Originally Posted by
Ian Brown
When I announce that I am a socialist, I guess it is no surprise because we are all socialists now. We just bought General Motors … The fact is that we now have Marxism realized. We own the means of production and we did not have to fire a single shot. It is really quite phenomenal what went on today.
– Pat Martin, NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre, in the House of Commons, Monday, June 1, 2009
Leo Panitch knew that Marxism was back, brothers, when he was asked by AM640 (“Home of the Leafs”), a sports-mad radio station in Toronto, to talk about the GM deal. The Canadian people suddenly own a few levers of the means of production, and some of the comrades wanted to know what they’d gotten themselves into.
The financial collapse has been manna for Marxists. Most Canadians don’t realize York University’s Professor Panitch is one of the world’s most prominent Marxist thinkers, a contender for the mantle of E..P. Thompson, the founder of the British New Left and, like Mr. Thompson before him, editor of the Socialist Register. This is a huge deal among Marxists, who wear their sense of history the way the rest of us wear underpants.
But the money meltdown has pushed Prof. Panitch to centre stage. Last month at Ryerson University, he delivered the Phyllis Clarke memorial lecture, in which he explained why Marxism is more relevant today than ever. A version of the speech is the cover story of the latest edition of Foreign Policy magazine, the bible of the Washington political establishment.
In Germany (where they’re thinking of nationalizing banks), sales of Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s masterwork, increased tenfold last year. (To over 1,000) More copies of Prof. Panitch’s Renewing Socialism have sold in the last four months than in the previous seven years. The London School of Economics – the once-leftist school where the professor did his doctorate, although he complains it now offers nary a course on Marx – has invited him back to a conference. Title? “Revisiting Marxism.”
FROM BERLIN WALL TO WALL STREET
To top all that, last week Prof. Panitch lit out for Moscow to take part in Russia’s version of the Davos forum on global economics. He was invited by none other than Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s President, to discuss whether the financial crisis could reinvigorate socialism as much as the fall of the Berlin Wall collapsed it. “Political systems with state capitalist elements seem to have advantages over countries with a pure liberal model,” the conference’s literature points out, before concluding that “liberal capitalism … obviously heads towards its historical end.”
“They’re flying me business class at a cost of $4,000 because I have a PhD defence Monday morning in Toronto,” Prof. Panitch says. “It’s ridiculous. Marxism seems to be the flavour of the month.”
CEOs aren’t abandoning their bonuses for worker committees and the power of the people. But Prof. Panitch and others point out that Marx predicted this collapse – right down to credit default swaps and other kinky tricks of finance. Marxism, they say, is a powerful tool with which to understand the mess we’re in – so powerful it will make us question the system that produced the crisis in the first place. Prof. Panitch has zero patience for the leftish wimpdom of the New Democrats or of Bob Rae, whom Prof. Panitch refers to as a “moral dwarf.”
He saves his deepest scorn for Stephen Harper. The spectacle of the Prime Minister, a free-market economist once bankrolled by the insurance industry, admitting that governments had no choice but to take over the North American car industry was rare redemption for a Marxist.
“What does that say? What it indicates is that these huge corporations, while they may be legally private, are incapable of operating as private institutions. And if they can’t function without being public, then the state has to maintain order.”
Canadian taxpayers and the Canadian Auto Workers now own more than $10-billion worth of GM stock. But neither the union nor taxpayers have a real voice on the board, and GM executives in Detroit are still pretending they own the joint, refusing to disclose financial details and vowing to close 2,500 dealerships, regardless of whether they’re profitable.
“That shows you how bizarre it is,” Prof. Panitch says, “that we call ourselves a democracy, but we have all these ‘private’ corporations that control our lives. Who owns them? The shareholders? Who are the shareholders in this case? Who owns GM? What’s being taken over by whom? And the fact that that question hasn’t been asked is frightening. Really, it has nothing to do with being a socialist. It has to do with being a democrat.”
Like Marx, the radical left insists capitalism brought these problems on itself. The tumultuous late 1970s – the last time organized labour had any power, when politicians still bragged about “mixed economies” – were followed in short order by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who managed to kidnap the affections of working people. Free trade, globalization, the near-death of trade unions, slashed social spending and the erosion of the economic power of the middle class ensued.
That, the Marxists say, is why people have been forced to overuse their credit cards and dive into debt – a situation then inflamed by the profligate, irresponsible behaviour of Wall Street.
And don’t expect Leo Panitch and his ilk to be heaping praise on your man Barack Obama: The new President is just part of the problem. Paul Street, a leftist historian in Iowa City, hammers out blogs and essays for Z Magazine, an influential new fount of leftist thinking in the United States. Mr. Street calls Mr. Obama a “fake progressive.” He likes to point out – when he isn’t lamenting how ignored Marxists are in his country, where they have an even lower profile than they do in Canada – that the finance, insurance and real-estate industries contributed $38-million to Mr. Obama’s election campaign, including a $900,000 chunk from Goldman Sachs. No wonder the Obama administration hasn’t thrown Wall Street to the pigs.
“The left has been immobilized by Obama, for the most part,” says Mr. Street’s comrade Doug Henwood, a Manhattan Marxist who produces the popular Left Business Review and hosts a weekly radio show with socialist sympathies in New York and California. “A lot of people think the country’s being run by a left-wing radical.” But in fact Mr. Obama is “a kind of centre-slightly-left politician” overseeing the resale of America’s financial assets at fire-sale prices to the same private interests that screwed them up in the first place.
(Mr. Henwood cites Old National Bancorp, an Indiana bank that sold stock warrants to the U.S. Treasury Department in return for bailout money. ONB recently became the first bank to get out from under the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s executive compensation restrictions by buying its warrants back for $1.2-million – about 20 per cent of what they may eventually be worth. Those larger profits could have gone to taxpayers, or so the Marxists would have it.) “The irony,” Mr. Henwood says,” is that, if Bush were still president, there might be more anger.” In his critique – every Marxist has one – “Wall Street, or the financial markets, are the institution through which a ruling class is constituted. Stepping on their toes is a no-go. And the contrast between Obama and Roosevelt is telling in that regard. The fact that Roosevelt came out of the aristocracy himself made him much more comfortable about stepping on their toes when he had to. The fact that Obama came out of the middle class and the meritocracy makes him much more reluctant to do so. I think he wants to do what they want.”
REFRESHING JARGON
The ruling class The aristocracy When was the last time you heard that ringing cry? Marxism has been out of favour so long, even its jargon sounds refreshing.
Marx would be unimpressed with the West’s handling of the biggest calamity since the Depression, Prof. Panitch says, because we haven’t been bold enough. “No ambitious vision for enacting change has resulted from the current financial crisis.” Financial-transaction taxes? Taking stakes in outmoded car companies? That’s thinking inside the box.
But the Marxists see encouraging signs. “The failure of my generation,” Prof. Panitch says, “has been that we haven’t been able to produce parties or social movements that go beyond social-democratic parties. If you’re not speaking to people through the mass media, you’re not speaking to people.” The Internet (and the success of Internet-fuelled inventions like microfinancing) may change that: Z Magazine is packed with provocative ideas about participatory economics, and Marxists in Canada and Europe are being picked up again by the mainstream media. Public anger over executive bonuses, collapsing pensions and trenchant unemployment is simmering on the gas – to say nothing of the coming fury if interest rates explode because of the bailout.
Even mainstream economists are now making radical, Marx-like noises. Willem Buiter, an economist at the London School of Economics, last week proposed socializing and nationalizing the entire banking system, given that it can’t keep itself afloat as a private enterprise. That, Prof. Panitch says, is the kind of opening
Marx wanted the organized masses to use to seize control. For a Marxist, the revolution is always just around the corner.
And even if it isn’t, Marx has his uses. “The point of still being a Marxist today,” Prof. Panitch says, is to think ambitiously, “to recover the spirit of the revolution.” Karl Marx, a freshman of 19 at the University of Berlin as his brain began to explode with ideas, sent his father a letter. “There are moments in one’s life that represent the limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new direction,” the young genius wrote. “Every change is partly a swansong, partly an overture to a new epic that is trying to find a form in brilliant colours that are not yet distinct.” Surely one can be forgiven for seeing a little pink in the sky.
Socialism and Obama
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