PEN-L message, Re: [Pen-l] Capitalism's Burning House

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I agree with the passages from the interview below

There is a strange synergy going on

See this article in the International Issue of Newsweek on "Why China Works"
http://www.newsweek.com/id/178810/page/2

I do not know where they get the statistic from but they claim that

"The leadership's faith in its own ability to mold markets may derive from
the fact that most are engineers, trained to build from a plan. Eight out of
the nine top party officials come from engineering backgrounds, and the
practicality of their profession may also help explain why they didn't buy
into risky and Western financial innovation."

So *if* this works, and the article predicts7% growth for China this year,
it will be because China is run by a purer more single minded,
intelligentsia, so the argument implies. This could have a strong influence
in the West if it remains difficult for quite some time to re-privatise the
banks, and populist anger is vented on the inflated salaries and the
irresponsible behaviour of poorly regulated finance capitalism.

Something about monopoly capitalism being the eve of the socialist
revolution?
But against such a technological background how will the class struggle
become more, not less, transparent in each country?

How best to make these processes "visible"?

Chris Burford

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 9:21 PM
Subject: [Pen-l] Capitalism's Burning House

Capitalism's Burning House: Interview with John Bellamy Foster
by WIN Magazine

^^^
CB: Nice explanation of the end of classical political economy and the
founding of neo-classical economics

^^

-clip-
I think it is best to see this as a whole phase of capitalist development,
which we could call monopoly-finance capital, with neoliberalism as its main
legitimating ideology. Of course this period generated extraordinarily bad
economics: monetarism, supply-side economics, rational expectations theory,
new classical economics, etc. Even the name of the system was changed from
capitalism to a vague and essentially meaningless ideological designation of
the "free market."
John Kenneth Galbraith in the title of his last book called all of this The
Economics of Innocent Fraud. Like orthodox economics in general (not
excluding the bastard Keynesianism of the Cold War era) it was a means of
control and a way of justifying what capital found necessary.

Orthodox economics is not innocent of class analysis; rather the class
position that it represents requires the ideological concealment of class
relations (class does not exist as a category in neoclassical economics).
This, however, does not prevent them from constructing concepts (for example
the "natural rate of unemployment") which are means of maintaining class
power. In contrast, nineteeenth-century classical political economy was
explicit about not only class but also the political nature of economics.
As Marx explained in Capital, only when the bourgeoisie had conquered the
state in the 1830s and '40s did scientific political economy turn into
vulgar political economy. The new orthodoxy of marginalist or neoclassical
economics (Marx's "vulgar political economy") was based on a class-analytic
perspective that could no longer be openly confessed. Its interests were no
longer revolutionary, as in the early stages of bourgeois economics, but had
given way to the "bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics." It is no
coincidence that this happened as soon as the working class began to become
a conscious force and thus a threat to the status quo. Eventually,
political economy was renamed economics. The latter was seen as
"scientific" because of its non-normative and non-political character (that
is, it succeeded ideologically in concealing its class character within its
analytical frame). In order to struggle effectively today, we need, for
starters, to change economics back into political economy, making the
economy a political/public issue once again. Capitalism works by way of an
"invisible hand": it needs to be made visible

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