Bird’s Eye View: Howlers (2023)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the May 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Howlers

‘Marx partnered with Lenin to launch the Communist movement…’ (American Greatness, 1 March). Lenin was 12 when Marx died and they never met! Worse still, we are told ‘Communism [is] ‘A system, devised by Karl Marx, in which the state controls virtually all economic activity. Private property is outlawed and income inequality is reduced. The theory is idealistic; in practice, communist regimes have been highly authoritarian.’ The Economist‘s definition of socialism is equally inaccurate: ‘… Socialists believe in some forms of collective ownership but not the near-complete abolition of the private sector imposed under communism. They will attempt to redistribute wealth through taxes on the rich and welfare for the poor, but not to eliminate all income differentials’ (The A to Z of Economics). This is somewhat surprising considering the same source is cited not unfavourably by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)! Even the Association of Mature American Citizens, a self-described ‘vigorously conservative’ United States-based advocacy organization and interest group, know that the terms communism and socialism are ‘…typically used interchangeably by Marxists’ (AMAC, 11 March). A far better A to Z of economic terms, from ‘abundance’ to ‘zero-growth’, ‘ is available here.

Territorial Pissings

The entry for Lenin in that A to Z concludes:

‘When he died from a stroke in January 1924, most of the main feudal obstacles to capitalist development had been removed, together with all effective political opposition. With his concepts of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the leading role of the vanguard party, and a transitional society of ‘socialism’, Lenin distorted Marxism and thereby severely damaged the development of a socialist movement. Indeed, Leninism continues to pose a real obstacle to the achievement of socialism.’

Bibek Sen in an obituary titled Marxist Economist Of Global Fame Dr. Paresh Chattopadhyay Is No More (The Arabian Post) writes along similar lines: ‘We were fed with Leninist ideas of two stages of communism, of workers’ inability to change the society, of state capitalism as Marx’s Socialism. Paresh opened our eyes that Leninism is a complete vulgarisation of Marx’. By contrast, Harsh Thakor’s obituary in Countercurrents (10 March) gets it completely wrong berating Chattopadhyay as he ‘…completely relegated the great advances in Socialist production through collectivisation in Russia, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China, the reasons for the defeat of Fascist forces by USSR in World War 2, the democratic form of power contrived in the Soviets and Communes or how encirclement of imperialist countries or penetration of counter revolutionaries, made it all the more imperative for the vanguard party to exercise its power. He failed to diagnose the symmetrical developments of the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao or how they were an integral part of each other’. An echo of Radio Moscow from the time of the state-capitalist USSR.

The lapdogs of bourgeois society

Mao, like Lenin before him, hastened the development of capitalism. He stated in 1949 ‘China must utilize all the factors of urban and rural capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy and the people’s livelihood, and we must unite with the national bourgeoisie in common struggle. Our present policy is to regulate capitalism, not to destroy it’ (On The People’s Democratic Dictatorship). That wages have increased since Mao’s day is not in doubt. The 1 percent in China and the US, unlike the vast majority of us, are doing very nicely: ‘The Chinese Communist Party is thought to have more than 80 billionaire delegates as part of its ranks this year’ (Daily Express, 15 March). ‘Xi’s government has cracked down on young people who apply Marxist analysis too critically to abuses of labour allowed under China’s system of state capitalism’ (Financial Times, 28 June 2022). Capitalist hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are found in China as they are worldwide. By contrast, the socialism Marx envisaged involved ‘abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production’ (Communist Manifesto, 1848).

Barking up the wrong tree

‘Sanders new book It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism reads like Marx and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto. The only difference is that in their manifesto, Marx and Engels clearly underline the positive role that capitalism played throughout history. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, doesn’t have a single good word to say about capitalism and – here he resembles Marx and Engels – calls for a working-class revolution to raze the capitalist system to the ground’ (American Thinker, 10 March).

Hardly! The status quo is safe – Sanders is all bark and no bite. Defining what ‘democratic socialism’ means to him, Sanders said:

‘I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad’ (Slate, 15 November 2015).

The American Marxist Daniel De Leon would have identified Sanders as a reformist lapdog!

‘As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “anti-rent and anti-capital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle’ (The Daily People, 2 November 1908).

It's a question of property (1995)

Book Review from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience by Paresh Chattopadhyay (Praeger, 1994.)

Some writers are unlucky. They start to write a book on some subject and are then overtaken by events before it is published. This has been the fate of Paresh Chattopadhyay whose book on Russia—and how, despite the various claims, it was neither socialist nor non-capitalist nor post-capitalist or whatever but capitalist in a strict Marxian sense—was overtaken by the collapse of the state capitalist system there, the changes of “is” into “was” at the proofreading stage notwithstanding. It is to be hoped that this won’t put people off reading the book on the grounds that this is all now ancient history, since Chattopadhyay’s analysis of Russia under Bolshevik rule is excellent. His basic argument is that Russia during this period was capitalist because the economic system there was based on wage-labour and that, as Marx pointed out, wherever wage-labour exists so does capital and so capitalism.

Capital is not a thing but a social relation, one that comes into being whenever the producers are separated both from the means of production and from the products of their labour; this means that they can only get a living by selling their mental and physical energies, their productive skills, for a wage or salary. This is why the fact that one class in society has to work for wages is in itself evidence that capitalism exists; it is a sign that the producers are separated from the conditions of production, irrespective of who controls these conditions and how.

Chattopadhyay points out that Marx distinguished between two kinds of property—what Chattopadhyay calls “economic property” and “juridical property”—only the first of which is essential to capitalism. “Economic property” describes the actual social relation whereby one class holds and another class is excluded from the means of production; it is a factual situation. “Juridical property” is where this social fact is recognised by the law in the form of legal individual private property rights. These existed before capitalism—in Roman law for instance—and capitalism can exist without them. In this sense they are the icing on the capitalist cake not its essential ingredients.

The mistake, says Chattopadhyay, made by those who saw Russia as socialist (the Stalinists) or non-capitalist (the Trotskyists) was to identify the abolition of capitalism with the abolition of “juridical property” instead of with the abolition of “economic property”. At no time after 1917 was this latter abolished, as was demonstrated by the continued existence and indeed general expansion of wage-labour there.

Some dissident Trotskyists and Stalinists have been prepared to go some distance down this road, but Chattopadhyay goes all the way. He argues that the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 was not even an attempt to establish socialism in the Marxian sense. Lenin in fact had a quite different conception of socialism from Marx’s:

  “Socialism, even as a concept, appearing in Lenin’s State and Revolution, contains elements such as ‘state’ and ‘hired employees’ earning ‘wages’, that are alien to Marx’s socialism, conceived as free association … Socialism, according to Marx, is a free association of producers without state, without commodity production and without wage labour.”

What Lenin and the Bolsheviks aimed to establish—and did in fact establish—was a state-run capitalism in which the role of Marx’s “functionaries of capital” was played not by individual private capitalists nor by paid directors of joint-stock companies but by Party/State officials. It follows from this that the Bolshevik seizure of power was not a socialist or proletarian revolution. It also follows that, as capitalism (the exclusion of the producers from the conditions of production and their having to work for wages) was never at any time abolished in Russia, all theories of “the restoration of capitalism” there—and there are people who would date this from the coming to power of Stalin or Khruschev or Yeltsin—were wrong; in fact nonsensical.

As can be seen, the approach of this book is very close to that of the Socialist Party. Certainly, it is now a book about history rather than the contemporary scene but it is yet another nail in the coffin of Leninism.

Adam Buick

Socialism, Communism, Association—A rose by another name (2020)

SPGB pamphlet from 1948.

From the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since Marx is famously known as the author of The Communist Manifesto, it is generally assumed that ‘communism’ must have been his preferred term to refer to a post-capitalist society. But in the scattered sketches that can be found in his writings, it is more common to see his image of a future society described as an ‘association’.

For example, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe how the ‘classes and class antagonisms’ of bourgeois society would be replaced by ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. And this is a manner of expression he stuck to in his later works. In Capital, for example, he imagines ‘an association of free individuals (sic), working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’; and describes a ‘higher form of society . . . in which the free development of every individual forms the ruling principle’.

The image here is not of citizens ‘sacrificing’ themselves for the ‘good of society’ but of individuals thoroughly at home in their social world, which is governed by the principle, ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

The social connection between these ‘associated individuals’ is clear from the outset, unlike the situation under capitalism, where the starting point is private capitalist firms pursuing their own profit in competition against each other. And the means of production are held in common, rather than confronting workers as the private property of other people. The connection between the individuals, and their relation to the means of production, is much like the situation among members of a family engaged in some project together through the use of their collective labour and commonly held resources. The relations between persons in such a case is not mediated by the exchange of things (money and commodities), and the interests of each individual are not in conflict.

Of course, we can also see such ‘associated’ behaviour to some extent under capitalism, as in the case of the various relationships and organisations people enter to pursue their interests and hobbies. But the scope of these associations is limited, since the vast majority of productive activities are done to receive the wages needed to survive—making them coercive rather than free. Every worker knows quite well the stark difference between freely entering into an association with others to pursue some interest and being compelled to work for wages.

The word ‘free’ shows up often when Marx describes a future society, using expressions like ‘free and equal producers’ and ‘free individuals’. Moreover, there is no contradiction or conflict between the different pursuits of individuals, who are no longer divided by the competition imposed by capitalism, thus resulting in a ‘large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour’.

Such passages on a future association emphasise how human beings would freely and consciously interact with each other in pursuit of common goals that also benefit each other. The emphasis on the central role of individuals within a future society runs quite counter to the stereotypes that many people have of Marx’s ideas and of the concepts of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’.

A great misfortune of the 20th century is that those terms became distorted by their association with state-capitalist countries that labelled themselves as socialist or communist to conceal their class-divided reality. A conceit that the foes of those countries were only too happy to oblige in as a convenient way to discredit all revolutionary ideas. Even today, when the term ‘democratic socialism’ has become trendy among younger generations, many still mistake the essence of socialism as economic intervention and regulation by the state.

From the passages quoted from Marx above, however, it should be clear that there is little need for a government and the actions of its politicians and bureaucrats when the subjects of society are free individuals consciously carrying out productive activities to meet common and individual goals. Quite unlike the state-capitalist model of a monolithic state that mobilises the ‘masses’ for its own aims, this would be an organic society made up of countless associations engaging in their respective activities and coordinating with each other to meet democratically determined needs. A ‘state’ would be completely superfluous to such free, associated individuals.

Some Marxian scholars like Paresh Chattopadhyay and Teinosuke Otani have used the term ‘Association’ or the ‘associated mode of production’ rather than ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ to refer to a future society. The debate over what term to use is not that important, since one is still left with the task of explaining its fundamental content. But the image of Association (or a global collective of associations) may help counter views that have emphasised the collective at the expense of the individual—or viewed the gains on one side as a loss on the other. The perspective of Association also reveals how capitalism, for all its championing of individualism, in fact stifles the possibility of each worker to freely pursue personal interests and fulfil individual potential.

Mike Schauerte

Twentieth Century ‘Socialism’? (2016)

Book Review from the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Twentieth Century Socialism: A Minority Rule’. By Paresh Chattopadhyay. (Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai). 14 May, 2016.

Although ‘Dedicated to the memory of the great libertarian George Orwell,’ in much of this article Paresh Chattopadhyay is spot on, carefully recounting some of the heinous misdemeanours perpetrated by Lenin, Trotsky and their Bolshevik coterie in Russia and upholding instead some pertinent positions and principles of Marx and Engels that are in opposition to them. However, he concludes this long interesting and informative criticism and citations with the Kronstadt revolt and massacre, wherein he affirms ‘The Kronstadt sailors and toilers called this incident the “Third Revolution,” after February and October.’ This he just cites without any comment presumably because of a ‘libertarian’ perspective. But Libertarianism, be what it may, is not Marxism. As world socialists we evaluate situations from a Marxist point of view. For argument’s sake, even if the Kronstadters happened to be victorious, it was not going to be a socialist revolution anyway. You cannot achieve socialism without an exclusively clear-cut socialist goal and class-wide revolutionary organization within a matured revolutionary situation. The Kronstadters had no socialist agenda and organization and circumstances were non-socialist. They were asking for some liberal democratic rights only.

He says nothing about what we socialists have to do today to end the rule of capital.

‘Twentieth Century Socialism’ is the name he gives to Leninism-Bolshevism as the most prominent form of ‘socialism’ in the last century. This term is ill-conceived as it suggests that not only was Leninism-Bolshevism a form of socialism but that all who worked under the same name ‘socialism’ during the twentieth century, whether to educate or mislead, to organize or disarrange the working class, were as well. This use of the term ‘socialist’ is one-sided and misleading and has to be contested, as no doubt it would by Marx and Engels were they alive today.

It ignores the fact that, in opposition to all the sundry ‘socialists’, there were, and till today are, the genuine socialists in the same sense as Marx and Engels – the  Socialist Party of Great Britain (ever since 1904) and the other Companion Parties of the World Socialist Movement, of which Professor Chattopadhyay is quite aware, being personally acquainted with the World Socialist Party (India) and familiar with our Movement’s relentless presence in the socialist milieu.

He creates an amalgam ‘party-state’, and equates this with the Leninist construct and frame. This is to confuse these two very different but transient institutions. True, the Leninist ‘party-state’ was a form of ruthless state capitalist dictatorship. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that party and state are of no use for the working class. Both are necessary and useful during the ‘political transition’ (Marx) from capitalism to socialism, though  certainly not in their present-day capitalistic forms. These organs will have to be revolutionized, transformed and converted from their present repressive forms into a participatory democratic form – as agents of emancipation in the hands of the victorious working class. Marx and Engels were neither against nor for the state and the party in the abstract. As scientists of the working class they analyzed their dynamics – their origin, evolution, and eventual ultimate demise.

To accomplish the revolutionary historical task of replacing capitalism by the ‘free and equal association of the producers’ (Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) the workers possess only two effective weapons at their disposal – universal knowledge of history and a class-wide revolutionary organization i.e. a participatory democratic party and movement. This is indispensable. Without such a party and movement the workers are nothing but defenceless, wretched, competitive, alienated and mutually hostile wage slaves. When workers unite for higher wages and reforms they are merely a class-in-itself. They become a class-for-itself when permeated with socialist knowledge about their common radical cause and by uniting themselves politically ‘to win the battle of democracy’ (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto) by unseating the bureaucratic ruling elites everywhere.

The working class will have to get this done by applying their franchise in elections state-wise and world-wide more or less simultaneously to seize the reins of states, and get them transformed to use to dispossess the capitalist class. This is done by lopping off their repressive organs, dismantling the bureaucratic-military structure, and by democratizing and absorbing the state’s useful organs into the new socio-economic formations of production for use in place of production for profit – rearranging administration of affairs of life on local, regional and global organizational scales. This will usher in, as Marx put it, a new era of equality and freedom replacing the pre-history of humanity with history proper.

Binay Sarkar

For socialism (2019)

Book Review from the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Socialism and Commodity Production’. By Paresh Chattopadhyay, (Brill, 2018)

Commodities are items of wealth that have been produced for sale. Commodities have been produced in pre-capitalist societies but such production was marginal. It is only in capitalism that it becomes the dominant mode of production, where goods and services are produced for sale with a view to profit. Commodities must be capable of being reproduced, and this includes the uniquely capitalist commodity of human labour power, the capacity to work which is sold for a wage or salary.

Because of the incidental nature of ‘simple commodity’ production in pre-capitalist societies, argued Marx, it would be a mistake to claim there had been a ‘simple commodity’ production society. It is capitalist society which has generalised commodity production. Under capitalism the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time needed for its production and reproduction. According to Marx’s law of value, generalised commodity production results in money as the ‘general equivalent’ in buying and selling.

In Marx’s writings the abolition of capitalism is the abolition of commodity production, and with it the money-wages-buying-and-selling-system, together with all the institutions needed to make it function, such as the state. He called this post-capitalist society variously social-democracy, socialism, communism, a free association, the co-operative society and more — but they all meant the same thing.

In Marx’s time there was a consensus on this view of commodity production. So August Bebel could write in Woman and Socialism (1879): ‘since in the new society there is no commodity to buy and sell … There is no money either’. Anybody who regarded themselves as Marxist would have agreed. However, the consensus broke down in the twentieth century as politicians pursued their own political agenda. In 1924 Kautsky wrote: ‘a socialist society would not be able to exist without a system of exchange of products’, that is, money, commodity exchange and the wages system. Kautsky was leader of the German Social Democratic Party and although he mouthed Marxist phrases he pursued policies favourable to a state-run capitalism. In 1917 Lenin asserted in State and Revolution that socialism was a transitional society between capitalism and communism. In this conception of ‘socialism’ the state, commodity production and the wages system not only continue to exist but in the years after the Bolshevik revolution their scope and intensity was extended throughout Russia.

In 1936 Stalin declared that the USSR was officially ‘Socialist’ and in a work published in 1954 spoke of ‘the necessity of commodity production under socialism’. For many the existence of commodity production and the law of value in ‘socialism’ was self-evident. The economist Oskar Lange could confidently write: ‘A careful study of Marx’s writings establishes clearly that he held the view that the theory of value applied to a socialist economy’ and ‘In a socialist economy the law of value continues to operate because production continues to be commodity production’. Unfortunately for Lange, Marx never held that view and here are just a couple of his repudiations:

 ‘Only on the basis of the capitalist mode of production do commodities become the general, predominant form of production’ (Capital, Volume 1).
 ‘Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme).

Paresh Chattopadhyay does a good job of showing why and how the establishment of socialism means the abolition of commodity production. Included in this work are detailed analyses of so-called ‘Market Socialism’ and the ‘Economic Calculation Argument’ and much more. It is to be hoped that a cheaper and more readily accessible version will soon become available.

Lew Higgins

Marxism: an anti-capitalist view? (2004)

Book Review from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Capitalism. A Marxist Introduction. Edited by Alfredo Saad-Filho. Pluto Press.

If you proclaim yourself to be “anti-capitalist”, it is a good idea to have some idea of what capitalism is. Alfredo Saad-Filho has gathered together here contributions from people considering themselves Marxists to produce “a Marxist introduction” to capitalism and anti-capitalism. His opening article on “Value, Capital and Exploitation” is excellent as is the closing article by Paresh Chattopadhyay, who understands that the abolition of capitalism involves the disappearance of money, wage-labour, commodity production and buying and selling generally and that “Marx does not distinguish between communism and socialism. Both stand for the society succeeding capitalism. (The distinction was first to be made famous, if not introduced, by Lenin)”. A number of the others make valid points, as, for instance, Ellen Meiksins Wood when she points out that many in the “anti-capitalist movement”:

  “are not so much anti-capitalist as anti-‘globalisation’, or perhaps anti-neoliberal, or even just opposed to particularly malignant corporations. They assume that the detrimental effects of the capitalist system can be eliminated by taming global corporations or by making them more ‘ethical’, ‘responsible’, and socially conscious.”

Others, despite their reputations, are obviously mere reformists, especially two ex-members of a Communist Party, Ben Fine and Suzanne de Brunhoff. The former, who can’t have known about Chattopadhyay’s contribution, talks of “some form of wage labour persisting” in the first stage of socialist/communist society while the latter opines that “a new public regulation of markets and financial institutions is necessary”.

   

In fact, all through the book there is an underlying tension between an analysis of capitalism as a profit-driven system governed by its own economic laws which preclude it working in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers and proposals to try to make it do precisely that.

   

You would have thought that the main aim of an anti-capitalist movement would be to end capitalism and establish socialism (as the sort of society described by Chattopadhyay). Apparently not. If this book is anything to go by, this is not advocated, except rhetorically, even by those within it who consider themselves Marxists. The aim seems to be to bring pressure on existing governments to introduce reforms and to change their policy so as to tame multinational corporations and/or return to the state interventionism of pre-Reagan and Thatcher times. Even Saad-Filho himself claims, in his introduction:

“Pressure for or against specific policies can be effective, and the ensuing policy choices can improve significantly the living conditions of the majority” (his emphasis).

“Improve significantly”? We can only retort “Prove it”, since all the evidence of experience as well as a Marxian analysis and understanding of capitalism goes against this. That’s why, in our view, coherent anti-capitalists should be campaigning for socialism not changes of policy.

Adam Buick