We have proposed to periodize revolutionary
movements into an initial phase comprising two stages, that of origins and
formation and that of the seizure of power as Party-State, during which the
movements may be said to operate according to a purposive rationality, and the
second and last phase, what we styled with Paxton as “the ultimate stage”,
during which they proceed in accordance with what we call value rationality. The
rationality that we intend here is not an absolute rationality: it is not the
Logos of Platonic or even Pauline or Johannine doctrine (“in the beginning was
the Word [Logos]”); rather, it is a Weberian relative or “value-free” (wert-frei)
rationality that we believe is distinctly applicable to advanced
industrial capitalism (it is the famous Rationalisierung theorized by
the German sociological titan as early as the Vorbemerkung to Die
Protestantische Ethik) for reasons that we shall adduce presently. It is
essential to understand our historico-materialist paradigm in this connection
because we believe that it is a novel and crucial application to revolutionary
movements and their totalitarian denouement - one that, we submit, will
enhance our ability to understand their historical and politico-economic dynamics
even for practical political purposes. In the premises, we propose to improve –
with the utmost respect owed to a great historian – on the periodization
advanced by Tim Mason in his seminal essay on “The Primacy of Politics”
wherein he argues that the advent of the Nazi Dictatorship to power in 1933
constituted the beginning of an epochal substitution of capitalist economics
with Nazi totalitarian politics. Whilst we agree with Mason that Hitler’s
accession to power epitomised the “primacy of politics” where the politico-economic
exigencies of the German bourgeoisie were concerned, we differ from him in the
narrow sense that, in our submission, to the extent that, to repeat, the Nazi
Dictatorship represented and answered to the politico-economic exigencies of
German capitalist industry, it was still operating, at this early stage between
1933 and 1939, under the guidance of the purposive rationality that we
described earlier. Although, quite plainly, it cannot be denied that the
“ethics of conviction” or absolute value rationality were already at play right
from the inception of the Nazi movement, we insist on this fundamental “break”
or “turn” or caesura between the earlier phase of the Dictatorship when
“the ethics of responsibility” prevailed regarding the conduct of social and
economic policies favourable to German capital, and the later phase when “the
ethics of conviction” lost all contact with the purposive-rational needs not
just of German capital but of German society tout court! It may be
useful, in this context, to invoke the well-known distinction introduced by
Ernst Fraenkel in The Dual State between “the Normative State” and “the
Prerogative State”. Evidently, we argue that in the early phase of Nazism it
was the ethos of the Normative State that prevailed in line with the interests
of German capital as the Nazi Dictatorship sought to cement its power as a
Party-State, whereas in the late phase it was the Prerogative State that
virtually eclipsed the Normative once the Dictatorship had eliminated all forms
of resistance to its totalitarian rule.
The correction we have made to Mason’s own
periodization may seem trivial but we insist on its importance on at least two
grounds: the first is that it is incorrect to say that “the primacy of
politics” imposed itself in Germany only from the time of Hitler’s appointment
as Kanzler because, as we explain below, to the extent that “economics
is a concentrate of politics”, politics always has “primacy” in social
relations. The real question is the extent to which economics as the rationale
of capitalist enterprise, which (as Mason rightfully argues) led to the rise of
Nazism, continued to hold sway over Nazi regime policies after its accession to
power. The second reason is that our differentiation of the periods of Nazi
totalitarian rule helps us focus on the extent to which capitalist social
relations of production are consistent with totalitarian rule, at what stage
the two part ways, and therefore on the significant differences between capitalist
social relations of production and the social policies of totalitarian regimes.
It may be said from the outset that economics is
truly a concentrate of politics and that consequently economics can be
distinguished from politics only in terms of the time periods or cycles that
the two spheres occupy. Economics is the inner sphere of social reality,
spinning around a hypothetical centre with a different torque or angular
momentum from that of the political sphere which has a faster cycle or torque.
As we shift from this hypothetical centre of the social sphere to its outer
layers, economics grows increasingly political until it turns into policy
and finally, at the outer surface of the social sphere, it resolves
itself into strategy and tactics.
Contrary to
what Lenin is said to have quipped, then, politics is not a concentrate of
economics. It is the other way round: economics is a concentrate of politics.
In other words, it is not politics that "boils down" to economics; it
is economics that can be reduced to a bundle of politics. The important thing
is to focus on the meaning of the phrase "a concentrate of" and the
phrase "boils down to". What is it that we mean when we say that
"in the final analysis" politics is economics or the opposite, that
economics really is politics? What kind of "reality"
do we refer to when we speak of the ultimate foundations of economics or
politics? As we all know, necessity is not just "the mother of
invention" - meaning that there are some needs that are so fundamental
that they stir up human imagination and inventiveness. Necessity can also be
camouflaged and disguised or simply be rationalised away as "virtue":
this is what we do when "we make virtue out of necessity".
Differently put, we recognize that there are situations in social relations
when we are coerced into doing things that either we would rather not do or
else "concentrate the mind" to the point of inducing virtue - the
acquiescence to necessity as virtue - or inventiveness, the desperate search
for alternative solutions. But in all these cases, in all these instances, what
we call ‘necessity’ is a function of social relations, not of physical or
physiological necessity. If we accept that our environment offers sufficient
resources for human societies to reproduce themselves, then it is evident that
economics - which as "the dismal science" is often confused with
"the sphere of necessity" - has little to do with physical or
physiological necessity but must instead have everything to do with "coercion".
The necessity of economics intended as a "science" is therefore in
reality the necessity of political coercion. That
is why it is correct to insist that "economics is a concentrate of
politics", in the sense that what we describe or circumscribe as a
separate field of human activity - "the Economic" - is a specific
form of coercion imposed by some people on other people in the sphere of the
production of and for human needs and their satisfaction.
To accept with
Lenin that "politics is a concentrate of economics" would be
tantamount to asserting that economic activity is dictated by a
"necessity" that is independent of "coercion", that is
physical or even physio-bio-logical in nature – and therefore
independent of "the Political". This may make sense in terms of
the economic determinism – indeed, an eschatology or even a “theodicy”
of communism – that Lenin inherited from Marx’s labour theory of value and is implicit
in the conception of human history expounded most explicitly in The
Communist Manifesto and in the “Preface to A Contribution”. It was
this economic determinism that Eduard Bernstein attacked with his Evolutionary
Socialism wherein he sought to reformulate the strategy of the
Social Democratic Party for the conquest of political power in post-Wilhelmine
Germany. To be sure, Bernstein’s attack on the notion of the “general crisis of
capitalism” or Zusammenbruchstheorie had little resemblance to Marx’s
notion of the inevitability of its decline and replacement by “the dictatorship
of the proletariat” – which was certainly consistent with the gradual transition
to communism and even more consistent with a revolutionary overthrow of
bourgeois regimes than with a sudden catastrophic end to capitalism. As
Karl Kautsky pointed out in his stinging rebuke Bernstein und das
sozialdemokratische Programm, there is nothing remotely resembling a Zusammenbruchstheorie
in Marx with the possible exception of “the law of the tendential fall of the
rate of profit” (at p.42: “Eine besondere
,,Zusantmenbruchsthteorie" ist von Marx und Engels nicht ausgestellt worden.”). Rather, what was
more significant than the applicability of the “general crisis” to capitalism
for Bernstein’s attack on Marxist eschatology was the undeniable determinism of
Marx’s theory based on the notion of “socially necessary labour time”
and, consequently, of the validity of the Law of Value. For if, indeed, we
assumed the notion of socially necessary labour time to be valid, then, given a
fixed working population, there can be little doubt that rising productivity would
push socially necessary labour time toward the zero bound, that is, to a point
where workers will receive little or nothing out of the social product whereas
capitalists will be entitled to the near totality of it! This tendency of
capitalism combined with the anarchy of production dictated by the reality of
market competition necessarily entails the equal necessity of its supersession
by political means to a new and higher form of social production that Marxists
call communism.
It was these
two pivots of Marxian revolutionary economic theory – those of (i) the unsustainability
of surplus-value extraction (Marx’s law of the tendential fall of the rate of
profit) and (ii) the anarchy of capitalist market competition – and the obvious
implication that these two factors would lead to inevitable and
irremediable crises for capitalist production and for
bourgeois society – that Bernstein attacked, first, by challenging the
“necessity” of the compression of workers’ wages as a proportion of total
income (“the immiseration thesis”); and second, in further evidence of the
erroneity of this Marxian hypothesis, by showing that indeed, far from the
progressive immiseration of the working class and the growing
intractability of capitalist crises, the recent emergence of welfare and
interventionist states in Western Europe – the Sozialstaat supplanting
the liberal laissez-faire Rechtsstaat or Lassallean
“night-watchman state” - together with their regulation of capitalist industry
occasioned in part by the rapid ascent of social-democratic parties and trade
unions – that these new political realities militated in favour of the ability
of the capitalist system to avoid catastrophic political and economic crises
and also – and this is the crux of Bernstein’s reformist thesis
- in favour of the ability of socialist parties to achieve the gradual and
peaceful, non-revolutionary evolution of capitalist society
into a socialist one of freedom and equality. (On the transformation of the
State in the nineteenth century, see the insightful studies by Franz Neumann
collected in his The Democratic and the Authoritarian State and The
Rule of Law, and those co-edited with Otto Kirchheimer in The Rule
of Law under Siege. Again, Bernstein's theses are reviewed elegantly
in L. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin.)
Note that both these theses which form the essence of Bernstein’s
socialist reformism can be derived directly from Marx’s own economic
determinism. For if, indeed, it is possible to calculate “socially necessary labour
time” by reason of its “necessity”, and with it the magnitude of surplus value
(the profit or value added by living labour after the cost of the means of
production and real wages are subtracted from the total value realized from the
sale of the products), it must follow that the Value derived from the Law of
Value and the Labour Theory of Value is a calculable material quantity
irrespective of the political relations between workers and capital, that is,
irrespective of the mode of production. But in that case the crucial question
in the Marxian critique of capitalism boils down to the distribution of
value in capitalist society and not to its production –
because the mode of production is not called into question: the
mode of production – what is produced when and how,
by what means - remains exactly the same under capitalism as under socialism.
All that changes is how the product – the Labour Value –
is distributed between capitalists and workers. Furthermore,
even the ownership of the means of production becomes relevant only to
the extent that it affects (a) the distribution of Value in accordance to the
labour-content of the product, and (b) the occurrence of economic crises and
consequent unemployment due to the “anarchy” of private capitalist ownership.
It is true that Marx had intended “the Law of Value” – that
economic value could be measured by labour content, specifically “labour-power”
– to apply only to a capitalist economy and not to a socialist one.
Indeed, Marx considered his greatest discovery to be undoubtedly the notion of
“labour-power” – in other words, the notion that it is not “concrete labour”
that measures the value involved in capitalist production but rather “abstract
labour” or “labour-power”, the abstraction of human living
activity coerced by capitalist employers into a measurable time
entity (“man-power”). But here Marx was trying to have his cake and eat
it, too. For if the measure of capitalist value is labour-power and
labour-power cannot be measured scientifically because it is
strictly a measure of political coercion, then it is inconsistent
to call Marx’s theory “scientific”! Throughout his works, Marx
was torn between his search for economic determinism, that is the historical
inevitability of the supersession of capitalism by socialism, and the simple
reality that by its very nature history is not and cannot be an inevitable
process. Specifically, Marx’s theorization of capitalist industry as dependent
on market competition between and within the capitalist and working classes
meant that the overall operation of the capitalist mode of production was
independent of political factors such as strategies and organizations not
immediately related to the process of production that could affect the
operation of capitalism as a whole and more particularly the stratification and
composition of social classes, including the working class and the proletariat
more broadly, and the segmentation of the working class itself through incomes
policies and through the labour process.
This
difficulty may be illustrated most effectively by examining the most
fundamental components of the Law of Value – the notions of socially
necessary labour time and that of labour-power. For these notions to
lend themselves to practical economic use in the calculation of the value of
commodities and then of their individual prices, it is obvious that the
particular living labour that goes into the production of the commodities, of
dead labour, must be capable of homogenization or “real abstraction” (the
phrase was coined by Alfred Sohn-Rethel in Intellectual and Manual Labour)
so that what are incommensurable living labours may be rendered equivalent
and thence measurable in an abstract manner. But how can such an
“abstraction” of living labours be achieved? Either it is done politically,
that is, through an institutional process that consciously directs the
processes of production of commodities and their distribution through pricing
and the market process – or else this is achieved mechanically through the
market process itself, in which case it may be said that the capitalist market
is capable of co-ordinating the entire process of capitalist production and
distribution automatically. Of course, the latter option is the one propounded
by bourgeois political economy through the notion of economic “equilibrium”.
What we find
in Marx is the impossible attempt to show that the Law of Value applies to
capitalist production through the exercise of coercion over living labour so
that it is reduced to its “real abstraction” as labour-power in the
process of circulation of capital (from valourization in the process of
production to realization in the market) to ensure the expanded reproduction of
capitalist industry. But we ask, once again, how is this possible? If indeed the
abstraction of living labour is achieved by means of political coercion, it is
then impossible for this coerced living labour to be homogenized as an abstract
entity, as labour-power, by “impersonal market forces”, that is, by means of a
market process that is independent of conscious political manipulation or
direction or management. In other words, it is impossible for capitalist
industry to be at once decentralized – so that no political agencies
determine or ensure the co-ordination of the productive system through
market-clearing prices – and centralized so that living labour can be
coerced into its abstract form, homogeneous labour-power, as “socially
necessary labour time”! (We may recall here that Gyorgy Lukacs, in History
and Class Consciousness, perhaps sensing the incongruity of the Marxian
position, resorted to describing this “real abstraction” as a “necessary
illusion” – conceding inadvertently the pleonastic inconsistency, given that
there can be nothing “necessary” about an “illusion”, and nothing “illusory”
about a “necessity”! Of course, the same applies to the equivalent phrase “real
abstraction” because an abstraction is not real and reality is not an
abstraction.)
One of two
things: either labour power and socially necessary labour time are
politically-coerced abstractions, in which case the capitalist system is
directed by specific political institutions and historical agencies (the
capitalist class, the capitalist State), or else they are real
objectively measurable and quantifiable entities that can be co-ordinated
through an “impersonal”, “self-regulating market-pricing mechanism”. But in the
latter case it is obvious that the capitalist market mechanism would be an
entirely “scientific” institution whose anarchical crises of overproduction or
underconsumption with consequent underemployment can be avoided easily,
contrary to what Marx envisaged in his critique. Conversely, in the former
case, it is impossible to see how the Marxian Law of Value could apply to the
capitalist system of “independent” or “decentralized” production for the
market! Even if we agree with Marx that the Law of Value, where commodity
values and prices are determined by socially necessary labour time, applies
only to capitalism as a historically specific form of class exploitation,
it is impossible to conclude that such a mode of production could ever
co-ordinate itself in any manner other than by conscious political direction –
and therefore that any such “law” of value could ever be possible, let alone be
effectual.
To recapitulate:
if, as Marx contended, the Law of Value applies only to the capitalist mode of
production, then it follows conclusively that the notion of “socially necessary
labour time” on which that of Value depends is just as necessarily the effect
of political coercion. But then, in that event, the homogenization of
living labour as labour-power “embodied” in commodities can be effected
only by means of political measures and institutions and certainly not by
“impersonal market forces” or “decentralised decisions”! If, conversely, the
Law of Value is an absolute standard applicable to all societies, then the
difference between capitalism and socialism becomes merely one of the just
distribution of Labour Values – a question of Ethics, not one of systematic class
exploitation and oppression.
Ronald Meek, in his impressive Studies in the Labour
Theory of Value, reviews Bernstein’s objections to Marxian theory and
rightly points out that Marx intended the Law of Value to apply only to
capitalism. But he remains ambivalent over whether Marx’s theory is to be
considered “scientific”, in which case it is clearly a vicious circle, which
Meek does not concede, or political, in which case it makes perfect sense from
a practico-historical viewpoint, but Meek considers to be insufficient to
qualify as "theory". Whilst he opts for the political theory that the
Law of Value applies only to capitalism, Meek then gets entangled in the
insistence that such a “theory” would be scientifically indeterminate or
unprovable:
But surely there are two
salient points which a theory of distribution appropriate to our own times
should concentrate on explaining: First, how is it that unearned incomes
continue to be received in a society in which the prices of the great majority
of commodities are determined on an impersonal market by the forces of
supply and demand, and in which the relation between the direct producer
and his employer is based on contract rather than on status? And second, how
are the respective shares of the main social classes in the national income
determined in such a society? Unless one is content to rely on some sort of
explanation in terms of “force” or “struggle” (in which case again one could
only with difficulty speak of a theory of distribution), it is impossible to
give adequate answers to these questions without basing one's account on a
theory of value.2 (Meek, Studies, p.250.)
Evidently, like Marx before him, Meek is trying to circle the square,
that is, attempt the impossible, because he is looking for a precise scientific theory
of distribution, how a capitalist economy can co-ordinate itself as a
market economy, without resorting to “force” or “struggle”, when in fact
such co-ordination can only be politically regulated, and certainly not be the
product of “impersonal market forces”! Meek’s retort is that such a
“theory” is not distinguishable from a general theory of exploitation:
A “theory of
distribution” which said only that unearned income was the fruit of the surplus
labour of those employed in production would hardly qualify as a theory at all;
and the mere fact that it expressed input and output in terms of embodied
labour would not make it any more likely to qualify as one. At the best, such a
“theory” could be little more than a generalised description of the
appropriation by the owners of the means of production, in all types of class
society, of the product of the surplus labour of the exploited classes. (ibid.)
Repeatedly, Meek reverts to the notion that for Marx “socially
necessary labour time” referred to an absolute standard or measure by
means of which the capitalist “transformation” of labour-time values into
market prices, and therefore the calculation of profit as surplus value, was to
be determined. (See above all his discussion of Benedetto Croce's critique of
Marx's labour theory in Studies.) But this is simply false,
because in Marx the concept of “socially necessary labour time”
refers to “labour-power” not in a theoretical society analysed
scientifically or objectively but specifically to the abstraction of
human concrete labour achieved by means of capitalist
political violence and coercion! Throughout his Studies, Meek
overlooks the fact that for Marx, as for us, capitalism is a specific mode of
production operating according to historically specific modes of
exploitation or “social relations of production”, into which we will
inquire presently. The essential point to Marx's critique was not to
determine the distribution of value in a capitalistic society on
scientific grounds but rather to show that capitalist production was
conceivable only through the violence of the reduction of concrete labour to
abstract labour or labour-power. The problem then becomes one of
discovering how such an abstraction or homogenization of concrete labour or
living labour can take place in a politically sustainable manner, albeit one
not immune to severe and often catastrophic crises.
It is true that Marx often deviates from this position in a
misguided attempt to give his critique of capitalism the (Darwinian!) status of
a natural science (a science of history in the Engelsian distortion of
historical materialism re-baptized as dialectical materialism).
Yet, this cannot detract from the essential validity of Marxian theory when
interpreted in its politico-practical, historico-materialist dimension. No
greater claim need be made for the originality and greatness of Marx’s critique
and theory of capitalism than that it discovered the precise
historico-political mode of exploitation specific to capitalist
enterprise! Once again, the residual problem then remains of how it is
possible for capitalist enterprise to regulate and calculate values and prices
to ensure at least partially the co-ordination of social production. As we
shall discuss later, this exakte Kalkulation at the heart of
capitalist enterprise will become the political measure or rule of
Weber’s entire theorization of Western capitalist “rationalization”.
The blatant
contradiction in Marx’s Labour Theory of Value that we have exposed above explains
his ambivalence with regard to the theorization of the State in
capitalist society. Marx’s firmly-held belief in “impersonal market forces” as
the unshakeable foundation of the capitalist mode of production meant that he
interpreted capitalist society as a construct of social relations of production
between individual workers and individual capitalists – as a set of economic links
that he called “civil society” – that were entirely independent from political
forces such as “the State” or liberalism, nationalism, religion or culture tout
court which he saw as an “ideological superstructure” entirely and scientifically
determined by the “economic base” of civil society. It is a widely
known fact that Marx never developed a political theory worthy of the name
after completion of the three volumes of Capital (although Volume Three
was published posthumously). It is true that he had promised to devote a later
volume of his vast oeuvre to the State, and that he died before being
able to keep his promise. But even a cursory look at his tangential or
incidental commentary on the nature and character of the State in capitalist
society scattered throughout his writings shows conclusively that even had he
had time to complete such a study – and provided he held firmly to his earlier
pronouncements on the subject - he would never have been able to develop
anything like an adequate political theory of capitalist society. To be sure,
our contention here is that Marx’s historico-materialist method combined with
his critique of political economy could have led indeed to the enucleation of a
powerful, coherent and cogent theory. Yet, such a theory would have had to
diverge quite significantly from the overall premises and perspective on which
his disparate commentary was clearly founded.
Bernstein’s revision of Marxist economic and political theory
starts from this deterministic Marxist premise that all human
activity – taken as “labour” in the abstract – can be measured, and that this
absolute measurement entitles workers to their rightful share of the social
product. It follows that for Bernstein the essence of socialism was the fair
distribution of the social product according to the “labour” required for its
production. For Bernstein and for social democracy, the key sins and flaws of
capitalism consisted in (a) the “theft of labour time”, and (b) the
unnecessary wasteful recurrence of economic crises or slumps. The whole
social question then became one of distributive justice, not one over the
political control of the entirety of social production including its what,
when and how.
Furthermore, Bernstein concurred with the prevalent critique of
Marx’s “scientific” labour theory of value set forth by Eugen Bohm-Bawerk in Karl
Marx and the ‘Close’ of His System to the effect that Marx’s theory could
not establish a direct verifiable empirical link between “socially necessary
labour time” and the market-clearing prices of individual commodities.
Following Bohm-Bawerk, Bernstein objected that Marx’s labour theory of value
was no theory at all because it pretended “to transform” aggregate value into
aggregate prices. But such an equivalence of “aggregates” clearly amounted to
sheer metaphysics because any “aggregate” in the world may be said to be
equivalent to any other “aggregate”. The difficulty of what became widely known
as “the transformation problem” from values to prices that Marx attempted to
solve in Volume Three of Capital is that the problem is not
open to solution because, even if we accept that there is such a thing as
“socially necessary labour time”, this “necessity” must ultimately be validated
by “market prices” – which yields the vicious circle that labour values determine
market prices and market prices determine labour values!
Paradoxically, the critiques conducted by Bohm-Bawerk (vaunted as
“the bourgeois Marx”) and Bernstein led scores of Marxists (from Bortkiewicz to
Hilferding and Sraffa) to theoretical and mathematical contortions to prove
that such transformation of values into prices was possible. Yet it is obvious
that precisely in the event that Marx’s “system” could be “closed”, the very closure
of this system would turn the Marxian critique of political economy into
a tautology – value is defined so as to be the equivalent of price - and Marx’s
entire notion of “praxis” (“philosophers have hereto interpreted the world; the
point now is to change it”) into an eschatology, that is to say, into an
immutable destiny incapable of the very “revolutionary praxis” that Marx
exhorted! Once the notion of value is reduced or reified to a quantity,
labour-time, then it is obvious that the calculations of the individual value
of commodities can be “transformed” into prices by applying simultaneous
equations that take account of “the average rate of profit”. (This is what
Bortkiewicz achieved mathematically – see his “On the Correction of Marx’s
Fundamental Theorem”, in P. Sweezy [ed.], Karl Marx and the Close of his
System.) But then, the Marxist attempt to prove the “scientificity” of
“Marxian economics” – what was on the contrary the Marxian “critique of
economics” – would demonstrate the very thing that Bernstein and Bohm-Bawerk
wished to prove (!) – the eschatological nature of Marx’s theory -,
which is why Schumpeter, Bohm-Bawerk’s pupil in Vienna, could speak
presumptuously of “Marx, the Prophet” (in Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy).
To return to
Bernstein’s revisionism, in a nutshell, it can be summarized thus: once
it is established that all Value is created by Labour – through the absolute
“scientific” version of socially necessary labour time -, it becomes clear that
the redistribution of value from capitalists to workers can be achieved
by peaceful reformist social-democratic means through the process of
parliamentary representation which was already spreading throughout Western
Europe with the introduction of ever more “universal” suffrage. The process of
production of Value and pricing of the product becomes thus a “technico-neutral”
question – a mere matter of social engineering - that is now removed
from the more “ethical” question of the workers’ claim to the fruit of their
own Labour. Thus, Bernstein’s revisionism and reformism represent a seismic
shift in socialist politics not just in tactics but indeed in strategy
– because the fundamental presuppositions (Voraussetzungen) of
Marxist theory have changed. The very title of Bernstein’s series of essays
that kicked off the controversy around the Bernstein-Debatte and the
secession of the Third from the Second International referred to The
Premises (Voraussetzungen) of Socialism. And these premises
had changed in part, as we have seen, because of the crucial ambiguity in
Marx’s own theorization of the evolution of capitalist enterprise. By seeking
to give a scientific foundation to his critique of political
economy, Marx had ended up reducing the political basis of
capitalist industry – the violence of the “exchange” between living and dead
labour, its coercion, in the production and reproduction of human
society – to the economic quantification of the distribution of a
scientifically calculated Value between workers and capitalist “managers”.
This
technical scientization of the production and distribution of Value
according to the calculable amount of Labour represented by them threw open the
question over the integration of working-class parties in the bourgeois
institutions of parliamentary government and representation that was at the
centre of the dramatic split in the workers’ movement between the Second and
Third International, between social-democratic and communist
parties around the Organizationsfrage – the question of the organization
of the workers’ party either into a reformist majoritarian “umbrella”
mass party leading to a broad-based parliamentary democracy or into a minority
revolutionary “vanguard” that would lead the proletarian “masses” to the dictatorship
of the proletariat. It is important to appreciate that both the
social-democratic and the communist variants of the Marxist movement
agreed on the “scientific” determination of labour-values in society, whether
capitalist or socialist. They also agreed that in a capitalist society founded
on private property the preponderance of anarchical decisions in capitalism
over the scientifically planned decisions under socialism would
result in unnecessary and oppressive social and economic crises of
underemployment and immiseration and social waste. The difference between the Sozialismus
and the Kommunismus lay precisely on the degree of scientificity, and
therefore of steered planned economic decision-making, that could be achieved
in a socialist economy. The lesser degree implied by Bernstein’s critique of
Marx meant that greater democratic consensus was required to avoid the
upheavals (and evils) of capitalism; whereas the greater degree of
scientificity claimed by the Kommunismus meant that only the “democratic
centralism” of the dictatorship of the proletariat could steer society to
socialism by wresting the ownership of the means of production from the exploitative
anarchy of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
The
inability of both the Sozialismus and the Kommunismus to
understand and penetrate the true political foundations of capitalist industry
can be traced back to the contradictory ambivalence of Marx’s critique of
political economy and specifically to his inability to construct a political
theory of capitalist society and its State: in other words, his failure
truly to understand and theorize what we have called “the society of capital”,
- a society founded and constructed entirely in the likeness and for the
purposes of capitalist industry.
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