[This is the fifth and last of a series of excerpts from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. The first four excerpts are here, here, here and here. This final excerpt is section III of the paper and draws some general political conclusions from the analysis of Marx’s Capital that precedes it. For a link to a full PDF version of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’, containing the footnotes omitted from these blogpost excerpts, see the end of this post – NG.]
The foregoing analysis has implications for contemporary left thinking about strategies for change – strategies aimed in the first instance at reducing inequality, and holding out the prospect in the longer term of a society thoroughly grounded in just and realistic principles of equality.
There is a long tradition of socialist commitment to democracy, and of activism to defend and extend it. From his earliest writings Marx held out the vision of a form of democracy that would transcend the boundaries of parliamentary politics, to run the length and breadth of the social order; and in his mature political writings he asserted, as a necessity for the workers’ movement along the way to a better society, the importance of fighting for democratic gains through trade unions, the ballot box, parliamentary representation and social reform. Even the Leninist tradition, with its instrumental attitude to what it called ‘bourgeois’ democracy, was generally opposed to the ultra-leftism of those who adopted an abstentionist attitude to electoral politics: a workers’ movement unable to make serious headway through democratic elections where these were available to it was unlikely to find itself in a condition to win power by insurrectionist means. In the interwar period Leon Trotsky, for his part, waged a fierce battle against those in the Communist movement who dismissed the differences between parliamentary democracy and fascist dictatorship as being of no account.
Alongside these traditions, however, there were other tropes that were to prove fateful for socialism in the 20th century, justifying as they did – in the name of class struggle and the harsh necessities of political combat – now terror, now the erosion of democratic norms and practices, now out-and-out dictatorship and a wanton disregard for civil liberties and the protections of human rights. There is no need here to rehearse all of this sorry history, but one important aspect of it was the propensity amongst some on the left in parliamentary-democratic countries – people living under the rule of law, with whatever limitations this may have involved in any given case – to make excuses for undemocratic actions, and even open tyranny, elsewhere. The apologetics by western communists and fellow-travelling socialists and liberals for Stalinism (for the purges, the show trials, the gulag) were only the most glaring expression of that propensity. They reflected habits of mind that have persisted on the left to this day, long after the effective demise of the international communist movement.
For there are still voices in this quarter ready to identify with, or at any rate to make exculpating noises on behalf of, undemocratic movements and oppressive regimes. Thinking on the left about the relationship between anti-capitalist struggles, on the one hand, and struggles for democracy, on the other, sometimes displays a tendency to regard anti-capitalism as the primary commitment while democratic norms and procedures are treated as more open to compromise on its behalf. This tendency may perhaps be prompted by standard impulses of political partisanship: on account of which the ‘enemy of my enemy’ becomes, if not my friend, then at least someone to be looked on with greater indulgence. Thus, if capitalism is the main object of antagonism, then movements and regimes regarded as anti-capitalist, but which are also undemocratic, may be given an easier ride than the elected governments of capitalist democracies. But the tendency has some independent theoretical underpinnings as well. It treats the capitalist economy and the political structures of democracy as occupying separate domains, as it were, so that efforts to shift the former in a more egalitarian direction or to replace it with something radically different can, depending on circumstances, take or leave the democratizing requirements of a truly self-active popular movement.
Rescuing the socialist idea from the failed experiments of the twentieth century and the persisting tendency, in a part of the left, towards anti-democratic apologetics must continue to involve (as it has always involved) the insistence that central to the very conception of a transformative socialist-egalitarian practice is that it is democratic at the root: which means in every sphere of economic and political organization. Democracy is not just an optional extra. The commitments to anti-capitalism and democracy are indissolubly linked. The force of the critique of capitalist economies and polities is only weakened by any relaxation of that link in projected socialist-egalitarian alternatives to them. Egalitarian struggles have, today, to be part of the culture of universal human rights that has developed since World War II and is now backed by a global civil society. In light of the previous history of socialism, no mature political populace will readily accept the rationalizations of an earlier epoch regarding the supposed need to curtail democratic rights and liberties because of ‘the struggle’ or of the necessities of economic development.
But beyond these general points, we would argue, in addition, that there are considerations specific to the ‘instituted economic process’ approach that strengthen the case for not driving a wedge between economy and polity.
First, there is no pure or universal model of the capitalist economy or of the relationship at its heart, that between capital and labour. The economy not being a closed system, it and the capital-labour relation are always and everywhere partly formed by political processes and legal norms; they are not simply a product of economic power. As we have attempted to show in the previous section, such legal, political and other social structures are co-constitutive of the pressure on the possessors of labour-power to exchange it. All the more reason to see the project of improving and extending the democracy of the polity and that of establishing just principles of economic equality as intimately related.
It is, after all, an old socialist theme that the democracy of the state is bound to be flawed, at best, where it coexists with economic relations in which wealth is distributed as unequally as it is in every capitalist country (with whatever variations). In these circumstances political power and influence, too, are bound to be unequal. But the causal relationship runs in the opposite direction as well. A state, a party or a movement from which political democracy is absent, or in which it is severely restricted, is not well fitted to achieving egalitarian objectives. The historical evidence is overwhelming that power which is not responsible and accountable to those over whom it is wielded will tend towards decisions unduly favourable to the interests of those who exercise it and the social groups – classes, strata or whatever – to which they are most closely linked. Democracy with exceptions, curtailments and apologetic excuses will not only be uncongenial to any politically experienced electorate today, casting doubt upon the sincerity of the egalitarian ideals professed by those seeking power in pursuit of change, it is also inadequate to the tasks of a transformative egalitarian movement. Political democracy and social and economic equality are profoundly interdependent, and the want of either must distort and weaken the other.
Second, it is no longer feasible to think of socialist-egalitarian progress as turning upon a single axis of change, in which capitalist exploitation in the classic Marxian meaning is abolished. It is no longer feasible because the model of relative economic advantage and disadvantage on which that conception relied was itself too simple, as we have shown. There is not a unique and universal differentiation according to which one class simply owns productive material assets while another class simply does not. Though this is indeed still a relevant and crucial dimension of economic differentiation and one yielding great relative benefits to those on the better off – that is, the possessing – side of it, real capitalist societies are also characterized by a multiplicity of other differentials of comparative advantage, not all of them reducible to that which divides the owners of material means of production from the non-owners. There are gendered inequalities, differences in access to educational opportunity, differences in access to available work, or to well-paid work, and to space and housing and health and insurance, and to a clean environment and to water, and more. Combating exploitation cannot, consequently, be thought of as simply undoing the appropriation by one class of the surplus produced by another. A more comprehensive conception of what a just egalitarian distribution of advantages and disadvantages would look like is required.
Nor can this issue of the multiple sources of comparative advantage be finessed by referring it to the Marxian distinction between productive and unproductive labour – so that the essential division is said to be between capitalist exploiters and those engaged in productive labour for profit, while other categories of ‘unproductive’ worker supposedly share in the surplus appropriated by the capitalist class, share in it in exchange for servicing the consumer wants of that class. The very distinction between productive and unproductive labour is predicated on the theory of value – value as labour-determined – that we have shown to be conceptually incoherent. This distinction cannot survive the theory’s demise, and neither can any secondary theoretical argument which depends on it.
Furthermore, there are grounds for thinking that the Marxian focus on the (class) distinction between those monopolizing the means of production and those without access to any such material means played its part in what went wrong with the would-be anti-capitalist revolutions of the 20th century. There was an assumption that collectivization of the means of production and state planning would, in and of themselves, halt the genesis of fresh inequalities at their source, so to speak. Abstracting from other possible sources of inequality, however, disguised from supporters of those failed socialist experiments the danger of new inequalities posed by state ownership of property itself.
The multiplicity of dimensions of comparative advantage is a conclusion with far-reaching theoretical consequences. It means, at bottom, that the conception of a route to socialism based on the abolition of class exploitation must give way to – or evolve into – one of a route based on a more comprehensive theory of just egalitarian distribution. The latter denouement is an ironic one. It is ironic when one bears in mind the dismissive attitude of so many within the Marxist tradition to normative liberal theory. But, in any case, realities of political economy – always the primary domain of Marxist research and argument – themselves dictate that outcome, since they are the site of many inequalities, multiple sources of differential advantage, dividing not only owners from non-owners, but also high-earning scientific personnel and earners in other relatively privileged categories from cheap labour; male from female workers; those with and those without higher education; people with ample pensions and people without; some with access to free or easily affordable medical care and others without; and so on. A society free of exploitation in the classic Marxian meaning would not, in and of itself, be a justly egalitarian one unless it were based on more generally just principles of distribution.
On the left today we are therefore confronted with a task of analysis and advocacy in support of the case that just distributive principles are egalitarian ones, and of explaining further what specific concept of equality is to be supported. For it is a well-known feature of the general notion of equality that it needs to be further specified before one can know what it entails. A plea for equality always invites the question equality of what? In face of the plurality of existing differences of comparative advantage and disadvantage, should the left be arguing for equality of resources, or equality of well-being, or equality of opportunity, or Rawlsian inequalities justified only when they benefit the least well-off, or something else again? We shall not undertake the necessary task of analysis and advocacy here, but only insist on its being necessary, and the more so in the light of an ‘instituted economic process’ approach, highlighting as this does the many dimensions of privilege and lack that exist across contemporary capitalist economies.
We will add, merely by way of indication, that exact equality of resources cannot be the aim where differences of need are taken into account, and equality of well-being is also problematic as an objective if the free choices of individuals are to be respected, since free choices inevitably generate unequal results – owing to differences in luck and to good and bad judgement – and it is debatable whether, or how far, such different outcomes ought to be ‘levelled’ by interventionist public policy. Equality of opportunity is also not unproblematic. What is often called ‘equality of opportunity’, as things are, is plainly not at all that, given how inequalities in one generation get passed on to the next. The advantages which richer parents can buy for their children, in terms of better physical surroundings, better health care, better education, better everything, are bound to mean that their children have greater opportunities than poorer children. Genuine equality of opportunity – or something approximating it, for perfection in this domain, as in most, is likely to be unattainable – could only be based on a greater equality of condition in the parental generation, so to put it, and on serious efforts to counteract the disadvantages among its offspring that are passed on willy-nilly.
Thinking through these problems and proposing solutions to them is an indispensable theoretical undertaking, and its necessity and difficulties throw a cruel light back on the self-satisfied stance of those Marxists who still profess to believe that Marx, though he supplied so little in this domain, was pretty much just ‘right’ about the things that matter most.
Because an egalitarian, non-exploitative society would aim to provide a decent life for all its members according to just criteria of need, effort, desert and so on, the democratic political institutions of such a society cannot be persuasively theorized purely by reference to abolishing divisions of class. Everyone is to be included in rights of citizenship and covered by the basic protections afforded by human rights. A reconstructed materialist politics must be as insistent on democratic rights and liberties as it is on the necessary transformation of global capitalism; as committed to the democratic traditions that have evolved within bourgeois societies as to the task of creating more egalitarian economic forms.
It is a striking feature of recent times and of the economic and financial crises with which the institutions of national, regional and international governance are still struggling that the left has mostly not been the clear beneficiary, in gaining fresh and vigorous mass support. Here and there Marx’s name is invoked and his theories are commended as having a new – or revived – relevance. But such talk is principally at a superficial level; it is not translated into serious programmatic argument or policy recommendation, a state of affairs suggesting that the old Marxian ‘unity’ of theory and practice remains sundered. In the light of what has been argued by us here, this should not surprise anyone. Former models of socialist strategy or egalitarian politics, based as they centrally were on the closed-system conception of labour, exploitation and the capitalist economy more generally, need to be rethought from the bottom up.
They need also to be integrated – as they never properly were in the traditional Marxist political vision – in a fully elaborated ethical critique and alternative. One of the signal strengths of the original conception of a transformative socialist politics founded in historical materialist analysis was to insist that its critique of capitalism must be more than merely abstract criticism. It was to be grounded in (a) an understanding of real socio-economic tendencies, and (b) a real social movement capable of effecting change. At the same time Marx bequeathed to the tradition he founded a one-sided rejection of moral advocacy (sometimes formulated in overtly relativizing terms) that was out of harmony with the commitment to certain universal values implicit in his critique of exploitation. A reconfiguration of materialist thinking towards progressive change needs not only to improve on the economic analysis founded by Marx, but in so far as such improvements are called for, as we have argued above that they are, it must also be able to engage with normative arguments in the area of human rights and different conceptions of equality and justice. No more than in Marx’s day will a moral critique of capitalism suffice; but unless there is a moral case for socialism there is no case for it, and it needs to be properly articulated.
[For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]