[Marxism] [lbo-talk] bankers quoting Marx!

[Sean Andrews]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 16:43, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> A friend who works at a hedge fund forwarded me this "quote of the day" from
> a friend of his who works at a bank.
>

My hedgie pal sent it around last week with the heading "Communism on the way?"

This was my response:

It's not in _Capital_ so far as I can tell and I don't think it's
Marx. He would never suppose that this form of nationalization would
lead to a communism that would benefit the working class. There is
such a thing as corporatist nationalization.  It was more the MO of
Mussolini who, along with Hitler was fiercely anti-communist.  But if
you want the trains to run on time...

Though Marx is generally a good source to look to for the
irrationalities of the pure market system, I don't think he could ever
have predicted the kind of incorporation that exists today.  I've
attached a short passage (about 10 pages) from a draft of my
dissertation.  These will probably not make it into the final draft
because they are somewhat tangential to the overall argument, but the
last four or five pages are specifically focused on the current
crisis.  I don't know if it is clear enough for anyone else to make
sense of it (like the quote from Abraham Lincoln, "I didn't have time
to make it shorter) but if it makes sense to you, I'd be interested in
your view since you work in the finance field.

In general, I'd say that the idea that we are _just now_ having state
intervention in the economy is a total misnomer: it was very involved
in setting up the monopoly capitalism of the inter- and -post war era,
strongly supporting consumer spending and lending in order to bolster
demand for the massive industrial infrastructure we built before and
during WWII; and then strongly supporting the push to privatize the
economy, undermine wage growth and social wages (education, SS,
welfare, unemployment) in the last 30 years, with private credit
picking up the slack (with college and health care accounting for
close to half of the costs paid for by consumer credit card debt).  It
was an unsustainable model since eventually people you lend money to
have to be able to make the money to pay it back.

Finally, we aren't headed for communism in any real sense because,
even though individual Americans will bear the brunt of this downturn,
they aren't at all organized or conscious of their common situation,
nor is there a coherent left to provide any direction or information
in that direction.  The election of Obama has taken a lot of the steam
out of the popular reaction, but he doesn't seem to have much new to
offer except calming rhetoric.  When the programs he tries to put in
place--mostly in the service of helping the financial class buy new
($400) shirts to replace the ones they lost--fail to create new jobs
or repair the economy on the scale needed, what meager solidarity
there is with the left will dissipate and 2012 will be prime territory
for Caribou Barbie and Joe the Plumber to stage their fascist takeover
in full.  It's an exaggeration, but only slightly.

In any case, unless there is a spontaneous uprising forcing Obama to
the left (not at all likely) even the nationalization of the banks
(something that still hasn't happened here, even if a few countries in
Europe are giving it a go) would basically be a form of socializing
the losses to all of the country, and setting up those institutions
for the next round of capitalism.  Then the former owners, with their
funds safely stowed in baskets of mixed currencies and Swiss bank
accounts, will be able to buy back the solvent ones for a song.  In
short, if Marx were around today, he'd probably find most of this
fairly depressing and would in no way predict that Communism was on
the way.  This quote points to the bourgeois state nationalizing
bourgeois finance: it is just a case of the institutions scratching
one another's backs in a new way.  In his theory it was never the
top-down nationalization that would have brought this about, but the
bottom up expropriation.  He was overly optimistic in this way and was
obviously unable to predict how plasma screen tvs and American Idol
would be so much more entertaining than bloody protest and class
struggle.

I'll leave you with the only place I can find in CAPITAL where he
really gets into what will happen next: note that he is very clear
that this is something the people call for.  He was always a fan of
the American and French Revolutions--often mentioning that he was sure
the US would be the most likely place for working class communism (and
Russia the least).  To him, it was just the continuation of the
political revolution with an economic one.  But for the latter to
occur, there needed to be a political force from below to, as the
passage says, "expropriate the expropriators."  Today there is no such
force in the US; but some people (such as the Indian economist Meghnad
Desai

http://books.google.com/books?id=S2XOt7Z6CyYC ) speculate that Marx's
theory will only bear fruit when we have a total domination of
capitalism on a global scale.  In that case, it's a bit like what
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai  famously said, when asked in the 1960s
what the impact of the French Revolution had been, "It's too early to
tell."

Here is the passage, from the second to last chapter of Capital:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm

"As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed
the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned
into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the
capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further
socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and
other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore,
common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of
private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be
expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the
capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is
accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic
production itself, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist
always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this
expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an
ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the
conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation
of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into
instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all
means of production by their use as means of production of combined,
socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the
world-market, and with this, the international character of the
capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of
the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of
this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression,
slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt
of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and
disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of
capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter
upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along
with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and
socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become
incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is
burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The
expropriators are expropriated."