Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 15:30:23 +0000 From: MA Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> Subject: M-I: fuk Rob Schaap wrote: > [Justin says something that I find interesting:] > > 'In my view, most of the important insights of Marxist economics that Mark > wishes to preserve can be not only adequately but better represented > without appeal to the LTV. These include the existence of exploitation and > its location in production, the social character of capitalist production > and its tendency towards instability, and a good many other things.' > Justin calls me a 'fundamentalist' because I disagree violently with this and continue to insist that value theory is the heart of Marx's work. But it is and I do. Take value theory away and you are left with an interesting 19th century essayist and belle-lettrist with a social conscience, and not much more. I do not think anyone can sensibly and non-provocatively disagree with this. Value theory is the core of Marx's work. I have not read Justin's detailed account of his own theoretical ideas, his alternative theory of exploitation etc. I have asked him to download his stuff and he has made a counter-proposal which I have balked at (sorry, Justin). But it is clear that he wants to jettison Marxism. Even if his counter-theory is correct (and I do not believe this) it would not be Marxism but Schwartzism. We should then become Schwartzists and Marxism would be relegated to the history books. The fact that Justin refuses to acknowledge this makes me suspicious of his other claims. He is a theoretical free-loader, a cuckoo in the nest. He denounces Marxism and becomes agitated if he is called anti-Marxist. It is difficult to take him seriously. Marx's Capital like the works which were its theoretical begetters >from at least 1844 onwards, is what its subtitle says: a critique of [bourgeois] political economy. The object of the critique and its principal intellectual as well as political purpose, was to develop the Marxian theory of value, to substantiate it and to defend it against all comers. It is simply trickery and time-wasting obfuscation to claim this is not so. It is also false modesty. What Justin wants to assert is that his theories are an improvement on Marx's, that they 'better represent' Marx's ideas. I do not believe Marx would agree. But if Justin can find a way to email me the detailed expositions of his theoretical developments which he has successfully emailed to other lists, I should be delighted to be proved wrong, because such a landmark in intellectual history should not go uncelebrated. Rob says: > ['The existence of exploitation and its location in production' is, I > assume, a reference to the 'surplus value' category. If my take on all > this is okay, capitalism is that mode of production where each commodity > produced has congealed in it a component of labour time for which the > proprietor does not pay (s). As c is beyond manipulation, only the v/s > ratio leaves room for profit. Does profit then equal the rate of > exploitation? Marxism is not, pace, Justin, a theory of exploitation. And there is no ethical judgement, implied or stated, in Marx's discussion of a rate of exploitation, which has the same technical connotation for Marx as discussing the technical rate of exploitation of an oil reserve or a coal mine would. The proprietor does not pay for any surplus labour-time performed by a worker because he/she does not have to. It would be a gift, and would lead to bankruptcy and unemployment. The worker receives what he/she has contracted to receive and does what he/she has contracted to do. I have no idea to what Justin is referring when he speaks of 'The existence of exploitation and its location in production' but it cannot be either Marx's value theory or the technical term 'rate of exploitation'. As for profit, it does not equal the rate of exploitation, or the rate of (relative or absolute) surplus value, either. Profit accrues when capital is valorised, which happens when its products qua commodities, are sold in the market-place. The rate of profit is not determined by what goes on within any particular factory (or labour process) but within the overall total process of production. What exercised Marx was the formation of an *average* rate of profit, across whole industries, national capitals, and finally for capital-in-general. Focussing on the concept of exploitation is a snare and a delusion. It is exactly against Ricardo's ethical notion of exploitation that Marx argues with the greatest rigour in volume 1 of Capital. He does so because ethical notions of exploitation are unscientific and easy to destroy, as neoclassic economics showed. > Do we, or do we not, need a theory of value to substantiate a theory of > exploitation? No, we do not, because the purpose of Marxism is not to substantiate a theory of exploitation, which we do not need, but to analyse logically and historically the process of capitalist social reproduction, in order to enable the working class to understand its historical predicament and social destiny. > And of Mark I ask, where does Marx pronounce a phase of market socialism as > incompatible with his thought? I ask because I wouldn't like the job of > assuring potential fellow travellers that our much vaunted revolution will > be one from capitalism one minute to 'from each according to capacity to > each according to need' the next. That doesn't wash with me and it won't > wash with them. Even Lenin thought along the lines of transitory market > socialism (as conditions for education on the human potential for the next > step), didn't he? Market socialism is an intellectual bog from which there is no escape once entered. If Justin or any of his fellow-travellers had their feet on solid ground and had any kind of real political direction themselves they wouldn't hang around a theory and worldview so utterly inimical to their ideas as Marxism is. But they do not. They have nothing to offer, and their politics as well as ideas are parasitic. Marx exhaustively criticises in Poverty of Philosophy, Wages Prices and Profit and many other polemical texts, the kind of fantasised ideas about the transition to socialism currently enjoying this ghostly afterlife in the guise of *market socialism*. The whole burden and thrust of Marx's life-work was to demonstrate that capitalism is not simple commodity exchange, that capitalism must be understood as a total social process, and that the advent of capitalism has dismissed simple commodity production forever to the mists of history. The idea that he should then resurrect this Lazarus of simple commodity production, which is in fact all that *market socialism* is about, and nothing more, as being the vehicle to transport us from capitalism to socialism, is preposterous, it is the maunderings of people who perhaps have spent too much time touring the vineyards and caves and bodegas of in France and Spain, seen the word 'Co-operative' over the door and after several flagons, formed a social theory. To win people to socialism it is not necessary to delude them with sentimental claptrap about benign vistas of "market socialism", workers control and the rest of this nonsense. This line of thought is just a pathetic footnote to the Grand Guignol of neo-classical economics, which may interest some morbid instinct of Justin's but smacks of necrophilia. For what it is worth, I am convinced his heart is in the right place and I don't say this in any patronising spirit. I am sure Justin is disinterested and not in pursuit of tenure. That just makes his aberration the more whimsical. It is necessary only to show people capitalism as it really exists and to point out its obvious tendencies. Capitalism has long since ceased to play any progressive role, and please, no more nonsense about women in the campesinos marching to the bright new future in the cities. Capitalism is on the threshold of destroying the planet. Start from that. If you disagree, propose your own vision of say the next two decades. And before talking about what Lenin thought of "market socialism", it is worth reading what he really said in its real context: not just about NEP, but even before that, when he faced a much sharper struggle, against allegedly left-wing exponents of worker's control in Petrograd during the summer of 1917. His position was decisively clear even then: for tactical reasons, he adopted the slogan of workers' control in the factory. But he was absolutely clear that this was not the primary slogan under which revolution would be made. The slogan was World Revolution, and this was not some kind of utopianism, this was simply a recognition that there could not be socialism in one country and that the enemy was world capitalism as an outgrowth, historically and logically, of capital-in-general. And if the world revolution had succeeded, neither workers control nor market socialism (a right wing variant he tactically veered towards in 1924) would have been the means of overcoming the historical legacy of capitalism (of which the factory, and commodity-production and exchange, are both a part). Both slogans are and were in their essence, reactionary. That was clear in 1917. If it is not clear today that can only be because we are at the ebb of a historical process. And we are. The workers' movement has never been pushed back so far. It can be pushed back still further. That does not mean that there will not be a corresponding flood tide. There will. If history does not teach anything else, it teaches that. Capitalism is radically parasitic. It parasitizes human labour-power, the only input it cannot itself produce, which is also the commodity which is the sole producer of value. Before 1917 the parasitism of capitalism was contained, expressed and embodied within nation-states. The imperialism which Lenin analysed in Imperialism the Highest Stage was an expression of this competition between national-capitals on the world stage, and this competition was the way capitalism was organised internationally -- its appearance-form globally. In 1917 capitalism had reached a historical impasse. It could not continue the world war and could not end it. Revolution exploding in central and eastern Europe and reverberating round the world, was the resolution of this impasse. From that time onwards (and Hitler was the exception which proves the rule) capitalism burst out of the nation-state foundation and straitjacket. But its parasitism too moved to a higher stage. Previously it had confronted the working class organised in trade unions and social democratic parties within nation-states. That was the sphere within which class antagonisms played themselves out. Working class struggle was co-opted by a parasitic capitalism incapable of securing its own conditions of reproduction (the free supply of wage labour) without a state, and without many subordinate instances (e.g. of ideological production) to underpin, authenticate and extend its social hegemony. It could not do without trade unions, for instance -- as Engels showed in Condition of the English W/c in 1844, capitalism to begin with simply wiped out new detachments of workers as these were recruited from the countryside, from disintegrating earlier social forms. Trades unions organised workers, made factories more functional, created markets, and permitted labour-power to be reproduced. Social democratic parties which represented the class interests of workers did so within the state which both co-opted them, gave them a stake, and at the same time gutted their long-range class ambitions. Since 1917 a new instance of w/c self-organisation was added into the matrix of previous (and already co-opted instances): the USSR. This was the historical correlative of capitalism bursting the barrier of the nation-state. Without the Soviet Union capitalism would by now have succumbed to its inherent anarchic and self-destructive tendencies, which reflect this essential parasitism. That indeed was the perspective Lenin offered: an era of increasingly-destructive inter-imperial wars. This view did not take theoretical account of the existence of the USSR and its recuperation to capitalist reproduction for the obvious reason that the USSR did not exist when Lenin wrote it. The USSR was co-opted to serve and buttress capitalism, as unions and social democracy had been before. At the same time it continued to embody legitimate w/c aspirations and was a defence of the working class both within Russia and internationally. By 1921, and certainly by the time of Rapallo when Lenin made peaceful coexistence the watchword and no longer World Revolution, the USSR had ceased to predicate its existence upon the overthrow of world capitalism and had entered its long, unequal, uneasy and eventually fatal accommodation with it. The NEP was the internal correlative of that forced adaptation to circumstances, dictated by the imperatives of survival. It was a tactic. NEP entailed moving away from socialism, not towards it. All attempts to suggest otherwise or to elevate this tactic into a theory of transition are disingenuous in the extreme. If you want to sell yourself, don't tie a label round your neck which has the honourable name of Lenin written on it. (When Gorbachev opened the gates to the citadel, the Soviet press for months beforehand had been full of lying stories about Lenin and the NEP, since in 1988 any change in course still had to be justified by 'Lenin's behests'. All illusions about the meaning and purpose of NEP ought to have been jettisoned in the light of subsequent events. And if ever there was need for a justification for Stalin and his alleged misdeeds, this curious and largely-forgotten footnote to the last days of the Soviet Union suggests one. But this is what you get when you strangle Marxism to save it, and jettison value theory "to better represent" its results.) The USSR saved capitalism not once but on numerous occasions. It destroyed Hitler, thus removing a cancer which would have precipitated uncontrolled wars and speedily brought the demise of world capitalism. (If any of you think that the UK or the USA had something to do with defeating Nazism, read a book about the Soviet-German war like for example my own 'Moscow in World War 2' (with Cathy Porter, Chatto and Windus, 1985)). The USSR provided a moral and legal brake on the wilder shores of capitalist predatoriness and bourgeois unreason. Its role in creating the UNO in 1944 was seminal in creating the conditions for the post-war settlement which allowed capitalism to have its long boom and under US hegemony to liquidate its colonial hangovers. Most important of all, Soviet foreign policy prevented the outbreak of nuclear war. (For those who think it was the main danger of nuclear war, and there are some even on this list, I say: watch this space). It is fashionable to argue that Nato served the purpose not merely of containing Soviet 'expansionism' (for which there is no historical evidence, unfortunately) but also and perhaps more importantly of locking Germany into Europe and by cretaing an intra-European collective security system, allowing the peaceful development of European capitalism at last. This is true, and what it proves is that even Nato, the most baleful spawn of US imperialism and its desire to extirpate Soviet communism, played a contradictory and positive role. But this role and Nato itself would not have been possible but for the great San Francisco meetings in 1944, when the UN was set up and with it the whole postwar legal framework of international law. Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko played a pivotal role in creating in that, often against British and US opposition. In doing so, he followed (rigidly, as was his wont) the 'behest of Lenin' about peaceful coexistence. The UN worked as Wilson's League of Nations did not. But in 1919 the Bolsheviks were excluded from Versailles and, as Thorstein Veblen said, anti-communism was the parchment upon which its Charter was written. The end result was Hawley-Smoot, the Great Depression, the collapse of Weimar and rise of Hitler, among other things. We celebrate the contradictory but in may respects glorious history of the USSR, the highest point until now of working-class self- organisation and the first occasion when the masses entered history on the world stage on their own account. We recall the intense passions and heroic sacrifice it prompted - and the baleful price the Soviet working class and peasantry paid for its accommodation with world capitalism (the gulags were the necessary toll exacted by containment and what Trotsky called 'the chatter of value at the borders'). We celebrate it in the same way as the history of the workers' movement in all its manifestations: >from friendly societies and corresponding clubs and workers' institutes, to co-ops, trades unions and labour parties. These are our predecessors and they struggled might and main for the cause they and we passionately believe in. Their flaws do not outweight their heroism. Their history belong to us, and to no-one else. And where else in history are there so many examples of uncompromising, selfless struggle for the highest principles, by ordinary men and women who sacrificed with no thought for themselves? Nowhere, except in this movement of which we are the inheritors. They saw the future through a glass, darkly, as we do: but they knew what they believed in and did not believe in, and the difference between the two. So do we. We are their people. We do not need to beguile newcomers with slick promises: it does working class men and women little justice to suppose they are less aware of their predicament or less courageous or less interested in a dignified life, than their forebears. It is impossible to contemplate the history of our movement without deep feelings of satisfaction and without the inner certainty that since we represent what is best in humankind, we cannot and shall not fail. But we cannot ignore the shortcomings and historical blindness which, conditioned by their circumstances, our predecessors suffered from (although it is hard not to read the memoirs of socialists and revolutionaries alive earlier this century and not to see how much of their élan and fighting spirit we have lost, how much of their self- confidence and solidarity, their cheerfulness and determination to overcome every difficulty). Yes, we have lost a lot and unlearned many lessons, of organisation and of theory. But the world we confront now is more dramatic than theirs. Capitalism spinning like a centrifuge whose brake has broken is fantastically dangerous. The liquidation of the USSR and the tremendous defeats suffered by the labour movement before and since, which actually prepared the way for the destruction of Soviet socialism, have taken the last fetters off world capitalism. But at the same time this conjuncture, the most dangerous for humankind since capitalism became historically dominant, is also full of profound hope that the age-old dreams of our movement may at last be realised. Because capitalism has nowhere else to go. It faces an absolute historical impasse and not the relative one it faced in 1917. At the same time that it hypertrophies commodity production, immiserates and pauperises vast new swaths of the world's working class, enlarges the reserve army of labour, and stumbles deeper into a political quagmire from which no Soviet Union will offer it a helping hand, creating new flashpoints in Africa, the middle east, Asia and especially in eastern Europe, and searching for ever-more inhuman technological solutions, revealing more clearly its moral bankruptcy and its true nature, which is degenerate and radically-inimical to humankind -- it also breaks the last fetters, of ethnicity, nationality, blind obscurantism, on the working class. The historical cul-de-sac facing capitalism is absolute. It has burst through every barrier to its absolute global hegemony and for that reason has and can have no strategy for incorporating and co-opting the revolutionary movements, the brush-fires, which will only not burst forth if history has ceased to be true to its laws and has mutated without our noticing into something different from what it has been for the many centuries. Regards, Mark Jones majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~majones/index.htm -- Regards, Mark Jones majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~majones/index.htm --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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