At 15:36 30/05/99 +0200, Hugh wrote
what was only his second contribution in 4 weeks, despite a post at 4 weeks
ago emphasising that we are in a revolutionary situation.
My own theory of his relative silence is that on the question of Kosovo he
has major differences with Bob Malecki tactically and strategically, and
instead of arguing on the merits of the case, he thinks it important to
keep an opportunist bloc with Bob, because
>It's all the crisis of leadership, as Trotsky said.
He hopes by minimising his differences, Bob will listen to his lead.
>Want to help bring a revolutionary crisis to a successful conclusion?
>Help build a revolutionary working-class leadership like the LIT.
Hence also the froth with which he tries to attack what I and Doug have
written as non-revolutionary.
>Chris argues as if any reforms at all are anathema to revolutionary
>Marxists.
My words were carefully chosen and they do not preclude revolution. I
challenge Hugh to substantiate his argument by direct quotation.
>This is crap.
Having set up the straw man, he is knocked over with bravura. The purpose
of the exercise.
>The question is who initiates the changes and why.
No. Here is a line of demarcation. Hugh clearly does not accept my argument
that capitalism is reforming itself all the time. He applies a virginity
test to reforms. They must not have been fingered by the bourgeoisie first.
This is nonsense.
If you accept Marx's argument about the socialisation of the means of
production going on independently of the conscious will of anyone, then
there will be times when this process can be accelerated by positive
initiatives or purely negatively, reactively by the bourgeoisie.
It absolutely requires the working class and working people to identify
those possibilities and the divisions within the bourgeoisie about which
way to turn, to be able to ally with a section of the reforming
bourgeoisie, and then take over the momentum from them.
>The postwar welfare state era in Europe was initiated by the bourgeoisie as
>an expensive concession to buy off the working class before it became
>conscious of the revolutionary character of its demands and especially its
>own social clout. With the help of the Stalinists in Moscow and the CPs
>worldwide, the bourgeoisie succeeded.
This undialectical and pessimistic description of the class struggle does
not recognise that without progressive struggle in the countries concerned
and in the world situation, the bourgeoisie would never have felt under
pressure to make such concessions.
Contrast the positive way Marx hailed the victory of the 10 hours bill.
>As for the present stage, "reforms" is just a euphemism for slash and burn
>reaction,
Nonsense. This is Hugh in his most hacklike revolutionary agitator mode. No
doubt the third world has borne the burden of the latest crisis of
capitalism, but the proposition that there are no reforms other than slash
and burn reaction, contadicts Hugh's argument of a few lines earlier about
buying off the working class.
The western governments have just lowered interest rates to ease the
pressure on mass consumers and keep them purchasing. Not much slash and
burn there - with good reason - the crisis might have spread to the
imperialist heartlands.
>so why anyone at all apart from the bourgeoisie and their
>spittle-licking Third Way social-democrat and recycled Stalinist pals would
>welcome such "reforms" is a mystery.
Bombast. But tautological I suppose. If anyone can see any reforms going on
short of slash and burn, their only purpose in referring to them must be to
be lick-spittle, not in order to analyse the situation more accurately, and
then to aid the process of the working class and the working people taking
the initiative.
But after the flourishes we come to the core proposition of Marx under
discussion:-
>As for Marx's meaning, it was always that the question at the heart of
>capitalist society was the exploitation of labour by the mechanism of
>unequal exchange between labour and capital. Labour sells its labour power,
>whose exercise produces value in far greater amounts than the labour power
>costs. Because of the sale (variable capital for labour power), capital
>acquires the right to appropriate the labour and its value.
But Marx is *also* saying that there is a process of socialisation of the
means of production going on.
He even says in Chapter 27 of Volume 3 (thanks for the reference Doug) that
one of the two characteristics immanent in the credit system is .. "to
reduce more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth".
Marx argues that the joint stock company causes the undertakings of capital
to "assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private
undertakings".
"It is the abolition of private property within the framework of capitalist
production itself."
!!!
This is perhaps for Hugh, a mere pirouette -
>Whatever pirouettes the capitalists, their direct representatives and
>apologists, and their indirect agents and apologists try and dazzle us
>with, the choreography is less important than the dance.
So Hugh wishes to distract attention from the choreography by asking us to
look only at the dance:
>Until the rule of capital is ended, this expoitation will continue.
And how will it be ended if we should all get bored awaiting the resolution
of the crisis of Trotskyist world leadership?
- if we cannot get to grips with the process that exists now, and take over
from the small number of bourgeoisie the levers of its management?
>The reason our indirect (not so bloody indirect actually) apologists for
>capital (such as Doug and Chris, with Rob flapping around them like one of
>Dante's trimmers on the banks of the Styx)
How is this apologising for capital, if capital does not mean the wider
category of accumulated social wealth (since wealth is accumulated in all
societies that are not subsistence ones) but means the private ownership of
the means of production, which we are saying, like Hugh, we wish to socialise?
>....keep trying to make us think
>that capital is doing OK and will save the world if only it's managed
>properly, is that they cannot conceive of a society without capital.
This is a caricature of positions that Doug, Rob and I have presented all
with our different emphases, but no where complacent about a society or an
economy dominated by capital. Certainly we do not say that the economic
crisis is going to lead imminently to a revolutionary crisis, in the narrow
sense that Hugh uses that expression, but nor does he.
>They
>do not see capital as a historical development from previous non-capital
>forms of production, and they do not see it as developing into a subsequent
>non-capital form of production. For them production is capital and capital
>is production (same crap as the market socialists), period.
An attack on straw men.
The chapter referenced argues in joint-stock companies labour is entirely
divorced from capital ownership of means of production and surplus labour:
"This result of the ultimate development of capitalist production is a
necessary transitional phase towards the reconversion of capital into the
property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the
individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers,
as outright social property."
>But if Rob would flap less and look about him more, he'd see just how
>energetically the Dougs and Chrises attack revolutionary analyses and
>policies,
evidence please, since Hugh agrees there is not currently a revolutionary
"crisis".
>and how eager they are to support bourgeois alternatives as long
>as there's some euphemistic label assuring them that their particular
>brand of capitalism is humanitarian, just, user-friendly and possessing a
>social conscience.
This is a deliberate obfuscation of the question of who is leading the
struggle for a reform and implies instead that no limited temporary allies
are possible in the political struggle. But some members of the bourgeoisie
do at times possess a social conscience. What is so heretical about that?
As the Communist Manifesto says, some members of the bourgeoisie move over
politically to the proletariat. Is marxism an exercise in demonology?
>He'd also see how the working class is always confused with the labour
>aristocracy and the petty-bourgeoisie when it comes to property, shares
>etc.
No need for such confusion at all. Of course with such an extensive move
towards social "forms" of production as joint stock companies, and with a
narrowing of the number of absolutely exploiting individuals, it is
necessary for the working people to be divided and for a large portion of
them in the short term to support the status quo.
That can be changed. But not by calling privileged workers members of the
bourgeoisie. And not by treating the bourgeoisification of the working
class as a whole, something to be used as a basis to divide the working
class.
>Class analysis in Marx's terms leads to the conclusion that history is
>the history of class struggle, and none of the great revolutionary thinkers
>and leaders ever subsequently departed from this fundamental axiom as
>stated in the fanfare opening of the Communist Manifesto. And no one who
>denies its validity has any claim to be a revolutionary socialist or a
>Marxist. Henwoodist or Bufordist, yes, but not Marxist.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Hugh
Who wants to deny the relevance of class struggle in converting the already
existing social "form" of production into a socialist content? How is it
possible without class struggle? But also how will it be possible if we are
saddled with such rigid dogmatism that Hugh displays in obscuring Marx's
message?
To reforms!
Chris Burford
London
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