Rob writes:
>G'day Hugh'n'Dave,
>>
>Sorry if I miss your drift, Hugh.
And I reply:
Gidday Rob,
Not mine, Marx's!
Why? Well, I wrote:
>>Yes. With the rider that productivity will need to be higher than that
>>attained by capitalism (at least with respect to the economy as a whole) in
>>order for the setting of prices by planned labour input to supersede the
>>pressures of the Law of Value working through the market. This was the big
>>economic reality that made it so difficult to control prices and planning
>>in the early Soviet Union and led to the excesses of kulakism etc.
and Rob argued:
>Productivity is about the amount of generic product (made generic only by
>way of the commodity form) produced as a function of a given consumption of
>factors of production, innit? If we start giving this kind of ground to
>bourgeois economics,
But to say this is to say that productivity is a purely bourgeois concept.
Which is crap. The whole point of the development of the productive forces
(a universal concept) taking place at all is that more and better use is
being made of our limited resources of raw materials and labour (also
universal concepts -- the distinction between labour-power and
value-creating labour under capitalism has to be determined as an
historically delimited distinction where labour is concerned -- this is
labour being constrained by its appearance and behaviour under a given
historical mode of production).
The whole driving force behind history according to Marx's perspective is
the development of the forces of production bursting the fetters placed
upon them by the various relations of production they operate within --
with each new change of skin, the creature growing apace (human social
production) is able to move a bit more freely and live a bit more richly.
But as the new skin (the most recent mode of production) grows tighter and
tighter -- failing to expand with the growth of the creature inside it --
then the freedom and wealth become more and more contradictory, until this
restrictive skin bursts in its turn. Capitalism has proved to be a more
flexible skin than slavery or feudalism, but at the moment it's about as
conducive to human happiness as a condom the size of a thimble or a tight
bra with spikes lining the inside of the cups. So to speak.
Talking about productivity is not giving ground to bourgeois economics,
it's removing the mat from under the feet of the utopians, who think that
we can just proclaim joint ownership, democratic management and fairly
planned production and have done with it. I thought that's what the lessons
of the Soviet twenties were all about. Stalin and Bucharin thought they
could *proclaim* Socialism at a snail's pace, but then discovered they
were being given no time at all to do this by the resurgence of commodity
relationships as the NEP affected more and more of Russian society and
began to encroach on the commanding heights of the centrally planned
economy. That was a *proclaimed*, utopian zig. To be followed by an
equally *proclaimed* utopian zag -- forced collectivization -- more in tune
with the needs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to be sure, but
carried out in a way that did nothing to develop the voluntary associative
relations of production needed if the new proto-socialist economy was to be
coaxed along till it could stand on its own two feet against the hostile
pressures of the world market. These hostile pressures, in one simple word,
were productivity. Preobrazhensky's book on the New Economics makes this
abundantly clear.
Commodity production is historically speaking a very efficient way of
getting things made for less and less cost in terms of materials and
labour. The only possible way for a mode of production to supersede any
mode of production based on commodity production is to outproduce it,
otherwise it'll be discarded. But the Soviet experience shows that it's the
aggregate productivity and the total response of the economy to people's
needs that is important, not just productivity in one or two branches of
industry -- otherwise the Soviet Union would never have survived as it did.
Nor would Cuba or China, for instance, have put up such resistance as they
have to capitalist restoration, regardless of the avarice with which their
bureaucracies are heading in that direction.
>we risk making no meaningful social progress at all.
>I mean, labour here is framed as just one such factor (as labour power),
>and socialism is all about recognising us as the SUBJECT of production, NOT
>the object with which production is done. WE produce for US.
Rob points to the importance of the historical subject here, and I thought
he was an anti-party man!!!
First you need to disarm and disable the bourgeoisie politically and
economically, and you need a political subject to do that -- ie the masses
following a coherent programme prepared and promoted by the party, ie the
politicized working class seizing power at the head of an unstoppable
rebellion by all the poor and working masses and aided and supported by the
bulk of the not so very privileged intermediate strata (such as Rob, for
instance).
Then, once you've set up a dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, a
society where the direct producers are able to plan and produce
cooperatively without the bourgeoisie forcing them to produce shit for the
profit of others -- and without such a society you'll never get to be in
this position -- you need an economic subject.
Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme makes this very clear with biting
polemics against utopians who think there will be no intermediate,
transitional stage between capitalism and full-blown communism. First we'll
have to do a political job of cleaning away the blood and gore from every
pore of society, and we'll have to distribute labour using methods of
compensation based on returns for labour contributed rather than returns
for need. This needs a politically and economically conscious leadership in
society, it won't happen spontaneously of its own accord.
If you like, we'll be exploiting our own labour for a while (what
Preobrazhensky called Primitive Socialist Accumulation), but once our new
economic entity as a whole supersedes capitalist world productivity IN
RELATION TO THE GLOBAL NEEDS OF HUMANITY, we'll be there, and can start
dismantling the repressive elements of social persuasion we needed to
retain as long as capitalism still represented a threat.
>To produce
>to meet plans which presuppose our status as 'factor' is to remain slave to
>the tyranny of 'abstract labour'
We will have to live in the shadow of the Law of Value for a while even
under a proto-socialist system. Escaping from this shadow will be the
greatest challenge of the early years of the new society. We won't be under
the tyranny of abstract labour, but we won't be able to ignore it, either
-- wherever it can produce faster and cheaper than our concrete social
labour in its planned allocation it'll have its thumb in our eye.
>and go the route of Stalinist state
>capitalism (yeah, I know you reject the term, but that ain't the point I'm
>making here). How do we avoid this under your proviso, Hugh?
Stalinism wasn't state capitalism, it was undemocratic bureaucratic
mismanagement of a proletarian dictatorship, and it only gained control by
a prolonged political struggle whose counter-revolutionary elements emerged
more and more clearly as time went on (from the gutting of the programme of
the Comintern in 1926, for instance, and the resultant beheading of the
Chinese revolution, to the culmination of the bloody counter-revolution in
the mass repression and starvation of the 1930s and the grotesquely
eloquent show trials in Moscow in the late 30s.
>Also, if we stopped making fridge magnets, penis-soap-on-a-rope,
>stretch-limousines, insipid-teenage-bouncing-trilling-cuties-bands, nuclear
>warheads, breast implants, collagen injections,
>cell-phones-with-little-TVs, neckties, cigarettes (shudder), tulip.cons,
>and rhino-horn-aphrodesiacs, and put just half of that social investment
>into the physical redistribution of extant meat mountains, milk lakes and
>medicine piles, we'd go a long way to obviating the scarcity issue (so much
>of which is surely invented by an economics profession that doesn't have a
>theory or a raison d'etre without the notion).
But I *like*, uh, nuclear warheads ;-)
>I submit that (a) there's less scarcity than is currently claimed;
There's *no* scarcity. It's a purely manufactured social fact under
imperialism. It's the great argument against the "health and vitality" of
imperialism that people like Henwood are always going on about, and it's
the single biggest argument for the fact that bourgeois relations of
production have outlived their usefulness for the development of the forces
of production.
>(b) there is NO scarcity in information;
Oh yes there is. A scarcity of OUR information. We have the beginnings of a
universal information infrastructure, but it's an abstract bourgeois notion
to think that that in itself constitutes a wealth of information. For
socialists the content goes hand in hand with the form. For the bourgeois,
the content and the form are in constant and unsustainable contradiction,
hence the ostrich-like facility with which the bourgeoisie so blithely
ignores the whole business. Thatcher and Reagan going on about democracy as
the only criteria for a state's worth just about took the biscuit where
this kind of formalism was concerned. (And yes, I know they didn't give a
tuppeny shit about democracy anyway.)
(c) whilst people are going without
>food, roof, medicine and education, there's stuff we must democratically
>decide not to produce during our official work time at all.
You mean our official work time under capitalism??? Dream on, Rob! First we
have to take political and social power, then we will be able to decide
what we need to produce and get on with the job. Until then any sensible
use of our time and resources will be enclave stuff locked into utopian
marginality as far as the great human needs you've been talking about are
concerned.
>The implication of that (If it's all kosha) is that we can't be far from
>that point where the forces of production do transcend the relations that
>carried them to this point.
It sounds as if you think it's not far *ahead* of us. In fact it's quite
some ways behind us already. For Marx in the mid-19th century we'd already
passed this point -- as you'll see if you reread the Manifesto (do it with
a friend -- it'll cheer you both up as autumn encroaches!).
The trouble is that if you mean by "transcend", do away with, then the
forces of production won't do this by and of themselves. A midwife is
needed to end this particular pregnancy. Every day that the forces of
production outstrip the relations of production makes the transition that
bit easier of course -- except that, the world being the dialectical thing
it is, if the birth doesn't take place soon, the infant will die and the
disgusting result will be barbarism -- the carcasse of capitalism torn
apart by the tensions within it, and the only things remaining alive being
the worms and the phosphorescent bacteria -- and maybe one or two jackals
and hyenas, but I wouldn't bet on it.
>If we're technically capable of giving
>everyone a human (free securely to pursue self-fulfillment) existence now,
>we're theoretically ready for socialism.
True, except there's a theory and practice available in the
Bolshevik-Leninist tradition of revolutionary Marxism that needs to be
relearnt before the concrete task of emancipating human society can have
any success. Perhaps you mean ready for socialism historically speaking,
because the social subjects we have in imperialist society at the moment
are in no way ready to take on imperialism and instititute socialism. The
mass leadership of the working class is at present in the hands of traitors
and bourgeois lickspittle marionettes. Imagine Blair (LABOUR party, god
help us) doing a little marionette dance while the multinats pull the
strings and watch him jerk about as he sings "Puppet on a String". Him and
his kind need the working class to be pulling another kind of string, one
chafing at his throat.
>And if we start talking about
>productivity at this stage, we'd better be very clear we mean something by
>it that has bugger-all in common with what CEOs and cabinet ministers mean
>by it.
Well, I've tried to clarify a bit what I think the position is on this.
>Either that, or come clean and start talking market socialism a la Nove and
>Schweikart.
Market socialism is a cowardly utopian cop-out. Anything to avoid the
life-and-death confrontation with the bourgeoisie that creating the
preconditions for real socialism will involve.
Cheers,
Hugh
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