Summer 1950
Paul M. Sweezy’s book, “The Theory of Capitalist Development,” states in its introduction that it is an attempt to explain Marxian economics by way of “... . discovering what, if anything, can be learned’ from Marx.” Mr. Sweezy adds that he has no intention of revealing “what Marx really meant.” Alas, the frailty of man! Mr. Sweezy quickly found out that it is utterly impossible to study Marx by what might be called ’pure’ abstraction. Marx has the habit of pulling one, willy-nilly, down to the warm caress of mother earth.
Mr. Sweezy’s first chapter is an analysis of Marx’s approach to Vol. 1 of Capital, he comes to the conclusion that almost all of Vol. 1 begins and ends on a “high level of abstraction.” Vols. 2 and 3 constitute a progressive lowering of the abstraction–a ’levelling down’ process. (My quote).
The question immediately comes to mind: what does Mr. Sweezy have in store for us with his insistent talk of Marx’s ’high level of abstraction’? Mr. Sweezy leaves us in no doubt, he states, page 18, “It follows that the tendencies or laws enunciated in Vol. 1 are not to be interpreted as direct predictions about the future.” Mr. Sweezy then comes to the conclusion that much useless controversy would have been avoided if Marxists and anti-Marxists had understood Marx’s use of abstractions.
The author illustrates this by citing, page 19, Marx’s Absolute Law of Capitalist Accumulation, pointing out that “... the term ’absolute’ used in describing it is used in the Hegelian sense of ’abstract’; it constitutes in no sense a prediction about the future.” (My emphasis).
We note in passing that Mr. Sweezy on page 18 says that these laws are not to be regarded as “... direct predictions about the future,” which could very well mean that these laws might have some roundabout sort of validity, but this too is dispelled, by page 19, these laws “... constitute in no sense a prediction about the future.” (My emphasis).
Marxists, by which term I mean the followers of Lenin and Stalin, have always insisted that this law of Capitalist Accumulation, with its corollary, law of the Increasing Misery of the Proletariat, is both relatively–that is by contrast with the increasing wealth of the capitalists–and objectively, i.e. it falls beneath a customary, historically conditioned way of life, with its diet, clothing, housing, etc. an expression of the essential, most basic, contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. (Actually social democracy is an historical trend and inescapable. As Lenin pointed out individuals can cease being social democrats, the trend continues.) Social Democracy, the type represented by Bernstein, Kautsky Hilferding and Otto Bauer, insists that all Marx meant was a relative worsening of the workers’ share–the capitalists add to their share at a faster rate than that falling to the working class. Consequently the gap between the two classes widens but at the same time it is essential to recognise that the workers share increases, even as a drop of water added to a bucket increase its contents.
Anti-Marxists, the direct representatives of the bourgeoisie, deny the validity of Marx’s assumptions. Many scoff at his laws and tendencies, nevertheless, generally speaking, either silence through hurried allusion, or, as is the case with Keynes, total ignorance (a supreme example of class arrogance) is their method of handling Marx. After all, what can be expected of quadrangle and campus? A serious attitude to life, a real study of Marx, which is impossible to all but scattered individuals by the very nature of bourgeois class psychology. These scattered individuals not only come over to the side of the working class, they bring with them full knowledge of the class which they have betrayed. [they are invaluable]
However times change, the polemical tone regarded as inevitable by Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin, seems to be foreign to Britain. Here, it would appear, we try to win over the most outrageous distorters of Marxist theory through politeness and endless kindness. But to continue. In no place is the intertwinement of theory and practice put to a more severe test, brought out more sharply, than by this question of reaction to the laws and tendencies postulated by Marx.
The true Marxists hold to the position that no matter how splendidly you organise, how clear-headed and hard you fight, the living standard of the working class, as well as other sections of the population, is forced, despite all hesitations and even upward ’leaps,’ in a downward direction. Hence, believing that the exploitation of living labour, in the form of its power to create new, added wealth–value–to ’dead labour,’ that is to say, to capital, cannot be done away with as long as capitalism exists, but acutely worsens as crises and wars wrack the system, Marxists emphasise the need to smash the old system, bury it.
Marxists declare that the struggle for partial demands is the key for conquest of power by the working class. Is there not a contradiction here? Of course there is, wholely in keeping with Marxist dialectic. For is it not clear that the more difficult the task of extracting surplus value, profit, the all-in-all of the capitalist system, the more savage the struggle of the capitalists to maintain and increase it, the more ruthless competition becomes between free and monopoly capital, between the monopolists themselves, and between the capitalists of one country and the capitalists of another? Finally, the capitalists need for absolute domination of the State is clear.
In consequence of this increasing competition, the greater the difficulty of maintaining the average rate of profit, the class struggle is speeded up and greatly intensified, for it must be remembered that to the Marxist the resistance of the working class increases even as the capitalist’s need for greater exploitation grows. But whatever forms of struggle develop, no matter how great the changes from place to place, the answer is to be found in the mutual unity and conflict of these opposites, each fighting desperately for a greater share of surplus value, with the winner take all in the final end!
If for the Marxists the answer is found in this conflict of opposites, of capitalist and worker–the relativity of their unity, the absoluteness of their conflict–then for Social-Democracy we might say that their answer is to be found solely in the unity of opposites, their relative, but not absolute oppositeness.
Precisely because social democracy does elevate the relative to a place of supreme importance and denies that the relative is contained in the absolute does it become the party of social reform, the party which seeks to belittle the evils of the capitalist system and which seeks to contain the struggles of the working class within the confines of the debating room and parliament All the persuasion social democracy is capable of is away from the workshop, the factory and mine, with their proletariat, its mutterings and picket lines. As for the anti-Marxists, the direct representatives of big business, not much need be said. More and more bourgeois economists tend toward obscurities, toward economic psychology, toward a world of absolute phantasy, away from Ricardo, Mills and Adam Smith. Indeed, could it be otherwise?
We have seen that there is sharp division over what Marx really meant, and we must at least thank Mr. Sweezy for doing a first class job of raising these matters, the point now to be raised is: can we test the validity of this tendency of the ’increasing misery of the working class’? Can we approximate the amount of absolute truth embodied in it?
Generalities and laws formulated in any field or branch of science must be subjected to a lengthy period of practical submission–a time-analysis–that invariably, inevitably–with the absoluteness of movement itself, corresponds to the amount of objective truth in it.
Let us be quite clear: objective knowledge is itself partial, contains the relative, but this by no means implies that objectivity is unknowable, even though complete objective knowledge is beyond our grasp.
That once famous ’brick of the universe,’ the atom, does exist even though our knowledge of its movements has profoundly increased. Similarly, as Engels pointed out, feudalism does not correspond to its perfected idea, to the projected image, even in Palestine where it moves closest to this purity.
So it is with this law of Marx that is being considered. We do not compare the conditions of early industrial England with those of today, rather do we examine the capitalist system in its totality, as an historically conditioned and moving system, such an examination includes the mechanical, without, however, developing it to a first principle.
This was the method of Marx. It is the only method which contains within itself the absoluteness of the whole, the doctrine of truth.
In its beginnings the capitalist system, born in strife against the older and still stronger system it was seeking to supplant, brought about an absolute worsening of the living standards of those unfortunates driven into the maws of its shops and factories. This sharp drop in the living standard is true of all revolutionary periods contained within a class structure of society. For it is well to remember that revolutions are not ’made,’ they are historically conditioned–an observation denied by the representatives of the bourgeoisie who recoil in horror from the thought that no matter what action they take in defence of the class they will be driven off the stage of history!
It might be pointed out that such a sharp drop in living standards followed the Russian socialist revolution and is true of the period through which the new European democracies are passing.
As the capitalist system overcame its enemies and gathered stability the innate movement of the system unfolded and we find an absolute bettering of the conditions of the working class. But the time comes when the standard of living of the working class is no longer rising. Allowing for wide-spread fluctuations owing to the uneven development of capitalism, can we not say that a fairly long period emerges during which the living standards of the working class levels off and becomes the fixed and accepted norm?
This was that period in the history of capitalism when it had spread its wings, when factories and workshops overflowed England, when capitalist enterpreneurs were busily engaged in moving over the face of the earth. Cannot this period be time-fixed, say 1850-1900, and closely scrutinised from the masses of available data? Similarly cannot the time period 1900 to today undergo a similar procedure? Surely a comparison of these two time periods would give us practical proof of the correctness contained in Marx’s theorem, its ability to stand up to the test of repeated practice, even as any other scientific theory is tested.
But this sort of thing is precisely what the theoreticians of social democracy and the bourgeois apologists seek to avoid as death itself. For them words and phrases, the play with ideas, the abstraction which contains an image world is all that counts. That is why they obstinately refuse to see that Marx’s use of abstraction nowhere corresponds to theirs, that is why these mechanists and pragmatists are blandly beginning to substitute god only knows what rubbish to take the place of the old worn-out rubbish of yesteryear. For practice is becoming too dangerous to be handled, it involves comparison, it brings out the increasing dreadfulness of this capitalist world which is literally rotting alive.
Who can deny that even in that most wealthy of capitalist countries, U.S. unemployment cannot be eradicated, that the capitalists themselves are desperately attempting to hold it in check? Who can deny that fear of mass unemployment haunts every European State? For was it not a sharp, uncontrollable drop in employment which forced German Finance-Capital to back Hitler and prepare for another redivision of the world’s markets, for war? And the war of 1939-45, did it not sink to a level of bestiality unknown since the rise of industrial capitalism?
It is precisely because the capitalist system does develop, can only develop along such lines, mass unemployment, a sharp lowering of accustomed living standards, then war, that the working class turns on it, savagely fights for a way out. Where the working class has thrown up a powerful Communist Party victory is in sight and they smash the capitalist State. Should the working class lack such leadership the capitalist class emerges from the crisis, and another round of the cycle begins, but this time limited by the emergency of a number of Socialist States. Hence the danger to it of slump, recovery and boom, is infinitely more dangerous than in its formative years, for then there was an expanding world market, now it is constricted. Furthermore, the very expansion of technology, the broadening and development of the material base, makes the time period between boom and slump of shorter duration. Only war preparation on an ever increasing scale has so far held unemployment to controllable dimensions. And this kind of expenditure ends in a blind alley of ever increasing State subsidy fought over by the monopolists, as a snarling group of wolves fight over a dead carcass.
Yet Sweezy ignores all of these things, that in the final analysis, usually at the take-end of war, the working class finds itself “with nothing to lose but its chains, a world to gain.” It is the historical task of the working class to finish off capitalism or else themselves perish as a class. For, as monopoly triumphs over its weaker rivals more and more State power comes to represent monopoly and not the capitalist class as a whole.
Should this historical tendency not be smashed, a well paid bureaucracy at the top would run the State machine. Coupled to the development of technique fewer and fewer workers would be needed, for production would change its character of competing for internal and external markets, it would become purely parasitic, that is to say it would exist solely to produce goods necessary to suit the needs of the ruling bureaucracy at the top and their servants, household slaves. The “free” working class would disappear and a form of universal slavery come into existence.
Sweezy denies the validity of Marx’s general laws, shuns mathematical analysis of slump, boom and slump, for this sort of methodology would reveal the triumphs of Marx’s reasoning, the bankruptcy, complete and total, of Sweezy and his like, people such as Maurice Dobb.