Why Marx’s ‘Realm of Freedom’ Depends on Continued Drudgery and… the Historic Tasks of the Cadre
Mickey Moosenhauer 2022
PART ONE
What is the purpose of modern exegeses on the ‘labor theory of value’ and ‘value form’ unless it is to prove to non-Marxists and economists that a ‘waged society’ is unfair (exploitative), and that capitalism is a mode of production, not just a system of circulation?
Surely the only people who read these voluminous and opaque pieces are those who already agree that capitalism is a mode of production and that it is exploitative? So, are such hermeneutic Marxian texts are really an exercise in (communist) philosophical backslapping?
For example:
https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2022/07/23/the-labour-power-theory-of-capital/
Of course, many in the ‘communist’ milieu claim that investigations of the ‘value-form’ (for example, Théorie Communiste, Endnotes) prove that ‘revolutionaries’ must, as Endnotes put it, “simply… cease to constitute value” — by which action, value, and capital, will be overthrown. But there is a huge lacuna in their hermeneutics:
The Marxian concepts around ‘value form’ are predicated upon the notion of a ‘product’ and ‘labor’. By defining something made by humans as a product, and thereby defining humans as the ‘producing’ animal, then all human activity remains reified as economic value.
Marx clearly states his ontology of labor and his view of humans as the producing animal (a widely shared perspective of the time, and beyond, of course) in Vol 1 of Capital (Part 3, Chapter 7, §1) and in The German Ideology.
The lacuna mentioned above (which is also an insistent teleology) in fact, and ironically, destabilizes the whole Marxist approach to social transformation, since if producing (even for ‘use’) and labor (even for the ‘collective good’) must be retained in communist ideology/strategy then how does that affect ‘communist intervention’?:
Jean Baudrillard writes something relevant:
“Marxist theory maintains [the] anthropological consensus… Science, technique, progress, history — in these ideas we have an entire civilization that comprehends itself as producing its own development and takes its dialectical force toward completing humanity in terms of totality and happiness. Nor did Marx invent the concepts of genesis, development, and finality. He changed nothing basic: nothing regarding the idea of man producing himself in his infinite determination, and continually surpassing himself toward his own end.”
By viewing all of human existence in terms of ‘modes of production’ Marx “generalizes the economic mode of rationality over the entire expanse of human history, as the generic mode of human becoming” (Baudrillard 1973).
Marx’s thesis, therefore, as Isaiah Berlin indicates, becomes the basis for all study: “the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society, so, the ‘history of humanity’ must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange” (‘The German Ideology’).
Our productivist mindset can be injected into the story of all human existence in the same way as evolutionary psychologists define and project ‘human nature’, and we can ascertain the reasons for, and consequences of things like under-production and surplus, and, therefore, everything, for us, is also written in terms of evolutionary subsistence and survival.
If communists accept (like Marx) that humanness is defined by our ability to labor (that is, do drudgery) and to produce, and that this ability is the key to our survival, then the plans communists will have for us after ‘the revolution’ will only be a repetition of Bolshevism (see ‘labor certificates’ and other post-revolutionary schemes in this article by Jasper Bernes:
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2021/03/12/the-test-of-communism/).
If a mode of production is based on production for use (i.e., communism), then we would have to accept that it is a mode of production based on a drudgery (labor) that is directed by the drudges themselves (or the Party theorists) and not, as in production for exchange, directed by markets controlled by others or other factors.
If we accept the tenets that uphold the concept of labor, which are here anthropological and evolutionary, then we are compelled to situate all human existence within the productivist and laborist perspective. And by so doing, we create a version of human nature based on the productive capacities of human beings always and forever determined by particular environments and particular circumstances — which means that the communists will (and necessarily so, since they will, of course, become our new ‘enlightened’ managers) tell us how to live and how hard to work, after we have made their revolution for them.
PART TWO
The 5000-year-old problem (because that’s the recognized timespan of civilization) of ‘what is to be done’ during and/or after ‘the revolution’ against things as they are (i.e., these things being mainly the State and the economy) is a constant and repeating refrain, once framed in ‘godly’ language, and since 200 years ago, also in ‘secular’ terms.
In 2021 Jasper Bernes (Endnotes) sets out four tasks that need to be accomplished to establish communism:
1) Immediate abolition of the parliamentary, bureaucratic, repressive state, and all legal subjects.
2) Expropriation of means of production by self-organized bodies producing directly for social use.
3) Break the link between right and responsibility, labor contribution and receipt of social wealth. Ration, if necessary, based on need not contribution.
4) Communize consumption, distribution, and production according to common, freely devised plan. (Bernes 2021, The Test of Communism)
These tasks may sound worthy (and even possible to some) but in practice how might they be played out? Who are the people who understand these tasks properly? Or, better, who will be the people who understand these tasks properly? Answer: The cadre who first formulated the tasks.
It is useful to remember Pyotr Tkachev (‘the first Bolshevik’). He understood that rural workers would impede revolution (as do Théorie Communiste, for example*1) and so he argued that a revolutionary dictatorship had to be imposed. But he was also aware that the new ideas would be hard for anyone over 25 years to assimilate so, Tkachev suggested that anyone over 25 should be suppressed or liquidated.
It’s a real philosophical conundrum. If we live in a mode of production, then we are all part of that mode. We are all reproducers of the society we exist within.
Therefore, it is unlikely, logically, that we can actually create anything entirely different, let alone a completely different society. (How we are created is how we create; ‘revolutionaries’ do not come from another planet.)
Figures such as Tkachev, Lenin and Bernes, appear to suggest that they themselves are actually able to think beyond the limits of their social construction, and can indeed create a new world by their will alone (of course, they may also prevaricate with, “it’s complex…”) but just how do might they defend their ‘extra-planetary genius’?
Particularly when Gilles Deleuze says: “Foucault’s key historical principle is that any historical formation says all it can say and sees all it can see.”
Maybe some of us, due to our superior intellects (“We come from another planet”), can escape this? Seems unlikely.
Bini Adamczak, in the book Yesterday’s Tomorrows (2007/2021), which is an overview of the Bolshevik Revolution, suggests that, since the evidence demonstrates that the ‘first generation’ communist revolutionaries will always enact terror, that is, their own counter-revolution, they should almost immediately liquidate or purge themselves, but as Žižek remarks in his review of the book, this is what happened in Russia anyway… so, what do we have here but a farcical loop of never-ending opening and closing doors.
(See https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-communist-desire/
And
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176949/the-house-of-government)
In relation: a short recent Twitter conversation (at cross-purposes) with Jasper Bernes*2:
Jasper Bernes:
What people mean by the phrase “by any means necessary” is actually by any means sufficient.
Mickey Moosenhauer:
The phrase (from Fanon etc?) is not a ‘closing-down’ phrase leaning toward ‘what is sufficient’ — but an ‘opening-up’ phrase challenging whatever ‘morality’ one (or others) might have toward, for example, violence, cruelty, or authoritarianism, etc?
JB:
Like I said [to another correspondent] I think it’s both, because of the any. But I also think a means in this case can only be sufficient not necessary.
MM:
The ‘any’ is certainly equivocal (‘all’ would do the same job as removing the ‘any’?). But the ‘means’ here is not an appeal to ‘what it takes’ but an (also equivocal) edict for the audience to dispense with whatever ‘moral sentiment’ they may entertain. But the ‘any (whatever) means’ is always the ‘secret code’ of the cadre — which can then be used to hide or justify ‘atrocity’, and also to perpetrate atrocity upon the followers of the particular cadre when the time comes.
[This was the end of the conversation.]
*1 Note:
For Théorie Communiste’s recognition of the obstacles facing revolution, in terms of social divisions to be surmounted, see their essay Communization in the Present Tense (2011); also these two commentaries:
*2 Note:
My use of Jasper Bernes’ work is not meant as an ‘attack’ on ‘him’ (or any individual within the Endnotes milieu). We don’t exist as ‘persons’ (the dream of ‘self-realization’)… only as functions. Bernes’ writings merely appear at a particularly interesting (for me) intersection of ‘radical’ thought; I engage with him on the level of ‘representation’: his writing represents something, as does mine. Until events over-run us we are not to be confused with reality, which is always elsewhere, though always lying-in wait.
