I greatly enjoyed Ted Reese’s article on Henryk Grossman, a Marxist thinker who I also believe deserves more attention today. I’m very much open to the idea that there is a long-term breakdown tendency in capitalism and that capitalism will experience an increasing inability to find profitability as it chugs along. This is further exacerbated by the ecological aspect, where the metabolic rift between man and nature creates more and more instability in the social fabric and undermines the reproduction of society itself.
That said, I do think one needs to be wary about the relation between theories of crisis and political strategy. One example that sticks out is the way that Stalin and his team after World War II banked on an economic crisis hitting the United States and forcing them to retreat from Europe. This prediction greatly informed their actions in Germany (which led to the propaganda disaster around the Berlin airlift) and their hope that German division would be a momentary situation. While there was a brief recession, the overall capitalist bloc instead saw massive growth and recovery with the Marshall plan being used to fortify Europe with US-backed guns and butter. And there are of course Trotsky’s various predictions about an economic crisis and World War leading to a global proletarian uprising with a political revolution in the USSR. Calculations that of course proved incorrect.
Of course, doubters of Marxism at the time who believed that Kenyesian indicative planning could be used to “cure” the underlying illnesses of capitalism that would lead to crisis were incorrect. Capitalism does have an internal tendency to crisis and is inherently unstable – this is something we can be fairly sure of. But there is a deeper question of how this informs us strategically. Often Marxists will look at the political situation and the tendencies at play and see little hope in the existing forces. Crisis, or an upcoming crisis, then acts as a sort of deus ex machina that will disrupt the hopeless situation and give a political opening that otherwise doesn’t exist. This is linked to a general error of economism that sees economic conditions as organically giving rise to political class consciousness. Yet politics and ideology are always mediating the economic contradictions that lay at the base. Crisis can certainly open up new opportunities, but these opportunities are still mediated by politics. And it is in politics where Marxists can intervene.
It is for these reasons that I am weary of predictions of future crisis. We can always be sure that a crisis will happen in the future as long as capitalism exists. Knowing when they will arrive, on the other hand, seems to be a fraught question. Our track record of predictions isn’t the greatest, and while making predictions isn’t necessarily wrong one should be wary of how much we base political strategy on these predictions. The complexity and lack of transparency of the global economy itself make getting accurate data difficult as Tony Norfield points out in our recent interview with him. So while we can and certainly must keep an eye on the tendencies in the global economy, we must also be skeptical of how much we are capable of predicting with the knowledge and theories that we currently have. And even then, no crisis on its own can produce a politically conscious working class – only a protracted campaign of party building and mass struggle can do this.
I do not mean to accuse Comrade Reese of making these errors. His prediction of an upcoming crisis due to automation isn’t tied to any strategic assessments, at least in the piece published. Where Grossman is useful, if he is correct, is in showing that capitalism can only bring about social decay and economic dysfunction in the long term. Periods of capitalist growth and stability are therefore transitory and do not prove that capitalism has a future. There is no need to instead base our politics on some ethical appeal to achieve a utopian vision. Communism is indeed the only possible solution for our species if it is survive and prosper into the future.
Comradely,
Donald Parkinson
