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| Statues of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Berlin |
The disinterring of Marx today is now common, even if the body dug up
is usually not that of Marx but imposters like Zizek who claim to be
Marxists but are really academics who never organise the workers
struggle. Marx had to suffer many attacks in his own lifetime and
further indignities in death as Marxism was plagued by a constant stream
of caricatures and misrepresentations, the most important being that
Marxism was never a ‘science’ and has no relevance today. Some even
attack Marxism as a utopia that diverts us from making meaningful,
incremental, progressive ‘change’.
Danylmc writing in the
Dimpost
blog decides after a quick skimming of Marxism that it never was
scientific and moreover is counter-revolutionary because it calls for
“smashing capitalism” rather than evolving through many iterations into a
new, better society…or not. For some reason Danylmc does not include
the ‘labour theory of value’ (LTV) as one of Marx’s utopian ideas gone
wrong. Maybe because Marx did not originate this theory as it was a
fundamental plank of the political economy of his day. Either Danylmc
understands the LTV as Marx does, or not. Either way by accepting it he
fails to see that it makes a mockery of his argument.
[i]
So let’s see what Marx means by science. Was he copying 19
th
century chemistry and reducing social revolution to a law like water
turning into steam at the right heat as Danylmc claims? No,
social science
has to account for the interaction of conscious subjects and their
material environment. For example, humans learn over millennia how to
boil water more efficiently (that is conserving labour time) a reality
that the young Marx observed when as a radical journalist he campaigned
for the right of landless peasants to collect firewood in the Rhineland.
This experience proved that social interaction is not the random
behavior of individuals because humans’ actions are ultimately
determined by their social relations. And it was capitalists that burnt
coal to heat water to drive their industrial revolution so as to exploit
human labour power more efficiently/profitably and even enable workers
to buy firewood or coal as a commodity.
So let’s go back to the make-or-break LTV. The LTV was a theory
shared by bourgeois political economy which observed the flood of
peasants off the land into the factories. Marx also began with the
presupposition that humans must reproduce themselves by means of their
labour. Marx was trained in philosophy and law which meant he had to
test the meaning of the words he used against the social reality. What
turned Marx onto the scientific analysis of society was the failure of
Hegelian philosophy to account for the actions of humans as part of
God’s plan. Similarly he rejected the bourgeois political economy that
turned social history into a march of human progress culminating in the
rise to power of the bourgeoisie.
The difference between natural and social science is that in the
latter the scientist is a partisan or ‘interested’ observer. It was
Marx’s taking the side of peasant wood collectors in the class struggle
that converted him from a bourgeois intellectual into a proletarian
intellectual. He did this by critiquing political economy and
developing the presupposition of the LTV into the Law of Value (LOV).
[ii]
Political economy was empiricist and merely described value as the
total labour embodied in commodities. Since this commodity production
resulted from the contributions of workers, capitalists and landlords,
each ‘class’ could claim a ‘fair share’ of the total labour/value as
wages, profits and rents. It justified this expropriation of labour
value as a reward to capital and land for the use of private property in
the process of production. This empiricist rationale was elevated by
Hegel into a divine mission. For Marx, it was one thing to defeat the
bourgeois political and economic holy rollers in philosophical class
struggle, but it would not stick unless the empiricist bourgeois
political economy that justified the exploitation of labour in the
process of production was blown apart by a scientific critique.
Marx’s Scientific Method
Marx’s method borrowed from Hegel in moving from concrete appearances
to abstract essence and then back to the reconstituted concrete. Hegel
observed the social classes, politics, state and law of German society
of the early 19
th century as a contradictory unity of
appearances accompanying the rise of capitalism. The appearances formed a
real historical society (the market lives!) but the essence which
explained them was the spirit of God. The Political economy of Smith
and Ricardo also took the appearance of developing capitalism but
appealed to the idealism of
material progress to resolve social contradictions into the universal freedoms of bourgeois society.
Marx put Hegel on his feet and argued that the essence was not ideal
but material. God and material progress were just idealist slogans used
by the bourgeoisie to claim it represented the interests of all classes
and nations. In the
Critique of the German Ideology, Marx and
Engels settled their accounts with the followers of Hegel. History was
one of social revolutions in which successive
modes of production made
up of social relations of production where the ruling class extracted
the surplus product of the producing class and justified it by invoking
Gods. Each mode reached its limits when the ruling class oppression of
the producing class produced a rising class consciousness leading to a
social revolution. Capitalism would follow course and give rise to its
successor, communism. For the young Marx this was still a philosophical
critique. The real task of proving it scientifically began. Hegelian
Marxists typically arrest at this point and explain history as a
‘lawful’ transition without any conscious subjective intervention unless
it is the will to power of the heroic individual!
Here we have to begin with
Capital Vol 1 and read it from
start to finish. It is no good relying David Harvey as a guide because
he recommends leaving the ‘difficult’ Part 1 for ‘later’. Marx
deliberately started
Capital with the concept of the commodity
because it was the “cell” of capitalism. His method for arriving at the
essence of value was to abstract from surface appearances of equal
exchange down to the commodity ‘cell’ and then move back to the surface
where the appearances are now understood as the result of “many
determinations”. The class struggles on the surface now reveal their
deeper causes. The commodity had a dual character, a contradictory unity
of use-value and exchange value. Labour power could be exchanged for
its value and at the same time create surplus value as it was the only
commodity to produce more value than its own value.
How did this come about? The primitive accumulation of
pre-capitalist material wealth in the colonial world gave capitalism its
kick start in Europe. But capitalism as a mode of production did not
come into full existence until commodity production was generalised by
commodifying labour power of
wage labour as a result of creating a class of landless labourers. The
secret, hitherto denied by political economy, was that the use-value of
labour power to the capitalist was defined as its capacity to create
more value that its exchange value, i.e. the wage needed to reproduce it
daily.
What is scientific about this discovery? The dual nature of the
commodity allowed Marx to resolve an anomaly in political economy where
labour
as the equivalent of value did not exchange at its value. It if
exchanged at its value capitalism would be all wages and no profits.
Therefore political economy had to fiddle with its LTV to account for
this anomaly, adding qualifications to explain why some of labour’s
value ended up as profits and rent. Marx resolved this so that the LOV
explained the exploitation of labour-power and expropriation of
surplus-value during the process of production.
Capitalism was not an
equal opportunity society of the political economists assuming unequal
exchange could be corrected. Capitalism was inherently unequal and would
develop in a contradictory way until it could no longer reproduce
itself giving rise to the conditions for socialism.
Marx learned from both Hegel as well as Smith and Ricardo, critiqued
their errors, using a method of analysis that exposed their limitations
and laid the foundations for his own science. This was to be a
scientific revolution greater than those of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin
or Einstein. From henceforth all social knowledge would have to be
subjected to the rigorous methodology of the scientific method. Social
science not only incorporated natural science it had to explain the
constant interaction between society and nature where social classes
determine these relations within limits set by nature.
Marxism: science or utopia in Russia?
Danylmc writes:
“After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks were
very disappointed to learn that (a) history and (b) humans didn’t work
like this at all. Firstly their revolution happened in an
underdeveloped, mostly agrarian economy, not an advanced economy like
Marx predicted. Second, the revolution failed to spread so they were
stuck with ‘Communism in one country’. Thirdly, it turns out that if you
have a capitalist economy – even a very basic one like Tsarist Russia –
and you take away the market and put the workers in charge of the means
of production (and execute anyone trading on the black market) then
instead of transforming itself into a utopia because of the scientific
laws of history and the malleability of human nature, the entire economy
collapses, and people in cities end up eating their own children to
stay alive, and everyone who can still walk rises up and joins the
capitalist counter-revolutionaries trying to overthrow you.”
This is a complete travesty of what happened in Russia. First as we
have seen assumptions (a) and (b) bear no relation to Marxism. Marx did
not hold to an idealist view of capitalism following inexorable laws
would arrive at a communist utopia. Rather class conscious workers must
overthrow it and seize power. He excoriated the German Social Democrats
in the 1870s for thinking that capitalism would evolve peacefully into
socialism by means of objective laws of progress. We have seen that
Marx’s scientific method makes class struggle the driver of capitalist
development. It motivates the contradiction that causes periodic crises
which we can see today are now terminal since the bourgeoisie can no
longer overcome these crises without the destruction of humanity and
nature. Either we the workers become the gravedigger of capitalism, or
capitalism buries us all.
We only know this because Marxism as a revolutionary science proves
that the dual nature of the commodity contains the fundamental
contradiction between use-value (nature) and exchange value (capital)
that is the basis for determining what happens at the surface of
capitalist society. Class struggle over the rate of exploitation at the
point of production explains class struggle at the level of the market,
nation state and international relations.
[iii]
In Capital Vol 3 Marx shows how the LOV is the basis of other ‘laws of
motion’ accounting for development of capitalist production, crises of
falling profits, and the drive to expand capitalist production on a
world scale. Here he sets out his theory of crisis whereby the periods
of boom and bust, the concentration and centralisation of capital, and
the widening income gap between capital and labour are explained. While
both he and Engels anticipated many of the developments of capitalism in
the 20
th and 21
st centuries, we have to look to
the work of succeeding Marxists to see how they used his finished and
unfinished work as the basis for the testing and validating of his
scientific theory.
Lenin finished off Marx’s unfinished volumes in one small pamphlet entitled “
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”.
To do this he had to go back to Vol 3 and show how the state, world
market and international relations were explained by the laws of motion
underlying crisis and counter-crisis tendencies motivated by class
struggle. This enabled him to break with the mechanical evolutionary
Marxism of the 2
nd International in Europe and the Mensheviks
in Russia. The result was Bolshevism, the concrete application of
Marxist revolution that made the revolution in Russia, the “weakest link
in imperialism”, and which led the 3
rd Communist International.
The most important breakthrough of Lenin was to recognise the need to
form a proletarian party as the mechanism of uniting theory and
practice to test the scientific method of Marx. Without Marxism that
penetrated the veils of capitalist exploitation revealing the essence of
the fundamental contradiction contained in the commodity, then workers
would lack the “consciousness” necessary to fight to overthrow
capitalism and replace it with socialism. While Marx had stood as the
scientific ‘authority’ against the lapses into bourgeois idealism within
the ranks of the workers movements, it remained trapped in by bourgeois
ideology and constantly lapsed back into class struggle over the
distribution of ‘fair shares’ that did not require the overthrow of
capitalism.
The result was the Bolshevik party that was as response to the
extreme contradiction between European imperialism and the old Tsarist
feudal regime. The party became the Marxist scientist that tested theory
in practice in the “weakest link” of imperialism in Russia. The old
evolutionary Marxist utopia was destroyed in theory and practice. The
February Revolution that began as the strike of women textile workers
threw up a bourgeois Provisional Government which was incapable of
breaking from British and French imperialism. It proved this by
collaborating with the Tsarist General Kornilov in a Tsarist Coup. The
Bolsheviks quickly drew the conclusion that the workers must take the
road to socialist revolution in the almost bloodless October
insurrection.
Far from ‘disappointment ‘resulting from the Revolution it inspired
world wide support from workers who rose to defend it when it was
invaded and isolated by the invasion of the imperialist nations. The
Bolsheviks already knew that socialism could not be built in one
country, let alone a backward isolated country. The survival of the
Russian revolution depended on the spread of revolution and they knew in
advance what was necessary to make this happen. They formed the
Communist International to organise Bolshevik type parties, the worker
scientists, in every country. Only the failure of workers to break from
their ties to the bourgeoisie and its ideology of market equality to
form such parties capable of leading revolutions, allowed the
imperialist ruling classes to hang onto their decrepit capitalist system
and condemning the revolution to degenerate into a Stalinist caricature
of “communism”.
The Bolshevik Revolution still stands as the most advanced struggle
of the international proletariat against the reactionary utopia of
rotting, dying capitalist society. If we look around the world today we
can see the bourgeoisie “eating their own children by the million” as
they fight to our death to hold onto the stolen wealth of generations of
workers. Our hope must be in the revolutionary science of Marxism,
embodied in the international revolution party, capable of putting into
practice the scientific program that can guide our struggle to take
power and replace capitalism with socialism.
NOTES
[i]
The Labour Theory of Value was the issue in Marx’s “The Modern theory
of Colonisation” Chapter 25 in Capital Vol 1. Mr Peel emigrated to the
Swan River (Perth, Australia today) with capital, machines and men. The
men shoot through to the bush to become independent producers, so Mr
Peel’s machines rust and his land lies unproductive. Never mind, Mr Peel
does what any good capitalist does when he cannot profit from the
exploitation of labour-power, he becomes a land agent and speculates in
founder’s rent.
[ii] The LOV means that value equals the
socially necessary labour time
required to produce it. Socially necessary labour time equals the
average time of work enabling wages to buy the average commodity basket
to allow the working family to live at the average standard of living.
[iii]
Vol 2 examines the circuit of capital including the transformation of
value into prices in the market while holding competition constant. Vol
3 moves to the more concrete level of competition among capitalists in
the market. He had planned 3 other volumes on the State, World Trade and
International Relations to return to the most complex concrete level of
reality which he never completed drafting.
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