Programme

Trotsky, from The Errors in Principle of Syndicalism

The bourgeois will readily repeat to the workers: “Do not touch the state because it is a snare full of dangers to you.” The Communist will say to the workers: “The difficulties and dangers with which the proletariat is confronted the day after the conquest of power – we will learn to overcome them on the basis of experience. But at the present time, the most menacing dangers lie in the fact that our class enemy holds the reins of power in its hands and directs it against us.”

(Source: marxists.org)

Marx, from the Grundrisse

Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.

The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

Marx, from Capital Volume 1

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Marx, from The Civil War in France

Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system – and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?

(Source: marxists.org)

Materialist Dialectics and Dialectical Materialism

Materialist dialectics is a development of the dialectical method, which is simultaneously a method for thinking and a method for comprehending the development of thought hitherto (all thought proceeds dialectically, if only unconsciously and imperfectly). It differs from the Hegelian version in that it understands the influence of ideas in reality to be weighed by the material circumstances of the society in which they develop. In this regard, the materialist theory of history (‘historical materialism’) is an extension of this method.

The unfortunate term ‘dialectical materialism’, while sometimes used as a synonym for the above approach, seems to imply a metaphysical position which, while materialist, nonetheless understands material reality to follow the same dialectical movement characteristic of thinking. This is an Hegelian anachronism.

United front

United front tactics seem to be the best option for current working class struggle, as they entail focus on organizing the working class internally through economic and small-scale political struggles, and by collaborating across divisions of theoretical, regional, organizational and other types. Only on the basis of an increasingly organized working class will there be the possibility of a genuine and grounded working class political movement from which a working class party might emerge.

An essential element of such unity is the rational integration of theoretical positions, such that those collaborating entities find what common positions they hold, and work through whatever incompatible positions they might have on the basis of the implications of their common views. Building theoretical unity is not a matter of winning everyone over to one faction’s established position, but of building a space in which the dialectical interplay of differing views is possible in a collaborative and mutually beneficial way.

Simon Linguet

It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live… It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him… what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him ?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune… These men… [have] the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. … They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?

Postone (and Marx) from Time, Labor, and Social Domination

This historical possibility [of the abolition of production based on value] does not, however, mean merely that ever greater masses of goods could be turned out on the basis of the existing industrial mode of production, and that they could be distributed more equitably. The logic of the growing contradiction between “real wealth” and value, which points to the possibility of the former superseding the latter as the determining form of social wealth, also implies the possibility of a different process of production, one based upon a newer, emancipatory structure of social labor: 

Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself…. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.

~

‘Value’ is just the form in which surplus extraction is represented. Value is created whenever the workers involved in a production process do not appropriate their product (or its monetary equivalent) in toto, but are forced to surrender a part to a non-worker who ‘owns’ the means of production, and who subsequently gets to dictate the terms of productive activity. These terms tend to include not only that this surplus value should be delivered to the owner, but that the process itself should take the form suited to creating the greatest amount of surplus value possible.

When Postone speaks of production based on value, that is, based on this extortive relation between owners and workers, he means just this: that the whole shape and yield of productive activity are determined according to the principle of exploitation. This is just the principle according to which those who already own the greater part of social wealth will continue to do so, and to own an ever greater mass of said wealth, while those who do not own that wealth will continue to not do so. The actual content of the wealth amassed is ultimately a matter of indifference, relevant only to the extent that it is effective in reproducing this relation between the classes. Wealth construed as value is just wealth as an instrument of perpetual and intensifying domination.

This domination is not necessarily perpetrated by a particularly malicious group of people, but is presented to those who happen to so perpetrate as the only means of escaping domination themselves. Becoming a capitalist is an indisputably rational option in the present circumstances, it being understood that the rationality in question has a desperate and cowardly character, a character wholly unbefitting of reason, an undignified and dishonest character incapable of supporting the full exercise of reason. This character is not a personal defect, but instilled by society as among the greatest of virtues.

I also think Postone is right about industrial production - that is, it is not this sort of production itself which comes into contradiction with capitalism, even while it unleashes productive capacities adequate to the conscious, transformative self-determination of productive activity by those engage in it, which is to say, adequate to distinctively non-capitalist relations of productive (as we have seen, capitalist relations of productive entail the domination of laborers engaged in productive activity by those with enough social power to control it from outside; I say ‘social power’ because the capitalist only ‘owns’ the means of production so long as other members of society are convinced of this, and thus insofar as he is capable of influencing their actions with respect to these means). This point, about the self-transcendence of industrial production, seems to go hand in hand with Lenin’s discussion of the maturation of communism.

We can imagine the comedic spectacle of the capitalist, panicked, striving in desperation to clutch and cling to his possessions, mistaking as he does his ownership as a socially imbued status with the misty conceit that he has, in his very nature, a strength and cunning by which he alone is capable of effectively wielding such an enormous abundance of things. His natural talents come forth all to readily when, like a buffoon, he bounces madly between the pile of commodities to which he claims ownership, while the gathered mass of former workers look on with laughter, knowing proudly that, together, they no longer need do this fool the favor of making an owner out of him. They stand ready to drag him away as soon as he faints from exhaustion, curled up and clinging to that one meager commodity to which he is still entitled: the labor power he now must finally embody.

Lenin on Equality and Communism

Lenin goes on, in parts 3 and 4 of chapter 5, to discuss the concrete structure of communist society. The early phase of communism, aka socialism, would still retain some of the basic structures of “bourgeois law”, with the exception of those allowing private ownership of the means of production. Production would instead be centralized in the hands of the state (“one huge syndicate”), which would itself be managed democratically. Everyone would be obliged to work, and would be allowed to partake of the collective product to an extent determined by the amount of time they work. This is a major element retained from capitalism - the notion of an form of equivalence mediating labor time and the use-values produced. 

Lenin attacks this form of ‘equality’, through which qualitatively different kinds of labor are equalized and qualitatively distinct circumstances bearing upon individual laborers are abstracted away. However, he claims that it would only be possible to do away with such a system of quantitative equivalence after communism reaches its mature period, which is to say, after productive forces are developed beyond the immature point at which capitalism leaves them - a point at which there are vast and brutal divergences in the kinds of labor required, as well as unnecessarily high requirements for the quantity of labor (the latter was obviously especially true in Lenin’s Russia, given the enormous lack of industrialization).

However collectively organized and democratically managed production develops from its socialist period, it would clearly evolve in such a way that laborers would phase out or minimize requirements for undesirable kinds of labor. It would also heal the gaping divergence between intellectual and manual labor, which is to say, between those who determine how production is to be organized and those who actually produce. (This is a crude way of capturing the distinction, because there are kinds of production specific to intellectual labor, but we’ll leave that aside for now.)

Only when the whole of productive activity is reorganized according to the conscious determination of society in concert will the structures of bourgeois law, including the brutally abstract quantitative equalization to which it submits labor. This is assumedly because a whole lot of clearly undesirable labor would still be necessary to sustain society’s subsistence and development to the point of mature communism, and this is especially the case in Russia at that time. It is likely significantly less so today, although this can only be confirmed with the aid of concrete analysis of existing industry and the extent to which it could already serve the cause of communism.