review of bhaskar

[rc-am]

the radical chains review questioned the proposition, put forward by
bhaskar, of combining a labour _market_ and a basic wage.   for those
committed to the demand for a basic wage like myself, those arguments are
important to take into account.   that is, specifically, what does a
partial decommodification mean in the context of a retention of the labour
market?  according to ticktin, this meant the eventual resort to mass
unemployment in russia.  mattick makes a similar argument about the
trajectory of keynsianism with its full employment.    the argument being,
that an atomised resistance in russia and an integrated labour movement
within keynsian arrangements ensured a resort to mass unemployment as a way
of moving beyond the inherent instabilities of both systems (where the
former led to a disintegration of production and the latter to inflation
and stagnation) _without_ having to countenance the abolition of either the
administrators (in ticktin's words) or the ruling class.

in short, for ticktin it was the administered form of the economy (he does
not think russia had planning) that gave rise to mass unemployment.

and that's why confusing a response of state technocrats to mass movement
with the aims of the mass movement is in itself an act of forgetting,
unless the aspiration is to substitute technocracy for movement.  and it's
this which results in mass unemployment and the restoration of monetary
command, not any categorical distinction between state planning and market.
ticktin (following preobrazhensky) in fact beleives that there is an
antithetical relationship between planning and the market, but he doesn't
confuse the former with state planning and nor does he regard the latter as
the essence of capitalism*.

whether or not ticktin/radical chains are right is one thing.  that they
have in fact made an important contribution to analysing the history of
class struggles is i think undeniable.

a couple of other articles on ticktin/radical chains.

Aufheben critique of Radical Chains/Ticktin
"The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory?"
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/Aufheben/auf4dec3.htm

"Harry Cleaver debates Hillel Ticktin on capitalism's present crisis"
Radical Chains
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/guest/radical/rc-debat.htm

*australia has had -- excluding the last fifteen years and about fifty
years in the last century -- a high degree of state regulation and
planning, esp of key industries, infrastructure, the labour market.   aside
from the US, most countries have experienced capitalism as a combination of
state planning and market, often with the accent on the former.  that seems
to be glossed over here.  i'm not sure why.

either the US is implicitly seen as the exemplar of capitalism, in which
case what's being advanced is that capitalism has a pure form, as if the
categories move outside the movements of history and class struggles that
(re)produce capitalism.  or, polemically, people think that it's important
to focus on what they perceive as the antithetical moments within a
specifically US terrain, in which case my only suggestion would be that a)
state planning is not an antithetical moment _outside_ capitalism, even if
(as negri, aufheben and radical chains have argued) state planning emerges
as both a response to and as the prevention of communist movement, and b)
that you should be careful what you wish for.

Angela
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