Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I don't really know what point you're making here.
Yes, any attempt to describe a social process will involve a model, however open and provisional. I don't disagree. My contention is with the suggestion that Marxism hinges on the construction of a closed and comprehensive model, something which is absent from Marx's work. Only in Capital does he present a closed model, and it is a consciously non-comprehensive model adopted for methodological purposes.
No, Marx does not believe that he can "predict the destiny of capitalism", or at least not in any immediate sense. What he identifies is the existence of certain insurmountable tendencies within capitalism, and infers from these tendencies the inevitability of capitalist crisis. He doesn't claim any specific fate for capitalism, or even insist upon a very particular relationship between crisis and revolution, he merely describes the way in which the one provides the conditions for the other.
Again, you present ideas in some Platonic sense, as things-in-themselves, which I totally reject. Ideas are relationships of meaning between subjects and their environment, of which the sort of grand, rational are merely complex abstractions. I do not begin with communism and set about realising it; I begin with the real world, and may draw together certain meanings of that world into a complex I then identify as "communism". Politic activity is not a matter of dreaming up some grandiose scheme and applying it to the world, not really, it's a matter of navigating a shifting sea of irreducibly complex actors and actions. A plan may at best provide some form of regulation, but the more general the plan becomes, the less effective this regulation, and by the time we're talking about something like reshaping a whole society, any notion of referring to blueprints is sheer fantasy.
I tend to identify with the tendency within Marxism broadly termed "autonomism", in which it is argued that revolution is (contra Lenin) not a matter of organising a revolutionary bloc and then staging a takeover, but of the struggle of the working class for practical autonomy from capital. This is a struggle that begins with, must begin with, our everyday lives. It is found in something as simple as workers trying to avoid the scrutiny of a supervisor, of taking extra time for their breaks, of attempt to obtain more time off to do what they want. Ultimately, the pursuit of this autonomy, the pursuit of humanity in inhuman conditions, leads to a confrontation with and rejection of capital, and above all with labour as a function of capital, and thus of labour itself. The worker becomes a communist not when he adopts this vision or those principles, but when he rejects his own existence as a worker. Communism is not a matter of pursuit, of driving towards some lofty set of goals: it is a matter of refusal, of refusing your present existence and of struggling to achieve a new one by whatever means you can. That isn't something that can be planned for, only some thing that can be done.
The ultra-guache theorist Gilles Dauvé once responded (I'm paraphrasing, but I hope closely) to a claim by some leftist group or other that "those who can imagine a better world can make communism" with the assertion that, on the contrary, those who can make communism can imagine a better world. That's about where I stand on the matter; the epistemic privilege of insight into a post-capitalist world can only be achieved by practice, by the activity of revolution itself, by actually making that world and witnessing what you make, and not simply by thinking about it. All we can achieve is utopias, and while that may not be without value, they are necessarily speculative, fragmented and hugely unreliable, which is very far from the sort of comprehensive outline you seem to expect.
That's what's up getting, on the mediation train. I like your question, too.
