The Narodniks believed that capitalism, in Russia, was an accident, the result of the country going down a wrong path from which it must be returned to its natural path of development. To that end, they drew up a series of Utopian schemes, which they put forward in the hope that they could get the Russian intelligentsia and society to adopt them as policies to be pursued by the state. The problem, here, was quite simple, the dominant social class, in Russia, was now the bourgeoisie. It was bourgeois relations upon which the fortunes of the state depended. It was bourgeois ideas that dominated the intelligentsia and the state, because it was the children of the bourgeoisie that occupied the positions within these institutions, which were linked to the bourgeoisie by a thousand other social ties.
Russia had not, somehow, accidentally stumbled into capitalism, as the Narodniks claimed. Commodity production had come to dominate the economy, and, as a result, competition meant that some producers accumulated money, which became transformed into capital, because other producers were ruined, and became wage labourers employed by that capital. The Russian state did not pursue capitalist policies, because it was somehow confused, or acting against the interests of the nation, but because it was now a capitalist state; its personnel imbued with bourgeois ideas, and tied to the bourgeoisie by a myriad of social and other ties. It acted in the interest of the bourgeoisie, because, for it, the interests of the bourgeoisie were the interests of society.
There was only one class, one social force that could put forward a different view of society, and that was the working-class, and specifically the industrial proletariat that had been completely severed from the roots of natural economy, and previous modes of production. It owned only its labour-power, which it now had to sell as a commodity. But, the industrial proletariat, in Russia, was very small – indeed, in much of Western Europe, it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that it grows to a substantial size – and the working-class does not automatically, or quickly, arrive at this level of class consciousness; it has to go through a lengthy preparatory stage, during which it increases in size and solidarity, as a consequence of continued capitalist development. Capitalism itself must develop to a stage where not only has it socialised labour and production, but has also socialised capital itself, abolishing capital as private property, expropriated by socialised capital, which is the collective property of the associated producers, and over which it requires them only to wage a political struggle to demand they be granted their rightful control.
But, the daily existence of the workers mitigates against them arriving at this class consciousness, because, as capital automatically reproduces itself, it also automatically reproduces the social relations on which it rests, and, thereby, the bourgeois ideas that flow from those relations. The workers require a revolutionary party that acts as the memory of the class, and continually reminds them of the lessons it has learned, and peels back the superficial appearances of bourgeois reality to expose to them the underlying relations and nature of their exploitation and condition.
Socialism, therefore, can never be achieved by expecting that the workers will somehow arrive at this level of understanding and consciousness spontaneously, as a result of industrial struggle for better wages and conditions – Economism – because there is nothing in such struggle that exposes the underlying reality. On the contrary, as Marx describes in “Value, Price and Profit” whilst workers have to engage in such struggles to prevent sinking below the value of labour-power, and to maintain a level of dignity and organisation, such struggles are, by their nature, bourgeois, and reinforce bourgeois ideas. They start from an acceptance of bourgeois relations, and so bourgeois ideas, of the nature of labour as wage labour. Remaining within those bourgeois constraints, it limits workers only to the struggle of any other commodity owner, a distributional struggle to get the best market price for the commodity they are selling.
“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. 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!"”
(Value, Price and Profit)
In the latter part of the 1890's, and into the early 1900's, Lenin had to fight an increasing struggle against Economism, which was growing amongst the younger members of the Marxists. It forms a significant element of his argument in “What Is To Be Done?” In the 1960's and 70's, this kind of Economism dominated not only the Communist Party, but also the left sects such as IS/SWP and Militant. Today, nearly all of the left is characterised by this kind of Economism, including where it finds political expression as Lassallean/Fabian statism.
The real class struggle, as Marx describes above, is not about these trades union struggles/distributional struggles, or their reflection in demands for corresponding reforms or income redistribution, but about a political struggle over forms of property and control over that property. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, the Communists, “bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” Capitalism itself, as Marx says, in Value, Price and Profit and in Capital, creates the forms of property – large-scale, socialised capital – that is the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. It provides the objective material basis of socialism. What is required is the subjective element, the recognition, by the working-class, that this property is its collective property, and the determination, on that basis, to exert their rightful control over it.
In the case of the worker cooperatives this comes automatically. The workers see straight away that this capital is their collective property, even if they take out bank loans to buy some of it, and, from the start, exert their collective, democratic control over it. As Marx puts it in his Inaugural Address, this is a powerful ideological tool that teaches workers far more than any number of strikes or political lectures.
“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 labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the cooperative 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.”
But, the expansion of such cooperatives is necessarily slow, and, in the interim, they cannot change the workers' fundamental position as subordinated to capital. The real key is the other form of socialised capital – the joint stock company or corporation. Once workers understand that these companies, like cooperatives, are also not the private property of any individuals, but legal entities in their own right, entities that may borrow money, from share and bondholders, or from banks, then they can see that these companies are objectively no different than their own cooperatives. If no individuals own this socialised capital, and shareholders are only creditors, like bondholders or banks, then there is no grounds for shareholders having any control over that capital. It is the company that has control, and should make decisions, but the company can only rationally be the associated producers within it, i.e. the workers and managers. The control exercised by shareholders is an anomaly, and should be anathema even to bourgeois property law, except, of course, that that law is created by the bourgeoisie itself, i.e. by those shareholders, and enforced by their state.
The Lassalleans and Fabians talk about nationalising this or that business or industry, as though the capitalist state would ever do such a thing on request from socialists. To cover their shame in making such pleas to the capitalist state, they tag on to their supplications the demand that the capitalist state also give workers control over this nationalised property. Such pleas are, ideologically, the same as the Utopian schemes put forward by the Narodniks. They are pleas to a capitalist state to act in ways that are against the interests of the bourgeoisie it exists to serve, and those that make such pleas have absolutely no means of forcing the state to comply with their wishes.
The demand for nationalisation is just an extension of the Economism such trends exhibit in general. The demand arises because this or that business has gone bust, or failed in some other way. The demand for nationalisation is really just an Economistic demand that the workers involved remain employed, and exploited by capital, and so to continue to be paid wages. It is simply a bourgeois demand that they now be exploited by a more powerful state capital rather than by a privately owned capital, or a capital controlled by private shareholders. The tagged on demand for workers control is simply a ridiculous pious wish, designed to deceive the workers. As Trotsky puts it,
“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 nationalisation by the bourgeois state of various branches of industry and their transfer into the hands of the workers’ organizations.”
“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 realised 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. Such subserviency, as experience shows, can last for a long time: depending on the patience of the proletariat...
What state regime corresponds to workers’ control of production? It is obvious that the power is not yet in the hands of the proletariat, otherwise we would have not workers’ control of production but the control of production by the workers’ state as an introduction to a regime of state production on the foundations of nationalisation. 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 falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to the period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word.
If the bourgeois is already no longer the master, that is, not entirely the master, in his factory, then it follows that he is also no longer completely the master in his state. This means that to the regime of dual power in the factories corresponds the regime of dual power in the state.”
Of course, raising the property question involves raising the question of workers' control, but for the reason Trotsky describes, it can only be raised as a general demand, a political demand around which the entire working-class is mobilised, i.e. as an element of a real class struggle, not individual industrial struggles. It can only be raised in the way suggested above that workers demand that, for all socialised capital, the control exercised by shareholders be ended, and democratic control by the associated producers be put in its place. That is the way the property question is raised an element of class struggle. Otherwise, it is simply a demand raised to cover a reformist demand for nationalisation by the capitalist state, a demand designed to deceive the workers, and to subject them, via class collaboration on the part of the labour bureaucracy.
But, raising such demands other than in conditions of dual power, of a revolutionary situation can only mean either this latter interpretation, or else it is a pointless Utopian demand, like those of the Narodniks, completely divorced from reality, and thereby also reactionary. In forms where it means that some radical social-democratic, or socialist government act in this way from above, it is dangerous, because it would mean that it would provoke a vicious backlash from the state, and, in any case, unless the workers themselves seek to pursue such a course of workers' control it is unrealisable, other than being a means by which a petty-bourgeois layer of technocrats and bureaucrats seek to substitute themselves for the class itself.
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