babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.
Leo Panitch: Still a Marxist After All
October 14, 2009 - 7:38pm
Leo Panitch delivered the Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lecture last March at Ryerson U. Including introductions the video, which is well worth watching, is just under an hour.
Still a Marxist After All: Lessons and Insights for our Time
Here are past Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lectures and a brief bio of her.
Is this the one where he says his big regret is failing to form a class-strugglist left alternative to the NDP, two official CPs, Trot sects, localized circles, and mere newspaper operations?
Panitch makes reference to a post-social democrat post-Leninist socialist political party and says ... "The failure to establish such a party is one of the main failures of my generation of Marxists."
There's some history that he outlines here, and it is a very useful service that he does, e.g., to remind us that social democrats/NDPers tried to use the anomaly of post-WW2 growth to claim that Marx was wrong about capitalism, etc., at that time. Of course, present day NDPers don't make such claims as the various crises since 1973 have undermined such (conveniently) forgotten arguments. The failure of NDPers, post-modernists and similar non-socialist leftists to take a more radical anti-capitalist political approach is something, says Panitch, we are all (on the left) still paying for. Why else do we have the failure to organize a successful fightback against the right wing attempt to solve the current crisis on the backs of ordinary working people?
The conduct of the NDP in the recent BC election, eg, is instructive in this regard. There was simply a failure to offer a genuine alternative to market idolatry and capitalist orthodoxy even during a capitalist crisis when thousands are losing their jobs, their hopes, their homes, and so on.
Anyway, all in all, not bad at all if you're not willing to keep drinking the capitalist kool-aid.
Yes that's the video, but any plans to organize on your part, though?
Well, if you mean the Social Revolution Party, I'm not convinced they're what Panitch is talking about.
For myself, I focus my own efforts towards more humble goals. Like babbling on rabble, among other things.
thread drift/ My PH.D. thesis topic before I abandoned it was on J.L. Cohen, Phyllis Clarke's father. His personal papers were fascinating to read. I believe I still have a letter from her giving me permission to use all of the collection. There has subsequently been a book published, Rebel Lawyer, which examined his life/ end thread drift.
Leo Panitch on The Agenda with Steve Paikin
Thanks for that, LordP. Here are a couple of remarks I took from that interview ...
Now that's turning things on their head. Heh. The next one is more substantial.
Hence the need to look at alternatives to this system of capitalism. Well done, Leo Panitch. I was particularly impressed with his response to a request for the "25 word summary" of Marx's Capital. Now that's intimidating. This guy probably leaps over tall buildings in his spare time.
How's that turning things on their head, exactly?
Is it in line with "I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party" during the McCarthy era, or with "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"?
I've edited my post and there is now a more substantial quote as well as the short snapper.
I had Leo as a prof for Canadian Politics in 2nd year Poli Sci at Carleton. He was one of the most engaging profs I ever had, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Most of the folks I grew up with in the NDP studied under him during those years, and it left its mark, although I venture to say many of us have wound up quite a bit further right than Leo would have approved of.
Still, his lessons on the limits of social democracy have insights to this day. I just finally concluded that it was a reasonable goal to try and make concrete gains for people within a democratic political system, rather than turn everyone's lives upside down for an unknown and uncertain result. Leo was personally very kind to me, and he inspired a whole bunch of us to take an interest in politics beyond careerist resume-ism, but I'm not sure he was ever going to be the one to lead a socialist revolution in Canada, and I'm not sure he had thought out overmuch how to get there and what to do after that. If you're going to lead a revolution, you kind of owe it to people to have thought that through a bit more.
Still I saw his interview with Steve Paikin the other week, and it did make me nostalgic for those days, when we thought anything was possible.
If one of those insights is that social democracy won't lead to the kind of fundamental change that is necessary for our society to move forward, then I don't see why that sort of observation shouldn't be enough for one person. Pointing out a dead end is useful as it helps other people to avoid such pitfalls. As was made clear in the interview, there's a great deal of resistance even to such a an apparently simple conclusion.
Does Leo Panitch have the leadership charisma of a Hugo Chavez? Should he be expected to?
With respect to social democracy to the depth and degree that exists in Nordic countries, how can we turn our noses up at something we've never had in Canada? When will Canadians be ready to make the leap from the bland right-wing pap of nothingness and dependence on a failed second-hand ideology we're still enduring today to that of a country committed to socialism? How do we do as Marx suggested we do and win the battle of democracy in a country situated nextdoor to the last bastion of rightwing conservatism in the world? Hugo Chavez at least has proportional MMP to work with same as Howard Hampton endorsed before 22 percent of registered voters in Ontario handed the Liberals one of the phoniest electoral majorities ever. What does Leo Panitch's party propose we do?
Watch the interview again. How is Panitch wrong about what NDPers have been saying over the years?
Listen, in particular, to the part of the interview that I quoted above.
The interviewer felt obliged to interrupt Panitch when he was making this argument, and challenge his claims about Bob Rae, but I think that the argument can still be followed. What I typed above, paraphrasing Panitch, was that " Hence the need to look at alternatives to this system of capitalism." Panitch claims, and I agree with him, that social democracy is not an alternative TO capitalism but merely a "tinkering" strategy within the system.
Please don't construe this argument as somehow opposing reforms, many of which the NDP supports and fights for, on some ultra-leftist grounds of "all or nothing".
I currently have a copy of Leo's book, Working Class Politics in Crisis, out from the library. A very good essay in there about the Impasse of Social Democratic Politics. He was of course critical of social democracy from the left during its "golden age as well." It is interesting today to hear Leo point out (correctly in my view) that many of the assumptions held by social democrats about capitalism were wrong yet social dems feel they've been vindicated by the crisis (since they warned all the long against the unrestrained free market), as Ed Broadbent did at the NDP convention in Halifax. Of course Ed's call for an all-out assault on inequality sounds downright radical to the social democrats of today.
You know, I think these sort of lessons on the limits of social democracy are very important for everyone who wants to struggle for a better world, and isn't a careerist hack.
Isn't it ironic that you are telling other people to organize?
Leo Panitch is not quite telling the whole story. After WW I, international capital was brrought to heel somewhat with the end of the gold standard regime. In Canada and with the CCF pushing and prodding the Mackenzie King Liberals, the Bank of Canada was nationalised in 1938. Until 1974, the feds were creating about a quarter of the money supply and using it to fund important infrastructure and social programs. And yes, US Friedmanites and Thatcherites, and Mulroneyites with little opposition from Liberals, privatized money creation in Canada with bringing an end to statutory reserves for chartered banks in Canada. All in all, as Canadian William Krehm describes it, it was a massive bailout for Canada's increasingly deregulated banks which lost money gambling on stocks and real estate around the world. A huge bailout with private banks allowed to load up with Canadian federal debt with nothing of their own money laid down. Since 1991, there has been a lack of interest-free government created money in circulation in the economy. This is the heart of the neoliberalorama, the fly in the ointment since 1991.
The 1960's and early 70's were the most prosperous times for workers at anytime in history in North America with mixed market economies. I don't believe the NDP or even Trudeau era Liberals could be faulted for believing that they were on the road to prosperity. They were certainly better times for workers than pre-WWII North America under laissez-faire capitalism. The federal NDP is on record as having opposed the very similar neoliberal agendas of both old line parties in Canada since the 1980's, so I don't really understand where Leo Panitch is blaming the NDP for Milton Friedman's voodoo permeating Canada in the top-down way it was implemented by Brian Mulroney's conservatives through to Paul Martin's Liberals and continuing today under the Harpers.
Panitch makes the argument that the NDP has been, ultimately, drinking the same Kool-Aid as the other bastards. We all know about the differences between the NDP, on the one hand, and the ConservaLiberals on the other hand. That's why so many of us on the left of the NDP wind up voting for that party. Panitch made this very remark.
Yes they can. They can be faulted in this way because: real fucking socialists have, all along, been saying that capitalism is prone to inevitable crises; that as long as the fight is over how big a piece of the pie working people will get, and not over who's in goddam charge, the other side is going to find ways to get the upper hand and bring ANY period of shared prosperity to an end; and, finally, that what needs to be explained is not the inevitable crises that come along but rather the periods of relative prosperity. The late Paul Sweezy and his crew over at Monthly Review have been making this argument for decades. It's just that social democrats have had their fingers in their ears ... or in some other part of their anatomy that shall remain unmentioned. The long term interests of working people get abandoned for short term gains.
Can anyone point to specific neoliberal koolaid that the NDP has implemented while in government and that was not a direct result of the neoliberal shitstorm emanating from Ottawa since PET was coerced over to the right by 1982-84?
And I can point to more than one instance when the federal NDP stood alone in effective opposition to the Friedmanite agenda implemented in Ottawa over the course of the last 30 years. And in some cases, our two old line parties drank of the koolaid even moreso than the two old line parties south of the border, if one can imagine that.
What does he say about the NDP exactly? I think Leo would agree that the main culprits in this 30 year-long neoliberalorama are the neoliberal ideologues themselves.
It's precisely Panitch's claim that an NDP Premier, such as Bob Rae, shared the same views and carried out the same neo-Liberal policies that Liberals and Conservatives carried out. Panitch, e.g., said in response to the objections of his interlocutor that if Rae had genuinely wanted to "spread the pain" then he would have imposed a 5% cut on everyone and not just civil servants in the province. By carrying out this policy, Rae paved the way for the Harris atrocities to follow.
Why am I recapitulating this? Listen to the interview. It's all there.
I have listened to it, and I think you're hearing something else altogether. It wasn't Bob Rae who privatised the life blood of our economy gradually between the years 1974 and 1991 - that was the two dirty old line parties bailing out Bananada's increasingly deregulated banks, and they did so on the advice of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements. Keynes and others demanded that pro-Nazi central banker's club be disbanded during the Bretton Woods conferences. If Marx was the one calling for dissolution of the BIS and 'financial disarmament' in 1946 only to be vetoed by US and British politicos acting on behalf of Wall Street and London bankers, and things run amok since then, would we be saying that Marxian economics is a failed ideology, too?
Bob Rae did not short Ontario by $4 billion in annual transfer payments. That was the Mulroney feds.
Bob Rae did not put the province in a budget deficit mode by $2 to $3 billion annually - which was an "unforseen" multi-billion dollar budget deficit announced by the Petersen Liberals a matter days before the 1990 election, when the cocky bastards realized they were going to lose.
Mike Harris didnt make anti-scab law of the land during the very neoliberal 1990's - that was the Ontario NDP government.
Neither Harris nor McGuinty backed loans to save paper mills and steel mills during the ideologically-induced recession of the 1990's. That was Rae's NDP with the two old line parties suggesting that those mills and workers sink or swim at the time.
It wasnt the two dirty old line parties who pumped counter-cyclical dollars into Ontario's economy in the 90's in easing some of the pain for those would have been unemployed, and or were relying on the NDP's social assistance and what was the highest minimum wage in the country by 1995.
It wasn't dimwit Harris or Pinocchio McGuilty and his mini-me Libranos who spent money on clean drinking water projects across under-developed, and in some instances, thirdworld Northern Ontario. That was Rae's NDP.
And none of that is mentioned in Leo Panitch's speech linked to above.
I have one criticism of Rae's NDP, and that's that they didnt listen to Galbraith at the time and spend even more than they did on stimulus. They were screwed either way with conservative minded voters in Ontario looking a gifthorse in the mouth. A phony majority of voters in Ontariio have been old line party for a long-long time. They werent ready for the NDP let alone Marxian economics then. It will take more rack and ruin in this province before they hand the NDP the phony baloney majority we did in 1990.
You can agree with the analysis of a problem and still come to different conclusions about what's the most ethical way to try and fix it. That was the point I was trying to make. Social democrats accept that you have to work within a democratic system to make whatever changes you can.
Characterizing social and political problems as "ethical" problems is often simply a preface to abandoning those problems altogether, particularly by refusing, in advance, to fight as dirty as the other side. It's a kind of political surrender.
So, if the "democratic" system rejects fundemental change, then socialists and those who advocate fundamental change can wait for hell to freeze over? Nice try. Simply define the question out of existence. How convenient. I can't treat these remarks of yours seriously, at all. It works out the same as someone who denies the need for fundamental change and is a kind of game with words.
Leo Panitch on Bob Rae:
"...what I would say most critically about him is not the Social Contract, but when they ran into the problems they did in the very severe recession which the whole world experienced in the early 90s, he didn't go on television to say "look, the reason I can't run an $18 billion deficit...is because the New York bondtraders would downgrade the value of Ontario bonds. Most Ontarians don't know that. If he had gone on television to explain that to people, we might have a higher level of political literacy..."