I don't believe that the so-called Bolivarian revolution is anything
close to as progressive as the following article makes it out to be and
the objective conditions and dynamics in Venezuela ever since the
election of Hugo Chavez show that very well. However, remember when I
was trying to define socialism and I offered a very broad definition of
it and said that I counted Hugo Chavez as a socialist despite the fact
that he was a social democrat? this article illustrates that very well.
He was far more a socialist than any of those social democrats who
misrepresent themselves as socialists while they are nothing more than
bourgeois liberals.
http://links.org.au/socialism-twenty-first-century-lebowitz-chavez
What is socialism for the twenty-first century?
By Michael A. Lebowitz
October 11, 2016 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
reposted from Monthly Review — Often the best way to begin to understand
something is to consider what it is not. Socialism for the twenty-first
century is not a society in which people sell their ability to work and
are directed from above by others whose goal is profits rather than the
satisfaction of human needs. It is not a society where the owners of the
means of production benefit by dividing workers and communities in order
to drive down wages and intensify work—i.e., gain by increasing
exploitation. Socialism for the twenty-first century, in short, is not
capitalism.
Nor is it a statist society where decisions are top-down and where all
initiative is the property of state office-holders or cadres of
self-reproducing vanguards. Socialism for the twenty-first century
rejects a state that stands over and above society and squeezes “the
living civil society like a boa constrictor.”[1] Also, socialism for the
twenty-first century is not populism. A society in which people look to
the state to provide them with resources and with the answers to all
their problems leaves them as people who look to the state for
everything and to leaders who promise everything.
Further, socialism for the twenty-first century is not
totalitarianism. It is not a society in which the state demands
uniformity in productive activity, consumption choices, or lifestyles.
In particular, socialism for the twenty-first century does not dictate
personal belief (through, for example, a state religion or state
atheism). Nor does socialism for the twenty-first century worship
technology and productive forces—a fetish that took the form in the
Soviet Union of immense factories, mines, and collective farms to
capture presumed economies of scale and destroyed the earth, our common
home. Finally, contrary to its self-proclaimed inventor (Heinz
Dieterich), socialism for the twenty-first century is not “essentially a
problem of informatic complexity” that requires cybernetic calculation
of quantities of concrete labor as the basis for an exchange of
equivalents.[2]
The key link
So, let us explain what socialism for the twenty-first century is.
There are lessons to be learned from the experiences of the twentieth
century, and the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela, adopted in 1999,
reflects many of those lessons. They are evident in Article 299’s
emphasis upon “ensuring overall human development,” in the declaration
of Article 20 that “everyone has the right to the free development of
his or her own personality,” in the focus of Article 102 upon
“developing the creative potential of every human being and the full
exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society,” in Article
62’s declaration that participation by people is “the necessary way of
achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both
individual and collective.” They are present in the identification of
democratic planning and participatory budgeting at all levels of
society. They are visible in the focus in Article 70 on
“self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms” as examples
of “forms of association guided by the values of mutual cooperation and
solidarity.” Lastly, they can be seen in the obligations noted in
Article 135 which “by virtue of solidarity, social responsibility and
humanitarian assistance, are incumbent upon private individuals
according to their abilities.”[3]
To understand this concept of socialism more deeply, we need to
retrieve Marx’s focus upon human development. In his 1844 Manuscripts,
Marx introduced the concept of a “rich human being”—a person who has
developed his capacities and capabilities to the point where he is able
“to take gratification in a many-sided way” and “in whom his own
realization exists as an inner necessity, as need.” “In place of the
wealth and poverty of political economy,” Marx proposed, “come the rich
human being and rich human need.”[4]
Real wealth, in short, is not the accumulation of material possessions
but, rather, the development of human capacity. “What is wealth,” Marx
asked in the Grundrisse, “other than the universality of individual
needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc.”?[5] Accordingly,
he stressed the importance of the “development of the rich individuality
which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption.”[6] This
was Marx’s conception of socialism: the creation of a society that
removes all obstacles to the full development of human beings. And he
maintained this position in Capital: in contrast to the society in which
the worker exists to satisfy the need of capital for its growth, Marx
there explicitly evoked what he called “the inverse situation, in which
objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for
development.”[7]
Consider what the worker’s own need for development implies. In that
inverse situation, each individual is able to develop his or her full
potential: that is, the “absolute working-out of his creative
potentialities,” the “complete working out of the human content,” making
the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself.”[8]
These are the productive forces of people, which have “increased with
the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.”[9] Rich human beings are the
premise and result of this inverse situation.
How, though, are rich human beings produced? How do we ensure that
everyone has the opportunity for the full development of their
potential? It is not by giving people gifts from above. Marx was very
clear on this point. In his Theses on Feuerbach, he insisted that people
cannot be changed simply by changing their circumstances—for example, by
creating new structures or new communities. On the contrary, he argued,
it is really existing human beings who change circumstances, and they
change themselves in the process. This is “revolutionary practice”—the
“simultaneous changing of circumstance and human activity or
self-change.”[10]
As with the goal of rich human beings, the central concept of human
development through practice was already present in Marx’s 1844
Manuscripts. Commenting upon Hegel’s focus upon activity (activity only
in ideal form), Marx repeatedly emphasized human activity as the way
real, concrete human beings produce themselves, and he explicitly
described “real man—as the outcome of man’s own labor.”[11] This concept
of the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change runs as a
red thread throughout Marx’s work. For example, in the very act of
producing, Marx argued in the Grundrisse, “the producers change, too, in
that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in
production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new
modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.”[12]
The link connecting revolutionary practice and human development is
obvious, too, in the struggles of workers against capital, which
transform “circumstances and men” and make workers fit to create a new
world. Thus, Engels stressed that, through such struggles, the worker
“is no longer the same as he was before; and the whole working class,
after passing through it, is a hundred times stronger, more enlightened,
and better organized than it was at the outset.”[13] Similarly, Marx
insisted that struggles over wages prevent workers “from becoming
apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of
production”; indeed, without them, workers would be “a heartbroken, a
weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass.”[14]
What we do, in short, forms us—this is the point of Marx’s key link of
human development and practice. We can remain dominated by the old ideas
and can continue to be shaped by the inherited culture or we can
construct ourselves as new people through our protagonism. Human
development and practice, as the Bolivarian Constitution recognized,
cannot be separated: the protagonism of people is necessary “to ensure
their complete development, both individual and collective.”
The second product under capitalist relations
Once we grasp Marx’s key link, we understand that every human activity
has two products—both the change in circumstances and the change in
self, both the change in the object of labor and the change in the
laborer. In addition to the material product of activity, there always
is a second product—the human product. Unfortunately, that second
product is often forgotten.
Accordingly, we need to ask a question that is rarely asked: what are
the changes in the worker? What kinds of people are produced in the
workplace? And the answer is that it depends. It depends upon the nature
of relations within the process of production. That second product,
under the appropriate conditions, can be positive. But, as Marx
understood when discussing the failure of workers to struggle, the
second product also can be negative.
Consider what occurs under capitalist relations of production. Within
the capitalist workplace, people are subjected to “the powerful will of
a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose.” And,
this subordination to capital cripples and deforms workers. In Capital,
Marx described the mutilation, the impoverishment, the “crippling of
body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single
specialized operation,” which occurs in the division of labor
characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing. Did the
development of machinery, though, rescue workers under capitalism? No,
he said, it completes the “separation of the intellectual faculties of
the production process from manual labor.” It completes, in short, the
crippling of body and mind.
And, in this situation, Marx explained, head and hand become separate
and hostile, and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in
intellectual activity” is lost. “All means for the development of
production undergo a dialectical inversion,” Marx accordingly indicated;
“they distort the worker into a fragment of a man,” they degrade him and
“alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor
process.”[15]
Rather than producing the all-round development of human beings, in
short, capital deforms the workers into fragments; rather than producing
rich human beings, capitalist production mandates the “complete
emptying-out” and the “total alienation” of workers.[16] The second
product of capitalist production is the fragmented, crippled human being
whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things, the
impoverished human being.[17]
Inverting the capitalist inversion
Capitalism, Marx stressed, inverts everything. Characteristic of
capitalist relations of production is that “it is not the worker who
makes use of means of production, but the means of production that make
use of the worker.”[18] Referring to this same inversion at another
point, Marx noted that “it is not the worker who employs the conditions
of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the
worker.”[19] In “this inversion, indeed this distortion, which is
peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production, of the relation
between dead labor and living labor, between value and the force that
creates value,” subjects become objects and means become ends.[20]
Within the capitalist system, Marx concluded, “all means for the
development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they
become means of domination and exploitation of the producers.”[21]
In contrast, Marx envisioned that inverse situation in which the means
for development of production are not means of domination and
exploitation. To build a society oriented to “the worker’s own need for
development,” we must invert the capitalist inversion; we must end “this
distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist
production.” In doing so, we end the crippling and fragmentation of the
producers and create the conditions in which the producers are able to
develop their capabilities—the conditions in which the second product of
productive activity is a rich human being.
Whereas the worker, under capitalist relations, “actually treats the
social character of his work, its combination with the work of others
for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him,” with the inversion
of the capitalist inversion (i.e., the negation of that particular
negation), the associated producers expend “their many different forms
of labor-power in full self-awareness as one single social labor force.”
In the “inverse situation,” rather than the crippling of workers,
workers develop their capacities: “when the worker co-operates in a
planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality,
and develops the capabilities of his species.”[22]
For Marx, it was absolutely essential to invert the capitalist
division of labor, the “dialectical inversion” that cripples the bodies
and minds of workers and alienates them from “the intellectual
potentialities of the labor process.” In the inverse situation, the
producers in full self-awareness plan together and end the separation of
thinking and doing. There is “no doubt,” he indicated in Capital, “that
those revolutionary ferments whose goal is the abolition of the old
division of labor stand in diametrical contradiction with the capitalist
form of production.”[23]
By ending what Marx called, in his Critique of the Gotha Program, “the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor,” the
second product can become not a distorted “fragment of a man” but a rich
human being.[24] Ending that separation of thinking and doing is why he
stressed the importance of the introduction of education into the
workplace: this was seen as a method not only of “adding to the
efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully
developed human beings.”[25]
The elementary triangle of socialism
Every day in which thinking and doing are separated is a day in which
the second product is a fragmented and crippled human being. And that
points to the necessity for worker decision making that breaks down the
division between head and hand. In its absence, the division between
those who think and those who do continues—as does the pattern that Marx
described as one in which “the development of the human capacities on
the one side is based on the restriction of development on the other
side.”[26] The recognition in the Bolivarian Constitution that the
protagonism of people is “the necessary way of achieving the involvement
to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective”
identifies an essential element of socialism for the twenty-first century.
Clearly, the activity through which people develop their capacities is
not limited to the sphere of production as narrowly defined within
capitalism. We produce ourselves through all our activities—not only in
recognized workplaces but also in homes and communities. Thus, every
activity with the goal of providing inputs into the development of human
beings (especially those which nurture human development directly) needs
to be understood as an aspect of production. Further, the conceptions
that guide production must themselves be produced. Only through a
process in which people are involved in making the decisions which
affect them at every relevant level (i.e., their neighborhoods,
communities, and society as a whole) can the goals that guide productive
activity be the goals of the people themselves.
Creating the conditions in workplaces and communities by which people
can develop their capacities, however, is only one side of the concept
of socialism for the twenty-first century. How can the worker’s own need
for development be realized if capital owns our social heritage, the
products of the social brain and the social hand—i.e., if the results of
social labor over time are monopolized by those whose goal is the growth
of capital? And how can we develop our own potential if we relate to
others as means to satisfy our individual material self-interest and to
other producers as competitors and rivals in a market? Viewed as a
connected whole, socialism, as a system of reproduction, contains not
only social production organized by workers but also social ownership of
the means of production and production for the purpose of satisfying
communal needs and purposes.
In short, “the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there
to satisfy the worker’s own need for development” is an organic system,
a particular combination of production, distribution, and consumption, a
system of reproduction. What Chávez called in January 2007 “the
elementary triangle of socialism”—social property, social production,
and satisfaction of social needs—is a step toward a conception of such a
system. Social property, because it is the only way to ensure that our
communal productivity is directed to the free development of all rather
than the private goals of capitalists, groups of producers, or state
bureaucrats; social production, because it builds new relations of
cooperation and solidarity among producers and allows them to develop
their capacities; and production for social needs, because instead of
interacting as separate and indifferent individuals, we function as
members of a community and begin from the recognition that “the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”[27]
These three sides of the “socialist triangle” mutually interact to
form a structure in which “all the elements coexist simultaneously and
support one another.”[28] That very interdependence of the three sides,
though, suggests that realization of each element depends upon the
existence of the other two. Without production for social needs, no real
social property; without social property, no worker decision making
oriented toward society’s needs; without worker decision making, no
transformation of people and their needs. All three sides are needed
because the absence of any particular side infects the whole.[29] Thus,
this particular organic system reproduces its premises only through
institutions and practices by which people develop their capacities on
all three fronts.
In this particular case, those institutions are workers’ councils and
neighborhood councils and the means for integrating them horizontally
and vertically. Those institutions are essential to ensure a process of
production for communal needs and communal purposes in which protagonism
within the workplace and community ensures that this is social
production organized by the producers, and they constitute a state—a
particular type of state, a state from below, a state of the commune
type.[30] Such a state, which Marx described as the “self-government of
the producers,” is central to the concept of socialism for the
twenty-first century—a point that Chávez grasped in describing the
Venezuelan communal councils as “the cells of a new socialist state.”
And this new state does not wither away; rather, it is an integral part
of socialism as an organic system.
Subordinating the old society
However, an organic system does not drop from the sky.[31] A new
system never produces its own premises at the outset. Rather, when a new
system emerges, it necessarily inherits premises from the old. Its
premises and presuppositions are “historic” premises that are produced
outside the new system. Hence the system does not develop initially upon
its own foundations.
Therefore, every new system as it emerges is inevitably defective: it
is “in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still
stamped with the birthmarks of the old society.”[32] Accordingly, as
Marx indicated, the development of an organic system “consists precisely
in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out
of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it
becomes a totality.”[33]
Because of the particular defects it has inherited from the old
society, socialism must proceed to subordinate those elements if it is
to produce its own conditions of existence. However, that process will
be subject to many variations because every society has its unique
characteristics (its unique history, its level of economic development
and its internal correlation of forces) and exists in a particular
external conjuncture. Given differing starting points, the paths to
reach the goal will differ. It is an “impossibly pedantic” conception of
Marxism, as Lenin argued in 1923, to insist that there is only one way
to build socialism.[34]
However, to assemble the elements of the new society, one step in
every particular path is critical—control and transformation of the
state. To end the rule of capital, it is necessary to take the state
away from capital—i.e., to end capital’s ability to use the police, the
judiciary, the army, legislative bodies, and its other oppressive
mechanisms to enforce its rule. Without the removal of state power from
capitalist control, every real threat to capital will be destroyed.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that, “the first
step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat
to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy” and
that workers would then use their “political supremacy to wrest, by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie.”[35] The twentieth century
demonstrated, however, that political supremacy of the working class is
not achieved simply by winning elections or seizing the state. The real
battle of democracy involves the creation of institutions that provide
the space where members of society can develop their capacities through
their protagonism.
Of course, that process cannot happen overnight and, indeed, may be
quite lengthy. However, Marx understood that we must begin to remove the
defects inherited from the old society immediately (“from the outset”).
He made this point clearly in his Critique of the Gotha Program by
introducing the matter of two specific “deductions” from the total
social product before it is distributed to individual producers for
consumer goods. Consider the first deduction—”the general costs of
administration not belonging to production,” which is to say, the costs
associated with state administration. Marx was unequivocal in indicating
clearly that “this part will, from the outset, be very considerably
restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in
proportion as the new society develops.”[36]
But why is there this immediate reduction and why is this the measure
of the development of the new society? Marx’s argument must be put in
the context of what he learned a few years earlier from the Paris
Commune. Those costs are “very considerably restricted” because the
state, he explained, immediately ceases to be “a public force organized
for social enslavement.” This was what the working class in motion
discovered during the Commune: “from the outset,” state functions are
“wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself,
and restored to the responsible agents of society.”[37] And, success of
the struggle, Marx indicated, would have meant that, in place of the old
centralized government, “all France would have been organized into
self-working and self-governing communes.” Indeed, the result would be
“state functions reduced to a few functions for general national
purposes.”[38] “As the new society develops,” in short, the state would
be converted more and more (in the words of the Critique) “from an organ
superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.”
What happens with that old state with its “systematic and hierarchic
division of labor” in which state administration and governing are
treated as “mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the
hands of a trained caste—state parasites, richly paid sycophants and
sinecurists?” From the outset, it is “considerably restricted,” and the
new society proceeds to create the new organs it lacks—those
self-working and self-governing communes in proportion as it
develops.[39] The experience of the Commune, Marx declared, revealed
“the political form at last discovered under which to work out the
economical emancipation of Labor.” In describing the course of the first
of these deductions both “from the outset” and “as the new society
develops,” the Critique of the Gotha Program reflected what Marx learned
from the Commune.[40]
The second deduction points to the transformation in distribution of
the total social product in the new society. “Secondly,” Marx indicated,
there was “that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs,
such as schools, health services, etc.” In contrast to the first
deduction, Marx indicated that “from the outset this part grows
considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in
proportion as the new society develops.”
Immediately, more and more of its total social product provides
use-values for common satisfaction of needs; more and more of its output
is deducted from the private claims of individuals. However, he noted,
“what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private
individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a
member of society.” In place of distribution in accordance with
contribution, a conception of “right” inherited from the old society, as
the new society develops, a new relation of distribution emerges in
which our claim upon the output of society increasingly is as a member
of society. The measure of the development of the new society is the
expansion of the commons.
This emerging relation of distribution, however, cannot rest in
mid-air. The concept of a “just” distribution cannot be imposed upon the
producers. “Right,” Marx indicated in the Critique, “can never be higher
than the economic structure of society and its cultural development
conditioned thereby.” Accordingly, to introduce new relations of
distribution requires new relations of production. In place of their
relation as individual owners of “the personal condition of production,
of labor-power,” who demand an equivalent for their individual activity,
there emerges a new productive relation. The condition for the new
distribution relation is a relation in which the producers function
consciously as members of a community (and their cultural development is
“conditioned thereby”).[41]
To subordinate the bourgeois right based upon individual ownership,
the associated producers must create new organs that ensure conscious
cooperation of “activities, determined by communal needs and purposes.”
As described in the Grundrisse, in this relation of associated producers
“a communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of
production.” And this new relation of production determines the relation
of distribution: “its presupposed communal character would determine the
distribution of products. The communal character of production would
make the product into a communal, general product from the outset.”[42]
The relation of distribution, in short, is not changed by exhortation.
Rather, it changes as the new society involves producers directly in a
conscious process of planning as “determined by communal needs and
purposes.” Through such communal organs, the result is “an organization
of labor whose consequence would be the participation of the individual
in communal consumption.” “In proportion as the new society develops,”
it learns to “distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to
achieve a production adequate to its overall needs.” As Marx noted in
the Grundrisse, “economy of time, along with the planned distribution of
labor time among the various branches of production, remains the first
economic law on the basis of communal production.”[43] Planning by the
associated producers, in short, is at the core of this economic
structure—one in which “the instruments of labor are common property and
the total labor is co-operatively regulated.”
This is how the new society develops upon its own foundations, how it
proceeds to produce its own premises. It increasingly subordinates
elements inherited from the old society and creates new organs for
co-operatively planning the distribution of society’s labor in order to
satisfy “the worker’s own need for development.” It does so by
increasingly substituting for the old state, which stands over and above
society, a new state based upon democratic institutions “completely
subordinate” to society—i.e., through those “self-working and
self-governing communes” through which people are able to develop all
their potential (that all-sided “rich individuality”).
Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, understood in the context of the
Grundrisse and what he subsequently learned from the Paris Commune,
contains within it the elements of socialism for the twenty-first
century—in particular the focus upon all-round human development and the
creation of institutions that foster the protagonism necessary for
“complete development, individual and collective.” Recognizing that
socialism as it emerges is “in every respect, economically, morally and
intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society,”
His Critique identifies the process by which the defects inherited from
the old society are transcended by the creation of new relations among
the producers. “From the outset” and “in proportion as the new society
develops,” every step must build the capacities of the working class.
Why socialism for the twenty-first century?
Why, though, do we speak of socialism for the twenty-first century and
not simply about socialism? Very simply, because there was a rupture.
Marx’s critical emphasis upon human development disappeared in
twentieth-century socialist experiments. Missing was a focus upon the
key link of human development and practice—upon the simultaneous
changing of circumstances and self-change. And, with the failure to
think specifically about the second product (positive or negative), the
question of the nature of people produced under particular relations of
production disappeared.
One departure in the twentieth century from Marx’s perspective was the
theoretical interpretation of socialism not as a process but as a
separate stage with specific characteristics that distinguish it from
“communism.” A second was through the actual development of “real
socialism.” These two twentieth-century departures shaped the popular
understanding of the meaning of socialism and interacted to support each
other.
Marx’s focus on socialism as a process directs attention, as we have
seen, to consideration of those elements of the old society that must be
subordinated, and to the process by which the complete development of
human beings “both individual and collective” occurs. The idea of
socialism as a specific stage, however, emerged in the course of the
Bolshevik struggle for power and led to a quite different emphasis—one
which stressed the centrality of the development of productive forces.
In the context of charges that the Bolsheviks were unrealistic
utopians, in 1917 Lenin interpreted the distinction that Marx made in
his Critique of the Gotha Program between communist society as it
initially emerges (its “lower phase”) and the “higher phase” once it
rests upon its own foundations as indicating the difference between a
stage of socialism and an ultimate stage of communism possible only
after “an enormous development of productive forces.”[44] Marx’s
distinction between two moments in the process in which the new society
advances by producing its own premises (thereby tending to become an
organic system) accordingly hardened into a difference between two
systems: socialism and communism—each with its own strikingly different
relations of distribution.
As noted earlier, when the new society emerges, one of the “birthmarks
of the old society” is that workers remain the “owners of the personal
condition of production, of labor power” and, as a result, consider
themselves entitled to an equivalent in exchange for their activity.
However, rather than focusing upon the development of new productive
relations (a new economic structure) in order to create the conditions
for removing this birthmark, the twentieth-century formula accepted and
built upon this self-orientation by insisting upon a so-called
“socialist principle” of distribution to individuals on the basis of
their contribution. If people in this stage are inherently
self-oriented, then according to this logic the most important thing is
to ensure that they are provided the necessary economic incentives to
induce them to work well.
No matter that Marx had already stressed in the Critique that from the
outset and as the new society developed, a different distribution
principle would increasingly prevail; no matter that he rejected a focus
upon the right of distribution as an equivalent for one’s activity as “a
right of inequality” and as a one-sided view of producers, treating them
“only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being
ignored”; no matter that he declared that it is “a mistake to make a
fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it”
(as opposed to focusing upon the mode of production)—all that the
twentieth-century interpreters took from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha
Program was their conclusion that distribution in accordance with
contribution is necessary in the socialist stage![45]
Transition with capitalism’s “dull instruments”?
How precisely, though, does this “socialist principle” go beyond the
economic, moral, and intellectual “birthmarks of the old society” to get
to the higher stage of communism? If “right cannot be higher than the
economic structure of society,” is it possible to proceed along a
socialist path without changing economic relations among the producers?
The twentieth-century answer was that development of the productive
forces in the socialist stage, supported by material incentives, creates
the conditions for abundance. And, in communism as that system of
abundance, the labor of people would become “so productive that they
will voluntarily work according to their ability” and that this
abundance would allow a person to take freely “according to his
needs.”[46] New people, in short, emerge as a “trickle-down” effect of
the development of the productive forces.
One would search in vain, however, for any suggestion from Marx that
it is possible to get to a future stage of abundance by trying to build
upon a defect inherited from capitalism. Indeed, the second product
characteristic of producing under these conditions points in precisely
the opposite direction. Since the owners of the “personal condition of
production, of labor power” want as much as possible for their property
in an exchange with society, they look upon labor as a means to obtain
articles of consumption, and if they do not get what they consider their
entitlement (the equivalent), they offer less labor. Alienated labor to
obtain alien products, alienation from other members of society, and
alienation from the socially owned material conditions of production,
and thus potentially their theft as a means of securing more articles of
consumption. Could abundance ever be reached under these conditions? If
alienated labor leads to constantly growing needs to possess alien
products, can there ever be an end to scarcity?
Lost in genuflection to the “socialist principle” is any understanding
of how the particular relations of production in the so-called socialist
stage may produce cultural development and consciousness compatible with
the restoration of capitalism. As Che Guevara warned in his Man and
Socialism in Cuba, reliance upon material self-interest is a dead end:
The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the
dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic
cell, individual material interest as the lever, etc.) can lead into a
blind alley. And you wind up there after having travelled a long
distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where
you took the wrong turn.[47]
Indeed, once you accept and rely upon individual material interest as
the lever, the solution to all that ails you is clear: use the lever
more. From this perspective, the source of economic problems must be (as
Gorbachev explained) “serious infractions of the socialist principle of
distribution according to work.”[48] The point is simple: if you try to
create the new society by building upon its defects, what it has
inherited from the old society, rather than building the new society,
you are strengthening the elements of the old society. By elevating the
right to an equivalent (that “right of inequality”) to a “socialist
principle” that must be enforced, the concept of a separate socialist
stage undermines the building of socialism as a process.
“Real socialism”: the Soviet model
Understanding the theoretical departure from Marx’s concept of
socialism is important—especially for those who seek to understand the
alteration in the Marxist legacy. Far more significant, though, in
shaping the inherited view of socialism has been the experience of
concrete socialist experiments in the twentieth century. Drawing upon
what was then called “the rich experience of countries that have
successfully built (or are building) socialism,” the concept of “real
socialism” emerged in the 1970s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
for the principal purpose of distinguishing the existing system there
from theoretical or abstract concepts of socialism.[49] “Real socialism”
refers thus to the Soviet Union and countries which accepted, with
variations, the Soviet model.
That model appeared attractive (especially in poor countries) because
the Soviet Union succeeded in combining its large rural population with
state-directed investments to build an industrial base and achieved
substantial increases in the standard of living—and all in the context
of external hostility. However, by the early 1960s, the deficiencies of
that model became increasingly apparent—so much so that Che predicted
the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.[50]
Certainly the Soviet model explicitly rejected capitalism—in
particular for its inherent tendency to generate unemployment,
inequality, and insecurity. Thus, characteristic of “real socialism” was
its emphasis upon full employment (and its protection of workers from
dismissal), subsidization of necessities, protection from price
increases, and the promise of future increases in the standard of
living. These clear benefits for workers were part of a “social
contract” in which workers in return acquiesced in the direction of the
party and state over the workplace and society.
Despite those benefits (now a source of nostalgia in the countries
that have restored capitalism), however, that social contract precluded
the development of rich human beings. Characteristic of the model of
“real socialism” is the conviction of the party/state that it alone
knows how to build socialism, that it alone can see the whole picture
and that, accordingly, it alone must lead. The perspective is that of
the orchestra conductor who believes that spontaneity and the absence of
predetermined unity produces disaster, that without direction there
would be chaos and that, accordingly, the working class must be
prevented from making mistakes.
Thus, in the workplace, it was not the workers who decided. Rather, it
was “the powerful will of a being outside them” that determined how and
what to produce. Nor was there an end to the separation of thinking and
doing and the subordination of the individual to the capitalist division
of labor; rather than developing the capacities of workers, “real
socialism” produced “a fragment of a man,” one degraded and alienated
from “the intellectual potentialities of the labor process.” Further,
protagonism within the workplace and society that might permit the
simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change was discouraged.
Transmitting its decisions downward through official social
organizations (and marginalizing social activity outside these), the
party/state precluded the opportunity for the working class (in the
words of Rosa Luxemburg) “to make its own mistakes and learn in the
dialectic of history.”[51]
After all, why follow such an uncertain and indeterminate path when
the party/state could guide society correctly? Given the existence of
juridical state ownership of the means of production (equated with
socialist relations of production), the central task (as set out in the
official theory) was to develop the productive forces and thereby to
ensure passage to the stage of abundance in which distribution would be
in accordance with need and labor in accordance with desire.[52] Very
simply, characteristic of “real socialism” was the premise that the
circumstances of workers and workers themselves would be changed under
the direction of the party/state.
Of course, this is precisely the perspective Marx rejected in his
Theses on Feuerbach! Those who propose to change circumstances for
people, he explained, forget “that it is men who change circumstances
and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is
bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to
society.”
What was lost in “real socialism?” In an obvious reference to what was
missing in the Soviet model, Che commented about Cuba in 1964: “For the
first time in the world we have established a Marxist, socialist system,
that is congruent, or approximately congruent, with one that puts man at
the center, that speaks about the individual, that speaks about man and
his importance as the essential factor in the Revolution.”[53]
Consider what happens when Marx’s key link of human development and
practice (that “coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity or self-change”) is forgotten. Missing from “real
socialism” was protagonism of the working class—protagonism in the
workplace, protagonism in the community, protagonism throughout society.
The result was predictable: alienation in the workplace, low
productivity, and the desire for alien products; the result was
“apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of
production.” “Real socialism” did not merely fail to produce rich human
beings; its second product was a working class with neither the will nor
the strength to prevent the restoration of capitalism. That path is a
dead end.
Reinventing or restoring?
President Chávez of Venezuela was determined not to follow that path
and insisted upon a rupture with the model of “real socialism.”
Explicitly rejecting the Soviet experience as state capitalism, he
declared in January 2005 that “we have to reinvent socialism”; and, in
subsequent months, he called specifically for the invention of socialism
for the twenty-first century. “We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a
project, and a path,” he insisted, “but this must be a new type of
socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the
state ahead of everything.”[54]
At the core of his view of socialism for the twenty-first century was
Chávez’s stress upon the key link of human development and practice.
“Socialists have to be made,” he explained on Alo Presidente in 2007. “A
revolution has to produce not only food, goods and services it also has
to produce, more importantly than all of those things, new human beings:
new men, new women.” Agreeing with Che’s point about the necessity of
simultaneously developing productive forces and socialist human beings,
Chávez insisted that the only road was practice: “We have to practice
socialism, that’s one way of saying it, have to go about building it in
practice. And this practice will create us, ourselves, it will change
us; if not we won’t make it.”[55]
Precisely because he understood the importance of revolutionary
practice, Chávez stressed the development of the communal councils where
people transformed both circumstances and themselves, calling those
councils the cells of a new socialist state. And, it is why, in his last
reflection (when already seriously ill), Chávez stressed the absolute
necessity of building the communes (“comuna o nada“) and argued that
capitalist workplaces with their built-in hierarchical social division
of labor should be replaced by one that involves the full participation
of the associated producers and an appropriate means of coordination
(and thus “radically different” from the organization of both the
capitalist economy and the post-capitalist variety “presented
deceivingly as ‘planning’”).[56]
For Chávez, the road was protagonistic democracy, protagonistic
democracy in the workplace and community as the practice which
transforms people. However, it is essential to grasp that this is not a
reinvention. Rather, socialism for the twenty-first century is a
revolutionary restoration—the return to Marx’s understanding of
socialism. This renewed vision (as reflected in the “elementary triangle
of socialism”) once again puts human development, the full development
of human potential at the centre. It insists that:
(1) Everyone has the right to share in the social heritage of human
beings—an equal right to the use and benefits of the products of the
social brain and the social hand—in order to be able to develop his or
her full potential.
(2) Everyone has the right to be able to develop his and her full
potential and capacities through democracy, participation, and
protagonism in the workplace and society—a process in which these
subjects of activity have the precondition of the health and education
that permit them to make full use of this opportunity.
(3) Everyone has the right to live in a society in which human beings
and nature can be nurtured—a society in which we can develop our full
potential in communities based upon cooperation and solidarity.
That renewed vision is desperately needed now because it can once
again move people to struggle against capitalism and to “reclaim
socialism as a thesis, a project, and a path.”
Michael A. Lebowitz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser
University. His most recent book is The Socialist Imperative (Monthly
Review Press, 2015). This article was prepared for a new program,
Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, established in Cuba in 2016 with
funds from the Libertador Prize for Marta Harnecker’s A World to Build
(Monthly Review Press, 2015).
Notes
[1] Karl Marx, “First Outline of the Civil War in France,” in Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, On the Paris Commune (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1971), 149–50, 154; see Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital:
Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 193–95.
[2] Heinz Dieterich, interview with Cristina Marcano, Rebelión,
January 2, 2007, http://rebelion.org. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi in
MRZine March 1, 2007. In his talk at the 2005 World Youth Festival in
Caracas, Dieterich stated that three objective requirements to construct
a socialist economy are mathematical matrices (e.g., input-output
tables), “complete digitalization of the economy,” and a computer
science network between the main economic organizations.
[3] The explicit link between protagonism and human development in the
Bolivarian Constitution is unique among twenty-first-century
constitutions in Latin America. See the discussion of the Bolivarian
Constitution in “The Revolution of Radical Needs: Behind the Bolivarian
Choice of a Socialist Path,” in Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now:
Socialism for the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
[4] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York:
International Publishers, 1975), 302, 304.
[5] Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 488.
[6] Marx, Grundrisse, 325.
[7] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 772
[8] Marx, Grundrisse, 488, 541, 708.
[9] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 24.
[10] Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976), 4.
[11] Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 305, 332–3,
342.
[12] Marx, Grundrisse, 494.
[13] Frederick Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question,” in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 275.
[14] Karl Marx, “Russian Policy Against Turkey.—Chartism,” in Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 12 (New York: International Publishers,
1979), 169.
[15] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 548, 643, 799.
[16] Marx, Grundrisse, 488.
[17] Marx was emphatic, too, that capital destroys not only workers
but also nature. Although a society can bequeath the earth “in an
improved state to succeeding generations,” capitalist production “only
develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social
process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources
of all wealth—the soil and the worker.” Marx, Capital, vol. I, 638.
[18] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 988.
[19] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 548.
[20] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 425.
[21] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 799.
[22] Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981): 178; Marx,
Capital, vol. 1, 447.
[23] Marx,Capital, vol. 1, 619.
[24] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 24.
[25] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 614.
[26] Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 191.
[27] For a discussion of the three sides of the social triangle and
its logic as an organic system, see Michael A. Lebowitz,The Socialist
Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2010), chapters 1–4. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in
Collected Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 506.
[28] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 6, 167; Marx,Grundrisse, 99–100.
[29] See, for example, the discussion of this problem with respect to
Yugoslav self-management in Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative.
[30] For a discussion of the processes involved in planning from
below, see “The State and the Future of Socialism,” in Michael A.
Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2015). While some may not wish to call this set of
institutions a “state,” because these are society’s “own living forces”
and not “an organ standing above society” but “one completely
subordinate to it,” it does not matter if they prefer to call these
articulated councils a non-state or the “Unstate,” as long as all agree
that socialism as an organic system requires these institutions and
practices in order to be real. Karl Marx, “First Outline,” 152–53; Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Program, 30.
[31] In socialism as an organic system, “every economic relation
presupposes every other in its [socialist] economic form, and everything
posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every
organic system.” A slight paraphrase of Marx, Grundrisse, 278.
[32] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 23.
[33] Marx, Grundrisse, 278.
[34] V.I. Lenin, “Our Revolution,” in Collected Works, vol. 33
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965).
[35] Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto, 504.
[36] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program.
[37] Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Marx and Engels, On the
Paris Commune, 68–73.
[38] Karl Marx, “First Outline,” 155–56.
[39] Marx, “First Outline,” 154–55.
[40] Marx, “The Civil War in France,” 75.
[41] One of the “birthmarks of the old society,” Marx understood, was
that initially there was only a partial passage beyond the “narrow
horizon of bourgeois right.” Although the material conditions of
production were now common property, workers remained at the outset the
“owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power.” Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Program, 23, 25.
[42] Marx,Grundrisse, 171-2.
[43] Marx, Grundrisse, 172-3.
[44] V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Beijing: Foreign Languages
Press, 1965), 112–16.
[45] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 24-5; Lebowitz,The Socialist
Alternative, 70–72.
[46] Lenin, State and Revolution, 115.
[47] Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the
Transition to Socialism (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1989), 92.
[48] Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The
Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 138.
[49] Richard Kosolapov, Socialism: Questions of Theory (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1979), 8, 11–2, 482.
[50] See the discussion of Che’s critique of the Soviet Manual of
Political Economy in Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of
Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), chapter 9.
[51] Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 108.
[52] In fact, development of the productive forces became the answer
to all questions—not only how to move from one stage to another but also
how to proceed through a single stage. What became important were
matters such as the output of steel, the percentage of economic activity
owned by the state—quantitative data meant to measure the advance of
socialism. This perspective was so pervasive that the great intellectual
question became whether a country with a low level of economic
development could become socialist or whether it would have to wait—and
wait.
[53] Che Guevara, cited in Yaffe, Che Guevara, 231.
[54] Cleto A. Sojo, “Venezuela’s Chávez Closes WSF with Call to
Transcend Capitalism,” January 31, 2005, http://venezuelanalysis.com;
Lebowitz, Build It Now, 109.
[55] Alo Presidente, episode 279, March 27, 2007.
[56] Hugo Chávez Frias, Golpe de timón (Caracas: Ediciones Correo del
Orinoco, 2012). Translated as “Strike at the Helm,” April 1, 2015,
http://monthlyreview.org.
Engels
Hugo Chavez
Karl Marx
Lenin
Marxist theory
Michael Lebowitz
socialism
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