Comments on the Fictitious Capital website

posted to www.marxmail.org on June 19, 2003

I want to urge Marxmail and PEN-L subscribers to take a look at the Fictitious Capital website (www.munism.com) that was announced recently and specifically at the Introduction. It has all the strengths and weaknesses of the sort of left-communism that the webmaster Loren Goldner is associated with. Whatever theoretical disagreements I have with Goldner, he is certainly a provocative thinker whose collected articles appear on the "Break their Haughty Power" website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/.

Goldner shares many of the anti-Bolshevik prejudices of the autonomist and anarchist currents, but like other left-communists such as Paul Mattick this does not prevent him from developing some thought-provoking analyses of the capitalist economy.

While I am in no position to answer his claim that the Marxist left has failed to understand the importance of fictitious capital (an understanding that can only be advanced by a thorough grounding in v.2 & 3 of Capital, a task remains in my 'to-do' bin), I do have some queasiness about whether this "is at the heart of today’s situation." My guess is that imperialist war and semi-colonial resistance has much more weight. I also wonder if Goldner is elevating one aspect of the Marxist analysis to a place all out of proportion to its original weight, in a manner somewhat similar to John Holloway's fetishization of the term fetishization. At any rate, Goldner at least writes in clear, direct language unlike the fogbound Holloway.

My comments will be limited to areas that I have a glancing familiarity with, the first of which deals with the business of a "socialist program". Goldner writes:

A Socialist program, in short, has to insist on how little a mature transition out of capitalism would look like the contemporary world. The capitalists have a full program for society that reaches far beyond the point of production, but the left offers nothing of the kind. Above and beyond this type of analysis, the purpose of this website is to make that kind of program palpable. This programmatic vacuum of the left is at least partly responsible for the ebb of struggle that has taken over the United States and much of Europe in the past three decades.

Might I suggest that this is entirely the wrong approach? It will lead inexorably in the direction of a kind of utopian socialism that characterizes much of the left today, from Albert-Hahnel's Parecon to the various schemas of the market socialists ranging from Mondragon writ large to John Roemer's Basic Vouchers (BV's).

I hold out the possibility that Goldner will not come up with blueprints for a future socialist society and will limit himself to "minimum transitional demands" such as "Dismantling of the dollar-based global financial system and of fictitious capital in all its forms". I must say, however, that this strikes me as neither minimum in the Social Democratic sense nor transitional in the Leon Trotsky sense. All in all, the call for dismantling of the dollar-based global financial system, etc." has a certain maximal quality, if you gather my drift.

I also obviously have criticisms of his failure to draw a clear class distinction between capitalist society and societies in transition between capitalism and socialism. Goldner writes:

Out of this pre-1914 reality, and the defeats of the revolutions of 1917-21, came the “planning states” of the 1930s—Stalinist, fascist, corporatist, Social Democratic, Keynesian, Third World Bonapartist—which held sway into the 1960s and early 1970s. For most of the postwar period, even conservatism in the West was generally resigned to the spread of this kind of statism, consciously seeing itself as mainly trying to slow down its inevitable triumph. The spread of this kind of statism from the 1930s to the 1960s set the stage for the vast “antibureaucratic” mood of the 1960s revolt, where “the” question was posed everywhere in terms of “bureaucracy” vs. “democracy,” above all in the strike waves in Britain, the United States, France, Italy and Poland. Planning itself acquired a purely technocratic, elitist aura, an activity of gray specialists. There was a certain convergence in the 1960s between the “antibureaucratic” revolts of the right and the New Left.

To put it as succinctly as possible, this has more in common with anarchism than it does with Marxism. Fascism is not about "planning". It is about the wholesale destruction of trade unions and socialist parties in order to maximize the power of corporations and pave the way for wars of conquest. If one cannot tell the difference between Nazi Germany on one hand, and social democratic Sweden or revolutionary Cuba on the other, then one needs to revisit v. 1 of Capital, which might be inadequate in terms of an understanding of fictitious capital but quite good on the question of commodity production.