Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 23:06:33 +0000
From: MA&NG Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: The former Soviet Union: what went wrong?


Doug

You wrote:

> We've been promised this crisis [of capitalism] for over 120 years, 
and it ain't happened.


120 years. 
That is not very long, is it? And even in that time much of the world 
has known only crises which made and still make everyday life more 
or less impossible for normal folk.
Even if we were sitting here in the year 2097 and it was still 
capitalism, the time scale would still not be long by any historical 
standards: and remember that what we are talking about is a change 
whose magnitude is incommensurable with any social revolution or 
historical transformation (between modes of production or modes of 
social being) for which records exist. Because all our recorded 
history from Homer on is the history of commodity-production, its 
emergence and evolution. Socialism, meaning the period of 
transition to communism, is qualitatively different --  it is the 
evolution *away* from commodity-production.

BUT the point of Marx's remark in Capital Vol III -- 'the integument 
must burst asunder' -- is that it defines his final view on the 
transience of capitalism. So what are we arguing about? That 120 
years is a long time for one person? Or that you cannot consider 
yourself a Marxist unless you subscribe to this key statement of 
Marx's.

'The integument must burst asunder' is a statement about the 
ontological status of capitalism. It is fundamental to our Marxist 
world-view. But Marxism is not theology and this is not a question 
of blind faith. 
Let us define terms. What do we mean by crisis? What do we mean 
by socialism and communism?

By general crisis I mean a generalised social and historical process in 
which capitalist society is unable to reproduce itself or secure its 
own conditions of reproduction (not the same thing). 

There can be no doubt that capitalism does produce such crises. 
Even Richard Pipes does not accuse Lenin of creating the world 
crisis of 1914-1919, which was a harbinger of the final crisis which 
will certainly come -- and which might easily have happened then, if 
a few variables had been a little different, but that is another story. 
In 1919 capitalism got its show back on the road with the help of 
the October Revolution: without that there would have been no 
Wilsonian grand finale to the First World War. This alone shows, as 
Lenin and many people immediately understood, that henceforth 
capitalism was a parasitic social order. Just how parasitic is shown 
by its rapid decay now that its twentieth-century crutch and 
correlative, the USSR, has gone. You think it is not now rotting like 
a corpse? Leave NYC some time and look around. Don't even leave 
NYC.

We all know that capitalism reproduces itself in and through 
immanent crises of accumulation, realisation, valorisation and that 
capitalist societies are constantly buffeted by exogenous crises like 
war, environmental degradation, disease generation and 
trnasmission, which all are not merely existential for the inhabitants 
but inter-react with the immanent process of value production and 
the valorisation of capital. Chronic or acute, but crisis is always 
present. 

We also know that 'the integument must burst asunder' because 
capitalist production is actually the extended and intensified 
reproduction of its own contradictions. And because these are 
immanent they are inescapable. We know that the organic 
composition of capital tends to rise, the reserve army of labour 
increases, there is relative overpopulation and the rate of profit 
tends to fall (Marx: 'this is in every respect the most important law 
of modern political economy'). We know that commodity 
production tends to hypertrophy.

Marx: ''To the degree that labour-time -- the mere quantity of labour 
-- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that 
degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the 
determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use-values -
- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and 
qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate 
moment, compared to the general scientific labour, technological 
application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general 
productive force arising from social combination in total production 
on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of 
social labour (although it is a historical product). Capitalism thus 
works towards its own dissolution as the force dominating 
production".
(Grundrisse, p.700)

The evidence for these crisis-processes is multifold, is everywhere 
before our eyes. The history of this century is nothing else but the 
history of capitalist crisis deepening and intensifying. 

Zeynep said it all when she said (I quote from memory) 'nobody 
gives a damn about different models when what people are worried 
will happen is American carpet bombing'. This truth applies not only 
in places like Nicaragua and Kampuchea, as a factor putting people 
of socialism. It applies in Russia. It explains absolutely why Russians 
hate what is happening, hate capitalism, but have become resigned 
to it. 

That, Doug, is the rising organic composition of capital made real 
before our very eyes: the fact that this Moloch we humans have 
created: the embodiment of objectified, expended labour-power -- 
this vast machinery, urban dystopia, gigantomania, which so crushes 
the human spirit (unless you are a philistine new Russian or an NY 
stockbroker) -- this 'vast accumulation of commodities' (sciences, 
buildings, machinery) confronts us each day and all our lives with its 
gigantic, unavoidable, overpowering indifference. It crushes us like 
beetles -- go and look at your own NY skyline and see what I mean. 
That is why we all, every one of us, find it hard to fight and even to 
think our way into some spirit of resistance -- we are like dung-
beetles staring at pyramids. Yet these pyramids do not only dwarf 
us. They dwarf capitalism too, this beggar-niggard, thief of time, the 
humiliator of the soul, denier of the human spirit, this lover of trash 
and filth, this narcosis of history, prostitutor of everything truly 
human, of the solidarity, love and sharing which you so well 
describe, Doug. And if we do manage to raise our faces off the 
deck, we get carpet-bombed.

We live in and through crisis and have become habituated to its 
rhythms. We sometimes console ourselves with a fatuous and vain 
hope of personal betterment or survival anyway, always ignoring the 
fact that even if we are offered technical immortality (we will be, 
they are working on it) it will be at the price of our humanity. 

And is this not the most telling form taken by the crisis of 
capitalism? That in order to continue and just to survive (because it 
cannot stand still) it is now obliged to plunder DNA to fuel its 
engines?

It is said that the first woman who planted the first grain of wild 
barley for later harvest, thereby put paid to evolution -- but this is a 
bigger thing by far than the neolithic farming revolution.

Funny how we can manage to avoid seeing what is happening in 
front of our eyes. Funny how we can simple not notice and not call a 
'crisis' something as cosmically (I am choosing my words) significant 
as the ending of DNA-based evolution of life on earth -- because 
that is what we are living through. 

You want evidence of crisis? Capitalism will face us with plague, 
epidemic diseases and generalised eco-catastrophe in the next fifty 
years (short enough time-frame?) -- unless it can control the 
consequences of the elimination of antibiotics, amongst other 
desperately urgent things it must do and probably will not -- and in 
anycase it can only do all that by means of massive invasion, 
deconstructing and utilising, transforming, re-engineering, DNA at 
the most devastating and fundamental level of all -- the microbial 
level of viruses and bacteria. So capitalism is already launched on a 
path fraught with consequence from which there is no turning back -
- because the alternative (standing still) will result in systemic 
collapse, throwing multi-millioned masses into final despair and 
death.

 And that would produce social revolution.

But let us suppose there is no rupture ala 1914-1917. As you seem 
to, let us suppose the technical fixes are in, everything is OK. Then 
we really shall disappear into the machinery. It is at that point that I 
no longer see meaningful commodity production being possible, and 
I foresee the complete hypertrophy of capitalist commodity-
production. One might posit this in classical Marxist terms: when 
live labour is absorbed by dead labour, when the radical dissociation 
of the human subject of production (the proletariat) and its 
previously-created object: the means of production -- is finally 
liquidated, then by definition the possibility of creating surplus value 
must disappear. And that, in these terms, is what Marx did predict, 
one hundred and forty years ago.

Marx:
[writing in 1857, about the time Dickens wrote "Little Dorrit"]:

"In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves 
a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly. the analysis
and 
application  of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of 
science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as 
that previously performed by the worker. However, the 
development of machinery along this path occurs only when large 
industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the sciences have 
been pressed into the service of capital; and when, secondly, the 
available machinery itself already provides great capabilities. 
Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to 
direct production itself becomes a prospect  which determines and 
solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and 
large, arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. 
This road is, rather, dissection- through the division of labour, 
which gradually transforms the workers' operations into more and 
more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can 
step into their places.  Thus, the specific mode of working here 
appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital 
in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued 
thereby. Hence the workers' struggle against machinery. What was 
the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine. 
Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in 
a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself- 'as 
though its body were by love possessed'.
 The exchange of living labour for objectified labour - i.e. the 
positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital 
and wage labour - is the ultimate development of the value relation 
and of production resting on value. Its presupposition :is -- and 
remains  --  the mass of direct labour time, the quantity  of labour 
employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But 
to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real 
wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of 
labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion 
during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn 
out of al proportion to the direct labour time spent on their  
production. but depends rather  on the general state of science and 
the progress of technology, or the application of science to 
production. (The development of this science, especially natural 
science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to
the 
development of material production.). Agriculture, e.g.,  becomes 
merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its 
regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. 
Real wealth manifests itself. rather and large industry reveals this - 
in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and 
its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, 
reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production 
process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be 
included within the production process; rather the human being 
comes to relate more as a watchman and regulator to the production 
process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the 
combination of human activities and the development of human 
intercourse.)
No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle 
link between the object and himself; rather, he inserts the process of 
nature, transformed into and industrial process, as a means between 
himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of 
the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this 
transformation, neither the direct human labour he himself performs, 
nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of 
his general productive power, his understanding of nature and 
mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body - in a 
word, the development of the social individual which appears as the 
great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The *theft of 
alien labour time, on which the present wealth is base* appears a 
miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large scale 
industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be 
the great well-spring of wealth, labour-time ceases and must cease 
to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the 
measure] of use value. The *surplus labour of the mass* has ceased 
to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as 
the *non-labour of the few*, for the development of the general 
powers of the human head. With that, production based on 
exchange-value breaks down and the direct, material production 
process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free 
development of individualities and hence not the reduction of 
necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the 
general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, 
which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of 
the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for 
all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it 
presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour 
time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence 
it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in 
the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing 
measure as a condition - question of life or death - for the necessary. 
On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and 
nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order 
to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour 
time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time 
as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and 
to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already 
created value as value. Forces of production and social relations - 
two different sides of the development of the social individual - 
appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to 
produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the 
material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high."
(Grundrisse p 703-706)

When we're all hard-wired to the machinery, social production 
cannot continue on the basis of a division of labour. Value-
production will be revealed as the 'miserable basis' incapable of 
supporting what is to come after -- communism. Put less 
apocalyptically, it will be impossible to extract surplus-value from 
the 
(total social) labour-process when all of its inputs are calculable. At 
that point, however, true non-stochastic planning will become not 
only possible but inevitable. And at the same time, the distinction in 
time and space between production and consumption must and will 
be eliminated. In other words, the social subject (it will no longer be 
possible to speak of individual human subjects)will simultaneously 
produce and consume itself -- will self-create.

I suspect that as you are reading this, you are saying to yourself, 
'Yeah, maybe, but how, in this
post-capitalist world, will I heat my apartment?' 

That won't be a problem, will it? It isn't now, in fact. The problem 
will be how your energy-supply utility can hope to extract surplus 
value from the non-existent labour-process involved. Because there 
won't be any workers in its employ. Disassembled bits of workers. 
Skills encapsulated in machinery or software. Maybe bits of 
reassembled human brain. But no workers. That's already the 
problem, in fact.

The clock is ticking. The example I gave about DNA is only one. It 
surprised me that you regard eco-catastrophe as unrelated or a kind 
of alternative to socio-economic crisis. It is not. 

The danger is that the transition to communism will be blighted 
because the unmeant decisions of the market and the blind process 
of valorisation in conditions of endemic, chronic and self-
reproducing crisis will fuck the planet. It is easy to see how this will 
happen if we don't manage to stop it. First, the bio-eco-resource 
depletion processes may go critical without warning and the natural 
response of our rulers to that will be terminally pathological (they 
can do it; even now they are feverishly and mindlessly preparing the 
conditions for thermonuclear war now, in eastern Europe -- and the 
only intelligible sign of awareness of this danger is the growing 
Beltway chatter about new ABM and other SDI initiatives. Do not 
underestimate their stupidity).

Doug wrote:
 >A politics that depends on the collapse of its opponent >is 
cowardly and doomed.

We do not want war, famine, collapse. I just lived through one 
collapse -- in Russia -- and believe me I would not wish to go 
through it again. And fixed capital is not an opponent. It is a barrier 
which capitalism itself produces.
 
Just allow me to think that you cannot call yourself a Marxist unless 
you can agree that 'the integument will burst asunder'. This is not 
cowardice; it's a wake-up call. If you think our only problem is 
envisaging a big enough supermarket to put in all the goodies 
socialism will bring, you're still asleep.

Doug wrote:
> I have no idea, and no one does, nor does anyone know that it will 
indeed
> break asunder. 

Wrong.
For the record, Doug, your work is fine, absolutely necessary and I 
100 percent applaud the division of labour you discussed with Louis 
Proyect. As Lenin said, our party must be like a factory, and martial 
law will operate in it. And your commitment comes from a 
passionate political feeling. But to make a revolution (revolutions 
are terrifying, by the way - I met a lot of old Bolsheviks ten years 
ago -- surprising how many were still around -- for a book I was 
preparing - and now I do not entirely relish the thought of even a 
socialist revolution) -- but to make one, you have to begin by 
recognising the need for one. 

> It's a lovely dream, but how do you put food on the table? This 
sounds like
> Utopianism of the most seductive, but irresponsible, sort.
 
Then please explain to me your own conception of communism -- in 
Marxist terms.


> How do you organise this social production? I thought one of the 
things
> that differentiated Marxian socialism from the utopian kind was 
that the M
> variety wanted to build on the institutions of capitalism, that for 
the
> first time in history organized production on a large social scale - 
to
> find the embryo of the new in the corpse of the old. 

I criticise productivist readings of Marx, like yours Doug, because 
they are wrong. 

In a radical sense, Marx saw production as historically and socially 
relative. These long quotes from Grundrisse, which show the 
laboratory of his mind, are proof enough. Marx did not share 
Engels' anthropomorphising of human labour. He regarded labour as 
always social and most importantly, he considered that 'society', 
meaning the realm conventionally demarcated off from 'nature', only 
came into autonomous existence with capitalism. Before that, 
society and nature were coterminous. But he was clear that 'nature' 
as an object for mathematics, science and poetry only came into 
existence along with commodity production (say, about the time of 
Periclean Athens). And that 'nature' was only fully realised as an 
independent object capable of complete scientific examination, by 
the time of the French Enlightenment. 
For Marx therefore society is a kind of detour made by humankind -
- a reflexive, Hegelian but materially-real detour, as a result of 
which we came to know the world and ourselves. This theme is 
present throughout Marx's work, especially in the Grundrisse but 
also in Capital.

Therefore his conception of communism was very far from one in 
which production is hypostasized, as it clearly is in the views you 
express.

In future contributions I intend to show how this general world-
view, theoretical conspectus, whatever you want to call it, connects 
with practice.

Marxism is not dead and nor is Leninism.
 
-- 
Regards,
Mark Jones
majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk



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