Marko puts corporate power at the heart of the issue. This mistakes the symptoms for the disease. Corporate power merely reflects the reality of the market and its results; it grows out of and is a consequence of the market. There is nothing new in this. Marx talked about it in his discussion about centralisation and concentration of capital. Lenin and others developed theories of Imperialism based on the tendency of competition to produce monopoly.

Marko attacks Rick Kuhn and Tom Bramble as Trotskyite Marxists. Trotskyite is of course a term of Stalinist abuse. I think he means that they are, like me, in the International Socialist tradition of socialism from below and the emancipation of the working class being the act of the working class, not peasants, or guerrillas or the Red Army.

Marko denigrates Kuhn for daring to suggest that the economic problems might be a consequence of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. God forbid that someone might use the labour theory of value without spending 400 pages defending it. This is a common ploy of conservatives. Every time a Marxist uses Marxist analysis they have to justify the theoretical underpinnings of the theory. No such requirement is imposed on neoliberals or Keynesians.But as Kuhn notes, the evidence does seem to show that profit rates have been falling since the late 60s, early 70s, with ups and downs but one clear direction over time - down.

Marko also doesn't address Bramble's important contribution - that class struggle is an antidote to the neoliberalism and the conservatism of Australian politics.

For me Bramble and Kuhn rescued an otherwise passable set of essays from the dreary discussion of passing trends and surface analysis to reclaim economics and struggle for the Left.

There's no denying the ongoing ascendency of neoliberalism, yet despite this material reality, neoliberal ideology is uncoordinated and covert, preferring to manipulate governments rather than indoctrinate en masse. And despite this neoliberal push, it's marked by a dread of economic crises and an increasingly desperate agenda to outpace even the frenetic privatisation that's been occurring. I don't think there's any doubt the rate of profit is perpetually dwindling, thus in recent decades we've seen the universalisation of the workforce; working couples, higher retirement-age and megaconsumption, and all the while the call for economic growth grows more shrill. As profits fall, expansion must increase to compensate.

It's true the left is bourgeois. Marx was bourgeois and Western Marxism is downright decadent. There is no proletariat and there never has been. There's only ever been ideologues, not true materialists, and unions never had any class consciousness that wasn't constantly harassed into compliance. Unionism's only ever been the "socialism of fools", more inclined to national socialism than communism, and the left has only ever languished in the helplessness Marx theorised for it. Marx wanted a genuine alternative to the State-affirming idealism of Hegel, yet what he theorised was a force of history, cum nature, as remote from human recourse as divine providence. Marx insisted the revolution of society must proceed at its own pace and via the development of proletarian consciousness; conscious dissatisfaction with the disparity between the demands of species-being and the culturalised sophistry of ideological being. Historical Materialism was meant to engender a kind of enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense of freedom from ideology/delusion and in the positivist sense that ideology/delusion obfuscates real individual/social development. But the proletariat just didn't and doesn't get it. Marx surely underestimated the tenacity of ideology, though for mine he was spot on about capitalism.

...The “left” came into view with the establishment of the union movement, and high union membership: And the influence of the “left” has disappeared as a consequence of the demise of the unions. When nu-unionism is a collective of public servants, with the core values attached to the militancy of the Teachers Federation as its power base, I would agree with the Author; the reality this poses puts the union movement a long-way distant from the problems of the working class,

...But the working class are suffering the effects of an identity crisis too, believing themselves to be the new middle class.
This is helped along by the establishment “status quo”: Bigger and newer houses; a quasi con-job of contractual employment independence.; private schooling for their children; University education for their children, all have painted the false picture of affluence. But the future of the “dream” is evaporating: Evaporating as quickly as the end comes to a viable manufacturing industry, shipped off to China, where the “true” Chinese working class establish themselves as the equivalent “aspirationals” of their Western counterpart, and fall victim to a “like” fallacy of Capitalism, and another con-job of the free market economy, cloaking the reality of a Corporatist power base.

...Yes, I agree with the author, there is nothing “left of the left”!

...Well-done Squeers, another classic post....

Squeers says: 'But the proletariat just didn't and doesn't get it. Marx surely underestimated the tenacity of ideology, though for mine he was spot on about capitalism.' Yet a look at history seems to show that the 20th century was the era of revolutions, some of them even working class one or potential working class ones. Europe during and after the first world war, Spain, Hungary 1956, Poland 56, 70, 80 to 81, Iran 78/79, etc etc. The Arab Spring, the strikes against austerity in Europe, even the Occupy movement, all contain a potentially that cannot be denied, and in struggle people's ideas are changing.

I don't know about that, Diver Dan, just the grumbles of a disillusioned leftist, but thanks.

Passy,
none of these "revolutions" were against capitalism, but against one form of tyranny or another, or they're actually for it, for democratic capitalism, redistribution, which to my mind is non sequitur and solves nothing. Marx insisted capitalism can't be reformed and I agree with him. The so-called Arab Spring is a sad joke as the temporary era of the welfare state is coming to an end; they're never going to know the West they covet, and democracy without prosperity is chaos, productive of a slave revolt, perhaps, but then what?