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Analysing Last-Stage Capitalism

Alex Constantine - August 6, 2009

JOE JOYCE
Irish Times | July 31, 2009

Twenty years ago Mr Strachey wrote The Theory and Practice of Socialism which was for many in the revolutionary 1930s a signpost to the future. His latest work, Contemporary Capitalism, is for the revisionist 1950s a guide to the present. In the intervening two decades Mr Strachey has moved from the extreme Left to left of centre . . .

His main thesis is that capitalism in the highly developed countries – the United States, Britain and Germany – has reached a new and distinct stage of development.

In each of these countries, the economy has become dominated by a handful of economic giants such as Dupont, General Motors, ICI, Unilever, IG Farben: he quotes Prof Galbraith of Harvard to the effect that “the heads of the corporations that produce between a third and a half of the national product of the United States could be seated comfortably in almost any neighbourhood motion-picture theatre” (ie about 400-500 persons) . . . Classical economic theory goes by the board as the major premise that prices establish themselves by competition becomes invalid.

This atrophy of competition Mr Strachey sees as the most important characteristic of what he terms last-stage capitalism.

In the course of a marvellously compressed survey of economic theory from Ricardo to Keynes, Mr Strachey pays close attention to Marx “to whose genius he is gratified to be able to pay the tribute of rigorous criticism”. His respect for Marx as an economist is undiminished: he remarks that the fate which has overtaken much of Marx’s work has been “to become a commonplace without ever being recognised as a valid discovery”.

Mr Strachey claims to discern in Capital the germ of Keynes’s crisis theory as well as his conclusions as to the rate of interest. He slyly hastens to add, however, that “nothing could be further from the truth than to suggest that Marx was a Keynesian”. Where Marx erred, Mr Strachey argues, was in his political judgment, in his failure to perceive the possibility that the mass of wage earners would be able to exert sufficient political pressure to deflect the innate tendency in capitalism towards ever-increasing misery (the so-called doctrine of “immiseration”). This brings him to his second major thesis, the all-important economic consequences of democracy.

Mr Strachey has little difficulty in showing that, contrary to what Marx expected, the standard of living in the advanced capitalist countries has risen considerably over the last hundred years. (This is not so evident in the case of undeveloped areas.) The surprising thing, though, that emerges from his analysis of the statistical evidence is that this improvement in the living standards of the masses has not been due to any radical redistribution of income.

The raising of living standards has been made possible by the tremendous increase in labour productivity. It has been effected by the pressure of the organised workers, politically and through their trade unions. Paradoxically, “the struggle of the democratic forces against capitalism has saved the system”. The economic consequences of democracy have been decisive.

For the future, Mr Strachey believes, either democracy's influence grows to a point where it steadily replaces capitalism by socialism, or is itself destroyed.

http://url.ie/23ho

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0731/1224251763247.html

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  1. I beg to differ with this analysis. There is no substitute for a well educated and well supported populace in the struggle against the various collections of interests trying to diversify oiligarchic socioeconomic systems of exploitation and repression. I have witnessed the failure time and again of elected union leadership to accurately represent the interests of the rank and file beyond the leaders’ own ambitions. This is part and parcel of living in an authoritarian cult of personality; millions manipulated into accepting the leadership of the one charismatic figure that fulfills the buried hopes and repressed dreams of a co-opted mass populace. I saw this in the videos I watched on Edward Bernays, the father of american mass marketing and conspicuous consumption.
    It’s the same pattern over and over; the wannabe leader talks up issues of major concern to the voting or the working populace. They affirm her/his bid for power; the wannabe wins and then awakens to the realities of the limitations placed on his/her power by the status quo of beliefs in the system they have entered along with the limitations placed on the leader by that system so the status quo, however stupid and destructive, is perpetuated in order to provide for the survival needs of the dependent bureaucrats and their families. In our own case in the US, nothing ensures that the nation will not adaptively respond more than the fixation on accumulation of wealth as the be all and end all of all activities in the US. Money, money, money is the sad tired litany that we hear from the cult leaders when they explain why it is that they cannot adaptively respond to to a new, difficult, and challenging future. First they ensure that the challenges are invalidated, then they repress out of the mass media the concerns of the people repressed. So a society that should have responded appropriately decades ago to the new information that was there then, instead continues down the merry path of mutually assured self-destruction that benefits only the criminally corrupted leaders, like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the generals, and all their deadened corporate minions who share their “values”, their ambitions, and also their delusional worldview, as in a worldview built up on lies and false images of a great future, kinda like the nazis promising a workers paradise in germany so that they would have enough slaves to feed the war machine insatiable need for more workers as it “advanced” on it’s goal of militarizing and killing off everything for an easy, dirty bloody buck. Hail Caesar!!

  2. In other words, as long as the control of capital lies in the hands of the worst men in the state, don’t plan on a viable future.

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