A Travesty of Scholarship: A Review of Samuel Farber's "The Politics of Che Guevara"

By Renzo Llorente

As is well known, many works on the Cuban Revolution that promise serious scholarship deliver little more than anti-Revolutionary polemics, and often extremely ill-informed polemics at that. This is true whether the topic is some political or social aspect of the Revolution or one of the Revolution's outstanding figures. One recent example of this phenomenon is Samuel Farber's book on Che Guevara. [1] Published in 2016, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice purports to be, in Farber's words, a work that "analyzes the substantive political ideas" of Che Guevara and "a political portrait focused on Guevara's thought." [2]

In reality, Farber's book contains many claims that are demonstrably false, coupled with a great deal of careless scholarship and numerous dubious interpretations. The cause of these problems is twofold. First, and most importantly, Farber chose to neglect a large amount of what Che actually said and wrote. Secondly, Farber's disdain for the Cuban Revolution, which prevents him from achieving a modicum of fairness, colors his book from beginning to end. Thus, instead of an accurate exposition of Che's political thought, Farber has produced a work that thoroughly distorts or misrepresents many of Che's ideas, and some of his actions (including, as we shall see, Che's role in the possible execution of innocent people).

I have already drawn attention to some of the most glaring inaccuracies in Farber's account of Che's thought in a brief book review published last year, [3] but the space limitations of that review prevented me from discussing more than a small number of the countless problems with The Politics of Che Guevara. The present essay offers a more comprehensive examination of the inaccuracies, errors, distortions and falsehoods in Samuel Farber's study of Che Guevara.

The errors in Farber's study of Che begin on practically the first page: in the "Selected Chronology" preceding the "Introduction," Farber has Che "graduating as a doctor" the month before he took his final exam, and also lists the wrong date in stating when Che was granted Cuban citizenship (he is off by a month). [4] Such inaccuracies are, in themselves, relatively insignificant, and certainly of much less importance than the errors that I discuss below.

Moreover, to this day there remains some uncertainty as regards the exact dates of some episodes in Che's life. Still, the errors that I have mentioned are significant insofar as they testify to the carelessness of Farber's scholarship, while also heralding those errors which are significant and which make The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice wholly unreliable as an account of Che's political thought.

Let me begin by restating four fundamental errors that I noted when I first wrote about Farber's book. Contrary to Farber, Che did indeed accept Marx's view that "the principle of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his work' was the one appropriate to 'socialism'." [5] Contrary to Farber, it is not true that Che's conception of socialism "ignored the hierarchical division of labor." [6] Contrary to Farber, it is not true that Che had no interest in increasing the quantity of consumer goods available to Cubans. [7]

Contrary to Farber, it is not true that giving "economic and political power" to "the working class and its allies" was not "a defining element of Marxism." [8] With regard to each of these questions, it is easy to demonstrate that Farber ascribes positions to Che that he did not in fact hold, and in the review to which I have referred I provided numerous references that plainly give the lie to Farber's claims. [9] (I cited three different passages from Che's works for each claim that I challenged; I could easily have cited several more.) The references were all taken from the seven-volume El Che en la Revolución cubana. [10] This work constitutes the single most comprehensive collection of Che's speeches, articles, interviews, talks, etc.-and runs to more than 3,500 pages-but, as far as one can tell, Farber never bothered to consult it (he never mentions it and the collection is not listed in his bibliography).

Nor, it seems, did Farber make much use of Escritos y discursos, [11] the standard, nine-volume edition of Che's works (which is, however, less complete than El Che en la Revolución cubana). To be sure, Farber includes Escritos y discursos in his bibliography and he does cite some of the texts from that collection that have been translated into English, but virtually all of his (limited) references to untranslated texts from Escritos y discursos are references to passages cited in another author's book. [12]

In any case, it turns out that it is not even necessary to have read more of what Che said and wrote to realize that it is a mistake to ascribe to him some of the views that I have noted, for there are passages at odds with such views in texts that Farber didconsult-i.e., works that he includes in his bibliography, such as theApuntes críticos a la economía política ( Critical Notes on Political Economy). In this work, Che states, in the course of one of his bimonthly meetings with colleagues from the Ministry of Industries, that the purpose of socialism "is to satisfy people's needs, and their ever growing needs; if not, it is not worth being a socialist." [13]

Needless to say, this statement is hard to square with the claim that Che had no interest in increasing the quantity of consumer goods available to Cuban people. In the same meeting (which had been recorded and subsequently transcribed), Che remarks that "retribution in accordance with work starts with [viene del] socialism [and lasts] until communism, and in communism retribution in accordance with need is established." [14] This remark is hardly consistent with Farber's claim, cited above, that Che rejected the idea that "the principle of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his work' was the one appropriate to 'socialism'."

So, had Farber only read the Apuntes-which, he tells us in the Introduction, was one of his two "most fruitful sources" [15] -more carefully, he would have had good reason to refrain from saying some of these things. Indeed, if Farber had only paid closer attention to passages from Che that he himself cites, he would surely have hesitated to make some of the claims that I have cited.

In Chapter Two, for example, Farber cites a speech in which Che states that "one of the premises of the construction of socialism-[is] creating a sufficient quantity of consumer goods for the entire population." [16] Is it really possible to reconcile this statement from Che with Farber's contention that "Guevara's ascetic attitude toward consumer goods aimed to suppress rather than satisfy the material needs of the Cuban people" [17] and that "consumer goods were at best unimportant" [18] for Che?

The extreme carelessness that leads Farber to misattribute many views to Che is, alas, characteristic of the book as a whole. For example, Farber repeats the familiar mistranslation of Fidel's famous dictum on cultural policy, despite the fact that Farber is perfectly fluent in Spanish. Fidel did notsay, "Inside the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing." [19] Rather, he said, "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing" (" dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada " [20] ).

Needless to say, the correct translation has very different implications and, incidentally, implications that Farber himself would presumably accept, insofar as he holds that a "new revolutionary government will need to suppress violent and subversive acts against the new socialist system" and "will also be forced, in specific instances, to curtail the civil liberties of those actively supporting the violent opponents of the revolution." [21] Another example: Farber identifies Spain's POUM, a prominent political force during the Spanish Civil War, as "an anarchist alliance," when, as is well known, it was a Marxist party, as Farber's own English-language rendering of the Party's title makes clear: "Unified Marxist Workers' Party." [22]

Such instances of carelessness are, to be sure, of less importance in assessing Che's life and work than the errors noted above. There is, however, a similar instance of carelessness that is important, as it involves a particularly scurrilous claim. In Chapter Three, Farber notes that Che "was the head of La Cabaña military fortress, where several hundred executions were carried out in the early months of 1959." [23] He goes on to add:

…it cannot be ruled out that there were some innocent people whose executions were carried out at least in part because of Che Guevara's political views. … The historian Lillian Guerra has presented evidence suggesting that Che Guevara repressed and executed some people not because they had killed anybody or committed atrocities but because of their anti-Communist activities, whether inside or outside Batista's government. [24]

Is it really true that there were "several hundred executions" on Che's watch, and is there really evidence that he may have "executed some people… because of their anti-Communist activities"?

According to the lawyer to whom Che entrusted the organization of the revolutionary tribunals, the tribunals' verdicts led to slightly more than 50 executions. [25] It is hard to understand how Farber could have made such a colossal mistake in this connection: his bibliography includes Helen Yaffe's authoritative Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, which cites the lawyer in question. But his reference to "several hundred executions" means that he not only overlooked the information cited in Yaffe's book, but he even ignored the figure included in one of the two sources that he himself cites in the endnote to the paragraph containing the two passages just cited.

This source says that there were 55 documented executions from January to May 1959 while Che was present, a far cry from "several hundred"; and it lists the total number of executions carried out while Che oversaw La Cabaña at 62. [26] In turns out, then, that an article published in contemporary Cuba (which I cite in endnote 25), an anti-Revolutionary US publication cited by Farber, and Yaffee's book (which, again, Farber lists in his bibliography) all offer very similar figures for the number of executions at La Cabaña, which are a fraction of the number given by Farber.

What about the evidence that Che may have "executed some people… because of their anti-Communist activities"? In support of this claim, Farber cites pages 78-79 of Lillian Guerra's Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 . [27] If we consult this source, we find one sentence relevant to Farber's claim: "Within days of first entering the capital after Batista's departure, Che or­dered the execution of BRAC'S [Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities'] FBI-trained director, Lieutenant José Castaño Quevedo, over a chorus of objections from multiple quarters including Andrew St. George." [28]

Guerra's source for this statement is Warren Hinckle and William Turner's The Fish Is Red. If we consult the one page of this work cited by Guerra, we find that what Hinckle and Turner actually say is that Che simply denied the CIA's request to grant Castaño Quevedo-who, the authors tell us on the previous page, "had been promptly sentenced to death by a revolutionary night court" [29] -clemency. (Andrew St. George, Hinckle and Turner add, was a journalist who had approached Che at the behest of the CIA, and had "suggested to Che that it would be 'diplomatic' to grant the CIA its wish about this man Quevedo." [30] )

In short, "some people" turns out to be one man, and "executed" turns out to mean Che refused to overturn a tribunal's sentence. What we find in Farber's account, then, is a misrepresentation of a misrepresentation: he misrepresents a source, which is itself a misrepresentation of another source. Indeed, Guerra not only mispresents what actually happened in saying that Che "ordered the execution," but also provides a highly misleading narrative: Since Che arrived in Havana in the first week of January 1959 and Castaño Quevedo was executed in March, as Guerra herself notes, [31] it is more than a little misleading to state that "within days of first entering the capital…Che or­dered the execution." *

As should be obvious, the errors, inaccuracies and distortions that I have already enumerated-and my list is hardly exhaustive [32] -thoroughly undermine the reliability of The Politics of Che Guevara. But what about Farber's overall interpretation of Che's thought? As it turns out, many aspects of Farber's interpretation of Che's thought prove untenable, for they are based on an extremely selective reading of Che's works (which is, as we have seen, also the reason that Farber wrongly attributes numerous views to Che).

Consider, first of all, Farber's assertion that Che's thought is uncongenial to "individual identity, interest, and self-determination," [33] which is basically a corollary of Farber's thesis-repeated in one form or another on several occasions-that Che espouses a "monolithic conception of socialism." [34] There are two problems with this claim. First of all, one finds many passages in Che's works that suggest just the opposite. [35] The second problem is that Farber's arguments for this claim prove quite unpersuasive. Take, for example, the passages that Farber cites on page 18, passages in which Che refers, among other things, to a situation in which an individual "becomes happy to feel himself a cog in the wheel, a cog that has its own characteristics…a conscious cog." [36] For Farber, this passage-which he cites not from Che's works but from J. L. Anderson's biography-shows that "Guevara's egalitarianism left little room for individual differences or individual rights." [37]

What Farber fails to tell readers is that Che makes the "cog" remark in the course of explaining that "what enslaves man is not work but rather his failure to possess the means of production," and after referring to "the happiness of fulfilling a duty [in working], of feeling [one]self important within the social mechanism." [38] Farber's interpretation, which echoes Anderson's own analysis of the passage cited, ignores Che's central points: it is a certain social arrangement that makes work alienating (Che explicitly refers to "capitalist alienation" in the passage cited by Anderson [39] ), but work can constitute a source of satisfaction if the worker has a sense of fulfilling his or her duty.

The passage thus offers little warrant for the claim that "Guevara's egalitarianism left little room for individual differences or individual rights," and nor does the other passage that Farber cites (another quotation borrowed from Anderson's biography) in the paragraph in which he makes this statement. Incidentally, had Farber bothered to consult Che's original speech instead of citing from Anderson's biography, he would have had to explain why, in a sentence that Anderson omits, Che states that "we are…zealous defenders of our individuality." [40]

As a matter of fact, Che's views on individuality, which I cannot discuss at length here, are similar to those of Marx and Engels. It is important to underscore this affinity with Marx and Engels's ideas because one of the central theses of The Politics of Che Guevara is that Che "was very selective of the aspects of Marxism he adopted as his own." [41]

Farber's interest in Che's relationship to Marxism appears to derive in part from the fact that Farber himself embraces "classical Marxism" ("my political roots are in the classical Marxist tradition that preceded Stalinism in the Soviet Union" [42] ). Farber's self-characterization will surely baffle any Marxists who read his book, for his judgments and overall approach to Che reflect the kind of perspective that one normally associates with Cold War liberalism, or perhaps right-wing social democracy. But Farber's own politics aside, how much truth is there to his thesis that Che's thought represents a significant departure from the ideas of the "classical Marxist" tradition?

One way to assess the plausibility of Farber's effort to pit "classical Marxism" against Che is to consider the positions that Farber correctly attributes to Che. For example, Farber notes Che's defense of "centralized economic planning and the rejection of competition and the law of value," [43] and also observes that Che was opposed to the market and favored "the nationalization of private property." [44] When we combine such positions with positions noted at the outset (Che's concern with the division of labor, his commitment to the empowerment of the working class, etc.),

Farber's attempt to drive a wedge between Che's thought and classical Marxism appears quite misguided. Other positions that Che holds, such as his defense of voluntary labor [45] or his adherence to democratic centralism, [46] were positions which, while not held by Marx and Engels, were of course advocated by Lenin, another "classical Marxist." Since Farber effectively ignores these similarities, it would seem to be the case that it is he, and not Che, who is "very selective of the aspects of Marxism [that] he adopted as his own."

Farber complements his efforts to counterpose Che's political orientation and "classical Marxism" with a strategy that seeks to convince us that Che was in fact a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist. So, for example, Farber not only points out, correctly, that the young Che admired Stalin, but also suggests that "Guevara's 'new man' is remarkably similar to the 'new Soviet person'…that Stalin tried to create in the Soviet Union." [47]

In reality, the qualities that Farber identifies as constitutive of Che's notion of the "new man"-this person is "a selfless and idealistic man, infused with the values and practices of heroism, dedicated to the good of society" [48] -sound a lot like the qualities found in the ideals of human transformation championed by both Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. [49] One could likewise find parallels in classical Marxism to Che's commitment to "unity," which, contrary to Farber's assumptions, hardly qualifies as a "Stalinist" idea. [50] In short, either Che is not the unreconstructed Stalinist that Farber makes him out to be, or Farber must believe that such figures as Lenin and Luxemburg were themselves Stalinists avant la lettre.

Given Farber's interest in encouraging the association of Che with Stalinism (and, we may note in passing, with many of the things that Farber dislikes about the Cuban Revolution, [51] which amount to more or less everything), it will hardly come as a surprise that he also holds that Che's overall political outlook was hopelessly undemocratic. [52] Farber's treatment of the topic of democracy is noteworthy for several reasons. First of all, he fails-yet again-to discuss many texts in which Che does express, either implicitly or explicitly, a commitment to democracy.

Secondly, Farber also fails to take seriously the enormous obstacles to the institutionalization of democracy during the early years of the Cuban Revolution; these obstacles included the United States government's efforts to strangle the Revolution economically-his book barely mentions the absolutely devastating economic embargo-and promote political destabilization, and its support for both counterrevolutionary terrorism and an insurgency in the Escambray Mountains that lasted until the mid-1960s. (Incredibly, Farber claims that "there was no major external or internal threat to the stability of the revolutionary government…in mid-1960." [53]

This would certainly come as news to Cubans, for it was at this was very moment that the US imposed the economic embargo, the Escambray insurgency was beginning to crystallize, and the preparations for the following year's invasion at the Bay of Pigs were starting to get underway.) Thirdly, although he takes Che to task for having "revolutionary perspectives [that] were irremediably undemocratic," [54] Farber offers few details as regards his own conception of "democratic socialism," and the little he does say in this connection is quite unenlightening.

Consider Farber's remarks on repression in defense of the "workplace- and class-centered socialist democracy" [55] that he advocates. ("Class-centered socialist democracy" is, incidentally, an odd formulation, since Marxist socialists-and recall that Farber considers himself a Marxist-view socialism as a phase of social development tending to the abolition of classes; and if by "class-centered" Farber merely means that the working class has power, the phrase is superfluous, at least from a Marxist perspective). Farber appears to believe that certain coercive and repressive measures are consistent with socialist democracy when hedefends them, but not consistent with socialist democracy when they constitute a part of Che's political practice.

For example, Farber grants that a "new revolutionary government will need to suppress violent and subversive acts against the new socialist system in order to defend itself"; in other words, "revolutionary violence is unfortunate, but necessary and inevitable in light of what oppressive ruling groups will do in order to preserve their power." [56] Indeed, he even acknowledges that "the revolutionary government cannot wait until…violent acts take place, but must try to prevent their occurrence whenever possible" [57] and, as we have seen, that "the government will also be forced, in specific instances, to curtail the civil liberties of those actively supporting the violent opponents of the revolution." But why, we may ask, would the restrictions on civil liberties that Farber defends here be more "democratic" than restrictions on the same grounds enacted in Cuba with Che's support?

To be sure, Farber insists that "the repression that the revolutionary government will be forced to carry out, particularly right after the overthrow of the old ruling classes, can be justified and controlled by democratic aims and purposes," [58] but a statement as vague as this hardly helps us to understand why the repression that he endorses is more consistent with socialist democracy than the repression accepted by Che. Moreover, the vagueness found in the passage just cited is characteristic of most of Farber's statements regarding his own vision of social transformation.

For example, Farber's alternative to "Che's revolutionary voluntarism" and "Latin American Communist parties' electoralism" is, as he tells us in his Introduction, "a perspective that posits revolutionary politics as requiring strategic and tactical thinking and action in order to advance the revolutionary process." [59] In light of statements such as these, one wonders why it is that Farber expects us to believe that his own commitments are more likely than Che's to meet "the need for a political process that brings together the politics of revolution, socialism, and democracy," [60] which is, of course, a very real need.

It should be clear at this point that The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice has little to recommend it to anyone interested in a dispassionate assessment of Che, let alone someone who seeks such an assessment from a Marxist perspective. As noted at the outset, Farber has neglected to read much of what Che said and wrote, and this lack of interest in reading Che vitiates one argument after another. Farber's analysis of the essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba" is a case in point. It is fine to undertake a "detailed critique" [61] of Che's famous essay, as Farber does in Chapter Three, but to devote such attention to this one short text, as significant as it is, while at the same time ignoring hundreds and hundreds of important pages of Che's output, makes little sense in a book that promises "a political portrait focused on Guevara's thought."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Farber's narrowly selective reading of Che leads him to criticize Che for neglecting certain topics in "Socialism and Man in Cuba" ("increasing consumer goods," "raising the standard of living of the Cuban population" and "working people controlling their fate by making democratic decisions about social, economic, and political matters" [62] ) even though Che addresses these very topics at length elsewhere. [63] This is not the only way in which Farber's limited interest in Che's writings weakens his "detailed critique" of Che's celebrated essay.

According to Farber, "it is impossible to tell what Che Guevara had in mind" when he referred, in "Socialism and Man in Cuba," to the "first period in the transition to communism or in the construction of socialism." [64] In fact, everyone who has taken the time to study Che's works in some detail knows that Che had in mind a transitional stage from capitalism to socialism in an underdeveloped country, a topic he often explores in other texts and one that he at least mentions in a book that was, Farber tells us in his Introduction, one of his two "most fruitful sources" in writing about Che, namely theApuntes críticos a la economía política. [65]

Despite the fact that The Politics of Che Guevara proves utterly unreliable as an exposition of Che's "substantive political ideas," the book is adorned with several blurbs from prominent left-of-center academics and intellectuals. According to one blurb, Farber is "a scrupulous historian," while another assures us that Farber's polemic "scrupulously reconstructs" Che's thought. Like the blurb that describes Farber's work as "a complex and serious analysis of Guevara," these comments will seem preposterous to any reader already acquainted with Che's writings, but they do serve, unintentionally, a very useful purpose: they remind us that there remains a great deal of work to be done in explaining what Che Guevara truly believed.

This review was originally posted at Marxism-Leninism Today .

Endnotes

[1] Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).

[2] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xvii; xxv.

[3] Review of Sam Farber,The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, International Journal of Cuban Studies, Vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 155-57.

[4] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, viii; x.

[5] Farber, 78.

[6] Farber, 67-8.

[7] Farber, 77-8.

[8] Farber, 107. Significantly, when Farber writes, "Even when he occasionally referred to the working class as playing a role in the seizure of power, he did so in deference to the putative working-class ideology of the Communist Party, treating the working class only as an ideological abstraction" (117), he provides no references.

[9] For the references mentioned, see Review of Sam Farber, 156.

[10] Ernesto Che Guevara, El Che en la Revolución cubana. 7 volumes. (Havana: Editorial Ministerio del Azúcar, 1966).

[11] Ernesto Che Guevara, Escritos y discursos. 9 volumes. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977).

[12] See, for example, Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 144, notes 38, 39 and 40.

[13] Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la Economía Política, ed. María del Carmen Ariet García (Melbourne: Ocean Sur, 2006), 363; my translation. In the original Spanish: "el socialismo es para satisfacer las necesidades y necesidades siempre crecientes de la gente, si no, no vale la pena ser socialista."

[14] Guevara, Apuntes, 339; my translation.

[15] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xxvi.

[16] Farber, 18.

[17] Farber, 77.

[18] Farber, 78.

[19] Farber, 57.

[20] Fidel Castro,"Discurso pronunciado como conclusión de las reuniones con los intelectuales cubanos, Biblioteca Nacional 'José Martí'," in Habla Fidel: 25 discursos en la Revolución, ed. Pedro Álvarez Tabío (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2008), 205. One could translate the first word as "inside," as Farber chooses to do, but the word that Farber renders as "outside" is invariably translated as "against" in English.

[21] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 74; 75.

[22] Farber, 87.

[23] Farber, 72-73.

[24] Farber, 73.

[25] Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution(Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 292-93, note 5 and Felipa de las Mercedes Suárez Ramos , "Tribunales revolucionarios: Monumento a la justicia," Trabajadores, January 19, 2014: http://www.trabajadores.cu/20140119/tribunales-revolucionarios-monumento-la-justicia/ . While both sources cite the lawyer to whom I refer, Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada Ramos, they provide slightly different figures for the total number of executions.

[26] María Werlau, "Las víctimas olvidadas del Che Guevara: ¿Cuántos fusilamientos están documentados? CaféFuerteDecember 2, 2014: http://cafefuerte.com/msociedad/19698-las-victimas-olvidadas-del-che-guevara-cuantos-fusilamientos-estan-documentados/ (Farber's endnote lists December 1 as the publication date.)

[27] 145, note 50.

[28] Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 79.

[29] Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War against Castro (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 59. The names of the members of the tribunal that judged Quevedo are included in the article "Capitán José J. Castaño Quevedo, Martír": http://www.autentico.org/oa09253.php .

[30] Hinckle and Turner, The Fish is Red, 60.

[31] Guerra, Visions of Power, 79.

[32] One might also mention in this connection Farber's peculiar-and questionable-treatment of Ernest Mandel's, very lengthy definition of "the law of value," which Farber cites almost verbatim but without quotation marks (107). The definition, taken from the glossary to Mandel's Late Capitalism, contains more than 80 words. Farber's changes are limited to the insertion of two commas, an Americanization of the spelling of one word ("labor"), the removal of a hyphen and a dash, and the conversion of "i.e." into "that is." Nonetheless, he presents his formulation as, in effect, a paraphrase.

[33] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xix.

[34] Farber, 67; see also xix, 19, 93, and 117.

[35] See, for example, El Che en la Revolución cubana, Vol. I, 164; Vol. III, 433; and Vol. IV, 373.

[36] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 18

[37] Farber, 18.

[38] Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life(London: Bantam Books, 1997), 605.

[39] Anderson, Che Guevara, 604.

[40] El Che en la Revolución cubana , Vol. II, 200; my translation. In the original Spanish: "nosotros somos…celosos defensores de nuestra individualidad."

[41] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, xix

[42] Farber, xvii.

[43] Farber, 90.

[44] Farber, 77; 152, n. 66.

[45] Farber, 78-79.

[46] Farber, 85.

[47] Farber, 146, n. 63.

[48] Farber, 76.

[49] According to Luxemburg, "One cannot realize socialism with lazy, frivolous, egoistic, thoughtless and indifferent human beings. A socialist society needs human beings who, whatever their place, are full of passion and enthusiasm for the general well-being, full of self-sacrifice and sympathy for their fellow human beings, full of courage and tenacity in order to dare to attempt the most difficult" ("The Socialization of Society," in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004], 348). As for Lenin, see, for example, "A Great Beginning: Heroism of the Workers in the Rear; 'Communist Subbotniks'," in Collected Works, Vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 423 and 427, and "From the Destruction of the Old Social System to the Creation of the New," in Collected Works, Vol. 30 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 517.

[50] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 84.

[51] For example, Farber assures us that "Che Guevara helped to establish in the mid-1960s" a "mass media system" that "was totally monolithic" (71), but never bothers to tell us what, exactly, Che's role was in this connection.

[52] See Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 117 and the passage cited below.

[53] Farber, 71.

[54] Farber, xviii.

[55] Farber, xxiii.

[56] Farber, 74; xx.

[57] Farber, 74.

[58] Farber, 75.

[59] Farber, xxiv.

[60] Farber, xxvi. Farber restates this conviction on page 120.

[61] Farber, xxvi.

[62] Farber, 78; 81.

[63] Again, I provide references in the review cited above.

[64] Farber, Politics of Che Guevara, 78.

[65]

For some passages in which Che refers to this stage, see my

The Political Theory of Che Guevara

(London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018), 154, note 13.

Learning from our Elders: Kwame Somburu and Scientific Socialism

By Colin Jenkins

A dear friend of mine passed away in 2016. He was a lifelong revolutionary activist and quite possibly the most interesting man in the world (sorry, Dos Equis guy). His name was Kwame Somburu, formerly Paul Boutelle.

I came into Kwame's life through chance when, after a journey that resembled more than a dozen lifetimes, his eclectic path led him to Albany, NY. It was 2012, and Kwame was well into his 70s when he entered the capital district activist scene. He was a bit of an enigma, presenting a uniquely powerful blend of principled conviction and carefree humor. Unlike many activists, he was immediately lovable; not bitter, not rancorous, not pushy, and not self-inflated. He was grizzled, yes, but in an old-school way, where you could almost see the wisdom oozing from his pores. He had every reason in the world to possess a runaway ego, but nonetheless carried a calm humility that could not be mistaken. In an oft-aimless world, he was the personification of guidance.

Kwame undoubtedly carried the emotional scars of growing up Black in America, as well as the spiritual exhaustion of being on the front lines of struggle for five decades. Yet he was bulletproof, unfazed by the cruel confines of American society, which he had long broken from in his push to lead a fierce and principled revolution against the roots of this society: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Kwame's list of achievements and experiences would require an entire book to do them justice. He had run for public office nine times throughout the 60s and 70s, once as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. He spent these decades speaking on the street corners of Oakland and Harlem, giving lectures at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and appearing on numerous TV and radio shows, most notably partaking in a contentious debate with William F. Buckley in 1968 on Buckley's popular show, Firing Line.

Kwame was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (early 60s), participated in the 1963 March on Washington, co-founded Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam (1965), spoke at numerous Black Power Conferences through the 60s, and assisted in organizing 400,000 people from the Native Sioux, Puerto Rican, and African-American communities to rally at the United Nations in 1967.

In 1970, Kwame served as the chairman of the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, an organization that spoke out against the U.S.-supported crimes of the Israeli government. Representing an early voice in support of the Palestinian struggle, Kwame toured Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria as a guest of the General Union of Palestine Students. In 1993, Kwame engaged in a speaking tour throughout Europe to discuss Malcolm X, the film about his life, and in defense of Black Nationalism and Socialism.

Despite all of this, Kwame's most endearing quality was his ability to inject his principles into humor. After living a few years in upstate New York, he regularly joked that there was "only one kind of white supremacy that cannot be denied…snow." He always made a point to immediately correct someone's usage of "history" by responding with, "it's herstory…because you can't have man without womb-man." He talked about his nationally televised appearance-turned-debate with William F. Buckley like a pugilist would talk about an old street fight in their prime: "Buckley had no idea how to respond to historically-informed analysis…he was a mental midget."

Kwame was proud of his performance on Buckley's show [ watch the entire episode here -Eds.], and rightfully so. He would encourage folks to watch it whenever he had the chance. He did this not in a boastful or braggadocios manner, but in a way that was meant to empower those of us in the trenches-as if to say, "here I was, a Black man in the belly of the beast and from modest beginnings, largely self-taught, staring down an Ivy League-educated white man and conservative icon who came from one of the most privileged paths imaginable." On national television. And not only staring down, but bodying on all levels-intellectually, ideologically, logically, historically, and morally, ala Malcolm X at the Oxford debates.

He masterfully defended the Cuban revolution to Buckley, justifying the harsh treatment of Cuban reactionaries by explaining that if a people's revolution occurred in the US, "I'm sure there will be a lot of Mississippi sheriffs who would be put on trial." To counter Buckley's misrepresentation of socialism, Kwame accurately described his party as "a party which represents social forces that desire change" due to a deadly and exploitative capitalist system and its embryonic Native genocide and "500-year slave trade" that resulted in the deaths of "100 million black people." When pressured further about his beliefs, Kwame brilliantly flipped the script, telling Buckley, "What are you representing? You're representing George Washington, you're representing Custer, you're representing an imperialist, oppressive, racist system. So, don't attack socialism on the assumption that the system you represent-which is full of lies, hypocrisy, and murder-has been so perfect. The only thing capitalism has done is to provide opportunists like yourself with the opportunity to be parasites on the backs of oppressed people." When Buckley tried to shut Kwame down by claiming, "American Negroes are free," and that he would "get more Negro votes" if he ran, Kwame nailed the coffin by snapping, "I'm sure of one thing… if you went down to Mississippi and told Black people they were free, you would be running and it wouldn't be for office."

During our time together, Kwame described his ideological development in his own words: "In 1960, after a few years of independent study (from a scientific perspective) in many and varied historical/contemporary areas, but mainly African and African American history, the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and acquired knowledge from life experiences, I declared myself to be a Black Nationalist-class definition-and a Scientific Socialist." Within a multitude of wisdom and guidance, it dawned on me that this unassuming portion was perhaps his most important-scientific socialism.

Or maybe it wasn't so unassuming. When describing his political orientation, Kwame was intent on always including "scientific" before socialist. Whenever bluntly asked if he was a socialist, Kwame would quickly respond "scientific socialist," always with an emphasis on the scientific part. If engaged in a political or theoretical discussion, he would sometimes refer to socialism, only to quickly correct himself with a "that is, scientific socialism." He wanted folks to understand that socialism goes deeper than utopian idealism; that it is rooted in a scientific, materialist analysis. It's safe to say the commitment to this message was obsessive. So much so that it may have been easy for many to view it as a trivial quirk.

And while I always appreciated his relentless effort of being literal, I too underestimated the importance of the emphasis. That was until 2015, when Bernie Sanders emerged as a formidable candidate for president.

To those of us in radical circles, Bernie was always viewed as an interesting member of the entrenched political class-a man who spent his entire career as a U.S. Senator flopping back and forth between maintaining the imperialist state and serving as a thorn in the side of wealthy capitalists. Bernie was known for his Senate hearings, where he would routinely grill a CEO or financier, denounce economic inequality and poverty, and put on a valiant show in the name of morality. In a bit of a stretch and with some exaggeration, he could be given some credit for helping to spark the Occupy movement. However, not a whole lot beyond that. Despite his entertaining interludes, capitalism and its war machine always continued unabated, running roughshod over much of the world and many Americans.

Despite his predictable impotence while serving as a cog in a rotten machine, Bernie's emergence onto the national stage was beneficial in one way: It paved the way for the fateful return of the term "socialism." As a result, socialism has entered public discourse once again, millennials in droves are now referring to themselves as socialists, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have experienced historic swelling in their ranks, from 5,000 members in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018 , and it led The Guardian to ask the question, " Why are there suddenly millions of socialists in America ?" even several months before the 2016 election. This development also indirectly helped authentic socialist candidates, like the Socialist Party USA's (SP-USA) Mimi Soltysik, the Party for Socialism and Liberation's (PSL) Gloria La Riva, and the Workers World Party's (WWP) Monica Moorehead to gain more momentum in their abbreviated tours across the country.

However, along with this sudden resurgence has been a lot of backlash and confusion. The backlash has come in the form of sensationalist tactics that are undoubtedly the product of an intentionally dumbed-down society. Red-baiting is being deployed from both sides of mainstream politics-by conservatives through their typical anti-intellectual and ahistorical knee-jerk reactions, and by liberals through a bizarre and equally ahistorical conflation of Trump, Russia, and Communism, which has reached the absurd level of associating the hyper-capitalist boss, Trump, with the hammer and sickle, a symbol that stands for industrial and agricultural workers uniting in opposition to capitalist bosses. The latter development has led to the chronic overuse of the term "democratic socialism"-a redundancy born of red-scare and cold-war propaganda-by those who moonlight in liberal spaces.

The confusion has come in the form of hordes of young people embracing a term that they have not researched or read up on. If you ask a few dozen, newly-ordained "socialists" in the United States what socialism is, you may get a dozen different answers. Many will be sure to insist that "socialism is not communism!" out of a residual fear still emanating from corporate media. Many describe socialism as nothing more than New-Deal liberalism, a tame form of capitalism that includes stronger social safety nets - an explanation surely rooted in the Sanders candidacy and Bernie himself. Others may give half-baked answers, vaguely referring to Nordic countries, cooperative business models, and even Guaranteed Basic Incomes in an attempt to separate themselves from the confusion.

In coming full circle, the answer to this backlash and confusion is found in my late friend, Kwame Somburu, or more specifically in his unapologetic, principled, and informed embrace of scientific socialism: The use of scientific methods, rooted in the work of Karl Marx (a materialist conception of history and dialectical materialism), that adequately analyze both the structure and evolutionary functioning of the capitalist system to expose inherent contradictions, exploitative and alienating underpinnings, surplus value, and the laws of accumulation of capital.

In "plain, proletarian English," scientific socialism is genuine socialism-an accurate breakdown of capitalism and a realization that it must come to an end if we have any hopes of living in a just and sustainable world. It means a constant, deliberate focus on pinpointing and destroying all forms of oppression, or as Kwame succinctly put it, "analysis of capitalism/imperialism, fascism, racism, and colonialism" with the purpose of "worker's revolution, colonial revolution, self-determination for all peoples, and relevant contribution towards a working-class world revolution." This does not mean a tightly monitored form of capitalism; it means no more capitalism. It does not mean government control; it means worker control of the means of production. It does not mean guaranteed income for all; it means workers, families, and communities finally enjoying the fruits of our labor. It does not mean "bread lines"; it means reducing massive amounts of waste through community-run production and the de-commodification of basic human needs. It does not mean equality; it means justice.

Although he never waned, Kwame would be rejuvenated by recent developments. But he would also be praising the merits of scientific socialism like never before. In a time of confusion, let's follow Kwame.

This was originally published at Monthly Review .

A Humanist Capitalism?: Dissecting Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential Platform

By Charles Wofford

One of the most delightful experiences I've had as a leftist is when I hear someone who has no apparent class consciousness express, seemingly from nowhere, a remarkably perceptive comment on class society. I recall a coworker once mentioning aloud how strange it was that we were all so frightened of the boss and what they might do to us. Entrepreneur and 2020 democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang of Venture for America has given us another example with his essay, " Humanity is more important than money - it's time for capitalism to get an upgrade ." Throughout the article, Yang advocates for a new capitalism, based on three principles: that humanity is more important than money, that the individual person ought to be the unit of the economy rather than the dollar, and that markets exist to serve "common goals and values." In the end, Yang explicitly calls for federal government intervention to "reorganize the economy."

There is little to disagree with in Yang's moral analysis and his point that capitalism does not serve the interests of the great mass of people. To be clear, I also think the government ought to reorganize the society along more egalitarian lines. But Yang also appeals to certain widely accepted economic beliefs about the "invisible hand," and self-interest and competition being the main drivers of economic prosperity. As a result, Yang's case is subject to the same critique that Marx made of the classical political economists in his 1844 economic manuscripts :

"Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property...Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild..."

Translation: Like the classical political economists, Yang looks at the capitalist world in which we live and simply takes it as a natural order, whose economic tendencies are unchanging laws. Because he does not understand the historical origins of the divisions of labor that make up capitalism, Yang can posit such oxymorons as "human-centered capitalism." Because he sees capitalism in the misleading and pedantic terms of supply-and-demand ("capitalism prioritizes what the world does more of") he thinks we need to merely demand a more just world and capitalism will provide it. Yang is clearly not involved in activist spaces, otherwise he would know that people have been making radically humanist and egalitarian political demands for longer than capitalism has been around, and at no time has capitalism worked toward those goals. If Yang read up on the founding of the United States (particularly Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10), he would know that the founding fathers intended this anti-egalitarianism. If Yang read up on Hamilton, he would know that many founding fathers thought the wealthy were the natural representatives of all people - a complete fabrication and a lie.

Yang argues for a conception of markets that meet human needs rather than compelling humans to meet the needs of markets. But then he talks about how we can change our behavior as economic subjects in order for the market to provide what we want. The contradiction seems lost on him: if markets are to be geared toward human need, then the question is not an economic one, but a political one. The question is not "how do we read the market?" The real question is "how do we get the power to create a human-centric society?" And this is the conceptual problem behind Universal Basic Income (UBI). Yang justifies it in terms of the productivity it may increase. But that's not a humanist concern; it is a capitalist-economic concern.

A brief history of how capitalist relations came to be is in order. Yang never defines exactly what he means by capitalism, but he suggests that it goes back over 5,000 years, conflating it with the invention of money. In reality, the notion of capitalism - private, for-profit ownership of industry with wage labor and commodity production - has its origins in 17th-century England. Over the centuries the city dwellers of the country - who were mostly merchants and exchangers by profession - had acquired so much money, and thereby power, that they were able to appropriate common-owned land in England. Up until the late 18th century, most of the land in England was commons: the people who lived there had rights to the land irrespective of whatever the "owner" may wish to do with it. Modern concepts of ownership did not exist at the time. As the merchants in the cities grew more wealthy, they bought out or often outright stole commons land in order to expand their holdings, and thereby their businesses. By the late 18th century, the merchant class (who Marx called the bourgeoisie, which literally just means "city-dweller") had bought parliament itself, and started passing parliamentary laws of enclosure to finish up the long consolidation process the bourgeoisie had begun over 100 years prior. At the end of this process, a tiny number of people concentrated in the cities owned some 98% of the land and industry in the UK. 99% of the population, formerly peasants, had to go work for them in a condition called "employment" in order to live. They were now wage laborers: the proletariat. This is the origins of what we now call capitalism. It did not come about through some peaceful transition, but through a violent process of robbery by a small class of an entire country. One of the relevant points to take from this history is that the peasants of England did not voluntarily employ themselves to the nascent bourgeoisie. They were compelled to go to work in the factories because they had been robbed of their own access to the means of existence. None of this has anything to do with freedom; it is all coercion.

The standard economic view of money is that it is a neutral means of exchange. However, if any one individual or clique acquires enough money then they may purchase and bribe politicians, control entire fields of media coverage giving them huge influence on political opinion, and they may commit horrible crimes with impunity because no one will take them to court, etc. In short, having enough money allows one to shape society to one's whims at the expense of others. The conclusion is that money is not merely a neutral means of exchange; it is a form of social power. A society focused around human need, and not markets and money, would therefore have, at the very least, strict limits on the amount of money any individual may possess. Ideally, it would abolish money altogether. But this is against the capitalist premise, which is about free exchange.

With this in mind, where does Yang propose that the government get the power to do these things that he suggests? Short of forcibly expropriating the wealth of the 1%, I do not see a way. Money is a form of social power, and the government is a prime target for that power. Yang has perhaps watched one too many episodes of the television show The West Wing, which shows some fairy-tale vision of politics as an honest journey of visionaries. Yang does not seem to understand that it's all about accumulation of wealth, exploitation of resources, the maintenance of power systems, and that capitalist society is unavoidably inhuman.

David Harvey gives a beautiful example that may help to illustrate the point. In almost every major city in the world today one can find thousands of high-rise condominiums existing in the same city as thousands of homeless people. The condos are empty except for a few weeks of the year. They were not purchased to be lived in; they were purchased to be speculated on in a housing market. This housing market grew to such proportions and has been given such reign that it caused a housing crisis which foreclosed some 4 million people of their homes. Those who lost their homes are not the same people who speculated on the housing market; those people are doing just fine. What does this show? Precisely that the market itself, if allowed to grow unchecked, may wreak havoc upon a society; a truism that seems obvious to everyone except business people and economists.

Ok, so we control the market via government regulation. But those market owners do not like that, and they lobby against regulation laws, they bribe politicians, they control the media discourse etc. Those without the money do not have any real recourse within the system to stop them, for the system has been hijacked via its own methods. So it's not as simple as "well, the government can just do this." The government has long ago been bought out by the capitalists, and politics is treated like another market now. Since the 1980s laws have been made such that it is all but impossible to reregulate the markets. The solution is that we need a completely new system, because "capitalist democracy" (so-called) has fallen past the event horizon into unworkability. This means the end of capitalism, and it means a newer, more direct, less representational form of government. It means public banking rather than private banking. It means the redistribution of wealth from those at the top who have robbed from all of humanity through a coercive system. Interestingly, this would also entail smaller government in many ways, as institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the military industrial complex, and others which exist to protect the status quo would be abolished. Just to drive the nail home, it would also mean the abolition of the Constitution and its replacing with something more progressive and centered around human values rather than defending the "minority of the opulent." (Madison)

Harvey rightly blasts the UBI idea as simply a front for Silicon Valley to get more effective demand for their products. The UBI is really a subsidy to Silicon Valley, not a method of providing for the people. That Yang is an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley is no coincidence.

In other ways, Yang's entrepreneurial training implicates him in the very values he attempts to refute. His "human-centered capitalism" is not a society that is in fact based on human need, but simply around the old fallacy of "meritocracy." A moment's reflection would tell us that a truly humane society would not be meritocratic, as the notion of "merit" is inherently politically implicated. Who defines what counts as merit? A truly humanist society would allow all people the means to develop to their fullest potential on their own terms.

Yang proposes a "parallel economy around social good." The capitalist economy would simply allow this parallel economy to get plump before taking it over. That is exactly what the capitalists are currently doing with the internet. If Yang's "parallel economy" were possible, it wouldn't be needed.

Yang writes, "Most entrepreneurs, technologists and young people I know are chomping at the bit to work on our problems." Our problems are known and have been known for at least 100 years. The problem is capitalism: private control over the means of production. The solution is socialism: worker control over the means of production. The means are popular revolution, which is above and beyond electoral politics. Unless and until you are speaking that language, your "human-centric" ideology is just a sham. Technology will not save us on its own; otherwise it would already have done so.

Lastly is Yang's line about how a humanist capitalism could "spur unprecedented levels of social activity without spending that much." This sounds like the opposite of a humanistic anything, and very capitalist. Why? Because Yang is thinking of more ways to get people to work more, produce more, engage in more activity. But we are already working ourselves to death; American worker productivity is higher than it's ever been. We don't need new ways to do more; we need new ways to do less. We need a new concept of what it means to "contribute" to society. A humanist society would not be obsessed with getting people to work, producing, exchanging, etc. but would rather leave them in relative peace while providing at least for their basic needs. But this is what the entrepreneur is trained to do: produce more, take more risks, and be more daring in the market. In this mindset, people are inherently viewed as commodities, tools to be used by the entrepreneur. We need to move beyond capitalist thinking if we are to move beyond the problems of capitalism.

In conclusion, Mr. Yang's proposed solutions are impressive to those armchair theorists and liberals who lack a deeper understanding of capitalism. They will not solve our problems. They may, in fact, empower capitalism to appropriate even more of our lives. I cannot help but suspect that Mr. Yang is just the liberal version of Donald Trump: the "successful" businessman who is "outside the system." Yang is noticing that there is a political market for progressive values and he is attempting to cash in on it.

He is, after all, an entrepreneur. But treating politics like a business is part of our problem. We've seen how capitalism can posture around the idea of "freedom." Do we not think it could do the same with ideas like "humanism?"

Charles Wofford is an activist and PhD student in historical musicology.

Why Black People Need Maoism in 2018

By Carine Williams

When they hear Maoism, many people think of China, Peru, and the Philippines. They picture peasants "surrounding the cities from the countryside." This is, of course, understandable, but a mistake. Maoism is not simply "everything that Mao did," or "everything that happened in China between 1949 and now." I have spent a great deal of my time writing working to dispel these sorts of myths, some peddled in an unprincipled fashion by anti-Maoists. Maoism is a living, breathing science. By science we mean something with universal principles that can be taken and applied by all who have a material interest in making revolution. In the United States, this is Black people, or the New Afrikan nation.

It was not by accident that the original Black Panther Party (BPP) developed close relations with the revolutionary leadership of the People's Republic of China. Huey didn't go to China to play; he went to study and learn things that could be applied back home. Of course, he eventually degenerated in political line and practice, taking a right opportunist course along with Bobby Seale (always a centrist) and Elaine Brown (who guided the party, in his absence, into a mainstream political force that led into the arms of the Democratic Party). This opportunism in the highest expression of revolutionary sentiment, practice, and force in this country to date needs to be studied and ruthlessly criticized, yet we should be careful. We must place things in their historical context and ensure that we are able to divide one into two, meaning see the beneficial as well as the negative aspects of a thing but also realize that one aspect must be primary.

The BPP was destroyed by a combination of factors: lack of a really scientific method of analysis and cohesive program of political education, failure to promote and apply the Marxist-Leninist principle of Democratic Centralism (debate inside the party, formation of a political line through this debate, and the upholding of this decision by all party members and organs), and a culture of liberalism that ended with comrades fighting comrades, thus opening the door for external factors (the FBI and other LE agencies) to play havoc and get cadre railroaded into prison and killed. We must study and learn all of these lessons, because when we develop another organization with the prestige, mass base, and power that the Panthers had, and we will, they will come for us all again.

So, why do we need Maoism? Because we are against the most brutal, bloody, and vicious empire known to humankind. This country is looting and enslaving our class siblings all over the world. To overturn this order of things, to smash it and rebuild it in the interests of the revolutionary proletariat of the entire world, we must apply the synthesis of 200 years of systematic, organized class struggle, which is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: the continuity of the revolutionary project that was Marxism-Leninism, with a rupture from the dogmatism and revisionism. Maoists do not uphold "Actually Existing Socialism" because a scientific analysis rooted in the principles laid down by the revolutionary movements and projects that gave us Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao would demonstrate that stealing food from Filipino fisherfolk, like the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been doing, is 100% non-Marxist. This is in disagreement with many Marxist-Leninist organizations today, which uphold these things and other imperialist depredations carried out under the faded red banner of China.

The Maoist argument is that Marxist-Leninist terrain has been spent, and the 21st century must learn from Maoism. "You haven't seized state power yet!" others cry. Indeed, and there has never been a truly Maoist party that has initiated armed struggle in the imperialist metro poles. This doesn't mean that Maoist principles cannot be applied to these countries, this means that we must be ever more creative in our application and ever more disciplined in our party-building efforts. Party building in the USA requires the careful and thorough cultivation of a mass base. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people must depend on and follow this party and participate in mass organizations before it can even begin to call itself a vanguard. This is what many who came out of the New Communist Movement of the mid-late 1970s failed to realize. The days of endless squabbling sects that fight over "mass bases" of a handful of other activists must be put to an end, and we must have a truly mass perspective.

There is optimism in the spread of For the People (FTP) organizations and the development of the Organizing Committee for a Maoist Communist Party (MCP-OC) which has a more mass orientation and places primacy on the development of a class analysis and political line in the USA that is based in painstaking investigation and rooted in the aspirations and struggles of the most oppressed, along with a record of seeking to develop international solidarity and prison work. This, I believe, is the best hope for New Afrikan Maoists in the United States and I wholeheartedly encourage Black comrades to develop FTP-type organizations in their own communities under OC guidance. Even if this isn't done, at the very least studies in Maoism, studies in Maoist revolutions, and studies in Maoist theory are beneficial. After and during these studies, think about how it can be applied on your block and in your community.

Learn about and be like Fred Hampton. Time is up for spinning our wheels; we must get together, unite on a principled and unshakeable basis, and mount a formidable resistance against decades and centuries-old oppression based in capitalism and white supremacy. I also encourage support and donation to the Hampton Institute as an invaluable resource in promoting revolutionary ideology and practice in the finest Marxist tradition.

Protectionism and Globalization Have the Same Mother: The Crisis of Capital

By Celso Beltrami

Has "globalization", the freedom for capital and goods to move from one end of the planet to the other, with no barriers to limit trade and its miraculous effects, come to an end? Looking at what has happened recently, it seems that an ideology, and, even more so, one of capital's ways of being has reached the end. It seems like the bourgeoisie, or at least a part of it, has taken a suit from its wardrobe which it has not worn for a long time, one which was needed for a tougher climate and the storms that come with it.

Beyond the metaphors, Trump's protectionist turn, which is carried out in a threatening manner and not just aimed at China, constitutes another turbulent factor, both from an economic point of view and that of imperialist relations on a world scale. These two aspects reflect two sides of the same coin, as Trump's economic measures serve an imperialist strategy aimed at both declared rivals and allies who are applying the brakes and who would like the embrace of the stars and stripes, which they have suffered for more than seventy years with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to be less suffocating. In fact, it is very doubtful that the custom duties will really be able to protect the entire US economy from foreign competition. Perhaps they will give a bit of respite to certain sectors of US manufacturing, like steel or aluminum, but many more will be hit and the retaliation will fall upon the workforce (but not just on them), who will probably be the victims of redundancies and worsening working conditions.

As is well-known, after decades of "globalization", it is difficult to disentangle the chain of value, since the productive process involves so many states: you just have to look at the "made in" label stuck on goods to see to what extent their constituent parts are "international". Moreover, it is no mystery that, for example, the large distribution chain Wal-Mart has many articles on its shelves which are entirely made in China. Therefore, "America First" served up in a protectionist sauce threatens to seriously reduce the enormous advantages that the tax reform launched a few months ago is generating for American firms. In this regard the mountain of money given by Trump to his capitalist accomplices is yielding the expected fruit - far from stimulating investment and therefore jobs in the so-called real economy, this mountain of money is mostly employed for speculative purposes, to strengthen financial activities aimed at realizing extra value, at collecting surplus value extorted from the productive process, without taking part in that process.

But, to return to protectionism, perhaps the duties, like those threatened on May 11th for cars produced abroad, are intended, in the creative mind of the New York property speculator, to compel the car manufacturers of Europe and Asia to increase their production in the US, but this would require large investment, more publicly-funded incentives at the expense of the taxpayers (as always) and, not last, conditions of work that approach those imposed on the working class in "offshore" destinations, like, for example, those in Mexico. Which, moreover, has already happened; however, "approaching" does not mean equal to. So as to not pose as prophets, we say that it is very probable that so-called reshoring, the repatriation of productive activity located abroad, will not go that far. But the thinking heads of the US bourgeoisie, and perhaps even those that think like Trump (who a few years ago was considered a buffoon of popular entertainment, good only for rubbish TV, but, who has been propelled to the top of the leading world power by the difficulties in political management generated by the crisis), know this. It is this, the story of the "populists", who have won power or made gains everywhere, that has made (political) life more complicated for the traditional bourgeois political class. The history of the bourgeoisie is not lacking in figures like Trump (remember Italy's national glory, the ex-cavalier Berlusconi?), starting with that Emperor of the spectacle, Louis Bonaparte, to whom Marx dedicated some of his most brilliant and magisterial works.

But, beyond the "unpredictability" of his course, the US President, even if in the badly joined-up and partly disconcerting terms which are characteristic of him, expresses a need, as was said at the beginning, to combat the economic and political growth of the US' competitors (to not say adversaries) on the world imperialist chessboard, or at least to put the brakes on their unhealthy idea (for the US) of, if not striking out on their own, at least carving out more room for autonomy vis-à-vis their burdensome ally. In short, the USA must continue to set the good and the bad tempo over the centuries and the rest should adapt themselves to it. This, however, is more and more complicated, because of the crisis that began 40 years ago, whose development has put China closer and closer to the heels of the USA and pushed the quarrelsome European bourgeoisie to undertake the difficult, and not to be taken for granted, road to a unitary pole of imperialism.

If China has become what it is, this is due in significant part to "Western" capital, including US capital, but now Chinese "market socialism" (that's not a bad joke…) is menacing the first place held by the USA in many economic sectors, starting with hi-tech manufacturing. Behind the duties on steel and aluminum, there is the real objective of harming the "Made in China 2025" [1] project, which aims at developing or accelerating the development of high technology, to make the leap from the "factory of the world" based on products with a medium or low added value (to use bourgeois terminology: in reality, value extorted from the working class), to one that uses the most advanced technologies. Although, according to certain bourgeois observers, the distance between China and the US is still large, and in certain sectors, very large, the gap is being made up very rapidly, even, it seems, more rapidly than forecast, which cannot fail to make the Yankee bourgeoisie think, no matter who their supreme representative is. Washington justifies the duties and the blocking of the acquisition of certain companies by Chinese capital as retaliation against China's supposed addiction to the theft of intellectual property. True or not - something which is anyway judged by the norms of the bourgeois world - it remains a fact that the USA cannot simply dominate the world through its brutal military superiority, which, furthermore, presupposes a military-industrial apparatus second to none, especially in the hi-tech sectors.

In some ways the same considerations can be made with respect to the protectionist "insults" announced against Europe, which, in passing, are supposed to release more money for the maintenance of NATO. Trump, obviously, didn't like Merkel's musing about the fact that Europe (guided by Germany) is starting to walk by itself, without always having to have Uncle Sam holding its hand. Clearly, in the present state of affairs, such a hypothesis is just a hypothesis, and isn't even close, but, if the US trade deficit with the EU, and, in particular, Germany, is added in, then there starts to be more than just something unpleasant.

We are in the first stages of this new phase of imperialist relations, a phase in which diplomatic formalities rooted in good manners still play a role, even if substantially as a façade (see the China-US summit of May 3rd, where practically nothing was decided), but, alongside the fake smiles, weapons are being waved, up to now only economic ones. China, in fact as a first response, has announced that it will stop importing soya from the USA (the world's biggest producer). China is the biggest importer of soya from the US. If this happens, it will hit the agricultural state of the Mid-West, which, among other things, gave majorities to Trump. Some think that the import block on soya "could cost more than 300,000 jobs in the Mid-West and Donald Trump's re-election, not withstanding his tweets on 'America First'."

It is not possible to yet know if, how and how far this protectionist battle will go forward, but it is a type of battle that has historically laid down the preconditions for the birth of acute tensions between states or for the accelerated worsening of these, to the point where they vent themselves in open conflict, no longer on the economic terrain, but on the military one. Already proxy wars have flared up in various parts of the planet and there is no guarantee that sooner or later these will not be fought in more direct fashion. The horizon is heavy with storms and it will be the course of a crisis which isn't going away to write the screenplay for the near future.

Originally published by The Internationalist .

Notes

[1] Without mentioning the new Silk Road, or rather China's geostrategic expansion to the four corners of the World, with the development of ways of communication which favour trade. And one can also add in the US's substantial trade deficit with Peking and the fact that the latter holds a portion of the US public debt that cannot be sniffed at. For more on this in English see leftcom.org

The Significance of Karl Marx

By Chris Wright

I often have occasion to think that, as an "intellectual," I'm very lucky to be alive at this time in history, at the end of the long evolution from Herodotus and the pre-Socratic philosophers to Chomsky and modern science. One reason for my gratitude is simply that, as I wrote long ago in a moment of youthful idealism, "the past is a kaleidoscope of cultural achievements, or rather a cornucopian buffet whose fruits I can sample-a kiwi here, a mango there-a few papayas-and then choose which are my favorite delicacies-which are healthiest, which savory and sweet-and invent my own diet tailored to my needs. History can be appropriated by each person as he chooses," I gushed, "selectively employed in the service of his self-creation. The individual can be more complete than ever in the past!" But while this Goethean ideal of enlightened self-cultivation is important, perhaps an even greater advantage of living so late in history is that, if one has an open and critical mind, it is possible to have a far more sophisticated and correct understanding of the world than before. Intellectual history is littered with egregious errors, myths and lies that have beguiled billions of minds. Two centuries after the Enlightenment, however, the spirit of rationalism and science has achieved so many victories that countless millions have been freed from the ignorance and superstition of the past.

Few thinkers deserve more credit for the liberation of the human mind than Karl Marx. Aside from the heroes of the Scientific Revolution-Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, a few others-and their philosophical 'translators'-Francis Bacon, Spinoza , Voltaire, Diderot, David Hume-hardly any come close. But not only did Marx contribute to our intellectual liberation; he also, of course, made immense contributions to the struggle for liberation from oppressive power-structures (a struggle that, indeed, is a key component of the effort to free our minds). These two major achievements amply justify the outpouring of articles on the bicentennial of his birth, and in fact, I think, call for yet another one, to consider in more depth both his significance and his shortcomings.

My focus in this article is going to be on his ideas, not on his life or his activism. He was certainly an inspiration in the latter respect, but it is his writings that are timeless. The fanatical and violent hatred they've always elicited from the enemies of human progress, the spokesmen of a power-loving, money-worshipping misanthropy , is the most eloquent proof of their value.

*

The central reason for Marx's importance and fame is, of course, that he gave us the most sophisticated elaboration of the most fundamental concept in social analysis: class.

He was far from the only thinker to emphasize class. One might even say that the primary of class verges on common sense (despite what postmodernists think-on whom, see below). In his Politics, Aristotle already interpreted society according to the divergent interests of the poor and the rich. The semi-conservative James Madison, like other Enlightenment figures, agreed, as is clear from his famous Federalist No. 10:

[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and views.

Could anything be more obvious than this proto-historical materialism?

But Marx was unique in systematically expounding this materialism and grounding it in rigorous analysis of production relations-the concept of which he practically invented, or at least self-consciously elevated to a determining status and analyzed with exhaustive thoroughness. As everyone passingly familiar with Marxism knows, such notions as exploitation, surplus, surplus-value, and class struggle acquired a quasi-scientific-which is to say exact and precisely explanatory-character in the context of Marx's investigation of production relations, in particular those of capitalism.

Given that historical materialism is often ridiculed and rejected, it isn't out of place here to give a simplified account of its basic premises, an account that shows how uncontroversial these premises ought to be. This is especially desirable in a time when even self-styled Marxists feel compelled, due to the cultural sway held by feminism and identity politics, to deny that class has priority over other variables such as gender, sexuality, and race.

The explanatory (and therefore strategic, for revolutionaries) primacy of class can be established on simple a priori grounds, quite apart from empirical sociological or historical analysis. One has only to reflect that access to resources-money, capital, technology-is of unique importance to life, being key to survival, to a high quality of life, to political power, to social and cultural influence; and access to (or control over) resources is determined ultimately by class position, one's position in the social relations of production. The owner of the means of production, i.e., the capitalist, has control over more resources than the person who owns only his labor-power, which means he is better able to influence the political process (for example by bribing politicians) and to propagate ideas and values that legitimate his dominant position and justify the subordination of others. These two broad categories of owners and workers have opposing interests, most obviously in the inverse relation between wages and profits. This antagonism of interests is the "class struggle," a struggle that need not always be explicit or conscious but is constantly present on an implicit level, indeed is constitutive of the relationship between capitalist and worker. The class struggle-that is, the structure and functioning of economic institutions-can be called the foundation of society, the dynamic around which society tends to revolve, because, again, it is through class that institutions and actors acquire the means to influence social life.

These simple, commonsense reflections suffice to establish the meaning and validity of Marx's infamous, "simplistic," "reductionist" contrast between the economic "base" and the political, cultural, and ideological "superstructure." Maybe his language here was misleading and metaphorical. He was only sketching his historical materialism in a short preface, the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and could hardly have foreseen that generations of academic sophists would later pore over his words, pick at them, cavil at them, fling casuistries at each other until a vast scholarly literature had been produced debating Marxian "economic determinism." As if the relative primacy of economic institutions-which is to say relations of production, class structures-that are, by definition, directly involved in the accumulation and distribution of material resources and thus power, isn't anything but a truism, and can be seen as such on the basis of such elementary reasoning as in the preceding paragraph.

The Communist Manifesto's epoch-making claim, therefore, that the history of all complex societies has been the history of class struggle is not ridiculous or oversimplifying, contrary to what has been claimed a thousand times in scholarship and the popular press; it is, broadly speaking, accurate, if "class struggle" is understood to mean not only explicit conflict between classes (and class-subgroups; see the above quotation from Madison) but also the implicit antagonism of interests between classes, which constitutes the structure of economic institutions. Particular class structures/dynamics, together with the level of development of productive forces they determine and are expressed through, provide the basic institutional context around which a given politics and culture are fleshed out.[1]

Thus, to argue, as feminists, queer theorists, and confused Marxists like Peter Frase are wont to, that class is of no special significance compared to group identities like gender and race is quite mistaken. Neither feminism nor anti-racist activism targets such institutional structures as the relation between capitalist and worker; or, to the extent that these movements do, they become class-oriented and lose their character as strictly feminist or anti-racist. If you want a society of economic democracy, in which economic exploitation, "income inequality," mass poverty, imperialism, militarism, ecological destruction, and privatization of resources are done away with, the goal of your activism has to be to abolish capitalist institutions-the omnipotence of the profit motive, the dictatorial control of capitalist over worker-and not simply misogyny or vicious treatment of minorities. These issues are important, but only anti-capitalism is properly revolutionary, involving a total transformation of society (because a transformation of the very structures of institutions, not merely who is allowed into the privileged positions).

Moreover, as plenty of feminists and Black Lives Matter activists well know, you can't possibly achieve the maximal goals that identity politics pursues while remaining in a capitalist society. Most or all of the oppression that minorities experience is precisely a result of capitalism's perverse incentives, and of the concentration of power in a tiny greedy elite. This ties into the fact that, since the time of Marx and Engels, a colossal amount of empirical scholarship has shown the power of the Marxian analytical framework. (I summarize some of the scholarship here.) Even ideologies of race, nation, and gender are largely a product of class-of slavery and its aftermath in the U.S., of European imperialism , of attempts by the Victorian upper class to control working-class women's lives and sexuality.

In the case of religious fundamentalism in the U.S., for example, historians have shown that since early in the twentieth century, and especially since the 1970s, conservative sectors of the business community have subsidized right-wing evangelical Christianity in order to beat back unionism and liberalism, which have been tarred and feathered as communist, socialist, godless, etc. More generally, for centuries the ruling class has propagated divisive ideas of race, religion, nationality, and gender in order, partly, to fragment the working class and so control it more easily and effectively. By now, leftists see such arguments, rightly, as truisms.

On the other hand, most intellectuals, including academically trained leftists, also see Marxian "economistic" arguments as overly simplifying and reductivist. Mainstream intellectuals in particular consider it a sign of unsophistication that Marxism tends to abstract from complicating factors and isolate the class variable. "Reality is complicated!" they shout in unison. "You also have to take into account the play of cultural discourses, the diversity of subjective identities, etc. Class isn't everything!" Somehow it is considered an intellectual vice, and not a virtue, to simplify for the sake of understanding. It's true, after all, that the world is complex; and so in order to understand it one has to simplify it a bit, explain it in terms of general principles. As in the natural sciences, a single principle can never explain everything; but, if it is the right one, it can explain a great deal.

Noam Chomsky, with characteristic eloquence, defended this point in an interview in 1990 . I might as well quote him at length. Since he is in essence just an idiosyncratic and anarchistic Marxist - in fact one of the most consistent Marxists of all , despite his rejection of the label-his arguments are exactly those to which every thoughtful materialist is committed.

Question: But you're often accused of being too black-and-white in your analysis, of dividing the world into evil élites and subjugated or mystified masses. Does your approach ever get in the way of basic accuracy?

Answer: I do approach these questions a bit differently than historical scholarship generally does. But that's because humanistic scholarship tends to be irrational. I approach these questions pretty much as I would approach my scientific work. In that work-in any kind of rational inquiry-what you try to do is identify major factors, understand them, and see what you can explain in terms of them. Then you always find a periphery of unexplained phenomena, and you introduce minor factors and try to account for those phenomena. What you're always searching for is the guiding principles: the major effects, the dominant structures. In order to do that, you set aside a lot of tenth-order effects. Now, that's not the method of humanistic scholarship, which tends in a different direction. Humanistic scholarship-I'm caricaturing a bit for simplicity-says every fact is precious; you put it alongside every other fact. That's a sure way to guarantee you'll never understand anything. If you tried to do that in the sciences, you wouldn't even reach the level of Babylonian astronomy.

I don't think the [social] field of inquiry is fundamentally different in this respect. Take what we were talking about before: institutional facts. Those are major factors. There are also minor factors, like individual differences, microbureaucratic interactions, or what the President's wife told him at breakfast. These are all tenth-order effects. I don't pay much attention to them, because I think they all operate within a fairly narrow range which is predictable by the major factors. I think you can isolate those major factors. You can document them quite well; you can illustrate them in historical practice; you can verify them. If you read the documentary record critically, you can find them very prominently displayed, and you can find that other things follow from them. There's also a range of nuances and minor effects, and I think these two categories should be very sharply separated.

When you proceed in this fashion, it might give someone who's not used to such an approach the sense of black-and-white, of drawing lines too clearly. It purposely does that. That's what is involved when you try to identify major, dominant effects and put them in their proper place.

But instead of trying to systematically explain society by starting from a general principle and evaluating its utility, then proceeding to secondary factors like race or sex and using them to elucidate phenomena not explained by the dominant principle, the approach that tends to prevail in the humanities and social sciences is a sort of methodological relativism. In historical scholarship , for example, especially social history, you're generally expected just to describe things from different perspectives. You should discuss gender, and race, and class, and various relevant "discourses," and how people identified themselves, how they reacted to given developments, and perhaps issues of sexuality and the body, etc. Some knowledge may be gained, but often this work amounts merely to unanchored description for its own sake - description from an idealist perspective , not a materialist one. The anti-Marxian idealism is an essential quality of this mainstream writing, and is quite dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

*

On the bicentennial of Marx's birth, it's intellectually shameful (though predictable) that idealism is still the primary tendency in scholarship and journalism. I've criticized bourgeois idealism elsewhere, for examplehere,here, and here, but it is worth discussing again because of how dominant it is, and how damaging.

What idealism means, of course, is an emphasis on ideas or consciousness over material factors, whether "social being"-economic conditions, institutional imperatives (the need to follow the rules of given social structures), interests as opposed to ideals or ideologies, and the necessities of biological survival-or, in the context of philosophical idealism such as that of Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and the logical positivists , the existence of mind-independent matter. Philosophical idealism, while no longer as respectable as it once was, persists in forms less honest and direct than that of Berkeley, especially in postmodernist circles and schools of thought influenced by the Continental tradition (e.g., phenomenology) and even American pragmatism. More important, though, is the type of idealism that disparages class and social being.

This idealism comes in different varieties. Its most common manifestation is the uncritical tendency to take seriously the rhetoric and self-interpretations of the powerful. As Marx understood and Chomsky likes to point out, humans are expert at deceiving themselves, at attributing noble motives to themselves when baser desires of power, money, recognition, institutional pressures, etc. are what really motivate them. The powerful in particular love to clothe themselves in the garb of moral grandeur. They insist that they're invading a country in order to protect human rights or spread democracy and freedom; that they're expanding prisons to keep communities safer, and deporting immigrants to keep the country safe; that by cutting social welfare programs they're trying honestly to reduce the budget deficit, and by cutting taxes on the rich they only want to stimulate the economy. When journalists and intellectuals take seriously such threadbare, predictable rhetoric, they're disregarding the lesson of Marxism that individuals aren't even the main actors here in the first place; institutions are. The individuals can tell themselves whatever stories they want about their own behavior, but the primary causes of the design and implementation of political policies are institutional dynamics, power dynamics. Political and economic actors represent certain interests, and they act in accordance with those interests. That's all.

The example I like to give of academics' naïve idealism is Odd Arne Westad's celebrated book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times , which won the Bancroft Prize in 2006. Its thesis is that "the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics. Locked in conflict over the very concept of European modernity…Washington and Moscow needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies…" It's a remarkably unsophisticated argument, which is backed up by remarkably unsophisticated invocations of policymakers' rhetoric. It rises to the level of farce. At one point, after quoting a State Department spokesman on George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq-"I believe in freedom as a right, a responsibility, a destiny… The United States stands for freedom, defends freedom, advances freedom, and enlarges the community of freedom because we think it is the right thing to do"-Westad states ingenuously that the Iraq invasion was a perfect example of how "freedom and security have been, and remain today, the driving forces of U.S. foreign policy." As if gigantic government bureaucracies are moved to act out of pure altruism!

Related to this idealism is the self-justifying faith of liberal intellectuals that ideals truly matter in the rough-and-tumble of political and economic life. John Maynard Keynes gave a classic exposition of this faith in the last paragraph of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which has stroked the egos of academics for generations:

…[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. [?!] Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas… [S]oon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

These are backward fantasies, which grow out of a poor sociological imagination. The point is that the ideas that come to be accepted as gospel are those useful to vested interests, which are the entities that have the resources to propagate them. (In the typically bourgeois language of impersonal 'automaticity,' Keynes refers to "the gradual encroachment of ideas." But ideas don't spread of themselves; they are propagated and subsidized by people and institutions whose interests they express. This is why "the ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class," which has the resources to spread them.)

Keynes' famous book itself contributed not at all to the so-called Keynesian policies of FDR and Hitler and others; in fact, such policies were already being pursued by Baron Haussmann in France in the 1850s, because they were useful in giving employment to thousands of workers and raising aggregate demand and thereby economic growth. Is it likely that had Keynes not published his book in 1936, the U.S. government during and after World War II would have pursued radically different, un-Keynesian economic policies? Hardly. Because they were useful to vested interests, those policies were bound to be adopted-and economists, tools of the ruling class, were bound to systematize their theoretical rationalizations sooner or later.

But liberals continue to believe that if only they can convince politicians of their intellectual or moral errors, they can persuade them to change their policies. Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times provide amusing examples of this sort of pleading. It's telling that he always ends his analysis right before getting to a realistic proposal: he scrupulously avoids saying that for his ideas to be enacted it's necessary to revive unions on a systemic scale, or to organize radical and disruptive social movements to alter the skewed class structure. Such an analytic move would require that he step into the realm of Marxism, abandoning his liberal idealism, and would thus bar him from being published in the New York Times.

If I may be permitted to give another example of liberal idealism: I recall reading a few years ago Richard Goodwin's popular book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (1988), a memoir of his time as speechwriter and adviser to John F. Kennedy. It's a flabby centrist whitewashing of history, a nostalgic apotheosis of Kennedy and America and democracy, etc., not worth reading on its merits. However- to quote myself-

The book is enlightening as a window into the mind of the Harvard liberal, revelatory of the sort of thoughts this person has, his worldview. Liberalism from the inside. A prettified ideology, bland but appealing, with the reference to spiritual truths, reason, ideals of harmony and peace, a rising tide lifting all boats, the fundamental compatibility of all interests in society (except for those we don't like, of course), the nonexistence of class struggle, government's ability to solve all social ills, history as a progressive battle between knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, reason and unreason, open-mindedness and bigotry, and any other set of binary abstractions you can think of. The whole ideology hovers above reality in the heavenly mists of Hope and Progress. It's all very pretty, hence its momentary resurgence-which quickly succumbed to disillusionment-with Barack Obama. And hence its ability to get through the filters of the class structure, to become an element in the hegemonic American discourse, floating above institutional realities like some imaginary golden idol one worships in lieu of common sense. It serves a very useful purpose for business, averting people's eyes from the essential incompatibility of class interests toward the idea of Gradual Progress by means of tinkering at the margins, making nice policies.

Such is the function of liberal idealism for the ruling class.

One other type of idealism that must be mentioned is the postmodernist variety (or rather varieties). It's ironic that postmodernist intellectuals, with their rejection of "meta-narratives" and the idea of objective truth, consider themselves hyper-sophisticated, because in fact they're less sophisticated than even unreflective doctrinaire Marxists. They're not so much post-Marxist as pre-Marxist, in that they haven't assimilated the important intellectual lessons of the Marxist tradition.

In both its subjectivism and its focus on "discourses," "texts," "meanings," "vocabularies," "cultures," and the like, postmodernism is idealistic-and relativistic. Foucault's Discipline and Punish, for example, tends to ignore class and particular economic and political contexts, instead concentrating on the opinions of reformers, philosophers, politicians, and scientists. (Far better-more illuminating-is Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer's Marxist classic Punishment and Social Structure , published in 1939.) Later on things got even worse, as with Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler's much-heralded collection Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997). I can't go into depth here, so suffice it to say that this book, like so much of postmodernism, consists essentially of playing around with ideas of cultural "contestations" and the tensions involved in people's "negotiations" of disparate identities. The analyses are so particularistic and so purely descriptive, focusing, say, on (the cultural dimensions of) some little village in Senegal or some protest movement in Ecuador, that no interesting conclusions can be drawn. Instead there is a fluctuation between hyper-particularity and hyper-abstractness, as in the typical-and utterly truistic-"arguments" that the colonized had agency, that colonized cultures weren't totally passive, that "colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent" (who has ever said they were?), that "meanings" of institutions "were continually being reshaped," and so on. After all the "analysis," one is left asking, "Okay, so what?" It's all just masturbatory play undertaken for the sake of itself. No wonder this sort of writing has been allowed to become culturally dominant.

The postmodern focus on the body, too, is, ironically, idealistic. Subjectivistic. Which is to say it's more politically safe than Marxism, since it doesn't challenge objective structures of class (except insofar as such subjectivism, or identity politics, allies itself with a class focus). Any intellectual who finds himself being accepted by mainstream institutions, as hordes of Foucault-loving postmodernists and feminists have-contrary to the treatment of materialists like Gabriel Kolko, Thomas Ferguson, Jesse Lemisch, David Noble, Staughton Lynd, Rajani Kanth , Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, and many others-should immediately start to question whether his ideas get to the heart of the matter or do not, instead, distract from the workings of power.

Said differently, the problem with identity politics is that it doesn't completely reject Margaret Thatcher's infamous saying, "There is no such thing as society." It takes a semi-individualistic approach to analysis and activism. A revolutionary answers Thatcher with the statement, "There is no such thing as the individual"-in the sense that the focus must be on institutional structures, which mold us and dominate us. To the degree that the focus turns toward the individual, or his identity, his body, his subjectivity, the radicalism becomes more anodyne (while not necessarily ceasing to be oppositional or important).

There is a great deal more to be said about postmodernism. For instance, I could make the obvious point that its particularism and relativism, its elevation of fragmentary "narratives" and its Kuhnian emphasis on the supposed incommensurability of different "paradigms," is just as useful to the ruling class as its idealism, since it denies general truths about class struggle and capitalist dynamics. (See Georg Lukács' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason for a history of how such relativism and idealism contributed to the cultural climate that made Hitler possible.) Or I could argue that the rationalism and universalism of the Radical Enlightenment , which found its fulfillment in Marxism, is, far from being dangerous or containing the seeds of its own destruction-as postmodernists and confused eclectic Marxists like Theodor Adorno have argued-the only hope for humanity.

Instead I'll only observe, in summary, that idealism is not new: it is as old as the hills, and Marx made an immortal contribution in repudiating it. Idealism has always afflicted mainstream intellectual culture, all the way back to antiquity, when Plato viewed the world as consisting of shadows of ideal Forms, Hindus and Buddhists interpreted it in spiritual terms and as being somehow illusory, and Stoics were telling "the slave in the mines that if he would only think aright he would be happy" (to quote the classicist W. W. Tarn ). Idealism persisted through the Christian Middle Ages, Confucian China, and Hindu India. It dominated the Enlightenment, when philosophes were arguing that ignorance and superstition were responsible for mass suffering and a primordial conspiracy of priests had plunged society into darkness. Hegel, of course, was an arch-idealist. Finally a thinker came along who renounced this whole tradition and systematized the common sense of the hitherto despised "rabble," the workers, the peasants, the women struggling to provide for their children-namely that ideas are of little significance compared to class and material conditions. The real heroes, the real actors in history are not the parasitic intellectuals or the marauding rulers but the people working day in and day out to maintain society, to preserve and improve the conditions of civilization for their descendants.

Had there been no Marx or Engels, revolutionaries and activists would still have targeted class structures, as they were doing before Marxism had achieved widespread influence. Unions would have organized workers, radicals would have established far-left organizations, insurrections would have occurred in countries around the world. Marx's role has been to provide clarity and guidance, to serve as a symbol of certain tendencies of thought and action. His uniquely forceful and acute analyses of history and capitalism have been a font of inspiration for both thinkers and activists, a spur, a stimulus to keep their eyes on the prize, so to speak. His prediction of the collapse of capitalism from its internal contradictions has given hope and confidence to millions-perhaps too much confidence, in light of the traditional over-optimism of Marxists. But having such a brilliant authority on their side, such a teacher, has surely been of inestimable benefit to the oppressed.

As for the narrow task of "interpreting the world," the enormous body of work by Marxists from the founder to the present totally eclipses the contributions of every other school of thought. From economics to literary criticism, nothing else comes remotely close.

*

Marx did, however, make mistakes. No one is infallible. It's worth considering some of those mistakes, in case we can learn from them.

The ones I'll discuss here, which are by far the most significant, have to do with his conception of socialist revolution. Both the timeline he predicted and his sketchy remarks on how the revolution would come to pass were wrong. I've addressed these matters here , and at greater length in my book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States , but they deserve a more condensed treatment too.

Regarding the timeline: it has long been a commonplace that Marx failed to foresee Keynesianism and the welfare state. His biggest blind-spot was nationalism, or in general the power of the capitalist nation-state as an organizing principle of social life. Ironically, only a Marxian approach can explain why national structures have achieved the power they have, i.e., why the modern centralized nation-state rose to dominance in the first place. (It has to do with the interconnected rise of capitalism and the state over the last 700 years, in which each "principle"-the economic and the political, the market and the state-was indispensable to the other. See, e.g., Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times . )

In essence, while Marx was right to locate a capitalist tendency toward relative or even absolute immiseration of the working class, he was wrong that this tendency could not be effectively counteracted, at least for a long time, by opposing pressures. That is, he underestimated the power of tendencies toward integration of the working class into the dominant order, toward "pure and simple trade-unionism," toward the state's stabilizing management of the economy, and toward workers' identification not only with the abstract notion of a social class that spans continents but also with the more concrete facts of ethnicity, race, trade, immediate community, and nation. These forces have historically militated against the revolutionary tendencies of class polarization and international working-class solidarity. They have both fragmented the working class and made possible the successes of reformism-the welfare state, social democracy, and the legitimization of mass collective bargaining in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Marx was too optimistic.

On the other hand, he was right that capitalism isn't sustainable-because of its "contradictions," its dysfunctional social consequences, and also its effects on the natural environment. No compromises between capital and wage-labor, such as the postwar Keynesian compromise, can last. The market is just too anarchic, and capital too voracious. Stability is not possible. Sooner or later, with the continued development of the productive forces, capital mobility will increase, markets-including the labor market-will become more integrated worldwide, elite institutional networks will thicken worldwide, and organized labor will lose whatever power it had in the days of limited capital mobility. In retrospect, and with a bit of analysis , one can see that these tendencies were irresistible. Genuine socialism (workers' democratic control) on an international or global scale never could have happened in the twentieth century, which was still the age of oligopolistic, imperialistic capitalism, even state capitalism. In fact, it wasn't until the twenty-first century that the capitalist mode of production was consolidated across the entire globe, a development Marx assumed was necessary as a prerequisite for socialism (or communism).

The irony, therefore - and history is chock-full of dialectical irony - is that authentic revolutionary possibilities of post-capitalism couldn't open up until the victories of the left in the twentieth century had been eroded and defeated by hyper-mobile capital. The corporatist formations of social democracy and industrial unionism, fully integrated into the capitalist nation-state, had to decline in order for class polarization in the core capitalist states to peak again, deep economic crisis to return, and radical anti-capitalist movements to reappear on a massive level (as we may expect they'll do in the coming decades). Many Marxists don't like this type of thinking, according to which things have to get worse before they get better, but Marx himself looked forward to economic crisis because he understood it was only such conditions that could impel workers to join together en masse and fight for something as radical as a new social order.

The best evidence for the "things have to get worse before they get better" thesis is that the relatively non-barbarous society of the postwar years in the West was made possible only by the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II, which mobilized the left on such an epic scale and so discredited fascism that the ruling class finally consented to a dramatic improvement of conditions for workers. Similarly, it's quite possible that decades from now people will think of neoliberalism, with its civilization-endangering horrors, as having been a tool of (in Hegel's words) the "cunning" of historical reason by precipitating the demise of the very society whose consummation it was and making possible the rise of something new.

But how will such a revolution occur? This is another point on which Marx tripped up. Despite his eulogy of the non-statist Paris Commune, Marx was no anarchist: he expected that the proletariat would have to seize control of the national state and then carry out the social revolution from the commanding heights of government. This is clear from the ten-point program laid out in the Communist Manifesto-the specifics of which he repudiated in later years, but apparently not the general conception of statist reconstruction of the economy. It's doubtful, for example, that he would have rejected his earlier statement that "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class." Moreover, he seems to have endorsed Engels' statement in Anti-Dühring that "The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property." It appears, then, that both he and Engels were extreme statists, even though, like anarchists, they hoped and expected that the state would (somehow, inexplicably) disappear eventually.

In these beliefs they were mistaken. The social revolution can't occur after a total seizure of state power by "the proletariat" (which isn't a unitary entity but contains divisions)-for several reasons. First, this conception of revolution contradicts the Marxian understanding of social dynamics, a point that few or no Marxists appear ever to have appreciated. It exalts a centralized conscious will as being able to plan social evolution in advance, a notion that is utterly undialectical. According to "dialectics," history happens behind the backs of historical actors, whose intentions never work out exactly as they're supposed to. Marx was wise in his admonition that we should never trust the self-interpretations of political actors. And yet he suspends this injunction when it comes to the dictatorship of the proletariat: these people's designs are supposed to work out perfectly and straightforwardly, despite the massive complexity and dialectical contradictions of society.

The statist idea of revolution is also wrong to privilege the political over the economic. In supposing that through sheer political will one can transform an authoritarian, exploitative economy into a liberatory, democratic one, Marx is, in effect, reversing the order of "dominant causality" such that politics determines the economy (whereas in fact the economy "determines"-loosely and broadly speaking-politics). [2] Marxism itself suggests that the state can't be socially creative in this radical way. And when it tries to be, what results, ironically, is overwhelming bureaucracy and even greater authoritarianism than before. (While the twentieth century's experiences with so-called "Communism" or "state socialism" happened in relatively non-industrialized societies, not advanced capitalist ones as Marx anticipated, the dismal record is at least suggestive.)

Fundamental to these facts is that if the conquest of political power occurs in a still-capitalist economy, revolutionaries have to contend with the institutional legacies of capitalism: relations of coercion and domination condition everything the government does, and there is no way to break free of them. They can't be magically transcended through political will; to think they can, or that the state can "wither away" even as it becomes more expansive and dominating, is to adopt a naïve idealism.

Corresponding to all these errors are the flaws in Marx's abstract conceptualization of revolution, according to which revolution happens when the production relations turn into fetters on the use and development of productive forces. One problem with this formulation is that it's meaningless: at what point exactly do production relations begin to fetter productive forces? How long does this fettering have to go on before the revolution begins in earnest? How does one determine the degree of fettering? It would seem that capitalism has fettered productive forces for a very long time, for example in its proneness to recessions and stagnation, in artificial obstacles to the diffusion of knowledge such as intellectual copyright laws, in underinvestment in public goods such as education and transportation, and so forth. On the other hand, science and technology continue to develop, as shown by recent momentous advances in information technology. So what is the utility of this idea of "fettering"?

In fact, it can be made useful if we slightly reconceptualize the theory of revolution. Rather than a conflict simply between production relations and the development of productive forces, there is a conflict between two types of production relations-two modes of production - one of which uses productive forces in a more socially rational and "un-fettering" way than the other . The more progressive mode slowly develops in the womb of the old society as it decays, i.e., as the old dominant mode of production succumbs to crisis and stagnation. In being relatively dynamic and 'socially effective,' the emergent mode of production attracts adherents and resources, until it becomes ever more visible and powerful. The old regime can't eradicate it; it spreads internationally and gradually transforms the economy, to such a point that the forms and content of politics change with it. Political entities become its partisans, and finally decisive seizures of power by representatives of the emergent mode of production become possible, because reactionary defenders of the old regime have lost their dominant command over resources. And so, over generations, a social revolution transpires.

This conceptual revision saves Marx's intuition by giving it more meaning: the "fettering" is not absolute but is in relation to a more effective mode of production that is, so to speak, competing with the old stagnant one. The most obvious concrete instance of this conception of revolution is the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, during which the feudal mode became so hopelessly outgunned by the capitalist that, in retrospect, the long-term outcome of the "bourgeois revolutions" from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was never in doubt. Capitalism was bound to triumph after it had reached a certain level of development.

But the important point is that capitalist interests could never have decisively "seized the state" until the capitalist economy had already made tremendous inroads against feudalism. Likewise, socialist or post-capitalist interests can surely not take over national states until they have vast material resources on their side, such as can only be acquired through large-scale participation in productive activities. As the capitalist economy descends into global crisis/stagnation over the next twenty, fifty, and a hundred years, one can predict that an "alternative economy," a "solidarity economy" of cooperative and socialized relations of production will emerge both in society's interstices and, sooner or later, in the mainstream. In many cases it will be sponsored and promoted by the state (on local, regional, and national levels), in an attempt to assuage social discontent; but its growth will only have the effect of hollowing out the hegemony of capitalism and ultimately facilitating its downfall. And thereby the downfall, or radical transformation, of the capitalist state.

I can't go into the detail necessary to flesh out this gradualist notion of revolution, but in my abovementioned book I've argued that it not only radically revises the Marxian conception (on the basis of a single conceptual alteration), in effect updating it for the twenty-first century, but that it is thoroughly grounded in Marxian concepts-in fact, is truer to the fundamentals of historical materialism than Marx's own vision of proletarian revolution was. The new society has to be erected on the foundation of emerging production relations, which cannot but take a very long time to broadly colonize society. And class struggle, that key Marxian concept, will of course be essential to the transformation: decades of continuous conflict between the masters and the oppressed, including every variety of disruptive political activity, will attend the construction-from the grassroots up to the national government-of anti-capitalist modes of production.

Glimmers of non-capitalist economic relations are already appearing even in the reactionary United States. In the last decade more and more scholars, journalists, and activists have investigated and promoted these new relations; one has but to read Gar Alperovitz, Ellen Brown , and all the contributors toYes! Magazine, Shareable.net, Community-Wealth.org, etc. A transnational movement is growing beneath the radar of the mass media. It is still in an embryonic state, but as activists publicize its successes, ever more people will be drawn to it in their search for a solution to the dysfunctional economy of the ancien régime. Local and national governments, unaware of its long-term anti-capitalist implications, are already supporting the alternative economy, as I describe in my book.

I'll also refer the reader to the book for responses to the conventional Marxian objections that cooperatives, for instance, are forced to compromise their principles by operating in the market economy, and that interstitial developments are not revolutionary. At this point in history, it should be obvious to everyone that a socialist revolution cannot occur in one fell swoop, one great moment of historical rupture, as "the working class" or its Leninist leaders storm the State, shoot all their opponents, and impose sweeping diktats to totally restructure society. (What an incredibly idealistic and utopian conception that is!) The conquest of political power will occur piecemeal, gradually; it will suffer setbacks and then proceed to new victories, then suffer more defeats, etc., in a century-long (or longer) process that happens at different rates in different countries. It will be a time of world-agony, especially as climate change will be devastating civilization; but the sheer numbers of people whose interests will lie in a transcendence of corporate capitalism will constitute a formidable weapon on the side of progress.

One reasonable, though rather optimistic, blueprint for the early stages of this process is the British Labour Party's Manifesto, which lays out principles that can be adapted to other countries. Such a plan will necessarily encounter so much resistance that, early on, even if the Labour Party comes to power, only certain parts of it will be able to be implemented. But plans such as this will provide ideals that can be approximated ever more closely as the international left grows in strength; and eventually more radical goals may become feasible.

But we must follow Marx, again, in shunning speculation on the specifics of this long evolution. He is sometimes criticized for saying too little about what socialism or communism would look like, but this was in fact very democratic and sensible of him. It is for the people engaged in struggles to hammer out their own institutions, "to learn in the dialectic of history," as Rosa Luxemburg said. Nor is it possible, in any case, to foresee the future in detail. All we can do is try to advance the struggle and leave the rest to our descendants.

*

Marx is practically inexhaustible, and one cannot begin to do him justice in a single article. His work has something for both anarchists and Leninists, for existentialists and their critics, cultural theorists and economists, philosophers and even scientists . Few thinkers have ever been subjected to such critical scrutiny and yet held up so well over centuries. To attack him, as usefully idiotic lackeys of the capitalist class do , for being responsible for twentieth-century totalitarianism is naïve idealism of the crudest sort. Ideas do not make history, though they can be useful tools in the hands of reactionaries or revolutionaries. They can be misunderstood, too, and used inappropriately or in ways directly contrary to their spirit - as the Christianity of Jesus has, for example.

But in our time of despair and desperation, with the future of the species itself in doubt, there is one more valid criticism to be made of Marx: he was too sectarian. Too eager to attack people on the left with whom he disagreed. In this case, Chomsky's attitude is more sensible: the left must unite and not exhaust its energy in internecine battles. Let's be done with all the recriminations between Marxists and anarchists and left-liberals, all the squabbling that has gone on since the mid-nineteenth century. It's time to unite against the threat of fascism and-not to speak over-grandiosely-save life on Earth.

Let's honor the memory of all the heroes and martyrs who have come before us by rising to the occasion, at this climactic moment of history.

Notes

[1] In my summary of G. E. M. de Ste. Croix's 1981 masterpiece The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests , I added the following thoughts to the foregoing account: "Class struggle is central to history in still more ways; for instance, virtually by analytical necessity it has been, directly or indirectly, the main cause of popular resistance and rebellions. Likewise, the ideologies and cultures of the lower classes have been in large measure sublimations of class interest and conflict. Most wars, too, have been undertaken so that rulers (effectively the ruling class) could gain control over resources, which is sort of the class struggle by other means. Wars grow out of class dynamics, and are intended to benefit the rich and powerful. In any case, the very tasks of survival in complex societies are structured by class antagonisms, which determine who gets what resources when and in what ways."

[2] In reality, of course, political and economic relations are fused together. But analytically one can distinguish economic activities from narrowly political, governmental activities.

The Multiple Meanings of Marx's Value Theory

By Riccardo Bellofiore

Karl Marx's "critique of political economy" is grounded in his value theory. "Critique" has to be distinguished from criticism: Marx aimed not only to point out the errors of political economy, but also to learn from its scientific results. Here the key names are François Quesnay, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo. Marx was also interested in assessing the conditions and the limits of the knowledge provided by classical political economy. At the same time, he saw the critique of the "science" of political economy as the means to develop a critique of capitalist social relations.

Among Marx's unique contributions was that his value theory is the only one consistently put forward within a monetary analysis: that is, it introduces money in the very initial deduction of value. In fact, Marx's object of inquiry is capital understood as a "social relation of production," defined by two main traits: the exploitation of labor within a monetary commodity-producing economy and an internal tendency to crisis. The connection between money and class exploitation on one side and the endogeneity of crisis on the other is related to the view that, in a capitalist economy, the "value added" (a monetary magnitude) newly produced in a given period has its exclusive source in "abstract labor" as an activity - more precisely, in the living labor of wage workers.

In a nutshell, Marx's reasoning may be considered a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. In the capitalist labor process, the totality of wage workers reproduce the means of production employed and produce a net product. The net product is expressed on the market as a new money value that is added to the money value attached to the means of production, historically inherited from the past. This value added is the monetary expression of the living labor time that has been objectified by the wage workers in the period. The value of the labor power (for the entire working class), which is exhibited in money wages, is regulated by the labor-time required to reproduce the capacity for labor, and hence by the labor-time required to reproduce the means of subsistence bought on the market. Accordingly, the surplus value(value added less value of labor power) originates from surplus labor, defined as the positive difference between, on the one hand, the whole of living labor spent in producing the total (net) product of capital and, on the other, the share of that living labor which has been necessary to devote to reproducing the wages, which Marx labels "necessary labor."

The Marxian critique of political economy is inseparable from the meaning Marx gave to the "labor theory of value," which in his case was rather a value theory of labor. The issue is how relations of production and circulation are affected by the fact that labor takes the capitalist social form of producing value and surplus value embedded in "things," in commodities. In what follows, I will look at Marx's value theory from five perspectives: (1) as a monetary value theory; (2) as a theory of exploitation; (3) as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production; (4) as a theory of individual prices; and (5) as a theory of crises.

A Monetary Value Theory

Marx's starting point is that capitalism is an economy wherecommodity circulation occurs throughuniversal monetary exchange. The analysis of exchangeas such is given priority relative to the analysis of capitalist exchange, and money is introduced before capital. In exchange "as such," individual commodity producers are separate and in competition with each other. The labor of these asocial individuals is immediately private and "becomes" mediately social on the market. Socialization of labor goes on indirectly, through the selling of commodities. Each commodity is shown to be equal to the others in certain quantitative ratios. The commodity has a use value, but it also possesses an exchange value: though invisible in the commodity, it is externally exhibited in money as the "universal equivalent."

At this stage of Marx's original argument, money must be a (special) commodity with universal purchasing power, gold, as a result of a historical process of selection and exclusion sanctioned by the state. The equal "validity" of products sold on the market is in fact an a posteriori equalization of the labors producing them. Thus, labor is not social in advance, but only insofar as its true output will be money, a form of "generic" or "abstract" wealth. Individual labor, which is concrete labor producing an object with some utility for some other agent (a social use-value), counts for the producer as its opposite, as abstract labor. Abstract labor is a portion of the total labor exhibited in the money value of output: it is then also a portion of the gold-producing concrete labor, the latter being the unique, immediately social labor. The "value of money" is fixed when gold first enters monetary circulation, in the original exchanges with the other commodities.

Although private labor becomes social labor only through money as a universal equivalent, it is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. On the contrary, commodities possess an exchange value because, even before the final exchange on the commodity market, they have already acquired the ideal property of being universally exchangeable, giving them the form of value. This property, so to speak, grows out of objectified labor as the substance of value: the form of value in the individual commodity is a ghostly entity, but it materializes by taking possession of the body of money as a commodity; the internal duality is now "redoubled" in the external duality of commodity-money. Money is nothing but value made autonomous in exchange, divorced from commodities and existing alongside them, and as the form of value it is the outward necessary exhibition of abstract, indirectly social labor.

This qualitative analysis of exchange-as-such has a quantitative counterpart. The magnitude of value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor-time needed for its production. "Socially necessary labor-time" has two meanings: production must run according to average techniques and intensity (determined by intra-industry competition), but it is also driven by the paying social need (what Marx calls "ordinary demand"). In a particular branch of production, each commodity of a given type and quality is sold at the same money price. Hence, the magnitude of value is ruled not by the "individual" labor-time actually spent by a single producer (i.e., by its individual value) but by the labor-time that has to be expended under "normal" conditions (i.e., by its social, or market, value). The magnitude of value is inversely related to the productive power of labor (the labor time required to produce the commodity, given the prevailing level of intensity). Commodity values are necessarily manifested as money prices. The quantity of money that is produced by one hour of labor in a given country and period may be defined as the monetary expression of labor: the magnitude of value of a commodity multiplied by the monetary expression of labor gives the so-called simple or direct price.

From this perspective, it is always possible to translate the external monetary measure of each commodity's value (ideally anticipated by producers before exchange) into the immanent measure in units oflabor-time. Note, however, that value is not identical with price, with the latter defined as any arbitrary relative ratio between commodity and money fixed on the market. Value instead expresses a necessary relation with the (abstract) labor-time spent in the production of commodities. To be effective in regulating market prices, value implies a coincidence between individual supply and demand. In that case, the spontaneous allocation of the private labors of autonomous producers affirms itself a posteriori on the market as a social division of labor. Price is the money-name taken by commodities, and since individual supplies and demands may well diverge, price may in turn exhibit a labor amount that differs from the socially necessary labor contained in the commodity. The whole mass of newly produced commodities is a homogeneous quantity of value whose monetary expression is necessarily equal to their total money price. The discrepancy between values and prices simply redistributes among producers the total direct labor, i.e., the content hidden behind the money form taken by the net product.

This approach to value theory, where value eventually "comes into being" in money, may be characterized as Marx's monetary value theory. In it, value and money cannot be divorced. It is formulated most clearly in the opening pages of Capital, where Marx moves from exchange value to value, from value to money, and from money to labor. It may be attacked on several grounds. In his famous critique of Capital, the nineteenth-century Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk failed to notice the essential monetary side of Marxian value theory, instead looking only at what he saw as a linear deduction in the sequence exchange value-value-abstract labor. Quite reasonably (from this limited reading), he observed that abstracting from specific use-values does not mean abstracting from use value in general. Moreover, an exchange value is also attached to non-produced commodities. It follows, then, that hidden behind the notion of value are the common properties that allow for exchange on the market, namely utility and scarcity.

A more recent criticism stresses that while the backward connection from money to value is convincing, less so is Marx's idea of an absolute or intrinsic value justifying that inverse movement from the inner dimension of value to the outer dimension of money. Marx himself shows that the social equalization among labors is achieved only when commodities are actually sold in circulation: before that, in production, we meet only concrete labors, which are heterogeneous and non-additive.

A Theory of Exploitation

All these positions ignore the fact that for Marx, commodity exchange is universal only when the capitalist mode of production is dominant-that is, only when workers are compelled to sell their labor power to money as capital, as self-valorizing value. Consequently, labor is for him the content of the value-form because of a more fundamental sequence going from money-capital to (living) labor to (surplus) value. The private "individuals" who are distinct and opposed on the commodity market, where they eventually become "social" (in capitalist terms) through the metamorphosis of their products into money, are now to be interpreted as the collective workers organized by particular capitals in mutual competition.

To explain the origin of the value added, and thereby of the surplus value contained in it, Marx begins from two assumptions: supply meets a demand of the same amount, and commodities are sold at prices proportional to the labor required to produce them ("simple" or "direct" prices). The argument is based on a two-step comparison. First, he sketches a hypothetical situation (but one that expresses something very real and significant in capitalism) where the living labor extracted from wage workers is equal to the necessary labor required to produce the historically given subsistence. It is a situation of simple reproduction without surplus value, akin to Joseph Schumpeter's "circular flow," where the rate of profit is absent. In the second step, Marx imagines a (or rather, reveals the actual) prolongation of the working day beyond necessary labor imposed by capitalists. The extension of the working day beyond the necessary labor time creates a surplus labor and its monetary expression, surplus value.

In this argument, some points must be noted. First, Marx does not abstract at all from circulation. Account must be taken, before the capitalist labor process, of the buying and selling of labor power on the labor market, and of the way subsistence is determined. He must also assume that the potential (latent) value within the commodities produced will be confirmed as a "social use value" in circulation: the metamorphosis of the commodities into real money must happen according to sales expectations. Moreover, to make clear that abstract living labor is the only source of value, Marx must abstract from the tendency toward the equalization of the rate of profit between the branches of production. Throughout the first and second volumes of Capital, Marx ignores "static" (Ricardian) competition as the tendency towards the equality of the rate of profit among industries. Already in the first volume, however, he cannot avoid considering "dynamic" (Schumpeterian) competition, the intra-industry struggle to obtain extra surplus value. The diversification and stratification of the conditions of production is determined by innovation and spreads the rate of profit within the sector.

The "generativity" of the surplus is an endogenous variable, influenced by the social form taken by production as production for a surplus value to be realized on the market. With given industrial techniques, and assuming that competition on the labor market establishes a uniform real wage, necessary labor is constant. Surplus value is extracted by lengthening the working day. Marx calls this method of increasing surplus value the production of absolute surplus value. When the length of the working day is limited-whether by law or through workers' resistance-capital may enlarge surplus value by the production of relative surplus value, that is, through technical innovations or by speeding up the pace of production (a greater intensity of labor). Technical change, which increases the productive power of labor, lowers the unit-values of commodities. To the extent that the changing organization of production directly or indirectly affects the firms that produce wage-goods, necessary labor falls, and with it the value of labor power. This makes room for a higher surplus labor, and thus a higher surplus value.

Changes in production techniques yielding relative surplus value are a much more powerful way of controlling worker performance than is the simple personal control needed to obtain absolute surplus value. Moving from "cooperation" to the "manufacturing division of labor" to the "machine and big industry" stage, a specifically capitalist mode of production is developed. Here labor is no longer under a formal subsumption to capital (with surplus value extraction occurring within the technological framework historically inherited by capital) but it is under a real subsumption to capital (enforced by "technology," i.e., a capitalistically designed system of production). Workers (the human bearers of labor power) become mere "appendages" of the means of production, a means of "absorption" of labor power in motion (living labor). The concrete "qualities" possessed by laborers spring from a structure of production incessantly revolutionized from within and designed to command living labor. At this point in the argument, labor does not only "count" but really "is" purely abstract, indifferent to its particular form (which is dictated by capital), in the very moment of activity, where it has lost the nature of the active element and become the passive object of capitalist manipulation in the search for profit. This stripping away from labor of all its qualitative determinateness and its reduction to mere quantity encompasses both the historically dominant tendency to de-skilling and the periodically recurring phases of partial re-skilling.

A moment of reflection is needed to appreciate the special features of this unique social reality where labor is made abstract already in production. Profit-making springs from an "exploitation" of workers in a double sense. There is, first, exploitation through the division of the social working day, with laborers giving more (living) labor in exchange for less (necessary) labor. The perspective here is that of the traditional notion of exploitation, which considers the sharing-out of the quantity of social labor contained in the new value, added within the period. Its measure is surplus labor over and above necessary labor. This, however, is the outcome of a second, more basic exploitation of workers, in the form of the use of workers' labor power. Capitalist wealth is created only on the condition of this "consumption" of workers' bodies and minds, which perverts the nature of labor. The quantitative measure of this "productive" notion of exploitation, which refers to the formation rather than the distribution of the fresh "value added," is the social working day in its entirety. From this second perspective, exploitation becomes identified with the whole working day, and with the abstract (living) labor of wage workers. This is the ultimate reason for tracing back value to labor, because of the value form taken by labor.

Marx shows that abstract labor reflects an inversion of subject and object (what philosophers would call a "real hypostatization"), which is deepened in the theoretical movement back from the commodity-output market to the labor market and the production process. Within commodity exchange, objectified labor is made abstract because the products of human working activity, as long as they are commodities, manifest themselves as an independent and estranged reality, divorced from their origin in living labor. The consequent "alienation" of individuals is coupled by "reification" and "fetishism": reification because in a commodity-capitalist economy production-work relations among people necessarily take the form of an exchange among "things," and fetishism because, as a consequence, the products of labor seem endowed with social properties, as if these were bestowed upon them by nature. These characteristics reappear in the other two moments of the capitalist circuit. On the labor market, human beings become the personification of the commodity they sell, labor power (or "potential" labor). Within production, living labor (or labor "in becoming") is shaped by capital as abstract labor, and embedded in a definite technique and organization specifically designed to enforce the extraction of surplus value. Abstract labor in motion (as the activity producing value and money as its result) is the true subject of which the real individual workers performing it are the predicates. In this way, Marx's capital as self-valorizing value is akin to Hegel's Absolute Idea, seeking to actualize itself and reproducing its own conditions of existence; but it is potentially limited by workers' resistance to their "incorporation" as internal moments of capital.

At this point, it is possible to understand that behind the anarchic "social division of labor"-carried out by private producers independently of one another and effected a posteriori via the market-a different "technical division of labor" within production is taking place. In the latter, inasmuch as it is subjected to the drive of valorization, an a priori despotic planning by capitalist firms leads to a technological equalization and social pre-commensuration of the expenditure of human labor power, tentatively anticipating final validation on the commodity market. This process imposes on labor-already within direct production and before exchange-the quantitative and qualitative properties of being abstract labor spent in the socially necessary measure. Even though capitalist production is completely actualized only in exchange-and therefore single capitals in competition are not guaranteed to find an outlet for their production-individual workers are immediately socialized in production.

Capitalist production is the paradox of dissociated firms whose production is "in common," but which have yet to appear as part of total social labor in the eventual validation on the commodity market. This pre-commensuration of labor and socialization within production, in its turn, is conditional on a monetary ante-validation expressed by the finance for production that money-capitalists grant to industrial capitalists. For Marx, once capitalism has reached its full maturity in large-scale industry, the subjection of wage workers to capital, with the consequent (ex ante) abstraction of living labor already in production, and hence the theory of exploitation, must be seen as the foundation of the monetary value theory.

A Macro-Monetary Theory of Capitalist Production

I have heretofore surveyed two interpretations of Marx's value theory: as a monetary theory of value and as a theory of capitalist exploitation. Here I will summarize a contemporary analysis that may link these two: an approach to the value theory as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. This interpretation was put forward by the Italian economist Augusto Graziani, as part of his version of the theory of the "monetary circuit," and it has the advantage of revealing a hidden Marxian current in the work of the "bourgeois" monetary heretics of neoclassical theory (Knut Wicksell, Schumpeter, D. H. Robertson, the Keynes of the Treatise on Money).

According to both the Marxian view and these monetary heretics, the capitalist "cycle," or circuit, is logically split into a sequence of successive phases: first, the initial buying and selling of labor power on the labor market (where money wages are bargained); then, immediate production, where labor power is used; and eventually, the final selling of commodities in the moment of circulation (where real wages are eventually fixed), leading to the reconstitution of the money capital which has been advanced. If we distinguish money-capitalists from capitalist-entrepreneurs, this series follows the tripartite separation of Graziani's macro-agents in the most basic abstract picture of the monetary circuit: financial capital, industrial capital, and the working class. Means of production circulate only within the firm-sector, out of reach of wage-workers, whose purchasing power can only materialize in buying the means of consumption that the capitalist class makes available to them.

The defining features of Marx's value theory can be characterized as follows. It is, first of all, a class macroscopic analysis, which leads directly to a description of the capitalist economic process as a monetary circuit. In the cycle of money capital, money is initial finance from the banking system, allowing the firm-sector as a whole to purchase labor power from the working class. Money, before being the universal equivalent in circulation (the "social relation" in circulation), is what puts capitalists in a specific "social relation" with workers in production. The possibility of crisis arises when money is hoarded, because of the pessimistic prospects of capitalist-entrepreneurs or money-capitalists, and brings with it unsold commodities and involuntary unemployment. Crisis is a "break" in the circuit-a point which encompasses both Keynes's view of crisis as the result of a rise in liquidity preference (failure to "close" the circuit), and circuitists' view of crisis as an outcome of capitalist-entrepreneurs' reluctance to invest (failure to "open" the circuit).

"Valorization" means an enlargement of abstract wealth. In a truly macro-monetary perspective, no exchange internal to the firm-sector can contribute to valorization. If we assume Marx's macrosocial, monetary, and class point of view, it is clear that surplus value (gross profits) cannot originate in internal exchanges within the capitalist class: inter-firm transactions could only give way to "profit upon alienation" (or "profit upon expropriation"), cancelled out at the level of the firm-sector as a whole. The genesis of surplus value can be found instead in the only external "exchange" for capital as a whole, the one between capitalist firms (financed by banks) and the living bearers of labor power. Following Michał Kalecki's revision of Rosa Luxemburg's argument, the level, composition, and distribution of output can be easily determined. The "autonomous" capitalists' expenses for investment and their own consumption fix the amount of their profits, their market power (expressed in the "degree of monopoly") defines the profit share on income, and from here it is straightforward to derive the level of output, income and employment. In this view, in a capitalist economy, the totality of the means of production must go to capitalist-entrepreneurs. Thus, the entrepreneurs must be able to buy all the new means of production which have been produced. The profit margin must be set at a level such that the mass of profits is equal to realized investments.

It is noteworthy that in this reconstruction of Marxian theory what the working class actually receives are the consumption goods that firms put on the market for them, even if there are household savings. Financial wealth allows individuals to modify their consumption stream over time, but it is irrelevant for the aggregate. A reduction in saving is followed by higher real consumption by workers only if the firm sector autonomously decides to increase the supply of wage goods. Even shares represent a fictitious ownership, as long as decisions over real production are out of workers' control. This does not mean that distribution is immutable. However, workers exert influence on firms' or government's decisions about the real composition of output through non-market actions: conflict in production, or struggles in society, or political interventions.

On the Marxian theory of money, Graziani also offers some original insights. We must distinguish "money" (Geld in Marx's original German) from "currency" (Münze). The former represents abstract "wealth in general," while the latter is the universally accepted intermediary of exchange, and is one among many representatives of wealth in general. If we accept this distinction, the valorization process is defined as money-commodity-more money, or M-C-M´, while the monetary circuit enabling its reproduction is defined as currency-commodity-currency. It follows that the specific goal of the capitalist is to acquire money in the sense of abstract wealth, not to accumulate money as currency. When Marx discusses the nature of gross profit, he makes clear that it is acquired by capitalists solely in the form of commodities.

While Marx stresses that currency as "means of circulation" in commodity markets is itself a commodity, currency representing money as a form of capital must be a form of credit, and more specifically bank credit ex nihilo. The role of currency as bank credit ex nihilo is not made explicit in Capital because, when Marx writes of money and currency, especially in volume 3, he does not present a "pure" theory of the monetary circuit, but only an inquiry into what we today call the practice of money markets. Moreover, he assumes an open economy and the presence of the state. It has been suggested that the assumption that money is a sign (like that made by the monetary heretics) threatens to undermine Marx's theory of exploitation, since money as capital may seem to be valueless. This is not so. The problem of the value of money as capital is reduced to the problem of determining wages, because in a class macro-monetary approach the only purchasing power of the advanced currency is the number of workers hired: following the general principle of the theory of value, the value of the real wages of workers is equal to the given (subsistence) real wage .

A Theory of Individual Prices

The macro-monetary reconstruction, like the other perspectives on Marx's value theory I have presented, deflates the theoretical drama which has been going on for a century or more about the so-called transformation problem. This debate centers on Marx's value theory as a theory of the determination of (relative) prices: the conclusion many drew from the discussion was that Marx failed to transform the "simple" or "direct" prices (proportional to the labor contained in the commodities exchanged, sometimes labelled "labor-values") into the "prices of production" (containing an equal rate of profit, and systematically diverging from simple prices).

The reason is easy to understand. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx focuses on the rate of surplus value (identical to the rate of exploitation)-that is, the surplus value divided by the money capital spent in buying labor power (what Marx calls variable capital). This ratio is identical to that between surplus labor and necessary labor. The rate of surplus value is positively related to the length and intensity of the working day. It also rises with increases in the productive power of labor, which is positively affected by the capital composition: the ratio between the money capital advanced to buy means of production (labelled by Marx constant capital) and variable capital. Surplus value springs only from the use of labor power bought with variable capital, and not from the means of production bought with constant capital-hence, their respective names.

The rate of surplus value explains the origin of gross profits for total capital, confronted with the working class as a whole. Total capital extracts the new value, as exhibited in money, of the living labor of the working class, and pays back the value of labor power, as exhibited in the necessary labor. However, for the individual capital, the success of an investment is rather measured by the rate of profit: the ratio between total surplus value and total capital (the sum of variable capital and constant capital). Because of inter-industry, "static" competition, the rate of profit tends to be equal among branches of production.

Here the problem is said to emerge. The rate of profit is positively related to the rate of surplus value, and negatively related to capital composition. The rate of surplus value tends to be equal in every industry, but there is no reason for capital composition to equalize across industries. Commodities, including the elements of constant and variable capital, cannot be evaluated at labor-values when inter-industry competition is introduced-hence the need to transform the labor-values in prices of production, with the rate of profit helping to determine the elements of variable and constant capital.

I will not go into the intricacies of this debate. The point is that, whatever the opinions on the technical details of the transformation, the problem simply cannot exist as such: it is a pseudo-problem. If the core of Marx's value theory is taken to be the a posteriori socialization of labor on the market against the universal equivalent, the argument may be put forward that there are no actual "labor-values" before the eventual validation on the final market . There is only a single system of prices, and the assumption of simple or direct prices is just a "law of exchange," to be removed at a lower level of abstraction. The vision of Marx's value theory as a theory of capitalist exploitation, tracing back surplus value to the extraction of living labor from human beings as bearers of labor power, is even more radical: the point there is that valorization arises from the social relation of capital and workers in the capitalist labor process as a contested terrain, through class struggle in production. Accordingly, the extraction of living labor meets specific social difficulties for the buyers, because the labor power sold by workers (and hence the living labor to be extracted from them) are attached to the sellers, who in capitalism are supposed to be "free" and "equal" individuals. Thus the new value produced in the period cannot but be the monetary expression of living labor alone: whatever the "rule of prices," the ratios by which commodities exchange cannot but redistribute the new value. By definition, gross profits appropriate a share of workers' living labor.

The macro-monetary theory of capitalist production complements this argument, assigning a more fundamental role to the labor-values hidden behind simple or direct prices as a price rule. In fact, it is maintained that in the macro-social argument, in the first volume of Capital, the relevant price between class macro-agents is the rate of surplus value, adequately expressed through simple or direct prices. The reason is easy to see. The new value added by current production is identical to the monetary expression of living labor, and the value of labor power is the monetary expression of the labor contained in the real wage of the working class. All this occurs independently of saving behavior, and, we may add, it remains true whatever the ruling price system. As Graziani argues, in a quite extreme but effective fashion, Marx's theory of value has nothing to say directly about the phenomenon of the prices in final commodity-circulation, since valorization has been accounted for in the macroscopic class analysis, which includes the buying and selling of labor power and immediate production.

The macroeconomic inquiry into valorization is prior to the microeconomic determination of individual prices. At stake in the latter are not the relations between total capital and working class, but the exchange-relations of single firms. The determination of prices of production may well give way to a disparity between the labor commanded (in exchange) by gross profits and the labor contained (in production) within surplus value, and between the labor commanded (in exchange) by the money wage bill and the labor contained (in production) within the real wage for the working class. However, this "unequal exchange" can only obscure the process of valorization, not erase it. The new value (and then the living labor extracted by total capital from workers) and the value of labor power (and then the necessary labor required to produce the given real wage of the working class) remain the same.

Both the Marxists, and their neo-Ricardian or neoclassical critics-who dealt with the determination of prices of production within a simultaneous exchanges perspective-were unfaithful to Marx, because they overlooked the process that constitutes the equilibrium position. In fact, Marx's value theory as it has been depicted here is a non-equilibrium theory. This is something intrinsic to all the foregoing accounts of Marx's value theory: that value eventually comes into being with money as its phenomenal form (the monetary value theory); that class struggle and intra-capitalist competition affect the extraction of living labor (the theory of exploitation); as well as in the view of the essential monetary ante-validation of labor power as potential labor through the financing of production (the macro-monetary theory of capitalist production). "Non-equilibrium" refers to the constitution of the economic magnitudes, allowing us to distinguish, afterward, between equilibrium and disequilibrium. This is not a "temporal" but a "logical" re-reading of Marx's value theory. In my understanding, this duality of value theory (an out-of-equilibrium perspective, embodying both an equilibrium and a non-equilibrium) is at the core of David Harvey's notion of "anti-value," which has eluded many commentators.

A Theory of Crises

Another controversial area in Marxian political economy is the theory of crises. According to Marx, accumulation-i.e., the conversion of some portion of surplus value into additional (constant and variable) capital, to produce more surplus value-is a contradictory process. Crises are at once necessary explosions of the contradictions, and temporary solutions to them.

Capitalism's tendency toward instability is already evident in its structure as a monetary economy, where commodity-exchange is universalized. For some of the separate and autonomous firms, the anarchy in capitalist social division of labor may easily lead to an incomplete "realization" in circulation of the value potentially produced in immediate production. The presence of money dissociates sales from subsequent expenditures, so that hoarding may disrupt the smooth sequence of supply finding its own outlet on the market as incomes are spent. Most of Marx's inquiry in the three volumes of Capital, however, rests on the assumption that commodities are sold on the market at their "social values" (in volumes 1 and 2) or at "prices of production" (in volume 3)-something akin to Keynes's basic model in the General Theory of fulfilment of short-term expectations.

In volume 2 of Capital, drawing on an original insight by Quesnay, Marx constructs his schemes of reproduction, which show that a balanced growth path, independent of the level of consumption demand, is a theoretical possibility. Marx divided social output into two departments, the first producing capital goods and the second consumption goods (which may be subdivided into wage-goods and luxury-goods). The value output of both sectors is seen as the sum of its three constituent parts, i.e., constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value. In simple reproduction, capitalists unproductively consume the entire surplus value, resulting in zero growth. In enlarged reproduction, they more or less completely invest surplus value in new constant and variable capital, allowing for accumulation. What the scheme clarifies is that each value component of the output is also a component of demand for its own or the other sector. Equilibrium, which is always possible, depends on some balance among intersectoral trades. Against Malthus and Sismondi, Marx affirms that capital may expand over time without meeting a barrier in effective demand, because it is the mainspring of its own demand. Nevertheless, against Ricardo and Say, Marx also states that, since equilibrium needs exchange in definite, "correct" proportions-and not only in value, but also in use value and money terms-a balanced long-run accumulation is not a guaranteed outcome, but rather materializes by "accident" (a point taken up again in the Harrod-Domar growth models).

The likelihood of departures from equilibrium because of this absence of planning simply reflects the possibility of crises occurring in a market environment. Marx instead seeks to explain the necessity of crises arising from the capitalist class relation itself. In his view, failures of effective demand issue from a fall in investments, which itself proceeds from a profitability crisis. Thus, the question becomes one of understanding the systemic, recurring causes of profit shortfalls. A first argument is described in the "general law of capital accumulation" at the end of volume 1 of Capital: assuming a constant composition of capital, a sufficiently rapid growth in the value invested exhausts the supply of labor power and tightens the labor market. Wage increases outpace the rise in the productive power of living labor, the rate of profit starts falling, and consequently, accumulation and the demand for labor slow down. A more lasting solution to this difficulty, located in distributive struggles over the partition of the new value added, is the introduction of labor-saving, capital-intensive methods of production. For a given capital, mechanization reduces the share of variable capital, and thereby the demand for labor, to produce the same output: it displaces workers, replacing them with machines.

Theoretically, a rise in the rate of accumulation may enhance or reduce employment, according to the relative weight of the two forces, the increase in the size of capital and the change in its composition. Through the cycle, the pace and structure of the accumulation of capital (the independent variable) constantly vary to reproduce an industrial reserve army of potential workers ready to be included in the valorization process, exerting a downward pressure on wages-the dependent variable. A permanent downward pressure on the real wage, i.e., an "absolute" impoverishment of the workers, is among the possible outcomes. All the same, the normal situation is very different. Capitalist accumulation is propelled by the production of relative surplus value, which presupposes a positive dynamics of the productive power of labor. The real wage, then, has room for improvement (without impeding the tendency for a greater share of the surplus value in the new value added to go to the capitalist class), as long as the increased level of workers' consumption is expressed in a lower value of labor power. This is what Luxemburg called the tendency toward a fall in the relative wage, i.e., a contraction in wages as a proportion of national income-a relative, not an absolute, impoverishment. On the other hand, with the rise of trade unions and a more militant working class, wage struggles can become partially independent from the labor market, break the tendential fall in the "relative" wage, and develop into an independent cause of capitalist crises.

Mechanization of production is also an autonomous drive for capital to control living labor and to remove workers from the point of production. If mechanization is a powerful lever to regulate both the exchange value and the use value of labor power, it nevertheless creates a further difficulty. The rise in what Marx calls the technical composition of capital - the "physical" ratio of the number of means of production to the number of workers employed-contributes to the expulsion of workers from the productive process; but workers' living labor, we know, is the exclusive source of value and surplus value. According to Marx, the consequent rise in the composition of capital expressed in value terms yields a tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It must be noted, however, that Marx expresses the "law" with reference to the rise in what he calls the "organic" composition of capital (in which the elements of constant and variable capital are evaluated at the prices before the diffusion of innovation), and not in the value composition of capital (in which these elements are evaluated at the prices after such diffusion). The latter definition fully reflects the revolution in the evaluation of constant and variable capital produced by mechanization, whereas the former measures inputs at their original prices. The "organic" composition follows the increase in the "technical" composition, but the trend in the profit rate depends on the "value" composition. The clarification of the distinction between physical, value, and organic composition of capital was a fundamental contribution made by Ben Fine and Laurence Harris in the late 1970s, and developed more recently by Alfredo Saad-Filho.

Some authors have interpreted the tendency of the rate of profit to fall not only as a cause of cyclical crises, but also of capitalism's long waves, and others have considered it the reason for a secular downward trend in profitability. There is some justification for this view. The application of greater quantities of constant (and especially, fixed) capital per unit of output is the most effective means to propel surplus value extraction from workers. Marx thought that the increase in the rate of surplus value could not compensate in the long run for the negative influence on the rate of profit of the higher (value) composition of capital, and so he downgraded it as a mere counter-tendency. Marx's strongest argument in favor of the "law" is an appeal to an absolute limit to the surplus labor that may be pumped out of a given working population.

To understand what is involved here, it is best to view the composition of capital as an index of the ratio between, on the one hand, the dead labor contained in the means of production and, on the other, the living labor expended in the period-that is, to represent it as the ratio between constant capital and the sum of variable capital and surplus value. Assuming that variable capital is tending toward zero, and thus that the whole social working day is objectifying itself as surplus value, the (value) composition of capital becomes the reciprocal of themaximum rate of profit. This latter can be seen as the ceiling for the upper movements of the actual rate of profit. Marx suggests that the numerator of the maximum rate of profit meets a "natural" constraint in the amount of living labor that can be extracted from workers, while, on the contrary, its denominator is free to grow without limits. At the ruling social values, individual capitalists are willing or forced to introduce more capital-intensive methods of production. In this way, they lower unit costs to gain excess temporary profits, but the longer-run effects of their behavior force a reduction of the social values of commodities and depress the average rate of profit.

Nevertheless, to deduce a necessary fall in the rate of profit would be unjustified, because progress in the productive power of labor, accelerated by mechanization, ends up reducing the values (i.e., prices) of all commodities, and thereby also those of the means of production. It cannot be excluded a priori that the devaluation of constant capital might even be strong enough to raise the maximum rate of profit, removing the barrier to the actual rate of profit. The latter is both a positive function of the rate of surplus value and a negative function of the composition of capital. Another criticism is thus that there is no reason to exclude the possibility that the rise in the rate of surplus value can offset the (possible, not necessary) rise in the value composition of capital.

It is interesting to observe that the higher the rate of surplus value soars, and thereby the more the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is repressed, the more likely the system is to run into a third type of crisis, that of realization. Some Marxists have indeed suggested that the rate of profit falls because actual (or expected) effective demand is insufficient for the system as a whole to buy commodities at their full value (including the average rate of profit). Two conflicting positions have been dominant in this group of theories. One approach (that of Hilferding, for example) stressed that disproportionalities-i.e., sectoral imbalances between supply and demand-were intrinsic to a spontaneous, chaotic market economy. If excess supply persistently affects important branches of production, this can spread to other sectors and easily degenerate into a general glut of commodities. This kind of difficulty, however, depends on the speed of price-and-quantity adjustment to disequilibrium, and may disappear in a more "organized" form of capitalism. Some of its proponents (such as Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski) even ended up endorsing the view that, being "production for production's sake," capitalism encounters no true barrier in effective demand, and in principle sustain a balanced growth path with declining consumption. The other approach (associated with Luxemburg and others) is sometime wrongly labelled "underconsumptionist," though in fact it stresses under-investment. It maintains that net investment could not compensate for insufficient consumption forever, since the long-term profitability of new machine-goods depends on future outlets, and these latter are less and less predictable with a decreasing share of consumption in total demand. The same reproduction schemas prove that the inter-sectoral trade proportions required for expanded reproduction are precarious and unsteady. An increasing extraction of relative surplus value-which is needed to overcome the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and which strengthens the tendency for the relative wage to fall-shifts them continuously, making them unlikely to be met for long.

For some of these theorists, such forms of realization crisis are of increasing severity and lead to a final breakdown, when the "external" factors mitigating them (such as the net exports to non-capitalist areas) are exhausted. Other writers in the same tradition, as Kalecki, objected that the insufficiency of effective demand may be solved by what he dubbed "domestic exports," i.e., governments' budget deficits financed by the injection of new money; indeed, Luxemburg already hinted at something of this kind in her original argument, under the heading of military expenditures on armaments. A similar role may be played by unproductive consumption by "third persons," drawing their incomes from deductions from total surplus value. To be compatible with a stable accumulation of capital, these "solutions" call for continued pressure on living labor. This confirms the role of the rate of surplus value as the pillar of capitalist development, and of the outcome of the class struggle within the capitalist labor process as the crucial determinant of its dynamics.

A re-reading of Marx's theory of crisis looks at the tendential fall in the rate of profit as a meta-theory of crises, incorporating the different kinds of crises which can be derived from Marx, and extending them to a historical narrative of the evolution of capitalism. From this point of view, the tendential fall in the rate of profits due to a rising value composition of capital was confirmed during the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century. The increasing rate of exploitation needed to overcome the tendency was implemented by Fordism and Taylorism, which jointly strengthened the tendency for the relative wage to fall. The rise in the rate of surplus value, however, created the conditions of a realization crisis, the Great Crash of the 1930s. The so-called golden age of capitalism after the Second World War was predicated on a higher pressure on productive workers, to obtain enough living labor and gain ever higher surplus labor. This in turn opened the way to a social crisis of accumulation, because of the struggles within the immediate valorization process-a key factor in the stagflation of the 1970s.

From this point of view, the so-called Great Moderation, leading to the recent Great Recession (if not Lesser Depression), must be interpreted as capital's reaction to a crisis originating from a rupture in the same capital-labor "social relation" within production. "Great Moderation," of course, was a misnomer, coined by Ben Bernanke in 2004 and founded on the delusion that finance and business cycles were at last under control. Neoliberalism is best captured as a real subsumption of labor to finance and debt within a Minskyian "money manager capitalism": the subordinated integration of households into the stock exchange market, and their descent into bank indebtedness. As I have argued several times with Joseph Halevi, even before Minsky the tendency to household private indebtedness was captured by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff as a powerful countertendency, and Sweezy developed a reading of the new phase of capitalism in terms of "financial dominance." The other side of the coin was the "deconstruction" of labor in the new phase of capitalist accumulation, characterized by new styles of corporate governance leading to a centralization without concentration, and then to a weakening of workers in the labor market and in the labor process. This form of capitalism was based on a capital market inflation, which, though it stabilized the system for a time, has proven unsustainable.

This piece originally appeared at MROnline . It is a revised version of a paper presented at the Union for Radical Political Economics session of the Allied Social Sciences Association Conference in Philadelphia in January 2018, and previously presented at the Historical Materialism Conference in London in November 2017.

Riccardo Bellofiore is a professor of economics at the University of Bergamo.

Contrived Connections of Capital

By Steven L. Foster

Unpastoral Limps

I made a couple of connections while taking an early morning bike ride along tree-lined, deeply rutted and pot-marked, dirt access lanes leading me through expanses of flooded checkered rice fields, sprouting green and dotted with white heron. One connection was a barbed-wire fence newly stung and anchored by poured concrete posts rising higher than the older bamboo barriers tied to trees along the pathway designating ownership over parcels of land.

The other was an old man in a not-too-distant wooded area emerging from his tiny platformed shack constructed from corrugated sheet metal, rough-hewn wood planks, and bamboo. Remnants of a wood fire in an arched ground level mud oven smoldered. Chickens were scampering about with dogs barking-once I became sighted, and a couple of penned-up pigs grunting near a small vegetable garden. The abode was likely his year-round home, and not a makeshift shelter built in shaded areas for temporary field laborers escaping the tropical sun.

Clad in grimy clothing, he listed to his left, severely limping (I too have limps), and slowly trudging toward a beat-up grimy motorcycle with side-car. He nodded towards me in acknowledgement while calming his dogs as he hoisted a bundle of wood kindling taken from the side-car. The old man's likely working as a tenant farmer hired by the land owner who constructed the new barbed wire fencing. Less than 14 percent of the farmers in the largely agrarian country where I reside own the land they work, even though less than three decades ago 44 percent were small land-owning farmers.

Triggered by the fence and seeing the farmer-representing to me an arduous life of poverty and toil for someone so old, I briefly thought: All three of us are commodities.

A contrived connection? Yes. But, not by me. We were intentionally made commodities and had little choice in the matter. After all, who wants to be merely a commodity unless you're branded as a wealthy superstar, luring others "to be like Mike," Madonna, or Rihanna? Especially, since I believe far more intrinsic connections exist between the three of us-whether we know it or not.

In what follows, I'll briefly explore the broad historical processes in how the land, the old man, and I received our assigned roles in the socially constructed capitalist global market. Retired (also with little choice in the matter) after nearly five decades of working, I've had time reflecting on my life in a society designed to turn as much as it can into commodities where my value resided largely in making someone else profits.

Let me first clarify what is meant by commodity and the processes of commodification.

Marx's analysis of a commodity basically stresses a thing's exchange value, quite different than the use an item possesses. For instance: A new case-hardened steel axe may have higher value to the tenant farmer when gathering fire wood than his old axe. That steel axe doesn't have much use value for someone living in a Chicago high-rise building. However, a hardware store owner in selling it (she lives in a high-rise) changes the nature of value the axe possesses. It becomes valuable for the profit it makes by buying the axe at a low price, then selling it at a high price beyond initial costs of purchase and overhead. The axe is now a commodity to the store owner.

Selling everything it can as commodities is essential to capitalism. That's how profits are made. The higher the degree of profit, the more valued a commodity becomes, often outstripping its worth as a useable item.

Take as an example a sturdy handbag and an elegant Gucci satchel. Both perform similar tasks by carrying things and may even require similar material. But, the Gucci sells at a significantly higher price, very likely making much more profit, and therefore, retaining higher commodity value when sold. Not surprisingly, you don't want to harm a costly satchel by carrying potentially leaky groceries in it. Just as you'd not want to take a grocery carrying handbag-maybe stained from previously seeping fresh fruit that got squashed, to a stylishly sophisticated restaurant. You pull out the Gucci for such an occasion and not carry much in it so there'd be no conspicuous bulges breaking its lines complimenting the sleekness of your evening wear.

Economic historian Karl Polanyi noted from his study of capitalist history (modern western history): the commodification of land, labor, and money was necessary for capitalism to work as a social system (see The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press edition, 2001). Without a capitalist market built around these three forms of commodities, we have something other than capitalism. He also suggested that commodifying these things stretches the seams of our social makeup where vital connections to our environments and the people in them breaks down.

We'll look at a broad history of how land and then labor changed into commodities that fueled my initial lament connecting me, the fenced land, and the (other) old man.

(I'm connecting large historical dots with thick lines in keeping with the essay's scope.)

Something Called Nature: Dominated and Sold

Modern humans have hypothetically labelled things in the world not made by us as part of nature. A tree is natural. The wood from it making a press board book shelf isn't. It's made by a human culture. The cultural worlds of people somehow became separated from a "natural" world comprised of nonhuman things: wild forests and jungles, oceans and reefs, and all the animals and strange stuff in them we study and use for our purposes. We moderns think of ourselves as minds living in bodies that we steer and engineer like a space craft from another world fashioned from material that's alien to the aliens.

Thinking and living like that's true provides us an illusion of our transcendence from a non-living world of atoms and what they combine to make, just waiting for us to give them meaning. People with minds give minds to mindless matter found in nature. Nice of us.

It's an unfounded modern concept. Our current sciences are showing the separation between nature and culture is patently artificial, a mere abstraction created by people in the past considering themselves scientific; yet, unaware of their specifically historical conditioning and the perspectival limits of knowledge saddling our finitude as humans. Examples of current scientific inquiry blurring distinctions are: quantum physics-with theories of massless (or nearly so) "fields" forming the primary essence of an organically connected universe (very likely one of many universes); molecular biology informed by this (meta)physics suggesting particles can be in two places at once that's important for respiration and nutrient absorption; sciences pursuing theories around consciousness finding it in more than just smart animals-like the self-awareness of tree communities; neurosciences questioning the existence of a unique self that's separated from "outside" experiences forming an individual; anthropology studying human cultures and still asking: what are humans and their societies-really?, etc.

But, this "Great Divide" between nature and culture persists. That's because the "Divide" has been, and continues to be, useful. (For analysis of the Divide see Bruno Latour: We've Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, 1993, and, Beyond Nature and Culture, by Philippe Descola, University of Chicago Press, 2013. I've taken current science references from a plethora of sources).

The nature part of the Divide is seen by modernity as a thing to be subdued. The Christians of the 16th century and 17th centuries took the biblical mandate from Genesis-subduing God's creation of a natural order, in a way very different than a Hebraic understanding of the passage. The myth of humans subduing and having dominion over nature was likely viewed by the authors of Genesis as caring for and nurturing a creation as one of its creatures placed on earth as a divine vassal, totems of God's cherishing presence (humanity in the image of God). The European religious understanding shifted the meaning to what the father of the scientific method- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), proposed. Nobly concerned as he was with the plight of humans struggling against uncertainties in a natural world, his search for scientific knowledge was for bringing nature under utter control of people. Now, subduing the earth means exercising dominating power over it in a constantly raging battle to conquer it as something other than us.

It's important to recognize this understanding between us and nature when considering how land became a commodity in the capitalist world. Using land productively for profit as an individual owner sees fit, with the land passed along to other individuals through sale or inheritance as a commodity, became like a religion in the west vehemently protected by law.

To be civilized, however rich and ancient your historical traditions, you must adopt the modern capitalist understanding regarding land. The primary meaning of "the rule of law and order" is the protection of private property and the absolute rights of an individual owner over that property, especially land. This is a very modern understanding, legally codified as recently as the later part of the 19th century, though theoretically formulated by John Locke two centuries before then. If you're one of those societies resisting 'the rule of law," you're automatically thrust into being from the natural world and not of culture, or at minimum, in a nebulous area in between the two (Latour); and therefore, less human and in need of civilizing.

Land use for myriads of cultures throughout human history was not for individual exploitation, but, for communities to take what was necessary for their cultural existence, replenishing the resources when able, or moving on when unable-allowing the land to recover and revitalize itself over time. The heads of communities-both women and men, provided land allotments based on specific family needs. Larger families got more land for their sustenance. Most often, there was redistribution of pooled resources ensuring needs be met for those unable, or under-able, to care for themselves. Reciprocity was the basis of economic practices and not individual gain central to commodity exchange-now nearly a universal feature in our global capitalist cultures. In some societies, leadership was chosen based on their capacities to give away the material excesses they accumulated through war or other means and ways.

Yes, there were resource wars over land and its contents. Tribal boundaries existed designating areas used by specific communities and infringement on these territories could amount to conflict, especially in times of scarcity. However, treaties were made allowing other groups certain access rights as needed, and inter-tribal marriages brought communities together effecting allocations of combined resources.

In sum, the singularly individual ownership of land for most our globe's cultures was a totally outlandish concept.

Of course, land was controlled. Under empires, it many have fallen under the jurisdiction of individual rulers and the religions supporting them. Though, what control primarily meant was exacting tribute over populations on the dominated land, payments often in the form of produce from it. There wasn't ownership of a thing called "private property." The subsistence needs of the populous garnered from land were granted by those in authority; that's if a dominating leader wanted to remain in power. When populations were denied land access, they violently rebelled jeopardizing a ruler's position.

In ancient Greece, private ownership for the sake of individual commercial exploitation occurred as prominent men transacted with other city-states and cultures through trade networks. But, land was still provided to non-slaves by law. Of course, tribute/taxation and other services were required for a ruler's protection.

Absolute ownership by an individual becomes legally granted under Roman law, statutes passed in the Republic by the elite landed classes. It was a break with tradition. Again, land was provided as a cultural practice to plebeians-classes of commoners. Access to land was vital to Roman self-understanding since citizen farmers served in the army when called upon with payment for military service often coming through land grants. House-holding networks were central to the Roman economy with redistribution of booty from the conquered supplementing the basic house-hold units.

After the break-up of the Roman empire, access to land for all classes of people during the middle ages followed centuries of socially engrained custom. This was the right of the commons (common land use).

The lowest of peasant groupings in the constructed social hierarchy-villeins, were able to maintain subsistence from the land: growing food, using materials for housing, raising livestock, and making things needed for essential living which was also traded for other needed items based on local markets controlled by social custom. The villeins maintained about 13 acres in their modest farms, holding between 40-50 percent of all the arable land according to geographer Gary Fields ( Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror, University of California Press, 2017, kindle location 821). In 1300 CE, nearly 50 percent of farming in England was on the commons (Fields). Landed nobility exacted tribute consuming most surpluses and would also demand services from villeins that could change like the weather.

Life was not easy. However, the deeply felt pride of self-sufficiency was part of the social fabric. Fields reveals that villeins, even though legally land insecure, still had recourse through manor courts protecting rights to the land based on custom. They were able to procure more holdings of land left fallow after the Black Plague depleted the population. Copyhold practices became a legal process in the 15th century where land occupied by villeins could be passed on to family if fines were paid to nobility.

They, like freeholding farmers, were vested in the land they worked, upgrading and maintaining both their individual lots and common fields worked by the community. It was a unique balance between individual farms and collective agrarian practices on the commons (Fields). Peasant farmers along with the manor courts ensured individuals would not dominate the commons and regulated grazing, crop rotation, and land regeneration ensuring individual farmers would preserve their lots for the benefit of the community and its future. Agricultural innovations boosting productivity were implemented well before the modern technological revolutions occurred.

All was to change by the dawning of the 16th century as England nobility, driven by a number of factors, most notably-commercial greed as mercantile capitalism was on the rise, began a long march of physically enclosing the land under their control. It was, as Fields states, "a long-term project of improving land by 'making private property' on the English landscape. This transformation represents a decisive moment in the long-standing lineage of reallocations in property rights, in which groups with territorial ambitions gained control of land owned or used by others." The result was "…eradicating common field farming and remaking a landscape that once boasted a large inventory of land used as a collective resource (loc 759)."

Very importantly, Fields points out that enclosing the land-using fences, barriers, and roads to designate individualized private property, not only meant inclusive control over it and all that it contains; but, exclusion of others. Even access passages leading to other areas of land that still held common use were denied. Boggs and forested areas were closed off from common use making hunting, food foraging, even fire wood-gathering, illegal to all except the owner. A whole way of life existing for centuries was slowly, yet systematically, dismantled as agrarian societies throughout England, Europe, and then the world lost vital access to land.

The rationale was improvement of land for commercial ends that would bolster integration of a national economy trading increasingly on a global scale. Whether turning grain producing fields into pasture or using it for monocrop growth in order to maximize exports outside of region or country, the goals were profits for elite landholders. Larger estates dominated the English landscape. The villeins, the most precarious members of society, were the first to be affected as peasant residents were expelled. Smaller holdings (yeoman farmers and copyhold villeins) were bought out or outright ousted with the rationale being "efficiency" (read-maximizing profits) in using land. What happened was an all-out assault on common field agriculture. And after the enclosing processes, whether noticeable efficiency in greater productive capacity over the long haul was really achieved or not-other than increased profits, is still a matter of debate among agricultural historians. Over grazing and soil exhaustion through large scale monocrop production had detrimental effects decades after initial increases in produce occurred over the short term because of so called improvements.

Land is now fully a commodity; a thing to be personally possessed and valued for its profitability as an investment. All others are excluded from using this commodity.

Importantly, land enclosures caused unrelenting social upheaval. It was the primary impetus for the institution of wage labor on a mass scale.

Behold! A Labor Market Is Birthed

It's always remarkable just how actions become supported by theoretical 'reason' after events have already occurred. John Locke, a founding thinker regarding land use and any "natural law" surrounding it, systematized what constituted proper land management while the English were slaughtering Indigenous peoples and taking their lands for decades prior to his ruminations. He served as a colonial bureaucrat overseeing the process in the Americas. Adam Smith, father of the "science" of modern economics, theorizer of free markets and worshipped by adorning capitalists in following generations, saw all people in history acting like his local butcher; that is, humans as essentially bartering, trucking, and trading beings driven by individual self-interest looking for personal gain. However, as Polanyi suggests, "…the alleged propensity of man to barter, truck, and exchange is almost entirely apocryphal (pg. 46)." Like the dichotomy between nature and culture, Smith's reductive speculations concerning human motivation is more useful than fundamentally truthful.

This was a necessary understanding of what constitutes the human for transforming society into capitalist culture. Polanyi notes, "The transformation implies a change in the motive of action on the part of the members of society; for the motive of subsistence that of gain must be substituted. All transactions are turned into money transactions (pg. 43)." Subsistence labor on the land must be displaced in capitalist society, workers now becoming wage earners.

The cultural change of the 19th century where, according to Polanyi, full-fledged capitalist culture occurred, was set-up in the 16 th and 17th centuries. As stated above, enclosures increasingly eliminated peasant copyholds, making remaining villeins at-will tenants, meaning they could be removed from the land at the whim of the owners without legal recourse and protections. Rents levied on leases of land and housing increased significantly over this period of time.

It wasn't that peasants didn't rebel against nobility's reneging on responsibilities as reactions were found in the high medieval period and continuing. Enclosing barriers were destroyed. Major rebellions, in Norfolk with Kett's Rebellion (1549), to the revolt at Midlands (1607) "would mark numerous protests against specific enclosures well into the eighteenth century (Fields, loc 770)." Violent crackdowns by local magistrates and state authorities met the insurgences. It was also a time of heightened religious persecutions in support of elites, including the church "inquisitions" of heretics and other evil-doers from among the lower-class rabble who were upsetting burgeoning commercial successes and calling into question questionable practices.

Incidents of poaching were on the rise throughout the long period. Capital punishments also increased, especially following armed poaching by masked raiders in the 18th century, not infrequently sending an offending party to the gallows for stealing a goose. Law enforcement groups were organized by gentry and the idyllic rural countryside was laced with precarity and the thievery and violence that accompanies it. Poaching only increased during the 19th century in spite of harsh laws inflicting weighty penalties.

After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the merchant classes and large land owners winning the day in controlling English monarchal power, the enclosure processes began to hit full stride, not stopping until the beginning of the 20th century. With the triumph of the capitalist classes came an onslaught of parliamentary actions that assaulted the traditions of law protecting rights of common land use, passage and access rights, collective farming, and tenant occupancy rights.

How did the once landed peasantry survive other than by illegal means?

The newly un-landed hired themselves out to large land owners for wages. Wage labor became a necessity if peasantry was to survive.

A degree of wage labor did exist prior to the enclosures. Landless folks unable to fully support themselves from farming would hire out to a manor lord, as well as to yeomen farmers who held larger plots, and even to a cohort of villeins who gained more copyhold land access. There were also local and increasingly regional cottage industries making needed items for use by local communities. However, wage labor was not a typical form of sustaining life. Society largely frowned it. Even if self-sufficient peasants were themselves poor, they were independently self-supporting. The social mores around idleness were severe to say the least. A chronically offending vagabond (unemployed, unauthorized traveler between parishes), or an able-bodied beggar, could be put to death.

Unemployment, or underemployment-pauperism, as never before seen was now a regular feature of the countryside. Enclosures were a key feature propelling this, although it must be granted that other processes were also at work. There were instabilities in commodity prices making for fluctuations in available work, especially after an increasingly nationalized and globalized mercantile capitalist markets spread.

During this time of upheaval, merchant groups were procuring charters for expanding once local cottage industries into manufacturing settlements, towns making commodities for sale to a larger region and on the growing international markets that would include supplying finished goods to colonial populations abroad. Un-landed peasants supplied them with workers. The towns grew into manufacturing cities with a workforce no longer restricted to manors and feudal life under a lord as of 1795. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, the industrial cities were fostering the inhumane conditions that Charles Dickens spoke about in the early 19 th century and Upton Sinclair in the early 20th century. Historical social research has confirmed their insights into urban squalor as the countryside was emptied of its hungry inhabitants needing wage labor for survival and travelling wherever work could be found.

And very usefully, the power of the parish craft guilds was broken. Previous to the privatizing of land as a commodity, guilds through the manor courts had authority controlling production: how many producers of given items in a geographic location averting undue competition, prices of goods and services with minimal standards of living specific to professions, as well as product quality-including worker training in all aspects of production, social support for the infirmed, etc. When agrarian society was dismantled, so was the cultural power of the guilds helping control individualistic merchant greed and manorial excesses. Meager wages now bought necessities with money and no longer through locally defined economics based on reciprocity and social convention. Now, "…all incomes must derive from the sale of something or other, and whatever the actual source of a person's income, it must be regarded as resulting from sale. No less is implied in the simple term 'market system' (Polanyi, pg. 43)." A national labor market being birthed in England was coming to full force.

Under the growing labor market income systematically fell short in meeting basic sustenance. Pauperism was becoming rampant. Previously, wages under the guilds were designed to be adequate for a worker to sustain his family appropriate to life's social stations (not everyone was to have the same standard of living). Not now. The roles of women changed along with the men, as their labor responsibilities in the mass-producing industries of factory towns were formed replacing those of the cottage. Hiring out as domestic servants took women away from the fields. Men, women and children, in making ends meet, were forced to work long, arduously monotonous hours of hard and dangerous factory labor. They were re-socialized into labor's divisions imposed from the outside-theorized in Smith's production of pins for maximizing profits, and not as workers who once made end products through all stages of manufacture.

The new labor force was disciplined and punished (M. Foucault) into new cultural configurations radically different than the centuries long traditions that formed them, traditions that were based on the cycles of nature and the harvest. Now lives were reflected in the factory and the inhuman drudgery it imposed. It was socially fracturing contributing to alcoholism, domestic abuse, petty thievery, and the ills and disease that infested their new environs.

Was there social relief for an enlarged population in distress? There was.

Beginning in 1494 and continuing through 1547 and beyond, laws were formed distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor. Those deemed deserving had recourse to support in special living arrangements-poor houses, with orphans and children of single mothers living with the elderly and those unable work-the infirmed. Those undeserving served under harsh workhouses that only grew harsher as time went on. But, as the feudal social system continued breaking down, more vagabondage, begging, and unemployment occurred growing the populations of the work-houses and debtors prisons.

The later part of Queen Elizabeth I's reign witnessed Poor Laws enacted, the 1601 laws codifying the previously established legislations and harsh penalties surrounding begging and undocumented travel between locales, and more systematically defined what was meant by being poor. It also provided relief for the pauperism plaguing the crown's subjects. These laws were administered at the local parish levels with lots of disparity between the parishes- who gets and how much assistance was given. The funding was also local through compulsory taxation rates on land, pressuring mostly smaller landholders and business people, not the elite whose personal wealth was exempted from the tax. Keeping costs down was a big motivation. Population movement to parishes better off and with better benefits was restricted with stark limits placed on travelling without appropriate permits in the mid-17th century.

The Speenhamland System, enacted around the same time of nationally "freeing" peasants for travel between parishes (1795) so they could find work, suggested an allowance system based on the price of bread and family size since grain prices were increasing primarily due to England's part in fighting the French revolutionaries, then the Napoleonic Wars, and subpar harvests. It was intended to supplement the cries of low wage earners for a "right to live," something wage rates did not afford. The system was a failure on many accounts.

Speenhamland, though national, was administered unevenly on the local level, and mostly in rural areas where peasant unrest was an ever-present reality. Little assistance went to the newly urbanized populations who also needed it. It became too easy for a worker not to work, or to not produce on a level of one's reasonable capacity, since there was a guaranteed income, even though survival on it was dismal. This was demoralizing and degenerating to long social traditions of self-sufficiency and the benefits work provided for families and their cohesion. Being "on the dole" was too similar to the social stigma attached to the work and poorhouses even though the system paid benefits 'outdoor' with recipients not having to live in one of the houses of disrepute if receiving assistance. The local taxation pressure placed on the smaller landholding and manufacturing employers made for deep animosity between those receiving benefits and those supporting the system.

The taxation levels only grew because of an important central flaw to a well-meaning system. There was never any pressure for raising wage rates. Quite the contrary. Employers lowered the wage rates as much as they could, knowing the system would make up the difference. Further, commodity prices remained high since public money was provided based on the price of buying bread. It also made what jobs were available more unstable when profits levels fluctuated and an employer could ready eliminate positions knowing workers would retain a basic income regardless. When it became clearer that the program hurt capitalist production in the long run, important public opinion decried the Speenhamland system, again-a program well intentioned, but, poorly conceived. Though costly to those paying the funding rates, it mostly hurt and dispirited the intended recipients-the working poor.

Prominent public policy figures and theorizers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus railed against the relief. Foremost, the lack of a "free" self-regulating market for labor was being jettisoned by Speenhamland. Ricardo suggested that wages would "naturally" stabilize at a basic survival level. Malthus felt 'right to live' wages would only encourage the poor to reproduce beyond the capacity of the land to sustain human life and starvation was a natural phenomenon for necessary population control. For him, the poor only waste any wage surplus in the ale house. (The Reverend Malthus appears an avatar for some of our current forms of (un)Christianity.) In the end, the old Poor Laws under Speenhamland were repealed and new Poor Laws enacted in 1834, cruelly sharpening the conditions of relief and removing outdoor assistance, making all who received support live in the workhouse, separating family members and deleting any dignity to life in a place worse than the poorest of working people's conditions.

At bottom, under the new Poor Laws, being poor was declared a moral character deficiency.

Polanyi indicates when the new Poor Laws of 1834 were implemented, a completely commodified labor market was born, the last of his three processes of commodification necessary for shaping capitalist society. Removed from subsistence sources and the land supporting agrarian communities, people were now left for a labor market to decide wage payments, hunger motivating a workforce to take whatever wages were offered them.

Yet, ironically, capitalism created its own critics and chief nemeses in a phenomenon labelled the proletariat.

Retorts and Exports

Though we've engaged an English commodification history, the process didn't stop within those borders. Other like-minded countries of Europe quickly followed the economic path the English elite trod, they too transforming their agrarian societies, such as: the 16th century independent Netherlands, France, Germany, late-comer Russia, along with a number of others joining the capitalist profits parade. However, it wasn't as if it was smooth sailing in socially transforming cultures into capitalist societies.

Retorts of seething revolutionary rumblings burst into action in the revolts of 1830, widespread throughout Europe, where demands were made for greater public participation through parliaments forming their country's direction and placing limits on monarchies. Even more unsettling to the system run by ruling elites were the revolts of 1848 (the People's Spring) involving a large part of western Europe that demanded greater democratic voice in national affairs. It didn't stop there as the Paris Commune shook all of Europe's profit-oriented leaders when coalitions of workers, craftsmen and artisans declared Paris independent from the French monarchy and showed the world that the rabble was very capable of self-governance outside the existing capitalist culture foisted upon them. They had to be utterly crushed to prevent others from undergoing the same machinations. And, brutally, in 1871 the French army-with the aid of the Prussians who had just signed a peace treaty with a defeated France, along with the political support of the rest of capitalist Europe, did just that. An alternative to capitalism was decapitated.

It's important to recognize that capitalism demands removing any ability for people sustaining themselves through other alternatives. This is an obvious lesson modern English history taught us when the population was removed from self-sustenance via land privatization while having a wage system thrust upon them. Capitalists also implemented minimal programs when necessary to thwart revolt against the system. The remedies of the Poor Laws were most active in areas bordering on revolution.

Capitalist leadership learned that making the labor market more humane through safer workplaces and providing some benefits to workers-like Bismarck's reforms in the later part of the 19th century, would ensure the system could continue operating. However, any reforms were still in the context of a system that had already commodified land and working people destroying any existing forms of collective self-sufficiency. When reforms impede the profit-making roles commodified land and labor possess, the impediments are removed, just like the Poor Laws were banished and harsher rules implemented.

This historical fact is very apparent today. The systemic pressures to remove the welfare side of state responsibilities to its citizens-obligations demanded and won through generations of workers fighting (and dying) for greater security, respect, and dignity, demanding the "right to live," have never been greater. Witness roll-backs of wage gains throughout the world, cut-backs of public safety nets under austerity as capitalists assume less responsibilities funding public programs, privatizations of public services through selloffs and private/public "partnerships," including national parks to roadways, from bridges to postal services (postal-England); even retirement programs (Chile), and fully public funded health-care services are being transformed into profit making endeavors.

I emphasize, it's not about neoliberal capitalist ideology versus a good capitalism where a paternal state will protect its people from the system's excesses. The socially destructive aspects of commodifying life have been apparent from capitalism's mercantile origins regardless of the liberal-electoral forms undertaken in the 19th and 20 th centuries that attempted to mitigate capital.

Stronger state interventions attempting to train an untrainable and individually greedy capitalism may have helped over the very recent historically anomaly-capital's golden age after the Second World War, but, not over modern history's long duration. Just as remedies were applied to social ills created by the enclosures and labor market, the modern state-intrinsically wed to capitalism, will suspend its paternalistic role whenever so demanded by capital. And under severe systemic threats, capital and its nation/state merge into a totalitarian state-run economy and society, taking fascist forms as seen following the World War I, and during the Great Depression after the 1929 market crash, and is now seen again, if under 21st century circumstances.

The same commodification processes of land and labor, and everything else it can, continue in various stages throughout the globalized world. It's the metastatic legacy of imperialism. This is where my fenced land and limping old man come in.

Consolidation of land into the hands of a few - now fueled by major corporations and investment firms (witness the voracious corporate land grabs in the food insecure areas of Africa and other parts of the world) dominate the remaining vestiges of a natural world ripe in generating profits while feeding populations of consumers. The mass migrations over the last few decades have forcibly expelled innumerable populations in a developing world from their ancient sustaining lands into cities where wage labor now provides their sustenance. Giant agribusinesses force feed existing agrarian societies with land exhausting technologies when they've been very capable of feeding themselves apart from global commodity markets while sustaining their land (unless disasters caused by global warming or profit-driven wars befall them.) Just like the brief history outlined in this essay, the globe is undergoing the necessary processes of social transformation needed to make capitalism supreme, regardless of any preexisting cultural structures.

Cultures founded on capitalism are irreformable. Mitigating reforms attempting to save societies, that's taken many generations to achieve, are being dismantled within far less time than a single generation. And answers don't mean trying to reassemble pre-capitalist pasts. These are long gone with social aspects that should be gone. Potential futures are bleak should capital remain dominant.

It will take visions of a flourishing future without capitalism from a new generation of the systemically dispossessed and disgruntled, dreams looking past the present, while recognizing how this moment came to pass by critically engaging history, and then saying no longer. Local ways will be found for working around the current system, and then networking of local successes into regional and more global alliances building new futures (local change cannot stand alone). Whatever alternatives will take place, they must not include making all things into commodities if life on the planet, as we know it, prevails.

The old man likely limps from his hard labors. A limp of mine from my past labors is now exposed.

China's Rise Threatens U.S. Imperialism, Not American People

By Ajit Singh

This year marks the 40th anniversary of China's "reform and opening up," initiated in 1978. At that time, although living standards had significantly improved following the socialist revolution in 1949- life expectancy nearly doubling in the first 30 years -China still faced tremendous challenges. Seeking to overcome the country's severe underdevelopment, the West's monopoly over technology, and the isolation to which it had been subjected to during the Cold War by the United States, China implemented reforms in order to promote economic growth and development. Deng Xiaoping, chief architect of the policy, summed up the Communist Party's thinking in three simple clauses: "Our country must develop. If we do not develop then we will be bullied. Development is the only hard truth."

Four decades later, the success of reform is undeniable: China has lifted 800 million people out poverty-more than the rest of the world combined during the same period-and generated "the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history," according to the World Bank . China's GDP growth has averaged nearly 10 percent a year over a 40-year period, without crises, with the country becoming a world leader in science , technology and innovation . Rising from extreme poverty to international power, China now has the world's second largest economy, and is generally expected to overtake the U.S. in GDP terms within the next two decades . Measured in terms of purchasing power parity, China's economy has already surpassed the U.S.

When beginning its reform, China sought to "keep a low profile" and "bide its time, while building up strength" , as the U.S. led an international offensive, destructively imposing neoliberalism on countries throughout the global South. Today, we are in the midst of a turning point. Announcing to the world that it is entering a "new era" at last year's National Congress of the Communist Party, China is playing a more assertive and leading role in global affairs. The country's trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative-called " the largest single infrastructure program in human history "-involves over 70 countries and 1,700 development projects connecting Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Meanwhile, mired in economic stagnation and decline, the U.S. is its losing international authority. In particular, during the "America First"-era, the country's reputation has plummeted , as the Trump administration unilaterally withdraws from international institutions and agreements , displays open bigotry towards developing countries, and eschews diplomacy for insulting arrogance and genocidal threats .

U.S. hostility towards China increases

That China and the U.S. are moving in opposite directions is not a new phenomenon, but this trend has been brought into sharp focus under Trump. Growing anxious about its diminishing global dominance, the U.S. demonstrates increasing hostility towards China. In a series of recent policy statements - the National Security Strategy , National Defense Strategy , Nuclear Posture Review , and State of the Union address - the Trump administration has repeatedly identified the "threat" posed by "economic and military ascendance" of China, declaring that "[i]nter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security." It is claimed that China, along with Russia, "want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests."

In response to this "danger," the Trump administration is pursuing a substantial buildup in U.S. military forces, viewing "more lethal" and "unmatched power [as] the surest means of our defense." Trump's 2019 budget proposes a massive increase in Pentagon spending to $716 billion and he has assembled a war cabinet to make use of it, including extreme hawks and noted anti-China hardliners such as John Bolton , Mike Pompeo and Peter Navarro . These moves come after top U.S. military officer, General Joseph Dunford, called China the country's "greatest threat" and U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Harry Harris, new ambassador to Australia, told Congress in February that the U.S. must prepare for war with China . Washington is increasing military pressure on Beijing: ratcheting up tensions on the Korean peninsula; taking steps to construct a "quadrilateral" alliance with right-wing governments in India, Japan and Australia, targeting China; and passing the Taiwan Travel Act which violates the "One China" policy and encourages the U.S. "to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa."

On the economic front, the Trump administration seeks to launch a "trade war" with Beijing and form a broad anti-China alliance , proposing $50 billion in tariffs targeting Chinese imports (and threatening $100 billion more ), launching an investigation into technology transfers to China, and lodging formal complaints at the World Trade Organization on "the state's pervasive role in the Chinese economy." Washington is increasingly regulating and monitoring inbound Chinese investment, outbound U.S. investment in China, and joint ventures. Viewing technological dominance as a pillar of its international authority, Washington considers China's development and technological advance to be an "existential economic threat."

As this animosity increases, U.S. rhetoric towards China calls to mind the virulent anti-communism of the Cold War and racist "yellow peril" phantoms of decades past. Newly appointed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently warned that China was trying "to infiltrate the United States with spies - with people who are going to work on behalf of the Chinese government against America … We see it in our schools. We see it in our hospitals and medicals systems. We see it throughout corporate America. It's also true in other parts of the world … including Europe and the UK." Similarly, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in February that "the whole of Chinese society" is a threat to the U.S. That such belligerent statements can be made towards 1.4 billion people, one-fifth of humanity, without receiving any challenge from Democrats, Republicans or the corporate-owned media, is an indication of the consensus around the "China threat" theory in the U.S. establishment, and the danger this poses.

A new Cold War

Washington's hostility towards Beijing is rooted in the foundation of modern U.S. foreign policy. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and end of the Cold War, ushered in an era during which the U.S. has sought to establish unipolar global dominance. Explicitly outlined in a 1992 Defense Policy Guidance paper authored under neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, the principal objective of U.S. foreign policy in this period has been "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival" capable of challenging U.S. aspirations for global hegemony. In the quarter-century since, the U.S. has aggressively pursued this aim, engaging in endless wars, "regime change" efforts, and military build-ups around the world, now operating over 900 military bases globally.

Despite these most destructive efforts, the U.S. has been unable to stop China's momentous rise, which has emerged as the primary obstacle to U.S. aims for unipolar dominance. Although Washington has sought regime change in Beijing ever since the socialist revolution of 1949, the U.S. has generally pursued a strategy of "containment through engagement" following the normalisation of bilateral relations in the 1970s. In part, Washington had hoped that China's economic reform and the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to political reform in Beijing and the abandonment of Communist Party leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, in favour of Western-oriented neoliberalism. History has confirmed that China has no such intention.

Recognizing its own declining leverage and that China will not become "more like us" , Washington is attempting to launch a new Cold War against China. The identification of China as the primary target of U.S. foreign policy originated during the Obama era with the "Asia pivot" seeking to encircle China, shifting 60 percent of U.S. naval assets to Asia by 2020. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton argued that the U.S. must reorient the focus of its foreign policy from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific to ensure "continued American leadership well into this century." The developments under Trump, mark an escalation of this bipartisan strategy.

The unipolar-multipolar struggle

The importance of U.S.-China relations cannot be overstated, with the two countries at the core of a broader unipolar-multipolar struggle over the shape of the international order. While the U.S. seeks to secure global dominance, China's rise is central to a multipolarisation trend, in which multiple centres of power are emerging to shape a negotiated, more democratic world.

China's political orientation has been fundamentally shaped by its history of subjugation to foreign powers during its "century of humiliation" and anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, China has always identified itself as part of the Third World or global South and the collective struggle of formerly colonized and oppressed nations against the global inequality wrought by imperialism.

Under the banner of "South-South cooperation", China continues to champion this collective struggle today, promoting greater say for developing countries in global governance and the construction of a rules-based international order in place of the unilateral actions of major powers, in particular the U.S. More than mere rhetoric, China provides crucial investment, infrastructure construction , technology transfers , debt forgiveness , and diplomatic support to developing countries. Most importantly, unlike the U.S. and West which engage in destructive foreign interventions, China abides by the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and does not impose conditions on its relations.

China's respect for the self-determination of other countries has made it an indispensable partner for nations resisting foreign domination and pursuing independent development, including Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. It is for this reason that the late Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro declared in 2004 that "China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries … an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability." Venezuelan foreign minister Jorge Arreaza echoed these sentiments last December, saying "Thank God humanity can count on China," as his country faces sanctions, economic sabotage, and threats of regime change from the U.S.

Contributing to the declining global authority of the U.S, China's international relations have prompted Washington to cynically accuse China of fostering dependency in Africa and being an "imperial power" towards Latin America . In fact, rather than behaving in a predatory manner, China provides sorely needed funding, on favorable terms, to African borrowers , and as we have seen above China supports Latin America's struggle against imperialism. That China is praised by fiercely independent nations of the global South and faces such charges from the U.S.-the most powerful empire in history-reveals the absurdity of such claims. Anxious about its own decline, the U.S. seeks to both drive a wedge between China and the South, and also restrict the right of developing nations to choose their own partners and path. China has demonstrated that its rise is compatible with the self-determination of other nations-whether capitalist or socialist; what it comes into contradiction with is U.S. imperialism.

It is important to recognize that U.S. hostility towards China is not simply a product of narrow competition with the Asian power, it is a resistance to the empowerment of the global South and democratization of international relations. China is the primary target of U.S. imperialism because of its strategic importance at the heart of the world multipolarisation trend, which threatens to bring an end to U.S. international supremacy and 500 years of Western global dominance.

An opportunity for ordinary Americans

For years, the U.S. political establishment has sought to leverage American workers in its struggle against China. Endless rhetoric about how China is "stealing U.S. jobs" seeks to stir up xenophobia and racism in order divert attention from the fact that it was Washington and U.S. corporations that implemented the neoliberal reforms which hollowed out America's economy. On a near daily basis, the corporate-owned media further promotes hostility towards China with hawkish, sensationalized and dishonest reporting. In recent months, Americans have been told that China, with its "model of totalitarianism for the 21st century" , "has a plan to rule the world" , that its "'long arm' of influence stretches ever further" , its "fingerprints are everywhere" as it "infiltrates" U.S. classrooms, colleges , and more. The message is clear: be afraid.

However, for ordinary Americans, multipolarity and the strengthening of international forces, like China, which challenge U.S. imperialism are not a threat. Instead, this offers the potential for progressive advances for the American people in their own struggles. The 20th century provides a historical precedent for this, where the existence of the Soviet Union and a concrete socialist alternative to capitalism along with the wave of Third World national liberation struggles, placed pressure on Western capitalist countries, including the U.S., to respond to their own people's demands for progressive social and economic policies, such as the welfare state, higher taxes on the wealthy, and anti-racist measures.

Similarly, today, as the U.S. and the world face tremendous social, economic and environmental challenges, Chinese socialism is demonstrating a concrete alternative to the dominant capitalist system: pledging to eradicate poverty by 2020 ; with wage growth soaring and real income for the bottom half of earners growing 401 percent since 1978 (compared to falling by one percent in the U.S. during that time); declaring healthcare to be a universal human right ; praised for having the "best response to the world's environmental crisis" and reducing pollution in cities by an average of 32% in just four years since declaring a "war on pollution"; becoming " a world leader in wind, solar, nuclear and electric vehicles" ; building the world's longest bullet-train network , spending more on infrastructure than the U.S. and Europe combined ; and announcing that inequality, not economic underdevelopment, is now the "principal contradiction" to be addressed in Chinese society.

China is able to prioritize social and environmental policies-while sustaining rapid, crisis-free economic growth for four decades-because, unlike the U.S., the interests of corporations and wealthy do not rise above political authority. China's wealthy regularly face severe repercussions for criminal behaviour (instead of bailouts). For example, an annual list of China's richest citizens is commonly called the "death list" or "kill pigs list" because those named are often later imprisoned or executed-according to one study 17% of the time.

While China is not a perfect society and continues to face many challenges, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has been able to respond to a number of pressing issues facing the world today, better than the U.S. capitalist system. This is likely why China leads the world in optimism , with 87% feeling the country is headed in the right direction, compared to only 43% feeling the same in the U.S.

The new Cold War that Washington seeks to launch against China requires massive increases in military spending, paid for by ordinary Americans with massive cuts to already inadequate social programs, housing support and health care . If the American people can reject the Cold War mentality of their ruling class and arrogant notions of "American exceptionalism", China's rise could offer them the opportunity to learn how to build a society that better meets their needs.

This essay originally appeared at MRonline.

What is Dialectical Materialism? An Introduction

By Curry Malott

After the deaths of Marx and Engels, socialists began taking up the important task of summarizing their work for popularization. In 1919, for example, Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist, argued that the essence of Marx's project is not the correctness or incorrectness of his many theses, but rather, his dialectical method. Stressing the significance of Marx's method Lukács notes that it is a "weapon" of the proletariat and "an instrument of war" (1919/1971, 224). Marx never wrote a text on dialectics or even used the term "dialectical materialism," and so articulating Marx's dialectic was left to Engels and those who followed. There are, as a result, a great many debates about what exactly dialectical materialism is. There has also been a tendency to oversimplify dialectical materialism into a mechanical and deterministic dogma.

This article outlines Marx's method, dialectical materialism, a theory and manner of understanding change. It is a theory that grasps how many of the competing social forces driving the movement of society are often hidden or mystified, and that gives us a way of uncovering them. It is a method that understands that unveiling social forces must be done in such a way as to foster class-for-self-consciousness within the working class as a revolutionary force. Toward these ends this article introduces the major components of dialectical materialism, including the negation of the negation, sublation, the unity of opposites, and the transformation of quantity into quality.

What Is Marx's Method?

In developing his method, Marx challenged what he considered to be vulgar materialism for its tendency to ignore the totality and the relationship between consciousness and material reality. A philosophical term, the "totality" refers to the total of existence in any given moment. At the same time, Marx rejected pure idealism for substituting material reality with the idea of reality (i.e. with abstract thought). Idealism therefore leads to the false assumption that alienation or estrangement can be overcome in the realm of thought alone, as if we could change our material reality by changing our ideas and beliefs.

Rather, Marx's dialectical method is based on "the unifying truth of both" (1844/1988, 154). What this means is that "it is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive toward thought." In other words, Marx's method entails the examination of the relationship between ideas and material reality, specifically as it pertains to class struggle and the emancipation of the proletariat. Marx's dialectics are called "dialectical materialism" in contrast with Hegel's dialectics. Marx wrote that he "discover[ed] the rational kernel within the mystical shell" (1867/1967, 29) of Hegel's dialectics.

To realize this revolution the working-class must not only understand the interaction of forces behind the development of society, but it must understand itself as one of those forces. The dialectic is a powerful weapon because it breaks through the capitalist illusion of individualism and atomism and disrupts the idea that isolated facts speak for themselves. Only by situating facts or ideas in the historical totality of society do they begin to make real sense. To comprehend this revolutionary movement we must conceive the interaction of forces as much more than the interaction of static and independent entities. When the parts of the totality change, their relationship to the totality changes, and they themselves change. Dialectics presents reality as an ongoing social process; nothing is ever static or fixed.

Dialectics is both a method-or a way of investigating and understanding phenomena-and a fact of existence. For Engels, what is most central to dialectics is the tendency toward perpetual "motion and development" (1894/1987, 131). What follows is a summary of the dialectical theory of movement and change. The concept around which the dialectical understanding of development revolves is the negation of the negation, which will be taken up first, before turning to the concept of sublation. The unity of opposites or the interpenetration of opposites, a central driving force of the dialectic is then explored. Finally, we look at the tendency toward the transformation of quantity into quality, which in turn allows us to understand the negation of the negation more deeply.

The Negation of the Negation

The tendency toward the negation of the negation is arguably at the heart of dialectical development. Engels, for example, notes that the negation of the negation is "extremely general-and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important" (1894/1987, 131). The negation of the negation refers specifically to the way that phenomena and structures produce their opposites.

For example, in the first volume of Capital, Marx (1867/1967) writes that capitalist private property is the negation of individual private property, or property held by the proprietor or individual laborer. Peasant proprietors, as small-scale industrial producers, tended to own private property and produced their own means of subsistence. This small-scale, scattered, petty industry of the peasants was limited in terms of its ability to foster economic growth. The advent of the capitalist era included the expropriation of the peasants from their means of production. The logic of the feudal system and exchange created the agencies of its own annihilation.

While feudalism was overcome in capitalism, aspects of it were preserved but reconfigured in a way to facilitate economic growth. For example, the private property of peasants was abolished, but private property itself was not.

Capitalism concentrates and centralizes property, tending towards monopoly. Bigger capitalists buy out or otherwise out maneuver smaller capitalists. At the same time, capitalism creates its antagonist: the working class. As capital grows so too does the working class. These contradictions provide the basis for the second negation: the expropriation of the expropriators, or the transformation of capitalism into socialism.

Under socialism the means of production that existed under capitalism are preserved. Instead of being held in private they are held in common. In place of exploitation the means of production are put in the service of meeting the many needs of the producers. This process is called sublation. When something is sublated it is both overcome yet preserved. We can also see sublation at work in Marx's theory of monopoly. Monopolies create the material basis for socialism as they aggregate and concentrate productive forces. Socialist revolution expropriates these from the capitalists, but instead of breaking them up into smaller enterprises, the working class takes control of them as they are. If this is still a bit confusing at this point, it should be clearer after we go through the other components of dialectics.

Of course, capitalism is not going to automatically transform into socialism, even though its own internal logic orients its development in that general direction. Capitalist crises and contradictions are necessary for socialist revolutions but they are not sufficient. If they were sufficient, then we would already be living under socialism!

The Interpenetration of Opposites

What compels entities to be in a constant state of motion are their internal contradictions, or the forces generated by the unity of opposites. The most central or essential contradiction within capitalism is between labor and capital.

Labor and capital are opposites because they have contradictory drives. For example, historically, labor has spontaneously sought to decrease the rate of exploitation by collectively bargaining for higher wages, better conditions, benefits, and so on. When successful, these decrease profit margins. Capital, on the other hand, seeks to always increase the rate of exploitation. Labor and capital are therefore compelled by opposite and antagonistic drives. This antagonism can be managed and mediated by unions and state regulation, but it can only be overcome through the negation of the negation.

Labor and capital, as such, do not have an independent existence apart from each other. To be a worker is by definition to be exploited by capital, and to be a capitalist is by definition to exploit workers. The relationship between labor and capital is therefore internal and constitutes the totality. As a relation of exploitation, capital is a unity of contradictions. The dialectical development of this relationship over time is the movement of the balances of forces within capitalism.

A common mistake is to conceptualize the movement generated from antagonistically-related social classes as the interaction of separate forces external to each other. This leads to the false belief that the role of the working-class revolution today is to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. Socialism can only be created out of what already exists.

Marx and Engels believed that socialism would first emerge out of the most developed capitalist countries. This did not turn out to be true, as socialism emerged first in Russia, an underdeveloped, predominantly feudal-based country. Socialism, nevertheless, was ushered in by the producers and created out of an old society, not separate from it.

Quantity Into Quality

The tendency toward the transformation of quantity into quality offers deeper insight into the negation of the negation. So far, we have seen how the essential contradiction within capitalism is the labor/capital relationship, which is an example of the unity of opposites. We also saw the sublation of private property from one negated mode of production to the next. Investigating the interrelationship of these two issues will provide the basis for our example of the transformation of quantity into quality.

The inherently unequal relationship between labor and capital was established, in part, through the violence of expropriating peasants from their means of production. Without direct access to the means of production, former peasants were forced to sell their ability to work for a wage, thereby becoming part of the working class. Although beyond the scope of this short introduction, it's crucial to note that the violence of slavery, colonialism, and settler colonialism were equally important in establishing capitalism.

The competition between capitalists drives technological development. Because the price of any given commodity tends to center around the average amount of time its production requires, devising new technologies that can reduce the number of labor hours it takes to produce whatever commodity is a tendency internal to capitalism.

In the short term this gives the capitalist at the technological forefront a competitive advantage because they can sell the commodity below its social value. But as soon as the new technology gets integrated into the entire branch or branches of industry, the average amount of time that it takes to produce whatever commodity lowers, and the competition begins anew.

While new labor-saving technologies can be super profitable for individual capitalists in the short term, in the long term it reduces the number of labor hours simultaneously set into motion. It also means that more capital is invested into machinery rather than workers. And since workers produce value and machines do not, this contributes to the tendency of the falling rate of profit.

When the amount of labor hours it takes to transform a given quantity of raw materials into whatever commodity is reduced, the composition of capital shifts quantitatively, by degree. Historically, individual capitalists have countered the falling rate of their profit margins in many ways such as devising schemes to reduce the price they pay for labor even while its value remains the same thereby pushing the laborer into depravity and impoverishment. The capitalist, driven to counter the falling rate of profit by extracting more and more value from the laborer, thereby deepens capital's crisis.

The internal drive of capital to forever expand the accumulation of surplus value brings the unity of opposites, labor and capital, into growing conflict with each other. This movement is the developmental process at the heart of the dialectics of capitalism. While the capitalist has an interest in maintaining the contradiction and creating the illusion of capital's permanence, the objective interest of labor is to resolve the contradiction, thereby changing the quality of production relations. This is quantity into quality and the center of struggle between labor and capital. The quantitative changes provide the basis or possibility of qualitative change.

Conclusion

One of the reasons why dialectical materialism is so important is because it embodies a deep revolutionary optimism. Drawing attention to the fact that the future already exists as an unrealized potential within the present demystifies the seeming permanence of capitalism. In other words, it reveals the defeat of imperialism as a real potential and not a fantasy. For example, it is a fact that the most advanced means of production, labor saving technologies, as they currently exist, are able to meet the basic needs of every person in the world. In this way, the future liberation of humanity from exploitation and material oppression already exists.

The practicality of the aforementioned optimism resides in the fact that Marx's method correctly locates the agent of revolutionary transformation within the working class, the many.

This originally appeared at Liberation School .

References

-Engels, F. (1894/1987). Anti-Duhring. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works (vol. 25). New York: International Publishers.
-Lukács, G. (1919/1971). History and Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge: MIT.
-Marx, K. (1844/1988). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Prometheus Books.
-Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1). New York: International Publishers.