I see Detroit, a city of 900,000 does not have one major store. The retailers have abandoned it, says the news. Borders was founded 40 miles away and they don't have a store there either. Starbucks has four stores. The population where I am is about 70,000 and we have about 10 Starbucks.
Detroit has a 22.8% unemployment rate is among the highest in the U.S.; 30% of residents are on food stamps, and you know these figures are most likely conservative.
I was re-reading Marx' s writing on primitive accumulation and the expropriation of the peasantry. He explains how in a period of 21 years, three and a half million acres of land were stolen from those whose home it was. Then free enterprise ventured to Ireland and Africa, a continent as Marx said that it "turned in to a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins". "These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation." he adds. In Asia, as we commented before on this blog, Capitalism left millions in misery and many dead in its wake. Banjuwangi, a Javanese province had 72,000 left people after 60 years of the precious market.
It is hard to write of history in more plainer terms than Marx. On Capitalism's emergence he write that "..the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour...forms the prelude to the history of capital." "The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless vandalism..."
We are seeing this results of this "merciless vandalism" from Peru to Detroit, Riga to Johannesburg. Bombay, Calcutta are evidence of it. Marx's scientific analysis of society and world history is confirmed by events, by objective reality. Yet the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus are brought to our attention through the mass media, the TV, and film so much more than the concrete analysis and conclusions of Marx.
"The only of the so-called national wealth that actually enters in to the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt." he wrote over 100 years ago. Look at what is happening now. Workers have had our debt payments tripled over the last two years.
For Marx, capitalism was a historical step forward, as murderous as it is. For capitalism increases the "cooperative form of the labor process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined socialized labor, the entanglement of all people's in the net of the world market, and with this the international character of the capitalistic regime."
Entangled we are in the net of the world market.
Capitalism strengthens the working class and creates the condition for the elimination of capitalism and the collectivization of production ownership of the social prodcut. This would be a lot easier. After all, Capitalism came to being through "the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers. " The historical task of the working class is "the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people."
Further reading on the subject of the birth of the capitalist mode of production can be found here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
Read through to chapter 28.
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