Trying to Save Capitalism from Itself:

The New Face of State Intervention in the Midst of Financial Crisis and Recession

By Andrew Kliman

The United States is in the throes of two distinct but interrelated economic crises, a recession and a financial crisis.  The latter crisis is potentially the more important one.  While recessions typically create the basis for, and give rise to, the next upturn in the economy, the financial crisis could bring the economy crashing down.  It calls into question the stability and indeed the very survival of capitalism. MORE.

Crisis in News and Letters

Statement from the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of News and Letters Committees, March 2008 MORE

Unpopular Capitalism?

  Richard Abernethy writes: In a programme recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4, "Britain's Business Problems", Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, puzzled over the question why public opinion tends to be unsympathetic to capitalist private enterprise.
   The programme explored a number of possible reasons for this strange, negative attitude so many of us have. It suggested that business people don't project a positive image of themselves. Sir Alan Sugar snapping "You're fired!" is not very appealing. It argued that there is no-one to promote the image of business as a whole, as individual companies only promote themselves. There is some truth in this: advertising for the banks often plays on the stereotype of bankers as crass and self-serving, only claiming that their particular bank is different. The unpopularity of "fat cat" executives receiving astronomical salaries was also noted.
   Margaret Thatcher's government set out to build "popular capitalism" by selling privatisation shares at discount prices. ("If you see Sid, tell him!") Interestingly, the programme argued that this made little difference to public attitudes in the long run.
  The broadcast did not even touch upon the basic objections to capitalist business that so many people feel, at least to some degree: the exploitation of those who actually work to produce goods or provide services (no workers were interviewed); saturation by advertising; damage to the environment; complicity with repressive regimes.
   Many people dislike capitalism, and I find this encouraging. The great problem is that few can see a positive alternative as a real, practical possibility rather than a distant aspiration.  Creating that alternative is a work in progress but at least we have an outline: freely associated individuals working together directly to satisfy human needs. #

Reification in the 21st Century

Lukacs' Dialectic – the First Hundred Years

David Black

Iranian Regime Arrests Socialist Students

According to the latest report - December 23, 2007 - from the Committee for the Freedom of the University Students, support group for dissident students at Amir Kabir University of Technology (formerly Tehran Polytechnic), it has been more than 3 weeks since the beginning of these arrests desribed below and during this period neither the family members nor the students’ lawyers have been permitted to meet them. In a few cases the inspectors have threatened the families so that they may not ask for a lawyer. Since new arrests are going on every day, nobody knows about the future of the imprisoned students.

From an Iranian Correspondent. December 7 2007 During the past few days, over 20  independent socialist students from universities at Tehran, Tabriz, Ahvaz and Shiraz have been arrested by the security forces of the Islamic Republic.  A statement of support from the Unity Center of the Free University of Tabriz emphasizes that Iran's young independent socialist activists have been especially targeted because of the links they have forged with labor and womens rights movements. MORE

Capitalism and the 'automatic subject'

Adventures of the commodity: for a new criticism of value (Die Abenteuer der Ware. Für eine neue Wertkritik. Munich 2005) by Anselm Jappe, Munich 2005. Reviewed by Karel Ludenhoff.

Anselm Jappe has two goals in writing a book about value theory. One, he wants to contribute to explaining the worldwide movements of protest and resistance against capitalist society..... Two, he criticizes those currents of Marxism that have their point of departure in the conception of labor as "the turning point of every society, which in modern society has come to the fore, while it had been concealed in the past. MORE

Talk to the Anarchists - Richard Abernethy

Labour, the Workplace and Alienation - a talk given at the Anarchist Bookfair at St Mary's College London on 27 October by Richard Abernethy of the London Corresponding Committee.

In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. This was a true word spoken in jest, it contained a lot of truth at the time, and also today. A recent study in Scotland showed that the rate of heart attacks increases by twenty percent on Mondays, the day that most people return to work after the weekend. MORE

Hobgoblin Archives extended!

The following articles from the first five issues 1999-2004 have been added to the online archive.

(SEE LEFT SIDEBAR FOR ARCHIVES ACCESS BY DATE)

Richard Abernethy on Janet Afary's The Iranian Constitutional Revolution. (1999) David Black on James Young's 'The World of CLR James - the Unfragmented Vision' (2000)
Amanda Sebestyen on Kosova as the Achilles Heel of the Left. (2000) The Debt and the Law of Value By Andrew Kliman.(2001)
From the Archives: Marxism and the 'Party' by Raya Dunayevskaya. (2001) David Black on 'Rethinking Fanon: the Continuing Dialogue'. Edited by Nigel C Gibson (2001). Dunayevskaya and Dialectical Materialism - Cyril Smith. (2002) Capital and Social Democracy - In Defence of Toni Negri: and Open Letter to Chris Harman by 'Goblin'. (2003)
Philosophy and Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya Reviewed by Harry McShane (2003)

Articles from 2007

UNISON Conference: The Impasse of Partnership - John Campbell - READ

Booklaunch - Reclaiming Marx's Capital - A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency by ANDREW KLIMAN - READ

DARFUR: ”This is not a clash of civilizations” - Ba Karang - READ

Amnesty International on Stoning in Kurdistan - George Shaw - READ

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? Adam Curtis's three-part BBC documentary. Reviewed by David Black - READ

Guinea: The Fall of Another Dictator? Ba Karang - READ

The Realm of Freedom and the World of Work: Marx, Hegel, Aristotle - David Black - READ

The Battle for Oaxaca: Repression and Revolutionary Resistance - Eugene Gogol - READ

In Defence of the Luddites - Letter in Newsweek - READ

Book Review: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn - READ

Disclaimer: Signed articles do not necessarily reflect the view of the editorial board. All rights reserved. Fair usage applies.

Trying to Save Capitalism from Itself:

The New Face of State Intervention in the Midst of Financial Crisis and Recession

By Andrew Kliman - author of Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital'

The United States is in the throes of two distinct but interrelated economic crises, a recession and a financial crisis.  The latter crisis is potentially the more important one.  While recessions typically create the basis for, and give rise to, the next upturn in the economy, the financial crisis could bring the economy crashing down.  It calls into question the stability and indeed the very survival of capitalism. 

It is frequently said in the financial world that it is driven by two motives, “greed and fear.”  During the last several months, fear has become the increasingly dominant motive.  To a degree rarely seen before, potential investors and lenders are fearful that the monies they throw into the market, in order to get a return, will in fact not return to them.  With their faith in the future shaken profoundly, the normal functioning of financial markets has been disrupted, and this threatens to turn a cyclical recession into something much more severe.  If the U.S. and foreign governments are not able quickly to restore faith in the system––that is, lenders’ faith that they will receive the payments that have been promised them, and investors’ faith that they will get the profit they expect––the chain of promises that keeps capitalism going, day-to-day, may unravel and cause a collapse of the financial system. 

GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION

The Fed, the Treasury Department, and the rest of the government are acutely aware of and afraid of this unraveling.  This is what lies behind their recent series of unprecedented and extraordinary interventions into the financial economy.  They are trying to save the financial sector from itself. 

Since much of the U.S. housing crisis has been exported overseas by means of financial globalization––it is estimated that foreigners hold about 60% of the mortgage-related debt that has gone bad or will go bad––central bankers abroad are also intervening.  In mid-April, for instance, the Bank of England announced a $100 billion program that will allow banks to obtain desperately needed cash by borrowing government bonds and then reselling them, using mortgage-related securities of questionable value as collateral. 

The overriding purpose of this government intervention is well understood by economists.  Writing in the New York Times (April 6, 2008), Yale financial economist Robert Shiller applauded the Fed’s interventions as “a significant step toward reducing the fundamental instability of our system.”  And Paul Krugman of Princeton opined that “government . . . officials––rightly––aren’t willing to run the risk that losses on bad loans will cripple the financial system and take the real economy down with it” (New York Times, March 17, 2008).

NEW FORM OF STATE-CAPITALISM

And so we are witnessing a new form of state-capitalism.  It isn’t the state-capitalism of the ex-USSR, characterized by central “planning” and state ownership, but state-capitalism in the sense in which Raya Dunayevskaya used the term to refer to a new global stage of capitalism, characterized by permanent state intervention, that arose in the 1930s with the New Deal and similar policy regimes.  The purpose of the New Deal, just like the purpose of the latest government interventions, was to save capitalism from itself.  

Yet those who would have us accept the permanence of the capitalist system as an article of faith are making it seem that this latest form of state-capitalism is about something other than trying to save the system.  Pundits are portraying the recent state interventions as an ideological shift back to regulation after decades of deregulation.  And faux-populist politicians, such as Clinton and Obama, are suddenly posing as the champions of foreclosed homeowners and presenting the distribution of wealth as the key issue:  whom will the government rescue, these homeowners or rich investors? 

But the Fed’s arm-twisting attempt, on March 16, to sell off Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase for the fire-sale price of $2 per share, a tiny fraction of what its assets would be worth on the open market (and a fifth of the ultimate sale price), shows that its aim was not to enrich the owners of Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s fifth largest firm.  If it had been able to borrow at the Fed’s “discount window,” Bear Stearns could have survived the crisis it faced because it temporarily lacked cash.  But the Fed waited until the following day to announce that it would now, for the first time, open the discount window to Wall Street firms.  Or, if Bear Stearns had filed for bankruptcy, it could have continued to operate, and doing so would have protected the value of its owners’ stock at perhaps $30, rather than $2, per share.  But the deal prevented it from filing for bankruptcy. 

Talk of a “bailout” of Bear Stearns is thus, at best, highly misleading.  The motive behind the Fed’s coercive intervention was not to make the rich richer, nor even to enrich the owners of JPMorgan Chase.  (The Fed chose that firm to buy up Bear Stearns because it was the only financial firm big enough to buy it.)  Instead, the Fed acted in order to send a clear signal to the financial world that the U.S. government will do whatever it can to prevent the failure of any institution that is “too big to fail.”  And that is because a failure of one of them could set off a domino effect, triggering a panicky withdrawal of funds large enough to bring the financial system crashing down. 

FED'S ROLE EXPANDS

For almost a century, the Fed has acted as “lender of last resort” to commercial banks (which hold customers’ deposits and make business loans).  And for decades the government has operated under the doctrine that the big commercial banks are so crucial to the system that they are too big to fail.  What is novel about the Bear Stearns takeover is the extension of this doctrine to major Wall Street firms, which reflects the fact that the recent crisis poses a threat to the financial system in its entirety, and the fact that investment banks and brokerages like Bear Stearns have become increasingly central to this system.

This extension of the “too big to fail” doctrine makes it inevitable that the government will, accordingly, start to regulate Wall Street institutions in much the same manner as it regulates the commercial banks.  Businesses that are gambling with their own money will generally make sure not to take excessive risks.  When businesses gamble with customers’ money, the customers will generally make sure that the risks taken are not excessive.  But with the government now propping up investment banks, these banks are ultimately gambling with the government’s (that is, the public’s) money, so the government naturally wants to protect itself against excessive risk-taking and to make sure that its guarantees do not become a green light for the banks to invest and lend in even riskier ways.  The government’s impending regulation of Wall Street is thus not an ideological matter, but a necessary concomitant of its decision that the investment houses are too big to fail.  The crisis is acute, the options are few, and so the government’s response and new policies will have to be much the same, no matter who is elected president in November, or what the makeup of the new Congress will be. 

'NATIONALIZATION OF MORTGAGES'

Although the Fed’s role in the takeover of Bear Stearns is what has garnered the main headlines and elicited the lion’s share of commentary, what might prove to be far more important, because of its potential size and scope, is a subtle government action taken three days later with respect to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  These firms take over the risk to mortgage lenders by buying up the mortgages they have made, pooling them, and reselling them as mortgage-backed securities.  Although Fannie and Freddie were created by the government and remain “government sponsored,” they are privately owned, and the government does not guarantee the value of the securities they issue or insure purchasers against losses. 

But on March 19, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the regulatory authority in charge of these mortgage pools, suddenly announced that they may reduce by one-third the funds they hold as a cushion against losses, and that it “will consider further reductions in the future.”  This is the opposite of what one would normally expect.  Because of the huge increase in mortgage loans that have gone bad, Freddie Mac in particular faces large and unexpected losses.  So what it needs is a bigger, not smaller, cushion against these losses. 

The regulatory authority’s move was presented as an effort to allow Freddie and Fannie to help stimulate the depressed housing market by buying or guaranteeing an extra $2 trillion worth of mortgages.  But what is far more important is the signal that the regulatory authority was sending.  By telling these mortgage pools to be less prudent, not more prudent, at a time when more prudence is called for, it was sending a signal that the government is there to bail them out (take over their losses) if and when they go broke.  Although this signal was subtle, it was understood by “those in the know.”  For instance, writing on prudentbear.com, Doug Noland referred to the action as the “Nationalization of U.S. mortgages.”

Unless the government goes back on this implicit guarantee, the lion’s share of mortgage losses will now be paid by U.S. taxpayers, in the form of interest payments on the extra funds the Treasury will need to borrow in order to cover these losses.  This does not mean, however, that the working class will ultimately foot the bill.  Under capitalism, wages and salaries are ultimately governed by economic laws that higher taxes do not suspend.  Thus, the extra government borrowing isn’t likely to have much effect on the after-tax income of working people.  If taxes increase, their pre-tax incomes are likely to increase as well, so that the bill will ultimately be paid by employers.  But this will cut into employers’ profits and thus retard investment, economic growth, and job creation for some time to come––perhaps even decades, if the mortgage losses turn out to be large and the government borrows for the long-term.  In this way, and in this sense, then, working people will indeed ultimately bear the burden of the mortgage losses. 

Of course, millions of them have already been hurt more directly, by losing their homes or by losing their equity in their homes as home prices have plummeted.  Millions more are likely to be hurt in the future, since the volume of unsold homes on the market, estimated to be an oversupply of more than 10 months, indicates that the housing market has not bottomed out yet.  The loss of home equity is especially significant because working people’s ability to borrow depends heavily on it, and because ownership of a part or all of their homes is the main way in which they hold what little savings they have. 

A VULNERABLE SYSTEM

This financial mess is fundamentally the result of the weakness of the U.S. economy throughout this decade.  First the stock market bubble burst, and then the economy went into recession in March of 2001.  The 9/11 attacks later that year further weakened the economy and touched off fears of financial collapse.  This impelled the Fed to lower short-term interest rates dramatically.  Although the recession was later “officially” declared to have ended in November of 2001, employment kept falling through July of 2003.   So the Fed kept lowering short-term lending rates.  For three full years starting in October of 2002, the real federal funds rate was actually negative.  This means that the Fed allowed banks to make additional loans by borrowing funds and then paying back less than they had borrowed, once inflation is taken into account. 

By trying to keep the system afloat through this cheap-money, easy-credit strategy, the Fed created a new bubble.  With stock prices having collapsed recently, this time the flood of money went into the housing market.  Home mortgage debt, which had increased by an average of 9.2% per year in the 1990s, increased by an annual average of 16.6% in the 2000–2005 period.  Loan funds were so ready-to-hand that working-class people whose applications for mortgage loans normally would have been rejected were now able to obtain them.  And lenders looked the other way when potential homeowners lied about their assets and incomes.  All of this caused home prices to skyrocket; according to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, they more than doubled during the 2000–2005 period. 

Yet this increase in home prices was far in excess of the flow of value from new production that alone could guarantee repayment of the mortgages in the long run.  That is precisely why the real-estate bubble was a bubble.  A rise in asset prices or expansion of credit is never excessive in itself; it is excessive only in relation to the underlying flow of value.  The new value created in production is ultimately the sole source of all income––including homeowners’ wages, salaries, and other income––and therefore it is the sole basis upon which the repayment of mortgages ultimately rests.

What seems surprising in retrospect is that the run-up of home prices was not recognized at the time to be a bubble.  But that’s the case with every bubble (remember the “new economy” in which Cisco Systems, now worth less than 30% of ExxonMobil, was the world’s largest corporation?).  And in this case, it was “natural” to assume that home prices would keep going up, because they had never fallen on a national level, at least not since the Great Depression.  Had home prices continued to rise, homeowners who had trouble making mortgage payments would have been able to get the necessary funds by borrowing against the increase in the value of their homes, and the crisis would have been averted.  It would very likely also have been averted if home prices had leveled off, and even if they had fallen by a few percent. 

But according to the Case-Shiller Index, by January home prices had fallen by 12.5% from the peak reached a year and a half before.  Knowledgeable analysts are forecasting an ultimate decline in home prices of 20% to 30%.  In some places, such as Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, Phoenix, and San Diego, they have already fallen by 20% or more. 

CHAIN OF LOSSES

Along with the collapse of the housing bubble came an unexpected decline in the values of a whole gamut of “mortgage-backed securities,” paper investments whose prices are ultimately based on the expected flow of mortgage payments, and which were regarded as safe investments when the worst-case scenario that was envisioned was for home prices to dip slightly.  Recent estimates by Wall Street and academic economists suggest that losses on mortgages and mortgage-backed securities are likely to total about $400 billion when all is said and done.  This loss, in turn, is expected to trigger about a $2000 billion ($2 trillion) decline in lending, and this will make the recession longer and more severe. 

But the crisis in the housing sector is not the sole cause of the financial crisis that is requiring new state intervention of a scale and scope not seen since the Great Depression.  Another factor is that the flow of cash from mortgage payments has been packaged and repackaged numerous times as various kinds of derivatives.  This has made it nearly impossible to identify which mortgage loans are underlying these securities.  But their value depends on whether the underlying loans are still likely to be repaid or not, so potential buyers of these securities don’t actually know what the sellers are offering them.  Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recently compared this to 10 bottles of water, one of which contains poison.  If you buy one, it’s very likely that you’re buying safe water, but who would take the chance? 

So, although the vast majority of the outstanding mortgage loans are likely to be repaid, potential investors became unwilling to take a chance.  Thus the market for mortgage-backed securities became “frozen,” [1] which impeded the ability of firms throughout a wide swath of the system to get the short-term cash they need to meet their obligations.  The government has been forced to intervene in order to get the cash circulating again.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is falling into a recession.  During the last four months, 300,000 private-sector jobs have been lost.  The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which increased by 4.9% in the third quarter of 2007, rose only by a miniscule 0.6% in the fourth quarter.  The figure for the just-completed first quarter of 2008 is widely expected to be even worse, with nearly half of the forecasters predicting an outright decline in the GDP.  Industrial production and retail sales have been sluggish.  Home sales and housing construction continue to decline without a clear end in sight.  And, once inflation is taken into account, consumer spending has failed to increase since November.

Moreover, a wide variety of “leading” (forward-looking) economic indicators, such as orders for durable goods, permits to build homes, applications for unemployment insurance benefits, and surveys of consumer confidence, suggest that the economy will continue to decline further.  The index of leading economic indicators, which combines them and averages them, has declined in five of the past six months, at a substantial 3.3% annual rate.  And this index, made up of monthly indicators, excludes the most important leading indicator of all, the quarterly corporate profits figure.  Corporate profits fell in the third quarter of 2007, and again in the fourth quarter, by a total of 4.5%. 

Thus far, the current downturn is not as sharp as that which occurred at the start of the 2001 recession.  For example, employment has fallen by only two-thirds as much.  But any new manifestation of crisis in the financial sector is sure to lengthen and deepen the recession.  And the longer and deeper the recession, the greater the chances of additional financial crises.  A great deal depends on how much and how long home prices keep falling.  Martin Feldstein, a member of the group that “officially” declares when recessions begin and end, and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan, stated last month that “[t]he situation is very bad, the situation is getting worse, and the risks are that it could get very bad.”  He also said that there is “no doubt” that both 2008 and 2009 “are going to be very difficult years.”[http:// nymag.com/news/features/45323/]

LOSS OF FAITH

The Fed and other government authorities seem to have quelled the worst fears of the financial world, for now, and for the most part to have freed up the movement of cash needed for it to function day-to-day.  But it remains to be seen whether the government’s aggressive interventions, its implicit promises to cover whatever losses need to be covered, and its extension of the “too big to fail” doctrine to Wall Street, have fundamentally restored investors’ and lenders’ faith in the system.  If additional financial firms fail, it will not be easy to find others with sufficient wealth to take them over in the way that JPMorgan Chase took over Bear Stearns.  And if the recession proves to be especially long and deep, the government may not be able easily to borrow the funds it needs in order to stabilize the economy by covering its losses.  Eventually, prospective lenders will question whether the U.S. economy is strong enough for the government to meet its obligations.  Or will it have to resort to paying back lenders by putting new money into circulation in excess of the new value that is created in production––in other words, to paying them back with Monopoly money?  The U.S. government cannot restore faith in the capitalist system once there is no longer faith in the U.S. government. 

The current economic crisis is bringing misery to tens of millions of working people.  But the crisis and the government’s recent interventions are also bringing us a new opportunity to get rid of a system that is continually rocked by such crises.  The financial crisis has caused such panic that the fundamental instability of capitalism is being acknowledged openly on the front pages and the op-ed columns of leading newspapers.  And the government’s recent state-capitalist interventions are perhaps best described as the latest phase of what Marx called “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself” (Capital, Vol. 3, Chap. 27; p. 569 of Penguin ed.).  There is nothing private about the system any more except the titles to property.  As the Bear Stearns takeover shows, the government isn’t even intervening on behalf of private interests; it is intervening on behalf of the system itself.  Such total alienation of an economic system from human interests is a clear sign that it needs to perish and make way for a higher social order.

AN ALTERNATIVE NEEDED

But revolutionaries cannot sit back and let the flow of events do our work for us.  It is one thing to disclose the instability of capitalism, but another to show that an alternative to it is possible.  Writing in the Financial Times on March 24, Michael Skapinker argued that the recent financial crisis and government interventions have put an end to the Reagan-Thatcher era, but “leftwing and far-left websites . . . clearly have not got a clue” about what might replace it.  Encountering answers such as a “world . . . in which the needs of the many come before the greed of the few,” he responded: “Like what, exactly?”  So platitudes and evasions do no good, nor does bluster about “denounc[ing] with merciless contempt those theorists who demand in advance guaranteed and insured perspectives and particulars about . . . the socialist society.” [2]  All of this will be exposed for what it is. 

Moreover, it actually harms the struggle for a new society, since it shows that one has “not got a clue” about the supposed alternative one is espousing.  It is time to recognize that “Like what, exactly?” is an honest and profound question that demands a straight and worked-out answer.  And it is time for revolutionary thinkers and activists to start working out that answer.  In the perceived absence of an alternative to capitalism, practical struggles have proven to be self-limiting.  They stop short of even tryingto remake society totally.  When questions about the future are bound up so intimately with the day-to-day movement, or lack thereof, a new human society surely cannot emerge through spontaneous action alone. 

NOTES

[1] However, unless the Dow Jones Index, the price of Treasury bills, etc. have fallen to zero without my knowledge, it is simply not the case that “any confidence that financial securities of any kind have any value behind them” has been lost (Ron Brokmeyer and Htun Lin, News & Letters, January-February 2008, emphases added).  Such a gross exaggeration can only reflect an attitude in which “the truth-values of … statements are of no central interest” (Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 2005).

[2] C. L. R. James, Facing Reality, 1958.

Statement from the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of News and Letters Committees - March, 2008

Dear Friends,

We are writing to alert all readers and friends of a serious crisis afflicting News and Letters Committees (N&LC)—a crisis that places its very existence in jeopardy.

In response to philosophic disputes within N&LC over the past several years, an organized group within N&LC has usurped control of the organization and is acting in complete disregard of the democratically approved perspectives and principles that have defined it since it founding in 1955 as a decentralized, non-hierarchical group based on the unity of worker and intellectual, theory and practice, and philosophy and organization. Those wanting to continue our democratic and humanist heritage have formed the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC. It constitutes almost half of the membership of N&LC, and we appeal to you to support us in our effort to reverse the crisis that threatens America’s only Marxist-Humanist organization.

During the past five years, theoretical discussions within N&LC have made significant progress in exploring one of the most important questions facing today’s radical movements—“what happens after” the revolution. Our effort to develop a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism flows from the work of Raya Dunayevskaya. As she wrote in 1987 in the course of her work on a planned book on “Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy”: “The burning question of the day remains: What happens the day after? How can we continue Marx’s unchaining of the dialectic organizationally, with the principles he outlined in his [1875] Critique of the Gotha Program? The question of ‘What happens after?’ gains crucial importance because of what it signals in self-development and self-flowering—‘revolution in permanence.’” In recent years we produced important theoretical work in focusing on this issue in the pages of News & Letters, in participating in numerous conferences, in editing and writing several books devoted to Marxist-Humanism, and in engaging in active dialogue with participants in the movements against global capital and in the anti-war, women’s liberation, gay and lesbian, labor, prisoner support, and Black liberation movements. This collective work represents an important step forward, since it marks the first time that a Marxist group has made a serious effort to reconnect with Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program by thinking out “what happens after” in a way that avoids the false alternatives of state plan vs. market. As a result, N&LC is becoming increasingly known in the U.S. and around the world as an organization that takes seriously the perspective of envisioning “what happens after” the revolution before it occurs.

Despite this important work, in recent years a small number within N&LC has opposed the perspective of working out a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism on the basis of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program and other writings. Although these critics have never articulated a coherent position or alternative to the organization’s effort to address alternatives to capitalism, they have undoubtedly been affected by the objective movement of the U.S. Left towards giving up on the possibility of revolution. Those in N&LC who oppose our perspectives have been united by one thing—an increasing lack of interest in revolutionary theory in general and Marxism in particular.

The problem is not the mere existence of theoretic disagreements. N&LC is a democratic organization that has always encouraged the freest discussion and debate, and we have never sought to impose a single interpretation or approach upon anyone. However, since our founding in 1955 it has been a principle in N&LC that its members are obliged to project and let the world know about the democratically approved perspectives adopted by the organization.

This principle is now being violated. During the past six months, the opponents of the organization’s perspectives have joined forces with some members who no longer believe that N&LC should be based on a specific set of ideas that have as their aim catching the historic continuity with Marx’s Marxism as well as working it out for our age. Voting for the organization’s annual Perspectives Thesis has for them become a mere routine that does not involve their actually working to develop Marx’s Marxism and Marxist-Humanism for the 21st century, and now they are actively interfering with the work of those of us who do take such development as our task.

Those who have moved away from the need to develop a viable Marxism for the 21st century have acted to prevent N&LC from functioning in such a way that its philosophic perspectives can be promoted, concretized, and developed. This is seen in a couple of local committees going off on their own without making even a minimal effort to project the democratically approved positions of the organization. It is seen in those who have launched personal attacks on those responsible for promoting the organization’s philosophic and political direction. And it is seen in a disdain on the part of some for creative theoretic work itself—as if repeating conclusions and phrases from Dunayevskaya substitutes for thinking out what Marx’s Marxism means for today.

The various critics of the philosophic direction of N&LC have not formed a tendency to promote their views. Nor have they—despite repeated requests to do so—ever proposed alternative perspectives for the organization to deliberate upon, and then approve or reject. Instead, in the past several months they have intrigued secretively to take control of N&LC in complete disregard for the democratic and consultative procedures by which it has always functioned.

Although N&LC has always been based on the principle that major decisions affecting Marxist-Humanism are to be discussed with the body entrusted with the day-to-day development of N&LC, the Resident Editorial Board, no member of the REB was informed until October, 2007 that a co-trustee of the Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Fund (RDMF) had resigned his position four months earlier and that a new co-trustee had been secretly appointed by Olga Domanski without any consultation. Although N&LC and the RDMF are legally separate entities, the members of the REB and both elected national co-organizers (Olga Domanski and Peter Hudis) had always been consulted about developments concerning the RDMF since it was established in 1987. The co-trustees of the RDMF are now claiming that they have the power to make decisions regarding the publication and distribution of Dunayevskaya’s work without any input from or consultation with the members of N&LC.

This new practice of making unilateral decisions without even informing the membership has carried through to an assortment of actions regarding N&LC. Whereas the two national co-organizers of N&LC have always had mutual input into all issues regarding N&LC, in recent months one of the national co-organizers, Olga Domanski, has made a series of decisions without consulting or informing other members of the REB or the other elected national co-organizer, Peter Hudis. In February the finances of N&LC were hijacked when a few people flown in from another city stacked an REB meeting to vote down a motion that “both national co-organizers have full knowledge and control of all aspects of N&LC’s finances.” Incredibly, the claim is now being made that the organization’s finances are the property of one person, Olga Domanski!

This has created a situation in which some people now control N&LC while others have no control but are expected to work. Such a situation, which is completely unprecedented in the history of N&LC, is contrary to the philosophic principles of Marxist-Humanism.

In order to defend and implement the current Perspectives of the organization, democratically approved by an overwhelming majority six months ago, a large number of the members of N&LC have constituted themselves as The Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC. The Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC includes one of the two national co-organizers (Peter Hudis), half of the members of the Resident Editorial Board, almost half of the members of the National Editorial Board, majorities in the two largest and most active locals, Chicago and New York, and almost all of the youth in N&LC. The members of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency have done by far the most work over the past 20 years since Dunayevskaya’s death in 1987 to develop the political positions, theory and philosophy of Marxist-Humanism itself; edit and produce collections of Dunayevskaya’s writings, such as The Power of Negativity; write articles and books for outside publications; make foreign trips and carry on international correspondence; write the organization’s Perspectives Theses; and organize the work of the two largest locals in the organization. It is no accident that the vast majority of those responsible for developing Marxist-Humanism over the past 20 years have joined the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC, as have almost all of our newest members.

The intransigence of the opponents of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency, who have refused to listen or take into consideration our views in violation of socialist democratic norms, suggests that they are intent on pushing the members of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency out of N&LC.

In late February they sent a letter to the membership that hints at our expulsion. And they have refused to rule out expulsion as an option they might implement at a Convention that will take place at the end of May, an unprecedented “special Convention” that they called hastily and without any organizational discussion having taken place beforehand.

The group within N&LC that has usurped control of the organization has created an intolerable situation for the organization as a whole. It is despicable that only one, instead of the two, national co-organizers should have knowledge and control of N&LC’s finances, as well as to assert ownership and control over all of Dunayevskaya’s writings through the RDMF. To protest this situation, brought to a head when an REB meeting was stacked on February 3 to deny the organization control of its own finances, the members of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency decided not to write for or help edit the February-March issue of News & Letters. Those who boycotted this issue of News & Letters include the Managing Editor of News & Letters, Jim Mills, the “Our Life and Times” co-columnists, Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth, the national co-organizer, Peter Hudis, and many others. We ask all readers of News & Letters to make your voices heard by protesting the actions of the clique that is threatening to destroy N&LC and to support the work of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC.

We are convinced that the important philosophic work that has been accomplished by N&LC in recent years—most of it by those who are now affiliated with the Marxist-Humanist Tendency—provides a firm basis from which the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism can and will be continued. We cannot achieve this, however, without your support.

We are all being tested by this crisis, and it has been tremendously uplifting to see so many of our members and friends, especially those who have contributed in such a major way to our political-philosophic-organizational development in recent years, rise to the occasion by opposing the recent efforts to pull apart the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanist from organization. We cannot allow N&LC to be destroyed for the sake of some private enclaves. We must not allow a clique to undermine two decades of vital theoretic, political, and philosophic work. We must begin anew, and we are determined to do so—not just for the short term but for the long haul. We call on your solidarity and support, by sending messages of support to the Marxist-Humanist Tendency and expressing your shock and dismay at these recent developments to N&LC (arise@newsandletters.org )

 

Marxist-Humanist Tendency of News and Letters Committees

arise@marxisthumanismtoday.org

Signatories:

Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism and  co-editor of The Power of Negativity and The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

Dan Beltaigne, longtime anti-war and labor activist

Dave Black, author, Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist  and Philosopher in Mid-19th Century England and member of London Corresponding Committee

Dino, Worker

Peter Hudis, national co-organizer of News and Letters Committees and co-editor of The Power of Negativity and The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

Anne Jaclard, News & Letters writer on feminism and international solidarity and member of National Editorial Board of News & Letters

Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’ and co-editor of the journal Critique of Political Economy

Ian MacDonald, London Corresponding Committee

Ray McKay, longtime activist in the Black liberation movement and member of National Editorial Board of News & Letters

Alex Maktoob, youth activist and co-founder of the Anti-Capitalist Theory Project at Purdue University

Jim Mills, Managing Editor of News & Letters

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Department of Philosophy, Lewis University; member of the founding board of the Caribbean Philosophical Association; member of the advisory board of the Radical Philosophy Review’ and author of numerous publications and a forthcoming book

Tony Rayan, student activist

Ali Reza, activist and organizer to defend the progressive movement in Iran

Seth Rosen, youth activist

Carlos Saracino, anti-sweatshop activist and co-founder of the Anti-Capitalist Theory Project at Purdue University

George Shaw, London Corresponding Committee

Joshua Skolnik, News and Letters Youth Committee Representative

Heather Tomanovsky, youth activist

Mitch Weerth, member of National Editorial Board of News & Letters

Steve Williams, youth activist

[Ed. notes:

The MHT supporters have launched their own website at http://www.marxisthumanismtoday.org

A statement from News and Letters has been put out in response to the MHT statement. This can be seen and debated at La Bataille Socialiste

Reification in the 21st Century

Lukacs' Dialectic – the First Hundred Years

David Black

2008 is a centenary of sorts for the great Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs (1886-1971). A centenary because a hundred years ago, in Budapest, Lukacs produced his first work, a prize-winning study of German drama. In 1922, following his leading participation in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukacs published his most influential work, a collection essays entitled History and Class Consciousness. Lukacs' ‘problematic’ of a reified ‘false’ consciousness - which can only be grasped in relation to its non-reified liberatory alternative - deeply impacted on the philosophers of the 20th Century: especially Adorno, Sartre, Marcuse, Merleau-Ponty, Debord, Edward Said – and maybe even Heidegger. Lukacs continues to engage thinkers in various fields, even if most of them see his socialist “solution” as “class-bound” and therefore historically invalidated by the collapse of the Stalinist system he subsequently embraced and eventually hoped to see reformed democratically.

Commodities and Consciousness

In his (pre-Stalinist) essay of 1922, ‘Reification’, Lukacs says that in a capitalist society rational human beings live in a reality that appears to them as alien and irrational, even though they themselves have made it. This contradictory, contemplative “activity” is experienced as “immediacy”; the individual’s experience of the reified existence lacks the “mediations” which could reveal it in its totality and point the way towards a “solution.”

In class terms, Lukacs argues that “objective reality of social existence is in its immediacy ‘the same’ for bourgeoisie and proletariat.” But as a correlate he says that beyond immediacy the “specific categories of mediation” necessary to grasp the totality of reified relations are “fundamentally different” for the bourgeoisie and proletariat, due to their respective positions within the same process. [p159]

Lukacs says of the worker: “Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity.” However, by “adding self-consciousness to the commodity structure a new element is introduced”; for “when the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge.” [emphasis in original] With this change the possibility arises that this “commodity,” “conscious of itself” at the level of class consciousness, can constitute itself as a “subject-object identity”: a Hegelian “knowledge of totality,” from the “standpoint of the Proletariat,” in which the categories of existence appear in consciousness, not as the determining categories of capitalist economics, but as determinants of the Proletariat’s own objective existence. [p149]

Lukacs does not justify this idea empirically, but instead formulates an “imputed” revolutionary consciousness, which he claims can be determined by relating existing consciousness to the totality of social relationships, so that “it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings men would have in a particular situation,” if they were able to assess how that situation, and the interests arising from it, “impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society.” [51] For Lukacs, this power to “infer” is embodied in the Party.

Lukacs’ position on consciousness and commodification is based on his interpretation of Marx’s analysis of the ‘Fetishism of Commodities’ in Capital Vol. I. [Ch.1 section 4]. Lukacs says that the essence of the commodity-structure is that it takes on “the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.” [p83] 

However, it is here, at the heart of Lukacs' analysis that we must ask: is Lukacs being "Marxist" enough? For isn't it the case that Marx’s dialectical analysis of concealment and appearance suggests that the fetishism does not just, as in the case of the money-form,  “conceal” the “relation between people” (a phrase Marx does not use), but actually constitutes the “relation between people” and things? In this reading, the reason the “direct social relations between individuals at work” don’t appear is because capitalism is, historically and logically, their negation (such relations existed in pre-capitalist societies, and would also exist in a society based on “production by freely associated men”). Although capital organises co-operation in production, it isolates individuals in their immediacy and forces them to compete with each other through the social “relation between people” that arrives post festum as commodity-exchange on a universal basis.

When Marx asks “Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities?” and answers, “clearly from this form itself,” this suggests that the reified relations can only be uprooted by the abolition of commodity-production. But Lukacs does not seem to rule out the production of commodities in a socialist economy; rather he seems to suggest that commodities would be stripped of the “fetish-character,” but produced nonetheless. For all his critique of the fetish-character of commodities, at no time does he locate that character in the form itself. Rather, Lukacs’ “dialectical conception of totality” dissolves the “fetishistic forms” iin consciousness and reveals them as ideological i.e. “necessary” illusions. [p13]

Raya Dunayevskaya argues that in Lukacs’ transformation of Marx’s concept of reification "into a universal, affecting all of society equally,” the “'becoming conscious' is endowed with a 'neutrality'", and that for all Lukacs writes on the proletariat as the sole revolutionary force, "it does not flow either logically or objectively, either historically or dialectically from his original theory."  Crucially, she argues:
"...Lukacs so overstressed 'consciousness' of the proletariat that it overshadowed its praxis which was both material force and reason, so that it left room, at one and the same time, for a slip back into the Hegelian idealism of the 'identical subject-object,' and into substituting the Party that 'knows' for the proletariat."  

Dunayevskaya however, recognises Lukacs as having “made his greatest contribution to authentic Marxism by interrelating and making central to his dialectic the interrelationships of the concepts of ‘totality’ and ‘mediation’.” [Power of Negativity 218-21] In exploring these concepts, in order see what else flows from his original theory, it is necessary to consider Lukacs’ critique of Kant.

Totality and Mediation
Kant refuses to grant the mechanical sciences an absolute knowledge of objective reality, but the other side of this refusal is his effort to preserve a self-determined, ethical (and aesthetic) dimension within the subjective realm of freedom.

Kant proceeds from Sense-Perception and Understanding to the higher level of Reason, in which particulars and universals are unified into the Idea. The highest philosophic form of the Idea is represented by Plato’s unconditioned infinite, but Kant places this beyond the reach of Reason because no psychological/sensuous intuition/perception of the empirical world can correspond with it. If we apply the categories supplied by reason to the “infinite” we are caught up in antinomies.

These antinomies arise in cosmological/theological questions, such as ‘does the universe have a beginning and an end in space and time or, is it endless and eternal?’ Kant points out that neither proposition can ever be tested and proved. Also the problem of antinomies arises in political issues, such as the ultimate “Good” (as represented by Plato’s Republic), because of the Kantian “chasm” between “is” and “ought,” and freedom and necessity.

Lukacs sees Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as the most precise expression of the antinomies of bourgeois society which need to be overcome. But Kant is an admirer of Rousseau, who argues that the essential will of the human being is to be free and self-determined. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant presents a moral will that, at its highest level, would attain a concrete notion of human “nature,” existing in a universal harmony with the notion of Freedom. Kant accepts the scientific idea of nature as the “aggregate of laws” but, as Lukacs points out, in Kant’s moral philosophy there is a parallel conception drawn from Rousseau’s “value concept” of nature, in which modern rational/scientific institutions are seen as reifying and dehumanising the life of the “People.”

Kant sees human feelings as sublime when directed towards a moral destiny, which humans are predisposed towards as an incentive for goodness. And because we can conceive of the possibility of living according to moral reason, that very conception can play a regulative role in our behaviour, if not a direct, constitutive role in society. In the Critique of Judgement Kant investigates the idea that the totality – in Rousseau’s terms, the unity and freedom of the People under the General Will - ought to be established, not as a Beyond, but as a Present. At this point Kant introduces the idea of Teleology: “the idea of collective nature as a system in accordance with the rule of purposes, to which idea all the mechanisms of nature must be subordinated.”

Hegel points out that Kant is here “returning” to Aristotle’s teleological idea that Nature, as a process, adapts itself to end and intelligence, so that in unity one element can be seen as a moment of another. [History of Philosophy, Vol. III. pp. 156-162]. Kant’s moral reason, based on the categorical imperative, subsumes the particular under the general, and subsumes the empirical and the concrete under the ideal and the abstract. However, as a hypothesis, Kant postulates an “intellectus archetypus”: a type of intelligence which would be capable of starting with the particular and advancing to the general; or, in other words, constituting a Good that emanates from the “good” nature of humanity rather than from an abstract ideal that appears to be eternally in conflict with the “crooked wood” of human nature.

Hegel comments on Kant’s “intellectus archetypus”:
“…that this ‘intellectus archetypus’ is the true Idea of the understanding, is a thought which does not strike Kant. Strange to say, he certainly has this idea of the intuitive; and he does not know why it should have no truth - except because our understanding is otherwise constituted, namely such ‘that it proceeds from the analytic universal to the particular’.” [ibid]

Advancing from the particular to the general (universal) is precisely what Lukacs aims for with his concept of “imputed” revolutionary consciousness, in which “it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings men would have in a particular situation” if they were able to situate them within the totality of the social structure and the historical process. Lukacs agrees with Hegel that, beyond immediacy, fate and purposive activity recognise themselves each other within mediation, and that consciousness is able to discern its essence in necessity. Lukacs  comments:
“To go beyond this immediacy can only mean the genesis, the ‘creation’ of the object. But this assumes that the forms of mediation, in and through which it becomes possible to go beyond the immediate existence of objects as they are given, can be shown to be the structural principles and the real tendencies of the objects themselves.”  [155]

Lukacs  says that the absence of such mediation can be seen most starkly in bourgeois political economy. Unlike for the bourgeoisie, Lukacs argues, “[f]or the proletariat  to become aware of the dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death.” [164] This is not just a matter of putting food on the table; there is also the barbarity of war caused by capitalist competion. Lukacs repeatedly speaks of the capitalism of his day, which had just gone through the First World War and the Russian Revolution, as being in its “final crisis” and he draws on the economic theories of Rosa Luxemburg, which sought to explain the economic causes of imperialist rivalry and war.

Luxemburg takes issue with Volume 3 of Capital, where Marx seeks to demonstrate that capital becomes its own barrier because of the Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Luxemburg comments that one might as well wait for the “extinction of the moon” as wait for the falling rate of profit to plunge the system into crisis. Luxemburg also tackles Marx’s schemas on circulation in Volume 2 of Capital, which appear to demonstrate that accumulation can take place in a society consisting solely of workers and capitalists, without breaking down due to underconsumption of goods produced. Marx argues that a crisis of underconsumption can be avoided because of the preponderance of the production of the means of production over production of the means of consumption – which Luxemburg fails to see as a strictly capitalistic preponderance of the “need” to accumulate over human needs.

Luxemburg, taking issue with Marx, argues that, in order for capital to sell enough of its output to continue the circulation of surplus value, it needs to have not only the capitalists and the workers of the industrialised world at its disposal, but also an increasing number of “third person” consumers in non-capitalist parts of the world; hence imperialism, hence the barbarism of imperialist rivalry, resulting in World War, and hence World Revolution. [See Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution 31-50] Lukacs in 1922 saw no future for civilization in the capitalist form that had spawned the horrors of the First World War and the “anarchy” of the post-War economic crisis – an opinion shared by Trotsky and the Council Communists. Clearly, he was wrong.

Totality as Globalisation
Whatever the shortcomings of History and Class Consciousness, the importance that Lukacs places on Kantianism has been vindicated historically. Kant’s 1784 essay, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, considers the idea that human freedom and self-determination, “beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence,” is willed by nature, “independently of [animal] instinct.” Kant’s radicalism seems to prefigure the Communist Manifesto when he says:
“The means employed by nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society… the unsocial sociability, i.e. their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition, which constantly threatens to break up society.”

Kant then, like Lukacs, is concerned with the moral individual who confronts an unsympathetic empirical world of mechanical laws. Kant says that history becomes a process – “progress” - which binds individuals together in exploitative relationships. But exploitation contradicts Kant’s categorical imperative that no individual should treat other individuals as a means to his or her own ends, but should instead treat them as ends in themselves. Kant says that moral wisdom must remain “an unceasing reproach” to “the realm of brute nature,” but he concludes that the best we can hope for is a gradual, “infinite progress” from “is” towards “ought.”

As a final providential gesture towards bourgeois optimism, Kant postulates an eventual “perpetual peace” on a global scale, quite at odds with the perspective of Rosa Luxemburg (though not quite at odds with that of Kautsky and social democracy). Kant bases his postulate on his expectation that, as traffic, trade and industry spread throughout the world, the leading nations would need to collectively manage the available natural and human resources. To achieve this, nation states would have to recognise that the selfish and increasingly destructive behaviour of competing trading powers would become self-defeating. And so the “crooked wood” of humanity might be straightened by its own competitive crookedness. Kant foresees the type of international bodies we have over 200 years later, such as the UN, WTO and G8.  Kant does not think revolutions can bring about the perpetual peace, but he does think that individuals can prepare for this new world by inward moral improvement. Therefore, he is today the moral philosopher par excellence for the “progressive” New Age “ethical consumer,” who believes “change comes from within.”

Although it is not impossible that members of the G8 will end up waging war on each other, this does not seem likely in the foreseeable future. The priority for the G8 leaders is to agree on international arrangements which will enable them to extract value from the workers and natural resources of the world “in peace.” The “peace” does not of course negate the “right” of the strong-and-willing to invade countries whom they regard as lacking “legitimate,” “civil societies” and can be portrayed as a “threat” (such a “right” is, incidentally, prohibited by Kant’s maxim that "No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State”).

In the opposition, “anti-globalisation,” camp, the priority of the G8 protestors is to fight their single-issue campaigns. The NGOs, in order to preserve their “activist” credibility, exert ideological leverage (“moral pressure”) on political leaders whom they are very careful about keeping their distance from. Gaspar Tamas rightly refers to this as “statism by proxy.” Here again, despite the  “anti-globalist” ideology, Kantianism re-emerges in the idea of the “infinite progress” towards a “fairer” and “safer” world, in which the self-edifying consumer becomes the agency for the “oughts” of “Make Poverty History” and “Stop Global Warming.”

The “final crisis” perspective of Lukacs, Luxemburg and others was invalidated during the course of the 20th century, based as it was on underconsumptionism. Marx’s much-misunderstood Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, on the other hand, has a serious claim to validity, both logically and empirically. (as shown in Andrew Kliman’s recent book ‘Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital": A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency').]

A "Socialism for the 21st Century”?
For Lukacs, in 1922, only after a “laborious process,” which would include the “seizure of power by the proletariat” and the “organisation of the state and the economy on socialist lines,” could the “reified form” of objects be sloughed off. In conclusion Lukacs posed two alternatives: either the proletariat would be “given the opportunity to substitute its own positive contents for the emptied and bursting husks” of the fetishistic forms; or, “it might adapt itself ideologically to conform to these, the emptiest and most decadent forms of bourgeois culture.” [208]

Whether or not the term “decadent” had any useful meaning then or now (which is doubtful), clearly the “laborious process” had the opposite effect Lukacs hoped for, resulting in tyrannical state-capitalism, as is recognised by a present-day Hungarian Marxist, Gaspar Tamas. In ‘Telling the Truth About Class’ [Socialist Register 2006]. Tamas - like Lukacs - charts the history of the Left as the retreat “from Hegel and Marx to Kant,” as well as “the retreat from socialism to egalitarianism, from Marx to Rousseau, the retreat from critical theory to ahistorical moral critique.”

Tamas highlights for critical attention Edward P. Thompson’s masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson, covering the period 1780 to 1832, shows how the working class formed and defined itself as morally superior to, and culturally independent of, the bourgeoisie, thus enabling it to form its first national organisation – Chartism – in the late-1830s. But Tamas sees Thompson’s approach, along with Gramsci’s perspective for working class “hegemony,” as Rousseauian Marxism: “Whereas Marx and Marxism aim at the abolition of the proletariat, Thompson aims at the apotheosis and triumphant survival of the proletariat.” Unlike Rousseau, Marx is the poet of “Faustian demonism,” in which capitalism is the “final revelation” that can only be reached by “wading through the muck of estrangement.” Marx “does not oppose capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rousseau, it is evil.”

Tamas, argues that with the collapse of traditional Lassallean/Rousseauian socialist, (and Stalinist) parties, along with their sectish social and political cultures, we can now see that their historical mission – in which they upstaged the liberal bourgeoisie - was to clear the way for a class-bound capitalism proper, by removing the historical obstacles: feudalism, fascism and eventually, the statist Rousseauian socialism they themselves had created.

The collapse of communism can be seen, in one sense, as a revolutionary-democratic upsurge by the peoples of Eastern Europe demanding their freedom. In another sense it can be seen as the result of Western capitalism's attempt to resolve its own problems: by applying pressure to implode the statist economies of the East in order to integrate them into the restructured “New World Order” that is now simply called globalised capitalism. Despite this supposed assault on “state control,” the reality is that, in the post-communist world, bourgeois class interests are, as Tamas points out, “taken over more and more by the state.”

If what remains of party politics is merely the media-run “debate” on how much of “egalitarian” policy is compatible with the “autonomous” and “final” demands of the economy then can a new “Socialism for the 21st Century” go beyond the “traditional” arguments for workers control and the “planned economy”? The US Marxist-Humanist journal News and Letters addresses this question in arguing:
“The restructuring of global capital has undermined not only the basis of liberalism but also versions of radicalism that reduced "socialism" to nationalized property and state control of industry. Yet many in the anti-vanguardist, autonomist and anarchist Left stop dead at affirming the need for workers' control without considering how value production subordinates the workers' activity to an alien power even when workers have POLITICAL control over some aspects of the labor process. This reluctance to concretely address what is needed to transcend capitalist value production has left the door open for narrow tendencies to step in and offer various false alternatives.” [August 2007]

Indeed, if commodified value-production was uprooted, a step Marx thought absolutely necessary to reach the “realm of freedom,” then the proletariat would cease to exist. And there is nothing in either the young or old Marx to suggest that he ever saw the political and cultural self-preservation of the proletariat within the alienated world of capitalism as serving any other purpose than its self-abolition – although he believed that many decades would have to pass before the subjective and objective developments brought about revolution. If, as Tamas claims, “Class as an economic reality exists and it is as fundamental as ever,” then the extinction of past cultural and political forms doesn’t necessarily mean that new ones can’t emerge which will go deeper than culture or politics; rather it may provide the impetus for such an emergence to take place. A Rousseauian/Lassallean Marxism there was and might still be. But a Rousseauian/Lassallean Marx there never was. The problem of History and Class Consciousness addressed by Lukacs remains unresolved.   

[18 January 2008]

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Iranian Regime Arrests Socialist Students

From an Iranian Correspondent. 
December 7 2007. During the past few days, over 20  independent socialist students from universities at Tehran, Tabriz, Ahvaz and Shiraz have been arrested by the security forces of the Islamic Republic.  A statement of support from the Unity Center of the Free University of Tabriz emphasizes that Iran's young independent socialist activists have been especially targeted because of the links they have forged with labor and womens rights movements.   I appeal to you to do whatever you can to publicize these arrests and demand the students' immediate release.  Below please find a list of the names of the arrested students and a statement  by the Unity Center of the Free University of Tabriz.   
Names of students arrested since December 2, 2008 who still remain in prison: 
Anushe Azadfar
Ilnaz Jamshidi
Mehdi grabloo
Nader Ahsani
Behruz Karimi Zadeh
Keyvan Amiri Eliyasi
Nassim Soltan Beigi
Ali Kalani
Amir Mehrzad
Milad Moini
Behrang Zandi
Hamed Mohamadi
Arash Pakzad
Ali Salem
Mohsen Ghamin
Roozbeh Safshekan
Roozbehan Amiri
Yasir Pir Hayati
Said Aqam Ali Khalili

Protest Against the Mass Arrests of Socialist Students at Tehran’s Universities
Statement by the Unity Center of the Free University of Tabriz (Iran)
December 5, 2007
Friends, Students, the Iranian Nation:
The boots of dictatorship cast a heavy shadow on Iranian universities.  Even as previously arrested students from Amir Kabir and other Tehran universities endure the most extreme mental and physical tortures, a new round of  mass arrests of socialist students at Tehran’s universities is being reported. 
 On Tuesday December 4,  just a few days prior to a “Student Day”  rally  sponsored by  socialist students at Tehran University,  state security forces arrested over 25 Left activists and pivotal figures of this movement at  Tehran University.  The slogan of the rally was to be “No To War.  The University Is Not a Military Base.”   These clashes even spread to the University of Mazandaran [Near the Caspian Sea].  Despite all these pressures and the continuation of the arrests, students at Tehran University were able to hold their rally under extreme police presence.
The crackdown on student activists and the extensive suppression of socialist students in the past few days indicate important points.    A cursory look at the history of student political activism in the last three decades shows that since the so-called Cultural Revolution of 1981 and the elimination of all opposition voices at the universities, and after the overcoming of the deep- freeze by the mid 1990s, and the experiences of the past few years,  this is the first time that a movement  has risen up that is completely independent of state institutions.  This movement is projecting its call for freedom and equality with perseverance at the university.     
In the not so distant past, student movements hoped for support from certain layers of the rulers or half-heartedly hoped for foreign intervention.  But now the movement that is taking shape at the university is not contaminated by any of the above mentioned views.  That is because, it cannot tolerate imperialist plunder and also challenges the totality of  native state institutions.
If we look back and review the experience of suppression of students in the early 1990s and early 2000s (such as the bitter events of July 1999 and June 2003) we can become aware of the precise consciousness of the current movement and its understanding of the necessity for independence from any power institution (be it the rulers or the critics within the government).  It is clear that the most important reason for the suppression of this forward looking movement is this definition of its attitude to political deals and its refusal to be used as a means.    Furthermore the link that this movement has established with other social movements (workers’ movement, women’s movement etc.) is a fine point that should not be overlooked.  Much more remains to be said about this which needs more space than the current statement.
As a group of students from the Free University of Tabriz, we support the completely independent student movements and the need for independence of each movement.    We also express our strong opposition to the latest attacks on students at Tehran’s universities.  We are also very sad to see the deliberate silence of many political activists and the news boycott concerning the suppression of socialist students.  In expressing our support for the imprisoned students, we strongly demand the unconditional release of all the arrested students.
Unity Center,  A  Student-Political Organization
December 5, 2007 
www.kanoonevahdat.blogfa.com
For further information, please contact the Unity Center at  kanoonevahdat@yahoo.com

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Marx, capitalism and the 'automatic subject'
by Karel Ludenhoff

Review: Die Abenteuer der Ware. Für eine neue Wertkritik (Adventures of the commodity: for a new criticism of value) by Anselm Jappe, Munich 2005.

Anselm Jappe has two goals in writing a book about value theory. One, he wants to contribute to explaining the worldwide movements of protest and resistance against capitalist society. He is thinking, for example, of movements like the peasant struggles in India and Brazil and struggles which try to resist the destruction of the welfare state in Europe and which are fighting the new biotechnologies. He argues that today's social movements are limited to their own sectors and propose partial solutions without looking for the deeper cause of the phenomena they are fighting. However, the need for fundamental explanations is emerging and he sees his book as part of a process of providing them. Two, he criticizes those currents of Marxism that have their point of departure in the conception of labor as "the turning point of every society, which in modern society has come to the fore, while it had been concealed in the past.

He writes, among other things, about the commodity as an unknown entity, compares precapitalist societies with capitalism, relates fetishism and anthropology; and criticizes the modes of thinking and practice in the anti-globalization movement. I will here focus here on just one theme, the so-called "automatic subject," and relate it to the concept of the Subject in Marxism-Humanism.

THE AUTOMATIC SUBJECT

Jappe says that it is of primary importance today to make use of Marx's work because it criticizes the basic categories of capitalist society and is not simply concerned with distribution. Nor did Marx envision applying his theory of value to non-capitalist societies.

He discerns two tendencies in Marx. One is a so-called exoteric Marx, whom he sees as a theoretician of modernization, a dissident of political liberalism and a protagonist of the Enlightenment who wanted to perfect industrial labor society under the guidance of the proletariat. The other is a so-called esoteric Marx, who in his difficult-to-understand criticism of value production went beyond capitalist civilization. According to Jappe, only this second side of Marx can provide a fundamental comprehension of present-day reality and enable us to trace out its most remote roots. He writes: "This criticism of the center of modernity is nowadays more topical than it was in Marx's lifetime....To bring this aspect of Marx's criticism-value criticism-to the fore...it is sufficient to read the texts [of Marx] intently, although nearly no one did that for more than 100 years." On the other hand, Jappe considers most of Marx's empirical work " obsolete" for our times. Jappe makes use of the notion that Marx conceived of abstract labor and the value created by it not as material and concrete entities but as societal abstractions. Jappe then introduces the notion "real abstraction," which he defines as "societal reality, an abstraction, which becomes reality." Although "where the circulation of goods has been mediated by money, the abstraction has become real," he emphasizes that this real abstraction takes place in the sphere of production. That is because "money only makes possible the expression of [value], but it is not its creator."

He differs here from the views of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who situated real abstraction only in the sphere of circulation. Jappe argues that abstract labor, which creates value, dominates and determines all spheres of life in capitalist society: "In reality it is only indirectly, through the self-expansion of value, that the demands of material production in capitalist society are victorious over all social, aesthetic, religious or ethnic points of view." Things are very different in pre-capitalist societies, where "material production could be sacrificed to such considerations." In a society based on commodity production the concreteness of things is submitted to this abstraction of value as a result of abstract labor. One of the most important consequences of this is the destructive forces that it produces in capitalist society. Jappe writes of the "destructive potential" of capitalist society-destructive because what matters to it is only the capacity to transform [things into] money. The ecological crisis is one thing he has in mind.

He argues that the commodity-just like value, money and abstract labor-is a fetishistic category because abstract labor creates the value of any commodity. Jappe refers to Capital, where Marx writes: "As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labor which produces them."

Jappe stresses that Marx conceived of fetishism not only as a mistaken conception of reality but also as an "inversion of reality itself" and he illustrates this with a passage from Capital in which Marx says: "To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labors appears as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things." In his method of analysis Jappe starts with the logic of value and not with surface phenomena-like the actions of social actors or the observable classes and their conflicts in everyday life. These he sees as deduced forms, consequences of the logic of value. We do not need to be surprised about that, he writes, because in a fetishistic society there is an inversion of concrete and abstract, of human beings and means, of subject and object.

This conception of the logic of value results for Jappe ultimately in the notion of value as "automatic subject": "The dynamics of a commodity producing society is not to be reduced to the subjectivity of the exploiters against the resistance of the subjectivity of the exploited. In reality, real societal subjectivity cannot arise in a commodity producing society." In Jappe's vision, "in capitalism there can be only one subject: the automatic subject, which has to be destroyed and not developed." He adds to this, "Value does not limit itself to being a form of production; it too is a form of consciousness." Jappe thinks he finds support for his conception in two statements of Marx. The first one comes from Capital, where Marx in his chapter "The General Formula for Capital" analyzes the money and commodity function of value: "It [value] is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject." The second one is from the Grundrisse and reads: "Value enters as subject."

CAPITALISM AND SUBJECTIVITY

It is true Marx criticized the basic categories of capitalist society. In doing so he broke with bourgeois society in its totality. And no one will doubt that the historical situation in Marx's lifetime is different from our own. But to split Marx up in an exoteric and an esoteric part is in my view completely besides the point. On the contrary, the power of Marx's thought is precisely the complementary character of the historical and logical in his analysis of the development of capitalist society.

Of course, there is a logic of value. But value does not exist in a vacuum, as a logic on its own. Or, as Otto Morf puts it in History and Dialectic in Political Economy: "When logical categories are, as Marx holds, real categories, then they have to be found in reality; method cannot be taken out of the object and cannot be put in opposition to it." In this sense the notion of "real abstraction "is better conceived of as a non-observable reality which gets an observable character through expression in a material object."

Is most of Marx's empirical work obsolete? I don't think so. Let us take as an example Marx's chapter about the working day in Capital. In this chapter we can see how Marx listens to the voices from below, how he analyzes the forces of the Subject in capitalist society. Marx writes here explicitly: "It is otherwise with the subjective factor of the labor process, labor power,which sets itself in motion independently." Labor power which is preserving the value of the means of production by transferring it to the new product and labor power which is creating new value at the same time. This chapter illustrates the status of Capital as a weapon in the struggle for human emancipation in capitalist society in order to get rid of capitalist society.

It is this status of Capital, which makes it, as Raya Dunayevskaya put it in Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, "a very different book than either the Grundrisse or the Critique of Political Economy, and it is a very different book from the first chapter to the last....it is that Great Divide [from Hegel] just because, the Subject-not subject matter, but Subject-was neither economics nor philosophy, but the human being, the masses."

Marx's concern with Subject as the living human being is developed throughout all of his work. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx already stresses subject as the living human being: "The worker produces capital, capital produces him-hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle." More as three decades later, in his "Remarks on Wagner," he states: "neither 'value" nor 'exchange value' are for me subjects, but the commodity." The commodity then is the result of labor power, which functions as wage labor. It will be clear that a view that is fixated on an automatic subject, and with it the disappearance of the human being as Subject in capitalist society, can only envision the way out of capitalism through a so-called "breakdown" of capitalist society. In the vision of Jappe, such a breakdown occurs through "the increasing productivity of labor-which in the last instance brings about the breakdown of the society resting on value."

Before coming to a conclusion about Jappe's conception of an automatic subject, a few words about the support he thinks he finds in the above mentioned passages in Marx. In both passages Marx is writing about form specifities. In the Grundrisse he is dealing with the formal specificity of the production process: "this process is a process of self-realization. Self-realization includes preservation of the prior value, as well as its multiplication." In the Capital passage Marx is concerned with the difference between Capital-Money-Capital and Money-Capital-Money. In both passages labor power actually is the center and I think Jappe's support is out of place. In reality, Jappe's notion of an automatic subject makes engagement for changing consciousness, in order to change the world, superfluous.

In my view this represents a dramatic example of the reification of thinking into categories. To change the world entails not only reading of the texts of Marx, but also listening to the voices of below, to the living subject, to develop theory to change the world.

This review frist appeared in the US Marxist-Humanist paper, NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2006

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Labour, the Workplace and Alienation

The following is a talk given at the Anarchist Bookfair at St Mary's College London on 27 October by Richard Abernethy of the London Corresponding Committee

In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. This was a true word spoken in jest, it contained a lot of truth at the time, and also today. A recent study in Scotland showed that the rate of heart attacks increases by twenty percent on Mondays, the day that most people return to work after the weekend.
The idea of this meeting is to think about why, and in what circumstances, work becomes a curse – that is, when it is alienated labour. And to start to think about how alienation can be overcome – how work can become a free human activity, an expression of our self-development and creativity.

In this talk I won’t be saying very much that is original, but I will be looking at what theoreticians and workers have said about the alienation of work. I will be speaking from the Marxist-Humanist tradition. We are Marxists at an Anarchist event.
I know that anarchists such as Kropotkin have also said very interesting things about work, and I hope we’ll hear about that in the discussion.
I would like to start by looking at how the great philosopher Hegel analysed alienated labour in early industrial capitalism, in words which are over 200 years old, but still very relevant:
(Quotations from Hegel are from the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, 1803-1806).
“In the machine, Man terminates his own formal activity and lets it do all the work for him… The more mechanical labour becomes, the less value it has and the more he has to work in this manner.”
“Man no longer acquires by working what he needs, nor does he any longer need what he has produced… His labour becomes formal, abstract, universal, discrete; he restricts himself to working to satisfy one of his own needs and exchanges the product of his labour for what is necessary for the satisfaction of his other needs.”
“The satisfaction of needs is a system of universal dependence of everyone on each other”.
“There disappears for everyone all sense of security and certainty that his individual labour is immediately adequate to his needs.”
“Labour becomes more and more dead absolutely, it becomes mechanical work. The skill of the individual worker becomes all the more limited, to an infinite degree, and the consciousness of the factory worker is degraded to the ultimate state of dullness”.
I would disagree with Hegel on that last point. In a moment we are going to hear from some workers who were anything but dull.
“A distant transaction can suddenly impede the work of a whole class of people, who satisfy their needs with it; and thus render their labour superfluous and useless.”
Hegel referred to commodity-producing society as “a vast system of solidarity and mutual dependence, a life of the dead with its own momentum; this system moves hither and thither blindly and primitively in its agitation and, like a wild animal, demands constant strict control and restraint”.
“The strength of the self consists of its rich comprehensiveness; this is lost.”
“A multitude is condemned to a brutal and stupefying condition in labour and poverty, so that others might amass wealth.”
“Currency must be honoured, but family, welfare, life etc. may all perish.”
“Masses of the population are condemned to labour in factories, manufacturing works, mines etc.; work which is totally stupefying, unhealthy, insecure and faculty-stunting.”
Now, let’s jump from Hegel writing at the dawn of the nineteenth century, to the words of two Marxist-Humanist workers who experienced production line labour in the twentieth century.

In “Indignant Heart”, Charles Denby describes the introduction of automation at Chrysler in Detroit in 1956:
“With the time-study, it was designed to make you work every second of every hour. You worked there, grinding your life away. What it actually meant was that you were coordinating the movements of your body to match that of the machines and the speed of the line. The machines were running the workers.
“A line I was working on moved so fast that they had a buzzer sound every time the line moved. When that buzzer sounded, you’d better move and move fast, or else you could get hurt bad. Behind me, just a few feet away, there was a water fountain. I wanted a swallow of that water so bad, and I thought maybe, if I worked as fast as I could in between the buzzer sounding, that I’d be able to jump back and get a drink of water. But no matter how much I tried, I never could get it. That swallow of water was so close, but it was like being on a desert.”
Felix Martin wrote:
“Marx writes of two types of labour: creative labour, which combines one’s muscles with one’s mind; and alienated labour, which is forced labour, any kind of labour just to live, doing just what you are told to do until you could do it in your sleep, without thinking, just like a machine. Do you know what this kind of labour does to your nervous system and the muscular system?
“If you let your mind think only about this kind of work, it would destroy the mind. At General Motors, I kept my mind on things other than work. I studied philosophy, Hegel, Marx and Raya Dunayevskaya. I knew that this system of production had to be destroyed or it would destroy the human mind.”
The nature of work in Britain and similar advanced capitalist countries has changed considerably during our lifetimes. Production line jobs involving endless repetition of a few physical operations have become rare. Such jobs have either been fully automated to the extent that they are done entirely by machine, or they have been shifted across the globe to New Industrialised Countries where wages are a fraction of what they are here.
The industrial job as it was known to previous generations has been replaced by other kinds of employment.
There is a category of skilled jobs, people who maintain and utilise the technology.
One cause of stress here is being expected to absorb lots of technical information, rapidly.
Many jobs still involve a high degree of repetitive monotony, but they also involve a certain amount of human interaction, like talking to customers. Think of baristas and waiters. Unlike a machine, a human being can cope with varied and complex situations and respond to unexpected events.
Alienated labour has not gone away, it takes new forms. One example is work in call centres, where people have a script that they are required to follow strictly at all times.
A different experience of alienation is when a firm or organisation restructures or downsizes or out-sources its operations and workers find themselves made redundant, or have to reapply for their own jobs, or are transferred to another employer. Even people who enjoy their work suddenly find themselves in a situation of powerlessness and uncertainty. It’s that sense of your life being affected by forces beyond your control.
Let’s turn now to the question of what non-alienated work might be like, in a post-capitalist society. What kind of work should people do?
Firstly (following Marx) I would reject the idea that work can be entirely abolished. Human beings in any conceivable society will need to work upon the materials provided by nature to product the necessities and amenities of life (use values). Even if the abolition of work were possible, I would argue that it would not be desirable. Without work, people would miss a sense of purpose and achievement, the satisfaction of developing skills and rising to challenges. Even our relaxation would be devalued, if we had nothing to relax from.
In the Grundrisse, Marx wrote:
“Adam Smith conceives labour to be a curse. To him, ‘rest’ appears as the adequate state, as identical with ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’… Certainly, the volume of labour itself appears to be externally determined by the aim to be attained… But Smith has no inkling that the overcoming of these obstacles is in itself a manifestation of freedom – and moreover, that the external aims are stripped of their character as merely external natural necessity and become posited as aims which only the individual himself posits, that they are therefore posited as self-realisation, objectification of the subject, and thus real freedom, whose action is precisely work… For work to become travail attractif, to be the realisation of the individual, in no way implies that work is pure fun, pure amusement, as in Fourier’s childishly naïve conception. Really free work, e.g. the composition of music, is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort.”
In Volume 3 of Capital, Marx expresses a somewhat different view, contrasting the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom:
“The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends: it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialised man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”
In her classic book “Marxism and Freedom”, first published 50 years ago, Raya Dunayevskaya argued the need for a far-reaching transformation of human relations:
‘“Not until the transcendence of this mediation (abolition of private property) which is nevertheless a necessary presupposition does there arise positive Humanism, beginning from itself’, said Marx. In a word, another transcendence, after the abolition of private property, is needed to achieve a truly new, human society which differs from private property not alone as an “economic system”, but as a different way of life altogether. It is as free individuals developing all their natural and acquired talents that we first leap from what Marx called the pre-history of humanity into its true history, the “leap from necessity to freedom”’.
“For Marx, as for us today, nothing short of a philosophy, a total outlook – which Marx first called not ‘Communism’ but ‘Humanism’ – can answer the manifold needs of the proletariat. Man will not again be alienated. He will not again be fragmented. He must again become whole with the reunification of mental and manual labour in the living worker whose self-activity will first then develop all his human potentialities: ‘Communism is the necessary form and the energetic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development, the form of human activity.’”

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UNISON CONFERENCE: The Impasse of Partnership

By John Campbell

For the Left, the recent Unison Local Government and National Conference was significant in that although the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and some independents increased their presence on the National Executive of the union, witch-hunting of the Left has started in earnest. Disturbingly the Right are using anti-racism as a foil.
Like most previous conferences there were many positive motions that were carried. Motions carried included defence of Asylum Seekers, opposition to the BNP and calls to act on Global Warming. But even on Global Warming, there were pernicious statements like,”….. seek to negotiate and cooperate with other employers to promote green workplaces or energy use…..” This gave the leadership another plank on which to peddle “partnership,” which any activist knows means workers footing the bill. There was lack of any focus on facts about the environment and the fact that Capital is responsible ultimately for the effects of Climate Change. What is inevitable is that Capital will adjust and is adjusting rapidly to the concerns of global warming to make further capital out of these concerns. Witness the oil companies’ ongoing campaign to “prove” green credentials. Witness also the reality of Shell’s destructive exploitation of resources in the Niger Delta.
The main issues of contention were Pay, Pensions and Palestine. On Pay, the leadership of the union originally were proposing that it should not be discussed and that there should be further consultative ballots of the members. The fact is for rank-and-file members this issue is not subjectively a Left /Right debate because the issues are crystal clear, “i.e. inflation is rising, we are lagging behind and we need more money and the only way to get that is withdrawal of labour.” The objective situation is somewhat different. The leadership, by holding back, is causing demoralisation and is using the issue to create a “Left/Right” split. I went to a consultative meeting recently where the Regional Leadership started the debate with “…there is no way my members are prepared to strike…… and they never have been.”!! With such a lack of leadership formal logic requires that pragmatic positions can be taken and industrial action not supported. What eventually happened was that the Left, in the form of the Socialist Party, carried an amendment to the leadership-supported motion, calling for the proposals to go straight to ballot. The leadership called for a vote against their own amended motion and supported a motion calling for another consultative ballot, which was carried. Watch this space!!
On the Local Government Pension Scheme the leadership was not prepared to have the matter discussed on the floor of conference and that was the end of the matter. On this issue especially, the membership is demoralised. The reason for this is that a year ago the leadership deliberately demobilised the campaign for a decent Local Government Pension Scheme and only under extreme pressure from the rank and file was a Special Conference allowed which, as it turned out, was rigidly managed by the union leadership. The leadership has put forward for acceptance proposals that do not line up with protection of the 85-Year Rule agreed in Scotland and do not measure up to agreements won by other public service unions. Workers have voted for these proposals. Again there is a formal logic to this. In the absence of any mass organised fighting alternative, workers on the whole will vote for the recommendation of the leadership or abstain.
On Palestine there was a heated debate and many speakers did not get to the rostrum before the “question was put.” The issue of debate was that a clause of a motion which rightly condemned Israel action and called for a two state solution, also stated, “…….But the Conference believes that ending the occupation demands concerted and sustained pressure upon Israel including an economic, cultural , academic and sporting boycott……” The SWP supported this. But the Socialist Party and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty supported an amendment, rightly deleting this clause. The problem with the call for a boycott is that it has racist implications, because it would mean in reality anti-Semitic campaigning. Speakers against this made the case of the South African Boycott back in the seventies and eighties. However, boycotts did not overturn the Apartheid regime. It was and still is the South African masses that are decisive in fighting Capital in all its forms – as can be seen in the present mass strikes in the South African public sector against a pay freeze imposed since 2004.
A few issues need to be addressed in summary.
Firstly there is an up and coming witch-hunt against the Left in Unison. The leadership used the excuse of Socialist Party dominated branches producing a so-called racist leaflet to initiate an investigation into those branches. The so-called racism was a graphic of the three monkeys: “hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil.” It is a graphic that has been used, for years and years throughout the union movement against the bosses and has never been construed as racist. To use anti-racism as a cover for witch-hunting the Left is worrying in the extreme and created an atmosphere in conference where delegates were afraid to say what they thought in case they were branded racists.
Secondly, of the left itself, there is no unity and no focus. This is not surprising when you have the SWP focusing on a popular front approach, which in reality gives ground to Islamic fundamentalism, which no Marxist should support. We a