Category Archives: Karl Marx

Marx on Poland and Ireland: review of ‘Marx at the Margins’ part II

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170px-Marx_oldby Belfast Plebian

Marx served as the chief European correspondent of the New York Tribune, the most important newspaper in the United States in the nineteenth century. Anderson believes these articles ‘constitute a far more serious and sustained affair than is generally realised. They fill most of the contents of volumes 12 through 17 of the MECW, each of which runs to over five hundred pages.’ All too often these articles have been seen as mere digressions from the more important economic works Marx was preparing roughly at the same time.

Their relative neglect is due in part to what Marx himself said about them in a letter disparaging his own involvement with political journalism. One letter Marx sent to a German comrade residing in the United States said he found the ‘perpetual scribbling for the newspapers tiresome’ and expressed a wish ‘ to withdraw into solitude for a few months and work at my economy.’

The articles were also ignored because in the beginning the principal students of the works of Marx were non English speaking Europeans who thought of him primarily as a writer of German prose and even as a strictly European intellectual. In more recent times the journalism has been downgraded due to a sarcastic criticism at the hands of some influential post colonial writers who have uncovered in them a so called Marxist justification for progressive colonialism.

Marx’s 1853 articles on India, especially his ‘The British rule in India’, are believed to espouse a doctrine of an enlightened colonialism. Edward Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ avers that in ‘article after article he [Marx] returnedwith increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible a realsocial revolution.’ Anderson accepts that some of the early Tribune articles contain Eurocentric generalisations.  In about the time of the communist manifesto Marx tended to extol the benefits of an inventive British capitalism over the cost of massive social dislocation. A dialectic relationship of both is present but not always so, and the neutral idea that all pre-modern societies like in India and China are destined to make an adjustment to a foreign induced capitalist modernisation is powerfully present.

Anderson presents the case that the Tribune articles on pre-modern and ‘barbarous Asian despotism’ register a steady shift in emphasis, becoming more dialectical and if anything the negative side of capitalist progress is emphasised and a critical support for political resistance to colonialism becomes more the norm.

What can be said with Said and others is that their criticism of Marx rests only on a few early Tribune opinion pieces and extrapolations from the general drift of the unrevised versions of the communist Manifesto, without appreciation of Marx’s constant revisions to his own analysis. What changed between 1853 and 1872-83 was his greater understanding and assessments of the various communal relations still dominant at that time.

Marx actually went on to identify at least three types of early communal relationships; the Greco-Roman, Germanic and the Asiatic. In the argument of 1853 the communal social relations present in these societies at the village level created a very repressive control by the village community over the non-free individual and made the basis for a despotic State, hence they were taken to be ‘barbarous.’ Marx then began to assess them differently and in the Grundrisse he states that the ‘The Asiatic form necessarily hangs on most tenaciously and for the longest time.’

Already in the Grundrisse of 1857-58 he was beginning to characterise the communal relations as containing both despotic and democratic potential. He also began to think that it was not the supposed common ownership of land that differentiated these pre capitalist social formations but the use of collective labour in working the land that really marked them out. Thus in the 1880s he wrote that the Russian village with its communal social organisation might be able to avoid all of the exploitation typical of capitalist progress by revolutionising itself and overthrowing the landed class and by linking up with the workers movements in the West.  Marx in fact refers to such an alternative in the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, although it should be borne in mind that he was not proposing a unique Russian road to socialism.

 

Marx was not defending communal social  relations in their existing forms in any unqualified fashion, for he also argued they needed to be revolutionised from within and linked to technological achievements from without . In this way, these indigenous social forms, and the defence of them against capitalist encroachment, could form the starting point for a wider communist transformation that would involve both large agrarian societies like India or Russia and the revolutionary labour movements of already industrialising ones like England, France and Germany.

In the occasional scribbling on the British colonialists and their actions in India and China Marx became ever more contemptuous of what the British colonial-capitalists were actually achieving: ‘More than that of any other nation, the history of English economic management in India is a history of futile and actually stupid (in practice, infamous) experiments . In Bengal they created a caricature of English large scale landed property; in the south east they created a caricature of peasant smallholdings. In the north-west they did all they could to transform the Indian economic community with communal ownership of the soil into a caricature of itself.’(Grundrisse p. 451)  

The developing journalism of Marx also refutes the widely held idea that he took no interest in the national movements of his own time.  It has been widely trumpeted that Marx raised up the idea of trans-national social class to such a height in his dialectic that the idea of ‘national right’ was completely suppressed altogether in his mind. In textual terms, much of the critique of Marx and Engels on nationalism centres on their early ethnocentric disparagement of some of the Slavic societies of Eastern Europe and the Balkans as “unhistorical” nations.

This thesis is challenged in the examples of Poland and Ireland, both primarily rural societies with no organised communist movement. Anderson shows that Marx’s support for Polish independence was one of the great political passions of his life. One source of our confusion stems from the fact that some influential post Marx socialists developed a pronounced opposition to Polish independence and an explicit critique of Marx, especially Rosa Luxembourg and even Karl Kautsky.  Also with Stalin, who partitioned Poland in 1939-41, everything to do with Polish independence was labelled a counterrevolutionary deviation, while most of Marx’s writings on Poland were expunged from the official collections.

The historian of ideas Isiah Berlin is just one of many influential liberals who have charged Marx with a political blindness in respect of the great national movements of the nineteenth century. A study of Marx’s writings on various national struggles, especially those covering Poland and Ireland, showed that he in fact related the workers struggles to the key national struggles without compromising the higher cause of communist revolution.

Anderson shows that the themes of nation and race were intertwined with class analysis and were not relegated to minor matters in his own active political life.  In fact they took up most of his Marx’s time as a leader of the First International and were at the core of his clashes and controversies with rival socialist tendencies (mainly Proudhonist and Bakuninist), covering the entire duration of the First International.

Anderson writes that: ‘In Marx at the Margins, I did try to respond to serious scholarly critiques of Marx on nationalism and ethnicity such as those by Ephraim Nimmi (1994), who carried out a textual analysis of Marx’s voluminous writings on nationalism. I generally eschewed reference to the kinds of peremptory (and textually unsupported critiques of those like Giddens who seem to get a free pass so long as their target is Marx.’

In the document of 1864, the ‘Inaugural Address’ of the International, which in effect became its programme, the main theme was of course the international battle between capital and labour, however even here Marx referred to Ireland, Poland and the American civil war.

The period of the First International was also the period of the first drafts of Capital and all three political struggles feature heavily in the historical side of the economic critique. The importance of the American civil war for International Labour is cited in the very preface of the first edition of volume 1 of 1867. The ideological divisions that caused an eventual split in the First International were over Marx’s insistence that the workers movement should not restrict its own outlook to reductive class questions. At the time of Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s death in 1865, Marx wrote a long article in German in which he repeated his earlier critiques of the French utopian socialist’s economic theories. He also added a stinging rebuke directed against Proudhon’s thoughts on Poland: ‘ his last work, written against Poland, in which for the greater glory of the tsar he expresses moronic cynicism, must be described as…not merely bad but base.’

A year later, opposition to Marx emerged within the International among some of its French-speaking members, most of them influenced by Proudhon. In keeping with the viewpoint that labour should not involve itself in wider political issues, but stick to social and economic ones, they opposed singling out Poland for specific advocacy. In a letter Marx send to Engels dated January 5, 1886 Marx says that Poland is the basis of the dispute ‘A plot has been hatched…it is tied up with that pack ofProudhonists in Brussels. The real crux of the controversy is the political question.’

Marx opened the year 1867 in the midst of his finishing the final draft of Capital with a lengthy, well researched speech to a London meeting commemorating the 1863 Polish uprising sponsored by the International and a Polish exiles group. Marx avers that Poland remains the key to a revolution on Continental Europe because it would undermine the reactionary grip of Russia: ‘There is only one alternative left for Europe, Asiatic barbarism under Muscovite leadership will burst over her head like a lawine (avalanche), or she must restore Poland.’       ` 

After Marx set about constituting the International he became heavily involved with Irish affairs and this was underpinned by a substantial amount of private study. His first interest was following the struggle for land reform and he went more deeply into the class structure of rural Ireland, summarising his findings in a July 11th Tribune article ‘The Indian Question-Irish Tenant Right:

‘A class of absentee landlords has been enabled to pocket, not merely the labour, but also the capital of whole generations, each generation of Irish peasant sinking a grade lower in the social scale, exactly in proportion to the exertions and sacrifices made for the raising of their condition and that of their families. If a tenant was industrious and enterprising he became taxed in consequence of his industry and enterprise. If on the contrary he grew inert and negligent he was reproached with the “aboriginal faults of the Celtic race”.  He had accordingly no other alternative left but to become a pauper-to pauperise himself by industry or to pauperise by negligence.  In order to oppose this state of things “Tenant Right” was proclaimed in Ireland….England has subverted the conditions of Irish society. At first it confiscated the land, then it suppressed the industry by Parliamentary enactments and lastly it broke the active energy by armed force.  And thus England created those abominable conditions of society which enable a small caste of rapacious lordlings to hold the land and to live upon it. Too weak yet for revolutionising those social conditions the people appeal to Parliament, demanding at least their mitigation and regulation.’ Marx then detailed the vociferous opposition from the land-owning classes to the tenants’ rights law proposed to Parliament in June 1853.

After a break of two years Marx returned to the subject of Ireland with an article called Ireland’s Revenge written for the Neue Order-Zeitung on March 16, 1855 and another eulogising the deceased Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor: ‘he died  as a pauper in the true sense of the word, the burial expenses were met by the working class of London.’ Three years later he wrote another article for the Tribune in January 1859 speaking of the ‘excitement in Ireland about a witch hunt directed against Irish conspirators.’

Kevin Anderson summarises the result of the first phase of the study of social conditions in Ireland covering the 1850s in three propositions:

1. While they (Marx and Engels) enunciated clear support for the struggles of the Irish they always counselled Irish revolutionaries to devote more attention to the internal class dynamics of Irish society. In this they were especially critical of the upper class Catholic nationalism of O’Connell.

2. They urged Irish revolutionaries to develop the firmest unity with British workers particularly the mass-based Chartist movement, pointing out that the Chartists supported the repeal of the Union of Ireland and England.

3. They singled out Irish immigrant labour in Britain, both as an index of Irish oppression at home and as a factor holding down the wages of English workers. Moreover they argued that British rule in Ireland proved that the British State could be just as repressive  as continental regimes like Bonapartist France or Prussia.

to be continued.

So you think you know about Karl Marx? A review of ‘Marx at the Margins’, Kevin B Anderson.

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Kevin B AndersonBy Belfast Plebian

To date, no comprehensive intellectual biography has been published in any language. Kevin Anderson.

Every new class consciousness generation is forced by contemporary events to return to the philosophy of Karl Marx, not in a mood of revival but to learn something important that has become forgotten or carelessly overlooked by previous students.

In the past the known side of Karl Marx was represented by the Communist Manifesto, a handful of works by Engels and the first volume of an unfinished study of the capitalist-bourgeois model of the good society, Capital volume 1. The later volumes of Capital economic studies were inaccessible to most readers because they followed a difficult logic and even Engels, the life long friend and editor of at least three of the economic volumes, is frequently accused by contemporary devotees of seriously misunderstanding the logic of value as expounded across its many pages.  In fact the leading lights of the ‘intellectual academy’ seem to have reached a sort of consensus that Engels got the economic critique wrong in his introductions and prefaces of the numerous editions, though it has not yet reached a consensus as to the linking arguments of the exposition, the relationship – to give one central example – of the tendency for the average rate of profit to fall to the sudden outbreak of an economic crisis, which is still hotly disputed.

There is another part of the Karl Marx legacy that has yet to be appreciated.  I will call this, for want of a better expression, the esoteric part: that part of the intellectual legacy that got buried and then neglected by the custodians of the early workers’ parties. Many documents concerning what Karl Marx did and thought during his own lifetime were left unpublished until after the formation of an ‘historic Marxism.’

Marx had frequent disputes with other communists in his own lifetime and they were certainly able to understand him, maybe because the fundamentals of political existence then were stated in common speech in contrast to the specialised language of later social  science.  Marx in fact is famous less for his critique of classical economic science than for his preparation of the communist manifesto in 1848, one of the most accomplished of common language documents ever recorded and distributed. The manifesto was composed as a blend of just rhetoric and historical knowledge, and espoused in the name of a living revolutionary movement, the Communist League.

The act of rendering the dialectical thought of Karl Marx into fluent and accessible pamphlets and journalism is not without a certain risk of vulgar distortion.  Even sections of books approved by Karl Marx himself, like the ‘Anti Duhring’ of Engels, to this day provoke criticism from some ‘Marxists’.

One reason we may well surmise why Karl Marx kept his partnership with Engels strong for so long was that he felt a need for an intellectual accomplice who could speak to the workers about political economy in a less convoluted style than he thought he could do. Marx always maintained that an attack on bourgeois economics as first expressed by Engels was not only his first introduction to the subject matter but a life-long inspiration.  

Marx for sure could write in the style of a campaigning journalist but he certainly preferred to delegate the role of first publicist to his partner in revolution. When Engels committed intellectual blunders Marx usually refrained from excommunicating him.  Engels held frustrations of his own, especially over the esoteric intellectual habits of Marx, complaining in a letter: “as long as you still have an unread book that you think important, you do not get down to writing.”

With the benefit of historical hindsight Marx and Engels may have even ‘over-succeeded’ with their exoteric publications like the Communist Manifesto and the Ani-Duhring because these publications became by the turn of the century the core of what became known as ‘Second International Marxism’.  They published the first version of the great manifesto in February 1848 and then went on to publish several revised versions.

With the very first one they faced a pressure familiar to all those who write for a public purpose: their friends’ impatience (from their comrades in the Communist League of whom we have records from the time). A month before publication the secretary of the Communist League wrote saying ‘The central committee charges its leading circle in Brussels to communicate with Citizen Marx and to tell him if the manifesto of the C. Party, the writing of which he undertook to do at the recent congress, does not reach London by February 1st of the current year, further measures will have to be taken against him.’

The manifesto was the declaration of a hard fought battle of ideas within the Communist League, an early example of a revolutionary united front, so the ideas expressed in the first edition can’t be ascribed without some reservation to Karl Marx alone.

Marx and Engels wrote several prefaces to the later editions that seem to edge closer to something like a genuine historical Marxism.  In the 1872 German edition they say that in view of the gigantic strides taken by modern industry in the preceding twenty-five years, and in view of the political experience gained through workers participation in the Paris Commune of 1870/71, the communist programme of the first edition has in some respect become antiquated.

In point of fact friendly critics of the manifesto like Leon Trotsky and Ernest Mandel point out some serious flaws even in the revised versions from the perspective of a later Marxism. Trotsky says that in showing how capitalism draws along in its wake the backward and barbaric countries the manifesto does not say anything about the struggle of the colonial and semi- colonial peoples for their independence. He also says that the most obsolete part of the manifesto is Marx’s criticism of the socialist literature prevalent at that time.

Ernest Mandel says that the manifesto established the unfortunate myth of the driving down of workers wages to a subsistence level, the iron law of wages, as one of the main tenets of orthodox Marxist thought, something he in fact refuted in his scientific account.

What we learn from this worry over the communist manifesto is that we must be conscious of shifts and developments in the thought of Karl Marx.  We must not even assume that the later books, essays and pamphlets are always an improvement on the earlier ones.  After all we all decline with age.

Marx is unusual in that he has often suffered greater distortion in the hands of his supporters than from his intellectual enemies although these have often stood on common ground. To give just one example, both past friends and enemies typically selected out points 5, 6 and 7 of the Communist Manifesto as the only guide to what Marx argued for by way of an alternative to capitalist arrangements.  Point 5 states that communists are in favour of the centralisation of all credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank with an exclusive monopoly. Point 6 states that communists are in favour of a monopoly of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State and point 7 calls for an extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State. Nowadays we would call this a programme for state organised capitalism.

It is to the credit of the author of this book about the thought of Karl Marx that he scrupulously tries to avoid a stereotyping of Marx by not resorting to the usual interpretative device of selecting just a handful of well known ‘key passages’ from the better known publications and then referring to this selection as definitive of Marxism . The chief virtue of the book is that it presents to the contemporary militant a serious reading of essays, documents and letters by Karl Marx that are not well known or are seldom thought to be worthy of comparison to the key passages approach.  The good thing is that we are offered a more ‘historical’ account than we are usually given.  We might legitimately call this a dialectical account of the development of the mind of Marx.

Anderson’s method is to split the collected works into a kind of core and a periphery and show how the works of the periphery if studied carefully offer us a more concrete understanding of the abstract core. The core for Anderson consists not so much of a privileged statement or single book but of the concepts of social capital and the exploitation of labour, the theory of alienation and fetishism and finally the notion of dialectics. These ideas are the core because they appear as a seam that is more or less present in all of the primary works.

Anderson does not make an assessment of Marx’s intellectual development on the basis of a definite epistemological break between a young, humanist Marx and a mature, scientific Marx like the French professor Louis Althusser tried to do. 

Anderson is one of those historians participating in the publication of  MEGA2 which began in Moscow and Berlin in 1975, came to a standstill in 1989 with the implosion of the Soviet regimes, and was taken up again mainly by Western funded institutes.  What we now have before us is a much expanded version of the works of Marx and Engels than was previously available.  It is hard to think of another modern thinker with so small a ratio of published writings during their own lifetime to those actually written.  Works now considered central to the canon such as the 1844 manuscripts, the German Ideology, the Grundrisse and the Theories of Surplus Value were largely unknown to the “orthodox Marxists” of 1905.  For the purpose of this review it is useful to be reminded of what new material is included in the complete works, for Anderson makes use of some of them in his study.

The updated complete works are divided into four sections:

Section One: early works, articles and drafts.

Of thirty two volumes now planned, seventeen have appeared.  Especially notable is the inclusion of a rougher but larger version of the influential 1844 manuscripts. Marx appears to be writing two versions at the same time.

Section Two: Capital and Preliminary Studies.

Consisting in 15 volumes, of which as of 2010, 13 have been published.  What has been included are all the editions of volume one of Capital.  Important here is a print of Engels’s 1890 German edition, but with an important addition from a French edition prepared by Marx himself in 1872-1875 with an extra 60 pages not included in the English translation of the standard German edition. This, it turns out, was the edition most favoured by Marx though not by Engels.   Anderson presents some extracts of letters concerning their difference of opinion over what version of Capital volume 1 should be prioritised.  Other volumes offer draft manuscripts for what became Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, which can now be studied to see how Engels edited and arranged them.

Section Three: Correspondence.

Of 35 volumes planned, 12 volumes covering the years up to 1865 have been published.  In the previous complete works most letters from Marx to people other than Engels were usually omitted.

Section Four: Excerpt notebooks.

Of 32 volumes planned, eleven have so far been published.  Here we have many drafts and notes never published before in any language.  These include notebooks from 1844-1847 on political economists such as Jean -Baptiste Say, Jean-Charles Sismondi, Charles Babbage, Andrew Ure and Nassau Senior.  Excerpt notebooks from Marx slated for publication include (1) notes from 1853 and 1880 on Indonesia, (2) notes from 1852 on the history of women and gender relations, (3) notes on the history of agriculture in Russia plus some on prairie farming in the United States, (4) substantial notes on Ireland from the 1860s, (5) notes on agriculture in Roman times, and finally (6) a massive chronology of world history composed during the 1880s.

Kevin Anderson situates his presentation of the development of Marx close to a mode of interpretation associated with the books of Raya Dunayevskaya (his own book is dedicated to her) whose most notable books are Marxism and Freedom (1958,) Philosophy and Revolution: from Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (1973) and Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1981).

In her own work Dunayevskaya turned to the unpublished ‘Ethnographic’ notebooks of Marx to argue against the thesis that the old Marx(the last ten years) was an unproductive thinker, pointing to some of the different conclusions Marx reached in contrast to Engels in the study of the role of women and class in early societies. This she believed was important owing to the undisputed spell Engel’s ‘Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ held over all later communists.  It was taken on trust that Marx had no thoughts of his own relevant to what was later to be called women’s liberation.

Some of the less well know documents that Anderson mines concern the political journalism, especially those relating to race and class in the United States, the national struggles in Ireland and Poland, and others covering the colonial expansion in India, China and Java.  He then relates some of this material to editions of Capital especially the generally ignored French edition, the one Marx himself preferred.

He also takes us on an excursion through Marx’s late studies of pre-capitalist societies with particular reference to Russia and India and asks what his reasoning was in spending so much time on them, all the while jeopardising the completion of Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital.

What we end up with is a much more energetic and interesting ‘late Marx.’ It should be noted that David Riazanov and his colleagues at the Moscow institute neglected to publish some of these later documents stating that Marx by 1880 ‘had lost his ability for intensive, independent, intellectual creation….. Sometimes, in reconsidering these notebooks, the question arises; why did he waste so much time on this….that is inexcusable pedantry.’

In the next post we will look at some of what Anderson reveals about these writings, including those on Ireland.

Marxism and the State

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In a previous post I said that I would be looking at the Marxist view of the State and in this post I will look at some aspects of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ original view.   For them the possibility of socialism was not that it best met some general principles of justice or equality but that it was based on the actual social and political development of the existing capitalist system.  If there were no developments within capitalism that might form a real foundation for achieving the former ideals then these ideals were practically worthless.  The question however is on what developments within capitalism is the potential for socialism based?

It is undoubtedly the case that the state plays a greater and greater role in capitalist society and that as this system has developed so has the role of the state.  That this has been so despite decades of rhetoric by the most ideologically rabid supporters of capitalism against the state ranks as only further proof of its central role.  The state also played a major role in the creation of the capitalist system although its importance may be subject to historical debate.

On this basis the majority of the socialist movement has come to identify socialism with this state either through state ownership, regulation, taxation or state expenditure on ‘public’ services.  In the form of Stalinism it has taken the shape of the most gargantuan forms of state power which has assumed prerogatives in social life that have associated the liberatory content of socialism with the totalitarian nightmares of Orwell’s 1984.

This has nothing to do with Marxism.  In fact the intellectual journey by which the young Marx came to ‘Marxism’ involved an utter and complete opposition to the state, as formulated by the German philosopher Hegel, which Marx carried out through his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’.  Marx’s view of socialism was not an ideal state which society must seek to achieve but the movement of a class to achieve political power as the means by which to ensure its own and humanity’s social liberation.  Socialism is therefore the movement of the working class to achieve power, not the actions of a state and especially not a capitalist one!

For Marx therefore the active germ of socialism is not expressed under capitalism by the growth of the state but by the growth in the social and political power of the working class, which itself is based on the objective development of the capitalist system.  The growth of the state does not in itself herald the new society because Stalinism has demonstrated that a society based on even the state of a superpower is not a historically viable social formation.

The Marxist view of the increasing role of the state was explained by Engels in relation to his native Germany under the Chancellor Bismarck:

“. . . only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.

If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III’s reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.”

In the development of capitalism increased socialisation of production that anticipates and presages socialism is reflected in the increased role of the state and in this sense only is it progressive in that it signals the development of society towards socialism.  This does not mean that socialists should give any political support to this increased role of the state never mind put it forward as socialist in itself.  The development of capitalism has created and continues to create massive misery and exploitation through driving people from the countryside to cities and is progressive because it creates a working class which is the bearer of a new society but no one thereby claims that socialists should support this process politically.

This again is presented by Engels:

“But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.”

Support for nationalisation as a socialist measure is a short-cut, a short-cut to nowhere:

“It is a purely self-serving falsification by the Manchesterite [laissez-faire] bourgeoisie to label every intervention into free competition as `socialism’: protective tariffs, guilds, tobacco monopoly, statification of branches of industry,…, royal porcelain factory. We should criticize this, not believe it. If we do the latter and base a theoretical argument on it, then it will collapse along with its premises” (Engels quoted in Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, 1990,p.96)

From the glorification of the power of the state comes the betrayal of socialism in the form of nationalism which is why it is so apt that this is often expressed in the demand for nation-alisation, as if the more of this demanded the more radical is the socialism.

This type of ‘socialism’ is often also associated with ethical considerations of justice and equality and the view that this can be achieved through state action.  This opens up the possibility of the latter becoming prettified beyond all recognition.  So vast bureaucracies become socialist institutions and means tested, inadequate benefits dispensed through pipettes become a whole new model of society.

If statisation is the advance of socialism then reforming this state is inherently the way forward and electoral success to reach the ‘pinnacle’ of this society becomes the most natural means to its attainment.  Calls for widespread nationalisation, defence of the welfare state without the least criticism of it, demands on the capitalist state to do things it simply will not and cannot do and rank electoralism are all consistent with each other and hallmarks of many of today’s ‘Marxists’.  As Marx was himself compelled to say of some of his ‘followers’, if this is Marxism I am no Marxist.

In his career Marx came across this approach to politics, which is all too familiar today, in the shape of the German Ferdinand Lassalle, who sought state aid for workers cooperatives as the germ of a future socialism, of which the workers were not yet ready to openly fight for.  Today some demands for nationalisation and state redistributive policies are designed to manoeuvre workers into a movement for socialism without even mentioning the word never mind traducing its real content.

Frederick Engels and Eduard Bernstein penned a critique of this sort of approach:

“If the masses could not yet be interested in the actual end of the movement, the movement itself was premature and then, even were the means attained, they would not lead to the desired end. In the hands of a body of working-men not yet able to understand their historical mission, universal suffrage might do more harm than good, and productive co-operative societies – with State-credit could only benefit the existing powers of the State, and provide it with a praetorian guard. But if the body of working-men was sufficiently developed to understand the end of the movement, then this should have been openly declared. It need not have even then been represented as an immediate aim, to be realised there and then. Not only the leaders, however, but every one of the followers that were led ought to have known what was the end these means were to attain, and that they were only means to that end.”

Today calls on the state to do good are presented as the means to win workers’ votes, which will ultimately lead to socialism, while the goal is considered too advanced to be put forward clearly, put to them as something that they must do and only they can achieve.  The avoidance of socialism and its real content today goes under the name of anti-capitalism or under the banner of broad left parties and alliances which hide what its sponsors claim they really stand for.

Let’s be clear about what the nature of Marx and Engels’ argument was.  It has been compared to their attitude to reforms.  Thus while they were in favour of many reforms to the capitalist system, the purpose of such reforms was to place the working class in a better position to carry out the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.  It was not because such reforms of themselves were the means to bring socialism into effect.

So today socialists should not reject demands on the state or recoil from calls for nationalisation where these might be appropriate.  These proposals should not however be considered the basic mechanism for the transition to socialism; the all-encompassing framework for the programme that becomes its heart, body and soul and the all-embracing grounds on which the socialist argument takes place.  However as we have noted before this is exactly the role that the capitalist state plays today in the politics and programme of the left.  In a number of posts this has been explained; from the demands that the state tax the rich to investment to create jobs and nationalisation as if this were socialism itself.

The difference can quite easily be seen,on the one hand, in opposition to austerity, cuts in public services and opposition to privatisation, which should all be supported, and, on the other hand, putting forward as the socialist solution massive state investment  as the answer to unemployment, economic insecurity, inequality and low standards of living.  While such a policy by the capitalist state might be better for workers in that it provides some protection and better grounds for workers’ own organisation it is not itself the workers’ own alternative.  Nationalisation, state investment and taxation are not solutions and certainly not socialist ones.  All this has been explained in previous posts.

One other thing must also be explained.  Opposition to austerity must be supported, be part of the Marxist programme, because this is something to be carried out by workers themselves.  Keynesian programmes of state-led investment hand everything over to the state to achieve.  It remains in control, dictates how much and what is to be done, when, where and how.  It is precisely to remove all this from state control that is the task of the working class.

This is what Marx meant when he said that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes” which has been re-translated today so that state reformist electoral programmes are mistaken for real movement.  This denial of the primary role of workers’ own activity is reflected also in these organisations sectarian organisational practices and electoralism which are simply the everyday practical out-workings of a programme that signals dependence on the state for solutions that should come from the workers themselves.

Thus for Marx, support for workers cooperatives in ‘Capital’ is distinguished from Ferdinand Lassalle’s state aid for producers’ co-operatives  – “as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”

For Marx and Engels “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”  This is the starting point for today’s struggle for socialism, not faith in the benign actions of the capitalist state.

BBC ‘Masters of Money’ considers Karl Marx (Part 2)

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The BBC programme was called ‘Masters of Money’ and was ostensibly all about money but there was nothing said about Marx’s theory of money, which is fundamental to explaining the current economic crisis.

For mainstream economics money is essentially just paper that can be used to exchange commodities.  Provided it is not issued in too high a quantity it will maintain its value and is useful for this purpose.  Already we can see a problem.  What is the intrinsic value of pieces of paper or metal coins?  If it had an intrinsic value its issue would hardly be a problem. It becomes a problem because paper money cannot fulfil all the functions of money precisely because it does not have an intrinsic value.

The massive expansion of credit makes credit too look like money in that it is used to exchange commodities.  However at a certain point people want paid with money and not yet more credit.  When this happens credit stops being given to some people and we have a ‘credit crunch’ such as developed in the latest financial crisis when banks refused to lend to each other and Governments had to step in.

For Marx money is itself a commodity with an intrinsic value because it too is the product of human labour.  Historically it has taken the form of gold.  This is why commodity exchange is an exchange of equals because when money is exchanged for a commodity the money is either gold directly or indirectly if it is convertible into gold.  The end of such convertibility does not abolish exchange being one of equivalents.  Just as credit cannot become real money and this is proved during a credit crunch so paper money is exposed when it is over-issued and creates inflation and when in a crisis capitalist investors look to put their money into something that will preserve the real value of their wealth.

In fact this occurs during booms when speculation on one type of asset after another leads to bubbles – in high-tech company stocks, houses, commodities and now certain government bonds. The price of oil is one barometer of this activity.

Thus just as the massive expansion of credit is not a solution to the problem of capitalist crisis and the contradiction between a limited market and profitable production so also is the printing of money through quantitative easing not a solution.  Yet according to mainstream economics there is no reason why printing money should not be a solution.  The proof of the pudding is that while quantitative easing  has prevented collapse it has not abolished the crisis.

Many companies are sitting on piles of cash including US multinationals holding money outside the US and so evading US taxes.  There is an ‘investment strike’ because of the recession which has created unemployment, falling incomes, debt crises for many countries and austerity which promises not a recovery but continued recession.  All this is worse in Ireland because it is not mainly the policy of austerity which is the problem but a massive overhang of debt, which must otherwise be repaid, and shrinkage in demand due to lower wages, unemployment and emigration.

We are back to ‘solutions’ that are based on more investment and higher wagers but which ignore that it is the system based on profit which is the cause of the problems.

Two other issues occupied the last part of the BBC programme.  The first was whether capitalism would last more or less forever or would be temporary and replaced by something else. The programme accepted that Marx’s analysis of capitalism had a lot of sense to it but it did not, to no one’s surprise I am sure, think that he had any alternative.  In fact the very scarcity of his views on this was held up a number of times while recognising that no one else had much of a clue either.

This was more than a little disingenuous.  The programme started off with shots of the Berlin Wall being demolished and of pictures of Red Square in Moscow and of Stalin.  The presenter recalled that she was at university at the time the Berlin Wall came down and one thing she was aware of was that ‘communism’ had definitively failed. The programme she said would therefore not look at what Marx had to say about communism.  To return at the end of the programme and say that Marx had no alternative while excluding what he did say about an alternative is, well, not exactly fair.

Also unreasonable was the nonsense that Marx, although he had been poor, had towards the latter years of his life become a bit bourgeois.  This seemed to consist of such things as worrying over the future of his children and taking walks in the park in quite nice areas of London.  What a traitor!  He hadn’t even been down a coal mine, unlike the presenter who went down one for the programme.

That leaves me a bit conflicted as I worry over my children, like nice walks in the park (sometimes) but have been down a coal mine (once).

More importantly the programme argued that Marx had no alternative and implied that this explains the otherwise puzzling phenomenon, gleefully expressed by ex-Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, that many people were not flocking to the banner of Marxism.  The latter is a fact, so is it the result of the former?

In an earlier post on the defeat of the opposition to the austerity referendum I asserted that the Left and the working class generally did not have a real alternative, as opposed to some theoretical one, and that this was fundamentally why many workers had voted for something that was against their interests and which some knew to be the case.  The programme actually expressed very well what is meant by an alternative, if I recall more or less accurately, it said that this would be when ‘a compelling alternative would appear.’  What is this ‘compelling alternative’?  If we are talking about the replacement of the political economy of capitalism we are also talking about its replacement by the political economy of the working class.  What is this?

Marx described the alternative to capitalism this way:

“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”

(http://www.Marxists.org/archive/Marx/works/1864/10/27.htm)

The beginning of an alternative to capitalism arises only when the working class takes action, however small, and is not limited to creation of worker owned and controlled production.  The creation of its own organisations to defend itself against capitalism also foreshadows its future control over the whole of society.  The creation of its own workers party is the pinnacle of it being conscious of its tasks.  Many of the political organisations claiming the banner of the working class and the mantle of Marx replace the centrality of the working class itself with calls upon the state, the capitalist state, to take the action only the working class can take and only which if it does take, can it be considered any step towards socialism.

So the BBC programme on the alternative of Karl Marx got his essential teachings wrong but unfortunately, through empirical impressions, got the current weakness of the socialist alternative right.  The programme itself however is an indication that this alternative is as necessary as it ever was.

BBC ‘Masters of Money’ considers Karl Marx (Part 1)

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BBC Karl MarxAs part of its ‘Masters of Money’ series the BBC 2 programme, which looked at the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, finished by looking at the economic ideas of Karl Marx.  The overall verdict?  It could have been a lot worse.

There were of course huge simplifications that erased exactly what Marx was saying.  These could have been avoided, and the dismissal of communism and what Marx had to say about it was on a par with cold war contempt, but despite this there was a coherent argument through the programme.

It was very much the creature of a mainstream bourgeois economist albeit one who thought there were important insights to be found in Marx, particularly his perspective on the inequality of capitalism and its instability.  It avoided some cheap shots and pointed out that Marx appreciated the revolutionising of production achieved by capitalism and its dynamic development across the world.  The presenter Stephanie Flanders repeated the often made observation that Marx’s description of capitalism is more true now than when it was first made.  She also correctly observed that profit is the soul of capitalism and made some correct remarks about the compulsive nature of the drive for profit within the system.

There were some strange observations which tried to tie the relevance of Marx’s views to particular periods which excluded the post war boom and included the 19th century but excluded the great depression of the thirties.  The whole point of the programme however was to assert the relevance of his views today and if it did no more than this then it must be judged positively.

There were some problems that, had they been addressed, would have made for a much better exposition of Marx’s ideas.  The first is that the programme avoided what Marx thought was his greatest economic discovery – the nature of surplus value.  This is the discovery that the economic value created by capitalism is the result of human labour and can be measured by the labour time necessary for its production.  The source of capitalist profit is the result of the difference between what the capitalist pays for this capacity to labour and what this labour actually produces.  This explains how a surplus can be produced and a profit arise when the exchange of commodities, including labour power, is the exchange of equivalents. It is not a question of workers being cheated when they receive a wage in return for their labour power or of unequal exchange of commodities.

This is not a particularly difficult concept to explain but it does very clearly reveal the exploitation of the working class and exposes all the hypocritical justifications of the system.

The second problem is not what was left out but what was included, that Marx held that the absolute level of wages would be held down under capitalism.  This doesn’t sit well with the programme’s acknowledgment of Marx’s view that capitalism develops the forces of production.  Who did Marx believe would buy the goods created by the development of these productive forces?  This of course was the central tenet of the programme: that for Marx this was precisely the problem.

Marx’s argument was held to be that the tendency to lower wages reduced the ability of workers to buy the goods they produced.  Increasing wages would only reduce profits, the objective of the system, so this is not a solution.  As a temporary ‘fix’ the system expanded credit to make up the shortfall in wages and allow all the goods produced to be purchased.  The explosion of credit therefore explains the current economic crisis emanating within the financial services industry.  The programme was actually quite good when it cut to the right-wing talking heads who pooh-poohed the idea that low wages contributed in any way to the crisis.  They looked neither comfortable nor convincing, or maybe that was just me.

The programme argued that Marx’s criticism went much deeper than any other but actually the programme didn’t go deep enough.  Not altogether its fault since there is widespread debate among Marxists about the causes of the current crisis and even about the fundamental mechanisms of what might be called ‘classic’ capitalist crises.

What can be said however is that the description of the crisis given in the programme and the role of credit and wages is only how the crisis manifests itself, not how it is caused.  To explain the latter would require one to start with the idea ignored – surplus value.

If low wages restricting the market were merely the problem the question would not be so acute.  The capitalists who had diddled the workers could simply purchase what the workers did not.  Everything would then be sold.  The problem is worse because the workers create added value over and above what they are paid, over and above what is required to maintain production and also above the conspicuous consumption of the capitalists, and this additional value produced must find a market.  Why can’t this too be solved by the capitalists buying the difference?

The answer is that it can but the question then is what is the result of this?  Additional value appropriated by capitalists can expand their luxurious lifestyles but the driving force of the system is not this but profit.  To increase this means expanding production both to garner extra profit and destroy competitors.  This means the capitalist must employ the additional value produced by the workers to further invest in more workers and also machinery, raw materials etc to expand output.  The problem is intensified as production increases, new markets are sought for the things that are produced and the amount of surplus value (unpaid labour) created is expanded.

In the longer term the rate of profit comes under pressure as the capitalists replace workers with machines in order to produce more cheaply or even to produce some goods at all (some high-tech ones for example).  However because profit comes from workers the value of production comprised of workers labour declines and so does the proportion made up of surplus value, from which profit comes.  Fewer workers will create proportionately less surplus value while the cost of machines and raw materials etc increases relatively, so reducing the rate of profit.  The capitalists with the lowest productivity and lowest profitability can be forced into bankruptcy.  Of course to some extent this too can be offset by lower wages but the increasing sophistication of production means that paying peanuts will not allow the ‘monkeys’ to engage in the skilled labour required.  This is a long term tendency but one we can see in operation through the economic history of the west and in the rapid economic development of Asia.  It implies that profit plays a smaller and smaller relative role in production which calls into question a system in which this is the whole purpose of its existence.

The regular periodic crisis, including the current crisis, is the route by which this longer term tendency operates.  The compulsion to produce more and more surplus value also produces these more regular booms and busts.  The drive to expand the creation of surplus value means increased accumulation of workers, machines and materials and the expansion of markets to purchase the additional production.  In an economy dedicated to the needs of the population such increased production can be consciously planned and coordinated and its limits set by society as a whole.  Under capitalism no such limits are acceptable.

The limits on production of surplus value are therefore not set by the needs of society or by the limits of the purchasing capacity of workers and capitalists.  To break from these limits credit is expanded to bridge the limitations on consumption that are the result of the limits of production.  Through credit capitalism seeks to satisfy the capitalist desire to expand production through the accumulation of more and more surplus value.  Credit expands the market for increased surplus value production.

This can produce fantastic economic booms of the sort we have seen in the last decade or so in Ireland and across much of the globe, from China to Brazil.  The attempt to expand real production and to create an even larger market for it must at some point necessarily collapse for the same reason that credit is originally introduced.  Just as increased credit is an attempt to increase profit so the collapse of credit is the result of credit no longer being able to expand profitable production.

Workers must pay back debt at some level and beyond a certain point this becomes impossible because of the limits to their real incomes determined by real production.  The same is true of the capitalists.  Ever more convoluted attempts to expand credit beyond the capacity to pay it back – through creation of yet more credit – is doomed to collapse as the ever expanding amount of debt requires greater and greater repayments to keep it going.  The fantastic expansion of the financial services industry is testament to how big such an exercise can become. A glance at the size of the balance sheets of the Irish banks in comparison to the size of the whole economy reveals the scale of the overproduction and credit expansion that can arise.

In Ireland and the US the limits were reached when workers could no longer pay for inflated housing or capitalists pay for inflated office and other building construction.  A surplus of such properties is eventually created, overproduction appears, prices collapse, capitalists cannot sell except at a loss and those who built the houses and offices go bankrupt, workers in construction are made unemployed and the banks which financed it all go bust.  At such points it can appear that the problem is that workers wages are not big enough to buy all that has been produced and that this is the problem.  Solutions are proffered by Keynesians who say that what is need is yet more investment to take the place of that which has just collapsed.  But as we see, these solutions do not address the underlying problem and provide a ‘solution’ only by postponing the collapse and stoking up a bigger tsunami when the boom busts later.

In these circumstances blame is also placed on the institutions which created the massive credit explosion – the banks – especially since such booms inevitably involve hugely speculative, criminal and stupid behaviour during a time when everyone thinks they should be getting rich quick.   No one needs regulation during a boom when money is being made and afterwards the call is made that we have to have stricter regulation when again, but for opposite reasons, no one needs regulation.  Regulation becomes the alibi for the systematic failures of the system.  Left wing critiques which focus on the banks play into the hands of those who want to ignore or are simply ignorant of the system itself being responsible for the bust.  That the bust is so spectacular is simply a result of earlier failure to burst the bubble.  For a longer and bigger boom the price paid has been a longer and bigger bust but either way capitalismproduces booms and crashes.  Keynesian solutions to extend the boom can simply create bigger crashes.

Forward to Part 2