Subjects Archives: Marxism

1131: Capitalism and ecological theft

Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” from Monthly Review.

EXCHANGE: Left Media and Venezuela

Lucas Koerner

The sociologist never levels the “authoritarian” charge against his own government, despite the United States’ murderous lawlessness at home and abroad—mass deportations, illegal wars, serial police killings, etc.—all in the absence of any credible external threat.

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Standing up for Left literature—In India, it can cost you your life

Vijay Prashad

On February 16, 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Pune (Maharashtra, India). Two men on a motorcycle stopped near them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them; one of the men laughed, removed a gun, and shot the two. Uma survived the attack […]

Why does Little Women still matter? Review of Little Women (2019) – Directed by Greta Gerwig

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Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women has struck a resounding chord with audiences, particularly young women. Why does this book continue to resonate with us one hundred and fifty years later, and what did this latest version bring us?

Mega-billionaire, Democratic presidential candidate, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks at a campaign stop at Eastern Market in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 2020. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)

If Bloomberg wants to buy an election, he should run as a Republican against Trump—not sabotage Democrats

Robert W. McChesney

The mega-billionaire should be running against Trump in the Republican primaries, not as a Democrat. If he actually cared about this country more than stroking his massive ego that is exactly what he would be doing.

High stakes tests aren’t better—and they never will be

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Accountability is important. But tests that tie school funding to student performance only make things worse.

This article is meant to clarify a point made earlier (Why Didn’t Socialism Have Over-Production Crisis, Newsclick, June 30, 2018) about the erstwhile socialist economies not having over-production crises as capitalist economies do. It is in the nature of capitalism to have “over-production crises”, i.e., crises arising from “over-production” relative to demand. “Over-production” does not mean that more and more goods keep getting produced relative to demand, so that unsold stocks keep piling up. This may happen only for a brief period in the beginning; but as stocks pile up, production gets curtailed, causing recession and greater unemployment. “Over-production”, in short, is ex ante, in the sense that if production were to occur at full capacity use (or at some desired level of capacity utilisation), then the amount produced could not be sold because of a shortage of demand. But it manifests itself in reality in terms of recession and greater unemployment. It is a mistake to believe that such crises are only cyclical in nature, i.e., that they get automatically reversed after a certain period of time. On the contrary, the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was a classic over-production crisis, lasted nearly a decade and was finally overcome because of the war, or, to be precise, because of military expenditure in preparation for the Second World War. Read Also: Why Didn’t Socialism Have Over-Production Crises? Since 2008, there has again been an over-production crisis that has persisted with varying intensity right until now. There is, thus, no question of an over-production crisis under capitalism automatically disappearing. But what was striking about the erstwhile socialist economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is that they were free from over-production crises. The question is why? Over-production crises under capitalism arise because of two main reasons. One, investment decisions under capitalism depend upon the expected growth of demand, for which the current growth of demand is taken as a clue: if demand slows down then investment gets restrained. Two, whenever investment gets restrained, so does consumption and hence total income (this is called the “multiplier” effect of investment). Both these factors were eliminated under socialism. Investment was undertaken according to a plan and not the dictates of profitability; hence, there was no question of investment being curtailed when the growth of demand slowed down for any reason. This is not to say that there were no fluctuations in the level of investment. These fluctuations, however, arose not in response to profit expectations, but for entirely exogenous reasons, of which, two in particular were important. One was agricultural output fluctuations. In years when the agricultural output went down for weather-related, or some other, reasons, investment was cut, in order to prevent excessive upward pressures on food prices; correspondingly when agricultural output revived, so did investment. These investment fluctuations, however, had nothing to do with any calculations of profitability on investment; they were unavoidable even in a planned economy. The second reason was the operation of “echo effects”. Suppose, for instance, that a whole lot of new investment had been installed in a bunched manner at a certain date, say the beginning of the planning period. These pieces of equipment would become due for retirement again in a bunched manner around the same time some years later, which would, therefore, push up the investment plan, and hence the real gross investment around that time, so that both net investment and replacement needs are accommodated. The investment figure, therefore, would not show a steady growth but would exhibit fluctuations. But these fluctuations again had nothing to do with any calculations of profitability; they arose because of past investment history. But even when such investment fluctuations occurred, socialist economies ensured that they did not lead to fluctuations in consumption and income, i.e., those economies snapped the multiplier relationship that necessarily characterises capitalism. This is because all firms in the economy were asked to produce to their capacity, and, if demand was low because of investment being curtailed, then they were asked to lower their prices until whatever they produced got sold. At these “market-clearing” prices, some firms would make losses, while others would still make profits; but this would not matter since both the profit-making and the loss-making firms belonged to the State, which could, therefore, cross-subsidise the loss-making ones from the profits of the profit-making ones. And taking both groups of firms together, there would always be positive net profits as long as investment was positive (even if lower than would have been otherwise). This was a remarkable break from what happens under capitalism, and provides a clue to why output and employment fall in a crisis there. Under capitalism, a firm does not produce when prices do not cover costs; and when demand is low, prices do not fall, because they are “administered” through collusion among the oligopolistic firms. Instead, output, and hence employment, fall in order to equate supply with demand, and to eliminate stocks which might have got built up briefly. The matter can be looked at somewhat differently. A fall in price, with money wages and employment given, which is what happened under socialism, meant a rise in the share of wages in total output; income distribution in short shifted in favour of the workers. Since workers more or less consume their entire wages, such a shift in income distribution in favour of the workers raised the share of consumption in total output. Thus, socialist economies never experienced over-production crises because even when investment fell for some reason, output was kept unchanged and the share of consumption rose to compensate for the fall in investment (through a rise in the workers’ share in output). This, however, can never happen under capitalism because capitalists would never voluntarily agree to a lowering of their share in output and a corresponding increase in workers’ share, even in a situation of inadequate aggregate demand. This is why capitalism experiences over-production crises: income distribution here is a matter of intense class-struggle where there is no question of capitalists agreeing to lower their own share and correspondingly raise workers’ share for the sake of overcoming a situation of over-production. The “multiplier” that operates under capitalism, whereby a reduction in investment causes a reduction in consumption and hence total output, occurs because of income distribution not being adjustable. The “multiplier”, in other words, is predicated upon the relative shares among capitalists and workers being given. In fact, under capitalism, far from the workers’ share rising to offset the problem of insufficient demand, the tendency in periods of crisis is the exact opposite, namely, to cut wages and raise the share of profits, which, in a situation of reduced investment that brought about the crisis in the first place, actually compounds the crisis. A 10% fall in investment in such a situation does not just bring about a 10% fall in output, as the “multiplier” analysis would suggest, but a more than 10% fall in output, say a 15% fall, because an additional squeeze on consumption through a fall in workers’ share (via the wage cut) is further superimposed upon the reduction in investment. The fact that the relative share of the workers is not allowed to increase in order to offset the tendency towards over-production, which is a basic characteristic of capitalism, also shows its supreme irrationality as a system. It shows that the system would rather have larger unutilised capacity and unemployment, i.e., a sheer waste of productive resources for lack of demand, than produce as before by avoiding this waste through giving more to the workers. From its point of view, wasted resources are preferable to using these resources to improve workers’ consumption. True, not being a planned system, it does not make such calculations consciously; but that is what its immanent tendencies amount to. Socialism avoids any waste or slack, such as is caused by a crisis, by raising the consumption of workers appropriately to avert it. As the collapse of the Soviet Union recedes further into history, people increasingly forget that a system had existed there, which, notwithstanding its many limitations and defects, had nonetheless been free of unemployment, of over-production crises and of the irrationality of capitalism.

Capitalism, socialism and over-production crises

Prabhat Patnaik

Unlike capitalism, socialism avoids any waste or slack, such as is caused by an over-production crisis, by raising the consumption of workers appropriately to avert it.

Flickr Image from page 246 of Symbol and satire in the French Re… | Flickr

Isabelle Garo on Marx’s strategic thought and the spirit of revolt

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The present context in France and across the world is quite bad for the exploited and oppressed in general, as also for the organised workers’ movement. This long term weakening in the conditions of capitalist crises gave the green light to the ruling classes to take out their revenge at the end of the 1970s […]

Marxism and the Climate Crisis: African Eco-Socialist Alternatives

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There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.

From Liberation Theology to Public Money Creation with Delman Coates

Maxximilian Seijo, William Saas, and Scott Ferguson

Reverend Dr. Delman Coates joins Money on the Left to discuss why the politics of public money creation are essential for social and spiritual liberation. Dr. Coates holds a Master’s in Divinity from Harvard and a Ph.D. in New Testament & Early Christianity from Columbia University. He currently serves as Senior Pastor at Mount Ennon […]

Flickr Bernie Sanders in the South Bronx March 31st 2016 by Micha… | Flickr

The Iowa fiasco and the Democrats’ shadowy plot to stop Bernie

Leonard C. Goodman

Yogi Berra, the great Yankees catcher, had the memorable line, “It’s like deja vu all over again.” Bernie Sanders supporters might have been thinking the same thing after the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses.

Bolivia: An election in the midst of an ongoing coup

Vijay Prashad

On May 3, 2020, the Bolivian people will go to the polls once more. They return there because President Evo Morales had been overthrown in a coup in November 2019.

Rosa Luxemburg and debt as an imperialist instrument

Éric Toussaint

In her book titled The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg devoted an entire chapter to international loans in order to show how the great capitalist powers of the time used the credits granted by their bankers to the countries of the periphery to exercise economic, military and political domination on the latter.

The Torture Machine, Racism and Violence in Chicago

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The Torture Machine, Racism and Police Violence in Chicago, by People’s Law Office and longtime National Lawyers Guild attorney Flint Taylor, is a meticulously detailed and authentic, truly appalling story of shame and disgrace to the city of Chicago, its political and police administration establishments, and numerous judges of the Cook County criminal courts; an […]

Prasanna Kumar, Creative Commons (CCO 1.0).

The origins of poetry: A Marxist analysis

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Christopher Caudwell, the British Marxist who was killed in 1937 in the Spanish Civil War at age 29, was one of the most important cultural theorists of the past century.

How women shake up the political world

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The originality of the Haitian feminist movement lies in the fact that it can be thought of neither in terms of a wave (first, second or third) nor in terms of a defined current (liberal, black, decolonial, etc.).

Acronym group that sabotaged Iowa caucus birthed by billionaire who funded Alabama disinformation campaign

Max Blumenthal

Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.

A fascist coup

Victor Grossman

While millions this week stared at Iowa and Washington with worried amazement, confusion or anger, Germany, too, had its own messy confusion–which turned into a frightening alarm signal!

A possible Communist redefinition of love

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In In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou defined love as a form of “minimal communism [where] the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts.”(1) Earlier in the book, Badiou provided a more elegant statement, associating the act of […]

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Monthly Review Essays

Misrepresenting Marx’s Ecology: A response to Daniel Tanuro’s “was Marx an ecosocialist?” John Bellamy Foster
Daniel Tanuro is an agricultural engineer and leading socialist activist who has made numerous contributions to ecosocialist thought and practice, most notably, in his book Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work. Yet, this has been coupled with persistent claims that there are “fundamental flaws” in Karl Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism.
Culturalism, Naturalism, and Social Metabolism Peter Critchley
The alternative to the social and ecological pathology which is becoming all-pervasive in the socioinstitutional and economic fabric of modern capitalist society is to be found in the development of an appropriate, harmonious relationship between humanity, their productive powers, and nature.

See all Monthly Review Essays

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Subjects Archives: Marxism