File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 384


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







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