Missing the point on communism
Wednesday 12 September 2012
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EmailAndrew Northall (M Star August 31), by calling "capitalism and communism two completely opposite social systems," ignores Marx's imperative and obscures the essential unity of what are, in Marxist - "scientific materialist" - parlance, two distinct modes of production.
In his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes: "In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out."
Dave Earland
Birmingham
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