By
Nick Beams
11 June 2015
Remarks last week by the governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko
Kuroda, likening the efforts of central bankers to keep the global
financial system afloat to the ability of J. M. Barrie’s fictional
character Peter Pan to fly are both extraordinary and revealing.
Kuroda recalled that Peter Pan was able to fly only because he
continued to believe he could. Once doubt set in, he would lose that
capacity. Likewise, central bankers had to believe that whatever
problems emerged in the financial system, they would be able to solve
them, but only to the extent that, like Peter Pan, they remained
confident.
The fact that one of the world’s three major central bankers—the
others are US Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and European Central Bank
President Mario Draghi—likens his actions, and presumably those of his
counterparts, to the spreading of “fairy dust” says something profound
about the state of bewilderment in the headquarters of the financial
authorities supposedly in charge of the world economy.
This has decisive political significance. It instantly exposes the
assertions of the bourgeoisie and its caste of high priests—central
bankers, financial authorities, advisors from academia—that they rule
over the economy by virtue of some special knowledge. To draw a parallel
with another fairy story, the emperor has no clothes.
The power of the various economic and financial authorities derives
not from their knowledge, but from the way they serve the class
interests of the owners of wealth, the corporate and financial elites,
ruthlessly imposing the dictates of this tiny stratum against the
working class and the mass of the people.
Their actions make this clear. Having bailed out the banks and
finance houses, whose rampant speculation set off the 2008 financial
crisis, they have poured more fuel on the fire by providing trillions of
dollars of ultra-cheap money, creating the conditions for another crash
to which they will respond with intensified attacks on social
conditions—mass unemployment and impoverishment—coupled with ever more
authoritarian and dictatorial forms of rule.
The ongoing economic catastrophe poses the immediate necessity for
the struggle for international socialism. The working class, quite
literally as a matter of life and death, must seize political power and
take the global economy under its control so that the wealth and
resources it has created through its labour can be utilised for social
advancement rather than the depredations of the profit system.
But in order to do so, it must confront and overcome the
mystifications that play an important role in sustaining the power of
the corporate and financial ruling classes.
One of the chief means through which the ruling class maintains its
ideological grip is the promotion of the idea that the modern capitalist
economy is so complex that social ownership, conscious planning and
democratic control are out of the question. Hence, the “magic of the
market,” overseen by the Kurodas of the world, must prevail.
The ruling classes deploy untold financial and other
resources—through the schools, colleges and universities, mass media and
pulpit—to argue that socialism is inherently impossible. But more is
involved than simply a vast propaganda exercise, significant as that is.
The very illusions promoted so assiduously by the ruling elites and
their ideological servants have their objective basis in the very
structure of the social relations of capitalist society and the
operation of those economic laws, peculiar to it, that generate its
mystifications.
Marx laid bare these roots in the opening chapter of
Capital. here, he analysed what he called the “fetishism of commodities,” that is, the ability of a
thing—the commodity, a product of human labour—to acquire a
social power over its producers.
This power, he showed, derived from the commodity form itself. Every
human society must allocate human labour in order to function. Without
human labour and its social allocation, society would collapse
overnight.
But in a system of commodity production, the basis of capitalism,
this allocation is not carried out according to custom or tradition, or
through some kind of caste system. It is determined, in the final
analysis, by the relations between different commodities, i.e., things.
Every expenditure of human labour power in the production of a
commodity is part of the labour of society as a whole. But in the
absence of any overall social plan, and where production is carried out
privately and separately, the social character of labour can be
established only by the relations between the products of labour—that
is, commodities—in exchange. In that way, these things acquire a social
power.
As Marx put it: “[T]he relation of the producers to the sum total of
their own labour [that is, to the labour of society as a whole, N.B.] is
presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves,
but between the products of their labour.”
This means that a “definite social relation between men… assume(s) in
their eyes the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
Drawing a parallel with religion, he remarks that in that sphere, man
is ruled by the products of his own brain, whereas under commodity
production, he is ruled by the product of his own hand.
The commodity producer who takes the product of his labour to the
market discovers only there whether his labour has been socially
necessary, depending on the amount of commodities he receives in
exchange for those he has produced.
Marx began his analysis of fetishism by examining the relations of
simple commodity exchange—the basis of capitalist economy. He then
demonstrated how, with the full development of capitalism, fetishism,
contained in the cell-form of that society, the commodity, takes ever
more fantastic forms.
Profit appears to arise not from the exploitation of human labour power, but from a
thing—machinery.
Land, by its very nature as land, supposedly begets wealth in the form
of rent, and money seemingly creates more money out of itself in the
financial system, whose operations determine the fate of whole societies
and billions of people. And the worker is sacked, or receives lower or
higher wages, on the basis the relationship of the things he has
produced to other things in the market as established through money and
the rate of its accumulation, in the form of profit.
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism discloses the origins of one
of the most important mystifications of capitalism. Social relations
established through the relations between things necessarily appear to
have a natural, and therefore eternal, character. This is the basis of
the ideological campaign waged day in and day out by the bourgeoisie and
its ideological representatives that socialism–the form of society in
which the vast wealth created by the labour of the working class, the
world’s producers, is under their conscious control–is inherently
impossible because it violates so-called natural laws.
But Marx, in laying bare the objective foundations of fetishism, also showed how, historically, it would be overcome.
“The life-process of society,” he wrote, “which is based on the
process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil
until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is
consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This,
however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of
conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product
of a long and painful process of development.”
In other words, the advance of the productive forces under capitalism
would make it possible to dispel the illusions it generated.
Furthermore, that development would itself create an economic and social
crisis that would make socialism, and the conscious control of
mankind’s productive forces, not only a possibility, but a necessity.
That point arrived long ago. One hundred years ago, in his book
Imperialism,
written in the midst of the carnage unleashed by World War I, Lenin
established the necessity for international socialism. He noted that the
emergence of gigantic enterprises, arising from the competitive
struggle on the market, involved a profound socialisation of labour in
which the activities of these corporations were decided by conscious
planning amid the overall anarchy of capitalist production.
The tendencies he analysed at that time have since developed on an
enormous scale. The giant transnational corporations dominating the
global economy consciously plan and regulate their operations. At the
same time, the financial system functions as a vast global information
system, delivering results within nanoseconds.
These mechanisms are utilised for the appropriation of profit at the
expense of the world working class, which has produced the wealth upon
which they rest. But their creation points to the fact that the “long
and painful process of development,” which Marx insisted was the
objective prerequisite for mankind assuming conscious control of the
wealth it had created and using it for human needs and advancement, has
well and truly been completed.
Moreover, the inherent contradictions of capitalism, arising from the
intensifying conflict between the growth of the productive forces on a
global scale and the social relations based on private property and the
nation-state system, have created an historic crisis.
It takes the form of the drive to war, as each of the capitalist
powers, with the US in the lead, seeks to assert its dominance over the
world economy. This develops alongside the breakdown of the profit
system manifested in deepening economic and financial crises. These two
tendencies interact and propel one another forward.
The deepening breakdown of the capitalist system and its historically
doomed character find expression in Kuroda’s remarks. It is said that
those whom the gods would destroy they must first make mad. It could be
added that with the invocation of Peter Pan economics, they must make
them appear ridiculous as well.
The very foundations of the profit system and the entire ideological
edifice on which capitalist rule has rested, together with the
mystifications sustaining it, are in an advanced state of decay and
disintegration.
But even as its historical bankruptcy is revealed ever more clearly,
the bourgeoisie has no intention of departing the scene. On the
contrary, its destructive political economy will intensify.
The working class as the only social force that can secure historical
progress must advance its own political economy by prosecuting an
offensive for international socialism. The spearhead of this fight is
the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International
as the world party of socialist revolution.
Wayne Allyn Root
joined us today, blasting the latest economic numbers issued by DC.
Wayne says they show that all the new jobs are going to illegal aliens
and that the economic is still in the dumps. 1st Quarter GDP has been
down for all 7 years of the Obama Admin and there’s no hope of things
getting better. Obamacare has been a total damper on the economy, which
is the way he wants it. He also says that Hillary will not be the
nominee which is what he has been saying for a long time. Things are
starting to get interesting.
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