Presentation on chapter 7 Brendan Cooney In this chapter RD looks - - PDF document

Presentation on chapter 7 Brendan Cooney In this chapter RD looks that the African revolutions, the way these revolutionary developments in practice meet revolutionary theory to form a single dialectic of revolution. She also addresses the retrogression of African revolutions, as revolutionary momentum was lost as nations got sucked into the world market. As with previous chapters, there is a lot of material covered, from economic theory and history, to African history, to revolutionary theory. I am going to try to summarize the main contours of the chapter as they focus on a few central questions. The chapter contains a concentrated history of global capitalism in the 20th Century as well as a Marxist-Humanist theory of capitalist crisis. I will turn to this first. On page 226, RD mentions Marx’s theory of the Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit (LTFRP). Though RD does not explicitly discuss this theory much in the chapter, this theory underpins much of her discussion of global capitalism and its inability to develop Africa. Marx argued that although human labor is the sole source of surplus value, capitalists are compelled to spend an increasing portion of their capital outlays on non-human inputs to the production process (machines and raw materials). As the proportion of non-human inputs to human inputs (the organic composition of capital) rises, the aggregate profit rate of the capitalist class, as a whole, falls. In other words, capitalists are compelled to spend more and more money on the elements of production that do not produce value. This means that the rate of return on their investments will fall as less money is spent, proportionally, on human labor. The rate of profit can fall even though the mass of profits rises. The tendential fall in the rate of profit eventually leads to economic crisis when there is a shortage of profitable investments for this mass of profit to be invested in. In a crisis, capital is devalued: firms go bankrupt and sell their factories and equipment at fire-sale prices. Once enough capital value has been destroyed so that the organic composition of capital falls, profit rates can rise again. Thus Marx saw crisis as part of an inherently cyclical process of boom-and-bust. Dunayevskaya is concerned to make it clear that the inevitability of capitalist crisis is not something which can be planned away. It strikes centrally-planned state-capitalist economies as equally as it does the lassie fair, free-market nations. This is because no capitalist nation can avoid the two inherent forces which compel capitalists to raise the organic composition capital:

• 1. Capitalist in competition compete to lower socially necessary labor time by making labor

more efficient through the development of labor-saving technology. This means more spending

• n machines and more spending on raw materials (the more workers can produce in an hour

the more raw materials they require to do so.) Since all nations still rely on the world market, all nations, centrally planned or not, feel this compulsion. 2. The other compelling force which drives the rise in the organic composition capital is the need for the capitalist to use labor- saving technology to discipline and control the recalcitrant worker. Thus, even in a closed system in which there was a single capitalist, with no competition over socially necessary labor time, labor-saving technology would still be necessary to compel the workers. Crises are also moments where capital is centralized. Firms that go out of business sell their assets to other firms, leading the the consolidation of capital into fewer hands. RD makes several references to the centralization and concentration of capital in this chapter. This is because she is trying to explain why capital remains in the hands of the industrialized West rather than flowing to the under-developed nations.

Though the tendential fall in the rate of profit forms the background for much of this section of the book, RD refers more frequently to the fall in the rate of accumulation. The rate of accumulation is the rate at which profit is reinvested in production. It is the rate at which the mass of profit existing as capital increases. Clearly, the two rates are related. The higher the rate of profit, the more money there is to accumulate for reinvestment, and vice versa. RD’s focus on the rate of accumulation is likely because she is discussing the inability of the West to invest in Africa. Thus the questions are “how much money is there for such reinvestment?” and “where do capitalists want to invest their accumulated capital?” In answer to the first, “How much money is there for such reinvestment?”, she argues that, “it would be hard to find anyone who would claim today that there is an excess of capital anywhere in the world sufficient to develop the technologically underdeveloped economies…” (p.227) RD argues that there just isn’t enough accumulated capital, even in prosperous times, for the developed countries to develop the under-developed countries. In answer to the question of where capitalists will invest the excess capital they do have, RD points out that capital will flow to where the highest rates of profit are. In the “sensational 50’s”, a time when high rates of growth were pointed to as proof of the robust nature of capitalism, Africa was entirely left out of this investment. Rather, most investment went to Western Europe where the rate of profit was high.
 The reason for the high rate of profit in Western Europe, as compared to Africa, is interesting, and takes us further towards an understanding of capitalist crisis and uneven development. While economic crisis devalues capital, setting the stage for recovery, it is not necessarily the case that enough capital can be destroyed in each crisis for a substantive recovery to take

• place. RD cites Simon Kuznet’s figures on the rate of accumulation to argue that the rate of

accumulation (and, by proxy, we can assume the rate of profit as well), has fallen not just in the short run (within the boom and bust of one profit cycle), but also over the long run (over many profit cycles). This suggests that the modern era of capitalism is faced with a chronic problem

• f low-profitability which cannot easily be overcome. RD argues that even the Great

Depression, as destructive as it was, was not sufficient to restore profitability. Rather, it was the massive destruction of WWII which finally laid the ground for a new economic boom. As she puts it, “The phenomenal growth of Western Europe in the 1950’s was only further proof of the fact that new growth depended on the equally phenomenal destruction of capital in the holocaust of WWII.” (p. 229) One might think that since African nations in the 50’s had little technological development, and large quantities of labor ready for exploitation, that they would have potentially high profit rates to offer capitalist investors- in other words, that their low organic composition of capital would allow for high rates of profit. But, RD argues that their extreme under-development, the fact that they “have no capital to begin with” (p.225), makes them unprofitable. The amount of capital that would be required to start to develop these countries presents a barrier to entry. When RD talks of the “most human way out of the most ‘complex’ and ‘purely economic’ questions,” she means that there is no way, through the logic of capitalist investment, that capital will solve the problems of poverty and lack of development in Africa and other under- developed nations. Instead, the African nations take on a Neo-colonial position vis-a-vis the developed nations. This means that their economic function within global capitalism is one in which they exist as mono-cultures, the price of their one crop determined by the world market.

Within RD’s discussion of the inability of the developed countries to aid in the development of the underdeveloped nations, there is a long aside about the limits which the developed countries themselves face. RD’s opponents here are those she calls the “growth fetishists”, who, enamored with the growth of Western Europe in the 50’s, claim that, with planning, Western Europe could mute the crisis tendencies of capitalism and become independent from US capital. They juxtaposed the planning in Western Europe with the free-market system in the US. RD’s argument is that, aside from the fact that Western Europe was not able to actually become independent of US capital, and aside from the fact that planning just makes economic fluctuations appear as temporary decisions made by planners, the juxtaposition between planning and not-planning is a false one. This is because all capitalist countries plan, even the

• US. Looking at the supposedly free-market US of the 50’s and 60’s, RD points out that a great

deal of economic investment came from the state, and that Nixon engaged in both wage and price controls to try to stabilize the economy. In fact, much of the supposedly spectacular development of the world economy during the period in question was actually just the militarization of economies via state spending. The role of planning in all capitalist countries causes RD to refer to the US and Europe as “state capitalist” countries. This is an expanded use of the term from her earlier work in which the term only applies to the so-called “communist” nations. RD begin the chapter by saying that “The African revolutions opened a new page in the dialectic of thought as well as in world history. Here RD’s focus is on both the self- determination of people and the self-determination of the idea as they combine into a single dialectic of liberation. The chapter focusses on the movement from practice to theory, as the struggles for self-determination in Africa open up new dimensions of thought. As opposed to the paralysis of thought in much of the West, where ideas had been subsumed by the paralysis

• f the Cold War, the struggle against colonialism was a fresh impetus in the dialectic of
• liberation. RD is clearly derisive of the arrogance of Western intellectuals whose patronizing

attitude to the African revolutions revealed only the shallowness of their own ideas. At the same time RD is aware that not only was there regression in Africa, as leaders chose to align themselves with either pole world capital, leading the the separation of leaders from the people, but also of the imperfections within various nationalist movements. However, despite these imperfections and regressions, she is able to maintain that a “new energizing principle” emerged during these revolutions, that there was a genuinely unique dimension to these African revolutions. Despite everything else, the essential revolutionary impulse within the African revolutions was that Africans felt “that they were not only muscle, but reason.” (p.237) Rather than being led, they chose to take destiny into their own hands. This “view of undiminished freedom” was powerful enough to successfully challenge the most powerful nations on the planet. RD says that, “The uniqueness of revolution is that it so alters human experience that totally new human relationships open up.” (p.237) In the process of people taking their destiny into their own hands, they abolish the separation between leader and led, mental and manual, subject and

• bject.

The regression in African politics, according to RD, comes when this unique dimension is

• betrayed. When leaders, obsessed with need to technologically catch-up with the West, turned

to the two-poles of world capital for assistance, they also turned away from the people that

created the revolution. These leaders began to see the people as labor power, as production inputs to be made more efficient, rather than as self-developing subjects. This is where RD’s argument is so interesting, and where the long-arc of the chapter all comes

• together. Despite various leaders turning from the people and appealing to Russia or the West

to develop their countries, this development did not happen. In fact, RD argues that it is impossible for this development to happen within capitalism. At the same time, RD continues to hammer the point that the choice between two poles of capital, or the choice between vulgar-materialism and voluntarism, is a false choice. These are

• nly choices within the confines of the world market, and capitalist production. Against these

false choices, she suggests that there is/was another way for these nations to hold fast to the absolute negativity of revolution and resist the objective pull of the world market and world war. See, for instance, these quotes: ‘without masses as reason and force, there is no way to escape being sucked into the world market.” p.218 “The state of technological development and the accumulated capital are the determinants, the

• nly determinants when the masses are not allowed their self-activity, which threatens to

undermine the stability of the whole globe, and which did gain the Africans freedom.” p.225 “So long as the motive force of production continues to be the accumulation of surplus-value… the straining of the ruling class to appropriate the full 23 hours of man’s labor still fails to create sufficient capital to industrialize the ‘backwards’ lands.” p.227 “…the leaders isolation from the very people who made the revolution led to the dependence upon existing world state powers and the emergence of neocolonialism.” P .237 “…the self-activity of the masses, which had made political independence a reality.” P .240 However, aside from the general idea of holding fast to the negative, to the energizing principle

• f the revolution, to the masses as force and reason, RD does not address the more concrete

question of how such nations can hold onto this principle within the context of the world market and global militarization. What would it have looked like for Ghana, for instance, to not be sucked into the world market? As far as I can see, this is not spelled out in this chapter. I hope we can spend some time discussing these issues.