17.04.2014

Imperialism, war and crisis

Yassamine Mather reports on two days of stimulating debate

The April 11-12 annual conference of the leftwing academic journal Critique was themed on the 100th anniversary of World War I, with the title ‘Imperialism and war’. Good attendance, very good speakers and intelligent discussion made this conference one of the best in recent years. The debates that followed the presentations were of a high standard and at times fierce, although on the whole discussions remained comradely.

As I pointed out in my introductory comments, last year has been an eventful year for Critique. 2013 was the 40th anniversary of the journal and we celebrated this with the publication of an online issue carrying selected articles from the archive of the last 40 years. These cover Critique’s attempts to develop a more credible modern Marxist theory of the USSR and of the cold war, as well as dealing with more general theoretical issues, a critique of existing Marxist theory of capitalism, including the question of decline and finance capitalism. In 2013 the editorial board also celebrated the September acquittal in Greece of Savas Michael Matsas of charges of defamation and instigation of violence initiated by the fascist Golden Dawn.

The conference started with a talk by Robert Brenner, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at the same institution. Brenner’s paper dealt with empirical evidence regarding the main causes of the current recession, which he described as the most devastating since the great depression. He talked of the secular decline in the US rate of profit and described the policies aimed at overcoming this, which included a series of ‘asset price’ credit-fuelled bubbles in stock markets (1990s) and residential property (2000s), when the economy was saved by its own enfeeblement.

He argued that during the early 1990s US and European governments, led by the administration of president Bill Clinton, tried to break their addiction to debt by moving towards balanced budgets. The idea was to let the free market govern the economy. But, because profitability had still not recovered, the reduction in deficits delivered a big shock to demand, and helped bring about the worst recessions and slowest growth of the post-war era between 1991 and 1995. He referred to the weakness of the world economy, especially after the crises of 1997-98 and 2001-02, and the fact that the huge purchases of dollars by east Asian governments to keep their currencies down, together with the rise in US consumption, made for unusually low long-term interest rates. And then there was the mortgage crisis of 2007-08 ...

Critique editor Hillel Ticktin argued that we were in a depression of which a major aspect was the way the capitalist class was limiting its investment. This was not dissimilar to its behaviour during the great depression of the inter-war years. The argument on this issue goes back to Lenin and Hilferding, in that growth of monopoly and finance capital led to firms being able to limit their production to optimise or maximise profits, and so their investments. In the first instance, this phenomenon led to imperialism and the wars against the indigenous populations of the ‘third world’, although most of the surplus investment went to the ‘first world’. He, therefore, drew a direct line from 1870 - imperialism, war, depression, another war and the present depression. World War I must be seen in this context, he said - of a capitalism unable to invest and so increase surplus value at the rate which might be expected. It would, therefore, have a lower level of productivity than theoretically possible. That, together with the decline in the law of value (monopoly, nationalisation, etc), and increasing difficulty finding mediations for the pulling apart of the poles of contradiction, are indications of the decline of the capitalist system.

Law or tendency?

The next session, presented by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, was a continuation of a debate carried in a joint paper called ‘Marx’s law: answering old and new misconceptions’ in the latest issue of Critique.¹ That article is a response to the critique of Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - recently taken up particularly by Michael Heinrich, in the US journal, Monthly Review.

Guglielmo Carchedi’s paper dealt with the law of tendential fall in the rate of profit as a theory of crisis and his response was aimed at those who question the validity of the theory. Technological innovations result in both productivity increasing and labour shedding, he said. The law indicates an inverse relation between the organic composition of capital (OCC) and the average rate of profit (ARP): ie, if the OCC rises, the ARP falls and vice versa. He argued against those who claim that there are many causes of falling profitability, apart from the increase in the OCC due to technological innovations. He addressed the role of new technologies in reducing profitability, while Michael Roberts provided empirical evidence in the form of statistics and graphs to support Carchedi’s theory.

Hillel Ticktin responded to this debate by clarifying his disagreements with Carchedi and Roberts on the relevance of Marx’s law of profitability to crises. Professor Ticktin argued that, despite differences with the Monthly Review approach, on the whole he finds himself closer to the argument that Marx’s thesis was not a law - a tendency is not a law and to call it ‘the law of the tendency’ is confusing. The falling rate of profit is either one or the other, but not both. Ticktin argued that the law of the tendency included the counter-tendencies and it was not possible to use it in a coherent way. He further argued that an empirical verification in statistical terms is impossible, because the data from official sources is inadequate as well as inaccurate. Professor Ticktin reiterated the argument that the regular recurrence of crises under capitalism is linked to the momentum of the class struggle, which plays a more significant role than the falling rate of profit.

The second day started with a talk on ‘Rethinking the origins of World War I’ by Mick Cox, and was followed by Mike Macnair’s session on ‘Die Glocke or the inversion of theory: from anti-imperialism to pro-Germanism’. Mick Cox gave a comprehensive summary of all the debates about the origins of World War I, including theories put forward by historians of the left and the right, inter-imperialist rivalry, the arms race and nationalism, as well as the actual incident blamed for triggering World War I, the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Mike Macnair’s paper dealt with the social-imperialist theories of a section of the German Social Democratic Party. He explained the ideas of Parvus and his support for the Turkish Committee for Union and Progress (CUP). He described how for Parvus empires resulted initially from the drive of capital to expand beyond national borders, leading to British exploitation of colonies throughout the world; then to the growth of competitors and a protectionist imperial system; and French, German, etc reaction to the British imperial system. For Luxemburg disproportionality problems in the realisation of value - and for Hilferding the increasing organic composition of capital and the overproduction of capital in developed countries - drove the major powers to export capital to less developed countries. The interpenetration of capital and state is the reason this export of capital assumed a state-backed form (formal empires and treaty capitulations, etc).

The next session started with a talk by Alex Marshall, who discussed both the influences that informed Lenin’s pamphlet, Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism, and the content of the work itself, finally addressing the question of its legacy and longer-term relevance. Marshall also explored the debate around imperialism within European social democracy in general at the time - an area recently covered in Richard B Day’s and Daniel Gaido’s edited collection Discovering imperialism, and also the eternally vexed and relevant question of where the concept of imperialism fits more generally within a Marxist theory of crisis, given the absence within Marx’s own work of the once-promised book on the world market.

In the last session Savas Matsas Michael gave an interesting account of developments in eastern Europe, comparing the attention given by western press and media to events in the Maidan in Kiev with the much larger worker protests in Bosnia. Noting the economic reasons behind Ukrainian protests at a time when the weakness of the left did not allow it to play a significant role, he highlighted the fascistic character of the government in Kiev. In response to comments from the floor, Hillel Ticktin explained the failure of transition in post-Soviet societies, where capitalism was never fully restored, yet all the problems of inequality and oligarchy have persisted.

In my talk, cut short because of time, I spoke about how the Arab spring encouraged us to look back at the fall of the Ottoman empire, the lessons we can learn from it in terms of colonial and semi-colonial intervention, as well as the consequence it has for the peoples of the Middle East.

All the papers will shortly be published in a special issue of Critique.

yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.org.uk

Notes

1. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03017605.2013.876811#.U0k3frQXJGU.