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Paper presented to ‘Volver a Marx’ Conference, Mexicali, Mexico, July 2009 Toward a Philosophic Return to Marx’s Marxism in Light of Today’s Realities 
By Peter Hudis Oakton University Today’s financial and economic crisis, the most serious in 70 years, makes this a critical moment to return to Marx’s Marxism. The crisis is leading even some former apologists of capitalism to argue that the globalization of capital and capitalism itself may have reached a historic limit. Many who only a few years ago consigned socialism to the dustbin of history are rediscovering the “prophetic” nature of Marx’s critique of capital. However, the fact that today’s crisis is spurring new interest in Marx does not mean that such interest will be sustained, nor does it mean that a viable Marxism that speaks to the realities of the 21st century will actually emerge. Old ideas have a habit of hanging around long after their limitations have been demonstrated, and we should be under no illusion that this doesn’t remain the case today. The response to the financial-economic crisis is a case in point. Thanks to a series of bailouts and nationalizations, the U.S. government today effectively owns most of the U.S. housing market and many of its major banks and investment firms. Some people, including on the Left, assume that such moves (as well as calls for greater regulation of global financial markets) represent an implicit concession to socialism. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. State intervention into the economy is as old as capitalism and is as integral to bourgeois society as the so-called “free” market. Capitalism has always resorted to state intervention when it reaches a crisis point, and not once has that given rise to any “socialist” society. “State intervention” and “market anarchy” are not and never have been absolute opposites. Many leftists who remain trapped in a superficial understanding of capital, however, foolishly imagine that they will be able to ride to power on the backs of state intervention in the economy—even though such intervention is now being promoted by the leading figures of U.S. capitalism-imperialism! Many still falsely identify the nationalization of property and state control of the economy with “socialism” because they think that capital can be controlled. They think that socialism is defined by public ownership of capital. However, that is not what Marx meant by socialism. Marx defined socialism as the abolition of capital. That is far harder to achieve that trying to control capital through public or state ownership. But it remains the only perspective that can liberate humanity from the oppressive power of capitalism. As I see it, any effort to return to Marx’s Marxism will not be successful unless it incorporates three features. First, we must break with outdated notions that equate socialism with nationalized property by returning to Marx’s critique of capital, which centers on the understanding that capital cannot be controlled. Second, we must incorporate into Marxist theory the subjectivity of the forces of liberation that have arisen in our era—women, racial minorities, indigenous peoples, ecological struggles, and battles to extend the terrain of political democracy. Third, we must develop a philosophically grounded perspective of a genuine socialist society based on the abolition of capital and value production. Without this, any effort to return to Marx will repeat the errors of the past. I will try to briefly explore these three points in my remaining time. I. First, efforts to return to Marx must begin by grappling with the distinctiveness of Marx’s concept of capital. For Marx, capital is not simply an instrument of production. Capital is rather the expression of a specific kind of labor. Capital is the congealment of abstract or undifferentiated labor. As Marx wrote it his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, capital is the expression of “a special sort of work which is indifferent to its content, of complete being-for-self, of abstraction from all other being.” In capitalism “all the natural, spiritual and social variety of labor” is extinguished. It makes humanity “ever more exclusively dependent on labor, and on a particular, very one-sided machine-like labor at that.” Marx wrote that by being reduced to an appendage to a machine at the point of production, the individual becomes “depressed spiritually.” From “being a man [he] becomes an abstract activity.” It was not until the writing of Capital, Volume I that Marx explicitly spelled out the concept of “the dual character of labor”—the separation of concrete labor from abstract labor. However, this concept—which Marx considered his “unique contribution” to the critique of political economy—was implicit in his entire understanding of capital from the 1840s onward. In every country of the world masses of people experience the “special sort of work” that produces capital by performing a kind of labor that is indifferent to who and what they are as human beings. Their concrete labor is reduced to its opposite—to abstract, undifferentiated labor. As I see it, this problem of abstract or value-creating labor is the source and reason for today’s economic and political crises and the environmental destruction that is threatening the very existence of our planet. For decades vulgar Marxists have repeated truisms like “labor is the source of all value.” However, there is nothing particularly “Marxist” about this statement. Leading bourgeois economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo also held that labor is the source of all value. Marx went much further than say that labor is the source of value. He wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875, “The bourgeois have very good grounds for ascribing supernatural creative power to labor.” Marx was not mainly concerned with the source of value but with the form of value. As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in Marxism and Freedom, “Marx’s primary theory is a theory of what he first called ‘alienated labor’ and then ‘abstract’ or ‘value-producing’ labor… it is more correct to call the Marxist theory of capital not a labor theory of value, but a value theory of labor.” This distinction is of critical importance. Marx was interested in the specific historical conditions that compel labor to take on the form of value. He was not only interested in having workers receive a fair value for the product of their labor. His main concern was with the kind of labor creates that value—abstract or alienated labor. The substance of value is abstract labor. Capital is a social relation of abstract labor. Capital is not simply a thing, but a value-relation; it lives by obtaining ever-more surplus value, or unpaid hours of labor, from the worker who produces it. Marx wrote, “The aim of capital is not served merely by obtaining more ‘wealth’...but because it wants more value, to command more objectified labor.” Capital cannot exist without obtaining more unpaid hours of abstract labor from the worker; that is, unless it subsumes concrete labor under the abstraction of “value.” Capital is “value that is big with itself,” or self-expanding value. As the embodiment of surplus value, capital is driven to expand irrespective of any natural or human limits. It is a monster that grows and devours all in its path. Why is this? The reason is that the aim of a society based on value production is not to accumulate material wealth. Nor does such a society aim to promote human happiness. So long society is governed by value production, its aim is to accumulate value as an end in itself. Capital is based upon the logic of abstraction—abstraction from human as well as natural contingency and particularity. For this reason wherever capital serves as the medium of social interaction “society’s distress is the goal of the economic system.” Herein lies the secret of capital’s enormous productivity as well as its destructiveness. Marx wrote, “Capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital—money as self-reproductive. If capital ever perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would have declined from exchange value to use value...Capital is the constant movement to create more of the same.” For this reason, any effort to control capital without uprooting the basis of value production is ultimately self-defeating. So long as value and surplus value persist, capital will strive to self-expand; any external boundaries established for it, whether by state intervention, nationalization of property, or regulation of the market, can and will eventually be overcome. ROSA LUXEMBURGO (1871-1919) This is the tragic lesson of the 20th century. Many Western liberals and socialists over the last 100 years thought that it was possible to control capital through the welfare state or government intervention in the economy. In some cases these Social-Democratic experiments produced useful economic reforms, but they failed to halt capital’s destructive impact on the society, the human personality, and the environment. Likewise, many revolutionary socialists over the last 100 years thought that capital could be controlled or abolished through a centralized state plan that eliminates the market through nationalized property and single-party state control. However, despite the claims of its adherents, this did not lead to the formation of socialist societies. It led to the formation of state-capitalist societies that called themselves “socialist” in Soviet Russia, China, East Europe, and much of the Third World. These societies failed to halt capital’s destructive impact on society, the human personality, and the environment. As a result, the model of statist socialism has been repudiated by working people around the world. There is no going back to such failed models. All of these models assumed that capital could be controlled through such external means as state control of the economy without addressing the need to uproot the kind of labor that constitutes capital. II.Second, any effort to return to Marx must incorporate into Marxist theory the subjectivity of the forces of liberation that have arisen in our era—women, racial minorities, indigenous peoples, ecological struggles, and battles to extend the terrain of political democracy. It is important to note that as crucial as are the categories of labor and capital in Marx’s work, Marxism is not simply a theory of class struggle. Class struggle is central in Marx; each of his theoretic categories reflects the struggles of opposing classes and class interests. However, in the Marxist-Humanist understanding of Marx, which I share, Marxism does not consist of a series of formulaic generalizations that one simply plugs into any and every new event that comes along. Rather, genuine Marxism seeks to grasp the dialectic of the thing itself. The aim of Marxian dialectical analysis is to penetrate beyond surface appearances by grasping the distinguishing content and contours of the subject of investigation. That becomes especially important when the subject of investigation are new forces of revolt, including those that Marx did not himself emphasize or fully analyze. Marxist theory has to constantly be rethought and reconstituted in light of the specific questions and concerns emanating from the live forces of opposition that present themselves to us in everyday society. For the sake of time, I will focus on only one such force here—mass struggles for democracy. Demands for democracy and democratic participation do not by themselves constitute a transcendence of the capital relation, but in specific historic instances they can point towards it. Demands for democracy, in other words, should not to be dismissed as merely bourgeois. As Rosa Luxemburg fully understood, there can be no socialism without democracy, just as there can be no genuine democracy without socialism. This perspective defined her critique of the Bolsheviks in 1918. Though she supported the Russian Revolution, she condemned Lenin and Trotsky for treating democracy as a “cumbersome mechanism” to be discarded at will. In The Russian Revolution she attacked ”a dictatorship of the party” and called for “the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of people, of unlimited democracy.” This was no idealist illusion on her part. It was a realistic understanding that the capital relation cannot be eliminated from above by even the best leaders or parties, since capital is not simply a material object but the expression of a social relation of domination. She wrote, “The proletariat must do more than stake out clearly the aims and direction of the revolution. It must also personally, by its own activity, bring socialism step by step into life.” As against those who “imagined it would be only necessary to overthrow the old government… and then to inaugurate socialism by decree,” she declared: “Socialism will not and cannot be created by any government, however socialistic. Socialism must be created by the masses, by every proletarian. Only that is socialism, and only thus can socialism be created.” Una de las más interesantes conferencias estuvo a cargo del Dr. Peter Hudis We need to keep these words in mind when viewing the emergence of a new mass movement battling for democracy on the streets of Iran. It is true that the protests in Iran, which have involved up to three million marching in the streets of Tehran and other cities at a time, initially arose over a split within the ruling class, as a military clique grouped around Ahmadinejad and Supreme Religious Leader Khamanei moved to monopolize power by stealing the recent election from reformers led by Mousavi. However, the protests quickly escaped the confines that had been set for them. As the U.S. Marxist-Humanists recently wrote in a statement on the Iranian protests, “As they began to articulate a series of [democratic] demands, the crowds grew far larger and more boisterous, putting a scare into the conservative establishment, which feared the strengthening of truly grassroots efforts like the Million Signatures Campaign for women’s rights. The presence of large numbers of women in the anti-regime demonstrations, as well as the emphatic calls for liberation of women in statements of opposition groups, show that the rebellion is fueled by a striving for new human relations with gender relations as the flashpoint of the struggle. While the Reformists want to preserve the Islamic Republic, the logic of events may be moving in a different direction, or at least toward a much more thorough-going set of reforms than was on the agenda even a week ago.” Clearly, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital mass movement in Iran that demands the support of all radicals and Marxists. It is therefore extremely disturbing to see some on the Left turn a deaf ear to the protests by either condemning them as a plot engineered by the U.S. or even (as in the case of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela) giving explicit support to Ahmadinejad’s reactionary military-clerical regime. In doing so they put themselves on the opposite side of the mass movement on the streets. How could such a thing occur? One reason is that some on the Left remain trapped in the old idea that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend. Since Ahmadinejad opposes the U.S., some on the Left feel the need to support him—even though he is a reactionary who has never voiced any opposition to capitalism! In doing so they not only put themselves on the side of a repressive state that has just stolen an election. They also place themselves in opposition to the demands of Iranian women for a transformation of gender relations. We see proof here of how a narrow kind of anti-imperialism, one that defines itself by what it is against instead of what it is for, fails to connect with the subjectivity of forces of liberation aiming to transform society. Marx’s Marxism will never be reconstituted if leftists continue to turn a deaf ear to such critical forces as women’s liberation. Marxism is not only a theory of class struggle. It is a philosophy of liberation. And there can be no liberation without the freedom of women—just as there cannot be women’s liberation without effective democracy. That is why we need to align ourselves with democratic movements wherever they arise, be it in Iran or Honduras—where masses of people are also coming into the streets in defense of a member of the ruling class, Zelaya, who was overthrown by the oligarchy as soon as he moved in a mildly reformist direction. III.Third, any return to Marx must strive to develop a philosophically grounded perspective of what it means to abolish capital and value production. This is extremely difficult, since we have little historical experience to guide us. The societies that called themselves “socialist” in the 20th century did not deserve the name; they were state-capitalist. Nationalization of property and industry, while a necessary and progressive step—especially when directed against the forces of multinational capital and imperialism—does not by itself equal socialism. So what would a genuinely socialist society that abolishes capital and value production look like? Although Marx provides no “answer” to this question, his work does contain an enormous amount of theoretic direction for working it out. As I see it, the most important reason to return to Marx is to discover what he meant by the transcendence of value production. Such a task requires a prolonged and multifaceted exploration and dialogue that will need to be carried out over many years. For the sake of time, I will point to one area of Marx’s work that may aid us in this—his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Although it is often assumed that Marx said little about the new society, he directly discusses it in his Critique. Yet as Raya Dunayevskaya said in Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Marx’s 1875 Critique "was never fully internalized.” This is despite the fact Marx’s Critique envisions a sweeping transformation of the relations of production. In the first phrase of a new society, he writes, right after the revolutionary seizure of power, the "individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor." The individual contribution to society is no longer assessed in terms of the number of products one produces or their value. What one contributes to society is now one’s "individual quantum of labor"—the actual amount of work one does. Thus, the products are no longer values and "the producers do not exchange their products." Corresponding to these new relations of production are new relations of distribution: "Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions [for social consumption and investment] have been made-exactly what [one] gives to it...the same amount of labor"—not the same amount of value or products. This does not imply that income will depend exclusively upon how much work one does. What workers contribute and receive are both measured in terms of "an equal standard, labor." This is a decisive, qualitative "advance" over capitalism, where "exchange of equivalents ...[does not exist] in the individual case"—since one sum of value tends to exchange for an equivalent sum, but one individual's hour of work creates more or less value than another's. Although equal remuneration for equal amounts of labor remains a "defect" from the vantage point of the higher phase of communism, the critical point is that for Marx, the abolition of value production must be achieved as the first act of a post-capitalist society. Marx never envisioned putting capital or value production under the control of the state and calling that “socialism.” His Critique of the Gotha Program indicates that socialism begins with the abolition of value production. His work shows that the transcendence of alienation, inequality, and exploitation are neither possible nor "fair" as long as labor continues to be only indirectly social—and when labor power continues to be a commodity and the law of value continues to compel producers to maximize production and minimize cost. It is by no means easy to see how this be achieved. But it clearly cannot be achieved unless the workers have effective and not just nominal control over the means of production. Such a society has not yet arisen. But that is no grounds for despairing of its possibility. It can arise, if we as theoreticians give direction to the mass struggles by thinking out what Marx’s Marxism, in its entirety, means for today. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 286. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 236-238. Critique of the Gotha Program, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), p. 81. Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 Until Today, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Amherst, NJ: Humanities Books, 2000), p. 138. Grundrisse (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 353. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 239. Grundrisse, p. 334. Ever since 1922 there has been claims, first expressed by Clara Zetkin, that Luxemburg changed her evaluation of the Russian Revolution and decided not to publish The Russian Revolution. This was settled over a decade ago when previously unknown letters of Luxemburg appeared that made it clear that she did intend to publish it. See Feliks Tych, “Drei unbekannte Briefe Rosa Luxemburgs über die Oktoberrevolution,” Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zür Geschichte der deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 27:3 (1991), pp. 357-66. The Russian Revolution, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Books, 2002), p. 308. “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” [Dec. 14, 1918], in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, p. 350. “Our Program and the Political Situation,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, p. 368. For the full text of this “Preliminary Statement of the Upheaval in Iran,” see www.usmarxisthumanists.org Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 154. Critique of the Gotha Pro
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Por Facundo García
