Fragmented and Inchoate Project
Dear Editors,
One of the greatest obstacles for me in accepting the kind of socialism advocated by the Socialist Party was its attitudes towards partial ameliorative reforms, which I found illogical, believing that any improvement in immediate conditions should be promoted vigorously and urgently. Why not fight for better workers’ rights, a better health service, transport, a right to work, freedom of association, a right to welfare, strong charitable institutions? All these seem like good causes worth defending.
However, I am changing my mind. I am beginning to see not only that the fight for partial reforms represents a fragmented and inchoate project in which the various claims to resources are actually made to clash with each other, but that the struggle for “rights” and "freedoms” as we perceive them in a capitalist society is distorted by the language of the market economy, it is invested with what Marx called the ideological superstructure— a set of ideas charged with the function of protecting the existing organism, by leading people astray into misguided, or even damaging, avenues of protest.
So it is, that, in an atomised and isolated way, individuals support various charities, pressure groups and unions. The historical precursors to these groups are what Marx called the Utopian socialists, a group of unconnected thinkers spanning the 18th and 19th centuries who railed against the emerging barbarism and inhumanity of international capitalism. These philosophers and economists, mostly either English or French, were a great influence on Marx himself. The difference is that Marx’s analysis of capitalism is on a deeper level than any of his predecessors; for his aim was not, for instance, to accept the "right” of the displaced labourer to the benefits of humane parish support, but more profoundly to reject the premise that human labour must turn to the capitalist for favours of charity, when the employer deems him surplus to the requirements of profit. Marx argued that "rights" and “freedoms" were determined by the material forces of production, and for him the point was not to assent to these forces—but to change them.
It seems to me that Marx was exactly right The way capitalist epigones appropriated the terms "freedom" and right, only admits of social justice within a narrow circle permitted by market forces. Marx’s scientific socialism amounts to a critique of the idea that social justice ensues from the proper disbursement to labour for the pain of labour; for Marx rejects the idea of the equation between labour and pain, and on the contrary shows that the expressive exertion of brain and muscle is at the centre of human beings’ existence. By absorbing the assumption that man has by nature an aversion to the exercise of his faculties, the Utopians conceded an axiomatic assumption of the capitalist system they strove to revise, and they were therefore limited to a kind of partial, extenuated reformism which was doomed to be ineffective. These palliative reforms are the basis of the fragmentary struggles we see today in the field of social justice.
In short, the Utopians (Hodgskin, Thompson, Gray and Bray) sought decent wages for workers, that is, a fair rate of exchange for the value by which the labourer enhanced the product. Marx’s analysis is far more profound; for him, the evil does not lie so much in the poor rate of exchange of labour, but in the very nature of exchange, which converts man as an active social and productive being into an instrument of profit by means of which man is not kept industrious and happy, but on the contrary unwillingly unproductive and unfulfilled.
Norman Armstrong,
Glasgow
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