The Specter of Depression: Paul Mattick’s Business as Usual

Business as Usual: the Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism

Reaktion Books (London), 2011

Paul Mattick’s Business as Usual is an attempt to come to grips with the global economic crisis that began in 2007 in Marxist terms, an entry into a growing category books which includes David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital. Mattick (son of the late council communist Paul Mattick) argues that, contrary to views of the entirety of the world of economists and business journalists, the ongoing crisis (ongoing in the sense that economies of Europe and the U.S. are inextricably interrelated) fundamentally reflects the dire problem of profitability for capitalism. However much the economists may wish to trumpet the long-awaited turnaround, the threat of depression and war haunt a system running out of options.

Mattick provides a bracing reminder of the reality of the nature of the capitalist system in his analysis of the limits of Keynesian stimulus policies:

From the viewpoint of economics—including most left-wing approaches—the point of an economy is the allocation of resources to meet consumption needs. The chief issue distinguishing conflicting viewpoints, then, is what sort of economy—what mix, for example, of market and state planning—does the best job of promoting the public welfare (the wealth of nations). This is why most economists, including Keynes, think of profit-making as a device for getting people with money to invest in the production that seves consumption. And this is what allows a contemporary Keynesian like Paul Krugman to ignore the imperative of profitability and insist, in making an argument for a massive stimulus program, that “under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful.” But capitalism is a system not for providing “employment” as an abstract goal but for employing people who produce profits; its goal is not the production of useful things but the increase of capital.

 Mattick excels in the anti-Keynesian argument so neccessary today (Naomi Klein should put this book on her reading list) as well as in his passages on the enormous role of the state in the capitalist economy, but in his stated aim of avoiding “jargon,” he constructs a critical structure lacking a treatment of  the foundation of the origin of profit: surplus value (the word “value” does not appear in the book) and the abstract labor that produces it. This stems from Mattick’s appearent interpretation of Marxism as a critique of political economy, rather than a philosophic criticism not only of political economy, but of the subjective assumptions that underlay it. The fetish of the commodity, as Marx criticizes it in Chapt. 1 of Capital, is neither an economic nor a sociological category, but rather a philosophic predicate of capitalist “civilization.”

Because of this sociological truncation of Marx’s thought (one he shares with David Harvey), the criticism offered in Business as Usual is ultimately inadequate. It should be read, however, as the puncturing of the balloon of dominant economic thinking it delivers is a salutory one.

(The excerpted passage is from Chapter 5: “Appropriate Policies”)

Retrospective Review: Boris Souvarine’s Stalin

Stalin

by Boris Souvarine, translated by C.L.R. James

Alliance Book Corporation, 1939

No biography in the conventional sense can be written about Stalin, due to the far-reaching falsification of the historic record of the “life” the man lived. Although Boris Souvarine’s Stalin is frequently referred to as a biography, it can be more accurately described as a detailed history and critique of the course of the Russian revolution and counter-revolution.

English-language sources on Souvarine’s life and politics are not particularly strong, but he was born in Russia and emigrated as a child with his family to France. He participated in the left-wing of the French socialist movement and was a charter member of the Communist Party, eventually breaking with the Third International in sympathy with Trotsky. He was not, strictly-speaking, a Trotskyist, but functioned as an independent oppositionist. Souvarine organized the French section of the Institute for Social History (which was burglarized by the GPU in a successful effort to obtain Trotsky’s archives). Souvarine sided with Victor Serge in his criticisms of Trotsky (he was also acquainted with Panait Istrati), which earned him the enmity of the Old Man. It is difficult to determine Souvarine’s post-WW II political trajectory from the sources at hand, but he seems to have moved towards a more traditional social democratic position.

Souvarine’s Stalin, originally published in 1935 and translated into English by C.L.R. James (while he worked on The Black Jacobins), is strong on the period after Lenin’s death and excels in its account of the Triumvarate and the so-called United Opposition. The English edition contains a long postscript on the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, which must have been written after the original edition. Below  are two brief (non-contiguous) excerpts from the postcript, dealing with the fascinating diplomatic relationship (and social kinship) of the U.S.S.R. and fascist Italy.

Criticism &.c highly recommends this indispensable book.

*  *  *

from Stalin by Boris Souvarine (excerpts from the postscript, “The Counter Revolution”)

ONE of the most remarkable phenomena of the period, the discovery of a Fatherland in the U.S.S.R., some time after the triumph of national-socialism in Germany, was the result of a great miscalculation of Stalin. He hoped at first to come to an agreement with Hitler, as he had formerly done with Mussolini, in spite of the verbal differences in doctrine, and on the basis of the similarity in method between parties of the mailed fist. Since the reception of the Duce at the Soviet Embassy in Rome, on the morrow of the murder of Matteotti, and later, under the pretext of courtesy, the dispatch of congratulations to Mussolini by Rykov after his stay at Sorrento, where Gorky spent most of his time, the relations between the U.S.S.R. and Italy became increasingly intimate and cordial. Mussolini did not conceal a discreet admiration for Lenin, and the reciprocal borrowings increased between the two totalitarian regimes, hand in hand with the progress of their economic relations. In 1933, the year of Hitler’s advent to power, an Italo-Soviet commercial agreement was concluded in May, followed in September by a pact of friendship, non-aggression and neutrality. A Soviet squadron anchored in October off Naples, and the following year an Italian military delegation proceeded to Moscow. Russia even placed orders for warships in Italy. Cordial telegrams from Litvinov testify for posterity to this mutual understanding…. Mussolini flattered himself that he had established a model entente with the Bolsheviks, suppressing communism at home whilst negotiating advantageously with the so-called Soviet State. Thus Stalin thought that he would conclude a similar pact with Hitler, on the ruins of the communist movement in Germany. The renewal of the agreement of Rapallo confirmed him in this hope, as did the new credit facilities granted to the U.S.S.R. by German industry. But he had to sing a different tune when the Third Reich assumed an attitude of determined hostility toward the Bolshevism of the Russo-Soviet State as towards export communism. Hitler’s intuition finally prevailed over the contrary view; a view fairly widespread both in the Reichswehr and in diplomatic circles, which opposed to a new Drang nach Oesten the Bismarckian conception of an alliance with Russia. In vain the Caucasian, D. Kandelaki, appointed as commercial envoy to Berlin with a secret mission from Stalin, multiplied advances, invitations and soundings. The Fuehrer turned a deaf ear and persevered in his attack on Russia through the Communist International. In the end the disappointed Stalin had no choice but to turn toward France and England, toward the League of Nations, to play a different game, and to awaken in the peoples of the U.S.S.R. the consciousness of patriotic duty and of the fascist danger.

*  *  *

Mussolini had taken a keen interest in this unique counter-revolution, to the point of devoting to it commentaries from his own pen in the Popolo d’Italia. After the sensational execution of the generals, his article entitled Twilight (13th June, 1937) was somewhat severe on Stalin’s regime where “massacre is on the order of the day and of the night.” But a month later, the Critica Fascista (15th July) considered, in a study of the Fascism of Stalin, that the latter’s “fascist” reforms proved the natural force of expansion and the universality of the ideal of the Black Shirts. And during the trial of the twenty-one, Mussolini himself asked (Popolo d’talia for 5th March, 1938) whether “in view of the catastrophe of Lenin’s system, Stalin could secretly have become a fascist,” and stated that in any case “Stalin is doing a notable service to fascism by mowing down in large armfuls his enemies who had been reduced to impotence.” In large armfuls, indeed, Stalin mowed down not only his enemies, declared or secret, alleged or real, but also his “friends,” his creatures, his accomplices. Between the last two pseudo-judicial exhibitions, he had mowed down not only the Old Guard of the Party and the flower of the Communist Youth, but, after the General Staff of the Red Army, all the heads of Soviet governmental, of national and local administration. (It almost goes without saying that the former oppositionists, not produced at the trials, such as Smilga, Preobrazhensky, Sosnovsky, Byeloborodov, Uglanov, etc., must have succumbed in the jails of their “socialist fatherland.”)

See also:

Panaït Istrati’s Russia Unveiled: A Forgotten Classic Of Opposition To Stalinism

Alan Wald on the literature of the Browder era

Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade

University of North Carolina Press, 2007, (319 pages).

Alan Wald, a cultural historian of the U.S. left and editorial board member of Against the Current, is now midway through a projected trilogy on leftist writers of the twentieth century. Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade focuses (primarily) on novelists of the thirties and forties and their relationship to the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front, and the African-American struggle against racism during this period. The phrase “Trinity of Passion” comes from a poem by Edwin Rolfe, an Abraham Lincoln Battalion veteran.

Unlike the writers treated in Wald’s best known book, the excellent The New York Intellectuals: the Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, those he profiles here are either members or close fellow travelers of the Communist Party.

Some of the highlights of the book are his discussions of the politics of African-American novelist Ann Petry, the writers of the large Yiddish-language CP press, and the political journey of playwright Arthur Miller, who we learn here sometimes used the pen name Matt Wayne in party publications.

Wald read his way through a prodigious amount of obscure novels from the period. While he doesn’t always make a strong case for the literary merit of some of this material, he does succeed in crafting a detailed view of the lost world of the cultural orbit of the CP (he includes a fascinating picture of the Daily Worker‘s city room among the books photographs).

His discussion of the Party’s subordination of the African-American struggle to the war effort of the Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin Grand Alliance is in my view the book’s most noteworthy aspect and a welcome antidote to the influential revisionist school of historiography on the CP’s relationship to Black America.

The final book of Wald’s trilogy is to be titled The American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. Like this book and Wald’s other efforts, I anticipate that it will be worth reading.

No Politics Are Local: A Critique of Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe

I have finally taken the time to read Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. The book was written twenty years ago, but it is still widely read and its subject matter is of such importance that it warrants a brief review here.

Kelley is a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His book, published in 1990, is part of a current of American historiography that—broadly speaking—attempts to rehabilitate the position of the Communist Party in the interpretation of the struggle of African-American freedom struggle. Since the book was published, Kelley’s work has become more interesting, perhaps in part due to the influence to his encounter with the late Chicago Surrealist Franklin Rosemont and the Black Radical Congress inaugural meeting in 1988 (see my review of Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, which he co-edited with Rosemont).

Hammer and Hoe is distinguished from most of the revisionist writing on the CP (for example, the work of Maurice Isserman) in that Kelley prefers the party’s Third Period and Hitler-Stalin Pact policy to that of the Popular Front. In Kelley’s view, the more “radical” domestic policies allowed the Communists to create an “invisible army” of northern Alabama sharecroppers and industrial workers (miners and steel workers) in Birmingham to combat the near-monolithic system of violent racism that reigned over the south. The Popular Front, Kelley argues, subordinated those efforts to the class collaboration that was the party’s official line between 1935 and 1939.

My main objection to Kelley’s thesis is that it is impossible to separate “domestic” from “international” politics (which Kelly calls “foreign policy issues” on p. 190—where in a discussion of Germany’s invasion of Poland he neglects to mention that the U.S.S.R. also invaded the country). To do so is to violate the Marxist relationship between theory and practice and to reduce potentially revolutionary activity to reformism.

The book does make a contribution of confronting us with the incredible level of deadly racist violence which was the foundation of Jim Crow rule in the democratic U.S., so-called. Kelley concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship of this period with the emergence of the civil rights movement in Alabama in the 1960s, speculating on the “Long Civil Rights Movement” thesis.

For an alternate view of the events Kelley closes with, I refer readers to Chapter 20 (“Stokely Carmichael in Lowndes County”) in Charles Denbys’ Indignant Heart: A Black Workers’s Journal, a book that should be studied in its entirety alongside Hammer and Hoe.

Between Uncle Sam and Papa Doc

Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957
Matthew J. Smith

(University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

***

Even for those sympathetic to Haiti, the big events—the great revolution at the close of the eighteenth century, the brutal Duvalier regime, and the roller coaster ride of Aristide’s political career—are probably all they are familiar with. Matthew J. Smith’s new academic (but lively) study Red & Black in Haiti details an enormously important period of Haitian history, one that may help to inform us about the political and social prospects for Haiti’s post-earthquake future.

Smith’s narrative ranges from the end of the U.S. occupation in 1934 to the event—one hesitates to call it an election—that first brought François Duvalier to power in 1957. His special focus is the intellectual currents that competed to shape Haiti after the Marines vacated the country and Haitian independence was definitively reasserted. Marxism and noirisme—the particular form of Black cultural pride in a country long dominated by its minuscule white elite class—were among the strongest and most influential trends. Of special interest to this blog is Smith’s attention to Haitian Marxism. Readers will be introduced to such important figures as Jacques Roumain and Max Hudicourt, who developed differing radical interpretations of Haitian social reality. Daniel Fignolé, who was definitely not a Marxist but who had a far greater urban working class following than the either the Communists or the Socialists, is also discussed at length.

The emotional center of the book is provided by the January 1946 revolution, which was a mass and spontaneous student and worker uprising against the corrupt and authoritarian rule of Elie Lescot. Smith carries out a fascinating narrative of the event, including the participation of Pierre Mabille and André Breton, described in earlier postings on this blog. Smith recounts a comment by Lescot that is fit to be included among the great last words of the foolish tyrants of history, “The youth were not dangerous. They are only dialecticians.”

Sadly, the Haitian Left was slowly but thoroughly marginalized in the period after the revolution, as some of its contradictions led to Haiti’s leaders coopting them into the state. For those who did not take this route, the increasingly extreme levels of repression extinguished opportunities to establish any relationship with the Haitian masses, either urban or rural.

The book ends on an ominous note: the accession to power of Duvalier, who used the school of noirisme to prepare himself for his brutal career. A short but interesting afterword discusses the lasting impact of this period, through the rise of Aristide.

Google Books has a long excerpt of the text available.

Death in Stalin’s forest

Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn

by Victor Zaslavsky

Telos Press, 2008. 133 pp.

I hesitate to review anything connected to the Telos school. The journal has undergone a precipitous theoretical decline from its origin as a center of phenomenological Marxism, critical theory, and council communism to become a vehicle for the Americanization of French New Right thinking, the intellectualization of reactionary and racist Italian regionalism, and the Left philosophical rehabilitation of Karl Schmitt.

The origins of the criticism of the Telos school have, however, steered them to some political positions that deserve a hearing. Among the products of this critical residue is Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn. Zaslavsky (who passed away late last year) was a Russian sociologist and political exile who lived and wrote in Italy.

Zaslavsky’s book is a devastating look at the legacy of an almost totally unknown (unknown to Americans, that is) period of history, the span of almost two years during which Nazi Germany and the U.S. S. R. were enthusiastically cooperating partners in an attempt to reshape Europe in the interests of the ruling class of the respective states.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, was on the surface a diplomatic pledge of non-aggression. In the long tradition of secret state conduct, however, the real content of the pact was a detailed plan to extinguish Poland as an independent country and to divide its territory between the two signatories. On September 1, 1939, the event hanging in the air for so much of the 1930s happened: Germany invaded Poland and initiated what was to become World War II. True to its pledge, Russia invaded the eastern half of Poland and annexed it to the U.S.S.R.

Zaslavsky gives a brisk and fascinating account of the impact of this chain of events on the Communist Parties of the western countries. After an extremely brief period of disorientation, the parties, so adept at dancing to the tune called from Moscow, fell into line and launched political attacks on Poland as an oppressor of its minority population of Ukranians and Byleorussians. (The impact on the Communists’ main opponents on the left, the Trotskyists, was no less severe, although it fall outside the scope of Zaslavsky’s book.)

To fully carry through its policy on annexation, the Russians had to incorporate the conquered territories economically and socially as well as politically. To do so, the old social structure needed to be destroyed. Stalin had more than a decade of experience in such matters, having annihilated peasant society in Ukraine in the early 1930s and physically eliminated not only the Old Bolsheviks in the Great Purge, but also many thousands of ordinary workers who were caught up in mass arrests ordered from above. The Russians quickly set up prison camps for the huge numbers of Polish army officers, soldiers, and police they had captured and the Politburo began devising its solution to the Polish problem.

In short, the solution was mass murder. The captured Poles who were not deported to camps in Siberia and elsewhere were summarily executed and buried in a forest village near Smolensk called Katyn.

Zaslavsky details the long and sordid history of the Russian cover-up of the Katyn Massacre, which lasted, incredibly, up through the Perestroika era. Initial and not insubstantial assistance was provided in this effort by Stalin’s wartime partners in the Grand Alliance, the U.S. and Britain.

The book is brief and highly readable. Although Zaslavsky is good in detailing the West’s complicity in the decades of the denial of the massacre, his political position seems to be nothing more than a sophisticated liberalism and it is not clear to me the nature of the affinity of Zaslavsky’s work with the current theoretical tendency of Telos.

In the shadow of the Separation Wall

Once upon a country: a Palestinian life

by Sari Nusseibeh

In paperback (Picador, 2008, 584 pages)

Nussibeh belongs to the highest strata of Palestinian society and so his life experience differs greatly from that of the average resident of a West Bank town. He has, however, sacrificed much for his commitment to the Palestinian national cause and his memoir contains a lot of interesting detail of his important participation in the (now almost forgotten) Intifada of the late 1980s. Nussibeh—a philosopher—also brief touches on his fascinating scholarship in aspects of Islamic philosophy. The chief value of Nussibeh’s memoir may be that it allows Western readers to hear the voice of a Palestinian intellectual actually on the ground there (he is president of Al-Quds University), in contrast to those in residence in Europe or the U.S.

Thumbnail Reviews

This blog is intended to be largely a critical exploration of ideas through the medium of the book review. Sadly, my pile of “books finished” is much larger than my capacity to produce thoughtful reviews. I am introducing the category of “Thumbnail Review” to permit me to share a few lines about books I consider noteworthy.