Whos Right on the Left?

The liberalization of the left

Dave Bedggood, University of Auckland Dr.bedggood@auckland.ac.nz We live in the epoch of imperialism -the epoch of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. The short 20th century came in with the Russian revolution and went out with the Russian counter-revolution of 1991. But capitalism cannot resolve its fundamental contradiction. Once more we are in a world crisis which opens up a revolutionary period. We need perspectives for this time of prerevolutionary openings at centuries end. What is Imperialism? Lenin defined Imperialism as a necessary stage, the final stage, of capitalist development that results from finance capitals attempts to resolve its fundamental contradiction by the export of capital in the search for super-profits. Objectively capitalism has outlived its historically progressive tendency to develop the forces of production. It now becomes parasitic on pre-capitalist modes and increasingly destructive of the forces of production and nature posing the question of barbaric reaction or socialist revolution. As imperialists compete in dividing and re-dividing the world market in the search of superprofits they are forced to go to war which raises the prospect of revolution. Therefore imperialism must bring wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions. The first imperialist war temporarily resolved the revolutionary crisis by suppressing revolution in Europe and by isolating, containing and bureaucratising the Russian revolution. However, the counter-revolution was not deep enough to allow imperialism to drive home its victory. Mass communist and social democratic parties resisted further attacks at the expense of workers. So capitalism could not for long forestall a further major slump and a second imperialist war. Capitalism survived this revolutionary crisis only with the aid of Stalinism, which contained revolutionary upheavals during and after the war. First, Stalinism weakened the international working class and allowed Fascism to come to power in Europe. Second, Stalinism subordinated the world revolution to the defense of the bureaucratic caste rule in the SU. Stalinism actively suppressed revolutionary movements in Europe and East Asia. Even so the legacy of the Russian

revolution, workers property, remained intact and was extended by means of bureaucratic conquests to Eastern Europe, East and South East Asia. One third of the worlds resources and more than half of this population remained outside the direct control of imperialism. Nevertheless this profound counter-revolutionary settlement allowed capitalism to embark on a prolonged expansionary period the post-war boom which disoriented revolutionaries for 30 years. The boom created the impression that capitalism has outlived its internal contradictions. Yet despite state policies which prolonged the boom, world imperialism once more exhausted its capacity for development with the necessary return of crisis as the expression of the inherent contradiction between the overproduction of capital at one pole and the mass destruction and impoverishment of the worlds workers and peasants at the other pole. The postwar boom ended in a crisis of falling profits caused by the TRPF bringing with it a period of structural crisis (depression) lasting from the early 1970s to the present. We can divide this period into 3 phases in the crisis. [1] Social Democratic Austerity. This phase from the mid-sixties to the early 1980s saw SD governments introducing austerity measures against the working class but failing to make any significant inroads into government spending, restructuring etc. [2] Neo-liberal offensive. This phase from the early 1980s to the current is characterized by much more extreme attacks on the working class typified by Reaganism in the US, Thatcherism in the UK and Rogernomics in NZ and the restoration of capitalism in the SU and EE. [3] Third way Social Democracy. Beginning with the election of Clinton in the US and Blair in the UK, this right-wing social democratic phase seeks to reconcile classes by transcending left and right in a end of century reinvention of late 19th century social liberalism. Posing as the end of communism and end of history it is nothing more than a pax americana when US imperialism at the height of its world domination is able to impose its hegemony behind the mask of democracy and human rights. During both of the earlier phases of the crisis the Law of Value devalued and further concentrated and centralised capital. However this was not enough to restore the rate of profit and to create the pre-conditions for new upward cycle of capital accumulation. Even the incorporation of most of the former workers states back into the capitalist world economy failed to restore profits. Productive capital has not been sufficiently devalued and continues to face a crisis of falling profits and overproduction. Excess capital looking for short-term gains has exacerbated this fundamental tendency and created the symptoms of a global financial crisis in the world economy. Yet these symptoms will not go away unless the underlying cause of overproduction of capital is temporarily offset by a massive devaluation of excess capital on a world scale. This brings us to the

third phase of the crisis the contradiction between the Blairite political transcendence of crisis and the reassertion of an impending massive devaluation of US capital. Such is the character of the current global crisis and it informs all attempts to render the crisis in discourse and practice. The Current Crisis and the Liberalization of the 'Left' What distinguishes the current crisis from the previous two phases during the 1970's and 1980's is that it has the makings of a global, synchronic crisis of overproduction.1 No part of the world is able to carry the rest. The ability of the US economy to drive the whole world economy is now being questioned by its bourgeois apologists.2 Moreover, the global economy now includes Russia and the other European former degenerated or deformed workers states that are now fully reintegrated into world capitalism. China, Cuba and Vietnam are well on the way towards re-integration. Only North Korea resists but it is small, isolated and near collapse. The victory of capitalism over the workers states was a world historic defeat for workers not because it destroyed the bureaucratic caste, but because it destroyed the workers property relations won as a result of the Russian revolution of 1917.3 Yet this has not been sufficient to allow capitalism to overcome its crisis and return to the path of accumulation. Rather, these former workers states are now fully exposed to the destructive effects of capitalist crisis making the current crisis truly global. Thus the global crisis is not confined to a financial crisis.4 While this phase of the current crisis started as a collapse of East Asian economies in 1997 due to falling profits from overproduction of capital, it now envelops the former Soviet Union and Japan, and threatens to overcome China and Latin America. Far from being a financial contagion due to the so-called Asian virus we are witnessing a Wall St Virus since it is symptomatic of the inherent problems of the global economy including the strongest economy that of the US itself.5 This reality is making itself felt even in the highest ranks of bourgeois apologists. Gone is the Social Democratic complacency of the post-war boom, and the neo-liberal triumphalism of the collapse of communism. These fancies are being replaced by anxiety if not alarm at the possibility of a breakdown of the world economy and a return to anarchy and revolution.6 The most significant point is that the source of the instability is clearly seen to be more than an uncontrollable excess of speculative capital, but rather the failure of productive investment. Neo-liberalism, the ideology that provided the cover for the radical deregulation of state intervention in the operation of the market (LOV) is now giving way to a new orthodoxy. This is not a return to a classic Keynesian intervention which is now widely rejected as involving crude and unproductive state subsidies of capital and labour, but rather the

development of a much more selective state intervention that targets subsidies at productive capital and penalises unproductive capital. The new model draws on a range of intellectual sources, including the theory of the Schumpertarian Workfare State derived from Joseph Schumpeters brand of neo-classical economics. Schumpeter like Keynes did not trust capitalists to invest productively. In his view this was because competition (the LOV) did not lead to innovation and efficiencies, but to monopolies and stagnation. So rather than blanket state policies of reflation (which were suited to the post-war upturn) Schumpeter argued for selective state targeting of firms to encourage productive investment in innovation. Hence a Schumpeterian state intervention offers incentives to firms, (private or public is not a major issue) that innovate by developing new knowledge and techniques and applying these to production. Nor is there a welfare state mechanism since jobs are expected to come from innovation, and welfare is replaced by workfare.7 A second, and related, intellectual source is that of Foucauldian Governance Theory. This approach applies the method of Foucault to the analysis of the considerable 'indeterminacy' in state policies. Couched as an alternative to the modernist, particularly Marxist theory of the state, which argues that state policies are the result of the interests of social classes engaged in struggle, Governance theory attempts to account for political behaviour in terms of primordial assumptions about power permeating social life. The result is that Governance theory converges with the new Social Democracy in promoting limited reforms based upon the micro-behaviours of individuals without monolithic or even identifiable class or other collective interests.8 Under the influence of these currents I argue that most of the social democratic left has been co-opted by an ideological right-shift and cannot counter the appeal of the new middle. The LOV, having re-asserted itself under the sign of neo-liberalism to devalue constant and variable capital in the 1980's and 1990's, has prepared the ground for the return of Social Democracy as The Only Alternative. This neo-liberal-Social Democracy convergence in the 'radical centre' has reverted to social liberalism as the revised minimal program of the 'left', while the maximal program, socialism, has retreated backwards over the horizon. More importantly, I argue that the so-called marxist left' today has tailed social democracy in adapting to neo-liberalism in various ways, all of which fail to offer any genuine revolutionary alterative to the masses. This rightward shift invariably involves a move away from dialectical analysis of prodution relations towards a politicist or culturalist analysis of exchange, distribution and consumption moments. I call this tailing of social democracy into social liberalism, abandoning a revolutionary left pole, the liberalization of the left. This process can be demonstrated by critiqueing the most prominent neo-marxist schools the post-lAlthusserians, Critical Theorists, Regulationists Wallersteinians and Mandelites that have, under the influence of neo-liberalism, moved further away from classic Marxism towards pre/post-marxism.9

In the face of this liberalization of the left, I argue that today as in the whole of the 'short' 20th century, the only possibility of a revival of the Marxist method and analysis is to restore the unity of the science of objective reality and the subjective practice of revolutionary struggle.10 This requires a political regroupment around a revolutionary international program capable of mobilising the international working class for the transformation of capitalism and the advance towards socialism.11 First, I will consider the claims of the most prominent 3W advocates Giddens, Gray and Soros. Then I will look at the former avatars of neo-liberalism promoting a proto-global state, closely followed by the 'new new right' Governmentalists and Schumpeterians. After that we are a position to critique the classic Social Democratic and centrist Marxist responses to the 3W. Finally I will launch into an orthodox Marxist analysis of all these currents and present a outline analysis of where imperialism is heading at end of century, and a brief guide to revolutionaries about what tasks are necessary to resolve capitalisms crisis and once again pose the necessity for socialism. The Third Way Convergence It is clear that the past 15-20 years of neo-liberal reaction has laid the foundations for the Schumpeterian/Foucauldian State. They can be seen in the policies of the Third Way the centrist tendency of Blairism and Clintonism and Rogernomics in New Zealand. Brazil is a current case of a rampant remodeling of the state along these lines. Neither left nor right, the Third Way (3W) rejects both neo-liberalism and state socialism. The 3W has come to the fore now that neo-liberalism has prepared the ground. Already in place are deregulated, corporatised or privatised Keynesian institutions of nationalised industry, state monopolised welfare, health, education etc. The state now targets through its funding agencies the most innovative and efficient providers of goods and services whether they are publicly or privately owned. The problem is that while such national macro-economic reforms have cleared the way for micro reforms and direct foreign investment in production, the massive growth of uncontrolled finance capital flowing instantaneously around the world threatens to destabilise these reforms. Extreme cases are East Asia and Latin America where high interest rates are necessary to attract capital, yet penalise domestic industry. And when this increased debt burden forces capital to flee there is a retreat to forms of protectionism as in Malaysia, and to a lesser extent, Russia. To overcome this problem the neo-liberal gurus, including Milton Friedman have seen the need to impose controls on the freedom of movement of capital through regulating interest rates and exchange rates.12 Jeffrey Sachs writing in the Economist has put forward a scheme for an international Schumperian protostate. This involves the reforming of the IMF and World Bank as mechanisms for the regulation not only of finance capital, but also for the dissemination of innovation through targeted investments.13

Under this proposal no longer will the IMF and World Bank act as right and left hand of the US Treasury, deregulating Keynesianism with the right hand and sponsoring socially sensitive development projects with its left hand. Rather they will target loans to states or firms that innovate. The result should be international regime of selective state regulation of finance capital to ensure that it is productively invested to return super-profits to imperialism, and to ensure that social objectives of employment and social wellbeing are met.14 Can this shift from extreme neo-liberalism to the 3W work for capital? Can it offset the fundamental contradiction between use-value and exchange-value that threatens to collapse the world economy and open-up pre-revolutionary times? We need to analyse this prospect thoroughly since it is the key to understanding the future. Can the 3W stimulate a return to profits without creating pre-revolutionary depressions and wars? And even if this were possible, how long can this solution last since it must activate the more intractable problems of a growing polarisation of classes, peoples and nations, and the destruction of the forces of production including the environment. Does the 3W offer the escape from chaos and revolution that its apologists hope for? Or will world capitalism descend into the reactionary dystopia of barbarism? The 'new middle' or the 3W gets its name from its rejection of both neoliberal and socialist planning so-called extremes. Couched as 'beyond left and right' its most astute intellectual advocate Tony Giddens, sees the new middle as a genuine 'end of ideology'.15 Giddens along with John Gray are formidable insiders in Blair's coterie of think-tankers. Giddens critique of 'socialism' is longstanding. He argues that we are living in a 'post-scarcity' society where the old conflicts that animated the 'left' and 'right' are no more. Giddens' Third Way Tony Giddens recent book titled The Third Way is the basic policy prescription on how to overcome the failure of both neo-liberalism and socialism. He writes off the 'old left" and the "new right" and in its place as remodelled social democracy. He traces the evolution of this social democracy over the last two decades in Europe. "I shall take it 'third way' refers to a framework of thinking and policy-making that seeks to adapt social democracy to a world which has changed fundamentally over the past two or three decades. It is a third way in the sense that it is an attempt to transcend both old style social democracy and neo-liberalism. What are these fundamental changes' to which social democracy must adapt? Giddens poses these as the 'Five Dilemmas'. They are globalisation, individualism, Left and Right, political agency and ecological problems. The increasing globalisation of the world economy has forced nation states to change their forms of governance to include non-governmental agencies, new multinational forms like the EU and transnational organisations like the UN and

IMF. Giddens regards the new individualism not as a form of market egoism, but 'institutionalised individualism'. This means that individuals take responsibility for social solidarity rather than look to state or traditional authority. Since individualism is now the basis of social organisation this makes the old labels of Left and Right redundant. The new Social Democracy does not base itself on the opposition of collectivism vs individualism, but has taken over individualism as the means of delivering social justice. "With the demise of socialism as a theory of economic management, one of the major division lines between left and right has disappeared, at least for the foreseeable future...No one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism the arguments that remain concern how far, and in what ways, capitalism should be governed and regulated" 16 Giddens argues for the end to Left and Right so the Centre can be captured in its own name rather than as a compromise for opportunistic reasons. "The idea of the 'active middle' or 'radical centre' discussed quite widely among social democrats recently, should be taken seriously." 17 The reason for this is that globalisation, and individualism have posed a number of problems, which Giddens calls 'life politics' "the politics of choice, identity and mutuality" which require radical solutions and radical policies. Social Democracy is still 'left' in the sense that social justice is its focus, but the centre now has new radical substance as individuals are empowered to act to make decisions that can bring 'social justice', 'ecological strategies' and 'lifestyle choice'. The New Social Democracy requires a style of governance that captures the radical centre. The shift towards 'micro-politics' of social movements away from the old parliamentary structures points the way. Most of these movements have sprung out of the failure of the old Social Democracy to break down inequalities, or confront ecological crisis. Therefore, 'Third way politics' for Giddens means "no rights without responsibilities'" and "no authority without democracy" 18. There has to be a "deepening and widening of democracy". How is the new Social Democracy going to use democracy to provide social justice and ecological survival? Surely the existing inequalities are far too deep seated to respond to the 'radical centre'? First, the nation state must retain its authority to act despite globalisation. Its prime task is to re-engage in social investment, but with efficiency, accountability and legitimacy (popular support). It must devolve and decentralise to democratise, and provide the framework for the 'renewal civil society'. Civil society for Giddens is social life outside the state where individuals take responsibility for their actions. But how does civil society survive unless the new Social Democracy provides a material basis for survival? "The new politics defines equality as inclusion and inequality as exclusion, although these terms need some spelling out. Inclusion refers in its broadest sense to citizenship, to the civil and political rights and obligations that all members of society should have, not just formally, but as a reality in their lives. It also refers to opportunities an to involvement in public space". 19

But how is this possible without 'radical' measures of wealth distribution such as radical reform of access to education, health, housing etc? Giddens sketches out his radical plan for reform of social welfare. 'Positive welfare' means targeting social investment at human capital rather than income maintenance. "In the place of the welfare state we should put the social investment state."20 What are his 'social investment strategies to meet the demands of inclusion? Giddens recognises that workfare can only work if part of a wider strategy of social investment in production. This means state investment in (1) entrepreneurial activities; (2) life-long education; (3) public project partnerships; (4) portability of human resources; (5) family friendly workplace practices. Giddens asks: "Can these strategies produce...enough good jobs to go around for everyone who wants one"?21 His answer is that there is already evidence that work can be provided at a living wage with reduced hours so long as productivity increases. Therefore the positive welfare state that invests in social capital can provide the platform on which productivity increases and with it the jobs and incomes that are needed to prevent social exclusion. "Positive welfare would replace each of Beveridge's negatives with a positive: in place of Want, autonomy; not Disease but active health; instead of Ignorance, education, as a continuing part of life; rather than Squalor, well-being' in place of Idleness, initiative." 22 Sounds great but will it work? Social justice requires inclusion via jobs based on innovation and growing productivity. This line of logic seems unbroken. For Giddens the trick is for the new Social Democracy to coordinate globally so that it can regulate social investment in jobs and achieve social inclusion. What he overlooks, however is that the problems of the global financial market are the consequences and not the cause of insufficient investment, which in turn arises from falling profits. The New Social Democracy cannot overcome the inherent barrier of the old Social Democracy, how to get capitalism to pay for social investment when its profits are already falling, and capital is forced to speculate or die? It seems that Giddens prescription for the new Social Democracy is no better than the old. False Dawn John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. In a recent article headed "Unfettered capital spells doom", Gray speaks out about an impending worldwide slump as Russia, Japan and finally the US economies go into free fall. "A sustained slide on Wall St would not be a market correction but a signal for a major dislocation of the world economy." 23 Such comments coming from the left would carry no surprise. It is to be expected that the left should be the cheerleaders of global capitalism in crisis and the collapse of triumphalism into doom and gloom. What is remarkable about Gray's pronouncements is that he is a former leading advocate of neo-liberalism. Over a number of years he has promoted the ideas of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin - a leading neo-liberal philosopher. But today Gray has been converted to the centre and to a

defence of democracy that he says is imperilled by neo-liberalism. "The natural counterpart to a free market economy is a politics of insecurity. If 'capitalism' means 'the free market,' then no view is more deluded than that the future lies with 'democratic capitalism.'" This is one of the memorable quotes from Gray's new book.24 Essential reading, for all those who want reasons to abandon the more market fetishisms of the New Right, False Dawn is a damning indictment of the ills of global capitalism. The free market has proven nothing but a disaster. Gray takes us through the history of the market and proves that the market was the creation of the state: "The laissez faire policies which produced the Great Transformation in nineteenth century England were based on the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artificial. The truth is that the free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression." 25 The corrosive agent of economic liberalism is seen most clearly in New Zealand where the counter-reformation was swift and deep. Here in miniature is found the inevitable rise of poverty and the undermining of democracy. "The New Zealand experiment" Gray writes, "is the free market project in laboratory conditions." The same policies of privatisation, deregulation, attacks on the unions and on welfare benefits resulted in the "creation of an underclass in a country that didn't have one before...New Zealand has experienced an astonishing growth in economic inequalities of all kinds...more than in any other western country." 26 In advanced, 'social democratic' countries like Britain and New Zealand the consequences of neo-liberalism have been devastating but they are nothing compared to the destruction of third-world contries like Mexico. Mexico"had long been one of the world's most unequal societies. Two-thirds of all income is distributed to 30 per cent of the population...The lowest 30 per cent of the Mexican population receives only 8 per cent of national income. The minimum wage in 1993 was less than half of what it was in 1975." 27 Behind the New Right thrust is the United States and its attempt to impose laissez faire as part of its planned domination of the global economy. It is the ideology of free trade and capital mobility by which the US economy hopes to win out over all its rivals. But the price of this policy is rising poverty at home as well as globally, and for Gray this poses the real problem. What happens when the poor revolt? The rise of poverty and insecurity must lead to anarchy and rebellion says Gray. There are no reliable institutions left to act as buffers to contain the insurgent masses. Families, trades unions and the nation state itself have become powerless to stop the rot. "The raison d'etre of governments everywhere is their ability to protect citizens from insecurity. A regime of global laissez-faire that prevents governments from discharging this protective role is creating the conditions for still greater political, and economic, instability".28 So what to do? Gray rejects socialist or state planning solutions as

unworkable and no answer to the free market. But he is no less dismissive social reforms and the so-called 'social-market' economy. Global democratic capitalism is as unrealisable a condition as world-wide communism". The old socialdemocratic model of peaceful reform and Keynesian methods of government protectionism cannot cope with global capitalism that operates with the "house rules of a casino." There is no escaping the market that today leaves little room for nation states to manoeuvre. "No western government today has a credible successor to the policies which secured western society against mass unemployment in the Keynesian era...The social democratic objective of full employment cannot now be achieved by social democratic policies." So what prescription are we offered for all of these ills? "A regime of global governance is needed in which world markets are managed so as to promote the cohesion of societies and the integrity of states. Only a framework of global regulation - of currencies, capital movements, trade and environmental conservation - can enable the creativity of the world economy to be harnessed in the service of human needs." 29 Instead of nation states and Keynesian policies it seems we need an international (neo-Keynesian?) body capable of reining in the market. This global reformism is even more unlikely since it would require a high level of agreement among rival nation states. What is more it would mean the US voluntarily backing down from its world hegemony.30 To his credit Gray sees such global regulation as utopian. As a result he is deeply pessimistic. Indeed, "a deepening international anarchy is the human prospect." 31 So False Dawn does not end happily in a New Dawn. Which is to be expected given Gray's vision of the fall of his once prized neo-liberalism. It seems Gray wants to transport himself into a New World where the dominance of a Western Civilisation is replaced by a "diversity of cultures, regimes and market economies as a permanent reality". For him such a vision is an intellectual exercise in post-modern pessimism. Yet for the vast masses of those countries whose lives have been ripped apart by the neo-liberal offensives of the last two decades this is no academic exercise. Those who struggle for economic survival and a democratic voice in the face of the neo-liberal jackboot don't have the luxury of pessimism because for them it is a matter of life and death.32 The new centre appears to be a shift to the left. However we can see that the end of ideology is a cover for the centrist adaptation to the new right. The main positions of the NR are accepted. The market is supreme in the economy. The state's role is limited to guiding the economy in such a way as profits are promoted and not diverted into social spending. Blair's New Labour party is the setting the pace here but the new German DSP coalition government is hard on its heels.33 Blair's success in office can be summed up in the "Smart wired zero sum designer state". The Smart state is designed to regulate the next phase of capital accumulation once the fallout from the neo-liberal wrecking ball has settled. Its model is not Keynes but Schumpeter. Not nationalisation and social welfare but

targeted incentives in capital and labour markets. The logic is that the Smart state will be run by the new Social Democracy or by popular fronts between Social Democracy and centre parties that contain workers aspirations and impose sophisticated social controls on social insurgency. From Nation State to Global Governance. Giddens provides a sophisticated intellectual rationale for Blairism as an international middle movement.34 His, and Grays, arguments converge in a rightward moving Social Democracy that no longer credits the working class or the union movement with any historically progressive role. Rather the new Social Democratic apologists are trying to take over the globalisation project and convert it to the ends of positive welfare and a multicultural pluralism. In this global vision Giddens and Gray join forces with that of the Schumpeterian economists and Foucauldian governance theorists. As the third of the trio, George Soros concern is less with realising a democratic ideal but with the fear of revolution. He advocates the 3W as a counter to revolution.35 Soros forms the link between the philosophy of the 3w and neo-liberal economists who advocate new regulatory mechanisms. His immediate interest is in protecting his vast speculative investments and the best way he knows is to establish stability as a precondition for growth. This is also the pressing concern of other well-known neo-liberals proposing international regulatory institutions.36 But how feasible is it to get agreement on international regulation? The globalization proponents deny that nation states have the power to control their domestic economies now under the domination of multinational capital. Yet global regulation means agreement on a set of rules. It seems that regulation will have to be imposed by the US in its capacity as backer of the IMF and World Bank. So it looks as if this expanded global role amounts to the expansion of the US imperialist state, which poses the question of what other imperialist powers will do in the face of this further US aggrandisement. Will a US proto-global state lead to super-imperialism? In the US the advocates of a 3W see this as putting limits on US imperialism in the name of a "new progressive" global governance.37 Social democrats like Wade and Veneroso argue that the ills of global capitalism can be managed by the correct state interventions that counter the institutions of US imperialism.38 However, their critics point out that this is a cover for further US hegemonic plans. Chomsky is clear in documenting the current thrust of US imperialism as one of total world domination.39 Michel Chossudovskys account of the recent US speculators raid on Brazils hard currency reserves gives a glimpse of how this US proto-state would work.40 It demonstrates how the proto-global state becomes the necessary complement of the national policies of the Schumperterian/Foucauldian State and vice versa in the interests of US imperialism.41

Post-modernism and Foucauldian Governance The radical centre has a class constituency. It is the petty bourgeois and the labour aristocracy. These classes and fractions benefit from their role as functionaries in the imperialist state or in civil society where they are rewarded with high salaries and relative economic security. However after decades of structural crisis this security needs constant renewal. What this middle class needs is a theoretical approach to the government that broadens the scope of the state to civil society to allow the petty bourgeois to exercise its class interests as facilitators and regulators of market liberalism. This shifts the classic Social Democratic locus of power from government institutions where clear lines of representation and accountability are contested, and dissolves power into an ever-present force throughout civil society. In the final analysis, power must be a proxy for value production and exchange in the market that involves capital and labour, but in order to empower the petty bourgeoise, it needs to be detached from production, re-packaged, mediated and regulated as a distributional resource.42 Enter postmodern political 'analysis'. A theoretical rationale is to be found in Foucault's work on governmentality. Foucault turned his back on the analysis of modern capitalism in which social relations of production determine power relations in the last analysis. In that sense, he too is pre/post-marxist.43 Thus Foucault's postmarxism returns to the pre-bourgeois, pre-enlightenment universals of Nietzsche and is therefore pre-marxist.44 Power becomes a universal force derived from the biological givens of the desiring body. The givens govern! The givens 'determine' but in an 'indeterminate' way. Biology rules personality without the mediation of social relations. Social relations are no more than interpersonal relations. Such a conception fits very neatly into the post-modern "smart wired zerosum" state. After all, such a state does not exist as a set of narrowly defined institutions. Rather it presupposes a nebulous realm of techniques, 'rationalities' and 'practices'. That is, a theoretically unlimited set of contingent cultural and political behaviours that compete in a non-determined way for political expression. There can be no sets of interests that are pre-determined in the sense of class, race, gender or sexual orientation. There is only the process and the outcome both of which are dignified with the term governmentality. 45 The confluence of lapsed neo-liberalism, the 'new middle' Schumpeterist economics, and the new governmental forms that the global and local states must take to regulate productive investment, are run together and seamlessly glossed over by this post-modern account. The purpose of such a theory is to coopt any challenge to the new form of state by posing as a ideological alternative to neo-liberalism. So when it comes to explaining major global shifts such as the ''Asian crisis" which Marxists seize upon with great glee to demonstrate the inherent instability of capitalism, governmentality ideology becomes politically opportunist. The 'crisis' is not the result of fundamental flaws in the capitalist

world economy, but rather the result of a conjunction of 'rationalities' and 'practices' in the nation states and international economic agencies which of course are open to 'radical critique' and hence policy change.46 It seems then that the governmentality ideology is itself selected to cover for the shift from open neo-liberalism towards a new right centrist social liberalism. It becomes no more than an official bourgeois doctrine that pronounces after the fact on the processes and outcomes of the post-modern, multicultural, pluralist, social democracy. Neo-Marxism backslides into Social Democracy. Along with the right shift of Social Democracy into social liberalism, postmarxism and the conversion of the former Communist Parties and Maoist parties of the East into ordinary Social Democratic parties,47 the Marxist left is also moving to the right and providing a left cover for social liberalism. One of the major causes of this weakness on the neo-Marxist left is the pre/post-marxism of the 'left' petty bourgeois intelligentsia. Neo-marxism is nominally opposed to post-marxism, yet abandons the base/superstructure model as determinist and reductionist and moves towards post-marxism. We can trace the development of a neo-post marxist trend over the three phases of the current structural crisis of capitalism. In the first phase during the 1970's Althusserian marxism sought to offer a Eurocommunist cover for a declining Stalinism. Its intellectual doctrine was little more than a bureaucratic rationale for the Gramscian war of position the functionaries long march through the institutions of bourgeois democracy. Its anti-humanist bias and the complicity of the Communist parties in the 1968 reaction prompted a revival of the equally elitist Frankfurt school critical theory as a democratic socialist New Left opposition to structural determinism. The second phase of neo-liberal reaction in the 1980's saw the rise of post-marxism in the form of world-system theory, regulation theory, Rational Choice marxism etc. The defeat and retreat of the labour bureaucracy before the market threw up echoes of market rationality in these currents. As the working class receded as the agent of revolution, the Althusserian apparatchnik and Frankfurter voluntarist gave way to the agency of the ordinary freely choosing individual.48 It is the third current phase of the structural crisis in the 1990's, the postcold war new world order, that has pushed most neo-marxisms beyond the pale into post marxism. The inherent weakness of neo-marxism based on the flimsy foundations of neo-ricardian economics, collapses into the arms of its poststructuralist middle class suitors. As a test of this I shall look at the transformation of 'marxist' economic theory in the work of Robert Brenner. Though Brenner defends the LOV, and rallied to the defence of Marxism against Wallerstein in the 1970's, in his recent analysis of global economics marxism ceases to privilege production relations and reverts to a neo-Ricardianism that naturalises

production relations and limits class struggle to a power struggle to rectify unequal exchange in the market.49 All of these brands of neo-marxism are more or less open in justifying their abandonment of marxism. Their common post-marxism is the 'destination of the 'Euromarxist' left which now rejects not only economic determinism but also the historical interests of the working class in socialism. These currents are not new since they reflect the long-standing traditions of Euromarxism in failing to unite the objective development of capitalism with the subjective organisation of revolutionary politics.50 We can begin by looking at the decline and fall of one of the most influential recent currents in Euromarxism structural Marxism. post-Althusserians Influenced by the late French stalinist philosopher Louis Althusser, much modern Western marxism is bogged down in ideological disputes within academia over which section of the middle class has the franchise for revolution. This swamp includes left cultural studies and left feminist studies. Cultural studies began in Britain in the 1970's as a declassed Gramscian critique of capitalist culture. But it took the enemy to its heart by adopting Althussser's claim that Marxism too was an ideology. This left the door open for cultural studies to become relativised by postmodernism during the 1980's. As a result, the analysis of politics and culture becomes contingent or 'free floating', apeing the post-modernist theme.51 There is no grounded materialist method with which to explain and critique the culture of 'late capitalism'. Into this void the post-als romp with gay abandon.52 For example, Fredric Jameson in critiquing the cultural turn, also takes a turn.53 Another example is the current of materialist feminism starts from Althusser and derives a 'global analytic' that marries marxism with some elements in postmodernism. Most important it shares with pomo, the rejection of Western science, including marxism, as 'foundational'. So the LOV is disclaimed as the distant inoperative 'last-instant' premise of Althusser. Even more than distant, as Rosemary Hennessey argues that Althusser was still too determinist. He had theorised the 'overdetermination' of the economic by politics and culture, but elements of 'economism' still needed to be removed.54 Note that Althusser's so-called 'Marxist economism' was already neoRicardian in the 1970's.55 Yet such is the rejection of economic determinism among feminists in the 1980's we had the de-economising of Althusser into a brand of mystical 'materialism' in which contradiction, exploitation, crisis etc all become sacrificed to empirical contingency. Once more a current of Euromarxism, this time augmented by Stalinist/Maoist and Althusserian positions, ends up in the post-al camp of anti-science. Pierre Bourdieu is perhaps the most prominent of the fashionable 1990's post-Althusserians.56 His position is based on a neo-Ricardian rather than Marx's method. That is, production is naturalised. It's true that Marx employed general

(i.e. transhistorical) abstractions which applied to all modes, but these were incidental to his method. Such generalisations could only be made as the result of first establishing the historic categories of capitalism to then determine what was 'left over' or 'embryonic'.57 Following the tradition of euro"marxist" sociology, Bourdieu employs marxisant type language (eg cultural capital) in order to co-opt marxism back into radical pre-marxist bourgeois ideology. Its interesting that Bourdieu has to reinvent Althusser (who himself was reinventing Gramsci and Western Marxism for the post 1956 "de-stalinisation") but in a quite different untainted language necessary to distance itself from even de-stalinisation. So Bourdieu becomes the "sexy" de-marxised, or marx-excised, sociology of the French social democratic opposition to the neo-liberal reaction.58 There is a real problem with Bourdieu's classifications of capitals. At some point he says that all capital derives from an economic surplus appropriated by a ruling class, which is a broad neo-Ricardian concept of exploitation in my view.59 Then he breaks capital up into all these other thingies as if cultural capital or symbolic capital is not commodity production already. The only difference between economic capital and symbolic capital that I can see is that one is the production of commodities that have an immediate connection with the material reproduction of labour power, or variable capital, while symbolic capital represents the production of immaterial commodities for exchange which meet certain cultural needs such as films, books, sexual attachments etc. So what are the consequences of Bourdieu's understanding of capital. At least he doesn't detach power from economic capital as Foucault does. But the economic capital he is talking about is labour expropriated during exchange. This expropriation is relatively transparent since it is a question of wages rising and falling relative to profits. It corresponds to the distributional discourse of morality and statistics that both "classes" throw at each other via their respective intellectuals. It follows that the reproduction of this appropriation which is relatively transparent depends heavily upon the use of political power and ideological domination in winning control of the instrumental state. And in the last analysis, it is not the production relations that speak but the (petty) bourgeois radical intellectuals. Their political responsibility is to uncover and expose the exercise of power and domination and contest it (politely in long very difficult books or dramatically turning up on the picket lines like Bourdieu) by advancing a superior morality and statistics from those put up by the traditional intellectuals of the ruling class. So note that when Bourdieu organises in support of workers it is as a separate intellectual "class".60 This radical Ricardian position slides inevitably from the class struggle at the point of production in which the contradiction use-value/exchange-value is the motive force of capitalist development, into exchange politics via the substitution of the petty bourgeois political elite in the bourgeois parliament. The petty bourgeois intelligentsia's leadership of the working class depends upon keeping the working class ignorant of this intellectual mystique by coining bullshit

language like 'habitus' or 'field' for what are already scientifically categorised by Marxist analysis of class, state and ideology. Thus, workers may fall for Bourdieu's link between "habitus" and what are "exchange relations" which stand in for naturalised (and hence unproblematic) production relations. At its worst Bourdieu's argument represents the recuperation of the neo-classical Say's law that supply creates demand. If 'habitus' can generate demand, and 'cultural capital' can ensure supply, then "hey presto" no crisis of underconsumption. However, the limit that Bourdieu faces is, that creating new "cultural" needs in a global middle class cannot overcome the capital logic of crises of overproduction, rooted in the TRPF, but ultimately as Marx says manifest in the underconsumption of the impoverished masses and downwardly mobile 'middle' classes.61 Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, whether they understand the contradiction or not, it "understands" them. It squeezes and then explodes their political chicanery in the historic vice between the revolutionary vanguard that represents the interests of the working class struggle against the destruction of use-values, and the bosses need to valorise capital as exchange-values by means of the destruction of use-values, and then settles the question with the "criticism of weapons".

post-Critical Theorists. The tradition of the Frankfurt school drawn on by critical theorists like Habermas62 goes back to the 1920's i.e. the previous structural crisis of capitalism. Its major features were formed in the historic defeat of the German working class, and as a result the world working class, in the 1930's by Stalinism and Fascism. Distorting the notion of hegemony developed by Gramsci, the Frankfurters argued that capitalism was able to hold back revolution indefinitely by means of its cultural controls over workers. As a result this school abandoned any belief in the working class as the historical agent of socialism and substituted a petty bourgeois intelligentsia as the agents of humanity. Today the most prominent post-critical theorist, Habermas, also uses Marxist terms to link cultural crises with economic crises. Yet the economic crisis are understood again as emanating from Ricardian technical relations. For the Frankfurt school one side of the contradiction use-value/exchange-value is dehistoricised. Use value becomes a universal, naturalised catogory, against which capitalist production for exchange is in contradiction. Marx's contradiction, inherent in capitalist social relations, is dematerialised and removed from class struggle. Rather than the working class struggling to consume the use values it produces and motivating the revolutionary overturn of capitalism, the petty bourgeois intellectuals become the opponents of an abstract and technical instrumentalism in the name of an equally transhistorical communicative reason.

This boils down practically to 'democracy' against the 'market'.63 For Habermas, such an "invasion by technology of the "life-world" (the space of communicative reason where Enlightenment civilisation can be realised) can be transcended by a radical bourgeois democracy. Having suppressed the contradiction in production relations and substituted exchange relations, these technical relations are not determinant in the last instance, because they can be 'overdetermined' by politics and ideology. Thus Habermas' post-critical theory gives the post-structuralist cultural turn a left cover as a structuralist political turn. The causal 'play' of the superstructure is unlimited by natural production relations again taking an ahistorical structuralism to post-structural extremes. But the problem is, and will remain, how to transform the bourgeois superstructure without reference to the dynamic laws of motion which shape the development of the infrastructure? So long as the infrastructure is governed by the law of value that is specific to capitalist production relations, then crisis tendencies will spread into the superstructure and undermine any hope of realising the petty bourgeois utopia of democratic capitalism. The recent attempt by Postone to rehabilitate Critical Theory on firm Marxist foundations unfortunately fails.64 Postone doesn't transcend the problems of the Frankfurt school that resulted when it dehistoricised the contradiction of use-value/exchange-value. He rightly argues that capitalism is a historically specific mode, against those who want to universalise Marxism as a form of humanist Hegelianism, or abstract neo-Ricardianism. The Frankfurters come in for a lot of criticism for abandoning the contradiction in capitalism. But when Postone tries to say what the contradiction is he muffs it completely. He correctly identifies the importance of the dual nature of the commodity - use-value/exchange-value. However instead of recognising that this dual nature underpins the contradiction between forces and relations of production, and is motivated by class struggle, he rejects the link completely and leaps to an abstract contradiction between 'alienated wealth ie. 'capital' on the one hand and the production of value on the other. Hence his own argument for a method which locates the historically specific contradiction within capitalism, is rejected. As a result we get a 'contradiction' in which 'value-production' ie. social relations, embedded in historical capitalism, are in opposition to the 'potential' of wealth i.e. accumulated use-values as a transhistorical category. 65 What he completely misses is that there can be no motion in the historically specific capitalist mode unless the contradiction is motivated by historical actors - ie. class agents with both feet on capitalist ground. My understanding of this is that the use-value/exchange-value contradiction can only become operative through class struggle. On the one side the working class attempts to retain as many use-values as possible, on the other is the capitalist class destroys use-values unless they are also exchange-values. Because Postone wants to reject simplistic, evolutionary, or teleological forms of Marxism that identify the working class as the Subject of revolution,

realising in socialism, some suppressed universal quality of unalienated labour, he also rejects the class struggle itself. This is classic baby and bath water stuff. Postone ends up with no class agents capable of motivating the contradiction; therefore no historic dynamic. So his historically specific mode is going nowhere. The revolutionary subject is abstracted out of class struggle and implanted in the Critical Intellectual who can represent the people, or the species, in realising the potential of accumulated use-values/wealth as restored 'nature' the means of abolishing labour and the working class under socialism. How? Teleology! So Postone's critical theory hasn't broken with the Frankfurt school. One pole of the contradiction use-value remains naturalised outside of the determinate forces and relations of production, residing in the mind of the Critical Intellectual ie Postone. I am very 'critiqual' of those who talk of the selfemancipation of the working class without spelling out how this will happen. I am even more critical of those like Postone who talk of the self-emancipation of 'capital'. Yet Postone and the Frankfurt school do at least recognise a fundamental contradiction that drives capitalist development even if they misrecognise its terms and operation. Other schools of neo/post-Marxism can't even claim to base themselves on the analysis of production relations. post-Regulationists Regulation theory says very little about production relations. Why should they if they're naturalised? Its object is to show how capitalism manages and postpones its crises by social and political intervention. This is more than a revamped Keynesianism since Regulation theorists pay lip service to exploitation at the level of exchange. Yet Regulationists are interested mainly in explaining how the mode of social regulation (MSR) is able to partially stabilise capital accumulation.66 The MSR plus the process of accumulation produces the 'regime of accumulation'. One of the best known exponents of the regulation school, Jessop, tries to account for the shift from the Keynesian Welfare State to the Schumpeterian Welfare State in terms of a shift from a Fordist to post-Fordist 'regime of accumulation'. He makes the cause of the neo-liberal reaction no more than a change in the way capitalists are able to maintain control over the labour process in order to extract more s/v. Jessop argues that neo-liberalism is the post-Fordist 'regime of accumulation'. Others disagree, arguing that neo-liberalism is the absence of regulation. Yet in evaluating neo-liberalism as an MSR they fail to see that both Fordist and the post-Fordist 'regimes' are but superficial effects of the operation of the law of value. Thus the MSR is an effect of flexible accummulation and not a social precondition. Since Regulationists say that the accumulation of capital is regulated by social and political processes, and not the law of value itself, the superstructure 'steers' the value base. This is similar to the sense of 'over-determination' as

conceived by Althusser when 'economic determination in the last instance' never arrives. Regulation theory therefore necessarily buys into neo-Ricardian concept of zero-sum exploitation based on unequal exchange that is made possible by the way in which capital asserts its domination (i.e. power over the working class).67 Ironically, this reduces to a power struggle over the instrumental state which in turn hinges upon an ideological struggle over ideas that justify such a class domination in the national interest. Since this is precisely the ground on which neo-liberalism justifies its reaction, namely to redress profits squeezed down by wages, Regulation Theory cannot provide more than an abstract moral and statistical argument for working class struggle. This is why a strong current in neo-marxism draws on a bastardized version of Gramsci that puts the determining instance in class struggle at the level of culture or ideology.68 This is the drift of the post-Wallersteinians also since the outcome of instrumental struggles over exchange is decided in the last instance by which petty bourgeois bunch of intellectuals have the biggest ideas about what is, and what ought, to be "equal". post-Wallersteinians Wallerstein's early work set the framework. He challenged the bourgeois model of national economies linked by international trade. Instead he argued that the 'world-system' was an integrated whole in which nations were just links. However, Wallerstein's world was one in which the unequal relations between states resulted from the Ricardian mechanism of unequal exchange. Exploitation occurs by extracting surplus by driving down wages (absolute surplus value) rather than by increasing labour productivity. This creates a nondynamic zero-sum account of capitalist development where capital expands by driving down wages. It fails to explain why capitalism developed explosively in the postwar period by increasing wages. Nor can it explain why capitalism has gone into crisis while driving down wages. World-system theory in sum describes part of the reality of the world capitalist economy its exchange relations but cannot explain why expansion and contraction of capitalist production result from fundamental antagonistic forces at the level of production.69 The limits of Wallerstein's approach are evident in his recent book on Utopistics.70 He posits the end of the 'world system' when the limits of the market (ie unequal exchange) are reached around 2050. This is similar to Rosa Luxemburg's underconsumptionist view of imperialism. When capitalism has exhausted its potential to capture new markets, it will no longer be able to realise its commodity production. Wallerstein's neo-Ricardian variant says that when every workers' labour has been commodified there will be no further potential to increase the rate of exploitation. Thus the answer is to adopt a market-socialist solution and mobilise a global rainbow coalition to de-commodify somethings!

Wallerstein's influence has been phenomenal and what passes today for 'marxist political economy' is often a version of world-system theory. The reason for this is that this theory has more appeal than Marxism because its political project is to reform exchange and not to expropriate capitalist property. While Wallerstein argues for a Rainbow Coalition, Arrighi's solution to a declining US hegemony has to be rather more robust, since declining hegemonic powers resort to political/military force to prop up their collapsing economies. This exercise of power necessarily calls forth ideological justifications for such a "new world order" which become the object of counter-hegemonic struggles. In the hands of Arrighi, Wallerstein's "Smithian" Marxism has become the radical social democracy of Chomsky.71 post-Mandelites Mandel's definition of late capitalism shows how the dynamics of production call forth the emphasis on consumption that accounts for a postmodern cultural turn. In fact he incorporates production and consumption factors in his multi-causal theory of crisis. Thus the third technological revolution brings with it a rising organic composition, higher productivity and the pressure to realise this expanding output as consumer commodities. But Mandel abandons the strict determination of the TRPF so there is no clear causal link between crises in production and consumption/culture. The TRPF becomes contingent upon the falling rate of profit at the level of the market rather than a necessary feature of the law itself. 72 Therefore the LOV is present as a premise but is not clearly implicated as a 'law' that causes the TRPF. The correspondence between the inherent dynamics of 'late capitalism' and culture is not specified. Crisis results not from necessity but from contingency.73 This opens up the way for the concept of 'late capitalism' to become 'postcapitalism'.74 Thus a new technological revolution the information society or knowledge economy posits the indefinite expansion of commodity production based on the fantastic productivity growth of information technology. Mandel's theory would say that rising organic composition will be offset by rising surplusvalue until a "certain threshold" is reached in the market when workers resist further increases. Yet this possibility is excluded by Marx in the framing of the TRPF as the cheapening of C and V and other counter-tendencies can never be sufficient to offset the formula s/C+V.75 Thus Mandels introduction of this revision opens the way for a post-marxist rejection of the necessity of crisis at the level of production, and for a much weaker theory of the possibility of crisis that can be expressed in exchange, distribution, consumption, and what is fashionable today circulation! The complex unity of the circuit production, exchange, distribution, consumption is broken allowing even the cultural turn of post-marxism to fixate on the politics of identity a la Jameson.76 The weaknesses in Mandel's method are expressed dramatically in the recent work of Robert Brenner once famous for critique of Wallerstein as "neo-

Smithian".77 Brenner's critique countered Wallerstein's exchange theory with an analysis based on relations of production. Capitalist development required the development of the forces of production resulting not from unequal exchange, but from the creation of capital/labour social relations of production. Hence, both development and crisis revolved around class struggle at the point of production. Twenty years later, however, Brenner himself has moved right along with the trend and is now much closer to Wallerstein's exchange analysis of the current world crisis.78 In a long essay "The Economics of Global Turbulence" Brenner investigates the reasons for the end of the long boom around 1973 and the long period of downturn the world economy has experienced to the present day. Is Brenner offering an alternative explanation for the current crisis to that of the neo-liberals, and 3W apologists on the one hand? Is he offering an alternative to the neo-marxists? Let's see. Brenner adopts a neo-Ricardian approach by reducing social relations to technical relations of production. In any given line of production profits fall because new technology cheapens production, forcing higher cost firms to cut prices and profits to get a return on their sunk fixed capital. When the old firms can no longer cut costs they have to scrap any remaining fixed capital, and invest in new techniques. But since in each line of production costs must ultimately fall, this would not lead to a general lowering of profits, rather the opposite, so how to explain falling profits and crises in the whole economy?79 To do this Brenner ignores the TRPF (that profits must fall in every line of production as a result of rising Organic Composition of Capital (OCC)), and argues that the lowering of profits in an individual line becomes generalised to the whole economy as the result of rising wages! Brenner rejects Marx assumption that crises are not caused by wage rises or underconsumption and they cannot be solved by lowering wages or increasing consumption. They are caused by the failure to increase the rate of exploitation sufficiently to ensure that there is enough surplus-value to valorise existing capital. The solution can only come from the destruction of excess capital. But where have we heard Brenner's arguments before? We have come full circle. It is the central thesis of the pre/post-marxists who make profits dependent on the regulation of labour by petty bourgeois functionaries on behalf of capital. Here we have a classic Ricardian position. There is natural technical progress as capital modernises by cheapening labour outputs. In fact Brenner agrees that improved technology must bring about lower costs and thus higher profits. But this general progress comes up against a social barrier - the inability of capitalists to collectively cuts costs of labour and prevent underconsumption! Since the ability of capital to maintain profits depends on its ability to hold down labour costs and sell their products, then the disruption to the process of increasing technical progress is caused by individual capitalists 'rational' behaviour leading to "unplanned competitive" consequences. It follows that if the market could be planned so that the process of adopting new technology was

rational for the collectivity, then crises could be averted and a form of market socialism introduced. 80 Conclusions All these adaptations of marxism reflect the class interest of petty bourgeois intellectuals and the labour bureaucracy in the service of the bourgeoisie. Intellectuals standing outside the working class judge history to occur in stages and consider workers as plastic putty in their hands. Blaming workers for their defeats in the 1920s and 1930s became after the Second World War a rejection of workers ability to stage a successful socialist revolution. The long march backwards has arrived at the 3W which is a recuperation of fin de siecle Bernsteinian revisionism, British 'liberalism' and US 'progressivism'. The neo-marxist trajectory has come down to earth in the form of a radical bourgeois democracy premised on civil society and the alienated bourgeois subject. And the long-standing historic pessimism of the European intelligentsia has taken a particularly reactionary turn during the phase of the neo-liberal reaction in the form of post-modernism. Since this middle class substitutes itself for the working class as the agency of historic change, it makes its own ideas the pivot of a power struggle over a zero-sum social division of labour value. This means an effective abandoning of capitalist social relations of production as economic determinism because such determinism implies the historic role of the proletariat, and denies that of the petty bourgeoisie, in voluntarily transforming these social relations into socialism. Shifting the agency to the chattering (discursive) classes explains why Social Democracy limits class struggle to a distributional struggle over wages and profits, and why post-neo-marxists reduce class struggle to a battle over power in order to increase wages at the expense of profits. Posing as a 'left alternative' to Social Democracy, neo-marxism backslides into a distributional analysis, and an instrumental political solution to the crisis. Both Social Democracy and post-neo-marxism are totally inadequate as a basis on which to lead the proletariat in its struggle for socialism. Why? Distributional analysis masks the relations of production and the class character of the capitalist state that must be smashed to transform those social relations. Social Democracy posits a class neutral state that can implement the majority will of the proletariat in the form of a Labor or Social Democratic party. Neomarxists, similarly, backslide from exchange based economics into distributional politics where the instrumental nation state, or global state, acts in the interests of the class that holds hegemonic power. The Marxist Critique Implicit in the above accounts of the shifts to the right of Social Democracy and neo-marxism, is a Marxist critique of contemporary capitalism. It is time to

bring this out into the open and to offer a genuine alternative to bourgeois ideology in all of its forms. Marx's method consists of the abstraction and reconstitution of the concrete following many complex mediations. Capitalism consists of historically specific contradiction between use-value and exchange value expressed as the class struggle to develop the forces of production within the constraints of capitalist property relations. Crisis results from the inability to produce sufficient surplus-value (living labour) to realise profits on the total capital (dead labour) accumulated. This process is invisible to the class actors and has to be exposed by the dialectical method. The unequal production relations of capitalism express themselves in surface forms as equal exchange, distribution or consumption relations. Hence dialectics entails a critique of capitalist ideology rooted in fetishised exchange relations. This critique allows marxists to expose the various forms of bourgeois ideology including the neo-liberal, liberal, neo-marxist etc. Each can be seen to represent the interests of the bougeoisie, directly or indirectly, in presenting capitalism in terms of the the dehistoricising or naturalising the dialectical unity of production, exchange, distribution and production relations. We can explain the neo-liberal, liberal and neo-marxist standpoints in terms of the levels of analysis which figure in their accounts. Consumption becomes the focus of neo-liberals and pomos because it is totally immersed in hegemonic fetishism. Liberals, similarly trapped by fetishism, take a moral and statistical approach to equalise distribution relations. Neo-marxists become hung-up on exchange analysis, and naturalising use-value rebel against the market. Genuine marxists who fail to insist on the unity of this process and the productivist focus also necessarily adapt to the ideological distortions of contemporary capitalism. The failure of each of these attempts to locate the problems of contemporary capitalism and the pre-conditions for socialism, are failures of method. Each moment is not grounded in the totality of production-exchangedistribution-consumption as explained in the Grundrisse. The neo-liberal and pomo attachment to consumption becomes clear. This is the most reified and fetishised view of capitalism. Value is seen as intrinsic to the commodity and totally removed from production, distribution and exchange. Hence, the moment of consumption is frozen apart from the unity of production and distribution and is fetishised as in Say's law when supply creates its own miraculous demand (commodities rule OK). The consumption of commodities then does not meet needs that are historically given as the "needs" of capital or labour, but as narrowly individualistic, alienated 'wants' or 'desires'.81 It follows that against such pomo culturalist and politicist critiques of commodification, "desires" are alienated expressions of need that cannot be transformed into authentic needs without the transformation of social relations. Against the Marxist account, the celebration of 'desire' is not class specific, but reflects the alienated desires of the bourgeois individual. The fetishised themes of post-modernity ARE the cultural expressions of 'late capitalism' understood as 'too-late' capitalism! That is, capitalism as historically doomed, as already 'too-

late' since it is destroying the forces of production at a rapid rate, denying consumption of use-values to meet the most basic social needs in the swelling immiserated masses. And in the process as capital cannot legitimate itself as 'desirable', its historic use-by date has long expired. To conclude, the one-sided neo-Marxist accounts of neo-liberalism all fail because they uncritically accept the basis of the very ideology that they try to critique. They are unable to escape the hegemony of commodity fetishism and so reproduce some of its ideological effects on the body of Marxism itself. The class explanation of this practice is that academic Marxism from which these accounts are drawn, is isolated from the working class, and lacks the grounded materialist method as a corrective to its 'middle class' or petty bourgeois class interests. As we have seen it is class struggle which grounds the materialist method. The petty bourgeois are relatively isolated from the worst effects of class struggle, since many act officially to regulate and rationalise this struggle in distributional or fetishist (individualised) terms. So the same set of class pressures in the petty bourgeois that have always led to revisions of Marxism are very much alive and well today. What drives the revived radical Social Democratic centre? The drive to reconcile, pluralise, democratise etc. is the license to practice for the radical petty bourgeois whose constituency is the 'new middle class' or labour aristocracy! A second set of intellectuals (Giddens is typical), some of whom are reborn (Gray), based in prominent European or US universities and Social Democratic bureaucracies, corresponds to this expression of class interest in the "middle" of distribution analysis. Neo-Marxism, as always, keeps left but is dragged towards the centre and appeals to a layer of left intellectuals, post-colonials etc who identify broadly with the labour bureaucracy, NGO's, UN agencies etc and see themselves as a left current against both neo-liberals and the new middle. The formal adherence to Marxism is pretty thin, since it remains (a la Wallerstein, Bourdieu, Habermas et al) as a neo-Ricardian exchange analysis.

Materialist Dialectics. Marxist dialectics not only explains events, but predicts events! Laws of motion are grounded in the law of value. Sidelining the LOV gives us unscientific, ideological perspectives on capitalism. Marxism demolishes these standpoints in revealing their class base. We can test them out! Neo-liberals failed because the market failed in Asia and Russia and needs international regulation. It is not the frozen consumption moment that rules, but productive consumption (or lack of it)! Liberals fail because they cannot overcome the contradiction between forces and relations since they reject the existence of the LOV. Capitalist growth does not generate distributional equity. Neo-marxists falter because if they seek to explain everything (Foucauldians do not actually

explain anything they presume) as the result of unequal exchange. But they cannot account for the discrepancy between equal exchange (wage rates) and the overproduction of capital. Even would-be genuine marxists fail to escape hegemonic fetishism if they are not immersed in the working class struggle. So it seems that we are back were we began. But not really. The current crisis is another expression of too-late capitalism that has reached the end of its long life and can no longer develop the forces of production sufficiently to prevent the onset of further periods of imperialist crisis of war/revolution. The 'Short 20th century' began with a war and revolution and ended with imperialism once more pushing towards war and revolution. The US struggle to maintain its hegemony must force it to engage with its rivals in mounting trade wars and military confrontations. Once more we see that the historic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production become manifest at the surface as symptoms of system breakdown the New World Disorder. Despite the historic distortions of the collapse of socalled 'communism', of the 'death of marxism' etc., it is capitalism that nears its end. Revolutions are not planned by self-conscious elites, but result from massive contradictions between nature/need and exploitation/greed that cause a system breakdown and the creation of a revolutionary situation. This time, the working class and its allies is the vast majority, the gravediggers of the old society and troops of the new society. Yet to paraphrase Lenin, capitalism will not collapse through its own dead weight. It has to be overthrown. This can only be done through the conscious action of the historic revolutionary class acting out its necessary role. The conscious leadership of the working class is the revolutionary party. Marx's method is in making dialectics conscious. The democratic centralist party is the working class social scientist applying materialist dialectics. Theory and practice are united in the living programme and tested in the struggle. It is time to revive the Marxist-Bolshevik-Leninist-Trotskyist pole of revolutionary communism in the form of a world party of revolution.

Notes and References. This conception of crisis owes much to Mattick 1981, Grossman 1992 and Yaffe 1973; 1975 and Bullock and Yaffe 1975. It is a structural crisis of overproduction that can be corrected temporarily when the law of value devalues sufficient capital to restore the rate of profit. 2 Among them Soros 1998, Sachs 1998, Friedman 1999, Volkner 1999. Also Robert Chote "IMF: US slowdown now inevitable" Financial Times, April 21 1999. 3 Clearly this position is orthodox Trotskyist. The historic defeat has material roots in the end of workers property. Cf. the state capitalist position (eg. Callinicos 1991) and the intermediate positions of Ticktin (1992) and Meszaros
1

(1995) etc. 4 The dominant view of crisis is that financial speculation is bad for productive investment eg. Soros, Sachs. 5 Ironically, the Asian crisis is driving home the fact that international capital must restructure production and not merely circulation. See Sach's (1998) proposals for a G16 and floating exchange rates to prevent specululation getting out of hand. 6 Soros, Wall St Journal Sept 15 1998 and (1998). This attempt to regulate capital is driven by the requirement of capital to be productively invested in order to restore the rate of profit and return to a path of accumulation. Despite its expression by intellectuals as a new orthdoxy, it replicates past phases of capitalist cycles coming out of depression into state assisted accumulation, but of course in a much more open global economy dominated by MNCs that have imposed freedom of movement across sovereign borders as never before See Socialist Appeal "Like all Bubbles, this will Burst" Oct. 1 1999. 7 Jessop 1995; Tickell and Peck 1995; Torling 1999. 8 Dean and Hindess 1998. 9 These schools are chosen because they claim to defend the Law of Value (LOV) against post-modern or post-marxist positions. I do not include Rational Choice Marxism (see Meiksins Wood 1989) or those like Chomsky (1998) and Chossudovsky (1998a, 1998b) who do not claim to be marxist. cf Frankel 1997. 10 Against those who draw pessimistic conclusions at the end of the "short century" I argue that the objective conditions for socialist revolution are now universal, so that the Enlightenment Project is within reach of fulfillment. 11We can quote Trotsky to say that the "crisis" remains that of the "crisis of revolutionary leadership". That is, it is necessary to rebuild a New International based on the foundations of the revolutionary 3rd and 4th Internationals. 12 Friedman quoted in Sachs 1998. 13 Sachs 1998. 14 Wade and Veneroso 1998a 1998b; Krugman 1999. 15 Giddens 1998; Gray 1997. Also Economist "Roots of New Labour" Feb 7 1998. See also debate between Nobbio and Andersen in the New Left Review #231 Sept/Oct 1998. 16 p.43 17 p.45 18 p.66 19 p.103 20 p.117 21 p.126 22 p.128 23 Weekly Guardian September 13 1998. 24 Gray 1998. 25 p.17 26 p.39-40 27 p.48 28 p.28

p.199 p.200 31 p.207 32 cf Gamble 1999 33 See Democratic Leadership Council Policy promoting Clinton as proponent of the Third Way. See note 38. 34 See his Reith Lectures "Runaway World" . 35Soros,Wall St Journal. Sept 15 1998 and Soros 1998. 36 Most notably Jeffrey Sachs (1998) who supports Friedman's call to float exchange rates to break the dependence of poor countries on Washington (IMF and World Bank) as a form of welfare dependency. 37The US Democratic Leadership Council promotes the 3Way philosophy vigorously. See www.dleppi.org/ppi/3way 381998a and 1998b. 39 Chomsky 1998. 40 "The Brazilian Financial Scam" 1998 www.twnside.org.sg/souths/twn/title/scam.cn.htm. See also Krugman on Brazil "Don't Blame it on Rio..." Slate Magazine Feb 11 1999. 41 See Chossodovsky, "The G7 Solution..." www.transnational.org/features
30 42 43

29

see Janmohamed (1995) on Foucaults power as poor proxy for Marxs value. Hennessy 1993. 44 Lukacs 1980: 310 passim 45Hindess 1998. cf. Frankel's (1997) critique of the "Anglo-Foucauldians". 46 Verbal exchange with Hindess September 1998 This shift is most blatant in Rational Choice 'marxism' where Weber's methodological individualism replaces Marx's method for Roemer 1994; EO Wright 1994; etc ( for critiques see Meiksins Wood 1989; Burawoy 1989). 48 Brenner 1998. 49 Euromarxism is used here generically to mean the petty bourgeois currents from Bernstein and including 'Western Marxism' that embody objective fatalist or subjective voluntarist one-sided applicationsof marxism. 50 eg Stuart Hall on "just jetting in from Tokyo.." ( 1991:31) . 51 See Ebert 1996 52 See Jameson's (1998: 136-154) shift from Mandel economics to Arrighi's speculations about speculation. 53 Hennessy 1993:30. 54 See Callinicos 1976 and Benton 1983. 55 I think Bourdieu's broad structuralist elitism is closer to Althusser than any other school. 56 This point is well made by Rosdolsky (1989) and also by Colletti (1974) despite his rejection of dialectics. 57 cf Callinicos 1999. 58 Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:118. 59 See Bourdieu 1998a and 1998b
47

On underconsumption theories see Mattick (1981: 60 passim) Carchedi (1991:181 passim) and Clarke (1994) . 61 Habermas 1998. 62 This is similar to Mandel's method (see discussion below) where the determinate contradiction in production relations surfaces as a technological determinism at the level of exchange relations. Once more the 'market' becomes the target of a 'democratic socialism'. 63 Postone 1993. 64 Postone 1993:358 passim. 65 Tickell and Peck (1995) explain that "Eventually, the capacity of the MSR to mediate, accommodate and absorb these crisis tendencies is exceeded through a process which might be characterised as 'institutional exhaustion' and the regime of accumulation will break down." (360). 66 See Carchedis (1991: 187) incisive critique of regulationists as neo-Ricardian because they posit a direct relationship between increased productivity and the rate of profit 67 This is the subjective/voluntarist wing of Euromarxism from Bernstein through a bastardised Gramsci to post-marxism. 68 Arrighi (1996) points to the inability of Wallestein to defend himself from Braudel and Brenner on the origins of capitalism as arising in the social relations of Italian cities in the 14th century or social relations of the countryside in Britain in the 16th century. 69 Wallerstein 1999. 70 Arrighi 1994: 330 passim 71 See Mandel 1978:172. 72 See Mattick's (1981) review of Late Capitalism. 73 As we have seen Jameson (1998) abandons Mandel for Arrighis model of capitalist development 74 Capital Vol 3 p etc etc 75 Jameson 1998. 76 Brenner 1977. Add to this Brenners political affiliations and his debt to Mandel's economics. 77 Brenner 1998. Brenner even reduces increased labour productivity to technical developments resulting from competition very much like the Wallerstein model he critiqued twenty years earlier. 78 p. ref 24 passim 79 Brenner has an affinity with the Rational Choice school since he bases his explanation of the dynamics of capitalist development on the 'rationality' of the competing individual capitalists which could be regulated by 'society'. 80 Heartfelt 1998

60

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Frankel, Boris (1997) 'Contronting Neo-liberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realpolitik.' New Left Review, 226 Nov/Dec. Friedman Milton, quoted in Sachs (1998). Gamble, Andrew (1995) 'The Last Utopia.' New Left Review, 236 July/August. Giddens, Anthony (1998) The Third Way. Polity Press. Gray, John (1998) False Dawn. Granta. Grossman, Henryk (1992) The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System. Pluto Press. Habermas, Jurgen (1998) There are Alternatives. New Left Review, No 231 Sept/October. Hall, Stuart (1991) 'The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. in Anthony D King (ed) Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Macmillan. Heartfield, James (1998) Need and Desire in the Postmaterial Economy. Sheffield Hallam University Press. Hennessy, Rosemary (1993) Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. Routledge. Hindess, Barry (1998) 'Neo-Liberalism and the National Economy' in Dean and Hindess, Governing Australia etc Hobsbawm. Eric (1995) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. Abacus. Jameson, Fredric (1998) The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the PostModern 1983-1998. Verso. Janmohamed, Abdul (1995) 'Refiguring values, power, knowledge or Foucault's disavowal of Marx.' in B Magnus and S Cullenberg (eds) Whither Marxism? Routledge. Jessop, Bob (1995) "The regulation approach, governance and post-Fordism: alternative perspectives on economic and political change" Economy and Society, 24 (3) August 1995 307-333. Krugman, Paul (1999) Return of Depression Economics. W.W. Norton. Lukacs, Georg (1980) The Destruction of Reason. Merlin Press. Mandel, Ernest (1980) The Second Slump. Verso. Mattick, Paul (1981) Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory. Merlin Press. Meiksins Wood, Ellen (1989) Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game worth the Candle? New Left Review, no 177 Sept/October. Meszaros, Istvan (1996) Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. Monthly Review. Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Roemer, John (1994) A Future for Socialism. Harvard University Press. Rosdolsky, Roman (1989) The Making of Marx's Capital. Unabridged edition. Pluto. Rubin, Isaac (1973) Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Black Rose Books. Sachs, Jeffrey (1998) Global Capitalism: Making it Work Economist, Sept 12, 1998. Soros, George (1998) The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Little Brown.(A brief summary appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Sept 15 1998.) Tickell, Adam and Jamie Peck (1995) Social regulation after Fordism: reguation theory, neo-liberalism and the global-local nexus. Economy and Society, 24 (3) August 357-386. Ticktin, Hillel (1992) Origins of the Crisis in the USSR. M.E. Sharpe. Volkner, Paul (1999) quoted in Wall Street: A Total Eclipse is in Sight. Michael Roberts, Socialist Appeal, Sept. 1. Wade, Robert and Frank Veneroso (1998a) The Asian Crisis: The High Debt Model Versus the Wall Street-IMF Complex. New Left Review, 228 March/April. Wade, Robert and Frank Veneroso (1998b)"The Gathering World Slump and the Battle over Capital Controls. New Left Review, 231 September/October. Wallerstein. Emmanuel (1998) Utopistics, or Historical Choices of the 21st Century. New Press. New York. Wright, Erik Olin (1994) Interrogating Inequality. Verso. Yaffe. David (1973) 'The Marxian theory of Crisis, Capital and the State.' Economy and Society. 2 (2) May. Yaffe, David (1975) 'Value and Price in Marx's Capital.' Revolutionary Communist, No 1, January 1975. Revised Edition, May 1976.

This conception of crisis owes much to Mattick 1981, Grossman 1992 and Yaffe 1973; 1975 and Bullock and Yaffe 1975. It is a structural crisis of overproduction that can be corrected temporarily when the law of value devalues sufficient capital to restore the rate of profit. 2 Among them Soros 1998, Sachs 1998, Friedman 1999, Volkner 1999. Also Robert Chote "IMF: US slowdown now inevitable" Financial Times, April 21 1999. 3 Clearly this position is orthodox Trotskyist. The historic defeat has material roots in the end of workers property. Cf. the state capitalist position (eg. Callinicos 1991) and the intermediate positions of Ticktin (1992) and Meszaros (1995) etc. 4 The dominant view of crisis is that financial speculation is bad for productive investment eg. Soros, Sachs. 5 Ironically, the Asian crisis is driving home the fact that international capital must

restructure production and not merely circulation. See Sach's (1998) proposals for a G16 and floating exchange rates to prevent specululation getting out of hand. 6 Soros, Wall St Journal Sept 15 1998 and (1998). This attempt to regulate capital is driven by the requirement of capital to be productively invested in order to restore the rate of profit and return to a path of accumulation. Despite its expression by intellectuals as a new orthdoxy, it replicates past phases of capitalist cycles coming out of depression into state assisted accumulation, but of course in a much more open global economy dominated by MNCs that have imposed freedom of movement across sovereign borders as never before See Socialist Appeal "Like all Bubbles, this will Burst" Oct. 1 1999. 7 Jessop 1995; Tickell and Peck 1995; Torling 1999. 8 Dean and Hindess 1998. 9 These schools are chosen because they claim to defend the Law of Value (LOV) against post-modern or post-marxist positions. I do not include Rational Choice Marxism (see Meiksins Wood 1989) or those like Chomsky (1998) and Chossudovsky (1998a, 1998b) who do not claim to be marxist. cf Frankel 1997. 10 Against those who draw pessimistic conclusions at the end of the "short century" I argue that the objective conditions for socialist revolution are now universal, so that the Enlightenment Project is within reach of fulfillment. 11 We can quote Trotsky to say that the "crisis" remains that of the "crisis of revolutionary leadership". That is, it is necessary to rebuild a New International based on the foundations of the revolutionary 3rd and 4th Internationals. 12 Friedman quoted in Sachs 1998. 13 Sachs 1998. 14 Wade and Veneroso 1998a 1998b; Krugman 1999. 15 Giddens 1998; Gray 1997. Also Economist "Roots of New Labour" Feb 7 1998. See also debate between Nobbio and Andersen in the New Left Review #231 Sept/Oct 1998. 16 p.43 17 p.45 18 p.66 19 p.103 20 p.117 21 p.126 22 p.128 23 Weekly Guardian September 13 1998. 24 Gray 1998. 25 p.17 26 p.39-40 27 p.48 28 p.28 29 p.199 30 p.200 31 p.207

cf Gamble 1999 See Democratic Leadership Council Policy promoting Clinton as proponent of the Third Way. See note 38. 34 See his Reith Lectures "Runaway World" . 35 Soros,Wall St Journal. Sept 15 1998 and Soros 1998. 36 Most notably Jeffrey Sachs (1998) who supports Friedman's call to float exchange rates to break the dependence of poor countries on Washington (IMF and World Bank) as a form of welfare dependency. 37 The US Democratic Leadership Council promotes the 3Way philosophy vigorously. See www.dleppi.org/ppi/3way 38 1998a and 1998b. 39 Chomsky 1998. 40 "The Brazilian Financial Scam" 1998 www.twnside.org.sg/souths/twn/title/scam.cn.htm. See also Krugman on Brazil "Don't Blame it on Rio..." Slate Magazine Feb 11 1999. 41 See Chossodovsky, "The G7 Solution..." www.transnational.org/features
33 42 43

32

see Janmohamed (1995) on Foucaults power as poor proxy for Marxs value. Hennessy 1993. 44 Lukacs 1980: 310 passim 45 Hindess 1998. cf. Frankel's (1997) critique of the "Anglo-Foucauldians". 46 Verbal exchange with Hindess September 1998 This shift is most blatant in Rational Choice 'marxism' where Weber's methodological individualism replaces Marx's method for Roemer 1994; EO Wright 1994; etc ( for critiques see Meiksins Wood 1989; Burawoy 1989). 49 Brenner 1998. 50 Euromarxism is used here generically to mean the petty bourgeois currents from Bernstein and including 'Western Marxism' that embody objective fatalist or subjective voluntarist one-sided applicationsof marxism. 51 eg Stuart Hall on "just jetting in from Tokyo.." ( 1991:31) . 52 See Ebert 1996 53 See Jameson's (1998: 136-154) shift from Mandel economics to Arrighi's speculations about speculation. 54 Hennessy 1993:30. 55 See Callinicos 1976 and Benton 1983. 56 I think Bourdieu's broad structuralist elitism is closer to Althusser than any other school. 57 This point is well made by Rosdolsky (1989) and also by Colletti (1974) despite his rejection of dialectics. 58 cf Callinicos 1999. 59 Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:118. 60 See Bourdieu 1998a and 1998b 61 On underconsumption theories see Mattick (1981: 60 passim) Carchedi (1991:181 passim) and Clarke (1994) .
48

Habermas 1998. This is similar to Mandel's method (see discussion below) where the determinate contradiction in production relations surfaces as a technological determinism at the level of exchange relations. Once more the 'market' becomes the target of a 'democratic socialism'. 64 Postone 1993. 65 Postone 1993:358 passim. 66 Tickell and Peck (1995) explain that "Eventually, the capacity of the MSR to mediate, accommodate and absorb these crisis tendencies is exceeded through a process which might be characterised as 'institutional exhaustion' and the regime of accumulation will break down." (360). 67 See Carchedis (1991: 187) incisive critique of regulationists as neo-Ricardian because they posit a direct relationship between increased productivity and the rate of profit 68 This is the subjective/voluntarist wing of Euromarxism from Bernstein through a bastardised Gramsci to post-marxism. 69 Arrighi (1996) points to the inability of Wallestein to defend himself from Braudel and Brenner on the origins of capitalism as arising in the social relations of Italian cities in the 14th century or social relations of the countryside in Britain in the 16th century. 70 Wallerstein 1999. 71 Arrighi 1994: 330 passim 72 See Mandel 1978:172. 73 See Mattick's (1981) review of Late Capitalism. 74 As we have seen Jameson (1998) abandons Mandel for Arrighis model of capitalist development. 75 Capital Vol 3 p etc etc 76 Jameson 1998. 77 Brenner 1977. Add to this Brenners political affiliations and his debt to Mandel's economics. 78 Brenner 1998. Brenner even reduces increased labour productivity to technical developments resulting from competition very much like the Wallerstein model he critiqued twenty years earlier. 79 p. ref 24 passim 80 Brenner has an affinity with the Rational Choice school since he bases his explanation of the dynamics of capitalist development on the 'rationality' of the competing individual capitalists which could be regulated by 'society'. 81 Heartfield 1998.
63

62