Reclaiming Economics - Part 1

Economic History

I’ve just started reading Alchian & Allen’s “University Economics”. Not light reading; its the size of book you can use as a large doorstop. Its one of many Economics books I acquired, but only read bits of as required, so its not too bad to be able to effectively just skim it. Economics is one of those areas that bourgeois society has thrown vast amounts of resources into in the last 100 years. Not surprisingly. As Marx pointed out, the economic analysis of people like Smith, Ferguson and Ricardo, though undertaken in the interests of a then revolutionary Capitalist class, uncovered much of the real working of Capitalism itself, the source of Exchange Value, the productive relations and so on. IN doing so, it provided the basis for a critique of Capitalism.

For the later defenders of Capitalism, not only did it seem natural to accept Capitalism as given, but there was a clear motivation to focus the science on the details of how to make it work more efficiently. IN doing so, a weighty body of science was developed, which, because of those underlying assumptions made, acted as a significant bulwark of Capitalism and bourgeois ideas in relation to the Marxist critique. The weight of that ideological juggernaut has been such that, over the years, even Marxist economists have resorted to effectively using orthodox economics – many have little choice because as academics teaching orthodox economics is a requirement – with Marxist Economics reduced almost to an equivalent of Latin, to be discussed in Marxist academic journals and seminars, alluded to in articles in left journals and periodicals, but for all intents and purposes abandoned for practical purposes. Its little wonder that over the years ‘Marxist’ Economics has tended to be corrupted itself by the infiltration of these orthodox ideas, with economists adapting to variations of ‘Left’ forms of whether it be in the models of Sraffa, or Left Keynesianism, or whatever.

Re-Arming The Workers

If we are to arm the working-class ideologically it is necessary to break decisively with all aspects of bourgeois ideology and develop proletarian science. The bourgeoisie were able to do that, because they owned property, and that access and the wealth that flowed from it, enabled them to finance study in the Universities and other establishments. Increasingly, as bourgeois property relations spread there was a natural tendency for study to gravitate towards understanding these new relations anyway. The working class needs something similar. In my blog The Economics of Co-operation Part 3 , I argued,

“From this perspective of a Co-op conglomerate can be seen the advantage of developing a Co-operative University similar to that established at Mondragon in every country. But, we need more than that. WE need Co-operative Colleges to provide training for workers not just in the skills that bourgeois education wants to limit them to, but in management, so that the reliance on elites to perform those functions can be overcome, and at the very least in the short-term the workers can learn the necessary skills to oversee, and inspect the work of those elites. And this education, then becomes connected to the workers daily lives, because day in day out they will be carrying out that Workers Inspection, will be making Management decisions alongside their comrades, at various levels of responsibility. Such education would also make up for the inadequacy of the State Education provided to workers by the State capitalist education system. Obviously, such Universities and Colleges should operate on the basis of giving priority to workers from the Co-operative sector, but they could provide education and training on a much wider scale than that in the way that the Workers Education Association used to do. Indeed, what is left of the WEA, together with the various Trade Union Studies Departments, and the Co-operative Studies Departments at various institutions could form the initial nucleus of such a Co-operative education system.”
In this respect see also:

BC Institute for Co-operative Studies

The Wales Institute for Research Into Co-operatives

UK Society for Co-operative Studies .

The State’s Ideological Policemen

By focussing on developing an understanding of the practical working of a Co-operative economy here and now, Marxist scientists – not just Economists, but sociologists etc. can begin to fulfil the same kind of function that bourgeois academics fulfilled in the development of Capitalism in its revolutionary phase. By developing the kind of academic framework discussed around such a development the practical requirements for developing such science outside the existing constraints of bourgeois academia can be slowly built up. The work of the Mondragon University shows how this could be done developing as Marxists should through praxis the fusion of ideas, theory and practice via the consideration and resolution of problems on a day by day basis, and the consequent development thereby of practical tools.

This is important for another reason. For as long as bourgeois scientists were dependent upon the favour of the old feudal classes the constraints, which that applied restricted their remit, even if only subconsciously. However, radical the scholastics their research was constrained within a framework within, which the central function of the Church remained. Even into the 19th century, as Marx pointed out, we see people like Malthus acting as the paid mouthpiece of the Landlord class. The phrase, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune”, may be too crude a formulation here, the constraints will be far more subtle than that implies – in the same way that the relationship of Capitalist ownership of media companies to journalists is not exercised usually via a direct dictat of what to write, but operates more through the selection of journalists, the environment in which they work, and an unconscious self-censorship.

And for a Marxist another factor is at play here. The Marxist definition of class is not some crude economically determined one. As Marx pointed out Capitalist production in all its aspects becomes increasingly complex. On the one hand the foreman and Managers of a plant may not own the means of production, and in that sense be viewed as workers like those who actually engage in production. However, the role of the Manager and foreman is to control the workers on behalf of the actual owners, to act as their agents and equivalents. To that extent their social position, the outlook they adopt, the lifestyle their generally higher wages provides, and their relationship to the workers and to the means of production clearly set them apart from the workers, and put them in the class camp of the bosses.

The same is true at the level of the State. A policeman or a soldier or any other part of the State’s repressive apparatus – the bodies of armed men – may well have no means of production at their disposal, their living standard may be little different than that of the ordinary worker, but like the Manager their class position is defined by their specific function, and the relation to the means of production and to the working class it engenders. Once again their function is to act as the paid agent of the bourgeoisie AGAINST the workers.

But, in a world in which the methods of control by the bourgeoisie and its state have become increasingly complex and ideological, outside specific times of social unrest the real repressive arm of the State is its ideological arm, the means by which day by day it grinds down the workers resistance, and reinforces their subordinate position. Whatever, the political aspirations of the individual teacher or lecturer that acts as part of that apparatus of ideological repression, no less than the individual political aspirations of the policeman, soldier or gaoler, or manager, they act as part of that repressive apparatus, and their class position is defined by it.

See: Marxism, Education and the State .

It does not matter what the political leanings of the individual teacher, it does not matter whether the teacher is teaching Politics, Economics, Religious Studies or Trade Union Studies; the essential power and class relations remain the same and determine the constraints in which those ideas are framed and conveyed. The teacher, even teaching Trade Union studies, still confronts the worker as student in a relationship where the teacher has power and the student does not, where the teacher acts as the agent of the Capitalist State, and the worker as its victim. It is exactly the same relationship that the Manager has to the worker in the workplace. AS Marx demonstrated in Capital, it is only through the establishment of Co-operatives that this relationship is broken and reversed, whereby the workers as owners of the means of production become the employer of the Manager and the foreman, whereby it becomes they who exercise the dominant position within the power relationship.

However, radical the people engaged in such occupations might appear, however, radical any particular individual, their class position determines the limits of that radicalism. By definition they form part of the petit-bourgeoisie standing between the workers and the bosses. However, the radical the radicalism of the gaoler might become it remains the radicalism of the gaoler not the liberator of the working class, and workers have to remember that fact. Or to use another old proverb, workers should beware of Greeks bearing gifts. That being understood in its historical context in relation to the Wooden Horse, of course, rather than casting any kind of aspersions on Greeks.

That is why it is necessary to develop Co-operatives, and to develop Co-operative Education for the workers in order to reverse those power and class relations freeing both the workers, and those who were employed as their gaolers both physically and mentally. Freeing the educators from the constraints of their role as agents of the bourgeoisie will free them to develop ideas directed to the needs of the workers, and under the control of the workers, and at the same time it will free the minds of the workers themselves from the ideological chains that bind them to Capitalism.