But, as Hal Draper, points out, in The Two Souls of Socialism, it was not this concept of Marx that ever dominated the labour movement, including those parties that claimed to be “Marxist”, but the ideas of social-democracy, as presented by the Lassalleans, and the Fabians. The epitome of this middle-class, managerial social-democracy, is state socialism, again, therefore, perfectly aligned with the concept of national interest, via the capitalist nation state, which is why it so often appears in demands for nationalisation by the capitalist state, for policies of economic nationalism, such as The Mosely Memorandum, or the AES. It is why, as Draper sets out, the Fabians like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Shaw could become uncritical apologists for Stalinism, because “national socialism” is the rational conclusion of social-democracy. In fact, its not socialism at all, but simply state capitalism.
Unfortunately, for them, even by the end of the 19th century, capital had expanded to such an extent, following the development of socialised capital, and the limited liability company, in 1855, that the nation state had become too small a politico-economic unit for capital in its imperialist form of huge monopolies and oligopolies, requiring similarly huge single markets, within which a level playing field of property laws, taxes, currency and so on existed, as companies became multinational and transnational corporations. The nation state, one of the progressive developments of capitalism in the 18th and early 19th century, and vital for its growth, had itself now become a reactionary fetter on the further development of capital, which also, therefore, made a mockery of the continued economic nationalism of social-democracy, and even more the concept of national socialism, as reflected in the Stalinist theory of Socialism In One Country, that flows from it. Defence of the nation state, and the associated ideas of national independence, national self-determination and so on, were, now, utopian and reactionary, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks set out.
The Second Internationalists, referred to themselves as “Social-Democrats”, and, for the most part of them, this was an accurate description, even though they also claimed to be Marxists, which was not. As part of the Second International, those like Lenin and Trotsky, also called themselves “social democrats”, which, for those unfamiliar with the history, therefore, also adds to the confusion. In 1914, on the outbreak of WWI, this division between social-democracy (national socialism/state capitalism), and Marxism (international socialism) was also violently exposed, and the movement split along these lines, more or less, but not cleanly, because the latter also carried with it the baggage accumulated from years of infection by the ideas of social-democracy and statism.
Its worth pointing out, here, that whilst National Socialism, and specifically its manifestation as German Nazism, is described as “reactionary”, this is not the case. From a Marxist perspective, which analyses social development, objectively, on the basis of class, and property forms, National Socialism, whether of the type of Nazi Germany, of Stalinist Russia, or Mosely's Memorandum, and so on, is the rational form of social-democracy, as statised capital, and its planning and regulation, within national bounds. It adopts those methods and forms, precisely to defend capitalist property, and particularly, capitalist property in its mature form as large-scale, socialised capital. As the mature form of capital, it is progressive compared to earlier forms of capitalism.
To be reactionary, it would have to seek to overturn that mature capitalist form, and return to some earlier less developed form of property, such as the era of small-scale, privately owned capital, and all-out free competition, or independent, small scale commodity production, of the type that existed before the dominance of large-scale industrial capital. Social-democracy, including in its forms as National Socialism, is conservative, not reactionary. What is reactionary, is the demands of those representing the interests of the actual petty-bourgeoisie, who do want to turn back those developed forms of capitalist property, by advocating action to break up monopolies, to support small businesses and so on.
The fact that these voices are also, now, dominant within social-democracy, is a reflection of the material fact that, over the last 40 years, particularly in developed economies, large-scale capital failed to expand rapidly, partly due to it shifting to other parts of the globe, but also, because, conservative social-democracy encouraged the growth of fictitious rather than real industrial capital, as it sought to inflate asset prices bubbles, after the financial crash of 1987, to protect the interests of the ruling class of speculators that now owns its wealth in this paper form, rather than in the ownership of real capital. I had predicted such developments back in 1983.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx sets out the roots of these ideas, and makes this distinction. The bourgeoisie as it smashed apart feudal society had been revolutionary, but, having done so, and established itself, it becomes not reactionary, but conservative, seeking to preserve its new dominant position. For it, it is the end of history. Marx sets out, the economic ideas that flowed from it, in the form of “fatalist economists” such as Adam Smith and Ricardo. They saw any deprivations suffered by workers as temporary, and Marx says, largely, in the first period of capitalist production, the workers saw things that way too, and were right. Following on from them were the humanitarian and philanthropic schools, which seeks to ameliorate the bad side of capitalism, and forms the basis of the ideas of social-democracy. Marx makes clear that these ideas are the ideology of the bourgeoisie.
The matter becomes one of a moral question of “good” and “bad”, of eliminating the bad side of phenomena, and within this can also be seen the roots of the ideas of “lesser-evilism”, and “my enemy's enemy is my friend”, which characterises the approach of the social imperialists. If the focus is on only eliminating the “bad” side of phenomena, rather than moving beyond the phenomena itself, then its justifiable to align with the less “bad”, the lesser evil for that purpose. But, Marx also sets out the problem of this approach, in responding to Proudhon, whose entire method of explaining history was based upon this moralistic dualism of eliminating the “bad” side of phenomena. It is one continuous series in which, by eliminating the “bad” side of phenomena, a new “bad” arises from the antidote used to eliminate the first. Marx quotes Proudhon to demonstrate this, and in it can be seen the approach of Sismondi, and other moralists, in which ideas divide into two parts, one of “useful effects”, and the other of “subversive results”.
In it can be seen the method of the petty-bourgeois, moral socialists, employed down to today. Proudhon's method posed antithesis as antidote, but, this, then resulted in a new “subversive result”, requiring a new antidote, all of which is assumed to be leading to the resolution of all contradictions in Nirvana. In this can be seen the concept of “lesser-evilism”, adopted by the moral socialist, of picking a side based upon which is seen to be morally superior, at any given point. It was also the basis of the “stages theory” of the Mensheviks and Stalinists.
For social-democrats, it requires workers to always subordinate their interests to those of capital, whose development is seen as the basis of society, and also of the the workers' welfare. It can be seen, today, in the anti-worker/pro-capitalist policies of Macron that lead to increased support for Le Pen!! It is seen in Starmer's failure to support striking workers, trying to defend their living standards, under attack from an inflation caused by the social-democratic policies of liquidity injections over the last 30 thirty years, and its recent policy of boycotting Russian energy and grain supplies that has resulted in global energy and food prices soaring.
Trotsky also described this approach used by the petty-bourgeois Third Campists, such as Max Shachtman, as “practical politics”, which is necessarily unprincipled and opportunist, and leads to wild swings and zig zags as a new practical political position has to be put forward for each new event, even if this position contradicts previous positions, the continuity of which can, then, only be enforced by the use of bureaucratic censorship of dissent, and bowdlerisation and distortion of past positions, i.e. the method of the epigone, not the disciple.
“Hypotheses are made only in view of a certain aim. The aim that social genius, speaking through the mouth of M. Proudhon, set itself in the first place, was to eliminate the bad in every economic category, in order to have nothing left but the good. For it, the good, the supreme well-being, the real practical aim, is equality. And why did the social genius aim at equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because “humanity has successively realized so many separate hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis,” which precisely is equality. In other words: because equality is M. Proudhon's ideal.”
This is a perfect explanation from Marx, of the point I have made previously about the petty-bourgeois moralism of the Third Camp, as displayed by its different components, such as the SWP, on the one hand, and the AWL on the other. Both employ this method of Proudhon, described by Marx, and, as Marx describes, both start from different hypotheses, different categorical imperatives of the “good” they seek, or “bad” to remove, and, in both cases, socialism itself never enters the equation, other than as something relegated to some distant future stage. The SWP's “good” is “anti-imperialism”, whereas the AWL's “good” is liberal democracy, and its global agent “democratic imperialism”, though they, so far, refrain from the logical conclusion of that, drawn by Paul Mason and others, of advocating support for NATO, and its strengthening and rearmament.
Proudhon assumes that all history is driving towards this nirvana of equality, just as spirits repeatedly reincarnated progress, in each new life, to greater enlightenment.
“He imagines that the division of labour, credit, the workshop – all economic relations – were invented merely for the benefit of equality, and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it exists only between his fixed idea and real movement.”
But as Marx points out this idea of equality was not one that pervaded previous periods of history, and modes of production. It was one that only arose as a result of bourgeois society, and the equalisation, via competition, of all labour to a single universal labour, of equal exchanges of value and so on. And, this illustrates another point. Marx points out that far from eradicating “the bad” side of phenomena, it is always this side that is revolutionary. Serfdom was the “bad” side of feudalism, but it was from among the serfs that the independent commodity producers arose, and which differentiated into bourgeois and proletarians, creating the new bourgeois society. The wage labourer is the “bad” side of capitalism, but it is the struggle of the wage labourer that brings about Socialism.
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