A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics?

To what extent are there parties or groups that self-identify as Marxist that have real clout in politics in the US and Europe?

For the United States, the answer if fairly simple: none.

In both the US and Europe, the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s produced a proliferation of small groups hoping to establish a "Marxist-Leninist" party modeled on a heroic notion of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban Revolution. In both Europe and the US, those efforts produced mostly endless polemics that served as group identifiers for one tiny sect or the other.

There was a controversy among liberals and progressives in 2002-3 around antiwar demonstrations organized by the International ANSWER coalition, which included people who self-identified as Marxists. There were many other labor and antiwar groups who participated in organizing the impressively large antiwar demonstrations against invading Iraq. The real significance of the marches was the measure they provided of antiwar sentiment among the general public, even at a time where many leading Democrats in Congress were falling all over themselves to not have anyone suspect that they might ever take a stand against an obviously useless and unjust war.

Some of the more fastidious liberal writers found that the fact that some people associated with small leftist sects might be part of those massive demonstrations rendered the marches too impure for them to praise. I thought and still think that it was a plain silly attitude to take. It was perfectly legitimate to look at the broader political agenda of International ANSWER. War advocates would have done so in any case. But it was sad to see some liberal writers obsessing over whether some of the organizers might have impure thoughts.

Republicans now routinely call the Democratic Party and President Obama socialist and Marxist, along with a lot of other things. It's a ridiculous notion. The fact that Glenn Beck and the Republican Party's chief ideologue Rush Limbaugh can babble on about Obama being a revolutionary Marxist who hates America and white people, too, without being dismissed as the bigoted cranks they are, isn't a sign of how radical or "Marxist" the Democratic Party is. It's a sign of how sleazy and dishonest the everyday rhetoric of the Republican Party has become.

The US Communist Party reached the height of its electoral influence in 1932, and barely exists now.

The Communist Parties of Europe are now mostly renamed and are referred to as "post-communist" parties to describe their organizational descent from former Communist parties.

The "post-communist" party with which I'm most familiar is the Left Party in Germany (Linkspartei, DIE LINKE). Their website has some English pages, including their Key Programmatic Points document from March 2007. They describe their program this way:

Democracy, freedom, equality, justice, internationalism and solidarity are our fundamental value orientations. They are inseparable from peace, the conservation of nature and emancipation. The ideas of democratic socialism are key guidelines for the development of the political goals of the Left.

DIE LINKE derives its political action from the connection between goal, path and fundamental value orientations. Freedom and social justice, democracy and socialism are contingent on one another. Equality without individual freedom ends in incapacitation and heteronomy. Freedom without equality is freedom only for the rich. Those who oppress their fellow human beings are not free either. The goal of democratic socialism, which wants to overcome capitalism in a transformational process, is a society in which the freedom of the other is not the limit but the condition for one's own freedom.

At the conclusion of Section 4, the document declares, "Together we fight to ensure that capitalism is not the last word in the history books."

In the fifth part of this series, I'll discuss the original, paradigmatic dispute in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) beginning in the late 1890s over Revisionism and Marxism as the party orientation. It's safe to say that the current Linkspartei program as shown in that document wouldn't have been recognizable as a "Marxist" program back in those days.

Now, official Party programs don't always define the substance of a Party's policies. We are unlikely to see the US Democratic Party adopt a platform plank in 2012 saying that the main purpose of its economic policy is to protect giant banks and their officers and stockholders from ever suffering the consequences of their most reckless and irresponsible policies. Nor will the Republicans explicitly write into their Party platform that they are committed to voter suppression methods aimed at disenfranchising African-American and Latino citizens.

The same is true with the German Left Party and other "post-communist" parties.

But the Left Party is becoming more and more accepted as a legitimate democratic party, and has participated in local governments at the local and provincial (state) levels. Both the SPD and the Left Party are assigned the color "red" in the German partisan color scheme. A "red-red coalition" of the SPD and the Left Party, led by the former, governed Berlin for a decade from 2001-2011. The red-red coalition was defined by its ... austerity economics. ( Markus Horeld, Wahl in Berlin.Rot-Rot war gut für ein Jahrzehnt Die Zeit 18.09.2011)

Former Foreign Minister and longtime Green Party leader Joschka Fischer said this about Berlin's red-red coalition in 2008:

It has been shown in the Federal State of Berlin, which has been governed by a red-red senate for several years, that all fears of a return to socialism are sheer nonsense. Very much the opposite; the red-red senate in Berlin stands for a policy of budget streamlining, the reduction of government jobs, the implementation of the Hartz-IV reforms ["pro-business reforms" which reduce some of the powers of unions] and a friendliness to business that one can with full justification characterize as to the right of red-green. Of socialism, there is not a trace to be found. (From Die neuen Regeln Die Zeit 03.03.2008; my translation)

Neues Deutschland (ND), formerly the paper of the ruling East German Communist Party (SED), today reflects the Left Party outlook.

This article by Karl-Heinz Gräfe, Katastrophe oder Notwendigkeit? 24.12.2011, and this one by Theodor Bergmann, Politisches Buch.»Von der Parteien Hass und Gunst verwirrt« 15.12.2011, discuss the end of the Soviet Union, which officially occurred on December 25, 1991.

I keep looking for some distinctive insights from their articles on the economic crisis and the European Union. But ND's coverage of both has seemed to be pretty lightweight. A current piece by Benjamin Beutler, Mit der Krise in die Arbeitslosigkeit.Rezession in USA und Europa trifft besonders Migranten aus Lateinamerika 27.12.2011, discusses the effect of the current depression in the US on reducing undocumented immigration.

However "Marxist" or not the Linkspartei may be, so far they aren't notably benefitting politically from the current depression. The 2001 election in Berlin left them with too few seats to continue the red-red coalition. And opinion polls aren't signalling some impending shift to the Linkspartei in upcoming elections. National parliamentary elections aren't scheduled until 2013, though if Chancellor Angela Merkel's government falls through the defection of the junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), they could come sooner.

A Marx revival? Maybe. But there's no strong evidence of it the US or Europe that I can see.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: communism, marxism, german left party

A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge

Neil Clark in an article on the recent passing of Czech leader Václav Havel called attention to one of the ways in which ideology interferes with realistic evaluation of the actual experience of the "real existing socialism", as East Germany and other eastern European governments in the Soviet bloc referred to their system. Václav Havel: another side to the story The Guardian, 12/18/2011:

No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Although he did clash with his uber-Thatcherite presidential successor, Václav Klaus, over economic policy, Havel, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur whose companies were nationalised when the communists came to power, showed little concern for the plight of ordinary people who lost out in the change towards a market economy. And there were losers aplenty. While the years following the liberation of eastern Europe from communism by Havel and his fellow dissidents are routinely portrayed in the west as one big success story, the reality is rather different. A 2009 Lancet study concluded that as many as 1 million working-age men died due to the health problems brought on by mass privatisation. As economies across eastern Europe were restructured so inequalities and social divisions grew. A 2011 OECD report found that Havel's Czech Republic had the joint-second largest rise in income inequality in OECD members since the mid-1980s.

The Western triumphalist narrative of the collapse of the European Communist regimes cast the last 20 years as the victory of Western-style democracy and the "market economy," i.e., capitalism. Although what is meant by the latter is often the neoliberal doctrine of allowing corporations to operate with fewer and fewer restraints by democratic governments.

I can imagine that many readers would object to Clark's comment that Czech socialism "was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first". Even those willing to look realistically at the strengths and weaknesses of those systems would mostly recognize that the Party leaders and apparatchiks were often focused more on their own power and comfort than on the needs of their people. And, clearly, the perceived greater affluence in Western capitalist countries was a major factor in the internal discontent the Soviet block regimes experienced, along with lack of personal and political freedoms.

The average per capita income in Russia has never yet regained the level it was when the Soviet Union collapsed. Michael Gorbachev, who was seriously committed to democratizing Russia and the Soviet Union and who withdrew Soviet support from eastern European "satellite" countries, says even today that Russia would be better off had the Soviet Union not fallen, as he says in this German-language report from ZDF, "Besser, es gäbe die Sowjetunion noch":



Getting back to Clark's comment, in East Germany the effort to maintain living standards for workers figured heavily into the country's eventual demise. As former East German democratic activist Ehrhart Neubert documents at length in his Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR, 1949-1989 (1998), the famous workers' uprising in 1953 badly shook the leaders of the SED, the Communist Party there. It became a permanent assumption that the standard of living of workers had to be maintained through such devices as subsidized rents in order to prevent the kind of discontent that led to the nationwide disturbances of 1953 would not be repeated.

Other devices such as the notoriously invasive and pervasive secret police, the Stasi, were also employed to prevent such a recurrence. But the various subsidies aimed at maintaining living standards were substantial enough that they limited the availability of funds for capital investment, which led to the chronic economic stagnation that became so evident in the late 1980s.

The West German capitalist system clearly produced a higher standard of living for its people than the East German system did. Not only did it never find a way out of the dilemma that the competition between subsidies for working people and the need for capital investment represented. But the environmental degradation in East Germany was tremendous. One of the unified German government's initial miscalculations was that it seriously overestimated the amount of actual investment that the East Germans had made in their economic infrastructure. A lot of the nominal investment had disappeared into waste, corruption and those proverbial Swiss bank accounts. (The Austrian Communist Party developed quite a reputation for its business acumen, not least by helping East German officials get money out of East Germany.)

But the eastern German states haven't become model economic miracles in the last 20 years, either, for a variety of reasons including mass emigration to the former West Germany.

What Clark's comment points to, though, is the substantive as well as ideological challenge that the existence of the Soviet Union and the eastern European countries represented to the West and to the kind of capitalism that has produced the latest depression. Although the military power-balancing represented by the Soviet Union and China loomed far larger in the fears and plans of the Western nations, they also represented a real-time ideological challenge that could also not be entirely ignored, however unappealing Western publics may have found the "real existing socialism" of the Soviet bloc as a political alternative.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: communism, gorbachev

A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left

In the first post in this series, I cited an article by Michael Sayeau, The Fifth International: n+1 covers the London Conference, "On the Idea of Communism" n+1 04/22/2009. The conference in question, Sayeau writes, featured "Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Jacques Ranciere, Peter Hallward, and other key (albeit mostly male and entirely European or American) players in leftist philosophy and theory."

It's safe to say that none of these people are household names in the US.

Alain Badiou holds the impressively-named Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. His faculty biography notes his indebtedness to Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. And to Plato.

Terry Eagleton is a literary scholar who has held chairs at the University of Manchester and at Oxford, and is currently on the faculty at Lancaster University. He writes for the The Guardian, where short articles by him are availble to sample his take on events, such as Occupy London are true followers of Jesus, even if they despise religion 11/03/2011. He is a prominent public intellectual in Britain.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher at Kingston University in London.His faculty profile tells us that he is currently working on a project on "the will of the people" in which he will "develop and defend a notion of democratic political will" drawing "in particular on the political works of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx." The site also has links to several articles of his.

Antonio Negri is described by the leftist site Libcom.org (which apparently stands for "libertarian communism" as "an Italian autonomist Marxist academic who was wrongfully imprisoned by the Italian state for alleged involvement in the Brigate Rosse urban guerrilla group". His profile at the European Graduate School says he "is influenced in great part by Karl Marx and Benedict Baruch Spinoza."

Jacques Rancière, professor emeritus at the University of Paris, is also a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School. His faculty bio includes this description of his views, "... is the experience of the distance of things; man acts as though his voice can be heard, but is always a proper distance from it."

Slavoj Žižek, a former democratic dissident in Communist Yugoslavia is "professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London; senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana and regularly a visiting professor to some American university or other," according to a 2011 profile by Stuart Jeffries. (A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek The Guardian 07/15/2011)

John Gray reviews a book co-authored by Negri with Michael Hardt and one by Žižek in a piece called In the Bolshevik cabaret The Independent 11/20/2009. He heaps scorn on the authors, saying that "communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century's biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas." I'm not sure in what circles "neo-Bolshevism" is considered "modish", but whatever.

From my admittedly modest acquaintance with Žižek's work, I can't say whether Gray is entirely accurate in the following description. But my impression is consistent with Gray's suggestion that Žižek is more interested in poking critics of capitalism in the eye than in criticizing capitalism himself:

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."

My interest in these posts that look at whether we are seeing a "Marx revival" is more about the immediate political influence of actual Marxist ideas. I take it for granted that grappling with ideas from Marx and the Marxist tradition are is and will continue to be important in academia and intellectual fields ranging from philosophy, literary theory, and history to sociology and political science and even theology. The very fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party and a Communist government that nominally adheres to a Marxist ideology would itself guarantee some continuing focus on Marxism in the intellectual world.

What struck me about Sayeau's report on that 2009 conference, though, is how little these luminaries of the left had to offer in the way of insight into the current situation. I mean, for the love of the Paris Commune, people, we're in a world depression! You know, like back in the 1930s? The "general crisis of capitalism", as Marxists (and not only Marxists) called it back then? What's the point of having Marxists around if they don't have some useful insights into the situation of a world economic depression?

Sayeau writes:

Despite the billing of the conference, and despite the fact that the papers presented were almost to a one solid pieces of philosophical work, I think it's safe to say that nothing groundbreaking, or even all that unexpected, happened. The speakers routinely erred on the side of contrition and caution. When Marx was cited, which was often, it was apologetically, rounded off with disavowals of dogmatism. When presenters engaged with the current economic situation, they were strident in proclaiming that change was necessary, but defensively so, as if they were still talking themselves into the idea — a holdover from the era of the bubble, when the "rising tide that lifts all boats" wrong-footed leftists for more than a decade.

Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sort of confidence would have been to see the presenters driven off their usual talking points. But the papers largely circled around the same conceptual axes that we would have expected five or ten years ago. The deployment of such familiar keywords as the "commons" (that is, places and objects owned collectively, if "owned" is even the right word for things as disparate as medieval grazing fields and open-source computer applications) and "immaterial labor" (work that manipulates information, feelings, or sensations rather than producing solid goods and materials) endowed the proceedings with an air of roteness, of business as usual. [my emphasis]

My point here is not to encourage sophomoric ridicule of European leftie intellectuals. My point is that their ideas need to be evaluated for their quality, or lack thereof. But with a world economic crisis now underway for going-on five-years with no end reasonably in sight, people in the United States and Europe particularly need to face that some of the dominant assumptions of the political and media elites have been proven deeply defective, such as monetarist economics and "end of history" assumptions about the secure victory of democratic institutions.

As we saw in the first post in this series, it is tempting for those whose goal is to comfort the most comfortable 1% to stigmatize any criticism of the real flaws of the current order as scary and foreign, for which the image of Karl Marx is still serviceable, now 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The John Gray article linked above indulges in some of that.

But that doesn't mean everyone else has to dismiss sensible ideas or useful critical insights, no matter where they come from. One would think that the left in general, including Marxist thinkers, would have useful insights into the current situation. Even utopian thinking has its uses, though if it doesn't get beyond "imagine things can be different," it won't add much distinctive insight. But it is important that people can imagine things to be different!

As far as the economics goes, during the last several years the best insights and more relevant criticisms I've seen have come from Keynesian economists like Jamie Galbraith, Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz. They have done an excellent job of pointing out what happened with the economy and how badly mainstream policy assumptions went off the track.

If more radical thinkers like Alain Badiou, Eagleton, Hallward, Negri, Rancière and Žižek have relevant insights as well, great. I should say in fairness to them that none of them present themselves as economists. Nor is it necessary for scholarly work to have immediate relevance to the day's headlines. Politics and scholarship are different things, to put it mildly, although hopefully both fields would take reasonable insights from each other.

I haven't read the papers from the "On the Idea of Communism" conference, so it's hard to judge how fair Michael Sayeau is being in his report on it. The title of the conference suggests that its focus would be on the experience of Communism in the "real existing socialist" states of the former Soviet bloc. Since as a matter of real-world fact those states aren't around any more, it's understandable that there would be a certain defensiveness among the participants to identify with the cause of those former regimes.

Sayeau notes that the panel wasn't especially receptive to questions from the audience. And he writes:

The anger that the less eloquent questioners provoked may well be a symptom of this fact: after all, the years spent in the ideological desert of the end of history weren't very long ago. For this reason, it was important to uphold the "celebrity" status of figures like Badiou and Žižek: a movement with superstars has staying power. After all, there wouldn’t have been eighty people in the audience, let alone eight hundred, if it weren't for these celebrities, a fact that speaks to one of the more troubling contradictions in the current world of ideas: that though theory was ostensibly about rejecting priority and hierarchy, origin and personality, patriarchal organization and filiation, no field or discipline is so thoroughly defined by a system of stars and acolytes, great men and those who would be great men, as theory is today and has been for quite awhile. [my emphasis]

Yes, academics are known to sometimes have outsize egos. And that can always figure into how they come across, expecially to a general audience.

And the translation from academicese to more general usage is important to keep in mind. Juan Cole, whose expertise on Shi'a Islam and familiarity with Iraq propelled him to prominence as a public intellectual in the US during the last decade, said once that it was part of his learning curve that in TV appearances, he would sometimes find himself asked to explain some snippet of a quote from something he wrote 10 or 20 years ago that was completely off the topic of the discussion. This is the political-campaign style of using "oppo research" to discredit one's oppenent in real time. As nasty as academic debates can and do get, generally academics are used to operating under rules of discussion that exclude off-the-wall, out-of-context quotations being used for ad hominem attacks.

Not only are a lot of academics uninterested in learning to deal in that style. But not every useful idea can be reduced to a 30-second soundbite.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: alain badiou, antonio negri, communism, jacques rancière, marxism, peter hallward, slavoj žižek, terry eagleton

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman

"Grasping the ways in which Marx was right is the first step toward making sure that his predictions of capitalism's downfall remain wrong," writes Peter Coy in Marx to Market Bloomberg Business Week 11/14/2011.

But discussion of Karl Marx's thought is still heavily filtered through Cold War considerations. Coy in his first paragraph declares:

Marx’s most famous predictions failed; there has been no dictatorship of the proletariat, nor has the state withered away. His followers included some of the 20th century's worst mass murderers: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Yet the gloomy, combative philosopher seems to find adherents in each new generation of tyrants and dreamers.

To be fair, sifting through even the major variations of Marxism since the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848 in one brief column would surely tax the abilities of even the most brilliant summarizer.

Michael Sayeau reports a similar reticence at a conference of academic Marxists in The Fifth International: n+1 covers the London Conference, "On the Idea of Communism" n+1 04/22/2009:

Despite the billing of the conference, and despite the fact that the papers presented were almost to a one solid pieces of philosophical work, I think it’s safe to say that nothing groundbreaking, or even all that unexpected, happened. The speakers routinely erred on the side of contrition and caution. When Marx was cited, which was often, it was apologetically, rounded off with disavowals of dogmatism. When presenters engaged with the current economic situation, they were strident in proclaiming that change was necessary, but defensively so, as if they were still talking themselves into the idea — a holdover from the era of the bubble, when the "rising tide that lifts all boats" wrong-footed leftists for more than a decade. [my emphasis]

Peter Coy credits the real existing Marx of history with the following:

One of Marx’s most important contentions was that capitalism was inherently unstable. One only has to look at the headlines out of Europe—which is haunted by the specter of a possible Greek default, a banking disaster, and the collapse of the single-currency euro zone—to see that he was right. Marx diagnosed capitalism's instability at a time when his contemporaries and predecessors, such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, were mostly enthralled by its ability to serve human wants. ...

Marx has gotten an attentive reading recently from the likes of New York University economist Nouriel Roubini and George Magnus, the London-based senior economic adviser to UBS Investment Bank. Magnus's employer, Switzerland-based UBS, is a pillar of the financial establishment, with offices in more than 50 countries and over $2 trillion in assets. Yet in an Aug. 28 essay for Bloomberg View, Magnus wrote that "today's global economy bears some uncanny resemblances" to what Marx foresaw. (Personal opinion only, he noted.)

Marx argued that overproduction was in fact endemic to capitalism because the proletariat isn't paid enough to buy the stuff that the capitalists produce. Again, that theory has lately been hard to dispute. The only way blue-collar Americans managed to maintain consumption in the last decade was by overborrowing. When the housing market collapsed, many were left with crippling debt. The resulting default nightmare is still playing itself out. ...

Now, once again, unbridled capitalism is threatening to undermine itself. The world's biggest banks, financially weak but politically powerful, are putting the screws on borrowers in an attempt to rescue their own balance sheets. Likewise, creditor nations such as China and Germany are attempting to shift the pain of rebalancing onto debtor nations, even though squeezing them too hard threatens to cause an economic and financial disaster.

It's understandable that at a time of serious and persistent depression, even business-magazine columnists would take a nervous look at Marx's work. Or at least third- and fourth-hand versions of it. My very first homework assignment in business graduate school was to read excerpts from Adam Smith and Karl Marx. (It was a Jesuit school!) The idea was that those two provided a classical philosophical justification for capitalism and a classical critique of capitalism's problems.

Marx and the Social Democratic parties that adopted his economic outlook were correct in their basic understanding of the longterm instability of capitalism. Or, to put it in more contemporary jargon, they were right in seeing that business cycles were an inherent part of the capitalist economic system. Coy's comments on the contradictions of the capitalist system ("unbridled capitalism is threatening to undermine itself") and the self-destructive foreign policies that it is producing are accurate enough. And such results were indeed referenced in Marx' classical criticism of capitalism.

In terms of the field of economics as we know it today, both classical capitalist economics and Marxism shared a different focus than today's economics. Classical econ and Marxism focused on labor relationships, particularly the labor theory of value. Starting with neo-classical economics of which Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was the most famous exponent, economics shifted its focus to markets. Marx's theory of surplus value was derived from the work of classical economist David Ricardo, though Marx made his own version of it having to do with "surplus value," which is basically the monetary value that workers add to materials in the production process.

I won't try to hash through it here. But Marx saw an inherent problem on the economic side that derives from his concept of surplus value. In his view, increased industrialization (and by extension automation today) would would create a secular (long-term) decline in surplus value and therefore of profits, or, more specifically profit rates. If such a tendency has been at work in capitalist economies since the 19th century, it is very much a long-term trend, because there is no clear evidence of such a process at work.

(Two recent examinations of that aspect of Marx' theory are Michael Heinrich, "Begründungsprobleme.Zur Debatte über des Marxsche 'Gesetz vom tendenziellen Fall der Profitrate" Marx-Engels Jahrbuch 2006 and Klaus Müller, "Tendenzieller Fall oder Anstieg? Zur Komplexität okonomischer Erscheinungen und Beispiel der allgemeinen Durchscnittsprofitrate" Marx-Engels Jahrbuch 2009)

As Coy points out, Keynes and the Keynesians recognized some of the same realities that Marx did about what Marxists would call the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Marx himself drew much of his imperical data for his economic theories from the business press of his day. To the extent he and his contemporary collaborators were careful in their observations and analysis, it is not surprising that some of their observations about the fundamental dynamics of the capitalist system still hold.

During Marx' time, no party that shared his philosophy took governmental power, so we can only guess what Marx' more short-term prescriptions for what we now call macroeconomic policies would have been. (Marx did write approvingly of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, but they never had a chance to set up long-term economic policies and they never actually governed France.)

And Marx' influence may have been greater in the long run outside of the field of economics proper as we know it today: in political science, in politics, in sociology and in philosophy. Whether what Marx called surplus value can be measured empirically or not, it could still have meaningful applications as a moral, historical and polemical concept. We're unlikely to see those thoughtfully analyzed in Bloomberg Business Week anytime soon.

In the end, business publications are not likely to spend much time or energy attempting to use Marxist theory to derive useful insights on economics and business news of the day. But Peter Coy's article gives a real clue to why the specter of Marx is haunting the pages of business publications (corny reference, I know!): the real contradictions of capitalist economies - the business cycle, the tendency toward maldistribution of wealth and income, overproduction, self-destructive tendencies for the whole system from warring business interests pursuing their own individual goals - are things that Marx' classical criticism of capitalism recognized. Hauling out the image of Karl Marx represents both a way of invoking those classical criticisms and an attempt to inoculate the audience against them. (Stalin! Mao Zedong! Pol Pot!)

Non-Marxist thinkers like Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes recognized the same things. But one of the effects of capitalism is to make very practical businesspeople forget that such longer-term problems are there and to actually start believing the feel-good propaganda that makes contemporary corporate capitalism sound like the best of all imaginable worlds. Instead of what it really is.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: communism, second subject

Blackslisting in the 1950s and a couple of thoughts from it today

Erik Tarloff, the son of Frank Tarloff, a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s for Communist affiliations, writes about his father in a piece for The Atlantic melodramatically titled, My Father Was a Communist 09/21/2011. (One early Cold War paranoia film was called I Married a Communist.) The writers known as the Hollywood Ten were the most famous targets of the blacklist, though Tarloff was not among the ten.

This is an interesting topic in itself. But it also relates directly to a couple of current concerns.

The Encyclopædia Britannica's current article on the Hollywood Ten describes the ten and the era succinctly:

... 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress, were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. The 10 were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

The group originally included the German writer Bertolt Brecht, but Brecht fled the country on the day following his inquest, and the remaining 10 were voted in contempt of Congress on Nov. 24, 1947. Convicted in federal court the following year, they were given sentences of six months to one year in prison. (While in prison, Dmytryk broke with the rest and agreed to cooperate, admitting being a communist and giving the names of 26 others.)

Ten years ago, it might have been more of a challenge to try to describe the Red Scare atmosphere of 1948-54, in particular. But if you've spent some time listening to FOX News, or Glenn Beck, or the Tea Party types, you pretty much get the idea.

In the case of Hollywood, rightwingers got it into their heads that Commie conspirators were sneaking Red messages into movies. ("Red" referred to Communists in those days, not Republicans.) Since there were few if any obvious examples, it was kind of like the fear of backwards messages on rock songs that were supposedly going to convert listeners into Satanists or something, a rightwing fad of the 1970s.

This obituary of the Tarloff, Obituary: Frank Tarloff by Dick Vosburgh The Independent 09/29/1999, includes the following story:

One of Tarloff's favourite anecdotes concerned the day he warned his landlord that he'd soon be called before HUAC: "I'll be refusing to give the names of Communists," he told him. "So if you don't approve of that, I'll understand if you ask us to leave." The landlord was a member of the Los Angeles underworld, and, although not a political animal, had no sympathy with squealers. "Don't worry," he told Tarloff. "As long as you don't rat on nobody you're welcome here."

HUAC was the House Un-American Affairs Committee, which before the Second World War had investigated both Nazi and Communist activities but achieved its greatest prominence during the postwar Red Scare and various investigations, notably the investigation of Alger Hiss which made Congressman Richard Nixon a national figure.

It wasn't illegal to be a Communist or a member of the Communist Party (CP, or CPUSA as the FBI preferred) in 1953 when Frank Tarloff was blacklisted. But the Truman Administration in 1948 had successfully prosecuted the top leaders of the CP under the Smith Act for being unregistered agents of a foreign power and for having conspired to advocate the overthrow of the US government. In 1954, the Communist Control Act outlawed the CP itself in all but name.

When actual CP members were called before an investigating committee at that time, the Party line was that they should refuse to testify on First Amendment grounds of freedom of speech. The political-legal argument was that it was unconstitutional for the government to investigate the personal political beliefs of individuals. But the courts at the time recognized only the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination as legally justifying a refusal to testify. The CP, it appears, was happy to have individual members in that situation become martyrs to the cause and go to prison.

The younger Tarloff's explanation of this in a footnote is confusing:

The earliest uncooperative witnesses invoked their First Amendment right to free speech as the basis for their non-cooperation, and subsequently were convicted of contempt of Congress and sent to prison. Later witnesses who, on the advice of counsel, relied on their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, escaped criminal prosecution, although they still sacrificed their careers. Of course, to any rational person, this distinction makes no sense: Since witnesses were not being accused of a crime, self-incrimination should have been an irrelevant consideration, whereas they had been exercising their right to free speech. But such were the times, and such are the vagaries of the justice system.

I think Erik Tarloff here is trying to argue in favor of the First Amendment option, though he might have mentioned that at least one later Supreme Court decision seemed to validate it. But arguing that the Fifth Amendment shouldn't have been appropriate doesn't take full account of the real risk of being prosecuted in connection with CP membership at the time, not unlike the way in 2011 members or even contributors to organizations officially labelled "terrorist" by the federal government risk prosecution and serious jail time.

Soviet espionage of later decades in the US tended not to rely on CP members or the ideologically committed, but instead used less romantic methods of bribery and blackmail. But that had not been the case in the 1940s, and revelations about atomic espionage, above all the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in connection with it in 1951, meant that there were real legal risks involved with admitting CP membership.

Erik Tarloff raises an important civil-liberties point:

The interviewer began the dialogue by asking if my father would feel equal outrage had the blacklist targeted Nazis rather than Communists. Wrong-footed, Frank fumfered some sort of response. After the interview, both my parents emerged from the studio in high dudgeon. "How dare he?" was the gravamen of their scandalized indignation. And when they told me about the interview later that day, I made matters worse by suggesting the interviewer had posed a legitimate question. There was a distinct chill in the parental household for some time thereafter.

But it is a legitimate question. Unless one is prepared to defend Communism on its merits, or, alternatively, is merely defending one's comrades out of a kind of tribal loyalty, then one is, I think, obliged to consider whether punishing people for their political beliefs is always wrong, or wrong only when it's one's own side that is being persecuted.

He goes on to point out (in a footnote) that his father supported the right of Nazis to march in the famous case in Skokie, Illinois.

Erik has framed it as a fairly straightforward civil-liberties question. But if we ask about Congress or other government bodies investigating private groups constituted as political or religious entities, it's a complex question, in practice. And it relates to two current concerns.

One is the designation of groups as terrorist groups and the drastic laws penalties a person can incur for giving "material assistance" to a group officially so designated. Laws apply to political and religious groups. Political parties can't just send money to the party leaders' Swiss bank accounts. A group organized as a tax-exempt religious institutions can't carry on partisan electioneering in its own name.

And the laws don't allow political parties, lobbyists or churches to run criminal enterprises, whether it's money-laundering, gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking or stockpiling arms to murder public officials. Although thanks to the NRA and the Republican Party's fetish for guns, the lst item probably has more legal latitude than the others. A criminal enterprise can't legalize itself by declaring itself a church or political group. Still, this is why we need to cops and prosecutors and justice officials who are scrupulous about following the law in making these investigations and determinations. The same goes for Congressional or legislative investigators.

Another way it relates to current concerns is the matter of how to research political groups, fringe or otherwise, and who should be doing it. Erik Tarloff mentions the publications like Red Currents that listed alleged Communists and sympathizers. This kind of thing is kind of a small-town conformity approach. "That ole boy ain't acting right. So nobody better give him no job until he straightens up." The fact that Hollywood media moguls were willing to play along with that is pitiful. So is the fact that too many slezy members of Congress and legislative bodies were willing to feed the fires. And there was a whole tawdry crew of paid informers, stool pigeons and fanatics who got into the act of red-hunting in those days.

All that said, if you're going to find out what a political group and individuals who identify with it stand for, you would obviously need to research what those groups say in their meetings, media appearances and publications. "Guilt by association" was all-too-common in the McCarthy era. But guilt-by-assocation refers to guilt by irrelevant association, e.g., you signed a Communist petition so you must be a Communist; this guy was a member of the CP so he must be spying for the Russians, etc. But it's not guilt-by-association to associate people with positions that they've taken in public. The two main CP leaders in this period, Eugene Dennis and William Foster, were official officers of the Party, spoke on the Party's behalf, and published articles under their own names in Party publications. It would hardly be irrational for people to associate themselves with actions and ideas with which they had publicly associated themselves.

So it's a perfectly legitimate and even necessary thing for reporters and scholars and political activists to investigate political groups and draw conclusions from their findings. That's no excuse for sleazebags like Andrew Breitbart or his disciple James O'Keefe to use tapes edited to create a totally misleading impression. This has come up recently in the press with whining from Christian Right leaders over writers from sites like Talk to Action and Religion Dispatches who have investigated the public activities of Rich Perry backers who have associated themselves with the extremist New Apostolic Restoration. Dave Neiwert has done excellent work over the last two decades or so conducting professional journalistic investigations of far-right groups.

Even public figures have a right to complain about unethical or illegal actions by investigators. But any of us who take public political or religious positions can't really object if people associate us with positions we take in public. If I publicly identify myself with the Democratic Party and publicly say I support Social Security and Medicare, all of which I've done here multiple times, I would look pretty silly whining that someone else was associating me with the Democratic Party or saying that I support Social Security and Medicare. But something like that is just what some of the mealy-mouthed leaders of the New Apostolic Restoration are doing in response to careful research by people like Rachel Tabachnick.

Tags: communism, communist party usa, mccarthyism

The Islamunists are coming!!

Calm down, trolls. That's not an "Islamofascist", that's an earlier version of the eternal bogeyman. This particular picture is called "The Bolshevik". This bogeyman was also known as a "Communist". He even eventually got a bunch of nuclear weapons that could pretty much obliterate all human life in the United States. He had a whole nation for a long time, called the "Soviet Union". But it went out of existence 15 or 16 years ago.

Now, I realize it's not nearly so scary as a bearded religious fanatic hiding out in a cave or in some godforsaken village out in the badlands of Pakistan who doesn't have an army or nukes or even a state of his own. Since 9/11, we know oceans no longer protect us. Unlike back in the days of the Soviet Union, when the oceans were an impenetrable shield against those nuclear missiles and warheads. That's why we need a Star Wars missile shield now, to protect us against those missiles from the Soviet Union, that no longer exists. Because the oceans don't protect us anymore. Or something... Look! Over there! A bearded guy speaking Arabic!!

That iconic image was featured in an article in El Mundo reminding the readers that today is the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Which is known as the October Revolution, because, well... Wait! Some Iranian on TV said he doesn't like America! What will we do?! The oceans don't protect us anymore!

Tags: bolshevik revolution, communism, october revolution, russia