Prospects and Results

1. We think that the  "revolutionary"upheavals of the early decades of  the19th century, those confused, awkward,  stumbling motions  represent a moment of "national liberation," of an emerging bourgeoisie struggling to secure their domestic market and domestic property against...the imperial houses of Castile and Aragon and their rule in the Americas, against the Sublime Porte of the Ottomans and its rule in the Aegean and Black seas; in the Balkans; in the provinces of its empire.

We think these moments were the echoes of the French Revolution clashing against the walls of those houses, banging on those sublime doors that fixed landed property and labor as one, in one, rather than in opposition to each other. 

We think we hear something like "liberty, fraternity, equality" in 1820, 1821, 1830, because we want to hear something like liberty, fraternity, equality today and tomorrow.

We know that romance is not history.  We know it is not the echoes of the French Revolution that we hear coming from that period, but the defeat of the French Revolution. We know it was the impact of the British industrial revolution, British production choking, suffocating, markets sustained by artisan, handicraft production. We know it was British production commandeering the agricultural markets, ruining  the textile export markets, and draining away the commercial lifeblood of the "underdeveloped, not yet and never to be "nations" of the Ottoman empire.

We know by this time "national emancipation" was a scaffold erected upon which the peasantry, the artisan, the village, were to  be sacrificed, removed, dispossessed, made itinerant.

We  know that even at this early date in its reign, capitalism could only do some,  but never all, and only in half measures of its so-called "historic tasks."  Capitalism was aces at dispossessing, immiserating, the small, direct producers, but held only the low cards when it came to  revolutionizing the mode of production.

We know that developing capitalism, its struggle for markets, its commercial impulse, its compulsion to absorb value whatever its source, was incapable of reshaping the economic territories of empires in its own image.

We know that 19th century capitalism undermined but perpetuated the archaic relations it encountered.  We know that 19th century capitalism did that just as 20th century capitalism did that... in Mexico, in Venezuela, in Ecuador, in the Philippines, in Greece.

In its long struggle against the Ottoman Empire, the "Great Powers" of Europe, always Britain, often France, later Germany, at times Russia, found nationalism a most effective weapon.  The "independence" of Greece, of the Balkan, or Black Sea, or Danubian provinces was the struggle of the agent, determined to win new clients from the portfolio of.....an opposing agent.

The Porte, organized to limit the power and the possibilities of a landed aristocracy, had bequeathed to  Greece  an agricultural sector dominated by the small producer, the marginal producer; and an urban sector dominated by the village; by artisans.

The capitalists of Greece in the 17th, and 18th centuries were the trading capitalists, the merchant capitalists.  We know that by the end of the 18th century, Greek merchants had a virtual monopoly on illegal cereal exports from the western provinces of the empire to the rest of Europe.  The Porte, porous as a sieve,  could not even ensure grain security for Constantinople.

In the first decade of the 19th century, the Greek merchant fleet grew to 625 ships and 154,000 tons, employing 37, 500 sailors (Mouzelis, Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment, Macmillan, 1979 page 10).  And in the second decade of the 19th century an "export crisis" devastated the shipbuilding enclaves, the textile centers, leaving both seamen and artisans ruined and itinerant.


With no interest, and no principle, to affect the transformation of agriculture, to make rural production the production of capital, to transform peasants into farmers and proletarians, to make landlords act as improving landlords, to make production the production not just of but also for value, the Greek merchant bourgeoisie defined, determined Greek capitalism as client capitalism, attached to, dependent upon, subordinated to Britain (most of the time).

The great themes and constraints of Greek capitalism-- the persistence of, and persistent impoverishing of small producers;  the diaspora bourgeoisie; the massive migrations to the United States; the restricted domestic market; the missing industrial production; the fragmentation of agricultural production-- were established not just as the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, but in Europe's confrontation with the Porte.  The merchant bourgeoisie mimic, support, synchronize perfectly with their patrons.  Greece is the product and the predicament of capitalist underdevelopment. 

The Greek nation was formed minus all the centers of Greece commerce. Smyrna, Salonica, Alexandria, Constantinople, all remained outside the boundaries of the new state.  The Greek nation crowned its "emancipation," its "independence"  by being awarded a monarchy by the "Great Powers," in 1832.  The "hereditary sovereignty" of and over Greece is award to Prince Frederick Otto of Wittelsbach, the son of..........King Ludwig of Bavaria:

Es lebe die co-abhängige, nicht ganz souverän, griechischen Nation!

The prince came with a guaranteed loan of 60,000,000 francs.  Greece, the Great Powers decided, must pay an indemnity to the Sublime Porte.  Nothing forged the chains of debt servitude like national liberation.   

2. "Configured" by commerce, subordinate to the economies of the "Great Powers,"  Greece's economy functioned as an enclave within capitalism, where capital as that specific relation, exchange of labor power for a wage, the organization of labor power as value expanding value was itself isolated, constrained.

Where capitalist markets expand, overproduction is sure to follow, and market collapses in currants and tobacco worked to drive the rural producers off the land.  This dispossession itself did not transform the mode of production. Throughout the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, agriculture remained the realm of the small producer.  Abandoned land was not consolidated,was not capitalized, in that no rural proletariat was created.  Share-cropping, and tenant relations,  "veiled" wage relations,  existed to be sure, but the capitalization of agriculture, that is to say the opposition of ownership of the land to the labor, the ability of ownership to command the labor of others was not the determining mode of production.

The cities, to which the ruined small rural producers migrated,  were not centers of industrial production, and the marginalized rural population became a marginalized urban population.

The Greek state, in all its weakness, its inadequacy, its corruption, was the only social body with enough cohesion, that is to say greed with a purpose, to even attempt improvements in infrastructure so necessary to stabilizing the domestic economy.  But....the domestic economy was contingent on its service to the world markets.  The Greek state could only satisfy that contingency through taking on massive loans from the "Great Powers," and so the economy was right back where it started, between the rock of world market, and the hard place of lowered productivity.

Wars with Turkey won; wars with Turkey lost; territory gained and lost; populations transferred, absorbed, expelled, slaughtered, none of that changed the once and future and eternal truths of the Greek economy: within international capitalism there is no solution to the conflicts, antagonisms, limits of Greek capitalism;  without the aid of an international revolution  there is no prospect for Greece.

3. The expansionary periods of capitalism in the 20th century had a significant impact on Greece without overcoming the historic limitations.  Between 1923 and 1930 foreign capital amounting to 1.2 billion gold French francs flowed into the country (Mouzelis, page 23).  By 1939, the horsepower utilized by industrial production tripled, and the volume of industrial production doubled (Mouzelis, page 23).  Still, the economy was dominated by the small producer; the artisan.  As late as 1958, half of the labor forced was trapped in agricultural production (Mouzelis, page 27). In 1930, 93 percent of manufacturing enterprises employed fewer than 5 persons.  In 1958, 85 percent employed fewer than 5 persons (Mouzelis, page 38).

After WW2, after the defeat of the Communist Party in the civil war by the spent British and the spending Americans, Greece's capitalism retained its enclave nature, with investment focused on textiles, tourism, and shipping.  Manufacturing was the slowest growing portion of the industrial sector, trailing construction, transport, and utilities in output.  Electricity production expanded tenfold to reach 2.7 million kwh by 1961 from the pre-WW2 mark (Mouzelis, page 25).

The banking structure was highly concentrated with just two institutions, the Commercial Bank, and the National Bank of Greece controlling 90 percent of domestic saving and maintaining significant ownership in the insurance and industrial sectors of the economy.

And then?  And then along came the Jones of the 1960s, the rapidly increasing expanding foreign direct investment in the metallurgical, chemical, communications industries.  Foreign direct investment which in 1960 had amounted to $11.7 million accumulated to reach $157.6 million by 1966 (Mouzelis, page 28).  Greece was becoming an exporter of industrial goods.

The persistent low productivity in agriculture, the persistence of smaller family-owned production units, combined with the technically advanced "islands" of FDI driven production meant that the cities, the urban areas, industry, could not absorb the population moving off the land.  Along with industrial goods, Greece once again exported portions of its population

However,  the FDI expansion did, almost, reshape Greek capitalism in its own image.  Like the advance capitalist countries, Greece featured an acute concentration of capital.  The forty-nine largest industrial enterprises employed 1/3 of the industrial work force and accounted for more than half of all capital assets.  Enclave monopoly, disassociated concentration were the tell-tales of the economy.  The largest 100 industrial corporations accounted for 65 percent of all assets and 68 percent of all profits (Mouzelis, page 38).

Agriculture, which in 1960 had accounted for 80 percent of Greek exports was, finally eclipsed by industry.  By 1968, agriculture's share had declined to 42 percent of the total (Mouzelis, page 121).

Greece had arrived.  It exhibited all the characteristics of modern capitalism: centralization of finance, concentration of industry, inability to meet the needs of all those moving into the cities; export of population.   Greece looked in the funhouse mirror, and saw all of capitalism reflected in its distorted image.

This transformation, and transfer, of the sources of wealth in the economy, destabilized the society and lead to the military coup. FDI, after a brief period of hesitation, resumed and continued to grow.

The threat, to the military, was not so much a threat from the working class, which was just beginning to reorient itself after the decimation of WW2, and the defeat during the civil war.  The threat was that Greece might actually become modern. 

Marx had thought that the not-yet-capitalist-developed, but market-penetrated,  countries of Asia should "look to Britain" for a glimpse of their future.  Indeed, but the image to be captured was not the Britain of the industrial revolution, of the cyclic but cumulative growth, or even of the Britain of the "long deflation."  Rather it was the Britain of the post long deflation period; the Britain of decay; the Britain where the dispossessed population could not be absorbed by industrial production; the Britain where the expulsion of labor was not only relative, but absolute; the modern Britain of redundancy; the Britain where capital accumulation and asset liquidation raced each other to the bottom line and the bottom line was zero.  Underdevelopment is advanced capitalism; capitalism that has run up against the limits of its own foundations-- private ownership.

The coup fell under the weight of the contracting global capitalist economy in 1974.  The message in both the coup and its disintegration was the same: within European, and global, capitalism,  Greece's economic development would always lead to failure; without a reciprocating European social revolution,  the prospects for the revolutionary struggle, the revolutionary opening in Greece were...bleak; still necessary as the only possible path out of impoverishment, but still...bleak.

That's the same message that has been transmitted in an SOS from Greece since 2009.

4. Since February, 2015, articles, debates, maneuvers, denials of Greece's imminent, and immanent, bankruptcy have filled the journals, the websites, the periodicals, the epublications of the world market.  It's on again; it's off again.  Greece can make it to April, but then... Greece can make it to May, but then....Greece can make it to June, but then.....  The last time the players of left and right in this gigantic hedging operation they wish they could substitute for class struggle predicted something to occur so many times in such a short period was when they were all awaiting, breathlessly, the death of Francisco Franco, who managed to keep breathing... to the point where it simply didn't matter.

Like Franco, the demise of Greek capitalism, its bankruptcy, is both a foregone conclusion, and an event  not worth waiting for.  Syriza pays the IMF?  Guess what?  It doesn't matter.  The payments will not resolve the structural, organic, inadequacies of capitalism in Greece.

Syriza draws "redlines"?  Guess what?  They don't matter.  No matter what Syriza does or does not do, the Syriza government, that is to say the government administering capitalism in Greece will not be able to pay the pensions, the salaries, the bills that are past due.

Syriza privatizes, refuses to privatize, communications, ports, the national lottery?  Guess what?  It doesn't matter.  The revenue generated from privatization, or from continued nationalized operations is inadequate to the needs of the population, and the needs of social development.

Syriza keeps Greece in the eurozone?  Syriza takes Greece out of the eurozone?  Doesn't matter.  The tasks of economic development, of social welfare, are class tasks.  The bourgeois class cannot, structurally, historically, meet those challenges.  Syriza, not being a class, intent on preserving the existing class relations, can only pose, posture, proclaim. It cannot perform.  

A "Grexit" would be "a disaster" for Greece?  Hey, exactly what do you think the last 6 years have been?  Catastrophic is the word.

Those who argue that Greece, under Syriza, would suffer horribly if it left the Eurozone are simply not paying attention to what has, and continues to, transpire in Greece.

Those who argue that Greece under Syriza must remain in the eurozone are utilizing the exact argument that was used by "leftists" to support the TARP program in the US to prop up the banks; the capital injections by the UK government to its banking sector; the coordinated actions of the central banks to protect capitalism.

"Under," "with" Syriza are conditions, not requirements.  Under, with are conditions of capitalism. 

The chances for improving the welfare of the Greek people begin with opposing Syriza's program; for declaring "no-confidence" in it as a government, and as a party. 

May 30, 2015


 

A Simple Question

So today's Financial Times is reporting:

Mr Tsipras ruled out defaulting on a €750m loan repayment to the
International Monetary Fund due on May 12 even though Athens is
struggling this week to pay pensions and subsidies, which he said must
take priority.

So here's a couple of  simple questions for the very important bloggers; tomb robbers; film reviewers; big I international big S socialists; big S socialist big W workers; former, current, and future Trotskyists; "left communists" and left Communists; autonomists; critical theorists; theoretical critics; moron shock-jock wannabees; progressive political economists; progressive economists; radical political economists; ultra-radical political economists; communiste theoristes; supersessionists; pre-mos, po-mos, and no-mos: 

Should Syriza make the loan repayment?   Should any support be provided to Syriza in its attempts to reach agreement with the Troika?

It's not that simple, someone says?  Insert favorite barnyard epithet here: Bollocks   It is exactly, precisely just that simple.  Opposing capitalism is really simple.  It gets complicated once capitalism is overthrown. 

Default on the debt.  No agreement with the Troika.  No support for the Syriza government's attempt to negotiate austerity with a "human face."  Don't sweat the simple stuff. 

April 28, 2015

Different Boy, Same Game

Here's the thing about history: it always, but always, out-goofs me.  I mean I've been known to use hyperbole, satire, spoof, sarcasm, exaggeration, and near-drunk hallucination to illuminate the macabre humor, the grinning madness that is the result of, and circulates with value production, but I'm an amateur, a naïf, when compared to what capitalism and its attenuated attendants come up with, and come up with constantly, and with straight faces...unlike me.   Example, you ask?  Example you get.  There's this gem, this perfect, this flawless, this naïf story:

http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/syrizas-reshuffle-step-nonerratic-marxist/3613

Got to love it.  And I do.  I do so much that I'm going to reproduce the whole thing right here:

 After a frantic weekend the Greek government sought to break the deadlock in its talks with lenders today by reshuffling its negotiating team.

Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister who made the global headlines in the aftermath of Syriza’s election victory will take a back seat, while the lesser known economic specialist in the foreign ministry Euclid Tsakalotos will lead the talks.  Though both men are western educated, fluent English speaking economists, their styles – and politics – are different.

Mr Tsakalotos is a classic Marxist of the New Left who, when he addressed a meeting in the British parliament last month, brushed aside calls by left Labour MPs for Greece to ditch the Euro on the grounds that “national” economic programmes do not work. Mr Varoufakis once described himself as an “erratic Marxist”; Mr Tsakalotos comes from that school of Marxism which learned from the 1970s onwards to make compromises with capitalist reality. 

He is not only softer spoken; he is very attached to the idea of Syriza as a reforming left-social government and existentially committed to the Euro. What is more, he is a longstanding member of Syriza, with a surer feel for what the party’s members will accept in the compromise that he’ll have to craft.

But the issue is urgent. Those who’ve seen the books in Greece say the country will be able to pay salaries and pensions this week, but that the cash flow of the government looks bleak in May. By draining the cash reserves of public bodies – local councils for example – Mr Varoufakis has been able to keep Greece afloat, but in a way that saps the resilience of such bodies – councils, hospitals etc – should Greece break decisively with the ECB.

To be clear, Mr Varoufakis remains in charge of the finance ministry, and of the government’s economic strategy. But by placing Mr Tsakalotos – who’s been involved from the start – at the head of the negotiating team, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras is sending the strongest possible signal that he wants a compromise to keep Greece inside the Euro.

A sense of the frustration on the Greek side can be got from a briefing document, originating inside Mr Tsipras’ office, which Channel 4 News has seen.

It speaks of “memorandum inertia”, complaining that Eurogroup negotiators have continually tried to unpick the agreement Mr Varoufakis signed on 20 February.

The briefing note states: “There is no agreement on basic topics of the negotiation between the European Commission and the ECB on the one hand, and the IMF on the other. For that reason they plan to draft an internal document writing down their common points and differences.”

The document claims that the ECB is at odds with the European Commission over the framework of discussions – i.e. it wants the old bailout not the 20 February agreement as the basis; and it claims the European Commission is open to ending repossession of people’s homes, and “does not consider massive layoffs to be an issue”.

In a further concession to its lenders, Greece will facilitate the work of EU and IMF teams in Athens: it had insisted all discussions go via politicians rather than officials and it is this – procedural rather than substantial – spat that lay behind the fractious end to Friday’s Eurogroup meeting in Riga.

In years gone by, it would not have mattered to the international bond markets what sub-genre of Marxist they were dealing with: this news knocked several points off Greek bond yields.

It prompted puzzlement among some journalists, who claimed Mr Varoufakis was already “effectively side-lined” two months ago when Mr Tsipras began negotiating direct with the EU.

This misses a vital point: Mr Tsakalotos has decades of political capital with the inner core of a couple of thousands Syriza activists who will have to take the decision on whether to stomach the compromise Greece will need to do.

He’ll have to face down the party’s left, which on the last count had 41 per cent of the votes for rejecting any deal with the Eurogroup. Given his non-party background, that was always going to be Mr Varoufakis biggest hurdle; now it will be jumped by someone else.

I don't know about you, but my favorite part is the bit about Tsakalatos being a "classic Marxist of the New Left who...comes from that school of Marxism which learned from 1970s onward to make compromises with capitalist reality."

That's classic Marxism, all right.  Not sure what school it is, maybe the London School of Economics or the Wharton School, but no doubt about it being classic Marxism.  I don't know why Mr. Mason limits the school to the classes of post-1970.  After all "compromises" "with capitalist reality"-- preserving and reproducing capitalist property, capitalist values-- is exactly what Marxism has been all about ever since....well, Bernstein for one; Kautsky for another; and Lenin, let's not forget Lenin and Trotsky who, in the "interests of the [Russian] revolution" of course, compromised revolutionaries in Turkey; who more or less, more and less, screwed the pooch as we like to say in the railroad biz, the pooch meaning the task, the task being the overthrow of international capitalism. Germany, anyone?  What leaders of "world revolution" would or could allow a murdering moron like Bela Kun to act as an agent of the "general staff"?  Case closed.

And beyond that?  Puhlease.  There's the Third International beyond Germany.  In China, in Britain, in Spain, in France, everywhere they could get their hands around the neck of the prospects for revolution.  That's classic Marxism too, isn't it? 

Not that the 1970s come up short when it comes to, well when it comes to coming up short.  We have the classic Marxists of the New Left (alma maters unknown) in Allende's Unidad Popular government.  There's a compromise that worked out well for both parties, don't you think?  And the ever classic Communist Party Espagne doing what it does naturally, or historically (same-same) in Spain during the waning of the light that was Generalissimo Franco.  And Portugal, don't forget the classic Marxist of Portugal, Cunhal, classically trained as a lawyer, and functioning as minister without portfolio in the various provisional governments of and around the MFA in the 1970s.  Look at Portugal now, huh?  Thing of beauty, that's what I think.

So we are getting a "classical Marxist" in place of an "erratic Marxist" when it comes to cutting a deal and this is a sign of the "seriousness" of a struggle against austerity, and for compromise?

Meanwhile, the Syriza government cuts a deal to finance overhauling weapons for the military and demands that public institutions, including hospitals and pharmacies, deposit all cash reserves (beyond what 15, 30 days of operating expense coverage?) into the central bank so that......so that the government can negotiate extensions with the Troika, pay its own operating expenses, provide an indeterminate amount of cash for pensions, and make payments to the IMF.  Now that's classic Marxism, isn't it?  Can't you just see and hear the old Moor applauding? 

This must be where my lack of classical training, committed vulgarian that I am, really shows.  I mean if I were facing a throw down with my creditors, and I wanted to protect the meager social services still extant in my charade of a government, I would keep that money out of the hands of the national central bank which is in the network of the European Central Bank and whose actions can be constrained at any moment by instructions from the ECB.

Yes, classic Marxism of the 1970s, available in compact disc format or......8-track tapes. This offer expires soon, so hurry.

 Meet the New Left classic Marxism that smells just like the classic Marxism of the old left, always looking for the next way to fuck to death the prospects for workers' power.   It's moments like these when I have to say "classic Marxism" does not exist.   There is only the critique of capital, which becomes the weapon for its abolition by social revolution.   


April 27, 2015

Meanwhile (Place Holder)

Defiant political economists,  ex- and still-Stalinists,  current and former Trotskyists, "leftists" of all sorts (all sorts being the sorts that attend the Left Forum and/or the World Social Forum) have linked arms to form the Stieglitz Brigade. Marching ever forward in defense of the Syriza government in Greece, the Stieglitz Brigade demands that the European Commission, ECB, and the IMF, release €7.5 billion in "bailout" funds so that Greece can make the required payments of the debt owed to the European Commission, ECB, and IMF. 

There, in a nutshell is all you need to know about finance, refinance, and the critical role played by defiant political economists, ex- and still-Stalinists, current and former Trotskyists, leftists of all sort in the re-formation and recomposition of capital.  

"Long live the chains!" proclaimed the Spanish guerrillas battling Napoleon's troops.  

"More rope!" chants the Stieglitz Brigade.

Meanwhile all those ex and still and former and current and forum patronizers remained silent after this report surfaced in the Financial Times. The Syriza government has agreed to fund a €500 million program to refurbish five P-3B Orion maritime patrol craft.  

Tsipras, knowing that discretion is the better part of democracy, did not present the deal for discussion to the parliamentary defense committee.

The ministry of defense, headed by Panos Kammenos, leader of Syriza's partner, the ANEL party, defended the deal on "humanitarian grounds," the humanity being, in part, providing money to the state aerospace company and a private defense contractor.  Another part of the humanity is the immigration issue, as the Orion aircraft will extend the range and ability of the Greek navy to intercept vessels carrying immigrants fleeing the wars that the EU, NATO, and the US have inflicted upon the Middle East and Asia, thus preserving the basic humanitarianism of capital's wars.  

The five aircraft will be rechristened the Rwanda, the Somalia, the Haiti, the Bosnia, and the Herzegovina in honor of other great humanitarian missions. 

επόμενο άνθρωποι!

April 25, 2015 

In No Particular Order...

1.  There was this from Michael Heinrich, arguing that real Marxists are those who declare they aren't Marxists, or at the very least, don't claim to be capital M Marxist.  Marx describes himself as 1. not a Marxist and 2. a "man of science." That, for Heinrich, not only sums it up, but is itself the it.  

Reading Heinrich, and not Marx, one would never guess that there was a specific content to Marx's "science,"  and that "science" was, in a word, history.  Nope, no sirree Bob, no way José, sorry Charlie, es tut mir lied Karl, désolé, Karl.  For Heinrich, the veracity, accuracy of Marx's analysis is not the point.

There is no point.  There are only targets.  And the first target is "the philosophical simplifications that are presented as 'Marxism,' those mixtures of simple materialism, bourgeois ideas of progress, and vulgar Hegelianism which are presented as 'dialectical materialism' and 'historical materialism.' "

I  think Heinrich means "vulgar materialism" not "simple" materialism, but your guess is probably better than mine.  Well, first off, Heinrich is a little bit late to the sing-along, isn't he?  I mean weren't the critical theorists, the Frankfurt School, the grad students and professors of Telos, the New Left Review, the CLR Jamesists, the Debrayists, the Althusserians,  etc. etc. ad nauseum slaying the stuffed dragons of simple materialism and vulgar Hegelianism forty or fifty years before Heinrich issued this epistle?   I could swear I remember something along those lines, right before or right after James, the Frankfurt School, the critical theorists,  Debray ad nauseum  found a home in this or that institution of capital-- you know, like a "nationalist government" here; a "socialist government" there; a tenured position somewhere?  

Heinrich takes on that cream-puff Lukacs, which is not unlike putting a dead fish on your line and then reeling the line in to show your prowess as a fishermen, arguing that whatever the "reasonable concepts of materialism and dialectic" may be, he doubts "one can put together the foundations of an ontology or all-encompassing method from them."

Right on, brother and all power to the people-- all encompassing ontology and all encompassing method are not Marx's pursuits. The specific historical determinants and limitations of capitalism are his pursuits.  

Heinrich states  that "it's not easy for Marxists to determine what 'Marxism' is."  And this difficulty is "Marx's fault," because only a small number of texts were published in his lifetime, all of the fundamental projects remain unfinished."  Yes, indeed.  But...and there's always a but...

Reading this epistle from Heinrich one would never know that Marx's "science" is the science of the critique of capitalism; of the determinations of capitalism that drive it forward, and put it into reverse.  One would never guess that indeed Marx's critique is the critique of that specific, historical condition of labor,  labor power as a commodity, as a value exchanged for values equivalent to, adequate for its reproduction. 

Actually, reading  Heinrich one would never know that Marx was not first and foremost a "man of science," but a revolutionist; that the critique he provides of capital is a critique that establishes the historical necessity, the practicality, for the proletarian socialist revolution.  Marx establishes that necessity, the practicality of that revolution in that his critique is the immanent critique of capital.  It is based on that condition of labor that is the source of value and its accumulation.  It is the granular logic of accumulation embodied in the existence of the commodity and of commodity production that dictates the barriers to accumulation.  It is the determinant of capital that is its negation.  

A target for Heinrich is those who refrain from an "engagement" with Marx's work.  Engagement for Heinrich apparently means reappraising the core of Marx's work, his critique of capital, his establishment of the material necessity for proletarian revolution, on the basis of "doubts" and "revisions" and the unfinished nature of Marx's work itself.

Except.....except in this regard Heinrich has sighted the cross-hairs on his own head, for the engagement with Marx's work is not, cannot be, solely the engagement with Marx's manuscripts.  It must be the engagement with Marx's own pursuit-- the critique of capitalism and the practical necessity of its overthrow.  Is capitalism as Marx described it?  Value production seeking expanded value?  Is that the necessity of capitalism?  Is that necessity predicated upon, and dependent on the reproduction of the means of production constituted as property and embodied by the class of capitalists in opposition to living labor, compelled as wage-labor, and embodied in the class of wage-laborers?  Does that opposition, the reproduction of that opposition propel the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism?

I know my answers to those questions.  I don't know Heinrich's, and I suspect he doesn't know either.  

Short version: there is no "Marxism," no "engagement with Marx" that does not confront capitalism, and the prospects for its overthrow. 

2.  Then there was this from Michael A. Liebowitz,  professor, author, pretty good writer and former adviser to the late Hugo Chavez's government in Venezuela.  Liebowitz gets right to the point, quoting Engels: "Marx was before all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat." Good point.  


And not just parenthetically, Chavez's government, and "Chavez-type" governments, are forms of government which capitalism has brought into being; forms of government which do not, cannot, amount to the "liberation of the present-day proletariat."

Leibowitz  asks what can be said about Marxists economists?  Are they "revolutionaries whose real mission is to contribute to the overthrow of capitalism?"  The answer to that is "yes," but only if you happen to religiously watch, and believe, Fox News, subscribe to the Cato Institute's newsletter, regularly attend the workshops of the American Enterprise Institute, or associate with the brothers spelled Koch. 

Otherwise, not so much.  I would say, of course, that's because there is no "Marxist economics," economics being to wage-labor, to the commodity of wage-labor, what money is to exchange value-- that is to say, alienation to its dis-embodied max.  

There are other and worthwhile explanations of course, not the least of which is that you can't be a "revolutionary Marxist economist" in a vacuum.  You need a revolutionary working class, or at least sustained and increasing class struggle to make you or me a "revolutionary Marxist."  Without that, we are what we are-- academics, critics of capitalism, railroad operations experts, novelists, painters, translators, day-laborers, farm-workers etc. etc.

Leibowitz proposes, more or less, that a revolutionary Marxist economics must focus upon what Marx "misses" or omits from his critique of capital. Liebowitz claims that Marx's Capital does not really consider capitalism as whole: 

"It does not because it does not develop the side of the workers as subject, subjects who struggle for their own goals. At its core, that goal is what Marx referred to in Capital as 'the worker's own need for development.'  Indeed, the one-sidedness of Capital is most obvious when we recognize that it does not examine the wage struggles (precluded by the assumption of a constant standard of necessity) or the essential requirement of capital (once we relax that assumption) that it divide and separate workers in order to capture relative surplus value.

When we focus upon the side of workers, we recognize that they are more than merely the products and results of capital.  Their specific relation to capital within capitalist relations of production does not exhaust their nature.  They exist within many relations--families, communities and nations--and they interact with other workers.  Through all their activities within these relations, through all their struggles to satisfy their need for development they produce themselves."

Well, yeah.  And yeah, so what?  First, let's be clear, Capital is the critique of political economy; political economy being the ideal and ideological presentation of capitalism.  The three published volumes are subtitled The Process of Capitalist Production, The Process of Capitalist Circulation, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole.  The "appendix" fourth volume is the  Theories of Surplus Value.  The emphasis is on the material determinants of capital-- the antagonism in the organization of social production as private property.  That's one.

Secondly, there is a limit to Marx's critique of capital, to his exposition of the immanent critique to capital, and that is that the critique, like capital itself, sets out the basis, the necessity, for the overthrow of capital, but is not in itself that overthrow. We're talking classes, aren't we?  The point being that the exposition has to terminate and give way to the concrete social struggle against capitalism.  The proletariat creates itself as the "subject" of the struggle in the struggle, not before, and not in the texts of economists, political or otherwise.

So Capital at a critical point has to be supplemented and supplanted by organization of the "present-day proletariat" to confront capitalism.  Marx did indeed initiate this "transcendence," taking the logical, logical as meaning historically necessary, step, namely his work in the International Workingmen's Association, which he undertakes at the same time as he is drafting and redrafting and finally proofing Capital.

And not just parenthetically, Chavez's government, and "Chavez-type" governments, are not the supplementing and supplanting of Capital/capital by the combat organization of the proletariat. 

Thirdly, the present-day proletariat as a social force, as a class, as an "agent" is what it is because of its relation to and its existence as the reproduction of capital. The emancipation of labor, the "free association of producers" requires the abolition of class.  What Leibowitz thinks Marx omits, the proletariat in its family, national, community interactions,  is in fact that old "class in itself" existence.  The redefinition of the present-day proletariat as a revolutionary force, that old "class for itself" condition, is a condition of transition where the "proletariat as subject" is doing away with itself.  It is becoming no longer "the present-day proletariat. "

Essentially Leibowitz's appeal is for and to "Marxist economists" to make themselves relevant; to make "significant contributions by focusing upon Marxism's lost core, human development;" by "challenging the assumptions and fallacies of mainstream economics;" to "focus upon the health of the working class rather than exclusively the health of capital by developing the theory and measures of human development, including explicit considerations of the crippling effects of producing under capitalist relations."  Except....what does that mean?  How do we measure the "health" of the "present-day proletariat" under capitalism with a method distinct from the quantitative measures of health already in use?  Is the "health" of the proletariat, is wage-labor any less or more alienated at this point in capitalism in relation to that point in capitalism?

Leibowitz asks "Why, in short, aren't we doing what Marx did in relation to the mainstream economics of his time?" Because that is not the "next step."  What Marx did in relation to capitalism, developing the IMWA, an international organization of the "present-day proletariat" is.

3.  Then there's this, I mean this, without a link:  I read and still read Marx's passages on overproduction with a sense of wanting, wishing, almost willing him to make the connection between overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as capital accumulates.  Most of the time I was, and still am, disappointed.  But there's always Chapter 15  Capital, volume 3, "Development of the Law's Internal Contradictions."  Refuting the notion that there can be "overproduction of capital" but not "overproduction of commodities," or that overproduction of capital is distinct from the overproduction of commodities, Marx writes:

It [overproduction of capital] is an overproduction of the means of production only in so far as these function as capital, and hence have to produce an additional value in proportion to their value in proportion to their value that has expanded with their mass; i.e have to valorize their values. 

It is still overproduction, for all that, since the capital is unable to exploit labour at the level exploitation that is required....at a level of exploitation that least increases the mass of profit along with the growing mass of capital applied; that therefore excludes a situation in which the rate of profit falls to the same degree as capital grows, or even falls more quickly than this.

Overproduction of capital never means anything other than overproduction of means of production--means of labour and means of subsistence--that can function as capital, i.e. can be applied to exploiting labour at a given level of exploitation; a given level, because a fall in the level of exploitation below a certain point produces disruption and stagnation in the capitalist production process, crisis, and the destruction of capital...The same causes that have raised the productivity of labour, extended markets, accelerated the accumulation of capital, in terms of both mass and value, increased the mass of commodity products, and lowered the rate of profit, these same causes have produced, and continue to produce a relative surplus population, a surplus population of workers who are not employed by this excess capital on account of the low level of exploitation of labour at which they would have to be employed, or at least on account of the low rate of profit they would yield at the given rate of exploitation.

Not bad, although it is not the low level of exploitation of the living labor at which the additional labor will be employed, but the high level of exploitation which however high is not high enough to offset the decline in the rate of profit due to the expulsion of living labor from the production process.

For labor to be expressed as value it must be compelled to present itself as a commodity for exchange with an equivalent to its cost of reproduction, i.e. as the time necessary for that reproduction.  The labor theory of value is the theory of labor-time as value-creating.  Additional value can only be the result of "new time" absorbed in production.

Now as capital expels living labor from the production process, replacing it with machinery,  the necessary time for reproduction of the wage drops; the surplus time increases.  The increased mass of surplus value must itself be valorized, and again the proportion of living labor is reduced, the overall time for reproduction of the wage equivalent declines.

No "new time" is contributed by surplus value once it is accumulated and embodied in new means of production.  The machinery reproduces its cost by transferring that value incrementally into the production process.

Every capitalist dreams of paying zero wages.  However, paying zero wages means that the working class cannot be reproduced or that there is no necessary labor time-- no, or no longer a need for wage-labor.  In both cases, for capital "new time"expressed as new value ceases to exist.  No additional value is absorbed by the means of production and acts as the conduit for transfer of the accumulated value.  There is no longer valorization.  Maximizing the rate of surplus value in order to offset a decline in the rate of profit must always, sooner and later, lead to destroying the basis for the reproduction of capital.  Devaluation is a "benign" expression of this process, a moment that says that the worst is yet to come.

Marx continues:

Moreover, capital consists of commodities, and hence overproduction of capital involves overproduction of commodities...If it is said that there is no general overproduction, but simply a disproportion between the various branches of production, this again means nothing more than that, within capitalist production, the proportionality of the particular branches of production presents itself as a  process of passing constantly out of and into disproportionality, since the interconnection of production as a whole here forces itself on the agents of production as a blind law, and not a law which...brings the productive process under their common control...If it is said that overproduction is only relative, this is completely correct; but the whole capitalist mode of production is precisely such a relative mode of production, whose barriers are not absolute, but only absolute for it, on its basis... It is because it is only in this specific, capitalist context that the surplus product receives a form in which its proprietor can make it available for consumption as soon as it has been transformed backed into capital for himself. If it is said, finally, that the capitalists have only to exchange their commodities among themselves and consume them, then the whole character of capitalist production is forgotten, and it is forgotten that what is involved is the valorization of capital, not its consumption. 

Even better than good.  What is involved is valorization, not consumption.  Value expanding value at a sufficient rate that can offset the very decline predicated upon its continued accumulation.

But the contradiction in this capitalist mode of production consists precisely in its tendency towards the absolute development of productive forces that come into continuous conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves, and can alone move. 

4. And finally.... this, Greece.  The Syriza government has attempted to make its goal for debt modification a national, patriotic struggle... as if the debt, and debt requirements, impact all Greeks equally; as if debt modification will provide significant relief to those who are impacted disproportionately by the austerity programs.  The debt, bailout, restructuring have not impacted, do not impact all Greeks equally.  These programs impact the working class and agricultural producers disproportionately.  That's their purpose-- see above remarks about driving the working class into a condition where it cannot reproduce itself.

Historically, the struggle for a "Greek nation" has been the cat's paw of the "Great Powers"- the "Protective Powers"--  different combinations at different times of Britain, France, Russia and Germany-- in their attempts to block,  contain, dismember, and profit from the Ottoman Empire and its collapse.

Nationalism really is miserabilism, and the "left" that supports Syriza in this endeavor is not "progressive" enough to even be considered a "left-wing" of capitalism. 

Syriza's cynical play on the national card, demanding reparations from Germany almost exactly equal to the amount of Greece's debt to the troika,  is but another cat's paw, designed to protect capitalism as somehow separate from the accumulated debt; designed to deflect from the condition of labor in Greece which cannot be ameliorated without the emancipation of labor in Europe.

The next, immediate step, in essence the first step,  in Greece remains what it was: immediate repudiation of the sovereign debt.

S. Artesian
April 12, 2015

Johnny B Crude

1. Not so long ago, Pollyanna Pangloss, professor of political economy, public policy, and positivist philosophy predicted that the dramatic decline in oil prices would mean good things for capitalism.

Joined by all the little Pollyannas, professor Pangloss opined that the 50 percent decline in prices would bring yet another sunny day in the endless summer of capital's long wave. "Let's grab our boards and.....accumulate," said the professor.

Singing behind the professor's December, 2014,  acapella  rendition of  "Surfin' Safari" (music stolen from Chuck Berry) were the studio artists known as the Fantastic Baggies-- made up of the IMF, the US Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank.  Declared the Baggies, in unison, "the low oil prices are a shot in the arm."  Mario the Draghi, given a chance to solo, grabbed the mike and crooned that the price drop was "unambiguously positive" for the world economy.


The "theory" was that for consumers-- and we're all consumers, aren't we?-- reduced prices due to expanded production of US "tight" shale oil would mean cheaper gasoline.  Cheaper gasoline would mean more disposable income.  More disposable income essentially would be a wage hike without costing employers anything.  And consumers, that's us, would consume more at... Starbuck's, Ikea, Loew's Cineplex, Amazon.

More consumption would mean more demand and more demand demands more supply and nothing supplies supply like more investment, and pretty soon, well it would be the most perfect of worlds.

For industry, the theory was that reduced oil prices would mean reduced costs of inputs to production, and lower costs means higher profits.

It was enough, almost, to make one stand up, turn towards North Dakota or Texas or both and pledge allegiance to Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the Permian Basin.  In fracking mud we trust.

2. Hasn't exactly worked out according to the theory. It can't work out according to theory, because the theory presumes that price determines consumption; consumption determines production; and production is last of the line in this long train of capital trying to climb the grade of accumulation.

Turns out, that price, in this case the declining price of crude, was the result of overproduction, and that the price deflation is the manifestation of the devaluation of capital that follows from a tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the means of production accumulate as capital.  Consumption, particularly consumption by all us consumers, is derived from profitability.   Overproduction is the acute manifestation of the chronic tendency of capital which is the falling profitability of production.

We have here a case of devalorization.

3. Once upon a time,  after1986 in fact, the mantra being mouthed in Texas went like this:  "Dear Lord, just give me another oil boom, and I promise not to screw it up."  Kind of true to its words, Texas since that bust has reduced its concentration on energy production.  Still the oil and gas sector accounts for 8.7 percent of the state's economic output.  Between 2009 and 2013, the Texas economy grew at an average annual rate of 4.4 percent, twice that of the United States as a whole.

But meet the new United States, same as the old Texas.  While Texas "diversified," oil and gas production for the US as a whole became an "overweighted" sector in the economy.  Fixed assets concentrated in the oil and gas sector at a rate far exceeding that for US industry as a whole. Between 2000 and 2013, the value of fixed assets in the oil and gas sector quintupled, while those in the entire industrial sector (includes manufacturing, utilities, construction, mining) increased 65 percent.  As a portion of the total fixed assets in industry, during these years those in the oil and gas sector tripled to measure 19.1 percent of the total. Since 2009, 70 percent of net new industrial investment (that portion above the amount required to replace investment in fixed assets consumed in production) has been dedicated to the oil and gas sector.

This concentration of investment in production is mirrored in the portion of bank revenues provided by the oil and gas sectors.  In 2014, oil and gas sector investment accounted for 11.8 percent of  Citigroup's banking revenues; for 14.9 percent of Wells Fargo Securities' banking revenue; for 7.4 percent of Bank America's revenues; 6.6 percent of JP Morgan's.

With US production achieving a record gain for a single year in 2014, with stored crude at its highest volume in 20 years, with the terminal at Cushing, Oklahoma literally topped out, with production from shale sources reaching 4.5 million barrels per day, amounting to half of all US production, the resulting deflation in oil price necessarily rebounds in reduced capital spending in this "overweighted" sector, and reduction in revenues to the still distressed banking sector.  Draghi might talk about a shot in the arm, but what counts is what's in the syringe.  In this case,  it's an overdose of heroin, not the jolt of methamphetamine.

The number of US rigs at work has declined by about 25 percent year-over-year.  The number of offshore rigs, laid up or scrapped has reached a 20 year high and now represents one-quarter of the total.   Schlumberger has laid-off 7 percent of its work force.  The oil "majors"-- ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, etc-- have reduced capital spending budgets between 12 and 20 percent.

What has not collapsed, however, is production from the shale fields.  In January 2015, US producer the number of new wells drilled was 28 percent the number drilled in June 2014.  Shale production however declined only 8.5 percent.  Greater production has been extracted from existing wells.  Even with budgets for new drilling slashed, the capital costs of drilling and bringing shale wells into production are so much less than in drilling offshore, or standard "vertical" wells, new shale wells can be brought on line to maintain production at high levels.  Nothing engenders more overproduction like overproduction.

4.  Oil, container ships, coal, steel, dry bulk carriers, these are all commodities, all capital, all values, all finished products at one moment, and all inputs, intermediate values to further production at the next moment.  The accumulation of capital becomes the biggest obstacle to the accumulation of capital. 

The "good times" are all in capitalism's past, and they were never there to begin with. 



S.Artesian
March 31, 2015

De Value

1.  Speaking for myself, I've had more than enough of political economy and political economists. Political economy is of a whole, and that whole is capitalism; political economists, in particular radical political economists are those who radically labor to prove that the alternative to capitalism is of course "radical" capitalism.  Here's an experiment:  take all the radical political economists in the world (starting with those clustering in Greece) put them all in one bag; shake bag; turn bag over.  What comes out?  Nothing. There's nothing there.  End of experiment. Political economy is the original zero-sum.

2. Speaking for myself, if I never hear the words "fictitious capital" again,  I'll be positively grateful.  Really.  And if I never hear a political economist uttering the words "fictitious capital" again... well can one person even expect so much good fortune in a single lifetime?  Obviously not, but that's the point, isn't it?  To not hear a radical political economist talking about non-existent capital capital is such good fortune that it could only occur in the end of the lifetime of a class, the bourgeois class.  It takes more than a village to raze radical political economy and it's "go to" explanation, fictitious capital. It takes a revolution.

3. But, and there's always a but, this thing, er.. this relation, called a revolution just doesn't happen overnight, spontaneously, miraculously.  We need to bend the stick in order to break it, and we are supposed to be all about breaking the stick, not making  a better stick, or putting a better stick into  "better hands."  That's what radical political economists think they are doing, making a better stick, and finding better hands.

4. So here's the thing, er.. the relation, and it's not that fictitious capital doesn't exist.  It always exists.   It's part and parcel, inherent to, immanent in capital, in that capital has no life, no existence, separate and apart from the expansion of value; apart from its self-expansion.  Ergo, hence, therefore any interruption or disruption in the accumulation process, in the process of reproduction, of capital makes all capital fictitious, more or less.  The difference is circumstantial, not determining.

5. So... when they, the radical political economists, are talking "fictitious capital," they think they're  talking debt, or credit, same-same. When Marx talks credit, he's talking about relation embedded in, determined by, the different turnover times of different capitals that somehow have to be reconciled, smoothed, averaged in order for exchange to exist period. Period.

6. Turnover times are the production times and the circulation times of the various capitals.  Now as capital accumulates, in particular as greater portions of expanded value are embedded into the fixed assets, the fixed capital of value production, the portion of value transferred from the fixed assets to any individual commodity decreases.  The time necessary for the turnover of the total capital embedded in production increases.

The time for the system as a whole is made up of individual times for the individual capitals which are necessarily asynchronous.  There is no "harmony," "balance," "equilibrium"  in capital.  Accumulation is realized only through an "uneven" distribution of the total surplus produced in dynamic disequilibrium where capitals are of different sizes, different efficiencies, with different ratios.  Credit/debt embody and reproduce this disequilibrium in, and because of, their "bridging" function of advancing money.  Rather than representing a "fictitious" quantity, credit/debit represent the real quality of capital-- production of, by, and for exchange value; production subjugated to aggrandizement of  value.

7. The iterations of credit/debt-- stocks, bonds, notes, syndicated loans, private equity, asset-backed securities, derivatives based on the future performance of stocks, bonds, loans, ABS, etc-- "advance" as the value mass of fixed assets accrues, as capital expands, as profits increase.  The notion that "self-financing" of industry represents some sort of "healthy" or "productive" condition is pretty much nonsense, primitivist nonsense.

8. The radical political economists ascribe an all powerful role and function to "fictitious capital."  When capital is expanding, the expansion is the product of "fictitious capital."  When capital contracts, the contraction is the result of "fictitious capital."  The source for capital's cycle, in fact for its very existence-- the exploitation of wage-labor; the compulsory organization of labor-power as a commodity, as a value for exchange-- is usurped by, and attributed to the volumes of  "fictitious capital."   Actually, "fictitious capital" is the radical political economist equivalent of "supply and demand"-- answers everything, explains nothing.

9. Consider this: the maritime shipping industry, and the ship-building industry, have been dire straits (pardon the pun) since 2008.  Massive sums were invested in the ships and the ship-building, between 2004 and 2008, far more massive sums than can be generated by profits in any single year.  So where does the money come from?  From the profits accrued through all previous years by other capitals that are held/circulated in the capital markets.  And those sums are in turn secured not by the assets, the ships built, delivered, in service, and anticipated to be in service, but by the value of those assets. 

For the shipbuilding enterprises,  those sums are secured by the values of the shipyards assets, the values of cranes, supplies of steel, aluminum, copper, microprocessors necessary for production...and by the value of the  ships being built on contract.

10. Remember, the basis of capitalist ownership, of private property in production, is that the owner has no use for the commodities produced, but produces and exchanges the  commodities only to accumulate value.  The loans, notes, bonds, the finance capital, are simply, or not so simply, capital's, or rather, capitalists' attempt to do what capitalists wish they could do everywhere and all the time, separate, disentangle, the heavenly value, the exchange value of the commodity, from its earthly, profane form, its material body; it's existence as an object of use.    

11. Continuing: hard times hit.  Now 10 percent of the container fleet gets laid up, stored at anchorage, no longer functioning as container ships, no longer functioning as capital.  Are the notes, loans, bonds, securities previously secured by the values of those ships now fictitious?  Are the notes any more or less fictitious as capital values than container ships no longer operating in the Asia-Europe trade, no longer functioning as capital?  Of course not.

The notes, like the container ships, like the capital values embodied in the container ships will be devalued, certainly.  That devaluation may discount the value represented by  notes, and the value represented by the ships, all the way to zero.  Is capital thereby made fictitious? No, or yes, but only to the extent that all capital in whatever form represents the conflict between use and exchange, between need and value.

12. The container ship, as a commodity, can only function as capital to the degree that it absorbs labor power, and only to the extent that value is expanded can the container ship pass on, in increments, its own value.  The container ship only functions as capital to the extent that it circulates in the processes of exchange.  It transports itself as a value as it transports the value of its lading.  Then the fullest expression of its exchange value is in the consumption, and the extinguishing, of its use value.

The problem is, for the expanded reproduction of capital, is that the exchange value fixed in the container ship a)reduces the rate of that expanded reproduction and b)cannot "outlive" the use value of the ship.

13. But what about...derivatives, credit default swaps?  What about Exxon vs. Enron?  What about say, Warren Buffett vs. Bernie Madoff?  Differences of degree, quantity,  circumstance, not source, quality, or determination.  And certainly not of negation, abolition, overthrow.   Thirteen's the charm.

S. Artesian
March 27, 2015