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,
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.
