Continuation of the second chapter of the book: Critique of Late Social Reformism
Hassan Abbasi
Harvey’s seemingly radical views on the invasion of capital, especially finance capital and foundations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or Wall Street, to the minimum subsistence of the world’s workers deceive and attract a wide mass of workers and especially students who have roots in working-class families. This is while all these views are cantered on the contradictions and conflicts of different sectors of capital and not the class struggle of labour and capital, and thus they are nothing more than deceptive bubbles. Because Harvey’s ups and downs and his exploration of different sectors of capital and their contradictions never and under any circumstances lead to the plan to abolish wage labour and eliminate capitalism. Not only Harvey, but the entire spectrum of left-wing bourgeois reformism, by separating the various forms of workers’ rights lessness, oppression and crimes that capital inflicts on humanity from the relationship between labour and capital, and thus removing the capitalist wage slavery system from the focus of the workers’ class struggle, only think about the sanctity and purity of the capitalist essence of the aforementioned relations. Harvey’s efforts to merely limit the “leverage of the free market” (even if such a utopia is achievable, which it is not) and legislate for the movement of capital and its circulation will not bring about any change in the capitalist nature and wage-labour basis of these relations, and as long as capitalism and wage-labour exist, there will be the circulation of capital and the market for commodity exchanges. The only change that occurs is the ownership and legal form of capital. The form of the legal and social embodiment of capital changes, but the relations of production remain the same and labour are exploited in the same way as before. The accumulation of capital resulting from this exploitation must also continue. However, in this situation, the change in the form of ownership of capital in the hands of the state creates a pretext for deceiving commoners like Harvey to consider capital as public property and the state as the representative of the working masses. For Harvey, there are only limited factors as material assumptions to justify the emergence and manifestation of neoliberalism. One was the power of imagination and theory-building, and the other was a strong will to implement it, both of which were manifested in politicians such as Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping. Instead of explaining and justifying the real battle between labour and capital, the class struggle of wage workers against capital that is going on every day and everywhere, the battle of ideas, the policies adopted between different sections of the ruling class, regardless of the extent to which these policies are based on the analysis of the realities of the day of capital and its needs, is the main theme and common point of all the different individuals and groups that call themselves the new front of the anti-imperialist struggle.
The main topic of this section of the article is freedom in general and market freedom, from Harvey’s point of view, but first of all I find it necessary to finish the previous topic. Harvey, seeking to discuss and prove that neoliberal policy is the basis of all the misfortunes that capitalism brings upon the working masses, turns to China and, according to himself, justifies the emergence!! of capitalism in China (For Harvey, as for his friend Esteban Meszaros, it is the emergence of capitalism in China and the Soviet Union, not the broader growth and development of capitalism in them) as follows: “In December 1978, the Chinese leadership, headed by Deng Xiaoping, announced a plan for economic reform. We can never know for sure whether Deng Xiaoping was a capitalist leader all along (as Mao claimed in the Cultural Revolution) or whether the reforms were merely a desperate move to ensure China’s economic security and protect its dignity against the rising tide of capitalist development in the rest of East and Southeast Asia. These reforms coincided exactly with the turn to neoliberal solutions in Britain and the United States. But it is very difficult to consider this as something other than a simultaneous coincidence with world-historical importance”. Just as Harvey considers the policy makers of capitalist states as the makers of history, he also considers Deng Xiaoping as the cause and founder of China’s capitalism or, as he prefers, the emergence of capitalism in China. Unlike Harvey, we know for sure that China began the process of capitalist development of its history in the last century and that there was never a stop in this process, and we also know for sure that Mao’s bourgeois movement in China had no other goal than the development of Chinese capitalism, but it gave it a huge acceleration, just as the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia caused a huge leap in capitalism in this vast country. For Harvey, the criterion for whether a country and society are capitalist or not is the type of market functioning, just like his friend Esteban Meszaros. For his part, the type and extent of competition in any society determines the growth of socialism! That society is such that, according to him, there can be capital in a society without capitalism! Harvey uses the same criterion in such a way that the degree of freedom of action of the “market lever” determines the growth of neoliberal policies in that society! He says, “The result of the reforms in China has been the creation of a special type of market-based economy that increasingly integrates liberal elements interconnected with centralized authoritarian control.” Of course, Harvey immediately forgives this mistake of Chinese politicians about using the “market lever” and distancing themselves from socialist ideals! Because, in his opinion, these leaders are still walking on the path to socialism, which he also believes in and hopes for. “Although China had not abandoned egalitarianism as a long-term goal, Deng Xiaoping said that the individual and local initiative must be unfettered to increase productivity and generate economic growth.” He goes on to write, “But it is unlikely that the Communist Party simply wholeheartedly supported the active reconstruction of capitalist class power. The party almost certainly embraced economic reforms to accumulate wealth and increase its technological capabilities so that it could better contain domestic dissent, defend itself against foreign aggression, and project power outwards, toward its immediate geographic sphere of interest in the rapidly expanding Southeast Asia. Economic development was seen not as an end in itself but as a means to these ends.” For Harvey, the actions of the capitalist class, the rampant exploitation of nearly a billion wage workers in this vast country, the class conflict and the daily struggle of Chinese workers against this system, do not reflect the relations of production of Chinese capitalism, but what the party leaders call themselves the standard. The scandal of Harvey’s analysis and fallacy is sufficiently obvious to require no explanation. But one thing is worth noting, and that is that Harvey can use this same analysis as a basis for justifying the actions of any capitalist state he chooses against its working masses, provided that the states call themselves socialist! He can call the accumulation of capital produced by the labour of Chinese workers the accumulation of wealth and economic growth, and in this way show his affinity and kinship with bourgeois economists in using neutral, incomprehensible, and non-class categories, but he cannot hide his class position. He makes his class position clear to us in the following: “Moreover, the actual development path chosen seemed to be consistent with the aim of preventing the formation of any coherent capitalist class power bloc within China itself. The heavy reliance on foreign direct investment (a strategy of economic development quite different from that adopted by Japan and South Korea) has kept the ownership power of the capitalist class abroad and, at least in the case of China, has made control somewhat easier for the state. The barriers that have been erected against indirect foreign investment (investment in stocks and bonds, etc.) effectively limit the scope of influence of international investment powers over the Chinese state. The exclusion of financial intermediaries other than state banks deprives capital of one of its main weapons against state power. While giving managers autonomy and freedom of action, the long-standing effort to maintain state ownership structures suggests a deterrent to the formation of a capitalist class.”
In Harvey’s analyses so far, we have seen how individuals, technocrats and the state play a major role in shaping or disrupting the relations of production. How Chinese technocrats prevent the formation of capitalist relations of production, and how these same technocrats in Britain and the United States are causing the “resurgence of class power”!! In addition, what is characteristic of Harvey’s examination of the expansion and growth of capitalism in China is the emphasis and highlighting of the entry of foreign capital. While he defends China’s domestic capital from this perspective, he clearly reveals his three-world view. This view is based on the idea that to the extent that the exploitation of Chinese workers’ labour by domestic capital, even in a vast country like China, is beneficial, sacred and “in the interest of economic progress”. While foreign capital leads to the formation of the capitalist class!! For the Chinese worker, like all workers in the world, the ownership and nationality of the capital that buys their labour power, transforms the surplus value of their unpaid labour into ever greater accumulations and causes ever greater growth of accumulation, makes no difference. The process of the disintegration of the Chinese peasantry and their transformation into a mass of urban and rural proletariat is the same process that began two centuries ago with the beginning of industrial capitalism and is still continuing. The process of transforming the collective lands of Chinese villages into the property of the bourgeoisie is the same process that the two-hundred-year history of industrial capitalism has witnessed. Chinese migrant workers (rural workers and poor Chinese villagers who seasonally or permanently move to Chinese cities in search of work) who are the result of the ruin of the poor peasantry, the bankruptcy of rural industries, and small-scale agriculture in villages have gone through and are going through the same process that the history of capitalism has gone through since two centuries ago in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. The difference is only in the dimensions and historical conditions of capitalism. The scale of the migration of Chinese villagers in a short period of time is so large that the world has never seen it before. So much so that now the population of migrant workers in China has reached 260 million (China on strike Oct 2016) while in 2002 it was only 14 million. The difference between this phenomenon and the past history of capitalism is not only in the scale of the devastation, poverty and despair of this huge human mass, but also in the fact that in the past, during the period of the growth of industrial capitalism, the discovery of new areas of production, the expansion of markets for the distribution of goods, the development of capitalism in a vast world that was still in its early stages or even in the pre-capitalist era, it was possible to work and receive a living wage. It is true that capitalism needed a smaller working population in the process of mass reproduction and accumulation, and the growth of the surplus population had just begun, but the situation of workers was drastically different from today. The huge masses of 260 million Chinese immigrants are coming to cities in search of work at a time when these centres are teeming with unemployed people, and the process of increasing labour productivity in China is advancing with increasing intensity, and the surplus population in cities is increasing.
Therefore, Chinese capitalism followed the same path that other capitalist countries have followed. Because the iron laws of capitalist production relations are not going to make exceptions anywhere. Capitalist crises in China are not a separate fabric from other countries, and here too the influx of state capital to save financial institutions, industries, and banks and to spread the costs of these bankruptcies on the shoulders of the country’s working class is no exception. Harvey, with his three-world-Maoist perspective, is so happy about these developments that everything under the shadow of his Chinese socialism is taken as a good omen. If these developments were the bourgeoisie of the United States, Britain, and other capitalist countries of the world, they would be considered aggression, capital export, and capital expansion of these countries at the cost of the bankruptcy of national capitalism! Other countries. Harvey’s sitting between two chairs suggests a vulgar opportunism that could not mislead even a primary school child. But despite this, there are Iranian students from the working-class base who are swept away by his charlatan theories and constantly use his sentences and phrases in their interpretations and imagine themselves fighting against capital in the fight against neoliberal policies! Harvey has such advice for his Chinese capitalist friends on the eve of the capitalist crisis of 2004 that, along with these developments, “but all this requires that the Chinese government break away from the neoliberal tradition and act like a Keynesian government. This requires that the government maintain capital and exchange rate controls… It is becoming increasingly difficult for China to exercise control over capital flows, as the yuan (Chinese currency) seeps out and into the global economy through highly permeable borders through Hong Kong and Taiwan.” Harvey, who has blackened many pages in the chapter on “China’s economic progress” in the 1980s and 1990s in his book, never tells us the class nature and production relations of these developments, based on which class added value, which wage labour force, how much unpaid labour of workers, how much ruined the homes of hundreds of millions of poor peasants, how much of the whipping and brutality of capital, but all at once he warns China’s leaders about the sudden consequences of “a few Chinese families” who have become rich under dubious conditions and the dominance of neoliberalism!! He warns China’s leaders that now is the time for these leaders to prevent the formation of a wealthy class!! Harvey does not tell us from which labour force and what production relations the wealth of these families originated. Because he sees the accumulation of capital not in the production process but in the distribution and circulation of goods, the division of income. Just as he hides capitalism under the banner of neoliberalism in order to preserve the sanctity of capital, Harvey does not see the accumulation of wealth as capitalist and the result of production relations based on the exploitation of wage labour, and he explains the entire process of value addition with neoliberalism, as he writes in the same chapter, “Neoliberalism with Chinese Characteristics.” “To the extent that neoliberalism requires a large, easily exploitable, and relatively powerless labour force, China, albeit with Chinese characteristics (read: Chinese socialism), certainly qualifies for a neoliberal economy. The accumulation of wealth at the other end of the social spectrum is a more complex story. This wealth seems to have been acquired in part through corruption, deceit, and the outright usurpation of rights and assets that once belonged to the public.” Thus, in Harvey’s view, capitalism is free from corruption, deceit, and overt usurpation of rights and property, and when accumulation occurs, it is due to neoliberal politics and rule! The history of capitalism is always full of such deceits, deceits, and corruption, and this is part of relations based on the exploitation of labour. Despite this, the main source of wealth in capitalist society is the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of profits from unpaid labour, which Harvey tries to hide with a hundred tricks and tricks under the headings of neoliberal politics. At the end of this chapter, Harvey recalls that labour also exists in China, but he considers the exploitation of labour to be a cause of wealth accumulation under certain conditions. “Another source of wealth accumulation is through the intense exploitation of labour, especially the labour of young rural migrant women. “Wage levels in China are extremely low and working conditions are already chaotic, oppressive and exploitative…Even more disturbing than these working conditions is the issue of non-payment of wages and pension obligations.” From Harvey’s perspective, capital accumulation, first, has a source other than the unpaid labour of workers, and second, if the labour force in general and rural women in particular are not severely exploited and wages are not low, there will be no accumulation of capital, and all of this occurs under the conditions of neoliberal policies. Continuing the same discussion, Harvey writes: “A large part of the capital that private and foreign companies accumulate is obtained from unpaid labour.” Harvey’s extremely absurd understanding of capitalist production relations, the process of producing goods and earning profit from the surplus value produced by labour, sometimes sees the accumulation of capital in the non-payment of workers’ wages, and in many cases, the result of collusion between managers and government agencies. Harvey mentions all these things, which are true, in order to ignore and remove from our view the specific aspect, the constant and permanent process of these relations of production in every form and shape, whether completely state, joint-stock, cooperative or completely individual, namely the buying and selling of labour power. Harvey has no understanding of the proletariat, just as he has of capitalism and its relations of production. For him, the working class is like any exploited class in the class history of the world that protests against oppression, inequality, tyranny and social injustice. He hides from our view the historical mission of the proletariat and the class war of the conscious proletariat against the system of wage slavery in liberating humanity from any class system. For this reason, he replaces every street riot, every protest based on the rebellion of a mixed group of small urban and rural owners against big capitals, with the struggle and rallying of the working class against capitalism and against wage labour. He pretends that the battle is for the realization of social justice and that all those who share a common interest against neoliberal policies, namely privatization, the free market of capital and the unfair inequality of incomes, share in this battle. In Harvey’s view, there is no such thing as a class at all. In the chapter “The Meaning of Class Power”, he expresses his opinion as follows: “What exactly does class mean here? This concept is always somewhat of a vague concept (some say an unknown concept). In any case, neo liberalization has brought with it its definition… If neo liberalization has been a means of restoring class power, then we should be able to identify the class forces behind it and those who have benefited from it. But this is difficult to do when class is not a fixed social configuration. In some cases, traditional classes have been able to appeal to a coherent power base. But in other cases, neo liberalization has been accompanied by a reconfiguration of what constitutes the upper class,” he then continues, making clear to us the crux of his populist thinking: “But as the contrasting cases of the United States and Britain show, class has different meanings in different places, and in some cases (for example, in the United States) the idea that class has no meaning at all, and there have been strong currents of differentiation in terms of class identity formation, re-formation in different parts of the world.” He then creates a confusing image with examples of the movement of people, property, etc., as if class exists as a word, but its content changes and is fluid depending on different properties and their amounts in different regions of the world!! Here, Harvey also starts from the thoughts and perceptions that people have of their positions in society and makes it the criterion of reality, as if when in America there is a belief in the meaninglessness of social classes, their real existence also disappears!! In the meantime, we are not surprised that he also considers the absence of classes to be a product of neoliberal policies. When Harvey bases his work on the existence and absence of classes in capitalist society on examining individuals and their position in the distribution of wealth, the type and amount of property, property, and ranks in the hierarchy of capital institutions, he presents an extremely mechanical and superficial understanding of capitalist production and social relations. Here too, he sees the trees but not the forest, he sees the individuals but not the relations of production that give rise to social classes and the relations between them. Harvey claims that the adoption of neoliberal policies such as privatization, the free market of capital and the unfair distribution of income have led to the dissolution of classes and that the struggle for social justice is within the framework of this system! Harvey’s socialism is based on the state apparatus suppressing the functioning of the market and paying fair wages, a society that Esteban Mazar also intends, but from another door he enters the discussion on the fact that a camp like the Soviet Union, where there was no market and therefore no profit was formed, is mixed with a little democracy, then his socialism has been achieved. So, it is not surprising that both of them are fascinated by Swedish social democracy, which has created all of their socialism on the spot!!
In continuing to examine Harvey’s views on China, it seems necessary to make a point about Harvey’s extremely vulgar views on the laws of bourgeois political economy. He blackens pages of the history of the growth and accumulation of capital in China (which, of course, in the dictionary of vulgar economics in which he was trained, is called “economic growth,” a title that is free from any burden of capitalist and therefore class relations of production) and at one point turns to foreign direct investment. “China’s foreign trade relations have made a great leap forward over time, but especially in the last four years. Although accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 has had a great impact on this, the sheer dynamism of China’s economic growth and the changing structures of international competition have made a fundamental reorganization of trade relations inevitable. China’s foothold in world markets in the 1980s was largely through the production of low-value-added goods, namely, textiles, toys, and cheap plastic items sold in large volumes on international markets… China needed only to import machinery and technology and access the market (and Hong Kong served this need well). It could gain a huge competitive advantage by using cheap labour. The hourly wage for textile production in China in the late 1990s was only 30 cents, compared with $2.75 in Mexico and South Korea, about $5 in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and more than $10 in the United States… Highly productive U.S. factories use expensive automated systems, but Chinese factories transform the process by taking capital out of the production process and giving workers a greater role. The total capital required is typically reduced by a third. The combination of low wages and less capital often increase the return on capital by more than it does on the level of U.S. factories.” The higher surplus value due to the lower organic composition of capital in China is due to the fact that the product of labour contains more living labour. This value is usually above the price of production and therefore provides a higher profit to capital with a higher composition, including parts of international capital with a higher organic composition. The main reason for the influx of international capital into the Chinese labour market is the existence of a large and extremely cheap labour force in this country. However, as the history of capitalism shows and the same production relations in other Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, etc. also show, with the growth of capital and its accumulation, the productivity of labour increases and capital’s need for less labour force, the same trend that has been going on in the United States for a long time is also going on in these countries, and Chinese capitalism is no exception to the laws of bourgeois political economy. Although the population of nearly one billion Chinese workers still offers a huge amount of their produced surplus value to global capitalism every day and makes it possible to compensate for the lack of profit rate growth to some extent, due to the inherent contradiction of capital, this trend is not growing and there will be no salvation for capital in mass reproduction. Therefore, contrary to what Harvey claims, this high labour productivity in America and Europe was, and to some extent still is, causing the surplus value produced by Chinese workers to flow into the capitals of these countries. What he depicts is the process of growth and expansion of capital in every country. Capitals in every country always evolve from small to large, from the production of small goods to production on a large scale and from the production of consumer goods in general to the production of increasingly large-scale manufactured commodity (capital). This trend, which is a common feature of the process of organization and expansion of capital in general, Harvey considers one of the wonders of history in the short period of the last few decades, which is apparently the result of the genius and efficiency of Chinese technocrats!!
In the sixth chapter of his book, “On Rights,” Harvey addresses topics such as universal rights, freedom, and social justice that arouse our curiosity. He first quotes Marx in a blunt manner, saying, “Marx rightly said that between two rights, force is decisive,” and then continues: “Consider the case of neoliberalism, rights are gathered around two dominant logics of power, namely the logic of the territorial state and the logic of capital. No matter how much we want universal rights, it is the state that must implement them. If political power is not interested in implementing them, then legal meanings remain empty.” Harvey does not explain Marx’s intention for the specific purposes he has, as Marx wrote. This short passage from Marx is taken from Chapter 8 of Volume 1 of Capital, entitled “Daily Labor.” Here, I find it necessary to bring an important part of Marx’s discussion of “right” from this chapter to clarify Marx’s purpose. Marx writes: “We started with the assumption that labour power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of any other commodity, is determined by the labour time necessary for its production. If it takes 6 hours for the average daily means of subsistence to be produced, he must work an average of 6 hours a day to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value which he receives as a result of selling it. The necessary part of this daily labour is equal to 6 hours and is therefore, other things being equal, a certain quantity. But nevertheless, the quantity of the daily labour itself is not yet known.” Marx then continues. “Thus, the daily labour is not a constant but a variable quantity. One of its components is certainly determined by the labour-time necessary to reproduce the labour-power of the labourer himself. But the total quantity of the daily labour varies with the length or duration of the surplus labour. The daily labour is therefore determinable, but not in and for itself… The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its daily value. The use-value of the labour-power belongs to him throughout the whole working day. In this way, he has acquired the right to make the labourer work for him during the whole day. But what is the daily labour? In any case it is less than a normal day. How much less? The capitalist has his own ideas about this boundary of the world, the necessary boundary of daily labour. As a capitalist, he is simply capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has only one motive, and that is the tendency to increase value and create surplus value… If the worker spends the time, he has at his disposal on himself, he has robbed the capitalist. So, the capitalist invokes the law of exchange of a commodity… Yet suddenly the worker cries out… The commodity I have sold you differs from the whole collection of ordinary commodities in that its consumption creates a value, a value that is more than its price… The use of my labour and the plundering of it are two entirely different things… When the capitalist tries to prolong the working day as much as possible, and where possible, to make two days’ work out of one day, he defends his right as a buyer. On the other hand, and the worker defends his right as a seller when he wants to reduce the working day to a certain standard. So, there is a contradiction here: right against right, and the law of exchange is equally applied to both. Between the two rights, equal force prevails. This is why, in the history of capitalist production, the normative fixation of daily labour appears as a struggle for the reduction of daily labour, a struggle that is waged between all capitalists, that is, the capitalist class, and all workers, that is, the working class”. As can be clearly seen from Marx’s speech, he does not reach abstract and specific issues from general discussions and general philosophical categories, like philosophers. In this specific regard, he does not go beyond the class struggle of workers against the wage labour system, and he does not float in the world of imagination as Harvey has flown, and does not draw general conclusions, and as he pretends, the state as the public claimant should be the implementer of right!! Issues such as right, freedom, social justice are specific concepts that have been stamped with class and have the colour of classes and class interests. Intellectual and political groups and representatives of different classes have different and, in many cases, contradictory interpretations of these categories and issues. These conflicts and differences, in addition to being real, refer to their historical and class content and therefore have an existence outside the specific interpretations of each of these. The foundations of the mentioned categories are material and real and are based on the structure of a mode of production and the socio-economic relations of a certain historical period. From the perspective of the interests of workers and their class, the right is based on preserving the workforce, fighting for the health of the environment and work, gaining as many economic and social privileges as possible in the process of struggle between labour and capital, between wages (paid labour) and surplus value (unpaid labour), and ultimately the struggle to abolish wage labour and destroy capitalism. Workers do not in any way transfer this right to the state of capital because the state, as capital personified by the whole of society, does not give this right to workers under any circumstances. The state is the guardian and custodian of capitalist production relations and is not and should not be an intermediary between labour and capital. It is Harvey and his associates who are trying to create an upside-down world. Freedom and democracy, from the perspective of the interests of the capitalist class and its state, are freedom to buy and sell commodity, labour, mobility and freedom of capital circulation, and the maintenance and enforcement of capitalist production relations contracts. The laws of reproduction of wage slavery relations, the preconditions of capital’s profitability and the conditions of its reproduction form the axis of all laws, national and international laws and government policies that Harvey makes so much of. It is very clear that in all these fields, the workers of the world are pursuing their own interests, even though they are very primitive, in confrontation with the capitalist ruling classes and their government. It is true that the working class in almost all capitalist countries and in most parts of the world has been forced to make disastrous setbacks in their day-to-day struggles and their future horizons, but it is not so absurd and helpless to listen to Harvey’s orders and leave the struggle for their rights in the hands of capitalist governments. The Harvey’s and all social reformists, based on their class vision and what they have said, written and done so far, not only insist on conciliation between these two classes, but most importantly, they see the capital state and various bodies of the capital world as implementing laws that pretend to support the interests of the working class. For a long time now, the scandal of unionization, involvement in the laws of capital, and hanging the working masses on the organizations of capitalist reform or the establishment of another type of economic, political, civil, and legal system of wage slavery has fallen from the roof to the ground. For some time now, even the reactionary oppositions of the bourgeoisie have not seen the establishment of a party and a union as a suitable tool for their oppositionist, while Harvey trumpets the involvement in the mechanisms of international capitalism. Harvey introduces the only violators of workers’ interests as the implementers of neoliberal policies, so that the charters of international capital organizations are considered to protect the interests of workers. After listing many rights, he continues, “But these are not the only rights available to us. Even within the framework of the liberal thought of the United Nations Charter, there are rights derived from this charter, such as freedom of thought and expression, educational and economic security, the right to form a union, and the like. Implementing these rights will pose a serious challenge to neoliberalism. Replacing these rights as fundamental rights with the fundamental rights of private property and the rate of interest as derived rights will require a major revolution in socio-political practices.” In this way, Harvey intends to launch a major revolution against private property and interest rates by relying on the rights of the Charter of Nations of capital, such as the right to form a union, security of education, etc.!! He always reaches the end of this garden, and Harvey welcomes freedom and this revolution in the last chapter of his book, entitled “The Prospect of Freedom”, with Franklin Roosevelt’s speech to the US Congress in 1935. “Roosevelt clearly stated his belief that excessive market-based freedoms were the main cause of the economic and social problems of the depression of the 1930s.” Then he reflects Roosevelt’s speech as follows: “Americans must abandon the concept of wealth acquisition that, through excessive profits, creates excessive private power… The main obligation of the government and its civil society is to use their powers and interests to eliminate poverty and hunger and to ensure the basic security of the people, security against the major dangers and hardships of life, and the provision of decent housing.” Roosevelt expressed all this in relation to the New Deal, which was nothing more than John Keynes’ economic policy for the sick and crisis-ridden economy of capitalism before the Second Imperialist War, only to defend rights, democracy, the state, civility, law, contract, culture and the values produced by capital and the instruments of bourgeois power. Since then, the workers of the world have felt the true meaning of these words more than ever before. These are all phrases that the bourgeois mouthpieces have been shouting for centuries, proudly proclaiming themselves the founders of freedom. Harvey belongs to this group, and with this introduction of his own, he goes on to quote his great leader Roosevelt. “What is most striking about the poor state of public discourse today in the United States, as elsewhere, is the absence of any serious discussion of the appropriateness of any one of the various concepts of freedom for the present age,” he writes. “If it is really the case that the people of the United States can be persuaded to support almost anything called freedom, then surely the meaning of the word must be examined closely.” He then begins his examination thus: “Roosevelt’s view has a considerable pedigree in humanitarian thought. Karl Marx, for example, also had the strangely extreme view that a hungry stomach does not lead to freedom.” Harvey then quotes Marx as saying: “The realm of freedom practically begins only where work imposed by necessity and material considerations ends,” and adds, in Marx’s words, “that freedom consequently lies outside the sphere of actual material production.” Harvey suggests that Marx’s understanding of freedom is as much a Martian and utopian as Roosevelt’s bourgeois understanding, outside the material and class reality of the living conditions of the working class. This naivety or demagoguery leads him to believe that freedom without infrastructural and material foundations is beyond society and the motive for class struggle. Of course, this has been the entire effort of the bourgeoisie since its emergence as a class, that rights, democracy and freedom have been valuable and unifying categories for all classes, and that the struggle to acquire and maintain them is the duty of all classes and their common point. To prove this, he refers us to Marx. This is a common feature of all bourgeois interpreters of history, who paraphrase the character of these categories and quote them from others in order to give them a transcendental dimension. Harvey, claiming to be a Marxist and a teacher of Marx’s book Capital, almost never refers to Marx’s writings themselves, and with excessive arrogance considers himself the continuation of his thoughts, and like most of Marx’s modern claimants, he selects a sentence or sentences from his long discussions and criticisms for his specific purpose, separates them from the main text, and places them in his discussion with a specific introduction and conclusion. To understand his method and to properly refer to Marx’s writings on this subject, I will quote here a part of Marx’s critique. In the third volume of Capital, Chapter 48, Marx, following the critique of capital in the context of the distribution of surplus value produced, comes to the topic of “revenues and their sources”. At the beginning of Chapter 48, he deals with topics such as capital, profit, land rent and wages, and here he very briefly re-states the discussions from the first volume of Capital in relation to the different periods in the history of human productive development (the periods before capitalism) and even briefly deals with the period after capitalism (the new society) and it is here that he deals with the “realm of necessity”. After describing the growth of capitalism, Marx says, “Hence the real wealth of society and the possibility of a permanent expansion of its reproduction process depend not on the duration of surplus labour but on the productivity of labour and on the greater or lesser degree of sophistication and development of the conditions in which production takes place. In fact, the realm of freedom begins only where work determined by necessity and ordinary considerations (work determined by necessity and opportunities imposed from outside) ceases: The realm of freedom therefore naturally lies beyond material production in the proper sense of the word… Freedom in this sphere can only be the freedom of socialized man, that is, the freedom of united producers who rationally regulate their exchanges with nature… But this is still in the realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human capacities as an end in itself, begins beyond this realm, although it can only flourish on the basis of this necessity.” As can be seen, the direction and direction of Marx’s speech goes beyond capitalist society and the exploitation of wage labour and is directed towards a purposeful communist society. It is there that the realm of freedom is not based on the necessities of production and its limitations, let alone the exploitation of labour power, and humans, with high productivity, have enough time and opportunity to deal with all aspects of their lives, from science, art, entertainment to their daily and long-term planning, without worrying about time and its limitations. The material conditions of these emerge from the very capitalist relations of production, but the free society of individual human beings itself is not possible spontaneously and automatically, as all reformists, including Harvey, intend and pretend, but rather from the long and hard struggle of the workers’ councils to overthrow capitalism and abolish wages. It is not difficult for them to recognize and know that in these relations of production and under the conditions of bourgeois democracy, the workers produce hundreds of times more than the necessities of a prosperous, modern life, with high educational facilities, an excellent health system, etc. But for the transformation of this society, this recognition is not enough; it is also necessary to be equipped in its class struggle against capitalism, against any reformist simplism, against wage labour and towards its complete transformation. This requires a movement in which not only the working masses organize themselves in workers’ councils against the existence of capitalism, class oppression and wage labour, but in the process act in a completely democratic way and learn how to plan and direct their future society. This is a world far from the freedom and democracy that Roosevelt promises. For the workers, this means that the workers’ councils must from now on be the vessel of the daily struggle, the daily struggle for wages, their increase, the shortening of the working day, against child labour, the inclusion of work in the home as an important part of socially necessary work, against all forms of racism and ethnic and sexual inequalities, against all forms of environmental destruction, against war, and in short, the vessel of the class struggle of the workers against the capitalists and their state. It is in this struggle that the workers act and learn how to govern a post-capitalist society and the abolition of wages. In their council organizations, in all spheres of production, distribution and services, in the neighbourhoods, in school and wherever they work and are present, the workers learn the lessons of democracy and freedom in practice, even against it, on the way to gaining power as a class. The consecration of freedom as something outside the dominant social relations of capitalism is characteristic of the bourgeois class and its thinkers like Harvey. He pretends that Marx also sought the same holiness, while Marx never, in any of his writings, views freedom in this way. On the contrary, as we saw in the above quote, he speaks of the free development of man when he is in control of his own destiny and can and is capable of planning for the advancement of his intellectual abilities. This is possible when he is freed from the constraints of capitalist production relations and wage labour and is able to plan for the entirety of his life and material and cultural needs. The abolition of wage labour for the working class, which is the cornerstone of man’s liberation from alienation, means the end of the relationship of separation of the worker from labour, the product of labour, the means of labour, the labour processes, and in short, the end of determining man’s destiny by the objects he creates. The abolition of the separation of man from the products of his labour means effective intervention in all aspects of life, both productive and social. When man is freed from pressing economic necessities, it is the beginning of a period in which the purpose of labour, what to produce and how much to produce, how to distribute it, are all determined in the councils of the masses with the utmost influence of the masses of free men, which takes place in the widest dimensions of democracy that man has ever seen. When men are able to decide how much of their annual product is spent on their social and individual well-being and livelihood and how much is allocated to their intellectual and cultural advancement, that is when their free and conscious intervention begins, which determines their future destiny. But the acquisition of this freedom requires the preparation and preparation of the preliminaries that must begin now. Because first of all, we cannot sit back and wait for the workers’ uprising to rise one day and herald the beginning of a new era.
Such a thing has never happened and will never happen. Secondly, we cannot today languish under the most severe anomalies resulting from capitalist production relations, in extreme poverty and helplessness, without the slightest influence on our own destiny, under the scourge of death, hunger, war, unemployment, homelessness, and in an environment full of ecologically destructive filth, and tolerate all of this, and at the same time refrain from fighting against wage labour and capital. The foundations of a society of free social human beings must begin now in this impoverished, alienated, war-torn, and capitalist filth society. There is no other way, no shortcut. We must build our power of influence now. This means that we must be tempered in the long process of class war and the battle against capitalism, constantly raise our anti-capitalist consciousness and awareness, and enjoy such a class existence that in every battle, over wages, working conditions, the work environment and work safety, the environment of our lives in all its dimensions, we are aware of our destiny through the influential workers’ council organ. Let us not forget that this is just the beginning of our work and training, and we are preparing ourselves for the final battle and the overthrow of the wage system. But without this preparation, without raising our class consciousness to higher levels and preparing ourselves in the daily experience of struggle, there can be no talk of the possibility of overthrowing the wage system. The most important issue of the day for workers is wages and their small amounts, and the attitude towards them leads to different ways and different results. We, who are fighting against the wage system and its overthrow, do not calculate it on the basis of the poverty line, nor by taking into account annual inflation, but only and only on the basis of what our entire class produces during the year. The annual social product that we have produced must be the basis for our wages. In this way, we are going to fight capital in this area. We want this product to be wages, just the opposite of the capitalists who want to accumulate the entire social product of the year. The entire annual product minus the depreciation of fixed capital (tools, buildings, etc.) belongs to us, and thus from now on our daily battle over the annual social product with capital begins. We, the workers, united and organized in our individual councils, declare class war on the capitalists and their government over what we have produced and belong to the entire working class. The more powerful, organized and united we are in this battle, the more and better our share will be. This is our method against capital and its government in all areas of life, environment and work, neighbourhood, school, hospital, etc. In this battle, there is no place for the sanctity of rights, civilization, culture and bourgeois democracy. The formation, struggle and organization of workers’ councils are based on the freedom and democracy of all workers, every decision, discussion and strategy is based on the participation of the widest possible number of workers, and the councils are literally formed and operate on the active participation of the broad mass of workers. In the field of the working environment and the health of workers, workers’ councils play a prominent and continuous role. They impose all working conditions in an environment with maximum work safety on the capitalists and their government at the expense of the annual product of the factory and institution.
I have strayed a little from the main discussion and the sequel to David Harvey’s critique of the illusions of freedom. But an important point became clear here, and that is that although capital is for the capitalist a perpetual machine for attracting and absorbing surplus labour in order to suck surplus value from the worker in the form of profit and constantly restore the conditions of labour, although a small part of the value created by the worker in the form of wages is given to him as part of the social product, that is, the necessary means of subsistence that he himself created, there is no definite boundary and limit between this part and that other part of the annual product of labour in the form of profit, but this boundary is always determined in the struggle between the power of labour and capital. In other words, it is the working class that determines this boundary in its struggle with the capitalist class and its state. In the meantime, democracy and freedom are nothing more than embellishing this struggle. It is not democracy that necessarily determines the context of this struggle, because this struggle is ongoing outside of the existence or non-existence of this context. Those like Harvey, who use the science and the trappings of freedom and democracy to justify the permanence of capitalist social-productive relations, pretend that these are the preconditions for their existence, that there is a factor independent of and dominant in the class structure of society. This sanctity arises solely to unite the two main classes of society, which are at war in all areas, to rally around a common ground called democracy, just as he tries to reconcile Roosevelt with Marx. This common ground is not only unreal and the brainchild of bourgeois intellectuals, but it is also never expressed by Marx in any way. The struggle of these two classes in determining the extent of what the worker considers his right and the capitalist calls his share of the profit determines the content of such categories as right, democracy, freedom, and law. The right, from the point of view of the interests of the working class, to the entire annual social surplus value that it produces, is the same as democracy, which is the workers’ right to decide and to explain, and this is what the workers do in their councils. Therefore, there is no common ground between the democracy that Marx means and what Roosevelt does. This is a pure and obvious lie that Harvey attributes to Marx for certain purposes. Moreover, the creation of value of labour, which is expressed in the social value of the commodity, has no logical connection with the division of this value between labour and capital. First, wages have nothing to do with the creation of value of labour, but with that part of the value that labour creates in the process of production for its own reproduction. Labor is the general agent of social production. It not only produces its own conditions of existence, but much more than that, and depending on the productivity of labour, its hours and its intensity, it creates all the value that is produced annually in society. Secondly, the value creation of labour means that whatever is added annually to social values is outside the wage aspect of labour, but rather the social aspect of labour. This is where the main battle lines because labour, the working class, is aware of its role in creating social value and therefore demands its share of this value, which is control of production. But capital always pretends that it is itself the source of surplus value, and for this reason, despite acknowledging that this surplus value is created in its relationship with the worker, it falsely and hypocritically makes the dead form of labour, i.e. capital, value-creating, in order to justify the appropriation of surplus value in the form of profit in the struggle against labour. But the capitalists do not stop there, but confine the owners and sellers of labour power to a corner and trap them in the narrow fence of the struggle over wages, so that they can navigate a vicious circle over daily needs and never think of fighting and attacking all the achievements of labour, i.e. all the products of labour. When the working class is in such a predicament, when the fear of unemployment and the lack of even the minimum wage grips it, and when capital, under the pressure of its own inherent crises, attacks these very meagre wages, it is in such a situation that Harvey and his like-minded people hang onto Roosevelt’s “humanitarian and libertarian thinking” that prescribes “to the point of a kind of return to a modified Keynesianism.” Where the working class is supposed to fight the wage base, targeting the entire structure of this system, people like Harvey, by falsifying history, consign the workers to bourgeois democracy and invite the struggle between the different sections of the bourgeoisie.
Harvey concludes his book by saying, “Even in mainstream policy circles, there are signs of dissatisfaction with the wisdom of the neoliberal agenda…all sorts of solutions are being proposed, from better regulatory structures for global governance to tighter controls on reckless capitalist speculators. In recent years, there have been not only sustained calls but also major blueprints for reforming global governance. There has also been a renewed interest in academic and corporate interest in universal ethics (human beings are members of one another) as a basis for global governance, and while this overly simplistic generalization can be problematic, it is not entirely without value.” After this moral sermon to the capitalist statesmen, leaders, and planners of the world capitalist system, Harvey addresses the efforts of world leaders to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, and disease, and advises them that since these things are not possible by adopting neoliberal policies, it is better for these leaders to turn to Keynesian policies after the second imperialist war, which, in his opinion, is the solution to the challenges of poverty, illiteracy, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to medicine for the working masses, in short, all the miserable living conditions of billions of wage slaves in the world. He continues, “Keynes despised the big shareholders who fed parasitically on dividends and looked forward to what he called the mercy killing of usurers, which he saw as a necessary condition not only for achieving a modicum of economic justice but also for avoiding the periodic crises to which capitalism was prone. The good thing about the Keynesian principles and internalized liberalism that emerged after 1945 was that steps were taken to achieve those goals. By contrast, the rise of neoliberalism has emphasized the role of usury, tax cuts for the wealthy, abnormal shareholder profits and speculative profits instead of wages or salaries, and countless but geographically limited financial crises with devastating effects on employment and life chances in one country after another. The only way to achieve those moral goals is to confront the power of money and to unravel the tangle of class privileges based on money.” After repeating Pierre Proudhon’s jokes about the dangers of money more than a hundred and fifty years ago, Harvey intends to bring financial capitalists to their senses in acquiring wealth with his moral sermons.