What is Needed is
A New Paradigm
CAPITALISM LEADS TO OVERPRODUCTION
Capitalism is a level of development of the productive forces where production is not for direct and immediate use or consumption, but for exchange. Capitalism is flawed because it leads to overproduction---too many goods chasing too few buyers. It is a situation that exists today. All these goods with no place to go.
While capitalist libertarians claim that collectivization is inefficient, they ignore the well known fact inherent in the collective nature of ownership among the wealthy through joint-stock companies and the banking and credit system which is itself an instrument to develop more collective forms of capitalist property. With regard to the collectivity of corporate combinations and their cooperation, Raymond Lotta, author of America in Decline (1984) writes that, "Under imperialism, market relations become increasingly INTERNALIZED within large units of capital, between such units, and within the state. For instance, the head office of a multinational corporation organizes exchange between its subsidiaries. The prices charged its overseas divisions for components amount to planned value transfers within the universe of the corporation. Cartels and joint ventures link different corporations. The total social capital may in fact be reproduced and commodity relations extended through the medium of a plan (rather than through the operation of private markets)......"
The facts when separated from fiction clearly demonstrate that societies have become bitterly divided between the wealthy classes and the poor and with high unemployment [underemployment, part time employment, etc.] and welfare cuts and this disaffection from government and the ruling class and disillusion with most of the alternatives now offered to societies [worldwide] there is a recognition of deep economic dislocation; and there is a growing sense of social crisis which also consequently has led to an increase in crime, riots, and scapegoating, as is happening not only in Germany but also elsewhere wherever there are foreigners taking up jobs or on the dole, as well as against racial and ethnic minorities.
"Lindsey German in CAN THERE BE A REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN, from the publication, INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM #57, says, "The old mediating structures were reliable in providing a stable means of transmitting ruling class ideas but they no longer have the same influence that they once did...So the once stable consensus built around the welfare state is replaced by a much more authoritarian ruling class presiding over a less contented mass. This is a potentially explosive combination."
If companies cannot sell the overproduction of goods they produce, they have to shut down factories and sack their workers. Or they have to reduce cost so they can under bid their competition through cheaper resources or cheaper labor. The total amount of wages then falls even more, and companies still cannot sell their goods but neither could unemployed and underemployed workers buy their goods (or services). A crisis of OVERPRODUCTION sets in, with goods piling up throughout the economy that people cannot afford to buy. And this has been the recurrent feature of capitalist society for at least the last 200 hundred years - during the Industrial Revolutiion. Better or worse, it just keeps up the cycle and improvements, where there are any, are incrementally up and down and improvements never really last but the rich get richer.
Sure -- of course with lower labor costs, the goods eventually are produced more cheaply and are bought in greater volumes once again raising profits and generating jobs.
There aren't enough jobs. No jobs, no money. Cheap has got to be free for people without work to afford them. And with lower labor costs, workers who are employed can't afford even cheaper goods. Capitalist accumulation is reduced inversely by the the capitalist extracting increased amounts of surplus value from his/her workers, therefore preventing further accumulation. They call it a crisis.
Of course it would be wrong to rule out any recovery from crisis. There have been recoveries from the crises of the mid-70s and early 80s. There was even a temporary recovery of the economy from the great slump in the 30s, even with a substantial, though short-lived fall in unemployment in key industries---before a renewed recession set in again in late 30s. Any such recovery today is likely to be narrowly based and shallow in key productive sectors, gaining only from short lived speculative surges. For a real recovery to maintain, consumer spending would have to underlay that recovery and that can't be sustained with jobs being moved to Mexico and Asia, etc. There have not been any substantial increase in jobs OR INCOMSUMER INCOMES. If we have a recovery it appears it is going to be a jobless recovery.
One option would be to let inflation rise. That would reduce the burden of debt on many coroporations, and some sectors of capital would realize windfall profits which may fuel a new cycle of accumulation, but it would be disasterous for the middle classes and force down even more the living standards of those dependent on benefits, pensions, etc.
The history of capitalism is a history of periodic lurches into crisis, into the insanity of unemployed workers going hungry outside empty factories, while stocks of unwanted [or unaffordable] goods rot.
And capitalism creates these crisies of OVERPRODUCTION periodically, because there is no planning.
After a few multi-year plans, you eliminate the business cycle and put in its place long term stagnation, corruption, and economic decline. Government is ALWAYS less efficient at allocating resources than the private sector.
Practical examples in nearly every nation, whether Russia, Israel, France, or even the United States show central-planning also fails.
What do you think we have now, if not planning to sustain the economy. It doesn't work long term for capitalism, and it doesn't work for lessez-faire capitalism [because the dynamics are all the same and that has been also quite adequately demonstrated with Reaganomics' lifting of regulations, attempting to make capitalism more lessez-faire; it only made it worse]. This is also a world economy, not something particularistic to the United States. It also affected the Soviet Union which was very much apart of this capitalist world economy.
Just as Marx foresaw the deepening crises of capitalism is an intrinsic feature of the system, even though it has usually been dismissed out of hand by mainstream economists. Marx however has been numerous times vindicated. He noted that the dynamic of capitalist accumulation contains within it an irresolvable contradiction. And that is the only source of value and surplus value for the system as a whole is labor. And each individual capitalist can increase his own competitiveness (and therefore his increased share of total SURPLUS VALUE) through increasing the productivity of his workers, he or she expands investment in the means of production more rapidly than his workforce. So the tendency for the process of capital accumulation to involve much more rapid expansion of investment in capital than in labor, although labor is the source of value, and, therefore of profit. The outcome is inevitable, a growth in the ratio of capital investment to profit. As a consequence, the ratio of profit to investment---the rate of profit---will fall. Yet, this is the driving force behind capitalist accumulation.
In otherwords, the success of capital accumulation leads to problems for further accumulation because eventually the competitive drive of capitalists to keep ahead of other capitalists results in new investment which CANNOT BE SUSTAINED BY THE RATE OF PROFIT. If some capitalists are to make an adequate profit it can only be at the expense of other capitalists who are driven out of business. This drive to accumulation inevitably leads to crises.
The problem isn't labor or even training. How are you going to train workers for jobs that don't exist? Production is moving to Third World countries where there is cheaper labor, thus causing greater hardship here and permanent unemployment. Ever listen or watch C-Span? During the debate over the jobs bill, this point was made over and over again. Yet, the capitalist lackys there didn't ignore those facts, they know them; they just refused to do anything about it.
You train workers for new jobs. New services. Unemployment is one of the largest motivators of entrepreneurship. Look at the groundswell in Russia right now where hundreds of little shops and offices are sprouting up. Look at this country. The Backbone of this country's economic strength has never been the greedy multinationals that you consistently attack. It is the efficient, profitable small businesses that drive growth and innovation.
It doesn't matter where it is. The paradigm is pretty much the same. Russia is in terrible shape. Companies in Israel are making lots of money, but the gap between rich and poor is just as bad as it is in America and elsewhere - Everywhere the capitalist system is in crisis. Privatization is polarizing the people and undermining their economies. Bad as it was due to inflation in the 70s and 80s, it is much worse now. There is widespread crime and a Russian mafia since privatization. The backbone of this economies' strength has been and always was labor. Labor creates all wealth. Capitalists steal it from the surplus labor as surplus value they extract from their workers.
The only way for labor to win is to play hardball. The Greyhound drivers fought the givebacks years ago but were defeated and sold out in one of the decisive labor battles of the Reagn era---that long and often bitter strike of 83. So did PATCO, the airline union. The grayhound company won because it was able to replace drivers with scabs [class traitors] and in most of the major cities through this country---most of them I might add, run by Democratic mayors, who loudly denounced Reaganomics-- police protected the scab drivers from the union pickets. In Ohio a scab driver ran over and killed a picket captain. That is class war.
The Greyhound drivers could have won that war by shutting down the bus terminals through mass picketing if all unionized workers and potential supporters joined them, but that would have meant defying the Taft-Harley and other anti-labor laws and confronting those Democratic mayors and governors who enforce those lousy capitalist laws just as burtally as any of their Republican counterparts.
Let me put it this way: No decisive gain of labor was ever won in a courtroom or by an act of Congress. Everything the workers movement has ever won of any value has been achieved by mobilizing the ranks of labor in struggle, on picket lines, in plant occupations. What counts is power, not your silly ass suggestions about training workers for new jobs that don't exist or for service jobs that don't pay anything.
Why shouldn't the rich pay more for their government services than the poor? Isn't it unfair that the workers enriched the wealthy owners with their labor, not the owners who were unjustly enriched by exploitation of the working classes or inherited their money? When Reagan lowered taxes in the '80s the rich got richer, but it did not trickle down to the working class. Any gains for the working classes were short term. Companies have been moving overseas and labor is again underemployed and underpaid.
Most of the really rich did not earn their money, they stole it off the backs of exploited labor, from fraudulent land deals, from off the backs of black slave labor. Those statistics have been more than once posted and I see no reason to post them again. You should all be aware of these facts.
The media is an echo chamber for whatever party is in charge and the fascist tripe is continually cranked out and sold to the public to keep the expropriation going. One day just turns into the next. The system isn't fair; it was never intended to be. Economics is predatory. Life is predatory. The goal is personal enrichment and there is no reward but death.
TAX THE RICH
As late as 1980 the rich paid a top marginal income tax rate of 70%. In 1982 Reagan slashed that down to 50%. And then in 1986, the top rate was again slashed to only 33%. According to the Citizens for Tax Justice, these tax cuts gave the richest taxpayers -- with incomes of $549,000 per year --- a total giveback of some $84.4 billion a year.
NOTHING FAIR IN CAPITALISM
As long as society is split into classes where an elite class grows rich off the exploitation and misery of a working class, then talk of fairness ends up being nothing more than a cover-up for oppression. Real fairness can only be accomplished by abolishing classes and creating a socialist system that works on the basis of from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
-* PRIVATIZATION AS LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHICAL CLICHES *-
These proponents of privatization speak about a "market of ideas." To do so in the context of privatization superseding collective benefit is to apply a misleading metaphor, for ideational wares are seldom afforded the kind of equal currency given goods at an old time bazaar. The ideational "market" is a right-wing capitalist market where ideas are distributed the way products are distributed to mass audiences by those few who have the financial resources to create and control the mass market. The "free competition of ideas," like its counterpart notion of free economic competiton exists as a legitimating myth.
A few ideas and images that are critical and others that are shocking can win access to the business-controlled mass media so long as they DO NOT CHALLENGE THE LEGITIMACY OF THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM. While real alternative views and news find what exposure they can in a handful of "little magazines" which function under the constant threat of financial extinction, or they find their exposure on computer networks [such as PeaceNet. MAP, pnews conferences, ET AL] until such networks and conferences gain too much exposure at which time there are attempts to take them over by right-wing libertarians and fascists and as with interNet now that its exposure has reached millions the attempt is being made to privatize it, to provide a "market of ideas" only in so far as those who would be able to afford it, and those who control it will allow it, thus precluding it from being a real marketplace of ideas.
And that is ultimately how a system for private gain will work because privatization would take everything unprofitable out of the public domain. It is the exact opposite of a free "market of ideas" because only those who could afford it would have access to that market and those who control it would determine what is acceptable in that very skewed -privatized- "market of ideas."
I remember an article I read years ago in the Canberra Times sent to me by a friend who I have lost contact with since then. He may be dead; he was old then. This is an excerpt:
Eastern European Preference for Communism
[...]
More than 75% of Poles said they were "a lot better"
under communism and in every country except East Germany,
citizens complained there were too many changes. Finding
themselves faced with the realities of capitalism,
Eastern Europeans, instead of enjoying the prosperity
they were promised, now admit they are "bored", that life
lacks something.
Peter Ayton a senior analyst with Mintel International
could not help but spot the obvious: when capitalism was
brought into Eastern Europe, GDP collapsed and the gap
between rich and poor widened.
Expectations are that, under capitalism, Eastern European
peoples' economic plight will worsen. From a previous
position of economic security many Eastern European
countries are now poorer than Portugal and are being
wracked by nationalistic fervour.
While Eastern Europeans might not want the old regimes
back they certainly have had a gutfull of capitalism.
The only solution must come from some form of free-market
socialism.
CHRIS WARREN
(End of Quote)
A "NEW" MORAL ORIENTATION IS NECESSARY
There must be more to tranforming society than just changing it from capitalism to socialism. For whatever we choose to call the xUSSR the objectives of socialist transformation to a humanitarian society never was achieved nor has it been achieved where socialism has been attempted on a smaller scale--so if changing the means of ownership of production to eliminate alienation isn't the answer, then what is missing in the equation? Claiming socialism has never been tried, I think is a cop-out. Human nature hasn't changed and I'm not one of those optimists who believes in the liberal version of the goodness of man. I think that is an unrealistic fiction and while cooperation and goodwill are apart of human nature, so also is destructiveness and selfishness.
While democracy empowers more people, by itself it doesn't guarantee that those more empowered will not exploit those less empowered.
There must be other human needs than those which socialism would satisfy; perhaps less tangible needs that must be considered: such as those that deal with personality, with spiritual satisfaction, with ego and boredom and love?
I don't think that dogmatism advanced in the ideas of Lenin can apply today, nor do I think, as the Anarchists do, that the end of the state can bring about this change in human conditioning. There is a moral side to the social transformation of society that is being neglected. Many have philosophized about guiding priciples, and some of these ideas precipitated revolutions, i.e., men like Engels and Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kerensky, Kropotkin and Landauer, among others. The paradox in many of their ideas is the bourgeois influence of the political conditions during the time when these men lived, which were then fixed ideas about society and became regressive when carried out in revolutions---but, as society changed and humanizing influences have had their affect on the way we think, new solutions have also become necessary.
The conservatives today stress the significance of economic rewards as the highest incentive for mankind [and womenkind] to achieve progressive humanitarian results. Socialists too often also stress the economic aspects and while "People Before Profits" would go a long way in achieving humanitarian results there is also a correlation between how people act towards each other and their cultural conditioning.
Capitalism has won in so far as it has produced the highest level of technological achievement and has been the greatest producer of consumer goods [though so many cannot afford them]. But freedom to grab a bigger piece of the capitalist pie by hook or crook doesn't satisfy the needs of the majority. We all recognize that fact. For some these irrational needs of more and more toys are satisfactions enjoyed by them even when wearing their chains as workers just as slaves enjoyed some degree of security, even though they were not free and just as being a soldier was authoritarian but for me a secure life.
With all the debating going on about this program and that program, i.e., anarchism, syndicalism, Leninism, Marxism, etc., what is explicitly missing is just how we go about achieving a "new" moral orientation---without which, all these political and economic changes mean very little.
Any ideas?
Hank Roth
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Today is Friday May 18, 2012
Today is Friday May 18, 2012
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)