From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Fri Oct 07 2005 - 17:03:39 EDT
---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------- Subject: The ambiguities of Hillel Ticktin From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@tiscali.nl> Date: Fri, October 7, 2005 4:06 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------- Hillel Ticktin offers an interesting article here: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/595/ticktin.htm> I think the article is thought-provoking, yet also a masterpiece of Marxist-Froebelist equivocation, in the sense that Ticktin fails to provide any objective yardsticks for "decline", based on facts, as if a clear discussion would "aid the class enemy". Seems to me - here I agree with Immanuel Wallerstein - that if you want to address this issue intelligently, you do need them. In addition, at least six different conceptual issues are conflated in a sort of pseudo-Hegelian poetry, namely, the issues of: - the overall functioning of the capitalist system, - social and material progress, - the balance of power between social classes, - the transition between modes of production, - prospects for revolutionary, rather than evolutionary political change, - the concept of societal decadence. I do not intend to discuss this in detail and depth, but I have a few comments on it. In general, the perspective of the Communist International was that the epoch of capitalist decline had begun, as proved by the outbreak of the first world war. Even so, as capitalism recovered from the world war, the rhetoric changed from "decline" to "stabilisation" and then back to "crisis" in 1929. Exactly same thing happened after world war 2, and then you get a long boom, which saw the fastest economic growth of capitalism ever. The doomsayers were wrong, and it led to apologism. It seemed that, because the autarkic policies of Soviet-type societies (which could not modernise otherwise, in an imperialist system of trade) took a large chunk of the world population out of capitalism, and because the political successes of the national liberation movements, that geographically the reign of capitalism was shrinking as well. However, further expansion of the world market (globalisation, or export-led development) in response to world recession, and the demise of official communism as well as the national liberation movements, signified a further expansion of capitalism, despite lower overall real growth rates of production, and an increasing mass of non-productive capital. The system didn't decline so much, as mutated, aided by computerisation. More about that below. It appears to me, that the most solid synthetic indicator we have for this whole problematic of decline, is "the extent to which the capitalist system is observably capable of satisfying basic human needs, globally". Ticktin doesn't mention it, except implicitly in a vague way. Yet the core claim of neoliberal ideology is precisely that "at least we are positively trying to meet human needs" through promoting trade; if not by this route, how would you do it? That is the real challenge. Yet Ticktin hasn't even mentioned socialism once yet, or alternative economic strategies. He just mentions a reformist ideology about substituting administration for the law of value, which misunderstands what is is really about, as I mention below (administration can obviously also work perfectly well on a "surplus-value producing" basis). Eric Hobsbawm titled his survey of 20th century capitalism "the age of extremes", and that is not a bad way of putting it, insofar as global human development shows more and more a juxtaposition of positive and negative extremes, creating ever more complex problems of moral and scientific evaluation. There is, in other words, both progress and regression, and the serious scientific question then is, which really prevails over the other in an overall sense. Ticktin says "Decline occurs at the point when the system is in process of supersession, but the process of supersession is a complex one." This could mean anything or go any which way, even so, it is a mistaken idea, because you can have decline without supersession, just simply decline; around a dozen countries in the world have shown consistent negative output growth rates without any supersession being in prospect. Hence the current fascination with the notion of societal collapse, as popularised by Jared Diamond. Ticktin says "Not all countries, however, were able to fully emerge into the initial stage of capitalism: eg, Holland." This is an obvious error of fact by a scholar, although you can say that Dutch industrial capitalism only really took off in the second half of the 19th century, lagging England. Marxists have often considered the question of the "nature of the epoch" in terms of whether capitalism is growing or declining, but this just is not very fruitful as characterisation; Anton Pannekoek already knew that. It leads to superficial doomsayer prophecies and so on. As Lenin himself noted, I think at the 2nd Comintern Congress, "there are no absolutely hopeless situations for capitalism", its progress and demise are contingent on the outcome of the conflicts between social classes, and I might add, feasible alternatives. A good illustration of this is Argentina, in recent years. I think there is a much more interesting and fruitful Marxian take on this question, if we frame the question more in terms of: given the current situation (forget about the dogmatists), what real opportunities exist for the working classes to advance and develop? What can they independently achieve? How are the perceptions of that, coloured by ideology about what people can and may do, or achieve? This Gramscian question links directly to the question I mentioned before, namely, the extent to which the capitalist system is observably capable of satisfying basic human needs we all have, globally, i.e. the (growing) gap between "the actual and the potential". Orthodox Marxists will often claim, as Louis Proyect does, that there is nothing progressive about capitalism, but that is obviously nonsense, that has no basis in Marx's or Engels's text anyway. Check out the Communist Manifesto for yourself. Funny thing is, that everybody missed the real substantive implication of Mandel's theory about the "long waves" of capitalist development, namely that another "long wave" of the type 1947-73 is ruled out, i.e. that overall growth of real production, as compared to population growth, will stay sluggish at best, precisely because of the condition that world capitalism has reached. Thus, the debate among Mandel's epigones was about "whether there would be a new long wave or not", which completely misunderstands the real substantive thesis Mandel offered. He moreover explicitly dissociated himself from any "cyclical" theory of history. But, in fact, that Mandelite thesis offered in my opinion itself *also* misunderstands the real question theoretically; as Alan Greenspan can tell you, the real question is whether or not world capitalism can successfully accomplish controlled *market expansion* at a sufficient rate, under conditions of gigantic socio-economic inequality, aided by credit (if people don't have buying power, the way you can initiate markets is by allocating them credit, which is what the IMF and the World Bank among others try to do; you try to go from natural economy to money economy via credit economy, to use Marx's expression in Capital Vol. 2). Also, output in value terms is quite a different thing than output in physical terms. In many important areas, physical output has continued to grow, although its market value has declined (which is what Marx would expect). The market question is not just a question of economic timing, but a question of the mutation and transformation of social and political relations, within an increasingly shaky and dodgy system lacking consensual values. This is precisely why Dr Condoleezza Rice refers to the importance of a "common system of ideological values", emphasizing "liberty, democracy, private property, capitalism and Bentham" (well, may be not Jeremy Bentham, but some other luminary). The ruling classes are trying to fumble towards a new ideology, a morality for a new order. The neoconservatives cannot provide it, they need the US Democrats for it, but they're in disarray as well. In a statesmanlike way, Clinton stands by Bush with an appeal for the ""unity of Americans". The real problem though is how they can invent a convincing ideology of unity that captures the "hearts and minds" of Americans. That isn't an insurmountable problem though - lots of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. If the President says it is true, then it must be true, even if it is a lie. It is all in a "way of seeing". Capitalism, as I have myself emphasized, did not originate with industry, it originated from commercial trade, and its future depends not on industrial development so much as on its capacity to "commodify" any and all assets, i.e. expand trade and establish private property relations. It doesn't matter so much from the point of view of the functioning of the capitalist system, if real output increases only sluggishly. Obviously it does matter to whole populations shut off from resources, but we can always blame that on their primitivism, laziness, immorality or lack of thrift, and so on. Once we understand this, we can understand better what "mutation" consists in, namely precisely the changing of the "rules of the game" governing trade in assets of any kind, and expanding the temporal-spatial-intellectual region within which commercial trading can occur. The problem here is that of course the labouring classes can also do a bit of "trade" of their own, which isn't surplus-value generating, raising the important bourgeois question of how one can stay in control of that trade, and contain it within those bounds compatible with basic capitalism. And broadly, you can do that only by means of more and more social controls by the state, that regulate behaviour, and larger and larger security forces of all kinds policing private property of all kinds. That is why neoliberalism isn't so liberal, as you might think. Of course, I should say something about the famous falling rate of profit beloved of orthodox Marxists. Simple math can show you that a falling rate of profit doesn't really matter so much, *provided* that the "mass" (volume) of profit increases sufficiently, through market expansion. Which is to say, the real problem of the epoch is not so much a falling rate of profit, but that of capitalist market integration, i.e. how you integrate more and more people and assets into markets, and get them to trade up the ladder, with the aid of well-intentioned middle classes spreading culture. Enviously, the Western bourgeois eyes India and China, which seem to be so much better at it. That is also really the core of of the so-called neoliberal idea, and it depends on the willingness of people to participate in capitalist market trade. You can of course also force them into it, as in Iraq, but if you do that, you really undermine the supposed "liberality" of capitalist market trade. That's a problem, which you cannot really pave over with rhetoric because nobody really believes it. How do you get that participation? Through advertising? Through practical demonstration of its benefits and superiority in giving people what they want? Through saying there are no alternatives? Through bashing the Bible? Mr Moneybags always has the advantage, that he owns most of the money that can be dished out. He can extend credit, or withhold it. But what if, for example, people don't need much of his money anyway for their lives? Anyway, I will be interested to read episode 2 of Hillel Ticktin's article, for the rest, I am I going to have a decline. Jurriaan We met as soul mates On Parris Island We left as inmates From an asylum And we were sharp As sharp as knives And we were so gung ho To lay down our lives We came in spastic Like tameless horses We left in plastic As numbered corpses And we learned fast To travel light Our arms were heavy But our bellies were tight We had no home front We had no soft soap They sent us Playboy They gave us Bob Hope We dug in deep And shot on sight And prayed to Jesus Christ With all of our might We had no cameras To shoot the landscape We passed the hash pipe And played our Doors tapes And it was dark So dark at night And we held on to each other Like brother to brother We promised our mothers we'd write And we would all go down together We said we'd all go down together Yes we would all go down together Remember Charlie Remember Baker They left their childhood On every acre And who was wrong? And who was right? It didn't matter in the thick of the fight We held the day In the palm Of our hand They ruled the night And the night Seemed to last as long as six weeks On Parris Island We held the coastline They held the highlands And they were sharp As sharp as knives They heard the hum of our motors They counted the rotors And waited for us to arrive And we would all go down together We said we'd all go down together Yes we would all go down together
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