The Socialist Alternative

Real Human Development

Michael Lebowitz

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781583674949
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

“A good society,“ Michael Lebowitz tells us, “is one that permits the full development of human potential.” In this slim, lucid, and insightful book, he argues persuasively that such a society is possible. That capitalism fails his definition of a good society is evident from even a cursory examination of its main features. What comes first in capitalism is not human development but privately accumulated profits by a tiny minority of the population. When there is a conflict between profits and human development, profits take precedence. Just ask the unemployed, those toiling at dead-end jobs, the sick and infirm, the poor, and the imprisoned.

But if not capitalism, what? Lebowitz is also critical of those societies that have proclaimed their socialism, such as the former Soviet Union and China. While their systems were not capitalist and were capable of achieving some of what is necessary for the “development of human potential,” they were not “good societies.”

A good society as Lebowitz defines it must be marked by three characteristics: social ownership of the means of production, social production controlled by workers, and satisfaction of communal needs and purposes. Lebowitz shows how these characteristics interact with and reinforce one another, and asks how they can be developed to the point where they occur more or less automatically—that is, become both a society’s premises and outcomes. He also offers fascinating insights into matters such as the nature of wealth, the illegitimacy of profits, the inadequacies of worker-controlled enterprises, the division of labor, and much more.

PART 1

The Socialist Triangle

1. The Wealth of People

Return to the concept of the good society—one with human beings at the center. We described the good society as one that fosters the full development of human potential, ensures the protagonism that is the necessary condition for complete development, and encourages solidarity and caring. The good society is a wealthy society. But what is the basis of a wealthy society?

According to Adam Smith, the key determinant of wealth, defined as the use-values that a society produces, is the productive power of labor; that is, the higher the level of society’s productivity, the greater the quantity of use-values produced for a given population. The starting point, of course, is human beings and nature—what Marx called “the original sources of wealth.” Whereas nature provides the original basis for life, human beings transform the raw materials that come from nature into use-values that are the substance of wealth.

Besides human beings and nature, another factor is critical in determining the quantity of use-values that can be produced in a given period—the instruments of labor with which human beings transform raw materials. When an individual devotes time to create a tool (for example, a Robinson Crusoe making a trap or a net or a simple plow), he increases the quantity of use-values he will be able to obtain subsequently. In short, his productivity increases as the result of the dedication of some of his labor to the production of instruments of labor.

Clearly, the results of past labor are an important factor in producing wealth measured as use-values. How important they are, though, will depend on how long they last. Thus instruments of labor that last only one season or one year will obviously have to be replaced quickly (and thus require the allocation of labor to this end); in contrast, durable instruments that do not require replacement for long periods of time can continue to contribute to productivity.

Further, labor-time that is not needed to replace instruments of labor that are consumed can be used to accumulate more instruments of labor—more nets, more traps, and so forth. Insofar as durable instruments continue in use without the need to devote labor for their replacement, they perform “the same free service as the forces of nature, such as water, steam, air, and electricity. This free service of past labour, when it is seized on and filled with vitality by living labour, accumulates progressively as accumulation takes place on a larger and larger scale.”¹ More and more, then, the productivity of labor can be the result of the “free service of past labour.”

Of course, we are describing the development of social productivity. The productive power of individual, isolated people is very low. Indeed, the concept of isolated individuals is a myth because we live in society (even if this is only a family). There is a reason, though, for people to cooperate. Marx noted that cooperation results in “the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one.”² For example, the combination of individuals for building a road is more than just an addition of their individual labor capacities: “The unification of their forces,” he observed, “increases their force of production.”³

So, in all societies people find ways to cooperate—whether it is by specializing or by working together by combining similar labor—precisely because our social productivity is increased by the combination of labor; that is, because of the benefits available from “united, combined labour.”⁴ Adam Smith certainly understood the importance of the combination of labor—both within the individual workplace (for example, the pin factory) and within the society—for the increase in social productivity. His emphasis, however, was upon the division of labor, which was the consequence of a “certain propensity in human nature … the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (which, of course, had nothing to do with the pin factory). In contrast, we stress not the division of labor (which is but one form of cooperation and presupposes cooperation) but the combination of labor—its character as social labor.⁵

Thus in the “association of the workers—the cooperation and division of labour as fundamental conditions of the productivity of labour,” we see what Marx and Engels called in The German Ideology “the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is caused by the division of labour.”⁶ This is a central proposition of the political economy of the working class that I identified in Beyond CAPITAL: “any co-operation and combination of labour in production generates a combined, social productivity of labour that exceeds the sum of individual, isolated productivities.”⁷ Very simply, as Marx noted, “the social productive power which arises from cooperation is a free gift.”⁸

When we work with the results of past labor, this too is the product of the combination of labor. Those tools, machines, improvements to land, and intellectual and scientific discoveries that substantially increase social productivity are available for use by living labor because of the previous allocation of labor to those activities. Both within specific workplaces and within society as a whole, some producers create means of production that increase the productivity of others; total social productivity increases—the more so, the more advanced and long-lasting the particular means of production in question. The heritage of past labor, our social inheritance, is there for generation after generation.

And we inherit and use more than tools, machines, the things that are the products of human society. “The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain” becomes a growing source of productive power over time. Incorporated in the process of producing use-values, science becomes a productive force. The organs of human industry (the limbs of the physical productive apparatus) are “organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.” Indeed, the growth of social productivity increasingly depends upon the extent that science, intellectual labor, “the general productive forces of the social brain” are incorporated into the production process:

This development in productivity can always be reduced in the last analysis to the social character of the labour that is set to work, to the division of labour within society, and to the development of intellectual labour, in particular of the natural sciences.⁹

In this respect, Marx was very clear that our ability to produce wealth as use-values for people depends more and more not upon immediate and direct labor but upon the results of past social labor—the means of production that incorporate “general social knowledge [which] has become a direct force of production.” Clearly, “to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time.” Indeed, direct labor itself becomes an “indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on the one side, and the general productive forces arising from social combination in total production on the other side—a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historical product).”¹⁰

Wealth as use-values is thus the result of this social combination—the result of people working with nature and the products of past labor, people creating products that maintain and enhance the original sources of wealth and provide the basis for increasing the future productive power of labor. We don’t produce nature, but our social inheritance is our product and the product of past generations of workers. But to whom does our social heritage belong?

Not to us. “One of the chief factors in historical development up till now,” Marx and Engels proposed in The German Ideology, is the “consolidation of what we ourselves produce into a material power above us.” Here indeed is what they called the muck of ages: “man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.” All the wealth produced by workers (“the social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals”) appears as “not their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them.”¹¹

THE MYSTIFICATION OF CAPITAL

There is a reason for this. Our power does not appear as our power because, in reality, it isn’t our power anymore. Rather, we think of the means of production, of our social heritage, as capital. And what is capital? What is this money for which we sell our labor power, these objects of labor upon which we work, these tools, machines, instruments that we use in production? What are these products that sit in stores and that we work to obtain?

This was the central point Marx attempted to explain—the essence of that power above us, the essence of capital. His answer was unequivocal: it is the workers’ own product that has been turned against them, a product in the form of tools, machinery—indeed, all the products of human activity (mental and manual). What you see when you look at capital is the result of past exploitation.

Insofar as workers sell their capacity to work to the owner of the means of production in order to satisfy their needs, they surrender all property rights in the products they produce. By purchasing the right to dispose of the worker’s power, the capitalist has purchased the right to exploit the worker in production; and the result of that exploitation goes into the accumulation of more means of production. The power over us represented by the means of production, in short, is the power yielded to capital by generations of wage laborers.

Precisely because workers have sold their power to the capitalist, the “association of the workers—the cooperation and division of labour as fundamental conditions of the productivity of labour—appears as the productive power of capital. The collective power of labour, its character as social labour, is therefore the collective power of capital”; and the “free gift” that arises from the combination of labor is a gift to capital.¹² Further, all the fruits of past social labor accrue to the capitalist. Fixed capital, machinery, technology, science—all are only present wearing their “antagonistic social mask” as capital.¹³ In short, “the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital.”¹⁴

But why doesn’t everyone recognize that this social heritage is our own product turned against us? Why doesn’t everyone understand that capital is the result of exploitation? The key, Marx emphasized, is that the exploitation of workers is not obvious. It doesn’t look like the worker sells her ability to work and that the capitalist then proceeds to extract as much labor from that labor power as possible. Rather, it looks like the worker sells a certain amount of her time (a day’s labor) to the capitalist and that she gets its equivalent in money.

What is the significance of the distinction that Marx made between labor power (the worker’s capacity) and labor (the worker’s activity)? When we focus upon the sale of labor power, we are thinking about the reproduction of the worker and thus her ability to work—that is, the necessary reproduction of the worker’s availability to capital. This is the point made in the preceding chapter: “the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production” is “the reproduction of workers as wage laborers” (as workers who must reappear in the labor market in order to survive). For Marx, here was one of the great contributions of classical political economy—the recognition that the wage was related to the reproduction of the worker. It was a point developed by the Physiocrats and followed by Adam Smith, “like all economists worth speaking of.”¹⁵

But if we think that what workers sell is a particular quantity of labor, what ensures the reproduction of workers? How does capitalism continue? This, after all, was a central question for Marx. But that is not a question that any individual capitalist or worker is thinking about. It is the last thing on their minds. What an individual capitalist wants is not the reproduction of capitalism but his own reproduction, and for this he needs a particular quantity of labor. Thus, on the surface, it necessarily seems that the worker sells a particular quantity of her labor and gets its value. Indeed, that appearance is reinforced by the very form in which wages are stated (a wage for a given number of hours of work)—“all labour appears as paid labour.”¹⁶

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance that Marx attached to this wage-form, which “extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary and surplus labour, into paid labour and unpaid labour.” For Marx, the wage-form (which makes it appear that labor is purchased and fully paid for) is the basis for the mystification of capital:

All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation.¹⁷

In that “actual relation,” the worker has sold the property right to command her labor power (which in itself yields an indeterminate quantity of labor) and has thereby yielded to the capitalist the right to extract as much labor as he can and the rights to all the fruits of exploitation. But if it seems (as it must s...