Actually Existing Marxists

It’s now fairly commonplace to note how the recession has caused economists to turn to Marx for some answers. On this site Matthew noted the various ways in which Marx himself has shifted into vogue during capitalism’s latest crisis. The problem is, most of what we get in the mainstream doesn’t really get beyond puff pieces written by people who have little time for Marx beyond noting that he might have been right about capitalism’s instability. It’s worth, then spending a bit of time highlighting the more detailed work of actually existing Marxists over the past couple of years, because there’s actually quite a bit of it about, and the wonders of the net make it a fair bit more accessible.

As Joseph Choonara observes in this valuable overview, a key dividing line amongst Marxist accounts of the crisis is over whether to situate it in the financial sector, which then ‘infects’ or ‘impacts’ on the real economy, or to see the crisis as part of a longer term trend within the economy. Focussing on the financialisation side of things are Robin Blackburn and the late Peter Gowan, both associated with New Left Review.  Blackburn in particular has written prolifically about the development of finance, and this warning about subprime defaults from spring 2007 puts a lie to the notion that the credit crunch caught everyone with their pants down. For Blackburn the crisis is firmly situated in financialisation – “a crisis of that venturesome ‘new world’ of leverage, deregulation and ‘financial innovation’”. Whilst Blackburn firmly situates himself within the Marxist tradition, his work has little engagement with traditional Marxist themes and concepts, and his explanations can exaggerate the changes involved in contemporary capitalism. As Choonara says, his writing often “gives the impression that the rise of finance comes out of finance itself”.

However, the reasons for the rise of finance ought to be of major significance. Alongside the question of how finance got into this mess there needs to be the question of why and how finance developed the importance it has. Many, notably those around the Monthly Review Journal and also International Socialism (though with important differences), situate it within a general trend of stagnation since the 1970s, in which capitalism has at different times sought to overcome underlying problems of production and accumulation (Costas Lapavitsas remains a notable exception, preferring to focus on the shifting role of banking and technological developments). These accounts tend to be, to their credit, reluctant to accept the idea that this represents a radically new phase of capitalism (See Chris Harman for a particularly forthright rejection). Where these two schools differ is in the value they assign to Marx’s famous, but maligned, ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’, Monthly Review preferring an analysis based on the formation of monopolies. This is the subject of much debate (see Harman, Kliman) but is often far too quickly rejected.

Naturally, analysis of the nature of the crisis give rise to differing prescriptions for solutions, both in terms of its administration and its content. Chris Harman and Neil Faulkner’s debate about the depth of the crisis is thin code for a debate about how activists should be responding. From a rather different perspective Blackburn offers a number of proposals for regulation of finance. The radicalism of the solution, of course, depends on how deep you think the crisis goes, but it is hard not to agree with Geoff Mann that:

Turning over our upside-down world requires not just the taming or grounding or redistribution of value, but its destruction. The overthrow of capitalism is the only way out. In short, it is the acceptance of the necessity, not just the inevitability, of revolution that makes a Marxist adequate to Marx’s analysis.