>>2612255The real issue you’re avoiding is when productive forces are sufficient. A century ago, in largely agrarian and semi-capitalist conditions, it made sense to argue that the task was basic industrialization. Capitalism was not yet the dominant mode of production.
But that argument cannot be extended indefinitely. If political power is exercised through capitalist relations, even if the social base is workers rather than capitalists, then the power of the state still derives from and reproduces the capitalist mode of production. At what point does quantitative growth stop being preparation and start being reproduction of capital?
Historical qualitative breaks don’t occur because productivity hits some abstract level, but because new productive capacities no longer fit the old relations. The steam engine mattered because it reorganized labour, coordination, and surplus extraction beyond what feudal relations could contain.
What is the equivalent rupture now? One possible answer is that globalized communication networks already make large scale, non market organization of labour technically possible. The barrier is no longer productive capacity, but the persistence of capitalist social relations.
And yes, some ultras have made the retarded argument that socialism is just a law abolishing commodities. That critique deserves to be mocked, but it is not representative of leftcom analysis, especially the communization variant, has always focused on material reproduction, not legislative fetishism.
>>2612517Feudal states did facilitate early capitalist processes, but they did so because those processes were already materially underway and provided revenue, military capacity, and administrative leverage the feudal order itself increasingly depended on. The state didn’t invent capitalism, it selectively enforced and generalized relations that were already becoming dominant. This is an important distinction.
The point is that state action can accelerate, protect, or generalize new relations, it cannot substitute for their material existence.
Killing the capitalist class does not abolish the capitalist mode of production if wage labour, value production, and accumulation persist. In Marx, a mode of production is defined by social relations, not by which class occupies managerial positions. Collective ownership administered through value relations is still capital.
The “lower phase of communism” Marx describes is already beyond commodity production and wage labour, even if distribution still reflects scarcity. Calling capitalist reproduction under workers management “socialism” doesn’t make it a transition out of capitalism, it makes it a different political form of capitalism.
That’s the historical question ML theory never resolves at what point does developing productive forces through capitalist relations stop being preparation and start being the reproduction of capital itself?