By Colin Foster
Socialism means democratic control by the producers — the workers — over what is produced and distributed.
That’s how it will end poverty, class inequality, exploitation, boom-slump cycles and the trashing of the environment. That is how it will ensure good social provision for all, in place of the chaos and inhumanity of the free market.
To make planning democratic, the process will have to be quite complicated. People in particular industries and localities will have to discuss and draw up proposals for planning targets. A balance will have to be found between local, national and international decisions.
Won’t this make life an endless round of meetings? Won’t it lead to decisions being dominated by the minority who can be bothered to sit through all those meetings? Even if that minority are to begin with only the most active and dedicated people, won’t they in time become a bureaucracy with vested interests?
This is a real danger. But a lot can be done to avoid it.
Meetings can be held in work time to maximise attendance. Each workplace group will be able to elect its own delegate, mandate him or her, get regular reports, and replace its delegate whenever it wishes. Socialist democracy will thus mean much more real control than any democratic procedure in society today.
All elections to administrative and managerial positions will be for fixed, short periods. Rotation of responsibilities will cut against vested interests. Administrators and managers will be paid at workers’ wages, so that they do not have privileges to defend.
Three things are necessary for this sort of democracy to work:
* that everyone has a decent standard of living, so that they are not preoccupied by the struggle to survive or the struggle to get a better job;
* that the working week is short enough for every worker to have time and energy to take part in the democratic debates;
* and that everyone has a high basic level of education.
Without these things, as Marx once put it, “all the old crap” will indeed revive. But those things are possible. Capitalism has generated the technology and the productive capacity that make them possible.
Making sure that democracy operates is one thing. But once the whip of wage-labour is taken away, how do we make sure the necessary drudgery is done?
Socialism will not be able to take away the whip of wage-labour straightaway. At first, wages will be made more equal, but there will still be wages. People will have to work for the same reason that they have to work today: that they won’t have enough to live on if they don’t.
The difference will be that everyone will have the right to a decent job, and that workers will have real control over their conditions of work and what they produce. But there will still be drudgery, and it will still have to be done.
Over time, socialism will whittle away wage-labour. More and more goods — food, transport, housing, education, entertainment, clothing — will be distributed free (“to each according to their need”) so that people do not need to rely on wages to buy them.
Meanwhile, people will become more and more aware that their work is to serve the common good.
Most people will want to contribute to the common good, and the pressure of majority opinion will be enough to push along any minority that doesn’t.
The development of science and technology will allow us to reduce drudgery to a basic minimum, shared out equally; and creative work, over and above that drudgery, will become something people want to do, not sharply separated from “leisure”.
Does that seem utopian? Remember that the 19th century socialist Blanqui was confronted with the objection “Under socialism, who will empty the chamber pots?” (which, he retorted, just meant “who will empty my chamber pot?”). One of the less spectacular achievements of technology, the flush toilet, has made the objection obsolete; and not even the most sceptical can think it is utopian to think that everyone will clean their own toilet in the future!
Won’t all the meetings and debates make for inefficiency? And isn’t a modern economy too complex to plan? Won’t we end up like the Soviet Union, with shops full of large metal buckets, but empty of toothbrushes?
Not everything will be done by meetings! There will be managers and administrators, and they will take decisions. But they will be elected and accountable, and they will not be a fixed class of people separate from everyone else.
Certainly at first large areas will have to be left to the market economy and the balance of supply and demand. Many smaller enterprises will remain in private ownership.
We will win fuller social control over what we produce as we become more cooperatively minded, more educated, more skilled. But even in the earliest stages we could avoid the monstrosities of the Soviet Union.
What stopped toothbrushes being produced in the Soviet Union to meet a need that everyone knew about was a huge hierarchy of bureaucrats, each passing the buck, blocking change, and looking after their own section interest. In a workers’ democracy, production would be quickly adjusted to meet the need, and any manager who was obstructive would be out of his or her job.
But there’s a lot that’s not worked out about this idea of socialism.
It is true that no perfect model of the future socialist society exists. The main “models” — those countries that claim to be socialist — are not socialist at all.
But society has progressed before without anyone have a blueprint! Capitalism is undoubtedly an advance over feudalism; but no one in feudal society had even a vague idea of how capitalism would work.
We do have general principles about how socialism would work, and soundly-based theories about why the modern working class is the class that — for the first time in history — can make socialism. And general principles are all that is possible in the nature of the case.
If socialism is to liberate the working class, then it will liberate creativity that we cannot possibly predict in advance.
For socialism will not just change society. It will change people.
We can see a small beginning of that change in the transformations that big class struggles — like the miners’ strike of 1984–5, or the French general strike of 1968 — make in people’s minds. Socialism will be a much bigger and more permanent change in the way people live, and so it will make bigger transformations.
Socialism will be the basis for a revolution in human nature: we will remove the fear of being done down by our fellow-beings which affects even the most prosperous workers today.
That is socialism, in short: the liberation of humanity from poverty, insecurity, wage-slavery and state tyranny; the achievement of conscious control over our destiny.
Comments
The Difference between Capitalism and Socialism
There is one huge difference between the development of capitalism without anyone having a blueprint, and socialism with no such blueprint. Capitalism grew organically within feudalism until it was the dominant mode of production (i.e. not just that capitalist production relations dominated, but the necessary superstructure of ideas, laws, morals etc also dominated) prior to the capitalist class actually assuming outright political power rather than sharing it with the feudal aristocracy as they had done previously. The great wealth accumulated by the bourgeoisie meant that not only did they have their own ideologists, but most of them were educated too, and their very mode of existence meant they could know and exercise their class interests.
That is probably not true for the working class (unless of course capitalism evolves in such a way that workers living standards continue to rise way above what they are now, that workers become owners of capital through pension schemes, and other saving schemes which they manage to bring udner some kind of democratic control and use to exercise in their own intrests, whilst large monopolies continue to adopt the methods of market research and forward planning rather than reliance on price signals and the market, and co-ordinate their plans through some macro-economic planning body) which continues as a slave class up to the time it takes political power into its hands.
Where the productive relations acted as a foundation for bourgeois ideas and social relations underpinning their political rule, the very same capitalist relations continuing as they inevitably must after the assumption of political power by the workers will on the contrary act to undermine and conflict with that political power. The weaker the working class, the less educated the working class, the less it recognises in vast numbers rather than just within its vanguard the task that lies before it, the more it continues to be dominated by capitalist ideology and conceptions e.g. the idea that profit, competition, private property are inevitable if not desirable, the less chance there is that the necessary economic and social transformation will be achieved quickly, and the longer capitalist economic relations continue the more likely it is that rather than moving forward to socialism the movement will be back to capitalism.
The question of managers and administrators is illustrative. The Soviet Union was an extreme example, but the same thing could be expected in an advanced capitalust country too. Lenin was forced to bring back the old managers and owners because they lacked the expertise. Whilst we will not need the owners (because in large firms they have already passed on the job of management to specialists) the far more technological basis of many industries means that it will be impossible to ignore the question of the employment of technical, managerial, and financial experts. Simply saying such people will be paid the average wage will not do. Why would such people accept such a wage, if I was one of these people and not a committed socialist I would simply opt to do a less demanding job for little less pay than I was being offered. How would such a society prevent me doing this - by forced labour! Already the seeds for the need of state policemen arise and the basis of Stalinism. But in fact if as you say, and I agree this would have to be the case, the market remained in force in many areas, then competition between enterprises would in any case allow me to simply sell my labour to the highest bidder i.e. capitalist relations are reproduced along with all the ideological baggage that goes with it.
No if we want to avoid the problems of Stalinism much more thought about exactly how the transition to socialism will be achieved needs to be done.
Arthur Bough
The problems of Economic calculation
Problems of Economic Calculation
The problem of economic calculation is much more difficult than Martin suggests. In his essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), the chief economic theoretician of the Austrian School of Neo-classical economists Ludwig Von Mises set out a range of the problems a socialist society would have in trying to undertake the necessary economic calculations to ensure that needs are met, and that all the intricate adjustments which capitalism achieves automatically through the market are performed in billions of individual decisions of consumers, and producers not just of the end product, but of all the products that are required in the intervening processes leading up to the end product. Mises views were echoed by many other right-wing economists of the time such as Hayek, Robbins etc.
Mises says quite correctly that a socialist society can determine one side of this equation whether by central decision or by democratic decision i.e. the determination of what the priorities for production are, but cannot do away with the other side of this equation, the costs of producing this output, and therefore the necessary decisions that need to be made about balancing priority with cost of production. Martin says that calculation of the cost of production could be measured in labour-time, but there are significant problems with this in the kind of transitional economy that would exist immediately after capitalism’s downfall.
First of all and most obviously these costs would continue to be paid out not in labour-time, but in money. If enterprise A for example has to pay out £1,000 in wages, and because its inputs of materials etc. are in high demand these materials cost £5,000 whereas the costs calculated on the basis of necessary labour time to produce the good and its inputs amounts to just £3,000 (because the necessary labour time multiplied by the value of labour comes to this figure) it would find that if it priced its output according to the cost based on labour-time it would soon run out of money as the demand for its output exceeded its capacity to generate sufficient income to pay for its inputs.
Secondly, and related to the above there is a question about how to measure the amount of labour-time used, because as Marx sets out concrete labour is not uniform, but the unit of measurement – general labour – has to be in order to act as a unit of measurement. The labour of a brain surgeon is not the same as that of an unskilled labourer either in terms of the use values it creates or the cost of its production. It is necessary to reduce the complex labour of the brain surgeon to a multiple of the simple labour of the labourer. Nor according to Marx is the exchange value of a commodity equal to the labour-time it contains but only to the necessary labour time it contains, and Marx argues that the only means of determining what is socially necessary labour time and what the appropriate multiple of simple labour any particular complex labour should be, is through the mechanism of the market which via competition and the supply and demand determines whether too much of a commodity has been produced (i.e. more socially necessary labour used than should have been, and the price that the commodity should be valued at both the determination of what the socially necessary labour should have been for this quantity, and the multiple of simple labour that should be placed on any complex labour used in the production of the product. In other words Marx argues in effect as far as capitalism is concerned that the law of value acts in the background not as some mechanical precise objective method of calculation but is manifested through the operation of the market, which enables values to be placed on the components of value only a posteriori. But the whole point of socialist production is to replace the market, and so these methods of calculation of what constitutes necessary labour, and what the multiple of simple labour any particular complex labour should be set at will not be available. It simply will not do to say that economic calculation of costs of production will be done in labour time without saying what mechanisms will be used to assess this in place of those provided by the market.
The process of calculating in terms of labour-time becomes even more complicated if we add in the problem of those commodities, which are not discrete products within the production process. For example, all those products, which arise as by-products.
Then there is the problem of timescales. Bukharin in his “Economics of the Transition Period” set out the problems arising from the diversion of resources to capital-intensive production, a problem associated with the turnover of capital. A certain project maybe a top priority in terms of its socially useful outcomes. It may actually consume a relatively small amount of labour-time in comparison to this outcome, however, because of the nature of the project – say the electrification of Russia, or the construction of coal mines or other necessary sources of fuel without which the economy will become strangulated – large amounts of labour are taken up without any value being created in outputs for a considerable period of time. Even the Stalinists were aware of this problem in how to offset labour-time against socially useful production over different time periods. In “Economic Calculation and Forms of Property” Bettelheim cites a number of these problems, which are addressed in Stalin’s “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, and Preobrazhensky’s “The New Economics”, as well as the works of later Soviet economists.
The question in the end really comes down to the fact that in a transitional economy i.e. an economy prior to the establishment of a socialist mode of production, where there is sufficient production to meet need without consideration of costs, money will continue to function not just as a unit of account, but as a means of circulation because goods and services will continue to be bought and sold rather than freely distributed. In other words the law of value will continue to operate, and in order to ensure that inputs and outputs balance money prices will need to be set such that the revenue raised from the sale of outputs is sufficient to cover the cost of inputs to produce those outputs. The question is how are these prices to be arrived at?
Oskar Lange in “On the Economic Theory of Socialism” (1936) gave the response to this question raised by Mises. Basing his work on that of Pareto Lange showed that the establishment of prices, which ensure conformity of inputs and outputs resolves itself into a series of simultaneous equations calculable even at the time he was writing in 1936. In a much later work “The Computer and the Market” (1967) he showed how computers made the task of calculation a rather simple task, and given the phenomenal increase in computing power since 1967 it is clear that the actual mathematical problem is not the real question at issue. In fact Lange’s solution of the mathematical problem only highlights the real issue. If you know what outputs you require, and you know the inputs that are available plus the technological constraints of production it is only a mathematical exercise to set input and output prices. But this almost by its nature presumes that outputs will be determined not by democratic methods, but by centralised planning methods. To expect that groups of workers could sit around and determine output levels prioritised by their socially useful benefits set against their costs of production is fanciful in the extreme. That workers can determine that a certain proportion of society’s resources should be devoted to certain priority projects for example the provision of more hospitals, schools etc. as indeed they do to a very limited extent now via the electoral process is one thing, but to think that it is possible to decide how many packs of Roast Chicken flavour crisps should be produced by means of a democratic process is ridiculous.
But herein lies a fundamental problem. If it is impossible to replace commodity production quickly with a democratically planned economy for the reasons given above then the continued existence of the market will inevitably reproduce all of the social relations of capitalism, and capitalism will be restored in one form or another. The other alternative of replacing the market with a planned economy whether planned centrally, or in a decentralised manner as was more specific to China not via a democratic process, but by handing the task over to specialised planners and statisticians leads to the potential establishment of a bureaucracy whose main aim is its own welfare rather than the working class whose existence and position in society it is socially based on. The greater the problems encountered by this bureaucracy in resolving the fundamental issues of ensuring that planned production meets consumers needs, and the needs of the economy overall, the greater the loss of control of the economy this bureaucracy really has, the more it is forced to resort either to measures of coercion (Russia) or to a return to independence for enterprises and market forces (China). The return to market forces and independence for enterprises necessarily leads to commodity production, the reproduction of capitalist norms and values, and ultimately the return of the capitalist mode of production. In either case the end result is the same, the transition leads not forward to socialism but back to capitalism.
How might this problem be resolved? It seems to me there are two possible solutions. The first solution requires that a certain level of democratic decision making over priorities is possible, as indeed occurs now as stated above. It is quite possible to have a national democratic discussion conducted by local groups at factory, neighbourhood and community level about the resources that should be devoted to the provision of hospitals, schools etc., and the human and other resources required for these. Some communities may want more or less of these than other depending on existing provision, some may require provision of different types of each depending upon their particular choices. These requirements can be formulated into a national plan of production for these priorities and the national planning authority can then set about buying the necessary inputs to achieve these outputs (some inputs if available at lower cost might be imported). The provision of these prioritised services would then be provided free as for example happens with health and education now. The resources set aside as inputs would have two consequences. First of all for those enterprises providing these inputs they would have a certain level of forward production guaranteed at guaranteed prices, which makes their own enterprise planning process easier and more stable. Secondly, the resources used by these enterprises to produce these inputs are clearly no longer available for other types of production, and consequently the prices they charge to other customers for the rest of their production will have to be set according to the level of demand for their products. Consequently, within the market sector of the economy prices will continue to operate as a means for determining the allocation of resources. For example, take an oil refiner. Assume the plan requires the refiner to provide X tonnes of refined petroleum, diesel etc. This will consume a given quantity of crude oil purchased by the refiner say on the spot market. But the refiner will also have demands for refined products from other customers still operating within the market sector of the economy. Given a specific amount of capital at the commencement of the cycle the refiner can only purchase a given amount of crude. The amount available for supply to the market is only that left after they have met their commitments to the plan. If demand for plastics rises say, and the refiner needs to allocate resources to meet this then clearly in response to this increased demand prices to its customers in this sector would rise, having a corresponding effect on the cost of plastic products and demand for these. With the increase in the price of refined products supplied to the market rather than the plan, the refiner would be able to buy more crude on the spot market (assuming the rise in demand from plastics producers was not offset by a fall in demand from other customers in response to the rise in market prices). In other words the normal market mechanism for the allocation of capital to those areas of production required to meet increased demand, and away from those where demand is falling would continue to operate. However, prices of refined product previously determined under the plan would not be affected. Nor should they because this change in price would have arisen not as a result of a change in the cost of production, but simply as a means of adjusting supply and demand.
An increasing quantity of products and services classified as priorities because of their socially useful nature could quickly be accommodated. For example, it might be considered socially useful and economically beneficial both to ensure that all homes were energy efficient and a programme of energy efficiency undertaken, whilst at the same time it would be possible to determine the most efficient means of heating, and the energy requirements to meet this need. Having done so energy could then be provided free, removing yet another area of commodity production where money circulates.
The consequence of this might be that if workers continued to be paid the same wages as previously then the saving made on former energy bills would be spent on other commodities with a resultant increase in prices, attention would therefore need to be paid to the effects that such price rises caused. It may be insignificant being merely a relabelling of price tags with no real economic consequences, on the other hand it may result in changes in allocations in resources in the unplanned sector which result in dislocations. Other areas where production could be prioritised might be housing with all homes to a good standard being provided free, whilst individuals would be free to buy homes if they wished above this standard. In order to ensure that existing home owners were not discriminated against all mortgages would need to be cancelled, and all rents abolished.
These measures would provide immediate and noticeable benefits to all workers even those currently enjoying a good standard of living in the West, and would provide a basis for not only transforming the basic social relations, but also the ideological superstructure built upon it. It would begin to set the basis for the encouragement of workers to extend such planned production into other areas of economic activity.
Much of the basis of this already exists within the current operation of existing capitalist enterprises. 30 years ago I worked for a large ceramic company. The ideas I was being taught in Economics at the time had no relationship to the actual practice of this business. I worked in the Marketing Department, and every year we would go out to various bodies such as Women’s Institutes etc. with a selection of existing and proposed product lines in order to do Market Testing seeing what was popular, and what was not as well as finding out what prices people would be prepared to pay. On the basis of this market research (which nowadays with customer profiling down to postcode level is on another planet compared with what we did back then) we would combined with past knowledge of what demand there was for existing products, develop a production plan, and all the attendant financial and marketing plans that it implied. Our decisions were not based on market signals other than peripherally, but on the basis of fore knowledge of what we needed to produce, how much, and at what price. If sales of a particular range slackened, we did not as orthodox economic theory suggests we should, adjust our prices lower, rather we reduced production of that line, and if demand for another line increased divert the resources towards that instead. Even if demand for all lines fell, the first response was to cut back production, place workers on short time, rather than to cut prices.
Most large companies work on this basis, rather than the idea that they adjust their prices up and down constantly in line with demand and supply. The Mars Corporation does not adjust its prices every day for Mars Bars because demand is higher or lower today than yesterday, such action would make its production and financial planning meaningless.
But this level of production for most commodities based on production plans resulting from market research is precisely the basis, which would enable production in the market sector of the economy to proceed pretty much as it does now to ensure that consumers’ needs are met. The main change that would be required would be that each enterprise abandoned commercial confidentiality, and the workers of each enterprise, linked up with those of their suppliers and customers as well as their competitors to bring about even greater integration of their individual plans, on the basis of co-operation rather than competition.
Over a period of time as workers no longer feared the possibility of losing their jobs, and the variations in their incomes were constrained within very small amounts, as well as no longer facing uncertainty in the costs of their housing, energy etc. their individual plans for consumption would become more stable, and predictable. Improved market research techniques would make the job of forecasting required production of consumer goods more and more accurate. Moreover, it must be remembered that we are not talking here about consumers walking into a store and immediately finding everything they want, anymore than that happens under capitalism. If I go to the local household store to buy a lampshade, I do not expect to go in and find one that meets my vision of what I want in every detail, and for the price I am prepared to pay. I go in and look at the lampshades on offer and pick the one that meets my needs most closely, at the price I am prepared to pay, or decide that I will try again in another store or another day. There is a big difference in this and having to queue all day for a basic item like meat for the evening meal as happened in the darkest days of the Soviet regime.
However, there is still a potential problem here that maybe only the future will determine. The question revolves around how much the experience of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam represent a necessary consequence of revolution led by a vanguard party, and how much they represent just the consequence in the Soviet Union of revolution undertaken by a vanguard party in very backward conditions with almost every conceivable obstacle put in the path of a successful outcome, and in the case of the others of revolutions in similar if not so bad conditions, but by a vanguard party deformed by the ideology of Stalinism, and in large part reliant materially on Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The Left going back even to the time of Marx and Engels has always been riven by sectarian division which in part probably derives from the domination of its organisations by intellectuals 110% convinced that they and only they have the correct understanding of what is going on and to coin a phrase “What Must Be Done”. This sectarianism leads to constant infighting and intolerance almost as deep-seated as religious intolerance. Whatever the theory of democratic centralism might say about the rights of factions and minorities it is rare that minority factions have ever in the history of democratic centralism had the same rights in reality as organisations’ leaderships, and it is rare that faction fights end in amicable resolution of the issue at hand, but instead end in the minority either leaving or being expelled.
Between organisations this results in manoeuvring and petit intrigues of a kind, which only seem important to those involved because of the smallness of the organisations involved and the limitation of their ability to influence actual events in the real world. Getting one over on this or that organisation in a meeting of this or that peripheral campaign or activity becomes the be all and end all of political activity. The same kind of thing could be seen in the fights between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks (who it has to be said, however, under far more testing circumstances still managed to work together in a way that many of those on the Left with smaller differences find it impossible to achieve as witness the last UK General Election where much of the propaganda was devoted to slagging off each other rather than the class enemy, and then leaves comrades wondering why the vote for the Left was so poor!)
The danger is then that it is within the nature of such organisations acting as a supposed vanguard of the working class that the experience of the Soviet Union et al is not an exception, and that in the aftermath of revolution the same intolerance and sectarianism that exists now would be raised by a power, the manoeuvring and position filling would take on new extremes, and at the first opportunity a dominant faction would silence its critics by whatever administrative methods were necessary.
Under those circumstances it might be better that the working class simply continue to fight for improvements in its condition under capitalism, to encourage the further development of planned production within enterprises, and should seek to take control of these enterprises not through some state bureaucracy or nationalisation but simply through the growth of its own economic power accumulated in pension funds and other types of savings, and that it demand democratic control over its own money in these funds so that it can use it to invest in the type of production it feels meets its needs. In doing so it would as the bourgeoisie, and feudal aristocracy did before it transform itself into the ruling class as a natural result of becoming the economically dominant class, the class that owns collectively the means of production, and controls them through democratic methods of its own construction, without some intellectual elite telling it what to do. Having done so the conquering of political power becomes a formality, and the construction of appropriate forms of its political domination arise automatically.
Arthur Bough
Blueprints galore
Comrade Bough says "There is one huge difference between the development of capitalism without anyone having a blueprint, and socialism with no such blueprint." Actually, Arthur, there are now blueprints galore. There's the model of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel (see www.parecon.org), of Pat Devine, of David Laibman, of W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell (http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/) -- really, more blueprints than you can shake a stick at. I tend to think Devine and Laibman are on the right track with their visions of comprehensive planning combined with market-like exchange. See if you can find the Summer 2002 issue of SCIENCE & SOCIETY for discussions of the various models, and/or Laibman's "Contours of the Maturing Socialist Economy" in HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Vol. 9 (2001).
It may not be particularly Marxist to engage in model-building, but it can be useful.
Blue Prints and Travel Maps
The problem is not that no one has produced blueprints, I have suggested a couple of very brief outlines myself, but that such blueprints remain the preserve of a few intellectuals or socialists, discussed within very limted circles, far removed from the ordinary worker, without agreement even amongst this tiny group let alone amongst the ranks of the working class, who are supposed to be the vehicle for implementing such blueprints.
If I propose a journey one of the first things I will be asked is - "Where are we going?" If my answer is, "I don't know, we will only know when we get there." A few adventurous souls might agree to come along. If they then ask, "What route are we going to take?", and I answer, "Well, I have a vague idea of the direction to go in, but that's all," then I am likely to lose a few more.
If on the other hand I propose a journey to a given destination, by a well worked out route, in a safe if not necessarily comfortable vehicle, I may attract customers. If I can point them in the direction of satisfied customers who have previously made this journey with me, all the better.
The problem is that not only have previous journeys ended in disaster, but the crew threw the customers overboard when things got tough in order to save themselves, and then used the only lifeboats to make their way back to the home port.
To make matters worse the customers find that there is not just one group of people trying to get them to make this journey but a whole gaggle of people, because after the first attempt to make the journey the crew continually mutinied and divided itself up into smaller and smaller antagonistic groups. Where at least on the first journey the crew had a fairly large boat, and began by pulling together, now they are continually trying to sink each other, and are left with small craft that get tossed about every time a decent size wave comes along.
Rather like the hustlers at holiday resorts trying to get people to get on their boat and do their particular trip, by running down the competition, potential customers find they are put off all of them and decide to keep their money in their pocket.
That it seems to me to be the understandable attitude of the vast majority of workers to the Left. They say "You go paddle your own canoes into troubled waters, sink each other with your squabbling if you like, we will watch from the shore, and wait until we have a more sturdy vessel, a reliable crew, a clear and safe course to follow, and control of the final destination.
Arthur Bough
Technological Feudalism
Marxist Theory does not posit a teleological conception of history with a smooth linear progression from primitive communism through, slave society, feudalism, capitalism until eventually communism is the inevitable result. Slave society collapsed into the Dark Ages and a return to communal property, the Asiatic Mode of Production arose as an alternative to feudalism etc.
Nor does the historical materialist method dictate a mechanical equation of the social relations automatically being determined by productive relations - feudal social relations, and the dominance of feudal political rule continued long after capitalism became the dominant economic force. Only when the social relations come into conformity with the underlying productive relations, which influence and determine the ideas and culture which bring about those social relations can we talk about a change in the Mode of Production.
Marx foresaw the development of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism based on the contradictions that existed between capital and labour at the time he was writing (to what extent his conclusions were also inevitably influenced by the pre-existing socialist and communist ideas is hard to say. Obviously he was influenced by these ideas and says so, but the question is to what extent he accepted socialism as "a good thing" and allowed this to colour the conclusions his research led him to.) Marx foresaw the rise of a large middle class of administrators and managers as being necessary as capitalism became more technological, but this did not affect his conclusion that the revolutionary class would still be the working class that would, because its concerns were universalisable be the vehicle for introducing the new type of society that would replace capitalism. The alternative was the "ruination of the contending classes". In other words the choice often quoted of socialism or barbarism.
But is this the only choice?
Marx criticised the Physiocrats for seeing agricultural labour as the only source of value. This he said was understandable because at the time they were writing agriculture was the predominant industry. Also from a certain perspective, indeed the one adopted by the Physiocrats, labour was only possible in other spheres, because of the produce of agriculture. In other words if some workers do not produce food for all workers to eat, then other workers do not become freed up to work in manufacture. On this basis the wages paid to manufacturing workers are merely a drain from the value created by agricultural workers. The Classical economists, Smith, Ricardo and Marx showed why this idea was false, and why all labour that exchanges with capital is productive.
But, the argument was essentially reproduced in terms of manufacturing labour versus labour employed in services, or intellectual labour. Indeed it still goes on. In testimony before the Senate last year Alan Greenspan questioned about the US trade deficit discussed the extent to which a country can exist purely on the basis of intellectual production rather than physical production. His argument was basically that it did not matter that China was now producing all the manufactured goods that the US used to produce so long as the US could continue to produce new ideas, technologies etc. which could be traded as commodities in return for these manufactured goods.
I do not want to get into a discussion of the implications of that argument, but merely to use it as a backdrop.
It is quite clear that capitalism in the US and most of the West is significantly different than when Marx was writing, and the question is, therefore, from a historical materialist perspective does what exist now affect the conclusions that Marx came to, can we now see other possibilities of how the future might unfold? I want to distinguish here between capitalism in the west, and in the rest of the world. It is quite clear that taken from a world perspective the working class does indeed now constitute the largest class, and from that perspective Marx's analysis is if anything stronger today than it was 150 years ago. Even in the West, and despite all of the various attempts to put forward embourgoisement theories, the working-class is still very large, and many of those who sociologists might describe as middle class (might even describe themselves in the same way) are in fact working class as determined by their relationship to the means of production. On the other hand the working class itslef is undoubtedly different from that slave class Marx described. Although, Marx did not put forward an absolute impoverishment theory and saw the potnetial for the working class to improve its standard of living absolutely as capitalism developed, it is unlikely he foresaw the possibility of a working class which had the possessions now taken for granted, the access to leisure and education, and even to a certain extent the ability to save and accumulate capital (in the real sense of money capital invested through pension schemes, mutual funds, and even direct share ownership). All of these things should cause us at least to question the concepts developed based on the idea of the working class being a slave class with nothing to lose but its chains (which clearly many workers would no longer feel to be true), and certainly to question the Leninist concept of the need for a vanguard party based precisely on the basis that the working class remains a slave class up to the time of the revolution, and therefore requires such a party of professionals to seize political power on their behalf.
But the development of capitalism, particularly in the last 20 years in the west possibly throws open another possibility. Not that the option is socialism or barbarism, not even that a new form of bureaucratic-collectivist, or state-capitalist mode of production might arise as the next stage of human development, but that a new form of society based upon technology might arise a mode of production in which technology assumes the role that land once occupied, permitting a dissolution and atomisation of the working class into a home based technological peasantry owning their own means of production (computer, software, fast broadband access etc.) and selling their product (intellectual production) within the context of a worldwide electronic marketplace. Within this context the owners of the technolgies used (e.g. Ebay type operators as a market place, Microsoft as provider of various software to be used, ISP's providing access etc.)become the technological equivalent of Landlords whose relationship to those who use their facilities is not one of capital and labour, employer and wage-worker, but monopolist renter and independent producer.
After all the introduction of robotic production together with the location of manufacturing production in low wage economies has already made the workers in manufacturing industry a minority in the West.
I am not suggesting that the world is anything like this at the moment, or that such a development is likely - only that it is a possibility. Already, in certain spheres for example the music industry there is a tendency for artists to by-pass the former relations of production (which in essence especially for musicians beginning their career is still one of worker and capitalist) and to sell their product directly over the Internet (making such musicians almost identical to the Medieaval Minstrel). The same kind of development is occurring with other types of intellectual production such as film-making, literary production etc., and although the products of various crafts cannot be transmitted electronically in the same way they can be sold directly via Ebay.
At the same time there is a small but increasing number of workers that are being encouraged to work from home rather than occupy expensive office space. The main reason such moves have not been taken further is the reluctance of managers to allow workers to operate from home where they cannot be surpervised to ensure they are working for the whole of their contracted hours (but in fact every survey into home-working shows that workers tend to actually put in more hours and produce more than were they working in an office environment). The increasing cost of commuting, together with rising accommodation costs will inevitably see an icnrease in such home working because nearly every clerical/adminsitrative job can be done by computer at home as easily as in an office.
In the US there are a number of newly developed villages where everyone works from home using the internet. It has led to some interesting results. The residents of the village (working for different companies)have a certain shared interest, and now instead of standing round the office water cooler have more interaction with their neighbours with whom they have shared interest.
We have witnessed the growth of temporary labour in most industries, and the idea of workers working from home, selling their ability to the highest bidder that day or week is not hard to imagine. Nor that such workers should begin to develop their own types of production as a means of icnreasing their self-sufficiency.
The downside of such a development would of course be that as Marx stated in relation to the peasantry its atomisation made it a weak and disparate political force. But to what extent such a technological peasantry would be able to overcome such an obstacle based upon its higher intellectual development, its access to a wide variety of ideas precisely resulting from the explosion of information provided by the new technology, and by creating political formations within its own communities of others in the same position is open to debate.
Such a development is probably unlikely, but not impossible either.
Arthur Bough