In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, J.WALKER, ILL
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>Comrades,
>
>Sorry I'm a bit confused by all this over-accumulation and under-
>consumption debate (as my earlier unresolved Gold question revealed I
>haven't got far through Book I of Capital, never mind Book III !).
>So it would be useful to know what exactly the old RCP/now LM were
>actually arguing?
>Does anyone have any references or is it just other's interpretation
>of the logic (dangerous word perhaps?) of their position?
>When the RCT split in 1974/5 was it related to economic differences
>with Yaffe & co. (a stong opponent of under- and over- consuption
>arguments describing them as effectively Neo-Malthusian) or were the
>differences just about the role of the Party etc.?
>Is the RCP/LM being singled out here for any particular reason? Are
>they unusual in taking such as position?
No, not that unusual. John is right to point out that the strict
interpretation of Marx's crisis theory is not unique to the old RCP,
indeed most serious Marx scholars would agree with it. He is also right
to say that the common ground between the RCP and the group it split
from, the RCG, was the orthodox reading of Marx, as Yaffe insisted upon.
The RCP's own writings on Crisis theory can be found on the LM website
(I wrote a few of them myself, see 'Marx and the Marxologists'). Around
1992 Living Marxism writer Tony Kennedy edited and introduced the Pluto
Press edition of Henryk Grossmann's Law of Accumulation.. . In 1996 the
journal Confrontation featured an article by Phil Mullan 'Confidence in
the Slump'. My Need and Desire in the Post Material Economy integrates
some elements of Capital-logic theory with a critique of cultural
theory.
As we read it the orthodox capital-logic theory of Marx argues that
Capitalism combines creative and destructive aspects, that the
development of the forces of production was restrained by the narrow
basis of the relations of production. In the period from the end of the
Second World war to the end of the Cold war the ruling class ideology
was apologetic, emphasising the creative side but covering up the
destructive side.
But in more recent times the character of economic ideology has changed.
Today, mostly due to the contribution of Green thinking to bourgeois
ideology, the emphasis is almost exclusively upon the destructive side
of capital. Clinton and Blair call for capital restraints, all aspects
of growth from genetic engineering to roads are unduly problematised.
Not straight-forward harmonist apologetics are the characteristic of
today's bourgeois ideology, but something like a petit-bourgeois
romantic anti-modernism.
In that context the emphasis of Marxist theory has to change. In the
seventies and eighties it was right to emphasise the destructive side of
capital because that was what was being obscured. Today it is right to
emphasise the case for progress, emphasising the positive side of
production, because this is what is being denied. And the effect of this
anti-progressive theme is to put all social change off the agenda.
In the previous edition of LM, 121, we carried a series of articles on
the economy that exemplify this approach. There is Phil Mullan on
Depressed Capitalists, Jamie Malone on 'Business Ethics', me on the
Culture industries, and Doug Henwood on left catastrophism.
http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM121/LM121_Index.html
John asks what the point at issue was between Yaffe and the RCG on the
one side and the old RCP on the other.
The specific point they flared up over was that the cdes who went on to
form the RCP thought that Yaffe was tail-ending the ANC, refusing to air
differences in public. We interpreted Yaffe's tendency as a
transformation of principled solidarity work into liberal guilt-
tripping.
The strict theoretical difference was that Yaffe proposed a theory
(based on a short article of Lenin's) that the organised British working
class was objectively reactionary because it had been bought off by
imperialism. Consequently revolution could only come from the black and
unemployed, and the third world.
We thought this was false. In truth the organised working class was not
a useful support for capitalism but the victims of the capitalist
offensive in the eighties. Far from it being the case that the
aristocracy of labour was more important to capitalism, the labour
bureaucracy was being dismantled as a barrier to accumulation.
--
Jim heartfield
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