The Socialist Project in a Disintegrated Capitalist World, by Arghiri Emmanuel

The following is an essay written by Arghiri Emmanuel for "Socialist Thought and Practice: A Yugoslav Monthly" (1976). It is a summary of many of his positions on outlook on the Periphery's movement towards socialism.
anti-imperiali...

[@sheed64]

I don't know if I will get a response, but I hope I do. I will soon buy Unequal Exchange and Profit and Crises. However, I want to know just how the notion of "finance capital" is dealt within the UE literature. The term still seems vague to me. Does "finance" actually hold any real value in terms of M -> M? Does it allow for the expansion of productive forces considering it just seems to be parasitic rentierism? Or is there a way to formulate it in a way that removes the parasitic aspect within it?

[@user-ke1gu9bx1e]

> "On the basis of the fundamental postulate of historical materialism set out in the introduction and according to which it is not the degree of exploitation that renders a situation revolutionary, but the objective incapacity of the system to develop the productive forces, and bearing in mind the scope of present development in relation to the general level of mankind’s technical knowledge today"
So exploitation is a secondary factor for revolution in the global South?
And does this mean that the primary reason labor aristocrats in rich countries aren't interested in communism is because the productive forces are still developing for them? And not because they're not exploited workers? Deindustrialization partly contradicts this, but it can also be negated because they can still get the products from industrial production via outsourcing from poor countries. So the primary reason they're still interested in capitalism is because it offers them the latest technology? And not being exploited workers is a secondary reason?
This also could be part of the reason communism fell in Europe and China. The industrial productive forces were built, but the technology productive forces were maybe still lagging the imperialist countries and the people wanted access to newer technology and they didn't trust communism to be able to do it. Being cut off from the world might be enough to convince most people to give up communism.
Edit - The below is not quite accurate. Emmanuel criticizes Lenin, but not everyone is right about everything all the time. This includes Emmnauel. Lenin's work is still valuable so it shouldn't be dismissed as unscientific like Emmanuel did.
Emmanuel also described Lenin's imperialism book as "marginal work" in this article "White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism," free download on www.annas-archive.org,:
"Unfortunately a certain piety towards Lenin's writings still prevents Marxists from disengaging themselves intellectually from the influence of a marginal work which never had any scientific pretensions, and which was written rapidly, in the difficult conditions of exile, with no other documentation to hand but the Bern library. The author himself described it as a simple 'attempt at popularization'; and far from being a general theory of imperialism, it was only an empirical analysis conditioned by a particular historical situation."
I think communist party central committee members need to be actual economists. If we had this requirement we wouldn't have parties failing to develop the productive forces or denying the labor aristocracy exists. And it would weed out and prevent career politicians and intellectuals from coming into positions of power and pumping more bad theory. Economic reality is not up for debate. Capitalist university education doesn't teach unequal exchange so it must be self-taught, meaning there's no excuse for communists not to learn it. Those who refuse to be economists won't take it seriously and will end up ignoring their economic advisors and continue to run communism into the ground.