Revised version of Re:Understanding Ed (previous version garbled)

Note from Alan Spector:  The earlier version of this was sent by mistake.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Here are two very short previous posts, and
some comments by me.
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> John_R_Groves@ferris.edu wrote:
>
> >His post also
> >showed how deeply capitalism (a term I find almost useless in the
> >post-communist
> >era) or rather more precisely, markets

Then Doug Henwood wrote:
-------
> Ah yes, markets. That utopian realm of liberty, equality, and
> Bentham! Forget production, just focus on exchange, where it all
> appears voluntary and satisfying.
>
> If the word "capitalism" is useless, what do you call a system under
> which a few people with lots of money hire those with none, paying
> them as little as they can, and appropriating the fruits of their
> labor in the form of monetary profit? Is it only because you can't
> imagine a non-capitalist Other that the word has lost its meaning?
>
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217 USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: <mailto:dhenwood@panix.com>
> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>

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COMMENT from Alan Spector:

To Doug (& others),

A point you often make, but that I'd like to add to this otherwise incisive
point, is the REALITY that the
big capitalists FULLY UNDERSTAND the FAILURE of the Market System, which is
why THEY VERY HEAVILY RELY ON THE STATE, ON BIG GOVERNMENT

1) TO SUBSIDIZE THEIR ECONOMIC WELL-BEING;

2) STABILIZE THE INSTABILITY CAUSED BY THEIR SHORT-SIGHTED GREED; AND

3) ENFORCE THROUGH THE COURTS, POLICE, AND MILITARY THEIR POLITICAL CONTROL
OVER THE POPULATION.

>From zoning codes to selective enforcement of the law;

from lobbying at the local and national levels,  to supporting anti-working
class terrorism in other countries
via the CIA;

from the privatization of profitable government enterprises so that
corporations can make a private profit from the economies of scale inherent
in some aspects of collectivity--to the nationalization of those enterprises
which failed because the private interests quickly sucked whatever was
profitable from those enterprises and then abandoned the not immediately
profitable (so-called "inefficient")
aspects of it for society to have to maintain;

from  tax breaks, government subsidies, outright grants, free transfer
of research information, and inflated government contracts, to full scale
invasions of other countries, to the jailing of striking workers and the
purchase of endowed chairs at public universities -- in all these things and
a million more the capitalists know that they need big government.  But when
the big government is employed on behalf of the capitalists, it is not
Marxism, it moves towards the Corporate State, or Fascism.

But how to get working class people to accept this?  They have to critique
those parts of big government which might return to the working class some
of our wages  (ie health care, etc.) -- and call that "socialism which is
destroying individual initiative."   For that, they have the Ayn Rand Fan
Club, some members of which seem to be on WSN,  extolling in broad
philosophical strokes the virtues of pure freedom while naively ignoring the
absolutely essential role that use of BIG GOVERNMENT plays in keeping
capitalism afloat.

Well, not quite. There are a few acknowledgementa, such as this from J
(Randy) Groves:

**************
"Strong language for a questionable argument. First, we should really be
careful
about reifying capitalism as an agent in history that "murders". There are
capitalists who seek profits. SOme with fewer scruples than others. THere
are
military strongmen, sometimes supported by capitalist interests, sometimes
not.
(Sometimes they were set up by the USSR in opposition to whomever was being
backed by NATO) Sometimes the poverty is caused by well-meaning by misguided
international economic organizations. Then there are all kinds of difficult
circumstances that cause immense pain in which is rather difficult to
isolate
exactly the source of the problem."
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So here we have a very MINOR acknowledgement of "the problem," : "But it is
all so confusing!!!!"

Life, and particularly science, is about sorting out the confusion, not just
saying that all  causes seem to be important and it is just "so confusing"
to sort it all out. Does anyone really believe that more "strongmen"  were
set up by the USSR than by the Western Capitalist Powers? Can anyone
seriously compare Castro's Regime, with its perhaps 500--1000 (I doubt it
but I'm bending the argument the other way)  executions in 40 years  (a
proportion that Texas is approaching)  to the US-funded regimes in El
Salvador (80,000 killed by the pro-U.S. forces) or Guatemala (100,000
murdered) to Chile (30,000)   (by the way, everyone's favorite "Market
Economist" Milton Friedman had many pleasant luches with the military
dictator murderers of Chile as he advised them on how to impoverish the
"less than free to choose" militarily oppressed Chilean people), Indonesia
(500,000) and do I have to go on and on and on, from U.S. corporate
profiteering from apartheid for 30 years to   "strong men" in Brazil,
Philippines, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea,  a war in Vietnam that killed
millions and destabilized all of Indochina.  And this is without discussing
the deaths from hunger and disease, deaths which are ENFORCED by the
inability of the people to organize "democratically" for better lives
because they would have to come up against CIA trained and armed military
forces from such democratic institutions as the School for the Americas.
(And as I mentioned in earlier posts, with the support of many political
parties which call themselves "socialist" including the British Labour
Party, the French, German, Italian socialist parties, etc.)

The type of argument that says "sometimes this and sometimes that" can be
used to EVADE an empirical discussion. Nobody likes to count the bodies, but
there is a demagogic style that appeals to people's sense of being tired and
says: "Okay, nothing is perfect. Everything has problems. Let's move on."
But we do have to weigh and measure. And to dismiss the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS
OF MURDERS CAUSED not just by "some capitalists with fewer scruples than
others" but rather by a SYSTEM WHICH REWARDS UNSCRUPULOUS ?  (how about
"murderous?") behavior evades an understanding of what social mechanisms
cause these processes to be repeated again and again.

Blaming it on a few bad people, or on some flaw in human nature provides a
very quick way to find an answer that is not disturbing and allows the
system to keep rolling on, but those two "bottom line answers" can be found
in any high school philosophy club. While philosophy has its place,
hopefully, those on WSN do try to employ some research, some data, and some
analysis, preferably interdisciplinary history, politics, economics,
culture..... I may not agree with everything written by such writers as AG
Frank, or Wallerstein, or Dunn or Diamond or Walton or Abu-Lughod or
O'Connor, but they represent  valuable and ultimately useful attempts to
push the analysis forward, based on analyzing and reanalyzing information.
Not so the bland pronoucements of the Ayn Rand Fan Club, which strips the
data out of the discussion and makes it look like a voluntary game of
checkers between two equally free adversaries.

Those who engage in the superficial philosphy comments about "freedom" are
ignoring the reality that it will come down to "working class controlled
egalitarian communism on behalf of all the world's people  (EGC)"  VERSUS
fascism--intensely brutal control by the capitalist minority, with or
without a base of support from the population.  There is no room for the
silly, unstable existence of mythical, equal exchange, small capitalist
places only found on television shows like "Little House on the Prairie."
(Don't believe me -- try reading Foreign Affairs, or the NEWS (not the
editorial) sections of Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, etc.
(and of course Doug Henwood's valuable work) instead of Newsweek and Time
and economics text books to see how these guys really talk among
themselves.)

Those who lobby against this TRULY "EGC" on the grounds that "big government
would limit individual freedom" WILL THEMSELVES BE PUSHED ASIDE BY THEIR
CAPITALIST ALLIES WHEN THEIR CAPITALIST ALLIES NO LONGER HAVE ANY USE FOR
THEM AND NEED TO IMPOSE FULL SCALE CONTROL OVER THE WHOLE SOCIETY. (by the
way--How come these anti-big government types have nothing to say against
the police state conditions which already exist against black American males
in major U.S. cities. The vast majority of my own black male students have
been severely threatened, sometimes arrested, by local police during illegal
searches.)

The capitalists will DROP most of this talk about "freedom" (except maybe
the "evil human nature" arguments so that they can justify their own
brutality towards & neglect of the so-called "unfit) and they will
substitute the NEED FOR "RESPONSIBLE SECURITY AGAINST CRIME AND TERRORISM OR
INSTABILITY OR SOMETHING"  to appeal to the massive fear that will be
gripping the populace, caused by the failures of capitalism in the first
place!  The big capitalists will push aside their own "libertarian-sounding"
allies after that group has done its work of disarming the populace, because
the big capitalists believe in big government.

=============================================================

Now, there are some who would say: "Spector (not Spectors, by the way), who
are you to make that criticism about empirical data versus rhetoric? You
employ emotional rhetoric all the time, with your sloganeering about dead
children!"

Well, the dead children really are dead children. And the massive
manipulation of the government on the side of the capitalists is also real.
These are data. If you don't like it, then do a serious comparison among the
health and education of children in Cuba and the health and education of
children in "free" Calcutta. Let's get down to cases -- real living
conditions of real people. Calories, protein, infant mortality, percentage
imprisoned, winners and losers in various trade exchanges, military
interventions etc. Not just GDP or how well the upper 10% are doing. You
want to analyze the successess/failures of the old USSR? Let's have some
data. Let's also cast a critical eye towards data that comes from defectors,
pro-Nazis, and CIA agents -- data that is so outrageously self-serving as to
defy our understanding of how society works (such as numbers like 50 million
murdered by Stalin, etc.).  Want to discuss the civil war/famine in the
Ukraine in the early 1930's? Fine. Let's also examine famine in the
capitalist world, India, China, Turkey, etc. during the early 1930's.   The
failure of the pro-capitalists (and also some of the socialists, by the way)
to seriously address the massive crimes caused by capitalism-imperialism
against the working class, especially in the so-called "Third World"
seriously weakens the credibility of all their arguments in favor of
capitalism.

----------------------------------
I don't think that the debate about whether capitalism can ever work is even
a serious debate anymore. I really do believe that Marx and others settled
that a hundred years ago. Capitalism is based on certain mechanisms that do
lead to collapses and wars, in uneven ways and irregular times, but they
eventually do come to pass, and when people, especially the working class,
come to realize that and organize against the essence of capitalism --
commodity production and the profit system, then the world will pass out of
this only several-hundred-year-old stage of world history.

I think the most interesting BIG SYSTEM questions are about how and why
things went sour in the USSR & China ( "sour" --literally, a process of
decay that is the result of the interaction of internal and external
factors) as well as how to create a world not based on profits and class
exploitation. These won't be decided on WSN, most likely, but rather by the
working class itself in struggle. But of course those of us on WSN do have a
right & responsibility to offer opinions, etc.

I don't mean to say that analyzing capitalism-imperialism is unimportant,
however. Analyzing it is still important, because understanding the way that
it crumbles can help us make particular kinds of adjustments to how we can
cope with those catastrophic events going on now and yet to come.   That's
social science, including World Systems analysis, at its most valuable.


Alan Spector

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