Sick society (1999)

Book Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism by John McMurty, Pluto Press, 1999.

In the UK, one in three people will suffer from some form of it. At most about 5 to 10 percent of cases are caused by defective genes, the rest have their cause not just in the natural environment but—as oncologists are increasingly becoming aware—the social environment. (How long before the Chief Medical Officer issues the health warning: “Capitalism seriously damages health”?) McMurty takes the argument much further and identifies the causes of the world’s social problems in the global market, which in the last 30 years or so has developed a cancerous state. He argues that the global market is “a profound perversion” of the market, “much as a diseased cell formation is a perversion of a healthy cell formation, but succeeds in invading its host by masking its nature as the normal ‘self’ of the body”. Money no longer has a direct relation to wealth creation. Within the global market transnational corporations in particular make money out of money. Corporations “create credit and thus increase domestic money supply with no restriction on the amount of new currency demand so created in the host economy”. This is the carcinogenic disorder within the global market.

McMurty claims that the global market and the new role of money is a development that Marx did not foresee, and that “the gold standard, and therefore the dead-labour basis of money value which Marx supposed as money’s stable yardstick, was eliminated in 1974”. However, Marx’s theory of money, which explained the prices of commodities by the value of gold using a fully convertible currency, is not the same thing as the Bretton Woods gold standard which McMurty refers to, which was concerned mainly with international exchange rates between currencies. If McMurty were correct in his claim that transnational corporations make money out of money, mainly through the creation of credit, then this would be incredibly inflationary. In fact, in recent years in the UK and US and a number of other countries, inflation has declined while globalisation has continued apace. Furthermore, no corporation would go bust in this scenario. If in difficulty, corporations would merely pull themselves up by their own bootstraps by “creating money”. McMurty’s grasp of what constitutes capital is decidedly shaky: “wealth that can be used to produce more wealth”. In which case your garden spade and many other inanimate objects become capital. It would have made more sense if he had added: “for sale with a view to profit”. But then this would have altered his argument about the dynamics of capitalism and this would have been a very different book.

Is the prognosis for capitalism terminal? With enough political momentum, McMurty argues, internationally enforceable legal limits can be established so that money “returns to its proper value function”. This begins the eradication of the carcinogenic disorder and markets then serve the common interest. If you believe that, then you don’t understand the economics of capitalism.

Lew Higgins