Diotima🦉

[diotima49]

Capital Relations and Alienation

The lack of care for and attention to the development of Marx’s thought throughout his life — in addition to the idolisation of him that renders his words immediately as fact — has led to some of Marx’s underdeveloped/erroneous positions being taken to be correct and final positions. A strong example of this is the conception of wage labour wherein the capitalist purchases labour as a commodity from the proletariat.

In the mature analysis of Marx (i.e. in his Grundrisse and onwards) it is not labour that is purchased by the capitalist, but the disposition over living/subjective labour, i.e. the ability to command and direct labour in production. This is an important distinction for multiple reasons, but primarily because this notion penetrates and moves beyond the surface level of exchange and circulation in bourgeois production. Instead of seeing wage labour as an exchange of equal values (wages and labour), it grasps the deeper essence of wage labour as a social relation wherein the capitalists dictate the expenditure of the labour-force of the proletariat in exchange for the means of maintaining their existence, i.e. food, housing, etc.

This mature concept of wage labour, secondly, shows the bourgeois notions of freedom and equality to be a false freedom and a false equality. As Marx says in Grundrisse: “[The worker] is absorbed into the body of capital as a cause, as activity. Thus the exchange turns into its opposite, and the laws of private property – liberty, equality, property – property in one’s own labour, and free disposition over it – turn into the worker’s propertylessness, and the dispossession of his labour, [i.e.] the fact that he relates to it as alien property and vice versa.”

Thirdly, this more profound conception of wage labour does, as is hinted in the above quote, complete the transition of Marx’s notion of alienation from the utopian critique of capitalist production predicated upon a subjective value postulate in the 1844 Manuscripts to “an objective self-opposition that emerges in real social relations” (Zhang Yibing, Back to Marx). In other words, the domination of objectified labour, of capital, of the capitalist over living labour (the proletariat) which is manifested through wage labour — but not exclusively through wage labour, as i’ll touch on later — objectively alienates the proletariat from their labour through “this absolute divorce [...] of [control over] the objective conditions of labour from living labour capacity [the proletariat]” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, square brackets added for brevity and ease of understanding); i.e. alienation is the ‘feeling’ of the domination of capital relations by the proletariat. This ‘feeling’ — becoming more pronounced in times of crises due to the forced confrontation of the proletariat with their alienation, with their objective domination by capital relations — is also the inherent revolutionary spark of the proletariat against capital relations.

Fourthly, it allows for an accurate and clear delineation between the proletariat and those working petty-bourgeois elements. (This is important as it helps in the theoretical establishing of the proletariat, something very useful in maintaining a proletarian outlook and avoiding the muddling caused by the inevitable contact of the party of the proletariat with those petty-bourgeois elements — Lukacs expands upon this in the second section of his work on Lenin.) In the erroneous notion of the capitalists buying the labour (as a commodity) of the proletariat, it is easy to fall into equating the purchasing of the products of the petty-bourgeois’ labour with the purchasing of the labour of the proletariat, thereby theoretically subsuming these petty-bourgeois elements within the proletariat. The mature concept absolutely refutes this and discards any possibility of confusion by moving past (as i said above) the realm of exchange and into the essential social relations that lurk beneath. From this penetration, the qualitative difference between the disposition over the living labour of the proletariat gained by the capitalist and the purchasing of the products of labour from the petty-bourgeois is made blatant.

One of the ‘discussions’ which sparked my writing of this whole thing (namely the previous paragraph) brought up a point which, though theoretically poor, had something interesting in it. This person attempted to argue that those commission based artists, often found on places like twitter in the modern day, are not petty-bourgeois (with the implication of them being proletarian) and used the example of coal miners being paid by the amount of coal they mined in order to justify this point. This obviously stems from an abstract analysis stuck on the level of exchange, whereby the exchanging of the coal by the coal miner for their means of subsistence is the same as the artist exchanging their art for their means of subsistence. And when it is phrased like that, I'm sure the reader can see where they’re coming from; but this is an ahistorical and surface level analysis. When you break it down, the relationships of production at play are fundamentally different: again, the labour of the coal miner is still being dictated by the capitalist, while the labour of the petty-bourgeois is dictated by their particular skills and the means of production which they have at hand. I’m sure the reader can now see how the coal miner is definitely proletarian and the artist is not.

All of this shows the objective fluidity so important to dialectics: “Hegel analyses concepts that usually appear to be dead and shows that there is movement in them. Finite? That means moving to an end! Something? Means not that which is other. Being in general?— means such indeterminateness that Being = not-Being. All-sided, universal flexibility of concepts, a flexibility reaching to the identity of opposites,— that is the essence of the matter. This flexibility, applied subjectively = eclecticism and sophistry. Flexibility, applied objectively, i.e. reflecting the all-sidedness of the material process and its unity, its dialectics, is the correct reflection of the eternal development of the world.”(Vladimir Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Book ‘The Science of Logic’)

[diotima49]

Chinese Socialism and National Politics

It is often claimed that the development of the productive forces under a system of wage-labor, commodity production, etc. cannot be “a transition into the next stage” because “political revolution performs that:” revolution is transformed into a total subjection of the world to the will of humanity; an abstract and homogenised humanity — which has never existed — which, through revolution, raises itself above the material world and its concerns.

Back in reality, the Chinese revolution did not and could not immediately wipe out the vestiges of feudalism nor can they now decide to wipe out capital relations. To reuse an old example, the abstract idea-dialectics (with its purely negative notion of negation, a notion of negation as undoing, and of capitalism as an abstract structure to be ‘unraveled’), of which you are accused, does not care for the isolated Chinese village nor of the practical problems posed by such social structures nor of the concrete solutions to such problems — namely, the objective sublation of these smaller social structures by the totality of Chinese society, which is to then be sublated (eventually) but the totality of human society in a higher socialism/communism.

And how is said objective sublation to be achieved? Thankfully we have the brilliant example of concrete-historical dialectics, and an approach to socialist construction developed out of such a profound grasp of Marxism, set by comrade Deng Xiaoping. He dissolved those policies which protected and maintained the Chinese villages, and which certainly may have been a necessity for national stability at a time: The Iron Rice Bowl. The dissolution of The Iron Rice Bowl allowed these pre-capitalist social formations to be properly subject to capital relations and therefore broken up and sublated (see the mass migration in China from the villages to the cities that continues to this day).

From this example we can see that the notion that “political revolution performs,” or must perform, a transition to new economic structures of itself (with an implicit immediacy) is ridiculous. The new political structures cannot just clear away these social forms, it has to come up with practical solutions whilst maintaining other wider needs such as improving the quality of life and satisfaction of the people in order to maintain stability.

I imagine some will protest: “this has nothing to do with socialism! This is a task of the National bourgeoisie!” Any such protests shows the necessity of seriously studying Lenin’s political writings. Lenin showed that the bourgeoisie will not always act on the impulse to totally assert their mode of production. Lukacs gives a piercing summary in his work on Lenin: “However problematic this alliance between the bourgeoisie and the old ruling powers may be, since it is of course a compromise which springs from mutual fear of a greater evil and not a class alliance based on common interests, it still remains an important new fact beside which the schematic and mechanistic ‘proof of the ‘necessary link’ uniting capitalist development to democracy must reveal itself to be a complete illusion” (György Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought).

This sketch can very readily take into account the dimension of being subject to imperialism and colonialism and the tendency towards underdevelopment within imperialism; I’m sure I don’t have to further expound upon this. Additionally, I have neglected to use Mao as a primary example here because that brings up more arguments that I do not wish to have at the present, but his analysis of the relationship between the different classes and forces that he conducted during the period of the revolutionary war (found in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong Volume One) provide more brilliant backing to the point I’m making here.

We can therefore see from Lenin (and from Mao) that these tasks which, when taken abstractly (as well as Eurocentrically and, quite frankly, in the manner of a Kautskyite), seem to fall under the preview of the bourgeoisie are actually, under particular conditions of course, tasks conferred upon the proletariat and socialism! The immediate tasks of the real movement of the proletariat cannot be found merely within the proletariat (or within their essential economic relations); it must be found within the broader social totality from the perspective of the proletariat, as only then are the tasks concrete ones, capable of real social transformation. Socialism is found through progress, as progress, as objective sublation: “Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science” (Lenin, The Tax in Kind).

[diotima49]

Marxism as a Comprehensive, Philosophical-Scientific Worldview

In Zhang Yibing’s Back to Marx he explains the epistemological aspect of historical materialism: he names this social historical epistemology. To sum it up, Marx develops upon the traditional natural materialist conception of epistemology — wherein knowledge is the product of the interaction between an individual and an object —: Marx recognises the ahistorical nature of this epistemology (see his critique of the use of the use of a ‘Robinson Crusoe-esque' individual by classical political economists in his Introduction to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy: in short, we do not exist as isolated individuals) and so introduces the real, mediating force of society and its particular historical development. That is to say, we do not interact with a thing directly, we interact with it through our social consciousness. On a deeper level, it means that we often interact with things through an image of it “historically projected” to us by our society. Yibing say’s this:

“In Marx’s new worldview, as men come into contact with natural phenomena, natural objects always exist in definite historical practice; they are historically projected to men in practical ways and degrees. Man’s understanding of their essence and laws is closely related to the historical nature of practice. Man does not simply observe nature from the sidelines, but rather intervenes in nature through the medium of practice […] Though natural material may be the premise, it is not the determining factor in deciding the essence of understanding.” And further: “In real social life, as individuals are cultivated into men, they do not always directly face the objective outside world. For individuals facing the world, indirect experience and indirect knowledge [i.e. the knowledge and experience of the social whole] are invariably decisive. […] we often use concepts to see” (Zhang Yibing, Back to Marx, Section 8.3.2).

Yibing therefore shows how Marx dissolves rationalist thought and its implicitly idealist essence: wresting epistemology from abstract metaphysics and returning it back to the real historical process; doing the same also with ontology — hence Lukacs assertion that historical materialism is the ontology of social existence. He also shows how, for Marx, social history — and all of its products, e.g. knowledge — takes place upon the foundations of a materialist world: hence a natural materialism “was still Marx’s practical materialist internal premise” and the scientific approach to reality, developing a conception from facts themselves — and for Marx interpreting these facts dialectically and historically — rather than a speculative construction of reality, coming from the tradition of natural materialism becomes the essence of his mature thought. This now takes me to the pushback I've received about this conception of Marx’s epistemology: that Marx does not have an epistemology as it is not constructed within an epistemological system that seeks to tackle all the traditional questions of that field.

Such a pushback is born of a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism: that of regarding Marxism as an extension of the western philosophical tradition (particularly of Hegel) rather than in its reality, as its negation. Traditional western philosophy and its metaphysics develop their conception in thought, idealistically, which invariably leads these philosophical systems into insoluble contradiction with reality; even Hegel, the greatest speculative philosopher of all, was trounced by Toussaint Louverture. This, of course, does not mean that Marxists can neglect philosophy; philosophy is still an essential part of marxism: in its negation, its real unity with a scientific approach, philosophy is qualitatively transformed into methodology. Hence understanding the dialectical method expressed in Hegel, particularly in The Science of Logic, allows one to penetrate the surface of the facts and comprehend them in their real movement and interrelations. It is in this spirit that Lenin said: “it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!”

Marx never developed, nor tried to develop, a complete epistemological system, leaving alone such questions as ‘how does cognition work,’ and merely developed epistemology from a social-historical perspective as that is the field that he studied. Marxism is not a substitute for scientific research, so to demand that Marx have produced a complete Marxist epistemological system for his social historical epistemology to be valid is to cling onto methodological idealism and expect Marx to break with the essence of his own thought. If one wished to produce a complete Marxist epistemology, then one would have to study neuroscience and psychology, in doing so deepening Marxist epistemology — for an epistemology that is not yet comprehensive is not necessarily incorrect, it merely means that it can be improved upon —: that is how Marxism works! What is revealed by this is that those overly philosophical ‘Marxists’ have not understood the philosophy of Marxism. We can see from this also the true relationship of science to Marxism. Marxism as a scientific world view assumes the breadth of science and subsumes its content whilst reinterpreting it.

I now want to highlight a passage from Once Again on the Trade Unions that I believe compliments well what I've written above and that I've never seen mentioned before. It expounds upon the particularity of our relationships to a thing, which is necessary for comprehending our social-historical relationship to a thing as history is always, in actuality, particular. It shows how our relationship to a thing is both conditioned by the totality of its properties and the particular conditions that we come into contact with the thing in. The only thing that I find lacking in this passage is that he doesn’t bring in the relationship of our use of a thing to production/social practice, but I find that excusable:

“A tumbler is assuredly both a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel. But there are more than these two properties, qualities or facets to it; there are an infinite number of them, an infinite number of ‘mediacies’ and interrelationships with the rest of the world. A tumbler is a heavy object which can be used as a missile; it can serve as a paper weight, a receptacle for a captive butterfly, or a valuable object with an artistic engraving or design, and this has nothing at all to do with whether or not it can be used for drinking, is made of glass, is cylindrical or not quite, and so on and so forth.

Moreover, if I needed a tumbler just now for drinking, it would not in the least matter how cylindrical it was, and whether it was actually made of glass; what would matter though would be whether it had any holes in the bottom, or anything that would cut my lips when I drank, etc. But if I did not need a tumbler for drinking but for a purpose that could be served by any glass cylinder, a tumbler with a cracked bottom or without one at all would do just as well, etc.

Formal logic, which is as far as schools go (and should go, with suitable abridgements for the lower forms), deals with formal definitions, draws on what is most common, or glaring, and stops there. When two or more different definitions are taken and combined at random (a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel), the result is an eclectic definition which is indicative of different facets of the object, and nothing more.

Dialectical logic demands that we should go further. Firstly, if we are to have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and ‘mediacies.’ That is something we cannot ever hope to achieve completely, but the rule of comprehensiveness is a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity. Secondly, dialectical logic requires that an object should be taken in development, in change, in ‘self-movement’ (as Hegel sometimes puts it). This is not immediately obvious in respect of such an object as a tumbler, but it, too, is in flux, and this holds especially true for its purpose, use and connection with the surrounding world. Thirdly, a full ‘definition’ of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants. Fourthly, dialectical logic holds that ‘truth is always concrete, never abstract’, as the late Plekhanov liked to say after Hegel.”

[diotima49]

The whole ‘critique’ of LTV by MUT must leave the sphere of large scale capitalist production wherein circumstances can be conjured for price to be more dependent on need. This obviously ignores the whole concept of value itself, but it also neglects the extremely important concept of particularity and historical transience in Marx’s thought. MUT approaches Marx without understanding any of the underlying philosophy, hence it presupposes that Marx views his theories as eternal categories just like they do; it does not realise that Marx refutes the very concept of eternal categories. For instance, Labour, as an abstract generality, isn’t eternal. Labour, as said abstraction, only comes into existence with the development of machinery as it allows for there to be undifferentiated human labour in place of labour as an expression of the individual subject, what we find outside of large-scale production predicted upon machinery. Once this is understood, the fact that MUT’s critique is nothing but an irrelevant straw man becomes evident.