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[ESC]DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT
Marx and the Death of the Author X: What is reality? Part II
In the last post, I discussed the concept of capitalist hyper-realism. Rereading it earlier today, I realised that I quoted the late, great Walter Rodney, but never explicitly said that it was, in fact, Dr Rodney I was quoting, although I did link to the book I got the quote from, so partial marks.
I also, rereading my post on Stiglitz's Freefall from earlier this week realise I never put in Marxist Tayroc's critiques of Freefall, and so, ironically, this gives me a perfect jumping off point for this week's M&DoTA post, as my main critique of Stiglitz is his incapacity to consider non-capitalist alternatives. Specifically, like most Keynesians he's trapped in assuming that capitalism must be, but that's okay because we can reform capitalism into something better. Marxist critique, on the other hand, knows that the nature and history of class struggle renders this to be wishful thinking. The bourgeois have a very limited way of conceiving and sharing power and resources, and so any attempts to critique the bourgeois way of life, or any larger economic threat to the bourgeois order will be met with resistance, typically in the form of fascist violence. To draw from Rodney, who wrote this back in the 1970s:
The American bourgeoisie – to use this example – is powerful enough to realize that it can afford certain forms of bourgeois democracy, unless the stage is reached where the system is so eroded that they must take to fascist alternatives. But, normally, the bourgeoisie will of necessity engage the large middle-class sector and a large segment of the working population in parliamentarianism, free speech, and the like. In the Third World, this is seldom possible. The petty bourgeoisie who reside in Accra and in Kingston and in Singapore cannot afford to have any formal exercise of democracy. They do not have the power. They do not have the economic base. They are entirely dependent on two things: first, their external support; and second, whatever local police forces they can muster. Increasingly, the political situation in these Third World countries becomes more openly authoritarian. A striking example has been the regime of Forbes Burham in Guyana. He began some years ago by trying to convince some folk that he was about nationalism and even about socialism. To a large extent, he succeeded in the mystification, but after just a few years, the mask has been removed, and it is now apparent that Guyana has the makings of a kind of Haitian situation, given the trend towards the creation of a Ton-Ton Macoute, aiming at political intimidation and assassinations. This and other indications in most of Africa and Asia suggest that neo-colonialism is not merely a state but – like all historical forms – it has its own motion, and both politically and economically the motion is in a negative direction.
This is to say, the American capitalist class was happy to give the pretence of liberal democracy, so long as the liberal capitalist part of this understanding had its needs met in the form of extractive capitalism without question. If capital's capacity to extract is threatened, impeded, or even stagnates, the bourgeois class will tend towards fascist violence in order to ensure their capacity to extract capital. One tends to think of, yes, the support Trump and other right-wing causes get in America from corporate interests, with even General Motors and the Ford foundation supporting Reagan, the John Birch Society, and other groups that have been contributing to America's right-ward slide since the Keynesian New Deal, but also how the Democrats have been behind 'crime bills' and other right-wing calls for increasingly racialised violence to maintain a capital-friendly status quo. Of course, in the UK, similar efforts by the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Mont Pelerin Society, and other similarly right wing instruments and think tanks have been long affiliated with the Conservative Party, as well as the post-Blair Labour party.
But back to Stiglitz himself, and why Freefall is born of the same wishful thinking that drove the FDR government in the US and the Attlee government here in the UK, and why this wishful thinking is, at least according to Marxists destined to fail. Or at least back to why FDR, Attlee, Stiglitz et al are so prone to such wishful thinking, whilst giving them a certain amount of the benefit of the doubt. Here I think of a phrase that a colleague of mine has occasionally used to describe much of the thinking around neo-liberalism, although I'm extending it to all capitalism, namely the idea of capitalism as a 'mental prison', which once you're inside of it, it can be difficult to conceive of any and all alternatives to the system, the system locks you into thinking about how you can survive in the system without letting up, or giving you the chance to think of alternative, better systems.
This is where I think the work of Mark Fisher comes into play, and his most well known book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? This book should likely be the subject of a future book review, but for now I'll introduce it quite plainly, it was written in 2010, around the same time that Stiglitz wrote Freefall and written in response to same gigantic systematic failure that Stiglitz was responding to. However, Fisher felt no loyalty or obligation to the system as Stiglitz had. Fisher had no previous relationship with the World Bank, and had never advised the US, UK, or any of the EU governments. He felt no need to be reverent to a system and institutions that clearly had demanded fealty without giving a sufficiently compelling reason for said fealty. Fisher, like David Graeber, had participated in the Occupy Wallstreet movements that had erupted in the aftermath of the 2007/08 crisis, and held the governments responsible for giving private capital the power necessary to bring us to the 2007/08 catastrophe. Fisher, like Graeber, felt that the problem with many of the proposed solutions to the crisis, and indeed the ones that would be followed by the Cameron government in the UK, spearheaded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel within Europe, and the Obama government in the US were still operating entirely with neo-liberal 'blinders' on that could only conceive of gradual reform to the existing system, rather than the radical overhaul the system clearly needed.
You see, when we talk about 2007/08, even back then, it was discussed as if it were a once in a lifetime failing that no one could have seen coming. This is laughable now, but frankly, was also laughable back then. As early as 1986, economist Hyman Minsky was already spelling out the precise ways that the Reagan era reforms would ultimately lead to economic disaster for the masses in his book Stabilising an Unstable Economy. If you consult the rudimentary timeline I drew up in the Stiglitz post, you'll see that 1986 is relatively early into the neo-liberal era. Truth is, a lot of economists back then still had not joined the cult of Friedman, but were finding themselves increasingly sidelined as the bourgeois class had already selected their champion in the form of Friedman and his disciples. Economists from the 'old' Keynesian tradition were rapidly sidelined. Of course, the first cracks of the neo-liberal system quickly showed, the US quickly faced the Savings and Loans crisis of 1986-1995, the 'Black Monday' crash of 1987, which already showcased many of the symptoms that would rebound and come back in 2007. This was followed by the 'dot com' speculative bubble burst of 2001, which was followed by the Enron collapse in the same year. In the UK, the further collapse of Baring's bank in 1995 showed the dangers of the deregulated investment banks here in Britain. Nick Leeson's general attitude should also have served as a warning of the types of personalities drawn to deregulated trading.
Like Fisher, and like Rodney, I tend towards thinking that Keynesian economic policies are more-or-less always doomed to fail. If you try to have capitalism and socialism living side by side in the same system, the bourgeois class will always see to it that the capitalistic half eats the socialist half in order to extract as much surplus value from the economy as possible. In both the UK and US we saw this, as the ink hadn't even dried on the FDR's New Deal or the myriad of acts that Attlee passed before the bourgeois controlled press set about trying to undermine the successes of the socialist programmes. Of course, no one would be more successful at undermining these across the English speaking world than Rupert Murdoch who specialised in 'I'm just asking questions' dog whistles based around notions of nationalism, race, and religion, all designed to replace class consciousness with racism and other divisive qualities to encourage the proletariat to vote against their best interest. Perhaps the most insidious version of this comes in the myth of the 'Welfare Queen', as outlined in The Queen by Josh Levin wherein the Ronald Reagan took the story of one specific criminal, Linda Taylor, who was racially ambiguous at best, but who they 'darkened' with the photo editing technology of the time to make her look Black, and spun into a myth to make her representative of all Welfare recipients, to demonise welfare in the American psyche, justifying the gutting of the programme. In both the UK and US, the right embellished stories of welfare cheats and frauds, whilst downplaying the financial crimes of corporations and the wealthy to justify the end of Keynesian politics. Racism, ableism, and classism were very much the tools of the political right and centre to dismantle socialist programmes in the 1980s, 1990s, and today. This is not conspiratorial thinking, this is well documented.
Thus, when one examines the history of 20th century progress, and sees how easily so much of it has come undone in the last decade, it is fairly easy to see, when we go back and reread Rodney, Minksy, Stiglitz, Levin, Fisher, Marx, and Friedman that indeed the bourgeois class will always, in the name of the self-interest, take a mile when you give them an inch. The way the bourgeois class does this is with the very same nationalisms, racialised, religion-based, cultural 'norm' based, that they beat the aristocracies with back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Whilst it is undeniable that the bourgeois are preferable to the aristocracy, it is also, simply, not enough. And this is where Marx, Rodney, Robinson, Harvey, and so many others come and state that for true liberation to come, for true progress to come, we must replace bourgeois nationalist thought with a class consciousness of the proletariat. The bourgeois and the aristocracy have class consciousness. We see this all the time in history, the British Royal Family respected the royal claims of the Indian princes as long as they recognised the supremacy of the British state. The British bourgeois recognised and collaborated with the American, French, German, and Indian bourgeois throughout the 19th century for personal profit. To the point where the American Marine Smedley Butler realised that American weapons, sold to the German Empire by the American bourgeois were now being used to kill American soldiers in the battlefields of the First and eventually Second World War. The international arms industry, of course, remains a potent force for evil in the present day, and was also called out by noted anti-Marxist Dwight Eisenhower.
Let's have one more go at nationalism to close out this two-part series. One of the best books to read on this is arguably Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities where he argues that nationalism contains three key paradoxes:
- Nationalism is a recent and modern invention, despite the nation's claim to ancient timelessness
- Nationalims claims to be universal in that every individual allegedly belongs to a nation, yet each nation maintains it is completely distinct from every other nation
- Nationalism is so influential that people will die for their nation, yet what constitutes a nation is difficult, even impossible to define
Nationalism tells us that the man in Glasgow has more in common with the man from Cornwall than the man from Philadelphia, but more importantly, has more in common with the bourgeois in his own nation than he does with the common man in a potentially enemy nation. In reality, the proletariat of the British public in 1914 had more in common with the proletariat of the German public in 1914, but the enthusiastic flag waving of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes in both countries ensured that such similarities were forgotten. The result, of course, was entirely useless slaughter of millions. Of the lessons to have learnt from the First World War, that was one we rather quickly forgot, as that same nationalism would be used by the far-right in Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Austria to bring us to the destruction of the Second World War. That same nationalism was whipped up in Britain and America, amongst other countries, during the so-called 'War on Terror', and now we see far-right groups around the globe using it again to cover the failings of the capitalist system. This is because when capital itself is threatened, it becomes violent. Capitalists will always prefer fascism to socialism because fascism will let them keep their ill-gotten gains so long as they stay in the 'in group', and with their capital, they get the right to define who the in-group is. This is what we see Elon Musk and Peter Thiel working so hard to do now.
Or to book-end this series, yes, you are being gas-lit, and if you're a Gen Xer or Millennial, you've been gas lit your entire life to believe that all roads always led to neo-liberal capitalism, and that there is no alternative. This is what the disgraced author Noam Chomsky meant when he talked about consensus building by the media. Even a broken clock and all that.
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