From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no>
Subject: SV: AUT: What could "proletarian socialism" possibly mean?Part 3
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 09:31:17 +0100


Just as short comment.

Chris, you say: "I can say that during the Russian Revolution, which is to
say from February 1917 to December 1917, the workers began taking
over factories and workplaces, running them through the factory
committees and reorganizing life, largely before October 25.  If
they could begin to transform things so quickly in Russia in 1917, I
am certain that we can do better now.  Someone familiar with Spain
in 1936 could prolly make the argument that things went even further
in a relatively short time there."


Everything went fast and further in Spain in 1936. So far correct.
But I am afraid you, as most everybody else regardless of
ideological persuation, have an exaggerated impression of what
had taken place in Russia in 1917. Up to March 1918 only 27
enterprises in the whole of the Petrograd province had been expropriated,
and mostly only after the former owners had run from a sinking skip. To
understand why the Russian revolution failed, (and why the Bolsheviks,
who showed even less interests than the workers of expropriating
the means of production, so easily came to power) the insufficient
confidence of the majority of workers in their own powers, even if
with some interesting exceptions, is important to grasp. Funny enough
though, most of the expropriations from October 1917 to the summer
of 1918, were illegal, just as the workers of the Opticheskii factory
illegally run the factory at night, illegally used the owner's bank-
account, illegally built a power plant in 3 months, and succesfully
but still illegally developed models for cinematographic equipment,
after having produced grenades and denotators throughout the
World War I period.
        The "workers' control" thing might have been effectful as a
political protest, and to bring in a new government, but not to re-
organise life on a new basis.

On the other hand, while things did not work out well in the end
there neither, in Spain, under what were in fact in many aspects, if
not in all,  far worse objective conditions (I am thinking of the inter-
national situation, the military forces confronting them, and the
fact of being a much smaller country)  went faster and further not
at least because there had existed a more or less a unbroken a
revolutionary tradition within the working class there since the
First International. It is the three generations thing again, a foundations
the Russian workers lacked. Which is not to say that what did
happen was bound to do so, it just made it more likely. I have
not here at all touched the vital but often overlooked countryside.
But neither do I believe the reason for the failure lay there, even
if the pesants certainly were to pay the highest price for the
failed revolution.

Harald









>> Seriously, Chris this creates far more problems then it solves. Running
>society in a mass way, by a new class will take time, and mistakes will be
>made, and new class forces will be pushing to establish themselves, pushing
>out proletarian insterests and furthering their own sectional ambitions.
>This takes time to resolve and the new abilities to produce take time and
>most of all alienated labour has to disappear in reality not just not in
>form.
>
>Chris:
>Greg, that does not mean that we would not still be looking at communism.
>That is exactly why Marx talks about two phases, but in the first there is
>no room for the state (or as Marx says in the Communist Manifesto, 'the
>public power loses its political character.'), even if there is space for
>all kinds of problems.  Also, I do not think that we will transform the
>world without having made big changes in the here and now.  'The revolution'
>is not simply an event, though there may be such 'events' that indicate
>breaking points.  If we take Marx's idea that 'communism is the real
>movement' seriously, then we have to say that the actual struggles of the
>working class are already the prefigurations and preparatory
>transformations, of communism in the process of being realized.  So I am not
>putting all the effort off until after 'the revolution' (the smashing of the
>state).
>
>>
>> Marx said:
>> That, in fact, by the word "state" is meant the government machine, or the
>> state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society
>> through division of labor, is shown by the words "the German Workers'
>party
>> demands as the economic basis of the state: a single progressive income
>> tax", etc. Taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of
>> nothing else. In the state of the future, existing in Switzerland, this
>> demand has been pretty well fulfilled. Income tax presupposes various
>> sources of income of the various social classes, and hence capitalist
>> society.
>>
>> Greg:
>> There is a lot in this paragraph above. I cannot help but point out that
>if you link this statement (the inherent capitalist nature of the modern
>state) with the previous quote about transforming the state (rather then
>abolish it immediately) then Marx is pretty well supporting my
>interpreation, that during the period of transition we have to deal with a
>state resting upon alienated labour and reflecting the divisions inherent in
>this by its own special structure (quite independant of who might be running
>it - the tendency of the state is to reflect social existence in its own
>form - it disappears when classes do, classes disappear when alienated
>labour does and this disappears with the end of the blind economic relations
>typified by the capital labour relation likewise dissapate - the process of
>dissapation in the first phase of communism).
>
>Chris:
>First, there is no 'tendency of the state to reflect social existence in its
>own form', IMO.  The state is a mode of existence, a form of the
>capital-labor relation.  As such, there is no state without the
>capital-labor relation.  This relates to a larger argument about the fact
>that capital involves the separation of the political and the economic into
>distinct spheres of life.  The political comes into being in the form of
>specific states.  But 'the state' (understood broadly as 'the political') is
>not a vessel or instrument, but a social relation.  That's why it disappears
>with the social relations bound to it.  Hence, Marx's reference to
>semi-state (in so far as the capital-labor relation continues to exist even
>when the working class has overthrown the institutions), but refers in the
>FIRST phase of communism to 'functions' analogous to those carried out by
>the state.
>
>> Chris says:
>> This little quote is useful.  Marx considers the state to be a special
>> organism separated from society.  Since Marx earlier discussed communism
>as
>> involving the abolition of the division of labor (1844 Manuscripts, for
>> example), but not here, what has changed?
>>
>> Greg:
>> Exactly - under full communism and NOT the period of transitioin from
>capitalism. Marx is making no excemption and niether am I. Somehow however
>the transition period just keeps dropping off the screen, as if it were not
>talked about as the persistence of capitalistic relations until their final
>dissolution. One thing nice about Marx is his consistency since 1844, but he
>eloborates and the Gotha program critique is a part of this active
>eloboration. In1844 Marx dealt with the general philosophical concepts of
>social evolution, it spent the rest of his life filling in the details. It
>is his conceptual consistency which is staggering, something not served well
>by relying on quotes.
>>
>> I know you agree with this, even if not with my rendition and that you to
>are seeking a complete concept with which to work. The disagreement here is
>not really about what Marx did or did not say, but about the concept of
>Historical Materialism. Our specific disagreement is two different
>conceptualisations of the bit between now and future communism. Lets look at
>the points where we have absolute agreement.
>
>Chris:
>FYI, IMO there is no such thing as 'historical materialism'.  Its a fiction,
>largely created by Engels and after him, Plekhanov.  It has a grounding in
>Marx's lesser moments (preface to a critique of political economy and a note
>in the 4th German Edition of Capital, for example), but he himself never
>uses anything like that phrase (not even Engels' 'materialist conception of
>history') and the idea of a 'logic of history' which could be applied to
>understand all prior history was foreign to Marx's notion of dialectics.  He
>may have fallen into it from time to time (again, the preface and his
>conception of 'bourgeois revolutions' come to mind), but Capital and his
>other major works militate against the idea of 'historical materialism'.
>
>> We both maintain almost identical concept of full communism, we both know
>the working class plays a central role in this transformation and no other
>class can, we both understand the social implications  of the dictatorship
>of the bourgeoisie and we both seek revolutionary relief from it.
>
>> Our disagreements are sandwiched in between. We can battle for ever over
>quotes, but there is another way.  I pose a simple question based not on our
>disagreement but on our points of agreement.
>>
>> Given today's society and given that full communism is classless,
>stateless and unalienated social production, what is the social
>contradiction that drives the transformation?
>>
>> My answer to this is that the contradiction is the persistence of an
>alienated labour being overcome by the alienated labourers - self activity
>in self (collective) interest. The contradiction is for the entire period of
>transition the only tool availabe to these alienated toilers is their own
>aliented labour. The solution of the dilemma is that this contradictions
>dissolves itself in practice, but long historical practice where reality is
>not always correctly percieved and illusions are also produced alond the
>way.
>
>Chris:
>I don't see alienated labor outside of the capital-labor relation (this is
>not exactly true, since forms of personal dependency such as slavery and
>feudalism, etc. also involve alienated labor, but alienated in a different,
>specific form, but for our purposes, these other forms of alienated labor
>exist less and less so).  You do.  So we will have a situation of capitalist
>social relations for decades after the overthrow of capitalist institutions.
>How is this not still capitalism?  How are these institutions not still
>capitalist?  Because the workers 'run' them?  How is this different from
>Lenin's logic?
>
>For me, the transition period does not need a contradiction to drive it.  In
>the process of defetishizing our view of the world, workers will cease to
>need a reason other than the working out of our own needs, the resolution of
>prior damage, of developing technologies and organizations of life that
>allows us to reduce the amount of time spent doing necessary labor and
>increasing the amount of 'free time'.  Marx posits the highest phase of
>communism as a society of abundance, in which the contradictions between
>mental and manual labor will cease to exist and in which 'labor' (creative
>self-activity, the activity through which humanity relates to nature and to
>each other) becomes life's prime need.
>
>The abscence of abundance in the first phase does NOT mean that people are
>any longer bound by alienated labor or exploitation.  Marx says that in the
>Critique.
>
>"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of
>production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little
>does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these
>products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to
>capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion
>but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of
>labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all
>meaning.
>
>What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has
>developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just
>as it emerges from capitalist society..."
>
>The last sentence indicates that the paragraph above is talking about
>communist society as it emerges from capitalist society.
>
>>Now my reading of your solution would be that no real transition takes
>place, that some or another system is employed and alienated labour can be
>declared no-existent.
>
>I have no idea what you mean by 'system'.
>
>> I have rendered your position into an absurdity and you would be rightly
>displeased, the solution to our disagreement lies in whether you are able
>render it into a logical form which supplies a motivating historical
>contradiction which does not use any "systems" at all. In otherwords not a
>"how to" manual, but rather a theortical understanding - just as a step by
>step procedure for making a car run is not of the same order of importance
>as a clear understanding of the logic of internal combustion engine.
>>
>Well, I tend towards agreement with Paresh, though I am also profoundly
>convinced that while I am defensive of Marx's discussion in the Critique as
>more libertarian than yours, I am not hell bent on the idea that I even know
>what revolution looks like anymore.  I know what it does not look like and I
>know what a transition does not look like (in that sense, and only in that
>sense, the discussion of Cuba had some tiny merit and I thought that Miychi
>for once disappointed me with her defense of Cuba as between capitalism and
>communism, but that is another matter.)  On the positive side, I wonder if
>we are not all going to be very surprised by what we see.
>
>I have engaged this line of thought because, like Harald, you will be a
>stubborn cuss who will follow out a line of thought to its end, which I find
>helpful :)  I am not sure where else I want to go with this for now, or if I
>just want to sit and try to think about it some more.  I do think that a
>liberatory vision, a more concrete idea of what could be is important, but,
>for example, we have not delved much into the ways that the possibilities
>are radically different today.  I am not even sure I would defend a notion
>of 'phases'.  I am sympathetic towards Harald on this, but that does not
>mean I find Marx's discussion worthless or lacking value.  I just disagree
>that Marx's notion was lacking in liberatory content.
>
>I'll instead come back to your points on labor certificates in my next post,
>since that involves the entire way in which we understand alienated labor,
>the commodity, etc.
>
>Cheers,
>Chris
>
>
>
>
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