Concentrating the Mind Wonderfully

 

Let me instance the case of General Ulysses S Grant (1822-85) lieutenant-general in charge of the Union forces in 1864-5 after a number of significant and decisive victories in the southern theatre and ultimately the military victor of the American Civil War. He was subsequently the 18^th President between 1869-77. Brilliant and focused in military command, Grant was, however, an inept president whose administration became a byword for corruption, though he was not corrupt himself.

After his presidency, he became bankrupted over financial affairs: in those days there was no presidential pension and Grant – now dying of throat cancer - sought to save the situation by writing his autobiography. It turned out to be one of the most incisive and readable autobiographies in history and became a triumphant best-seller, though Grant himself did not survive to enjoy the fruits of his literary success.

Until the Civil War Grant was a failure on almost all counts. Graduating bottom of his class from West Point military academy, whose superintendent was Robert E Lee, Grant fought indifferently in the Mexican War of 1848-9 after which he left the army and tried his hand unsuccessfully at farming and storekeeping. By contrast his rise as an officer in the army he re-joined on the outbreak of the Civil War was meteoric, if not without occasional setbacks. When Lincoln (‘I like this man, he fights’) finally placed him in charge directly against Lee in the closing stages of the war Grant turned out to be the only Union general Lee could not outfox or outfight. Though unlike Lee, Grant was entirely non-charismatic, even prosaic by comparison.

Prosaic or otherwise, there is no doubt about Grant’s greatness as a general. And in a special sense the American Civil War was ‘his’ war. Though reluctantly on his part, it has to be said, Grant spilt a hell of a lot of blood in his time. Yet without him the United States might have gone on drowning in it in hopeless stalemate.

After the war was over life went downhill for him even as he reached the pinnacle of American power. And then just on down and down – until the autobiography. By re-fighting the war in his memoirs, Grant regained his former iron resolution. Saving his family from destitution became the new purpose of what remained of his life, into which he poured his latent and elusive genius.  Yet again Grant ‘rose to the occasion’, as we might say. The backwoods life and footling war of his earlier years, and then the dispiriting corruption and cynicism of the post-Civil War period seem to have brought out an old enemy of lethargy in him. But he had an instinct for what mattered and did not fail that. One spark flew up from within his doleful presidency. By the late 1860s white southerners, including those who formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1868, were terrorising the southern countryside with the brutal murders of thousands of blacks in the dead of night. President Grant acted decisively by sending in the Union army to disperse and destroy these gangs, including the Klan, which did not rise again until 1915. It was his one signal service as a president-general, so to speak.

We have here a figure who needed certain circumstances and a certain kind of power of command to gainsay an irresolute nature – against the odds. Without the Civil War Grant would have ended his days as a man without purpose or even a unifying identity. He would have died a nonentity. This looks like a vivid historical demonstration of the fact that without purpose to unite the will, irresolution and ‘do-lessness’ prevail.

I am reminded of old Grant, curiously enough, when I look at the state of political polling in this country, the UK, at the present time.

Quite frankly, no one knows how to interpret the confusing signals coming from views polled on Brexit, Remaining, Single Market-till-whenever. Although adhering to Brexit out of respect for the referendum result and knowing that swathes of Labour may turn away if the Party sneaks in some kind of Remain as party policy, Jeremy Corbyn in acceding to a transitional Single Market has been lambasted as a treacherous hypocrite by the Daily Mail (itself a strong – even demented – advocate of Brexit) and at the same time is criticised by the Communist-orientated Morning Star for going wobbly on Brexit, for the Star is in the somewhat awkward position of being on the same side as the Mail regarding Brexit, though for entirely opposed reasons. Both the main political parties are in a state of confusion and internal dissension over this issue.

This merely reflects the state of public opinion taken as a whole. In other words, if we do not ourselves lead, we fall into emotional and ideological disarray. We believe contradictory things at the same time, because to us individually it really doesn’t matter what we think. And that is because, as a people, we do not hold the reins in deciding what to do in the face of the problems afflicting both this country and late capitalism in general. There is only one alternative to leading, and that is being led. But if we seize the opportunity to get to grips and decide – in forceful discussion with each other – on the plan of action to do what is to be done, lethargy of this collective divisive kind will evaporate against an all-too-necessary purposeful act, with each doing what each can and wants to do. Through purpose, power and means, our instinct for what matters revives. As it is, we have become so used to being led that through the polls we have infected our ostensible leaders in their ability to lead. And so capital, not people high and low, makes the running.

 

 

MODERATION IN ALL THINGS?

 

If hypothetically you had been a moderate in Germany and aware of the Nazi Holocaust, where would you have stood on the issue?

Let’s see. Well, social stability at all costs, but perhaps only 3 million instead of 6 million Jews and others might have been killed? Or: conditions in the concentration camps could have been more humane, while calling them something like ‘rest resorts’ or ‘temporary accommodation centres’ might have been pleasanter.

Plot to overthrow the Nazi government? Assassinate Hitler? Hide Jewish strangers? Be active in a secret underground to subvert the system? All these would be extremism!

Look the other way perhaps, but don’t get involved!

Ironically, perhaps, it is moderates who exist to give support to genuine extremism.

‘Moderate’ Republicans in the US Congress abhor Trump to be sure, but they are neoliberals down to the last politician, and wish to see free medical care stripped from twenty million Americans, as well as turning the directing of America over to Wall Street and the Pentagon – sane, rational entities unlike that blustering buffoon in the White House.

Socialism and human equality? Extremism!

Even hostility towards further military adventures to end the 16-year Afghan war?  Extremism!

Being against doing the same thing over and over again even if it doesn’t work (Einstein’s definition of insanity)? Extremism!

Long ago King Solomon (knowing the likely outcome) proposed a moderate solution to the custody battle over a baby child between two women: cut the child in half and give half the child to each. So: cut Afghanistan in half? Partitioning countries has always been a great moderate solution.

Black Lives Matter? What about: half of black lives matter? Or better still: ‘Black lives matter except in certain circumstances’?

The anti-Marxist Karl Popper moderately proposed ‘piecemeal social engineering’ to improve society as against what he considered to be rabble-rousing, fanatical, Marx-inspired revolution. Unwittingly – and oddly for such an eminent intellect - Sir Karl thus tacitly acknowledged the powerful forces of the establishment right: that is, he bowed to the existence of a class war that he never openly acknowledged as being with us.  Hence the moderation of ‘piecemeal’, moving very cautiously and almost invisibly towards progress if any progress was to occur at all. But why ‘piecemeal’ if the strategy was not to defend the power of the controlling upper class? Why not ‘all-out’? And how inevitable was it that ‘piecemeal’ would be broken down into ever-tinier pieces when the class war intensified? Never mind. Just keep doing piecemeal – insanity.

Erich Fromm wrote a book in the 1950s called The Sane Society. I suggest a slight adjustment to that title to describe the moderate one we live in today.

Jeremy Corbyn has been under constant, sustained attack by ‘moderates’ in the Labour Party, but at least Owen Jones in the Guardian (17.8.17) in an article headlined ‘Centrists attack the left, but they are the true extremists’, has seen the light. As Jones concludes:

It is my own view that centrism has no answers, and that if the left fails, the vacuum will be filled by a populist, hateful right. It was the extremism of the economic order that centrists defended – not its moderation – that left Britain here. Centrists will dispute this, and find it almost inconceivable that they have been thrust into the political wilderness once inhabited by the left. But until they come to terms with their own failures, they will surely never rule again.

 

Or perhaps they are already going mad in Einstein’s sense.

CARDIGAN RIGHTWINGER STRIKES AGAIN

 

          Thus Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail for 3^rd August 2017: ‘I’ve not got a socialist bone in my body, but I’d tax the rich’s empty homes’, says his headline. So, surprises from the Mail’s resident cardigan reactionary. But more surprises to come:

          ‘I’m not shocked because of what happened at Grenfell…’ Wot? Not at the deaths of at least 80 people and the maiming and personal distress and loss of hundreds? This seems not just anti-socialist but anti-human. I believe even Mrs May was shocked. Perhaps it should be placed in context:

I’m not shocked because of what happened at Grenfell, whose recently refurbished flats were seemingly much sought after. That appalling inferno seems to have been the result of flawed building regulations and huge incompetence on the part of the council and its agencies.

Poor Stephen still doesn’t tell us if he was shocked about what actually happened to these people: perhaps by the end of the passage he forgot what he’d written at the beginning. What he does is surmise the how of the tragedy while conveniently ignoring the why: the rooted, probably criminal indifference at the base of the ‘incompetence.’  We have just seen reports of fires in Dubai tower blocks from which there was little human loss of life or limb because of more than one functioning staircase, a top-grade lift system and an army of flunkies on tap. The safety of the rich is well provided for on high; Grenfell shows that no one in authority had bothered much about the safety of the poor at great heights. But for Glover all that is ‘a separate issue’.

          Yet the predominance of super-rich homes that are empty because they are being held as assets in a city with a severe housing shortage ‘will stoke understandable resentment and envy among moderate people – feelings that will be cleverly exploited by zealots like Corbyn and McDonnell.’  I doubt if it takes a lot of cleverness to ‘exploit’ what Glover already refers to as ‘understandable resentment’; I doubt if it takes any at all.

          Meanwhile, ‘ordinary middle-class people, who may own a modest second home, [will be] penalised because of the excesses of the super-rich’. Notice that the actual victims at Grenfell were and are not exactly ‘ordinary middle-class people’ and few are likely to have owned ‘a modest second home’, perhaps a key reason for those who do to be ‘moderate’. Glover leaves all the victims behind as ‘a separate issue’. (Ask the Welsh or the Cornish what they think of ‘modest’ second homes displacing the needs of their own young.)  We see here that Glover is appealing to his own middle-and upper-middle-class readership. That is, to the core of the Conservative vote. No point in wasting one’s polemical time on the hoi polloi who are unlikely to vote Tory whatever happens.  

          The zealotry of Corbyn and McDonnell does, however, lead to a fear that even some ‘moderates’ in the middle-classes might be drawn to Labour: that is the real danger.

          Hence we turn populist and demand that the super-rich be taxed more on their empty homes. Not, of course, that they be dispossessed of them, for they have the same right to property as anyone else. But: ‘Can it be right that, in Kensington and Chelsea, the owner of a property worth £325,000 pays the same rate of council tax as a billionaire living in a house worth £50 million?’ (Or not living in it, as the case may be?) That leads me to w9onder how much council tax should be paid by someone who owns a £50 million house as compared to that paid by someone owning a £325,000 house. What should an equitable ‘top rate’ of council tax be in this instance? Surely £1 million would be more than just, but to impose this as council tax would surely distort the council tax system out of all recognition. So that is what Glover’s radical tax-the-rich amounts to: an increase in their council tax of some unspecified amount, and surely not that onerous a one for a billionaire to pay.  As Glover himself admits:

A little legitimate squeezing (sic) of the absent super-rich might not make much practical difference. But it would at least show that Theresa May’s Tory Party has the right moral priorities, and that its heart is in the right place.

In other words, don’t do anything much but show that you have the right moral priorities. To be a bit blunter: bring in a fig-leaf policy to keep the Tories in power and able to continue pursuing the politics of inequality, in including that of housing. Earlier on Glover gave the game away when he wrote:

Surely one lesson of the last election is that housing is a toxic issue.  If the Tories are planning to be elected next time round, they had better build a lot more homes than the Coalition ever achieved.

Thus, not a social policy but an election strategy. People may, however, find this a rather unsatisfactory – not to say hypocritical - stance to take as opposed to ‘zealots’ who seek to implement basic social justice (i.e. in housing): build houses in order to get elected. And how many of those, when push comes to shove?

         

We see the same sort of rather obvious realpolitik in an Observer interview (6 August 2017) with Will Tanner, ‘formerly deputy head of the Downing Street policy unit’, who says at one point that ‘If Conservatives want to win the next election, they to need to build a radical new prospectus’. (Note: not that ‘a radical new prospectus’ is the right thing to do.) When then follows from Tanner’s position is a Goldilocks list of things Tories should promise – indeed whether they were to carry them out or not – and this involves various ‘shoulds’ about what needs to be done. ‘These things are easy to say, hard to translate into policy and more difficult still to deliver,’ says Tanner with admirable frankness. Though who said anything about actually delivering on election promises? It will certainly be ‘difficult’ for a party consisting of Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, David Davis and Liam Fox. Unfortunately Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel, Disraeli, Butler and Macmillan do not appear to be available to help out.

JULIET SAMUEL AND THE VISION THING

 

‘We get signals that the system is under stress’ – leading economist

Ex-Obama adviser Mohamed El-Erian believes the global system is at crisis point.  He talks to Nils Pratley and Jill Treanor (Observer May 14^th, 2017).

‘He is chief economic adviser to Allianz, the German financial powerhouse that owns Pimco’ (born in New York to Egyptian parents, educated at both Oxbridge universities).

Among his pearls of wisdom as a prophet is the following forecast: ‘We’re either going to turn towards higher growth or towards recession and unsettling volatility’. As in: ‘Tomorrow will be either sunny or rainy.’ Predictions like these are never wrong. But Mr El-Erian’s true wisdom lies in being unafraid to voice the unpalatable, and so avoiding a reputation for Daily Telegraph-type boostering. Yet in truth he knows the future no more than I do.

Though Mr El-Erian knows more than I do about the reasons behind the known unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld might call them. Investors today think that the piles of cash on some companies’ balance sheets will come their way in the form of dividends and share buyouts.  ‘You need a major shakeout to change that mindset.’ (Wot? Capitalism without ‘shareholder value’???) But Mr El-Erian has a ‘four-point plan’:

The first point: ‘We need to get back to investing in things that promote economic growth, infrastructure, a more pro-growth tax system, serious labour re-tooling.’  These are code-words for lower taxes for the rich and more labour mobility (less security for workers is a sure-fire way of keeping wage-bills down). So: lower wages combined with less State help for those who need it.  As for youth unemployment in Europe (which comes up in this part of the conversation): this is ‘an issue you’ve really got to think about seriously.’ Sage advice. I am sure we do. If we think hard enough about it, the problem might go away. Lowering taxes and labour re-tooling might help here, too. Labour being a machine that can be ‘re-tooled’.

Second, some countries ‘that can afford to must borrow to invest or cut taxes’. Germany and the US can certainly do this ‘and to a certain extent the UK’. As for Greece, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Tuvalu and just about everywhere else all this may not be feasible: at any rate none of these is mentioned here. So much for them.

Third, ‘pockets of extreme indebtedness must be addressed’, and debt is a terrible thing to be sure, but perhaps Mr El-Erian might have proffered a suggestion or two as to how to go about it. It will be tricky to solve, not only because such ‘pockets’ include the United States Federal Government, other governments, many business firms and corporations and millions of individuals and families, but also because one person’s debt is another’s asset. A wholescale moratorium on all debt everywhere would bring down the entire world financial system, so presumably that is not part of ‘the plan’.

Fourth, ‘regional and global governance needs repair’. He instances the Eurozone, which should have fiscal integration meaning ‘a common budget and political harmonisation’.  A magic wand should be sufficient to bring all this about.

Mr El-Erian is candid that none of this sounds easy to achieve: it’s ‘a political judgment’.

That is the right way for an economist to sign off: hand the whole can of worms over to the politicians who will no doubt say ‘thank you very much’.

Since this is capitalism, which is inimical to macroeconomic planning and rationalisation of any sort, this ‘plan’ (as is usual with economists putting forward solutions, such as Ha-Joon Chang in – for example - 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism,) is a wish-list. This and that should be done, which invariably means that none of it will be done.

Of course wide swathes of capitalists would agree wholeheartedly with more tax-cutting and zero-contracting of labour, but would probably also have to agree, reluctantly, that they are unlikely to bring about ‘political harmonisation’ of any kind.  But that is not an economist’s problem.

This sagacity from an economist is not without precedent, i.e., passing the buck.  Many years’ ago the eminent Lionel Lord Robbins outlined all the economic problems facing the Wilson government in a BBC talk. His recommendations included tax-cuts as well as austerity following from less government interference in the economy. For Robbins it was ‘up to the politicians’ (I remember that phrase well) to make his nostrums palatable to the general public. No doubt all this went down well amongst Lord Robbins’ chums in the Atheneum.

All in all, Planet Economist appears to exist in a different eco-system.

Two great but now unjustly unknown socialist classics:

Out of the Night by Jan Valtin

(Richard Krebs 1904-1951)

New York 1941; republished by Fortress Books, London 1988

Krebs was a German Spartacist activist from the age of 14 in the period 1918-23, after which – a sailor – he became a courier and then agent for the Comintern. His adventures are hair-raising and page-turning. He was assigned the perilous mission of mobilising the merchant marines of Western countries for strike actions in the 1920s and 30s. His career included a three-year spell in San Quentin penitentiary before he tangled with the much nastier Gestapo back in Germany.  Krebs was sent to a Nazi concentration camp but evaded execution by posing as a double-agent for the Gestapo while reporting back to the Comintern. Before long both sides where hunting him down. Krebs escaped to America where he wrote this book in seclusion. It sold a million copies. To gain US citizenship as an alternative to deportation and certain death, Krebs joined the US Army and was decorated for bravery in the Pacific war. He died – in his bed - but of a tragic illness at the age of 45.

Valtin may have given up on the Comintern (out of necessity, one might say) but he never renounced his belief in fighting for the cause of the poor and the oppressed. In the wider sense he remained a socialist to the end.  Out of the Night (as is the subject of my next review) was badly timed. By the end of 1941 the United States had joined Stalin’s Russia in a war against the Nazis. In view of Krebs’ remarks about the Comintern leaders (as well as his description of its day-to-day running) it would have been impolitic to bring out further printings, out of deference to the new alliance. It is otherwise difficult to explain how a book that had already sold a million copies would not go into more editions and was – quite the contrary - allowed to lapse into obscurity. In fact Stalin abolished the Comintern in 1943 in his campaign to get the West to open a Second Front against Hitler’s armies and so draw off Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe forces from the Soviet invasion.

Unputdownable.

Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis Corey

New York 1934 – available on www.marxist.org/archive/corey

Don’t let the ‘1934’ put you off; this is a magisterial Marxist account of the history of US and world capitalism and what it was undergoing in the depths of the Great Depression  of the 1930s, with voluminous statistics. By a founder-member of the US Communist Party who by the late 1940s had distanced himself from Marxism in his attempt to save his American citizenship in these McCarthyite years. (Born of Italian immigrant parents, his real name was Louis C Fraina, 1892-1953.)

The book would have been widely seen as an anachronism in the ‘golden age’ of capitalism from 1945 to about the mid-1970s but its rigorous Marxian analysis comes into its own and especially since the post-2008 crisis of neoliberalism. Corey shows why ‘recovery’ eludes a capitalism in decline, but he had not reckoned on the possibility of a Second World War that effectively delivered America from Depression. It’s possible he might have foreseen war as early as 1934 but may have believed revolution might come before anything like that. Marshal Foch had called the 1918 Armistice one that would last only twenty years; a pity Corey did not relate to the old marshal’s pessimism. As a typical Communist of his time Corey extolled Stalin’s Five-Year Plan as the coming of true socialism to Russia; I doubt if Marx would have made that mistake – one has to disregard Corey’s remarks on Soviet Russia as the one really dated element in the book. In 1940, however, Corey renounced Stalin for his atrocities and left the Party.

His attack on Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration as ‘state capitalism’ was badly timed: NRA was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court only a year after his magnum opus was published. Ironically it was too ‘state capitalist’, it seems, for the US ruling class also.

These blemishes, however, are outweighed by one of the best works of applied Marxist analysis ever written. The Left for whom Jeremy Corbyn is the last word in Left politics would do well to revaluate it in the light of what is going on today: a real class-war being fought by the 1% against the 99%.

The Historical Materialist and the Concept of History

Just to note that the above essay, on the Philosophy of History page in this website, has been newly revised.  It deals with the intellectual roots of Marxism and its historical materialism via a discussion of the 1978 work The Poverty of Theory’ by Marxist historian EP Thompson in his famous polemic against the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser.  In fact I give the great Thompson, who died in 1993, a bit of a rough time – who am I to do that? Anyhow, you might like to judge for yourself!

Happy reading!