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Is Capitalism in Decline?Paper by GB, submitted 10/8/08,
Introduction
What I am doing here is putting firstly my view of the state of capitalism then I will move to look at the two major opposed standpoints put into the discussion (The International Communist Current and Aufheben). In the final section I will develop the initial argument.
The First Steps
It starts in the head. The first mark of the decline of capitalism emerges from thinking about the nature of the system. Marx pointed out that thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo had attempted systematically and scientifically to study the nature of capitalist society. He argued that they misunderstood a lot but that they were basically serious in their endeavours.
However, they wrote when the class struggle between workers and capital was very undeveloped. They could ruthlessly examine life from the standpoint of the new rising world set against the old decaying pre-capitalist world. Even as they wrote there were other economists dealing only in superficiality.
With the rise of the working class movement the bourgeoisie took fright. From the 1830s the approach that predominated was of justification of capitalist rule. Thus, the shift was from genuine enquiry to straightforward justification of the system. 1 Today most economists work entirely within the system. The whole approach assumes the premises of the inevitability of capitalism.
Yet this was not the decay of the system as a whole.
Systemic Decay
The classic Marxist argument for decay starts from the proposition that the dynamics of capital mean that it is shark like – it has to continually move forward. Once it stops advancing it must decline. Put another way, capital gave the world the enormous gain that it makes us one world. But it is a world torn apart by continuous class conflict. Having created the global village capital’s historic usefulness is over. It has opened up the possibility of a socialised humanity. It moves rapidly from there to becoming a barrier to human progress and must therefore be removed.
The basis of decline in this argument is the falling rate of profit. Profits are constantly under pressure in the whole system. If action cannot correct this tendency firms will sack people and crisis will erupt. Once there are no new people to exploit and markets to conquer capital turns simply to war on the poor and rivalry with other capitalists. This has led to two world wars, continued minor wars and trade wars.
Some of the marks of a system in crisis are worth noting. The first is the tendency to economic monopoly. In most industries today we have a form of limited competition between massive providers. They distort the market and force governments to intervene. In every developed country governments now play a major role in the market.
The second is rise of the organised working class which has also driven intervention especially the creation of welfare services. Indeed, the actions of workers have pushed the state to the fore. Sometimes this is done by parties like Labour winning office or because right wing governments want to pre-empt them.
The third, resulting from the above, is growth of the state, which has historically been the mark of social crisis. The current way in which the state is harnessing new technologies to intervene in every corner of our lives says something about the fears of our leaders.
Today, much development is driven by the state. The result may include profit but the point of the development is not simply to make money. It is in part to ensure continued social support for the system. Note that the attempts to use them for private profit (privatisation, PFI, etc.) have been riddled with corruption
The expansion of the state is a way of coping with system malfunctions. Ticktin 2 argues that as the state seeks out supplementary methods of correcting the problem they work to some degree, thereby giving the system a sense of new life. The price paid is that the basic workings of capitalism are failing.
A real strength of his essay is that he argues that decline cannot turn to terminal crisis until the majority of the population sees socialism as a viable alternative.3 His point can be summed up by saying that we are in a declining system and that decline is a necessary but not a sufficient premise for termination. Beyond the economic, Ticktin argues that our society is in social decline. The movements towards fascism, military dictatorship, and the new imperialism are political symptoms. The rise of pleasure rather than work, irrationalism and the drugs culture are social expressions of the same trends.
Capital has clearly gained some time and development by the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes of the old Soviet bloc and the opening up of the market in countries like China and Viet Nam. These processes will run their course but they are inherently limited.
Ticktin’s argument is that essentially the law of value, which regulates the workings of capital, is being progressively replaced by a dysfunctional kind of socialised activity. As bureaucracy replaces the law of value the working class tends to be fragmented. Abstract labour, the basis of the system, is increasingly undermined and thus, the possibility of working class unity is weakened. The alternatives today are not abstract labour or freely associated human activity but abstract labour alongside bureaucratically directed work. People move continually towards freely associated labour. In most workplaces there are ongoing conflicts around the way to work. On one side are workers who aim to ‘do their job’, that is provide whatever their employer claims to be the point of the operation. On the other employers want to cut corners and do the job quickly but poorly to maximise profits.
We can follow Ticktin’s summary that a limited number of control systems have been used to put off socialist advance:4
The debate we are having has focussed on two worlds of thought presented by two very different journals. Alongside these journals are others with similar views on each side.
The International Communist Current and Trotskyism
World Revolution presents an objective analysis of capitalism. It demonstrates the inevitability of revolution. Capitalism has gone through a period of growth, full flowering and then decay. The decay marks the period for the next steps.
Within this system ideas are mere refluxes which reflect back the economic basis of society. This argument is based on the following quotation from Marx:
This is misconstrued as meaning that everything to do with thinking and feeling is simply caused by economic factors. If it were true we would be no more conscious than any other animal. It would offer a grim mechanical world without the possibility of genuine intellectual or emotional development. For all the talk of struggle and movement such ideas verge on a kind of inevitability. This opens up the possibility of passivity on the basis that it will all happen irrespective of what we think or do.
If we read the ICC analysis we can see a model of that mode of thinking. It treats Marx as providing a body of objective laws which start from a metaphor used about a base and a superstructure.
From this quotation from Marx and some other materials a whole universal theory of history is developed. Any group of humans anywhere on the planet would be pushed by the objective forces to go through what are basically the same stages of development. Each society rises, reaches its pinnacle and declines.
Capitalism is now in its declining stage. All that is left is either communist revolution or ruin.
A problem is how we know these things. If thought passively reflects the system then this applies to our own thinking. The argument ends up with a form of special pleading for the writer and his work’s validity against everybody else.
Classical Trotskyism based itself on the 1938 “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare the Conquest of Power”
It predicted war as part of an ongoing catastrophic crisis of capitalism. Today it reads as something out of time and place. The core analytical idea is:
The strength of this Transitional Programme (TP) compared with the ICC is that it recognises that without a mass following a political group is meaningless. A weakness is that even as it was written the Fourth International had few followers over most of the world. There was no real prospect of these parties taking the lead in revolutionary struggles except in a tiny number of countries.
The denunciations by both the ICC and Trotskyists of various leaderships – trade union, Stalinist, social democratic, etc. miss the point that if the workers are to win power across the world they need to be able to see through these reformists and reactionaries for themselves. Trotsky had shifted ground from his early years when he made eloquent attacks on substitutionism 7 to attempting to get small parties to think for millions of people.
Aufheben
The Aufheben line of thinking is subjective approach which bases itself on another set of ideas stemming from Marx. That is to say that we make our own history. Humans are creative, transforming nature and society as we will. From this line of thinking we have the truism that revolution will happen when we make it happen. However, it seems to have little to do with social circumstances. Changes in the overall way that society functions seem irrelevant.
The difficulty is that we cannot just dream up any world. Our dreams and hopes are outcomes from what we have. They are not just passive outcomes. We struggle to understand in order to change life. Understanding is active and creative. We are different from the lower animals because we can imagine.
A quote from Aufheben
The picture here is one of a society with a curious kind of historical development . Its movement is essentially ahistorical in that while the system changes it neither rises nor falls.
A Plague on Both!
I will argue that neither of these is sufficient to meet the real world of modern capitalism.
Aufheben seems to miss the fact that we may creatively make our own lives but we are not simply free to do it as we like. We live in a real place and time with real constraints. We need to have some idea of what is happening in the system. The overall character of the social relations is changing in the ways outlined at the beginning: growing power of the state, monopolistic power, a mixture of planning and chaos, etc. The rise of new technologies has radically changed the way we live and the potentialities. However, they are used to increase levels of social control and impose state power. Indeed the social developments of the system create its long-term crisis. History is a one-way street. We are not in a kind of pre-revolutionary ground hog day in which we repeat the same experiences until we destroy the system.
As we have seen the International Communist Current’s (ICC) argument is dead and mechanistic. The creative force in all human life is our ability to transform ourselves and nature. Our ability to do that consciously separates us from the rest of nature. Capitalism organises us in a community with no overall use of our consciousness to produce a harmonious society able to provide the best lives for its people. It enslaves billions and increasingly creates madness.
But the billions only enter the World Revolution picture as passive objects. They are not seen as creative. This model misses the core point that the problems of the system are the struggle of working people against the constraints of modern life. Reading the ICC account we cannot find any comprehension of real people in daily efforts to live their lives. Society is in decay but this is an objective process almost beyond the people who live it. The specifics of our lives seem irrelevant to the ICC. The enormous changes of recent decades seem to pass the authors by.
Yet the way we work, how we understand our work, our leisure and our outlook on the world are light years from the days when Karl Marx crossed Piccadilly carefully avoiding the horse shit on the street.
Work and working people will not fit the dogmas of theorists. Any thinking on this needs to take into account the way that our social life has changed. Marx thought that the proletariat was the revolutionary class based on two factors one was that it was exploited and the other was the sophisticated web of social relations it had to enter when people worked in their factories and mines every day.
Some aspects of how things have changed can only be briefly glanced at.
Work
Soon around 40% of working people in the advanced world will be graduates. This will make workplaces very different. Related to this is the fact that in the developed world, we are both more connected and more isolated. Our lives are part of massively more complex social relations than people’s were in Marx’s day. Everything has changed and unless we have some idea of the actual lives people lead we cannot offer them anything.
The picture summoned up by World Revolution is the sturdy proletarian going to his factory and acting much as he did in 1917. In the developed world most people are not doing that sort of work. And the number who are will continue to decline. We work with computers, increasingly from home. In the newly industrialising world they are going through an industrial revolution but not the one Europe and America experienced. Computer controlled machinery is there from the start. A strange mixture of cutting edge technology and hand work exists side by side. And each needs the other.
Politics
The defeats we have experienced since the 1970s have undermined the old formations of the class. In Britain, the Labour Party has undergone a transition from a worker dominated reformist body to something more like the US Democratic Party. That party may never have been revolutionary (or at its core socialist in any sense) but it has now left the left. The trade unions have changed similarly. They have shrunk and lost their privileged position in relation to government. The non-manual unions dominate. They are still lead by bureaucrats and in most of them the membership’s views are stifled.
New movements like the feminist movement, gay rights, green movements and social forums have appeared. They have ambiguous relations with the older labour movement. The ideas coming from these movements are also transforming how we all see the world.
Society
Social life has moved on from the rigidities of the past. The movements referred to above are part of a transformation of life which is often dated from the 1960s. These changes affect how we relate, music, art, clothes, etc.
Conclusion
We need to look to the way that the working class (as the force that opposes capital) has entered a period of dissolution and is now reconstituting itself. For me it is this creative force of billions of people that will transform society. It is not a narrow party reciting the cutting edge thought of 1917. The mess that socialists are in is both part of the problem and part of the solution.
GB
1 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, (1976, London, Penguin) p. 97 2 H. Ticktin, The Nature of an Epoch of Declining Capitalism, Critique 26 1994, p. 70 3 Ticktin, p. 74 4 Ticktin, , pp. 88 - 90 5 Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 6 pp. 1 - 2 7 The substitution of a party for the working class as a whole. 8 Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part II
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