Paul Mason and Armageddon

Paul Mason and Armageddon

(Paul Mason: Postcapitalism Penguin, 2016)

          In recent years, a new-ish breed of capitalism’s critics has arrived. (Apart from Marxists, capitalism has always had its humanitarian critics, going back to Dickens and beyond.) That is, those of the newer criticism and of the Keynesian revival since the 2007-08 financial crisis who reject perfect-free-market assumptions about capitalism in the face of widespread and ever-growing inequality or disproportionality in income between the world’s richest and poorest.  That is, as both cause and result of what appear to be endless economic stagnation and portents of crisis which ‘orthodox economics’ seems unable to solve and indeed ignores altogether.  These critics vary in their attitudes towards socialism. Some of them are entirely non-socialist, such as Paul Krugman, Will Hutton and Thomas Piketty, while being critical of capitalism-as-presently-run; some  appear to be just that bit more acerbic if also of the Keynesian oppositional mainstream such as John F Weeks, Mark Blyth and Ha-Joon Chang with perhaps more leftish social-democratic overtones; and those like Owen Jones and Paul Mason who are, or pose as, out and out radical-left and who do not shrink from placing Karl Marx at the centre, or near the centre, of their critiques, as well as appearing to countenance the removal of capitalism, perhaps.  Taken together, all of these share either a tacit or overt indignation at our state of affairs and seek to show, by statistics or persuasion or both, what can be done about it. The shtick seems right for our febrile and turbulent zeitgeist.  

I admired that sentence so much I left it in.

Here is a quote from Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism:

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, interacting constantly with the counter-tendencies, is a much better explanation of what drives the fifty-year cycle than the one Kondratieff gave. And once you meld the two [Marx and Kondratieff], long-cycle theory becomes a much more powerful tool than the Marxist left suspected. (77)

Question: ‘waves’ form no part of Marx’s theory, and if Kondratrieff’s theory is so patently inferior, why meld them?  What is substantively gained by that? This procedure would appear to be eclectic with a vengeance. But Paul Mason is nothing if not eclectic .

          Postcapitalism, whose title looks so promising, is vitiated by an attempt to integrate cyclical long-wave (and long-discredited) theory – initially introduced by A.V. Kondratieff in the 1920s – with Marxist theory as partially grasped. That is, to show why since 2008 (from 1948) we have been in a state of economic and political crisis. Mason brings in technology, employment and unemployment, investment and politics as the constituents of fifty-year ‘waves’ of the rise, success, dominance, decline and depression of capitalism, seen here as coming in ‘cycles’.

          Now, cyclical theory tends to suggest an overall stasis with internal movement and reversal: as, for example, when we speak of ‘the cycle of the seasons’ of the year. Thus different periods of the year change but the onward march of years themselves is eternal and the yearly cycles with varying seasons vary from one another only occasionally. Wave-theory when applied to economics suggests that business may go up and down in some sort of rhythmic pattern, but the system in toto goes on forever. Whatever else it is, wave-theory is certainly not Marxism. Dialectically based, Marxism suggests that there is qualitative change buried within quantitative change, such that every now and again, a totality or total situation is suddenly transformed qualitatively under the increasing pressure of constant and long-running quantitative change. For example, that after – indeed as a result of – long years of apparent stability and docility, a society rather suddenly goes through a revolutionary upheaval that appears to change everything, or a ‘stable’ economic system rather suddenly gives way to a great and terrible depression: either of these events putting the whole totality upon a qualitatively new basis. This interpretation, however, is not justified because historical and economic processes are governed by dialectics but because materialist dialectical theory is the best mental approximation we have been able to reach with regard to the dynamics of these phenomena, as being of relatively frequent occurrence. The former approach would be an example of idealism; the latter is materialism. The former –  without dialectics or in using idealist dialectics – leads all too easily to the idea that, for example, it is the waves that control the movement of economic life, like an ocean wave lending impetus to the water perhaps - not economic life making us think of it in images of coming in waves. What was supposed to have been a metaphor got out of control by becoming the thing it previously only expressed poetically, which generally happens when materialist dialectics as a rational tool is not applied to the formation of theory.  This is shown empirically by the fact that wave-theory cannot, for example, show why ancient slavery evolved into feudalism, feudalism into early modern capitalism, early modern capitalism into industrial capitalism, and industrial capitalism into world imperialism. Wave-theory can attempt to show the rhythms of constant and eternal quantitative change but is entirely useless at elucidating the nature of the big qualitative changes in, say, Western civilisation.  This may be why Paul Mason wishes to inject a bit of Marxism into the mix in order to beef up the Kondratieff postulates.

          Paul Mason rejects nearly all of the durations of waves suggested by Kondratieff but does go for the fifty-year wave, since this seems to fit Mason’s own view of the dynamics involved. But once you pose some sort of ontological reality or ground for such a thing as a chronologically-rigidified wave, you have to make all the available data fit into it (not to speak of the unavailable), rather than formulating theory out of the data.  It becomes a kind of secular theology.

          One of Mason’s wave-constituents is science and technology, which indeed feature prominently in Postcapitalism. But scientific discovery and technological development do not occur in waves, more specifically in economic waves, if such exist. They happen regardless of perceived apparent fifty-year cycles. Science and technology – at varying levels of sophistication, to be sure – come into play in any period. There was agricultural innovation in the so-called Dark Ages, if it rather took its time. Indeed, the fact that technologies will tend to accelerate in progress with their clustering is obviously true but this is not a process that comes in periodic ‘wave’ form. Technologies are not economic phenomena; they only become so when they are brought on to the market as commodities. But even this process conforms to no long-wave pattern in line with everything else that is contemporaneous. Innovation does not invariably need a prosperous period full of investment opportunities; it can flourish just as well in a depression period when (for example) industries desperately competing over dwindling markets are forced into innovation in order to bump up their productivity so as to reduce market prices.  Depression-hit America in the 1930s was characterised by enormous industrial invention, renovation and rationalisation, not to speak of a booming advertising industry as well as a burgeoning and largescale Art Deco architecture in big cities, small cities and towns all across the country, meant obviously to be impressive and suggest trendiness. (The New Deal’s WPA and PWA played a relatively minor part in all this, which was predominantly commercially-driven.) It is no anomaly that the lavishly futuristic New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 brought the whole dismal period to a dazzling climax.

Technological progress has nothing to do with ‘waves’ as such since it happens in all sorts of periods: good years, bad years and mediocre years. And, for example, it tends to take off in times of war. (‘War is the mother of invention.’)  War itself rudely upsets the neat patterning of orderly fifty-year waves.  

          Mason states that Kondratieff, a Soviet economics professor, fell out of favour with the Communist Party of the USSR in the 1920s because his wave-theory of capitalism contradicted Marxism’s dictum of the inevitable downfall of capitalism. But he entirely distorts the nature of the debate between Kondratieff and the Bolsheviks. The inevitable downfall of capitalism was never the position of Marx nor of Lenin or Trotsky. It may have emerged as a heresy within the Socialist Second International (1889-1914) but Kondratieff was not debating with the Second International; he faced Lenin and Trotsky. Marxism’s view is that capitalism will never crumble of its own accord; it can only be brought down by force, by all who are oppressed and exploited by it. Otherwise capitalism could go on and on whatever degree of misery it sustained and extended. The whole point of Marxism lies in helping working people by giving them an argumentative weaponry with which to aid them in bringing the system down. So Kondratieff’s seeming suggestion in his wave-theory that capitalism could go on and on was not the point at issue as far as Lenin and Trotsky were concerned. What was the point to them was that Kondratieff’s wave-theory was pure economic metaphysics, relatively untouched by empirical facts, built only on such facts that appeared to support the theory. On this account it was ideology, not economic science at all.  And idealist because it suggested that things are made to happen by mysterious ‘waves’, not of themselves and their own dynamics in relation to other things within a totality. That Kondratieff later died in a Siberian concentration camp some time after Stalin took charge and dispensed with argument altogether is an appalling tragedy: above all we should honour and memorialise Kondratieff as a martyr to academic freedom. Mason makes much of this martyrdom but it does not of itself justify the theory, except perhaps journalistically.

          Mason has a vivid and comprehensive grasp of all that is happening in our present world, as fully befits one who is so determined on a cause, being also well-informed and well-travelled. His details are much too profuse to go into here, in any case because I have little or no quarrel with them as such. What Mason brings to bear upon that which is engulfing us at the present time seems apparently sufficient to render the Labour Theory of Value obsolete and so will complete a massive and global transformation of all present-day capitalism into a ‘post capitalist’ world by 2075. I will not be around then to tell him he was wrong and I doubt if he will be around then to hear me. But his argumentation for change gets woollier as he tries to explain just how all this transition will unfold. Apparently the super-rich 1% will have to give way, and very rich people will become of the past. The wave, it seems, is irresistible. And so we have a revolution with no revolution, which is perhaps why Mason’s ‘visionary bestseller’ (see back cover of Penguin edition) is extolled from The Guardian to the Financial Times – a ‘Sunday Times bestseller,’ as the front cover emblazons. Things change not because of struggle but because we wish it so. But what about expropriation of the capitalists? What about drones, robocops and armoured vehicles as likely responses to expropriation?  Will the rich simply fall back and say ‘We were wrong! We were wrong! Take everything we have, for the good of humanity!’ (?) No owning class has ever given up without a fairly good fight. And in any case the rich have an ‘ultimate weapon’ in their hands: capital. What of capital in this new future? As long as there is capital, somebody – or indeed the state – has to own it. Capital is inconceivable without ownership. Whatever form it takes, it must belong to someone. You can’t have it in a completely co-operative society because its essence is accumulation as against – and taken from - the resources and labour of others.  Capital in all its various forms must be somebody’s property and not somebody else’s, if it is to accumulate as all capital – to be capital – must.  And capital’s surplus value is created from unpaid labour time. Capital and the labour theory of value are like a horse and carriage – and about as anachronistic; indeed, as much as any system could be. The labour theory of value can’t just be wished away. One of the reasons automation is destroying capitalism, bit by bit, is that it is removing its sole source of profit in living human labour time which is unpaid. Thus the fewer workers that are left, the more intensely must they be screwed for the necessary profit, since automated machines yield only their own value but no new value in commodities. But capital and capitalism have myriad ways of regaining, maintaining and augmenting profit which they are not about to dispense with just because the system is becoming unworkable. If capitalism were to die of its own accord, it would take an awfully long time to expire. The Roman Empire of the West was almost five hundred years in the declining; had it not been for the wretched Barbarians it might have gone tottering on for aeons’ longer, with ever-greater misery for its people.

          Going back rather further in time, only an incredibly, astronomically rare event destroyed the dominating dinosaurs without whose extinction humankind amongst other beings would never have come into existence.  As with the capital-system called capitalism: nothing is inevitable, everything is contingent.

          Meanwhile, however, those in power who despaired at trying to bring masses of people towards liking the perpetuation of the system that exploits them can now rejoice in a book that meets everybody’s needs. For what we have here, without the forcible expropriation of those who refuse to give up anything, is a revolution far more utopian than anything Marx could have dreamt up. As the book does not demand any non-ruling class instrumentality, let alone the dictatorship of the proletariat, it should continue to sell.

(With acknowledgements to Alan Woods, www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratieff14100.htm.) (now discontinued)