Lower Irish bond interest rates the solution to economy's recovery?

[cactusflower]

If P.ie will indulge me, I'd like to draw your attention to a section from Slavoj Zizek's (who describes himself as a dialectical materialist) essay "Repeating Lenin," that I think you will find interesting, and which sheds light on the discussion we were having on the Lacan/Marx thread. You can read this essay in full on the IRBB in the Economics section, or on Lacan.com:


So where are we to begin? In the present climate of the New Age obscurantism, it may appear attractive to reassert the lesson of Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism: in today's popular reading of quantum physics, as in Lenin's times, the doxa is that science itself finally overcame materialism - matter is supposed to "disappear," to dissolve in the immaterial waves of energy fields.4 It is also true (as Lucio Colletti emphasized), that Lenin's distinction between the philosophical and the scientific notion of matter, according to which, since the philosophical notion of matter as reality existing independently of mind precludes any intervention of philosophy into sciences, the very notion of "dialectics in/of nature" is thoroughly undermined. However... the "however" concerns the fact that, in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, there is NO PLACE FOR DIALECTICS, FOR HEGEL.

What are Lenin's basic theses? The rejection to reduce knowledge to phenomenalist or pragmatic instrumentalism (i.e., the assertion that, in scientific knowledge, we get to know the way things exist independently of our minds - the infamous "theory of reflection"), coupled with the insistence of the precarious nature of our knowledge (which is always limited, relative, and "reflects" external reality only in the infinite process of approximation). Does this not sound familiar? Is this, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy, not the basic position of Karl Popper, the archetypal anti-Hegelian? In his short article "Lenin and Popper,"5 Colletti recalls how, in a private letter from 1970, first published in Die Zeit, Popper effectively wrote: "Lenin's book on empiriocriticism is, in my opinion, truly excellent."6

This hard materialist core of Empiriocriticism persists in the Philosophical Note-Books from 1915, in spite of Lenin's rediscovery of Hegel - why? In his Note-Books, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as Adorno in his "negative dialectics": how to combine Hegel's legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the "predominance of the objective" (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the "theory of reflection" according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).7 However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of objective reality OUTSIDE the thought's subjective mediation, but by insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive "objective reality," never being able to grasp it in it infinite complexity.8 The problem with Lenin's "theory of reflection" resides in its implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the reality it "reflects." The very metaphor of the infinite approaching to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact that the partiality (distortion) of the "subjective reflection" occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects - only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see the whole of reality "the way it really is."9

This, of course, in no way entails that the tracing of the difference between idealism and materialism is today not more crucial than ever: one should only proceed in a truly Leninist way, discerning - through the "concrete analysis of concrete circumstances" - WHERE this line of separation runs. One is thus tempted to claim that, even WITHIN the field of religion, the singular point of the emergence of materialism is signalled by Christ's words on the cross "Father, why have you forsaken me?" - in this moment of total abandonment, the subject experiences and fully assumes the inexistence of the big Other. More generally, the line of division is that between the "idealist" Socratic-Gnostic tradition claiming that the truth is within us, just to be (re)discovered through an inner journey, and the Judeo-Christian "materialist" notion that truth can only emerge from an EXTERNAL traumatic encounter which shatters the subject's balance. "Truth" requires an effort in which we have to fight our "spontaneous" tendency.

And what if we were to connect this notion of the truth emerging from an external encounter with the (in)famous Lenin's notion, from What Is to Be Done?, of how the working class cannot achieve its adequate class consciousness "spontaneously," through its own "organic" development, i.e. of how this truth has to be introduced into it from outside (by the Party intellectuals)? In quoting Kautsky at this place, Lenin makes a significant change in his paraphrase: while Kautsky speaks of how the non-working-class intellectuals, who are OUTSIDE THE CLASS STRUGGLE, should introduce SCIENCE (providing objective knowledge of history) to the working class, Lenin speaks of CONSCIOUSNESS which should be introduced from outside by intellectuals who are outside the ECONOMIC struggle, NOT outside the class struggle! Here is the passage from Kautsky which Lenin quotes approvingly -

"/.../ socialism and class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. /.../ The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia /.../ Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously."10

- and here is Lenin's paraphrase of it:

" /.../ all worship of the spontaneity of the working-class movement, all belittling of the role of 'the conscious element,' of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon workers. /.../ the only choice is - either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course /.../ the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology /.../ for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism."11

It may SOUND the same, but it's NOT: in Kautsky, there is no space for politics proper, just the combination of the social (working class and its struggle, from which intellectuals are implicitly EXCLUDED) and the pure neutral classless, asubjective, knowledge of these intellectuals. In Lenin, on the contrary, "intellectuals" themselves are caught in the conflict of IDEOLOGIES (i.e. the ideological class struggle) which is unsurpassable. (It was already Marx who made this point, from his youth when he dreamt of the unity of German Idealist philosophy and the French revolutionary masses, to his insistence, in late years, that the leadership of the International should under no conditions be left to the English workers: although the most numerous and best organized, they - in contrast to German workers - lack theoretical stringency.)
The key question thus concerns the exact STATUS of this externality: is it simply the externality of an impartial "objective" scientist who, after studying history and establishing that, in the long run, the working class has a great future ahead, decides to join the winning side? So when Lenin says "The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true," everything depends on how we understand "truth" here: is it a neutral "objective knowledge," or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin's wager - today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever - is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position - truth is by definition one-sided. (This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests.) Why not, then, shamelessly and courageously ENDORSE the boring standard reproach according to which, Marxism is a "secularized religion," with Lenin as the Messiah, etc.? Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint IS EXACTLY like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement for its Cause; yes, the "truth" of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, NOT to any neutral observers. What the EXTERNALITY means here is that this truth is nonetheless UNIVERSAL, not just the "point-of-view" of a particular historical subject: "external" intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive ITS OWN PLACE within the social totality which enables it to accomplish its "mission" - this insight has to be mediated through an external element.

"No place for dialectical materialism in Materialism and Empiriocriticism..?

truth is by definition one-sided

- he doesn't understand dialectics if he thinks that - truth is many-sided, and contains internal conflicts/contradiction,movement and change. It is objective, but seen through the prism of class. This guy is a virulent anti-Marxist. He completely mistates Lenin.

This needs a thread of its own...

Btw - bond interest rates are driven up by the perceived and actual weakness of the economy.

[feargach]

Cutting public sector pay by 25% would take about €5 billions out of spending and cutting social welfare 15% would take about €3 billions more,with a high multiplier effect on economic demand in the latter case. These cuts could be spread over two years and would certainly be deflationery,depressing demand in the overall economy by maybe 2% a year for two years.

Maths might not be flawless here.

Cutting public sector pay by 25% would take at least €5 billion out of economic demand.

cutting social welfare 15% to get €3bn gives us a cut in demand of a total of at least €8 billion.

So, you say this amounts to a total removal of only 2% of demand per year? If 8bn is 2% then 4bn must be 1% so 100% must be €4bn times 100 or €400 billion.

I think if our economy had 400bn of demand we'd have heard about it by now. That sounds more like Spain or Italy's economy to me.

Our entire GDP is €205bn, going by the IMF's 2008 figures.

€8 billion is 3.9% of the whole economy as it was in 2008.

But we're in a recession, so the 2009 GDP fugure will be smaller than €205bn.

If we assume we're lucky and our developer-led recession is only 5% (it will probably be closer to 10%). So let's say our GDP will be €194.75bn in 2009. if that is so, then €8 billion is 4.1% of that figure.

So all in all, your idea of it only costing us 2% would appear to be vastly off-beam. By over 100% (4.1 is something like 105% bigger than your original guess of 2).

SIDE MATTER: (There is this notion going about that public servants are big savers, which many of them are. But they are not known to be net savers. They got into debt too, buying unsuitable cars and Bulgarian dream homes, just like everyone else. And like everyone else, their debts outweigh their savings more often than not.

So a 25% cut will send many into insolvency, but the majority will actually cut back heavy on all non-essential spending, or simply cut back on all non-Northern Ireland spending.)