Editorial Introduction to Marxist World Journal Issue 1

Editorial Introduction, Bruce Wallace, on behalf of the Editorial Board. Reproduced from Issue 1 of the journal.

The launch of the Marxist World journal is a welcome development for the revolutionary Left. The decision to publish this new journal has been relatively short in gestation and stems from an internal struggle within the Committee for a Worker’s International (CWI) and more specifically the Socialist Party (SP) of England and Wales and the Socialist Party (Scotland), although members of other CWI sections were also involved. This includes comrades in the USA, Germany, Austria, Canada, Portugal and Ireland.

The internal struggle was around fundamental questions of Marxist theory in relation to the continuing capitalist economic crisis that erupted with the global financial crash of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession.

A number of CWI members argued that the crisis could only be fully explained by recourse to the core Marxist theory contained within Marx’s Capital, his Critique of Political Economy. Marx’s Capital transcended the economics of his day establishing The Law of Value as the determining law of capitalist production. It armed the working class with a revolutionary theoretical weapon for the persecution of the class struggle. As the great Russian Revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky noted: “Official political economy is dead. Real knowledge of capitalist society can be obtained only through Marx’s Capital.”

Our contention was that it was only through the application of the economic laws elaborated in Capital that a satisfactory analysis of the crisis could be grounded by socialists. Specifically that the crisis was not purely a financial one, but represented far deeper processes at work in the globalised capitalist economy.

The leadership of the CWI appear to hold to what has now become known as the conventional left account of the crisis. This account argues that the crisis was the result of neo-liberal policies which had driven down the wages of the working class, thus limiting demand for capitalist goods and services. The demand gap had been plugged by recourse to consumer and government debt. In the context of a speculative orgy of financialised capitalism the bubble burst with the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage scam in the USA, leading to a full blown financial and banking crisis in the advanced capitalist countries. In turn, the financial crisis led to a downturn in the real productive economy.

On the Left, a small but trenchant minority argued the conventional left account was superficial and was based, primarily, on the accepted norms of bourgeois economics. At root, they argued, the crisis was caused, indirectly, by the working out of the economic laws of Capital, and especially Marx’s Law of the Tendency of the Rate of profit to Fall (LTRPF).

This argument proposed that capitalism had not overcome the crisis of profitability of the 1970’s in the advanced capitalist countries. Despite the advent of neo-liberal policies in 1980, capitalist profitability did not significantly recover, and over the entire period from 1947 the economy-wide average rate of profit of US capitalism, twenty-five percent of the world economy, had continued in a downward trend.

The fall in the rate of profit meant that the rate of capitalist investment slowed down, as did wage growth. Capitalist firms and governments turned to borrowing and piled bad debt on top of more debt until finally there was a disruption in the reproduction process of capital.

This was completely verified by the facts of the American economy leading up to the crisis. As we noted in one of our documents In Defence of Marx’s Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall: A Reply to Lynn Walsh and the Socialist Party Executive Committee during the “Profits debate” within the SP in 2013: “In 2006 in the US, a quarter of the world economy, there was a slump in profits. In the 3rd quarter of 2006 the mass of pre-tax profits was $1,865 billion but in the 4th quarter of 2006 this had collapsed to $861 billion, a fall of more than half (see Brooks, 2012). On its own, such a catastrophic fall in the mass of profits would have caused a severe recession, but the slump in profitability and investment detonated an implosion in the bloated edifice of international finance capital, resulting in an acute financial and economic disaster.”

The collapse in US profits in 2006 was the culminating point of the long term decline in the rate of profit, and was the background or underlying cause of the financial crisis.

When we raised these points within the SP and in the Party journal Socialism Today we were met with a typical lecturing tone that we had to base our analysis on real developments within capitalism and not the working out of an abstract theoretical law!

Capitalism was not facing a crisis of profitability, replied the leadership of the CWI, but quite the contrary; Capitalist profits had never been higher! It is not our intention to relive the ins and outs of the “debate” here, but it quickly became clear that the CWI leadership had a very limited grasp of the fundamentals of Marxist economic theory.

In fact, the leading theoreticians of the CWI had a vulgar economic outlook, didn’t understand some of the most basic concepts of Marx’s Capital and largely based their analysis of the crisis on the outpourings of the capitalist economic commentators and radical bourgeois economists (Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf for example).

“It would be entirely wrong”, stated SP General Secretary Peter Taaffe at the Party Congress in 2012, “to blame the cause of the crisis on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall alone. There has been some of that”, he explained, “but the real cause of the crisis is lack of demand and deflation”. Completely mixing up cause and effect, Taaffe merely mirrored the arguments of the bourgeois Keynesian economists. When their theoretically uniformed arguments were challenged with hard facts and arguments grounded in the logic of Marx’s Capital, the leadership closed ranks. A debate, of sorts, took place but it was kept a closed one, lest the leadership of the CWI be found wanting in sight of critically minded workers and youth. The attitude of the leadership towards the issues in this debate was highly dismissive and is exemplified towards the end of a statement from the SP Executive Committee: “This is not the first debate to have taken place in the CWI, nor will it be the last. In the future we will face disagreements of a more serious character”.

In truth the leadership did not regard this question, i.e. having a correct Marxist analysis of the crisis, as a serious one. For them it was a distraction, an abstruse theoretical disagreement and unimportant in terms of the tasks of building the party and fighting for socialism.

Once the ritual of debate had taken place, the leadership resorted to indefinite suspension, effectively expulsion, of two of the chief critics of the Party position, Bruce Wallace and Steve Dobbs.

Not only had the leadership proved totally hapless in addressing the criticism from the “eleven” comrades who originally made up the opposition (they have palpably failed to reply to our trenchant criticisms of their economic analysis) but had been totally exposed in their inability to orient towards a changed world situation. Their perspectives of the development of broad mass workers’ parties as a stage towards rearming the working class politically has begun to unfasten with the victory of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in the UK, when for two decades the Labour Party was described by the SP as an out and out capitalist party, no different to the Tories!

Similarly, the strategy of building the electoral front Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) as a potential focal point for developing a working class alternative to the Labour Party met with disastrous results in the 2015 UK General Election, gaining just 0.1% of the vote. TUSC is set to disintegrate as its main trade union support return to Labour Party affiliation. The opposition within the CWI drew attention to the flawed strategy of the attempting to rebuild mass left reformist parties as a necessary stage for politically rearming the working class. Our criticisms are being completely borne out by political developments.

The reaction of the leadership of the CWI to our critique has laid bare the bankrupt political opportunism of the organisation. When challenged, the leadership resorted to bureaucratic diktat and cult-like expulsions. What was clear was that the regime inside the CWI bore no resemblance to genuine democratic centralism, but was more akin to bureaucratic centralism where genuine disagreement and debate could not be allowed if they questioned the infallibility of the leadership.

In our view, our criticisms and the response to them from the CWI leadership exposed fatal flaws in their theoretical orientation and in the nature of the party regime. We do not reject the entire tradition of the CWI as there is still much that is positive to be reclaimed from that tradition and it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but essentially the CWI is no longer the revolutionary vehicle it once was. The CWI remains a working class organisation with many fine class fighters in its ranks, but it has degenerated in a right-opportunist direction.

Hence there is the need for an independent theoretical journal to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of Marxism. It is not the intention of the Editorial Board of Marxist World to proclaim ourselves as the one true and authentic current of Marxism. The Left is littered with tiny groups making this claim. What we do stand by is the critical self-testing method of Marxism. That method, however, is not something one gets out of a tin. It depends, fundamentally, on basing any analysis of contemporary capitalism on the scientific discoveries of Karl Marx and specifically on his major work Capital.

The aim of Marxist World is primarily to carry theoretically critical material relating to the class struggle, educational series on the basic ideas of Marxism and up to date articles on world events. Although not adhering strictly to a specified “line”, the Editorial Board hold by the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and we welcome contributions from activists and theorists who adhere to these general ideas. We also welcome critical contributions on contentious issues, although we reserve the right to reply. Our aim is generate debate and discussion on the revolutionary Left. This issue, for example, contains opposing views on the class nature of the Chinese state.

We will also be hosting further material, including articles and videos, on our website marxistworld.net. We hope that this journal will flourish and stake a claim as the home of vibrant debate in the furtherance of the science of Marxism and the struggle for socialism.