File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-07-marxism/95-07-31.000, message 84


Subject: Re: SUBJECTIVITY, HEGEL'S ABSOLUTE, SELF-EXPANDING CAPITAL
From: wpc-AT-clyder.gn.apc.org (Paul Cockshott)
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 95 22:01:32 PDT


On the concepts of socialism and communism

Scott has asked me to elaborate on my comment that soviet orthodoxy was 
wrong to identify socialism with the lower phase of communism.

This identification has its origins in a passage by Lenin in State and 
Revolution where he is discussing Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program:
"But when Lassalle, having in view such a social order ( usually called 
socialism but termed by Marx the first phase of communism), says that 
this is "equitable distribution",  that this is "the equal right of all 
to an equal product of labour", Lassalle is mistaken." ( Collected works 
25, page 450)

Lenin here links what is usually called socialism to what Marx called the 
first phase of communism. This gloss is inaccurate. Throughout their 
political lives Marx and Engels polemicised against socialism which they 
saw as a middle class reformist movement, and explicitly called 
themselves communists instead. One must therefore assume that when Marx 
used the term Communism he did so deliberately and one can not assume 
that he meant the same as what was usually termed socialism.

However, in 1916, Lenin was writing from within the context of 
internationl social democracy - a movement whose title and much of whose 
ideology was even more concilliatory than socialism. This movement, which 
was generally seen as the socialist movement was an amalgam of some 
communist ideas filtered through Marx, with various components of 
socialist ideology. Since no socialist society had existed at this point, 
the socialist movement's theorisation of socialism was inevitably vague. 
However, one important component of what Marx describes in the Critique 
of the Gotha program had been explicitly repudiated by Kautsky who had 
argued - basing himself on the Poverty of Philosophy - that socialist 
society could not abolish money and replace it with labour tokens.

Thus, what was commonly understood as socialism at this point was a 
society with public ownership of the means of production and planning, 
but in which money still existed. This is essentially what operated in 
the USSR from the '30s onwards.

There were other Social Democrat thinkers who presented a vision of 
socialism that was essentially the same as Marx's presentation of the 
lower phase of communism. Bebel in 'The Society of the Future', presented 
a model in which all calculation was to be directly in terms of labour 
time, payment was to be in labour tokens and the working week drastically 
reduced. This presented difficulties for Soviet ideologists when they 
republished his book. The introduction to the Moscow edition says:
"The reader should, however, keep in mind that Bebel and the majority of 
Social-Democrats in the latter half of the 19th century did not 
differntiate between the two stages of communist society - the lower and 
the higher. Speaking of socialism, Bebel refers mainly to the higher 
stage - to communism. That is why he maintains that in the new society 
class distinctions and the state will have disappeared, money and trade 
been abolished, and the productive forces will have reached such a level 
that the working day will last only three to four hours, and all peoples 
wll live together in a fraternal family, while weapons will be exhibits 
in museums."

This is an accurate description of what Bebel proposes, but a distortion 
of Marx. In the Critique of the Gotha program Marx clearly presents the 
lower phase of communism as involving the abolition of commodity 
production.

In the orthodox soviet model one had the schema:

1. Socialism = Marx's lower phase of communism
        No income from private property
        All must work for a living thus
        Payment is according to labour but as wages
        Product still takes form of commodity
2. Communism proper = Marx's higher phase
        High development of the productive forces
        Distribution according to need
        No commodity production

Marx's schema was

1. Lower phase of communism
        No commodities goods exchanged for labour tokens
        Labour tokens do not circulate
        Eaual payment only for labour, but  this is unequal in that more
        productive workers can perform more labour and get paid more
        Deductions for social funds
2. Higher phase of communism
        Higher productivity
        Erosion of idea of bourgeois right
        Unequal payment to labour to compensate for unequal
        needs ( to each according to their need ).

The effect is that by identifying socialism with Marx's lower phase of 
communism, what Marx originally described as such gets edited out of the 
historical sequence. This has the effect of making the higher phase 
unattainable, as the necessary transition phase to it can not be thought. 
Instead, the higher phase gets projected into the indefinite future - to 
some point where the productive forces allow free distribution of goods. 
This was Kruschovs vision of communism: the boundless productivity of the 
soviet planned economy would allow, by the end of the century, a system 
in which essentially all the necessities of life are to be distributed 
free. Orthodox Trotskyists like the Spartacist league, have essentially 
the same vision except they call it socialism.

This conceptuallisation has several deleterious effects.
1. The transition to communism is seen to depend primarily upon the 
productive forces rather than upon a change in relations of production.
2. The formula 'payment according to labour' can be used to justify wide 
discrepancies between male and female pay, between skilled and unskilled 
workers, between managers and shop floor workers. This is only 
politically sustainable in a system of monetary payment. Paying women 3 
hrs for an 8 hour working day would be so obviously nonsense as to be 
politically impossible. Thus the greater part of the stratifications and 
inequalities of soviet society rested on this.

3. The fact that the state financed both public services and defence out 
o the profits of publicly owned industry - rather than out of an explicit 
tax or deduction from labour vouchers - meant that the level of surplus 
extraction was fetishised, hidden and inaccessible to even the 
possibility of democratic control.

4. The attempt to move directly to the higher phase of communism and 
provide free distribution, meant that the price of labour power was 
progressively moved below its value, with the difference made up from 
free or subsidised services. This led to gross underestimates of the true 
labour costs of production, inhibiting the use of labour saving machinery 
and greatly contributing to the stagnation of the productive forces.

Thus a failure to understand how Marx's labour theory of value was at the 
heart of his conception of communism, was central to the failure of 
historically existing socialism to advance to communism. When the 
contradictions of historically existing socialism reached crisis point, 
this theoretical failure prevented the development of a proletarian 
communist alternative economic program. The only program on offer was the 
market socialist one. Since without revolutionary theory there can be no 
revolutionary practice, there was no revolutionary alternative - hence 
counter revolution was the only option.

Paul


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