I've come to the conclusion that there is a dearth of good, adequate summaries of the current crisis and our role in it for working people to read. I started these series of diaries to address that, and tonight we have two more lectures from Brilliant Marxist Scholars Chris Harman and David Harvey at the Marxism 2009 conference in London, July 5. I chose to start, as the conference did, by leading into Harvey's talk with a brief explanation of the current crisis according to Marxist economics (For a longer, better one, please go here) Once you've got the gist, a lecture by David Harvey really breaks down the issues of the left going forward. IN a nut: how do we win the various ideological, financial, ecological battles with the Right and redefine this system in a way that works? I highly recommend Kossacks read my summary or watch the video of Professor Harvey's lecture, and of course please leave feedback. These issues must be discussed. And if you feel the spirit move, please rec this diary and help share these ideas with others. Thanks!
We are in the middle of a very dire economic crisis which is going to dominate all of politics for the next 10 or so years (flowery talk of green shoots notwithstanding), but far more important is the longer-term implication-- that this is a recurrent economic, ideological, and political crisis, the outcome(s) of which, in Harman's view, will determine whether human life will survive on this planet past end of the 21st century. That is, putting together not only the economic and political crisis, but the ideological wars, the destruction of the environment, etc.
How are we to understand this crisis? Sarkozy makes it sound like capitalism was some wild animal that somehow escaped from its cage, nobody knows how. Gordon Brown says "how could anyone have thought this was going to happen?" The thing that we must understand is that the history of capitalism is a history of crises. Since 1820's when the first real industrial capitalism was taking root in Britain, you've had recurrent crises every ten years, with the slight exception of 1940-70 in postwar Britain and America, a 30 year slice in the 180+ year history of modern capitalism.
Capitalists have to exploit surplus value of workers one way or another to survive (roughly 2/3 of your labor goes straight into the company's coffers). They place that value right back into investment, and, due to the something called the coersive laws of competition, must continue to grow at as fast a rate as possible (usually averaging 3%). As with any good race to the bottom, eventually it hits its limits. The limit could be characterized as the limit of extracting an adequate surplus value of labor to sustain a compounding 3% rate of investments in order to remain in competition. But this means ever-more surplus value of labor must be produced to compete with other capitalists or "capitals". Workers then get squeezed. And when they can be squeezed no more, there is a crisis. Marx likened it to a vampire film. When the vampire runs out of blood, then that's a pretty good description of capitalism in crisis.
There are essentially 2 basic ways that capitalism is programmed to prevent a crisis from developing:
- By increasing exploitation of the workers... a short term fix.
- When some firms fail, then others are supposed to be able to get labor and machinery on the cheap, and can thus resume making their 3% compound rate of growth and investment, until it's their turn to fail.
However, Marx talks about something else, which is called the concentration and centralization of capital, whereby you get these firms like Lehman brothers who are "too big to fail". That is, the system reaches a point where its automatic reaction to the crisis no longer simple, and it becomes sporadic and bogged down. This is what happened in both 1929-30 and now, when there was this long and protracted period of downward pressure on wages and organized labor known as "neoliberalism" (which Harman defines very loosely here as the ideology of the ruling class. Interesting). Of course, the suppression of real wages over the past four years in Europe and for much longer in the United states and China led to an increase in surplus value, revenue, etc. in the short run; however, there became a lack of investments to be made with it as effective demand was so low from the excessive labor exploitation. And thus we faced another 1929 type situation.
This time, however, the system seemed to have tumbled on a short term mechanism which seemed to solve the problem, that is: the series of bubbles that we've faced: the stock exchange bubble in the 1980's; the tech stocks bubble in the late 90's, and now the subprime bubble, feeding into the final bubble, which found our entire system, after 2006, going forward on fictitious premises at our normal 3% worldwide growth. In actuality the western world was simply colonizing East Asia, Germany, and the oil producing countries producing more income than they could use, and lending it to the united states. The United states lent this borrowed money to the poorest people in the united states in the form of subprime loans. In the summer of 2007 the whole banking system began to come unraveled.
On September the 16th, 2008, the powers that be thought they would have to teach the capitalist system a lesson by letting one of the giants fail: Lehman. This only exacerbated the crisis. Banks across the world failed and we found ourselves in the situation where the banking system across the world was paralyzed just 6 months ago; we were talking about nationalizing the banks for god sakes. But instead we have the situation where the banks are limping along... the zombie bank scenario. But zombies don't just lie there docile: they feed. They need to make their 3% rate of profit, remember. Only they're more than happy to get it from the flesh of the working class in the form of 13 trillion in non-transparent bailouts from the federal reserve.
If they even get out of the current crisis, they will still have to figure out how to pay off the 13+ trillion or else face another, possibly deeper crisis. If they use another bubble they delay a second crisis by 5 years, only to result in an even deeper crisis.
Professor Harvey's response:
The best way to think of a crisis is as an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system. The irrationality: "you have massive amounts capital and massive amounts of labor, side-by-side, in a world that is full of social need. How stupid is that?"
The rationalization that they are looking for is one by which to reestablish the basis for extraction of surplus, the 3% compounding profit rate. "The irrational way that they're going about it is actually to suppress those possibilities by suppressing labor and suppressing wages, [health care 2009, anyone?] and suppressing, if you like, the circulation of capital." So that is what is meant when one says that capitalism is an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system.
For a socialist, however, there is a different kind of rationalization that must take place, and that is the question of how to put together all of the capital and labor in a way that can best meet the overwhelming human need. That's the only rational response to a crisis, and you can see that discussion going on all over the world right now, even in the halls of congress. And rightly so, as a moment of crisis is a moment of opportunity for a transition to socialism, a transition to communism, as two options that should be pushed for. In doing so we could certainly benefit from a bit of revolutionary fervor.
But in a society of revolutionary hairsprays and shaving creams, there is the danger of "revolutionary" becoming an empty term. Margerate Thatcher, after all, was considered revolutionary. What would a revolutionary movement look like? In this case we need a theory of social change which would address the ways in which a revolutionary movement could really move towards a society that is radically different from the one in which we live right now.
To do that, Harvey looks at one theory of social change hidden deep in Marx's Capital that he finds the most compelling. The passage is the fourth footnote in chapter 15, the chapter about machinery and large-scale industry.. Where Marx discusses the way that technology and relations to nature and social relations, mental conceptions; come together in a kind of dialectic configuration. Marx brings these together with his own relation with Darwin in an attempt to set out a theory of evolutionary change. The elements Marx looks for, plus one or two from Harvey, are intended to allow us to look at the different elements and ask certain specific questions about the future, where we are not, and how we might get from here to some other configuration.
The Seven Crucial moments of the coevolution of social movements
I. The first concept he looks at is the idea of the relation to nature and he asks the question "what is the relation to nature, how do we understand it, and in what ways would we think of modifying it in the future and how do we think about the dialectical relationship between human activity and transformation of nature?" No obviously you can't say Humanity determines nature, and there is a coevolution of human transformations and transformations in natural order, and that dialectic is absolutely crucial in the course of human history and one that Marx talks about very expansively and needs to be thought about very carefully. This is one "moment" in historical transformations. The first question that we should consider is: what kind of a relation to nature would we be thinking about in a socialist society, and how would we go about getting there from the relationship to nature we have now?
II. The second question Marx introduces pertains to the technological moment (technology for Marx was more than just hardware; it was about the divisions of labor, social forms, organizational forms, software, etc.) What kind of technological mix are we looking for here, and how can that technology be established. Specifically, from chapter 15: "How does capitalism actually identify its own unique technology which is absolutely suited to its own specific mode of production?" After all, capitalist technology developed on the basis of feudal technology, of feudal forms of organization, and it was only when it defined its own technology in its own unique ways that it finally defined itself as capitalism. So the evolution of technology is also connected to the evolution and emergence of capitalism out of fuedalism. This leads to the second question socialists must ask, and that is: "Where are the technologies that we can imagine as a socialist society and how would they be established, and how would we get from the fact that right now we can only use the technologies that we have; how would we progress from capitalist technologies to something that is completely "other than" capitalist technologies?" Just as capitalism had to overcome this same problem in leaving behind feudalism.
Now that question is not independent of the question of the relation to nature, because the relation to nature is technologically defined in the very some way that many technologies today are designed to deal with the relation to nature. So there's a dialectic betwen the technologic evolution that's going on and the evolution in the relation to nature. And you can not keep them separate and yet at the same they are distinct from each other. In other words they're dialectically a part of each other and yet they're distinct from each other. Nature changes in its own way, we have to deal with that fact, even as we see that the natural things that are occurring are somewhat a consequence of what we do.
To illustrate the point, Harvey brings up the case of swine and bird flu, and says many of the flus that have come out lately have been the consequence of high density farming (featherless chickens in the pearl river delta, hog farming from the North Carolina to Mexico, etc). So these kinds of dialectics are going on all the time, and we therefore have to think about them very carefully, and those are two moments that we have to consider, the moment of technology and the moment of the relation to nature.
III. The third component is social relations. What kind of social relations do we have and are talking about in the present, and what kind of social relations would we be working towards? No obviously this question relates to the previous two, and there is all kinds of internal conflict and immense complexity in terms of what kind of social relations we want. How do we deal with the questions of gender, race and class... perhaps more importantly, the technology limits the kind of social relations you can have. It's one thing to be for horizontal structures of social relations, but Harvey points out the problematic scenario of having an anarchist commune running a nuclear power station, where you'd have to have hierarchical command structures and fast response times. And he points out that these things are going to be here for a very long time, so it's not enough to say you don't want nuclear power station. So the technologies you get are not independent of the social relations and the possibilities that exist are not independant of the technologies. Harvey then brings up a further example of lithium and other rare metals that are required for the production of independant enrgies like wind and solar power. So it's not a simple question.
IV. The fourth element is the organization of production, a question that socialists and unions tend to understand quite well, but again, not independant of any of the previous three.
V. The fifth moment is the notion of mental conceptions of the world (one which Harvey thinks is absolutely fundamental). The mental conceptions of the world have to change, and we have to reconfigure how we see ourselves in relation to nature and technology and all the rest. But again not independant of all the other moments.
VI. Then there is the question of: what's daily life like? Going to your job, making your breakfast, reproducing, etc? What's that going to be like?
VII. And finally there is the question of institutional and administrative arrangements by which people actually get together.
So these are 7 moments that have to ALL change is we are going to move beyond the present system to something else. They have to COEVOLVE. And if Marx always carefully related his models in capital to all of them. It's false to think that Marx ever thought any one of them was above the rest.
But capitalism in itself once established, was never satisfied with the configuration by which those seven moments hung together. Think those seven things, and think about what the mental conceptions that dominated in the 1970's, for example, versus what they are now? What were the dominant technologies? And think of it now; in other words, what the 1970's did was to start a revolution in how all of those elements were going to co-evolve.
IN other words,
capitalism has been about the history of a radical reconfiguration of those moments over time, so there's a process of social change operating there. And a moment of crisis is a reconfiguration of all of those moments. Right now we are in a moment of crisis, so we've got to think about what are the possibilities with all of those moments, and start to configure them in a different way, so that we actually orient society away from re-estabishing the basis for profit making to re-establishing the basis for meeting human needs
The great thing about this idea is that you can start your social movement at any one of those movements that you like, but the most important thing is that you have to move, you have to move in a way that is a movement across all of those dialectical inter-relations. And the other great thing is that capitalism doesn't know exactly what reconfiguration it's going to come up with. And at this particular crisis we are in a situation right now where we need to get a better sense of how those possibilities might exist right now. But to do that we need the imagination, we need the scientists, we need the resources to be mobilized to actually get at this. But the problem right now is that those potential resources are all essentially imprisoned. They're imprisoned ideologically, they're imprisoned within institutional structures, and the have to be broken free. One of the best things we could do right now is liberate the universities from their neoliberal and corporatist chains. And actually mobilize these qualified people like economists who don't have a clue what's going on to start working on all of this.
Harvey makes the very good point that to the extent that none of this stuff is being thought about or taught in the university system it's completely redundant to the contemporary crisis, and we have to make it, and many other institutions, central to the solution. But in order to mobilize those resources, there has to be a vision, there has to be an alternative to the vision they're offering us. And it has to be a very broad vision, as we're going to in a very long transition if we're to get out of capitalism, just as there was a very long transition from capitalism to feudalism. It's not going to be about just overthrowing the government or something of that sort. We can overtake existing institutions from within, sure, but we can't just overtake the government; we have to completely reconfigure it or it won't work )sound familiar?). It doesn't make sense to talk about overthrowing the state when you have no vision for what you are going to put up in its place. It's going to have to be something very much like the state, and without knowing what it is, it's doomed to repeat the mistakes of its predecessor.
One of the biggest crises on the left has been its failure to advance an imagination, a vision, to capture the possibility and to say, "
look, here's where we're going, here's what we need to do, and WE CAN DO IT,
" if we put together our resources and enrgy, but we have to have a much broader vision if we're going to get it done.