Letters

Straw man

Paul Demarty quibbles over nothing when he notes that the Grundrisse, not Capital, is where Marx wrote that the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is “in every respect the most important law of modern political economy” (‘Rudeness and revolution’, July 4).

In Capital, Marx wrote the same thing in slightly different words: “Given the great importance that this law has for capitalist production, one might well say that it forms the mystery around whose solution the whole of political economy since Adam Smith revolves.”

Demarty’s comment that “there is no one theory of capitalist crisis in Marx” is misleading for several reasons, among them the fact that Marx did not counterpose the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit to the financial causes of crisis, but included the latter within the former. And, given that it’s been more than six years since the latest capitalist crisis erupted, Demarty’s comment is far too abstract. The important questions, which he avoids, are what are the actual causes of this crisis and how does Marx’s work help us to understand them?

Demarty also attacks a straw man when he criticises the notion that “underconsumptionism necessarily equals reformism”. Who has ever said anything like that? My own view is that a “proponent of underconsumptionist theory may happen to have a revolutionary perspective, but not because it comes organically from his/her theory”, since underconsumptionist theory implies that capitalism’s “interests and [working people’s] interests go hand in hand” (The failure of capitalist production London 2012, pp198-99). If Demarty thinks the latter clause is incorrect, he should explain why.

Instead, he treats us to a completely illogical counterargument. Since one proponent of the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, David Yaffe, “was driven not towards sound revolutionary Marxism as a result, but shrill, Castroite stupidity”, the theoretical implications of the underconsumptionist theory of crisis are therefore not reformist, according to Demarty. This is the logical equivalent of ‘One person got wet by dumping a bucket of water over his head, so it’s not true that you’ll get wet if you stand in the rain’. But Yaffe and underconsumptionists can both be all wet because the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, for “sound revolutionary Marxism” and because individuals’ politics are frequently inconsistent. This latter consideration indicates that we shouldn’t focus on the vagaries of individuals, as Demarty does, but on the implications of ideas, about which his article has absolutely nothing to say.

Demarty writes: “It is extremely difficult to demonstrate that the rate of profit [was] falling sharply in the run-up to the crisis, primarily because of capital’s inherently global nature as a social formation and the difficulty in aggregating statistics from wildly different sources.” This statement is correct insofar as the global (worldwide) rate of profit is concerned, but the global rate of profit is a red herring. I have shown that US corporations’ rate of profit (rate of return on accumulated fixed-asset investment) failed to recover in a sustained manner “under neoliberalism”. And since the US was the epicentre of the great recession - it spread elsewhere after, and because, it erupted first in the US - it is not the global rate of profit, but the persistent fall in US corporations’ rate of profit and its many indirect effects that we need to focus on to explain why the great recession occurred, in the US and therefore throughout (much of) the globe.

Demarty also claims that “Kliman adheres to the US Marxist Humanists, who are ‘unorthodox Trotskyist’ in origin, but were also in substance an obedience cult around Raya Dunayevskaya.” However, I have absolutely no connection to the ‘US Marxist Humanists’ organisation, which is only four years old and thus could not be “an obedience cult around Raya Dunayevskaya”, who died in 1987, and who (the record shows) did not run an obedience cult during her lifetime. I don’t think the US Marxist Humanists organisation is a cult, but it has in practice required ‘obedience’ - to its leaders, not Dunayevskaya - which is why I have no connection to it (see www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophyorganization/why-a-new-organization, especially paragraphs 8 and 9).

I work politically with Marxist-Humanist Initiative. It is grounded in the ideas of Marx and Dunayevskaya, and that is the underlying issue. If a group is a “cult” merely because it is grounded in a body of ideas, then these terms apply to any group grounded in Marx’s ideas, not just one that is also grounded in Dunayevskaya’s further development of them. Misology (hatred of ideas) is thus the real sentiment that Demarty and others express, yet conceal, when they throw around vile allegations like “cult” and “sect”. And what alternatives do the misologists have to offer, I may ask? Nothing but mindless activism, opportunism and unprincipled eclecticism.

Straw man
Straw man

Mangling Marx

Poor Karl Marx and Frederick Engels! They collaborate for over half a century on a project to arm the working class with the most advanced understanding of how capitalism works and what its likely future is. But their revolutionary successors, far from establishing any kind of intellectual hegemony in society and developing the science bequeathed to them, cannot get to first base in agreeing the significance of what Marx and Engels plainly wrote. In particular, every academic Marxist feels obliged to write their own version of Marxist political economy and to defend that version (and their academic careers) against allcomers. Confusion, fragmentation and a thousand fragile egos abound.

Now Paul Demarty joins in the fun. Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is to be kicked into the long grass of abstractions that have little bearing on real economic events. At least he does not go so far as Michael Heinrich (discussed by Mike Macnair in a couple of articles in the Weekly Worker in May) who, on the basis of supposedly privileged access to the later notebooks of Marx, declares that the latter planned in the last year or two of his life to completely rewrite Capital. Shame the old man died. But let’s not worry too much. No doubt Heinrich will oblige with yet another take on Karl’s political economy.

Marx proposed many explanations of economic crisis, Demarty protests. The fall in the rate of profit is just one of them - and, since we can’t measure it, we might as well ignore it. Not true. Crises break out in the sphere of circulation. Money, by separating the acts of selling and buying, creates the possibility of crisis. Financial speculation can serve as the immediate cause of a crash.

But the underlying causes of the regular occurrence of crisis in the epoch of the rule of capital must be sought in the specificity of capitalist production. Marx explicitly rejected underconsumptionism. ‘Marxist’ underconsumptionists today choose to point to a handful of isolated and ambiguous passages. Yet none of Marx’s laws of motion support it. Indeed, Marx’s reproduction schemes serve the purpose of demonstrating that ‘expanded reproduction’ on the basis of reinvesting surplus value to create more value is possible, whatever the rate of exploitation of the working class. It is “revolutions in value” that regulate the cycles of capitalist economic life: ‘moral depreciation’ (the loss of value of existing investments of fixed capital as a result of productivity changes), as well as falls in the rate of profit as a result of changes in the organic composition of capital.

Demarty attempts to dismiss Andrew Kliman’s work - probably the most significant contribution to analyses of the current crisis - with a lazy (and inaccurate) attack on his political affiliation. Demarty needs to do that because Kliman has demonstrated precisely that it is possible to put in the work and measure the rate of profit - on a multitude of theoretical bases. True, he is using United States statistics. But the rate of profit in the US is hardly irrelevant to the dynamics of global capitalism - or the current crisis. And, what is more, Kliman has disaggregated the rates of profit earned by US corporations in different countries overseas from those earned domestically. So the US statistics can provide pointers - for those diligent enough - to global trends.

Kliman, by the way, does not reckon that there was a fall in the rate of profit immediately prior to the crash of 2008. His explanation is built on lowered profit rates since the 1980s.

Then Arthur Bough throws his two-pennies-worth into the mix (Letters, July 11). Marx made a “huge mistake” in not predicting the shift from unskilled to skilled labour, which, according to Bough, means workers today are simply producing more value than in the past. So yah, boo, sucks to any fall in the rate of profit. I rather suspect that the average worker of the past was more skilled than today’s workers, but, putting that to one side, Bough makes an elementary mistake. An average hour of socially necessary labour in any given year (or reproduction cycle) is as productive of value as an average hour of socially necessary labour in any other year - regardless of whether the comparison is 2013 with 2012 or 2013 with 1850. That is the point of Marx’s law of value. The value produced by complex, skilled labour is not measurable in any absolute sense, but only as a ratio of the average. That average is socially determined and in fact, for most purposes, you might as well just work on the basis of the average - especially since it is very difficult to disentangle the contributions made by individual workers in a complex production process.

Apple and Microsoft may employ a disproportionate number of researchers and programmers in the US. However, they employ a good number of manufacturing workers in China and other parts of Asia. Even research and development is subject to the same pressure towards uniformity (basically deskilling) as other lines of work - capitalism has a tendency to turn abstract labour into a reality. For instance, computer programming today is all about putting in long, tedious hours slotting together pre-written software components - not so very different from factory work.

As for the productivity of David Beckham’s labour, the fact that he can still earn a fortune now that he has hung up his football boots is a strong indication that his earning power was at least as strongly linked to his brand as his footballing skills. That is better analysed as a form of differential rent - ie, a variety of monopoly that enables ‘brand Beckham’ to grab a slice of surplus value produced elsewhere. Next, Bough will be telling us that corporate CEOs are the most productive workers in any enterprise.

Mangling Marx
Mangling Marx

Golden age

Again Chris Knight insists we must believe in a prehistoric golden age of woman rule, this time with Engels purportedly onside (‘Genetic evidence is richer than the stale party line’, July 11).

Engels’ innovation in the Origin of the family, private property and the state was to link changing reproductive arrangements to different epochs of production, though not mechanically. This ground-breaking study of the family covered early forms, such as group marriage with ‘sexual promiscuity’, as well as pairing bonds within a small clan group.

However, Engels showed his attitude to golden ages when he wrote in the Origin: “Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression …”

If an archaic society of woman-dominance can be proved to exist, let those who would promote it in the present say how it is a guide to the making of a new global society. Should we isolate women from men in revolutionary organisations? Should women always be in command (or is that only women who agree with the Radical Anthropology Group hypothesis)? What technology from the “interval” of the last several thousand years should be rejected as patriarchal? Which “modern” techniques like solar time should be replaced by archaic ones like lunar time? (Well, Chris?) Marx and Engels promoted a politics of the present, in which the condition of the productive forces (and consciousness of human ability) meant a better future could be made rather than a glorious past asserted.

Golden age
Golden age

Slovenly

I am long inured to the intellectually slovenly deployment of personal abuse in polemics from the sectarian left. Consequently, to be described as a “domesticated leftist”, a “renegade” and a “poseur” in Jack Conrad’s critique of the Socialist Workers Party’s internal democratic life, with reference to the (varying) versions of democratic centralism advocated by the Bolsheviks, came as no surprise (‘Laughable history produces laughable results’, July 11).

Neither did his total lack of any supporting evidence for these charges. But perhaps Conrad was discomforted by the fact that some of the criticisms he makes of the SWP internal regime are only repeat points I have made repeatedly over the years since the mid-1970s split within what was then the International Socialists. If he wants, he can hear many of these deployed in recent debates (www.soundcloud.com/talking-shop/talking-shop-may-15 and www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/06/23/tradition-debate-ideas-freedom-2013).

I made the point that the Mensheviks adopted ‘democratic centralism’ before the Bolsheviks. I also underlined the influence which Zinoviev’s authoritarian centralism exercised on the Trotskyist movement’s stance on democratic centralism, including the SWP. Indeed the IS Opposition forecast many of the more disturbing developments in the SWP decades ago (see Jim Higgins at www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1997/locust and the work of related oppositionists such as Michael Kidron, Richard Kuper and Peter Sedgwick) at a time when the antecedents of the current CPGB were foot soldiers in the British road to Stalinism.

So how to explain the vitriol? I suspect it might be due to Conrad’s unease with some of the issues raised by the changing nature of class in modern capitalism - or more precisely the radical decline of class-consciousness. This phenomenon, of course, is to be understood as a consequence of several distinct but interrelated developments: massive defeats of organised workers in recent decades, the wholesale restructuring of employment, the atrophy of many working class economic, social, cultural and mutualist institutions, and the emergence of a new working class reflecting the atomised and profoundly insecure nature of work and employment today.

Class differences have, of course, become far more, not less, profound, with the obscene widening of the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of society. But mere recital of traditional formulae about class and class conflict no longer captures the period we are in and certainly shows little sign of capturing the attention of workers themselves. Perhaps there is an analogy to be drawn between the radical transformation of the economy and the nature of the labour force today and the profound transition from the artisanal working class (and its political and social traditions) to the new industrial proletariat in the mid-19th century. Some of the best of the old Chartist radicals at that time found great difficulty in recognising these changes and remained enmeshed in outmoded ideas. But those who recognise Marxism as a method and not a doctrine will try to understand current changes and to relate political action to them - as Marx and Engels did 150 years ago.

Slovenly
Slovenly

Gratuitous

Jack Conrad has written a good, thoughtful article about organisation. Regrettably, in a pointless preamble he engages in gratuitous name-calling - “domesticated leftist … has-been … renegade … poseur” - directed at a miscellaneous list of individuals, lumping together a notorious Islamophobic supporter of imperialist intervention with a veteran socialist comrade, John Palmer, who is one of the earliest victims of exactly the kind of bureaucratic-centralist purges comrade Conrad is denouncing, and who has never left the left. Ironically, the views that comrade Palmer has been advocating on the issue of organisation are not all that far from those argued for by comrade Conrad in this very article.

And anyway, what possible purpose is served by such irrelevant personal attacks? They add no persuasive power to comrade Conrad’s argument.

Gratuitous
Gratuitous

Nasty things

What a good read the Weekly Worker is when it arrives on a Saturday. I read a page or two with a coffee. Informative? Yes. I’m not antagonistic to WW, but some contributions tend to amuse me. The spread of interest over the globe, Turkey, Syria, etc. Lots of column inches about internecine/sectarian differences with various comrades. Letters about “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”. Wonderful! I can sense excitement over the upcoming Communist University. What a feeling!

But I don’t feel as hopeful about mass unemployment, a privatised NHS, cuts to universal benefits, the abolition of public services, the coming redundancy of 144,000 public-sector workers, the growing racism and xenophobia in Britain today. Homelessness and now would-be tenants in the private housing sector are being hugely ‘taxed’ by property managements, the bedroom tax, the possible break-up of the UK. I don’t believe that people can wait for a suitable leadership to take them to a better world.

Nasty things
Nasty things

Nazis

One can only wonder if recent comments made in parliament by Lib Dem MP Sir Bob Russell are a desperate and cynical attempt by the party to try and gain some extra votes at the next general election. This feeble drum-beating of holocaust parallels to the Israeli/Palestinian situation is completely outdated and stinks of desperation, to possibly detract attention away from parliament’s own domestic and foreign policies.

While there are indeed problems in the Middle East, references to Israel and Nazism could easily be turned around to comparisons with parliament’s own behaviour, which, for millions of people, has actually resembled various elements of European Nazi rule. Parliament’s own participation in the extermination of 5,000 children per month while Iraq was under sanctions was once described, by journalist Felicity Arbuthnot, as having turned the country from a “concentration camp into a death camp”. The Fire Brigades Union were also so angered by what was taking place that they called their 1998 conference on Iraq ‘The silent holocaust’.

Nazis
Nazis

Labour not

The Labour Party membership unit has informed me that I will have to wait a year, starting from November 2012, before I can re-apply to rejoin the Labour Party.

However, I have thought, do I really want to be a member of the Labour Party? It was the last Labour government which introduced employment and support allowance medicals carried out by Atos as its replacement for incapacity benefit. So far, these medicals have led to more than 20 suicides. It also introduced personal independence payment medicals as its replacement for disability living allowance.

It was Liam Byrne, Labour shadow minister for work and pensions, who first used the term, ‘Strivers, not shirkers’, at the 2011 Labour Party conference, as a way of dividing people in work from people like me who have to claim benefits. Since Mr Byrne said this, The Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express have implied that all people in receipt of benefits are scroungers.

The Labour Party is controlled by supporters of the Progress organisation, which is being bankrolled by Lord Sainsbury. I have concluded that Ed Miliband, and the group of Tony Blair supporters who surround him, will never let unions such as Unite have any success in getting working class people selected as Labour candidates in safe Labour seats.

Labour not
Labour not

Echo

This weekend marked the formation of a Syriza-Unitary Social Front. Instead of a coalition organising solidarity network services and not based on trade unions, what emerged was a unitary party on the same basis, overcoming anti-party, pro-‘coalition’, pro-status quo opposition claiming to be from the ‘left’.

Also, it should be noticed that the new unitary party has a leadership structure similar to that of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, topped not by a colourless secretary or by a power-hungry chairman, but instead by a president, echoing the early history of the German worker-class movement.

Meanwhile, the Eurosceptic Left Platform secured 30% of the central committee seats.

Echo
Echo