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

On November 4th, 2009 the Marxist-Humanist Initiative and the New SPACE presented a talk by Daniel Ankarloo, “Swedish ‘Socialism’ – Not what it used to be, but then again it never was,” in NYC. An audio recording of this talk is now available online.

Listen to Daniel Ankarloo’s Presentation

Listen to Q&A

View the original announcement of Daniel Ankarloo’s Nov. 4 talk and reader comments

I was very pleased to read Jefferies’ critique, because it was comradely (though in a comment following it that I will discuss below, he made an unsubstantiated and false charge of scholarly misconduct against me), and because he engaged with what I actually wrote. That’s something I’m not used to. I’m used to simultaneist-Marxist and Sraffian critics of Marx who lie about what I write, intentionally distort it, engage in diversionary ploys, and take actions that have threatened to deprive me of my means of earning a living. And I’m used to “Marxist-Humanist” critics who set up strawpeople and knock them down while assidously avoiding the words I’ve actually written.  So a critique like the one that Jefferies wrote is quite refreshing as well as quite commendable.

Also, here’s a big h/t to “mne.”  I’m not aware of whom s/he is, but s/he has said many good and important things about Jefferies’ critique in the comments section following it, though s/he is outnumbered there. S/he is probably the “m” that let me know about the critique by posting a comment on the MHI website yesterday. If not, an h/t to “m” as well.

1.  On my relationship to Harman, the International Socialism journal, and all that

a. Jefferies writes that “Kliman shares the Harman, Choonara and the ISJ’s view that capitalism already existed in the former centrally planned economies of China, Russia and Central Europe.”  Yes, but only in the same sense as I share “their” view that the Sun is the center of the solar system. In both cases, I arrived at my view independently of them. I am a Marxist-Humanist. To borrow a phrase that Marx used to describe his relationship to Hegel, I am a pupil of that mighty thinker, Raya Dunayevskaya, and I am politically active with Marxist-Humanist Initiative, which is endeavoring to renew Marxist-Humanism organizationally in the wake of the disintegration and retrogression of prior Marxist-Humanist organizations. Thus, when Jefferies writes that “Kliman is … from a broadly speaking similar theoretical tradition to that of the ISJ,” he is speaking very broadly.

b. Jefferies seriously misrepresents my review when he alleges that

Kliman claims that the basic problem with those who disagree with Harman is they have not broken completely with capitalist ideology and that therefore they “must always try, as Harman puts it, ‘to pin the blame on something other than capitalism as such”. Some might think that this was an attempt to shut down the debate ….

Nowhere did I say or suggest that those who disagree with Harman haven’t broken completely with capitalist ideology. I wasn’t even referring to his views at that point in the review, but to the fact that the economic crisis has not impelled many on the Left to engage in serious rethinking:

On the left there has been even less rethinking than on the right. This is because the crisis has the “form of appearance”—to use an apt Hegelian-Marxian expression—of being a crisis of free-market, deregulated capitalism and specifically a crisis emanating from the financial sector. In other words, it appears to be a crisis of things the left never celebrated (though those who spoke of a new long upturn tended to regard them as successful), and thus an ideological predicament only for the other guys.

The basic problem is that those who have not broken completely with capitalist ideology must always try, as Harman puts it, “to pin the blame on something other than capitalism as such”.

What is at issue is the lack of rethinking, not “disagreement with Harman.” There is a world beyond the shores of the UK. Thus, consider the views of the US Stalinist economist David Laibman, who I quote in my review. Not long ago, he wrote stuff like

Capitalism … maintains a certain coherence over time. The homeostatic aspects must be balanced against the transformative, crisis-provoking ones. The term “equilibrium” … has different meanings … and some of them are crucial to the Marxist enterprise.

Has there been any serious rethinking of this on Laibman’s part. No. Instead, true to tradition, the only thing that’s happened is that his line’s been changed again:

“the Marxist understanding of the inherent instability and progressive unworkability of capitalism has been vindicated!”

(The first quote is from David Laibman, 2004, “Rhetoric and Substance in Value Theory: An Appraisal of the New Orthodox Marxism.” In Alan Freeman, Andrew Kliman and Julian Wells (eds), The New Value Controversy and the Foundations of Economics (Edward Elgar), p. 15. The second is from David Laibman, 2009, “The Onset of Great Depression II: Conceptualising the Crisis,” emphasis in original.)

Of course, some people aren’t even changing their line, since the specific form of appearance of this crisis permits them to continue to think that they can properly pin the blame on “neoliberalism” or “financial capitalism” or “deregulation” or “corporate greed” or anything and everything but capitalism itself. So that’s why, far from trying to “shut down the debate,” I’ve been trying to get one going. But I can count on the fingers of zero hands the number of times I’ve been invited, here in New York or elsewhere in the US, to debate a simultaneist-Marxist economist or any other proponent of the view that the current crisis is purely a financial crisis unconnected to a persistent profitability problem.

2. On the crisis and the persistent fall in profitability

a. Jefferies writes that my review of Harman’s book “re-treads” a “well worn road” according to which

capitalism is stagnant and has been for nearly four decades now. Throughout the period of globalisation …, capitalism has seen declining production and investment, overcapacity and low, stagnant or falling profit rates. The digital age, internet revolution and Nintendo Wii Fit are all manifestations of capital’s inability to revolutionise the productive resources.

Almost all of this is simply false. Neither in my review nor elsewhere do I claim that capitalism is stagnant, that is it unable to revolutionize the productive resources, or that there have been declining production and investment throughout the period of globalization. And “overcapacity” as such is an obvious fact (does Jefferies wish to argue that the capacity utilization rate has been 100%?).

For the same reason, it is also simply false to claim, as he does, that my review “mount[s] a standard defence of the stagnation school” or that it is “a thinly veiled polemic against those Marxists specifically including ourselves in Permanent Revolution (PR), who have demonstrated that the period of capitalist globalisation has been anything but stagnant.”

To his claim that my review is a polemic specifically against Permanent Revolution, he adds the further claim that “Kliman … goes on ‘Even some Marxists spoke of a “new long upturn”’. Kliman is referring to PR’s 2006 article ‘Capitalism’s Long Upturn.’  Of course he does not admit it.”

Neither of these claims is true. I did not have the views of Permanent Revolution—with which I am familiar only in passing––in mind when I read Harman’s book or when I wrote my review. What was on my mind was the pervasive myth of “capital resurgent” put forward by some academic Marxist economists and, unfortunately, parroted by many on the US left. (Capital Resurgent is the title of a 2004 book by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, two people who are genuinely “academic Marxist[s]”; I am a Marxist-Humanist who happens to teach for a living.) For example, even well into the current crisis, late last year, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and all that, the US “radical” economic “journalist” Doug Henwood spoke of the period since the early 1980s as a new long boom, or words to that effect.

And I did not refer to “PR’s 2006 article ‘Capitalism’s Long Upturn,’ which I do not recall having read and doubt that I read. I was quoting the author of the book I was reviewing. The words “Even some Marxists spoke of a ‘new long upturn’” are his, as I indicated in a footnote, though Jefferies does not bother to inform the reader of that fact.

b. Jefferies complains that

Kliman tries to prove too much. By wanting to demonstrate that profit rates have not recovered with globalisation, he actually shows that they rose in the 1970s compared with their levels in the 1960s boom, particularly after the oil crisis of 1973. It effectively destroys profit rates as a guide to the health of the capitalist economy or otherwise.

I have anticipated and responded to this argument in “The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis: New Temporalist Evidence.” See part II, section C. The extremely short version is that the rate of profit and “the health of the capitalist economy” are different things and shouldn’t be conflated.

I also made adjustments for inflation (in the general price level and in the monetary expression of value) in part V, section D of the same paper. Nominal rates of profit did of course rise sharply in the 1970s. That’s exactly what should be expected in a period of rapidly accelerating inflation. But (as I noted in my review of Zombie Capitalism) the rise is entirely or almost entirely attributable to the inflation. The adjusted historical-cost rates of profit did not rise sharply. When a broad measure of “profit” is used in the numerator, my results indicate that the inflation-adjusted historical rates of profit fell during the 1970s.

However, in the period between the trough of 1982 and the last trough before the current crisis, 2001, there was little or no difference between the trends in the nominal rates of profit and the trends in the inflation-adjusted rates.  Depending on the particular measure of profitability, there was a very slight rise in the rate of profit, or a complete failure of the profit rate to recover, or a continuing fall in the rate of profit.

c. Jefferies contends that my way of measuring the rate of profit “is not a Marxist theory of the rate of profit” because I “exclude[ ] wages and circulating constant capital” from the denominator.

I have anticipated and responded to the “Marxist theory” bit in part II, section D of “Persistent Fall.” I do not exclude circulating constant capital, though I didn’t think a review of Zombie Capitalism was the place to go into a long discussion of the various measures of profitability I have looked at. Measures that include circulating constant capital (which are quite unsatisfactory, because they also count output that hasn’t yet been sold as advanced capital) are reported in “Persistent Fall.” One historical-cost rate of profit that includes it rose just a tad between the 1982 and 2001 troughs, while the other continued to fall.

I did not include wages, because data on the turnover time of wage payments are unavailable. The turnover time is important because, although the total wage bill is large, the turnover of wage payments is rapid, so little capital is advanced in the form of wages. As an exercise, I have just assumed that wages turn over twice a month on average and have thus included 1/24 of the annual wage bill in the denominators of the rates of profit. The trends in the rate of profit are scarcely altered. (My data are in a spreadsheet available to all on my website, in the same location as “Persistent Fall,” so you don’t have to take my word for it.)

d. Jefferies writes, “leaving [circulating constant capital and wages] out of the equation means that an accurate measure of profit rates cannot be established.” I have anticipated and responded to this argument in part II, section C of “Persistent Fall.”

e. Jefferies also objects to my use of historical-cost rates of profit (the only genuine rates of profit there are):

There is also a debate amongst Marxists economists, as to whether to use historical or current cost of fixed assets when determining the value of assets in the calculation of the rate of profit. Kliman thinks it is correct to use historical cost. Marx on the other hand explained that as the socially necessary labour time required for the cost of capital production changed so would the value of fixed assets. If a capitalist buys an expensive machine it may be working fine, but if a new cheaper machine is invented that is no consolation to him (probably it’s a bloke). He cannot insist that his machine cost him hard money and he wants it back. The capitalist will simply be unable to sell his now expensive and out of date product. Instead the cost of the capitalists historic investment will be devalued immediately to the level of the most efficient competitor i.e. its current replacement cost. Historic investments will be written down to their present cost of reproduction, i.e. the socially necessary labour time they cost now.

Yeah, I know. I’ve read Marx, too, and well enough to know that this is irrelevant at best. (Actually, the devaluation of the capital causes the rate of profit to fall, not rise, when the loss is written down, which is a hugely important phenomenon in this crisis.) Jefferies is simply confusing the value (or price) of means of production with the capital that was advanced to acquire them. A rate of profit is the ratio of profit to advanced capital, not the ratio of profit to the value or price of means of production. [Two irrelevant sentences in original post removed by me on 10/24/09--AJK]

A fuller critique of current-cost “rates of profit” can be found in “Persistent Fall,” especially part V, and in my 2007 book, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency.

… Speaking of which–and speaking of inconsistency–I believe that it was Bill Jefferies who not only published a favorable review of the book on the Permanent Revolution site, but also specifically endorsed its repudiation of physicalism and simultaneous valuation:

Marx’s critics assert that it is the physical quantities of things, the amount of useful things produced in excess of the initial quantity of inputs that create exchange value.

This is known as “physicalism” and it runs alongside two other key propositions, “simultaneism” … and the idea of a “dual system”….

Physicalism could only be correct in a static world, where production does not take place in time, i.e. it is not temporal, and where inputs and output are priced simultaneously.

… of course Marx’s account does produce a difference between input and output prices, but far from this being an inconsistency in his account, it is absolutely consistent with his explanation of the derivation of prices from values.

In other words Marx had a temporal, single system method.

Was the author of these excellent passages unaware at the time that current-cost “rate of profit” is inherently physicalist, or that it is an inevitable by-product of simultaneous valuation?  Hardly. I repeatedly stressed this in my book. Also, at the end of the review of the book in Permanent Revolution, we find the following:

profit rates are measured against the actual cost [historical cost] of fixed capital … rather than its notional cost [current cost or replacement cost]. … If the rate … of profit is measured against the new notional value i.e. its value if it had to be paid for at present prices [i.e., at the current cost of fixed capital], then it is possible to show that rates of profit are low or falling, even when they are high and rising. [Bracketed material inserted by me—AJK]

So why has Jefferies now defected to the side of the physicalist-simultaneist academic-Marxist critics of Marx–basically the same people who use their simultaneous-valuation model to “prove” that Marx’s value theory and law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit are internally inconsistent and therefore false?  Why does he no longer understand that a rate of profit is the ratio of the profit of one moment to the sum of capital that was actually advanced at earlier moments, not the amount that would have been advanced if the means of production “had to be paid for at present prices”?  Might it have something to do with the fact that he suddenly doesn’t like the conclusions that flow from temporalism?

Ironically, it is “bill j” who accuses me of choosing a particular concept of profitability in order to get the conclusions I want! “The reason Kliman prefers the historic fixed cost measure is because it reduces profit rates now” (22 Oct, 2009, comment on his article). He does not substantiate this extremely serious allegation of gross scholarly misconduct.

The allegation is completely false. I first criticized current-cost “rates of profit” publicly more than two decades ago, in a 1988 conference paper that was then published in a journal (“The Profit Rate Under Continuous Technological Change,” Review of Radical Political Economics 20:2, Summer 1988). This is publicly available proof.

I of course had no way of knowing way back in the 1980s that current-cost “rates of profit” would rise while historical-cost rates of profit would level off or continue to fall into the current decade. And I’ve consistently (a term I use advisedly here) put forward and developed my critique of current-cost “rates of profit” over two decades.

In “Permanent Revolution – our way forward,” Permanent Revolution says that “Our starting point is that we are an organisation that tells the truth.” But their “bill j” has not done so.

f. Jefferies does not like the fact that I assess trends in profitability by means of trough-to-trough comparisons:

Kliman would claim that he ends his series in 2001 as this was the trough of the last recession. The problem with that is we are attempting to establish the reasons for the recession in 2008 not 2001. If we want to know why there was a recession in 2008 we need to know the direction of profit rates then not seven years before.

… [We need to know about] the period after 2001 … The period which preceded the present crash and which explains it …

First, I do not “end the series.” I make trough-to-trough comparisons when assessing trends in profitability, but I provide all of the data through 2007 and do not ignore it (though again, my review of Zombie Capitalism didn’t go into all the details of my study of profitability). Second, Jefferies is guilty here of cherry picking peaks and troughs, a procedure I criticize in Persistent Fall, part IV, section B. To avoid such cherry-picking of the years one prefers, one must look at comparable points in any series of data, such as profit-rate data, that exhibit pronounced short-run cyclical fluctuations. Third, “I measure trends in the rate of profit by comparing one trough to another … in order to ascertain whether a sustainable recovery in profitability took place” (“Persistent Fall,” p. 4, emphasis in original). A short-term cyclical spike in profitability, driven by a huge asset bubble, that ends in the worst crash since the Great Depression (or worse—time will tell) is not a sustainable recovery.

As for Jefferies’ belief that what occurs immediately prior to an event is what explains the event, I wonder whether he would maintain that when a chronically and terminally ill person is taken to the hospital and then dies, the cause of death is that she was cared for by the medical staff? Let me also note that I anticipated and responded to this line of reasoning in “Persistent Fall,” part III, section B, where I discuss intermediate links between falling profitability and crisis, and I explain why time lags are to be expected and why they pose no problem for Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit but are, instead, part and parcel of it.

3.  Other points

a. Jefferies quotes the following passage in my review of Harman’s book:

The title Zombie Capitalism reflects Harman’s focus on capitalism itself. Taking seriously Marx’s theory of the “fetishism of the commodity”, he characterises the system as a zombie, an undead creature[,]

He then comments that the relationship between “Return of the Living Dead” and “Marx’s theory of alienation has been until now an undiscovered quality.”

Maybe it hasn’t been discovered by Jefferies, but it was Marx himself who wrote, in an essay that––significantly––bears the title “Alienated Labour,”

The worker puts his life into the object, and his life no longer belongs to himself but to the object . . . . The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power.  The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force.

Nor was this only the view of the “young Marx,” the “philosopher” rather than the “mature” “economist.” In Capital, Volume I, Chap. 25, which deals with capitalist accumulation, he wrote,

Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand. [end of section 1]

Is Jefferies really unaware of this?

b. My review noted that when Harman started work on Zombie Capitalism, well before the current crisis erupted, he wanted “to criticise … the belief that ‘capi­talism had found a new way of expanding without crisis.” Later I noted that he “was convinced, before the crisis erupted, that another capitalist crisis was inevitable.” In a third reference to this point, I wrote that “he predicted the current crisis.” Jefferies takes the last phrase out of the above context in order to argue that “Harman did not predict the crisis.” What he apparently means is that that Harman didn’t predict the timing of another crisis, but “only” the fact that there would be yet another capitalist crisis––as if that were somehow an insignificant matter! In any case, I said nothing about him predicting the timing of the crisis, and what I meant­­ should have been clear from the context.

c. I also wrote that Zombie Capitalism endeavors to “account for the major economic events and trends of the past 90 years, booms as well as busts.” Jefferies responds: “As for Harman explaining booms and busts from the last century on in his little book, well he does not do that either.” But he provides no evidence or argument in support of this claim, so there is nothing of substance here for me to address.

[the above is the revised version of Oct. 24]

Note from the National Secretary of the MHI:

The Marxist-Humanist Initiative held a successful first Annual Conference in New York City on Sept. 26 and 27, nearly six months after our founding conference. The conference agenda appears in the announcement of the conference below.

A major event that took place at the conference was our collective work on a new public statement. We have since finished it, and we publish it here.

Our statement is followed by two writings by Raya Dunayevskaya that are discussed in the statement. They are from 1986, during the period before her death in 1987 when she was preparing to write a book on philosophy and organization—a subject she considered to have constituted a void in Marxism since Marx’s own writings. Her notes and letters from this period and unpublished writings from throughout her life are archived in the Wayne State University Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs and are available to the public.

The MHI aims to continue her exploration of the relationship between philosophy and organization, in theory and practice. To see what we have produced as an organization, you may wish to read this statement in conjunction with our founding Principles and By-Laws, and our April statement on “Why a New Organization?,” all of which appear on this site and are also available in paper.

 We look forward to your comments, and we hope to activate those who consider themselves Marxist-Humanists – whether long-term ones who are re-thinking the relation of philosophy to organization, or brand new people who may decide to help Marxist-Humanism at this critical moment for the future of humanity.

 ***************************************************************************

 The Self-Thinking Idea Does Not Mean You Thinking: 

A Contribution to Our Ongoing Effort to Work Out, in Theory and Practice, How to Renew Marxist-Humanism Organizationally

An urgent statement from the membership of Marxist-Humanist Initiative, mhi@marxisthumanistinitiative.org

                                                                                                                        October 8, 2009

To all those concerned about the future of Marxist-Humanist philosophy and organization:

1. Toward the Collective Organizational Renewal of the Marxist-Humanist Philosophy of Revolution

At a moment in which the world economic crisis makes the renewal and projection of Marxist-Humanism more crucial than at any time in recent history, the very future of this philosophy hangs in the balance. If current trends continue, it could well perish within the next decade.

This crisis of Marxist-Humanism can be seen in the alarmingly lopsided demographic composition of the organizations that call themselves Marxist-Humanist. Twenty-two years after the death of Raya Dunayevskaya, what is needed is not only what was needed then, a collectivity to continue Marxist-Humanism after her death, but a collectivity to continue Marxist-Humanism after the death of those who knew her. However, the membership of these organizations is predominately late-middle-aged and elderly, there are extremely few people in the 35–55 year-old age group, and the organizations also lack a substantial core of young people. “Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew,” [1] but how many members will still be alive and well in 10 years’ time? So even when the matter is viewed on this most prosaic level, it appears doubtful that Marxist-Humanism has a future.

But the demographic crisis is only a symptom of a deeper crisis––the lack of concretization and development of Marxist-Humanism since the death of Raya Dunayevskaya. The philosophical crisis stems principally from the fact that, after her death, News and Letters Committees did not make it a top priority to create a collectivity of people able to concretize and develop Marxist-Humanism collectively.

On the contrary, the retrogressive view took hold that it was sufficient, even desirable, for the organization and its members to act as placeholders until the next “genius,” by some mystical process, appears from out of nowhere. So did the mystical faith that “ideas have wings,” in other words, that the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism can survive and even experience ongoing development––without a conscious, organized effort to develop them collectively––simply by individuals getting their and/or Dunayevskaya’s works published and hoping for the best. And the frequent use of the term “philosophy” to mean a bare set of beliefs clung to as sacred, or a worldview (Weltanschauung) that achieves a spurious “totality” by remaining abstract and threadbare, made the lack of ongoing development seem something less than a matter of life and death for Marxist-Humanism. Given this use of the term, people seemed to be “practicing philosophy” in the absence of such ongoing development.

On a still deeper level, the crisis is structural, organizational. To attribute organizational failings to the wrong ideas of individuals in an organization is to succumb to the genetic fallacy of attempting to account for a phenomenon by identifying its origin (genesis). This is a fallacy because the question is not why wrong ideas were there at the start, but why they were never corrected and rooted out, instead growing to such a point that the philosophical problems reached the point of crisis. The answer is that the organizational structure caused these problems to be continually reproduced.

Retrogressive notions went largely unchallenged in News and Letters Committees because, for the sake of so-called “organizational unity,” a “big tent”/lowest-common-denominator approach was practiced. But under this big tent, there was actually disunity, though it was obscured by a kind of “peaceful coexistence” of opposed positions and ideas. This is in diametrical opposition to Absolute Method, which “allows no opposites merely to coexist peacefully or, to use Hegel’s words, to come ‘before consciousness without being in contact,’ ‘but engages all in battle.’” [2] Because the former approach was practiced, the organization attracted new people, to the extent it attracted any, who were like the existing members––people who were comfortable with the organization the way it was, people whose interests were served and whose perceived needs were met by it––while repelling others.

The ongoing reproduction of this dynamic allowed such members either to remain or to become the majority. And the combination of majority rule [3] and the “big tent” approach had a disastrous consequence: in combination, they turned the organization into one that served the interests and met the perceived needs of its individual members instead of working to achieve its own avowed goal, the continuation of Marxist-Humanism through the creation of a collectivity of people who take responsibility for continuing the philosophy .

Marxist-Humanist Initiative has set out to reverse this process. We are distinguished from the other organizations calling themselves Marxist-Humanist in this: we have the goal of rebuilding an organization capable of renewing Marxist-Humanism by concretizing and developing it as a collectivity. [4]

In the theoretical realm, we have had great success. It has not been a quick or easy process, but we have finally identified the structural deficiencies and we have analyzed how they caused the philosophical ones to be reproduced. We have sought to correct the structural deficiencies––above all, we have sought to create an organization that is able to work toward the achievement of its avowed goals, rather than to serve the different interests and perceived needs of individual members––and to do so without sacrificing democracy or imposing hierarchy. Creating an organization that works toward the achievement of its goals is easy; so is creating a democratic organization. The hard part is to unite these two things.

In order to unite them, we have developed what we believe are necessary structures and rules. The new method of working we have developed, and are now in the process of implementing, is especially important. The fullest democracy prevails within the organization, but the organization and its accomplishments are nonetheless safeguarded against attempts to hijack it or have it serve the different interests or perceived needs of individual members, because membership is a privilege granted to people who do their fair share of organizationally approved work to accomplish the specific goals and tasks that the organization sets for itself. [5]

Although not necessarily right for other times or places, this method is needed to address and solve the current crisis in Marxist-Humanism. Because of undemocratic practices, described in “Why a New Organization?,” [6] that we recently endured in other organizations, we realized that it would be useless to endure this yet again. So safeguards were needed that protect the organization and its achievements against cliques and individual agendas. Without them, we realized, it would be a waste of time to contribute the hard work, time, and thought needed to rebuild an organization that does not exist in order to fulfill our personal aims, but is capable of working to achieve its own aim––the renewal of Marxist-Humanism by means of its collective concretization and development. Thus the safeguards we have developed and are in the process of implementing are a necessary precondition for the renewal of Marxist-Humanism at this moment.

Whatever may happen to Marxist-Humanist Initiative, these theoretical achievements will endure. They cannot be taken away. They are, to date, our key organizational contribution to Marxist-Humanism and to the movement for human freedom generally. Others, now and in the future, may benefit from an examination of the structures, rules, and methods of working we have developed, and the process of thought by which they have come to be. Most importantly, these theoretical achievements show that retrogression need not be taken as one’s ground. It is instead possible to take the high point of development, Dunayevskaya’s work of the 1980s to transcend the mutual separation of philosophy and organization from one another, as the ground. [7]

Yet, due to circumstances beyond our control, we may not be able to progress from theoretical success to practical success. Practical success requires financial resources that we currently do not have and, even more, it requires that others join with us in the effort to renew the collective organizational development of Marxist-Humanist philosophy. If we do not achieve success in the practical realm, it will be because others have not joined in this effort or helped us obtain the needed financial resources.

We therefore issue this urgent plea to all those who continue to care about the future of Marxist-Humanism, and have not given up on the possibility that it may still have a future: Set aside whatever differences you may have with Marxist-Humanist Initiative, and join with us in the effort to rebuild an organization capable of renewing Marxist-Humanism by concretizing and developing it as a collectivity.

As we discuss below, we take the concept of proof, of the testing of ideas, very seriously. So we acknowledge from the outset that something might be wrong with the analysis above, although some key elements of the analysis were published in our April 2009 founding documents (see footnotes 5 and 6 above), and we have not yet encountered an argument against them. We invite and encourage everyone to subject our reasoning to the strictest scrutiny and to discuss its possible errors, with us and publicly. We regard reasoned public criticism and debate (in contrast to rejection without accompanying argumentation) as a sign of serious intent and of continuing concern for the future of Marxist-Humanism.

2. Why the Marxist-Humanist Philosophy of Revolution Requires Collective Organizational Renewal

Why does the future of Marxist-Humanism require all who care about its future, all who have not given up on its future, to come together in the effort to rebuild an organization capable of renewing Marxist-Humanism by concretizing and developing it as a collectivity?

From 1981 until her death in 1987, [8] Dunayevskaya frequently used the phrase “organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism” and similar expressions. Just what does the phrase mean? It does not mean individuals taking on organizational responsibilities. It does not mean individuals taking on organizational responsibilities within a Marxist-Humanist organization. It does not mean assuming responsibility for an organization that calls itself Marxist-Humanist. It does not mean individuals assuming individual responsibility for Marxist-Humanism, i.e., for its ongoing philosophical development. It does not even mean––and this is the pons asinorum of 2009––individuals taking responsibility for the ongoing philosophical development of Marxist-Humanism within a Marxist-Humanist organization.[9]

All of these things are good, even necessary, but they are insufficient. “Organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism” means that a Marxist-Humanist organization worthy of the name must itself take responsibility for the ongoing development of the philosophy. Thus the individuals who take responsibility for its ongoing development must do so organizationally, as a collective rather than as an individual task.

Note that Dunayevskaya herself explicitly put the emphasis on the adjective “organizational” more than once. For instance, she wrote, “responsibility, organizational responsibility, for the Idea of Marxist-Humanism developing Marx’s Humanism for our age, is so urgent in the 1980s.”  And shortly thereafter, she wrote, “[T]here was a responsibility for the Idea, before it actually gained that name of Marxist-Humanism. And that responsibility meant organizational responsibility for ideas.”[10]

The collective assumption of responsibility for the development of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism is imperative because its self-development, the self-thinking of the Marxist-Humanist Idea, as it were, does not mean you thinking––or, for that matter, us thinking. As Dunayevskaya put it in August 1985:

I want[ ], first of all, to firmly establish that the Self-Thinking Idea does not––I repeat, does not––mean you thinking.

Forget what I never stop repeating in the critique of Hegel, that it’s not Ideas floating in the upper regions of the philosopher’s heavens that “think”; it is people who think. That is totally wrong if you are serious about tracing the Logic of an idea to its logical conclusion. Therefore, instead of any person (including what was primary to Hegel––philosophers) thinking, I want you to face the Idea itself thinking, i.e., developing it to its ultimate. [11]

Thus the Self-Thinking Idea is not a process that takes place within the confines of an individual’s head. It is the ceaseless development of the Idea itself.

Of course, however, it is people who think. Thus the ceaseless development of Marxist-Humanism requires people to be “bearers” of this process. So we seem to be back to where we started. The Self-Thinking Idea does seem to mean you thinking.

However, this is incorrect. There is a crucial difference between the self-development of the Idea and the intellectual self-development of the people who carry out this process (which is not to deny the desirability of, and even the need for, both). People are needed to carry out Marxist-Humanism’s ongoing development, but the development of thoughts inside their heads, while necessary for Marxist-Humanism’s development, is not identical to it.

To understand the difference, and what it has to do with organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism, we need to study Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of Hegel’s discussion of the third attitude (or position) of thought with respect to objectivity at the start of his Smaller Logic. The third attitude is the philosophy of Intuitionalism. Writing to George Armstrong Kelly on December 8, 1986, she inverted the sequence of Hegel’s text in order to develop her understanding of a “dialectic flow in the third attitude to objectivity from a critique of the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists to organizational responsibility.” [12]

In her critique of the Intuitionalist philosophy, Dunayevskaya was concerned above all with the importance of and need for proof. Intuitionalism denies the possibility of, as well as the need for, proof of what is thought to be known about “what is infinite in import.” [13] With regard to such matters, it holds that the truth can be known immediately, that is, in an unmediated fashion. Such knowledge supposedly does not require the mediation of proof, the process of demonstration.

Dunayevskaya held firmly to the opposite view (as did Hegel). Nine days after writing to Kelly, she asked us to “take the question of proof, not merely as something ‘scientific,’ but as process which is every bit as great a determinant in philosophy as in organization.” [14] And a month earlier (November 15), in a text entitled “On Third Attitude to Objectivity” that largely prefigures the letter to Kelly, she developed this point at length: [15] “Now whether you go into the details … or skip directly to para. 72 [of the Smaller Logic’s discussion of the third attitude], the point still is on the necessity of proof.”

She then quoted Hegel: “A second corollary which results from holding immediacy of consciousness to be the criterion of truth is that all superstition or idolatry is allowed to be truth …. It is because he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and syllogism of what is termed mediate [mediated] knowledge, that the Hindu finds God in the cow, the monkey, the Brahmin, or the Lama.” [16] In other words, what is wrong with efforts to bypass the process of demonstration is that they allow “all superstition or idolatry” to be taken as true. Marxist-Humanism cannot tolerate this. As we know, if it is not subjected to the process of demonstration, it, like anything else, becomes the dogma of a cult.

In the same November 15, 1986 text, Dunayevskaya summarized the “essence” of Hegel’s critique of the Intuitionalist philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: “The essence of his sharp attack on Jacobi is that … it is absolutely wrong” to turn back to what was at one time right, the starting point of modern philosophy, Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). What this has to do with the issue of proof is that, as Hegel notes, Descartes’ conclusion is “not mediated, or proven.” [17] “[T]he whole attack,” Dunayevskaya wrote, “is very, very deeply rooted against anything, whether Cartesian or Jacobi or Spinoza[,] that roots its philosophy in ‘unproved postulates.’” [18].

She then quoted Hegel’s comment that “philosophy, of course, tolerates no mere assertion or conceit, and checks the free play of argumentative seesaw.” [19] These things are reactionary: “It is for this that Hegel called Jacobi a reactionary.” [20]And in her letter to Kelly of the next month, Dunayevskaya returned to this theme, arguing that “mere faith” makes retrogression nearly inevitable: “Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to escape regression by mere faith.” [21] “Mere faith,” as we shall see, is a reference to the “faith” or “personal revelation” celebrated by Intuitionalism as “immediate knowing,” knowledge supposedly acquired without a process of proof.

Ideas must be proved, subjected to a process of demonstration, in order genuinely to be known to be true. Otherwise, anything can be taken as being known immediately to be true. The nearly inevitable consequence of the latter is that thought, since it has not been “check[ed]” by a process of demonstration, does not develop but, on the contrary, retrogresses into superstition, idolatry, mere assurances, and imaginings. This is so no matter however many “opinions and arguments without norm or rule” [22] are offered, and no matter how well they may seem to substitute for proof.

This, in a nutshell, is why the Self-Thinking Idea does not mean you, or us, thinking. Genuine self-development of the Idea requires continual “check[ing],” continual proving, but the process of proving is obviously not something the thinker carries out on his or her own. The very point of the process is to subject an argument that the thinker regards as proof to the scrutiny of others, in order to see whether it withstands their scrutiny. No proof is accepted on anyone’s say-so.

And this is where organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism comes in. In her 1986 discussion of the third attitude of thought with respect to objectivity, Dunayevskaya addressed the issue of organizational responsibility by taking up the Christian church. She did not take it up, nor do we do so now, in order to advocate hierarchical structure, the embrace of dogma, or the adoption of any specific religious beliefs. Indeed, Dunayevskaya, in a manner that some would regard as “un-philosophical” because they privilege beliefs (“philosophy”) over organization, did not focus on the beliefs of the church, but abstracted from them––set them aside––in order to consider it as an organization. [23]

On October 6, 1986, she wrote, “I’m still talking to myself … This time it’s on organization in relation to of all things, church or school or theological and philosophic conferences.” [24] In the mid-November text that anticipates her letter to Kelly, she wrote, “[Hegel’s] whole point [in his discussion of the third attitude of thought with respect to objectivity, beginning with paragraph 63], then, … is that he makes a very sharp distinction between the abstract expression of a ‘Supreme Being’ and Christianity which proves itself and has an organizational expression in the Church.” [25] And at the start of her letter to Kelly, she made clear that it was organization, not religion or philosophy of religion, in which she was interested as she re-explored Hegel’s analysis of the church:

[In Hegel,] the dialectical relationship of principles (in this case the Christian doctrine) and the organization (the Church) are analyzed as if they were inseparables. All this occurs not in the context of a philosophy of religion as much as in the context of the great dividing line between himself and all other philosophers[,] … on the relationship of objectivity/subjectivity, immediacy/mediation, particular/universal, history, and the ‘Eternal.’” [26]

Later in the same letter, she again discussed the church as an organization, this time in connection to Hegel’s critique of the third attitude of thought with respect to objectivity:

[w]hat excited me most about this attitude to objectivity is the manner in which Hegel brings in organization. As early as §63 Hegel had lashed out against Jacobi’s faith, in contrast to Faith: “The two things are radically different. Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the Church; but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of personal revelation.” As we see [in his next sentence], Hegel now has suddenly equated organization to principle, doctrine: “And secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine ….” [27]

Dunayevskaya is not advocating blind acceptance of the pronouncements of an “authority” or embrace of the tenets of Christianity. To understand why not, we need to recall that for her “the point” of Hegel’s whole critique of the third attitude of thought with respect to objectivity is “the necessity of proof,” mediated knowledge, as against the Intuitionalist claim that “what is infinite in import” can be known without mediation. Unlike the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy, the Christian faith is not the product of immediate, personal revelation, but the result of a process of demonstration. As Dunayevskaya remarked in the mid-November letter, “Christianity … proves itself and has an organizational expression in the Church.” Thus, the authority of the church is the “organizational expression,” the mediated result, of that process of demonstration.

But it is not merely a result. The church, organization, is also the mediation. It is the church, in other words, that takes organizational responsibility for the process of developing its beliefs, subjecting them to scrutiny, and demonstrating them. By means of this organizational process, “Christianity … proves itself”; the Christian Idea is self-thinking. [28]

Importing this into the secular realm, in particular to the Marxist-Humanist realm, the point is that there needs to be what Dunayevskaya called the “organization of Marxist thought.” [29] In order for the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism genuinely to self-develop, new as well as existing conclusions need to be checked, subjected to public scrutiny, and demonstrated. In the best case, non-Marxist-Humanists will take part in this process, but at the present time, outside engagement with Marxist-Humanist philosophy and theory proper, to the extent it exists at all, is almost exclusively a matter of “using” arguments and ideas for one’s own purposes or positioning one’s own thinking in relationship to them.

But even in the best case, organizational responsibility for Marxist-Humanism is needed in order to make sure that the checking of conclusions is carried out in an ongoing and adequate manner. Dunayevskaya addressed what can happen when this does not take place:

the [Johnson-Forest] Tendency … rushed to “conclusions” ….

Where Marxist-Humanism now checks before and after each movement from practice also the movement from theory, and measures how we anticipated some of the events as well as created the fabric––the single dialectic in both subjectivity and objectivity­­––that was not so when we were a united Tendency in the critical period of 1950–53 ….

Instead, State-Capitalism and World Revolution, in its section on philosophy, focused on Contradiction rather than second negativity and Absolute Idea, which would have brought us to Marx’s Humanism. [30]

Owing to the necessity for proof, and to the needed organizational responsibility for this process in order to ensure that the Idea develops to its ultimate, ideas simply do not “have wings” in the sense that the self-development of Marxist-Humanist philosophy requires––not even in the best case, and certainly not now. [31] Intellectual production without the necessary public process of demonstration and rigorous scrutiny is insufficient for the continued development of Marxist-Humanism, no matter how many works are republished or new ones are published.

And thus we reiterate our urgent call to all those who have not given up on the future of Marxist-Humanism and who are concerned to help it continue into the future. Join with Marxist-Humanist Initiative in a common effort to rebuild an organization capable of renewing Marxist-Humanism by concretizing and developing it as a collectivity. The need for it is great, but time is running out.

                                                                                              Marxist-Humanist Initiative

 [1] Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 195.

[2] Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy of Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 29. In the final chapter of his Science of Logic, “The Absolute Idea,” Hegel wrote that “the material, the opposed determinations in one relation, is already posited and at hand for thought. But formal thinking makes identity its law, and allows the contradictory content before it to sink into the sphere of ordinary conception, into space and time, in which the contradictories are held asunder in juxtaposition and temporal succession and so come before consciousness without reciprocal contact.” Hegel’s Science of Logic, A. V. Miller (trans.) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), p. 835, emphases in original.

[3] A single person owned or controlled all organizational property. In other respects, majority rule prevailed until the fall of 2007. For a discussion of that period, see our April 2009 statement, “Why a New Organization?,” available at http://marxist-humanist-initiative.org/why-a-new-organization/.

[4] See Anne Jaclard, “The Concreteness of Marxist-Humanism,” (available at http://marxist-humanist-initiative.org/?s=Concreteness+of+Marxist-Humanism) for a discussion of what is needed in order to concretize Marxist-Humanism.

[5] This issue is discussed near the end of our founding “Statement of Principles” (available at http://marxist-humanist-initiative.org/statement-of-principles-of-the-marxist-humanist-initiative/), and in paragraphs C(9), C(10), and E(1) of our By-Laws (available at http://marxist-humanist-initiative.org/by-laws/).

[6] http://marxist-humanistin-itiative.org/why-a-new-organization/.

[7] See especially Volume XIII of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection (Detroit: Wayne State University, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs), “Raya Dunayevskaya’s Last Writings, 1986–1987––Toward the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy.” Some of these writings are discussed below.

[8] See Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10946.

[9] The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary gives the following as definitions of pons asinorum: “a critical test of ability or understanding,” “stumbling block” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pons%20asinorum). See also the discussion of the term’s origin in the Encyclopedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/724634/The-Bridge-of-Asses).

[10] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10839, p. 10878, emphasis in original.

[11] Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Self-Thinking Idea in a New Concept of and Relationship to the Dialectics of Leadership, as well as the Self-Bringing Forth of Liberty,” August 1985, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 10348ff, emphases in original.

[12] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 11228ff, emphases added. Kelly, who died in 1987 at the age of 55, was a non-Marxist intellectual historian and political theorist, and a recognized authority on Hegel.

[13] G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, with the Zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopedia of philosophical sciences with the Zusätze, T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (trans.) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), p. 123, §77. 

[14] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10832.

[15] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 10811–12.

[16] G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, p. 120, §72; Dunayevskaya quoted a different translation.

[17] G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, p. 122, §76.

[18] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10812.

[19] G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, p. 123, §77. Geraetz et al. render the sentence as follows: “philosophy will not tolerate any mere assurances or imaginings, nor does it allow thinking to swing back and forth while using this type of arbitrary reasoning.”

[20] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10812.

[21] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 11228ff.

[22] G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, p. 123, §77.

[23] Let us bear firmly in mind that the Catholic Church in particular remains the most successful organization the world has known, both in terms of longevity and in terms of its achievement of it own goals. Although there are aspects of the Church’s experience and organizational dynamics that are specific to it, specific to religious institutions, and so forth, some of its experiences and dynamics are ones it shares with other kinds of organizations, and are thus relevant to Marxist-Humanist organization as well. Might it therefore not be appropriate to inquire into the organizational determinants of its success, setting aside other factors in order to isolate common experiences and dynamics, so that we can see what lessons, both positive and negative, we can learn?

[24] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10788.

[25] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, p. 10811, emphases added.

[26] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 11228ff.

[27] Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 11228ff.

[28] The soundness and salience of Dunayevskaya’s argument, and ours, in no way depend upon whether Hegel’s view of the Christian church as an “actually-existing” organization was in fact correct. The point is rather that there are two radically different kinds of “belief”––one is based on intuition and the other is the result of a process of thinking––and that their differences have to do with demonstration and organization. Hegel discusses the different senses of the word “belief” at some length in §63 of The Encyclopedia Logic.

[29] Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until today (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 156, emphasis in original.

[30] Raya Dunayevskaya, “The Movements from Theory as Well as from Practice vs. the Great Artificer, Ronald Reagan, from whom the Whole World is a Stage,” July 7, 1984, end of part III, section 2. The full text is in Raya Dunayevskaya, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 8193ff. Part III is sometimes known by its subtitle, “Not by Practice Alone: The Movement From Theory.”

[31] For more on the notion that “ideas have wings,” see the fourth paragraph of the present statement.

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Transcription of Raya Dunayevskaya’s notes entitled

“On Third Attitude to Objectivity,” November 15, 1986 

(Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 10811-10812)

             When, in my notes on Nov. 7, 1986, I diverted from p. 96 to return to a page of previous attitudes, specifically the Critical, as well as to the 3 Final Syllogisms and, of all things, J’s Notes on the Dialectic, I was really talking in as disorganized a manner as Random Thoughts are generally, rather than following through with the 3^rd Attitude as Hegel discusses it on p. 96, i.e. para. 62.  There are, after that, para.s 63 to 78 before that attitude is completed. The point is that, beginning with para. 63, the question of Faith and Intuition are too often “subjected to arbitrary use, under no better guidance than the conception and distinctions of psychology, without any investigation into their nature and motion which is the main question, after all.” Hegel insists that if one is going to qualify intuition “as intellectual, we must really mean intuition which thinks …”  His whole point, then, (and it continues on p. 98) is that he makes a very sharp distinction between the abstract expression of a “Supreme Being” and Christianity which proves itself and has an organizational expression in the Church.

             Now whether you go into the details of 64 to 72 about the one-sidedness of the intuitional school or skip directly to para. 72, the point still is on the necessity of proof. Thus, continuing the rejection of abstractions like Supreme Being:  “A second corollary which results from holding immediacy of consciousness to be the criterion of truth is that all superstition or idolatry is allowed to be truth, and that an apology is prepared for any contents of the will, however wrong and immoral.  It is because he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and syllogism of what is termed mediate knowledge, that the Hindu finds God in the cow, the monkey, the Brahmin, or the Lama.”

             The essence of his sharp attack on Jacobi is that Descartes was right because it was the starting point for modern philosophy, but it is absolutely wrong “to return to this modern starting point or this metaphysic in the Cartesian philosophy”.  He then goes into the 3 points on which Jacobi and Descartes agree: 1) “Cogito, ergo sum” at which point Hegel notes parenthetically “(Descartes, in fact, is careful to state that by thought he means consciousness in general.)  This inseparability is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated.”

             “2) The inseparability of existence from the conception of God:  the former is necessarily implied in the latter, or the conception never can be without the attribute of existence which is thus necessary and eternal.”  At this point, Hegel footnotes all of Descartes and also Spinoza.

             “3) The immediate consciousness of the existence of external things.”

             In a word, the whole attack is very, very deeply rooted against anything, whether Cartesian or Jacobi or Spinoza that roots its philosophy in “unproved postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable, proceeds to wider and wider details of knowledge and thus gave rise to sciences of modern times. The modern theory (of Jacobi) on the contrary, (para. 62) has come to what is intrinsically a most important conclusion, that cognition proceeding as it must by finite mediation can know only the finite ….”

             As against this, Hegel concludes naturally “philosophy, of course, tolerates no mere assertion or conceit, and checks the free play of argumentative seesaw.”  It is for this that Hegel called Jacobi a reactionary and ended the whole attack with this final sentence, before going to Logic itself: “Strictly speaking, in the resolve that wills pure thought, this requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.”

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Letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to George Armstrong Kelly,

December 8, 1986 

(Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 11228ff)

 Dear GAK:

            Despite the acknowledged gulf between us on the Absolute Method, may I discuss with you (and may I hope for a comment from you?) my latest self-critique on organization? On that question I also see Hegel in a new way. That it is to say, the dialectical relationship of principles (in this case the Christian doctrine) and the organization (the Church) are analyzed as if they were inseparables. All this occurs not in the context of a philosophy of religion as much as in the context of the great dividing line between himself and all other philosophers that he initiated with the Phenomenology of Mind, on the relationship of objectivity/subjectivity, immediacy/mediation, particular/universal, history and the “Eternal.” This addition to the [Encyclopedia] Logic—the Third Attitude to Objectivity—I see in a totally new way.

             I can’t hide, of course, that though it’s not the Absolute, I’m enamored with that early section of the Encyclopedia outline of the Logic, because it was written after Hegel had already developed Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Idea, Absolute Method.

             Here history makes its presence felt, by no accident after the Absolutes both in the Phenomenology and in the Science of Logic, as well as in anticipation that he is finally developing the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind.  Indeed, that to me is what made possible the very form of compression of those innumerable polemical observations on other philosophers and philosophies into just three attitudes to objectivity.

             This time, as we know, a single attitude, the First, embraces everything preceding the modern age. Further emphasis on this compression is evident when Hegel comes to the modern age and includes both empiricism and criticism in the Second Attitude.

             My attraction to the Third Attitude was not due to the fact that it was directed against those who placed faith above philosophy—the Intuitionalists. (I’m not renewing our old debate, just because I’m an atheist; atheism, to me, is one more form of godliness, without God.) Rather, the attraction for me continued to be the dialectic. Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to escape regression by mere faith.

             Here again, history enters, this time to let Hegel create varying views of Intuitionalism, depending on which historic period is at issue. Intuitionalism is “progressive” in the period of Descartes because then empiricism opened the doors wide to science. On the other hand, it became regressive in the period of Jacobi.

             It is here that I saw a different concept of organization when it comes to the Church than in all of Hegel’s many oppositions to the clergy’s dominance in academia. Do please follow my strange journey, that I identify as the self-determination of the Idea.

             The Third Attitude begins (§61) with a critique of Kant, whose universality was abstract so that Reason appeared hardly more than a conclusion with “the categories left out of account.” Equally wrong, Hegel continues, is the “extreme theory on the opposite side, which holds thought to be an act of the particular only, and on that ground declares it incapable of apprehending the Truth.”

             In praising Descartes, Hegel points not only to the fact that empiricism opened the door to science, but that Descartes clearly knew that his famous “Cogito ergo sum” wasn’t a syllogism, simply because it had the word “therefore” in it. This becomes important because Hegel’s critique could then be directed against the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists, for equating mind to mere consciousness, and thus “what I discover in my consciousness is thus exaggerated into a fact of consciousness of all, and even passed off for the very nature of mind” (§71). That too is by no means the whole of the critique. What excited me most about this attitude to objectivity is the manner in which Hegel brings in organization. As early as §63 Hegel had lashed out against Jacobi’s faith, in contrast to Faith: “The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the Church; but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of personal revelation.” As we see, Hegel now has suddenly equated organization to principle, doctrine: “And secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine; while the scope of the philosophic faith is so utterly indefinite, that, while it has room for faith of the Christian, it equally admits belief in the divinity of the Dalai Lama, the ox, or the monkey.”

             Hegel proceeds (§75) “And to show that in point of fact there is a knowledge which advances neither by unmixed immediacy nor unmixed mediation, we can point to the example of the Logic and the whole of philosophy.”

             In a word, we’re back at the Dialectic and it’s only after that (§76) that Hegel uses the word “reactionary” in relationship to the whole school of Jacobi, that is to the historic period, “The Recent German Philosophy.” “Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw” (§77).  Freedom and Revolution (which word I “borrowed” from Hegel’s very first sentence on “The Recent German Philosophy”) will hew out a new path. In this way I see the dialectic flow in the third attitude to objectivity from a critique of the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists to organizational responsibility.

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Please note that the study is kind of long — 27,000 words, 106 double-spaced pages. If you just want the main conclusions, here they are:

Conclusions

This paper’s principal findings are

1. U.S. corporations’ rate of profit began to fall about a decade after the end of World War II and the falling trend has persisted until the present time. Some measures of the rate of profit leveled off or increased very slightly after the early 1980s, while others have continued to decline. None indicates that a genuine, sustainable rebound in profitability took place.

2. Claims to the contrary are based on cherry-picking of the data and on the use of current-cost “rates of profit” that are not rates of profit in any normal sense.

3. The persistence of the fall in the rate of profit is not eliminated when rates of profit are adjusted for inflation in the general price level or in the monetary expression of labor-time.

4. Because the rate of profit has not rebounded, there has not been a growing divergence between the rate of profit and the rate of capital accumulation. The rate of accumulation has tracked the rate of profit quite closely, and the former has fallen in response to the fall in the latter.

5. Distributional changes account for little of the fall in the rate of profit because, apart from a one-time fall in the profit share of income in the late 1960s, there has been no sustained distributional change. Once that brief period is set aside, almost the entire fall in the rate of profit is traceable to a rise in the value composition of capital rather than to a fall in the rate of surplus-value.

6. The dominant cause of the fall in the rate of profit, by far, was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall toward a lower incremental rate of profit determined by the growth rate of employment and the share of profit that is reinvested. Changes in the profit share of income, and in the relationship between nominal prices and the real value of commodities as determined by labor-time, had a very minor influence.

7. Since 1982, the ratio of surplus-value to advanced capital seems to have fallen in relationship to the rates of profit derived from official government data, because of a marked increase in depreciation due to obsolescence (moral depreciation) resulting from increased employment of computer technology.

These results strikingly disconfirm the claim, which is based on the contention that the rate of profit has rebounded during the last quarter-century, that the present economic crisis is rooted in nothing deeper than financial-sector phenomena (such as irresponsibility and deregulation that produced unsustainable asset-price bubbles) that are essentially unrelated to and separable from movements in profitability. They therefore fail to lend support to the now-fashionable belief that greater state control over the financial sector will suffice to prevent the recurrence of similar crises in the future.

My findings also indicate that Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit fits the facts remarkably well. The substantial explanatory power of this law can be seen especially in the fact that the principal source of the fall in the observed nominal rate of profit was the pronounced tendency for the rate of profit to fall toward a lower incremental rate of profit that is regulated by the factors that the law singles out (the growth rate of employment and the rate of surplus-value that is reinvested).

It is time to reclaim this law and the value theory in which it is grounded. Yet they cannot be reclaimed as long as the myth that they have been proven to be internally inconsistent is allowed to persist. The record needs to be set straight, and the “Marxian economics” tradition ––which has given us “consistent” but spurious current-cost rates of profit that head ever upward while the economy goes down the tubes and, as a direct result, Marxian theories of the current economic crisis that take surface financial-sector phenomena to be essential causes of the economic crisis––needs to be repudiated.

In light of the crisis of neoliberalism that the “financial crisis” has made apparent, but also the impasse of the Left, political analysts and activists increasingly turn to Sweden as a “socialist” example. However, the “socialist” character of Swedish society is a severely limited one. For the last 20 years or more, Swedish society has been moving steadily in the opposite direction of socialism, in a wave of privatization, retrenchment of social services and social security, “flexibilization” of labor-market relations, and increasing inequalities. Furthermore, Swedish socialism – “the social policy road to socialism” – was a class-collaborationist attempt to achieve “socialism within capitalism,” a project that from the outset was bound to fail because of its inner contradictions. From this perspective the speaker deduces some political implications for the Swedish labor movement and the international Left in general.

Daniel Ankarloo holds a doctorate in economic history and is a Senior Lecturer of  social policy and social work at Malmö University in Sweden.  He is a frequent contributor to the theoretical and political debate within the Swedish labor movement and the Left.  He has published widely in Swedish journals on topics of economics and politics – recently with specific focus on the prospects and limitations of the Swedish Welfare Model.  He has published two books in Swedish on the topic: Kris i välfärdsfrågan (Crisis in the Welfare Issue) and Marknadsmyter: en kritisk granskning av nyliberala påståenden (Market myths: a Critical Look at Neo-Liberal Assertions).  Ankarloo is currently working on a book on the Swedish Welfare Model in English.