Root & Branch # 7

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Transcribers note : The strapline on this issue was 'A libertarian marxist journal'—on the previous issue it had been 'a libertarian socialist journal'.

This issue contained a centre section, described as a mini-pamphlet, entitled 'Anarchism vs. Marxism'. (Presumably the intention was that extra copies could be printed and distributed separately, although I don't know if that was done). It reprinted two articles by Ulli Diemer from the Canadian paper Red Menace with a (somewhat critical) Root and Branch introduction. There was a debate about these articles in subsequent issues of Red Menace, involving Sam Dolgoff and the author, which can be found in the online Red Menace archive.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

On the Class Situation in Spain - Charles Reeve

Are We Headed for Another Depression ? - 'Mose' (Fred Moseley)

Authority and Democracy in the United States - Paul Mattick sr.

Mini-Pamphlet: Anarchism vs. Marxism - R&B intro
Anarchism vs. Marxism: A few notes on an old theme - Ulli Diemer
Bakunin vs. Marx. The continuing debate - Ulli Diemer

Root & Branch

When Men Become Gods - Alan Wallach

Reviews—
Food First : Beyond the Myth of Scarcity - reviewed by Gary Roth
Marx and Keynes : The Limits of the Mixed Economy - reviewed by Rick Burns
Correspondence

Introduction

The economic prosperity of the sixties and the political stability that rested on it have eroded to such an extent that falling profits and inflation, on the one hand, and governmental crises and a distinct trend toward authoritarian politics, on the other, have now spread to the entire capitalist world. The developing crisis and its social implications are the focus of this issue.

Mose's article examines the prospects for a full-scale depression as the outcome of the current economic downturn. Having previously discussed the economists' inability to control or even explain this situation (see Root & Branch 6, "The Obsolescence of Modern Economics"), he outlines Marx's theory of capitalism in order to demonstrate its usefulness in analyzing the current crisis. Summarizing from a Marxian perspective the most important factors determining the structure of the economy, Mose concludes that both the squeezing of workers' living standards and government economic interventions can, at best, only prevent a sudden collapse of the system.

If then we can expect a continuing decline in the standard of living in each country accompanied by a heightening of international tensions, what are the consequences for American politics ? Paul Mattick shows that corresponding to the absence of a socialist movement in America is the absence of fascistic movements as attempted resolutions of extreme class conflict. The complacency of the American working class, however, depends upon continuing capitalist expansion. Thus, the limits imposed by the developing crisis create the possibility of a break with the belief that politics can be safely left to the bourgeoisie.

Mattick's book, Marx and Keynes, is the subject of a lengthy review by Rick Burns, who focuses on its critique of Keynesian theory on the basis of Marx's theory of value. In his review of Lappe and Collins's Food First, Gary Roth deals with agriculture, as an example of the problems set by capitalism for the satisfaction of human needs.

While Maoism seems to be on the wane in China, statues of the Great Helsman still standing in public places provide a starting point for a look at the intersection of politics and art. In a picture essay and an article by Alan Wallach the meaning of monumental figure sculpture in the western past is examined through its reflection in China's present.

Finally, this issue includes our first "mini-pamphlet", a reprinting of two pieces on Anarchism and Marxism.

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On The Class Situation In Spain

The balance of power between the unions and the ranks of workers in Spain is clearly shifting to the advantage of the former at the expense of every extra-union form of organization, especially the general assemblies. The recent practices of the Socialist (UGT) and Communist (CCOO) unions indicate a modification of their strategy toward the assemblies, whose status as a recognized and privileged form of the workers' movement appears to be waning. This at any rate is the conclusion of an analysis of two recent strikes by the comrades of the Barcelona collective publishing the journal, Bicicleta.

Although the transport maintenance workers had controlled their strike through daily assemblies and had fought to the point where 400 were arrested, the UGT and CCOO managed to end the struggle by a mere decision of the negotiating committee. The rank-and-file opposition to this was so great that the bureaucrats had to appeal to the police for protection during the last general assembly; nevertheless, the unions succeeded : the majority returned to work. Then, in a strike in graphics arts, the UGT and CCOO left the strike committee and again negotiated a back-to-work. As Bicicleta put it :

These experiences have been useful to the UGT and the CCOO. Finding it impossible to control the assemblies, they hastened to change the decision-making machinery before the metal-, construction-, and textile-workers' contract talks began. Decisions will no longer be made by general assemblies of the workers, but by assemblies of union stewards, either directly designated by the CCOO and the UGT or elected during the last union elections, which were held when acceptance of the State's version of union liberty set strict limits on things. Now the CCOO and the UGT criticize the general assemblies as manipulative and "anti-democratic" because they don't represent "the totality of the workers of each sector". (As if this totality had voted during the union elections !). These familiar arguments of the bosses under Franco are now used to run down every strike not controlled by the CCOO and the UGT.

What is "correct" tor the unions is the "legal way", a way that increasingly resembles the old [fascist] vertical unions.

But transferring the decision-making power from the general assemblies to the representatives hasn't been enough. Because not all representatives are controlled by these unions, the latter press harder whenever they can. Thus, for the national chemical contracts the UGT and the CCOO were the sole negotiators. As justification they claimed that an agreement with the employers had given negotiating rights to only those unions with more than ten percent of the votes.

The truth is that the movimento assambleario, the CNT, and the organizations of the working-class left—perhaps as a result of their limited influence in the factories—have not been able to respond effectively to this control of the situation by integrative unionism and the parliamentary left.

In this connection may it be said that to explain this predicament as the result of manipulation of the masses by the unions seems simplistic and insufficient. We are witnessing today the establishment of a balance of forces within capitalist Spain that favors the normalization of struggles and frustrates radical minorities of workers. The majority of workers accept and follow the line of the reformist unions. Some comrades (for example, those of Emancipacion) attribute this state of affairs to the revolutionaries failure to act in a clear way on the union question. This criticism is to a degree true, when addressed to the CNT militants who, despite their revolutionary spirit find themselves reduced more and more to just keeping a purely trade-unionist project alive. But, on the other hand, this explanation is too colored by a subjectivist and voluntarist image of the class struggle. The power of ideology does not explain everything : it is necessary to analyze the material conditions behind the support that Spanish proletarians render to the UGT and the CCOO. The strength of these unions is rooted in their capacity to respond successfully to the immediate needs, reformist but real, of wage-earners. As the economic crisis lays bare the inadequacy of the social infrastructure necessary to reproduce the labor force (education, housing, health, transportation etc.), the unions can present themselves as the managers of services indispensable to Spanish proletarians. Since they command significant funds (stemming partially from the massive financial aid received from the German Social Democrats), the UGT for example, can support such projects in the field of housing and food coops as were recently reported by Triunfo. These displays are aimed at convincing workers that unions, rather than direct action, offer the least risky means to ameliorate their immediation condition.

Charles Reeve

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[Transcribers note : the two main articles in this issue appeared here]

Are We Headed for Another Depression ?
Authority and Democracy in the United States

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Root & Branch Mini-Pamphlet

Anarchism vs Marxism

We are here reprinting two articles by Ulli Diemer—Anarchism vs. Marxism and The Continuing Debate : Bakunin vs. Marx—which first appeared in The Red Menace 2 :2. 1 In a clear and concise way they confront the main anarchist misconceptions about Marxism and demonstrate the relevance of these issues for libertarian socialists today. However, there is a major weakness in the Bakunin vs. Marx article. In demonstrating that Marx is not an economic determinist, Diemer comes close to denying Marx's materialism. The conflict between materialism and idealism was central to the debate between Marx and Bakunin. More significantly, it remains important for our own attempts to clarify the difficulties and possibilities of revolutionary action.

Idealism and what we may call vulgar materialism both disconnect ideas from the process of people's active transformation of their environment, natural and social. For the latter, people are the passive recipients of ideas forced on them from outside; for the former, conceptions evolve by their own logic, and here too "happen to" people, instead of being developed by people in the course of dealing with their problems and opportunities. As a result of this similarity, both orientations have tended to see world-changing ideas as the property of educated elites. As it has no explanation for the origin of ideas, except earlier ideas, idealism gives those who have the "correct" ideas at any time a key role in the making of history. On this terrain the idealist and the undialectical materialist shake hands on the necessity of placing the reins of action in the hands of the few who, for one reason or another, are in tune with the objective necessities of the situation.

Thus Lenin, the philosophical materialist, was a complete idealist politically, believing that the idea of socialism could develop only in heads exposed to higher learning, and never among the workers, tied to their immediate needs, themselves. Similarly, Bakunin believed in the absolute necessity for an elite organization controlling and guiding the movement of the People, to whose unformed thoughts only the anarchist Alliance (and above all he, Bakunin) could give articulate form.

While such views may be very inspiring to an intellectual elite, they are of no use to the rest of us. It is this problem that Marx was addressing when he wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach that "the educator himself needs educating". Marx, in contrast to the left wing idealists whom he criticized (Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin), did not see the problem of revolution as that of drawing up plans for others to carry out. His ideas and later theory developed out of his experiences and studies of movements of the emerging proletariat. He noted that this class, unlike the peasantry, was integrated over large areas because it produced for the national or world market instead of for local consumption. Consequently, what happened to workers in one area tended to affect workers in others. But this state of affairs was also relative. In times of capitalist expansion and prosperity, workers' struggles for higher wages, better working conditions, and even political goals could remain more or less localized. On the other hand, capitalist crises threw the working class in general into similar conditions, conditions (mass layoffs, wage-cutting, and generalized misery) which could neither be ignored nor fought on a small group level. They could only be fought collectively and cooperatively.

Marx studied the origin and development of the proletariat in order to clarify the meaning of the ideal of socialism, advanced during periods of crisis. His analysis of capitalism led him to conclude that the system would become world-dominant, that the proletariat would become the large majority of the population in the capitalistically developed countries, and that the continuing crisis cycle would thus become more severe and involve larger numbers of people. At some point in history, he supposed, the world's working class would be so large and the crisis so deep that the direct, collective activity of the proletariat would move from resistance to revolution, expropriate the capitalists, and create a society on the basis of "the free and equal association of producers". These predictions were based in part on empirical observations and in part on scientific abstraction from such observations. Only in this way could theory be a guide to action, rather than an ideological justification or a program for others to carry out. It was in order to aid his comrades in changing the world—the workers—to realize their collective capabilities that Marx wanted to "lay bare the laws of motion of capitalist society" in Capital. He wanted to understand, and so help others understand, the social realities that make possible new forms of social action, and the new forms of thinking that such action involves. This was the content of Marx's materialism—the explanation of the origin and content of socialist ideas in terms of the structural dynamics of capitalism.

The Marxian model is, if anything, more relevant today than it was in Marx's time, when large portions of the world were still untouched by capitalism and the working class was a small minority even in the most capitalistically developed countries. At the present time, it is true, the revolutionary workers' movement has reached a uniquely low point. The officially left organizations—parties and unions—have come to devote themselves to the interest of capitalism or its party-ruled analogue in the "socialist" nations. And yet the international working class, larger than ever, and more closely than ever linked through their domination by the world market, faces the very conditions and necessities that Marx discerned a century ago. The current economic decline indicates that government intervention in the economy has not rendered the capitalist crisis obsolete; it is rather the crisis which is rendering obsolete those theories—shared in the sixties by bourgeois ideologists and most of the left—that see crisis as a thing of the past. The Marxian analysis of capitalist development, clarifying the situation faced by the workers, provides no guarantee of a libertarian future. That depends now as before on the workers' response to their conditions. But Marxism does show that such a future is not just a utopian dream but a real possibility worth fighting for.

Root & Branch

"... From the first moment of victory, mistrust must be directed no longer against the conquered reactionary parties, but against the workers' previous allies, against the party that wishes to exploit the common victory for itself along. . . The workers must put themselves at the command not of the State authority but of the revolutionary community councils which the workers will have managed to get adopted. . . Arms and ammunition must not be surrendered on any pretext".
K. Marx & F. Engels. Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850).

[Transcribers note : here there followed the two reprinted articles which are already in the library].

Anarchism vs. Marxism : A few notes on an old theme
Bakunin vs. Marx. The continuing debate

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Root & Branch

With the 1960s the eternal prosperity, the managed economy, and the attendant "death of ideology" of the post-World War II period came to an end. The combination of unemployment and inflation in the capitalist West and the inability of the state-run systems of the East to satisfy their working classes are producing unsettling effects throughout "industrial society" : the deterioration of conditions in the big cities, which nonetheless draw an increasing proportion of the world's population; the brutalization of the seemingly permanent army of the unemployed, which has been accumulating in these urban centers; the instability of governments in the democracies, in the absence of any clear policy alternatives, inspiring a drift toward open authoritarianism; the development of opposition to the party dictatorships in the East, both in the form of liberalism among the intelligentsia and, more significantly, in that of strike movements among the working classes; and the continuing decay of ideologies and social norms. All this testifies to the basic character of the "limits of growth" that modern society is coming up against.

Whatever disappointments Nature has in store for us in the future, the limits we are encountering now are not ecological but social ones. It is not even socially caused, environmental disaster but the third world war that most directly threatens our extinction. That a fascination with zero-growth has replaced the nineteenth century's discovery of eternal progressive development is only the ideological form of the experience of the bankruptcy as a social system of capitalism and its state-run analog.

As yet we cannot speak of the existence anywhere in the world of forces or social movements which represent a real possibility of social revolution. But, while in no way inevitable, social revolution is clearly necessary if possibilities for an enjoyable and decent life are to be realized—and perhaps if human life is to be preserved at all. For this reason we see the overthrow of the present order of society as the goal to which we as a group wish to contribute. While the ideal we aim for has been called by a variety of names—communism, socialism, anarchism—what is important to us is the idea of a system in which social life is controlled by those whose activities make it up. Capitalism has created the basis of such a system by so interweaving the production and consumption of all producers that only collective solutions are possible to meet the producers' need to control the means and process of production and distribution. To eliminate the problems caused by the subordination of social production to capital's need for profit, the working class must take direct responsibility for what it already produces. This means opposition not only to the existing ruling class of capitalists and politicians but to any future managers or party leaders seeking to hold power in our name. Root & Branch, therefore, holds to the tradition of the workers' movement expressed in the Provisional Rules of the First International, beginning with the consideration "that the emanicipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves".

From the past we draw not only inspiration and still-meaningful ideas but also lessons on mistakes to be avoided. The fundamental idea of the old labor movement, that the working class can build up its forces in large organizations in preparation for the "final conflict" has proven false. Whether the organization was that of reformist or of revolutionary parties, producer or consumer cooperatives, or trade unions, its success has always turned out to be a success in adapting to the exigencies of survival within capitalism. The Bolshevik alternative of the small vanguard of revolutionaries preparing for the day when they would lead the masses to the conquest of state power has also proven useless for our purposes. Such parties have had a role to play only in the unindustrialized areas of the world, where they have provided the ruling class needed to carry out the work of forced economic development unrealized by the native bourgeoisie. In the developed countries they have been condemned either to sectarian insignificance or to transformation into reformist parties of the social-democratic type.

While history has indicated that there can be no revolutionary movement except in periods of revolution, the principles of such a future movement must guide the activity of those who wish to contribute to its creation. These principles—in contrast to those of the old labor movement—must signify a total break with the foundation of capitalist society, the relation between wage-labor and capital. As our goal is that of workers' control over social life, our principles must be those of direct, collective action. Direct, because the struggle for control of society begins with the struggle to control our fight against the current order. Collective, because the only successes which have a future are those involving (if only in principle) the class as a whole. We recognize that the working class does not have one uniform identity, and thus experiences oppression under capitalism differently according to age, sex, race, nationality, etc. However, what defines and thus unites the working class is its exploitation by capital, even if the character of that exploitation varies giving the appearance of separate problems and thus separate solutions. While it is true that the struggle against capitalism will not by itself solve these problems, overcoming capitalist exploitation raises the possibility of their solutions. Thus, each working-class struggle, even if it does not address an issue experienced by the class as a whole, must be aimed at the real enemy, capital, and not other members of the class. In the same way, we think workers must overcome in action the division between employed and unemployed, between unionized and non-unionized members of their class. Such a view automatically brings us into opposition to existing organizations like trade unions, which exist by representing the short-term interests of particular groups of workers within the existing social structure. Similarly, we are in conflict with the parties and sects which see their own dominance over any future movement as the key to its success.

We see ourselves as neither leaders nor bystanders but as part of the struggle. We are for a florescence of groups like ours and also for cooperation in common tasks. We initiate and participate in activity where we work, study, and live. As a group, we would like to be of some use in making information available about past and present struggles and in discussing the conclusions to be drawn from this history and its future extension. We organize lectures and study groups. Since 1969 we have published a journal and series of pamphlets. We hope others will join us to discuss the ideas and the materials we publish and that they will help us to develop new ideas and means to circulate and realize them.

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When Men Become Gods

[Transcribers note : this was an illustrated essay—the illustrations can be seen in the pdf of this issue]

Lincoln Borglum, whose father Gutzon began the massive faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, fears that in a thousand centuries man may conclude that they represent the gods or mark the tombs of heroes. The younger Borglum, who finished the job after his father died shortly before WW II, wants a hall of records carved into the mountainside, with the history of the U.S. inscribed on its walls—just to get the story straight. (The New York Post, 1 May 1978)

In the West, the tradition of large-scale figure sculpture has come to an end. It is now unlikely that anything comparable to the great works of the tradition will again be made. A number of reasons might be cited to explain this decline : the scale of our cities, modern communications, our over-familiarity with the sight of our leaders, their obvious lack of heroism, the deepening disillusionment of the age. Because of our growing distance from the tradition it is perhaps possible to begin to assess what the tradition meant in the West—and also what it means in China, where it lives on.

Despite an extraordinary cultural diversity, the subjects of monumental figure sculpture were generally limited to gods, heroes and rulers. The meanings associated with these subjects were, in a sense, equally limited. Monumental treatment endowed the subject with an aura of divinity. The superhuman size of the figure as well as the way it was exhibited on a pedestal or within a special precinct removed it from everyday life. The viewer could thus experience it only as part of a mythic realm—a realm exempt from mundane laws of time, change and human scale. In the long run it mattered little whether the subject was king, hero or god. All belonged to the same otherworldly domain.

The power of monumental sculpture to elevate its subject to the timeless realm of the gods was recognized at the beginning of recorded history and exploited, although perhaps not always consciously, for political ends. Often the sculptor emphasized a ruler's special godly attributes or mission—the divine origin of his inspiration or his unique ability to communicate with the gods. For example, in the statue known as Augustus of Primaporta, the Roman emperor is accompanied by a tiny winged figure representing divine genius; or in the case of Girardon's equestrian Louis XIV—a prototype for statues of the king that were erected in all the major cities of France—the king looks to heaven for guidance.

The monumental figure of the ruler made visible a claim of divinity and unassailable power that usually was part of a dominant system of religious and political beliefs. In other words, the statue extended into the realm of visual and spatial experience the dominant ideology of the society that produced it.

By virtue of its physical presence, the statue forced its viewers to define themselves in relation to the abstract power it personified. That power was experienced subjectively in terms of the figure's size, expression and symbolic attributes. But it was also experienced in the way the figure's presence articulated and charged the surrounding space. The figure turned the surrounding space into a ideologically active environment—one in which the only appropriate response could be awed respect. In this sense, all monument figures might be thought of as cult objects since all demanded reverence from their viewers.

What I am saying may become somewhat clearer if you imagine an open space and then add to it a monumental statue. Consider the way the statue, by becoming the focal point, transforms the meaning of the space and your relation to it.

At first the feelings inspired by a monumental figure of a ruler may have been ambivalent—a wavering between the protection it offered and its inherent threat. With time, however, the statue and the aura of divinity surrounding it were accepted as a normal part of experience. To the extent the dominant ideology shaped experience, the meanings the statue embodied appeared consistent with and therefore as a continuation of other aspects of experience. Thus its ideological function generally went unnoticed even as it added to the force of the ideology. (If this seems paradoxical, try to imagine as ideological any large-scale figure sculpture that is normally part of your environment—for example, the sculptures in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art.) Only when the ideology as a whole was called into question, as in moments of revolutionary upheaval, would the supremely ideological character of the statue be fully revealed. This may explain why opposition to an ideology so often included iconoclasm—for example, in the French Revolution, or in anti-colonialist struggles.

Yet if the statue survived the destruction of the ideology that had been its raison d'etre, it necessarily lost its original cult function. The museums are filled with monumental figure sculptures that are normally experienced as part of contemporary ideologies (Our Cultural Heritage, Civilization, etc.). In the context of the museum, or rather in the context of a culture in which the museum has become the primary art institution, the work has been placed in the service of a new cult—the modern, Western cult of art—which endows it with a new aura.

What I have been attempting to describe are two ways of seeing monumental figure sculpture : in terms of the traditional relations between the figure and the ideology that gave it meaning; in terms mediated by the art institutions of modern, Western culture. These two ways of seeing, although they frequently coexist within a given society (e.g., religious shrines and archaeological museums), are mutually exclusive : each is unimaginable from the viewpoint of the other. For example, educated Europeans and Americans often react with horror when they first encounter idolatry. Horror results not because of intellectual or religious prohibitions but because, for the spectator, the worshipper's ritual activity in front of the statue appears absurd.

In China, the authorities have set up thousands of over-life-size white marble statues of Mao Tse-tung. These statues are probably the most unobtrusive monumental figure sculptures ever made. With their compact shapes, immaculate, machine-tooled surfaces and limited repertory of poses—Mao in an overcoat holding rolled-up blueprints, Mao in a "Mao jacket" with arms behind back, etc.—they recapitulate the bureaucratic virtues of orderliness, uniformity, impersonality, efficiency, control. Impassive, aloof, Mao makes almost no claims upon the viewer. He is simply there, a ghostly, paternal presence.

The term "cult of personality" partially expresses the meaning of these works. They contribute to a system of belief which is further supported by other forms of artistic celebration : poems, songs, paintings, embroideries, billboard portraits, etc. Mao is the central figure in a ubiquitous iconography of political power—an iconography that includes other leaders (Hua Kuo-feng, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh); heroes of production (e.g., Iron Man Wong, the Chinese Stakhanov); the People, usually represented genre-style, as types; political villains, always caricatured (e.g., the Gang of Four). And yet, with the exception of occasional monuments to the anonymous "heroes of the people", Mao is the only figure to be memorialized in stone. The strength of the Mao cult is further attested by the recently constructed tomb in Peking where his embalmed and painted body is solemnly displayed, as if to confirm Mao once was flesh.

The cult of personality reflected Mao's enormous ambitions. With his death, the cult became purely an expression of the state power he had for so long dominated. The current leadership opposed Mao's policies while he was alive (and no doubt heaved an enormous sigh of relief at his passing). That it has chosen to maintain the cult—at least for the time being—reveals how irrevocably Mao symbolized the authority of the state at the time of his death.

I remember now the statue I saw in January at the entrance to the People's Park in Loyang. It is not hard to imagine the park in spring : families crossing the narrow bridge over the Jin He River on their way to the menagerie and hothouses; the flowers; crowds of people enjoying a day off. The white figure on its pedestal, a distant, looming presence—above them yet in the midst of their lives. When men become gods. . .

Alan Wallach
May 1978
A somewhat different version of this article is appearing in Art in America.

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Reviews :

Francis Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; 1977.

Francis Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins have written a book which provides one of the more detailed descriptions yet to appear of the capitalist division of labor as it applies to agriculture. While this is not the ostensible purpose of the book, it is one of the more important themes in it.

Both capitalist production and the expansion of society in goods and population depend on the modern division of labor. This situation, however, also threatens people with hunger and starvation if the marketing system based on the division of labor ever breaks down; unless, that is, it can immediately be replaced by an alternative form of distribution. Natural disasters have always posed a threat to human society, but the division of labor created a new form of vulnerability toward nature. Never before have the industrial and agricultural capacities of society been greater, but also never before has society been faced with the possibility of extinction as a permanent facet of society's organization.

A hundred years ago Marx speculated that a nation which ceased to work "even for a few weeks would perish". 2 If anything, the situation is more extreme today. Access to food depends on daily shipments of produce and the constant restocking of the merchandiser's shelves. In the cities, the food close at hand would hardly serve as a temporary buffer; the availability of processed foods depends on an extensive network for receiving raw materials and distributing the finished products. Even farmers and agricultural workers face this situation; the division of production into component parts extends into agriculture, and people cannot live long on a diet of strawberries, wheat, or soybeans alone. The ability to eat depends on the system of production and distribution remaining intact.

Thus, the relationship between nature and culture has undergone a complete reversal. Where natural disasters still cannot be predicted and planned for, their negative effect can be counteracted through a quick reallocation of goods. Not nature, but the system of production and distribution now poses the biggest threat to human civilization. The opposition between nature and culture has been replaced by a situation in which the social organization is the greatest potential obstacle to the use of nature.

Besides this potential horror, capitalism has also produced hunger and malnutrition as an automatic accompaniment to its accumulation process. During the last decade, more and more attention has been drawn to the number of hungry people in the world. The current recession has worsened this, but even before, there was a growing acknowledgement that hunger was widespread, and spreading. It is this crisis which Lappe and Collins address in their book, Food First : Beyond the Myth of Scarcity.

What most alarms them is the tendency to view human miseries as due to the limits which nature is imposing on civilization's growth. In countering these ideas, they show in great detail how it would be possible to provide everyone with more than enough food. The obstacle, however, is the restraint placed on production and distribution by the profit criteria of the food producers.

The ideology which they oppose is by no means without sophistication or superficial confirmation. The explanation usually goes something like this : the world's population has outstripped the earth's capacity to produce food, and not even the Green Revolution or Food Aid has been able to make much of a dent in the problem. Consequently, we must give up the goal of adequately feeding everyone, and instead, concentrate on solutions like birth control and setting limits to material growth, lest we deplete the earth at an even faster rate which will only exacerbate the problems. In the meantime, we need to steel ourselves and adjust to this new ethic.

For believers in "lifeboat ethics", as it is appropriately called, survival is ensured only for those most capable of weathering the turbulence. Not surprisingly, this means that the industrialized countries survive at the expense of the underdeveloped, the working population at the expense of the unemployed, the rich at the expense of the poor. The utopian aspirations of capitalism—to increase productivity indefinitely—are to be replaced with a more realistic attitude. While it may seem obvious that this "ethic" is a convenient means to blame nature for the plight of the unfortunate, the growing popularity of these ideas makes the publication of Food First important.

The book itself is organized into a series of 48 questions, each dealing with some aspect of the "lifeboat" ideology. Lappe and Collins point out, for instance, that high population density is not synonymous with a lack of food. "France has just about the same number of people for each cultivated acre as India". (p. 17) Nor does the problem stem from a lack of food production. "Half of Central America's agricultural land produces food for export while in several of its countries the poorest 50 percent of the population eat only half the necessary protein". (p. 15) In the same manner, the food scarcity is not imposed by nature. In the United States "the acreage allotment figure for 1970 was only 75 percent of that of 1967; less land was cultivated in 1970 than in 1948-1952. In both 1969 and 1970 the amount of grain that could have been grown, but was not, on land held out of production amounted to over seventy million metric tons—about double all the grain imported annually in the early seventies by the underdeveloped countries". (p. 23)

These few examples give a sense of the information contained in the book. With 466 pages of information, the authors present material on overpopulation, agricultural output, education and birth control, foreign aid programs, the spread of the desert, trade relations, livestock and feed grain production, technology and the small farmer, nutrition, and other topics; the purpose of which is to explain the contradictions between agricultural production and human needs. As such, they provide an overall description of the development of agriculture as well as a detailed rebuttal of the specific arguments which explain hunger as a result of the "crisis of overpopulation".

Agricultural production has become increasingly segmented, and large farms based upon export production have come to dominate the market. While this process began in colonial days, its development has been extremely rapid since World War II. The growth of the world market coincided with the interest in and possibility of profit-making through these channels. Different parts of the world began to specialize in one-crop, or monoculture, production, and thus became dependent on other parts of the world for their agricultural needs. The same process took place with the products of industry. Countries fostered agriculture for export as a means to gain money to buy other goods. Because the agricultural market was a lucrative one, corporations (and the multinationals in particular) took part in and encouraged this development, investing heavily in fertile lands, and, in the Third World, in cheap labor. In Ghana, for instance, "over half of [the] country's arable land is now planted with cocoa trees", (p. 185) and indeed, "over half of the 40 countries on the United Nations list of those most seriously affected by the food crisis of the 1970's depend on agricultural exports for at least 80 percent of their export earnings". (p. 186)

International agencies which provide credit and technical assistance to farmers have also strengthened this trend. The majority of this aid goes to large farmers or to the multinationals and their affiliates. In Tunisia, one "agricultural program provided credit only to those owning a certain minimum acreage—usually 125 acres, a large holding indeed in that country". (p. 117) This bias can also be seen with the Green Revolution; the use of new, high-yield seeds which were to inaugurate a sort of food heaven on earth. Only farmers with large amounts of capital could afford to buy new seeds each season or the mechanized equipment which their use often required. The large farms then set the norms for market prices and are better able to withstand price fluctuations. More and more land comes under the domination of the large farms.

The small farmers and peasants are unable to compete on the international markets, and the local markets are undercut when monoculture crops are imported. Because of these and other pressures, the ability of communities and nations to grow food for their own use is lost. In Mexico, due to the Green Revolution, "wheat yields tripled in only two decades", yet "there are also more hungry people than ever before". (p. 111) In West Malaysia, "by 1970, the bottom 20 percent of rural households had experienced a fall of over 40 percent in their average income since 1957, while the average income of the next 20 percent fell 16 percent. By contrast, the top 20 percent of rural households increased their mean income 21 percent". (p. 133)

The populations of the industrialized countries have, for the most part, been isolated from this process during the twentieth century, having experienced it a century earlier. But because these countries were able to industrialize, the landless could find jobs in manufacturing. The increased consumption of the industrialized countries has made them the focus of export agriculture. The peoples of the Third World have not been so lucky. Industry, by preference, invests near markets and where transportation and communication facilities are already established. This favors the industrialized countries. When industrial establishments are created in the underdeveloped countries they are often capital-intensive; and when they are labor-intensive, the work can be brutal. In either case, not enough employment is available to the population. Production on the land and in the factories has increased, but unemployment and hunger remain major problems.

On the basis of all this, Lappe and Collins conclude that "neither population growth nor the size of today's population is now the cause of hunger"; (p. 62) for while "there is scarcity... it is not a scarcity of food. The scarcity is of people who have either access to the means to grow their own food or the money to buy it". (p. 22) Overpopulation explains these problems only if it is assumed that the social structure is above examination.

Because of the inability of people to feed themselves, Lappe and Collins see a solution in local, diversified agriculture. The means to avoid a market-induced scarcity is to stop producing for the market. They suggest that such a reversal is possible within the prevailing social order, particularly for the Third World countries. National revolutions could set a priority on self-reliant agriculture, and thus circumvent the problems of landless peasants, farmlands owned only by a few, the need for foreign exchange, and vulnerability to price fluctuations.

Their own data, however, speaks against this solution. The underdeveloped countries are entangled in the market system to such a great extent that to withdraw from it would be akin to self-imposed genocide. Just to alter the agricultural techniques would require a massive quantity of new seeds, fertilizers, and machinery. In addition, those countries would then need to find a way to obtain the manufactured goods for which they now trade their crops. Lappe and Collins show with their statistics that it is conceivable for every country to feed its own population; but this is not the same as saying that this is a realistic possibility.

In part, the authors opt for their solution because they believe it to be a practical step which any part of the world can immediately embark on. Cuba and China are cited as the outstanding examples for the rest of the Third World. Cuba, however, has extensive trade relations with both Western Europe and the Soviet bloc, and this has not undergone any significant changes because of its interest in self-reliant agriculture. The Soviet Union's support of Cuba's sugar prices, far above world market levels, is the most important means by which a livable standard of living is maintained for the population.

China, on the other hand, was not completely dependent on the world market at the time of the 1949 Revolution, and the array of natural resources and land within its borders accounts for its stance of independence. For the rest of the Third World, it has been since World War II that international trade relations have become so entangled. Furthermore, only a few of the underdeveloped countries have a variety of resources to draw upon. From an economic point of view, neither China nor Cuba is a positive example for Third World countries—Cuba because it is not self-reliant and cannot become so in the near future, and China because its development began in circumstances which do not exist today in the other underdeveloped countries. And all this avoids discussion of what Lappe and Collins mean by "people's power" in those two countries.

The note which ends Food First is all the more surprising since the authors show so well that social causes underly the crisis of "overpopulation". Yet, in offering solutions, they reverse their position. The evil is not, as Lappe and Collins imply, the division of labor itself, but the system of production and distribution presently attached to it. Large-scale monoculture would be feasible, perhaps even preferable, if the vulnerabilities caused by the market system were eliminated and replaced with a guaranteed system of food allocation. Farmers would not be subject to market fluctuations, and those not attached to the land could be guaranteed their livelihood through an international system of commitments. In the same manner, natural disasters could be anticipated, and everyone insured that in case of disaster other parts of the world would automatically come to their aid with relief and materials for rebuilding. Whatever vulnerability people experience today stems from the social structure. To posit a technological solution by restructuring the division of labor, in the end, skirts the problem.

The authors' bias has one other negative aspect : they only present information which speaks against a large-scale and international division of labor. It would be useful to know what potentials this might contain if the social system was not structured according to profit criteria.

But regardless of the bias, the book contains much useful information. The authors document the social reasons for hunger and support their ideas with data drawn from official sources—the reports of governments and international agencies. As such, it is a contribution to the ongoing critique of capitalistically-induced misery. Levi-Strauss, in Tristes Tropique, told about the perpetual holocaust which primitive people were subjected to upon contact with Western civilization; Lappe and Collins tell of the holocaust which the no-longer primitive people of the Third World are now experiencing, and which we will all face should the market system collapse and we not have an alternative immediately at hand to replace it with.

Gary Roth
September 1978

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Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, by Paul Mattick, Boston, Porter Sargent, 1969, 341 pp.

Ten years have passed since the publication of Paul Mattick's Marx and Keynes, a decade in which we have all witnessed the collapse of the Keynesian "solution" to the boom-and-bust cycle of the capitalist economy. For several years now economists and politicians, as well as business and labor leaders, have not been able to devise any solutions to the pervasive and persistent problems of simultaneous high rates of inflation and unemployment, slow growth, lagging investment and productivity, and the social divisiveness that accompanies such economic difficulties. In the late 1960s, while neo-Keynesians were proclaiming a new era of permanent prosperity, Mattick was insisting that Keynesian policies do not resolve the fundamental contradictions of capitalist production which manifest themselves in periodic crises and that sooner or later the limits of these stabilization policies would be reached. In his own words : "It is my contention that the Keynesian solution to the economic problems that beset the capitalist world can be of only temporary avail, and the conditions under which it can be successful are in the process of dissolution". (viii) 3 Now, after ten years, the accuracy of Mattick's prediction warrants another look at his book.

Mattick presents a twofold critique of Keynesian economics : first, he focuses on its major theoretical inconsistencies, then he points out the ineffectiveness of Keynesian-inspired policies throughout the capitalist world. Mattick argues persuasively that the mixed economy is still fundamentally a capitalist economy and is therefore still subject to its laws of development as presented by Marx. The existence of government intervention in the economy does not abolish these laws, rather, the effects of such intervention must be analyzed within the context of these constraints. The successful analysis of the dynamics of the mixed economy in terms of Marx's theory of capital accumulation is Mattick's most significant contribution to our understanding of the contemporary world economy. It sets him apart from more well-known American left wing theorists such as Sweezy, Baran, Magdoff, and O'Connor, who by and large claim that Marxist categories need to be revised in light of twentieth century economic developments. For this reason alone Marx and Keynes continues to deserve more serious consideration than it has received in the past decade.

Mattick begins his critique of the Keynesian policy of government economic intervention by illuminating logical inconsistencies in Keynes's theory, as spelled out in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. For Keynes, governmental intervention was a necessary response to the inability of the capitalist economy to maintain equilibrium conditions at full employment on its own due to a lack of "effective demand". That a lack of adequate demand was not automatically self-correcting and could stabilize the economy at less than full employment was clearly revealed for the first time, according to Keynes, by the depression of 1929. Basing his analysis on the assumption that the sole purpose of economic activity is consumption, Keynes claimed that this insufficiency of effective demand was the result of two psychological factors, the "propensity to consume" and the "inducement to invest". Briefly, both the propensity of the population to consume and the inducement of entrepeneurs to invest decline with the growth of income and the decreasing marginal efficiency (profitability) of capital. This results in the slackening of effective demand and economic stagnation. Keynes believed that it was possible to remedy this deficient demand by government fiscal and monetary policies designed to increase the propensity to consume and to stimulate new capital investments.

As Mattick shows, however, by admitting to "a difference between what he considers the community's chosen propensity to consume and the actually existing social consumption needs" (12) evidenced by the depression itself, and by linking the inducement to invest to expected profitability, Keynes cannot escape the contradictory conclusion that profit-making, not consumption, is the goal of economic activity in capitalism. If the object of economic activity were consumption, Mattick argues, "there would be no problem of effective demand". (12) Furthermore, if profit-making, not consumption, is the goal of capitalist production, the propensity to consume can no longer be regarded as an independent variable whose decline weakens the effective demand, thus halting economic growth. "A lack of effective demand", Mattick asserts, "is just another expression for a lack of capital accumulation and is not an explanation of it". (13) Thus, a consistent analysis of capitalist production and the government intervention it has called forth must lie elsewhere.

After this brief review of Keynesian theory, Mattick summarizes the Marxian theory of capital accumulation. He stresses that prosperity in a capitalist economy depends on the maintenance of a rapid rate of capital accumulation and that crises occur when the accumulation process is retarded. Mattick, following Marx, locates the cause of the decline in accumulation in the economy's inability to produce enough surplus-value to maintain the vigorous rate of expansion achieved during the boom : "... the only possible reason why (capital accumulation) should suddenly be halted is a lack of surplus-value; and this lack must have arisen within and despite the accumulation process". (78) "The real problem of capitalism is a shortage, not an abundance, of surplus-value". (82) That a lack of surplus-value causes crises, is basic to the analysis of the mixed economy and differs fundamentally from the Keynesian viewpoint. Mattick's theory of the mixed economy is also radically different from Baran and Sweezy's argument, a variation on Keynesian themes, that today's economic problems derive from too much surplus, and from other under-consumptionist arguments to the effect that the central problem is a limited demand for consumer goods caused by the fact that the wages which workers receive are less than the value they produce and by the general inability to further extend foreign markets.

Mattick's point that economic crises are breakdowns in the capital accumulation process, due, not to an overproduction of use-values, but rather to an underproduction of surplus-value in terms of the expansion needs of the existing production system, reflects the clearest understanding of Marx's argument in Capital to have appeared in the United States. For Mattick, "even on the assumption that no realization problem exists, it is possible that a discrepancy between material production and value production will arise which will have to be overcome before accumulation can go on". (69-70) In other words, within Marx's theory of Crisis problems of the sphere of circulation, or realization problems such as overproduction of capital and commodities, market disproportionalities, disequilibrium of supply and demand, etc., are not causal factors, but instead are the observable effects of underlying problems in the production of surplus-value.

For Marx, Mattick argues, the fact that the resumption of accumulation which ends the crisis involves the expansion of production beyond what it was when the crisis occurred, proves that the overproduction of commodities in itself cannot cause a crisis. "For the overproduction of capital and commodities, instead of leading to a curtailment of productivity, only accelerates the latter, thereby indicating that the dicrepancy between the production of surplus-value and its realization arises because of a decline in the rate of accumulation". (74) While during the crisis the inability to sell all the commodities which have already been produced is certainly real, the saleability of a larger mass of commodities following the crisis is no less real. A theory of crisis must account for both; it must explain in one unified theory not only how and why crises occur but also how they are overcome. This point may seem too elementary to need repeating, but the fact remains that nearly one hundred years after his death, Marx is the only theorist, whether mainstream or left wing, to have constructed a cogent, unified theory of capitalist development. In this alone lies Marx's central importance for us.

In Marxian theory, economic crises result from conflicts between the enlargement of material production and the expansion of value production occurring in a system where the appropriation and accumulation of surplus-value by private capital is the primary purpose of material production and the motive force of its growth. Capitalists attempt to expand material production without limit in order to accelerate the accumulation of surplus-value, through which new capital is produced and material production further expanded. Obstacles to continued expansion are encountered when, at a certain level of material production characterized by the mass of existing capital of a specific organic composition, the new surplus-value produced and appropriated is insufficient to fund additional expansion at the same rate. Expansion slows, compounding the problem of insufficient surplus-value, and accumulation finally stops. "When the expansion of production outruns its profitability, the accumulation process comes to a halt". (67)

More concretely, the mass of newly produced surplus-value is not sufficient for its distribution among all the individual capitalists in portions large enough for them to achieve accustomed rates of profit. New investment slows and it becomes increasingly difficult for capitalists to meet their debt obligations. Overproduction, unemployment, and bankrupcy result. Prices, both of capital goods and of consumption goods, decline sharply and wage rates drop. Means of production and labor-power can be purchased more cheaply than at the peak of the preceding boom; eventually it becomes possible to once again produce profitably. In theoretical terms, Marx spoke of this process as a restructuring of value relations brought about through the depreciation or outright destruction of capital-values and the increase in the exploitation of labor-power (or rate of surplus-value). Obviously this description is only schematic and is incomplete on many points. Nonetheless it is just as obvious that much of the current stagnation can be characterized in these terms. Furthermore, those phenomena which are novel to postwar recessions, in Mattick's view, can also be incorporated into this framework.

As oversimplified as the above outline is, it illustrates the flavor and importance of Marx's distinction between material and value production, i.e., between use-value and value. Hence, it is not caprice that led Marx to open Capital with a discussion of the use-value and the value aspects of the commodity form itself. The distinction, however, is among the least understood notions in all of Marx's writings. On this point Mattick's discussion of Marx's theory is most noteworthy. His clarity here allows him to clear away much of the intellectual deadwood that has comprised longstanding debates about the transformation problem, the realization problem, the cheapening of constant capital as a long term offset to the tendential fall of the rate of profit, the nature of the Soviet economy, and imperialism.

The concept of use-value is straightforward enough; on the other hand, Marx's use of the concept of value is much more problematic. "When Marx speaks of the 'law of value' as relating to a deeper reality which underlies the capitalist economy", Mattick writes, "he refers to the 'life process of society based on the material process of production'. He was convinced that in all societies, including the hoped for socialist society, a proportioning of social labor in accordance with social needs and reproduction requirements is an inescapable necessity". (29) Quoting from Marx's famous letter to Kugelmann (see Selected Correspondence, p. 251), he continues; "That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural law can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these proportional distributions of labor asserts themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself in a state of society where the interconnections of social labor are manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange-value of these products". (29) That is to say that the concept of value is used to discuss the distribution of social labor in capitalism, where such determinations are made indirectly, through the profitable exchange of the products of labor in the marketplace. Value is the theoretical reflection of what the market, or the fact that all commodities are exchanged, accomplishes in practical activity through the trial-and-error efforts of individual capitalists to make a profit. As such value represents the societal recognition that labor is expended in the production of commodities and not the actual physical labor-time embodied in them.

Root & Branch Box 236, Somerville, MA 02143

• 1The Red Menace. P.O. Box 171, Station D, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 2Letter to Kugelman, 11 July 1868; Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence p. 251.
• 3Numbers in parentheses indicate page references to Marx and Keynes.
• 4J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1965, p. 15.