ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
There’s an interview here from last year with Paul Mattick Jnr who puts an opposite view : that the present crisis has been caused by a fall in the rate of profit caused by capital-intensive technical development or rather by the failure to overcome this by personal and government borrowing and spending. Not too sure that this is entirely convincing, but the conclusion he draws from it that the only capitalist way-out of the crisis is austerity seems sound enough.The trouble is he spoils it by suggesting that workers ignore or take on the state by helping themselves to food, housing, etc whereas the obvious lesson is to organise politically to win control of the state and abolish capitalism that way (while of course fighting a rearguard action to try to slow down austerity). As we’ve always said, if workers are not prepared to vote for something they’re even less likely to take so-called “direct action” to get it.
A Labour politician (ex-MP and ex-Minister) who knows something about us. I thought that breed had died out. In a sense it’s comforting to know they haven’t.
Quote:the CPGB leadership clique have embarked on a tactically inept attemptThis sort of criticism is par for the course in vanguard organisations and why some feel compelled to leave and form another one, as Keith Scholey explained in his talk on Trotskyism the other weekend.
On Saturday a young Maoist , from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist Leninist), came into Head Office. We paid for copies of their paper Proletarian and Lalkar (published by Harpal Brar of the Stalin Society) with 5 volumes of the writings of Kim Il Sung which someone had donated to us. The point of this is that in the January/February issue of Lalkar there’s an article which puts the case for the present crisis being a crisis of underconsumption (even though it calls it a crisis of “overproduction”). The article can be found here. It’s paragraphs 2 and 3 in the subsection “The crisis in Europe” that offer their explanation of the crisis:
Quote:This crisis has been building up over at least the last 30 years. It is at heart a classic crisis of overproduction, this being the design fault built into the capitalist system. As the masses of workers – who at the same time make up the bulk of consumers – are, in the interests of profit, paid as little as possible and reduced in number as much as possible, they are increasingly unable to buy all the increasing mass of commodities that the capitalist enterprises bring to market. This in turn bankrupts the least “efficient” of the capitalist enterprises, causing further job losses and downward pressure on wages caused by an excess of the supply of labour power over the demand for the same. Bankruptcies start to escalate, while economic activity stagnates. However, this process can be, and is, retarded by the simple expedient of the capitalists, who would otherwise find it difficult in the circumstances to invest profitably, lending money to workers to enable them to continue as consumers despite their relative poverty. (…) But then comes the day of reckoning – literally speaking – the day the borrowing must be repaid. So much has been borrowed, however, that repayment is no longer possible.This is quite a common explanation of the current crisis, put forward even by people who consider themselves Marxists, but it’s not true as it ignores the fact that what the workers can’t buy (out of their wages) the capitalists can (out of their profits). In fact, from one point of view, a crisis is caused by capitalists choosing not to buy (not invest profits because they judge they won’t make any profits or not enough). Crises are not caused by workers not being able to buy back all they’ve produced. If this was the case, what would need explaining would not be crises but why there could ever be a boom.And Marx himself noticed:
Quote:It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and “simple” (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears, then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will, conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily, and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.Two of us braved the patriotic crowds and the weather yesterday to leaflet this. The police had restricted access to the announced meeting place but 200 or so gathered outside the barriers and marched down the street chanting “Monarchy Out, Republic In”. The patriotic crowds were indifferent, presumably regarding it as part of the spectacle. Everybody there must have received either the Queen Capital’s Jubilee and/or the Identity leaflet. They weren’t the usual suspects and seemed a thoughtful lot and I can’t believe that they really think that merely “replacing the monarch with a directly elected, largely ceremonial head of state” (as the leaflet distributed by Republic, the organisers, put it) would make any difference at all, ie they must have other ideas of change too. Anyway our leaflets were well received. We’ll see if they get a response.
I see these nutters have started the insurrection already in Bristol. The State will smash them in no time. I expect their prison cells are already being prepared.
I saw that letter as I sometimes buy the Morning Star on a Saturday to avoid having to throw away the weekend supplements the other papers bring out even though it means reading the day before yesterday’s news.. Anyway I’ve sent off this letter. Maybe they’ll publish it:
Quote:Peter Cole ( M Star May 25-27) is wrong. Martov was right to oppose Lenin’s idea of a hierarchical top-down vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. Had he suceeded maybe the outcome of the anti-Tsar revolution would have been a democratic republic allowing the working class elbow room to wage the class struggle, and not the state-capitalist dictatorship over the proletariat that Lenin and the Bolsheviks established.I agree that we should keep in touch with developments in the what might be called “the anti-capitalist milieu” and while the split from Workers Power was a step in the right direction as a step away from building the vanguard party this report is very disappointing as it shows the usual suspects jumping on the bandwagon: the Internationalist Bolshevik Tendency, Permanent Revolution, Workers Power, etc. These are the smaller Trotskyist grouplets looking for a wider audience to recruit from. Unless Leninist/Trotskyism dies out these pests will ruin any attempt to get something going. The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, is more interesting, precisely because it doesn’t carry this vanguardist baggage.
He was in the old RCP (who used to publish Living Marxism aka Dead Leninism). He stood for the RCP in the 1989 by-election in Vauxhall (which we gave a miss) and got 177 votes. He has now abandoned Leninism and wrote a piece about what life was like for the members of the RCP and the illusions they held. It can be found here. A contributor to spintcom has said he is sympathetic towards us.
Yes, he does understand that Marx was not anti-elections and say that Marx’s political position is closer to ours than to the Leninists’, and he does delight (and delight us) in using Marx and us against them. Pity he’s got a bee-in-his-bonnet or a mental block or whatever it is about Proudhon who was a “free market anarchist” and virulent critic of communism.His claim that Marx pinched the concept of surplus value from Proudhon is absurd. Marx himself pointed out that Proudhon himself had been preceded in this by various English writers who employed Ricardo’s labour theory of value to show that workers were exploited (easy enough to do if you start from the premise that only labour is the source of value as where else could profits come from?).
We did manage to blag a stall in the courtyard of UCL last year. We can try again this year but if not there’s always Gower Street, not that that pseud Toni Negri will be worth listening to (or be comprehensible). Trouble is it clashes with our summer school in Birmingham, but not everybody goes there. Up to North London branch.
