colinskelly
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Of course, the working day in all societies is divided into necessary labour (that part where the means of living of the worker is reproduced) and surplus labour (that part above and beyond the amount necessarily consumed to reproduce labour). Marx was at pains to explain that surplus labour was a feature of all societies but that private ownership of the means of production meant that this surplus was siphoned off by the owners in different ways: “It is just as important for a correct understanding of surplus-value to conceive it as merely a congealed quantity of surplus-labour time, as nothing but objectified surplus labour, as it is for a proper comprehension of value in general to conceive it as merely a congealed quantity of so many hours of labour, as nothing but objectified labour. What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour – is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.” (Vol.1, p.325)Wolff argues that if surplus-value was to be re-distributed amongst the workers who produced it then society would be post-capitalist as there would be no exploitation. He is of course perfectly at liberty to argue his point but wrong to call his theory Marxian economics. By all means let it stand separately and contend with Marx’s theory but he should not conflate his surplus theory with that of Marx. The article on Wolff quotes Marx’s well know criticisms of co-operative enterprises as involving “self-exploitation” so requires no further justification. Wolff envisages a supposedly post-exploitative world with commodity production still intact, a world of production for exchange with prices and wages. However, let Marx speak for himself as to the post-value nature of post-capitalism (socialism, communism, free association, call it what you will) where the product of work will be things (use-values) and not prices (exchange-values):“Let us… imagine… an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force… The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by members of the association as means of subsistence.” (Vol.1, pp.171-2)Marx then goes on to talk “for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities” that the apportionment of the share of the social product for individual consumption could be determined by labour-time but this is a different debate altogether. The key point Marx is making is that it would be an apportionment of things, not money (exchange-value) and that a society of free association produces things “in accordance with a definite social plan”, “under their planned and conscious control” and not as commodities for exchange. In other words there would be no production for exchange, no prices, no wages – and no value or surplus-value but still necessary labour and surplus labour, consciously planned and distributed.
I think the key to Engels quote is where he says 'at present'. In continental Europe and the USA the labour movement arose contemporaneously with Marxian ideas and many organisations formally adopted as their political aim the ultimate aim of capitalism. Marx and Engels had high hopes for the fertility of their ideas in such movements, a justifiable optimism at the time. The British labour movement, I think, is a different story. It had had a far longer history of developing its own political independence from liberalism but had not needed a non-capitalist ideology to this. Rather, it fought for the right for political inclusion. Early British socialists, the Anglo-Marxists, saw this coming and did not see the political development of the labour movement so optimistically. They followed a long tradition of criticism against purely political reform beginning with the Chartist Bronterre O'Brien. What was important, he argued, was what the working class would do with political power. This thread was picked up by the early British Marxian socialists who were more pessimistic about the prospects of working class radicalism. They needed to know what to do with an increase of power. Theory and practice told them that 'a million or two workingmen's votes' did not necessarily amount to meaningful change. Unless there was a clear idea of what had to be done, a clear idea of what change was in the interest of the working class as a whole. The early SPGB was therefore sceptical of the credentials of the nominally Marxist German SPD, a party held up as the apex of Marxian socialism at the time and still be many left historians. Engels, it turned out, was wrong to be optimistic that organisations like the Knights of Labour could be revolutionised from within.
I think that erosion of the legal right to strike action is clearly something that we would oppose as individual members, activists and officers within our trades unions. Similarly, members in an individual capacity will be active in opposing cuts to local public services, housing issues and so on. William Morris, in the 1893 Manifesto of English Socialists where he was trying to hold the Fabians and SDF to an explicit end goal of socialism, went along with a position which talked of defensive struggle as linked to the ultimate aim of revolution:“The first step towards transformation and re-organisation must necessarily be in the direction of the limitation of class robbery, and the consequent raising of the standard of life for the individual. In this direction certain measures have been brought within the scope of practical politics . . . as tending to lessen the evils of the existing regime; so that individuals of the useful classes, having more leisure and less anxiety, may be able to turn their attention to the only real remedy for their position of inferiority"This was, though, as I am sure Morris realised, the triumph of hope over realistic expectation. Today such a position would be hope over experience. As he had earlier written:"The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt to bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side."As a party we are opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia, in short any ideology which seeks to divide the human race against itslef, particularly the working class. As such we are opposed to the racial bigotry often involved in anti-immigration politics but there is no clear cut position as regards the costs/benefits to the working class as a whole of such a policy – some would gain, some would lose. Borders will be open / closed according to the needs of capital. The small business interests who seem to dominate UKIP would soon change their policies if not their tune in the face of a squeeze on the labour market. Once drawn into questions as to what policies are or are not favourable to the working class within capitalism then we are onto a slippery slope. The point is to change the questions, to change the terms of debate. As the party has often said, the surest way to get concessions within capitalism is to advocate revolution.
The quotes from the early Socialist Standard that Alan gave show the problematic nature of our position of reforms. We obviously wish to live as best we can within capitalism and therefore support membership of and activism within trades unions. Most other reforms on the other hand are far trickier to make judgments on. What is on the one hand a gain for the working class within capitalism, is on the other a palliative prolonging the system. As mentioned already, what may seem like a shift in the balance of power to the left is in fact often a structural readjustment, accommodating improvements in living standards and health to boost productivity and profits in the longer term. Our political cousins, the early SLP adopted a programme of reforms that they firmly tied to revoutionary intent and the early SPGB contained a wider range of attitudes on the subject than was the case later on. If an elected SPGB MP would vote on reforms as they affected the working class as a whole then the party would in effect be making a judgment that some reforms were an immediate gain to the working class so I cannot see why, in theory, the party could not do that whilst it does not have an MP. You do not have to advocate reforms to make a judgment on them. However, the problem is making a judgment on whether a reform is a gain or a palliative is time consuming, difficult and divisive. Such judgments are highly complex. It is extremely difficult to assess the impact of a reform on the working class as a whole – it is hard enough calculating the impact on parts of the working class in one country. It would be a challenge with a mass party with a research department, for us near impossible. Why waste time arguing over the crumbs being thrown to us? Will we gain traction on the left by changing tack on this? I personally doubt it. What would be an example of a policy we would support or oppose? We would end up arguing about this rather than about our end goal – this is ultimately what happened to the other Marxian parties in the 20th century.
My hairsplitting was not intended to sap your resolve, twc. The point is that, in the politics of persuasion that we are engaged in, it is not just what you say but also very much how you say it. If you try to outmuscle those close to you politically because their definition is not the ‘correct’ one then we won’t get very far. We are trying to substitute other meanings of socialism for our own and in so doing need to engage in sympathetic conversation and not denunciation and triumphalism at the superiority of our own doctrines.
twc wrote, 'The party has kept the original meaning of “socialism” alive for a century '. But the party's definition wasn't the original meaning of the term socialism, which derived from Owenite socialism in the 1820s. From the 1880s to around 1914 it could be argued that it was more or less synonymous with 'communist' or 'social-democrat' . Thereafter 'communist' became synonymous with Soviet state-capitalism and 'socialist' and 'social-democrat' with Labour politics. We are holding to a definition of socialism not the defintion of socialism. The meaning of socialism is fluid not frozen. It is contested territory and we are occupy a very small piece of that territory at present.
Paul Mattick Jr. in 'Business as Usual' raises the issue of how far the state, despite professed neoliberalism, makes no progress in withdrawing from its role in the economy. He describes neatly the paradoxical between state and private business, noting that despite the professed desire for a small state: "the share of GDP appropriated by the state has increased… Even while more powers are abandoned by the state to profit-orientated corporations, government funds … remain essential to the operation of the economic mechanism. … as it [the state] becomes increasingly both a form of enterprise for the enrichment of its practitioners and one devoted to the servicing of dominant economic interests, it remains true that those funds represent a cost to the capitalist economy of which they have become a fundamental part."(p.89-90) Mattick Jr. supports the SPGB view of taxation as utimately a burden on profits: "The underlying problem is that government-financed production does not produce a profit… Tax money appears to be paid by everyone. But …only business actually pays taxes. … So when the government buys goods or services from a corporation … it is just giving a portion of its cut of profits back to business, collecting from all and giving it to some."(p.81)
I came across the term in relation to the specific claims of Sweezy and Baran in their 1966 book 'Monopoly Capitalism', the blurb to which says: "Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such firms accumulated–as a result of their pricing power, massive sales efforts, and other factors–could not be profi tably invested back into the economy. Absent any 'epoch making innovation' like the automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result was a general trend toward economic stagnation–a condition that persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis was also extended to issues of imperialism…" Its association with the complex debates within left politics and academia mean that the term is probaby best left alone. Given the ups and downs of the global economy since 1966 and the massive growth of China, India, computers, digital technology, etc. I would have thought the empirical case against their argument was clear enough. Interestingly, Monthly Review Press is re-releasing 'Monopoly Capital' (updated by Foster) later this year so they clearly think its specific arguments still have mileage.
Harvey’s work is well worth a read for those already acquainted with Marxian economics. But, as with all ‘introductions’ or guides to Marx, Harvey’s work is the guidance of an individual with a certain axe to grind. Harvey is not the worst of these, and if guides to Marx inspire people to go and read Capital or other works then all well and good. But, of course, they generally don’t. Guides and introductions stand as texts in their own right and an (mis)understanding of Marx is grasped through them. I suspect this is true, too, of the many introductions of Marx’s writings written by eminent academics, many of which are hostile to Marx (take AJP Taylor’s and G. Stedman Jones’s introductions to the Communist Manifesto). Marx is too important to be left to the academics. His work needs to be read independently of the abstract and abstruse academic struggles which have tended to monopolise debate about his ideas. Today, most of the thinking about Marx and his relevance is not coming up from working-class politics but down from academics, mostly in the US. Hence we end up discussing the fantasy politics of oxidisable currency. Marx’s work is often hard going but today, more than 150 years after Marx first began writing about the materialist conception of history, his ideas still remain the starting point for understanding capitalism and how to end it. So much baggage has been collected along the way that, for the next generation in working class politics, it is probably necessary to start again from the beginning. One historian of socialism (Joseph Clayton), hostile to the SPGB, once wrote that it was committed to ‘Marx, the whole Marx and nothing but Marx’. Now, as then, it might not be a bad place to start.
But, surely, pgb, after a century of activism by millions in the labour movement we might expect some increase in socialist class consciousness through the political strategy you advocate. The reverse is true. A century ago it looked as if socialism might be on the near horizon. Today the left is in long term decline. In the long run your approach has been successful as ours. The SPGB said back then that without a primary comittment to socialism, the labour movement would succumb to to the liberalism it sought to influence. It did. But it did not argue against its members being active in the class struggle outside of the socialist political party, in trades unions and elsewhere. They were and are. It hasn't happened yet, or even looked likely, but without a majority of socialists, there can be no socialism. The realisation of the limitation of reforms to qualitatively change capitalism has to be a part of that process if it is to occur. A move beyond defensive measures.
I think perhaps it was the sense of the imminence or at least the inevitability of socialism that suffused socialism in the late 19th/early 20th century that might be part of the approach of socialists at the time. The question wasn't if socialism was going to emerge but when. The strategic debate was around how to bring it about more quickly. If it was imminent and/or inevitable then reforms in the meantime, as 'stepping stones', make sense. The SPGB marked itself out by its argument that socialism was not inevitable but required a majority of socialists. Support for reforms from this perspective does not make sense or may even confuse matters and thus prolong capitalism. Hyndman wrote an article in which he argues the SDF to be on a middle path between anarchist 'impossibilism' and opportunist Labourism and that “Everywhere, in all civilized countries, it is obvious that Socialism is the power of the near future”. http://www.marxists.org/archive/hyndman/1903/05/impossibilism.htm I think that this attitude could be argued to be the mainstream socialist view with the early SPGB outside of it because of its insistence that socialism could not emerge without a conscious socialist majority. However much reforms might be welcome for the immediate improvement of working class standards of living, a programme of reforms would be counter-productive as it would divert attention from the immediate aim of 'making' class conscious socialists or even support the claims of revisionists that socialism might evolve within capitalism.
But that would mean that a socialist MP or group of MPs, whilst still a minority, would just sit in parliament as a sterile protest group. Whilst not adopting a programme of reforms these MPs, as delegates, could use their votes in favour of working class interests. How that might be determined is, admittedly, problematic – what reform is a gain for the working class and what a palliative prolonging the system? But should the socialist movement have got that far it would not really be possible to keep its hands clean.
I think you are right ALB, Luxemburg made the assumption that the SPD was a mass party for socialism. In fact her position, given that assumption, is not too disimilar from that of the SPGB established in (I think) 1911 – that socialist MPs would in fact take a position in parliament on matters relating to reforms, ie. they would not just be there as a protest until a majority came about, they would be active in the class struggle. Luxemburg's assumption was wrong of course. The SPD was not a mass party of socialists but a mass party of reformists utilising Marxist phraseology and an increasingly merely formal theoretical commitment to revolution.
Luxemburg's pamphlet was part of the struggle then being fought between the 'orthodox' Marxists, (committed theoretically to revolution as the ultimate aim) in the German SPD against revisionists like Bernstein (who wanted to adopt a new theory – non-class, idealist and evolutionary). The defeat of revisionism within the SPD was of those who sought to reject what they saw as out-moded revolutionary theory in favour of a political theory that fitted with its actual reformist political practice. This is why Luxemburg's pamphlet defends reformism (after all, the day to day practice of the SPD) whilst advocating a commitment to revolution against theoretical revisionism. In the long run of course this strategic unity of reformism and revolution was destined to fracture, for which Luxemburg (who really was a revolutionary in a more than formal sense, unlike, say, Kautsky) paid with her life at the behest of her former reformist comrades in the then governing SPD.
You couldn't make it up. Because Kliman credits Chris Harman SPEW conclude that he must be a bad sort: "There is a very simple aphorism in judging individuals and political groupings: 'Show me who your friends are and I'll show you who you are.' " Although Kliman himself (influenced by Harman) does something similar in reverse with regard to Monthly Review when he rejects the monopoly-financial capital theory (associated with Sweezy & Magdoff and now Bellamy Foster and others) as underconsumptionist because they tend to towards a modified Keynesianism as a way of capitalism breaking free from stagnation. “…underconsumptionist theory … holds that the ultimate reason for capitalist crises and slumps is that working people are paid too little. This implies, conversely, that crises and slumps can be averted by giving them a bigger slice of the pie.”(p.197) He is rightly clear that this cannot achieve socialism. But then so are they. Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff in The Great Financial Crisis (2009), conclude that a new New Deal would inevitably fail because it "would likely soon succumb to its own and capitalism's contradictions". Nonetheless they think that a radical reform movement is a good idea because "if such a movement were tried and yet failed (we think inevitably) to remove the injustices and irrationalities of the system, there would be no need to go back to square one. Rather the population would be fully justified in such a case in pushing forward and concluding that the entire political-economic structure should be replaced, brick by brick, with another that would meet their genuined needs and be under democratic control: a system of social use rather than private gain."(p.23) Obviously this is a bonkers political strategy unwittingly similar to that of SPEW and their ilk (although it does show that Keynesian radical reform is not their ultimate end in sight). Kliman's rejection of these convoluted strategies was a really positive outcome from his 2011 book:He arguesThat resistance within capitalism but also thought needs to be given to an alternative system: “..people need to know not just what to be against, but what to be for…”(p.204)That we have to look beyond mere “political and legal changes” to “changes in the actual relations of production”(p.205)That capitalism “…is a network of relationships. These relationships will remain governed by the laws of capitalist production unless and until those laws are broken, and that will require a thorough transformation of the relations of production. … The most important law is the determination of value by labor-time. It compels an enterprise, whoever owns or “controls” it, to minimize costs in order to remain competitive and therefore to lay off inefficient or unnecessary workers, speed up production, have unsafe working conditions, produce for profit instead of producing for need, and so on.”(p.205)That “…developing socialism within capitalism… cannot be done. …The economic laws of the larger system will not allow it. If you buy from the capitalist world “outside,” you also have to sell to it in order to get the money you need to buy from it, and you will not sell anything if your prices are high because your costs of production are high.”(p.205-206)That what is require is not leaders but popular consciousness: “…the core issue is not one of “taking power,” but of what happens after… There needs to be a new relation of theory to practice, so that regular people are not just the muscle that brings down the old power, but become fully equipped, theoretically and intellectually, to govern society themselves. Nothing short of this can prevent power from being handed over to an elite. It seems very utopian, but there really is no alternative.”(p.206)That “…we have to work out how we can have a modern society that operates without the laws of capitalist production being in control.” But “There must first be new relations of production; only then will these things be possible. This too seems utopian, but again, there is really no alternative.”(p.206)For SPEW to reject all this because it sounds like the SPGB really is an unintended compliment worth having.
