Communism: Self-Determination and Economy of Time
As a student of Hegel, Marx expected that long before capitalism collapsed of its own accord, revolutionary class consciousness would intervene as the spirit of revolution. The workers are reduced to things - commodities at the disposal of capital - but they are also thinking things.[306] [307] When workers know themselves as a living contradiction, they will also know what must be done with capitalism: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice'.222 But what follows the revolution? Marx tells us remarkably little about communist community. Marx had no inhibition when it came to interpreting political events of his own time. He wrote countless such articles. But he also faced an obvious methodological constraint when it came to anticipating the future. First published in full in 1953, the Grundrisse abounds with references to the themes of alienation and reification that we have already encountered. Marx speaks of machinery that ‘objectifies the scientific idea' and then becomes an ‘animated monster', using the worker as its ‘living isolated accessory'.[308] [309] [310] [311] [312] [313] He says labour is deprived of skills when those same skills are transferred to ‘the dead forces of nature'.224 The machine ‘possesses skill and strength in place of the worker'.225 ‘The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is... absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour...'.226 Many more such comments could be cited. It is worth noting that even Adam Smith had shared such concerns, worrying that machines would dehumanise and destroy the working class.227 And Hegel, having read Smith, also warned in his unpublished manuscripts that machines dehumanise, deskill, and devalue labour at the same time as they create the prospect of alleviating toil.228 Hegel said we deceive nature by harnessing its forces, but nature exacts its revenge by impoverishing human consciousness:. this deceit that he practices against nature [mechanical appropriation that displaces skilled living labour]. Marx would have found Hegel's remarks intriguing. In the Grundrisse he wrote that ‘The principle of developed capital is to make special skill superfluous... to transfer skill. into the dead forces of nature'?30 The difference, however, between Marx and Hegel, is that Hegel was anticipating the industrial revolution, whereas Marx saw enough of it to extrapolate its potential contribution to human emancipation. Capital, he wrote in the Grundrisse, ‘reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation'?31 With its thirst for profit, capital is compelled to replace living labour with the ‘technological application of natural sciences', but since science and fixed capital cannot be ‘an independent source of value, independent of labour time',232 capital is also involved in a fatal contradiction that ‘works towards its own dissolution as the force dominating production'.233 Since the capitalist law of value measures value in terms of labour expended, the gradual displacement of living labour necessarily negates the law of value. The theft of alien labour time, on which the presentwealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. In Capital and the Grundrisse, Marx formulated the question in terms of the ‘realm of necessity' and the ‘realm of freedom', which coexist in a dialectical unity at the same time as technology frames and alters their relationship. On the one hand, man is inextricably a part of nature and must work to satisfy natural needs; on the other hand, rising productivity creates the material basis for extending the realm of freedom. Movement from the former towards the latter involves the satisfaction of needs beyond those that are merely natural. The ‘cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being' involves a ‘constantly enriched system of need'. In a community beyond capitalism, citizens ‘rich in qualities and relations', and ‘cultured to a high degree', will ‘take gratification in a many-sided way'. The ‘social human being', in that case, will be ‘the most total and universal... social product.'?35 In Volume iii of Capital Marx wrote: The real wealth of society and the possibility of a constant expansion of its reproduction process does not depend on the length of surplus labour but rather on its productivity and on the more or less plentiful conditions of production in which it is performed. The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. Capitalism ‘frees’ workers from labour, but it does so in the dehumanising form of enforced unemployment. Marx anticipated that communist community will replace externally imposed idleness with a working day deliberately shortened for all. A shorter working day will transform surplus labour time (in capitalist terms) into disposable time during which citizens might work out of themselves their own creative powers. The highest end, the end in itself, will then be self-development of the social individual. Communism will transcend capitalism by harnessing technological forces of production to enable ‘the absolute working out of creative potentialities... which makes... the development of all human powers as such the end in itself’^7 Recognising that capitalism initially deskills labour, Marx saw that the advance of technology also presupposes reskilling. An unskilled worker cannot be the master of modern machinery. With the continuing and even accelerated development of scientific means of production, the rigid division of labour must ultimately give way to development of multiple talents and ‘the universal development of the individual' - ‘Not an ideal or imagined universality, but the universality of his real and ideal relations'.[323] [324] [325] [326] [327] [328] Marx expected that universal workers will be capable of doing many things at many different times. Labour will acquire an altogether ‘new use-value, the development of a constantly expanding system of different kinds of labour. to which a constantly expanding and constantly enriched system of needs corresponds'?39 The capitalist division of labour will be replaced by a flexibly planned ‘organization of labour'?40 If the essential human character is the capacity for ‘free, conscious activity', as Marx said in the 1844 Manuscripts, then human ‘existence' must finally conform with human ‘essence': Free time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausubung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.241 Knowledge, objectified in sophisticated means of production,242 means that ‘Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator of the production process itself. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor'.243 In a community where the realm of physical necessity contracts, the need to invest in things will also diminish, creating the increasing opportunity to invest in the creative potential of human beings: Real economy - saving - consists of the saving of labour time. but this saving [is] identical with development of the productive force[s]. The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.[329] [330] [331] Hegel said the consciousness that bonds society is shared ethical knowledge, articulated in the laws of the state. In the Grundrisse Marx placed far greater emphasis upon scientific knowledge and ‘the law of the rising productivity of labour time’?45 presupposing that humans will recognise the inherent dignity of other reasoning beings when capital no longer reduces workers to things. Hegel regarded the laws of the state as ‘our’ laws, on the supposition that all are mediated into political life through representation in the Estates. For Marx, the analogue of Hegel’s laws would be ‘our’ plan - not a plan that happens to us, externally imposed by a state authority, but one that might emerge from workers’ associations that would be directly involved in the planning process?46 In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx had looked for a way beyond capitalism by way of immediacy of political life and human relations. In the Grundrisse he saw that ‘Mediation must, of course, take place’.[332] [333] The purpose of a socially determined plan would be to mediate the activity of all in the pursuit of common ends. Marx did not presume to tell future generations exactly how to plan, but he was quite certain of what a rational plan must achieve. Whereas capitalism counts labour time as ‘value’, in a community beyond capitalism the purpose of a plan will be to reduce labour time to a minimum. The most ‘valuable’ product will not be the one incorporating the most labour - as measured by the capitalist ‘law of value’ - but rather the one involving the least labour. Real wealth will be non-labour time, and to maximise non-labour time will be the paramount law of planning: Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself... Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree. However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time.248 If the social plan replaces the laws of Hegel’s state, and if, as Kant said, we lay down the law of the plan (the economy of time) to ourselves, then communist community must finally comply with the philosophical requirements of Kant’s ethical commonwealth and kingdom of ends; that is, a social plan that will, as Kant put it, ‘conceive all ends combined in a systematic whole’. The activity of planning will then become the universal-practical activity of social reason. The plan will replace ‘conscience’, for we shall now ‘know together’ in a way that neither John Calvin nor Adam Smith could possibly conceive. It will also replace Hegel’s Absolute Spirit - the thought of thought as creator of a world - when an emancipated human community creates its own world. The ideals of philosophy will finally be realised when Hegel’s ‘circle of necessity’ issues in a fully human community of rational self-determination. Communism will not merely repudiate capitalism; it will transcend it by incorporating the powers of science, first harnessed by capital, to accomplish a future that capitalism objectively anticipates but can never realise.