at the center, growth means development, making the economy more integral, in the periphery growth does not mean development, for it disarticulates the economy — it is only a ‘development of underdevelopment’.

Exports that are destined for the center cannot grow faster than demand at the center — that is, approximately at the rate of growth of the center: it is impossible for a country to catch up on its historical handicap while sticking to the basis of international specialization.

The international division of labour [reproduces] its own conditions, splitting the world labour market into watertight national markets with big differences in rewards. It deepens unequal exchange by internalizing this in the firm.

"To say that the theory of unequal exchange means that ‘the workers at the center exploit those at the periphery ‘ is meaningless, since only ownership of capital makes exploitation possible…To say...that it means that the bourgeoisie of the periphery is...interested in shaking off the domination of the center, [forgets] that this bourgeoisie has been formed...in the wake of the bourgeoisie of the center."

A policy of development for the benefit of the masses would have to base itself upon a fundamental revision of priorities in the allocation of resources, implying rejection of the rules of profitability. That is what a strategy of transition would mean.

The doctrine of free trade has only ever been preached by the stronger, after they have established a dominant position by other means.

It is thus not the ‘laws of the market’ that explain the way wages have evolved in the periphery (which is the basis of unequal exchange) but quite simply the policies of primitive accumulation that are practiced there.