Date: Mon, 27 Oct 1997 23:42:17 +0100 (MET)
From: m-18043-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Stuart Sheild)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Value theory, the empirical economy and socialism


Good one, Hugh. Right on the button all the way.

Stuart

>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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