Dealing With Comments On Michael Roberts' Blog

Over the last few days, I have posted about half a dozen comments on Michael Roberts Blog, on the thread COVID19 and Containment, none of these comments have appeared, and nor do they appear in the moderation queue.  I assume, therefore, that it is because Michael Roberts is blocking these comments for some reason, albeit a mystery to me, because they do not breach any sort of rules.  By contrast, Roberts' Blog is continually fall of trolls, often the same one using several sock puppets, that spread fake news, gibberish and continually do the usual troll thing of simply spewing forth ill-tempered invective against others in place of rational debate.  They appear free to continue to do so, which is hardly an advertisement for a rational Marxist platform.

I can see, why Roberts' would want to block my comments, however.  For years, he has been one of those catastrophists that have perennially forecast "The Next Recession" - The URL for his blog - based upon their claim that crises of overproduction are caused by Marx's Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall.  Of course, if you believe that to be the case - which Marx himself didn't - then it follows that you must be perpetually predicting such crises, because the Law itself is a permanent law, it operates continually over a long period.  But, Marx was right, and Roberts is wrong.  The Law is not the cause of such crises, but is part of the mechanism by which such crises are resolved.  Consequently, there are no permanent crises, as Marx, says.

Of course, the fact that governments have deliberately - and stupidly - closed down the global economy, and thereby created an artificial global recession, gives the catastrophists the very recession they have been craving year after year.  The trouble is it is also proving what Marxists have pointed out to them during all that time they have been craving such a crisis.  That is that unless the conditions are right, crises do not favour the working-class.  They cause unemployment and increased division and competition between workers; they spread fear and anxiety that leads to scapegoating of vulnerable minorities and "others"; they encourage the growth of reactionary ideas and reactionary organisations.  So, we have seen the forces of reaction use the COVID19 moral panic to spread fear and loathing of Asian people, it has allowed Trump to blame China for the crisis, rather than his own idiocy, and the lack of socialised healthcare for the people of the US, it has seen Orban in Hungary turned into an effective dictator, it has allowed right-wing authoritarian governments like that of Johnson to close down social interaction by law, whilst requiring the vast majority of workers to continue to act as drones, turning up to work each day to produce profits.  It has led to the strengthening of already growing reactionary economic nationalist tendencies that are now demanding that globalisation and free movement, and so on be turned back.  None of these things are progressive or movement in the direction of a socialist transformation.

All of the arguments of the catastrophists that thought that a capitalist crisis would do for them what their own miserable views about what Socialism is or should look like had failed to achieve, have been also blown out of the water by events that have turned in quite the opposite direction.  I'm not surprised that Michael Roberts doesn't want to defend his past predictions, including his prediction that deaths in Sweden would reach 61,000 without containment, and restated again in a comment on 20th April, when he said, "Yes, sweden is behind the uk right now as my figures show but the projection for Sweden is that eventually passes the uk per cap rate. We shall see".

Well, yes eleven days later, we have seen.  The per capita mortality rate in Sweden has remained at about half that in Britain.  Rather than rising to 61,000 deaths, the total number of deaths in Sweden is currently just 2,586.  The number of deaths on the last day available was just 19, and the data shows that the curve in Sweden is flattening decisively.  In addition, scientists in Sweden believe that its policy of not imposing a lockdown, whilst recommending sensible social distancing, and that those in the at risk 20% self-isolate themselves, has meant that in Stockholm where the majority of the population is based, and where the majority of deaths have, therefore, occurred, is now more or less at a point where natural immunity has been developed for enough of the population so as to prevent its further rapid spread.  In other words a process of self-vaccination or herd immunity, as scientists call it, has taken place, and in the absence of an actual vaccine this is the best means of the population as a whole being protected against the virus.

Marxists are supposed to be scientists.  We are supposed to analyse the reality of the material world around us, and to develop our prescriptions for workers based upon it.  We are not moralists, or subjectivists that proceed on the basis of how we would like the world to be.  So, I'm sorry for Michael Roberts that just as his perennial predictions of the next recession proved not even as accurate as a stopped clock, his prediction that the mortality rate in Sweden was going to somehow zoom past that in Britain, also proved wildly innaccurate, but that is the fact!  Him simply running away from a discussion on that fact does not change it.

There are, however, some contributors to his blog that post in good faith, and I had posted comments in reply to some of them, that have been blocked - some on quite different topics than on COVID19 itself - and others have posted subsequent comments that I will not waste time now responding to on his blog, because the comments are also likely to get blocked.

I will, however, try to find time to reply, here, on my own blog to comments from Rory, fredtorrsander, JLowrie, and Gerald Kavanagh.

This last is perhaps the easiest and quickest to deal with, so I will dispense with it, here, and deal with the others in separate posts.

A troll, who I should have learned not to bother responding to, had come out with a load of crap about me disagreeing with Lenin about pushing forward capitalist development as the basis for Socialism.  He claimed that  Lenin had only said this in 1894, in relation to pushing forward the development of a relatively undeveloped Russia.   I pointed out that this was completely wrong, as set out by Lenin in Left-Wing Childishness, where he sets out the need for capitalist development to proceed as far as possible so as to create the best possible conditions for a transformation to Socialism.

Here, Lenin sets out the various types of productive relations that existed in Russia from the predominance of independent handicraft production through to the giant state owned enterprises.  Given this breakdown, Lenin says, if Russia were able even to raise this profile to one that could be described overall as "state capitalism", where giant capitalist trusts operated, as in Germany, financed by the banks through the Stock Exchange, that would itself be a great step forward.  And, he goes on to describe the situation in Germany, and says that, in fact, its economy, its productive relations, based upon these huge enterprises, represent, in essence, the economic content of socialism, one wing of Socialism, so that all that is required for it to be Socialism, rather than "Junker-bourgeois imperialism", is the subjective factor, i.e. that the workers themselves exercise control over this capital, and that they also exercise control over a Workers state that defends it.

Gerald's question is basically, if that "Junker-bourgeois imperialism" was an adequate level of development of the productive forces for Socialism at that time, isn't it adequate now, and so why do you still want to wait before arguing for Socialism.  The answer is two-fold.  Firstly, I don't want to wait to argue for Socialism, any more than Lenin waited to argue for Socialism in 1894.  The question now as then is simply is Socialism, here, today, practically a question on the agenda?  Gerald asks this question, because earlier I had objected to the demand raised by Brian Green for "Socialism Now", as an answer to the COVID19 crisis.  It is totally nonsensical, because it is not rooted in current reality.  There is no working-class, currently, anywhere in the world that is even close to being on the edge of waging a struggle for Socialism.  The level of class consciousness is generally low; the workers organisations are weak as a result of having only a decade from the start of the new long wave uptrend in 1999 to rebuild, before being hit by the 2008 financial crisis, and subsequent imposition of austerity; the workers parties are weak, and nowhere is there any mass revolutionary party.

To call for Socialism Now, or Revolution Now, is simply the kind of revolutionary phrasemongering that Marx attacked Guesde for.  It is the kind of thing the Stalinists did in 1923, and that Trotsky attacked them for, when they called General Strikes when it was clear they were not going to be supported, and so led to defeat and demoralisation.  It is removed from reality and actually amounts to going AWOL from the real political struggle, and need to provide practical demands and solutions for the workers here and now to be able to take them forward.  It is also the kind of thing that the Narodniks did in 1894, and that Lenin attacked them for.  In 1879, the Narodniks were peasant Socialists, they had a vision of a Peasant Socialist society, but it was just a Utopia, a schema of what they would like, not the reality they faced.  That fact had become clear by 1894, when Lenin was writing "What The Friends of the People Are" and now, the Narodniks had become simply petty-bourgeois socialists that had accommodated to the liberals.

Its not that Lenin did not argue for Socialism, but that he argued that simply drawing up schemas for Socialism dissociated from current reality, was simply Utopian, and because such Utopias lead nowhere, and worse, often lead back to some non-existent previous idyll, they mislead and demoralise workers, sending them down dead-ends, which then demoralises them, and sets them back.  They are, then reactionary.

Nor is it then that I or any real Marxist says that we should not argue for Socialism, that we should somehow have to wait.  Not at all.  The point is to analyse reality as it actually exists.  The question is, do the requirements exist for Socialism to be constructed?  Well, in many places as Lenin indicates in his description of Germany, the material conditions do exist.  We have the large corporations, the socialised capital, we have large amounts of planning and regulation of production, and so on.  We also have large working-classes.  But, the question is, are these working-class classes in themselves or also for themselves?  In other words, have these working classes reached the stage of class consciousness where they are fighting for their own class interests, and ready to overturn the existing society?  The answer is clearly no.

These classes at best engage in sectional distributional struggles for higher wages showing that they are completely imbued with bourgeois ideology of seeing themselves still simply as sellers of the commodity labour-power at the highest price they can achieve.  It means they are still committed to a continuation of the existing wage system.

So, I do not know how Gerald arrives at the conclusion that I am saying that we have not arrived at a position where a revolutionary transformation is not possible on the basis of the productive forces.   It is, what is lacking is the subjective factor, the development of the class consciousness of the working-class!  And, in the absence of that a Marxist argues in favour of the continued development of those productive forces, because their continued development simply raises the antagonistic contradiction to even higher levels, it means that when workers do reach that level of consciousness the task of creating Socialism becomes that much easier, because of this higher level of development.  What a Marxist does not do is to say, as the Sismondists, the Narodniks and the "Anti-Capitalists" and "Anti-imperialists" do, that capitalism has to be held back, or turned back in some way.

What the Sismondists et al do is to equate Socialism with the "anti-capitalism/imperialism", whereas as Marx and Lenin set out these are two completely different and opposing things.  Socialism implies the continued maturing of capitalism, and so long as workers do not yet bring about that transformation, Marxists are in favour of that process of maturation continuing, not of a reactionary turning back of it!

Gerald says,

"To add to the confusion, you say we need to await the “latest discoveries of modern science”, i.e keep kicking the can down the road until we have exhausted the search for the ‘latest discoveries’, which means never never land."

But, I can't see anywhere that I have said that, and nor would I.

But, there is a second part to this answer, as I said above.  That is that, everything is relative.  The productive relations that existed in Germany in 1918, would, today, appear archaic.  Indeed, that is why, in the absence of a socialist revolution, Marxists are not in favour of "holding back" or "turning back" such developments.  As Marxists, we base ourselves on the reality, and how it is unfolding and showing to us the future, and we are also, as Lenin says, partisans in that process, we don't just describe the process of unfolding, but actively take part in it as champions of the working-class interest in that process.  We are not "anti-capitalists", or "anti-imperialists" attempting to "hold back" or "turn-back" that process, whose conclusion our analysis tells us is Socialism itself.  The existing system is the Mother of the new society that grows out of it, our job is not to kill the Mother, and thereby abort the foetus, but to act as the midwife, facilitating the birth.

The reality of the world in which any such socialist transformation might occur is one in which the newly emerging society will be in competition with existing powerful capitalists states.  A socialist economy that today only had the productive power and capacity of Germany in 1918, would be quickly prey to more powerful competitors.  Trotsky discusses precisely this - I don't currently have time to look up the reference - in these kinds of terms.  Even assuming the superior nature of socialist production, Trotsky says, a young socialist country would require time to be able to build itself into a position to defeat bigger more powerful enemies, just as a young bear may be prey to a pack of wolves, and requires time to grow into a full grown bear before it can see them off.

It is not possible to talk about development of productive relations in absolute terms, because in terms of the competition - let alone attempts to overthrow such a state militarily - that a socialist state will encounter, it is not the absolute level of productive forces that counts, but their relative development compared to all the others.  That is also why the concept of Socialism In One Country is also a fraud, because unless Socialism is built in a range of the most developed economies, it will inevitably become isolated, decline and collapse.

Postscript:

Part of the point referred to above in relation to Trotsky's comments is given in his article Mr. Baldwin and Gradualness.

In it, Trotsky writes,

"The more easily the Russian proletariat took power the greater were the obstacles it met on the path of socialist construction. Yes, I said this and I repeat it. Our old governing classes were economically and politically insignificant. Our parliamentary and democratic traditions hardly existed. It was easier for us to tear the masses away from the bourgeoisie's influence and overturn their rule. But precisely because our bourgeoisie had appeared later and had done little, we received a small inheritance. We are now obliged to lay down roads, build bridges and schools, teach adults to read and write and so forth, that is to carry out the main bulk of the economic and cultural work which had been carried out by the bourgeois regime in the older capitalist countries. It was in exactly this sense that I said that the easier that it was for us to deal with the bourgeoisie the more difficult the business of socialist construction. But this direct political theorem presupposes its converse: the richer and more cultured a country and the older its parliamentary-democratic traditions the harder it is for the communist party to take power; but the faster and the more successfully will the work of socialist construction proceed after the conquest of power. Put more concretely, the overturn of the British bourgeoisie is no easy task; it does require a necessary 'gradualness', i.e. serious preparation; but once having taken control of state power, the land, the industrial, commercial and banking apparatus, the proletariat of Britain will be able to carry out the reorganisation of the capitalist economy into a socialist one with far less sacrifices, far more success and at a much quicker pace.

When I spoke of the difficulties of socialist construction I had in mind not only the backwardness of our own country but also the gigantic opposition from outside. Mr. Baldwin probably knows that the British government, of which he was a member, spent about £100 million on military intervention and the blockade of Soviet Russia...

There is no doubt that, as Mr. Baldwin points out, we are striving for a greater productivity of labour. Without this the upsurge in the welfare and culture of the people would be inconceivable, and in this lies the basic goal of communism.".