http://kasamaproject.org/
Posted by Mike E on April 24, 2012
“Recently, when I spoke in
Atlanta, I mentioned the importance of a political economy of modern
capitalism. And one brother said to me later ‘I really appreciated your
point about the need to study political economy.’
“And I suddenly realized that I had not made my point clearly. I’m not arguing that we have to study more political economy — I’m arguing that we have to create one. We have no communist political economy (from the whole last century!) to just go study.”
“Some of the current theoretical fashions among communists today (of focusing on studying Capital) are both
extremely positive (every communist should take theory seriously, and
everyone should study Capital once or twice in their lives! And such
study is a valuable place to begin preparations for political economic
analysis. But it is also associated with some misguided assumptions — in
those cases where the notion is that the analysis we need today simply
requires somehow erasing what Marxists have done since Marx — as if the
true answers are in the “basic texts” and have merely been obscured
since.
“It would be nice if such fundamentalist logic were true, but unfortunately it is not.”
“The political economy of the
twentieth century did (of necessity) require both negation and
affirmation of Karl Marx’s analysis. His great work Capital is
the analysis of capitalism (and its essential contradictions) that is
(inevitably) rooted in a particular stage and manifestation of the
capital relations. A number of things changed with the emergence of
colonialism and monopoly, and then with the domination of the whole
world by capital (and the subsequent shrinking of semi-feudal relations
and the reversal of socialist relations).”
* * * * * * * *
Karl Marx studies his world.
by Mike Ely
Keith starts by challenging my use of the term imperialism to describe modern capitalism:
“The casual use of terms like “imperialism” is problematic because: the term is essentially meaningless.I don’t think it is literally (or essentially) meaningless (as you say). But I do agree that virtually all our communist terminology is contested — and so to use it invites questions. There are no common accepted meanings to any of our communist terms — and part of our struggle is to develop a common language. (Notice our discussion of the term “nation“!)
Keith writes:
“Do you mean what Lenin meant? Lenin argued that imperialism would bring capitalist development to the third world and thus speed the revolution, or do you mean what the underdevelopment school meant, e.g., the opposite. Capitalism in the first world arrests development in the third world? In any case both views are the negation of Marx’s scientific findings without reason, argument or evidence.”I don’t simply mean what Lenin meant. Lenin described global capitalism at his moment (world war 1, a century ago). We can accept and learn from his analysis and method — but we obviously can’t simply take his definitions or conclusions as permanent or universally applicable.
But when I use the word imperialism I mean modern capitalism operating on a world scale in some particular ways — with the rise of huge corporations and rapidly shifting blocks of finance capital. (I don’t mean “imperialism” as the external foreign policy of expansionist capitalist powers — but, as with Lenin, consider imperialism to be the name of the monopoly capitalist system inside and outside national borders.)
I definitely don’t mean the “underdevelopment school” — or those “general crisis” theories — that assume that modern capitalism is inherently devoid of any remaining ability to develop production (or to expand industrial production in the Third world) or is inherently in a moribund spiral of crisis.
Those diverse theories were simply wrong when they were first expounded.
And promoting them now would be doubly wrong — since (rather obviously) capitalism since World War 2 has undergone many massive leaps in development and innovation (including massively in the previous colonial countries of the Third World.)
Back to Marx won’t solve problem of theoretical lagging.
I think that the political economy of the twentieth century did (of necessity) require both negation and affirmation of Karl Marx’s analysis.
His great work Capital is the analysis of capitalism (and its essential contradictions) that is (inevitably) rooted in a particular stage and manifestation of the capital relations. A number of things changed with the emergence of colonialism and monopoly, and then with the domination of the whole world by capital (and the subsequent shrinking of semi-feudal relations and the reversal of socialist relations).
Keith writes:
“If I ask you to explain imperialism or refer me to a scientific exposition of imperialism you cannot do it. So when you say something is the result of “imperialism” that is just dogma by definition.”I don’t pretend to have a developed political economy of 21st century capitalism/imperialism in my pocket to whip out. It is one of the serious theoretical tasks that stand in front of us.
And I even agree that communists have lagged — in major ways — in the ongoing political economy of imperialism (since Lenin).
The theory of the Comintern came to be dominated by “general crisis” which was terrible theory serving terrible politics.
When (in the RCP in 1994) we published the Maoists’ political economy of socialism (the Shanghai political economy textbook) we simultaneously buried a lesser known “other volume” on the political economy of imperialism because it was so terrible (theoretically).
The RCP’s own attempts at a new synthesis for political economy (concentrated in Lotta’s “American in Decline” and its theory of world system and spiral/conjuncture) was, in some ways, a necessary, ambitious and sincere attempt — but it was just basically wrong. And the outcome of the 1980s showed that the emperor had no clothes in a pretty definitive way. the attempt by other communist forces to develop a political economy (or theory of crisis) have not (as far as I know) been better. And the attempts outside the organized communist movement (world crisis theory, under-development theory, long-wave crisis theory, etc.) all seem deeply flawed to me.
We have been lagging. And (perhaps) the actual dynamics and developments are also just very hard to understand.
But…..
Despite that confession of poverty, I believe that the answers to our analytical challenges aren’t solvable simply by going “back to Marx” (and assuming that the insights and methods we need are all simply curled up there in those wonderful volumes.) It would be nice if the analysis we need were there (all long) — like Dorothy’s ruby red slippers. And we could just click our heels and have the insights we need. but that is not the case.
I don’t need to have all the answers already at hand, in order to know that our current questions show we don’t live in Marx’s world.
While there is much to learn from Marx’s Capital (and much that it still describes about our society’s fundamental contradictions), we can’t solve our controversies or shortcoming around political economy simply by “going back to Capital.”
And part of the reason for that is (quite simply) that many developments since Marx’s time (colonialism, world war, emergence of modern corporations, development of production out of the previous Fordist factory model, development of finance capital, the massive development of capitalist state ownership and Keynsian interventions, the bourgeoisification of upper tiers of the workers, and so on) all affect how the system functions. These are not just side phenomena that (somehow) are separate from the core functions of capital (and that don’t “feed back” into its operations).
For example: Karl Marx never developed some single capsule “theory of crisis” under capitalism… and then, who can miss that the forms and effects of economic crisis have changed (profoundly) since his time, both because of the rapid and international nature of capital circulation and because of the operation of states?
And (in fact) some of the current fashions among communists today (of focusing on studying Capital) are both extremely positive (every communist should take theory seriously, and everyone shoould study Capital once or twice in their lives! And such study is a valuable place to begin preparations for political economic analysis. But it is also associated with some misguided assumptions — in those cases where the notion is that the analysis we need today simply requires somehow erasing what Marxists have done since Marx — as if the true answers are in the “basic texts” and have merely been obscured since.
It would be nice if such fundamentalist logic were true, but unfortunately it is not.
Recently, when I spoke in Atlanta, I mentioned the importance of a political economy of modern capitalism. And one brother said to me later “I really appreciated your point about the need to study political economy.” And I suddenly realized that I had not made my point clearly. I’m not arguing that we have to study more political economy — i’m arguing that we have to create it. We have no communist political economy (from the whole last century!) to study.
There are insights, of course (including in Lotta’s work, and Wallerstein, and Bettelheim, and certainly from the pre-imperialist theorist like Marx.) But our need is far more ambitious (and daunting) than merely going to “study” some of the available political economy — we face a major work of pulling together a currently non-existent communist understanding of how capitalism and its world system now works.
The positive side of capitalism: Who celebrates that?
Keith writes:
“In any event, Capitalism is a system for the extraction of surplus labour. It is a system of exploitation and domination. Yes it sucks. But read, for example, Fred Douglass’s “Narrative of and American Slave” to see how much less wage slavery sucks than chattel slavery. Douglass feels absolutely liberated as he moves from chattel slavery to wage slavery.”I’m not sure what your point is. I have spent the last year closely studying the civil war, including (among other things) to understand what (exactly) the Unionists believed and wanted, and what “free labor” meant to them (in their growing conflict with slave labor).
No communist fails to understand that wage labor (for its time) was a leap over chattel slavery. And even in the Chinese revolution, Tibetan serfs had never received payment for work — and when the Peoples Liberation Army hired people to work on road development, and paid them money, it was a shocking and extremely radical development within a once closed feudal system based on forced “corvee” labor.
But what is your point?
Reading the Manifesto in German class
A personal experience: I went to high school in France for about half a year. It was 1968 (!) so I was a bit distracted from school, and just stopped going after a while.
But in that French high school we studied German, and as part of the readings there were excerpts from Karl Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (in German, obviously).
What did the French school system pick, as an excerpt, to require of their students, in the midst of the storms of 1968? The reading was those poetic passages (at the beginning) when Marx and Engels describe the positively revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie over the preceding century (i.e. before 1848) in developing science, production and creating the world market through trade and force….
But it struck me (immediately!) that this was a crude bait-and-switch — They were taking those lyric passages out of context in order to suggest (to the student readers) that capitalism is somehow a great thing (in our world, in our time), and that even Karl Marx thought so.
In fact, Karl Marx and Engels were making an argument for overthrowing capitalism (and all class society) in 1848. That was their point, which they soon get to in their Manifesto!
What a revolution was good for….
Keith writes:
“Yes, technology is marked by the system that it is developed in. It doesn’t take the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to know that.”Actually it did take the GPCR to know this.
I assume you are aware of Lenin’s infatuation with the U.S. capitalist production methods of the “Taylor System.” Or Stalin’s talk of “American efficiency plus Russian revolutionary sweep.”
Or how the Soviet Union increasingly had an uncritical view of capitalist production processes (and increasingly saw the revolutionary transformation as a mix of state ownership and inserting workingclass-origin managers into the slots of fairly typical class structures.)
Or how (in China) there was often a rather classless view of development (in the name of “learning from xxxx” — where xxxx was any more developed country).
In opposition to the Maoist view on these things, we have the very sharp pithiness of Deng Xiaoping’s 1961 declaration
“Black cat? White cat? I don’t care. What matters is if it catches mice.”
(Meaning: Red communist methods? Capitalist methods? I don’t care as long as production rises rapidly.)So yes, asserting the class nature of production processes and methods was very controversial and did require a revolution to unseat. It precisely took a revolutionary movement to push a different logic and set of assumptions to the fore (despite the fact that you can, in a scholastic way, find this or that footnote in Marx or Lenin that might suggest a similar insight.)
Keith writes:
“yes our technology is marked by the system of exploitation and domination.”
Let’s note a moment of agreement. And appreciate that.“At the same time the law of value — commodities exchange at socially necessary labor times and value is a social relation between necessary and surplus labour — is a social law that can only be overcome in ONE WAY. That is what Marx proves. The law of value cannot be overthrown by an act of will. The law of value is overcome via capitalist development. A socialist revolution can put the working class in political power and thus we can oversee this process of development in a way that is more environmentally sound and more egalitarian but none the less the law of value is the same as the law of gravity. “This is (to me) a profoundly wrong assertion. On every level.
Idealized automatism of “Theory of Productive Forces”
First, the law of value is elevated by capitalist development to being the commander of human society. Once human labor power itself becomes (generally) treated (socially) as a commodity — something profound happens to human development (to the way everything confronts the worker as alien, to the way huge wealth and dead labor can suddenly loom over living labor in unprecedented ways.)
Capitalist development helps create (some!) of the conditions for the abolition of the law of value (and the end to exploitation of working people).
But (frankly) there is also needed that new development we will command under socialism — which in many ways (some similar, some different) will undercut the soil from with the capital relations spring.
The law of value is precisely not like the law of gravity — i.e. the law of gravity is not subject to politics and human history. We will not “abolish” the law of gravity from our work (both economic and political).
We can’t simply abolish the law of value by diktat, but we can abolish it. (And those who argue we can simply abolish it have not, on some level, come to grips with the fundamental challenges of abolishing classes and class society.)
But in a period of transition, it is possible to both restrict the law of value and undercut the soil from which its power arises. It is possible (under socialism) for working people themselves (and their labor power) to cease (in some contradictory but significant ways) to be commodities (to the extent that the society is in transition, and to the extent that the process, overall, is commanded by communist politics and not the law of value operating through state forms.)
“I can’t float because I want to, I can’t abolish relations of production exchange just because I want to.”This is half true. Surely you can’t float because you want to. But we will (through a real and material world process) abolish commodity production and capitalism because we want to.
It is not an automatic process over which we are powerless bystanders.
Revolution is a conscious process of real people deciding and doing. (As the song says “We must ourselves decide our duty, we must decide and do it well.”)
The conscious decisions and collective mobilization of people (in their millions) has a huge impact on how and whether the law of value dominates human life (and how radically and rapidly its grip is loosened.)
“Capitalist development moves towards the production of use values with less and less exchange value. The increasingly small amount of exchange value is the result of technology advancing and less and less necessary labour entering the production process. That is the path to working class liberation.”Your vision here is a vision without revolution. It is a vision of passively cheering on capitalist expansion. And (without making a moral condemnation of you) it is precisely the advocacy of the capitalist road (in opposition to the communist road).
Revolution is not automatic. Liberation does not arrive (inevitably or automatically) after enough generations of “nose to the grindstone.” Communist revolution is a protracted conscious process in the context of an objective framework.
To criticize “the theory of productive forces” is not to criticize materialist dialectics. It is not to deny that the rise of productive forces disrupt and weaken existing production relations. But criticizing the “theory of productive forces” is a critique of the idea that the productive forces are the dynamic factors, and that conscious, struggling people are merely bystanders (or players to the extent they work as wage slaves for capitalists.)
