03.03.2011
Stalinist barriers to study and thought
Paul B Smith concludes his call for a renewed Marxist culture
I stated in the first part of this article that in Capital Marx embarked on an inquiry into how the surplus product is extracted from labour (‘A Marxist culture free from the taint of Stalinism’, February 24). I could also have added that he wanted to discover the laws governing the mode of extraction of the surplus product. The key concepts in the book are surplus value and abstract labour as the substance of value. These are not logically or empirically independent. They do not exist in a static relationship to one another. They are interconnected. They are in constant movement and part of a process of transformation.
Abstract labour, for example, comes into being as labour-time that is socially equalised through capital’s use of labour-power. Marx uses the term ‘homogeneous’ to describe it. Capital is indifferent to labour’s qualities and reduces all working activity to a certain intensity and rate. In principle, capital is blind to whether labour is skilled or unskilled, women’s or men’s, intellectual or manual. These qualities become important only as a means of dividing workers in the class struggle. Gender, race, ethnic and religious hatreds serve a crucial role in keeping workers helpless and powerless, but destabilise the conditions for capital accumulation. They are an aspect of a declining capitalism.
Labour is abstract because it can be quantified in terms of the time expended, the value of the commodities it consumes and the amount of value and surplus value it produces. Capital combines labour-power with raw materials and machinery and this combination produces and reproduces value. It follows that, when abstract labour ceases to exist within the mode of production, then surplus value will not be the form the surplus product takes.
This was the case in the former Soviet Union. The ruling elite of this state attempted to extract a surplus through brute force. Extensive policing of every aspect of their working and non-working lives atomised workers and kept them isolated and fearful of one another. Workers were dependent for their subsistence on a bureaucratically allocated distribution of products. Generalised commodity production set neither the rate at which the Soviet worker worked nor the way in which they worked. The surplus product was bureaucratically administered and took the form of use-value, not value.
Marx argued that, through the process of competition, capitalist production becomes centralised. In response to repeated crises and through the impact of the class struggle it becomes socialised and politicised. Transnational monopolies, bureaucracies and governments manage production, consumption and distribution socially and politically. Education, health and social care produce use-values, not value. The pursuit of profit is divorced from industry. Surplus value is invested in finance. Unproductive finance capital comes to dominate and destroy industry. As a result of these tendencies, abstract labour and the law of value go into decline.
The student struggling to understand Capital faces a couple of challenges. The first is that the education system is based on training people for the needs of capitalism. Capitalism needs a workforce trained to subject itself to the routines of industry. Students in higher education see getting a degree as a means of becoming a manager or a professional on a good salary. Compulsory assessment forces them to internalise competition. Unfortunately this does not develop students’ talents and creativity. The system atomises, divides and isolates students from one another. It makes it difficult for them to study cooperatively. It also makes it hard for teachers to give students critical feedback without appearing to harm students’ careers.
The second challenge is that the study of Capital requires the student to have a perception of the whole of humanity and society rather than a specialised examination of its constituent parts. Students are not taught how to approach the critical understanding of the evolution of society as an interconnected global totality.
Instead schools promote a mixture of religious and nationalist propaganda, market conformity and compliance. They stuff children’s heads with heaps of facts and useless information in order to make them compete for positions within a social hierarchy. As a result, students bring to their study habits that separate events from their conditions, people from their alternatives and potentials, social problems from one another and the present from the past and future. The liberal ideal of a critical understanding of the arts and social sciences is confined to the teaching of a few privileged children and young adults. Such an understanding pursued honestly and diligently, of course, could lead to a critique of capitalism itself. The majority of middle and working class students are denied this form of education.
When Marx, for example wrote in Capital about the “law of the determination of value by labour-power” acting as a “coercive law of competition” (p110), he was not referring to a generalisation based on numerous examples of observed particular instances. He described a movement within the totality of capitalist social relations. This is movement between the poles of a contradiction - in this case, the contradiction between abstract and concrete labour. Marx thought of this contradiction as affecting the whole of society. It is not confined to one particular sector of industry, nor is its operation limited within the boundaries of the nation-state. It is global and inclusive in operation.
Contradiction
When Marx mentioned the poles of a contradiction, he was not referring to a logical contradiction. A logical contradiction is when it is stated that both a proposition and its negation are true. When Marx stated that the commodity contains a contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, he was not speaking of a logical contradiction between propositions.[1] Rather he was stating that use-value and exchange-value have completely different natures. Use-value is essentially qualitative in nature. Its aim is to realise a human goal, or satisfy a human need or desire through its natural or artificial qualities.
The aim of exchange-value, on the other hand, is essentially quantitative: to realise itself as money and capital. The latter must increase its magnitude through accumulation if it is to retain its nature as self-expanding value.
The commodity then is the bearer of two different natures. A real contradiction expresses the antagonistic movement between these two opposing natures or - using the analogy of a magnet - opposing poles. Through countless daily acts of purchase and sale, contradiction is the principle of change between one form and another. Commodities are changed into money, money into commodities, and money into more money. Exchange-value and use-value are two forms of the same social substance - labour - and the movement between these two forms constitutes the dynamics of the system as a whole.
It leads to the supersession of the contradiction - a new entity emerges or the old entity disintegrates. Supersession, like contradiction, is a concept Marx took from his teacher, the German philosopher, Georg Hegel, in order to understand change. Supersession means the retention of what is rational or pro-survival in the evolution of an entity into something new. At the same time this evolution destroys what is irrational and harmful. Supersession is a revolutionary concept.
Socialist theory
I stated previously that Marx intended Capital to be a contribution to proletarian science and that the contents of the book were an advance in socialist theory. In previous works, Marx had criticised the political economy of his socialist predecessors and contemporaries. These included people such as the followers of the reformer, Robert Owen, and the French thinker, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon is famous for his saying that private property is theft. Like the Owenites, he had a moral critique of capitalism based on a labour theory of value derived from Smith and the other great bourgeois political economist following him - David Ricardo.
The Owenites condemned capitalism for robbing workers of the fruits of their labour. Following Smith and Ricardo, these early socialists knew that labour was the source of value and surplus value. They then argued that money could be abolished and replaced with units of labour. They introduced schemes replacing money with coupons. These recorded the amount of hours workers had worked. These labour chits were then exchanged for goods that had an equivalent amount of hours spent on them.
Socialists even proposed a national bank. This would issue a certificate for a number of labour units in exchange for the worker’s product. Socialists argued that labour money and exchange markets would enable workers to gain the full labour value of their products. They could then avoid having to sell their labour-power to robber capitalists. All their schemes rapidly went bankrupt.
Marx argued that money could not be abolished without abolishing all the categories of a capitalist economy. These included wages, rent, interest, money and capital. It meant abolishing the commodity form and exchange itself, so that workers were freed from alienation and all production was for use-value or human need. The emphasis Marx gave to the doubling of form throughout Capital reiterated these points.
Marx showed that socialism is incompatible with the market in all its forms. This included the small-scale commodity exchange his Owenite socialist predecessors and the anarchist followers of Proudhon wanted to preserve. In Capital, Marx used the idea of the planning of production and distribution within society worldwide as his criterion for a socialist alternative to capitalism.
He suggested that if the working class came to power it would aim to abolish the capitalist division of labour. He argued that capitalism creates the conditions for this abolition. It makes workers constantly change their jobs. Capitalism demands that they be completely adaptable to the different demands of different kinds of work. Abstract labour is flexible labour. Freed from the coercive pressures of wage-slavery, workers can strive to be fully developed individuals, capable of performing many alternative kinds of activities.
There are many insights into the future society within the book. Marx pointed out that capitalism creates the foundations for socialism. Capitalism’s drive to lengthen the working day overworks and kills workers. But it also lowers the value of labour-power through the introduction of automated machinery. This diminishes the amount of time necessary for the worker to engage in the labour process.
There is labour-time necessary for the reproduction of the individual and society and there is labour-time which is not. The distinction between necessary and free labour is crucial to the idea of a global society planned democratically by workers. The possibility of a world of abundance in which robots made robots and workers were freed from all forms of unnecessary and unwanted work is therefore posed by capitalism itself.
Within capitalism, surplus labour-time is wasted. The population surplus to the requirements of capital is underemployed or unemployed. In the absence of social planning, this surplus population grows larger, as more automated machinery is introduced. Within a planned society, on the other hand, necessary labour is freed from the commodity form. A fully automated society is one in which individuals have more free time to engage in domestic and creative activities. Thus Marx stated in volume 3 that the shortening of the working day is the fundamental prerequisite of the realm of freedom within socialism. This has become an important transitional demand for socialists.
Stalinism
Marx engaged with and contributed to a vital socialist movement. This thrived until the 1920s. It has been almost completely wiped out by Stalinism. Prior to then, socialists saw the teaching of Capital as an essential part of the education workers needed to emancipate themselves. For example, in the 1900s the Scottish teacher and Marxist, John MacLean, held political economy classes every Sunday in Glasgow. These attracted hundreds of workers. Moreover, Marxist intellectuals such as Luxemburg and Hilferding were able to develop Marx’s categories. Political economy had something important to say about the way the world was changing under the impact of imperialism and finance capital.
After the defeat of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s, the communist parties worldwide remained tied to the Soviet Union. This had a disastrous effect on the evolution of Marxist political economy. The rise of Stalinism as a counterrevolutionary movement entailed - as I mentioned earlier - the killing of thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands of Marxists. The purges culminated in the denunciation and death of countless Marxist intellectuals and activists. It gave rise to what Ticktin has called “anti-Marxism dressed up as Marxism”. This was propagated throughout the world by communist parties, their fellow travellers and their opponents.
Readers familiar with the intellectual history of the left will have noticed that I have not mentioned the terms ‘dialectical’ or ‘historical materialism’. I have done this not because these terms are meaningless, but for another reason. They were taken over by Stalinists and used to exclude political economy from left discussion. Those of you who bother to consult Soviet textbooks will find that a summary of the ideas found within Capital are given short shrift and the bulk of the teaching concentrates on ‘DiaMat’ and ‘HistMat’.
These are not theories. They are recitations of thoughts as patterns used to justify the pre-eminence of the USSR worldwide. Thus DiaMat, based on Stalin’s reading of Engels’ Anti-Dühring, attempted to show that the USSR had transcended the contradictions of capitalism. The notion of ‘contradiction’ is understood to be ‘conflict’ based on the class struggle. The propaganda stated that the USSR had eradicated conflict because it was a classless society and therefore had no contradictions.
Stalin based HistMat on Marx’s 1857 Preface to the contribution to a critique of political economy. This is the passage that mentions the concepts of an economic ‘base’ and an ideological ‘superstructure’. Stalin used HistMat to argue that the ideological superstructures of the USSR were socialist because the economic base was owned by workers: ie, it was a nationalised economy.
I mentioned previously that, for Marx, political economy was an inquiry into how the surplus product was extracted from labour. Stalin tried to write the concept of surplus product out of history. The concept had been used by the Soviet ‘Asian mode of production’ school of political economy in the 1920s. Stalin suppressed this school because it was clear that the concept of surplus product could be used to criticise the USSR. It could not therefore be tolerated. The idea that there could be a surplus product and hence a group of people living off that surplus product in the USSR was a revolutionary concept. It had to be air-brushed from history.[2]
Far from being a classless society that had eradicated contradiction and conflict, the elite group in the former USSR tried to extract a surplus product from the working class in the USSR by force. The driving contradiction of the Soviet product was within use-value. The system produced useless products. These ranged from unwearable clothes and shoes, to factories unable to produce machinery that worked or could be repaired. Atomised Soviet labour prone to alcoholism and sabotage was useless as source of a surplus sufficient to reproduce the Soviet elite.
Planning was non-existent in a society where managers fulfilled targets either by fiddling figures or by producing sub-quality goods. For example, one of the ways the Soviet Union attempted to boast its superiority to the capitalist west was that it manufactured arms as good as anything made in Europe or the US. When the regime collapsed in the 1980s, the only weapon that could compete with western products for efficiency was the Kalashnikov rifle.
The contradiction within the Soviet product drove the system to change into the disintegrating hybrid of capitalism and Stalinism that exists today. With neither a labour market nor planning controlled by freely associated labour, the USSR could move only either towards socialism or back to capitalism. Socialism would have meant world revolution and was therefore inconceivable.
The path the elite chose towards integration with the capitalist class is now blocked by crises and political instability. The intelligentsia has been reduced to poverty and workers work without payment. The former USSR is therefore continuing to disintegrate into antagonistic parts at war and in conflict with one another.
When Stalinists declared socialism to be inevitable, they were justifying the Soviet Union. They meant something like: ‘The Soviet system is superior to capitalism. Marx’s concept of global socialism is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future. Anyone who questions these ideas will be punished, ridiculed or denied privileges.’ It does not follow from this, of course, that socialism is not inevitable. Marx clearly thought that socialism was more than a possibility. On the other hand, he had no conception of what might happen if capitalism were to defeat an attempted socialist revolution in an undeveloped nation.
Althusser
Stalinism encouraged interpretations of Capital that served to uphold the power and interests of bureaucratic elites in monstrous regimes. These were neither capitalist nor socialist. Thus the French philosopher, Louis Althusser, argued that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the humanist Marx of the early 1840s and the anti-humanist Marx that wrote Capital. The latter, he argued, showed that individuals were subject to impersonal social forces they could not understand or resist.
For example, people’s belief that freedom is worth fighting for was an illusion caused by the impersonal forces of an ideological state apparatus. Schools, religion and the family force individuals to think and behave as they do. People have no choice. A prime example of an ideological state apparatus was the Stalinist Communist Party. Party members could not be held responsible for crimes of mass murder committed in the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes if ideology controlled their subjectivity and social structures determined their actions.
Towards the end of his life Althusser admitted to being a trickster and deceiver who was ignorant of Marx. However, the influence he had on a generation of leftist students has been damaging. His interpretation of Capital made Marx’s ideas almost unrecognisable. It took years of scholarship to clear up the mess Althusser and his followers left behind.
When students of Capital turn to secondary sources on Capital they will find much that is confusing. There has been a level of contestation within Marxist studies rarely found elsewhere. This would not be a problem if argument is based on an agreed set of fundamental truths concerning how to study Capital. These have yet to be established. This contributes to difficulties students may experience.
It is true that consensus is much easier to achieve now than it was during the cold war when Stalinists and anti-Stalinists were at loggerheads. For example, there is agreement now that Marx’s notebooks of 1857 - The Grundrisse - prove that the attempt to separate Marx’s early work from his late work has failed. Althusser’s claim that there is an “epistemological break” between the early philosophical and humanist Marx and the late scientific and anti-humanist Marx is false.
It is now impossible to argue that the German philosopher, Georg Hegel, was not a major influence on Marx. It is clearly false to suggest that, in Capital, Marx is not grappling with the alienation that workers experience within the capitalist system. Many of the prejudices that Stalinist academics inculcated have been by and large exploded and this is all to the good.
The point I am making is that the means to realising socialism presently appears to be absent. It has been absent for nearly a hundred years. There is no vital socialist movement that presently supports students of Capital. If one of the means of creating a vital socialist movement entails the study of the book then we have to start the process of Marxist education over again in apparent isolation. Certainly we need a political economy that can explain the present crisis and its possible trajectory. This is difficult without a grasp of the categories found within the book.
Science?
The final reason for neglect of the book is that it is considered outdated and no longer relevant to understanding the 21st century.
Capital is allegedly of philosophical and historical interest only. It is a form of pseudo-science. These were positions taken in the heat of the cold war in the last century. They appear less convincing today. Karl Popper, the leading philosopher of science of the period, dismissed Marxism as a form of pseudo-science on two grounds. The first was that explanation and prediction in the social and historical sciences was impossible. The second was that Marxism was not a falsifiable doctrine.
Popper was correct to argue that Marx’s predictions do not conform to the accuracy of a natural science. Why should they? They should only conform if one accepts the dogma that only the natural sciences can achieve success in understanding reality. One of the differences between the natural and social sciences is that the latter deal with people in social relations, not things. To deny that people are unaware of the social forces that control them (and cannot therefore act on the basis of this information to change them) reduces them to things. This is what Althusser does. It is a form of commodity fetishism.
Marx’s predictions and explanations are based on the concept of tendency. Laws are not like natural laws that are always empirically corroborated. They are identifiable tendencies within an evolving social totality. Predictions based on them do not therefore have the accuracy of predictions in physics or chemistry.
Popper was wrong, however, to argue that the methods and results of Capital are not falsifiable. If, as it appeared in the 1950s, a new form of class society was evolving out of capitalism worldwide and a bureaucratic elite was becoming the new ruling class extracting a surplus from workers, then Marx’s prediction of a classless alternative to capitalism would have been falsified. Moreover, if, as was argued during the cold war, capitalism had eliminated social inequality; benign management had eradicated the possibility of crises; and workers standards of living worldwide (not just in western Europe and the US) had risen far above subsistence - then again, Marx’s predictions would be falsified. Capital would then be neglected deservedly.
The problem with these falsifications is that they were based on Soviet interpretations of Marx - in particular the so-called law of the accumulation of misery. This is found in the section of Capital titled ‘The general law of capitalist accumulation’. Here Marx discussed tendencies towards greater centralisation and concentration of capital, industrial cycles and crises, the industrial reserve army of labour and the surplus population. The Soviet interpretation passed into the folklore of educated debate on Marx at the time. Stalinists argued that the standard of living of workers in capitalism always declined to below the value of their labour-power.
Consequently, over time workers would become increasingly pauperised. This misreading was used to support Soviet propaganda - in this case that, because workers were fully employed in the Soviet Union, their standard of living was higher. Workers were happier than workers in the capitalist west. During the cold war advocates of capitalism and critics of Stalinism found this easy to falsify.
Marx actually states the following: “It follows that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army ... establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole” (pp169-70).
Marx is not referring to workers’ standards of living. The law is supposed to apply to high paid as well as low paid workers. Marx confirmed that capital employs workers at wages above the value of their labour-power as well as below it. This follows from the distinction he makes between the concept of price and that of value - wages in this case expressing the price of labour-power. Wage rates are determined by supply and demand.
The accumulation of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation are qualitative aspects of workers’ lives that can be confirmed empirically. Research into the relationship between overwork and mental illness, deaths and disabilities caused through industrial accidents and war; the relations between addictions, feelings of desperation, alcohol, drugs and the sex industry; the persistence of child slavery and sweatshop labour and the destruction of social relations in working class families and communities - these can all be used (along with other indicators) as objective confirmation of this law.
Relevance
Marx’s ideas appear more relevant today than they did during the cold war. During the recent crash of 2008, two of the chief investment officers of JP Morgan, the investment bank, wrote a commentary for their clients titled Eye on the market. They stated that global consciousness had been rudely awakened and that “the greatest fear for Europe might be that Karl Marx was right: that capitalism is a system doomed to destroy itself through its own internal contradictions”.[3] This is a recognition that there is an awareness within the ruling class that capitalism is an unworkable system. It addresses Marx’s understanding of crises directly and confirms one of his predictions. This is that capitalism cannot avoid or prevent crises.
In Capital, Marx refers to the life of modern industry as being one that follows a cycle of periods of prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. During the 19th century, these cycles were frequent and posed crises of political and social relations. Working people were thrown out of the factory with no means of support. They were forced into the industrial reserve army of labour competing for jobs or rotted in the surplus population. Crises brought the nature of the system into question.
Regular cyclical crises are typical of the unplanned nature of capitalism. Within Capital, Marx argued that the possibility of crisis arises out of the circulation of commodities. Commodities can be exchanged for money - a sale - and money can be exchanged for commodities - a purchase - but people are not bound to buy because they have made a sale - or to sell because they have just bought. If the time between sales and purchases becomes too great, then there is the possibility of crises.
Marx understood the causes of crises to be overproduction, underconsumption and the disproportionate imbalance between the manufacture of producer and consumer goods. In the 19th century, Marx saw these fluctuations in economic activity as threats to capitalism and therefore as crises to the system itself. By the late 20th century, however, periodic downturns and upturns were managed by governments and were no longer global in extent. Under conditions of full employment in the 1950s and 60s, they were successfully controlled by fiscal and monetary means.
The collapse of consensus on how to manage the global economy in 2008 reflects changes in the modes of control since then. Full employment depended on cold war expansion of arms manufacture and Stalinist bureaucratic controls over labour-power. This led to wage rises, inflation and workers’ militancy. A turning point was 1968, when for a brief period, both capitalism and Stalinism appeared to have lost control and proletarian revolution had once more become a realisable idea. A subsequent political and economic crisis led to the return of finance capital as the dominant strategy.
The G20’s endorsement of austerity and cuts in public expenditure risks a slump in demand. This will slow down recovery, make the prospects of a relapse greater, increase deflationary pressures and pose the danger of training a new generation in the art of anti-capitalist political opposition. Conversely, the Keynesian alternative of fiscal expansion would reflate the economy, but risks a return to wage militancy, inflation and increased working class confidence in collective action. It is difficult to see how the capitalist class can find a coherent strategy to stabilise the system in these circumstances. For the moment in the UK, the section that supports the government appears to be following a reckless path.
At the same time, environmentalists argue that there is an ongoing crisis in species survival, caused by carbon dioxide pollution and climate change. It is unlikely that the capitalist class as a whole wants to destroy the planet or commit suicide. The question is whether it is capable of developing strategies to regulate pollution and invest in initiatives designed to offset warming such as carbon capture, storage and pollution-free sources of energy.
Crisis, therefore, poses the possibility not only of recovery, but also of decline and termination of the system. Environmentalists have highlighted the preoccupation capitalism has with growth and how growth is damaging to the environment. This is correct. There can be no such thing as a capitalist social order that is not about growth and accumulation on a progressively increasingly scale. However, the environmentalist solution to growth is to advocate frugality and reduced forms of consumption.
Marx, on the other hand, links the destructive power of capitalism on the environment with the damage it does to workers. Thus he states that capital’s investment in technology increases the soil’s fertility in the short term but ruins it in the long term. Capital’s overworking of the land is at the same time a process of overworking labour-power. Waste of natural resources involves wasting human resources (p102).
Marx is opposed to growth as capital accumulation, but in favour of growth of the productive use of natural and human resources. The solution he recommends is, of course, the classical socialist alternative - the supersession of capitalism by a globally planned economy under the control of the immediate producers. Crisis therefore poses the possibility of a transition to a new social form of production, distribution and consumption.
Conclusion
I have argued that ideas found in Capital are relevant to an understanding of changes today. The reasons for the book’s neglect are the influence of commodity fetishism and Stalinism. These have created barriers to study and thought. One of these includes an education system dominated by the needs of the market and industry (rather than honest inquiry into the nature of capitalism). Another barrier is the absence of a vital movement for socialism. Neither of these barriers is insuperable. Stalinism is a spent historical force. Commodity fetishism is still potent, but arguably more transparent, now that free market ideology or ‘neoliberalism’ is discredited. As the crisis deepens and is prolonged, the socialist movement has an opportunity to renew itself. Embedded within a working class mobilising to act globally and collectively, there will be greater opportunity for creating a vibrant Marxist culture, free from the taint of Stalinism.
How do you define Marxism? What has been your experience of teaching and learning Marxism? What kind of support do you need to campaign for a Marxist education? I would like to hear from you. Contact me at teachingandlearning4socialism@gmail.com.
Notes
- S Meikle, ‘Dialectical contradiction and necessity’, in J Mepham, DH Rubin (eds) Issues in Marxist philosophy Vol 1: Dialectics and method Brighton 1979, p19.
- HH Ticktin, ‘Marxist political economy’ Critique 40, Vol 34, No3, 2006, p282.
- HH Ticktin, ‘Critique notes’ Critique 46, Vol 36, No3, 2008, p334.