Category: Capitalism

Wed, May 28, 2014

by Susan Rosenthal

BOOK REVIEW: Women and Class: Towards a Socialist Feminism (2011), by Hal Draper, August Bebel, Eleanor Marx, Clara Zetkin, and Rosa Luxemburg.* Edited by E. Haberkern.

The organic connection between women’s liberation and socialism has been shoved so deeply down the Memory Hole that most people know nothing about it. Women and Class brings this rich history to light, revealing important lessons that our rulers prefer we not learn.
Part 1: “The Class Roots of the Feminist Movement” explains how the world’s first revolutionary women’s movement developed during the French Revolution, disappeared during the reaction, then re-emerged when the working class rose again in the mid-1800s.
Part II: ‘The Debate in the Social Democracy” chronicles the resurgence of the socialist and women’s movements during the later 1800s and early 1900s with a focus on efforts to combat capitalist feminism (commonly called ‘bourgeois’ feminism) in society and also inside the socialist movement.

A movement of women

As Draper explains, various women (and men) had written about women’s rights prior to the French Revolution, but no organized movement of women was possible until the mass of society began to move.

“[I]nsofar as a revolutionary upheaval reaches down into the recumbent strata of society to set them in motion, women too are set in motion; and insofar as popular social forces are inert and passive, the women’s movement too is quiet or only partial.”(p.13)

During the height of the French Revolution, between 1789 and 1793, the masses rose against their feudal oppressors, and the mass of women was an integral part of that uprising.

“[The women] had to feed hungry families. This formed their politics; this was their politics in the first place; and so they were not imbued with the superstition that only men could act politically. And in acting on their “politics” they did not typically react to issues by writing declarations or pamphlets; they went into the streets. And in the streets they assumed equal participation in the teeming life of sansculotte politics, without anyone’s say-so.”(p.45)

Working women were central to the capture of the Bastille, key to returning the king to Paris from Versailles, crucial to the storming of the Tuileries, and actively involved in every protest, insurrection, and battle to defend the revolution. In 1792, the women of Lyons seized control of their city in response to intolerable economic conditions.

“They dominated the city for three days. ‘Women police commissioners’ established controls over price schedules, which the city authorities were forced to countersign.”(p.42)

The emerging capitalist class rode to power on the back of this movement. After the last remnants of feudalism were dismantled, the Church disempowered, and the aristocracy defeated, the capitalists had to stop the revolution from growing into a force that would also sweep them away.

“The danger of invoking revolution even for a class-limited objective is that it suggests to all oppressed people that the power on top can be overthrown; in that sense, it is infectious or contagious. This is one reason why revolutions – real revolutions, that is, social upheavals that turn society upside down – are so often truly creative, fructifying, and personally liberating for masses of people. This belies the common historical myth that revolution is nothing but a bestially destructive force.”(p.12)

The Revolutionary Women

Having overthrown one class of tyrants, the masses were unwilling to submit to a new class of tyrants. Legal equality meant nothing to those with no property, so the left wing strained to push the revolution forward to achieve social equality and mass democracy.
In May of 1793, the most militant women organized themselves into The Society of Revolutionary Women (La Société des Citoyennes Républicaines Révolutionnaires) also called the Revolutionary Women (Femmes Révolutionnaires). They did not counter-pose women’s rights to the needs of the revolution; they fought for women’s rights to advance the revolution.

“[The Society of Revolutionary Women] was one of the few citywide political clubs, as distinct from section clubs and assemblies. It was the first all-women’s revolutionary vanguard association. It was the extreme left of the Revolution in organized form.”(p.43)

In order to bring the masses to heel, the Jacobins (the capitalist party) moved to crush the left opposition and, in particular, the Revolutionary Women.
In September 1793, the Jacobin government slandered and then arrested a leader of the Revolutionary Women, Claire Lacombe, on trumped-up charges. A month later, the RW meeting hall was sacked. After that, women’s societies were outlawed. The following year, all women were denied the right of association. These escalating attacks on the movement were resisted, but the newly-born working class was neither large enough nor economically important enough to build an alternative to capitalism.
The history of all battles is written by the victors, in this case, the capitalist class. As a result, the achievements of the Society of Revolutionary Women and its leaders – Claire Lacombe, Etta Palm, and Pauline Léon – have virtually disappeared from the record. Instead, histories of the period highlight the writings of bourgeois feminists like Olympe De Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and George Sand who had nothing but contempt for the mass of women who had fought to change society from below.

Continue reading:

Guest post by MOHAMMED OMAIS SHAYAN  As the Nation is welcoming its 29th state, Telangana is upbeat with hope of starting a new chapter of progress. Amongst the jubilations in Telangana, voices of people affected by the Polavaram dam are being lost. “Dam’ned”, a film by Saraswati Kavula is an attempt to air the unheard […]

Guest post by PRANJAL RAWAT A revolution of sorts is on the cards for the students of economics amidst a great surge of international support for radical restructuring of the subject and its pedagogy. From the politically incorrect ‘Non-Autistic Economics’ movement to the Post-Crash Society in Manchester to the Jadavpur University Heterodox Economics Students’ Association […]

by Michael Roberts

After the European Central Bank (ECB) announced a battery of new credit easing measures at its council meeting yesterday, the European stock markets hit six-year highs, while Wall Street also reached another record. Indeed, the FTSE All-World equity index surpassed its previous high touched in late 2007 when the financial crisis began to unfold. Investors in the stock market (and in property) just love news that interest rates on borrowing are being lowered further and there will be all sorts of new cheap credit facilities to invest with.

Mario Draghi, the ECB chief, is worried that the Eurozone economy is not recovering and instead is in danger of slipping into a debt deflation spiral. So the latest measures: cutting interest rates; providing four-year cheap loans to banks if they lend onto to small businesses; and talking about buying bonds directly from banks (so-called quantitative easing, QE); all these are designed to boost the economy and lower the value of the euro against other currencies to help Eurozone exports, raise inflation and thus corporate profits.

The ECB downgraded its latest forecasts for growth in the Eurozone to just 1% this year and still expects real GDP growth to be below 2% even in 2016 (1.8% is the forecast). As for inflation, the ECB has a mandate to keep Eurozone inflation under 2% a year. It will have no problem with that. On the contrary, the inflation rate is falling not rising. The ECB now expects Eurozone inflation to be just 0.7% this year and be only 1.4% in 2016, and that assumes economic ‘recovery’ and the ECB’s credit easing works.

Can all this cheaper credit make a difference and stimulate the capitalist economy and not just stock, bond and property markets? Well, all the measures so far introduced by the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the ECB have failed to increase lending to industry. Net lending by the commercial banks to businesses (particularly small businesses) is negative.

The belief of mainstream economics (particularly the monetarist and Keynesian wings) that low interest rates and plentiful credit can get a capitalist economy going continues to be proved wrong. What matters for businesses is whether sales and profits are rising sufficiently to suggest that investment and borrowing is worth doing. Instead, large corporations around the major economies have been stockpiling cash in low tax havens and then borrowing (raising debt through bond issues) to buy back their shares to boost the price and pay out bigger dividends to shareholders. Small companies want loans to keep going but cannot get them because they are seen as bad credit risks by the banks, which are still trying to deleverage their previous bad debts. An ECB measure is hoping to get round that.

But it is demand for loans that matters not supply. More credit in an environment of low profitability in Europe , austerity and falling real incomes is really like pushing on string. Or to use another cliché, you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Many corporations are unwilling to invest while profitability remains lower than before the Great Recession. That is the case in all the major economies, even the US, where the nominal mass of profits (and measured against GDP) has been at record levels. And as I reported in a previous post, US profits have started to turn down (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/is-americas-profit-explosion-over/).

At the same time, real wages are falling in most parts of Europe, the UK and in Japan, while stagnating in the US. This is no environment for capital accumulation.

The latest figures for the so-called Flow of Funds in the US economy reveal that, while total debt to GDP has been falling from a peak in 2009, this has been due only to banks going bust and ‘deleveraging’ and households defaulting on their mortgages and walking away. Corporate debt has risen as companies issue more bonds to buy back their own shares and raise dividends for shareholders. The economic recovery remains very much a ‘fictitious’ one.

I have argued in the past that getting corporate debt down is a necessary part of the process of devaluing capital and restoring profitability for sustained accumulation (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/deleveraging-and-profitability-again/). As Bank of America economists recently concluded: “In our view, further required balance sheet adjustment in the (non-bank) private sector weighs on the outlook for investment.” The level of debt had reached unprecedented levels before the Great Recession. But near-zero central bank interest rates and guaranteed credit has encouraged large companies to borrow even more. That poses a risk ahead: if interest rates were to start to rise, many companies would be pushed into bankruptcy.

The flow of fund data also show that the US corporations are maintaining large surpluses rather than investing in technology (red block). So the US economy is unable to expand (falling black line) at the rate it did between 2002 and 2008. Instead, corporate spending in the real economy has stagnated and so the US economy has failed to expand much (tightening black line) since 2009.

Economic growth in the major economies remains stuck at well below trend despite the efforts of central banks. The US is doing little better than 2% a year and that’s the same as Japan (and probably the UK), while, as the ECB says, the Eurozone area will only manage about 1% a year.

Will the ECB measures change that? Well, it has not worked elsewhere, except to help the rich investors in stock markets (US household wealth has jumped up 10% this last year as a result of higher financial asset and property prices). Indeed, if the ECB succeeds in raising inflation rates and lowering the euro, that is only more bad news for the average European household. The measures of the BoJ in Japan have raised inflation but not reduced unemployment or raised wages. So Japan’s ‘misery index’ (unemployment plus inflation rate) is at a 30-year high!

Governments in Europe are starting to talk about new measures of fiscal stimulus as well as monetary stimulus from the ECB. But as in Japan, the one announced by the Spanish government this week is mainly to cut the taxes on corporate profits, not to boost real incomes or get unemployment down. If you start from the premise that there is only the capitalist economy to work with, and more business investment won’t happen without higher profitability, then cutting taxes for business makes sense. But it has not worked so far to get things going.

Ironically, the ECB measures did not lower the euro’s value against the dollar and the pound as hoped. That’s because the US and other governments tried to talk down their currencies too and investors were not convinced that the ECB had done enough. So the most important part of ECB’s plan, a lower euro, has not happened so far. Every government wants a weaker currency to stimulate exports with world trade growth slowing (see my post (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/world-economy-still-crawling/) – it’s a race to the bottom for currencies.

Elliot Rodger clearly hated the women who rejected him. However, portraying the Santa Barbara massacre as “misogynist” violence minimizes the problem and makes it harder to solve. Rodger stated that he wanted respect as an “alpha male,” and he chose to establish his masculinity by killing people – women and men. Such twisted thinking is cultivated in a society that depends on the oppression of women and on gender stereotypes that help trap women (and men) in an oppressive family system.

The concept that real men are aggressive and real women are submissive is not based on biology. These gender roles are imposed by a capitalist family system that relies on women’s unpaid labor in the home – financially valued at more than $11 trillion world-wide. That’s 11 trillion reasons to keep women oppressed. The family system also traps men in the home with the legal obligation to financially support women and children, a responsibility that the ‘real man’ does not shirk.

Violence against women takes two forms: inside the family and outside the family.

The family is the most violent social institution for both women and men, caused by unrelenting stress that builds to the point of explosion. A 2010 survey found that 1 in 4 American women and 1 in 7 American men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner at some point in their life, that means being hit with a fist or something hard, beaten, or slammed against something. Sons of violent parents are 1,000 times more likely to batter their partners. Daughters of violent parents are 600 times more likely to batter their partners.

Violence against women outside the family is part of the widespread violence that is directed towards members of all oppressed groups. Capitalism grinds us down, and our anger is misdirected against those who are weaker, not against the system itself. That is why we have a ‘culture’ of violence, sexism, racism, and war.

Rodger could have turned his rage at being a social failure against any oppressed group: Blacks, gays, immigrants, Muslims, etc. Failing socially is not a personal problem, nor is it caused by women. In a class-divided, hierarchical society, the majority are set up to fail.

Rebecca Solnit is wrong when she states, “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

Violence certainly does have a class, the capitalist class. The process of capital accumulation results in hazardous working conditions, environmental pollution, poverty and war – all of which kill  women and men.  Class inequality on its own is a major killer of both sexes.

Violence does not have a gender. In Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, James Gilligan dismantles the myth that most perpetrators of violence are men and most victims are women.
More men and women kill men than they kill women. Overall, men die violent deaths from two to five times more often than women.

Inter-personal violence is a social problem, a sign of how desperate life is under capitalism, so desperate that 800,000 women and men kill themselves every year. Far more women die from suicide than from murder.

Dave Zirin is wrong to argue that men have a “collective responsibility” to end violence against  women. Men, on their own, cannot solve a problem that is embedded in capitalism. And not all men have an interest in solving it. Men (and women) in the capitalist class enrich themselves by perpetrating all kinds of violence on the rest of us.

During times when the working class is gaining strength, inter-personal violence diminishes because people are working together to solve their common problems. During times when the working class is weak and divided, inter-personal violence increases.

The only effective solution to ending violence against women is for working-class women and men to unite against a capitalist system that immerses our lives in violence.

by Michael Roberts

As President Obama announced the final phased withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, I was reading The Second World War, a Marxist history by Chris Bambery   It is a very succinct account of the war, showing that it was a continuation of the cynical and intense rivalry between imperialist powers that had culminated in the 1914-18.  That useless and violent Great War did not resolve who would be top dog among the imperialist powers.  That required another terrible war before American imperialism became the hegemonic power.  But the second world war was different from the first in that it was also a fight by working people to defeat the rise of fascism and dictatorships that destroyed all independent class action with genocide, racism and permanent militarism.  Bambery’s book reminds us of just how many millions upon millions of all races, nationalities and creeds perished under jackboot of dictatorship as well as during a war for markets and global power.

But wars are not only a terrible product of capitalist rivalry, they are often necessary for capitalism to recover from the depths of recurrent recessions and depressions.  Outdated and loss-making capital is destroyed; governments and the taxpayer come in to revive industry’s profits through building war machines and labour accepts worse conditions, longer hours and rationing for the ‘war effort’.  It took the second world war to enable profitability to be restored in the US after the Great Depression.  The New Deal failed to do so.

So wars can be beneficial to capitalism when it is on is knees.  But wars are also expensive and are waste of resources (labour and capital) that could have been applied to productive investment that creates more value and surplus value.  The strategists of capital in the White House, Downing Street, the Elysee and the Kremlin may reckon that going to war is sometimes necessary to preserve markets and future profits and power. But wars come at a financial cost, especially ‘small wars’ that the major capitalist economies have conducted at various intervals since 1945 under Pax Americana and the New World Order with the collapse of Soviet Union after 1989.

The financial cost of these small wars of 21st century so far (Afghanistan and Iraq) continues to mount.  The cost to the US economy is now put at $6trn, which I estimate is a deduction of about 0.3% of national output every year since 2001 and 1.5% points off annual ‘productive’ business investment

We also have a new report on the cost to the UK economy of Britain’s support to the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Wars_in_Peace_Foreword_and_Intro is a semi-official study produced by the Institute of Strategic Studies, the research front for British intelligence.  According the report, so far, it has cost £40bn, equivalent to the sort of cuts in the social welfare budget that the current government has imposed on the poorest Britons.  It is enough to recruit over 5,000 nurses and pay for them throughout their careers. It could have funded free tuition for all students in British higher education for 10 years.  It’s a sum equivalent to more than £2,000 for every taxpaying household.

These are the examples used in another study by Frank Ledwidge, Investment in Blood, published this week by Yale University Press. Ledwidge was a civilian adviser to the British government in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan,,  According to Ledwidge, since 2006, on a conservative estimate, it has cost £15m a day to maintain Britain’s military presence in Helmand province, Afghanistan. The equivalent of £25,000 will have been spent for every one of Helmand’s 1.5 million inhabitants, more than most of them will earn in a lifetime.

Ledwidge estimates British troops in Helmand have killed at least 500 non-combatants. About half of these have been officially admitted and Britain has paid compensation to the victims’ families.  The rest are based on estimates from UN and NGO reports, and “collateral damage” from air strikes and gun battles. Ledwidge includes the human and financial cost of long-term care for more than 2,600 British troops wounded in the conflict and for more than 5,000 he calls “psychologically injured”. Around 444 British soldiers have been killed in the Afghan conflict, according to the latest official MoD figures.

And it has been all for nothing.  Ledwidge says Helmand is no more ‘stable’ now than when thousands of British troops were deployed there in 2006. Opium production that fell under the Taliban, is increasing, fuelling corruption and the coffers of warlords.  Though British and other foreign troops were sent to Afghanistan to stop al-Qaida posing a threat to Britain’s national security, “of all the thousands of civilians and combatants, not a single al-Qaida operative or ‘international terrorist’ who could conceivably have threatened the UK is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand,” Ledwidge writes.

The real beneficiaries of the war, he suggests, are development consultants, Afghan drug lords and international arms companies. Much of British aid to Afghanistan is spent on consultancy fees rather than to those Afghans who need it most. The real reason Britain has expended so much blood and money on Afghanistan is simple: “The perceived necessity of retaining the closest possible links with the US.”

ADDENDUM:
As the fest of criticism and counter-criticism of Thomas Piketty’s book continues in the economics media and elsewhere, just a note to say that I have written a new review of his book for Weekly Worker (http://weeklyworker.co.uk) that should be published in the next week or so.