Re: Brad's B&S quotations

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brad, I don't see the point here. I'm sure we could find some quotes from
the intellectual founders of your school of economics (e.g., Vilfredo
Pareto) in order to discredit your views. That would also be a useless
enterprise.

> [Brad] started rereading Baran and Sweezy's _Monopoly Capital_ and could
> not stop...
>
> ...capitalism's basic law of motion, temporarily thwarted [during World
> War II] soon resumed its sway. Unemployment kept steadily upward, and the
> character of the new technologies of the postwar period sharply
> accentuated the disadvantages of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. By
> the end of the 1950's the real state of affairs could no longer be
> concealed: it was impossible to continue to believe in the existence of a
> meliorative trend

B&S believed that the underlying tendency of a "monopoly" capitalist
economy was to sink toward what they saw as the normal state, a 1930s-type
depression. This ignores Marx's critique of an earlier generation of
underconsumptionists, i.e., that there is a strongly dynamic side to
capitalism.

> ... one need not have a specific idea of a reasonably constructed
> automobile, a well planned neighborhood, a beautiful musical composition,
> to recognize that... the rock-and-roll that blares at us exemplif[ies] a
> pattern of utilization of human and material resources which is inimical
> to human welfare...

this is old-Left elitist nonsense.

> The history of recent decades is particularly rich in examples of the
> substitution of authoritarian for democratic government in capitalist
> countries: Italy in the early 1920's, Germany in 1933, Spain in the later
> 1930's, France in 1958?

yup. These days, of course, it's the IMF and World Bank encouraging
authoritarian "parliamentary" regimes (like Russia's Vladimir "Ras" Putin),
just as the CIA encourages military take-overs.

> And then continued down my bookshelf and ran across these great
> contributions to analysis from _The Theory of Capitalist Development_ and
> _The Present as History_:
>
> "The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production.
> Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at
> last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist
> integument. The knell of private property sounds. The expropriators are
> expropriated." This is, however, not so much a prediction as a vivid
> description of a tendency...

This is Sweezy's valid point at the start of the TCD: volume I of CAPITAL
is at a very high level of abstraction. Turning that volume's "predictions"
into real-world predictions means that we have to bring in the
complications that are a necessary part of a lower level of abstraction.
(Similarly, orthodox economics cranks out results from idealized models and
then modifies them in light of "exogenous shocks" and "frictions" and the
like.)

> We must conclude that, because of the differences in their underlying
> economies, the socialist sector of the world would [after World War II]
> quickly stabilize itself and push forward to higher standards of living,
> while the imperialist sector would flounder in difficulties...

this is the B&S-type stagnationism again, based on their real-world
experience during the 1920s and 1930s.

> From the standpoint of economic science, the political leadership in the
> Soviet Union is acting as the agent of the working class. No relation of
> exploitation exists between controllers and workers. The real issue is
> one of general interests and objectives, which are prescribed by the
> structure and form of social relations as a whole. In this sense the
> objective of those who direct the Soviet economy can only be production
> of use values which corresponds in every way to the interests of the
> working class. We might, therefore, say that the working class is the
> ruling class in the Soviet Union...

This is Sweezy's apology for the USSR (which he did not take as far as the
Communist Party folks did). He later repudiated this view.

> And worst of all:
>
> The publication in 1952 of Stalin's _Economic Problems of Socialism in the
> USSR_ would make possible today a more satisfactory reply. In the light of
> [Stalin's] explanation I would like to amend the statement which Mr.
> Kazahaya criticizes. [The amended statement] conveys my meaning more
> accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord
> with Stalin's view...

Well, maybe Stalin was right about some things. (Even Milton Friedman is
right now and then.) What, specifically, was he talking about here? Simply
agreeing with Stalin doesn't mean that someone is wrong or evil.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine