Politics Of the Ghetto - Part 5

Part 5

The Market Nexus

As I’ve pointed out before a feature of the Lassallean, statist socialism, which dominates the Left, is its fetish of Plannism, or the obverse, seeing everything in terms not of property ownership, but of opposition to the market. This is very odd, because Marx never had such concerns. On the contrary, it was competition, and therefore, the market, which Marx identified as being the most revolutionary aspect of Capitalism through which it dissolved all of those reactionary, bureaucratic, statised, monopolistic features of feudal society. When Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,

“If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?”,

the distribution he is speaking of is a distribution via the market. He does not make his first priority abolition of the market, but the transformation of property ownership. But, its within this context of opposition to the market that statist conceptions of Socialism raise up ownership of the means of production by the State – even the Capitalist State – on to a socialist pedestal, precisely because the establishment of a State Capitalist Monopoly is seen as in some way abolishing the market nexus. But, as Elson demonstrates even this is a nonsense, because in all of these areas what has been witnessed has been the development of market processes to replace the market. Even in 1979, as she writes this was marked in the Health Service. But, it is true for other State Industries too. An aspect of bourgeois neo-classical economics is the idea that under perfect competition price should be equal to Marginal Cost. Such a requirement was inscribed on to the pricing policies of nationalised industries. But, of course, there is no perfect competition. Studies of actual pricing policies suggest that businesses most frequently set price equal to average not marginal cost, and it was found that prices were generally around 10% than marginal cost. The consequence was that nationalised industries were really underpricing, and this meant providing a subsidy to the private sector.

But, even were this not the case, even had the reverse been the case this subverting of the market would have offered no benefit for the working class, because it was not their property, not their state. It would be no different to the proposals that sections of the bourgeoisie raised in the 19th Century for the nationalisation of the land. The basis of the idea was that Rent would then be paid to the State rather than to private Landlords, and this Rental Income would then defray some of the costs of running the State, thereby reducing taxes deducted from Surplus Value. That did not mean it was not a progressive policy, but not everything progressive under Capitalism is “Socialistic”. State Capitalist ownership is progressive vis a vis private Capitalist ownership, but it is not socialist. It is possible to defend one as against the other, but the job of a Marxist is not to advocate the lesser evil, but to propose a socialist alternative to both.

Elson writes,

“It is clear from this that they are inclined to view Capitalism and Socialism in terms of the social nexus that regulates activities, rather than in terms of the class relation in which surplus labour is extracted. The growing role of non-market forms of social nexus, particularly the social nexus of the state apparatus, is for them prima facie evidence that certain activities fall within a socialist mode of production.

‘The state sector is the most important example of a mode of production within Capitalist society which is not itself organised within capitalist relations of production.’ (p.138)

‘the degree to which the British Economy already contains a major degree of [state] regulation should not be forgotten. In a purely economic sense there is little novelty about Socialism in Britain.’ (p.52)”

(ibid pp104-5)

Of course, it was partly experience of this statised, inefficient, bureaucratic “Socialism” by the working class that turned it away from the idea, and towards Thatcher and her ilk.

“Any perspective formulated in terms of the articulation of capitalist and socialist modes of production in a social formation in which capital is the dominant mode, runs the risk of proposing a strategy simply in terms of extending, in a purely quantitative fashion, the existing socialist mode of production to encompass more and more activities.The metaphor is some territory already having been won for socialism, and the struggle being one of extending those liberated zones.”

(ibid p105)

In fact, I have less concern over this than Elson does with certain provisos. If this process is seen as one of “peaceful co-existence”, or “Socialism In One Country”, which is really the analogy that Elson is alluding to, then the concern is justified. But, the reality of attempting to build “Socialism In One Country”, always had to be that you would not be allowed to do it unhindered, that the process could only be successful if it was extended internationally, and so on. The question was, how you dealt with that reality, not that you should throw up your hands and give up the task in the first place. The bourgeoisie were not left alone by the Landlords to establish Capitalism, but it was precisely the points of conflict within that process that provided the need for class struggle, and through which developed the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Such a development has not occurred in relation to the proletariat precisely because the points of conflict between the classes – as classes – has never been about attempts by the bourgeoisie preventing the proletariat developing its own “socialist” forms, but has only ever been fought out on bourgeois terrain in conflicts over how much or how little the proletariat is exploited within that system.

Only had the proletariat been seriously struggling to develop its own forms, its own property in contradistinction to Capitalist forms and property, and came up with such opposition could it really be said to be engaging in a “class” struggle, rather than a purely Economistic, trade union, sectional struggle, and only then could it have begun to develop its own class consciousness, as opposed to a purely bourgeois, trade union consciousness. As Marx put it in his Address to the First International,

“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor 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 labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor 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.
At the same time the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however, excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle-class spouters, and even kept political economists have all at once turned nauseously complimentary to the very co-operative labor system they had vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatizing it as the sacrilege of the socialist. To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor. Remember the sneer with which, last session, Lord Palmerston put down the advocated of the Irish Tenants’ Right Bill. The House of Commons, cried he, is a house of landed proprietors. To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France, there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political organization of the workingmen’s party.”