File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism_25Jul.94, message 56


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


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005