2. Growth of Productive Forces; Domestication of Human Beings
The capitalist mode of production becomes decadent only with the
outbreak of effective revolution against capital. As of now, human
beings have been decaying for a century, they have been domesticated by
capital. This domestication is the source of the proletariat's
inability to liberate humanity. Productive forces continue to grow, but
these are forces of capital.
"Capitalist production develops technique
and the combination of the social production process only by
simultaneously using up the two sources from which all wealth
springs: the land and the laborer." [9]
It makes no sense to proclaim that humanity's productive forces have
stopped growing, that the capitalist mode of production has begun to
decay. Such views reveal the inability of many theoreticians to
recognize the run-away of capital and thus to understand communism and
the communist revolution. Paradoxically, Marx analyzed the
decomposition of bourgeois society and the conditions for the
development of the capitalist mode of production: a society where
productive forces could develop freely. What he presented as the
project of communism was realized by capital.
Man elaborated a dialectic of the development of productive forces. [10] He held that human emancipation depended on their fullest expansion.
Communist revolution - therefore the end of the capitalist mode of
production - was to take place when this mode of production was no
longer "large enough" to contain the productive forces. But Marx is
trapped in an ambiguity. He thinks that the human being is a barrier to
capital, and that capital destroys the human being as a fetter to its
development as productive power. Marx also suggests that capital can
escape from the human barrier. He is led to postulate a self-negation
of capital. This self-negation takes the form of crises which he
perceived either as moments when capital is restructured (a
regeneration carried out by the destruction of products inhibiting the
process: another reason why capitalism must disappear), or
as the actual moment when capital is destroyed.
In
other words, while providing the elements necessary for understanding
the real domination of capital over society, Marx did not develop the
concept; he did not recognize the run-away of capital. For Marx, gold
remained a barrier to capital, the contradiction between valorization
and devalorization remained in force, and the plunder and estrangement
of proletarians remained an obstacle to the evolution of capital.
"In the development of productive forces
there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are
brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause
mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces
(machinery and money). . ."
(Before continuing the citation, we should mention the
retardation of those who proclaim that capital now develops only
destructive forces. It turns out that for Marx, in 1847, capital is
destruction; he continued to hold this view.)
". . . and connected with this a class is
called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without
enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the
most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the
majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the
consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the
communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other
classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this
class." [11]
The proletariat is the great hope of Marx and of the revolutionaries of
his epoch. This is the class whose struggle for emancipation will
liberate all humanity. Marx's work is at once an analysis of the
capitalist mode of production and of the proletariat's role within it.
This is why the theory of value and the theory of the proletariat are
connected, though not directly:
"The above application of the Ricardian theory, that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers, leads directly to
communism. But, as Marx indicates too in the above-quoted passage,
formally it is economically incorrect, for it is simply an application
of morality to economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics,
the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who
have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not
to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We
are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our
sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands
upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of
production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever
greater degree. . ." [12]
Marx did not develop a philosophy of exploitation, as Bordiga often
recalled. How will the capitalist mode of production be destroyed, and
what does the "ruin" consist of? (Engels, in 1884, provided
arguments for those who today speak of the decadence of
capitalism.) This is not specified. After Marx the proletariat
was retained as the class necessary for the final destruction, the
definitive abolition of capitalism, and it was taken for granted that
the proletariat would be forced to do this.
Bernstein
grasped this aspect of Marx's theory, and applied himself to
demonstrating that there were no contradictions pushing toward
dissolution. [13] But this led Bernstein to become an apologist for the old bourgeois
society which capital was about to destroy, especially after 1913;
consequently his work does not in any way clarify the present
situation.
Marx
left us material with which to overcome the theory of value, and also
material necessary for overcoming the theory of the proletariat. The
two theories are related, and justify each other. In the Grundrisse,
Marx praises the capitalist mode of production, which he considers
revolutionary. What is not stated explicitly is that the proletariat
has this attribute to the extent that it carries out the internal laws
of capitalism. The proletariat is present in the analysis. Marx
postulates that the proletariat's misery will necessarily push it to
revolt, to destroy the capitalist mode of production and thus to
liberate whatever is progressive in this mode of production, namely the
tendency to expand productive forces.
In Capital the proletariat is no longer treated as the class that represents the
dissolution of society, as negation at work. The class in question here
is the working class, a class which is more or less integrated in
society, which is engaged in revolutionary reformism: struggle
for wage increases, struggle against heavy work imposed on women and
children, struggle for the shortening of the working day.
At
the end of the first volume, Marx explains the dynamic which leads to
the expropriation of the expropriators, to the increase of misery [14] which will force the proletariat to rise against capital. [15]
In the third volume, and also in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,
Marx does not describe a real discontinuity between capitalism and
communism. Productive forces continue to grow. The discontinuity lies
in the fact that the goal of production is inverted (after the
revolution; i.e., the discontinuity is temporal). The goal ceases
to be wealth, but human beings. However, if there is no real
discontinuity between capitalism and communism, human beings must be
wilfully transformed; how else could the goal be inverted? This
is Marx's revolutionary reformism in its greatest amplitude. The
dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional phase (in the Grundrisse it is the capitalist mode of production that constitutes this
transitional phase: this is obviously extremely relevant to the
way we define communism today) is a period of reforms, the most
important being the shortening of the working day and use of the labor
voucher. What we should note here, though we cannot insist on it, is
the connection between reformism and dictatorship.
The
proletariat seems to be needed to guide the development of productive
forces away from the pole of value toward the pole of humanity. It may
happen that the proletariat is integrated by capital, but - and this
is abused by various Marxists - crises destroy the proletariat's
reserves and reinstate it into its revolutionary role. Then the
insurrection against capital is possible again.
Thus
Marx's work seems largely to be the authentic consciousness of the
capitalist mode of production. The bourgeoisie, and the capitalists who
followed, were able to express only a false consciousness with the help
of their various theories. Furthermore, the capitalist mode of
production has realized Marx's proletarian project. By remaining on a
narrowly Marxist terrain, the proletariat and its theoreticians were
outflanked by the followers of capital. Capital, having achieved real
domination, ratifies the validity of Marx's work in its reduced form
(as historical materialism). While German proletarians at
the beginning of this century thought their actions were destroying the
capitalist mode of production, they failed to see they were only trying
to manage it themselves. False consciousness took hold of the
proletariat.
Historical
materialism is a glorification of the wandering in which humanity has
been engaged for more than a century: growth of productive forces
as the condition sine-qua-non for liberation. But by definition all quantitative growth takes place
in the sphere of the indefinite, the false infinite. Who will measure
the "size" of the productive forces to determine whether or not the
great day has come? For Marx there was a double and contradictory
movement: growth of productive forces and immiseration of
proletarians; this was to lead to a revolutionary collision. Put
differently, there was a contradiction between socialization of
production and private appropriation.
The
moment when the productive forces were to reach the level required for
the transformation of the mode of production was to be the moment when
the crisis of capitalism began. This crisis was to expose the
narrowness of this mode of production and its inability to hold new
productive forces, and thus make visible the antagonism between the
productive forces and the capitalist forms of production. But capital
has run away; it has absorbed crises and it has successfully provided a
social reserve for the proletarians. Many have nothing left to do but
to run on ahead: some say the productive forces are not developed
enough, others say they have stopped growing. Both reduce the whole
problem either to organizing the vanguard, the party, or resort to
activities designed to raise consciousness.
Development
in the context of wandering is development in the context of
mystification. Marx considered mystification the result of a reversed
relation: capital, the product of the worker's activity, appears
to be the creator. The mystification is rooted in real events; it is
reality in process that mystifies. Something is mystified even through
a struggle of the proletariat against capital; the generalized
mystification is the triumph of capital. But if, as a consequence of
its anthropomorphization, this reality produced by mystification is now
the sole reality, then the question has to be put differently. 1)
Since the mystification is stable and real, there is no point in
waiting for a demystification which would only expose the truth of the
previous situation. 2) Because of capital's run-away, the
mystification appears as reality, and thus the mystification is
engulfed and rendered inoperative. We have the despotism of capital.
The
assertion that the mystification is still operative would mean that
human beings are able to engage in real relations and are continually
mystified. In fact the mystification was operative once and became
reality. It refers to a historical stage completed in the past. This
does not eliminate the importance of understanding and studying it so
as to understand the movement which leads to the present stage of the
capitalist mode of production and to be aware of the real actors
through the ages.
Both
the mystifying-mystified reality as well as the previously mystified
reality have to be destroyed. The mystification is only "visible" if
one breaks (without illusions about the limitations of this
break) with the representations of capital. Marx's work is very
important for this break. But it contains a major flaw: it fails
to explain the whole magnitude of the mystification because it does not
recognize the run-away of capital.
Earlier,
revolution was possible as soon as the mystification was exposed; the
revolutionary process was its destruction. Today the human being has
been engulfed, not only in the determination of class where he was
trapped for centuries, but as a biological being. It is a totality that
has to be destroyed. Demystification is no longer enough. The revolt of
human beings threatened in the immediacy of their daily lives goes
beyond demystification. The problem is to create other lives. This
problem lies simultaneously outside the ancient discourse of the
workers' movement and its old practice, and outside the critique which
considers this movement a simple ideology (and considers the
human being an ideological precipitate).
[9] Marx, Capital, Vol. I [ Le Capital, I. 1, t. 2, p. 182. ]
[10] This requires a detailed
study which would include the analysis of labor. In the article which
follows we begin this study: it presents the first conclusions
we've reached. In particular we want to analyze the stage of this
decadence of humanity, how it is expressed, etc. In addition we want to
show the intimate connection between the movement of value and the
dialectic of the productive forces. The end of the movement of value
and of capital is the end of a mode of representation and destroys its
autonomy. The Marxian dialectic will be completely overcome.
[11] Engels, Marx, The German Ideology, [ Moscow, 1964, p. 85. ]
[12] Engels, "Preface" to The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx, New York: 1963, p. 11.
[13] See particularly "The Movement of Income in Modern Society" and "Crises and Possibilities of Adaptation" in Presuppositions of Socialism and the tasks of Social Democracy, Rowohlt Verlag, pp. 75ff.
[14] Here we should be careful, as Bordiga justly observed, not to reduce this to an economic concept.
[15] Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, New York: Random House, pp. 831-837.