Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 01:10:26 +0100 From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> Subject: M-TH: Value theory, the empirical economy and socialism Two things about James H's account of problems and advantages in Marx's presentation of bourgeois political economy in Capital. First the spot-on characterization of bourgeois economics as a dead science. Classical economic theory from Petty to Smith to Ricardo served only to blast holes in bourgeois rationalizations of their own economic behaviour, especially once Marx had gone to work on it. The bourgeoisie preferred the motto Marx coined for them: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" ("We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it") (3 pages into the section on commodity fetishism, Pt 1, ch 1, sec 4). The trajectory of bourgeois ideas on economics was away from the classics towards superficiality and psychologizing, so marginalism was perfect when the economists had become too thick-skinned and stultified to notice or care what they were doing with the scientific principles Smith and Ricardo had tried to work from. Second the strange slide in the following passage on self-serving (ie I suppose what the critics sometimes call "non-falsifiability") theory: >There are many versions of the >objection that the system is self-serving (such as Bohm-Bawerk's attack >on the value/price of production distinction) and I do not intend to >answer them here, only to note the lingering suspicion that the sole >import of Marx's theory is to console Marxists that Capital will >collapse. Of course, any theoretical system is open to such a charge, >but I think it is sufficient to say here that anyone who thinks Marx >predicted the collapse of the capitalist system under the weight of its >own contradictions has misread him. Marx didn't see the contradictions in capitalism as having weight so much as explosive power, accumulating tensions that would act like an earthquake when released. Collapse is the wrong image of the end of capitalism altogether, except in so far as a building might collapse after its subjected to an earthquake. Marx sees the lurching instability of capitalism as a very dynamic thing, and frequently predicts the destruction of the capitalist system -- including of course in some of the most famous passages in the Manifesto and Capital -- usually in terms of its revolutionary overthrow by workers seizing power. He leaves the determination of the actual content of the explosive demise of capitalism to history as it unfolds in the interaction of the social actors and their historically given circumstances in each period. But the processes of violent contradiction and self-destruction are clearly present in his analysis of capital and its laws of motion. Catastrophe, and historically speaking sooner rather than later, is what Marx sees in store for capitalism, from the day he grasped its essence (ie well before the Manifesto in 1847) to the day he died (1883). When James writes the way he does about Marx's view of capital, it ties in with his own view of the peaceful development of capitalism today, and the practical conclusion he draws from this that a revolutionary party is unnecessary (ie we're in a different epoch from the one Lenin characterized as the epoch of imperialism -- one characterized by wars, revolutions, and the transition to socialism) for the task of overthrowing imperialist states and instituting dictatorships of the proletariat as a necessary precondition for building a socialist mode of production. This in turn is due to the usual pressure from the bourgeoisie and the treacherous leaderships of the working class that have run the errands of the bourgeoisie (principally Stalinism, secondarily Social-Democracy). Why? Because this pressure tells us that capitalism survived and emerged strengthened after the second world war because of its own innate vigour and resilience, and the regenerative powers of democracy. It sidelines the importance of political leadership in the working class by creating mirages of huge objective forces no-one is capable of controlling, not even the sublimely intelligent bourgeois elite running imperialist states and companies, not even the sublimely intelligent bureaucratic elite running the socialist bloc and watching it harvest victory upon victory. The juggernaut of history ... No. There is no way this view of things can link the victory of October to the fusion of Lenin's Marxist party practice with the catastrophic contradictions of world capitalism at their most explosive in Russia and the correspondingly explosive militancy of the Russian masses and working class in particular. Or link the degeneration of the Stalinist bureaucratic rule of the Soviet Union to step-by-step departures from fundamental socialist principles by those who usurped power in the Bolshevik party after 1923. Or see the development of the second world war as the result of Stalin's victory in the Soviet Union leading to Hitler's victory in Germany as a direct consequence of Stalinism's policies in relation to the international working class. Or the failure of capitalism to explode and collapse after the second world war to the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation given it by Stalinism in diplomatic wheeling and dealing that led to the disarming and beheading of the worldwide mass revolutionary upsurge of the end of the war. The class struggle as the fundamental axis around which history turns is set aside for a one-sided view of capital as the only viable force in history, with the working class relegated to bit players in the minor role of wage labour assigned them by bourgeois political economy! So the fetishized relationships of bourgeois economics win out in the end even for as astute a reader of Marx as James, as soon as he abstracts away the logical political conclusions of Marx's insights into the laws of motion of the capitalist economy. Take away the violentlly self-destructive tendencies of capitalism, take away the titanic collisions involved in seeing history as the working out of class struggle, take away the need for a disciplined international organization of committed revolutionary militants with a Marxist perspective and a Bolshevik practice, and you're left with Proyect's jeremiads about the boss always being stronger and Henwood's mantra that Vietnam never won the Vietnam war and US imperialism never lost it. You're left with hugely powerful objective forces beyond our control and a correspondingly weakened notion of our subjective potential to do anything about it -- in a word, fatalism. All defended and predicated on the oafishly empirical observation that capitalism is still with us. It survives, therefore it must possess supernatural powers of endurance. Socialism is still not with us, so it must be pure illusion. The kind of thing lots of fools were saying before October, and lots of Mensheviks and bourgeois ideologists repeated after October, refusing to admit the evidence of history even when it was there in front of them. But as Marx demonstrated, capital must expand and grow merely to survive, even if the growth is merely relative to what's around it. So the growth and survival of the most powerful capitals is no surprise, as long as capital is with us. But capital is no longer capable of developing the productive forces of humanity, so the necessity for destruction of capital to boost the "performance" of the surviving capitals grows at the same time, and with it the desperation of the imperialists as they watch the world shrink in on them and the opportunities for exploiting nature and people diminish, and they start to suffocate while still screaming for more room, more riches and more human blood to feed their insatiable vampire appetites. Our world is a world of class struggle. Our class is the world proletariat. Our instrument for changing history will be the international party of the proletariat. The defeats of the world proletariat in the past seventy-five years can be explained in terms of the leadership of the international workers' movement. It has been non-Marxist, non-Bolshevik, class-collaborationist, nationalist, repressive and counter-revolutionary. *This* is what we should be discussing, not the hall of mirrors trickery of capitalist resilience or imperialist omnipotence. Trotsky put it very well in the opening words of the Transitional Programme in 1938: The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat. Along with the most fundamental insights of the Manifesto and The State and Revolution, this retains full validity for us today. Cheers, Hugh --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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