Book Review: Marcello Musto, “The Last Years of Karl Marx”

In this intellectual biography, the Italian sociologist and Marxologist Marcello Musto seeks to rehabilitate the theoretical and political output of the last years of Marx’s life. Covering the period from roughly 1879 to his death in 1883, Musto tries to counter a tendency observed both in academic philosophy and in many biographies of Marx, namely to treat his final years after the publication of Capital as more or less uninteresting and a period of intellectual decline, usually skipped over entirely or at least given short shrift. To support this aim, Musto builds on the much greater manuscript knowledge of Marx’s work, thanks to the MEGA2 project, as well as the re-evaluation of the richness of Marx’s late theorizing, as seen in works like e.g. Kevin B. Anderson’s Marx at the Margins.

In some respects, the book – which consists of four essay-length pieces with a brief introduction by the author – must be considered successful in this regard. The combination of personal biographical material, in-depth theoretical discussion, and political and social context in the book gives a real stimulus to taking the last years of Karl Marx seriously. Some of the material discussed will be quite familiar to people well-versed in ‘high Marxology’: the famous draft letters to Vera Zasulich on the possible persistence of the Russian mir, or the work Marx undertook on revising for translations of Capital volume 1 and the publication of volume 2, or Marx’s engagement with the then highly popular ideas of the American economic reformer Henry George. Musto provides some helpful additional context to Marx’s well-known comments on the work of the political economist Adolf Wagner, whose work was representative of the so-called ‘state socialism’ of the time, a highly conservative form of dirigisme that would eventually play a role in defining some non-Marxist strands of social-democracy.

Even so, there is a lot that was quite new (to me, in any case), either in content or in degree. While scholars probably know that Marx wrote mathematical manuscripts, Musto shows just how thoroughly he engaged with pure maths – especially calculus – as an intellectual hobby, something undertaken for pleasure and mental relaxation as much as for the purposes of supporting his theoretical work. Remarkable to me was learning that Marx engaged on a chronological timeline of world history, with short notes and comments, covering global history from about the time of Caesar onwards. This seems to me something of enormous intellectual interest even though it is apparently still largely unpublished anywhere (the references provided give the IISH source material).

There are also some interesting observations from Marx from his brief stay in Algeria, the only time Marx ever left Europe, something typically only alluded to in biographies because it provided us with the last photograph of the man before his death. (It turns out Marx shaved his beard immediately afterwards! Musto gives us a ‘reconstructed’ version of the photo showing what he might have looked like with less hair – it turns out this is something of a cross between Sigmund Freud and Jules Verne.)

Some of the material is interesting but more tragic in nature. The biographical matter is rather grim reading, a chronicle of Marx’s ever-worsening ill health (Musto suggests he had bronchitis that seems to have worsened into tuberculosis) and the loss of his wife and then one of his daughters. He shows how the impression of a lack of intellectual fertility in this period is rather to be blamed on the dispersed and fragmented nature of his writings and activities, often induced by his bouts of illness, which have given the impression of a lack of systematicity.

But in fact Marx did a great deal, and in some respects was at the height of his abilities. Not just in the revisions of Capital, including preparing the French edition often considered the ‘canonical’ version, but also in working through huge amounts of new material: for the question of Russia, for the anthropology of ancient society, for the development of a political programme for the French communists (of the Guesde faction), for the study of the effect of the railways and the growth of joint stock companies, and for the study of colonialism. Merely the constant interruption of illness and the need to move to warmer climes or keep to his bed forced periods of inactivity on him, and prevented much of this labor from being worked up into published or publishable materials.

In this sense, Musto succeeds quite well in demonstrating that Marx died not a doting old man well past his prime, but really at the prime of his intellectual powers and especially at a time when his theoretical range had if anything markedly widened compared to his early years.

Unfortunately the book also has some less felicitous aspects. In his eagerness to underline how Marx’s thought gained in scope and subtlety as it matured, Musto constantly wants to tell us just how flexible and how undogmatic he was, which ultimately comes to sound so defensive that it achieves rather the opposite. It is an irritating habit of Marxologists, who by nature tend to be fans of the man as well, that they are always so keen to contrast in everything the Marx Who Was Right with the Everyone Else Who Was Wrong. The contrast is inevitably made in an ad hoc fashion against a litany of figures whom such a Marxologist wants to blame for a perceived bad reputation Marxism has: whether it’s the Soviets, or Engels, or the Frankfurt School, or the liberal interpreters does not really matter.

While it’s right of course to point out when later commentators or interpreters have misread Marx or use him poorly, this kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ practice generally does more harm than good for rehabilitating Marx’s reputation, and is annoying for a reader who isn’t looking for a convenient target to shove the ‘blame’ onto (especially poor Engels is often the most convenient straw figure here, and Musto abuses him similarly).

The more Musto cites Marx seemingly just to tell the reader “See! Look how flexible and nondogmatic this is!!”, the less interested one becomes in what Marx was actually saying, since it is (so to speak) damned with vague praise. Here the old novelists’ adage “show, not tell” would have served the author better: whether Marx’s arguments are wise or subtle is a subjective judgment best left to the reader, not imposed by the author, however enthusiastic he is. The fact the individual parts of the book were probably written or published as separate essays also adds a considerable amount of unnecessary repetition and some clunky structure to the overall work, which is all the more a shame given how short it is.

That said, for a solid systematic overview of what Marx – indeed continuously in collaboration with Engels – was up to during the last years of his life, this work is probably as good as it gets, short of consulting the relevant MEGA2 volumes oneself when they are fully published. Musto finely balances the focus on intellectual-theoretical biography with information about Marx’s social and family circle, political acquaintances and antagonists, his travels, and the many different subjects and themes of interest to Marx in his final days. In so doing, he provides a stimulating portrait of genius at work, and makes one all the more lament how the state of medical knowledge in the Victorian era ultimately cut short the fervor of his wide-ranging mind.

Book Review: Aaron Benanav, “Automation and the Future of Work”

Does automation mean the end of work? In this relatively brief essayistic work, Aaron Benanav – fellow Berliner and sociologist – engages critically with one of the main topics that have found new and fruitful engagement in Marxist theory over the past two decades or so: the topic of automation and its relation to freedom. Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, computing (or at least computational power), and algorithmic coordination have advanced so greatly in recent years that they have led to a reconsideration of the future of labor under conditions of strong labor-saving technological change. For many, not least in the Western labor movements, this has been a cause for concern and even fear. But others have seen in these developments the unfolding of the potential required to make a qualitative leap into a new kind of relation to work, and therefore a new relation to human freedom.

The tendency to see potential in these developments, rather than merely threat, is primarily found among the intellectual thought of the contemporary left. Certainly, for some reactionaries the thought of pesky labor organizations and demanding First World workers being shunted out by automation and being relegated to cowed serfs depending on a new corporate-feudal oligarchy for handouts is an attractive proposition. Among some liberal economists, there has been worry about the implications of shifts in the labor market for social stability and for the ability to contain ever-rising inequality. But among those engaging with real-world developments, it is primarily the left that has drawn attention to this process and its implications in our times. (Certainly the theme as such is not new, but this orientation was true in past iterations of automation discourse as well: examples are such figures as André Gorz, James Boggs, and Herbert Marcuse, as Benanav points out.)

Moreover, an important strand of Marxist thought, with its pedigree in writings of Marx and Engels themselves, points to automation and the labor-saving process as the foundation for the potential to reduce the total workload of society, and thereby to free up humanity for its true development. The development of the productive forces makes much human labor objectively unnecessary, even if under capitalism only labor has the ability to add value and is therefore essential to the system’s reproduction. This contradiction can be blown up with capitalism itself in order to free up humanity from its unneeded toil, leaving the machines, robots, and computers to do most of the work when humans no longer depend on such work for a living. In recent years, this has found a new impetus with among others the work of Srnicek and Williams in their Inventing the Future (Srnicek and Williams 2016) and sometimes ‘semi-ironically’ referred to by the loose slogan “fully automated luxury communism”, associated with the left media network Novara.

It is with this tendency that Benanav’s book critically engages, marshalling both economic-historical and theoretical arguments. His core thesis is that automation, which he defines as fully labor-saving technology as opposed to technology that merely increases productivity of existing labor, appears as a sense of crisis or a tipping point because of a persistently low demand for labor. This low demand is not just in evidence in the rich countries, but across the globe. However, against the automation utopians, Benanav argues contemporary automation is not the actual cause of that low demand for labor. Instead, he locates the causes of this low demand in the long term of secular capitalist stagnation that set in after the boom period of capitalism was over, i.e. in the 1970s. Since then, as Benanav shows, rates of output growth have slowly but systematically declined throughout the world.

The crux of his argument is not this familiar observation, however, but to point out that rates of productivity growth have also systematically declined since then, quite contrary to what the bullish talk of the automation theorists would suggest. During the boom period of capitalism (1950s-1970s) and as part of the process of economic development and reconstruction in the postcolonial era, manufacturing output enormously increased. Because the world market is a capitalist market, this tremendous increase in output caused significant and persistent overproduction at the global level (tempered only somewhat by population growth). This overproduction has not only hindered the possibilities of economic development through industrialization in much of the Third World, but it also caused rates of growth in manufacturing to plummet, causing deindustrialization. Indeed deindustrialization has been such a potent process that it has not only stripped much of the Western world of its industrial workforce, but even such ‘workhouses of the world’ as China have seen declining shares of manufacturing employment. Manufacturing output growth rates have over time become so low that productivity growth in this sector is consistently greater than the rate of output growth, implying the systematic shedding of employment.

This absolute surplus workforce has been shunted off into the service sector. But the service sector has the peculiarity that it is particularly unamenable to significant growth in sectoral productivity. (Indeed, as Benanav mentions, the primary way this tends to happen is by a process one could call ‘reindustrialization’: instead of launderettes you have washing machines, and fast food has subjected cooking to a factory mode of organization.) This leads to even lower rates of output growth and an even more sluggish accumulation rate overall, with declining rates of return inducing enormous financial bubbles for want of places to invest.

So as overproduction in global manufacturing has crashed output growth rates and taken productivity growth with it, it is not rising productivity rates but falling output rates that are the real drivers of global stagnation. The result is widespread underemployment and increasing inequality, as organized labor has been unable to adjust to the new feedback loop of stagnation and has found it harder to organize in the service sector. Meanwhile many governments have pursued neoliberal austerity policies aimed at reducing the costs of labor, both to remain competitive in the global market and to force workers into accepting an absolute increase in the rate of exploitation. Underinvestment resulting from the lack of returns for private capital – and almost as poor prospects of improvements in productivity across the economy as a whole – lead to technology hypes and huge speculative inflation of fixed assets like real estate as capital seeks a way out of the cycle of stagnation.

Seen from this vantage point, Benanav proceeds to critique some of the more utopian or at least optimistic solutions proposed by the automation theorists, in particular his comrades on the left (whom he repeatedly avows sympathy with, even as he disagrees on the analysis). Based on the preceding analysis, he critiques the proposals from the left (and some of the libertarian tradition) for a form of Universal Basic Income (UBI), as well as more traditional Keynesian and social-democratic amelioration strategies. What these have in common, Benanav argues, is that they essentially ignore that the power of capital over the production process and over investment and distribution of resources is the basis for the political power of capital, and that in order to counter the ‘rational’ decisions of capital in the pursuit of profit under conditions of stagnation an enormous amount of political force and power will be required.

Essentially Benanav’s critique of these approaches is in line with the traditional Marxist critique of social-democracy (in the post-1918 sense): if you have enough power to force capital to accept a UBI that supplements workers’ bargaining position rather than undermining it, or to accept something like the Meidner Plan, then you also have the power to overthrow capital as such, and should rather do so. In the conclusion, he points in that same direction: a regime of social relations based on maximizing free time, equal distribution of burdens, and rational collective control over economic decision-making is a matter of political will and strength, and does not depend on any particular level of automation or the coming of the Great AI.

Indeed the great strength of the book is precisely this: to remind the left automation theorists that while their Marxist analysis of the potential of liberation from work is quite correct, what they should not neglect is the other part of the Marxist theoretical legacy, namely the critique of capitalist production. Although Benanav mostly eschews using Marxist economic jargon and uses mainstream authors like Leontieff and Baumol wherever possible, in essence his argumentation is based on a demonstration of the operation of the falling rate of profit: capitalism’s own success undermines its conditions of accumulation, and this causes stagnation and bubble formation until sufficient value is destroyed to reboot the cycle. Benanav’s emphasis on the particular significance of manufacturing as the “engine of economic dynamism” is a reflection of the role of commodity production for the production, and therefore possible accumulation, of surplus value. Although large ‘service sectors’ are often portrayed as a sign of a modern and mature economy and therefore desirable, from a Marxist point of view it is ultimately the regime of surplus value generation and accumulation that determines the ‘health’ of the beast, not the distribution of this value across all other sectors. (Needless to say, the health of the beast is not the same as the health of the workers trapped in its belly, in either case.)

The point of all this is not to hammer one over the head with theory, but to point out that left engagement with automation and other forms of qualitatively striking technological change should not forget what Kliman (Kliman 2011) has aptly called the failure of capitalist production. Even for left theorists it can be tempting to take capital in a sense at its word, to be led to the mountaintop and shown the dazzling vistas that lie ahead and to think what we could do with all those tools and riches. But not all that glitters is gold. For all the hype generated by the tech billionaires and the slow but not negligible rate of improvement in global living standards from increased output (which the author acknowledges), capitalism is reminiscent of the man who sticks a bar between the spokes of his own bicycle: sooner or later it brings itself to a fall, and then looks around indignantly for who might have sabotaged its great promise. But it is its own mode of production and accumulation that does this, and it cannot help but do it, again and again. No amount of machine learning or robotics can alter this fate of its own power, whatever other potential the computers and robots may have.

That said, Benanav’s own suggestions for the norms of a noncapitalist world are in the foundations not very different from those discussed in such left automation theory works as Srnicek and Williams’ or Peter Frase’s Four Futures (Frase 2016), also premised on a fully automated future. Indeed, with its discussions of collective distribution of work and its slightly blithe argument that the denizens of the future socialist world should just agree with each other on how to solve economic challenges, it reminds one a bit of the slightly older tradition of such postcapitalist social design like Parecon (Albert 2004).

On this basis, I would suggest it is not so much to be read as a critique of left automation theory as a supplement to it, one that more systematically incorporates the Marxist critique of capitalist production as not just wasteful of its potential, but also as subject to (irrational) secular tendencies to stagnation and unemployment. Insofar as the book has weaknesses, it is mainly in this latter sphere, the discussion of the low global demand for labor. Benanav tends to treat the First World and the global South as fairly equivalent and subject to the same processes in this regard, but thereby tends to elide the structural differences between them. After all, the vast majority of global inequality is inequality between nations, not within them, and structurally huge unemployment and underemployment are characteristics of poorer nations more than of richer ones. Premature deindustrialization is certainly a matter of the world market, as Benanav rightly says, but that world market is not born equal, and likely his argumentation works all the more clearly and transparently in countries with an educated but wildly underemployed workforce like Syria or Egypt than in the Western metropole.

This also raises the question of what to do with the traditional Marxist argument of the need to develop the productive forces to achieve the necessary potential for a postcapitalist future – a cornerstone of both Marxist and non-Marxist state practice in the 20th century in the form of the developmental state, but an issue not much addressed by Benanav. This is slightly curious since precisely this insight is at the heart of the (so to speak) ‘left optimists’ in the automation discourse: it is precisely the appearance of a very advanced state of development of the productive forces that invites the suggestion that the potential for utopia is around the corner. This may not be justified, and others have historically hewed closer to Benanav’s apparent approach that the leap to freedom is a matter of political will more than of technological capacity. But a further discussion of this theme would, I think, add to the filling out of Marxist theory that the left automation theorists are so fruitfully and – dare I say – productively engaged in.

Overall, Automation and the Future of Work is a remarkably lucid and sharp argument made in hardly a hundred pages. It fits well together with the previously mentioned works of Srnicek and Williams as well as Frase as part of a larger (and very welcome) exchange of thoughts among left theorists on the implications of modern automation technology and the systematic restructuring of the global workforce since the 1980s. It adds to this discussion a firm rooting in the Marxist theory of capitalist production and accumulation as well as more neoclassical interpretations of the ‘secular stagnation’ thesis, which point in the same direction. Most importantly, by emphasizing declining output growth rather than increasing productivity growth, it provides an important empirical and theoretical check on overly bullish interpretations of capitalist Promethean power.

Cited:
Benanav, Aaron. Automation and the Future of Work. London 2020: Verso.
Frase, Peter. Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London 2016: Verso.
Kliman, Andrew. The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. London 2011: Pluto.
Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London 2015: Verso.

Book Review: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work”

I have for some time been looking forward to reading Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Not just because I know both well enough to expect insightful commentary from them, but also because their recent political writing has been an important component in the trend to re-evaluate leftist strategies (back) towards consciously future-oriented, optimistic, technology-friendly and generally ‘modernist’ approach. In these respects, this book did not disappoint. The work consists essentially of two parts. The first few chapters are devoted to a critique of existing strategies and ways of thinking as identified by Srnicek and Williams, approaches they deem to be harmful to the prospects of the left and in need of overcoming. The second part is concerned with developing an alternative proposal for the (radical) left’s political orientation, buttressed by more empirical discussions of political economy and technological change. Although in that sense the book is multi-layered and ambitious in scope, it is throughout an easy read: Srnicek and Williams have found, I think, the right tone for popular political writing that seeks to deal with abstract problems without relying on tedious jargon. If at times it seems a little dry, a bit lacking in the spark one expects of a directly political tract, it makes up for it in combining a light touch of vocabulary with analytical seriousness.

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Book Review: Richard Seymour, “Against Austerity”

It’s easy to be against austerity and neoliberalism; it is less easy to say something meaningful about it, and to take stock of the Western situation in a sober and critical way. To do this is the purpose of Against Austerity, the most recent work of the hand of Richard Seymour, blogger at Lenin’s Tomb and (ex-)member of various radical groups in the UK. Although the cover blurbs present it as a strategy for defeating austerity and reviving the left, most of the book by far is actually concerned with analyzing what austerity is, how it relates to neoliberalism, state and class strategies, ideology, and economics. While these topics are by now fairly well-trodden ground in left analysis, there is perhaps a need for a popular synthesis of the various theories and interpretations offered in the literature, and this book helps fill that gap. Combining — as is Seymour’s wont — Poulantzian/Gramscian state and class theory with the economic interpretations of the crisis offered by the school of Panitch & Gindin and Duménil & Levy, this work offers a (brief) political economic reading of the crisis that is fully integrated with a strategic and political conception: neoliberalism as a class offensive of financial capital and its state integration to recompose the state-economy relationship and indeed the very structure of ‘the market’ and its society itself. As Seymour puts it: “what we are witnessing, under the auspices of austerity, is not just spending cuts. It is a shift in the entire civilisational edifice of capitalism, deepening an equivalent shift that began in the 1970s” (3-4).

What does this shift consist of, according to him? The author discusses a fairly broad range of phenomena, and the discussion of the crisis and its strategic meaning ranges from economics to class, to state, and to ideology. Let’s take the economics first. The general thesis of the crisis interpretation may be summed up as the Panitch-Gindin-Duménil-Levy school. That is to say, the view that neoliberalism entails an intensification of existing trends towards ‘financialisation’, seen as the dominance of finance capital over other capitals and its stranglehold on the state; an attendant rise in inequality and more open class warfare, as opposed to the welfarist compromises of the boom period when manufacturing capital was in charge; and a shift from consumption to an investment orientation. When it comes to the state analysis of neoliberal economics, however, Seymour (in my view rightly) takes his cue from Philip Mirowski: the neoliberal state presents itself as a ‘small government, free market, individual responsibility’ type liberal regime of familiar sort, but in reality neoliberalism means an enormous increase in the state’s repressive authority and even in its reach over all aspects of life. The difference is that the state is now used to create markets and market dependence where none existed before, or where it was attenuated by welfarist ‘obstacles’. The neoliberal state is a regime of (re)imposing market relations into the fabric of everyday life wherever possible, and it is in this context only that the combination of increasing authoritarianism (at least compared to the 60s-70s) with the new conservatism and the drive to (anew) outsource and commodify all labour can be understood.

Financialization also comes into the class analysis. After all, one of the characteristics of neoliberalism (all agree) has been the increasing indebtedness and financial ‘enmeshing’ of Western workers. Also, the centrality of finance and the finance-state alliance in the United States to the workings of the international economic system since the end of Bretton Woods, as documented by Gindin and Panitch in The Making of Global Capitalism (London/NY 2013: Verso) has generated (or imposed) similar alliances elsewhere in the Western world. The upshot of this is that, on this interpretation, finance has become the central nervous system of capitalism and that financial capital has become the leading sub-class (hegemon) within the ruling class alliance. Unpacking Seymour’s Gramscian-Poulantzian jargon, the social relation that is the state is always in some sense a reflection of the struggle of different classes and class forces. In this particular case the alliance between corporations, banks, political parties, civil servants and so forth that dominates the UK is led by finance capital and its direct or indirect representatives in politics: the often-observed City-Westminster nexus.

Yet in the state analysis, Seymour rightly emphasizes that the neoliberal austerity alliance is not an impregnable unity. On the contrary, neoliberalism is as any movement an alliance of different ideas and forces and has a fragmentary nature. If cohesion is created by the dominance of the particular interest of finance over the whole, even other sectors of capital, the strategies pursued on this basis also entail risks and potentials for division. The wholesale attack on the conditions of social reproduction as they have grown in the postwar era more aggressive and sweeping than even in the Reagan-Thatcher years, and this means that either Marx’s ‘moral’ historical element in the reproduction of labor will be pushed down to a systematically lower living standard for the Western working class; or it could mean sufficient disruption and resistance that this social reproduction itself is threatened and the attack has to be called off. The former appears to be happening now, but the latter was the picture of the earliest wave of neoliberalism in the 1970s, and this shows the importance of organized labor resistance to raising the risks of an austerity strategy for the ruling class.

Similarly, the pursuit of debt reduction, cutting government expenditure, public employment and so forth makes sense from the viewpoint of financial capital — as it strengthens credibility and therefore creditors — but it threatens through the ensuing conflict and contraction the position of weaker elements of capital, such as manufacturers and those dependent on international trade. Such state intervention as exists in the economy is explicitly to defend finance capital at all costs, hence the bailouts, but there are also other elements of the ruling class alliance and global stability to keep in mind, not least politically. Hence Seymour rightly notes that “the divisions among elites over whether to proceed with austerity reflects both the risks of the project and divergences of short-term interests” (94). This solves the riddle of whether austerity is ideological madness or whether we should adopt the ‘rational choice’ view that this ruling class must be right about its own interests: it depends on what segment of the alliance we are talking about.

This brings us to the question of ideology, which perhaps more than anything else (unless it is the decline of unionism) defines our current era. Here, Seymour is perhaps at his best. As is obvious to all, but often handwaved away in the wishful thinking that passes for much left analysis, the situation ideologically is very grim. In the UK, fewer people now support the old ‘welfare’ set of views than even at the height of the ‘winter of discontent’ in the late 1970s that inaugurated Thatcher’s rule. The new ‘common sense’ imposed by decades of virtually unchallenged neoliberalism and the demise of the Soviet Union — the latter a factor Seymour barely mentions — has quite successfully imbued the current generation of young people with an ethos of individual careerism, of identifying with the discipline of the market. While this generation is much more progressive than the previous on questions of gender, sexuality, race and so forth, it is also much more neoliberal in terms of the relationship of individuals to society and its political economy — a trend visible throughout the Western world. In addition, Richard Seymour gives due attention to the counterpart of this common sense: the increasing violence and authoritarianism against those who resist or transgress the new discipline of the market and its inequalities and exploitation. From forced labor to obtain benefits to the escalation of police tactics, it is especially the women and people of colour of the Western world who make up much of the working class that bear the brunt of this offensive. The rhetoric of ‘scroungers’ and benefit dependence only legitimizes this new ‘liberalism without a human face’, and the more the state and its remaining welfare system present themselves as modes of exercising neoliberal authority, the less they are seen as universal achievements of citizenship in a high-wealth society. Seymour brings out this vicious cycle of our current times quite well.

There is much to like about this book. It is a clear and well-structured read: it starts off rather blocky and posturing in the beginning (for which I am just not the right audience) but improves over time with an at times fairly detailed analysis of the relationship between the rule of finance capital within the neoliberal state and the concrete strategies, alliances, and ideological ‘strong redescriptions’ this entails. Refreshing especially are two important things about this work: firstly, Seymour’s resistance to wishful thinking and hand-waving optimism. He describes the utter weakness of the left’s resistance, the decline in unionism and the small likelihood of its recovery, and the increasing neoliberalization of the Western common sense in no uncertain terms. Secondly, he rightly points out how identifying neoliberalism simply with ‘free marketeers’ and seeking a restoration of the old welfare capitalism and union alliances to combat it is an illegitimate and impossible exercise in old union worker nostalgia and doomed to collapse before it ever gets off the ground. He emphasizes how much unions have now come to rely on public service workers for their base, the last relatively privileged and secure bastion against the labour market, and how the neoliberal offensive on this point is destroying even that base as we speak — without any clear counter-strategy to be seen. The spirit of ’45 is an obscene display of delusional nostalgia, and should be rejected wherever it appears, and Richard Seymour does not indulge it — which is rare among the left in the UK, although such politics of nostalgia is much less evident in the United States. On the whole, this book does what should be the starting point of any Marxist analysis: it describes with sober senses how bad the radical left’s strategic position is, unhindered by the shibboleths or blinders of sect strategy.

Admittedly, I have some disagreements with the analysis as well, both larger and smaller in nature. Although these are all points on which people can reasonably disagree, I’ll mention a few points of difference here. One is that I think Seymour still concedes too much to the existing union structure, despite his justified emphasis on the need for a ‘new unionism’. The Owen Jones argument that unions are still the ‘biggest democratic institutions in the UK’ and the like simply does not convince, and masks the real issues of organized workers in the West. Firstly, if we criticize liberal democracy for being a sham democracy in some respects, being structurally set up to favour the elites and by demobilization and abstention excluding much of the working class, then this goes a fortiori for the unions. Even in the United States general elections will reach a 50% turnout or so, whereas union leadership elections are often decided on a turnout of about 15%. That does not bode well for an argument about their democratic content. Moreover, the dependence of Western unions on public sector workers. While the conditions and makeup of the public sector workforce is increasingly like that of private sector work, the strategic position is different. Public sector workers are more subject to the neoliberal ideological resistance to the state apparatus, making them seem ideal examples of wasteful obstacles and parasites to be cut; they’re often, as state representatives, in ambiguous relationships to workers (think of teachers or social workers); and they depend way more than private sector workers do on a general reserve of public support and solidarity. In Chicago, the CTU managed to triumph on this basis, but in most cases the long-term trend is not good for public sector-heavy unions.

Finally, there is also a certain analogy between the ‘Labour is defined by its members, therefore should be supported’ and the ‘unions are run by workers, therefore democratic’ arguments: both ignore the way the structure of membership is set up to prevent the use of that instrument for any anti-capitalist purpose under current conditions. A new unionism would mean a radical reformation of the existing union structure just as it would require a doing away with Labourism (something Seymour does agree on). It is worth noting that in various polls, from the US to Australia, people systematically indicate that unions are among the least trusted and liked institutions in the West — comparable to big business and parliaments, in fact.

Another point concerns the economic analysis. While I do not want to go into too much technical detail that will likely bore or confuse a general left audience, it is at least worth noting that some of the economic reasoning that underpins the book is disputable. While I readily agree with Seymour’s analysis of neoliberalism in the Mirowskian style, i.e. as the imposition of markets by a stronger (and even sometimes bigger) state rather than a classic free market offensive, I am less enamoured than he is of the Gindin-Panitch-Duménil-Levy approach to the crisis. Everyone can agree that the proximate cause of the crisis lay in the financial system and its particular overexposure to bad debt, and that this bad debt in turn has its roots in the stagnation (though not necessarily decline) of worker compensation. But it does not follow from this that long-term financial trends are the dominant ones in explaining global capitalism since the neoliberal turn of the 1970s. The argument that opponents of this school do not take finance to be a ‘real’ part of capitalism is misplaced; while indeed the populist narrative sometimes leans towards seeing finance as merely parasitical on capitalism, none of the Marxist economic literature on the crisis does this. It is clear that the credit system and finance are central to capitalism, as one can find in Capital volumes 2 and 3. But it is also clear that if finance is essential to capitalism, it is equally incapable of generating new value in the system, and this — rather than its circulation or the imposition of competition and productivity increases for their own sake — is the lifeblood of capitalism at a global level. This does not make finance irrelevant, fictitious, or parasitical, but it means that a purely financial explanation of longer term trends in capitalism is less plausible within a Marxist economic analysis, because less ‘microfounded’ (as the neoclassical economists would put it). Perhaps, of course, such Marxist analysis is wrong — post-Keynesian theory, for example, does indeed give good reasons to support a wholly financial explanation of long-term crisis tendencies, relying on the interaction of expectations and demand, and this is something we find repeatedly in Seymour’s book next to the Marxist literature.

This points to some of the inconsistency of the economic analysis proposed by some of Seymour’s narrative. He attacks those who see declining rates of profit (identified by Marx himself as one of capitalism’s most important crisis tendencies) as central to the long-term analysis of crisis trends in capitalism by using two arguments: 1) that profits have been at a record high before and after the crisis; and 2) that such an argument is teleological and implies there is a ‘final crisis of capitalism’. Neither of these is convincing. The first is a common reply to the ‘rate of profit’ literature on the crisis, as in Andrew Kliman and Michael Roberts, but it rests on a conceptual misunderstanding. The historically high profit rates Seymour cites are, besides being uncorrected for inflation (!), stocks of profit. What determines investment in Marx’s theory, however, are rates of profit — returns on investment. Not absolute amounts, but returns as a percentage of a capital invested. If capitalist A invests $1000 and gets $100 back, and capitalist B invests $100 and gets $50 back, then it is A who will be outcompeted, not B. A should have invested in B’s production process (or finance, or trade, or whatever) and made $500 instead of $100 on his capital, and it is precisely the role of finance to make such distributions of investments happen, and thereby to equalize (and maximize) the rate of profit. It is precisely these rates of return that are advertised in all the financial literature and that play the same role for capital as the ’200 or 500 a year’ in rents (or interest) did for the Mister Darcy types in the Austen and Brontë novels. In fact, Seymour himself notes that “what matters to capital is the rate of profit on investment” (69)!

Why does this matter? Because whether or not Kliman and Roberts are right in their statistical analysis, it seems evident that a rate of profit analysis can explain why despite all the neoliberal offensives and despite 500 billion bailouts and the governments more or less begging capital to invest (as Seymour notes in his book), no investment is forthcoming. The left is no serious opposition; the unions are moribund; the government gives capital all it wants; and it does not invest. This baffles the Obamas and the Osbornes, who have only neoclassical economics to go by. The high-profit view also has no explanation of this, but the low rate of profit view does. There lies the relevance of this debate among Marxists.

The second counterargument should also be addressed, because it applies to the broadly SYRIZA-type strategies proposed by Seymour. While I think he is probably right that this kind of Eurocommunist ‘broad alliances’ and ideological offensives are about the best we can achieve at the moment, I think we should recognize that this is a position of weakness. The liberals are winning, and while a long-term offensive of ideology may hit the neoliberals where they are weakest, it is not likely to reverse the arrangement of forces in the short or even medium term. It is therefore very nefarious when nostalgic analysis substitutes for sober senses in this regard, as Seymour observes. But this applies also to the strategic implications of the inconsistency mentioned above, between emphasizing the need for investment and accumulation on capital’s part on the one hand, and simultaneously insisting this requires more consumer demand on the other. This is a fundamental mistake. Contrary to the Keynesian analysis underpinning this argument, according to Marx’s economics it is not the case that capital accumulation requires high worker consumer demand, nor therefore does it require the state to intervene on this basis to guarantee it.

The state does indeed often, since the Great Depression, intervene to prop up — in various ways, according to the class configurations in charge — the consumption levels of the working class. But this is for political reasons, and defended as such: Roosevelt and LBJ alike were worried about riots, uprisings, and revolutions, not about ‘multipliers’ (in fact Roosevelt famously campaigned on an austerity agenda). If this seems implausible, remember that capitalism accumulated quite fine in the Victorian age, even if regularly wracked by crises, despite the subsistence level (or lower) consumption of the workers, and the same thing is true for capital outside the West — a dimension Seymour barely mentions at all in his discussion of the political economy of the crisis. (I could here go into the relevance of the global dimension for the strategic problem of whether we should prioritize the living standards of Western workers in the face of globalized value flows, and also the absence of a discussion of the transnational capitalist class in this work. But arguably that would go too far for a review of a popular book mainly concerned with domestic strategy.) The importance of this argument rests in this: 1) that it would be wrong to think that the liberal state cannot go beyond a small bandwidth of austerity and repression; 2) that it would be wrong to think that any form of ‘demand side’ politics would do better than austerity at overcoming the crisis from the standpoint of capital.

The mistake here is a common one, and by no means limited to Seymour, but it entails confusing the needs of capital accumulation with the needs of the working class. It is precisely Marx’s point that the two are disjoined under capitalism. The conditions of capital accumulation are determined by the rate of profit and the variables that constitute it; whereas Marx pointed out that saying a crisis consists of insufficient demand is a tautology. (It must be noted this is recognized by some post-Keynesian literature as well.) The upshot then is that we must resist the urge to promote Keynesian solutions as an alternative to austerity ones for growth, i.e. capitalist accumulation, although of course we can and should defend the welfare state, good public services etc. on other grounds. It also means that we should not think that austerity is irrational or a mistake on the part of the ruling class compared to the possibility of a Keynesian alternative, as most of the center-left suggests. Not to suggest Seymour is one of them, but there is perhaps an unexamined tension between his interpretation of the economics and the most important observation in the book: that “if we attempt to ground our criteria in terms of the dominant criteria of what is good for capitalism, we cannot win” (159, emphasis omitted).

If I seem to spend exaggerated attention to the economic discussion in this book — which is only a part of the whole — I apologize; this just happens to be my main subject of interest at the moment. But the relevance of economic analysis of the crisis remains important to any strategy as well, as I’ve hopefully shown, and that is a major concern of this book. That said, I think on the whole this is a readable and useful guide to the interrelationship between austerity, neoliberalism, and the state at the level of strategy and ideology, and these are perhaps the book’s main foci in any case. It will disappoint the more ‘left communist’ skeptics, in its Eurocommunist-Gramscian approach, but this is itself a product of the limitations of our times. Aside from the usual minor errors — Alex Andreou is not called ‘Alex Alexandreou’ (102n56); Krugman is not ‘marginal within his profession’ (126) — the book has much to offer in terms of a sober and nuanced analysis. This goes especially in the UK where the trend towards nostalgia, wishful thinking, and resisting empirical and strategic reconsideration is so strong. As Richard Seymour puts it in the conclusion: “if this book has been intended to do anything, it has been to find a way to drop those fetishes… assimilate the reality of our present situation, and soberly assess the challenge posed by austerity, without losing sight of the objective — which is to navigate our way out of this impasse” (152). To that aim this book is certainly a worthwhile contribution.

Theory and the Left: A Nighttime Reflection

Introduction
In this post, I intend to do something perhaps unpopular among the contemporary left: that is, to provide a conditional defense of Theory, with a capital T, and by implication the academy from the point of view of the radical left and its critiques. While the first part of this reflection will focus on the latter, this sets the stage for my discussion of the former; it is the need to defend theory for its own sake, the virtues of abstraction, and the recognition of the nature of knowledge and what this means for a radical view that animates my thoughts.

Much has been written about the ‘academic turn’ within Marxism – and radical thought more widely – as a corollary of the decline of a radical workers’ movement. Everyone is familiar with the way in which Marxism besides moved increasingly within the domain of professional theorizing from its previous points of emphasis: economic history, economic theory and political theory are less and less Marxist, whereas (at least in the Anglosphere) many Marxist academics have either abandoned it altogether or sought refuge in the ‘safer’ domains of literary criticism, cultural studies and so forth. This is, however, in a certain sense a battle within the academy, and takes its institutional framework for granted. While I believe that this shift is a major part of the defeat of Marxism in the 20th century, both as cause and effect, this is not the view in many parts of the contemporary left. Rather, it is often questioned whether academia itself is a worthwhile thing for Marxists to pursue and to engage with, and more strongly, whether Marxism today does not suffer from an excess of theory compared to a paucity of practice. The academic left is easily blamed for this perceived state of affairs; not just individually as Marxists, but especially as those responsible for perpetuating Marxism’s academic turn in the first place. Everyone is probably familiar with the exasperated activist’s complaint that all these supposed Marxists are just writing abstract stuff in the ivory tower and that they should come down to join the streets for a picket or a placard instead. Continue reading “Theory and the Left: A Nighttime Reflection”