Build It Now

Socialism for the Twenty-First Century

Michael Lebowitz

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781583675106
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

Build It Now puts forward a clear and innovative vision of a socialist future, and at the same time shows how concrete steps can be taken to make that vision a reality. It shows how the understanding of capitalism can itself become a political act—a defense of the real needs of human beings against the ongoing advance of capitalist profit.

Throughout the book, Lebowitz addresses the concerns of people engaged in struggle to create a better world, but aware that this struggle must be informed by the realities of the twenty-first century. Many chapters of the book began life as addresses to worker organizations in Venezuela, where worker self-management is on the agenda. Written by an eminent academic, this is far more than an academic treatise. The book brings an internationalist outlook and vast knowledge of global trends to bear on concrete efforts to transform contemporary society.

Build It Now is a testament to the ongoing vitality of the Marxist tradition, drawing on its deep resources of analytical insight and moral passion and fusing them into an essential guide to the struggles of our time.

1

The Needs of Capital Versus the Needs of Human Beings

Like other early nineteenth-century socialists, Karl Marx’s vision of the good society was one that would unleash the full development of all human potential.¹ “What is the aim of the Communists?” asked Marx’s comrade Friedrich Engels in his early draft of the Communist Manifesto. “To organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” In Marx’s final version of the Manifesto, that new society appears as an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”²

This idea of the development of human potential runs throughout Marx’s work—the possibility of rich human beings with rich human needs, the potential for producing human beings as rich as possible in needs and capabilities. What indeed is wealth, he asked, “other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces?” Think about the “development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption”; think about “the absolute working out of his creative potentialities.” The real goal is the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself.”

Realization of this potential, however, cannot drop from the sky. It requires the development of a society in which people do not look upon each other as separate, one where we consciously recognize our interdependence and freely cooperate upon the basis of that recognition. When we relate to each other as human beings, Marx proposed, we produce for each other simply because we understand that others need the results of our activity, and we get pleasure and satisfaction from the knowledge that we are accomplishing something worthwhile. Your need would be sufficient to ensure my activity, and, in responding, I would be “confirmed both in your thought and your love.” What Marx was describing, of course, is the concept of a human family.

Marx’s vision of a society of freely associated producers, a profoundly moral and ethical one, led him quite early in his life to pose certain analytical questions. What is it about this society in which we now live that if you were to tell me you had a need for something I was capable of satisfying, it would be considered as a plea, a humiliation, “and consequently uttered with a feeling of shame, of degradation”? Why is it, he asked, that rather than affirming that I am capable of activity that helps another human being, your needs are instead a source of power for me? “Far from being the means which would give you power over my production, they [your needs] are instead the means for giving me power over you.”

As long as we relate to one another not as members of a human community but as self-seeking owners, Marx concluded, this perverted separation of people is constantly reproduced. So, Marx was led to explore the nature of the social relations that exist between people, the character of the relations in which they engage in producing—producing for themselves as well as producing for each other. It was how he proceeded to analyze capitalism.

Capitalist Relations of Production

The story told by economists who celebrate capitalism is that competition and markets ensure that capitalists will satisfy the needs of people—not because of their humanity and benevolence but, as Adam Smith put it, “from a regard to their own interest.” Competing on the market with other capitalists, they are driven (as if whipped by an invisible hand) to serve the people. For Marx, though, this focus upon competition and markets obscures exactly what distinguishes capitalism from other market economies—its specific relations of production. There are two central aspects of capitalist relations of production—the side of capitalists and the side of workers. On the one hand, there are capitalists—the owners of wealth, the owners of the physical and material means of production. And their orientation is toward the growth of their wealth. Beginning with capital of a certain value in the form of money, capitalists purchase commodities with the goal of gaining more money, additional value, surplus value. And that’s the point, profits. As capitalists, all that matters for them is the growth of their capital.

On the other hand, we have workers—people who have neither material goods they can sell nor the material means of producing the things they need for themselves. Without those means of production, they can’t produce commodities to sell in the market to exchange. So, how do they get the things they need? By selling the only thing they have to sell, their ability to work. They can sell it to whomever they choose, but they cannot choose whether or not to sell their power to perform labor, if they are to survive.

Before we can talk about capitalism, in short, certain conditions must already be present. Not only must there be a commodity-money economy in which some people are the owners of means of production but also there must be a special commodity available on the market—the capacity to perform labor. For that to happen, Marx proposed, workers first must be free in a double sense. They must be free to sell their labor-power (i.e., have property rights in their capacity to perform labor—something the slave, e.g., lacks) and they must be “free” of means of production (i.e., the means of production must have been separated from producers). In other words, one aspect unique to capitalist relations of production is that it is characterized by the existence of people who, lacking the means of production, are able and compelled to sell a property right, the right of disposition over their ability to work. They are compelled to sell their power to produce in order to get money to buy the things they need.

Yet it is important to understand that while the separation of the means of production from producers is a necessary condition for capitalist relations of production, it is not a sufficient condition. If workers are separated from the means of production, there remain two possibilities: (1) workers sell their labor-power to the owners of means of production; or (2) workers rent means of production from their owners. There is a long tradition in mainstream economics that proposes it doesn’t matter whether capital hires labor or labor hires capital because the results will be the same in both cases. For Marx, as we will see, there was a profound difference: only the first case, where capital has taken possession of production and the sale of labor-power occurs, is capitalism; only there do we see the unique characteristics of capitalism.

But it is not simply wage-labor that is critical. Capitalism requires both the existence of labor-power as a commodity and its combination with capital. Who buys that particular property right in the market and why? The capitalist buys the right to dispose of the worker’s capacity to perform labor precisely because it is a means to achieve his goal, profits. Because that and only that, the growth of his capital, is what interests him as a capitalist.

Well, we now have the basis for an exchange between two parties in the market, the owner of money and the owner of labor-power. Each wants what the other has; each gets something out of that exchange. It looks like a free transaction. This is the point at which most non-Marxist economics stops. It looks at the transactions that take place in the market, and it declares, “we see freedom.” This is what Marx described as “the realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.” In fact, since the “free-trader vulgaris” sees only the transactions in the marketplace, he sees only freedom.

But this is not every market economy we are describing here. Not every market economy is characterized by the sale of labor-power to a capitalist. A defense of a market economy as such is not a defense of capitalism, no more than a defense of the market is a defense of slavery (which of course involves the buying and selling of slaves). This distinction between capitalism and markets, though, is not one the defenders of capitalism tend to make—their ideology, Marx proposed, leads them to confuse on principle the characteristics of pre-capitalist market economies with capitalism.

Why? Think about what is unique about this market economy in which labor-power has been sold to the capitalist. Now that the market transaction is over, Marx commented, we see that something has happened to each of the two parties. “He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.” And where are they going? They are entering the place of work; they are entering the place where the capitalist now has the opportunity to use that property right he has purchased.

The Sphere of Capitalist Production

Two central characteristics exist in the process of production that takes place under capitalist relations. First, the worker works under the direction, supervision, and control of the capitalist. The goals of the capitalist determine the nature and purpose of production. Directions and orders in the production process come to workers from above. There is no horizontal relationship between capitalist and worker as buyer and seller in the marketplace here; there is no market here. Rather, there is a vertical relation between the one who has power and the one who does not. It is a command system, what Marx described as the despotism of the capitalist workplace. So much for the realm of freedom and equality.

And why does the capitalist have this power over workers here? Because he purchased the right to dispose of their ability to perform labor. That was the property right he purchased. It was the property right that the worker sold and had to sell because it was the only option available if she were to survive.

The second characteristic of capitalist production is that workers have no property rights in the product that results from their activity. They have no claim. They have sold to the capitalist the only thing that might have given them a claim, the capacity to perform labor. In contrast to producers in a cooperative who benefit from their own efforts because they have property rights in the products they produce, when workers work harder or more productively in the capitalist firm, they increase the value of the capitalist’s property. Unlike a cooperative (which is not characterized by capitalist relations of production), in the capitalist firm all the fruits of the worker’s productive activity belong to the capitalist, the residual claimant. This is why the sale of labor-power is so critical as a distinguishing characteristic of capitalism.

What happens, then, in the sphere of capitalist production? It all follows logically from the nature of capitalist relations of production. Insofar as the capitalist’s goal is surplus value, he only purchases labor-power to the extent that it will generate that surplus value. For Marx, the necessary condition for generation of surplus value was the performance of surplus labor—the performance of labor over and above the labor contained in what the capitalist pays as wages. The capitalist, through the combination of his control of production and ownership of the product of labor, will act to ensure that workers add more value in production than the capitalist has paid them.

How does this occur? At any given point, we can calculate the hours of daily labor that are necessary to maintain workers at their existing standard of living. Those hours of “necessary labor,” Marx proposed, are determined by the relationship between the existing standard of necessity (the real wage) and the general level of productivity. If productivity rises, then less hours of labor would be necessary for workers to reproduce themselves. Simple. Of course, the capitalist has no interest in a situation in which workers work only long enough to maintain themselves. What the capitalist wants is workers to perform surplus labor—i.e., that the labor performed by workers (the capitalist workday) exceeds the level of necessary labor. The ratio between surplus labor and necessary labor, Marx defined as the rate of exploitation (or, in its monetary form, the rate of surplus value).

We now have in place the elements that can illustrate what Marx referred to as the “law of motion,” i.e., the dynamic properties, which flow from these particular capitalist relations of production. Remember that the whole purpose of the process from the point of view of the capitalist is profits. The worker is only a means to this end—the growth of capital. Let us begin with an extreme assumption—that the workday is equal to the level of necessary labor (i.e., there is no surplus labor). If this case were to remain true, there would be no capitalist production. So, what can the capitalist do in order to achieve his goal?

One option for the capitalist is to use his control over production to increase the work that the laborer performs. Extend the workday, make the workday as long as possible. A 10-hour workday? Fine. A 12-hour workday? Better. The worker will perform more work for the capitalist over and above the wage, and capital will grow. Another way is by intensifying the workday. Speed up. Make workers work harder and faster in a given time period. Make sure there is no wasted motion, no slack time. Every moment workers rest is time they are not working for capital.

Another option for the capitalist is to reduce what he pays. Drive down the real wage. Bring in people who will work for less. Encourage people to compete with each other to see who will work for the least. Bring in immigrants, impoverished people from the countryside. Relocate to where you can get cheap labor.

That is the inherent logic of capital. The inherent tendency of capital is to increase the exploitation of workers. In the one case, the workday is increasing; in the other, the real wage is falling. In both cases, the rate of exploitation is driven upward. Marx commented that “the capitalist [is] constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and extend the working day to its physical maximum.” He continued, however, saying, “while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.”

In other words, within the framework of capitalist relations, while capital pushes to increase the workday both in length and intensity and to drive down wages, workers struggle to reduce the workday and to increase wages. They form trade unions for this purpose. Just as there is struggle from the side of capital, so also is there class struggle from the side of the worker. Why? Take the struggle over the workday, for example. Why do the workers want more time for themselves? Marx refers to “time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind.” Time, Marx noted, is “the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden.”

What about the struggle for higher wages? Of course, there are the physical requirements to survive that must be obtained. But Marx understood that workers necessarily need much more than this. The worker’s social needs include “the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste, etc.” In short, workers have their own goals. As they are beings within society, their needs are necessarily socially determined. Their needs as human beings within society stand opposite capital’s own inherent tendencies in production. When we look at the side of the worker, we recognize, as Marx did, “the worker’s own need for development.”

From the perspective of capital, though, workers and, indeed, all human beings, are only means. They are not an end. And if satisfying the goals of capital require employing racism, dividing workers, using the state to outlaw or destroy unions, destroying the lives and futures of people by shutting down operations and moving to parts of the world where people are poor and unions are banned, so be it. Capitalism has never been a system whose priority is human beings and their needs.

True, wages have increased and the workday has been reduced since Marx wrote. But that doesn’t invalidate Marx’s description of capitalism—every gain occurs despite the opposition of capitalists (as it did in Marx’s time). Writing about the Ten-Hours Bill, the law that reduced the length of the workday in England to ten hours, Marx described it as a great victory, a victory over “the blind rule of the supply and demand laws” that form the political economy of the capitalist class; it was the first time, he noted, that “in broad daylight the political economy of the [capitalist] class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.”

In other words, the gains that workers make are the result of their struggles. They press in the opposite direction to capital; they struggle to reduce the rate of exploitation. And, implicit in that political economy of workers and in the struggles of working people is the overcoming of divisions among them (whatever their source). None of this is new. Marx described the hostility at the time between English and Irish workers as the source of their weakness: “It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.” In this respect, the struggle between capitalists and workers is a struggle over the degree of separation among workers.

Precisely because workers (given their needs as human beings) do resist reduced wages and increased workdays, capitalists must find a different way for capital to grow; they are forced to introduce machinery in order to increase productivity. By increasing productivity relative to the real wage, they l...