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Notes
From
the Editors
István
Mészáros is author of Socialism or Barbarism: From
the "American Century" to the Crossroads (Monthly Review Press,
2001) and Beyond
Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (Monthly Review Press,
1995). This essay is excerpted from his newest book, The Challenge and
Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century
(forthcoming). |
1.
Once upon a time the capitalist mode of production represented a great
advance over all of the preceding ones, however problematical and indeed
destructive this historical advance in the end turned out -- and had to
turn out -- to be. By breaking the long prevailing but
constraining direct link between human use and production, and replacing
it with the commodity relation, capital opened up the dynamically
unfolding possibilities of apparently irresistible expansion to
which -- from the standpoint of the capital system and of its willing
personifications -- there could be no conceivable limits. For the
paradoxical and ultimately quite untenable inner determination of
capital's productive system is that its commodified products "are
non-use-values for their owners and use-values for their non-owners.
Consequently they must all change hands. . . . Hence
commodities must be realised as values before they can be realised as
use-values."1
This self-contradictory inner determination of the system, which
imposes the ruthless submission of human need to the alienating necessity
of capital expansion, is what removes the possibility of overall rational
control from this dynamic productive order. It brings with itself
perilous and potentially catastrophic consequences in the longer run,
transforming in due course a great positive power of earlier
quite unimaginable economic development into a devastating negativity,
in the total absence of the necessary reproductive restraint.
What is systematically ignored -- and must be ignored, due to the
unalterable fetishistic imperatives and vested interests of the capital
system itself -- is the fact that, inescapably, we live in a finite
world, with its literally vital objective limits. For
a long time in human history, including several centuries of capitalistic
developments, those limits could be -- as indeed they were -- ignored with
relative safety. Once, however, they assert themselves, as they
emphatically must do in our irreversible historical epoch, no irrational
and wasteful productive system, no matter how dynamic (in fact the more
dynamic the worse) can escape the consequences. It can only
disregard them for a while through reorienting itself toward the callous
justification of the more or less openly destructive imperative of the
system's self-preservation at all cost: by preaching the wisdom of "there
is no alternative," and in that spirit brushing aside and, whenever need
be, brutally suppressing even the most obvious warning signs that
foreshadow the unsustainable future.
False theorization is the necessary consequence of this lopsided
objective structural determination and domination of use value by exchange
value not only under the most absurdly and blindly apologetic conditions
of contemporary capitalism but also in the classical period of bourgeois
political economy, at the time of the capital system's historical
ascendancy. This is because under the rule of capital a
fictitiously limitless production must be pursued at all cost, as
well as theoretically justified as the only commendable one. Such
pursuit is imperative even if there can be no guarantee whatsoever that:
(1) the required and sustainable "changing of hands" of the supplied
commodities will actually take place on the idealized market (thanks to
the mysterious benevolence of Adam Smith's even more mysterious "invisible
hand"); and (2) that the objective material conditions for producing the
projected unlimited -- and humanly unlimitable, since in its primary
determination divorced from need and use -- supply of commodities can be
forever secured, irrespective of the destructive impact of
capital's mode of social metabolic reproduction on nature.
The ideal suitability of the market for rectifying the unalterable
structural defect indicated in point (1) above is a gratuitous
afterthought, bringing with it many arbitrary assumptions and
unfulfillable regulative projections in the same vein. The sobering
reality underlying the market as a remedial afterthought is a set of
insuperably adversarial power relations, tending to monopolistic
domination and to the intensification of the system's antagonisms.
Likewise, the grave structural defect of pursuing unlimited capital
expansion -- idealizing all-important "growth" as an end in itself -- as
put into relief in point (2) above, is complemented by an equally
fictitious afterthought when it has to be admitted that some
remedy might be in order. And the remedy thus projected -- as an
alternative to the system's collapse into the unredeemable negativity of
the fateful "stationary state" theorized by bourgeois political
economy in the nineteenth century -- is simply the wishful advocacy of
making distribution "more equitable" (and thereby less
conflict-torn) while leaving the production system as it stands.
This postulate, even if it could be implemented, which of course it cannot
be, due to the fundamental hierarchical structural determinations of
capital's social order itself, would not be able to solve any of the grave
problems of production on which also the insurmountable
contradictions of the capital system's incurable distribution are
erected.
One of the principal representatives of liberal thought, John Stuart
Mill, is as genuine in his concern about the "stationary state" of the
future as he is hopelessly unreal in his proposed remedy to it. For
he can only offer vacuous hope in his discussion of this problem which
happens to be absolutely intractable from the standpoint of capital.
He writes that "I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they
will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels
them to it."2 In this way Mill's discourse amounts
to no more than paternalistic preaching, because he can only acknowledge,
in tune with his acceptance of the Malthusian diagnosis, the difficulties
arising from population growth, but none of the contradictions of
capital's reproductive order. His bourgeois self-complacency is
clearly visible, depriving his analysis and paternalistic reforming intent
of all substance. Mill peremptorily asserts that "It is only in the
backward countries of the world that increased production is
still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically
needed is a better distribution, of which one indispensable means
is a stricter restraint on population."3 Even his idea of "better
distribution" is hopelessly unreal. For what Mill cannot possibly
recognize (or acknowledge) is that the overwhelmingly important aspect of
distribution is the untouchable exclusive distribution of the means of
production to the capitalist class. Understandably, therefore, on
such a self-serving operational premise of the social order a paternalist
sense of superiority remains always prevalent in this that no solution can
be expected "until the better minds succeeded in educating the
others,"4 so that they accept population restraint
and a "better distribution" supposedly arising from such restraint.
Thus people should forget all about changing the destructive structural
determinations of the established social metabolic order which inexorably
drive society toward a stagnating stationary state. In Mill's
discourse the utopia of the capitalist millennium, with its tenable
stationary state, will be brought into existence thanks to the good
services of the enlightened liberal "better minds." And then, as far
as the structural determinations of the established social reproductive
order are concerned, everything can go on forever as before.
All this made some sense from capital's standpoint, however
problematical and ultimately untenable that sense in the end had to turn
out to be, due to the dramatic onset and relentless deepening of the
system's structural crisis. But even that partial sense of the same
wishful propositions could not be ascribed to the reformist political
movement which claimed to represent the strategic interests of
labor. Yet, social-democratic reformism at its inception took its
inspiration from such naive, even if at first genuinely held,
afterthoughts of liberal political economy. Thus, due to the
internal logic of the adopted social premises, emanating from capital's
standpoint and vested interests as the unchallengeable controller of the
reproductive metabolism, it could not be surprising in the least that
social-democratic reformism ended its course of development the way in
which it actually did: by transforming itself into "New Labor" (in
Britain; and its equivalents in other countries) and by abandoning
completely any concern with even the most limited reform of the
established social order. At the same time, in place of genuine
liberalism the most savage and inhuman varieties of neoliberalism
appeared on the historical stage, wiping out the memory of the once
advocated social remedies -- including even the wishful paternalistic
solutions -- from the progressive past of the liberal creed. And as
a bitter irony of contemporary historical development, the "New
Labor"–type former social-democratic reformist movements installed in
government -- not only in Britain but also everywhere else in the
"advanced" and not so advanced capitalist world -- did not hesitate to
unreservedly identify themselves with the aggressive neoliberal phase of
capital-apologetics. This capitulatory transformation clearly marked
the end of the reformist road which was a blind alley from the outset.
2.
In order to create an economically viable, and also on a long-term
basis historically sustainable, social reproductive order it is necessary
to radically alter the self-contradictory inner determinations of the
established one, which impose the ruthless submission of human need and
use to the alienating necessity of capital expansion. This means
that the absurd precondition of the ruling productive system -- whereby
use values, by preordained and totally iniquitous ownership
determinations, must be divorced from, and opposed to, those who create
them, so as to bring about and circularly/arbitrarily legitimate capital's
enlarged self-realization -- has to be permanently relegated to the
past. Otherwise the only viable meaning of economy as
rational economizing with the available, necessarily finite,
resources cannot be instituted and respected as a vital orienting
principle. Instead, irresponsible wastefulness dominates in
capital's socioeconomic -- and corresponding political -- order which
invariably reasserts itself as institutionalized
irresponsibility, notwithstanding its self-mythology of
absolutely insuperable "efficiency." (To be sure, the kind of
"efficiency" glorified in this way is in fact capital's ultimately
self-undermining efficiency for blindly driving forward the
adversarial/conflictual parts at the incorrigible expense of the
whole.) Understandably, therefore, the governmentally
well-promoted fantasies of "market socialism" had to fizzle out in the
form of a humiliating collapse, due to the acceptance of such
presuppositions and capitalistically insuperable structural
determinations.
The now dominant conception of the "economy," which happens to be quite
incapable of setting limits even to the most grievous waste, in our time
truly on a planetary scale, can only operate with self-serving
tautologies and arbitrarily prefabricated, as well as
simultaneously dismissed, false oppositions and
pseudo-alternatives, devised for the same purpose of unjustifiable
self-justification. As a blatant -- and dangerously all-infecting --
tautology, we are offered the arbitrary definition of productivity as
growth, and growth as productivity, although both terms would require
a historically qualified and objectively sustainable evaluation of their
own.
Naturally, the reason why the obvious tautological fallacy is much
preferable to the required proper theoretical and practical assessment is
that by arbitrarily decreeing the identity of these two key terms
of reference of the capital system the self-evident validity and
timeless superiority of an extremely problematical -- and ultimately
even self-destructive -- social reproductive order should look not only
plausible but absolutely unquestionable. At the same time, the
arbitrarily decreed tautological identity of growth and
productivity is shored up by the equally arbitrary and self-serving false
alternative between "growth or no-growth." Moreover, the
latter is automatically prejudged in favor of capitalistically postulated
and defined "growth." It is projected and defined with
fetishistic quantification, as befits its way of presupposing
forever, as self-commendingly synonymous to growth itself,
nothing more specific and humanly meaningful than the abstract genericity
of enlarged capital-expansion as the elementary precondition
for satisfying human need and use.
That is where the incorrigible divorce of capitalistic growth from
human need and use -- indeed its potentially most devastating and
destructive counter-position to human need -- betrays
itself. Once the fetishisitic mystifications and arbitrary
postulates at the root of the categorically decreed false identity of
growth and productivity are peeled away, it becomes abundantly
clear that the kind of growth postulated and at the same time
automatically exempted from all critical scrutiny is in no way inherently
connected with sustainable objectives corresponding to human need.
The only connection that must be asserted and defended at all cost in
capital's social metabolic universe is the false identity of --
aprioristically presupposed -- capital expansion and circularly
corresponding (but in truth likewise aprioristically presupposed)
"growth," whatever might be the consequences imposed on nature and
humankind by even the most destructive type of growth. For capital's
real concern can only be its own ever enlarged expansion, even if
that brings with it the destruction of humanity.
In this vision even the most lethal cancerous growth must
preserve its conceptual primacy over (against) human need and use, if
human need by any chance happens to be mentioned at all. And when
the apologists of the capital system are willing to consider The
Limits to Growth,5 as the "Club of Rome" did in its vastly
propagandized capital-apologetic venture in the early 1970s, the aim
inevitably remains the eternalization of the existing grave
inequalities6 by fictitiously (and quixotically) freezing
global capitalist production at a totally untenable level, blaming
primarily "population growth" (as customary in bourgeois political economy
ever since Malthus) for the existing problems. Compared to such
callous hypocritical "remedial intent," rhetorically pretending to be
concerned with nothing less than "the Predicament of Mankind," Mill's
earlier quoted paternalistic preaching, with its genuine advocacy of
somewhat more equitable distribution than what he was familiar with, was
the paradigm of radical enlightenment.
The characteristically self-serving false alternative of "growth or no
growth" is evident even if we only consider what would be the unavoidable
impact of the postulated "no growth" on the grave conditions of inequality
and suffering in capital's social order. It would mean the
permanent condemnation of humanity's overwhelming majority to the
inhuman conditions which they are now forced to endure. For they are
now in a literal sense forced to endure them, by their thousands of
millions, when there could be created a real alternative to
it. Under conditions, that is, when it would be quite feasible to
rectify at least the worst effects of global deprivation: by putting to
humanly commendable and rewarding use the attained potential of
productivity, in a world of now criminally wasted material and human
resources.
3.
To be sure, we can only speak of the positive potential of
productivity, and not of its existing reality, as often predicated,
with green-colored good intentions but boundless illusions, by old
fashioned single-issue reformers, wishfully asserting that we could do it
"right now," with the productive powers at our disposal today, if we
really decided to do so. Unfortunately, however, such a conception
completely ignores the way in which our productive system is presently
articulated, requiring in the future a radical rearticulation. For
productivity wedded to capitalist growth, in the form of the now
dominant reality of destructive production, is a most forbidding
adversary. In order to turn the positive potentiality of productive
development into a much needed reality, so as to be able to rectify many
of the crying inequalities and injustices of our existing society, it
would be necessary to adopt the regulative principles of a
qualitatively different social order. In other words,
humanity's now destructively negated potential of productivity
would have to be liberated from its capitalist integument in order to
become socially viable productive power.
The quixotic advocacy of freezing production at the level attained in
the early 1970s was trying to camouflage, with vacuous pseudo-scientific
model-mongering pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the ruthlessly enforced actual power relations of U.S. dominated postwar
imperialism. That variety of imperialism was, of course, very
different from its earlier form known to Lenin. For in Lenin's
lifetime at least half a dozen significant imperialist powers were
competing for the rewards of their real and/or hoped for conquests.
And even in the 1930s Hitler was still willing to share the fruits of
violently redefined imperialism with Japan and Mussolini's Italy. In
our time, by contrast, we have to face up to the reality -- and the lethal
dangers -- arising from global hegemonic imperialism, with the
United States as its overwhelmingly dominant power.7 In contrast to even Hitler, the
United States as the single hegemon is quite unwilling to share
global domination with any rival. And that is not simply on account
of political/military contingencies. The problems are much
deeper. They assert themselves through the ever-aggravating
contradictions of the capital system's deepening structural
crisis. U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism is an --
ultimately futile -- attempt to devise a solution to that crisis through
the most brutal and violent rule over the rest of the world, enforced with
or without the help of slavishly "willing allies," now through a
succession of genocidal wars. Ever since the 1970s the United States
has been sinking ever deeper into catastrophic
indebtedness. The fantasy solution publicly proclaimed by
several U.S. presidents was "to grow out of it." And the
result: the diametrical opposite, in the form of astronomical and still
growing indebtedness. Accordingly, the United States must grab to
itself, by any means at its disposal, including the most violent military
aggression, whenever required for this purpose, everything it can, through
the transfer of the fruits of capitalist growth -- thanks to the global
socioeconomic and political/military domination of the United States --
from everywhere in the world. Could then any sane person imagine, no
matter how well armored by his or her callous contempt for "the shibboleth
of equality," that U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism would take
seriously even for a moment the panacea of "no growth"? Only the
worst kind of bad faith could suggest such ideas, no matter how
pretentiously packaged in the hypocritical concern over "the Predicament
of Mankind."
For a variety of reasons there can be no question about the importance
of growth both in the present and in the future. But to say so must
go with a proper examination of the concept of growth not only as we know
it up to the present, but also as we can envisage its sustainability in
the future. Our siding with the need for growth cannot be in favor
of unqualified growth. The tendentiously avoided real
question is: what kind of growth is both feasible today, in
contrast to dangerously wasteful and even crippling capitalist growth
visible all around us? For growth must be also positively
sustainable in the future on a long-term basis.
As mentioned already, capitalist growth is fatefully dominated by the
inescapable confines of fetishistic quantification.
Ever-aggravating wastefulness is a necessary corollary of such
fetishism, since there can be no criteria -- and no viable
measure -- through the observance of which wastefulness could be
corrected. More or less arbitrary quantification sets the
context, creating at the same time also the illusion that once the
required quantities are secured for the more powerful, there can be no
further significant problems. Yet the truth of the matter is that
self-oriented quantification in reality cannot be sustained at
all as a form of productively viable strategy even in the short run.
For it is partial and myopic (if not altogether blind), concerned only
with quantities corresponding to the immediate obstacles
hindering the accomplishment of a given productive task, but not with the
necessarily associated structural limits of the socioeconomic
enterprise itself which -- whether you know it or not -- ultimately decide
everything. The capitalistically necessary confusion of
structural limits with obstacles (which can be
quantitatively overcome), in order to ignore the limits (since
they correspond to the insurmountable determinations of capital's social
metabolic order), vitiates the growth orientation of the entire productive
system. To make growth viable would require applying to it
profoundly qualitative considerations. But that is
absolutely prevented by the unquestioning and unquestionable
self-expansionary drive of capital at all cost, which is
incompatible with the constraining consideration of
quality and limits.
The great innovation of the capital system is that it can operate --
undialectically -- through the overwhelming domination of
quantity: by subsuming everything, including living
human labor (inseparable from the qualities of human need and use) under
abstract quantitative determinations, in the form of value and
exchange value. Thus everything becomes profitably commensurable and
manageable for a determinate period of time. This is the secret of
capital's -- for a long time irresistible -- sociohistorical
triumph. But it is also the harbinger of its ultimate
unsustainability and necessary implosion, once the absolute
limits of the system are fully activated, as they increasingly happen
to be in our own historical epoch. Ours is the time when the
undialectical domination of quality by quantity becomes dangerous and
untenable.
For it is inconceivable to ignore in our time the fundamental, but
under capitalism necessarily sidelined inherent connection of economy
as economizing (which equals responsible
husbandry). We have now arrived at a critical point in
history when the ruling productive system's willing personifications do
everything in their power to wipe out all awareness of that vital
objective connection -- opting for undeniable destructiveness, not only in
the cult of extremely wasteful productive practices, but even glorifying
their lethally destructive engagement in unlimited "preventive and
preemptive wars."
Quality, by its very nature, is inseparable from
specificities. Accordingly, a social metabolic system
respectful of quality -- above all of the needs of living human beings as
its producing subjects -- cannot be hierarchically regimented. A
radically different kind of socioeconomic and cultural management is
required for a society operated on the basis of such a qualitatively
different reproductive metabolism, briefly summed up as
self-management. Regimentation was both feasible and
necessary for capital's social metabolic order. In fact the command
structure of capital could not function in any other way.
Structurally secured hierarchy and authoritarian regimentation are the
defining characteristics of capital's command structure. The
alternative order is incompatible with regimentation and with the kind of
accountancy -- including the strictly quantitative operation of
necessary labor time -- which must prevail in the capital
system. Thus, the kind of growth necessary and feasible in
the alternative social metabolic order can only be based on
quality directly corresponding to human needs: the
actual and historically developing needs of both society as a whole and of
its particular individuals.
At the same time, the alternative to the restrictive and fetishistic
time-accountancy of necessary labor time can only be the
liberating and emancipating disposable time consciously offered
and managed by the social individuals themselves. That kind of
social metabolic control of the available human and material resources
would -- and actually could -- respect both the overall limits arising
from the orienting principle of economy as economizing; and at the same
time it would also consciously expand such qualitative limits and needs as
the historically developing conditions safely permitted. After all,
we should not forget that "the first historical act was the creation of a
new need" (Marx). Only capital's reckless way of treating the
economy -- not as rational economizing but as the most irresponsible
legitimation of boundless waste -- is what totally perverts this
historical process: by substituting for the rich diversity of human needs
capital's alienating one-and-only real need for enlarged self-reproduction
at all cost, thereby threatening to bring to an end human history
itself.
4.
There can be not even partial correctives introduced into
capital's operational framework if they are genuinely
quality-oriented. For the only qualities relevant in this respect
are not some abstract physical characteristics but the humanly
meaningful qualities inseparable from need. It is true, of
course, as stressed before, that such qualities are always specific,
corresponding to clearly identifiable particular human needs both of the
individuals themselves and of their historically given and changing social
relations. Accordingly, in their many sided specificity they
constitute a coherent and well defined set of inviolable systemic
determinations, with their own systemic limits. It is
precisely the existence of such -- very far from abstract -- systemic
limits which makes it impossible to transfer any meaningful operating
determinations and orienting principles from the envisaged alternative
social metabolic order into the capital system. The two systems are
radically exclusive of each other. For the specific qualities
corresponding to human need, in the alternative order, carry the indelible
marks of their overall systemic determinations, as integral parts of a
humanly valid social reproductive system of control. In the capital
system, on the contrary, the overall determinations must be unalterably
abstract, because capital's value relation must reduce
all qualities (corresponding to need and use) to measurable generic
quantities, in order to assert its alienating historical dominance over
everything, in the interest of capital expansion, irrespective of the
consequences.
The incompatibilities of the two systems become amply clear when we
consider their relationship to the question of limit
itself. The only sustainable growth positively
promoted under the alternative social metabolic control is based on the
conscious acceptance of the limits whose violation would imperil
the realization of the chosen -- and humanly valid -- reproductive
objectives. Hence wastefulness and destructiveness (as
clearly identified limiting concepts) are absolutely excluded by
the consciously accepted systemic determinations themselves, adopted by
the social individuals as their vital orienting principles. By
contrast, the capital system is characterized, and fatefully driven, by
the -- conscious or unconscious -- rejection of all limits, including
its own systemic limits. Even the latter are arbitrarily and
dangerously treated as if they were nothing more than always superable
contingent obstacles. Hence anything goes in this social
reproductive system, including the possibility -- and by the time we have
reached our own historical epoch also the overwhelming grave probability
-- of total destruction.
Naturally, this mutually exclusive relationship to the question of
limits prevails also the other way round. Thus, there can be no
"partial correctives" borrowed from the capital system when creating and
strengthening the alternative social metabolic order. The partial --
not to mention general -- incompatibilities of the two systems arise from
the radical incompatibility of their value dimension. As
mentioned above, this is why the particular value determinations and
relations of the alternative order could not be transferred into capital's
social metabolic framework for the purpose of improving it, as postulated
by some utterly unreal reformist design, wedded to the vacuous methodology
of "little by little." For even the smallest partial relations of
the alternative system are deeply embedded in the general value
determinations of an overall framework of human needs whose
inviolable elementary axiom is the radical exclusion of waste and
destruction, in accord with its innermost nature.
At the same time, on the other side, no partial "correctives" can be
transferred from the operational framework of capital into a genuinely
socialist order, as the disastrous failure of Gorbachev's "market
socialist" venture painfully and conclusively demonstrated. For also
in that respect we would always be confronted by the radical
incompatibility of value determinations, even if in that case the value
involved is destructive counter value, corresponding to the
ultimate -- necessarily ignored -- limits of the capital system
itself. The systemic limits of capital are thoroughly compatible
with waste and destruction. For such normative considerations can
only be secondary to capital. More fundamental
determinations must take the precedence over such concerns. This is
why capital's original indifference to waste and destruction
(never a more positive posture than indifference) is turned into their
most active promotion when conditions require that shift. In fact
waste and destruction must be relentlessly pursued in this system in
direct subordination to the imperative of capital expansion, the
overwhelming systemic determinant. The more so the further
we leave behind the historically ascending phase of the capital system's
development. And no one should be fooled by the fact that frequently
the preponderant assertion of counter value is misrepresented and
rationalized as "value neutrality" by capital's celebrated
ideologists.
It was therefore mind-boggling that at the time of Gorbachev's
ill-fated "perestroika" his "ideology chief" (called officially by that
name) could seriously assert that the capitalist market and its commodity
relations were the instrumental embodiments of "universal human values"
and a "major achievement of human civilization," adding to these grotesque
capitulatory assertions that the capitalist market was even "the
guarantee of the renewal of socialism."8 Such theorists kept talking about the
adoption of the "market mechanism," when the capitalist market was
anything but an adaptable neutral "mechanism." It
was in fact incurably value laden, and must always remain so. In
this kind of conception -- curiously shared by Gorbachev's "socialist
ideology chief" (and others) with the Friedrich von Hayeks of this world
who violently denounced any idea of socialism as "The Road to Serfdom"9 -- exchange in general was
ahistorically and anti-historically equated with capitalist
exchange, and the ever more destructive reality of the capitalist
market with a fictionalized benevolent "market" in
general. Whether they realized it or not, they capitulated thereby
to idealizing the imperatives of a ruthless system of necessary market
domination (ultimately inseparable from the ravages of imperialism)
required by the inner determinations of capital's social metabolic
order. The adoption of this capitulatory position was equally
pronounced but even more damaging in Gorbachev's reform document.
For he insisted that
There are no alternatives to the market. Only the market
can ensure the satisfaction of people's needs, the fair
distribution of wealth, social rights, and the strengthening
of freedom and democracy. The market would permit the
Soviet economy to be organically linked with the world's, and
give our citizens access to all the achievements of world
civilization.10
Naturally, given the total unreality of Gorbachev's "no alternative"
wishful thinking, expecting the generous supply "to the people" of all
those wonderful would-be achievements and benefits, in all domains, from
the global capitalist market, this venture could only end, most
humiliatingly, in the disastrous implosion of the Soviet-type system.
5.
It is not at all accidental or surprising that the proposition of
"there is no alternative" occupies such a prominent place in the
socioeconomic and political conceptions formulated from capital's
standpoint. Not even the greatest thinkers of the bourgeoisie --
like Adam Smith and Hegel -- could be exceptions in this respect.
For it is absolutely true that the bourgeois order either succeeds in
asserting itself in the form of dynamic capital expansion, or it
is condemned to ultimate failure. There can be really no
conceivable alternative to endless capital expansion from capital's
standpoint, determining thereby the vision of all those who adopt
it. But the adoption of this standpoint also means that the question
of "what price must be paid" for uncontrollable capital expansion
beyond a certain point in time -- once the ascendant phase of the system's
development is left behind -- cannot enter into consideration at
all. The violation of historical time is therefore the
necessary consequence of adopting capital's standpoint by internalizing
the system's expansionary imperative as its most fundamental and
absolutely unalterable determinant. Even in the conceptions of the
greatest bourgeois thinkers this position must prevail. There can be
no alternative future social order whose defining characteristics would be
significantly different from the already established one. This is
why even Hegel, who formulated by far the most profound historical
conception up to his own time, must also arbitrarily bring history to an
end in capital's unalterable present, idealizing the capitalist nation
state11 as the insuperable climax of all
conceivable historical development, despite his sharp perception of the
destructive implications of the whole system of nation states.
Thus, there can be no alternative to decreeing the pernicious dogma of
no alternative in bourgeois thought. But it is totally absurd for
socialists to adopt the position of endless (and by its nature
uncontrollable) capital expansion. For the corollary idealization of
-- again characteristically unqualified -- "consumption" ignores the
elementary truth that from capital's uncritical self-expansionary vantage
point there can be no difference between destruction and
consumption. One is as good as the other for the required
purpose. This is so because the commercial transaction in the
capital relation -- even of the most destructive kind, embodied in the
ware of the military/industrial complex and the use to which it is put in
its inhuman wars -- successfully completes the cycle of capital's enlarged
self-reproduction, so as to be able to open a new cycle. This is the
only thing that really matters to capital, no matter how unsustainable
might be the consequences. Consequently, when socialists internalize
the imperative of capital expansion as the necessary ground of the
advocated growth, they do not simply accept an isolated tenet but a whole
"package deal." Knowingly or not, they accept at the same time all
of the false alternatives -- like "growth or no-growth" -- that
can be derived from the uncritical advocacy of necessary capital
expansion.
The false alternative of no growth must be rejected by us not
only because its adoption would perpetuate the most gruesome misery and
inequality now dominating the world, with struggle and destructiveness
inseparable from it. The radical negation of that approach can only
be a necessary point of departure. The inherently positive
dimension of our vision involves the fundamental redefinition of
wealth itself as known to us. Under capital's social
metabolic order we are confronted by the alienating rule of wealth
over society, directly affecting every aspect of life, from the
narrowly economic to the cultural and spiritual domains.
Consequently, we cannot get out of capital's vicious circle, with all of
its ultimately destructive determinations and false alternatives, without
fully turning around that vital relationship. Namely, without
making society -- the society of freely associated individuals -- rule
over wealth, redefining at the same time also their relation to
time and to the kind of use to which the products of
human labor are put. As Marx had written already in one of his early
works:
In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in
which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be
determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of
production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of
its social utility.12
This means an uncompromising departure from viewing wealth as a
fetishistic material entity which must ignore the real
individuals who are the creators of wealth. Naturally, capital
-- in its false claim to be identical to wealth, as the "creator and
embodiment of wealth" -- must ignore the individuals, in the
self-legitimating service of its own social metabolic control. In this
way, by usurping the role of real wealth and subverting the potential use
to which it could be put, capital is the enemy of historical
time. This is what must be redressed for the sake of human
survival itself. Thus all constituents of the unfolding
relationships among the historically self-determining real individuals,
together with the wealth they create and positively allocate through the
conscious application of the only viable modality of time --
disposable time -- must be brought together in a qualitatively
different social metabolic framework. To say it with Marx:
real wealth is the developed productive power of all
individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any
way, labor time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the
measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and
disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus
labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour
time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker,
subsumption under labour.13
Disposable time is the individuals' actual historical
time. In contrast, necessary labor time required for the
functioning of capital's mode of social metabolic control is
anti-historical, denying the individuals the only way in which
they can assert and fulfill themselves as real historical
subjects in control of their own life-activity. In the form of
capital's necessary labor time the individuals are subjected to time
exercised as tyrannical judge anddegrading measure, with
no court of appeal, instead of being itself judged and measured in
relation to qualitative human criteria "by the needs of the
social individuals."14 Capital's perversely
self-absolutizing anti-historical time thus superimposes itself over human
life as fetishistic determinant which reduces living labor to
"time's carcase," as discussed elsewhere, in relation to "The
Necessity of Planning." The historical challenge is, then, to move
in the alternative social metabolic order from the rule of capital's
frozen time as alienating determinant to become freely
determined by the social individuals themselves who consciously
dedicate to the realization of their chosen objectives their incomparably
richer resources of disposable time than what could be squeezed
out of them through the tyranny of necessary labor time. This is an
absolutely vital difference. For only social individuals can really
determine their own disposable time, in sharp contrast to
necessary labor time which dominates them. The adoption of
disposable time is the only conceivable and rightful way in which
time can be transformed from tyrannical determinant into
autonomously and creatively determined constituent of the
reproduction process.
6.
This challenge necessarily involves the supersession of the
structurally enforced hierarchical social division of labor. For so
long as time dominates society in the form of the imperative to extract
the surplus labor time of its overwhelming majority, the personnel in
charge of this process must lead a substantially different form of
existence, in conformity to its function as the willing enforcer of
the alienating time imperative. At the same time the
overwhelming majority of the individuals are "degraded to mere worker,
subsumed under labour." Under such conditions, the social
reproduction process must sink ever deeper into its structural
crisis, with the perilous ultimate implications of no possible way of
return.
The nightmare of the "stationary state" remains a nightmare even if one
tries to alleviate it, as John Stuart Mill proposed, through the illusory
remedy of "better distribution" taken in isolation. There can be no
such thing as "better distribution" without a radical restructuring of the
productionprocess itself. The socialist hegemonic
alternative to the rule of capital requires fundamentally overcoming the
truncated dialectic in the vital interrelationship of
production, distribution, and consumption. For without
that, the socialist aim of turning work into "life's prime want" is
inconceivable. To quote Marx:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith
also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished;
after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime
want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the
narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society
inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs!15
These are the overall targets of socialist transformation,
providing the compass of the journey and simultaneously also the
measure of the achievements accomplished (or failed to be
accomplished) on the way. Within such a vision of the hegemonic
alternative to capital's social reproductive order there can be no room at
all for anything like "the stationary state," nor for any of the false
alternatives associated with or derived from it." The all-round
development of the individuals," consciously exercising the full
resources of their disposable time, within the framework of the
new social metabolic control oriented toward the production of
"co-operative wealth," is meant to provide the basis of a
qualitatively different accountancy: the necessary socialist
accountancy, defined by human need and diametrically opposed to
fetishistic quantification and to the concomitant unavoidable waste.
This is why the vital importance of growth of a sustainable
kind can be recognized and successfully managed in the alternative
social metabolic framework. Such an alternative order of social
metabolic control would be one where the antithesis between mental and
physical labor -- always vital for maintaining the absolute domination
over labor by capital as the usurper of the role of the controlling
historical subject -- must vanish for good. Consequently,
consciously pursued productivity itself can be elevated to a
qualitatively higher level, without any danger of uncontrollable
waste, bringing forth genuine -- and not narrowly profit-oriented
material -- wealth of which the "rich social individuals" (Marx),
as autonomous historical subjects (and rich precisely in that sense) are
fully in control.
In the "stationary state," by contrast, the individuals could not be
genuine historical subjects. For they could not be in control of a
life of their own, in view of being at the mercy of the worst kind of
material determinations directly under the rule of incurable
scarcity.
Ever growing -- and by its ultimate implications catastrophic -- waste
in the capital system is inseparable from the most irresponsible way in
which the produced goods and services are utilized, in the
service of profitable capital-expansion. Perversely, the lower their
rate of utilization the higher the scope for profitable replacement -- an
absurdity emanating from capital's alienated vantage point whereby there
can be no meaningful distinction drawn between consumption and
destruction. For totally wasteful destruction just as
adequately fulfills the demand required by self-expansionary capital for a
new profitable cycle of production as genuine consumption corresponding to
use would be able to do. However, the moment of truth arrives when a
heavy price must be paid for capital's criminally irresponsible husbandry,
in the course of historical development. That is the point where the
imperative to adopt an increasingly better and incomparably more
responsible rate of utilization of the produced goods and
services -- and indeed consciously produced with that aim in mind, in
relation to qualitative human need and use -- becomes absolutely vital.
For the only viable economy -- one that economizes in a
meaningful way and is thereby sustainable in the near and more distant
future -- can only be the kind of rationally managed economy, oriented
toward the optimal utilization of the produced goods and
services. There can be no growth of a sustainable kind
outside these parameters of rational husbandry oriented by genuine human
need.
To take a crucially important example of what is incurably wrong in
this respect under the rule of capital, we should think of the way in
which the ever growing numbers of motor cars are utilized in our
societies. The resources squandered on the production and fueling of
motor cars are immense under "advanced capitalism," representing the
second highest expenditure -- after the mortgage commitments -- in the
particular households. Absurdly, however, the rate of utilization of
motor cars is less than 1 percent, spuriously justified by the
exclusive possession rights conferred upon their purchasers.
At the same time the thoroughly practicable real alternative is not
simply neglected but actively sabotaged by the massive vested interests of
quasi-monopolistic corporations. For the simple truth is that what
the individuals need (and do not obtain, despite the heavy
financial burden imposed upon them) are adequate transport
services, and not the economically wasteful and environmentally most
damaging privately owned commodity which also makes them lose countless
hours of their lives in unhealthy traffic jams.
Evidently, the real alternative would be to develop public
transport to the qualitatively highest level, satisfying the
necessary economic, environmental, and personal health criteria well
within the scope of such a rationally pursued project, confining at the
same time the use of -- collectively owned and appropriately allocated,
but not exclusively/wastefully possessed -- motor cars to specific
functions. Thus the individuals' need itself -- in this case their
genuine need for proper transport services -- would determine the
targets of the vehicles and communication facilities (like roads, railway
networks, and navigation systems) to be produced and maintained, in accord
with the principle of optimal utilization, instead of the individuals
being completely dominated by the established system's fetishistic need
for profitable but ultimately destructive capital expansion.
The unavoidable, but up to the present time tendentiously avoided,
question of the real economy, corresponding to the considerations
presented in this article, must be faced in the very near future.
For in the so-called third world countries it is inconceivable to
follow the wasteful "development" pattern of the past, which in fact
condemned them to their precarious condition of today, under the rule of
capital's mode of social metabolic reproduction. The clamorous
failure of the much promoted "modernization theories" and their
corresponding institutional embodiments clearly demonstrated the
hopelessness of that approach.
7.
In one respect, at least, we have seen alarm raised in this regard --
characteristically pressing at the same time for the assertion and
absolute preservation of the privileges of the dominant capitalist
countries -- in the recent past. It concerned the internationally
growing need for energy resources and the competitive
intervention of some potentially immense economic powers, above all China,
in the unfolding process. Today that concern is primarily about
China, but in due course also India must be added, of course, to the list
of major countries unavoidably pressing for vital energy resources.
And when we add to China the population of the Indian subcontinent,
we are talking about more than two and a half billion
people. Naturally, if they really followed the once grotesquely
propagandized prescription of The Stages of Economic Growth,16 with its simple-minded advocacy of
"capitalist take-off and drive to maturity," that would have devastating
consequences for all of us. For the fully automobilized society of
two and a half billion people on the U.S. model of "advanced capitalist
development," with more than 700 motor cars to every 1,000 people, would
mean that we would be all dead before long through the global
"modernizing" benefits of poisonous pollution, not to mention the total
depletion of the planet's oil reserves in no time at all. But by the
same token, in an opposite sense, no one can seriously envisage that the
countries in question could be left indefinitely where they stand today.
To imagine that the two and a half billion people of China and the
Indian subcontinent could be permanently condemned to their existing
predicament, still in heavy dependency to the capitalistically advanced
parts of the world in one way or another, defies all credulity. The
only question is: whether humanity can find a rationally viable and truly
equitable solution to the legitimate demand for social and economic
development of the peoples involved. Otherwise, antagonistic
competition and destructive struggle over resources are the way of the
future, as befits the orienting framework and operating principles of
capital's mode of social reproductive control.
Another respect in which the absolute imperative to adopt a
qualitatively different way of organizing economic and social life
appeared on the horizon in our time concerns the ecology.
But again, the only viable way of addressing the increasingly grave
problems of our global ecology -- if we want to face up in a responsible
way to the aggravating problems and contradictions of the planetary
household, from their direct impact on such vital questions as global
warming to the elementary demand for clean water resources and safely
respirable air -- is to switch from the existing order's wasteful
husbandry of fetishistic quantification to a genuinely quality
oriented one. Ecology, in this respect, is an important but
subordinate aspect of the necessary qualitative redefinition of
utilizing the produced goods and services without which the advocacy of
humanity's permanently sustainable ecology -- again: an absolute must --
can be nothing more than pious hope.
The final point to stress in this context is that the urgency to face
up to these problems cannot be underrated, let alone minimized, given
capital's vested interests, sustained by its dominant imperialist state
formations in their insuperable rivalry among themselves.
Ironically, although there is so much propagandistic talk about
"globalization," the objective requirements of making a rationally
sustainable and globally coordinated reproductive order of social
interchanges work are constantly violated. Yet, given the present
stage of historical development, the irrepressible truth remains that with
regard to all of the major issues discussed in this article we are really
concerned with ever aggravating global challenges, requiring
global solutions. However, our gravest concern is that
capital's mode of social metabolic reproduction -- in view of its
inherently antagonistic structural determinations and their destructive
manifestations -- is not amenable at all to viable global solutions.
Capital, given its unalterable nature, is nothing unless it can
prevail in the form of structural domination. But the
inseparable other dimension of structural domination is structural
subordination. This is the way in which capital's mode of social
metabolic reproduction always functioned and always must try to function,
bringing with it even the most devastating wars of which we have much more
than just a foretaste in our time. The violent assertion of the
destructive imperatives of global hegemonic imperialism, through the
formerly unimaginable destructive might of the United States as the global
hegemon, cannot bring global solutions to our aggravating
problems but only global disaster. Thus, the unavoidable
necessity to address these global problems in a historically sustainable
way puts the challenge of socialism in the twenty-first century -- the
only viable hegemonic alternative to capital's mode of social metabolic
control -- on the order of the day.
Notes
1 Karl Marx, Capital,
vol. 1 (Penguin Classics, 1992), 85.
2 John Stuart Mill, Principles
of Political Economy (Prometheus Books, 2004), 751.
3 Mill, Principles, 749.
4 Mill, Principles, 749.
5 To quote this book with its full, utterly pretentious,
title, Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth: A
Report for the Club of Rome Project on the Predicament of Mankind
(London: Earth Island Limited, 1972).
6 Tellingly, the principal theoretical figure behind
this "growth limiting" venture, Professor Jay Forrester, of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contemptuously dismissed all
concern with equality as a mere "shibboleth of equality." See his
interview in Le Monde, August 1, 1972.
7 See István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism: From
the "American Century" to the Crossroads (Monthly Review Press,
2001).
8 Vadim Medvedev, "The Ideology of Perestroika," in
Perestroika
Annual 2, Abel Aganbegyan, (ed.) (London: Futura/Macdonald,
1989), 31–32.
9 The title of Hayek's most famous crusading
book.
10 Gorbachev quoted in John Rettie, "Only Market Can
Save Soviet Economy," The Guardian, October 17, 1990.
11 To quote one of Hegel's idealizing postulates:
"The nation state is mind in its substantive rationality and
immediate actuality and is therefore the absolute power on
earth." G. W. F.
Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 212.
12 Marx, The
Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx-Engels Collected Works,
vol. 6, 134. Quoted in István Mészáros, "The Communitarian System and the
Law of Value in Marx and Lukács" (chapter 19 of Beyond Capital),
Critique,
no. 23, 1991, 36. See also chapter 15 ("The Decreasing Rate of Utilization
under Capitalism") and chapter 16 ("The Decreasing Rate of Utilization and
the Capitalist State") of Beyond Capital, which deal with some
important related issues.
13 Karl Marx, Grundrisse,
708.
14 Ibid.
15 Karl Marx, Critique
of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol.
2, 23.
16 See Walt Rostow, The Stages of
Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960).
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