27.10.2010

Debating transition and neoliberalism

Nick Rogers outlines two key differences with the perspectives of the CPGB's Draft programme

Open debate is the life-blood of the workers’ movement. It provides the opportunity to test theories, and the strategies and tactics that arise from them, against a changing world. It is the strongest defence against organisational stagnation. For a communist party no debate is more important than that around the programme, for it is in this document that the party sets out its strategic perspectives.

The CPGB published a redrafted Draft programme back in February.^[1] Since then a number of criticisms of the redraft have appeared both in the form of letters and full-length articles. Last month Jack Conrad - in the first contribution from a member of the Provisional Central Committee - published three articles in the Weekly Worker replying to criticisms of the new draft.^[2] Specifically, Jack took on articles by Paul Cockshott and me.

In this single article I will respond to some of the criticisms Jack makes of my contributions, offering further clarification of my position. In doing so, I aim to highlight what seem to me to be two key areas of theoretical difference between us and touch on the programmatic implications of these differences. The two areas are the interaction between ‘decline’ and neoliberalism, and the transition to communism.

Decline

In one article^[3] Jack Conrad accuses me of a “surprising failure to grasp” the concept of decline, along with those of “surplus working population and subsistence”. In another^[4] he suggests that I dismiss “the idea that British capitalism shows signs of relative weakness and that the entire capitalist system is in secular decline. Sadly not essential laws and tendencies, but strike days, trade union membership, privatisations and other statistics are cited as evidence. Like comrade Cockshott, he too maintains that our Draft programme is ‘wrong’ when it states that unemployment is an inevitable by-product of capitalism.”

I do not think that these charges are borne out by a considered reading of what I actually wrote.

To deal with the most important accusation first, it is hardly the case that I deny the reality of “secular decline”. I did not write about decline at length in my articles on the Draft programme, so perhaps I should sketch out my perspective. I see capitalism from the latter part of the 19th century as responding to two long-term trends.

The first is the tendency towards the concentration of ownership - ie, monopoly (or, perhaps more accurately, oligopoly) - going along with a rising organic composition of capital (ie, more investment in machines and fixed capital). The larger quantity of capital required of capitalists to enter the world of profit-making makes long-term planning of prospective markets and the greater assurance of the returns to be expected increasingly imperative if investment is to happen at all. Hence capitalists strive for monopolistic (or oligopolistic) control of production and form cartels to stabilise their markets. All in the interests of maximising their own profits, of course.

The second is the rising challenge of the working class. This becomes a particularly acute problem for the capitalist class when it takes a political form. The earlier fears of the ruling class that universal suffrage (or something close to it) would lead to revolutionary consequences - the expropriation of the propertied by those without property - have yet to be fulfilled. The ruling class nevertheless has paid a price. The extension of the vote to the working class recast the terms of political debate. During election campaigns politicians now have to make an explicit appeal to the interests of the majority and in government they have to take account of those interests.

Working class industrial organisation not only forced concessions from capitalists in the workplace, but reinforced developments in the political sphere. Marx identified the early factory acts as victories for the “political economy of the working class”.

Both these tendencies require that the capitalist state play an increasing role in the economy and society - both to plan and regulate economic activity, and to manage the relationship between the capitalist and working classes. The increasing role of the state in society and economy cannot but transform relations between states. The relative success of national capitalist classes depends on the comparative strength of their respective states. Hence the rise of imperialism and the international division of labour.

Jack believes that I am not interested in “essential laws and tendencies”. In fact, contrary to Jack’s assertion, in the article in question I cite not one specific statistic. It is only tendencies that I discuss. I do make reference to real events and developments. That means I could have produced statistics to back up my analysis if I had been so inclined and in a longer contribution I would do so. Surely, Jack does not object to rooting our analysis, whether of political economy or political strategy, in the world as it actually is?

So what might be the difference on the question of ‘decline’ between Jack and me? I think we have a different take on the immediate consequences of decline.

While the tendencies I have outlined point towards capitalism’s eventual supersession - socialisation of the economy and the political and social victory of the working class - they provide little guidance on the immediate prospects for capitalism. I do not think they imply that capitalism is about to collapse of its own volition, whatever phase of the economic cycle we happen to be in. I do not underestimate the seriousness of the current economic crisis, but without a decisive political intervention by the working class (and that can only be by a communist party with mass support) capitalism will survive and in time economically revive. I do not believe any purely economic crisis will be terminal for capitalism.

This was not the position of communists in the 1920s and 30s. From Lenin onwards the ‘imperialist’ stage of capitalist development was seen as synonymous with actual stagnation or decline of productive forces. This was not an unreasonable conclusion to draw from the economic crises of that era. But in the light of post-World War II developments I think we have to accept that capitalism has the capacity to restore growth and generate striking technological innovation.

This is not incompatible with an analysis that recognises the continuing strengthening of the tendencies associated with ‘decline’. It is an interpretation that recognises ‘decline’ as a very long-term secular process and not a process that is likely to lead to an immediate collapse of capitalism.

Indeed, it is only the continuing ability of capitalism to expand productive forces and increase the size of the global working class that validates our project as the materialist one of building communism on the basis of developments within the capitalist mode of production. If capitalism were to exhaust its capacity to both internationalise and socialise production - no doubt the ultimate destiny of the present social system - in the absence of a working class in pretty short order able to take power on a global scale, the possibility of a communist future would slip from our grasp.

It seems to me that the theory of a permanent arms economy, a variety of which the Draft programme endorses (section 1.3), is an attempt to discount economic developments over the last 65 years. How to defend Trotsky’s prediction that the end of World War II would see a renewed economic slump against the reality of a long economic boom? Why, argue that the cold war and high levels of military expenditure mean that, in effect, the world war has yet to come to an end - or at least did not end until 40 or 50 years after 1945.

As I argued in my original article,^[5] this analysis incorrectly interprets the role of what in the United States is an unquestionably large military-industrial sector - although nothing on the scale of military production and mobilisation during World War II. I think the relevant paragraph ought to be deleted from the Draft programme.

Neoliberalism

The sharpest difference between Jack and me is over the question of neoliberalism. I wrote that neoliberalism “has allowed the capitalist class to offset (or roll back) many of the features associated with ‘decline’. Concessions to the organised working class (politically, socially and industrially) have been radically weakened. State micro-management of particular economic sectors has been substantially reduced. The emphasis of macro-management has changed, with genuine moves to focus on ‘inflation targeting’ via independent (ie, partly privatised) central banks rather than on growth and jobs.”^[6]

It would be a strange Marxist analysis that failed to recognise the internal contradictions and dynamic flux within any process or tendency. No graph of a real-life phenomenon follows one inexorable straight line. Yet it is precisely my contention that neoliberalism represents a partially successful attempt by the capitalist class to push back against the secular tendencies of ‘decline’ which causes Jack most offence.

Neoliberalism has not made ‘decline’ irrelevant. As I went on to say, “The reversal of ‘decline’ is partial and contradictory: privatisation has often required the state to set up tight regulation of the privatised monopolies; the most dynamic parts of the world economy, in China and east Asia, have the greatest degree of state control (and ownership); in the US, Reagan and Bush junior have run deficit economic regimes; government social expenditure as a proportion of GNP generally had not declined.”

The credit crunch and financial crash do not change this reality. The response of capitalist governments confirms the vital role of the state in managing economic affairs. It also signals that those governments currently calculate that they have very little to fear from a resurgent working class. A reversion to Keynes’s measures to combat looming economic catastrophe is possible only because there is no need to make concomitant concessions to the working class. On the contrary, off the back of a massive financial package to save finance capital, a fresh onslaught against the working class gains and conditions is being prepared.

Jack, quoting Hillel Ticktin, may assert that “Neoliberalism as an ideology now looks ‘dated at best and a failure at worst’”, but neoliberalism was never primarily a free-market ideology. Nor does the term ‘financialisation’ accurately encapsulate it - the promotion of a strengthened role for financial institutions was a strategy of US imperialism to forestall its relative decline. ‘Neoliberalism’ was and is at its heart a global attack by the capitalist class on the working class. That attack shows no sign of abating and demonstrates the continuing political self-confidence of the capitalist class.

That is why I object to the Draft programme’s comment that “the erosion of the social democratic settlement, beginning in the late 1970s, testified to the diminishing strength of British imperialism” (section 2.1). Not because I question the relative weakening of British imperialism, but because the relative position of British imperialism has little explanatory power when it comes to a global phenomenon such as the capitalist neoliberal offensive.

And what of Jack’s accusation in an extended passage on unemployment? He writes “comrades Cockshott and Rogers quote the experience of the 1940s-60s economic boom and the policy of full employment .... Clearly comrades Cockshott and Rogers believe that unemployment is due to the policies and coloration of ‘this or that government’ .... Perhaps comrade Rogers thinks that the balance of class forces can be titled back and once again full employment imposed on the capitalist class.”^[7]

Only a glancing familiarity with the article he is critiquing can explain Jack’s blatant misrepresentation of my position. Perhaps Jack was distracted by the dual-headed Cockshott-Rogers ogre he summons into life.

It is true that I take issue with the phrase, “unemployment is an inevitable by-product of capitalism” (section 3.6). But my argument that “Unemployment … is central to the ability of capitalists to control workers and hold down wages and conditions” might have caused Jack to consider that it was not the inevitability of unemployment that I disagree with, but the Draft programme’s designation of it as a by-product - as if everyone would prefer there was not any unemployment, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it.

Unemployment is to wage-slavery what the whip is to chattel slavery - inevitable and absolutely necessary for the health of the social system. As I also argue, “the principal component of the offensive globally was the decision to abandon the post-war commitment to full employment. In fact economic policy was readjusted to mandate a ‘non-inflationary’ level of unemployment - the ‘reserve army of labour’ was to be recreated.”

What should the Draft programme say about neoliberalism? I have no “underlying agenda”, as Jack alleges^[8], in the sense of a cunning plan to insert my thinking into the Draft programme by subterfuge. Submitting an article to the Weekly Worker strikes me as a fairly open and explicit course of action. In the interests of being entirely upfront, let me say again that I do think that the Draft programme should discuss neoliberalism as an international - not just a British - phenomenon.

I recognise that the terms of the class struggle are always fluid. Nevertheless, a programme due to be agreed in 2011 should address a tide in the class struggle that has prevailed for at least the last quarter of a century. Our programme is only relevant so long as it takes account of the social and political terrain that defines our strategy and tactics.

When that terrain shifts, our programme should be amended. We are not drafting a timeless text so abstract and so pure that it will hold good, whatever vicissitudes confront us in the decades to come. A communist programme needs to be a living document, subject to regular amendment as the class struggle shifts and, for that matter, as different ideas are fought out within the party itself.

Transition to communism

Jack Conrad apparently has more time for my discussion of the transition to communism.^[9] Nevertheless, there are significant differences between us. To summarise, the Draft programme uses the term ‘socialism’ to refer both to the period of political rule by the working class immediately after we come to power and the period after the “full socialisation of production”, when society is evolving towards “full communism”.

Jack and the Draft programme, then, conceive of one period of transition, whereas most classical Marxists (ie, Lenin, the Bolsheviks in general and Trotsky) speak of a conceptually distinct period of workers’ rule and a first phase of communism (to which the term ‘socialism’ is often applied).

Jack cites the Critique of the Gotha programme (1875) in justification of his schema. Yet Marx in that document quite clearly speaks of the “first phase of communist society” as “a cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production”. It “recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else”. There is no exploitation: “Nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption.”

Elsewhere in the Critique of the Gotha programme Marx discusses the transition from capitalism to communism: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Now, Jack is correct to point out that the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to the state form rather than the actual transition period, but, for Marx, is the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism the same as the “first phase of communist society”? Is the state form of the “first phase of communist society” the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Jack insists?

I think the clue is in the terminology Marx uses. The “first phase of communist society” is still communism. It is not a distinct form of society, but part of the communist mode of production. The transition from capitalism to communism is therefore the transition to the “first phase of communist society”. The “first phase of communist society” can not be part of the transition to communist society.

The only way Jack can logically apply his interpretation to the Critique of the Gotha programme is to argue that, while in one passage Marx uses ‘communism’ to refer to both the first and higher phases of this mode of production, in the other ‘communism’ refers exclusively to the “higher phase of communism” (or “full communism”, as the Draft programme puts it). I do not think such an interpretation stands up. I read Marx here as being quite scientifically precise. When he says that the “first phase of communist society” has moved beyond class society, we should take him at his word.

What is more, in no other text I know does Marx distinguish the two phases of communism that he discusses in the Critique of the Gotha programme. In my article on this aspect of the programme,^[10] I quoted at length from a passage in Capital volume 1 in which Marx speaks of “an association of free men working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social force ...”. Marx says that the form of social distribution will depend on “the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers”. No sharp distinction, then, between phases, but rather the concept that communist society itself undergoes a process of evolution.

Perhaps we should take seriously what Marx says in the Critique of the Gotha programme about it being “a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it”. It is the “distribution of the conditions of production themselves” that is crucial and therefore defines a mode of production.

I am reluctant therefore to talk about two or more stages of communist society - one of which is ‘socialism’ and the other ‘communism’. The communist mode of production will undergo constant change and flux and the social forms that evolve will reflect that. It is not therefore a question of two stages versus one stage of transition (or three versus two, if you include the ultimate destination), as Jack characterises the debate, but how you define the transition. The question is whether that transition is from capitalism to a new mode of production based on common ownership of the means of production and self-conscious planning of production by the whole of society. Or a transition to something called “full communism”. In other words, a (comparatively) short versus a long transition?

There are two consequences for the Draft programme. First, the discussion in chapter 5 on the transition to communism makes a number of presumptions that I disagree with. Private property in the means of production and the class struggle will not continue once the equivalent of Marx’s “first phase of communist society” is reached (section 5.1). A residue state form, it is true, will persist as long as the tasks of communist society in overcoming the inheritance of capitalism - the division of labour, attitudes towards work and social responsibility, and insufficient productive forces - remain unresolved. This state form will not be the dictatorship of proletariat for the simple reason that there are no classes for the working class to exercise a dictatorship over and the working class itself very rapidly dissolves into a classless society.

In consequence, once we reach communism, there is a rapidly diminishing role for a communist party - defined, after all, as the party of the working class. Society as a whole takes on responsibility for dealing with social contradictions. It is not a question of a communist party issuing “a correct political line” (section 5). In that sense social evolution within communism - towards “full communism” or otherwise - is “a spontaneous development”. It is therefore not the role of the programme of the communist party to map out the precise line of evolution of communist society.

We should keep conceptually distinct the tasks that confront the working class in overcoming class society - making the revolution and socialising production - from the tasks confronting communism (or ‘socialism’ for those intent on using different terminology for the early phases of communist society). It is the former tasks - broadly summarised as “winning the battle for democracy” and more than challenging enough - which are the crucial concern of a communist programme.

Two, it is not true that “the full socialisation of production is dependent on and can only proceed in line with the withering away of the skill monopolies of the middle class and hence the division of labour” (section 4.3). During the transition from class society we may well make major strides in resolving all kinds of social contradictions, including the division of labour. However, to set ending the division of labour as an absolute barrier to overcoming class society - when Marx sets it as a task of communist society - is a utopian demand that could easily turn into its conservative (reactionary even) opposite.

A living programme

I have focused in this contribution on what seem to me to be the most interesting theoretical debates thrown up by the various contributions in the Weekly Worker on the Draft programme - in particular, the differences I have with Jack Conrad’s recent articles.

Differences remain over some aspects of the ‘Immediate demands’ section (chapter 3) of the Draft programme. But these seem to me to mostly revolve around the degree of detail we should go into and stylistic or sub-editing questions. I am convinced that Jack’s intentions over hours and the minimum wage are sufficiently radical (although in raising these question initially I hardly “lambasted” an apparently over-sensitive PCC). Whether that intent is made unambiguously clear is another issue.

I do think Jack displays an esoteric, and possibly incorrect, understanding of the role of the value of labour-power in Marx’s political economy (section 3.4 on “A minimum net wage to reflect the value of unskilled labour-power”). In general the class struggle between workers and capitalists over the division of the social product is not simply to align the price of labour-power with the value of labour-power, but over the rate at which surplus value is extracted by the capitalist class. It is true that the struggles of the working class themselves can redefine the value of labour-power, but at any one time the demands of the working class extend beyond the then-existing value.

I have argued that chapter 4 of the Draft programme should discuss in a little more detail the role of the working class and our international in the course of the workers’ revolution. I have also raised a difference with Jack’s take on the practice of democracy during the period of working class political rule around the very specific issue of how recallability is to be exercised - by the party or by the working class directly^[11]. An important question. We should never propose that the communist party substitutes itself for working class self-activity.

Paul Cockshott accuses the Draft programme of having no economic programme^[12]. I have not joined Paul in making this accusation. I realise that the PCC is not advocating a transitional economy to the right of the Attlee government.

However, I do think that the Draft programme is far from clear on the question of socialisation. The rather gnomic “Planning and state control of the financial sector and the monopolies is posed by capitalist development itself” (section 4.3) raises as many questions as it answers. Chapter 4, especially read in conjunction with the passage on economic policy in the ‘Immediate demands’ (section 3.7), is open to genuine misinterpretation. Jack’s attack on Paul’s past in the British and Irish Communist Organisation does not alter that fact.

Nor do I share Jack’s rather defensive position that at times in his articles borders on opposition to any clarification of any aspect of the current draft of the Draft programme. Or his resistance to tampering with its length. The Draft programme is already many times longer than the 19th century min-max programmes Marx and Engels were involved in drafting or critiquing.

That is as it should be. A programme is not the communist equivalent of the tablets of stone brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. Otherwise, why are we in the CPGB engaged in our current redrafting exercise? As I have argued, in future the programme should be amended to reflect changes in the world we seek to transform and our deepening understanding of theory and strategy.

The programme of a mass communist party challenging for power, for instance, will have a much more fully worked-out section on the economic programme of the transition. For the present, the Draft programme should be just as long as it needs to be in order to clearly explain our strategic perspectives.

Notes

1. www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1002562
2. J Conrad, ‘Goldilocks and the communist programme’ Weekly Worker September 9; ‘Neoliberal ghosts and the art of brevity’ Weekly Worker September 16; and ‘The phases of communism’ Weekly Worker September 23.
3. J Conrad, September 23.
4. Ibid.
5. N Rogers, ‘The road to working class revolution’ Weekly Worker April 8.
6. Ibid.
7. J Conrad, September 16.
8. Ibid.
9. N Rogers, ‘Communist transition’ Weekly Worker August 26.
10. Ibid.
11. N Rogers, ‘Electoral reform and communist strategy’ Weekly Worker May 27.
12. P Cockshott, ‘Less radical than clause four’ Weekly Worker March 18.