Letter: BBC reply on Marx (2013)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

We wrote to Stephanie Flanders about her programme about Marx but received no reply. A Socialist Party member did, however, receive this reply to an individual letter

Dear Mr Maratty

Thank you for contacting us about Masters of Money and please accept our apologies for the delay in responding. I discussed your letter with the production team and the Executive Producer has requested that I forward you his response [below]. 

As you say, exploring Marx’s ideas within an hour is a huge challenge for television aimed at the uninitiated. This is especially the case when the programme is made with reference to the recent financial crisis, itself a very complex issue. I am very sorry that you didn’t enjoy this particular compression of the relevance of Marx’s thinking, and hope this letter explains some of the thinking behind the programme to your satisfaction.

The reason why we concentrated so heavily on the ‘can’t buy back’ idea is that the programme and series was framed around explaining the recent global financial crisis. The thinkers featured in the programme who spoke in support of Marx in some shape or form –Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, George Magnus, Raghuram Rajan, Tariq Ali, David Harvey and Martin Jacques –all highlighted this particular reading of Marx’s ideas as being the one most pertinent today, as did our academic advisors at the Open University. I am aware that there are many other Marxist or Marxian readings of our current situation, but given the constraints, this seemed the best one to focus on.

You object to our description of Marx having ‘next to no alternative laid out’. We believe this description to be fair and it is supported by a number of commentators and academics. As you say, not having a ‘blueprint’ and not having an ‘alternative’ are not one and the same, but if one asserts the existence of an alternative without describing in any great detail what that alternative might be and how it might work, it seems reasonable to say there is ‘next to no alternative laid out.’ We also explained in commentary and through interviews with Tariq Ali and Slavoj Zizek, why logically Marx might not have felt able to give a very detailed description of an alternative.

You write that there was no critical examination of ‘Marx and the so-called ‘Communist’ countries, the link between the two being taken pretty much for granted, with a couple of very minor caveats.’ We did make clear that Marx’s lack of a detailed blueprint should lead us to question his association with 20th century Communism, and we asserted that the ‘Communist countries…left Marx far behind’. That said, it was necessary to mention them as they were real world attempts to find an alternative to capitalism constructed by people who claimed to be following Marx’s thinking, and – as a result – audiences would expect any discussion of Marx, and any discussion of alternatives to capitalism, to mention them. We felt the overall direction of the programme – advancing Marx’s theories as being useful today and exploring some surprising aspects of his writings about capitalism –would have helped uninitiated audiences learn that there is far more to Marx than his association with 20th century Communism. Indeed this was a major thrust of the opening sequence.

You take issue with the use of the word ‘collapse’ to describe Marx’s descriptions of the end of capitalism. I hope I understand what you mean here. I think you are suggesting that capitalism does not end because it is inherently unworkable, but because through its development it inevitably creates the political and social conditions that lead to its overthrow, and that by using the word ‘collapse’ we underplay the importance and role of the proletariat. We did explain also the end of capitalism by saying: ‘He thought it would all get so bad that the workers would overthrow the system’, also in the opening titles we say ‘Karl Marx had the most radical advice of all: get rid of [capitalism]’, and we do discuss Marx’s thinking on the revolution that ends capitalism. Either way, Marx certainly did envisage a time when capitalism would no longer be and ‘collapse’ is a reasonable shorthand for Marx’s best known description of the end of the system in Capital.

Finally, you ask us why we didn’t consult your organisation. We contacted a wide range of commentators – both pro and anti-Marx but because of the constraints of time, we are not always able to contact everyone. We believe the people we spoke to enabled us to produce a good overview of the issues surrounding Marxian economics. 

Thank you again for taking the time to write and I hope you would agree that while not offering anywhere near a complete appraisal of Marx’s ideas, it might have served as an engaging introduction.

I hope this addresses the points you raised and explains the production’s view. We’re grateful to you for watching and for taking the time to contact us. 

Yours sincerely, 

Paul Kettle, 

BBC Audience Services

Reply: 

We can only speculate why Ms Flanders feels unable to respond to a direct invitation to discuss the statements made in her programme, while the Executive Producer on the contrary has supplied an interesting and considered response to one individual’s letter. Paul Kettle argues quite reasonably that one can’t really do justice to Marx in an hour, and it is true that one can find Marxist academics who still argue for underconsumptionist theory, even though it doesn’t make much sense. Nevertheless we have to object that the defence of the word ‘collapse’ borders on sophistry. The meaning of the word ‘collapse’ is pretty straightforward, and if one claims that Marx believed that capitalism would ‘collapse’ one is saying that Marx did not really believe that revolution was necessary to end it. Which is the precise opposite of the truth.– Editors.

Half Marx: Flanders Flounders (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whenever capitalism gets into an economic crisis there is a revival of interest in Marx, and not just amongst critics of capitalism. So it was to be expected that Marx’s ideas should be examined in BBC Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders’ recent three-part programme for BBC2 and the Open University: ‘Masters of Money’.

She examine first the ideas of Keynes (who advocated government intervention to save capitalism), then the obscure and slightly batty Austrian School economist Friedrich August von Hayek (who wanted to free capitalism from all government interference, which not even his great admirer Thatcher dared to try). Marx’s turn came last, on 1 October.

Flanders got two things right. First, that Marx analysed capitalism as an economy that pitted two classes – profit-seeking capitalists and wage-dependent workers – against each other. Second, that Marx saw capitalism as an inherently unstable system under which economic crises and downturns were bound to occur from time to time.

But she got it wrong on two other, crucial points. First, her claim, repeated several times, that Marx had offered no alternative to capitalism. Second, she made Marx have an “underconsumptionist” (workers can’t buy back) theory of capitalist crises.

Marx’s alternative

It is true that Marx did not believe in drawing up recipes for the cookshops of the future, but he did describe the basis of the society he thought was going to replace capitalism: “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common” (chapter 1 of Capital); “a co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production” (Critique of the Gotha Programme); “abolition of private property”, “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling”, “the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production” (Communist Manifesto); “abolition of the wages system” (Value, Price and Profit). In short, a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society based on the common ownership of the means of production.

It was probably inevitable that what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe would be seen as a failed attempt to replace capitalism, with disastrous results. So Flanders went to visit a former Stasi prison in East Berlin but, to be fair, she didn’t overdo this and at one point hinted that Marx might not have approved. Indeed he wouldn’t. He would surely have recognised this as a form of capitalism, based on the exploitation of wage-labour by a minority which controlled the state – state capitalism.

What Marx did not say

According to Flanders, Marx’s theory of crises was that they are caused when the total income of the workers falls too low so that they are unable to buy all the products that the capitalists want to sell to them. So capitalism is in a bind: capitalists seek to maximise profits and this can only be done at the expense of wages. But, if wages are reduced, so is the market for goods. On the other hand, if wages go up, the market does expand, but profits go down, reducing the capitalist’s incentive to invest in production.

The trouble is that this simplistic theory has been put forward by people who regard themselves as Marxists. They argue that the crisis of the 1970s was caused by workers pushing up wages and so squeezing profits and that this provoked a fightback by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s on behalf of the capitalists. This, in turn resulted in the workers’ share in national income falling. For a while workers’ consumption was kept going by their going into debt, but when their credit ran out, the crisis caused by a fall in total workers’ income broke out. This is the view put forward, for instance, in Richard Wolff’s widely viewed video When Capitalism Hits the Fan.

Flanders accepted this as Marx’s view. But it wasn’t. This theory is based on the fallacy that capitalism is a system geared to meeting consumption and that the market is made up of paying demand for consumer goods only. In fact, the market is also made up of paying demand for producer goods (machinery, raw materials, intermediate goods and energy) so what the workers can’t buy the capitalists can. It is this business reinvestment of profits in expanding production that is the driving force of the capitalist economy, and it is variations in this – not in workers’ consumption – that causes capitalism’s instability.

Capitalism is a system geared to capital accumulation which falters, as now, when the prospects for profit fall, resulting in capitalists choosing not to spend their share of national income. This inevitably happens sooner or later in a boom when capitalists in one key sector of the economy in their pursuit of profits overproduce in relation to the demand for their products and this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy, leading to a more general economic downturn.

The end of capitalism

Flanders also talked of Marx arguing that economic crises would get worse and worse and would eventually lead to, as she put it, “the total collapse of capitalism”. It is true that in the Communist Manifesto, a political manifesto rather than a work of economics and written before Marx undertook his detailed study of capitalism, he did refer to “more extensive and more destructive crises” but never expressed the view nor expected that capitalism would collapse of its own accord through its inherent economic contradictions. He saw capitalism coming to an end, but through the political action of those he called its “gravediggers”, the exploited working class. In other words, capitalism had to be done to death. It still needs to be.

Adam Buick