Boris Blows The Gaff

Britain and other states in the NATO imperialist alliance have been ramping up the war rhetoric in recent months, as they prepare to move from the phase of phoney war to hot war, as the drive to World War III accelerates.  They claim that its necessary to massively increase military spending, and, thereby, divert spending away from real capital investment, to improve living standards, because of some supposed imminent military threat to western Europe from Russia.  This is the same Russia, of course, that has been bogged down, just in Eastern Ukraine for the last four years.  There is no indication that Russia poses any immediate, or, for that matter, longer term military threat to western Europe.  It may pose threats in other ways, such as via cyber attacks, and interference in political processes, but that is a different matter, and its hard to see how spending more on weapons deals with that.  What would you do, blow up your own computer systems?

The real military threats to western Europe, in fact, have not come from Russia - or China - but from the US.  Its the US that has threatened to invade Greenland - or was it Iceland as Trump doesn't seem to know the difference.  Its the US that has been bombing one country after another, as well as one of its envoys Mike Huckabee literally threatening biblical hellfire, to justify a Zionist takeover of land "from the river to the sea", as being justified by God in the Bible.  Similarly, Boris Johnson, fresh from having wrecked the British economy with help from his mate Farage, via Brexit, has now blown the gaff on what is going on by blurting out that he wants British troops, now, on the ground, openly in Ukraine, i.e. not Russia knocking at the door of Britain and Western Europe, but vice versa.

Nothing much changes.  In the last couple of hundred years, it has never been Russia, let alone China that has been threatening to invade Britain, France or the rest of western Europe.  It has always been the other way around.  It was Britain and France attacking Russia during the Crimean War, thousands of miles from both Britain and France.  It was France, during the Napoleonic Wars that invaded Russia, not vice versa.  It was Germany that invaded Russia during World War I, and, although Russia fought on the side of the Allies in both world wars, after World War I, it was Britain, France, the US, and a succession of other imperialist powers that invaded Russia in an attempt to overthrow the workers' revolution.

So, when, the USSR fell, and NATO, despite its assurances given to Gorbachev, to get his agreement to German unification, rapidly expanded Eastwards, marching its battalions ever closer to Moscow, the Russian people saw history repeating once again.  Not surprisingly, their reactionary leaders took advantage of that, to enhance their own positions.  Yeltsin the puppet of US imperialism, who presided over the looting of state assets, and immiseration of the population, was replaced by Putin.  So, similarly, when NATO sought to expand further East, first in Georgia, where even western observers noted that Saakashvili engaged in an attempted ethnic cleansing of Russians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and, later in Georgia, its no wonder that the Russian leaders saw the opportunity to mobilise the population behind them.

In Georgia, the Russian troops quickly dispatched the invading Georgian forces, and raced towards the Georgian capital Tbilisi.  Yet, contrary to the narrative being created, today, in respect of Ukraine, having rolled their tanks into Tbilisi, the Russian did not overthrow the government, or occupy Georgia.  Having neutered the Georgian military threat, they withdrew, securing the ethnic Russian populations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  It was no doubt, not a sign of the peaceful, moral nature of Putin's regime, but simply a recognition of the fact that there was nothing to be gained by Russia tying up its forces in Georgia.  Russia will not be conquered in any new imperialist war.  Its stock of nuclear weapons ensures that will not happen.  But, it is a long way from that to the idea that Russia has the military, industrial or economic power to project itself across the globe, or even into western Europe.  Its slow progress in Eastern Ukraine shows that.

Similarly, when NATO pushed forward again into Ukraine, despite the fact that support for NATO membership never rose above 40%, in Ukraine, and the West backed the coup against the pro-Russian government in 2014, it was inevitable that the ethnic Russians in Ukraine, particularly in Eastern Ukraine, which had always voted for closer ties with Russia, would see it as hostile, and that Russia would, again, be led to intervene.  US imperialism/NATO has used this tactic numerous times.  It used its links with Bin Laden to finance and arm the criminal of the KLA to stir up ethnic violence in Kosovo, to provoke intervention by Serbia, for example, which then gave it a pretext to attack Serbia, and split Kosovo away. 

Even then, Russia seeking to avoid a prolonged military commitment, agreed to the Minsk Accords, designed to afford a large degree of self government to the ethnic Russian regions of Eastern Ukraine.  But, Merkel, herself, admitted that the Minsk Accords were always intended to be a farce, designed only to give the Ukrainian state time to build up its forces.  So, in the meantime, the reactionary nationalist regime in Kyiv, not only stepped up its attacks on ethnic Russians, in terms of cultural attacks on the Russian language etc., but never gave any degree of self-government, and used the forces of the Azov Battalion to launch military attacks, shelling and so on of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine.  It gave Putin's reactionary regime no real choice in having to respond.

It is not Russian military forces sitting on the border of the UK or other western European states, ready to invade, it is, as it always has been British, French and other Western European military forces sitting on the border of Russia, and moving forward, wherever they can in what has always been an aggressive expansionist manner, as they seek to get their hands on Russian land and resources.  So, when Boris Johnson basically bemoans the lack of progress of Ukraine in acting as its proxy to that end, despite the vast amounts of weapons and money given to it, he only blows the gaff on the western imperialist strategy all along, as he calls for young British workers to go and, once again lay down their lives for the benefit of the rich and powerful, for the same King and Country that has given you the likes of Prince Andrew, Lord Mandelson and all of the other leeches and perverts.

SNNS 31

 

Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 22

Engels (Marx), then, sets out a brief summary of the Tableau. I have dealt with Marx's presentation of it, elsewhere.

“As is known, the physiocrats divide society into three classes: (1) The productive class, i.e., the class which is actually engaged in agriculture — tenant-farmers and agricultural labourers; they are called productive, because their labour yields a surplus: rent. (2) The class which appropriates this surplus, including the landowners and their retainers, the prince and in general all officials paid by the state, and finally also the Church in its special character as appropriator of tithes. For the sake of brevity, in what follows we call the first class simply “farmers”, and the second class “landlords”. (3) The industrial or sterile class; sterile because, in the view of the physiocrats, it adds to the raw materials delivered to it by the productive class only as much value as it consumes in means of subsistence supplied to it by that same class. Quesnay's Tableau was intended to portray how the total annual product of a country (in fact, France) circulates among these three classes and serves annual reproduction.” (p 314)

At this point, its worth summarising what was correct and what was wrong in the Physiocratic theory. What was right was that surplus product/value is created in production, and not in the process of exchange. In that revolutionary discovery, the Physiocrats were ahead of both the Mercantilists, and of today's, orthodox economists, be they neoclassicists, Austrians, Keynesians or post-Keynesians, all of whom see profit arising from the process of exchange, as a “consumer surplus”. Adam Smith recognised this leap forward, made by the Physiocrats, and it formed the basis of his theory, and that of the rest of the Classical School. Again, it put Smith ahead of the Mercantilists, and of the later schools of orthodox economists.

What was wrong with the Physiocratic theory was its explanation of the source of this surplus product/value, created in production. Because, contrary to Duhring, the Physiocrats were primarily concerned with the production and circulation of the physical product/use-values, in a country – France – where agriculture dominated production, their attention focused on the difference between physical inputs and physical outputs.

In agriculture, superficially, this seems obvious. A certain amount of seed corn is planted, a certain amount of corn is fed to the farmer/worker, to reproduce their labour-power. Let us say 1 ton as seed, 1 ton as food for the farmer/labourer. But, at the end of the year, 3 tons of corn are produced, a surplus product of 1 ton. Where has it come from? For the Physiocrats, it is obviously a free gift of the land. Marx sets out, in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 22, that Ramsay makes a similar error. In fact, even in terms of the physical product, the Physiocrats were wrong in thinking that the surplus arose out of nowhere, just from the land.

As well as the seed planted, the final output of corn involves a whole series of chemical processes, whereby other use-values – nutrients from the soil, water from rain, energy from sunlight – are incorporated in it. Its wrong, even on this basis, therefore, to say that the increase in the physical product arises from nowhere. It involves a whole series of processes whereby matter in one form is transformed into matter in a different form. It, also, involves a transformation of energy (sunlight, labour) into matter. So, Marx says, if all of these other use-values are taken into consideration, there is no magical increase in the total product, only a transformation of use-values in one form into use-values in a different form.

This is, in fact, entirely consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. An obvious illustration of this is to look at what happens during a drought. The land no longer magically produces a surplus product. Indeed, it may not even be able to reproduce the inputs themselves. The same is true, where there is not enough sunlight, or where the soil becomes depleted of nutrients. In these cases, rather than the land magically producing a surplus product, there may be negative reproduction. In other words, even restoring the initial scale of production may not be possible, or may require, if they exist, stocks to be used to restore that initial condition.

Back To Part 21

Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 21

Engels notes that Duhring's statements, so far, have not taken the understanding of the Tableau forward one bit, “but now it is coming:

“On the other hand, however, now also”—this “however, now also” is a gem!—“the net product, enters into circulation as a natural object, and in this way becomes an element which should serve ... to maintain the class which is described as sterile. Here we can immediately (!) see the confusion arising from the fact that in one case it is the money value, and in the other the thing itself, which determines the course of thought”.” (p 312)

In fact, as Engels sets out, and as Marx describes, in Capital II, and Theories of Surplus Value, the Tableau describes the measurement of inputs and outputs, in the process of reproduction, both as physical quantities, “natural objects”, i.e. use-values, and as money values.

“Subsequently Quesnay even made his assistant, the Abbé Baudeau, include the natural objects in the Tableau itself, beside their money values.” (p 312)

Why? Because reproduction is about the reproduction of those use-values, the basis of continuing production, on at least the same scale, as the requirement to production on an expanded scale.

“After all this “input“, we at last get the “output”. Listen and marvel at these words:

“Nevertheless, the inconsistency“ (referring to the role assigned by Quesnay to the landlords) at once becomes clear as soon as we enquire what becomes of the net product, which has been appropriated as rent, in the course of economic circulation. Here the physiocrats and the economic Tableau could offer nothing but confusion and arbitrariness, culminating in mysticism”.” (p 312)

In other words, Duhring has to admit that he does not understand even the basis of Physiocratic theory, and the Tableau, and cannot see what happens to the “net product”, i.e. surplus product, appropriated as rent by the landlords. There is certainly error and some “mysticism” in Physiocratic theory, as set out by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, in that it describes this “surplus product”, which it equates with surplus value, to some innate property of the land. In Physiocratic theory, it is this property of the land to produce this surplus product, which is the basis of the owners of the land, the landlords, appropriating it as rent. But, its not true, as Duhring claims, to say that they or the Tableau does not describe what happens to it.

Engels quotes Duhring's statement,

““The lines which Quesnay draws to and fro” (in all there are just five of them!) “in his otherwise pretty simple” (!) “Tableau, and which are meant to represent the circulation of the net product”, make one wonder whether “these whimsical combinations of columns” may not be based on some mathematical fantasy; they are reminiscent of Quesnay’s attempts to square the circle” — and so forth.” (p 313)

Back To Part 20

Forward To Part 22

Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 20

Engels quotes Duhring.

“What this “economic image of the relations of production and distribution means in Quesnay himself,” he says, can only be explained if one has “first carefully examined the leading ideas which are peculiar to him”. All the more so because hitherto these have only been set forth with “wavering indefiniteness”, and their “essential features cannot be recognised” even in Adam Smith.” (p 310)

But, as Engels sets out, Duhring, in the following five pages, fails to put forward any new perceptions in respect of the Tableau, and presents only confusion and vagueness “such as, for example, “the difference between input and output”. Though the latter, “it is true, is not to be found complete in Quesnay's ideas”, Herr Dühring on the other hand will give us a dazzling example of it as soon as he passes from his lengthy introductory “input” to his remarkably short-winded “output” , that is to say, to his elucidation of the Tableau itself.” (p 311)

Engels quotes Duhring's “input”.

“It seemed self-evident to him” (Quesnay) “that the revenue” (Herr Dühring had just spoken of the net product) “must be thought of and treated as a money value ... He tied his deliberations” (!) “immediately with the money values which he assumed as the results of the sales of all agricultural products when they first change hands. In this way” (!) “he operates with several milliards (that is, with money values) in the columns of his Tableau” .” (p 311)

Engels stresses Duhring's repeated statement that there are only money values set out in The Tableau. The Tableau does indeed contain money values, just as Marx, in his own schemas of reproduction, in his depiction of the circuit of industrial capital, and so on, also uses money values. But, these money values are a shorthand, they represent the money equivalent of the actual physical product that must be reproduced. It assumes no change in the value of money, i.e. no inflation of prices, and no change in social productivity, i.e. no change in the value the commodities to be physically reproduced.

But, it is precisely because the Tableau, as with Marx's schemas, is about the reproduction of the physical product, that its real basis is as an input-output table of these physical quantities. As Marx puts it in Capital III, Chapter 49.

“If the productiveness of labour remains the same, then this replacement in kind implies replacing the same value which the constant capital had in its old form. But should the productiveness of labour increase, so that the same material elements may be reproduced with less labour, then a smaller portion of the value of the product can completely replace the constant part in kind.” (p 849)

In other words, if productivity rises so that the product of 100 hours of labour is 1,000 kilos of corn (seed), rather than 800 kilos of corn (seed), and to produce this corn (seed), 100 kilos of seed must be planted, it is this physical amount of seed (100 kilos) that must be replaced, as Marx noted, in response to Ramsay, and it, now, constitutes only 10% of the product, not 12.5%, as before.

Engels quotes Duhring further.

“Had Quesnay considered things from a really natural standpoint, and had he rid himself not only of regard for the precious metals and the quantity of money, but also of regard for money values...But as it is he reckons solely with sums of value, and imagined” (!) “the net product in advance as a money value”.” (p 311)

In these arguments of Duhring can, also, be seen the roots of the same errors made by the proponents of the TSSI, and use of historic prices.

Duhring says,

“He” (Quesnay) “obtained it” (the net product) “by deducting the expenses and thinking, (!) principally” (not traditional but for that matter all the more superficial reporting) “of that value which would accrue to the landlord as rent”.” (p 312)

Set aside the reference to “rent” as opposed to profit, and essentially, this is the process used by Ramsay, as described by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 22, which results in the “illusion” of profit arising from changes in prices, leading to a release of capital. It is also the argument of the TSSI based on the use of historic prices.

Back To Part 19

Forward To Part 21

Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy, X – From The Critical History - Part 19

Engels asks,

“But why is Hume given such an exaggerated position in Kritische Geschichte? Simply because this “serious and subtle thinker” has the honour of enacting the Dühring of the eighteenth century. Hume serves as proof that

“the creation of this whole branch of science” (economics) “is the achievement of a more enlightened philosophy”,

and similarly Hume as a precursor is the best guarantee that this whole branch of science will find its immediately foreseeable close, in that phenomenal man who has transformed the merely “more enlightened” philosophy into the absolutely luminous philosophy of reality, and with whom, just as with Hume, and what is

“ unprecedented on German soil … the cultivation of philosophy in the narrow sense of the word is combined with scientific endeavours in economics”.

Accordingly we find Hume, who in any case is respectable as an economist, inflated into an economic star of the first magnitude, whose importance could hitherto be denied only by the same envy which has hitherto so obstinately hushed up Herr Dühring's achievements, which are “authoritative for the epoch”.” (p 309-10)

Engels turns, then, to the Physiocrats, the Tableau Economique, and Duhrings treatment of it.

He writes,

“The Physiocratic school, as everyone knows, left us a riddle in the form of Quesnay’s Tableau économique on which all critics and historians of political economy have so far broken their teeth in vain. This Tableau, which was intended to bring out clearly the Physiocrats’ conception of the production and circulation of a country's total wealth, has remained pretty obscure for succeeding economists.” (p 310)

The Tableau was seen as a significant development by Marx, which shaped his own analysis of the integration of the process of production and circulation of commodities, money and capital, in Capital II and III, and his schemas of reproduction, rates of turnover and so on. It can be seen as an early form of input-output table.

Back To Part 18

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