WHERE MARXISTS GO RIGHT

Kaus, Robert M.

WHERE MARXISTS GO RIGHT Robert M. Kaus Liberalism is the enemy." That was the slogan I treasured as a college semi-revolutionary who spent most of his academic career reading Marx (well, at...

...If the radicals had to defend themselves at a few Democratic policy symposia, they would be forced to think that one through again...
...But in the end they were unable to drop the radical pose, the scorn for the liberals in the middle, that has isolated them for so long...
...Economists in the mainstream "policy" world would instantly recognize this as a crude fudge...
...The radicals invariably describe union demands as an admirable form of "resistance" to capitalist "relations of domination...
...This .law begins to operate as early as chapter one, when the radicals attack the "illusion" that we are living in a "zerosum economy" where present consumption must be sacrificed for the sake of investment...
...Oppose the Pose A few months ago, I happened to call up the radical economist—a colleague of Sam Bowles— who was my guru in college...
...He mentioned that he felt trapped on the "useless left" and was trying to escape...
...Did I know of anyone else he might talk to...
...The result was "declining work intensity...
...And if the difference is that Hart's tax-based price controls would also apply to wages while theirs wouldn't—well, that becomes the difference between an oppressive "probusiness" approach and wholesome "democratic economics...
...Republicans said it might destroy work incentives and undermine capitalism...
...They stage their own conferences, publish their own journals, cite each other in their footnotes, get each other tenure...
...There are larger blind spots...
...Of course, radical economists don't see this finding in quite the same light that, say, the National Association of Manufacturers would...
...Only a Nixon could go to China, and only a Marxist could get away with arguing that the economy is going to hell because you can't find good help anymore...
...Investment shortage...
...Thurow doesn't fit the polarized scheme, so he is ignored...
...And a large part of the productivity problem, say Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf, is political: a breakdown in the "postwar accord between capital and labor...
...Beyond the Waste Land suggests that radical economics has become more an aesthetic pose than a distinct political viewpoint...
...We agreed with the Republicans, adding only "the sooner the better...
...We agreed with the hawks—victory to the NLF...
...Not enough spent on research and development...
...Robert M. Kaus is politics editor of Harper's and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Agreeing with the most rabid Reaganites, they argue that the economy really has been hobbled by the civil rights movement, the consumer-protection movement, and environmentalism—make that by "popular resistance to corporate domination"—because costly regulations have eaten into profits...
...Like conservatives, they also see dramatic consequences of America's military decline, as "popular struggles" against "imperialism" increase and multinational corporations are unable to impose their "terms of trade" on Third World nations...
...To their credit, they are willing to set out their own program for restoring economic growth and investment—a 24-plank platform that includes guaranteed public works jobs, "flexible" price controls, "indicative planning," an elected Federal Reserve Board, national health care, and modifications of the labor laws to encourage employee ownership...
...It's a question of cultural identity, you might say, rather than economics...
...Once they roll up their sleeves and undertake to save the economy, after all, Marxists can no longer simply chuckle at what they themselves pinpoint as one of the main causes of its decline...
...But this is the last we hear about whatever arguments Thurow made...
...Their academic appeal—their objective class interest, if you will—demands that they continually distinguish themselves from the liberal economists who are their academic rivals...
...Unlike the standard-issue economists who spend their time trying to explain the economy by mathematical equations and multivariate regression analyses, Marxists are quick to recognize that economic enterprises are political institutions...
...Unions were emboldened to press for higher wages...
...With the advent of generous unemployment benefits, the "cost to workers of losing their jobs" declined...
...develops the zero-sum argument...
...Uh-uh—during the seventies the share of assets owned by the 200 largest companies actually decreased...
...And if unions do tend in that direction, maybe they should be encouraged to change their behavior now, before the revolution...
...But what makes the radicals think that, once their proposals are in place, powerful unions are going to stop using whatever leverage they have to grab whatever economic benefits they can get...
...This nightmarish blend of the worst in communist and capitalist meritocracy would presumably be demanded by angry workers marching under banners bearing the slogan, "From each according to his resume, to each according to his GS rating...
...But the radicals convincingly reject many of the traditional explanations for this productivity drop...
...No again—declining R & D couldn't possibly have affected the economy that quickly...
...The victory of the proletariat is inevitable...
...But, they add, "prevailing union wages would apply to those public jobs created within covered municipal bargaining units...
...But unlike most adherents of the zero-sum logic, Thurow does not support a redistribution of income toward corporations and the rich...
...The radicals note that the rate of growth of total worker compensation rose from 4.1 percent for the period 1959-1966 to 6.8 percent for 1966-1973, while the rate of growth in non-farm output slumped from 2.9 percent to 2.1 percent...
...No, investment didn't begin to decline until the mid-seventies, after the economy had already started sliding downhill—and then it declined (supply-siders pay attention) because there was insufficient demand for anything capitalists might want to produce...
...Where capitalism would fail ("break down") was in its inability to end "alienation"—to provide meaningful work, offer democratic participation in management, and nurture the bonds of community...
...A decade later, with the economy in a shambles and most Americans grateful to have work, alienated or not, it's beginning to look like the neoMarxists of the sixties gave capitalism too much credit...
...They urge the government to "establish standards" to "evaluate" the "responsibility, skill, and training requirements" of every job in the country in a sort of all-encompassing civil service system...
...How, then, do the radicals explain falling productivity...
...Only a few sour sects went around mumbling about the Labor Theory of Value, the Law of the Declining Rate of Profit, or the Increasing Organic Composition of Capital—all those equations that made Das Kapital such tough sledding...
...Monopoly pricing...
...Another of the Marxists' proposals—abolishing the corporate income tax while making corporate earnings immediately taxable to individual (and usually wealthy) shareholders—was recently suggested by Ronald Reagan...
...Earlier Marxists could sit back and laugh while the Titanic was sinking because they claimed to have a lifeboat ready—namely socialism, in which all the "contradictions" of a profit-oriented economy would, of course, vanish...
...A more basic point is that, although their ideas are certainly more tilted toward government intervention than the average position paper of the Young Democrats, the radicals don't really come close to abandoning either the market or the profit motive—what most people would call capitalism...
...There seems to be a sort of Law of the Excluded Middle at work here, by which the ideas of liberal economists that don't fit into the "pro-business" half of the dichotomy are either shoehorned in anyway or simply ignored...
...Hawks said deescalation would mean a Communist victory...
...In discussing their plan for guaranteed public-service jobs, for example, the radical economists stipulate that the jobs should pay "roughly $6.50 an hour...
...To pick one example, the radicals' anti-inflation plan tax-based controls—is a familiar neoliberal standby, endorsed by not only Thurow and Gary Hart but also The New York Times editorial page...
...They do drop a footnote, admitting that "Lester Thurow's important book The Zero-Sum Society...
...Back then, the hippest Marxists had given up on the idea that capitalism was going to collapse dramatically in another depression...
...I don't want to overemphasize this point, since I know Bowles, et al., to be serious, committed people—but radical economists have had a good thing going in the universities for the past decade...
...Comrade Reagan For all its traditional Marxist elements, however, there is something unusual about this year's version of the end of capitalism...
...I admired both my teacher's decision and his bluntness...
...That was the slogan I treasured as a college semi-revolutionary who spent most of his academic career reading Marx (well, at least taking courses where I was assigned Marx...
...Waste Land does spend a few paragraphs dismissing various "neoliberal" politicians, but in truth there is far less difference than the radicals let on between what they are proposing and what familiar Democratic "rethinkers" like Thurow and Robert Reich are saying...
...The radicals realize more clearly than most liberal economists the costs of excessive wage increases...
...Mondale and Hart are just two of the politicians who could benefit from talking to its authors...
...They must be different from Thurow, from all the professors who wear ties instead of denim shirts and scurry around advising politicians like Hart and Walter Mondale...
...The whole problem with publicservice jobs is that practically all of them are arguably "within covered municipal bargaining units," where the prevailing wage is more likely to be $16.50 an hour than $6.50 an hour...
...The resulting economic crisis (the one we're in now) has only made matters worse for the capitalists, choking off demand, profits, and business innovation— and still labor's power has not been broken, as declines in production "have not been fully matched by reductions in the growth of workers' real incomes...
...Bowles and company strike the traditional Marxist tone, laughing from the sidelines, enjoying the delicious contradictions as the very attempts to ameliorate capitalism, through institutions like unions and collective bargaining, fatally weaken it...
...As a piece of economic analysis, Beyond the Waste Landis a far more subtle and useful book than other, similar efforts, like Tom Hayden's The American Future...
...Die, Bourgeois Dogs Like other, more traditional, economists, Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf think our economy is in decline, a decline reflected in the sluggish growth in productivity over the past two decades...
...Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf are too honest and sophisticated to resort to that traditional "after-the-revolution" device...
...The insistence of Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf on maintaining their radicaler-than-thou pose is unfortunate, because the current debate going on in the left wing of the Democratic Party could use some of their ironic insights...
...Beyond the Waste Land by Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf (Anchor/ Doubleday, $17.95) is more than a curio for Marxism buffs, however, because in their ironic Marxist way the authors get close to some truths that other economists, more loyal to current arrangements, tend to miss...
...Give up, capitalist dogs...
...Time and again in Beyond the Waste Land, the radicals set up a rigid dichotomy between "probusiness" economics, on the one hand, and their own "democratic" economics, on the other...
...The NLF did win, remember (even if in retrospect that wasn't such a cause for celebration)—and the work ethic doesn't seem to be in such good shape, either...
...On the other hand, the radicals join the misguided campaign to guarantee equal pay for jobs of "comparable worth...
...Workers were "less likely to accept the continuing discipline of their supervisors...
...Democrats defended the welfare state...
...As passengers on the Titanic, we nodded at the dire warnings from the conservatives, ridiculed the liberals' deck-chair fiddling, and settled back on our favorite stool by the bar to enjoy the proceedings...
...In the Marxist tradition, my comrades and I cultivated a biting irony that turned the arguments of our opponents on their heads...
...Lefties of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your tired prejudices...
...And if capitalism can be modified to "provide both economic recovery and greater democracy" (and the three economists modestly claim a 42 percent increase in GNP for their program), what's all the macho Marxist rhetoric about...
...What is different in the radicals' platform—their complicated plans for a national "needs survey" to assist economic planners, for instance—is also often what is least appealing in it...
...Well, maybe a bit of economics is involved...
...He had lined up an appointment with Representative Barney Frank in Washington...
...What's more, Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf claim to have proof...
...Germany and Sweden spend far more than we do yet outproduce us...
...The "practice of 'productivity bargaining,' which had linked wage gains to productivity growth, was an early casualty...
...Addressing their traditional radical audience, they can get away with too much...
...Liberals thought you could end the war in Vietnam through a negotiated settlement...
...They fed data on "worker motivation" and "management control" into their computers, and their multivariate regression analysis shows that declining "work intensity" accounted for fully 63 percent of the decline in productivity between 1967 and 1973...
...And the radicals frankly could benefit from mixing it up with the liberals...
...The bourgeoisie is simply losing the class struggle...
...One suspects that Beyond the Waste Land was motivated by similar impulses— certainly it represents a giant step out of the "useless left" and back towards the mainstream for its authors...
...Some of the Marxists' proposals are fresh and sensible, like the idea of federalizing all income and payroll taxes to eliminate competition among states to slash business taxes...
...Unwilling to abandon the trappings of revolutionary doctrine, the Marxists of the sixties flaunt them, much as drugstore cowboys show off the regalia of another defunct way of life...
...As a result, the corporate powers have staged a "full-scale counterattack," putting the economy through the vicious cold-soak of a tight-money recession in a desperate attempt to weaken employees' bargaining leverage (shifting, as we always suspected they would, from a benign "demand-constrained accumulation process" to a sinister "exploitation-constrained accumulation process...
...The reporters who subsequently baited Reagan for his "insensitivity" to the poor would do well to read this left-wing endorsement of his position...
...Zerosum" is a trick, the radicals tell us, designed to support regressive Reaganesque policies...
...I don't mean that collective bargaining is necessarily bad...
...What we advocate is not a socialist program," Bowles admitted to the Village Voice—but he quickly reassured Voice readers that "we are socialists...
...But no less than the Milton Friedmans and Martin Feldsteins of their profession, the radicals seem uncomfortable translating their statistical findings into reality—real Americans losing their jobs, homes, and dignity—if it means sacrificing a cherished bit of ideology...
...Excessive government spending...
...Now, three of the smartest of the radical economists have come up with a new theory of capitalism's collapse that focuses much more closely on the traditional evils of economic stagnation...
...That's too bad, because in reality liberals and radicals have more in common than either group cares to admit, including a common need for the fresh insights that they could provide each other...
...Two decades of unprecedented prosperity had shown that capitalism could "deliver the goods," we thought...
...Yet, surprisingly— for Marxists—they ignore the concrete institutional system that gives the unions the power to demand those increases—the collective bargaining system...

Vol. 15 • March 1983 • No. 1


 
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