Hate is useful?

Posted on September 26, 2025 by irishmarxism

Raju Das, in an article on ‘The Communist Manifesto’ noted that:

‘Interest in anti-capitalism as well as socialism is growing in many parts of the world. According to a poll conducted in 28 countries, including the United States, France, China, and Russia, 56% agree that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world”. A June 2021 poll indicates that 36% of Americans have a negative view of capitalism; this number is much higher among the youth: 46% of 18–34-year-olds and 54% of those aged 18–24 view capitalism negatively. Conversely, and interestingly, 41% of respondents from all ages have a positive view of socialism. This number is higher for the younger people: 52% of 18–24-year-olds and 50% of young adults aged 25–34 have a positive view of socialism. An October 2021 poll shows that 53% of Americans have a negative view of big business . . . The situation outside of the United States within the advanced capitalist world is similar.’

A more recent opinion poll by the magazine Jacobin also recorded promising results on the advance of the idea of socialism in the US. Believing these views can be advanced further by more hate, as we have reviewed in previous posts, is a mistake, not least because it already exists is copious amounts. What is required is clarification and direction, not a greater emotional charge which is unlikely to provide either.

Anger and hatred at the iniquities of capitalism on their own, or even fore-grounded, invite moralistic evaluations that do not in themselves form an understanding of how capitalism can be replaced or the nature of the alternative. The influence of capitalism on the working class, in terms of illusions, pessimism, demoralisation, passivity, and backward ideas, can cause those opposed to it to look for an alternative in various ideas and movements that ignore or reject the working class as the force that can bring about the alternative.

Historically, revolts based on hatred have been the province of peasant rebellions that fail to achieve any lasting change, even in circumstances where they appear to be successful. Provocations by the capitalist state rely on hatred of their regimes in order to suppress developing movements before their time has come; something only clear-headed judgement can hope to determine. Hate is not therefore a distinguishing mark of successful movements and while extreme subjectivism may have become more prominent it is not an answer to objectively unfavourable circumstances or contributory to the working out of strategy.

For Marx the primary need for socialist revolution is not so much to overthrow capitalism as to make the working class fit for its own rule – the transformation of the working class so that the economic, social and political system can be transformed. This involves opposition to ideas and practices that divide the working class such as nationalism, racism and sexism but hatred of these should not lead to the belief that these can and must first be completely eradicated within the working class before the building of a working class movement can be commenced or continued.

Marx and Engels stated in ‘The German Ideology’ that ‘Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’. This includes the existing working class that must make itself capable of creating this movement, which is only possible through struggle, not the assumption that it can come when the class has first purified itself.

Marx had no illusions about the shortcomings of the working class and refused to simply follow it when its actions were antithetical to its long term interests. In the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ written in 1875, he explained the character of society following the capturing of political power by the working class:

‘What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.’ The working class will itself still be stamped with this birthmark, both ‘morally’ and ‘intellectually’, something that intensifying hatred will do nothing to remedy.

Even alienation, which we looked at before, through which the workings of capitalism disorients and oppresses the working class while also acting to suppress and hide its true nature, has its positive as well as negative character, which more hatred would do nothing to illuminate. As Sean Sayers set out in an article:

Alienated labour ‘is also the process by which the producers transform themselves. Through alienated labour and the relations it creates, people’s activities are expanded, their needs and expectations are widened, their relations and horizons are extended. Alienated labour thus also creates the subjective factors – the agents – who will abolish capitalism and bring about a new society.’

‘Seen in this light, alienated labour plays a positive role in the process of human development; it is not a purely negative phenomenon. It should not be judged as simply and solely negative by the universal and unhistorical standards invoked by the moral approach. Rather it must be assessed in a relative and historical way. Relative to earlier forms of society – strange as this may at first sound – alienation constitutes an achievement and a positive development. However, as conditions for its overcoming are created, it becomes something negative and a hindrance to further development. In this situation, it can be criticized, not by universal moral standards but in this relative way.’ (Sean Sayers 2011, ‘Alienation as a critical concept’, International Critical Thought, 1:3, 287-304).

Advocating greater hatred in order for workers to advance towards greater awareness of their class position assumes it is a pedagogical aid for a politics that is already sufficient for its task. It is not such an aid and the politics sufficient to its objective is still in the process of elaboration.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 70

Back to part 69

Marx admires capitalism too much?

Posted on September 16, 2025 by irishmarxism

A worker gathers items for delivery from the warehouse floor at Amazon’s distribution centre in Phoenix, Arizona November 22, 2013. REUTERS/Ralph D. Freso

Marx’s alternative to capitalism explains that it arises from the contradictory nature of capitalism. The simple and popular, but misleading, understanding of this is that it is primarily expressed in capitalist crises and class struggle, and although Marx had much to say about both, his alternative regarded these as arising from property relations, on which we based a large number of the previous posts in this series, and on his claim that communists put these to the fore in seeking social and political change.

We have noted the (one-sided) emphasis on resistance to capitalism – ‘anti-capitalism’ – and the impulse to state what you are against instead of what you are for, with what you are against being more concrete than what you are for. Concrete issues and instances of exploitation and oppression are often denounced by abstract claims for justice within the existing capitalist system.

It is worth emphasising the contradictory character of capitalism because many of those claiming adherence to Marxism find it difficult to fully appreciate that, for all the horrors of capitalism, what in the end is most important is that it provides the grounds for socialism. It is not a question of there being a good side to capitalism and a bad side such that they can be separated, except in the most superficial way of description, but that they are inseparable and that it is this integrity that involves contradiction and antagonism out of which a new society arises.

Even very informed views fail in this regard, so that there is a compulsion to emphasise the ‘bad’ while relegating the ‘good’ to some purely historical existence. As we have explained in the previous post, in a reproduction and critical commentary on ‘The Communist Manifesto’, China Miéville records Samir Amin writing that it was a ‘hymn to the glory of capitalist modernity’, and repeats the words of Joseph Schumpeter that ‘Never, I repeat, and in particular by no modern defender of the bourgeois civilization, has anything like this been penned, never has a brief been composed on behalf of the business class from so profound and so wide a comprehension of what its achievement is and of what it means to humanity.’

Miéville complains that if this ‘is an exaggeration, it isn’t by much’. The Manifesto ‘admires capitalism and bourgeois society and the bourgeoisie. It admires them too much.’ He quotes ‘a phrase from Neary, in another context, The Communist Manifesto’s “negativity is not negative enough”. ‘It does not hate enough’, exclaims Miéville. (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 176). We reviewed this request to ‘hate more’ in a general sense in the previous post.

This view not only does not consider the purpose of writing the Manifesto – for a particular organisation at a particular time – but also its status as the elaboration of a set of beliefs, principles and programme that has had lasting relevance.

In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx writes that:

‘Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.’

‘For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule . . . The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.’

‘The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.’

So, Marx’s praise for ‘bourgeois civilisation’, ‘capitalist modernity’, and even perhaps his ‘admiration’, insufficiency of ‘negativity’ and ‘hate’ are not unrelated to the grand forces of production created by capitalism that are to be wielded by ‘the modern working class’.

The ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are not separate and attempts to keep the good ‘side’ of a phenomenon while discarding the bad are doomed to failure. Worse than that, many of those that promise to do so reject the development and resolution of the contradictions contained in the phenomenon – this ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’ – with the assurance that it can be maintained either with ‘reforms’; by asserting that the bad can be removed, while refusing to supersede the phenomenon as a whole, or by the rapid instigation of planning as if this was the alternative to capitalism understood solely as a market phenomenon.

To see ‘bourgeois civilisation’ and ‘capitalist modernity’ as simply negative or to belittle their power is thus also to call into question the power of the weapons to be wielded by ‘the proletarians.’ Ultimately, to question the revolutionary consequences of the rule of the bourgeoisie is to question the revolutionary character of the working class and its future rule.

It is thus not enough to say that ‘It’s OK to be angry about capitalism’, in the words of Bernie Sanders. Even in the citadel of world capitalism, in the United States, there is growing evidence of opposition to capitalism and sympathy with socialism, but it’s not enough to simply get angry or to hate. Recent events have demonstrated that there is no shortage of both. It is necessary to understand and to do this requires appreciation of capitalism’s contradictions.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 69

Back to part 68

Back to Part 1

Forward to part 70

The need to hate capitalism more

Posted on September 6, 2025 by irishmarxism

In the 1970s I used to sell the paper of the International Marxist Group Red Weekly every Saturday afternoon on Union Street in Glasgow at the side entrance of the Central Station. I remember one occasion when a visibly agitated man rushed up to me demanding to know whether I was a communist – ‘Are you a communist?’ ‘Are you a communist?’ He launched into a few remarks I barely took in at the time and don’t remember at all now. I gathered that he was very angry about something and ‘communism’ was some sort of answer. He then exited as frantically as he had arrived. I doubt very much he had anything to do with ‘communism’ thereafter.

I was reminded of this minor incident reading China Miéville’s book on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which he borrows a phrase employed by someone else, and in a different context, to say that The Communist Manifesto’s “negativity is not negative enough”. ‘It does not hate enough’, (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 176)

This appears in a section entitled ‘On Hate’ in which he states that capitalism deserves to be hated, but that “a focus on hatred . . . is fraught, and dangerous territory . . . Hatred, after all, is an emotion that can short-circuit thought and analysis, can segue into violence, and not necessarily with any discrimination’; although he then notes that “hatred, particularly by the oppressed, is inevitable” (p170-171)

Against this he quotes Marx’s favourite maxim – Nihil humani a me alienum puto – nothing human is alien to me, and while he then states that it’s “hardly productive to pathologise hate per se, not least when it’s natural that it arises . . . the very absence of a critical mass of hatred may militate against resistance.” He then quotes others on the need for ‘class hatred’ – “a radical structural hate for what the world has become” that is not “personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a structural hate.’ However, a hate that is neither personal nor psychological is not an emotion and a ‘structural hate’ must refer to something else entirely if it is to refer to anything at all.

Miéville is correct to refer to a statement about “deliberate hate as a rational category”. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted that “emotions always involve thought of an object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance; in that sense, they always involve appraisal or evaluation.” The neurologist Antonio Damasio similarly comments that “Emotions provide a natural means for the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and around the organism and respond accordingly and adaptively.”

This is the opposite of the view of emotions–that they cloud rationality, which they obviously can, and fits comfortably into the long tradition of Western philosophy focused on what is rational but which exaggerates both the disruptive potential of most emotions and the precision and certainty of human rationality. Emotions are an evolutionary development of humanity that helps us quickly gather and process information about the world and respond to it accordingly.

Some have made the comparison of thinking slow and fast, with emotions involving the latter entailing problems associated with ‘snap decisions’ and avoidance of ‘careful deliberation.’ If anyone was to look to Marx for inspiration, they might consider his long years in the British Library in London; his purported need to read all potentially relevant books on a subject before forming a definite view, and this resulting in missed deadlines and much unfinished work left to posterity.

Miéville believes that hate is not only necessary for resistance but “may help not only with strength but intellectual rigour, and of analysis, too” (p173). He quotes an Anglican priest, Steven Shakespeare, quoted above regarding hate’s “dangerous territory”, that it is necessary to be “more discriminatory about hate, where it comes from, where it should be directed, and how it gets captured for the purposes of others.’

So, we are into Goldilocks territory of not too much, and not too little, hate but just the right amount. Or we can appeal to Aristotle’s golden mean; where, for example, courage is a virtue but if taken to excess is recklessness and if too little, cowardice. “Emotional intelligence” is a modern variation. Cogitating on how much hate to evoke against capitalism is, however, a pretty unproductive pursuit.

Miéville, however, is particular about determining the need for greater hate, including that “Marx and Engels were too generous in their eulogy to its [capitalism’s] transformation and energetic properties, and to the bourgeoisie itself, as well as about the likelihood of its collapse.” (p175)

It might be more accurate to say that Marx and Engels were too sanguine, optimistic and confident about the overthrow of capitalism (not its collapse) but that they didn’t live to see the development of the workers’ movement or the programmes developed by its various parts that impacted on the outcome of subsequent failures. The point of this series of posts is not to relay this long and involved history but to set out what their alternative to capitalism was, which should go some way to exposing the reasons for failure so far.

As for Marx and Engels being too generous about the transformational and energetic properties of capitalism, this is simply false; it is in fact one of their most brilliant judgements and predictions, fully confirmed by today’s capitalism and its spread across the globe.

Miéville says we should retain our “shock” at the iniquities that capitalism throws up and that provoke an “appropriate human response, the fury of solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering . . . We should feel hate beyond words.” But the feeling of solidarity is also an emotion. An emotion that we should wish to promote, which is not (simply) a “humane” one but one based on a feeling of class solidarity, to be combined with the emotions of pride in our cause and our movement, and growing confidence in our success.

If there is a deficiency in emotional investment it is in these, which are more vital to our future than learning to hate capitalism that bit more. No one experiences only one emotion at a time (hence the falsity of the question repeated by Miéville “is your hate pure”); and as we have said, even the most instinctive emotion involves rationality and a degree of thought.

Marx noted, in relation to Miéville’s call that we should retain our “shock”, “fury” and “loathing” that some suffering has not been “unnecessary”, but absolutely necessary for the development not only of humanity in general but of capitalism and the grounds it creates for the subsequent potential for socialism. Many still cannot get their head round this: that the suffering imposed by capitalism was unavoidable for its birth and development – and in this sense necessary – but that this does not in the least mean we do not cease to damn it and to seek its overthrow.

To claim otherwise – that much of the suffering endured through capitalism was unnecessary must explain a number of things. How could capitalism birth and develop without suffering? Is a non-suffering capitalism possible? Is socialism possible without capitalism (and therefore without this suffering but then also without the working class)? Was all this suffering therefore without any historical meaning, but simply contingent and accidental? Explain the laws of the development of capitalism and its relation to the possibility of socialism without contradiction and antagonism and therefore suffering!

Marx is criticised in Miéville for his greater criticism of other socialisms than of the bourgeoisie because the former has none of the “ambivalence” that he attaches to the latter. (p176) This “ambivalence”, however, was entirely appropriate in a period in which capitalism was more or less fully developed in only a couple of countries and had yet to supplant the legacies of feudalism. Apart from recognition of the insights of the original utopian socialists, Marx admonished their succeeding followers because there was no merit in repeating anachronistic nostrums that were now reactionary.

Did Marx and Engels hate capitalism more than Weitling, Proudhon and Bakunin? This would be a hard claim to sustain, but whose politics is the best guide to ending it, and would their’s have been better had they done so?

The emotion of hate has its (inevitable) place, but this does not mean “we must hate harder than did the Manifesto”; the demand for greater hate (“hate beyond words”) is a substitute for politics. After all his detour on the need for hate, Miéville says that “Hate is not and cannot be the only or main drive to renewal. That would be deeply dangerous. We should neither celebrate nor trust our hate. But nor should we deny it.” It would have been better had he started and elaborated on this than drop it into the end of a disquisition on how much we must hate more.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 68

Back to part 67

Forward to part 69

Back to Part 1

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 57 – towards ‘Aufheben’

Posted on January 6, 2025 by irishmarxism

We see from the previous post that capitalism, as a transitional mode of production to socialism, is a progressive development, recognition of which is one of the hallmarks of Marxism. This, however, is not how Marxism is normally understood by its enemies, by those unfamiliar with it and even by some of its friends and self-styled adherents.

Certainly, some of these will accept that this is true in relation to previous societies, whether understood as feudalism, some form of Asiatic mode of production, or older tribal societies, but, it is argued, this is no longer the case. Capitalism has conquered the world, is now in decline and/or in its ‘death agony’, as declared by Leon Trotsky. Marx lived when only a small number of countries were capitalist in any developed sense and today it is the irrationality and barbarity of capitalism that predominates.

There are a number of problems with such a view but in this post we will mention only three. First, Marx’s view is that capitalist progress is not a serene, tranquil and untroubled process. It is not one of harmony and uniformity but one of antagonism, generated by contradictions that are often expressed in palpable horrors. It was ever thus, and today’s horrors engendered by the system are neither new nor preclude progress in the sense set out in the previous post.

Secondly, capitalism continues – albeit with its waste and degradation of humanity and the planet – to develop the forces of production and therefore the foundations for socialism. This includes massive expansion of the working class, without which capitalism does not exist. The sense of progress set out by Marx therefore continues even as it lays waste to nature and humanity, not least because these forces can be developed in such a way to further the protection of both. The alternative view is that the new society must start from somewhere very far away from being able to address these tasks and can only begin to develop the forces necessary after capitalism is overthrown, which ironically calls into question the current possibility and imperative to do so that is so much a part of this view.

Thirdly, a one-dimensional understanding of modern capitalism as regressive can easily elicit appeals to the past, to older models of society or more primitive capitalist forms, which Marx had to reject in his own day, but that are continually proffered, becoming obstacles to the replacement of capitalism by socialism. These include opposition to the centralisation and concentration of productive forces in the name of ‘anti-monopoly’ capitalism; to the growth and development of these forces on the grounds of planetary limits, or to the internationalisation of capitalism on the grounds of the protection of ‘national sovereignty’, against ‘globalisation’ etc. There are many other examples.

Opposition boils down to opposition to the socialisation of the forces of production, to the progress that capitalism has involved, and upon which future socialism depends. In this view, opposition to capitalism cannot rest on what capitalism has achieved but on its purely negative aspects, such as its exploitation and oppression. We have seen that it is precisely in the expansion of surplus labour, on exploitation as a result of the socialisation of labour, that socialism is possible. It is not capitalist crises, or its inhuman oppression or its tendency to war and destruction that will give rise to socialism but to the contradictions of the system of which these are expressions. Capitalism is essentially still the antagonistic system riven by contradictions analysed by Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century. Were it not, we would not be expounding his alternative as still relevant.

Marx did not in the least minimise the horrors of capitalism but did not reduce his opposition to capitalism to its deleterious effects, as the sole grounds for creation of a new society or the incentive to do so. To maintain a belief in socialism while abandoning his analysis necessarily involves invoking some other grounds, and since this means abandoning the material premiss of the world as it exists, it usually involves invoking principles or ‘values’ – moral claims – that cannot support it.

In 1849 Engels wrote that: “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom”, “equality”, “fraternity”, “independence”—so far we have found nothing in the pan-Slavist manifesto but these more or less ethical categories, which sound very fine, it is true, but prove absolutely nothing in historical and political questions. “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom” etc. may demand this or that a thousand times over; but if the thing is impossible, it does not take place and in spite of everything remains an “empty figment of a dream”. (K Marx and F Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, Collected Works Vol 8 p 365)

What Marx and Engels demonstrated was that ‘the thing’ – socialism – is possible because it is based on the development of existing society itself and can unfold out of it. This does not make it inevitable in the sense that this unfolding is an unconscious, inescapable process, but that it is precisely a conscious process, derived from a consciousness of what exists and its evolution.

This was expressed very early in Marx’s political development when he wrote that he did not want to ‘dogmatically anticipate’ the new world but wanted ‘to find the new world through criticism of the old one’. The task was to ‘develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles’ and wanted to ‘merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’. In a letter in 1843 he wrote that ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, according to this being, it will historically be compelled to do’.

This consciousness cannot not stop at the obvious iniquity of capitalism, which Marx didn’t fail to note; the bourgeoisie, he noted, had never ‘effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation’, but that through its ‘development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world . . .‘ (K Marx, The Future results of British rule in India, Collected Works Vol 12 p 221 and 222)

He states in Capital Vol I that ‘within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’

‘But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock.’

‘It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.’ (Marx, Capital Vol I chapter 25 section 4)

Marx damns the capitalist system for its exploitation and mutilation, for its domination and stultifying effects on the worker and family, and for its gross inequality, but still ‘the social productiveness of labour’ is raised.

Back to part 56

Forward to part 58

Part 1

An exchange of views on ‘Public Sector’ vs ‘Private Sector’

Posted on September 9, 2023 by irishmarxism

The comment below to a previous post is almost perfect in illustrating the illusions that exist on the role of the state and for which the series of posts were written. It is therefore worthwhile bringing greater attention to it along with my response:

=====================================

I would have reservations about what you say about the State and capital relationship. Both sides of the equation seem to be too general, categories that are not specific to time and place. I find the categories of the public sector versus the private sector a little more specific. The key thing here is that there has occurred over the last thirty years a major transformation in the relation between the two sectors. In short hand, there really is no public sector to talk about in the way we once did. One should preface talk about the public sector with the phrase ‘so called public sector’. The public sector has been taken over by the private sector yet throws over this capture an appearance of being in the hands of and being managed in the interest of the public.

When you use the public health service it is easy to believe that you are being served by what used to be known as the public sector, when in fact your are not, most of the services are provided to the hospital you are using by many private companies. This is just one example of many. It is interesting to see how in Britain many of what you would once have thought of as classic public services are in fact in the hands of private companies like SERCO.

I read the policy documents of the World Economic Forum and everything is dressed up in the clothes of Public Private Partnerships, something designed to deceive. What we mostly end up with, are private companies extracting money from what used to be called the Public Purse. Even the Dole broadly defined is operated by private companies pretending they are public bodies.

In a nut shell it is important to keep up with changes that have only recently occurred, over the last 30 years, not to get stuck using doctrines about State and Capital that are so universal that they pass over the particularities that now prevail.

RTE was once upon a time a part of the public sector, yet the funding came from both the licence fee and income raised from commercials. A model I have to admit I never liked, when I watch it I can’t stop moaning about the deluge of commercials, I have to sit through, more frequent than the those you get with British commercial television, four breaks for ads every hour. So the public broadcaster always had one foot in the commercial private sector. I wonder if State capitalism ever actually existed in the Republic of Ireland. When I travel from the North to the South I am struck by how more commercial the South seems to be, maybe this is too is deceptive.

=================================================

You write that the categories of State and Capital “are not specific to time and place” and that “the categories of the public sector versus the private sector [are] a little more specific”, and that the public sector gives “an appearance of and being managed in the interest of the public.” Of course, the opposite is the case.

“Public” and “private” in these contexts are empty abstractions designed precisely to obfuscate the real situation and to give appearances that essentially deceive. So-called public sector organisations are presented as if they serve the public but experience illustrates otherwise, as the posts on RTE demonstrate. The reformist left pretends that failures are due to the corruption of ‘public’ sector ownership by ‘private’ interests but the ‘public’ (however understood) does not own or control it; as we have seen from their sale and from the complete and utter lack of democracy and accountability in their operation.

Even ‘private ownership’ is no longer dominated by single ‘private’ capitalists but by collective pools of capital, including pension funds of workers, as well as pools of money of separate capitalist companies and ultra-rich individuals. Capital is being socialised but is still capital, so operates according to the laws set out by Marx, while the state is not the depository of the ’public’ or general interest but of the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Again as set out by Marx.

It is a body separate and above society, which, while it rests on society, has its own interests that are intimately tied to the capitalist system and to various fractions of the capitalist class or to individual capitalists. Precisely in what way permits greater specification of their forms that are “specific to time and place”, which you see as the shortcoming of these categories. The general abstractions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ go nowhere, while the Marxist categories of ‘state’ and ‘capital’ have engendered whole libraries of analysis and empirical studies.

As I wrote on Facebook about the controversy at RTÉ – ‘it wasn’t commercial interests that decided to pay one presenter over €500,000 per year. It wasn’t they who doctored the accounts to hide this. It wasn’t they who cut other RTÉ workers’ salaries and conditions, and it wasn’t these interests who wasted millions by, for example, buying thousands of euros worth of flip flops on ‘barter accounts’. So what is it with “public service broadcasting” that requires so much forgiveness and support?’

Illusions in the ‘public sector’ are deep. Consider these facts:

During the Covid-19 lockdown everyone was invited to clap for the NHS in the North and in Britain when it had closed its doors to other services, with lasting effects we still suffer from, while it spent billions of pounds on useless equipment from the cronies of the Tory Party. Everyone now complains that they struggle to get a GP appointment, and that the service is crumbling, while more and more are signing up for private healthcare if they can afford it. If the ‘public’ sector really was there to serve the public none of this would be happening. If it really belonged to ‘the public’ it could be stopped but it can’t in its present form of state ownership.

The NHS is a bureaucratic monster. We recently learned of the neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby, who murdered at least seven infants and attempted to murder at least six others in her care between June 2015 and June 2016. The worst serial killers in British history have been ‘public sector’ employees paid to care for the public. It would be possible to write these off as tragic anomalies were it not for the fact that such scandals are exposed on a regular basis and are certain to recur. Only when workers and patients have the power to control and make accountable these services will this change, and this will only happen when these services are removed from bureaucratic state control.

You write that “most of the services are provided to the hospital you are using by many private companies” but this has always been the case. One of my first jobs was processing invoices from these companies in the NHS, from medical devices to food to pest control. The use of agency staff, employed indirectly through private companies, has certainly increased, but this is because the terms and conditions are better in some ways so workers such as nurses would rather work for an agency. In the last year millions of ‘public sector’ workers have gone on strike to get higher wages in defence of living standards ravaged by inflation, in the teeth of opposition by their state employers. Many workers in the private sector have already achieved higher pay increases without even having to go on strike.

You are correct to say that many previous state services have been privatised and often this leads to attacks on workers’ terms and conditions as well as deterioration in services. This often obscures the poor services previously provided under state ownership, as evidenced by telecoms in the South of Ireland. Much of the left opposed the creation of a single water authority in the Irish State, forgetting the failure of the previous mode of state ownership.

While it is correct to oppose privatisation it is no alternative to champion ownership by the state. The use of the term Public Private Partnerships, which you state is “something designed to deceive” is only true in one sense, for those with the illusion that state ownership is on behalf of the public. The purpose of the capitalist state is to protect capitalist ownership of the means of production, which is a sort of partnership. The use of the term Public Private Partnership is therefore not “something designed to deceive” but is actually a more accurate description of the relationship between State and Capital.

The alternative is workers’ ownership and not the belief that capitalist state ownership can be made democratic. This, of course, does not prevent us furthering any democratic changes that are possible without illusion that they are adequate or any sort of solution.

Social forms of emancipation

Posted on July 3, 2022 by irishmarxism

Photo: https://www.positive.news/uk/the-uk-workers-co-op-filling-in-fast-fashions-gaps/

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 48

In the previous post I noted that Marx states that solving the problems thrown up by social revolution will be possible when the conditions are present or “in the course of formation” with the implication that if they are not present or insufficiently in formation they cannot be accomplished.

These tasks include the development of the forces of production and of the working class and its movement so that it takes into its own hands these forces. Only through the massive socialisation of production carried out by capitalism is it possible to make these forces the collective power of the working class. Individual production such as peasant holdings, guild production, or petty commodity production in general, cannot support collective ownership. In the terminology of the Preface of 1859, the new relations of production would not be appropriate to the forces of production.

The massive development of today’s socialised production could only come about through the huge accumulation of means of production and transport etc, which cannot now function without equal development of massive amounts of data and information. These have developed through accumulation of these means as capital by the capitalist class. This in turn is simply invested surplus value that could not have been accumulated without the massive growth in the exploitation of the working class.

All this entails certain characteristics that are important to understanding the prerequisites for socialist revolution, understood both in terms of the development of the productive forces, before and after the occurrence of working class political revolution, and for the political revolution itself.

The advance of the forces of production has involved the prodigious increase in the international division of labour with implications for their continuing development, and how they must develop further under working class control and direction. It also makes clearer than was the case in Marx’s time that political revolution by the working class cannot succeed on a purely national basis, something that would already be universally accepted had the working class movement succeeded in developing international organisation, which therefore remains a crucial task.

The existing forms of socialisation also inevitably involve enormous increases in the concentration and centralisation of capital, which assists the possibility and potential for collective ownership by the working class. This has necessarily involved an enormous increase in planning both within and between individual productive forces. Engels recognised this in his critique of the Erfurt Programme, when referring to paragraph 4 of that programme’s criticism of “the planlessness rooted in the nature of capitalist private production”

Engels suggested that this “needs considerable improvement. I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception.”

‘Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”

The opposition between capitalism and socialism is not therefore about a simple counter-position of market and plan, since development of the latter within capitalism also helps lay the ground for the new relations of production that define the new working class society. It is the class that rules, that carries out the planning and that determines its scope and character that makes the difference, not the existence of plans themselves.

This also means that whatever role market relations initially have in the transition to cooperative production – before and after political revolution – will arise from the existing planning within capitalism, its degree of development beforehand and the capacity to expand and advance it thereafter.

The material relations of production that herald socialism also therefore refer to the forms of ownership that exist before political revolution, that will serve to help bring it about as well as help progress its success thereafter:

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.”

As Engels said in a letter to Bebel:

“Marx and I never doubted that in the transition to the full communist economy we will have to use the cooperative system as an intermediate stage on a large scale.”

It is not therefore simply a question of some quantitative development of the forces of production, which is the limited way that it is often considered, but the necessary characteristics of that development – including the social forms that it takes – that affect the sufficiency of the material preconditions for socialism and the associated requirements for successful political revolution.

So, Marx does not say that just because the forces of production have developed – to whatever level – the new society will emerge out of it. If it does not then it (the old society) may well continue to develop its forces of production. The creation of the new is a conscious act.

This is because it is the working class itself, as it is organised in production, that is the prime productive force, which comes into conflict within the prevailing relations of production, i.e. the class relations of subordination and exploitation, and which means the contradiction between the forces and relations is not a simple resolution in favour of the forces, as some bourgeois analysis might seek to contend. An early formulation by Marx appeared in the Poverty of Philosophy:

“For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organisation of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.”

In Value, Price and Profit Marx explains to workers that ‘They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.’

Thus, the way the social forms of production have developed under capitalism are also part of the material circumstances that face the working class in its task of overthrowing and transforming it. This includes the international nature of the division of labour and of the classes necessarily based on it; the increased removal of the capitalist class directly from the greatest means of production with the substitution of professional and technical staff that shade into the working class; and the forms of socialised ownership arising, including development of its cooperative forms, which can all act as more direct preparation of the working class for its new role as master of society.

Marx presented no systematic view on how all these elements might come together just as he did not provide a blueprint about how the new society would be planned, as the latter grows out of the former and not from some prior schema. It has however been stated repeatedly that this would arise directly out of existing society and not from some invented first principles, whether that be a certain plan or state structure; especially as the latter must become subordinated to general society and not its master.

Back to part 47

Forward to part 49

The redundancy of the capitalist class

Posted on June 28, 2021 by irishmarxism

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 40

While the socialisation of the capitalist mode of production, associated with the centralisation and concentration of capital, requires unprecedented cooperation in production, alongside the massively increased division of labour, it not only makes the potential for the working class to control such forces manifestly easier, it also progressively demonstrates the increasing potential redundancy of the capitalist class for the direction and management of this production.

The scale and scope of production becomes too big for individual capitalist owners to finance and manage. Marx refers to the “enormous expansion of the scale of production and of enterprises, that was impossible for individual capitals.” (All quotations from Capital Vol III).

“Capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.”

This means that there is a “transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, administrator of other people’s capital, and of the owner of capital into a mere owner, a mere money-capitalist . . . (the salary of the manager is, or should be, simply the wage of a specific type of skilled labour, whose price is regulated in the labour-market like that of any other labour) . . . total profit is henceforth received only in the form of interest, i.e., as mere compensation for owning capital that now is entirely divorced from the function in the actual process of reproduction, just as this function in the person of the manager is divorced from ownership of capital.”

“This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property. On the other hand, the stock company is a transition toward the conversion of all functions in the reproduction process which still remain linked with capitalist property, into mere functions of associated producers, into social functions.”

Marx describes this process as “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production.”

For Marx, this whole process demonstrates that profit is not the reward for the labour and skills of the capitalist but makes it more obvious that it is the result of the appropriation of surplus value derived from the labour of workers, including its managers in so far as these are exploited.

Individual capitalists, indeed the whole capitalist class, commands capital that they no longer actually own, the property of others, so that all justifications of profit as the reward for risk (with other peoples’ money) or, even more ridiculously, abstention and saving (through a finance industry notorious for excess consumption!), is exposed as absurd.

Also created is “a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.” “Conceptions which have some meaning on a less developed stage of capitalist production, become quite meaningless here.”

Today these phenomena are reflected in the widespread contempt for corporate executive pay and the culture of greed, incompetence and arrogance of bankers and others engaged in the finance industry.

The sacred principle of private ownership of capital and associated caricatures of the heroic self-made entrepreneur less and less reflect any reality in the system, which itself carries out the crime of expropriation that is supposed to damn socialism:

“Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals.”

“With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter’s social property, much as they are their social products. However, this expropriation appears within the capitalist system in a contradictory form, as appropriation of social property by a few; and credit lends the latter more and more the aspect of pure adventurers.”

“The credit system accelerates the development of the productive forces and the establishment of the world-market. It is the historical mission of the capitalist system of production to raise these material foundations of the new mode of production to a certain degree of perfection. At the same time credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction – crises – and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.”

Over-expansion of credit is often blamed for the periodic crises of overproduction or financial crises, including the construction boom in Ireland when it became the predominant element of the Celtic Tiger, and the 2008 financial crash centred on unsustainable credit and its extension through derivatives. For Marx such events are simply the aggressive manifestation of the essential dynamic of the capitalist mode of production which, as such, has a two-sided result requiring more than simple condemnation.

“The two characteristics immanent in the credit system are, on the one hand, to develop the incentive of capitalist production, enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others, to the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling, and to reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth; on the other hand, to constitute the form of transition to a new mode of production. It is this ambiguous nature, which endows the principal spokesmen of credit from Law to Isaac Péreire with the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.”

All these developments have the potential to provide a transitional form out of capitalism and towards socialism:

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.”

“Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale.”

“The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

“Cooperative factories provide the proof that the capitalist has become just as superfluous as a functionary in production as he himself, from his superior vantage point, finds the large landlord.”

Back to part 39

Forward to part 41

The socialisation of capital

Posted on June 22, 2021 by irishmarxism

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 39

Marx notes that a certain accumulation of capital is a precondition for the capitalist mode of production that it then develops accumulation enormously:

“The continual re-transformation of surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the process of production. This in turn is the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising the productive power of labour that accompany it, and of accelerated production of surplus-value.” (Marx Capital Volume 1)

This involves an increasing division of labour inside and outside the workplace; the introduction of machinery and development of large-scale industry; the application of science and knowledge to production; and the increasing transformation of the natural world, all of which can only be the work of many workers combined together.

While many Marxists have prioritised regard to the underdevelopment of imperialist dominated countries and the remaining industrial backwardness of many, they have been loath to also recognise the growth of capitalism which is a necessary feature of its existence. Instead of capitalist development being the grounds for socialism its relative lack of development is often considered to be the warrant for revolution.

This increasing accumulation of capital results in its concentration and centralisation, the former “only another name for reproduction on an extended scale.” Centralisation of capital on the other hand allows the greater extension of capitalist accumulation: “a more comprehensive organisation of the collective labour of many people, for a broader development of their material motive forces, i.e. for the progressive transformation of isolated processes of production, carried on by customary methods, into socially combined and scientifically arranged processes of production.” (All quotes from Marx, Capital Volume III).

This centralisation accelerates accumulation and allows the creation of forces of production hitherto beyond the capacity of previous numerous smaller capitals, with Marx noting the example of the construction of railways in the 19th century. These in turn add to the productive power of any particular capitalism, raising the standard of productivity required by any newly aspiring capitalist power; requiring it to match the already existing scale, division of labour and technology in order to successfully compete. New capitalist enterprises or countries must aim to at least match this level of development in order to survive, even allowing for temporary protectionist measures it may adopt in then meantime.

The concentration and centralisation of production is but one aspect of the centralisation of capital, with capital in its money form also concentrated and centralised; through its expansion it becomes an enormous means for further development of production and accumulation.

As this accelerated accumulation becomes ever more powerful it heightens the contradictions of capitalism, including the elimination of smaller, or even larger, capitals by competitors, which becomes less and less acceptable to such capitals.

Cartels are formed that predetermine the level of production in order to support the prices and profitability of participating firms, and when even this is not enough socialisation goes further with the creation of monopolies.

“This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-abolishing contradiction, which presents itself prima facie as more a point of transition to a new form of production.”

Marx notes that expropriation as the starting point of capitalism – through depriving of peasants etc. of their means of production by severing their ties to the land so that they must sell their labour power to capital – becomes the expropriation of other capitals and the creation of monopolies.

The scope and scale of capital no longer allows for the great productive powers created to be the product of individual capitals but the combined power of socialised capital. The financial system becomes one mechanism through which this socialised capital is concentrated, centralised and distributed.

The scale of production – including huge monopolies – and the power of the financial system require the intervention of the state to secure and regulate their workings, while the monopolies and financial system in turn intervene into the state to defend and advance its collective and specific interests.

This socialisation of production comes more and more into contradiction with the appropriation of production by individual capitals and tiny class of capitalists at its apex. The massive planning of huge companies with internal economies larger than many countries stands in contrast to the uncontrolled gyrations of the economy as a whole. The product of socialised labour is inimical to capitalist appropriation of its product, resulting in greater or lesser, but nevertheless permanent, inequalities due to class distinctions.

The socialisation of production continues today, reflected in the growth of the concentration and centralisation of capital in monopolies and growth of the capitalist state. Even after decades of ‘neoliberalism’ that supposedly relegated the importance of the state, in the US government spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product has reached around 40%, having been 34% in 1979 and 7% before World War I.

The expanding role of the state includes vital support for production as noted in the book of economist Mariana Mazzucato:

“Mazzucato lists twelve crucial technologies that make smartphones “smart “: (1) microprocessors; (2) memory chips; (3) solid state hard drives; (4) liquid crystal displays; (5) lithium-based batteries; (6) fast Fourier transform algorithms; (7) the internet; (8) HTTP and HTML protocols; (9) Global Positioning Systems (GPS); (11) touchscreens; and (12) voice recognition. Every last one was supported by the public sector at key stages of development.”

The extent of the concentration and centralisation of capital is recorded in a database of 37 million ‘economic actors’ from 194 countries (the Orbis 2007 marketing database reported on by New Scientist). The socialisation of capital is illustrated by the 13 million ownership links involving ownership of shares etc. between these agents. The study of these identified 43,000 transnational companies in 116 countries, plus an additional 500,000 other corporations and 77,000 individual shareholders to which the transnational corporations have direct or indirect ownership relations. A core of 147 firms controls 40% of the value of the transnational corporations while 737 companies or individuals control 80%.

Such integration is also illustrated by the chance that any two firms in the S&P 1500 US stock market index will have a common owner holding at least 5% per cent of shares in both is 90 per cent, up from around 20 per cent only twenty years ago (People’s Republic of Walmart)

In another academic paper (from 2018) the authors find that:

“In the last two decades, over 75% of U.S. industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels. We find that firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins and more profitable M&A deals. At the same time, we do not find evidence of a significant increase in operational efficiency, which suggests that market power is becoming an important source of value.” The paper thus appears as another example of the view that monopolisation is at variance with the essential operation of capitalism.

This growth of the forces of production has relied upon the development of the labour of the working class, even if its powers have been turned against it; illustrated by notoriously anti-worker companies such as Amazon that are to the fore in developing unheard of levels of planning in their operations.

Nevertheless, the growing concentration and centralisation of capital, with its increased planning and networking of production and distribution, makes the potential for the working class to control such forces manifestly easier. As Engels notes in an addition to Volume III of Capital, when speaking of the chemical industry, “competition has been replaced in England by monopoly, thus preparing in the most pleasing fashion its future expropriation by society as a whole, by the nation.”

Back to part 38

Forward to part 40

Capitalist cooperation and Socialism

Posted on May 25, 2021 by irishmarxism

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism – part 38

A recent book on how capitalism, through the socialisation of production, is preparing the ground for socialism makes a point made by many – that Marx left no blueprint for a socialist economy.

“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels may have expertly described the political economy of the capitalist mode of production, but they left few specific descriptions of what their hoped-for replacement would look like.”

Not only is it just as well that they did, given the specific way capitalism has developed, but had they done otherwise it would have contradicted their view that socialism would be the creation of the working class, not the elaboration of ideas sucked out of the thumb of great thinkers.

In fact, the authors of the book do not repeat the error of others, who rebuke Marx for not leaving a ready-made solution, because their book is all about how modern capitalism provides the foundation for socialism (as Marx first described in his critique of the political economy of capitalism). As the great man said, the task of socialists is only to make workers conscious of what is going on in front of their eyes in order to move forward.

Their criticism of lacking a blueprint is made more against the Bolsheviks in 1917, but then the Russian empire did not have the preconditions for socialism. The development of the socialisation of production possible under socialism, made possible by prior capitalist development, wasn’t achievable because the latter’s development was insufficient. Other more advanced capitalist powers could not assist because they did not also succumb to revolution. The fault was not in the heads of the Bolsheviks or the gaps in their programme but the gaps in reality between what existed and what had to be achieved.

The socialisation of production under capitalism that paves the way for socialism can be considered in a number of aspects – the concentration and centralisation of capital and production, created by the increase in cooperative labour arising from the expansion of the division of labour. The first two provide the grounds for the fully cooperative labour of socialism just as the increase in cooperative labour has entailed centralisation and concentration.

As Engels said, quoted in the previous post, “Before capitalistic production . . . the instruments of labour – land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool – were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself. . . . But the bourgeoisie . . . could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men.”

The point of socialism is for these means of production to become not only the product of the labour of the collective worker but also to come under its ownership and control.

Capitalism, properly speaking, only really begins with this enlarged scope and scale of production. As Marx writes in Capital Volume 1:

“Capitalist production only then really begins, as we have already seen, when each individual capital employs simultaneously a comparatively large number of labourers; when consequently the labour-process is carried on an extensive scale and yields, relatively, large quantities of products. A greater number of labourers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if you will, in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist production.”

Marx notes that:

“When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes, this form of labour is called co-operation . . . Not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new power, which is intrinsically a collective one.”

It is this collective economic power that must become conscious of its role and its interests, which necessarily must entail political consciousness.

Of course, with this development of capitalism, it is capital which combines the many workers, the social labour, that makes cooperation the productive force that it is, requiring greater and greater amounts of capital with person(s) whose sole role it is to wield this capital. The technical division of labour is subsumed within a social division of labour marked by an increasingly hierarchical division of power between owners, Directors, managers and workers, within which there are other numerous lesser gradations of division. Cooperative labour thus presupposes a capitalist class that grows in power as the scale of cooperative labour also grows.

This class performs the necessary tasks of directing, superintending and adjusting the performance of this cooperative labour. This class also imposes the discipline and domination of labour which unavoidably arises, and suppresses the resistance that workers instinctively feel in response to external discipline and control. Capitalist ideology then identifies the necessary role of direction of cooperative labour with the capitalist and its role of domination. It does this even when the individual capitalist owner has been replaced by Directors and senior managers who might however be ‘incentivised’ by share options etc. and thus see a material basis for their role of enforcing the requirements of capital.

How easily this is done is demonstrated by Marx when he says that “it is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist.”

This ideology does not grant that the cooperative workers might carry out the direction of their labour themselves. Marx quotes the ‘philistine’ Spectator magazine, unfortunately still with us, saying of workers’ cooperatives that:

“They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops, mills, and almost all forms of industry with success, and they immediately improved the condition of the men; but then they did not leave a clear place for masters.” As Marx says – ‘Quelle horreur!’.

The individual workers are only in the workplace because capital has employed them to be there and directs and controls their actions. Their collective power appears as the power of capital and the capitalist and/or management. While they understand that they do not ‘belong’ to either they also understand that they only perform their work because they have been hired to achieve both the objective of the company and the means to achieve it, neither if which is theirs. This alienates them from their work and is a barrier to their understanding that their labour, like that of the rest of the working class, is the collective foundation of all production, and this being the case, they should both direct and control it.

Again, Marx notes the confusion created: that the power of cooperative labour created by capitalism is not seen as a particular form of such labour but only as the power of capital and its system. Capitalism is nevertheless necessary to bring this particular power of social labour into the world – “the capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labour process into a social process . . .”

Of course, cooperation has been a feature of all human society and often comes to the fore in particular circumstances, such as natural disaster, giving the lie to crude propaganda that people are naturally or spontaneously selfish or greedy. Only the capitalist mode of production however raises this cooperation to unprecedented scope and sophistication and does so regardless of the subjective motivations of individual members of each class.

It is capitalism which brings about the socialisation of production through increased division of labour allowing the concentration of capital, the application of machinery and development of large scale industry, requiring the most developed cooperation to make it work.

The ideologues of capitalism constantly assert the virtue of competition in its creation but fail to acknowledge and recognise the associated requirement for cooperation. At best they seek to determine the limits of cooperation to within firms, in order to assert the primacy of competition in relations between them, but which even here is only partially true.

The unacknowledged role of cooperation can often be seen in references to Adam Smith’s famous pin factory, which required no new techniques or technology but simply required a single worker to devote herself to one of the eighteen tasks required to make a pin, as opposed to each worker completing all of them. Where previously 200 could be made in one day by ten workers, this specialisation allowed production of 28,000 pins in a day.

No pin was therefore the product of a single worker, so we cannot measure output by adding up the number created by each worker as we would have before. Labour has become a social activity requiring the cooperation of each worker so that every pin is wholly the product of all.

When we consider the incredible division of labour today, in order to create such things as cars, ships and computers, it has extended beyond a single workshop to a division of labour between thousands if not tens of thousands of production sites across the globe. Even ‘simple’ commodities, that are usually taken for granted in the most advanced countries, are the product of tens of thousands of factories and offices. Water requires treatment works, which requires cement, steel, computers and chemicals etc., which each require their own enormous separate production processes. Electricity requires power stations and wind farms with thousands of separate components and an electricity transmission and distribution system to deliver it.

All these elements involve a massive division of labour both within production units and between them. We can no longer even conceive how any of this could be the product of one worker or even single group of workers.

Such is the achievement of capitalism in creating the collective worker. Its socialisation of production requires the cooperation of millions of workers across the globe, yet rather than unite to advance this cooperation to the benefit of all those involved we have drummed into us that we must compete with each other. Not to develop the best products or techniques, but to crush and kill off competitors and potentially destroy the jobs of others.

As the division of labour has advanced so has the necessity for cooperation and so are the preconditions for socialism more and more established; all driven by capital’s own thirst for surplus value and profit. The full potential of such cooperation can only be realised through its conscious extension by all those involved in the process of production, distribution and consumption, and the political arrangements that preside over it. All aspects of it, including competition, then become the conscious and purposeful activity of the collective worker.

Back to part 37

Forward to part 39

Karl Marx’s Alternative to capitalism part 26 – forces and relations of production 9

Posted on March 24, 2018 by irishmarxism

In the previous series of posts I have set out Marx’s views on the contradictions of capitalism, between its productive forces and the relations of production, and have gone to some length to explain the concepts involved.

Much of this might seem rather tenuously related to the issue of Marx’s alternative to capitalism. Previously, however, I have explained that this alternative can only arise out of existing society, and not from any sort of blueprint, either based on high moral values of equality and justice etc. or more or less elaborate plans for the a society, for example how a planned economy might be made to work more efficiently than capitalism.

More particularly, this alternative cannot be conceived as simply political revolution, for such a revolution presupposes the grounds for its success – on the development of the forces and relations of production as set out in these previous posts, this one and the next one.

The development of the forces and relations of production explains how the alternative that grows within capitalism and will supersede it might be conceived, and on these grounds that political revolution might be considered a reasonable objective.

In this way, Marx explains how the development of capitalism creates the grounds and tendencies of development of an alternative society:

“The conditions for production become increasingly general, communal and social, relying less on the individual capitalist. We have seen that the growing accumulation of capital implies its growing concentration. Thus grows the power of capital, the alienation of the conditions of social production personified in the capitalist from the real producers. Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist’s source of power.”

“The contradiction between the general social power into which capital develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the individual capitalists over these social conditions of production, on the other, becomes ever more irreconcilable, and yet contains the solution of the problem, because it implies at the same time the transformation of the conditions of production into general, common, social, conditions. This transformation stems from the development of the productive forces under capitalist production, and from the ways and means by which this development takes place.”

Marx sets out “Three cardinal facts of capitalist production:

1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship.

2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences.

In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though in contradictory forms.”

Marx notes that the bigger, more concentrated and centralised capital becomes, the less important is the role of the capitalist himself, while this process simultaneously involves the centralisation of capital in a few hands including through the decapitalisation of many. Although “this process would entail the rapid breakdown of capitalist production, if counteracting tendencies were not constantly at work alongside this centripetal force, in the direction of decentralisation.” (Capital Volume III, p 354 – 355)

Ernest Mandel, in his introduction to Volume III of Capital, sets out a flow-diagram putting forward the elements of Marx’s analysis and placing them within separate boxes, with the end point being ‘socialism’, and with the penultimate box the ‘tendency towards collapse of capitalist system’.

While useful as a graphical presentation of the elements of Marx’s analysis, it is misleading if it is assumed that socialism is simply a result of capitalist collapse, rather than capitalist collapse being the result of socialism, in other words the actions of the working class.

It is however useful to sum up the last few posts by itemising these different elements that are included in Mandel’s schematic, with the understanding that socialism is not the result of the automatic working out of any or even all of these factors, but rather the conscious intervention of the working class, not in a voluntarist way, but arising out of (at least some of) the factors set out below, and in particular ways that we shall later explore.

Growing difficulty of maintaining market economy, value realisation, under conditions of growing automation.
Periodic crises of overproduction.
Tendency to growing centralisation of capital in fewer and fewer hands.
Tendency of average rate of profit to decline.
Tendency to growing objective socialisation of labour.
Growing contradiction between socialised labour and private appropriation.

The contradiction between capitalist relations of production and its productive forces is evident every day, in the inability of capitalism to secure permanent full employment, in fact its inability to function without a reserve army of labour that helps regulate its functioning.

The tendency to the socialisation of production through, for example, the growth of monopoly might be seen as anticipation of socialism, which in a negative fashion it is, but while it entails increased planning within enterprises, it does not otherwise prevent capitalist crises.

Likewise, increased state ownership and intervention also anticipates resolution of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, but does not resolve it and does not represent a model of future society. As Engels notes:”

“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 organisation 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.”

The true anticipation and herald of the new mode of production is contained in the development of workers’ production, anticipation of the associated workers’ mode of production, through the growth of workers cooperatives, as argued by Marx:

“They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale.”

Back to part 25

Forward to part 27

	revolutionaryprogram… on Left reaction to the ‘discover…
	Paul Flannigan on Marxism and Gender Identity Id…
	Paul Flannigan on Ukraine and imperialism after…
	irishmarxism on Karl Marx’s alternative to cap…
	Paul Flannigan on Karl Marx’s alternative to cap…

Sráid Marx

An Irish Marxist Blog

Tag Archives: Capitalism