Soviet economic stagnation, since the mid-1970s, followed by the very debacle of the socialist bloc and the successful implementation of a comprehensive reform program in China, under the auspices of building a “market economy under
by Elias Jabbour
Published 28/01/2009 14:22
On the one hand, there is a tendency to consider, in an a-historical way, many ideas departed from Marx and Engels themselves, some notions that directly relate the construction of a new type of superstructure with the banning of influence, under socialism, of laws such as supply and demand and that of utility and the amount of labor employed in a given product as a way of obtaining its value.
– Therefore, the establishment of methodological parameters capable of taking this controversy in the direction of fair syntheses and backed by historical science necessarily involves retaking the essence of Political Economy as a science, listing the sources and the postulates to be deconstructed in a way that enables us to work on possible trends in the development process of a given social formation.
The essence of Political Economy: the economic process and its objective laws
Economic laws: their character, their objectivity, historical scope, mode of action, mutual relations and their consequences in the multiple determinations of concrete are the object of study of Political Economy.
The economic process is a set of human actions that are constantly repeated;
Under determined conditions, resulting from a certain historical development of society (fruit of the development of the productive forces), these actions are repeated in a definite manner, that is, they are characterized by a set of specific regularities.
The regularity of such actions is the basis on which such an order of phenomena are referred to as “economic laws” – which can also be referred to as “laws of Political Economy” or “laws of social development”. Such laws reflect the regular nature of processes that take place independent of human will. However, unlike the laws of nature, which have a lasting character, economic ones have a historically defined character.
Anyway, you can discover them, know them, and, based on them, use them in the interest of society, give another direction to the destructive action of some laws, limit your scope, give free rein to other laws that make way forward; but they cannot destroy them or create new economic laws.
In order to affirm, in a figurative way, the objective character of economics laws and, consequently, demonstrating that these are the engine of the economic process, acting directly under the development of society as a whole, Lenin stated:
“The law is the same in the phenomenon (…). The law is not beyond the phenomenon, but it is directly immanent. ”
Economic laws under socialism
– Inseparable from the political aspect that demands the installation of a superstructure of a new type (Dictatorship of the Proletariat), the main class of contradictions to be equalized in socialism, as the main part of the transition to communism and with central use for the analysis of current experiences in progress , lies in three main contradictions: those related to the differences between country and city, industry and agriculture and between manual and intellectual work. It is worth remembering that in all ongoing experiences, a large part of the population still lives in rural areas, urbanization is still a long-term process (eg China) and agriculture is not yet endowed with great technical capacity. Finally, they are elements that contribute to clarify the size of the path to follow towards a superior society.
– On the other hand, bearing in mind these order of contradictions to be faced, it is important to note the following content of Karl Marx’s Letter to Annenkov on December 28, 1846, in the sense that we realize that the current experiences of socialist transition are subject to realities whose steps to socialism must be in accordance with the level of development of each experience:
“It is unnecessary to add that men are not free arbitrators of their productive forces – which are the basis of their entire history – since the entire productive force is an acquired force, the product of a previous activity. Thus, the productive forces are the result of the practical energy of men, but this energy itself is circumscribed by the conditions in which men are located, by the productive forces already acquired, by the social form that exists before them, that they do not create, that it is the product of the previous generation. ”
In Marx and Engels, capitalism would end a so-called “pre-history of humanity”, while socialism would mean the apprehension of conscience in the construction of a new type society. What does that mean? Where does the heart of this issue lie? And what are the nodal mechanisms of this new phase?
In short, this question directly affects the question of the economic management of the new society; being that the main economic characteristic of capitalism necessarily resides in the anarchic aspect of the productive process (result of a total or partial ignorance of the ways of functioning of the laws that govern society and nature), socialism in a stage that coincides with the domination, by man, the laws that govern society and nature, creates the objective conditions for the use of these laws in favor of man. It is important to note that man does not have the capacity to change the rule of this order of laws, being able – at most – to use them to his own advantage.
– Hence the importance verified in Marx and Engels in the centrality of concentration, in the first phase of the capitalism-socialism transition, of the strategic means of production by the State and of economic planning as means to end the anarchy inherent in the capitalist mode of production. In short, the social ownership of the means of production and planning are the two central tools of socialism in the face of the anarchy of production and the use of economic laws for the benefit of man (for example in China and Vietnam, the internal use of the mercantile law of supply and demand and the use of the exchange rate to achieve its economic development objectives).
For example, in this respect (planning + social ownership of strategic means of production lies the answer to questions surrounding Chinese resistance to crises inherent in the world capitalist system.
Misreadings of the problem
The mistaken way of observing the whole process led certain authors to defend the thesis that, under socialism, Political Economy loses the object of analysis, as there would be no economic laws to be studied, or at most, it could stick the study of social formations prior to socialism.
This point of view was defended, for example, by Rosa Luxemburg, who, by limiting the object of Political Economy to the study of the laws of production aimed at the market under the capitalist mode of production, concluded the following:
“Political Economy, as a science, ends its mission at the moment when the anarchic economy of capitalism gives way to a planned economy, consciously organized and directed by the whole of laborious society. The victory of the contemporary working class, as well as the realization of socialism, therefore means the end of Political Economy as a science ”
– A similar point of view was defended by Bukhárin (in his “leftist” phase) as follows:
“Indeed, from the moment we consider the social economy organized, all the fundamental problems of Political Economy disappear (…). Hence a certain system of description can be understood here, and a system of norms on the other. But there is no place, here, for a science studying the ‘blind laws’ of the market, given that the market no longer exists. Thus, the end of capitalist mercantile production also means the end of Political Economy. ”
In these two cases, Bukhárin and R. Luxembugo, in addition to reducing the object of Political Economy to the study of certain relations mediated by the law of value, incur a triple mistake:
1) They confuse spontaneity with the objectivity of economic laws, that is, they work with the hypothesis that socialism, by canceling the spontaneous aspects of the action of economic laws, consequently, such laws ceased to exist, when in fact the objectivity intrinsic to such an order of laws continue to act;
2) They incur a misunderstanding of a liberal order when they do not relate the commercial relations of production and distribution as something historically given, therefore having their epilogue associated with the creation of objective and subjective conditions, including: A) the composition of a new type of power and B) the development of the productive forces at such a level so that the market as a mechanism for allocating resources and as a source of scarcity loses its reason for existing and
3) As an expression of this a-historical logic of approaching certain categories, they do not take into account that under the conditions of an order aimed at achieving socialism the laws inherent in supply and demand and the value of each commodity continue to act, now devoid of its spontaneous aspects, starting to be carried out in accordance with human intentions.
The role of “Western Marxism”
On the other hand, the denial of the role of Political Economy was the subject of syntheses of important intellectual currents, the main one in the West being called “Western Marxism”. Such a scanting of economic determination is, in Western Marxism, part of a whole that involves an attempt to isolate Marxism from both positivism and vulgar materialism.
In the field of scientific method, in Western Marxism, we see the logic according to which Marxism is a proposal for the emancipation of relations between men mediated by the economic domain, therefore, it is concluded that Marxism intends to subvert the economic domination inherent in the categories studied by Political Economy. According to Lukács:
“(…) Marxism is not just a proposal for advanced social theory, but the abolition of Political Economy.”
In addition to being a great source for subjectivist syntheses and without concrete appeal, soon playing a role in the theoretical disarmament of our movement, the conclusion that Marxism is the abolition of the role of Political Economy as science lacks substance for at least two reasons :
1) The lack of understanding, according to which, a certain branch of knowledge when developing throughout history can obtain a clear class feature;
2) The inconsequential aspect of such an observation lies in the relationship with the need – on the part of the working classes – to appropriate the ways in which economic laws operate under society.
Conclusion
The study and analysis of the socialist transition process must be supported by some historical and methodological bases:
1) Unlike the bourgeoisie that already constituted itself as an economically dominant class already in the epilogue of feudalism, the proletariat only constitutes a politically dominant class in socialism and, even from an economic point of view, a process of transformation into dominant economic power is necessary within the framework of what was already exposed in the Manifesto, as can be seen from a “despotic violation of the right to property and the relations of bourgeois production”, using for this “his political supremacy to gradually pull all the capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all production instruments in the hands of the State ”. Hence the need for a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, as a form of political mediation with the aim of achieving objectives of such magnitude;
2) The “brain” of Chinese economic reforms, economist Xue Muqiao, always liked to quote Marx about the return of reactionary forms of production after attempts to implement idealistic social relations, without a material basis. This type of Marxian assertion fits very well with Maoist ultra-egalitarianism (imposed after decades of decaying feudalism in China) of the lost 20 years (1966-1976). This type of practice in terms of economics, for Muqiao, was to be severely punished by the laws that govern economic development;
3) In this sense, the following phrase by Marx in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy is convenient, a passage that closes a series of questions and serves as a condenser for a deeper debate about the particularities of the first experiences of the last century and the current ones in progress:
“A social formation never disappears without all the productive forces it has the capacity to contain developed; never new and superior relations of production replace the old ones, before the conditions of material existence of these relations have been exhausted within the very heart of the old society. This is the reason why mankind never proposes anything but the tasks it can accomplish, because looking at it more closely, it will always be observed that the task itself does not arise except where the material conditions to accomplish it already exist or at least they are in the process of existing. ”
