Leo Panitch on The Relevancy of Marx, Climate Change and the Need for Financial and Industrial Planning

Leo Panitch has been the editor of an excellent series of yearly edited volumes known as the Socialist Register, each organized around a particular theme.

Recently, Leo Panitch was asked to author an article for Foreign Policy magazine on the relevancy of Marx to understanding modern capitalism. This was the event that led the Real News to interview Leo. I have embedded Part II below, but you can find Part I on You Tube.

In summary of Part II, Panitch discusses the financial-economic crisis, the collapse of Detroit's auto industry, and the problems of addressing climate change under capitalism.

Panitch points out that the "cap and trade" schemes currently being devised are a lot like the complex financial products of derivatives, mortgage securities, and credit default swaps that played a role in the speculative housing bubble that lead us into the current financial crisis. And of course there is the more obvious problem that these schemes only create incentives for industries to voluntarily reduce carbon dioxide emissions it it is profitable. They don't directly create policies that drastically cut emissions, which is really what is needed.

This is basically all that the present liberal wing of the ruling class establishment has to offer. Basically they are afraid to consider the more rational alternatives like economic planning. Instead of massive bank bail-outs, Panitch argues that a socialist response would be the nationalization of the banking and auto industries to be run as a public utilities. With those financial and industrial assets in hand they could be directed towards re-orientating production into green technologies.

Panitch points out that the collapse of the auto industry is a great loss of human skill and know-how. There is no reason that those people could be put back to work building solar panels.

Another key point of the interview is that Marx was not in the business of giving advice to capitalist states. He was under no illusion that those who control the state and economic institutions of capitalism would implement rational solutions to problems if it was contrary to their class interests. As always, what is needed is a working-class movement from below.

Macro and Micro Levels of Socialist Transformation

In an article at MRZine titled Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Renewal Rick Wolff argues that now the time is right to develop a new socialist program. As part of that new program is a critique of prior socialist projects such as the Soviet Union and China, and their degeneration.

The framework for Wolff's critique of the 20th century's socialist projects is to look at them from the perspective of macro and micro levels of socialist organization. So in contrast to capitalism with its private ownership of the means of production and the anarchy of the market, at the macro level the socialist project focused on the social ownership of productive property and national economic planning. However, at the micro level, within factories and productive enterprises there was no qualitative differentiation between capitalism and socialism.

"Thus, when and where socialists became politically dominant, the basic internal structures of enterprises were not fundamentally altered. Laborers still finished their work days and departed, leaving behind their labors' fruits and leaving to others -- boards of directors -- the decisions about what to produce, how, and where, and what to do with the surpluses/profits. True, socialists emphasized state regulation of those boards' decisions or sometimes replaced private corporate boards of directors with state officials. However, the basic structures connecting workers to enterprise decision-makers remained, where socialists shaped them, markedly like their counterparts under capitalism."

Another way to say this is that at the micro level, the actual "relations of production" were not tranformed despite socialist ownership relations. And this of course has political consequences and dimensions as well, for if actual workers are not in control of their workplaces, then they could hardly be able to exercise real political control at the national level.

Although not mentioned by Wolff, we have seen more in experiments in actual workers control recently in Venezuela as part of the Bolivarian revolution and in Argentina as portrayed in the film The Take , and recently covered further on Democracy Now!

In watching the The Take however, one is struck with the sense that the factory expropriation and worker control movement could go so much further with a national macro level political movement. Regardless, lets hope we are entering a historical period where we can start putting together the pieces of a wholistic macro-micro socialist project. Enjoy the trailor for The Take.

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