FW: in 1998 Karl Marx came back

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Tue Oct 20 15:22:53 PDT 1998


At 01:52 PM 10/20/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Guardian (London) Tuesday October 20, 1998
>
>MARKETS, MELTDOWN AND MARX
>
>For more than a decade there seemed only one viable economic system -
>unfettered capitalism. Now it is destroying Russia, failing in Asia
>and widening inequalities in the West. So why is new Labour still
>wedded to it? Eric Hobsbawm, Britain's foremost Marxist thinker, says
>it is time for Blair to go back to the basics of social democracy

This passage from Eric Hobsbawm's article is usefully concise description of what we have been fighting in Europe against, and call neo-liberalism:


>Second, there is what might be called the consensus of the
>neoclassical academic economists who dream of a nirvana of an
>optimally efficient and frictionless economy in a self-adjusting
>global market. That is to say an economy with minimal interference by
>states or other institutions. Given the state of the world, this
>implied a systematic policy of privatising and deregulating the
>economy. In practice, of course, this was an economics which fitted
>the economy of transnational corporations and other operators in a
>period of boom. This consensus is now at an end.

The extract concludes:


> Like President Clinton,
>New Labour will be judged, both by history and by the people, by other
>criteria than its success in winning another election. In any case, if
>there is any way of losing the next election, it is by not recognising
>that the age of neo-liberalism is over.

It is valuable Doug was able to post this article which marks a step in the possible re-emergence of marxism. From having been on the defensive so long, Hobsbawm here seems to be once again on the offensive.

Of this particular article my main reservation is that there is no recognition of the concept of total global Value providing a ceiling which the global economy has crashed up against and which it is going to fall back from to a substantial degree. Hobsbawm quite rightly in my opinion cautions against over-emphasising or underemphasising the significance of the global crisis. Certainly he does not regard it as terminal. But it is quite possible for the capitalist economy to get stuck fluctuating around an even larger percentage of the workforce of the world being unemployed or only marginally employed.

I have not yet got a copy of the whole one-off issue of Marxism Today but will try to do so. Perhaps others can share their analysis.

Like the brief interview with Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, tonight, Hobsbawm seems to criticise the Labour government for not really being social democratic. As far as I am concerned we will have to come back to this question many times. I am not confident I can spell out the difference, but I really do not sense it is social democratic at all. And while it has taken much from Thatcherism, I don't agree with SWP (UK) slogans that it is just same old conservatives.

I think it is a government of national unity run from a centrist position in terms of the electorate, *openly* courting business, and arguing that everything must be run efficiently. And one of the surprising things is that the stratum of cadres that have been recruited for this, from various parts of the state sector, especially local government, are running bourgeois democratic capitalism more smoothly from the point of view of the big monopoly corporations than the scattering of speculative small time entrepreneurial capitalists and self-opinionated lawers that provided the cadre force for Thatcher and Major's conservative party. That is perhaps because the tendency to monopoly is the true face of capitalism.

Jacques was complaining that the government had no ideology, and was knocked down by a christian minor novelist, and talk-show host, who supports them, on the basis of how wicked ideology had turned out to be in the twentieth century. But ideology is sometimes a negative word in marxism too, and in that sense I suspect it may be better that the government has no ideology, rather than that its spreads illusions in the working class that capitalism can work for the interests of the working class. Instead they pose the claim that they can work the system efficiently and democratically.

New Labour is indeed to the right of the French socialists and the German SPD. Whether it is to the right of Clinton I do not know. I do think it has opened up space for marxists to exploit.

Chris Burford

London.



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