This is part 2 of a 3-part essay. Part 1 was Fetters on the Development of the Productive Forces.
Freedom [in the sphere of material production] can consist only in this, that socialised man, the associated producers, govern their metabolic interaction with nature rationally, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing this metabolism with the smallest expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.
Framing the reduction of the working day as the basic prerequisite for rationally humanizing material production and thereby enabling a true realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity recalls Marx's words about the Ten Hours' Bill in his Inaugural Address to the First International:
This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor... told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class.
Marx wrote his Inaugural Address in October 1864. Chapter 7 of his draft of volume 3 of Capital was likely completed in December 1865 (Müller et. al, 2002). Bringing the associated producers' "metabolic interactions with nature" under their collective control echoes and rephrases "social production controlled by social foresight" and thus could equally be designated political economy of the working class. Similarly, being dominated by production "as a blind power" employs the same metaphor as "the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class."
A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day.
It is needed to restore the health and physical energies of the working class, that is, the great body of every nation, as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action.
Again in the resolution, Marx referred to reduction of the working day as a prerequisite, a preliminary condition. This is significant in that so much of Marx's analysis is built around prerequisites, preconditions, preliminary conditions, and, especially, presuppositions. His analysis was, after all, historical. He was intensely concerned with how what comes before enables what comes next, although it may neither anticipate nor compel it.
Which brings me to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The phrase is not to be found in Marx's Capital or the Grundrisse. Admittedly, neither is political economy of the working class to be found in those volumes. As I pointed out above, however volume 3 contains a paraphrase of the passage in Marx's Inaugural Address that defined the political economy of the working class. This is not to suggest that Marx abandoned the idea of political power. Only that he became more ambivalent and circumspect about its imminence.
In a November 1871 letter to Friedrich Bolte, cited in the introduction to the 1976 Penguin edition of volume 1 of Capital, Marx wrote the following (capitalization as in original):
The POLITICAL MOVEMENT of the working class naturally has as its final object the conquest of POLITICAL POWER for this class, and this requires, of course, a PREVIOUS ORGANISATION of the WORKING CLASS developed up to a certain point, which arises from the economic struggles themselves.
But on the other hand, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and tries to coerce them by PRESSURE FROM WITHOUT is a POLITICAL MOVEMENT. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory, or even in a particular trade, to force a shorter working day out of the individual capitalists by STRIKES, etc., is a purely economic movement. The movement to force through an eight-hour law, etc., however, is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially binding force. Though these movements presuppose a certain degree of PREVIOUS organisation, they are in turn equally a means of developing this organisation.
Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e. the political power, of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against, and a hostile attitude towards, the policies of the ruling classes.
Marx's example of a political movement was the movement for an eight-hour law, as opposed to the purely economic action to obtain a shorter working day at a particular workplace. It is no coincidence that this example is the same one he used in his Inaugural Address, in volume 3 of Capital, and in the International's resolution on the limitation of the working day. It is also consistent with his argument in Grundrisse, beginning with the remarkable statement in notebook 4 that the "whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time" and concluding in notebook 7 with the declaration:
The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour.
The context of this sentence in notebook 7 had made it clear that "their own surplus labour" refers to disposable time expropriated by capital. The paragraph containing it mentions disposable time seven times in English in the original, German, draft. In terms of the forces and relations of production, the creation of disposable time is unambiguously a productive force in Marx's analysis. On it rests, "the whole development of wealth."
Political power, the "legal and political superstructure" arising from the foundation of the relations of production is, according to Marx's 1859 preface summary, a relation "appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production." Those forces will in part be shaped by the requirements of capital but, crucially, they will also be shaped by THE POLITICAL MOVEMENT of the working class, "a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially binding force." Thus a focus on the conquest of political power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is misplaced and premature absent the training and organization of the working class through such a political movement.
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