Surveys Confirm Scale of Crisis

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Two million unemployed: recession' for at least two years: inflation in double figures for the foreseeable future: more closures, more redundancies -and higher profits for the banks.

This is the grim prospect for British workers if action is not taken to bring down the Thatcher government and implement a programme of policies to create a planned socialist It is not simply Socialist Press that holds this view. It is now a consensus of several leading forecasting and advisory bodies who are monitoring the downhill progress of the British capitalist system.

These include the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the London Business School, the international • Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the CBI.

Fall in output

The OECD's latest report predicts that output in Britain will actually fall by 24% between the second half of 1979 and the second half of 1980-and that even this figure s artificially good because of Tine increase a production of North Sea Oil.

On the same basis the OECD calculates that unemployment will rise during 1980 from 54% to 7%-meaning 2 million on the dole by next winter.

The "good news" is that inflation is expected to average "only" 162% over the yearsmall consolation for the millions of workers whose wage increases on the last pay round are nothing like that amount.

The key to this mounting anarchy of unused factories, unemployed workers and unmet social needs-housing queues, NHS waiting lists, inadęquate schools and social services, massive world poverty-lies of course at the very heart of the capitalist system itself.

Profit

For all the Labourite dreams of an eventual "planned" capitalist system in which production of commodities could be tailored to social need through appropriate government policies, the capitalist mode of production in ieality functions solely for the extraction and accumulation of profit.

And with the growing disiocation of the world market, the crisis in the credit system, instability of every major world currency and a protound econHowe Are 1 th ISUI fits! omic crisis wracking the underdeveloped nations, the prospects of achieving adequate profits from expanded _or even sustained production dwindle by the day.

The London Business School whose Professor Terry Burns is now a leading monetarist advisor to Tory Chancellor Howe, forecasts that profits in British industry other than North Sea Oil will fall by a staggering 60% in 1980.

The CBI calculates that the pre-tax rate of return on investment in non-North Sea companies last year was a mere 3%-and predicts a drop to 2% in 1980. But if the London Business School is right, that 1980 figure could wind up as 1%!

Further rod workers therefor to Tory/CBI clamou for s to boost com iny Are they to join the *Defend living standards! Fight for pay claims of at least 20%, linked to cost-of-living clauses to keep pace with inflation, as monitored by elected committees of trade unionists and housewives.

*Defend all jobs! Occupy threatened plants and public service facilities to prevent closure. Fight for supporting strike action. No redundancies: fight for work sharing on full pay under workers' control!

*Defend all. services! For a sliding scale of public service spending to keep The growing appeals from increas ingly bankrupt sections of industry such as textiles and British Leyland for a government policy of import controls to help improve the business climate for British employers?

Such policies would merely PO only success- North Sea da in da provide a further rod for the back of the labour movement.

The profitability of private industry can only be driven up in the present period by an increase in the rate of exploitation of the working classthrough further rationalisation pace with inflation.

*Full support to the steelworkers!

No surrender on pay: no loss of jobs! For a General Strike to bring down the Tory government.

*Build councils of action in every area, to draw rank and file delegates from all labour movement organisations into the fight to extend mass picketing, control essential supplies. and counter police violence.

*Open the books of the banks (Lloyds profits up 90% this year) and major industries! Reveal the way mass unemployment, falling living standards leadership have readily endorsed the call for import controls, it is already clear that this policy not only creates dangerous nationalist divisions in the international working class, but also provides a further pretext for a line-up. between union bureaucrats and the employers, in the so-called "national interests".

In reality, the threat to jobs flows not from "foreign" capitalists as such, but from the inescapable anarchy of the capitalist system as a whole, which on a world scale proves daily its inability to develop and utilise the productive forces, science and technology in the interests of the vast majority of the population.

Sooner than seeking to palm uff factory closures and sackings from Britain onto workers in the USA, Germany or Japan through measures to keep imports out of the British markets, workers need to look to policies to confront and overthrow the British capitalist class whose drive ior protits 1s at -1--- 1.:- 091 - - 1 1L -Ipot of the Tory onslaught.

ES and public service cuts are used to boost the profits of private employers! Show the case for •the nationalisation of industry withoüt compensation to make way for a planned socialist economy under workers' management.

*Kick out the Callaghan-Healey Labour leadership and any othér leadership that opposes the necessary socialist policies to defend the interests of the working class in Britain and internationally! For a workers government!

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From the 1920s to the present day, major contributions to Marxist theory have been made by thinkers indifferent or implacably opposed to the revolutionary heritage of Trotskyism.

From George Lukacs to Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci to Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Korsch to Herbert Marcuse, a powerful body of 'Western Marxist' theory has been developed, which has yet to receive 'full critical assessment by Trotskyists How are the Stalinist or revisionist these writers to be weighed against their In this series, Terry Eagleton examines the work of the theorists named above, as an introduction to Radical French students on the streets in 1968 Herbert Marcuse is probably best known today as the intellectual high priest of the Amertheoretical respectability io the pot-and-sex 'liberation' of the late 1960s student movement.

But Marcuse had been an important Marxist theoretician long before the media shot him to fame in his later years.

As a leading member of the so-called Frankfurt School in the Germany of the 1930s-the Marxist philosophers grouped around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt-Marcuse had made some significant contributions to the School's work on culture and philosophy. When the Nazis came to power, the Institute transferred itself to New York: and Marcuse was to rémain in the USA as a professor of philosophy for the rest of his life.

• Defects Politically isolated, theoretically elitist and doctrinally revisionist, the Frankfurt School graphically illustrates most of the defects of 'Hegelian Marxism' discussed in previous articles in this Their strong reaction against the • mechanical materialism of Stalinism led them straight to a form of Marxism which was at times little more than a thinly disguised version of Hegel's philosophical idealism.

Marcuse's early book, Reason and Revolution a full evaluation of their work:

(1.941), is one of the most subtle accounts of Hegel's philosophy available; but though it criticises Hegel for his later reactionary standpoint, it is remarkably uncritical about the Hegelian philosophy itself.

In this, Marcuse shares the position of the Young Hegelians'-the left-wing disciples of Hegel who, as Marx argued, had failed to break decisively with the master's idealism.

Throughout Marcuse's work runs one recurrent theme: the contrast between the actual and the essential.

Utopian

The "actual' means the facts as they present themselves; the 'essential' means the underlying truth of such facts. ' Such a distinction is, of course; central to Marxism: dialectical thought is precisely that which refuses the obviousness' of the facts' and grasps instead the complex, contradictory processes at work beneath them.

Few modern Marxist philosophers have been as effective as Marcuse in their onslaught against non-dialectical thinking; he sees precisely how bourgeois positivism, in consecrating that which exists'. , tries to tend off the revolutionary impact of negative, critical thought.

At the same time, however, the 'essence' which Marcuse : opposes to the 'actual' is often utopian and idealist.

Like the early Marx, he speaks of 'Man' and his essential needs and capacities, in an unhistorical way; like the early Marx too, he sometimes conceives of history as no more than the gradual unfolding of this abstraction 'Man' ', which has stood in for Hegel's Idea' Marcuse's writings on rcuse culture are perhaps the best illustration of this. • Unlike a long, philistine tradition of revolutionaries, Marcuse takes culture seriously: he recognises, as did Marx and Engels themselves, that culture is not only an important feature of class society, but that it can provide a powerful opposition to that society's. ideologies.

Traditional culture, Marcuse argues, has played a compensatory role: it provided the beauty, harmony and fantasy into which men and women could escape as an alternative to the harshness of real life.

Subversive

As such, its function is essentially reactionary, and Marcuse calls for new artforms which will be critical and subversive of the existing social order.

But by the time of his last book The Aesthetic Dimension (1977), Marcuse has retreated into pure Platonic idealism, arguing that the very form of an artwork, regardless of its content, expresses an ideal essence, over and . above history, to which men and women should aspire.

Art which explicitly engages with political issues is in his view automatically inferior; the genuine artsilent form Which one gates, actual reality without actually criticising it.

If this were all that there were to Marcuse's cultural theory, it would hardly be worth taking issue with it.

Sensitivity

But Marcuse, almost uniquely among modern Marxist theorists, has a deep sensitivity to the importance of art and culture which allows him to make some trenchant analyses of the cultural barrenness, exhaustion and triviality of monopoly capitalist society.

He sees that in such a society two major new developments have occurred, both of which offer a contrast with the liberal capitalism of an earlier period.

On the one hand, the political has penetrated more deeply into the social. The state, rather than simply securing the general conditions for capitalist reproduction, as it did in an earlier epoch, now actively, massively intervenes in the sphere of social labour and commodity exchange.

On the other hand, the social has assumed new political functions. Certain social forces such as 'culture' have become; mainly through the mass media, closely bound up with political repression.

In such a society, it is Marcus impossible to relega culture to a purely margin role-as the bourgeois themselves have tradition: ly done.

For not only is cultu a huge apparatus of ide ogical manipulation; it also, in 'consumer societ! inseparable from econom life itself.

Society is converted in a kind of degraded artist spectacle-into a vast or / Heg of consumption whe glitteringly packaged co! modities, . like imitati works of art, offer thei selves to our 'aestheti taste.

•The third-rate mov where flashy images alluringly by before

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