[PEN-L:7641] Forward

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From another list:

(((((((((((((((((((((((

by Sharon
Jones which from issue #2 of the New Zealand-based journal,
'Revolutionary Marxist' (Winter 1999).  RM is put out by some of the people
who produce the magazine 'revolution'.  A shorter, earlier draft of the
paper appeared in issue #8 of 'revolution' (Dec 1998/Feb 1999).

Reformulating the politics of human liberation today


At the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet bloc imploded, Francis Fukuyama
penned The End of History and the Last Man.  Fukuyama, to the initial
delight of much of the Western elite, took the implosion of the Soviet bloc
to represent the demise of all alternatives to liberal capitalism.
However the celebrations were shortlived.  These days the mood in the West
is decidedly pessimistic. Thus Fukuyama's follow-up book, Trust, dealt with
the downside of the triumph of the market: the fragmentation of society.

Things falling apart
Two key factors have driven this fragmentation - the collapse of
'communism' (and, with it, collective solutions generally )and the
protracted economic problems of the past 25 years.

The collapse of Stalinism removed the external factor cohering the
capitalist world.  Both 'the West' and much of the national identity of
individual Western capitalist states was shaped by their rulers' ability to
present the Soviet bloc as a threat.  Many of the core institutions of
Western capitalist societies were essentially products of the cold war.

At the same time as this external cohering factor was removed, the internal
economic dynamic of Western societies was grinding to a halt.  Slump
conditions, which returned with a vengeance to the metropolitan capitalist
countries in the early 1970s, have worn away at the economic foundations of
the West and its sense of security.

Twenty years of both Keynesian and free market attempts to regenerate
capitalism have failed to overcome the central problem for the capitalists
- falling profitability.  There have been mass unemployment, anti-trade
union laws and the breaking of the power of the old trade union movement,
and decreases in working class conditions of life - essential measures for
increasing the rate of exploitation and overcoming the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall.  Yet they have failed to restore levels of profitability
sufficient to make it possible or worthwhile for the capitalists to carry
out the massive new rounds of investment needed to regenerate industrial
and manufacturing production.

Capitalists have therefore continued to compensate by exporting capital;
speculating in foreign exchange, property, shares and futures; and engaging
in any other unproductive activity where profit rates are higher than in
productive enterprise.  These in turn have led to volatility in global
financial markets and to the bubble effect in a string of Third World
countries - from Mexico to Thailand.  Most of the 'tiger' economies of Asia
have turned out to be paper tigers rather than real ones.  There and in
Mexico - the great showpieces of Third World capitalism - the bubble has
burst.

Even in those Asian countries where substantial real industrialisation and
capital accumulation took place, such as Japan and South Korea, falling
profitability has had a devastating effect.   While workers' wages in South
Korea reached British levels earlier this decade, the economy is now
riddled with crisis.  According to an item on the country screened on TV3's
Nightline on September 29, output levels there have dropped to their lowest
in decades and 2000 South Koreans committed suicide in the previous three
months.

Japan, which was crucial to keeping the world economy afloat in the 1980s,
as the recession-plagued US economy could not play this role, has been hit
by economic malaise for a decade.  Recently Japanese officialdom finally
admitted the country was in recession.  The economic problems there are
mirrored by a political impasse.  Political parties have fragmented and
even a bourgeois regime with a plan to solve the crisis at the expense of
the working class has not emerged.

The exhaustion of capitalism
The long campaign to defeat the Soviet bloc, 'communism', national
liberation struggles and the enemy within (militant trade unionism) and to
overcome the slump, appears to have exhausted the resources of Western
'democratic' capitalism.  In defeating its human enemies abroad and at home
it has undermined its own intellectual foundations.

Moreover its failure to overcome the slump has undermined its material
foundations.  In this situation the certainties of the old postwar world -
economic progress, social reform, national identity - have virtually
disintegrated.  The capitalists, like their system, now appear exhausted.
It is certainly difficult today to find any really upbeat, optimistic
intellectual advocates of the system.  Positive visions of a brave new
capitalist world have been replaced by a culture of pessimism and
limitations among bourgeois intellectuals.

In fact, in fields such as economics, there has been a virtual collapse of
bourgeois theory.  The fact that 'recoveries' over the past 20 years have
been smaller and weaker, while each recession has cut deeper, has caused a
loss of faith in both Keynesian and free market approaches.  Unable to
explain real economic events by a rational investigation of the workings of
capitalist economy itself, since capitalism appears to defy their theories,
they even turned to a term from physics - hysteresis - to explain what has
been going on.  Hysteresis in physics refers to the failure of an object to
return to its previous equilibrium path once a disturbance is removed.  It
is now used to explain why, having removed militant trade unionism,
inflation and the other so-called disturbances, Western capitalism has not
resumed its postwar developmental arc.  But one might as well explain this
by the law of gravity or sunspots!

In fact, one prominent mainstream international economics journal even
recently revisited the sunspot theory, while now-departed ACT 'ideas man'
Simon Carr has described the current state of the New Zealand economy by
the old bourgeois superstition of 'animal spirits' being at work.

The stagnation of the production process has also led to the rise of
notions of a 'post-material' economy.  In New Zealand, the new magazine
Unlimited, launched at the end of 1998, sums up the concept.  According to
editor Vincent Heeringa:

"In the new economy, ideas, innovation and brain power mean more than
factories, machines and farms. In the new economy, intangibles like brands,
relationships and culture are more important drivers of business than the
old laws of labour and capital. . . There are no barriers to our success in
the new economy - save a lack of imagination."

Usually when people are high on something, they start seeing things.  In
this case, the editor - high on the 'new economy' - has lost sight of
something.  Namely, the way the new economy is predicated on the old
economy.

For a start, just where does he think all the computers, without which all
this innovation is impossible, are produced?  Not only is the whole
computer industry dependent on factory-line production, the entire 'new
economy' is as well.  Without hundreds of millions of industrial workers
around the world creating actual goods, there would be no surplus-value for
the 'creative' economy to cream off any profit at all.  At even the most
basic level - the very physical existence of these innovators - where does
Heeringa imagine his food comes from if not off farms?  Where does the
building he works in and all the equipment he uses come from?  Has
everything appeared out of thin air?
Like the rest of the middle class, the writers at Unlimited are unable to
inquire into the preconditions for their own existence - namely, the good
old-fashioned exploitation of labour-power by capital in the production
process.  This not only creates the actual products which the middle class
utilise, it also creates the total surplus-value of society, from which a
chunk is siphoned off for the services provided by the middle class
intelligentsia.

While this intelligentsia wallows in its ignorance and pseudo-creativity,
hundreds of thousands of workers in this country are working longer hours,
in worse conditions, for less pay in real terms.

More recently, I happened to be in a social setting where a prominent
academic economist/historian and columnist for the National Business Review
was declaiming on the difference between 'commodities' (which he hated) and
'brands' (which he liked).  An item produced capitalistically was, in his
view, no longer a commodity if it had a fancy brand name and packaging
attached to it.  The future, he was arguing, was in 'branding' because this
meant the good had a great deal of value-added and value-added products
were crucial in the global economy.  But this is price-added rather than
value-added.  No new value is being put into the commodity at all.

What is occurring is that the price is being drastically raised and the
funds spent purchasing such goods will simply be unavailable to be spent on
other goods. Only expanding production itself - or increasing the
labour-power and technology used in producing the specific commodities -
can increase the actual value embodied in the goods. If sought after brands
achieve a higher price, this means they sell above their value; other goods
then have to sell below their value or not at all.  The net value produced
in society does not change in this situation; existing surplus-value is
simply being redivided.  This is something that the great figures of
political economy, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would have
understood but which appears to be lost altogether on their sorry heirs.

What allows the production process to be disappeared by these middle class
commentators is the fact that the class struggle itself has virtually
ceased.  Once the struggle between labour and capital over the division of
the social product - between wages and profits - vanishes, then the realm
of production, where the wealth of society is produced, becomes seen as
unproblematic.  It then ceases to be theorised at all.  Next, it disappears
from view altogether, simply taken for granted.

But this is not unproblematic for capital in general.  For while
journalists like Heeringa can fantasise about the replacement of factories
and farms by "intangibles like human capital, brands and company cultures",
the capitalist class itself still has to be concerned with producing
commodities and thereby generating surplus-value.  Without production
lines, there is no creation of real wealth and capitalism cannot exist.

Bourgeois economic theory is clearly in crisis.  What is left of it is - on
the theoretical side - superstition, cargo cult theories and a total
confusion of value and price, and - on the empirical side - convoluted
models which simply track and predict economic factors and changes rather
than explaining the workings of the system.  Even the divides between
macro- and micro-economics and between theory and empiricism indicate the
irrationality and disintegration of bourgeois economic theory.  This sad
and sorry state in turn reflects the material exhaustion of the capitalist
system itself.

But the serious capitalists know that theories of post-materiality are no
answer.  Thus alongside the notions of post-materiality, the latest trends
in bourgeois economics are the preoccupation with 'risk' and the
development of 'caring capitalism'.

Risky business
The end of all the old certainties associated with the boom and the Cold
War, followed by the failures of both Keynesianism and 'new right' reforms
have left the bourgeoisie with an acute sense of uncertainty and risk.  In
addition, the overall stagnation of production in much of the advanced
capitalist world has led to the importance of what is increasingly
speculation and gambling, often dignified under the title 'the markets'.
Because 'the markets' are increasingly disconnected from real production
they are also particularly volatile and vulnerable to panics.  Even small
changes in mood, eg 'confidence', can have a major impact on share prices
and trading, exchange rates and so on.  Moreover, the attempt to apply an
inversion of another law of physics to economics - "what goes  down must go
back up" -  has been revealed as less than entirely reliable.  This has
reinforced the sense of things being out of control and deepened the
concern about 'risk'.

A spate of new works in a number of fields from sociology to economics have
appeared on the subject and this new field has finally reached New Zealand.
In early October 1998, for instance, Prime Minister Jenny Shipley and 150
other guests attended the launch of  Owning the Future: integrated risk
management in practice.  The book, containing a range of papers by New
Zealand, Australian, British and US experts, is published by Canterbury
University's Centre for Advanced Engineering and 'sponsored' by the
Ministry of Civil Defence, the Department of the Prime Minister and
Tranzrail.  CAE board of directors chairman Dr Francis Small told the
launch that, "In an increasingly unpredictable environment. . .   New
Zealand is going to have to become smarter at managing risk."  Shipley
herself claimed that New Zealand was especially "plugged in" to risk
management but also argued that "the idea of risk is not easily understood
- often it is regarded as a rather abstract notion and people constantly
defer both confronting it and planning effectively for the management of
that day-to-day risk.  Yet it is a fundamental aspect of all our lives."

One of the means of averting 'risk' is seen by an increasingly influential
school to be developing a more careful and caring capitalism - a nicer way
of exploiting labour-power.  In New Zealand, this has been pioneered by
people like muesli magnate Dick Hubbard and is championed by Auckland
University economics professor Tim Hazledine in his new book Taking New
Zealand Seriously: the economics of decency.

'Decent' capitalists like Warehouse founder-owner Stephen Tindall, rather
than the likes of Fay and Richwhite, now win business awards.  Even ACT
leader and 'new right' champion Richard Prebble sits on the board of a
freight company whose mission statement commits it to the new socially
responsible capitalism.
Sir Dryden Spring, former head of the Dairy Board and long-time corporate
fund-raiser for National, appeared at the Labour Party's conference in
November 1998 and expressed his alienation from National's supposed
radicalism (ie its commitment to radical economic restructuring) and his
agreement with much of Labour's policy.  Labour itself, the chief
instrument of the 'new right revolution' of the 1980s, now stands mid-way
between the fading 'new right' and the newer, shinier 'caring capitalism'.

Global trends in ideology
An interesting indication of the way things are going globally in terms of
bourgeois ideology in the field of economics is the Nobel Prize.  In 1997
the prize for economics went to Myron Scholes and Robert Merton for their
work in the field of the pricing of risk.  This year's prize went to Indian
economist Amartya Sen, whose work on poverty and inequality and the need to
take these into account when examining the economic 'health' of societies
led to him being dubbed "the conscience of the profession".

In fact while the left in New Zealand still demonises the Business
Roundtable, Roger Kerr-style forthright championing of the market went out
of vogue abroad several years ago and is well on its way out here as well.
The air of doom and fear surrounding the recent IMF- and World
Bank-sponsored meeting of finance ministers, international bankers and
businessmen in New York makes this clear.  As a report on the gathering in
the October 9 New York Times noted:

"international bankers here were visibly troubled by a wave of financial
woes washing from one country to the next.
'I woke up this morning an optimistic man,' said David Komansky, chairman
of Merrill Lynch & Co., who came here earlier in the week for a day of
meetings.   'By the end of the day, I wanted to jump out the window.'
'What I've seen is fear and people frightened,' he said. Frequent visitors
to the gathering, sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank, said they have never seen an atmosphere so downbeat. . .
'There's a real sense of pain,' said Sharif Ghalib, director of sovereign
rating for the London office of Standard & Poor's, a rating agency. 'All
the major financial players are criticized for not anticipating the
problems and for having no mechanisms to deal with it. I don't recall a
meeting as gloomy as this one.'
.. . . Official speeches were a cascade of bad news: Hans Tietmeyer, head of
Germany's powerful central bank, warned there is 'certainly no panacea for
overcoming the present problems.' He was followed by Gordon Brown,
chancellor of the Exchequer in England, who said 'market turmoil is going
to have an effect on world growth and in Britain.' Kiichi Miyazawa, finance
minister of Japan, talked of a 'risk of a serious deflationary spiral of
the entire world economy.'"

A new social contract?
Recently, political scientists and sociologists from the right and the
centre have joined in the liberal-left call for a new social contract to
restrain the social disruption caused by market reforms and globalisation.
Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard
University, argues, "We're neglecting this. We need a new social insurance
to soften world capitalism."  In 1997 he put forward his alternative in Has
Globalization Gone Too Far?

William Greider, author of One World, Ready or Not (Simon & Schuster, 1997)
suggests steps to "moderate the pace of industrial revolution" and reduce
the "danger of a tragic breakdown."  Among the moves he calls for are
controls on capital movements around the world, debt forgiveness for poorer
nations, higher taxes on wealth and lower rates of tax on working people.

Disillusioned conservative and politics professor at Oxford University John
Grey has denounced moderate leftist and right-wing parties for supporting
free trade and a single global market. In False Dawn: The Delusions of
Global Capitalism (Granta Books, 1998) he describes the single global
market as "a utopia that can never be realized but which has already
produced social dislocation and economic and political instability on a
large scale."

The attacks on the free market have even now been joined by George Soros,
long regarded by mainstream bourgeois figures as the unacceptable face of
capitalism due to his fortune-making activities in global speculation.  In
the February 1997 issue of Atlantic Monthly, he claimed that the free
market was one of the chief enemies of an open society.

The Asian economic turmoil has also had an effect on long-time supporters
of trade liberalisation and globalisation and the belief of the
international bourgeoisie in some of its key institutions.  As left-wing
historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in the October 20, 1998 British Guardian
newspaper:

"The Asian crisis. . . has played hell with the reputation of bankers,
economic advisers and gurus.  The giant, and spectacularly misnamed
Long-Term Capital Management Fund, with the assistance of two Nobel Prize
economists and an allegedly foolproof system, gambled away well over
$(US)100 billion until it had to be saved by, in effect, a rescue operation
of the US Federal government."

The London Times, Hobsbawn added, now describes the IMF's reputation as
having "'sunk to its lowest ebb since the body was set up. . . in 1944.'"
He further notes:

"Under the impact of economic crisis not only governments but some of the
most passionate champions of free market globalisation, such as economists
Paul Krugman and Jagdish Bhagwati, are now envisaging heterodox economic
policies like exchange control, amid weepings and gnashings of teeth from
the City of London."

In fact, the gloomy prognostications from left, right and centre tend to
exaggerate the current woes.  Capitalism is exhausted, but it is not on the
verge of collapse. In the absence of mass working class resistance there
will be no meltdown, however unstable 'the markets' might be.  Moreover, in
the absence of a powerful working class challenge, the general air of doom
and gloom can intensify pessimism about the prospects for improving the
world.  Overcoming such pessimism has to be crucial to the Marxist project
today.

A critical element of this is examining where capital accumulation is at
today and how the ruling class sees the world, keeping in mind that their
understanding is - like that of the working class - reified.

The politics of low horizons
As the system has run out of steam and the bourgeoisie has run out of big
ideas, 'risk', 'caring capitalism' and 'low horizons' have become the order
of the day.  They, not 'new right' thinking and certainly not bold new
initiatives, represent the ideology most in tune with fin-de-millenium
capitalism.  Where does that leave us?

The combination of the impasse reached by capitalism today and the collapse
of the Soviet bloc and old labour movement explains the weakening of
traditional institutions, sources of authority and political parties.  The
exhaustion of the capitalist order reduces the options for every person and
every party which accepts that order.  The crucial element of the
reification involved in bourgeois consciousness today is the way in which
the problems of capital accumulation and social decay are perceived as
natural limits.  Economic and political policy is reduced to managing the
malaise within these limits.  Even risk aversion has been replaced by risk
management - the bourgeoisie now lacks even confidence in its ability to
prevent major problems breaking out.  In effect, capitalist economy is seen
by individual capitalists in terms comparable to those of chaos theory.

This framework of low horizons clearly affects mainstream politics in New
Zealand.  There is little real difference today between the opposing
National and Labour parties or their policies - in fact there is a growing
consensus around economic issues as neither party can restore vitality to
an economically exhausted system. This consensus  is not a positive
agreement based on a principled future vision for society but, instead, a
defensive consensus based on an inability to see 'beyond' the low horizons
of the existing social system.
In the context of this negative consensus, old loyalties and political
principles collapse.  In the absence of any strongly held principles
pragmatism and  'personality' are the rule of the day with parties no
longer forming around programmatic political doctrines but instead around
trivial localist issues that are motivated by  the narrowest of interests.
When seven MPs  set up United NZ in 1996, it became the third biggest party
in Parliament.  Yet it offered no principled, dynamic vision; its leaders
simply declared that the party wanted ordinary people to be able to get on
with their lives.

When NZ First split several months ago, there were no clear-cut policy
divisions, no left and right; it was simply a division between those who
wished to stay in government and protect their positions and salaries and
those who realised that the party would get wiped out electorally unless it
left the Coalition and repositioned itself well before the next election.
Tau Henare's new party, Mauri Pacific, has also been formed without
policies.  Mimicking the more vacant-minded of today's youth, Henare
declared the party just wants New Zealand to be 'absolutely awesome'.

Leaders of existing political parties can do little more than enact a kind
of 'me too' politics.  In 1995 Helen Clark echoed the anti-French nuclear
testing policy of Jim Bolger.   The supposedly left-wing Alliance now
imitates Labour's tax policy and adopts an overall economic policy which
pro-market columnists such as Neville Bennett of the National Business
Review find highly acceptable.  On the 'radical right', ACT has abandoned
much of its early programme.
'Prebble's rebels' now stand for 'values' rather than policies, and instead
of arguing for a coherent right-wing position, send a bus around the
country 'listening to the people'.  Henare suggests that his party's focus
will be on reformulating 'citizenship'.  Clear-cut principles and
programmes are out all round.

The introduction of MMP has only accelerated the drift away from politics
to personalities and 'values', each as empty as the other. Within such a
climate the vision needed for a serious challenge to the limits of
capitalism is sorely lacking.

The coming NZ general elections will offer people less choice - and even
less bribes to the electorate - than ever.  For example, in the past people
had certain expectations of improvements in their lives.  Politicians would
have to relate to these in order to get elected.  So parties would often
vie with each other to see who could offer the most.  Thus Muldoon and the
National Party in 1975 offered workers a more generous superannuation plan
than Labour.  These days, however, people's expectations are so low and
what the system can deliver is so miserly, that politicians vie with each
other to see who can offer the least!  Last November's Labour Party
conference was a weekend of indulgence in lowered horizons.  The emphasis
was on how little Labour can deliver and this is now put forward publicly
by the leadership of this bourgeois-liberal party as a reason why people
should vote for them.  Meanwhile most of the 'radical left' tag along
behind, suggesting that workers vote for this party and/or the Alliance,
which has abandoned its attempts to be a social movement and settled for
being a junior partner in administering slump capitalism with Helen Clark
and Michael Cullen.

The old institutions of the left are in a state of marked decline.  Not
only does the Labour Party have hardly any working class members left and
arouse no enthusiasm among workers, but what few trade union struggles
there are in countries such as Australia and New Zealand end up in the
courts literally before the left has time to make a placard.  Those who
naively assumed that the Australian waterfront dispute was the herald of a
new era of industrial struggle have been sorely disappointed.  This
situation has been replicated in New Zealand with the dispute over the fire
service.  The number of days lost through industrial action in this country
has dropped by 95 percent in the course of the 1990s.

Even in a country like South Korea, which boasted a powerful radical labour
movement in the 1980s and early 1990s during the boom years, the militant
fightback - which much of the left around the world expected - has failed
to materialise.  Suicide rather than class struggle appears to be the order
of the day there.  While the left hunts in vain for any sustained renewal
of old-style trade union struggle, back on planet earth things have moved
on.

While the establishment desperately hopes that there is light at the end of
what appears an endless tunnel, the left hallucinates about more May 1968s
being just around the corner.  The result is that the left tends to go from
a brief bout of euphoria on the rare occasion a picket line pops up for a
few seconds to depression when the struggle ends in the courts and is
demoralised and defeated.

Dreaming at the fag-end of the postwar boom?
The result is that much of the left of the 1970s and 1980s has ended up
lowering their own horizons to adjust to 'new realities'.  Thus long after
the NZ Labour Party has become a liberal middle-class party, most of the
left still pretend that it is a 'workers party', call for workers to vote
for it and console themselves with the thought that at least Helen Clark is
not Roger Douglas.  Much of the old radical left has, meanwhile, up and
departed from their organisations and collapsed into the Alliance or even
the Greens.  Others have given up altogether and gone home to tend their
gardens or concentrate on their careers.

However this collapse is rationalised by those who have ended up taking
this path, it simply boils down to an acceptance of the existing framework
of society.  This is a framework in which the market imposes increasingly
narrow limits on human potential and wreaks havoc on much of the world.  It
is indeed ironic - or perhaps a telling comment on the politics of the
'children of '68' - that at the very time the market economy itself is
exhausted, so much of the left has also become exhausted and has abandoned
the project of social revolution and human liberation.  Such 'leftism', it
now appears, was merely the juvenile dreaming of radical intellectuals at
the fag-end of the postwar boom; now that long-term slump has set in,
making the Marxist project more relevant and important than ever, they can
only throw up their hands in despair.

In this atmosphere, in which political disorientation and pessimism are
widespread, it is essential to re-establish the case for liberation.   This
case does not, and cannot, rest on the old left's politics of righteous
moral indignation and radical reform through (capitalist) state
intervention.  People serious about changing the world will never be
convincing as long as they confine themselves to cross-carrying and
witness-bearing at the immorality of the system.  Indeed, such moralistic
approaches are reflections of powerlessness and lack of genuinely
transformative-liberatory politics.

What is to be done?
What has to be established is that the current dismal state of politics
expresses the material exhaustion of capitalist society itself.  As long as
capitalism remains we are stuck with the slump society which has been our
lot over the past 20-25 years.  The system of production for private profit
has reached an historic impasse - the end of the line.  It can no longer
develop the means of production and push forward science and technology -
yet these are vitally necessary if the problems of the world are to be
solved.  We need more and better science, more and better technology,
greater productive capacity, so that every human being on the planet can
make for themselves the best life possible.

Italian Marxist Gramsci noted that in a situation in which the old system
is not yet dead and the new society cannot yet be born there is an
interregnum in which all kinds of morbid symptoms appear.  The morbid
symptoms of our age focus on various forms of denigration of humanity and
the rise of a climate of fear. Humans are increasingly accused of having
ideas above our station.  Our 'disrespect' for nature and our 'hubris' at
thinking we can shape the world for our own ends, once favourite themes of
hardened old reactionaries attacking the Enlightenment, have now become
widespread in liberal and left circles.  Any new developments, from
breakthroughs in medicine to cloning to new food technology, are seen not
as significant achievements of humanity but become focal points for fear
and irrationality.

Such attacks on humanity need to be strongly opposed since they serve only
to legitimise and naturalise the limits on human progress which have been
political culture based on limits and low horizons is a greater obstacle to
the development of anti-capitalist politics and a serious struggle for
human emancipation than has-beens like Richard Prebble and Roger Kerr and
their followers.

It is vital to remember that, as Marx noted, there are two sides to
capitalism.  The positive side is that it massively raises the productivity
of humanity, thereby laying the basis for human emancipation.  The other
side is that the profit-motive serves to restrict this progressive
development of productivity.
It is a reflection of the pathetic state of 'radical' alternative politics
that so many on the 'left' concentrate on attacking the first - ie the
progressive - aspect of capitalism.  Such an approach means abandoning the
idea that there is actually a dynamic within capitalism towards a higher
form of society.  Yet if there is no objective dynamic along these lines,
socialism is reduced to a mere pipe-dream, a prayer, or envisioned as a
regression to lower standards of living.

Marx's hostility to capitalism was not based on the system's
'productivism'.  Quite the contrary; he drew attention to the limits that
profitability places on the massive expansion of production made possible
by the technological and scientific developments associated with
capitalism.  The problem is that capital itself becomes a fetter on the
very development it has unleashed.

In contrast to Greens and liberal leftists who alibi the failures of
capitalism as 'natural limits', what is needed most immediately is an
approach which combines:
1. a vigorous defence of the achievements of humanity, including the
advances made under capitalism in production, science and technology
2. a rigorous analysis of the economic decay and exhaustion of the
capitalist stage of society
3. a critique of the morbid symptoms arising from that decay
4. a pinpointing of the dynamic within capitalism towards its replacement
by a higher form of society
5. an intellectual offensive to show the inspiring potential of conscious
human action to change the world
This combination points to the possibility and necessity for humanity's
next big leap forward.

Through such an approach we can start to develop the ideas and political
vehicles which can win the battle for a future of material abundance and
human freedom.
								Sharon Jones