Book Reports

Dialectics 2: Relations

“History is the true natural history of man (on which more later).”

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx explains that his standpoint makes “the evolution of the economic formation of society … a process of natural history…” In the same Preface he claims that “the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly changing.”¹ Since organisms don’t generally generate spontaneously, we can safely conclude that all societies past, present and future are organisms capable of change. References to humanity and human society (they are the same thing) as a particular outgrowth or aspect of nature are not difficult to find in Marx.

In his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General” in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx claims that “man” – by which, unfortunately, Marx means humanity in general – “is directly a natural being,” “at bottom he is nature,” moreover our needs are “natural need[s]” which “therefore [need] a nature outside of [themselves] … to be stilled.” Still more significantly, the common sense distinction between nature and human activity is entirely dismissed; this allows Marx to speak of “the human character of nature and of the nature created by history – man’s products.”² According to Paul Sweezy, Marx’s materialism “holds that … humanity and society are integral parts of a nature that existed before there was (terrestrial) life, including human life, and will continue to exist after [humanity] has become extinct.”³

Of course, Marx’s view of nature differs drastically from the ideological view in which nature (a separate entity from humanity) is a system of delicate, unchanging balance and equipoise, moving only when we interfere with it. Rather, Marx’s ‘nature’ is closer to that of Darwin of whom Marx and Engels were such critical admirers. As Gould points out:

Darwin grasped with great clarity what most of his contemporaries never understood at all – that the question of agency, or levels of selection, lies at the heart of evolutionary causation. And he provided … a forthright answer that overturned a conceptual world – natural selection works on organisms engaged in a struggle for personal success, as assessed by the differential production of surviving offspring. ⁴

The theory of evolution by natural selection overturns the idea of a static nature and replaces it with a complex system of agents and factors engaged in a struggle to reproduce themselves and changing in the course of reproduction. Organisms, environments, indeed whole ecosystems, exist as relations of dependence, cooperation, antagonism – and development is precisely the result of the changes that they undergo as the contradictions arising from these relations get worked out over time.⁵

All this will perhaps be helpful to keep in mind when we read Engels’ claim that “economics is not concerned with things but with relations between persons … these relations however are always bound to things and appear as things.”⁶ It suggests that social and economic relations are particular kinds of ecological relations – they arise in the strict sense of ‘naturally’ discussed above within a continuous history of development in our interaction with our ‘natural’ world; this is true at the level of the individual, of the population of the species as a whole (since society is itself ‘an organism’) and at the level of subgroups within the population of the species.

Marx frequently writes of these relations that they are so deeply interconnected as to necessarily imply or entail one another.

For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole.⁷

So exchange value, as a single relation, is a part that already implies an entire concrete whole.

Moreover, exchange itself is only a moment in an entire political-economic process in which “mutual interaction takes place between the different moments. This is the case with every organic whole.”⁸ As Bertell Ollman correctly observes, this mutual interaction is precisely “only possible because it occurs within an organic body.”⁹ Once again, ecology, with its complex economy of material and energy appropriation and exchange is a useful model. No single process simply goes about its business unimpinged by other processes or without therefore impinging upon others as well. In this respect, climate change is giving us a practical lesson in dialectics.

Ollman notes that ‘Verhӓltnis,’ the German word for ‘relation,’ “probably occurs more frequently than any other expression in Marx’s writing”¹⁰ this is precisely because Marx takes the relation to be the basic mode of existence for all real things. As Marx writes, somewhat obscurely:

A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some [other] being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective.

A non-objective being is a non-being.

… non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous thing – a product of mere thought (i.e., of mere imagination) – an abstraction. To be sensuous, that is, to be really existing, means to … have sensuous objects outside oneself.¹¹

For real (sensuous) things, the extension into the world, the appropriation of it, and the being appropriated by it – this lack of self-sufficiency – is precisely what it means to be.

And so, relations are the basic units of the “organic whole” which Marx believes society is. As Ollman puts it

The relation is the irreducible minimum for all units in Marx’s conception of social reality … Capital, labor, value, commodity, etc., are all grasped as relations, containing in themselves, as integral elements of what they are, those parts with which we tend to see them externally tied… This view does not rule out the existence of a core notion for each factor, but treats this core notion itself as a cluster of relations.¹²

Marx himself explicitly mocks the idea that, “the properties of a thing are not the result of its relations to other things, but only manifest themselves in such relations”.¹³ John Rees gets at much the same point when he writes that, “In a dialectical system, the entire nature of the part is determined by its relationship with the other parts and so with the whole.”¹⁴ These relations therefore are not external to the nature of a thing, they actually constitute it; they are “internal relations”.

The concept of ‘core relations’ suggests that the key relations which define a part are themselves limited. A similar point is made by Chris Arthur in his critical review of Ollman’s Dance of The Dialectic:

a mind, a society, a solar system, are different realms of being with the ‘parts’ having differing status in relation to the whole. With an all-embracing philosophy of Ollman’s kind there is a double danger: first, of ‘thinning’ out the concept of internal relation such that it can indeed cover ‘everything,’ at the cost of being uninformative; second, of overextending the range of a ‘thick’ concept to cases where it does not really apply, at the cost of mysticism. I do not doubt that much of Marx’s work, especially Capital, treats with great sophistication totalities characterized by internal relations. But in my opinion this derives … from the peculiar character of his object.¹⁵

The preliminary task, then, for any dialectical investigation is determining that the phenomenon being studied really does constitute an ‘organic whole’ – Marx’s own example, e.g. exchange value, demonstrates that this is often simply a matter of extension. Exchange value could not constitute an organic whole because it is itself merely part of a larger organism (a concrete society). On the other hand, it would not be very useful to say that the exchange relations present in contemporary capitalism are organically related to any of the social relations that may exist right now among species in other star systems. Conceivably, they might establish relations if we ever encounter extra-terrestrial life in the future, but they would be historical relations. They would become related to the new society formed by contact only because our future develops from the present.

This caveat is important because contingency plays a key role in development. Europeans and Native Americans had nothing to do with each others’ development until Europe’s period of expansion and colonization – since then, however, they have been inextricably linked, each being a major determinant in each other’s history.

Once the work of delimiting the boundaries of the system has been done (although of course, they may be redrawn in response to new discoveries) and the key relations determined, we can assume that the general rules of dialectics hold between them. The most significant of these is that the nature of a phenomenon is determined by its relations. This assumption has important implications for Marx’s understanding of development. In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx quotes a commentator who had fairly well captured this aspect of his method:

economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. … [A] thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. … one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, etc.¹⁶

Dialectics therefore banishes certain ideas from the bounds of thought. Greed for example, can no longer be easily generalized into an eternal aspect of humanity; instead, it becomes necessary to examine the context in which the desire for things becomes greed as we understand it today – and also, in what contexts it would fail to be greed. Humans are necessarily needy (sensuous) beings, but it still must be asked: what forms do these needs take in any given concrete society, how are they met – is this neediness always necessarily greed? (And if so, what are the immutable relations that constitute greed?)

It must be emphasized that in their real life processes, all the relations of the whole are in a constant movement of shaping and reshaping each other, forcing their fellows to accommodate their needs, and being forced in return. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that all relations are not identical.

It may be true that “exchange value … presupposes a certain kind of family, or commune, or state” but that does not mean it presupposes the family, or commune, or state as such. It presupposes particular forms of them (ones which allows exchange value to exist). Similarly, exchange implies surplus available for exchange – but the existence of exchangeable surplus does not guarantee that exchange will take place.

On the other hand, Marx calls exchange a ‘moment’ of the entire economic process – this kind of relation is clearly different from the one that exists between exchange value and ‘a certain kind of family, etc.’ Exchange, in this respect, is contained as an aspect of a wider process. But more than that, according to Marx, these moments ‘mediate’ each other. Consumption, for example, which is a relation between consumers and products is ‘mediated’ by production, a relation between producers and the means of production and vice-versa, meaning they structure each others’ expression:

Production … furnishes the material and the object for consumption… therefore, in this respect, production creates, produces consumption… But the object is not the only thing which production creates for consumption… the object is not an object in general, but a specific object which must be consumed in a specific manner, to be mediated in its turn by production itself. Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption… Production thus creates the consumer … Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy … it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object… Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption (1) by creating the material for it; (2) by determining the manner of consumption; and (3) by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of consumption. Consumption likewise produces the producer’s inclination by beckoning to him as an aim-determining need.

Production, which is structured by the other moments, thus also structures them and, in fact, for Marx, in some sense predominates over them:

production and consumption … appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. Consumption as urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity. But the latter is the point of departure for realization and hence also its predominant moment; it is the act through which the whole process again runs its course. The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self-reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production. ¹⁷

So for Marx it is possible to speak of hierarchies of relations, both of scale (the production process ‘contains’ the consumption process) and weight (although they all mediate each other, production is, in general, more determining than the other moments).

Finally, there is the relation between ‘polar opposites’. These are different from mediations in a total process, and different again from conditions of possibility. Polar opposites require each other by definition, in exactly the same way that the South pole of a magnet already implies the North, or the way that one side of a coin requires the other. There are no hosts without guests, there are no rulers without ruled, and, most importantly for Marx, there is no bourgeoisie without wage-labor.

All of this puts us in a slightly better position to understand contradiction. If the nature of every thing is defined by its relation to everything else then two things follow: (1) everything with which a thing is related is collectively the condition of possibility for that thing (2) they are also a limit on it. No relation can follow the course of its own development without running up against the relations on which it depends but which also stunt, divert or suppress its development. These contradictions must find resolution.

Resolutions which change the balance of the contradictions without actually ending them – partial resolutions – are obviously inherently unstable. Furthermore, by allowing both sides to continue developing alongside of each other, they lay the basis for deeper struggle with more developed forces in the future. Over time, elements relatively marginal to the system are more thoroughly assimilated into it. A system consolidates and comes into itself, it gathers up those relations which it inherits from its history of development or finds in its expansion; it either simply annihilates these marginal or retrograde relations or else it transforms them and subordinates them to its logic. It becomes itself, only more so. Capitalist expansion in South Asia, for example, has not destroyed the peasant class or the caste system, but it has – sometimes more, sometimes less successfully – colonized them and forced them to accommodate to its needs. The same could be said of women’s oppression or of the family. In this way, the contradictions of capitalism become the over-arching contradictions of the entire world.

The complete resolution of contradictions, on the other hand, necessarily abolishes both sides. More precisely, the successful side of the contradiction abolishes those relations which put a fetter on it and it abolishes itself – or rather, that form of itself which was enmeshed in the contradictions – and so pushes the entire system into a new form. It follows that, even in systems characterized by some degree of gradualism, change is not simply a matter of smooth transitions: sudden, dramatic transformations are part of the basic pattern of development. However, it does not follow that a contradiction may be resolved in favor of just any side of the relation. More often, only one side is capable of following its course of development in a way that productively transforms the entire system – the alternative is often regression or even the destruction of the system. Marx does not see the ruling class as capable of resolving the contradictions of capitalism in their favor: “Private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.”¹⁸

The resolution of the contradictions of capital (on which more later) is a task for the proletariat, who can carry out their task because:

One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the cooperative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.¹⁹

Failure can only mean the “mutual ruin of the contending classes.”²⁰

The Meaning of May Day | Green Left Weekly

class-struggle-anarchism:

redbookreports:

class-struggle-anarchism:

kropotkitten:

class-struggle-anarchism:

amodernmanifesto:

That first May Day expressed a conception of working-class struggle that intertwined three cardinal ideas.

First, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation can only be achieved through workers’ own, organised, self-activity.

Secondly, that for this organised self-activity to even begin to free labour from capitalist exploitation it must take the form of a movement that champions the interests of labour as a whole, as a class, against the interests of the capitalist class. That is, it must be a political movement, a movement against the political policies and the political power of the capitalists, against the governments and laws that protect the capitalist private-profit system.

And, thirdly, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation is not a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries that are dominated by the capitalist private-profit system, a system that is by its very nature an international system, and, therefore requires solidarity between the workers of all nationalities.

Oh fuck right off

An article on the meaning of May Day with absolutely no mention of Haymarket or the martyrs whatsoever. It mentions the strike, but not the riot - it mentions the decision to make may 1st international worker’s day at the second international, but not the fact that this day was chosen specifically to commemorate the martyrs.

It’s not like this is obscure or contested knowledge. Let’s go all the way to Wikipedia and search for “International Worker’s Day”

first sentence under the heading “History”:

International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago.

Not so difficult. This isn’t an honest mistake, it’s a deliberate and shameful attempt to write anarchists out of working class history.

Trots - if you’re ever wondering why anarchists don’t like your newspapers - It’s this shit.

I’m not even surprised though

honestly, it’s literally the same thing liberal labor groups do

I saw a PBS documentary that named the haymarket martyrs and told briefly about who they were but literally refrained from calling them anarchists

it just said they were labor activists who were on strike for the 8 hour day

Oh fuck yeah, that was the argument I had with some trots last year, they were honestly arguing that Albert and Lucy Parsons weren’t anarchists.

That would be Lucy Parsons, author of “I am an Anarchist”.

The standard of journalism in these trot rags is terrible - like that article says that the May 1886 strike was called by the AFL - which is interesting because it didn’t exist until December.

I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself.  Green Left Weekly is published by Socialist Alliance, this is NOT a Trotskyist organization, although they probably have members who think of themselves as Trotskyist.  Not saying that Trotskyists organizations would necessarily be much better in this regard, although as it happens, Socialist Alternative’s article does trace May Day back to Haymarket (although without feeling the need to mention the contribution of anarchism) and S. Alternative could be called Trotskyist with much more accuracy than S. Alliance.  Since we’re fact checking.

Aw c’mon, Trot is as Trot does, I just had a look at their website and they’re pretty much indistinguishable from plenty of trot groups…here’s a quote from a discussion bulletin I pulled up at random:

The one-week school being organised in January 2010 for  instance, looks at the Marxist theory of the state, democracy and revolution, the fight against Stalinism in the USSR and against bureaucracy in Cuba and finishes with a look at Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s famous work “Their Morals and Ours.”

Trot. Trot I say.

Maybe this is splitting hairs, but the Socialist Alliance about page states that it is “a broad socialist coalition. Anyone who agrees with the general approach of our policies is welcome to join, and organisation that agrees with them is invited to affiliate.”  In point of fact the biggest coherent bloc within it is probably the DSP, which I think might have been closer to Trotsky (?), but I wouldn’t underestimate how much the DSP’s perspectives would have changed as a result of its experience in the Alliance.  Still finding that a socialist organization discusses Trotsky, even favourably, clearly doesn’t prove that they are Trotskyists.  For that matter, finding that they talk about ’ bureaucracy in Cuba’ doesn’t mean that they didn’t publish numerous pieces by Castro, the head Bureaucrat himself, in GLW. 

Strangely, the same about page, which makes no mention of Trotsky or links to any of his works, or to any major Trotskyist works DOES have a link to Oscar Wilde’s “Soul of Man Under Socialism”, it also has links to the Monthly Review, which has its roots in Stalinism.  Not that there aren’t some truly ridiculous Trotskyists — ahem, Spartacists, ahem most of the European FI — I just don’t happen to think S. Alliance is a Trotskyist organization.

The Meaning of May Day | Green Left Weekly

class-struggle-anarchism:

kropotkitten:

class-struggle-anarchism:

amodernmanifesto:

That first May Day expressed a conception of working-class struggle that intertwined three cardinal ideas.

First, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation can only be achieved through workers’ own, organised, self-activity.

Secondly, that for this organised self-activity to even begin to free labour from capitalist exploitation it must take the form of a movement that champions the interests of labour as a whole, as a class, against the interests of the capitalist class. That is, it must be a political movement, a movement against the political policies and the political power of the capitalists, against the governments and laws that protect the capitalist private-profit system.

And, thirdly, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation is not a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries that are dominated by the capitalist private-profit system, a system that is by its very nature an international system, and, therefore requires solidarity between the workers of all nationalities.

Oh fuck right off

An article on the meaning of May Day with absolutely no mention of Haymarket or the martyrs whatsoever. It mentions the strike, but not the riot - it mentions the decision to make may 1st international worker’s day at the second international, but not the fact that this day was chosen specifically to commemorate the martyrs.

It’s not like this is obscure or contested knowledge. Let’s go all the way to Wikipedia and search for “International Worker’s Day”

first sentence under the heading “History”:

International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago.

Not so difficult. This isn’t an honest mistake, it’s a deliberate and shameful attempt to write anarchists out of working class history.

Trots - if you’re ever wondering why anarchists don’t like your newspapers - It’s this shit.

I’m not even surprised though

honestly, it’s literally the same thing liberal labor groups do

I saw a PBS documentary that named the haymarket martyrs and told briefly about who they were but literally refrained from calling them anarchists

it just said they were labor activists who were on strike for the 8 hour day

Oh fuck yeah, that was the argument I had with some trots last year, they were honestly arguing that Albert and Lucy Parsons weren’t anarchists.

That would be Lucy Parsons, author of “I am an Anarchist”.

The standard of journalism in these trot rags is terrible - like that article says that the May 1886 strike was called by the AFL - which is interesting because it didn’t exist until December.

I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself.  Green Left Weekly is published by Socialist Alliance, this is NOT a Trotskyist organization, although they probably have members who think of themselves as Trotskyist.  Not saying that Trotskyists organizations would necessarily be much better in this regard, although as it happens, Socialist Alternative’s article does trace May Day back to Haymarket (although without feeling the need to mention the contribution of anarchism) and S. Alternative could be called Trotskyist with much more accuracy than S. Alliance.  Since we’re fact checking.

The economic crisis which began in 2008 and the mounting political and economic polarization that has come with it has forced mainstream sociology to reconsider its theoretical positions. So, for example, synthesizing the results of the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, Mike Savage and his coauthors elaborate a ‘new model of social class’ and justify their work by observing that

Over the past decade, there has been a striking renewal of interest in the analysis of social class inequality, driven by accumulating evidence of escalating social inequalities, notably with respect to wealth and income , but also around numerous social and cultural indicators, such as mortality rates, educational attainment, housing conditions and forms of leisure participation ¹

which the current (the Erikson–Goldthorpe–Portocarero [EGP]) model fails to illuminate. Savage et al. do mainstream sociology a service by theorizing “elites in a way which has not been possible over recent decades where no elite class was distinguished within the EGP ”² – although it is true that the Occupy movement had already tried to tell them this in 2011 (as, for that matter, had Marx, some years before that).

Nevertheless, there are considerable problems with the new model proposed which junks occupational class measures in favor of “measures of economic, cultural and social capital ”.³ It is worth going through each of these forms of ‘capital’ in turn.

Economic capital is easy enough, it is measures “household income, household savings and house price .” It does not in anyway measure the nature or source of that income; it does not ask if household income is composed of wages or profits, whether it comes in the form of liquid cash or is bundled up in the ownership of a business.

Social capital are the “contacts and connections which allow people to draw on their social networks ” – in other words, who you know and in what numbers.

Cultural capital is somewhat more interesting. According to the authors, “there are now two main types of cultural capital: that associated with highbrow taste, and what we term ‘emerging’ cultural capital .” The measure of highbrow cultural capital “scores the extent of respondents’ engagement with classical music, attending stately homes, museums, art galleries, jazz, theater and French restaurants ” – incidentally, it is a good thing that the paper was published on April 3 rather than April 1, mainstream sociology is serious business. A second measure for ‘emergent’ cultural capital scored “the extent of a respondent’s engagement with video games, social network sites, the internet, playing sport, watching sport, spending time with friends, going to the gym, going to gigs and preferences for rap and rock .”⁴ Serious business.

One of these things is not like the other. Economic and social capital at least correspond to the general usage of ‘capital’ as instrumental – wealth and contacts are both things that we have at our disposal. Their ‘cultural capital’ requires us to redefine ‘capital’ to allow it to include tastes and patterns of spending and consumption. By their definition, “liking shopping” or “going regularly to the theater” are forms of capital in which it is possible to have “stocks”⁵.

Using these three measures of capital, the authors present to the world “a complex map of seven classes .” Naturally, if the map had not been complex it would not have been worth following. The seven classes are the elite, the established middle class, the technical middle class, the new affluent workers, the traditional working class, the emergent service workers and the precariat.⁶

The ‘elites’ have “very high economic capital (especially savings), high social capital, very high highbrow cultural capital .” The class is mostly populated by CEOs, IT and telecommunications directors, marketing and sales directors, functional managers and directors, barristers and judges, financial managers, advertising and public relations directors, and dental practitioners. And mostly they live “in the south east of England, and especially in areas close to London in the affluent Home counties.” ⁷ On the other end of the spectrum, the ‘precariat’ have the lowest score on every form of capital, “they are located in old industrial areas, but often away from the large urban areas. Stoke on Trent stands out as having a high over-representation ” and they tend to be “unemployed, van drivers, cleaners, carpenters, care workers, cashiers and postal workers, and they also include shopkeepers. ”⁸

These are basically inert theoretical categories. Although history is sometimes brought into the picture superficially when, for example, they discuss the “traditional working class” as a “’throwback’ to an earlier phase in Britain’s social history ,”⁹ the overall framework ignores development, past and future, in favor of a narrow taxonomy of the British population. Beginning with the recognition of development in terms of stratification, the intrepid sociologists have discovered a new species of Briton endemic to the barren streets of Stoke on Trent; the lucky ones derive sustenance from driving vans for large parts of the day; they live in narrow social circles and display only a very rudimentary level of culture. These ‘precariats’ – like all the other new species and subgroups – have developed while the sociologists weren’t really looking, the unassuming task of science is merely to catalog the new groupings – to reorganize in theory the new strata.

The categories themselves are just boxes, more or less discrete, which are populated by people who may move in or out of them – the model does not take into account how these boxes developed in the first place. Readers are left to supply the answer: The Economy did it. The problem is that ‘The Economy,’ like ‘history,’ “does nothing … it is man, real, living man … who possesses and fights … [it] is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”¹⁰ Stratification, like everything else that happens in society, is the aggregate result of people doing things to and with each other. If inequality has increased in Britain, it is because the actions and reactions of people have caused it to increase. Savage et al. rightly see these people as belonging to social classes in a differentiated society, but these people are not seen as social actors through and within these classes.

In other words, the ‘classes’ they discover do not relate to each other socially, but only descriptively – through the drawing of theoretical boundaries differentiated by more or less arbitrarily chosen criteria (this is why it was possible to group income with patterns of spending in the same general category). Their categories do not include in their definition the real interests and social powers which the real people who populate them really possess. They do not tell us how people – as members of these particular classes – produce and reproduce the differentiation, or the increased stratification which occasioned the new model in the first place. In this model, the social reproduction of all the other classes is not the complex from which (for example) the ‘elites’ derive their relative wealth; instead, each class merely reproduces itself.¹¹

To borrow from Engels, what these sociologists all lack is dialectics.¹² In fact, it is an almost perfect case study of un-dialectical thought – a flaw fairly common in mainstream sociology.

Dialectics, to be clear, is not the sole possession of Marxism. Marx and Engels learned it from Hegel – who, while briefly a bourgeois radical, was no socialist. Within radical circles Proudhon, one of the founders of modern anarchism, also made use of dialectics, as he understood it – which was rather differently from Marx and Engels. Dialectics has remained an important aspect of some anarchist thought, for example in the works of Murray Bookchin. But one of the things which distinguishes Marxism as a political tradition is that dialectics is generally seen as central to our style of thought, which is very much not the case for most other radical or revolutionary traditions. Marxists who explicitly reject dialectics do exist, but they are very much the minority; the result is that no other body of knowledge has developed dialectics to the degree that Marxism has.

As with almost every aspect of revolutionary thought, dialectics has been systematically misunderstood – both by conservatives and by other traditions on the left. At its core, dialectics is a way of studying development which takes change to be fundamental to reality. For Marx, dialectics

is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence¹³

Every aspect of reality is in a process of becoming, and so is “itself, and yet something other than itself.”¹⁴ Reality itself, therefore, is shot through with contradiction (it is itself, and yet, as a process of development, contains potentially something other than itself) – its very elements are contradictory, and, in the movement through these contradictions, also enter into contradictions with every other developing aspect of the world with which they are interrelated. Development, therefore – which necessarily is only the movement of these interrelated processes – is always development through contradiction.

To grasp a thing in thought, therefore, requires you to grasp its history, its current state, and its general trajectory – to grasp it, in other words, as a thing developing into something else and interconnected with other processes also in development. Precisely for this reason, categories must be cast in a way that allows us to understand when it has undergone a major qualitative transformation and when it has merely changed its form, but not its general content.

What this means for class is laid out in its essence in the famous first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, which, for sheer brilliance, deserves to be quoted at length:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. …

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

… the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. …

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society …

… Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly …

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

… the price of a commodity, and therefore also of [commodified] labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. …

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. …

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. …

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property [in the means of production].

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. …

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.¹⁵

This understanding of class in terms of antagonistic and contradictory social relations – whereby one class has a monopoly on the means of production and can thereby compel the other class to sell their ability to labor – significantly re-frames the issue of stratification raised by Savage and his coauthors. Now we have a general division of society into a class compelled to labor (the proletariat, or working class) and a class whose wealth depends on purchasing the labor of others (the ruling class, or bourgeoisie), to which can be added a managerial class whose job is to coordinate and control the purchased labor in the interest of the bosses. The current stratification of British society therefore becomes a concrete development within this overall social structure. From the Marxist perspective, unless we can prove that these social relations of production which determine the existence of capitalists and workers have been transformed by the phenomenon of stratification, all we have are changes in the division of labor within these classes, not new class formations.

When this framework is compared with the one developed by Savage and his team, the deficiencies of static, undialectical thinking become obvious.

so long as we consider things as at rest and lifeless, each one by itself, alongside and after each other, we do not run up against any contradictions in them. We find certain qualities which are partly common to, partly different from, and even contradictory to each other, but which in the last-mentioned case are distributed among different objects and therefore contain no contradiction within. Inside the limits of this sphere of observation we can get along on the basis of the usual, metaphysical mode of thought. But the position is quite different as soon as we consider things in their motion, their change, their life, their reciprocal influence on one another. Then we immediately become involved in contradictions.

Or, more succinctly:

In the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.¹⁶

It is not firstly that Savage and his coauthors are wrong; we are using words in fundamentally different ways. There is no point denying that there exists in Britain a group of people significantly wealthier in every respect than all the others, or that this group is generally composed of business executives, high ranking state officials and the occasional dentist. Using a logical schema that is unfortunately less than perfectly consistent, Savage wants to call this group a class. I don’t deny their right to do this, only that, in doing this, they have less than fully understood the phenomenon they study.

In the final analysis, the superiority of the Marxist categories (and therefore our approach to making categories) has to be tested by what we can do with them. Savage’s sociology approaches society after the development has happened, Marx’s seeks to grasp that development in its movement. The difference between the two is the difference between a sociology that only seeks to anatomize stratification and one that seeks to abolish it. It is the difference between a sociology which pretends to stand neutral and apart from social conflict and one which seeks the best point from which to intervene in it.

Marx’s sociology is self-consciously partisan. This is precisely why it is forced to do more with its categories than mainstream sociology. Because revolution is serious business.

Socialism Art Nature: Maybe this is too economic-reductionist, but what are the connections...

socialismartnature:

Maybe this is too economic-reductionist, but what are the connections between the growing ruling class offensive against abortions, and the current changes in the capitalist system (i.e., austerity, lowering working-class wages and living standards, etc), which have attended the recent global…

I actually had a thought about this the other day.  I think linking it directly to wages and competition amongst workers would impute a very long-term kind of approach to the management of capitalism on the part of the ruling class (and also a good deal of self-consciousness?).  Probably 2 additional factors need to be included. (1) the fact that religion tends to be the organising myth of the most right-wing sections of the ruling class means that when the ruling class goes on a general offensive all sorts of ideologies can get dragged into the fray even if those ideologies are not directly or completely functional [eg creationsism, anti-scientific sentiments generally].  More than any other organising myth, religion has consciously drawn the conclusion that ‘family values’ are necessary for the smooth running of [capitalist] society, and it is also the place where this idea has been most ossified.  Hence the reflexive assumption that when things fuck up, the ‘erosion of family values’ must be to blame. (2)  There is a general drive to impose ‘responsibility’ on the working class today.  Simultaneously cutting things like maternity leave, welfare benefits, the social wage generally AND reproductive control means that adult workers today will be more desperate, in more dire straits, and more easily dominated.

The following is a talk given by Peter Jones at Marxism 2013 in Melbourne, Australia. Peter is a member of Socialist Alternative and is doing a PhD at the Australian National University.  

Talk for Marxism 2013 – Peter Jones

I want to start this talk by trying your patience with a convoluted metaphor. Suppose we, in this room, are the global economy – which is partly true, since we are a small part of it – and suppose we’re all out on a bushwalk, and have been for a couple of centuries. We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know why we’re going there and we can’t even remember agreeing to go on this walk in the first place.

Most of us are quietly pissed off with this whole situation, around one percent of us seem to be having a great time and making all the decisions, and another group of us is arguing that this whole walk is a crazy idea and we need to do something else.

The only maps we have are the ones some of us have made ourselves, they aren’t very well drawn and they cover ground we’ve already walked over. Indeed, it would be fair to say that the map makers appointed by the one percent don’t actually know that much about navigation or even have a very good sense of direction.

A bit over five years ago it was a foggy August morning and some of us stumbled over a cliff. Some of our friends fell to their deaths; others climbed down alive but shaken. At the bottom of the cliff was a great big bog that most of us have been slowly trudging through ever since, though at different speeds.

Will we get out of the bog soon? If we look at the global economy today there are plenty of bogs around: Europe’s in recession, and the has come US out of one but with the slowest recovery in employment from a recession ever recorded.

The European debt crisis looks like it might be another cliff in the making, maybe a continuation of the same geological process that created the first one. China has somehow more or less flown over the bog so far, and the Australian economy has been picked up with it to some degree, but everyone’s worried about a hard landing.

Nevertheless, progress through the bog isn’t as slow as it was before, and some of the map makers are saying the worst is behind us. So, spurred on by the money printed by central banks which is keeping interest rates down and driving down returns in bonds and term deposits, investors are moving their money back into the stock markets.

So that’s a brief survey of the terrain from the perspective of down in the bog; from the perspective of what we can immediately see around us. But if we want to see further, we have to climb up to a higher vantage point, and take careful note of what was behind us as well as what we think we can see in the distance; and if we want to make sense of what we see, we need some theory.

Now, I was warned by a comrade not to bamboozle you all with too many technical graphs, and I have to confess I am going to refer to a few graphs and some concepts that won’t be familiar to many, in a few cases perhaps any of you in this talk.

I think that’s unavoidable because the way capitalism presents our social relations to us is not at all transparent. But I find, and I hope you’ll agree, that ultimately the system is actually easier to understand if we make the effort to delve down and try to see the real interconnections between events on the surface. That means both using theory and avoiding unnecessarily complex formulations.

OK, let’s start with the theory. Most basically, the social relations that make up ‘the economy’ aren’t actually landscapes formed by natural forces. The people and classes who reproduce economic relationships are agents endowed with wills of their own who can exercise those wills in unpredictable ways. So even if we had the perfect theory and perfect data any predictions we made would still just be best guesses; and we don’t have either of those things in any case.

For mainstream economists the ‘science’ of economic forecasting basically involves plugging numbers into models of the economy that assume that, after a few years, markets will return to equilibrium, and economic growth will return to what it has been in the past. So if there are no new crises these models work OK, but they simply can’t predict major new recessions or crises.

And that’s not surprising, seeing as mainstream economists don’t have anything you could really call a ‘theory of crisis’. If, as their high theory assumes, markets are always in equilibrium, then the cause of crises must be something other than markets.

So for Milton Friedman the Great Depression was caused by central banks; the common sense is that the recessions of the 70s were caused by rising oil prices; and the economic crisis of 2007-08 was supposedly caused by a lack of transparency in financial markets.

Since the 1930s these economists have been competing with John Maynard Keynes and his followers for the attention of the world’s ruling classes. For Keynes, markets can actually be at fault, and on occasion the state should do more than simply reproduce their existence.

For Keynes, the most important cause of crises is a lack of demand for goods and services, caused by people keeping money in their bank accounts rather than spending it or investing it. This idea also has an appeal to reformists, and trade union leaders in particular, because it can be used to argue for the benefits to all classes of increasing wages; since as workers, we can’t just decide to save a huge chunk of our incomes if we want to eat.

Steve Keen, for example, who’s a sort of radical Keynesian, argues the global economic crisis was caused by too much debt. People in the advanced economies had to borrow too much to buy a house and make up for the fact that their incomes weren’t growing as quickly as they used to, and companies borrowed too much because that helped boost profits for a time.

But then the property market crashed, people losing their jobs couldn’t pay off their loans, and the banks’ balance sheets’ went into the red.

Keynesians like Keen and Paul Krugman are saying that governments are making the recovery slower by slashing social services to pay off sovereign debt, when they should be spending more money to help boost demand, and writing off the debts owed to banks by governments and people.

Now, these are good demands for reforms, but the analysis on which they are based doesn’t get to the root cause of the crisis. If the root cause of the crisis was simply debt, it suggests that the main political enemy is the banks, finance capital and neoliberal economists.

It suggests that without their influence governments could scrap their irrational austerity policies, helping both workers and capitalists outside finance. This raises the possibility of a cross-class alliance between us and productive capital against finance capital.

Marx has a theory of crisis that goes deeper, and pins the blame on the system as a whole. For Marx, as capital accumulates over time the rate at which capitalists make profits on their investments tends to decline.

Why? Because as production techniques improve, the money companies outlay on constant capital – that is, things like factories, office buildings and equipment used in production – tends to rise faster than the money they outlay on wages.

But according to Marx, it’s only workers who can create surplus value, and not things; so as more money is outlaid on things relative to labour power, the ratio of surplus value to total outlays declines; or in other words, the rate of profit falls.

Now this is just a hypothesis, and a highly counter-intuitive one. Basically Marx is saying that improvements in productivity from the introduction of new machines lead to economic crises, even though we know that companies that introduce more advanced machinery tend to fare better; and even though it’s just common sense, surely, that producing more ‘stuff’ means capitalists make more money.

Well, this is a graph of my measure of the underlying rate of profit in the US, and the rate of real GDP growth. Real GDP growth measures the rate at which the total amount of goods and services we produce expands.

The straight line is the trend in the rate of profit. Both the rate of growth and the rate of profit have fallen over the period, and there’s some short term correlation between them too.

Why? In the short term both are influenced by capacity utilisation and financial profits, so they’re correlated. That’s not so interesting as the longer term trend.

This graph brings that out more clearly; it gives the decade by decade averages. The ROP falls markedly after the post-war boom of the 60s, as does GDP growth. There’s some recovery in the ROP in the 90s, and a much smaller recovery in GDP growth.

But the rate of profit in the 2000s was almost as low as during the 80s, and GDP growth was its lowest since the 30s and the Great Depression (which isn’t on there). The long term trend in both is down.

This connection is causal. In the medium to long term, the main determinant of GDP growth is the rate at which the stock of constant capital grows. For the physical economy to expand, which is what real GDP growth measures, you need more factories, mines, office buildings and machines; and it helps if they are using more advanced technology.

China, for example, is growing so quickly because a vast portion of its output is devoted to producing more machines and more factories, and much less as a proportion is devoted to consumption.

Those who see a lack of consumption as the underlying problem for capitalists tend to forget this; under-consumption is always a problem for us, but not so straightforwardly for them.

Under capitalism investment is funded out of profits. So the ratio of profits to the amount of money tied up in existing means of production, which is the rate of profit, is crucial for determining how quickly the stock of means of production grows. The rate of growth of means of production is otherwise known as the rate of accumulation.

The rate of profit also influences how much of their profits companies decide to invest. If business conditions are bad, or if they’re expected to become bad, investors want companies to preserve their wealth, not risk it in new projects.

Here’s the relationship between the two. As you can see, it the rate of accumulation follows the ROP most of the time, with a bit of a lag.

But there’s a blip in the mid-70s when the two don’t go together, which coincides with high rates of inflation. I suspect that’s because the high rate of inflation created a strong incentive to hold physical assets, and this artificially high rate of investment accounts for why GDP growth didn’t fall faster in the 80s when the profit rate dropped further.

Investment decisions also have a short-term impact. If every company decided tomorrow to stop investing and hold on to cash then companies that make means of production would soon start sacking workers. Justified panic would set in and everyone would want to hold on to whatever wealth they have rather than spend it.

We’d have a crisis, not in the loose sense of a period of low growth, but in the sense of circulation shutting down with unsold goods piling up alongside money; that is, a crisis in the sense that Marx used the term.

A fall in the average rate of profit can also send some less competitive companies to the wall, which can lead to the means of production they used to own being temporarily or permanently mothballed, so that also influences the rate of accumulation.

Why did the rate of profit fall? As I mentioned, Marx thought that it tended to fall because the money invested in constant capital rose in proportion to the money invested in paying wages, and that this was driven by the rising ratio of machines and buildings in the production process compared to workers. He calls this the rising OCC.

I don’t think Marxists have measured this well. Here is my measure. It rises.

If it were the only influence on the ROP the ROP would be down around zero by now. But it isn’t. There are counter-tendencies. One is that as productivity increases it tends to take less labour time to build each factory and each machine.

Another is that, over time, it tends to take less time for workers to produce, transport and sell commodities. Think of the enormous change that just-in-time production has made to how long parts have to sit in warehouses, or the way containerisation has meant stuff can be unloaded straight from the ship to the truck to the warehouse.

Marx and Engels identified this as an important counter-tendency to the rising OCC that Marxists have not really paid enough attention to in my view.

The final effect of the ROP that we can measure – or, at least, that I can measure – is the ratio of surplus value to wages; otherwise known as the ROSV or rate of exploitation. As the name suggests this is mainly a measure of how much capitalists are screwing us over.

This graph shows its effect on the ROP, and the effect of each of the other factors I’ve just mentioned. Really this graph has too much detail for a talk like this, but I wanted to show it anyway because when it comes to the TRPTF there are a lot of doubters, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. I’ve even partially been in that camp because this stuff is just far from straightforward and aspects of it are unavoidably technical.

What I want to point out is that these results fit pretty comprehensively with Marx’s hypothesis. The negative effect of the rising OCC was the biggest effect on the ROP through the period, turnover time and cheapening constant capital acted as counter-tendencies, and the ROSV moved around in a range in the middle. All of which had the overall effect of bringing down the ROP across the period as a whole.

But the net effect of all these factors isn’t necessarily to make the ROP fall at all points in time. This graph’s at least a bit easier on the eyes I hope, it’s the same as the last one but it lumps together the effects of the OCC, turnover time and cheapening constant capital – that is, the technological effects on the ROP for want of a better term – and compares it with the effect of the ROSV.

It shows that from the mid-60s, during the boom, the technological factors had a net positive effect on the ROP, and made it possible for bosses to grant wage increases as the level of struggle started to pick up. But that possibility ended as the TRPTF asserted itself again during the 70s, and the post-war boom came to an end.

Then the effect of technological factors swung back the other way during the 80s and 90s, which made a partial recovery possible. But that recovery was very partial; it was a period of relative stagnation, because the profit rate didn’t recover to anywhere near the average of the post-war boom period, and so neither did growth.

Why not? Because the state acted to prevent the crisis of the 70s from really letting rip; initially through high rates of inflation, though that strategy was abandoned in 79, and then through a combination of bail-outs and allowing banks to take on more debt than they were previously allowed.

That staved off a more serious crisis at the time; but if instead they had let big companies and banks go to the wall, the money tied up in constant capital would have been written down, and the ROP could have recovered more than it did. It also would have provoked an even more severe social crisis.

All of that is important background to the current crisis. Starting with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 the period of a slowly recovering ROP came to an abrupt halt. Technological factors started driving the ROP down, and driving an assault on wages, and the ROP became much more volatile. The attacks on workers succeeded in making the ROP fall less than would have otherwise, but it still fell and it fell from a low base.

This is what drove debt levels crater deep. From the early 80s onwards, US administrations funded more and more government spending out of borrowing, instead of tax. Why? Because all tax is ultimately a deduction from profits. So swapping taxes for borrowing helped to keep the after-tax rate of profit from falling as far as it otherwise would have.

Ballooning company debt and other financial instruments served a similar purpose, as did the property market bubble. After 2001 especially the Federal Reserve encouraged this with cheap interest rates.

I want to say something about how this works.

What financial instruments and rising land prices do is they create claims on future surplus value. If I buy an investment property, for example, I exchange cash for a claim over a piece of land from which I can collect rent. If I buy shares, I’m exchanging cash for a claim over the dividends that I hope the company will pay me, or money I hope I’ll get from selling the shares later.

Now, suppose I’m lucky and I buy some shares for $1m and sell them for $2m. That’s a $1m I’ve appropriated for doing fuck all. Not only that, no one loses from this exchange, or so it appears. I’ve made a million bucks and the person or company that bought the shares from me can also claim that they haven’t lost any money – they’ve just exchanged $2m cash for $2m in shares.

So society’s total wealth has gone up $1m as a result of just buying and selling right? Wrong! It looks like it’s gone up $1m, the accountants sort of say it’s gone up $1m, and as long as enough people believe that there are no immediate consequences, aside from boosting my profit figures if a company books this as income.

Debt and land speculation create claims on future surplus value in a similar way.

But ultimately those shares are claims on future profits, and if there’s not enough profit out there to justify what people are paying for shares, bonds and land, then the crash is gonna come eventually, though a lot people might make a lot of money out of speculation in the meantime.

In this way the financial markets and the property markets mask what’s going on beneath the surface; they mask it for us, they mask it for the central banks and they mask it for the capitalists themselves. But they can’t mask what’s going on down below forever.

The major bubbles and crashes in recent years were the Asian financial crisis, the dot com crash of 2001, and then of course the GFC of 2007-08. In each case states intervened to limit the carnage. Last time they used bailouts, stimulus spending and interest rate cuts, all of which undoubtedly had an effect, but couldn’t stop the worst recession since the great depression. And by preventing the crisis from being even more severe than it was, the destruction of constant capital hasn’t taken place on such a large scale.

From 2010 the actual recession ended in the US, but with an incredibly weak recovery. Employment as a proportion of the population basically hasn’t recovered at all from the depths it reached during the crisis, because the pick up in growth has been so weak.

OK, I’ve focused on the US because it’s big and it’s where the data is best, but obviously the current flashpoint is Europe. The dodgy data I have suggest that the average ROP fell in Europe too, and there’s no real reason to think it would have been otherwise, seeing as GDP growth follows a similar pattern to the US.

But the reason the situation with banks and sovereign debt is worse currently I think is because the same dynamics were at play as in the US, but in a more uneven context economically and politically; even though the ‘contagion’ started in the US.

The Euro gave the ruling classes of the peripheral European states a strategy that wasn’t open to them before. Now they had a major, relatively stable world currency, but with the freedom for each state to set their own corporate tax laws and regulations and so on.

So states like Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, and really the whole of Southern Europe to a lesser extent could attract finance capital with low tax, low regulation regimes, and with a stable currency. They could compensate to some extent for the relative weakness of productive capital by attracting finance capital.

But this was a short-cut development strategy, and it’s led them into a morass. By tying their fortunes to finance capital the peripheral European ruling classes amplified the effects of the bubble and crash on their economies. Banks were bailed-out throughout Europe and the US; but the relative burden has been much larger in the peripheral European economies.

As an aside, it’s important to see that the bail-outs and stimulus packages weren’t primarily driven by political imperatives. Their purpose wasn’t to serve the sectional interests of the banks. The US Federal Reserve, chock full of former bankers, let Lehmann Brothers go broke in 2008. A lot of big shareholders lost a lot of money, and they just said ‘too bad, so sad’.

But then the justified panic set in. The Fed realised it had made a mistake; it realised it really had no option but to bail-out banks in future or the whole system would be thrown into a prolonged period of chaos. Other central banks and governments came to the same conclusion.

That why the Northern European states are prepared to spend money bailing out states, and indirectly banks, on the periphery. They don’t want the chaos and damage to the Euro that would ensue from a disorderly default if they can help it.

But preventing this chaos comes at a price, and it’s a price they want to minimise. One way to do this is to impose some losses on the banks who own the government bonds, and they did that to an extent in Greece. But everything has a knock-on effect.

The Cypriot banks had lent a whole lot of money to Greece. So now they need bailing out. Most of the money for this is still coming from the government of Cyprus and the ECB, but some is coming from deposits of over 100,000 euros.

This has been justified as a tax on the Russian mafia who used Cyprus to launder money, but it will also hit workers’ retirement savings. The EU leaders and Cypriot government had planned to go after everyone’s savings before they realised this might start a run on the banks.

These events mean the whole economic strategy of the Cypriot ruling class is screwed. The island’s days as a financial centre are over. The economy will head into a deep depression.

The wrangle over the Cyprus bailout is in part a part of the continuing fight over who will pay the debt amongst Europe’s ruling classes. This fight can have chaotic consequences, and it weakens their political credibility. Bail-outs or bail-ins of Greece or Cyprus are destabilising enough, but the big fish are Italy and Spain. No one really knows what would happen if one of them were to default; all kinds of scenarios are imaginable.

And as we know, there’s another even more important fight over austerity, that’s connected to the debt. Austerity is supposed to serve two purposes: (1) it cuts government spending in the here and now and hence, so the theory goes, borrowing and (2) it makes lower government spending more likely in the medium to long term.

Now, the first effect is probably not a real one. In most cases if the state cuts spending savagely in the short-term that’s going to drive down the mass of surplus value by creating unemployment, and hence cut the government’s tax revenues even further. But in the medium to long term it can boost profitability by destroying capital, cutting the services the state provides to workers, and using unemployment to force down wages. So, for sections of the capitalist class, there is a certain rationality to austerity, at the expense of everyone else.

And it isn’t just about the debt, though austerity is more intense in the heavily indebted countries. There’s much more to say about this, but the longer term ruling class response to falling profit rates has been to try to limit the costs imposed on the state by tendencies like higher health care expenditure, an ageing population, and the need for prospective workers to spend longer in education; and to limit workers’ bargaining power by co-opting or attacking trade unions.

There’s a debate going on between some Marxists about whether this project has actually succeeded at eroding workers’ living standards, and I haven’t done the research to have a position on that. But what is clear is that sections of the ruling class see the crisis as an opportunity to push the neoliberal agenda harder.

I want to move on from the US and Europe to say something about Asia, because of its particular importance to us in Australia. The developing economies of Asia taken as a whole have had an upward growth trajectory since when I could get half reasonable data in 1960, and there was only one year of below trend growth during the crisis.Now, only a fool says this is the trend so it’s going to last forever, but it is obviously a trend we have to look at very seriously.

According to Michael Roberts, who’s a Marxist who maintains an excellent blog called ‘The Next Recession’, the ROP rose in China during the 2000s; but another study finds that it fell sharply.

My own preliminary numbers suggest a rising ROP, driven by a large increase in the rate of surplus value. Importantly they don’t rely exclusively on the stats reported by the Chinese state; the figures I’ve used take into account revisions by some mainstream economists in the US.

A rising ROP also fits with what has happened to GDP growth, so that’s what I’m inclined to say has happened. And it helps to explain why China really wasn’t hit much by the global economic crisis.

At the same time real wages have gone up, as workers’ have fought incredible struggles against a brutal regime. It’s just that profits have gone up faster; or that’s what the data suggest anyway.

I suspect this is the result of low productivity farm workers being transformed into high productivity factory workers, meaning it takes fewer labour hours to produce the commodities needed to feed, house and clothe each worker. Marx calls this the production of relative surplus value.

But that migration from countryside to city is slowing, and will probably continue to slow. This will probably make the effect of the undoubtedly already rising OCC start to bring down the ROP.

In fact, this is probably already happening. Growth was down from 10% in 2010 to 7.8% in 2012, and this could well be the result of a gradually falling ROP, and the beginning of a longer term trend.

There’s also been an enormous growth of credit, partly hidden in the so-called ‘shadow banking’ system, which hides huge debts off the balance sheets of the banks. If this triggered a financial crisis in China, the state would respond by dipping into its enormous stash of foreign exchange reserves, and that might neutralise a fully blown credit crisis in China itself. But that could seriously devalue the US dollar and the Euro, creating more problems there, and further inflame inter-imperialist rivalry.

The other question is what is going to happen to struggle in China even if economic growth continues. The Chinese working class is enormous and has enormous potential power in police state conditions; and it’s getting bigger. And we know that there can be upturns in struggle in boom conditions.

How significant are these developments in Asia on a world scale? In 2012, the developing Asian economies accounted for about 26% of world GDP after adjusting for price differences; the advanced economies accounted for 51%.

So we are talking about developments in a minority of the world economy by dollar value, but not a small minority. They accounted for 44% of world growth between 2011 and 2012, and the advanced economies only accounted for 31% of growth.

The OECD thinks China will become the world’s largest economy in 3 years, after adjusting for price differences. That’s why, when we look at world GDP growth, the rate of growth didn’t actually fall before the crisis hit, even though it did fall in the advanced economies.

OK, onto Australia. Why hasn’t it been hit by the crisis? The simple answer I think is that Australian companies’ export markets haven’t dried up, and the rate of profit has been rising.

Exports first: this graphs shows the GDP growth of Australian companies’ export markets. Because of the growth of China and India exports markets grew more quickly during the 2000s than they had previously.

Now the ROP: basically profit rates took off during the 2000s but didn’t bring GDP growth with them. In fact growth has been slowing since the early 90s.

So in a way the problem this data poses is more ‘why didn’t the Australian economy grow more quickly’ than ‘why didn’t the crisis hit’?

If you’ll allow me to exaggerate a bit, the answer is that what’s happening is the transformation of the Australian economy into something like a middle eastern oil state, but based on minerals and gas.

While the mines and gas hubs are being built, this creates quite a bit of employment and investment. But that isn’t going to last much longer. We’re seeing an enormous rate of investment at the moment, but it’s going to peak this year or next.

The huge revenue being raked in by the mining companies is keeping the dollar high. That’s a particular problem for some other Australian capitalists, because it means profits on their exports are lower, and they aren’t getting the extra revenue that the mining companies are. This is speeding up the decline of manufacturing, and it hits tourism and universities who rely on milking international students.

But I don’t think the peak of the mining investment boom will mean the end of the high dollar. Once the mines and gas hubs are operating and pumping out more output that will push down prices for exports, but it may well push up total revenue for the mining companies, because they’ll be selling more stuff. That could well keep the dollar high, though trying to predict currency markets is asking for trouble.

If it does, that will widen the divergence that I suspect exists between rates of profit in finance and resources and in the rest of the economy. I suspect a high dollar will mean that the slowdown we’re already seeing in the non-mining states won’t go away. Unemployment probably won’t explode, but it probably will rise steadily.

That’s assuming growth in China doesn’t tank, and we don’t have another 2008 moment in the US or Europe in the next couple of years. That last assumption is a big one.

OK, I’d better conclude. The main argument I want you to go away with is that the rate of profit fell in the lead up to the crisis, that debt papered over that problem for a while, but also set things up for a bigger crash. Austerity, the bail-outs, the Cyrpus bail-in, all these are ultimately products of the falling rate of profit. There’s no need to refer to under-consumption or over-capacity: the theory Marx develops in Volume 3 of Capital is the best explanation we have of the crisis.

But in the developing Asian economies, there has been rapid growth and a rising ROP. The property speculation is being driven by a boom, and workers’ who are prepared to risk savage repression have been able to win wage demands, because productivity is rising. The Chinese state is petrified that economic struggles will spill over into political struggles.

A rising rate of profit doesn’t mean stability; what’s going on in China in particular is a highly volatile social process. And rates of profit may already be falling.

In the West, the crisis has created what the American Marxist Andrew Kliman calls a ‘new normal’. This ‘new normal’ is one of high unemployment, recession or sluggish growth, plus sustained and often savage austerity, as low profit rates and the debt burden drag accumulation down.

Slow growth might be broken by a new wave of debt-driven expansion, with all the contradictions that entails, or the ROP might even increase for a time. But unless a whole lot of capital is destroyed, we won’t see any sustained new boom in the West.

The much more likely outcome is for the ‘new normal’ to persist, or to be broken by a fresh financial crisis. Either way workers’ living standards will continue to come under assault through corporate and government austerity. The trick will be to confront the class struggle from above with a class struggle from below. 

“… the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

-Marx, “Afterward to the second German edition of Capital” 1873 

Materialism is a philosophical position that gives matter primacy over thought, and explains phenomena in terms of matter. Again, for “matter” may be substituted several analogous concepts: being, nature, et cetera. Although materialism existed in various forms among the Greeks, present day materialism has its roots in the development of the hard sciences in Europe. It begins, in other words, as a materialism of Nature. By the time of the Enlightenment however, materialism begins to make serious inroads into the study of humans and our society.

The materialist approach to social theory begins with the question of what kind of thing humans actually are. Evolutionary psychology, for example, is a materialist attempt to get to grips with human behavior by looking at the conditions which prevailed when homo sapiens came into being as a species, and at the effects these may have had in shaping the kind of species that we are. As Stephen Jay Gould notes, this is a “worthy and vital goal”¹. Further, given that our ideas and consciousness can only exist because we have evolved material bodies capable of them, an evolutionary approach is a necessary component in developing a scientific understanding of humanity. Unfortunately, as Gould has also observed, evolutionary psychology is failing utterly to achieve this goal. In fact, evolutionary psychology resembles nothing so much as a quasi-scientific rewriting of the most ridiculous and obscene ideas of reactionary ‘common sense’ – but it is also a particularly crass example of the sorts of bad philosophical maneuvers that bourgeois ideology employs.

Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological bases of Sexual Coercion, written in 2000, is a survey of different theories of the origins of rape from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Although their arguments are not universally accepted in their field, this controversial book is a convenient and particularly clear case study for examining the logical structure of evolutionary psychology.

According to the authors:

Selection favored different traits in females and males, especially when the traits were related to mating. …

The males of most species – including humans – are usually more eager to mate than the females, and this enables females to choose among males who are competing with one another for access to them. But getting chosen is not the only way to gain sexual access to females. In rape, the male circumvents the female’s choice.

… the difficulty of gaining sexual access to choosy females was a major obstacle to reproductive success for males. Owing to the significance of this obstacle throughout evolutionary history, there would have been strong and effective selection pressures favoring traits in males that increased their access to mates.

Rape therefore:

may be an adaptation that was directly favored by selection because it increased male reproductive success by way of increasing mate number. That is, there may be psychological mechanisms designed specifically to influence males to rape in ways that have produced a net reproductive benefit in the past.

But in order to prove that rape is an adaptation rather than merely a contingent behavior arising as a possibility from other sexual adaptations, “what is needed to support the human rape-adaptation hypothesis is evidence of a phenotypic feature in the human male … [that] appears to have been designed specifically for rape.”

One such possible mechanism would be a drive to rape which emerges

in males who lack alternative reproductive options (Thornhill 1980; Thornhill and Thornhill 1983). A lack of alternative reproductive options correlates with the male’s inability to acquire resources. Hence, a key prediction from this hypothesis – sometimes referred to as the mate-deprivation hypothesis (Lalumiere et al. 1996) – would be evidence of a psychological mechanism designed to make rape contingent upon lack of resources and/or lack of sexual access to females.

And so, operating on the bizarre but not very original assumption that poor men are less able to have consensual heterosexual sex than their wealthier counter parts, Thornhill and Palmer look for evidence that poor men rape more than the rich. To no one’s surprise, least of all Thornhill and Palmer’s, this is easily found:

This hypothesis is supported by evidence that rape is disproportionately committed by males with lower socioeconomic status, insofar as that is evidenced by data on rapists in the penal system (Thronhill and Thronhill 1983). … men of lower socioeconomic status are overrepresented among rapists.

A study of adolescent male criminals by the evolutionary psychologist A. J. Figueredo and his colleagues (Figueredo et al. 1999) supports the prediction that males of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to rape. The offenders Figueredo et al. Studied included rapists and were characterized by backgrounds of repeated frustration and failed romantic sexual relationships. They had lower psycho-social functioning, including learning disabilities and psychological disorders that may have generated the competitive disadvantage they exhibited.²

It is probably correct to claim that, at present, “men of lower socioeconomic status are overrepresented among rapists,” and this claim is backed up by some research regarding the “distribution of reported and unreported rapes in relation to the household income of victims”³ – however the methodology behind these supporting research is never discussed. Strictly speaking, the only thing we can conclude from the data provided by the penal system (of the United States) is that ‘men of lower socioeconomic status are over represented among men convicted of rape (in the United States)’. It is worth problematizing this data. Are the police more likely to pursue suspects of ‘lower socioeconomic status’? Might differences in social pressures and networks of support create differences in how women of higher economic status think about reporting a rape to the police? What is the proportion of men of lower economic status to the rest of the male population, what is the relationship of this proportion to the proportion of poor rapists to rapists in general?⁴

But what is most significant is the theoretical use that is being made of the data. The claim is that data on the socioeconomic and psychological profile of rapists today can be used as evidence for deep psychological drives developed as a result of our evolution. For this to work, a key assumption must be made: what rapists are in general like today, under capitalism (American capitalism) is essentially similar to what rapists were like among our ancestors 40 or 50 thousand years ago, indeed, they are essentially similar to the majority of rapists everywhere and at every time. Hence, on the basis of data from the renowned sociologists at the American penal system, we now know that rapists have always generally been sexually frustrated, of low socioeconomic status with lower psycho-social functioning even among our most egalitarian ancestors.

An embarrassingly superficial understanding of the present is being used to systematically distort our understanding of the past, by which, once more, our view of the present is skewed.

But wait! There is a fifth column in the ranks of the evolutionary psychologists:

Research such as that of the evolutionary psychologist Martin Lalumiére and his colleagues (1996) on men’s self-reported tendencies towards rape … found that men with self-reported histories of high partner number also report more rape-related behavior.

This time, the data will be problematized. Our clever scientists have concocted a clever way to account for Lalumiére et al.’s inconvenient findings:

One probable reason such men are likely to have had many partners is their physical attractiveness to women – an important influence on the number of women willing to have sex with a man (Gangestad and Thornhill 1997a,b, 1998). There is also evidence that men with many partners are less committed in their heterosexual relationships than other men and yet are attractive to women (Gangestad and Thornhill 1997a).

(Naturally our scientists are puzzled by any display of female sexuality that doesn’t have marriage in mind.)

As we discussed earlier, physical attractiveness in men may have connoted genetic quality pertaining to offspring survival in human evolutionary history. Although women sexually desire physically attractive men, they may receive few material benefits from them.

The female’s strategy might, therefore, include displaying to physically attractive males an unwillingness to mate. This display may function as a signal to the male that the female is discriminating about mates, which may increase the man’s perception of her value in terms of paternity reliability, and thus may result in her eventually getting more material benefits from the male than she would get in the absence of the display. If a woman’s display of reluctance is truly effective, a man who achieves copulation with her will perceive that he achieved it by force.⁵

The men only thought they had raped! With this coup de main we have, in the name of science, the justification for the most hideous of sexist fantasies: no does not mean no. If the man is sufficiently attractive, the woman, deep in her uterus, whatever she may say or even consciously think, cannot possibly mean her resistance. Not only have men evolved to rape, women have evolved to trick them into thinking they are rapists! Furthermore, this is a strategy that could possibly work; because clearly, a man who has just forced himself upon a woman (so far as he knows – the cunning minx) is certainly likely to be the sort of person who will then proceed to give her “more material benefits”.⁶

In their Preface, Thornhill and Palmer assure us that they are “scientists who would like to see rape eradicated from human life”⁷. Their publishers at the MIT Press ought to have informed these “scientists” that you cannot eradicate a problem by defining it away.

If they were feeling charitable, most feminists would rightly call this kind of thinking sexist. If they were feeling less charitable most feminists could probably think of a host of more colorful words than just ‘sexist’ – for example, ‘crude materialist’. Thornhill and Palmer, like most evolutionary psychologists, begin with the correct observation that we are evolved organisms that reproduce sexually and barrel from there headlong into a discussion of contemporary human behavior with only the most passing attention paid to the things that might mediate between these two levels of analysis. Perhaps the most striking thing about evolutionary psychology is how little it cares for cognition: humans are, like all animals, machines for the transmission of genetic material; our consciousness, motives and thoughts are little more than how we represent the teleology of our DNA to ourselves. So it is a crude materialism, but it contains an irony: it goes straight from biology to deep psychological drives – that is to say, it is also a kind of crude idealism. In fact, because human nature is treated as a kind of laundry list of persistent phenotypes, an approach which ignores an inconveniently changeable material world in favor of imputed unchanging psychological mechanisms is probably inevitable.

This universalizing thought structure is a fairly common move for bad social theory (and for ideology in general). As Marx notes, “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”⁸ But it is not easy to get beyond surface appearances to reality, because, in fact, appearances form part of that reality. The reality of oppression not only gives rise to all manner of absurd ideas, it also damages every one of us that grows up in this oppressive system. Sexism is to blame for the fact that mathematicians in the peak of their fields are still mostly males but the corollary is that in fact fewer women are trained to develop the highest levels of skills in mathematics. Not only does this bolster the belief that women are fundamentally inferior at math, it reinforces a system which makes them in general poorer at math than men.⁹ Evolutionary psychologists are misunderstanding the surface appearance and mistaking it for essence. But if getting behind appearances is a difficult task, it is also true that not everyone is equally well suited to do it.

To understand this, what is needed is a theory of knowledge. Compare the social sciences with Phil Gaspar’s observations on the natural sciences:

the natural sciences under capitalism have achieved a high degree of objectivity. Indeed, the relentless competition of capitalist society and the system’s constant need to expand, promote theoretical and technical innovations which are then rigorously tested in terms of their practical consequences. Thus shortcomings in our understanding of the natural world are often ruthlessly exposed, and we are forced to come up with ideas that describe the world around us more accurately.¹⁰

Gaspar is taking up a point from Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology who argue that the “sensuous activity of men [and women],” in particular their practical attempts to transform nature to meet their needs through “trade and industry,” provides the sciences not only with their “aim” but also with their “material”¹¹.

It is precisely in our conscious intervention with and transformation of the world that we find material for theories and test them out. In fact, according to Marx, “real, positive science” begins “where speculation ends, where real life starts”.¹² Social theory, then, is sabotaged from the start – the bourgeoisie are already the rulers of the world, they are not interested in changing it except here and there to improve their ability to rule and exploit (as in industrial psychology). Institutionally and financially tied to the capitalist system, social research is not in a position to do the job it thinks it has set for itself. Furthermore, the capitalist system prevents what good social science that does exist from proving itself against the mass of bad science. This is why the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky was able to observe that,

the more abstractly [science] generalizes the entire experience of mankind (psychology, not in its experimental, physiological sense but in its so-called “philosophic sense”) the more does it obey the class egotism of the bourgeoisie and the less significant is its contribution to the general sum of human knowledge.¹³

With this observation Trotsky is not merely telling us that bourgeois social theory is shot full of errors, he is also telling us something about those errors: they are not innocent. There is something determinate about the errors of bourgeois social theory.

The rape apologetics of Thornhill and Palmer can tell us something about this determination: it is easy to see that their ideas about rape are deeply connected with the whole ideological edifice of sexism. In fact, they themselves demonstrate this clearly.

The capitalist system depends upon women to perform all the many unpaid tasks involved with maintaining and reproducing each new generation and a whole ideological edifice has been erected around the position this has imposed upon them. It follows that the people who most benefit from the current setup of the world – the ruling class – also have the greatest interest in maintaining this oppression and the ideology around it.

The ability of social theorists to add “to the general sum of human knowledge” in the realm of gender is therefore directly related to their ability to break with this system of oppression – which in turn would necessitate a break with bourgeoisie ideology to the same degree. What is perhaps most glaring (but least surprising) in Thornhill and Palmer’s book is their almost total failure to situate rape today in a concretely articulated political-economic system of domination and power. How can they break with this system, they cannot even see it?

This is a point made very forcefully in 1920 by the Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukacs. For Lukacs, a real social science has only become possible with the developments that capitalism has ushered in, but, in a choice irony, the capitalist class itself is not capable of carrying through this potential. Since the “rule of the bourgeoisie can only be the rule of the minority … in the interest of that minority … the need to deceive the other classes … is inescapable”. But he goes further:

the veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself. For the insoluble internal contradictions of the system … confront its supporters with a choice. Either they must consciously ignore insights which become increasingly urgent or else they must suppress their own moral instincts in order to support with a good conscience an economic system that serves only their own interests.¹⁴

In other words, the ruling class is not in a position to develop a real social science “unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely.”¹⁵

This leaves us in a difficult situation: how can a vantage point be found capable of making a critique of bad social theory and assessing the good? The answer that Marxism offers is that knowledge is partisan. It requires the identification of a vantage point from which the problems of capitalism are actually solvable, both from a material and psychological point of view – otherwise, the material for such a body of knowledge could not be grasped and the anatomy of the problem would have to be found after the collapse, as in an autopsy.

The oppressors and the exploiters must simultaneously preserve and mystify their society; it is the oppressed and the exploited who not only have an interest in transforming society, in their struggles, they have already done so. It is from their vantage point – and their real political activity – that the ‘material’ for a real social science can be found and tested out.

It follows that the more thorough the potential transformation the more potentially thorough the science. In that sense, science belongs to the revolutionary proletariat for whom: “truth is a weapon that brings victory; and the more ruthless, the greater the victory.”¹⁶

To keep me sharpish, I am working on a series that will be called something like ‘Marxist philosophy: a political introduction’.  The intended posting rate will vary a bit between posts depending on the difficulty.  This post is on (philosophical) Idealism, why it isn’t a great idea, and some of where it comes from.  The next post will be on Materialism.  So…

The political uses of philosophical idealism:

“The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.”

-Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. 1886

Marx and Engels developed their thought partly in reaction to a philosophical position known as ‘idealism’. Briefly, idealism is a way of looking at the world which emphasizes thought over matter; it seeks to explain phenomena and their development in terms of thought, giving thought greater causal weight than matter. ‘Thought,’ of course, has many analogues: Spirit, ideas, discourse, culture – the synonym chosen is as much a matter of fashion as it is of significant philosophical difference.

Strangely, Engles thought that idealism had been “dealt a death-blow by the Revolution of 1848”¹ – however moribund it may have appeared in 1886, it has certainly since made a healthy recovery. Today, it can be found nearly everywhere. The famous and philistine argument of Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington, which seeks to explain international conflicts in terms of cultural differences rather than – oh, say – the imperialist nations’ desire for oil, demonstrates this recovery quite clearly: Huntington was the Director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.

Huntington has the nerve to write about “the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests” – and does not ever pause to consider that ‘democracy and liberalism’ might be at variance with the drive to establish political and economic hegemony before informing us that these “engender countering responses from other civilizations”.²

Huntington divides the world into ‘civilizations’ which he defines as

cultural entit[ies] … the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.³

‘Civilization’ in Huntington’s hands is therefore fundamentally an idealist category. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t bother to mention that class antagonisms exist in every country and bloc of countries regardless of ‘subjective self-identification’. Having banished class conflict within his civilizations, he has also conjured away the possibility that a power bloc might go to war to satisfy the needs of its ruling classes rather than its people as a whole. And, having smoothed the West into a neatly cohesive contradiction-free entity simply launching its zealous liberalism and democratic impulses like missiles at an illiberal world, he is free to do the same for all those nations with whom the West could go to war. Apparently their response is engendered as an equally texture-free ‘civilization’ – if even the West cannot have oppressed resisting oppressors, why bother to mention the possibility among brown folk? Why bother to mention that reactions within these ‘civilizations’ might differ along lines of race, gender, and especially, class? This would only inconveniently complicate a world where the “United States and other Western powers” have struggled valiantly and vainly to

induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.⁴

How Huntington can square this naivety with his ironically accurate observation that “In the Arab world, in short, Western (sic!) democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces”⁵ is anyone’s guess.

It is plain to see that Huntington is a fool, a liar or both. Whatever gloss the hired mouthpieces of empire give their actions, there remains at least a section of the West’s ruling class which knows why they would really want to send drones into Pakistan, invade Iraq, or bomb Afghanistan or Libya (or wherever) – and it has nothing to do with passionate, evangelical liberalism and everything to do with wealth and power. The Arab Spring, with its revolutions against Western backed dictators, put the lie to the claim that there is anything particularly Western about democracy, and anything particularly democratic in the West’s foreign policies.

The Western powers (itself a bloc with considerable internal conflicts) justify their imperialism with an idealist ideology – the Near East as a stubbornly unchanging ideological entity hostile to the West’s liberal values – mostly because, thanks to the history of anti-racist struggle, they can no longer safely use the old claim that people of color were not physiologically suited for the towering achievements of Western ‘civilization’. So the phrases have changed: the ideology of the new racism is “cultural” not “scientific”. But boldfaced hypocrisies on the part of Centers for Foreign Affairs do not necessarily prevent their cant from being accepted sincerely elsewhere.

In 2006, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous science popularizer gave a lecture which was shown on The Science Network as part of a symposium called Beyond Belief⁶. The lecture is mostly about the way in which many brilliant scientists in the past – for example, Newton – have turned to a belief in “Intelligent Design” to explain what they were not at the time capable of understanding. Although not perfect, it is for the most part, reasonably interesting. Until he gets to the final section of his talk.

Here he informs us that from about 800 to 1100 CE the Muslim world experienced an intense flowering of scientific knowledge: for medicine, for astrology, for mathematics and many other disciplines besides, the Muslim world became the center. Then along comes a closed minded scholar by the name of Imam Hamid al-Ghazali:

out of his work you get the philosophy that mathematics is the work of the devil. And nothing good can come of that philosophy. That combined with other sort of codification, philosophical codifications of what Islam was and would become: the entire intellectual foundation of that enterprise collapsed and it has not recovered since.⁷

Why is he telling us about a 12th century Islamic scholar? Because, apparently he has direct bearing on what the world of science looks like today:

If you do the math, ok – just look at all the Nobel Prize winners there ever were, some even in this room, and ask how many were Muslim? And its like one, maybe two? […] How many Muslims are there in the world? There’s like a billion Muslims […] Had Islam not collapsed in its intellectual standing in the year 1100 and you just do the ratios, they would have every single Nobel Prize today! So the fact that it’s not only just a few, it’s near zero is deeply worrying. I’m concerned about what lost – what brilliance may have expressed itself and did not. In that community, over the past thousand years.

Why are there not more Muslim Nobel Prize winners? Because al-Ghazali.⁸

Is it worth mentioning the sordid history of European colonialism or US imperialism? Might rapine dictators backed by the West be a factor? The US funding and training first of the Taliban then the Northern Alliance of warlords in Afghanistan? The CIA sponsored coup against Mossadegh in Iran? Israel’s slow genocide against the Palestinians? Do we dare mention the systematic anti-Muslim racism that Muslims living in the West must face? Or the possibility that this racism might be present in schools, universities, and – most embarrassingly – the Nobel Committee itself? Not in the least! This is The Science Network, how could such vulgar material considerations be admitted into the lofty ramparts of the intellect? Al-Ghazali is plenty explanation enough.

This is Islamophobia at its most smug and condescending: Muslims are basically in thrall to the ideas of a very important Imam (al-Ghazali was certainly very significant) who died 900 years ago. Without recourse to biology, a fundamental and, in practice, eternal attribute is ascribed to “like a billion” people all across the world. It is an attribute which marks them as a ‘civilization’ unchangingly irrational and backwards – but, oh no, let’s not call it racism!

It is also, however, idealism at its most pathetic. Tyson’s agenda is quite clear. In the context of a rising tide of anti-scientific, ultra-conservative Christianity, he is worried for the American ‘civilization’:

“We all know tomorrow’s economies will be founded on innovations in science and technology and of course that gets cut short if we lose our civilization as what happened in Islam in 1100 AD.”

But just as he offers no explanation as to why anti-scientific ideas should have emerged in 1100 AD or why they should have gained such prominence in what was then the center of European thought⁹, so too is he unable to explain the emergence of Creationism as a movement in America today. In fact, the possibility that the phenomenon might need explanation at all does not seem to have occurred to him: it is as though ideas merely appear without need for a cause and spread from vector to unarmed vector like a plague from god or a zombie apocalypse.

My claim is not, of course, that people have racist ideas because they are so idealist (in fact, the reverse could just as easily be true). But in order to engage with the world, people need a more or less consistent world view from which to view it and by which to organize their actions in it. Idealism provides one such organizing principle and it is particularly friendly to the kind of racism the imperialist ruling classes of the West currently require. This is not to say that idealism is the sole property of cultural racism: idealism is a very common way of looking at the world, which is precisely why racism dressed in its logic can have such traction.

Religious idealism – explaining the world through the ideas of deities – is, of course, very old; the “theory” of intelligent design is only a fairly modern example. But when it comes to explaining the human world at least, we aren’t lacking in secular versions. It isn’t difficult to find a history book that treats human history as the history of ideas. Epochs become defined by big epoch-making ideas (or the men and, sometimes, women who thought them). Ideas become the driving force in social change; in Europe and North America in particular, since the ‘Enlightenment’, that change can be given a pattern – it is the pattern of progressive advancements in our ideas about human rights and social inclusion.

Engles, writing about the vainglorious fantasies of the French Utopians had this to say about their ideology:

If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen [in the form of the Utopian] and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.¹⁰

What Engles is saying, obviously, is that you cannot cut developments in philosophy off from other historical developments – that there is a reason the French Utopians could arise when and where they did and not 500 years earlier.

To make a more obvious example: it is difficult to imagine that the theory of democracy espoused by the revolutionaries of America and France could have taken the particular form that it did in a society where the aristocratic claims to virtue by blood had not already been materially undercut by the growth of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes and a form of economy appropriate to them. The ideas of Paine or Jefferson did not appear among even the most radicalized peasants (the Diggers, for example) and nothing even remotely similar ever took hold among the feudal royalty. For obvious reasons, in the case of the latter.

Given what we know about the world today: our rich and expanding scientific understanding of the cosmos, of the fact that our minds are the result of a long process of biological evolution, that our perception is dependent upon and affected by a vast and complicated array of electro-magnetic and chemical processes, the entanglement of our bodies and minds – given all this, how is it possible for idealism, a philosophical method which has the absurd result of reducing human beings to free-floating intellects, to have survived and flourished?

One explanation is simple mendacity on the part of our ruling classes. As the example of cultural racism and Islamophobia demonstrates, it is convenient for some sections of the US ruling class to say that war is a function of the ‘fact’ that Muslims ‘hate our freedoms’¹¹ and disastrous to admit that their wealth and position as the most powerful ruling class on the planet is dependent on their ability to secure access to resources, in particular oil, against other ruling classes; sometimes that means diplomacy (Iran) sometimes that means war (Iraq). Given that this same powerful ruling class has considerable control over which narratives we hear on the news and elsewhere, it is hardly surprising that their claims might be bought into.

But this explanation requires us to believe that the hired mouthpieces of power are just a bunch of audacious and straight-faced liars. This is only sometimes the case. Marx and Engels offer another explanation. For them the root comes from the division of mental and manual labor in class society: from the moment this develops,

consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.

Furthermore, this division of labor

manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class.¹²

In other words, professional theoreticians (like the priest) are hamstrung precisely by the narrow and isolated world that they inhabit; living in the world of ideas, it is easy for them to imagine that ideas are really all there are to the world¹³. The rest of the class, and in fact the rest of society, might share the same illusion superficially, only because in their immediate, equally narrowactivities they are ad hoc materialists. Idealism persists as an ideology precisely because the theories of the ideologues are in fact an almost entirely separate realm with only a very indirect bearing on the actions and policies of the ‘active members’ of the ruling class: the day that an idealist becomes actually responsible for these actions is the day she finds herself forced into materialism.

Crisis in the SWP

Seymour on the crisis in the SWP — on the assumption that the facts given are accurate, this is simply unforgivable.  The CC must be sacked if the SWP is to have any serious political future.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Crisis in the SWPposted by lenin

Laurie Penny writes an article about the crisis in the SWP, following up on Tom Walker’s very finely written resignation statement. It quotes my long-time friend and comrade China Mieville making some, to my mind, extremely well put observations about the catastrophic nature of this crisis and the roots of it in the party’s deformed democratic structures and lack of accountability. It is an excellent piece. And it stands in stark contrast to the shameful whitewash in this week’s Socialist Worker, and ironically does more service to the party.

So, let us recapitulate. A serious allegation is referred to the Disputes Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, my party, to investigate. The Disputes Committee is composed largely of individuals who know the accused. The Disputes Committee asks the person making the allegations a series of completely inappropriate questions that, had they been asked of someone making such allegations in a police station, we would rightly denounce them as sexist. Another comrade makes a related allegation against the same accused, and submits a statement. The committee subjects this comrade to similar treatment. The committee reaches a verdict of ‘not proven’. The conference of the party is then lied to about the nature of the allegations. The Central Committee and the Disputes Committee collude in a cover-up. They suppress it. This is already a disgrace.

But word does get around. People begin to hear what has happened, and are outraged. They begin to hear of senior party members spreading the most disgusting rumours about the two women involved. Many members, especially young members, begin to kick off about it. It becomes clear that this will be an issue in the party conference of 2013. So, there is a preemptive strike against four members for participating in a Facebook thread discussing the case, which is alleged - on the basis of selective excerpts - to be evidence of ‘secret factionalising’, which is prohibited. The expulsion is enacted immediately, with no due process, no disciplinary hearing. The four comrades are expelled by email. This is totally at odds with the party’s usual procedures. It is a clear bureaucratic manoeuvre to stymy the upsurge. But it produces a revolt. A group of comrades form a faction to contest the expulsions, campaign for the rejection of the Dispute Committee’s report on the allegations, and challenge the party’s democracy deficit. (Naturally I join this faction.)

We organise. But the members who raise this issue, many of them students, are yelled at in meetings, denounced for ‘creeping feminism’, or for carrying the germ of autonomism into the party. Old polemics against ‘feminism’ from the 1980s, always somewhat dogmatic, are dusted off and used as a stick to beat dissenters with. People who try to raise the issue at district aggregates are shouted down. Wised up hacks turn up at meetings, with their best ‘what, us?’ innocent expression, claiming to be shocked and horrified at the lack of trust in the party, and astonished that some people use terms like ‘hacks’. They express befuddlement about why the faction even exists. They accuse dissenters of being ‘inward-looking’. Nonetheless, the faction grows quickly. Soon, there are two factions, both opposing the expulsions and criticising the findings of the Disputes Committee. They have different emphases and different tactics, but similar objectives. They go to conference, expecting to be in a minority - after all, most comrades still haven’t got the slightest clue what is happening, or have only heard the rumours and lies. In the history of party conferences, dissenting motions generally haven’t fared well. But we find, suddenly, that there is a groundswell. The more members hear, the more they’re throwing up. And we get to conference, and our delegates face down the most appallingly bureaucratic arguments. And we are surprised, and disappointed. The party ratifies the expulsions by two thirds to one third. The party ratifies the Dispute Committee findings by a slender margin. But the reality is that despite formal wins for the leadership, this amounts to a serious crisis for them.

How do they respond? A sane response would be to say, ‘much of the party is still not convinced, we need to debate this further and work out a solution’. At the very least. More generally, a sane leadership might think about opening up year round communications so that party members can communicate with one another outside of conference season. They might think about creating more pluralistic party structures, ending the ban on factions outside of conference season and rethinking the way elections take place. Instead, they tell everyone in Party Notes that there will be no further discussion of the matter. CC members tell full-time party employees that the accused was ‘exonerated’ by conference (no such thing), insist that conference voted for an ‘interventionist’ party, rather than a ‘federalist’ party, and begin a purge. Report backs from conference either don’t discuss the Disputes Committee session in any detail or discuss it in an arrogant, dismissive manner. A CC member gives a report back that instructs members, “if you can’t argue the line, you should consider your position in the party” - as if the party was the possession of the bureaucracy. They tell members to get on with focusing on ‘the real world’. In the real world, this is a scandal. And we, those who fought on this, told them it would be. We warned them that it would not just be a few sectarian blogs attacking us. We warned them that after we had rightly criticised George Galloway over his absurd remarks about rape, and after a year of stories about sexual abuse, and after more than a year of feminist revival, this was a suicidal posture, not just a disgusting, sickening one. They continued, obliviously, convinced that this was the correct, hard-headed Bolshevik position. Now members are caught between the choice of having to expend energy on a fight to save the party and its traditions, or burying their heads in the sand, or swallowing the Kool Aid and joining the headbangers.

There isn’t enough bile to conjure up the shame and disgrace of all of this, nor the palpable physical revulsion, nor the visceral contempt building, nor the sense of betrayal and rage, nor the literal physical and emotional shattering of people exposed to the growing madness day in and day out.

This is the thing that all party members need to understand. Even on cynical grounds, the Central Committee has no strategy for how to deal with this. A scandal has been concealed, lied about, then dumped on the members in the most arrogant and stupid manner possible. The leadership is expecting you to cope with this. This isn’t the first time that such unaccountable practices have left you in the lurch. You will recall your pleasure on waking up to find out that Respect was collapsing and that it was over fights that had been going on for ages which no one informed you about. But this is much worse. They expect you to go to your activist circles, your union, your workplaces, and argue something that is indefensible. Not only this, but in acting in this way, they have - for their own bureaucratic reasons - broken with a crucial component of the politics of the International Socialist tradition that undergirds the SWP. The future of the party is at stake, and they are on the wrong side of that fight. You, as members, have to fight for your political existence. Don’t simply drift away, don’t simply bury your face in your palms, and don’t simply cling to the delusional belief that the argument was settled at conference. You must fight now.

***

One last thing. There is an article in The Independent about this case. It uses the phrase “socialist sharia court”. It is miles away, in tone and spirit, from Laurie Penny’s piece. I would urge people to think carefully about who wants to use the sort of language deployed in the Independent article. I think the answer is, “racists”. I would also point out that, as far as I know, the Independent did not speak to any party members. My advice is to disregard that piece.