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It's practically a dead issue in these days of the Internet. That could conceivably change [anything's possible] but scarcely seems imminent.The Party has a fearless open policy, which you've outlined. What more of socialist significance need be said or can be said on this non-issue for us, in which we would always be victim, never perpetrator.I suppose, we could add — socially acknowledged censorship against us would be interesting indeed!
Ownership and Control of SocietySocial production relies on workers, instruments and resources.Possible social relations of ownership and control — expressed as pure abstractions:1. Society as Socialism. Society collectively owns and controls all three. Social production is controlled democratically by the whole society, is directed in the interest of the whole society, is performed in association by the whole society, is aimed at productive consumption by the whole society and luxury consumption by the whole society.2. Society as Chattel Slavery. The ruling class of society legally and socially owns and controls all three. Social production is controlled by authority of the ruling class of society, is directed in the interest of the ruling class of society, is performed under physical compulsion by the working class of society, is aimed at productive consumption by the working class of society and luxury consumption by the ruling class of society.3. Society as Feudalism. The ruling class of society legally owns and controls resource [land] and socially owns and controls worker and his instrument. Social production is controlled by authority of the ruling class of society, is directed in the interest of the ruling class of society, is performed under social obligation by the working class of society, is aimed at productive consumption by the working class of society and luxury consumption by the ruling class of society.4. Society as Capitalism. The ruling class of society legally and socially owns and controls instrument, resource and the worker's labour. Social production is controlled by private decision of the ruling class of society, is directed in the interest of the ruling class of society, is performed under social compulsion by the working class of society, is aimed at productive consumption by the working class of society and luxury consumption by the ruling class of society.[Please no complaints about the following. 1. All class-exploitative forms are inhomogeneous, but are homogeneous at this level of abstraction. 2. The economic abstraction labour power doesn't exist at this level of abstraction. Labour power arises precisely because the labourer has already ceded ownership and control of his labour to his employing capitalist at the abstract level under consideration here. Though consequential upon the base, labour power emerges in terrifyingly concrete manifestation in the social superstructure.]The conclusion I reach, based on Marx's materialist conception of history's base—superstructure model, is that everything in our case is derived from the abstract base of capitalist class ownership and control relations.Many assertions have been floated by others in this thread about how to make the case against capitalism. I am now prepared to lay my own cards on the table for all to play against. I assert that we can't repudiate the following challenges [some controversial; others possibly unexceptional] without repudiating our case for socialism.How to Confront Capitalism — For discussion…Challenge 1. We must be able to demonstrate deterministically how the social ills people want to overcome [and can't ever overcome under capitalism] relate back to — are deterministic consequences of — capitalist class ownership and control of the whole society's instruments, resources and labour. Otherwise, how can we hope to convince anyone else to join us in changing capitalist ownership and control to socialist ownership and control [our Object]?Challenge 2. We must be able to demonstrate deterministically how a social base generates its appropriate social superstructure [by using capitalism as a model to unmask the capitalist superstructure as a reflection of its class-divided base]. Otherwise, how can we hope to convince anyone else to join us in changing the capitalist social base into the socialist social base?Challenge 3. Our theoretical task is to expose the capitalist class's ownership and control of society's productive instruments, resources and labour, and the working class's deprivation of ownership and control of society's productive instruments, resources and labour.Challenge 4. Our class interest is precisely "to own and control society's instruments and resources", and in so doing control our social labour in our social interest.Challenge 5. Our goal is our Object, to the achievement of which all else is subservient.Challenge 6. Our class consciousness is precisely the conviction "affirmation of the above 5 challenges".
Subject and VerbLet us revisit the transitivity of worker [subject] — working instrument [verb] — resource [object] to see how it actually expresses itself in real social systems.Who's really subject and who's merely verb under capitalism?Worker—instrument—resource is the situation that prevails when the worker owns and controls instrument and resource.But we assert that the worker doesn't own and control instrument and resource. The ultimate proof that the worker has voluntarily relinquished ownership and control is expressed in the actual prevailing reality of the inverse transitivity — that which actually occurs in capitalist production:Instrument [subject] — labouring worker [verb] — resource [object].The worker is controlled in the working process by the things he doesn't control. He is demoted from the working process's subject to its mere verb.If the worker is a mere verb in his own workplace, the working class is collectively a mere verb in the social system at large.With Ownership and Control go Responsibility and AccountabilitySo, to assert that the working class is the subject of the social system [in which it's practically the verb] is to saddle it with responsibility for the social system it allegedly subjects. As alleged subject, the working class must now be held responsible for, and so accountable to its wretched self for, the poverty, degradation, destruction, war, famine, … endemic to the system it allegedly subjects.The insidious implications of the allegation of worker as subject of production is the final humiliation of his degraded status — the worker is now morally guilty for the mess he is forced, by actual lack of ownership and control, to be illusorily in ownership and control of. Can any further degradation await him? Any crueler mockery?And what does that allegation do to the socialist case? It trivializes the socialist case to merely expunging moral guilt for the mess the working class has allegedly wrought upon its own class and upon the world through its gross mismanagement of the world it's allegedly in charge of. Can humiliation go lower!But, let us now unmask the real subject of the capitalist social system. The capitalist class owns and controls the worker's conditions of working, and it legally and socially owns and controls the worker's labour. The capitalist class therefore owns and controls the whole social system in the only sense that matters — at the level of assigning responsibility and accountability for it. It owns and controls the mismanagement of the world it's legally and socially in charge of. [Apparently they don't teach management of the world in a Harvard MBA — only management of the working class.]Sheet home responsibility where it so obviously belongs!So the Capitalist Class isn't in Control?We therefore have no common interest with the capitalist class in any sense that matters — ownership and control. Any other sense is blather!Now to examine the assertion that neither class owns and controls the whole social system… [By implication, the allegation that both classes do have a common interest.]The illusion that the capitalist class isn't in control of capitalism — and so, not in control of the working class — rises primarily from our everyday popped illusions over the workings of capitalism. Capitalism always suggests opportunities and possibilities that can't be realized within it. Ever expanding capital growth that "pops" only to collapse in a heap. Non-class conscious politicians finding solutions that "pop" because the problem can't be solved under capitalism. Everyone wants X but it "pops" and they get Y. Things just don't work out as we believed they should.No wonder the disillusioned delude themselves that nothing can be controlled and that the poor dispossessed capitalist class controls absolutely nothing, least of all the working class. How very deluded, but how wonderful for capitalism that its very workings [or failure thereof] generate protective illusion.The non-class conscious desire an imagined capitalism without its popped disappointments. That is the very essence of illusion.We deterministically know why capitalism always pops the illusions it copiously creates. But the explanation is entirely deterministic, and is entirely about control, and not the absence of control.We oppose the capitalist class because it robs us [it legally and socially owns society's instruments and resources, and the working class's labour] and because it rules us [it legally and socially controls how we labour for it, and so controls our lives].The capitalist class owns and controls its very own mismanaged mess. We should relieve it of its responsibility.
TheOldGreyWhistle,Yes, I fully understand.I had my ironic reason [which might have backfired] for using the term "voluntary" for it is legally and socially "voluntary" — to let people reconsider just how illusory, but really deceptively insidious, are their capitalist freedoms, etc. They turn out to be socially necessary consequences of the capitalist social base, which actually shackles them."Voluntary", of course, not! Unless you have the means, it's practically "necessary" — social necessity in operation.By the way, nothing I've said is different from what Marx discovered. He only hinted at some significant scientific things that he suppressed spelling out in full, mainly in order to avoid being misunderstood as an old-fashioned Hegelian mystic instead of the most modern materialist scientist, still ahead of us all.Marx has consciously seen further than any other scientist before or after about the nature of our social being. He felt he owed the working class everything. He showed mankind how, at last, to cut through appearance to reality. That's what we must do.
TheOldGreyWhistle: "So capitalism consists of two classes in conflict over the price of labour power."You'd have to include the correlative — capitalism also consists of two classes in conflict over the price of goods and services. In other words, you assert that capitalism consists of two classes in conflict over price in its market.That's precisely how non-class conscious academic economists sum up capitalism to their satisfaction. They propagate the illusion that the market controls capitalism — instead of being controlled by it — but their professional role is to sustain this inversion, and so they rightly deserve their Nobel Prizes for theoretical exploits in service of capitalist deception.Yet every normal human being from the age of five upwards [beyond the confines of the economic theology of capitalist apologetics] senses that conflict over market price is a superficial view of something deeper going on beneath the surface.We can't avoid the market, but we should beware it! It is the breeding ground of the illusions of capital. It is where capital realizes itself — where capital conceals its actuality.A capitalist who realizes his capital in the market has little concern over how this alchemy actually occurs. His own class's economic theory amounts to a justification of the market. It is of no practical use for his day-to-day pursuits. Which is just as well, because not even its practitioners can apply it to actual markets.The capitalist market is a place where owners of commodities meet each other with exactly identical legal and social equality. It would not be a free market otherwise.It is wrong to think either party to a capitalist market transaction is robbed. The free market couldn't work that way. It relies on tacit fairness or it would collapse.So exactly how is the worker dudded? Well all production relies on three categories — think of them transitively as worker [subject], working instrument [verb] and resource [object]. The capitalist class owns the last two categories outright.Unfortunately, the free worker owns himself [especially his socially prized ability to operate-the-instrument-upon-the-resource].But the worker [as seller] must meet the capitalist [as buyer] on the labour market to actualize his possession, because he lacks the other two.So the worker voluntarily trades away his prized ability to operate-the-instrument-upon-the-resource to the capitalist to use as he wishes. In other words he voluntarily gives up ownership and control of the third category [subject] that the capitalist didn't own and control.In actuality he has freely, both legally and socially, volunteered away his ownership and control of production. And this on the free capitalist labour market, where equal faces equal.That's the most fundamental assertion that we can make about the free capitalist market.[In what contempt would we hold a slave who had willingly volunteered away his [in capitalist terms] "basic human right to own himself" for servility?]In the annals of human control — what else really compares with the willing servility of the capitalist worker? What else really matters?
Sorry, but prepare for my usual defensive barrage…DJP: In fact how can capital be capital if it does not reproduce and enlarge itself?Answer: From the standpoint of social appearances…1. When the world-wide social system can't realize its world-wide capital outlays on the world-wide market, as now, without massive world-wide write-downs. That's how! World-wide destruction of capital, capitalists and labour — the calamitous consequence of precisely the failure of world-wide capital to live up to world-wide delusional expectations. Yet, surely this horrific spectacle of world-wide capital contracting is a perfect example of capital being its normal itself. Continued capital expansion is the great capitalist delusion, as many racing pulses and burnt fingers are finding out, courtesy of capital being forever its very own expanding-and-collapsing self.2. Should you counter that, despite world-wide capital contracting, some individual capitals continue to prove that they really are capital by individually expanding, I counter this by reminding you that the socialist case is social — not individual — and that basic socialist theory is sterile if not applied to actual social instances [an observation best made by Hegel "All theory is grey, but green is the tree of life"].3. World-wide money capitalists are feverishly engaged in the business of what Marx called "fictitious capital" — a furious world-wide swindle over carving up the world-wide surplus value among their world-wide powerful selves. This is no marxian basic textbook example of individual capitalist factory owners expanding their individual capitals in their own working-class factories. We are talking about glamorous world-wide money capitalists here. Some respect, please! They don't dirty their hands in expanding surplus value; they already own most of it.So, in the application of theory, we find that everything appears different in its concrete instances [that derive as consequences of its pure abstract theoretical base] from the purely abstract theoretical base itself. This is precisely the import of Marx's profound observation that "If appearance and reality directly coincided, there'd be no need for science".[Marx's unstated materialist implication, of course, is that it is precisely through the application of theory that reality and appearance do indirectly coincide for us. That is even more profound.]DJP: … the production of surplus value is the direct object of production.Yet you won't fully concede that this can only take place because the capitalist class owns and controls [and the working class doesn't own and control] the resources, instruments, and labour necessary for production to achieve this object. Instead, you venture an alternative opinion on why we support the working class.DJP: it is the working class which suffers the most and as it [is] also this class which physically reproduces capital that is why we focus our attentions upon them.Absolute drivel!We don't focus on the working class because it suffers the most. Why doesn't it just suffer in silence — show more mettle, courage and stoicism in the face of adversity — like its fellow suffering [but apparently less-suffering] companion in arms, the capitalist class?We support the working class because it's robbed [has no ownership in capitalist production] by the capitalist class and because it's ruled [has no control over capitalist production] by the capitalist class.All revolutions are against robbing-and-ruling within social production by the powerful [owning and controlling] minorities over the powerless [robbed and ruled] majorities. They are power struggles over ownership and control of social production. Suffering is consequential, not fundamental!We are getting so befuddled by the capitalist superstructure if we lose sight of our class interest — something that is apparently becoming a mere revolutionary phrase whose import is lost in the distant past, where it once had some significance we fail to know not what!DJP: I'd also agree with this, it just depends in what sense you are using the word control.You can't agree, if you do so with reluctant prevarication. Everything depends on understanding the only important sense.I claim that for socialists it doesn't "just depend" on what meaning we assign to control. On the contrary, it precisely depends fundamentally on what we mean by control. Everything depends on control.I assert that in the only significant sense for us, the capitalist class owns and controls the resources, instruments and labour of social production — and that is all the control it needs. Inversely, the working class doesn't own and doesn't control the resources, instruments and labour of social production — and that is all the control it must desire before it can introduce socialism — realize its [our] Object.In defending your claim that it is possible to run capitalism without a capitalist class, you add the rider — DJP: I am of course talking about state-capitalism. But I guess more accurately I should have said 'a class of individual capitalists'.If it's state capitalism we are talking about — what do you call the identifiable wielders of financial might in modern-day China, Bismark's Germany, Louis Bonaparte's France, Soviet Russia ?My point in responding has been to defend clarity, precision, and our own science toward realizing our Object.
I'm a life long member of a Companion Party of the World Socialist Movement — an overseas companion socialist party of the SPGB.[That may explain my delay in sometimes responding quickly,]
Hi DJP,Just a quick immediate heartfelt response, without a second glance to edit what I'm now sending you.I'm so pleased that you didn't take offence, as none was intended.We, all of us participants in this debate, are thinking things through out loud as we go along — on the run — to clarify our own views as much as to convey them, with a vague hope of finding common ground,I'm sure I probably read far too much into what you were saying that I should ever have read into it. You certainly alarmed me, and that must have come through in my response.I take the approach, on this forum, that our case, being social and ultimately for all mankind, is too big to be a respecter of personal feelings over views held. But it must always be a respecter of human beings, which is about all we can do that's fine in this social system.As an advocate in another thread for not forgetting morality [which I only ever intended in the sense of respecting our common sociability, which it is hard to watch being daily eroded before our eyes] I have unbounded respect for the members of the SPGB.You tirelessly fight as G. B. Shaw once said about Party predecessor William Morris that "he was on the side of Karl Marx contra mundum". One day the world will come to be made to realize that the Party is the only organization that this poor long-suffering world [human and natural] has as its one consciously true friend, on its side — pro mundum.We need to win it!For socialism.
Ownership and Control in CapitalismThe production necessary for running and maintaining a Socialist social system will be based upon the work the working class already performs for the Capitalist social system. That's an indispensible precondition.Capitalism, with its crucial dependence on objective science and engineering, involuntarily educates its working class for running and maintaining socialism. That running-and-maintaining education was perfected long ago, and generations have graduated with honours from that school.But we can't graduate as a united class until we educate ourselves to unmask the insidious capitalist superstructure that is able to create inverted impressions or benign impressions of power relations in capitalism.Marx worked a lifetime — entirely on our behalf — to dispel the illusion that the working class's running and maintaining of capitalism is its actuality.Its actuality is far worse. The legally and socially free worker finds himself dispossessed of and disempowered over the instruments he must necessarily work with. The only socially necessary possession this legally and socially free worker has and controls is his own ability to use those instruments owned and controlled by the equally free and socially free capitalist class.But the legally and socially free worker has no choice but to sell the very thing he owns and controls in the service of the capitalist — his ability to labour. In other words, when he accepts employment he voluntarily [legally and socially] parts with his one legal and socially free possession.But in this legally and socially free transaction with his employer, the legally and socially free labourer also trades away his own socially-necessary upkeep by his employer for his own vaunted legal and social freedom. In times of need, the free worker must therefore prostrate himself at the mercy of a social system where he quickly disillusions himself over who is actually running and maintaining the social system he formerly deluded himself he ran and maintained. He rapidly discovers that the legally free and socially free worker, himself, is responsible for his own upkeep — that is the sum total of his finally remaining ownership and control — freedom that reminds him of slavery![Yet, even worse than slavery is his situation in times of need, for the legally and socially free worker finds himself unable to upkeep himself unlike a slave, who [with great social foresight] has effectively traded his own personal freedom in exchange for his socially-necessary upkeep at his master's own expense.]We all know what Marx thought about the actuality of the worker's running-and-maintaining of capitalism in the service of the capitalist's owned-and-controlled resources and instruments of labour. Ownership and control trump running and maintaining. The power relationship is entirely one way, as it legally and socially should be, if you happen to legally and socially own all the means of working, apart from the will and ability to perform it yourself.The worker's sole legally and socially free possession — his concrete ability to work — is viewed in an entirely different light by the capitalist, who now owns and controls it, and so is now able [legally and socially] to employ it in his own interest.The worker's dearest posession is now viewed purely abstractly as the variable part of the capitalist's very own [owned and controlled] capital, destined ultimately to be indistinguishable in the form of money from the rest of his very own capital that currently exists in the form of his very own [owned and controlled] resources and instruments that he supplies the labourer with to perform his labour process.In the capitalist process of production, the worker's now alienated [no loner legally or socially his own] concrete labour circulates away from him to the capitalist in the form of the capitalist's sought-after capital. To add insult to injury, the labourer's traded freedom [ownership and control] is now legally and socially free to be abused to gain the capitalist more labour than his upkeep. That's exactly how the capitalist, through his ownership and control and the labourer's non-ownership and no-control, is able to expand his capital.In the only applicable capitalist sense, does any capitalist really care if the labourers actually run the show? That way, it's a perfect illusion of capital.The answer to the reverse charge that — the capitalist doesn't control capital — is clearly shown above to be absolute nonsense. It's the other side of this insidious illusion.The capitalist only needs to control capital in the essential way for him — by owning its material components — the resources, instruments and voluntary labour of the working class.In controlling the labourer's labouring process, the capitalist controls the production process of capital. Do we really think that the capitalist's capital expands by chance, and that the power of capitalist ruling class ownership and control [legal, social or otherwise] has nothing at all to do with it?
DJP: The fundamental thing which sets capitalism apart from other modes of production is the constant need to reproduce and enlarge capital for its own sake. In this sense neither the capitalist nor the working class is in control.In another sense of the word, 'control' of the means of production is in the hands of the working class, after all it is workers who operate the vast productive and administrative machinery they are just doing so in the interests of capital.After all it would be possible to have a capitalist system without a capitalist class. It's the law of value that governs capitalist society and it is that which must be overcome.Fundamentally Wrong but Consequentially Right!Unfortunately, I must take your list of fundamentals as a critique of mine. My critique of yours is that they are omnipresent and pervasive but they are not fundamental. They are consequential.The capitalist base is solely about ownership and control of the social system's resources and instruments of production, and the social relations that coalesce around them.Everything else is consequential upon this, is a consequence of this — is not fundamental. In that sense, everything else is an instance of a consequential possibility. These instances can only be understood in terms of the fundamental. Our goal is to change fundamentals, and let the consequentials follow in their wake..Challenge 1.The need for capital to be capital — to expand — arises precisely from the capitalist social system's base.Can you explain how capital expansion — though apparently fundamental — isn't consequential upon private ownership and control of society's resources and instruments directed toward the production of surplus value?Challenge 2.Marx showed that the capitalist social system arose out of rudimentary forms of capitalist ownership and control that existed sporadically in pre-capitalist societies, where the worker found himself doubly free of being owned himself and of owning his means of production. [Land-owning feudalism's achilles heal was that it allowed some workers to own their personal means of production — otherwise the capitalist class couldn't haven't arisen from them to now own all of society's means of production.]Can you explain how capital arose [=fundamental to its becoming] if not on the social ownership basis outlined above?Challenge 3.Marx spent most of Capital Vol 2 analyzing a Simple Reproduction model of social capital flow — one in which individual capitals necessarily expand as capital [as you say — that's what capital must do or hopes to do in order to be capital] — but in which overall social capital remains constant. Sure, it was an investigatory model for him, but he saw it as a theoretical possibility — much as our non-class conscious opponents, the Greens, crave their variety of Capitalism to become in actuality.Can you explain how — if expansion is fundamental — capitalism can't survive in something like a steady state, where the capitalist class is still extracting surplus value, carving up the same amount between themselves, just [unfortunately] not more of it?Challenge 4.If Capitalism's need "to enlarge for its own sake" is fundamental, and not derivative from the constitution of its base, what do we call a society in which capital is not enlarging, but shrinking — as now.Can you explain what system we are currently living under since it isn't fundamentally expanding at the moment?Challenge 5.Growth, contraction or steady state. It is always fundamentally capitalism as long as capitalist relations of ownership and control of society's resources and instruments persists.Can you explain why it's not possible for capitalism to exist indefinitely — even when it attains a possible state of utter chaos — if capitalist relations of ownership and control of society's resources and instruments remain in tact?Challenge 6.You assert that in one sense workers are practically in control and in another sense that nobody is in control, only avaricious capital is.If we are concentrating on fundamentals of the capitalist social system — I make the counter assertion that both forms of control are powerless to subvert the fundamental [absolutely indispensable] control that matters in capitalist society — the capitalist class's control of the use of all of society's resources and instruments productively in its own interest [what Marx calls productive consumption] to extract surplus value and not for social need.In passing, materialists fully understand that both classes are mere agents of the system. However, eventually our class does get to control the currently-uncontrollable capitalist social system when we eventually abolish it, and then craft ourselves a social system that we can consciously control. To perform this momentous act, we should not delude ourselves over where the only fundamental control [or lack thereof] resides.A minor point. It has never has been necessary for the ruling class to control its social system — which before socialism couldn't be done anyway. It is sufficient for it to control that piece of the social system that's essential to its class interest — always to control use of the resources and instruments of production.Do you really believe in a fundamental sense that capitalists have no real control over production in their own class interest, even if they exercise it within the possibilities of a social system which controls them?Challenge 7.You claim the law of value is fundamental. Omnipresent perhaps. Marx spent his working life to show how it appears fundamental to us — acts like a law of nature, though often as much in the breach as in the observance — but it is totally consequential upon the base's production process. The law of value takes pride of place in the capitalist pantheon of pervasive fetishes, alongside money and the fetish of all fetishes — capital. It definitely derives from the base, and will be abolished when we abolish the fundamental capitalist base.Can you explain how the Marxian law of value is not a necessary social law, consequent upon production being carried out under capitalist conditions of ownership and control of society's resources and instruments, and that vice-versa that the system is a consequence of the fundamental law of value?Challenge 8.You claim it is possible to run capitalism without a capitalist class. Really?Every disappointed-capitalist, wistful humanist, radical economist and everyday do-gooder agrees wholeheartedly.Can you explain why we go to the bother of engaging in a fundamental class struggle to remove capitalism and so capitalists, if the inessential capitalist class [a benign target of misguided attack] isn't fundamental in any way whatsoever to capitalism?Challenge 9.Our Party Object concentrates exclusively on ownership and control of society's resources and instruments for social production.Can you explain why, if our Object is fundamentally correct in doing this, the similar ownership-and-control approach to describing capitalism offered in an earlier post is fundamentally [it may be totally inadequate] wrong?Our century-old Object and Declaration of Principles are the banner under which the working class will reclaim the social system. It says better than anything else in such small compass what is fundamental about capitalism. That has always and ever will be our fundamental case!
I propose the following definition, inspired by the wonderful century-old formulation of our Object and Declaration of Principles.It describes as concisely as I can the essence of what Marx called the social base of the capitalist mode of production. I deliberately avoid what Marx called its social superstructure, since we hold that to be derivative of the base.Capitalism is a system of society based upon the ownership and control of the society's means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the society's ruling [or capitalist] class; and also based upon the society's working [or ruled] class being freed from such ownership and control, and being itself free of ownership by the ruling class; and consequently based upon society's working class being compelled to perform society's necessary labour without control over its mode of labour, and hence based upon its members living out their social existence without control over their own lives.This definition distinguishes capitalism from other exploitative modes where the ruled classes are not themselves free — as in chattel slavery — or are not freed from ownership of their means of living — as in feudalism. Modified: Sat, 03/11/2012 – 12:48pm. "…without control over its mode of labour." originally read "…without control over its means of living,"
Co-opting by the SuperstructureI think your point about co-opting misses the only real point — that it is the superstructure's role to annul, anesthetize, trivialize, sanitize, bastardize all threats to the integrity of the capitalist system as-a-capitalist-system by co-opting these threats into its very generous bosom. Finally, it is we who must un-co-opt the co-opted.Banker ScenarioIt's the usual case of non-class conscious "moral outrage" succumbing to the might of Marx's social superstructure doing precisely what Marx said that social superstructure was itself co-opted by class-exploitative society to do.Swindlers who swindle themselves are rescued by a trillion-dollar donation. Their representative meets hostile donors who, perceiving a shared stake in the survival of his line of business, release him on a good-behavior bond to continue swindling. Like a plot from "Hustle"."Moral outrage" is an easy target for co-opting because it can be defused in the short term as it merely threatens the stability of the system [people quickly decide it is more important to preserve an outrageous system than to preserve their outrage against it] and moral outrage never threatens the viability of the system [which, unfortunately, non-class conscious people also think is much more worth preserving].But class-conscious theory is a long term issue, and even it has proven a ready target for co-opting, by agency of our non-class conscious opponents. They have all but successfully annulled, anesthetized, trivialized, sanitized, bastardized it precisely because it does directly threaten the long-term viability of the system.Look what the non-class conscious agents of the capitalist superstructure have done to our song: "class struggle"=wages battle; "class conscious"=unionist; "Marxism"=Leninism; "socialism"=capitalism; "democracy"=dictatorship; "ideology"=superstructure; even the Party name. This is a tribute to the might of the capitalist superstructure working through its willing agents — Marx's non-class conscious political heirs!Look what the non-class conscious agents of the capitalist superstructure have done to our theory. They mathematized Marxian economics [thereby adding academic respectability to it] by co-opting it in the service of Sraffian linear algebra. When Marx's value theory proved antagonistic to its imposed environment, the whole tribe of Marxian academic economists [being non-class conscious] instinctively blamed the import and not the environment.The wondrous upshot of this mathematical amalgam of interpenetrating opposites was that value and surplus value were redundant fictions, and that man, machinery and animals are all equally exploited and all three are equally sources of profit. This is a tribute to the might of the capitalist superstructure working through its willing agents — Marx's non-class conscious theoretical heirs!This victory was celebrated in an academic festival in which the whole tribe of professional Marxist economists paraded before the amazed capitalist superstructure a job worthily done and dusted. Finally they had disproved Marx mathematically. We owe thanks to Andrew Kliman and others for reclaiming Marx [un-co-opting him] from this non-class conscious illusion.All this establishes the point that co-opting is a very serious problem indeed. But it runs deeper than moral outrage. The whole socialist case is about unmasking the illusions of the capitalist superstructure. Put another way, we must un-co-opt the co-opted.Primal Co-optionCo-opting is an essential function of the social superstructure. Otherwise we could never bring our actions and ideas into conformity with our changing world. Natural evolution works the same way — progressive adaptation of what already exists — which its theoreticians take as proof against divine [perfectly engineered] creation.In that sense, co-opting is normal. Which is why, when the superstructure of a class-exploitative base builds into itself a disingenuous component, alongside its perfectly natural component, we readily fail to detect the sleight of hand.The superstructure's disingenuous component has to annul, anesthetize, trivialize, sanitize, bastardize whatever threatens the base that raises it.Firstly, it is important to distinguish our very own capitalist superstructure's insidious deliberate cunning distortion from the naive distortion that beset the superstructure of primitive social economic formations. Their naive distortion arose from their superstructure's limited social base. For them, when grand appearance presents itself at odds with reality, their elementary superstructure seeks an imaginary reality through natural awe of the natural world. Their elementary superstructure confines all grand conceptions incestuously within its sterile self because it lacks the social base to support the science to refertilize itself.[However, their everyday life teaches them very well indeed how to distinguish between appearance and reality [= science] with a skill that elicits our admiration and gives us sophisticates a gimpse into the lost co-operative sociability of the ancestral superstructural world that we've been co-opted out of. But the grand conceptual paralysis that arises from its limited social base also shows us why the whole tragedy of civilization has been socially necessary.]Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that our very own sophisticated superstructure cannot dispense with its naive component because its base — whose sole function is to extract surplus value — necessarily relies on the growing power of objective science and equally on the vestiges of cooperative sociability [it can't fully extinguish that because the base only functions through the social agency of us sentient feeling humans].In passing, LaFargue's article is precisely his take [shades of Rousseau] on the primal co-option in which class exploitation in the social base erodes its natural reflection in the primitive superstructure and sets the superstructure off on its disingenuous course.His implied conclusion is profound. The superstructure of a class-divided society is irrevocably class divided. But it can't show it. It would be naively naive indeed of it to reveal the shameful riven avaricious soul of the base that raised it. Consequently, the naive primitive superstructure, once wholly social, undergoes a grand primal co-option in the interests of the ruling class. Henceforth it must hide its disunited social shame from itself behind a disingenuous perception of united sociability. This is the universal insidious co-option from which all others derive as instances.
Class ConsciousnessMy point is that class-conscious socialists [which precisely means people who are convinced of our Object] must come to recognize that it is impossible to change what Marx called the social base, without first changing what Marx called the social superstructure, in order to accomplish our Object.Our non-class conscious opponents [which precisely means people without conviction in our Object] quite correctly recognize that it is possible to modify the social base, even if they harbour the fond illusion that it is they who are determining the modifications rather than, as Marx spent his working life demonstrating, the social base itself determining them to perform necessary modifications to itself.The mighty social base allocates its non-class conscious minions the necessary bit roles in its normal adjustment process that sustains the whole base–superstructure edifice as a complex self-adaptive system. They are its necessary willing unsuspecting agents, eager to resolve discord between base and superstructure. [When will they ever learn!]But the base always suggests its possible possibilities in the first place, and only actuates those modifications it can accede to, and then on its terms, and decidedly not on any of our socially unconscious opponents' terms. If only the entire social organism were as easily amenable to being changed as to being adjusted, we'd be living in socialism long ago.On the other hand, the social base allots us class-conscious socialists a different role that can only be played out in its superstructure. That role is to change the mighty superstructure itself as precondition to changing the even mightier determining base.It is only when the superstructure consciously recognizes that it no longer conforms to its base — this is precisely what is meant by class consciousness — that it can deterministically move against and redetermine its base, something that normally can't be done. The impossible becomes possible!In Marxian materialism, this is the case of determinism doing a switch-back upon itself. In Hegelian terms — it is the negation of the negation. Amazingly, the base determines its own dissolution by agency of its own determined superstructure. This is ultimately what the "reflection" process in the clause "the superstructure reflects the base" is finally about.Class-conscious socialists must, and only can, operate in the superstructure [which includes politics, art and, shudder, morality] in order to propagate our Object. The superstructure's illusions are the objects we must fight and overturn before we overturn the social base.The Party is the only political and social organization that has been doing this consistently class-consciously for over a century, and has regularly demonstrated that it can, when called upon, use morality most effectively to further its Object.Perceptions of MoralityThis thread originated from a moral judgement of the quite normally human kind made by ALB. My originating post was, perhaps naively, intended to back him up over what always comes across as a theoretical slip. In the event, it has highlighted how pervasive is fear of the capitalist social superstructure for all of us.Hud955: "Morality is merely a reflex of class interest, not class interest itself."If linked by "reflex", they are inextricably yoked together. Idealist Hegel would call them "identical" and treat them as interpenetrating ideas. Materialist Marx would link them via an intermediary "reflecting" deterministic material process — in this case, presumably a process of social practice.In passing, typically Marxian "reflex" (or reflected) processes are the interesting "dialectical" processes. They develop through stages by performing that negation-of-negation back-flip [a "reflection" that "reflects" itself] in which the determiner determines the determined to determine the determiner — in your case, morality would then turn the scales upon class interest to redirect it instead of being directed by it. That happy event, though expressed abstractly here, will befall capitalist class interest.Regarding LaFargue. His scientific account casts the origin of ideological morality out of natural social relations in a way that touches the core of our social being [despite hints of Rousseau], and we immediately feel impelled to restore tainted morality to a higher form adequate to advanced social needs [Engels] — at least I feel impelled to want to restore it upon reading him. He makes us feel the need for transforming society.But leave LaFargue and his mentor Engels, and consider their progenitor Lewis Henry Morgan [in passing a Republican congressman, no less]. Morgan wrote perhaps the finest combined moral–scientific judgement against capitalism and for socialism that we have. We know it almost by heart.The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction…. the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.Engels, lost in admiration, reproduced this extract in full, leaving every bourgeois-ideologically tainted word of it verbatim, unaltered, uncommented, unexpurgated because every sentient reader knows in his heart of hearts precisely what underlying natural content is intended.Morality in its bourgeois form lacks every vestige of humanly cooperative content. At the very least, we should be able to confront the stinking perversion of a corpse that now parades in its name. We have powerful such confrontations by Marx, Engels, Morgan and, yes, ourselves as models.
Dear Hud955,Both you, TheOldGreyWhistle and I, as committed socialists all three, accept that capitalist conceptions of "rights" and "morality" are socially-necessary ideological expressions of an exploitative class society.Both of you, however, overstep the science when you spirit away the ideological conceptions of capitalism as if they were figments of the imagination. If we could unmask them as easily in practice, we'd already have won socialism.Our task is to unmask them in practice. If you've already spirited them away in theory, you've already dismissed the central problem, and all means of its solution.Our most powerful weapon, the materialist conception of history, when applied to the capitalist economic formation is almost exclusively devoted to comprehending and exposing these ideological expressions and their life history. For us not to use this science against its special target — human ideological forms — is to give up the fight before it starts.Furthermore Marx expressly concludes that these are the very "ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out". That conviction lies at the very heart of his science.[Of course he acknowledged these forms as expressions of "relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production", but we don't fight class battles at that deep level — or as he would have put it — we conduct class struggles in the "ideological" superstructure and not in the "ecomonic" base, even when it appears that we do.]Naturally, Marx himself fought with intellectual ferocity against these capitalist ideological forms all his theoretical life. Most spectacularly, he went for capitalism's jugular when he exposed its central commodity fetish. This central ideological conception of capitalism acts like a law of nature — just like gravity, as you both imply — and we, necessarily social beings, in our daily lives can do little practical about it other than shrug our shoulders and unwittingly help sustain it — and we don't even have to help sustain gravity.Your brave clause "revolutionary action is the growing consciousness of class interest" is too abstract if it doesn't lock horns with the system-sustaining ideology of capitalism. For that's what it has to overcome, mentally before physically, and largely all it can do with its weapon — the materialist conception of history. Fortunately for us, it is salutary to discover that the most powerful science of human history is on our side.A life time's exposure to commodities and money never brought anyone — apart from Marx — around to a spontaneous realization that capital and money are not [just] things but ideological expressions of the exploitative capitalist social process of production. [He found them to be its most perfectly-concise and adequate ideological expression. Who but he could have seen that — but once assimilated as a key to his thought processes, it completely changes how we understand the capitalist system. Amazingly, this apparently rarefied insight almost tumbles out of his well-known basic formulation of the materialist conception of history.]Similarly, isolated personal insight through social experience into less-veiled capitalist ideological expressions is still unlikely to lead to socialist consciousness without first being comprehended in the global context of the materialist conception of history. That's why we, along with humanity as a whole, need that conviction-based agreed-upon socially-necessary social construct called science.Because prospective socialists are all trapped [just like us] to varying degrees within capitalist ideology, we create our own process of winning them to our ranks. This intellectual [or conscious] Primitive Socialist Accumulation process must engage directly with but in opposition to capitalist ideology if it is to engage with anything substantial — not abstract or purely academic — at all.Capitalism has spontaneously prepared the inevitable ideological battle field. It has exploitative-class ideology on its side. We have the materialist conception of history on ours. We have the intelligence on it.
Dear TheOldGreyWhistle, in the spirit of your open invitation to discuss central issues of our case — though not yet in the forum you propose — I submit this response to your previous.Marx [Preface to the Contribution] sees morality [by implication] as a definite form of social consciousness arising from the "relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production".He sees socialism as ending class antagonism in the sense of "an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence", and with it the demise of "legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic" ideological forms of consciousness.He makes the case for socialism in terms of class interest, and not in terms of "morality" nor, by implication, in "legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic" terms. But he also points out that these are the very "ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out".In other words, we have to combat these ideological forms with science [the materialist conception of history], in terms of class interest, because they are the central ideological forms that our opponents conceive our case by and confront it with.We would hardly concede that socialism is not a "political" issue, for we actively engage with that ideological form by using it but opposing it as a class issue. Likewise, with the other ideological forms, especially "art", but also that dreaded ideological form "morality".
