On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 8:23 PM Max Herman <maxnmher...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > What if socialism has also won the Cold War, i.e. a system has prevailed > in which periodic bubbles are cushioned by ever-replenishing state > bailouts? > Toni Negri had this idea quite a while ago, in a text that more or less launched the movement of autonomous Marxism: https://libcom.org/files/negri_keynes.pdf Negri thought that the Keynesian welfare state was a successful response, by the bourgeoisie, to the challenge of the Bolshevik revolution. The response came at the moment of capital's greatest weakness: 1929 and the following decade, during which Keynes and Roosevelt invented the basic principles of welfare. The people would be saved from the collapse of entrepreneurial capitalism, but their revolutionary agency would be sacrificed to a new and higher form of the same old system. The state internalized the workers' demands, paying out fiat money to smooth the jagged edges of the business cycle and thereby making proletarian consumption into the very engine of capitalist growth. For this reason, Negri believed, the state could no longer be taken over by a revolutionary class. Instead, it had to be subverted, destroyed from within. A whole lot of 1968 sprang from that logic. It cast a long shadow over the following decades (and there are other versions of this analysis in the Frankfurt School, Debord, and the American theorists of monopoly capitalism during the postwar era). Unfortunately, we've done a lousy job of subverting the state. The Occupy movement (bless David Graeber's departed shade) made that painfully obvious. We would need a theorist of Negri's stature to chart a new course for the twenty-first century. Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it over the top into ecosocialism. principle of hope, Brian
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