Che's Motorcycle

He’s 90 already, going on 91. Are there forces behind him desperate to keep the status quo?

Good thing western media keeps manifesting increasing supplies into existence then.

Sure thing. So the dialectical materialist view of capitalism is that it is a relation between workers and capitalists. Crudely, the capitalist class wants the working class to produce as much as possible for as little as possible (provided the working class as a whole gets enough to reproduce itself). The working class resists the attempts of the capitalist class to do so.

But the capitalist drive for profit (surplus value from exploited labor) leads to periodic crises. Worse, for capitalists, the means of production (think factories, farms, shipyards, etc) keep accumulating as well. This is a core contradiction in capitalism: the need to accumulate undermines the ability to accumulate.

In short, capitalism gets so good at producing stuff that it requires different management techniques. This is socialism: very large enterprises under the democratic control of workers.

Why? Again, because the contradictions inherent in capitalism require it.

(Well, so long as capitalism doesn’t succeed in overheating the planet first.)

It’s explanatory and predictive power. We can make sense of past events in terms of balance of forces. And, in the case of capitalism, it allows us to predict its replacement with socialism. Capitalism produces its own gravediggers, as Marx put it.

Not to sound cheeky, but we have to make some assumptions to get anywhere. We have very strong reasons for accepting dialectical materialism, but I’m not sure even those could be a demonstration that it’s true. So we’re left with “if dialectical materialism is true, then __”.