again an excellent blog from ZZ
A quick tour of my book shelves
produces many books and articles that promise a new look, a re-thinking, a
fresh approach, a reconstruction, or an updating of Marxism. If I had the time
or the patience, I would expose the short-sightedness, naiveté or sheer
humbuggery that lurks behind most of these misbegotten projects. It is not that
Marxism is scripture or that there are no new aspects or perspectives on
Marxism; there are indeed many yet-to-be-revealed wrinkles and old, mistaken or
inapplicable perspectives. But the core of the theory developed and elaborated
by Marx, Engels, and Lenin has resilience and usefulness that defies the hubris
of academically trained “specialists” impressed by the latest bourgeois school
and its analytical tools or seduced by a passing “trend” identified by the
business press or the media pundits.
We have seen them come and we have seen
them go, with embarrassing regularity.
Think of the celebrations around the
arrival of a book by Laclau and Mouffe. Or recall the heralding, not so long
ago, of the Hardt and Negri book, Empire and its sequel. Or consider the
celebrity “Marxist” flavor-of-the-day, Slavoj Zizek. Zizek’s prolix
ranting, as with those who preceded him, will soon settle in the remainder bins
and disappear into irrelevance.
Nothing discourages the curious from
actually reading Marx more than an impenetrable tome by a self-important
Marxist poseur. Nothing tarnishes the Marxist legacy like an “entertainment”
laden with pretentious neologisms and paradoxical aphorisms.
One of the most common shell games is
to invent a new “stage” of capitalism, a hitherto undiscovered direction
signaling epochal change. When Lenin wrote Imperialism, he explained it
neither as a departure from the evolutionary course of capitalism nor as a step
away from its fundamental wellspring. Instead, he showed how capitalism’s core
mechanisms evolve qualitatively new forms, in this case, the features
associated with imperialism.
Over the last few decades, writers have
professed to discover a new stage of capitalism that supersedes Lenin’s
imperialism, generally based upon impatience with the course of history or an
urge to become the next celebrity Leftist intellectual. In all cases,
the new post-imperialism theories have sprung from a misreading of passing
historic trends.
Some have fixed on the post-Soviet
emergence of so-called “humanitarian intervention” on the part of the US, NATO, and
other allies as the mark of the obsolescence of imperialism. Others take the proliferation
of supra-nation institutions as signaling a new international order
overshadowing the nation-state and hence rendering the theory of imperialism
outmoded. And still others have interpreted the late-twentieth-century global
expansion of investment and trade (so-called “globalization”) as indicative of
new cooperative links incompatible with Lenin’s view of imperialism.
Driving all of these views is a general
hostility to revolutionary Marxism and the political implications of Lenin’s
theory. That is, the authors do not want anyone to take imperialism seriously.
Where argument may fail, events have
largely rendered these theories irrelevant: “humanitarian intervention” is a
thinly disguised cover for old-fashioned imperialism; one nation-state—the
US—dominates nearly every international institution from the UN to the IMF
while maintaining much of the world as client-states; and “globalization” was
critically wounded by global economic collapse.
Yet proclamations of a new stage
continue to crop up. The latest is a pretentious piece laden with tables,
figures and neologisms posted on August 7 in the formerly Communist
publication, Political Affairs. Authored by Greg Rose and entitled
Beyond Imperialism? Have We Reached a New Stage of Capitalism?, the article
promises a fresh challenge to imperialism.
Not to keep a reader waiting, Rose’s
answer is a resounding “yes”! He says: “The four new features of the current
stage of capitalism…have intensified capitalism’s contradictions and carry
implications for revolutionary struggle as urgent as those of the features of
Lenin’s Imperialism.”
Rose claims to identify new
developments that “question whether the underlying model [Lenin’s imperialism]
fits the current stage of capitalist development.” Taking them in order, they
are:
Hyperfinancialization
“Financialization” is a term that
labels, but fails to describe or explain the process that resulted in the
financial sector’s domination of the US economy. Like the word
“globalization,” it is a popular word used by those who lack an understanding
or forego an explanation of the underlying process. Rose’s coinage of the
exaggerated term “hyperfinancialization,” while an attention grabber, adds
nothing to an already empty neologism.
In truth, the financial sector has
grown by leaps and bounds, but its dominance of national economies has been
limited largely to the US
and the UK (and Iceland, by
choice). Finance grew sharply and dominated in these economies precisely in
step with the destruction of the manufacturing sector in the US and UK. As manufacturing began its
migration to lower wage areas, both countries, but especially the US, shifted its
economic “activities” toward finance and financial services. In effect, the
unification of the global economy created the conditions for a new
international division of responsibilities, with productive labor associated
with emerging markets and financial markets associated with US and UK financial
centers.
Following Michael Hudson’s theses on
“fictitious capital” (From Marx to
Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital), Rose reduces the global
financial crisis to the fetish of compound interest. While there is a small,
metaphorical kernel of truth to this observation, it makes a profound crisis of
capitalism appear to be an exercise in fantasy on the part of investment banks
and their financial colleagues. Matters are not that simple.
It was not fictitious capital that
ended the capitalist boom, but real wealth exploited from productive workers
and concentrated in the hands of capitalist investors. The enormous pool of
capital, searching for investment opportunities and finding few risk-free,
profitable avenues in the productive sector, gravitated to the bankers. Armed
with Rube Goldberg investment innovations, the bankers promised safe and
comforting returns. But the new vehicles broke down.
If fictitious capital alone were the
culprit, then it could be regulated away and capitalism would merrily get back
on course. But the villain was over-accumulation, a process inherent in
capitalism and perpetually leading to crisis.
Rose links the austerity measures urged
by many governments with “hyperfinancialization.” But this is to confuse policy
with the imperatives of capitalism. Whatever pressures the bond scavengers may
place upon governing bodies, social democratic and conservative politicians are
not compelled to comply. No government or union (like the European Union) need
accept the tyranny of bonds—they choose to do so.
In the end, the growth in significance
of the financial sector in the US
and the UK—whether
dressed up in the fancy uniform of “financialization” or
“hyperfinancialization” – hardly evidences a new stage in capitalism.
Fusion
of Ownership and Management at the Highest Levels of Capital
Since the era of Berle and Means
(1932), researchers have acknowledged the changing patterns of corporate
control, ownership, and compensation. C. Wright Mills (1956) observed that
management emerged from and was sustained as “the very rich.” Baran and Sweezy
(1966) noted that “managers are among the biggest owners… Far from being a separate
class, they constitute in reality the leading echelon of the property-owning
class.” Undoubtedly the merging of ownership and management has continued—even
intensified—over the last fifty years. There is nothing new in this process.
Rose sees this long established process
of fusion as linked somehow to “hyperfinancialization,” a difficult thesis to
maintain given their independent histories. He is shocked to see management
“…make increasing stock price the principal objective of corporate operations.”
And when was increasing the nominal value of the company alien to management?
In a curious non sequitur, Rose
offers figures and data taken from a study by Fyrdman and Jenter (2010) that
highlight two different measures of the effectiveness of CEO compensation. In
the words of the two academics, they are trying to determine: “What is the
right measure of the wealth-performance relationship?” They conclude: “The
progress made by recent studies on all these dimensions is cause for optimism
and suggests that answers may not be far off.”
And I might therefore ask: What is the
relevance of their study to Rose’s thesis?
The fusion of management and ownership
is old in origin and continuing. It suggests no new stage in capitalism.
Capitalism’s Cannibalism of Invested
Public Labor through Privatization
Recapitulating
Key Facets of the Earlier Process of Primitive Accumulation
Rose performs a service by underscoring
the significance of the privatization of Soviet and Eastern European socialist
property and the absorption of the workforce into the capitalist labor market.
The privatization of publicly owned assets served as a basis for the creation
of a national bourgeoisie in many countries and for fire-sale asset purchases
by existing capitalist enterprises. But the destruction of European socialism
had an even more lasting effect by opening up a new and very cheap labor market
and a destination for global products. In a real way, the elimination of the
socialist economic community cleared all obstacles to trade agreements and
unfettered market relations; there was no longer an existing economic
alternative.
But to advance this to a new form of
“primitive accumulation” or its like is completely unwarranted.
Rose cites a passage from Rosa
Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital to bolster his thesis, a passage
that likens colonial domination (in the era of imperialism!) to the brutality
and violence of the era of primitive accumulation “…at the end of the Middle
Ages, when the history of capitalism in Europe began…” But where primitive
accumulation jump-started capitalism in its time, colonial accumulation served
to free land, resources, labor, and trade for capitalist exploitation.
There are two paradoxes here.
If Rose is right and modern
privatization heralds an era of capitalism akin to Rosa Luxemburg’s account of
colonial domination, then how is it different from Lenin’s near simultaneous
and similar account of imperial (colonial) domination for land, resources,
labor, and trade?
Secondly, if this is a new era of
accumulation through privatization and the snatching of vast amounts of real
value, then how can this claim be reconciled with the “financialization” thesis
that stands on the foundation of “fictitious capital” and not real sweated
value?
While Rose offers some ideas of
interest, Lenin’s theory of Imperialism remains safe.
Parenthetically, Rose’s pretentious
borrowing of an esoteric expression from cellular biology – “autophagic
accumulation”—to describe his modest insight is reminiscent of the petty
academic practice of surrounding small ideas with a dense fog.
The Emergence of External,
Environmental Constraints on
Capitalism’s
Ability to Accumulate and Reproduce
Finally, Rose reminds us of the impact
of environmental degradation. He offers a useful warning of both the finite
limits of fossil fuels and the increasingly ominous impact of climate change.
While peak oil is not as settled of an issue as Rose suggests, it certainly
looms somewhere ahead on the time line. But climate change threatens with much
more immediacy and with amplified influence on economic growth.
While climate change must be a central
issue for any progressive program, it and the peak-oil question do not modify
the logic or course of imperialism. Imperial policy has and remains focused on
securing scarce resources. The human cost of climate change will no more
deflect imperial policy than did the human cost of colonial invasion,
occupation, and domination or world wars. To point to deaths from starvation,
as Rose does in his article, no more influences the imperial agenda than
pointing to the deaths in Libya
or Syria.
In reality, one cannot be a serious
environmental advocate without being an anti-imperialist. The enormous waste
associated with maintaining, transporting, and unleashing an enormous war
machine trivializes the commendable collective commitment to recycle or recover
consumer goods. The scrap heap of weapons systems –their development,
deployment and rapid obsolescence—counts as one of the greatest insults to the
environment as well as a callous disregard for protecting and preserving our
resources. Their actual use in destructive imperial adventures courts even
greater environmental catastrophe.
However, this is not a new feature of
imperialism, but a quantitatively greater assault on the environment, an
assault that threatens first and foremost those weakest and poorest.
To argue that the great harm of
reckless destruction of the environment is somehow inconsistent with or alien
to Lenin’s theory of imperialism defies credibility. No social theory devised
since the advent of capitalism consistently links essential features of the economic system to harm brought on the world’s
people as do Marx, Engels, and Lenin’s theories of capitalist development. Other
theories warn of dangers, setbacks, or potential tragic policies, but none
demonstrate a logical connection between capitalism, imperialism and human
suffering as do those theories.
It is not the inviolability of Lenin’s
words that is at stake here; capitalism may well mutate to another stage beyond
imperialism (hopefully a transition to socialism!). Instead, it is the
integrity of our social science, its ability to account for and predict events,
and its cumulative advancement that call for defense.
Rose errs in cavalierly violating these
standards. His is not a challenge to Lenin’s theory, but a misunderstanding.
Zoltan
Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
