All post-Marxian economics has tried—in order to get rid of Marx—to put the origin of “progress” somewhere other than in social labor. To that end, it has invented specific productivities of “the factors of production,” or reduced these to that of the “commodity” (Sraffa: “commodities produced by means of commodities”), or to that of money (money produces money), or to that of time (“time is money,” Böhm-Bawerk’s discounting of the future), or—today—that of “science” (“cognitive capitalism,” descended from the marginal efficiency of capital as it was understood by Keynes). All these are nothing but forms of the basic alienation proper to conventional bourgeois social thought.
Marx had filled out his critique of capitalist reality with a critique of the writings that aimed to legitimize capitalist practice, whether those produced by the great classics, who founded modern thought in the domain of the new political economy (Smith, Ricardo), or of those from the vulgar economics already present in his day (Bastiat and others). Critique of the post-Marxian economists is no less necessary. It has been carried out by several good Marxists who have thrown off the yoke of exegesis. In this regard, the contributions of Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff have been crucial. Let me point here to my own contribution to critique of the best attempts of conventional economics to extend the classics (Keynes, Sraffa) and also my critique of the new forms of vulgar economics (which I called “the witchcraft of modern times”).5
8. ECONOMIC LAWS AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
The schema of expanded reproduction thus seems to reveal that precise economic laws do exist, which, like any other laws, have an objective existence, that is, impose themselves willy-nilly on everyone.
To conclude, the importance of Volume II of Capital, as it stands, is essential: it shows that, in the capitalist mode, social reproduction appears first and foremost as economic reproduction. Whereas in the precapitalist modes, in which exploitation was transparent, reproduction implied direct intervention from the level of the superstructure, that is not so here. This qualitative difference needs to be emphasized.
There has been no question, so far, of the class struggle. This is, indeed, absent from the direct discourse of Volume II of Capital.
“Economic determinism” was foreign to Marx, but not so to historical Marxism. A linear economic determinism, linked to a scientistic philosophical vision of “progress,” was predominant in the Second International and became even more dominant when social democracy, after the Second World War, abandoned its claim to derivation from Marx.
One attitude that can be taken in this connection is that the class struggle setting bourgeoisie and proletariat against each other over the division of the product (the rate of surplus-value) is subordinate to economic laws. The class struggle can, at most, only reveal the equilibrium rate that is objectively necessary. It occupies, in this context, a position comparable to that of the “invisible hand” of bourgeois economics. The language of the “universal harmony” of social interests is replaced by that of the “objective necessities of progress.”
What we have here is a reduction of Marxism to the so-called Marxist (or, rather, Marxian) political economy that is fashionable in the English-speaking world under the name of “Marxian economics.” According to this view, there are economic laws, which constitute objective necessities, irrespective of the class struggle.
On such a basis, however, it is no longer possible to conceive of a classless society in the true sense, since it appears as a society identical with class society. The progress of the productive forces continues to dominate it, just as this progress has been dominant throughout history. This progress has its own laws: an ever more intensified division of labor, in the form we know well. Capitalism is seen as guilty only of not being able to carry forward the march of progress effectively enough. As for those writings of Marx in which he criticizes sharply the shortsightedness of the philistine who cannot imagine a future in which no one is exclusively an artist or a lathe-operator, they are so much utopian daydreaming. Capitalism is seen as, basically, a model for eternity, blameworthy only for the social “wastage” constituted by the capitalists’ consumption, and for the anarchy caused by competition among capitals. Socialism will put an end to these two abuses by organizing, on the basis of state-centralized ownership of the means of production, a system of “rational planning.”
How are we to arrive at this statist mode of production—the highest stage of evolution, a wise submission to “objective laws” for the greater good of society as a whole? By the road of reformism: trade unions, by imposing a “social contract” governing the distribution of the gains of productivity, prepare the way for the formal expropriation of the unnecessary capitalists, after having first served as a school of management for the cadres and elites who represent the proletariat and whose task it is to organize and command.
There is a second possible attitude. Reacting against this type of analysis, one proclaims the supremacy of the class struggle. Wage levels, it is held, result not from the objective laws of expanded reproduction, but directly from the conflict between classes. Accumulation adjusts itself, if it can, to the outcome of this struggle—and, if it can’t, the system suffers crisis, that’s all.
I here put forward four theses concerning the linkage among the (economic) “laws” of capitalistic accumulation, on one side, and the social struggles, in the broadest sense, on the other. By that, I mean the totality of social and political struggles and conflicts, national and international.
THESIS 1: These struggles and conflicts, in all their complexity, produce “national” systems and a global system, which go from disequilibrium to disequilibrium without ever tending toward the ideal equilibrium formulated by conventional or Marxian (but, in my opinion, scarcely Marxist) economists.
THESIS 2: The inner logic of capitalism—maximization of the rate of profit and of the mass of surplus-value—gives rise to a tendency toward a disequilibrium favoring the possessing classes (the bourgeoisie in the widest sense) at the expense of labor incomes (of all diverse forms). Capitalist reproduction, by virtue of this fact, ought to become “impossible.” And in fact, the history of capitalism is not one of “continuous growth,” of a “long tranquil river” assuring continuous growth of production and consumption, flowing over accidental obstructions that are called “crises.” Like Paul Sweezy, I view this history, contrariwise, as being one of long crises (1873–1945; 1971 to today and, no doubt, stretching far beyond 2010), reducing the short periods of rapid (and problem-free) growth to historical exceptions (like the “thirty great years” between 1945 and 1975).6
THESIS 3: Despite this permanent malaise, capitalism has managed so far to get out of its blind alleys and to invent effective ways for adapting to the demands posed by changes in the balance of social and international forces. This reminds us that the progress of the productive forces (its pace and the directions it takes) is not some independent exogenous factor, but one that results from class struggle and is embodied in production relations—that it is modulated by the ruling classes. This thesis reminds us that the Taylorism of yesterday and the automation and “technological revolution” of today are responses to working class struggle, as are also the centralization of capital, imperialism, the relocation of industries, and so on.
So