This blog is about my reflections on an influential Anarchist critique of Leninism, written in 1970. Whilst having much adoration for Anarchism, and find its critique of Leninism valid, I nevertheless argue that Anarchism does not fully grasp what needs to change, especially in an epoch of climate crisis and an economy that seems irredeemably screwed.
Read the Anarchist text here. https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/ Written by Maurice Brinton for Solidarity.
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This is a great read and I agree with most of its arguments and historical evidence. I agree wholeheartedly with Brinton where he says, for example, “in relation to industrial policy there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of Stalinism.”
I think where it is going wrong is in seeing relations of production only as social relations. But there is also a thingness to them, isn’t there. They have a material element as well as a social element, hence the view ‘there is no alternative’. Social relations of production are embodied in things – capital, commodities, money, etc. Unless the relationship between mankind and his products of labour changes, social relations of production cannot be altered in the long-term, merely, at best, contested in brief moments of political upheaval.
That’s why the Russian Revolution was doomed from the outset – the Bolsheviks did not have a theory of what replaces capitalism’s Law of Value. And boy, you do need a new mechanism for an economy to function, else there is no social economy and, as we know, self-sufficiency like Richard Briers in The Good Life, does not work and is not attractive.
“For various anarchists the fact that the State or “political power” was not immediately “abolished” is the ultimate proof and yardstick that nothing of fundamental significance [in relation to revolutionary achievement – BC] really occurred. The SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain) draw much the same conclusion, although they attribute it to the fact that the wages system was not abolished, the majority of the Russian population not having had the benefit of hearing the SPGB viewpoint (as put by spokesmen duly sanctioned by their Executive Committee) and not having then sought to win a Parliamentary majority in the existing Russian institutions.”
The SPGB is basically correct, in my opinion, to the extent it is on the path to grasping what the new economic rule is. It is, in the lower phase of communism, the equating of labours, not wage labour which is a form of pay related to a magnitude of value produced (albeit, significantly curtailed). In the lower phase of communism, 4 hours = 4 hours, brain surgery is rewarded with the same amount of physical stuff as cleaning. The magnitude of what a worker receives is shaped only by the amount of time he or she has worked.
Of course, it will be immediately objected that brain surgeons are worth more than cleaners. But the new economic measure is not a moral measure. We are not saying both forms of labour are worth the same in a moral sense, only in an economic sense. Society can find other ways to praise the brain surgeon. Indeed, economic value deviates more from moral value in capitalism. Why can a banker get £100,000 bonus whilst the nurse is going to a food bank? Indeed, let us say a junior nurse earns £500,000 over a lifetime, and that Elon Musk’s net worth is £600bn. In that case, 1.2m junior nurses = 1 Elon Musk. That’s meant to be justice? The only way of suppressing the Law of Value is to equate labour hours instead. No labour commands more wealth than another of equal duration. In a higher phase of communism, it will become “from each according to their abilities to each according to their need”, but that could only evolve non-coercively on the back of a society which has already abolished money. So, we are struggling for the lower phase of communism right now.
By effecting this change, there are tremendous ramifications: 1) the commodity is stripped of its value form and becomes a naked physical thing 2) this allows the exchange of products of labour via a measure of equal labour time, so, assuming it takes 2 minutes to make a pint of beer in an economy of scale, then I get 30 pints a week for 1 hours work (not 15 hours work as it is under capitalism on a pay rate of £10 hour (where 1 pint = £5); the beach hut that requires 8 hours to build and under capitalism retails at a whole year’s salary, instead I can obtain by exchanging 8 hours of my labour; it takes 5.25 hours of my labour to obtain my year’s supply of energy (because that is what it takes them to produce and distribute it), whereas under capitalism I have to work a whole month to heat my home. 3) so, you are able to both increase the physical magnitude of wealth and simultaneously reduce the length of the working day at the same time, by having corrected capitalism’s inversion of the subject and the object. 4) Money is abolished, so the termination of commodity fetishism permits a new fruition in human relationships – at last our existence becomes truly humanized. 5) A substantial chunk of the reasons for war and various oppressions have been annulled.
6) Abolition of the Law of Value furnishes Man with the resources needed to tackle climate change. A 100% switch to renewable energy would require capitalism to invest $73tn, and, once up and running, these renewable sources of energy like wind and solar would be reaping less profit. There is just no material incentive for capitalism to go green which is why, despite vociferous campaigning by literally millions of people, little or nothing has been done in relation to investment in renewable energy. What is more, any attempt by Liberals to coerce capitalism into change (like a Green New Deal), triggers a political rise of the Far Right, eager to protect the ruling class’s privilege. They portray acceptance of climate science as a ‘choice’ between ‘progress’ (which they identify with capitalism), or ‘regress’ from naïve hippy tree-huggers. So, truth, and perhaps existence itself, demands an opposition to these people with dollar signs for eyeballs, and, with regard to gaining the upper hand in economic arguments, an opposition to the Law of Value.
7) Abolition of the Law of Value permits infrastructural improvement, for it becomes far easier to rally resources. Currently Britain’s water and sewage piping dates back to the Victorian period. The result of that is that every river in Britain now breaches safe levels of pollution (by EU criteria). Whatever public service one considers, there are none that wouldn’t fare better without price tags on everything.
8) With increased free time, obviously it is up to individuals how they spend it. But we would hazard a guess that many would want to invoke measures to rejuvenate wildlife which has suffered a 68% decline since 1970.
All these changes are what political struggle is about, and it is non-reducible to a simple idea of ‘worker’s management’.
But Brinton does not go down this route. He says: “Workers’ management of production – implying as it does the total domination of the producer over the productive process – is not for us a marginal matter. It is the core of our politics. It is the only means whereby authoritarian (order-giving, order-taking) relations in production can be transcended and a free, communist or anarchist, society introduced.” But worker’s management is not enough if the context in which said management takes place remains unchanged. If you are still operating in a capitalist economy but have “worker’s management”, all you have is a brief spell of happier workplaces. It is brief. It will be undone, quickly. Besides which, without a concept of radical social change, these workers as managers will not want to take on these roles as they will regard it as an extra burden. Most people say ‘I just want to do my job and go home/I don’t want the burden of managing/I want a job where I don’t have to think’ etc. So, the economic context has to change at the same time the social relations of production change. There is no other way. Given we want to avoid the Red Terror of the USSR, thinking along the lines of how we can expand democracy is a priority, and this involves an active relationship with what little shreds of democracy exist today like Parliament. (My reading of Marx’s notion of ‘smashing the state’ and having a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is non-superficial; I think it can equally mean opening up the state to the widest possible democracy).
Leninism does not abolish the wages system, and for that, it is tragically flawed. Meanwhile Anarchism does not have any idea of what comes next after the state is smashed. What we do instead is create a new mode of production in which vast quantities of Value can no longer be siphoned off into the netherworld. Something accomplished by no longer producing metaphysical metamorphic substances, but relating human activities to each other directly.
environmentalism
Corona Capitalism: The New Highest Phase
It used to be imperialism. Marxists worried that the rise of Donald Trump to power would unleash a massive new imperialism including nuclear war. Yet the world has no stomach for that kind of thing nowadays (thank God). Then Austerity 2.0 was launched with an attempt at “going green” with Greta Thunberg as its figurehead. But ordinary people were reluctant to give up half-decent lifestyles they thought they were entitled to, after a hard day’s grind. Environmentalism didn’t work for the capitalist class. But then, hurrah hurrah! Something new came along, and every single capitalist class in every country has pounced on it with relish: Coronavirus.
Through Corona, all the ingredients are there for capitalism to make a profit during slump conditions, following unprecedented falls in their rate of profit. Through Corona, you have (i) a cheapened labour force – people are now desperate to work even for crumbs to avoid the prospect of homelessness that the Government is not-so-subtly threatening them with. Today, the UK Government even demanded 250,000 out-of-work people, out-of-work caused by their shutting down of many economic sectors – do volunteering for our ‘beleaguered’ NHS. These new volunteers, unskilled in any medicine, would doubtless be used to do the cleaning and cooking terrible food, admin, and bureaucracy. The thing about volunteering is that it is unpaid. In other words, it is cheapened-down labour to the point of classical slavery.
ii) Cheaper Raw Materials. With the cessation of modern production (e.g. factories, transport, metals), worldwide governmental policies have completely devalued the raw materials that go into production. Therefore, any new raw material is bound to be cheaper. Thus, for example, petrol at the local garage is now 20p cheaper per litre than it was two weeks ago. People, ordered by text message, to stay at home, hardly need petrol, so it has slumped in price. But this is a big boon for the remaining companies. One may ask if Western and other leading economies have so decimated production, why are they focussing on the lesser remaining companies such as pharmaceuticals, supermarkets, and healthcare like the NHS that cannot generate wealth in such staggering ways as existed in prior history. The answer is that investors have realised that traditional manufacture no longer returns a decent rate of profit. In order to make any rate of profit at all, they are hinging themselves on companies with a lower organic composition of capital, that is to say, the new favoured companies are more labour-intensive, with a lower technological base. They are also scarcer of labour, hence you find the hospitality industry shutting down – off-licenses good, pubs bad, because the latter relies on service-sector labour which costs a bit and doesn’t return much.
iii) New Markets. Particularly through the decimation of the hospitality sector (pubs, cafes, restaurants, hotels), travel abroad, and the general banning of going out per-se, elites have created a literally captive market. This market, whilst it has little money for nice things, has some expenditure power for supermarkets and online news sites and media entertainment. So, there will be more expenditure on these things (that, as aforementioned, take a lower organic composition of capital to create). Avoiding pubs, restaurants, cafes, hotels, puts the money into different pockets, for sure, but when those pockets have done less to deserve the cash, it creates a higher rate of profit for eager investors.
The newly emerging Corona Capitalism will be a hellish place to live. There will be little culture, no socialising, and only mundane jobs, if there are jobs at all, rather than perhaps, all-round slavery with Statutory Sick Pay your only reward.
All this over some curious virus that kills less than flu annually, and also leads to symptoms milder than the flu for most people. Coronavirus could have been coped with sensibly. Corona Capitalism is more likely to evoke The Furies.
Why Was Marx So Fundamentally Opposed To Capitalism?
Numerous misinterpretations prevail. This blog attempts to clear up two of these: the environmentalist interpretation, and the ostensibly ‘materialist’ take. No blog of around 800 words could do Marx’s ideas justice – these are a few ideas that are intended to spur debate.
Firstly, the environmentalist interpretation holds that capitalism is destructive to the environment and must be reformed to enable a simpler type of existence that is more harmonious with the desires or interests of the planet. But Marx’s concern is only for human welfare – this depends on a functioning planet, yes, and also some concern for animals is appropriate to the extent they enrich human life. This is Big Anthropocentrism. Capitalism does degrade the environment, even to life-threatening levels as we are beginning to see with the growing frequency of extreme weather events constituting a new trend. And yes, part of the issue is indeed non-human species depletion or extinction. Today Marx would be horrified at the conversion of Africa’s big game into just another resource, or the undermining of the sustainability of coral reefs.
But this is because Marx the humanist is worried about things that concern us, rather than some kind of inherent non-human moral value floating within such entities. The solution to capitalistic environmental degradation is a new human society where our relationship to nature is considerate and rational rather than solely profit-oriented, that doesn’t preclude doing this or that where appropriate. Moreover, with concerted effort, capitalism can sometimes mop up ecological disasters, so the environmentalist critique is non-revolutionary, whereas Marx wanted to transform our whole relationship with nature so as to remove the powerful alienation that prevails under capitalism.
Because Marx wrote so much about economics, and academia has failed to link this to his earlier focus on alienated human relationships, some have claimed that the essential Marx was all about developing the productive forces, go for economic growth whatever the cost. This is erroneous firstly because it silences that most petulant of productive forces – labour. Although Marx clearly thought the good society massively develops machinery and the such, his main concern was on the freedom of the individual worker and their own self-development that capitalism negates. Capitalism reduces the individual member of society to an appendage to the machine and crushes them both mentally and physically. Thus, the emphasis on developing the productive forces is first and fore mostly about liberating labour from the drudgery of profit-driven society.
Secondly there seems to be a semi-conscious attempt to interpret Marx as a vulgar pro-growth materialist in order to let capitalism off the hook – to say that alienated human relationships and their impact on everyone are irrelevant to his overriding concern with fixing or ameliorating the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Thus, Phil Mullan’s recent book Creative Destruction that I reviewed here takes a very narrow interpretation of the oeuvre only in order to suggest ways capitalism might overcome some current barriers to growth. The role played by the theory of the falling rate of profit in Marx’s overall outlook is totally neglected.
The centrality of the theory of the falling rate of profit in Marxism is the final proof that the bourgeoisie would undoubtedly cease to be a revolutionary force in every country they reign, and that capitalism would have to undermine its own moral and intellectual foundations to persist. In other words, the quality of human life would necessarily deteriorate as long as capitalism persisted, not only in terms of the material standard of living but also in terms of the quality of human relationships in society at large.
Marx’s understanding of the consequences of his theory of the falling rate of profit upon the quality of human existence is borne out by subsequent history. Two world wars later and perhaps a third on the horizon, with only 36 minutes of peace known to the world since the end of World War Two, racism and brutality, the increased role of the state in social affairs, increased homelessness in the ‘advanced’ countries and massive destitution everywhere else, show capitalism has not fulfilled the claim it originally made to be an ‘Enlightenment’ society heading towards a new golden age. The falling rate of profit is not important because we want capitalists to make lots of money – who cares? – but because the consequences of it upon society are dire as the ruling class offer apology after apology and quietly drop the claims to liberty and equality they once made. Nowadays everyone hates everyone else, partly because economic life is so frustrating, and, filtered down, you get the new trend of horrendous school shootings in the USA.
To conclude, Marx was fundamentally opposed to capitalism because he was the most astute and consistent humanist that philosophy has ever produced.
barryessex 