Can Marxian Economics Explain the Crisis?

Anyone have time to write a refutation of this? I like to take any opportunity offered to debate Marxism -- but I do not have time at the moment..???

john

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Can Marxian Economics Explain the Crisis?

via Economist's View by Mark Thoma on 1/6/10

John Quiggin wonders if anyone has constructed "a distinctively Marxian analysis of the current crisis":

Marxian economics MIA?, by John Quiggin: The financial crisis has, justifiably, enhanced the reputation of Karl Marx as an economic thinker. Marx was the first economist to treat crises and panics as an inherent feature of capitalism rather than as an inexplicable, but fortunately temporary, departures from a natural equilibrium.

Unfortunately, most of his analytical effort, and even more, that of the school of thought that followed him, was devoted to pointless exercises in value theory[1]. Marx's discussion of crisis rested mainly on the idea of the falling rate of profit which seemed at the time to be both a theoretical inevitability and an observable trend. But with technological progress, there's no necessity for the rate of profit to fall consistently, and it hasn't. There are other ideas in Marx that might be developed to yield a better theory of crisis, but nothing resembling a systematic theory.

And, in the current crisis, Marxian economics seems to be pretty much Missing in Action. I haven't seen much and what I have seen hasn't added much, in analytical terms, to the standard left-Keynesian analysis. Perhaps the problem is that just about everyone expects capitalism, in one form or another, to survive this crisis, contrary to the orthodox Marxist view where crises become ever more severe and eventually precipitate the revolutionary overthrow of the entire system. But it's equally possible that I haven't been looking in the right places.

Readers of my blog have pointed me here, which has some good stuff, but, as I said, isn't much different from the standard left-Keynesian analysis[2]. Can anyone recommend a distinctively Marxian analysis of the current crisis?

fn1. If I get time, I'll write a longer post on this point. ...

fn2. Except for this piece, which reads more like Cochrane or Fama with some added Marxist verbiage.

Anti-Dühring: The General Introduction

ANTI-DÜHRING: THE GENERAL INTRODUCTION [1]

Thomas Riggins

Modern Socialism, says Engel's, is the product of the class war between capitalists and workers and the irrational anarchy rampant in capitalist production. Its theoretical elaboration is descended from the French philosophers in years just prior to the Great French Revolution. In a note we are informed that the FIRST socialists were Morelly and Mably.

Morelly published THE CODE OF NATURE in 1755. Nobody really knows anything about "Morelly" and this name might have been a pseudonym for either Francois-Vincent Toussaint OR Denis Diderot. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785) published ENTRETIENS DE PHOCION in 1757.

Engels says the French thinkers just before the Revolution were "extreme revolutionists" and means that as a compliment. They did not accept any authority except REASON. "Reason became the sole measure of everything." Engels then quotes HEGEL on the Revolution as a "dawn of a new day" the advent of the Kingdom of Reason. "All thinking beings," Hegel wrote in The Philosophy of History, "participated in celebrating this holy day."

Today we know that this "holy day" was not of Reason but was "the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie." Great as the French thinkers were (especially Rousseau with his Contrat Social) they could not "go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch." And we should keep this in mind too when we read Engels (and Marx)-- these giants of the nineteenth century-- in the twenty-first century.

Capitalist development was still in its infancy in the eighteenth century and the bourgeoisie put itself forward as the representative of all the classes being oppressed by feudalism. The bourgeoisie, the workers, and peasants comprised "the people" against the exploiters (the feudal nobility). But there are always hints of the coming struggle between the bourgeoisie and its class allies. Engels gives three examples:
1. The Reformation-- The Peasant's War-- Thomas Münzer, the Anabaptists.
2. The great English Revolution-- The Levelers.
3. the great French Revolution [Engels likes to put "great" in front of any revolution]- Babeuf.

Engels says even though the workers as a class were just beginning to form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were still thinkers that had begun to express the interests of the future class, although in a utopian manner [Thomas More "Utopia" 1516, Thommaso Campanella "City of the Sun 1623]. Then came 'the three great utopians"-- i.e., Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. What the three had in common, according to Engels, is that they presented systems of universal social salvation and did not base themselves on the working class as such.

All these systems, Engels says, end up in "the dust hole" just because they are as irrational as the bourgeoisie that they represent: in the last analysis they just can't work to liberate humanity. "To make a science of socialism," Engels says, "it first had to be placed upon a real basis."

So, part of the real basis was rooted in the French philosophers -- materialism and revolution, but something else was still needed-- dialectics. And that was provided by HEGEL. Hegel's philosophy was the high point of German philosophy. "Its greatest merit was taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning.

Hegel made advances on the philosophy of Aristotle ("the Hegel of the ancient world") and developed ideas first enunciated by the ancient Greeks. Other philosophers responsible for laying the real basis for socialism as a science who Engel's mentions are Heraclitus, Descartes, Spinoza, Diderot and Rousseau.

The Greeks saw a world in flux and change, everything in motion and change (for the most part at least, there were major exceptions) and they laid the foundations of modern science, also the Arabs (Muslims) of the middle ages contributed, but real modern science actually dates from the middle of the fifteenth century. Due to the influence of thinkers such as Bacon and Locke, Engels says, the idea of flux and dialectical thinking was given up and people began looking at the world as made up of unchanging forces and objects subject to immutable mathematical laws. Engels calls this "the metaphysical mode of thought" characterizing the eighteenth century. It will have to give way to the dialectical mode of thought before socialism can be scientific.

This won't be so difficult because, as Engels says, "Nature is the proof of dialectics" and the biggest blow against the metaphysical outlook was struck by DARWIN whose theory of evolution reveals a biological world in constant change and flux. But this theory can also be extended to the solar system and the universe itself as revealed by KANT and LAPLACE and their formulation of the nebular hypothesis which put an end to NEWTON'S eternally enduring universe. HEGEL, of course, saw the course of human history as an evolutionary development. So, by the mid nineteenth century the natural, biological, and human sciences were all poised to be studied with the dialectical method.

Hegel's idealism proved inadequate to a correct understanding of the world. Hegel's view was that the flux and change of evolution was the reflection in the material wold of the development and manifestation of the Absolute Idea, which when once achieved would then arrive at rest. Engels considered this an unresolvable contradiction-- that world of flux would end up at rest. So idealism is replaced by MATERIALISM which sees the process of change as unending. But Engels may have a contradiction too. Why should the social question end with the arrival of socialism. If flux is eternal why would not a socialist world also change and break up (as we have apparently seen happen around 1989-91)?

Perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Lets stay with Engels' intro. We have arrived at scientific socialism based on science and a materialist outlook. We can make sense of the social question without resorting to metaphysics or utopian schemes. A scientific study of how capitalism works, that is the world economic system currently in place, is now possible. The secrete of capitalism is not revealed simply by enumerating its bad social consequences. That won't tell us how it works. The secrete is to reveal how SURPLUS VALUE works, how unpaid labor "is the basis of the capitalist mode of production."

There is a short second part of the introduction, "What Herr Dühring Promises"[2] this is about six pages. I am only going to say a few words about this section. It is basically a series of quotes from Dühring's works showing what a ridiculous megalomanic he was. He claimed to have arrived at the absolute final truth about philosophy, science, socialism, etc., and anyone who disagreed with him was simply backwards and wrong. Engels mocks Dühring's oversized ego in this section.

Well, this is enough on the Introduction to Anti-Dühring. I will now proceed to Part One "Philosophy" and go over the fourteen chapters devoted to this topic. Keep in mind, that Engels doesn't see any role for modern philosophy over and above the role of science for understanding the world-- except for logic and dialectical thinking.
[Anti-Dühring 2]

Since 1999 in Venezuela...

• Extreme poverty fell from 20.2 to 7.6 percent
• Household poverty dropped from 49 to 21 percent
• Social spending has averaged 17.5 percent of GDP
• Human Development Index ranking rose, 68 to 58
• Literacy increased from 93% to 96%

--Source: Venezuelan Embassy, Washington

DeMint: If TSA Workers Join Union, They’ll Let Terrorists In

by Mike Hall
From AFL-CIO Now Blog

After the now infamous Christmas day “crotch bomber” episode on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) couldn’t keep his anti-union bile from bubbling out of his mouth.

DeMint, who has single-handedly bottled up the nomination of Erroll Southers to head the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), screeched that if TSA workers were allowed to unionize, terrorists clothed in plastic explosive-laden underwear or shoes or ball caps would begin blasting airplanes out of the sky on a regular basis.

BTW, the Obama administration supports the radical idea that TSA workers should be allowed to choose whether to join a union. Workers should have the choice, not officious senators.

Read more...

What if?

by Sam Stark
From People's World

What if this is 1935 and Congress is getting ready to vote on the Social Security Act?

As political progressives, union activists or whatever, do you support the bill or oppose it?

No-brainer, right?

So what if I told you that by supporting the 1935 Social Security Act you would be selling out the working class and capitulating to right-wing special interests who wrote half the bill?

Didn't see that one coming, didja?

Read more...

What's Going on in Obamafanland?

A Lexicon of Disappointment
Lookout [reposted from The Nation]

by NAOMI KLEIN

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.
Whatever the last straw, a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard.
This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce enough to produce programs capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding.
The first stage, however, is to understand fully the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves. To do that, we need a new language, one specific to the Obama moment. Here is a start.
Hopeover. Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame. It's the political equivalent of the crash after a sugar high. Sample sentence: "When I listened to Obama's economic speech my heart soared. But then, when I tried to tell a friend about his plans for the millions of layoffs and foreclosures, I found myself saying nothing at all. I've got a serious hopeover."
Hoper coaster. Like a roller coaster, the hoper coaster describes the intense emotional peaks and valleys of the Obama era, the veering between joy at having a president who supports safe-sex education and despondency that single-payer healthcare is off the table at the very moment when it could actually become a reality. Sample sentence: "I was so psyched when Obama said he is closing Guantánamo. But now they are fighting like mad to make sure the prisoners in Bagram have no legal rights at all. Stop this hoper coaster--I want to get off!"
Hopesick. Like the homesick, hopesick individuals are intensely nostalgic. They miss the rush of optimism from the campaign trail and are forever trying to recapture that warm, hopey feeling--usually by exaggerating the significance of relatively minor acts of Obama decency. Sample sentences: "I was feeling really hopesick about the escalation in Afghanistan, but then I watched a YouTube video of Michelle in her organic garden and it felt like inauguration day all over again. A few hours later, when I heard that the Obama administration was boycotting a major UN racism conference, the hopesickness came back hard. So I watched slideshows of Michelle wearing clothes made by ethnically diverse independent fashion designers, and that sort of helped."
Hope fiend. With hope receding, the hope fiend, like the dope fiend, goes into serious withdrawal, willing to do anything to chase the buzz. (Closely related to hopesickness but more severe, usually affecting middle-aged males.) Sample sentence: "Joe told me he actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions. What a hope fiend!"
Hopebreak. Like the heartbroken lover, the hopebroken Obama-ite is not mad but terribly sad. She projected messianic powers onto Obama and is now inconsolable in her disappointment. Sample sentence: "I really believed Obama would finally force us to confront the legacy of slavery in this country and start a serious national conversation about race. But now he never seems to mention race, and he's using twisted legal arguments to keep us from even confronting the crimes of the Bush years. Every time I hear him say 'move forward,' I'm hopebroken all over again."
Hopelash. Like a backlash, hopelash is a 180-degree reversal of everything Obama-related. Sufferers were once Obama's most passionate evangelists. Now they are his angriest critics. Sample sentence: "At least with Bush everyone knew he was an asshole. Now we've got the same wars, the same lawless prisons, the same Washington corruption, but everyone is cheering like Stepford wives. It's time for a full-on hopelash."
In trying to name these various hope-related ailments, I found myself wondering what the late Studs Terkel would have said about our collective hopeover. He surely would have urged us not to give in to despair. I reached for one of his last books, Hope Dies Last. I didn't have to read long. The book opens with the words: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."
And that pretty much says it all. Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward (as Obama likes to say) is not to abandon hope but to find more appropriate homes for it--in the factories, neighborhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.
Political scientist Sam Gindin wrote recently that the labor movement can do more than protect the status quo. It can demand, for instance, that shuttered auto plants be converted into green-future factories, capable of producing mass-transit vehicles and technology for a renewable energy system. "Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches," he wrote, "and putting it in the hands of workers."
Which brings me to the final entry in the lexicon.
Hoperoots. Sample sentence: "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots"

Podcast #112: Interview with Gerald Horne about his latest book, Mau Mau in Harlem?

Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes

Political Affairs #112 - The US and Kenya: Interview with Historian Gerald Horne

Gerald Horne is the author of numerous books including Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese attack on the British Empire, Cold War in a Hot Zone, The White Pacific, Fire This Time, Blows Against the Empire, and The Deepest South. His most recent is a study of the impact of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya on US foreign and domestic policy.


Download the mp3 version of episode #112 here

Verge of health reform

Why Did Engels Write Anti-Dühring?

Thomas Riggins

In the 1870s the German professor Eugen Dühring joined the German Social Democratic Party. He made a lot of friends and began interpreting socialism along lines that were new and different and which he thought were more in accord with modern science. Engels' German comrades asked him for clarification on some of these new views as Dühring was starting to collect a following. Engels, however, was busy doing other things. But after three years of requests he decided to write the book ANTI-DÜHRING: HERR EUGEN DÜHRING'S REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. This book became one of the most important of the so-called Marxist "classics" and is a basic foundational document for the understanding of DIAMAT (Dialectical Materialism).

In this article I will make some comments on the prefaces to the work (there are three for the three German editions made in Engels lifetime) before going on to review the First Part of the work, that devoted to philosophy, to try and situate it in our time at the beginning of the 21st century.

Engels' tells us that Anti-Dühring is an extension of the world view first developed by Marx in his book THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY, then extended by the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and DAS KAPITAL. To make sure that this solo flight would properly represent their joint philosophy, Engels read aloud the whole manuscript to Marx and the latter even wrote a chapter for the book (chapter ten of part two). I note this because many people today try to divorce the thought of Marx from that of Engels and maintain that Anti-Dühring is a deviation from Marx's philosophical views which were more sophisticated than those of Engels.

In order to write the book, Engels first took eight years to review the math and natural sciences of his day. The reason he did this was to convince himself that the laws of the materialist dialectic of motion which he and Marx had detected at work in history and in the evolution of human consciousness, were equally at work in Nature. These laws were first developed by the German philosopher G.W.F. HEGEL but, Engels says, in a "mystic form." Once stripped of this form, Marx and Engels were able to apply the dialectical method to both the natural and historical sciences.

Engels was aware that the charge might be made that the dialectic was being forced upon Nature from the outside and that the "facts" were being forced into the straight jacket of the theory. This serious charge is still made today by the bourgeois opponents of Marxism. Engels however says that he did all he could to avoid this: "to me there could be no question of building the laws of dialectic into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it."

Engels lived in a time of rapid scientific advance towards the end of the 19th century. Only a few years before he wrote the second preface to his book, he says, the LAW OF THE CONSERVATION ENERGY was propounded ("the great basic law of motion") but it was put forth NOT qualitatively but only quantitatively as the "indestructibility and uncreatabilty of
motion."

But now (1885-- the time of the second preface) Engels sees a more dialectical approach as scientists are beginning to discuss THE TRANSFORMATION OF ENERGY which when fully understood will remove "the last vestige of an extra mundane creator." A mere ten years after Engel's death (1895) Einstein published his famous equation E=mc2.

Engels says we still see rigid barriers in Nature-- the wave vs particle theory of light had not yet bloomed into quantum physics-- but had he lived I don't think Engels would have been thrown off by such seeming contradictions. Contradiction is the essence of dialectics. He writes that: "The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions, though to be found in nature, are only of relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature only by our reflective minds-- this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature."

So, the purpose of the book is to reaffirm the scientific nature of Diamat, to exclude the erroneous accretions of Herr Dühring, and to demonstrate that modern science, including Diamat, is the result of a long tradition of philosophical development whose two poles (as we shall see) include Aristotle and Hegel.

Engels thinks that science must "assimilate the results of the development of philosophy during the past two and half thousand years" to avoid basing itself on some bogus world view [as the Nazi movement later did] and to also get rid of its metaphysical (i.e., mechanistic and non-dialectical) baggage) which is "its inheritance from English empiricism."

In the next article I will look at the two part introduction to Anti-Dühring.
[Anti-Düring I]

THE WAR COMES HOME: A REVIEW

The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans
by Aaron Glantz. 254 pages. UC Press $24.95 Book Review by Luis Carlos Montalván [reposted from The Huffington Post]

In January 2009 alone, 24 veterans of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide. The following month, the Army announced that there were 128 documented suicides in 2008, the highest number since it began keeping records in 1980.

When the subject of veterans' care is raised in most circles, people tend to think of the scandal at Walter Reed Hospital or of Soldiers and Marines returning home without limbs and/or with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Rarely, do they grasp the deeper problems facing veterans.

This ignorance, which is encouraged by Government agencies, explains why "The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans," will enflame readers' passions while enlightening their minds.

What makes this book about war different?

From the time of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the scrolls of Homer and Herodotus, literature's most memorable dramatis personæ have been warriors. Indeed, humanity seems continually captivated by the paradox captured by Tolstoy's War and Peace. Tolstoy further reminded us:

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

The author of "The War Comes Home," Aaron Glantz, who spent parts of three years covering the war in Iraq, does what no professional journalist has done heretofore - he chronicles combat from the bloody Middle Eastern battlefields to both the hospital beds where broken body parts lie and the living rooms where relationships are torn asunder as a hidden but real collateral damage of these wars.

The effects on America's sons and daughters, their families and our society at large are meticulously detailed through Glantz's powerfully compelling yet simply rendered factual accounting. He explains how the government and its systems have created the neglect behind the Walter Reed scandal as well as the outrage that is the Veterans Administration so-called health care system. In so doing, he appeals to our collective conscience.

One result amounts to an impassioned plea to the US government to wake up and undo the bureaucratic logjam that prevents wounded heroes from recovering. Glantz makes clear that the struggle begins the moment a service member returns home from the war zone. Veterans' readjustment to family, friends and society is often complicated or even sabotaged by the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Glantz discusses Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), the signature wound of Mr. Bush's wars that ravages the once able-minded. Citing mind-boggling RAND Corporation data, he reminds us that more than 320,000 veterans have experienced TBI while deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

And he reminds us that only when a returning soldier or Marine utters a cry for help does the fight really begin - against the unsympathetic and inhumane juggernauts of the Departments of Defense and Veterans' Affairs.

One of many personal stories woven into the narrative is that of Army Specialist Eric Edmondson. On October 2, 2005, while supporting a Marine Corps offensive near the Syrian border, his Stryker vehicle was struck by a terrorist-detonated Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Edmonson lost his right leg and his spleen to shrapnel. Eric's family had to put their own lives on hold in the effort to support their son by, as they put it, "trying to battle our way through the labyrinth of bureaucracy called government."

One of several trenchantly named chapters is "Homeless on the streets of America," so called because, according to records compiled by the VA and the National Council on Homeless Veterans, on any given night, nearly 200,000 veterans "sleep in a doorway, alley or box." Sad to say, most of these veterans served in Vietnam, but those of today's wars are steadily swelling the ranks of the homeless.

Full light is thrown on the growing backlog of veterans' disability claims. Since the start of the Iraq War, such claims "have grown from 325,000 to more than 600,000," Glantz writes. To the everlasting shame of the previous administration and others inside the beltway, neither the VA nor the DOD has done anything to anticipate the future increase of veterans. Six years into Iraq and Afghanistan, the VA still fails to care adequately and appropriately for these men and women.

Glantz's monograph raises the quintessential question that has been repeated throughout history:

"Why is it that, generation after generation, Americans who've risked their lives for their country return to do battle with their own government?"

The answer is elusive. But Glantz believes that when the media raise a veterans' issue, politicians are only temporarily stirred. Even then, it usually serves only to deprecate the mistreatment of those who have sacrificed for their country. Shortly after, both press and politicians tend to revert to idle talk that leaves veterans to suffer anguish and frustration in silent anonymity.

Simply put, "The War Comes Home" is transfixing. Like Rodin's famous sculpture, The Thinker, perched atop the Gates of Hell, what lies between the book's lines expresses simultaneous rage and sadness. For veterans who read the book, traumatic memories of fellow soldiers loved and lost may exacerbate physical and psychological wounds. So, be prepared to scream aloud, reach for the pills, or both.

Mr. Glantz concludes by asking what he calls "the billion-dollar question": Will the former administration's loathsome legacy mistreating millions of veterans continue, or will a new President's vision and promise bring forth the fulfillment of Abraham Lincoln's famous call

"...to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan"?

Only time and veterans will tell.