24.07.2002
Utopianism or materialism
Richard Sherratt's letter in the Weekly Worker elaborates a view of socialism that is fundamentally abstract, at odds with a materialist view of the world and owes much both to syndicalism and some utopian forms of reformist sectarianism that still linger around today (July 11). The central theoretical error comrade Sherratt puts forward is his equation of the political power of the bourgeoisie - which in capitalist society is in large measure an extension of its power as an economic class, as master of the private appropriation of the social surplus product as surplus value - with the political power of the proletariat. Comrade Sherratt believes that the political power of the proletariat similarly is a function of its economic power. Thus he writes: "Political power is only achieved via the possession of economic power - be it land, labour or capital. Without economic power political power is unachievable." Comrade Sherratt then compounds this error by also mechanically equating the economic power of the proletariat with the economic power of the bourgeoisie. But, while it is true that both these great classes possess considerable economic power in capitalist society, the one is fundamentally different from the other. The way in which that economic power is projected politically is also radically different - a product, in fact, of the radical difference between the social functions that each exercise in capitalist society itself. The economic power of the bourgeoisie is the power of ownership within the framework of a system of generalised commodity production. As capitalist society develops, the bourgeois mode of production leaves behind the previous system of manufacture with its relatively modest scale of enterprise (the so-called capitalism of free competition) in favour of monopoly capitalism, with the growth of finance capital, of enormous financial institutions that play a kind of organising role for capital as a whole within the framework of the capitalist nation-state. Capital also, of course, has a tendency to spill over the confines of national borders - the contradiction between the existence of such borders and the need of monopoly capitalism for expansion without limits resulted twice in the past century in generalised war between the major contenders for domination of the world market. Today, of course, in a rather different context, we have the phenomenon of so-called globalisation - under the hegemony of one overarching capitalist power (the United States), qualitatively superior in military power to all the others put together. In a period where all systemic rivals to this state of affairs appear to have evaporated, we have an unprecedented growth of apparently internationalised capitalist institutions. Whether or not so-called 'globalised' capitalism has really outgrown the limitations of the individual capitalist-imperialist nations-states from which it originated has yet to be historically tested - but such institutions as the European Union at the very least portend a future in which the nationally based imperialist powers of the past are superseded by a potential new conflict of regional imperialist pan-national superpowers. That is a historical possibility, not yet fully determined. But all these matters are strategic questions for the proletariat, which have to be addresses as political questions in order for the proletariat to master the politics of the epoch in which we live. This is where comrade Sherratt's schema is fundamentally flawed. As I have pointed out, he equates the economic power of the proletariat with the economic power of the bourgeoisie. But the economic power of the bourgeoisie is that of the dominant class, able to shape society according to its own interests. Hence all the institutions elaborated above are either formalisations, or means to promote the interests, of the bourgeoisie as both an economic and a political class. Meanwhile, wielding economic power alone, the proletariat is condemned to be a passive spectator of all these events - at most the economic power of a politically passive proletariat is a factor that the bourgeoisie must make some precautionary allowance for in its moulding of political and economic developments in its own interests as a class. The economic power of the proletariat under capitalist society consists in the fact that, in material terms, the source of all value is ultimately the labour of the working class. But the only way it can really exercise this power within the framework of capitalist society is through strikes: ie, the withdrawal of its labour power, for a necessarily limited period, from the usage of the capitalists. Since, by its lack of property in the means of production, the proletariat is compelled to work in order to survive, ultimately the strike weapon alone is limited in its ability to produce gains for the working class. Further than that, it is necessary for the working class to master politics, to take political power off the capitalists in order to make itself the ruling class in both the political and the economic sense. For, while the bourgeoisie holds political power, it holds the dominant economic power also. The bourgeoisie will ultimately be able to break - through starving people back to work and through the use of its monopoly of armed force - any strike that refuses to go beyond purely 'economic' objectives. Thus comrade Sherratt is exactly wrong when he concludes that, "The method to achieve socialism then is through a general strike. The working class take over workplaces and proclaim them to be social property and through this they set up workers' councils which become the political manifestation of the workers' economic power." A general strike poses point blank to the ruling class: who is the master of the country? Who will prevail? The bourgeoisie will react to a general strike by means of some sort of political manoeuvre - either it will use an existing rotten misleadership of the working class to betray the general strike, as happened in 1926 in Britain, or it will make far-reaching concessions to the working class in an economic sense, in order to maintain the reins of political power in its hands, and thus strike back later. Classic examples of this are France in 1936, as well as the revolutionary situation in Germany at the end of World War I. What is most dangerous about comrade Sherratt's crude equation of a general strike and the creation of workers' councils with the 'economic' power of the working class on the one hand, and his dismissal of the 'political' power as a simple function of economic power on the other, is that its logic would disarm the working class before the political power of the bourgeoisie. Workers' councils (Räte) came into existence as a result of mass, semi-insurrectionary strikes in post-World War I Germany - but political power remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie because of the failure of the workers' councils to take power themselves. But in taking power into their own hands, the councils themselves would be forming a kind of a state - a state of the type that actually came into existence in an incoherent, embryonic and short-lived form in Paris in 1871, and which took a rather more coherent form in the major cities of Russia for a few, all too short, years beginning in October 1917, before the defeat of the international revolution and its isolation in a vast country with a largely medieval level of culture and economic development caused the destruction of the national revolution. Comrade Sherratt's semi-anarchist critique of so-called 'state socialism' effectively forbids the working class from taking power. That is what it means in practice to equate any kind of state with the bureaucratic state of Stalinism. In taking political power into their hands, the workers' councils become the organs of the democratic control of society by the mass of the working population. They also constitute the locus of organisation of this working population, otherwise known as the working class itself, to safeguard its supremacy over the old exploiting class and transform the society economically so that the economic basis of such an exploiting class itself ceases to exist. That is not any kind of bureaucratic state, but a semi-state, that is already in the process of withering away, and which ceases to exercise any state-like, coercive functions to the extent that its task of eliminating the material basis for the existence of exploiting classes is successful. Thus there is no such thing as 'state socialism' in the sense that comrade Sherratt means; there is only the political power of the working class. Comrade Sherratt's point about the continued existence of prices, and thereby some sort of domination, under this presumed 'state socialism', is a product of some degree of ignorance of the real economic history and record of both scientific socialism and of the various Stalinist bureaucratic perversions that have unfortunately disgraced the name of socialism in the last century. It is materially impossible to decree the abolition of money - rather money is an economic form that, like the state, withers away when scarcity itself withers away: that is, when society - to paraphrase Marx's words - crosses the boundary between the kingdom of necessity and the kingdom of freedom, and reaches out towards communism itself. In the absence of such a material basis in the form of the development of the productive forces, money is a social relation that will continue to reproduce itself from the necessities of life itself. In fact, far from the immediate abolition of "price relations" - ie, money - being a sign of a genuinely free socialist society (as opposed to 'state socialism'), the artificial suppression of money in the absence of the material basis for its redundancy would require the coercion of society itself by a ferociously repressive state power. Those Stalinist states that most blatantly sought to jump over economic and social reality in this manner were in fact the most repressive of all, the most redolent of all that comrade Sherratt rightly finds most repulsive and mistakenly identifies with so-called 'state socialism': Russia under Stalin's five-year plans, Mao's China under the so-called 'Great Leap Forward' are cases in point; the ultimate example being Pol Pot's Cambodia, which, as is well known, decreed the immediate and complete abolition of money. The programme of scientific socialism is, contrary to comrade Sherratt's anarchistic prejudices, in no way based on some kind of 'state socialist' programme or the enslavement of the working class to some new bureaucratic behemoth state. Communists seek the liberation of humanity from the shackles of the state - that is our most fundamental aim. But the state is only a tool of class society itself - as materialists we understand that only the abolition of class society in practice, and not merely some act of voluntarism or state decree (the two are often synonymous in practice), can really bring about human liberation and an end to all forms of coercion, both political and 'economic'. Ian Donovan
Worker