Two Bonapartes (2)
In the post-war period, Stalinism and most of the revolutionary socialists had a problem. The Third International had been born largely on the basis that Imperialism, as Lenin had outlined in his polemical pamphlet of that name, represented the highest stage of capitalism, and reflected that it had now become degenerate, and was no longer even relatively progressive. They saw the period of long wave crisis that began between 1914-20, and ran into the 1930's, when a period of stagnation, as part of the long wave downturn, set in, as signalling a condition of permanent crisis, and revolutionary upheaval. They were wrong. As Marx says, permanent crises do not exist.
Even by the mid to late 1930's, the conditions for the next uptrend, that began in 1949, were visible. New production techniques, based upon Fordism and Taylorism, that had been developed in the previous two decades, to address the crisis of overproduction of capital, which arose from the conditions Marx describes in Capital, Chapter 15, and which have been outlined above, began to be rolled out intensively. Indeed, its this intensive accumulation that results in stagnation, as new machines and techniques mean that the existing levels of output, or modestly higher levels of output, can be produced both with fewer, more efficient machines, and with relatively fewer workers, so that the growth in aggregate demand is slowed. As Marx describes it, in Theories of Surplus Value, during such periods, Net Output increases relative to Gross Output. This is the basis for the rise in the rate of profit during all such periods of stagnation that prepares the ground for the next upswing.
By the mid 1930's, in Britain and other developed economies, the manifestation of this is that a number of new industries, such as motor cars, petrochemicals, electronic domestic appliances, all based around the new technologies that had been developed in the previous period, begin to grow more rapidly, though not rapidly enough to lift the whole economy out of stagnation. The workers in these industries, often located in new geographic regions, are relatively well paid. In Britain, this development arises around the Midlands, and South-East, and, along with it, grows the development of new suburbs, themselves being developed with new building techniques, and the workers in these areas, with their higher wages, begin to become homeowners rather than renters for the first time. All of these tendencies, visible during the 1930's, become the basis of the sharp increase in growth in the post-war period.
This sharp increase in growth is not consistent with the thesis set out by Lenin in 1916, and which had been taken on board both by the Trotskyists, and turned into a mantra by the Stalinists. The Stalinists, in the form of Varga's Law, declared that, because capitalism was in a period of decline it could not see such rapid growth, and that it could only see increasing immiseration of the working-class. They continued to argue this, even though it was plain for anyone with eyes to see that capitalism was expanding massively, and that workers living standards were rising hugely too. The Stalinists performed numerous logical and statistical acrobatics to try to prove that black was white, and that capitalism was not growing, and that workers living standards were falling. They did this even after Varga himself had abandoned the proposition. The Trotskyists also kept believing that this period of growth could not continue, and that “the next crisis” could not be far away.
But, even when recessions did materialise, during this period, social-democracy simply utilised the tools at its disposal via, Keynesian demand management to cut them short, as Mandel describes in The Second Slump. He identifies five recessions – 1953, 1958, 1961, 1970, 1974-5.
Mandel sets out this effect by comparing the 1929-32 recession with the 1957-8 recession. In the first 9 months of both, they were of a similar severity.
1929
- 32
|
1957
- 8
|
|
Employment
(non-agricultural
|
-
6.5
|
-4.2
|
GNP
|
-5.5
|
-4.1
|
Industrial
production
|
-15.9
|
-13.1
|
Volume
of Retail Sales
|
-6.1
|
-5.1
|
Orders
For Durable Goods
|
-26.5
|
-20.1
|
But, the consequence of Keynesian intervention was that whereas the 1929 recession lasted for three and a half years, the 1957-8 recession lasted for just 12 months.
Having spent more than a decade proclaiming that the next crisis was at hand, both Stalinists and sections of the Trotskyists, such as Mandel, effectively collapsed into Keynesianism. For the Stalinists, who had become nothing more than advocates of left social-democracy in one country, acting openly to sabotage any revolutionary struggles of workers, such as those of the French workers in 1968, and frequently aligning, in all sorts of cross-class popular frontist organisations, with Liberals, faith leaders and so on, this was a logical development. Its no surprise that many of the Stalinists, of that time, went on to be prominent advocates of Blairism. Many of the Trotskyists went the same way, the infection of their ideas with Lassallean and Fabian statism and reformism, meaning that their programmes abounded with calls for the capitalist state to nationalise this or that failing business, or to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy, with the self-activity and self-government of the working-class not even brought in as an afterthought.
It was a collapse into subjectivism. It now appeared, on this basis, that capitalism by utilising Keynesian intervention could prevent crises, and so it was a purely subjective matter of whether it did so or not. On this basis we have the development of the Permanent Arms Economy Thesis, which says, basically, that the capitalist state deals with the problem of excess production by using it to finance an immense arms industry. This is an application of Keynesianism to explain the long-wave post-war boom, which, in turn, is simply an application of Malthus' idea that to avoid such overproduction, it was necessary to maintain a huge unproductive class of landlords, clergy and other parasites, who could soak it up. Similarly, the explanation for the growth of the welfare state, and of workers living standards, during this period, is again reduced to pure subjectivism.
On the one hand, it is that the capitalists made these improvements for fear of revolution, as workers looked to emulate the conditions of workers in the USSR. No really, some people did actually make this ridiculous argument, even after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. On the other hand, it was to be explained by workers militancy forcing these concessions out of capital. So, alongside left-social democratic reformism, and liberal welfarism, we also get a rise in syndicalism, and the idea promoted by groups like the International Socialists/SWP, that the wage rises of workers during the 1950's and 60's, were purely a function of workers militancy during that period, removing any objective basis for the determination of wages as the phenomenal form of the value of labour-power, as analysed by Marx. Gone is any recognition that wages, as such a market price, were driven up precisely by the condition of the expansion of capital during this period on the basis of extensive accumulation, and that as soon as those conditions reversed, all of this subjectivism, all of the calls for “more militancy” would collapse like a house of cards.
Gone, in all of this, is any concept of objective laws driving these developments as described by Marx.
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