Lessons For The Left
Lesson 3 – Independence of The Working Class
The most important lesson, reaching back to Marx and Engels, and the revolutions of 1848, is the need for the independence of the working-class, and to be able to express that independence politically and organisationally. The forces of Socialism, today, are weak. Following the defeats of the 1980's, they suffered twenty years of demoralisation, and disintegration. They had just 8 years from the start of the new long wave upswing in 1999, to begin to rebuild, before that process was interrupted by the financial crash of 2008, and the imposition of austerity alongside massive money printing to hold back the upswing, and divert money into the inflation of asset prices. The forces of Socialism are in a similar condition to that faced by Marx and Engels in 1848, and which continued until the 1890's, when mass socialist parties were developed. The socialists, then as now, had to enter the existing bourgeois parties that the workers supported, in order to gain the ear of those workers, and try to break them away from those bourgeois parties.
But, as Engels makes clear in his description of that tactic, the whole point involved maintaining this organisational and political independence, as a wing of such parties, in order to be able to act as a pole of attraction, around which the core of the new mass parties could be constructed. In looking at the LP, today, and considering the tactic of the United Front and Workers' Government, Paul makes several serious mistakes. Firstly, he confuses the United Front with the Popular Front, and so, also, confuses a Workers Government with a Popular Front government. But, Paul also confuses form and substance.
There is a difference between social-democracy – even progressive social-democracy – and socialism, and so also between social-democrats and socialists – even reformist socialists. Social-democracy is a bourgeois ideology. It has no desire to go beyond capitalism to socialism, because it believes that capitalism represents the end of history, that is the best of all possible worlds. It believes that capital and labour are partners in this best of all possible worlds, and that their mutual interests are served by it. All that is required is for these mutual interests to be recognised and mediated. Its not surprising it believes this, because it is the ideology of this large middle-class layer whose role in society is to manage such mediation. Socialists, however, believe that this mutual interest between labour and capital is ephemeral, and hides the actual, fundamental and sharpening contradiction between the interests of capital and labour.
As Marx sets out in Wage Labour and Capital, it is certainly true that the best conditions for labour exist when capital is itself expanding, and it expands fastest when it has large profits to fund such expansion. And, also, as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky describe, capitalism is required to develop the productive forces to a level whereby Socialism becomes possible. However, the fundamental contradiction is that, precisely because the best conditions for labour exist when capital expands most rapidly, it is at that point that wages rise most, and begin to squeeze profits. But, capital is only advanced in order to produce profits, and so, when profits are squeezed in this way, it is a manifestation of the fact that capital has been overproduced. Not overproduction in the sense that there are absolutely too many commodities produced, or too much means of production, but too much capital relative to labour, too much to be able to act as capital. Far from there being too much produced, many in society may lack even the minimum requirements, and far from there being too much means of production, there is not enough to raise output to levels required to ensure that such a level of basic existence can be achieved.
The overproduction is an overproduction of capital, i.e. it is production that does not increase profit, which may be because no additional surplus value is itself produced, or else any additional surplus value cannot be realised in sale, or both. And, so, this capitalist society does not prioritise the needs of society, but the need to produce these expanding profits. As Marx puts it,
“Given the necessary means of production, i.e. , a sufficient accumulation of capital, the creation of surplus-value is only limited by the labouring population if the rate of surplus-value, i.e., the intensity of exploitation, is given; and no other limit but the intensity of exploitation if the labouring population is given. And the capitalist process of production consists essentially of the production of surplus-value, represented in the surplus-product or that aliquot portion of the produced commodities materialising unpaid labour. It must never be forgotten that the production of this surplus-value — and the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or the accumulation, forms an integrate part of this production of surplus-value — is the immediate purpose and compelling motive of capitalist production...
The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move — these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means — unconditional development of the productive forces of society — comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production.”
(Capital III, Chapter 15)
It manifests itself as a crisis of overproduction of capital.
"There would be absolute over-production of capital as soon as additional capital for purposes of capitalist production = 0. The purpose of capitalist production, however, is self-expansion of capital, i.e., appropriation of surplus-labour, production of surplus-value, of profit. As soon as capital would, therefore, have grown in such a ratio to the labouring population that neither the absolute working-time supplied by this population, nor the relative surplus working-time, could be expanded any further (this last would not be feasible at any rate in the case when the demand for labour were so strong that there were a tendency for wages to rise); at a point, therefore, when the increased capital produced just as much, or even less, surplus-value than it did before its increase, there would be absolute over-production of capital; i.e., the increased capital C + ΔC would produce no more, or even less, profit than capital C before its expansion by ΔC. In both cases there would be a steep and sudden fall in the general rate of profit, but this time due to a change in the composition of capital not caused by the development of the productive forces, but rather by a rise in the money-value of the variable capital (because of increased wages) and the corresponding reduction in the proportion of surplus-labour to necessary labour."
Capital responds to the crisis of overproduction (excess capital relative to labour supply/social working-day) by replacing labour - increasing “the rate of surplus-value, i.e., the intensity of exploitation”. Instead of simply introducing additional machines (extensive accumulation), it introduces new types of machines and technology that raises productivity (intensive accumulation), and so replaces labour creating a relative surplus population, which causes wages to fall, and profits to rise, thereby ending the crisis of overproduction. Instead of introducing new technologies that raise productivity so as to lighten the burden of the labourer, or so as to produce more of the necessaries that society requires, for a civilised existence, it introduces this technology to replace labour, which, in the short-term, leads to unemployment, undermining those “best conditions” for labour, and causing a fall in wages, and even a fall in living standards, with consumption levels falling rather than rising. But, this is what is required for capital to increase its profits once more, and thereby to resolve the crisis of overproduction. For social-democracy, labour must always be subordinated to the needs of capital.
Socialists reject that limitation on the development of the productive forces, and ability to meet the needs of society that capitalism imposes, because of its need to continually increase profits. (And, when private capital is replaced by socialised capital in the latter part of the 19th century, the laws of capitalist competition, still impose this requirement.) That is true whether the socialist is a reformist or a revolutionary. If we take the reformist socialists of the early twentieth century, be they the Mensheviks or those of the German SPD, and other socialist parties, they all accepted this reality, of the need to go beyond the limitations of capitalism. They indeed all traced their ideas back to Marx and Engels – though as Draper describes the truth was that the ideas of Lassalle and the Fabians were more pervasive, which is why all the reformist parties ended inevitably on a path that led away from socialism to social-democracy. The dispute was over how to arrive at that destination.
So, when Paul talks about these concepts such as the United Front and Workers Government, its important to distinguish exactly what political forces we are talking about. When the Bolsheviks talked about the United Front, they were talking about a front of reformist socialists and revolutionary socialist parties. When they talked about a Workers' Government they were talking about a government comprising the reformist socialist parties alongside the progressive social-democrats, who claimed to be representatives of the working-class. The reality is that the Labour Party, and all the other social-democratic parties across Europe, today, would not fall into any of those categories, certainly in respect of their parliamentary representation.
Today's Labour Party is not the equivalent of the Mensheviks or the reformists of the German, French or Italian Socialist Parties of the early twentieth century. If today's LP was transposed to Russia in 1917, it would be more closely aligned with the Kadets or Octobrists, i.e. the openly bourgeois parties. Most of its Shadow Cabinet consists of people for whom the Bolsheviks would have been demanding that Kerensky remove them from his Provisional Government! So, discussing the United Front or a Workers' Government, in relation to today's LP is wholly misplaced. Marxists' orientation in the LP, today, has one focus, and one focus only, and that is to gain the ear of the working-class, and to mobilise them in opposition to the bourgeois ideas that dominate the party. That is the direct opposite of the course of action that Paul proposes.
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