Monthly Archives: February 2025

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (59) – Alienated labour

Posted on by
Reply

The early Marx sought to understand the new capitalist society through a study of political economy as expounded by its disciples and critics.  In doing so he faced multiple phenomena, seeking ‘to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.’ (Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844)

In doing so he considered that ‘Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production.’

Marx goes on to put forward the idea that in ‘our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production . . . We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labour.’

‘If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. . . . Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.’

‘Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour creates the relationship to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.’

‘Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.’

‘True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.’

‘Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.’

The alternative to capitalism for Marx is not simply the abolition of private property but the ending of alienation: of workers from their work (as it is imposed as a necessity in order to live while not under their control as to its nature or purpose); of workers from their product (which includes products they would choose not to make with workplaces and technology that subjects them to control and determines the nature of their work); alienation from each other (they compete for resources, including employment, and are atomised by lack of collective control of the means of providing for their needs); and through all this, alienated from their essential nature as social animals working in cooperation to develop their humanity in all its richness through and with other people, who are regarded not as constraints on their freedom, as in bourgeois theory, but only through whom their freedom can be realised.

‘From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.’

‘We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.’

Marx’s critique of political economy, and the conditions of estranged labour in capitalism, included the concepts of the forces of production and relations of production and the potential to overthrow the capital-wage relationship upon which they were based.  Labour power is the main force of production and the relations of production are more and more dominated by the capital-wage relationship. It therefore becomes clear that the social revolution that is necessary is one not just for the working class but by it:

‘Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology)

The alienation that thwarts the exercise of human powers and potentialities is the product of these forces and relations, which also provide the potential to free humanity from such alienation and allow the further development of human powers and potentialities. Bourgeois private property and alienated labour condition each other and reflect aspects of the same social relation of wage labour and capital. The overthrow of this form of social labour is not therefore something external to humanity (‘man’) but deals directly with its social relationships and therefore directly to humanity itself, as its nature for Marx is the ensemble of these relationships.

The forces and relations of production in feudal society created classes within which an individual’s identity is fixed and determined in a hierarchy by birth. As Marx puts it: ‘a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner’.  (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology) Capitalism involves capitalists and workers and while there must always be capitalists and workers within it, the individuals personifying this class relationship are not always necessarily fixed.  An individual may not always be a worker if she then employs labour, and a capitalist may be reduced to a member of the working class if she becomes bankrupt.

More importantly, while the peasants of precapitalist society were socially and geographically isolated as virtually self-sufficient economic units, producing almost everything they needed, the working class is part of a cooperative division of labour spanning the world (with the organisation of society corresponding to it) and organised by capitalism in such a way that, while alienated from the very powers it has created, has the potential to appropriate these powers and dispel their alienation.

This is what the abolition of bourgeois private property begins to do, with the creation of a cooperative economy and a workers’ state that defends it, together developing the forces of production and dissolving the exploitation of labour by capital.

Back to part 58

Part 1

Forward to part 60

Carving up Ukraine

Posted on by
Reply

Two years ago, the Ukrainian Defence Minister Alexei Reznikov, admitted during an appearance on local television that “Today, Ukraine is addressing [the] threat (of Russia). We’re carrying out NATO’s mission today, without shedding their blood. We shed our blood, so we expect them to provide weapons.”  Nothing could be clearer – Ukraine was fighting a proxy war for Western imperialism against Russia.

In January this year, it was reported that in a closed-door meeting with the Ukrainian parliament, military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, predicted “If there are no serious negotiations by the summer, then very dangerous processes for the very existence of Ukraine may begin.”

In other words, Ukraine was losing the proxy war.  Despite all the support from the West, it was running out of soldiers while its Western sponsors were running down their own stock of weapons and ammunition; it had either been destroyed by the Russians or had been expended to no avail.

Now, with Donald Trump’s proposals, there is some prospect of “serious negotiations by the summer” and an end to Ukrainians “shedding their blood”.  The US has other concerns and has torpedoed the declared purpose of the war by declaring that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO, will not return to its 2014 borders, and no US troops will be placed in Ukraine at any time, even after the end of hostilities. European NATO countries will have to take up the burden.  He announced that ceasefire negotiations with Russia would start and of course, Ukraine would be involved, although it was not even informed of Defence Secretary Hegseth’s statement about the radically changed objectives of the war.

Zelenskyy’s ‘Victory Plan’ is dead in the water, as is his statement that US troops are essential for Ukraine in the event of a deal.  Having declared that it would be ‘very difficult’ to survive without U.S. military support, and that he doesn’t “want to think about” not having it, he now declares the need for an “army of Europe.”  It is a form of denial.

So is the statement by the ‘High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission’ Kaja Kallas, who said that ‘we must help Ukraine to defend itself against aggression so that there is no wider conflict.   It will be a dirty deal, which we’ve seen before, for example in Minsk, and it just won’t work. It won’t stop the killing. It’s not going to stop the war.”  “Why are we giving them [Russia] everything they want even before the negotiations have started? It’s appeasement. It has never worked.” “It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work. You need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”

Of course, Russia hasn’t been given everything it wants, and what the US administration has accepted is something it does not have the power to deny. Pretending you can go into negotiations demanding the impossible as a bargaining chip undermines your position from the start and subverts credibility.  It is a recipe for continued and ‘wider conflict’, which is what the EU and the British are proposing.  All the sanctimonious snivelling about ‘stopping the killing’ and ‘stopping the war’ is just so much hypocritical and cynical lying.  It is also a form of denial because the European arm of NATO cannot impose its will on Russia and cannot even police an eventual settlement with any degree of certainty.  Neither can Ukraine continue the war without avoiding defeat and the longer it goes on the worse it will be.  The so-called friends of the Ukrainian people in European governments are happy to continue to shed their blood even when NATO’s mission is dead.

If the European ‘friends’ of the Ukrainian people are false, so they are also betrayed by their own political leaders who, having declared the need to shed blood in a war for NATO and need for US military support, are now determined to continue to shed more blood without the declared objective and without this support.  Meanwhile Zelenskyy fends off the US emissary seeking his signature to Trump’s deal for his takeover of 50% of Ukraine’s mineral deposits.

Any observer with any appreciation of the reality of the war has noted that the first impact of Trump’s initiative is to further demoralise Ukraine, already suffering from exhaustion, desertion and draft-dodging.  Many Ukrainian workers are voting with their feet and see no sense in following orders that risk their lives on behalf of NATO or to allow the plundering of the country’s natural resources.  On top of these we now have the glaring reality that they cannot win.

In the absence of working class political opposition, the proxy nature of the war has imposed itself anyway, and many Ukrainian workers will not fight and die for it.  Despite this political absence the resistance to the war has weakened the West’s project and that  of the Ukrainian state and this can now can only increase.

Some observers have already noted the repeated attempts by the Zelenskyy regime to escalate the war with the latest being the false flag attack on Chernobyl nuclear power station, blamed of course on the Russians, who could blow it up if they wanted, have no interest in doing so, and especially at this time when it suits only Ukrainian attempts to drum up support.

It is by no means obvious that the road to ending the war is clear.  Not only the Zelensky regime but also the far-right Banderite factions stand in the way.  The nonsense that the West is fighting for democracy has again been exposed by Zelenskyy sanctioning his political rivals in preparation for elections that will come sooner or later.  The Banderites are another obvious threat to his regime and any attempt by it to negotiate a less damaging and humiliating peace agreement.  

Kaja Kallas, has stated EU opposition to “a dirty deal . . . for example in Minsk” and that “you need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”  Her and the EU’s demands are and will be unacceptable to Russia while the Minsk agreements failed not least because Ukraine had no intention of implementing them and Germany and France had no intention of making it.  What this means is that Russia will itself not accept an updated version of Western promises that might not last longer than a change in the US administration.

Russia therefore has its own problems in enforcing a deal that cannot be unravelled later, including the extent of its territorial acquisitions and the nature of the rump Ukrainian state; the scale of its armed forces and the need to exclude NATO troops from it under the pretence of being ‘peace-keepers’.  It also needs the removal of sanctions, which the EU can stymie.  These point to pursuit of a definitive Ukrainian defeat and Russian victory which is not yet imminent, but which endangers any arrangement with Trump and provides more opportunity for Ukrainian provocation and European intervention.

The task of socialists is clear – no support to Trump and whatever plans he has, which can radically change; opposition to the attempts of European imperialism and the Ukrainian state to continue the war, and advance its end by explaining its reactionary character to the workers of all the combatant states, including Russia.  If the pro-war left in the West is consistent with its existing policy it will row in behind Starmer, Scholtz and Macron etc. in seeking to continue the war and in doing so increase the risk of a wider conflict with Russia.  It will leave European workers politically disarmed in opposing rearmament, the militarisation of their society and the austerity and repression that will be required for its implementation.

One supporter of the Russian invasion has stated that “we need to organise a mass movement to demand a just and democratic peace in Ukraine”, as if any peace agreement arising out of negotiations involving Trump, Putin, Zelenskyy and von der Leyen could possibly embody a democratic solution.  The only possible democratic solution to this war and to capitalist war in general is a working class revolution but neither the social-imperialist left in the West, or the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ left that supports Russia, will contribute to this.  Instead, they will look to their favoured reactionary state to triumph.

Imperialist rivalry and the Left (2 of 2)

Posted on by
Reply

The Trump mantra of Making America Great Again is recognition of relative US decline and the need to arrest and reverse it, and in this he is no different from his recent predecessors. It is also recognition that this cannot be done in the old way – as during the short unipolar moment of US supremacy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

The US no longer reigns supreme because of a higher level of industrial productivity and is no longer able to militarily dominate the whole world unchallenged despite an enormous military. The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson seriously overstates the case when he asserts that the US currently resembles the Soviet Union in the 1980s although his observations are accurate. In both there was/is a geriatric political leadership; the population no longer bought/buys into the political regime; the rising level of state debt was/is unsustainable, and most dramatically there was/is a marked decline in life expectancy in major sectors of the population caused by deaths of despair – alcoholism, opioids and suicide.

Despair is food for reactionary petty bourgeois politics, not for socialism, although socialism is no longer put forward by much of the left as an alternative.  Other demands and policies and other movements have taken its place.  As we have noted, in Ukraine it is ‘self-determination’ of an independent capitalist state; anyone but Le Pen for French workers to defend French bourgeois democracy; and a ‘left’ Government in Ireland that isn’t left in any genuine sense to replace a hundred years of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

The new imperialist rivalry makes the pro-war left’s approach of opposing imperialism through a policy of self-determination of nations incoherent, although it probably thinks the opposite.  It forgets that the policy arose as a means of combatting nationalism, not supporting it.  That it applied to countries and peoples that existed in colonies and empires, not already existing independent states.  That the role of the policy was to propel bourgeois revolutions among these peoples as a way of advancing socialist revolution in the advanced imperialist countries.  Not as a means of supporting bourgeois forces in already capitalist countries that seek alliances with one or other imperialism. Not in pursuit of a bourgeois revolution – whether called ‘national liberation’ or self-determination – where capitalism has already been fully established and with a large working class the task of which is to win it to socialism – through opposition to its own bourgeoisie and imperialism.

A world of at least nominally independent states makes a policy of self-determination dependant on secondary characteristics that results in political opportunism because this self-determination for countries can only apply against others.  Such justification falls apart when one or other imperialist power becomes the sponsor of this ‘self-determination’.  This is clearly the case in Ukraine, which requires massive NATO intervention as the only means of achieving what is claimed to be national liberation.  This would necessarily involve the takeover by Western imperialism and would involve the pillaging of Ukrainian resources by the US and other multinationals, as various US media and politicians have made abundantly clear.

An article attempting to justify this position illustrates the problem of employing inane criteria to support capitalist war. Its “practical conclusions” are that “When an imperialist country is invading a poorer nation to try to carve up the world, advocating the latter’s right to resist and defending its right to self-determination is a basic democratic demand. Even saying you are in favour of the smaller nation winning is a principled and correct position.”

In this case the argument is that we must support a “poorer” or “smaller” nation against an imperialist one. Whatever about what is meant by “poorer” or “smaller,” what is missing is the need for a concrete class analysis of what the war involves – whether a “smaller” or “poorer” nation is sponsored and supported by a more powerful imperialist one or whether it is a capitalist state itself despite its poverty or size.

A world in which any significant war will involve support to one side or the other by an imperialist state in rivalry with another is ignored through moralistic claims about their size and wealth, ignoring that it is the working class who will fight and die in both. This is ignored because capitalist war is viewed as a war between nations and the class struggle is rendered irrelevant by choosing the most worthy and deserving capitalist state to support.

A policy of supporting self-determination and the independence of capitalist states is not a policy of supporting the right to self-determination of countries that are colonies or parts of former empires.  It amounts to endorsing the policies of independent states against others and involves the left drumming up support for these under the cloak of the same hypocritical phrases about freedom long ridiculed by socialists.

It is as easy to declare support for the poorer and smaller alliance of Russia and China against the United States and the West over Ukraine – or Taiwan – as it is to support the West and its Ukrainian proxy.  It is as stupid to declare one more democratic than the other, or to label one or the other as fascist, or define its capitalist character as non-imperialist, in order to justify support for it.  In all cases the subordination of the working class to the favoured ‘democratic’ or ‘non-imperialist’ state is concealed and rendered invisible.  Socialism cannot be put on the agenda by picking out what capitalist state to support, and the poverty of the arguments for it demonstrate it.

Back to part 1

Imperialist rivalry and the Left (1 of 2)

Posted on by
Reply

The widespread revulsion among many in the West at the genocide in Gaza explains the increasing clampdown by governments on protests against it.  These tend towards opposition against the Western states themselves, whose complicity is too obvious to hide, while the attempts to disguise and justify it by the likes of the BBC etc. reduces their influence.

This comes at a difficult time when Western political and military leaders and their propagandists in the media announce that the populations of the West should be preparing for war themselves.  The latest is a report stating that:

‘The European Commission should facilitate the prolongation of the conflict in Ukraine in order to contain Russia and prepare for war within the next five years. European Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius made such a statement during the annual conference of the European Defence Agency in Brussels.’

“Every day that Ukraine continues to fight is another day for the EU and NATO to become stronger,” he said, calling on European countries to “prepare for war in the next five years” and to move the European economy to ” turbowarfare regime”.’

“We should spend more on weapons, produce more and have more weapons than Russia,” Kubilius added.’

This is the inescapable logic of all those, from the right to the pro-war left, who currently support the war.  It follows from their claims that Ukraine must be supported because it is fighting for democracy – for ‘us’ – against an aggressive imperialism. If it is acceptable for Ukraine to ally with NATO and for workers in the West to support it in doing so, then the same Russian threat exists not only to Ukraine but also to Eastern Europe.  After all, is this not the inevitable course of an aggressive imperialism?  If this imperialism threatens Eastern Europe only the stupid could deny that the same threat would then not also be posed to Western Europe.

So far, some groups like that promoted by  Anti-capitalist Resistance are committed to this view in relation to Eastern Europe; but a war they believe can spread from Ukraine to Eastern Europe has, for similar causes, no rationale not to spread from Eastern Europe to Western Europe.  This means that there is no reason not to support their own states in this future war and accept the preparations necessary to fight it, those demanded by the EU Commissioner for Defence.

Since most of the Western left has failed to oppose the war it is therefore politically disarmed against the bellicose demands for rearmament by their own capitalist states.  This is true both of those who pretend that the war by Ukraine is one of national liberation and of those who believe it is an imperialist proxy war and a war of national liberation at the same time.  The latter simply import into their position the contradiction that the real world outside damns in the former.

Now, along comes Donald Trump to make it clear that imperialist rivalry really is aggressive by its nature, including the Western variety.  The attempt therefore to claim that it is the Russian variety that is solely responsible for war must explain in what way it is not just one instance of a world-wide phenomenon; why the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine is not central to the cause of the war; why Ukraine should be supported when its criticism of Israel has been that it hasn’t provided it with weapons – something now being rectified; why support should be given to the Western variety of imperialism when it is participating in genocide in Palestine; and most importantly, why opposition to the invasion requires support for the alliance of Ukraine and Western imperialism.

Of course, the pro-war left opposes Trump, but more as an anomaly – rather like others in the bourgeoisie media – who will highlight the differences but ignore the continuities with the previous Biden administration.  However, some of these commentators have already admitted that what stands out about Trump is his open espousal of the same principles as his predecessors without the hypocritical rhetoric that has usually accompanied it.  He is as much a product of Western bourgeois democracy that the pro-war left defends as the Obamas and Bidens.

Trump’s threat of ethnic cleansing will compete against Biden’s genocide for barbarity.  Sanctions and creeping economic war against China started under Trump but were maintained and expanded by Biden.  Trump’s threat to make Europe pay for the war in Ukraine follows Biden’s existing imposition of its costs on Europe through sanctions, blowing up European infrastructure, and selling it more expensive energy and lots of US weapons.

Trump is evidence of there being more than one way to pursue US primacy.  Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference, but it is necessary not to limit opposition only to them.  The petty bourgeois character of the left is exposed by its seizing on such differences to drop principled opposition to other bourgeois forces and ally with them in opposition to what is called the far-right or fascism.  This includes the same forces whose rule led to the growth of the far-right in the first place.  We see this process again and again in support for the Democrats in the US, Macron in France, and Starmer’s Labour Party in Britain.  In Ireland it is Sinn Fein that is supposed to be central to a left alternative despite its record in office in the North of the country.

All these have failed, or will fail, because these forces are not an alternative to what is called the far-right, which in many cases is just the further right.  These far-right formations represent, or are composed of, the reactionary sections of the petty bourgeoisie with their narrow nationalist ideas that must inevitably under current conditions gravitate to those they seek to replace, or shift their ground to achieve the same outcomes with different methods.  The accommodation that many so-called centrist bourgeois formations are making with the far-right should be all the evidence needed that the dividing line is not some notion of a more and more discredited bourgeois democracy against right wing populism and authoritarianism but between the working class and the bourgeoisie that is attempting to conscript it for war and get it to pay the price in money and blood.

Forward to part 2