Lenin 2017: Slavoj Zizek

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This was my first exposure to Slavoj Žižek's writing. He contributes a substantial opening essay and a small afterword. Half of the book is devoted to Lenin's writings in the last years of his life (1921-23). This was the period of the NEP, the New Economic Policy, and Lenin was intent on defending this 'reversion' to capitalist economics while simultaneously denouncing the gathering, inertial growth of 'the bureaucracy', in fact the recomposition of a fundamentally unreformed Tsarist state apparatus.

In hindsight, Lenin's myopia is truly sad. He sees the problem in organisational terms, proposing a revamped Control Commission of good communists to root out corruption. He also calls for intensive education, both in general and specifically in management principles, to be made a priority. Everywhere he sees a 'lack of culture', which is rendering the efforts of the communists to chart a proletarian way forward null and void.

Fine speeches are being made by the Bolshevik intelligentsia, but the state machine - its numberless functionaries - sits in torpid paralysis, looking after its own material interests.

Lenin writes in clear and increasingly urgent terms as his illness gets worse. He sees the disease creeping into the ranks of the Party itself.

Žižek's writing, by contrast, is weaselly. First the credit: Žižek is smart, well-read and has thought about things. He has, though, no good answers as to why the revolution finally failed (1991) or what the ambitious and dedicated Marxist should be aspiring to today.

He hides this ignorance in the highly abstracted language of Hegelian-tinged continental Marxism in which the ploy is to recompose the problem in tiers of layered abstractions, without ever instantiating the resulting totality to a decisive and compelling problematic of transition.

See, I can do it too.

I agree that in this theoretical hole, Žižek is not alone. Indeed no-one has been able to find their way out. Žižek is surely best as a cultural critic and debunker and that alone is worth the price of his books. I will read more of him.

Reading Poulantzas and McDonnell

Classes in Contemporary Capitalism

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From the preface:

"The book starts with a general theoretical essay that for the first time seriously explores the distinction between the “agents” and “positions” of capitalist relations of production, and seeks to avoid the typical errors of either functionalism or historicism. It also provides a polemical reconsideration of the problem of the “nation state” as a political unit today, and its relationship to the internationalization of capital.

Finally, and most originally, Poulantzas develops a long and powerful analysis of the much-abused concept of the “petty-bourgeoisie.” In this, he scrupulously distinguishes between the “traditional” categories of petty-bourgeoisie—shopkeepers, artisans, small peasants—and the “new” categories of clerical workers, supervisors, and salaried personnel in modern industry and commerce. At the same time he demonstrates the reasons why a unitary conceptualization of their class position is possible. The difficult question of the definition of “productive” and “unproductive” labor within Marx’s own account of the capitalist mode of production is subjected to a novel and radical reinterpretation. The political oscillations peculiar to each form of petty-bourgeoisie and especially their characteristic reactions to the industrial proletariat, are cogently assessed.

Poulantzas ends his work with a reminder that the actions and options of the petty-bourgeoisie are critical to any successful struggle by the working class, which must secure the alliance of important sections of the petty-bourgeoisie if the fateful experience of Chile is not to recur elsewhere tomorrow."

These are really critical issues when trying to understand the kind of class dynamics underlying the recent events in France, the left and right populist movements everywhere and specifically the SJW phenomenon. It's also relevant to any incoming Labour government here in the UK.

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State, Power, Socialism

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This is Poulantzas's great exposition of the anatomy and dynamics of the various forms of the capitalist state, and the implications for the transition to socialism. I already read "The State and the Transition to Socialism" (Chapter 14 "The Poulantzas Reader" - PDF) where Nicos Poulantzas debates with the (at that time) Trotskyist Henri Weber (of the LCR) as to whether the Leninist model of a proletarian revolution/state based on federated soviets is really viable in modern Western Europe.

Poulantzas further questions whether the power of the bourgeois state can really only be overthrown by dual-power soviet structures as in the Bolshevik revolution (that was Trotskyist orthodoxy at the time of the interview, 1977). A kind of head-on assault.

My sympathies align with Poulantzas here, insofar as he at least thought about the nature of the state unlike the FI which had not moved beyond "The State and Revolution".

Weber is right against Poulantzas that the state is too strong and - in extremis - too focused to be subverted/reused from within. But they are both wrong to think that modern capitalism is vulnerable to the revolutionary imposition of a post-capitalist mode of production led by the massed ranks of the industrial proletariat.

That isn't the failure mode.

Update 23rd February 2019:

I've just read Ellen Meiksins Wood's book, "The Retreat From Class", where she devotes a chapter to Poulantzas. She takes him to task for assigning white-collar workers to the 'new petty-bourgeoisie'  (rather than the working class) and also for assuming this category is equivalent to the Marxist (technical) distinction between productive and unproductive workers (productive of surplus value, that is).

Poulantzas was undoubtedly wrong about this, and Wood has him nailed.

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Economics for the Many

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I'm expecting this book to be a bunch of left-Keynesians arguing that an incoming Labour government should put more demand into the economy through deficit spending and increased transfer payments in order to stimulate investment and productivity.

I'm completely with Michael Roberts here: good luck with that.

Still, no sense in prejudging. Let's listen to what Mr McDonnell's favourite economists have to say.