Chapter One:
1. Critique of Istvan Meszaros’s views
Hassan Abbasi
First, I find it necessary to briefly quote the importance of Meszaros ‘s views in comparison with other socialists of his kind, from the words of this group. Before doing so, it would not be a bad idea to mention the names of his most important works here:
The necessity of social control 1971, Beyond capital 1994, Socialism or Barbarism 2001, socialism in the 21st century 2008, Alternative to parliamentarism 2009
Meszaros is still very active in putting forward his views.
He is respected not only among his fans, but also among politicians. By politicians I mean those who, either within bourgeois parliamentarism or in the assembly of forces and movements like Wall Street, consider themselves critics of capitalism and pro-proletarian representatives!!! John Bellamy Foster writes about Meszaros ‘s book “Beyond Capital” in 2014: “Three radical theoretical innovations are central to Meszaros’s analysis of the structural crisis of capital and the possibility of a transition to socialism. 1- The concept of the capital system 2- The idea of reproduction and social metabolism 3- The idea of second-order intermediaries. Accordingly, “considering the capital system as the embodiment of the logic of capital that emerged from the capital-labour dialectic has three implicit implications for the theory of socialist transition: A. As long as the revolution does not abolish the capital relation itself, it is incomplete, even if it overcomes the most important institutional formations of capitalism, such as private ownership of the means of production or the internal link between the state and the market. For even if, as in the Soviet Union, the state is the sole commander of society and becomes social property, the capital relation will still operate according to the fundamental logic of the capital system. B. It is possible to fight against the logic of capital, to emerge victorious from a series of important battles (not wars) within the institutional and formal realms of capitalist society, and to make the implementation of revolutionary socialist policies, i.e. a genuine movement towards socialism within the borders of capitalism, strategically sustainable (and that too without storming the Winter Palace), but only on condition that it means an all-out struggle against all aspects of the capital relation and progressively substitutes an alternative and organic mode of social control in the pores and cracks of existing society. C. In all cases, the aim of revolutionary struggles must be the abolition of the second-order intermediaries (state, money, market, commodity fetishism) and the reified ideological structures from which the alien existence of the system is formed. The revolutionary aim is not simply the displacement of one of these intermediaries or the empty and empty seizure of a part of the system, for example, the command of high government positions, but the overcoming of the alien capital-labour construction in all respects and the creation of a truly equal society. The same John Bellamy Foster writes about Meszaros:
“Istvan Meszaros is one of the most important philosophers that the tradition of historical materialism has ever produced. His work is virtually unique in the depth of his analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the death of post-revolutionary societies like the Soviets, and the necessary conditions for the transition to socialism. His dialectical investigation of social structure and forms of consciousness (a systematic critique of dominant forms of thought) has no equal in our time. The “pathfinder” of twenty-first-century socialism is also a title that Hugo Chávez attributed to the controversial figure of recent Latin American decades.” Foster wrote this in his preface to Meszaros’s the Necessity of Social Control. Foster continues by writing, “This book is the result of a conversation between Meszaros and me in London in July 2013, during which I expressed the need for an accessible work that would open a path to his ideas for newcomers. He took this challenge seriously and achieved it in The Necessity of Social Control. In this preface, I attempt to place Meszaros’s system of thought in general and this book in particular in their historical context, and to clarify some of the distinctive concepts that govern his analyses.” Leaving aside Foster, Peter Heudis also wrote in December 2014 about the book “Beyond Capital” under the title “Conceptualizing an Alternative for Liberation”: “Few have so directly and honestly (meaning Meszaros) faced the crisis of imagining an alternative to the existing society”, “Meszaros insists that we will not be able to free ourselves from the absolute blockage that the socialist movement has reached unless we can put into practice what he calls “theorizing.” Theorizing that identifies forms that can lead the revolutionary seizure of power towards the abolition of capital” These are the points that Meszaros’s fans have said about him. The truth is that many people, upon reading Meszaros’s writings, at first glance say to themselves that this is the same as socialism!! But it is enough to first ponder his understanding of capitalism and socialism and then explore the foundations of this understanding with Marx’s critique of political economy to find out what terrible errors lie behind his words. Meszaros’ understanding of capital bears no resemblance to Marx’s dissection of capitalism. He does not seek to dismantle the relations of wage slavery and the abolition of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. What we get from all his discussions is that in his model of socialism, labour remains as the producer of surplus value and capital, and what he claims to be eliminated is money and the current form of the state through the democratization of the labour process and production. Meszaros sees this as the end of the commodity and capital of the product of human labour, the elimination of the fetishist nature of the product of labour, and finally the complete liberation of man from the captivity of capital as dead labour dominating his destiny. This is all that Meszaros trumpets to the workers, and apparently it is this that has distinguished Meszaros by several heads and necks from the social reformists of the 21st century, especially those who add environmental flavour to their ideas, those who try to position themselves as the most modern thinkers in the market of ideas!! Let us turn to some passages and parts of Meszaros’s thoughts. We will start with his book “Either Socialism or Barbarism”. Before starting the discussion, it may be necessary to bring here some specific terms and expressions that appear frequently in his works and point out the meanings he intended for these expressions and words.
1. P. 20 “Structural necessity”: meaning the material and unstoppable movement of capital towards global monopoly integration at any cost” and the same terminology is followed on pp. 22 and 23 of the book under the title of confronting the “structural necessity of capital”.
2. P. 31 “Structural crisis in the entire capitalist system”: A term used in response to the periodic and conventional crises of capitalism. (The underlined words and phrases are the same ones that Meszaros uses in his own narrative. For example, he uses the term “system” instead of the capitalist mode of production, and as is evident throughout the book, he identifies various systems in the world that are all “capitalist systems” but are not necessarily capitalist!
3. In many of his analyses of the countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, he even uses the term “Third World,” and despite the fact that he refrains from using it in the interview at the end of the book, wherever he talks about the societies of the three continents of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the like, he displays the same famous national-left and populist view that the imperialist countries are deliberately preventing the capitalist progress of these societies and are even worried about this progress!! For example, on page 34 he says, “Thus, the ideology of Third World modernization was inevitably abandoned, along with some shame.” Or on page 35, “It was clear that even if only two countries, China and India, were allowed to reach the catastrophic level of environmental waste and pollution that the living model of modernization, the United States, had reached.” On the same page he writes, “Furthermore, the selfish solution proposed by the United States… is not only self-destructive, but its premise is based on keeping Third World countries in a state of perpetual backwardness.” And so on.
In all these cases, Meszaros refers to political instruments as instruments of economic exploitation in “systems” and on this basis, in his own words, he separates “systems” from conventional capitalism!!! He insists that, again, in his own words, conventional capitalism (Europe and America) is holding back the “Third World” with the help of political instruments and probably preventing their capitalist development!!! In this regard, on page 38, he speaks of “the end of the modernization of the Third World as a very fundamental problem in the evolution of the capitalist system. He emphasizes very strongly that the “capitalist system” is unable to generalize itself globally as a capitalist system, that is, as a system in which the extraction of surplus labour in the form of surplus value is carried out essentially by following economic laws (and not political compulsions)!!! …
4. On pages 36 and 37, he speaks of “the end of the historical stage of the rise of the capitalist system.”
5. On page 37, Meszaros continues to discover new categories by inventing a formula and he himself expresses it as follows: “The global phenomenon of a tendency towards equalization of the unequal rate of exploitation accompanied by a decrease in wages” and in the footnote on page 38 it is said that the tendency towards a decrease in the relative advantage of the working class of the advanced capitalist countries is due to “the limitation of capital possibilities” and “the problem of accumulation in the original country”. We do not mean that the latter incident did not happen. The problem is that Meszaros does not see the real roots of the matter in capital, he does not realize that the problem does not lie in the relationship between the different sectors of world capital. Rather, it lies in the depths of the existence of capital. It is not only European and American capitalism that constantly attacks the living standards of workers in order to maintain the rate of profit. The whole of world capital is engaged in this barbarity for every moment of its survival.
6. On page 39 he says: “Another problem should also be mentioned briefly, and that is the phenomenon of hybridization of the economy, which can be observed even in the most advanced capitalist countries. The main dimension of this phenomenon is the increasing direct and indirect intervention of the state to protect the survival of the existing mode of reproduction and social metabolism.” Meszaros’s views on capital and the role of the state are among the points that, according to him, had a great influence on the deepening of his theory of imperialism. But what he says is nothing more than the usual refrain of all reformist views about the separation of the state from capital. Meszaros explicitly sees capitalist society as carrying three axes: the capitalist class, the state and the working class. This view is the basis for bargaining with the relations of production of capital in many of his analyses. Seeing the state as neutral and third in capitalism is not unique to him but is a common feature of all social reformists from the Second International onwards. They all see the state as a sacred institution that acts as a buffer between the two main classes of society, whose role is to reconcile them in times of crisis and to preserve order and peace in society in non-crisis times. There is no mention of the new roles of the state, which has always been the representative and political power of capital and the guardian of the relations of production. Have Meszaros and all activists like him forgotten the great and decisive role of the state in the expansion of industrial and agricultural capital in England, in taking agricultural land from smallholders, in passing iron laws on property in England, and in forming a reserve army of labour in the pioneering capitalism of this country in the nineteenth century? Did this role diminish during the period of Margaret Thatcher and the various periods of the Labor Party government? However, the new roles of the state that Meszaros and his accomplices have been concealing since the Second International are to spread the burden of capitalist crises on the working class, a lever for the capitalists to exert ever more severe pressure on the working class with the aim of increasing the rate of profits or preventing their decline in various ways, from making workers indebted to deepening their poverty and misery and all their other misfortunes. Even when he mentions this role of the state, it is from the perspective of drawing a line of separation between capital and the state. In this case, his position is the same as that of the most right-wing social democrats who speak of “the state’s seizure of people’s property.” Consider this section from his book “Either Socialism or Barbarism” in Chapter Two:
“One of the most important contradictions and limitations of the capitalist system is the relationship between the tendency of transnational capitals to globalize in the economic sphere on the one hand and the continued dominance of national states as the overall structure of political command in the ruling order on the other… Nevertheless, the national state remains the final arbiter of general socio-economic and political decisions (domestic) and the real support for the risks of the entire major activities of transnational monopolies. It is clear that this contradiction is of such depth and scope that, despite all the rhetoric and the endless preteens of resolving it through discussions of “democracy and development”, it is conceivable that such a contradiction will persist forever.” Page 41, chapter “The Deadliest Stage of Imperialism” is nothing more than a continuation of the “imperialism” of Rudolf Hilferding, Lenin and Hobson on a newspaper level. In this writing, like its predecessors, the project of “imperialism” is used as an excuse to challenge the labour movement and integrate it into the bourgeoisie under the names of “countries,” “nations,” and non-class, eclectic, and popular categories.
On pages 54-55 of the book, the author enters into his favourite discussion, namely the “issue of national interests” of countries and their confrontation on a global level. In this section, without paying attention to the class nature of the states and the forces that he calls the vanguards of the national interests of the whole society!!! He deals with issues that, based on his own divisions, cover post-capitalist countries of the Soviet type, countries that are not capitalist but have a capitalist system. Referring to the fact that Marx spoke more about capital and not capitalism, Meszaros makes a strange fallacy for building a “system”. He creates the “capitalist system”, the “Soviet system”, the “Chinese system”!! He also completely underlines the fact that most of the present world is capitalist!! Word games that ultimately result in nothing more than the glorification of Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and the criminal capitalist governments and the advice to the working class to overthrow these capitalist governments and give up the class struggle. Meszaros has no valid criticism of capitalist production relations, he is not fundamentally a critic of capitalist production, he is a critic of the excesses of a few powerful bourgeois states. Moreover, according to his theory, apart from a few countries in the world, there are no capitalist countries that are destined to be the target of the struggle of the working masses!!! When Meszaros speaks of the so-called Soviet system, he is not willing to distance himself even a step from his predecessors such as Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and George Lukacs. Those who, throughout their active lives, spared no effort to mislead the working masses of the world in order to criticize the capitalist relations existing in the Soviet camp. The only difference between Meszaros and his predecessors is that after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, he had the opportunity to flee from opportunism and people’s socialism to people’s socialism adorned with bourgeois democracy.
Otherwise, the professor and philosopher of the colourful institutes of the bourgeoisie, with all his flashy titles, has not been able to add anything to what his predecessors have said. In one thing, he has surpassed his predecessors, and that is that his books are like new chapters in the library of the Iranian bourgeoisie and its intellectual representatives, and countries like it, which once tried to strengthen the fortress of the “national” bourgeoisie with the theses of “semi-colony, semi-feudal”, “dependent capitalism” and “comprador capital”, now see themselves as “non-capitalist” in Mazar-i-Sharif’s theses, and this is a great service that he is doing to capital. In this section (4.2) of his book, Meszaros speaks of the most deadly and dangerous stage of imperialism, the conflict of class interests of one part of the bourgeoisie against another, and considers this to be the aggressive nature of a particular class (in this case, the dominant and powerful part of America) against other global ruling classes!!! The main focus of the discussion, like in other sections of the book, is to raise issues such as how America does not fulfil some of its economic obligations in the United Nations and its organs. It is similar to what capitalist governments like the Islamic Republic raise in their so-called anti-imperialist revelations. Here Meszaros probably has a lot of listeners!!
7. In section 5.2 of the same book, as in other sections, Meszaros uses populist methods typical of a part of the world bourgeoisie, with the bargaining of the liberal bourgeoisie, to expose the policies of the dominant sector. He discusses the support of the US federal government for its own industries and the loans taken in this regard. “I mean the loans of the US government itself in astronomical figures, the effects of which the imperialist power of the supreme government imposes on all countries until the rest of the world can pay for them.” Here I will not enter into non-class and populist categories such as “the rest of the world” and “all countries” and will limit myself to the issue of loans that a state takes on the capital market. It seems that the author, with all the pompous and mouth-watering titles he has acquired, still does not understand the economic basis of the capital state and its purposes for borrowing. All capitalist states have huge debts, some of them even amounting to several times their gross domestic product. These debts are obtained in the form of securities, etc., from banks and financial institutions by pledging their income, which is taxes collected from the working class and even its advance sale. This process has a history as long as the entire life of capitalism. The difference that may be worth mentioning is that the capitalist state has been continuing this task for a long time now, due to the continuous and uninterrupted crises to pave the way for accumulation. Here, the capitalist state generally acts as the saviour of big capital in times of crisis and to reduce the thirst for capital accumulation in large areas. In such a situation, a section of capitalists who usually receive a smaller share of this widespread encroachment of capital on the livelihood of workers, shout about the lack of democracy, the injustices that are being done to them, and demand a larger share of the surplus values. The populist nature of Meszaros’s views lies in the fact that he groans as the mouthpiece of a section of the bourgeoisie that receives a smaller share of the surplus values and loans from the capital state. Just a few lines later, he echoes the sighs and groans of the French and Japanese bourgeoisie and says: “With all these conflicts, the trade war at the international level shows a very serious trend whose consequences for the future are very widespread.” Poverty, homelessness, unemployment, lack of medicine, a destroyed environment, war and fleeing from war are not Meszaros’s problems for the international proletariat. He is concerned about the interests of a part of the bourgeoisie against its stronger part. “Imposing imperialist laws on the victim countries” and similar analyses that reflect the constant lamentations of the national left spectrum of “anti-imperialist”!!
8. In this same section 5.2 of the chapter on the deadliest stage of imperialism, as well as section 6.2, which deals with the military aspects of imperialism, he suffers from the naivety of all the writers and explorers of the spectrum of “anti-imperialists” of the people. Naivety means that both Lenin, RudolfHilferding and Karl Kautsky, as well as other critics of imperialism such as Meszaros, see the process of formation of monopolies and concentration of capital as one-sided and linear. This means that, according to them, such concentration has been going on continuously since the last two decades of the 1800s and that now there should be no trace of small or even medium capitalists other than the monopoly giants. While the reality is not like that. First, capitalism continuously creates new areas of advance, the industrial giants of the past find new competitors alongside them, the giants of yesterday are divided into parts that can compete with their competitors. More importantly and more fundamentally, the inherent dynamic of capital, while profoundly centralizing, also seeks various possible escape routes from the explosive upward trajectory of increasing organic composition and concentration, and of course, it also distributes the full cost of this directly onto the lives of the global working class. Capital’s approach to using the shacks of Filipino and Bengali women, rather than building huge factories or the entire requisites of accumulation in these regions, is just one of these mechanisms.
A few decades ago, only the Seven Sisters oil giants were talked about in the world. Now, there are nearly 150 oil companies in the world, a significant number of which are as great as the giants of the 1950s and 1960s, both in terms of capital size and investment fields and areas. In his works, Meszaros sees the so-called global imperialist stage as one-sided and linear, and ultimately even summarizes it only in the existence of America. The power struggle over the areas of capital advance has existed since the beginning of capitalism and will continue as long as capital relations exist in the world. Meszaros speaks as if the war and conflict within the bourgeoisie class on the national and international levels have ended. As if the world has been replaced by two poles of imperialism in the form of the United States and all other peoples, governments and countries, replacing the two poles of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat!! What is his ultimate goal with all this fuss about monopolies and imperialism? Isn’t it that he, too, is only pursuing the withdrawal of the working class from the class struggle by this category and by blackening the pages of numerous books and articles? Like other owners of the theories of imperialism, he is trying to paint something super capitalist and non-capitalist before the workers of the world and to make this painting a means for the proletariat to abandon the real war against wage slavery and against the foundation of the existence of capitalism. Theories that are familiar enough and have led the world labour movement into the wilderness as far as the eye can see. The theory of the alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie for the “anti-imperialist” struggle!!! The formation of the “people’s and anti-people’s front” and all these kinds of things, or in a word, the theory of the complete dissolution of the labour movement in the capitalist order, which are familiar enough to everyone. Otherwise, what is all this fuss about? Because everything that Marx said nearly 150 years ago about capital, the process of capital centralization, the relationship between different parts of capital, how surplus values are distributed among these parts at the level of each society and the whole world, is all forgotten, and new heretics, under the false banner of explaining the new phase of capitalist development, set about completely derailing the world’s workers from the real track of the struggle against capital. The discussion is absolutely not about downplaying the importance of dissecting the imperialist conditions of capitalist production. We will discuss the misinformation of this group further.
2. Istvan Meszaros and the Theory of Socialism
In the previous part of this discussion, we examined the opinions of ” Meszaros ” about the imperialist conditions of capitalist production by referring to his works (Socialism or Barbarism), Beyond Capital and his interview with “Critic Magazine”. Here we continue the same investigations. Throughout the above books, the Maoist three-world vision screams. In Socialism or Barbarism, America appears not as the dominant pole of international capital, the pole that captures the greatest share of the surplus value derived from the exploitation of the world’s workers, the pole that, in order to obtain and increase this share, makes the whole world its arena of aggression and war, but only as an imperialist superpower and “enemy of the people.” In section 8.2, he writes, “The ultimate target of America’s Preventive strategy is undoubtedly China.” The discussion is not about the reality or the author’s fantasies (conspiracy theory, conspiracy illusion), but about the conclusions that the author draws from the presentation of the topics and especially his three-world view of the danger of imperialism. Like many, he hysterically beats the drum of the danger of imperialism, only to replace the real war of the working masses of the world against the foundation of capitalist existence with the disastrous fallacy of “the struggle between the people and imperialism”!! The populist and anti-proletarian perspective of the imperialist theory enthusiasts has no other goal than to create an alternative to the proletariat. The author’s views on the relations between states and the competition of capitals of different countries in appropriating as much surplus value as possible from the labour of the world’s workers are extremely childish and superficial, and the immediate result is the misguidance of the minds of the world’s working class. On page 76, under the heading ” perspective American Attacks,” after explaining the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by American forces in the midst of the Balkan War, he writes: “The issues that deeply affect the relationship between China and America cannot be more serious than this. These problems arise, in part, from the unfortunate fact that the party state has not yet found its place in the free market world. When the dominant global imperialism uses concepts such as democracy and the free market to legitimize its ideology,…what makes this challenge unbearable is the prospect of economic development that, given current growth rates, would be detrimental to the United States, coupled with the fact that China has a shocking one billion more people than the United States.” The author is so fascinated by the contradictions of capitalists that he does not understand the economic reality and the common point of the global capitalist class, that China’s economic growth, along with the staggering surplus values that it brings to the capitalist class of this country, is a ready platform for the capital of other countries, including the United States. Whenever this economic growth suffers an interruption for any reason, however brief, the entire American administrative apparatus, the capitalists of this country, from monopolies to its small producers, are in a panic as to how the arteries and channels of the billions of surplus values of Chinese workers can be dredged so that the flow of this enormous profit is not disrupted. The author is so immersed in his imperialist theories that he sees the billion-strong population of Chinese workers as a threat to American capital, or in fact, he pretends that the class enemy of the Chinese workers is not the Chinese capitalist state and capitalists, but only American imperialism, as the enthusiasts of the theory of imperialism like to show! He does not understand, or perhaps pretends not to understand, that this is Paradise, this billion-strong cheap labour force, is the way to salvation and to reduce, however slightly, the fall in the rate of profit of capital, not only for American capital, but for European capital and the whole world. The author then quotes The Economist magazine as saying: “China’s economy alone will be three times the size of the US economy by 2020.” He concludes: “It is not difficult to imagine what a sense of danger such a prospect would arouse in the circles of the American ruling class.” (This is Meszaros’s way of working, in that all the sources he refers to are publications, newspapers, and statements by capitalist officials and government officials, without any criticism of them. He quotes exactly what one representative of capital says against another, and then, in the same vein as the author, reaches similar conclusions). Meszaros has no knowledge of Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy. By bragging about the contradictions between imperialists, by pointing out the differences of interests and conflicts between different sections of the bourgeoisie, by putting together a vulgar theory of imperialism devoid of capitalist foundations, by expressing horror at the extension of one imperialist pole to the other poles, by feeling regret at the inequality of the profit shares of different sections of world capital, by lamenting the possible slowdown in the process of capital export, and so on, he opens before the workers a thick case of his complete and total alienation from the working class and its anti-capitalist movement. The contradictions between the different sections of capital, which have been and are the constants of capitalist production, are the only thing that attracts his attention, and this is due to the fact that the philosopher of his time is himself a part of this contradiction and current. Like any bourgeois intellectual, his thoughts and worries revolve around this contradiction. The author says in the third chapter of his work, entitled “Historical Challenges Facing the Socialist Movement.” “The anti-imperialist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries failed because of the labour movement’s compromise with the trusts and their support for their foreign policy.”
It is quite natural that Meszaros, with his point of view, cannot see that the deviation and misguidance of the labour movement at the very moment he mentions occurred under the pressure of the “anti-imperialist struggle” and anti-monopoly prescriptions formulated by his own predecessors. Meszaros believes that the struggle of the working class should have been more popular and should have lined up in alliance with one part of the bourgeoisie against the other part, and in this way, he makes the class basis of his views clear to the workers. As in the next sentence, quoted by George Boutwell, a former colleague of US President Abraham Lincoln in 1902, he says: “The final effort to save the American republic must be made by the working class and the producers, today it seems truly prophetic. For the conditions of victory have not changed and it is only the working classes and producers of America who can put an end to the destructive movement of world imperialism.” Thus, Meszaros, together with Lincoln’s advisor, calls on the American working class to play the role of infantry of a part of the bourgeoisie against the other parts and to enter into war with the monopolies. This is not the first time that the bourgeoisie, in the process of its internal contradictions, has disintegrated the labour movement and the working class and has taken part of it as its own support. Marx’s writings on the struggles of the French working class in the periods 1848-1852 and also on the Paris Commune are full of accounts of this kind of criminal trickery of the bourgeoisie. In the 20th century, the creation of labour organizations with the aim of burying the anti-capitalist movement of workers, using them to change the balance of power between different sections of the world bourgeoisie, or increasing the share of one pole at the expense of another pole of the surplus values resulting from the exploitation of the working class, has constituted the main strategy of the dominant part of capital. Nasser Paydar’s work entitled “Internal Conflicts of the World Bourgeoisie” provides clear and instructive examples of the successful and sometimes unsuccessful attempts of this global strategy of the bourgeoisie. Meszaros does not need to look for the experiences of two hundred years ago or even the last hundred years in the disintegration of the labour movement. It is enough to consider the process of formation and functioning of the international syndicalist institutions that were created in the name of workers (the International Federation of Trade Unions (ICFTU)) and the role they played as tools in the hands of the bourgeoisie to crush the anti-capitalist movement of the working masses, as well as to strengthen the power of this or that section of world capital, to understand what the bourgeoisie and its various intellectual representatives have done to the labour movement. Meszaros calls on everyone to join the nationwide people’s movement against monopolies, regardless of class affiliation! “One does not need to be a militant socialist to realize the dangers that lie ahead.” He then lists bourgeois figures, from Nobel Prize winners to liberals opposed to Margaret Thatcher, as standard-bearers against imperialist monopolies, and calls on the working class and part of the industrial bourgeoisie to join hands in the anti-imperialist struggle!!! At the end of this part of the chapter, he writes, “But what is absolutely clear to us in the light of historical experience is that only a genuine socialist movement will be able to confront and defeat the forces that are now dragging humanity into the abyss of destruction.” It is enough to refer to the experiences of the last few decades in the field of capital governments’ plans to recruit workers in internal competitions with factions of the bourgeoisie of a country to find out that what Meszaros means by these sentences is only the destruction of the labour movement and that’s it. Of course, like all his fellow thinkers, Meszaros does not say this and even tries to find the root of the collapse of the labour movement in the “hierarchical structure of the capital system and the unequal and incurable form of the hierarchy of power in this system” with a new formulation!!! Apparently, capital itself has the greatest sanctity and the only form of adherence to the hierarchy of power that prevents the flourishing of workers’ struggles!!
It seems that when the labour movement in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was so violent and progressive that it was pushing back the bourgeoisie and even launching the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and the German Revolution, the capitalist system did not have a bureaucratic and hierarchical structure!! The author’s new theory on the consequences of the labour international’s subjection to “the contradictory hierarchical structure of the capitalist system and the unequal and incurable hierarchical form of power in this system” is very interesting. In this analysis, Meszaros attributes the failure of the Fourth International to this factor. In general, and generally speaking, he states that the inherent contradictions of capital are the main cause of the fragmentation and failure of the working class. In his opinion, in order for the labour movement to take the right direction, it must purify capitalism from the hierarchical method of power!!! A recommendation and prescription that will probably cure all the pain of the global working class overnight!! But Meszaros had to first prove his brotherhood and then claim the inheritance because, apart from the First Workers’ International, which ended with the defeat of the Paris Commune, all the others were bourgeois unions under the name of workers, which, before they could do anything, were practically hated by the working class because of their class nature, and the only reason for their failure was this bourgeois nature and their capitalist-oriented wastefulness. A way and a formality that, of course, Meszaros is proud of with pomp and show. But that is not all. He is burying his intellectual wealth and poverty in a well he has dug himself, because for him there is no other way than what the other reformists have gone, that is, only the supra-class force of the “socialists” remains, who, like saviour angels, will save the working class from dispersion and defensiveness. Meszaros weaves together all sorts of things, but the real reason for the weakness, lethargy, and inferiority that grips the labour movement is very clear. The root of this lethargy and inferiority must be found in the lack of an independent labour front, the deep penetration of reformist ideas and practices, involvement in the trade union struggle, and party games. Meszaros continues to justify the Internationals from the accusation of diverting the labour movement and following the bourgeoisie. “But none of them (the Internationals) could come close to their declared goals, let alone realize those goals. It is not right to attribute these failures solely to the treachery of common-sense individuals. Even if these attributions are true on a personal level, the very important question of objective determining factors remains unanswered and ignored. If we are to remedy this situation, we must take these factors into account. For the question of why the current conditions in a long historical period have actually been conducive to such deviations and treachery has not yet been answered.” Meszaros considers the origin and cause of these failures to be “the conflictual multiplicity of capital”, “the conflictual hierarchical structure of the capital system”. He opens his mouth to say nothing! Because all the parameters he lists have been and are constant throughout the history of capitalism, and what has changed has been the approaches and strategies that have dominated the world labour movement in different periods. Although Meszaros fills the earth and time with imperialism and more imperialism, he is not prepared to consider the influence of factors such as the galactic expansion of imperialist capital accumulation, the entry of world capital into vast areas of quasi-free labour, the mythical rate of surplus value in the largest part of the world, the achievement of capital in a position that could lay the material foundations for the emergence of social democracy and right-wing reformism of the unions, and the derailment of the labour movement from the anti-wage labour struggle. The establishment of conditions that allow nationalist anti-imperialistic to ground the labour movement in the rest of the world, the failure of the October Revolution and the role of Lenin’s popular communism, and many other important factors in the birth of the present situation, he completely ignores. More than many, he delivers imperialism and imperialism to the masses, but he does not say a word about these events and the role of these factors. Meszaros is incapable of using these parameters to answer this question, precisely where he should, and this is not due to his ignorance, but, as in other cases, he does so on purpose. Pay attention to the continuation of his discussion on this subject. “This very unfortunate historical fact that in major international conflicts, the working class of various countries, instead of turning their arms against their ruling bodies in response to the call of the socialists, took the side of the exploiters of their own country, finds its material grounds for justification in the aforementioned conflicting power relations and cannot be reduced to a question of ideological clarity.” In this way, Meszaros firstly considers the socialists as the saviours of the working class and does not consider this class to have any role or mission. Their mission, in his opinion, is at best to follow the socialist imams!!! Secondly, and in this regard, he refers the workers to the subordination of the social reformists who themselves have had the greatest share in misleading the labour movement. The social reformists whom he first cleanses of their skirts from leading the working class astray and on the other hand, he shouts his agreement with all the Second Internationals since then. The Internationals whose point was that the proletariat is not anti-capitalist and, in any case, should join the parties claiming to lead it. In this way, it was only the sin and mistake of a handful of German workers who sided with the ruling capitalist class of this country in the first imperialist war, and not its leaders who, in the presence of the Social Democratic Party, the Second International and other vessels of the bourgeoisie, issued a call for workers to serve in the imperialist recruiting fields. Social democracy and all the motley socialist parties of Euro socialists, Trotskyists, etc. have always been nothing more than the propagation of the views that Meszaros formulates today, that the working class is nothing without the bourgeois intellectuals. Meszaros is not a pioneer in this either, because this too has its roots in the same Second International, which even nurtured the Bolshevik parties and the like. But Meszaros’s argument does not end there, because his whole aim is to create an anti-imperialist front led by all those who claim to fight against the trusts. But Meszaros also advises and advises these parties and does not fail to guide them. We listen to his words on this subject to understand the secret of the survival of his extra-capitalist social relations.
“Another objective and very important factor that we are forced to face, however uncomfortable it may be, is related to the nature of the political sphere and the parties within it. The reason is that the way in which the fragmented working class is centralized (the fragmentation that the political parties were supposed to cure) is largely due to the way in which the workers’ parties themselves must act in their inevitable opposition to their political enemy in the capitalist state. The enemy represents the entire political command structure of capital.” Here Meszaros reveals two aspects of his view to us. One is the one we have discussed above. That it is as if the parties claim to represent the working class that turn the workers into a class!!! And they themselves are not. According to Mezőrosz, workers, like farmers, are composed of scattered guild and occupational elements like a sack of potatoes. This is completely opposite to Marx’s thought and the historical reality of the proletariat. A class that is, by its very nature, a class and not a handful of guilds. Marx and even Engels, especially in their theoretical works such as Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, clearly highlight and show that the social existence of the working class is the origin and foundation of his socialism. Another idea of Meszaros, which is apparently accompanied by criticism of the so-called socialist parties, is that they seek to seize power. And since this capitalist state is in its essence the organizer, gatherer and centralizer of the scattered bourgeoisie, for this reason these parties also have the same disadvantages after gaining power that this organ (the state) itself has. “They are trying to counter the centrifugal structural factor of the inherited system by installing a highly centralized command apparatus in the form of an authoritarian political state on the basis of specific opposing elements.” Apparently systematic sentences address the weak points of the parties claiming to lead the proletariat and teach them a lesson, but the author has not yet been able and will not be able to explain the root and main reason for how these parties and social forces in general suffer from such deviation and are inherently so. How is it that, as he says, they seize political power but follow the same path as the capitalists and the capitalist class. Do these parties and social forces, like Meszaros, believe in their own failure, or is it the author who claims such a failure? Without going beyond the circle of continuity he has created, Meszaros describes the last directive as follows: “In contrast to the developments that took place in the so-called really existing socialism, what is necessary as a vital condition for the success of socialism is the re-establishment and growing access of the real producers to the political decision-making powers that have been alienated and other matters are in the transition to a genuine socialist society… The re-establishment of unity in the realm of material and political reproduction is the fundamental and determining feature of the socialist method of controlling social metabolism… This is what constitutes the greatest historical challenge of the future.” And the directive he gives to the workers is characterized by four factors: “The first factor is a negative factor, arising from the intensifying contradictions of the existing system, which emphasizes the emptiness of the justificatory predictions of the absolute permanence of the system.” Then Meszaros argues that his socialism is a positive solution to the challenges of capital. “The second factor represents the possibility of a turn of events towards a more hopeful situation.” Here he relies on the relation between labour and capital, which is repeated in the third factor, and since he offers a specific insight into this relation, we will criticize them in connection with the presentation of this argument. “The third factor concerns a major historical transformation in the confrontation between labour and capital, which has necessitated the search for a completely different way of defending the vital interests of free and associated producers.”
He further explains that “the question of real control of an alternative social metabolic order, no matter how unfavourable the conditions may be at present for its realization, is put on the agenda” and “Finally, the final point, as a logical consequence of the previous point, is the question of real and genuine equality, which is raised in contrast to the formal equality…in the process of capital’s decision-making and also against the method that was copied and reproduced in the failed historical experience of post-capitalism from the capital system. The reason for this is that the socialist alternative to the control method, which is a non-hostile and truly programmable social metabolic order (an order that is absolutely necessary for the future) is completely unthinkable without real and genuine establishment as its structural and regulating principle.” To critique these views, we refer to his further explanation in his interview with critic magazine. In response to the question of critic, “Where is the place of the proletariat today and what role does it play in social change? Where can the historical factor be found today?”, Meszaros says this. “I think your real question to me is related to the issue of the social factor of transformation and change in society. Because that was the summation of the term proletariat in Marx’s time, the factor that most people understood to be industrial workers. Industrial workers are all manual workers, from miners to industrial producers… Marx did not think that the concept of manual labour was an adequate framework for explaining what was needed for social change. We must remember that he was talking about how, through social polarization, more and more people are being “proletarized.” It is this process of problematization that is inseparable from the global development of the capitalist system – which determines and ultimately determines the issue.” Meszaros adds that the majority of society is proletarized. The main thing about them is “the lack of control over their own means of life” and all he wants is for them to take control of their lives! On the one hand, Meszaros sees capitalist society as a collection of capital, including monopolies, etc., meaning that he sees the trees but does not understand the forest, and similarly, the working class is a handful of industrial workers and the vast mass of people, as he says, proletarianized. He does not accept that capital is, first of all, a social relation that, as the foundation of society, determines all forms of productive, political and social relations. The working class is also not a handful of people who have lost control of their lives. Just as productive workers are necessary to produce the surplus values needed by social capital, so are unproductive workers, whether in the fields of commodity circulation, exchange, warehousing, etc., or in the fields of education to train specialized workers, in hospitals to treat workers in case of illness, accidents, etc. In the same way, the mass of office workers who turn and lubricate the huge apparatus of the state machine of capital are equally necessary for these relations. Just as Meszaros sees capital as separate and inorganic, and sees part of it as degenerate, wasteful, and wasteful (finance capital, usury, etc.), in the same way, in the final analysis, there is no such thing as the proletariat for him. Pay attention to this passage from Marx’s Capital, Volume II, on industrial capital to see the naivety and improvisation of all those who consider the theory of imperialism to be their new development. Marx writes:
“Industrial capital is the only mode of existence of capital in which not only the appropriation of surplus value or surplus product, but also its creation, is considered the function of capital. Therefore, industrial capital requires that production be capitalist in its very nature, its existence implies the existence of class antagonism between capitalists and wage-earners. To the extent that it appropriates social production, the technical and social organization of the labour process, and with it the economic-historical type of society, is transformed. Other forms of capital, which had previously emerged within the framework of past or declining conditions of social production, not only become subordinate to it and, as a result, their mechanism of functioning changes in accordance with it, but now move only on its basis, live and die on it, survive and fall on this basis. Money capital and commodity capital, in so far as they act as carriers of special branches of business alongside industrial capital, are only modes of existence of various functional forms which industrial capital now constantly adopts and discards within the sphere of circulation, modes of existence which have become independent and have developed unilaterally through the social division of labour.”
Just as Meszaros does not see the division of capital into the various spheres of capitalist production, he sees capital but forgets capital, so he sees the proletariat in the social division of labour dissolved into scattered parts. This is especially evident where he insists on showing us that there is no unity in the working class. Pay attention to this passage from Marx in the Communist Manifesto to see the depth of Meszaros’s shortsightedness in this regard. “The development of industry, which the bourgeoisie involuntarily but eagerly promotes, replaces the revolutionary unity of the workers by their assembly for the dispersion caused by their competition. The growth of large-scale industry therefore destroys the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates its products. The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. Of all the classes now facing the bourgeoisie, the proletariat alone is the truly revolutionary class. Other classes are destroyed and disappear in the face of big industry. Whereas the proletariat itself is its most specific creation. The lower layers of the middle classes, the owners of small workshops, the merchants, the artisans, the peasants, all of them fight against the bourgeoisie because they want to save their existence as part of the middle class from extinction. They are reactionary because they are trying to turn back the wheel of history.” But the relationship between labour and capital, according to Meszaros, apparently has only one major challenge, and that is the vertical system of subordination, based on which workers, except for their upper class, do not participate in decision-making and, as he puts it, in social metabolism. Therefore, he invites the workers to demand a kind of self-management instead of fighting against the basis of wage slavery. The fact is that this trend is already underway in some countries. For several years now, we have been witnessing the realization of Meszaros’s dream in Argentina and Mexico (the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas), Chile, etc., and even in crisis-ridden Greece, we have seen attempts to self-manage and control factories, hospitals, schools, etc. Even in the heart of America, where the pulse of capital beats faster than anywhere else, we see hundreds of production and service units with hundreds of apparently self-managing workers, parallel to the capital state apparatus and other capital institutions, presenting their institutions as an alternative by establishing worker control and democratizing them, and leftist intellectuals (including Richard Wolff) are making all this noise about it.
We witnessed an example of the call for workers and bourgeoisie to form control units after the defeat of the Bahman Revolution in Iran 1979. Where the entire Iranian left, even the Peykar organization, called on the working masses of Iran to join hands with that part of the bourgeoisie that had just come to power to form councils (Peykar publication No. 1, “The revolutionary initiative of His Holiness Ayatollah Taleghani to establish local councils… which has also been approved by His Holiness Ayatollah Khomeini”!!). Without going into the details of these examples, one thing is clear in all of these cases, and that is that they are all loyal to the production of commodity, the sale of labour, the creation of surplus value, and its conversion into capital. The sale of labour power, even in cooperative units and in collective ownership, is the basic principle of the relations governing these self-governments. The only positive point in these is the experience that the workers gain in these processes and struggles in the field of self-organization, self-government of production, exchange and management of educational and health organizations, and all this is done in the process of a kind of organization that is outside the narrow limits of the union. But not only is it not proletarian socialism, but it is not even a step away from the relations of production of capital. What causes the joy and feeling of victory of Meszaros is that here “the extraction of surplus labour through political order and coercion” is not done. Let us emphasize one point here. We certainly recommend the struggle of the workers to seize the factories and manage them by their own councils as a tactic, but we absolutely do not see the result of the victory of this tactic as guaranteeing the socialization of the relations of production and labour. This is only a moment of war and a strategy in the general struggle against capital, and only from this perspective is it valid.
Now let’s go back a little and look at Meszaros’s advice to workers on how to achieve socialism. The entire structure of Meszaros’s socialism and that of his ilk rests on their view of capitalist social and production relations. He summarizes the path to socialism in something called a positive solution to the challenge of capital. This is all that defines his socialism. That is, the solution to the challenges of capital. Meszaros uses this theme in all of his works that we know of. Meszaros paints a romantic picture of capital for us that, as he says, corresponds to its past function. In this picture, capital is fulfilling the social tasks it has set for itself. In Chapter 14-7-2 of Beyond Capital, he explains to us the “ultimate structural limits and limits of the capitalist system.” He says: “Here, however, it must be emphasized that the current prevailing tendencies for the development of capitalism make the contradiction and conflict between the two alternatives of social control even more apparent. For the inherently problematic issue of capitalism is the unity of need, productivity and production, which in the past was very effective in its own way but is now seriously questioned (by productivity, Meszaros means the degree of useability of goods or their use value). What is at stake here is not only the destructive destruction of the potential capacities of capital in relation to the most trivial signs of a decline in the rate of use, but also the disturbing fact that such a destruction operation no longer seems capable of fulfilling its previous functions in the process of social reproduction. “Because the productive destruction that was once so praised by famous economists has now lost its productive power and has become an ultimately crippling haemorrhage of the basic metabolic needs of the global family.” Or in Chapter 15-1 of the same book, on the ultimate limits of capital and the “decreasing rate of utilization of commodities,” he writes, “Thus, the fact that the tendency of the capitalist mode of production is hostile to the durability of commodities and that, therefore, in the course of its historical development, it must eradicate in every possible way, including the general deterioration of quality, those productive activities that serve to increase the durability of commodities is completely ignored.”
The question is not what disasters capital is now bringing upon the working class and all of humanity in order to escape the pitfalls of accumulation and especially the ever-increasing trend of decreasing rates of profit. Rather, all the sighs and groans are that capital used to have very good and useful products in the past, its capacity to produce useful goods was high, but now it has lost this ability and is producing more and more goods that are contrary to people’s needs. What Meszaros is arguing about in this regard is the increasingly outdated repetition of the same theory that he once recited to the workers of the world, that capitalism has entered its reactionary phase since the 20th century, and that before that, it had been the leader of growth, progress, and excellence!! How and from what perspective of political economy does Meszaros conclude that capital “is unable to fulfil its previous functions in the process of social reproduction” is only because he emphasizes the current limitations of this system and the “productive destruction” of capitalist production relations. Meszaros claims that this system has failed to fulfil its functions! Because its function is destructive and the cause of this destruction is its limitations. In this way, firstly, he sanctifies the past of capitalism and secondly, with the system of cause and effect that he himself created, he is riding a vicious circle that leads nowhere. Because, according to Marx, since the day of its emergence, capital has also been developing its own path of development. For this reason, as long as capitalism exists, its development will continue uninterrupted. Meszaros’s romantic plan of the past of capitalist production relations, like his plan of “different capital systems,” confuses the working class, which, according to Meszaros, must constantly audit various systems with varying degrees of internal contradictions and choose a path!!! He continues to promise us his socialist system as follows: “This change of direction from the inevitable and ruinous bottleneck of wealth production to humanly fruitful productive wealth with an optimal level of commodity utilization instead of the present decreasing and dangerous level of commodity utilization. Naturally, the change of direction will mean fundamental changes at all levels of economic, social and cultural production and within the framework of a fundamentally different organization of work without command from above… the alternative.” The fundamental change and fundamentally different organization of Meszaros’ socialism clearly manifest themselves only in the democratization of the process of production and circulation of commodities, and this new system is based not only on commodity production but, of course, on wage slavery. The only difference will be in the vertical system of command. He also promises us another revolution, which is encouraging!! And it gives us hope to continue the discussion, and that is the use of his category of “capitalist exchange value”. According to him, the proletariat in this new system continues to produce surplus value because this is also the source of all the values of the new system, but (and this is very important) the exchange value of goods is not capitalist! Because according to the philosopher of our time, it is dominated by use value. But he does not reveal the secret of this dominance to us at all, and we only see through the lines of his writings the cock’s tail of the Hegelian system of his categories, which intends to impose its heavy burden on the reality of the production of surplus value in his socialist system. Meszaros’s socialism compensates, repairs and ultimately saves the social and productive relations of capital.
The picture he gives us with his romanticism is that capital has emerged primarily for the welfare of man, the production of goods he needs, his social progress and his happiness, but later it went astray and now it must be put on the right track by promoting self-government instead of uplifting it. For Meszaros, the critique of political economy has fallen to the liberal bargaining that capitalism is another imperialist era against capital and that something must be done to return commodity production to its past values. The production of useful goods and overcoming the production of “surplus goods”, the repair and soldering of the sunroof of capital that leads to the return of the good old days of these relations, with useful goods!! These are Meszaros’ expectations of these relations. Otherwise, the challenges of capital are precisely the declining rate of profit and its continuous crises, which are the inevitable result of the galactic concentration of capital, the increase in labour productivity, the decrease in capital’s need for living labour and their inevitable consequences are an increasingly unbridled invasion of the lives of the working masses, the destruction of the living and working environment. The longing for the revival of past capitalism and the curse and curse on contemporary capitalism is the dark and gloomy wasteland that Mesaros spreads before the workers. He is a fan of good and bad “different capital systems” in order to advise the workers to demand a replacement whose goods are more adapted to human needs and whose industrial reserves are greater!!! He says: “Advanced capitalism is due to the stupid reversal of the results of its production advances in favour of the production of quickly disposable products.” In other words, the period of imperialism or advanced capitalism becomes anti-capitalist with the reversal of the results of production advances! The use of categories such as “luxury and necessity, destruction and production, evil and goodness, useful and useless goods, durable and non-durable” which, in his opinion, show the different dimensions of the “limitations of the capitalist system” is prevalent in his writings and interviews. Words that lack any class content and even the political economy of the bourgeoisie does not consider them to be determining. The author is not fundamentally opposed to capitalist production relations, but rather all his thoughts and mentions are about better capitalism and the production of more useful goods. He also wants “workers’ self-government” solely so that these self-governing workers can replace capitalism, which produces the goods people need, with capitalism, which produces shoddy goods. In Chapter 20 of Volume 2 of Capital, under the title “Exchange within the Second Sector: Necessary Means of Subsistence and Luxury Goods,” Marx, when examining simple reproduction in Sectors 1 and 2 of Capital (production of manufactured commodity and production of consumer commodity), says: “Those means of consumption which enter the consumption of the working class and, as necessary means of subsistence, form part of the consumption of the capitalist class. Even though this component differs both in quality and value from the consumer goods of the workers, the whole of this (sub-branch) may be classified for our present purpose under the heading of consumer necessities, and in this connection it is quite immaterial whether a product, such as tobacco, is from a physical point of view a consumer necessity or not, it is sufficient that it is a consumer article by custom and custom… consumer luxuries which enter into the consumption of the capitalist only, that is, which can only be exchanged by spending surplus value which does not accrue to the workers”. Marx does not make moral judgments about the production and consumption of commodity. Moreover, he considers the discussions that people like Meszaros launch today under the name of the 99 percent and the 1 percent to be absurd and meaningless. For him and for every worker who is at least familiar with his critique of the political economy of the bourgeoisie, the fundamental problem of the labour movement is not the question of how to distribute the annual social product between the profits of the capitalists and the wages of the workers!!! The discussion is about the abolition of the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the abolition of the relationship of producing surplus value, the complete destruction of the principle of the separation of the worker from labour and the product of labour and the fate of his social life. Meszaros, like all popular economists, has no problem with the existence of capital. His main problem is why capitalism produces luxury and unnecessary commodities. Instead, it should produce the commodities needed by the working masses. He is a romanticist whose words in the twenty-first century are much more regressive than those of the utopian socialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the extent of his misguidance for workers is much more terrifying. For Meszaros and his colleagues, the sacred principle is to disguise the bad appearances of this system. Whether part of the accumulation of capital is spent on the production of luxury and wasteful goods, or whether the system of decision-making and planning of production is top-down and vertical, or whether the useful content of goods is decreasing, this is the only concern of his thought and action. In the capitalist mode of production, labour power is bought and sold like any other commodity, but labour power is a special commodity. This commodity, or in fact this part of capital, is the only source of surplus value production and the only creator of capital. When the worker sells his labour power to the capitalist, he no longer owns it, but it is capital that decides how and for what purpose this particular commodity is consumed. It may be used to produce cluster bombs, luxury goods, narcotics, or pens, paper, and medicine. As long as capital exists, it is he who decides, and Meszaros unnecessarily puts himself in trouble to rationalize and humanize the production of goods by capital. As long as the relationship of buying and selling labour power continues to exist, the working class has not and cannot have any role in planning production, determining its content, or the purpose of production. This is a short definition of capitalist production relations. Now, by creating a non-bureaucratic system, Meszaros intends to involve workers in planning production. As long as the goals of capital are met and sufficient profits are deposited into the pockets of capitalists, this will not create any problems for capital, because it is even in its interest that workers work hard and produce, reduce production losses, expand the sales market under the pretext of democratic production! and, in short, give their lives to increase profits as much as possible. His calling this a society beyond capital does not change the content of the relations of production. In Chapter 15 of Beyond Capital, Meszaros explains one of the limitations of capital as follows: “The reduction in the rate of utilization of commodities is in a sense directly inherent in the progress made towards increasing the productivity of labour. This manifests itself first of all in the change in the proportion between a given quantity of available time in society which must be devoted to the production of non-durable goods such as food on the one hand and durable goods on the other, a proportion which is clearly biased in favour of the latter. Without such a change in proportion, the continuation of potentially liberating productive progress is inconceivable. The fact, then, that beyond a certain point in the history of advanced capital this process – which is inherent in the progress of production in general – is completely reversed is a highly problematic issue. The reversal of this process takes on its most astonishing form because a wasteful society can only achieve the balance between production and consumption that is necessary for the continuation of production if it can artificially and hastily consume, that is, throw away prematurely, vast quantities of goods that were previously considered durable products”. Like all reformists of the Second International, the author sees the economic obstacles to capital, the limits to its growth, the concentration of capital and the growth of monopolies. But despite his preoccupation with the technical and economic capabilities of capital, he is unable to understand the simple fact that this same advanced capitalism, contrary to his imagination, has succeeded in making enormous progress in making food and what he calls non-durable goods durable, especially during the last century (and even now), at the cost of the terrible and brutal pollution of all food, clothing, air and everything in the human environment. Now in the agricultural sphere the life span of produced goods has reached a point that was unthinkable even before the Second Imperialist War. I have dealt with this issue in detail in the chapters on the areas of capital’s advance in the book “Capitalism and the Catastrophe of Environmental Pollution”.
Now, the question of what price this increase in the life span of goods and their durability is to be paid is not and never has been a question of capital, because it is a requirement of the progress of the social productivity of labour and the guarantee of maximum profit for capital, which must reduce waste and reduce excess costs. The destruction of soil properties, the expansion of the use of pesticides in agriculture, the use of supplementary food in the preparation of food and their serious health consequences for the working masses – none of these have been and will not be a concern of capital. These are only the expectations of Meszaros from these relations, which manifest themselves in the form of liberal grumbling. He intends to present another image of these relations to the workers, an image based on the assumption that capital and its social-productive relations were originally supposed to be based on satisfying human needs, and now (in the era of imperialism!!) they have turned into their opposite!!! The foundation of Meszaros’ socialism is also based on returning the human face of capital to it!! And the socialist trick this time is to increase the use value of goods over their exchange value!!! The essence of stupidity and misleading lies, the workers know and must know that as long as capitalism exists, our share of life is not only misery, hunger, unemployment, war and all kinds of poverty, but also environmental destruction, toxic goods, polluted air, destroyed forests, animals that have disappeared forever, the planet is sweltering with heat, beaches destroyed and devoid of life, etc. As mentioned in the previous texts, he practically considers the basis of capitalist production not to be the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power or the production of surplus value, but rather self-created categories such as the dominance of exchange value over use value. Something that, in his opinion, if controlled, we will have good capitalism, and if not, we will fall into the trap of bad capitalism!
In Chapter 14 of his book Beyond Capital, he writes, “The complete subordination of human needs to the reproduction of exchange value—in the interest of the extensive reproduction of capital—has been the dominant and most striking feature of the capitalist system from the very beginning, and is in sharp contrast to the mode of production in ancient times.”
This depiction of capitalist production relations, which is repeated in various forms throughout this thinker’s works, on the one hand confuses the reader and on the other hand obscures the real distinction of capitalist production from other historical relations of commodity production. What distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from past modes of production is not the production of exchange value but the systematic and structural production of surplus value, which constitutes the main purpose of these relations. In pre-capitalist commodity production, the purpose was also to produce exchange value. Of course, commodity production becomes the dominant mode of production only in the capitalist form. But in any case, it is not simply exchanging value that characterizes capitalism. Why Meszaros avoids mentioning surplus value, especially the existence of the commodity that creates it, namely labour power, is not at all due to his negligence but, on the contrary, arises from his foresight. He knows very well that entering into this category is acknowledging the existence of the working class as the only producer of surplus value, the only commodity that produces new value, which characterizes the capitalist relations of production. It is precisely for this reason that Meszaros concludes on page 42 of the same book. “Thus, we see that if we were to set use value against the superior exchange value of the inexorably expanding capitalist type, we would be a long way from providing sufficient conditions for a successful socialist transformation… It is therefore necessary that the socialist critique of capitalist exchange value relations and the affirmation of the useful and vital role of use value be accompanied by evidence and practical ways of overcoming the contradictions of the socio-economic forms of pre-capitalist relations in so far as their treatment of use value is concerned.” Meszaros’s socialism is capitalism adhering to the preference of use value over exchange value!!! A concoction that can only be found in the grooves of his brain. Meszaros denies the objectivity of the anti-capitalist movement of the working class. He denies the independent class struggle of this class. He writes down the entire process that the proletariat must go through to prepare for socialist society. He has created a series of categories and developed political economy after its predecessors!! In his writings, including “The System of Production Dominated by Capital”, he uses these categories to explain capitalist relations. It is not irrelevant to mention this matter with the discussion we have made above. That is, he separates the system of production from capital. First of all, it is necessary to mention that it is not we who have extended the scope of criticism to economic categories, but in this case, it is our old Hegelian who, in all his works, at least pretends to be unique in this area and we are also forced to answer him. He pretends that a system can be created that is compatible with the existence of capital but is not dominated by it!! How? Just as a commodity production can be created in which use value dominates exchange value!! You may ask how this is possible. The answer is clear and simple, given by people like John Bellamy Foster in a society that the theory of “Sustainable Development” of capitalism deals with!! “The ultimate structural limits and boundaries of the capitalist system” is another category that recurs in Meszaros’s works. On page 45 of the same book, he says about the contradiction of capitalist production relations that “the resource-wasting nature of the development of this mode of production means that its productive evolution cannot continue indefinitely.” He uses this so-called critique of capitalism in various ways, and it has two fundamental challenges. One is that it ultimately leads to the same determinism and economic inevitability that all his predecessors, from Kautsky to the present, have been mired in. Because none of them begin their analysis of capitalism with wage labour, and for this reason their socialist alternative is really another form of these relations. In their opinion, since these relations are in crisis, cause environmental destruction, are unjust, and in their opinion (especially Mezőros’s) have limitations, their socialism is an alternative that is supposed to tear the strings of this limitation from the feet of capital. The alternative that the upper echelons proclaim to the inhabitants of the earth as the inevitable result of the process of historical evolution, and the working class and its independent movement are at best to be the instruments of this deterministic process. The entire foundation of Meszaros’s socialism is based on the fact that since capitalism has a growth limit, socialism has the task of neutralizing this limit. He continues in the same place. “Therefore, when the capitalist expansion of exchange value is in crisis, if we want to seriously raise the questions of development and backwardness, in order to investigate the conditions of a viable socialist alternative, we will be forced to challenge the horizons of the new production of wealth of the type of capitalism within which there is no solution to these problems.” Let us now see with what practical method Meszaros builds his “socialist system.” He continues. “What concerns us practically is how human beings can be made the object and purpose of production again, in opposition to and in step with the enormous potential capacities of the productive forces – which are already partially available, but are being used destructively… Since capital is the most powerful regulator of spontaneous production that mankind has known to date, it cannot be replaced by a socio-economic vacuum.” The only way to overcome the social rule of capital is to present a system of production that is materially reasonable and humanly fruitful, and that takes over the totality of the activities that fuel and control this system, minus its contradictions.” In this way, Mazars wants to have his cake and eat it. He wants capitalism both because of its extraordinary power in production and because it is incompetent in maintaining this extraordinary power to regulate production!!! He continues. “Production will either be under the conscious control of the associated producers and serve their ends, or it will subjugate these producers by imposing its structural requirements as inescapable presuppositions of social action. Therefore, only self-realization through the enrichment of production (and not the production of alienated and distorted wealth) as the goal of social human activity can offer a viable alternative to the blind spontaneous reproduction of capital, with its destructive consequences, which means both the production and realization of all human potential and the reproduction of the material and spiritual conditions of social exchange.” Meszaros’s socialism is capitalism under the conscious control of the associated producers. Beyond the capital he is so much fussing about is only a request and plea to the capitalists to give up the hierarchical order in the planning of production and to allow the workers to participate in this planning. If this happens, capitalism will stop producing what is not needed by man and all its production will become human. Its magical power in producing goods corresponding to human needs will flourish and the paradise of socialism will open its wings over humanity!!! But the alliance of producers recommended by Meszaros, no matter how democratic this alliance is, will not change the nature of capitalist production.
Workers still sell their labour power, and the surplus-value production relationship determines the foundation of the existence of society and human life. Meszaros is unable to understand the fact that when capital is the driving force of things, the democratic union of workers for the planning of production will serve without any reduction to the needs of capital’s valorisation. It is capital that judges and makes the “structure of command from above”, the “vertical foundation of labour organization” or Meszaros’s proposal for the intervention of a “democratic union of workers” a matter of decision. Meszaros considers a problem of capitalism to be its crisis-proneness, but his socialism does not even discount this problem, for the obvious reason that his socialism is capitalism. The root of the crisis of capitalism is not in the democratic or non-democratic planning of its production order. It is in the existence of capital itself. As Marx said, “the obstacle to the accumulation of capital is capital itself” is the predominance of the process of capital accumulation over the process of value-added, which manifests itself in the decline of the rate of profit and ultimately in the crisis. Meszaros continues to express his views on the shortcomings of advanced capitalism: “The obstacles which capitalism itself faces, both in terms of production and consumption, do not seem to affect its power of self-expansion. Moreover, the apparent failure of this system at the level of production to create the form of universality which it is irresistibly striving to achieve does not seem to impair its power of global dominance, socially even in the most backward parts of the world in terms of productive forces. To understand these perplexing features of contemporary capitalism, a crucial distinction must be made between production and self-reproduction. The reason why such a distinction is so important is that capital is not at all concerned with production in itself. Capital’s main concern is with self-reproduction. Similarly, the irresistible drive of capital to become universal is directed only towards its infernal expansion tendency in the interest of self-reproduction, and not towards purposeful and humanly fruitful production. Naturally, under certain historical conditions, the extensive self-reproduction of capital can be symmetrical with real and genuine production in a positive and useful sense. In such circumstances, the capitalist system can play its civilizing role in increasing the productive power of society and can go so far that its interests not only permit but also impose on society the emergence of general hard work… Contemporary capitalism, in complete contradiction to the predominantly capital-forming social configuration of Marx’s lifetime, has reached a stage where the fundamental rupture between genuine and real production and the self-reproduction of capital is no longer a distant place, but a ruthless reality with extremely destructive consequences for the future, because the overcoming of the obstacles in the way of capitalism today is carried out by capital itself to a very great extent and increasingly in the form of an inescapable destructive self-reproduction in irreconcilable conflict with genuine and real production.
Rest assured that Meszaros is not dizzy and delusional in listing the anti-capitalist characteristics of “advanced capitalism”. Throughout his writings, he tries to convince the reader that today’s capitalism (American imperialism and Western European countries) is no longer capitalism but has become its antithesis. To do this, Meszaros tears apart and slaughters all the organic elements of Marx’s critique of political economy. He builds not a Chinese wall but a wall of identity distinction between production and reproduction, between production and consumption, between the productive order and the political order, between capital and all its legal, civil and social overhangs. Capitalism is good and humane in the realm of its production, but in the realm of concern for its own reproduction, it takes an inhuman path!!! In Marx’s time, it established a correct relationship between human needs and the consumption of its own creation!!! But with the advent of the era of imperialism, it has lost this characteristic; if it is governed by a united democratic alliance of the people, it will gain socialist honour!!! And if he listens to the dictates of hierarchical planning, he ends up with anti-capitalist imperialism!!! Meszaros weaves all these lines and lines together. He leaves only one point unsaid. To clarify Marx’s task and shout in the ears of the world that Marx did not appreciate good capitalism with good production and good reproduction and unnecessarily started writing volumes of Grundrisse and Capital and manuscripts and all works of criticism of bourgeois political economy!!! Meszaros does a great service to capital when he paints a romantic picture of its past for the world’s working class. In fact, he warns the world’s working class to get rid of the thought of the failure of these relations and try to return its human face, real and genuine production, mainly constructive and purposeful production and humanly fruitful for capital. According to him, capital has now failed in its global expansion and has created a non-capitalist world. You will recall that not long ago, the majority of the left-wing intellectuals of Iran and other countries were trying to convince the working class to help build their own capitalism together with the national bourgeoisie!! and thus bombard the existence and relevance of the workers’ movement against capitalism. Meszaros formulates the same idea on a global scale. Meszaros’s illusionism has whitewashed his predecessors, such as Kautsky, Trotsky, Paul Sweizy, and Paul Baran. His philosophizing of his romantic capitalism knows no bounds. At the end of this chapter of his book “Beyond Capital,” Chapter 16-2, he says: “There was a time when the idea of creating abundance instead of scarcity was entirely compatible with the processes of the capitalist type and its ideals. Today, however, this goal, within the horizons of capitalist development and modernization, is found only in the realm of ideological justifications of the most hypocritical philosophizers of the ruling system. This fact alone says a lot about the content of the structural reorganization of capital in recent decades.” Everything that he attributes to others is fully true of himself. Has capital had any other ideal from the beginning than the acquisition of profit and the accumulation of capital based on the ever more unbridled exploitation of the working masses and their poverty and misery? He says yes, its ideal was the abundance of blessings and well-being of the working masses, but capital itself has betrayed this goal! In this way, he takes on a task that capitalism is “incapable of fulfilling its reproductive tasks on a large scale” and under titles such as capitalism no but capital yes and this, in his opinion, means moving towards a capital system that will act on these matters and a society that he describes as “bound by producers must subordinate all elements of society to itself and at the same time must create from within the inherited organic system, whose structure is progressively renewed, the organs that it still lacks in order to be able to transform itself into an organic, irreversible and qualitatively different whole belonging to itself!!! “A new organic system that is not only not retrogressive to the past (Meszaros means the Soviet system), but also creatively and endlessly looking towards the future.”
This is the concept of the distinction between capital and capitalism that Meszaros beats on and struggles to make Marx’s emphasis on the concept of capital also the support of this anti-Marxian demarcation!!! He commits a huge lie, calling his ideal future capitalist society socialism and attributing it to Marx. Capitalist production can take different forms in terms of the formal aspect of production planning and political order and has taken them to this day. Even today there is a patchwork of joint-stock, individual, state, cooperative, even worker-controlled companies, but all of these are based on the same basis that ensures the higher and higher valuation of capital. Meszaros continues with his grandiose sentences about the alternative of capital on page 55 of his book and following long sentences from Marx regarding productive and unproductive labour: “It is here that the inherent limitations of the guiding principles of capitalist production clearly show themselves. “The solution to the deepening crisis of the ruling system is not possible only on the basis of expanding wealth production, because within this system wealth is considered to be the same as surplus value, and not as use value and through the creative use of free time.” He understands that capitalist production is fundamentally based on obtaining as much surplus value as possible with the use of less labour and as much profit and accumulation as possible, but he is determined to push capitalism towards the production of human consumption values and preaches to capitalists not to insist on the greatest possible accumulation of surplus values in this transition!!! Marx says the following in Volume III of Capital, Part III, Chapter 15: “The capitalist production process consists essentially of the production of surplus value, which appears as a surplus product, or as a part of the commodities produced in which unpaid labour is embodied. It must not be forgotten that the production of this surplus value (and the return of a part of it to capital or accumulation, which forms an integral part of the production of surplus value) is the immediate aim and determining motive of capitalist production. Therefore, capitalist production must not be presented as what it is not, that is, it must not be pretended to be production whose immediate aim is pleasure or the production of means of pleasure and comfort for the capitalists. Such an assumption would be to completely ignore its special character, the character expressed throughout its inner foundation. The capture of this surplus-value constitutes the immediate process of production and, as has been said, has no other limits than those already mentioned. As soon as the quantity of surplus-labour to be extracted is embodied in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But with the production of surplus-value, the first stage of the capitalist process of production, the process of direct production, has been completed. Capital has sucked up so much unpaid labour. With the development of the process represented by the fall in profits, the volume of surplus-value thus produced swells to an enormous extent. Now comes the second stage of the process. The entire mass of commodities, the entire product, both the part that replaces constant and variable capital and the part that represents surplus-value, must be sold. If the sale does not take place, or is sold only partially or only at prices below the prices of production, then although the worker has been exploited, his exploitation has not been organized as intended by capital and may be accompanied by a complete disorganization or a partial organization of the absorbed surplus value, with a partial or total loss of capital”.
Marx then returns to a further description of these two processes, which are necessary and necessary for each other but separate in time and space, which we will not enter into here. Marx’s own words are enough to reveal two important and misleading points of Meszaros. One is the nature and main motive of capitalist production, which, contrary to Meszaros’s assumption, is not to be determined by him and his fellow academics, and the other, which we will discuss a little later, is the continuity of production and circulation of commodities in these relations of production. Meszaros continues to try to instil in us his illusions about these relations. It is as if these relations were to produce the ideal leisure of workers from the surplus time!! created in society by the increase in the productivity of labour (read: the endless increase in unemployment due to the ever-decreasing need of capital for labour power!!!). We will discuss his discussion on this issue. “At the same time, the potentially liberating capabilities of increasing labour productivity are also being destroyed due to the cancerous growth of the false costs of control that serve the exploitative aspect of the system. The Marxist proposal, which focuses on directing production from the production of surplus value (i.e., the production of wealth aimed at the accumulation of material wealth) to the goal of satisfying needs, productivity, and increasing the creative power, i.e., the richness of socialist production, is precisely trying to solve such problems that are insoluble within the framework of the capitalist system.” Thus, Meszaros opens his mouth again to say nothing, and he has not yet told us how his socialist system is going to change “from the production of surplus value” to the goal of “meeting needs.” What mechanism and what change in the relation of labour and capital ensures this transition? How does Meszaros’ socialist system not lead to a new labour camp? He then goes on to cite Marx to explain the difference between his “socialist system” and capitalism: “The assumption of such an understanding is naturally that the associated producers have found the ability to overcome the pressure of scarcity and have based their lives on a truly rational allocation of resources. And that this rational allocation applies not only to the available and dynamically employed resources, but also to the potential liberating possibilities of free time.” He tries to show the difference between these two systems in a concrete way and in this regard, he refers us to Marx. Marx pointed out the abundance of free time in socialism and Meszaros, like a Quebecer who has buried his head in the snow, considers himself to be a continuation of Marx’s path, regardless of the fact that his socialism is the anti-socialism of Marx and that “free time” in his model of socialism is merely a vulgar romanticist utopia!!!: “The inherent nature of capital as a general regulator of social metabolism, which has a contradictory nature, the progress in labour productivity and the potential increase in excess free time that can be usefully allocated, cannot be compatible with its framework.” He sees the shortening of working hours as implying the elimination of surplus labour!!! An idea that many years before him, the decadent Western social democracy and right-wing union reformism, by learning it, also took on the task of burying the anti-capitalist movement of the working class in the cemetery of bourgeois interests. In the Groundwork, where Marx speaks of the “free time” of workers in socialist society, he first speaks of the elimination of classes and the elimination of class exploitation. He blows his trumpet. His model of socialism is the democratic participation of workers in the process of planning the relationship of buying and selling labour power. He considers this democratic intervention to be a sufficient condition for the elimination of commodity fetishism, the alienation of the worker from work, the product of work, and the fate of his life, and the negation of human self-alienation!!! In Chapter 2-14 of his book, where he begins to develop his miraculous thought, he becomes terribly Hegelian. He sees the historical compulsion of capital to accept the democratization of the production planning process as the solution to all the problems that the wage slavery system has imposed on man. As we saw in his book “Socialism or Barbarism”, the democratization of the production process is the true foundation and theme of his socialism.
3. Meszaros and the Soviet Union
The world working class cannot maintain its real movement for the abolition of wage labour, step on the path of building workers’ socialism and cultivate the idea of victory without analysing the greatest historical experience of the proletariat in the twentieth century. This is a barrier that the entire world workers’ movement has to cross. Sooner or later, the correct results of this expensive workers’ experience must be applied in order to find a way somewhere and cross the pathless swamp of bourgeois. For this, it is necessary to first have a clear understanding of capitalist relations. Without this, nothing can be said about the analysis of the October Revolution and the consequences of its defeat.
In “Beyond Capital” on page 209, Meszaros states six factors and parameters to explain the formation of capitalist relations, which are: 1. Production for the purpose of exchange, 2. Capital treats labour power as a commodity as much as anything else, 3. The profit motive, 4. The mechanism of extracting surplus value, 5. The extracted surplus value becomes private property through the economic method, and finally 6. The globalization of capital production. The analysis of capitalist relations in Meszaros’s style and his reference to parameters such as the form of ownership, or this or that component related to the process of organizing capital, is common to all those who escape the Marxian dissection of capitalism and, essentially, the Marxian critique of political economy. Capitalism comes into being through wage labour, through the relationship of buying and selling labour power. This conversation took place in the distant past between Marx and Proudhon. Proudhon considered the origin of surplus value not to be production but to be exchange. The influence of Proudhon’s ideas and his socialism among the French workers and the deviant role of him and his supporters in the Paris Commune is not hidden from any worker who is familiar with and interested in the history of the working-class movement. Then it was the turn of other representatives of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement to introduce factors such as labour productivity, the role of machinery, and even the process of commodity circulation and the level of demand, to divert the attention of the working class from the main and determining aspect of capital, namely the commodification of labour power and its purchase and sale. Since then, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, social reformism has further and more deeply distanced the explanation of capitalism from its true nature, and has relied on factors such as the anarchy of production, the type of ownership of the means of production, and the fact that production in these relations is not oriented towards the needs of the masses. Representatives of these thoughts, such as Bernstein, Kautsky, and even Lenin, both before and after the October Revolution, in their social practice and in their articles and instructions to the Bolshevik Party, what is non-central and non-essential for them is labour power and its commodity nature. Even today, the entire left, all social reformism, in all its practical efforts and in its political and economic writings, continues to lead the workers astray in the wilderness of mutilated and non-Marxian categories of political economy. In none of his writings did Marx proceed to define the relations of production of capitalism with the components and parameters describing the various periods of previous commodity production. Meszaros, by proposing that labour power is treated as a commodity as much as anything else, is apparently showing great favour and generosity to the proletariat. But since he is a skilled academician, he lists all these characteristics with purpose. He knows very well that labour power is, by the way, a commodity for capital that is different from other commodities. The more capital can buy it below its value, the less it needs it, and at the same time, it increases its profit by increasing its relative surplus value. The more it reduces its position in the class struggle by means of demagoguery such as the Meszaros concoct, the longer these relations last. In all his works, Marx shows the characteristics of this special commodity, which is the producer of all values, the founder of capital, its blood donor and its life force, and at the same time it is the only one that is the gravedigger of capital, and if we are to say anything about socialism, we have not said anything without its existence. Meszaros and all the social bourgeois, old and new, know this well, and for this reason they consciously act to show its low value and introduce it as a component among other components. They write books and play with every charlatan to achieve this goal. But if we speak of the commodification of labour power, the alienation of the worker from his labour, the products produced by himself, and the alienation of workers from each other, these are all facts that Marx has sufficiently explained and taught us. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in the section on Alienated Labor, he writes: “The more wealth the worker produces and the greater his products become in power and quantity, the poorer he becomes. The more commodities the worker creates, the cheaper he himself becomes. The increase in the value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in the value of the world of men. The worker does not only produce commodities, but also produces himself and the worker as commodities, and this in the same proportion as he produces commodities in general. The above fact simply means that the object that labour produces, the product of labour, stands out in contrast to labour as something alien and a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour that has been embodied in an object, that is, transformed into matter. This product is the objectification of labour. The objectification of labour is its objectification. The objectification of labour in the realm of political economy appears for workers in the form of a loss of reality, objectification in the form of a loss of the object and servitude to it, appropriation (of the product) in the form of separation or alienation (from the product).” And these are such descriptions of the reality of the world of us workers today that each day is felt better and more deeply than the other. Up to this point, we have briefly discussed Meszaros’s views on capital and capitalism, and here we will expand on the same discussion. For this purpose, I will first discuss the interview with Meszaros by critic magazine, which appears at the end of the book Socialism or Barbarity. One thing to note first of all is that the questions asked in the interview were completely with his own agreement and the questioner actually asked the questions with his guidance and direction. For this reason, his answers are expressed with complete precision and purpose.
Critique magazine: To what extent is the criticism of Marx’s theory of “the transformation of value into price” valid, and to what extent is Marx’s model valid in the face of it?
Meszaros: This brings us back to the “labour theory of value.” Marx’s framework for the way in which “surplus value” is created and appropriated under the rule of capital is based on the “labour theory of value.” Because in the conditions of socio-economic reproduction that exist in many countries, we have a market framework to which the “multiple types of capital” I mentioned earlier must adapt themselves. You mentioned the rate of profit, which is also constantly adjusting itself to market conditions. But this adaptation cannot take place without the mediation of the conversion of value into price… The question of whether surplus labour is appropriated through economic or political coercion is of secondary importance. What is of primary importance is that this surplus labour, in all conceivable types of capital system, must be appropriated by a group separate from the workers, imposed on them and structurally dominating them. You see that here, contrary to what is often mistakenly believed, the fundamental category is “surplus labour” and not “surplus value.” Surplus value and the specific forms of its realization and appropriation under capitalist conditions are of absolutely fundamental importance. But the capital system encompasses more than just the various capitalisms. There have been, and indeed there are, varieties of capital systems that cannot be simply described as capitalism. You know, there have been many who have tried to describe the former Soviet system as state capitalism. In my opinion, such a description makes no sense. The Soviet system was not state capitalism but a post-capitalist system. Yet the system in question revolved around the appropriation of surplus labour by a group separate from the workers and structurally dominating them, and the extraction of surplus labour through political coercion”.
The more the opportunists cover up their shamelessness, the more they expose themselves. The Critique magazine and Meszaros are in cahoots in this misleading inversion that Soviet society and the former camp were not capitalist at all, and neither is today’s China!!, neither is under the rule of the law of value and naturally surplus value has not been produced and will not be produced in these societies!! He beats himself on every door and wall to prove this empty claim that human dignity refuses to imagine. First of all, he replaces capital with a strange concoction called “a separate group of workers”. With his mental materials and accumulations, he builds a society whose foundation is not the relationship of buying and selling labour power, nor the relationship of labour and capital, but a relationship between a group of people called workers and people called “a separate group of workers”! In this society, the product of Meszaros’s fantasies, which is called “post-capitalism”!!! The surplus labour of the workers does not take the form of surplus value at all!! It does not become capital!! It does not turn into additional capital!!, but rather becomes something imaginary, to be owned “separately from the workers”!!! This surplus labour that does not become surplus value!! It does not even wear the garb of profit!! Because from the perspective of Meszaros and the critic magazine, there was no market camp and it is in the market that surplus value is transformed into profit and the rate of surplus value into the rate of profit, the small and the big are lined up until finally Meszaros’ “post-capitalism” appears. A society that is not a society. It is not capitalism, it is not socialism, it is not based on any mode of production, the law of value does not and does not rule there. In this society, only a handful of workers “separately from the worker” steal the surplus labour of a handful of workers!!! He attributes all this to Marx with indescribable shamelessness!! But Marx’s words are a whip that falls on the dust of Meszaros’s very stupid juggling. Marx sees the true nature of the capitalist system as the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the relationship of producing surplus value, the relationship of separating the worker from his labour, the relationship of the domination of dead labour over living labour. Here, the capitalist is capital personified. There is no concoction with the identity of a “group separate from the workers.” Surplus labour in capitalism, from Marx’s perspective, is simply another name for surplus value. This society does not revolve around something called “the appropriation of surplus labour by the workers”!!! It revolves around the appropriation of surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the working class by capital. Soviet society and the entire camp were like this, and so is China today. All of this was and is based on the relationship of surplus value production. Hundreds of millions of workers produced and continue to produce surplus value. The surplus value resulting from their exploitation was transformed into capital, and the capitalist state appeared as the owner of social capital. The ownership of capital with political power, the planning apparatuses of the capitalist production order, and the octopus’ machine of coercion and repression all formed an organic whole. Meszaros closes his eyes to all this. He deceives himself in order to spread the magic and illusion of “post-capitalism” and mislead the workers of the world. Continuing the long answer above, he argues that in the former Soviet Union and present-day China there is no need to convert surplus labour into surplus value because, in his opinion, the market lever plays the main role in this work, and this lever also plays a secondary role in present-day China, and the conversion of value into price, in his opinion, “also depends on the stage of historical development of capital. Therefore, the more advanced the monopoly stage of capitalism, the conversion of surplus value into price is clearly based on a different method than the previous stages of the development of capital that Marx knew.” Meszaros always keeps us in the excitement of his new ideas, the axioms of his weaving are not borderline. The important point in this is that he does not aimlessly invent new categories of political economy or a new definition of its known categories but pursues a specific goal in this work. To understand his goals, we will answer another question that the Critique magazine asks him.
Critique Magazine: Under what conditions does the labour theory of value have no validity? Are these conditions technological, economic, or related to the human factor?
Meszaros: “The functioning of the labour theory of value can only be stopped following a fundamental socialist transformation. This is the first thing to emphasize” page 123 of the book Socialism or Barbarism. According to Mezrósz, “post-capitalist” societies such as the Soviet Union, present-day India and China, and other societies that he lists, which collectively include the entire capitalist world except Western Europe and North America (according to him, advanced capitalism), are based on the “appropriation of surplus labour, not necessarily surplus value,” which he explains to us as “surplus labour by a group separate from the workers and structurally dominating them and the extraction of surplus labour through political coercion.” This gives these societies a non-capitalist nature, or, as he puts it, capital. The difference between these societies and the socialist society he envisions is the existence of a separate group of workers that generally makes surplus labour possible for capitalist states through political pressure!! And his prescription for a way out of this problem is as follows in his explanation. “To abandon the theory of value based on labour, one must abandon the extraction and appropriation of surplus labour by an alien group, of any kind, whether political or economic… In other words, we can speak of socialism when the masses of the people have taken the fate of their work and activity into their own hands and use it to achieve their ideals.”
In this way, most of the world is not far from his socialism. Enough of all “social fuel” (this is the term he uses instead of capitalist production relations because when he considers these societies to be post-capitalist, there is no longer any talk of contradictory capitalist production relations!! Otherwise, even a primary school child will understand the contradictions of the philosopher of time). In Meszaros’s socialism, there will be no surplus value because there is no market (as, according to him, it does not exist in the Soviet Union and China today). But in this socialism, there is no mention of the abolition of wage labour, and there is no talk of dismantling the relationship of buying and selling labour! He considers workers’ control alone sufficient for the comprehensive establishment of socialism and even the end of labour alienation. In Chapter 14 of his book (The Worship of the Idol and Its True Meaning), Meszaros dissects the relationship between alienated labour and the commodification of labour power and falsifies Marx’s argument on this fundamental issue. He then turns to the Soviet Union and, as he puts it, examines the intermediate system of that society (between socialism and capitalism):
“In Western society, many things work themselves out through the laws of the market. Labor is ruthlessly subjected to the tyranny of the market. Therefore, the decisive issue in this regard is precisely the existence of the labour market. The collapse of this system coincided with the unwise and futile attempt by [Gorbachev] to introduce the labour market into it. This was, in fact, the end of what was being promoted as perestroika. For the labour market can function only under capitalist conditions, where the law of value has complete dominance over the mass reproduction of capital, and not in a partial and marginal way, but fundamentally and definitely. Within the framework of the world of capital, outside the capitalist world, various restrictions were placed on the Soviet system, according to which it had to operate. Many things that could have worked in the past within the framework of the extraction of surplus value under economic laws have become very problematic in the evolutionary conditions of the twentieth century. Today, market anomalies and the problematic functioning of the law of value are also clearly visible in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. The increasing role of the state (without which the survival of the capitalist system in these societies is impossible) places serious restrictions on the functioning of the law of value”.
For the same reason as we have already stated, Meszaros considers the state capital as a buffer between the two classes of workers and capital, and for this very reason he sees its greater interference in matters of production and distribution as a violation of the law of value, and this argument is the basic principle for his judgment in all cases where the state capital is at stake regarding the capitalist relations of production of societies or not. He, like all social reformists, is trying to draw our attention from the production process to the process of commodity circulation, in order to deprive us of the Marxist weapon of understanding capitalism and that in this system everything begins with the production of commodities. Capitalist production is the production of surplus value and capital. Now, how do the produced goods reach the hands of consumers, whether capitalists or the workers themselves, what stages do they go through, what levers do they use to go through these stages, and many other issues of this kind are not at all issues that are indicative of the presence or absence of these relations!! In addition, he ignores the billion-dollar commodity exchanges between the former Soviet Union and Europe, both Eastern and Western, India, China, and parts of Latin America, which were carried out with money as an intermediary. The fact that the price of labour in the Soviet Union was a monthly piece of meat, daily bread, cement shelter, health, and education to the extent necessary for their survival is also not Meszaros’s intention. The bourgeoisie of these societies acknowledged the mass production of these values, but he, the socialist philosopher, intends to expose the wage slavery of those societies under the guise of vague sentences. He continues:
“The attempt to restore capitalism in the former Soviet Union is one thing, and success in this is quite another. Fifteen years after Gorbachev began the process of restoring capitalism, one can only speak of partial success, and that is primarily limited to mafia capitalist circles in the major cities… Large groups of workers (including miners) do not receive their meagre wages for months, and sometimes for a year and a half, something that would not be possible in the context of real capitalism, where the extraction of surplus labour obeys economic laws. To the extent that today about half of the world’s population, from China and India to large parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, does not belong to the mainstream capitalist world but lives under a kind of hybrid capitalist system due to chronic conditions of backwardness, or massive state intervention in socio-economic metabolism, or a combination of the two.”
It must be admitted that the anthropocentric, full of the sanctity that Meszaros attributes to the filthy, savage, and barbaric system of capitalism, even many capitalists, many official defenders of this system, and many of its famous intellectual representatives are not willing to express it in his crude and impudent way. Marx once explained that capitalism, in parallel with its development, puts aside the crutches of its heyday and stands on its own feet. But Marx, when he sometimes uttered that sentence, probably did not even think that a hundred or so decades later, Meszaros would use the same phrase as a very shameless denial that capitalism is 70 percent of the entire world, rotten and capitalist. From Meszaros’s perspective, the capitalist mode of production is the iron guard of this very sacred, sublime and proud principle that the process of surplus value production should not be contaminated by political coercion and police violence at all and should definitely and definitely adhere only to the same completely civilized, silky, development-creating, humane and honourable economic determinism!!! I wish there was a borderline of insolence, but capitalism has removed this border from the feet of its intellectual representatives!! The main lines of Meszaros’ socialism are very clear. All his efforts are aimed at ensuring that the world outside of what he calls “real capitalism” enters this utopia. Real capitalists emerge and real workers produce value and surplus value!! In the not-so-distant past, in the 1960s-1970s, Meszaros’s teachers and leaders, influenced by Mao Zedong’s ideas, divided the world in this way. The advanced industrial world (mainstream capitalism is Meszaros’s nature!!), the Soviet system and the rest (the Third World) which were a collection of countries according to Mao that were semi-feudal-semi-colonial, dependent capitalism, comprador and the like!!! He and his masters (Paul Suez and Paul Baran) went beyond their Maoist predecessors, they expanded the borders of the non-capitalist world to the former Soviet Union and the entire camp with their Maoism adorned with Trotskyism. It is now a long time since these categories and theories woven to show a part of the capitalist class of the world have lost their colour and can no longer be used with these justifications to call the proletariat to the slaughterhouse of the national-people’s bourgeoisie. Meszaros, contrary to the right of the theorists of popular struggles, now invites the same geographical area, the same countries, the same proletariat, which has now increased to billions and has the potential power of class struggle, to be slaughtered in the same way, which, in his opinion, will result in their real proletarianization and the real capitalism of these societies!!
The long quotes we have quoted from Meszaros so far indicate that he was in the realm of explaining capitalism and judging the surroundings, and that his absence places special emphasis on some points. These points are: 1. The role of the market lever in converting surplus labour into surplus value. 2. The extraction of surplus labour through political coercion and the lack of the need to convert surplus labour into surplus value in most of the world. 3. The existence of the labour market as the only condition for the law of value to be implemented. Let us examine these components. Meszaros says that in the former Soviet Union, the camp or present-day China, and many parts of the world, surplus labour is not converted into surplus value. The basis of his argument is clear. In his opinion, the conversion of surplus labour into surplus value requires a market. The countries he is considering, including China, lack a market, and therefore the surplus labour of the working class, instead of being converted into surplus value, goes to a “separate handful of workers”!!! Marx explained that in a commodity economy, in general and naturally, in its highest phase of development, in capitalism, the relationship between individuals gives way to the relationship between objects. He reverses this relationship. In his view, objects are the ones that give way to their owners!!! Marx called the capitalist personified capital, while Meszaros, on the contrary, sees capital in the capitalist!!! He is responsible for inverting reality. In his view, the capitalist market is not a place for the circulation of capital, but a celebration and banquet for capitalists of all kinds. In his opinion, the market is not a place for the conversion of capital goods into money capital and vice versa. It is a meeting place for merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and business owners. If they don’t meet, there won’t be any talk of a capitalist market at all! All of this, of course, is only half of the great discoveries of the rare philosopher of the time. The other half is that a capitalist can only be considered a capitalist by virtue of his official title deed, which must be registered in the official land registry, otherwise he would not have such a position. Based on all these great discoveries, Meszaros firmly denies the existence of any market in the Soviet Union, the former camp, and any part of the world where state ownership of capital is involved. In Russian society before the collapse of the camp, capital, like everywhere else in the capitalist world, went through the process of organizing itself. Capital had a single owner but was exchanged in different forms. The market is also the place for this. But Meszaros is not after capital but is fascinated by meeting capitalists with colourful faces. That is why he does not see a market at all in the societies of that day in the camp. It seems that the psychological impact of the absence of individual capitalists in the Soviet Union at that time shocked him to such an extent that even today he does not see the Chinese capitalist market and the role of the Chinese capital chain in the world capitalist market!!! Contrary to Marx, he does not move from capital in its general sense, he does not start from capital as a relation of production of surplus value. He wanders around looking for many and numerous capitals with colourful owners in order to find capitalism. It is in this connection that he does not see the capitalist market either!!
Is it not true that capital is the same dead labour that political economy calls constant capital in the process of social production? Dead labour is always opposed to living labour, just as in the process of production, constant capital is opposed to variable capital. Dead labour has acquired this title because it is unable to produce new value itself and needs living labour, that is, the labour power of workers, for its survival, expansion, and increase. The relationship in which living labour is continuously transformed into dead labour, that is, capital, is the relationship of buying and selling labour power or the relationship of producing surplus value. This relationship is the indicator of the existence of capitalism, but he does not accept this at all. He is looking for a market in which private owners of large, dispersed capitals compete and exchange with each other, and any part of global capital whose market type is not like this, according to Meszaros, loses its license to be capitalist and acquires the special name and designation of “post-capitalism.” Meszaros, with all the magic and magic he has done with the categories and all the tricks he uses to cover up the capitalist production relations by using his Hegelian system, is not able to explain this issue of political economy, that is, the law of value and the accumulation of capital. He bases his argument on the fact that since competition was limited in the former Soviet Union, since equalization of profits and balanced profits were not possible!!! Therefore, there was no profit at all in these societies!!! Meszaros is terribly misled and tries to mislead others. Contrary to what he thinks, in the Soviet camp, firstly, competition continued to exist, albeit with a different appearance than in Western societies. Secondly, the laws of the general rate of profit were operating. Observing all this required adherence to the Marxian critique of political economy. Something that Meszaros escapes from. In the Soviet Union, different capitals owned by different economic enterprises each captured their share of the total surplus value, and this share was greater for capitals with greater productive capacity and higher organic composition than for capitals lacking these components. Capitals had different conditions of production and value, and these conditions affect their role in determining the profit rate of the total social capital. These were all there, but the core of our discussion in the criticism of Meszaros is not such points at all. The real word is the one that determines the basis of Marx’s understanding of capital. Any society that revolves on the basis of the relationship of buying and selling labour and separating the worker from work, the product of work and the basis of determining the destiny of his life is definitely a capitalist society. He is stuck in his Hegelian system, so he is forced to use factors other than production to justify himself. Capital cannot produce without the goal of acquiring surplus values (or, as Meszaros likes, surplus labour), because accumulated dead labour or capital is profit.
Such profit has never been obtained without living labour. As can be seen, even with the help of the Hegelian system and the change of the name of the categories of political economy from accumulated value to accumulated labour, Meszaros is unable to reverse the reality of capitalism in societies such as the Soviet Union, China, India, and places he calls hybrid systems. He says that due to the lack of exchange of goods, the absence of a market, and the absence of competition, there is no surplus value!! But with all his cleverness, he cannot explain where the gigantic social capital of these countries comes from?!! The societies that he claims are hybrids mean something between capitalism and socialism. They are neither socialist nor capitalist, and in his own way, they are socialist and capitalist at the same time!! Meszaros twists and turns the ball he has woven and weaves it upside down. He says that the former Soviet Union was not socialist because the laws of bourgeois political economy ruled them. Nor was capitalism because there was bureaucratic and hierarchical rule. He presupposes what he has to prove. He blows his trumpet and considers the superstructural factors to be the determinants of the relations of production. So far, we have only spoken of production, but since the driving force of capitalism is the production of surplus value, the process of valorisation is at the same time the process of reproduction of capital, and this is not possible without the circulation of capital (and consequently also the circulation of commodities). Circulation and production are the mediators of each other, and neither can exist without the other. When we talk about capital here, we mean industrial capital. But this same industrial capital inevitably takes on productive, monetary, and commodity forms. In Soviet society and throughout the world today, all forms of capital exist, both production and circulation, otherwise we cannot talk about capital accumulation without this. Meszaros does not discuss this process in any of his works, but he does not deny the process of production and circulation of goods and capital either. He cannot claim that in these societies’ capital employs workers for production without production having a purpose. For example, the financial oligarchy of the Revolutionary Guards, the financial oligarchy of the Turkish, Israeli, Egyptian, and Soviet armies, which control the production and sale of pots, kettles, military vehicles, missiles, and nuclear reactors, own all forms of capital, including productive, monetary, and commodity capital. He, however, considers all of these to be non-capitalist because, in his opinion, there is no trace of competition, the exchange market is limited, and so on. Our philosopher has no way out of the tangle of contradictions he has woven, but he is forced to know that the biggest competitors of American military goods in world markets are the Soviet Union of yesterday and Russia and China of today.
Let us return to Meszaros’s discussion of what he calls the extraction of surplus labour through political coercion in much of the modern world. He fails to grasp that when he acknowledges labour as a source of value, he also endorses the determination of value by labour time. He cannot build a society based on his own ideas, so he must start somewhere based on reality, and where he starts is with labour as a source of value. But he immediately points out that in much of the world, political coercion and the increasing role of the state have replaced economic coercion, and this has called into question the very existence of countries as capitalists!!! The example given above of the great manufacturing and financial oligarchies clearly applies to the political coercion that Meszaros has in mind. Farideh Sabeti’s two articles (Iran and the Labor Movement in the First Two Decades of the 21st Century and Prison Industries and Labor Prisoners) well explain capitalist production under the most intense conditions of exploitation, under the strictest production control, and clearly demonstrate that the production relations governing these institutions are in no way less capitalist than their Western counterparts such as General Electric, Bosch, or Siemens. What Mezőros mentions about the role of the state as a non-capitalist parameter in these societies is only due to his view of the state under the banner of the third part, that is, between capital and labour!!! But the reality of the role of the capital state in regulating production relations, distributing the burden of the crisis to the workers, arranging financial envelopes for the capitalists, making very large investments in social infrastructure such as communications, airports, etc., the army is always on standby to suppress the working masses is clear to everyone. All states do this and there is no state with the imaginary characteristics of Meszaros in the world. He has not learned a single word from Marx. For Meszaros, like all social reformists, the state is a sacred institution between capital and labour that, in his opinion, cannot even be tainted with the filth of capital. Meszaros goes so far as to rule out the possibility of state capitalism in the Soviet Union or sees the massive intervention of the state!! in what he says is the metabolism of production resulting from the hybrid capitalist system. Let us listen to his statements in Chapters 2-5 of the book Socialism or Barbarism, which, apart from liberal checks and balances to defend the interests of one section of the bourgeoisie against another, deals with the support of the US federal government for its own industries and the loans it has taken in this regard: “I mean the US government’s own loans, in astronomical figures, the effects of which are imposed on all countries by the superior imperialist power of this government, until the rest of the world can pay the price.”
Here we will not enter into non-class categories like the rest of the world and all countries and will only limit ourselves to the issue of loans that a state takes out in the financial capital market. The author still does not know the economic basis of the capital state in the process of borrowing. All capital states are deeply indebted and indebted to financial institutions that they obtain by pledging their current and future incomes, which are workers’ wages, taxes levied on these wages, and the sale of their future wage rights in the financial market, and this process has a history as old as capitalism. It is enough to refer to “Class Struggles in France” or Marx’s writings regarding the English Parliament in obtaining loans to understand the history of this phenomenon with the birth of capitalism. If the philosopher of our time here means by “the rest of the world” and “all countries” both classes of society, namely the proletariat and the capitalists, which Marx showed more than 150 years ago in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” what the basis of the state and its function in capitalist society is, unless Meszaros innovates here too and claims that the state, compared to Marx’s era, is no longer the state of capital, but rather acts as the guardian of public interests in society!! Let’s listen to Marx’s words in describing the state:
“In France, the executive power has at its disposal an army of half a million employees and, therefore, holds a large part of the interests and lives of the people in absolute dependence, exercising constant supervision over them. In such a country, the state has subjected civil society, from its most insignificant movements, from the most general aspects of its life to the private aspects of individuals, to its pressure, supervision, regulation, care and supervision. In such a country, this parasitic bureaucratic body, in the light of the most extraordinary forms of centralization, enjoys such an omnipresent and omniscient presence, and such a rapid ability for movement and leaping that the like of it cannot be found in anything else except in a state of incurable indecisiveness and incoherence of the social body. Yes, in such a country, it is clear that if the National Assembly were deprived of the right to appoint individuals to government positions and lost its supervision over the administrative apparatus, it would no longer have any real influence in society… But the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are closely related to such an extensive and complex apparatus of government.”
The state, apart from the privileges it gains for the high-ranking officials of the bureaucracy and, as mentioned above, it exists as a symbol of the relations of production of capital, its investments in various fields, apart from the routine profit-making, contribute very decisively to the establishment of the necessary foundations of social capital and thereby to the raising of the rate of profit of the various sectors of capital. Meszaros does not pay attention to these matters. He sees the burden of loans on the shoulders of “the whole of society” as he cries out a few lines later, lamenting the groans and groans of the French and Japanese bourgeoisie. “With all this, the international trade war shows a very serious tendency, the consequences of which are very far-reaching for the future.” Poverty, homelessness, unemployment, lack of medicine, war and flight from war are not enough for the international proletariat; it must also be concerned with the interests of a section of the international bourgeoisie against its stronger section, the United States. “Imposing imperialist laws on the victim countries”!! And such nonsense is a pain in the ass throughout Meszaros’s book. His popular laments are the laments of one part of the bourgeoisie at the hands of another part. The theory of “world domination of imperialism” or the theory of sanctifying capitalism under the guise of the danger of imperialist monopolies and the propaganda of the alliance of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat against the monster of imperialism is a delusion that pursues the goal of disintegrating and diverting the class struggle of the proletariat. As explained, the ultimate and even immediate goal of capitalist production is the creation of surplus value and unbridled self-expansion. Money and commodity capital are transformed into each other all over the world in the same way as before. Wage slaves have no role in the planning and purpose of production, they do not enjoy any social or human rights, and for this reason no change has been made in the capitalist mode of production. If individual capital is less visible today, it means that social capital is less personally favoured, the capitalist class has become more cohesive, and its class elements act more in the general interests of the class than in the past. But this does not mean that there is no competition between these elements, nor does it mean that the planners of the processes of production and circulation of capital have stopped competing for greater profits, for individual privileges, for a better position in domestic and world markets in difficult conditions of competition. The transformation of commodities produced by different capitalists in the sphere of circulation operates in the sphere of the whole of commodities, and this means a greater coherence of the circulation of commodities, so that their complete rotation requires the balanced movement of each other. Today, for example, the production of automobiles, their various spare parts, and their repairs require such an orderly provision of services and equipment that includes complete coordination of supply and demand. The supply of food products, their packaging, storage, transportation, and their sales centres must enjoy such order and harmony that any disruption in it causes a wave of disorders that are not in the interest of other sections of capitalists. But all this does not reduce the competition in production, sales, and profit-making in the slightest; on the contrary, the dimensions of competition become deeper and fiercer every day. Meszaros does not understand that when he speaks of the end of competition, he is at the same time acknowledging its compression and ferocity, and this is the challenge of all those who have become absolutist about the role of monopolies in the period of mass and centralized production of capital. They do not understand that the deepening and increasing competition has not and will not remove capital from its essence as the basis and substance of capitalist production relations. He, like capitalists and planners of capital, only looks and thinks about the difficulty of competition. He is so delusional here that he does not see the different forms of capital in the former Soviet Union. China today is the Kaaba of his aspirations, and, in his opinion, it is only a little lacking in democracy!! He completely denies the existence of different forms of capital in China, including monetary, productive and commodity, which have reached the sky, as well as the dynamics of their conversion. The fact that the relationship and proportion of the Chinese currency (yuan), the Indian rupee and the Soviet rubble are exchanged at different values in the world and domestic markets of countries does not diminish the role of their monetary capital and only makes Meszaros’s intellectual crudeness of capitalist production relations. The purchase and sale of labour power, which is the basic condition of capitalist production, also reigns and rules everywhere with power. Money and its proportions with other currencies are a relative relationship. Let’s say that the Chinese capitalist government overstates its currency for a certain period of time and thereby obtains certain privileges for exporting and importing goods, but does this, in a broader perspective, destroy the relationship of the Chinese currency with the real unit of value, which is socially necessary labour time? This is just like considering the units of measurement of length, area, and volume of objects, which are based on different measurements in Europe and America, to be the cause of the difference in the reality of their length, area, and volume, and saying that such dimensions of objects do not exist at all because there are different measurements for them!! In this regard he does not know even as much as a general economist about the relations of production and circulation of capital. He considers the Chinese capitalist government to be the one determining the exchange rate and believes that, indeed, governments do determine the exchange rate at their own will and desire!!! In this regard and referring to this claim of the government, he claims that there is no currency and no market for buying and selling goods in China. Commodity production in general and capitalism in particular presupposes its circulation, and therefore Meszaros claim that surplus labour does not lead to surplus value in these societies is completely baseless and completely absurd. The reality is clearer than day that what is produced is the product of the labour of the working class. These products carry huge mountains of surplus labour and quantities of necessary labour in capitalist society. This surplus labour has no other path in the process of its organization than to become surplus value and capital. Capital and again it becomes capital, the capitals that have filled the world and suffocated it under their pressure. Although he is determined not to see them and speaks of “post-capital”!!! The existential necessity of money and monetary capital is not a political origin, nor the desire of the political leaders of the bureaucratic apparatus of the capitalist state to have a symbol for their society, but the force of capitalist rule and the relationship of buying and selling labour power or the existence of capital. If the price of Chinese, Indian and Soviet money is valued more than their value, it does not determine the scale of production and its limits. For people like Meszaros, the category of the market is outside the relations of capitalist production. They imagine that monetary, commodity and productive capital is something outside the market and its function. Their idea is that goods can be produced without the purpose of exchange being hidden in it! They don’t even understand to the extent that capital and its social-productive relations are market-creating anyway. Their intellectual immaturity, like that of their peers in the environmental field, leads to the slogan of low consumption to preserve the environment!! The result is only to deceive the working masses. But at the same time, the role of money as capital has changed in different eras and is now subject to further changes. Just as natural resources have always been exploited by capital without any monetary capital being paid for them, in the current conditions of capitalist production, commodities are exchanged between different sectors of capital without any monetary capital being exchanged between them. But this does not mean, as Meszaros thinks, that commodities are not exchanged and that the surplus value hidden in them is not converted into new capital. We will not go into the discussion that money is now transferred in important parts of the world only as figures and numbers in electronic devices. Now, people like him probably consider the market to have disappeared in this sense too because they do not touch money in its physical form!! Marx nowhere in his works does he view the capitalist as an individual actor because he sees capital as a social relation and for this purpose speaks of social capital, social product and the reproduction of social capital. He even warns those who hold this view, saying on page 548 of Volume II of Capital: “When we speak socially, that is, when we consider the total social product, which includes both the reproduction of social capital and individual consumption, we must be careful not to fall into the habit of bourgeois economics, as imitated by Proudhon; in other words, we must not look at things in such a way that society based on the capitalist mode of production, when considered as a whole, loses its specific historical and economic character. On the contrary, what we have to deal with is the collective capitalist. The total capital appears as the joint-stock capital of all the individual capitalists together. This joint-stock company has in common with many joint-stock companies that everyone knows what they put into it but does not know what they get out of it.” Meszaros, like Proudhon, is looking for the individual capitalist. By not seeing him, he denies the existence of the capitalist class, the capital market and capitalism as a whole. He sees the concentration and monopoly of capital and conceals competition.
But Meszaros’s third condition for the relations of production to be capitalist is the law of value based on the existence of the labour market. For a further explanation of Meszaros’s opinion, we refer to his interview with the magazine Critique.
Critique: Under what conditions is the theory of value based on labour invalid? Are these conditions technological, economic, or related to the human factor?
Meszaros’s answer to the above question is in detail:
“The working of the labour theory of value can only be stopped by a fundamental socialist transformation. This is the first thing to emphasize. To abandon the “labour theory of value” you must abandon the extraction and appropriation of surplus labour by an alien group of workers, of whatever kind, whether political or economic… It is natural that the producers, taken together, will not be able to control their work, their activities, and their goals, unless they also control the appropriation of the surplus of social production. Therefore, if an alien group (of real producers) were to control the extraction and appropriation of surplus labour, socialism would be unthinkable… This is why it is necessary to change the orientation of social exchanges from the tyrannical system of surplus value and the appropriation of the surplus labour of the producers by an alien group of them, to a qualitatively different system. In the new system, where producers are tied together, in which they control the production and allocation of their products, there is no place for surplus value to impose itself on social men. In other words, there is no place for the necessities and requirements of capital and the accumulation of capital…and this is by no means the end of the story. The matter is further complicated by the fact that in the difficult historical period of transition from the rule of capital to a very different system, the theory of value based on labour and the law of value functioned in a very imperfect way. This was, among other things, the reason why the Soviet-type capitalist system was doomed to failure. The Soviet Union was a system that could have gone towards socialist transformation, but it did not, or it had to collapse. Because a certain time came when the Soviet system was, so to speak, sitting between two chairs. Because it had no way of regulating the economy with some kind of economic mechanism such as the market, the price system, etc., and therefore could not create the kind of workers’ discipline that we usually see in the capitalist market system”.
For Meszaros, the political control of the rate of purchase and sale of labour, the absence of a free market for the supply of labour and goods in general causes the value of the law of capitalism to be worthless!! In other words, wage slavery is not a characteristic of capitalist production. According to him, when the Revolutionary Guards in the institutions of South Pars (Asaluyeh in Iran) or the organization of prisons around the world exploits workers in prison workshops, this is not done on the basis of capitalist production relations because there is no market for labour and its manufactured goods!! In order to clarify the opinion of Meszaros and all his like-minded camp, we look at the discussion he started with Stalin. He quotes Stalin’s writings in “Economic Problems of Socialism in the Socialist Soviet Union” (1951, page 12):
“Some comrades claim that the Party’s method of maintaining commodity production after seizing power and nationalizing the means of production in our country was not correct. They believe that the Party should have abolished commodity production at the same time,” and Stalin then counters this view by saying, “They say that commodity production must, in all circumstances, lead to capitalism and will necessarily do so. This is not true. It is not always and in all circumstances like this! Commodity production should not be identified with capitalist production. These are two different things. Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. If there is private ownership of the means of production, if labour power is put on the market as a commodity that the capitalist can buy and exploit in the process of production, if, therefore, there is a system of exploitation of wage labourers by the capitalists, then only then will commodity production lead to capitalism. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands and workers deprived of the means of production are forced to sell their labour power as a commodity. Without this, capitalist production does not exist.” (Economic Problems of Socialism in the Soviet Union, published by the Labor Party of Iran, Toofan, August 2005).
The question is whether Meszaros, by trying to create a difference with Stalin, has shown anything other than a difference of opinion over the number and type of party leadership. Like Stalin, he also emphasizes the socialist foundation of the Soviet economy. His only difference with Stalin is that the bowl is hotter than the pot. He recommends that societies like the Soviet Union stop producing based on the capitalist law of value because, in his opinion, these societies have gone beyond capitalist production relations. “The Soviet system could not operate on the basis of the laws of commodity production and commodity circulation and, consequently, the law of value. The most important reason for this was the lack of a suitable market, and the least important reason was the non-subordination of labour to the laws of the market” (The Failure of De-Stalinization and the Collapse of Really Existing Socialism, Beyond Capital, Section 17).
This is while Stalin in his writing, just as Lenin saw production according to “Taylorian management” or individualism as appropriate for the Soviet state capitalist economy, explicitly defends the law of value and commodity exchange, the role of factory managers, the market, profit and accumulation. (Part Three of Stalin’s writing, page 19, entitled The Problem of the Law of Value in Socialism). Our intention here is not to deduce the production relations existing in a society from what the leaders of the political apparatus, philosophers and thinkers discuss about it or to base the historical reality of a phenomenon on what its role-makers state. The fact that workers in Stalin’s socialism take orders from managers and the oligarchic hierarchy does not change the functioning of the laws of capitalist production relations. Because these same managers and this same bureaucratic apparatus that supervises the work of workers operate under the iron laws of value and the production of surplus value and the accumulation of capital. It is not the managers and capitalists who create and formulate the laws of political economy, but the opposite. It is capital and the relations of production of capital that regulate and give purpose to even the thoughts of the capitalists, their will and their desire for production. Meszaros entire claim to the suspension of the law of value in a large part of the world is itself an emphasis and guarantee of the perpetuation of wage labour. Why is this so, because since production was carried out on the basis of exchange and reached its highest level of development under capitalist conditions, the universality of labour has become the main condition of production. The universality of labour itself means the social character of labour, and this is outside all forms of planning of production and circulation of goods, whether state, cooperative, joint stock, etc. How and under what conditions the products of labour are exchanged, how their price is determined, is determined, just like labour power itself, on the basis of the social character of labour and its unit of measurement, that is, socially necessary labour time. The law of value is nothing more than this. The products that are produced, for this very reason, the universality of social labour, have a certain unit of socially necessary labour time, which is the basis of their exchange with each other. Public labour time is sold by the working class in general to the capitalist class or to the total social capital, when a very small part of it is spent on the means of subsistence of the worker and a much larger part becomes the profit of capital. All this clamour that he has made about the law of value not ruling in a large part of the world, the exchange market for goods and labour as they operate in Western societies does not exist, the general rate of profit is not formed, and such claims only come from his sick mind, which is based on bourgeois political economy. Otherwise, the objective reality, and especially what the workers see and understand in practice, is different. The motivation is that in all these societies, increasing the productivity of social labour, lowering the costs of production, a fierce and brutal struggle over the division of the total surplus value produced by the workers, competition between managers in a production and distribution institution and between institutions in certain areas over economic privileges and production management, lowering the wages of workers to the lowest levels, if all this does not define capitalist production relations, then what is it? The fact that most of the world is considered neither capitalist nor socialist by Meszaros and all those who try to sanctify capitalist relations in general is only to drag the proletariat under the bourgeoisie’s influence and to flog any attempt by the working masses to form their own independent front against capital. Stalin speaks very clearly and bluntly about the motives of production in the former Soviet Union. All the theatre that Meszaros has started in his criticism of Stalin is because today no one, no reformist, not even any die-hard lover of the Soviet camp, openly sides with Stalin: “Sometimes they ask: does the law of value exist in our socialist regime? Does it operate? Yes, it exists and operates. Where there are commodities and commodity production, the law of value cannot be absent. We know that the operation of the law of value in ours is primarily commodity exchange, the exchange of commodities through buying and selling, which mainly includes the exchange of goods for personal consumption. Here, in this context, the law of value, of course, reserves a regulatory role to itself to a certain extent. But the effect and operation of the law of value are not limited to the field of commodity exchange. This effect and operation also include production. It is true that the law of value is not of decisive importance in our socialist production, but this law, whatever it is, affects production, and this cannot be ignored in the management of production.” (Page 19 of the same article and chapter).
The above statement could have been made in the same way (and in practice it certainly is) by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party to describe the relations of production and exchange of capitalism in China. Here, Stalin apparently separates the exchange between the various sectors and areas of production of manufactured goods from the production and exchange of workers’ consumer goods and pretends that the law of value does not exist in this regard. The fact is that in these areas, monetary, productive and commodity capital operates under a different guise, but this does not mean that the law of value does not govern it. On the contrary, not only the law of value but especially the surplus values produced are rapidly converted into capital. For example, when a machinery manufacturing company acquires a new technique, it sells this technique to capitalists in other sectors, whether producers of consumer or manufactured goods. The new technique is the source and basis for increasing the productivity of labour and naturally takes the market as its field of supply. With all this, it is clear as day that buyers are not able to pay any price, they accept the price that the competition between different capitals has created and imposed on the market. Now let’s see how Stalin considers the leadership of production to be subject to the laws of value. Forget for a moment that Stalin is a political leader and commander of forces who, with a single order, deports the working masses throughout the vast Soviet country to different places or commits mass murder. See him for a moment as the director of production enterprises who trains employees and managers in the economic laws of planning:
“Here the influence of the law of value on production becomes particularly evident. In this connection, in our institutions such questions as the question of observing the principles of trade and profitability, the question of cost price, the question of prices, etc. are important. Therefore, the affairs of our institutions cannot and should not pass without taking into account the law of value. Is this good? It is not bad. In our present conditions, this is really not bad, because it trains our economic workers in the spirit of rational management of production and disciplines them. It is not bad, because it teaches our economic workers to calculate the amount of production, to calculate it accurately, and with the same accuracy to take into account real objects in production, and not to engage in talking about approximate figures taken from the air. Because it teaches our economic workers to search for, find and use the hidden reserves that lie in the depths of production, not to trample on these reserves.”
In this way, as a production manager, he encourages and encourages the production management planners to save production costs. “It is not bad because this teaches our economic workers to systematically improve production methods, reduce the cost of production, implement business principles and try to ensure the profitability of the enterprise”. It is clear that Stalin is trying to play the role of gods in regulating, writing and implementing social laws and in some cases also claims that this part of the economic laws is good in his opinion and should be preserved and the other part should be ignored!! But these do not change the reality of the production relations prevailing in the Soviet Union at that time and today, in its capitalism. Stalin can at best be a commentator on social-production relations, which itself plays a role of a pawn in implementing its laws, which is the political economy of capitalism, neither he nor Meszaros created these relations. All production planner managers, the bureaucratic apparatus supervising the work of workers operate under the iron laws of value and the production of surplus value and the accumulation of capital. It is not the managers and capitalists who create and formulate the laws of political economy, but the reverse. It is capital and the relations of capital reproduction that regulate and give purpose to the capitalists, their will and their desire. After listing, as he puts it, the challenge of the Soviet system (the vertical hierarchy of labour and production), Meszaros writes: “Therefore, while they wanted to preserve the political method of imposing the exploitation of surplus value through central despotism established under Stalin, they tried to inject capitalist methods of accounting for production costs and profits into the post-capitalist system, a system incompatible with such a way of working. In the end, when they realized that the solution they sought was not practical, they chose, in accordance with their nature, the path back to capitalism.”
Our old Hegelian, after two hundred years, has still not understood that the relations of production, the class struggle, and the reproduction of social capital are not the creations of the thoughts of men, thinkers, and politicians. It is not categories, ideas, desires, and individuals that determine the nature of the relations of production and their functioning. Meszaros still sees the world upside down after two hundred years of Hegelian idealism. Let us dwell for a moment on Marx’s writings in Ludwig Feuerbach and the German Ideology: “But in one point the history of the development of society differs fundamentally from the history of the development of nature. In nature, if we leave aside man’s reaction to it, only unconscious and blind factors act on each other, and it is from their mutual influence that the general law comes into play. Here none of the events, whether the countless apparently accidental events that are visible on the surface or the final results that confirm the inner order of these accidents, occur as a purpose that has been consciously willed. In the history of society, on the contrary, all the factors are conscious, all are men who are moving deliberately or passionately towards certain goals. Nothing happens without a conscious intention, without a deliberate goal. But this distinction, although important for the study of history, and especially for the study of individual events and epochs, cannot change the fact that the course of history is also governed by general internal laws. Here, too, in general, despite the conscious goals of all individuals, chance seems to rule. What is willed rarely happens. In most cases, countless goals collide and intersect, or these goals are unattainable from the very beginning, or the means to achieve them are inadequate. Thus, the collision and intersection of individual wills and countless individual actions create in the realm of history a situation which is quite similar to that which prevails in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which these actions actually produce are not what were intended, or when these results appear to be in accordance with the intended end, they ultimately lead to results which are different from the intended end. Thus, it seems that accident also governs historical events in general. But where accident dominates their surface, in practice inner and hidden laws always govern, and it is only a question of discovering these laws.” Page 60
And in the discussion in question, it is the laws of political economy of capital that are decisive, not the will of individuals. What Marx writes in the section “The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History, Social Being and Social Consciousness” of the same book:
“The social structure and the state constantly emerge from the life process of definite individuals, but individuals do not appear as they appear to themselves or to other people, but as they actually are, that is, as they act, engage in material production, or rather, as they work within material limits, backgrounds and conditions independent of their will.”
But in the mind of the philosopher of our time, it is not life that determines consciousness, but the consciousness and planning of parties and leaders that determine life. Now, what motivates these leaders and their will arises from and what class foundation, Meszaros is unable to say. In his opinion, these fundamental relations of production of the Soviet camp were not based on wage labour, production for the purpose of capital accumulation, which made its harsh reality clear to everyone, but in his opinion, it was these political leaders who “themselves chose the path back to capitalism.” Instead of seeing the harsh and naked realities of the working class situation in the vast Soviet land of that day, instead of observing the production of astronomical surplus values resulting from the exploitation of extremely cheap labour, instead of seeing the effect of these surplus values on the creation of one of the most magnificent industrial giants in the world in a short period of time, instead of seeing the role of these surplus values in the establishment of a gigantic giant that competed with the largest pole of world capital in the production of cotton and textiles and clothing, food products to the most advanced space technology, steel, chemical industries and advanced weapons, yes, instead of pondering all this, he says that he denies capitalism!!! The above facts can be clearly seen in a book published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. There he explains how commodity production planners in 1970 used the advanced computers of that time for what he called “the most rational type of employment, the increase in labour productivity and the most complete form of utilization of investment.” How they boast of what they are doing to intensify the most brutal exploitation of the workers in every production enterprise. In the book mentioned, one can clearly see how the monstrous exploitation of hundreds of millions of workers in a short time brought Soviet society to the throne in the production of iron and sheet iron and similar materials and turned it into a huge exporter of these products to Eastern Europe, Western Europe and India. The same is true of India, China and all of Asia with its billion-strong workforce today. Now Meszaros, with his magic and a jumble of self-made categories, is trying to turn upside down the reality of the daily, hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute mass production of surplus value by workers who are born and die there under the most difficult working conditions, in ports, labour camps, on the water of the sea. Meszaros’s message to them is not to fight against capital and wage labour, but against the vertical hierarchy, against the extraction of labour by an alien group of workers. He wants to create a new Soviet Union in which there is no vertical hierarchy of command, but wage labour is still the basis of the relations of production. A democratized former Soviet Union is the entire ideal he seeks!!