January 15, 1951
Dear J:
Perhaps I better return to letter writing both in order to explain the "milieu" in which I am developing the question of form and plan, and thus answer your question about "quotations" and also because much of what I say will still have a tentative (very !) character and some of the rough edges taken off even before put into first rough draft. (The enclosed continuation is just some after thoughts or a sort of P.S. to the manuscript sent last week).1
Volume III of Capital2 appeared in an entirely new light the minute: 1) I found the quotation (on p. 58) which directly related the transformation of profit into rate of profit with the perversity of subject and object in the process of production; for years I have been trying to get the full significance of Marx's speaking of form in Volume III as transformations where in Vol. I3 form was more or less "pure" form of appearance, with the sole exception of fetishism of commodity which of course was the key to it all but which escaped us until fairly recently; 2) shook off the awe at law of value and returned to Hegel's definition of law as the "reduction of negativity to self-identity" (free-as-remembered-translation) which I now connected with Marx's reduction of all concrete labors to one abstract mass, so that Hegel's world of appearance which he considered above law since it was a totality, containing both law and "self-moving Form", and Marx's world of appearance (Vol III) was not any longer just "showing" the capitalists he could work with their superficial categories too only to return the faster to the essence of Vol. I. But on the contrary now Vol III, which showed that the law of value which figures for so much in Vol. I and still remained dominant, was nevertheless lower than appearance, for now we see that the dominance of the law of value itself caught in the "self-moving form".
Capitalistically this self-moving form was the transformations of form so constantly due to the technological revolutions and changing concept of socially-necessary labor time, and due to the fact that his glorious exploitation of labor and constant increase in the rate of exploitation due to the machine nevertheless ended in a declining rate of profit that the form dominated even his private property so that they became no more than the "trustees of bourgeois society". Socialistically, that is on the workers side, this development of form meant the individual became a social individual with a new mass-power-form in cooperative labor so that his plan, as contrasted top the despotic plan of the capitalist meant the accomplishment of a task "with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it" (p. 954);4 and finally; 3) our present task assumed concreteness in suddenly seeing that Stalinist planning has a long list of ancestors from Proudhon through Bukharin and Trotsky5 and that Marx anticipated all this when he hit at Proudhon for his wishing to bring order (and in a capitalist world it could be only the capitalistic order of the factory) into the market by "organizing exchange" and then brought Proudhon back for a knockout blow in Vol. II when he wrote: "we must not follow the manner copied by Proudhon from bourgeois economy, which looks upon this matter as though a society with a capitalist mode of production would lose its specific historical and economic characteristics by being taken as a unit. Not at all. We have, in that case, to deal with the aggregate capitalist" (p. 503).6
Now it wasn't only "Proudhon who copied from bourgeois economy" the question of considering social capital as the absolute opposite of individual capital and hence, etc. etc. Marx himself in his contrasting of individual and social in labor, made the social aspect the division between worker and capitalist; social individual was the worker in cooperative labor while the individual exchange was the capitalist. Even as late as 2nd edition of Capital he stresses the individuality of exchange and saying that if we viewed them as classes instead "we should be judging by standards entirely foreign to commodity production" (p. 816).7 That was 1872. The Vol. II was 1878. But it wasn't the dates that made the difference so much in this case: it was the treatment of the individual capitalist in Vol. I, the dealing with individual only as an "aliquot" part of the social capital in Vol. II, then going through the transformations of form in Vol. III and is confronted with "capitalist communism", that he returns to Volume II and now the contrast is not individual to social but social to socialized. It is this type of concept against which poor Luxemburg, filled with the planlessness before her, hit out.8 Lenin could destroy her when he dealt with it as "production creates its own market", but he left aside the question of plan until 1917 Soviets; it is only then that he saw the capitalists too could plan, but etc., etc.9
Here is the paradoxical thing about the Marxists at the turn of the century. Volume I meant nothing to them. I mean nothing concrete. All they did was "explain" it; nobody wrote anything but "popularizations" and Lenin did not even do that because he was satisfied with Bogdanov!10 Then Vol. II is published and everybody is in an uproar. Why? Read the innumerable volumes, articles, pamphlets, etc. on Vol. I: it had been reduced to the explanation that capitalism is planlessness, socialism is plan. And here they are suddenly confronted with planned production, and such "perfect" planning that all the minor sorts of crises are avoided. Finally, Lenin rises to his full stature; he doesn't bother with "explanations": he immediately applies it and comes up with "Development of Capitalism in Russia"11 which both destroys underconsumptionism,12 market theorists, and deals with reality for it was the concrete form the question was posed in Russia (could she develop without a "market"?) that made him "read" Vol. II right and feel the necessity to write.
However, the concrete form in which the question is posed in Russia has the disadvantage of not being the question as posed in the world (imperialism) and therefore that question was not dealt with until 1916 and in actuality plan did not get back to be debated till 1917-21. But even then Vol. III did not assume concreteness till 1929. I feel that just at this time both Vols. II and Vol. I will for the first begin to reveal all that is in them.
Now then the framework in which I am working, with the milieu of Stalinism violently demanding or calling to battle ideologically with their attempt to forget Ch. I of Vol. I. The main thing in Vol. I was therefore Ch. I and the main quotations were the contrast between p. 44 where social relations appear in the fantastic form because that is what "they really are" vs. p. 51, where the mysticism could not be stripped off until "freely associated men" regulated their production "with a settled plan".13
The next stage in that was to send us to "plan" and the minute we suddenly discovered despotic plan of capitalists (p. 322) in cooperation,14 we saw the cooperation as the opposite of the capitalist's plan; it was clear that this was the new form, social man vs. planning of capitalist. Now I will admit that this is still the individual factory on the part of the capitalist, but the worker is already social and revolts en masse.
Now then we have the following three stages of plan by now: 1) Plan as authority of capitalist - bringing many workers together to labor; 2) Plan as despotism - the workers at labor must obey the movements of machine; 3) Plan as administrative caste - the division of labor reaches its concrete capitalistic form with him being a cog in the machine and the capitalist being "transformed" into an administrative caste. All the future analysis in machine production will be to destroy the division of labor and because it is placed in this fundamental, basic form, the outer forms of plan seem to take a back seat, except that "the cooperative form of the labor process" is never lost sight of and reappears in full blast in Historical Tendency.15
Here, however, there is one tentative change. Remember how we/you*** tried to make socialization of labor appear as the "natural" result so to speak of capitalism and hence as if it were still capitalistic. I do not think so now. It appears to me now 1) that the division between social and socialized is what Marx was aiming at; plan and social was true also of capitalism, but mass power of cooperative labor and socialized production was socialism. Moreover, the centralization of the means of production is a sort of minimum to be retained. He says "Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor" become incompatible with "capitalist integument"; the integument, I would say now, is the value form from which they must break out and the cooperative form is already there to replace it.
2) Monopoly is the fetter; monopoly is not the centralization, it is the one killing the many. Private property, he stresses, excludes both concentration of m.p.16 and cooperative labor; the capitalist as based on labor of others can overcome that limitation of private property as self-earned; but then arises the monopoly which is private property in another form and fetters it. Nobody is now going to pass out individual rails to individual owners; concentration of means of production remains and "acquired power" along with cooperative labor; and now "all" we need to do is break out of the value form; and socialized man could produce in a manner "most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it".17
Let me put it another way. Presently the Fourth (Murray impersonates it just now18) says centralization in the hands of a single capitalist does not mean what Johnsonites19 say, state, but highest monopoly, etc. They have a slight point; the point is they are still all lost in concentration of means of production and centralization of capital as something apart, without getting hold of the more basic contradiction in cooperative production. Marx saw them too way ahead of time and he says in Civil War in France "If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions...".20
What is it showing thereby, the Fourth I mean? That it remains a "prisoner of the world of illusion" of state and plan by not bringing in the self-activity of self-mobilization of the masses, even as the classicists remained the prisoner of their economism.21 That too I did not see clearly until in rereading a very famous passage of Vol. III which I must have quoted dozens of times previously but only now I saw why Marx insisted on crediting them with a theory of s.v.22 they had not discovered. It is on p. 967; from that to to pp. 1021-22: "finally, if we include in number one, necessary labor, and number two, surplus labor, that quantity of labor which must always be performed by able-bodied..., if we deprive both wage and surplus value, both necessary and surplus labor, of their specifically capitalist character, then we have not these forms but merely their foundations, which are common to all social modes of production".23 And then to p. 1027 about the social character of production being the authority and the hierarchy, then we will find that it is not centralization of capital "as such" but specifically as capitalist authority and administrative hierarchy.
I have a feeling that I am not making myself clear since it seems as if that is exactly what we have been doing with our analysis of state capitalism and of the bureaucracy as the bodyguards of capital. But the point is it still seems to come out of an economic analysis, rather than out of a dialectic development. For example, the only time we approach the manner in which Lenin dealt with the question in imperialism is when we speak in our last document of state capitalism being "the absolute contradiction".24 We should also speak of state capitalism being not so much the "logical conclusion"25 and "highest stage" of capitalism, as about the transformation of monopoly capitalism into its opposite, state capitalism. And once we speak of these transformations, as in Vol. III, we then can jump directly to notion instead of merely26 contrasting form to essence, and begin to speak of the human factors in production not as if they were brought in from the outside by us, but as Marx deals with them in Vol. III as stemming from the fight for the shortening of the working day, and Lenin in State Revolution,27 and we finally in reaching in this era not merely the unity of opposites, but the negation of the negation. We must return therefore to the labor process as we are doing in our latest document on Stalinism.28
Yrs R
*** The word 'we' is typewritten, and the word 'you' is handwritten over the top of it.
1 The 'enclosed' that Dunayevskaya is referring to appears to be the second part of a document on "Form and Plan" that she completed on the 14th of January 1951, the first part is dated 27th December 1950. The document, (along with two letters), can be accessed on the MIA.
2 Marx's Capital: Volume Three was not published in Marx's lifetime, but was edited and published by Frederick Engels more than a decade after Marx's death.
3 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, (1867).
4 The quote is from Chapter Forty-Eight of Marx's Capital: Volume Three.
5 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), is considered by many to be 'the father of anarchism'. Marx met, and became friends with, Proudhon while in exile in Paris in the mid-1840s. But Marx later became critical of him, and wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) as a critique of Proudhon's System of Economical Contradictions: or, Philosophy of Poverty (1847).
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a leading Bolshevik theoretician. Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee(-Boggs) and CLR James are critical of Bukharin's interpretation of Marx, as undialectical, in several places in the correspondence. See letters: 18. Lee(-Boggs); 24. Dunayevskaya; 28. James.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was one of the leaders of the October (Russian) Revolution, and leader of the Red Army during the 'civil war' that followed the Revolution. When Stalin became the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after the death of Lenin, Trotsky became sidelined and eventually exiled from Russia. While Trotsky was exiled in Mexico Raya Dunayevskaya served as his Russian language secretary and bodyguard, 1937-38. CLR James visited Trotsky in Mexico in early April 1939, to discuss what was then referred as the 'Negro Question', as part of preparation that the Socialist Workers' Party were doing for their party Convention of mid-1939.
6 The quote is from Chapter Forty-Eight of Marx's Capital: Volume Two.
7 The quote is from Chapter Twenty-Four of Marx's Capital: Volume One.
8 Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), was a major figure in Second International. She was one of the few major figures in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who actively opposed World War I as an imperialist war. She broke with the SPD over its leadership's stance on the War. Her major work on Marx and political economy, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), was influential amongst her Marxist contemporaries, but was criticised by Lenin.
9 The quote appears to be from Lenin's article 'A Note on the Question of the Market Theory', (1899).
10 Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928) was a founding member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, after the Menshevik/Bolshevik split. Between 1904 and 1906, he published a three volume philosophic treatise Empiriomonism, which attempted to merge Marxism with Machism. He was, initially a close ally of Lenin, but after the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution he led the otzovist ('boycottist' or 'recallists') faction of the Bolsheviks. He vied with Lenin for leadership of the Bolsheviks. Lenin wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, as a polemic against Bogdanov and others who were promoting a Positivist philosophy in the Bolshevik Party. In 1909 he was expelled from the Bolsheviks. He drifted from political activity and became interested in culture. His influential science fiction novel, Red Star, was published in 1908. After the October Revolution he co-founded, in 1918, the proletarian art movement Proletkult and he was its leading theoretician.
11 Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, (1899/1908).
12 'underconsumptionism' is a theory of capitalist crisis that locates the source of the crisis in the sphere of consumption, rather than production. Underconsumptionists sever the connection between the processes of production and circulation and consider the latter independently and as the limitation of the production process. Marx critiqued underconsumptionists of his day, most prominently Malthus. Rosa Luxemburg's book The Accumulation of Capital (1913) is underconsumptionist in its explanation of Imperialism as being driven by a search for new markets for commodities.
13 The quotes are from Section Four of Chapter One of Marx's Capital: Volume One.
14 This appears to be a reference to Chapter Thirteen of Marx's Capital: Volume One.
15 This appears to be a reference to Chapter Thirty-Two of Marx's Capital: Volume One.
16 'm.p.' is an abbreviation of 'means of production'.
17 The quote is from Chapter Forty-Eight of Marx's Capital: Volume Three.
18 The 'Fourth' is a reference to the Fourth International established by Leon Trotsky, and various Trotskyists around the world, in 1938. The Socialist Workers' Party were one of the leading organisations in the Fourth International. 'Murray' is possibly a reference to Phillip Murray, an American trade unionist and leader of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
19 'Johnsonites' was a term used for members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency.
20 The quote is from the section 'The Paris Commune', in Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, (1871).
21 The editor has been unable to identify the source of the quote.
Economism was the term used to refer to Social Democrats who theoretically limited the aspirations of the working class to an economic struggle for higher wages and better working conditions. They set up an intellectual division of labour between 'economic' struggles (for better wages and conditions), which was the focus of Social Democratic theory, and 'political' struggles (e.g. extension of the franchise), which was primary the role of the liberal bourgeoisie. In doing so, the Economists were against the importance of revolutionary theory and class-consciousness, and instead asserted that socialist ideology could arise out of the spontaneous movement of the working class.
Lenin was a forceful opponent of Economism. He outlined his criticisms in an article in Iskra, the Bolsheviks newspaper, entitled 'A Talk With Defenders of Economism', (1901). He further developed his critique in the pamphlet, What is to be Done?, (1902).
22 's.v.' is an abbreviation of 'surplus-value'.
23 The quotes are from Chapter Fifty of Marx's Capital: Volume Three.
24 'our last document' appears to be a reference to the Johnson-Forest Tendency pamphlet State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950). The phrase "the absolute contradiction", however, does not appear to be a direct quote. Dunayevskaya likely has in mind the following sentences, from the beginning of Chapter Eleven, 'Philosophy and State Capitalism':
"State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution. It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx's sense of human activity has become actual."
25 'conclusion' is the editor's best guess at the word. It is obscured in the digital version of the manuscript.
26 'merely' is the editor's best guess at the word. It is obscured in the digital version of the manuscript.
27 Lenin State and Revolution, (1917).
28 The editor is unclear on what the 'latest document on Stalinism' is a reference to. It could be State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950), or it could be the book that Dunayevskaya was working on, that the Johnson-Forest Tendency leadership were then referring to as "The Lenin Book".