[lbo-talk] Universal Asceticism and Social Levelling

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Mon Jul 16 20:46:12 PDT 2007


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
>His
> views are clearly laid out in the 1875 Critique of the
> Gotha Program, where he says that the lower phase of
> communism will be the fulfillment of bourgeois right,
> where each is remunerated according to his work, prior
> to the higher phase, with the unfettering of the
> productive forces and remuneration according to need.

Carrol Cox wrote:

I'm in an intellectually lethargic state just now & I don't want to reread the Critique of the Gotha Programme to check for myself. Does the phrase "unfettering of the productive forces" (or any clearly synonymous phrase) appear in that work, or any other writings of the late Marx? _And_, is there any clearcut explanation in Marx of any period as to just what the phrase, "Productive Forces," means? If Marx meant unfettering of productive forces to mean that progress came from greater gdp, then it's a case of Homer nodding.

For a landed aristocracy, Realith = The Past, and a defense of reality is a defense of the past embodied in the present.

For a capitalist class, Reality = the Future, and a defense of Reality is destruction of the present.

For workers (or for people in a non-class society), Reality = the Present, and a defense of reality is an opposition to the tyranny of the Future.

Endless increase in production is just another version of the Tyranny of the Future.

*********************************************

What bourgeois thinkers mean when they call for unfettering the production process is pretty well summed up by Benjamin Franklin:

"Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, on half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon *that* the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six and turned again it is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills the breeding sow, destory all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys al that it might have produced, even scores of pounds."

N.B. the reified notion of just how wealth is produced i.e. by money. Note also that time is equated with money. Who's time?

Well Franklin was not Marx. Marx knew very well who produced the wealth of the world when combined with natural resources: workers applying their skill over time. And wealth and the freedom associated with it (which is so closely guarded by the bourgoeis and their hired politicians in the State) for Marx is directly related to the possession by the producer of their own time and the social product of their labour:

Capital, the social relation... " is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone's time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so -- and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence -- then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus ...." http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/grundris.htm

"Unfettering the productive forces" would be freeing labour from wage-slavery and the empowerment of a free association of producers to determine how much or little socially necessary labour time, they wished to put into producing wealth in a co:operative commonwealth.

As for Marx's position on "unfettered production" vis a vis the environment, IMO, one should consult John Bellamy Foster's work.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/marxecol.htm

Mike B)

An injury to one is an injury to all http://www.iww.org/

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