[lbo-talk] funeral fund

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Nov 16 16:28:45 PST 2009


Speaking ill of the dead, Chris Harman was in fact a philistine hack. His main contribution was to write the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)'s theory of capitalist growth and crisis. This was a thankless task since the group had saddled themselves with an opportunistic adaptation to capitalist expansion post war, the theory of the 'permanent arms economy', which underneath its angry denunciation of the arms industry was a Keynes-style add-on to Marx's theory of accumulation that claimed that growth could carry on ad infinitum because the disruptive surplus was bled off into the 'luxury consumption' of the arms sector. This theory carried the party through the postwar boom, but when the crisis tendencies that Marx identified re-emerged in the seventies, the defence of the theory that capitalist growth would persist ad infinitum put the theory before reality.

Harman's job it was to pooh-pooh those in the S.W.P. foolish enough to go back to read Marx on crisis, when they ought to be reading Michael Kidron on the permanent arms economy. In Explaining the Crisis, Harman reproduced some of his catty dismissals of the marxist fundamentalists in his own orgnisation from the internal bulletin discussions - namely David Yaffe - who had been foolish enough to read Paul Mattick and Henryk Grossmann. Those Marxists were expelled from the SWP.

Later, some of them re-published Henryk Grossmann's Law of Accumulation with Pluto Press. Weirdly, the same Chris Harman who had been attacking the study of Marx's crisis theory in Explaining the Crisis, suddenly came over all fundamentalist Marxist in 'Economics Of The Madhouse: Capitalism and the Market Today' (1995). Now he was quoting Grossmann on the crisis and talking about the falling rate of profit again. Discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which had been a sign of dissident 'paleo-Marxism' in the seventies became a religious Mantra for Harman in the 1990s. Some weird calculations were made to show that the redirection of the surplus into arms spending no longer prevented the crisis tendencies from re-emerging. The imminent crisis of capitalism would keep the comrades committed to the cause - even if that meant pretending that there was no expansion of capitalism into the developing world after the collapse of Stalinism (after all, those countries had been capitalist all along, according to another SWP shibboleth).



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