The Realm of Freedom and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

This is part 2 of a 3-part essay. Part 1 was Fetters on the Development of the Productive Forces.

In volume 3 of Marx's Capital, development of the productive forces returned with a vengeance after only sporadic appearances in the first two volumes, aside from the unpublished draft "chapter 6" of volume 1 titled, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production." The last part of volume 3, chapter 7 in Marx's draft contains a remarkable passage on the "true realm of freedom." "In fact the realm of freedom," he wrote, "begins only when labour determined by necessity and external expediency comes to an end..." Although it is transformed, the realm of natural necessity does not come to an end. In fact it expands, along with the productive forces to meet these new needs.

What Marx then wrote about the realm of necessity is in my view one of the clearest articulations of his social vision:

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."

Eight months later, Marx drafted the "Instructions for the delegates of the Provisional General Council" for the First International. On the Question of the "Limitation of the working day," he wrote:

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.

Fetters on the Development of the Productive Forces

This is part one of a three part essay. Part two is The Realm of Freedom and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Part three, Antecommunist Manifesto, is forthcoming. 

Compare the following two sentences:

"From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters." (January 1859)

"The stages of production that precede capital appear as so many fetters on the productive forces, regarded from the standpoint of capital." (December 1857)

Both sentences were written by Karl Marx, a bit more than a year apart. Both are about historical social relations imposing "fetters" on the development of the productive forces. The first sentence, from Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has become part of the canonical definition of "Historical Materialism." The second is from notebook IV of Marx's 1857-58 manuscripts, the Grundrisse.

One might expect that scholars would have paid a great deal of attention to the relationship between the two sentences since publication of the Grundrisse in 1953. One would be wrong. Searches in Google Books and Google Scholar in German and English return no books or articles that quote the two sentences, even portions of the two.

Eric Hobsbawm, who edited and wrote an introduction to Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, a selection from the Grundrisse called it "an indispensable pendant to the superb Preface." By "pendant" Hobsbawm probably meant something like supplement or companion. The English translator of the Grundrisse, Martin Nicolaus called it "One long extended commentary on the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production." Neither examined the respective treatment in the two texts of the fetters on the development of the forces of production.

In my view, the standard reception of the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has been, if not a misinterpretation, a one-sided interpretation. Left out of that interpretation is the pivotal role of disposable time. The creation and appropriation of disposable time is both the secret of capital's accumulation and the focal point of labour's resistance to capital's domination.

The prominence of disposable time in Marx's discussion of the forces of production in the Grundrisse illuminates why Marx repeatedly referred to the limitation of the working day as the prerequisite or precondition for emancipation and hailed the enactment of the English Ten-Hour Bill as a victory of the political economy of the working class. 

In a future post, I plan to address the relationship between the political economy of the working class and the much better know "dictatorship of the proletariat." In my view, the former is to forces of production as the latter is to relations of production.

Below the jump break are the passages from the preface to A Contribution and the Grundrisse (shaded brown and indented) that I have combined to create an enhanced narrative of what Nicolaus called "the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production." This is the composite text I used in Marx's Fetters: A Remedial Reading.

Stephen Miller: Renegade Without a Cause

In case you've ever wondered about Stephen Miller's histrionic performance of rage and disdain, here is a brief explanation.

In 1971, David Horowitz edited a volume of essays, Isaac Deutscher: the man and his work, conceived as a tribute to Deutscher, who had died in 1967. Deutscher had been one of Horowitz's mentors. 

Horowitz died in April of this year. Deutscher wrote Horowitz's obituary 75 years earlier in a review of The God That Failed published in 1950 and republished five years later as "The Ex-Communist’s Conscience" in Heretics and Renegades and other essays.

Deutscher's review begins with a joke:

IGNAZIO SILONE relates that he once said jokingly to Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader: ‘The final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communists.’ There is a bitter drop of truth in the joke.

Deutscher cites Silone again later in the essay: 

...irrational emotionalism dominates the evolution of many an ex-communist. ‘The logic of opposition at all costs’ says Silone, ‘has carried many ex-communists far from their starting-points, in some cases as far as fascism.’ What were those starting-points? Nearly every ex-communist broke with his party in the name of communism. Nearly every one set out to defend the ideal of socialism from the abuses of a bureaucracy subservient to Moscow. Nearly every one began by throwing out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby bathing in it.

Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of communism, the heretic goes on to break with communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow.

David Horowitz's trajectory from the radical left to the radical right and Deutscher's prescient commentary on the mundaneness of that trajectory are important for understanding the bizarre demeanor of Horowitz's disciple, Stephen Miller. 

Miller has appropriated the characteristic traits of the renegade ex-communist without ever having belonged to the creed he has "broken" with. That is to say, his bitterness, rage, and feeling of betrayal is an affectation. He is pretending to have the same feelings he learned from his mentor. But without the life experience.

When the Truth is Found to be Lies...

And all the hope within you dies... 

Then what?