[Marxism] Jean-Francois Revel Aboard the Enterprise...

["www.leninology. blogspot.com" <leninology@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jean-Francois Revel could once claim to be a socialist of considerable
standing. But have a wee look at his latest screed for The American
Enterprise Institute . Or, if you can't be bothered doing that, allow me to
pick out the highlights and make fun of them for you:

(Or, just click here:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_leninology_archive.html#108404121492911836)

Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism


How to understand this war against globalization...?

What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means
freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently
hostile to that. But behind this fight lies an older and more fundamental
struggle?against economic liberalization, and against the chief
representative thereof, which is the United States. Anti-globalism carnivals
often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme
scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist
tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America
are impossible to separate.


Mark the conflation - economic liberalisation is, for the New Revel, the
same as "economic freedom". This is peculiar, since most anti-capitalist
activists would tell you that what they object to about "globalisation" is
not necessarily the movement of goods from one end of the earth to the
other, and certainly not the movement of peoples from country to country. It
is precisely the unfreedom that accrues to those who are excluded by TRIPs,
and the lack of power of domestic constituencies over the forces which
determine their lives (since economic liberalisation removes control from
accountable bodies like parliament to unaccountable corporations) that
arouses the hostility of much of the developing world and some of the
developed world.

But more crucially, Revel is too sophisticated a person to imagine that
"globalisation" is not a contested term. For Revel, it may very well mean
freedom of movement for persons and goods. However, this is not the only
view. Most anti-capitalists regard the term as a neutral cover for a
political project which they prefer to call "neo-liberalism", and which has
taken the form of the attempted Multilateral Agreement on Investment, Gats,
TRIPs and so on. There is also the additional criticism that the free
movement of goods and the free movement of people are strictly not part of
the same process. In this regard, Kenan Malik makes the point that:


These days the cost of a Easyjet fare will take you from Budapest to Luton,
and it's not much more to fly in from Beijing. Immigration only becomes
expensive when it's illegal and you have to pay traffickers to smuggle you
across borders. Make all immigration legal and it becomes dirt cheap.


Quite. But the decreasing regulation of trade is directly proportional to
the increasing regulation of migration. One aspect of the anti-capitalist
movement is addressed precisely to this problem (see, for example, Teresa
Hayter's essay in Emma Bircham ed., Anti-Capitalism: A Guide To The Movement
).

Revel continues:

"The simplistic article of Marxist faith that capitalism is absolute
evil..."

Would that Marxism had the appeal of a faith, (although it admittedly
requires a certain suspension of disbelief - like most political philosophy
in my view)! But no Marxist of serious standing actually considers
capitalism an absolute evil, and Marx certainly did not. Consider this
passage from the Communist Manifesto:


The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left
no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy
water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom ? Free Trade. In
one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it
has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage
laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.


Not unmixed praise, to be sure - but it was part of Marx's strategy to
praise capitalism more fervently than the most naive liberal, all the better
to bury it. Frederic Jameson once wrote (in The Cultural Turn, I think) that
one should develop a sensibility [about post-modernism] like Marx's, in
which one was capable of appreciating in a single thought both the
demonstrably baleful effects of capitalism and also its dynamic, liberatory
potential.

Revel, then, is rioting (revelling?) in a comic book version of Marxism,
which is highly suitable for his audience of spear-carriers.


But ultimately it is something even bigger that the anti-globalizers want to
destroy: liberal democracy and free-market economics. Or quite simply
liberty itself.


We're off into wonder-land now. Iago-like evil lurks behind the
anti-capitalist movement, a motiveless malignity that would like to crush
nothing less than "liberty itself".


According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed
ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority. This is
of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth
century for the industrialized nations of Western Europe and North America.
But we all know how history has confirmed that brilliant prophecy.


To extend a little generosity to Revel, this distortion of Marxism is not
unknown in economic textbooks (introductions and guides - Marxism rarely
features in mainstream macroeconomic text-books). But, of course, neither
Marx nor the anti-capitalist movement expect or have expected absolute
immiseration to be the rule for either the advanced capitalist core or the
increasingly excluded periphery. It is true that there has been a measured
increase in absolute poverty in the world over the last thirty years:


The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 840 million
people are malnourished, the great mass of them living in countries of the
Third World. More than half the countries for which statistics are available
do not have enough food to provide all their population with the minimum
daily requirement of calories. In some regions hunger has become far more
general: across Africa the average household now consumes 25 percent less
than in the early 1970s.


But while Marx inherited the notion of "absolute immiseration" from Ricardo,
and held it as he was writing the Communist Manifesto, his views on writing
Das Kapital are considerably altered. He later developed the concept of a
"subsistence" wage level, which would be determined by socio-historical
factors. Trotsky developed a similar idea on reviewing the Communist
Manifesto in 1938.

Nonetheless, Revel has an answer for those who cite Africa as an example of
market failure:


This is most obvious in Africa, the only Third World continent to have
actually declined. Impoverishment there has political, not economic, causes.
It is statism, not the market, and socialism, not capitalism, that has
destroyed the African economies. After independence, the African elites who
formed the political leadership generally adopted the Soviet and Chinese
systems.


This might pass as an argument were it not the case that China is presently
booming, that poverty has declined in China from 63.8% of the population
living below $1.08 a day in 1981 to 16.6% today. Similarly, the impeccable
capitalist states of South Asia have experienced a reduction in poverty -
yet, even today, 31.3% of its citizens live on an income below $1.08 per
day. This, before anyone starts barking, is not a defense of China. Amartya
Sen famously compared India and China on life expectancy, poverty and
starvation. Noting that China was well ahead of India on most indicators, he
nevertheless noted that China had been fatally prone to famine precisely
because of its undemocratic political structure:


"Consider China. Even before the recent economic reforms, China had been
much more successful than India in economic development. The average life
expectancy, for example, rose in China much more than it did in India. Well
before the reforms of 1979, reached something like the high figure ---
nearly 70 years at birth --- that is quoted now. China was not able to
prevent famine. It is estimated that the Chinese famines of 1958-61 killed
close to 30 million people --- 10 times more than the 1943 famine in British
India. The so-called "Great Leap Forward" initiated in the late 1950s was a
massive failure, but the Chinese government continued to pursue much the
same disastrous policies three more years. It is hard to imagine that this
could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and has an
independent press.

"The lack of a free system of news distribution misled even the government
itself. It believed its own propaganda and the rosy reports of local party
officials. Indeed, there is evidence that just as the famine was moving
towards its peak, the Chinese authorities mistakenly believed that they had
100 million more metric tons of grain than they did.

"These issues remain relevant in China today. Since the economic reforms of
1979, official Chinese policies have been based on the acknowledgment of the
importance of economic incentives without a similar acknowledgment of the
importance of political incentives. When things go reasonably well, the
disciplinary role of democracy might not be missed; but when big policy
mistakes are made, this lacuna can be disastrous."


However, while India avoided famine (after 1943), it invested far less in
rural health care services than China. Hence, approximately every 8 years in
India, the number of people who dying from starvation, poor health,
malnutrition, and diseases equals to a 1958-60 Chinese famine. (Jean Drèze
and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action Clarendon Press, 1989). The point
is that political democracy and economic democracy are not co-substantial.
And what has happened in Africa? Mugabe, whom Revel bizarrely accuses the
anti-capitalist movement of "defending", has implemented, since 1989 at
least, an impeccable neo-liberal programme. He has slashed taxes on the top
income bracket from 60 percent to 45 percent, and corporation taxes from 50
percent to 37 percent. Government revenue has declined as a share of
national income by 5%. He has pursued this programme at the behest of the
IMF, in fact, enemy number one of anti-capitalists. The official ideology of
such Structural Adjustment Programmes is one of assisting growth. However:

"Although there have been a number of studies on the subject over the last
decade, one cannot say with certainty whether 'programs' have worked or
not.... On the basis of existing studies, one certainly cannot say whether
the adoption of programs supported by the Fund led to an improvement in
inflation and growth performance. In fact it is often found that programs
are associated with a rise in inflation and a fall in growth rate" (Mohsin
Kahn, The Macroeconomic Effects of Fund Supported Adjustment Programs, IMF
staff papers, vol. 37, no. 2, 1990, pp. 196 and 122, emphasis added). ( IMF
tightens the screws on Zimbabwe, Jean Shaoul, 18 August 1999 ).


Revel mistakes simple declarative statements and bald assertions for
argument, however:


The anti-globalists are often incoherent. They brought mayhem to Seattle in
the name of combating a "savage" globalism that "profits only the rich." Yet
which groups met in Seattle? The World Trade Organization (WTO), whose role
is precisely to monitor international economic transactions so as to prevent
them from being "savage." ...

If you ask the developing countries what they want, they will tell you they
want more globalization, not less. What they desire most of all is freer
access to the world?s best markets for their products. So when well-heeled
young radical protestors try to subvert meetings whose goal is to extend
free trade and strengthen poor countries? ability to export goods, they
actually act as enemies of the world?s poor.


One wonders, then, why it should be the case that institutions such as the
World Trade Organisation consider it within their various duties to attempt
the imposition of schemes such as the MAI, already alluded to, which would
have invested corporations with the powers that properly accrue to
democratic states? One wonders if Revel has actually attended any of the
demonstrations he derides as having been populated by "well-heeled young
radical protestors"? Revel, still not satisfied, succumbs to further
absurdity:

"Democrats worthy of the name should not forget that power is conferred by
ballots, not by bricks hurled through windows. It is disturbing that the
Left too often ignores this principle."

Power indeed ought to be conferred through ballots. Until we are allowed a
vote on the decisions of the WTO and its confederate organisations, however,
bricks hurled through windows remains all too timid a response. And a
younger Revel might well have been the one with the make-shift missiles in
his hands. Instead, he now writes on behalf of those who have use of real
missiles when they don't like what is happening. Maturity, as Terry Eagleton
once wrote, is a myth that only the young still believe in.  He ought to
have included those apostates who regard with such miserable condescension
the ideals of their youth.

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