24.01.2013
Nature and Programme: Wealth of nature and counterfeit Marxism
Why does SWP Online insist on carrying anti-Marxist nonsense? Jack Conrad shows why root-and-branch change is long overdue
SWP Online continuously carries the following paragraph: “Workers create all the wealth under capitalism. A new society can only be constructed when they collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution according to need.”1
For those inexperienced in Marxism, this ‘What we stand for’ proposition might appear to be perfectly acceptable. Yes, it is superficially anti-capitalist and apparently militantly pro-working class. But, as we have repeatedly argued, there is a problem.2 The problem lies not with the call for the working class to “collectively seize” control of the wealth they create and then “plan its production and distribution”. The programmatic poverty and economism of the International Socialist tradition announces itself in the very first sentence: “The workers create all the wealth under capitalism.”
The fault with this statement is twofold. Firstly, it is simply untrue. Workers do not create all wealth under capitalism. Secondly, it treats workers merely as wage-slaves, the producers of commodities - not feeling, thinking, emotional human beings.3
Let us begin with wealth. To do that we must sketch out some basic Marxist concepts. Wealth for capital concerns value, surplus value and accumulated surplus value - its general form being money. Marx gives a simple algebraic formula for capital: M-C-M¹. This movement involves the capitalist laying out money to purchase commodities in order to realise more money in the market place.
When this takes the embryonic form of mercantile capitalism, the secret of making something out of nothing is to be found in the cheating of the immediate producers and the existence of isolated geographical zones, which are tenuously linked by the merchant’s ships or caravans. Arab traders bought cheap in India and China, and sold dear in Byzantium and feudal Europe. Merchants parasitically inserted themselves between these ‘worlds’. There were no socially determining capitalist relations of production. Unequal exchange was the key to the merchant’s wealth and capital accumulation.
Under industrial capitalism, however, surplus value derives from the surplus labour performed by workers who are forced to sell their ability to labour to a capitalist. By means of coercion, direct producers have been separated from the means of production and as a result workers have to present themselves daily for hire. It is that or grinding poverty and maybe even starvation. Yet on average, workers sell their labour-power at a ‘fair’ market price. As sellers of a commodity - labour-power - they receive back its full worth. Wages buy the means of subsistence necessary for the reproduction of the worker as a wage-slave. Only as human beings are they robbed.
Capital - and therefore in the last analysis its personifications - has no concern for the worker. Capital would compel workers to work for 24 hours a day and seven days a week if such a feat were physically possible. Nor has capital any particular concern for the commodity created by the combination of labour-power, the instruments of labour and raw materials - albeit brought together under the auspices of capital. The resulting commodity could be of the highest quality or complete rubbish. But, as long as it sells, and sells at a profit, that is what really matters. Value is what drives capitalism and drives it to constant expansion. Growth and overcoming all barriers to growth is inseparable from the system. The capitalist lays out money at the beginning of the circuit in order to realise more money … and not just once, but repeatedly.
Hence, for capital, wealth comes in the form of value, surplus value and, above all, money. In other words, exchange-value. Of course, for the capitalists themselves, wealth also comes in the form of use-values. Despite the myths of Max Weber and the so-called protestant work ethic, no-one should imagine them living a frugal, self-denying existence, which sees all takings ploughed back into the production process and using money to make more money.
As individuals, capitalists indulge themselves … and often to extraordinary excess. They live in ostentatious luxury and cultivate all manner of louche habits and extravagant tastes. When it comes to transnational companies, Lear jets, chauffeur-driven limos, vintage wines, Savile Row suits and an endless supply of female flesh are almost considered the birthright of every CEO.
Use-value
For capital, wealth is self-expanding money or value. But for the human being, wealth is use-value - what fulfils some desire, what gives pleasure, what is useful. Because use-value so obviously relies on subjective judgement, Marx quite correctly gave the widest possible definition. Use-value, he said, must satisfy a human need of “some sort”. Whether these needs arise from the “stomach or from fancy” makes no difference.4 Use-value is therefore not just about physical needs: it encompasses the imagination too. Indeed, a use-value may be purely imaginary. Its essence is to be found in the human being rather than the thing itself. The consumer determines utility or use-value.
Obviously, use-values are bought on the market for money and come in the form of commodities produced through the capitalist production process. However, it is vital to grasp the fact that capital has not only an interest, a drive, to exploit labour and maximise surplus labour. In pursuit of profit, it also seeks to maximise sales and therefore to expand consumption. Capitalists sell raw materials and the instruments of labour to other capitalists: electricity, steel, machine tools, computer programmes, etc (department I). They also, however, sell the means of consumption (department II) to other capitalists … and to workers too (food, clothing, housing, transport, drink, etc).
While the individual capitalist, the particular capital, attempts to minimise the wages of the workers they employ, capital as many capitals - capital as a system - encourages, manufactures and even acts as the pimp for all manner of new or even artificial wants and needs. Hence advertising, special-offer promotions, celebrity culture and the endless transformation of luxuries into necessities. That and the class struggle conducted by workers themselves combine to constantly overcome the barrier represented by the limited consumption power of the working class. Part of what the working class produces is therefore sold back to the working class … and historically on an ever increasing scale. That way, workers manage to partially develop themselves as human beings. Not that their needs are ever fully satisfied. There is a steady stream of the latest must-haves. Capital, capital accumulation and the lifestyles of the rich always run far ahead of the workers. Relative impoverishment, gnawing dissatisfaction and immiseration therefore remain the lot of the working class.
First paragraph
Workers and capitalists alike consume use-values that come in the form of commodities and from the sphere of capitalist relations of production and the exploitation of wage labour (there are non-commodity use-values such as domestic labour - cleaning, cooking, looking after the children, maintaining the car, putting up shelves, etc). Doubtless they also consume some commodities that come from peasant agriculture, the individual service-provider or the self-employed artisan. Eg, when visiting Greece, I enjoy drinking the rough village wines sold along the roadside by small farmers; I buy newspapers from my local British-Muslim newsagent; and I get my shoes repaired by the British-Bengali cobbler over the road. Such little businesses produce use-values and therefore, by definition, wealth too. With such examples in mind, it is surely mistaken to baldly state that “workers create all the wealth under capitalism”.
In theoretical terms, forgetting or passing over petty bourgeois commodity production is a mote, a mere speck of dust, in the eye of the SWP’s ‘Where we stand’ column. But there exists a beam.
In his Critique of the Gotha programme Marx is quite explicit. “Labour is not the source of all wealth.”5 There is nature too.
Marx writes here against the first paragraph of the draft programme of the newly established German Social Democratic Party. The Gotha unity congress in 1875 represented a rotten, unprincipled unification, joining together Lassallean state socialists and the Eisenachers - the Marxists, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
The first paragraph of the Gotha programme has a strangely familiar ring. A ghostly anticipation of the SWP’s ‘Where we stand’ proposition: “Labour is the source of all wealth and culture and, since useful labour is possible only in society and through society, the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.”
Incidentally, Marx had doubtless been stung into writing his Critique by Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76). In his book Statism and anarchy (1873) Bakunin portrayed Marx as being a German nationalist and an “authoritarian” worshipper of state power; not only that, but Marx was said to have been responsible for the programme and every step taken by the Eisenachers from day one. Eg, “The supreme objective of all his efforts, as is proclaimed to us by the fundamental statutes of his party in Germany, is the establishment of the great People’s State (Volksstaat)”.6
As a skilled political fighter Marx chose to point the finger of blame at Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64). Lassalle was the real German nationalist and worshipper of state power. He secretly offered to do a deal with Otto von Bismarck. The German proletariat would align itself with the Prussian state … against the capitalists. Marx credited Lassalle with being the spiritual father of the Gotha programme, including the above quoted paragraph. Unfair, perhaps. Lassalle was dead - killed in a silly duel. But, by blaming Lassalle, Marx was able to give his own comrades an escape route, which, if it had been taken, would simultaneously go to drawing a clear line of demarcation against Lassallianism and state socialism. However, Bebel and Liebknecht were quite capable of making such an elementary blunder all by themselves. No help, no prompting from Lassalle and his state socialists was needed.
Ditto the SWP leadership old and new. Neither Tony Cliff, Duncan Hallas, Chris Harman, John Rees, Martin Smith, Alex Callinicos nor Charlie Kimber have been cribbing from Lassalle ... or Bebel and Liebknecht, for that matter. The SWP leadership are transparently honest and frighteningly sincere in their theoretical poverty. Clearly, we have an almost textbook case of historical reflux, opportunism recurring, economism spontaneously resurfacing, as it inevitably does, given the material conditions of capitalism and the oppressed position of the working class.
A short aside. Economism is in essence a bourgeois world outlook, which restricts, narrows down the horizons of the working class to mere trade unionism - that or more commonly it simply denies or belittles the role of high politics and democracy in the struggle for socialism and communism. So in this the SWP is hardly alone. Almost the whole spectrum of the left in the United Kingdom advocate economism in one version or another - Socialist Party in England and Wales, Counterfire, Socialist Resistance, Workers Power, Socialist Appeal, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, etc.
Not that economism denies politics. The problem is that when the economistic left takes up politics it is not the politics of the working class and necessarily therefore orthodox Marxism. It is the politics of other classes and other ideological trends: left social democracy, bureaucratic socialism, stagist halfway houses, liberalism, greenism, feminism, black separatism, petty nationalism, etc.
Economism is therefore a parody of Marxism. One-dimensional Marxism. Genuine Marxism strives on every front to bring about an understanding of the necessity of the working class to master the strategy and tactics needed to become the ruling class. So proletarian socialism is not the welfare state plus nationalisation; neither is it income equalisation or even the abolition of capitalism. Socialism is victory in the battle for democracy and the first stage in the transition to a communist society. In other words, the Marxist project is about the realisation of universal freedom. It is that or nothing.
Anyway, Marx savaged the “hollow phrases” about “useful labour” and all members of society having an “equal right” to society’s wealth. There is useless labour in society. Labour that fails to produce the intended result. Furthermore, every society needs a surplus to reinvest in production and infrastructural projects or in case of emergencies. Hence not all production can be, or should be, returned “undiminished” to the producers.
As to equality, people are not equal in their abilities. Nor in their needs. The first stage of communist society will operate according to the principle of work done; but, once fully mature, it will inscribe onto its banner these splendid words: “From each according to their ability; to each according to their needs.”
What of the claim that “Labour is the source of all wealth” serving as an indictment of capitalism? If anything, the opposite is the case. Displaying great insight, Marx argues that the “bourgeoisie have very good grounds for ascribing supernatural, creative power to labour; since precisely from the fact that labour is determined by nature, it follows that man who possesses no other property than his labour-power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour. He can work only with their permission, hence live only with their permission.”7
More to the point, what did Marx have to say about nature? He emphasised: “Nature is just as much the source of wealth of use-values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour-power.”
Marx goes on to explain that, “insofar as man from the outset behaves towards nature” - what he calls the “primary source of all instruments and objects of labour” - as an “owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labour becomes the source of use-values, therefore also of wealth”. The same gendered metaphor occurs elsewhere in order to depict the twofold source of wealth. In Capital, he approvingly quotes William Petty: “Labour is its father and the earth its mother.”8
Sunshine and water, air and soil, plants and animals are all ‘gifts from nature’. Human beings too are of nature and, just like every other living thing, rely on nature in order to survive. Humanity applies itself to nature and we often calculate on the direct actions of nature. Though a natural product, wheat is selected, sown and harvested by labour; yet it germinates in the soil and needs both rain and the warmth of the sun if it is to grow and duly ripen. So the two forms of wealth conjoin. Yet, for the laws of capital, what gives the wheat value is not that which is supplied by nature. That has use-value, but no value. Value derives from the application of labour-power alone.
Custodian
There is a spiritual, or artistic, dimension to the use-value of nature that should never be underestimated or discounted.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
(George Gordon, Lord Byron Childe Harold’s pilgrimage - 1812)
I am unable to match such poetic heights. Nevertheless, I am constantly inspired, humbled, by the wonders of nature: the evening sunset I see through my office window, the mists of autumn mornings, the thunderstorms as they roll over London. All are wealth for the human being.
So wealth cannot be limited to the products of human activity alone. Wealth must include every form of consumption which produce human beings in one respect or another. Michael Lebowitz rightly considers this of particular significance: “Marx’s identification of nature as a source of wealth is critical in identifying a concept of wealth that goes beyond capital’s perspective.”9
Capital, as we have shown above, has but one interest - self-expansion. Capital has no intrinsic concern either for the worker or nature. Nature and the human being are nothing for capital, except as objects. Especially over the last 100 years, and increasingly so, capitalist exploitation of nature has resulted in wanton destruction. Deforestation, the erosion of topsoil, the spread of deserts and air and water pollution grow apace. Half the world’s population has no ready access to clean drinking water. Countless species of plants and animals have been driven to extinction. Instead of the cherishing of nature’s resources, there is greed, plunder and recklessness. Oil is prodigally devoured and criminally depleted through the car economy; air travel booms, while railway prices are hiked; nuclear power is presented as the salvation from global warming and the danger of dramatic climate change.
The working class presents the only viable alternative to the destructive reproduction of capital. First as a countervailing force within capitalism, one which has its own logic pulling against that of capital. The political economy of the working class brings with it not only higher wages and shorter hours. It is responsible for health services, social security systems, pensions, universal primary and secondary education - and measures that protect the environment. Wealth, for the working class, is not merely about the accumulation and consumption of an ever greater range of commodities.
Besides being of capitalism, the working class is uniquely opposed to capitalism. The political economy of the working class more than challenges capital. As Michael Lebowitz suggests, it points beyond - to the total reorganisation of society and, with that, the ending of humanity’s strained, brutalised and crisis-ridden relationship with nature.
Socialism and communism do not raise the workers to the position where they own planet. Mimicking the delusions associated with capitalism - as witnessed under bureaucratic socialism in the Soviet Union - brings constant disappointment, ecological degradation and the certain revenge of nature. Humanity can only be the custodian.
Marx was amongst the first to theorise human dependence on nature and the fact that humanity and nature co-evolve. He warned, however, that a metabolic “rift” had occurred which threatened the nature-imposed conditions of human existence. Capitalism crowds vast numbers into polluted, soulless, crime-ridden concrete jungles. Simultaneously, the ever bigger farms of capitalist agriculture denude nature through mono-crops, the ripping up of hedgerows and, as highlighted by Rachel Carson back in the early 1960s, the chemical death meted out to “birds, mammals, fishes, and indeed practically every form of wildlife”.10
The Marx-Engels team wanted to re-establish an intimate connection between town and country, agriculture and industry, and rationally redistribute the population. Mega-cities are profoundly alienating and inhuman. Sprawling conurbations should be halted and new spaces made inside them for woods, parks, public gardens, allotments and small farms. Doubtless, this programme has little practical relevance to capitalist society, which, because of its short-termism and manic fixation on generating profits, is incapable of carrying through such far-reaching measures. But under conditions of socialism and communism such ideas will surely be put into practice.
Our aim is not only to put a stop to destruction and preserve what remains. Of course, the great rain forests of Congo, Indonesia, Peru, Columbia and Brazil must be safeguarded. So must the much depleted life in the oceans and seas. But more can be done. Communism would restore and where possible enhance the riches of nature.
Human activity - when it progresses spontaneously and not according to a conscious plan - leaves deserts in its wake. Mesopotamia - now dry and dusty - can be remade into the lush habitat it was in pre-Sumerian times. The Sahara in Africa and Rajputana in India were once home to a wonderful variety of fauna and flora. The parched interior of Australia too. With sufficient resources and careful management, they can bloom once again.
The aim of such projects would not be to maximise production and churn out an endless flood of products. Hardly the Marxist version of abundance. On the contrary, the communist economy has every reason to rationally economise and minimise all necessary inputs.
The “enormous waste” under capitalist social conditions outraged Marx. The by-products of industry, agriculture and human consumption are squandered and lead to pollution of the air and contamination of rivers. Capital volume three contains a section entitled ‘Utilisation of the extractions of production’. Here Marx outlines his commitment to the scientific “reduction” and “re-employment” of waste.11
In place of capitalism’s squandermania and Stalin’s cult of steel, coal and cement, there comes with communism the human being who is rich in needs. However, these needs are satisfied not merely by the supply of things: they are first and foremost satisfied through the concert of human interconnections and a readjusted and sustainable relationship with nature.
At the heart of the Marxist project is therefore the richest development of human beings. Individuals who have developed their capabilities and capacities so that there is a full working out of all innate and acquired potentialities.
Notes
2. Presumably that is why the proposition was tweaked in Socialist Worker a couple of years ago. Its ‘What we fight for’ column now reads: “Under capitalism workers’ labour creates all profit. A socialist society can only be constructed when the working class seizes control of the means of production and democratically plans how they are used.” Hence the SWP has, in effect, two, opposed, positions, which are both wrong. Testimony, if it were needed, of the SWP’s complete lack of seriousness when it comes to its own statement of principles.
3. It was, therefore, disappointing to read the trusted SWP member, Colin Baker. He was tasked with defending the ‘Where we stand’ column in a 19-part series in Socialist Worker over December 6 2003-June 26 2004. Naturally he began with proposition one, but dishonestly steered clear of nature. The same goes for Martin Empson’s pamphlet, Marxism and ecology: capitalism, socialism and the future of the planet (2009). He too tried to do the impossible: that is square the SWP’s ‘Where we stand’ statement on wealth and the workers with the Marxism of Marx and Engels.
4. K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p35.
5. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p81.
6. dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/marxnfree.html.
7. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 24, London 1989, p81.
8. K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p43.
9. M Lebowitz Beyond Capital Basingstoke 2003, pp130-31.