Why do they suddenly quote Marx and Gramisci in the Financial Times?

David Seaton's News Links

All of a sudden Karl Marx and Marxist thought are being talked about in the most unlikely places... like the Financial Times. Here is a sample that I identify a lot with from Gideon Rachman, the FT's chief foreign affairs commentator. Like Rachman, when I was a student I couldn't make any sense of Marx either.

"The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” That statement from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was a favourite of student Marxists when I was at university in the 1980s. Back then it struck me as portentous nonsense. But Gramsci’s observation does resonate now – in an age of ideological confusion. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

It is a little like what Mark Twain said,

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

Commenting on Gideon's Gramsci quote, I would counter-quote with what Marx himself said on the transition from one historical period to another, something which so many of us feel is happening right now

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Quite naturally, there are many people who believe that Marx's thinking is valueless because the Soviet Union collapsed in ruin and that Marx was to blame for it. They forget that Marx didn't create the Soviet Union, Lenin did that, using Marx as an intellectual tool. Where Marx said, not before "material conditions have matured in the womb of the old society itself", Lenin believed that the "new social order" could be delivered by Caesarian section. He was wrong and instead of the the moneyless, classless society that Marx vaguely predicted would succeed our system, Lenin gave birth to a sort of state capitalism, whose definition might have been the old soviet joke, "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

Having said that, it is doubtful if the czarist regime could have ever industrialized Russia, defeated Nazi Germany and put the first man in space as Lenin's creation did. The irony of course being that the USSR's collapse made a perfect example of what Marx had said, that "new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." Lenin's C-section revolution produced a rigid, dogmatic system that couldn't adapt to the post-industrial, information society trends. They were the ones that were "old". In the end they were brought down because their brand of "capitalism" was more fragile than ours, which as we are discovering now, doesn't mean that our system isn't also fragile.

In a sense we may be about to die of success, we may be spinning off the road, like a car in an ice storm. We like to think that our system is about "freedom" and democracy, but it is probably about consumption. We produce more and more stuff with fewer and fewer people; pay is stagnant for the mass of consumers, who can only stay in the game with credit, which has dried up. But it was grand while it lasted. That is what the soviet block never managed to do.

Here is a classic joke from the now defunct German Democratic Republic.

A man is walking home from work, when he sees a long line forming in front of a government store, he asks the people what they are in line for and they tell him "lemons"... Frantically he runs home, arriving much earlier than normal, and finds his wife in bed with his next door neighbor, confronting them furiously he shouts:

What are you doing here, don't you know that today they are selling lemons?

What brought the GDR down and the rest of Really Existing Socialism, including the USSR along with it, was not really people's chaffing under the repression of totalitarianism, but rather our system's miraculous ability to produce and distribute an infinite variety of affordable consumer goods, which their godless, planned economy couldn't. Free health care, social equality, guaranteed employment, good schools (Angela Merkel graduated from the University of Leipzig) and guaranteed housing couldn't compete with our cornucopia.

The essence of our system is a quite recent -- and never before in history achieved -- endless variety of things, many of them amazingly cheap, to choose from.  Think about it, you wander into a shopping mall looking to buy some deodorant and you'll be forced to choose between dozens of different brands at many different prices until you find exactly the one that suits your pocketbook or your "unique lifestyle" and image. You can eat your favorite fruit at any time of the year, flown in from the other side of the planet. This is freedom!

However it appears that we produce more and more with fewer  and fewer people and the majority's earning power has stagnated to the point where the newly impoverished would-be consumers can only pay to play by going deeply into debt. And now credit has dried up.

So Marx's idea expressed in "Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", was that when our system reached its full potential, its inner conflicts would cause it to collapse.

What would that "full potential" look like?

Maybe it would be interesting to look into the opinion of venture capitalists, after all they risk their money on predicting that future. I recently stumbled on an interesting one, Steve Jurvetson, who is a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson a firm with affiliate offices in more than 30 cities around the world and over $7 billion in capital commitments. The video I am featuring below comes from the Stanford Center for Professional Devopment, and in it Jurvetson speaks about the future. He is a very effective communicator and allthough a lot of what he says sounds like pure science fiction, it most certainly isn't. 

Jurvetson gave the lecture in the video below at Stanford back in 2009 and although it is an hour long, I think that anyone interested in where the world is heading should watch it carefully.  Even stop the video and go back and watch and listen to some parts more than once.

This is the Kurszweil chart that Jurvetson uses in his presentation.  I am putting here so that you can study it it in detail. DS

Get on your Marx

David Seaton's News Links
At this writing I am sixty four years old and the immense bubble that has burst and is now deflating all around us has been inflating itself since I was a tiny child.

This bubble world is the world that I have always lived in and, unless you are considerably older than I am or live in an undeveloped country then, it is your world too.

When I was very young the "commie menace" hysteria began, and one of my earliest TV memories in suburban America, beside Howdy Doody, of course, was of the McCarthy hearings and the Korean war.

Karl Marx and all who sailed in him were taboo, trefa, haram. Compared to what Karl Marx was then, today's villain, Osama bin Laden, is Brad Pitt.

Then, later on in high school and especially in the atmosphere of 1960s college life, it was titillating to provoke teachers and parents, and especially the friends of parents, with snippets from Marx. During the Vietnam war it was a way of showing "attitude".

But truth to tell, the bubble world that we lived in was so different from the world Marx described that none of what he said made that much sense. In fact, looking back, I would say the whole point of our now fast disappearing bubble was that it was created so that Marx would not make any sense.

Until recently the original Karl has never spoken to me that directly. However, I have always found myself gravitating toward people like Marvin Harris or Eric Hobsbawm, formed in Marxist analysis: I love the way Harris explains why the Aztecs were cannibals and I love the way Hobsbawm writes history as a process, not as a series of biographies of "great" men. I could be considered a "contact" Marxist, like somebody who gets stoned off the stuffy air in places where other people are smoking quantities of hashish. But, "Das Kapital" itself was fairly impenetrable for me... As I said, I had trouble relating to its cold dissection of the 19th century English economy. My 19th century England is Dickens and Conan Doyle.

Now, as I try to balance the contradictory warnings of people who I think make sense, people like Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, James Kunstler, Peter Schiff or Angela Merkel, all their takes on the crisis that I read are like the famous Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant: each of them is describing accurately what comes to their hand, but I get the feeling that none of them is describing the whole animal. Therefore I think that all of them are right and all of them are simultaneously wrong.

Thus, searching for some synthesis, I am beginning to discover Karl Marx in the same way that a traveling salesman who with a bad hangover in a flea bitten hotel, far from home in the middle of a bad night, in the middle of a bad week, might open a Gideon Bible and discover Jesus.

The first thing I think it is important to do is to separate Marx from Lenin. Lenin is action, he breaks and recreates: Lenin is to political action what Pablo Picasso was to painting. Marx for Lenin is only like a cookbook to a great cook: a starting point. What he was interested in was the chopping, the dicing and the frying... what ended up on the plate. Lenin is all "see snake, kill snake".

Marx for Marx is a bit different I think.

Although Marx said that understanding the world was only useful as a way of changing it, he was mostly about the understanding and understanding is what we need now.

As I fumble with the keys, Marx seems to me to say that capitalism is a historical process that will, as time goes on, become so contradictory as to destroy itself.

The old boy thought that the great day was not that far off and that it would happen in some highly advanced country like Germany. When Lenin made a revolution in primitive, illiterate Russia and called it Marxist, most Marxists, like most millenarians always do, swallowed their doubts and, like the "end of days" crowd, waited to ascend into heaven ... many were still waiting when the Soviet Union imploded.

In my opinion what Marx got wrong was the timing and what Lenin got wrong was the place. Capitalism wasn't ripe yet.

Perhaps, with the fulfillment of its potential that globalization represents we are actually going to live to witness the capitalist version of the Rapture.

The logic would be that the USA is the cutting edge, the vanguard of capitalism, and that unlike all other advanced capitalist nations, in America the economic system is not overlaid on a centuries old, traditional culture. In the United States of America the economic system is the culture itself. Eb-dee eb-dee eb-dee ebdee- That's ALL FOLKS!

If this is really a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end then it would be natural for the whole thing to start rotting where it has developed to its fullest.

So it stands to reason that if this system ever finally "enters into contradiction," that is to say, is torn apart by the conflicts of interests and the subsequent struggle between its different elements, then logically it will happen first and most clearly in the USA.

What would be an example of "entering into contradiction" a sign of this "End of Days"?

The "inflation versus deflation" polemic is that sort of contradiction: destroying the value of the currency in order to make possible consumption of foreign goods which must be paid for with the worthless money that we print and give to other countries that in turn have to lend it back to us without hope of payment in order to keep their own populations employed and doing all of this, not because we are stupid, but because any other alternative would be so painful and disruptive as to be unthinkable.

Getting into that sort of idiotic shit and not being able to get out of it could be called "entering into contradiction". The bubble has run out of road.

Anyway I'll keep on reading and trying to make reality and what I read fit together somehow. DS