The respectable left

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Review of Ha-joon Chang: 23 Things they didn't tell you about capitalism. Penguin, 2010


Ha-joon Chang, a professor at Cambridge, is on his way to becoming the British counterpart of Paul Krugman, the economic expert of the respectable left. He writes frequently in the Guardian, and the Campaign for Labour Democracy has one of his articles at the top of its web page.

He is a former student of Bob Rowthorn, a Cambridge professor who was a member of the Communist Party and briefly of the IS (forerunner of the SWP) in the late 1960s. The elderly Rowthorn's intellectual self-description sets the scene well for Chang's writings.

"First read Marx in the later 1960's; believe that Marx's biggest mistake was to believe that there is an alternative to capitalism, to over-emphasise the role of human rationality in planning a complex world economy; however, his analysis of capitalism I think is absolutely brilliant... Marx gave some of the basis for reformed capitalism" (https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/201548/rowthorn.txt).

Chang is contemptuous of "supposedly centre-left parties such as Britain's New Labour" because "the managerial classes have gained enormous influence over them". He writes well in favour of expanded welfare, systematic government promotion of industry, and wider equality of opportunity. He neatly refutes ideas that market forces can fix everything. But he is no socialist.

"Capitalism is still the best economic system that humanity has invented. My criticism is of a particular version of capitalism... The profit motive is still the most powerful and effective fuel to power our economy".

He argues that real, rather than only formal, equality of opportunity requires social welfare measures to help children of poor parents or people who unluckily lose their jobs. But he is not in favour of actual equality.

"Excessive equalisation of outcomes is harmful", he writes. And he doesn't mean that a better society would be unable for a while to do without paying more to people who work longer hours, or that (as Engels commented) in any society people who live in mountains will not have exactly equal conditions with those who live on plains. Indeed, he thinks that capitalist Finland, under the social-democratic governments of Kalevi Sorsa, probably had too little inequality in the 1980s.

23 Things suggests to me that Chang's knowledge of Marxist ideas is limited to what Rowthorn will have passed on. For example, Chang thinks that Trotsky opposed the limited-return-to-market-forces New Economic Policy of Bolshevik Russia after the civil war. In fact Trotsky (unsuccessfully) proposed something like the NEP a year before Lenin did; deliberately limited his criticism of Stalin's and Bukharin's economic policies in the mid-20s to proposing shifts within NEP; and in Revolution Betrayed (1936) argued that an analogue of NEP would be necessary in any workers' state, and for some time.

A side-strand in 23 Things is interesting. Chang argues that the economic impact of the internet is much overrated. The washing-machine, he argues, changed things more. (An even stronger case can be made, I think, that containerisation changed things more).

The conventional wisdom about "knowledge economies" in which making things becomes unimportant is nonsense. Capitalist economies have always been "knowledge economies", but the knowledge incorporated into technologies for making things is central.

Over a whole swathe of the economy, advanced technology means that jobs require less, not more, knowledge. (A shop assistant no longer needs to know how to measure out quantities, or how to do arithmetic.) Chang refers here, and aptly, to Marxist discussions about "de-skilling" of workers.

Churning as big a proportion of young people through extended schooling and university is not the royal road to capitalist growth which many governments think it is.

In the row which broke out after economics students at Harvard and Manchester universities criticised their courses for narrowness, the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/08/economics-professor-voices-of-finance) interviewed a professor of economics in London. He mused:

"Many of my colleagues conceive of a university education at least partly as Bildung, an opportunity for young people to discover, develop and realise themselves, and we believe society will benefit from that. Most of our students could not care less about all this. They conceive of us as a hurdle; a selection station to get through. They aren't here to learn, they are here to pass..."

Chang (following Joseph Stiglitz, http://pearsonblueskies.com/2014/the-signalling-mechanism) argues that universities function in capitalist economies today not primarily to teach anything, but to sort job applicants. The boss doesn't care how much you learned about Aramaic or zoology, or how quickly you forget it, but your university record is a cheap (for him) and easy certificate of your ability to jump through hoops. So now, for a whole swathe of jobs, the qualification is to have a degree, or to have a degree from a "good" university, in no matter what subject. Students are only responding realistically if they think that "people have to go to university to get a decent job", as Chang reports; and that it doesn't matter much what they learn or don't learn at university, as long as they pass. University education has become market-oriented, as the left often argues; but not in the way that what's taught is tightly geared to job skills.

"Education is valuable", Chang concludes, "but its main value is not in raising productivity".

I would add more. More education, and more university education, would be good: but it should come with a dismantling of "credentialism" (the abolition of exams in schools and universities, and their replacement where necessary with entrance exams for trades, would be a good start on that); a reduction in conveyor-belt straight-from-school-to-university education; and an expansion of lifelong learning independent of job skills.

Marxist Theory and History

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