18.03.2010

Less radical than clause four

A trained economist and computer scientist with a political background in Maoism, Paul Cockshott damns the CPGB's Draft programme as being to the right of Labour governments past and present

There are definite positive aspects to the CPGB’s Draft programme (Weekly Worker supplement, February 11). In particular it is strongly pro-European, breaking with the narrow nationalism that some previously associated with communism have espoused. It is strongly pro-democracy, though it has a rather limited and conventional idea of what democracy is, but, since I have already gone into that, and I do not want to waste space rehashing these issues (see ‘Democracy or oligarchy’ Weekly Worker October 8 2009).

A programme is a sequence of steps, the following of which will achieve some predefined goal. A programme can be judged on what its goals are, and on the adequacy of the steps that it proposes to achieve them.

Let me concentrate on the economic goals in the draft, and the adequacy of the measures proposed. Socialism has always been about running the economy in a different way - politics has been the means to that end.

The draft splits the programme into two phases - a minimum programme and a maximum programme. There are historical precedents for this. In the late 19th century socialist groups in countries like Russia that were governed by autocracies had a minimum goal of a democratic republic with various social welfare measures that by late 20th century standards were quite modest. Their maximum programme was the achievement of socialism, which was seen as something which would come later.

This late 19th century structure has been revived, with a minimum programme having as its goal “winning the battle for democracy and ensuring that the market and the principle of capitalist profit is subordinated to the principle of human need”, which is seen as being “technically feasible under capitalism. However, it can only be fully realised through the working class taking power - not only in Britain, but on a continental European scale.”

The longer-term goal is given as: “Next, again logically, comes the tasks of the CPGB in terms of the worldwide transition to communism. Here is the maximum programme.”

Let us look at what the first goal means. The CPGB wants the working class to take power across Europe, and on that basis to ensure that the market and principle of capitalist profit is subordinate to the principle of human need. And at the same time they assert that it is technically feasible to do this under capitalism. The logic of this is that even in the event of communists having taken power on an all-Europe basis, their European economic aims are compatible with the continued existence of capitalism. Progress beyond capitalism is relegated to the long-term future, when communist parties hold power on a worldwide scale.

The economic goals that the draft sets are thus very modest. For the foreseeable future the draft seeks no more than a reformed capitalism - what used to be called the mixed economy. It is much less radical than what 20th century European communists aimed at: the replacement of capitalist economies with socialist economies. A close equivalent in economic terms would be the 1940s Labour Party or the Chinese CP in the 1950s or the Communist Party of China again in the 1980s. The draft says that only those capitalists who “rebel” should have their firms confiscated. This is what the CPC initially did: only those capitalists who sided with the Guomindang lost their property. But, since shareholders cannot collectively rebel, all public companies would be safe under a communist government.

In all these historical cases the goal was a predominantly market economy with a significant state-owned sector, but where the characteristic features of capitalism - money, wage labour, profit and marked differences in class and income - persist.

That communists even in the EU, arguably the most advanced part of the whole world economy, should have pulled back from advocating a socialist economy is a testimony to the ideological power of neo-classical and neoliberal economics. These people have become convinced that taking the means of production into public ownership or attempting to eliminate exploitation would be economically disastrous. Indeed the abolition of exploitation is not even given as an explicit objective in the Draft programme.

It is no secret that the principal founder of communism, Karl Marx, gave the best years of his life to the writing of Das Kapital, his analysis of how capitalism worked. Marx argued that the value of commodities derived from the labour required to make them, and that under capitalism only a portion of the value created by workers is paid to them as wages. He said that employees are only paid for the first part of the working day; in the second half they work for their employer for free. Property incomes like profit, interest and rent arose from the unpaid labour. By exploitation he meant this process by which people are forced to do unpaid work.

Marx’s concept of exploitation is completely absent from the Draft programme. Yes, the word is used. It says that backward countries are viciously exploited, that nature is an object of exploitation, that the economy is distorted by exploitation. But this is just using the word as a general term of moral condemnation.

Does this matter? Yes, because without an understanding of exploitation and how it is inherent in the wages system the authors are unable to explain:

(a) why it is in the immediate interest of workers to abolish the wages system;

(b) how to go about doing this.

Instead the economic objectives they set are either very modest or very vague. So they say: “The political economy of the working class brings with it not only higher wages and shorter hours. It brings health services, social security systems, pensions, universal primary and secondary education ...”

Full fruits

While it is true that the labour movement aimed at all these things in the past, it greatly understates the objectives of socialist political economy. Indeed those points above were also advocated and supported by European Christian democracy. The old clause four of the Labour Party, despite being written by a Fabian, gave a clearer and more accurate summary of Marx’s economic aims than today’s lengthy draft:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Here we have the elimination of exploitation (“full fruits of their industry”), egalitarianism (“most equitable distribution”), common ownership, and - stretching it a little - a consciously planned economy.

Today’s draft comes out as basically against public ownership. Their section on the economy starts out by condemning nationalisation: “From the point of view of world revolution, programmes for wholesale nationalisation are today objectively reactionary. The historic task of the working class is to fully socialise the giant transnational corporations, not break them up into inefficient national units.”

Remember the context. They are talking about a programme that they hope that a European CP will put into effect once being elected to power on an all-European basis - so by nationalisation they must mean taking into European public ownership. If one was talking about the old nation-states then their point may some validity in the most technically advanced industries: aircraft, cars and semi-conductors spring to mind, but these are only a part of the economy.

Having initially damned nationalisation, the authors backtrack and say that they support it for banking and the basic infrastructure. In which case why not say that they favour nationalisation apart from those industries where development costs are too high for individual countries to afford them?

If we look at what they think should be nationalised - “land, banks and financial services, along with basic infrastructure, such as public transport, electricity, gas and water supplies” - it is markedly to the right of Labour governments past and present. Alistair Darling has nationalised a large part of the banking system. In the past public transport, electricity, gas and water were nationalised. Under Labour governments so too were coal, oil (BNOC), shipbuilding, steel, parts of the car industry, road transport, air transport, the health system, etc. In view of their currently limited goals for nationalisation, the draft must agree that the Tories did the right thing when they privatised much of this. Indeed, since the draft does not include the NHS as something which should still be nationalised, they must favour privatisation there too.

They are basically against public ownership, saying: “Universal nationalisation, forced collectivisation and flat-wage egalitarianism are ruled out - historic experience certainly shows that they lead to disaster.” The whole tone of this is reminiscent of the Labour right in the 1960s. Forced collectivisation, in Britain? In a country where the peasantry was dispossessed by the landlords three centuries ago?

It is just put in as a scare to distract readers from the objection to public ownership and egalitarianism. Which country has ever applied “flat-wage egalitarianism” and found it to be disastrous?

What they are trying to cover up here is that there is very little egalitarianism of any sort in their programme. For instance there is nothing at all on taxation. At least the old Labour Party tried to achieve egalitarianism by steeply progressive income tax. Since then the income tax system has been shifted to favour high earners, with regressive taxes like VAT and council tax becoming more important. As far as the draft is concerned, this Tory tax structure is not worth mentioning.

And when has nationalisation led to disaster? It is pretty clear that the denationalisation of industry in the eastern bloc after 1989 did result in a disastrous recession, but what disasters followed nationalisations in, say, the UK or Czechoslovakia in the 40s?

Nationalisation is not the only route to common ownership. There are other more direct and radical courses that can be taken.

Emotive

What I object to is the way the authors make the sort of unsubstantiated and emotive criticisms of socialist economics that one is used to from neoliberals. They seem to believe that unemployment is inevitable until capitalism has been abolished, and since they do not actually propose any measures at all to abolish capitalism, they say that unemployment cannot be blamed on government policy. This is to concede far too much to rightwing economics. The Labour Party had, from 1945 to the late 60s, a policy of full employment, which it largely achieved.

This full employment policy greatly strengthened the labour movement and raised the social influence of the working class. Its abandonment from the end of the 70s involved very definite changes in economic policy that can be blamed on subsequent governments - in particular the removal of exchange controls and prices and incomes policies. Instead there was a deliberate neoliberal policy of encouraging unemployment to discipline labour. The economic mechanisms that allowed full employment in the 40s-60s are still there in the policy arsenal. The refusal to use them is entirely a matter of class politics. But it seems that the CP would be resigned to seeing high levels of unemployment and capitalist exploitation continuing well after they came to power.

When this policy was adopted by the Chinese in the 50s it was an understandable, if ultimately dangerous, given the undeveloped state of their economy. The justification that the capitalists were needed to accelerate industrialisation can hardly be used in Britain. Instead the authors justify leaving most of the economy in private hands on the odd grounds that “socialisation of production is dependent on and can only proceed in line with the withering away of skill monopolies of the middle class and hence the division of labour”.

Nonsense on stilts!

Production in a capitalist economy is already socialised. Production is for society in general via the intermediary of the market. Production is already social. Appropriation is private - and not only private, but privately monopolised by one class.

Bill Gates, Lakshmi Mittal, and Richard Branson are not billionaires because of the “skill monopolies of the middle class”, but because capitalist property relations mean that they are the legitimate owners of the surplus value created by workers they employ. Bill Gates is not rich because of his undoubted middle class professional skills. Such skills would at most command him a modest wage differential. He is rich because he can afford to employ tens of thousands of other people with middle class skills to work for him.

The authors confuse three quite distinct issues:

1. How to eliminate capitalist exploitation - this has to be the key question for socialists.

2. In what way the market can be replaced as a mechanism of economic coordination.

3. How to eliminate class differences between the working class and the middle class.

Let us look at each of them.

Capitalist exploitation rests on wage-slavery and can be eliminated by abolishing wage-slavery, as chattel slavery was abolished in the past. It requires only a legal change to the effect that net value added is the property of employees, not employers. When slavery was abolished in 1833 compensation was paid by the state to slave-owners. In the case of an abolition of wage-slavery no compensation arises, since the employers are deprived of no property, but merely of the opportunity to use property in an exploitative way. Secondary forms of exploitation like interest can be substantially abolished by making interest debts no longer legally enforceable.

Eliminating the market as a coordination mechanism requires the introduction of a society-wide system of time-accounting. Marx and Engels wrote about this and experiments in how to do it were carried out in Czechoslovakia in the 60s and more recently by Stamher at the Statistischen Bundesampt in the 90s. The technology it needs is now clearly present in the internet and modern databases.

The authors speak loosely of eliminating the division of labour, as if this was either a necessary or desirable goal. Eliminate the division of labour and you eliminate civilised society. Without a division of labour we would regress to the Neolithic.

What the draft presumably means is the elimination of lifelong class divisions between mental and manual workers. Well, if that is the case they should propose concrete measures to achieve this. Albert and Hahnel, for example, propose systems of rotating roles, though a precondition for this is a general raising of educational levels.

The programme does contain some good progressive proposals on state education, but strikingly it says absolutely nothing about private education. Any socialist government that was serious about eliminating class differences could not overlook the role of fee-paying schools in reproducing the class hierarchy.

In terms of economic policy the draft attempts to place the CP in a position which was historically occupied by the centre-right of the Labour Party. I would not criticise this unless I was convinced that there was a real economic alternative, that a radically egalitarian socialist economy was a realistic objective. I and others have been arguing for years that Marx’s vision of an economy without exploitation and without money is now a practical objective. For detailed arguments about how this can be done, read Towards a new socialism by Cockshott and Cottrell or Parecon: life after capitalism by Albert.

For a transition programme based on these principles to contrast with the CPGB draft see www.socialismoxxi.org/Transition Program english.pdf