Introduction by Chris Ford

Published below is what may appear a rather unusual article entitled ‘What Remains of Marx’ by Professor Georg Sans published in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit paper, closely monitored by the Vatican. It was then republished by the Vatican’s own newspaper L’Osservatore Romano giving it added endorsement by the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October. What is so important is that Sans gives a strong endorsement to Marx’s critique of capitalist society. Now for a Christian to positively engage with Marx in itself is not unusual: there have been Christian communists for many years, furthermore there continues to be strong movement of liberation theology especially in Latin America.

What is important in this article is where it has been published – with clear Vatican approval. The Vatican has especially in the post-war period waged a campaign against the radical left-wing of Christianity, for example the Christian communist movement in Italy was hounded by the hierarchy. The current Pope Benedict XVI earned the nickname the ‘Panzer Cardinal’ when under his predecessor Pope John Paul II he lead the campaign against liberation theology in Latin America. One of the leading theorists of that movement, Leonardo Boff wrote that the Pope saw liberation theology as a “Trojan horse” for Communism: “He convinced himself that in Latin America, Communism was the danger, whereas the true danger was savage and colonialist capitalism, with its anti-people and retrograde elites.” Of the current Pope he wrote: “Like his principal counsellor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], the Pope put forward an Augustinian vision of history, where what counts is only that which passes through the mediation of the Church, which carries with it the supernatural concept of salvation… This position led him to a total incomprehension of Latin American theology of liberation”. Boff concluded: “To the outside, he presented himself as a champion of dialogue, of liberty, tolerance, peace, and ecumenism, but within the Church he shuttered the right of expression, banned dialogue, and created a theology with powerful fundamentalist overtones”.

It is against this recent history of the campaign against liberation theology and corresponding retrogressionist trends illustrated in Church policy on gender and sexuality that the article below is of importance. It is noteworthy that whilst the article has been widely reported it has not been published in any of the Catholic press in the UK or Ireland. This is perhaps a reflection of the weakness of the left-wing of Christianity in the UK and Ireland, as regards Marxism there has only been a few Marxian theologians such as Alisdair MacIntyre and Rev.John Marsden. This conservatism has been compounded by the crude nature of the left’s own engagement with religious affairs, either accommodating to conservative trends such as in opposition to war, or taking an undifferentiated approach and failing to see the more radical emancipatory currents which also emerge: the article by Sans below is clearly an expression of the latter current. The article is published in full by The Commune, appropriately on Christmas Day, the official celebration of the birth of Jesus, the leader of a movement against oppression and inequality, who was later crucified by the Roman overlords.

What remains of Marx?

by Georg Sans

From the misery of the proletariat Karl Marx was led to conclude that alienation could be neutralised only by the elimination of capitalism and abolishing private property. However, the history of Marxism has taught us that all attempts of introducing communism violently have led to greater injustice and misery. What is therefore left of Marx, the philosopher and the economist, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

The novelty of the Parisian manuscripts consisted in connecting anthropological and philosophical-social issues with the economic problems. As Marx illustrates the principles and the theories of economic science have strong foundations. Especially as far as the fundamental object of every financial matter is concerned: money. ” capital”, is indeed a treatment of the very nature of money. Marx worked for more than thirty years on his main work, of which he only completed the first volume.

Critically challenging representatives of classical political economy, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx seeks to transform money into capital. While the money that one possesses is necessary, in principle, to be exchanged in order to acquire different things for daily needs, the function of payment of capital is purely theoretic. Who possesses or wants to possess capital desires that it grows. This desire is not at all a sign of cupidity or greed, but it simply reveals the very function of capital.

According to Marx capital originates, so to speak, as a secondary product of work, when the employer sells the goods produced and earns more than what he pays his employees.

The employer certainly needs money to buy machinery and raw material in order to produce new goods; but he gets profit only when he refuses to give employees the just portion of what is gained through the sale. Capital grows only thanks to the work done by employees beyond the measure of the value of their labour power. ‘It produces surplus-value, which smiles at the capitalist with all the fascination of something created from scratch’. Although the Marxist theory of value has spawned multiple objections in the sphere of economics, recently it has generated new interest. A new reading of Marx has started, especially in Germany and Italy, thanks to the attention given to his preliminary works before ‘Capital’ now the integral critical work of Marx and Engels is published, which attempts to free it from a determinist vision of the history the first critical elements of Capitalism, formulated by the mature Marx. The primary supposition of this work is that social injustice that can be found everywhere in capitalist society is not simply the consequence of wrong individual conduct, but it finds its roots in the way money becomes capital. According to these studies, Marx highlighted that, contrary to external appearances, money is not a simple object of exchange and it is not be correct to say that money in the bank or in the purse ‘works’ for its owner. It is no exaggeration to say that nothing has damaged the interests of Marx the philosopher more than Marxism. The ideological abuse, which lasted for decades, the excessive exaltation of the significance of his thinking has led, first, a resolute denial and, in obstinate misunderstandings. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War should now be high time to draw a balance sheet.

For this purpose it is necessary to distinguish between Marx of the communist party and Engels from the young Marx and author of Capital. Furthermore it is necessary to give pre-eminence to the observer critical of all rigid dogma. Researches conducted on the evolution of his thought have shown that Marx was much less determined in his beliefs than is commonly thought.

Also, a debate that desires to be productive presumes that one knows how to carefully distinguish between the various elements which compose Marxist theory. Therefore, for example, nobody will find the materialist conception of history convincing – that considers the ‘material production of immediate life as a foundation of history’. And in the same way the materialist vision of man is similarly too reductive – according to which our culture can only be understood only relation to the physical needs and the concrete activity of man. This however is not an attempt to pronounce a judgment on the nature of alienated labour, nor the unresolved problem of the origin of surplus-value. These are the questions that face the study of Marx today. We should be grateful to the philosopher for the idea that the human being is also considered in light of the mode of production and of the form of economic management that predominate in society.

After the fall of communism it is not a matter of condemning every private property as bad or unjust in itself. The experience of the previous century has shown sufficiently that the difficulties that have augmented with industrialisation cannot be overcome by collectivising property. Much more urgent is the problem of the equal participation of all men, and not just the ones who are part of the decision processes – financial and political. The fact that a large part of humanity remains outside a social co-participation can be considered with Karl Marx as the alienation of man from himself, as a social being.

Another aspect of the alienation, of which we are certainly more aware, is the one that concerns man with respect to nature. It not necessary to be a materialist in order to recognise that harmony between human beings and their natural environment must be established. It is not about simply relating to a vital space or finding food, but taking into account the man who is constituted of the unity of one spirit and body. Inconsiderate exploitation of natural resources and the consequent destruction of the environment, show us how necessary it is to form an integral vision of man. Finally we have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system. Although today one is broadly in agreement with the Marxist theory of wages and prices it does not find correspondence in concrete economic situations, the question of the origin of the surplus-value has not lost its legitimacy at all. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few? However so far it does not seem to contradict Marxist thesis, that in the end it is always the actual work of someone that creates the excessive wealth of others. Obviously this statement has to be framed and nuanced in light of other considerations, for instance the role of intelligence, acquired knowledge and time.

Certainly, it has become common fashionable to counter ‘the market economy’, understanding in a positive sense to capitalism understood in its negative sense. But this contraposition remains imprecise, as long as it is not sustained by a general theory of money. Also from this point of view it is not convenient, today as in the past, to simply leave the critique of Marx’s political economy to the left.

By Georg Sans on “l’Osservatore Romano”

David Broder reviews First as tragedy, then as farce by Slavoj Zizek

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profane (Marx, Communist Manifesto)

As we reach the end of the ‘noughties’ this month, there is much scope for reflection on the events of the last decade. There remains a crisis of alternatives to capitalism, yet together with the current dark spectres of recession and ecological crisis, two events bookmarking the decade disrupted the ideology of ‘the End of History’. The September 11th terrorist atrocities in New York shattered the illusion of the invulnerable American military hegemon, while last October’s financial meltdown has fatally undermined the gospel of free-market economics. George W. Bush’s speeches on each occasion were the same, of course: ‘action’ was needed to defend ‘our way of life’. As Slavoj Zizek acerbically comments, this brings to mind Marx’s quip that “History always repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”

This latest book by Slavoj Zizek reflects an increasing ‘politicisation’ of the Slovenian critical theorist’s work and his enthusiastic embrace of the idea of communism. Zizek’s books rarely have one particular subject – nor are they broken down into clearly defined sections – and typically feature a rollercoaster ride through many diverse themes of philosophy, psychoanalysis, film critique and varied historical and political episodes. First as tragedy, then as farce has sections like this, but the overall structure here is rather more strongly rooted in the current capitalist crisis and the ideology behind critiques of ‘reckless’ or ‘unethical’ capitalism.

Although far from an activist, Zizek deserves at least some grudging credit for this ’stooping’ to the level of practical politics, and reaffirming the idea that a communist society is both a desirable and possible alternative to capitalism. Academia is not lacking in philosophers who use Marxism to provide a theoretical framework and set of categories but who are not themselves communists or insist that it is a purely abstract idea. We need only note Zizek’s attempt to rouse the 1,000 people in attendance at June’s Idea of Communism conference at Birkbeck to sing the Internationale, which was greeted with utter bemusement.

We see then, commodities are in love with money, but “the course of true love never did run smooth” (Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. 1 Chapter 3.2)

Zizek relishes the spectacle of free-market dogma left shattered, but also points to how little has been learnt. The market fundamentalists react in a manner “typical of utopian “totalitarians”: they blame all failure on the compromises of those who realised their schemes (there was still too much state intervention, etc.) and demand nothing less than an even more radical implementation of their doctrines” (p.19)[1]

He cuts sharply against the idea that the capitalist crisis shows that large corporations have become reckless or that ‘casino capitalism’ has run out of control. Quite the opposite: these are not contingent excesses of capital, but are the direct expression of its central internal dynamic towards ever-greater accumulation. Bernie Madoff was not some ‘bad egg’, the exception to the rule, but rather a ‘respected’ figure at the very heart of NASDAQ and the US financial establishment.

He notes: “It is not without irony to note how ideologists who once mocked [the] critical defence of socialism [that the Eastern Bloc was not really socialist] as illusory, and insisted that one should lay the blame on the very idea itself, now widely resort to the same line of defence: for it is not capitalism as such which is bankrupt, only its distorted realisation…” (p19)

So is ’socially responsible eco-capitalism’ a contradiction in terms? Many on the British left today will have heard from SWP or Socialist Party comrades the idea of ‘transitional method’[2], arguing that what the left has to do is argue for reforms which sound reasonable to ‘ordinary’ workers, but which capitalism would in fact be unable to afford, for example free transport, massive house-building, more workers’ control in the workplace and so on. The left communist Loren Goldner has critiqued such a notion on the grounds that “There is nothing that, failing to call into question the hegemony of value production over social reproduction, which cannot be integrated into capitalism.”

Surely Goldner is right insofar as capitalism is immensely adaptable and not necessarily reliant on free-market dogma – which is why the massive state involvement in the economy this last year by bailing out the banks has in no way lessened the capitalist nature of these institutions, and why Starbucks is able to charge more for coffee produced by better-paid farm labourers or which is less detrimental to the environment. The ‘transitional method’ is basically patronising and elitist (putting forward the strategy for a left government over the bourgeois state, only later to reveal that we know the state bureaucracy and army would never allow it… and so we would have to take on a totally different strategy…), although it is also the case that struggles which increase the power of the working class are both ‘immediately’ necessary and useful for the overall purposes of revolution.

Zizek goes beyond saying that ’socially responsible eco-capitalism’ is a contradiction in terms, and furthermore argues that it is a deeply ideological project. NGO-type ideas are not merely illusory, but rather directly integrated into capitalist development. The urge to ‘do something’ we can all engage in – buying organic fruit, Fairtrade products, the idea of carbon trading etc. – are a means of ‘action’ which substitutes for actually changing anything at all. This line of thinking seeks to blame us all for the outcomes of capitalism, and for us all to busy ourselves with alleviating its problems, to which we ourselves are also victim!

Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over our eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters (Marx, preface to Das Kapital)

This ideological facade reaches its high point with the ‘personalisation’ of politics – the attempt to insist that social relations and structures of oppression do not really matter, since we are, after all, ‘all human’. Even if apparently the opposite of the scapegoating of individual bankers as guilty for the crisis through their ‘greed’, this nonetheless maintains the same rigid separation between our wants and needs as ‘ordinary’ human beings and our position in social relations. Zizek cites the Israeli media’s love of portraying IDF troops as ordinary people caught in a difficult situation, and uses the example of a soldier involved in a raid of a Palestinian family’s home:

“The mother of the family called her daughter by her name in order to calm her down, and the surprised soldier learned that the frightened girl’s name was the same as that of his own daughter; in a sentimental outburst, he pulled out his wallet and showed her picture to the Palestinian mother. It is easy to discern the falsity of such a gesture of empathy: the notion that, in spite of political differences we are all basically human beings with the same loves and worries neutralises the impact of the activity the soldier was engaged in.” (p.41)

As in the novel The Kindly Ones [3], narrativising the personal ’story’ of an SS officer in the Holocaust – his crushes, his sexuality, his family life, as well as the massacres of Jews – we see that ‘the personal’ is not ‘the political’: the trivia of everyday home life is not ‘who we are’: what we do is who we are.

Zizek also argues, however, that much as we should not deny the IDF soldier or Nazi prison camp guard’s subjectivity by saying he is only ‘all too human’ and caught in violent circumstances, equally the left is wrong to support groups like Hezbollah on the grounds that their reactionary ideas are “no more than a confusion resulting from their being caught up into the immediacy of struggle” (p.69). They are not, as Badiou asserts, merely bound by “an internal limitation… bound as they are to religious particularity” (p.71) which tacks backward views about woman and gay people onto their anti-imperialism, but rather, their Islamic fundamentalism is the mainstay of all their other ideas, which is why they do not distinguish at all between US economic and military imperialism, and secular/’Western’ notions of emancipation.

Islamist movements may win support because of grievances against imperialism, and win hegemony due to the vacuum of a communist pole of attraction, but that does not mean they do not ‘really’ believe what they say. Their political ideology and consciousness of their anti-Zionist struggle are not somehow ’separable’ as and how we choose to see them, any more than the fact that fascists ‘displace’ class struggle onto struggle against so-called Jewish financiers means that at heart they share some of the ideas of communists.

It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (Marx, Letter to Engels on the Indian Mutiny)

Zizek argues that the battles ahead are not between unfettered free-market capitalism and communism, but rather, between so-called socialism (whether that be European social democracy or Chinese authoritarian capitalism, a ’social’ system based on capitalist relations), and communism (p.95).

However, his idea of what communism actually is – as something separate and apart from state-managed capitalism – is very shaky and heavily reliant on the Hardt/Negri “post-class” understanding that we ought to struggle for “the commons”: to fight against the privatisation of the “shared substance of our social being”, for example infrastructure like transport and communications, nature threatened by pollution and exploitation, and the “biogenetic inheritance of humanity”. (p.91).

We should oppose the selling-off and degradation of all of these “commons”, if we are to use that term, but this is hardly much of an elaboration of what communism would be as opposed to capitalism. After all, the working-class exclusion from the collective control of intellectual property and infrastructure is not the only or main way in which it is exploited under capitalism: the working class is of course ‘internal’ and necessary to capitalist production, not some excluded ‘minority’ merely being denied equal rights within capitalist liberal democracy. And if we do maintain that communism really is a possible and necessary social order, then surely we should be able to more definitely give some outline of its basic principles and what differentiates it from state-managed or ’socially responsible eco-capitalism’ which Zizek spends such effort decrying?

Even if Zizek is right in part to argue that communism is not a fixed historical experience we just have to transplant onto today’s conditions (recreate the soviets and factory committees of 1917, the Bolshevik Party etc.), but rather something which has to be continually reinvented, surely this only points to the stark need to reinvent it for the here and now. After all, it does not take much effort to imagine what basic principles of organisation might be – getting rid of the state, armed forces and all permanent bureaucracy, self-managed workplaces and community facilities without any hierarchy of management functions, the free exchange of goods, services, media and educational resources for all and abolition of money, massive reduction in working hours, etc. – but Zizek is deliberately aloof on the question.

Equally – and for the same reason – he only fleetingly raises the notion of working-class agency for social change and he does not integrate any analysis of the shape of the working class or workers’ movement into his perspectives. He does, to be fair, say that the idea of ‘Workers of the world, unite’ is “more pertinent than ever” (p.147) and insists on the unity of intellectual workers, anti-intellectual and anti-outcast ‘rednecks’ and the outcasts (e.g. illegal immigrants, the unemployed) themselves, but he offers no understanding of how they might be united. I am not making the boring old argument that the problem with philosophers is that they do not write what they ‘practically’ mean, but rather that since Zizek does leave the realm of abstraction and says he does want a very practical change – working class unity and communism – he ought to explain what he means by it.

Zizek knows that “It is easy to make fun of Fukayama’s notion of ‘The End of History’ but most people today are Fukayamean, accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the finally found formula of the best possible society, such that all one can do is to try to make it more just, more tolerant and so on” (p.88). Yet those like Hardt/Negri who effectively see the state as a neutral space, and think all “the multitude” need fight for is to “reclaim the commons” are essentially among this milieu. So too are the likes of Evo Morales in Bolivia, praised by Zizek for his “involvement of the grassroots” – in fact this is merely the most extreme point of capitalist recuperation, the radical left president who co-opts the revolutionary movement by channelling it into the constant, strangling procedures of parliamentary bills and gradual reforms. It is the Bolivian equivalent of Keynesianism and ’socially responsible eco-capitalism’ in the USA or UK.

There were not many books in my local Waterstone’s philosophy section putting forward a communist alternative to all the liberal ‘anti-corporate’ drivel on its shelves. Zizek’s defiance in declaring himself a communist, and trying to rouse his colleagues from their slumber in the isolation of the university can only be admired. Given Zizek’s witty writing style and ability to integrate many different themes and anecdotes, I can forgive much of what is wrong with First as tragedy, then as farce. But for all his confidence in an alternative to capitalism, Zizek seems rather less sure what his communist alternative is.

Notes

[1] All page references from Slavoj Zizek, First as tragedy, then as farce, Verso, London/New York, 2009

[2] This very crude ‘transitional method’ is, as it happens, not even in the spirit of Leon Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, from which it purportedly derives legitimacy. Trotsky’s programme is one of socialist revolution, including such slogans as the establishment of soviets and a workers’ militia.

[3] This critically acclaimed book was a fictional ‘memoir’ of an SS officer called Maximilian Aue, best known in its French version Les Bienveillantes. See here.

by Moshé Machover: only the introduction is presented below, see the full document here.

The importance of this issue cannot be over-stated: it concerns the very essence of communism. If communism means anything at all, it means a radical eruption of democracy. Bursting its present narrow political confines, where it is allowed to hold truncated and partly illusory sway, democracy is to engulf all spheres of social life. This applies in particular to what is, under capitalism, the alienated sphere of economics: major choices that are now made behind the backs of society – imposed by private owners who monopolize wealth, or left to the chaotic play of blind market forces – will be decided consciously and collectively by the community concerned. The enormous extension of the sphere of collective decision-making will necessarily imply a corresponding expansion and deepening of the scope of public supervision, ensuring proper implementation of decisions.

Capitalism depends for its stability and ideological legitimation on a separation between the political and economic spheres: the former ruled by formally democratic public decision-making and supervision, the latter by a combination of the micro-tyranny of private ownership and the macroanarchy of the market. In both spheres the citizen is reduced to a passive voter or consumer, offered a limited choice between brands of political parties or soap powder whose minor differences are inflated by smooth spin machines and privately owned brain-washing media.

The borderline between the two spheres is however far from fixed: privatization pushes it in one direction, allowing public politically-controlled domains to be hived off, sold on the market and annexed by private owners.

Communism demands a far-reaching shift of the borderline in the opposite direction – turning production into a social service – as well as blurring of the borderline itself, until eventually the very division between the two spheres is effaced.
Yet, socialists have devoted far too scant attention to the question as to how communist democracy is to function. There is very little detailed discussion of the institutional framework that a communist commonwealth might use for making collective decisions and supervising their implementation.

The relatively few discourses that do exist in the socialist literature are, for the most part, very sketchy; perhaps worse, they depend on extremely utopian assumptions – more often than not unstated – about communist society.

Among Marxists, in particular, there is a reluctance to engage in what is felt to be speculative drawing of blueprints. This is justified up to a point, but must not be taken too far. We cannot win people over to communism if we remain too vague about what a communist commonwealth might be like.

Moreover, given the twentieth-century experience of tyrannies that claimed to be ‘socialist’, and the moral and political bankruptcy of their ‘communist’ apologists, most people are suspicious of the true intentions of communists, and doubtful of the very compatibility of communism with democracy.

Many Marxists – particularly those of the left-wing, councillist variety – tend to be too insouciant about the whole issue. Surely, with the disappearance of classes and the withering away of the state, social conflicts will cease to exist and collective decision-making – reduced to matters of mere administration – will no longer be problematic.

This is a grave error. First, the disappearance of classes and the withering away of the state cannot happen overnight but – following a revolutionary crisis – must extend over decades of changing consciousness. In the meantime, acute social conflicts are inevitable. Second, even in a classless society, many matters coming up for collective decision are bound to be hotly contested.

In all probability, conflicting local, sectorial and personal interests, not to mention sharp differences of taste and opinion, will still exist. It is quite naive to assume that all such conflicts and differences have a class basis.

Third, a decision – whether or not hotly contested – needs to be implemented, which usually requires a social mechanism of supervision, to ensure its proper implementation.

by Nathan Coombs

Nowadays it is hard to find many examples of academic leftism crossing paths with real left wing politics. One could even argue that the former might have a negative effect on the latter – the UK is, after all, home to one of the strongest left wing publishing empires and conference circuits in the world, and yet its organised, political left is drearily weak by all continental comparisons.

There was something a bit edgy, then, about the recent workshop on the philosophy of Alain Badiou  taking place in the Venezuelan Embassy’s Bolivar Hall on 20th November. One half expected to be spending the day staring at an enormous portrait of Hugo Chavez hung at the back of the hall during the proceedings. Thankfully, the large hall was graced by a more tasteful/less piece of generic modern art and there was not a trace of Chavez propaganda in sight.

As one of the world’s most famous ‘post-Maoists’ any event on Alain Badiou has the virtue/misfortune of attracting the followers of the Maoist sect the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. They were the only left wing political group who showed up to pamphlet the event. Unlike at the ‘Idea of Communism’ conference held at Birkbeck earlier in the year though they kept a low profile and abstained from grand standing and speech making. Shoehorning a bunch of arts students and academics into their demand to follow the vanguard to glorious victory – from across the Atlantic – has hopefully since struck them as a bit silly. This time they seemed happy just to take their seat in admiring the last remaining vestiges of depoliticised Maoism like everyone else.

As for the event, did it live up to expectations? That would depend on what expectations the one might bring to the proceedings. For those out of the know, Badiou has recently shot to academic stardom on account of his elaborate mathematised metaphysics, which he presents as an alternative to Hegel’s dialectic. He also had a minor-hit with a book on Sarkozy, and was the subject of notorious hand wringing commentaries in the French press for his rejection of the “predicate Jew” as given meaning through the Holocaust.

In a more general sense, Badiou is a timely hit because of his commitment to political universalism, faithfulness to the events of May 1968 and his unwavering loyalty to communism as the only truly politically emancipatory idea of our time. It also doesn’t hurt that his philosophy is fiendishly clever and complex – bordering on insane genius.

The specific focus of the well-attended workshop (perhaps 100 people attended) was two books of Badiou’s recently translated into English: Theory of the Subject (from 1982) and Logics of Worlds (2005). They mark a strong change in register between one another. Theory of the Subject is an absurdly impenetrable book; but also a revolutionary one in intent and tone. In this book Badiou rails against unionism, the exclusion of immigrants, and sets up a theory of deviation – against ‘leftist adventurism’ (anarchism) to the left, and ’structuralism’ (unionism) on the right. In Logics of Worlds, however, there are traces of Badiou’s political commitments, but by and large it is a totally abstract piece of Platonistic metaphysics.

There were interesting presentations from translators of both works, Bruno Bosteels and Alberto Toscano – and if you are interested in metaphysics the workshop would no doubt have been greatly enjoyable in this regard (as it was for me). Yet the last panel on Badiou and politics showed its limitations.

Alberto Toscano took a stoic interpretation – what Badiou is useful for is keeping the flame alive and waiting for the radical left to regain its strength. Nina Power highlighted the fact that Badiou’s philosophical concerns of late reflect much of the philosophical and political maelstrom of the pre-Marxist 1840s. One audience member (probably RCP USA) noted that Badiou’s writing off of the “tragedy” of the 20th century and seeming demand that we return to the 1840s was not very helpful. I was surprised to find myself agreeing with him!

As the daylong conference closed everyone could feel satisfied. It was a rare event where all could claim to be a communist and talk about communism as if it were patently obvious that it was the only politics worth discussing. On the whole this must be a good thing. But still, as the hundred or so shuffled out the door (after some much appreciated free drinks) you couldn’t help wonder with the minuteness of the left, where, between Badiou workshops and ‘Idea of Communism’ conferences, all these people disappear to?

The November issue of our monthly paper The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see the PDF, or see articles as they are posted online in the list below.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

are we ready for a winter of discontent? – by Sheila Cohen

post strike: this is no deal – by Joe Thorne

underground pay deadlock – by Vaughan Thomas

what is the union bureaucracy? – by Alberto Durango

occupation and state building in the new afghanistan – by Emma Gallwey

mixed reactions to cwu-royal mail deal – interview with a communist postman

manchester students build solidarity with post workers – by Mark Harrison

honduras: democracy has not been restored – by Socialismo o Barbarie

month long strike in france: ‘papers for all!’ – interview with Seni cleaners and piece from Où va la CGT?

communism twenty years after the berlin wall fell – interviews with eastern european activists

scottish ruling class: division over union – by Allan Armstrong

obituary of chris harman – by Andy Wilson

university occupations in austria – interview with vienna student activist

question time row: did the straw man really slay the griffin? – by Adam Ford

communist recomposition and workers’ representation – by Chris Ford

‘full and open debate’ on post-no2eu project: ok, when? - by David Broder

building from below: the work of paulo freire – by Dave Spencer

the global commune, january 16th

activities of the commune around britain

by Andrew Kliman

I have just released a new study of the rates of profit of U.S. corporations, 1929-2007, with emphasis on the period since the early 1980s. It’s entitled “The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis: New Temporalist Evidence.

You can obtain the text, and an accompanying spreadsheet file containing data and graphs, by clicking on the link.

Please note that the study is kind of long — 27,000 words, 106 double-spaced pages. If you just want the main conclusions, here they are:

Conclusions

This paper’s principal findings are

1. U.S. corporations’ rate of profit began to fall about a decade after the end of World War II and the falling trend has persisted until the present time. Some measures of the rate of profit leveled off or increased very slightly after the early 1980s, while others have continued to decline. None indicates that a genuine, sustainable rebound in profitability took place.

2. Claims to the contrary are based on cherry-picking of the data and on the use of current-cost “rates of profit” that are not rates of profit in any normal sense.

3. The persistence of the fall in the rate of profit is not eliminated when rates of profit are adjusted for inflation in the general price level or in the monetary expression of labor-time.

4. Because the rate of profit has not rebounded, there has not been a growing divergence between the rate of profit and the rate of capital accumulation. The rate of accumulation has tracked the rate of profit quite closely, and the former has fallen in response to the fall in the latter.

5. Distributional changes account for little of the fall in the rate of profit because, apart from a one-time fall in the profit share of income in the late 1960s, there has been no sustained distributional change. Once that brief period is set aside, almost the entire fall in the rate of profit is traceable to a rise in the value composition of capital rather than to a fall in the rate of surplus-value.

6. The dominant cause of the fall in the rate of profit, by far, was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall toward a lower incremental rate of profit determined by the growth rate of employment and the share of profit that is reinvested. Changes in the profit share of income, and in the relationship between nominal prices and the real value of commodities as determined by labor-time, had a very minor influence.

7. Since 1982, the ratio of surplus-value to advanced capital seems to have fallen in relationship to the rates of profit derived from official government data, because of a marked increase in depreciation due to obsolescence (moral depreciation) resulting from increased employment of computer technology.

These results strikingly disconfirm the claim, which is based on the contention that the rate of profit has rebounded during the last quarter-century, that the present economic crisis is rooted in nothing deeper than financial-sector phenomena (such as irresponsibility and deregulation that produced unsustainable asset-price bubbles) that are essentially unrelated to and separable from movements in profitability. They therefore fail to lend support to the now-fashionable belief that greater state control over the financial sector will suffice to prevent the recurrence of similar crises in the future.

My findings also indicate that Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit fits the facts remarkably well. The substantial explanatory power of this law can be seen especially in the fact that the principal source of the fall in the observed nominal rate of profit was the pronounced tendency for the rate of profit to fall toward a lower incremental rate of profit that is regulated by the factors that the law singles out (the growth rate of employment and the rate of surplus-value that is reinvested).

It is time to reclaim this law and the value theory in which it is grounded. Yet they cannot be reclaimed as long as the myth that they have been proven to be internally inconsistent is allowed to persist. The record needs to be set straight, and the “Marxian economics” tradition ––which has given us “consistent” but spurious current-cost rates of profit that head ever upward while the economy goes down the tubes and, as a direct result, Marxian theories of the current economic crisis that take surface financial-sector phenomena to be essential causes of the economic crisis––needs to be repudiated.

The October issue of our monthly paper The Commune is now available. Click the image below to see the PDF, or see articles as they are posted online in the list below.

To purchase a printed copy for £1 + 50p postage, use the ‘donate’ feature here. You can also subscribe (£12 a year UK/£16 EU/£20 international) or order 5 copies a month to sell (£4) online here. If you want to pay by cheque, contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com.

we’re not ‘all in it together’ – editorial of The Commune

update on the activities of our network

tuc congress: an opportunity wasted? – by Gregor Gall

fragile livelihoods at cowley mini factory – by  Brian Rylance

what is the london postal strike really about? – interview of CWU reps by Sheila Cohen

gordon brown’s workhouses for single mothers – by Emma Gallwey

‘new’ tactics versus rubbish bosses – by Adam Ford

lessons of the tower hamlets esol strike – interview with two members of teaching staff

how we fought education cuts in tamworth – by Rob Marsden

on the necessity of pluralist communism – by Nathan Coombs

a letter from tegucigalpa: resisting the honduran coup – by a member of Socialismo o Barbarie

political report from the land of the haggis-eating surrender monkeys – by Allan Armstrong

electoral parties: let’s not put old wine in new bottles – by David Broder

a beginners’ guide to cuts – by Robert Kirby

platform of our communist network

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first working-class revolution in history. With the French capital surrounded by the troops of the newly founded German Empire and the ruling-class government in Versailles presiding over military and economic chaos, the Parisian population overthrew the state apparatus and created a revolutionary government. The Paris Commune comprised diverse political forces, from radical plebian French nationalists aspiring to complete the 1789-93 revolution; to communists and anarchists: but its democratic way of organising and splitting of the army meant it represented what Karl Marx called in his first draft of The Civil War in France “a revolution against the state as such“.

The Commune’s new pamphlet features a chapter from Marx explaining how the revolution came about and its significance; and the reproduction of the text of a pamphlet by libertarian socialist group Solidarity critiquing the traditional left’s claim that the Paris Commune proved the need for a vanguard party to seize state power on behalf of the masses.See PDF by clicking here, or buy a hard copy for £1 + 50p postage: use the ‘donate’ feature here to pay online, making sure to write your address and explain your order; or email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to arrange to pay by cheque.

by Nathan Coombs

This is an edited copy of a talk originally given at the Institute of Ideas Postgraduate Forum.

Introduction

What ever happened to Marxism Today? There is, of course, a word play at work in this question: we could be asking both about the fortunes of Marxism as a political movement, and about the various publications that have professed insight into said movement over the years under that title. Still, it is uncanny the extent to which tracking the fate of those publications called Marxism Today gives us insight into the fate of the political movement – from the heroic early years to the banality and absurdity of a lot of what passes as institutionalised Marxism nowadays. Understanding this passage also helps us understand how unhelpful a lot of contemporary academic Marxist and post-Marxist theories are when they do not allow for the radical freedom to become a revolutionary Marxist.

From Maurice Dobb to Martin Jacques

The first mention I could find of “Marxism Today” was the title of a 1932 book by Maurice Dobb; at the time considered the leading historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) historical group. To him Marxism Today meant erasing the way events are separated into the material and the ideal; and he boldly formulated the way that ethics and liberal economic theory were just reifications of social relations. (Blackedge 2006, 83)

Dobb was part of a generation of intellectuals and scholars committed to the serious intellectual work of Marxist analysis with the aim of the overthrow of capitalism. His generation inaugurated an entirely new form of historiography committed to retelling “history from below,” from the perspective of ordinary working people, which has now become assimilated into mainstream historiography. It is a methodology that has also somewhat ironically ended up also being used by conservative historians against the communist revolutions of the 20th century, such as in Orlando Figes’ history of the Russian Revolution: A People’s Tragedy.

To find the next well known use of the title Marxism Today we have to move forward roughly half a century to the title of the journal of the CPGB, edited by Martin Jacques since about 1978, who later went on to found the Demos think-tank. Jacques, within four years of establishing Demos, went on to release reports declaring the following:

“’the end of politics’, ‘the end of unemployment’, ‘the end of social democracy’, ‘the end of 200 years of industrial society’, the end of traditional demarcations of what it means to be a man or a woman’ and the end of ‘class-based left –right politics’.” (Cohen 2000, 33)

One of the most curious reports was Demos’ take on feminism, which separated women into five basic categories, which sound like they have been plucked from a badly written GCSE marketing book: “networking Naomi, frustrated Fran, back to basics Barbara, Mannish Mel and New Age Angela.” (ibid)

And just to give another telling quote from one of Demos’ pamphlets:

“The old tired struggle between left and right is dead, destroyed by the Internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Sainsbury’s ready to eat Thai Green Curries” (ibid)

In its place this think-tank made a number of proposals to carry the torch of radicalism into the future. For instance, they proposed that marriages should be limited terms, schools should be run by private corporations and, the most unusual one of all, that every July in Manchester should be a week of celebration of sexual activity!

I don’t think it would be too uncharitable to ask what could explain the descent into such gibberish? In the last issue of Marxism Today in 1991 Jacques provides a revealing explanation:

“The magazine faced a more fundamental problem. I was frequently asked during this period ‘OK, we agree with your critique, but what is to be done?’ The answer: Waffle, silence, cliché, pause.” (Jacques 1991)

Which is a quite staggering admission. Despite spending their time courting Tory MPs for the paper and revelling in killing as many of the “sacred cows” of the left as possible, they professed no revolutionary strategy at all. In fact, it never seemed to even cross their mind until one day in 1988 when Jacques recounts how his editorial team convened was he describes as a “high-powered seminar” to address the question. The conclusion of their outing, in a kind of sickly inversion of Leninism: Nothing can be done.

I think these two examples well illustrate the tragedy of the fortunes of Marxism Today in the half century that separate Dobb’s book from Jacques publication: From revolutionary scholarship to new age marketing gibberish; from Communism to so-called ‘radicalism’ – minus any Marxist analysis or revolutionary intent whatsoever.

Rigby on Marx

It is not surprising, then, that in roughly the same historic period S.H. Rigby wrote in the preface to the second edition of Marxism and History the following description of his:

“…historical project of determining which aspects of Marx’s theories were most helpful for us in understanding the societies of the past. After all, of Marx’s and Engel’s intellectual heritage, their politics, based on the conception of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, now seems like wishful thinking; their economics, premised on the labour theory of value, is now rejected by all but a handful of fundamentalists; their philosophy of dialectical materialism in now a museum piece.” (Rigby 1998, vii)

This is, of course, your fairly typical post-Cold War take on Marxism in line with what we have heard already. But what comes after is more interesting and starts to unravel the matter at hand. He claims:

“Marxism has actually been rather more successful at comprehending the world than changing it” (ibid)

He resuscitates the Marxian division in On Feuerbach between comprehending the world and changing it and turns it back on Marx himself; to rather claim that despite Marx’s various declarations his theory too was more of a philosophy of comprehension than something successful at effecting change.

Rigby then goes on to talk about the ambiguity of what exactly Marxism is in regard to whether we see Marxism in convergent terms – and by this he means as a revolutionary philosophy to replace capitalism – or in the divergent terms, as a form of analysis to help us ask questions, i.e. an academic frame, which he clearly prefers:

“One response to these two readings…would be to scour Marx’s works in order to find which of the two approaches corresponds most closely with Marx’s ‘real meaning’. The problem when we do this is that we find Marx’s works themselves are profoundly contradictory, thus allowing both schools of thought to claim scriptural authority for their reading of Marx.” (ibid, viii)

Scriptural Hermeneutics

The interesting word used in Rigby’s analysis is “scriptural”, because it introduces us to the problem of hermeneutics, one that he unfortunately fails to follow up on throughout the rest of the book.

To provide some background: The modern study of hermeneutics arose in 19th century Germany in response to the sense by some theologians that the words of the Bible had become hopelessly lost in the eighteen centuries since its canonisation. Hermeneutics roughly means ‘understanding,’ but the sense of understanding means not just what do the words say, but their meaning, the experience they impart and whether we can ever return to their original sense. In a crude way, this also refers to what is played out in all these interminable debates in the Church, from the Catholic to Protestant split on the issue in the use of the Latinate Bible, to gay and female Anglican bishops.

One the one side, some seek to legitimate their positions by referring to certain lines in the Bible; and on the other, some use different lines to counteract that message. But the far more interesting position is those that refer to the higher principles of Christianity and say: “No, it doesn’t matter what it says in the Bible, instead we have to now act in the spirit of Christianity.”

But what does this mean when we talk about the spirit of Christianity? It seems to me that they are not just talking about the changing over time in line with social norms and so forth, because Christianity has always claimed to actually define moral norms, but instead, something more fundamental, as in we have to actually ignore or negate some of the key words of the Bible to stay faithful to the spirit of Christianity.

What would it mean to stay faithful to the spirit if not in abeyance to the words? If we follow Badiou (2005) in his definition an event as being the occurrence of an unnameable, an unknown, into the fabric of social reality, then we can see that the event of Christ can be divided into two parts: the self-declaration as the Son of God and a certain set of new moral principles, and the event of Christianity, which was how exactly to spread the news of the resurrection and formalise Christianity as a religion.

It was the task of St. Paul to accomplish the latter and in that process it was Paul’s intervention that turned Jesus the Jew into Jesus the Son of God who died on the Cross. It was Paul’s faith in the Christ event that ultimately led to some of the foundational tenets of Christianity, which are not directly derivable from Jesus’ words himself.

So following Badiou and Zizek I would also argue that the Holy Spirit of Christianity exists not in a dogmatic adherence to either the Bible or a ‘real’ Jesus we have no access to, but precisely in the gap between Christ and Christianity, and if there wasn’t that gap we would never have experienced Christianity as a living practice at all.

Marxism as an event

This theological detour considered, to return, then, to Rigby’s analysis I think we can also perceive the same problem. Because although he specifies that there are two readings of Marxism he doesn’t correlate these positions to the gap. That gap is very clear in Marx: there is a clear gap between his dialectical, scientific analysis of the world, and how to actually realise the defeat of capitalism. It is a gap between the analysis and response, and what I want to argue here is that they are not identical sides of the same coin.

Rather, when we become Marxists what we are doing is essentially shifting our perspective to thinking how to realise revolution, how to change the world – and thus our analysis will essentially shift also. They are irreconcilable. You can apply Marxist analysis, without the corresponding political commitment to Marxism, and come up with a totally different and logically coherent explanation of a situation.

Essentially what I am getting at is a radicalised version of Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe’s argument in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. But whereas they note that in Marx there is no dialectical mechanism for the passage from contradiction to antagonism in the workplace, and use that to discredit the theoretical basis of Marxism, I would rather radicalise that observation and use it as the basis for understanding what Marxism actually is. They say, for example:

“Antagonism, far from being an objective relation, is a relation wherein the limits of every objectivity are shown.” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 25) – because – “this was the hiatus which the distinction between ‘class in itself and ‘class for itself’ tried to fill.” (ibid, 16)

Let us look at it more broadly beyond this dialectical passage and rather claim that the gap in Marx between analysis and response is in fact the very basis of Marxism. Because if there were no gap, there would be no Marxism: just a rigid set of dictats that would quickly become out of date and leave no room for subjects to insert themselves.

And in fact it is a total failing on Laclau’s part that despite the promise of his analysis here, he never came to realise this and was rather dutifully rolled out in the last issue of Jacques’ Marxism Today to nail a final theoretical hammer on Marxism as “an outmoded system of thought.” (Laclau 1991, 56)

But it is that gap we have pointed to which means that Marxism is actually never an outmoded system of thought; even if academic careers are made espousing such ruminations and ex-Communists can find themselves media niches denounced the folly of their past commitments.

The miserable sight of ex-Marxists

We can witness this trend quite clearly in the way Jacques came to run a think-tank that provided New Labour with the intellectual ammunition for its complete betrayal of the labour movement and the few principles it still embodied. We can also note that Frank Furedi’s post-RCP adventures are also no longer allied to a Communist project: Furedi’s calls to “axe the welfare state” and so forth are nothing more than fodder for the right-wing media. We can also note that the leading lights of the ex-Marxists from the former RCP were called upon by The Times to give an opinion on “What Marxists think” about the economic crisis – with a predictably soothing message that nothing can be done!

Arguably the situation is even worse in France where a whole generation of 68ers like Andre Glucksmann became the most outspoken supporters of capitalism and liberalism and later neoliberal Sarkozy supporters. In the New Left Review Alain Badiou talks about a confrontation he had with Jacques Alain Miller as far back as 1978. He asked:

‘Why did you just quit like that?’ Because they dropped out very suddenly – even today there are elderly workers, Malians in the hostels, Moroccans in the factories, who ask us: ‘How is it that, over-night, we never saw those guys again’? Jacques Alain Miller said to me: ‘Because I realized one day that the country was quiet.’ And Gerard: ‘Because we understood we were not going to take power.’ (Badiou, 2008, 126)

Badiou also gives a second reason for the turncoat phenomenon of Marxists who turned into the most die-hard right wing apologists of capitalism:

“What happened at that point was a transition from the alternatives of a ‘bourgeois world or a revolutionary world’ to those of ‘totalitarianism or democracy’. The shift can be given a precise date: it was starting from 1976… Here you can see the reversal at work. It revolves around the idea that at a certain point, absolute commitment becomes indistinguishable from absolute slavery, and the figure of emancipation indistinguishable from barbarism.” (ibid, 127)

What Badiou is getting at is that without the fundamental commitment to the revolutionary project, Marxism has all the potential to turn into the ideology of reaction and free market fundamentalism.

What is the meaning of Marxism?

Let us return to the event of Marx to understand this relationship better. We have seen how the gap is between analysis and response is what constitutes the event of Marx.

If we try decide what the new element Marx introduced was, it is not as it is commonly understood, in materialist political economy. Already, in a rudimentary way Marx has derived these insights from the Scottish thinkers such as Adam Smith. And it is also not the dialectical method and conception of totality that he derived from Hegel. It was the way he wedded the materialist scientific analysis of history and society to the revolutionary project. Not by closing the gap, but precisely by asserting the gap and arguing that one can only understand the former by adopting the analysis and the subjective position of the latter: attempting to realise communist society. The event of Marx is that only once you adopt the position of commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, does your analysis fall into place and become Marx-ist.

Let me quote from Raymond Williams on the matter:

“…in the transition from Marx to Marxism’, the concepts of ‘base’, ‘superstructure’ and ‘forces and relations of production’, among others, were projected, first, as if they were precise concepts and second, as if they were descriptive terms for observable “areas” of life.” (Blackedge 2006, 62)

What seems to have happened with the death of Marx and the transference to Marxism is the narrow empiricalisation of Marxism, i.e. the closing of the gap into a teleological schema of the realisation of Communism through the development of the forces of production. Karl Kautsky who inherited the Marx estate, has taken much of the blame for this for this brand of ‘right-Marxism.‘
But, in many ways in the historical conditions of the late 19th century this understanding of Marx made a lot of sense, as the strength of both the workers’ movement and the productive force of capitalism increased at the same time.

However, if we move forward to Lenin in exile in 1914, this was in fact they key point that came out of his study of Hegel’s the Science of Logic. After his study he declared – and this is also where I would also like to leave us to further reflect – “until now, no Marxists have understood Marx.”

Is such a conceivable reappraisal possible today?

Bibliography

Badiou, Alain. 2008. Roads to Renegacy. New Left Review 53, Sept/Oct 2008: 125-133

Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum

Blackedge, Paul. 2006. Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Cohen, Nick. 2000. Cruel Britannia: Reports on the sinister and the preposterous. London: Verso
Jacques, Martin. 1991. The Last Word. In: Marxism Today, December 1991: 56-59

Kouvelakis, Stathis. 2007. Lenin as Reader of Hegel. In: Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth. Durham and London: Duke University Press

Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantel. 2001. 2nd ed. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso

Laclau, Ernesto. 1991. God Only Knows. In: Marxism Today, December 1991: 56-59

Rigby, S. H. 1998. Marxism and History. 2nd. Ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press

An essay by David Broder on Marx’s understanding of wage labour drawing together notes for a recent meeting of our London reading group on workplace organising.

Capitalists pursue development to accumulate capital: they do not invest in the production of linen because they want lots of linen or in the extraction of oil because they want lots of oil, but because they believe that putting capital into the production process will allow them to accrue capital by selling the end product.

Although wealth exists in nature and not just thanks to human endeavour, capitalist development must depend on investment in a commodity which can itself produce further value – this means human labour, our mental and physical energies. In this framework our work must create some goods or services which satisfy some human desire or need (‘use value’) but also be sold as a commodity to those able to pay for it (‘exchange value’).

The manner in which the productive forces are developed under capitalist relations is no simple reflection of what meets society’s needs. But neither can it be primarily based on mere financial exchange or accruing capital through the process of trading goods.

Under capitalism workers are contracted to sell our capacity to work (‘labour power’) – our skills, our time, our potential effort – to an employer for a given period, the bargain being that we are paid enough to get by, while creating sufficient value through our work such that the capitalist can take a profit from the remainder (’surplus value’), thus accumulating capital.

Particular to Marx is this distinction between labour and labour power. Unlike farmers selling their own produce, workers are not selling the end result of our labours (as if the capitalist would buy that, then make a profit playing the markets) but our capacity to work in itself. The hiring of labour power (‘wage-labour’) is the relationship fundamental to work under capitalism.

The ‘up side’ is the freedom of the transaction – we can, to a certain degree, choose our employment and change our pay, hours, work rhythms and so on – marking a difference from slavery or serfdom whereby conditions of employment are long-term and enshrined in traditions and laws. The ‘down side’ of this same aspect of wage-labour is that the employer can more easily dispense with their workers’ services and replace them as necessary. Indeed competition between different workers for the same jobs is part and parcel of the way in which the employers can divide the workforce along lines of perceived skill, as well as gender, race and nationality, all the better to rule over them.

The great limitation to the worker’s freedom is that even worse than being exploited is not to be exploited: being unable to sell your labour-power. With no ownership over the land, equipment and capital of the enterprise (‘means of production’), the worker’s existence relies on finding employment week-by-week. In this sense selling your capacity to work is quite different from selling some natural resource or exchanging property or money:

” The commodity labour power has great disadvantages against other commodities. For the capitalist, competition with the workers is a mere question of profit, for the workers it is a question of their existence. Labour is of a more evanescent nature than other commodities. It cannot be accumulated. The supply cannot be increased or reduced with the same facility as with other commodities.” (Marx, Wages, 1847)

And although we trade our labour-power for money, not directly with food, housing, phone bills or any other goods and service, wages are tied into all other commodities in a very unique way:

” In all crises the following circular movement relates to the workers: The employer cannot employ the workers because he cannot sell his product. He cannot sell his product because he has no buyers. He has no buyers because the workers have nothing to offer in exchange but their labour, and precisely for that reason they cannot exchange their labour…” (Wages)

Wages are the price of the labour power commodity, which can be altered by all sorts of measures (e.g. worker organising; market fluctuations; employment law). Marx differentiates this from the idea of value (‘abstract labour’), since we can compare different commodities via a common abstract of what productive effort they represent (’socially necessary labour time’), rather than having to directly exchange the goods themselves.

Value does not – and prices do not necessarily – increase or decrease due to changes in wages, since these are determined in society-at-large, not by the relations existing within any given workplace. The ability of a product to sell, or to satisfy a human want, can only be determined externally.

“The rise and fall of profits and wages expresses merely the proportion in which capitalists and workers share in the product of a day’s work, without influencing in most instances the price of the product.” (Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, Chapter 2.5)

The ratio of profits to wages might be termed the ‘rate of exploitation’: the measure of how efficiently hiring labour power increases the employer’s capital.  This is a scientific use of the word ‘exploitation’ to demonstrate the underlying laws of capitalism, not a moral category. Marx’s critique of capital is not merely that wages – the price of labour power – are ‘unfairly’ low.

Clearly, in order for any enterprise to sustain itself, its workers must create extra value worth at least as much the sum of their wages. Long-term unprofitability could well mean the employer going bust. But it does not follow that wage increases which chip away at profits to bring them close to nothing are gradually disposing of capitalist relations, any more than it is the case that a business losing money is one where the workers are ‘exploiting’ their employer.

The ‘exploitation’ which remains here, to use the other sense of that word, is that workers are still selling our capacity to work and have no control over whether the work we have to do is productive. If I worked making cars or compiling surveys, it would be no concern of mine whether my employer was able to sell the end product or not, except insofar as their lack of success was not such that the company folded and I was out of work. I would not judge the need to change my conditions by my ‘rate of exploitation’ in Marx’s sense, but rather in terms of what I perceived as the disparity between my potential creativity and need for money, and the work I was told to do and what I was paid for it.

Underlying this question is alienation – where we feel that what we ourselves create is somehow separate from us, and our labour is controlled from the outside. We do what work we are told, not what we think necessary or what we think most creative and enjoyable: we are, after all, selling our capacity to work.

Moreover, employed as an individual with our own contract, often on different terms from more or less skilled staff, in gendered job roles or as a migrant worker, our attitude to our workmates often reflects the division of tasks which capitalism imposes on humanity. The system relies on consent: our acceptance that there are order-givers and order-takers; the division between mental and manual labour and idea that some people are just not cut out for certain jobs; and that our individual advancement is at odds with other workmates’ interests. It is not the state stuffing propaganda down our throats, but the lived experience of such divisive relations at work every day, which trains us in the mentality of an atomised, individual worker who wants to rise above their class rather than with it[1]. The worker is convinced that she or he[2] is already a capitalist:

“The fact that a man is continually compelled to sell his labour-power, i.e., himself, to another man proves, according to those economists, that he is a capitalist, because he constantly has “commodities” (himself) for sale.” (Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 20)

The mass of people learning to accept this way of things as normal is much like the way in which it is often said that society has to follow market laws, when in fact money, markets and so on are not natural but actually part of the social relations created by humans. Marx compares this to how humans create gods in their own imaginations, and then allow themselves to be ruled by these gods’ supposed laws, which are also simply a human construct.

Precisely because such relations have not always existed and rely on mass consent it is quite possible that we could change them, but for many the idea of social change has itself been discredited by alternatives such as the USSR and its satellites. State-socialist systems with equal wages at what the authorities deem a ‘fair’ level preserve this alienation and separation of decision making exactly, as Marx warned:

“An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity. Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.” (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844, ‘Estranged Labour’)

Rather, we have to abolish, as such, the need to be hired by an employer and accept their dominion over our labour-power.

So in terms of making radical change, trade union struggles for higher wages are not in and of themselves anti-capitalist merely because they squeeze profits: but if successful they do both serve an obvious immediate benefit and also help to build the confidence and assertiveness of the workforce, which might then go on to uproot capitalist relations in a more fundamental sense. Communists support struggles which not only alleviate exploitation but also increase workers’ reliance on themselves and their colleagues to change their conditions, in doing so constraining management’s absolute control in the workplace.

Therefore, where Marx writes that “Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!” (Marx, Economic Manuscripts, 1867, Part XIV) we ought not conclude that the working class will simply wake up one day and decide capitalism is rotten, before then proceeding to storm Buckingham Palace (still less, going off to live on a commune, thus leaving the existing capitalist society intact) – and therefore decide wage struggles are pointless.

“As ['utopian'[3]] socialists we tell you that, apart from the money question, you will continue nonetheless to be workers, and the masters will still continue to be the masters, just as before. So no combination! No politics! For is not entering into combination engaging in politics?

“The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight. In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, combination has not yet ceased for an instant to go forward and grow with the development and growth of modern industry.” (Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter 2.5)

We can only build our organising strength, sense of solidarity and our confidence gradually and under capitalism: these are all at play in the here and now and their development is the only way in which the mass of people could ever take power over our lives. Saying this is not reformism – which is characterised not so much by being slow as the fact that the envisaged agency of change is the existing state – but on the contrary recognises that rather than relying on some benign top-down process, the working class has to acquire such consciousness as to be able to liberate itself.

The battle for control in the workplace – of labour process, the speed of work and the terms and conditions of employment – never goes away, and we shall be looking in more detail at this in our next reading group.

[2] Marx often uses ‘man’, ‘he’ and so on when in fact he ought to describe all genders. In some cases the sexism apparent in his language is purely a matter of translation, in others his failure to challenge the prevailing attitudes of his time.

[3] Marx is mocking the likes of Robert Owen, a Victorian philanthropist who was hostile to worker organising but planned and created a small model ‘utopian socialist’ society where benign administrators ruled over a community of workers, much in the same vein as later state-socialist experiments.