Hard Tim

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Aruments o Hard times in firmon Just out from Pluto Press: an analysis of capitalism in crisis from regular Socialist Organiser contributor Bob Sutcliffe. £2.50 from bookshops, or • (with 50p post and packing) from Pluto, The Works, 105a Torriano Avenue, London NWS. and well made. Underlying all of the points is the general implication that the AES is not addressing the fundamental profitability crisis of capitalism. It is here where his analysis is in my view inconsistent.

His analysis suggests rightly that the adoption of Thatcherite/ Reaganite policies by the state is a response to the crisis of profitability. Reversing these policies means reasserting the gains made by the working class and undermining the capitalist attempt at restructuring.

The AES is not socialist (and has rare claimed. to be). But it does represent a working class challenge to capitalist restructuring. Assessment of the ABS must depend on how effectively it can unite anti-capitalist forces.

At one point on page 108 Bob concedes that the anti-capitalist

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started frowning as soon as they Communist Parties today. DUlt Du Icautis wi lavo LUM MUSI колу alliance'. And indeed I think Bob points to another problem in Bob Sutcliffe could have devoted a Sutcliffe's book. He calls for the sentence or two to explaining broad alliance of millions. But he how what he proposes is different says nothing about how we can from what the Communist Party get to it from where we are now.

However, if I have understood therefore reply, with a shine of properly, what he proposes is dit- plausibility, that the revolutionalist crisis ferent. In 1926 the Italian Marxist ary programme favoured by Bob Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The is the property at most of thousproletariat, in order to be able to ands (and those thousands serrule as a class, must rid itself of all iously divided among themselves), corporative hangovers, of all syn- and that even if the AES has dicalist prejudices and incrusta- faults it is the only basis for an tions.. The metalworkers, the alliance of millions. not only think as proletarians and have to show how the forging of no longer as metalworkers, joiners a clear-headed (and inevitably, at Martin Thomas or builders, but they must take a this stage, relatively small left step forward: they must think as wing today _connects with the members of a class which aims at mobilisation of millions toleading the peasants and the intel- morrow. has escalated even further - to 20 times the value of world trade in goods and services.

Capitalism also grew internally': in the 25 years starting 1950 the proportion of workers in agriculture in the advanced capitalist countries fell from 22% to less than 8%.

But in Bob Sutcliffe's view, "Probably the key difference between capitalism in the post-war boom and all previous epochs of capitalism has been the growth and change in the economic role of the state"

And that role has also been central to the renewed capitalist crisis since the late '60s. Bob Sutcliffe holds "the fundamental theoretical question in crisis theory to be the contradiction between the production and realisation of surplus value"

"Much of state spending ON CARICON ... contradictory role: it assists the realisation of surplus value [i.e. the transfarmation of workers' unpaid labour into actual money profits, by the sale of the goods produced] by maintaining high demand for goods and services (and it is this aspect which was stressed by Keynesians), yet at the same time its financing demands one way or another a subtraction from surplus value produced (which is the aspect stressed by the anti-Keynesians)"

This contradiction. lies behind the failure of Thatcher's and Reagan's attempted capitalist solution. They have focused on : attacks on the working class designed to improve conditions for production of surplus value, but simultaneously worsened conditions for its realisation. Moreover, their experience shows that "no matter how hard governments of modern advanced capitalist economies try to cut government spending, it is very hard to achieve"

It is, however, according to Bob Sutcliffe, "basically a crisis of profitability of capitalism... other aspects [such as] the fiscal problems of the state... follow from that and are not primary"

Bob's argument, if I have understood it properly, is that reduced profitability means both (obviously) worse conditions for production of surplus value, and (also) worse conditions for realisation (because investment slumps and wages are held down) -hence the production/realisation contradiction is aggravated.

He attributes the decline in the rate of profit principally to wages push - though warning that "It does not follow from this that if the working class had agreed to the level of wage increases demanded by the capitalists then the crisis would not have occurred... It would have meant rather that the manifestations of the crisis would have been different" . If wages had stayed lower, capitalism would first have run into problems on the side of realisation of surplus value.

In the last 19 pages, Bob Sutcliffe examines alternatives, and finds the official 'Alternative Economic Strategy' wanting. The AES centres its plans on increased state spending - and ignores the evidence that today such spending produces "inflation, uncontrollable state deficits, and so on"

The AES sometimes proposes price controls to deal with this problem: but these could be implemented seriously only under "an economic police state" , including wage controls, and with corruption and black markets on a grand scale as its flipside.

As for the AES's proposal of 'planning agreements' - "capitalists cannot be forced to plan in accordance with the needs of workers and consumers. They are in business to make profits...

Behind these 'economic' problems, the more fundamental flaw of the AES is that it is a strategy for a national government - and for a national government. Bob Sutcliffe insists that socialism must be an international programme, and one that looks fundamentally to mass action rather than to reforms from on high.

In his preface, Bob Sutcliffe warns that "This book... does not pretend to solve the problems involved in analýsing the crisis. Its emphasis is more descriptive than theoretical"

Far better this approach than the one neatly described later in the preface: "Too often theoretical writing has had the same function as wearing a lapel badge saying, 'I am orthodox' " Yet it seems to me that there are flaws in the book which weaken its important and well-written argument against the ABS.

I would agree with Bob Sutcliffe in rejecting the "suggestion that Marxist theory of economic crisis is basically an extension of what Marx called the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall". • However, his formulation of the production/realisation contradiction seems to me to be not so much an answer to the problem of crisis theory, as the question restated in more high-sounding terms.

Yes, if wages move up then (all other things being equal) it worsens conditions for production of surplus value while improving conditions for realisation, if they move down, improving conditions for surplus production, then that makes it more ditticuit for capitalists to realise the surplus.

But bourgeois economics is familiar enough with problems of this sort, and argues that they find their solution in a perpetually self-renewing balance. According to pre-Keynesian bourgeois economics, the gap between production levels and demand from wage earners is made good by investment, and it investment Is not sufficient then interest rates will automatically fall so that investment rises to make good the gap.

The novelty of Keynes was the argument that investment generally would not rise sufficiently, and so supplementary state intervention would be necessary. The state investment would more than pay for itself by the snowball effect of the additional production it stimulated.

Now it is pretty clear that the system does not work so smoothly. But the point of theory is to show why the contradictions result neither in perpetual balance - nor in constant imbalance. The production/realisation scheme, at least in the summary form proposed in this book, neither shows precisely why capitalism is not always in crisis, nor adequately refutes even the pre-Keynesian bourgeois argument, let alone the Keynesian. Or so it seems to me.

The argument, I think, has to be cast in more dynamic terms: not just in terms of a general 'contradiction' between production and realisation, but in terms of an inherent tendency of production to move 'out of synd' with demand. (This point connects with the book's unfortunate tendency - in my view - to talk about 'the crisis, rather than specific crises).

The other place where the The other place where the book is weak, I think, is at the book is weak, I think, is at the : verv end. Having demolished the very end. Having demolished the AES, Bob Sutcliffe proposes instead "a broad, democratic and anti-capitalist alliance" - 'an all¡ance of organisations, movements and individuals which combat oppression, of minorities against racial discrimination and prejudice, of the people of poor countries for their national liberation and for economic development in democratic conditions, of young unemployed against the failure of capitalism to offer them/any future, of women against their double oppression in today's society, of lesbians and gay men against our nearly universal social oppression"

Alliance

Comin on ++7:11 have saw the words 'broad democratic proposes under the same name: joiners, the bullders, eic., must Conference: June 4 and 5, County Hall, London SE1 lantunlo " ('Tha Cauthorn ArpeICUludis... tion'). The same, basic idea, it seems to me, should be interpreted today as the need for the working class movement to become the leading centre for such movements as the women's movement and the gay/lesbian movement - for all stryggles for liberation.

How did Gramsci fight for his concept of an alliance? He started by fighting to crystallise, educate and organise first a coherent left wing in the Socialist Party, then a Communist Party. His attitude was: first demarcate the revolutionary forces, organise them in opposition to the reformists, and raise their political and intellectual level, then fight for an alliance. The alliance required raising the workers' movement to the level of fighting for a new society, rather than just for its own trade union type interests - not restricting it to a political lowest-common lennminator. as with the The reference to Gramsci Defenders of the AES can To answer this, I think we Contact:

Neville Adams 115 Neville Rd, London N16.

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Socialist Organiser no.128 April 21 1983 Page 10

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