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NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005A new look at the Russian revision of Marx's concept of "directly social labor"by Andrew Kliman Why return to a more-than-60-year-old debate over whether the USSR was subject to the Marxian "law of value" and what that meant? Does the issue even matter now, given that the USSR and its satellites have been defunct for more than a decade? In its time, this was a very important debate. In 1943, a leading Russian theoretical journal published an article, ostensibly about the "Teaching of Economics in the Soviet Union." The next year, Raya Dunayevskaya translated it, got it published in the AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW (AER), and commented upon it there. For her, the article’s key claim was that the law of value holds under socialism. All parties acknowledged that this claim revised prior Russian doctrine; Dunayevskaya argued that it also departed from the views of Marx and Engels. The Russians were revising their doctrine, she argued, in order to make it fit Russian reality--a reality in which the law of value did indeed hold, a reality which was therefore (according to the concepts of Marx and Engels) not socialist but capitalist. Her comment impelled responses from leading pro-Stalinist intellectuals--Paul Baran, Oskar Lange, and Leo Rogin. These responses, and her rejoinder, also appeared in the AER. Baran, a Stanford professor, was Paul Sweezy’s sidekick at the MONTHLY REVIEW. In his response to Dunayevskaya, Baran treated Sweezy’s then-recent book, THE THEORY OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT, as the authoritative word on Marx, citing it three separate times in nine pages. Lange, a University of Chicago professor, was already famous for supposedly having proved, in a debate with Friedrich Hayek, that a "socialist" (that is, centrally planned) economy could operate "efficiently." After the war, he served as Polish ambassador to the U.S., Polish delegate to the UN, and chairman of the Polish State Economic Council. Leo Rogin was a UC Berkeley professor, a teacher of and a major influence upon J. K. Galbraith. But again, why return to this debate now? Is it just a matter of reliving the past? It is true that "What is the class character of Stalinist Russia?" is no longer a burning question. But underlying this question are other questions--"What is capitalism?," "What is socialism?"--that have become even more relevant, in the light of the emergence of new movements against global capital, and the renewed discussion of potential alternatives to capitalism. It is important not to let "Another World is Possible" remain a mere slogan. "Another world" needs to be theorized concretely in order to become a real possibility rather than an abstract one. In light of this project, certain aspects of the AER debate have assumed renewed importance. One such aspect is the meaning of Marx’s concept of "directly social labor" (ably discussed by Seth Weiss in the July-August N&L) and its relation to money, abstract labor, value, and commodity production. The Russian article acknowledged that two of the three contradictions of commodity-producing society that Marx identified continue to exist in "socialism." Products still have a dual character of use-values AND values. Accordingly, labor is both concrete AND abstract--use-value-producing labor AND value-creating labor. But what follows immediately from this second contradiction, in Marx’s presentation (in chapter 1 of CAPITAL, Vol. I)--a contradiction between private and social labor--no longer exists in socialism, according to the Russian article. "[T]his dual character of labor [concrete labor and abstract labor] is no longer linked with the contradiction between private and social labor which is characteristic of commodity production on the basis of private property. The labor of individual workers engaged in socialist enterprises has a DIRECT SOCIAL CHARACTER. Every useful expenditure of labor is DIRECTLY RATHER THAN INDIRECTLY PART OF THE SOCIAL LABOR..." (emphases added). This uncoupling of "indirectly social labor" and commodity production flatly contradicts the position of Marx, who wrote in CAPITAL that Robert Owen’s "labor-money" "presupposes DIRECTLY SOCIALIZED LABOUR, a form of production DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED TO THE PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES" (Penguin/Vintage edition, pp. 188-89, note 1, emphases added). What’s at issue here is not "orthodoxy," but the meaning of theoretical categories. In Marx’s theory, there is a necessary, internal relationship between commodity production, the duality of concrete and abstract labor, and the split between private and social labor. So when the Russian article declares that these categories have become uncoupled, it is REDEFINING them, altering their meanings. What the article means by directly and indirectly social labor is not what Marx meant. What DID Marx mean when he said that directly socialized labor is "diametrically opposed to the production of commodities"? And how did the Russian article revise that concept? The reason why it held that "Every useful expenditure of labor is directly rather than indirectly part of the social labor" in the USSR was that it had "abolished that characteristic of commodity production by which...labor...finds no social recognition because the commodity it produced remains unsold....In socialist society, all labor that is useful to society is rewarded by society." In other words, the article contends that the sale of the commodity is what turns private labor into social labor in a commodity-producing society based on private property. Thus labor is only indirectly social; an act of private labor counts as social labor--"finds social recognition"--only when, and if, the commodity it produced can be sold. In Russia, however, a worker’s labor counted as social labor whether or not the commodity could be sold. Labor was therefore directly social. However, this is not what Marx meant by the distinction between indirectly and directly social labor. As far as I am aware, no writing of his identifies the SALE OF THE COMMODITY as the intermediary that turns private labor into social labor in a commodity-producing society. In his theory, the intermediary is MONEY: "Labour on the basis of exchange values presupposes, precisely, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are DIRECTLY general; that the product attains this form only by passing through an OBJECTIVE MEDIATION, by means of a form of money distinct from itself" (GRUNDRISSE, Penguin/Vintage ed., p. 172). "[If] the labour-time contained in commodities [were] IMMEDIATELY social labour-time...it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity" (CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, Progress Publishers, pp. 84-85). Thus, in Marx’s theory, an act of private labor becomes social labor in a commodity-producing society because its product, the commodity, is equal to a certain amount of money. Yet the existence of money is not the cause, but the reflection, of the indirectly social character of labor. One commodity, money, is directly social ("universal") only because others are not; accordingly, the labor that produces the money commodity is directly social only because other kinds of labor are not. These dualities in turn reflect the split within the commodity between use-value and value--all commodities appear to be mere use-values, except money, which appears to be value--and thus the split between concrete, useful labor and abstract, value-producing labor. Now the Russian article acknowledged that money in the USSR played the same intermediate role as in other commodity-producing societies. "In the planned socialist economy of the USSR, commodities...have PRICES WHICH ARE MONEY EXPRESSIONS OF THEIR VALUE" (emphasis added). Dunayevskaya drew attention to this statement both in her original comment and in her rejoinder. She wrote in her comment: "The document states that...‘distribution according to labor’ is to be effected through the instrumentality of money. This money is not script notes or some bookkeeping term but money as the price expression of value. According to the authors, ‘... the measure of labor and measure of consumption in a socialist society can be calculated only on the basis of the law of value.’" Thus, as Dunayevskaya correctly suggests, a key pillar of the article’s contention that the law of value exists in socialism was the fact that money AS THE EXPRESSION OF VALUE existed in Russian "socialism." The article reached this conclusion through a critique of the notion that labor under socialism could be measured, not by money that expresses value, but DIRECTLY, "in hours or days, in what Marx calls the natural measure of labor--that is, the time of labor, labor hour, labor day, etc.... [T]he difficulty is that the labor of the citizens of a socialist society is not qualitatively uniform....a distinction between physical and intellectual work still exists....there exist differences between skilled and unskilled work....One sort of occupation is better equipped technically than another...." Thus, the article concludes, "All this signifies that the hour (or day) of work of one worker is not equal to the hour (or day) of another. As a result of this, the measure of labor and measure of consumption in a socialist society can be calculated only on the basis of the law of value." Hence, the reason why the law of value operates in "socialism" is that an hour of work of one worker is not equal to an hour of another. Immediately following is a statement about directly and indirectly social labor under "socialism": "The calculation and comparison of various kinds of labor are not realized directly, by means of the ‘natural measure of labor’--labor time--but indirectly, by means of accounting and comparison of the products of labor....The products of socialist labor have value. From this follows the utilization of such instruments as trade, money, etc." In other words, because one worker’s labor-hour is not equal to another’s, an hour of labor does not count DIRECTLY as an hour of social labor. The amount of social labor a worker performs instead depends upon the QUANTITY and VALUE of the products of her "socialist labor." Value, expressed in money, is the intermediary that turns an hour of actual labor into some amount of social labor. This statement is an implicit acknowledgement that labor in the USSR was not directly social in MARX'S sense of the term "directly social labor." Thus the article contends, on the one hand, that labor is directly social in "socialism," but that, on the other hand, the more output a worker produces, and the more valuable her product, the greater is the amount of social labor she performs during an hour of actual labor. All useful labor is supposedly directly social. But HOW MUCH directly social labor it is depends upon the mediation of value and money. As Orwell might have put it, all labor is directly social, but some labor is MORE directly social labor than others. To try to distinguish their society as a "socialist" one, the Stalinists were trying to make the direct sociality of labor a purely QUALITATIVE issue and to divorce it from the quantitative issue. If the Plan recognized all labor as social, then supposedly all labor was directly social, even though an average worker’s labor might count only as one half or one tenth as much labor as an intellectual’s. The fact that money and value mediated the quantitative relationship somehow did not stop labor from being directly, or immediately, social. Thus we see the danger in emphasizing qualitative issues at the expense of quantitative ones. Some people suppose that qualitative matters are profound, while quantitative matters are beneath them. But without careful attention to the quantitative issues, it would be very hard, if not impossible, to answer the Stalinist contention that labor was directly social in the USSR. We could say that laborers weren’t freely associated, but it is hard to see how we could deny that their labor was directly associated. |
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