Cooking the Books: Was Marx really a reformist? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A controversy has broken out between two reformist groups about reforms. It started with an article by Dylan Riley in the New Left Review in April which criticised ‘neo-Kautskyites’ for advocating a green new deal; this, argued Riley, would come up against ‘the structural logic of capital’ and so wouldn’t work as intended (tinyurl.com/4wy2hc75). Accepting the tag neo-Kautskyite, Seth Ackerman replied in Jacobin magazine to try to show that Marx himself believed that reforms could overcome the ‘structural logic of capital’ and so were worth struggling for (tinyurl.com/5whj5u8p).

Ackerman’s case was based on Marx’s support for the 1847 Factory Act which limited the working day for women and children to 10 hours. This had been opposed, not just by most factory owners but by tame economists one of whom notoriously argued that profits were made in the last hour of a day’s work and that cutting hours would ruin businesses. Marx refuted this by showing that every minute a worker worked was divided into paid and unpaid labour and so the Ten Hour Bill would not result in a total loss of profits (see section 3 of chapter 9 of volume I of Capital). It was also in the longer-term interest of the capitalist class as a whole, as over-working workers threatened their fitness as profit-producers of future generations of workers. In other words, it was not against the ‘structural logic of capital.’

Nevertheless, in his Inaugural Address to the founding congress of the International Working Mens’ Association in 1864 Marx did describe (which Ackerman quotes) the passing of the Ten Hour Bill as the first time that ‘the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class’.

Marx’s strategy at the time was to get a workers’ movement going, even just on a trade union basis, in the expectation that it would later develop into a conscious movement for socialism. So, this was a rhetorical flourish to show that working class struggle, even within capitalism, was not useless. In the event, Marx’s strategy didn’t work. Working class political parties did emerge but turned out to be more interested in obtaining reforms under capitalism than in campaigning for socialism.

In arguing that this meant ‘that Marx knew that the struggle for reforms was part of the struggle for socialism’, Ackerman reads too much into Marx’s rhetoric for the occasion and ignores his insistence in the same speech on the need for the workers to win control of political power (‘revolution’) before anything could be done to end their exploitation. Marx did support certain reforms that benefitted workers, and the Factory Acts did do this, but he never saw campaigns for them (‘reform’) as part of the struggle for socialism, only to try to get a better deal under capitalism.

Ackerman went on to argue that there is no ‘structural logic of capital’ that prevents reforms working but chose an easy interpretation of this logic to refute — that reforms will fail due to ‘the falling rate of profit’. That is not our position. Ours is that capitalism is a profit-driven system and that any reform that impinges on profit or profit-making won’t work as envisaged; the only reforms that are accepted are those that don’t go against this ‘structural logic’, including health services and universal education (which help create and maintain a reasonably educated and fit working class to operate modern industry).

The real argument on reforms is not about the reforms themselves but against reformism, the policy of advocating reforms in the belief that this will somehow help the struggle for socialism. It doesn’t and it can’t and it encourages illusions that divert from the struggle for socialism.

Cooking the Books: Divvying up? (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article in New Left Review 128 (March-April 2021), Kenta Tsuda imagines a computer that calculates the world’s wealth and then allocates an equal amount to every man, woman and child on Earth. Credit Suisse’s research institute estimated total global wealth in 2019 to have been $360 trillion. Sharing this out equally amongst the world’s population of 7.8 billion gives everybody $46,000 (or £33,000) worth of wealth.

He wasn’t advocating this himself. There are others who do advocate redistributing wealth so that it is more evenly divided than at present. Normally they don’t advocate that everybody should have the same amount but that the present highly unequal distribution of wealth and income should be drastically reduced.

Some – and some of them – think that this is what socialists want. But we don’t and never have. Friedrich Sorge, a close associate of Marx who was in regular correspondence with him, wrote in a pamphlet Socialism and the Worker that was first published in 1876:

‘Concerning the division of money, I must relate an anecdote invented to ridicule people who are represented to have such intentions. One day in 1848, as the story goes, Baron Rothschild took a walk on the Common of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Two labourers met him and accosted him thus: “Baron, you are a rich man; we want to divide with you.” Baron Rothschild, not the least puzzled, took out his purse good-humouredly and answered: “Certainly! We can do that business on the spot. The account is easily made. I own 40 millions of florins; there are 40 millions of Germans. Consequently each German has to receive one florin; here is your share;” and giving one florin to each of the labourers, who looked at their money quite confused, he walked off smiling’ .

What socialists want is not to divide up existing wealth but for it to become commonly owned by society as a whole. Dividing it up doesn’t make sense. Most wealth is not houses, cars and the other things people consume to live. It is the wealth that is used to produce more wealth (‘the means of production’) in the form of farms, factories, warehouses, shops, roads, railways, communications systems, and the like. These can only be operated cooperatively and are interlinked as a world-wide network of productive units (most items, even consumer goods, incorporate the work of people from different parts of the world).

In this sense the production and distribution of wealth is already ‘socialised’. What is not is the ownership of them and of what they are used to produce. That is in the hands of a tiny minority. Socialists want to bring ownership into line with the reality of production by making the means of production the common property of all society, so that they can be used for the benefit of all instead of as at present to make profits for the few.

Some of the wealth of the super-rich isn’t really wealth, for instance most of that attributed to the major owners of the tech giants – Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the others. This is commonly measured by the stock market value of the shares they own in their company. But shares are not actually existing wealth; they are claims on future wealth (and so which does not yet exist), with their price based on the future income they are expected to bring. There is nothing physical that corresponds to them. Their value is different from that of the real things (buildings, machinery, IT systems) that companies own. When their price goes up no new wealth is created any more than wealth is destroyed when their price goes down. There is nothing there to be divided up. Or to be commonly owned.

Letter: Russia, Women, Transition . . . (1982)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The SPGB’s characterisation of modern Russia as ‘state-capitalist" is, I would argue, somewhat mistaken. At present the most relevant interpretation of the country has been made by Corrigan, Ramsey and Sayer, in an article published in the New Left Review, on which I draw heavily.

Capitalism has three specific and necessary features: 1) production units operate independently so that goods are produced as commodities and resources through a market system; 2) capital accumulation through the extraction of surplus value, is in Marx’s words “the direct aim and determining motive of production"; and 3) the foundation of this exploitation is the wage relation.

In the case of 1 and 2, they cannot be applied to Russia because the overwhelming majority of resources “are allocated through the plan often uncconomically by capitalist market rationality. The absence of market laws in turn means no compulsion to accumulate comparable to capitalist economies. Accumulation has occurred, but has resulted from political decisions about priorities and necessities, of a characteristically Bolshevik kind.” Moreover, the third condition is difficult to maintain: “even if we allow that the workers do not exercise political power (an over simplification) and are effectively removed from the state-owned means of production, the contents of this separation are very different to that under capitalism. Also, real guarantees of employment mean that wage levels are not subject to supply and demand determination of capitalism”.

Those who propose the state-capitalist thesis have singularly failed in specifically outlining capitalist relations in Russia. The SWP case rests on the analogy between military competition between Russia and the West, and economic competition within capitalist economics. Bettleheim on the other hand, inflates necessary into sufficient conditions for capitalist production: confusing surviving capitalist elements with a fully-fledged capitalist system.

In my view Russia contains elements of capitalism, socialism, and elements unique to itself. It is a class-divided society, but they arc not based upon the private ownership/non-ownership model of the means of production. Rather, they are based upon authority and legitimation created and maintained by control of the means of communication (mass media, books, etc.) and control of the means of coercion (the armed forces, moral and ethical pressure).

Unfortunately the SPGB views the women’s movement as a type of “bourgeois deviation”, of little relevance to socialist theory. They derive their primitive views from the archaic and mostly erroneous writings of L. H. Morgan, a 19th century anthropologist, via an interpretation of Engels. The latter adapted the work of the former and claimed that society moves through three stages of marriage which result in the limitation of women's freedom. Essentially, in order to protect the descent of property through the male line Engels claimed that with industrialisation male domination would be removed, even before the advent of socialism. He linked male domination to private property in a grossly mechanistic way. He felt it would disappear because a) the working class family lacks private property, b) because the woman becomes a wage earner, thus achieving economic [in]dependence from her husband and family, and c) because the working class family lacks the instrument of male domination through bourgeois law. This is deficient in a number of ways; i) he fails to analyse the ideology of domesticity and male superiority and ii) he presumes that the monogamous family would end among the working class as women were drawn into the labour market; these are but two.

The relationship between a man and a woman is often one of domination and subordination/acquiescence. In short, one of exploitation, and moreover, one which cannot be simply reduced to a class relation, a phenomenon of capitalism. The working class male possesses domination and authority over the female not because he owns private property or the means of production. His authority is made possible by the subordination of the female via a process of legitimation, i.e., male ideological hegemony. If we forget Morgan and look at modern anthropological data, we will see many examples of such relationships. There have been numerous examples of societies in which the means of production were communally-owned, with little or no private property. However, sections of the tribe/group accrued wealth and power, which appeared to the subordinate sections as legitimate and desirable. It was justified on religious, moral, mystical, ethnic, hereditary and pseudo-rational grounds. These beliefs were inculcated via socialisation. Male dominance will have to be overcome in post-capitalist societies, as well as present ones, and must be the work of women themselves. All socialist groups must support the women’s movement.

My final point is in connection with the SPGB’s utopian notion of “no transitional society” between capitalism and communism/socialism. That is, the creation of a classless, moneyless, private propertyless, totally-free, equal society, almost immediately after the downfall of capitalism. This notion seems to be premised on the belief that during “late capitalism” the working class will gain a perfect understanding of what socialism is, and what action is required of them. Having done this they will automatically elect, via universal suffrage, the SPGB who will begin the rapid transformation. The multinationals and the capitalist classes will realise that it is “a fair cop” and will hand over the ‘goodies.’ Of course you cannot have socialism in one country, so the previously described process will take place on a world scale.

One is left with the impression that the SPGB owes more to Tolstoy and the anarchist movement than to Marx and socialism. The problem of a class-divided society based upon authority and domination, cannot be dismissed with a trite slogan, such as “state capitalism”, nor male oppression as a "bourgeois deviation”. The major problem of authority-domination relationships must be overcome with transcendence capitalist relations, and other major problems— something that can only be achieved in a transitional social development. Nevertheless, we should give the SPGB the benefit of the doubt and not label them as mystical anarchists, and put it down to some simplistic and mechanical views on capitalism, socialism and society in general; if only because a non-Bolshevik socialist party is badly needed. Although it needs to be a thinking one!

Ray Berringer 

North Humberside

REPLY

It’s a pity that the writer quotes so extensively, for what he has to say is more interesting than the NLR stuff, which is easily disposed of.

It is claimed to be a necessary feature of capitalism that production units operate independently through a market. Yet in this country the National Coal Board does not operate independently of the Central Electricity Generating Board, there is cooperation between the boards on coal output for power station input, both directly and via the government. In the USA the aircraft companies are not independent of NASA and the USAAF. In general it is absurd to insist that large production units must remain independent of major customers in modern capitalist society. Interestingly though, those who use this argument to show that Russia is a special case, often make much of the dreadful conspiracies between multi-national corporations.

The “elements of socialism” that people profess to see in Russia arise from confusing nationalisation with socialism, a weakness in most left-wingers, which they could cure by asking themselves a simple question: does nationalisation of the major production areas bring socialist society any nearer? If it does, then Russia must be closer to socialism than Britain. Marxism and socialism are the most unpopular social theories in Russia today: if you advocated the socialism of the SPGB in Red Square you might be ignored by the people, but whisked off to jail by the secret police. So the subjective conditions for socialism, democracy and class consciousness, are almost totally absent.

We are told that capital accumulation proceeds in Russia, not by the extraction of a surplus from the workers, but results from political decisions. All governments would be delighted if this were so, for they would then only have to take the necessary decisions and decree that all production be profitable, making capital accumulation great enough to fund any level of government spending.

In fact the so-called plans of the Russian government have been little more than successive accommodations to reality. Starting in the 1920s everything was to double in five years; by the 1970s ten per cent increase in production over five years has become acceptable. So a rate of growth barely sufficient to ensure the replacement of worn-out stock is hailed as a triumph of a “planned economy”.

The early plans hoped to extract a surplus from the rich peasants—“de-kulakisation”. That didn’t work, the grain wasn’t forthcoming. The next plans encouraged collective farms, but they proved hopelessly inefficient. Then shock-work and the Stakhanovite movement were encouraged, to push up industrial production levels and flood the countryside with agricultural machinery; but the workers resented the increase in the rate of exploitation, so concessions had to be made to them. Thus arose the mass of welfare benefits and heavy subsidies on basic items all in short supply. At this point Russian society has got stuck. On paper the plans allocate whatever resources a production unit requests; in fact every unit has to fight for what it can get in a cycle of inventory-taking, estimation, planning and allocation. All ensuring that the most efficient exploiters—the industries that extract the greatest surplus from their workers—are the ones that get the largest allocations. So the foundation of Russian production is still the wage relation—the smaller the bundle of commodities the workers can appropriate, the greater is the mass of surplus accruing to the state for division among the elite, the Politbureau and the managers.

Can socialists support the women's movement, when, as the writer proclaims, overcoming male dominance ‘must be the work of women themselves’? Many of the feminist groups are exclusive preserves into which men are not allowed. So the efforts of male socialists would be limited to cheering from the sidelines and agreeing with whatever the women decide. Support on those conditions is not worth having or giving.

A society divided into nations whose armed forces wave nuclear weapons about in the hope of frightening others away from the markets and raw materials that all countries covet, periodically blowing the opposition away in wars, when sufficient patriotic fervour can be drummed into the workers—is not a society where equal relations, non-dominance and toleration can be fostered. In brief, workers are encouraged by turns to hate the “bloody huns”, “grasping frogs”, “lousy gooks” and so on; both during the trade wars and actual wars. Not surprisingly. this attitude spills over to others as “dirty yids”, “bleeding pooftahs” and “silly moos” in the domestic and local tyranny of wife-bashing and street brawls. A society transitional between capitalism and socialism would have to be one without war, if tolerance and equality were to be achieved. Does the next step in the argument need to be spelt out? Capitalism without nations, armies, wars and international competition is the reformer’s pipe-dream—what everybody who stops short of socialist conclusions would like the world to be. For this reason the SPGB is not prepared to sully socialism by working with those who are trying to turn capitalism into the impossible—a transitional society of non-socialists. Apart from that, socialists do what they can in their personal relationships, without believing that they are changing the world with such behaviour.

With regard to the comments about Morgan and Engels: the SPGB is prepared to discuss the matter. We consider the work of Morgan and Engels provides a starting-point from which to look at social evolution, tribal common ownership and the origin of private property society; in answer to those who hold that social institutions are permanent, that capitalism has always existed and will continue to do so. But the letter-writer is not concerned with such things, he knows “essentially” what Engels said and that it was “mechanistic”. Arguing against dogma derived from secondary opinion is a lengthy business, so we will restrict ourselves to a single counter-quotation; in Engels’ book his theory is quite sophisticated:

With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair. (Emphasis added)

(The Origin of the Family . . . Lawrence and Wishart, 1972, p. 139.)

How the various classes or privileged groups justify their dominance is a minor matter as far as socialists are concerned, because the tightest legitimations of privilege can disappear with the smallest social change. The almost universally-held belief that wealth grew from abstinence and frugality, ceased to be credible in the Edwardian period of “conspicuous consumption”. Generations of “socialisation” into this belief just evaporated then. Now this argument may be generalised. Almost any position may be justified, belief in it inculcated by socialisation, establishing the ideological hegemony of those whose interest it serves. But when another lot of people with different interests come along, they can take the same “data” and justify a completely different position, blowing down the other ideological house; proving that the “legitimation process” is a quite secondary problem. It is the support that workers give to capitalist society (private, mixed, state, and peculiar) which generates the morals, attitudes and behaviour that go with this society. Withdraw that support on the basis of socialist understanding, change society by democratic revolution and the requisite cooperative morals will arise, difficult to under.

The last paragraph of the letter is difficult to understand. The writer appears to want a thinking, non-Bolshevik political party, that will overcome authority and domination, along with other major social problems, transcending capitalist social relations, by achieving a non-socialist transition world. Is he writing a manifesto for the SDP? Does he want a revolution or not?

Editors.