Presented by Marxist-Humanist Initiative

Tues. April 6, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Speakers:

Anne Jaclard: “The Biography of an Idea Whose Time has Come”

Andrew Kliman: “Capitalism’s Changing ‘Forms of Appearance’: Going Below the Surface with Dunayevskaya”

Mike Dola: “Automation: A New Stage of Production, a New Stage of Cognition”

Seth Weiss: “Philosophy, Organization, and the New Society: An exploration of Dunayevskaya’s last writings on Marx’s Gotha Critique”

At TRS Inc. Professional Suite, 11th floor, 44 East 32nd Street, Manhattan (bet. Madison & Park Aves.)

Contribution requested

Dear Friends,

I want to thank those of you who have been supporting my people back home in Kenya— children orphaned by AIDS, families living with AIDS, community library efforts, and others. Your contributions have been life changing for the recipients of your generosity. 

Here is what we have done recently:

1.  Our children from single mothers’ homes and those orphaned by AIDS are doing great. Some have graduated from college, high school, and primary school. We pray that those who have graduated from college find jobs. Others are continuing their education at various levels. Those who need medical treatment are receiving it; they have a roof over their heads, food, clothing, and school supplies. Please let me know if you want to join us in supporting a child attending school in Kenya. 

2. Our Tumaini (Hope) community library is up and running. Located in Nakuru town, the library is hosted by one of the local children’s homes. The children’s home was started by Poster Gladys Wekesa with her meager earnings as a teacher. It is accessible to children from the children’s home, the school, and the community. We still need books for the library. You may send books or cash to purchase books locally. In addition, we are looking for computers that we can use to install a virtual library and, eventually, provide internet connection. The address to send books is: Rev. Gladys Wekesa, P O Box 3758/-2100, Nakuru, Kenya.  

3.  In October, a friend in Kenya tried to commit suicide. Her husband abused her, exposed her HIV status to the public, and left her for another woman. My friend lost her baby in a miscarriage and stopped taking ARVs. In her cry for help, she sent me a text message telling me she was going to end it. I called her and spoke to her for three hours. After our call, I started looking for help for her in Kenya. I couldn’t get through to any of the hotlines posted on the internet. I found some women to talk with her individually. Today, she is recovering and has returned to work.

This experience reminded me of how many African women and girls are dying and suffering alone without anyone in whom to confide. As you may know, psychotherapy or counseling is very limited, and hotlines are non-existent in most African countries. This experience made me dream of starting a hotline for women and girls in Africa. We need to give women and girls someone to call, someone who can encourage them and support them in their time of crisis. 

We are now in the process of starting hotlines in Kenya and South Africa. We will extend this work to shelters, placing children in schools, and instilling economic empowerment for survivors so that they can become independent. We are calling this project Usalama (safety/peace/good) African Women and Girls. 

The Usalama African Women and Girls will aim to connect women and girls to legal, health, and educational services as well as temporary shelters. In Kenya, we are working with the Network of Survivors. In South Africa, we are working with Rev. Mpho Tutu and Tandi Tutu, daughters of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The first hotline will go live soon.  (Contact MHI for information on how to make a contribution.)

I have just completed a response to him, entitled “Masters of Words: A reply to Michel Husson on the character of the latest economic crisis.”

For the full text, click here.  Below are the start of the paper, the first two sections, and the final section.

Masters of Words

A reply to Michel Husson on the character of the latest economic crisis

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t––till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean––neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master––that’s all.”

––Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

1. Introduction

This paper replies to Michel Husson’s (2009a; also Husson 2010) critique of my study of movements in the rates of profit of U.S. corporations (Kliman 2009). I showed that rates of profit fell markedly, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the early 1980s, and that no sustainable rebound in profitability took place between the trough year of 1982 and the trough year of 2001. Depending upon the particular measure of the rate of profit one considers, the rate of profit during that period either continued to decline, or stagnated, or increased extremely modestly.  I argued that this persistent fall in profitability is an underlying cause of the latest economic crisis, since it led to sluggish accumulation of capital, sluggish economic growth, instability, and, above all, mounting debt problems.

I also argued that, while some leftist economists––Husson is one of them––claim that “the rate of profit” did rebound substantially, and thus that profitability problems are not an underlying cause of the economic crisis, their conclusions are based partly upon cherry picking of the data and partly upon the use of current-cost “rates of profit” that are simply not rates of profit in the normal sense of the term. Although the latter practice is sometimes defended on the ground that it is a way of producing inflation-adjusted estimates, I argued that current-cost “rates of profit” do not adjust for inflation in a proper manner, and I went on to report on my own estimates of movements in inflation-adjusted rates of profit. I found that their trends in the period since 1982 differed very little from trends in un-adjusted rates of profit.

Curiously, Husson’s critique of my work does not defend the manner in which current-cost rates adjust for inflation, and I am not aware of anyone else who has done so, either. He ignores that issue and instead sets out to turn the tables. He criticizes my use of unadjusted (historical-cost) rates of profit. His major argument, however, is that the alternative procedure I used to adjust for inflation is “incorrect” and that my “error” results in the elimination of the substantial rebound in inflation-adjusted profitability that actually occurred.

Let me note that even if everything he says against the unadjusted rates of profit and my inflation-adjusted rates were correct, it would not constitute a defense of the use of the current-cost “rate of profit.” Such a defense has evidently not yet been produced.

The next section of this reply discusses what is ethically at stake in this debate, and the final section discusses what is politically at stake.  In between, I respond to the particulars of Husson’s critique. Section 3 defends the use of unadjusted historical-cost rates of profit (alongside inflation-adjusted ones). Section 4 argues that Husson’s critique of my inflation-adjustment procedure is much ado about nothing, since an alternative adjustment procedure along the lines he recommends yields results that are almost identical to those I reported originally. Section 5 argues that the failure of current-cost “rate of profits” to adjust for inflation in a proper manner is responsible for almost all the rise, since 1980, in a key current-cost rate (the ratio of U.S. corporations’ property income to the current cost of their fixed assets).

Husson argues that the low rate of accumulation we have experienced since the 1980s is not due to a failure of the rate of profit to rebound. Rather, he claims, it is due to a neoliberal “regime of accumulation” that has encouraged diversion of profits away from productive investment and into financial speculation. In Section 6, I briefly recapitulate the counter-argument I provided in Kliman (2009), which Husson has not addressed. And Section 7 briefly clarifies a point that Husson (2010) seems not to have understood: the current-cost “rate of profit” conjures away a portion of advanced capital, and this leads to a spurious rise in the rate of profit, when prices or the rate of inflation are falling.

2. What is at Stake Ethically?

This reply’s title and epigraph are directed at the work of physicalist-Marxist and Sraffian economists generally, not that of Husson in particular. They refer to an ethical matter, one that concerns the responsibility of intellectuals when communicating with the public.

Physicalist-Marxist and Sraffian economists use the terms rate of profit or profit rate to refer to profit as a percentage of the amount of money that would currently be needed to replace the capital assets, i.e., the assets’ replacement cost, also known as their current cost. To almost everyone else, however, what these terms mean is profit as a percentage of the book value of the capital assets. The book value is the amount of money that was actually advanced (i.e., invested) in the past the order to purchase the capital assets––their historical cost ––minus depreciation and similar charges. For instance, this is how the term is defined in the MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics (1992):

profit rate. profit expressed as a proportion of the book value of capital assets.

This is how it is defined in the Encyclopedia of Small Business (http://www.enotes.com/small-business-encyclopedia/profit-margin):

the rate of profit (sometimes called the rate of return) …comprises various measures of the amount of profit earned relative to the total amount of capital invested …. [T]he profit rate measures the amount of profit per unit of capital advanced ….

And this is how Marx (1991a, p. 133, emphasis in original; 1991b, p. 91) defined it:

The surplus-value [s] or profit … is consequently an excess over and above the total capital advanced. This excess then stands in a certain ratio to the total capital, as expressed by the fraction s/C, where C stands for the total capital. We thus obtain the rate of profit[,] s/C ….

Profit . . . expresses in fact the increment of value which the total capital receives at the end of the processes of production and circulation, over and above the value it possessed before this process of production, when it entered into it.

Because this is what rate of profit means to almost everyone, when they read or hear that “the rate of profit” has consistently risen since the early 1980s, they are seriously misled into thinking that there has been a recovery in what businesses, investors, Marx, and they themselves mean by the rate of profit.

However, no such recovery has taken place. So physicalist-Marxist and Sraffian economists have a responsibility, when engaging in public communication, to avoid saying things that will inevitably be understood as statements that there has been such a recovery. Ideally, they should avoid trying to make rate of profit mean just what they choose it to mean––neither more nor less––and find a different term for what they now insist upon calling “the rate of profit.” But if this is somehow too much to ask for, they should at the very least let the public know that “what we mean by ‘the rate of profit’––which is not what businesses and investors mean, or that Marx meant, but is instead the ratio of profit to the replacement cost of capital––has consistently risen since the 1980s.”

Definitions of one’s variables that are buried in the middle of technical papers are not adequate substitutes for such clarifications. Most people who hear talks or read interviews will not read the technical papers. Even those who do read them will frequently not realize that “fixed assets valued at current cost” differs from “the amount of money actually spent to acquire fixed assets, minus depreciation” unless this is pointed out explicitly. But intellectuals––especially radical intellectuals––have a responsibility to promote understanding, not misunderstanding, among the public. If they instead become the masters of words, they likewise become the masters of public discourse rather than its servants.

8. What is at Stake Politically?

Husson (2009a) concludes his critique of my work by quoting, and taking issue with, my response to a question during the discussion period that followed a talk I recently gave on the latest economic crisis:[1]

The first question I was asked was regarding my criticisms of the claims made by Marxist economists such as Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Fred Moseley, and Michel Husson who have said that the rate of profit, especially of corporations in the US, ha[s] almost completely recovered from the low point in the early 1980s. It is an extremely important issue because it affects how we view the character of the present crisis. If there is a huge crisis in the midst of an almost complete recovery of the rate of profit, that suggests that it is purely a financial crisis that we are experiencing rather than a crisis of capitalist production as such. And it suggests therefore that what needs to be fixed is the financial system: we need regulation, we need, maybe, nationalization of banks, but a change in the character of the socio-economic system is not on the agenda. So a lot of people are moving into the camp of Keynesianism and calling for fights against financial capitalism rather than against capitalism. [emphasis added]

In response to the sentences I have italicized, Husson objects that each link of my syllogism is false. If the rate of profit is high, it is still possible that the crisis is not only a financial one, and even if the crisis is only a financial one, it is still possible that it calls into question the underlying logic of the system. But the term “syllogism” is his, not mine. When one is giving an impromptu verbal response to a question, it is not the time to try to formulate a watertight syllogism. I therefore said “that suggests” and “it suggests,” not “that implies,” or “it follows inevitably that,” or some similar expression that announces the conclusion of a syllogism.

Yet there is indeed a precise logical connection that can be drawn between the notions that profitability has rebounded, that the latest economic crisis has an irreducibly financial character, and that changes to the financial system could in principle prevent such crises in the future. That connection was spelled out admirably by Chris Harman (2009, p. 299, emphasis added) a few months before his tragic and untimely death last fall:

Those radical economists who put the stress on financialisation in creating the crisis [… characteristically] claim that profit rates had recovered in the 1980s and 1990s sufficiently to have brought about a revival of productive investment were it not for the power of financial interests. Such was the argument of the French Marxist Michel Husson, when he claimed in 1999 that there were ‘high levels of profitability”, and [Engelbert] Stockhammer and [Gérard] Duménil were saying much the same thing in the summer and autumn of 2008. If they were right, the crises that broke out in 2001 and on a much bigger scale in 2007–8 would indeed have had causes very different to previous ones, including the inter-war slump [i.e., the Great Depression––AJK], and greater control by the existing state over the behaviour of the financial sector would in the 21st century be sufficient to stop such crises. In accordance with such an approach, Duménil and [Dominique] Lévy described the “Keynesian view” as “very sensible” and looked to “social alliances” to “stop the neoliberal offensive and put to work alternative policies––a different way of managing the crisis.”

If the sentence of Harman’s I have italicized still does not qualify as a fully-articulated syllogism, it comes damned close.

Unfortunately, Husson chooses not to respond to the substantive issues at stake here. Instead, he changes the subject. The error upon which my “false syllogism” rests, he writes, is my inability to understand that “capitalism may be in crisis even as it enjoys a high rate of profit. … [T]he crisis is that capitalism is incapable of responding, and indeed refuses to respond, in a rational manner to the needs of humankind, whether these be social needs or the struggle against climate change” (emphases added).

Husson’s use of the word “crisis” here is a bad pun. My talk––entitled “La Crisis Económica, sus Raíces y Perspectivas”––was wholly about the economic crisis, Thus, when I used the word “crisis” in my “syllogism,” it was the economic crisis to which I was referring. I do not mean to suggest that social needs and climate change are “non-economic” matters. My point is rather that economic crisis is a technical term that has long had a specific and precise meaning: “A situation in which the economy of a country experiences a sudden downturn brought on by a financial crisis” (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/ economic-crisis.html). So when Husson answers me by employing the word “crisis” in a different sense, he is just changing the subject.

In other words, the question is not whether capitalism is experiencing some sort of crisis. Nor is the question whether there is some justification for fighting against capitalism. Rather, the questions that are at issue––and in need of a full debate––are these:

• Is the latest economic crisis a crisis of a specific form of capitalism, rather than a crisis of capitalism itself, such that a change in the form of the system can in principle prevent the recurrence of economic crises of the same sort?

• Has this economic crisis put a change in the character of the socio-economic system on the agenda, in the sense that, in order to prevent the recurrence of economic crises of the same sort, capitalism itself must be transcended?

My answer to the first question is “no” and my answer to the second one is “yes.”

To the best of my knowledge, Husson has not explicitly answered these questions. But he has characterized the latest economic crisis as one that is “shaking the foundations of neo-liberal capitalism,” not “shaking the foundations of capitalism” sans phrase. He has written that “[t]he crisis is a glaring confirmation of the criticisms addressed to financialised capitalism,” not “criticisms addressed to capitalism” sans phrase. In the same piece, he wrote that “we have to take strength from the rout of the advocates of neo-liberalism” but he did not also warn us of the dangers we face now that the crisis has given new life to Keynesianism, social democracy, and “leftist” visions of statist capitalism.[2]

Such statements seem to suggest that Husson’s answer to the first question is “yes” and his answer to the second question is “no.” If that is not the case, it would be helpful if he would clarify his views.

[2] The quotations from Husson in this paragraph are from the first paragraph, and the first paragraph of the final section, of Husson (2008b). Emphases are mine.

 Editor’s note:  In response to our request to publish some of their writings, we were sent the following article by the Argentine organization Razón y Revolución (Reason and Revolution). We enjoyed extensive discussions with some of its Marxist scholar-activists in December, when Andrew Kliman spoke at their Buenos Aires conference. This article appeared in their publication El Aromo, March/April 2007. Our translation is by Carlos Saracino. 

Crisis = nationalization. Far from being a Bolivarian inspiration, let alone a socialist one, Chávez’s oil nationalization in Venezuela responds to a common dynamic in capitalism, present when prices rise. Towards the end of the 1970s, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela itself nationalized their oil industries. History repeats itself today in the face of the same increase in oil prices.

For many years now, petroleum has occupied center stage in global economic reality. The volatility of its price created therein a strong sensibility to any market alteration that could affect the development of the global economy. Consequently, any news coming from an oil producing country echoes immediately throughout the global news media. Chávez’ announcement that he would nationalize Venezuelan energy production—particularly in the Orinoco belt—was no exception. Followers and opponents alike have portrayed said action as the manifestation of a president willing to confront imperialism as a step toward the construction of “socialism of the 21^st century.” Nevertheless, oil nationalization is less than meets the eye.

 We are dealing, first and foremost, with a part of the dynamic of capitalist competition. State intervention aims at concentrating a larger portion of the income generated by the rise in the price of oil. Through these means, the state seeks to boost development of capital on a national scale. Nevertheless, the possibility of this development arises neither from Bolivarian convictions nor from the influence of Fidel Castro; instead, it is a given in the context in which the heating up of the global economy pushes oil prices upward. Thus, the force that makes nationalization possible is far from emanating from the construction of any kind of socialism. As we will see, nationalization is the normal historical behavior of an oil producing country’s bourgeoisie: the increase in oil income allows it to dispute its share of the profit with the superpowers for a few years, with the illusion of building an “independent” national capitalism. But the aforementioned force which allows it to do so remains subordinate to the fate of oil prices. 

 Crisis and Nationalization

 In times of economic crisis, the price of commodities such as oil (or soy) tends to rise. The continuing fall in the rate of profit of capitalist industries forces them to sharpen competition between one another in order to survive. This heightened level of competition leads to the widening of the scale at which they accumulate; in other words, in order to lower costs, firms have to produce larger quantities. As is to be expected, this has the side effect of increasing demand for raw materials, which in turn leads to a rise in their prices. Kirchner gains a certain room for maneuvering by utilizing the taxes on exports as a mechanism for appropriating soy income. In the case of countries that live from oil income, nationalization appears as a similar mechanism, though on a larger scale.

 Just as state appropriation of agricultural income is not new in Argentina, oil nationalization is not either.  In the first half of the 1970s there was a scenario of this kind, in which the fall in the rate of profit translated into an abrupt rise in oil prices.[i] From 1973 to 1974, the latter rose 317%, subsequently doubling in 1979, reaching $85 per barrel (in 2005 USD).[ii] These circumstances made available a mass of wealth way beyond the profit required by oil capital for its own reproduction, for which the states of the primary oil exporting countries then vied. To this end, these states increased their participation in their respective oil sectors.  Venezuela did so in 1975, and by then, other oil producing countries were doing so as well, in different ways. In 1971, the Algerian state guaranteed itself 51% of shares in oil firms and Libya begun its nationalizations. The next year, Iraq nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company. The process was joined next by Iran. In 1975 Kuwait followed suit, and Saudi Arabia, the first world exporter, acquired 60% of the shares in the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO)—by 1980, state control over ARAMCO would reach 100%. In none of these cases was there a move, even remotely so, toward socialism.

 The current economic situation appears not to differ much from that of those years. In the debates over the economic crisis that we have published in previous issues of El Aromo and in issues 15 and 16 of Razón y Revolución [Reason and Revolution], it was argued that capitalism is far from returning to its glory years.[iii] In this context, the price of oil began a new upward climb from an annual average price of $20 per barrel in 1999 to beyond $60 in 2006. It is estimated that in the coming years it will stay close to $60. The Energy Information Administration, the official American organ in charge of energy statistics, predicts an average price close to $59.49 for 2007, and $62.58 for 2008.[iv] Similar scenarios evoke similar responses.

 What Nationalization?

 Currently, Venezuela has the sixth largest oil reserves, and is the eight largest oil exporter, in the world. The rise in oil prices gives it strength with respect to its buyers. 70% of its sales are to the United States, a fact that—along with ideologies—explains a great part of the clashes between Chávez and Bush.[v] However, beyond increasing the appropriated income and charging the US more, the much announced nationalization does not constitute an expropriation of oil capital. Instead, the nationalization is no more than an agreement with the oil companies that operate currently [in Venezuela] (British Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips and Total), in accordance with which the state ensures itself a majority holding in all oil-related activities—which should not surprise us. This will allow the state, first and foremost, to help itself to a larger cut of oil income. But the objectives of this nationalization do not end there.

The largest part of Venezuelan oil reserves are found in the nationalized Orinoco Belt—a region where oil extraction is difficult, and where the crude itself is extra-heavy, requiring a greater degree of processing before refinement. The most optimistic projections estimate a recovery rate of 20%. Even so, despite its low yield the extra-heavy oil in the Orinoco is thought to be more recoverable than oil of the same kind found in other regions.[vi] It has been 16 years since the last important discovery of conventional reserves in the world, and the existing ones are being drained as demand rises.[vii] Although conventional reserves exclude regions with oil of this kind, their exhaustion and the rise in oil prices leads progressively to a situation in which extra-heavy reserves are seriously considered, and acquire the status of commercial reserves. After all, extra-heavy oil constitutes the largest part of the potential reserves that can be added to the commercial pool in the coming decades.[viii] With the inclusion of the Orinoco reserves, Venezuela would become the largest oil reserve in the world, overtaking even Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, as was previously said, the extraction of oil in the Orinoco is complicated. Its low yield must be compensated for by a high price per barrel. Although the current price is favorable in this regard, it does not thereby make it unnecessary to make substantial investments in extraction and processing. The Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, recognizes this reality when it affirms that $59 billion must be invested by 2012.[ix] Predictably, the state will put forward the largest part of this sum. This is why, in making investments that private capital is not willing to make, the state’s appropriated oil income will play an important role in boosting oil production.

Nothing New Under the Sun

The rise in the price of oil pushes Chávez toward energy nationalization, and even gives him some room to buy other firms. According to his apologists, this wave of nationalization is intended to reverse years of neoliberalism and deregulation of the oil industry during the 1990s. They go so far as to call this wave a decisive step in the construction of socialism. However, the reach of this nationalization is much more limited. Certainly, through nationalization the state will concentrate a larger portion of  income; simultaneously, it will guarantee the development of oil production in Venezuela, allowing that country to take advantage of a global demand whose annual rate of growth can be appreciated from the recent declarations by the president of ExxonMobil. He said: “…we believe that for 2010, half of the daily volume necessary to meet the projected demand is not yet in production today—and that is the challenge facing producers.”[x]

Now, whoever interprets state participation as a step in the construction of socialism ignores the fact that boosting domestic capital accumulation is a basic task of the capitalist state. Activities that require large investments in order to be realized have always required an initial push from the state. That was the case with the steel sector in Italy, with the aerospace sector in the US, and—without going too far from home—of the railroads in Argentina. What Chávez is attempting is to take advantage of high oil prices in order to expand the size of Venezuelan capital. That is what the “socialism of the 21^st century” amounts to, and that [high oil prices] is what its future depends on.

NOTES

[i] We take as reference the evolution of the rate of profit elaborated by Anwar Shaikh in his Valor, acumulación y crisis: Ensayos de economía política [Value, Accumulation and Crisis: Essays in Political Economy], Ediciones ryr, Buanos Aires, 2006.

[ii] http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview.

[iii] See http://www.razonyrevolucion.org/HTML/dbt/crisis.html.

[iv] See http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents/html.

[v] See http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/topworldtables1_2.html.

[vi] See Pierre, René: What Future for Extra Heavy Oil and Bitumen: The Orinoco Case, Total, Paris La Defense, France, 2006.

[vii] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves.

[viii] See Pierre, René, op. cit.

[ix] See www.pdvsa.com.

[x] See http://www.crisisenergetica.org/staticpages/pdf-rtf/Kjell_Aleklett_sobre_Dick_Cheney’_%20apeech.pdf.

At last month’s Historical Materialism conference, Duménil denied that they cherry picked the data.  I replied. Then we showed what the facts of the matter are.

In these pages and elsewhere, I’ve cited Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy’s cherry picking of the data as one reason why they contend that the rate of profit of U.S. corporations experienced an almost complete recovery since the early 1980s. This claim is crucial to their argument that the current economic crisis began as a financial crisis that was not itself rooted in a long-term fall in the rate of profit.

I discussed this issue during a January 15 presentation at the Historical Materialism 2010 NYC Conference last month. Duménil responded vociferously that they did not cherry pick the data. I replied. The following day, members of Marxist-Humanist Initiative distributed an informational flier at the conference that documented the relevant facts. It includes screen shots of the paper in question.

The transcript of the exchange between Duménil and me, and the informational flier, are in a PDF file you can download from the “Crisis Intervention” page of my website. The file is in the “Ethics” section, and it has a “New!” bug next to it.

Listen to the panel

Listen to q&a

Another recording of this panel is available at the Radical Perspectives on the Crisis website:

http://sites.google.com/site/radicalperspectivesonthecrisis/audio-video/audiohistoricalmaterialism2010nyc-originsofthecrisis-moseleyklimanmohun

(The audio quality may be better here. The Radical Perspectives on the Crisis website also features recordings of a number of other panels at the conference.)

Friday, January 15, 2010 at 10:15 a.m. At the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (bet. 34-35^th St.), Room 6417.

Kliman will be speaking on a panel with Fred Moseley and Simon Mohun entitled “Origins of the Current Crisis.” He will present a challenge to common left views of the crisis:

Various leftists are trying to have working people march behind the banner of some statist version of capitalism, as a supposed solution to the economic crisis and/or a way of preventing a recurrence of crisis. Frequently the turn to statism is justified on the basis of the claim that the current crisis is a purely financial one, caused by free financial markets, unrelated to and distinct from profitability problems within capitalist production. This paper will show that the claim is incorrect. Properly measured and assessed, there has been a persistent fall in U.S. corporations’ rate of profit and declining GDP growth, the effects of which have been continually papered over with ever-growing mountains of debt. But the excessive indebtedness leads to bubbles and the bursting of the bubbles. The latest crisis is the most severe yet. A further rise in debt is not a genuine solution to the crisis; only a new human society is. In the meantime, working people should fight for concessions without subsuming their self-activity under the agenda of some section of the ruling class.

*           *          *

Be sure to visit MHI’s book table at the Historical Materialism Conference.

For information about the conference, which takes place Thurs. Jan. 14 through Sat. Jan. 16, visit http://www.hm2010nyc.org/

Pedagogical Workshop

November 7, 2009. A workshop on the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx’s value theory with Alan Freeman and Andrew Kliman. Watch the video.

Dialogue on the Economic Crisis

November 7, 2009. A roundtable on the economic crisis featuring David Calnitsky (Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) on “Capitalist Competition, Self-Organization, and Crisis”; Brendan Cooney (Kapitalism 101 video blogger) on “Crisis, Value, and Marx’s “Order of Operations”; Radhika Desai (Political Studies, University of Manitoba) on “The Demand Problem in the Current Crisis: Marxist and Keynesian Reflections”; Alan Freeman (Visiting Scholar, University of Manitoba) on “How did 1929 end?”; and Andrew Kliman (Department of Economics, Pace University – Pleasantville) on “Contradictions of Capitalism’s Value Production: Internal, Inevitable, Insuperable.” Watch the video.

             Iraq is fast becoming a forgotten story to the rest of the world, but women continue to be killed in the streets of Baghdad simply for being women. OWFI activists are still in constant danger of assassination by political Islamists. I still have to sleep in secret locations and travel with guards, and we need guards to protect our office. Fortunately, we share a building with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI), who support all our endeavors, events, and programs.

             One of our new projects is organizing women workers to lay the groundwork for unionization, a joint project with FWCUI. Few women in Iraq are in unions, and most other unions have shown little interest in bringing them in. Our project, called “Women at Work,” consists at this stage of finding interested nurses in private hospitals and helping them learn leadership skills, so they are able to start preparatory committees toward unionization. They are now organizing for a nurses’ annual conference. We found some “experienced” women who were union leaders under Saddam, but they tend to be nationalistic or patriarchist; we want to help new left-leaning leaders to emerge.

             In October, we started experimenting with airing programs on our new radio station. I am really excited about that, because radio and TV were so important to letting people know about OWFI and raising discussion on women’s rights in general. After the government censored OWFI on their affiliated TV stations, we begin to need our own media outlets. We are already swamped with applications from groups wanting to put on programs. Our rule is that all the material we broadcast must be secular, egalitarian and women-friendly.  It is important to move the material people hear to the left, that they  hear something besides the religious programs that are all there is on the radio now.

             We recently completed an anti-trafficking report that made a big splash. The study detailed the huge trafficking networks in Iraq who kidnap and smuggle girls and women to other countries where they are sold into prostitution. One line of trafficking takes girls ages 11 to 15, who are considered especially desirable in some other countries. We wrote a big report, and then we didn’t know what to do with it, because the Iraqi government will not admit this problem exists. When we sent an OWFI activist out of the country to announce the report on a TV station, the Iraqi government spent the next three days denouncing us on its television station, Al Iraqia. They kept showing a picture of “the woman who calls Iraqi women prostitutes,” which of course makes her a clear target for the Islamists and nationalists.

             The government often denounced us before, but the extent of this campaign seems disproportionate to our threat to it. In fact, people have warned us that if we do anything further with this report, we surely will be assassinated by the trafficking networks!

             OWFI continues to publish our newspaper, “Equality,” and to run shelters and safe houses for women fleeing the threat of “honor” killings. We now have three secret safe houses in Baghdad and suburbs. They are run by teams of families whom we train. 

             OWFI is not involved in the coming national elections. Some members were going to run on slates of individuals under the slogan “freedom and equality,” but now they are not going to participate, since we read the newly legislated election law, which is tailored to bring forward religious and ethnic groups to have full control of their areas. The last election was completely dominated by parties formed on religious and ethnic bases, and look what has happened.

             It is completely untrue that women or men have benefited from the more than six years of foreign occupation. For example, the new constitution contains Article 41, which allows Sharia law to supersede the previous family law known as the “personal status law.” Another example: unionization is still illegal for public sector workers, who are a large part of the workforce.

             In terms of how we live, Baghdad buildings, which received normal electrical service before the invasion, since it receive electricity for only one hour in the morning and one hour at night. If you want electricity the rest of the time, you have to buy it at a high price from a private seller. Fuel of all kinds is as expensive as it is in New York—a taxi ride costs about the same. The condition of women has deteriorated greatly from the dangers of war, lack of security and ascendancy of political Islam, especially because so many girls no longer get an education. In fact, I estimate that twenty percent of OWFI members are illiterate, especially the younger women.

 For more information, see OWFI’s  website:  www.equalityiniraq.com

I sent the following message on behalf of MHI with our condolences to the London Corresponding Committee:

What a shock, and what a tragedy. It’s difficult to believe that someone so full of life and so dedicated to Marxist-Humanism is suddenly gone. I will always treasure the contributions he made to the U.S. movement through his proletarian perspective and his Left experience–and most of all, his passion for a new society.

The following  press release is from his local union:

IAN MACDONALD

1957-2009

SOCIAL WORKER. TRADE UNIONIST. MARXIST-HUMANIST.

It is with great sadness that Surrey County UNISON has to report that Ian MacDonald, a long-standing UNISON activist and our lead convenor for social care died on Sunday morning at 6am. Ian had been ill for some months and was diagnosed with cancer only a few weeks ago. Although Ian was a fighter, this was one fight too many.

Paul Couchman, Branch Secretary, said “Ian was one of a kind – an honest, hard working and committed trade unionist and socialist – who always put the needs of members first. Ian was never afraid to speak up for workers and spent his entire life organising and defending workers in Surrey, in Britain and Internationally. Many of the rights, terms and conditions we take for granted in Surrey would not exist if Ian had not been at the fore.

One of the last things Ian did was to make a short video message offering his solidarity to colleagues in children’s services, which was played to UNISON members at a meeting on Friday. This video is available on our website.

I knew Ian personally for thirty years. We met in the Labour Party Young Socialists (youth section of the Labour Party) in the early eighties. Like many, we both left the Labour Party when we felt it had turned on working people. Ian grew to be a comrade, a political confidant and a close personal friend. He will be sorely missed.

Many of you sent get well wishes when you heard that Ian was ill. We also have many donations towards a collection for him and his family. We will pass all of these on to his wife, Carol, and if any of you would like to send your condolences we will make sure all of these are also kept and given to Carol ….

UNISON will make sure that Ian’s work and commitment is continued and built upon. This is the least we can do ….

Chris Leary      
Chief Executives Office Convenor
Surrey County UNISON    
For solidarity - at home and internationally
Tel: 020 8541 9091            
Direct: 020 8541 7954
Fax: 020 8546 6993     
Email: chris.leary@surreycc.gov.uk 
National UNISON website: www.unison.org.uk
UNISON South East: www.unison.org.uk/southeast
UNISON young members: www.unison.org.uk/young
Surrey County branch website: www.surreycountyunison.org.uk