There are times when one encounters a book that is frustrating in a way particular to the intellectual life: that is to say, when one encounters a book that is precisely the book one wanted to write. Given the relative obscurity of my interests, this does not happen often to me, but Zak Cope’s Divided World, Divided Class is precisely one of these. I have harboured plans for the longer term to write a book on the history of the labour aristocracy and its interrelationship with the rise of social-democracy as the political expression of the imperialist rent required for the maintenance of that class, with all the necessary economic and historical detail; in fact, I almost undertook this as my PhD subject. If I had done so, I might well have been embarrassed. Cope has done just this, even up to much of the same bibliography I had had in mind! Be that as it may; these reflections are not to make myself seem important, but to underline the value I think this book has, being the only one of its kind and a real historical contribution to the critique of political economy under capitalism. Continue reading “Book Review: Zak Cope, “Divided World, Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism””
Category: History
Why a Theory of Value?
The gentleman from Unlearning Economics asked me recently in response to my rebuttal of Steve Keen’s critique of Marx’s theory of value why indeed there is any need for a value theory at all. It seemed to him labor as the measure of value was simply assumed by Marxists, and even if their explanations of the economy were clearly better than others and they can rebut the critiques of Keen, Bose and others, it is still not clear why there should be such a thing as a ‘labor theory of value’ at all. I find I often run into this problem with many intelligent, critical people who are by no means unwilling to take my Marxisant analysis seriously, but who simply do not get what kind of thing a theory of value is, let alone Marx’s; and then indeed it must seem a strange and unnecessary quasi-metaphysical imposition. Now initially I thought this as well, and before I fully immersed myself in Marxist thought I was quite hostile to the notion of the labor theory of value, or even the need for such a theory at all. And indeed neoclassical economists have spent more than a century trying to refute both Marx’s theory and the need for such a theory at all. However, it is not so much just Marx’s arguments in Capital itself that convinced me, as my wider reading giving me a more historically and anthropologically grounded perspective about production and exchange in history, and I would venture to say the concept of a theory of value can only make sense if put explicitly in this wider context. Continue reading “Why a Theory of Value?”
Some Critical Notes on the Fetishism of the Party, or: Why I am Not a Trotskyist
The proliferation of the micro-party in the West is a subject many times examined, and I would not pretend to say too much that is original about it. Already Hal Draper wrote much on this subject, the libertarian communist tradition has had various critiques, and there has moreover been a very considerable literature of self-examination and party histories among the micro-parties in different countries. The majority of this last literature both concerns and is produced by the Trotskyists, and it is they who have by far the largest proliferation and attach the greatest importance to the multiplicity of such micro-party structures; moreover, in some respects these formations themselves seem to follow from Trotskyist thought more organically than they do from other currents. This is not to say that this phenomenon is wholly unique to Trotskyism, as there have been various Maoist, ‘anti-revisionist’ and other micro-parties as well, often demonstrating the same essential weaknesses.
But it is in Trotskyism that it has the greatest focus of attention, and since the fall of the USSR it is Trotskyism that has numerically and politically the greatest support in most Western countries among the whole spectrum of independent Marxist groupings and associations (therefore not counting Marxists inside social-democratic formations). For this reason, it is particularly important to make a few critical notes about the persistent weaknesses of this political current in its practice, in order to mark out a clear difference of method and viewpoint on my part, as well as to invite some more productive reflection than the usual. Of course, as always with such critiques, whoever fits the shoe should put it on – my aim is not a personal nor a specific attack on this or that organization as such, but to point out what I see as some persistent trends many or most have in common, and which to me appear as unhelpful or even destructive. So what I shall write about Trotskyism in general here may be applied wherever it fits best. Continue reading “Some Critical Notes on the Fetishism of the Party, or: Why I am Not a Trotskyist”
Why Not Join the Labour Party? A Personal Reply to Owen Jones and the Labour Left
The errors of the giants of revolutionary thought, who sought to raise, and did raise, the proletariat of the whole world above the level of petty, commonplace and trivial tasks — are a thousand times more noble and magnificent and historically more valuable and true than the trite wisdom of official liberalism, which lauds shouts, appeals and holds forth about the vanity of revolutionary vanities, the futility of the revolutionary struggle and the charms of counter-revolutionary “constitutional” fantasies.
Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 378.
I am not usually fond of the obligatory Lenin quotes in socialist articles, but this particular phrase stood out in the context of what has been called ‘the defeat of the left’, and the struggle between social-democratic and radical responses to it. Lenin is dead; but the question of political strategy and socialist potential is alive. Unusually for members of the committed and serious left involved in Labour Party politics and activism, Owen Jones actually took the trouble, about a year and a half ago, to write an argument why the left should be in Labour. Of course, many such appeals for Labour get written by fake leftists, careerists, right social-democrats and think tank idiots from time to time, but such appeals make ‘the left’ into such an amorphous entity that these hacks can pretend there is a commonality of viewpoint and tradition between Emma Goldman and Luke Akehurst. The Labour left in the proper sense – those who are committed in one form or another to a substantive socialist vision opposed to capitalism and who are serious about the possibility of achieving it – rarely write such apologetics. That is a shame, because it is an argument worth having. Between the old, ossified clichés of the various ‘three letter parties’ on the Marxist left and the blatant opportunism of those using Labour as a vehicle for ‘achieving aspiration’, the arguments for party strategy are currently not well developed. Yet this is a crucial decision in theory as well as practice, and goes beyond a mere immediately tactical choice. It concerns the question of what you consider the core of what ‘the left’ should be about, for it to be worthy of its name and accomplishments.
In such a fundamental question, there are inevitably going to be both objective and subjective arguments involved. By this I mean: partially it can be debated in terms of arguments that are universalizable and general, and would apply in any similar situation for anyone, and partially it is a matter of personal commitments, priorities, and theoretical ‘intuition’, which may not wholly escape the boundaries of personal experience and idiosyncrasy. It seems fair then that in this reply I shall produce both, and I emphasize that I speak only for myself and my own considerations in this; ones which may of course change over time, besides. The question is made all the more complicated because, as anyone who has ever engaged with radical left micro-sects is aware, much of it depends or appears to depend on the reading of history in one particular way or another, and therefore it quickly gets mired in historiographical quicksand. This can’t be entirely avoided, but it is important in my view to be able to tell the difference between analytically major and minor issues. On the left altogether too much strife and confusion abounds simply because of an inability on the part of many writers to clearly state what to them is a premise and what to them is a conclusion. Explicating this will not necessarily lead to more agreement, but can make disagreement at least more productive and perhaps clear some old obstacles off the path. Continue reading “Why Not Join the Labour Party? A Personal Reply to Owen Jones and the Labour Left”
On “Cosmos” and “The Ascent of Man”
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.
So Edmund Burke begins his examination of the natural sublime in his A Philosophical Inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), often seen as one of the central works in outlining the concept of the sublime and its role in the cultural transition from the classicist to the romantic period. Arguably, it is written somewhat too early to fulfil that role; but in its descriptions of the central concepts of the natural sublime – the effects of fear, of vastness, of infinity, of darkness, of magnificence and of great light – it is beyond doubt a powerful foreshadowing of the central themes of romantic figurative art and of the notion of the thrill of the sublime, especially the sublime of nature, that has moved us ever since. The stereotypical depiction of this sensation is of course the pictures of Caspar David Friedrich or John Constable, the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth, and the like.
But I believe the contemporary world has a powerful place for the natural sublime, whatever may have been the progress of technology since those days. Indeed, one may argue that this process, together with the attendant secularization and disenchantment of the world, has in fact strengthened the desire for the experience of the natural sublime, by making it harder to find in the immediate effects of the everyday natural world, and by making that natural world a more threatened and remote thing for the city-dwellers that make up the majority of the population of the world today. Indeed, perhaps the ever increasing familiarity with the scope and interconnectedness of our own globe in the here and now, provided by the hitherto unimaginable progress of communication and computing technologies, airplanes and cargo ships, makes the modern natural sublime require an altogether greater tableau to effect that great thrill and terror that causes the suspension of the reasoning mind and the carrying away of the emotions that Burke describes. Continue reading “On “Cosmos” and “The Ascent of Man””