Category: John Quiggin

06 Jul

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John Quiggin, ‘Marxism without revolution’ and Left strategy: A response. (Part 2)

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Egypt’s ‘Second Day of Rage’

 

John Quiggin recently ran a series on “Marxism without revolution”, with posts covering Marx’s ideas on class, crisis and capital. I began a response here. In this post I look at his claims about Marx’s theory of crisis and his approach to Left strategy. John’s attack on Marx’s crisis theory, specifically the “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, is different to his criticisms of Marx’s “value theory”.

Firstly, he claims that Marx says falling profit rates make working class revolution inevitable rather than just possible and necessary. Marx did argue there were strong “laws” of capitalist development which did inevitably lead to crisis and resistance, but it is quite another thing to suggest he really thought that the outcome (socialism) was assured. Otherwise, why would he have spent so much time on theory and activism rather than just await the fateful day? Famous works like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte analyse in detail how economic, political and ideological moments of the class struggle interact to produce outcomes incompatible with an economic determinist view. John, by locating the impossibility of workers’ revolutions in part in a dismissal of falling profit rates, is the real economic determinist here.

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Filed Under: capitalism, John Quiggin, Left strategy, revolution

04 Jul

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John Quiggin, ‘Marxism without revolution’ and Left strategy: A response. (Part 1)

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Greek workers march on Finance Ministry, finding common cause against austerity

 

Thanks to @liz_beths for her helpful comments and suggestions.

The economist John Quiggin — whose valuable book Zombie Economics I reviewed last October — has just completed a three part series on “Marxism without revolution” at his blog. The three posts cover Marx’s ideas on class, crisis and capital. In responding it is difficult to know where to start because the case he mounts is tautological, often well astray in its representations of what Marx said, and replays well-worn tropes about how Marx got it wrong in terms of the economics without seeming to have much awareness of the substantive debates.

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Filed Under: capitalism, class, John Quiggin, Left strategy, Marxism

01 Nov

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Postneoliberalism: Return of the living dead?

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In my review of John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics I started to develop a theme about the nature of neoliberalism that goes beyond his focus on a set of flawed economic ideas and their application:

So why do market liberal ideas persist despite being disproved in practice? Quiggin suggests a mixture of the influence of vested interests and institutional inertia among economists. Both are true, but they overstate the independent power of the ideas he is critiquing. His description of the history of policy responses to the crisis of the 1970s exposes a rapidly shifting theoretical terrain, more consistent with a desperate and pragmatic search for a solution to recession on capital’s terms. So under “really existing neoliberalism” the state never removes itself from economic life, it rather acts more aggressively for elite interests. Market mechanisms don’t get applied neutrally but to increase the exploitation of workers and increase profitability at ordinary people’s expense. And behind every mystification within neoliberal ideology is the drive to make the majority class pay for the restoration of the minority ruling class’s power and wealth.

Quiggin ends with a modest program for mainstream economics, one that is necessarily lacking in hubris because he doesn’t claim to have “the answer”. Yet he strongly implies that the ideas of market liberalism will eventually die out as a result of their practical failure (currently for him they exist mainly in reanimated, “zombie” form, hence his title).

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Filed Under: John Quiggin, neoliberalism

29 Oct

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When there’s no more room in hell, dead labour will walk the earth

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Me on the ABC’s The Drum Unleashed, reviewing John Quiggin‘s latest book, Zombie Economics:

In seeking a progressive economics, Quiggin keeps skirting around some of the fundamental assumptions behind the ideas he critiques. So he portrays class as a social gradient rather than a power relation, the origins of value are left unexamined despite various value theories being trashed, and the state’s role is assumed as potentially neutral rather than as an instrument of domination. And while recognising the inequalities created by markets he has much less to say about growing micro-management and authoritarianism as capitalist logic intrudes not just into work life but every aspect of our “free time”, what has sometimes been called “Market Stalinism”. Despite being acutely sensitive to how certain theories are used to serve narrow interests, he cannot posit an approach that breaks out of this logic.

Filed Under: John Quiggin