03.09.2008
Taking Stalinism seriously
What does 'production for need' mean? Mike Macnair responds to Tony Clark
In this series of three articles I propose to respond to the June 19 article in these pages by comrade Tony Clark of the Communist Party Alliance (and Stalin Society?). It is worth doing so because, though comrade Clark’s ideas belong in the dustbin of history, they are a version of what are probably still the majority views of the global left.
In the process (in the next article) I will review a recent book by David Priestland, Stalinism and the politics of mobilisation (2007). The combination is posed because Priestland addresses some of the same issues as Clark, albeit from a very different angle: the Weberian assumption that Marx’s ideas are utopian, and the belief that this explains Stalinism.
Comrade Clark, in contrast, adheres to ‘Stalinism’. He judges - in fact, correctly - that the ‘anti-Stalinism’ of Khrushchev and his co-thinkers was pro-capitalist, tended to undermine the USSR, and hence led to 1991. He rejects Trotsky’s ideas on the basis of the standard (and false) Stalinist critiques of them, and does not consider at all Menshevik and Kautskyite or ‘left’ and ‘council’ communist critiques of the Soviet regime. Hence, ‘Stalinism’, in the sense of upholding pre-1954 official Soviet ideology, is his tabula in naufragium, his plank to cling to in the shipwreck of ‘official’ communism.
In this article I will begin with a central issue in comrade Clark’s arguments: the meaning of ‘socialism’, on which comrade Clark - like ‘official communists’ generally - breaks with the absolute core of Marx’s ideas, the perspective of workers’ power, in favour of an ethical or utopian socialism. The next step is to discuss Priestland’s arguments. It will then be possible to return to three other features of comrade Clark’s arguments - the question of ‘bureaucracy’; judging the global role of the USSR; and the case against Trotsky.
Production for need
Comrade Clark writes that “the essence of socialism is production for need”.
The expression, ‘production for need’, is a common way of expressing what the left stands for, and it has a sort of Marxist warrant in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme (1875). In 1875 it stood in opposition to “the Lassallean catchword” that the workers should obtain the “undiminished proceeds of labour”. The old British Labour Party clause four - “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry” - was a variant of Lassalle’s slogan. It stands opposed to - for example - redistribution of property to make everyone into a peasant or artisan, equalisation of shares through taxation and various other such utopias.
But it is necessary to quote at least the immediate paragraph of Marx’s Critique in which it is used: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’!”1
The flags are there - almost the whole of the paragraph - to emphasise and re-emphasise the point Marx is making: that even on the best possible assumptions we do not pass immediately from capitalism to ‘production for need’.
In fact, the reference to the overcoming of the division of labour in the first sentence makes clear that what Marx means by “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is a restatement of what was already in The German ideology (1845): “… in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”2
As Marx makes clear, to make this possible requires that “the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly”. In other words, it requires a major increase in social productivity compared to where we are now, enabling a higher proportion of individuals’ lives to be spent on general education, on retraining for new tasks, and on self-chosen creative activities.
Comrade Clark advocates an “ecological perspective within socialism”, and says that the “consumerist conception of socialism” was “always implicit in the old socialist tradition”. It may be that he means by this to accept the objections to Marx’s arguments on this issue as ‘productivist’, ‘Promethean’ and ‘unsustainable’, which have been made by several greens, and from within the traditional left by Gregor Benton in 1989.3
My opinion, for what it is worth, is that these green arguments are wrong. If we break with the profit-driven system and apply resources to democratically chosen projects, we could, I think, within a century or two provide the material conditions globally for overcoming the ‘division of labour’ in Marx’s sense: that is, lifelong human specialisation on particular skills and tasks. And we could do so without breaking the bounds of the global ecosystem, but on the contrary could repair the damage that has already been done.
Nonetheless, this may turn out to be impossible. And in any case it would certainly not be the immediate result of overthrowing capitalism worldwide (let alone attempting to replace capitalism in a single country, which would result merely in another disaster like those of the 20th century). There are therefore unavoidable choices to be made about the application of limited resources.
Choices
The problem which is then posed by a “society based on production for need” is: who decides what counts as “need”, and which needs are to be given priority?
“Need” is a slippery word which can have an expansive or a restrictive sense.4 The expansive sense requires Marx’s interpretation of ‘production for need’: ie, a society with very high productivity, in which the division of labour is overcome. But suppose we adopt the restrictive sense, and say simply that people need food, clothes, housing, access to transport and communication, education, health services and public health measures, and so on. These basic needs are very extensively unsatisfied in the capitalist world. On the other hand, a great deal of what is currently offered for sale in the capitalist market cannot be said to be things we need in the most expansive sense of the word. They may, indeed, be things we need not to have: for example, cigarettes, urban 4x4s, and instruments and techniques of torture. In this limited sense comrade Clark’s critique of ‘consumerism’ is entirely justified.
Within the restrictive sense of need, however, there remain unavoidable choices. To give a large-scale example. Suppose that we overthrew capitalist rule worldwide. Whether the greens are right that we need to cut down the ‘human footprint’ on the earth and hence reduce resource expenditure, or whether an increase in productivity which does not destroy the earth is possible in the long run, material resources would initially remain limited. We would have to make choices about priorities. What is the relative priority between improving transport infrastructure, education or health services? What is the relative priority between improving healthcare for the old in Britain, and improving basic-level healthcare in Latin America? Either choice will be a decision to use production for need: profit would not enter into the question. But the choice will nonetheless have to be faced.
How will the choice be made? The CPGB’s approach is to say that we will have to make them democratically; that that is the only way in which the working class can effectively take decisions. Hence (among other reasons) our very strong emphasis on the struggle for extreme democracy as the centre of our political programme.
But the majority tradition of the 20th century left, including the Stalinists, was that the choices should be made by ‘experts’. It makes no difference whether these ‘experts’ are to be technical experts, or ‘cadres’ (political ‘experts’): they have still been taken away from the people ultimately affected. A trivial example, dating back to the 1970s: a local council decided it would be beneficial to council tenants to live in an architect-designed block; the expert architect designed the block with amber windows; tenant complaints (they wanted clear windows) were unavailing.
It is an accumulation of petty ‘expert’ stupidities of this sort, together with real cuts in public expenditure leading to cuts in repairs, etc, on council housing, which undermined mass support for council housing and opened the political way for the Tory ‘right to buy’ legislation. Bureaucratic ‘collective’ decision-making is so unattractive as to make pro-capitalist ideologues’ offer of increased individual decision-making - part of what comrade Clark calls ‘consumerism’ - look attractive.
The Soviet and eastern European regimes were, and the Chinese, Vietnamese and North Korean regimes remain, much more extreme examples of this problem: that the broad masses are denied the right to make decisions, and the result is bureaucratic stupidities which do not conform to people’s actual needs.
The result in fact was not production for human need at all. In the Stalin-era USSR, all other needs were subordinated to the needs of the state for arms production: hence the priority accorded to heavy industry. It is grotesque to imagine that the Marx who in 1871 characterised the Paris Commune as “a revolution against the state itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life”5 would have thought that the USSR was an example of ‘production for need’.
Resentment about subordination to decisions arbitrarily taken by ‘experts’ is partly because of the bad results of the decisions. But it is also, in fact, an aspect of human basic needs. Status inequality is, independent of absolute wealth or poverty, a cause of ill-health.6 Since the phenomenon is independent of absolute wealth or poverty, hierarchical relations of decision-making, in which some people are permanently subordinated to others, are implicated in this problem just as much as monetary income inequality. In addition, of course, permanent relations of domination and subordination will tend to produce income inequality, since the decision-makers will tend to favour themselves: as already appeared in the USSR in 1922, with the creation of special material privileges for ‘cadres’.7
Production genuinely aimed at the basic human need for health would therefore involve ‘republican equality’: ie, the end of permanent relations of domination and subordination between humans.8 This goal, in turn, involves - as Marx points out in the Critique of the Gotha programme, quoted above - the end of “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour”.
Workers’ power
In comrade Clark’s account we can leap immediately from capitalism to socialism - defined as ‘production for need’ - in a single country. As we have already seen, this was certainly not Marx’s view. So what came before the development of full communism for Marx and Engels?
Actually, the answer is that they spoke mainly not of what full communism would be like, but of what would immediately succeed capitalist rule. And that was: the political rule of the proletariat as a class over the other classes (surviving capitalists, petty proprietors, managers, lumpen class).
Thus, in the Communist manifesto we find the formula: “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”9 Of the Paris Commune, The civil war in France says this: “Its true secret was this: it was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.”10 In 1890, Engels wrote: “Of late, the social democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.”11
In 1894, a letter of Engels to Turati contains a direct quotation from the Communist manifesto. After this direct quotation, he paraphrases: “Consequently they [socialists] take an active part in all the phases of the development of the struggle between the two classes without in so doing losing sight of the fact that these phases are only just so many preliminary steps to the first great aim: the conquest of political power by the proletariat as the means towards a new organisation of society.”12
In general - the Critique of the Gotha programme is an apparent exception - Marx and Engels were quite concrete about immediate proposals for working class rule, but avoided speculation about the shape of the future communist society beyond its broadest outlines; and they criticised the utopians of one sort or another for precisely such speculation and detailed blueprints. Thus in The civil war in France:
“If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production - what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism?
“The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old, collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.”13
‘First phase’
An exception, which appears to discuss the shape of socialism, is found in a passage of the Critique of the Gotha programme, coming immediately before the section quoted earlier. Here Marx postulates what has been called a ‘lower stage’ of communism, “the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society”. This “first phase” came in the Second International to be called ‘socialism’, and in ‘official communism’ a rigid distinction was drawn between this ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. ‘Socialism’, meaning the “first phase”, the USSR claimed to have achieved. ‘Communism’, meaning exclusively the higher stage, it did not claim to have achieved.
In this “first phase”, the means of production are owned in common, and hence “... no-one can give anything except his labour, and ..., on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption”.
The total social product is first allocated to common purposes: “First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.” Then, “First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion, as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc: in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.”
What remains is then distributed, not in proportion to need, but in proportion to work contributed. “… the individual producer receives back from society - after the deductions have been made - exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
“Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values ... the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.
“Hence, equal right here is still in principle bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
“In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour.
“But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.
“Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only - for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.”14
There is a strong case for taking this passage less seriously than it has been taken both by Marxists and by academic Marxologists.
In the first place, the whole of this part of the Critique of the Gotha programme is not an argument for inserting positive Marxist formulations in the programme, but for removing Lassallean formulations from it. In particular, this passage is part of a reductio ad absurdum of the Lassallean formulae that “the proceeds of labour belong undiminished, with equal right, to all members of society” (gehört der Ertrag der Arbeit unverkürzt, nach gleichem Rechte, allen Gesellschaftsgliedern) and “a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour” (gerechter Verteilung des Arbeitsertrags).15 Marx is concerned to show that ‘equal right’ or a ‘fair’, ‘just’, or ‘equal’ distribution would at the end of the day be unequal, so that the Lassallean slogan is self-contradictory. He reaches the conclusion, the payoff of the argument, in the last paragraph quoted. There is therefore little reason to suppose that the ‘labour certificates’ idea is actually a positive proposal for organising distribution.
Secondly, the economic analysis is sloppy: unsurprising in a negative critique, written at speed, but a good ground for supposing that the passage is no more than a negative critique. Marx most unusually speaks of the cost of labour (“he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost” - “und zieht ... aus dem gesellschaftlichen Vorrat von Konsumtionsmitteln soviel heraus, als gleich viel Arbeit kostet”) rather than the cost of labour-power. The distinction is fundamental to Marx’s Capital: ‘labour’ does not, in fact, have a cost, and the ‘cost of labour’ is actually either the reproduction cost of labour-power, or the price of labour-power. We could re-read this as the cost of the products drawn by the labourer from the social stock, assessed purely in their labour inputs, but such a reading would be inconsistent with Marx’s criticism, at the very beginning of the Critique, of the Lassallean claim that “Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture”.
The same issue has a more fundamental aspect. The analysis of the division of the total social product proceeds on the basis that the claim of the labourers on this product is a residual claim. First deduct so much for replacement of the means of production, funds for growth, insurance, administrative costs, public services and payments to those unable to work; then what remains is divided among the labourers in proportion to their work. As part of a reductio ad absurdum of the Lassallean slogan this makes perfect sense. But from the point of view expounded in Capital the total social labour-power is just as much a means of production which has to be reproduced as the material means (machines, buildings, etc).
At least the minimum cost of reproduction of social labour-power, including not merely the cost of bare subsistence, but also the cost of acquisition by workers of necessary skills, therefore should appear as a necessary deduction from the ‘distributable fund’ before the “additional portion for expansion of production”. The accounting/distributive scheme of the “first phase” is therefore simply untenable (except insofar as it is internal critique of the coherence of Lassalleanism on the basis of Lassalle’s own assumptions).
What, then, are we to make of “the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society”, and which is still, at least partially, within “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right”?
The answer is that it is, if it is anything at all, the outcome of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx’s argument about this “first phase” supposes the continued existence of what is, in substance, the relation of wage labour, and hence of the proletariat as a class. “It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else.” But what is meant by this is that the other classes have been absorbed into the proletariat. By virtue of the proletariat becoming and remaining the ruling class (meaning the ultimate decision-makers in society) it becomes more attractive to work for wages than to run a small family business or farm; and at the end of this process there is nothing left in society except wage-workers, with the result that classes cease to exist.
Strange as it may seem, we can already see a tendency in this direction in contemporary British society: according to a 2007 survey, 57% of the population think of themselves as working class, including many people who before World War II would have self-identified as middle class.16 If the working class ruled, the tendency would be much stronger.
The heart and centre of Marx’s and Engels’ political arguments was the struggle for “the conquest of political power by the proletariat”. The discussion of the “first phase” of communism in the Critique of the Gotha programme, which appears superficially to tell a different story, turns out on close analysis to be a variant of the same story. The transition beyond class society is through working class rule, to everyone becoming wage-workers, so that classes as such cease to exist: thereby, in turn, putting us on the road to overcoming the ‘division of labour’ and “the antithesis between mental and physical labour”. Why is there this constant emphasis on working class politics?
A little earlier in the Critique, Marx wrote: “… equally incontestable is this other proposition: ‘In proportion as labour develops socially, and becomes thereby a source of wealth and culture, poverty and destitution develop among the workers, and wealth and culture among the non-workers.’ This is the law of all history hitherto. What, therefore, had to be done here, instead of setting down general phrases about ‘labour’ and ‘society’, was to prove concretely how in present capitalist society the material, etc conditions have at last been created which enable and compel the workers to lift this social curse” (emphasis added).
The point is that capitalism for the first time since the end of ‘primitive communist’ hunter-gatherer society makes communism possible. It does so, on the one hand, because the development of productivity makes it possible to go beyond the division of labour. It does so, on the other, because capitalism both socialises the major means of production and throws up a class - the proletariat - which lacks property in the means of production.
In pre-capitalist society communism is desirable because it is more consistent with the basics of human nature than class society. Witness the persistent reappearance in many periods and cultures of utopian communist ideas. But it is impossible, for two reasons. The first is that the economy is insufficiently productive to free the large majority of people from immediate labour to enable them to acquire the skills of, and participate in, social-decision-making.17 The second is that communism requires social decision-making; and this is inconsistent with small-scale private ownership and petty family-based farming and artisan production. Capitalism removes both obstacles to communism.
The proletariat as a class is the class whose growth expresses this transformative possibility. Workers, because they are separated from the means of production, are forced to create voluntary associations - trade unions, tenants’ associations, cooperatives, political parties - to defend their interests. These voluntary associations foreshadow a future world of the “freely associated producers”. It is therefore through the class rule of the proletariat that it is possible to pass to the end of classes and communism.
‘Official communism’
‘Official communism’, and with it comrade Clark, breaks with this fundamental core of Marx’s and Engels’ policy. The process of the break will be the subject of the next article, my review of Priestland on Stalinism. The expression of the break has two sides. First, ‘official communists’ characterise the USSR and similar countries as ‘socialist’ when there were transparently social classes in these countries, so that the most that these regimes could possibly have been was the dictatorship of the proletariat, the political power of the working class over the other classes (in fact, they were not that either).
Second, in the politics of the capitalist countries, the immediate alternative to capitalism is the political power of the working class. ‘Official communists’ instead offer a ‘socialism’. This ‘socialism’ ignores the problem of working class political rule and attempts to create a cross-class coalition for a morally better society. Clark’s ‘eco-socialist’ approach is one variant; Respect is another; the ‘official’ CPGB’s ‘broad democratic alliance’ was a third.
This break is in the face of overwhelming evidence confirming Marx’s and Engels’ original idea that it is only capitalism and the rise of the proletariat that makes communism possible, and that the only road to communism is through the class rule of the proletariat over the other classes. The USSR and its fall (and the fall with it of the eastern European and South Yemen satellite states), and the market turns in China and Vietnam (and most recently Cuba) are part of that evidence. It is to this question that we must next turn; and I will do so by reviewing Priestland.
Notes
1. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
2. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4
3. ‘Marxism and natural limits’ New Left Review first series, No178.
4. Cf. my review of Ian Fraser’s Hegel, Marx: the concept of need (1998): ‘Hegelian pitfalls’ Weekly Worker July 31 2003; and also Norman Geras’s (in my opinion unsatisfactory) discussion of Marx’s formula, in ‘The controversy about Marx and justice’ (1989): www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/geras.htm
5. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch01.htm
6. R Wilkinson The impact of inequality: how to make sick societies healthier (2005); or outline summary at www.nationalestatechurches.org/Wilkinson%20Conf%2006.pdf
7. A Podsheldolkin, ‘The origins of the Stalinist bureaucracy - some new historical facts’: www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/podsheld.htm
8. For the use of ‘republican equality’ here cf P Pettit Republicanism (1997), though Pettit’s policy prescriptions are in substance social democratic. Compare also Marx’s comment in ‘Instructions for delegates of the provisional general council’ (1866): “We acknowledge the cooperative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show that the present pauperising and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.”
9. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
10. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
11. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm
12. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm
13. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
14. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
15. English text at source cited above; German text from www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels/1875/kritik/randglos.htm . Emphases added.
16. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6295743.stm
17. Peasants can self-manage their villages, artisans their local guilds. But both are part of larger divisions of labour, which they are not able to self-manage.