The vindication of Karl Marx - industrial relations

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1992 by Elin Whitney-Smith

You might not agree with this article. The author might now prove her contentions, support her suppositions, defend her positions, or explicate her conclusions to your satisfaction. But Elin Whitney-Smith has her own distinctive view of economic history, especially in those areas where information technology transforms social and economic relations. We need new ways of looking at the economic upheavals taking place today. The new answers might not emerge until enough people give up their old frameworks and start thinking about the new questions posed by the likes of Art Kleiner ("The Coevolution of Governance," and Whitney-Smith, whose pugnacious, iconoclastic views have also appeared in issues 72 and 73.

Elin Whitney-Smith can be reached via e-mail: elin@well.sf.ca.us --Howard Rheingold

THE TIME: NOW.

The place: a coffee house somewhere in the great beyond.

"I TOLD YOU it wouldn't work in Russia. You can't skip the capitalistic phase, Vladimir. In Russia you never got out of the feudal period; you went from nobles and serfs to party members and proletariat."

"But Karl, we established the dictatorship to bring them up to date. They are backward. They are peasants. We had to do it all."

"You don't understand. The capitalistic phase develops individual identity, Vladimir . . ."

"Yes, Karl, for America, for England, and maybe even for Germany. But Russians are different. The national character . . . the inherent backwardness . . . the superstition . . . the ethnic problems. Look at them now, fighting over ethnicity. They don't think the way you and I do. They've lived in a modern world and yet they are still fighting old, dead, and forgotten wars. It's inherent, part of the culture: conservative and backward!"

"No! it's not inherent! It is learned. Look: as the means of production change, the relations of production change. These become the social relations of the society. Yes?"

"Yes."

"As the relations of production change, people learn the social relations that emerge from that production system, as if they were the only social relations possible. This was my point when I said that Darwin had neatly made his theory predict the English bourgeois of his day as the pinnacle of evolution."

"I know, I know. But, Karl, the USSR has been industrialized. The means of production have changed. But the people haven't changed. They're still the same. Like I keep telling you, it's the character of the people."

"But the capitalistic phase! Vladimir, they never went through the capitalistic phase, they never negotiated for labor, labor was never alienated, they never developed relations of formal equality, they never sold their labor as a commodity! . . . Look, Vladimir, there is an implied negotiation inherent in the sale of labor as a commodity.

The negotiation develops the notion for the individuals as distinct from the social group because there is an implied contract. A contract implies that the two parties are capable, and that implies a formal equality. This takes place under capitalism! Why can't you see it, man?

"In the USSR, people are either party members or they are workers. They don't negotiate. They are paid what the government decides. As a result, they haven't developed relations of formal equality and they are identifying as Serbs, or Abyssinians, or Lithuanians, or Ukrainians, or Georgians, not as individuals or works.

"People must join together to demand their portion of the profit produced by their labor. Petty distinctions between groups, like race, religion, or ethnicity, keep workers divided. So first they need to identify as equal individuals. This happens as a consequence of the sale of labor because of the formal equality of the relation. But formal equality is not economic equality. The demands of the owners -- of capital -- for profit plunder the system. They siphon off wealth made possible by the workers. This is the inherent contradiction of capitalism and this leads to crisis. Each crisis is resolved in a way that improves production. This will lead to the ultimate triumph of socialism, because workers will come to own the means of production."

"Wait just a minute, Karl. Which is the contradiction? The relation between labor and management or the relation between production and capital? You don't make that clear."

"Both. A capitalist entrepreneur invents some way of making some thing, machinery or process to make something or other. He hires laborers and they make the thing -- their labor, organized together or magnified by the machinery, adds surplus value. The capitalist appropriates this surplus value and accumulates capital in the form of profit. His inclination is to take that profit and keep it. But for production to improve he should re-invest it into the means of production -- the machinery and the people whose labor is generating the surplus worth. The contradiction is that the desire of the capitalist for profit and the needs of improving production are inherently opposed.