C.8 Is state control of credit the cause of the business cycle?

If state control of credit does not cause the business cycle, does that mean Keynesianism capitalism can work? Keynesian economics, as opposed to free market capitalism, maintains that the state can and should intervene in the economy in order to stop economic crises from occurring. The post-war boom presents compelling evidence that it can be effect the business cycle for the better by reducing its impact from developing into a full depression.

The period of social Keynesianism after the war was marked by reduced inequality, increased rights for working people, less unemployment, a welfare state you could actually use and so on. Compared to present-day capitalism, it had much going for it. However, Keynesian capitalism is still capitalism and so is still based upon oppression and exploitation. It was, in fact, a more refined form of capitalism, within which the state intervention was used to protect capitalism from itself while trying to ensure that working class struggle against it was directed, via productivity deals, into keeping the system going. For the population at large, the general idea was that the welfare state (especially in Europe) was a way for society to get a grip on capitalism by putting some humanity into it. In a confused way, the welfare state was supported as an attempt to create a society in which the economy existed for people, not people for the economy.

While the state has always had a share in the total surplus value produced by the working class, only under Keynesianism is this share increased and used actively to manage the economy. Traditionally, placing checks on state appropriation of surplus value had been one of the aims of classical capitalist thought (simply put, cheap government means more surplus value available for capitalists to compete for). But as capital has accumulated, so has the state increased and its share in social surplus (for control over the domestic enemy has to be expanded and society protected from the destruction caused by free market capitalism).

Indeed, such state intervention was not totally new for "[f]rom its origins, the United States had relied heavily on state intervention and protection for the development of industry and agriculture, from the textile industry in the early nineteenth century, through the steel industry at the end of the century, to computers, electronics, and biotechnology today. Furthermore, the same has been true of every other successful industrial society." [World Orders, Old and New, p. 101]

The roots of the new policy of higher levels and different forms of state intervention lie in the Great Depression of the 1930s and the realisation that attempts to enforce widespread reductions in money wages and costs (the traditional means to overcome depression) were impossible because the social and economic costs would have been too expensive. A militant strike wave involving a half million workers occurred in 1934, with factory occupations and other forms of militant direct action commonplace.

Instead of attempting the usual class war (which may have had revolutionary results), sections of the capitalist class thought a new approach was required. This involved using the state to manipulate credit in order to increase the funds available for capital and to increase demand by state orders. As Paul Mattick points out:

"The additional production made possible by deficit financing does appear as additional demand, but as demand unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in total profits. . . [this] functions immediately as an increase in demand that stimulates the economy as a whole and can become the point for a new prosperity" if objective conditions allow it. [Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory, p. 143]

State intervention can, in the short term, postpone crises by stimulating production. This can be seen from the in 1930s New Deal period under Roosevelt when the economy grew five years out of seven compared to it shrinking every year under the pro-laissez-faire Republican President Herbert Hoover (under Hoover, the GNP shrank an average of -8.4 percent a year, under Roosevelt it grew by 6.4 percent). The 1938 slump after 3 years of growth under Roosevelt was due to a decrease in state intervention:

"The forces of recovery operating within the depression, as well as the decrease in unemployment via public expenditures, increased production up to the output level of 1929. This was sufficient for the Roosevelt administration to drastically reduce public works. . . in a new effort to balance the budget in response to the demands of the business world. . . The recovery proved to be short-lived. At the end of 1937 the Business Index fell from 110 to 85, bring the economy back to the state in which it had found itself in 1935. . . Millions of workers lost their jobs once again." [Paul Mattick, Economics, Politics and the Age of Inflation, p. 138]

With the success of state intervention during the second world war, Keynesianism was seen as a way of ensuring capitalist survival. The resulting boom is well known, with state intervention being seen as the way of ensuring prosperity for all sections of society. Before the Second World War, the USA (for example) suffered eight depressions, since the war there has been none (although there has been periods of recession). There is no denying that for a considerable time, capitalism has been able to prevent the rise of depressions which so plagued the pre-war world and that this was accomplished by government interventions.

This is because Keynesianism can serve to initiate a new prosperity and postpone crisis by the extension of credit. This can mitigate the conditions of crisis, since one of its short-term effects is that it offers private capital a wider range of action and an improved basis for its own efforts to escape the shortage of profits for accumulation. In addition, Keynesianism can fund Research and Development in new technologies and working methods (such as automation), guarantee markets for goods as well as transferring wealth from the working class to capital via taxation and inflation.

In the long run, however, Keynesian "management of the economy by means of monetary and credit policies and by means of state-induced production must eventually find its end in the contradictions of the accumulation process." [Paul Mattick, Op. Cit., p. 18]

So, these interventions did not actually set aside the underlying causes of economic and social crisis. The modifications of the capitalist system could not totally countermand the subjective and objective limitations of a system based upon wage slavery and social hierarchy. This can be seen when the rosy picture of post-war prosperity changed drastically in the 1970s when economic crisis returned with a vengeance, with high unemployment occurring along with high inflation. This soon lead to a return to a more "free market" capitalism with, in Chomsky's words, "state protection and public subsidy for the rich, market discipline for the poor." This process, and its effects, are discussed in the next two sections.

Basically, the subjective and objective limitations to Keynesianism we highlighted in the last section were finally reached in the early 1970s. Economic crisis returned with massive unemployment accompanied with high inflation, with the state interventions that for so long kept capitalism healthy making the crisis worse. In other words, a combination of social struggle and a lack of surplus value available to capital resulted in the breakdown of the successful post-war consensus.

The roots and legacy of this breakdown in Keynesianism is informative and worth analysing. The post-war period marked a distinct change for capitalism, with new, higher levels of state intervention. So why the change? Simply put, because capitalism was not a viable system. It had not recovered from the Great Depression and the boom economy during war had obviously contrasted deeply with the stagnation of the 1930s. Plus, of course, a militant working class, which has put up with years of denial in the struggle against fascist-capitalism would not have taken lightly to a return to mass unemployment and poverty. So, politically and economically a change was required. This change was provided by the ideas of Keynes, a change which occurred under working class pressure but in the interests of the ruling class.

The mix of intervention obviously differed from country to country, based upon the needs and ideologies of the ruling parties and social elites. In Europe nationalisation was widespread as inefficient capital was taken over by the state and reinvigorated by state funding and social spending more important as Social Democratic parties attempted to introduce reforms. Chomsky describes the process in the USA:

"Business leaders recognised that social spending could stimulate the economy, but much preferred the military Keynesian alternative - for reasons having to do with privilege and power, not 'economic rationality.' This approach was adopted at once, the Cold War serving as the justification. . . . The Pentagon system was considered ideal for these purposes. It extends well beyond the military establishment, incorporating also the Department of Energy. . . and the space agency NASA, converted by the Kennedy administration to a significant component of the state-directed public subsidy to advanced industry. These arrangements impose on the public a large burden of the costs of industry (research and development, R&D) and provide a guaranteed market for excess production, a useful cushion for management decisions. Furthermore, this form of industrial policy does not have the undesirable side-effects of social spending directed to human needs. Apart from unwelcome redistributive effects, the latter policies tend to interfere with managerial prerogatives; useful production may undercut private gain, while state-subsidised waste production. . . is a gift to the owner and manager, to whom any marketable spin-offs will be promptly delivered. Social spending may also resource public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy. . . The defects of social spending do not taint the military Keynesian alternative. For such reasons, Business Week explained, 'there's a tremendous social and economic difference between welfare pump-priming and military pump-priming,' the latter being far preferable." [World Orders, Old and New, pp. 100-101]

Over time, social Keynesianism took increasing hold even in the USA, partly in response to working class struggle, partly due to the need for popular support at elections and partly due to "[p]opular opposition to the Vietnam war [which] prevented Washington from carrying out a national mobilisation. . . which might have made it possible to complete the conquest without harm to the domestic economy. Washington was forced to fight a 'guns-and-butter' was to placate the population, at considerable economic cost." [Noam Chomsky, Op. Cit., pp. 157-8]

Social Keynesianism directs part of the total surplus value to workers and unemployed while military Keynesianism transfers surplus value from the general population to capital and from capital to capital. This allows R&D and capital to be publicly subsidised, as well as essential but unproductive capital to survive. As long as real wages did not exceed a rise in productivity, Keynesianism would continue. However, both functions have objective limits as the transfer of profits from successful capital to essential, but less successful, or long term investment can cause a crisis is there is not enough profit available to the system as a whole. The surplus value producing capital, in this case, would be handicapped due to the transfers and cannot respond to economic problems with freely as before.

This lack of profitable capital was part of the reason for the collapse of the post-war consensus. In their deeply flawed 1966 book, Monopoly Capital, radical economists Baran and Sweezy point out that "[i]f military spending were reduced once again to pre-Second World War proportions the nation's economy would return to a state of profound depression" [p. 153]

In other words, the US economy was still in a state of depression, countermanded by state expenditures [for a good, if somewhat economic, critique of Baran and Sweezy see Paul Mattick's "Monopoly Capital" in Anti-Bolshevik Communism]

In addition, the world was becoming economically "tripolar," with a revitalised Europe and a Japan-based Asian region emerging as major economic forces. This placed the USA under increased pressure, as did the Vietnam War. However, the main reason for its breakdown was social struggle by working people. The only limit to the rate of growth required by Keynesianism to function is the degree to which final output consists of consumption goods for the presently employed population instead of investment. And investment is the most basic means by which work, i.e. capitalist domination, is imposed. Capitalism and the state could no longer ensure that working class struggles could be contained within the system.

Basically by using, and then managing, the 1970s crisis to discipline the working class in order to reap increased profits and secure and extend the ruling classes' power. It did this using a combination of crisis, free markets and adjusted Keynesianism as part of a ruling elite lead class war against labour.

In the face of crisis in the 1970s, Keynesianist redirection of profits between capitals and classes had become a burden to capital as a whole and had increased the expectations and militancy of working people to dangerous levels. The crisis, however, helped control working class power and was latter utilised as a means of saving capitalism.

Initially the crisis was used to justify attacks on working class people in the name of the free market. And, indeed, capitalism was made more market based, although with a "safety net" and "welfare state" for the wealthy. We have seen a partial return to "what economists have called freedom of industry and commerce, but which really meant the relieving of industry from the harassing and repressive supervision of the State, and the giving to it full liberty to exploit the worker, whom was still to be deprived of his freedom." [Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, p. 28] The "crisis of democracy" was overcome and replaced with the "liberty to exploit human labour without any safeguard for the victims of such exploitation and the political power organised as to assure freedom of exploitation to the middle-class." [Op. Cit., p. 30]

Then under the rhetoric of "free market" capitalism, Keynesianism was used to manage the crisis as it had previously managed the prosperity. "Supply Side" economics (combined with neo-classical dogma) was used to undercut working class power and consumption and so allow capital to reap more profits off working people. Unemployment was used to discipline a militant workforce and as a means of getting workers to struggle for work instead of against wage labour. With the fear of job loss hanging over their heads, workers put up with speedups, longer hours, worse conditions, less safety protection and lower wages and this increased the profits that could be extracted directly from workers as well as reducing business costs by allowing employers to reduce on-job safety and protection and so on. The labour "market" was fragmented to a large degree into powerless, atomised units with unions fighting a losing battle in the face of state backed recession. In this way capitalism could successfully change the composition of demand from the working class to capital.

This disciplining of the working class resulted in the income going to capital increasing by more than double the amount of that going to "labour." Between 1979 and 1989, total labour income rose by 22.8%, total capital income rose by 65.3% and realised capital gains by 205.5%. The real value of a standard welfare benefit package has also declined by some 26 percent since 1972. [Edward S. Herman, "Immiserating Growth: The First World", Z Magazine] And Stanford University economist Victor Fuch estimates that US children have lost 10-12 hours of parental time between 1960 and 1986, leading to a deterioration of family relations and values. Unemployment and underemployment is still widespread, with most newly created jobs being part-time.

We should point out that the growth in income going to labour includes all "labour" incomes and as such includes the "wages" of CEOs and high level managers. As we have already noted, these "wages" are part of the surplus value extracted from workers and so should not be counted as income to "labour." The facts of the Reagan fronted class war of the 1980s is that while top management income has skyrocketed, workers wages have remained usually stable or decreased absolutely. For example, the median hourly wage of US production workers has fallen by some 13% since 1973 (we are not implying that only production workers create surplus value or are "the working class"). In contrast, US management today receives 150 times what the average worker earns. Unsurprisingly 70% of the recent gain in per capita income have gone to the top 1% of income earners (while the bottom lost absolutely). [Chomsky, Op. Cit., p. 141] Income inequality has increased, with the income of the bottom fifth of the US population falling by 18%, while that of the richest fifth rose by 8%.

Indirect means of increasing capital's share in the social income were also used, such as reducing environment regulations, so externalising pollution costs onto current and future generations. In Britain, state owned monopolies were privatised at knock-down prices allowing private capital to increase its resources at a fraction of the real cost. Indeed, some nationalised industries were privatised as monopolies allowing monopoly profits to be extracted from consumers for many years before the state allowed competition in those markets. Indirect taxation also increased, being used to reduce working class consumption by getting us to foot the bill for Pentagon-style Keynesianism.

Exploitation of under-developed nations increased with $418 billion being transferred to the developed world between 1982 and 1990 [Chomsky, Op. Cit., p. 130] Capital also became increasingly international in scope, as it used advances in technology to move capital to third world countries where state repression ensured a less militant working class. This transfer had the advantage of increasing unemployment in the developed world, so placing more pressures upon working class resistance.

This policy of capital-led class war, a response to the successful working class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, obviously reaped the benefits it was intended to for capital. Income going to capital has increased and that going to labour has declined and the "labour market" has been disciplined to a large degree (but not totally we must add). Working people have been turned, to a large degree, from participants into spectators, as required for any hierarchical system. The human impact of these policies cannot be calculated. Little wonder, then, the utility of neo-classical dogma to the elite - it could be used by rich, powerful people to justify the fact that they are pursuing social policies that create poverty and force children to die.

As Chomsky argues, "one aspect of the internationalisation of the economy is the extension of the two-tiered Third World mode to the core countries. Market doctrine thus becomes an essential ideological weapon at home as well, its highly selective application safely obscured by the doctrinal system. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated. Service for the general public - education, health, transportation, libraries, etc. - become as superfluous as those they serve, and can therefore be limited or dispensed with entirely." [Year 501, p. 109]

The state managed recession has had its successes. Company profits are up as the "competitive cost" of workers is reduced due to fear of job losses. The Wall Street Journal's review of economic performance for the last quarter of 1995 is headlined "Companies' Profits Surged 61% on Higher Prices, Cost Cuts." After-tax profits rose 62% from 1993, up from 34% for the third quarter. While working America faces market forces, Corporate America posted record profits in 1994. Business Week estimated 1994 profits to be up "an enormous 41% over [1993]," despite a bare 9% increase in sales, a "colossal success," resulting in large part from a "sharp" drop in the "share going to labour," though "economists say labour will benefit -- eventually." [cited by Noam Chomsky, "Rollback III",Z Magazine, April 1995]

Moreover, for capital, Keynesianism is still goes on as before, combined (as usual) with praises to market miracles. For example, Michael Borrus, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (a corporate-funded trade and technology research institute), cites a 1988 Department of Commerce study that states that "five of the top six fastest growing U.S. industries from 1972 to 1988 were sponsored or sustained, directly or indirectly, by federal investment." He goes on to state that the "winners [in earlier years were] computers, biotechnology, jet engines, and airframes" all "the by-product of public spending." [cited by Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New, p. 109]

As James Midgley points out, "the aggregate size of the public sector did not decrease during the 1980s and instead, budgetary policy resulted in a significant shift in existing allocations from social to military and law enforcement." ["The radical right, politics and society", The Radical Right and the Welfare State, Howard Glennerster and James Midgley (eds.), p. 11]

Indeed, the US state funds one third of all civil R&D projects, and the UK state provides a similar subsidy. [Chomsky, Op. Cit., p. 107] And after the widespread collapse of Savings and Loans Associations in deregulated corruption and speculation, the 1980s pro-"free market" Republican administration happily bailed them out, showing that market forces were only for one class.

The corporate owned media attacks social Keynesianism, while remaining silent or justifying pro-business state intervention. Combined with extensive corporate funding of right-wing "think-tanks" which explain why (the wrong sort of) social programmes are counter-productive, the corporate state system tried to fool the population into thinking that there is no alternative to the rule by the market while the elite enrich themselves at the publics expense.

So, social Keynesianism has been replaced by Pentagon Keynesianism cloaked beneath the rhetoric of "free market" dogma. Combined with a strange mix of free markets (for the many) and state intervention (for the select few), the state has become stronger and more centralised and "prisons also offer a Keynesian stimulus to the economy, both to the construction business and white collar employment; the fastest growing profession is reported to be security personnel." [Chomsky, Year 501, p. 110]

While working class resistance continues, it is largely defensive, but, as in the past, this can and will change. Even the darkest night ends with the dawn and the lights of working class resistance can be seen across the globe. For example, the anti-Poll Tax struggle in Britain against the Thatcher Government was successful as have been many anti-cuts struggles across the USA and Western Europe, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico is inspiring and there has been continual strikes and protests across the world. Even in the face of state repression and managed economic recession, working class people are still fighting back. The job for anarchists to is encourage these sparks of liberty and help them win.