Questions of Marxist economy, 1962

Questions of Marxist economy, 1962
International Communist Party
On Marxist Economics
Group reports to the inter-federal meeting in Milan on 9‑10 June 1962
For the Beset Vicissitudes of the World Proletarian Battles, Only the Offensive Theory of Marxism Is the Inflexible Directive That Binds the Great Traditions to the Future of a Powerful Resurgence
Questions of Marxist economics
Chronology of crises
Theory of crises
(
Il Programma Comunista,
No. 19, 1962)
Questions of Marxist economics
As was announced in the first summary report of the meeting, which
appeared in issue no. 12 of the journal, the speakers were not able to
present even relative conclusions of the theoretical research work on
Marxist economics. However, due to the breadth, depth and difficulty of
the research, these conclusions will not be immediate, nor should we
expect the unravelling of who-knows-what mysteries or novelties.
The theory of ‘waste’ is a central thesis of Marxism not only from an
economic point of view, but first and foremost from a revolutionary
point of view. The discussion of the theory began at the meeting in
Genoa on 4-5 November 1951, the written report of which appeared in
issues 1 and 2 of this year’s journal. Waste is the squandering of
productive forces, products and social wealth. Using the method of the
‘three moments’, the dialectical key to the reading of
Capital
and Marxism, waste at the enterprise level, i.e. in the first moment, would
be reduced to the exploitation of wage labour by capitalists; but that
would always be little. In fact, Marx struck down Lassalle’s notion of
‘undiminished fruit of labour’, making it clear that even in communist
society, the surplus product would exist, but its form and social
destination would be radically transformed.
It is in the second moment, within capitalist society taken as a
whole, in the corporate whole, that most human labour is uselessly
consumed. This social ‘waste’ is most evident and criminal when
comparing capitalist society and the future, communist society. It is,
in fact, the communist model of the organisation of production and the
form of human labour that fully emphasises the nefarious features of the
capitalist mode of production, once it is unanimously admitted that in
history the forms of production succeed one another on the basis of the
increase in productive forces. For capitalist society, according to its
apologists, there is no waste, no unnecessary labour, no destruction of
wealth, except in an entirely accidental manner, as in wars between
states. Marx, on the other hand, constantly emphasises the destructive
character of capitalism, based on the continuous juxtapositions between
capitalist society and communist society.
The ‘faux frais’, the false expenses of capital circulation proper to
an exchange-based society and exasperated by ‘free competition’ on the
basis of a corporate, mercantile and monetary economy; militarism, the
very notions of homeland and the family, constitute elements of
effective destruction or irrational utilisation of labour and wealth:
narrow forms of the atrophying of labour productivity. Crises are,
therefore, the natural outcome of the multiple manifestations of
‘waste’, the periodic and recurring result of the accumulation of
uselessly produced surplus labour, irrationally reproduced, on the basis
of social production and private appropriation.
Chronology of crises
The dates we give in this text are taken from Marxist texts, and
therefore signify crises that were the subject of reflection and study
by our masters. The series opens with the crisis of 1800, which,
according to Ricardo, was caused by the grain famine due to a poor
harvest and occurred only in England. The next one occurred in 1815, for
the same reasons – in Ricardo’s opinion – as the previous one.
The crisis of 1825, on the other hand, had its epicentre in the
United States of America and India, and was a so-called commercial crisis.
Marx (
Capital
, Vol. III Part V) characterises commercial crises
as follows: ‘The most general and palpable phenomenon in commercial
crises is the sudden general decline in prices following a prolonged
overall rise’. The crises of these years all manifested themselves under
the guise of commercial crises, i.e. due to foreign market restrictions, and
the phenomena they generated were more or less the same, more or less
accentuated. Marx also dedicates a lengthy piece of writing to the
crisis of 1847-48 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in addition to
constant references in other texts, particularly in
Capital
. In
this text Marx examines all the phenomena before and after the crises
themselves. Prosperity, the prosperity of today, precedes critical
travail. ‘The years 1843-5’, Marx writes, ‘were years of industrial and
commercial prosperity, a necessary sequel to the almost uninterrupted
industrial depression of 1837-42. As is always the case, prosperity very
rapidly encouraged speculation. Speculation regularly occurs in periods
when overproduction is already in full swing. It provides overproduction
with temporary market outlets, while for this very reason precipitating
the outbreak of the crisis and increasing its force. The crisis itself
first breaks out in the area of speculation; only later does it hit
production (...) we cannot at this moment give a complete history of the
post-1845 crisis, we shall enumerate only the most significant of these
symptoms of overproduction’.
Our opportunists would like prosperity without scheming, boom without
speculation: our master teaches that in a capitalist regime, prosperity
is the mother of speculation, into which the immediate effects of
incipient overproduction are initially poured. Marx already traces the
sinusoid of capitalist production, with its periodic ups and downs of
productive exaltation and depression. The crisis is preceded by a period
of intense productive upswing, which is in turn preceded by a period of
crisis. The characteristic feature of affluent production then was the
rush to invest in railways. Today, the productive content of wealth is
the universal speculation of international lines of communication:
motorways, tunnels, transatlantic liners, fighter jets, missiles, and
the great Barnum of cosmonautics.
The classic prediction of the historical catastrophe of capitalism
can still be found in this text: ‘[S]laves will be emancipated, because
they will have become useless as slaves. Wage labour will be abolished
in Europe in just the same way, as soon as it becomes not only
unnecessary for production, but in fact a hindrance to it’. Whenever the
crisis erupts in the midst of the blissful apparent eternity of
capitalism, the futility of capitalist forms of the economy appears in
meridian light: nothing has any value any more, money serves at most for
physiological needs, the untouchable categories of capital’s economy
blow up, it is chaos.
Marx also carries out a ‘bird’s eye’ analysis of the most volcanic
American productive machine, in which he sees a powerful hotbed of the
contradictions of capitalism and the future centre of the unbridled
development of the world bourgeoisie: ‘The prosperity in England and
America soon made itself felt on the European continent. The world
market links every corner of the earth and forces it to submit to
capital’. The two centres, England and America, of world capitalism are
‘the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’ from which ‘the initial process’
of crises and prosperity originates. Thus, ‘while, therefore, the crises
first produce revolutions on the Continent, the foundation for these is,
nevertheless, always laid in England. Violent outbreaks must naturally
occur rather in the extremities of the bourgeois body than its heart,
since the possibility of adjustment is greater here than there. On the
other hand, the degree to which Continental revolutions react on England
is at the same time the barometer which indicates how far these
revolutions really call in question the bourgeois conditions of life, or
how far they only hit their political formations’. This valuable
theoretical lesson, drawn from the economic entanglement that had
already enveloped the two continents, but still predominantly Europe and
Britain, and from which the crisis of 1847 exploded, anticipates and
sanctions the validity of the revolutionary position defended by Lenin
and the Italian Left, for whom the October Revolution would have
resisted any reactionary comeback on condition that the European
powerhouses, notably Germany, of capitalist imperialism collapsed.
The closure to this text constitutes a tremendous slap in the face to
voluntarists and immediatists of all times: ‘With this general
prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop
as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships,
there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only
possible in the periods where
both
these
factors
, the
modern productive forces
and the
bourgeois forms
of
production, come in collision with each other. The various quarrels in
which the representatives of the individual factions of the Continental
party of Order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from
providing the occasion for new revolutions are, on the contrary,
possible only because the basis of the relationships is momentarily so
secure and, what the reaction does not know, so bourgeois’. ‘All
reactionary attempts to hold up bourgeois development will rebound off
it just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic
proclamations of the democrats.
A new revolution is possible only in
consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this
crisis
...’
The new crisis of 1857 had its epicentre in the United States, but
soon infected England and Germany. In Great Britain, agriculture itself
was plunged into economic depression, as Marx had already felt in 1850.
To the extent that capitalist forms of production seize every branch of
productive activity, channels open up through which the crisis flows.
The entire economy is thus subject to crises!
Theory of crises
From ‘73 to ‘78 the crisis became chronic in the US and in ‘75 it
rebounded again in England. The last date to be found in Marx’s texts is
1879, of which he gives a cursory mention in his letter to Danielson, a
Russian economist translating the 1st volume of
Capital
. In it,
Marx again highlighted the desolation of the economy and especially the
apparent tranquillity of the banks and railways, which accumulate debts
and shares every day.
Marx notes that crises recur roughly every ten years, and while his
concern to grasp the reasons for this near-constant periodicity is
always alive in the search for the immediate phenomena that develop
before and during the crises themselves, nevertheless, and above all,
his interest in contingent facts serves to demonstrate the validity of
the doctrine. How many times has it been necessary to mock the
petty-bourgeois habit of correcting the nefariousness of capitalism with
the proposal to a return to simple commodity production! Marx took
Proudhon’s as a scapegoat and demonstrated that the diseases of mature
capitalism had their origin in capital itself, in the simple categories
of capitalist economy. It was not necessary to resort to expanded
reproduction to explain the crisis, even if overproduction flooded the
channels of the economy. Marx always speaks of relative overproduction:
‘To say that there is no general over-production, but rather a
disproportion within the various branches of production, is no more than
to say that under capitalist production the proportionality of the
individual branches of production springs as a continual process from
disproportionality, because the cohesion of the aggregate production
imposes itself as a blind law upon the agents of production, and not as
a law which, being understood and hence controlled by their common mind,
brings the productive process under their joint control (...) but the
entire capitalist mode of production is only a relative one, whose
barriers are not absolute. They are absolute only for this mode, i.e.,
on its basis’ (
Capital
, Vol. III, Part III).
On the other hand, the entire capitalist economy is ready to provide
the simplest and most complex forms of crisis. ‘The most abstract form
of crisis (and therefore the formal possibility of crisis) is thus the
metamorphosis of the commodity itself; the contradiction of
exchange-value and use-value, and furthermore of money and commodity,
comprised within the unity of the commodity, exists in metamorphosis
only as an involved movement’ (
Theories of Surplus Value
, Ch.
XVII). The primary form of the crisis is already in the commodity, that
is, in the fact that it is both a product to satisfy a need and the
bearer of value, of average social labour and surplus value. It is
therefore in the social contradiction on which capitalist production
rests that the content and cause of crises must be sought.
Lenin’s lesson on the causes of crises is perfect: ‘Crises are
possible (…) because the collective character of production comes into
conflict with the individual character of appropriation’ (
A
Characterisation of Economic Romanticism
). Marx again in a succinct
form: ‘Three cardinal facts of capitalist production: 1) Concentration
of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the
property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production
capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of
capitalists. These are the
trustees
of bourgeois society, but
they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship. 2) Organisation of
labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of
labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences. In these
two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property
and private labour, even though in contradictory forms. 3) Creation of
the world-market. The stupendous productivity developing under the
capitalist mode of production relative to population, and the increase,
if not in the same proportion, of capital-values (not just of their
material substance), which grow much more rapidly than the population,
contradict the basis, which constantly narrows in relation to the
expanding wealth, and for which all this immense productiveness works.
They also contradict the conditions under which this swelling capital
augments its value.
Hence the [origin of the] crises
’.
(Capital, Vol. 3 Part III). And another quotation among a thousand:
‘Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent
is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible
relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It
becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to
society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist’s source
of power. The contradiction between the general social power into which
capital develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the
individual capitalists over these social conditions of production, on
the other, becomes ever more irreconcilable, and yet contains the
solution of the problem, because it implies at the same time the
transformation of the conditions of production into general, common,
social, conditions. This transformation stems from the development of
the productive forces under capitalist production, and from the ways and
means by which this development takes place’ (Ibid.).
Unfortunately, the translations of Marxist texts, monopolised by the
rich opportunist powerhouses, are always interestingly weak and fail to
render the true sense of the original text. Indeed, by capitalist one
must not only mean the capitalist-man, but above all the capitalist
enterprise, the agent of capitalist production, the impersonal and
anonymous capitalist productive organisation. Otherwise it would be a
complete misunderstanding of state capitalism, in which there are no
capitalists understood as individual masters of the means of production,
whereas there are, as in Russia, the ‘trustees pocketing the proceeds of
bourgeois society’ mentioned by Marx above. The
trustees
of the
‘prophet’ Karl are today called
economic operators
.
Marx’s analysis of the origin of crises then appears in meridian
light: on the one hand, the socialisation of the productive forces,
social production; on the other, the private control of the means of
production and the productive forces themselves by individual production
units. This is where social chaos lies: capitalist production units can
no longer contain the growing social forces of production, companies are
too cramped to organise labour power, control surplus labour and
distribute it throughout society. Consequently, the anarchy of
production, the relative overpopulation of producers, and the continuous
destruction of wealth, constitute the stigmata of capitalism. And this
is so even when the most advanced concentration of scattered capital
induces bourgeois agents to rant about programming, control of
production, planning. In reality, they feel the absolute and urgent need
to plan production, but they clash in the insurmountable contradictions
between associated production and corporate, private appropriation of
surplus value. The crux of the matter is all here: it is not merely an
economic phenomenon, but essentially a social one: the production of
surplus value and profit is the beginning and end of the capitalist mode
of production. Capitalism could and should – this is its historical
merit – socialise production, but not appropriation, which has remained
at the private and
pecuniary
level, for
everyone
,
bourgeois and proletarian.
Our revolutionary critique of the pretence of planning in the USSR,
for example, starts from this general observation, where it is quite
natural that centralised control of production and consumption, and of
appropriation, should be dismantled, because the basis of the Russian
economy is the enterprise, with its positive balance sheet aimed at
realising surplus value and profit, and wages paid in money.