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Critique has recently published the translation of an
article by Ernest Mandel, in which he develops his now familiar
theme that, in the course of social evolution, there intervenes –
and must intervene – between capitalism and socialism a
transitional “society” with its own social base,
relations of production, etc. This is a point of view worth
discussing but, despite the Marxist terminology in which it is
expressed, it is in fact not a view held by Marx himself. As the
present article will try to demonstrate, Marx did indeed speak of
a “political transition period” between capitalism and
socialism but never of a “transitional society”.
What, then, did Marx mean when he spoke of this
“transition period”? Contrary to what is generally
supposed (largely as a result of decades of Stalinist and
Trotskyist propaganda), for Marx this period was not that between
the establishment of the common ownership of the means of
production and the time when the principle “from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”
could be implemented. Rather it is the period during which the
working class would be using state power to bring the means of
production into common ownership. In other words, the transition
period is a political form between the capture of political power
by the working class within capitalist society and the eventual
establishment of socialism, a period during which the working
class has replaced the capitalist class as the ruling class, i.e.
as the controller of state power.
The end of this
transition period is the establishment of a classless society
based on the common ownership and democratic control by the whole
of society of the means of production, with the consequent
disappearance of the coercive state, of the system of working for
wages, of the production of goods for sale on a market with a view
to profit, indeed, of buying and selling, money and the market
altogether.
That for Marx the “transition
period” was the period after the capture of political power
by the working class and before the actual establishment of the
common ownership of the means of production is clear both from his
early and his later writings.
In 1852 he wrote to his friend
Weydemeyer in America that one of the things he had proved was
that “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (as he
called the period of working class control of state power) “only
constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to
a classless society”(emphasis added). Engels summarizes his
own and Marx’s view in 1873 as follows:
“The views
of German scientific socialism on the necessity of political
action by the proletariat and of its dictatorship as the
transition to the abolition of classes and with them of the state.
. .” (emphasis added).
The transition period, then,
is the period up to the establishment of the common ownership of
the means of production. Again, in 1875 in his private notes on
the Gotha Programme adopted by the unity congress of the German
Social Democrats Marx wrote:
“Between capitalist and
communist society lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is
also a political transition period in which the state can be
nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat.”
Marx, we can note here, used the
words “socialist” and “communist”
interchangeably to refer to future classless society (if anything,
he preferred the word “communist”, but we shall follow
Engels’ later usage and employ the word “socialism”
to describe future classless society based on the common ownership
and democratic control of the means of production). The idea that
“socialism” and “communism” were two
successive phases of post-capitalist society is not to be found in
Marx, but derives from Lenin. Thus, when Marx writes, in the above
quote, of “communist society”, he means precisely the
same as when he wrote of “classless society” in 1852.
It is true that Marx realised that, had socialism
been established in his day, it would not have proved possible to
implement immediately, or even for some years, the principle “from
each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”,
i.e. free access for all to consumer goods and services according
to individual need. In the early years of socialism, established
at this time, there would inevitably have had to have been some
restrictions on access to consumer goods and services, some form
of, if you like, “rationing” (if this word’s
association with the war-time and post-war ration cards is
forgotten, for although full free access according to need would
not have been possible in 1875, the amount allocated for
consumption could have been considerably higher than the workers
were then getting under capitalism). Marx suggested as one such
possible method so-called labour-time vouchers. It is important to
realise that this was only a suggestion and, moreover, one open to
serious objections. But Marx’s point was that, for some
period of time, some method of rationing consumption would be
necessary. He referred to the period of socialism during which
this would be so, as “the first phase of communist society”,
as compared with a “higher phase” in which free access
to consumer goods and services could be implemented. Note that
Marx is talking of different phases of the same society, society
“based on the common ownership of the means of production”,
i.e. a classless, stateless society with no wages or monetary
system (Marx made it clear that the “labour-time vouchers”
were not money, “no more ‘money’ than a ticket
for the theatre” as he put it in Capital ). No doubt one
could speak of a transitions from the “first” to a
“higher” phase of socialism, but the fact remains that
Marx did not employ the concept of “transition period”
in this sense. For him, as we have explained, it was the
transition from capitalism to socialism and not from one phase of
socialism to another.
How long did Marx expect this
political transition period to last? His opinion on this question
changed over the period of his political life. In 1848, he clearly
felt it would have to last quite some years. Thirty years later,
he and Engels thought it could be considerably shorter, as a
result of the tremendous development of modern industry in the
intervening period.
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 speaks of
the working class capturing political power and using
“its
political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the
bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the
hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the
ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as
rapidly as possible” (emphasis added).
Marx and
Engels go on to list various immediate measures which they and the
other members of the Communist League felt the working class
should take on coming to power, in order to make “despotic
inroads on the rights of property”.
They conclude:
“When, in the course of development, class
distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been
concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole
nation, the public power will lose its political character”.
(emphasis added)
Clearly, in 1848, Marx and Engels
expected the transition period to the establishment of common
ownership and the consequent abolition of classes and the state to
be fairly long. Engels, in his draft for the manifesto which was
not used but was later published under the title Principles of
Communism {and which is always a useful gloss on the Manifesto),
stated this explicitly. Answering the question, “Will it be
possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?”,
he wrote:
“No, no more than existing forces of
production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary
for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the
proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually
and will be able to abolish private property only when the means
of production are available in sufficient quantity”.
It
was not until later, after the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm of
1848 had ebbed, that Marx and Engels worked out the full
implications of this. They had been saying, in effect, that the
establishment of socialism was not possible in 1848. Engels, in
1895, in an introduction to some articles Marx had written, in
1850, on French politics, openly stated this:
“History
has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it
clear that the state of economic development at that time was not,
by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist
production.”
Engels was clearly correct on this
point. Capitalism, as Fritz Sternberg has pointed out, was then
dominant only in one country:
“When Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote ‘The Manifesto of the Communist
Party’, – that is to say, about the middle of the
nineteenth century – capitalism was dominant only in
England; the United States was still a colonial country, in which
the agricultural population far outnumbered the industrial; in
Europe, the beginnings of capitalism were confined to the west –
in Germany, for instance, pre-capitalist forms of production were
still dominant; Russia and Japan were still feudal states; and
there were relatively few points on the Asiatic coastline which
were in contact with those occidental countries in which
capitalist development had begun.
To say that, at that time,
perhaps 10 per cent of the world’s population were engaged
in capitalist production is probably an optimistic estimate.”
If
socialism wasn’t possible in 1848, this raises the
interesting question (clearly relevant for later attempts to
establish “socialism” in a single, backward country):
What would the working class, or rather a determined group of
Communists, have been able to do in the unlikely event of them
having gained control of political power at that time? Surely,
only to develop capitalism. In fact, the measures listed at the
end of Section II (“Proletarians and Communists”) of
the Manifesto, and referred to above, could accurately be
described as being of a state-capitalist nature. Many of them have
since been implemented in openly capitalist countries (progressive
income tax, state bank, nationalisation of railways, free
education, prohibition of child labour, etc.), thus indicating
that there was nothing inherently anti-capitalist about them.
Neither Marx nor Engels went quite so far as to
repudiate these measures, or to state that the Communists of 1848
were wrong to have imagined that they could even capture political
power, let alone establish socialism at that time. But this is
what Engels wrote in 1872 of these measures:
“. . . no
special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at
the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be
very differently worded today. . . this programme has in some
details become antiquated.”
Also, writing in
1850, Engels discussed the fate of Thomas Munzer, as the leader of
a communistic party coming to power before conditions were ripe
for establishment of a communistic society. This passage is worth
quoting extensively:
“The worst thing that can befall a
leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a
government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the
domination of the class he represents and for the measures which
that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will
but upon the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and
upon the level of development of the material means of existence,
of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class
contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party
demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of
development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound
to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do
not proceed, from the class relations of the moment, or from the
more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from
his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of
the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds
himself in a unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all
his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests
of his party and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he
is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the
class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the
interest of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests
of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and
promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien
class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward
position is irrevocably lost.”
Marx himself had
written something similar in October 1847 (a few months before he
and Engels wrote the Manifesto) :
“If the proletariat
destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, that will only be
a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the
bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1794, so long as in the course
of history, in its ‘movement’, the material conditions
are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the
bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of
bourgeois political rule.” {Marx’s emphasis)
Is
it too much to say that, had Marx and Engels and the others in the
Communist League come to control political power in 1848, that,
not being able to establish socialism, they would have been
“irrevocably lost”, in that they would have had no
alternative but to develop capitalism (even if in the form of a
state capitalism)?
In any event, this situation never arose,
nor was it even a remote possibility. In exile in London, Marx and
Engels soon realised the futility of communists plotting to seize
political power in the immediate future, and turned to
concentrating on the long, hard task of preparing the working
class to organise itself to capture political power.
After
1848, modern industry made great advances. In 1847, Engels had
written of the means of production not being available in
sufficient quantity to permit the immediate, or even rapid,
establishment of socialism. A quarter of a century later, in 1872,
he was writing :
“...it is precisely this industrial
revolution which has raised the productive power of human labour
to such a high level that – for the first time in the
history of mankind –
the possibility exists, given a
rational division of labour among all, of producing not only
enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and
for an abundant reserve fund, but also of leaving each individual
sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in
historically inherited culture – science, art, forms of
intercourse – may not only be preserved but converted from a
monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole
of society, and may be further developed.”
And
six years later, in that part of Anti-Dühring later published
as the immensely popular pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and
Scientific :
“The possibility of securing for every
member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence
not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more
full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development
and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this
possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.”
(Engels’ emphasis)
In other words, it was
Engels’ opinion that by the 1870’s, contrary to the
situation in 1848, “the state of economic development was .
. . ripe for the elimination of capitalist production”.
While he might not have answered the question, “Will it be
possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?”
with a ‘yes’, he would certainly have answered that it
could be abolished (i.e. common ownership, and a classless society
established) fairly rapidly. The principle is clear here: for Marx
and Engels, the higher the level of development of the means of
production, the shorter the political transition period needed to
make them the common property of society as a whole.
Engels
was exaggerating when he wrote in 1872 that the means of
production could then have provided “enough for the
plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an
abundant reserve fund”. Certainly, they could have provided
enough to completely eliminate material poverty and to raise the
consumption of all well above the level they had to endure under
capitalism, but it would not really have been possible to
implement the principle of “from each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs”. Engels, or
course, recognised this, and it was precisely Marx’s point
as well in his notes on the Gotha Programme about the
inevitability of some limitations on free consumption in the
“first phase” of socialism.
Having
discussed the question of how long Marx and Engels expected the
political transition period between capitalism and socialism to
last, we can now ask, how long did they think the transition (as
one might want to call it) between the “first” and
“higher” phases of socialism itself would take. This
is something they don’t seem to have discussed, but it is
clear that the same principle applies: the higher the level of
development of the means of production, the shorter the period.
One thing is clear, though, that the development of the means
of production during this period would be on the basis of the
common ownership and democratic control of the means of
production, and the consequent abolition of the market, money,
buying and selling, wages, profits, etc, The “first phase of
communist society”, like the higher phase, would be a
non-market society in which production would be consciously
planned to satisfy human needs. What would be produced would be
useful things, for direct allocation to democratically-decided
social uses (individual consumption, collective consumption,
expansion of productive resources, reserves, etc.). What Marx
called “commodity-production”, the production of goods
for sale on a market, would not exist; indeed could not exist
without the society ceasing to be socialist.
Marx repeatedly
made it clear that socialism, in both its phases, was a
non-market, production-solely-and-directly-for-use society. The
Communist Manifesto specifically speaks of “the Communistic
abolition of buying and selling”, and of the abolition not
only of capital (wealth used to produce other wealth with a view
to profit), but of wage labour, too. In Volume I of Capital Marx
speaks of “directly associated labour, a form of production
that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities
...”, and, in Volume II, of things being different “if
production were collective and no longer possessed the form of
commodity production. ..”. Also, in Volume II, Marx, in
comparing how socialism and capitalism would deal with a
particular problem, twice states that there would be no money to
complicate matters in socialism: “If we conceive society as
being not capitalistic but communistic, there would be no
money-capital at all in the first place. ..”, and, “in
the case of socialized production the money-capital is
eliminated”. In other words, in socialism the production and
distribution of wealth is solely a question of organisation and
planning.
It is precisely Mandel who is the most
influential and able opponent of Marx (and the others who have
agreed with him, notably Bordiga) on this point about the entirely
non-market nature of the “first” phase of socialism.
In his essay Economics of the Transition Period, Mandel notes
that,
“Immediately following the victory of the October
Revolution, and especially in the period of War Communism, the
Communist theoreticians saw the construction of a socialist
economy primarily in terms of an immediate and general
disappearance of the market and monetary
economy.”
Significantly, he does not question
why this should have been, since this would have led him to have
to admit that, on this point, the Bolshevik thinkers were in the
Marxist tradition.
Mandel goes on to state that in Russia it
soon appeared that “maintaining money and market relations
was best suited to maximising economic growth and to the best
defense of the interests of the workers as consumers” and to
conclude by formulating the following general law:
“The
survival of market and monetary categories thus proves inevitable
during the period of transition from capitalism to
socialism.”
(Actually, what the experience of
Russia under so-called “War Communism” proved was that
isolated Russia was ripe at that time only for some form of
capitalism – with its “market and monetary categories”
– and not for socialism). Mandel accepts socialism as a
world-wide, classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society (to
define it somewhat negatively). As he wrote in The Inconsistencies
of State Capitalism :
“Socialism means a classless
society. It therefore presupposes not only the suppression of
private property of the means of production, henceforth managed in
a planned way by the associated producers themselves, but it also
calls for a level of development of the productive forces which
makes possible the withering away of commodity production, of
money, and of the state.”
and,
“The
working class ... is not capable of building a socialist society
in a single country, not even the USA (not to speak of Britain or
Western Europe).”
All that can be
established in the immediate future, says Mandel, is a third
society neither capitalist nor socialist, which will have the aim
of developing the means of production to the level where world
socialism becomes possible as a society of abundance: a
“transitional society” between capitalism and
socialism, with its own social structure and economic laws
different from those both of capitalism and of socialism. Mandel
describes this so-called transitional society of his as follows:
“nationalisation of all the means of production
under workers’ control, democratically planned economy, but
still with commodity production of consumer goods, with the
survival of money, with foreign trade, and with a workers’
army as long as the threat of strong bourgeois states
subsists.”
This “transitional society”,
like capitalism but unlike socialism, can be established on a
national scale. In fact, says Mandel, it should be the immediate
aim of each national working class (thus rejecting the Marxist
view that the working class of all countries should be aiming at a
more or less simultaneous world socialist revolution).
I
f Marx had really subscribed to this view, that there was another
system of society –lasting for a whole “epoch” –
between capitalism and socialism, it is curious, to say the least,
that he never mentioned it. Nowhere, in fact, does Marx speak of
any “transitional society” in between capitalism and
socialism, or, to use some of the phrases employed by Mandel, “the
epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism”, “a
transitional-economy”, “the society in transition from
capitalism to socialism”. He certainly spoke of a “political
transition period” and of “a period of revolutionary
transformation” between capitalism and socialism but, as we
have seen, this was merely the period during which the working
class would use its control of state power to establish the common
ownership of the means of production, a relatively short political
transition period, which would be shorter the higher the
development of the means of production was at the time the working
class won control of political power, and certainly not lasting an
“epoch”.
Mandel tries to justify his
position by identifying his “transitional society”
with Marx’s “first phase of communist society”
(despite the fact that the phrase “first phase of communist
society” obviously means what is says: the first phase of
communist, not some other, different, society). Marx, we have
seen, did recognise the inevitability of some limitations on free
consumption in the early stages of socialism (had it been
established in the 1870’s), and did mention “labour-time
vouchers” as one possible method of doing this. Mandel
claims that whether these labour-time vouchers or money is used in
these circumstances, is just a matter of choice. Money, he argues,
is better because it allows workers, as consumers, more freedom of
choice than would labour-time vouchers, or some system of physical
rationing.
But, this is based on a complete
misunderstanding of the Marxian theory of money. For Marx money
was not a thing but a social relation, an economic category which
existed on the basis of certain social relations between the
producers, specifically, an exchange economy, reflecting the fact
that production was not yet socialised but carried out by isolated
individual producers – and later the fact that, despite
socialized production, there was still private or sectional
appropriation. He pointed out that “labour-time vouchers”
were not money; they were simply pieces of paper entitling a
person to draw so much from the stock of goods set aside for
individual consumption. They did not circulate, nor did they
reflect a relationship of private property. As Marx put it, in a
passage in his notes on the Gotha Programme, – a passage
incidentally quoted by Mandel in the Critique article –
“within the co-operative society based on the common
ownership of the means of production, the producers do not
exchange their products.”
We do not want to
defend the “labour-time voucher” system. Even for
Marx’s day, it was inappropriate, suffering from numerous
anomalies, only some of which Marx himself recognised. We would
subscribe to the view that Marx’s criticism of schemes to
introduce “labour-money” under capitalism, applies to
some extent also to the scheme for “labour-time vouchers”
in the early stages of socialism. But it is clear that Marx did
not regard the use of money (a commodity that has come to be
universally exchangeable with all other commodities) as an
alternative form of rationing in the “first phase of
communist society”. In fact, he would have regarded this as
an absurd, contradictory proposal. We can imagine him lambasting
Mandel in the same terms as he lambasted Proudhon for similar
inanities!
Let us now return to the question of how
long, after the establishment of socialism, some restrictions on
free consumption would have to continue. Today, looking back, we
can say that, had world socialism been established in the 1870’s,
it might have taken about a generation before full free access to
consumer goods and services, according to individual needs, could
have been implemented. This estimate is based on the fact that it
was by around 1900 that the effects of the so-called second
industrial revolution – the application to production of the
electric motor and the internal combustion engine – were
beginning to be felt. Marx and Engels, remember, were judging the
possibilities of socialism on the basis only of the first
industrial revolution (the application to production of the steam
engine). Marx, who died in 1883, never saw either an electric
motor or an internal combustion engine. But of course every
advance in technology made his case for socialism even more
relevant.
By about 1900, thanks to this second industrial
revolution, capitalism became the predominant world system. By
“predominant” we don’t mean that capitalism
existed all over the world, but merely that all the people of the
world, even if they lived under pre-capitalist conditions, were
decisively affected by the workings of world capitalism, 1900
marks, if you like, capitalism becoming a world system – a
fact which some Marxist writers have described as its becoming
“imperialist”. 1914, with the outbreak of the first
world war in the history of mankind, was a bloody confirmation of
this. To quote Sternberg again:
“Capitalist
development had taken several hundred years to arrive at a stage
at which perhaps 10 per cent of the world’s population
produced along capitalist lines, but within the two-thirds of a
century which followed – approximately from the middle of
the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the first world war –
capitalism became the dominant form of production not merely in
one country, England, but all over the world, until perhaps
between 25 and 30 per cent of the world’s population were
producing along capitalist lines, whilst in Great Britain, the
United States, Germany and Western Europe in general, capitalism
held practically a monopoly of production. At the same time
capitalist development had made considerable progress in Russia
and Japan, although the remnants of feudalism still existed,
whilst in the other Asiatic countries the pre-capitalist forms of
production had been definitely undermined.”
We
can, in fact, place the end of capitalism’s role in history
– to create the material basis for a world socialist society
of abundance – at this time. By 1900, capitalism had
completely outlived its usefulness. From then on only the
immediate establishment of world socialism has been “progressive”.
From then on, in fact, world socialism – given, of course,
the development of a majority socialist movement amongst the
working class in the industrialised parts of the world –
could have been established “at one stroke” by a more
or less world socialist revolution.
Since 1900,
the working class has still, it is true, needed to organise itself
to capture political power in all the various states of the world,
and, in this sense, a “political transition period”
during which the working class uses state power to establish the
common ownership of the means of production, is still necessary.
However, since this period would be so short as to be negligible,
the concept of a transition period has become outdated.
Similarly, though in the first few years of
socialism, as the mess left by capitalism is cleared up, some
restrictions on full free consumption may still be necessary,
world socialist society could now move rapidly (i.e. in well under
a decade at the most) to implementing free access to consumer
goods and services according to individual need as the principle
of distribution. To sum up, the concept of a “transition
period”, lasting some years, between capitalism and
socialism is today an obsolete 19th century concept, while the
ideal of a “transitional society” between capitalism
and socialism, as proposed by Mandel, was never to be found in
Marx in the first place.
Critique 5, 1975
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