/lit/ - Literature

>>18792830
Well, capitalism is a global economic system.

If you break it down to basics, it's just obvious, just look around your room and select an object and think about the materials and labor that went into it, from where, at every step of the process, and then how it was transported to the store you bought it from. The physical resources in the computer or phone you're using right now and then combined into parts are from all the world. Or like the dye in your clothes and where the pollution as a byproduct have just totaled India's rivers. But that's not "counted" as a cost by capitalist bean counters.

Capitalist social relations make this all seem very abstract, though. You might just see the commodity with a brand logo or something and it seems like it all just pops into existence. You didn't think about the guy who actually harvested the coffee that you're drinking. So Marxism is interesting because it's a method for looking at the concrete relations underneath all this abstract smoke-and-mirrors.

That doesn't refute your point though. But Marx also wasn't really prescriptive. That's a notoriously weak point in it. But it has a theoretical form and a realistic form and those can differ. So when that happens, is it because the theory has deviated from reality? (Maybe.) Or is it because reality deviates from the theory? (Not this.) Or as Engels wrote:

>...the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter, and Herr Dühring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere before the world, from eternity — just like a Hegel.

Now, I know someone is about to say: well Marxists have tried to dogmatically force things to conform to abstract principles. And that's not wrong... like the Soviet Union. Or saying "a planned economy + highly centralized political system = socialism" and you have to impose that on everyone. Of course that fails and it might have ended up negating Marxism. Or what might be suitable at different times, in different countries might not be suitable during other times and in others countries.

The world is not even. Different countries have different histories, different material conditions, are at different periods of development from each other. The only way you can find out where to go from there is through real-world investigation and practice and you reason out from the particular.