Socialism in common parlance is generally taken to refer to the post 1917 regimes in the world ruled by the single (communist) parties and characterized by the ownership of the means of production mainly by the state– dubbed ‘public ownership’ – the economy directed by central planning. The two most important points stressed for this socialism are the existence of a central authority exercising political power, and the institution of the so-called ‘public ownership’-claimed to be the negation of private ownership in the means of production. The rationale of considering these regimes ‘socialist’ has been basically the claim that with the installation of ‘public ownership’ in the means of production private ownership in those means no longer exists and thereby capitalism has been abolished. Before proceeding further we should stress that the concept of ‘socialism’ and the related central categories used by these regimes are derived from Lenin’s writings, mainly his State and Revolution which its author claimed was an exposition of Marx’s own ideas.
The way of looking at things, as given above, it should be clear, is purely juridical. The question of real (social) relations of production – that is , the relations between the workers and the conditions of production (including means of production) in the process of production – is not taken into consideration whereas, following Marx, juridical relations arise from production relations. As regards the question of ownership in the means of production, we submit that the concept of capitalist private ownership (in the means of production) signifying individual (private) ownership’ that is , ownership by ‘separate persons ‘, as Lenin puts it (the term ‘separate’ does not appear in the standard English translation) and, correspondingly, the capitalist as the individual owner of capital is pre-Marxian. As a juridical category it is as old as the Roman law taken over later by the bourgeois jurisprudence. This is the juridical form in which capital appears at its beginning period. But with the progress of accumulation this form increasingly looses its relevance. Marx shows clearly that at a certain stage of capitalist development, for the needs of increasing accumulation of capital- the “independent variable” in capitalist production- this form tends to be largely inadequate and there appears increasingly (as is seen in the rise of share capital) what Marx calls “directly social capital in opposition to private capital” together with the “associated capitalist”.This signals the “abolition of private ownership within the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself” (Marx discusses all this in Capital vol.1 in the chapter on the ‘general law of capital accumulation’ and in the manuscript of Capital vol.3, in the chapter on the ‘role of credit ‘).
However, Marx does not speak only of individual private ownership in the means of production. In his work we also read about another kind of private ownership largely left aside by the Marx readers including those who claim to be Marx’s followers. In this second, and more significant sense, private ownership in the means of production exists as ownership of the few in the face of non ownership of the great majority who are compelled to sell their labor power (manual and mental) in order to survive. In this sense, as Marx puts it in his 1861-63 ‘Notebook’ 6, the objective conditions of labor are the “private ownership of a part of society”, and “private ownership of a distinct class”(emphasis added). This is the sense which appears in the assertion of the 1848 Communist Manifesto that communists could sum up their theory in a single expression: ”abolition of private ownership”, and the latter is explicitly used in the sense of “disappearance of class ownership”. The same idea reappears in Marx’s address on the 1871 Paris Commune: “The Commune intended to abolish that class ownership which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few”. Hence even with the (juridical) abolition of individual private ownership in the means of production, if the great majority continues to earn its living by exchange of labor power against wage/salary, that would signify that private ownership continues to exist as “class ownership”. It is not with (supposedly working class) state ownership but only with society’s direct appropriation of the conditions of production implying necessarily the disappearance of the wage system and capitalism along with it that private ownership finally goes out of existence.
The cardinal fact of the capitalist mode of production is the separation of the (laboring) producers from the conditions of production. Already in an early work by Marx(and Engels)– The Holy Family (1845)– the private ownership is characterized as the ‘antithesis’ of the proletariat. The immediate consequence of this great divide is that the great majority of the society have only their laboring capacity to exchange for wage /salary irrespective of its level. In his very first Notebook of 1861-63 Marx calls this situation of the laborers ‘absolute poverty’, and the waged/salaried laborer her/himself a ‘pauper’, however high the level of the remuneration. It is clear that we have here , confronting these ‘paupers’ class private ownership. ‘Posited as non capital, labor, the non-objectified labor, labor power appears negatively – non-raw materials, non instruments of labor , non means of subsistence, non-money. Labor separated from all objectivity, as simple possibility. Positively, the labor not as object , but as activity , as the living source of value. Labor is , on the one hand , absolute poverty as object, on the other hand, universal possibility of the wealth as subject, as activity’(In his 1857-58 Notebook 5 Marx had already called the laborer ‘free laborer , objectless, purely subjective labor power confronting the objective conditions of production as his/her non ownership, as alien ownership’.This clearly shows the continuity of thought from his 1844 Parisian manuscripts).
In a later work, the so-called ‘sixth chapter’ of Capital I we read:‘To the same extent that the social productivity of labour develops along with the development of the capitalist mode of production, develops also the piled up wealth in opposition to the laborer as the wealth that dominates as capital, as the world of wealth, alien and dominating the laborer. In the same proportion develops also the subjective poverty, want and dependence in opposition. Its emptiness corresponds to the fullness of the other’.
In other words, the existence of the wage (salary) system in a society immediately signifies separation of the laboring people from the conditions of production, and that means the existence of private ownership (in the sense of Marx). The proposition holds: the existence of the wage system is a necessary and sufficient condition of the existence of private ownership of the conditions of production.
The post-1917 Party-State regimes had wage labor from the beginning of their existence. Hence, ignoring the real relations of production (the wage system), simply on the basis of installing the so-called ‘public ownership’ it is false to claim that these regimes had abolished private ownership and thereby capitalism itself and had founded socialism.
Paresh Chattopadhyay
University of Quebec in Montreal |