The following lectures were developed between 1991 and 2015 as part of the RCG educational programme. They are based on a 10 lecture programme given by David (Reed) Yaffe in 1991.
I have given lectures on the critique of political economy, on and off, over a period of 15 years. Looking over the notes to these lectures it can be seen how they had to change, develop and be adjusted in response to the changing political circumstances in Britain and internationally. They can, if we include this series of lectures, be divided up into three different political periods. Not only have the circumstances in each period changed, but also our own understanding of politics has continually developed and changed:
1. In the mid-1970s during the debate on Marx’s crisis theory as part of an attempt to understand the crisis hitting the major capitalists nations at the end of the post-war boom.
2. At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s at the time of the Eurocommunist/social democratic assault on the main tenets of Marxist-Leninism. The Reagan/Thatcher counterrevolution and growing crisis in socialist bloc.
3. Today with the collapse of the socialist bloc and the proclamation of the victory of capitalism over socialism. ‘Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.’ (New Yorker 23 January 1989)
In the first period we were developing a Marxist understanding of the theory of crisis and defending it against the so-called ‘critical’ Marxists. We believed that a reformist political perspective arose from a failure to understand the laws of motion of the capitalist system. ‘The abandoning of the materialist basis leads inexorably from revolutionary socialism to reformism’ (Henryk Grossmann). The failure to grasp the real character of the relations of the capitalist system – the fact workers were exploited – was rooted in the way the capitalist system appeared to workers and capitalists alike. For example the wage-form – the phenomenal form of payment for wages hides the reality of exploitation. Ideological expression in the slogan a ‘fair days’ pay for a fair days work’. Another example would be that wage rises were responsible for inflation or job losses. These appearances are not mere illusions but have a basis in the way things appear under the capitalist system. ‘If essence and appearance coincided there would be no need for science’ (Marx). Our task was to provide the science and use it to destroy the illusions of the working class.
In this period we fought those who were questioning a Marxist understanding of the crisis under the banner of ‘critical Marxism’. These critics – we called them neo-Ricardians – attacked Marx’s theory of value, the concept of productive labour, and the theory of crisis particularly that based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. ‘Critical Marxism’ was a recurring feature historically, usually occurring at the end of the period of capitalist boom and not long before a new crisis was to break out. Eduard Bernstein said in Evolutionary Socialism (1899 – English edition 1909) ‘The further development and elaboration of the Marxist doctrine must begin with criticism of it.’ (p25) His criticisms were an attempt to remove the revolutionary content of Marxism and the ‘critical Marxists’ of the mid-1970s were doing the same thing.
It is important to understand that the critics of Marxism claimed to be criticising Marxism under the guise of further developing it. Steedman saw himself as removing ‘incoherencies’ in Marx to save wasting time so it was possible to get on with ‘worthwhile Marxist theoretical work.’ (CSE Bulletin Autumn 1973) What was important about these schools of thought is that in the period in which they were writing, when Marxism had significant or growing influence in the socialist movement, they were forced to oppose Marxism hypocritically. That is not to oppose the principles of Marxism openly but to pretend to accept them or parts of them while purging them of its revolutionary content. Lenin could say of such ‘Marxists’ in his own day: ‘the dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists.’ (CW Vol 18 p584)
In the second period two new developments determined how we approached the critique of political economy. Firstly the critics of Marx now began to form a distinct political current – Eurocommunism. Historical materialism, the necessity for socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat came under attack. Secondly we developed our understanding of imperialism, and, most importantly, began to understand the materialist/class basis of reformism/opportunism and the split in the working class movement.
Again none of this criticism of Marxism/Leninism was historically new. Bernstein had, after all, rejected the ‘phrase’ dictatorship of the proletariat in 1899:
‘Is there any sense, for example, in maintaining the phrase of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” at a time when in all possible places representatives of social democracy have placed themselves practically in the arena of Parliamentary work, have declared for the proportional representation of the people, and for direct legislation – all of which is inconsistent with a dictatorship’ (op cit p146).
Bernstein and our modern day critics of Marx are determined to remove the revolutionary content from Marxism. Their criticisms are, however, not difficult to refute. But to understand their position requires a quite different approach. Plekhanov gets to the root of the matter when discussing Bernstein’s views:
‘Anyone who wishes to understand Herr Bernstein should try to understand, not so much his theoretical arguments, which contain nothing but ignorance and muddled thinking, as his practical aspirations, which account for all his mishaps in the realm of theory and his backsliding. ‘What a man is, such is his philosophy’, Fichte said with much justice.’ (‘Cant against Kant’ Plekhanov Selected Works Vol II p365-6)
Plekhanov is showing us how to understand the theoretical positions of the ‘critical Marxists’ – a materialist approach. It is the class standpoint of the critics which forces them to revise Marx – not their revision of Marx which determines their political standpoint.
Today the rejection of Marxism/Leninism has gone much further and has been given, in the eyes of their proponents, total vindication by the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe. Eurocommunism was very quickly overtaken by ‘new realism’ and a total rejection of all fundamental Marxist/Leninist principles followed. In an interview in Marxism Today (January 1990 p41) Eric Hobsbawn soberly, and with some intellectual rigour, presented his conversion to the anti-Marxist/Leninist bandwagon. It is worth making his points in some detail because they show us the issues we need to deal with in defending Marxism/Leninism.
On the capitalist system:
‘Insofar as we envisage a change in the nature of capitalism, it will not, within the foreseeable future, be through a basic catastrophic crisis of the capitalist system, out of which the only thing that can be saved is by revolutionary means.
‘…certainly from the 50s on it’s been quite clear that, for instance, the argument that capitalism is not viable economically disappeared. It’s more than viable.’
On the split in the working class movement:
‘…the split in the labour movement which was introduced after the 1917 revolution no longer has any justification…The case for the split between the communist and the social democratic movements I believe falls by the wayside.’
Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, always more crude and provocative, summed up the position succinctly – ‘The international communist movement is now surely at an end’. Or, in the slightly more sober words of Eric Hobsbawn, ‘what we see is the end of an era dominated by the October Revolution’.
Essentially this is a rejection of all the fundamental positions of Marx and Engels not just of Lenin. It is further a rejection of the position that we are still living through the epoch of imperialism – a period of wars and revolutions. History has a habit of refuting such epochal statements soon after they are made. The first major product of the ‘new world order’ was the barbaric Gulf war. Kautsky had a similar comeuppance with the first imperialist war.
Faced with this onslaught against Marxism/Leninism we have to return to fundamentals, to restudy the basic positions of Marxism/Leninism. So this series of lectures more than the others will be concerned to re-establish these positions through a deeper study of the two most important texts of Marxism/Leninism – Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism.
Before we begin to study the text of Marx’s Capital we need to say something of Marx/Engels overall view of the historical process – historical materialism.
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’ (Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1853)
The central determining factor in these circumstances for Marxists is the mode of production – the way in which human beings produce and reproduce the necessities for life. It is this which determines the general character of the social and political processes of life. Marx sums up the position in the famous preface to the ContributiontotheCritiqueofPoliticalEconomy 1859.
‘In the social production which men carry on they enter definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, these relations of productions correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.
‘No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation…
‘The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create material conditions for the solution of that antagonism.’
The class which would resolve that last antagonism was the working class – a class Marx argued in the Communist Manifesto which is the builder of socialist society. The revolutions of 1848 confirmed this position of Marx showing that only the working class was a reliable revolutionary force.
In 1852 in a letter to J Weydemeyer Marx sets out his broad historical view – written before he started to work on Capital. Marx states that no credit is due to him for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between such classes.
‘Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the ‘existence of classes’ is only bound up with particular historic phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’
So that when Lenin wrote some 50 years later in What is to be done?:
‘The fundamental economic interests of the proletariat can be satisfied only by a political revolution that will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat’.
He was merely following in the generally accepted tradition of Marx and Engels.
What has Marx said so far in the passages quoted above?
The economic structure of society is the real foundation on which politics and political struggle arise – it follows also that the economic standpoint adopted in relation to society inevitably expresses and reflects the economic interests of classes in society. In that context Marxist writings on the economic structure of capitalism and imperialism are part of the class struggle:
they express the fundamental interests of the proletariat;
they lay bare the economic law of motion of capitalist society;
they are a weapon in the hands of the class which will destroy capitalist society – the working class. So Engels could say that ‘Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this [class] conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class. (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific p97, 1877).
Why then are we socialists? Why is socialism/communism progressive? Because capitalism is a fetter on the productive forces.
Engels:
‘In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that they reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of the means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.’ (op cit p127-8)
