So What?

So this showed up in the comments section on Michael Roberts' website:

The elephant in the room in all self titled Marxist economists are the effects of labour migration to labour rates as advanced capitalism started to go east in the early 70′s due to the costs of the Vietnam war which triggered the breakdown of the post Bretton Woods financial system.

The companies that could not physically go east started to import workers en masse and massively lowered wage rates at the same time as massively increasing indebtedness. Deindustrialisation in the West is becoming the norm and the Chinese having been recipients of western technology are involved in massive copyright fraud which will collapse eg the German economy.

The old recession hasn’t gone away its just that the capitalist nation states have stepped in to honour the debts of private banks. These banks are now being centralized on a massive scale and by the end of this year 85% of all Eurozone banks will be controlled from Brussels. When the next wave of financial meltdowns occur each country in the EZ wont have more than 4-5 banks forcing one more mergers until we are left with …one.

Either which way monopoly capitalism is losing both its customer base (by lowering the standard of living across the EZ) and its financial base is being centralised across different countries with different histories and languages and work cultures. By allowing those who have perfected the art of bankruptcy in the 20th century to run the EU in the 21st, total bankruptcy once more is on the cards….

Britain on the other hand just prints money, creates hyperinflation for overseas investors in property and the indebtedness of the banks if property was accounted for would be massive but a false sense of security exists as it has the EU model with American financing and appears to be permanently in ‘boom’ even when billions are spent subsidising wages or bailing out banks. As such it its business as usual, nothing learned nothing new gained as if Northern Rock never happened.

And so what?  So this:  this guy's got a point:  we haven't opposed his type, and this type, of  garbage vigorously enough; we have not refuted this xenophobic nonsense with enough data and enough passion to shut up these clowns who think they can camouflage their racism, their jingoism, their inner Le Pen, with allusions to and the illusion of radicalism.

We haven't repeatedly, insistently, called for the end to all immigration restrictions; to open borders.  We haven't repeatedly, insistently, demanded that all workers, in or out of all workers' organizations, take actions in the US to bar the entry of ICE agents into the workplaces.


We haven't refuted the nonsense about "de-industrialization." 

Asset stripping is not de-industrialization.  The growth of industrial output in China, Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia is no more the cause of so-called de-industrialization than is the growth of "finance capital."  The de-industrialization is not de-industrialization at all but rather the increase in the organic composition of capital,  improvements in the productivity to labor, accompanied by, and by necessity, attacks on the wage-structure, which is the response to the fall in profitability dictated by the accumulation of capital itself.

We haven't pointed out that for capital what counts is not the accumulation of the means of production, but the accumulation of the means of production as capital, as value-absorbing, value-commanding, value extracting values themselves.  So......so the industrial output of Japan, US, Canada, Australia, the EU may decline as a percentage of world-wide industrial output, but the value added by private industry in the US between 1999 and 2013 increased 35 percent, a rate greater than that of GDP as whole, and this despite the greatest economic contraction in 75 years.

We haven't vanquished this baloney that says workers in the "advanced" capitalist countries "benefit" from the "super-profits" extracted from workers in Africa, Latin America, Asia, when transparently,  the assaults on the workers living standards in the "advanced" countries increases in tandem with the
proportion of global industrial value extracted from those workers in the "less developed" countries.

We haven't been forthright in demanding not only that bourgeois governments default on both their sovereign debt and the debt of financial institutions, but that our program of our party for our class regards such defaults as necessary, unavoidable, and welcome. 

We haven't said flat out that the failure of the financial system, the absolute implosion of capitalism (which is unlikely to occur) is the lesser evil.   We haven't been explicit in pointing out that this is not a case of  wishing that "things get worse, so they can get better," but that the cost to human beings from the collapse of capitalism is less than the cost of maintaining capitalism, as because and since the maintenance of capitalism, much less the expanded reproduction of capitalism, is the most destructive force ever known.  Look at China, Mexico, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, the Marianas, Greece, India.

We haven't risked advocating economic defeatism; that the main enemy is always at home, and home is everywhere.  We haven't stated often enough, loudly enough, that we don't care if China's capitalism and capitalists steals every "trade secret" from the bourgeoisie of Germany, France, Japan, the US, etc. etc. etc.  We haven't said we would welcome the collapse of the German bourgeoisie if that collapse were to be caused by China's disregard of property rights.

We also haven't said that no such collapse will occur from such "theft."

We also haven't said that we have no interest in preventing a collapse of Chinese capitalism, Russian capitalism, Brazilian capitalism, Venezuelan capitalism, because such a collapse is immaterial. What is material is which class will mobilize enough of itself and others with enough power to defeat the other class?  

We haven't pointed out enough how printing money has absolutely nothing to do with impaired or repaired profitability.  We haven't vanquished this mealy-mouthed superficial political economist's tabula rasa, which is nothing but the old supply and demand ideology all dressed up and going in circles.  

We haven't said it often enough, loudly enough, that we have no stake, no interest, no desire in accommodating, preserving, protecting any single aspect of the economic, political, social, cultural disaster that is capitalism.

We haven't said enough how sick we are of the "left"-- the boredom and ignorance it traffics in as it operates as a career-path for "professional revolutionists."  Don't take my word for it.  Just look at the archives of the "Left Forum."

We haven't said the "left" all of it, from top to bottom, stem to stern; from councilist to partyist; from Kautskyists to the self-styled little Trotskys, to the neo-situationists, is a waste of time in a wasting land.

And don't make me say this again.


S.Artesian
July 14, 2014