Higher education as public relations

Mary Beard blogged about the Open University's absurd ads for spin doctors.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/08/university-publicity.html

I commented:


I think they're just seeing how far they can push us without getting their shins hacked. Or their spins reversed.
There's a more general aspect to this zeitgeist stuff. It ties in with the Romantic dissolution of genre boundaries (exploding in the novel form in the Enlightenment, and culminating in things like Brecht's "epic drama" and Joyce's "poetic novel" last century). For some decades now it's been eroding the boundaries between fiction and documentary (ficumentaries and reality shows etc).
The historical ground for it of course is the dissolution of class (ie rigidly, materially hierarchical) society. The philosophical ground is the transition from analytical to dialectical reason/logic (A equals A, you say? Hmmmm). Living, moving and becoming more than dead, static and either/or.
Which affects us in our everyday lives by making us conscious that we are not just living but being seen to live. And exist in a permanent state of metamorphosis through our interactions. We make ourselves (poesis) not just invent, but make, shape.
Except that society (still rigidly class-determined) is struggling to the death against this change. It might as well struggle against the tide of course, but as a result of its resistance all this is happening but no one is aware of it. ("They do not know it, but they do it", as Marx comments in Capital.)
And examples of it happening are all around us, particularly in the US, the most dialectically contradictory country on earth. Like the focus in schools on shaping yourself in relation to your classwork - oral presentation. You are your image. A company or institution is its perception. Careers and billions in profit depend on this.
And people being what we are, we examine it and make a science out of it, excising all the critical bits on the way.
It's international and damn near universal now, because the social transformation is so delayed. The zeitgeist juice impregnates the whole body of the world system deeper and deeper because of the immense material pressures involved.
So humans are the deliberate synthesis of their social conventions and their innate selves. However, the refusal to grasp what's going on means that the innate self bit - the "poor, bare, forked animal" - is obliterated. What's left is the social self that flatters the system. The "furred robes". But since the times are in a state of chassis the unconscious forces itself on us in the form of nightmare and dystopian imaginings. The emperor's new clothes are both furred robes and dissolved in air, flickering before our eyes like strobe lights.
Which means we get spin doctors and social masseurs and Big Media pushing the Big Lie with the straightest of faces and immense self-importance, while a few brave souls (Chomsky, Wikileaks) are busy trying to slow down the strobe and reveal the emptiness at the heart of the Emerald City, so to speak.
Mary is on the side of the angels here, asking who is managing the light show, and why. So our small, voluntary, blog community is standing up to the huge, professionally funded educational institution, and can point to the rising tide, or at least the rising pressure it is exerting.
The nice thing is that keeping the zeitgeist locked up demands a huge amount of effort and resources. And although it takes resources and effort to liberate it, they are infinitesimal in proportion. This will be evident in some decades when capitalism has disappeared down the plughole and sucked bourgeois society down the drain with it.
In the meantime, the truth is a mighty warrior, and a warm and sexy companion to boot. Blake wrote: "Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed." Which is basically what we're doing as we make and shape ourselves in our opposition to the absurdity and inhumanity of the prophet Gobbledegook and incomprehensible Profit.

Women against rape who don't want Assange extradited

Interesting article in the Guardian entitled “We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/23/women-against-rape-julian-assange

I commented:

Proportionality is the key to a rational understanding of this affair. And the disproportionate and unusual aspects of the prosecution of this case are made very clear by Naomi Wolf in this article: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-sweden-8-big-problems-with-the-case-against-assange-by-naomi-wolf/
A rational understanding of the affair is of course not the key to its resolution. That lies in a powerful political confrontation of the reactionary and inhuman forces hounding Assange by those fighting for justice and humanity. It is good to see that imperialist states (Sweden, Britain and the US) by no means have things all their own way in this conflict. Their material interests (extracting profit from us at all costs at the expense of our lives and dignity, and violently and deceitfully defending this robbery) confront ours head-on (the Marikana massacre is a recent blatant example of this - the Sharpeville of the Black Bourgeoisie). But although they have the upper hand as yet with their jealously guarded monopoly of violence and propaganda, they are constrained by self-interest to observe certain rights and freedoms allowing us to organize and agitate against them (it's called bourgeois democracy and it's necessary for capitalism to work optimally, and it enrages them as much as competition does, and is just as frequently disregarded by them if they can get away with it).
In this case the material interests ranged against the imperialists include those of exploited minor capitalist states (neo- and semi-colonies like Ecuador), and even the strategic interests of more powerful uppity competitor states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, for instance), so Assange is not solely dependent on public opinion or rags like the Guardian for his safety and defence.
The shocking thing here is really the imperialists' complete lack of concern for women subjected to rape and violence. There has been no massive, long-term campaign in any of the media attacking Assange (and going on about the sanctity of arrest warrants and legal procedure) to highlight and combat the scourge of oppressive everyday sexual practices. Date rape, marriage rape, repressive laws (Oil ally Saudi criminalizing women drivers, say, or the US witch-hunting of professionals providing abortion and sex advice), sneering and smearing attitudes demeaning and humiliating women at work, etc. If what Assange is accused of were taken seriously by the propagandists using it to attack freedom of speech and of information, then they would be permanently apoplectic at the behaviour of the thousands of men in our laddish, macho cultural world who refuse to wear condoms, force themselves on drunk or sleepy or unwilling partners, and never ever ask for explicit permission to get their leg over.

Assange, material interests and rational discourse

There's a good article by Seamus Milne in the Guardian today. “Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange?

I commented:

This article is simple and straightforward. Its foundation is the potential consequences for Assange of the material threat posed by his Wikileaks activity to the material interests of the US and its allies, including Britain and Sweden. These consequences are manifestly terrifying. The most evidence for this is the treatment being handed out to Bradley Manning and the whole procedure of extraordinary rendition. In the name of proportion it considers this aspect of the affair to outweigh the elements touted as central by the anti-Assange lobby - law, the legal system, and the rights of women. And the need for justice to be enforced to the letter. Proportionality reveals that this mountain of abstractions is wobbling atop a speck of fly shit in terms of substantial violation of law, legality and the rights of women - the shit is there, but if we compare every component of the accusations being made with similar or worse misdemeanours we know to be committed all day every day but which are never brought to court or given the same headline treatment, then we can see it is a speck of fly shit. No serious drive to discourage rape or other violence against women would use the methods or tone of the anti-Assange campaign or spray ideological filth all over the arena. 

In this affair substantial material interests are at stake, and it's worth noting that in such conflicts rational discourse is not the way things are done. People fight for their interests (or what they think are their interests) using any means they can. The British state spends thousands of pounds on an unprecedented show of police force around the Ecuadorian embassy, for instance. No rational discourse there. 

What we can do, in the interests of rationality, is to analyse the degree of reason in the arguments put forward by the conflicting sides. Where substantial state interests are concerned there is no such thing as an impartial judge, history is clear on that, so our analysis won't decide any conflict, but it will show us which side is closer to reality and the truth, and so which side is most likely to emerge victorious in the long run.

The US, Britain and Sweden will claim they are closest to truth and justice even while they are tumbling into the dustbin of history, and will heckle and bully the world to believe them.

But they look more and more like incompetent enemy agent Chico Marx in Duck Soup when he says: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Hidden curriculum and philosophical teaching

An article in the Guardian Teacher Network discusses the problem of bringing a philosophical approach to teaching, in contrast to "teaching to the test".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/2012/aug/14/philisophical-teaching-students

I commented:

Schools are an institution to socialize children and make them ready for the role allocated to them by society. This is a massive matter operating on a massive scale. The working class is huge, and schools are there to refresh it - not to make self-employed creatives or employers or administrators of all the kids. 

Traditionally, independent and critical thought is not required of workers or the poor, and as someone says here, it fails to recognize the barriers society wishes to keep in place, so it is liable to cause more problems than it's worth if it is instilled and encouraged in education.

So independent thought runs slap bang into the wall of Philip Jackson's Hidden Curriculum. The glass ceiling keeps women from rising in society, and the glass wall of the hidden curriculum keeps working class kids in their parents' factories, offices and dole queues.

The corollary of the hidden curriculum for teachers (education workers in general) who want to see it gone is the Double Curriculum. That is, we (I was in this game for twenty years, in a difficult school in a deprived are, goes without saying really) have to work both to the official curriculum and the liberating curriculum. 

Most, that is MOST, teachers won't even be aware of this, let alone contemplate undertaking such a project. And for a lot of teachers attempting it, the result will be burn-out - it's just as frustrating to bang your head against a glass wall as a brick one.

The solution is to organize publicly and politically against the hidden, reactionary curriculum - get it out in the open. Work for a programme of educational change incorporating all the effective learning methods mentioned here and in other discussions within a programme of changing society so that all people will have guaranteed meaningful employment with a guaranteed democratic say in managing their work and everything connected with it. In this way learning and work will become meaningful, not just spiteful hostile abstractions, and the activities of learning and working will be performed with pleasure and a satisfaction we rarely see today.

This is the only realistic way to better education for everyone. If the political and social perspective is set aside, we'll just see a repetition of the vagaries of education policy over the past century in Britain and other developed industrial countries (ie imperialist countries, like Sweden or the USA).

Utopian corners of good educational practice can and will exist meanwhile, of course, and provide a growing list of excellent examples to learn from... but cultivating a tiny model garden in an industrial wasteland will never satisfy a truly independent and critical mind. It's the wasteland that needs transforming.

A short reading list

On a discussion list DO wrote the following:

"The sapient brain continues to evolve, and teaching methods continue
to improve, but the underlying hypothesis of traditional liberalism
(John Locke & Voltaire), and of Marxism, that the human brain is a
blank slate or general-purpose computer waiting to be programmed or re-
programmed, is biologically preposterous."

And  I replied:

Locke and Voltaire might be liberals (traditional??) but they're not so much philosophers as popularizers. The blank slate thing is the hallmark of mechanical  materialists - empiricists like Hume and a lot of the enlightenment encyclopedians. It has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas. Stalin's social-darwinism is related to it, of course, but that has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas, either. D, I think you should take time off from reading folks like Lakoff and dig into the mother lode of modern ideas. For me this means the following short reading list.

Kant:                 Critique of Pure Reason

Hegel:                Phenomenology of the Spirit

                           Science of Logic

Marx:                The German Ideology - part 1, Feuerbach (including the Hegel section)

                           The Grundrisse 

Too skeletal? ;-)

Add before:   

Machiavelli:     The Prince

Hobbes:            Leviathan

Rousseau:        The Social Contract

Include:

Kant:                  Critiques of Practical Reason, and of Judgment

Marx/Engels:   The Communist Manifesto

Engels:               Anti-Dühring

Marx:                 Capital I-III and Theories of Surplus Value

Add afterwards:

Freud:             The Interpretation of Dreams

Lenin:              The State and Revolution

Trotsky:          The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed

Chomsky:       Cartesian Linguistics        

All of them (and the idea of  evolution which I haven't "crystallized" in a single book recommendation cos that shouldn't be necessary) are concerned with ripping away illusion, false appearances, and exposing the real elements and forces at work in our lives and our world. With the possible semi-empiricist exceptions of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant. Kant in fact going too far the other way and declaring impossible the unveiling of the hidden depths of the Thing-in-Itself. The least empirical hard-nosed empiricist you can imagine :-)

For a light-hearted frame to all this, I'd recommend Lucretius On the Nature of Things 

"Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
Suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti
Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque." 

rounded off by Sartre's Critique de la Raison Dialectique.

The alternative? Being consigned in perpetuity to Intellectual Hell - a dim, draughty, library with hard, splintery, rickety chairs, flickering lamps, traffic noise, machines throbbing and whining at unpredictable frequencies and volumes, musty air, moaning twitching whimpering snivelling readers radiating chill not warmth, with inaccessible and scrapy loudspeakers pouring out Stephen Hawkings reading the collected works of Jacques Lacan. For ever.

Cheers

Chops

On Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuador

There's a trite little article in the Guardian purporting to give a Swedish view of the Assange case.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-few-friends-left-sweden
I commented:

Karin Olsson ignores the most important factors in this case.

The first and most obvious - the elephant in the room, the big picture - is the proportionality. 

Assange is NOT under official suspicion of any crime in Sweden. He is NOT charged with any crime, let alone absconding from a trial or a sentence. The offences in relation to which he is wanted for questioning BEAR NO RELATION to the issues relating to his fear of a miscarriage of justice leading to his rendition to the USA, neither in substance nor proportionality. Potential exemplary punishment of bad sexual behaviour during an otherwise consensual encounter would be better exacted in a case WITHOUT THE POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC ASPECTS of this one. 

In this case the severity and seriousness of the political and strategic tensions involved are beyond dispute, which can't be said for the severity and seriousness of the alleged sexual crimes involved. 

Sweden has a concrete record of handing people over to the USA in collaboration with the CIA in breach of international law - the case of the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians in 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden) is the most flagrant.

The USA has demonstrated very clearly the kind of treatment Assange can expect if it gets hold of him by its treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning is alleged to have supplied Wikileaks with a great number of secret US documents. Assange is the head of Wikileaks and therefore responsible for annulling the secrecy not just of these documents but all the documents published on Wikileaks, most (but not all) of which are diplomatically and politically embarrassing to the USA. So Assange can reasonably expect even harsher treatment. 

And since threats should taken into account where a reasonable assessment of fear is concerned, the threats of execution and assassination made by senior public officials in the US are highly relevant.

There's a good article in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot about the situation now:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-asylum-ecuador

Barcelona 2 - 2 Chelsea

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/apr/24/barcelona-chelsea-champions-league

Just when you think you've soon it all, your jaw is made to drop again.
Barcelona were a tsunami - but Chelsea were defences that held despite cracks and leaks.
The myth was consummated by Torres's goal coming like the rainbow after the flood...
It was like watching Muhammad Ali getting beaten over fifteen rounds by an opponent with one eye left and a broken finger.


...

IMF curing the disease but killing the patient

Mike Roberts's blog  "A generation of austerity" on 18 Apr 2012 reports on the soul-searching of the IMF in relation to the possibly counter-productive effects of the massive austerity programmes it has been recommending for Europe and the US. My response was as follows:

Not to worry. As soon as enough capital has been destroyed one way or another, and as long as no political economic alternative (ie a non-capitalist workers state) is created by the leadership of the world's working classes, then the whole shebang will start moving again, accumulation will gather steam and the current nightmare will be forgotten. And so on, ad infinitum, until that alternative is created or we all get engulfed in a tidal wave of toxic flame.

None of the official explanations blaming it all on money supply, state profligacy, labour greed, protectionism, the Yellow Peril work now, have ever worked or will ever work.

I think our duty as Marxists is not to accompany the puffed-up pompous bourgeois lemmings over the cliff as their embedded Boswells. If we are to be annalists of the death agony of capitalism we should at least try to emulate Tacitus.

I'd rather we did a Preobrazhensky and applied our theory (which works) to understanding where the present economic situation finds us as a class, and how best we can use it to put our working class society in place instead of the bourgeois society which is now falling to pieces before our eyes, and has been doing so more and more visibly ever  since Marx wrote that capitalism was a thoroughly socialized hybrid economic formation trapped within the confines of bourgeois relations of production in the mid-1860s. (Capital, Book III, Ch 27)

Communism - good on paper but doesn't work

Here's a short Facebook exchange about "communism" not working. Naz had been discussing things at home with her dad.


Naz: 
Hello chops I was having a talk with my dad about communism and he was telling me that it looks good on paper, but it doesn't work. If you nationalize land there's less production, he said south africa was more successful under apartheid because they had more production. He also included that Poland had a lot more progress in 3 years of Capitalism than in 40 years of communism! Explain!! 

Thanks 

Me: 

Hi! Depends how you measure being "successful", doesn't it.

Ask him that first. Success is what? And for who? Would he be among those enjoying the "success"? Why?

Poland. "Progress" is like success - depends what you mean, how you measure it and for who.

And Russia is more appropriate to look at when it comes to what happened under the Stalinist version of "communism". Poland and the other eastern European countries did make progress under the Soviet regime, but they were also badly hit by being treated as occupied semi-colonies and forced to be run for foreign interests by agents of the foreigners.

Despite this Polish women have suffered very badly since 1990, and education and culture have been under the thumb of a very primitive Catholicism since then, too. And the jury's still out on the effects on the peasantry (the mass of small independent farmers) of the return of capitalism. So far the governments haven't dared to attack them in the interests of agribusiness the way they do in most other EU countries.

As for Russia, I don't think anyone living there thought life between 1990 and 2000 marked an improvement over Soviet days, except in relation to certain limited areas of civic rights (there was greater formal freedom of speech, but you could get shot if you exercised it) and the availability of some foreign goods. In the USSR people had money but little to buy. In post-Soviet Russia people had no money (their Soviet savings were DELIBERATELY wiped out by Yeltsin and his pro-western friends) but lots of things they could (NOT) buy with it.

Also the majority of Russians resented being governed by a drunken clown and his robber baron oligarch cronies - and the MOB, which was a genuine product of reborn capitalism. People died younger, were sicker, committed suicide more, drank more, were worse housed, got worse education and health care, had to put up with the horrors of racism, terrorism and war, and watched US-style crime grow unchecked.

Progress and success for some...

Now that was between 1990 and 2000. After Putin became president in 2000 most ordinary Russians felt an improvement came. A lot of the most important resources were brought back in to national ownership (oil, gas). A lot of the least "patriotic" oligarchs were driven abroad, jailed or bankrupted. The mob was tamed. Russia started winning international sports competitions again (like ice-hockey). Russians were very proud of Soviet achievements, and felt humiliated by Yeltsin turning them into a mockery and selling their arses to anyone with a fistful of dollars.

I'm inclined to think that Yeltsin himself was sick of being the laughing stock of the world. From super-power to mange backstreet mutt in ten years flat....k

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons was to get his revenge on all the people who had been laughing at him to his face.

You should ask your dad what he thinks about Putin's Russia. By all the criteria of success he seems to use Russia is doing pretty well. But it's doing so by laughing in the face of the US and going back to greater state control. It's looking after its own interests, thank you very much. And of course it's tightened a lot of the civic freedoms that were relaxed after 1990.

Does that make the new Russia "communist" again?

It certainly looks like "our" (ie the West's) enemy again.

But of course the real question behind all this is what is "communism"?

Ask your dad what he thinks capitalism is, and when it started.

Ask him if he thinks capitalism in the US after independence was such a great success.

If he does, ask him if he really thinks the slavery of its first 90 years were such a great thing...

The thing is, new social systems grow, and even though they can be fundamentally stronger than previous ones (capitalism was fundamentally stronger than feudalism) their early years can be very ugly indeed.

Especially if they are surrounded by very hostile and powerful representatives of the old system doing their damndest to exterminate them, which was the case in the USSR.

And one last thing, if capitalism is so good and free and successful and progressive, how come it didn't just cheerlead the whole world to celebrate a capitalist white christmas after world war 2?

The poor people of China threw it out and laughed. Same thing in Cuba and Vietnam.

And all those millions of East Europeans just let themselves be corralled into slavery???

Stalin wanted to hand Yugoslavia to the West on a plate (like John the Baptist's head), but the Yugoslav's didn't want to be a head on someone else's plate and made their own revolution.

He did manage to hand Greece to the West, but not until the Greek people had fought and lost a revolution of their own.

Ask him to look at the world today. And ask him how attractive the rest of the world finds the US. Ask him how often he sees poor people in some war-torn part of the world running on the streets waving We Love America placards. Ask him why US soldiers don't dare walk around in jeans smoking Marlboros chatting and smiling to the locals.

Ask him what kind of success and progress a bunch of armoured SWAT goons smashing through a poor family's wall represents to the ordinary people of the world. US life on TV soaps is one thing. Murderous thugs in your back yard, pissing on your relatives' dead bodies and burning your sacred books, is another.

US forces don't even walk around smiling in places like Iceland any more.

Maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby looked like success and progress once. And John Wayne. But they're dead and no one wants them back. Their success has turned out to be a huge historic failure. US history is on fast rewind. Right now we're back in the Great Depression.

Have a great day, Naz! I

I'm taking the dog out for a walk now...

 ---

Why are Finnish schools so successful?

A blog article in the Guardian described the success of the Finnish school system:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/apr/09/finish-school-system

I commented:

The "free everything" element is not true of higher education. Tuition is free, and that's your lot. Living costs are high, accommodation is hard to find, and materials are not cheap.
The utopian tone of the article is a pity, cos it weakens a very strong case. Finland is riven by class differences and the usual social, economic and political tensions of well-off capitalist countries. Life is hard for wage-earners, and tough for the poor and for immigrants. And the egalitarianism (within class boundaries NB) is soured by Lutheran killjoy look-after-number-one-ism and who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are-ism. (Personally I'd rather live in Finland than Britain but that's cos I like saunas and the smell of wood...)
What the schools show is that decent education to a high general standard is possible and can feel natural without a socialist revolution - ie it's a bourgeois democratic aspiration that isn't utopian. All it needs is the political will. 
The proof of this is in the historical record. In Britain during the first flush of the postwar Welfare State local authorities sent hordes of wage-earners' kids to university for free - not just tuition, but the works, maintenance and all. And Britain (if we believe the capitalist mantra of "getting better all the time") in those days was a far poorer and shabbier place than it is today - far less able to "afford" this kind of thing. Which shows that "affording" is not the issue. 
Same thing in Sweden during the "golden years" of their Home of the People (folkhem) welfare state - say '65 to '90. The Swedish comprehensive system, like Finland's but far less formalistic, worked wonders for the kids and national skills, culture, etc. High PISA results for instance. Dazzling performance in research, sports, culture (ABBA :-). In 1991 (I think it was) the Economist even had a panegyric about it. Great high general level of education produces the skills and attitudes needed by business and industry. Trouble is, the article was published just after the then minister of education, Social Democrat Göran Persson, soon to be prime minister, had begun the ruthless dismantling of the system the Economist loved so much. 
Swedes, compromising hypocritical bastards that they are in government, are nothing if not ruthless and single-minded when they want to be (ask any Europeans on the receiving end of the armies of Gustavus Adolfus or Charles XII :-D. They began by emulating Britain, and have now ruined the educational system so thoroughly that Britain is beginning to emulate them (how about "free schools" allowed to operate for profit??).
Again, it's not a question of "affording" anything. Sweden today is pig-richer than ever. It's the political will. If you think (as a bourgeois government) that you can get away with screwing the working class out of past concessions, you'll go ahead. Money is the whole object. And fear the decisive factor. 
So, Sweden and Britain used to be up there with Finland as admirable examples of educational achievement. Now they're slithering in the sewers with the rest and no better than they should be.
For various reasons (including a powerful teachers lobby with real political influence) Finland is still admirable, while Sweden and Britain are despicable.
The main thing I suppose is that there are no miracles or utopias involved. Finland is nothing like Utopia. Nor were Britain or Sweden a few decades ago.

It can be done, it has been done, and it can also be undone. ABOVE ALL, IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF BEING ABLE TO AFFORD IT.


---

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.

Feeling hopeless

On Facebook a progressive professional colleague of mine posted a cartoon with the caption: "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."
This was echoed by almost everyone in the thread. I reacted sharply:

Marx was once asked in one of those parlour games "What is your idea of happiness?" His answer was simple: "Fighting". (zu kämpfen). Any rugby player knows what he means. This depression is pure black magic - the propaganda machine makes us think it's all hopeless (QED so to say) so we feel passive and powerless. But if you look at the explosions of discontent that erupt all around, with people fighting heroically against what seem to be insuperable odds, then humanity isn't passive, and often enough not powerless either, cos the dictators and repressive scum get thrown out on their ear regardless.
The dissenterati (aka "fake left") also do their bit to oil the machine (eg "CounterPunch" and pundits like Tariq Ali. They dispute the strategy of the rulers, but speak as if it's only them as individuals who can see what's up. That is, the masses are inanimate clay, sullenly and stupidly refusing to be quickened by the genius of the dissenterati. (Arundhati R is one of these but with much closer ties to struggle, and a correspondingly less fatalistic and depressing message.)
Shutting your ears to the deafening din of the cheerleaders and the skulkers sticking pins in them is salutary. But we don't have to shut ourselves up into our own little individualist boxes.
What sanity I have comes from a) knowing that humanity is where it's at, and humanity is not the ruling bourgeoisie or its lickspittle goons or the court jesters dissenting to general merriment and being flung chewed-on pieces of gristle from the table. It's billions of us with very elementary human needs that are deliberately being spat on. And b) knowing that all real (ie organized, mass-oriented) struggle taps into the strength of humanity, and its most powerful creative force, the working class -- presently covered over by the congealed sewage of our "labour leaders" and "progressive politicians", but smouldering and rumbling beneath the surface ready to erupt and flow free.
I'm not the pathetic old fraud I see in the mirror each morning, but a vital representative of human liberation. Whereas the rulers see vital representatives of civilization and justice in the mirror each morning, while they are in reality nothing but puffed up leprous reptiles.
We underestimate the huge amounts of money and energy they need to expend to keep us covered in shit - the truth is hard to hide! But we underestimate our own power and the simplicity of the measures required to do away with these vampires for good.
Let's put it this way - fighting is simple - but not easy.
So brighten up and pull your heads out of your arses - it's dark and shitty in there (like Plato's cave ;-). Breathe clean air and enjoy the sun!

China and the law of value

In his latest blog post Mike Roberts looks at the contradictory character of the Chinese economy, and concludes that whatever it is it's not predominantly capitalist. Among other things he discusses the role of the law of value in China.

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/which-way-for-china-part-two

I made the following comment:

Thanks, Mike. You've opened a door here that has been very firmly shut for far too long. A door on a China where capitalism has not been restored, and where a restoration would make no economic sense. As you say about the World Bank report: "The report is also totally blind.  It wants China to abandon its current economic model and publicly-controlled financial system, which brought it successfully through the world financial crisis, and instead adopt the very model that led the US and Europe into disaster." Not to mention the Soviet Union - Russia is still recovering from its restoration, and two decades have passed.

So I'll stick my foot in the door and ask you for some clarification. You write: "So the Chinese economy is affected by the law of value.  That’s not really surprising.  You can’t ‘build socialism in one country’ (and if a country is under an autocracy, by definition).  Globalisation and the law of value in world markets feed through to the Chinese economy.  But the impact is ‘distorted’, ‘curbed’ and blocked by bureaucratic ‘interference’ from the state and the party structure to the point that it cannot yet dominate and direct the trajectory of the Chinese economy." You also write: "But the vast majority of employment and investment is undertaken by publicly-owned companies or by institutions that are under the direction and control of the Communist party. The biggest part of China’s world-beating industry is not foreign-owned multinationals, but Chinese state owned enterprises."

Is public ownership of the vast majority of companies and institutions and control of these by a single party enough to make a country non-capitalist?

If not, what else is required?

Is the only thing blocking the operations of the law of value in China interference by the state and party? If so, can a mode of production be changed and preserved by political decree?

As I understand it, the law of value operates most powerfully when the whole of an economy (pre-eminently the world economy, but to some extent a national economy) is commoditized. Land, means of production, labour power. Surplus value is generated by every (productive, market-oriented) interaction between labour and the means of production, and this surplus value is transformed into various kinds of capitalist surplus (rent, profit, interest) over the whole economy and equalized out into chunks proportional to capital invested. So where do the boundaries go between commoditized and non-commoditized production in China?

And what happens with surplus that isn't transformed into profit? Assuming normal conditions of production won't this mean that wealth equal to the average rate of profit (on the whole) remains within the system of production to be reinvested, or distributed as revenue not on the basis of ownership of a certain amount of capital but on quite other grounds? How do you view this "invisible" surplus? Disappearing completely into corrupt political and management pockets? Being ploughed back into production to a degree unmatched in capitalist economies?

Or, and this could be even more important, serving to pump up a credit system backed by real wealth in a way that is totally incomprehensible to mainstream economics (let's make that "to all economics except orthodox Marxism"). For decades now bourgeois economists have been gaping in disbelief at the "bad debts" incurred by non-capitalist economies like the Soviet Union and China, and predicting their imminent implosion. It hasn't happened.

One last thought in relation to all this... If underdeveloped and constantly embattled non-capitalist economies like the Soviet Union and China can easily outperform their underdeveloped and embattled peers (Indonesia, Brazil, India, for instance) over decades (not to mention the example of Cuba in relation to its peers in Central America and the Caribbean), and beyond this challenge the developed and "embattling" imperialist countries (the US, Europe, Japan) enough to keep them on their toes, mind their behaviour and strive to compete... well, if this is the case, what kind of impact would a non-capitalist state have if it arose in a relatively advanced and strategically robust country? Like Britain or Sweden?

---

'Waistline' persisted in his technological fetishism, but also made a point about the law of value that I commented on:

Waistline, please give us the relevant quotes from the GP. 

You write: "As I understand things Marx directly states that the law of value will still operate under socialism, but not communism. This is stated in Critique of the Gotha Program." But "operating under" and "dominating" are not the same thing. And Marx never thought they were.

Under slave-ownership the law of value operated wherever commodity production and exchange were present. Notable in manufacture for the market, commerce, and money-lending. But it didn't determine the whole economic process. It was even more strongly present under feudalism, most especially in the capitalist enclaves of the city states (ex-Roman municipalities) like Florence, Venice or Augsburg. (Henri Pirenne is good on this.)

Under capitalism the law of value determines the whole process (and we can sharpen this to say that if you deny the viability of value as the fundamental theoretical concept underlying the economic analysis of capitalism, you're floating free in space untethered from reality, and might as well be a marginalist instead of a shame-faced pseudo-Marxist).

As the development of the forces of production make the class struggle more and more a desperate rear-guard action by the bourgeoisie, as they fight like cornered rats to keep the proletariat from power and the forces of production from developing unfettered by the constraints of bourgeois production relations, then the law of value becomes sidelined to an extent varying with the degree of oligopoly, the impermeability of political economic barriers between countries, and most particularly with the presence of countries based on a non-capitalist (proto-socialist) mode of production. 

Mike is one of the few professional economists in a position to help us determine the progress of this tug-of-war between production and circulation on the basis of the law of value, and production and circulation beyond it, on the basis of cooperative planning in the perspective of a whole economy run and operated by freely associated producers. To determine the proportion of the world economy driven by the one or the other system of organizing the social production of humanity.

Understanding the character and trajectory of China today is as important for the emancipation of the working class worldwide and thus humanity as understanding the Soviet Union was after 1917. 

Which is why this discussion we are having right here and now is so crucial.

---

Waistline later provided a useful quote from the Gotha Programme:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.Hence, equal right here is still in principle — bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case. In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

I replied: 

Waistline, thanks for the quote from the Gotha Programme.

What I'd like to point out here is that the remarks here are against utopian anarchist dreams of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" the day after the setting up of a proto-socialist society. There are two axioms underlying everything Marx wrote. One is "Nothing comes of nothing" (no profit out of thin air for insubstantial things like "abstinence" or "responsibility") and the other is "Like exchanges for like" (in capitalist society based on the law of value, in aggregate, all commodities produced are exchanged against commodities of equal value).

Which means, in relation to the quote from the Gotha Programme, that the "deductions for the common funds" are equal to the surplus value of the whole of social production measured using the bourgeois yardstick of socially necessary labour time. This surplus value is gigantic, equivalent to the total profit appropriated by capitalists (and their governments) and "reinvested" (often in luxury buildings, the pyramids of our day), consumed as revenue (and how), or destroyed in war. So although associated workers "only" receive the equivalent for their labour power seen as a commodity, in part their labour power brings them much more wealth under the associated mode of production, and in part they receive vast wealth from the common funds in the form of education, health care, culture, public amenities etc etc.

In the initial stages of the non-capitalist mode of production, this pattern of production and distribution will be hugely distorted (birthmarked, gory, deformed) by the relative lack of development of the forces of production and by the immense superiority in terms of wealth and power of the remaining imperialist countries dominating the world economy. We saw this in the Soviet Union, and we are seeing it in China.

But since the capitalist mode of production is fighting an historically losing war against the socialist mode of production, our proto-socialist system is far stronger than decaying imperialism, DESPITE ALL APPEARANCES TO THE CONTRARY. These appearances are peddled by all bourgeois ideologists (including economists) as the truth. Our task as revolutionary Marxists is to expose this surface lie and prick it like a bloated wobbly bubble of sewer gas. The stench will be awful, but the view will be clear.

Waistline then added:

Choppa Morph, if you are not a police agent then stop your insults and personal attack. I suggest not using the weapon of personal insult on this blog. Since you started this cop, you really do not want to engage men in a contest of personal insults . . . .Cop Morph. 

And I responded:

Thanks for calling me a cop ;-) Next time back up your problems with my style with quotes and not just impressions. 

And when the hell did you ever see a cop argue about Marx's economic theory at this level in these terms??? And if you do find one, recruit the bastard!

---

Raved commented:

Getting back to China. Marxists who deny that the law of value prevails in China are proposing a hybrid economy where the LOV is subordinated to the plan. This is possible briefly in a healthy workers state. Not so in a bureaucratically degenerate workers’ state. There can be no efficient allocation of labour time when the plan is managed by a bureaucracy. Stagnation follows. Hence the bureaucracy’s interest is to convert itself in a capitalist class by opening up to the LOV operating on the global market. Once the state officially allows the LOV to enable global prices to apply to China capitalism is restored. Since that state is already centrally organised and can manage to combine cheap labour with advanced technology the rate of exploitation and accumulation is extraordinarily high. Only on that basis can we explain China’s remarkable growth rate and expansion into the global economy. China is not only capitalist, it is super-capitalist, and hence imperialist.

I then responded to him and Waistline:

Waistline - It's not a question of you and me "simply having different points of view", it's a question of you and Marx having different theoretical understandings of the relationship between means of production and modes of production.

Raved (and I'm sorry I got swept past your first comment, so to say) - In China (as was the case in the Soviet Union) we have proto-socialism - a situation in which the mode of production is fundamentally non-capitalist, but in which (to use Preobrazhensky's term) primitive socialist accumulation is taking place in the teeth of political and economic aggression from an imperialism that still dominates the world economy. The process is further distorted by political and economic aggression WITHIN the new state where the interests of imperialism are promoted by its counter-revolutionary agents in the bureaucratic regime - as Trotsky spells out in The Revolution Betrayed. However, as long as the bureaucracy (and its twin the military) as a whole is predominantly dependent for its power and privileges on the non-capitalist state, it will defend this state. It is tearing itself to pieces this way and will either be dissolved by a resurgent revolutionary socialist workers movement or capitulate to imperialism and consummate the political counter-revolution with full restoration, that is a socio-poltical counter-revolution, as happened in the USSR/Russia. Trotsky makes this alternative very clear in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.

You write that this view holds that China is "a hybrid economy". That is correct as long as we remain clear that this involves a single dominant socio-economic system incorporating elements of another system within it. That is, not so much a mongrel, as a root system and stem with an alien organism grafted onto it. You also write that in this view "the LOV is subordinated to the plan". This, however, is nonsense if you equate a non-capitalist society with a smoothly functioning plan. If a non-capitalist society is equal to your idea of "the plan" as the "efficient allocation of labour time", then imperialist corporations are non-capitalist because they allocate labour time with extreme efficiency (within certain bounds), and we have never ever seen a non-capitalist society of any description because we have never seen such efficient allocation of labour time in any existing society.

This is perverting both Marx and the evidence of our own eyes.

First our own eyes - we see China allocating labour time more efficiently than comparable capitalist countries (eg India) and even than imperialist countries, while avoiding (as Mike R and Hydeparkspeakes note) the catastrophic crises of overproduction these other societies have suffered. Not very efficiently compared to a perfectly efficient allocation, but MORE efficiently. As a whole.

And secondly Marx, because as I showed by the quotes from Capital III ch 27, he already saw the non-capitalist character of the operations of joint-stock companies before 1867. That is, a hybrid economy dominated by one mode of production (capitalism) but with a new and superior mode of economy grafted on to it (or growing within it), that is the economy of associated producers. So he had no problem whatever envisaging this kind of setup. If imperialism is a duck with a swan grafted on to it (or a dragon pregnant with a unicorn ;-), then non-capitalist societies, proto-socialist systems, are swans with ducks grafted on to them (or unicorns still fighting their way free from the stinking placenta and rotting remnants of the dragon they have emerged from).

This is the economic side of things. The political is very important too. Despite all appearances and a judgement that a political counter-revolution had been carried out in the USSR, Trotsky in the Revolution Betrayed insisted that it is still a workers state, ie non-capitalist. While others were claiming it was fascist or state capitalist. (Or if they were Stalinist stooges, fully-fledged socialism.) We have since seen a genuine socio-economic counter-revolution in Russia, and the convulsions involved. There is no principled difference between Trotsky's insistence that the Soviet Union was still a workers state and our insistence today that China is still a workers state. Neither you nor anyone else has yet demonstrated that a socio-economic revolution has taken place in China. Capitalist techniques including certain legal entitlements to profit, sure, but nothing turning the country inside out as happened and is still happening in Russia.

Until you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that this has happened then either you hold that China was never a non-socialist society, or you are wrong about its recent history.

So convince me.

---

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.