Two Marxisms?

Google knows that I have an abiding interest in Marxism. Consequently, I receive frequent links to articles that Google’s algorithms select as popular or influential. Consistently, at the top of the list, are articles by or about the irrepressible Slavoj Žižek. Žižek has mastered the tricks of a public intellectual-- entertaining, pompous, outrageous, calculatedly obscure, and mannered. The disheveled pose and the beard add to a near caricature of the European professor gifting the world with big ideas embedded deeply in layers of obscurantism-- a sure-fire way to appear profound. And a sure-fire way to advance one’s commercial entertainment value.

Close followers of the “master” even post videos of Žižek devouring hot dogs-- one in each hand! He is currently cashing in on a public debate with a right-wing gas-bag counterpart which reportedly brings in obscene prices for tickets. Marxism as entrepreneurship.

Žižek is one of the latest iterations of a long line of largely European academics who build modest public celebrity from an identification with Marxism or the Marxist tradition. From Sartre and existentialism through structuralism, postmodernism, post-essentialism, post-Fordism, and identarian politics, academics have appropriated pieces of the Marxist tradition and claimed to rethink that tradition, while keeping a measured, safe distance from any Marxist movement. They are Marxists when it brings an audience, but seldom answer the call to action.

The curious thing about this intellectual Marxism, this parlor, dilettante Marxism is that it is never all in; it is Marxism with grave reservations. Marxism is fine if it’s the “early” Marx, the “humanist” Marx, the “Hegelian” Marx, the Marx of the Grundrisse, the Marx without Engels, the Marx without the working class, the Marx before Bolshevism, or before Communism. Understandably, if you want to be the next big Marx-whisperer, you must separate yourself from the pack, you must rethink Marxism, rediscover the “real” Marx, locate where Marx got it wrong.

Previous generations of well-meaning, but class-befuddled university students have been seduced by “radical” thinkers who offer a taste of rebellion in a sexy academic package. Student book packs carried unread, but fashionable books by authors like Marcuse, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Laclau, Mouffe, Foucault, Derrida, Negri, and Hardt-- authors who shared common features of exotic, provocative book titles and impenetrable prose. Books that promised much, but delivered murk.

With a new generation of radically minded youth looking for alternatives to capitalism and curious about socialism, it is inevitable that many are looking toward Marx. And where do they turn?

A Yale professor unabashedly offers a handy primer, featured in the hip Jacobin Magazine, entitled How to be a Marxist. Professor Samuel Moyn is currently the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence. Apparently, Moyn feels no unease with holding a chair endowed by one of the country’s most notorious anti-Communist, anti-Marxist publishers, while offering a guidebook to Marxism.

Moyn’s How to… presumption to guide the unknowing to Marxism is neither justified nor explained. Nonetheless, he feels confident to recommend two recently deceased academics, Moishe Postone and Erik Olin Wright (along with the still living Perry Anderson), as representing the last of “...the generation of great intellectuals whose 1960s experiences led them to adopt a lifework of recovering and reimagining Marxism.”

I confess that his choice of Moishe Postone had me baffled. Should I be embarrassed to say that I had never known Professor Postone’s work or known him to be a Marxist? When I found a YouTube interview with the esteemed Professor Postone, I quickly discovered that he emphatically and without reservation denies being a Marxist. Further, Postone contends that most of what we call Marxism was written by Frederick Engels. Postone concedes that Engels was “really a good guy,” but Engels never properly understood Marx. Postone, on the other hand, does. And his Marx does not “glorify” the industrial working class.

I am, however, familiar with the other alleged exemplar of a “great intellectual” devotion to Marxism, Erik Olin Wright. Wright was a long-standing, prominent member of the so-called “Analytic Marxism” school. Wright, like the other members of this intellectual movement, attempted to place Marxism on a “legitimate” foundation, where legitimacy was earned by subjecting Marxism to the rigors of conventional Anglo-American social science. The conceit that Anglo-American social science is without flaws or that it has nothing to learn from Marx’s method is never questioned with this clique. But to Wright’s credit, he struggled mightily to grasp the concept of social class.

In order “to save the Left from going down various cul-de-sacs again,” Professor Moyn offers the latest book of his “brilliant colleague,” Martin Hägglund. Moyn assures us that “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom is an excellent place to start for those who want to energize the theory of socialism, or even build their own theory of a Marxist variant of it.”

It takes only a brief moment to see that Martin Hägglund and his admiring colleague are taking us down other cul-de-sacs, ones trod by many earlier generations. Hägglund’s journey would revisit existentialism, Hegel, and Christian traditions in search of the elusive “meaning of life.” Though many of us thought that Marx offered a profoundly informed analysis of social change and social justice, Moyn/Hägglund, following Postone, bring forward “the ultimate questions anyone must ask: what work should I do? How should I spend my finite time?” Accumulating capital contrasts, they submit, with “maximizing... each individual’s free time to spend as she pleases…”

Thus, the struggle for emancipation, in this rethinking of Marxism, is not the emancipation of the working class, but the wresting of freely disposable time from the grip of work. The professors concede that this struggle is far easier for academics than for “the wretched of the earth.”

“And finally,” Moyn concludes, “there is Hägglund’s proposal that Marxists can ditch communism — which in any event Marx described vaguely — in favor of democracy. It is not totally clear what Hägglund means by democracy, something which neither Marx himself nor many Marxists have chosen to pursue theoretically.” So Hägglund distills “Marxism” into a rejection of Communism and an embrace of a vague “democracy.” I would have to agree with Moyn: “Indeed, it is remarkable how little of what most people have thought Marxist theory was about make it into Hägglund’s ...attempt to restart it for our time.” Apparently, the now revealed secret of becoming a Marxist is to discard Marx.

Like many self-proclaimed “Marxists” who came before Postone, Hägglund, and Moyn, their intent seems to be to defang Marxism more than it is promote it.

Dangerous Ideas

The naked truth is that Marxism-- from the time of Marx’s censorship and multiple expulsions from different countries-- is a dangerous idea. Marx’s inability to secure academic appointments and his constant surveillance and harassment by authorities proved to be a harbinger of the fate of nearly all authentic Marxist intellectuals. Capitalism does not endow those who advocate the undoing of capitalism with academic honor or celebrity. And those “Marxists” who do rise to academic acclaim, who get lucrative book deals, who enjoy media exposure, seldom present much of a threat to the system.

It is a telling fact that, though history has produced many “organic” Marxists, Marxists with roots in the working class and in movements challenging capitalism, their contributions seldom populate the bibliographies of university professors, unless to deride. University employment is rarely available to purveyors of dangerous ideas or the advocacy of a version of Marx that calls for revolutionary change.

A Marxist historian like the late Herbert Aptheker, who did more than any other intellectual to challenge the twisted Birth of a Nation/Gone With The Wind depiction of the benign South and its heroic defense of a noble way of life, could not find work in US universities. Indeed, it took a free speech movement to get him to be permitted to speak at all on US campuses. His books have disappeared from circulation and few students of African American history are exposed to his contributions.

No one has created a history of the US labor movement to rival the late Marxist Phillip Foner’s 10-volume History of the Labor Movement in the US. Foner’s 5-volume The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass reestablished Douglass as a preeminent figure in the abolition of slavery in the US. An historically Black university, Lincoln University, courageously hired Foner after years of blacklisting. Sadly, today, his works are largely ignored in fields where he pioneered.

The serious contributions of many other US Marxist intellectuals can be found in back issues of publications like Science and Society, Political Affairs, Masses, Masses and Mainstream, and Freedomways resting on out-of-the-way library shelves gathering dust, diminished by McCarthyism, blacklists, scholarly cowardice, and blatant anti-Communism.

The doors and public discourse of the academy and the mass media have equally been shut to working class Marxists (unless they renounce their views!). Despite his leading of working class movements and his writing prolifically, Marxist William Z. Foster’s works on organizing, labor strategy and tactics, and political economy are largely forgotten, unless they reappear as someone else’s thinking. Other key Marxist figures responsible for and interpreting some of labor’s finest moments such as Len De Caux and Wyndham Mortimer are denied membership in the club.

Similarly, Marxist pioneers in the Black and women’s equality movements like Benjamin Davis, William Patterson, and Claudia Jones are neither hailed as such nor offered as examples of “How to be a Marxist.” 

Marxist political economist Victor Perlo's work in identifying the highest reaches of finance capital and the economics of racism are curiously missing from any relevant academic conversation.

What these Marxists all share is an activist political life in the US Communist Party, a proud badge, but one denigrated by most US intellectuals.

The best writing of the venerable Monthly Review magazine suffers the same marginalization. Its founders were threatening enough to be victimized by the Red scare. And co-founder Paul Sweezy, a serious Marxist political economist, never was enthusiastically welcomed into academic circles.

Today, Michael Parenti is the most dangerous Marxist intellectual in the US. I know this because despite countless books, videos, and speaking engagements, despite an uncompromising commitment to a Marxist interpretation of history and current events, despite a profound, but reasoned hatred of capitalism, and despite an admirably approachable style and manner with big ideas, he is otherwise unemployed by universities and denied access to all but the most left or marginal media.

Another impressive US Marxist scholar, Gerald Horne, though enjoying academic tenure, deserves to be studied by every “leftist” in the US for the integrity, accessibility, and quality of his work.

Authentic Marxism, as opposed to fashionable, trendy, or faddish Marxism, is relentless, aggressive, and inspiring of action. It diligently dissects the inner workings of the capitalist system. It is ruthless and unsparing in its rejection of capitalism. It challenges conventional thinking, making few friends in the capitalist press and rocking the gentility and collegiality of the staid liberalism of the academy. Marxism is not a career move, but a thankless commitment.

Real Marxists are necessarily outliers. Until the conditions for revolutionary changes ripen, they are often subjected to skepticism, disinterest, even derision and hostility. Marxist poseurs are allergic to political organizations, activism, and intellectual risk, while committed Marxists are compelled to seek and join movements for change; they are driven to serve Marx’s oft-quoted, seldom heeded eleventh thesis on Feurbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

THE US ECONOMY: A MID-YEAR REPORT CARD

It's no secret that investors are frightened. A fog of uncertainty hangs over US equity markets, with Wall Street mavens reassuring each other that the course ahead is promising. Activity is down and performance volatile, with institutional investors and fast traders catching small waves at the end of trading days. Fear over Greek negotiations and a possible Federal Reserve increase in interest rates haunt the investment banks, fund managers, and other institutional investors.

US commentators hopefully hail any modestly positive economic news-- an encouraging employment gain here, a small spike in consumer spending there. At the same time, they are deathly afraid of a dampening interest rate hike. Frequent bad news -- like the first-quarter drop in GDP in three of the last five years -- is either dismissed as weather related or conveniently attributed to other non-systemic factors.

Cautious, wary signals crop up in newspaper headlines: “Postcrisis Financial-System Risk Casts a Darkening Shadow” (WSJ, 4-9-15), “A World Awash in Almost Everything” (WSJ. 4-25/26-15), “Tech Investors See the Froth, but None Dare Call It a Bubble” (NYT, 5-25-15). Warnings about “bloated” stocks by the Fed chairman, and alarm over declines in business investment, industrial production and worker productivity, all cast a shadow over the cheer leading of stock purchase evangelists and other financial hucksters.

And then there is the eccentric David Stockman-- President Reagan's former budget director-- who makes a convincing case regularly that the sky is falling. He forewarns:

What is coming, therefore, is not their father’s inflationary spiral, but an unprecedented and epochal global deflation...

What ultimately stops today’s new style central bank credit cycle, therefore, is bursting financial bubbles.

That has already happened twice this century. A third proof of the case looks to be just around the corner. (4-5-15)

Where Are We Headed?

Despite riding a lucky hunch before the 2008 crash, I believe Marxists should avoid the speculative temptation of announcing impending crashes. The fashionable practice of revealing a “tipping point” is just that: a fashion, and not science. One should follow the sage advise of Marxist political economist, Alfred Evenitsky: “...if one is a Marxist intent on understanding the underlying forces which move and shape the capitalist economy, the ‘trigger,’ while not insignificant, is of less importance than the underlying economic configuration which is being ‘triggered.’ This is a difference in emphasis and point of view, but it is more than that. It is also a difference in the depth of analysis, for ‘triggers’ are in their nature surface phenomena and provide few clues to the subterranean forces they release.”

So what are the subterranean forces shaping the US economy (and the global economy) in mid-year 2015?

Comparisons with earlier downturns-- 1980, 1983, 1991, 2002-- show that the post-2009 “recovery” is by far the most tepid and problematic. Significantly, each successive decline has delivered a successively weaker rebound, culminating in the tentative, stumbling growth after 2009.

Clearly, the enormous boost that global capitalism (and especially US capitalism) received from a several-decades-long tonic of classical and state-monopoly policies (deregulation, privatization, the easy substitution of workers from cheap labor markets, and state intervention on behalf of the monopolies), along with the demise of the economic community of European socialism and the concurrent expansion of global markets, is reaching exhaustion. The historically unprecedented oddity of roughly one-third of the world's population joining or re-joining the global market economy in little more than a decade provided a powerful thrust to a struggling capitalism mired in a toxic swamp of high inflation and slow growth. Neo-liberal ideology fit the moment well, bringing a seductive world view to potential elites throughout the formerly socialist world and to other countries with a tempered stance towards capitalism.

But that unique moment is passing and those who were convinced that “there is no alternative” are surely having second thoughts. The triumphant capitalism of several decades earlier now seems far less sure-footed.

From the perspective of working people, the post-2009 “recovery” is no recovery at all. Change in average hourly earnings is trending below its generally pathetic long-term performance over the last thirty-five years; non-farm payrolls, disposable personal income, and consumer spending growth largely trail previous expansions; and total household debt is marching steadily toward the previous high of the third quarter of 2008.

Both the harsh discipline of unemployment and the lack of effective representation (no mass political voice, frail class-based organizations) batter the US working class. The growth of employment since 2009 exists largely in the low-wage, temporary, and contingent sectors, exerting little pressure on employers to raise wages and benefits. Chastened by the financial crisis, workers have been hesitant to take on mortgage and credit card debt. But this cautious posture has been more than offset by exploding student loan and automobile loan debt. Consequently, household debt has skyrocketed to levels unseen since 2007 (only 6.5% below its 2008 peak).

For those on the other side of the class divide, the post-2009 period has been most generous, thanks to high profits, low interest rates, exploding equity prices, improving home prices, and friendly government policies. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has recovered smartly from its February, 2009 low of around 7,000 to over 18,000 in May of this year-- an increase of well over 150%!

How can the stock market grow so explosively when Gross Domestic Product-- an, at best, exaggerated measure of real value generation-- grew by only 21% in constant dollars in the same period? What magic lies behind the good fortune befalling the ownership class?

The explanation of explosive stock market inflation begins with the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of those buying and selling equities. The capitalist imperative to invest, to pursue a return, drives money back into a market filled with “bargains.” And “free” money, available through virtually interest-free loans, amplifies the surge in stock purchases. Publicly traded firms, flush with cash and able to fund investments with “free” money, buy back caches of their own stocks, inflating the price of stocks remaining in the market. Firms also pump up their dividends with their bloated cash reserves. And most significantly, the Federal Reserve's policy of quantitative easing-- gobbling up financial instruments and depressing the yield on bonds (and driving up their prices!)-- effectively herds investors seeking attractive returns into equity markets.

That equity prices have departed dramatically from economic reality is easily shown. Traditionally, investors grow suspect of equity prices when they exceed historical relationships of price-to-earnings (the p/e ratio). The p/e of the Standard and Poor's 500 has reached 17.5, well above its 10-year average of 15.8 and sufficient to strike alarm bells.

For comparative purposes, another gauge of the sustainability of equity pricing is the so-called Buffet indicator, the ratio of the Federal Reserve's estimate of corporate capitalization over the concurrent gross domestic product. In 2015, the ratio topped 1.32 (corporate capitalization 132+% of GDP). Immediately before the 2008 crash, the ratio was approaching 1.15. Before the 2000 “dot com bubble” burst, the ratio was 1.53, a level easily within reach in the next year or two given the current trend. Clearly, equity inflation has taken the stock market into a danger zone associated with the last two downturns.

Do the apparent dangers signal economic speed bumps or serious systemic issues?

Policy makers-- limited by ideology and class loyalty-- sought to escape the jaws of the 2008 crisis by pumping up the prospects of corporations and the ownership class. The corporate bail-outs (too often conditional upon downsizing and layoffs), the near-zero interest-rate policies, and a host of other corporate-friendly moves paved the way for the consequent surge in profits and the stock market frenzy.

These policy makers were counting on corporate coddling and painless credit to encourage firms to invest vigorously. They were determined to create a climate with investors and corporations choking on cash, with ready access to interest-free loans, and anxious to make even more money through hiring and expansion.

Indeed, with massive layoffs, labor productivity jumped as production continued and the hours worked declined (raising the rate of exploitation), fixed business investment grew at a satisfactory rate, and profits exploded (S&P 500 companies' earnings soared 30% in 2010).

But this jump-start was not sustained. Federal Reserve policies (low interest-rate policies and quantitative easing) encouraged corporations to satisfy stockholders through mergers and acquisitions, stock buy-backs, and dividends rather than invest in plants or hiring. Consequently, corporations successfully decoupled market capitalization from earnings performance. Since 2011, corporate capital returns (to investors) have exceeded capital expenditures. As profit growth declined since the 2010 explosion, stock values nonetheless continued to climb, leaving investors overjoyed.

Broadly speaking, the three key factors of fixed business investment, productivity and, corporate profits have been trending downward for three to four years. First-quarter 2015 fixed investments fell 3.4%, not surprisingly, output per hour (productivity) fell by 3.1%, and earnings were expected to barely move. These three interdependent and fundamental indicators underscore the critical weaknesses in the US economy. Capitalism has wrung as much sweat as it can from workers, managers are reluctant to invest in new or advanced means of production, and US corporations are experiencing a decline in the rate of profit.

Are the problems besetting the US economy and confounding bourgeois economists fleeting or deeply embedded in the 21^st century capitalist system?

A recent Wall Street Journal (World Awash in Almost Everything, 4-25/26-15) makes some interesting, relevant observations. Authors Josh Zumbrun and Carolyn Cui note: “The current state of plenty is confounding on many fronts... Global wealth-- estimated by Credit Suisse at around $263 trillion, more than double the $117 trillion in 2000-- represents a vast supply of savings and capital, helping to hold down interest rates, undermining the power of monetary policy.”

They might add that this extreme accumulation of capital also overflows existing channels of profitable investment, exerting downward pressure on profit growth and encouraging ever riskier investment choices. Capital will not remain idle. In an environment of over-abundance, conventional profit opportunities become scarcer and investors reach desperately for yield.

As with pigs foraging for truffles, too many foraging pigs reduce the chances of any individual pig finding the treasured fungus. Profit-seekers -- like truffle-seekers -- will go to any length and take any risk to secure their goal. Today, there are 65 venture capital investments of over $1 billion each (CB Insights says there are 107), drawing funds from yield-hungry retirement funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds. Whatever the number, all agree that the total capitalization of these investments in firms that are little more than start-ups approaches or exceeds the capitalization of the similar “dot com” firms that blew up in 2000. Like the “dot com” fiasco, capital is flowing freely to almost any garage enterprise with little more than a rough business plan and a clever idea. The search for yield is that intense.

As New York Times writer Conor Dougherty (Tech Investors See the Froth, but None Dare Call It a Bubble, 4-25-15) comments:

But the tech industry's venture capitalists - the financiers who bet on companies when they are little more than an idea - are going out of their way to avoid the one word that could describe what is happening around them.

Bubble.

Once again, the US economy suffers from a case of hyper-accumulation coupled with a declining rate of profit, seducing investors into riskier and riskier bets. As with the lead-up to the 2000 downturn and the 2007 crash, too much capital is pursuing too few attractive investment opportunities. Consequently, rampant speculation follows, risk intensifies, and the profit-making engine runs off the rails.

From time to time, we all need to be reminded that the capitalist system runs on profit and the confidence that profit-making opportunities will be available tomorrow. Even Marxists need to be reminded that Karl Marx placed the process of accumulation and its tendencies at the center of his analysis. Careful study shows that the challenges to continued profit growth have not been wrung from the US economy. As investors have emigrated from traditional productive sectors or service areas of the economy in search of further investment opportunities, they have shaken the system's foundations with risk and insecurity. But given the dynamics of 21^st century capitalism, given the enormous concentration of wealth that relentlessly and necessarily seeks to grow ever larger, investors must accept more risk and insecurity. There is no alternative, to steal a quote from the enemy. Therefore, they must continuously put the capitalist system in harm’s way.

For those who-- like the popular social democratic thinker, Thomas Piketty-- think that we can redistribute the obscene concentration of global wealth through tax policies and set capitalism merrily on its way... think again. Should, by some miracle, the ownership class surrender their grip on the state, capitalism would, in time, reproduce the inequalities that lead to the concentration of capital and crises. That's its nature. As the great song writer Oscar Brown Jr. reminds us:

“Take me in, tender woman," sighed the snake

"Now I saved you," cried the woman

And you've bit me, even why?

And you know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die"

"Ah shut up, silly woman," said that reptile with a grin

“Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in...”

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Getting Serious about Inequality

“The tenacity of the Yankees... is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.” Frederich Engels, letter to Sorge, London, January 6, 1892. Translation by Leonard E. Mins (1938)

One hundred and twenty-two years later, the Yankees remain bereft of theory while clinging to every outlandish scheme promising to curtail the appetite of an insatiable capitalist system. Churning on without interruption, capitalism generates greater and greater wealth for its masters while devouring everyone else in its wake. From regulatory reform to alternative life styles, from tax policies to cooperative endeavors, self-proclaimed opponents of this rapacious economic behemoth have announced newly contrived exits from its destructive path. While “...people [in the US] must become conscious of their own social interests by making blunder upon blunder...” as Engels put it in another letter to his US friend Frederich Sorge, the contented capitalists merrily continue profiting.

Engels' brutal indictment of the North American allergy to theory and the affinity for unfocussed activism was tempered by an optimism based more upon hope than reality: “The movement itself will go through many and disagreeable phases, disagreeable particularly for those who live in the country and have to suffer them. But I am firmly convinced that things are now going ahead over there... notwithstanding the fact that the Americans will learn almost exclusively in practice for the time being, and not so much from theory.”

That conviction may well seem misplaced today as many of those who claim opposition to capitalism continue to decry theory and invest instead in utopian schemes and isolate burning issues from a general critique of capitalism and its social policies.

Nothing illustrates the Engels' diagnosis more than the current public discussion of inequality and poverty. It is tempting to call the new-found interest a fad or fashion, since it seems to spring from nothing more than a sitting President's alarm. But the present-day rage to address economic inequality is far more cynical. With interim national elections on the horizon and a competitive Presidential race on its heels, Democratic Party leaders served notice on the lame-duck President that it is time again to rouse the Party base, the labor unions, the progressive single-issue organizations, internet lefties, and the deep-pockets social liberals. Hence, despite the fact that inequality and poverty are neither newly discovered nor newly arrived, the alarm goes up: inequality is with us! Poverty is on the rise!

It is true, of course. Only a few outliers would deny that income and wealth growth for most people in the US have been stagnant or declining since some time in the 1970s (Even right-wing ideologue, Representative Paul Ryan, concedes that there are 47 million US citizens living in poverty). Health care has been in crisis, with millions left without any significant health options and untold numbers dying prematurely. The education system, like the physical infrastructure, is underfunded and crumbling. Employment continues to decline as discouraged workers exit the labor market. In short, poverty, disease, declining living standards, crime-- all the attendant problems of social and political neglect-- continue unabated, increasing dramatically over the last forty years.

At the same time, a privileged minority has enjoyed increasing income and wealth, a sharp rise in that group's share of the economic pie. As the economy marched forward, the “fortunate few” marched forward as well, but at an ever accelerating pace.

Without Theory

“Data, not stultifying political or ideological rhetoric, must drive our agenda.” So says rising Democratic Party superstar, Senator Cory Booker, in a newsprint debate with Republican policy icon, Representative Paul Ryan. Sponsored by The Wall Street Journal (A Half Century of the War on Poverty, 1-25/26-14) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Lyndon Johnson-era “War on Poverty,” the two contestants demonstrate the futility of addressing poverty without a broad and deep understanding of its sources and its history-- the “how” and “why” of social theory. Representing the “respectable” Left in the US two-party political pantomime, Booker rehearses a host of liberal think tank palliatives based on education, job training, apprenticeships, de-criminalized drug use, and a bare-bones safety-net designed to shrink the number of those unlucky enough to fall below official government floors.

Solutions, for Booker, come through the tools of business and commerce: investments, cost-benefit analysis, returns on investment, cost savings etc. Rather than improving peoples' lives, the task of reducing poverty resembles an MBA project of this new generation of Democratic Party politician. He draws on suspect, often out-of-date correlations once found between education levels and future economic outcomes to sell education as a magic elixir. These long unexamined verities are now shaken by the absence of good paying jobs, the declining worth of higher degrees, and the enormous growth of student debt. Booker's feeble defense of the leaky safety-net that remains as a tarnished legacy of the New Deal and Johnson's anti-poverty legislation centers on food stamps and Medicaid, a formula to barely sustain life, but to not escape poverty. Add a dash of Moynihan-like sermon against single-motherhood and you have the anti-poverty program of the new generation of Democratic Party leaders-- truly a patchwork of “economic absurdity” worthy of Engels' contempt.

As for the Republicans, they argue for nothing, only against Democratic Party plans. Theirs is a simple contention: Forty-seven million US citizens remain in poverty. While the “War on Poverty” may have shifted the victims of poverty demographically, the poor are still with us and in great, stubborn numbers. For Representative Ryan, charity and moral suasion-- the remedies of two centuries ago-- are the only alternative to liberal interventionism and its failure.

Now liberals will recoil from these harsh conclusions. They can and will point to significant pockets of improvement, temporary declines in the poverty rate, or promising social experiments. But what they can neither explain nor address is the persistent reproduction of poverty by our economic system. For nearly forty years, measures of income and wealth inequality have grown, signally an inevitable increase in poverty. Even those ill-disposed to theory can surely see a relationship between growing inequality and increasing poverty.

Glaringly absent from Booker's program is any significant plan to redistribute income and wealth. We can attribute that absence to the near complete ownership of elected officials of both parties by the corporations and the wealthy. But on the periphery of mainstream politics, voices can be heard advocating measures both to grow the economy beyond mass impoverishment and/or to redistribute wealth through taxation.

The Krugmans, Reichs, and Stiglitzs and the like enjoy a measure of independence afforded by their academic tenure and widely celebrated intellectual stature, allowing them to somewhat sidestep fealty to corporate masters. As esteemed economists, they understand that the continued growth of inequality will ultimately bring harsh economic or social consequences. But their nostrums, like those of the political establishment, only treat the symptoms of a persistent malady that continually generates inequality, unemployment, and crises. A study of economic history demonstrates that bursts of economic growth and progressive taxation have indeed tempered, even slightly reversed inequality and the growth of poverty, but over time both return to their former trajectory.

A Dose of Theory

A new study by a French economist, Thomas Piketty, brings forward the view that the long-term tendency of capitalism is to produce and reproduce inequality. Though his book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, is not scheduled for release in the English language until March, it has already generated serious discussion across the spectrum of the US commentariat. New York Times columnist, Thomas B. Edsell, asserts that the book “suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality.” (Capitalism vs. Democracy, 1-28-2014)

How can that be? The liberal and social democratic consensus cries out for government spending, progressive taxation, and corporate regulation as the answer to growing inequality. A gaggle of Nobel laureates embrace these tools, attesting that they are effective means to combat inequality. What does Piketty see that they do not? 

History.

Piketty is not afraid to study the history of inequality, a necessary condition for any proper socioeconomic theory. What he finds, according to Edsell, is that:

...the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.

According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression.

In other words, growing inequality is the normal for capitalism and its shrinkage the aberration. Apologists would have us believe otherwise, that capitalism does not carry a gene for inequality. Unlike his Yankee counterparts, Piketty is willing to study the economy as a system-- capitalism-- and explore its historical trajectory. Both methodological dispositions give rise to a theory of inequality, an incomplete theory, but a theory no less.

Now Piketty and his frequent collaborator Emmanuel Saez are widely acknowledged to be among the leading experts documenting inequality world wide as well as in the US. Undoubtedly this gives a high plausibility to his core claim to identify a strong correlation between capitalism's typical course and the growth of inequality.

Of course students of Marxist theory or followers of this blog should not be surprised by Piketty's findings. For over a hundred and fifty years Marxists have maintained that inequality and impoverishment are necessary products of the capitalist system. That is, the logic of capitalism necessitates growing inequality. By locating profit at the heart of the capitalist organism, Marxists understand that wealth will invariably flow to the tiny minority of the owners of capital and away from the producers. It is this process of profit generation that overwhelms all barriers, all “reforms,” to channel society's resources to the capitalist class.

Piketty's argument is a welcome antidote to the paucity of explanatory theory presented by the liberal and social democratic punditry. The controversy stirred by Piketty's argument well before its English-language availability is a sure sign that he offers something beyond the conventional.

However, his interpretation of the long-term trajectory of capitalism, especially its departure from the norm, may be incomplete. He reportedly sees the time between 1914 and 1973-- a time when he claims that the growth of inequality was uncharacteristically retarded-- as a period when the after-tax rate of return on capital lagged behind economic growth. One could quibble that this is perhaps too simple and mechanical, the era was certainly one in which many factors worked to change the “normal” course of capitalism and often buffered the growth of inequality, together constituting a tendency.

But it would be a simplification to locate these factors entirely in economic or political events while overlooking policy. For example, throughout most of the twentieth century capitalism paid an anti-Soviet levy or rent to the working class as an inoculation against the threat of socialist or Communist ideology. That factor played no small part in moderating inequality, creating the mirage of working class equality, and ensuring labor peace.

Closer examination of Piketty's interesting thesis must await publication of the book.

For a Robust Theory of Inequality

We needn't wait for Piketty, however, to find an adequate theory of inequality. Elements of Karl Marx's theory of socioeconomic development offer the key to understanding the production and reproduction of inequality in our time as well as earlier times.

There are, of course, many possible causes for the concentration of wealth. Theft, good fortune, guile, dishonesty are only a few of the ways that humans have redistributed wealth since antiquity. Such causes occur often in history, but only haphazardly. The only systemic cause of inequality is the expropriation of the labor of one by another under the protection of social norms. Marx called this process exploitation. He was the first to identify its forms and its trajectory. He was the first to explain adequately the mechanisms of expropriation. Armed with Marx's theory of exploitation, the inequalities of slavery, feudalism, and, of course, capitalism are revealed with all their specific features. Thus, the concentration of wealth produced by expropriation of the labor of slaves, serfs, and employed workers is connected to unique socially protected forms of exploitation.

Exploitation explains how inequality arises and continues. Without recognition of this mechanism embedded in capitalist economic activity, liberals and social democrats cannot explain the persistence of inequality. They will apply inadequate reformist measures to stem the tide of wealth and income concentration springing from capitalist exploitation, but the tide will not be forestalled by reforms.

It cannot be overemphasized that inequality springs from a process, a process definitive of capitalist economic relations. Outside of the Marxist orbit, commentators view inequality as a state-of-affairs, a state-of-affairs existing between various social groupings. While they authentically decry the misery generated by inequality, they are at a loss to find the proper quantitative relationship between different groups constitutive of society. Sure, some have more than others, but what is the socially just distribution of society's goods? Granted that inequalities exist, what is the optimal way to assign shares of wealth? How much and for whom? Should everyone get an equal share? Should those on the bottom get a 10% larger share? 20%? These are the questions that perplex the non-Marxists.

The best answer from the best minds of Anglo-American social philosophy is a pretty nasty and unsatisfactory principle called Pareto efficiency. Rather than solving the inequality puzzle, Pareto efficiency justifies an unequal state-of-affairs provided that it does not diminish the well-being of others, including the least advantaged. Because of the theoretical intractability of settling on exactly what constitutes a just distribution of goods and services, modern bourgeois academic philosophers attempt to establish what would be the least objectionable, but unequal state-of-affairs. Nothing demonstrates the theoretical barrenness of Anglo-American social thought than this misguided, impossible task of determining distributive justice once and for all and for all times and places. There is no idealized state-of-affairs that could answer this question. The question itself is misguided.

Rather, in our time, the task of reducing inequality, of advancing distributive justice, is to eliminate exploitation. There can be no ideal, perfect solution to the inequality issue, but there is a way of eliminating the primary cause of indefensible inequality in a capitalist society: end labor exploitation.

Liberals and social democrats have no answer to the rightist challenge that workers today are immeasurably better off under capitalism than they were two hundred years ago. It is certainly true that most workers now live longer, are healthier, and have more free time than did their counterparts two centuries earlier. Marxist theory does not challenge that point. Instead, it asserts that the logic of the capitalist system tends to impoverish working people at all times. Whether capitalism succeeds in suppressing living standards is entirely a different matter. Other factors-- labor fight back, labor shortages, the cheapening of the means of subsistence, etc.-- may buffer, even overwhelm this tendency for a time, but the tendency never disappears.

The tendency towards impoverishment flows logically from the Marxist understanding that labor under capitalism is a commodity like any other commodity. Capitalists buy and sell the labor power of workers just as they do any other factor of production or distribution. And as with any other cost, they seek to pay the lowest possible price for it. Accordingly, the capitalist system, through the cost-cutting actions of individual capitalists (or corporations), is constantly pressuring the compensation of workers downward to levels of mere maintenance-- that is, poverty. The only systemic constraint upon that pressure is the necessity of securing labor in the future.

Therefore, we find in Marxism a basis for understanding (and addressing) inequality and poverty. Thanks to a theory that identifies the two closely related afflictions with specific historically evolved mechanisms and that connects their production and reproduction to economic systems, we can avoid the muddiness and ineffectiveness of the liberal and social democratic approaches. Both mystify the causes, offer a balm instead of a cure, and fail to halt the continuing reproduction of inequality and poverty. Like quacks and faith healers, liberals and social democrats may make the patient more comfortable, but only excising the cancer of capitalism will finally end the suffering.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

UNDERSTANDING THE CRISIS

For a student of Marxist political economy, one of the last year’s highlights was the seven-part discussion of the global economic crisis, its causes, and consequences which was featured in Socialist Voice, the excellent monthly publication of the Communist Party of Ireland. Beginning in January with the review of a book on the crisis, two interlocutors—identified as NC and NL-- surveyed the landscape of radical and Marxist explanations of economic crises and their meaning for the working class movement.

Several features of the discussion were remarkable.

First, the discussion was conducted in a comradely and respectful manner. Much of the academic “Marxist” dialogue is about scoring points and splitting hairs. The SV exchange, on the other hand, sought to construct and unify.

Second, the articles were free of jargon and pretension. Too often self-styled Marxist economists feel compelled to package their views in fashionable or “sophisticated” language to create an aura of profundity.

Third, the dialogue owes little to bourgeois economics. Outside of a few distinguished Marxists like Maurice Dobb, Ronald Meek, and Victor Perlo, in the English-speaking world, training in mainstream bourgeois economics has been more of a hindrance than a help in grasping and advancing Marxism. Likewise, formalism—the fetish of mathematical and logical constructs-- has elevated issues like the so-called transformation problem or the “Okishio Theorem” to center stage at the expense of pursuing and elaborating the insights of Marx, Engels, and their successors. In most cases, the formalists and academicians would be well advised to return to a study of the opening chapters of Capital, an exercise that would render much of their exercises pettifoggery.

The Socialist Voice contributions cover briefly, but clearly and seriously, the theories of crisis ranging from the tendency-of-the-falling-rate-of-profit through underconsumptionism, stagnation, long cycles, and the general crisis of capitalism. They draw on a diverse group of theorists from Andrew Kliman and the Monthly Review adherents through Nikolai Kondratiev and Hans Heinz Holz.

The articles are to be found in the January, April, May, June, October, November, and December issues of Socialist Voice or online at:     http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/sv/index.html.

I urge everyone interested in Marxist political economy to read them. Hopefully, this discussion will generate further research and debate over the many issues addressed. Developing a clear and full Marxist account of the current crisis is a work in progress. My own thoughts, offered in the same comradely spirit, are below:

SYSTEMIC CRISIS

1. Capitalist economic crises are of two types: cyclical and systemic. In the course of capitalist economic activity, imbalances occur between various departments of production, between suppliers and producers, between production and consumption, etc. These imbalances result in slumps or slowdowns in productive activity. Bourgeois economists refer to these as “business cycle” events, meaning that they are cyclical or self-correcting; recovery is on the horizon, perhaps the distant horizon, but on the horizon. Generally, bourgeois politicians apply conventional nostrums—interest rate adjustments, state spending, incentives or inducements—to adjust these cycles to their political ends. Even though these are episodic events, the ensuing damage generally falls on the backs of working people.

2. Systemic crises, on the other hand, are reflective of deep contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. As such, they are not subject to either patience or the usual menu of remedies. Capitalism, like a perpetual motion machine, violates the laws of nature. A system cannot continue forever that depends upon increasing complex social interactions while awarding the riches produced by those interactions to a few who are dissociated from the same social processes. In the long run, the accumulation of private, concentrated wealth tends to choke off the further accumulation of that wealth.

3. Systemic crises do not pass, but are temporarily suppressed or resolved through transformative change. That is, policy makers may blunt or postpone the harshest consequences of systemic crises, but eventually systemic changes are necessitated to exit the crisis. For example, despite New Deal boasts about resolving the Great Depression in the US, the Depression’s demise only came with the vast systemic changes that accompanied a world war— socialist-like economic planning, organization, investment, and production in war supplies and the massive destruction of material assets. In our time, the full impact of the 2001 technology crisis was suppressed only to exacerbate the 2008 crisis. The underlying dynamics of capitalist crisis remained, and still remain. 

4. Systemic crises are, in the final analysis, crises of accumulation. What cripples the mechanism of capitalism most decisively is the inability to generate sufficient profit. Conversely, those factors which restrain the growth of accumulation-- retard the rate of profit-- largely account for systemic crises. Thus, broadly speaking, crises are caused by a tendency within the system for the rate of profit to fall.

5. Basing systemic crisis on failing accumulation and not imbalances or unrealized consumption has the following political consequence: it cannot be overcome with liberal or social democratic panaceas. Wealth redistribution, public sector jobs programs, social insurance etc. will not directly restore profitability unless these programs are actually subterfuges for surplus transfer. Only the restoration of profit growth will stabilize the economy. We saw this in the US after mid-2009 when profits rebounded sharply (generated by intensified exploitation!). But even then earnings began to recede again by mid-2012. Thus, for the working class, the choice is really only between helping the capitalists restore profit or working to eliminate the capitalist system!

6. Paradoxically, the crisis exists because the accumulation process is overwhelmed by the huge pool of surplus in the hands of the few, the owners of the means of production, distribution, service, and finance. Just as before the Great Depression, investment opportunities in productive activities are outstripped by the sheer weight of accumulated surplus. The rate, as well as the expected rate, of profit sinks against the aggregate capital held by corporations, banks, and the rich.  They turn to speculation in scarce resources, property and financial schemes, the ever-active “hunt for yield.” And they take on debt which amplifies the folly of this ceaseless search for a return on available capital.

7. The systemic crisis should not be understood as foretelling an ultimate breakdown of the system. Henryk Grossmann’s pioneering work on Marx’s tendency of the falling rate of profit—because of its strict logical exposition—mistakenly led some to believe that capitalism would implode by its own logic. Similarly, academic Marxists divorced from the working class movement lean heavily on projected stagnation to force the departure of capitalism from the world stage. But capitalism always has extreme measures to fall back on for its self-preservation: a re-shuffling of the cards through war, forced-march capitalism through fascism, and many forms of direct and indirect enslavement. The only escape from capitalism is through the efforts of the most advanced, organized elements of the working class armed with an understanding of capitalism. 

MONOPOLY AND STATE-MONOPOLY-CAPITALISM

1. The theorists at Monthly Review are correct to persistently point to the never-ending concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands as evidence for the rise of monopoly capital. Mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, and integration ensure that leading corporations grow stronger and fewer. At the same time, they understate the resiliency of capitalism to create and re-create new arenas of competition. Frederick Engels stated it well in the very first Marxist tract on political economy (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy): “Competition is based on self-interest, and self-interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition—indeed, it itself breeds competition…” It is this seemingly small point that eludes the “Monopoly Capital” (MC) school associated with Monthly Review.

2. Even in a hugely capital-intensive industry and a paragon of monopoly like automobile production, competition persists with new producers entering the industry through new technologies (e.g., electric cars) or national initiatives (Japan, Korea, and today China and India). While price competition persists (contrary to the MC school), competition is also expressed through technological features, fuel consumption, performance, warranty protection, and a host of other differences. Moreover, these differences are based in the techniques of production and costs of production and not merely sloughed away as “the sales effort” as Sweezy and Baran do in Monopoly Capital. They equally sidestep the competition between old and new, mainstream and alternate industries.

3. Despite the persistent concentration of capital, competition among capitalists and the thirst for a return on capital stocks will always steer the system towards systemic crisis.

4. Of greater use to the working class movement is the theory of state-monopoly-capitalism. While monopolization may bend, but not break the logic of capitalism, enormous monopoly corporations have succeeded in merging their interests with the functions of the state. The enormous power and reach of monopoly enterprises have commandeered all organs of the state and harnessed the state’s actions to the promoting of capital accumulation. While the theory of state-monopoly-capitalism has been dismissed in left circles since the demise of European socialism, the priority by the state given to the US/European bank bailouts surely underscores its validity and makes the critics pause to reconsider. The theory is an essential tool for understanding the behavior of EU and US policy-makers through the course of the crisis.

“FINANCIALIZATION” AND DEBT

1. “Financialization” is an unfortunate term—fashionable, but adding little light to our understanding. The growing role of finance has been noted since before the time of Lenin. The process culminated in finance accounting for over 40% of corporate profits in the US by the early twenty-first century—in part by its increasing absorption of stampeding surplus and in part by the decline and departure of manufacturing that formerly accounted for a far greater share of US profits.

2. Unquestionably finance took on a leading role in the US, the UK, and a few other advanced capitalist countries with the creation of a vast new pool of low-wage workers available to manufacturing after the destruction of Eastern European socialism, its socialist-oriented allies and the PRC’s opening to global markets. This reflected the new national division of labor in the global economy— manufacturing and export in the East and South and finance, management, and services in the West and North.

3. As the leading financial center, the US became the Mecca for those with pockets overflowing with cash and fewer investment opportunities in an era of low interest rates and cheap money.

4. Unlike in the world of commodity production where value is produced in real time, finance offers opportunities to appropriate future value through contractual instruments like mortgages, bonds, futures, and, in our era, even more exotic creations. These instruments trade in future value, hence challenging capitalism to find even more marginal investment opportunities to absorb surplus and potential surplus.

5. Debt—the offspring of easy credit and low interest rates—serves as an amplifier of financial investment, the critical bridge to ever-more reckless speculation. Thus, finance served up its many “innovations” designed to absorb the ocean of surplus accumulated over decades and in search of another round of accumulation in an environment of diminishing returns. In this manner, the tendency for accumulation to retard its own re-production found its expression in the financial crisis that broke out in the US in 2007-2008.      

OTHER CRISIS THEORIES

1. Wave theory-- the notion that economic activity exhibits a wave-like trajectory from boom to bust and back to boom again—enjoys an almost mystical, spiritual attraction for many. Associated with the views of Nikolai Kondratiev in Marxist circles, the theory of a regular, periodic wave—long or short—is flawed for two distinct, but fatal reasons.

2. From an empirical perspective, it is impossible to settle on those features of economic history that are decisive in expressing the upturns and downturns of regular cycles. That is to say, the dependent variables are illusive and hazy. Moreover, when they are clearly stipulated—GDP, labor productivity, profits, etc—no incontrovertible pattern is revealed. Instead, only intuitive patterns are seen by those already disposed to see them.

3. From a theoretical point of view, there is no candidate for an independent variable that demonstrates a consistent and regular wave-like behavior throughout economic history (or the history of capitalism). Neither technological innovation, cultural or demographic change, nor any other candidate for the cause of cycles exhibits the kind of wave-like nature that would account for regular, periodic waves in the historic record. And where we find wave-like motion in nature (eg. Lunar cycles), there is no obvious causal connection with economic life.

4. In short, long cycles are impossible to discern without appealing to Rorschach-like impressionism and impossible to explain without assuming what it sets out to illustrate. When you want to see a face on the moon, you’ll see one.

5. We owe a great debt to Hans Heinz Holz, the late German Marxist philosopher, who brought new life to the long-standing Communist concept of the General Crisis of Capitalism (GCC). As Holz points out, Soviet social science mechanically and empirically attached the GCC to the historical stages ushered in by the Bolshevik revolution and the Second World War. This was a misleading interpretation dissolved by the setbacks to socialism.

6. Holz is correct in rehabilitating the GCC as a truly general crisis generated by capitalism’s internal mechanisms independently of important, but external events. He is correct to conceive of the GCC as a total crisis, not limited to the economic sphere but including social life, culture, ideology, and all other human relations.

7. Thus the GCC is not a theory of economic crisis. Instead, the systemic crisis of capitalism is one element—one causal element-- in the General Crisis of Capitalism.

8. Much more work needs to be done in developing a full theory of the GCC with its consequences in every aspect of everyday life.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com