http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n03/benjamin-kunkel/how-much-is-too-much
How Much Is Too Much?
Benjamin Kunkel
* The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey
Profile, 296 pp, £14.99, April 2010, ISBN 978 1 84668 308 4
* A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’ by David Harvey
Verso, 368 pp, £10.99, March 2010, ISBN 978 1 84467 359 9
The deepest economic crisis in eighty years prompted a shallow revival
of Marxism. During the panicky period between the failure of Lehman
Brothers in September 2008 and the official end of the American
recession in the summer of 2009, several mainstream journals, displaying
a less than sincere mixture of broadmindedness and chagrin, hailed Marx
as a neglected seer of capitalist crisis. The trendspotting Foreign
Policy led the way, with a cover story on Marx for its Next Big Thing
issue, enticing readers with a promise of star treatment: ‘Lights.
Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.’
Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece was typical of the
general approach to Marx and Marxism. It bowed at a distance to the
prophet of capitalism’s ever ‘more extensive and exhaustive crises’, and
restated several basic articles of his thought: capitalism is inherently
unstable; political activism is indispensable; and revolution offers the
ultimate prize. This can’t have done much more than jog memories of the
Communist Manifesto, the only one of Marx’s works cited by Panitch. The
Manifesto remains an incandescent pamphlet, but the elements of a
Marxian crisis theory, one never fully articulated by Marx himself, lie
elsewhere, scattered throughout Theories of Surplus Value, the
Grundrisse and above all the posthumous second and third volumes of
Capital. Marx’s brilliant and somewhat contradictory comments on the
subject bring to mind Cioran’s remark: ‘Works die; fragments, not having
lived, can no longer die.’ Such shards sowed one of the most fertile
fields in Marxist economics. Over recent decades, the landmarks of
Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism
(1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long
20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence
(2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual
quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by
Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded
practitioners of what might be called the bourgeois theorisation of the
current crisis.
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