Bill Mitchell-en To reclaim the state, we have to start with ourselves
(http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=48907)
(…)
Contemporary commentary
Fast track to December 16, 2021, and Serbian economist – Branko Milanovic – has written an excellent Op Ed – Why it is not the crisis of capitalism: The sources of discontent – which is a recycled version of an earlier Op Ed from the same author that I read in 2019.
He clearly is influenced by Harry Braverman’s insights (whether knowingly or through a sort of ‘unity of science’ phenomenon) and notes that Capitalism has been very successful:
… both in terms of its geographical span and the expansion to the areas (like leisure time, or social media) where it has created entirely new markets and commodified things that historically were never objects of transaction.
When Harry Braverman was writing, the geographical span of Capitalism was limited by the Soviet bloc, China, Cuba, etc
That has all changed since and even China’s ‘private sector’ produces “80% of value added”.
He also notes the conversion of “non-markets” into surplus-creating (profitable) activities.
People now rent their own cars (uber) or their homes (Airbnb), in addition to a host of other areas of life that were mediated through price-setting markets.
We no longer walk to the shop to buy a pizza – a teenager on a scooter buzzes it to us – for a pittance from the franchise that runs the shop.
The point that Branko Milanovic makes here is that these new forms of capitalist expansion are just an expression of what Karl Marx identified way back then.
In this blog post – The Left confuses globalisation with neo-liberalism and gets lost (April 27, 2016) – I discussed that exact point.
In the – Communist Manifesto – published in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels discuss the way that discoveries of new lands (America, Rounding the Cape, etc) “opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie”.
They wrote:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
They were obviously aware of the tendency of capitalism to geographical spread to open up new markets and new spaces to extract raw materials.
The search for new markets and new ways of organising production is not new and has been going on for centuries.
The widening of this push into these non-market areas of life has had a fundamental impact on our thinking.
Branko Milanovic writes:
This does not mean that we would all immediately run to rent our homes or drive our cars as taxis, but it means that we are aware of the financial loss that we make by not doing so. For many of us, once the price is right (whether because our circumstances change or the relative price increases), we shall join the new markets and thus reinforce them.
And so the gig economy has evolved as the most recent manifestation of this market broadening phenomenon.
As Harry Braverman identified in the quote above – we cannot want more of that because it makes us unhappy.
The other point he makes is that while the expansion that Marx and Engels were writing about in the C19th benefitted the elites in Europe and allowed them to appease workers with higher wages, which morphed into the era of mass consumption era, which, in turn, morphed into something even more comprehensive where aspects of our lives that were previously considered ‘non work’ (which meant non capitalist) became markets, with commodities supplied to support.
But as capitalism’s never-ending search for ‘market’ penetration continued the beneficiaries changed.
The most recent period of global expansion has not “benefit disproportionately rich countries and their populations”.
Rather, it has “benefited especially Asia, populous countries like China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia” and created a “gap between the expectations entertained by the Western middle classes and their low income growth”.
This hollowing out of the middle class in advanced nations – which is behind phenomenon such as Brexit, Trump, Yellow Vests, etc – has also been accompanied by a ‘market’ penetration into politics:
The expansion of market-like approach to societies in all (or almost all) of their aspects, which is indeed a feature of advanced capitalism, has also transformed politics into a business activity. In principle, politics, no more than our leisure time, was regarded as an area of market transactions. But both have become so. This has made politics more corrupt.
We now distrust our polity more than ever.
And they lie, cheat, defraud and get away with it.
His overall conclusion is that this “crisis is not of capitalism per se” but rather its uneven geographical spread and the “capitalist expansion to the areas that were traditionally not considered apt for commercialization”.
His solution is to wind back the “field of action” of the capitalist system.
Which is where I diverge.
I think that Karl Marx understood that capitalism had tendencies to ensure that capital as a class could reproduce.
The sort of market penetration into our previously ‘non-market’ lives is not something that can be easily wound back.
The resistance of the capitalist class is one thing.
But as noted above, after several decades of neoliberal penetration into our lives, we – us – have become the problem that needs to be addressed first.
We need to activate along the lines we wrote about in our book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, September 2017).
But to do that we need to lift our levels of education.
Progressives have to stop saying things like “we need to tax the rich to afford hospital care” or “it is fine for the government to borrow while interest rates are low” or “if our governments are not careful with taxpayers’ money then the financial markets will exact discipline” – and all the rest of the nonsense that many well-meaning commentators pump out to sound erudite.
But all they are doing is maintaining this ‘market penetration’ mentality and distorting our own personal calculations into ‘can we make a buck’ by renting our house out while we go on holiday sort of thinking.
Ondorioak
1) The problem is capitalism.
Because the logic of that system evolves into what we have.
Harry Braverman understood that even though he didn’t live to see the worst of what it has become.
2) As the first step, education.
3) Then, reclaim the state.
4) Then evolve the production and distribution system away from one that needs to colonise every aspect of our lives with ‘markets’.
Gogoratzekoa:
Irtenbide bakarra:
