Re: Re: Re: US Consumer Confidence index surges

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

Louis,
      Declining rate of profit?  Oh, so you really
are into all that OPE-L stuff after all, eh?  Do
you buy the Kliman-McGlone counterattack
against the Okishio Theorem to save the idea,
or do you prefer Fred Moseley's more empirical
approach with its special categorizations of labor?
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 10:09 AM
>Subject: [PEN-L:9662] Re: Re: US Consumer Confidence index surges


> >That is probably because Marxists have lost self-confidence in our
> >own political tradition.  Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, etc. used to
> >argue that humanity can do better than even what the *best* of
> >capitalism can offer.  Many of us today, in contrast, sound as if
> >Marxism can be *no competition* to capitalism in *boom times* (even
> >though the neoliberal recovery has been a *paltry* one).  *If* the
> >only virtue of Marxism were that it's better than the Great
> >Depression, the working class would be correct not to take interest
> >in it.
> >
> >Yoshie
>
> I have an entirely different take on the question. What I believe the
> differences are about can best be understood by comparison with the
battles
> inside the Second International with Rosa Luxemburg on one side and Eduard
> Bernstein on the other. In the late 1800s capitalism experienced a
> prolonged expansionary phase which led many Marxists to believe that
> something qualitatively had changed. "Evolutionary socialism" was premised
> on the belief that the institutions of monopoly capitalism could be
> gradually transformed into socialism by expanding the power of the working
> class through peaceful, legal parliamentary and trade union activity.
>
> Luxemburg argued that the rising standard of living and democratic
openings
> were largely connected to the rise of imperialism which allowed the class
> struggle to be co-opted in countries like England and Germany. While the
> Kaiser was instituting the first social security system in modern times,
he
> was at the same time turning the territory now called Namibia into a
> concentration camp, which served as a model for Hitler's camps years
later.
>
> Over the past 55 years or so, we have experienced a similar trend. It also
> has had a similar disorienting effect. While the Second International of
> today has long ago dropped any pretensions to socialism, and while the
> Communist Parties have tended to fill the vacuum left by such parties, the
> Marxist intelligentsia has worked overtime to restyle a Bernsteinian
> worldview suitable for the modernist and postmodernist epoch. As Ellen
> Meiksins Wood has pointed out, the growth of postmodernism can be directly
> linked to the bull market that kicked in during the early 1980s. By the
> same token, postmodernism has begun to lose strength because of the
> difficulty of sustaining illusions in a permanent boom, especially in the
> financial markets.
>
> Some of the Marxist sects tend to adopt a "worse the better" kind of
> catastrophism. Despite their "stopped clock is right once a day"
> tendencies, there is useful information to be gleaned from something like
> Ted Grant's "In defense of Marxism" website which specializes in this sort
> of thing. (http://www.marxist.com/)
>
> But in reality, the broader issues are about the continuing relevance of
> some of Marx's core theoretical precepts, especially the declining rate of
> profit. Frankly, I find much of the chatter about the NASDAQ rather
> limited. It does tend to look at the stock markets as some kind of rectal
> thermometer that can be used to determine the health of the patient.
>
> What I find much more interesting is the changes in the American economy
> brought on by deregulation, which have reached something of a climax in
the
> rolling blackouts in California. The real question for Marxists and
> progressive economists is whether this tendency is some kind of momentary
> abberation brought on by the machinations of crooked capitalists or
> something more intrinsic to the system. I am of the opinion that such
> tendencies are as central to the operations of the US economy as
> unemployment is to the post-USSR economy and for many of the same reasons
> that I will explore in detail when I post something here on airline
> deregulation.
>
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>