To accept with
Lenin that "politics is a concentrate of economics" would be
tantamount to allowing 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. But 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, the
notion of socially necessary labour time were valid, then, given a fixed
working population, there can be little doubt that rising productivity would
push socially necessary labour time to 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 of (ii) the anarchy of capitalist
market competition – and the obvious implication that they 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”). In further evidence of the erroneity of this Marxian hypothesis,
Bernstein proceeded to show 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
instead of 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.)
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 Law of Value derived from the Labour Theory of Value is a calculable
material quantity. 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 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. Bernstein’s
reformism, in a nutshell, is all here: once it is established that all Value is
created by Labour – through 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 becomes thus a “technical” question that is now removed from the more “ethical”
question of the workers’ claim to the fruit of their own Labour. (As we shall
discuss later, this exakte Kalkulation at the heart of capitalist
enterprise will become the metre of Weber’s entire theorization of Western
capitalist “rationalization”.)
It is this 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 or into a minority revolutionary “vanguard” that would lead the proletarian
“masses” to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Bernstein’s reformism
represents a seismic shift in socialist politics not just in tactics but
indeed in strategy – because the fundamental presuppositions (Voraussetzungen)
of Marxist theory had 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 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 “surplus value” between workers and
capitalist “managers”.
The change
in strategy that Bernstein proposed and that was adopted
enthusiastically by the German bourgeoisie in its backing of the integration
of the Sozialdemokratische Partei (SPD) with the establishment of the
Weimar Republic in 1919 had already been flagged by Friedrich Engels in his 1895
Introduction to the re-edition of Marx’s The Class Struggles in France. Written
shortly before his death, this Introduction can be regarded as a last testament
on the part of Marx’s lifelong companion, and for that reason alone it received
enormous attention in the workers’ movement leading up to the First World War. It
is an important document for our purposes because it addresses several analytical
themes that are essential to the schematization and periodization of our own
study of the origin, formation and seizure of power of revolutionary movements
in the totalitarian era between the World Wars. To be sure, Engels had intended
his theses to be a mere change of the tactics to be adopted for the
transition to communism; but they were never meant as a change of strategy
because unlike his assistant, Eduard Bernstein whom he appointed as trustee of
his intellectual estate, Engels unflinchingly held fast to the theoretical
premises of the Marxist critique of capitalism.
In this
astoundingly visionary short exposition, Engels owns up to “mistakes” that he,
together with Marx, had committed in the assessment of the political
preconditions and the revolutionary tactics to be adopted for the successful
transition to a communist society. Tersely summarized, these mistakes referred
principally to the ability of a minority vanguard or leadership of the working
population to lead the majority of the proletariat to a successful revolutionary
insurrection given (a) the spread of capitalist enterprise and (b) the rise of
the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic political force in control of (c) powerful nation-states
with their pervasive bureaucratic apparatus including (d) sizeable standing
armies capable of putting down any uprising with overwhelming force. In support
of his critical revision, Engels could do no more than to point to the fate of
the Paris Commune of 1871 – itself the subject of another Marxian piece on The
Civil War in France where the “mistakes” of the earlier tract written in
1848 were repeated. As a remedy for these “mistakes”, Engels proposed a change
of tactics toward a more “majoritarian” conquest of power by socialist workers’
parties given that the spread of parliamentary representation and of universal
suffrage could not but lead to the gradual political supremacy of the proletariat
and its eventual transformation of human society to socialism by either
peaceful or, if compelled, revolutionary means.
The reason
for us recalling this quite remarkable Introduction by Engels is once again
that it presciently referred, with unmatchable perspicacity, to the essential
ingredients of the origin and formation of proto-totalitarian regimes in
accordance with our thesis on “the primacy of economics” in the first phase – comprising
the first two stages – of the historical evolution of these regimes. To repeat,
these ingredients are: - (a) the spread of capitalist enterprise; (b) the rise
of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic political force within integrated economic
regions; (c) the formation of powerful nation-states with their pervasive
bureaucratic apparatus to govern and administer these economic regions, including
(d) sizeable standing armies capable of putting down any uprising with overwhelming
force.
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