The World is Upside Down, Capitalism is Not Working!

The common phrase “The World is Upside Down” reflects the widespread concern that things are not right in the world. I will argue that it is not the world that is upside down but capitalism, and that this has always been so. The catchphrase “Capitalism is not working” is closer to the truth, but likewise when has that not been true? What we face today is the decline and fall of an upside down society making way for a new society which is right way up.

Neocon market rules

Neocons (my term for all neoliberals, neocons and neo-classicals) assume that capitalism is the best society yet and anything wrong with it results from interference by monopoly interests taking control of the state. Capitalist society is seen as made up of individual citizens buying and selling commodities. The role of the state is to defend the private interests of such individuals from those who would used the state to disposses them. Spending on the police and military are a justified ‘overhead cost’ of running capitalism. This ideology of a class neutral state was always an attempt to hide the real role of the capitalist state in making capitalism work.

In fact since NZ was colonised by white settlers, the state always played the leading role in creating the market and then regulating it to manage the economic use of land, labour and capital. NZ history abounds with examples of the use of the state power to dispossess Maori, subsidize farmers, regulate unions and monopolise producer boards and so on…

This history disproves the ideology that the market rules without state intervention. There would be no market without the state. The neocons suffer from hubris and bad faith and when it become obvious that they use the state to advance their private interests. They bait and switch like crazy to deflect attention away from the key role of the state back to the dogma of market rules. For them the World is only Upside Down when the state does not work to make capitalism profitable by filling their pockets.

Liberals and Labourites

Liberals have always been in love with the big state because they think that the market can only work if regulated by the state. The left in government can use the power of the legislature and bureaucracy to work in the interests of social harmony, equality and welfare. Witness the First Labour Government. However, this is a faustian pact because in the process workers are turned into slaves of the state which regulates them as drones to supply the profits of the bosses e.g. the labour unions.

When they realise their dreams of social equality have fallen into the great abyss between the rich and poor, their refrain is; oh dear, The World is Upside Down, Capitalism is Not Working. For liberals to put the world right side up and make capitalism work they have to try harder. This means turning into neo-liberals and using monopoly state power to deregulate society. Workers become more productive (that is exploited) making more profits – witness the Fourth Labour Government. Scratch a liberal and you find a neocon.

In fact as the global capitalist crisis worsens and threatens to bring with it climate collapse, liberals are in a state of panic clutching as all sorts of panaceas to make capitalism work and stand the world rightside up. The problem is that it is they, the liberals, who are Upside Down. Liberals try to make society free of conflict. They get upset when they realise they can’t make capitalism work without collaborating with neocons. Labour’s great search for the middle class is running away from its working class base and the reality of class society. But the futile search for a classless state to manage a kinder, gentler society cannot overcome their cognitive dissonance.

Radicals aroused

Radicals reject both the neocon market rule mantra and the liberal delusion that social harmony and equality can by created by state reforms. The more market dementia of neocons and the cognitive dissonance of liberals cannot be solved unless the deeper cause is challenged – class struggle. Once the power of the classes are equalised then wealth can be equalised and capitalism is turned right side up and begins to work.

But what sort of classes? For radicals the problem is the unequal distribution of wealth made possible by capitalist control of the state. The bosses screw the workers by cutting their wages to increase profits. To correct this the bosses’ control of the state has to be overthrown so that workers can organise society by regulating equal exchange. For some (socialists) this means workers must take power to control the state, for others (anarchists) once state power is destroyed, there is no need for a state.

However, anti-capitalism in all of its forms fails to get to the root of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Classes formed by unqual exchange cannot be eliminated by workers replacing capitalists with workers running the state or substituting workers control over exchange. This is because capitalist exploitation does not result from unequal exchange (except as a bonus) but by the expropriation of value at the point of production. Without the expropriation of the means of production owned by the capitalist class, no amount of workers power in the state can overturn the exploitative social relations of capitalism.

Marx to the rescue

Marx’s critique of capitalism proves that neocon, liberal and radical ideas are all expressions of the ideas of the ruling class, that is bourgeois ideology. The neocons celebrate this, the liberals are ambivalent and impotent, the radicals are fooled by capitalism’s classes appearing as based on market relations. The key to understanding this is that bourgeois ideology is not invented by intellectuals but produced along with commodities as the fetishism of commodities.

Capitalism appears right side up because the unequal social relations where labour power is exploited are inverted to appear as equal exchange relations. Marx explains this inversion of reality as ‘commodity fetishism’. Instead of workers’ labour power being seen as the producer of value, value appears to be inherent in the product – commodities. Hence the struggle over the distribution of value becomes represented as one over the exchange of value in the market between workers, capitalists and landlords.

It follows that capitalism cannot be made to work by eliminating state interference in the market (neocons) reforming it (liberal) or taking it over (radicals). Capitalism as a society is created upside down to allow one class to profit from the exploitation of nature. It only works because it is upside down. So when capitalism works for neo-cons, liberals and radicals, it is still upside down. It can only be made right side up by a critique which goes to the roots of capitalist society and which drives a revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism.

How Marx arrived at his critique of capitalism, penetrating the fetishism of commodities and understanding of the contradiction between capitalist society and nature, stems from his critique of the German philospher Hegel, who, while standing on his head was stood right side up by the young Marx. I will deal with this in another post.

Reblogged from:

http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/10/10/guest-blog-dave-brownz-the-world-is-upside-down-capitalism-is-not-working/

Europe Rising?

The revolution will not be twittered says a facebook friend. To which we answer: #tahrir #spanishrevolution #Libya #Yemen #Syria #italianrevolution #frenchrevolution #palestine etc. What is happening in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, France and elsewhere in Europe, is the opening of a social revolution promoted by social media, inspired in part by the Arab Spring, the pro-democracy revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, and also by the 'outrage' sparked by the treacherous role of social democracy. But all of these uprisings have their roots in the resistance of the labour movement to capitalist austerity coming up against dictatorships as in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the failure of institutionalised social democracy to stop austerity, as in Spain, Portugal and Greece.

This has led to the mobilising of unemployed and educated youth by means of facebook and twitter against these austerity regimes. In MENA the unions have been outlawed or repressed by the dictatorships. In Europe the unions have been tied to social democracy to act as barriers to mass mobilisations. Ostensibly, these uprisings take the form of democratic revolutions rejecting the political system and main political parties that are ‘owned’ by the banks, or by corrupt dictators. There is a common opposition to being mere ‘commodities – bought and sold by the banks’ with no political rights. A moment’s reflection shows that rejection of fraudulent politics ‘owned’ by banks and corrupt politicians is objectively targeted at the heart of capitalism at a time when to survive it has to force young workers to work for slave wages to pay for its structural crisis. We can therefore see that the content, if not the form, of these uprisings are in fact the opening shots of potentially anti-capitalist and socialist revolutions. This seems to be taken for granted on the streets and is reported in the mainstream media. What is not yet widely understood, is that these revolutions, to meet the demands of the youth and other working people, must become openly socialist to succeed, and failing that they will subside into defeat and worse, counter-revolution.

So what has to happen to make these revolutions succeed? There are many competing theories and programs on offer each putting forth a program for success but we can roughly put them into three categories, liberal, radical and Marxist.

Liberal Reform

If we start with the liberal reformists such as Democracia real Ya! their program asks for no more than making capitalists pay their fair share of austerity rather than imposing it upon the youth and other workers. Their understanding of capitalism is at the level of distribution. They don’t want to be bought and sold by the banks, but do not object to fair wages paid by fair employers. So these street reformers have rejected the institutionalised reformists such as the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, who they see as ‘owned’ by the banks, but they are not opposed to the masses creating new parties or backing more radical parties, to challenge the excess power of the finance sector. They are not anti-capitalists. This is the stage that the Egyptian revolutionaries have reached. They are negotiating with the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to prevent the old parties, notably the PSA of Mubarak, and the Muslim Brotherhood, from dominating politics and open the elections to the new forces for change. Its reformist objectives embrace both secular and liberal Islam currents. These street reformists will quickly find their liberal assumptions will be put to the test as they come up against the class nature of the state which is to manage exploitative class relations on behalf of the ruling class. So if the European uprisings that we are now seeing spreading from Spain and Portugal to Greece and France etc are in part inspired by the MENA revolutions, then the reformists will quickly learn the lessons of those revolutions as the struggle to make even the most minimal changes to the existing ‘system’. The reformists will be radicalised as anti-capitalists.

Radical Reform

The second grouping is of the anti-capitalist radicals who speak of the need to make a revolution to overcome capitalist exploitation and oppression but without taking state power. This includes a range of modernist political currents from anarchist, autonomist to indigenous and Islam. They view really existing capitalism as exploitative at the level of exchange. To get profits bosses pay workers less than the value of their labour. The state is totally complicit in its legal backing of this unequal exchange. Typically Radicals think they can defeat the power of the autocratic state by non-violent mass movements that refuse to play by the rules of existing institutions. Therefore to break with the state and the law mass resistance is necessary in refusing to work as wage slaves. The state will try to smash resistance to work by bringing out the police etc, but resistance on the street and workplace will destroy the state’s legitimacy so its moral authority will dissolve and with it the employers ability to enforce unequal exchange.

The pitfalls of this radicalism all flow from its exchange analysis. The masses cannot impose a radical reform that equalises exchange without a social revolution that means overthrowing the capitalist state. The capitalists and their state are not constrained by a morality that acknowledges unequal exchange. They think they have the total right to impose their property rights on workers and to force them to work, and will use the state to smash resistance unless it is organised as a revolutionary power capable of defeating capitalist state power in an armed struggle for socialism. The danger of radical anti-capitalism is that young workers won’t learn these lessons until they have been defeated. To avoid this danger it is necessary for Marxist revolutionaries to use the conditions for intense ideological struggle and  debate to convince reformists, radicals, and non-Marxist socialists that they need a Marxist program for revolutionary socialism.

Marxist Revolution

While the liberals think that capitalism can be reformed to produce a fair distribution of income, and radicals think that capitalism can be reformed to produce equal exchange of value, Marxists understand that capitalism is based on fundamentally unequal production relations that have to be overthrown before social equality is possible. But this is not a consciousness that can be arrived at spontaneously by camping in the city square or even by heated ideological debates. Capitalism is able to hide its exploitation at the point of production by turning production relations on their head as exchange relations which makes it seem that individuals can be made equal by getting paid the full value of commodities they produce. Marx called this commodity fetishism because instead of labour-time being seen as the measure of value, value now appeared to be inherent in the commodities themselves. Marx discovered that while workers got paid the full value when they sold their labour power for a wage, that unique 'queer' commodity is able to produce more value than its own value.

The result is the expropriation of surplus value from the working class in the production process. Surplus value is the source of profits, and when insufficient surplus value is produced profits fall. When profits fall capital is not invested in production but in speculation in existing values. This causes price bubbles in excess of values that must go bust. Capitalist crisis therefore begins at the point of production not in the banks which must go bust when the speculative bubbles burst. Thus the role of Marxist revolutionaries in the revolutions that have begun in MENA and Europe is to critique liberal and radical reformist politics as unable to confront the basic cause of capitalist crisis and austerity – capitalist social relations and the state which exists to reproduce and enforce those relations. Marxists explain what causes the ‘outrage’ and ‘indignity’ and also what must be done to eliminate that cause by means of socialist revolution.

Outrage>uprisings>class consciousness>revolution!