Class, Surplus, and the Division of Labour

A Post-Marxian Exploration

M. Polák

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137287731
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

The traditional Marxian picture of a two-class polarisation seems far removed from today's diverse society. Re-examining the very foundations of the Marxian theory in the process, the author argues that important critiques can fruitfully be understood and to accomplish the goal, he extends the traditional concepts in innovative and original ways.

1

Introduction: The Legacy and the Crisis

There are many ways in which a society can be split into classes. We could divide people into categories on the basis of income and wealth, power and status in a hierarchy, the kind of work they do, their level of education, their cultural characteristics such as tastes and accents, and so on.

The classic Marxian conception of classes is often characterised as being based on the relation to the means of production. The relation in question is one of ownership: society is divided into classes depending on who owns which productive resources. However, this is only half of the Marxian story. Although private property looms large in this picture of the world, it should be always borne in mind that it is not significant in itself. If ownership as such were all that mattered, the relevant class division would be simply into the rich and the poor. This is clearly not the fundamental Marxian description. Instead, ownership is bound up with exploitation – that is, the production and the appropriation of goods beyond the needs of the direct producers; in short, of the social surplus. The particular property relations in a given society help define the way in which exploitation occurs, and thus delineate the exploiting and the exploited class. Ownership is not an end in itself within the Marxian explanation; it is only the means for describing the process of exploitation. Thus, it is not just that there are rich and poor people; the rich can only remain rich because the poor remain poor.

From this fundamental relationship, other significant features are supposed to follow: the exploiting class is also the ruling class, using a putative expression of the general interest, the State, to cement the exploitative relationship; and it is also the ideologically dominant class, producing ideas to legitimise that relationship in the eyes of the exploited.

The general conception stems from the particular description of capitalism that Marx bequeathed his followers: on the one hand, there was the wealthy, powerful, high-status bourgeoisie, owning the means of production necessary for the production of subsistence goods; on the other hand, there was the poverty-stricken, powerless, low-status proletariat, owning nothing but their labour-power and thus forced to perform surplus labour in order to get access to the means of production.

This two-class description is of course not the only one that is to be found in Marx’s writing. It is by now a staple of the Marxist discussions of class that Marx used the term with a wide variety of meanings, depending on the context (Roberts 1997; Cottrell 1984). In particular, in the more journalistic pieces, the word ‘class’ seems to be applied to an enormous array of social actors. In the more abstract works, however, the description tends to be restricted to the two classes mentioned above. At the level of abstraction of Capital, capitalism is thus seen as polarised between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The usual way in which the abstract model has been linked to reality was in terms laid down by the Communist Manifesto, according to which society is ‘more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps’ (Marx and Engels 1967, p. 80). In other words, the claim was that as time progresses, various ‘intermediate strata’ will gradually disappear. These intermediate strata were more or less explicitly identified with the ‘petty bourgeoisie’, that is, small producers owning their means of production, with at most a small number of employees aside from the members of their own family.¹

Two problems for Marxian class analysis

The trouble for this traditional Marxist picture was that reality refused to co-operate. The problem was not that the small business owners did not accept the invitation to completely disappear (although that was true, too). This would be a minor difficulty that could be dealt with, just as long as there was at least a long-term tendency towards decline. Even stagnation would do, provided such petty bourgeoisie did not constitute a significantly large stratum of the society.

What was far more important, and far more difficult to deal with, were two developments that can be summarised under the headings of ‘the separation of ownership and control’ (Means 1931) and ‘the embarrassment of the middle classes’ (Wright 1985, p. 13). By these phrases I intend two phenomena that constitute a challenge for the Marxian picture from ‘the top’ and ‘the bottom’ respectively, as it were. The former refers to the fact that individual agents appeared who seemed to possess pretty much every superficially significant feature of the capitalists save for the actual legal ownership of property. The latter refers to the converse fact that other agents appeared who seemed to be property-less and selling their labour yet otherwise possessed very few superficially significant features in common with the proletariat.²

Thus, the separation of ownership from control means that the individual protagonist of the early capitalism no longer plays a significant role in today’s society. Such an early industrial capitalist magnate can be characterised as the ideal type embodying the financier, the entrepreneur, the manager and the supervisor all at once. These characteristics have come apart, chiefly if not exclusively with the advent of the joint stock company. It has been argued that Marx himself was very well aware of these effects of the coming form of capitalist property (see for example Carchedi 1977). To some extent, this is indeed the case; there are interesting insights about such ‘abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself’(Marx 1966, p. 438) in his work. Nevertheless, the proper theorisation of the implications for the class structure has not been worked out by Marx. The dominant notion of classes in his work remained the one based on the early structure of clearly distinct individual owner-managers and purely subordinate workers, occasional discussions of supervisory labour notwithstanding. To this extent, the proponents of the ‘managerial revolution’ were quite correct: the development did constitute a problem for Marxism. How are we to theorise the social status and the political interests of actors who, while superficially non-owners, exhibit far too many signs of ‘being on the side of capital’? The problem is perhaps not insoluble, but it certainly requires a response.

However, this was still more of an anomaly for the Marxist theory rather than an immediate problem for practice. Even if a proper theorisation is lacking, it is not so difficult to amalgamate the capitalist owners and the high-level managers in real-life struggles. Indeed, the revolutionary socialist rhetoric, still in evidence among the political sects, solved the problem by simply talking about ‘the workers and the bosses’, not bothering with theoretical niceties about the subtle differences in the standing of the various strata of the latter. After all, ‘if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck …’

The embarrassment of the middle classes, however, was precisely a problem par excellence for practice, and only consequently also for Marxist theory. The trouble was presented by the appearance of whole swathes of nominal wage-earners who did not identify themselves with the working class, socially or politically (while at the same time not clearly belonging to the category of the ‘bosses’ either). In terms of practice, the persistence of non-proletarian, non-capitalist strata inevitably had a major impact upon the strategies of the nominally working-class political parties. The seemingly inexorable slide of the initially Marxist Social Democracy towards ‘revisionism’ was informed by the realisation that an explicitly ‘workerist’ orientation and programme simply was not going to deliver the electoral success that these parties craved.

Hence also the challenge for the Marxist theorists, as well as for the class-oriented political activists. While Marx was predicting a ‘movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’ (Marx and Engels 1967, p. 92), there is not and never has been any such movement. At least a part of the explanation lies in the fact that not all who prima facie sell their labour seem to have had sympathies for the socialist project. If a class-based political strategy were ever to avoid the pitfalls of the social-democratic road, how then should the problem of the ‘middle classes’ to be approached? How to conceptualise their existence? How to appeal to those wage-earners who explicitly or implicitly identify themselves as ‘middle class’? How should their alliances with the putative working class be built – indeed, should they be built?

And so on and so forth.

The Soviet mode of production and the fate of Marxism

A question might be asked at this stage: What exactly is the point of all this? After all, Marxism is dead, ‘as any fool knows’.

The main reason is a problem which came from an unexpected direction. Despite much initial enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, independent-minded Marxists both inside and outside of the USSR or the Eastern Bloc gradually came to perceive the Soviet system very critically. Whatever else it was, it could hardly be claimed even by its defenders as that which Marx had in mind when he talked about Communism – regardless of whether we mean the ‘higher’ or the ‘lower’ stage.

Of course, as many people have noticed, it would be hard to expect a historical phenomenon to follow the exact contours of any one person’s idea (see for example Bahro 1978, Cockshott & Cottrell 1993). In fact, it would be downright bizarre. Nevertheless, as is well known, Marx did not actually prescribe any very definite shape for Communism – he is famous for poking fun at ‘writing recipes for cookbooks of the future’. His views on Communism are thus few and far between and can be considered as the least conditions that a society would have to fulfil to qualify as Communist in the Marxian sense. We can relax these conditions even further, if need be. All that is necessary is to note that Marx’s Communism is a society where ‘associated producers’ jointly decide on the future shape of production and life in general. Only a committed apologist for the Soviet system could through some tortuously sophist arguments come to a conclusion that this was true about the Soviet system.

Instead of a society of equality (subject only to differences in natural talents), true democracy, with every one producer’s voice being heard, and a true community where people have each others’ interests at heart, the Soviet system was characterised by domination, alienation and hierarchies of of privilege.³ The question is, can those characteristics be explained by reference to class? Is such an explanation illuminating in any way? And in particular, does it help to identify any ‘contradictions’ or ‘laws of motion’ of the Soviet system?

Now, there is no doubt that the collapse of what we now perhaps should call ‘historically existing socialism’ had an incredibly deep impact on the stature of Marxism. It can be argued that this is deserved. After all, regardless of the fact that the official Communist interpretation of Marx was by no means the only one, and that there were more than enough Marxist critics of this type of regime – at the end of the day, if the test of a theory is social practice, then the Communist parties had a very strong claim to represent Marxism. For after all, they had achieved and kept power, while the dissident Marxists of all sort were being repeatedly defeated on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It is no use complaining that history did not conform to the wishes of those believing in a less authoritarian type of Marxism.

So perhaps there are good reasons why the defeat should have a deeply depressing effect on Marxists and socialists. However, even if these reasons are good, bad conclusions are often deduced from them. In particular, it is very easy to just dismiss the entire structure, to completely give up on the transformatory project.

This strikes me as an enormous waste. Granted, the collapse of the political-economic system may have exposed the bankruptcy of the system of thought too; but this in itself tells us nothing about which and how many parts of it were faulty. We do not need to throw away each and every individual nut and bolt. To switch metaphors, surely instead careful work is required to sort the wheat from the chaff.

There is a difference between the spirit, the motivation, the general outlook on the one hand, and the particular theoretical structure on the other. The collapse of that structure undoubtedly does have a strong impact also on the spirit, but in the long run, the two can be disentangled. It seems to me that it is necessary to sort through the wreckage, discard what is rotten and broken, but collect the still-usable parts – and move on.

Hence the subtitle of this work, a post-Marxian exploration. I want to see how much mileage there still is in the Marxian concepts, to push them as far as they can possibly go – but no further. That is, no loyalty to the overarching theory nor to the particular writings should be expected. Hence the ‘post-Marxian’ nature of the project. What I do find inspiring and what I am most impressed by is the general theory of reproduction, which seems to me to be the rational kernel of Marxism, and that will be the focus of the investigation.

Exploitation and the Labour Theory of Value

Yet another problem for Marx’s class theory has come to a head already quite a long time ago. The mature Marx based his understanding of classes in capitalism on the concept of exploitation. To summarise it briefly, the Marxian working class is a class of direct producers that, deprived of the necessary means of production, is forced to sell its labour-power to the capitalists in order to earn a living. The capitalists squeeze as much profit out of the working class as possible by means of paying only subsistence wages – wages which just allow the workers to reproduce themselves, that is, to renew, ‘feed’ their labour-power so that they are as productive tomorrow as they were today.

The exploitation of the working class results from the fact that while it receives (under conditions of ‘equal exchange’, that is, unrestrained competition) the exact equivalent for its labour-power – the exact amount that is needed to renew it – it hands over to the capitalists not this labour-power, which is an intangible productive ability, but rather its labour, which happens to be greater than that embodied in the goods received for labour-power.

Now if the problems mentioned above are to be resolved successfully, it had better be the case that this understanding of the fundamental class relationship of capitalism is in fact a solid enough foundation for the purpose. Yet, this foundation, usually termed ‘the Labour Theory of Value’, had suffered many an attack over the years – in fact, it was called ‘thoroughly over-demolished’ already more than thirty years ago (Lerner 1972, p. 50).

This means that before even attempting to deal with the problems newly arisen, it is necessary also to go back and thoroughly examine how much of the Marxian approach can actually be preserved, what needs to go, and what it should be replaced with. In particular, since many of the critiques of the Labour Theory of Value were based on the development of so-called Sraffian economics, I will try to explore the issues at stake through Sraffian eyes.

As I will be referring to various elements of the Sraffian schema almost from the beginning, let me briefly explain its basic idea. The economy is considered by Sraffa to be undergoing cycles of production, during which inputs described on the one side of the schema of production are transformed into outputs on the other side. The crucial assumption made is that the amount of outputs must at least match the amount of inputs – if this were not so, the economy could not reproduce, or in other words repeat the cycle, since it would lack the requisite materials. The interested reader will find a little more detail in the Appendix to Chapter 6.

Now, while the approach has been used against the Labour Theory of Value by anti-Marxist Sraffians, there have actually been also pro-Sraffian Marxists, and it will be my contention that the analysis of the relationship between the two theories yields less strictly contradictory results than is often thought. Although I cannot claim to have provided a new ‘solution’ to the so-called Transformation Problem, which was the fundamental starting point of many of the critiques, it turns out that such a solution is far less important than the very interpretation of the problem. For my analysis leads to a conclusion that rather than a rejection, the Sraffian system can be understood as a generalisation of the Marxian approach to political economy.

The plan and the goal of the work

I am going to proceed in the following way: the first part will be devoted to the views on the issues of class, division of labour and exploitation that have been advanced in the past. The first chapter will consider the various solutions suggested in the literature to the problem of non-capitalist, non-proletarian strata within capitalism, while the second chapter will critically examine the work of John Roemer on the notion of exploitation. The second part will then consist of a single chapter attempting to provide my own re-examination and reconstruction of the various basic concepts of the Marxian approach to classes.

In the third part, I will turn my attention to the problem of defence of Marxian theory of exploitat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Legacy and the Crisis
• Part I: Alternative Solutions
• Part II: Reconstructing the Fundamental Concepts
• Part III: A Dual Theory of Exploitation and Price
• Part IV: Integrating the Two Concepts of Class
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index