[ Rather than expansion of the means of production or direction by
the state, human beings must be at the centre of the new socialist
society.]
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THE STATE AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM  
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Michael A. Lebowitz
April 23, 2023
Socialist Project
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_ Rather than expansion of the means of production or direction by
the state, human beings must be at the centre of the new socialist
society. _

, Michael A. Lebowitz

 

We are in the midst of a class war. That’s not unusual. There is
always class war in capitalism – although sometimes it is hidden and
sometimes there is the interlude of an apparent Carthaginian Peace.
But the class war has intensified now because of the crisis in
capitalism – a crisis rooted in the over-accumulation of capital.
And, in this crisis, capital has intensified the class war against the
working class. Austerity, cutbacks, the need to sacrifice – these
are the demands of capital as it calls upon workers to bear the burden
of capital’s own failures. This is a war conducted by capitalist
states against workers to compel them to give up their achievements
from past struggles. And, in some places (but, unfortunately, not
all), we see that the working class is saying, ‘no’. In some
cases, we see that workers are fighting to defend their past successes
within capitalism and that they are fighting against the racism and
xenophobia which are the default position when workers are under
attack but are not in struggle against capital. Such struggles, as
Marx knew, are ‘indispensable’ – they are the only means of
preventing workers ‘from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or
less well-fed instruments of production’.1
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But, who will win this class war?

In his recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou describes
the past defeats of May 1968, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the
Paris Commune as well as those of factory occupations and other such
struggles as defeats ‘covered with glory’.2
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Because they remain in our memory as inspirations, they must be
contrasted, he insists, to the ‘defeat without glory’ that social
democracy brings.3
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This is certainly true. However, we need to acknowledge that the
current struggles against capital’s attempt to make the working
class rescue it from yet another of its crises may yet be added to the
list of glorious defeats. Of course, it is necessary to try to stop
the cutbacks and to communicate to capital how high its costs will be
for attempting to shift the burden of its own failures to workers.
And, of course, we must celebrate those struggles taking place
wherever the working class has not been anesthetised as a result of
previous defeats without glory, leaving only what Marx once described
as ‘a heart-broken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass’.4
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But it is not enough to say ‘no’. There are those who think that
an accumulation of loudly screamed no’s can be sufficient – let
alone the ‘silent farts’ celebrated by John Holloway.5
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These poets of negation demonstrate thereby that they don’t
understand why and how capital reproduces itself. Why is it that after
so many defeats so many still cannot see what Marx grasped in the
nineteenth century – that capital has the tendency to produce a
working class which views the existence of capital as _necessary_?
‘The advance of capitalist production,’ he stressed, ‘develops a
working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the
requirements of this mode of production as self-evident natural
laws.’6
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Marx understood that capitalism tends to produce the workers it needs,
workers who look upon capitalism as common sense. Given the
mystification of capital (arising from the sale of labour-power) which
makes productivity, profits and progress appear as the result of the
capitalist’s contribution, it followed that ‘the organization of
the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed,
_breaks down all resistance_’.

And, Marx added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the
unemployed ‘sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over
the worker’ and that the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s
‘dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of
production themselves, and is _guaranteed in perpetuity_ by them’.7
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Obviously, for Marx, capital’s walls will never be brought down by
loud screams or silent farts.

Even with a certain resistance marked by struggles over wages, working
conditions and the defence of past gains, as long as workers look upon
the requirements of capital as ‘self-evident natural laws’, those
struggles occur within the bounds of the capitalist relation. In the
end, workers’ subordination to the logic of capital means that faced
with capitalism’s crises they sooner or later act to ensure the
conditions for the expanded reproduction of capital. Nowhere is this
clearer than in the defeats without glory of social democracy.

And, defeat when capitalism is in crisis means that capital can emerge
from the crisis by _restructuring_ itself – as it did
internationally with the Bretton Woods package after the crises of the
1930s and the 1970s. As is often noted, there is a big difference
between a crisis _in_ capitalism and a crisis _of_ capitalism. The
latter requires conscious actors prepared to put an end to capitalism,
prepared to challenge and defeat the logic of capital. But this
requires a vision which can appear to workers as an alternative common
sense, as _their_ common sense.

Like the ‘worst architect’, we must build our goal in our minds
before we can construct it in reality; only this conscious focus can
ensure the ‘purposeful will’ required to complete the defeat of
the logic of capital.8
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To struggle against a situation in which workers ‘by education,
tradition and habit’ look upon capital’s needs ‘as self-evident
natural laws’, we must struggle for an _alternative_ common sense.
But what is the vision of a new society whose requirements workers may
look upon as ‘self-evident natural laws’? Clearly, it won’t be
found in the results of twentieth century attempts to build socialism,
which, to use Marx’s phrase, ended ‘in a miserable fit of the
blues’.9
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The ‘Key Link’ for Twenty-First Century Socialism

_‘We have to reinvent socialism’._ With this statement, Hugo
Chavez, President of Venezuela, electrified activists in his closing
speech at the January 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
‘It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet
Union,’ he stressed, ‘but it will emerge as we develop new systems
that are built on cooperation, not competition.’ If we are ever
going to end the poverty of the majority of the world, capitalism must
be transcended, Chavez argued. ‘But we cannot resort to state
capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We
must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new
type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines
or the state ahead of everything’.10
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There, at its core, is the vision of socialism for the twenty-first
century. Rather than expansion of the means of production or direction
by the state, human beings must be at the centre of the new socialist
society. This marks a return to Marx’s vision – to the contrast he
drew in Capital between a society subordinate to the logic of capital
(where ‘the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values
for valorization’) and the logic of a new society, that ‘inverse
situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the
worker’s own need for development’.11
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This concept of the worker’s need for development is the culmination
of Marx’s consistent stress upon the centrality of the development
of human capacity – the ‘development of the rich individuality’,
as the real wealth and explicit goal of the new society. Here was the
‘inverse situation’ which would allow for ‘the all-round
development of the individual’, the ‘complete working out of the
human content’, the ‘development of all human powers as such the
end in itself’, a society of associated producers in which ‘the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all’.12
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But this is only one side of Marx’s perspective. A focus upon the
full development of human potential was characteristic of much
socialist thought in the nineteenth century.13
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What Marx added to this emphasis upon human development was his
understanding of _how_ that development of human capacities occurs. In
his Theses on Feuerbach, he was quite clear that it is not by giving
people gifts, not by changing circumstances for them. Rather, we
change only through real practice, by changing circumstances
ourselves. Marx’s concept of ‘revolutionary practice’, that
concept of ‘the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity or self-change’, is the red thread that runs
throughout his work.14
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Marx was most consistent on this point when talking about the
struggles of workers against capital and how this revolutionary
practice transforms ‘circumstances and men’, expanding their
capabilities and making them fit to create a new world.15
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But this process of changing ourselves is not at all limited to the
sphere of political and economic struggle. In the very act of
producing, Marx indicated, ‘the producers change, too, in that they
bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in
production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas,
new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language’.16
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And, certainly, the relations within which workers produce affect the
nature of the workers produced. After all, that was Marx’s point
about how capitalist productive relations ‘distort the worker into a
fragment of a man’ and degrade him and ‘alienate from him the
intellectual potentialities of the labour process’.17
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It is essential to recognise that every human activity has as its
result a _joint product_ – both the change in the object of labour
and the change in the labourer herself.18
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Unfortunately, that second product is often forgotten.

Marx’s combination of human development and practice constitutes the
_key link_. Taken seriously, it has definite implications for
relations within the workplace – rather than capitalism’s joint
product (the fragmented, crippled human being whose enjoyment consists
in possessing and consuming things), it implies a person who is able
to develop all her potential through her activity. Taken seriously,
that key link has definite implications for the nature of the state
– rather than allowing us every few years to elect those who misrule
us as our representatives to a state which stands over and above us,
it implies what Marx called the ‘self-government of the
producers’, the ‘reabsorption of the state power by society as its
own living forces’.19
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Taken seriously, that key link has definite implications for the
nature of the party – rather than a body that sees itself as
superior to social movements and whose members are meant to learn the
merits of discipline in following the decisions made by infallible
central committees, it implies a party which learns from popular
initiative and unleashes the creative energy of masses through their
own practice. Taken seriously, that key link has obvious implications
for building socialism.

Consider the characteristic of socialist production implicit in this
key link.20
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What are the circumstances that have as their joint product ‘the
totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions
are different modes of activity he takes up in turn’?21
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Given the ‘dialectical inversion’ peculiar to capitalist
production that cripples the body and mind of the worker and alienates
her from ‘the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’,
it is clear that to develop the capacities of people the producers
must put an end to what Marx called, in his Critique of the Gotha
Programme, ‘the enslaving subordination of the individual to the
division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental
and physical labour’.22
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For the development of rich human beings, the worker must be able to
call ‘his own muscles into play under the control of his own
brain’. Expanding the capabilities of people requires both mental
and manual activity. Not only does the combination of education with
productive labour make it possible to increase the efficiency of
production; this is also, as Marx pointed out in Capital, ‘the only
method of producing fully developed human beings’.23
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Here, then, is the way to ensure that ‘the productive forces have
also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and
all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’.24
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The activity through which people develop their capacities, however,
is not limited to the sphere of production as narrowly defined within
capitalism. Every activity with the goal of providing inputs into the
development of human beings needs be understood as an aspect of
production. And the goals that guide production must be democratically
established so that people can transform both their circumstances and
themselves and thereby produce themselves as subjects in the new
society.25
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The implication is obvious – _every_ aspect of production must be a
site for the collective decision-making and variety of activity that
develops human capacities and builds solidarity among the particular
associated producers.

When workers act in workplaces and communities in conscious
cooperation with others, they produce themselves as people conscious
of their interdependence and of their own collective power. The joint
product of their activity is the development of the capacities of the
producers – precisely Marx’s point when he says that ‘when the
worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the
fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his
species’.26
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Creating the conditions in workplaces and communities by which people
can develop their capacities is an essential aspect of the concept of
socialism for the twenty-first century. But it is only one element.
How can the worker’s own need for development be realised if capital
owns our social heritage – the products of the social brain and the
social hand? And, how can we develop our own potential if we look upon
other producers as enemies or as our markets – i.e., if individual
material self-interest is our motivation?

Capitalism is an organic system, one which has the tendency to
reproduce the conditions of its existence (including a working class
which looks upon its requirements as ‘self-evident natural laws’).
That is its strength. To counter that and to satisfy ‘the worker’s
own need for development’, the socialist alternative also must be an
organic system, a particular combination of production, distribution
and consumption, a system of reproduction. What Chavez named in
January 2007 as ‘the elementary triangle of socialism’ (social
property, social production and satisfaction of social needs) is a
step forward toward a conception of such a system.27
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Consider the logic of this socialist combination, this conception of
socialism for the twenty-first century:

_1. Social ownership of the means of production_ is critical within
this structure because it is the only way to ensure that our communal,
social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather
than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of
producers or state bureaucrats. But, this concerns more than our
current activity. Social ownership of our social heritage, the results
of past social labour, is an assertion that all living human beings
have the right to the full development of their potential – to real
wealth, the development of human capacity. It is the recognition that
‘the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all’.

_2. Social production organized by workers_ builds new relations among
producers – relations of cooperation and solidarity. It allows
workers to end ‘the crippling of body and mind’ and the loss of
‘every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual
activity’ that comes from the separation of head and hand.
Organization of production in all spheres by workers, thus, is a
condition for the full development of the producers, for the
development of their capabilities – a condition for the production
of rich human beings.

_3. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes_ as the goal of
productive activity means that, instead of interacting as separate and
indifferent individuals, we function as members of a community. Rather
than looking upon our own capacity as our property and as a means of
securing as much as possible in an exchange, we start from the
recognition of our common humanity and, thus, of the importance of
conditions in which everyone is able to develop her full potential.
When our productive activity is oriented to the needs of others, it
both builds solidarity among people and produces socialist human
beings.

These three sides of the ‘socialist triangle’ mutually interact to
form a structure in which ‘all the elements coexist simultaneously
and support one another’, as Marx put it. ‘This is the case with
every organic whole.’28
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Yet, the very interdependence of the three sides suggests that
realization of each element depends upon the existence of the other
two. Without production for social needs, no real social property;
without social property, no worker decision-making oriented toward
society’s needs; without worker decision-making, no transformation
of people and their needs.

The State’s Place Within ‘Socialism as an Organic System’

Is there a place for the state in socialism as an organic system? In
the absence of a mechanism by which this particular combination of
production, distribution and consumption can be realized, it remains
purely a vision. Thus, implicit in the concept of socialism as an
organic system is a set of institutions and practices through which
all members of society can share the fruits of social labour and are
able to satisfy their ‘own need for development’. To produce and
reproduce ‘rich human beings’ in a society based upon solidarity
requires a conscious attempt to ensure that the necessary conditions
for full human development infuse all levels of society.

Consider one possible scenario for a process of participatory
diagnosis and planning.29
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At the level of an individual neighbourhood, it is possible for
neighbours to discuss directly the kind of community they want to live
in and what they see as necessary for the development of their
capacities and that of those around them.30
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While this process identifies needs, the discussion also allows this
community to explore its own ability to satisfy those needs itself; in
other words, it identifies the capabilities of the community. Thus, at
the level of the community, there is a direct attempt to coordinate
the system of needs and the system of labours. In addition to being
able to identify its needs and the extent to which those can be
satisfied locally through the labour of community members, this
process (which occurs under the guidance of elected neighbourhood
councils) has a second product. By sharing and attempting to reconcile
views of the most urgent needs of members of this community, there is
a learning process – one in which protagonism builds and reinforces
solidarity – i.e., the process of participatory diagnosis produces
particular people, a particular joint product. At the core of this
process, thus, is revolutionary practice – the simultaneous changing
of circumstances and human activity or self-change.

Of course, the probability of a precise match between capabilities and
needs within this community is negligible. The community is likely to
have needs it cannot satisfy locally and capacities it does not need.
In this situation, autarky supports neither the ability of people to
secure the use-values they identify as important for their development
nor the satisfaction in meaningful activity that can come from meeting
the needs of others outside their immediate neighbourhood. Thus, to
satisfy ‘the worker’s own need for development’, the community
needs to go beyond this barrier in order to coordinate with other
communities in a larger body.

The commune represents a further step, bringing together the
information transmitted by local neighbourhood councils about the
needs and capabilities of their communities as well as drawing upon
the knowledge of workers within units of production in this
geographical area.31
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Do workers have the capacity to satisfy the needs identified by the
communities? By exploring this question in their workers councils,
workers engage in conscious consideration of production options within
their workplaces and focus upon the logic of producing for communal
needs; however, to answer this question adequately requires more than
responses from individual production units taken separately. By
combining their knowledge and capabilities, workers in particular
workplaces can achieve results which are greater than the sum of their
individual parts taken separately. But, here again, more than a
process of producing for communal needs and purposes occurs.
Cooperation within and between units of production for this purpose
generates solidarity among the combined workers and reinforces their
understanding of the goals of production.

Throughout this process, community members and workers can interact
through communal meetings and a communal parliament. And, the result
of the process is that the commune councils have at their disposal
data on (a) needs that can be satisfied from within the commune and
(b) the needs which cannot be satisfied locally. Further, there is
information on (c) the potential output of workplaces that can be
provisionally utilized within the commune, and (d) the potential
output of workplaces that is unutilized. Thus, there is both an
indication of the level of needs that provisionally can be satisfied
locally as well as identification of the excess demand and excess
supply within each commune.

To stop here would reproduce the problem of remaining at the level of
the individual neighbourhood. To create the conditions for the free
development of all, it is necessary to go beyond geographical
barriers. Thus, this process is extended to larger areas: the data
from communes is transmitted upward to cities (communal cities), to
the states or provinces and ultimately to the national level – to
bodies composed of delegates from the communes, cities and the states,
respectively. At the national level, then, it is possible to identify
(a) provisionally satisfied needs, (b) unsatisfied needs, (c)
provisionally assigned output and (d) provisionally unassigned output.
It is fair to assume that there will not be a balance between needs
and capacities at the first iteration.

Accordingly, the process of reconciling the system of needs and the
system of labours is an essential requirement of the set of
institutions and practices characteristic of socialism as an organic
system. If there are excess needs, there are two logical resorts: (1)
find a way to increase output (a question for workers councils to
explore), and (2) recognise the necessity to reduce satisfaction of
some needs.32
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Thus, a critical discussion must occur here – what is to be
unsatisfied? Exploration of this question requires a discussion of the
relative requirements of different areas and the different types of
needs to be given priority. It is only at this level that
identification of national and regional inequality occurs as well as a
discussion of priorities and choices for the society as a whole. This
dialogue needs to take place not only at the national level but at
every level down to the neighbourhood. Such a discussion is absolutely
essential because, through such a process of participatory planning,
people learn about the needs and capacities of others elsewhere in the
society. There is no other way to build solidarity than to put faces
upon other members of society. Thus, throughout this process, there
are two products: development of the plan and the development of the
people who participate in its construction.

The result of this scenario is a process of production for communal
needs and communal purposes in which protagonism within the workplace
and community ensures that this is social production organized by the
producers. Obviously, too, the third side of the socialist triangle,
social ownership, is present in that there is neither production for
capital nor production for any particular group, i.e. a process of
group ownership. In each workplace, workers are conscious that their
productive activity is for society. In short, begin with communality,
and the product of our activity is ‘a communal, general product from
the outset’.33
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How, though, could the concept of socialism as an organic system be
made real _in the absence_ of institutions and practices such as
these? This combination and articulation of councils and delegates at
different levels of society is necessary to ensure the reproduction of
a society in which the ‘free development of each is the condition
for the free development of all’. And, it is a _state_ – a
particular type of state, a state from below, a state of the
commune-type. This state does not wither away – rather, it is an
integral part of socialism as an organic system.

Of course, some people may not wish to call this set of institutions a
state because these are society’s ‘own living forces’ – i.e.,
not ‘an organ standing above society’ but ‘one completely
subordinate to it’.34
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How would designation of this as a state be compatible with the view
that, by definition, as Holloway puts it, ‘the state is the assassin
of hope’?35
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Like those who conceive of labour as inherently a burden (and thus can
think of nothing better than to reduce it to zero), those who reject
these institutions as a state demonstrate that they are trapped in the
categories of old societies.

Old habits die slowly, though. And, taxonomy should not trump content.
So, if some people prefer to call these articulated councils a
non-state or the ‘Unstate’, this should not present a problem –
as long as they agree that socialism as an organic system requires
these institutions and practices in order to be real.

To read the entire essay please click here
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