In Capital Marx
examines the working of capitalism in detail. He takes as the basic
unit of the capitalist economy the commodity, an item of wealth
produced for sale. Where goods are produced for sale then, and only
then, do they have a value. The law of value operates only where
there is commodity-production. For thousands of years goods, produced
for sale under pre-capitalist conditions, exchanged more or less at
their values. Capitalism, which is a system of production for profit
as well as for sale, is more complex and commodities only
accidentally exchange at their values. Nevertheless the law of value
still operates. In fact, under capitalism all the paraphernalia of
exchange—money, prices, trade, banks, bills, bonds, credit—are
developed to a high degree.
For
Marx the classless society that would replace capitalism—which he
called either Socialism or Communism— would not be an exchange
economy. Wealth would be produced for social use and not for profit
or for sale. Hence the law of value would not operate in Socialist
society. There would be no commodities, no money, no prices, no
trade, no banks and the like.
This
was also how all the Social Democratic writers on Marxian economics,
people like Kautsky and Luxemburg, saw it.
The
standard textbook on Marxian economics used by all sections of
Russian Social Democracy, including the Bolsheviks, was A
Short Course of Economic Science by A.
Bogdanov first
published in 1897
“The
new society will be based not on exchange but on natural
self-sufficing economy. Between production and consumption
of products there will not be the market, buying and selling, but
consciously and systematically organised distribution.”
Bukharin
and Proebrazhensky's The A.B.C. of Communism, wrote
of Socialism (which he, for political reasons, calls Communism):
“The
communist method of production presupposes in addition that
production is not for the market, but for use. Under communism, it is
no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who
produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic
co-operative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer
have commodities, but only products. These
products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought
nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are
subsequently delivered to those who need them. In such conditions,
money will no longer be required”
The
question no reformer ever face is, if society’s ideas are “bad”,
what makes them so? Why are they not “good” ideas? Why is society
so “unreasonable” that it accepts an arrangement which allows a
few people to enjoy almost boundless wealth while the condition of
the vast majority is never better than insistent poverty and can sink
as low as outright starvation? Why is society so “foolish” as to
waste so much of its resources on destruction? Such questions are
endless but had we known, or cared, the one logical and consistent
answer to them had already been found, by that man whose beard caused
us so much amusement. The
Materialist Conception of History which, among other things, sees
ideas in their place as the products of material conditions and not
as the makers of those conditions:
“.
. . economic production and the structure of society of every
historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the
foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch .
. . “ (Engels — Preface to the German edition of the Communist
Manifesto, 1883).
From
this viewpoint, history is not the jumble of accidents, personal
misdeeds and romantic mysteries which was served to us as the staple
diet of our schooldays. History is a continuous process of social
development, passing from one system to another, marking its way with
periods of social revolution and with each system giving rise to its
own class antagonisms. Man’s history, in other words, has been a
process of class struggles which have brought him now to capitalism,
a system with only two classes and therefore with only one class to
struggle for its emancipation. Capitalism has done many things. It
has broken the customs and taboos of earlier society, it has massed
its people into great productive units. It has entirely separated one
of its classes from the means of production and by so doing has
brought into existence the most explicit of class divisions in human
society. Capitalism has developed—and continues to develop—the
process of extracting a surplus product, from the unprivileged class
for the privileged class, into an unprecedented science.This, then,
is capitalism. But how do we examine the system, how explain its
workings, its class relations, its method of exploitation? How do we
come to an understanding of capitalism’s tendencies and the process
by which it nourishes the seeds of its own destruction? This analysis
was the work of Marx’s Capital.
The
first question Marx had to ask was—what is the mode of production
in capitalist society? The answer was commodity production, that the
mass of wealth under capitalism was produced as commodities. “Our
investigation” said Marx, “must therefore begin with the analysis
of a commodity.”
Marx’s
method is to isolate the commodity, as ". . . in the first
place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies
human wants of some sort or another.” From this simple statement he
goes on to examine the commodity in detail; the limits within which
one will exchange with another, the implications of the social
relationship of value, the way in which commodities perform their
function of exchanging so as to realise a surplus value for the
capitalist class.
Marx
examined the nature of the commodity which all workers possess—human
labour power—and he revealed the process by which the working class
are exploited, he revealed the reasons for their alienation from the
means of production and he charted the course of their ever-deepening
misery and degradation:
.
. . within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social
productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the
individual labourer; all means for the development of production
transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation
of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a
man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy
every remnant of charm in his work, and turn it into a hated toil . .
. (Capital).
This
passage, which ends with the famous statement that “Accumulation of
wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of
misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental
degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that
produces its own product in the form of capital,” has come in for
much criticism from those who argue that the opposite tendency has
taken place, that capitalism has solved its problems and makes its
people ever happier in a flood of washing machines, cars and
television sets.
But
is what Marx said true? Misery? Agony? Join the rush-hour, take your
place on a fast assembly line with everyone trying to keep up the
bonus, have a go at finding somewhere to live which is bearable and
within the pay packet of an average worker. Look into the figures of
families who are suffering extremes of poverty amid the so-called
Welfare State, which was another of those things which were supposed
to have proved Marx wrong.
Brutality?
Look up the recent crime statistics, with their evidence that we live
in times of almost unprecedented violence. Consider the fact
that men now earn their living by making the things which have the
power almost to wipe out settled life on the earth. Mental
degradation? This is the age when capital accumulation usually means
the use of computers and automated techniques of production, when
human beings are reduced to simply numbers, when exploitation is
constantly being refined and intensified.
Capital probes
the entire mechanism of capitalist society. While the “orthodox”
economists grapple with their feeble expedients—their selective
employments taxes, their import restrictions, their manipulations of
Bank Rate—the Marxist analysis explains it all. And not at all in
the popularly supposed manner of the unsmiling “Red Prussian.”
Although he deals with a difficult and intricate subject, Marx never
leaves his readers in doubt that he is a human being. His writing not
only has power, but wit and movement as well:
Our
capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims: “Oh!
but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more
money." The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he
might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing
at all. He threatens all sorts of things. He won't be caught napping
again. In future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead
of manufacturing them himself. But if all his brother capitalists
were to do the same, where would he find his commodities in the
market? And his money he cannot eat, (Capital, p.172).
Marx
shows how capitalism develops and how and why it will end. He shows
that there is now only one subject class, and that it is their
historical function to abolish private property and build the new
society of Socialism. All this is in his works, in Capital and
others. But at the same time Marx was clear that none of this was
inevitable; he knew that men make their own history and that, working
within the society they find, they must carry out their historical
task.
What
this means is that capitalism is not a matter of mankind, in some
blindingly tragic mistake, getting onto the wrong path. It is not a
matter of incorrect or anti-social ideas. In the same way, socialism
will not happen simply because we think it is a "right” idea.
Both systems are part of man’s social evolution, both have their
own super-structure of institutions and ideas springing from a basis
which can be scientifically examined and classified.
Socialists
are distinguishable for their grasp of all this. Non-Socialists,
however sincere they may be, however pressing the problems they
protest against, can be identified by their failure to appreciate the
scientific case for socialism. The reformers:
:They
all want the impossible, namely, the conditions of bourgeois life
without the necessary consequences of those conditions.” (Letter to
Paul V. Annenkov, December 28, 1846)
