michael a. lebowitz wrote:
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Meszaros' new book
So am I. What he has written below would alone be sufficient to me to
sustain my anticipation.
If correspondences between the 1929 Great Depression and the present
putative crisis are of any instructive relevance, and the former was,
according to general consensus ultimately resolved only by WW2 whereas
now the crisis can only be truly global and a similar resolution is on
that scale unthinkable, among other things what say the Keynesians and
monetarists now - and what of the implications and prospects for
socialist renewal in the coming period?
For example, here are two thought-provoking pages of Meszaros's Beyond
Capital (page 700-702) (I hope this reproduction from his text is not
too long to get through the space limitations of the list - in which
case I'll beak it up) in his chapter entitled 'The Historical Actuality
of the Socialist Offensive' - which seem to me to be particularly
germane just now, as the Group of 7 have met and the World Bank is about
to meet to discuss economic aspects of the same set of contradictions:
While it becomes painfully obvious that capital's alternatives today are
more and more confined to manipulative fluctuations between varieties of
Keynesianism and monetarism, with perilously less and less effective
oscillatory movements tending toward the 'absolute rest' of a depressed
continuum, the socialist rejection of the tyranny of 'no alternative'
must be positively articulated in the form of intermediary objectives
whose realization can make strategic inroads, even if in the first
instance only partial ones, into the system to be replaced.
What decides the fate of the various socialist forces in their
confrontation with capital is the extent to which they can make tangible
changes in everyday life now dominated by the ubiquitous manifestations
of the underlying contradictions. Thus, it is not enough to focus on the
structural determinants - even if it is done with insight, from an
adequate vantage point - if at the same time their directly felt
manifestations are left out of sight, because their socialist strategic
implications are not visible to those concerned. For the meaning of
socialist pluralism - the active engagement in common action, without
compromising but constantly renewing the socialist principles which
inspire the overall concerns - arises precisely from the ability of
participating forces to combine into a coherent whole, with ultimately
inescapable socialist implications, a great variety of demands and
partial strategies which in and by themselves need not have anything
specifically socialist about them at all.
In this sense, the most urgent demands of our times, directly
corresponding to the vital needs of a great variety of social groups -
for jobs and education as well as for a decent health care and social
services, together with the demands inherent in the struggle for women's
liberation - are, without one single exception, such that, in
principle, every genuine liberal could wholeheartedly embrace them. It
is rather different, though, when we consider them not as single issues,
in isolation, but jointly, as parts of the overall complex that
constantly reproduces them as unrealized and systematically unrealizable
demands.
Thus, it is the condition of their realization that ultimately decides
the issue, (defining them in their plurality as conjointly socialist
demands) and not their character considered separately. Consequently,
what is at stake is not the elusive 'politicization' of these separate
concerns though in the end they might fulfill a direct political
function in a socialist strategy, but the effectiveness of asserting and
sustaining such largely self-motivating and 'non-socialist' demands on
the broadest possible front.
The immediate concerns of everyday life, from health care to grain
production, are not directly translatable into the general values and
principles of a social system. (Even comparisons become relevant and
effective only when there is a shortfall in one area as a result of the
more or less unjustifiable demands of another; like today's cuts in
vital social services in the interest of the war-industry.) Any attempt
at imposing a direct political control on such movements, following the
rather unhappy tradition of the not so distant past, is in danger of
being counterproductive (even if for the best intentions of
'politicization'), instead of helping to strengthen their autonomy and
effectiveness.
It is an important sign of the historically changed conditions that
these demands and the forces behind them can no longer be 'incorporated'
or 'integrated' into capital's objective dynamics of self-expansion. In
view of their chronic insolubility as well as their immediate motivating
power, they are likely to set the framework of social confrontation for
the foreseeable future. Naturally, no matter how important even on their
own, the issues referred to above were mentioned here only as examples
belonging to a much larger number of specific concerns through which
socialist aspirations and strategies must mediate themselves today.
Another type of demand involves a more obvious and direct
social/political commitment, although even this set cannot be
characterized as specifically socialist. For instance, the intensifying
struggle for preserving peace against the vested interests of the
military-industrial complex, or the need for curbing the power of the
transnationals, or indeed for establishing a basis for cooperation and
interchange in order to secure the conditions for a real development in
the 'Third World'. While it is fairly obvious that capital cannot meet
any of these demands, and thus its control over the forces behind them
is diminishing, it is also true that the liberating potential of its
slipping control cannot be realized without the articulation of adequate
socialist strategies and corresponding organizational forms.
The demands that actually manifest the necessity of a socialist
alternative concern the inherent wastefulness of capital's mode of
functioning. For, paradoxically, capital manages to impose on society
the 'iron law' of its economic determinism without knowing the meaning
of economy at all. There are four main directions in which the necessary
wastefulness of capital asserts itself with increasingly more harmful
consequences, as the ultimate limits of its productive potential are
reached:
(1) the uncontrollable demand for resources - i.e., capital's
irrepressibly rising 'resource intensity', of which 'energy-intensity'
is only one aspect - irrespective of the consequences for the future, or
for the environment, or indeed for repressing the needs of people
afflicted by its so-called 'developmental strategies';
(2) the growing capital-intensity of its production processes, inherent
in the necessary concentration and centralization of capital, and
greatly contributing to the production of 'underdevelopment', not only
on the 'periphery' but even in the heartland of its 'metropolitan'
domain, generating massive unemployment and devastating a once
flourishing and in many respects perfectly viable productive base;
(3) the accelerating drive for the multiplication of exchange-value, at
first simply divorced from but now more and more openly opposed to 'use
value' in the service of human need, for the sake of maintaining
capital's rule over society intact; and
(4) the worst kind of waste: the waste of people, through the mass
production of 'superfluous people' who, both as a result of capital's
'productive' advances and its increasing difficulties in the
'realization process', cannot fit any longer into the narrow schemes of
the production of profit and the wasteful multiplication of
exchange-value. (The fact that the mass-produced 'superfluous time' of
the growing number of 'superfluous [people' is the once only given
life-time of real people, cannot be. of course, of any concern to
capital's devoted personifications.)
In relation to all these tendencies and contradictions of capital,
demands for change can only be formulated in terms of a global socialist
alternative. It is in this respect that a renewal of Marxism is so
vital. For despite the criticisms concerning the 'crisis of Marxism',
there is no serious alternative theory anywhere in sight that might be
able to address itself to these problems in their complexity and
comprehensiveness.
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