The law of uneven development: too many applications?

[Die Neue Zeit]

To begin with, the classical aspect of Marx's law of uneven development under capitalism refers to geographic areas (most notably ones that are nation-states or groups of nation-states):


The world is ready for revolution, but it isn't ready for the socialist mode of production. America, Japan, and Western Europe would presumably be closest to being ready for socialism, but poverty-stricken regions in Africa wouldn't. Those regions would need accelerated "primitive stamocap" (hence the whole reason behind Lenin's "revolutionary democracy"). Of course, the acceleration would be made possible by aid in economic development by the more advanced capitalist countries.

[This is basically a "revolutionary extension" of subsidized trade in favour of developing countries... except that I'm not talking just about trade.]



Then I posited another aspect in the Stamocap (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stamocap-t59014/index4.html) thread - industrial sectors:



From my understanding of your proposal, within a single economy there would be a capitalist sector and a non-capitalist sector (that could be represented various "different" non-capitalist sectors...).

So the socialist republic of X would have, instead of thinking of an iron sector, etc., we'd have a capitalist sector, etc.

That's my understanding of your proposal.

Not quite. My semantics are wrong here. I should have used the word "economy" instead of sector (Ben uses the two words interchangeably in his "post-revolution" articles). The whole global economy should be referred to as a "multi-economy" (for the purpose of this discussion).

Take the financial sector, for example (I'll give two or three here). The global proletocracy would absorb most of this sector into the state-capitalist economy, but there would still be the niche "credit unions" to serve as local competition (the private-capitalist economy, yet in this example "cooperative" in nature). The directly democratic elements ("socialist sector" - ie, no bureaucracy, but with sufficient communications technology to make society-wide decisions) would take quite a bit of time to wrest control of the financial sector from the state-capitalist economy, all the while competing with state enterprises. Then there are "moneyless"/communist considerations to consider (upon communism eliminating this sector completely).

Second example: in the case of the capital-intense "heavy industry" (especially construction and the related heavy urban development projects, which is dear to me), the "niche" would be either much smaller or non-existent (because of improved, yet capital-intensive, information technology in controlling manufacturing processes, for example), but direct democracy would also come after a protracted period of state monopoly capitalism. The moneyless/communist economy would emerge MUCH later.

Third example (and this one's dear to Ben): the media. In this one, I'm not sure if the private-capitalist economy will be existent immediately afterwards. The Big Media will have been wrested by the state-capitalist economy, and even then methinks the directly democratic economy will QUICKLY wrest this away from state capitalism. Furthermore, moneyless relations will be more prevalent here than in the financial services (the Internet). According to this example of uneven development, the full socialization of the media - and partial communization - will occur much faster than those of the financial and heavy-manufacturing sectors.



Now, what about a third: the uneven development of capitalist decadence?

The left-communists keep saying that capitalist decadence was ushered in with the start of WWI. The problem, however, is that they fail to consider the Stalin-era Soviet economic boom and the post-WWII Western economic boom.

WWI was certainly a major step towards capitalist decadence, but what about mass de-colonialization and all the associated national-liberation movements immediately after WWII? By that time, it became clear that:

A) Colonialism was a liability to capitalist development; and
B) Even when progressive, colonialism wasn't a quintessential feature of capitalist development.

Granted, today we've got "Balkanization," but if the whole capitalist decadence began with WWI, "Balkanization" would have occurred long ago.

What about the mixed-bag credit boom (which, per gilhyle, "faciliates the intensified integration of society's assets into the capitalist economy") associated with the overall post-WWII Western economic boom? On the one hand, there was an economic boom not seen in the West during the interwar years, but nowadays we're seeing negative savings rates and sluggish economic growth in the developed world, in spite of an accelerated credit boom that followed the abandonment of the gold standard:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/banks-and-credit-t67963/index.html




Actually you can keep expanding credit for ever - as long as the credit advanced leads to an expansion in the forces of production. Credit operates like a commodity. There is a credit cycle where the volumes of credit expands and contracts and the price of credit varies.

The situation is complicated by the manipulation of the price of credit by the state and the manipulation of the credit cycle by regulation.

The expansion of credit is not a sign of capitalism in crises, it is the basic mechanism of growth in the capitalist economy.

On the one hand, it seems disheartening at first. On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of phenomenon I was referring to in my "Stamocap" thread (credit taking the form of "leverage" re. pyramidal holdings).

That last remark of yours needs further discussion in my Research and Online Classes thread ("Question on America's debt levels"), because debt is growing disproportionately to the economy and to national income. Is this disproportion what you're referring to in your "as long as" qualification above?

Under capitalism proportionality is determined by the market. If you can invest and get a return sufficient to service the debt then the credit cycle will continue. Debt will grow 'disproportionately' under the kind of neo - Keynesian policies the Fed has pursued for years now. But disproportionality is not a yes or no condition. Credit expansion can justify itself after the fact - sometimes by events that were unrelated to the assessment of the credit decisions. The anarchy of capitalism sometimes works in its favour. Thus something can be disproportionate at the time of issue and later prove sustainable.

Thats not to underestimate the capacity for capitalism in its current phase for significant credit-based asset price inflation. This is undoubtedly caused by the weakening of credit regulation - linked to taking credit off-balance sheet the banks' b/s and thus out of the regulatory framework.



Other applications? General thoughts?

[Alf]

Important questions, but your post leaves out certain key points about the nature of capitalism. Capitalism, unlike previous modes of production, cannot allow other modes of production to subsist independently; as Marx noted in the Communist Manifesto, it is impelled to create a world in its image, spreading its tentacles across the whole globe. But as Rosa Luxemburg noted, capitalism also needed those non-capitalist economies as the soil for its expansion, and by using them up, integrating them into the capitalist system, becoming the one dominant mode of production on the planet, it also accelerated its own downfall. In becoming global, it becomes decadent.

This doesn't mean that all parts of the planet are equally plunged into crisis, or that all phases of decadence are equally catastrophic. In that sense, the course of decadence is uneven, but we have to step back from particular phases and regions and view the system as a totality.

Capitalism has certainly found various ways of maintaining its existence as an obsolete social form. One of the most important is the tendency to 'defy' its own laws and substitute state direction for the untrammelled reign of market forces; and however much the bourgeoisie and its leftist appendages talk about 'neo-liberalism' today, capitalism will never unlearn the lessons it learned in the 1930s: you can't go back to the golden age of liberalism. Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were in effect the first regimes to put this truth into practice (although Keynes theorised the same trend in the 'democracies') and were able to 'solve' the problem of mass unemployment in that period by building up a war economy. But this in itself confirms that this was fundamentally an expression of a decadent social system that could only 'live' through destruction.

The 'credit' boom whose days now appeared to be numbered is another manifestation of this: what better demonstration of the impasse facing the system than the fact that it has only managed to survive on a huge mountain of debt? The mere facts and figures of growth are not the main point: the point is the basis on which this growth takes place.

Lots more to discuss but I'll leave it there for now.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Here's another possible application, and this one addresses vanguardism:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1086462&postcount=47



The point is that the whole mass of working-class folks by itself cannot develop this consciousness [particularly at the same time]. It has to be either imported (petit-bourgeois intellectuals, with their literary works, and ESPECIALLY "coordinator"/managerial individuals per my Theory thread on modern class relations (http://www.revleft.com/vb/has-capitalism-really-t65831/index.html)) or developed by informed segments of the working class.

[As a revolutionary Marxist side rant, Kautsky made a reductionist error by saying that the "bearers of consciousness" in his time were exclusively petit-bourgeois.]

Also:

Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (http://books.google.ca/books?id=8AVUvEUsdCgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0)


As we set about the task of rediscovering Lenin's actual outlook, the terms 'party of a new type' and 'vanguard party' are actually helpful - but only if they are applied to the SPD as well as the Bolsheviks. The SPD was a vanguard party, first because it defined its own mission as 'filling up' the proletariat with the awareness and skills needed to fulfil its own world-historical mission, and second because the SPD developed an innovative panoply of methods for spreading enlightenment and 'combination.' The term 'vanguard party' was not used during this period (I do not believe the term can be found in Lenin's writings), but 'vanguard' was, and this is what people meant by it. Any other definition is historically misleading and confusing.

Ultimately, the vanguard outlook derives from the key Marxist assumption that 'the emancipation of the working classes must be the work of the working classes themselves.' Sometimes this dictum is viewed as the opposite of the vanguard outlook, but, in actually, it makes vanguardism almost inevitable. If the proletariat is the only agent capable of introducing socialism, then it must go through some process that will prepare it to carry out that great deed.

[gilhyle]

Dunno if these very general points are relevant or not but:

1. The dispute between proponents of working class power and those of the capitalist state is a dispute about how to manage/contain/demobilise competition. Part of the success of the bourgeois class over the course of the 20th century has been its complex strategy for managing competition. They have shown their strength as a class by not insisting that competition must be allowed free reign. On the contrary, through sectoral regulation (of the labour market, of credit, of agriculture, of trade etc.) and, less successfully, anti-trust regulation capitalism has very significantly contained their own mode of production and built elements of the socialisation that the overcoming of capitalism requires. By contrast revolutionary socialists insist that the secortal/anti-trust approach is historically inadequate and just costs too much in terms of human suffering. In other words, revolutioary socialists insist on the 'decadence' of capitalism, i.e. that the compromises of which it is capable are not acceptable.

2. The sense in which capitalism is decadent varies depending on its own moments. In the middle of a crisis of international war, capitalism is immanently decadent. Revolutionary parties are imperative. The contending social strata coalesce into a reactionary mass and the progressive forces. The Russian Revolution happened within the first moment after the development of imperialism in which capitalism was immanently decadent in this sense. The defeat of the Russian Revolution mean that imperialism became a multi-periodic epoch, having a variety of moments within it in which the sense in which capitalism was decadent have varied. Wwhen capitalism is not immanently decadent it can neverthelss remain decadent as a matter of universal calculation, i.e. it can, nevertheless, be true that - on balance - the control of comeptition as revolutionary socialists would wish to do it is better than the way capitalists do it.

3. Where capitalism is immenently in crisis, the political significance of the law of uneven development is minimised (though never trivial) while during other periods, its importance reasserts itself.

4. Maturing imperialism is characterised by the systematic trading of risk and a major effect of this is to integrate credit markets world wide. In prinicple this opens up the possibility of a world wide credit crisis of imperialism - thus reversing within the credit sector the significance of the uneven development pattern. If this is happening in the credit sector it may also happen in other sectors - thus suggesting that with sufficient time to develop, imperialism will undermine the political siginficance of the law of unevern development......by combined development.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Methinks this material should be double-posted in my thread "Is a new theory of imperialism required?"

You elaborated more on the anti-trust stuff, but your stuff on sectoral regulation is especially interesting. Could that be another thing to talk about in that thread? :confused: