Grimes, the Great Reset and "capitalist communism"

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In an 1868 letter to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, Karl Marx makes the following observations with respect to a tendency of Capital to consolidate:



https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68\_04\_30.htm



...Then it turns out that, assuming *the rate of surplus value*, i.e. the exploitation of labour, as *equal*, the production of value and therefore the production of surplus value and therefore *the rate of profit* are *different* in different branches of production. But from these varying rates of profit a mean or general rate of profit is formed by competition. This rate of profit, expressed absolutely, can be nothing but the *surplus value* produced (annually) by the *capitalist class* in relation to the total of social capital advanced. E.g., if the social capital = 400c+100v, and the surplus value annually produced by it = 100m, the composition of the social capital = 80c+20v, and that of the product (in percentages) = 80c+20v | +20m = 20% rate of profit. This is the *general rate of profit*.



What the competition among the various masses of capital — invested in different spheres of production and differently composed — is striving for is capitalist communism, namely that the mass of capital employed in each sphere of production should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.





Marx's notion of "capitalist communism" is little discussed in relation to his overall thesis, but it bears consideration: such a system, if achieved, would require the mediation of computers to quantify the distribution of surplus value to each capitalist, and require the cessation in large part of overt competitive activity among them. It would also require popular support, and could only be justified rhetorically through an appeal to what Marx called "bourgeois socialism.

The conditions it would produce would be a working class largely dispossessed globally and subjected to renter hyperextraction. This would force the proletariat into consolidation, and, while leaving them universally destitute, forge the connections between workers on a mass scale that might turn them into a revolutionary subject.

I believe this process - Grimes spouting off about Communism on TikTok, the sudden popularity of overtly "socialist" and even "Marxist" rhetoric, etc. - is visible in broad and obvious outline today. If true, it means that the precursor phase of capitalism signifying the possibility of world revolution is in immanent production.

These are the conditions which Marx says must prevail before the revolution. *The German Ideology*.

... This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.



Now compare:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lBBxWtKKQiA/maxresdefault.jpg

[pbrower2a]

Marxism is obsolete. The demand for social justice is not obsolete.

Yu can trust that with the profit motive comes a desire for self-preservation. and capitalists are wise to ensure that the common man have a stake in the capitalist system. The survival of capitalism depends upon the consent a nd acquiescence of people not capitalists. Most people lack the self-discipline and foresight to be capitalists, which is much like most people lack the skill-set to be plumbers or aviation mechanics.

Owning and operating a capitalist enterprise, even if nothing more than a newsstand, gift-shop, or diner is a specialized set of skills in the same sense that teaching or engineering is.

The spectre of rule by a Communist Party that will dispossess and either kill or exile feudal and capitalist elites has forced the capitalist class and big landowners to take one of two routes. The highest risk goes with establishing an order similarly brutal and repressive as Stalinism, such as Nazi Germany or Pinochet's Chile, that at the least suppresses any semblance of left-wing thought or organization through lies, tortures, and murders. With super-cheap labor and a monopolized economy, the capitalist and land-owning classes can keep everything for themselves that is not not needed to keep workers alive, if destitute. The other is to humanize capitalism by sharing some of the boon that capitalists might get if they took everything for themselves.

....Ownership may be overvalued with material objects. All material objects eventually rot, wear out, break down, or become obsolete. If you don't believe me, then just visit a thrift shop. You will find plenty of music LP's of music tailor-made for middle-aged people in the 1960's. The kids now think those corny. You will find plenty of VHS tapes. Those are woefully inadequate for current preferences. You no longer need rewind DVD's that take up much less space and have far more features. You will find plenty of "legible clothing" commemorating events that people no longer care about. You might find coffee cups with names of businesses long obsolete. You might find obsolete equipment for computers such as scanners (those are now built into printers).