So, for Marx, although workers must organise in trades unions to defend their position, such action itself, on its own, can only result in the existing productive and social relations reproducing themselves. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx examines the economic theories of the first representatives of the workers such as Piercy Ravenstone, John Bray, and Thomas Hodgskin. All of these do so by basing themselves on the economic theory of Ricardo, whilst trying to turn its propositions to the workers' advantage. It is the basis of Ricardian Socialism, which, in turn, provides the theoretical basis for social-democracy. This ideology permeates the labour movement, and its most obvious manifestation is the trades unions themselves. Its not surprising that, in Britain, when these trades unions create their own political party, the Labour Party, this same bourgeois ideology is grafted on to it, and becomes its characteristic feature and foundation. Indeed, the trades unions, in founding the party, insisted that no commitment to Socialism be included in its constitution, hence the vague, reformist formulation of the original Clause IV, Section 4.
Marx had to confront this bourgeois ideology that assumes the form of what Lenin calls Economism. Following on from his statement in “Value, Price and Profit”, cited above, Marx says.
“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. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"...
Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”
The material conditions and social forms, Marx refers to are the developed productive forces, the creation of cooperative labour, and socialised production, the world market, and the creation of socialised capital as the transitional form of property that the workers simply need to demand control over, as their property.
And, Lenin, too, in “What Is To Be Done?” has to confront the same Economism. The point that Marx makes is that the trades unions are necessary for the workers to organise the basic defence of their interests; they organise the workers together, due to their common position in production as a class in itself, but not yet for itself. For the latter, a revolutionary Workers Party is required, and that party's function is not to organise the workers simply to be able to obtain reforms that ameliorate its condition within the constraints of the existing system, the existing mode of production, but to bring about a revolution in the mode of production itself. Or more correctly, as Marx sets out in Capital, the revolution in the mode of production, in respect of the productive relations and property relations proceeds whether or not, as a result of the operation of natural laws. It has, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 27, already abolished capital as private property, within the confines of capitalism itself. It has created in its place, socialised capital, and established property relations on the back of it, as well as creating social-democracy as the form of state that flows from those property relations. What has not occurred, is that the working-class itself has become aware of this change in property relations – other than in the case of the worker owned cooperatives – and thereby insisted on its rightful control over that property. Its focus has been on purely economic, distributional struggle, ignoring the fundamental property question, or else, where it does, mistaking the form of capitalist ownership for a change in the nature of the mode of production itself. So, for example, it accepts state capitalism, in the form of nationalised industries, and the welfare state, as in some way being the equivalent of some form of Socialism, rather than the reality that it simply represents a more developed, but also a more onerous and oppressive form of capitalist exploitation. It fails to bring the legal and juridical structure into alignment with the underlying social and property relations.
No comments:
Post a Comment