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CURRENT POLITICS - Constant Revolutionising Part II |
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‘Constant Revolutionising’ Part II None depicts a qualitatively different
future. That absence makes Lanchester’s closing paragraphs the more remarkable
since he goes beyond the information that he and Kaplan compile. Much of what
they tell us extends warnings about situations that we know too well. The
surprise comes when Lanchester contends that the new technologies not only have
made socialism practical but also a necessity. So that we can ponder a line of
thinking which has been shoved off the agenda, his final section deserves to be
reproduced in full but interleaved with comments from Marxist and Leninist
perspectives: It’s also worth noting what isn’t being said about this robotified
future. The scenario we’re given – the one being made to feel inevitable – is
of a hyper-capitalist dystopia. There’s capital, doing better than ever; the
robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much, but
having fun playing with its gadgets. (Though if there’s no work, there are
going to be questions about who can afford to buy the gadgets.) There is a
possible alternative, however, in which ownership and control of robots is
disconnected from capital in its current form. That rupture
is what bourgeois ideologues cannot conceive as being possible. For them, capitalism
is eternal, natural and universal, sprouting rom what Adam Smith called our
‘propensity to track’. Without necessarily denying this version of the past,
Lanchester envisions a qualitatively different future: The robots liberate most of humanity from work, and everybody benefits
from the proceeds: we don’t have to work in factories or go down mines or clean
toilets or drive long-distance lorries, but we can choreograph and weave and
garden and tell stories and invent things and set about creating a new universe
of wants. This would be the world of unlimited wants described by economics,
but with a distinction between the wants satisfied by humans and the work done
by our machines. This picture
of a future of superabundance is pretty much that of Marx, whether young or
mature, both utopian and scientific. Lanchester, however, glides around the
point that, within socialism, our wants will be stimulated no longer by the
need that capital has to expand. Our needs therefore will not be ‘unlimited’ in
the way that capital must make them for its survival. New limits will apply,
some to protect our physical environments. At the same time, new types of
‘need’ will arise through deepening the socialisation of human creativities. The meaning of ‘unlimited’ also confronts us with how to distribute
goods, both within and between economies. Despite the fantasy of mass
marketers, ‘unlimited’ can never mean that every Italian, let alone every
African, will own a Maserati. Our actualisable choices will be about
reallocating the totality of the commodities that exist across the globe, as
the pope is fond of saying. How much more stuff will eight billion human beings
need for us all to enjoy somewhat better than frugal comfort? Or can that goal
be reached by redistributing the excess from what is currently over-consumed by
two billions? Communism means free public transport instead of everyone being sold
both a HumVee and a Jazz. Mass marketing has made obesity a burden for the
richest and the poorest so that redressing food intakes will mean lower medical
bills and less waste. Economies in the Global South that have been
‘over-developed’, that is, distorted, to supply corporates with coffee or
copper will rebalance their productive systems to nourish more of their own
citizens. Lanchester now gets to the crunch point: ‘It seems to me that the only
way that world would work is with alternative forms of ownership.’ In a word,
our pressing need is for socialism. As ever, the hard bit is how to get out
from under the rule of capital. Here, Lanchester tumbles into utopianism in the
bad sense of wishful thinking about the means to that end. Marxist-Leninists
are scientific about how to realise a goal which the agents of capital dismiss
as utopian because it is not capitalism writ ever larger. Lanchester can do no
better than to claim that ‘[t]he reason, the only reason, for thinking this
better world is possible is that the dystopian future of capitalism-plus-robots
may prove just too grim to be politically viable.’ A shift in property relations will take more than the spread of despair.
The world dominated by capital has been ‘grim’ for 250 years yet that system
remains ‘politically viable’. Why? Because the property-owning class holds
state power and shows every sign of clinging to it with ‘grim’ death. Leo Huberman ends Man’s Worldly Goods (1936) with an
anecdote about a monkey prized by zoos; trappers place pieces of sugar inside
coconuts tied to trees. The creature puts its paw in through a narrow hole,
seizes the sugar in its fist, and gets stuck. All it has to do to escape is to
let go the sugar. It never does. Neither will capitalists. Imagine a class
which has always had breakfast served in bed meekly accepting that it is now its
turn to be at the match factory by 7 a.m. Lanchester returns to utopianism in
its best sense of striving for a future which is not predicated on injustice,
war and the crippling of human potential: ‘This alternative future would be the
kind of world dreamed of by William Morris, full of humans engaged in
meaningful and sanely remunerated labour. Except with added robots.’ That
exception unpicks a key thread from Morris’s tapestry. His craft practices
convinced him that art is the only kind of work suited to humankind. His
workshops were producing use-values as exchange values (commodities).
Socialists will also need carpets, curtains and wallpapers. The unasked
question is how are billions to regain fulfilment from the application of our
capacities in paid employment as well as out of creative leisure. Alienation Alienation
arises from twin aspects of wage-slavery. First, we sell our creative
capacities as just another commodity. That step is a formal subjection of
labour to capital. But as Marx and Kaplan remind us, capital needs to do more
than to own our capacities for set periods of time: ‘The less he is attracted by the nature
of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less,
therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental power,
he closer his attention is forced to be.’ To maximise profit, its agents must discipline
our application of those capacities. The maximisation of surplus-value requires
severing conception from execution, as Josiah Wedgwood imposed at his pottery
production lines from the 1760s. This Quaker secured the subjection of labour by
having one strike leader hanged; he pursued the subordination of his hands by
turning them into the arms of a machine for mass producing fine-art ceramics.
This division of labour needed artisans, not artists. One hundred years later,
Morris sought to restore workers to art by reintegrating the arts of conception
with the crafts of execution. Harry Braveman places the anti-human necessity
for capital to expand in its splitting of conception from execution at the core
of Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974).
The issue of meaningful work is often presented through the prism of
Marx’s contrasting our
species with all other creatures, usually given as the difference between an
architect and a bee: … a bee would put many a human
architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells, but what
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the
master-builder builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. Two
textual doubts call for consideration. The German that is translated here as
‘human architect’ is Baumeister which
literally means ‘master builder’ and is, therefore, at some remove from the
less hands-on engagement of an architect, as that professional is now
understood. Moreover, the doer in Marx’s next sentence is neither sense of Baumeister but Arbeiter (worker): ‘a result emerges which had already been
conceived by the worker at the beginning.’ In addition, the anti-Materialist (teleological)
implications of an end result ‘already existing ideally’ are trimmed by Marx’s
recognition that ‘a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the
work.’ Hence, conception cannot ever be utterly severed from execution. Man not only effects a change of form in
the materials of nature; he also realises his own purpose in those materials.
And this is a purpose he is conscious off, it determines the mode of his
activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.
This subordination is no mere momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the
working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the
work. This means close attention. Marx
returns to the part played by re-conceptualisation throughout every sensuous
human activity: … it is by their imperfections that
the means of production in any process bring to our attention their character
of being the products of past labour. Each
incremental improvement in performance brings any initial goal closer to
realisation but only by modifying it. In Lanchester’s future, robots will do what we now call ‘work’. In
certain cases, their take-over of tasks might be desirable since it is not easy
to see how the integrating of conception and execution relates to cleaning
toilets. However, that technical fix avoids an ethical element in socialism,
namely, respect for every contribution to our well-being. From that
perspective, cleaners are as valuable as authors. Lanchester’s catalogue of
what we could do instead of work ‘in factories or go down mines or clean
toilets or drive long-distance lorries’ is that we can ‘choreograph and weave
and garden and tell stories and invent things and set about creating a new
universe of wants.’ Stimulating as this mixed bag of alternatives is, its
premise is not the same as Marx’s vision that humans can avoid becoming a thing
(reified) only if we doing more than one thing. Historical materialists do not reduce ‘sensuous human activity’ to
labour or still less with paid work or wage-slavery. Instead, we know that we
become what we do, as individuals and as a species. Collective doing and
re-making are how we hominised ourselves as a species and how we were
socialised as individuals, as explained by Engels on ‘The Part Played by Labour
in the Transition from Ape to Man’. Our learning to speak is a foundational
instance of social labour. A future without labour is therefore as inhuman as
one n which labour is reduced to the routines of wage-slavery. Opiates Socialists
are not looking forward to the Brave New
World that Aldous Huxley conjured in the early 1930s. Parts of that dystopia
have been realised in order to meet the needs of capital by promoting drugs as
soporifics, stimulants and prescribed pharmaceuticals, and by the
commodification of sex and the sexualisation of children as one niche in the
mass marketing of over-production. In
a social order where morality has been boiled down to a choice between vanity
and gluttony, possessions are a more effective opiate than the happy-clappies
or rival Fundamentalisms. In living memory, the determining of one’s worth by
owning a commodity has given way to the pleasure from the purchase, whether one
ever uses the acquisition or not. Obsolescence has become instantaneous. Yet, the craving for those narcotics is still, in Marx’s words, ‘the expression of real distress and also the
protest against real distress.’ These conflicting opiates, mental or material, are
ways of helping us to go on struggling against ‘a heartless world,’ as Marx
wrote of religions. Superstitions will not lose much of their appeal until
after the social conditions that help to make them necessary can be abolished.
Meanwhile, no sense can be made of rampant consumerism without first
recognising how all purchases serve capital by realising as profit the
surplus-value present in commodities. In addition, materialists recognise
‘affluenza’ as a quack diagnosis of surrogates for the lack of satisfactions
from socially productive labour, not as an individual’s sin; ‘affluenza’ is
inherent in the expansion of capital, not some original concupiscence of the
flesh. Conditioning determinism In charting
the road ahead, Lanchester is right to conclude: ‘It says a lot about the
current moment that as we stand facing a future which might resemble either a
hyper-capitalist dystopia or a socialist paradise, the second option doesn’t
get a mention.’
In taking up the good old cause, we dare not rely on the old tactics, no matter
how much of the Marxist-Leninist strategic critique of capitalist exploitation
and repression holds good. If new things did not happen there would never have
been capitalism, just as socialism would be impossible. That rule applies to
how we might take the first steps in reordering strategic assumptions about the
links between technologies and social relations of production. Marx foresaw how capitalist exploitation
could develop the productive forces needed for socialism. Indeed, he built his
efforts to overthrow capitalism on how class conflicts manifest themselves in
the cross-links between the forces of production and their social relations. In
the West, we already have a production system which could deliver a
superabundance of material goods in a free association of producers. On paper,
we could leap over any further development of the productive forces needed for
human self-emancipation. In light of these changes, a passage
from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy takes on a new significance: No social order ever perishes before
all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and
new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions
of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. This
timetable has been attacked for implying that we have to wait until capitalism
is over-ripe with the productive forces needed for socialism before any attempt
can be made to bring it into existence. This recipe for counter-revolutionary
politics does not apply to the circumstances that confront us now. How much
more room for development will the productive forces require before making an
end to capitalism a possibility? The means of production necessary for
socialism have existed for a couple of generations. Does that excessive capacity mean that
we can bypass socialism on some freeway to communism? To see why our answer
must be NO, we have to absorb the significance of what Marx says next: Therefore mankind always sets itself
only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it
will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material
conditions for its solution already exist or at least in the process of
formation. The
validity of this claim is beyond doubt as a statement about the origins of socialism.
The possibility of a post-capitalist solution did not begin to capture the
imaginations of working people until after 1800 when the centralisation and
concentration of resources initiated the cooperative manner of working
essential for the accomplishment of socialism. Some 200 years on, ‘the material
conditions for its solution’ are present to the power of ‘n’. Capitalism has been pregnant with
socialism far longer than any pachyderm. Once we extend ‘the task’ for
revolutionaries from developing the means of production to overturning their
social relations, it becomes obvious that only a caesarian will rip the new
from the womb of capital. More
than a socialist alternative has lost its place in thinking about the future of
humankind. Even among those of us ‘clinging to the wreckage’ of socialism, a
key element has gone missing in action – namely, a dictatorship of the
proletariat. One reason for this erasure is the memory of real existing
socialisms. There is no chance of building a mass movement in Australia by
calling for any kind of dictatorship, not even one decked out as a Peoples
Democracy. In addition, every attempt to build
socialism runs into the anarchist point of divergence from Marxism-Leninism.
Yes, both camps agree about the exploitative nature of capital and the
repressive nature of the state. But the anarchists say that we
Marxist-Leninists are wrong about the means of reaching our shared goal of the
withering away of the state. Yes, the anarchists are still wrong about how far
spontaneity can take us. As Shaw quipped: ‘Anarchism is a game at which the
police can always beat you.’ No, the anarchists were not mistaken to fear where
democratic centralism could end up. In light of what went wrong after 1917, we
cannot brush aside their insistence of matching means and ends. Even more debilitating has been a
reluctance around the Left to face up to the real existing dictatorship which
we endure in bourgeois democracies. One sign of that avoidance is that every
tightening of the law is labeled fascism when it is no more than a further
instance of the normal functioning of the covert dictatorship. New laws for
data retention and FairWork Australia do not point towards fascism. If they
did, would you be reading this article? Moreover, fascism is only one form of
overt dictatorship, the one that emerged to deal with revolutionary threats to
the rule of capital during the 1910s. In countries like Australia, the agents
of capital do not want to risk the illusion of popular rule. That asset is too
valuable to be abandoned unless absolutely necessary for the survival of class
rule. In the case of Jack Lang in 1931-32, Andrew Moore has shown how the Old
Guard organised to contain the extra-Parliamentary New Guard. The big
bourgeoisie solved the political crisis of capital not by a military coup, but
by manoeuvres within the parliamentary circus to shift Joe Lyons from the Labor
government to head up the United Australia Party. Of course, had the electorate
failed to follow suit, more drastic measures would have been undertaken. Dictatorships of the bourgeoisie,
whether overt in Saudi Arabia, or covert in Australia, are grounded in the
property relations that socialists strive to replace. Similarly, class conflict
is grounded in the fact that an overwhelming majority of us, though not ‘the 99
percent’, are compelled to sell our labour-power in order to exist. That
economic oppression has double-headed effects. It keeps wage-slaves submissive
from fear of being put out of work; at the same time, the exploitative nature
of wage-slavery kindles resistance. The agents of capital know the difference
between ‘the puny strength of one’ and
‘Solidarity Forever’. The Kaplan article again illustrates how the
restructuring of workplaces aims to isolate workers from each other, as do
casualisation, churn and the loss of coffee breaks. Once the facts of class power are
re-admitted, the prospect of leaping over socialism crashes to the ground. No
matter how over-developed the forces of production might become, the social
relations of production are now weighted more heavily against the socialist
alternative than at any time since the late eighteenth century. Even in the
gun-toting United Mistakes, the firepower of the state overwhelms that of the
right-wing militias by multiple orders of magnitude. Remember Waco? All but one seizure of power by
workers and peasants against overt dictatorships has come out of wars which had
broken the monopoly of the propertied classes of violence: Paris in 1871;
Russia in 1917; Eastern Europe in 1945 followed by China, Korea and Indo-China.
Cubans snuck in along the rails before the U.S. made sure that nothing like
that happened again until Venezuelans cracked the carapace in the late 1990s
only because Chavez started with more support within the army than Allende had
after 1971. Another exception to the dependence of
revolution on war was the 1979 fall of the Shah of Iran which was made possible
by the willingness of unarmed civilians to march against troops in the
expectation of being killed. Those methods have no positive lessons for a
proletariat seeking to overthrow the rule of capital. Leninists do not engage
in human-wave attacks in which the lives of the most advanced sections of the
proletarian are thrown away. On the contrary, we stick to the maxim: ‘Maximum
harm to the boss at minimum cost to the workers.’ Since the U.S. defeat in Indo-China,
its strategists have de-labourised their side of the battlefront. Instead of
B-52s, they send in the drones. This shift comes at a cost to the imperialists.
Air-power can take territory but only infantry can hold it. Hence, the frantic
attempts to train Afghani and Iraqi forces alongside the inability to drive
ISIS out by bombs alone. These disasters for Big Oil echo the failure of
Nixon’s Vietnamisation policy in the final stages of the wars against the
peoples of Indo-China. But this realignment of firepower has also come at a
cost to the working-class since the state no longer needs to arm us and thus no
longer risks depriving itself of its monopoly of violence. The implications for socialism are
stark. Suppose that Lanchester’s arguments were to be accepted by two-thirds of
Australians. We then vote in parties at every level of government committed to
ending capitalist property relations. What next? The answer is the same as Norm
Gallagher gave in 1961: ‘When I see how hard it is to get the bosses to pay an
extra ten shillings a week, I can’t see them handing over the keys just because
we ask.’ The anti-Marxist Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney denounced Communist
demands in the 1930s for a revolution to achieve socialism in Britain but
accepted that the British propertied classes might not accept a Labor victory
at the ballot box. Hence, he called on the labour movement to prepare for mass
action to block a Tory reaction. He had seen the spread of overt dictatorships
between the wars to do just that. Moreover, Tawney was an expert on the English
Revolution of the 1640s which set up the example of cutting off the head of
God’s Anointed to rewrite property relations. Those victories were consolidated
by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the invasion of 30,000 Dutch troops to
install William of Orange on the English throne. The huntin’, shootin’ and
fishin’ squires harboured no doubts about the efficacy of violence. The fact that the socialist
alternative has been off the agenda is a marker of our difficulties in
attaining the political revolution necessary for an utterly transformed
socio-economic order. Nothing is to be gained from avoiding the truth that the
achievement of state power in Australia is less likely today than at anytime
since 1788. The paradox is that what had been
unrealisable before 1970 was still imaginable. Now, what is economically
possible is rarely imagined. Today, socialism is not imagined largely because
it is impossible to see how the states behind the global corporates can be
smashed. Their firepower is overwhelming and their willingness to employ it
undiminished. Must acceptance of the
Marxist-Leninist recognition of the state as organised class violence raised to
an obligatory norm in the law result in despair? Given the massive over-kill in
the hands of capital, what can we do except amuse ourselves to death with digital
gadgets and on social media? Faced with a comparable imbalance of class forces
in fascist Italy, Antonio Gramsci reflected on ‘Pessimism of the will and
optimism of the intellect’. If that saying means not throwing ourselves onto
lines of police bayonets but rebuilding an anti-capitalist movement brick by
brick with a scientific analysis of the laws of accumulation of capital then we
must be all for it. Yet we also need some optimism of the will – a rekindling
of the utopian promise of socialism’s pioneers that the way we live now is not
the best of which our species is capable. Some pessimism of the intellect is
called for if we are to integrate a scientific critique of capital accumulation
with moral fervor and not assume that the il-logic of capital is set in
concrete. A rational basis for why we must
challenge the power of the state is that it can never leave us alone. The world
is a million miles away from the days when ‘The emperor’s writ stops at the
village gate.’ No one can survive a nuclear attack. No one can opt out of the
current implosion of capital, neither billionaires like Malcolm Turnbull nor
the labour lieutenants of capital like Shorten. A million dollars in a
self-managed Super Fund is no guarantee against ending up in the poorhouse.
Capital and labour must fight their way out at the expense of the other. No
win-win operates here. One more pre-condition holds. The
utopia of communism cannot be detailed in advance. The greatest creative effort
ever from our species will be in learning what communism means as we build it.
Whatever five-year plans we start out with will prove inadequate. Whether in
the sphere of strategy or at the level of tactics, revolutionary socialists
should harken to Engels: ‘Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings
about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite
different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.’ The free association of individuals is
assured only through collective self-liberation.
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