Historic compromise between leninists and conservatives [Archive]

griffjam

22nd April 2009, 21:08

In a recent interview published in the journal Red Pepper, the Marx scholar David Harvey showed a complete misunderstanding of the current crisis:

“We have to socialise the capital surplus, and to get out of the problem of 3 per cent accumulation forever. We are now at a point where a 3 per cent growth rate forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs and such tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to go from one crisis to another.

The core problem is how you are going to absorb capitalist surpluses in a productive and profitable way. My view is that social movements must coalesce around the idea that they want more control over the surplus product. And while I don’t support a return to the Keynesian model of the sort we had in the 1960s, I do think there was much greater social and political control over the production, utilisation and distribution of the surplus then.

The circulating surplus was put into building schools, hospitals and infrastructure. This was what upset the capitalist class and caused a counter movement towards the end of the 1960s – that they were not getting enough control over the surplus. However, if you look at the data the proportion of the surplus being absorbed by the state has not shifted very much since 1970. What the capitalist class did was to stop the further socialisation of the surplus.”

If only we could restore full employment, just like the good old days! Or perhaps Bert Brecht got one thing right: Rather than start with the good old days, lets start with the bad new ones. The trad marxist analysis is steeped in a folk-lore of a bygone age. Quite simply, they refuse to accept the fact that value is created out of time expended in labour. In 2009, technology has destroyed labour time. But never let the facts get in way of a good myth - the myth of labour as the structuring principle of society. The traditional marxist zombies want to recusitate the dead - and they are ones supposedly putting across the most ‘radical’ critique! Another moron is the ‘Leninist’ blogger Richard Seymour. His analysis of the crisis boils down to the same level of simpleton critique that he offers of ‘imperialism’ (this is the same man who cheers on the Taliban as if they are a resistance on par with the Spanish revolutionaries of Barcelona, 1936). Seymour says that ‘the concentration of money wealth represents nothing other than the accumulation of surplus value’ (it is as if Marx’s analysis of fictitious capital and fetishism never existed.) He goes on to say that:

‘If there was to be a break with neoliberalism in the US, there would surely be a well-funded infrastructural development programme, a boost to local state treasuries to fund vital services, the full nationalisation of most of the banking system and its subordination to public need, debt relief, house-building, interest-free loans, etc etc.’

Happily for Leninist Seymour, the idea that ‘the social surplus’ is there to be re-organised by more efficient managers is currently in vogue within the British Conservative Party as well. At least the Tories would probably do a better job, managerially speaking, at least. Conservative Party supporter Phillip Blond in the April 14 issue of the Financial Times says: “half the (British) population now owns just one percent of non-propertied wealth. A fully engaged economy requires new associative models of equity and ownership (…) to generate wealth and influence for all.”

In short, everyone is agreed on the one aim: lets get everyone back to work.

On the contrary, we can guarantee that these self proclaimed ‘managers of labour’, whether they be Tory, ‘marxist’ or Leninist, will find opponents every step of the way; the desire for freedom from value relations, useless work and alienation will continue to inspire all those who refuse to lick the boots of power. It is a tragedy of Edwardian dimensions that the so-called ‘marxist’ rebels are actually the real conservatives in 2009.

Invariance

23rd April 2009, 08:22

I understand that anarchists, liberals and other post-leftists like to misrepresent others, and that they have never liked to debate on grounds of honesty, since mere things like facts and academic integrity are only important to those lesser beings known as Marxists who actually do take a historical materialist approach, but this is a distortion that is laughable.

]Originally written by Harvey
The core problem is how you are going to absorb capitalist surpluses in a productive and profitable way. My view is that social movements must coalesce around the idea that they want more control over the surplus product. And while I don’t support a return to the Keynesian model of the sort we had in the 1960s, I do think there was much greater social and political control over the production, utilisation and distribution of the surplus then.

The circulating surplus was put into building schools, hospitals and infrastructure. This was what upset the capitalist class and caused a counter movement towards the end of the 1960s – that they were not getting enough control over the surplus. However, if you look at the data the proportion of the surplus being absorbed by the state has not shifted very much since 1970. What the capitalist class did was to stop the further socialisation of the surplus. They also managed to transform the word government into the word ‘governance’, making governmental and corporate activities porous, which enables the situation we have in Iraq.

I think we are headed into a legitimation crisis. Over the past 30 years we have been told, to quote Margaret Thatcher, that ‘there is no alternative’ to a neoliberal free market, privatised world, and that if we didn’t succeed in that world it’s our own fault. I think it’s very difficult to say that when faced with a foreclosure crisis you support the banks but not the people who are being foreclosed upon.

You can accuse the people being foreclosed upon of irresponsibility, and in the US there is a strong racist element in this argument. When the first wave of foreclosures hit places like Cleveland and Ohio they were devastating to the black communities there, but some people’s response was basically ‘Well, what do you expect, black people are irresponsible.’ We are seeing right-wing explanations of the crisis that explain it in terms of the personal greed of those who borrowed money to buy houses. So they attempt to blame the crisis on the victims. One of our tasks must be to say ‘no, you absolutely cannot do that’ and to try to create a consolidated explanation of this crisis as a class event in which a certain structure of exploitation broke down and is about to be displaced by an even deeper structure of exploitation. It’s very important this alternative explanation of the crisis is discussed and conveyed publicly.

One of the big ideological configurations we are going to have is what is going to be the role of home ownership in the future once we start saying things like you’ve got to socialise much more of the housing stock, as since the 1930s we have had huge pressures towards individualised home ownership as a way of securing people’s rights and position. We’ve got to socialise and recapitalise public education and medicine.The nerve of this social democrat! He's actually arguing that for society to be developed on further productive grounds that we need to socialise capital, i.e. to abolish the system of capitalism we currently have, that social movements should attempt to have more control over their social product than they currently have. And that this shouldn't be a Keynesian model: What a betrayal to workers!

If only we could restore full employment, just like the good old days! Or perhaps Bert Brecht got one thing right: Rather than start with the good old days, lets start with the bad new ones. The trad marxist analysis is steeped in a folk-lore of a bygone age. Quite simply, they refuse to accept the fact that value is created out of time expended in labour. In 2009, technology has destroyed labour time. But never let the facts get in way of a good myth - the myth of labour as the structuring principle of society. The traditional marxist zombies want to recusitate the dead - and they are ones supposedly putting across the most ‘radical’ critique! This is almost sad if it wasn't so funny. First you go on about Harvey being a 'traditional marxist zombie' and hence 'steeped in the myth of labour as the structuring principle of society.'

Yet Harvey follows exactly your critique:

Originally written by Harvey

Radical politics beyond class divides

There is another point we have to consider, which is that labour, and particularly organised labour, is only one small piece of this whole problem, and it’s only going to have a partial role in what is going on. And this is for a very simple reason, which goes back to the failure of Marx and how he set up the problem. If you say to yourself the formation of the state-finance complex is absolutely crucial to the dynamics of capitalism, and you ask yourself what social forces are at work in contesting that or setting it up, labour has never been at the forefront. Labour has been at the forefront of the labour market and the labour process, which are important moments in the circulation process, but most of the struggles that have gone on over the state-finance nexus are populist struggles.

For example, many of the struggles going on in Latin America are more populist than labour-led. Labour always has a very important role to play but I don’t think we are in a position right now where the conventional view of the proletariat being the vanguard of the struggle is very helpful. There may be times where proletarian movements may be highly significant – for example, in China, where I envisage it playing a critical part that I do not see it having in the US (although it still has an important role there). What is interesting in the US is that the car workers and automobile companies are in alliance right now in relation to the state-finance nexus, so in a way the grand dividing line of class struggle that has always been there in Detroit isn’t there anymore. We have a completely different kind of class politics going on. So I think some of the conventional Marxist ways of viewing these things get in the way of a real radical politics.

There is also the big problem on the left that many think the capturing of state power has no role to play in political transformations. I think they’re crazy. Incredible power is located there and you can’t walk away from it as though it doesn’t matter. I am profoundly sceptical of the belief that NGOs and civil society organisations are going to change the world – not because NGOs can’t do anything at all, but it takes a different kind of political movement and conception if we are going to do anything about the main crisis. In the United States the political instinct is very anarchist, and I am very sympathetic to a lot of anarchist views but not all of them – for example, their perpetual complaints about the state.

I don’t think we are in a position to define who the agents of change will be. In the United States right now there are signs that elements of the managerial class, which has lived off the earnings of finance capital all these years, are getting annoyed and may turn a bit radical. A lot of people have been laid off in the financial services, in some instances they have even had their mortgages foreclosed. In the 1960s art schools were the centre of political radicalism in the US. You might find something like that re-emerging. Or cross-border organisation with groups affected in Mexico by reductions in the amounts migrants can send home to them.

Social movements have to define what strategies and policies they want to adopt. We academics should never view ourselves as having some missionary role in relation to social movements; what we should do is get into conversation. Having said that, I would want us to propose ideas. An interesting idea in the US right now is to get municipal governments to pass anti-eviction ordinances. I think there are a couple of places in France which have done that. Then we could set up a municipal housing corporation which would assume the mortgage and pay off the bank at a partial rate – the banks have been given a lot of money to supposedly deal with this, but they’re not.

Another key question is that of citizenship and rights. I think the rights of the city should be guaranteed by the rights of residency no matter what your citizenship is. Currently people are denied any political rights to the city unless they happen to be citizens. So if you’re an immigrant you don’t have any rights. I think there are struggles to be launched around the rights to the city. In the Brazilian constitution they have a ‘rights to the city’ clause which is about the right to consultation, participation and budgetary procedures. Again I think there is a politics which can come out of that.So firstly, you criticize him for being steeped in Marxist dogma, then it turns out that Harvey thinks populist struggles are a good thing, that class politics is a thing of the past! Its almost as if he is writing for Crimethinc, isn't it?

I'm sorry, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Seymour says that ‘the concentration of money wealth represents nothing other than the accumulation of surplus value’ (it is as if Marx’s analysis of fictitious capital and fetishism never existed.) 1. Marx's arguments of fetishism had nothing to do with the collapse of capitalism. It was about the way our ideological conceptions of capitalism are distorted by material conceptions, that we see things as having inherent wealth which is disconnected from the process (the labour process) which create them. You demonstrate this too when you say "the myth of labour as the structuring principle of society"

2. Harvey wrote a whole section on credit:

Originally written by Harvey

The collapse of credit

The collapse of credit for the working class spells the end of financialisation as the solution for the crisis of the market. As a consequence of this we will see a major crisis of unemployment and the collapse of many industries unless there is effective action to change that. Now this is where you get the current discussion about returning to a Keynesian economic model, and Obama’s plan to invest in a vast public works programme and in green technologies, in a sense going back to a New Deal type of solution.

To understand the current situation we need to go beyond what goes on in the labour process and production to the complex of relationships around the state and finance. We need to understand how the national debt and credit system have from the beginning been major vehicles for primitive accumulation, or what I now call accumulation by dispossession – as you can see from the building industry.

In my ‘Right to the City’ article I looked at how capitalism was revived in second-empire Paris because the state along with the bankers put together a new nexus of state-finance capital to rebuild Paris. That provided full employment – and the boulevards, the water systems and sewage systems, new transport systems. It was through those types of mechanisms that people built the Suez Canal. A lot of this was debt financed. Now that nexus has undergone a massive transformation since the 1970s. It’s become far more international, it’s opened itself to all types of financial innovations. including derivative markets and speculative markets and so on. A new financial architecture has been designed.

What I think is happening at the moment is that they are looking for a new financial set-up that can solve the problem not for working people but for the capitalist class. I think they are going to find a solution for the capitalist class and if the rest of us get screwed, too bad. The only thing they would care about is if we rose up in revolt. And until we rise up in revolt they are going to redesign the system according to their own class interests.

I don’t know what this new financial architecture will look like. If we look closely at what happened during the New York fiscal crisis I don’t think the bankers or the financiers knew what to do at all. What they did was bit by bit arrive at a ‘bricolage’; they pieced it together in a new way and eventually they came up with a new construction. But whatever solution they may arrive at, it will suit them unless we get in there and start saying that we want something that is suitable for us. There’s a crucial role for people like us to raise the questions and challenge the legitimacy of the decisions being made at present, and to have very clear analyses of what the nature of the problem has been, and what the possible exits are.
We need, in fact, to begin to exercise our right to the city. We have to ask the question: which is more important, the value of the banks or the value of humanity? The banking system should serve the people, not live off the people. And the only way in which we are really going to be able to exert the right to the city is to take command of the capitalist surplus absorption problem. We have to socialise the capital surplus, and to get out of the problem of 3 per cent accumulation forever. We are now at a point where a 3 per cent growth rate forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs and such tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to go from one crisis to another. What can I say about this, has there been a historic compromise between post-leftists and social democrats?! It appears there has been! :rolleyes:

People can read Harvey's article, and understand it in its non-distorted content here:

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Their-crisis-our-challenge

The other writer's views can be seen here:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/04/acting-awfully-bored-i-loaned-buck-from.html

I haven't read all of the last one, but how disgusting of him to write:

Originally written by Richard Seymour

So, wherein lies the rumoured crisis of neoliberalism? Despite Gordon Brown's formal renunciation of its tenets, no alternative vision has emerged among the ruling classes - and the working class movement is not as yet organised and militant enough to impose its own solutions. If the magnificent movements taking place in Greece, Italy, France, Ireland and Iceland don't spread; if the factory occupations in the UK don't spark off a wave of working class revolt; if the American working class doesn't explode in apocalyptic fury, then there is absolutely nothing to say that a new Frankenstein version of neoliberalism, with more Keynesian nuts and bolts, will not become the new dominant orthodoxy. I'm not expressing pessimism here, by the way. I think a renewed socialist ideology can emerge in the near future. In the meantime, however, we have to expect a certain lack of coherence. One of the most redundant, and condescending, complaints about the G20 protests was that "they don't know what they want". Of course there is not yet unity around a way forward, or what outcome should be obtained. There has been plenty of intellectual labour dedicated to exploring possible post-capitalist scenarios, but these remain dry, academic exercises in the absence of a movement capable of realising them. The best ideas, and the best perspectives about the means to get there will emerge precisely in the context of struggles over day-to-day issues. I would be more than willing to discuss the ideas they put forth. But misrepresenting someone to build a strawman with which you can burn them never leads to productive discussion.