As may be
gleaned from our review of Engels’s 1895 Introduction to The Class Struggles
in France, the “errors” which Engels confessed had been committed by Marx
and himself and the additional errors that we listed earlier were due to the
lack of the kind of political theory that Marx’s critique of capitalism
contained implicitly, but one that Marx failed entirely to develop. What we are
saying is that the “errors” that Marx incurred in the application of his theory
of capitalism to the political events occurring in his time were not due to any
corresponding “errors” in the theory itself, but rather to the application
of the theory that Marx carried out. The reasons behind Marx’s erroneous
application of his theory of capitalist industry to the society of capital –
his failure to develop a political theory apposite to capitalist industry as
social capital – can be attributed to his inability to see that capitalist
industry is only a part of the society of capital, but not its entirety!
Furthermore, had Marx extrapolated his theory of capitalist industry to the
social and political developments implicit in that theory, he may have been able
to predict political developments in the society of capital of equal foresight
and importance to those that he successfully predicted regarding the evolution
of capitalist industry and finance itself!
Of course,
whilst it may be fair to upbraid Marx for unduly extending his theory of
capitalist industry to capitalist society overall, and therefore incurring the
“errors” that Engels pointed out, we are much less entitled to chastise him for
failing to extrapolate from the capitalist society that he confronted in his
time to the kinds of developments that took place after his, and indeed after
Engels’s, time. The first mistake Marx made was to believe that the class
antagonism of capitalist society was a magnified yet exact replica of the
antagonism between workers and capitalists inside the factory walls. In other
words, Marx failed to see that the kind of politics that pertain to the labour
market and to the labour process is not the same as the politics that applies
to the entirety of capitalist society. Capitalist industry is not confined to
the factory walls! Capitalist industry requires for its existence, reproduction,
and expansion a society of capital that comprises at least those elements of
social life that precede the birth of capitalist industry and – much more
important perhaps – social features or resources that go beyond the boundaries
of the particular society in which a specific capitalist industry is first
located and develops.
We cannot
stress these elements strongly enough. What we are contending is that Marx
confined his analysis of capitalist social relations of production to the very
restricted realm of the labour market and of the labour process – to what we
may call loosely “industrial relations”. And from these industrial relations
Marx then presumed to extend the same kind of “politics” to the entirety of the
society in which capitalist industry first originated and developed – without
regard to the fact that this society is a far greater entity, both in size and
reach and political significance, than the more limited sphere of
worker-capitalist or factory relationships! It is possible, for instance, to
have an authoritarian workplace, on one side, within a democratic
society on the other side! Conversely, it is possible for a society of capital
to display more representative features within the factory walls, in its
industrial relations, and entirely authoritarian and even despotic
structures at the broader political level.
Simply and
curtly put, Marx failed to see that capitalist industry (including
finance capital) and the society of capital are not necessarily one and
the same thing! Marx’s greatest error was to reduce all social relations
required by capitalism – in other words, the social relations of production
required by capitalist industry – to the narrow confines of the social
relations that obtain inside the workplace. Marx mistook bourgeois
society for a factory-society, as if the factory could extend
seamlessly to the rest of society and cover it entirely. – Whereas in
fact we know that for this to occur the capitalist factory must first rely upon
and gradually transform the rest of the society in which it operates to its
image and likeness, to “the society of capital”, without ever succeeding in
this process of assimilation and integration because it is impossible for
capitalist social relations of production to swallow all social relations. It
is entirely fair to claim that Marx’s theory and critique of capitalism
remained wholly locked inside the factory gates!
Capital is
continually expanding and can never be static without abolishing itself – it is
“value in motion”. Consequently, capitalist social relations of production
always require use values – first among them a “reserve army of unemployed” -
that lie outside of the circulation of capital. In his effort to theorize
capitalist social relations of production, Marx reduced human society to the
factory precinct and forgot entirely that capitalist industry is only a part –
yes, the vital part, but still only a part – of the society of capital but not
its entirety! Capitalist industry requires for its simple reproduction,
and especially for its expanded reproduction, the existence of areas and
regions of social life that are not yet subjected to its “social relations of
production”. This ought to have been obvious to Marx; but in his theoretical
eagerness to apply Ockham’s Razor to his theory of capitalism (in other words,
to reduce the theory to the simplest formula, to its minimum common
denominator), Marx forgot that capitalist industry can exist and thrive only
within a larger “social body” on which it can feed!
Even the
best bourgeois economic theoreticians have perceived this essential
characteristic of the capitalist economy by adverting to the “externalities” of
its operation – that is to say, the ravages of capitalist industry on the
environment and on society whose “economic costs” are not included in the
circulation of capital, precisely because they are “external”, they lie outside
that process of valorization and realization of capital through what is only
apparently, and catastrophically, mistaken for “the self-regulating market
mechanism” or “impersonal market forces”. (See above all, A. Pigou, The Economics
of Welfare and J. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development.)The
very fact that Marx dedicated Volume Two of Capital to the schematic
analysis of the simple circulation of capital (what Schumpeter described later
as Kreislauf or “circular flow”, that is, a capitalist economy in static
equilibrium) shows implicitly that Marx believed in the theoretical
possibility of such a static equilibrium or circular flow whereby capitalist
industry is a “self-contained” unit not reliant on any “external” factors such
as classes other than capitalists and workers, the reserve army of the
unemployed, the capitalist state and bureaucracy, other nations, non-renewable
resources affecting the political relations between capitalists and workers
intra-nationally and inter-nationally.
To revert to
the simplest criticism we can make of Marx’s theory of capital, in his haste to
reduce capitalism to a scientific formula, Marx forgot that “the forces of
production” do not and cannot cover the entirety of “the social relations of
production” and still less “social relations” overall, and that “the economic
base” cannot be separated categorically from “the ideological superstructure” –
because politics is not a concentrate of economics but instead it is economics
that is a concentrate of politics – because capitalism is not reducible to
“impersonal market forces” but is instead entirely dependent on specific social,
political and historical agencies that cannot be reduced to a simple
“scientific” or “economic” formula! Of course, anyone who has read Volume One
of Capital, or indeed the section on “Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations”
of the Grundrisse will know full-well that Marx was aware of how violent
the transition from feudalism to capitalism was, what he called “primitive
accumulation” (ursprungliche Akkumulation) where he describes how
capitalism came into being “steeped in blood from head to toe” by expropriating
the existing peasantry, especially in England, in what came to be known as “the
enclosure movement”. Yet even from this potent historical perspective, Marx
still sees the period of primitive capitalist accumulation whereby the
bourgeoisie “formally subsumes” the existing agricultural and artisanal mode of
production prevalent in the decaying feudal absolutist regime as the doings of “the
bourgeoisie” – as a historical “class”, yes, but still as a collection of
individual proprietors!
What Marx
failed to see, even when it ought to have been so evident, is that the emerging
bourgeoisie acted not as a collection of separate individuals but much rather
through the agency of the reformed absolutist State – in England as in France! The
insurmountable, almost unpardonable, problem with Marx’s theory of capitalism
is that he always saw the bourgeoisie as a collective of individual proprietors
and entrepreneurs and the capitalist State consequently as “a committee of management”
(in the Communist Manifesto) acting not as an independent agency with its own
political instruments extending over the entirety of society, including those
elements not yet within the cycle of the circulation of capital, but rather as
a simple elementary blunt tool of social repression against the proletariat! So
keen was Marx to show that the capitalist mode of production could operate
through “impersonal market forces”, that he forgot the very violently coercive “act
of birth” of capitalist enterprise – that original sin of “primitive
accumulation” – that not only lay the foundations for all future capitalist
industry but remained to the present day an essential feature of the society of
capital!
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