Letter: Is Marx’s Analysis of Capitalism Relevant Today? (2017)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

The article ‘Analysing an economic system’ (Socialist Standard, September) closes with the words: [today] Marx’s Capital remains valid and relevant. Well sure as his analysis is valid—correct, and Wall Street spivs confirm this, but as a political weapon for workers . . . well, increasing less so. The irony is that perhaps Marx’s Capital is more relevant to ‘city types’ than to workers. Marx’s illuminations to workers (and ‘city types’) on capitalism: its exploitation, surplus value, its transitory existence, its contradictions—and your point on behalf of Marx, that it’s iron-clad rules (economic laws) a have not changed over time…etc., etc., are interesting to academics and economists, but for workers today—h’mmm?

Has Marx’s analysis in Capital, as a value to workers for change, been surpassed by the actual practical workers experience of capitalism today in that today there is increasingly developing an impossibilist situation reality for most workers in the West that cannot be turned around or alleviated by social reformers or by capitalists themselves wishing to preserve their society in a Keynes moment? This to be quickly followed by others in China and India and emerging Africa and is this a development which Marx himself would have relished? Practical experience over theory and idea.

So who cares how it works, knowing that it doesn’t work and it cannot be made to work by ‘romantic fixers’ is knowing enough, the experienced reality that it does not work is by far the better educator for workers. Therefore, should SPGB and World Socialist Movement workers and Trade Unionists etc., etc., speak less of Marx and more point out the fact that it cannot be made to work and what it might be replaced with? To highlight how we might do things differently post capitalism is not to become the little cook in his/her cookshop churning out blueprints for some far-off future—the future is here and now. It’s time to start cooking! Let us all set out our vision of Socialist Society—free society and let us set in motion an on-line discussion and the World Socialist Movement set up another website for this very purpose; you don’t have to insist on party membership to participate—being a member of the working class ought to be sufficient.

In the West jobs are disappearing to Far East workers and technology and never to come back, wages are sinking never to come up, pensions are a pittance and State benefits practically non-existent—certainly diminishing rapidly, and bills for food, rent, clothing and childcare and leisure etc., etc., keep rising and more and more we work longer and longer hours and many in more than one job. The global capitalist economy has created too many workers needing to earn a living—and increasing that number by hundreds of thousands if not millions daily and capitalists cannot meet that need for employment and on wages adequate for everyday bills never mind descent living. Life is no fun for capitalists themselves, they cannot in general make an acceptable profit (acceptable to them) hence more and more tax dodging (legal, illegal and with permission), calls for set-up and maintenance grants, thus they can no longer afford to maintain their States, thus cuts (or austerity) in health, education and council spending and no way can any of these trends be halted never mind reversed. Two cases in point: UK trains and main energy supplier corporations for their size, customer base and capital input cannot make acceptable profits for dividend expectations and this with UK government subsidies for infrastructure maintenance and upgrades.  Even the mighty Apple Corporation is fast losing ground to Samsung and Huawei and up-and-coming others.

With the present state of technological development maximised by capitalists this perilous state of Western workers will soon befall those in China and India, and thus well over have the globe’s workers will be effected and feel threatened and angry—out of a job and their only source of income.

Endless talk about Marx and his illuminations are not going to get the job done.

Of course Marx and his dialectical method is invaluable for moving forward and we should be applying this method to everyday problems facing the globe as examples. Brush-up here: www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/books/index.php

William Dunn, 

Glasgow

Reply:

So you like the dialectic but not the much simpler theory of surplus value!

Certainly the evidence of the experience has shown more than any book that capitalism can’t work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers and their dependants. And you are right that in the end, as long as people realise this, they don’t really need to know exactly why – though having some idea why would avoid the risk of being misled by radical-sounding reformists. As you say, understanding this is the basis of the case for socialism. The deduction from ‘capitalism can’t be reformed to work for the majority’ is that the majority needs to consider what different system of society would work in their interest. Which is where socialists come in. Experience does not automatically lead to understanding; reflection has to intervene whether this involves talking to others or reading.

Marx’s analysis – whether in his own words or in popularisations – is a key weapon in the socialist arsenal in the battle of ideas against capitalism. Agreed, we also need to present the alternative, which the second article in the same issue, ‘A World Without Commodities’, did. The discussion forum you call for already exists and can be found at: worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum.

Capitalism, at least in the West, is in a bad state compared to in some earlier periods, but whether we can conclude that ‘wages are shrinking never to come up again’ or that unemployment is to go on growing and growing is another matter. Of course, even if wages do go up again and unemployment goes down the case against capitalism remains valid. Capitalism will still be based on the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value (as Marx explained in detail) and it will still be impossible to make it work in the interests of the majority – Editors.

Where Do We Go From Alienation? (1974)

From the January 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years Marxism has taken on a different look. The existence in German of early philosophical writings of Marx was known since before the war. The English publication in the late nineteen-fifties of The Holy Family and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 set loose the theory of alienation which Marx formulated as a young man and echoed in his work nearly fifteen years later. Its appearance at first was gratifying enough; here was Marxism come in from the cold, as it were, and revealed as humanism.

From there, however, it has become an academic industry. Preliminary and marginal Marx is turned over in repetition of the thirties’ nonsense-debate as to What he Really Meant. Then, it was about political economy; now, about Man. It’s a sad reflection that Marx and Engels meant their work to make explicit the struggle of the working class, and the academics have obstructed that happening by making it as esoteric as possible. An Inaugural Lecture at the London School of Economics in November dealt with “some theoretical aspects of Marx’s original work” under the heading “The Fundamental Marxian Theorem”. A feeling, no doubt, that so valuable a property cannot be left to the workers’ mucky hands.

But from this scholarship world where theses are hatched to fly in ever-decreasing circles, influences seep down. There is the case of the Left, with leadership increasingly claimed as of right through comprehension of Marxism’s alleged inner mysteries. And there is alienation as not only the vogue-word of the times but one pronounced as substitute for an analysis of practically anything. What is to be said about capitalism in 1974? Alienation. How is the subject-life of millions to be explained? They are alienated. The cry of “alienation” has rendered Marxism as a vague universal humanitarianism instead of the mechanics of the class struggle.

Words and Men

Of course Marx had a conception of the nature of man. He saw man’s distinctive ability to “make his vital activity into an object of his will and consciousness”: his power to create his own environment, to change it and thereby change himself. He saw how capitalism militated against human fulfilment in those terms — productive activity, the “species-life” of man, was appropriated from him. Using Feuerbach’s word, he proposed that man under capitalism was alienated from the product of his labour and the act of production; from other men; and ultimately, therefore, from his own nature.

What does “alienation” mean? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives it as “estrange” or, in legal application, “transferring ownership to another”. The first is a stilted but everyday one. Jane Austen in Persuasion has: "What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals . . .” The second is found in records of changes in the holding of land, as:

   Further alienation occurred in 1636 to Charles Maynard, one of the Auditors of His Majesties Court of Wards and Liverys, who in 1639 became the purchaser of the manor and the whole of its rights and privileges.

(A Calendar of Deeds, pub. 1923)

It is important that these meanings should not be confused. Up to quite recent years legal actions were occasionally brought by husbands for “alienation of the affections” of their wives. What was envisaged was not estrangement — which had obviously taken place anyway — but the loss of the wife’s services and duties: a matter of property.

The German words Marx used for alienation were “Entfremdung”, “Verausserung” and “Entäusserung” They correspond with the English meanings above, the first two referring to property and the last to personal relations. Marx seems to have used them more or less indistinctly. In the Communist Manifesto “entäusserung des menschlichen wesens” is “alienation of humanity”, and in Vol. I of Capital (p.708, Kerr edn.) the word “entfremden” is used in “estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”.

In his book Marx's Theory of Alienation István Mészáros attempts to explain the difference:

  When the accent is on “externalization’ or “ojectification”, Marx uses the term "Entäusserung” (or terms like “Vergegenständlichung”), whereas “Entfremdung” is used when the author's intention is to emphasize the fact that man is being opposed by a hostile power of his own making, so that he defeats his own purpose.

This explanation is less important than the actual translations into English. Why did Moore and Aveling, who translated Vol. I of Capital, choose and Engels as editor approve “estrange” — and, elsewhere, “divorce”? All three knew Marx and were well placed to render what was in his mind. Yet we know for a certainty that any modern scholar would seize on “alienate”, because the intellectual fashion of the time says so. And with it is conveyed a heavy philosophical package.

Changes of Thinking

The theory of alienation appeared initially as Marx’s first view of the capitalist world, an interim enquiry between the Hegelian philosophy of his youth and his major historical and economic analysis. The academicians will have none of that, however. David McLellan in Marx Before Marxism declares:

   Those who claim to find a break between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ Marx usually maintain that alienation is a concept that was central to Marx’s early thought but which he abandoned later . . . These statements are, however, inaccurate.

For McLellan, the Grundrisse of 1857-8 is the final word:

  The Grundrisse, then, are as Hegelian as the ‘Paris Manuscripts’ and their publication makes it impossible to maintain that only Marx’s early writings are of philosophical interest, and that in the later Marx specialist economic interests have obscured the earlier humanist vision.

Mészáros takes the same standpoint, pouring scorn on those who believe Marx put aside the alienation concept and quoting from The Holy Family, The German Ideology, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus-Value. But difficulties immediately arise. Except the Grundrisse these are all early works, and both Marx and Engels wrote deprecatingly of them later. A. Voden in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels recalled a conversation in 1893 in which Engels refused to have an interest in “publishing old manuscripts from publicistic work of the forties”; and Marx spoke of The German Ideology as having been meant mainly for “self-clarification”. Indeed, The German Ideology—only two years after the 1844 Manuscripts—makes ironical references to “the self-estrangement of man”. Likewise the Communist Manifesto (1848) ridicules the German academics:

  They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”.

(SPGB edition, p. 85)

More Reservations

Having claimed that Marx never gave up the alienation theory, Mészáros has to qualify the assertion:

  But once it is conceived in its broadest outlines—in the Manuscripts of 1844— it becomes possible to let the general term “recede” in the presentation . . . This is why it is not at all surprising to find that the works which followed the Manuscripts of 1844, up to about 1856—and written for publication—are far less densely populated with the word “alienation” than the first broad synthesis.

This is “special pleading” with a vengeance, and it does not stand up for a moment. If Marx really thought on those lines, that having stated a theory there was no need to go on reiterating it, he did not act accordingly over the labour theory of value and the materialist conception of history; these, once begun, never “recede” in his work. To look at this another way, Marx’s main works have been extant for generations. In them the words “alienate” and “estrange”, and statements on the condition of man, have been perfectly comprehensible as part of his economic analysis. It is only the early and preparatory works which put them in the context of a philosophical theory belonging, at that, to Marx’s intercourse with the Hegelians and Feuerbach.

But what about Engels? According to both Mészáros and McLellan, Marx was first influenced towards the alienation concept by Engels’s Outline of a Critique of Political Economy (1843-44); and there is Engels’s own work on Feuerbach. Mészáros and McLellan both lay stress on Marx’s unfulfilled intention to produce an enormous work on mankind, of which Capital was the first “brochure”. It should be taken for granted that Engels, as the lifelong collaborator of Marx, would share the pursuit of the alienation theory and seek to complete what Marx allegedly left unfinished. But not only did Engels dismiss their early philosophical work and describe its “semi-Hegelian language” as “not only untranslatable, but has lost the greater part of its meaning even in German” (letter to Mrs. F. K. Wischnewetsky, 1886); the theory is — despite the wide range of his social investigation — entirely absent from his own post-juvenile writings.

A Sterile Concept

It is possible, of course, to brush off Engels on the grounds that he was not Marx. That is what Kamenka. in The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, attempts to do. However, in the Introduction to Marx and Engels : Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis S. Feuer argues and offers evidence that for Marx the alienation theory was a youthful aberration which he shared Engel’s wish to forget. He points out that Marx’s last published writing, A Workers' Enquiry (1880), showed him preoccupied with further economic research “into the deeds and misdeeds of capitalist exploitation” (Marx’s own words):

  It consisted of a hundred questions directed to workers as to their conditions, their treatment by their employers and governmental agencies, their conditions at home, their diet, their children, the frequency and duration of strikes, the workingmen’s societies, and so on.

And in 1881 Marx wrote to a Russian correspondent about his friend Ray Lankester’s essay Degeneration. Of Marx’s interest in it, Feuer says: “Evidently it was related to an even more basic questioning of his philosophical standpoint which he never articulated.”

What then are we left with? A theory which Marx may or may not have retained; which Engels apparently discarded altogether; of uncertain terminology; and in the absence of which, Marxism has existed as a lucid, coherent and not-at-all-deficient body. Its being put in the fore of left-wing Marxism has damaged that coherence, despite claims that it gives “a fuller view”. Bertell Oilman in his book Alienation presents value, appropriation, the money-system etc. as facets of alienation; Mészáros asserts the importance of economics to be as

  a vital link in the programme of gaining mastery over the various causal factors involved, serving the purpose of practically superseding alienation in all spheres of life.

This does not expand the existing view of Marxism: it diminishes it. If a working man understands (in fact, he already does) that he is estranged from life’s potentialities by being exploited, that is proper consciousness. But if he is to be asked to say he is first and foremost alienated, and exploited as part of it, that is futile.

Meaning and Purpose

This brings us to the question: where does the theory of alienation lead? Any theory is going to be reduced in frequent usage to the common-or-garden, and at this level it has already become sheer do-gooding with a highfalutin name. Four years ago a TV programme on political dissent showed a member of a well-known left-wing group expounding alienation: “There — on the other side of that wall — you could die, and nobody would know about it!” Of course there is an appeal in this kind of “theorizing”, and being able to invoke the pre-scientific Marx for it. It is not only more romantic but easier than learning the economics of capitalism.

At the academic level, however, there is not much improvement. Oilman gives a clear and readable account of the alienation theory, but seems conscious at the end of the problem of not knowing what to do with it: his critical summary turns out to be chiefly a criticism of Marx’s economic categories after all. And Mészáros, after attacking the “hot air”, “falsifications” and “grotesque ideas” of misinterpreters of Marx, emerges as a supporter of the regimes in Cuba, China and Eastern Europe and a believer that the critical breakdown of capitalism is almost upon us. Since this is merely the old rubbish of the Left, the alienation theory looks to have been brought forward as a convoluted support for it.

  

Only one conclusion is possible. The Marxian Socialism which makes sense is founded on the economic theory of Marx about which there is no surmise. It does not at all exclude “human” considerations; on the contrary, it has no meaning if it does not begin from indignation at what capitalism does to the great majority of people. But nor can it have meaning unless it is understood to be rooted in the class struggle. The way to Marx’s “human society” is not through contemplating “freedom as essence” (Oilman’s phrase) but by consciousness aimed at abolishing exploitation.

Robert Barltrop

Who can read Marx? (1972)

Book Reviews from the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Concept of Nature in Marx, by Alfred Schmidt. Published by NLB. £3.25.

Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, by Bertell Oilman. Cambridge University Press. £4.

These two books by professional philosophers are very different in approach, yet both seem to have been chiefly inspired by two manuscripts of Marx: the Grundrisse and the Paris Manuscripts. In these, Marx’s debts to other writers, particularly philosophers, are much more evident than in Das Kapital, and it is much easier for scholars to get to grips with the feelings which motivated him and the principles which governed his thinking. Neither writer believes that Marx altered his attitudes in anything more than detail or emphasis later in life, and they trace the development of certain ideas from the earlier to the later works.

Socialists will approach both books with a measure of caution, because they are tacitly welcoming Marx back into the philosophers’ fold from which he was at pains to escape. Alfred Schmidt, in the doctoral dissertation which forms the main part of his book, sets out to show that, in spite of Marx’s avoidance of philosophical terms in Das Kapital, the work contains a considerable amount of implicit and explicit philosophy which is a natural development of his earlier ideas about the interaction of man and nature and whose origins lie in Hegel and Feuerbach. Schmidt’s scope is more limited than Ollman’s: he is principally concerned to set the record straight as regards Marx’s philosophical respectability and consistency. This involves the painstaking dissection of a number of Marx’s followers as well as his critics. Although Lenin emerges unscathed, the generality of

Soviet philosophising is repeatedly criticised. Kautsky, Plekhanov, and even Engels are shown to be less consistent and rigorously honest than Marx; and the chimera which leads most of them astray is the dialectic. Schmidt examines dialectics in some detail and shows that Marx was judicious in his use of it, whereas Engels, in Dialectics of Nature was led into silliness by his enthusiasm for it, and the Soviet thinkers who have followed him almost up to the present day have made a new metaphysics of it.

The most refreshing thing about Schmidt’s rather turgid book is its scholarly manner, which never gives way to the point-scoring partisan writing on Marx with which socialists are so tiredly familiar. Its most valuable attribute is the documentation of Marx’s scrupulous caution in employing ideas in the effort to understand and describe what exists. Oversimplifications, such as the one some of us slip into when we talk of the development of stages of society, are laid against the considerably more sophisticated explanations used by Marx, and we are reminded that the critics, even to the present day, are in the main [much] less intelligent than the writer they are criticising, and only half aware of what he said.

Bertell Ollman is very much aware of critics, and lays about him with considerable vigour. His is a much more lively book than Schmidt’s, and sets out immediately to challenge the reader with a new approach to Marx’s writing which is to make everything clear. Perhaps it is because he really has an established reputation that he speaks with such scholarly authority and does not think it necessary to substantiate his contentions with many or with very substantial quotations; but it may be simply due to the fact that he is American. When he takes it for granted that the workers in "imperialist” nations have benefitted at the expense of the colonial workers, or suggests that, because the workers of the world have not attempted to bring about a communist revolution, they must therefore have a character defect preventing them from acting in their own best interests—such glib assumptions make one wonder whether the main thesis of his book is any more reliable than these.

Ollman’s contention is that Marx is largely misunderstood because he used language in a special way. He had adopted, says Ollman, the philosophy of internal relations, so that a thing was never regarded as itself pure and simple, but a plexus of relationships viewable from many different angles. Marx could only tackle the enormous job of describing the interrelated and changing elements of capitalist society, without distorting the picture, by using such an approach. The result is that his words have different meanings at different times. This is a degree of subtlety which has led critics like Karl Popper to make fools of themselves, according to Ollman, because they have tried to pin Marx down to a more naive terminology in which things are stationary and mutually exclusive.

Ordinary socialists have never found it difficult to think of capital as money at one moment and a factory full of machines, materials and workers the next, or to regard the process of production as also one of consumption. This may be at the root of their steady contempt over the years for the ‘what-Marx-really-meant’ brigade of writers. Nevertheless, if this erudite explanation of how to read Marx is what is necessary for the avowed experts, then Oilman’s book could have a salutary effect on the level of Marxian criticism.

Ollman’s second thesis is that Marx’s experience of philosophy convinced him that it was impossible to state a fact without incorporating a value judgement in the statement . Accordingly, any such study as Das Kapital was bound to set out from a point of view and to incorporate the relevant value judgements. And the point of view that Marx adopted, says Ollman, was that of alienated man—particularly the alienated worker —whose life and whose self were so much inferior to what they might be in a communist society. This is why Ollman entitles his book ‘Alienation’. He regards it as the most meaningful way to study modern society.

On the whole, Ollman’s approach is very convincing. It illuminates the labour theory of value and the role of religion with equal relevance, but his Critical Evaluation which sums up is very disappointing. It is not his pessimism which disappoints, or even his introduction at this late stage of the notion of “character structure’’ to account for working-class apathy, but the strong impression he gives of making reservations about Marx’s work simply in order to seem impartial. In this it echoes the Introduction to the book, but is quite out of keeping with the enthusiastic eulogism of the main text. Perhaps the fact that the Ford Foundation helped to finance the writing of the book has something to do with it, but it does add further doubts about Ollman’s integrity. It also points up the fact that readers who are not considerable Marxian scholars have very little chance of detecting the flaws in clever cases built up on selected quotations. Only a steady scepticism on our part, and the repeated testing of the ideas against our own experience offer any protection. Occasionally we shall have the added advantage of watching the professionals fall out amongst themselves, as these two do to some extent. In his Preface to the English Edition, Schmidt says

It will help the English reader to understand this book if from the outset he bears in mind its polemical aspect. It was one of the first attempts to draw on the politico-economic writings of middle-period and mature Marx . . .  for a ‘philosophical’ interpretation of Marx’s life-work. In doing this, the book opposed the widespread Western European, often neo-Existentialist, tendency of the 1950s to reduce Marx's thought to an unhistorical ‘anthropology’ centred on the alienation problematic of the early writings . . .

Which is largely what Ollman is doing.

Ron Cook

Dance of the Dialectic (2004)

Book Review from the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dance of the Dialectic. By Bertell Ollman. University of Illinois Press, 2003

For Socrates it was teasing out the threads of an argument by asking questions. In Hegel's philosophy it was the development of the idea through history. With Marx and Engels, however, there is some dispute as to what their version of the dialectic means, or even if they were both talking about the same thing. This apparent confusion is compounded by Plekhanov's term “dialectical materialism”, a phrase not used by Marx or Engels, yet this was designated the official philosophy of state capitalist Russia in the years after the Bolshevik revolution.

Ollman is in no doubt that Marx and Engels were talking about different aspects of the same thing. For Ollman, their dialectic has two main features. Firstly, it is a philosophy of internal relations. Capitalism is a system constituted by its social relations of production, and a change to one relationship will have consequences for the whole system. This philosophical viewpoint tries to understand that process. Secondly, it is a method of abstraction. The key social relationships of capitalism (e.g. value, commodity, class) depend upon, but are not reducible to, material objects. They can only be comprehended as abstractions but they are nonetheless real and can affect our lives profoundly when they mean that profit-making takes priority over human needs. To some it may seem that this explanation is very different from how the dialectic is often understood. According to Ollman:

“Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing, and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world”.

Ollman goes into considerable detail in what is likely to be the standard work on this subject for many years to come.

Lew Higgins

Hopping on moving cars (1995)

Book Review from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dialectical Investigations by Bertell Ollman (Routledge, 1993)

Bertell Ollman, an American Marxist theorist, whose earlier works on Marx's theory of alienation, and the relationship between social and sexual liberation (as well as his invention of the fascinating board game "Class Struggle") have marked him out as one of the finest radical scholars in North America, has written a book which makes the concept of dialectical thinking both accessible and inspiring. Consider this opening to chapter 1 on "The Meaning of Dialectics" as an illustration of both of these charcteristics:

"Have you ever tried to hop on a car while it was still moving? How different was it from entering a car that was stationary? Would you have been able to get into the moving car if you were blindfolded? Would you have been able to do it if you were not only blindfolded but didn't know in which direction it was moving or even how fast it was moving?"

Society is just such a vehicle, says Ollman, and there is no point in trying to understand or change it without a method of thinking about where we are and where we're going.

Much of the book is academically challenging and points here and there could be challenged, but first read the book. Chapter 9 on "How To Study Class Consciousness" is a worthwhile essay in itself. 

Incidentally, Ollman's use of dialectical thought is not a mere paper commitment. Some time ago the present writer attended a conference in Chicago at which the fad amongst left-wing theorists was the oxymoronic "market socialism". The few of us who challenged this political absurdity (now the official credo of Blair's Tory Reserve Team, of course) were dismissed as anachronistically "unreconstructed" Marxists. Speaking on a panel with Ollman it was good to see the latter make a far better job than the present writer of explaining with striking dialectical force the utter incompatibility between socialist freedom and the continuation of any form of the money relationship. Anyone put off for life from the term "dialectics" after reading some of those atrociously devious defences of the indefensible by old-time Leninist dialecticians (practitioners of what one old comrade called "diabolical materialism") should read Ollman and restore their confidence in the historical highway code.

Steve Coleman