Appreciate the line of direction here. A couple of random points. First the US is not the only polity that combines the last decades of neoliberalism with a relatively low rate of investment in fixed capital. The UK shows the same dynamics, and its generally accepted that this is a cause of the persistent low productivity crisis there. Empirically it seems that the two most enthusiastic embracers of the Chicago School gospel, the US and the UK (happy to play Mini Me to America's Dr Evil) show that neoliberalism and fixed capital investment, not just in public infrastructure, but in private enterprise as well, don't go well together.
The second point is that Marx (and Engels) had a name for Hegel's bureaucracy/"universal" class - they called them the "ideological classes". This term, along with the unloved lumpenproletariat, has gone out of Marxist fashion, but I would argue that we would be well-advised to reconsider it. For Marx, the ideological classes were not just politicians, judges and priests - people who may be thought to work purely in the ideational fields of the intelligentsia - but also soldiers, jailors and cops. That is - anyone employed by the superstructure, rather than the base of social production (under private capitalist organisation). Marx attributed a particularly distorted consciousness to these ideological classes, based on their self-image as the agents of history - an upside down view of a world where the real forces of historical change originated in the depths of social production (and its class struggle) in the economic base. But... that doesn't mean that change doesn't have to appear as events on the political surface of the superstructure, just as goods realise their value in exchange, even if its origin is in production. So, yes, factions of the ideological classes will be necessarily involved in the struggle to change over from exhausted "regimes of accumulation", to potential new ones. After all, the Mont Pelerin Society was originally just a group of ideologists, until the contradictions of Keynesianism (and the Vietnam War) opened up an opportunity for them.
As I've moved further to the left over the past decade my biggest frustration is the persistent attachment to Marxist economics. Marx was wrong full stop; the foundation of his theory (the labor theory of value) is internally incoherent and empirically false. All of the predictions he made regarding the rate of profit, wages, and etc have failed to come to pass (since Marx predicted real wages would asymptotically decline toward zero they have increased approximately fifteen-fold). There is little if anything to be redeemed from his economic theorizing.
The value of Marx is in his moral clarity and in his analysis of political economy. But insofar as the left continues to rely on his economics as the basis for its platform it dooms itself to failure. My belief is that the left would do well to consign Marxist economics to the dustbin and attempt to build on the insights of Polanyi, Keynes, and Piketty but it seems there is little appetite for that.
This should be a minor point, but dogmatists are obsessed with this "labour value is just wrong" nonsense. Just for one minute stop being a dogmatist and consider what the Consumer Prices Index is. The CPI is the way central banks measure the value of money (and money in turn is the measure of all other values), to determine the rise or fall of the value of money, in a word - inflation (topical!). But what is the CPI? It is an index of the consumer goods necessary for the reproduction of an average worker - in other words, it is an index of the cost of labour. So stop talking about the labour "theory" of value, and wake up to the universal practice of labour value, as instituted by the central banks of the world. Here endeth the lesson.
While it’s true that Marxian theories on market price and labor value have not held up under empirical scrutiny (although the core technical idea he largely took from Ricardo and Smith) it’s also worth stressing that the theory has never had any salience in the real world of policy, even on the left, much less in the academic profession. That (dis)honour goes to the much more fantastical and empirically de-anchored school of neoclassical economists whose assumptions, even today, are still taken seriously, even under the relentless competition of the bahaviouralists.
What does endure from Marx (also in Ricardo and Smith but greatly elaborated by Marx) is the centrally important concept of historical materialism - that in producing things for itself, society is also producing and re-producing not only social relations but also theories about those social relations, with the attendant class alignments and struggles over resources. The entire concept of “political economy” is pretty much wholly due to Marx (again, with nods to Ricardo and Smith), and clearly defines his thinking and contrasts it with the theological assumptions of the neoclassical economists. The methodology has shown its mettle in even penetrating the rarefied world of legal analytic philosophy, with, for example, a book like Katrina Forrester’s award-winning book on Rawls (In the shadow of justice). Theories of Marx’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
My colleague Andre Wakefield wrote a historical study of the 18th-century enlightened bureaucrats you discussed (called "cameralists" in German). His finding: they were frauds who created a racket of government advisors.
>... how can we begin to imagine this beyond the realm of the think tank? What organizations and mediating institutions are required? Who are the organic intellectuals of this coalition and how should they move forward?
The claim that there's been no real growth since 1980 or so--which I've seen crop up in several places, including several times in New Left Review--is always a puzzling one to me. If you want to argue about the failings of the US economic system, there are much more easily verified claims you could make (wages for many workers remaining flat in real terms over that same period, for instance). The "all the conventional statistics indicating we've had economic growth are actually fake" claim seems questionable at best, conveniently eschatological at worst. There's also the fact that, as Feygin and Gilman touch on, the US is in the process of forming something like a coherent industrial policy and bolstering manufacturing itself as well as supply chains, infrastructure, etc. If all of that fails to lead to "real economic growth," then we'll be in big trouble indeed. But it seems like a much stronger left-facing analysis to point out all the ways in which economic growth can be perfectly robust while the fortunes of ordinary workers stagnate or worsen.
Appreciate the line of direction here. A couple of random points. First the US is not the only polity that combines the last decades of neoliberalism with a relatively low rate of investment in fixed capital. The UK shows the same dynamics, and its generally accepted that this is a cause of the persistent low productivity crisis there. Empirically it seems that the two most enthusiastic embracers of the Chicago School gospel, the US and the UK (happy to play Mini Me to America's Dr Evil) show that neoliberalism and fixed capital investment, not just in public infrastructure, but in private enterprise as well, don't go well together.
The second point is that Marx (and Engels) had a name for Hegel's bureaucracy/"universal" class - they called them the "ideological classes". This term, along with the unloved lumpenproletariat, has gone out of Marxist fashion, but I would argue that we would be well-advised to reconsider it. For Marx, the ideological classes were not just politicians, judges and priests - people who may be thought to work purely in the ideational fields of the intelligentsia - but also soldiers, jailors and cops. That is - anyone employed by the superstructure, rather than the base of social production (under private capitalist organisation). Marx attributed a particularly distorted consciousness to these ideological classes, based on their self-image as the agents of history - an upside down view of a world where the real forces of historical change originated in the depths of social production (and its class struggle) in the economic base. But... that doesn't mean that change doesn't have to appear as events on the political surface of the superstructure, just as goods realise their value in exchange, even if its origin is in production. So, yes, factions of the ideological classes will be necessarily involved in the struggle to change over from exhausted "regimes of accumulation", to potential new ones. After all, the Mont Pelerin Society was originally just a group of ideologists, until the contradictions of Keynesianism (and the Vietnam War) opened up an opportunity for them.
'[…] a more just, verdant, peaceful and verdant world[….] `
—' You said "verdent" twice. '
' I _like_ verdent. '
—(with apologies to Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman et al.)
As I've moved further to the left over the past decade my biggest frustration is the persistent attachment to Marxist economics. Marx was wrong full stop; the foundation of his theory (the labor theory of value) is internally incoherent and empirically false. All of the predictions he made regarding the rate of profit, wages, and etc have failed to come to pass (since Marx predicted real wages would asymptotically decline toward zero they have increased approximately fifteen-fold). There is little if anything to be redeemed from his economic theorizing.
The value of Marx is in his moral clarity and in his analysis of political economy. But insofar as the left continues to rely on his economics as the basis for its platform it dooms itself to failure. My belief is that the left would do well to consign Marxist economics to the dustbin and attempt to build on the insights of Polanyi, Keynes, and Piketty but it seems there is little appetite for that.
This should be a minor point, but dogmatists are obsessed with this "labour value is just wrong" nonsense. Just for one minute stop being a dogmatist and consider what the Consumer Prices Index is. The CPI is the way central banks measure the value of money (and money in turn is the measure of all other values), to determine the rise or fall of the value of money, in a word - inflation (topical!). But what is the CPI? It is an index of the consumer goods necessary for the reproduction of an average worker - in other words, it is an index of the cost of labour. So stop talking about the labour "theory" of value, and wake up to the universal practice of labour value, as instituted by the central banks of the world. Here endeth the lesson.
While it’s true that Marxian theories on market price and labor value have not held up under empirical scrutiny (although the core technical idea he largely took from Ricardo and Smith) it’s also worth stressing that the theory has never had any salience in the real world of policy, even on the left, much less in the academic profession. That (dis)honour goes to the much more fantastical and empirically de-anchored school of neoclassical economists whose assumptions, even today, are still taken seriously, even under the relentless competition of the bahaviouralists.
What does endure from Marx (also in Ricardo and Smith but greatly elaborated by Marx) is the centrally important concept of historical materialism - that in producing things for itself, society is also producing and re-producing not only social relations but also theories about those social relations, with the attendant class alignments and struggles over resources. The entire concept of “political economy” is pretty much wholly due to Marx (again, with nods to Ricardo and Smith), and clearly defines his thinking and contrasts it with the theological assumptions of the neoclassical economists. The methodology has shown its mettle in even penetrating the rarefied world of legal analytic philosophy, with, for example, a book like Katrina Forrester’s award-winning book on Rawls (In the shadow of justice). Theories of Marx’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
Hot damn. This Substack is worth the money, I’d say.
My colleague Andre Wakefield wrote a historical study of the 18th-century enlightened bureaucrats you discussed (called "cameralists" in German). His finding: they were frauds who created a racket of government advisors.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo6407642.html
lol
>... how can we begin to imagine this beyond the realm of the think tank? What organizations and mediating institutions are required? Who are the organic intellectuals of this coalition and how should they move forward?
Yup. This rules man.
The claim that there's been no real growth since 1980 or so--which I've seen crop up in several places, including several times in New Left Review--is always a puzzling one to me. If you want to argue about the failings of the US economic system, there are much more easily verified claims you could make (wages for many workers remaining flat in real terms over that same period, for instance). The "all the conventional statistics indicating we've had economic growth are actually fake" claim seems questionable at best, conveniently eschatological at worst. There's also the fact that, as Feygin and Gilman touch on, the US is in the process of forming something like a coherent industrial policy and bolstering manufacturing itself as well as supply chains, infrastructure, etc. If all of that fails to lead to "real economic growth," then we'll be in big trouble indeed. But it seems like a much stronger left-facing analysis to point out all the ways in which economic growth can be perfectly robust while the fortunes of ordinary workers stagnate or worsen.