Marx's telescope (part 1)
The working class is the revolutionary class. It is the gravedigger of capitalism and the architect of socialism. Everyone who has even heard of Karl Marx knows that those were central ideas.
But Marx himself, in old age, gave an eager suggestion from a young co-thinker about producing an edition of his collected works the wry response: “They would first have to be written”.
Marx wrote a lot, but only a fraction of what he planned to write, and that fraction selected by haphazard circumstances as well as by deliberation. Thus, the Communist Manifesto opens with the sentence: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”; but the one chapter where Marx set out to explain systematically what he meant by “class”, chapter 52 of Capital volume 3, is an unfinished fragment of five paragraphs.
Likewise with the revolutionary role of the working class. The idea runs through all his writings, yet nowhere does he clear a space to set down his arguments in textbook form, step by step.
In textbook Marxism, therefore, it can be all too easy to divide the perspective into two separate propositions:
1. Capitalism will break down (because of economic contradictions);
2. Someone (probably the working class) will take over and concentrate the means of production into a single hand.
The “someone”, in this scheme, needs no prior preparation except to be around, and available as a cohesive force, when capitalism collapses.
Stalinism could present itself as “Marxist” by hammering at proposition one, and quietly, under cover of the noisy banging, amend proposition two to “someone, in the name of the working class, will take over...”
In recovering the real gist of Marx’s thought, evaluating its relevance to capital today, and working out a sound long-term perspective in the 21st century, one of Marx’s major but least-known writings is central.
That is the Grundrisse, Marx’s “Rough Draft” of 1857-8.
The Grundrisse, some 779 pages in the English translation, comprises seven notebooks written by Marx in the winter of 1857-8 in a dash (so he hoped) to get his “Economics” finished.
In September 1850 Marx had broken with the majority of the Communist League exiles in London, with these words:
We tell the workers: If you want to change conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil war.
Now they are told [by the majority]: We must come to power immediately or we might as well go to sleep. The word proletariat’ has been reduced to a mere phrase, like the word ‘people’ was by the democrats.
To make this phrase a reality one would have to declare the entire petty bourgeois to be proletarians, i.e. de facto represent the petty bourgeoisie and not the proletariat. In place of actual revolutionary development one would have to adopt the revolutionary phrase.
In other words, only by a lengthy development within capitalist society (by civil war, Marx evidently means social war, rather than necessarily military battle), does the working class become the revolutionary working class. To adopt the “revolutionary phrase”, that is, to pretend that the working class is always immediately revolutionary, is to fall into a politics of pretences. You end up recommending whatever (petty-bourgeois) oppositional movements are immediately to hand, and glossing them up as proletarian, rather than cleaving to the long-term interests of the working class.
Around the same time Marx wrote:
While this general prosperity lasts, enabling the productive forces of bourgeois society to develop to the full extent possible within the bourgeois system, there can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at a time when two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production... A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself.
In 1857 crisis erupted. Marx feverishly set to work to pull together his long-languishing economic studies. “I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines clear before the deluge”, he wrote to Engels (8 December 1857).
By February 1858, he was writing to Ferdinand Lassalle: “I would like to tell you how thing stand with my work on economics. For the last few months I have in fact been working on the final version”.
Final it wasn’t. But by June 1858 Marx had completed a manuscript which covered, in outline, much of the terrain to be covered by the three volumes of Capital and the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value; and, what interests us most here, a great deal besides.
Brewing subversion
The writing was spurred on by the idea that revolution was the more-or-less mechanical product of crisis. But Marx must have soon realised that this crisis would not evoke revolution. In fact, the Grundrisse is a big step in Marx’s path from the idea that revolution is a product of crisis towards his later view that revolution is brewed up in the whole course of capitalist development itself, rather than primarily in the mechanical blockages and reversals of that development (i.e. crises).
More than in any of his other works, in the Grundrisse Marx sometimes lays aside the microscope with which he analyses current economic and political intricacies, and takes up a telescope to look at the very long-term trends of capitalist development.
What does that telescope see as the traits of fully-developed capitalist society?
In the first place, the commodification of everything, and extensive privatisation of public utilities.
Since Engels in Anti-Dühring (the manuscript of which Marx read and approved), Marxists have seen the concentration and centralisation of capital as moving logically to a “highest stage” of the withering of capitalist competition and the grouping of production in the hands of states or of large private capitalist enterprises more or less monopolising their national markets. And up to the 1970s, things went pretty much that way.
Now they are obviously different. Capital continues to “concentrate and centralise”, as Marx put it in chapter 25 of Capital. But Marx developed that argument “within a given [national] society”. That is more or less how it went until nearly 100 years after his death.
To this day, most multinational corporations still have a definite “homeland”. But on a world scale their growth comes with an intensification of capitalist competition, and a cutback in the direct economic enterprise of individual states.
In the Grundrisse, Marx, more prescient than perhaps he knew, foreshadowed this development:
All general conditions of production, such as roads, canals, etc... presuppose, in order to be undertaken by capital instead of by the government which represents the community as such, the highest development of production founded on capital. The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital... [p.531].
The highest development of capital exists when the general conditions of the process of social production are not paid out of deductions from the social revenue, the state’s taxes — where revenue and not capital appears as the labour fund, and where the worker, although he is a free wage worker like any other, nevertheless stands economically in a different relation — but rather out of capital as capital. This shows the degree to which capital has subjugated all conditions of social production to itself, on one side; and, on the other side, hence, the extent to which social reproductive wealth has been capitalised, and all needs are satisfied through the exchange form; as well as the extent to which the socially posited needs of the individual, i.e. those which he consumes and feels not as a single individual in society, but communally with others — whose mode of consumption is social by the nature of the thing — are likewise not only consumed but also produced through exchange, individual exchange. [p.532]
“The invading socialist society” within capitalist forms is thus not, as Engels suggested, the “planned production” of monopolistic associations of private producers, or directly of the capitalist state, in national frameworks.
What are the subversive elements in this advanced capitalist society viewed through Marx’s telescope?
Capitalism so advanced rarely has women and men as the direct agents of production. Instead the workers tend, supervise, and maintain a process of production driven by science.
The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as...
on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves...
and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]...
and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realised, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence...
where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased...
Natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. That is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. [p.325]
General intellect
Capitalist wealth depends on the capitalist squeezing more labour out of the worker than the equivalent of what he has paid for the labour-power; on “the theft of alien labour”.
As science and technology advance, it becomes plain to all that this squeezing of wealth for a few from the misery of the many can replaced by wealth for all by the achievement of collective control over “the general intellect”.
Aspiration to that collective control is built into the development which capital spurs on within the working class itself. For capital cannot develop its productive powers, cannot sell the new products which new powers make possible, without constantly requiring greater general knowledge, and expanding the horizon of needs and wants, among the workers (at the same time as it curtails that knowledge, and frustrates those wants and needs).
While... individual labour as such has ceased altogether to appear as productive, is productive, rather, only in these common labours which subordinate the forces of nature to themselves, and while this elevation of direct labour into social labour appears as a reduction of individual labour to the level of helplessness in face of the communality [Gemeinsamkeit] represented by and concentrated in capital... Thus all powers of labour are transposed into powers of capital...
Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realise a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here — quite unintentionally — reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation...
To the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production...
Real wealth manifests itself, rather — and large industry reveals this — in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself... He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor.
In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body — it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.
The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.
As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down... The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them...
Forces of production and social relations — two different sides of the development of the social individual — appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high...
The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process...
The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital...
The mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so — and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence — then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.
Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour....
As the basis on which large industry rests, the appropriation of alien labour time, ceases, with its development, to make up or to create wealth, so does direct labour as such cease to be the basis of production, since, in one respect, it is transformed more into a supervisory and regulatory activity; but then also because the product ceases to be the product of isolated direct labour, and the combination of social activity appears, rather, as the producer... in the production process of large-scale industry... [p.700ff]
Here Marx describes to us a working class which becomes revolutionary because:
Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality.. [p.325] which cannot but collide with the barriers of capital.
“Civilising influence” of capital
In the first text in which he identified the working class as the agency of socialist revolution, his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), Marx put it like this:
Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?
Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
The working class is able to create a new, more human, society... because it has been dehumanised and brutalised, “is the complete loss of man”. There is nothing but dialectical flourish to explain this postulated transition.
This exposition takes us no further than the hopeful but puzzled comments by Engels in a letter to Marx of October 1844:
As it is, the workers had already reached the final stage of the old civilisation a few years ago, and the rapid increase in crime, robbery and murder is their way of protesting against the old social organisation. At night the streets are very unsafe, the bourgeoisie is beaten, stabbed and robbed; and, if the proletarians here develop according to the same laws as in England, they will soon realise that this way of protesting as individuals and with violence against the social order is useless, and they will protest, through communism, in their general capacity as human beings. If only one could show these fellows the way! But that’s impossible.
In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx has moved forward. Building on the prefigurations of “the brotherhood of man” which he has seen in his association with organised French socialist workers in Paris in 1844, and on the understanding of the importance of trade-union struggles which he has developed from studying the English experience and in his polemic against Proudhon (1846), he adduces positive properties of the working class itself — its self-organisation in economic struggles, its building of links using modern communications, its learning about political action thanks to the bourgeoisie being compelled to draw it into that action — rather than simply postulating it as the negation of capitalist society.
He also distinguishes between the working class, as a revolutionary force, and those who are most brutalised and dehumanised by capitalism, the lumpenproletariat, whom he considers more likely to be reactionary.
Even in the Communist Manifesto, though, Marx has not emancipated himself from the old “iron law of wages” (the idea, commonplace among socialists at the time, that capitalism necessarily limited wages to physical-subsistence level), and so there are still large elements of his view of the working class as the epitome of brutalisation and dehumanisation.
It is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases....
In the Grundrisse (and later, in chapter 15 of Capital), Marx argues differently. Developed capitalist production, precisely because of its drive to extract and realise surplus value, has no choice but to “drive labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness”, to replace “labour in which a human being does what a thing could do”, to create a workforce of varied and wide potentialities, and also to create new aspirations and needs among the working class.
A precondition of production based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circulation, whether the sphere itself is directly expanded or whether more points within it are created as points of production. While circulation appeared at first as a constant magnitude, it here appears as a moving magnitude, being expanded by production itself...
The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself....
The production of relative surplus value, i.e. production of surplus value based on the increase and development of the productive forces, requires the production of new consumption... creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle... production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values...
[Thus] the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations — production of this being as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures [genussfähig], hence cultured to a high degree — is likewise a condition of production founded on capital....
Just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side... so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities... while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange...
Hence the great civilising influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry...
Capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionises it... [p.409-10]
Development through contradiction
Too often among Marxists, this thought has been dismissed as relevant only to “when the bourgeoisie was a progressive class”. We are told that since some time around World War One capitalism has been in its “epoch of decay”, and so all it does is reactionary.
At best this argument is a stretching — to breaking point and beyond — of an assessment by Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky of actual capitalist decay in the period after World War One. They worked to have that decay replaced by workers’ power. They were defeated. It was replaced by a self-restructuring of capital, at workers’ expense, which eventually created the terms for a new capitalist expansion.
At worst it becomes sheer superstition and romanticisation of the bourgeoisie of days gone by. So the “financial aristocracy” which ruled France at the time Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, which Marx called “the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society”, could work a “civilising influence of capital”? Or the “gang of shady characters” which succeeded it to rule between 1851 and 1870? Or the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys of mid-19th century Britain? Those who, as Marx put it, had enslaved the workers to no more impressive purpose than “to transform a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts into ‘eminent cotton-spinners’, ‘extensive sausage makers’ and ‘influential blacking dealers’.” They were not so bad? They were “progressive bourgeois”? But the bourgeois of today, who in their own interests and in their own way have set up the Internet and mass higher education? They, in contrast, have provided no elements on which the working class can seize as levers for emancipation?
Marx refers, startlingly but emphatically, to the “civilising influence of capital” on the working class.
Read thoroughly, and it is clear that Marx is very far from “the ‘socialist’ professors” whom Rosa Luxemburg derided as:
acclaim[ing] the wearing of neckties, the use of visiting cards, and the riding of bicycles by proletarians as notable instances of participation in cultural progress.
Whatever the arguments about Hegel, it is clear that Marx’s telescope sees development as proceeding through contradictions.
Marx is clear that the “positive aspects” of capitalist development are inextricably intertwined with — really, are the same thing as — the “negative aspects”. They are the same process looked at from a different angle. And they are “positive” not because they make capitalism not so bad after all, but because they create within capitalism an immense potential for abolishing and going beyond capitalism.
It is precisely the drive to exploit — to extract more and more surplus-labour and then to “realise” it (by selling the products) — that drives the “civilising influence”. And the “civilising influence” becomes manifest through the workers’ fight back against that drive to extract surplus labour, and the organisation and self-education built on it.
The semblance of exchange [between workers and capital] vanishes in the course [Prozess] of the mode of production founded on capital. This course itself and its repetition posit what is the case in itself, namely that the worker receives as wages from the capitalist what is only a part of his own labour. This then also enters into the consciousness of the workers as well as of the capitalists. [p.597].
This development-through-contradiction, for Marx, breeds a drive by the working class to press on through the contradictions and to go beyond them by seizing collective control of production.
Marx did not attempt to carry this argument through in full detail in Capital. A pungent condensation of it is however there, in passages little-noticed in summaries of Capital but nonetheless central to the book’s argument about the revolutionary role of the working class and specifically of the working class in the most advanced capitalist industry.
Modern Industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative... It is continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the labour-process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another. But if Modern Industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer, on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularisations... This absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer... Variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance at all points, [but] Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes...
By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the processes of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one [Chapter 15, section 9]
As a footnote, to give individual illustration to his argument about the subversive potential of advanced industry’s inherent fluidity, Marx cites the testimony of a French worker who spent time in California:
I never could have believed, that I was capable of working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter-press printing.... Once in the midst of this world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as they do their shirt, egad, I did as the others. As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typographer, slater, plumber, &c. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit to any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.
“Up to its blessed end”
There is nothing in the Grundrisse about trade-union struggles, organisation, utilisation of the political arenas of bourgeois democracy, i.e. the specific forms through which Marx saw workers collectively becoming “less of molluscs, more of humans”, and indeed more than just the dialectical obverse of capital, more than just the poverty accompanying capitalist wealth. For that we need to read The Poverty of Philosophy, Wages Price and Profit, and Marx’s writings for the First International.
But there are two things in the Grundrisse, very important for our times, which is not in those better-known articles and pamphlets.
Contrary to what became the assumption — reasonable on the face of it — of most Marxists in the era after Marx’s death, Marx here suggests that every building-up of the labour movement, until our final victory, must be only provisional and temporary, subject to be undermined by the constant whirl of capitalist restructuring. The movement will then need to be built up again, with a changed, more developed, more “individualistic” working class..
Marx takes the emergence of “labour in general”, as distinct from a segregation of the population into traditional trades and callings, as characteristic of developed capitalist society, and as existing empirically “as its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society — the United States”.
This is not “labour in general” established by the fact that everyone does much the same sort of labour. On the contrary. “Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant” [p.104].
As capital develops, therefore, labour becomes every more differentiated and ever more fluid. Every form of labour organisation built up on fixed communities or trades is, in time, dissolved, the movement has to rebuild itself on the basis of an even richer, more diverse, “totality of real kinds of labour”.
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