By Schalken, on 08.22.11.
Six months ago, Gadaffi’s son Saif al-Islam was adored in the West as Libya’s best hope for a democratic transformation. Today it appears only a matter of time before ol’ Saif, having dodged the cruise missiles and bombs of his former benefactors only to be captured by rag-tag rebels, will appear before a court to face charges of crimes against humanity. None of this is to say that democracy and crimes against humanity are contradictory; even a cursory examination of three centuries of rule by terror by the democratic bourgeoisie dispels that notion. It is said instead to reinforce the old adage that politics makes for strange bedfellows.
Consider John Bolton for another example. The American right — of which Bolton is certainly a part — ceaselessly accuses Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim or Marxist (or even a secret KGB sleeper agent). Yet the right’s distaste for anything they perceive as Marxist (such as taxes or science) and Islam, to say nothing of fundamentalist Islam, hasn’t deterred Bolton and 200 American congressmen from “palling it up” with terrorists who claim to have synthesized so-called Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism into a coherent ideology. Basically, various U.S. conservatives, in their quest to weaken Iran’s theocratic thugs, have quite vocally supported the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, which is designated by the U.S. and others as a terrorist organization. Making the MEK an even unlikelier ally to a cold warrior like Bolton, the group got its start — after training in the USSR — by assassinating American officers and helping to occupy the American embassy in Tehran in ’79. Soon turning on the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, the group worked its way into the good graces of the American right by serving during the Iran-Iraq war as mercenaries for Saddam Hussein — himself an American mercenary. Despite being targets of coalition attacks during the Second Gulf War, which Bolton helped to bring about, Bolton has recently violated U.S. law by publicly advocating for a repeal of the group’s terrorist designation.
For more, check out the Wikipedia pages for John Bolton and the MEK.
Gilles Dauvé, otherwise known by his pen name Jean Barrot, has a long history of writing lucid, insightful texts that grapple with the very deepest questions the movement towards communism has to confront; his work “Fascism and Anti-Fascism” prompted a hearty debate with the author in the pages of Aufheben, while “Capitalism and Communism” has been called one of the best introductions to the communist movement ever written.
Today Libcom.org posted Dauvé’s “In This World, But Not Of This World”, which Dauvé penned for some Lithuanian comrades republishing “Capitalism and Communism.” I haven’t read it all yet, but I can already tell it’s a good one by this simple but elegant rebuttal to the nearly century-old lie that the Soviet Union was a socialist society that appears early in the essay:
Capitalism is not just a system of domination whereby a minority forces the people to work for its own benefit. In 1950, in Vilnius as in Pittsburgh, money was buying labour, which was put to work to valorize sums of money accumulated in poles of value called companies or corporations. These firms could not go on unless they accumulated value at a socially acceptable rate. This rate was certainly not the same in Vilnius as in Pittsburgh. Like Pittsburgh-based firms, Lithuanian firms were managed as separate units, but (unlike in Pittsburgh) no private owners could sell or buy them at will. Still, a Lithuanian company manufacturing shoes did not just produce shoes as objects supposed to fulfil a function: it had to make the best profitable use of all the money that had been invested to produce the shoes. “Value formation” mattered as much in Vilnius as in Pittsburgh. Those shoes weren’t given free to the Pittsburgh or Vilnius pedestrian who would then have put them on and walked away. In both towns, the pedestrian paid for his shoes or went barefoot.
Of course, the Lithuanian State could decide to subsidize shoes and sell them at a low price, i.e. below production cost. But in each country, value had to be finally realized on the market. Russian, East German and Lithuanian planners kept bending the rules of profitability, but they could not play that game for ever. These rules asserted themselves in the end, through poor quality, shortages, black market, purging of managers, etc. The State protected the Vilnius company against bankruptcy. But that was artificial. No-one can fiddle the logic of valorization for too long. One firm, ten firms, a thousand could be saved from closure, until one day it was the whole society that went bankrupt. If the British, Belgian or French State had kept bailing out every unprofitable company from the early days of industrialization, capitalism would now be defunct in Britain, Belgium or France. In short, the “law of value” functioned in very different ways in “bureaucratic” and in “market” capitalism, but it did apply to both systems.
Good stuff. Well worth a read.
[Author's Note: This post presents some notes I began to take almost two years ago on the role of the state intervention and assistance under capitalism. For various reasons, not least of which was the daunting scope of the subject, I gave up the research not long after starting. Thanks to a confluence of events and realizations in my personal life, I recently decided to tackle some of my backlogged projects. What little I did manage to take note of regarding the role of the state in capitalist economies is presented here, warts and all.]
“Socialist” – the word turns up everywhere, from the course and schizoid ramblings of AMERICAMAN1776 on Yahoo’s comments section to the meant-to-be-profound speeches of GOP presidential hopefuls (in 2009, Mike Huckabee told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “Lenin and Stalin would love” Obama’s stimulus plans). While the word has seemingly displaced half of the average conservative’s vocabulary, we would do well to remember that liberals were the first to employ the term in the current debate, using it to disparage President Bush at the end of his term.
In October 2008 the liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson accused the Bush administration of “tossing aside ‘Atlas Shrugged‘ and speed-reading ‘Das Kapital.’” A day later in a column entitled “In Bush’s bailout, echoes of Marx,” Star Ledger columnist John Farmer declared that “the Bush administration has come full circle — from Karl Rove to Karl Marx.” By the middle of the February of ’09, this prognosis was confirmed when the cover of Newsweek declared “we’re all socialist now” (a play on Nixon’s statement “we are all Keynesians now”). If America has become socialist, the converse implication, of course, is that America is no longer capitalist. Once again this was not an opinion of fanatical conservatives. Dean Takahashi, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, mused in VentureBeat in October of 2008 that “when they write the textbooks when this is all over, I’d like to see how they describe the U.S. economic system. Is it capitalist? Not at the moment.”
Underlying all of these proclamations, whether uttered by the left or right, is a very superficial understanding of what constitutes the totality of a society’s economic activity. For, if the United States suddenly became a “socialist” country with the passage of a few bailout bills, then it’s clear that in most eyes capitalism and socialism are seen as virtually identical economies, differentiated only by the level of state intervention. If the state intervenes little, the economy is capitalist. If the state intervenes more than a little, this economy immediately becomes socialist. Thus Hugo Chavez only half-jokingly called Bush a “comrade.” Even sophisticated definitions of capitalism (i.e., the kinds you find in textbooks, not internet comments) fall into this same trap, as Dobb notes:
According to this, capitalism is identified with a system of unfettered individual enterprise: a system where economic and social relations are ruled by contract, where men are free agents in seeking their livelihood, and legal compulsions and restrictions are absent. Thereby Capitalism is made virtually synonymous with a regime of laissez-faire and in some usages of the term with a regime of free competition.1
In an extreme example of this line of thought, one conservative on Amazon writes that “capitalism can only exist when the State exerts no influence over the market. It is impossible for a country to be capitalist and have a government that exerts control over the market, for instance via environmental regulation, minimum wage laws, etc etc etc.” One problem with this reasoning is pointed out by Dobb:
Few countries other than Britain and U.S.A. in the nineteenth century conformed at all closely to a regime of “pure individualism” of the classic Manchester type; and even Britain and U.S.A. were soon to pass out of it into an age of corporate enterprise and monopoly or quasi-monopoly, when laissez-faire as a policy has been in decline.2
Other scholars concur. Supple writes:
Indeed, in the context of modern world history, a laissez-faire economic policy seems less like an orthodoxy than a brief aberration from a norm of detailed government intervention in economic affairs.3
This is a point we shall elaborate on later. For now, let us take it for granted that capitalism with strict laissez-faire policies means that one must be willing to concede that capitalism existed only for a brief spell in the 19th century. The absurdity of this position is evident, but absurdity has never deterred defenders of capitalism! Moreover, one could easily argue that is not complete non-intervention, but some relative measure of non-intervention, that is an inherent characteristic of capitalism. In either case, those arguing at just what size or reach a state becomes capable of transmogrifying a capitalist economy into a socialist economy are wasting their time, as far as we’re concerned, for what really sets capitalism apart from previous – and future – economies, what defines it, has nothing to do with non-intervention.
After all, the state didn’t even exist for the vast majority of our history as a species, yet we don’t speak of hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists as living in capitalist societies. In antiquity, the almighty slave-owners were virtually unchecked by the power of the state – but no one would call them capitalists. Neither was the Feudal baron a capitalist merely because he was free to dispose of the products of his peasants labor as he wished.
If capitalism isn’t an economic system defined by the absence of state intervention, what is it? For Marx and those following his method, what distinguishes capitalism from previous economic formations is that for the first time in history the majority of what is produced are commodities — items produced to be sold — and that the human capacity to labor is the foremost of those commodities. In short, to quote Fine and Saad-Fihlo, “what characterises capitalism is … the purchase and sale of the workers’ capacity to labour and its use in commodity production for profit.”4 Buick and Crump offer a six-point definition of capitalism that’s more detailed, but emphasizes essentially the same thing. In their view, capitalism consists of:
1. Generalised commodity production, nearly all wealth being produced for sale on a market.
2. The investment of capital in production with a view to obtaining a monetary profit.
3. The exploitation of wage labour, the source of profit being the unpaid labour of the producers.
4. The regulation of production by the market via a competitive struggle for profits.
5. The accumulation of capital out of profits, leading to the expansion and development of the forces of production.
6. A single world economy.5
In such a view, the involvement — or non-involvement — of the state is of little consequence.
Using such a conception, we can turn to the history of capitalism — having secured our flanks against the objection that talking about state intervention and capitalism is a contradiction in terms — to see that the state played a central role in introducing, developing, expanding, and maintaining the system of wage labor, i.e. capitalism.
The state and the ‘invention’ of capitalism
In feudal society, those who worked and those who exploited had a very different relationship than those classes today. The serf toiled on the lord’s manor, handing over a portion of his production, not in money, but in kind. If the serf reaped 100 bushels, perhaps the feudal lord received 50 or 70 or however many. This was, by and large, a moneyless economy, one in which production for the market barely existed; what the serfs produced, they themselves ate for their sustenance or was eaten by the parasitic landlords. Consequently, production was for need. Eventually, however, the market economy intruded. Lords turned their fields into pastures and pushed off the small farmers. The state assisted in this process, with vast areas being closed off to peasants, the land that was once held in common being forcibly divided, and heavy punishments being imposed on those who were made homeless through this process but which didn’t find wage-labor in the cities or on other farms (vagabonds).
Later, a world market emerged. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
This “trade with the colonies,” this “open[ing] up [of] fresh ground” was accomplished by the state. The journeys of Columbus, Magellan, Cabot, Cartier, et al., were financed by Europe’s monarchs; later, the British state played an instrumental role in making that country the center of the capitalist world economy. As Supple writes,
Perhaps the most striking indication of this is the powerful role which the state played in the creation and defence of the Empire, in the extension of an international trading network of which Britain was the centre, and the regulation of commercial and imperial relations so as to benefit the domestic economy and British businessmen. This was, in fact, ‘mercantilism’ of a different sort: navigation laws which attempted to monopolize imperial trade for British and colonial business interests; which obliged colonial imports to pass through Britain; and which stipulated the use of British or colonial ships. It also meant wars which were ultimately successfully fought to expand and defend Britain’s colonial possessions and trade. If by the 1760s Britain was indeed the centre of the world’s biggest free trade area, if her trade and shipping enjoyed a worldwide dominance, if her merchants and manufacturers had privileged access to large markets in Asia and America, if she was a major entrpôt for Europe, and if, as seems likely, these developments were critical components of her ‘readiness’ for industrialisation — then the state did play an important, albeit indirect, role in the pioneer Industrial Revolution.6
Turning to Supple once again, we find that he contends that “historically, the most important way in which the state stimulated industrial growth in a capitalist setting was through its ability to create a capitalist setting in the first instance.” Sometimes this involved a monarch or a parliament legislating away age-old laws that hindered the development of capitalism, or preventing any burdensome legislation from affecting the financial and mercantile classes, but in other cases the state played a more coercive and active role in clearing away the choking vines of feudalism.
The French Revolution is the example par excellence of a bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, first rising and then victorious, decimated the reactionary aristocracy. As Soboul wrote, a capitalist transformation of French society
required that the individual laborer be free, and therefore that serfdom be abolished; it required freedom of production and hence the destruction of seigneurial monopolies like the banalities; it required the free disposal of property, and hence the suppression of primogeniture, of the feudal right of repurchase, and of the franc-fief; it demanded the formation of a unified national market, and hence the abolition of internal tolls and tariffs.7
But even as the French Bourgeoisie’s hour of the victory was rung in with the execution of its enemies by grapeshot and the guillotine, a tendency towards state ownership and intervention was evident. In the first place, the state was happy to set maximums on the price which could be charged for goods like bread — not out of any sort of Bolshevism, as some have later alleged, but as a necessary measure for keeping the ‘rabble’ in line. More dramatically, after the French Republic declared war on Old Europe, the French state pressed nearly every man who wasn’t at the front into munitions factories operated by the state. These factories might not have been capitalist enterprises, as they weren’t producing commodities for exchange. On the other hand, the discipline imposed by the overseers was identical to that being imposed on the early factory workers in England at the time. Moreover, the French soldier and his musket, sent to the front by the state, were essential for defending democracy — and as one member of the Committee of Public Safety said, “democratic government is always more favorable than the monarchy to the prosperity of commerce and merchants.”8
But however much the state did to get the ball rolling and to protect the trade on which the fledgling capitalist economy survived, it wasn’t until the 19th century that the state actively applied its lucre and energy to clearing the way for a modern economy based on wage labor and industry. These efforts of the state were so extensive and so universally applied that it is impossible to write a short narrative history of government aid to industry in the 19th century that includes each country; instead, I will point out a examples from England and America. This is in no way comprehensive — there’s a wealth of literature on the subject that can provide more details — but it does provide enough to demolish the myth that equates capitalism with laissez-faire.
Britain
Even though Britain was one of the most ‘liberal’ capitalist societies of the 19th century, with a state that did little to intervene, it is clear that the state set the stage for the development of capitalism. To Supple, recall, “the most important way in which the state stimulated industrial growth in a capitalist setting was through its ability to create a capitalist setting in the first instance.” As regards Britain, he suggests that
it is worth remembering that the very characteristics of the market environment which distinguished Britain’s position from that of the other European countries were in large part a function of state action. Thus, the whole evolution of government since the civil strife of the seventeenth century had resulted in an unmatched degree of political stability and social harmony, while the early political and administrative unification of the country helped create a relatively compact and unified market. In addition, compared with its neighbors, Britain enjoyed the benefits of a standard currency, tax and tariff system, and a sound structure of commercial law. Finally, and in some respects most significantly, the governing classes in what was still a heavily landed society were broadly sympathetic to, and indeed, representative of, the commercial and financial interests which helped transform Britain’s economic institutions and opportunities from the late seventeenth century onwards.9
At the end of the Napoleonic wars, government action consisted primarily of removing as many barriers to capitalist development as possible. In a sense, this trend towards laissez-faire paradoxically demonstrates the role of the state in the development of capitalist society; after all, laissez-faire was a policy dictated by the state, not some “natural state” that exists precisely because of the state’s non-intervention.
Still, there was some direct intervention. In 1844, the Railway Act gave the British state the option of buying out the railroads after 21 years. The state passed up on this option, but it did buy the telegraph system in 1868 and hand it over to the Post Office. Between 1892 and 1911, the telephone system was also nationalized. According to Buick and Crump, “the reason for these nationalisation measures was clear: the state, acting on behalf of the private capitalist class as a whole, bought up an industry of use to all enterprises in order to ensure that its product was made available to them on a uniform basis and prevent a particular group of private capitalists from holding the rest of the private capitalist class to ransom.”10
The British state also funded technological developments. Between 1823 and 1834, William Stanley Jevons was given over 17,000 pounds by the state to further development of his Difference Engine.11
The Factory Acts provide were one of most important examples of direct state intervention in 19th century Britain. Enacted over the entire course of the 19th century, these acts limited the number of hours workers could work in certain industries and set other rules for safety and working conditions in factories. While it is tempting to view these as an obvious attempt to improve the situation of the working class (or placate it) and to leave them at that, in an interesting debate debate by Booth and Lawrence that took place in the pages of the Review of Social Economy, Booth argued that Karl Marx viewed the laws as an effort by British capitalists to ensure that the working class was not depleted in a literal sense. (It must be remembered that the life expectancy of industrial workers in 19th century England was quite low; in 1842, the average age at death for laborers was estimated to be 15 in Liverpool and 17 in Manchester!)12 Lowering the hours of work would increase life expectancy and prevent wages from skyrocketing. Booth explains the need to impose these laws society-wide thusly:
In modern terminology, a limitation on the working day is a public good for the capitalist. If such a limitation is imposed on all capitalists, the result will be a larger and more productive supply of labor power. Without such a limitation, the working day would be excessive, threatening the labor reproduction process. No single capitalist can gain very much by voluntarily limiting the working day. The limiting of the working day for a relatively few workers would have little impact on the reproduction of the total working class population, and it is the totality of that population that determines supply conditions in the market for labor power. Moreover, if capitalists of today are unconcerned with labor supply conditions faced by capitalists in the future, then there is an absence of either a private or collective incentive to pursue limitations on the working day. Hence there is a need for state intervention.13
Lawrence disagreed (this is a debate after all) that a strategic, class-based interest for the preservation of the the working class’s ability to reproduce its labor power was the motive force behind the Factory Acts; instead, he attributed the legislation to an attempt by the largest factory owners to drive their smaller competitors out of business by increasing costs.14 Booth himself also suggested that one reason the acts managed to get passed was because the smarting aristocracy sought revenge for the the repeal of the Corn Laws, a move which benefited the factory owners (who benefited from cheaper foreign corn, as it lowered wages) while harming the landed aristocracy (who now had to compete with cheaper foreign corn).
America
In the United States in the 19th century the military played a much more aggressive role in exporting and defending American commerce than it does today, if you can believe it. In the entire period 1789 to 1993, American military power was “used” abroad 234 times.15 Contrary to the notion that the U.S. only entered the arena of imperialist struggle with the acquisition of Hawaii or the war with Spain in the 1890s, over 100 of the 234 instances of military use abroad occurred in the 19th century — and were usually undertaken in order to defend maritime commerce by combating pirates or to “defend American interests,” then as now a euphemism for protecting the property of the wealthy. Indeed, as the Secretary of the Navy said in 1853, “it is very desirable to make our navy an efficient branch of the government, both in extending and protecting commerce and trade.”16 To “extended commerce” was often obviously synonymous with rapaciousness, such as when “Commodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration, landing marines twice, and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa; he also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands with the purpose of securing facilities for commerce.”17
Domestically, the military ruthlessly exterminated native Americans, opening up the way for settlement and commerce, and defended slavery where the whip of the overseer could not reach. For instance, an escaped slave named Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston after living there for a few years. To return him to slavery, 300 soldiers and deputies escorted him to the harbor, where another 250 soldiers were there to load him on to a ship back to Georgia. (In another similar case, the Pierce administration spent 100,000 dollars — 2 million dollars in 1987 dollars — to return to slavery another escaped slave called Anthony Burn).18 These cases were both symbolic ‘shows of force,’ but the armed might of the state was there when force was really needed. During Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, two U.S. Navy ships delivered soldiers to help suppress the insurrection, though they arrived after the militia had defeated the insurgent slaves. At Harpers Ferry in 1859 Robert E. Lee led the detachment of Marines that suppressed Brown’s brave insurrection. If a larger slave rebellion had ever broken out, there is no doubt that the full force of the army would have been brought to bear. Slavery, of course, wasn’t quite synonymous with capitalist production, though the profits of it often went to northern bankers and capitalists. (See Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom for more on the link between American prosperity and democracy, on one hand, and slavery on the other.)
The military also explored and surveyed the interior of the country. The Corps of Discovery, under whose aegis the interior of the continent was traversed by U.S. Army Captain Merriwether Lewis, his partner William Clark, and their party, was commissioned in 1803 by President Jefferson. (This expedition was partially conceived with the improvement of the fur trade in mind.)19 Later expeditions sent by the government surveyed rivers and resources, dug wells, built wagon-roads, and made maps, all of which were invaluable for later settlement and for the construction of railroads.20
Once the state mapped the interior and subdued its original inhabitants, the state further effected settlement by the vast interior and the return of produce to the eastern markets through internal improvement projects. Between 1783 and 1861, government investment accounted for 70% of the total investment in canals and 30% of the investment in railroads.21 One of the largest and famous of these projects was the Erie Canal, which was funded by the state of New York. At the time it was the world’s largest canal. It opened the Great Lakes region to settlement and reduced shipping costs by 95 percent, thus making participating in the market economy feasible for hundreds of thousands of farmers. The famous National Road, or Cumberland Pike, connected the Potomac with the interior of the country. It was financed by the federal government beginning in 1806 and continuing until the late 1830s. Of course, the most famous 19th century mode of transportation was the railroad, and the benevolent hand of the state is seen here as well. Very few of the early railroads going from the seaboard to the interior were made without government aid. The government assisted railroad construction by providing large grants of land to railroad companies in exchange for some say in the routes of the rails. Between 1823 and 1869, 129 million acres were given by the government to railroad companies. (129 million acres equates to around 200,000 square miles, or an area four times as large as Alabama.)22 Beginning in the 1860s, direct financial support was also given to railroad companies. The import of governmental financing of these ventures cannot be overstated. One scholar, Carter Goodrich, questions whether without government funds the Erie Canal would’ve ever been constructed or railroads would have crossed the Appalachians. In turn, he questions whether a unified national market could have been created without state assistance.23
Broude notes that one important activity of the state was to remove “roadblocks” to commerce. Such measures were extremely inexpensive relative to their outcomes. Examples of removing roadblocks cited by Broude include clearing rivers of raft, making piers, improving harbors, and building particular roads. Broude also suggests that the state had important psychological benefits for the development of commerce.24 On one hand, it is hard to imagine that even the hardy settlers of America would brave the hostile interior without some modicum of military protection. On the other, government support for individual businesses increased investors’ confidence in a market where most businesses was young and unknown; in Pennsylvania in 1844, government was involved in 150 corporations, whether owning just a few shares or several thousand.25 Virginia had a similarly extensive system of “mixed enterprises.” Between 1790 and 1820, New York State provided loans to 48 enterprises.26
A panoply of other governmental aids to the development of American capitalism should be noted. Broude begins a list by saying “government effected a land tenure policy for the country, controlled immigration policy (conditioning the supply of labor), maintained intervention in the banking system (varied of the period), established protection of trade through tariff and patent legislation, performed the roster of services rightfully’ governmental, and represented and strengthened the particular legal framework within which Private business was organized.”27 One might also add that the state aided business through the establishment of the merchant marine; the establishment of schools, universities, and military universities where engineers were trained, and so on.
Finally, we may add that there was as lively a debate about the role of the state in the economy in the 19th century as there is now in the 21st. Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” contained the familiar claim that already industrialized nations had made it difficult for young nations like the U.S. to compete; therefore, like so many 20th century leftists in the third world, Hamilton called for trade protections, subsidies (which Hamilton preferred), and the importation of skilled laborers and modern machinery. In 1808, Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin proposed a 20 million dollar program of internal improvements. Though rejected, most of the proposed projects were eventually carried out. Presidents Madison, Monroe, and Quincy Adams were all favorable towards funding internal improvements, but were each held back by their own doubts as to the constitutionality of such measures. By the 1830s, President Jackson killed off federal funding for development. Two decades later, concern with the “malign influence” of state funding of these improvements and projects led to a backlash ably described by Goodrich:
In Pennsylvania, as Professor Hartz has pointed out, the reaction was marked in the year 1857 by the sale of the ‘Main Line’ of the Public Works to the Pennsylvania Railroad and by the adoption of a constitutional amendment forbidding either the state or local governments to invest in the stock of improvement companies. By 1860 seventeen other states had adopted similar provisions against aiding companies by at least one of the three methods of loan, subscription, or donation, although most of them did not extend the prohibitions to local authorities. … These decisions reflected widespread disillusion with government support of improvements, and particularly with the failures and financial losses in the years following the crisis of 1837, although some states like Virginia were still expanding their programs and others would do so after the Civil War.28
This heated debated is proof enough that governmental involvement in the economy was hardly incidental or unimportant. Despite these tensions, Broude concludes that “the record does indicate that at the end of the century calls for governmental aid had resulted in the holding by government of approximately 7 percent of the nation’s capital assets and the employment of approximately 4 percent of the national labor force.”29
Conclusion
Compared to the United States and Great Britain,state intervention and assistance played an even larger role in the 19th century in countries like Russia, Germany, France, and Belgium. In the 20th century the phenomenon reached grotesque new heights, with the state actually assuming the role of the entire capitalist class in countries like Stalinist Russia and its so-called “Socialist” descendants in the third world. Elsewhere the state took a more active role in suppressing the rapacity of the individual capitalist through legislation, though only because, as Marx and Engels noted in the 1840s, “a part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.” Today the “socialism” of the bourgeoisie plays the same role.
Hastily Compiled List of Sources
1. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pages 3-4.
2. Ibid.
3. Supple, “The State and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1914,” in The Industrial Revoltuion 1700-1914, edited by Carlo M. Cipolla. Volume 3 of the Fontana Economic History of Europe. Page 302.
4. Fine and Saad-Filho, Marx’s Capital. 4th Edition, 2003. Page 22.
5. Buick and Crump, State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management, 1986.
6. Supple, 314-316.
7. Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799, 1977. Page 59.
8. Robert Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, page 230.
9. Supple, 314-315.
10. Buick and Crump, 25.
11. Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the making of modern economics, page 100.
12. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1966. Page 330.
13. Booth, “Marx on State Regulation,” from the October 1978 issue of Review of Social Economy, page 142.
14. Lawrence, “A Rejoinder to Booth,” from the April 1980 issue of Review of Social Economy
15. http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
16. Carter Goodrich, Government and the economy, 1783-1861.
17. http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
18. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom.
19. Goodrich.
20. Henry W. Broude, “The Role of the State in American Economic Development, 1820-1890,” in The State in Economic Growth, edited by Aitken, 1959.
21. Goodrich, XVI.
22. Goodrich.
23. Goodrich, XVIII.
24. Broude.
25. Broude, 13.
26. Goodrich, 196.
27. Broude, 9-10.
28. Goodrich, 95.
29. Broude, 9-10.
By Schalken, on 02.18.11. Tagged with: anarchism, book review, history.
Man and Fighter is the subtitle of Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen’s biography of Karl Marx. It is also readers’ first clue that the work is something unique, something that transcends the triviality of biography. With taut prose and careful research, the authors are as capable of recounting how Marx wooed his wife as they are of charting the struggles inside of the First International. But Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen give us something more than a book that combines portraits of Marx as a man and Marx as a fighter. They show that Marx the Man and Marx the Fighter are one and the same. This, and the authors’ keen understanding of Marx’s politics and his respect for the working class, make this book a worthwhile read even 70 years after its publication and 120 years after the death of its subject.
The personal lives of revolutionaries aren’t usually of much interest — even Lenin’s personal life has largely escaped hyperanalysis — but with Marx it’s different. Generations of anarchist and bourgeois critics, perhaps despairing of any other route of attack, have painted Marx as a veritable monster. One such accusation paints Marx as a hypocrite who was contemptuous of the class he claimed to champion. The authors make it clear that such criticism has no basis in fact. Marx’s ties to the working class were real, meaningful, and went in both directions. For instance, when Marx was called before a court in Cologne in 1849, local workers gathered outside the courthouse and refused to disperse until Marx reappeared. By the same token, when police framed the Cologne branch of the Communist League, Marx worked tirelessly in defense of the accused workers. Despite Marx’s defense, seven of the eleven defendants were convicted and endured tremendous hardship in a fortress-prison. Marx afterward forever steered clear of secret organizations which endangered others. Another blow is struck against the mythical elitist Marx when the authors demonstrate time and time again Marx’s dedication to the education of the working class. Men like Willich and Bakunin after him wanted to turn the Communist League into an organization of plotters whose conspiracies would ignite the revolt of the working class, but Marx instead fought to preserve this organization and the others he belonged to as means for educating and organizing the working class. (Those who fetishize the vanguard party would do well to remember this — as would those who accuse Marx of fetishizing it). To this end he invested considerable time in lecturing, particularly on economics, of which he always was careful to speak clearly. Knowing that clear speaking wouldn’t always be enough, Marx quizzed his audience to make sure that they considered and understood the material. He did all of this even though he routinely spent the better part of his day in the reading room of the National Library! And when the publication of the French translation of Das Kapital had to be delivered to the public in installments due to the financial difficulties of the publisher, Marx remarked that this work will be more accessible to the working class in this form, and for me that consideration takes precedence of all others.
A second pair of charges hurled against Marx are even more remarkable for the fact that they completely contradict each other: on the one hand, it’s sometimes said that Marx allowed his family to languish in poverty while he diligently avoided work. On the other hand, it’s occasionally claimed that Marx and his family lived a proper Victorian life of opulence while the workers he cared so much for starved and shivered. Indeed, the authors of the volume under consideration have a good deal to say about the dire straits the Marx family found itself in when living in London. We are told that their poverty was so great that several of the children died (as was common in proletarian families of the day), meat was a rarity, and at one point Karl Marx was forced to stay indoors all winter because he had to sell his coat! Marx made a living at times by writing on foreign affairs for the capitalist press, but their interest in the matters Marx knew most about was not always long-lived. Consequently, for many years Marx’s financial security, such as it was, depended on Engels, who was forced to work a job he despised in order to ensure that his compatriot could at least count on having the merest sustenance. Nicolaievsky and his co-author make it obvious that Marx was a loving, dedicated father and husband who did his utmost to support his family. His failing, such as it was, was the inability to find work; those who fault him for this reveal their own inability to understand the misery of 19th-century England or the fact that some men, such as Marx, will not abandon their convictions for lucre (as Marx probably could’ve done by writing handsome lies).
Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen also meld the political and the personal in instances where the political implications of the personal are obvious. For instance, they demolish the undying misconception that Marx was the first communist, or even the first communist to strike out in the vein he did. Even as late as 1842 Marx vehemently denied accusations that he was a communist. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen point to Ludwig Gall as a forerunner of Marx; Gall was particularly exceptional in that he anticipated the language of the Communist Manifesto in 1835, 13 years before that seminal rallying-cry of the exploited was put to paper. In charting the personal and political development of Marx in the 30s and 40s, our authors clearly evince that Marx, far from inventing communism in his own prodigious mind, was merely the best of an entire generation of men and women who revolted against the degrading and impoverishing tendencies of capitalism.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest value of the present volume is that its authors prove that the ideas of Marx and his compatriots were not derived from some Utopian vision or eternal, unchanging sense of justice or rights, but rather from the process of attempting to answer a question they constantly posed: what will hasten the development of the working class as a revolutionary class that can smash capitalism and destroy class society once and for all?
This method is best exemplified by Marx’s stance on the various wars of his days, on which Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen provide much commentary. For Marx, the question was always which side’s victory would do the most to hasten the social revolution — and in his day this question was synonymous with asking which side would destroy more barriers to capitalist development or prevent the old barriers of feudalism from being reintroduced. This was not because Marx supported capitalism over feudalism per se, but because capitalism created the preconditions for socialist revolution. As Marx wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 21 January 1849,
We are certainly the last people to desire the rule of the bourgeoisie … but we say to the workers and the petty bourgeoisie that it is better to suffer in the contemporary bourgeois society, whose industry creates the conditions for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone society…
Accordingly, the primary criterion by which Marx judged wars in his day was whether Russia was involved. As “the great stronghold, reserve position, and reserve army of European reaction,” as Engels wrote, Marx sided with Russia’s foes in every war. When Russian advances on Istanbul in the 1850s prompted the French and British to declare war, Marx was so enthusiastic in promoting the war effort that he eagerly contributed anti-Russian commentaries to conservative newspapers and even took an interest in the anti-Russian fanatic Urquhart. Indeed, during the ’60s Marx was best known to Englishmen — the only people who remembered him — merely as an anti-Russian. When France and Austria went to war in 1859, Marx supported Austria since it was a powerful counterweight to the power of Russia. And in 1877, during the brief war between Turkey and Russia, Marx once again called on the workers’ movement to support Russia’s foe.
In wars not involving Russia, Marx applied the same principle of supporting whichever country or bloc would promote the development of capitalism and, in turn, the strengthening of the working class, the gravediggers of capitalist society. During the American Civil War, Marx enthusiastically supported the cause of the modern, capitalistic Northern states over the semi-feudal South, which was antagonistic to industrial development. This view was so pervasive within the workers’ movement that many of Marx’s comrades found themselves fighting for the North. (Ironically, American conservatives point to the presence of “Marxists” within the ranks of the Union army as evidence of the federal government’s “socialism,” even though the reason they fought for the North was precisely because only under Northern leadership could the whole of American experience real capitalist development!) Even in British cities where workers were turned out of the factories for lack of cotton from America — prevented from reaching Britain by a powerful Union blockade of Southern ports — there was nearly unanimous support for the Union war effort. Finally, during Prussia’s war with France in 1870, Marx and Engels supported Prussia since its victory would (and did) unite Germany and open the way for unified capitalist development in Germany, thus enabling the workers’ movement there to move on make more important demands, and because Prussian victory would topple Napoleon III’s regime (and did). However, once the Prussians had met their objectives and continued to press onwards into France, Marx quickly swung to the side of France — not out of a moral abhorrence for wars of conquest, but to prevent a Franco-Russian alliance that would (and in fact did) arise from a humiliating French defeat and harsh German peace terms.
Contrast this method, which saw Marx supporting powerful states against weaker ones and national oppressors against national unification movements (e.g., Austria, the oppressor of Italy, in its war against France), to the method employed by, say, the Trotskyists, who speak endlessly of the “rights” of “smaller countries,” or worse yet, of the need to respect the sovereignty of (capitalist) nations, or any of a dozen mystifications which amount to taking the side of one group of capitalists against another group of capitalists, without ever considering the interests of the working class (which, today, has no interest in supporting any war since, as capitalism already rules the entire globe, no war can serve a progressive role).
The last third or so of the book focus on Marx’s dispute with the anarchists. These chapters reiterate and amplify all of the wonderful work the authors did to demonstrate the integrity of Marx and the process by which he came to possess his political opinions. Equally important, they show that “official Anarchism” is an ideology that has no place within the workers’ movement, and that the who anarchists have been great fighters for our class — of which there were and are many — have only become such by breaking with the noxious ideas of Bakunin.
To better understand Marx’s dispute with the anarchists, we must first get a bit of history of anarchism — particularly the personal history of its greatest 19th century proponent, Bakunin — as well as the history of the Workingman’s International, which was to be the battleground between the “Marxists” and the anarchists.
Bakunin was not the first modern to be called an anarchist — that distinction belongs to Proudhon — but he was arguably the first whose anarchism was really at odds with the established capitalist society. (Whether Bakunin’s vision was incompatible with capitalism in general is debatable.) Born to nobility, Bakunin quickly renounced his heritage. Already by the 1840s he was well-known to Europeans as a voice of opposition to Tzarist absolutism. He was first sentenced to death by Saxony for his part in the 1849 risings in Dresden. He was sentenced to death for a second time by Austria, whereupon he was handed over to the Russians where he served five years in solitary confinement.
Marx and Bakunin were already familiar with each other by 1844. The two evidently respected each other’s abilities and tread a common path, but there conceptions of revolution were inimical. Bakunin saw revolution as a great sweeping away while Marx, of course, saw it as growing from the foundations of the present society. Accordingly, Bakunin criticized Marx for teaching “paralyzing theory” to the working class in 1848.
The next misstep was Marx’s. In 1848, Marx printed a letter from Polish radicals charging that Bakunin was a Russian agent. Marx was acting in good faith, but was duped. He publicly retracted the letter later, and subsequently defended Bakunin when a similar smear was made a few years later, but the damage was already done. Still, Marx and Bakunin both were men who would not let personal disputes stand in the way of working for a common cause. Unfortunately, the two — and their factions — did not have a common cause, or at least a common vision of how that cause was best served.
The International Workingmen’s Association — afterward known as the First International — was a mass organization founded in the middle of the 1860s which brought together a wide spectrum of groups within the workers’ movement. English members saw the organization as tool to aid strikes by discouraging foreign scabbing. On the other hand, the French saw it as a way of furthering reforms beneficial to artisans and went so far as to repudiate strikes! Because its goal was to organize all workers, this incoherence was to be expected. By 1869, the First International had 800,000 members on every inhabited continent.
Marx joined in 1864 though he realized its composition and leadership were not ideal. Even so, he felt that its ties to the working class were real enough that he was obligated to join. He was soon elected to the first committee, for which he wrote the inaugural address, which reads thusly: “The capture of political power has become the great duty of the working class.” Marx quickly became leading member and quite busy. He worked to keep disparate factions united, even though he privately had many criticisms of them. At the same time, he wouldn’t budge on the class character of the international — he was happy to see Mazzini and other Italians forced out after their attempts to dilute the class character of the international by promoting nationalistic schemes.
Like Marx, Bakunin was an early member of the First International. However, unlike Marx, Bakunin rejected the idea that the proletariat was capable of organizing and acting as a class. Instead, like the Leninists that modern anarchists denigrate while venerating Bakunin, Bakunin was firmly attached to the notion that the revolution would be effected by heroic actions, undertaken by shadowy conspiracies, that would ignite the revolution. Accordingly, Bakunin told Marx he would agitate for international in Italy, but upon arrival promptly founded a society society. Meuron, who joined Bakunin’s next secret society in Switzerland, saw these conspiracies as a means for protecting the International from ambitious, scheming men who craved power and success more than revolution. As the authors point out, Meuron like Bakunin could not conceive of a large, public organization organized in a way that wasn’t a “cockpit” for ambitious men. Like the anarchist caricature of Lenin, Bakunin and his compatriots had an incredibly low regard for the ability of the working class to organize itself. In this they were truly the first vanguardists.
The best example of the elitist, anti-proletarian attitudes of the anarchists is provided by Bakunin’s association with a young Russian emigre named Nechaiev. An extract from Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen’s book detailing this affair will ably tell this story and give readers a delightful taste of how the authors write.
The Nechaiev affair plays such an important role in the history of the International, or rather in the history of its decline, that it deserves to be recounted at some length.
Nechaiev was the son of a servant in a small Russian provincial town. He put to such good use the few free hours that his work as a messenger in the office of a factory left him that he succeeded in passing his examinations as an elementary school teacher. He starved and scraped until he had saved enough money to go to St. Petersburg, where he had himself entered as an external student at the university. In his first winter term, in 1868, he entered the student movement, in which his energy and the radical nature of his views soon earned him prominence. But that was not enough for him. He wanted to be foremost, and in order to enhance his reputation as a revolutionary he started inventing stories of his adventurous past. First he said he had been a prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Then he added an account of his daring escape. The majority of his listeners accepted all this unquestioningly, and were filled with indignation at the stories he told of his treatment by the prison warders, and a students’ meeting was actually called and a delegation actually approached the university authorities. Nevertheless there were some who doubted. Some of the details of Nechaiev’s prison experiences sounded improbable to the more experienced among his colleagues, and the officials declared that Nechaiev had never been under arrest.
Before this fact had been established, however, Nechaiev illegally went abroad to make contact with the Russian émigré leaders. He reached Geneva in March, 1869, and made the acquaintance of Herzen and Ogarev, the patriarchs of the ‘emigration,’ as well as of the representatives of the younger generation of refugees. He made an extraordinary impression upon them all. Herzen, who had grown old, tired and sceptical, said that Nechaiev went to one’s head like absinthe. But the young student was not satisfied with praise and honour. He added details of his own. He said that Russia was on the eve of a tremendous revolutionary outbreak, which was being prepared by a widespread secret society. Of this society he was a delegate. And he repeated the story of his imprisonment and flight. In Geneva also there were a few people who refused to be taken in so easily. A number of émigrés had been prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress themselves and knew how impossible it was to escape, and letters came from St. Petersburg from people who ought to have known, saying that the secret society did not exist, or at any rate gave not the slightest sign of its existence. But those who regarded Nechaiev with suspicion belonged to groups who were hostile to Bakunin. It was these who not long afterwards formed a ‘Russian section’ of the International and made Marx their representative on the General Council. This, however, cannot have been the deciding factor in causing Bakunin to ignore their warnings. He knew the Peter and Paul Fortress himself and knew–could not possibly have helped knowing–that Nechaiev was a liar. But what did it matter? Lies could be useful in revolutionising the slothful, and after all this Nechaiev was a marvellous fellow. Bakunin wrote a regular panegyric about him in a letter to Guillaume, describing him as ‘one of those young fanatics who hesitate at nothing and fear nothing and recognise as a principle that many are bound to perish at the hands of the Government but that one must not rest an instant until the people has risen. They are admirable, these young fanatics–believers without God and heroes without phrases!’ Bakunin and Nechaiev became fast friends.
Bakunin did not apparently formally admit Nechaiev to his secret society. The idea of his association with Nechaiev being surveyed by its otherwise fully initiated members was an uncomfortable one to him. The Bakunin—Nechaiev society was a quite intimate super-secret society, such as the old conspirator loved. Its object was the revolutionising of Russia.
In the spring and summer of 1869 Bakunin wrote as many as ten pamphlets and proclamations, and Nechaiev had them printed. Among them was the subsequently famous Revolutionary Catechism, which was intended to be a reply to the question of what were the best ways and means of hastening the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. The answer was to be found by the consistent application of two principles. The first was ‘the end justifies the means’ and the second was ‘the worse, the better.’ Everything–and by that Bakunin meant every thing without any exception whatever–that promoted the revolution was permissible and everything that hindered it was a crime. The revolutionary must concentrate on one aim, i.e. destruction. ‘There is only one science for the revolutionary, the science of destruction. Day and night he must have but one thing before his eyes–destruction.’ That was Bakunin’s own summary of the duties of a revolutionary. Within the revolutionary organisation the strictest centralisation and the most rigorous discipline must prevail, and the members must be completely subordinate to their leaders. The object of this organisation was ‘to use all the means in its power to intensify and spread suffering and evil, which must end by driving the people to revolt.’ The Catechism even defended terrorism, which, however, it did not recommend against the worst tyrants, because the longer such tyrants were allowed to rage the better it would be for the revolutionising of the people.
Towards the end of the summer of 1869 Nechaiev travelled illegally to Russia, taking with him a mandate from the ‘Central Committee of the European Revolutionary Alliance,’written and signed by Bakunin, recommending him as a reliable delegate of that organisation. Bakunin had actually had a special stamp prepared, with the words: ‘Office of the foreign agents of the Russian revolutionary society Narodnaia Rasprava.’
Nechaiev remained in Russia for more than three months. He succeeded in forming an organisation based on, or alleged to be based on, the Revolutionary Catechism. Revolutionary-minded young men were not so very difficult to find, and his letter of recommendation, signed by Bakunin, whose name was universally honoured, earned him the greatest respect. He chose Moscow as his centre and it was not long before he had gathered a group about him. Had he assigned it practical aims and objects, its fate would have been the usual fate of such organisations in Russia. It would eventually have been discovered and dissolved by the police, but two or three new groups would have arisen to take its place. To Nechaiev,however, that would have appeared an idle pastime. He wished his followers to believe that there was a secret revolutionary committee which they must unconditionally obey, and,true to the injunctions of the Catechism, he used every means that tended to serve his aim. Once, for instance, he persuaded an officer he knew to pose as a supervisory party official sent from the secret headquarters on special duty. That ruse might pass at a pinch. But Nechaiev did not shrink from even cruder mystifications, so crude that he ended by perplexing some of his own followers. Finally a student named Ivanov announced to other members of the group that he no longer believed in the existence of any committee, that Nechaiev was lying to them and that he wished to have nothing more to do with him. Nechaiev decided that the ‘criminal’ must die. He succeeded in persuading the rest of his followers that Ivanov was a traitor and that only his death could save them. On November 29, 1869, they lured Ivanov to a dark corner of a park and murdered him. Ivanov defended himself desperately and bit Nechaiev’s hand to the bone as he was strangling him with a shawl. Nechaiev bore the scar for the rest of his life! The murderers were soon discovered and arrested, and only Nechaiev succeeded in escaping abroad.
Detailed reports of Ivanov’s murder appeared in the papers, and the crime was remembered for many years. It armed the Russian revolutionaries against Nechaiev-like methods.
Bakunin knew the whole story in detail, but it only enhanced Nechaiev’s reputation in his eyes. On learning that Nechaiev had arrived in Geneva–he was living at Locarno at the time–he leapt so high with joy that he nearly broke his old skull against the ceiling, as he wrote to Ogarev. He invited Nechaiev to Locarno, looked after him and was his friend as before. ‘This is the kind of organisation of which I have dreamed and of which I go on dreaming,’ he wrote to his friend Richard. ‘It is the kind of organisation I wanted to see among you.’ At this time Bakunin had already started his struggle against the General Council of the International on the ground of its ‘dictatorial arrogance.’
To the same period there belongs the incident which, apart from the other reasons, led directly to Bakunin’s expulsion from the International. His financial position had always been precarious, but in the autumn of 1869 he was in particularly desperate straits. Through some Russian students who were followers of his he was put into touch with a publisher who offered him 1,200 roubles–far more than the author himself ever got for it–for translating Marx’s Capital. Bakunin accepted the offer gladly and received an advance of 300 roubles. He did not show himself to be in any hurry to complete the task, however, and three months later he had only done sufficient to fill thirty-two printed pages. He readily let himself be convinced by Nechaiev that he had more important matters to fill his time and that he belonged to the revolution and must live for the revolution only. So he laid the work aside and gave Nechaiev full authority to come to an arrangement with the publisher. Nechaiev set about this task in an inimitable manner. It was impossible for Bakunin to communicate directly with the publisher himself on account of the police, and a student named Liubavin had undertaken to do so on his behalf. The contract had been formally made out in Liubavin’s name and in the publisher’s books Liubavin was nominally liable for the 300 roubles’ advance. One day Liubavin received a letter bearing the stamp of Nechaiev’s organisation. Its most remarkable passages are quoted below:
‘DEAR SIR, –On behalf of the bureau I have the honour to write to you as follows. We have received from the committee in Russia a letter which refers among other things to you. It states: “It has come to the knowledge of the committee that a few young gentlemen, dilettanti Liberals, living abroad, are beginning to exploit the knowledge and energy of certain people known to us, taking advantage of their hard-pressed financial straits. Valuable personalities, forced by these dilettante exploiters to work for a day-labourer’s hire, are thereby deprived of the possibility of working for the liberation of mankind. Thus a certain Liubavin has given the celebrated Bakunin the task of translating a book by Marx, and, exploiting his financial distress just like a real exploiting bourgeois, has given him an advance and now insists on the work being completed. Bakunin, delivered in this manner to the mercy of young Liubavin, who is so concerned about the enlightenment of Russia, but only by the work of others, is prevented from being able to work for the supremely important cause of the Russian people, for which he is indispensable. How the behaviour of Liubavin and others like him conflicts with the cause of the freedom of the people and how contemptible, bourgeois and immoral their behaviour is compared with that of those they employ and how little it differs from the practices of the police must be clear to every decent person.
‘”The committee entrusts the foreign bureau to inform Liubavin:
‘”(1) That if he and parasites like him are of the opinion that the translation of Capital is so important to the Russian people at the present time they should pay for it out of their own pocket instead of studying chemistry and preparing themselves for fat professorships in the pay of the state…
‘”(2) It must immediately inform Bakunin that in accordance with the decision of the Russian revolutionary committee he is exempt from any moral duty to continue with the work of translation…”
‘Convinced that you understand, we request you, dear sir, not to place us in the unpleasant position of being compelled to resort to less civilised measures…
‘AMSKIY,
‘Secretary to the Bureau.’
Bakunin subsequently stoutly denied that he knew anything of the contents of this letter, and there is every reason to believe him. But when Liubavin sent him a letter indignantly protesting against these threats, Bakunin, instead of talking to Nechaiev about it, for he must have guessed who was behind it all, took occasion to be offended at Liubavin’s intelligibly not very courteous tone. He wrote to Liubavin that he proposed to sever relations with him, that he would not continue the translation and would repay the advance. He never did repay the advance and must have known that he would never be able to do so.
In Nechaiev’s opinion this species of blackmail was not only permissible to a revolutionary but was actually demanded of him. At every opportunity he threatened denunciation or the use of force, and stole his opponents’ letters in order to be able to compromise them with the police. He shrank at nothing. He caused revolutionary appeals to be sent to one of his greatest enemies, a student named Negrescul, who was being kept under police observation, and, as Nechaiev expected, the material fell into police hands and Negrescul was arrested. He succumbed to tuberculosis in prison and died a few months after his release.
Bakunin knew what Nechaiev was capable of, as many others did by this time, but he remained loyal to him as before. Not till Nechaiev actually started threatening people whom Bakunin held dear–Herzen’s daughter for instance–did Bakunin raise his voice against him. The final impulse that caused Bakunin to break with him seems to have been provided by Nechaiev’s plan to form a gang for the specific purpose of robbing wealthy tourists in Switzerland. He even tried to force Ogarev’s stepson to join him, whereupon Bakunin protested. At that Nechaiev appropriated a strongbox of Bakunin’s containing correspondence, secret papers, and the statutes of his revolutionary organisations–including the original manuscript of the Catechism–and threatened Bakunin with publication should he take any steps against him.
That was the end of Bakunin’s friendship with Nechaiev. Bakunin was horrified at the practical conclusions that Nechaiev drew from principles that he himself had helped him to formulate. The story that Nechaiev told some of his acquaintances, namely, that when he first came abroad he was an ‘unspoiled, good and honourable youth’ and that it was Bakunin who corrupted him, was, of course, not true. Nechaiev had started his mystifications in Russia before his first journey abroad. But Bakunin not only made no attempt to counter-act Nechaiev’s inclinations, he actually encouraged them by giving them a kind of theoretical foundation. Their quarrel is not sufficient to obliterate the fact that Nechaiev was very strongly influenced by Bakunin and that it was Bakunin himself who evolved the theory by which all things were permitted.
Not much more needs be said about Nechaiev’s further career. He lived two more years abroad, First in London, then in Paris and finally in Switzerland. He published more revolutionary literature and threatened and blackmailed as before. Bakunin refused to have anything more to do with him and was so embittered against him that he would have liked to denounce him as a ‘homicidal maniac, a dangerous and criminal lunatic, whom it was necessary to avoid.’ Nechaiev was finally betrayed by a Polish émigré in the service of the police. He was arrested in Zurich in the middle of August, 1872, and repatriated to Russia as a common criminal. On January 8, 1873, he was condemned to twenty years’ hard labour in the mines of Siberia. He was not sent to Siberia, however, but confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Such was his power over people that he actually succeeded in winning over the soldiers who kept guard over him, and they helped to put him in touch with revolutionaries outside. He devised a plan for seizing the fortress during a visit of the Tsar’s, but he was betrayed by one of his fellow-prisoners and transferred to severe solitary confinement. He died of scurvy on November 21, 1882.
Faced with the obvious association of the bandit Nechaiev and Bakunin, a leading figure in the International, as well as the Anarchists’ unwillingness to put the interests of the working class, though it often meant supporting the development of capitalism, before insurrectionist conspiracies, Marx’s decision that it was necessary to purge the international of Bakunin. The authors carefully defend this.
In many ways, this was a fight Bakunin himself had begun a few years before. In 1869 Bakunin and his followers tried to have the First International’s council transferred from London (where Marx lived) to Geneva (where the anarchists usually resided). But by 1871 or ’72 a tremendous waning of the International’s strength prepared the way for bitterest infighting. Jacobin emigres from France revived Bakunin’s old claims that Marx was authoritarian, a pan-German, or, even more unscrupulously, they revived the bourgeois press’s claims that he swindled workers or was a secret servant of Bismarck. The English section, increasingly conservative, felt entitled to their own regional council, whereas previously the General Council, on which Marx served, and which was based in London, had served this role. Finally, Bakunin and some of his followers were incensed at the growing importance of Germany within the European workers’ movement. Seizing upon all of these tensions, Bakunin — who had already declared his intention of conquering the International by taking down Marx’s weaker factional supporters — decided to use local autonomy as his rallying cry. Marx and the General Council, on the other hand, sought more centralization, in order to combat Bakunin’s incessant plotting and the increasingly fractious nature of the International.
After much wrangling, a congress of the 1st International decided to expand the purview of the General Council, to move the General Council to New York (where Marx would not be able to follow it, which meant this measure was heartily supported by the Anarchists — and which demonstrates, for the umpteenth time, that Marx was no power-seeking authoritarian), and, in the end, to expel Bakunin. Marx’s faction received support from the Germans, Swiss, and Americans (who were mostly German emigres), while Bakunin’s faction received its support from the Spanish, French, and the conservative English, whose demands for local autonomy meshed up with the hypocritical but tactical stance of Bakunin (who, as we saw before, was not hostile to the most intense centralization, even going so far as to invent centralized bodies that did not exist).
Once again demonstrating a keen understanding of the personal and political, Maenchen-Helfen and Nicolaievsky suggest that Bakunin’s contempt for the ability of the working class to self-organized stemmed from his focus on the periphery of capitalist Europe: “the differences between Marx and Bakunin boiled down to the differences between the historical tasks necessarily confronting the proletariat in countries in which capitalism was fully developed and the illusions to which the semi- and demi-semi-proletarians living in countries in which capitalist development was only just beginning were equally necessarily subject.”
In the end, then, our brave authors forever smash the notion that Marx unfairly prosecuted Bakunin or that some personal agenda was at work in their dispute. They also clearly demonstrate that Marx was deeply committed to fighting alongside the working class, rather than working outside of it as a conspirator who regarded the class as an inert powder-keg waiting for its spark. Perhaps the best summary of Marx’s role in the workers’ movement is offered by a passage of Engels’s which the authors cite:
By his theoretical and practical work Marx has acquired such a position that the best people in the workers’ movements in the various countries have full confidence in him. They turn to him for advice at decisive moments, and generally find that his advice is best. … but any attempt to influence people against their will would only do harm and destroy the old trust that survives from the time of the International. In any case, we have too much experience in revolutionary matters to attempt anything of the sort. It is not Marx who imposes his opinions, much less his will, upon the people, but it is they who come to him.
Under the weight of anarchist criticisms, one might dismiss this as vapid hagiography from a committed friend. Thanks to the work of Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, we instead see that this portrayal is true. In reminding us of Marx’s respect for the capacity of the working class, as well as his dedication to basing his the interests of the working class rather than abstract principles or morality and justice, their work is not only an antidote to Official Anarchism’s distortion of history, but also to the lies of Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and all the other phony followers of Marx.
Karl Marx: Man and Fighter by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen is available for free download at archive.org.
By Schalken, on 11.29.10. Tagged with: human nature.
From a letter published in the November 1912 issue of International Socialist Review, we have an interesting and unusual rebuttal to the age-old claim that socialism is contrary to “human nature” (which seems to have arisen as a mere inversion of the claims of men like Hobbes and Hume, who argued that human nature is the basis of capitalist society and the capitalist state).
I protest. I hate to do it when so good a comrade as Robert Rives La Monte says so, but if I don’t it will be Frank Bohn and Big Bill who will admit next that we will change human nature before we get Socialism. The first law of nature, human and otherwise, is self-preservation, and it is that law that will force the workers to co-operate. It is natural, likewise, for the human family to co-operate. It is natural, likewise, for the human family to co-operate–self preservation made it so–until too much power was granted to some individuals in early in the days of cooperation and he headed the list of individuals, a list which is doomed to end with Rockefeller. Take another view of it and see if your mind does not conclude that the nature of the workers is to co-operate. Is it not a worker who always stands ready to assist, to the extent of his power, another worker who needs assistance? His heart is soft, too soft for his own welfare, and he is much concerned about Rockefeller when the Social Revolution occurs. Co-operation means brotherhood and the workers are naturally of a brotherly nature. When they strive one against the other the fault lies in the teaching of the capitalist system and not in the nature of the men and women who oppose one another. Consider the scab. Does he scab because he loves to scab? Give him all he desires and then ask him to scab, and would he? No. If we change human nature we will abolish the law of self-preservation and without that law we would not have Socialism. In fact, we would not need Socialism.
If you want to see it in context, here’s a link to the page on Google Books.
Monthly Review’s Crisis of Capitalism
As the worldwide economic crisis exploded onto the front pages in late 2008, Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster responded by reissuing five essays that had originally appeared in the pages of Monthly Review in the few years prior to 2008. The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences collects these essays and adds an introduction and a concluding chapter written specifically for this volume.
Given that most chapters originally appeared as self-contained essays written months apart from each other, it’s no surprise that each one covers the same ground. Every essay begins with the authors trotting out their intellectual predecessors, namely Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Fred Magdoff’s father Harry Magdoff. (This isn’t just filial piety – Sweezy and Magdoff have been sounding the alarm about capitalism’s turn to finance and debt since the 70s. Still, citing your sources and noting their prescience comes to look like hagiography when you do it every twenty pages.) Magdoff and Foster then invariably turn to explaining the causes of the crisis. Here especially the format of the book fails readers, since the authors chart the genealogy of the crisis six times in brief rather than once in depth. To prove their arguments, each article then throws a few graphs at you. Most essays then conclude with a reminder of the intractability of the crisis facing capitalism. Thus, while each chapter is individually satisfying – if short – the book as a whole is redundant, with each chapter reading like a variation of the one preceding it. This might compromise the quality of the book as a product or piece of literature, but this tedious exposition doesn’t diminish the worth of the authors’ thesis.
For Magdoff and Foster, the ultimate cause of the crisis can be summarized as follows: in the modern era of capitalism, the economy is dominated by monopolies. Under monopoly capitalism, price warfare has disappeared and monopolies more or less tacitly agree to fixed prices, with the actual competition taking place in advertising and the “sales effort.” Consequently, greater profits are realized. In fact, the profits are too great to reinvest back into production because supply already exceeds demand and the infrastructure of the modern economy has already been developed. When such a situation arises, the economy is said to be “stagnant.” The world avoided an earlier onset of stagnation thanks to the advent of the automobile and the new markets it entailed, the necessity of rebuilding a world literally destroyed by the Second World War (what better way to increase demand?). Moreover, the initial profitability of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sectors was a counterweight to any tendencies towards stagnation. But this profitability of the FIRE sector is a double-edged sword. The paper claims of the FIRE sector are meant to reflect real investment in factories and the like, but as the real economy hit a brick wall in the 70s there were even fewer investment opportunities in the real economy. This led bourgeoisie to turn the FIRE sector more greedily than ever – but it also meant that the FIRE sector would have to be divorced from the stagnant real economy if it was to remain profitable. Now any lack of confidence in the soundness of the foundations of the FIRE sector could lead to economic disaster. Each time the FIRE sector’s bubble threatened to burst, the bourgeoisie averted disaster by borrowing more and increasing profitability by holding down the wages of workers, who were in turn themselves forced to turn to debt as the only means of maintaining their standard of living (which, of course, was quite profitable for the FIRE sector). But by 2007 and 2008, led by the collapse of the mortgage bubble, the whole rotten edifice finally collapsed.
To back up this history, Magdoff and Foster offer some convincing proofs of capitalism’s increasing reliance on the FIRE sector. For instance, they point out that the share of financial profit as part of the the total domestic profit rose from about 16% in 1965 to almost 40% in 2007. Similarly, the ratio of total debt to GDP went from about 1.5 to 1 in 1970 to 47.7 to 13.8 in 2007. In the financial sector alone, this ratio went from 0.1 to 1 to 16.0 to 13.8, which was the largest increase of any sector. Household debt increased from 40% of the GDP in 1960 to 100% of the GDP in 2007, in large part due to the fact that wages in real dollars haven’t risen since 1972 while consumer spending has increased greatly. (This disparity between debt and income led to the mortgage crisis.) Finally, the precariousness of this situation is demonstrated by the fact that corporations held 600 billion dollars in savings, but total investment between 1986 and 2006 only once reached the average of the years 1960-1979. Clearly, the tremendous profits of these corporations don’t correspond to anything in the ‘real’ economy.
Now, given the fact that the laws of capitalist production have forced the bourgeoisie to turn to debt, Magdoff and Foster reject the idea that banking reforms and the like can accomplish anything. Against the whining liberals who belief that all that’s necessary is to force the capitalists back to investing in the “real” economy, Magdoff and Foster argue that the only reason capital turned to finance in the first place is because investment in the ‘real economy’ was untenable. No legislation can change this.
In looking at speculation and the reliance on debt as the effects of a deeper crisis in capitalist production, rather than the causes of the crisis itself, the authors join the ranks of the Marxists (and others) who point to inescapable contradictions in the base of the capitalist economy (e.g., tendency for the rate of profit to fall, overproduction, or the loss of extra-capitalist markets, etc.) as the root causes of the periodic crises that throw hundreds of millions of workers into ever-increasing misery.
The Crisis of Monthly Review’s Conception of Capitalism
In passing, it’s worthwhile to point out what I see as the most unsatisfactory aspects of Magdoff and Foster’s explanation: the stagnation thesis. This is a concept that the authors acknowledge came from Keynes and his student Hasen, so to cast doubt on it doesn’t mean to cast doubt on the work of Marx in the 1800s or those who built on the foundations of his piercing investigations of political economy.
Stagnation, as Magdoff and Foster explain it, appears to be a special kind of overproduction. At any rate, stagnation doesn’t bankrupt the capitalists as overproduction did in the past; on the contrary, it merely deprive him of the opportunity to reinvest his capital (which, because of the supposed monopolistic nature of capitalism, is quite large indeed). That this is a problem according to the stagnation thesis demonstrates (at least to my mind) the problematic nature of the stagnation thesis. According to Marx and those who have followed him in investigating capitalism objectively, competition compels capitalists to return their profits to the sphere of production as they continuously upgrade their production capabilities and so on, in order to sell lower than their competitors. But according to the stagnation thesis, competition of this kind is a thing of the past. Why, then, does it matter if capitalists cannot invest their money back into production? Why wouldn’t they be content to consume these profits unproductively (as we well know they can)? What, other than greed, compels them to increase their capital?
Now, it may be that my understanding of capitalism is wrong and this isn’t an issue; and it may be the case that Baran and Sweezy and their successors explain this in their other works. But it also appears to be the case that Sweezy and Baran had an ulterior motive for the stagnation thesis: to argue that “capitalism” was no longer able to develop the productive forces of society, while third world “socialism” was, as evidenced by the great industrial advancements in Russia, China, and so on. Whatever the statistical merits of this argument, it missed the point that economic development is the prerequisite of socialism, not its goal. The very fact that these regimes were just then imposing, on a greatly accelerated scale, the same drive towards wage labor that the west experienced in the 1700s and 1800s was testament to their capitalist character. The forced relocation of Romanian peasants to industrial cities, the Chinese attempt to modernize overnight with the “Great Leap Forward,” and the Soviet cult of Stakhanovism are all examples of this developmentalist, capitalist character. This association of Socialism with economic development was the essence of the Stalinist counter-revolution, and explains why “Marxism-Leninism” (i.e, Stalinism) was a force to be reckoned with, if not a prevailing power, in virtually every underdeveloped country in the world. For a more serious exposition of this argument, specifically as it relates to the work of Baran and Sweezy, see The Exploits of University Marxism. For a more general consideration of the misidentification of Marxism with developmentalist state capitalism from the perspective of several bourgeois authors (even some of them recognized that Stalinism had nothing to do with Marxism!), see The Marxian Revolutionary Idea by Tucker, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? by von Laue, and Daniels’s introduction to A Documentary History of Communism.
At any rate, it seems that the stagnation theory at best is inessential to the core of Magdoff and Foster’s work, which demonstrates the increasing importance of debt in the capitalist economy – something one can explain by factors other than overproduction (such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall or overproduction).
The Crisis of Monthly Review’s Politics
Given that Foster and Magdoff see the crisis as a symptom of capitalism’s contradictions rather than the poisonous fruit of the irresponsible behavior of a few bankers, it seems logical that Foster and Magdoff would reject any suggestions that reforms can overcome this crisis.
Not so.
While the authors do occasionally point to a vaguely-defined socialism here and there as the only solution, elsewhere they claim that reforms – if big enough – actually can overcome capitalism’s internal contradictions. In effect, the authors fall prey to the delusion that “reform is revolution, and vice versa.”
In fact, Magdoff and Foster explicitly state that the working class can end the crisis while working “within in the system”:
The only thing that conceivably done within the system to stabilize the economy, Sweezy stated at Harvard in 1994, would be greatly to expand civilian state spending in ways that genuinely benefited the population; and to carry out a truly radical redistribution of income and wealth of the kind “that Joseph Kennedy, the founder of the Kennedy dynasty” referred to “in the middle of the Great Depression, when things looked bleakest” – indicating “that he would gladly give up half of his fortune if he could be sure the other half would be safe.” Neither of these radical proposals of course is on the agenda at present, and the nature of capitalism is such that if a crisis ever led to their adoption, every attempt would be made by the vested interest to repeal such measures the moment the crisis had passed.
In praising this explicitly conservative call to reform, Magdoff and Foster not only abandon Marx and Engels’s time-tested warning that “a part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society” but also the appearance of being able to comprehend the simplest of sentences. Here we have a nadir in the execrable history of leftism; past generations of leftists naively took bad men at their word; Magdoff, Sweezy, and Foster can’t even do that much!
Now, if the Monthly Review cadre interprets capitalists’ explicit calls to defend the status quo as “radical,” then it’s no surprise that their suggested course of action amounts to pallid reformism. Indeed, our authors insist that we need a “mass social and economic upsurge, such as in the latter half of the 1930s, including the revival of unions and mass social movements of all kinds — using the power for change granted to the people in the Constitution; even going so far as to the threaten the current duopoly of the two-party system.”
Thus, amid such bold prescriptions as “threatening the current duopoly of the two-party system” – what Bolsheviks! – Magdoff and Foster call for a return to the Union building of the 1930s, which was largely a legally mandated, government-imposed response to working class struggle exploding onto the streets in 1933 and 1934. And at the head of this challenge that Magdoff and Foster envision are the union and “social movement” activists who are charged with making “the larger public … see through this deception” of austerity and attacks on wages. Of course, Magdoff and Foster should have known – as we’ve since seen – that the unions can’t be counted on to do anything more than muster up a bit of harsh invective as they blame the crisis on the “greed” and the failings of Wall Street and Congress rather than the immutable laws of capitalist production. Neither can they be counted on to fight back against attacks on wages. Far from it!
Elsewhere, Magdoff and Foster call for “massive class struggle” to increase government spending and unstintingly praise the social spending of the New Deal. However, they themselves point out that civilian government has increased from its New Deal levels: civilian government purchases totaled 13.3% of the GDP in 1939, but from 1960 to 2008 the average was around 13.7%. All of this without even the slightest palliative effects! An even more important objection must be made: even if government spending were to double or triple, capitalism, as a system of production in which value is created by the exploitation of wage labor in the production of commodities, would remain unaffected; and as capitalism would remain regnant, all of the tendencies towards crisis and collapse that are inherent in any economy based on wage labor and commodity production would persist unchanged.
Conclusion
Near the end of the book the authors remind readers that political economy once consisted of “splendid tournaments” in which economists represented different classes struggling for supremacy. Today the bourgeoisie reigns supreme, but economics is still used as a weapon in the fights between different sections of the bourgeoisie and between the bourgeoisie and the working class. If the work of Magdoff and Foster can be likened to participants in such a “splendid tournament,” they should be seen as fighters in a frenzied melee: for every blow the authors strike against the bourgeoisie with their lance of economic analysis, another blow is struck against the working class with their mace of political recommendations. The authors insistence that crises are inherent in the capitalist mode of production is overshadowed by their insistence that class struggle take the form of reinvigorating the bourgeois unions and confining political action to the realm of bourgeois elections. In the end, their economics might open the eyes of the working class, but their politics will never lead the working class to break its chains.
Right now 33 Chilean miners are entombed 2,3000 feet below the earth in 540-square-foot cavern. At 85 degrees Fahrenheit, this cavern is undoubtedly the closest thing to the Christian Hell on this Earth. Unfortunately, it may take as long as four months to rescue the men.
Depending on your capacity to endure small, heated spaces for months at a time, you may judge these miners are either luckier or worse-off than many other miners, since this is just one of a string of often-deadly accidents to strike the mining sector in the last few years. Even in the U.S., where mining is a relatively safe occupation, and where mining is safer than elsewhere, a number of heart-wrenching disasters have killed dozens of miners in the last five years:
- 2006: At Darby Mine No. 1 in Kentucky, a methane explosion killed five miners. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) determined the root cause of the explosion was management’s failure to
ensure that prudent seal construction measures were utilized. 1
- 2006: At Aracoma Alma Mine No. 1 in West Virginia, smoke from a conveyor belt that caught on fire killed two miners and injured ten more. In 2009, Aracoma Coal Company pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges related to the accident and was ordered to pay a total of 4.2 million dollars in fines. The widow of one of the dead miners said that
executives much farther up the line expected the Alma Mine to emphasize production over the safety of the coal miners inside. 2
- 2006: At the Sago Mine in West Virginia, an explosion killed 12 miners and left another miner with life-threatening injuries; his partial recovery took several months. The MSHA later determined that explosion was caused by transfer of energy from a lightning strike to an abandoned pump cable that should have been removed, which then ignited the mine’s unmonitored methane. The seals used to separate areas were also inadequate and unable to withstand the explosion.3
- 2007: At the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, six miners were trapped by the mine’s collapse. Three men were killed in a rescue attempt. The miners were never recovered. Federal officials determined that the mine was
doomed by its owner’s demands that even the pillars that supported the mine be aggressively mined for coal. During the crisis, mine owner Bob Murray alternated between self-aggrandizing media interviews and private meetings with the miners’ families in which he made wives and children cry by yelling and pinning the blame on unions and the media.4
- 2010: At the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, an explosion killed 29 miners. In the month before the accident, the mine was cited for no less than 50 safety violations — twelve of which pertained to the ventilation of the mine’s methane. The CEO of the company that owned the mine described mining fatalities as
unfortunately an inevitable part of the mining process even though his company has long had a record as being exceptionally dangerous to work for.5
All of these mine accidents, from West Virginia to Chile to China (where thousands of miners die ever year), have one thing in common: they were avoidable. In each instance, the inherently dangerous work of mining was made more dangerous by the mine operators’ decisions put profit before safety. But this decision isn’t only made by mine operators. Across the world, workers in every industry needlessly die on the job. The only difference is that miners die en masse.
Is this forsaking of safety for the sake of profit a result of insatiable greed overriding human decency? Both left and right agree there’s no need to look any further for an explanation. For conservatives, it’s man’s nature to be greedy, even to the point where he’ll sacrifice his fellows for his own gain, and nothing can be done about it apart from avoiding greed’s deadly consequences by becoming a capitalist yourself. Liberals, on the other hand, merely modify this position and posit that some capitalists are frightfully greedy and that all will be better when more upstanding capitalists are found (the message behind the Anti-BP movement and hokey business school initiatives) or when the greed is reined in by regulation. Left and right, then, are united in viewing the problem as one of choice — the choice to put profits before safety. Either better choices can or can’t be made, but in the end, no matter how fiery the pseudo-radical harangues against greed, the problem is personal, not systemic.
But there’s another way to look at it. Instead of fretting about the morality of individual capitalists, which would reveal no clear-cut correlation between personality shortcomings and disregard for workers’ safety, we can step back and look at the capitalist system as a whole and consider the role profit plays. On the one hand, the typical capitalist uses a part of his profit unproductively, frittering it away on all manner of frivolities. But if this capitalist wishes to continue to enjoy his unproductive use of profit, an even greater proportion of his total profit must be turned into capital and reinvested into his enterprise. Why? Because the capitalist’s competitors have used their profit to invest in newer machinery that lowers their costs of production, enabling them to sell their products more cheaply while still making a profit. Our capitalist must follow suit unless he has no concern for being edged out of the market. Thus, as Marx wrote, do …the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. Geoffrey Kay brilliantly elaborates on this in his book The Economic Theory of the Working Class, where he writes the following:
… it would be wrong to underestimate the importance of competition as a means of reminding individual capitalists of their class duty to exploit labour and amass surplus value at the greatest possible rate. Contrary to the view that it is an expression of innate human nature, competition depersonalises the capitalist qua capitalist and reduces him to an individuated element of social capital. Consider the classic individual capitalist, the entrepreneurial hero of orthodox economics. From a juridical point of view the capital embedded in his firm is private property which he can dispose of as he wishes. In so far as capital is property and the capitalist a property owner, the individual is under no particular social pressure to do one thing or another. Apart from liquidating his assets, in which case he gives up all pretence of being a capitalist, he could, in principle, draw out all the surplus value the enterprise generates and use it exclusively for his private pleasure — i.e. he could decided to remain a capitalist but one who does not accumulate capital. But it is precisely this choice which competition denies him, except perhaps for a short period of time and in special circumstances. For unless all capitalists agree to a strategy of non-accumulation, any individual capitalist who decides to follow his bent and eschew accumulation would find his profits reduced, as his rivals introduce new methods of production that undercut him on the market. Hence to survive as a capitalist, as opposed to a mere property owner, the individual has no choice but to compete, and there his no way he can do this except by turning substantial parts of his surplus value into new capital — in a word, by accumulating. Since laissez faire was first celebrated some two hundred years ago by Adam Smith who saw the ‘free market’ and open competition as an ‘invisible hand that leads men to an achieve an end that is not part of their intention’, competition has acted as an objective constraint upon those property owners whose property is capital. In other words. competition determines the action of capitalists as capitalists, reducing the individual capitalist to a mere personal representative of capital, depersonalising him into the functioning agent of a social relation of production which is none of his making. The fact that this determination — the negation of personal individuality — present itself in the opposite guise as a condition of individual freedom, and moreover, makes the accumulation of capital appear the result of choices freely taken by individuals in competition with each other, is yet a further example of the fetishism that pervades capitalist society.6
Even if the appropriation of profit for unproductive, hedonistic ends was reduced or even abolished (say by turning factories over to the workers) – in effect, reducing or abolishing greed as a motive force behind accumulation – the need to accumulate capital from profits wouldn’t be reduced one whit. So long as an enterprise wishes to survive, and so long as a competitive market exists, profit must be continually reinvested in enterprises if they wish to survive.
There are thus two different ways to look at these accidents. The first, despite its seemingly radical denunciations of greed, offers no better explanation for the ubiquity of workplace accidents than to say businessmen are bad and no better solution (if any) than to wait for the day when businessmen are good. The second perspective, unafraid to critically examine capitalism as a system, suggests that pious wishes about putting people before profit, however radical they may sound, only obscure (often intentionally) the truth that under the immutable laws of capitalism, and for even the most saintly capitalist, profit must come before any other consideration, be it safety, the environment, morality, etc. For such a perspective, the only solution to the problem of profit before people is to abolish profit entirely, in order to usher in a system of production based on human needs.
- http://www.msha.gov/Fatals/2006/Darby/FTL06c2731.pdf
- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Aracoma_Alma_Mine_accident
- http://www.msha.gov/Fatals/2006/Sago/ftl06C1-12.pdf
- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26050043/
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/05/AR2010040503877_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010040505519
- Kay, Geoffrey. The Economic Theory of the Working Class. Pages 100-101. Palgrave Macmillan, 1979.
For good and ill, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story is a product of the current crisis of capitalism. On the one hand, this crisis forced Moore to try and go beyond liberal critiques of a single issue, the usual fare for his documentaries. Thus, in his latest documentary Moore aimed to critically examine capitalism, the very foundation of modern society. Unfortunately, the same preoccupation with the crisis prevented Moore from tackling capitalism in its entirety; instead we’re treated to pallid denunciations of financial speculation, deregulation, and corporate greed, the forces Moore blames for the nastiness of the last couple of years — which is all the nastiness that Moore seems to recognize.
Capitalism: A Love Story begins with several scenes steeped in pathos but conspicuously devoid of analysis, but before long Moore attempts to provide some explanation for the economic crisis that loomed so large during the production of his movie. He begins by proffering a jocular definition of capitalism as a system of giving and taking–mostly taking. Viewers are then subjected to a clip from a 1950s propaganda film in which one young American woman defines capitalism as a system of free enterprise. After the young woman’s friend prods her to tell us what free enterprise is! Moore inexplicably cuts to actor Wallace Shawn, who explains free enterprise thusly:
Free enterprise is a form of words intended to conjure up in your mind a little town with different shops, and the guy who runs the best shop has the most customers. … The basic law of life is that if you have things, you can get more things. Pretty quickly, one guy has five times more than anybody else.
As if to distract us from the inadequacy of this definition, Moore immediately launches into a short history of the post-war economy. But by doing so he is only getting himself into a deeper hole. His inability to provide a real genealogy of the crisis, to understand the true misery of capitalism, becomes painfully evident. He begins his history with a wistful look back to his own youth. He claims that his autoworker father was able to buy a new car every third year, was able to pay off his home’s mortgage before the kids entered school, was able to bring his family on vacation to New York every other summer, and so on:
If this was capitalism, I loved it. And so did everyone else. During these years a lot of people got rich, and they had to pay a top tax rate of 90%. 90%? Yeeeep. But they still got to live like Bogey and Bacall. And what did we do with all their money? We built dams, bridges, interstate highways, schools, hospitals, we even sent a guy to the moon. Things seemed to be going in the right direction. Dad had a secure job, mom could work if she wanted — but didn’t have to — middle class families needed one job to survive. Our union family had free health care and free dental. The kids could go to college without getting a loan from a bank, dad had four weeks paid vacation every summer, most people had a savings account and little debt, and dad’s pension was set aside where no one could touch it. It would be there for him when he retired. It would be there when he retired.
Most readers will recognize this as more than a little rose-tinted, but it does raise the question of what changed between the 1950s and today, a time when savings are unheard of for most workers and you’re as likely to have your home foreclosed as you are to pay it off. Moore quickly offers one possible answer juxtaposing images of 1950s America with images of her vanquished foes of a decade earlier: We got all this because our main industrial competition had been reduced to rubble. … I guess you could say it’s easy to be number one when you have no competition. Then Moore shows scenes of German and Japanese autoworkers as he tells us that Germany and Japan rebuilt and reentered the world market as producers (of better cars than what America made). Is increased global competition, absent immediately after the war, the cause for the boom and bust of the post-war economy? Even though Moore has all the pieces in place to explain it thusly, he opts for a completely different explanation. According to Moore, the real reason for the decline of the “golden age” of American capitalism was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 — Wall Street had found their sheriff. The attacks on workers and the deregulation of the economy in the 70s, 80s, and 90s are thus presented as the consequences of a clique of bad men taking power. But why did Wall Street need a “sheriff?”
Moore never says, but answers are forthcoming once we figure out another question: just what is capitalism?
Most definitions of capitalism, particularly those advanced for public consumption, emphasize the freedom of buyers and sellers to interact, to set their own prices on the market, etc., usually without excessive assistance or interference from the state. But none of these characteristics is exclusive to or even inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Under slavery and feudalism, and especially so under the primitive communism which humanity lived its first ninety-nine one-hundredths of its existence as a species, the state either didn’t exist or played less of a role in the economy than it does today. And to one degree or another, the other supposed features of capitalism were apparent, from private ownership to the ability to set prices without coercion. In fact, it was only with the advent of capitalism that the state’s role in the economy became really important for the first time in history. Apart from the period 1850-1875 in Britain, no state has ever really pursued a laissez-faire policy. If the laissez-faire myth is more widely cherished in the United States than anywhere else in the world, then reality and myth diverge more here as well. Between 1783 and 1861, government funding accounted for 70% of the total investment in canals and 30% of the investment in railroads in the United States. The Erie Canal, the largest canal in the world at the time of its construction and a driving force in the development a market economy in the area, was publicly financed. Government assistance to private enterprise also came in the form of loans, protection of domestic manufacturers through tariffs, military “defense” of “American interests,” the upholding of slavery in the Southern U.S., attacks on workers’ attempts to organize, publication education, and so on. Indeed, Henry Charles Carey, one of the foremost American economists of the 19th century, and an economic advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, won his fame as a vociferous critic of British laissez-faire and an ardent defender of the “American system” of state intervention.
Now, if abstractions such as “freedom” and “non-intervention” aren’t characteristics unique to capitalism, then what are the distinct features of capitalism? What sets it apart from preceding economic systems? What gives it its peculiar internal dynamic?
In short, the defining characteristic of capitalism — what sets it apart from other systems and gives it its peculiar internal dynamic, including the tendency to crisis — is the exploitation of wage-labor in the production of commodities. This is also the material basis for the swill about economic (and in turn political) equality, freedom, the lack of coercion, etc, that the capitalist motormouths never cease to preach, since in outward appearance capitalist society consists solely of buyers and sellers (of goods and labor-power) who freely associate according to their own self-interest. Dig a little deeper, however, and you see that things are less idyllic. Why does the worker sell his labor-power (his ability to work) for a wage? Because he has no other means to provide for his subsistence, since he or his ancestors were divorced from the land they once tilled or the small shop they once worked in. Then the capitalist pays this practically indigent worker wages and sets him to work out of the goodness of his heart? Far from it! In reality, the capitalist hires laborers not for charity, and not even for the labor they provide, but for the free, gratuitous, uncompensated labor they provide. This is, as Marx put it, the great secret of modern society: the creation of surplus value.
But why and how does the capitalist obtain this gratuitous labor, this surplus value, from his employees? The answer is found in the nature of commodities, which is where Marx rightfully begins his investigation of capitalism in the first volume of Capital. A commodity is a thing that is produced for exchange on the market. The fact the virtually any two items can be exchanged, albeit perhaps in different quantities, suggests that all commodities have some identical quality. Why are 10 candy bars worth one puppy nursing bottle? Why are three sweaters worth one coat? These items have identical values, we can say. But what is the basis of this value? It can’t be weight or shape or color or texture, since physical properties can differ widely among items of equal value. In fact, the only common property between all commodities is that they are products of labor. In fact, all any commodity ever contains is labor. Even the most advanced raw materials are only products of successive working by human hands. Thus the value of an item is determined by how much labor was expended in its creation. Not labor in specific — then, as the famous example goes, the slow and lazy shoemaker should make the most valuable shoes — but rather the socially necessary labor, the labor required on average in a given society at a given stage of development.
But let us return to the capitalist and the laborer. When we left them, the capitalist was about to hire the dispossessed laborer in order to obtain free labor from him. This is accomplished thanks to the special nature of the commodity labor-power. Like every other commodity, its value is determined by the labor expended in its creation, i.e., the cost to create and maintain the laborer’s ability to work. (Thus doctors are paid more than farmhands because, as a rule, far more labor has gone into the doctors’ education, etc.) But unlike any other commodity, labor-power, when used by the capitalist, creates value. Now imagine that the value of an autoworker’s labor-power comes out to 200 dollars a day. This will be paid to the autoworker as a wage. What does the capitalist receive in turn? First, he makes sure that his laborer adds 200 dollars worth of value to the raw materials he has inside of his factory. Let us further imagine that this is accomplished in four hours. After these four hours, the worker has given the capitalist 200 dollars worth of value — a fair exchange, considering that the worker will receive 200 dollars for his day’s work. Is the worker free to return home now? Heavens, no! The worker must remained dungeoned up in the hellish factory for another four or six or eight hours, during which time all the value he creates is simply appropriated by the capitalist. This is surplus-value, value created above and beyond the value he received in the form of wages for his work. The production of surplus-value is the entire goal of the capitalist system.
Now, with this as our basis, we’ve already gone far beyond Moore (or rather Wallace Shawn’s) tepid attempt at defining capitalism. We know that there is no divide between the capitalism of the 50s, capitalism of the 70s, and capitalism of today. It’s all based on the exploitation of wage-labor in the production of commodities (and all that that entails, from wars to repression to environmental destruction).
Moreover, unlike Moore and the leftist mouthpieces of capital, we need not look for the alpha and the omega of capitalist crisis in the bad behavior on the part of the plunderbund’s leading figures. Deregulation, debt, and financialization were just strategies for the capitalists (and the capitalist state) to cope with the larger crisis of capitalism. For as it turns out capitalism is not essentially static so long as politicians, capitalists, trade unions, or other bogeymen don’t mess it up. Capitalist production invariably leads to crises. (19th century economists recognized that capitalism crisis-prone, though they denied that crises were the fault of capitalism’s logic; thus, one 19th century economist blamed the periodic crashes and busts of capitalism to sun spots — a scapegoat capitalism’s defenders have now revived to explain away climate change.)
First, the value congealed in commodities is realized as monetary profit unless these commodities can be sold on the market. A capitalist has a warehouse full of shoes, imagine, in which each shoe’s value composition can be divided into one third raw materials, one third the wages paid the worker, and one third the surplus value obtained from the laborer’s unpaid work. But unless the capitalist can exchange these shoes for money or some other commodity, that surplus value does him no good — indeed, its creation was a waste of money, since now 100% of his outlays and all of his profits are locked up in some heavily guarded warehouse. Now, as we’ve seen, capitalism’s whole goal is the production of surplus-value rather than meeting human needs. As such, capitalists will flock to industries where profits are great without much thought to demand. Accordingly, crises of overproduction were very common since the inception of capitalism. What’s more, since workers — who by and large are the main consumers in capitalist society — only receive a fraction of the value they produce, more value is produced that can ever be bought. Some have pointed to the disappearance of non-capitalist markets that can serve as outlets for these goods as another kind of overproduction crisis. As mentioned above, Moore seems to inch towards overproduction as an explanation of the wage-cuts and turn to financialization beginning in the 70s, but in the end says no more about it.
Second, competition in capitalist society leads to the use of ever more productive machinery. Because the value of a product is equivalent to the socially necessary labor time embodied in it, the capitalists who can produce commodities faster, thanks to the employment of more machinery, are in a position to realize a handsome profit. Over time, the less productive capitals either die off or modernize, and so the average quantity of labor in a given commodity decreases. Thus there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time, which was not lost on Marx or those who have followed the investigative path he blazed.
We can now see just how shallow Moore’s economic thinking is. He presents the “deindustrialization” of America in the 80s as a dastardly conspiracy by corporate America and its friends in the White House to secure short term profits no matter the cost. But with a few paragraphs of instruction in the true nature of the capitalist economy, we can see that capital’s flight to finance and debt was not a choice but a necessity. While Moore is right in pointing to the finance sector as the epicenter of this latest crises, he’s wholly wrong to believe that a return to the capitalism of the 1950s is a solution — since it was this very same beloved capitalism that contained the seeds of decline that led to the current impasse — or even a possibility. The turn to financial speculation and debt is a symptom, not the cause, of the crisis.
This inability to come to grips with capitalism is the source of every error in Moore’s movie. Take, for instance, his idealized description of the prosperity of his family during the 1950s. Love this capitalism as he might, it was still predicated on the exploitation of wage labor; if workers were paid well, it’s only because they were making their bosses that much richer. As soon as profits declined — as surely they must — the capitalists were forced by the lash of competition to attack the wages and living standards of the workers. (To his credit, Moore acknowledges that this relative prosperity for American workers wasn’t incompatible with racial segregation and brutal imperialist wars.) He drops the ball elsewhere, too. At one point in the movie, Wallace Shawn laments that in the last decade capitalists stopped producing the things that everyone loves and began speculating. Trouble is, capitalists don’t set out to “produce the things that everyone loves” — they produce what they can sell at a profit. This is obvious to starving Africans, who obviously would love food but never see it, not now and not in the golden age of capitalism in which Shawn’s capitalists produced material goods.
Furthermore, Moore completely mistakes the nature of labor unions. Throughout the movie unions are represented as the guarantors of prosperity for the working class and as a counterweight to the power of the capitalists. In reality, while unions were once organizations of the working class, in the 20th century economic gains on the terms of the working class were no longer possible. Unions were permitted only as the guarantors of social peace in the factories. Strikes were permitted but only to avoid wildcats and unplanned work stoppages (contracts usually demanded that unions warn the company in advance of any strikes, which enabled the company to adjust its production to avoid losses). Higher wages were granted for the same reason. It is no accident that Franklin Roosevelt’s push to extend the legal rights of unions came during the massive strike-wave of 1933-1934. As Anton Pannekoek said at the time, the capitalist class itself recognized that trade unions are necessary to direct the revolt of the workers into regular channels to prevent them from breaking out in sudden explosions. Sixty years later, the head of the French employers’ association said we have everything to lose if the unions become weaker still … and so we have to find ways of keeping their heads above water. The capitalists understand that the unions are their allies. Many workers who have been in unions see that as well. Why can’t the left, from Moore to the Trotskyists, see the same?
Moore also fails to understand that capitalism can exist even without foremen and even individual capitalists. In one part of Capitalism: A Love Story, he stops by a factory which is owned and operated by workers. He tells us this kind of ownership isn’t some bullshit stock option… they’re the true owners. This, he claims, takes money out of the equation. He has ventured into the absurd with this statement! Even a child could see that the workers are still producing commodities for exchange on the market for money! Moreover, in doing so, they’re forced to compete with other enterprises (self-owned or not). As Rosa Luxemburg wrote almost a century ago, this competition means the workers are faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur — a contradiction which accounts for the usual failure of production cooperatives, which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving. For all the talk of “factories without bosses,” the leftists forget the simple truth that capitalist competition is the true master of whosoever would enter the marketplace.
Moore’s economics are bad, but it’s in the realm of politics where he entertains the most dangerous delusions. He claims that it was only with the election of Reagan in 1980 that Wall Street embarked on a plan to make America serve them. Unsurprisingly, this narrow vision of what it means for the state to serve the ruling class translates into a belief that Obama’s election somehow threatened the capitalists’ interests. Of Obama’s campaign, Moore says, Holy Shit! This was not what Wall Street wanted. What if he won? What would happen to their way of life? Moore presents the first days after Obama’s election as a the beginning’s a worker’s revolt against wall street, pointing to the mayor of Detroit’s decision to end the eviction of owners of foreclosed homes and support from politicians for the workers at Republic Windows and Doors who were staging a sit-down strike to win severance pay.
But Moore’s initial exuberance was misplaced, he concedes. For our director, it was Obama’s support for bailout bills that showed Obama as a friend to big business. Moore explains this “shift” (in reality, Obama was always recognized by big-business and the advocates of American imperialism as “their” candidate) as the result of corporations “buying” Obama by financing his election campaign. Even though Moore resorts to the simplest explanation, and the one least bound to reality, for Obama’s supposed treachery, he still can’t come up with a reasonable solution to the obvious fact that the state is on the side of the rich. Even Adam Smith, the prophet of capitalism, saw this 200 years ago: Civil government, as far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. Despite centuries of evidence that the state is not a neutral instrument of society at large, Moore still claims that the only way to challenge the rich is to return to the ballot booths and remember the phrase “one man, one vote.” Moore even manages to drum up some right-wing writer for a financial paper who states his own uneasiness about democracy.
But here’s a question for Moore: if democracy and voting were all that were required to break the capitalists’ grip on political power, then why hasn’t such a thing happened in all of history? Is it perhaps because democracy, far from being the capitalist class’s nightmare, is actually the perfect ideological reflection of capitalist society? Just as individuals appear to confront each other in the economy as isolated, equal commodity sellers, so with democracy individuals are reduced to the level of citizens, isolated individuals with the same rights and the same say in representation. The very notions of democracy, freedom, and equality are based on commodity exchange, as Marx writes in his Grundrisse:
Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual, each one of them, is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing of the self as means, or as serving, only as means, in order to posit the self as end in itself, as dominant and primary; finally, the self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization; the other is also recognized and acknowledged as one who likewise realizes his self-seeking interest, so that both know that the common interest exists only in the duality, many-sidedness, and autonomous development of the exchanges between self-seeking interests. The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power.
But these pure, hollowed ideas obscure the deeper reality:
In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear. It is forgotten, on one side, that the presupposition of exchange value, as the objective basis of the whole of the system of production, already in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that the individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value, hence that the whole negation of his natural existence is already implied; that he is therefore entirely determined by society; that this further presupposes a division of labour etc., in which the individual is already posited in relations other than that of mere exchanger, etc. That therefore this presupposition by no means arises either out of the individual’s will or out of the immediate nature of the individual, but that it is, rather, historical, and posits the individual as already determined by society. It is forgotten, on the other side, that these higher forms, in which exchange, or the relations of production which realize themselves in it, are now posited, do not by any means stand still in this simple form where the highest distinction which occurs is a formal and hence irrelevant one. What is overlooked, finally, is that already the simple forms of exchange value and of money latently contain the opposition between labour and capital etc. Thus, what all this wisdom comes down to is the attempt to stick fast at the simplest economic relations, which, conceived by themselves, are pure abstractions…
Economics and politics are thus mirrors in which the fictions of both reinforce each other. Apparent freedom in economics is the basis for the apparent freedom in politics, and vice-versa. In both cases the outward appearance is equality, but the reality is inequality.
As in the realm of production, complete freedom and equality in the sphere of politics is seen as an illusion once we move beyond the simplest relations, which, conceived by themselves, are pure abstractions. In reality, despite the apparent equality of all citizens, the minuscule class of capitalists always has the better of politics in capitalist society. There are a few reasons for this.
First, the capitalists’ control of the media and their tremendous influence on the education system ensure that their candidates are at a disproportionate advantage. Thus while the phrase “one man, one vote” may accurately describe the democratic electoral system, it neglects to account for how the casting of those votes is determined. Second is the fact that politicians cannot simply act according to their own will. Say that to Moore’s delight the American public overwhelmingly votes for a populist candidate who pledges to raise taxes on the rich and increase wages. Should this candidate attempt to turn these pledges into policy, capital will of necessity seek greener pastures and safer harbors. Now, what do we care that those inveterate parasites are inconvenienced? Indeed, we care very little save for the fact that with them and their money would go jobs, tax revenue, and so on, until the reforming policies of our newly elected leader became a threat to the national economy and even the health of the state. No matter his sympathies, no politician could tolerate that. Just such a thing happened in France in the early 80s when the “Socialist” Mitterand was elected on a strongly left-wing platform. Within a matter of years, with the economy in shambles and capital fleeing abroad, Mitterand was forced to adopt the policies of the arch-conservatives Reagan and Thatcher despite his own political proclivities. Finally, the workers’ own reverence for democracy is a major stumbling block. Only through understanding its ideological basis, outlined above, will workers be ready to confront the capitalists and their state. Far from contributing to such a clarification, Moore only adds to the mystification of democracy.
The final great mistake of Capitalism: A Love Story is Moore’s presentation of socialism, which is based on a conception equally as flawed as his conception of capitalism.
When Capitalism: A Love Story was first revealed, conservatives happily decried Moore as a socialist and relished in the supposed contradiction of a rich man attacking capitalism (perhaps not realizing that hypocrisy and contradiction are two different things). But by the end of the movie, it’s clear that Moore’s no socialist. Moore misidentifies and conflates socialism with both Stalinism and Social democracy. When Moore shows a clip of Joe the Plumber decrying Obama’s “socialist policies,” he follows it up with a clip of Mao and Stalin reviewing their armed goons. Shortly thereafter, however, we’re supposed to forget that definition of socialism — after all, there’s actually a socialist in the Senate, Moore informs us. He then cuts to Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator who runs as an independent but caucuses with the Democrats. In a short interview with Moore, Sanders serves up pablum about the government needing to represent middle income and working people rather than just the wealthy and powerful.
All that these two pathetic caricatures of socialism have in common is that they both call for a more powerful state to intervene in, or run, an economy based on wage labor and commodity production; in a word, both are state capitalist ideologies. Moore sides with the “socialism” — in actuality, just watered-down European social democracy — of Sanders. Accordingly, Moore never once advances a genuinely socialist agenda, which would mean calling for the working class to seize power from the capitalists, to institute its own dictatorship with the aim of abolishing private property and capitalist social relations based on production for profit. Rather, in the end all that Moore (like Sanders) can think to demand is for the state to accomplish the impossible: to return capitalism, by way of regulation, to the conditions which existed at the beginning of its last boom, to the conditions of the 50s and 60s.
At every turn in the movie, Moore’s fundamental confusion about the nature of capitalism, detailed broadly in the above review, leads to errors, misinterpretations, and ultimately quixotic demands for reform (rather than a clear demand for revolution). Despite some good content, Moore’s latest documentary has the rare misfortune of being a work that lives up to its billing and thus being the worse for it: this really is a love story. However tortured Moore’s love for capitalism is, it’s clear he can’t envision a world without it.
By Schalken, on 03.31.10. Tagged with: leftism.
Towards the end of a rather long drive home to my parents’ house, I turned on some of the local radio stations I’ve missed while living in another state. Tiring pretty quickly of the classic rock station I listened to at work hours each day for years, I turned the radio to NPR, where I heard Terry Gross interviewing well-known history professor Tony Judt. The talk was interesting on a mostly personal level, but Judt said something that was of political interest:
There was the residue of Marxism, which was still very much alive, kicking in the ’60s, but in the worst possible sense in that Marxists were now young people, with the exception of a few old people, who thought that, well, the West was a lost cause, liberalism was a fraud, the proletariat had disappeared. So let’s focus on blacks or colonial, minority victims or someone outside ourselves. So we never looked hard at ourselves to ask what was wrong with our own society.
Judt’s implication that Marxism is no longer “still very much alive” is demolished by the inability of anyone but Marxists to comprehend the latest capitalist crisis, and his suggestion that all of those who came to “Marxism” in the 60s abandoned the working class is invalid as a blanket statement; yet in those few lines he effectively summarizes the intellectual ghetto that was the “new left.” (“New,” mind you, only in that it traded the concrete-and-steel modernization project of Stalin for the peasant mysticism of Mao’s modernization project.) It reminds me of something Michael Zweig wrote in his book The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret:
In the 1960s even much of the radical left became estranged from the working class. No better symbol of this estrangement exists than the day in 1970 when construction workers beat up demonstrators who had gathered at New York’s City Hall to protest the war in Vietnam as it escalated into Cambodia. Images of the City Hall beatings were broadcast around the world and became emblematic of the mutual hostility supposedly between all unionized workers and all student activists. …
Much was made at the time of the reactionary worker, enemy of social progress, or, from the other side, the patriotic worker, true to the American cause, standing against the communist foe. With anticommunist leadership, the labor movement moved to the right. As class-conscious workers’ voices were silenced, the simple-minded right-wing characterization of the working class was more easily picked up by the media and came to dominate the thinking of many young sixties student radicals. They, in turn, often came to think of themselves as outside the long tradition of progressive intellectuals’ support for the working class.
The new movements of the sixties developed radical critiques [sic] of society and in their analyses often challenged capitalism itself. But, for many, the working class came to be identified as only reactionary white men. Activists in these movements, and those who developed social theories to understand and guide them, often dismissed the working class as a backward, hostile enemy, and recast politics solely in terms of race and gender. Radical politics of the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly dominated by identity politics.
Yet on the campuses, despite the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist talk, the working class tended to disappear from the map, replaced in the theories of many radical opinion leaders by a combination of race and gender. This has happened in one of two ways. Sometimes the working class has come to mean White Men. This is most often the case among those stuck with the images of workers on the construction sites of the sixties and seventies. Other times, in the triumvirate “race, class and gender,” class has come to mean “the poor,” who are in turn said to be Women and Minorities. In these formulations, white men are either irrelevant or the enemy, and white working class men are stripped of their legitimate standing among those who suffer wrongs in this capitalist society. This type of politics is a recipe for alienation and anger among white men, dividing the working class and creating needless hostility towards the justifiable demands of women and minorities.
Sometimes you’ll find Maoists who claim that in the “United $nakes of Amerikkka,” there is no proletariat. This idea — like all of Maoism — isn’t even worth consideration. But even those who admit the existence of a white proletariat can do much to distort reality, Zweig points out:
The media attack on workers has not been the work of conservative political forces alone. In a process paralleling the retreat from the working class by sixties radicals, liberal media personalities have also abandoned or stereotyped workers. The television show that most lampooned the working class in the 1970s and 1980s was produced by Norman Lear and starred Carroll O’Conner, both active and influential in liberal political circles. All in the Family’s Archie Bunker was the worker-as-reactionary-white-male, disrespecting his wife from opposing the anti-war, anti-racist ideas of his son-in-law, whom he called Meathead. Although Meathead was from a working class family, he was never presented as another way for us to think about workers. He had progressive ideas; he became a student. Archie’s buffoonery give him a certain charm, perhaps, but in the popular culture of the time he served to dismiss the working class as a serious or reasonable force.
Note that these perceptions don’t necessarily reflect reality. Zweig, through official statistics, paints a picture of the working class as heterogeneous. For instance, while the largest occupational category for white men was salaried managers, this category was also in the top ten for black men, Hispanic men, and white women. Truck driving was the #1 category for black men and #2 for white men. Zweig writes that the privileged titles usually appear higher and more often for whites, especially men, but there’s no shortage of awful jobs for white folks either.
For a wonderfully enlightening and even entertaining account and critique of the New Left, see Loren Goldner’s “Didn’t See The Same Movie: Review of Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. It’s tempting to say that Goldner’s piece is all the more worthwhile now that some buffoons have decided to reform the Students for a Democratic Society, but it seems unlikely that the new SDS will do anything to disprove Marx’s famous witticism that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
By Schalken, on 03.22.10. Tagged with: political economy.
Over the summer, I made a blog post here in which I argued that health care reform was a handout to the capitalist class at large at the expense of the “health” care companies. If reform legislation went against the interests of the pharmaceutical or insurance companies, went my reasoning, it was only to drive down the insurance costs of other capitalist enterprises in less profitable sectors or to increase consumer spending (i.e., capitalist profits). While the state would indeed be stepping on the toes of some capitalists, this wouldn’t alter its character as the ideal personification of the total national capital, to use Engels’s words (with my emphasis).
While I was clear that I considered meaningful reform unlikely given the money companies like Wyeth and Merck poured into Congress, it seemed to me at the time that any legislation would have to come at the expense of the “health” sector. Frank Ahrens over at the Washington Post’s Economy Watch says otherwise. He counts the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, along with hospitals (most of which are for-profit enterprises in the U.S.), as the biggest beneficiaries of the health care reform bill. The stock markets seem to agree with Ahrens. After all, the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies just got 30 million new paying customers.
Like “Solidarity Forever,” that fiery anthem of industrial warfare that today’s trade unions have betrayed but won’t give up (and which has been co-opted by bourgeois political parties looking to embellish their credentials), the revolutionary message of “the Internationale” was separated by a huge chasm from the practice and ideology of most of those who laid claim to it. That is, until Billy Bragg transformed it into a song that Social Democrats and reformed Stalinists could really relate to.
A comparison of Billy Bragg’s 1990 version with a 1910 English translation of a German version:
Billy Brag’s 1990 version of the Internationale
Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don’t cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all
Chorus:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The Internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race
Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We’ll live together or we’ll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We’ve but one Earth on which to live
And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above
Emil Luckhardt’s 1910 German Version, translated into English
Arise you damned of the earth,
you prisoners of starvation!
the right like a volcanic glow
is about to erupt with force.
Clean out the oppressor!
Arise, you army of slaves!
Bear your nullity no longer
Become everything–unite!
Chorus:
Peoples, hear the signal!
Arise, for the last battle
The International
Fights for the Rights of Man!
No higher being can save us,
No God, no Kaiser, nor tribune
Saving us from misery
we ourselves alone must do!
Empty phrase: “Rights of the poor!”
Empty phrase: “noblesse oblige!”
Dependent, servile they call us,
Bear that shame no longer now!
Chorus
In town and country, you workers,
We are the strongest of parties.
Push the loafers aside!
This world must be ours;
Our blood shall no more feed
the crows and mighty vultures!
Only when we’ve driven them out
will the sun forever shine!
Most of you will immediately recognize just how much of the original spirit of the song Bragg discarded in inventing his new version: all of it. For those of you who don’t understand that, here’s some comparisons.
First verse: By the end of the first verse, it’s already clear that Bragg’s version is more indebted to the ideology of Amnesty International and the likes of Naomi Klein than it is to the struggle of the working class. Thus, for Bragg it’s the “oppressed” who rise up rather than Luckhardt’s “army of slaves.” This difference might seem insignificant, but it’s essential to understanding Bragg’s version. Fundamentally, he’s not talking about a a revolution that would overturn the real foundation of oppression — the relation of labor to capital — but rather some kind of sing-along that leads to a greater appreciation of “freedom” in the abstract. This “respect” and “freedom enjoyed by one and all” somehow “makes the empires fall.” In reality, of course, it doesn’t. And in reality, freedom is just the ideological cloak of bourgeois exploitation, the ideological underpinning of bourgeois society. Freedom in this sense is the freedom of atomized citizens to exploit and be exploited as they please. It is, in Lenin’s phrase, “freedom for the slave owners.”
In contrast, Luckhardt’s first verse doesn’t flow quite as nicely, but it’s infinitely clearer. He rightly identifies the seizure of power as the way forward for the proletariat. The damned of the earth, the “prisoners of starvation,” are called upon to “arise.” The proletariat is identified not only as an exploited class, but a class that must and will fight against exploitation. Bragg, by contrast, echoes the Maoist slander that the Western proletariat has been “bought off” — and in in fact no longer exists as a class — by asking all of us, collectively, not to “cling so hard to your possessions.” Luckhardt calls for the workers to “clean out the oppressors” — Bragg calls for his middle-class audience to demand rights and respect, not for themselves, but presumably for their maids and the like.
Chorus: Luckhardt’s chorus invokes the imagery of an epoch-making showdown between the proletariat, united in The International, and the bourgeoisie. Bragg’s? Well, there’s some cozy language about brothers and sisters struggling (why bother with that “last battle” when you can have the activists’ joy of a life spent lashing out against chimeras?), singing, and the human race being united by a fuzzy kind of idealistic internationalism. Class distinctions are lost in Bragg — we’re left with “the human race” while in Luckhardt it’s clearly the working class that’s envisioned drawing together for its final, glorious assault on the citadels of capital.
Second verse: Luckhardt’s first lines in the second verse brilliantly recapitulates one of the central ideas of the working class, which led to the formation of the First International and guided its activities: the idea that, in Marx’s words, the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself . This verse throws back in the face of reformism the “empty phrases” by which reformism attempts to pacify and derail the working class.
Bragg, unsurprisingly, latches on to just such empty phrases. “Let no one build walls to divide us” — after all, we have to be united in song. The rest of Bragg’s second verse is full of pablum about togetherness and unity — but it’s never clear to what end.
Final verses: Luckhardt concludes by painting the picture of the working class, united internationally, “pushing the loafers aside,” taking control of the world, and once and forever putting and end to capitalist war and exploitation. The sun shines forevermore.
Bragg, on the other hand, as a middle class activist, can’t imagine anything more hallowed than playing the hero, perpetually reenacting the feat of the Tienanmen man — “we stand unbowed before their armour.” There’s a fight — for what, we know not — but it’s only “provoked by their oppression.” This is a far cry from the embrace by Luckhardt, and the proletarian movement as a whole, of bold, strong action against the oppressors.
On Friday, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley begged Kentucky senator Jim Bunning to drop his one-man opposition to the extension of unemployment benefits for over a million Americans. Bunning’s response? Tough shit. He also complained that because the Senate would not agree to drop debating an extension and adjourn, I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00.
You’d might think that this would be the most callous, out-of-touch comment ever uttered in Congress, but that’s not so. Probably not by a long shot. Consider this exchange between a factory worker and a Senator in the early 1880s, during a Senate investigation into the relations between labor and capital :
Senator Blair: Why do you not go West on a farm?
Thomas O’Donnell: How could I go, walk it?
Senator Blair: Well, I want to know why you do not go West on a $2,000 farm, or take up a homestead and break it and work it up, and then have it for yourself and your family?
Thomas O’Donnell: I can’t see how I could get out West. I have got nothing to go with.
Senator Blair: It would not cost you over $1,500.
Thomas O’Donnell: Well, I never saw over a $20 bill, and that is when I have been getting a month’s pay at once. If someone would give $1,500, I will go…
In his day, Blair was one of the senators most concerned with the welfare and conditions of American workers.
(Source: Garraty, John A. Editor. Labor and Capital in the Gilded Age. Boston: Little Brown And Company, 1968.)
By Schalken, on 02.28.10. Tagged with: book review, mike davis.
In 2003, SARS raised the specter of a global pandemic the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since influenza swept the world and killed 100 million in 1918. While SARS was defeated in short order, new diseases took its place. Fortunately, these too have been vanquished. Swine flu, the newcomer presented by the media as the disease that would live up to all the deadly promise of SARS, has so far killed fewer people than the plain old flu.
Does this mean we’re off the hook?
Far from it. In his excellent 2004 book The Monster at our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, Mike Davis examines the industrialization of agriculture and many other structural features of capitalism make a catastrophic pandemic almost inevitable in the near future. Such a pandemic could kill as many as a billion people.
To begin with, it has to be pointed out that given enough time and opportunity, nature herself concocts the superviruses that can decimate species. Around 10,000 years ago, however, humans intervened in the process. Our ancestors domesticated animals, crowding together animals and people in a totally new way. Such close contact facilitated the mutation of diseases within animals herds and the eventual mutation and transmission of these diseases to humans. (Thus, European diseases bred in a land of domesticated animals killed tens of millions of Native Americans, whose immune systems developed in a world largely devoid of domestication). Fortunately, for 100 centuries the scale of farming expanded only gradually.
But today, as Davis points capably shows, this relationship between man and farm animal exists on a wholly different scale. Driven by competition and an increased demand for meat in the third world, where proletarianization has forced hundreds off millions off the land and into cities, capitalist firms have implemented the most remarkable centralization of meat production. Gone are the days of the small farm with a few hundred animals. For instance, in Western Arkansas and northern Georgia, more than 1 billion chickens are slaughtered annually, and one swine megafarm in Milford Valley, Utah, reputedly produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles (page 84). Packing together so many animals means diseases have exponentially more chances to mutate, and more chances to gain an ineradicable foothold. So it was that Swine flu evidently originated in a Mexican hog farm operated by Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor.
It’s not only the concentration of farm animals that heralds danger. These animals are transported further and more often than ever before, a practice which expands the radius of potential infection. Increased use of antibiotics and vaccines may also increase selection for hardier strains of viruses and bacteria (page 91). Thus, researchers told Science that swine influenza’s sudden burst of mutational energy has probably been stimulated by parallel changes in herd size, interstate transport of hogs, and vaccination practice (90).
Changes in human population density and transportation habits mirror those of the livestock and poultry used in these giant capitalist enterprises. If the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 100 million people had its origins, at least in part, in the trenches of the Western Front, imagine what diseases might be fostered by the slums of the third world. Slums house (to use the term loosely) a billion of the world’s people, Davis points out. Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, has 571,000 inhabitants per square kilometer; Delhi has a slum with the density of 300,000 per square kilometer; Kibera, a slum of Nairobi, has a density of 200,000 people per square kilometer; and Cite-Soleil, a slum of the now earthquake-flattened Port-Au-Prince, had a density of 180,000 people per square kilometer (page 154). In Hong Kong, SARS possibly spread because of an apartment building’s faulty sewage system; imagine, then, the possibilities for the spread of disease in slums where the sewage systems are not faulty, but non-existent (pages 72-73). (In Dharavi there is one toilet for every 1,400 people.) Ironically, affluence as much as poverty contributes to the transmission of diseases. Corporate scumbags and yuppie travelers flying ’round the world are capable of spreading disease from one continent to another in a matter of hours.
It might be argued that advances in medical science can match step for step the evolution of deadly, pandemic-causing diseases, but on this point Davis has more bad news. First, the pharmaceutical industry has put profits in front of people — the only possibility in capitalism — and virtually abandoned producing vaccines. Davis presents two reasons for this. First, companies have been found liable for the inevitable side effects of their vaccines, so in the 1970s there was a “rush” to get away from vaccines (page 41). Moreover, vaccines and antibiotics just aren’t profitable: “products that actually cure or prevent diseases, like vaccines and antibiotics, are less profitable, so infectious disease has largely become an orphan market. As industry analysts point out, worldwide sales for all vaccines produce less revenue than Pfizer’s income from a single anticholesterol medication.” Thus, while in 1976 there were thirty-seven companies in the U.S. producing flu vaccines, by 2004 there were only two (one of which maintained a criminally unsanitary vaccine production facility) (pages 140, 143). Davis also notes that pharmaceutical companies spend nearly three times as much on marketing as they do on research.
If capitalist medicine offers little help, can we at least rely on the state and its health officials? Again, Davis paints a bleak picture. In the first instance, the countries in which SARS and deadly influenza strains have appeared are quick to deny that there is any problem. This has been especially true of Thailand and China, but even Canada is guilty as well (page 94). Such a response is the only option open to the state, which is really nothing but the defender of national capital; its only course of action is to protect the sales of the local capitalists producing diseased chickens, as well as the capitalists reliant on tourism, even if this means allowing a small outbreak to turn into a full-fledged pandemic (all the better to hide the disease’s origins, after all!). Some governments find ways to use these outbreaks to the advantage of the big capitalists who finance them. In Thailand, for instance, the government forced a chicken culling that devastated small farmers but exempted the largest producers, leaving them free to take over more of the market. Other countries are blase about the dangers of influenza. In the U.S., more money was devoted to abstinence education than to the development of an avian influenza vaccine (page 128). The U.S. government also made it clear that in the event of an avian flu pandemic, it would first distribute Tamiflu to its “imperial legions” occupying Iraq and Afghanistan (page 146). Even more troubling is that the U.S. only ordered two million doses of Tamiflu, rather than the 100 million recommended by experts (pages 144-145). Other states are no better. India, for instance, spends eight times as much of its budget on defense as it does health (page 157). In Africa, fully one million more health workers are needed to ensure even basic care (page 157). And so on, and so on.
These are the main points of Davis’s book. He very capably lays out the case against the current scale of industrial agriculture and states’ inability to confront incipient pandemics, a course of action which would harm the profits of ‘their’ capitalists and draw resources from military endeavors and the other criminal enterprises of the state. Whether the next would-be pandemic fizzles out and fades from memory, as SARS did and now Swine Flu seems destined to do, Davis’s book will remain relevant, for a catastrophic pandemic is virtually assured by the capitalist mode of production. (Though an updated edition touching on the 2009 swine flu outbreak might be useful.)
By Schalken, on 01.28.10. Tagged with: leftism.
Howard Zinn is dead. While my own political development has led me down a different road than the one Zinn traveled for so long, he was so clearly such a good and kindly man that I can’t help but feeling a bit morose. His family and friends have my most sincere condolences.
That said, I feel compelled to say a few things about Zinn’s politics. In the media he will be referred to as a socialist, an anarchist, a revolutionary, or even a Marxist. He was none of these, at least in recent years. Whatever Zinn’s claimed to believe in, A People’s History of the United States — his most famous work — and his support for bourgeois politics in 2000, 2004, and 2008 combine to paint a very clear picture of Zinn’s bad politics.
In 2000, Zinn was an impassioned supporter of Ralph Nader, the consumer safety advocate turned perennial left-wing presidential candidate. I am for Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke, he said, because someone must speak the truth. Someone must say: Ours is a country of enormous wealth. We can use that wealth to guarantee to every American free medical care, decent housing, work at a living wage, child care and nurseries, clean air and clean water. With this, and his demand that Nader be included in the televised debates between the major presidential contenders on the grounds that “democracy requires a free marketplace of ideas,” we can see how far Zinn was from any kind of radical critique of capitalist society.1 Evidently, his demands didn’t go any further than a fair wage (which even in Marx’s day was a “conservative” demand2), good schools, and health care. Whether capital has the resources and wherewithal to implement such programs, history shows that none of them is inimical to the dictatorship of the capitalists. After all, the British state in the 19th century passed the Factory Acts in part to raise the health of the working class and ensure that it would be able to reproduce itself on a biological level3, it was the anti-socialist Bismarck that institute the world’s first universal health care system, and today Mr. Obama is peddling health care reform in the U.S. to improve that country’s overall profitability by cutting into the profits of the drug makers and by reducing employers’ health care costs. Likewise, the child care and nurseries Zinn demands would be an extension of the current system of indoctrination.
By 2004, and again in 2008, Zinn had abandoned Nader moved firmly into the camp of lesser-evilism along with fellow leftist Noam Chomsky. Their support for Kerry and Obama was based on a peculiar piece of sophistry which posited that the historical situation was such that even the minute differences between the democratic and republican candidates would translate into huge changes in the world. As he said in a 2008 interview, there are certain moments in history when even a small difference between the candidates may be crucial, may be a matter of life and death for a large number of people. 4 Minute differences such as which strategies to carry out in Iraq, or which country to attack next? In the same interview, he sounded like a typical Democrat as he blamed the Bush administration for the economic downturn of the 2000s (God forbid!) and accused the Bush administration of disregarding the Constitution … the same Constitution which he criticized in the above cited 2000 speech as a Constitution designed to prevent more rebellion, to maintain control of the country by slaveowners, merchants, manufacturers, and Western expansionists ! In his final piece published before his death, Zinn repeated one of the most confounding liberal delusions, that there could be “some national movement to push him [Obama] in a better direction.”5
Even though Zinn was mired in electoral politics and reformism, there can be no doubt that Zinn’s hope for real change was heartfelt. This juxtaposition can only be understood by Zinn’s inability to see that the proletariat’s struggle against exploitation is the only force capable of creating a new world.
His esteemed A People’s History of America bears this out. The title is wholly accurate — instead of drawing lessons and inspiration from the American proletariat and its valiant fight, Zinn focused on every “marginalized” group fighting for equal rights as citizens within the illusory community of the state. Swathes of the book look at the struggles of Native American radicals in the 60s, farmers in the 18th century, pacifists, feminists, black nationalists, student protesters, etc. Nowhere is it clear that Zinn appreciates the central insight of Marx, which is that “the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation.”6
Disturbing confirmation of Zinn’s bourgeois perspective comes in the form of A People’s History’s chapter on World War II. Zinn is clearly ambivalent about the notion that this was a good war, but his claim that “only one organized socialist group [the Socialist Workers Party] opposed the war unequivocally” is in contradiction to historical fact. Of the groups with a proletarian veneer, the SWP in fact were the war’s greatest cheerleaders after the “Communist” Party. What the SWP objected to was the notion that the bourgeoisie could adequately safeguard democracy — and the party believed so strongly in this that it drummed its members into the ranks of the imperialist American army. By contrast, the most advanced American workers, particularly the council communists around Paul Mattick (organized under the name the Groups of Council Communists, and putting out International Council Correspondence, New Essays, and Living Marxism), understood that the working class’s agenda in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War had to be “revolution against fascism and bourgeois democracy.”7 Of these steadfast warriors, Zinn makes no mention. For Zinn the pinnacle of political development was the struggle for integration into bourgeois democracy and the defense of it. This colored his perspective of what was possible and how it could be achieved.
At any rate, I’m sure more can and will be said in defense of or disagreement with his legacy as a radical. This is a discussion that I’d like to see, so feel free to comment with your thoughts or even just link to another post or a discussion in a forum.
- Both quotes are from this speech he gave in 2000.
- Thus Marx wrote in Value, Price and Profit that
Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’
- See Douglas E. Booth, “Karl Marx on State Regulation of the Labor Process: The English Factory Acts,” Review of Social Economy 36, no. 2 (October 1978): 137-157, as well as the April 1980 issue (Volume 38, issue 1) for a critical reply by Lawrence as well as Booth’s response to Lawrence.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_M2W5SisPs
- http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-obit-zinn,0,3882068.story
- Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
- See “The Civil War in SPAIN!,” International Council Correspondence 2, no. 11 (October 1936): 1-40.
By Schalken, on 01.26.10. Tagged with: book review, history.
Sometimes it’s tempting to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the 1770s, Americans protested British taxes levied after a war in which Britain fought to defend her American colonists. In 2009, some Americans drew on the imagery and rhetoric of those earlier protests and held “tea parties” bemoaning Obama’s plans for healthcare reform. The history of American as an independent nation is thus bookended by protests against two of the least objectionable taxes ever proposed. (Not that health care reform amounts to anything more than a redistribution of profits for the bourgeoisie.) In light of this, it would be easy to fall for the idea that America is and always has been marked by hyper-individualism and stinginess.
David Freeman Hawke’s Everyday Life in Early America provides a counterpoint to such a view. This is not a work of special scholarly merit. It was written for popular audiences and is merely a synthesis of the research of many other scholars. However, in addition to being a book I recently finished (the primary reason I’m discussing it), it does an excellent job of providing a look at an American society that was quite different from ours today, which drives home the point that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Hawke begins by describing the world of the Englishmen that came to America. He points out that in many places in 17th century Britain, many farmers still tended land in common. Moreover,
youngsters were taught the medieval notion that what they did reflected first on the family, then rippled out to affect the entire community. Whether they became craftsmen, merchants, or farmers, they knew from youth that no man was an island, that their lives and actions were inextricably involved with the welfare of the community. Town fathers regulated the products that citizens brought to market — judging the quality, the weight, the justness of the price — and no one questioned their right to do so. (This is not to say that cheating did not prevail; ideals seldom flourish in everyday life.) When someone died in a seventeenth-century English village, no one needed an explication of John Donne’s lines, “Do not send to ask for whom the bells toll. It tolls for thee.” (p. 8)
In some parts of America (specifically East Hampton, Long Island) community life persisted in much the same way:
All things considered, the life of the town was corporate to a remarkable degree. The citizens were indeed a body, each one integrated into part of the larger whole. Experience came to them in, and by, and through the group; literally and figuratively, they lived in each other’s presence. Their houses lay huddled together along a single street. Their field-lots were scattered in every direction — two acres here, four acres there, but always among a bevy of neighbors. They accepted common tasks and they shared both good and bad fortune. They worked together, they worshiped together, governed together. (p. 20-21, quoting John Demos)
The “profit motive” that the defenders of capitalism present as innate and eternal was little-known in the North:
there was little innovative, risk-taking behavior; there was no determined pursuit of profit. Indeed, the account books of these farm families indicate that they invariably chose the security of diversified production rather than hire labor to produce more wheat or to specialize in milk production. Economic gain was important to these men and women, yet it was not their dominant value. It was subordinate to (or encompassed by) two other goals: the yearly subsistence and the long-run financial security of the family unit. (p. 42-43, quoting James A. Henretta)
While in other regions, particularly Virginia, community was illusory and a cutthroat spirit prevailed:
The worst sides of English life flourished in a brutal, self-centered society that lacked communal bonds of any kind. Manners and morals collapsed. During the “starving time,” some “fed on the corpses of dead men, and one who had gotten insatiable, out of custom to that food, could not be restrained until such time as he was executed for it.” Excessive drinking prevailed. Community cooperation and restraints found in the village vanished. Every man looked out for himself. In the winter of 1631-1632, one entrepreneur collected two thousand bushels of corn in Virginia and sold them to New Englanders while his brethren at home wanted for food. The ideal of the commonwealth, “in which the interest of ever part would be harmoniously subordinated to the larger interest of the whole society,” never appeared. (p. 21)
The community ideal wasn’t entirely abandoned, however. Virginia tried four times to hold down ‘the excessive and immoderate prices exacted by diverse, avaricious … practitioners in psychic and surgery,’ but with little success. (p. 84) Moreover,
most communities tried to impose restraints on the miller. His monopoly usually had a time limit on it which might not be renewed if his performance failed to satisfy the neighborhood. A contract usually restricted charges to customers. The gristmill, in short, was treated as a public utility. The aim was to “adjust private enterprise to community ends.” (p. 147)
Attitudes toward religion also varied by region. To say that early white America was a Christian land may be a stretch:
A pious visitor toward the end of the century found “the lives of the planters in Maryland and Virginia are very godless and profane.” The trend that had set in there soon became fixed in most colonies. “Sunday is very badly kept,” said a visitor to Pennsylvania, “especially in the rural districts, where most country folk pay little attention to it.” (p. 90)
New England was more devout, but their Christianity was quite different from the conservative evangelicalism of today. Their take on marriage might be called progressive in modern parlance: New England departed radially from English custom. The Congregationalists held that nothing in the Bible designated marriage as a religious rite–even pagans got married–and they made it a civil affair officiated by a magistrate. (p. 93)
All in all, Hawke’s little volume does an admirable job of explaining the complexity and variety of lifeways in early British North America. Everyone should be able to find a topic of interest, whether it is his discussion of early American furniture or his comments on linguistic differences, but to me its greatest worth is in its demonstration that society and “human nature” are very much malleable. If America today is indeed marked by hyper-individualism and the complete atomization of individual, Hawke shows that this was not always the case. Those of us hoping for a better future can take heart in that.
By Schalken, on 01.11.10. Tagged with: environment.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously claimed that the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class. This assertion has been dismissed by all save for the serious students of history. We’re told that there’s a “marketplace of ideas” in which ideas fairly and freely compete, with the best ones winning. (Ironically, this bourgeois conception of intellectual life is nearly a perfect analogue to the mythical bourgeois conception of capitalism as an economic system in which self-interested actors meet on free and equal grounds; proving, of course, Marx and Engel’s preface to the above quote: intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed. )
At any rate, the Marketplace of Ideas myth is slowly crumbling, at least for the time being. Faced with fanatical opposition to their “plans” for health care reform and slightly slowing the pace of catastrophic global warming, a few liberal commentators have had to reveal the dirty secret that monied interests set the intellectual agenda in the United States (and everywhere else, for that matter). Liberal talk radio has gone on the offensive against astroturfing, the corporate bankrolling of supposedly grassroots activist groups. For instance, Rachel Maddow recently reported on the ties between the billionaire David Koch and the “grassroots” Americans for Prosperity and Mother Jones has named ExxonMobil as number one in its dirty dozen of climate change denial, because of the company’s funding for think-tanks that promote climate change denial. (Climate change legislation might threaten ExxonMobil’s profits, which in 2008 were over 45 billion dollars.) And so on and so on.
But money buys more than attention for the handful of conservative astroturf groups. It even sets the agenda in American universities, as this Reuters article from 2008 points out.
April 11 (Bloomberg) — Ayn Rand’s novels of headstrong entrepreneurs’ battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.
The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.
Ayn Rand, of course, is of no use to anyone but angsty teenagers and the small business owners who receive none of the government’s largess and protection — but all of the taxes and regulations. But it gets one wondering just how many intellectual whores in academia have been purchased by successful businessmen (not that these tycoons ought to bother — by and large, academics are merely propagators of the dominant ideas or purveyors of “revolutionary” distractions).
By Schalken, on 01.11.10. Tagged with: William Morris.
Racial unrest between whites and black immigrants flared this week in the southern Italian town of Rosarno. Reuters reports that the violence began when several African immigrants were assaulted by white youth wielding air rifles; these African workers responded by rioting, which led to further confrontations with white residents. The state’s reaction has been to destroy the immigrants’ hovels (some of which were nothing more than abandoned factories with no water or electricity) and to remove them to immigration centers across Italy.
Predictably, some factions of the ruling class have responded by calling for even more oppression and ostracism — “Jobs for Italians!” — while the left, naturally, is preaching some kind of feel-good unity. Both have the effect of dividing the working class and mystifying the causes of this division. The right says it’s human nature, the left says it’s ignorance. Both ignore that it’s manufactured by the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system of competition.
Only through struggle and the concurrent development of its consciousness can the proletariat discover that its unity as an exploited class is more important than all the other divisions one could invent; as Pannekoek said, the proletariat is not weak because it is divided, it is divided because it is weak. In the course of this development, the proletariat will necessarily also discover that the bourgeoisie is merciless in its machinations.
As an example of this kind of development in consciousness, look at the case of C. P. Ellis. Ellis was an alienated working-class white who joined the Ku Klux Klan because it offered a sense of community and importance. As a Klansman, he rubbed elbows with local politicos in fighting the emerging Civil Rights movement. But before long he saw the real nature of this alliance:
One day I was walkin’ downtown and a certain city council member saw me comin’. I expected him to shake my hand because he was talking to me at night on the telephone. I had been in his home and visited with him. He crossed the street. Oh shit, I began to think, somethin’s wrong here. Most of ‘em are merchants or maybe an attorney, an insurance agent, people like that. As long as they kept low-income whites and low-income blacks fightin’, they’re gonna maintain control.
…
I’d go home at night and I’d have to wrestle with myself. I’d look at a black person walkin’ down the street, and the guy’d have ragged shoes or his clothes would be worn. That began to do somethin’ to me inside. I went through this for about six months. I felt I just had to get out of the Klan.
This was a realization cemented by some workplace struggles Ellis was later involved in, where he came to see that people were “again bein’ used. Blacks against whites. I say this without any hesitancy: management is vicious. There’s two things they want to keep: all the money and all the say-so.” (Source for C. P. Ellis quotes).
We also have to realize that relentless shuffling of humans by capital in its quest for cheap labor undermines or confronts traditional cultures in Europe. This is a legitimate concern, to an extent. But at the same time, European capital and capitalists have long undermined and destroyed cultures in the rest of the world. For that matter, European cultures are being undermined by other European cultures — just take a look at the list of endangered European languages. (One could easily argue that African immigrants are less of a threat to the dominant Italian culture than the dominant Italian culture is to the cultures of other linguistic groups living in Italy.)
Defending cultural variety does not mean endorsing racist violence and nationalist extremism. Not only are those methods and ideas abhorrent, they cannot defeat the homogenizing tendencies of capitalism (since they reinforce capitalism). The brilliant English communist William Morris wrote a splendid novel called News from Nowhere in which a Rip Van Winkle-like newcomer is guided through a future socialist society. Morris uses the protagonist’s endless questions asked of his guides to tackle a number of questions, one of which is whether national variety is obliterated in a communist society:
Said I: “How about your relations with foreign nations?”
“I will not affect not to know what you mean,” said he, “but I will tell you at once that the whole system of rival and contending nations which played so great a part in the ‘government’ of the world of civilisation has disappeared along with the inequality betwixt man and man in society.”
“Does not that make the world duller?” said I.
“Why?” said the old man.
“The obliteration of national variety,” said I.
“Nonsense,” he said, somewhat snappishly. “Cross the water and see. You will find plenty of variety: the landscape, the building, the diet, the amusements, all various. The men and women varying in looks as well as in habits of thought; the costume far more various than in the commercial period. How should it add to the variety or dispel the dulness, to coerce certain families or tribes, often heterogeneous and jarring with one another, into certain artificial and mechanical groups, and call them nations, and stimulate their patriotism—i.e., their foolish and envious prejudices?”
“Well—I don’t know how,” said I.
“That’s right,” said Hammond cheerily; “you can easily understand that now we are freed from this folly it is obvious to us that by means of this very diversity the different strains of blood in the world can be serviceable and pleasant to each other, without in the least wanting to rob each other: we are all bent on the same enterprise, making the most of our lives. And I must tell you whatever quarrels or misunderstandings arise, they very seldom take place between people of different race; and consequently since there is less unreason in them, they are the more readily appeased.”
Something to reflect on.
Edited To Add: The Internationalist Communist Tendency has put up a good article on the strife in Rosarno.
Fischer over at Notes from Underground recently blogged about the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of Dickens’s Little Dorrit and the critique of capitalism implicit in it. I can’t comment on that work as the only Dickens I’ve read is his 1854 novel Hard Times, but that’s fine because Hard Times is one of the finest backwards-looking critiques of capitalism I’ve ever read. Dickens’s characters might be caricatures (especially Slackbridge, the union organizer), but damn if there’s not some element of truth in most of them, particularly Bounderby, the industrialist who’s always reminding those around him of his long climb to the top. Here he is, speaking of himself in the third person:
Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the antecedents, and the culmination. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant. Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all right, all correct – he hadn’t such advantages – but let us have hard-headed, solid-fisted people – the education that made him won’t do for everybody, he knows well.
At the end, of course, it’s revealed that Bounderby’s not a self-made man at all. This is a hypocrisy Dickens returns to time and time again in the work:
This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ Dickens had no trouble recognizing this:
It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.
and
It must be admitted that he allowed her [his indigent mother] half a pound of tea a year, which was weak in him: first, because all gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient, and secondly, because his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it for as much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of man – not a part of man’s duty, but the whole.
But for all of Dicken’s clearsighted criticism of 19th century capitalism, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is another 1854 novel that is more relevant to us in these years of capitalist crisis (it’s also an excellent BBC miniseries — which you can watch online with Netflix if you’re a subscriber). There’s none of the caricaturing as in Hard Times, but this works to the advantage of Gaskell’s story; the character of John Thornton is an affirmation of one of the central tenets of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, which is that the imminent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him (Marx, Capital.) Thornton is a stern but decent factory owner whose business is on the verge of going under. On the one hand, he’s moved to mercilessly exploit his workers and quash their attempts to unionize, and on the other his capitalist cronies are constantly encouraging him — against his better judgement — to survive the crisis by speculation. Sound familiar? It’s the story of the last 40 years. But lest we think that Gaskell and Dickens wrote timeless works, it’s important to remember that both were brilliant precisely because they saw what was new and horrible in capitalism, a social formation that was new to the world in the 19th century. If subsequent writers haven’t dealt with capitalism so clearly, it is because they lived in a world that has known nothing else. Dickens, Gaskell and a host of 19th century writers remind us that capitalism is not ageless. If the working class can rise to its historic task, it won’t be immortal either.
By Schalken, on 12.17.09. Tagged with: bourgeois democracy.
The death of revolutionary energies lies in class collaboration. Democracy is class collaboration through lots of talk, fascism is plain class collaboration in fact. – Amadeo Bordiga.
National defense and democracy – here are the solemn formulas of the capitulation of the proletariat to the will of the bourgeoisie! – Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Communist International
By Schalken, on 12.09.09.
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