Hegel Boot Camp and grappling with Reason

On Mike Roberts's blog The Next Recession (arguing that the most important factor driving the current crisis in capitalism is the tendential fall in the rate of profit/LTRFP), there is a lively discussion in progress taking its starting point in the misrepresentations of Marx and his ideas perpetrated by Marxists without Marx such as Michael Heinrich and his sponsors the Monthly Review group. The discussion has ranged well beyond Heinrich and his shallow work and moved on to important differences between serious Marxist economists. These differences include the approach to fundamentals of scientific inquiry, which induced me to make the following proposal for a Hegel Boot Camp to bring all would-be Marxists up to speed on the Hegelian foundations of Marx's work:

Well, I’d like to send everybody here on a summer boot camp to work through Hegel’s Logic together.

Programme:
Prepare by reading the lot — Part One, Objective Logic, Book One: Being, Book Two: Essence; Part Two, Subjective Logic: The Concept.

Daily routine: participants take turns presenting papers in plenum, followed by group sessions. Morning and afternoon same story. Evening free form social hive buzzing over day’s harvest.

Expected course of events:
First week, “Being”: leads up to dissolution of Kant’s mind-forged manacles and Saturday night dance and barbecue round the bonfire of the Antinomies.
Second week, “Essence”: leads up to acknowledgment of contradiction as fundamental and inescapable ground of knowledge, thought and being. Dissolution of “induction” as a possible source of knowledge ;-)
Third week, “The Concept”: leads up to acknowledgment that Kant’s a priori insight was a damn sight more powerful than he ever imagined ;-) , and that Hegel didn’t exactly stand him on his feet regarding this but rather blew open the gates of concrete and steel that he misused the antinomies to construct in the path of scientific and philosophical inquiry.
Fourth week, Science and Philosophy: papers and discussion on Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, Empirio-Criticism, and free choice topics. Purpose: to digest general methodological consequences of weeks one to three.
Fifth and final week, Economics and Politics: “Capital” and Marx’s and Engels’s trajectory from the 1840s using the methodological foundations and consequences thrashed out previously.

After such a learning experience our present discussion would be much less of a mess. Fewer misunderstandings and grabbing the wrong end of sticks. Because everyone would have a much better grasp of criteria for scientific validity in general, and of Marx’s understanding of scientific procedure in particular.

For instance, we wouldn’t be sloshing around in the dark in an Arctic quagmire trying to wallop each other with cudgels labelled “induction” or “inevitability”. We’d have a much better idea of what Marx considered his categories of the theory of capitalism to be, as he presented their unfolding and development from the simplest “cell” of economics, the commodity, into the most advanced organism the capitalist mode of production could generate – the credit system.

There’s a technology of thought as well as machines, and except for a very few exceptions (Boolean logic, for instance) it’s been stagnating since 1848. The suppression of Hegel’s revolutionary advances on Kant, and Marx’s revolutionary advances on Hegel has been much more effective in crushing progress in thought than even the institutional and legal instruments of patents and copyright have been in crushing progress in material technology and culture.

As I’ve written earlier, there’s a difference between the collapse of capital as a mechanism of production and circulation (the immanent, ideal, “mathematical”, pure, deductive, theoretical, whatever aspect) and the collapse of capitalism as a social formation, a mode of production. Capital is a process involving dead elements of completed labour. Capitalism is a social formation composed of living human producers caught up in the capital process. Living labour trying to orient itself and navigate a violent ocean using alien instruments in a ship it has been forced to build to an alien design.

The better we understand the design of this ship Capital, and the currents swirling under it, and the strengths and weaknesses of its boiler and hull, and the way it is being sailed, the easier it is for us to mutiny, seize it and expel the capitalists from the bridge, sail it into calmer waters, and carry out a complete refit to our own design for our own ends.

This discussion is not just about Economics, it’s not even just about Political Economy. It’s about understanding political economy in the context of human society and history in general. And while digging into what Marx actually wrote is a sine qua non for being able to do this, and consequently a huge benefit emerging from this discussion of Heinrich and his distortions of what Marx actually wrote, we mustn’t stop there or we’ll just end up being so many clever dick Jack Horners admiring the plums our thumbs have pulled out of the pudding and pie. We have to understand why he wrote it, and how he was able to write it, and in what circumstances, both material and immaterial.

This is the challenge of social-historical practice, of thinking politics, and it is the challenge that would make our Hegel boot camp into a more exciting intellectual experience than most of us might imagine. Hegel is no agnostic, unlike Kant. He is after the Truth and won’t rest till he can grasp it, judging the correlation between ideas, reality and experience. And once you are in the hunt for the truth, you’re hooked: “das einzig konsequente Mittel gegen die Vernunft ist, sich mit ihr gar nicht einzulassen” (“the only consistent way to fight reason is not to engage with her at all”).

Andrew Kliman was good enough to comment on this:

I don’t think Morph’s comments sufficiently appreciate the differences between (a) philosophical knowledge of the kind that Hegel sought, (b) the kind of knowledge that Marx understood the LTFRP as providing, and (c) what people are engaged in when they make inductive inferences, which is not knowledge-acquisition. AFAICS, Hegel was saying that philosophy needed its own methods, not that other methods are incorrect in their own spheres.

and I responded:

Thanks for “engaging with reason” ;-)  We shouldn’t forget that our Reason is not just thundering in revolt, but is also Red in tooth and claw!
Hegel was concerned with the processes of thought and logic in relation to the truth. The energy with which he explored the foundations of every element involved in this is unexampled – his intensity is on a par with Marx’s and I’m not exaggerating. But it was a different field and more in thought than reality – although once he came to a conclusion he applied what he had learned in more applied fields of knowledge. So I think Andrew K needs to be more specific about “philosophical knowledge” before we can start comparing. But let’s say that Hegel sought the ultimate foundations of knowledge, continuing and developing Kant’s almost equally ferocious and dedicated drive in the same direction.
We can’t single out Marx’s view of the place of the LTFRP and compare it to this. We have to see it in its place in the totality of Marx’s public work, both intellectual and political to make a fair comparison. Marx tackled the whole of Western Philosophy head on as a student, as we know from his doctoral thesis among other things, and came to the conclusion that Hegel, using the whole of this tradition, had found the ultimate foundations of knowledge as far as they could be discovered using an idealist perspective. From then on Marx applied himself to continuing and developing Hegel’s revolutionary work on a materialist basis – the dialectical aspect of Marx’s work coming in from Hegel’s fundamental solutions of the problems of thought, which Marx had no reason to reject or modify, except as regards their roots in the spirit. We know this from his comments in the correspondence with Engels regarding the use he made of Hegel’s logic. (And as we also know, Marx never regarded anything as correct unless it arose from first principles, and he applied first principles everywhere and always, with a speed and sure-handedness that comes from long practice that makes it hard to spot sometimes).
So Andrew’s distinction between Marx/LTFRP and Hegel’s search for philosophical knowledge doesn’t really hold water. Marx was criticizing a whole mode of production, a whole civilization, and this is a very general agenda that has clear parallels with Hegel’s criticism of all hitherto practised philosophy, especially given Hegel’s extremely broad and inclusive view of philosophy as including thought and human practice – maybe I should have mentioned the Phenomenology or brought it in as part of the preparatory reading for my boot camp to make this clear.
As for inductive inferences not being knowledge acquisition this is nothing but verbal wand-play. I brought in induction in a slighting (not sleighting ;-) ) way because all induction is based on principles and axioms that can only be teased out deductively. This is the inescapable a priori of thought so to say, the revolutionary insight Hegel acknowledged in Kant, and an insight that freed up Marx to pursue such a ferociously (again) deductive method in his study of capital.
We could compare it to the gravitational power of a black hole – the deductive theoretical black hole of Capital centred on the commodity and the value theory sucking astronomical quantities of inductive empirical material into its orbit (eg the material on the 10-hours day, primitive capitalist accumulation and all the parliamentary Blue Books). Only I won’t, because we’d have to invert the whole metaphor and turn a black abysmal Inferno of a black hole into a Paradiso of clarity and light.

The state of affairs at the moment

On a mailing list, GA posted the following, linking to an article in a Swedish daily ("We are living in the biggest bluff in history"):

http://www.svd.se/naringsliv/nyheter/varlden/vi-lever-i-historiens-storsta-bluff_7636778.svd#xtor=AD-500
One highlight from the article (translated on the fly):
"The IMF calculated the other year that the group of Americans that turned 65 in 2012 can count on the state paying out 333 billion dollars more than they paid in taxes. This jackpot is 17 higher than what those 25 year old at the time will have to make do with.
Europe isn't any better. A report issued by the EU Commission shows that with the welfare systems intact, the average member country's state debt will amount to 477% of the gross national product in 2060."
FWIW. Sorry I don't have the time to translate the rest. I hope GT will make a halfway decent job of it.

BR

GA 

I commented:

In other words -  either capitalism survives, or we do...

And capitalism is no bluff. It's very real. Its alleged benefits are all a bluff, but that's another matter altogether. 

What it really does is condemn most of humanity to a daily life of misery and pain and anxiety and insecurity. And that's those of us with work and an income. Shit, it can't even keep translators feeling bubbly, let alone people working in a factory or a sweatshop or a mine. Or scratching at debt-ridden soil. 

Meaningful daily activities, food, shelter and health - forget it. Food and shelter if you're lucky, maybe. If you're displaced or unemployed, tough luck.

What capitalism does do is waste an awful lot of the wealth produced by those working for it (let's call them "workers" :-) on things that are directly intended to repress, enslave and kill these workers. Armies and weapons. Not only intended, either, but doing it all day every day throughout the world. It also wastes an awful lot of our wealth on things intended to deceive us and brutalize us - advertising, media garbage (films, radio, tv, press).

It directly engenders its mirror image in mass organized crime - the arms, drugs and sex industries. No capitalism in America, no drug wars horrors in Mexico or Colombia. The freer a country is from US/imperialist influence, the freer it is from the arms drugs and sex industries..Just compare Guatemala and Cuba.

Capitalism is now so over-ripe and rotten it's liquefying. It still stands because it and its treacherous (for the workers) henchmen Social-Democracy and Stalinism have deliberately and brutally smashed anti-capitalist working class political and economic alternative leaderships. Capitalist China in 1948, for  instance, was as flimsy (as Peng Shuzi wrote) as a wooden house full of dry rot - one good kick and it would fall. The Chinese Communist Party led by Mao was still capable (despite the counter-revolutionary orders/advice it received from Moscow) of delivering such a kick, and it did. Castro's army did the same in 1959 in Cuba. But since then mass mobilizations have kicked out regimes (Nicaragua and Iran in 1979, Spain and Portugal in the mid-80s, Egypt and Libya today) but they have been leaderless with regard to the economic system which is at the root of all the trouble. So fascist and comprador regimes have been replaced by still bourgeois, still capitalist regimes with little hope to offer the workers for a qualitatively better life, including political, cultural and economic power. The same process but in an even more perverted fashion took place in the Soviet bloc in 1990, when the rage of the masses flung out the oppressive Stalinist regimes - and simultaneously destroyed the non-capitalist foundations of the state. Bringing in equally or more oppressive regimes, along with new and horrific economic and cultural inequalities and destitution.

So that's the state of affairs at the moment. And the multiplying newspaper reports like this one just rub it in a little bit more painfully with every new day it's allowed to continue.

As Marx said, we don't make history in conditions of our own choosing, but we do make our own history - and it's time we started doing it again and with a sense of purpose. 

And that purpose should be: 

Out with capitalism 
In with socialism.

On the economic crisis which isn't really an economic crisis...

In response to Mike Roberts's blog about a Greek pensioner killing himself in despair outside the Greek parliament, and a couple of comments there, 

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/tsolakoglou/

I wrote the following:

Well, from this and your previous blogs it's obvious that humanity's crisis at the moment is less and less narrowly economic and more and more overtly political. The Political in Political Economy is coming to the fore. As I showed a couple of blogs ago with lots of quotes from ch 27 of Book III of Capital (on the role of credit in capitalism), by 1867 Marx already considered that capitalism had outgrown itself and was taking on more and more socialized forms of production and circulation, although remaining trapped and crippled within bourgeois relations of production. So the problems to be solved aren't economic as such - the preconditions for a non-capitalist society run by democratically associated producers (socialism) are there and have been there for one and a half centuries.

The problem, the deepest crisis of humanity, is political. As Trotsky formulated it in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938: "

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

You can't put it much clearer than that.

The leaderships of the working class on a mass scale are class traitors, from the Labour Party in Britain to the Socialist Parties in France, Spain and elsewhere, to various "revolutionary" left government parties in Latin America, to the Social Democrats of Sweden. Not to mention the counter-revolutionary regime running the non-capitalist Chinese state. The unions are as bad in their way, backing these governments, worldwide, and in the US even backing an openly bourgeois pro-plutocrat party.

In an economic perspective the most glaring symptom of this betrayal is the total capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the economic theory front. Nowhere among the working class leaderships is Marxist economics taken seriously - and hardly even among the more truly revolutionary (and small) parties.

So the working class is not just politically blind, in that it is force-fed bourgeois policies and whipped into the polling booths to vote for its own flaying, but it is economically blind as to the part it plays in creating society's wealth (flaunted by super-rich individuals and corporations) and running the whole system of production and distribution (against its own interests).

So basically if we are to resolve the deepest crisis of humanity we need to fuse the two aspects of social life, and bring more economics into politics and more politics into economics.

Someone once characterized Soviet citizens as "ferociously egalitarian", and what we need is to be "ferociously revolutionary" if we are to remove the capitalist system and create an egalitarian and democratically run society.

What causes a mode of production to change?

The discussion on China as a mode of production focused for a while on what lies behind the transition from one mode of production to another -- class struggle or the development of the means of production. That is, is it primarily an economic or a political question?

 http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/which-way-for-china-part-one/#comment-3839

'Waistline' wrote:

“Marx was quite clear about the antagonisms leading to the passing of one mode of production into another, including capitalism into socialism – they are *all* the product of class struggle. Relations between living people, not between dead things (ie not technology). To claim that new means of production bring about the final crisis of capitalism is a) to ignore the fact that human labour power is a means of production, and b) to fall into the trap of commodity fetishism attributing human qualities (living drives and aspirations) to dead things.”

In my opinion socialism is not a mode of production. It is precisely because socialism is not a mode of production that controversy existed over defining the economy of China and even that of the former Soviet Union. Socialism or rather industrial socialism in the past century was according to much of Marxism a transition society or the first stage of transition to a new mode of production. When Marx spoke of the bourgeois mode of commodity production (capitalism for short speak) he meant a specific form of property plus the industrial revolution. Means of production plus social relations of production, based on means and property form.

New means of production brings about the final crisis for every mode of production, not simply capitalism. By final crisis is meant “the condition of crisis – antagonism – that is transition to a new quality or the leap to a new quality. By antagonism I mean something different than “contradiction” or the unity and struggle of opposites.

Marx is clear. My view changed concerning the question of the law system immanent to capital and whether or not its crisis, understood as cyclical crisis, can usher in a new quality of means of production or a new mode of production. In his famous outline of transition from one mode of production to the next, Marx does not write about “class struggle” causing transition to a new mode of production. Let look at Marx again.

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

“Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

Further

“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

The last paragraph is the enigma. “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” In my opinion capitalism of the past century was not pregnant with socialism, precisely because socialism is a transition to something else. Further, there was still much room for development of the means of production based on the industrial revolution. In America we experienced destruction of the sharecropping system by the tractor, which changed the form of land tenure and the social organization of labor based on old implements of production. Determining how much “room is left in a social order” (does social order here mean mode of production) is tricky business Rosa L attempted to solve. I do not believe one can figure out how much “room is left in a social order” until new means of production actually appear and throw society into antagonism or a mode of destruction of the old society productive forces and social relations.

Without question history is about human beings, which we presuppose or there is no history. When Marx writes about the material power of productive forces he assumes the reader understands this material power is the product of the human, as they are productively active and form social groups and classes.

Class struggle most certainly plays a role. Specifically, there seems to be two distinct kinds of class struggle. The struggle between the two basic classes defining a mode of production, e.g. feudalism as serf and landowner/nobility, drives the feudal mode of production through all its quantitative boundaries. Then qualitatively new means of production enter the picture, the industrial revolution.

The struggle between the serf and nobility or all the classes defining the meaning of feudalism can never cause society to spontaneously leap to a new mode of production. To incite a leap to a new quality, something qualitative has to happen. A new quality has to be injected into the social process or something taken away that destabilizes the quality and set it into a qualitatively different kind of change cycle.

What happened in history was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution created new classes (bourgeoisie and proletariat as basic class constituting the foundation of what becomes a new mode of production). Stated another way, a new social organization of labor arose on the basis of the industrial revolution. The new classes are connected to and express the self-movement of qualitatively new means of production. Marx uses the steam engine as a bookmark, but I understand this bookmark to mean the entire technology regime implied in the steam engine and its continuous development.

In my reading of Marx, history and society moves in class antagonism and not simply class struggle. The antagonism is not reducible to the struggle between the primary classes, e.g. serf and nobility. The serf and nobility in this example are the decisive contradiction defining and driving the feudal system through its quantitative stages. Capitalist and proletariat evolved within the society of feudalism. However, the serf and capitalist are not “connected together” as the unity of the mode of production identified as feudalism. Serf and nobility is the unity of feudal production. The proletariat and nobility are not connected together as the unity of production or rather the unity of production relation defining feudalism. Serf and nobility as the landed property relations define feudalism in its property form. In its material power feudalism spans centuries from handicraft to manufacture and then the industrial revolution brings the world of feudalism to an end, or rather set the condition for the leap to a new mode of production. In this sense Marx writes the steam engines get you industrial capitalist.

I do agree that people are decisive in shaping the society formed on the basis of new means of production.

What happen in my opinion is that bourgeoisie and proletariat evolve in external collision – antagonism – with the serf and nobility as these old classes constitute the decisive contradiction defining the world of feudalism. The world of the serf and nobility is not industrial. Of course there is much more involved in transition from one mode of production to the next. For instance gold as an expanding form of wealth begins the breakup of the landed property relations or what is the same, society based on landed property as the primary form of wealth.

I think. 

Waistline

I replied:

Waistline, if technological progress is all that is needed for a new mode of production to arise, all we need to do is sit back on our arses and wait for the great day.

You are trying to get Marx to argue this. But he doesn’t. If Capital III isn’t good enough an illustration of this, then how about:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

[...]

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

“Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

“A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.”

[...]

“The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. [...]

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.”

[...]

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Surely this is clear enough? The forces of production grow – of course – but they grow because new relations of production, that is new class relations, replace old relations of production that strangled these forces. And the replacement of these all-important relations of production depends on the fighting out and resolution of class war – “open revolution” and “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie” laying the “foundation for the sway of the proletariat”.

Economic fatalism, “objectivism”, led many Marxists (like Ernest Mandel and his followers to imagine that the Soviet Union had means of production that were too highly developed to be stuffed back into the straitjacket of bourgeois property relations. The class struggle, with a misled and disorganized working class and a rampant imperialist bourgeoisie proved them wrong. But to stuff the non-capitalist baby back into the capitalist womb, the baby had to be chopped into bloody pieces.

Our concern right now is to figure out what is happening in China in this historical political economic perspective. Forcing the Chinese baby back into the devil mother’s womb will require grinding it up. Our discussion is about how much of this is capitalism, how much is a new mode of production in becoming, and who is doing what on which side of the class divide, and where, and how.

I might add that this discussion is of burning urgency for the masses of the Indian subcontinent, too. And India and China make up almost half of humanity. We aren’t just engaged in academic chit-chat.

China and capitalist restoration

In a discussion on FaceBook (11 March 2012) Gerry Downing answers MT and takes the opportunity to  justify the idea that capitalism has been restored in China.
Gerald Downing FaceBook

I don't know why you think I think that China is a deformed workers state but you are wrong. In my view the date of transition was 1992, although that is arguable (Workers Power put it at about the same time). Here is what I think:Let us list the features of the Chinese economy and state to see which it is;1. The “iron rice bowl” is basically gone. Mao’s welfare state has been abolished apart from in a few places. The Gini Coefficient shows a sharply rising graph of income and wealth inequality in China since the early 1980s as in India, not yet as high as Brazil, Mexico and South Africa but getting there. 2. There is a thriving capitalist sector with its own class differentiated bourgeoisie and working class. China now has more millionaires than the UK, Germany or Japan, although at 450,000 it is still a long way behind the U.S. even though that fell by 2.5 million to 6.7 million in 2008. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states expropriated their capitalists and prevented that class arising anew. 3. There is a Stock Exchange and capitalist banks, although, a la Bismarck, Stolypin and Keynes, they are state controlled (unlike in Britain under Blair and Brown) to ensure the better development of capitalism. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have no stock exchanges. This is not neo-liberal capitalism but it is capitalism nevertheless.4. The monopoly of foreign trade is gone but the state still retains strategic control over trade as good capitalist planners. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have a state monopoly of foreign trade.5. They are developing as an imperialist power; their investments in Africa, South America and Sri Lanka, for example, are for purely commercial and strategic/military purposes. This is totally unlike the practice of the USSR where support and investment was to strengthen their hand and give them more pawns in the chess game of achieving peaceful cooperation and compromise with the world Imperialism. The USSR was prepared to sponsor, ideologically and materially, armed opposition to imperialism to this end, China arms its clients but has no ideological opposition to imperialism, however distorted, to offer. However China still retains strong elements of a semi-colonial state in its far-flung backward regions, which are prey to US/CIA interventions to begin the breakup of a developing rival. It is still a long way from a fully fledged imperialist power and history never proceeds in a straight line without wars and revolutions so its uninterrupted development is far from certain.Comrades, when we see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, we call that bird a duck. James Robertson had pragmatically seen the significance of the long swim of the capitalists from Cuba to Miami by 1966 but the International Committee of Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert refused to look at what had happened there after 1959. In his play Galileo Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo invites the leading scholars of Florence to peer into his telescope for the ultimate proof that Aristotle was wrong; but the men refused to look, instead making evasive, dogmatic speeches about why the telescope could not possibly show any such thing. A little more pragmatism and common sense would now assist comrades, before we progress to the more complex world of the Marxist dialectic. China is capitalist, look; it waddles and paddles and quacks, it’s a duck!.

I responded: 

Sorry, Gerry, I think your duck might turn out to be a swan - even though it's exceedingly ugly as a duckling ;-)

Your version of the history of the capitalist mode of production in the era of transition to socialism is impressionist because it ignores all the important historical questions. 

Most importantly it ignores the question of how modes of production develop and transform - from slave-ownership to feudal to capitalist etc. Despite occasional hiccups they don't head back. It's not straightforward, but it's irreversible. If the new mode of production breaks down, you get chaos and catastrophe - in our day formulated as socialism or barbarism.

So if imperialism is the ultimate stage of capitalism (ie can develop no further scientifically speaking, but just decay or metamorphose into something new and non-capitalist) and is essentially capitalism pregnant with socialism, we must ask what the direction of history is and why capitalism can so easily return to a country where its foundations were destroyed. Against the tide. This tide - clearly seen by Marx in the 1860s, where he states (in Capital III) that capitalism is socialized through and through in every respect except ownership and the direct consequences of ownership), and fully accepted by Lenin - is important for understanding the history of the 20th century. Especially the Soviet Union and its character.

First of all, it's the only possible explanation for the survival of revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union for seven decades. Trotsky recognizes this in the Revolution Betrayed where he attacks impressionist notions that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state in 1936. The political distortions in the Stalinist USSR were at least as great as the economic distortions in China today, if not greater - Trotsky didn't hesitate to draw direct parallels between the Stalinist regime and the Nazi regime in Germany. He characterized it as counter-revolutionary. But the foundations of the USSR were different. The capitalist "integument" had "burst asunder", and social economic productive forces were no longer constrained by private appropriation. The results of the newly unleashed productive forces were skimmed off by the bureaucrats, of course, but this isn't the same.

Right, so despite a counter-revolutionary regime that banned all political opposition and critical Marxist thinking, crushed oppositional organizations and individuals, didn't understand Marxist economics, and spread lies and confusion about socialism, the new workers state, crippled, weak and impoverished, survived for seven decades and put the imperialist world to shame on many fronts.

When the bureaucratic regime finally sold out to imperialism we got to see real economic counter-revolution in the mode of production sense. First and only time. No lessons have been drawn from this in relation to China. Impressionism talks as if real economic counter-revolution has taken place there too. This is making a nonsense of the category of counter-revolution. Both poltical and economic. Counter-revolution on this scale is spectacular. 1991 in Russia, however well prepared it was politically, and however eagerly and non-militarily embraced it was by imperialism, was not a reformist transition, an undramatic gliding over to capitalist ownership and management.

The urban and rural workers - trampled and despised under Stalinism - were stripped of what little they had left. But this little was HUGE - it was the fundamentally different relationship between a worker and the forces of production in a non-capitalist state. Every speck of inequality and meanness and brutalization in the USSR had arisen AGAINST the nature of a workers state, even a backward and isolated one in a world dominated by imperialism. Superficial analyses (eg the State Capitalist view) missed this aspect of the USSR completely. 

In China, however well prepared the political and some of the economic conditions might be, we have seen nothing approaching the devastation and barbarity of post-restoration Russia. The political chaos. The human destruction. Reversing a mode of production from non-capitalist to capitalist is non-trivial. It means (historically speaking) ramming a big bouncing baby back into a womb that was already too small before it was born. In Russia the only way the restoration has survived is by reshaping the womb, so to speak. The social scale of the forces of production could only be handled by the state taking over the role of capitalist - leading to a real state capitalism run by loyal oligarchs and powerful politicians. Foreign imperialism is nowhere. 

No one has bothered to envisage what might actually happen in China following a real restoration. We have lazily watched capitalist techniques being introduced and just nodded sagely saying: "look - restoration - goodness me..." This has also led to idiotic reinterpretations of "pre-restoration" such as "Mao's welfare state".

In the Revolution Betrayed Trotsky castigated those who treated the bureaucracy as one featureless mass. He pointed out that the class struggle doesn't vanish because its surface expression is suppressed. But the same error is being made in relation to China. And this is the second big problem of the China is Capitalist view. The Chinese bureaucracy is larger and more powerful and far more stable than the Soviet bureaucracy ever was, but it is just as riven by economic, social and political differences - the material interests of the lower, middle and upper bureaucracies are not the same, and often they are in complete contradiction. Lower bureaucrats would stand to lose everything in a restoration. Middle bureaucrats (as always) feel more secure with the status quo. Upper bureaucrats (the equivalent of the Soviet nomenclatura) would probably prefer restoration. Now - and this is BIG - for Marxists a state is an apparatus mobilizing violent force to maintain and defend a particular mode of production. The army, militias, and the elements making them up. Not just leaders but rank and file. Not just general staff but higher and lower officer castes, and the foot soldiers. This organized violence is inextricably bound up with the political and economic management of the state. 

So where does the army stand in relation to restoration? Well, bugger me, how should I know, is the answer, to judge by the total lack of inquiry into the question. 

In short, it's reasonable to assume that there are very powerful forces in China working in both directions - for restoration and against it. Much stronger and more contradictory than they were even in the Soviet Union, as China is a larger and more powerful nation.

Further, just as the USSR prospered (in spite of everything) during the 30s while imperialism was on its knees, China has been prospering during the loooong drawn out death rattling of the great capitalist crisis following the post-war reconstruction (etc) boom. Since say 1980 (when Thatcher and Reagan initiated a desperate reactionary assault on the core imperialist working class) China has been doing very well thank you.

Now, if I were a Chinese bureaucrat of any rank (particularly perhaps a top bureaucrat) I would be asking myself this question: "if imperialism is making such an intolerable mess of things, getting bogged down in expensive unwinnable wars, rotting away socially, lurching from one deep crisis to the next even deeper crisis... and I'm doing just fine with things the way they are here, getting kickbacks from my industrial and financial cronies... and my cronies are doing just fine being looked after by me... Why the fuck would I ever be stupid enough to give everything up and join a losing side? Why should I go aboard their sinking ship?? They are now coming to me with a begging bowl. Asking for bail-outs and handouts, begging for mercy. Nope, I'll carry on as I am for a bit, I think. So, as far as full frontal restoration goes, thanks, but no thanks."

These questions I raise are all fundamental. They can't be answered with trade figures or organizational charts. Economy is Political economy, not company economics, and the big political questions just aren't being asked.

If we hold with Trotsky, then we should move beyond the Revolution Betrayed (1936) to the Transitional Programme (1938), a much more general document assimilating the lessons worked out in the Revolution Betrayed and all of Trotsky's and the class's previous Bolshevik-Leninist experience.

The most important single sentence in the TP is the very first: "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

We need to work out what this means ACTIVELY in relation to problems of capitalist restoration and the fate of Russia and China. It's not enough to passively sit around and bemoan "restoration" and counter-revolution without even considering this aspect of the matter. Because what is happening in Russia and China, obviously, is an expression of the class struggle today in a period of extreme imperialist putrefaction. If "restoration" can be brought about at the stroke of a pen, at the whim of some highly placed bureaucrats in Beijing, and does not depend on a social cataclysm involving a direct confrontation between the working class and the bourgeoisie, then we might as well go into "politics" and fight for a place by the trough in Brussels or Washington. There was no bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union when restoration occurred (which is one reason why it took so long to materialize), so the confrontation was far from straightforward and extremely mediated. There is no real bourgeoisie in China (no state power, no control of commanding heights or army etc etc) so there will be no straightforward confrontation there. 

What we have to do is to work out what social (ie class forces) will be involved in the decisive confrontation, how the bourgeois element will be mediated in China, and in what way we can bring an end to historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.

We can't do this by handing our enemies a walkover and letting them win by default. "Oh shit, capitalism just restored itself in China. Well, ain't that a shame. Still, it'll be our turn soon..."

I think if a political Galileo were to ask today's "scholars of Florence" to look into his telescope, the thing they would shrink from observing would be "capitalism pregnant with socialism", and a Chinese workers state whose social and economic fate is by no means decided yet.

This very ugly duckling might make quacking noises, but if we use Galileo's microscope (well, today's equivalent :-) we will see that the DNA is that of a swan.

Educational policy and gambling in Pompeii

An article in the Times Higher Education reported and commented on Mary Beard's remarks on Roman gambling being more honest than our government's current policy-making on education.


http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410349


I commented:


Mary B's right. Why? Well, the factors involved in evaluating the risks and benefits of a high general level of education and of research are just not accounted for in the models being used in relation to higher education to close departments and exclude working class youth, etc. Same goes for the models used for creating bad schools and criminalizing working-class kids and their parents (aka promoting excellence and freedom of choice). (Criminalizing because parents can be jailed if their children play truant, for instance.) 
It's an obvious case of market failure that those running the system will never admit. The best example of this kind of thing is the market failure of capitalism itself. The models used there assume that the system is basically in equilibrium and basically rational. This isn't the case. The system is out of control, as its recurrent crises since the 1850s (say) demonstrate clearly enough, together with the permanent state of war within the system between the states constituting the system. 
People like Mervyn King talk of the economy returning to a "normal state" - but boom and bust are just as much normality as the ups and downs between them. So the assumptions used in the models explicitly exclude crisis, for ideological reasons. 
Education and economic systems are excluded from rational scientific investigation, whereas most insurance statistical work isn't. You can't be actuarial about developments you refuse to understand. So toss those dice! And shoot yourself when you lose the society you've staked on the outcome.