Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Rabi-ul-Sani 29, 1429    

Of Marx & Marxists

M Akmal Pasha
Email: akmalp@yahoo.com

On May 5 we celebrated 190th birth anniversary of Karl Marx. Probably the whole philosophy of Karl Marx boils down to his tendency of lamenting the Capitalist class for being exploitative with respect to the Labor class; wherein the issue as to who produced, distributed and ultimately pocketed the ‘Surplus Value’ has been the nexus. Marx clarified this concept in his book ‘Poverty of Philosophy’ which he wrote against French philosopher M Proudhon’s ‘Philosophy of Poverty’. Through this he reversed the non-philosophical phenomenon postulated by the latter segregating thereby the ‘Use Value’ of a product from its ‘Exchange Value’; the natural difference being the ‘Surplus Value’. This surplus value would eventually be usurped by the Capitalist by virtue of his having piled up huge amount of Capital; (the factory or the productive asset) or the ‘Accumulated Labor’ and at the same time he would feel obliged to marginally pay government taxes or the ‘Negative Wages’ gradually extracted from the ‘Proletariat’.

The use value to Marx is the worth of a product in terms of its usage (or the utility in Marshallian terms). On the other hand the exchange value furnishes its worth, while this product is given in return to something maybe cash or kind. One can deduce that the use value involves absolute terms, while the exchange value determines the relative worth of the product. Obviously, the use value is lesser than the exchange value. Now the labor is paid according to the use value of his produce whereas the Capitalist charges the exchange value from the Market, the difference that is the Surplus Value is taken away by the Capitalist which must have been shared with the labor. Here lies the inherent cruelty in the Capitalistic economic system.

The Capitalist on the other hand would argue that as long as labor is getting the equilibrium wage rate, there should arise no question of cruelty. But if this were virtuous enough there would have been no need to stipulate the minimum wage rate! Some critiques have charged Marx with being overly sentimental in favor of the labor class, some propounded that Marx was a capitalist when the capital stayed with the labor class and a socialist when the capitalist owned it. Some have gone far beyond to falsely locate some mental illness in (or even skin problem with) Marx which some how or the other forced him to condemn capital. Some still assume Marx opposed Capitalism because he did not have capital!

Later on when socialism was practiced, it was felt that ‘Under capitalism, man exploits man, under socialism the reverse is true’ the Polish proverb evolved. Or like Oswald Spengler put it out ‘Socialism is nothing but capitalism of lower classes’. Even Winston Churchill did not lag behind and came up with the criticism, ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing, the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.’ By the same token, Bernard Shaw commented that, ‘we should have had socialism already, but for the socialists’. This bickering could be put to an end with a remark from William James, ‘A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.’ Basically Marx never underestimated the importance of existence of capital, he just revolted against the capitalistic mentality. Like the existence of material is positive contribution to the economic world, but the materialists are negative additions to the overall social setup of humans at large.

Let’s borrow a page from Richard Wolff’s Rethinking Marxism. In fact, Marxism is the self-criticism of capitalist society aiming for a communitarian transformation. To Marx, the working people themselves and not the supervisors, boards of directors, state officials, or “investors” should be operating the community of production. Building thereby alliances that would eventually link their program of the class transformation of production with other social movements with different yet compatible programs necessitating at the very outset democracy, equality and cultural diversity.

We can enumerate Marxism’s major achievements since 1850 as: construction of explicitly Marxist organizations (trade unions, political parties, journals, newspapers, mass organizations) and Marxist components of other organizations; production of a genuinely global literature of social analysis including the documentation of countless practical struggles for socialism and communism, influencing several generations of workers and intellectuals to think in class terms and political struggles and functioning governments that tried to replace capitalism with socialism in several nations and regions across the world.

To be candid, Marxism simply could not yet displace capitalism. This is chiefly ascribable to the inability of Marxist political actors to appreciate the radical novelty of Marx’s class analysis. In fact, Marx’s new understanding of class differed from the older concepts of class that radicals had long been using to criticize capitalism. In Marx’s new conception, class is not about who owns and/or wields power; it is rather about how surplus labor is organized: who performs the surplus labor and who appropriates, distributes, and receives its fruits; the notion which is different from how the society distributes wealth and power. The question remains as to who failed Marx or the Marxists!As historical evidence the world’s most ambitious and long-lasting effort to date to replace capitalism with communism has been the USSR. One could understand that it has duly illustrated the costs to radicals of not recognizing surplus labor’s role in social life. In the decades before 1917, Russian industry was mostly private capitalist. Private citizens, Russian and foreign, owned and operated corporations that hired other people, laborers, to produce commodities. The boards of directors of these private corporations then sold those commodities. They used a portion of the proceeds to pay wages, another portion to replenish used-up raw materials and tools, and a final portion as the corporation’s profits. Those profits were the surplus value produced by their workers and appropriated by the boards of directors. The latter distributed those profits to keep themselves and their corporations in business and growing.

In pre-1917 Russia, this capitalist class structure coexisted with an extremely unequal distribution of property and power. Very few individuals owned most of the corporations and a Czar monopolized most of the political power. Russia’s history of mass privation, catastrophic involvement in World War I, and the resulting collapse of its economy destroyed the workers’ and peasants’ confidence in both the Czar and the capitalists. Radicals suddenly had a chance to win mass support to take political power. A group of Russian Marxists, the Bolsheviks, did so together with other socialists. Because they all understood class analysis in the old property and power way, they focused on transforming the distributions of wealth and power in the new USSR. They took land from many of its former owners and distributed it roughly equally to millions of peasant families. They abolished stock markets and took industrial property from private owners, making it instead the nation’s collective property to be administered by the state. The Soviets, as the democratic organization of popular power, would control the state. They were replacing capitalism with socialism because of these changes (certainly monumental) in the social distribution of property and power. What did not change when Russian became Soviet industry was the organization of surplus labor.

Before 1917, workers performed surplus labor in Russian factories and offices for private capitalist boards of directors who distributed the surpluses to maintain that exploitative system. After the revolution, those same workers performed surplus labor — usually in the same ways with the same machines and making the same products — whose fruits, again, others took away and distributed. But in place of the dispossessed private capitalist boards of directors, state officials appropriated and distributed the workers’ surplus. The industries’ capitalist class structure — in Marx’s surplus labor sense — had not changed. Instead, a Private Capitalism had been supplanted by a State Capitalism.Lenin, to his credit, partly recognized this, arguing that state capitalism was needed until the Soviet state could manage the transition to a genuine socialism and then communism. But he did not express this in terms of a surplus labor theory of class. He too had not found that part of Marx’s work sufficiently important to place it at the forefront of the political agenda. Stalin (Bad Stalin) simply then formalized and enforced the official definition of socialism as that “negation” of capitalism that existed in the USSR.

But Marxists argued that exploitation — as a particular organization of the production and distribution of surplus labor — alienated workers and fostered all sorts of economic waste, cultural inequities, and social injustices. And exploitation continued in Soviet industry (and increasingly in agriculture too) through to the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What collapsed in 1989 included the USSR as a nation, state property as the exclusive mode of owning industrial capacity, the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, and the dominance of state allocation over markets as means of distributing productive resources and outputs. What did not collapse was communism in Marx’s class sense: it had never existed in Soviet industry. It was Soviet state Capitalism that collapsed. Thus the fiasco pertained to those Marxists who attempted to tinker with implementing Marxism; and if there could evolve Marxist wisdom, spirit, volition and execution, the Surplus Value must help diminish Labor Alienation & exploitation. ‘Let’s talk of wills and choose executors.’ (William Shakespeare)