More on Marxism - a guest contribution

     Here is Steven Coatrella's response to my post about his book.

     Hello David, and thank you for this balanced, constructively critical discussion of my book and the wider context of both our political trajectories in making sense of the world today. Since I first read your review of my book here, the world changed on Tuesday night, and I have read your two comments here on this blog about the election results, which I agree with and appreciate for their insight and depth.

     As to my book, I will say that I see it more as an attempt to use Marxist class categories as living and vital tools, rather than putting or even less forcing today's complex reality of classes and other groups and organized political forces into a Marxist framework. I also use the English title for Marx's great work, "Capital" - as the German title tends to be off-putting to readers of English suggesting a more impenetrable work that it in fact is. But these are minor points.

As to the recent - well 40 plus years now - dominance of finance capital or as you quite rightly see it capitalism in its pure form - profit rate maximizing investment or credit and no interest in the actual product sold, service provided, production process, much less the social effects of their investment choices (private equity, Wall Street, banking, speculation, crypto currency speculation etc.) like working conditions, employment, environmental degradation, undermining of democracy and even dismantling of the demos itself - we agree. I think this is where the focus of the new, magnificent Democratic majority and the solid if still minority democratic socialist force within it should be, along with really holding the Trump Administration monsters accountable for their actions the past two years (and previously). It is at the core of the abyssal inequality, and so much more. Industrial capitalism in the New Deal era WAS capitalist, but it was not ONLY capitalist - it had actual representation of workers to a high degree, democratic government had set standards, limits, minimums, even goals. The late, under-rated Lynn Stout ("The Stakeholder Value Myth") called that system "Managerial Capitalism" so if we are looking for a name that could work. While, as a democratic and American Marxist, I don't want "management" in the sense that labor has always referred to "bosses" in charge of workers in a power relationship within firms and workplaces, I do within the current system want managers to actually run firms in the best interests - long term interests preferably - of the company rather than be worried about the share price, shareholder value, and the quarterly earnings report which is what shareholders supposedly base their investment choices on. We need to ban stock buybacks by the companies of their own stock, but even before that decent management should refuse to engage in that, instead investing in the company - research and development, product development, market share, job creation, wages and salaries and productivity gains, the company's relationship to the community, its customers, its suppliers, workers, government and environment.

However, the shareholder class of pure finance capitalism has used stock options and other incentives to win management to their side, and away from such wholesome practices for decades now, starting with the "Shareholders' revolt" of the 1980s. This is known in Organizational Behavior as "The Agency Problem" and in business schools is always presented as "how can investors make sure that management does what it is in their interests?" but the agency problem cuts several ways - how can managers keep shareholders from disinvesting while doing what is best for the company? How can workers ensure management does what they need, instead of what shareholders want? (we call this "class struggle" where I come from), how can the public ensure that companies act in the public interest. In my view, worker representatives - at least 40% as proposed in Senator Elizabeth Warren's "Accountable Capitalism Act" is a start, but I support managers being elected by the workers - at least the ones who oversee the workplace, and CEO's being elected in a republican system (small "r" - workers, customers chosen by jury type selection, suppliers, local community representatives, again using random jury selection, and shareholders all having votes for the Board and CEO, something like that. Democratic Mangerial Companies. For smaller and newer companies, I prefer they take the form of worker owned and managed cooperatives, run democratically, managers elected by employee-owners.

We need many changes, and with Trump in office, though much of his power and influence has now gone up in smoke, we won't get as much through as we want, and the conservative Democratic leadership will balk at much else. But we can start now, with the huge majorities around the statehouses and the halls of Congress. And a little brainstorming might be a good thing right now. So New Deal liberals well-versed in what has worked already, and Marxists who understand American social relations and many other groups - including as we have seen in the Talarico and El-Sayeed victories, all kinds of Christian, Muslim and other cultural backgrounds, have much to contribute, as they have in the past.

Finally, Europe. Europe is often used, understandably by American progressives as the counter-argument to American conservativism and neoliberal capitalism - we can have public health care, paid vacations and family leave, and other things they have in Europe. And indeed we do have these things to varying degrees and in slightly different forms in Europe (I live in Italy). But these victories of the past have been undermined for a couple of decades at least, are struggling with at least two decades of austerity programs by governments with the EU Commission and Central Bank taking the lead and keeping the money supply tight. This is the context for the Europe-wide revolts taking place right now. People can't make it to the end of the month anymore. Students don't see a future. Workers, from truckers to public employees, from teachers to factory workers, from delivery service workers to health care workers, are struggling and are fed up. My chapter "Why Is there no socialism in Europe?" was an attempt to address that picture. Americans need to see Europeans not as cousins living in a utopia, but as fellow working class people who have fought and won things in the past - health care, vacations, legal job security - just as we did - Social Security, the minimum wage - and just as we have, have seen their rights under attack by financial capitalism and its poiltical allies on the right and the neoliberal center. But the US election this week and the European strikes and demonstrations the past month show that the jig is up for these awful decades. David and I are older now, hopefully wiser, but we aren't done yet and many of you reading this are just beginning. There is much to be done, and better conditions to convince our fellow citizens and renew democracy and make it work for everyone that I have seen since I was in college in the 1970s.

[Thank you Stephen!] 

Some further reflections

 On July 2, 1964, just a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  According to his press secretary Bill Moyers, that evening, he remarked, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come."  Telling the same story on another occasion, Moyers amended this to, "We may have lost the South for your lifetime--and mine."  If the second version is true, LBJ got it exactly right.  Bill Moyers died last year--and this week, the era of Republican domination south of the Mason Dixon line came to an astonishingly dramatic end.  It's a turning point in American history that spectacularly vindicates the whole civil rights movement and the original vision of a nation of equal citizens.

The turning point manifested itself in many ways, not least the extraordinary landslide Senate victories of Roy Moore in North Carolina and James Talarico in Texas, the latter accompanied by the gubernatorial victory of Gina Hinojosa.  Yet the truly mind-boggling results, to those of us who remember LBJ and what he did, came from South Carolina and Mississippi, which finally, definitively emerged from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Here some history is in order.

When the Civil War came to an end and Reconstruction began, only three southern states had actual majority black populations: South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  The other states could restore white supremacy via the ballot box within a decade or so even if their former slaves voted, but they could not.  As a result, they witnessed the worst political and racial violence and the rapid intimidation of their black populations to prevent them from voting.  Mississippi and South Carolina produced a long series of racist demagogues such as James Vardaman, Theodore Bilbo, James Eastland, John Rankin, Cotton Ed Smith, and Strom Thurmond, who ran on the Dixiecrat ticket against Harry Truman in 1948 to protest Truman's civil rights proposals and led the exodus into the Republican Party in the mid-1960s.  By 1900 such politics had become mainstream in other southern states as well. Mississippi in my teenage years was the scene of some of the worst outrages and greatest crises of the civil rights era: the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962, which could only take place with the aid of federal troops;  the murder of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers by Byron de la Beckwith in 1963, for which Beckwith was initially acquitted and not convicted until the early 1990s; and the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Mississippi, whose perpetrators also initially escaped justice, although some did serve sentences on federal civil rights charges. And it was in Mississippi that LBJ's prophecy played out most dramatically.  By the 1990s the state had transitioned from one-party white Democracy to one-party white Republicanism.  

There was another awful consequence of the backlash to the civil rights movement.  Thanks in large part to the New Deal, the South by the 1950s had elected a number of Senators and Congressmen who were important and powerful liberals on every issue except race.  They included Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. in Tennessee, Claude Pepper in Louisiana, John Sparkman and Lister Hill of Alabama, a number of important Congressmen, and last but hardly least, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas.  Kefauver and Johnson even became liberals on civil rights, as did Johnson's colleague Ralph Yarborough, elected in 1958.  One by one these figures disappeared.  North Carolina had been a relatively liberal southern state, but Jesse Helms became its leading political figure in the 1980s and 1990s.

A succession of Republican strategists--Richard Nixon, Kevin Phillips, Ronald Reagan (who started his 1980 campaign in the county fair near where the Mississippi civil rights murders had taken place), Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Donald Trump--made the South the focus of successful campaigns.  They added the emerging social issues of the 1970s and 1980s to the race issue, fueling opposition to gay rights in particular.  It seemed that we remained two nations--until just two days ago.

The Republican debacle, to put it bluntly, also owes a good deal to another change in Republican strategy: their weakness for pathetically stupid candidates.  That problem burst on the national scene in 2008 when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate  Many more have followed in her wake, including Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton in Texas, Lauren Boebert (who is losing her seat as I write) in Colorado, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (who surprised us all this year) in Georgia.  Donald Trump fit the same mold, and promoted other candidates like him.  And this really caught up to them in South Carolina and Mississippi. Darline Graham immediately showed that she lacked the background to become a national leader, and incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi apparently doomed her campaign by proposing that Mississippians turn to another form of protein if meat were too expensive.  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party came up with a troop of engaging, smart young candidates of all shapes, sizes, colors, and professions.  They have won.  160 years later, we have shaken the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

No one obviously should believe that Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina will never elect Republicans again, or that they will reliably vote Democratic for president.  That isn't the point.  The point is that those states now have real two-party systems and will no longer harbor rotten boroughs that breed very indifferent legislators on both sides. They will have to pay attention to the real needs of their constituents. In a column on civil rights not long after Brown v. Board of Education had been handed down, I.F. Stone noted that some progress toward integration had been made in Kentucky and Tennessee.  That, he said, was no surprise:  those states had two-party systems, and Negroes voted.  The same can now be said, praise the lord, for most of the South, and I expect that Alabama, Tennessee (where Democrats appear to have missed a bet this time), and Louisiana will follow. Arkansas, oddly, now looks like the most solidly Republican state in the entire region.

Perhaps it is time to stop talking about our hopeless racism.  I have made it clear that I did not regret the Supreme Court decision to effectively eliminate the provision of the Voting Rights Act upon which the conscious creation of majority black districts was based.  Those districts removed any need for black legislators to appeal to white voters, and vice versa.  Now black-white-brown coalitions have won statewide elections in Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi, where all the indications are that Scott Colum will prevail.  The CNN exit polls--now renamed Voter polls--show that white voters, including poor white voters, swung significantly towards the Democratic Party. It's the urgent task of the new Democratic majorities to put forward measures that will help the lower half of our population, regardless of race.  We still have huge obstacles to real progress and I'll be addressing them later.  But the end of a long national nightmare is on the horizon, our democracy suddenly looks stronger than the democracies of any major European nation, and we will have a new generation of leadership.  We couldn't have asked for anything more.

The Morning After

 The biggest loser in yesterday's landslide was not Donald Trump.  It was another Boomer, Newt Gingrich, who managed to redraw the political map in ways that have kept the Republican Party in or near power for the last five decades.  While the Democratic base eroded, with the Northeast losing relative population and the Midwest turning purple to red, the Republicans secured hegemony in the rapidly growing Sunbelt, with the exception of California.  They have evidently overplayed their hand.  In one extraordinary night, some of the most solidly Republican states have gone purple, and the largest of them all, Texas, looks like it might have gone blue.  And the Republicans have lost Senate seats in at least one and maybe two of the most historically reactionary and racist states in the union, South Carolina and Mississippi.  I never expected to see that in my lifetime and I feel like a great weight has been lifted off me.  The Civil War, whose origins I am now studying in detail, is finally over, a fitting 161 years (= 2x80) after the fighting stopped.

Let me begin with some data, more than you will find on the front pages of leading newspaper websites. The Associated Press has awarded 228 seats to Democrats and 139 to Republicans.  Of the remaining 68 seats, Democrats lead in 38 of them, and if they win those 38, they will finish with 266 seats, representing a gain of 49 seats.  Because apparently so many Republicans either stayed home or voted Democratic, the redistricting battle that the Republicans set off turned out to be disastrous for them.  If current trends hold up the North Carolina delegation will be will be 10-4 Democratic,  up from 7-7;  California will be 48-4 Democratic,  up from 39-12 (one seat was vacant); Texas will be 24-14 Republican, down from 25-15; and Florida, where four Republicans are hanging on by tiny margins, will remain at 20-8. Republican.  The Republicans have for the moment lost the richest and fastest-growing states in the Sunbelt.  That is a truly historic development.

In the key Senate races Democratic performances range from impressive to miraculous.  In Texas Ken Paxton, one of the worst candidates in American political history, who owed his nomination to President Trump, went down to James Talarico won by 55 percent to 43 percent. Roy Cooper won 59-39 in North Carolina over another hand-picked Trump opponent. Sherrod Brown won 50-45 over John Hustead in Ohio and Abdul Sayed won in Michigan by 7 percentage points.  Democrat Josh Turek won Iowa 51-46, and Adam Hamilton became the first Democratic Senator from Kansas since the New Deal days by the same margin.  Troy Jackson beat incumbent  Susan Collins in Maine, 54-46.  And most incredibly, Annie Andrews, the Democrat, beat Darline Graham, another Trump designee, 51-47, while in Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom leads incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes [sic]. Annie Andrews is the first post-Dixiecrat Democrat ever to be elected to the Senate from South Carolina, and Colomb will be the same from Mississippi if his lead holds up.  (I'm afraid it won't, because all the absentee ballots remain to be counted, but we shall see.)  Since 1874 racial issues kept Mississippi and South Carolina firmly in the Jim Crow Democratic camp until the 1980s and firmly in the Republican camp since then.  Apparently those days are over.  Republican Julia Letlow won her race in Louisiana by only 2 percentage points, Jon Ossoff in Georgia won handily, and it looks like Alabama is the only remaining Republican bastion in the Deep South.  What this means to me is that 161 years after Appomattox, the Civil War is over, and we don't need the post-1983 interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and the racial gerrymandering that went with it after all.  No one will win a state election in South Carolina or Mississippi simply by being white again.  Hallelujah.

In the runup to this election Donald Trump did what Franklin Roosevelt had been unable to do in 1938: he successfully defeat popular Republicans, led by John Cornyn in Texas and Tom Tillis in North Carolina, who had stood up to him.  His candidates' disastrous performance should break his hold on the Republican Party and it will put some pressure on Republican hopefuls for 2028 to abandon him.  Democrats also gained one House seat and state legislature seats in Indiana, where Trump purged the Republican state legislature after it refused to execute a redistricting plan.  For the eleventh time in the last twelve national elections, the people of the US exercised their constitutional right to turn the rascals out--this time, it looks like, even more decisively than in 2008 and 2010.   I certainly can't predict what this means for the future. Donald Trump was never our only problem.  I have always said he is more of a symptom than a cause.   The task of restoring the bonds between our citizenry and our political elites has not yet begun, and our society seems at the mercy of forces beyond political control.  Still, there are signs of a very new era in yesterday's results, which exit polls will probably show to have been heavily generationally inspired.  That is a great comfort at my advanced age.

The Battle of the Sexes

 Few issues have taken up more public space in the last half century or so than relations between men and women.  These aren't the kinds of issues I usually discuss here, even though they have taken up plenty of space in my own life, too.  However, quite by accident, I just came across a long twitter thread on this subject that I found both hilarious and very revealing.  Let me say that I know where many of my favorite female thinkers, such as Nancy Friday and Camille Paglia, would stand on this exchange.  These issues are out of balance, in my opinion, and I hope eventually younger generations can make some progress.

https://x.com/MadelaineLucyH/status/2117306893282509251?a=ag9idhqZ6KA9DM4-OJc&s=20

A Marxist for the 21st century

 Marx valued private property in the hands of truly private individuals, e.g. peasants or artisans. Capitalism inevitably wants to do away with this. 

I met Steven Colatrella some months ago when he commented on one of my posts here to mention that he had read Politics and War.   He recognized our similarities. He is thirteen years my junior and has had a similarly checkered academic career.  Born in the New York area to a working class family, he was trained as a sociologist but now seems to see himself as a political scientist. He teaches at the University of Padua in Italy. He also happens to be a baseball fan.  He has done me the honor of reading several of my books, which we have corresponded about, and I decided to read one of his, a series of lectures that he gave about five years ago called Looking into the Abyss: The US and Europe Beyond Capitalism.  It is a demanding, highly theoretical work, using classic Marxist texts, including Das Kapital, to try to understand what has happened to our world in the last eighty years or so.  Rather than try to recapitulate its main points, I am going to talk about what I have learned from it. 

The tremendous insight from which so much can follow with which the book begins is a definition of capitalism.  For him, as for Marx apparently, it is not simply a system of private property or private enterprise.  The ideal type of capitalism, if you will, is a system in which holders of capital care about only one thing:  finding the maximum available return for their money, wherever it may be and whatever it costs.  This definition--whose understanding has become crucial in the last forty years or so--suggests that the great corporations of mid-twentieth century like General Motors, US Steel, General Mills, Alcoa, and the rest, were not purely capitalist, because they pursued wealth within a relatively narrow framework involving the production of one or a number of closely related products.  That meant, I feel certain, that their return on their investment was subject to very significant market fluctuations and that they might have to increase or decrease their production according to circumstances. It left plenty of room for technological innovation and increased productivity that could increase their profits.   It occurred to me as I read that we desperately need a word for that particular form of industrial capitalism, or for any kind of economic entity that focus on providing a particular good or service, especially for mass consumption.   If we had such a term we might start thinking about how to promote more of it, and less of the pure capitalism which now rules our world.  We managed that from the 1930s into the 1970s with high marginal tax rates and a lot of strict rules, both domestic and international, about the movement of capital.  Colatrella didn't try to come up with one, though, and I feel at a loss myself.  It's out there somewhere, I have no doubt.

The pure capitalism that Marx defined now rules our world.  That is no accident: it is the shareholder capitalism that was so influentially defined by Milton Friedman in my youth.  It is the capitalism practiced by the megabanks and hedge funds that dominate our economy, and it has taken over, in two senses, or elite educational system.  To take the most salient example: Harvard University on the one hand places its record-setting $60 billion endowment in the hands of hedge fund managers now so that they can use it for the sole purpose of maximizing profits--not Harvard's profits, but their own.  They have accounting tricks to inflate the impact of their management beyond its real benefit to the university, which is why they stopped beating the S & P index after the financial crash of 2008, and still don't.  And not coincidentally, the main educational function of Harvard College--and Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School as well--is to channel the smartest, most industrious young people in the world into high finance and into big tech, where more than half the graduating class goes every year.  Harvard, which in earlier incarnations trained clergymen, or teachers, or lawyers and doctors, now depends upon huge annual contributions to pay its enormous administrative staff, and those contributions come from the same huge financial institutions that the graduating class staffs.  Harvard is part of the team, and assigns correspondingly little value to really outstanding intellectual work, particularly in the humanities, in its faculty or among its students.  

It is these pure capitalists, of course, who re-oriented the US economy beginning in the 1970s, abandoning domestic industries because their products could be produced more cheaply and with higher profits overseas.  And some people noted at the time that many steel companies, for instance, were still making money when they were shut down--but their shareholders could make more money doing something else with their money, so they had to die, with horrifying effects on their communities that persist to this day.  Jack Welch became the new hero of the US economy by turning GE from a manufacturing giant into a new financial services company, to the acclaim of our economic press. A recent book, once reviewed here, showed how even Boeing, one of the gems of US manufacturing, began to value its stock price more than its engineers, with truly disastrous results.  The investors in companies now insist on steadily increasing earnings reports, undermining a key manufacturing principle: that there are times when you have to spend more money now, on new equipment or designs for instance, to make more money later.   And that is not all.  The financial crisis of 2008 occurred because thousands of bright young highly educated professionals used their ingenuity to devise new financial instruments that, as it turned out, served no useful purpose except to inflate their bonuses and their companies' profits.  AIG literally wrote insurance policies on the whole economy.  When it crashed, they could not of course pay off, but the government--a loyal ally of pure capitalism at least since Reagan, without a break--stepped in to bail them out with the help of the Federal Reserve, which demonstrated unprecedented largesse to prevent the kind of rethinking that the nation went through after 1929.   And the reach of mobile capital continues to increase, as private equity buys up whole health care complexes, nursing homes, and medical practices, all with disastrous results for medical personnel and patients--for everyone, in short, except itself.

Meanwhile, things have changed just as dramatically in Europe.  The catastrophe of the Second World War had led to a new economic ethos based on higher wages, high marginal tax rates (as in the US), and social welfare programs.  Having seen how economic collapse led to Fascism between the wars, two generations of Europeans were determined not to allow anything similar to happen again.  They built the European Union for similar reasons--but now its role has changed.  Colatrella stresses that the European Central Bank and the unelected commission of the EU have now become equally strong allies of pure international capitalism--what he calls "mobile capital"--and thus reacted to the crash with austerity requirements that have slowed economic growth and threaten social benefits.  European governments have not been able to cope with the impact of de-industrialization and mass immigration, with the result that political instability has become their hallmark, and right wing parties now have the largest followings of any political party in several major countries--not a majority, but a plurality nonetheless.  The same political impact of the triumph of pure capitalism has elected Donald Trump twice here in the United States.  (It is a sad feature of Looking Over the Abyss, written in the very early 2020s, that its author repeatedly refers to the Trump era as a thing of the past.)    

Colatrella spends a good chunk of the book trying to put contemporary social classes into a Marxist framework.  This analysis isn't easy going, but makes some very important points.  In the US, which he obviously follows very closely from across the ocean, he notes the rise of the educated professional class that has also been the focus of books like The Meritocracy Trap and We Have Never Been Woke, both reviewed here.  He regards them as the servant of the pure capitalists; I think that is a half truth.  This class, now the backbone of the Democratic Party, has its own world view and its own interests.  As Daniel Markovits in The Meritocracy Trap argued, it has been very good at structuring our institutions to benefit itself.  It has little or no sympathy for the traditional working class, which is why the majority of that working class now votes Republican while the professional class votes Democratic.  In a long chapter, Colatrella argues that the Green New Deal could be the key slogan of our era, partly because it might unite those two classes if it could be designed clearly to benefit the working class.  This turned out to be harder than he might have thought under the Biden interregnum.  That administration promoted electric vehicles against the opposition of the UAW, which knows that those vehicles don't require as much labor to make.  The professional class also dislikes and has put up guardrails against big infrastructure projects that disrupt communities, such as the California high speed rail project. It has resisted attempts to deal with our tremendous housing crisis here in the Boston area and elsewhere.  And now, of course, under the second Trump administration, all Biden's efforts to promote green energy have given way to new efforts to promote fossil fuel.  

Until we got to know each other I don't think Colatrella had encountered Strauss and Howe and their crisis theory.  That theory provides, of course, one way to understand how new generations have destroyed the great postwar political and economic system in Europe and the United States.  It predicted a great crisis that is far advanced in the United States and just hitting its climax, I think, in Europe, where Marie LePen may very well become the President of France next year. I am afraid that pure capitalist institutions--which I think now include big tech, which didn't loom as large five years ago as they do now--have become too powerful to overcome.  The business press now reports that the massive investments in AI and data centers don't seem likely to pay off, and could trigger a new crisis which in theory could put revolutionary new ideas on the table, but that one may simply lead to more bailouts.  Meanwhile, the next two years may see an even bigger breakdown in the US political system, as well as in Europe.   Colatrella is a kind of activist academic who felt he must try to point the way to a better future.  I have given up on that.  The world, I think, does need both of our types.  I'm very glad to have encountered him.