Book Review

[p051] Book Review was the context of all their thinking. Despite all his show of sophistication, Kidron is part of this trend. He poses the problem like this: High employment, fast economic growth and stability are now con- sidered normal in western capi- talism ... Each can be seen as the immediate cause of the others, together forming a causal loop that can be made to revolve in any direction from any point. The loop itself needs to be ex- plained. In the thirties it was one of unemployment—stagnation— instability; now, of high employ- ment—growth—stability. The in- terconnexions and sequence are the same. Only the level is differ- ent. (In passing, note here the way in which the Keynesian framework has been taken for granted, and also the use of a little second-hand cybernetic jargon, just to show we are really switched on.) * Part One of the book is headed ‘Explanations’. Is planning the reason for the difference between pre- and post-war capitalism? No, decides Kidron, it has helped a bit, but it does not suffice as an explanation. What about the idea that technical innovation has meant an expansion of trade? Not an ‘autonomous’ fac- tor, says Kidron. And so to Chapter Three, ‘An Arms Economy’. Now we are on the right track, he thinks. The idea that world capitalism, and US capi- talism especially, had developed a ‘permanent arms economy’, in which war preparations stabilized the sys- tem, is certainly not a new one. The patent, in any case, is not held by Kidron and Cliff, but by the Shacht- manites, whose journal New Inter- national carried a long series of articles with this message during 1950-1951. By repeating the argument in 1968, however, Kidron helps us to see its mechanical and anti-Marxist character more clearly. Here is the paragraph in which he outlines what he imagines to be a theory of capi- talist crisis. The argument for seeing a per- manent threat of over-production (not a threat of permanent over- production) as inseparable from capitalism rests on three empiri- cal propositions: that the rela- tions between different capitals are by and large competitive; that an individual capital’s com- petitive strength is more or less related to the size and scope of its operations; and that decisions affecting the size and deployment of individual capitals are taken privately by individuals and groups which form a small seg- ment of the society which has to live with the consequences. Were it not for the first two there would be no compulsion on each capital to grow as fast as it might through ‘accumulation’ (that is, saving and investment) and ‘con- centration’ (that is, merger and takeover): were ‘it not for the third, growth would never stumble far beyond society’s off- take. Together they also define the mechanism for attaining, and retaining, stability as one that augments offtake while moder- ating the rate of expansion that would result. Ideally, it should do this without altering too grossly the relations between in- dividual capitals. Such a mechanism is to be found in a permanent arms budget. * Now why did that fellow Marx spend several decades failing to com- plete a four-volume work on capital and its crises, if the job could be done so simply? Kidron’s patroniz- 85

[p052] ing reference to Marx in the preface should be considered before answer- ing this question: ‘Marx’s attempt to grasp the workings of the system is neither laughable nor holy. Allow- ance made for its primitiveness, it can be used to effect.’ The old man was very primitive, you know, but we eminent political economists can use him to effect! In reality, Kidron shows not the faint- est conception of what Marx was talking about. Capital lays bare the economic law of motion of a particu- lar stage of the development of society. At this stage, the producers of wealth are separated from the means of production, and are re- connected only by selling their labour-power as a commodity. The only relationship between producers is that mediated by the market on which commodities are exchanged for the universal commodity, money. Such a society cannot plan industry. The expansion of production must conflict with the relations of pro- duction in a series of explosive crises. Driven forward by the search for the highest rate of profit, capital stands as a social power over and above the decisions of any indivi- dual, worker or capitalist. * The ‘underconsumption’ which is implicit in Kidron’s falsification of Marx has nothing in common with such an analysis. Because, just like any other ‘eminent political econo- mist’, Kidron takes capitalism as a given object, he thinks he has only to consider the mechanisms through which its component parts are brought into quantitative relation- ship with each other. The argument really botls down to this profound thought: ‘Growth’ is outstripping ‘offtake’; throw some of the stuff away, and ail will be well. Feeling the need for a rather stronger theoretical prop, Kidron wheels in a reference to the falling rate of profit. Marx, like the earlier political economists, shows that as capital is accumulated and produc- tion expands, the surplus value ex- tracted per unit of capital tends to fall because labour power forms a 86 smaller proportion of total capital. This fall in the rate of profit has to be counteracted if the system can go forward. In this century, as Lenin proved, the export of capital to backward areas of the world is the major form of action taken by the monopolies to maintain the rate of profit. But Marx does much more than state the law of the falling rate of profit. He also demonstrates that this tendency cannot operate in a smooth, orderly fashion. The opposing forces on the rate and mass of profit can only be resolved through crises. The rate of profit remains stable or in- creases in the course of a boom, only to come crashing down in a slump. The destruction of capital, both in physical and financial terms, then leads to a renewed rise in the profit rate and a new cycle begins. None of these contradictory pro- cesses could be seen by Kidron and his fellow eminent political econom- ists in the 1950s and 1960s. Looking at the world through the windows of the bourgeois categories of thought, they saw nothing but steady expansion. Some, like Kidron, said they disliked what they saw. They protested occasionally at the iniquities of the world around them. But they were incapable of grasping the explosive conflicts prepared by the expansion itself and consequently the power of the working class, given a leadership which based itself on those conflicts. * Kidron’s reference to the rate of profit is therefore even more super- ficial than his meagre ideas quoted above. Rapidly flashing references to von Bortkiewitz and Sraffa (which appear to indicate that arms produc- tion has no effect on the rate of profit), he then pretends he has proved that arms production offsets. the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He finds it impossible to get away from the notion that, by pro- viding a market for products of in- dustry, armaments expenditure is somehow draining away a surplus that would otherwise accumulate, and thus keeping the boom moving. But the extent and quality of the demand for armaments is quite un- related to the development of the private sector of industry. The essential planlessness of capital is made still more chaotic by the de- mands of the cold war. : Kidron does explain that the ‘per- manent war economy’ leads to one or two ‘problems’, However, he hurriedly reassures us, ‘as yet these elements of instability are just a smudge on the horizon’, * Part Two of the book is headed ‘Problems’, and is mainly concerned with prices and wages. But these ‘smudges on the horizon’ are seen as firmly embedded in the basic stabil- ity of the permanent arms boom. When he talks about working-class action, it is of the non-political, mili- tant shop stewards’ variety, which was possible only under the condi- tions of industrial expansion. Although he refers in Chapter One, ‘Planning’, to international monetary difficulties, it is only to show that conflicts between capitalist countries interfere with international planning arrangements. The fundamental nature of the ‘liquidity problem’ is denied im- plicitly by him. ‘Were it not for a substantial increase in US expendi- ture abroad since 1964,’ says the eminent Dr. Kidron, ‘in pursuit of the Vietnam slaughter, and the phenomenal growth in the network of “US swap-credits”, a form of US- initiated bilateral mutual currency insurance which has added some $5 billion to total liquid reserves (1967), the world might well have been in the throes of a_ serious financial crisis.’ Well said, Dr. Kidron. But how is is that the crisis did arrive, precisely because Vietnam expenditure had inflated the dollar? Here is the nub of the question. The outflow of dollars in the forms of aid, investment and pur- chases of imports was the means whereby the boom was propped up. This was especially so after the 1950 Korean war stockpiling of raw materials. But the outflow, and the world expansion of credit which accompanied it, contained the seeds Fourth International, August 1968

[p053] of the crisis now threatening to dis- rupt world trade and production. For it rested on a stock of gold whose price had to remain fixed at the 1934 level. No economist or financial expert, however eminent, could get away from the reality of capitalism, that it involved the ex- change of the products of labour and that gold was the universal com- modity in the background of all international transactions. This remained the limit on the boom and, somewhere along the line, the expansion of trade had to run into this contradiction. The fall in the rate of profit could be evaded only up to this point by means of investment in Europe and state pur- chases of armaments. And the fur- ther the boom continued, the more explosive the contradictions within it. If only a ‘normal’ post-war slump had occurred, say around 1949 or 1950, the present crisis might well not have proved so dangerous. But just because Kidron’s ‘war economy’ was so effective for 23 years, the crash now approaching is all the greater. Revisionists and political econo- mists to the contrary notwithstand- ing, we live in the epoch of the death agony of capitalism. The struggle for revolutionary leadership in the working class can alone re- IN OFFERING for sale at 25s. ‘The Basic Writings of Trotsky’, New Park Publications are providing Marxists with a real bargain. This volume, priced normally at 42s., gives extracts from nearly every one of Trotsky’s major works and alsc includes a number of less well-known pieces. Excellently pro- duced, it covers much of the enormous range of Trotsky’s writings, from the 1905 Revolution to the fight against the Moscow Trials. Thus we get a picture of the career of a revolutionary and the destiny of the Russian Revolution itself. Among the passages not readily available elsewhere are ‘Thermidor and Anti-Semitism’ and an essay on the French novelist Céline. Pre- viously untranslated into English are an extract from ‘1905’, a tribute to Gogol and a passage from Trotsky’s unfinished ‘Life of Lenin’. Anyone just beginning to read Trotsky’s work would do well to buy this book at once. price 25s. NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD. 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 Marxism and Stalinism in Britain (Part Ill) solve the conflicts tearing world society to pieces. October 1917 was the first stage in the world prole- tarian revolution. Only the betrayals of social-democratic and Stalinist leaderships enabled capitalism to ride out the crisis of 1929-1933 and the war which followed. The new crisis prepared by a quarter of a century of capitalist ex- pansion renews the demand which history places before the working class: ‘Take power!’. Kidron may not have recognized the contradictions of the late boom. As Trotsky remarked of Burnham; they will certainly recognize him.

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[p055] ANTHOLOGY NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD. PRICE: 12/6 THE AGE OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION A TROTSKY ANTHOLOGY Edited with an introduction by Isaac Deutscher (with the A TROTSKY assistance of George Novak). Published by tt Publish- ANTHOLOGY ing Co. Inc. Distributed in Britain by New Park Publica- tions Ltd. Price 9s. 6d. A concise and invaluable collection of Trotsky’s writings. The theoretical genius of one of the world’s great Marxists and co-leader of the first successful socialist revolution is brilliantly revealed in this book. It is an indispensable addition to the library of all communists who are serious about studying, understanding and grasping the method and programme of contemporary Marxism. Orders to: NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST., LONDON, S.W.4 88 Fourth International, August 1968

[p056] LIMITED NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS Write Free for List Book 186A Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 MACaulay 7029 Essential Marxist Reading The New Course By Leon Trotsky A collection of articles written in 1923 during the lull before the great storm of persecution which was later to overwhelm Russian Bolshevism. Here Trotsky analyses the incipient stages of the degeneration of the Communist Party, uncovers its causes and proposes measures for combating its further decline. He here analyses the party in a historical, that is dialectical way, the relationships between generations, social strata, groups, factional forma- tions, tradition and the multitude of factors that go to make a revolutionary party. 111 pages, 3/6 a8 FE Most timely reading for British socialists, this book places the development of British politics in correct S historic perspective. Here Trotsky, writing on the eve of the General Strike of 1926, employs his great revolutionary experience to analyse and explain the ideological and moral concepts of the ruling classes and their servants in the Labour bureaucracy. te 136 pages, 7/6 Britain Ge ; The Draft Programme of the Communist International by Leon Trotsky This is part of the author’s criticism of the draft programme submitted by the Executive Committee of the Third (Communist) International to the 6th Congress of the Comintern which was held in July 1928. The manuscript of that criticism was written by Trotsky during his exile in Alma-Ata (Central Asia). It was sent to the Congress in Moscow together with an appeal for reinstatement into the party from which he had been expelled a few months before by the Stalinist faction in 1927. Stalin and his supporters had invented the theory of ‘Socialism in one country’, which was made party policy in 1925 and converted into an article of faith to be defended by the world institutions of Stalinism. It is this theory which Trotsky criticises in these pages. 64 pages, 1/- This document is a landmark in the development of 20th century Marxism. It sums up the experience of an entire period of struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy. This Platform also represents the highest point in the fortunes of the Joint Opposition (Trotskyist-Zinovievite) to Stalin. It is the programme of the last of the Bolshevik-Leninists who insisted that they remained communists despite all the per- secution, jailings, violence and slander inflicted on them. But this document also represents a watershed—the end of one phase and the beginning of another—in the evolution of Trotskyist politics. 112 pages, 5/- This is a polemic against Radek in 1928. Trotsky examines the arguments against his pre-war theory of the permanent revolution (as expounded in Results and Prospects) and takes up the history of his differences with Lenin before 1917, of which Stalin and his henchmen made so much. Trotsky shows that it was Lenin’s criticisms of his attitude to the centralised Marxist party, which he afterwards understood and accepted, that kept them apart, and not their differences _ on the permanent revolution. 254 pages, 15/- soft cover, 25/- hard cover Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU) r.o. 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4.

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