20.06.1996

Philosophical limitations

Phil Sharpe of the Trotskyist Unity Group makes some initial comments on István Mészáros’s latest work, Beyond Capital (Merlin Press 1995)

Mészáros’s work, Beyond Capital, elaborates an ontology that extends the theoretical gains of the Left Communists and Left Opposition about the importance of an internationalist strategic perspective. The structural determinations of capital-labour relations are global, and so the main problem for any emerging national dictatorship of the proletariat is that the revolution will remain political. It can displace and overthrow the rule of the capitalists, but the hegemony of capital remains within the relations of production. Social revolution as the organisation of production by the cooperative association of producers cannot be realised on a national scale.

Kautsky had the idealist illusion that the national development of the productive forces in socialised terms, together with bourgeois democracy, equals the objective basis for socialism. This perspective puts an ontological closure onto the problem of the domination of capital on an international scale, and so a particular high level of economic development is no guarantee of socialism.

The Bolsheviks’ strategic perspective of uneven development facilitated the political success of a national dictatorship of the proletariat, but it did not provide a wider political basis for the objective success of social revolution through international revolution. Neither did the strategy of political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy face up to this question as to what constitutes the objective possibility for social revolution.

With this theoretical ontological model, Mészáros is able to identify the problems of utopian socialism within the attempt to build the national dictatorship of the proletariat, and so equate politics with the economic victory of socialism in one country.

However his strategic perspective still contains its own form of idealist ideological limitations in that he effectively opposes the importance of building a revolutionary party. Instead he perpetuates the illusions of economism, in that spontaneous struggles - the possibility for mass communist consciousness - will somehow generate a scientific socialist political culture. The role of existing scientific socialists is to act as an external philosophical subject which is able to link the structural crisis of capitalism with an inexorable potential telos for revolutionary struggle.

The increasingly generalised crisis of capitalism, with only a limited basis for reforms, and with the transformation of social democracy into bourgeois organisations, means that, as capital still depends upon labour for its operation, it is increasingly vulnerable to oppositional actions by labour. This represents the objective context to conceive of mass communist consciousness, and of defensive struggles becoming increasingly offensive and revolutionary in character, without the crucial role of a revolutionary party organised on the theoretical basis of scientific socialism.

To Mészáros Leninism represents utopian socialism, but his argument against Leninism is argued in terms of a crude identity of the economic class character of the proletariat with oppositional political activity, and so his strategy acquires catastrophist and fatalistic imperatives connected to the spontaneous power and ‘logic’ of class struggle.

Significantly, Workers Power, who fetishise spontaneity, are the most appreciative of the idealist aspects of his strategy rather than its scientific content. The scientific absence from Mészáros’s work is the concept of cultural revolution as the necessary first stage of a non-teleologically defined prospect of international proletarian revolution.