The Economy Of Analysis - Part 12

Yesterday, I looked at the inadequacy of the analysis of the SWP and SP, which is rooted in Lassalleanism and Fabianism rather than Marxism. But, the problem with the SP argument is also fairly apparent from another angle. They talk about the billions of pounds in unpaid tax that has been identified by the PCS. However, the PCS is a union which the SP controls. The obvious question that is raised here is, if its that easy, why they do not simply instruct their members in the PCS to do their job conscientiously, and collect this unpaid tax!!! In fact, it illustrates the problem. For Capital, the payment of tax is essentially voluntary.

The Capitalists recognise the need to pay taxes, because they recognise the need for their State to have resources to do the things they need it to do – protect their property, ensure a measure of economic, political and social security etc. - which is why some of them today are agreeing with Warren Buffett in the need to pay more. But, they see no reason to pay taxes for all those things that are essentially commodities sold to workers by the Capitalist State, on a socialised basis. Those things form part of the Value of Labour Power, and like all other commodities of that type consumed by workers are paid for out of the wage fund.

Any attempt to get Capitalists to pay more tax, to cover these items, will then be responded to by Capitalists in the same way Marx set out in his debates with Weston, in relation to how they would respond to a rise in wages above the Value of Labour Power. That is they would reduce Capital Accumulation, which would reduce the demand for Labour Power, creating unemployment and lower wages. They would seek to introduce Labour-saving machinery with the same effect, and today they can simply relocate production to overseas. In the short term, they do not even have to physically relocate the Capital, large liquid Capital Markets mean that they can simply sell shares in companies in one country, and buy them in another. The Value of Capital falls in the former, and rises in the latter, with the actual transfer of Capital occurring instantaneously via electronic transfers of money capital. All attempts to effect redistribution via higher taxes, simply result in higher taxes on better paid workers, and the Middle Class, and if anything in worsened economic conditions, via a reduction in Capital Accumulation.

The only real way to prevent this, and to ensure a real redistribution of income is by transferring ownership of the means of production directly into the hands of workers themselves.

But, if that is not to mean a call for “Revolution Now”, the only practical means of bringing it about, is as Marx and Engels argued, by groups of workers setting up worker owned Co-ops, by utilising Credit to extend that across the economy etc. as Marx outlined in Capital, and in his Programme for the First International.

The SP, continue to talk about the “destruction” caused by Capitalism. Quite true, Capitalism does bring about such huge destruction. But, Marx was highly critical of the petit-bourgeois/moral socialists such as Sismondi who only focussed on these aspects, and who failed to point to the progressive role of Capitalism overall.

Capitalism brings about destruction, because of its inherent contradictions, but those contradictions arise within the context of an overall expansion of productive potential. If we want to win workers for a fight for Socialism it is necessary to demonstrate in practice that a socialist, co-operative society is capable of even greater development with less of the destruction. It is not possible to do it, by attempting to paint Capitalism as a wholly destructive system, bankrupt, and incapable of lifting workers conditions. It is not possible, because that is not true, and workers can see quite abundantly that it is not true.

So, for example, the SP say that there is no prospect of a return to healthy, economic growth. Why? There have been repeated crises, and recoveries.

On what basis can the SP, claim this one is different? In “The Second Slump”, for example, Mandel examines the recessions that occurred during the Post-War, Long Wave Boom, and the extent to which they were foreshortened by the use of Keynesian stimulation. We have many such examples of where Marxists have proclaimed that Capitalism was in its death throes, only for it to engage in a further period of dynamic growth and development. Moreover, were it true then it would be bad news for workers, as Trotsky set out in “Flood-Tide”. For workers to advance, they need to feel solid ground beneath their feet.

As he demonstrates there, conditions of prolonged economic weakness, intensify the competition between workers, undermine their collective strength, and increase the influence of reactionary elements. Periods of prolonged economic weakness, such as the 1930's, and the 1980's, have always brought forward periods of political reaction, and seen the Labour Movement set back.

But, were it true, how does the other Lassallean/Fabian solution they put forward, for the Capitalist State to take over the “commanding heights” offer a step forwards in solving the crisis? It never has in the past. In the past, nationalisation of things like Coal, Steel, Shipbuilding, Transport, and Power led to massive redundancies and closures.

Capital, in these industries, was bailed out via investment paid for out of workers taxes. They saw the development of huge, oppressive and inefficient bureaucracies and ultimately after their rationalisation they were sold back to private owners. As for “democratic public ownership” what does that mean?

In the CGP, Marx was scornful of the Lassalleans for raising such a demand. He writes,

“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labor" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!

From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put -- under the democratic control of the "toiling people".

In the first place, the majority of the "toiling people" in Germany consists of peasants, not proletarians.

Second, "democratic" means in German "Volksherrschaftlich" [by the rule of the people]. But what does "control by the rule of the people of the toiling people" mean? And particularly in the case of a toiling people which, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!”

Here we see the true measure of Marx's hostility to the State, particularly the Capitalist State. In like manner we see the extent to which his view of Socialism is based upon the workers maintaining independence from that State, and creating Socialism from the ground up via their own independent efforts, by developing their own property, democracy and upon it their own self-govenment. He makes it even clearer, as he goes on to say,

“That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid.

But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”

And, it is not as though, subsequent developments changed the attitude of Marxists on this question. So, Trotsky writes, for instance, in Nationalized Industry and Workers’ Management,

“It would of course be a disastrous error, an outright deception, to assert that the road to socialism passes, not through the proletarian revolution, but through nationalization by the bourgeois state of various branches of industry and their transfer into the hands of the workers’ organizations.”

Whilst he is as scathing as Marx about the notion of “Workers Control”, let alone the SP's classless notion of “democratic control”.

In Workers Control Of Production,

“If the participation of the workers in the management of production is to be lasting, stable, “normal,” it must rest upon class collaboration, and not upon class struggle. Such a class collaboration can be realized only through the upper strata of the trade unions and the capitalist associations.

There have been not a few such experiments: in Germany (“economic democracy”), in Britain (“Mondism”), etc. Yet, in all these instances, it was not a case of workers’ control over capital, but of the subserviency of the labour bureaucracy to capital...

The closer it is to production, to the factory, to the shop, the less possible such a regime is, for here it is a matter of the immediate, vital interests of the workers, and the whole process unfolds under their very eyes.

Workers’ control through factory councils is conceivable only on the basis of sharp class struggle, not collaboration. But this really means dual power in the enterprises, in the trusts, in all the branches of industry, in the whole economy...

...What we are talking about is workers’ control under the capitalist regime, under the power of the bourgeoisie. However, a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual power in its enterprises. Workers’ Control consequently, can be carried out only under the condition of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavourable to the bourgeoisie and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production.

Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the failing back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.”

But, it is clear that we are not in such a revolutionary situation, or even approaching one, so the demand can only mean Workers Control in the former sense outlined by Trotsky i.e. it is a thoroughly reformist demand for class collaboration, as a means for a more effective exploitation of the workers by the Capitalist State!

In fact, this is the problem with the way in which today's Trotskyists use “Transitional Demands”. They seem to have no inkling that these demands are only revolutionary when they are used within the context of a revolutionary situation. Trotsky made that clear in the “Transitional Programme” itself. For example,

“However, the state-ization of the banks will produce these favorable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”

Outside, these revolutionary conditions, which offer the potential for the establishment of dual power, for the possibility of a Workers Government, that might be pressed from outside to break with Capital, for the potential for Capitalist State power to be broken, then these demands like that for Workers Control become simply reformist demands at best. They are not like magic beans that only have to be sprinkled upon the class struggle, in order to grow up into a revolutionary beanstalk!

And we are NOT in a revolutionary situation. In fact, the workers seem content, at best, with a right-wing Labour Party, and at worst with the policies of the Coalition.

Attempts by the Left to test out the extent to which their dreams of there being some working-class out there champing at the bit for a new leadership, have continually been shattered, with every attempt to create a new Party in their image, or their disastrous showing at elections, which only emphasises the extent of their irrelevance to the class. I have focussed on the SP's advocacy of Fabian, statist policies for Redistributive Socialism and State Capitalism, but they are just the worst variant of that trend. The same reformist approach, the same Economism, runs like a yellow thread through the positions of all the Left from the SWP, through their mirror image in the AWL, to the CPGB, to PR, to Workers Power, and, of course to the Stalinists of the CPB etc.

Back To Part 11

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