Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>CB: Wouldn't the WTO, IMF, World Bank, U.S. Treasury, NAFTA, NATO, US war
>machine, et al, combine to be this organ ?
>
I can't respond to Charles Brown's posting right now. But I'd like to
submit a note I sent to marxmail where I address issues that are very
closely related to this discussion. Hope that's proper.
***
The mischaracterization of Vicente Fox is a corollary of the leftist
mischaracterization of the social formation in Mexico, Latin America, and
the Third World. The confusion arises from a misunderstanding of the
prospects of capitalist development in the world and our reliance on the old
dogmas of the Left.
The theoretical arsenal of the Left in Latin America continues to be based
on (1) the fruitless attempt to force Lenin's analysis of imperialism into
the framework set by Marx in Capital, (2) the recycling of the ideas of
Sismondi, Malthus, and the Russian populists as dependency theories, etc.,
and (3) the misunderstanding of the trends and prospects of today's
international capitalism.
In the view of the historical circumstances that led to WWI, Hilferding,
Hobson, Bukharin, and Lenin viewed protectionism, colonialism, and
militarism as manifestations of the increasing power of large companies and
'finance capital', who could obtain systematic super-profits, superseding de
facto the laws of exchange of the old 'competitive capitalism'.
Marx was fully aware of the tendency of capitalist production to overflow
its self-imposed boundaries, to break all rules and codes of conduct
including those of its own making. But he was clear that the main dynamics
of capitalist reproduction was to be pin down as M-C-M' proper, value that
expands itself via surplus production and exploitation based on an
unswerving compliance with the laws of legally voluntary exchange. The new
views came to regard the repeated violation of M-C-M' proper as the natural,
'dialectical' result of the process itself in the conditions of the new
capitalism.
While Marx stated that as capitalism evolved, its historical configuration
would approach more closely the 'pure' economic logic of M-C-M',
increasingly weeding out or getting around its external hurdles, the new
views regarded extra-economic forms of competition and super-exploitation of
foreign workers (using state power as a systematic weapon), in one word,
imperialism, as natural and growing expressions of mature and even agonizing
capitalism. In this light, the old ways of mercantilism, which played a key
role in mustering the historical premises of capitalist reproduction in
Europe, were now refurbished at a larger scale, more intensely, as the
inexorable methods of choice of rich and mature capitalism.
Marx praised political economists who, like Ricardo, pinned down the
fundamental dynamic thrust of capitalist production (M-C-M' proper) and
viewed its main sources of trouble as arising from the internal process
itself in the form of a tendential decline in profitability and, ultimately,
the growing rebelliousness of the direct producers. The political economy
compatible with the new views would have to be a re-edition of the ideas of
Sismondi, Malthus, and the Russian populists, pointing one way or another
outside of the M-C-M' process to find the main sources of trouble (and even
denying the mere possibility) of capitalist expansion.
These ideas, and not the ideas of Marx, were the ones attuned to the belief
of 'the development of underdevelopment' in Third World capitalism, as a
result of reduced domestic markets and effective demand traps (breakable by
state sponsored industrialization), and foreign exchange gaps (breakable by
protectionism and import substitution), etc.
While the ascent of Keynesianism in the rich capitalist countries is to be
pondered in its own specificity, it is partially the result of the same
tendencies. The rapid ascent, in both the theoretical and policy realms, of
the doctrines of the so-called 'neoliberalism' (frequently mocked and
underrated by Keynesian economists who had the ear of Leftist thinkers) came
as a shock in the Keynesian-dominated economics establishment. While Marx
showed in Capital that, as a result of relative surplus value production,
without resort to government deficit spending, seigniorage, or
protectionism, it was possible for workers to systematically improve their
standard of living under capitalism, the Left seems almost unanimously
unable to even consider it.
In fact, a great deal of what the Left in Latin America calls
'neoliberalism' is not an expression of imperialism but of its exact
capitalistic opposite. To a large extent, 'neoliberalism' is a forceful
ideological rationalization of M-C-M' proper. If we fail to see this, we
mischaracterize the WTO, the EU, the NAFTA, the FTTA initiative, etc. To
the extent that international agencies sponsored by national states, and the
national states themselves, remove protectionism and enforce regional and
global 'free trade' (when and if it is real and not merely rhetorical), they
are not promoting imperialism but enforcing M-C-M' proper.
The removal of barriers to the free circulation of workers across countries
is becoming a fundamental need of M-C-M' proper in today's capitalist world.
Increasingly, M-C-M' conflicts frontally with the old restrictions on
immigration. Look at the political factions that favor bans on migrant
labor (and demand protection against foreign commodities) in the United
States. What interests do they represent? The Wall Street Journal and,
more intelligently, the BusinessWeek regal us every other occasion with
forceful arguments in favor of an 'orderly' (of course) but aggressive
attraction of foreign workers. Becker, Friedman, Lucas, and many other
villains of 'neoliberalism' are -- as far as I know -- openly on the side of
less restricted (or even unrestricted) labor migration policies. But aren't
workers and their union leaders also opposed to 'neoliberalism'? Of course,
things are more complicated than my little description. The concerns of
workers in the rich countries who want to defend their real wages and
working conditions against sudden changes in their social landscape are
legitimate. But the Left, IMO, has not done its homework in disentangling
what is so tangled.
We need to draw proper political conclusions out of this. A primary task is
to take the mixed bag of social oppression in Latin America, and tell apart
the "modern evils" from the "inherited evils arising from the passive
survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production." Covering everything
under the rhetorical cloak of 'capitalist hegemony' does not do. Our global
opposition to capitalism cannot, should not imply local stupidity. If we
don't draw the proper political lessons, we will be banging our heads
against the same wall over and over again like flies against a closed
window.
Of course, trial and error may work. Eventually. But the whole point of
Marx undertaking such a vast analysis of capitalism as a mode of production
was (and us discussing the issues online is) that we be able to anticipate
historical tendencies and, ultimately, "shorten and lessen the birth-pangs"
of building a new and better society.
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