WeeklyWorker

19.12.1996

Control of our own life processes

Here we publish the speech by István Mészáros opening a discussion on his recently published book, Beyond Capital, at Communist University ’96

I am very happy to attend a meeting like this, because it is so important for the future that real dialogue among socialists, whatever their past differences, is now beginning to take place. There is so much to be fundamentally reassessed: many of the mythologies of the past have to be faced and rejected. The condition of that happening is real dialogue amongst people with socialist concerns and orientation.

My fundamental concern in Beyond Capital was not an historical re-evaluation of the Soviet experience - though this is of course an important area in itself, which I deal with in the book. Beyond Capital grew out of Marx’s theory of alienation, which I finished writing in May 1969. There were a number of important problems which could not be included in that book.

I hope Beyond Capital can contribute to the process of clarification. The only legitimate purpose of examining historical issues here and now is their relationship to the challenges of the future.

The communist parties have disintegrated everywhere, not only in the west, but in the east as well. The historical parties of the past of the socialist movement have all disintegrated. Small groups like those present today cannot be considered parties in the same way as the Italian or French parties, which were massively influential forces; or indeed the Polish party, just as much as the Hungarian and Russian parties of the East, which all disintegrated. This calls into question the whole historical experience of the way in which the socialist movement was originally articulated. We know that in this country the Party changed its name to the ‘Party of the Democratic Left’.

Movements like the re-baptised CP are completely farcical, even in their own terms of reference, yet still maintain some pretence of being on the left.

Behind such changes is an absolutely vital and fundamental question of why this happened. We cannot simply say that it was due to betrayals. It is a very implausible explanation to say that history progresses by betrayals. They are, of course, part of it. But what are the foundations and the inducements for individuals to proceed with betrayals, and how do they get away with them?

My point is that an historical phase has come to an end. The disintegration of the parties is the crowning phase of a very unhappy development, which ended up making the working class simply incapable of asserting its own interests. The reason being that even the parties which claimed to be revolutionary belonged to the defensive articulation of the socialist movement. Both the parties and the trade union movement reflected a phase of the defensive articulation of the socialist movement, and we have reached a stage a couple of decades ago of an absolute necessity for the offensive re-articulation of the socialist movement.

The reason for the bewildering political reversals is that capital has reached a stage in its development in which it is incapable of making concessions. The historical achievements of the socialist movement in the past refer to a phase when this was not the case, when capital in western countries could make concessions. The welfare state was a manifestation of these concessions, but it is not capable of doing it any more. The welfare state is being liquidated in front of our very eyes. Every day something is chipped back and every concession capital could make in the past has to be taken back. The authoritarian legislation to which we were subjected in the last one and a half decades is the manifestation of that. It is needed for the same purposes - to destroy even the defensive organs of the labour movement. Now what can even the trade unions deliver to their members? They can deliver the representative of the CBI at the TUC conference, who preaches to them that, ‘You are historically outdated. You were all right in the 19th century, but there is absolutely no need or use for you today.’ And the Labour Party joins in the same enterprise.

This situation can only be reversed if the labour movement, the socialist movement succeeds in radically re-articulating itself in the form of the socialist offensive.

What was defensive about all socialist movements of the past was that they never succeeded in challenging the capital relation. They could score relative victories against sections of capitalists, usually the backward sections, but without challenging, in a substantial sense, the capital relation, which can be summed up as labour’s structural subordination to the imperatives of the capital system.

Marx is often misinterpreted as being concerned with capitalism. My answer to the title of my talk announced in the programme for CU ’96, ‘How do we go beyond capitalism?’, is that the only way of going beyond capitalism is by going beyond capital. The two are not the same: Marx’s book is not entitled Das Kapitalismus, but Das Kapital. He did not write on capitalist production; he wrote on the “production process of capital”. Unless the target of socialist transformation is going beyond capital, there is no chance of achieving lasting success even against capitalism. That is the powerful evidence of the developments in the last five or six decades.

The capital relation is characterised by Marx in two important categories. The first - the “personification of capital” - is hardly ever mentioned and the second, which is never mentioned, is its pair - “the personification of labour”. The capital relation expresses the relationship between the two. Labour, or workers, exist under the particular conditions of capitalistic development as the personification of labour. Labour is not a self-evidently emancipatory movement or force. It is a very naive idea that it is enough to turn labour into a political force in order to realise the Marxian notion of the “class for itself”. Marx makes the point that “class in itself” is “class against class”. Class for itself is something else. But only inasmuch as labour is active politically does it remain class against class. The parameters within which such action can take place are already defined in capital’s favour, because labour in this situation is in dependency on capital. Labour is structurally subordinate to capital. It is the suffering subject of the hierarchical social division of labour.

This is where we come to the Soviet experience, inasmuch as it concerns us for the future. I want to point out the differences between capital and capitalism, because the Soviet socioeconomic reproductive system was neither state socialist, nor state capitalist, nor bureaucratically socialist. The Soviet system was simply a post-capitalist system in the most obvious sense of the word - the previous capitalist forms of reproduction had been overthrown, the capitalist state had been overthrown and what was established in its place was a very strange transitional system which was characterised by very different ways of managing the socioeconomic process.

The capitalist formation extends only over that particular phase of capital production in which:

  1. production for exchange and thus the mediation and domination of use value by exchange value is all-pervasive;
  2. labour power itself, just as much as anything else, is treated as a commodity;
  3. the drive for profit is the fundamental regulator in the force of production;
  4. the vital mechanism of the extraction of surplus value, the radical separation of the means of production from the producers, assumes an inherently economic form;
  5. the economically extracted surplus value is privately appropriated by the members of the capitalist class or the bourgeoisie;
  6. following its own economic imperative of growth and expansion, capital production tends towards a global integration through the intermediary of the world market as a totally interdependent system of economic domination and subordination.

To speak of capitalism in post-revolutionary societies or post-capitalist societies - synonymous here after the October Revolution - as retaining only one of these essential defining characteristics - no4, and even that in a radically altered form, in that the extraction of surplus labour is regulated politically and not economically - can be done only by disregarding or misrepresenting the objective conditions of development, with serious consequences for understanding the nature of the problems at stake.

Capital maintains its by no means unrestricted rule in post-revolutionary societies primarily through:

  1. the material imperatives which circumscribe the possibilities of the totality of life processes;
  2. the inherited social division of labour which, notwithstanding its significant modifications, contradicts the development of “free individualities” about which Marx spoke;
  3. the objective structure of the available production apparatus, including plant and machinery, and of the historically developed and restricted form of scientific knowledge - both originally produced in the framework of capital production and under the conditions of the social division of labour;
  4. the links and interconnection of the post-revolutionary societies with the global system of capitalism, whether these assume the form of ‘peaceful competition’ (which is a very doubtful proposition anyway) - ie, commercial and cultural exchange with western capitalist countries, or that of the potentially deadly opposition from the arms race to more or less limited actual confrontations in contested areas.

Thus the issue is incomparably more complex and far-reaching than its conventional characterisation as merely the imperative of capital accumulation, now renamed as ‘socialist accumulation’. It is important to remember that the crucial category here is the extraction of surplus labour - this is what capital cannot function without. So long as surplus labour can be extracted in one alienated form or another, the capital relation remains intact. Challenging the mode of surplus labour extraction is at issue here, and also has to be faced in the future. It always remains a crucial question. For without the extraction of surplus labour and its allocation for productive purposes there can be no hope of a socialist development. The question is how it is done.

Under capitalism surplus labour is converted into surplus value and its mode of extraction is essentially economic through the ‘mechanism of the market’, as it is described, which is actually a social relationship of domination. This is a very important part of the functioning of the capitalist mode of surplus labour extraction.

Under the Soviet system surplus labour was not extracted economically, but politically. It was directly controlled politically by the Soviet state. We cannot run away from the question of the extraction of surplus labour or say that it is unimportant. But the crucial difference, the only one which can characterise society as socialist, is if the surplus labour extraction is done by the producers themselves, the “freely associated producers” (Marx). If they are not in control of their life activity by regulating the reproductive mechanism of society, then of course the whole thing is bound to revert to the previous modality - which is exactly what happened in the course of Soviet development.

It is important here to note that capital preceded capitalism by thousands of years. There were forms of capital, primitive forms of capital, which were active and developing, unfolding and acquiring greater and greater weight in the course of historical development, until the time came when capital could dominate all aspects of social reproduction by taking over the control of industrial capital. Earlier you had monetary, financial, merchant capital, but not industrial capital. Thus labour itself remained outside the framework. In other words labour was not a commodity in feudal times; it was not a commodity in classic antiquity, etc.

To imagine that through the act of political revolution the rule of capital can be swept aside and abolished is totally naive at best and totally self-defeating in the longer run. Socialist emancipation can only be a very hard and ongoing restructuring process. These are the terms in which Marx talked about the permanent revolution. He is the one that introduced that idea, rightly repeated by Trotsky 50 years later. But Marx insisted that only through this kind of permanent revolution - which means the constant re-examining and radical, critical assessment of every single experience of long decades of social revolution - can the situation be altered. It was in this sense that he made a distinction between social and political revolution.

What is characteristic of all phases of capital and all modalities of capital development are the following:

1. the separation and alienation of the objective conditions of the labour process from labour itself. This is necessary both in the capitalist variety and in the post-capitalist variety of the Soviet type;

2. the superimposition of such objectified and alienated conditions of the labour process over the workers as a separate power exercising command over labour. Whether you think of the way in which capitalism functioned, or the way in which the reproductive functions were controlled under the Soviet system, command over labour remained an external force;

3. the personification of capital as egotistic value, with its usurped subjectivity and pseudo-personality pursuing its own self-expansion, with a will of its own, without which it would not be ‘capital for itself’ as the controller of the social metabolism; and will not in the sense of individual entities, but in the form of setting as its internalised aim the fulfilment of the objective expansionary imperatives of capital as such. Hence the grotesque notion of ‘socialist accumulation’, to be accomplished under the unchangeable rule of the Soviet-type bureaucrat. It is also important to stress here that it is not the bureaucrat who produces the Soviet-type capitalist system, however much he is implicated in its disastrous running, but rather the inherited and reconstituted post-capitalist form of capital gives rise to its own personification in the form of the bureaucrat, as the post-capitalist   equivalent   to   the

formerly economic extraction-orientated capital system, which had to give rise to the private capitalist. We see here a complete reversal of the causal relationship between capital and the capitalist or between the bureaucrat and the underlying reproductive system;

4. the equivalent personification of labour: ie, the personification of the workers as labour destined to enter a contractual economic or a politically regulated dependency relation with the historically prevailing rule of capital. The subject identity of this labour is confined to its fragmentary productive function, whether we think of the category of labour as a wage labourer under capitalism or as the norm-fulfilling and overfulfilling so- called socialist worker under the post-capitalist capital system with the latter’s own form of vertical and horizontal division of labour.

What is characteristic and important to bear in mind as the object of transformatory action is to make impossible in a post-revolutionary order for the personifications of capital to reconstitute themselves in the form of the so-called bureaucrat, because it is the causal relationships which we have to address ourselves to. One of the important features of the capital system under all conceivable forms, whether capitalist or post-capitalist, is that causality and time are handled in it in a perverse way. Capital cannot tolerate causal intervention even in the sense of directives. Capital is what used to be called in philosophy causa sui, its own cause.

Capital’s causa sui is the absolute framework of orientation of everything. It means that directives are only feasible at the level of symptoms and effects. If there are troubles, disturbances, dysfunctions, etc, it is possible to intervene to rectify them by addressing the symptoms only. This is considered legitimate - if you say to the personifications at the top echelons of the capital system that you are concerned with eliminating the grievances, the difficulties and the contradictions, addressing yourself to the symptoms, they will say that that is exactly what they want. But to attack capital at its causal foundations is inconceivable. Not only not possible within capital’s framework, but inconceivable, because capital is its own cause.

As far as time is concerned, the temporality of capital in terms of running its system is what is called post factum; post festum: that is, retroactive and retrospective. This means that after contradictions develop, capital can react to them. This is also its mode of reproduction. Within the framework of the market the various individual capitalist enterprises collide with one another. If you produce too many potatoes in this year (as indeed happened in Europe in 1996, with disastrous consequences for the potato industry) you will try to take measures to produce less next year; and maybe then there will be a shortage, restarting the vicious circle. This is always necessarily post festum. Precisely because it is its causa sui, capital’s limits are very clearly defined - what is compatible with it and what is not. This is also why capital is incapable of planning. A system in which temporality is post factum and post festum is quite incapable of planning, whether you think of the capitalist or the post-capitalist enterprises. Read Galbraith’s wishful characterisation of the industrial system in which he postulated that the two systems - the Soviet system and the western capitalist system - had converged, because they were both managed by planning.

In actuality, they were both characterised by the total failure of planning. There can be partial planning dictates, which can be imposed in both systems. The personifications of capital running the huge transnational corporations can impose types of operation on their various subsidiaries in light of past performance, and they also have to take post festum corrective actions when a mess issues out of it all. The giant transnational motor corporations, including General Motors and Ford, have almost gone into bankruptcy in the last few years. Thus to think of planning and thereby radically reforming the capitalist system is a complete fantasy.

The same goes also for the Soviet system. To talk about the planned economy in it is a total misrepresentation of what actually happened. There were arbitrary planning dictates and arbitrarily set targets. Planning was something which was imposed from above on the social body to which the body had to conform. There was no way of influencing the targets of planning from below. Such influences were requested occasionally as a lip-service. At Party meetings all the plans had to be adopted and applauded, and you saw the sorry tale of how it all ended in tears.

The capital relation is also characterised by contradiction and antagonism which are fundamental to it. In historical development capital and labour are inseparable from one another. Also in the capital relation you have three elements which have to be borne in mind: the state, capital and labour. These are the three fundamental constituents of the system. None of them can be “politically overthrown”. The idea of dealing with the situation through a political revolution is a complete illusion and must remain so for the future. What is possible is to overthrow the capitalist state, but that does not overthrow the state as such. The state, as it exists, has to fulfil vital functions in the social reproduction process. Capital cannot be overthrown either. It is possible to overthrow the private capitalist. They can even be jailed or exiled or whatever you want to do, but it solves none of the problems. That is why the need for the personification of capital in a new form arises after the political revolution, precisely because capital as such cannot be overthrown. Thirdly labour cannot be overthrown or abolished. The idea that we have a big political meeting and by an act of parliament or assembly we abolish this or that - all this is terribly naive, because labour as such is the basis of social metabolic reproduction. Only wage labour can be abolished under determinate sociopolitical circumstances through some legislative intervention.

Capital itself is an order of social metabolic reproduction, The controller of the social metabolic reproduction, which was our fate in the last few centuries. This can only be transcended, superseded in Marx’s sense through this laborious process of restructuring; which means that it has to deal with all three dimensions. It has to deal with the state in that the state as such has to be superseded. Marx talks about the “withering away of the state”; he does not say it is enough to overthrow the capitalist state - that was Bakunin’s fantasy, declaring that with a hundred or so revolutionaries we will overthrow the capitalist state and live happily ever after. This is not going to happen under any conceivable circumstance: the state as such must be superseded. How can this be done? Only through the transfer of the controlling functions of the state to the social body. For the state that has been developing in the last few centuries is the comprehensive political command structure of capital. Capital is constituted, on the one hand, through a multiplicity of capitals confronting one another in the market place; and the totality of social capital confronting labour, on the other hand. Both of these dimensions have to be addressed by socialists. The question is, how is it possible to transcend this vicious and destructive relationship?

The dynamic element in it is of course the antagonism between capital and labour - labour not simply as a sociological category, but as the structural antagonist of capital. This is a multifaceted problem. There are divisions within labour. Just as there is competition between capitalists, there is competition among labour. Let me quote from Marx:

“Competition separates individuals from one another - not only the bourgeois, but still more the workers - in spite of the fact that it brings them together. Hence every organised power standing over and against these isolated individuals, who live in conditions daily reproducing their isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. To demand the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that competition should not exist in this definite epoch of history or that the individuals should banish from their minds conditions over which in their isolation they have no control.”

This speaks very clearly of the predicament of labour in the capital relation, which is necessarily fragmented and in which workers are competing against themselves. If this was all that Marx had said, we could do nothing about it. But he also said that the fundamental antagonism is between capital and labour. It is not between worker and worker or capitalist and capitalist, but between capital and labour. It is because of this fundamental antagonism that all the fantasies of people’s capitalism, etc came to absolutely nothing; because this is an irreconcilable structural antagonism. Capital is dependent on labour and labour is dependent on capital; and in that sense it is a stalemate that we are talking about. But there is a dynamism which is determined by the limits of the capital system.

Capital is an expansion-orientated and accumulation-driven system. If its condition of expansionary functioning cannot be realised for whatever reason, the system is bound to collapse. That is what puts an end to the expectations of the capitalists and the apologists of capital who think that their system can go on for ever - that it will always renew itself. It has been modified in the 20th century and ‘market socialism’ can play a part in resolving the problems, but the system itself is eternal. However, it cannot be eternal because of the structural limits of the system, which cannot help being extremely destructive.

The capital system was always dynamic and from the very beginning it was global in its internal dynamism. Today there is a lot of talk about globalisation as the ultimate solution to all social contradictions. Yet capital was always global in that it could never acknowledge limits to its potential expansion. It had to embrace the totality of what was available: namely, the whole of the planet. This was the secret of its success. It is the only system of social metabolic reproduction in history which had this characteristic. But there is a limit to all forms of expansion and especially a limit to a system of expansion which is blind and irrational, which is incapable of rational considerations. The rationality of the capital system is minute and partial. It is a tiny rationality, which is containable within very limited objectives. It is totally incompatible with the requirements of meaningful planning because of its post festum determination of the socioeconomic reproduction process and because of its incorrigibly self-absoluting and ultimately destructive relationship to causality.

That is why the capital/labour antagonism is permanent - irrepressible, in the sense that is untranscendable as an antagonism. God knows how many attempts have been made in the last century and a half to produce some form of reconciliation between capital and labour, even in an institutional form. What is New Labour, if not a new way of trying to reconcile labour with capital within the permanent framework of the capital system? It is a grotesque idea, but it tells you a lot about the nature of the political movement which defines itself in terms of such tasks. Because of the irrepressible structural antagonism between capital and labour the dynamic goes on, and it is ultimately an explosive antagonism. Solution to it can only be found if it is positive. The ‘overthrow of capitalism’ does not solve anything. It can only make the first step in the direction of a positive solution. The solution must be positive according to Marx and all those who took Marx seriously.

Only through the positive restructuring process can the capital/labour antagonism - which remains alive in the post-capitalist order - be superseded. Thus the real target of socialist transformation is the replacement of the system in which the personifications of capital confront the personifications of labour - under capitalism or in post-capitalist societies - by what Marx described as the freely associated producers controlling their own life processes.