Die Neue Zeit
17th July 2009, 01:03
The Basics of Social-Abolitionism and Social Proletocracy Revisited
In my earlier work on the “profoundly true and important” (to use Lenin’s words) Marx-Engels-Kautsky merger formula as defined best by the Lost Bolshevik-Pope and true founder of “Marxism” (quoted at the beginning of Chapter 4), I defined proletocracy (a contraction of proletarian democracy and identical with the classical, revolutionary social democracy before succumbing to cross-class coalitionist “compromise”) and the synonymous ergatocracy as a social system that encompasses the following:
1) The establishment of ever-increasingly participatory democracy, as discussed more fully (as demarchy) in Chapter 5;
2) The revolutionary (as opposed to reformist) extension of this “participatory democracy” to socioeconomic affairs (that is, the implementation of neither state-capitalist ownership nor state-capitalist control, but rather the implementation of societal ownership and societal control); and
3) The revolutionary worker-class-strugglist emphasis of the two features above (that is, at the expense of other classes, such as the bourgeoisie).
That is one side of the specific incarnation of the merger formula addressed in my earlier work. On the other side, however, is something far more socially revolutionary than even the aforementioned revolutionary social democracy of the Lost Bolshevik-Pope and true founder of “Marxism,” his most well-known disciple, and even the revolutionary martyr Rosa Luxemburg (whom that disciple commended in 1922 for declaring German social democracy a “stinking corpse” in 1914): social-abolitionism.
Where does “communism” fit into all of this? As quoted in my earlier work, an aging Frederick Engels had this to say about “communism”:
I do not consider the term “communism” suitable for general use today; rather it should be reserved for cases in which a more exact description is required and even then it would call for an explanatory note having virtually fallen out of use for the past thirty years.
Notwithstanding the subsequent hijacking of that term by monetary social-statists – bureaucratic opportunists, sectoral-chauvinist “workerists,” sectarians, and even class-conciliationist reformists – Engels was correct about the imprecision of “communism” as a term.
Now, consider the historic abolitionism directed against “slavery” (chattel slavery, to be more precise). What succeeded “slavery” was wage slavery, a continuation of surplus labour above socially necessary labour – the strictest definition of “social labour.” Consider this modern rendition of a statement by Engels in The Principles of Communism:
The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself [hourly, monthly, yearly, or per temporary contract]. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest.
The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class, which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it [through the existence of reserve armies of labour, both unemployed and underemployed].
The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Less than twenty years later, Marx went beyond the legal formality of property relations in the means of production to address the monetary wage labour system itself:
[Workers] ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!"
In Volume II of Das Kapital (which along with Volume III makes for a more interesting read than the presently hyped Volume I), while analyzing “the reproduction and circulation of the aggregate social capital,” Marx suggested a very practical solution for this seemingly utopian call to reconcile the expansion of socially necessary labour with the abolition of surplus labour:
In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.
We see that inasmuch as the need for money-capital originates in the length of the working period, it is conditioned by two things: First, that money in general is the form in which every individual capital (apart from credit) must make its appearance in order to transform itself into productive capital; this follows from the nature of capitalist production and commodity-production in general.
[Note: In this fuller-than-full realization of societal control over the economy – through detailed control over its collective labour-time, as opposed to control through monetary mechanisms – “producers” refers to both actual producers and those benefitting from the “common funds” mentioned in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and the Anti-Duhring, such as retirees and the disabled. As for this “sketchy blueprint,” it was elaborated upon in 1930 by the left-communist Group of International Communists of Holland in their woefully underrated work Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, which illustrated how “the proletarian revolution must summon forth the power to implement in society the system of Average Social Reproduction Time.”]
To be sure, there are problems with 19th-century or Catalonian paper vouchers as labour credit for the purposes of personal consumption, per se. Even tickets, which Marx compared these vouchers to, can be circulated “under the table” (the modern equivalent of these tickets would be retail gift cards) – not least of which in order to hire wage labour. These tickets can even be counterfeited! However, the development of information technology, of plastic card technology in general (debit, credit, gift, etc.) and of the “food stamp” program in the United States (especially with the advent of electronic benefit transfers) has made possible the attribution of labour-time to specific individuals.
In my earlier work, I gave the face of Lenin to the monetary social-statism of revolutionary social democracy. However, of all the revolutionaries of his day, it was ironically Lenin who came closest to breaking away from monetary social-statism, when he quoted the relevant sections of the Critique of the Gotha Programme in his work The State and Revolution. Monetary social-statism was subscribed to by the likes of Trotsky, Luxemburg, and even many left-communist elements back in the day, all due to their common agreement with what the true founder of “Marxism” said much earlier, in The Social Revolution:
I speak here of the wages of labor. What, it will be said, will there be wages in the new society? Shall we not have abolished wage labor and money? How then can one speak of the wages of labor? These objections would be sound if the social revolution proposed to immediately abolish money. I maintain that this would be impossible. Money is the simplest means known up to the present time which makes it possible in as complicated a mechanism as that of the modern productive process, with its tremendous far-reaching division of labor, to secure the circulation of products and their distribution to the individual members of society. It is the means which makes it possible for each one to satisfy his necessities according to his individual inclination (to be sure within the bounds of his economic power). As a means to such circulation money will be found indispensable until something better is discovered. To be sure many of its functions, especially that of the measure of value, will disappear, at least in internal commerce.
The aforementioned abolition of both wage slavery and money-capital, not just of the legal formality of non-possessive property “rights” (to borrow from contemporary anarchism’s abbreviation for private property in the means of production) and the related debt slavery, and not just of economic anarchy in the consumer goods and services market, forms the core of social-abolitionism.
However, social-abolitionism does not stop there or even at the abolition of both classes and the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes, known collectively as the state. There are other “socially revolutionary transformations aimed at abolishing non-class oppression and alienation” (Appendix A). Even the aforementioned emancipation of labour is only partial.
REFERENCES:
Notes of a Publicist by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm]
Engels to Karl Kautsky, 13 February 1894 (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50, p. 269)
The Principles of Communism by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm]
Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm]
Das Kapital, Volume II by Karl Marx and edited by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm]
Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution by the Group of International Communists of Holland
[http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6579/]
[http://libcom.org/library/fundamental-principles-communist-production-gik]
[http://thecommune.wordpress.com/ideas/the-fundamental-principles-of-communist-production-and-distribution/]
[http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/gik1.htm]
The Social Revolution, Volume II: On the Day After the Social Revolution by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/pt2-1.htm]
In my earlier work on the “profoundly true and important” (to use Lenin’s words) Marx-Engels-Kautsky merger formula as defined best by the Lost Bolshevik-Pope and true founder of “Marxism” (quoted at the beginning of Chapter 4), I defined proletocracy (a contraction of proletarian democracy and identical with the classical, revolutionary social democracy before succumbing to cross-class coalitionist “compromise”) and the synonymous ergatocracy as a social system that encompasses the following:
1) The establishment of ever-increasingly participatory democracy, as discussed more fully (as demarchy) in Chapter 5;
2) The revolutionary (as opposed to reformist) extension of this “participatory democracy” to socioeconomic affairs (that is, the implementation of neither state-capitalist ownership nor state-capitalist control, but rather the implementation of societal ownership and societal control); and
3) The revolutionary worker-class-strugglist emphasis of the two features above (that is, at the expense of other classes, such as the bourgeoisie).
That is one side of the specific incarnation of the merger formula addressed in my earlier work. On the other side, however, is something far more socially revolutionary than even the aforementioned revolutionary social democracy of the Lost Bolshevik-Pope and true founder of “Marxism,” his most well-known disciple, and even the revolutionary martyr Rosa Luxemburg (whom that disciple commended in 1922 for declaring German social democracy a “stinking corpse” in 1914): social-abolitionism.
Where does “communism” fit into all of this? As quoted in my earlier work, an aging Frederick Engels had this to say about “communism”:
I do not consider the term “communism” suitable for general use today; rather it should be reserved for cases in which a more exact description is required and even then it would call for an explanatory note having virtually fallen out of use for the past thirty years.
Notwithstanding the subsequent hijacking of that term by monetary social-statists – bureaucratic opportunists, sectoral-chauvinist “workerists,” sectarians, and even class-conciliationist reformists – Engels was correct about the imprecision of “communism” as a term.
Now, consider the historic abolitionism directed against “slavery” (chattel slavery, to be more precise). What succeeded “slavery” was wage slavery, a continuation of surplus labour above socially necessary labour – the strictest definition of “social labour.” Consider this modern rendition of a statement by Engels in The Principles of Communism:
The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself [hourly, monthly, yearly, or per temporary contract]. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest.
The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class, which buys his labour only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it [through the existence of reserve armies of labour, both unemployed and underemployed].
The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Less than twenty years later, Marx went beyond the legal formality of property relations in the means of production to address the monetary wage labour system itself:
[Workers] ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!"
In Volume II of Das Kapital (which along with Volume III makes for a more interesting read than the presently hyped Volume I), while analyzing “the reproduction and circulation of the aggregate social capital,” Marx suggested a very practical solution for this seemingly utopian call to reconcile the expansion of socially necessary labour with the abolition of surplus labour:
In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.
We see that inasmuch as the need for money-capital originates in the length of the working period, it is conditioned by two things: First, that money in general is the form in which every individual capital (apart from credit) must make its appearance in order to transform itself into productive capital; this follows from the nature of capitalist production and commodity-production in general.
[Note: In this fuller-than-full realization of societal control over the economy – through detailed control over its collective labour-time, as opposed to control through monetary mechanisms – “producers” refers to both actual producers and those benefitting from the “common funds” mentioned in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and the Anti-Duhring, such as retirees and the disabled. As for this “sketchy blueprint,” it was elaborated upon in 1930 by the left-communist Group of International Communists of Holland in their woefully underrated work Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, which illustrated how “the proletarian revolution must summon forth the power to implement in society the system of Average Social Reproduction Time.”]
To be sure, there are problems with 19th-century or Catalonian paper vouchers as labour credit for the purposes of personal consumption, per se. Even tickets, which Marx compared these vouchers to, can be circulated “under the table” (the modern equivalent of these tickets would be retail gift cards) – not least of which in order to hire wage labour. These tickets can even be counterfeited! However, the development of information technology, of plastic card technology in general (debit, credit, gift, etc.) and of the “food stamp” program in the United States (especially with the advent of electronic benefit transfers) has made possible the attribution of labour-time to specific individuals.
In my earlier work, I gave the face of Lenin to the monetary social-statism of revolutionary social democracy. However, of all the revolutionaries of his day, it was ironically Lenin who came closest to breaking away from monetary social-statism, when he quoted the relevant sections of the Critique of the Gotha Programme in his work The State and Revolution. Monetary social-statism was subscribed to by the likes of Trotsky, Luxemburg, and even many left-communist elements back in the day, all due to their common agreement with what the true founder of “Marxism” said much earlier, in The Social Revolution:
I speak here of the wages of labor. What, it will be said, will there be wages in the new society? Shall we not have abolished wage labor and money? How then can one speak of the wages of labor? These objections would be sound if the social revolution proposed to immediately abolish money. I maintain that this would be impossible. Money is the simplest means known up to the present time which makes it possible in as complicated a mechanism as that of the modern productive process, with its tremendous far-reaching division of labor, to secure the circulation of products and their distribution to the individual members of society. It is the means which makes it possible for each one to satisfy his necessities according to his individual inclination (to be sure within the bounds of his economic power). As a means to such circulation money will be found indispensable until something better is discovered. To be sure many of its functions, especially that of the measure of value, will disappear, at least in internal commerce.
The aforementioned abolition of both wage slavery and money-capital, not just of the legal formality of non-possessive property “rights” (to borrow from contemporary anarchism’s abbreviation for private property in the means of production) and the related debt slavery, and not just of economic anarchy in the consumer goods and services market, forms the core of social-abolitionism.
However, social-abolitionism does not stop there or even at the abolition of both classes and the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes, known collectively as the state. There are other “socially revolutionary transformations aimed at abolishing non-class oppression and alienation” (Appendix A). Even the aforementioned emancipation of labour is only partial.
REFERENCES:
Notes of a Publicist by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm]
Engels to Karl Kautsky, 13 February 1894 (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50, p. 269)
The Principles of Communism by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm]
Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm]
Das Kapital, Volume II by Karl Marx and edited by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm]
Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution by the Group of International Communists of Holland
[http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6579/]
[http://libcom.org/library/fundamental-principles-communist-production-gik]
[http://thecommune.wordpress.com/ideas/the-fundamental-principles-of-communist-production-and-distribution/]
[http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/gik1.htm]
The Social Revolution, Volume II: On the Day After the Social Revolution by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/pt2-1.htm]