Rob wrote:
>
> Well, maybe he's getting at the fact that the *competition* for share prices
> and, among fund managers, for the accounts of pension funds etc, is a major
> driver of what's happening around us.
Obviously this won't go away just yet.
I haven't properly followed the debate on Thaxis which started this, because I
think the whole approach it springs from, is wrong. Let me put it this way:
one of the reasons why it made sense for Lenin to analyse capitalism's nuts
and bolts the way he did, and why he spent so much time investigating its
engine room, was because in 1916 there still had not been a single successful
anti-capitalist revolution. This was not true by 1917, and the entire history
of the succeeding century was a history of world war, anticolonial and
national liberation war, and open revolution. For this reason alone, it makes
no sense to continue to take capitalism as an analytical object in the way
that Marx did in Das Kapital or in the way that Lenin did *before 1917*.
When Lenin analysed capitalist crisis *after* 1917 he did so from the point of
view of a practical revolutionary striving to further the cause of World
Revolution. The best analyses of capitalism would henceforth not be dry
academic texts a la Kautsky or Grossman or Lenin pre-1917 or Henwood in "Wall
St", they were of a different kind altogether, in which class analysis,
revolutionary theory, and the analysis of capitalist crisis were combined in a
single whole. It is possible to do this, and not only that, it is VERY
NECESSARY to do this, and when Rob says, as he did here yesterday, "no book
can do it all, but this bit certainly needed doing", this is understandable,
maybe, but it is wrong. No book can be encyclopedic, but every work of theory
is always based upon certain universal assumptions of one kind or another.
Henwood's assumptions are those of a practising economist, not a practical
revolutionary. There would be no shame in that, were it not for the fact that
starting from these assumptions, Henwood proceeds to a critique of
revolutionary theory, and indeed his whole Internet persona, and his politics
in general, is concerned with the very idea of revolutionary organisation. Did
this escape your notice, Rob? Of course, his attacks are empty of real
content, and how could it be otherwise? But evading issues does not mean
issues evade us: as Trotsky said, you may not be interested in war, but war is
interested in you.
This is why I don't want to get trapped in the terms of debate which Henwood
sets, which require us to abandon ab initio and without discussion, any
*revolutionary* analysis or politics of what we now *know* is a deep and
general crisis of capitalism. Endlessly anatomising the minutiae of share
registers and banking and industrial capital cross-holdings etc serves only
the most limited of purposes from our point of view. OF COURSE capitalism
today is not the monopoly capitalism of 1916 but OF COURSE this actually tells
us less than nothing about the relevance or otherwise of revolution-making,
and of party-building. Yes, we need to understand the mechanism of modern
capitalist economy and the dynamics of crisis, but we have no agreement even
on the most basic of issues, so why on earth should we start the discussion at
the level of post-Keynesian abstraction deployed by Henwood? We need to begin
elsewhere, with much more crucial and fundamental issues. Most people
understand this by now, which is why it is so tedious to have to keep coming
back to this issue.
Doug does not believe, for example, that there is any problem about fossil
fuel. Most people on this list anyway, understand that there is a serious
issue about the energy supply of modern capitalist economy. Henwood does not
accept that there is now or ever will be a shortage of oil, gas or coal. When
I said on his list back in 1998 that huge energy shortages were looming in the
USA, particularly in natural gas supply, his response was typical: a stream of
sarcastic one-liners and put-downs and then, as the shortages happened:
complete silence on the issue. Until these fundamental questions are thrashed
out, I don't propose to waste time discussing the fluff in corporate capital's
navel with Doug Henwood.
I do have Henwood's book in front of me, and it is open at page 262. While I
am reading his forensic analysis of who own what, I am thinking about the
situation in Russia. What has happened there is that this large and
well-endowed (in resource terms) and generally beautiful country has lost
control of its fate and is now a happy hunting ground for the 300 or 400 large
corporations which dominate the world economy. They have got an iron grip on
it, and they have fostered the creation of large new Russian monopolies,
mostly energy and natural resource companies, in their own image; these
Russian corporations are tied to wstern coporate and banking capital by
thousands of threads of personal interest, private deals, banking and
shareholding cross-linkages, shared criminality, and a common purpose: the
purpose being, plunder and self-enrichment. Together, Russian and western
monopolies are tearing apart the forests, tundras, mountains, mines and oil
and gas reserves, they are stripping away anything of value, and in the
process they are sidelining the beleaguered cities wherein *hundreds of
millions* of people eke out desperate lives, while sliding to oblivion.
Tragic, but what is happening to Russia is only a more accelerated version of
what is happening everywhere else in the world, even in the core countries
themselves! Truly, 'Apres moi le deluge' remains the capitalist watchword.
Soon there will be no Alaska Refuge; there will be no Ogallala aquifer, and a
hundred other obscenities will be committed on the physical body of North
America in the name of profit. You don't need exquisite scholastic theories,
you don't need a slide rule or even a calculator to work out what is going on;
a fucking abacus will do.But for what it is worth, and enough books by Marxist
economists have already been written on the subject for anything you or I has
to say to be more than redundant, the fact remains that when Henwood (or
Sweezy for that matter, who he appears to discuss on p262) writes about the
relationship between 'finance' capital and 'industrial' capital, they do not
do it as Karl Marx himself did, i.e., they do not start from the premise that
each of these departments of the total social capital is merely *one momentary
form of appearance of capital in motion*: thus, finance capital is only *a
stage which value goes through* during the process of its realisation as
profit, and the fact that this stage in what is a constant, fluid process, has
created firms, buildings, personnel, etc, ie has acquired an objective,
existential presence, does not mean that there is a separate thing or entity
called 'finance capital' somehow set apart from industrial, commercial etc
kinds of capital.
It is because Henwood does not accept this (Marxist) way of looking at things
that he is able to end this book with the following immortal peroration:
'Finally, since most of this book is about the securities of large private
corporations, that's where this chapter should conclude. The long-term goal
[!] should be to reduce the financial and governance role of the stock market
with an eye towards its eventual elimination. Corporations should be placed
increasingly under a combination of worker, community, customer, supplier, and
public control. Of course, it's easy to say that in a reasonable-sounding
sentence or two, but the actual task, technically and politically, would be as
difficult as hell.
The present fashion for putting more outside directors on boards, in the name
of "independent" supervision, rules out union representatives, who are
considered insiders...' (p321). etc etc, for another 2 paragraphs of similar
breathtaking, epochal policy ideas which encapsulate what Henwood calls 'the
fundamental principles of where I think we should go.'
Now, this banal, trite, vacuous, sterile politics would be fine as the
conclusion of a first-year college textbook, and who could take exception to
it on that level, indeed one would be gratified to see such breadth of vision
in Social Studies 101. But that is not how Henwood represents himself, and
those who lionise him as providing a "thoroughly comprehensive...prescription
for market socialism in light of the notion that 'a future society has to
emerge out of this one, on the basis of experimentation and struggle' are the
ones who ought to hang their heads in shame.
Mark
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