So I'm not an enthusiast of 'revolution', at least not in the Jacobin understanding of it. For the very same reasons, I opt not to use the word 'socialism' in an uncritically approving way. Socialism for marxists has always been a kind of transitionary concept. But if the various socialisms that we have known did not constitute any sort of transition to communism - far from it - then what is the point? Marx himself wrestled with the dilemma of transition and did not provide answers for us. For example, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme he even comes out in favour of labour vouchers and the slogan about, 'from each according to his ability to each according to his need'. **********************
I would disagree that one cannot find the answers for transtion in Marx. Even his suggestion of labour vouchers in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" is an indication that the wages system should be abolished in a transition from the DOP to higher levels of socialism/communism. What's been missing from most of the official communist/socialist dialogue has been the critique of the wages system and how the wages system itself contributes to the reproduction of bourgeois consciouness.
Wages are the price workers get for their productive skills in a commodified market system. The price of labour doesn't depend on the productivity of the worker, it depends on the amount of socially necessary labour time embodied in the worker's hands and brains (e.g. education, apprentice skills and so on) combined with the supply and demand for those skills on the market. The essential point is that the worker is separated from the ownership and control of the product which s/he produces. This is what needs to be rectified in a transition from lower (each according to work) and higher (each according to needs) "stages" of communism/socialism. It requires direct democracy and social ownership of the means of production/consumption.
This observation is formulated time and again by Marx in various passages of his work. For example, this piece which I posted the other day to you, my fellow LOBsters: ********************************* If one day's work were necessary in order to keep one worker alive for one day, then capital would not exist, because the working day would then exchange for its own product, so that capital could not realize itself and hence could not maintain itself as capital. The self-preservation of capital is its self-realization. If capital also had to work in order to live, then it would not maintain itself as capital but as labour. Property in raw materials and instruments of labour would be merely nominal; economically they would belong to the worker as much as to the capitalist, since they would create value for the capitalist only in so far as he himself were a worker. He would relate to them therefore not as capital, but as simple material and means of labour, like the worker himself does in the production process. If, however, only half a working day is necessary in order to keep one worker alive one whole day, then the surplus value of the product is self-evident, because the capitalist has paid the price of only half a working day but has obtained a whole day objectified in the product; thus has exchanged nothing for the second half of the work day. The only thing which can make him into a capitalist is not exchange, but rather a process through which he obtains objectified labour time, i.e. value, without exchange. Half the working day costs capital nothing; it thus obtains a value for which it has given no equivalent. And the multiplication of values can take place only if a value in excess of the equivalent has been obtained, hence created.
Surplus value in general is value in excess of the equivalent. The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself. Hence surplus value can never sprout out of the equivalent; nor can it do so originally out of circulation; it has to arise from the production process of capital itself. The matter can also be expressed in this way: if the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus-labour. What appears as surplus value on capital's side appears identically on the worker's side as surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive. The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.
The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation—as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery—how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this 'use value', regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the planters' impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as an embellishment for this mood of malicious glee and indolence. [39] They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become wage labourers, but, instead, self-sustaining peasants working for their own consumption. As far as they are concerned, capital does not exist as capital, because autonomous wealth as such can exist only either on the basis of direct forced labour, slavery, or indirect forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital, but rather as relation of domination [Herrschaftsverhältnis]; thus, the relation of domination is the only thing which is reproduced on this basis, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth itself, and which can therefore never create general industriousness. (We shall return to this relation of slavery and wage labour.) [40]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm#p324
I think from this and other passages in Marx's work, one can see the core importance of control of one's time. Who is controlling the worker's time, the worker or the bosses? It's a class issue. This is why the class struggle over shortening the work week is so crucial to the formation of class consciousness.
Mike B)
"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill "http://iamawobbly.multiply.com/
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