File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-11.162, message 76


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



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