Reviews and Views
Volume One
Nasser Paydar
Moshe Poston’s article entitled “Criticism and Historical Development” is, according to him, dedicated to his revision and reworking of Marx’s explanation of capitalism. He believes that he understands the foundations of Marx’s analysis in the critique of political economy in a different way than others and that his conclusions in this passage have a high capacity for the critique and historical development of capitalism! Poston’s discussion in this article begins here. “The main categories of Marx’s critique do not explain only a mode of exploitation; they also include temporally dynamic categories, which attempt to understand modern capitalist society as a way of life, shaped by quasi-objective forms of domination (commodity, capital), which are the basis of the historically immanent dynamics of capitalism.” We will discuss Poston’s explanation of the “historically immanent dynamics of capitalism” a little later, but for the time being, we will explore his view of Marx’s way of analysing this system. “Poston” claims that for a passionate critical examination of capitalism one should not rely solely on the labour and production process. Such an action is in conflict with Marx’s dissection of capitalism!! And attributing this method to Marx is what “traditional Marxism” has done!! Is “Poston’s criticism of capitalism really passionate! Or is it, on the contrary, very passionate and at the same time devoid of any kind of passion? How and where did he understand that Marx does not base his anatomy of capitalism on the labour and production process!!! And why referring to the labour and production process in describing this system is incorrect and unscientific!!! All of these are issues that need to be seriously discussed.
Quite contrary to what Poston thinks, Marx bases his analysis of capitalism on the labour and production process. He sees the labour process as a common element of all modes of production, due to its “abstract nature and pure materiality,” and therefore considers starting from it as a very fundamental and urgent entry point for understanding the capitalist labour process. His point is that: “Capital is the process of production. That is, the matter of production is the content of capital moving in itself.” (1) Marx begins Capital with commodities. Because, according to him, “the wealth of communities in which capitalist production prevails manifests itself in the form of a huge mass of commodities.” In other words, in capitalist society, both labour power is a commodity and capital, as the crystallization of dead human labour, is a commodity whose real basis is the condensed and petrified labour power of workers. Capital is a social relation, just as the commodity or the cell of the capitalist life structure is also a social relation, but just as Poston thinks, the dominant relation here is not the relation of commodities in general, but the relation between commodities, in which on one side is the living labour force of the masses selling this force, and on the other side is the vast mass of dead labour of the same sellers of labour force, but in the ownership of others. The dominant relation here is the relation of buying and selling labour force, and the labour process is the process of producing surplus value. The “formed way of life” referred to by Poston, which he also refers to as “quasi-objective forms of domination (commodity, capital),” cannot be anything other than the social structure, civil institutions, laws, agreements, contracts, rights, culture, ethics, traditions, cultural and moral values, and political order corresponding to the process of self-expansion and development of the relation of production of surplus value on the one hand, and the specific influences of all these on the inevitable ongoing process of class struggle on the other.
“Poston” lumps everything together in the same bowl within the given scope of this discussion and makes no distinction between right and wrong. This reflects first of all his inattention to the content of Marx’s teachings on the critique of the foundations of bourgeois political economy and, secondly, or as a natural consequence of the same, causes his extremely incorrect and misleading explanation of capitalism. It is not without reason that Poston’s sophistry of small and big things ultimately does not lead, contrary to his claim, to any radical critique of capitalism, but quite the opposite, bridges the gap between the existence and non-existence of the class struggle of the working masses. The author of “Criticism and Historical Transformation” says that “his critical theory of capitalism does not refer solely to labour and production and a specific mode of exploitation and is not of the type of traditional Marxist perspective or a critique of forms of distribution, such as the market and private ownership of the means of production.” The explicit translation of these phrases is that it seems that the departure from the mode of production, the labour process, and the specific form of exploitation with reference to the critique of forms of distribution and exchange, the market, and ownership is precisely of the same type and foundation!! Why does Poston confuse and replace these two profoundly contradictory ways of looking at the social relations of the capitalist era or society in this way? This is a matter for which he himself must naturally answer. But one thing is very obvious. In the Anatomy of Capitalism, Marx rightly relies on the relationship of buying and selling labour power or the relationship of producing surplus value, and rightly, in explaining the correctness of his research method, he clearly states that any reference to this dissection to categories such as exchange, distribution, and ownership is strictly incorrect and misleading. Marx, especially in the first discussions of the Grundrisse, discusses the difference between these two methods and states that: Categories such as ownership and the form of distribution or exchange, although they are continuous consequences of capitalist production, all of these acquire their true meaning in the light of the relationship of buying and selling labour power, and reveal the clear distinction of this concept from previous economic concepts in other historical forms of production. The upshot of his argument is that in all forms of society one particular form of production dominates over the others, and this particular form of production serves as the general background in which all colours’ floats. This general background in capitalist society is capital itself, but capital characterized and explained by the relation of production of surplus value.
Poston says that Marx understood capitalist society as “a way of life shaped by objective forms of domination”. In explaining this objective form of domination, he emphasizes its synonymy with commodities and capital and goes to the principle of value or a kind of capitalist wealth, which is in any case the crystallization of exchange value and a kind of social intermediary. This is not a point of contention so far, and what it means is that Poston apparently considers the Marxian narrative of capital to be what it is, that is, that capital is a social relation, and furthermore, he himself apparently accepts and even emphasizes this narrative. The very important problem is that the author of “Critique and Historical Development” sees the explanation of capital as a social relation as the method of unilateral reference to the mere private property for the anatomy of the capitalist mode of production!! In this regard, he also draws a distinction between the definition of capital as a social relation and the departure from the relation of surplus value production or the commodity nature of labour power in the anatomy of capitalist society!! Emphasizing the dominance of capital in society and the present world and clarifying its social mediation role as a mass of exchange values only implies a Marxian account of the understanding of capitalism when all of this is referred to the relationship between the production of surplus value or the mode of production of capital and capitalism. Capital is a mass of value, but a value that is simply the product of the labour of the masses selling labour power, or in other words, the unpaid labour of wage workers. This dense dead labour has become capital because its producers have not been paid, and the relationship in which this production is realized and in which this labour is unpaid and transformed into capital is the relationship of buying and selling labour power, or the capitalist mode of production. A major problem with Poston’s conclusions is his disregard for Marx’s way of explaining capital as a social relation. Marx’s point is that capital is not a bunch of things or wealth accumulated in the form of things. A means of production does not necessarily become capital simply because it is a means of production. Not every objectified labour that is placed in the service of production and new labour is necessarily capital. A narrative of capital that confines itself to the scaffolding of means of production or objectified labour considers only the material of capital and abandons its form, and on this basis is absolutely incapable of truly understanding capital as the fundamental indicator of the capitalist mode of production. In this regard, Marx emphasizes that in this narrative, “After all, it is not clear under what specific criterion or purpose the product must again function as a means and instrument, and it is enough to discuss production in the general sense of the word. It would be wrong to imagine that all this is a kind of abstraction that has meaning in every social system, or to think that this is a kind of analysis that is presented in a more general way than the usual expression. Of course, if we ignore the specific form of capital in this way and pay attention only to the fact that the content of capital is nothing more than a necessary element for every type of productive activity, then it is easy to conclude that capital is one of the necessary conditions for every type of human production. This argument is based on the fact that all the special conditions of capital as the main element of a given historical stage in the development of human social production are ignored.” (2)
Capital, in its specific forms of usurpation and trade, also existed in historical periods before the emergence and dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Even wage labour, as a fragmentary phenomenon, has a long history in the history of human life. “Some economic relations, such as wage labour, the use of machinery, etc., were first used in armies before their historical development as relations of bourgeois society” (3). There is no doubt that capital, as a mass of commodities and crystallized human labour, also had the character of social mediation in its pre-capitalist forms. The decisive issue in this regard is the existence of capital as the basic indicator and the basis of identity of a historically determined mode of production, namely the capitalist mode of production. Capital cannot be examined and judged on this basis as a phenomenon belonging to all eras and stages of the historical development of human life or as a phenomenon outside the circle of determinations and essential indicators of a mode of production.
On the one hand, Poston focuses on the element of social mediation as a defining characteristic of capital, which is true in itself, but at the same time, by ignoring the fundamental distinctions of different social modes of production in the history and specific place of capital as the fundamental indicator of the mode of production based on wage labour, he completely distorts the boundaries of the knowledge and explanation of capitalism and, consequently, the foundations of class and labour critique of this system. He says: “From here, from the beginning of the twenty-first century, looking back, it is obvious that the socio-political and cultural configuration of the hegemony of capital has been diverse and different throughout history. A look at mercantilism and liberal capitalism of the nineteenth century, to the state-cantered Fordist capitalism of the twentieth century and contemporary neoliberal global capitalism, shows that capitalism has various periods and different historical forms. Each specific configuration has led to the inference and extraction of a series of penetrating critiques of exploitation and uneven and unjust growth, or, for example, of technocratic-bureaucratic modes of domination.”
Poston sees the hegemony of capital in human life in the era of mercantilism and contemporary capitalist society as the same!! And it is natural that he also views the concept of the social relation of capital in all these periods, from a different perspective!! This shows that even his perception of capitalism as bourgeois socialism dominating the camp or anywhere else, despite its correctness, is not based on the secure foundation of Marx’s materialist narrative of history. He confines himself to the real and correct characteristic of the social relation of capital and at the same time completely ignores the real essence of capital as a characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. According to what he himself says, he sees the exceptional virtue of his theory in its explanation of capitalism as a bridge between the labour process, the mode of production and a certain form of exploitation!!! He ignores the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power and the production of surplus value, which is Marx’s starting point in dissecting capitalist society, and reduces it to a subordinate and marginal component, and finally emphasizes the sociality of capital in society and the existing world in the absence of the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power. “Poston” continues this discussion by saying: “My view is that Marx’s critical theory allows us to move beyond the classical distinction between necessity and freedom. That is, to move beyond the tension between one understanding of history as something necessary and another understanding of history as something purely accidental and contingent. As I will explain later, Marx’s categories describe modern capitalist society at a deep level by reference to an intrinsic dynamic, which is understandable in terms of historically determined forms of social mediation.”
The denial of the validity of the mode of production and the specific form of exploitation in Poston’s analysis of capitalism naturally leads to many subsequent conclusions. It is clear that the discussions so far about the understanding of capitalism have been confined to the narrowness of the differences between the classical ways of looking at “freedom” or “necessity”, and the mission of Poston’s theory is to go beyond the boundaries of these disputes and make “immanent dynamicity” the platform of departure for achieving this understanding!! Years before writing Capital, Marx, based on his critique of the philosophy of Hegel and then Feuerbach, underwent a great revolution in the way humans look at society, the world and history. In formulating the thesis resulting from this revolutionary critique, he first of all stated that “the object, reality and the tangible world are not the subject of knowledge or observation, but the tangible activity of man or, in fact, praxis and active man” (4). This kind of view of existence and society made Marx to correctly start from the crystallized human labour, that is, the commodity, in the analysis of capitalism. From here, he goes to the work process or the process of human connection with nature and explores this process as an activity with the purpose of man to produce consumption values, then he reaches the process of adding value to work from the single process of work and points to the unity of the work process and the process of value formation as the basic indicator of the work process in the production of goods. The next step for Marx is the dynamic anatomy of the transformation of commodity production into the capitalist mode of production, which is characterized by the replacement of the process of value creation by the process of increasing value. He says, “The production process as the unity of the work process and the value creation process is the product production process. The said process, as the unity of the work process and the value creation process, is the process of capitalist production. (5)
It is in the continuation of this dissection of the labour process that Marx sees the commodification of labour power, the emergence of wage labour, and the relationship of surplus value production as a special “ethereal ray” on which the entire historical existence of capitalism rests. Capital here is a fundamentally contradictory relationship, and this contradiction, contrary to the assumption of some points of view, is not simply in the crisis of capitalist production, but in the basis of the existence of capital. The proletariat, as human power selling the commodity of labour power, produces all capital, but at the same time, in the process of selling its labour power and producing capital, is completely deprived of any kind of ownership rights and power to intervene in the fate of its own labour, products, and labour process. The downfall of the proletariat in this process is absolutely not limited to its exclusion from the social and economic ownership of what it has created but also encompasses all forms of its human and social freedoms and authorities. Let us recall that Marx’s materialist narrative of history sees the existence of the tangible world, and here the capitalist world, as the specific activity of man and, in its concrete form, the crystallization of the activity and work of the proletariat, the same proletariat that, precisely in the process of creating the historical existence of capitalism, is stripped of all its rights of ownership, freedom, and human freedoms. This inherent contradiction within the dynamics of capital is the generative and ever-boiling source of class struggle in this system, and it is this inevitable and uncontrollable class struggle that relentlessly targets the pillars of the existence of the capitalist system. “Poston” lumps all these facts and Marx’s way of looking at these facts together in the neglected part of his knowledge and, by attributing his contradictory mental findings to Marx, declares that the Marxian theory of understanding capitalism is based on the “internal dynamics of capital”!!! The author of “Criticism and Historical Transformation” claims that in order to correctly understand the Marxian narrative of the critique of bourgeois political economy, he is trying to escape from the common theories of understanding history as a necessity or an accident, but he deviates his path of overcoming!!! from the very beginning towards the “internal dynamics of capital” and in this approach accelerates so much that he crushes the basis of Marx’s revolutionary materialism and the entire basis of his analysis of capitalism under his feet. “Poston” correctly understood that what existed for a while in former Russia, the camp of Soviet countries, and countries such as China, Albania, and elsewhere under the name of “socialism” had nothing to do with socialism and the elimination of capitalism. He again correctly sees this type of “socialism” as another form of capitalist planning of labour and production, but he draws deeply incorrect conclusions from these completely correct assumptions. This conclusion, which seems to indicate the possibility of different state or non-state planning of the social capital of countries and the existence of grounds for the transformation of different forms of capitalism into each other, is evidence of the existence of a permanent dynamic in the historical existence of capital!!
He considers the rise and falls of the Soviet model to imply the definitive importance of the issue of historical dynamics and, at the same time, possible and probable structural changes in the capitalist system. Perhaps it is with this conclusion that Poston seeks to more accurately recognize this enduring dynamic in the existence of capital!! He lines up a multitude of phrases around his claim to have made an unprecedented discovery in Marx’s works and finally to have achieved complete certainty about Marx’s belief in this enduring dynamic at the core of capitalism!!! He recalls the role of the commodity, the abstract and specific forms of labour, the role of labour as an external relation and the content and essence of value, the mediating approach to labour, and the like in Marx’s theory. Finally, after presenting all these points, he claims that labour in capitalism is not a productive activity, but a historically determined, socially mediated activity, and it is this mediating role that determines the basis of social relations.
“As I will show, Marx’s analysis is of a system based on value, which simultaneously creates and limits the historical possibility of its own overcoming on the basis of (another system) based on material wealth. Within this interpretation, then, what is essentially characteristic of capitalism is a historically determined and abstract form of social mediation; a form of social relations that remains unique and exclusive insofar as it is mediated by labour. This historically determined form of mediation is shaped by specific forms of social practice, but seemingly independent of the people who engage in these activities. Consequently, it is a new and historical form of social domination; A form that subjects humans to the dictates and constraints of increasingly rational impersonal structures that cannot be adequately understood in terms of social domination, or more generally, in terms of the domination of specific social groups or institutional agents such as the state or the economy.”
In search of the historically enduring dynamics of capitalism, “Poston” came to abstract labour and its mediating role, and now, to find his lost object at this meeting point, as far as the content of his words can be understood, he sets before himself the path of exploration in the alienation of labour. What he refers to above is nothing other than the process of the worker’s alienation from the product of his labour. Capital is produced by the masses selling labour power, but according to the capitalist labour process, firstly, it induces the source of its birth in a completely altered and distorted form in the minds, and secondly, with this fake and false identity card, it relies on the seat of divine power in the universe. What the workers have produced and created with their labour not only completely goes beyond the scope of any kind of exercise of their will, but also rules over their entire social existence, beyond the boundaries of the intervention and will of the producers. Capital is able to achieve such a role because it has become a mass of abstract labour. A figure of socially necessary human labour time in the form of a powerful Cairo and activist Mayisha who makes policies for everything and for the entire human world, determines tasks, is a legislator, makes contracts, maintains the state, shapes and engineers the dominant thoughts of society and the world, creates culture, and plans the entire legal, civil, and political fabric and social structure of human life. Capital dresses all these interactions and functions in the same process of its own reproduction and self-expansion, as it grows and in the same process that it makes the mass of new abstract human labour the collateral for its growth, it also achieves these mechanisms, arrangements, and specific social and historical structures. In a word, capital does not continue to grow in the form of objects and a handful of machines and tools of labour, but essentially in the form of a social relationship and a mass of abstract mediated labour. Accordingly, what is real is that the proletariat, with its work and in the process of producing capital, also produces and reproduces society and the world, which in all aspects of its existence, from economy and civilization and politics to thought and culture and rights and law and state and army and apparatuses of repression and violence and order and morality and social interactions and all its other being and non-being, has declared its existence and organized itself as a force beyond it, against it and in line with the ever-deepening exploitation, poverty, disenfranchisement, and oppression of its class.
The author of “Critique and Historical Transformation,” while still very stubbornly searching for the “historically enduring dynamic of capital,” goes through all the channels of the ups and downs of the alienation of labour in capitalism, and in the process of this rotation, he goes step by step to the mediating role of abstract human labour and the type of this phenomenon, that is, socially necessary labour time. In this regard, as far as the content of his statements can be understood, he also looks at the process of the decline of the rate of profit in the capitalist system and the capacity within the boiling of capital to neutralize this process. The discussion he puts forward in this context is terribly philosophized and contains a very deliberate attempt to freeze the transparent economic realities in the darkness of abstract philosophical categories. The result of this philosophizing is very clear. He wants to finally prove the historical enduring power of capitalism!!! And in this passage, he sees the reference to the capacity within the dynamic of capital to neutralize the downward trend of the rate of profit as a suitable way to achieve this goal. But let’s see what he says in this passage?
“Increased productivity leads to an increase in the amount of use-values produced per unit of time, but only to a short-term increase in the amount of value created per unit of time. When that increase in productivity becomes a general phenomenon, the amount and quantity of value again fall back to its original level. Here we have a driving force of the wheel of exploitation. In his early exposition, Marx describes capitalism as a society with a special and progressive dynamic, which leads to a continuous increase in the level of productivity; the result of which is a general increase in the yield of use-value. This increase in productivity levels, however, is not proportional to and does not imply an increase in the level of value; which is, in fact, the socially dominant form of wealth in capitalism. This very special driving force of the wheel of exploitation is driven by the time aspect of value. The historically determined and abstract form of social domination, which is inherent in the main forms of social mediation in capitalism, is the domination of time over people. This form of domination is limited to the historically determined and abstract form of time – Newtonian abstract time – which has been historically constituted by the commodity form. This dynamic lies at the heart of the category of capital.”
The result of this part of the Poston discussion can be summarized in a few simple sentences, if we are not mistaken. As follows:
– The social form of wealth in capitalist society is a mass of socially necessary labour time.
– The increase in labour productivity in this system leads to the production of more use values per unit of time.
– The use values created in the process of increasing labour productivity are valid only in the short term.
– As productivity increases to a general phenomenon, the amount and quantity of value fall to the same level as before.
– The course of the above sequence within the capitalist mode of production is driven forward by the temporal aspect of value.
– The aforementioned dynamism, or the capacity to pass through the process of this sequence, lies at the heart of the category of capital.
Poston could certainly have formulated his theory much more simply. But he intends to force his worst and most baseless distortion of the Marxian narrative of capitalism into the reader’s brain in broad daylight, using the emptiest of academic jargon. What he is saying, in human terms, is that the increase in the productivity of social labour in the capitalist mode of production normally raises the organic composition of capital. As this happens, that part of social capital that has equipped its labour process with a new level of productivity produces more value than similar amounts of capital that lacks this level of productivity. The effect of this event, however, is not long-lasting. For gradually other parts of social or global capital also reach new levels of productivity, and this naturally places the total capital at a higher level of organic composition than in previous periods. Poston does not mention here the relationship between these internal interactions of capital with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the inevitability of capitalist crises, but the gist of his speech is that capital, in any case, has such an intrinsic historically enduring dynamic that it emerges victorious in the face of all these ups and downs, crises, contradictions and forced conflicts!!! We will discuss these distortions and, more importantly, Poston’s mass of illusions a little further down, but before that, it is necessary to follow his speech process further. He continues:
“Capital, according to Marx, then involves an endless process of self-augmentation of value. It is a directed movement without any external end, which creates vast cycles of production and consumption, creation and destruction. In introducing the category of capital, Marx describes it mainly in the same Hegelian language of phenomenology, that is, by referring to Hegelian reason, that self-moving substance which is the subject of its own process of movement. In doing so, Marx says that there is indeed a historical subject in the Hegelian sense in capitalism – but and this is a decisive point – he does not identify this subject with the proletariat (as, for example, Lukács does) or even with humanity. Instead, he grants this status to capital. This identity of the Hegelian spirit (reason) with capital is the introduction and full elaboration of Marx’s theory of alienation; which was initially raised in his early works”
“Poston” completes his theory to a large extent by proposing the above. He began his article by grossly distorting the content of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and claiming that the Marxian account of the capitalist mode of production does not consider a specific form of the labour process and production or a specific type of exploitation!!! He then separated the principle of the social relationship of capital from the relationship of the purchase and sale of labour power or the production of surplus value altogether! And he explored the validity of the former in ignoring the existence of the latter! His subsequent discussion revolved around the role of abstract labour, the mediating character of this form of labour and the category of value, and in this regard, he made the problem of the alienation of labour, in a narrative opposed to Marx’s revolutionary materialism, a guarantee of proving the “historically enduring dynamics of capital”! The author of “Criticism and Historical Evolution” did all these things and covered all these disgusting distortions and distortions with the garb of respectability under the name of referring to Marx and correctly understanding the Marxist theory of capitalism!!! The next stage of this long process of distortion by him is the same as we saw in the quote above. That capital is the self-moving substance that is the subject of its own movement and that it creates and organizes vast cycles of production and consumption, creation and destruction, and that the proletariat is unable to play any role against capital in the meantime.
According to the above narrative, which Poston also attributes to Marx, the proletariat is not a social class possessing a commodity called labour power, but only a mass of labour power!! This class does not have any active, productive, changing, history-making entity capable of transforming the present objectivity, instead of all these, it is a phenomenon that becomes part of capital in the process of its sale. In other words, it is not the labour power of the proletariat that constitutes variable capital, but the proletariat itself is variable capital and is necessarily capital, and now that this is the case, it is capital that, beyond the social, class, and historical existence of the proletariat and outside the sphere of influence of its inherent contradictions or the class struggle resulting from these inherent contradictions, moves on its “historically permanent dynamic” and in this process, it harmonizes with all its might all the heterogeneities, all the historical struggle of classes, and all the forced and destructive conflicts of the capitalist mode of production and makes its existence permanent. The two poles of capital and labour in this discussion become one and the same. The proletariat is no longer a force protesting the existence of the capitalist system and a force of class struggle engaged in the destruction of this system but is an inseparable part of the historical existence of capital. It is not the working class that produces and reproduces the entire capital with its labour, quite the opposite is the case, it is capital that reproduces the proletariat as an inseparable part of its existence!!
Under the rubble of these theories and theories of the weavers, “Poston” completely forgets that a phenomenon called the vast masses of workers who sell their labour power in history has a human existence. They need food, clothing, water, shelter, doctors, medicine, education, and other necessities of life, at least to reproduce their labour power and resell it to capital. The author of “Criticism and Historical Transformation” Pak forgets that the same process of production, accumulation, expansion, and self-expansion of the vast mass of values or abstract mediated labour is simultaneously and organically the process of giving birth to hunger, homelessness, poverty, misery, and misery of the human beings who produce those values. In the spiritual joy resulting from his philosophical and academic discoveries, he completely forgets that crisis is an inevitable phenomenon of the process of production of surplus value, and that the burden of crises being distributed on the workers’ livelihood deepens the process of hunger, poverty, and homelessness with the greatest possible acceleration. Poston forgets that the relationship of buying and selling labour power is a relationship of complete and complete severance of the working class from any kind of freedom and human rights and the possibility of influencing the fate of its own work. Finally, the author of “Critique and Historical Transformation” completely forgets that the proletariat, for all these reasons and due to the institutional, anti-human nature of the capital relationship, is forced to have a widespread, effective, and decisive presence in the ever-ongoing process of class struggle against capitalism.
He erases all these obvious, tangible and at all times obvious facts of the history of the capitalist mode of production from his historical memory at once and concludes in the ivory tower of his transcendental and metaphysical philosophies that capital is an endless process of self-expansion without any historical end, and the active entity that changes the historical existence of capitalist society is not the proletariat, but capital itself!!! It is the latter phenomenon that overcomes all the bottlenecks and contradictions of the process of its own self-expansion, and the huge mass of workers selling labour power is not the active force that changes the objectivity of existence but is a continuous organic part of the existence of capital!!! The depth of the disaster is here that the owner of these theories tries with indescribable insistence to attribute all these fabrications and illusions to Marx. He claims to have surpassed everyone else in understanding the core of Marx’s materialist narrative of capitalism, and the above distortions are the result of his unparalleled depth of analysis and discussion of Marx’s capitalist mode of production!! “Moshe Poston” does not only underline the social, historical, and revolutionary existence of the proletariat. He also questions, albeit shamefully, the foundation of the production of surplus value by the wage worker. He says in this regard:
“This category (surplus value) is usually understood as something to explain exploitation, indicating that, despite its appearance, the surplus product in capitalism is not obtained from the combination of a series of factors of production (such as labour, land, and machinery), but is produced by labour alone. Surplus value is generally seen as a category of class exploitation. While I do not disagree with this analysis of surplus value, I do find it to be somewhat correct. The problem is that the usual traditional understanding of surplus value focuses solely on the creation of surplus value but does not properly consider the meaning of the form of wealth referred to in Marx’s analysis of the form of value and the motive force of the machine (the workhorse or the wheel) associated with it.”
The author of “Criticism and Historical Transformation” has a problem with focusing the discussion on the process of production of surplus value and believes that this focus should be entirely on the category of value and not on surplus value. The reason for this is also quite clear. He fundamentally does not believe in anything called a mode of production and a definite form of exploitation and a definite social relation in which surplus value is created. He has his eyes on the huge mass of abstract labour or social wealth composed of values, which, independently of its own production process, now rules over the earth, time and destiny of mankind in the form of capital. A phenomenon that relies in its existence on a historically permanent dynamism and has absorbed its active productive force within itself with the help of this dynamism. Poston had already said that “labour in capitalism is then, according to Marx, not a productive activity, as we understand it trans historically with the conventional understanding. “It is rather a historically determined activity that has become socially mediated.” The meaning of this kind of inference from Marx’s words would naturally be that the social capital of countries, world capital, or general capital in general, is not fundamentally the surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the proletariat and was not produced by this class!! Why does Poston understand the matter this way!! One possibility is that he has completely misunderstood Marx’s analysis of the different levels of the purchase and sale of labour power and the process of its consumption by capital. Marx writes in this regard:
“Considering the exchange of capital and labour, we see that this exchange is divided into two processes that are not only formally but also qualitatively different and even contradictory:
1- The worker sells his possessions, his labour, which is a use value and has a price as a commodity, like any other commodity, for a certain exchange value, that is, for a certain amount of money, which capital transfers to him.
2- The capitalist receives in return labour, whose value-creating activity is productive activity. That is, he acquires the productive force that preserves and multiplies capital, the productive and reproducing force, that is, the force of capital itself. The separation of these two processes is so obvious that each can occur at a different time from the other and there is no need for them to be simultaneous. (6)
“Moshe Poston” does not put forward any specific argument for his inference from Marx’s arguments. He considers the mere claim to be sufficient for the validity of his conclusions!!! But it seems that he considers the first phase of the exchange between labour and capital to be the whole story and completely ignores the second phase, which consists of the consumption of labour power by capital and the production of surplus value and capital by the worker. In the first phase, the worker only sells his labour power to the capitalist, and this power is placed in the ownership and possession of capital as a commodity. Up to this point, no production has taken place, and Poston’s inference from the “non-productivity of labour in capitalism” must in principle correspond to this phase. The fundamental issue here is that the capitalist must consume this force either in the realm of capital production as productive labour or in the general process of capital reproduction as unproductive labour. Poston considers the occurrence of the first phase to be the entire capitalist labour process and concludes that labour, without having fulfilled a productive role, has effectively been appropriated by capital and has become a part of capital. The second part of Poston’s conclusion, which complements the first part of his theorizing, is that after the first phase of labour-capital exchange, everything is capital, and therefore the production of capital, value, and surplus value must be attributed not to labour but to capital!!! Poston has made a very great and miraculous discovery!!! As someone who sees himself as the only discoverer of the true essence of Marx’s teachings on the critique of the foundations of bourgeois political economy!! In his discoveries, he has reached something that illustrates the paradox of the entire relationship between the production of surplus value and the reality of the capitalist mode of production. He has found that “labour in capitalism is not a productive activity in Marx’s view”!! And he has also found that “Marx considers the historical agent in capitalist production not to be the proletariat, but capital”! In this respect, he may be quite right to consider himself the only discoverer of his kind in Marx’s works!! Because no other human being has expanded the scope of distortion and falsification of Marx’s works on capitalism to such an extent. The author of “Critique and Historical Development” has created all these assumptions and attributes them all to Marx, which does not consider the focus of the discussion on the process of production of surplus value to be in any way logical and Marxian!!! And he demands that all discussions be focused on the position and place of capital as a dense mass of value and abstract mediated labour. In this form of analysis of the capitalist mode of production, it is very easy to deny the entire exploitation, disenfranchisement, oppression and misery of this class in the capitalist system by emphasizing the role of the international working class in the production and reproduction of capital.
Poston says: “Productivity in Marx’s analysis is the manifestation of the specific social character of labour and the expression of the acquired productive abilities and capabilities of human beings. The value aspect refers to the unique historical function of labour in capitalism as a socially mediating activity. The production of value, unlike the production of material value, is necessarily tied to the expenditure of direct human labour. As we have seen, Marx initially explains the category of capital only in terms of the abstract social aspect of labour—such as self-expanding value. In the course of introducing the growth and development of production in capital, however, Marx says that the surplus-value aspect of labour becomes a historical property of capital.”
According to the above statement, which Poston again demagoguery attributes to Marx, the entire increased surplus value corresponding to the difference between the forms of labour at different levels of the social productivity of labour is referred to the role of capital. In other words, the additional surplus value that an advanced capital with a higher organic composition and more productive labour force earns in comparison with a capital with a lower organic composition and less productive labour force, not the unpaid labour of workers, which is a kind of miracle of the dynamics of capital!! What Poston says is pure and disgusting lies. Marx insists on this point more than any other and makes its explanation more than any other issue his agenda, that the source of the production of surplus value is only the variable part of capital, namely labour force.
He states that all components of fixed capital recover their total value in each round of reproduction. What accrues to capital as surplus value and profit is simply and exclusively the unpaid labour of wage labourers. Marx emphasizes in particular that this is as true of capital of the highest organic composition as of capital of the lowest composition. After laying the foundation for all these distortions and illusions, Moshe Poston finally shares his final words with the readers of his article. The purpose of all these inversions was to invite the international working class to abandon the field of class struggle and submit to the eternity of capitalism. He does this. “My desired approach to the dynamics of capitalism does not present a single-line evolution table, which (for this reason) points beyond the existing structure of the work organization (such as what post-industrial society theories propose) and does not see industrial production and the proletariat as the foundations of the future society (as many traditional Marxist approaches suggest). Conversely, my approach shows that capitalism historically opens the way for the emergence of a different form of growth and production, and at the same time, capitalism structurally destroys the realization of this possibility and possibility. According to this interpretation, the structural contradiction of capitalism is not the contradiction between distribution (market, private property) and production, between the existing relations of ownership and industrial production, but rather the contradiction between the existing forms of growth and production and what could potentially be.”
Proletariat based on this explanation!!! Neither the power to change objectivity exists, nor does it basically have such a capacity and power. Capitalism cannot be destroyed, and manipulation and modification and trying to influence the production planning process and its work is the only task that humans can think of. Fighting for the improvement of the environment, political freedoms and social rights under the rule of this system is the only way that is in front of humanity!!! The capitalist system continuously paves the way for the emergence of different forms of social growth and production, and at the same time structurally disrupts and destroys the possibility of realizing these forms of growth. The structural contradiction of capitalism is ultimately summed up in the contradiction between existing forms of growth and other forms of development. Humanity must work within this structure to help open the way for such developments!!! Poston, like a man who does not seem to live in the existing world, does not say a single word about the inevitable compulsion of the labour-selling masses to ignite the class struggle against capital with the aim of destroying capitalism. He does not say that in the distance of the world’s borders, where the wealth of only the 3 largest capitalists in the world is greater than that of the people of 49 countries, in a world where the daily income of half of the world’s inhabitants (about 3 billion people) is much less than 2 US dollars, in a world where prostitution and the auction of body parts have become the only way of livelihood for a large part of the masses who sell labour, yes, in a world where the chain of its existence is the volcano of savagery, crime, exploitation, oppression and inhumanity of capital, how can we make the possibility of human life and survival possible by launching reformist movements and burying the class struggle of the proletariat!!! “Poston” and the Poston’s have the right to resort to any kind of illusion-spreading and philosophizing to distort the thoughts of the workers of the world and invite them to accept the perpetuation of the wage slavery system, but the multi-billion-strong population of the world’s labour-power sellers also naturally give themselves the right to make the complete abolition of wage labour and the establishment of a nationwide organization of socialist labour and production councils the content of their daily struggle as the only way to guarantee their life and historical well-being.
March 20, 2007
Footnotes:
(1) Grundrisse 271, translated by Parham and Tedin
(2) Ibid., pp. 216 and 217
(3) Ibid., p. 36
(4) First Thesis on Feuerbach
(5) Capital, vol. 1, p. 257
(6) Grundrisse, vol. 1, p. 236, translated by Parham and Tedin