Rakesh,
I think you miss the central point.
You cannot persuade people to attend to the real barrier that capitalism places before human development by telling lies about how dreadful their lives are. If what Marxism has to say has no resonance in the lives of ordinary people, then it won't gain a hearing.
In the 1950s the Communist Parties were committed to a vulgar theory of the absolute immiseration of the working class. That theory proved to be false, and those comrades were made a laughing stock. Histrionic caricatures of what is taking place do not win radical politics any support.
Marx never put forward a theory of catastrophism or of absolute immiseration. That's just as well, or his insights would have been relegated to the dustbin of history, like Sisimondi's, or Malthus's. Instead Marx showed that destructive and creative aspects of capital were always combined, with the one laying the basis for the other.
It was always Marx's point that the potential of industrial society should be liberated from its narrow restriction within the profit motive. If that potential had no existence in the here and now, then Marx would have been just a utopian dreamer. But his point was that the basis of the future society was present in the here and now.
In message <v02130500630bd2c94413@[128.112.70.2]>, Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes
>Jim, I appreciate your insistence that we must tell the truth about
>capitalism:
I don't think that you do, as the following shows
> the stagnation in real wages in the OECD,
There is a fall in wages relative to profits in the OECD countries. But wages command a greater mass of commodities, because these are produced more cheaply. To say that living standards have stagnated in the OECD countries is just not true. In life expectancy, longevity, quality of life and so on, it is unavoidably the case that my generation have lived better than my parents'.
This is not a debating point. I am not addressing a public meeting. If it is not possible amongst ourselves to be honest about what happens then rational discussion is impossible. I had a friend, Chris Perry, who was a member of the Socialist Labour League, a Trotskyist group that took a dogmatic approach to the Capitalist crisis. He sold the party paper outside car plants in the sixties. 'The capitalist crisis is upon us' he would be saying. 'Fuck off Chris,' they replied, 'we're making a packet'. His analysis was at odds with their experience. When in the 1980s the crisis did happen, his authority was already depleted.
> the having to run
>harder on the treadmill to stay in place,
I have to say, that would have been true in the early 90s, but for about five years now the British economy has been on a qualified upturn.
> intractable unemployment
>throughout Europe,
In Britain, I have to report, it has been falling, month on month for ages now, and is at an all-time low. I think that is also true that it has been falling in the US, which recruited more immigrants in the 1990s than it did in the 1890s. By all means, let's have a look at some other countries.
> the lost decade + in Latin America and Africa, the
>compression of real wages in Mexico,
On this score I would certainly agree with you.
>the barbaric descent of Russia,
Russia has indeed suffered a moral collapse (perhaps something to do with the wasteful and destructive character of the Stalinist era). However, you should distinguish between the Western scare stories which relish painting the old enemy as barbarous.
>the
>long stagnation in Japan (now only getting a little boost from big deficit
>spending),
'Long' stagnation? Not all that long, and following several decades of strong growth.
> the permanence of horrifying poverty among at least the bottom
>1/3 of the population in Asia,
As I think you know, I've just written on that very subject, which, I understand Michael Yates is publishing in RRPE, soon.
> the looming depression in China the collapse
>of the lone success story of miracle NICS (even renewed growth promises
>little benefits for the working class in the future, this being the point
>of 'restructruring'),
too early to say collapse, I think.
>the persistence of war and destruction (Iraq, the
>Balkans).
I am surprised that you would think that I had ignored the question of war and destruction in Iraq and the Balkans.
>
>To all this you say that life expectancy is improving, yet this is an
>average
Yes, indeed it is an average, 17 per cent increase in life expectancy worldwide between 1950 and 1990. In the poorer countries of Asia the increase is 20 per cent (UN World Population Prospects, 1990). Infant mortality, too has improved, most pointedly in Africa. Of course it can be said that starting from a lower level, small investments create considerable improvements. But I don't think that you can just sweep these facts under the carpet.
>(you seem to have forgotten the explosion in all kinds of inter and
>intra national inequalities over the last 20 years).
Far from it. As you know, I have published on it, last year in a publication for the Sheffield Hallam U Press.
>You refuse to
>recognize the impacts structural adjustment programs have had on the infant
>mortality of the poor throughout the world.
Do I? I seem to remember that the magazine I work for published John Pender's articles on just that question.
>In the case of the US the
>reduction in poverty among the elderly which has doubtless improved life
>expectancy has been accompanied by the growth of poverty among children.
I don't think that even you can magic away the long improvement in US living standards. Of course it is not a uniform picture, and, as I think I pointed out, the actual distribution of America's incomes is diverging. But it has to be remembered that this is a larger cake that is being cut than it was in 1950 or 1975. It is still possible to get more by getting less of more.
>And you seem unconcerned with the resurgence of communicable diseases:
>cholera, malaria, yellow fever
Do I? How do you divine that? I do note that some of the world's deadliest killers like smallpox have been defeated.
>
>The point is that capitalism reverses the progress that it has indeed made
>possible--it undermines the optimism of its Golden Ages and Bandung eras
>(and let us remember the destruction of capital it required to allow that
>bout of optimism). If you think it can continue to ensure progress, though
>not at the optimal rate and with a few 'temporary' setbacks, then you
>should say that you have removed any rational warrant for revolutionary
>Marxism.
I don't think so. Capitalism is indeed destructive, and I have tried in my political activities and writing to show some of the ways that it is so: in the subordination of the third world to the West, in the attacks on civil liberties across the globe, in the dismantling of basic forms of social solidarity, from the trade union to the family. In the lowered expectations of political life.
What I am not prepared to do is to rig the figures, to invent some kind of apocalyptic collapse of the economic system, and immiseration of labour. But then Marx himself always insisted that this was bullshit politics, of the kind he deplored in Sisimondi, and polemicised against in Wages, Prices and Profits. I am surprised that you should want to resurrect the old Stalinist canard of absolute immiseration.
>
>Jim, just admit that you have thrown in the towel.
Well, I would be the first to admit that the character of struggle changes, but I find myself more politically involved now than ever.
>>But I also said that capitalism combined
>>destructive with creative aspects, that capitalism restrained the
>>development of the forces of production (and hence of human
>>development).
>
>The creative aspects include the concentration of drug innovation on high
>end users (see Ken Silverstein), useless r&d into copy cats and killer
>seeds, semiconductor based guidance systems for weapons, the use of nc
>tools to concentrate all skills among management, etc.
No doubt, but they also include higher yield grains, a telecommunications revolution, family cars, package holidays, and all those other mundane improvements in ordinary people's lives that intellectuals look down upon.
>
>And I think this is silly:
>
>>You load onto scientists a responsibility that we have failed.
>>Scientists are not responsible for the way that society is organised.
>>But those of us who see our role as the betterment of society are. It
>>was out failure to provide a better solution than the existing one that
>>left science in the hands of imperialism.
>
>Are scientists not to be blamed if they agree to work on atomic weapons,
>biological warfare? Can't scientists be greedy if they all rush into
>petroleum engineering instead of ecological biology? Can scientists be part
>of the problem or are they some kind of holy men in your world view?
Since we were talking about Einstein, who played no direct role in the development of the atomic bomb, I think this is a bit rich. Should he have become a watchmaker instead?
I hope that scientists do get involved in petroleum engineering instead of ecological biology. My discussions with biophysicist Mae Wan Ho persuade me that the latter field is religious hocus pocus, while the former is a real contribution to human advancement. -- Jim heartfield