Worker Socialist: Brutal Class Justice Shows Its Teeth

Worker Socialist: Brutal Class Justice Shows Its Teeth: 13 of the Falsely Implicated Maruti Workers condemned for Life, Shorter Terms for 18 Others - Rajesh Tyagi/ 20.3.2017 Out of the ...

The Long Depression: A Review

 

Michael Roberts new book The Long Depression (TLD) brings together much of his previous work from his blog and articles. It follows his previous book The Great Recession (TGR) that looked at the causes and effects of the so-called Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. There will be no surprises in the book for those already familiar with his work but for those whose knowledge of Marxism is scanty or distorted by misrepresentation, it is a great read.

Roberts develops his argument that the GFC was not an accident or result of wrong decisions by central banks, or greedy Wall St traders. It was not an aberration of 'financialisation' where financial speculation undermined profits and created massive debt. It was necessary symptom of a crisis-ridden capitalism which since the end of the post-war boom entered a long period of stagnation, despite periodic ups and downs, signifying the increasing stagnation of global capitalism.

According to Roberts (and many others) what the GFC did was prove Marx correct. Long-term declining profits generate a massive surplus of money that loses its value unless capitalists speculate in existing asset markets creating bubbles from housing to commodities to bonds. Not until those bubbles burst and wipe out the fictitious value of inflated asset prices are the conditions for a return to profitable investment possible. The period of falling profits and the stagnation of growth which precedes the GFC and ends only with massive devaluation of trillions of surplus capital to restore profitable investment is the broad definition of what Roberts calls The Long Depression.

In scientific terms, for a theory to work it has to explain not only past and present events better than its rivals but also offer predictions on future outcomes. Marxism does this well because while all change in capitalist society is explained as determined in broad terms by 'economics', society, culture and politics are factored into the analysis to account for variation in possible outcomes.

No other theory can trace changes in ideas and politics back to economics as clearly and convincingly. So in the first chapters of TLD Roberts shows how Marx's theory of falling profits, the Tendency of the Rate of  Profit to Fall, (TRPF) is a law which underpins all the booms and busts from the Long Depression of the 1880s, the Great Depression of the 1930s and now the Long Depression of the 2000s.

Great events such as wars and depression which shape our history and our lives are not only explicable but inform our understanding and our actions. Not the caricature of Marxism which reduces all human activity to 'economism' in which individuals are reduced to ciphers or automatons with no freedom of action. On the contrary Marxism proves that it is class struggle over the share of value that propels humanity (as represented by the proletariat that produces the wealth) to rid itself of the increasingly destructive capitalist system that ultimately threatens climate collapse and human extinction.

It is this point that is the key to our liberation. Roberts touches on it but does not develop it. Capitalism is an historical society that can last only so long as it can produce to meet human needs efficiently. It came into existence with the rise of the bourgeoisie who harnessed productive labor to reduce the necessary labor time needed to produce commodities. The reduction of necessary labor time was historically 'progressive' yet racked by contradictions. Under capitalism 'progress' is expropriated as rising surplus labor time (exploitation) in the form of profits by the class that owns the means of production. This contradiction causes the TRPF where the drive for profits meets the inevitable resistance of the proletariat over the share of value intensifying the class struggle and threatening to resolve crises by revolution. 

So how do we predict the course of TLD today? While 'economics' accounts for the crisis and its severity, already built into 'economics' is the class struggle complete with class ideas and class actions most notably wars and revolutions. Each historic boom and bust cycle is therefore the product of class struggle. Each bust gets stronger and each boom weaker as we can see by tracking them.

The Long Depression of the 1880s which led to a weak boom until WW1 threw the proletariat into the trenches and stimulated new production in the victors and destroyed the industry of the losing capitalist states. But war brought with it the threat of revolution and there was no guarantee that the crisis would be solved and capitalism 'stabilised'. It was resolved temporarily (outside Russia) by the power of bourgeois ideology and politicians who disarmed and trapped workers in parliaments, and where that failed unleashed fascist counterrevolution.

But the post-war boom was weak and the crisis returned in The Great Depression of the 30's. This led to another World War in which the victors boosted production and developed new techniques while destroying the economies of the defeated states stimulating the renewed capitalist accumulation known as the post-war boom. The potential for revolution in Europe was smothered by the allied troops (including the by now Stalinist Soviet Union) or steered into 'neo-colonisation' in the 'third world'. Once more the boom was short lived and a period stagnation followed.

Again the TRPF munched into profits which slumped from the early 1960s until the equivalent of a new World War, the neo-liberal counter-revolution, rescued capitalism in the 1980s from its impending demise. Neo-liberalism in the name of the 'free market' openly attacked workers resistance to rising exploitation, restored capitalism in the Soviet Union and China, and everywhere destroyed state assets to revive the rate of profit. Yet as Roberts shows, the upturn of the neo-liberal 1980s and 1990s was too weak to restore profit rates to post-war boom levels. The result was 'financialisation' as the surplus capital had no place to go except into speculation in existing assets.

So the historical record shows that each crisis gets stronger and each upturn weaker because the worsening contradiction between the owners of the means of production and those who produce value leads capitalism to an inevitable decline. It cannot use its expropriated wealth to generate new wealth without destroying more wealth. 

 

Here we come to the most interesting final chapters of Roberts book.  He spends some time speculating about Kondratiev Curves (K Curves) which Trotsky rubbished in the 1920s as a blind alley and nothing to do with Marxism and which I don't propose to debate here. Much more relevant is his argument about whether or not the current Long Depression is the 'terminal' crisis.

This is an old argument among Marxists. Always keen to predict the inevitable fall of capitalism, Marxists have tended to see every crisis as the last one before socialism must replace it. The general rule of thumb is that capitalism must decline but it cannot fall unless pushed by the proletariat. As we have seen every crisis is caused by class struggle in which the relative strength of the two classes determines the outcome. Roberts takes this position and argues that if the capitalist ruling class can resolve the current crisis by defeating workers then a new boom of capital accumulation is possible. While this 'possibility' cannot be excluded it is more likely that the destruction of the 'forces of production' required to exit TLD into an historically weak boom will be so extreme that the TLD will become the last, or terminal, crisis, whose outcome must be either human extinction or socialism.

Briefly in summary, in every crisis, capital has to destroy more wealth to create new wealth. As the destruction gets worse, the ability of capitalism to survive is reduced. As more and more workers are thrown out of production, as their lives become more intolerable, they rise up and "blowback". As more and more of the forces of nature are destroyed including the pre-conditions for human life in the biosphere, then a qualitative shift takes place in the resistance of labor. As the current crisis get worse the quality of revolutionary knowledge and action will advance. The class struggle throws up mass experience of struggle that tests the limits of capital and as class consciousness grows validates Marxism as the critique of capital and the promise of socialism. The proletariat adopts Marxism as its revolutionary program and representing humanity becomes the agent of the last revolutionary transformation before capitalism kills us all.

That is the prediction; whether it comes true or not is up to you.

Michael Roberts, The Long Depression: How it happened, Why it happened, and what happens next. Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2016

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/the-long-depression-an-interview/

Why is Russia in Syria?

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 403 civilians, including more than 160 women and children, have died in Russian airstrikes. Reuters, Nov 15, 2015.

Reuters pic, November 25, 2015.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 403 civilians, including more than 160 women and children, had died in Russian airstrikes. Other organisations have different estimates. – Reuters pic, November 25, 2015. - See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/world/article/reports-of-civilian-casualties-dim-chances-of-us-russia-alliance-in-syria#sthash.Myudm4dB.dpuf

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says at least 403 civilians, including more than 160 women and children, had died in Russian airstrikes. Other organisations have different estimates. – Reuters pic, November 25, 2015. - See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/world/article/reports-of-civilian-casualties-dim-chances-of-us-russia-alliance-in-syria#sthash.Myudm4dB.dpuf

RT ‘socialists’ who back Russia and its allies against the insurgent masses of MENA are now openly exposed as enemies of the socialist revolution. The shooting down of a Russian plane by Turkey has opened people’s eyes to the bigger picture behind the dirty war against ISIS. There are much bigger dirty wars going on, and they are the proxy wars between the US and China/Russia imperialist blocs to back client regimes capable of smashing the workers revolutions. The Middle East is now a war zone in the growing confrontation between the two main imperialist blocs. It is high time for the Western left to break from its social imperialist legacy and fight for socialist revolution.

RT 'socialists' in bed with Russian imperialism

Meanwhile the RT (Russia Today) left that takes its world view from the Russia state media giant, is still pretending that the Syrian civil war is no more than a US sponsored war to remove Assad, while Russia is defending the ‘democratically’ elected Assad regime. Liberal John Pilger says that Assad is ‘independent’. From what? Today Assad is increasingly dependent on Iran and its allies, Russia and China, to put down a popular uprising. Since Russia started bombing Syria last month it has dropped most of its bombs on the anti-Assad rebels and civilians.

UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is standing up against the UK bombing ISIS. But he still looks to the UN to stop the civil war in Syria. Corbyn is taking a classic social democratic stand against the right wing Blairites who back imperialist war. He argues that a war under the aegis of the UN is somehow not imperialist. For him imperialism is not inscribed in the DNA of capitalism, rather it’s a disease that is “not nice to have”. By this reasoning, the 'social imperialist' (socialism at home and imperialism abroad) left rejects the reality that Russia and China are imperialist powers and defends them as ‘progressive’ regimes opposed to the world arch-enemy, US imperialism and its NATO allies.

Now that the frontlines between the two imperialist blocs are becoming clearly staked out, it’s obvious even to idiots that the Syrian revolution has for 5 years been suppressed by both imperialist blocs as part of the ‘great game’. We can see Russia’s dramatic upstaging of the US in the war on ISIS as evidence that Putin is no pawn of the US or EU. He has‘come out’ as an imperialist rival capable of breaking up NATO, dumping Turkey but drawing France and Germany closer to the orbit of the Russia/China bloc.

It is high time that the labour movement declared its independence from both imperialist blocs and stood for the class independence of the worlds workers. First it has to abandon it's Eurocentrist faith in 'good' capitalist regimes like that of Assad which has killed 400,000 and exiled millions. It must recognise the Syrian civil war as today’s Spanish civil war, and send volunteers and arms to defeat Assad and to reinforce the secular armed masses of MENA to advance the revolution and overthrow the reactionary pro-imperialist regimes and kick them and their imperialist masters out!

Imperialism screws MENA

The Syrian people, like all those of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) are pawns in a power game between the two rival imperialist blocs. The main imperialist proxies (leaving out Israel a US tool), SA on the US side and Iran on the Russia/China side, happen to be Sunni and Shia respectively, so the battle lines have increasingly taken a sectarian form to rally and discipline their forces. There is a history to this.

Since it was kicked out of Iran by the revolution in 1979 followed by the counter-revolutionary Shia Khomeini, the US, and its Israeli stooge, has aimed its ‘axis of evil’ policy at Iran. The US backed Saddam in the Iraq/Iran war which Iraq lost. Saddam began to challenge the US in Kuwait in 1991 leading to the first Gulf war that killed over a million Iraqis in that war or by starving them with sanctions. At the same time the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the capitalist road in China made the US appear invincible.

The 9/11 blowback punctured this illusion and Bush launched the frenzied 'war on terror' to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The US smashed the Baathist regime because it began to swing towards Russia. Bush used the occupation to destroy the largely Sunni army leadership. It turns out that many of these leaders formed the beginning of what would become ISIS while in jail.

Born again Russia and China

The rise of China and Russia as new born imperialist powers in the 1990s and 2000s changed the balance of power in MENA and forced the US to compromise in tolerating regimes in Syria and Iraq that did not rock the boat. Israel, Saudia Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey, did not recognise this 'power sharing'. They opposed the Shia dominated regimes as extensions of Iran. When in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out and the popular masses threatened to revive the Arab Revolution, the reactionary regimes tried to steer any development of the revolution for democracy and socialism into sectarian regimes.

Behind the scenes NATO and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) lined up with their Islamic proxies to contest the control of oil in MENA, but their main enemy was now the Arab revolution picking up momentum and threatening to overthrow their client dictators. This created an opening for al Qaeda to re-emerge as the radical Sunni counterweight to the rival Shia sects sponsored by Iran and now backed by the China/Russia imperialist bloc. The Arab revolution would be declared dead and buried in a morass of sectarian infighting.

Instant repression such as in Bahrain, fake Muslim Brotherhood democracy followed by military dictatorship in Egypt, NATO intervention in Libya, or US/Saudi invasion of Yemen, have held the revolution at bay. Only in Syria did an armed popular revolution threaten to overthrow a dictator and look like winning. The US intervened mainly to starve the FSA of heavy weapons (as it had done to the rebels in Libya) in the hope that Assad and the FSA would fight to a bloody draw allowing a US/Israeli stooge to replace Assad.

After 4 years the FSA still looked capable of defeating Assad so Russia and Iran stepped up their military support. The US then tried to take over the popular revolution by arming and training 'moderate' militias without success. The long bloody stalemate in the civil war opened up a vacuum waiting to be filled by the radical Sunni sects like ISIS/Daesh willing to overthrow the Shia aligned regimes in Iraq and Syria. But Daesh was not prepared to act merely as a proxy for the US bloc, its origins in the former Baathist Iraqi regime meant it wanted to rewrite the old imperialist borders and exploit its Sunni backing to build an Islamic State.

All of this proves that all the lying rhetoric coming out of both imperialist blocs about a ‘war on terror’ is bullshit to mask their own rotten role in screwing over MENA for at least a century. Their power-grab today when the global crisis is pushing the US to aggressively challenge both Russia and China for control of the Earth's dwindling resources means that neither bloc will back down if their strategic interests are involved. 

Daesh threatens the strategic interests of both blocs because its rhetoric directly challenges the DNA of imperialism to invade and plunder with its own virulent DNA to create a world-wide Islamic State. Daesh is not a problem because it cuts throats and rapes women, but because it is not prepared to bow down to either US or Russia/China imperialist blocs. Therefore, those who defend either the US or Russia/China bloc in the name of 'democracy' in a 'war on terror' against ISIS are no more than apologists for the imperialism that dominates, invades, occupies and represses the Arab masses.

Survival Socialism!

How do we want to die? Ground down by a terminal crisis of global capitalism? In one or other of the proxy wars that fosters national, religious or tribal divisions to slaughter 100,000s of workers and smash their democratic and socialist revolutions? Surveilled and executed in our homes or streets in a mayhem of global terror? Or will we survive all these only to face a slow death by climate or nuclear meltdown? Of course these are not choices at all. They are all in the last analysis manifestations of the decline and collapse of global capitalism. Economic crisis makes wars necessary and the massive waste and destruction of war-torn capitalism makes climate collapse even more certain. It should by now be obvious that capitalism has to die for the working masses of the world to survive!

The question of whether this or that particular proxy war will blow up into a world war depends on how far the rival imperialist ruling classes will go to defeat their rivals. If history is any indication they will go all the way. At a certain point bluff and counter-bluff may lead to adventurist actions that spark a meltdown. For example, Erdogan shooting down a Russian plane has been met by Russian economic and trade sanctions on Turkey. Such sanctions are always a preparation for war.

But at each point in this path to destruction, economic, military and ecological disaster can be stopped. They are man-made and more importantly, made by the capitalist ruling class. Whether we succumb to the implosion of global capitalism critically depends on how quickly we can build a mass anti-imperialist movement in both the West and the East that can unite our forces to halt the drive towards crisis, war and the sixth great extinction.

You can be sure that the only thing that will stop the imperialists and their client states from dragging the popular masses into a widening global war of terror is global resistance. That is why it is essential to oppose imperialist warmongering from the West and the East and not to be diverted by the ‘war on terror’. Only by stopping imperialism at home from intervening directly or indirectly in MENA and by backing the popular secular forces fighting for democracy against imperialist and Islamic reaction can the Arab revolution rise again with any prospect of victory.

A new international revolutionary party

For this to happen, the social imperialist left that holds back the revolution with parliamentary talk of reformist compromises with the capitalists has to be removed. These are the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Syrizas, the union bosses, the NGO bureaucracies and the left commentariat that covers for them. Since the First Imperialist war, the working class has been capable of overthrowing capitalism. The only thing missing was a revolutionary party able to defeat the treacherous social imperialist leaders that acted as the agents of the ruling classes. In Russia a Bolshevik Party existed and the revolution succeeded. Elsewhere social democracy prevailed and the revolutions were defeated and the epoch of fascism, and the 'short' 20th century began.

Today it is the lessons of that period that are most important. They are summarised in the 1938 Transitional Program of Trotsky and the Fourth International. It is necessary to build a new World Party of Socialism that can lead workers united fronts to defend the interests of workers and expose and replace the treacherous leaders of the unions and social democracy that are the agents of the capitalists in the working class, with many millions of revolutionary fighters. This is the revolutionary road to socialism, the only answer that humanity has to the evils of economic, military and climate destruction.

While the capitalist ruling class and its apologists defend the worst excesses of capitalism in the name of 'democracy', we have to say that bourgeois democracy is a sham reserved only for those who can buy it as a guarantee of their property rights. Parliaments are talkshops that divert us from the world of the workshops in which the working billions create the world's wealth. We are forced to work for a wage because we have no other means to survive. Now that our survival itself is threatened by the capitalist system facing a terminal crisis and ecological collapse it is necessary for the working class to take control of the global economy and get rid of the system that exploits both workers and nature.

John Key the Money Man

A lot of people on the left in NZ are mystified by the popularity of John Key. He has been caught out lying and cheating, hiding under
several ‘hats’ and generally faking it.

The explanation lies in his personal amorality, hypocrisy, and boorish behaviour. These are useful personality traits for a money trader, or more accurately the Money Man as personification of money. Key represents nothing but money and like money he is all show and no substance. To discover why a national leader is first and foremost a money man we have to trace the origins of money in capitalist society.

Money originates as a means of exchange and measure of value of commodities. Money may have value itself as a precious metal like gold because of the labour congealed in it, but today money itself is valueless and more importantly, worthless unless it can be exchanged for a commodity of value. Marx called the commodity a ‘mysterious’ thing because it is not what it appears to be. The labour required to make value is alienated and appears instead as a property of the commodity itself. Money takes this ‘upsidedownness’ and flaunts it. It masquerades as the source, repository and religion of value-in-itself.

It’s easy to see why famous prophets like Proudhon and Te
Whiti saw money rather than capitalist exploitation as the root of all evil. What they opposed was the upside down reality of capitalism which defined people by money.

Of course the world has to be turned right way up by overthrowing not only money and its political personification in Key, but the system of labour exploitation that is the beginning and end of it all. The world capitalist economy today is in big trouble because it cannot produce commodities profitably. The result is that money has become detached from the production of value and becomes what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’.

This is the money that Key represents, the fictional, worthless, valueless character of money as a fake equivalent of value. Because it cannot be exchanged for the real value produced by workers, it pretends that by speculating in land and existing commodity wealth it can artificially create value out of panicked shoppers. This is not value inflation it is price inflation that will burst sooner or later.

But to keep the pretence going that bankers pyramid schemes create value, the banking system needs a Money Man as political leader to push speculation in all existing values by printing money. He also tries to commodify everything from state owned assets to social services as private property so that the market can drive the price speculation that keeps pumping up the fictitious economy. Capitalism like climate is headed for collapse.

Are you ready? Boom Bang!