Hi Rakesh,
Jurriaan, I would like to read it. There is a chapter on the state in Late Capitalism, if I remember correctly. This would have been written after that?
Yes. Mandel was influenced considerably by Leo Kofler (1907-1995), who was a German social philosopher/historian from Cologne. Kofler became politically active as socialist when he was twenty and in the 1930s operated on the leftwing of German social democracy, working with Max Adler.
Now that is someone (Adler) who very much interests me. I found quite helpful Leszek Kolakowski's summary of his work (especially Adler's rethinking of the Kantian problem of transcendental subjectivity in light of a socialized and historically evolving humanity quite promising). Some of Adler's work was translated in Austro Marxism, ed. Bottomore and Goode. I have wanted to study the debate on state theory between Hans Kelsen and Max Adler in the 1920s, but I read German slowly at this point. Lúkacs and Trotsky seem to have despised Adler, but there seem to have been very sharp divisions with Austrian social democracy--Adler on the left, Bauer and Hilferding in the middle, and Renner on the right. While quite a bit has been written in English about Austrian social democracy between the wars, there seems to be nothing about the Adler-Kelsen debate which from what I was able to make out was conducted at a very high level.
Adler also had great influence on Lucien Goldman.
During the war he was in Switzerland and studied Lukacs. In 1947 he became professor in East Germany I think, but after a while fell out with the Socialist Unity Party who called him a "Trotskyist" which he wasn't. He published Zur Geschichte der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (later revised) in 1948, and Geschichte und Dialektik in 1955. In 1950 he left with his wife Ursula to live in Cologne. In 1960 he published a sociological analysis of late capitalism called Staat, Gesellschaft und Elite zwischen Humanismus und Nihilismus. After that he became very interested in Marxist ethics, aesthetics and anthropology, and published a large amount of innovative books. Not much of it has been translated though. Mandel associated with many of these people, they were Marxists of some sort but neither in the CP or in the SDP, or at best on the fringes of it.
thank you for having taken the time to write this up. Kofler seems very interesting indeed. Was Kofler's anthropological interest motivated by the desire to critique Gehlen?
>Bob Fine has some interesting discussion of the functionalism of Marxist state theory.
Agreed. But my own preferred procedure in these matters is normally different from the Marxists and closer to Marx, because I prefer to study the facts and history first with a theoretical orientation, and then utilise detailed theory to explain it, or illuminate it, and establish a relationship between theory and evidence. The bad habit of Althusserian theoreticism and postmodernism is to spin theory out of nothing, they don't do much empirical or historical research.
Fine is a political theorist, interested in the problems that Marx inherited from classical liberalism. Once reading his book, I had a better appreciation of the work done by Ahmet and others as well as why they had decided to research empirically certain questions.
As regards Reuten's book, it is actually worth reading, it contains important ideas, particularly if you want to continue Marx's own project with the same sort of method and are interested in Hegel. A Dutch CP Marxist called Siep Stuurman wrote a good book on the state, very comprehensive in its review of the literature, but not translated. I think lateron he gave up on Marx and became some sort of liberal.
how different? that's what I would like to know.
I will try to think of sources, it's a long time ago now that I studied this. In the case of New Zealand, the situation changed over time. Initially, workers did get more or less what they paid in, but later it was more like the situation Shaikh & Tonak describe. Initially workers would not pay income tax, only possibly some property tax, rates and so on. In settler colonies, social insurance provisions or social funds for the first wave of immigrant workers did not exist, and the state had to provide them, that is why around the 1890s for example people were talking about State Socialism in New Zealand, welfare provisions were provided by the state because there was no other way. The Webbs even went to New Zealand to investigate State Socialism there (there is also a book about it by William Pember Reeves). With social insurance-type funds you cannot really evaluate the exchange made other than over a long period of time. Very few Marxists outside of actually existing socialisms ever investigated public finance beyond a few main aggregates, but this is peculiar, because if you look at the history of it, one of the main reasons why bourgeois revolutions actually happened was to gain control over taxation, which is a critical factor for capital accumulation, and state debts were a means of exerting control over state policy.
Clinton referred to this as the f...g bondtrader problem.
In Holland, a lot of welfare services started as workers' cooperatives (credit unions, housing, etc.) which were over time corporatised and privatised. In Europe, the Marshall Plan also boosted state expenditure. Gerd Hardach did a book on the Marshall Plan in relation to Germany, but I don't know if you read German.
didn't Elmar Altvater and others find that the rate of exploitation was quite high in post War Germany and one of the crucial factors in its fast growth.
ok. What I would like to consult again is Perry Anderson's exploration of the nature of representative democracy in his essay on the antinomies of Gramsci.
I wasn't necessarily criticising you, you know. It is just that the ultraleft debate about reform versus revolution occurs because of a lack of a political method.
Yes public finance. Why do Asian Central Banks continue to hold US govtdebt now that the devaluation has already cost them $200 bn? Must they support the dollar given export orientation?
I don't know that, I haven't studied it yet. A lot of trade is done in US dollars, certainly, and there's a sense in which you get locked into that. The US dollar will rise in the next year somewhat, I think, the longrun historic trend is likely to be gradually downward, but the Americans have many financial levers to prop up the US dollar for quite some time if they want to.
What would include as among those levers?
Also, I think that the euro hasn't established itself as strongly yet as a world currency as it could be. Many investors are probably also iffy about how it is all going to work out with the inclusion of Eastern Europe and so on, and in Scandinavia there is still resistance to the euro. I think there is a lot of controversy among investors about longterm economic strength of different regions of the world, different countries. The main nuisance of terrorism and the Mideast conflict from a capitalist point of view is that instability reduces investor confidence, and from that, you get a lot of investment capital hiving off into bonds, securities, that kind of thing.
still two trillion dollars in money markets here.
I want to look at the whole thing quantitatively very comprehensively at some stage, but it is more a book. I have a few personal issues to resolve meantime.
Regards
Jurriaan
