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NEWS & LETTERS, October-November 2006EssayDemonstrating an alternative to capitalismby Andrew Kliman Developing a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism is vitally important in order to free our minds from the clutches of Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, "there is no alternative" (TINA)—and from its practical effects. Struggles for freedom continue but, given the widespread acceptance of TINA, they understandably stop short of trying to remake society totally. Just as it is rational to try to change what can be changed, it is rational to refrain from trying to change what cannot be changed. People who don’t want to hear about socialism because of the failures of what they believe to have been socialism are making perfect sense. On the other side is a new global justice movement declaring that "Another World is Possible." This slogan, too, is quite rational if one interprets it as a call to think through the possibility of another world and to prefigure another one. But ultimately, whether struggles for a completely different, non-capitalist, human society are rational depends upon whether another world is actually possible. This needs to be shown, and that requires showing how it is possible to break with capitalism and make that break sustainable. At the present moment, I believe, no one can answer with confidence that another world is possible. But I do not think this is a reason to despair. The effort to work out how it might be possible is really just beginning. The whole problem was avoided for many, many decades, mostly because it was believed that state-capitalism was the "actually-existing" alternative, or that the state-capitalist mode of production could and would become socialist simply by virtue of one or another sort of political change—"democracy," workers councils in control, etc. Although it is commonly said that Marx was a theorist of capitalism, not of socialism, a lot of his work pertains, directly or indirectly, to the concept of a new society. We ignore it at our peril. Throughout his life, Marx battled Proudhonism and similar tendencies, showing that their proposed alternatives would not be viable and would lead back to capitalism. And he worked out to some extent what would actually be needed. That work needs to continue—Marx does not provide "the answer"— but it needs to continue on the foundation he laid, and that Raya Dunayevskaya built upon. THE CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM Above all, it is crucial to take seriously her identification of his CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM(CGP) as "New Ground for Organization."(1) I don’t think she meant that the CGP was a treatise "on organization," but that Marxist organizations need to make the actual content of the CGP their ground. In other words, they need to make their differentia specifica the projection and further development of the CGP’s vision of the new society, especially its analysis of what is required in order to make that vision a reality, the "whole theory of human development" that Dunayevskaya said was worked out in the CGP.(2) In this CRITIQUE, Marx theorized the future course of human development, from the dawn of revolution, through the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism, as well as the further development of the latter, on the new foundations established during its initial phase, into a "higher phase of communist society." Dunayevskaya criticized Marxists for continually quoting the slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"—which concludes the CGP’s discussion of the higher phase—but "never bother[ing] to study just how concretely that arose from the CRITIQUE of the supposedly socialist program, and what would be required to make that real."(3) I believe that this statement puts in a nutshell the whole methodology of Marx’s critique. One key theoretical principle runs throughout his commentary on Paragraph 3 of the Gotha Program: relations of distribution correspond to and depend upon relations of production. Thus the "fair distribution" that the Program called for cannot be made real without a revolution, in permanance, in the mode of production—a revolution that, in its initial phase, makes labor directly social and thereby does away with the law of value and the commodification of labor-power, and then continues until the "higher phase" is reached.(4) Simply being for "from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs" is a retrogression from what the CGP achieved. So is being "for" an end to value production without specifying what is required to make that real. It is precisely this sort of thing that got Marx so enraged about the Gotha Program. The Program ignored the theoretical achievements that had resulted from three decades of hard intellectual labor on his part, and that were finally available in Capital for all to study—if only they would do so. Instead, the Program spouted what he called "obsolete verbal rubbish" and "pervert[ed]...the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it." But what is needed in order to make real the vision of a society without value production? Some people imagine that we simply need to "produce for need, not for profit." This betrays an extremely superficial and inadequate conception of value production. The really crucial issue is the one that Dunayevskaya singled out in her critique of the Stalinist revision of the law of value: value production is characterized by "minimum costs and maximum production."(5) It doesn’t matter what products you produce. Nor is workers’ control of the planning process sufficient in order to abrogate the law of value: "[E]ither you have the plan of freely associated labor, or you have the…despotic Plan. THERE IS NO IN-BETWEEN. The only possibility of avoiding capitalist crises is the abrogation of the law of value. That is to say, planning must be done according to the needs of the productive system as a HUMAN system. A system where human needs are NOT governed by the necessity to pay the laborer at MINIMUM and to extract the MAXIMUM abstract labor…."(6) Nothing short of this is the plan of freely associated labor. It remains the despotic Plan of capital—even if workers’ faces rather than corporate managers’ faces serve as the new personifications of capital. "There is no in-between." As long as the law of value exists, producers will need to compete effectively, and therefore to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible. There cannot be socialism in one country, much less in a single cooperative or network of cooperatives. Even if the members of a cooperative or network of cooperatives are nominally their own bosses, it follows from the continued existence of the value relation that "the process of production has mastery over [human beings], instead of the opposite."(7) Thus as long as "[t]he co-operative factories run by workers themselves [exist within capitalism]…they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them…the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here…only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e., they use the means of production to valorize their own labour."(8) What was crucial to Marx wasn’t which human beings were nominally in control, but whether the process of production had mastery over human beings, or the opposite. WHAT CAN END VALUE PRODUCTION? Some people suppose that qualitative matters are profound, while quantitative matters are beneath them. But without careful attention to the quantitative issues, we would give our Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to a system of worker-run cooperatives that produce for human needs like health care, in which "the workers in association [are] their own capitalist." That is, in order to compete effectively, they pay themselves the minimum and extract from themselves the maximum output. Of course, a system like this wouldn’t really produce a lot of health care, because the great mass of humanity, paid at or near value, wouldn’t be able to afford much health care. And it wouldn’t really be run by workers, both because the law of value would really be in control, and because class divisions are the inevitable result of a system that seeks to minimize cost and maximize production. In such a system, you have to have some people whose job it is to guarantee maximum production from other people, and these other people are a "cost." Marx was well aware that capitalist class rule follows from the capitalist mode of production, rather than the reverse. As he wrote in The Civil War in France, "The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The [Paris] Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule." Now then, what is needed in order to end value production? Marx’s view, as expressed in the CGP, was that "Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor." Question: Why doesn’t the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products? Marx’s answer: "since now, in contrast to capitalist society," the individual’s labor is directly social— "directly …a component part of total labor." Thus, in order to end the law of value, labor must become directly social. This was not an isolated remark. In Chapter 1 of CAPITAL, he showed that neither the commodity fetish nor the value-relation exist in non-capitalist societies because, in these societies, the individual’s labor is directly social. In the future free communist society, for instance, workers will act as "one single social labour force" and, once there are "direct social relations between persons in their work," their social relations no longer need to be mediated by things that serve as "objective" representatives of the work they’ve done. And thus there are no longer "social relations between things"—social relations between commodities insofar as they are values, congealed quantities of labor in "objective" form.(9) MAKING LABOR DIRECTLY SOCIAL But what must be done in order to make labor directly social? It is tempting to answer "abolish exchange of the products." This is, in essence, the answer given by the Stalinists in 1943, when they claimed that the contradiction between private and social labor had been overcome in Russia, thereby making it a non-capitalist society. The individual’s labor was supposedly recognized, without mediation, as social labor in the State Plan; it did not have to become social labor by its product first being sold, nor did it fail to count as social labor if its product could not be sold.(10) But this answer puts the cart before the horse. The reason why there must be exchange of products is that labor is only indirectly social—not vice-versa. If labor were directly social, there would be no need to exchange products. For instance, Marx projects in the CGP that, in the lower phase of communism, "The same amount of labor which [an individual] has given to society in one form, he receives back in another." If you work for an hour, you’re entitled to the product of an hour of other people’s work. There’s an exchange, to be sure, but it is directly an exchange of labor. The products don’t exchange, as Marx noted, quoted earlier. Another way of putting the same point is that the Stalinists did not do away with exchange of products. Nominally, there was no exchange of products, only exchange of labors. But the amount of "labor" one did depended not only on how long and hard one worked, but on how much one produced, and the value of what one produced. As Dunayevskaya noted, the Stalinists wrongly equated "‘distribution according to labor’ with distribution according to value."(11) So what does need to be done in order to make labor directly social? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows at this point. But I am confident that remunerating expenditures of labor equally is not the solution. It is the consequence, not the cause, of the direct sociality of labor. Marx spent decades fighting the utopian-socialist/Proudhonist view that equal remuneration is the solution, arguing correctly that it is not even possible without a thorough revolution in the relations of production. It does no good to say, "let’s remunerate all labor equally," or "let’s count all labor as equal." If the economic relations are such that different labors aren’t actually equal, counting them as equal will be a principle at loggerheads with practice. For instance, if we "declare" that the labor of a surgeon and a nurse’s aide are equal, it is almost inevitable that a black market for surgical services will quickly emerge. Either that, or "we’ll" have to enforce the equality through military-state power that has no prospect of withering away. So the issue is not whether we count different labors equally—politics is not in command—but whether the social relations are such that different labors actually count equally. The task is to work out what such social relations are, and what is required to make them real. NOTES 1. Raya Dunayevskaya, ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991, p. 153. 2. Raya Dunayevskaya, THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002, p. 261. 3. ROSA LUXEMBURG, pp. 156-57, emphasis added. 4. If we want a free, human society in the here and now, we have to think seriously about the whole trajectory of the revolutionary process, not just the higher phase, because we remain extremely far from the point at which the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can prevail. A society in which we contribute according to our ability, and which satisfies our (basic) needs, may well be possible in the near term. But the principle in question is far more visionary, projecting a future in which society in effect imposes no obligations on its individual members. There’s no longer any connection between what one contributes to society ("from each") and what one is entitled to receive ("to each"). You give according to your ability without regard to what you get in return, and others receive according to their needs without regard to whether they have contributed anything to society. This principle is practiced in some cases even now, but society cannot viably operate on this basis—it cannot become the governing principle of social life as a whole—until (a) we achieve levels of material, cultural, and individual development far in excess of those that currently exist, and (b) the nature of work is transformed so profoundly that it becomes "life’s prime want" rather than something to avoid when possible. 5. Raya Dunayevskaya, THE MARXIST-HUMANIST THEORY OF STATE-CAPITALISM, Chicago: News and Letters, 1992, p. 87. 6. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000, p. 136, emphases in original. 7. Karl Marx, CAPITAL, Vol. I, London: Penguin, 1990, p. 175. 8. Karl Marx, CAPITAL, Vol. III, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 571. 9. Marx, CAPITAL, Vol. I, p, 171, p. 166. 10. "Teaching of Economics in the Soviet Union," unsigned, AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 34:3, September 1944, p. 525. 11. THE MARXIST-HUMANIST THEORY OF STATE-CAPITALISM, p. 84. |
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