Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 01:34:50 +0700 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones) Subject: Mattick/environ/malthus On Mattick 1. I must make clear that I may be relying upon people who would probably find many weaknesses in my thinking. I think that Paul Mattick's critique of keynesianism and state policy is important. Mattick was one of the first, and most rigorous, to take on the long-term effectiveness of Keynesianism.(In many ways this was the most important feature of the so-called falling rate of profit theorists trashed in vol II of the Howard and King history--see the Mattick-ite Cogoy in InternationalJournal of Political economy, 1987) I think that Mattick's use of the basic concepts of Capital is also very enlightening (also see Geoff Pilling's 1980 book). But I never met him, and I have never participated in the politics of the council communists or the root and branch group. In some ways, Mattick's work was a polemic against those brands of New Leftism (marcuse) and third worldism (Baran) that left no room for the class struggle within the imperialist countries. His voice was a theoretical expression of the necessity of revolutionary class struggle within the imperialist lands--especially given the sure failure of Keynesian panaceas. ***(I will not be insulted if my characterizations require serious correction)***. I myself probably have too strong third worldist tendencies for this school in that I think that the international transfer of value (and tribute and rent) significantly affects, without at all dissipating, the class struggle within the imperialist countries. There is some basis for divisions within the working class, divisions which I think Mattick downplayed in order to keep alive class struggle in the imperialist countries. But I don't think environmentalism has displaced class struggle here (as Gunder Frank seems to think in his theses on social movements). But I am not nearly as theoretically acute as those with whom I think I partially disagree. So I am no designated defender of anything. I am just tossing the name out. I think that one of the most important points in the Mattick polemic was his thesis that the law of value operates at a world level, not a national one This point is further developed by Carchedi. On environmentalism 2. In that stuff from Gilder, I am obviously bringing out intra-capital conflicts, something I would imagine to be quite boring to a solid proletarian theorist; moreover, my emphasis on restructuring and those extra-value capitals again are problems more for the national competitiveness theorists, like Michael Porter at Harvard, than Marxists. In defense, all I can say is that some forms of environmentalism could be located in sphere of the distribution of value among capitals, not necessarily as a facet of proletarian emancipation. But I sense that I am messing something up. Gilder is so bourgeois that all that he can understand is intra-capital conflicts, the hard-working vs. the underclass, family-oriented vs. the decomposers of the hearth, etc. He is the flip side of the new social movement theorists, as they are of him. The abolition of wage-labor is not on the agenda in this world. 3. In one of his recent columns in the Nation, Alexander Cockburn discussed the relationship between Garret Hardin and eugenics. he also discusses Hardin's tragedy of the commons. thought I would mention it. How is the environmental movement dealing with its Malthusian elements. On Malthus 4. In the 1929 Grossmann text there is a fantastic discussion of the differences of overpopulation in an early and late capitalism, an explication of the law of population historically specific to capitalism. But, alas, that section, which included--as Rick Kuhn has pointed out--one of the first Marxist analyses of plantation slavery--a solution to population shortages characteristic of an early capitalism--the turning of Africa into a warren for the commerical hunting of black skins--as the grand old man put it. d jones
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005