August 2017
Hassan Abbasi
Preface
The World Labor Movement and the New Face of Social Reformism
In Chapter 4 of the book “Capitalism and the Catastrophe of Environmental Pollution”, Volume 1, I briefly reviewed and criticized the views of bourgeois reformist environmental theorists such as John Bellamy Foster, Andre Gores and others. There, I did not address the roots and basis of their views, especially the American sociologist Foster, but now it is time to address this issue not only from the perspective of environmental issues, but especially the core and class roots of their ideas about capital and the production relations of capitalism and socialism. First of all, it is necessary to mention one thing about Foster, and that is that this sociologist does not have any of his own ideas or thoughts in any of the above-mentioned cases. He is very active and follows the speeches and ideas of the spectrum of theorists of bourgeois socialism and works to publish and disseminate them in various publications, including the one he himself edits (Monthly Review). For this reason, I will not only deal with the perceptions and what he says about others, but also with the original owners of the ideas. It is necessary to say that here we will not go to the group called market socialists or the founders of the reconstruction and revival of the model of social democracy under the false name of Marx, mainly because they do not have any environmental ideas and, at least in this specific area, do not pose a direct danger of misleading the proletariat.
One prominent eco-socialist figure who has had a major influence on others is Micheal Löwy. In his essay “Eco-Socialism and Democratic Planning,” he attempts to bring together and make accessible to readers the broad outlines of what he says other socialists have advanced on environmental issues. For example, he quotes Richard Smith in his essay “The Environmental Collapse Machine”: “If capitalism cannot be reformed to make profit subordinate to human survival, what alternative is there but to move towards an economy that is planned on a national and global level… What other path is there, then, but to think of a real alternative, namely, ecological socialism?” And or James O’Connor as saying: “The goal of ecological socialism is a new society based on ecological rationality, democratic control, social equality and the primacy of use value over exchange value.” Michel Lévy then concludes that “I should add that these goals require the following three things: 1. Collective ownership of the means of production (collective here means public, cooperative and group ownership). 2. Democratic planning that allows society to determine the goals of investment and production. 3. A new technological structure of the productive forces. In other words, revolutionary social and economic transformation.”
The points mentioned here from these socialist thinkers, such as “democratic planning”, “subordination of profit to human and environmental survival”, “the primacy of use value over exchange value in ecological socialism”, “public and cooperative ownership” and “new technological structure” should be remembered, because these are terms and categories that not only constantly recur in most of the writings and propaganda of these thinkers, but also carry with them the content of all that they call socialism. As Foster proudly called this, the organization of the ecological revolution. A revolution that deserves this name on the surface of the planet and can be carried out within the framework of a broader social and “I emphasize socialist revolution that rationalizes the relations of producers and the construction between man and nature.” It should be noted that they are trying to draw a line with the official Green parties, for this reason they claim that the Green movements do not pay attention to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, the expansionism of capital and the accumulation of profit on the one hand, and the environment on the other, and therefore their efforts do not go beyond the limits of reform. At the same time, eco-socialists are trying to separate themselves from social democracy and camp parties. In this regard, Michel Löwy writes, “Any change in the forms of ownership that does not entail democratic management, and a new organization of the production system can only lead to a dead end.” This is the only point that not only separates the eco-socialists from all other socialists of the variegated variety, but also the most important tool that socialist thinkers such as Istvan Meszaros and Ernest Mandel emphasize in criticizing the Soviet camp and presenting their own plan of socialism. We will examine the works and ideas of Istvan Meszaros in detail, because he has had a very profound influence on others. But first of all, let us turn to the “democratic planning” that this group seeks.
In defence of “democratic planning,” Michel Lévy says: “Free market advocates point to the failure of planning in the Soviet Union as a reason to reject any idea of a planned economy. Without going into the merits and demerits of the Soviet experience, we can… see that experience as a form of dictatorship of necessity. That is, an undemocratic and authoritarian system that gave the monopoly of decision-making on all matters to a small oligarchy of techno-bureaucrats. It was not planning alone that led to dictatorship, but the increasing restrictions on democracy in the Soviet Union and, after Lenin’s death, the establishment of a centralized bureaucratic power led to a system of planning that was increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian.”
As can be seen, all intellectuals and theorists of this spectrum summarize their entire demarcation with camp socialism and all their criticism of this model of “socialism” in the absence of democracy and democratic economic planning in the former Soviet society. They have nothing to say about the type of understanding and analysis of Bolshevism and Lenin and then the camp of capitalism, socialism, the socialist transformation of the economy, the economic, political and social conditions and requirements of the negation and elimination of the separation of the worker from his work and other fundamental issues of the class struggle of the proletariat. The fact that the relationship of buying and selling labour power formed the foundation of the existence of Soviet society, that the root of the absence of the most basic freedoms and human rights, and as they call it, democracy, and all this must be dug up in the depths of the filth and stench of capital or these wage labour relations, is also not at all acceptable and sensitive to them. In this regard, when they present their model for the future human society, they are not going to have the slightest Marxian lesson from what happened in the camp and after the October Revolution. What they consider ideal and propose to the world working class is a Soviet society with democracy!! Now let’s see what relations prevailed in Soviet society and what changes the democratic seasoning will bring to it. I will defer the in-depth criticism and analysis of the failure of the October Revolution to the writings of “Nasser Paydar”, especially his valuable writing called “Communism of the Abolition of Wage Labor and Militant Leninist Reformism”, in which he deeply analyses all the roots of the failure of the October Revolution. Michel Lévy and all his associates know very well that the basis of Lenin’s new economic plan, the NEP, was to pave the way for the establishment of state capitalism. It should be noted that we emphasize the preparation of conditions and paving the way for the establishment of state capitalism, otherwise what Lenin was directly pursuing was the effective levers of control of the state of the day over the private ownership of small and medium capital. Lenin saw the passage of this phase as requiring the possibility of complete and complete state ownership over the workers of the entire social capital of the country. What he considered socialism. A type of socialism that was homogeneous in all respects with the narrative of the Russian Social Democratic Party, its entire previous practice, and the teachings of the Second International on this phenomenon. One of the most prominent forms of scientific management of the Bolsheviks, which is so revered by today’s socialists, was the Taylor system. A kind of fear-mongering and inhuman capitalist organization of labour in which the mass of workers selling labour power are placed, transformed, and frozen in a special hierarchy based on a division of labour corresponding to the production of maximum surplus value, according to their scientific and specialized capabilities. Managers, elites, and superiors plan the entire work and production, or in fact, the order of the process of production of surplus value, and the workers, in a wilful manner, without having any right to interfere in any field, dress up this planning as execution.
The Bolshevik Party recommended the application of this method in all centres of work and production. Lenin praised it in a very dazzling and astonishing way. Trotsky went beyond all this and demanded the combination of Taylorism with a terrifying garrison order under the supervision of the commanders of the Red Army. The Communist Party and the ruling political power of the Soviet Union continued to implement this system until 1939 and to make it more effective, they sought the help of American specialists between 1920 and 1930. The Bolsheviks, under the pressure of the teachings of the Second International, saw mere planning as a sign of socialism and in conflict with the existence of capitalism!!! It was in this context that Lenin declared the NEP to be the great gateway to socialism and spent a lot of time describing it.
There is nothing more vulgar than to hang the existence and non-existence of capitalism or socialism on something called planning. Planning and concentration of production are inevitable requirements for the development and expansion of capitalism. Today, with continuous modernization and the widespread use of technology, no production process and capital circulation is possible without planning. Moreover, the use of technology and planning is the most effective weapon of capital in increasing labour productivity. The relative and permanent reduction of capital’s dependence on labour is one of the main tools of capital, not only in terms of reducing production costs, but also for slaughtering the working class as much as possible. The continuous and intricate expansion of economic planning, whether in the scope of production and circulation of goods or at the general level of society, for example, government planning, has become a reality that, on the one hand, polishes the mechanisms of capital accumulation and its anti-crisis, and on the other hand, provides a role for a wide range of so-called left-wing academics, party builders, and the like needed to bury communism, abolish wage labour, and the anti-capitalist movement of the proletariat in the capitalist order. For this simple reason, in socialism, there is no talk of abolishing wage labour, destroying capital, and the rule of workers’ councils, because the elected technocratic boards of directors of companies, offices, and governments are supposed to be the founders of socialism. They should be given the good news that the social division of labour of capital has now created companies worldwide that plan adequately not only for the various areas of capital advance, but even for the capital states and their economic programs, both on current issues and in dealing with economic crises and distributing their burdens to the working masses. Companies such as The Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company, etc., with huge capital and monthly reports, are writing scripts for more than 130 countries around the world to guide production, financial institutions, and capitalist governments. It was not without reason that Keynesianism and its economic management coincided with the labour movements of the early 20th century, and it should not be ignored that the main basis for its emergence was what was called the NEP plan of the Soviet Communist Party. All of these emerged from conditions that required economic planning in the process of production and circulation of capital and the creation of a new role for the state of capital. The Bolshevik Party, which considered the mere state control over the private sector of social capital (let’s not forget that the state capitalism envisioned by Lenin is just that) to be a great step on the path to socialism, had understood this necessity before anyone else. Therefore, Michel Lévy is absolutely right not to consider economic planning itself to be in conflict with capital, and we also consider science, technology, and planning to be factors that both the bourgeoisie seeks to exploit to intensify the exploitation of workers as brutally as possible, and the proletariat can use them in the process of eliminating wage slavery and establishing socialism. We are talking about the class nature of planning. As long as the mechanism of accumulation and valorisation of capital is against the proletariat and in line with the intensification of its exploitation, it is only against it and in line with the intensification of its exploitation. It enables the relative and absolute increase of surplus value, which is why Michel Lévy has no choice but to expose the bourgeois nature of his words, despite his long speech in favour of socialism with the index of democratic planning. He quotes the Argentine Claudio Katz from his book On Socialism, who states that “democratic planning from below, under the control of the majority of the population, is not accompanied by absolute centralization, complete nationalization, war communism, or an economy planned by order. The transition is therefore the primacy of planning over the market, not the elimination of market variables. The combination of both models must be adapted to each situation and each country. However, the goal of the socialist process is not to maintain a comprehensive balance between planning and the market, but to promote the gradual decline of the market.” The entire effort of this left spectrum to believe that the market can be a mechanism for social justice and equality stems from a deeply bourgeois perspective. They believe that the exploitation of the working class lies in the sphere of circulation, not in the production of commodity. Although Marx addressed this issue in his numerous works in his critique of political economy, such as Capital, The Grundrisse (“Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft)”), and The Poverty of Philosophy, and showed that the basis for the separation of the worker from his work and his fall from existence is in the capitalist mode of production, in the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power and the commodification of his labour. However, it is not because people like Michel Lévy do not know and are unaware of this point, but rather deliberately and with the aim of misleading the proletariat that they bring up issues such as production based on use value!!
“In a socialist planned economy, use value is the sole criterion for the production of commodity and services, with significant long-term economic, social, and environmental consequences.” He then quotes Joel Kovel and his book The Enemy of Nature: “The reformation and reinforcement of use value and the reconstruction of its associated needs in this case become more a social regulator of technology than the transformation of time into surplus value and money, as occurs under the rule of capital.” Here, “Louis” exposes his very wrong understanding of the functioning of the laws of the political economy of capital. Following his other socialist predecessors, he tries to play the role of historical heroes in the economic arena and, with a decree, to attach the use value of a commodity to its exchange value!! He is unable to understand the simple fact that capitalist production relations, no matter how planned they are, do not operate outside their own economic laws and are not supposed to operate on the basis of the decrees of technocrats, no matter how brilliant. Capitalism, as long as it exists, has its own planning, work process, and organization of work. The form of this planning, whether the ownership of capital is private or state or cooperative, whether the state of capital is democratic or dictatorial, whether it is bureaucratic or fascist, even how the lever of competition works and the type of these, all of which are consequences and mechanisms of the relationship of production of surplus value or its political, social, legal and security infrastructures, can undergo some changes, but these changes absolutely do not question the reality of the existence of capital or the relationship of buying and selling labour power and its relations of production. It is not planning and its democratic nature or absence that determines the existence and non-existence of capitalism. On the contrary, it is capital that, as long as it exists, arranges these in accordance with all the requirements of its own valorisation process and according to its capabilities. Lévy knows very well that he is demagogue; his words are very misleading, vulgar and ridiculous. He pretends that the proletariat, by taking the hawk of the balance between use value and exchange value, will slowly, slowly bring capital to its senses that it must put its capital in order and become socialism through its own gender surgery!!! It seems that the proletariat’s problem is to manipulate the balance between use value and exchange value in the capitalist mode of production!!! Michel Lévy should be asked what he means by use value? Something under this name is mentioned in wage slavery relations simply because it is a condition for a commodity to have exchange value. In Marx’s words, in order for a commodity to have exchange value, it must have use value. That’s all. What is dominant, domineering, and all-pervasive is exchange value. Capitalist production is the production of surplus value, and as long as there is evidence of it, it revolves around the foundation of the production of surplus value and the relationship of buying and selling labour power. Löw must explain what his model of socialism is supposed to do with this relationship, with the relationship of the production of surplus value? Furthermore, if he truly, truly accepts the destruction of this relationship, he must explain very precisely how he sees the process of this destruction. This is where all the various spectrums of false socialists in the world, from the Second International, Leninists, Soviet-camp, Chinese, Trotskyists, to the likes of Lévy and Isteban Mezőros and thousands of their like-minded people, partners, and sympathizers, are disgraced and disgraced.
But let’s see what Marx says about the use value and production of commodities in “Critique of Political Economy, Part One, Chapter One – Commodity”: “The wealth of bourgeois society appears at first glance as a huge accumulation of commodities, the unit of which is a single commodity. Every commodity, in any case, has the dual aspect of use value and exchange value.” Then, in further explaining these two components, Marx continues by giving an example, “The necessary condition for a commodity is indeed that it be a use value, while whether it is a commodity or not is not a use value. Since use value is inherently independent of a specific economic form, it falls outside the scope of political economy. Use value fits into this scope only when it itself has a specific form. Use value is that immediate physical essence which is necessary for the expression of a definite economic relation (i.e. exchange value).
Marx does not consider the discussion of use value to be the work of political economy. This is clearly because use value is not the essential index of any particular economic formation. In order for the product of human labour to be a commodity, it must have use value, but the existence of use value in itself is no reason for the product to be a commodity. He clarifies that for this reason use value falls within the scope of political economy only when it is used to express exchange value. Marx adds that: “Furthermore, different use values are the products of the activity of different individuals and therefore each of them is the product of a different form of labour. But as exchange value it represents the same homogeneous labour (i.e. labour in which the individual characteristics of the workers are ignored). Thus, the labour which creates exchange value is called universal abstract labour.”
After discussing exchange value as “socially necessary labour latent in the commodity” and emphasizing labour time as the basis for determining this value, Marx continues:
“From the analysis of exchange value, we conclude that the conditions of labour that create exchange value are social categories of labour or categories of social labour. Social, of course, not in its general sense, but in the specific sense that implies the existence of a particular type of society. Simple uniform labour shows, first of all, that the labour of different individuals is equal and that in fact their labour is treated equally by their conversion into homogeneous labour. The labour of each individual has this social characteristic of equality insofar as it appears in exchange value, and its manifestation in exchange value is only insofar as it is made equal to the labour of all other individuals.” Thus, with the emergence and development of commodity production, that is, production for sale, and its ascent to its most developed state, the capitalist mode of production emerged. A new phase characterized by the commodification of labour power. A phase in which capital, that is, the dead labour of the worker, outside the sphere of his intervention and as a dominant force over his being and non-being, put living labour, that is, the worker and his labour power, to its service, the same sole source of capital production, to produce ever more and ever more and more extreme capital. Therefore, in this system, separating the exchange value from the use value of the commodity and preferring one over the other is only possible in the minds of thinkers like Michel Lévy and his associates and in the world of their absurd imaginations. The conditions of work that create exchange value are beyond the control of the producers, i.e. the workers, as long as they produce under conditions of production based on the purchase and sale of their labour power. Even if the ownership of the means of production were in the hands of the state, a cooperative, or even representatives of the workers themselves, there would be no change in the process of the exchange value of the entire product and its function, i.e. the appropriation of the worker’s surplus labour in the form of surplus value, the conversion of surplus value into capital, and its accumulation in the form of additional capital. The basis of this process, as Marx states, has not changed at all. “General labour-time is only a general measure, which represents a social measure… And finally, one of the characteristic features of labour is that it establishes exchange value, which in turn causes the social relations of individuals to appear in a misleading way as relations between things. The labour of different individuals is only equated with one another by comparing one use-value with another in the guise of exchange value, and is treated as general labour… Two commodities which have different use-values but contain the same amount of labour-time have the same exchange value. Exchange value thus appears as the social determinant of use-values, a determinant which is proportional to their nature and consequently enables them to stand in definite proportions to each other in the process of exchange.”
In this way, not only do human relations in the relations of capital production become relations between objects, but it is also objects and their production processes that dominate humans, and for this reason it is only in the imagination of theorists who imagine that with a single decree it is possible to make the dominance of use value over exchange value possible without ending the basis of these relations, namely capitalist commodity production. And this is possible by abolishing capital as a social relation and abolishing wage labour. If workers want to escape the domination of objects and relations between commodities and to free human life from the domination of the laws governing relations between objects that they themselves produce, and to be the creators of their own history as free individuals in control of their own destiny, they have no choice but to abolish their living conditions, which are forced labour or the compulsion to sell labour power as a commodity. his, which is the only way to save the proletariat and, consequently, all of humanity, cannot be achieved even in the slightest with the participation of workers in the management of the units of production, circulation and services of goods. The participation of workers in the management of these institutions only means the confirmation of the relations of production of capital and the washing of hands of the class struggle, which is what so many social-bourgeois intellectuals are promoting and trying to introduce to the workers as socialism. Michel Lévy is among these intellectuals or this spectrum of intellectual representatives of capital. He says:
“It is also worth emphasizing that planning is not incompatible with the self-government of workers in production units… The democratic nature of planning is not incompatible with the existence of experts, since their role is not to make decisions but to offer their opinions, which, if they do not contradict the democratic decision-making process, are often different from it. As Ernst Mandel has pointed out: governments, parties, planning boards, scientists, technocrats, or anyone who can make proposals, make proposals and try to influence the people… But in a multi-party system such proposals are never universally agreed upon, that is, the people can choose between coherent alternatives, and that the right of power and decision-making lies in the hands of the majority of producers, consumers, citizens and no one else.” (E. Mandel Power and money). What generosity!! Wrapping bourgeois democracy, which has dominated Europe and America for more than two hundred years and whose results we see today, in a new form called socialism does not require any mystery or astrolabe. All you need is a little bit of impudence and you can mold Soviet state capitalism with a little bit of bourgeois democracy into the working masses, but our delusional imagination sees the rooster’s tail from under the cloak. John Bellamy Foster’s impudence goes further than this. In his book entitled “Marx and the Environment”, he regularly mentions Marx. Without directly quoting and documenting the quotes, he writes that Marx said and wrote about nature and the environment, and in this way, he sells his ideas under the name of Marx. Foster goes so far in the above article as to say that “Marx argued that the proper purpose of agriculture, contrary to the general spirit of capitalist production, which focuses on the immediate profit of money, is to help meet all the various and permanent basic needs of life that humanity needs from generation to generation.” Where and in what context Marx said this remains a mystery throughout Foster’s article. The fact that agriculture, like any other sphere of labour and production, undergoes fundamental changes in its nature and from the ground up in the process of historical developments and the replacement of one form of production by another, and accepts the properties of the new production formation, is not at all credible to Foster. The fact that Marx never subjects capitalist mechanized agriculture, which is the starting point and the end of that capital, to such a judgment in any way and absolutely does not offend Foster’s ethics and research conscience. He is only seeking to prove the legitimacy of a model of socialism that others have proposed and that he is also hopelessly enamoured with. In this regard, he insinuates every falsehood as true and bulldozes everything that is true, including Marx’s words. Foster continues that “there was thus a complete contradiction between the short-sighted exploitation of the earth’s resources by capitalism and the long-term character of truly sustainable production!! Marx repeatedly insisted that in a society of free and closed producers economic progress could be made without endangering the natural and global state on which the well-being of future generations depended. This is precisely the description that is given to the concept of sustainable development (capital) today and is most clearly seen nowhere else in the report of the Bratland Commission entitled ‘Our Common Future’, development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The shamelessness is beyond description. “Sustainable development” was fed to the workers by the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie as Marx’s socialism of the abolition of wage labour!!! Let us not forget that Foster’s sustainable development is the same message of the bourgeois environmental movements of the 1970s in Europe, the content of the Brundtland report entitled “Our Common Future” in 1987, and finally the basis of the work of the UN conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The thesis of sustainable capital development has found its most ardent supporters in Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, the presidents of Venezuela and Iran. But Foster continues to stubbornly try to forge a Marxist identity for the delusions of bourgeois scholars of fear and terror. He says, “Marx and Engels did not limit their discussions to environmental issues related to the soil, but also delved into many other issues in the field of sustainability… In addressing the issue of industrial waste, Marx spoke of an economy based on the prevention of waste production, that is, the reduction of production waste to a minimum and the immediate use of all raw and auxiliary materials needed in production.” Thus, according to Bellamy Foster, Marx wrote environmental prescriptions for the sustainable development of capital!! Foster concludes that “Marx and Engels were unique in their emphasis on the natural conditions of production and in their acceptance of the fact that a sustainable economy requires a sustainable relationship with nature on a global scale, and in this sense, the acceptance of natural limitations was an essential part of their argument.” It goes without saying that Mr. Foster is in an exceptional position. As a professor at a prestigious American university, he takes full advantage of this position and attributes everything he has to Marx without a reference. Foster is not only active in environmental issues but also tries to promote the views and theories of his teachers and predecessors by publishing books and articles, especially in the journal he edits. He is a disciple of Istvan Meszaros. He is himself strongly influenced by the ideas of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. By doing this, Foster helps to spread and disseminate the barbaric creations of the Meszaros and Mendel type. Foster’s writings, some of which have been translated into Persian, are numerous, but their current articles and discussions are the same as those that Meszaros has dealt with more seriously, eloquently, and maturely in his works. Therefore, we do not see the need to deal with Foster’s articles here beyond what has been said.