What exactly is wrong with the Monthly Review school?

[GPDP]

By school, I mean the line of thought and theory pushed by past and present editors of the magazine such as Paul Sweezy and John Bellamy Foster.

Anyway, I've recently seen MR come under criticism several times here, with posters criticizing them for "misinterpreting Marx" or even of being "un-Marxist." Part of it seems to be due to their ideas about monopoly finance capital, which incorporates quite a bit of Keynesian/Post-Keynesian ideas, though I'm not sure if that's all there is to it.

I'm not necessarily going to defend them. I just think they publish some very interesting articles from time to time. That, and they've given me something to read during long boring intermissions between classes at my University Library for years, so I feel a bit of attachment to them. :lol: In any case, I'm willing to hear what is wrong with their assessments, and how their Marxism is revisionist or whatever.

[Die Neue Zeit]

There's too much incorporation of "Keynesian" economics (read: Bastard Keynesianism) and not enough of post-Keynesianism and a critique of such. This would mean, for instance, the adoption of Chartalism as a monetary theory.

[RadioRaheem84]

I love Monthly Review and tout it all the time, but even I admit that they push too hard for relevancy among the mainstream sometimes and defend structural Keynesianism sometimes.

But I've never read that they've strayed from being fundamentally anti-capitalist. Even if they do give room to Left Keynesians, they're still critical of them and insist on a systemic critique rather than reformist.

[redasheville]

I think it is safe to say that the Monthly Review has always been anticapitalist. However, I agree with DNZ above...their economic theories are a kind of left Keynesian form of Marxism. By that I mean simply how they understand the dynamics of capitalism and not necessarily their political program. I am on my phone at the moment and will comment more when I get off from work.

[RadioRaheem84]

However, I agree with DNZ above...their economic theories are a kind of left Keynesian form of Marxism.

I agree that when I read their articles they take a lot of the concepts shared by mainstream economists rather seriously. They speak highly of Minsky, Joan Robinson and other left Keynesians. Paul Sweezy himself said that Marxists could learn a lot from Keynesians too, so that probably explains a lot.

But MR is still fundamentally an anti-capitalist magazine. Sweezy and Magdoff took a lot of heat during McCarthyism and Sweezy gave up an illustrious career as a Harvard economist to pursue Marxism. Something that his mentor Joseph Schumpeter thought was ridiculous considering he was a great economist.

Other than that they have great stuff on imperialism, history, etc.

[redasheville]

OK. So I've never read any of Sweezy's works, but I read John Bellamy Foster's articles on the crisis. Basically, the MR folk believe that "monopoly capitalism" is characterized by stagnation, and that the periods of stagnation (i.e. crisis) are interrupted by booms. The post war boom was the result of innovations in marketing, defense spending etc. which allowed capitalism to expand for a period of time. However, at the end of the post war boom (in the 1970s) capitalism went back into stagnation. Since there were a lack of means of profitable investment, this allowed for the process of financialization occur. Capitalists took their profits and invested it in the financial sector, creating massive speculative bubbles. The current crisis is of course the result of the bubble bursting.

I don't buy that argument because I think the neoliberal period (1970s until now) as being one of the most dynamic periods of capitalism's history and included record profits up until 2006. Not sure how than can be explained as "stagnation".

Also, this dynamism is the result of the interrelationship between finance and industry. Finance is essential to the functioning of capitalism. MR folk tend to view finance and industry being antagonistic or at least contradictory (i.e. finance was where the capitalists invested their capital instead of industry). This is why MR has a streak of left populist/Keynesianism to it.

That's my take...could be wrong though. Read "In and Out of Crisis" by Leo Panitich et al. for an excellent explanation of the crisis that takes on some of what the MR people have been saying. Also, David McNally's writings are great (his book is forthcoming).

[Die Neue Zeit]

I agree that when I read their articles they take a lot of the concepts shared by mainstream economists rather seriously. They speak highly of Minsky, Joan Robinson and other left Keynesians. Paul Sweezy himself said that Marxists could learn a lot from Keynesians too, so that probably explains a lot.

Actually, I have yet to read any article of theirs that goes into post-Keynesian analysis on labour specifically. I have yet to read an article on the ELR proposal of the Minsky-Wray line. I have yet to read a counter-critique of Steve Keen's critique of LTV (his is a vague "commodities theory of value" that asserts labour, machines, and physical commodities create value but money doesn't).

Most of the time they talk about Stiglitz and his ilk, who come from the Bastard Keynesianism school.

[syndicat]

redasheville:
I don't buy that argument because I think the neoliberal period (1970s until now) as being one of the most dynamic periods of capitalism's history and included record profits up until 2006. Not sure how than can be explained as "stagnation".


I agree with you. There were huge increases in corporate profits and in the share of national income going to the capitalists throughout the neoliberal era, '80s, '90s, early 2000s.

However, the view that capitalism was stuck in unending stagnation since the '70s isn't unique to the MR school. There are some more orthodox Marxists, who hold to the declining rate of profit theory, who also hold the same view, for example Loren Gouldner.

The reason for this is confusion between growth and profits. The neoliberal era has not seen an increase in growth of GNP since the '70s. But that's not what the capitalists care about. What they care about is their profits and their income. And that did revive under the deregulated neoliberal regime.

[Zanthorus]

Here is what Loren Goldner has to say about this "school":


Amin belongs to a constellation of thinkers, including Bettelheim, Pailloix, Immanuel and Andre Gunder Frank, who worked off the ideas of Baran and Sweezy and who became known, in the post-World War II period as the partisans (not of course uniformly agreeing among themselves) of the "monopoly capital" school of Marxism. The "Monthly Review" school, which had its forum in the publishing house and journal of the same name, evolved from the 1940's to the 1980's, liked "anti-imperialist" movements and regimes, and believed that "de-linking" (to use Amin's term) was the only road by which such movements and regimes (which they then tended to call socialist) could develop backward countries. This inclination led them from Stalin's Russia to Mao's China, by way of Sukharno's Indonesia, Nkrumah's Ghana, Ben Bella's Algeria to Castro's Cuba. Most of the time, they came away disappointed. They went with China in the Sino-Soviet split. The post-Mao evolution cooled them on China, but this disappointment was quickly followed by Pol Pot's Cambodia, the expulsion of the (ethnic Chinese) boat people from Vietnam, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Sino- Vietnamese border war of 1979, and China's virtual alliance with the U.S., It was hard, in those years, to be "anti-imperialist" forces were all at war with each other, and when China was being armed by the biggest imperialist of them all. With the fundamentalist turn of the Iranian revolution for good measure, by 1980 a lot of people, including people in the Third World, were coming to the conclusion that that "anti-imperialism" by itself was not enough, and some were even coming to think that there was such a thing as a REACTIONARY anti-imperialism. Finally, around the same time, countries like South Korea and Taiwan emerged as industrial powers, not by autarchy, but by using the world market and the international division of labor, which Amin and his friends had always said was impossible.

De-linking is a fancy name for an idea first developed by Joseph Stalin called "socialism in one country". (Amin thinks that Stalin was too hard on the peasants, but he has never said what he thought about the millions who died during Mao's "Great Leap Forward".) Amin and the school he comes out of base their world strategy on a theory of "uneven development" which they see as a permanent by-product of capitalism. This in itself is fine, and was worked out in more sophisticated fashion by Trotsky 80 years ago. For Amin and his co-thinkers, de-linking is a strategy to break the "weak links" in the chain of international capitalism. Karl Marx also had a theory of "weak links", which he called "permanent revolution", a term significantly never used by Amin, probably, again, because of its Trotskyist connotations. Marx applied it to Germany in 1848, where it explained the ability of the German workers, because of the weakness of the German bourgeoisie, to go beyond bourgeois liberalism to socialism in the struggle for democracy, hence giving the revolution a "permanent" character. Leon Trotsky applied same theory in Russia after 1905, and was alone, prior to 1917, in forseeing the possibility of a working-class led revolution in backward Russia.

But Marx and Trotsky, unlike Amin, did not propose that the workers in "weak link" countries "de-link" from the rest of the world. They saw the working class as an international class, and saw German and then Russian workers as potential leaders in a world revolutionary process. Following this logic, the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy of 1917 was entirely predicated on a successful revolution in Germany for its survival. When the German revolution failed, the Russian revolution was isolated and besieged. Only when Stalin proposed the previous unheard-of grotesquery of "socialism in one country", and the draconian autarchy it implied, did "de-linking" first enter the arsenal of "socialism".

Although Amin and his Monthly Review colleagues rarely spell out their origins so clearly, their theory rests on the defeat, not on the victory, of the world revolutionary wave of 1917-1921. Amin's theory takes from Marx's notion of permanent revolution only the "weak link" aspect. Amin thinks that "de-linking" saves the workers and peasants of the de-linked country from the bloody process of primitive accumulation imposed by Western capitalism, but it only legitimates that same process, now carried out by the local "anti-imperialist" elite. The workers and peasants of Cambodia, for example, learned this lesson the hard way. Amin's theory also "de-links" the workers and peasants of the Third World from the one force whose intervention (as the early Bolsheviks understood) could spare them that ordeal: the international working-class movement. (Amin thinks socialist revolution by working people in the West is essentially a pipedream; he at least has the honesty to say so. Amin's theory, finally, links the workers and peasants in the "de-linked" countries, under the auspices of "national popular democracy" (he does not dare call it socialism, as he and others used to) to Mao, Pol Pot and their possible future progeny, who substitute themselves for Western capitalists and carry out that accumulation under the rhetoric of "building socialism". That is why it is appropriate to call Amin's theory that of a Third World bureaucratic elite, and his universalism a univeralism of the state.

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/universality.html


I have yet to read a counter-critique of Steve Keen's critique of LTV (his is a vague "commodities theory of value" that asserts labour, machines, and physical commodities creating value but not money).

Well Keen's "critique" rests on a form of commodity fetishism, as well as confusing the order in which Marx proved his concepts (The proof of LTV comes before the proof that labour is the only source of surplus-value), which most people familiar with Marx should be able to see through.

[KurtFF8]

I like MR quite a bit actually. They do deal with Keynesianism quite a bit, but the idea that one can't use elements of other critques into a broader Marxist critique is just being dogmatic. They stick to Marxism petty consistently and certainly aren't Keynesian. The book they published around 08 ("The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences") was one of the best accounts for how it happened I would argue.

And for their note about stagnation: they are talking mainly about stagnation of the industrial, or "real" economy that has yet to recover from the crisis of the 1970s. They argue that the make up for this, Capital moved more and more towards finance.

[chegitz guevara]

OK. So I've never read any of Sweezy's works, but I read John Bellamy Foster's articles on the crisis. Basically, the MR folk believe that "monopoly capitalism" is characterized by stagnation, and that the periods of stagnation (i.e. crisis) are interrupted by booms. The post war boom was the result of innovations in marketing, defense spending etc. which allowed capitalism to expand for a period of time. However, at the end of the post war boom (in the 1970s) capitalism went back into stagnation. Since there were a lack of means of profitable investment, this allowed for the process of financialization occur. Capitalists took their profits and invested it in the financial sector, creating massive speculative bubbles. The current crisis is of course the result of the bubble bursting.

Increases in productivity and profitability during the last forty years have largely been carried out on the basis of deindustrialization in the imperialist countries and the shifting of production to the neo-colonies. Profitability in capitalism has largely been accomplished by cannibalizing other capitalists, as well as taking back wages and benefits from the workers and taxes from the state, so that both the worker class and the state have had to borrow money from the capitalists, an repay at interest.

Growth over the past forty years in the U.S. has averaged around 2.5% annually, iirc. Normal growth in capitalism is considered to be between three and four percent. Hence, stagnation.

Frankly, what the MR articles have led me to conclude is that, while the dominant mode of production is still capitalist, the ruling class in the imperialist countries is not. Rather, it is a rentier class of financiers, who make their living off of renting their capital to the state, and all other classes.

[KurtFF8]

It's still the Capitalist class though. They also make arguments that the capitalist leaders of "manufacturing" industries like automotive are the same folks who increased their hand in finance. For example: GM involving itself more and more with finance. It's still a major capitalist company, it just engages itself in finance more.

[syndicat]

Growth over the past forty years in the U.S. has averaged around 2.5% annually, iirc. Normal growth in capitalism is considered to be between three and four percent.

on what basis do you posit a "normal" rate of growth for capitalism? I don't think there is any such basis.

The rate of growth in the '80s and '90s annually was about 3 percent in the U.S., which is about the same as the '70s but less than the post-war boom years. But so what? Profits and capitalist income went way up in the '80s, '90s, early 2000s. That's why we can say the capitalists "solved" their crisis of the '70s, on their terms.

they did not solve it thru "deindustrialization". Why would that increase their profits? Moving production to low wage havens, yes, that lowers costs. they also increased productivity by about 3/4 in the U.S. from 1969 to the early 2000s while wages were stagnant. but the main way they "solved" the crisis of the '70s is by an aggressive offensive against the working class that shifted bargaining power to their advantage: increasing unemployment, lower value of the minimum wage, destroying or avoiding unions, reduced welfare expenditures, more temps and part-timers under the post-'80s "lean production" regime. by destroying the bargaining power of labor, they ensured they would scarf up gains to productivity and be able to impose a harsher work regime. this solved the crisis of the '70s because the latter happened due to the higher bargaining power of labor under the post-World War 2 welfare state regime and high levels of unionism, pattern bargaining etc. during the post-world war 2 boom.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Well Keen's "critique" rests on a form of commodity fetishism, as well as confusing the order in which Marx proved his concepts (The proof of LTV comes before the proof that labour is the only source of surplus-value), which most people familiar with Marx should be able to see through.

Paul, who noted Keen's problem, has taken issue with how I worded the first words of my Draft Program's Basic Principles. There I included the role of labour-saving technology in what I call "value production." Maybe I'm still not yet clear on what kind of value labour-saving technology produces. Heck, does the very same phenomenon of productivity paradoxes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity#Productivity_paradox) that I raise sometimes actually fly in the face of my statement on labour-saving technology?

Coincidentally, I'm surprised "surplus value" is used in economics in the process of calculating "productivity":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity#Surplus_value_as_a_measure_of_product ion_profitability


on what basis do you posit a "normal" rate of growth for capitalism? I don't think there is any such basis.

David Harvey said this in his recent book Enigma of Capital. He said this in other videos, too. The normal growth rate since the Industrial Revolution is 3%.

[syndicat]

David Harvey said this in his recent book Enigma of Capital. He said this in other videos, too. The normal growth rate since the Industrial Revolution is 3%.

thanks for pointing this out. i think the higher growth rate of the post-World War 2 boom was not necessarily "normal" to capitalism, just as the rising real wage rates of that era were also not necessarily "normal."

[KurtFF8]

Harvey also mentioned that number (I think he said 3 and a half percent) in his excellent BBC Hardtalk interview.

And the "Golden Age of Capitalism" was indeed unusual for Capitalism: the post-war years until about the mid 1960s, if we're to count the political troubles as a demonstration of the beginning of the end of the era. Although this same period was one of the more stable and growing periods for the Socialist East as well.

[Proletarian Ultra]

Echoing pretty much everyone else, the objection is that they are embarrassingly close to left-Keynesianism and embarrassingly reflexive anti-impie.

Since I am also embarrassingly close to left-Keynesianism and embarrassingly reflexive anti-impie, I love MR.

BTW: Can someone point me to a good Marxian critique of Keynesianism? And by good I don't mean 'it's capitalist so it sucks'. I mean a real intellectual engagement.

[Zanthorus]

Can someone point me to a good Marxian critique of Keynesianism? And by good I don't mean 'it's capitalist so it sucks'. I mean a real intellectual engagement.

Read through this a while ago. Seems OKish:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/keynes/index.htm

[KurtFF8]

BTW: Can someone point me to a good Marxian critique of Keynesianism? And by good I don't mean 'it's capitalist so it sucks'. I mean a real intellectual engagement.

Sure, look no further than The Monthly Review (http://monthlyreview.org/100401foster-mcchesney.php)

[RadioRaheem84]

on what basis do you posit a "normal" rate of growth for capitalism? I don't think there is any such basis.

The rate of growth in the '80s and '90s annually was about 3 percent in the U.S., which is about the same as the '70s but less than the post-war boom years. But so what? Profits and capitalist income went way up in the '80s, '90s, early 2000s. That's why we can say the capitalists "solved" their crisis of the '70s, on their terms.

they did not solve it thru "deindustrialization". Why would that increase their profits? Moving production to low wage havens, yes, that lowers costs. they also increased productivity by about 3/4 in the U.S. from 1969 to the early 2000s while wages were stagnant. but the main way they "solved" the crisis of the '70s is by an aggressive offensive against the working class that shifted bargaining power to their advantage: increasing unemployment, lower value of the minimum wage, destroying or avoiding unions, reduced welfare expenditures, more temps and part-timers under the post-'80s "lean production" regime. by destroying the bargaining power of labor, they ensured they would scarf up gains to productivity and be able to impose a harsher work regime. this solved the crisis of the '70s because the latter happened due to the higher bargaining power of labor under the post-World War 2 welfare state regime and high levels of unionism, pattern bargaining etc. during the post-world war 2 boom.


Is this not part of the MR school theory too? I assumed the assault on the working class was a given when "de-industrializing"? The point of doing so was also to strip these companies of their assets and drain the wealth. Their focus then turned primarily to finance due to the massive money they made stripping the country of it's wealth.

[RadioRaheem84]

Echoing pretty much everyone else, the objection is that they are embarrassingly close to left-Keynesianism and embarrassingly reflexive anti-impie.

Since I am also embarrassingly close to left-Keynesianism and embarrassingly reflexive anti-impie, I love MR.

MR has an open relationship with Keynesians but they're not Keynesians. They like some of their ideas and praise them when they get somethings right but overall MR has always been pretty critical of Keynesianism.

I think it's more or less to maintain a bit a relevancy and legitimacy in the mainstream on their part.

[KurtFF8]

MR has an open relationship with Keynesians but they're not Keynesians. They like some of their ideas and praise them when they get somethings right but overall MR has always been pretty critical of Keynesianism.

I think it's more or less to maintain a bit a relevancy and legitimacy in the mainstream on their part.

I see nothing wrong with this. It's good to interact with more mainstream theories, and demonstrate that we're aware of them and able to critique them, not just dismiss them as bourgeois and ignore them.