DH Lawrence, his poem ‘Poverty’ – and what does it mean to be progressive?

Posted on March 13, 2015 by c21styork

DH Lawrence (1885-1930)

Marx understood perfectly well that capitalism was disruptive; that was what he liked about it, that, along with the possibilities that such disruption opened up in its wake.

The following is contributed by guest blogger TomG.

* * * *

DH Lawrence’s poem ‘Poverty’ was read to me by an old friend several years ago as a birthday gift. It turned out to be a very good one. I knew that DH Lawrence had a reputation as a right wing sympathizer; I also knew he hated the bourgeoisie and had written a poem, ‘How Beastly the Bourgeoisie Is’, to that effect. But aside from that poem I was unfamiliar with any other of his poetry. Beside liking ‘Poverty’ and appreciating my friend’s consideration of me I became sufficiently intrigued to pursue Lawrence’s poetry and ended up reading a collection of his shorter poems, Pansies, written toward the end of his life and which contained both ‘Poverty’ and ‘How Beastly the Bourgeoisie Is’. Both of these poems were written after the 1926 General Strike in the U.K. but before the rise of Hitler or the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, neither of which Lawrence lived to witness or offer an opinion about.

What is it about this man, who died in 1930, age 44, who hates poverty and the bourgeoisie with a visceral intensity (the bourgeoisie were not too keen on him either), and whose sympathies lie with the right? On a flippant note I think: this is the perfect man for today’s strange and politically discordant times. On a more serious note, on reading his poems, ‘Poverty’ in particular, I am reminded of the confusion that abounds today about just what terms like “progressive” and “reactionary” mean. Since my initial political schooling in the 1970’s, particularly in supporting the National Liberation Front in the Vietnam War and embracing revolutionary Marxism, these terms seem to have morphed into one another, the revolutionary left in the developed world has collapsed completely, the reformist left looks cadaverous and economic development and internationalism, once proud mantles of the left, are being championed more by the right. Go figure.

So looking at Lawrence’s poem became a vehicle for raising some very contemporary questions. But first, the poem.

Poverty

The only people I ever heard talk about my Lady Poverty
Were rich people, or people who imagined themselves rich.
Saint Francis himself was a rich and spoiled young man.

Being born among the working people
I know poverty is a hard old hag,
and a monster, when you’re pinched for actual necessities.
And whoever says she isn’t is a liar.

I don’t want to be poor, it means I’m pinched.
But neither do I want to be rich.
When I look at this pine-tree near the sea,
That grows out of rock, and it plumes forth, plumes forth,
I see it has a natural abundance.

With its roots it has a natural grip on its daily bread,
And its plumes look like a green cup held up to the sun and air
And full of wine.

I want to be like that, to have a natural abundance
And plume forth, and be splendid.

I remember being impressed when I first heard it and further readings deepened my appreciation. It captures the grim determination to survive that those subjected to the rule of the old hag need to have as they try to escape her grip; and it evokes their desire to flourish. One of its great strengths is its authentic tone; no privileged condescension here, Lawrence is speaking from a personal and very individual experience. This, I think, also proves to be its central weakness; more on this below. Its aims of natural abundance and splendour are modest; who could possibly deny the right to material comfort, to the personal and cultural growth Lawrence yearns for in the poems last lines, to those who either do not enjoy them or whose experience of them is tenuous or subject to the caprice of external forces?

But the question I returned to was how progressive is the poem? It would have been a pertinent question when Lawrence wrote it; and in today’s climate where confusion reigns about what it means to be progressive, it remains pertinent. In trying to answer this I ended up looking at the poem from two angles. The first of these is aspirational, deeply personal and all the more powerful because of it. The second deals with the ‘how to?’ question, the road to take to consign the old hag to the history books. The poem’s silence on this last point should not forbade us from taking this matter up for the silence contains suggestions which are implicit in the poem and are faithful to the man.

The Aspirational

Lawrence knew poverty first hand and arguably its effects contributed to his early death from tuberculosis; there is a bitterness, a knowing, which is intimately felt and communicated. Like those who feel her pinch now, the desire is to escape, to get out from under, to get ahead. This is a progressive yearning; it always has been and it remains so whether or not the pinch is felt in the so-called developed world or in the undeveloped or third world.

Lawrence’s attack on the romanticism accorded “lady poverty” by the privileged, his exposure of their hubris is also personally felt, hard edged and progressive. He wants the old hag removed, along with the pieties of her well heeled apologists; he wants to develop, to move forward (literally, to progress). No problems here. In spite of his generally right wing sympathies he could be speaking for workers everywhere; so too for those ground down and “pinched” by poverty over the millennia.

You take the high road and I’ll take the low road*

If Lawrence offers suggestions here, of what is the best path to take escape from the old hag’s grip, they are ambiguous to the point of being opaque; the poem is, after all a personal testament and not a manifesto. And I must confess to liking the way the question is left open. It is up to the reader to pick up and develop this should they be inclined to do so.

Being a communist I’m inclined to do so and somewhat absurdly perhaps the first person that popped into my mind when I read the poem was Richard Burton. The second was Deng Xiaoping, but more on him later. Actually the Burton reference is not so absurd: both he and D.H. were sons of miners who knew what it was to be pinched, and both became famous in their respective artistic fields, one being sympathetic to the left, the other the right. So while the reference to the dearly departed Welsh thespian is playful, it is also serious. Burton described himself as a socialist (a communist on occasions – because, he said, he didn’t exploit others) and justified his wealth and lifestyle by pointing out that everyone should be able to live like him. He was right. He too wanted to have a natural abundance and be splendid and it is something he thought all people should have. Greens and assorted pseudo-leftists, please take note.

If Marxists, of whatever stripe, are to promote beliefs in economic and social development and the cultural and personal transformations which spring from these, then we aim to level upwards, not downwards. We can argue about roads, (can of worms anyone?) but as soon as we concede, hands wringing, that development may have gone too far, too quickly, too disruptively; that it is ruinous to the environment or to ‘fragile eco-systems’ and must therefore be stopped; that the human footprint is bad; that modernity has sold us a lemon and so on, we cease to be progressive let alone Marxist and we give the old hag a legitimacy she does not deserve. We may remain concerned, decent and politically active souls involved in any number of things; and, heaven knows, there is a chance that some of these activities may even be progressive, but we ourselves are left at the starting blocks.

Marx understood perfectly well that capitalism was disruptive; that was what he liked about it, that, along with the possibilities that such disruption opened up in its wake. He understood too that in order to create a propertyless working class capitalist development dispossessed the mass of peasants and drove them into the arms of what was then (and is now, in developing countries) an unregulated free labour market with all the uncertainty, impoverishment, degradation and possibilities that accompanied this. But even before the Manifesto was written he also understood the need and opportunity that these same developments afforded the working class to organise and fight for political rights and economic concessions. And while it is true that he had wanted and expected the working class to recognise the need for revolutionary transformation – a task that still beckons – it is also true that the working classes in all advanced countries has been able to wrest significant democratic and economic concessions from their respective ruling classes, thereby ameliorating the kind of poverty that characterised the Industrial Revolution of Marx’s and Dickens’ time. While the old hag is still with us, she has been forced to give ground and develop the capacity to ‘shape shift’ as developed economies see a widening wealth gap accompanied by a decline in absolute poverty. In the undeveloped world she remains a traditional old hag while in the developed world she has also assumed a distinctly post modernist capacity.

Hit the road Jack …

Above I had indicated that Lawrence had made no suggestions about what road to take or whether there was even a choice of route. However such a view is disingenuous.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a silence is just a silence; but not here, not with DH Lawrence. While this has something to do with his right wing sympathies, leaving it at this is a cheap shot. More at issue is his individualism and how this individualism is largely cut off from his working class roots. There is, for example, a warmth and a fidelity to his past in Burton which one struggles to find in DH Lawrence. It is as though the experience has been too painful and embittering for him to want to do anything other than turn his back on it and escape. He doesn’t want to be rich, to be one of “them”; he just wants to get out from under and to flourish. This is a modest enough desire on the one hand, but it’s all about him (as opposed to him and his mates, and beyond this, his class) on the other. And this is where Deng comes in.

Two sayings of Deng’s stand out above all others: “Black cat, White cat? Who cares so long as it catches mice?”, and “To get rich is glorious”. The former was a metaphor for promoting capitalist economic development over socialist economic development, was uttered under proletarian rule and was designed to fudge. The latter is a blunt, honest admission of his position and was said under restorationist rule where the need to fudge had disappeared. Cats may not matter, but roads do and Deng knew it. So too did his protagonists, which is why they were after his hide.

DH Lawrence and Deng neither knew, or knew of, each other and at first take they make strange bedfellows. But there exists a certain similarity between them, between their yearnings and the politics each is drawn to or promotes. The similarity is around paths to development or what Lawrence may describe as escaping the clutches of the old hag. When Deng uttered his infamous ‘black cat, white cat’ line he was not meaning the he was indifferent as to what approach was taken or that he valued each equally – no post modernist relativism for this man or the newly emerging class that he represented. He had an antipathy to the ‘socialist road’ and favoured the ‘capitalist road’. His appeal was both to the new, privileged class that found organisational and political expression in the communist party (those in power taking the capitalist road) and to the narrow type of individualistic aspirations this class nourished. It is all about getting ahead any way you can and Deng’s way (the capitalist way) will get you there quicker because you won’t have to worry about who you step over, or step on, on your way to achieve your “glorious” prize.

So far as I am aware DH Lawrence did not take an active interest in political economy and it is not on this level that he sidles up to Deng. Lawrence mistrusted and was estranged from his class. The idea of collectivism, of collective action as a means of getting out from under – and in the process, of finding himself as an individual, a very different individual from the one he became – scared him viscerally. My guess is he feared being overwhelmed individually to the point of losing himself. Nietzsche’s modernist affirmation of individualism – that the individual has always had to struggle against being overwhelmed by the tribe and that nothing was more important than the privilege of owning oneself – would have struck a deep chord in Lawrence. It is his rejection of his class and of class politics as such that place Lawrence alongside Deng and places his poetry in a very different political camp than that of the great communist poets like Mayakovsky, Brecht or Hikmet.

DH Lawrence ‘s path to salvation, to getting out from under, is an individual and lonely one. While there is occasional reference made in his poetry to workers, the poor, the rich… there is no sense of attachment or connection and even less of trust. There is a chasm that separates him from his class of origin which finds expression in his poetry. His attempts to bridge this chasm, to really connect, fail. He reaches out to individuals, generally women, never to his class. I think he would have argued that he didn’t reach out to any class, certainly not to the bourgeois class that he despised. While this is true in one sense it also reinforces my point. In terms of class, or even community attachment, he felt and was isolated. This affected his yearnings and his means of escape. It leaves him and Deng sharing an affinity around roads. While the encouragement to get rich would have stuck in his craw the idea of black cat, white cat, of get me out of here any which way, would have appealed.

Lawrence’s mistrust of class, particularly the class consciousness and loyalty that the working class requires if it is to overthrow the capitalist class and to rule society itself, his elevation of individual aspiration above all else, is precisely the bait that Deng (and his equivalents elsewhere) rely upon and appeal to. One doesn’t have to agree with all of it – as mentioned above, Lawrence would have rejected the appeal to be a bourgeois fat cat – to be hooked and reeled in. This is one of the appeals of petty bourgeois individualism (to give it its PC, old school description); we may be genuinely appalled at the behaviour of those who stab others in the back, push or keep others down as they go for glory and we may even protest the fact. But so long as we abjure a class identification and solidarity and put all of our eggs into the narrow form of individuality that appealed to Lawrence, such protest would be as effective as pissing into the wind and the pull of that lone pine tree, flourishing and abundant, becomes impossible to resist. No wonder the tree appealed – it was as cut off from its kind as Lawrence was from his. This type of reaction would have suited Deng and the new Mandarins right down to the ground.

(As an aside, the term ‘petty bourgeois individualism’ certainly describes the kind of individualism Lawrence was drawn to. Unfortunately it’s a term that has been typically used by the radical (and, too often, censorious) left as a term of abuse designed to silence rather than to critically analyse. This is a pity because it tends to discourage communists from asking what kind of individualism, or perhaps more accurately, individualisms, will flourish in post revolutionary and communist societies and how we can recognise their beginnings and encourage their development under capitalism.)

Lawrence’s poem, then, is progressive in so far that it is identifying a problem and in aspiring to rise above them, but reactionary in the solution it implies – individual talent and enterprise cut off from its social base – a solution that, by definition, excludes most of those in the old hag’s grip, leaving them to their own devices as well as to hers.

It might be eighty-five years since Lawrence’s early death from tuberculosis but the question of what constitutes progressive, the question of ‘roads’, if you like, is contemporary and urgent. As mentioned above, this piece is not so much about Lawrence as it is about us. Marxists, there have been numerous incarnations, have been the inheritors and are now the remnants of a once vibrant revolutionary movement (or movements, depending on your stripe) who are now so marginalised and irrelevant to the day to day life and struggles of the modern working class and, very importantly, the individuals who make up this class, that we can now comfortably meet in the roomy confines of a broom closet. To become relevant enough to move out of the broom closet, let alone be credible as a challenge to bourgeois hegemony we need to rediscover what it means to be progressive as well as revolutionary (Marx is a good place to start) and be prepared to fight for it.

If some of the divergent strands of DH Lawrence’s poetry can be of assistance with this then, eighty five years on, we can happily acknowledge the contribution he is now making to a progressive cause.

*The reference is to an old Jacobin song The Bonnie Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond. While the Jacobin cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie was a dud one the song is correct to suggest that roads matter (and that the low road, the one the common folk were made to take, is the right one). The chorus, which has a very familiar ring, is reproduced here:

O ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will ne-er meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomon’.

If the Dalai Lama is Marxist, then so was Leo X111.

Posted on February 20, 2015 by c21styork

Last month at a university lecture in Kolkata, India, the Dalai Lama declared that, when it comes to “socio-economic theory”, he is a Marxist. His reasoning was as follows:

“In capitalist countries, there is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor. In Marxism, there is emphasis on equal distribution.”

The Dalai Lama joins a growing list of religious leaders, including Pope Francis, and other global celebrities, to declare an affinity with the notion of ‘equal distribution of wealth’, an idea that is widely (but wrongly) regarded as being Marxist. A leftist influenced by Marxism does not ask, “How can wealth be distributed more equitably?” but rather “Who produces the wealth in the first place?” And: “Why does socially produced wealth end up in the hands of the owners of the means of producing it (machines, factories, raw materials, etc) rather than in the hands of those without whom it could not have been generated?”

The positive side of the publicity is that Marxism is of international interest again, as a theory that helps to understand the dynamics of capitalism. This is happening at a time when, in the advanced economies, capitalism isn’t delivering the promised goods any more and growing numbers of people are pissed off.

But, one must feel some sympathy for old Karl. His exasperation with those who adopted the brand without understanding the content led him to declare 150 years ago that “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist”. Marxism is not, and has never been, about the equal distribution of wealth.

‘To each according to his contribution’: Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, written as a letter in 1875 in response to the draft platform of the German Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP), Marx pulled no punches when he described the idea of “fair distribution” being proposed by the SDAP as “obsolete verbal rubbish”, which ‘perverted a realistic outlook’.

He first tackles the proposal in the draft platform that “the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society” and asks: “’To all members of society’? To those who do not work as well? What remains then of the ‘undiminished’ proceeds of labor? Only to those members of society who work? What remains then of the ‘equal right’ of all members of society?”

Marx then dissects the notion of “proceeds of labor” in the sense of “a product of labor” with the co-operative proceeds “the total social product”.

“From this”, he points out, “must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc. These deductions from the ‘undiminished’ proceeds of labor are an economic necessity, and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity”.

He continues: “There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption. Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today. Only now do we come to the ‘distribution’… to that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society”.

As Marx notes, the “undiminished” proceeds of labor in the draft have now become converted into the “diminished” proceeds, “although what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society”.

And what of the obvious and natural inequality among individual workers? “… one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal”.

The Critique of the Gotha Programme is one of my favourite works by Marx. In it, he is thinking practically about how the future society based on socialism – ‘To each according to his contribution’ – and then communism – ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ – might develop. A most important point is that the new socialist society emerges from the old capitalist one and will still be marked by the culture and habits of the past. It will not be a wholly new system simply because the old social relations have been overthrown.

Accordingly, argues Marx, the individual producer in socialist society receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – “exactly what he gives to it”. He continues: “What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor…The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another”. Marx’s view of how this could be done involved certificates rather than money.

And, “the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values… a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form. Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case. In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”

Progressive taxation as a distributive measure

It is true that in the Communist Manifesto, Marx advocated a system of “heavy progressive or graduated income” taxation, which is the way wealth is redistributed by governments, and argued about, in capitalist societies today. But progressive taxation has now been part and parcel of capitalism for more than a century. It would be absurd to regard the Prussian government of 1891, when modern progressive taxation was first introduced, as Marxist; even if Emperor Wilhelm 11 did regard himself as “king of the mob”.

Progressive taxation imposes a greater rate of tax on the wealthier income-earners. In Australia, people who earn less than $18,200 per year pay no income tax, those who earn between $18,200 and $180,000 pay (an average of) 20%, while those who earn over $180,000 pay at a rate of 45%. It can be a way of redistributing wealth downwards, as in the case of funding the Welfare State, or upwards through subsidies and ‘bail-outs’ to the capitalist class. Labor parties, or right-wing social democratic parties, are particularly good at the latter. In Australia, under the former Labor government led by Prime Minister Gillard, subsidies amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars were handed out to the big capitalists. In 2012 alone, nearly $90 million went to General Motors Holden.

Mind you, the US experience shows that ‘right-wing’ parties, like the Republicans, are also extremely good at it too. Witness Bush jr’s $700 billion bail-outs to failed financial-services capitalists over there. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, or Labor or Coalition, they will do what it takes with workers’ money to keep zombie capitalism going. Naturally, people become disenchanted with a political party system of that kind and it becomes common to hear phrases such as “No matter who you vote for, you end up with a politician”.

It cannot be disputed that progressive taxation occurs under capitalism and does not in any way challenge the basic set of social relations defining it.

Rerum Novarum, distributism and fascism

By the measure of the notion of fair wealth distribution, the Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo X111, which was formulated in 1891 as a Catholic conservative response to the ills of capitalism and the ascendancy of secular democracy and the growing interest in socialism among the working classes, might also be regarded as ‘Marxist’. Rerum Novarum advocated ‘distributism’, a system in which means of production and property are distributed throughout society as in medieval times, as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. It was, and is, a desire to return to the era of the guild, an economy centred on small land holdings and artisan production, and based on class collaboration (ie, the peasants/workers ‘accepting their place’ in return for being exploited more nicely).

In Australia, the best known advocate of this system was B.A. Santamaria. In his book, The earth, our Mother (1945), the basis of the new small-scale distributive society was to be the family unit living as close to possible to self-sufficiency on the land. As in medieval times, prior to industrial capitalism, this society would be protected from the ‘corrupting’ influences of big cities and secular materialism by the unifying ‘higher’ spiritual values of the Church. The cooperation of owners and producers would also be cemented through the promotion of nationalism, adherence to custom and tradition, and ethnic solidarity (the folk or volk).

Much of this has resonance today in E. F. Schumacher’s Small is beautiful (1973) and the Green movement. The higher spiritual value from the viewpoint of green ideology is Gaia, or the idea of harmony with, and subservience to, Nature.

Not surprisingly, in the twentieth century, Rerum Novarum and distributism influenced fascist movements, including Italy’s with its corporatist form of tyranny under Mussolini. That influence is also seen in the right-wing social democratic and Christian Democratic commitment to systems of arbitration between workers and owners of means of production. Australia currently has one avowedly ‘distributionist’ parliamentary political party: the Democratic Labour Party. Appropriately, its representative in the federal Senate is a practitioner of one of the medieval era’s ‘mechanical arts’: blacksmithing.

Given that the medieval feudal past cannot – (and should not!) – return, then the quest for more equitable distribution of wealth ends up being a defence of the status quo, capitalism. To socialists influenced by Marxism, capitalism was a revolutionary leap forward from feudalism, because feudalism limited the capacity of individuals to expand their horizons and to be freer. It trapped people in what Marx called “rural idiocy”. At best, from a Marxist perspective, the issue of wealth distribution – the gap ‘between rich and poor’, as the media likes to put it – is useful because it can raise the real question of production rather than distribution, of how value is produced and how it is appropriated. And, from there, why the appropriators need to be expropriated.

The revolutionary nature of capitalism in the nineteenth century

To Marx, capitalism was revolutionary in the way it overturned feudal claptrap and “at last” compelled people “to face with sober senses their real conditions of life and their relations with their kind”.

In the Communist Manifesto, he put it poetically:

“The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air… “

Industrial capitalism created material conditions that cannot be unmade but only taken further, and social relations that can be overturned and transformed into something new and better.

Marxists are all for progress with a big ‘P’. It’s about the future, not yearning for a ‘small is beautiful’ rural past.

Distribution of wealth and relations of production

Under capitalism, with private ownership of means of production, and production for private profit, distribution of social wealth flows from the relations of production. The resultant scale of inequality can be no other way. Increases in inequality between rich and poor or, more to the point, between the owning class and the working class is part of the system of exploitation of wage labour itself, through which value is created.

In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx points out how,

“…even the most favorable situation for the working class, namely, the most rapid growth of capital, however much it may improve the material life of the worker, does not abolish the antagonism between his interests and the interests of the capitalist. Profit and wages remain as before, in inverse proportion. If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened…

“Growth of productive capital and rise of wages, are they really so indissolubly united as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not believe their mere words. We dare not believe them even when they claim that the fatter capital is the more will its slave be pampered. The bourgeoisie is too much enlightened, it keeps its accounts much too carefully, to share the prejudices of the feudal lord, who makes an ostentatious display of the magnificence of his retinue.”

On this last point, I think Marx would reconsider his position were he alive today. The ostentatiousness of the big bourgeoisie is sometimes astonishing – be it in the USA, the Russian Federation or China.

Marx would also be amazed at the material progress that has taken place, especially for the working class, but any great thinker from the nineteenth century would be the same. Marx acknowledged that the material conditions for the workers were improving even in his time. The important point is that the social chasm widens. (There are, of course, plenty of other reasons why capitalism sucks and has outlived its usefulness).

Labour theory of value: Marx meets the Jetsons!

The Marxist labour theory of value (LTV) explains how exchange value is created by labour’s interaction with nature and how, in the capitalist mode of production, wage labour is exploited. Bourgeois economists hate the theory because it lay at the heart of Marx’s analysis of the need for revolution. Capitalism reaches a point where it is a fetter on production – as we have seen for some decades now. Workers as a class without borders have nothing to lose by overthrowing this system based on their exploitation. Some real productivity can then occur, free from the constraints of production geared to the pursuit of private profit. For starters, we’ll be able to mass produce and have our own flying-cars!

I wanted to find a good summary of the theory that wasn’t too scant, and found the following at a non-Marxist economics blog called ‘Unlearning Economics’:

“Marx’s theory goes as follows: under capitalism, the value of commodities is determined by the ‘socially necessary’ amount of labour required to produce them (‘variable capital’), plus the current necessary cost of the capital used up in production (‘constant capital’). Fixed capital, such as machines, adds value at the same rate it depreciates, while raw commodities are used up completely and so add all of their value. Labour is generally paid less than the value it adds, and therefore is the sole source of profit.

“Here’s a brief mathematical example: say an hour of labour adds £1 of value, and a certain type of chair requires 8 hours of labour (‘labour-time’), uses £2 worth of wood and depreciates a saw worth £10 by 1/10th (i.e. after the saw is used 10 times it will break). It follows that, according to the LTV, the value of this chair is:

“(1/10)*£10 + (8*£1) + £2 = £11

“The only way the capitalist can make a profit is to pay the labourer less than the value he creates (for the most part, Marx suggested wages were determined by a social subsistence level). So if the wage is, say, £0.50, the capitalist will have £4 worth of profit. Contrary to what many think, this does not imply that capital-intensive industries will have lower rates of profit, as the rate of profit will tend to equalise between industries, ‘sharing out’ the total surplus value produced in the economy.

“The qualifiers of “necessary” costs and “socially necessary” labour are also important. It’s logically possible that a madman could purchase a saw for £100 for some reason, or that a lazy labourer could take 10 hours to make the chair, but this would do nothing to alter the resultant value of the chair. Marx was concerned with general rules, not specific cases, which could obviously fluctuate wildly as they are based on human behaviour.

“The main implication of this theory is that, since capitalists tend to use labour saving technology to increase productivity, over time they use relatively more constant capital – which cannot be a source of surplus – and this drives down the rate of profit: the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). Though the first capitalist who uses the technology will be able to sell at the market price, and thus gain, once the technology is widely adopted, the value of the commodity will decrease – a ‘fallacy of composition’. Again, this may not be true in particular industries at any one time, but it holds true across the economy as a whole. The result will be intermittent crises as capitalists face lower profits and try to increase them by pushing down wages, devaluing their constant capital, or through technological progress. Marx never predicted capitalism would collapse in on itself, though he did suggest that the working class would revolt as their wages were pushed down”.

Conclusion

A shared prosperity can only spring from common ownership of the means of production. It is not possible under capitalism. The system would grind to a halt. The capitalist would not invest and they would have no incentive to force alienated workers to keep their noses to the grind stone. The system of distribution cannot be separated from the system of ownership.

* * * *

INTERVIEW WITH A UKRAINIAN MARXIST AND SOLDIER FIGHTING IN THE DONBAS (from Ukraine Solidarity Campaign)

Posted on January 13, 2015 by c21styork

“In Russia right-wing conservatism and authoritarianism are not just a tendency but full reality”.

Reprinted with permission from ukrainesolidaritycampaign in Donbas, January 12, 2015

* * * *

anti-imperialist-action

Ukrainian soldiers in Donbas with the symbol of Anti-Fascist Action – and slogan ‘Anti-Imperialist Action’.

Andriy M. (the name was changed) is one of those Kiev white-collar leftists, who after some hesitations supported Maidan last winter and in spring took a decisive stand against the reaction in Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine. His stand finally led him to the Ukrainian army and now Andriy is taking part in the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation) in the Donbas. Having known this, “Nihilist” [1] asked him a few questions. Republished courtesy of Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski.

– How did you come to join the army? What unit is it?

– A very ordinary one, the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade. The one that was surrounded near Izvarino in July. In that time it was constantly being shot at, while suffering heavy personnel and equipment losses. Four hundred soldiers were even forced to withdraw to Russian territory, an outcome that generated a lot of media hype. Later the Ukrainian troops gained control of Savur-Mohyla barrow, liberated the surrounded brigade, and led it out of the ATO zone. In August-September near Melitopol the brigade was replenished with personnel and armored fighting vehicles. I then joined that brigade as a gunner and was mobilized in August. At the moment the brigade is again in the ATO zone.

– Could you have evaded military service?

– Technically yes, definitely I could. But already in March I went to the military commissariat and told the commander that the army can count on me. At that time Crimea was just annexed and the riots in the Donbas and Kharkov had begun. It was clear to me that a big war was coming. I was also convinced that Russian Army intrusion was a matter of a few weeks. For me the Putin regime, Russian occupation, and ideas of “Russian World” are absolutely unacceptable. Therefore it was impossible for me to remain a bystander. Then everything went a bit different than expected. Instead of regular army invasion, Putin began by using local paramilitary formations, but in reality it did not change the situation. Of course, lots of friends offered me “help” – shelter, leaving Kiev and going abroad, applying for a visa etc. I did not take such alternatives into consideration for reasons of principle.

– Do you characterize yourself as a leftist and a Marxist today?

– In respect of beliefs, a worldview – definitely yes. However, if one takes a point of view that sees Marxism as a political practice in the first place, I could be reproached that according to this criteria I am not a Marxist. I will not argue with that, but I just ask whether the Bolsheviks were Marxists when they were defending the Kerensky government from the Kornilov Revolt.

As a Marxist, I am aware of the fact that today a Ukrainian state is an unpleasant thing. There are very strong rightist conservative and nationalist tendencies there, with the power in the hands of big capital – the same as before, a powerful offensive is launched against the social component of state spending and workers’ rights. You know, as in the “socialist realist” art, the priority was depiction of a conflict between the good and the better, today in the Donbas there is a conflict between the bad and the worse. In Russia right-wing conservatism and authoritarianism are not just a tendency but full reality. The new expansionism in the sauce of the “Russian World” is a disgusting reactionary ideology that in reality is translated into war, violence, lies and hatred. In the Donbas all of them are in full bloom and trying to expand themselves. In my opinion, the main task is to stop it. Referring to the Kornilovism analogy, I will mention that a good friend of mine, a socialist, says that this war takes place between Petliuraites [2] and White Guards. This analogy is a bit lame, but in the situation when at war there is no communist side, for me as a Marxist the choice between White Guards and Petliuraites is obvious: in favor of the latter. At the same time it is evident that we are not even allies but just fellow travellers and just to the first crossroad.

– What do you think about Maidan? What was that?

– Maidan is a very complicated theme. On the one hand, it was a popular uprising and an experience of the self-organization of the masses, followed by the creation of volunteer battalions and a powerful and effective network of volunteers supporting those battalions, but on the other hand, there was an openly right-wing political wrapping. My approach to Maidan was changing from careful neutrality towards critical support following the infamous 16 January Laws. In any case, even the very right-wing wrapping was not sufficient to discredit the powerful democratic component of Maidan. In my opinion, it is enough to deserve acknowledgment. In any way, Maidan is in the past now; we live in the post-Maidan epoch and at the moment that mixture of progress and reaction, prepared on Maidan, is breaking down into its components: so much the better. It would be easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

– What is this war for you?

– Firstly, it is a huge tragedy for millions of people – sorry for the banality. The civilian population is being disinformed, deceived and terrorized by both sides. In those rare cases, when the dialogue with the local inhabitants is held, the majority of them ask: “Why have you come armed to our land?” When you answer: “To prevent separatists and Putin’s soldiers from coming armed to our land”, they do not accept it. However, this is a real goal. There are lots of aspects of this war and I clearly see political profits gained by the Ukrainian and Russian elites – the profits generated from sufferings of local population and Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. For me personally, such phantasms as a territorial integrity or a national statehood have no meaning and I do not see them worth life and blood. However, if Ukraine lays down arms, the war will not stop but imperialist Russia will just continue its bloody expansion undisturbed. It is an aggression and the aggressor must be stopped not appeased. Unfortunately, there is no good solution here. One has to choose between the bad and the worse.

– What are Ukrainian soldiers in the East fighting for?

– Every soldier is fighting for his own reasons. For example, my colleague, a Maidanist and romantic nationalist, Sanya is fighting for his fatherland and the centuries-old Ukrainian dream of independence. A robust peasant, Misha, is fighting so that no-one from abroad tells him, his children, and grand-children what rules they should live by. An electrician Serhiy is fighting only because he was mobilized and he is very unhappy with it. He is also personally unhappy with the commissar who sent him to the slaughter instead of somebody more suitable. However all that does not prevent him from performing combat missions with dignity. Some people do not hide that they are fighting for money – due to the poverty and unemployment in civilian life, going to war has become a noteworthy alternative for a number of people. The majority of soldiers are convinced that they are fighting for Ukraine, its territorial integrity, the right to live not on orders from Kremlin, preventing “Donetsk bandits” and “commies” for good from trying to govern the country. That is the main motivation.

– It turns out that the soldiers are anticommunists and it is a mass phenomenon. How could you explain it?

– There is a great temptation to shift the entire responsibility to the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU). The party of Petro Simonenko did really all that could have been done to make the word “communist” offensive. Years of serving the interests of oligarchs accompanied by the socialist rhetoric and last year’s explicit support for the enemy – all that leaves a trace. However, this is not only the matter of the KPU. The ancestors of numerous soldiers and officers were victims of Stalinist repressions or died during the Holodomor (extermination by famine). For each of them those things are not an abstraction or historical events but a tragedy that directly touched their families, a crime committed by the Soviet government. And through two decades the Ukrainian state propaganda machine was successfully flooding the masses with the idea that the famine, violence and executions are the essence of communism. No wonder people easily adopt it as their own viewpoint.

– Does a communist feel comfortable in such an environment?

– Of course not. But there is one good principle: “neither to cry nor to laugh but to understand”. To keep one’s cool. To notice that the hatred to communism among the masses of soldiers is not hatred toward the ideas of justice, cooperation, solidarity and freedom. On the contrary, it is hatred of the social parasitism that typifies communist party hierarchies, and hatred of the total physical, ideological and economical violence. And it is entirely compatible with sharp non-acceptance of the new post-Maidan government. For the majority of soldiers Poroshenko, Yatseniuk and Klychko are no better than Yanukovych. The timeliness of the social question has not been abolished. Certainly, today the ultra-right forces are trying to speculate with it but that is because the left in Ukraine turned out unable to play on its traditional political field.

– Is that why the left has lost in Ukraine?

– It is a complicated question. Now I am to say a handful of standard phrases about the combination of objective and subjective factors. And where did you see a victory of the left in the period of primitive accumulation and redistribution of capital? The actual left-wing class-oriented mass movement has not been able to form yet – one cannot take for the left the Soviet-conservative KPU or pale pink bourgeois socialists! Not to mention commercial and technological political projects like Borotba, which, from the very beginning, were created to fulfill completely non-leftist tasks. Those left-wing organizations that were actually trying to fulfill the proper tasks, either were organizationally too weak to grow out of little circles or turned out to be so accustomed to the certain conditions that they were not able to realize themselves outside those conditions – like for example the Direct Action [3].

– Has your approach to the Western and Russian left changed?

– It has not changed but rather definitely formed. In the West the left is characterized by rational conformism, by dogmatism or – most often – by a combination of both of those unpleasant features. They, more or less successfully, fulfill the tasks in their own countries but in respect to Ukraine their position is affected in varying degrees by adjusting their thinking on the Ukrainian situation to some of the usual dogmas and to “export” opinions of their Ukrainian contacts that very often turn out to be presenting and analyzing in bad faith Ukrainian developments. As a result, numerous Western leftists believe that there is a socialist revolution in the Donbas, that Ukraine is a fascist state and this state is drowning the popular uprising in blood on the orders from Washington. To make them change their mind is incredibly hard, even impossible. Therefore, in my view, it is easier and better to live as if there was no Western left. As for the Russian left, a huge part of it is under the impression of bygone “Soviet socialism” and the “great victory against fascism”. The Soviet Union passed away long time ago, in the Kremlin there are no people in power who defeated fascism in 1945. Meanwhile in Kiev the power is not in hands of Bandera and Shukhevytch, but the matrix is in use and people who curse the regime furiously turn out to be faithful Putinists when it comes to the issue of Ukraine. Fortunately, not all Russian left is like that, but…

– What should be done?

– To observe attentively. In no case to shut away in an ivory tower but, quite the contrary, to be in the thick of things, as close to people as possible. As a matter of fact, it is another reason why I am in the war now. As long as we have the first-hand experience of what the people of Ukraine live and breathe, we will be able to create an effective strategy and tactics. A very complicated time is coming. A right-wing consensus in the society combined with an unsolved social question can lead to a fascist coup. One should become aware of this danger and prepare for it. To educate the masses, to propose a solution to social conflicts that would be based on a class approach. That solution must be more effective than the one proposed by the right-wing national-social populism. And I have fallen into the abstract again. Let us finish the war and then we will talk about this issue in more detail, ok?

Nihilist, December 6, 2014

Translated by Katarzyna Bielińska and edited by Louis N. Proyect

[1] “Nihilist” is a web portal edited in Ukraine by anarchists and left-wing anti-authoritarian radicals who try to “combine constant theoretical search with everyday revolutionary practice”.
[2] Petliuraites was the popular name of supporters of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, formed in Kiev after the fall of the Russian Empire. It existed since January until April 1918 and since December 1918 until November 1920. It was in war both with Soviet Russia and the imperialist Great Russian White Guards. Its Commander-in-Chief and, since February 1919, its President was Symon Petliura.
[3] The Direct Action (PD) is a network of independent students’ unions, with a left-wing anti-authoritarian and syndicalist orientation, established in 2008 in Kiev and active also in some other universitary centers of the country.

REVIEW: Bright Future: abundance and progress in the 21st century

Posted on December 11, 2014 by c21styork

This is a review I wrote in 2007 of David McMullen’s book “Bright Future – Abundance and Progress in the 21st Century“. The review appeared in the Canberra Times (Saturday 3 February 2007, Panorama supplement, p. 17)

* * * *

As a young long-haired student radical in the late 1960s, I used to gain inspiration from a cartoon that appeared in my university newspaper. The multi-panelled strip commenced with two characters crouched tightly in a sparse door-less little room. One of the characters stretches out his arms, accidentally damaging a wall. He becomes curious and starts making a hole in the wall but his companion is distressed and urges him to desist, lest he damage the room. The final panel shows an aerial view of the scene: both figures are actually confined in a tiny box but outside the box is a beautiful big sunny world. The message was and is clear: creativity requires destruction, a better world only comes from overturning the familiar safe one.

David McMullen’s book is refreshing in that it revives that spirit in consideration of the future. His analysis will jar anyone who uncritically accepts the prevailing ethos of ‘doom and gloom’. He reclaims rational optimism and rebelliousness, rejecting the inherent conservatism of opposition to globalisation and modern industrial society – which he characterises as pseudo-left.

Bright Future is no mere polemic. McMullen’s training in economics informs his view as much as his decades of involvement in left-wing movements. His analysis is essentially a Marxist one, though this is not stated in the book. The text is meticulously researched and there are nearly 700 endnotes to lead the critical reader into sources of substantiation for claims made. The book will either be ignored or, hopefully, will have an influence in promoting debate about the issues canvassed, including, controversially, the author’s support for ‘collective ownership’ as an alternative to capitalism.

The content is wide-ranging but focuses strongly on the question of food production and world hunger, affluence and resource exploitation. Specific issues discussed include GM foods, soil degradation, water, fisheries, non-renewable resources, fossil fuels, global warming, alternative energies, nuclear power, pollution, deforestation and species extinction. He shows how food production can be increased through technological and scientific advance and better management practices. It is possible he argues, to eliminate hunger by the end of the century ‘The planet’s capacity to comfortably accommodate us’, he says, ‘is limited only by the application of human ingenuity, something we are never going to run out of’.

While not downplaying environmental problems, McMullen’s take is that Nature is remarkably resilient and human impact is minor compared to the planet’s ‘battering on a regular basis from super volcanoes, meteors and ice ages’. Moreover, the affluence of modern industrial societies is what allows for environmental awareness and protection. For example, the best way to save the tropical forests is to integrate the children of subsistence farmers into the modern economy rather than to idealize their way of life.

The author sees capitalism as playing a continuing progressive role in those places still emerging from pre-industrial feudalistic systems and a section of the text dealing with the problem of kleptocracy in Africa is particularly informative and cogently argued.

What makes McMullen’s book unusual and important however is that it does not reach the conclusion of those who argue from the Right that material progress under capitalism is our benefactor and that this system is therefore the ‘end of history’. McMullen points out that affluence under capitalism continues to mask gross inequality and is only achieved through the alienation of wage slavery which chokes personal development and human initiative.

He argues that the continuing industrial revolution creates the conditions necessary for capitalism’s demise. As technological change progressively does away with the old back-breaking, dangerous and boring jobs, making work more complex, interesting and challenging, the need for a capitalist ruling class becomes less and less. More than half the workforce in the most advanced industrial societies now requires post-secondary education. With the automation of the most unpleasant jobs, who needs the profit motive? And who needs what McMullen calls “the master class”?

Collective ownership, he argues, will be ‘the obvious way to go’ and would unleash the creative energies of the individual, ‘freeing the economy from the distorting effects of sectional interest’. This, he says, is ‘real free enterprise’.

The obvious challenge to McMullen’s thesis is that socialism, when attempted under Communist governments, has failed. To this he responds that the experience of such socialism has been limited to places that had barely emerged from feudalism and had not yet developed advanced forms of industrial capitalism.

‘Bright Future’ is a scintillatingly dangerous book; a threat to the stability of walls and boxed thinking everywhere.

Review of the major “radical” trends and their attitudes: Part 4 (final part) of ‘Outline on technology and progress’ – a Marxist view (Written by Albert Langer in October 1979)

Posted on December 3, 2014 by c21styork

“Quite politically conservative people like businessmen or revisionist party bureaucrats can contribute to social progress by developing the productive forces, but only revolutionaries can tackle the central issue of overturning the obsolete social relations”.

* * * *

17. Let us now review the major “radical” trends and their attitudes to these issues.

18. The ideology of the “soft technology” trend is well expressed in the journal Resurgence whose Editor Satish Kumar has summarised its aims thus: “The breaking down of our over-large and over-centralised political and economic structure into smaller autonomous units in order that institutions should become responsive to the needs and desires of everybody and that everyone should thus feel involvement with and responsibility for the conduct of affairs.” (“Time Running Out? Best of Resurgence”, Prism Press 1976)

The belief that smaller autonomous units guarantee responsiveness to the needs and desires of everybody is somewhat quaint in view of the history of feudalism. Nevertheless, in one form or another, this whole approach is still extremely popular in “left” circles. It seems that Marxism never did defeat anarchism after all.

Although many adherents of this trend are very nice, gentle people who would probably find themselves on the right side of the barricades if it came to that (even if only as stretcher bearers), the ideological content of this trend is undiluted reaction against modern society.

The best known exponent of this trend is E.F. (“Small is Beautiful”) Schumacher, whose social views are not radically different from B.A. Santamaria’s and are based on the same papal encyclicals (ibid p103). But Resurgence points out Schumacher should be paired with Professor Leopold Kohr in a “Kohrmacher”, like the “Chesterbelloc” of the last generation’ (an interesting comparison with another pair of religious medievalists)(ibid p1).

To show just how openly reactionary this trend can be, without the admiring disciples even noticing, we need not consider the promotion of Zionist kibbutzes as a model for the new society (p108). Let us just take an article by Professor Kohr on “The Economics of Progress” (p18).

Kohr starts with a conversation between two college professors discussing how to wash their shirts, and also “plumbing, floor polishing and cooking, glorying in the fact that progress had so simplified matters that all these things could now be done by themselves”.

But one of them sighs and declares:

…fifty years ago we would have had maids. Instead of having to wash, plumb, and cook like unspecialised pioneers, we might have been better engineers and economists. Moreover, our shirts would have looked pressed, and our meals have tasted better. And instead of discussing housework at a party of scholars, we might have discussed our subjects.

According to Kohr:

“The experience of the two professors is shared by an increasing number of people. On one hand, we witness the gigantic pace of progress and continuously rising output figures. But on the other hand, we have the strange feeling that, instead of getting ahead in life, we have to give up every year something we could afford when, according to living standard experts, we must have had less”.

To support this conclusion, Kohr notes that:

“When I was a student in the early 30’s, I drove a racy sports car”. (During the Great Depression). Now as a University Professor he rides a bus.

“And the income classes above me have fared still worse… Mr Dupont had to abandon his palatial residence.. Now it is a museum…Where are the people who have become richer as a result of Mr Dupont having become poorer? On the contrary, most seem to be carried along the same road: downhill… Those who previously drank wine with their meals now drank water, and those who had maids now have none.”

“As to maids, it is frequently said that their disappearance is precisely a sign not of decline but of rising standards. For maids of former days are now housewives or businesswomen. Quite. But why should maids have aspired to these higher levels except in the hope of having maids themselves?…

“And workers seem to have fared only outwardly better. True, they have record incomes and record quantities of goods to spend them on. But if all is taken into account, can they really be said to be better off than workers of earlier times? They can write and read. But what is their main literature? They can send their children to college. But what has college education become under the levelling impact of intellectual mass production made necessary by the unprecedented numbers of those now able to afford it?…With so many other workers going to school, higher education, already intellectually sterile, seems without added material benefit, having become the competitive minimum requirement for almost any job.”

(Exactly the same point is made by Braverman, but dressed up as “Marxism”)

“As a result, what has actually risen under the impact of the enormously increased production of our time is not so much the standard of living as the level of subsistence. We swim in more water, but we are still in it up to our necks, In addition, along with the rising water level, many who previously enjoyed the luxury of the dry shore, are now up to their necks in water too”.

(Braverman makes a similar point to this too).

“…the problem is…no longer how to foster growth, but how to stop it..”

The above is not a distortion of Professor Kohr’s views, but an accurate picture of the introduction to an article that goes on with the usual theme of the need for smaller, more decentralised communities.

It is perfectly clear what section of society this “aristocratic socialism” speaks for – that part of the financial aristocracy being ruined as the proletarianisation of society proceeds (just as the old feudal socialism spoke for the declining feudal aristocracy).

To his credit, Professor Kohr does not attempt to conceal this in the slightest. But why are his views, or those of “Kohrmacher” nevertheless perfectly respectable in “left” circles?

Since a critique of Braverman’s romanticism necessarily includes a critique of this even more reactionary opposition to modern society, I will leave the matter there.

19. A second major trend, which may be called “Luddite” has closer connections with genuinely working class and socialist movements, and is in part a theoretical reflection of the ideas naturally arising in the course of trade union struggles to safeguard the rights of workers affected by automation.

This trend is not opposed to modern technology in itself, and emphasises the benefits that could flow from it in a socialist society. But it has a negative attitude towards the introduction of new technology within capitalist society, seeing this as a means of doing workers out of jobs and strengthening capitalist control.

The question “For Whom?” is repeated continuously and with enormous self-satisfaction as though it throws some penetrating light on the issues at stake, although in fact it obscures the question “What are the social implications?”. Since the answer to “For Whom?” in capitalist society is naturally “For them” (the capitalists), it is rare to find people who ask this question actually in favour of any new technology being introduced now.

20. Typical of this genre is a pamphlet called “Computers vs Journalists who wins?” (40 cents from Box 175, P.O. 367 Collins St Melbourne 3000)

Under the subhead “Problems, Problems, Problems…” we read:

“Sub editors are particularly affected, as the new technology not only means removal of some existing skills, but makes it more difficult to perform many traditional ones. ‘Casting off’, or determining the length of a story, can be done automatically by computer, making redundant a skill acquired over a long period by subs…The skill in writing a headline, which “fits” will be greatly de-valued because the computer can reject those which “bounce” before they are set in type.

Some subs will welcome the job of casting off, or headline counts being made easier, but by transferring the skills involved from men and women to a computer the human component involved in the highly-skilled task of good sub-editing is weakened”.

The appeal here is unmistakably conservative. One can imagine similar warnings about moveable type being addressed to monks in defence of their highly skilled craft copying manuscripts (which was indeed completely destroyed by the new technology).

It has not even occurred to the writer that it might be an advance for a machine to do routine counting operations while the human sub-editor concentrates on the content of the material sub edited. Obviously one should fight for people whose skills have been made obsolete by new technology to be re-trained, re-employed and not to suffer in the slightest. But this preference for human labour when something can be done as well by machine is really quite different, and quite reactionary. It means using people like machines.

The conservatism involved is made quite explicit when the pamphlet quotes approvingly from an agreement between the Swedish Unions of Journalists and Graphic Workers, recommending similar agreements between Australian unions:

“GF and SJF agree that the introduction of the new technology shall not affect the traditional basic principles of a division of labour among the categories of employees concerned. Thus, mechanical production tasks fall to the lot of graphic workers, while journalistic tasks are the domain of the staff members. Special importance must be attached to the workload of the staff, which must not be increased in such a manner that creative journalistic work is made to suffer. Nor may the tasks of graphic workers be made to include functions embracing journalistic work of a creative or decision-making nature”.

This desire to preserve “the traditional principles of a division of labour” against a new technology that tends to break down those divisions can only be called reactionary. Why shouldn’t journalists set their own copy? Why shouldn’t printers’ jobs include work of a creative or decision making nature?

The other side of this coin is attempts to prove that a new technology is deepening the division of labour and therefore should be opposed, when in fact like most new technology the actual effect is to break down that division.

Word processing is a classic example. No serious person could argue that a typewriter with editing and correcting features is in itself worse for humanity than one without these features (although some people have tried). Yet from all the “left” literature on the subject, one would think that the main social impact of word processing under capitalism would be to reduce the status of typist/secretaries to the level of the typing pool, and reinforce the division between “executive” and “clerical” Labor.

Naturally some reactionaries will try to take advantage of any change in work methods to make things worse for the workers by introducing typing pools and what have you. Although it is easier to maintain word counts and so forth with a word processor, there is nothing inherent in the technology that would make it easier for bosses to impose typing pools and other worse conditions on the workers, and in fact they have not been successful in doing so.

While word processors are still new and expensive, there is some tendency to try and achieve maximum utilisation of the machine and so attempt tighter control over the Labor using it (especially since such intensification of labour is feasible in the present economic climate of increasing unemployment). But the inherent trend of the technology is in the opposite direction (as will become clear, when word processing keyboards and VDUs become cheaper than electric typewriters and replace them on a one for one basis – with a separate printer shared between several typists).

The actual impact of word processing has been and will be to reduce the total requirement for typing Labor, especially by eliminating the repetitive typing of similar documents with minor variations (“personalized” form letters with different addresses, revised drafts etc). These are precisely the applications where typing pools have been common, and they are being eliminated, so typing pools must be declining.

The jobs previously done by “secretaries” are now being done by smaller numbers of “administrative assistants” on the one hand, and word processors on the other. This elimination of the Executive’s personal secretary/body slave is a clear-cut upgrading in job status (except for the Executive’s some of whom are complaining) and a break down in the division of Labor. As has already happened with printers and journalists, the next logical step is for all “word originators”, whether “Executives” or not, to do their own typing, since no special manual dexterity is required with the new machines and the difference in wage levels does not “justify” specialisation. These trends will be accelerated, with similar impacts on the Labor presently required for fileing and other clerical work, as communication between word processors on different desks, and direct access to mass data storage is developed. Even for purely “typist” Labor in typing pools, the use of a machine with editing and correcting facilities is a clear upgrade in job function.

People who are afraid to confront bosses with the simple demand that there be no intensification of Labor under cover of the new technology will rationalise this fear by pretending that the new technology, rather than the bosses, are the source of the pressure for Labor intensification. But most workers know how to fight such pressures and have been successful in doing so (although the degree of Success or failure always ultimately depends on the state of the Labor market and the ease of transferring between jobs, hence on the overall economic climate, rather than on the militancy of struggle in individual workplaces).

This awareness that one’s fate is bound up with that of all other workers develops in the proletariat and helps develop its consciousness as a class for itself. It seems to be sadly lacking in many “left” writers about the “Labor process” who picture the class struggle as unfolding in particular workplaces rather than on a national scale, and seem to be under the illusion that workers are tied to their particular employers for life.

21. Leaving aside the overall struggle for a new society, even within capitalism, the natural reaction of socialist toward new Labor saving technology should be to demand its speedy introduction and a share of the benefits. Thus the earlier replacement of handicrafts by machine industry prompted agitation for a shorter working day in the factories, and so should the latest stage in automation promote agitation for a shorter working day.

Instead we have the modern Luddites repeating the mistake of the earlier Luddites who tried to prevent the new machinery replacing handicraft Labor in the.first place. An attempt as futile as it is reactionary.

22. This term “Luddite” is not used here simply as a form of abuse. It is admitted by representatives of this trend themselves, despite the whole history of scientific socialism since the Industrial Revolution. Here is Chris Harmon of the UK Socialist Workers Party in a pamphlet titled “Is a machine after your job? New Technology and the Struggle for Socialism”. (p21)

“… the Luddites were a group of workers suffering from miserably low wages and facing a destruction of their jobs by new working methods. Their attempts to fight back by destroying machines may not have been successful (although they did succeed in holding down a bigger army than the Duke of Wellington had in the same years to fight his war against the French in Spain).

“But the result of their failure was not something good. It was grinding desperate poverty for hundreds of thousands of people, enduring for a whole generation…

“…Our response has to start from the same suspicion of the way the new technology is being used that motivates those who simply say “No”. We are on the same side as the Luddites, not against them .”

The “microprocessor revolution” promises (not “threatens”) to have as big an impact on the labor process as the development of automatic machinery in the earlier industrial revolution. Just as the dexterity of human fingers was for most purposes replaced by machinery, so now some higher functions of control and supervision will also be replaced (although not yet much in the way of actually creative intellectual processes). It is truly amazing that instead of the further development of Marxism, which based itself on a theoretical comprehension of the social consequences of the age of machinery, we should see a revival of earlier and cruder varieties of socialism that have long been discredited in favour of Marxism, by the history of modern society.

Once again, since a critique of Braverman’s romanticism necessarily embraces a critique of modern Luddism, I will leave the matter there. But I should stress that this “theoretical” difference does put me on the opposite side to modern Luddites on strictly practical questions. When they are agitating against the introduction of word processors, I would be agitating for workers to demand their immediate introduction and refuse to operate obsolete typewriters that haven’t got all mod cons.

23. Before turning to Braverman and romanticism, it may be worth pointing out the important differences between the Liberal and Social Democratic defence of modern technology and economic growth on the one hand, and the Marxist view on the other, since so far we have been mainly talking about the similarities.

Both the similarities and differences are made clear in an article on “Technology and the Left” in the CPGB organ Marxism Today of May 1979. Here Ian Benson, a British Labor Party and trade union activist, makes much the same criticisms of “romanticism” and the CPGB’s line (similar to the CPA’s), as would be made by Liberals on the one hand and Marxists on the other.

24. After quoting Lenin’s analysis of the socialisation of Labor, Benson argues:

“From this perspective the simple classification of technology into exploitative and non-exploitative is seen to contribute little either to the raising of the cultural level of mankind or the solution of the political problems of establishing democratic control over the means of production.

The defence of particular skills amounts to an attempt to freeze the existing division of Labor, and defers the satisfaction of material and cultural needs by the rest of the population which would be met by automation. The principled opposition to centralisation on the grounds of the alleged greater democracy of decentralised production, is both contrary to the need for further integration of the world economy as a prerequisite for the breakdown of skill, class and national barriers, and offers nothing to solving the problem of establishing democratic control over the economy as a whole.

A socialist technology policy with these ends must be based on an analysis of the constraints on the development of science as a productive force, “preparing the ground for the dissolution of human alienation”.

This whole approach is so foreign to the romantic outlook that dominates most “left” thinking that people replying cannot even grasp what is being said. Consider this from a reply titled “What Type of Technology do we want” by Dave Elliott in the same issue of Marxism Today:

“…Benson believes that science and technology somehow develop independently from other forces in society. They are “neutral” resources of knowledge and techniques which can be applied either to the benefit of society generally (under socialism) or for the benefit of a few (under capitalism).”

Manifestly Benson does not believe that at all.

He quite clearly treats technology as a positive force which pushes society forward and helps transform it from capitalism to socialism. This is a view common to Social Democrats and Marxists. But it is so unthinkable to romantics that the worst accusation they can fling at the pro-technology camp is that we view technology as merely neutral, which we do not!

I have seen numerous articles loftily criticising the “old fashioned”, “economic determinist” and “simplistic” view that technology is neutral and that a socialist society could simply take over the previous technology and apply it to more humane ends. This “neutral” view is often attributed to Engels, Lenin and Stalin although Marx and Mao are often claimed to have been more sympathetic to the romantic school. But I have hardly seen any material directly confronting the “unthinkable” explicitly pro-technology view which was in fact articulated loud and clear by Marx as well as the rest.

What this “criticism” proves is simply that the critics are quite ignorant of the views of their opponents, let alone being in a position to advance on those views from a more comprehensive understanding.

It is rather like accusing atheists of the Protestant heresy because we will not pray to the virgin Mary, when in fact the problem is even more serious!

26. The differences between the Marxist and Social Democratic approaches to the social implications of modern technology are made clear when Ian Benson proceeds “Towards a Socialist Technology Policy”: “It should call for the removal of all barriers to the full development of science and technology in the interests of society, through a programme of radical institutional, scientific and political reforms.”

Benson then outlines a program of reforms to promote “re-skilling,”Democratic Control”, “Social Ownership”, “Development of Science” and “Socially Useful Production” – all with the aim of “liberation of science”.

What this omits is precisely the Marxist concept that the main “institutional” barrier to the full development of science and technology in the interest of society, is the capitalist mode of production based on commodities and wage labour itself. This has been obsolete since the age of electricity (never mind micro-electronics) and needs to be swept away by revolution (not reform).

Social Democrats share with Marxists the fundamental concept that the development of the productive forces, modern technology and economic growth, is the positive dynamic factor which pushes forward the transformation of social relationships. But they stand this conclusion on its head by calling for reforms to push forward new technology and economic growth (which are dynamic and pushing forward spontaneously anyway), instead of concentrating on the obsolete social relations which are the passive factor that has been left behind and is acting as a brake on further progress. In fact in an era such as this, where the social relations are obsolete, it is precisely by social revolution that the productive forces can be unleashed for further and more rapid development (and in the act of social revolution, the relations of production temporarily assume the role of the most active dynamic factor).

Although the terms “productive forces” and “relations of production” have been turned into an almost meaningless cliche, once grasped, the concept is almost tautologous in its simplicity.

27. Economic growth, and especially technical progress, is essentially cumulative. New developments, even if quite useless, or only capable of being used in a harmful way, always add to the range of possibilities open and never shut off possibilities that were open before. We still spend most of our waking hours “Making a living” and our social relationships are formed in the course of doing so. It is hardly surprising that the continous opening up of new ways of making a living should continuously leave behind and render obsolete the old social relationships founded on the basis of obsolete ways of making a living.

28. The whole point about the productive forces being the active dynamic factor, is that they have an in-built tendency to develop spontaneously, which the relations between people do not.

Whenever an enterprise improves its production technique, or an individual worker improves his or her lot (eg. by obtaining a more responsible position), there is a development of the productive forces. But it is not automatically accompanied by any corresponding change in social relations. Under capitalism such developments are proceeding spontaneously all the time, indeed they are a necessary condition for the expansion of markets and the possibility of re-investing surplus value in the expanded reproduction.

29. The social relations of production can get left behind as the productive forces develop, so that today for example, we still have essentially capitalist relations between people, based on commodity exchange and wage labour, which were appropriate to the petty production of the middle ages but are no longer compatible with large scale machine industry (let alone being compatible with the latest developments).

30. Just as the institutions of slavery and serfdom once held back the further development of the productive forces and had to give way against the slave and surf revolts, so the institution of wage labour is now holding things back and giving rise to revolts. Eg. apart from the obvious contradictions between capitalism and economic growth expressed in business crises, there is the day to day stifling of the enormous creative energies of the workers themselves, which could be unleashed in a system where they had an interest as masters of production, instead of a direct interest in sabotaging it and “conserving” their jobs. Then scientific and technical innovation would not only be unhindered by mass unemployment and crises, but would be the conscious activity of the majority instead of the province of “management control”.

31. It follows from this analysis that the critical task facing society is to smash the obsolete social relations as the only way to liberate the productive forces or “liberate science” as Benson puts it.

32. Quite politically conservative people like businessmen or revisionist party bureaucrats can contribute to social progress by developing the productive forces, but only revolutionaries can tackle the central issue of overturning the obsolete social relations.

33. Therefore in every society in transition from capitalism to communism, whether a capitalist society like Australia or post-Mao China, with the bourgeoisie in power, or a socialist society like Mao’s China, the central political issues are often expressed in terms of whether to focus on developing the productive forces or on transforming the relations of production

34. The representatives of the old capitalist relations, the bourgeoisie, the conservatives, whether they be “businessmen” or “party officials” share much the same rhetoric in calling for “hard work” to “make more cake” and in dismissing the workers struggle to transform social relations as an interference in that process. It is interesting to note how Ian Benson appeals to both the Czechoslovak Communist Party Program of Dubcek’s time, and the “four modernisations” stuff coming out of China today, in support of his views. The only difference between Social Democrats and Liberals in this regard is that Social Democrats place greater stress on making necessary concessions to the workers: “share the cake more equally and don’t waste it”.

35. In opposition to the Malcolm Fraser’s and Hua Kuo-feng’s, the representatives of the new communist relations of production the proletariat, the radicals, raise the question of “all power to the cooks”. This (after a certain amount of cake-mix spoiling due to confusion among the cooks), is the only way to really transform cake production.

36. Unfortunately the Marxist analysis of forces and relations of production can only be grasped by the majority in communist society where the majority of humanity are consciously engaged in changing themselves. If it was the dominant view, even among the “left”, and did not have to continuously fend off assaults from reaction, Luddism, romanticism and Social Democracy, then we would have already have had the revolution.

* * * *

Technocratic priesthood, Centralisation, Unemployment : Part 3 of ‘Outline on technology and progress’ – a Marxist view (Written by Albert Langer in October 1979)

Posted on December 2, 2014 by c21styork

“… in its most absurd form, we even get complaints about the large scale and “centralisation” of the means of production themselves, and not of their ownership. Thus in arguments about nuclear power, we are told to beware of oppression by the controllers of big, centralised power stations. Apparently the theory is that if all power comes from a central source we have less control over our destiny than if we have smaller, local power stations. Taken to an extreme, some people are mad keen on windmills, solar panels, methane generators etc and hope to combine these with vegetable plots, mud brick construction and what have you to create a life style in which one can escape the clutches of capitalism as completely as possible by avoiding all buying and selling and isolating oneself from the market economy. While I have no objection to other people tinkering with such things if they really want to, personally I prefer being able to obtain electric power at the flick of a switch and without tinkering with anything. This does not “alienate” me in the slightest and I am quite sure most people feel exactly the same way”.

* * * *

14. f) Technocratic Priesthood

The very term “priesthood” evokes images of barbaric societies in which the mass of the population were ignorant of natural phenomena and paid homage to a minority elite who were sufficiently literate to be able to pass on knowledge about the seasons, tides and other matters essential to production as well as culture.

To believe that such a priesthood rules society today, requires considerable imagination. It is perfectly obvious that power in our society is held by capitalists and stems from their wealth and not from any monopoly of technical knowledge. In the more backward capitalist countries like the Soviet Union and China, one might confuse the ruling Party bourgeoisie with a priesthood because of superficial resemblances in forms of organisation and alleged service to a “Marxist-Leninist” religion. This may have something to do with the survival of more backward semi-feudal relationships. But there is clearly nothing “technocratic” about it and the interrelationship between wealth and power and the role of managers and bureaucrats is quite similar to more advanced Western capitalist countries.

Scientists and engineers are employed by the ruling class and work for wages like the rest of us. They too have no monopoly on technical information, which is widely diffused among the literate population and can be readily acquired in libraries and even newsagents. The mythology about a “technocratic priesthood” is most widespread among liberal arts graduates who have gone through school and university doing only “humanities” courses and have thus been denied the basic technical education which is acquired by most school and University students in our society.

There is no excuse for this one-sidedness however, since any literate person can pick up the fundamentals of modern technology by just browsing through the “How and Why” type of children’s’ encyclopaedias readily available in every newsagent.

Nuclear power is held up most often as an industry where the dangers of a “technocratic priesthood” are greatest. In fact it is the most publicly regulated industry with the least initiative in the hands of technocrats. The whole technology down to blueprints and detailed engineering reports is completely in the public domain and there is no mystery about it whatever.

The average worker today has far more grasp of basic industrial technology, and is given a far more “theoretical” education than in earlier times. If some liberal arts graduates feel left behind and overawed by modern technology, they would do better to learn something about it than to continue writing speculative nonsense about a “technocratic priesthood”.

15. g) Centralisation

Socialists have always welcomed the centralisation of capital as a progressive development paving the way for Communism. In everyday practical terms, most people understand that the big multi-nationals have more “enlightened” management, produce better products and pay better wages than the smaller “sweatshops”, that supermarkets are a better place to do one’s shopping, that family farms are on the way out and so forth.

But many “radicals” actually stake their hopes on retarding monopolisation, propping up the small businessmen, shopkeepers and farmers against the multi-nationals and so on.

Fundamentally the complaints about “centralisation” reflect an awareness that wealth and power in our society is concentrated in the hands of a very tiny elite, but with a conservative reaction to try to turn the clock back, instead of pushing forward to socialism and communism.

But in its most absurd form, we even get complaints about the large scale and “centralisation” of the means of production themselves, and not of their ownership. Thus in arguments about nuclear power, we are told to beware of oppression by the controllers of big, centralised power stations. Apparently the theory is that if all power comes from a central source we have less control over our destiny than if we have smaller, local power stations. Taken to an extreme, some people are mad keen on windmills, solar panels, methane generators etc and hope to combine these with vegetable plots, mud brick construction and what have you to create a life style in which one can escape the clutches of capitalism as completely as possible by avoiding all buying and selling and isolating oneself from the market economy.

While I have no objection to other people tinkering with such things if they really want to, personally I prefer being able to obtain electric power at the flick of a switch and without tinkering with anything. This does not “alienate” me in the slightest and I am quite sure most people feel exactly the same way. We have simply never felt oppressed by power stations (except by the bills which are of course much lower than they would be with less centralisation).

It is difficult to even imagine how centralisation of power stations could be used as an instrument of oppression. Is it suggested that in a crisis the embattled bourgeoisie might take refuge in the power station and threaten to turn it off if we didn’t return to wage slavery? On the contrary, they seem concerned to ensure that “essential services” are not disrupted during major strikes. In any case the electricity grid that links power stations in every industrialised country is about as “decentralised” as one could ask.

It is hard to imagine a more direct reversal of traditional socialist attitudes towards the implications of large scale industry. The point is not to refute this wooly thinking about “centralisation” but to ask what process of mental atrophy could produce such patent nonsense, repeated so often with such authority?

The only answer I can see is that the extinction of Marxism by revisionism during the period of capitalist re-stabilisation has been so complete that most “radicals” have never even heard of Marxist views and have had to re-discover for themselves all the pre-Marxian socialist theories. (This certainly seems to have been the case with the “New Left” that grew up in the middle sixties, even when Marxist phrases were used.)

16. h) Unemployment

It is a well known proposition of Marxism that as capitalism develops with an increasing organic composition of capital, the size of the industrial reserve army increases and this is particularly manifested in mass unemployment during crises.

The obvious conclusion is that capitalism should be abolished so that people are not “employed by” capital but instead “employ” means of production to satisfy their own requirements.

Instead we have extraordinary proposals from “radicals” to freeze technological development, or at least control and retard it, so as to “safeguard jobs”. The whole trend of most “left” analysis of technology and unemployment involves an acceptance of capitalist irrationality as permanent, and a willingness to restrict the growth in productive forces and therefore living standards so as to adapt them to this irrational economic system (without mass unemployment).

Surely the most elementary socialist consciousness would involve welcoming Labor saving technology and demanding its speediest and widest adoption. If the social and economic system can’t cope then that’s its problem! It is very strange to see “socialists” arguing that since capitalism can’t cope with new technology without unemployment, we should keep the capitalism, but do without the technology. Yet that is exactly what is implied when people complain about Labor saving technology. They are even prepared to put up with having to work longer hours to produce fewer goods, just as long as they can keep their precious capitalism!

Ricardian economics long ago accepted that the introduction of new technology can be against the real immediate interests of workers who lose their jobs because of it. But its a long way from there to adopting a program that tries to inhibit new technology. In fact it has always been when technological change is most rapid that the scope for expanded capital accumulation is greatest and new jobs are created soaking up the reserve army and raising wages. Stagnation simply means a larger and larger reserve army.

Actually most remarks about technology are prefaced by a reference to “the current economic climate”. This reflects awareness that technological change and the accompanying destruction and creation of jobs is a permanent factor of capitalism, both when there is “full employment” and when there is mass unemployment.

Obviously the fact that mass unemployment suddenly started to develop throughout the Western world a few years ago cannot be attributed to any equally sudden change in technology and must be attributed to the particular stage in the capitalist business cycle that was reached then. So why do people persist in blaming a process of technological change that has been going on all the time?

It can only be because they don’t want to face up to the implications of capitalism as the source of our problems. Its easier to fight “the machines” than “the bosses”, or at any rate it’s more respectable to do so.

Final installment next time… Reviewing the major “radical” trends and their attitudes…

Limits to growth, Third World dependency and Consumerism: Part 2 of ‘Outline on technology and progress’ – a Marxist view (Written by Albert Langer in October 1979)

Posted on November 30, 2014 by c21styork

… it is no task of the “left” to support protectionism and try to retard the integration of the world capitalist market. We can only support “Free Trade”, not oppose it – but in the same revolutionary and critical spirit that Karl Marx did.

* * * *

11. c) Limits to Growth

Depletion of non-renewable resources is another fashionable attempt to find some barrier other than capital itself. The club of Rome’s project, and all derivatives, carry out exactly the same exercise as Malthus in comparing geometric growth of consumption to arithmetic growth of production and drawing tautologous conclusions.

Of course it’s true that any positive rate of growth, no matter how small, must eventually (and in fact quite quickly) exhaust any finite non-renewable resources. But if this spells doom for industrial society, then it should be added that any positive rate of consumption at all even if there is a declining rate instead of growth, must also eventually exhaust any finite non-renewable resources, though it may take longer. The issue is whether “resources” are “finite”. If they are then we are doomed, growth or no growth.

As Ehrlich points out, with any positive rate of population growth, humanity would eventually occupy a volume larger than the planet earth and expanding faster than the speed of light. But what does this actually have to do with the real and pressing problems of the world we really live in?

Again the Liberal answer to these themes is straightforward and irrefutable:

“As an historical fact, the long-term trend has been for the cost of mineral inputs to decline as a proportion of total production costs. Numerous studies of the available statistical data, spanning more than a century, have demonstrated that the tendency during this phase of unprecedented growth in the world economy and in the use of minerals has not been towards scarcity but towards abundance. In the United States the real cost of minerals output was less than one-half the average 1870-1900 level by 1929; and by 1957 it was less than one-half the 1929 level…(ibid p33)

…Such resources may be being ‘used up’, but they are also – and as an integral part of the same process- being ‘created’. It is in the twentieth century that the essential uniformity of energy and matter has been discovered, that the development of new synthetic materials has become almost commonplace, and that technological advance has become virtually continuous, each improvement creating new opportunities for further advance. The extension of knowledge about the world has not only confounded past predictions of resource scarcity but has been in directions which make such predictions less and less defensible as time goes by.” (p39)

Since such predictions are less and less defensible, why are they also more and more popular? It seems clear that the degree of rejection of this “bourgeois optimism” is not related to the degree of one’s knowledge of industrial processes, but to the degree of one’s rejection of modern society. Those who recognise there is a barrier, but do not fully understand the barrier is capital itself, look for that barrier in something else, like “Limits to Growth”.

12. d) Third World Dependency

This theme has been adequately refuted by Bill Warren, who belongs to the Social Democratic rather than purely Liberal trend. As a Social Democrat, Warren tends to defend imperialism, playing down its contradictions in a Kautskyite way opposed to Leninism, although some of this can be excused as iconoclastic shock treatment against the excesses of “dependency theory”. Warren’s refutation of the “radical” conventional wisdom about the Third World is quite crushing and no serious attempt has been made to refute him.

It is a historical fact (not emphasised by Warren) that the development of technology and economic growth has been extremely uneven, with imperialist exploitation of the poor nations by the rich (just as internally too, industrialisation has meant the exploitation of the poor by the rich and polarisation of society).

But it is equally a historical fact (denied by dependency theorists), that imperialism has meant the more rapid spread of capitalist social relations throughout the world and that far from becoming more and more dependent, the backward countries are proceeding very rapidly along the same path of commercialisation and industrialisation that Europe undertook a few hundred years ago.

The world is becoming more polarised, with even imperialist “second world” countries joining the Third World in suffering from superpower exploitation and domination, but it is doing so in the course of a rapid progressive social development – just as the internal polarisation of capitalist societies into a smaller and smaller handful of exploiters (the Rockefellers and such) against a larger and larger proletariat including the ruined middle classes, was also part of a progressive social development.

Lenin’s classic work “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” described this process, which is now taking place in most Third World countries,as it took place in the then backward agrarian and semi-feudal Tsarist Russia. Answering the Narodnik “dependency theorists” of his day: “The Russia of the wooden plough and the flail, of the water-mill and the hand loom, began rapidly to be transformed into the Russia of the iron plough and the threshing machine, of the steam-mill and the power-loom. An equally thorough transformation of technique is seen in every branch of the national economy where capitalist production predominates. This process of transformation must, by the very nature of capitalism, take place in the midst of much that is uneven and disproportionate: periods of prosperity alternate with periods of crisis, the development of one industry leads to the decline of another, there is progress in one aspect of agriculture in one area and in another aspect in another area, the growth of trade and industry outstrips the growth of agriculture, etc. A large number of errors made by Narodnik writers spring from their efforts to prove that this disproportionate, spasmodic, feverish development is not development.” (Collected Works Vol 3, p597)

Precisely because the Third World is industrialising, its importance in world affairs is greatly increasing, to an extent that has not been recognised by most Western “radicals”. This profound social change which is affecting some two thirds of the world’s people is obviously of enormous importance and cannot simply be dismissed.

We have lived through the post-war decolonisation and have only recently experienced the defeat of the USA by Vietnam, as well as the general rise of the Third World in the United Nations. It is quite clear that economic growth and technical progress has not reinforced the conditions for dependence, but has been abolishing the situation which made it possible for backward regions to become colonies or “mandated territories” of the “civilised countries” who bore the “white man’s burden”. “Countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people want revolution”.

On an international scale, the trans-national corporations are creating and uniting an international proletariat to be their grave diggers, as earlier the bourgeoisie broke down local boundaries and created nations with a national proletariat, In defending national independence and other democratic rights, it is no task of the “left” to support protectionism and try to retard the integration of the world capitalist market. We can only support “Free Trade”, not oppose it – but in the same revolutionary and critical spirit that Karl Marx did.

13. e) Consumerism

Instead of the “old-fashioned” socialist critique, which condemned capitalism, even in England, the richest capitalist country of the time, for holding down the living standards of the masses,we have a “new” critique which condemns it for inundating us with “useless” and “wasteful” products. Although often coupled with moralising lectures about the poverty of people in Third World countries, this is really quite irrelevant to the issue and the “new” theme bears a strong resemblance to the old “barracks communism” of Weitling.

Certainly some quite useless and even harmful products are sold because of advertising and this should be opposed. But people who make “consumerism” their theme are talking about something more fundamental than that, and calling for a far reaching change in Western consumption patterns towards a “simpler” and allegedly more “wholesome” lifestyle based on “necessities” and with less emphasis on “unnecessary” consumer durables, “gadgets”, motor vehicles etc.

It is not clear whether these changes are to be compulsory, with restrictions to prevent people from buying the dishwashers, cars or electric toothbrushes that our “radicals” disapprove of, by inhibiting their production. Or is it to be voluntary, with a massive propaganda (advertising) campaign to dissuade people from buying products the “radicals” don’t like?

Either way involves an enormous elitist contempt for the common sense of ordinary people. Part of this is a reaction against the political backwardness which has led many people to accept the continuation of capitalism without revolt, in exchange for the post-war “affluence” (a mess of potage). Understandable as this is, it is still elitist.

People are entitled to want, and to be satisfied to get, access to things that used to be regarded as luxuries. There has been a very substantial improvement in mass living standards since the 1930’s and it is hardly surprising that while the post-war boom continued, the capitalist social order was relatively stable. Not only material standards, but also the “quality of life” with access to culture, education etc has improved with the rise in real wages (even if the value of wages in terms of labour time has declined, exploitation increased and the social position of workers worsened). There are even some progressive aspects to the way capitalism stimulates new “wants” to expand its markets.

The higher standards of living which have been achieved involve an increase in people’s expectations and their determination to defend the greater dignity that they have won. It is sheer arrogance to condemn all this as “consumerism”. People will revolt when they find that the existing social order cannot provide them with what they want, not when some “radical” persuades them that they shouldn’t want it. Now that living standards are again starting to decline, we will see whether the generation that was brought up on “consumerism” will put up with more or less shit from capitalism than their parents did in the last Great Depression. From general attitudes towards “authority” etc, it seems likely that the “consumerist” generation will be more ready to revolt, not less.

At least Malcolm Fraser’s proposal to reduce living standards by cutting real wages is more democratic than the “radical” attacks on consumerism. Why can’t the radicals who oppose “wasteful consumption” settle for demanding a general wage cut? This would leave people free to choose for themselves without manipulation what they regard as necessary and what “wasteful” items they could do without.

Of course I’m not saying we’ll all still have private cars after the revolution despite the various social problems that go with them. We’ll have helicopters and spaceships. (“We want bread and roses too…”)

To be continued. Next installment, Part 3, Technocratic priesthood, Centralization and Unemployment…

‘Outline on technology and progress’ – a Marxist view* (Written by Albert Langer in October 1979) Part One: Introduction – Marxism, eco-catastrophe and environmental degradation

Posted on November 29, 2014 by c21styork

The major trends among Western “radicals” on issues concerning technology and progress can be summarised as follows:

a) Outright opposition to modern technology and nostalgia for the past, summed up in the slogan “Small is Beautiful”.

b) Acceptance of modern technology if society was socialist, but Luddite hostility towards it in capitalist society, summed up in the slogan “For Whom”.

c) Acceptance of modern technology in present day capitalist society but a rejection of the social relations that have developed together with it and a romantic “nostalgia for an age that has not yet come into being”, where the dignity of craft skills will prevail.

* * * *

The following outline for an article is unfinished, incomplete, out of sequence and lopsided in emphasis. A major section or companion article on Braverman’s “Labor and Monopoly Capital” has not been prepared yet.

1. Objections to the trend of modern technology and economic growth may be summarised under the following headings:

a) Eco-catastrophe

b) Environmental degradation

c) Limits on Growth

d) Third World Dependency

e) Wasteful Consumption

f) Technocratic Priesthood

g) Centralisation

h) Unemployment

i) Commercialisation and rat race

j) Degradation and Deskilling of Labor

2. These themes are all part of the very fabric of “left wing” and “radical” thinking in Western countries. Reference to them, often in a glib and trendy way, has become a trade mark to distinguish “them” (“the establishment”) from “us” (“the radicals”). Rejection of these themes is generally considered heretical and a sign of impending desertion to the other side.

3. Nevertheless, Third World revolutionaries actually engaged in armed struggle against imperialism, the classic founders of scientific socialism and the leadership of socialist countries have never stressed these themes in the same way. This paper will challenge the widespread assumption that emphasis on these themes reflects a more “advanced” conception than other “simplistic” views, and will show that a polemic against opinions that are now most fashionable among the “left” was a central feature of the development of scientific socialism (by which I mean “orthodox” Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism).

4. This paper has nothing new or startling to say but will simply try to raise the banner of a position of whose existence most “radicals” seem quite unaware, without undertaking a comprehensive defence of that position. Since in surveying the literature I couldn’t find a single article advocating the position I hold, and which I understand to have always been the “orthodox” Marxist view on these questions, I felt obliged to write one myself. Any assistance from readers who can point me to relevant material would be most appreciated.

5. The major trends among Western “radicals” on issues concerning technology and progress can be summarised as follows:

a) Outright opposition to modern technology and nostalgia for the past, summed up in the slogan “Small is Beautiful”.

b) Acceptance of modern technology if society was socialist, but Luddite hostility towards it in capitalist society, summed up in the slogan “For Whom”.

The dominant view is of course an eclectic mixture of all three, sometimes even combined with views taken from the pro-technology, pro-growth camp.

6. In the camp which rejects the main objections to economic growth and modern technology listed above, and which criticises the reactionary, Luddite and romantic assaults on modern society, the dominant trend is straight forward bourgeois complacency or Liberalism, which explains the unpopularity of pro-technology, pro-growth views among the “left”.

Closely allied to Liberalism, and subordinate to it, is a Social Democratic trend which dresses up much the same analysis of society with a few Marxist phrases about promoting the revolutionisation of society by developing the productive forces. This has more support than Liberalism within the “left” because it is more critical of modern society and therefore closer to the anti-technology, anti-growth camp on issues unrelated to technology and economic growth.

The dominant ideology in such allegedly “socialist” countries as the Soviet Union, post-Mao China, and Albania, reflects a mixture of Liberal and Social Democratic attitudes and therefore adds to the unpopularity of pro-technology, pro-growth views within the “left”.

7. But also in the pro-technology, pro-growth camp, is a quite different position, which I would call the “orthodox” Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, or scientific socialist view. This fundamentally agrees with the Liberal and Social Democratic trends in opposing reaction, Luddism and romanticism (as Lenin agreed with Struve and the “legal Marxists” in fighting Narodnism in Russia). But it fundamentally breaks with these trends in its analysis of the revolutionary implications of modern technology and economic growth. While joining with the anti-technology, anti-growth camp in rejecting modern society, this rejection is positive in contrasting the present with the future and not negative in trying to retard the further development of modern capitalist society.

The views of this trend will be found in various works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, many of which are explicit polemics against romanticism etc.

8. Let’s review the various anti-technology, anti-growth themes one by one. The first eight, which tend to attack modern technology and economic growth as things in themselves, will be dealt with rather quickly. The last two, concerning Commercialisation and the Rat Race, and the Degradation and Deskilling of Labor raise more serious issues about capitalist social relations, and will be dealt with more fully when analysing romanticism and commenting on Harry Braverman’s “Labor and Monopoly Capital”.

9. a) Eco-catastrophe

Various scenarios for the catastrophic destruction of humanity if present trends continue have been put forward by the more extremist opponents of modern technology and economic growth. These range from the “population explosion” to the long term effects of heat pollution, carbon dioxide or the break up of the ozone layer. Although in one sense a “lunatic fringe”, these ideas do have some real influence within the “left” and people often fall back on them (without necessarily knowing any of the details) when otherwise stuck for arguments.

Detailed refutation of the various theories is not appropriate here. But it’s worth noting that some people actually want their disaster theories to be true because they want there to be some barrier to the further development of industrialisation. Feelings of “doom” are widespread because the present social system is in fact doomed, but instead of correctly identifying exactly what is doomed, people tend to transfer their feeling to anything convenient. Catastrophe theories are not being put forward by scientists who believe in technical progress and economic growth and are worried because they have come across some phenomena that might threaten this. These theories are put forward by people (whether scientists or not), who already want there to be a barrier and go out looking for it.

They do not understand Marx’s proposition that “the only barrier to capital is capital itself” and they look for some external obstacle to the further development of capitalism, lying outside capitalist society itself.

There is even a kind of “eco-fascism” with ideas and solutions remarkably similar to those of fascists in the 1930s, particularly in regard to population control.

10. b) Environmental degradation.

This theme is also taken up by people who want there to be some external barrier to the further development of capitalism. It is really only relevant to the technology and growth debate insofar as some catastrophe is predicted. Insofar as one is talking about incidental environmental degradation, the classic answer given by Liberals cannot be refuted:

“It is easier to modernise plant and equipment (e.g. to incorporate pollution control mechanisms) and to engineer structural readjustments to the changing pattern of economic activity in a growth context than otherwise. More fundamentally, economic growth implies that the stock of resources (including technology) which the community has at its disposal is continually expanding… Nowadays we have the opportunity that comes with growth to opt for a more pleasing environment. If that opportunity occurs in an expanding economy, opting for it need not involve an absolute reduction in presently enjoyed standards in other respects. In short, ‘growth’ entails a positive contribution to pollution control in a way which a ‘stationary state’ cannot…

…If pollution control standards are set to high that the costs of control clearly exceed the resulting benefits, resources will be wastefully diverted from other purposes – including perhaps other forms of environmental improvement. Moreover, it is already apparent – with the technology of pollution control only beginning to develop – that even modest expenditure can have large effects in reducing pollution.

In summary the damage from environmental pollution in a large and growing economy with effective pollution control standards certainly need be no greater and in practice is likely to be far less than the damage in a small and slower growing economy operating in the same area without effective pollution control measures. The quality of the environment can be improved much more – and more quickly – by measures to counter pollution than by steps to contain economic growth. It is doubtful in any case whether action of the latter kind will be deliberately attempted, and if it were, and the improvement in living standards were slowed down as a result, the resistance to applying resources to control pollution would be so much the greater.” (Treasury Economic Paper No 2 “Economic Growth: Is it worth having?” June 1973, AGPS Canberra, p19 and p21)

Even leaving aside the difference between capitalist and socialist attitudes to the environment, it is clear that industrialisation has markedly improved the environment compared with pre-industrial societies. Not only was the life of the “noble savage” something “nasty, brutish and short” but even in feudal times the environment can be summarised in this jingle:

In days of old, when knights were bold,

and lavatories weren’t invented;

People laid their loads, beside the roads,

and went away contented.

Even the aristocrats, let alone the “solid yeomen” of pre-industrial society literally stank – and not only in the towns where the streets were used as sewers. Forests were denuded and dustbowls and deserts created, before modern agriculture began to reverse this process.

Over the last decade in particular (as a result of pressure from people concerned about the environment) we have seen a clear and definite improvement in environmental protection. The increasing concern with pollution controls today precisely reflects the fact that as industrialisation proceeds, higher standards not only become necessary but also possible and are demanded.

(* ‘A Marxist view’ does not appear in the title of the original 1979 article but I think it is important to state from the outset that that is what it represents – C21styork )

To be continued… next instalment, Part 2 – Limits to growth, Third World Dependency and Consumerism…

Mr Obama: Tear down that wall! (Open the borders and share the chaos)

Posted on November 23, 2014 by c21styork

The elephant-in-the-room in all current discussions of immigration is the question of ‘open borders’.

President Obama’s speech announcing executive action to grant temporary relief from deportation to about half of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the USA contained some moving and highly accurate words. Much of what he said applies to Australia too. After all, there is a sense in which we are “a nation of immigrants” and “We were strangers once, too”.

The notion that we were all strangers once suggests its opposite – our common humanity. ‘They’ are ‘us’. ‘We’ are ‘they’.

Obama gave examples of heartbreak and anxiety experienced by decent hardworking parents who faced deportation and separation from their US-born children simply because “they didn’t have the right papers”. He suggested it was unfair (my word) when “circumstances of birth” determined who could and couldn’t be an American. These ‘illegals’ are here, working in menial jobs and paying their way through university, and he wants them given a legal status through a system of registration with the government and payment of a $500 fee, which will protect them from deportation for up to three years, as well as grant them work permits.

There are precedents for such protection under Reagan and Bush. It’s better than the status quo. Were I one of the 4.9 million ‘illegals’ eligible for the protection, then I would breathe a sigh of relief in the here and now.

But, there’s also something inconsistent in Obama’s position when he stresses that the temporary legal status he is offering does not “create a path” to citizenship or permanent residence or access to federal health care. Why not? – given that we are all strangers sharing a common humanity and that “these people” helped create America and keep America going.

And why the temporary nature of the protection from deportation? Why the prospect of renewing the “anxiety and heartbreak” in a few years time?

And why – if we were all strangers once – does the decree only apply to about 5 million of America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants? Why should it matter whether they have been ‘illegal’ for more or less than five years?

A practicable policy, based on the principles argued by Obama, would open the way for citizenship for all 11 million of the undocumented immigrants. And it would be an executive order, which is binding, not an executive action, which isn’t.

To make the fine words and sentiments even shallower, Obama stressed that he wants more resources allocated for border control to stop illegals coming into the US and he wants to “speed the return of those who do cross over”. Why do this if you believe such people help build America and that “Scripture tells us, we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger”?

Open the borders – share the chaos!

The elephant-in-the-room in all current discussions of immigration is the question of ‘open borders’. The undoubted benefits of globalisation are often lauded when it comes to trade, communications, cultural exchange and advances in air travel, yet many governments are imposing greater restrictions on who may gain permanent admission into their country.

On the other hand, in our lifetime, many borders have come down. The Berlin Wall is an example that tends to be taken for granted. Chaos ensued, with scores of thousands of east Germans flooding into west Germany. But the chaos was there anyway, and was now simply being shared in the interests of all.

The European Union nations have shared open borders for about 20 years – that’s 26 countries and 500 million people representing about 25% of global GDP. More recently, the Union of South American Nations representing 12 South American countries, have opened their borders to free movement of citizens of their member states. The United Kingdom and Ireland have allowed their citizens unrestricted movement between their countries for a long time, as do India and Nepal.

In 1973, Australia opened its border for the first time since federation in an agreement with New Zealand, the Trans-Tasman Arrangement.

The free movement of people becomes an issue as countries integrate their economies regionally and globally. ‘Free trade’ agreements could – and should – but don’t – provide a framework for the gradual development of open borders and the rights of workers to move as freely as capital, goods and services. The North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, USA and Mexico imposes restrictions on the right of workers to move freely between the member states. You’d think the trade unions would be protesting about this but they tend to be led by people who do not believe in Marx’s great slogan ‘The workers have no country’ and who instead actually believe there is such a thing as a ‘foreign worker’.

Marx nailed the way things were developing in The Communist Manifesto, in 1848:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood… In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production… National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible… The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate”.

Nationalism and xenophobia are the main factors working against proper consideration of ‘open borders’ and recognition and acceptance of us all as having once been ‘strangers’. The countervailing forces include classical liberals, such as those at the excellent Open Borders: The Case site, and internationalist leftists (of the kind who prefer ‘red’ to ‘green’ and are welcome at my blog, C21st Left).

Obama made the point in his speech that “mass deportations” are not “realistic” (or desirable). The reality is that immigration restriction itself is no longer realistic and becomes less realistic the more what’s left of the world’s national economies integrate into a global economy with advanced means of communications and travel.

Mr Obama: Bring down that wall!

REVOLUTION: Part 7 of ‘Unemployment and Revolution’ by Albert Langer. (This part, a draft, was written in 1982, a year after the first paper).

Posted on November 21, 2014 by c21styork

Note by C21styork: I think the earlier instalments stand up well over the 30 years since they were written but this section, on revolution, begs the questions as to why, over more than three decades, there is still no real interest in revolution in the advanced capitalist societies. The slogan ‘Smash capitalism’ was more popular back in the late 1960s when a significant minority of leftists (and the state’s intelligence agencies) did take the notion of revolution seriously – yet that was a time also of post-war economic boom. Now, in the C21st, capitalism is in decline to such an extent that the basics that are lauded by social-democrats, such as free public health and free education, can only be funded on the basis of debt. The zombie system is kept alive by government support and the ideal of the ‘free market’ is – or should be – exposed for the utopianism that it is. In places like Greece, people are angered by austerity measures, and throw rocks at banks. But that is frustration, not revolution. Meanwhile, in Australia and other advanced economies, what passes for left-wing thinking continues to obsess about the weather…

* * * *

“These days people are rightly cynical about the “policies” and “programs” of political parties, whether “revolutionary” or not. Revolutionary Leninist ideas are widely discredited by the sterility of their apparent supporters, and Marxist concepts that sum up important truths from the history of revolutionary struggle seem empty because they have been repeated so often as banalities. One hesitates therefore to use the word “program”, let alone “party”, for fear of being taken for yet another loony with pat simplistic answers to all the world’s problems”.

Part 7: Revolution

We Need a Program

Expropriating Big Business

Central Planning

Labour Policy

The Struggle for Control

Socialist Management

Investment Planning

Draft 4. August 1982

(Note: A number of comments on earlier drafts of this section have pointed to the conclusion that it really ought to be rewritten completely. However, it seems better to get the thing out, and allow others to comment as well. Please bear in mind that this was originally intended to simply round off the paper “Unemployment and Revolution”, by suggesting that revolution is a more “practical” solution to the problem of unemployment, than the various other “left” schemes to deal with it, that were analysed there. It is not intended to satisfy people’s desires for a meaningful answer to the general problem of “revolution”, but merely to say something about what a revolution could do about unemployment. Unfortunately everything, like everything else, is related to everything, as well as being a class question…, which makes it very difficult to complete an acceptable article about anything…)

In its normal state, capitalism has become an obsolete oppressive system that ought to be got rid off. A relatively small minority recognise this and are consciously anti-capitalist, but the masses continue trying to satisfy their needs within the system rather than by overthrowing it. So there is no real possibility of overthrowing that system and attempts to do so degenerate into futile reformism and/or terrorism, whatever the “revolutionary” rhetoric.

But during periods of economic crisis, the contradictions of capitalism sharpen and the possibility of actually getting rid of it arises. A substantial proportion of the population is drawn into active political struggle as they confront questions of what society is to do to get out of its impasse. There is no crisis that the ruling class could not resolve if it was allowed to, but with the masses politically active, the possibility arises of the ruling class not being allowed to, and of people taking things into their own hands.

In boom conditions, capitalism develops the productive forces at its maximum rate. That may be far slower than would be possible for a communist society, but there is no basis for comparison, so the obstruction is not so noticeable.

The “development of the productive forces” is not some abstract question. It means concretely that the wealth of society is increasing, not just materially, but also culturally and in every direction. Opportunities for development are open and people who want to better their own situation can do so by grasping those opportunities. Most workers can expect better jobs, with a higher standard of living and better conditions. Capitalists can find opportunities for profitable investment. International trade is expanding and the different nations, classes and sectional interests are fighting over their share of an expanding “cake”. Such fights may be acute, but there is always room for compromise about who benefits more, when nobody is actually asked to accept being worse off than they are already. Reforms may be fought bitterly, but there is scope for reform without shaking the whole system apart. Within a “pluralistic society”, there can still be “consensus”.

In crisis conditions all this is reversed. The cake is contracting and the fight is over who is to bear the loss. Among capitalists the fight is over who is to survive and who is to eat whom. Between capitalists and workers there is no room for compromise. Reforms become impossible and even past achievements may be rolled back. “We can’t afford these luxuries any more”. Within the working class too, there is less unity as people find themselves in “hard times” where it is “everyone for themselves”. The “social fabric” unravels, consensus breaks down and capitalist society stands revealed as based on sharply antagonistic interests.

The last major capitalist crisis was the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Subsequent economic fluctuations; including the present one, have not amounted to much more than “recessions”; so the inevitability of capitalist crisis has been forgotten until the next crisis again smashes the illusion. But even in “recession”, the sharpening of contradictions can be seen, together with the complete inability of the reformist “left” to come up with any serious alternative program. All the signs point to a gathering crisis, much deeper than the 1930’s, and the necessity for a serious revolutionary alternative opposed to trying to patch capitalism together again.

Internationally, overproduction intensifies the struggle for markets between imperialist nations as well as between individual financial groups. International conflicts that could have been resolved peacefully become intractable because the economic barriers have gone up and there is no room to manoeuvre. The “underdog” or “latecomer” imperialists can no longer hope for a place in the sun by peaceful competition in an expanding market. They can only expand at the direct expense of the established “status quo” powers and so they seek a re-division of the spoils by force. Despite its costs and risks, for them war becomes a more attractive alternative to economic collapse.

On questions of war and peace, the general “left” attitudes are perhaps even worse than the whining domestic demands that capitalists should continue running things but should do so more humanely and with less unemployment. Just as they shut their eyes to the real impossibility of continuing capitalist prosperity and “demand” a boom economy, they also shut their eyes to the real inevitability of imperialist war and “demand” peace. Pretending that the Soviet superpower is not aggressive, and that its arms build-up is not preparation for war, but a figment of Reagan’s imagination, becomes another way of avoiding the critical issues of war and revolution.

Workers have no stake in the existing imperialist division of the world nor would they have a stake in the proposed new one, they do however, have a stake in opposing aggressive predatory wars and the accompanying overt denial of national and democratic rights. (The first world war was a different situation not arising directly from an economic crisis, in which both sides had essentially similar expansionist aims). As we had to fight the fascist powers in the second world war, we would have to fight any fascist power that launched a third world war. (Although the Soviet Union still describes itself as “socialist, if it actually launched a third world war, the correct description of “social-fascist” would be more widely understood.)

If we fail to defeat social-fascist war preparations, we could be stuck with fascist domination holding up social development for decades. If we fail to organise independently around our own revolutionary program, we could be stuck with social development continuing sporadically in capitalism’s self-contradictory manner, lurching forward to the next crisis and the next war. If we get our act together, while the bourgeoisie’s act is in a mess, then we have a world to win.

All this relapse into the barbarism of crisis and war occurs as on obvious result of capitalism itself. Workers are unemployed, goods and services are unsaleable, plant capacity stands idle, and consumers are forced to do without, for no “unavoidable reason”. All that stops the continued expansion of wealth and opportunities is the capitalist system of production for private profit. All that is needed for the unemployed workers to use the idle plant to produce goods that people want and need, is a communist system of production for use instead of profit.

We Need a Program

Obviously we are not in a revolutionary crisis right now, and no question of overthrowing any western government arises immediately.

But a major economic crisis and/or a world war would certainly lead to a revolutionary crisis. The question of an alternative to capitalism will certainly be posed. Capitalism will survive if we let it. Crises can resolve the contradictions temporarily and allow a new period of expansion until the next crisis. The outcome of the 1930’s crisis was the post-war boom, not communist revolution in western countries. In retrospect this appears hardly surprising, since the Communist Parties devoted themselves to fighting fascism on a purely defensive basis, and advanced slogans like “Make the Rich Pay” that implied no intention to abolish capitalism.

In its present state of confusion, the left in advanced countries is hardly capable of even fighting fascism let alone challenging the bourgeoisie for power, let alone winning that challenge. There is even a strong tendency to be “soft” on social fascism and adopt a tolerant, apologetic or defensive attitude towards the overt denials of national and democratic rights by the Soviet Union. This can only make it easier to undermine those rights in the West as well. Certainly no movement unable to defend bourgeois democracy against (“socialist”) fascism can hope to overcome the limitations of bourgeois democracy and replace it with communism.

Fortunately however, the confusion on the left is so great there is at least a chance the existing “left” movements and ideologies will disintegrate completely before the actual crisis breaks out, and there will be room for something new and genuinely revolutionary to emerge.

The task of building a revolutionary left is at present primarily destructive – exposing and undermining the reactionary ideology of the present “left”. But we need to at least think about construction at the same time. The aim of destruction is to open the way for a revolutionary left that is fighting for progress rather than reacting against capitalism, and that is quite serious about winning political power to actually implement the social changes it is fighting for, instead of whining about the present rulers of society.

It has been said often enough that there can be no blueprints for the future because the people themselves will decide how to build the new society as they are building it. Fundamentally I agree with that, and will therefore refrain from attempting to present any blueprints. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to put forward a few ideas for discussion about what a revolutionary government might do to start building socialism. Consistent refusal to do so suggests that we are not fair dinkum about having an alternative. “No blueprints” is often a cop-out excuse for “no ideas”.

Revolutionaries need to have a “program” that is more than an analysis of the present society and a promise for the future. We need to develop a clear statement of the concrete measures a revolutionary government would aim to take, so people can decide whether or not they want to fight for a revolution. Too many “parties” talk about “revolution” in the abstract, and none at all seem to be serious about it concretely.

These days people are rightly cynical about the “policies” and “programs” of political parties, whether “revolutionary” or not. Revolutionary Leninist ideas are widely discredited by the sterility of their apparent supporters, and Marxist concepts that sum up important truths from the history of revolutionary struggle seem empty because they have been repeated so often as banalities. One hesitates therefore to use the word “program”, let alone “party”, for fear of being taken for yet another loony with pat simplistic answers to all the world’s problems.

Nevertheless, in a crisis situation, people will judge according to how the measures proposed by revolutionaries compare with those advocated by the existing regime. It will be a very real life and death question for a revolutionary party to have clear policies to deal with unemployment and similar questions. If the revolutionaries do not form a political party that aims to take power from the old regime then the old regime must continue. It will not just disappear in a burst of anarchist enthusiasm. If the revolutionary party does not propose policies that are more desirable and effective than those of the old regime, then why should anyone support a revolution? Even if there was a revolution, there would be a counter-revolution when the new regime failed to solve the problems that had discredited the old regime in the first place.

So, we need to go beyond denouncing what the existing regime is doing and start offering constructive alternatives, even though any such proposals are bound to be half-baked at this stage. Reformists will make constructive proposals as to how the present regime should deal with problems, with or without a change in the political parties administering the regime. Revolutionaries will make proposals about how a new regime, a workers’ state or “dictatorship of the proletariat”, would cope with these questions.

Only left sectarians will talk about revolution in the abstract, without having in mind anything so mundane as taking political power and running the joint. But unfortunately the “revolutionary” organisations in western countries are overwhelmingly sectarian. Their concern is to defend their own organisations and “principles” and not to make revolution. A discrete veil is usually drawn over the question of what a revolution might actually do about unemployment or anything else for that matter, because the alleged “revolutionaries” have no idea what they would do, and have not even thought about it. This does not worry them much, because they are not serious about actually establishing a new regime, but only wish to denounce the present regime more extravagantly than a “mere reformist” would denounce it.

So, let us talk about what communist revolutionaries should do, if we had the political power to do it. No doubt anarchists will disapprove, and insist that discussion of government policy implies we are bureaucrats no better than the old regime. But the choice society faces at present is between revolutionary government or counter-revolutionary government, and the road to abolishing all government lies first through establishing a revolutionary government (but certainly doesn’t end there). Therefore if we want to eventually abolish the state, we need to start exchanging views about proposed government policy now. The reformists talk about government policy because they are perfectly serious about governing, and there is nothing “unrealistic” about this intention of theirs. Revolutionaries should do so too, for exactly the same reason. Those who disdain to talk about government policy obviously have no belief in either reform or revolution, but only a slave’s inclination to whinge occasionally.

The discussion below will not go into the many problems of building a new society and transforming human nature. It will not sketch any exciting vision of how wonderful a new society could be, but will discuss the more mundane problems of what a revolutionary government could do about unemployment in a society that still had not been transformed. Obviously this is not the main point of a revolution. It would be just as boring to have a revolution simply against unemployment as it would be to have one to improve living standards. But this is an article specifically about unemployment.

In the first phase of communist society, the period generally known as “socialism”, there would still be wage labour and commodity exchange through money. It would be quite impossible to abolish these social relations left over from capitalism all at once.

People would not work if they were not paid for it, and they would grab whatever they could get if they did not have to pay for what they consumed. Production would still be geared to market exchange. Basic social relations would still be bourgeois. There would be a bourgeois society in which the bourgeoisie no longer held political power.

A revolutionary government would presumably come to power only as a direct result of a profound political and social crisis, like the last Great Depression. Very likely too, it would arise in the aftermath of a devastating world war. Either way, or both ways, the new regime would be faced with severe economic dislocation including unemployment, as well as all the problems of a regime born in civil war. So what should it do about unemployment?

Obviously a revolutionary government should not attempt to deal with unemployment by any of the methods currently proposed from the labour movement. It could not simply reduce working hours, or raise wages, or increase government spending etc. From the previous analysis we know that these measures would not work in a market economy.

“Revolution” does not mean that we would “demand” that the multinationals do this or that. It means that we, the working class or its advanced sections, take over the running of industry and make the decisions ourselves. To eliminate unemployment, a revolutionary government would have to proceed with abolishing the market economy.

That will be a long struggle and there will certainly be setbacks. The democratic revolutions in Europe were spread over hundreds of years interrupted by various wars and counter-revolutions. They culminated in the establishment of the modern imperialist powers and not some “utopia”. That result was a lot better than the medieval feudal societies that existed before. The democratic revolution was worthwhile and the sordid power struggles undermining feudal power were important. The Russian and Chinese revolutions suffered reversals too. But they, and their power struggles, were worthwhile. The coming Communist revolution will also be protracted and tortuous. But it has to start somewhere and we ought to be discussing it now.

It may seem odd to be discussing concrete economic policy for a regime that is nowhere near existing yet. But it is no more odd than the usual discussions of how to make capitalism work better, or how to retreat from it.

Expropriating Big Business

The first step towards abolishing the market economy and eliminating unemployment, would be to establish state control of the labour market by expropriating the big businesses that employ the large majority of workers. It would not be a matter of “kicking out the multi-nationals”, but of taking them over, and advancing on the basis they have already laid.

Most likely it would have to be done on an international scale. The world economy is already “transnational” and we certainly would not want to retreat from that to any kind of economic autarchy in the name of “independence”.

Expropriation of capitalist property obviously relates to what the revolution could do about many other concrete problems as well, and also relates to implementation of the maximum program, towards socialism and communism. But in an immediate sense, the state taking over most industry is not in itself socialism, but can be state capitalism. It is only a pre-condition for socialism and a pre-condition for abolishing the market economy. Nevertheless, we will not discuss other aspects of the transition to communism here.

In Australia, like other advanced capitalist countries, a very large part of the labour force, about one third, already work for the state at one level or another, or for public corporations like Telecom, or government owned corporations like Qantas. These are already state capitalist industries.

Most of the rest of the labour force is employed by large corporations, often transnationals, whose owners play hardly any direct role in administering them, but are purely passive shareholders or bondholders. These firms could be converted to state capitalism by simple decrees transferring ownership to the revolutionary government, and by the cancellation of government debts. They would remain capitalist because they would still be employing labour to use it for making profit by selling goods on the market. But expropriation without compensation would undermine the economic basis of the old bourgeoisie, and pave the way for communism. It would make the state responsible for hiring and firing the bulk of the Australian labour force, and therefore place the state in a position where it could take responsibility for employment and unemployment.

Many other workers are employed by small firms that are really little more than outside workshops for the big corporations, or “self-employed” in the same, completely dependent, situation. It would be difficult to simply establish state capitalism in these enterprises by decree. But taking over the big corporations on which they are dependent, means making them dependent on state owned enterprises. Control of the big firms would make it possible for the state to influence hiring and firing by the small firms, and so establish state control of that part of the labour market indirectly.

Naturally there is no great problem for a capitalist state to nationalise capitalist industries when it is necessary to the continued survival and development of capitalism – and no great benefit either. A revolutionary state doing it for revolutionary purposes is another matter.

The major obstacle to all this would of course be the state power of the previous regime, including local and foreign armies, navies and air forces, as well as terrorists, saboteurs etc. But we are talking about measures to be taken by a new state that rests on the power of the armed working class, so we may assume that these obstacles are being overcome through revolutionary civil and national war.

There are still a number of major economic obstacles that would persist even after victory in a revolutionary war. Let us look at a few examples.

First, the directors and top management of big industry, whether public sector or private, would side with the present ruling class against a revolutionary government. Unlike the owners as such, these people do play an important role in the actual organisation of production, and can not simply be dismissed by decree.

Second, many lower level executives, engineers, public servants and so on, who play an essential role in production, could not be relied upon by a revolutionary government, even though they have no direct stake in the other side. They see themselves, and are seen by others, as “middle class” (although their real status might be better described as upper strata of the proletariat, since their income is obtained from wage labour, not property ownership).

Third, there are substantial sectors of the economy, even in the most advanced capitalist countries, where people are still self-employed or work for small employers who do play a direct and important role in the actual organisation of production – for example, farmers, shopkeepers, professionals such as doctors, and a good deal of small manufacturing, construction and services enterprises. These could not simply be taken into government ownership be decree, nor are they all directly dependent on firms that could be. They would have to remain for some time as a “private sector” (quite different of course from the present “private sector”dominated by huge transnational corporations).

Certainly capitalism is already replacing small shopkeepers with supermarket chains, and family farms with agribusiness. Doctors will eventually be forced to work for salaries and so on. But it takes time, and a workers’ state would want to do it less blindly and destructively, and with more attention to the problems faced by the people concerned, than under capitalism.

As long as there was a private sector, relations between it and the state sector would have to be based on commodity exchange through money, and this would remain true even when privately owned businesses were being transformed into co-operatives as part of the process of socialisation. In connection with the private sector, there would still be a labour market. This would continue until the state sector was able to offer jobs doing everything that needs to be done, on terms more attractive than the private sector. That could be quite a long time.

Fourth, there are links between the ownership of bigger industries and smaller ones, and even links to the savings, superannuation and insurance funds, and housing and consumer finance, of ordinary workers and working people. We cannot simply expropriate shareholdings and assume we have hit only big capitalists.

These problems all have to be faced up to, if we are serious about solving unemployment, because we cannot solve unemployment without expropriating capitalist private property in this wholesale way. International ramifications are left aside, on the assumption that we are talking about some sort of world revolution, at least in the advanced capitalist countries together. But that whole question needs to be gone into as well.

It may be repetitive to again emphasise that eliminating unemployment requires wholesale expropriation of capitalist private property. But usually this central point is left out entirely. The “socialists” and “communists” who agitate about unemployment without focussing on this issue, must in fact be demanding a solution within capitalism. They could not possibly believe in socialism or communism, or they would mention it at least occasionally, if only in their prayers.

Central Planning

Assuming we are able to solve the above problems, how would the establishment of state capitalism allow the revolutionary government to deal with unemployment? And how could it avoid becoming some drab,boring and repressive system like East Germany?

Economically, it would be a “fairly straightforward”(!) question of subordinating the state capitalist enterprises to a unified central plan, instead of production for the market. Socially and politically, this would be part of the same process that transforms capitalist production for profit into communist production for use, and wage labour into communist labour for the common good.

Since most workers would be employees of state enterprises, “manpower planning” or rather “labour force planning” could be carried out seriously. Instead of independent hiring and firing from a pool of unemployed, there would be a planned allocation of labour. Individual workers would all be permanent employees of the public service, not liable to hiring and firing as in private industry.

At present, about 5% of the labour force are in career public services and there are also career services in some corporations like Telecom and BHP. In general these workers do not get hired and fired according to the needs of capital investment in their industries. Their firms manage such a large sector of the economy in a centralised way, that they are able to engage in labour force planning alongside their other investment planning and transfer and promote workers within the firm’s career structure. There seems no reason why similar personnel practices could not be very quickly extended from 5% of the workforce to 80% or 90%, thus establishing complete state control over the labour market. (A large section of the Japanese labour force are “permanent” employees already, with another large section being “casuals”to provide the slack necessary in a market economy).

This would not in itself eliminate unemployment, as witness the present staff ceilings and cutbacks in the public service, and the redundancies from the state sector dominated economies of the Soviet bloc and China. But it would create the minimum organisational prerequisite for the government to take responsibility for unemployment. After all, if the government is not the main employer, it is not responsible for employment, so how can it be responsible for unemployment?

As well as control of the labour market, the revolutionary government would have in its hands, all the operating revenue and profits of big industry, and therefore the decisive funds for investment. Instead of the present anarchic distribution of investment through the capital markets, there could therefore be a planned allocation through the state budget. This, and this alone, makes it possible to eliminate unemployment, simply by making full employment an essential criterion of planning. As long as firms decide their investments privately, and hire and fire accordingly, there can be no real “labour force planning”. Once investments are centrally allocated, then the labour force can be planned too.

A single central plan would co-ordinate the requirements for labour of different occupations and skills in each industry and locality, and indeed in each establishment. The plan would take into account changes in labour force participation, the education system, immigration and emigration flows etc. The same plan would allocate funds for investment, together with the labour force required by that investment.

Far from discouraging new technology, to save jobs, the plan would facilitate its speediest implementation, to provide leisure. But the same plan that provided funds for a labour saving innovation in a particular industry or establishment, would also provide for the transfer and re-training of those workers made redundant, and the investment of funds in the industry that is to employ them, or the reduction in working hours that goes together with increased productivity.

The decisive point is that things would not just be left to “sort themselves out” through the interaction of wages, prices and profit rates on investment, and the consequent formation and absorption of a pool of unemployed. No matter how much state ownership and “planning” there may be in a market economy, if production and investment decisions are at all regulated by “the market”, they must to that extent be allowed to “sort themselves out” through market movements, including unemployment.

A fundamental distinction should be recognised, between this kind of central planning, in a state owned economy, and the sort of bureaucratic planning implied by “statist” proposals mentioned earlier. Here we are not talking about government “controls” imposed on separate, privately owned enterprises from above, while those enterprises are still basically geared to employing workers to produce goods for sale at a profit on the market. We are talking about a transformation of the enterprises themselves, in which they cease to be separate entities, and become social property working to a common social plan. That involves a political struggle, by the workers in the separate enterprises and in the whole society. It implies a social revolution as profound as abolishing the ownership of slaves by slaveowners.

The same distinction should be recognised between the central planning we are talking about, and that which exists today in the Soviet bloc and China. The “economic reforms” of the 1950’s in the Soviet bloc, and more recently in China, established the same kind of relationships between central planning authorities and separate enterprises geared to the market, as were described as “statist” rather than “socialist” in section 6 above. Some forms remain similar to socialist central planning, but the content is commodity market relations and even the forms increasingly resemble those common in the west.

The injustices of slavery and serfdom were eliminated by abolishing the social institutions of slavery and serfdom themselves, not by prohibitions against maltreatment of slaves and serfs. The injustices of wage labour, including unemployment, will be eliminated by abolishing the social institution of wage labour itself, not by directions to employers to treat their workers better.

Labour Policy

The planned allocation and transfer of labour need not be bureaucratic like the present public service, although it probably would be at first. It can be made far more flexible than the freest labour market, simply by leaving enough vacancies unfilled all the time, to allow a wide choice of jobs. Industrial conscription has been required in both capitalist and socialist economies under wartime conditions, but it can never be the peacetime norm in any post-feudal society.

Under capitalism, easy job changing only occurs in boom conditions. In a planned economy it can be deliberately maintained all the time, at the expense of some loss of efficiency in the establishments that have unfilled vacancies (but with an overall gain in efficiency due to labour mobility).

Imbalances would inevitably occur, but could be corrected by revision of the plan. Apart from other miscalculations, the plan would also have to take into account unplanable variations in the demand for labour by the relatively small private sector, just as it would also have to correct for other anarchic movements in market forces generated from that sector.

Even capitalism is normally able to maintain an approximate balance between the demand and supply for labour, with only the market price mechanism as a regulator. So there seems no reason to doubt that unemployment could be rapidly abolished with central planning. This has been the case even in relatively backward socialist countries like China, where the state sector was a relatively small part of the economy compared with agricultural co-ops. Only since the widening of market relations between separate enterprises has mass unemployment become a problem there.

In advanced capitalist countries like Australia, a revolutionary government would immediately have control over a far larger state sector than either the Soviet Union or China had when they were socialist. The remaining private sector would be insignificant in comparison, so there should be little problem.

At first however, the relations between state owned enterprises would still be market relations, just as the relations between Qantas,TAA,Vicrail and the SEC are market relations today, with all the anarchy and waste that implies. The struggle to subordinate them to the plan, would be part of the struggle to solve the basic economic problems of transition to communism.

Simply directing state owned enterprises to adhere to a central labour force plan could not work while they were still basically oriented towards a market economy. If the products have to be sold on a market, and there is no market to sell more of that product, then its no good having the government telling a state owned firm to hire more workers. Those workers might just as well be paid unemployment benefits direct – their services are not required.

Labour force planning can only work to the extent that labour power is not a commodity that is purchased to produce other commodities for sale on the market. When production is being carried out by society as a whole, rather than by separate enterprises engaged in commodity exchange, then society can allocate its labour time,as well as other resources. To the extent that separate enterprises exchange their products, then they must buy their labour power too, and to the extent that labour power is bought and sold, it cannot be allocated according to a central plan.

A necessary requirement for centralised labour force planning would of course be centralised wage fixing. Enterprises could not be free to determine their own wage rates if labour is being allocated between them according to a central plan. Otherwise the allocation of labour would be influenced by wage rates as in any other market economy. At the same time, as long as people still work for wages rather than for the public good, wage incentives will be required to attract workers from one industry or occupation to another, if unemployment or other forms of coercion are not to be used.

Clearly wages and wage relativities must be fixed centrally – as though the present Arbitration system really did perform the function it purports to. But this also implies moves towards an abolition of wages as payment for the sale of labour power.

In a fully communist society, income would not depend on “wages” at all. Instead of price and wage fluctuations and unemployment, any imbalance in economic planning would simply result in shortages in facilities available for people engaged in various projects, and/or surpluses of things people do not really want. Annoying, but not a major social problem.

But even in the early stages of transition, wages could conceivably be paid directly from the central budget, together with other “welfare” income. In that case enterprises would not “hire” their labour force directly, but from an employment bureau (as occurs now with some kinds of labour such as temporary staff). The rates paid by firms to the employment bureau need have no direct relation to the combined wages and welfare payments paid out of the state budget to the workers concerned. Imbalances can result in state subsidies to employment (or penalties on it), rather than unemployment (or labour shortages).

Similar proposals have been made for capitalist governments to encourage or discourage employment by altering taxes on wages. But there is really very little scope for that when the government’s own revenue is dependant on those taxes. Moreover such adjustments could not cope with mass unemployment due to overproduction. It is a very different matter when the government revenue coincides with the whole revenue of big industry, and when central planning ensures a basic balance between production and consumption, leaving only minor deviations to be compensated.

When production is geared to social needs rather than profits, it is quite feasible to cope with increased labour productivity by simply reducing the hours of work required for given wages. Eventually, as technology continues to develop, and social attitudes change, very little work would be performed in “exchange” for wages. But from quite early on, the funds available for investment and job creation would not depend on profits, but could be allocated, just like wages and welfare payments, directly from the total revenue. Productivity increases that increase the total revenue can be used any way society wants. Cutting working hours in a non-market economy would not have the “paradoxical” effect of choking off investment and increasing unemployment due to reduced profits. Nor would increasing foreign aid or social welfare or wages have that effect. The total size of the “pie” would be the only constraint once there was no mechanism for the economy to “jam up” whenever “profits” had an insufficient slice.

With the transition from wage labour to communist labour, an increasing proportion of incomes would be based on needs (or desires), rather than payment for work (as a matter of right not charity). Correspondingly, work would have to be an increasingly voluntary activity. Wage and welfare increases, and reduction in working hours, could then be planned together with the necessary investments in consumer goods industries, with additional flexibility provided by the increasing “social wage” of”public goods”. When work has become a voluntary community service, there is of course no question of a “labour market” to require a “labour policy”.

In making the transition, it would be necessary to arrange social services, foreign aid, public benefits, wages, insurance and housing and consumer finance, as well as investment, as allocations from total revenue all at the same time. In expropriating big industry, the revolutionary government would take the whole of that revenue into its hands directly, including those “profits” previously paid out through taxation or via insurance funds to provide pensions etc.

Universal social welfare coverage financed from current revenue rather than “funds”, would compensate for most “savings” tied up in shareholdings etc, and small property owners could have their property redeemed rather than expropriated. The maximum number of people should gain from the expropriation of big industry and only a tiny minority should be losers. “Labour Policy” would have to embrace policy on these questions too.

The Struggle for Control

The social revolution required to transform capitalist enterprises into communist collectives obviously involves far more than government decrees transferring ownership. The revolution itself would have produced workers’ councils in many establishments, which would have taken over responsibility for management from the previous authorities. But that only establishes pre-conditions for the transformation, without actually solving the problem itself. Moreover, in many enterprises the workers’ councils would be weak or non-existent, or a screen behind which the old bosses are still in charge, since revolution develops unevenly.

While the left is in opposition, it seems natural to assume that all problems of control should be resolved by “decentralisation of authority”. After all, the people in charge at the top are reactionaries, so the more room there is for lower level units to determine their own affairs, the more chance there is to adopt more progressive policies in at least some places where radicals happen to be concentrated. The problems in other places, where radicals have no influence at all, are simply not worth even thinking about. Often a focus on “local” or “community” issues seems to reflect an acceptance that there is really nothing we can do about national and international issues.

With a revolutionary government in power, the situation should be reversed. The highest levels of the hierarchy should be more radical than the lower levels, and radicals at lower levels would be demanding obedience to government directives aimed at changing the social system, rather than agitating for autonomy where that would mean continuing in the old way. (Of course this can change, if the revolution is defeated and the “revolutionary government” ceases to be revolutionary – but that simply means the radicals are in opposition again – it does not mean that the whole problem could be mysteriously avoided by “decentralisation”.

Anarcho-syndicalists seem to imagine that if everybody democratically discusses everything, production units will be able to exchange their products to supply each other’s needs, and to supply consumer goods for the workers, with no more than ‘co-ordination” by higher level councils of delegates from the lower level establishments. Actually things are not so simple, and any attempt to realise that vision would only mean preserving market relations between independent enterprises, still not working to a common social plan. The concept involves a sort of “parliamentary cretinism of the workplace”, even though anarchists and syndicalists are generally well aware that the right to vote can not in itself transform bourgeois social relations into co-operative ones.

So far, modern big industry in the advanced capitalist countries, has always been based on capitalist production for profit, and nobody actually has much experience in how to run it any other way. Indeed many people allegedly on the “left” seem to be unable to conceive of it being run any other way, and dream of somehow going back to a smaller scale of production, for it to be “more human”. On the contrary, it was precisely small scale production that was suitable for capitalism, while the development of huge transnational corporations with a single management for entire sectors of the world economy, proves that the socialisation of production makes private ownership an anachronism.

The only experience we have of communist labour for the common good has been in a few “community projects” providing voluntary services to the public. Everything else is based on people working for wages under the supervision of bosses to produce commodities for sale on the market. Often voluntary community projects also end up adopting a boss system too, or remain hopelessly inefficient and get entangled in factional disputes that can not be resolved without a clear chain of authority, and in effect, “ownership”. Then they go under and reinforce the idea that capitalist production is the only system that can really work.

We should study the positive and negative lessons of the way small scale community projects and co-ops are managed, as well as studying capitalist management of big industry, in order to prepare for transforming the management of big industry. The mentality that equates “popular”, “democratic” and “co-operative” with “local” or “community” projects is a slave mentality that accepts the necessity of a bourgeois ruling class to manage big industry and the affairs of society as a whole. We do not just want to create some free space within which slaves can manage some of their own affairs, although that may sometimes be useful. We want to overthrow the slave owners and abolish slavery altogether.

If modern industry is to be run in a fundamentally different way, then essential policy and planning decisions to run it in that different way will have to be taken by somebody. Whether they are called the workers council, the revolutionary committee, or the state appointed management, somebody will have to take decisions about the sort of questions currently decided by the boards of directors and top management of BHP, the ANZ Bank, the Treasury and so on. More importantly, people will have to take decisions about economic, as well as other questions, currently resolved by the boards of directors of General Motors, ITT, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Morgan Guarantee Company, Mitsubishi, the Central Committee of the CPSU or CPC and so on. Even more importantly, we will have to take decisions about questions which none of these bodies have the power to decide, since none of them controls the world market, either separately or together.

No amount of elections from below, directives from the revolutionary government, or consultations with the masses will change the fact that these people will be responsible for the policy decisions in industry and will have to know what they are doing. Nor would it change the fact that they are doing the job currently done by capitalists “bosses” and will have ample scope to develop into new capitalist bosses themselves (and bosses with wider and more totalitarian powers).

Most workers expect to have bosses, and that would not change overnight in a revolution. There would be a tremendous unleashing of workers initiative, but there would also be a strong tendency to retain or return to the old ways of doing things, with new bosses, or even the same old bosses, in charge. Electing new bosses does not abolish the boss system.

The big issues are not decided “on the shop floor”, to use a phrase much loved by advocates of “self management”. Capitalism is already transferring more and more authority on the shop floor to workers themselves rather than supervisors or lower level line management. This only highlights the fact that questions like unemployment are imposed by market forces outside the control of “shop floor” management, or higher management for that matter.

Elected workers’ councils would be in exactly the same position of having to lay off staff, if there is no market for the goods they produce. Revolutionaries have to raise their sights above the shop floor, to places where more important decisions are taken, and to issues on which decisions simply are not taken in a market economy, because there are no decision makers with authority over the economy as a whole, and our fate is still subject to the blind workings of economic laws beyond our control.

If we want a revolution, then left-wingers, revolutionaries, will have to take on the functions of directors and managers of big businesses, as well as government ministries. Not many genuine left-wingers and revolutionaries have any great hankering to be on the board of directors of the Reserve Bank or BHP. But if revolutionaries are not leading the workers’ councils to implement a socialist economic policy, then it can only be right-wingers, or unreliable middle-of-the-road “experts” who are doing (or sabotaging) the job of management. Indeed in socialist countries, economic management functions seem to have been breeding grounds for revisionist bureaucrats.

Just saying “the workers will do it” does not solve a thing. Who are these workers who will do it after the revolution, without discussing what they will do, before the revolution? Power will pass from the hands of the bourgeoisie to the hands of the working class, because the working class will put forward a clear cut program to rescue society from the impasse it finds itself in under bourgeois rule. Slogans simply demanding a change in power because it is “more democratic” will get nowhere. The issue of “who decides, who rules” only arises in the context of “what is to be done”.

Revolution occurs when those who presently hold power are unable to do what has to be done, and when the only way it can be done is for their opponents to take the power to do it. The most class conscious and politically conscious workers will be the ones discussing these problems beforehand, and if we do not
have any ideas, how can we expect others to?

Socialist Management

The main areas of “management” in a typical capitalist firm are production, personnel, sales and finance. Research and development is another significant area in a small proportion of enterprises.
A lot of production management has become a fairly routine function which could be readily taken over and transformed by workers’ councils. Workers should have no difficulty rapidly improving productivity over what can be achieved under a basically antagonistic system of bossing. While workers’ productivity undoubtedly improves as a result of capitalist “bossing”, the very need for that bossing is itself a demonstration of how capitalism restricts productivity. Slave productivity was increased by harsh overseers, and also by having heavy tools that were hard to break (as well as hard to use). But productivity jumped much more with the elimination of slavery.

Capitalist bossing actually tries to keep workers stupid. “You’re not paid to think” is the supervisor’s catch cry, as soon as a worker starts saying “I think…”. But in fact workers are paid to think much more than slaves, serfs or peasants would think in their work, and they get sacked if they do not think. It is just that they are not supposed to think too much. Moreover modern technology places increasing demands on workers’ intelligence and requires a more and more educated labour force in greater and greater conflict with the old techniques of capitalist bossing. Communism would resolve this contradiction and unleash workers’ intelligence in production, so that “management”, “engineering”, “research”, “science” and so forth would cease to be restricted to an elite, excluding the contributions of the vast majority. Research and development would become much more widespread, be much closer to production, and require much less “management”.

Likewise personnel management is an essentially routine function that will be made much easier by the elimination of “industrial relations” between hostile employers and employees. There should be no problem organising the recruitment, training and allocation of labour in a plan based on full employment.

Purchasing and sales management does still involve an element of capitalist “entrepreneurialism”, although the work is done by salaried employees. But it can nevertheless readily be grasped and transformed, by the employees already engaged in it, and by other workers. The flexibility and dynamism of modern capitalism can be greatly exceeded by unleashing the workers’ initiative in this area too, as well as in production, to seek out new needs and new products. Even in a state capitalist market economy, the elimination of useless competition would save a lot of trouble, with unified marketing and supply arrangements under central planning. As the “market” is abolished, the supply function would become another aspect of production planning, rather than a separate problem of “marketing”.

The weakness of supply and marketing in socialist economies has been due to the general backwardness of those economies. They are (or rather were) “socialist” only in the sense of having *had revolutionary governments determined to accelerate the transition from capitalist to communist social relations. As far as the actual level of social development is concerned, the advanced capitalist countries have already reached a higher level, and this includes a higher level of centralised management and a higher level of organisation of marketing and supply, as well as the well known higher level of productivity in most industries.

Monopoly capitalism has abolished purely commodity relations in many areas, since the “exchange” is taking place between units under the same control, while labour power, and capital itself, remains a commodity. Although commodity production has been more restricted in socialist countries, as regards labour power and capital, central control of many products was actually less developed than in advanced capitalist countries. The improvements in supply and marketing when socialist countries have restored capitalist market relations does not reflect any inherent superiority of capitalism. It reflects the superiority of free market capitalism over bureaucratically controlled capitalism. A classic cartoon shows a “socialist” factory overfulfilling its production quota for nails (measured by weight), by producing a single giant (completely useless) “nail”.

The revisionist solution is to find more rational ways for central planners to co-ordinate the factories output to social requirements – mainly by setting goals in terms of market profits rather than arbitrary physical measurements. But exactly the same problem is faced by the top managements of large corporations in advanced capitalist countries. Solutions include the establishment of separate “profit centres” within the one enterprise, so that local managers will be more sensitive to market profits rather than blindly responding to higher directives.

In both cases the problem is that there can be no substitute for the market in an economy based on commodity production. If social production is divided between separate enterprises with antagonistic interests, then they can really only be brought together through market exchange, the best measure of which is money prices. If instead they are brought together by some other form of external coercion, there will inevitably be some misallocation of resources because the quotas set do not exactly correspond to money – the only measure of social needs in a market economy.

The communist solution is to dissolve the antagonism between separate enterprises so that each is directly aiming to meet social needs as best it can, rather than responding in its own separate interests, to an external compulsion to do so. Setting quotas in terms of numbers of nails, or the price of nails, would not solve the problem (although the latter would improve it). Having a factory management (the workers themselves), who are dedicated to meeting social needs, would solve it completely, since they would interpret planning directives from a social viewpoint rather than a narrow one.

The question of centralisation and decentralisation of enterprise management, is quite separate from the question of abolishing commodity production. One may advocate more local initiative at the same time as completely abolishing market incentives. Indeed it is noticeable that in both China and the Soviet Union, revisionists have strengthened central controls over individual enterprises, at the same time as widening markets relations. Increasing bureaucratic regulation there is necessary for the same reasons that it is necessary here.

Enterprises already under bourgeois management in socialist countries show more initiative when given material incentives and market “freedom”, just as socialist enterprises lose their drive when asked to produce just for profit. Overall, supply and marketing workers in an advanced economy working for the public interest should be able to introduce new goods to meet new needs far more dynamically than where this is done only to squeeze extra profit for their employers.

“Socialism” does not imply the restricted range of products available in economically backward socialist countries any more than it implies the lower standard of living, longer working hours or lower cultural levels common in those countries as compared with advanced capitalist countries.

Backward capitalist economies in third world countries have far worse problems with shortages and misallocation of production etc than backward socialist countries have had. There is no reason to anticipate major problems with the replacement of “commerce” by unified supply and marketing arrangements in advanced industrial countries.

Although the above functions of “management” present no special problems, financial management and investment planning is still an exclusive “entrepreneurial” function of capitalists, and it is precisely this that is decisive in abolishing the market economy and eliminating unemployment. The job is done by salaried employees as well as actual capitalists, but many of the employees are accountants, lawyers, bankers, investment analysts and so on, not ordinary workers. We shall consider this problem in more detail than other “management” problems.

Investment Planning

How do you decide whether to build a steel mill, or a hospital, or a thermal or hydro-electrical power station? Not just by democratically consulting steel workers, or hospital patients, or construction workers, or delegates from all three and others concerned. There must be some definite economic criteria for decision making. It is no good just saying we will build socially useful things like schools and hospitals instead of profitable things like steel mills or power stations. You need steel to build schools and hospitals, and you need electric power to run them.

The contempt a lot of “left” intellectuals have for industrial development, let alone “finance”, reflects a lack of seriousness about really doing anything. It implies either that we expect capitalist industry to somehow produce these things for the public benefit, or we postpone social change until everything can be produced free by magic (or we reduce our living standards below the appallingly low level that capitalism has managed to achieve).

At present the only criterion according to which goods and services are produced and investments are made to produce them, is market profitability. Some public services superficially have different criteria, but the “cost-benefit analysis” they use includes interest on capital as part of the costs, and measures benefit by what would be paid for the service if it was marketable. Government funds can only be invested if the overall social rate of return is sufficient to allow payment of interest on borrowings directly, or by taxes raised from sections of the economy that have benefited indirectly. Despite loud squeals from the “private sector”, no government projects are based on expropriation. It all has to pay for itself on the market, and return interest on the funds borrowed from the private sector.

The actively functioning capitalists today are the financial managers and similar functionaries (or party officials in “socialist countries”) who are not the nominal owners of the capital they control, but carry out the social functions of the capitalist controlling it, and live it up accordingly. Both in east and west, ownership is usually mediated via various “trusts” and capitalist luxury consumption owes as much to “perks” as to direct property income.

“Private ownership of capital”, in the sense of an individual capitalist directly owning means of production, is fairly obsolete. The difficulty Trotskyists have in finding a bourgeoisie in the Soviet block and China, ought to be just as great in the west, where capital is not usually privately owned by individuals either, and is certainly not passed on legally by inheritance, when death duties can be avoided. There are important differences between being a beneficiary under a trust, or enjoying perks as an executive, in the USA, and having a senior party position in the Soviet Union. But they are not as important as the differences between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – between those who employ or exploit labour and those who are employed or exploited.

It is a specific function of the capitalist ruling class to allocate investments. It does this rather blindly, and with colossal waste, but it does do it and whatever is wasted, is often a loss to the particular capitalists concerned, as well as to society as a whole.

If the new regime had no criteria for regulating investments there would be general chaos as each workers’ council decides what it thinks should be produced and only finds out later that it lacks the necessary inputs or their is no market for the outputs.

In fact to begin with, the old criteria of market profitability would have to be used. To some extent even some of the old personnel, familiar with finance, would have to be used also. They would be disposing of state capital rather than private capital, and getting their perks from that, as before.

Starting from the old system, it would be a long struggle before the new system was really being used for planning, and experience in the Soviet Union and China shows that there is plenty of room for reversals along the way. As long as commodity production and wage labour exists, even the complete suppression of the old bourgeoisie and its replacement by a genuinely socialist state can not prevent some cadres of that state themselves degenerating into a new bourgeoisie.

Of course the top managers and administrators who can not be bribed or coerced into co-operating can simply be replaced by the workers’ councils. But most workers do not even know what they do, let alone how to do it differently, so there will be a pretty strong tendency to continue doing things the same old way. Workers would work, bosses would boss and financiers would finance, if these categories are not systematically uprooted.

Technically, it is not hard to imagine criteria for investment planning that are not simply based on “profitability” in disguise. There is even a substantial branch of orthodox “welfare economics” devoted to the problem of production for use.[1]

But implementing new criteria means going from private production for profit to social production for social needs, and requires fundamentally changing the way things are done.[2]

About 4% of the Australian labour force work directly in the “financial industry”, apart from those doing similar work in the industries being financed. That is about half the labour force employed by the construction industry, and most of its effort is tied up with just trying to keep track of who owns what and transferring profits from one pocket to another (and to or from the taxation system), rather than actual investment planning.

The capitalist parasites are not even very good at keeping track of their own wealth, as is shown by the various multi-million dollar frauds that have been coming to light. They certainly do not do a brilliant job of investing it more wisely and frugally than public servants would, as is constantly suggested by apologists for capitalism. In fact even their investment function is carried out for them by accountants, advisers, brokers etc who receive a share of the spoils, but are not the actual owners of the capital they invest.

After a revolution these workers could be employed far more productively to ensure that resources are used as efficiently as possible and to keep track of public property so that it is not misappropriated.
There is no great technical mystery about financial work that means it could only be done by and for an old or new bourgeoisie. It just requires a major struggle.

Under slavery, public officials were necessarily slave owners. Under feudalism magistrates were necessarily landowners and under capitalism captains of industry were necessarily capitalists. But social relations change. All it needs is revolution to change them.

“Experts”

Bourgeois “experts” can work for the new owners of industry just as they used to work for the old ones, being bribed with high salaries if necessary. Or they can work for their own account, as “Nepmen” did during the “New Economic Policy” following “War Communism” in the 1920s Soviet Union. But unless the new proletarian owners at least know what they want, the “experts” cannot be forced to work in a fundamentally new way. In the long run they have to be replaced by the workers themselves, and in the short run they have to be tightly controlled by the workers councils, while the workers develop their own expertise.

In the immediate period after winning power, real control of day to day management in most enterprises would continue to be in the hands of bourgeois “experts” who know how to do it, but only know how to do it in a capitalist way. Where managerial power was not in their hands, effective management would still be paralysed to some extent by the initial incompetence of workers who are taking on unfamiliar functions. No amount of decrees giving power to the workers councils would change those facts, unless we are supposed to wait until the working class has already completely changed, before having the revolution that will change it.

There would be considerable scope for resistance to and sabotage of government economic policy. There would also be difficulty reconciling the different priorities and demands of different sections of the working class itself. Only the practical takeover by the workers could gradually change this situation, and then only with reversals and a long historical struggle, combining mass pressure from the workers councils below, and coercion and inducements from the revolutionary government above, before the dictatorship of the proletariat has really effective control of even the state sector of the economy, let alone education, culture etc.

Nevertheless, the working class in advanced capitalist countries like Australia is already literate and quite highly educated compared with the workers that took power in the Soviet Union and China. Most “experts” are not bourgeois, but just highly trained workers, perhaps with a few airs. Even the managers and engineers in overall charge of industry at present are themselves salaried employees, mostly at no great social distance from the mass of workers. Engineering is already a basically proletarian occupation. Management not yet, but headed that way.

Where the workers councils are strong, it should not be all that difficult for them to encourage or compel most managers and engineers to cooperate, and take on the functions of those that won’t. It will be more difficult where the workers councils themselves are weak, which is bound to be the case in many places, since the revolution develops unevenly. But it would hardly be impossible.

Conclusion:

The problem of abolishing unemployment by having a revolution is nowhere near as difficult as the impossible task of trying to abolish it without one! There is no need to politely cover up the absurdity of “left” schemes for dealing with unemployment within capitalism. We should say directly that these schemes are nonsense and go on to work out the realistic problems of preparing for revolution.

As the Communist Manifesto argued, we should raise the “property question” to the forefront of all immediate, practical struggles. Just how we can have a communist revolution in an advanced industrial society remains to be seen – it’s never been done before. But we should be quite clear that this is “what we are on about”.

[1] It can be proved mathematically that the capitalist pattern of investment according to the rate of profit can never lead to an efficient allocation of economic resources, and that “marginal cost pricing” amounts to a labour theory of value.
[2] The debate among allegedly “Marxist” economists about the so-called “transformation problem” relates closely to the problems Soviet bloc economies faced in allocating investments without using the traditional capitalist calculations based on an “average rate of profit”. A “rate of profit” is essential when enterprises have separate interests, and “marginal cost pricing” is only feasible when they do not. The “optimal” allocation of resources according to a central plan is not the same as the “equilibrium” possible when resources are privately owned – whether competition is “free”, “perfect” or monopolistic. “Equilibrium” situations can include unemployed labour and other resources, as long as the rate of profit is equalised and maximised.

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