I don't know what you mean by open or closed. Right now, 40 percent of the world's economy is in deep crisis and the ruling class is worried that the contagion might spread. I explained to Professor Mike yesterday that Marxism is not about "inevitability" but if we can not use the term crisis to describe what's going on, then the term should disappear from the Marxist lexicon. I believe it remains because it does accurately describe the current situation, as George Soros concurs.
(Following critical comments on Keynes, Doug proves my point by failing to
transcend Keynsianism)
>I don't see what choice a socialist has but to support living wage and
>comparable worth legislation and a less cretinous NLRB. But those things
>aren't socialism, and the bourgies will never concede them unless they fear
>expropriation.
Doug, this is something you do habitually and it is blatantly undialectical. You construct a menu with two choices: an EPI-flavored "comparable worth" legislation or "expropriation". The choice is not between pallid reforms and the Spartacist League.
In Marxist terms, you have created a binary opposition between minimal and maximal demands. In the real class struggle, socialists try to bridge the gap between minimal and maximal demands. Trotsky understood this and tried to systematize it with the Transitional Program. He wrote:
"The strategic task of the next period -- prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization -- consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation . It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.
"Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of he masses' living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state."
While this methodology is sound, his followers soon forgot about the methodology and made a fetish of the particular transitional demands that Trotsky raised in the context of the 1930s. However, the approach remains sound. We have to provide a bridge between the current level of consciousness and subsequent steps necessary on the road to taking power.
>Oh, I'm not sure the Korean bourgeoisie is thrilled with its plight right
>now, but it knows that to remain a bourgeoisie it has to go along with what
>its masters tell it. But fuck the bourgeoisie. Is it in the interest of the
>world working class to see liquidation? Ask the Hyundai workers who were
>occupying their plant.
It is not in the interests of workers to face the liquidation of the factory that employs them. Nor is it in their interest to go to war when the various ruling classes of South Korea, Japan, etc. decide to resolve their problems by liquidation excess capacity through violence. The problem for Marxists is how to come up with an alternative. It must be stated as clearly as possible: there is no alternative to socialism. All the palliatives that are being discussed in the bourgeois press will fall short. No fixes from the IMF or G7 will work. The problem is that there is excess capacity. We are witnessing a crisis of overproduction. Capitalism has no solution for that.
>In this context, the IMF's role can be read as assuring that the costs of
>the deflation are shifted as much as possible towards the recipients of
>its largesse, and to limit the blow to creditor nation finances.
>Bailouts of these sorts are justified as essential to preventing a
>collapse of the global financial and economic structure like that of
>1929-32. This may or may not be true -- who knows? With every crisis,
>you never know if it's the one that, unchecked, could lead to ruin.
This is exactly the sort of hedging you are good at. It is starting to wear thin, in my opinion. You are one of the most respected young Marxist economists in the US. It is about time you learned to take a stand of the sort that Marx took in "Value, Price and Profit":
--- At the same time, and quite apart form the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!" ---
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)