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 --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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