Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labour and Leninist Militant Reformism
The founder of the phenomenon of two-organization in the world labour movement is social democracy. The twisted version of parallel party and trade union organizations for the rising reformism of the last years of the 19th century in Western and Northern Europe, or in general, international social democracy, was an urgent need, relevant and coherent with all aspects of the life of this approach. The theory of two-organization has adopted and established the basis of its objectivity precisely from the depths of the real needs and preconditions of the rise and manifestation of the existence of this reformism. Social democracy itself was born of certain contexts and events in the history of the development of the capitalist system. The defeat of the widespread anti-wage labour movements of the 19th century, the remarkable advances of the bourgeoisie in the fields of science and technology, the stunning increase in the productivity of social labour and the ever-increasing development of industry during this period, and finally the emergence of the imperialist conditions of capitalist production were among the important historical events that fertilized and gave birth to the germ of the life of social democracy in their common womb.
Between the beginning of the 1980s and the first decade of the 20th century, the level of GDP in advanced European countries increased by about four times. Among these countries, Germany was ahead of most of its competitors in terms of industrial growth and increased production. Taking advantage of the great achievements of scientific inventions and discoveries and the occurrence of industrial revolutions allowed the bourgeoisie to raise the productivity of social labour to a very stunning level. The simultaneous development of the capital accumulation market throughout the world and the extensive possibilities of exporting goods and capital to all parts of the world opened a window of hope for overcoming the economic problems of the capitalist system in front of the owners of European monopolies and concentrated capital and the governments of these societies. All these events took place in a period when the labour movement of these countries was carrying the burden of huge eroding defeats. The defeat of the Paris Commune, the failure of the First International, the failure of previous revolutions, the continuous successes of the bourgeoisie in suppressing the largest labour movements of the middle of the nineteenth century, all tipped the balance of power in favour of the bourgeoisie and to the detriment of the proletariat.
Capitalist governments, burdened by the defeat of these movements on the one hand and the relatively significant achievements of the economic boom of those days on the other, began to carry out certain reforms. Social democracy was the unfortunate offspring of this process and at the same time the founder and because of its further realization and development. Thanks to the aforementioned economic conditions, the bourgeoisie was able to somewhat modify some of the laws and government decrees corresponding to the most brutal and slaughterous acts against the labour movement. In Germany, it temporarily repealed the anti-socialist law and allowed the Social Democratic Party of that country to participate in the parliamentary elections. At the same time, it recognized the right of workers to form unions, slightly reduced working hours in workplaces and production centres, and somewhat raised wage levels compared to the past.
Social democracy, consisting of reformism within the working class and the vast mass of bankrupt and dissatisfied strata, made these very bourgeois retreats a breeding ground for its own political rise in the current conditions. Referring to the record of the failure of previous anti-capitalist and revolutionary movements and pointing out the possibility of achieving small and large expectations within the framework of compromise with the capitalist system, determined all the bricks and mortar of this platform, and social democracy, using the most wicked tricks, set about the work of architecting this evil capitalist edifice. Right reformism attempted to redefine the basic pillars of the real analyses and beliefs of the anti-wage labour movement with a narrative that was bourgeois to the core, anti-revolutionary materialism, and anti-Marxist teachings. In order to understand more deeply the real articulation between the theory of the two formations and other aspects of theorizing and distortions of social democracy regarding the fundamental issues related to the labour movement and the class struggle of the proletariat, it is necessary to speak very briefly about the most basic of these distortions.
The departure from the Marxian principles of the critique of political economy and the analysis of the capitalist mode of production was the first and most important axis of these distortions. In dissecting the capitalist system, Marx begins with the relationship of buying and selling labour power. He first analyses the phenomenon of the commodity. He explains the socially necessary labour inherent in the commodity, the dual value of the commodity, abstract and embodied labour, necessary and surplus labour time, the labour process in the commodity economy, the fetishization of the commodity, the process of evolution of commodity production up to the stage of labour power becoming a commodity, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. In this regard, he emphasizes wage labour and the relationship of surplus value production as the foundation of the life of capitalist society. In Marx’s anatomy, the form of ownership is a function of the mode of production, and capitalist ownership can only be understood in the light of the recognition of capital as a social relationship, in other words, in its internal and organic connection with the labour process of capital and the relationship of surplus value production. The leaders of the Second International established a fundamental basis for their distortions of Marx’s dissection of the capitalist system precisely here, in explaining the basis of its existence. Karl Kautsky writes in this regard:
“Anyone who understands the necessary conditions of the present system of production knows what those conditions will require when the existing system of property is no longer possible. The origin of private ownership of the means of production lies in small-scale production. Individual production necessitates individual ownership. On the contrary, large-scale production implies cooperation and social production. In large-scale production, not one individual works alone, but a large number of workers, the whole community of sharers of wealth, work together to reproduce the total production. Thus, the new means of production are diverse and powerful. It has become quite impossible for each individual producer to own his own means of production. When we have reached this stage of large-scale production, two more types of ownership are no longer possible. One is private ownership of the means of production used by common labour. This means the existing capitalist system and its attendant misery and exploitation for the workers and stifling abundance for the capitalist.”
(Emphasis added)
According to Kautsky, the process of growth, development and evolution of capitalism should be sought in large-scale and collective production based on private ownership of the means of labour. It is clear that the collective nature of production, along with the private form of ownership of the means of production, is one of the indicators and existential components of the wage slavery system, but any attempt to explain capitalism based on this component is a deeply misleading attempt and is aimed at disguising the fundamental characteristic and true character of this mode of production and social relations. Between what Kautsky’s perspective of capitalism is and Marx’s way of explaining it, there is a very deep gap as wide as the entire difference between reformism and communism of the abolition of wage labour, or the gap between two deeply hostile and conflicting class perspectives. Capital is not a bunch of things that are fought over the method of its ownership. On the contrary, it is a social relationship. A relationship that is the starting point and return point of all class, political, civil, legal, cultural and social relations in existing society. The worker creates capital with his labour and at the same time is not only separated from the labour and production process but is also profoundly prohibited from any interference in determining the fate of his own work. He is placed comprehensively and in all aspects of his social and individual life under the control of the market and the complete and complete domination of the product of his labour. The process of production of surplus value is the process of the absolute domination of dead labour over living labour. Here, the worker’s separation from any form of free intervention in the labour process is the solid foundation for his complete and total deprivation of any form of real and free intervention in determining the fate of his life. With the realization of this separation, the worker not only becomes absolutely useless as a result of his own labour and production, but the entire political, civil, and social order and the entire structure of law, culture, and thought transcending the relationship of buying and selling labour power also become tools for consolidating his wage slavery and make the foundations of the all-encompassing domination of capital, or the dead labour he created, over him and his class firmer and firmer. We will see below how Kautsky’s method of analysing capitalism serves to deny all these basic characteristics of the wage slavery system. At the same time, this method of explanation also subjects many of the real tendencies, functions, and contradictions within the relationship of production of surplus value, or the capitalist mode of production itself, to serious distortion and inversion. Analysing the crises of capitalism is one of these topics. Let’s pay attention to this part of his writing. “The acute modern crises that shake the world market arise from overproduction, which in turn stems from the unplanned nature of the commodity production system. Overproduction, in the sense of producing more than is actually needed, may exist in any system, but as long as producers produce to meet their own needs, overproduction can generally do no harm. For example, in the past generation, if a farmer’s wheat crop happened to be more than he needed, he could store it for years when there was less, and when his barn was full, he could give the rest to his herd or, in the worst case, let it rot.”
The reference of the capitalist crisis to the anarchy of production is a complete revelation of the real causes and grounds of the crisis within this mode of production. The root of the crisis lies not in the way capitalist production is planned or in the anarchy and disorder that lie at the foundation of the existence of capital. Capital is the relation of surplus value production, or in other words, the production of capital, capital, and again capital. The reproduction of this relation depends on the continuous increase in the productivity of labour, and this in turn implies an upward trend of the fixed part of capital in comparison with its variable part. The tendency towards a falling rate of profit is an institutional phenomenon of this mode of production, and the absoluteness of this tendency under certain conditions, the overtaking of the rate of accumulation by the rate of surplus value production, and the emergence of a crisis are also inevitable and inevitable things of capitalism. The process of accumulation and reproduction of social or even global capital, even if, for example, it is controlled by the most precise and considered planning, will still bear the burden of all the above internal interactions with all its severity and intensity. The real source of the capitalist crisis is the very existence of capital, or, to put it more explicitly, the fact that capital is the product of human labour and production. Marx says in this regard:
“The real obstacle to capitalist production is capital itself. The point is that capital and its self-fertilization are regarded as the starting point and the end, as the motive and the end of production. Here production is only production for capital and not vice versa. That is, the means of production are not simple tools that serve the society of producers solely for the purpose of creating a constantly expanding process of life. The preservation and fertilization of value-capital, which is based on the expropriation and impoverishment of the great mass of producers, can only move within certain limits. Therefore, these obstacles constantly come into conflict with the methods of production that capital must inevitably use to fulfil its purpose. For these methods are driven towards production in order to increase the limits of production, primarily in order to expand the social productive forces of labour. The means of the unconditional expansion of the social productive forces of labour are constantly involved in the limited goal of fertilizing existing capital. Therefore, if the capitalist mode of production is the historical means of developing the material productive forces and creating a world market corresponding to them, it also carries with it a constant contradiction between this historical task and its own social relations”.
We see that in Marx’s analysis it is absolutely not the anarchy of production and economic unplanning that constitute the source of the crisis, on the contrary, it is this internal drive of capital for ever greater productivity of labour and ever greater production and ever greater accumulation of additional capital, which on the one hand is the self-expansion of the capitalist mode of production and on the other hand creates a completely insoluble contradiction within this mode of production. Kautsky separates the roots of crises from their true origins with the help of the worst kind of distortions and then, in the completely foggy atmosphere that he has invented to distort the entire reality of the capitalist system, he turns to exploring an alternative for an economy devoid of anarchy of production. Based on the assumptions that he has made in advance, whenever anarchy of production can be replaced by mature and deliberate planning of the economy, the risk of crisis will naturally be eliminated!!! He says:
“In the syndicates and large trusts, the precondition for the regulation of production is above all the control of all branches of industry and their organization on an international basis in all countries where the capitalist system of production is developed. But it is difficult to organize international trusts, and even more difficult to keep them coordinated. Therefore, a trust rarely becomes powerful enough to regulate international trade and to avert a crisis. Given the surplus production over consumption, the main task of the trust is not to prevent it, but to shift its undesirable consequences and to distribute them to the workers and consumers.”
The essence of Kautsky’s argument is that the process of developing the huge industrial trusts and monopolies of capitalism is aimed at reducing the anarchy of production and replacing this state with a kind of economic organization and planning. On this basis and referring to his point of departure in analysing the capitalist crisis, the process of expanding and dominating the monopolies must in principle also be the process of drying up the sources of crisis in the structure of this system!! Kautsky firmly adheres to this belief. His problem is that he does not assess the prospects of the capitalist system achieving a centralized, global and monopolistic planning at the international level very clearly and precisely from this perspective he is not completely confident in the establishment of capitalism without any crisis. He himself adds in completing the above statements that:
“Only when all the trusts are transformed into one trust and the entire production machinery of capitalist nations is concentrated in a few hands, that is, when private ownership of the means of production ends, can the trust put an end to the crisis. On the contrary, from a certain stage in the development of industry, as long as private ownership of the means of production continues, the crisis becomes inevitable.”
In Kautsky’s discussion of the capitalist crisis, there is no mention of the real roots of this phenomenon. He makes no mention of such issues as the downward tendency of the rate of profit, the natural process of its absolutization, and the role of this process in the occurrence of the crisis. He absolutely does not accept that the source of the crisis lies in the nature of the existence of capital but sees the lack of planning and the existence of anarchy in production as the only source and reason for the occurrence of this phenomenon. He says that the huge industrial trusts play a very important role in organizing production and eliminating anarchy and centralizing economic planning, but this fierce competition between these trusts and monopolies itself shows the survival of anarchy in capitalist production. His version of overcoming crises is that if the process of development of industrial monopolies progresses to the stage of transforming all these institutions into a huge nationwide monopoly, then one can truly believe in the end of the era of crises and the emergence of a crisis-free economic relationship. Kautsky declares the realization of this and the arrival of this state as the end of the era of private property!!!
The second main axis of the distortion of Marx’s teachings by Kautsky and the leaders of social democracy was related to the narrative of socialism and the type of perception of socialist society. When the identity indicator of capitalism is individual ownership of capital and production without centralized planning, it is clear that socialism will be nothing other than state ownership of social capital and centralized planning of production by the state. We saw above that Kautsky considers the transformation of all trusts into a huge economic trust to represent the end of private property and its replacement by social ownership of the means of production. The socialism of the leaders of the Second International welcomed with open arms the existence and continuation of wage labour with all its economic determinations and with all its social effects and consequences. Kautsky describes the characteristics and process of establishing his expected socialist society as follows:
“Socialist production requires, first of all, the transformation of individual capitalist institutions into social institutions. The preparation of this transformation creates conditions in which the individual capitalist in the present mechanism of production becomes more and more marginalized. Secondly, it is necessary for social production that all institutions that serve the common good be united and transformed into one great concern…”
Here and in all the discussions of the leaders of social democracy, the principle of the continuity of the relationship of buying and selling labour power as the foundation of the socialist economy is not the subject of any dispute or objection. The discussion is entirely about how this relationship is planned. The elimination of individual owners of production or commercial enterprises, the integration of separate and small economic units into cartels and huge economic trusts, the centralized and nationwide planning of these units by the state, and other such components determine the entire top and bottom of this socialism. The process of establishing such a society is also naturally explicitly architected within this explanation. The capitalist system, in the natural process of its development, establishes and develops the necessary foundations for the emergence of concerns and their development. It is enough for the proletariat to achieve a position where it takes control of the ownership and planning work of these large economic enterprises and institutions. In such a situation, private ownership of capital will be abolished and socialist society, and in later steps, the socialist world, will replace the existing social order.
A simple look at the analysis of the leaders of social democracy of the capitalist system and its socialist alternative presents us with the task of the class struggle of the proletariat in the existing society and the content of this struggle in the present conditions and finally the future and historical horizon of the labour movement in a very obvious and explicit way. We said earlier that finding a solution to confront the terrible dangers of the great labour uprisings of the century and escaping the suffering of the new Paris Commune was very seriously on the agenda of the bourgeois governments. We also added at the same time that the extensive economic achievements resulting from the boom period of the 1980s and the huge profits resulting from the extensive export of goods and capital provided the material possibilities of this solution to a certain extent and for a certain period at the disposal of the bourgeoisie and the governments of this class. In the context of these specific historical conditions and with the way social democracy looked at the existing society and the horizon of its liberation!!, a part of the European working class was determined to erase the approach of the Paris Commune and the First International or the labour movement of the beginning of the second half of the century from its historical mission book. The teachings of social democracy, within the framework of the economic reforms of the governments of the day, made him understand that parliamentarism and the possibility of achieving a parliamentary majority nullified the philosophy of the need for revolution. When the whole problem was summed up in replacing individual ownership of capital with the formation of a huge state economic trust, when in the light of the existence of free suffrage!!
It is possible to enter parliament and also secure the position of majority, when the parliamentary majority of social democracy can acquire the title of workers’ state!!! When with the help of this state it is possible to advance the process of transforming private property into state property, when socialism is not supposed to be anything more than state ownership of capital!! When all this can be interpreted in this way, then the need for class struggle against wage labour will also be eliminated!!!
Social democracy naturally did not stop at this and expanded its teachings to all areas of class struggle and to the entire framework of knowledge and worldview and the way the proletariat looks at society, history and the world. In these teachings, the entire revolutionary and practical materialism of Marx was practically rejected and Hegelian historical determinism combined with Darwinism took its place. Earlier, Marx and Engels, while welcoming the teleological aspect of Darwin’s theory, had seriously condemned and warned against any generalization of this view to the process of historical evolution of human societies. It is necessary to say that the application of Lamarck’s theory of the struggle for survival and then Darwin’s theory of evolution had gained a relatively wide foothold among a part of the socialists of the day in Europe. For Kautsky and the leaders of the Second International, the generalization of Darwinism to the historical process of the evolution of human societies was the basis for the belief in the inevitable and predestined course of historical developments. Within these beliefs, they did not deny, at least superficially, the role of the struggle between social classes, but they considered the entire process of this conflict and struggle to be a function of an inevitable and deterministic process. Referring to Darwinism in explaining the process of the evolution of human societies convinced them that the fate of the struggle between classes in different historical periods would in any case, and independently of the various ongoing struggles, lead to the victory of the rising class and the destruction of the ruling class. Based on this very belief, Kautsky considered the replacement of capitalism by socialism to be a given and historically determined event, and he considered the process of economic and political developments and ongoing class disputes to be the content of this inevitable process. In the context of this view, the internal course of the capitalist system organically created and reproduced all the social preconditions for socialism. The process of concentration of capital, which is the inherent dynamic of this mode of production, inevitably led to the emergence of large joint-stock companies, trusts and monopolies. In parallel with this process, the working class also became a larger and larger force and, in this regard, could assume the role of the vast majority of society. These were all the realities of capitalist society, and in the meantime, the important task of social democracy was to play a more effective role in the planning of this process. For this, it was enough for the elites of the working class, together with the thinkers of other dissatisfied strata, to form a political party called the workers. The working masses were organized in their vast trade union organizations. The bourgeoisie trusted in the approach of compromise and submission of the working class and in return for this approach recognized the right and rights of a temporary low livelihood, plus the right to form a union and a party. Socialism and the ideal system of the leaders of social democracy would be fully established architecturally and in reality, with these mechanisms and with the provision of these materials. The working class, as the rising class of history, would take control of affairs and put an end to the existence and survival of private property and the capitalist system!!!