'Of Bread and Guns' by Nigel Harris Short on answers

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Trotsky on S The classic Marxist of Stalinism is Leon Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where It Going?' Available via Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8: £2.50 plus 50p postage. ECONOMICS textbooks are still being published which depict the world as a collection of national • economies which, with the right (Keynesian or monetarist) economic policies coula produce permanent prosperity for all. Even after a decade or more during which this has looked increasingly mythical, it is only quite recently that general accounts of the world economy have appeared which focus on and try to explain its renewed crisis.

And since so many of these are written in what for most people is alien jargon, Nigel Harris is to be commended in trying to write a book accessible to the ordinary reader unfamiliar with the terminology of economics or Marxism.

And aside from his tendency to over-season the meal with off-target metaphors, this book does give a readable description of the present state of the world economy. An important aspect of the book's accessibility is its knack of illustrating generalisations with memorable concrete instances. For instance, the decline of the industrial sector and the rise of services in the advanced economies is illustrated by the fact that in the USA more than twice as many people now serve

Reviewed by Bob

Sutcliffe MacDonald's hamburgers as make steel (though there are those who say the two have a lot in common).

And the significance of arma. ments in the world economy by the estimate that world military expenditure amounts to £432,406 a minute.

The emphasis of Harris's account is change - from the days of the Keynesian myth. And the change which he puts most emphasis on is the internationalisation of the world economy. The vast extent of this internationalisation through investment, trade, the development of the multinational company, the use of modern telecommunications is cogently described and this is clearly, I think, the main contribution of the book.

The world economy is a system which, he argues, on occasions when it functions well is capable of fulfilling human need, if very unequally, all over the globe.

Today, however, - after the great post war boom which Harris correctly emphasises - it has once again ceased to function well.

With reference to the advanced economies, the Third World and the states of the East (which he believes are capitalist as well) Harris describes this malady well enough, though his recent statistics are sometimes hard to follow because they tend to be separated from a context which would make them more meaningful.

But two questions insistently emerge which I don't think Harris is able to answer any better than any other socialist writers who have written on the crisis. One is: why has it happened? The' other is: what can be done about it?

Nigel Harris answers the first in passing only: his answer seems to be that the crisis has occured because the rate of profit has fallen. And that has happened through the mechanism described by Marx of a rise in the organic composition of capital - a notion which Harris converts into a kind of metaphor speaking of the 'weight' of accumulated cape at proarin ad this is doe matic and unhelpful la kind of lip service to theoretical orthodoxy) but it hardly plays a major role in the book.

The second question -what is to be done? - is designed to play a more important role in the book. Harris convincingly argues that the new internationalism of the world economy makes national solutions even more difficult. This allows him rightly to dismiss the narrow protectionism of the alternative economic strategies so popular at the top of the labour movement. But the two final chapters where the writing becomes more loose and rhetorical fail to make clear either what the solution is (except world socialism') or to helpfully define the questions.

And it seems confusing that on the one hand Harris should argue that: "The core of socialism, human freedom, had been subverted by the doctrines of worship of the state... This was part of the explanation as to why, so often, the left made little contribution to the movements of the seventies, so often was no more than those who trailed behind movements' -and then say little more about how to resolve today's 'stalemate between the world classes' than to express a faith that somewhere, sometime, a repeat of 1917 will spark off a new fire of world revolution. In a number of asides on questions of industrialisation, technology and similar questions, Harris himself seems to share many of the conceptions which state-worshipping socialists usually adhere to.

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