Prabhat Patnaik’s opening remarks:

What framework is needed to understand land acquisition in India? In Marx’s analysis of older, pre-capitalist communities, land acquisition involved the dispossession of the primitive community and their re-absorption as individuals into the proletariat class. This transition from one form of community to another was seen as historically progressive, as the proletariat was the revolutionary class.

In pre-industrial England, there were three factors that allowed for the dispossessed to be re-absorbed into the capitalist economy (none of which are possible in present day India or China):

1. Massive waves of migration to US, Australia, etc. If the same percentage of India’s population were to migrate today, it would amount to 300 million (?) people.

2. The ability to sell goods in the colonies. In other words, England could export its unemployment to the colonies, thereby significantly increasing the position of workers in the domestic economy.

3. During the early years of industrialization, machines were made by people through labor-intensive processes. Modern technology is one of “machines making machines.”

To understand capitalism in third world societies today, it is important to emphasize the distinction between the reserve army of labor and the proletariat. Extreme poverty is concentrated in the reserve army. In contemporary India and China, as labor productivity increases, the wage rate remains the same. An underconsumption crisis is averted through an increase in consumption by the elite. If jobs are not available, peasants remain or return to the rural regions, causing increased distress on informal sector employment. It is here that we find both a consolidation of the old community and the strongest resistance to neoliberal policies. The revolutionary role of the proletariat in absent. What we need to look for then are working-class political formations that defend petty-producers, without defending existing old community structures.

Group Response and Discussion:

Last year, a few of us heard you speak on a panel at Columbia University on ‘What Does ‘Imperialism’ Mean in an Age of Global Finance?’ This set off a series of discussions within our own group on the question of imperialism—what is the relevance and use of the concept for understanding our world system today, and also the relationship between imperialism and neoliberalism. (In particular, getting away from thinking of neoliberalism merely as another word for contemporary capitalism.) In many ways, your reflections today on global economic recession and the world food crisis provide us with a very clear and important framing of the current conjuncture and an opportunity to reflect further on how we might use these two terms—neoliberalism and imperialism—to understand the capitalist system today.

A few broad themes for discussion:

1. Delinking. You argue that third world economies such as India and China to “delink from the vortex of globalized finance’?” (section IV of paper). How should we think of this as a political project?

So, for example, Lenin, describing the imperialism of his time, observed how a privileged section of labor in advanced capitalist countries were able to secure some of the surplus value appropriated from the colonies. This continued in the post-WWII period, when unionized labor in the US were the beneficiaries of US global empire. As you say, state expenditure in the form of Keynesian welfare spending, was a major exogenous stimuli for advanced capitalist economies during this period. In this historical context, the call for delinking of the Third World is also specifically a recognition of the corporatist attitude among powerful sections of the working class in advanced capitalist countries.

Of course, this privileged position of the working class in advanced capitalist states has been under assault since the advent of neoliberalism. As you say, one of the major aspects of the structural crisis today is a tendency toward “underconsumption.” One way to say this is to say that the situation for labor in advanced capitalist countries has been moving in the direction of that of labor in the third world. Because austerity measures imposed by financial interests and the freer movement of capital results, as you say, “in a significant diffusion of activities from high-wage metropolitan economies to low-wage third world countries like India and China.”

So, to return to the question, how should we understand delinking in this different conjuncture, when the situation for working classes in the center and periphery have been radically transformed. Or, to put it another way, if we want to think in terms of delinking, must our analysis not also point to the idea that advanced capitalist countries must also delink themselves from the vortex of globalized finance. And if so, what exactly is it that we are to be delinking from?

Finally, what are the limits to delinking? For example, how should we understand the current global attempt led by the US to delink Iran from the global economy?

2. Military. One form of state expenditure and exogenous spending is, of course, military spending. You identify very clearly how intensification of the current crisis leads to the emergence of fascist and semi-fascist tendencies within the third world that create divisions among people along communal lines.

In recent years, and particularly after the Mumbai attacks on 2008, India has spent a lot on beefing up military—to strengthen its role as a dominant power within the region, but also to take a position as being a frontline on the US-led “Global War on Terror.” What I’m interested in here are the kinds of linkages this entails. So, for example, India’s relationship to Israel—India accounts for 50% of Israeli defense exports, and Israel for 30% of India’s defense imports. These flows are under the full support of the US state.

So, the question is, where do we place this dynamic, of the ramp-up of military spending, as an exogenous stimulus, in relation to the deep structural contradiction of capital that you identify. Military spending in relation to GWOT is somewhat different from, for example, liberalization which allows global finance capital to come in and out of third world economies—whether its manufacturing FDI from someone like Walmart, or speculation in land values or financial assets.

Related to this is the question of Chinese and Indian land grabs in Africa. These seem to be the result of the structural contradictions identified with neoliberalism getting pushed on to other places. How should we understand these formations? As primitive accumulation? imperialism?

3. Democracy. To bring this discussion back to the question of imperialism, we might consider its relationship to democracy. Are common notions of imperialism and democracy inherently opposed to each other? Or, for example, could the rhetoric and practice of democracy be advancing imperial designs?

Patnaik’s response:

Finance capital today is quite different from Lenin’s time. Then, there was a strong link between state, finance, and industry. Today, finance capital is no longer confined to the nation-state. Instead, it makes its way around the globe in quest of speculative gains, without any links to industry. Finance capitalists no longer have an interest in seeing the world divided into blocks. Indeed, with the opening up of the world, segmentation is no longer even possible. First world labor become susceptible to third world wages (as seen in the drops in US wages, for example).

In India, there is an integration of financial elite into an international finance capitalist class. Domestic elite are no longer interested in protecting the home space. For example, they have an interest in Africa which is a kind of imperialism. However, it is an imperialism focused on control over natural resources by international capital; it is not an imperialism of which any segment of the working class could benefit.

Indo-China-Israeli pact. This is a result of our new economic formation. Previously, non-alignment was the foreign policy correlate of dirigiste. Today, we see this form of militarization as a response to the new liberalized economy. However, this is not as important as a stimulus to demand—most of this leaks out, anyway. Also, keep in mind that militarization alone is not fascism (which requires a mass movement). Militarism has to be backed by something else, like a Hindu-Muslim divide. It requires communal/racist/fascist movements as support.

Delinking. There is no real international worker movement today. Alliances must be made in the context of particular countries. If your economy is open to global financial flows, you are constrained to financial power. In Greece, financiers are demanding an austerity package. A necessary progressive strategy is to delink from these financial flows. This might allow the conditions for a political formation that is itself internationalist.

In relation to the question about Iran and the limits of delinking, it must be emphasized that delinking is only possible on a regional bases or for major economies like India and China that can cope with a separation from global flows of finance.

Finally, I would emphasize that imperialism is incompatible with real and substantive democracy. For example the IMF, World Bank, and finance capital insist on the autonomy of central banks, thereby removing from democratic accountability the most influential institution on economic polices.

— Ahmed Sharif and Neil Agarwal

Lenin’s The State and Revolution, is a historically- and theoretically-engaged work that provides extraordinary analytical clarity regarding state power.  Writing against the liberal conceptions that consider the state above society, an impartial entity that reconciles class antagonism, Lenin asserts that the state, as a manifestation of irreconcilable class antagonism, is necessarily the dictatorship of a single class and can never be autonomous from social struggle. He emphasizes that modern state power rests on three institutions: the bureaucracy, the army and the bourgeoisie.  Distilled to these pillars, this centralized state can only serve class dictatorship, which will “wither away” and become “dormant” as a new politics emerges from the ruins of the capitalist past.

In a fascinating polemic with anarchists over the means for radical political change from capitalism to this end, Lenin asserts that political relations of power and authority cannot be transformed immediately. It is as if the capitalist state can be smashed “at once”, with freedom asserting itself “naturally” — as if humans are free by nature and the only thing to do is to remove the obstacles and repressive mechanisms of the modern state. Freedom is not a returnof the human to his/her nature where he/she is free by definition. Freedom is the future which demands a radical political-economic transformation and reconfiguration of social relations and means of realizing life potentialities. In this sense the expropriation of rents aims to enable the formation of new social relations on the basis of material transformations.  In relation to that, we wonder, how does Lenin address the question of authority and autonomy? He does not see necessarily a contradiction between the two, which the liberal theories often assume. Autonomy is not that which is essentially against any presence of authority. The relationship between authority and autonomy (here one may rather think of freedom instead of autonomy) is both a pragmatic and theoretical concern.  On a pragmatic level, the complex machinery of industrial society necessitates some level of subordination and authority in order to function properly. The same can be said of the state machinery. It is on these grounds that a disavowal of state power is itself a disavowal of revolution. If “authority and autonomy are relative concepts” (56) and are not necessarily oppositional, this also raises interesting questions not just tactically, but theoretically, about the contextual nature of politics, power, and subjectivity.

Anticipating both revolution and counter-revolution, Lenin also addresses the problematic of capturing the state apparatuses and exercising state power. He suggests that the state must be smashed, and then retained, and that violent force is required at both stages, before the state withers away.  Here, we sense a certain tension central to The State and Revolution – how can the state be both smashed and retained by the same actor? Or to put it differently, what is it that could be smashed and retained or redeployed at the same moment? Moreover, how can state power be exercised and replaced with something new, when “all previous revolutions perfected the state machine” (26)? More perfection? Modification of the state? A new “transitional” state form, which will gradually undo itself?  For Lenin, this – and not the withering away of the state – “is the very nub of the eradication of the state as a state” (18).  This tension is manifest, as well, in Lenin’s discussion of forms of democracy.

Anytime Lenin encounters a question concerning the political future, he refers to the historical analysis of Marx and Engels (of the Paris Commune, in particular), noting: “Marx did not set out to discover the political forms of the future.  He limited himself to a precise observation of French history” (50), a historical experience which should be relearned for the future forms of the political. With this in mind, we ask how Lenin’s concepts help us to observe more precisely contemporary struggles, iterations of state power, and horizons of political thought. How could we make sense of the class formations at present and their relation to the state in light of Lenin’s view of the proletariat (which is both already there as the popular class basis of the Proletariat’s Dictatorship, and is the subject which is to become the subject of the October Revolution) and of the vanguard party, and notions of authority and freedom? Who is today the subject of revolution? And what is the concept of revolution?  Where and when? What sort of macroscopic anomalies, such as the postcolonial state, defy – and force us to rethink – both the bourgeois-state relation and the institutions that support state power more generally?  Also, Lenin provides an incisive account of the repressive forces necessary to replace the state’s standing army with a popular one. Given the preponderant force of the Communist Party following the Bolshevik Revolution, did the dissolution of the bureaucracy actually prove more difficult to anticipate or realize? What does this tell us about modern state power?

Lastly, how does this work relate to imperialism?  How could the state ever be conceived without considering the international relations in which it functions? How could the socialist state wither away when other states do not? How could the state be theorized without considering the forces of imperialism that work both from within and without the nation-state? How useful is it to think Lenin’s conception of the state (as an expression and instrument of class antagonism, of repression of other class forces; an organizational apparatus enabling the transition to Communism) with the postcolonial state form?

– Saygun Gokariksel, Mark Drury

Meeting with Stanley Aronowitz

Readings: How Class Works and Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered

These notes are meant to flesh out some of what we discussed with Professor Aronowitz, as well as some of the key ideas that emerge from the readings of his work we did for this meeting. My notes are oriented around three themes: 1) class formation and class struggle; which is very closely related to 2) historicizing class/revolutionary movements, especially in relation to the state; and 3) subjectivity.

1) Key to Professor Aronowitz’s arguments in How Class Works and to our discussion of it is that class formation is fundamentally overlooked in theories of class struggle. Aronowitz identifies two major contemporary approaches to conceptualizing class, which broadly fall into Marxian and Weberian camps. Building upon Weber’s idea of status groups, Talcott Parsons became the preeminent functionalist thinker of social stratification in the 20th century. In the Marxian tradition, ‘scientific’ Marxists (such as Eric Olin Wright) take structural relations to the means of production as categorically definitive of class positions. The problem with both of these approaches, as Aronowitz argues, is that they place class in varying series of atemporal grids, taking class as a given and dehistoricizing class formation (48-49). According to Aronowitz, the work of Pierre Bourdieu is a partial exception to this binary. Bourdieu temporalizes class as emergent from “what has been won in previous battles,” and theorizes class formation in vertical and horizontal (multidimensional) social space (51).

Aronowitz builds upon this situatedness of class formation in time and space to widen the scope of class into power relations more generally, drawing upon Gramscian notions of the subaltern and power/powerlessness to chip away at the traditional barrier between class and social movements (57-59). Also part of this widening of class formation is the inclusion of an analysis of consumption. Focusing on Fordism, Aronowitz fills out the much rehearsed treatment of Fordism as a change in production arrangements to point out that it also entailed major shifts in consumption habits that required a new extension of credit to ordinary people. In this analysis Fordism did not just usher in a new accumulation regime, but also a fundamental transformation of everyday life into consumer society (68).

What emerges from the text and from our discussion with Professor Aronowitz is his view that a class, as such, emerges when it divides society and forces it (society) to confront its questions. In this sense, classes are not a priori givens out of peoples’ structural relations to the means of production, but class formation is historically situated, and classes can form, grow, and even die out. This essentially builds on Marx’s 18th Brumaire and his (Marx’s) distinction between a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself, the latter of which is by no means historically assured of emerging. Class is thus more properly about class formation, which is to say a process of becoming more than a state of being.

2) As such, class formation and class struggle must be historiziced. In Chapter 3 of How Class Works, we get a detailed history of class formation and struggle in the U.S. One of the major historical shifts that Aronowitz identifies is the change in the role of the state in the early part of the 20th century from Adam Smith’s “Nightwatchman state” that exists solely for the purpose of protecting private property into “an organizer of capital accumulation and the chief purveyor of the fascist mass appeal” (72).

In our contemporary context, according to Aronowitz, the state retains three crucial functions: monetary policy, policing, and ideological functions (or what Lefebvre calls the reproduction of the relations of production). Gramsci and later Althusser rightly argue that the primary locus through which the state achieves the reproduction of ideology is the educational context, and to this end, we all should be careful not to be thoroughly turned into dopes by being trained for specialization in this or that!

Our conversation on historicizing class formation and revolution opened into a very thought provoking consideration of the relationship between class and the state. Aronowitz provided us a historical contextualization of the roughly decade post Bolshevik Revolution period. ‘Left Communists’ in Hungary and Germany such as Lukács and Korsch were either drawn in to the Leninist line (Lukács) or formed the opposition Council Communists (Korsch; see Paul Mattick for a discussion: http://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc/introduction.htm), while Trotsky and Kollantai were exiled. Aronowitz’s contextualization added (for me, at least) an otherwise obscured line to the commonly known split between Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ and Trotskyist international ‘permanent revolution.’ Aronowitz also examined to greater or lesser degree the similar issue of revolution and state power that arose in both the Spanish Civil War and the May 1968 protests in France that very nearly toppled the French state.

Issues of the state and imperialism arise on the level of theory in Paradigm Lost. According to Aronowitz, the Miliband – Poulantzas debate is in many ways a replay of the earlier Lenin – Luxemburg debate, Miliband taking the Leninist position that the state is instrumental both to the capitalist class and for the organization and defense of the revolutionary party against imperialism, while Poulantzas assumes Luxemburg’s structural position that the state is by nature capitalist, such that working class movements must organize autonomously from it (xiii). According to Aronowitz, both Deleuze & Guattari and Hardt & Negri offer similarly inadequate versions of Empire. D & G put forth an “anarchist manifesto” of smooth space (xvi) that Poulantzas anticipated as missing the state’s territorial administration of capital accumulation, international power relations, and political struggle (xxv). The argument of H & N, meanwhile, misses that an inside/outside dialectic applies only to the vertical power of the state, and not the ‘limitless’ horizontal space of capitalism. Thus, the arguments of H & N for a locus of “power residing ‘above’ or ‘over’ or ‘beyond’ the territoriality of the state are necessarily incorrect unless some space other than that of the state…can be identified as being the generator and locus of alternative political power” (xx). H & N therefore “could not anticipate” the antiglobalization protests as “precisely against the institutions of the Empire,” which, while molecular and international in scope, “are conducted with the political culture, as well as the borders, of the nation-state” (xxi).

In Aronowitz’s reading, moreover, Poulantzas makes an important series of arguments concerning contemporary imperialism, specifically that it is a result of class struggle. In this view, the export of capital is less a search for new markets and raw materials and more a result of the falling rate of profit of national capitals due to “the more or less successful economic and political struggles of the working class to raise living standards” (271). Because these struggles play out in the nation-state frame, furthermore, Poulantzas rejects Hilferding’s thesis of superimperialism, on the grounds that the state is not simply instrumental to the capitalist class. In other words, there does not actually exist the independent framework through which an international capitalist class could operate a political hegemony (even the IMF and WB, for instance, are run by finance ministers representing various nation-states).

3) Finally, our discussion coalesced around the issue of subjectivity. In our discussion, Professor Aronowitz argued that there is a need to take Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach seriously. In this thesis, Marx chides Feuerbach for grasping materialism only contemplatively and thus “not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”; it is because of this that “he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.” Aronowitz argued that failure to take this seriously has led to the type of overly objectivist theory that is looking the wrong direction to truly grasp the consequences of the fact that capitalism is increasingly incapable of providing meaningful work to people. To this end, Aronowitz maintained that the work of Henri Lefebvre is key to grappling with the notion of subjectivity (indeed, the opening of Lefebvre’s Production of Space is a short journey through social theory’s attempted elimination of a historical, collective subject). This, according to Aronowitz, is the importance of Lefebvre’s three volume Critique of Everyday Life: it takes seriously the transformation of social life into consumer society, in which consent – even to imperial projects – is achieved as people “literally buy in to the system” (74, in Aronowitz).

Thus, while we appear to be straying a bit from imperialism here, I think only upon first glance. Aronowitz draws on the Frankfurt School’s thesis on fascism in a way that connects back to the issues of class formation and the nation-state. As against the orthodox Marxist thesis that the German working class had fascism imposed on them, critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer argued that this missed the family and the workplace as crucial sites of ideological reproduction, with authority embodied in the father in the home, and in ‘the name of the father’ in society at large, especially in Nazi leaders. Thus, according to critical theory, “the whole culture, therefore, is caught up in the dynamism of history, and the cultural spheres…form in their interconnection, dynamic influences on the maintenance or breakdown of a particular form of society” (73). According to Aronowitz, then, the German working class had been integrated into the system of domination, and the subjectivities formed in home and school as preparation for the workplace are implicated in the working class acceptance of Nazism. Here we see subjectivity, class formation, and the nation-state all in play in Nazi Germany’s imperialist aspirations.

— Charles Dolph

Citations:

Stanley Aronowitz, “Marxism and Democracy” in Crisis in Historical
Materialism
(1981)

Stanley Aronowitz, Dawn Esposito, William DiFazio, and Margaret Yard,
“The Post-Work Manifesto” in Post-Work, eds. Stanley Aronowitz and
Jonathan Cutler (1998)

Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future (1994)

Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (1923)

Karl Renner. I don’t think Aronowitz mentioned any specific titles,
but “The Institution of Private Laws and Their Social Function” (1929)
seems to be the one to look at.

Stanley Aronowitz in New Labor Forum. I didn’t catch the title for
this, but looking online, he recently published “One, Two, Many
Madisons: The War on Public Sector Workers” here. Unless this refers
to the place where his OWS piece will be published later?

Michael Tigar, Law and Rise of Capitalism (1977)

International Council Correspondence (aka Living Marxism), ed. Paul
Mattick. This magazine, published from 1934 to 1943, was printed in a
six(!) volume collection by Greenwood in 1970.
Its also here: http://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc

Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc

Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes: the Limits of Mixed Economy (1955)

Anton Pannekoek on workers’ councils. Not sure a specific reference
was given.