Chris Hedges on Blanqui

[ALB]

You could say he's hedging his bets but I don't recognise the Marx he's saying is right:

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He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse.

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as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt.

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The hoarding of wealth by a tiny capitalist elite, Marx foresaw, along with the exploitation of the workers, meant that the masses could no longer buy the products that propelled capitalism forward.

Capitalism collapsing through underconsumption and debt crises? That's not in Marx.The man's a bluffer.

[Dave B]

I think calling him a bluffer is also a bit unfair. As I think I said earlier he seems to be listening to Leninists and I suspect a lot of this stuff is part of the financial imperialism stuff of around 1910 as well as some of Rosa’s material. Some of Hedges stuff is ‘OK’ eg; “Socialism, in other words, would not be possible until capitalism had exhausted its potential for further development………” I mean that is part of more orthodox Marxism that until very recently was heretical to vulgar neo-Leninism. I suspect that there is a lot of again of 1910 style Bernstein-ism, Bauer and Kautskyism mixed in with the dog’s dinner as well. We do have a problem with this kind of approach as there are sort of grains of truth in what they are saying that are being twisted about to fit their position. Thus we have Karl on co-operatives, and we must have done this twenty times as could remember exactly where is was and it looking like a very dog eared grubby page now. “The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm (That quote is also surrounded with stuff in the role of credit etc.) This was part of a deeper argument and trend projection that the capitalist class would increasingly become hands off as regards production. Creaming off surplus value only through the mere ownership of capital ie finance capitalism and shareholding etc. (Eg Karl had noted a very early and nascent trend of workers borrowing money from finance capitalist to buy out functioning capitalists or profiteers of enterprise to form co-ops.) The surplus value from such co-ops would then accrue to the finance capitalists as and in the form of interest. Thus they would organise there own production, and exploitation for the interest bearing capitalist class. Well it hasn’t happened really. Although, as with the associated argument of joint stock companies, the capitalist, now mostly financial, class are becoming increasing divorced from the production process itself. Ie many probably don’t even have any clear idea of what they own, where it is or what it does, and what they do own probably changes on a daily basis anyway in high frequency trading on the stock market. The CEO’s function, being somewhat closer to the coal-face, is to make sure that the general principal, objective and algorithm of maximisation of profit is followed. Somehow I don’t think Hedges and Wolff are suggesting that we run to Goldman Sachs for cash to buy out General Electric and run it as a Co-op, but who knows. What happens to successful co-ops and unsuccessful ones? The members of the former employing the latter, and others, as wage workers? Eg Kibbutz co-ops and Mondragon in Poland? I thought Wolff’s surplus theory analysis re who controls owns, controls and determines the rate of surplus value was an intriguing perspective. I guess some of these workers enterprises might democratically decide to increase their own rate of surplus value to accumulate more productivity enhancing means of production and screw the competition in the market place.? So lets throw the monopoly board over when we start to loose and start an new game with the same rules?  where we end up  is the communism (and socialism) that dare not speak its name?      V. I. Lenin, From the Destruction of the Old Social System, To the Creation of the New  Communist labour in the narrower and stricter sense of the term is labour performed gratis for the benefit of society, labour performed not as a definite duty, not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and legally fixed quotas, but voluntary labour, irrespective of quotas;  it is labour performed without expectation of reward, without reward as a condition, labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good, and because of a conscious realisation (that has become a habit) of the necessity of working for the common good—labour as the requirement of a healthy organism. It must be clear to everybody that we, i.e., our society, our social system, are still a very long way from the application of this form of labour on a broad, really mass scale.  But the very fact that this question has been raised, and raised both by the whole of the advanced proletariat (the Communist Party and the trade unions) and by the state authorities, is a step in this direction.  http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/11.htm

[ALB]

You are right. Hedges's views aren't always bad. Witness the other threads on this forum. But, on Blanqui and the last one on Marx, are no good. If that's what he thinks Marx said then he's bluffing that he's read Marx.Anyway, back to Blanqui. Here's a rough translation of what he thought of cooperatives. It's from something he wrote in 1867 but which is not yet on either the English or the French language MIA but can be found in his Textes Choises in French. This was in the context of a discussion on them in the First International. As can be seen, Blanqui took a harder line than Marx:

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As far as production societies are concerned, I take them to be the most deadly trap that the proletariat could fall into. It is clear that only a very small number of workers possess the necessary capacity for such enterprises. It is thus the intellectual elite that will take this road. Well, on this road, both failure and success would be equally bad. Failure is ruin and discouragement. Success is worse, it's the division of workers into two classes: on the one side, the great mass, ignorant, abandoned, without support, without hope, in the underworld of wage-working; on the other side, a small intelligent minority, concerned from then on only with its private interets and separated for ever from their unfortunate brothers.

This of course reflects his view that the "ignorant masses", because of their ignorance cultivated by the ruling class, can't free themselves but that the "intelligent minority" ought to concentrate on seizing power so as to be in a position to free and educate their unfortunate brothers.For the record, Blanqui was not against strikes, writing in another article the same year:

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The strike is the only genuinely people's arm in the struggle against Capital. Supported provisionally by the strike as a means of defence against the oppression of Capital, the popular masses should concentrate all their efforts towards the political changes, recognised as alone capable of bringing about a social transformation and a distribution of products according to justice.

I don't think we need to be as hard on coops as Blanqui nor damn them with faint praise like Marx. Just say that they are one way of trying to survive under capitalism but have nothing to do with socialism or with promoting it.

[alanjjohnstone]

ALB, do i detect an opening for someone able enough to translate Blanqui into English and perhaps produce a small pamphlet. Or at least add material to the Marxist archive.

[Dave B]

 MondragonContradictions in Paradise; When workers Become Boses.http://www.cooperativeconsult.com/blog/?p=490

[alanjjohnstone]

For those with  the time a video of Chris Hedges talking about his latest book (ALB, i think he is actually talking from a pulpit !) He is quite good on the importance in a revolution of disaffection of the military.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d0jphETPnM

[alanjjohnstone]

Chris in an optimistic mood for The Revolutionhttp://www.alternet.org/we-are-revolutionary-moment-chris-hedges-explains-why-uprising-coming-and-soonBut having had my attention drawn to his religious background, cn't help but keep noticing it now

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In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is; and then we let it go. The Buddhists call it karma, but faith is the belief that it goes somewhere. By standing up, you keep alive another narrative. It’s one of the ironic points of life. That, for me, is what provides hope; and if you are not there, there is no hope at all.

[Author]

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