Campbell

In the concluding paragraph of the second of two articles critiquing what he regarded as Don Robotham's superficial understanding of the role that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) plays in the functioning of the global capitalist economy, the nature of the current economic crisis, and the policy options that are open to the Jamaican state, David Wong stated a fact and posed a related question to Robotham:

"In California and around the United States, police officers, teachers, nurses, professors, and other employees of the civil service are being laid off and/or their salaries are being reduced while their workloads are being increased. Is this deplorable? Yes. What does this have to do with the IMF per se? You tell me." ('Where Robotham went off track' The Sunday Gleaner, July 19.)

The point that Wong was trying to get across to Robotham (and I am certain that he would extend the same challenging question to the union leader, Danny Roberts, in light of the latter's article - 'The IMF reform: aged wine in new wineskin', the Sunday Observer July 19 - which contains some serious misconceptions about Keynesian economic theory and the function of the IMF in the global capitalist economy) is essentially this: globalised capitalist production is rendering so-called Keynesian economic policy options untenable. This is so whether it is at the level of the Jamaican state, the US Federal and state governments or the various European states.

The argument, therefore, that Robotham was positing - that the political leadership of the major capitalist states were engaging in a deliberate game of "economic double standards" by, on the one hand, providing state support for their public-sector workers while, on the other hand, recommending cutbacks for their counterparts in the so-called developing countries - does not appear to have any basis in reality. Workers all across the globe are experiencing a decline in their standard of living.

In fact, one of the paradoxes of economic globalisation (which is made possible by the technological revolution) is that by generalising capitalist production throughout the world, it is objectively undermining the bargaining power of the working class within what is still considered the developed regions of the world.

MISCONCEPTION RE KEYNES

One of the more popular misconceptions about the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes is that their application (in the realm of state economic policy) was the primary reason why the major capitalist economies were able to recover from the economic crisis and the depression of the 1930s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The facts are as follows: It was the outbreak of the war, with its massive destruction of the productive forces in Europe, that created the conditions for the economic recovery to occur, first in the US, and later in the rest of the world.

In other words, capital accumulation (and the technical innovations which are an integral part of this process) cannot be sustained for any considerable length of time without the periodic destruction of the older existing physical infrastructures and social relationships in which the obsolete technologies are ensconced. Marx was not the only political economist who observed this process. The Austrian-born Joseph Schumpeter also elaborated on this feature within the capital accumulation process, which he termed "creative destruction". He identified it as a necessary aspect of capitalist development.

Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, wars have always been a major contributor to this process of destruction and renewal, in the context of the capitalist accumulation of wealth. And it was the outbreak of World War II in Europe that served to stimulate the demand for commodities that were produced in the factories and fields of the United States that led to the economic recovery of the global capitalist economy during the 1940s. The war served to accelerate and strengthen the role of the capitalist state in the reproduction of the capitalist economy.

The primary intellectual contribution of Keynesian economic doctrine to capitalist economic theory was its challenge to the obsolete doctrine of the laissez-faire theory of how the capitalist economy was to be reproduced, in the new context of 20th century capitalism.

The ideologues of the laissez-faire doctrine argued that the best regulator of economic prosperity (capital accumulation) was the market left to itself and free from interference by monopolies, the state or trade unions. They argued that the role of the state was primarily to act in the manner of a referee, seeing to it that the laws of the market were left free to work for the benefit of all social classes. Let us not forget that the call for a "free market" was the battle cry of the bourgeoisie (the then revolutionary class in the 18th century) in their struggle against the feudal class and the feudal state that held a monopoly on trade.

The economic crisis of the 1930s was the event that created the material conditions and the political space for an intellectual challenge to the old orthodoxy, within the general school of capitalist economic theory. Let us be very clear on this: Keynes was not challenging the primacy or the legitimacy of capitalist production relations. What he was recognising, from the inside, were the growing limitations of an economic doctrine that had continued to maintain ideological hegemony in the academy, during most of the period of Britain's industrial revolution.

UPCOMING STRUGGLES

No section of the modern bourgeoisie or its managerial strata is politically opposed, per se, to having the capitalist state assume an activist role in reproducing the conditions that are necessary for capital accumulation. The issue is really about the following: on whose behalf will the state play this activist role?

All sections of the capitalist class are compelled to engage in a battle over where and how the taxes that are are collected by the state (or the loans to the state by financial institutions) will be invested. This is part of the battle for the subsidies that are channelled into various infrastructural projects that directly or indirectly serve the needs of a particular industry or group of industries. What must be "creatively destroyed" in order for the new forces to have the necessary room to develop and grow? This is the type of questions that the political managers of the capitalist state, as well as the leadership of all the social classes in Jamaica and the Caribbean, are being forced to think about, and act upon, in this period of global economic crisis and restructuring.

Jamaicans United for Sustainable Development (JUSD) recently published a long list (essentially a smorgasbord) of issues which that organisation deems necessary for collective discussion, under the heading 'Beating the economic crisis'.

However, here is the problem: nowhere in this long list is it mentioned that there needs to be a serious discussion of the nature of capitalist economic crises in general and the specificities of the present economic crisis, the scope of the restructuring of the global economy that is under way, and what this process concretely implies for places such as Jamaica and the Caribbean. The business managers, the political managers and the intelligentsia continue to assume that they can continue to operate in the fashion they have been doing over the past 40 years and get the results that they claim they are wishing for.

In other words, the discussion that Dickie Crawford (the signer of the JUSD document) is calling for is not going to go anywhere unless it is situated within the appropriate conceptual framework.

NEO-Keynesianism useless

As I stated earlier in this presentation, appeals to orthodox Keynesianism or some sort of neo-Keynesianism are not going to be much use in this new environment of globalised capitalist production. Keynesianism, which developed on the basis of national finance capital that was directly tied to the national economies of the various capitalist states, has been negated by the full emergence of trans-nationalised finance capital which has freed itself from the boundaries of the nation state.

All three of the gentlemen who I have mentioned here (Don Robotham, Danny Roberts and Dickie Crawford) appear to be oblivious to these developments, much less what they imply for the options facing the social classes in Jamaica and the Caribbean.

In our 2003 paper - 'Globalisation and the crisis of the Caribbean intelligentsia' - Reggie Nugent and I argued, in our attempt to locate and explain the basis for the current crisis of the intellectual and political leadership in Jamaica and the Caribbean:

"The real basis of the crisis lies in the fact that the ideas of the present leadership of all existing political parties are out of step with the realities of a modern world that is being integrated by the process of globalisation. What we are witnessing is the disintegration of a world that this leadership has become accustomed to and was prepared for.

"This was the world that was configured around an agenda of managing the process of nation building in a post-colonial reality and the protectionist economic arrangements that were bequeathed by British colonialism.

"Today, this world is being fast left behind and with it the ideas and leadership that it spawned. The question before us is whether the present political leadership can be retooled to manage the new economic landscape that is shaping global competition and the contradictions between the contending classes in the spatial context of the Caribbean. Herein lies the basis for the crisis of the Jamaican and Caribbean intelligentsia."

For the discussion to move forward, the leadership in all sectors of the society will have to come fully to recognise and accept the reality that no viable, competitive industry can develop or expand in the region unless it is fully integrated into global industries, as part of the global supply chain.

However, as I have suggested here, there is no way of getting around one of the most fundamental requirements of major change: the so-called educators (themselves) will have to be re-educated, if their intention is to provide leadership.

Danny Roberts - file photos

Richard Crawford

Trevor A. Campbell is the moderator of the online forum 'Caribbean Dialogues' . He can be reached at tcampbell@eee.org. Feedback may also be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.