Michael Heinrich’s ‘New Reading’ of Marx—A Critique, Pt 3

In this month’s post, I will take a look at Heinrich’s views on value, money and price. As regular readers of this blog should realize by now, the theory of value, money and price has big implications for crisis theory.

As we have seen, present-day crisis theory is divided into two main camps. One camp emphasizes the production of surplus value. This school—largely inspired by the work of Polish-born economist Henryk Grossman, and whose most distinguished present-day leader is Professor Andrew Kliman of Pace University—holds that the basic cause of crises is that periodically an insufficient amount of surplus value is produced. The result is a rate of profit too low for the capitalists to maintain a level of investment sufficient to prevent a crisis.

From the viewpoint of this school, a lack of demand is a secondary effect of the crisis but by no means the cause. If the capitalists find a way to increase the production of surplus value sufficiently, investment will rise and demand problems will go away. Heinrich, who claims there is no tendency of the rate of profit to fall, is therefore anathema to this tendency of Marxist thought.

The other main school of crisis theory puts the emphasis on the problem of the realization of surplus value. This tendency is dominated by the Monthly Review school, named after the magazine founded by U.S. Marxist economist Paul Sweezy and now led by Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster.

The Monthly Review school roots the tendency toward crises/stagnation not in the production of surplus value like the Grossman-Kliman school but rather in the realization of surplus value. The analysis of this school is based largely on the work of the purely bourgeois English economist John Maynard Keynes, the moderate Polish-born socialist economist Michael Kalecki, and the radical U.S. Marxist economist Paul Sweezy.

Kalecki’s views on markets were similar to those of Keynes. Indeed, it is often said that Kalecki invented “Keynesian theory” independently and prior to Keynes himself—with one exception. Kalecki, like the rest of the Monthly Review school, puts great emphasis on what he called the “degree of monopoly.” In contrast, Keynes completely ignored the problem of monopoly.

Needed, a Marxist law of markets

A real theory of the market is necessary, in my opinion, for a complete theory of crises. Engels indicated in his work “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” that under capitalism the growth of the market is governed by “quite different laws” than govern the growth of production, and that the laws governing the growth of the market operate “far less energetically” than the laws that govern the growth of production. The result is the crises of overproduction that in the long run keep the growth of production within the limits of the market.

This, however, is not a complete crisis theory, because Engels did not explain exactly what the laws are that govern the growth of the market. Unfortunately, leaving aside hints found in Marx’s writings, Marxists—with the exception of Paul Sweezy—have largely ignored the laws that govern the growth of the market. This, I think, would be a legitimate criticism of what Heinrich calls “world view Marxism.” As a result, the theory of what does govern the growth of the market has been left to the anti-Marxist Keynes, the questionably Marxist Kalecki and the strongly Keynes- and Kalecki-influenced Sweezy.

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Michael Heinrich’s ‘New Reading’ of Marx—A Critique, Pt 1

The April 2013 edition of Monthly Review published an article entitled “Crisis Theory, the Law of the Tendency of the Profit Rate to Fall, and Marx’s Studies in the 1870s” by German Marxist Michael Heinrich. This is the same issue that published John Bellamy Foster’s “Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy,” which I examined the month before last.

Michael Heinrich teaches economics in Berlin and is the managing editor of “PROKLA A Journal for Critical Science.” His “new reading” of Marx apparently dominates the study of Marx in German universities.

The publication of Heinrich’s article brought about a wave of criticisms on the Internet from Marxists such as Michael Roberts who base their crisis theory precisely on Marx’s law of the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” or TRPF for short.

Today on the Internet, partisans of two main theories of capitalist crisis—or capitalist stagnation—are struggling with one another. One theory attributes crisis/stagnation to Marx’s law of the TRPF that Marx developed in “Capital” Volume III. The rival theory is associated with the Monthly Review school, which is strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes and even more by Michael Kalecki. Unlike the supporters of a falling rate of profit theory of crisis, the Monthly Review school, like Kalecki, puts the question of monopoly and monetarily effective demand at the center of its explanation of capitalist crisis/stagnation.

In addition to publishing Heinrich’s attempt to prove that there is in fact no tendency for the rate of profit to fall, Monthly Review Press published an English translation of Heinrich’s “An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital,” originally published in German under the title (in English) “Critique of Political Economy—an Introduction.”

Is Michael Heinrich a new recruit to the Monthly Review school? In fact, we will see later that the Monthly Review school and Heinrich have radically different views on the questions of capitalist monopoly and imperialism. So at this point, it is more a question of an “alliance” between the Monthly Review school and Heinrich’s “new reading of Marx” trend against the TRPF school, whose leading academic representative today is Andrew Kliman, a professor of economics at Pace University.

The first thing I must say about Heinrich is that it is clear that he knows his Marx at least as well as any writer whose works have been published in English. He is also a remarkably clear writer. This reflects the fact that he has thoroughly mastered his material. This does not mean that Heinrich agrees with Marx on all questions. Indeed, Heinrich is more than willing to express his disagreements with Marx. And as we will see, Heinrich disagrees with Marx on some very important issues.

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Bitcoins and Monetary Reform in the Digital Age

Recently, there has been a rising wave of interest in a new Internet-based currency called bitcoins. In one sense, bitcoins are the latest attempt to improve capitalism through monetary reform. But unlike other monetary reform schemes, bitcoins are very 21st century, based as they are on modern computer technology and the Internet.

According to Wikipedia: “Bitcoin (BTC) is a cryptocurrency first described in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash system. Bitcoin creation and transfer is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. Each bitcoin is subdivided down to eight decimal places, forming 100 million smaller units called satoshis. Bitcoins can be transferred through a computer or smartphone without an intermediate financial institution.”

A short history of monetary reform before the Internet

One monetary reform that was popular among small farmers and small businesspeople in the late 19th-century U.S. was bimetallism. The bimetallists proposed that the U.S. dollar be defined in terms not only of gold but also of silver, at a fixed ratio of 16 to 1. Under this proposed reform, the silver dollar coin would weigh 16 times as much as the gold dollar coin.

The supporters of bimetallism argued that this would, by sharply increasing the money supply, increase demand and thereby raise the prices of agricultural commodities. The increased demand would, the supporters of bimetallism argued, put unemployed workers back to work. In this way, the bimetallists hoped to unite the interests of workers, small farmers and small businesspeople against the rising power of the Wall Street banks.

A basic flaw in this proposal was that while at one time the ratio of 16 to 1 more or less reflected the actual relative labor values of gold and silver bullion, by the late 19th century the value of silver was falling sharply relative to the value of gold. Given a choice of using either silver or gold coins at this ratio, people would have chosen to pay off their debts in cheap silver—which is why bimetallism was so popular among highly indebted small farmers and businesspeople—while using the cheap silver dollars to purchase and hoard the more valuable gold dollars. This effect is known as “Gresham’s Law,” named after the early British economist Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579).

Under Gresham’s Law, cheap silver dollars would have driven gold dollars out of circulation, leaving the silver dollar as the standard dollar. This would have had the effect of devaluing the U.S. dollar from the value of the gold dollar down to the value of the silver dollar. Fearing that supporters of bimetallism would win the upper hand in the U.S. government during the 1890s, foreign capitalist investors began to cash in their U.S. dollars for gold leading to a series of runs on the U.S. Treasury’s gold reserve as well as the gold reserves of U.S. commercial banks.

A wave of bank runs and an associated stock market crash that occurred in the northern hemisphere spring of 1893 has gone down in history as the “panic of 1893.” This panic was followed by a prolonged period of depression, mass unemployment and plunging commodity prices. This was the exact opposite of what supporters of bimetallism desired.

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John Bellamy Foster’s Latest Attempt To Reconcile Marx and Kalecki

In the “Review of the Month,” entitled “Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy,” in the April 2013 edition of Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster once again attempts to show that the views of economist Michal Kalecki (1899-1970) are fully compatible with Marx. Foster even quotes Marx’s “Value, Price and Profit” to show that Marx agreed with Kalecki—and Keynes—that higher wages lead to higher prices.

Foster writes, “Although a general rise in the money-wage level, Marx indicated, would lead to a decrease in the profit share, the economic effect would be minor since capitalists would be enabled to raise prices ‘by the increased demand.’”

Foster’s promotion of the theory that higher money wages cause prices to rise is so out of line with Marx’s whole body of work in general and “Value, Price and Profit” in particular that I could not let it pass without comment.

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Monetary crisis in Cyprus and the ghost of 1931

In recent weeks, a financial, banking-monetary and political crisis erupted on the small Mediterranean island country of Cyprus. Here I am interested in examining only one aspect of this complex crisis, the banking and monetary aspect.

The Cyprus banking crisis was largely caused by the fact that Cypriot banks invested heavily in Greek government bonds. Government bonds appeared to be a safe investment in a period of crisis-depression. But then these bonds fell sharply in value due to Greece’s partial default in 2012—the so-called “haircut” that the holders of Greek government bonds were forced to take in order to avoid a full-scale default. The Cyprus banking and financial crisis is therefore an extension of the Greek crisis. However, in Cyprus the banking crisis went one stage beyond what has occurred so far in either the U.S. or Europe.

The European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF imposed an agreement on Cyprus that involved massive losses for the owners of large bank deposits, over 100,000 euros. Mass protests by workers in Cyprus forced the European Union and the European Central Bank to retreat from their original plans to have small depositors take losses as well.

Since the late 19th century, central banks, like the Bank of England, have gone out of their way when they wind up the affairs of failing banks to do so in ways that preserve the currency value of bank deposits for their owners. The officials charged with regulating the banks prefer instead to wipe out the stockholders and sometimes the bondholders.

Why are the central banks and other governmental regulatory organs—like the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Agency, which was created under the New Deal in hopes of avoiding bank runs in the United States—so eager to preserve the value of bank deposits, even at the expense of bank stockholders and bondholders?

The reason is that if the owners of deposits fear that they could lose their money, they will attempt to convert their deposits into hard cash all at once, causing a run on the banks. Under the present monetary system, “hard cash” is state-created legal-tender token money. Whenever depositors of a bank en mass attempt to convert their bank deposits into cash, the reserves of the banks are drained. Unless the “run” is quickly halted, the bank fails.

A bank facing a run in a last-ditch attempt to avoid failure calls in all loans it possibly can, sells off its assets such as government bonds in order to raise cash to meet its depositors’ demands, and halts additional loans to preserve cash. Therefore, if there is a general run on the banks, the result is a drying up of loan money capital, creating a massive contraction in demand. This causes commodities to pile up unsold in warehouses, which results in a sharp contraction of production and employment. Soaring unemployment can then lead to a severe social crisis.

This is exactly the situation that now confronts the people of Cyprus. University of Cyprus political scientist Antonis Ellinas, according to Menelaos Hadjicostis of CNBC and AP, “predicted that unemployment, currently at 15 percent, will ‘probably go through the roof’ over the next few years.” With official unemployment in Cyprus already at a Depression-level 15 percent, what will the unemployment rate be “when it goes through the roof”? Throughout the Eurozone as a whole, official unemployment now stands at 12 percent.

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Can the Capitalist State Ensure ‘Full Employment’ by Providing a Replacement Market?

The followers of Keynes believe that when there is a considerable amount of unemployment of workers and machines, the government and the “monetary authority” can create whatever additional purchasing power is necessary to achieve “full employment” by providing a replacement market for otherwise overproduced commodities.

If this is true, the general overproduction of commodities can only arise because of either policy mistakes by governments and central banks or because the governments and central banks deliberately wish to create unemployment. Therefore, according to this view, it is perfectly possible to avoid the periodic mass unemployment created by crises of generalized overproduction without abolishing capitalist production.

If, on the other hand, crises of generalized overproduction occur because the industrial capitalists periodically produce more commodities than can be purchased by the combined purchasing power of the working class, the capitalist class, the middle class, and the state and its dependents, long-term “full employment” is impossible under capitalism.

In order to examine the question of to what extent if at all the capitalist state can create a replacement market for commodities that otherwise cannot find buyers requires an examination of government finance in light of Marx’s fundamental discoveries involving the nature of value, price and money.

It is pretty obvious how the production of commodities can exceed the purchasing power of provincial governments—including the national governments of the euro zone countries—state governments, and local governments—none of which has the power to issue its own currency. During downturns in the industrial cycle, tax revenues of the governments decline. If they spend more than they take in, they must borrow. If the recession is persistent, their debts will grow so that sooner or later they will be forced into bankruptcy, just as happens with private individuals and individual corporations.

But what about the case of governments that can issue their own currency—most famously the U.S. government, whose currency, the U.S. dollar, is widely accepted as a means of payment, not only in the United States, where it is “legal tender for all debts private and public,” but throughout the world? Why can’t the government make up for any gap between the ability or willingness of the “private sector” to purchase commodities and the ability of the industrial capitalists to produce them?

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Economic Stagnation, Mass Unemployment, Budget Deficits and the Industrial Cycle

A few months ago I had dinner with a some friends from the old days. One of them expressed the view that the current economic situation of prolonged economic stagnation, continuing mass unemployment, and falling real wages represented a fundamental change in the workings of the capitalist system. He asked what is behind this change? This a good question and is worth examining in a non-trivial way.

A month or so ago the media, which had been painting a picture of a steadily improving economy, was startled when the U.S. government announced that its first estimate showed that the fourth-quarter GDP declined at an annual rate of .01 percent. Though slight, this would be a decline nonetheless.

Those economists who make a business of guessing the U.S. government’s GDP estimate expected an annualized rate of growth of 1.5 percent for the fourth quarter (of 2012). This would represent a historically low rate of growth, but growth nonetheless.

The media has been working hard to create an impression of a recovery that is at last gaining momentum. Therefore, if we are to believe the capitalist press, a “new era” of lasting prosperity is on the way. This latest “new era” will be fully assured if only the Obama administration and both Democrats and Republicans can settle their differences on the need to bring the current deficit in the finances of the U.S. federal government under control.

This is to be done by some combination of “entitlement cuts” for the working and middle classes and very modest tax increases for the rich. With the tax question settled by the New Year’s Day agreement, the only question now is how deep the entitlement cuts will be, spending on the military and “national security” being largely untouchable.

Thrown somewhat off balance by the estimated fourth-quarter GDP decline, the economists, bourgeois journalists and Wall Street brokerage houses—ever eager to paint the U.S. economy in glowing terms in order to sell stocks to middle-class savers—explained that “special factors” were behind the slight fall in the estimated GDP, not a new recession.

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Behind the Austerity Drive

January 2013 marks the beginning of the sixth year since the last crisis began in August 2007 and the fifth year since the crisis reached its climax with the panic on Wall Street in September 2008. Compared to the stormy events of those years, recent weeks have been relatively quiet.

The European debt crisis has at least momentarily eased with the decision of the European Central Bank to expand the euro-denominated monetary base—though much of the European economy remains in the grip of recession with unemployment still rising. In the U.S., the economy remains sluggish as the leaders of the ruling class seek ways to accelerate growth in order to halt and reverse U.S. de-industrialization and prevent a serious social and political crisis.

This is therefore a good time to take a larger view of the current economic situation within the broader long-term evolution of the capitalist system. This month I will focus on the U.S. government deficits and the current austerity drive.

The U.S. federal government is now carrying a debt of over $16 trillion and is fast approaching the current legal maximum of $16.4 trillion. The financial situation of the federal government doesn’t affect only the United States but the entire world, since not only is the U.S. government the world’s biggest borrower, it is also the center of the entire world imperialist system.

Real versus manufactured crises

On New Year’s Day, just as I predicted last month, a last-minute agreement was reached between the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats and Republicans to avert mandatory tax hikes and spending cuts that would have withdrawn as much as $800 billion of purchasing power from the U.S. economy over the next year. If such a withdrawal of purchasing power had actually occurred, the U.S., and perhaps the world, economy would have been thrown into an artificial, government-induced recession that would have aborted the current global industrial cycle. Exactly because of this, there was virtually no chance this would actually happen. Far from seeking to induce a recession, the political leadership of the U.S. ruling class is attempting to accelerate the slow rate of growth of the U.S. economy.

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The September 2012 Unemployment Numbers and the ‘Surplus Population’

This post concentrates on the U.S. economy. However, the basic trends are the same in all imperialist countries.

On October 5, the U.S. Labor Department issued its monthly estimate of unemployment for September 2012. Much to the surprise of most observers, the figures showed a drop of unemployment from 8.1 to 7.8 percent. For the first time in 44 months, unemployment dropped below the psychologically significant level of 8 percent.

The reported drop in unemployment gave a much needed shot in the arm for the Obama reelection campaign, which had been reeling in the wake of the president’s poor performance in his first debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney. As could be expected, Democrats were delighted by the unemployment report, which at first glance seemed to indicate that the lagging recovery from the 2007-09 “Great Recession” was finally gaining momentum.

Republicans, on the other hand, were disappointed, and some could hardly hide their anger. Jack Welch, the former head of the General Electric Company and a staunch Republican, infamous for his “downsizing” and layoffs when he was head of GE, even hinted that the unemployment report was deliberately falsified by the Obama administration to boost the president’s chances of reelection.

Is it possible that Welch is right? As we will see, of far greater importance is what the Labor Department’s rate of unemployment actually measures.

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The ‘Implications’ of Paul Baran, Pt 3

Forty-six years after ‘Monopoly Capital’

The special July-August 2012 edition of Monthly Review, devoted to the critique of economics, not only includes Paul Baran’s “Implications” and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy that is invaluable in understanding the past of Marxist political economy and monopoly capitalism. It also contains an article by John Smith of Kingston University in London that points to the kind of Marxist economics that is necessary to understand the monopoly capitalism of the early 21st century.

“Monopoly Capital” was published 56 years after Rudolf Hilferding’s “Finance Capital” and 50 years after Lenin’s pamphlet “Imperialism.” The period of time that now separates us from “Monopoly Capital” is approximately the same as that separating Rudolf Hilferding’s “Finance Capital” and Lenin’s Imperialism from Marx’s “Capital.”

The world of ‘Monopoly Capital’

As we have seen, “Monopoly Capital” was very much a book of its time. It reflected the changes that had occurred between the era of Hilferding and Lenin and the time that “Monopoly Capital” was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Let’s review what those changes were.

The most important was the impact of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which proved to be the defining event of the entire 20th century. For the first time in history, the working class seized and held state power for a substantial period of time. The working class held power long enough to embark on the construction of socialism. As a result, for the first time world capitalism faced a rival economic system that proved in practice, not just in theory, that capitalists are not necessary for modern industrial production.

The other defining event of the last century was the great Chinese Revolution of 1949. Only today can we fully appreciate the significance of this revolution. It began a process of shifting the center of human civilization from Europe and its “white colonies”—including the United States—toward Asia. The days of using the term “Asiatic” as a synonym for backwardness are gone for good.

These revolutions—and there were many others—forced the capitalist classes to make unheard-of concessions to the working classes of the imperialist countries in order to maintain capitalist rule. These revolutions also completely undermined the old European colonial empires—most importantly the British Empire. In contrast, the European empires were near the peak of their power when Hilferding published “Finance Capital” in 1910.

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