Re: a false dichotomy: economic vs. political issues [was:Darwin's God]

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/10/07, Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yoshie, now:
> > The welfare state, military Keynesianism, shifting to the poorer
> > countries, etc. all have had the same effect in the sense that crises
> > like the Great Depression have not happened in the West and may not
> > happen again here.
>
> with so-called "globalization" (i.e., the second phase of
> international capitalist integration, from approximately the 1970s,
> after the first one of the 19th century), the difference between the
> rich countries and the poor countries is fading. (The class
> differences within the countries aren't fading, obviously, but are
> getting more extreme.) So this rosy scenario seems quite limited in
> its validity.

The insulation of the West from a crisis may not last, but we can't
count on its not lasting either, so if there is to be a future of
socialism in the West, we have to figure out how it can make a
political difference here even without a crisis.

> it's true that M&E tended to see the development of a "self-organized
> & class-conscious working class" as somewhat automatic, extrapolating
> from the trends of their own time (the development of the German SD
> party, the class struggles in France, etc.) They also hoped that they
> could trust the working class to do part B itself rather than having
> some intellectuals tell them how to do it. Thus, M&E's most concrete
> discussions of what socialism mean were based directly on actual
> working-class practice (the Paris Commune, the Gotha Program).
>
> But since Lenin, these questions have been discussed a lot. People
> like E.P. Thompson and the "new social historians" have added a lot of
> information to our knowledge of this subject. It's not like there has
> not been a debate. One major problem was that until 1991 or so, many
> leftists thought that part of the world had already made the
> transition to socialism, which stifled a lot of discussion. Then, with
> the fall of Stalinism and social democracy, along with the
> acceleration of globalization under the guidance of a monopolar
> superpower, people have become demoralized.
>
> As for the "far more intellectual energy expended on explaining
> commodity fetishism, the mechanism of surplus value extraction,
> contradictions of capitalism, why crises are  inherent in capitalism,
> etc.," it's been pointed out before -- by Perry Anderson among others
> -- that such subjects tend to dominate when Marxist intellectuals have
> no social movements to relate to (and to learn from).

Since the Paris Commune, there have been at least three moments when
the possibility of transition to socialism was on the political
horizon: the Spanish Civil War, France of 1968, and the Meidner Plan.
Two of them were anarchists in fact (in Spain) or spirit (France) --
both held back by the largest current of the Marxist tradition then --
and the last was social democratic.  So, when and where movements
existed in the West to which intellectuals could attach themselves,
Marxism as understood by many Marxists then ironically played the role
of a brake or had a little role to play.  Could it be because many
Marxists by then had ceased to think about transition to socialism in
the North (while still hoping for it in the South)?

> Yoshie:
> > I'm thinking of debates over underconsumption vs. overproduction and
> > things like those.  Some of the crisis theory debates in the past
> > originally had some political implications, with regard to what to
> > think of Keynesian economics, how to explain imperialism, and so on.
> > But it seems like debate on Keynesian vs. Marxist economics has become
> > virtually moot as just about everyone in the West has become basically
> > social democratic in practice (and if that's the political
> > destination, Keynes makes a lot of sense), and attempts to get a
> > theory of imperialism out of the laws of motion of capitalism seem to
> > have petered out.  Hence my claim that crisis theory has exhausted
> > itself.
>
> I get the feeling that you just don't want to discuss political
> economics, Yoshie. Maybe talking about economic issues is boring to
> non-economists, but broad generalizations of the sort in the paragraph
> above don't help at all. They're talking about economics without
> presenting any content.

I basically wish to highlight the fact that the entire theoretical
debates on such question petered out (without making judgement about
this or that participant's theory in the debates); and in a similar
fashion, the Marxist/socialist feminist debate on domestic labor
faded.

> Or maybe the problem is that you don't like political-economic
> _theory_, as opposed to empiricist explorations like finding
> economics-related stories on-line and then posting them to pen-l.

I'd love to see debates on theory of imperialism, for instance, but
analyses of imperialism today (which have gotten revived to a certain
extent for obvious reasons) made by leftists and even Marxists seem to
me to be mostly or entirely empiricist in character.  (Several years
ago, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire stirred up some debates,
and their thoughts were indeed theoretical in some sense if wrong
overall, but it is striking that both are philosophers, not
economists.  The events since then have made their theory already
quite out of date.)

Marxists and other leftists have little to say about the political
economy of Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East in general,
etc. either, empirically or theoretically.  MERIP used to carry
Marxist takes on such questions, but it basically has gone in the
direction of NACLA*, much more liberal, much more empiricist than
before.

* The latest issue of NACLA, focused on sex and gender questions, has
very good and interesting articles, however.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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