Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

Historical Materialism #36

by Peter Hudis

In contrast to the traditional view that Marx's work is restricted to a critique of capitalism � and that he consciously avoided any detailed conception of its alternative � this work shows that Marx was committed to a specific concept of a post-capitalist society which informed the whole of his approach to political economy.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Philosophy

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College.

Reviews

[Redpoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, interesting, enlightening, well researched, well written, clear, fairly concise. Most of us when asked about what Marx wrote about a future communist society say, he didn't write much about that. Peter Hubis decided to say more. Notice the similarity between the hints Marx makes about a communist society and the concept of Democratic Confederalism described by Abdullah Ocalan (and the ongoing project by the Kurds and their allies building an autonomous new society in Northern Syria).

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

My reading of Marx in his own words and on his own merits, in VPP, WLC, and the first half of Capital V 1, has left me with a greater appreciation of Marx's place in the history of economics, but arguably even less insight into (or sympathy for?) modern Marxists. Marx's theory, as a descriptive scientific theory, is closer to an attempt to derive neoclassical economics without marginal utility theory than anything fundamentally distinct in its premises, mechanisms, and conclusion. But obviously neither Marxists now nor Marx himself agree with that framing, and reading Marx that way left me no closer to my goal of identifying what specifically, if there was a specific thing, out of Marx's analysis of capitalism could/would be eliminated in a revolution. I picked this up hoping it would clarify what Marxists saw that I was missing.

Does it succeed? Yes and no, hard to say. There are a lot of answers here, different framings of the same idea from different phases of Marx's thought. They're textually supported and seem reasonable. But they're also juxtaposed with heterodox Marx interpretations that Hudis seeks to undermine, which raises the problem of any secondary source--maybe the other people he criticizes have it right after all. And of course none of them provide a "convincing" answer to the question--I'm more confident than ever that the veil of revolution is an empty promise. Nonetheless, I feel like I've gained a lot more clarity about exactly how Marxists disagree on that, and implicitly, why they feel the need to reject marginalism.

Per Hudis, in his youth, Marx's original motivation was (unsurprisingly) a general commitment to human freedom and flourishing. In fact it might genuinely be reasonable to say that Marx was a libertarian who believed social forces--market forces, institutional interests, etc--were the greatest threat to human freedom. So when he moves into a critique of "alienation" in wage labor, his problem is less that workers are giving up the things they produce, or that some other person decides what to make and when and how, but that no one decides what they make or how or why--all of it is decided by market forces, which are arbitrary and myopically focused on the production of value, and relatively indifferent to the preferences of actual people as to what they'd like to produce or consume. Marx believes that markets don't express human intelligence and intentionality, and that this is a bad thing.

In Marx's pre-economic work, this line of thinking often feels fairly hippy-dippy. The quotes Hudis includes have a sense of Rousseauian nostalgia to them: Marx was driven by (paraphrasing) an "affirmation of sensuousness against the objectivist standpoint of modern science," he "found the market irrational because it was determined by arbitrary supply and demand instead of by person to person relations," he asks us to imagine a world in which exchange was of "love only for love, trust only for trust, etc." He rejects the mediation of institutions like markets, churches, even families, in search of a more immediate and genuine ("transparent") existence as a social being. People in this state of freedom (a term which Hudis tells us Marx treats interchangeably with socialism and communism) would work and contribute to society in a way that freely expressed "their particular nature." Capitalism, conversely, treats humans as interchangeable means to an end.

Marx's early work on economics is, conversely, very precisely targeted (and in light of what comes later, almost pedantically so). He is responding to proposals by utopian socialists like Proudhon who share his ideals and goals but propose alternatives that fail to address the real problem. Proudhon wants to have workers paid in tokens proportional to the labor-time they have contributed. For Marx, this is just taking the core problem of capitalism--that workers are judged by the time they contribute--and making it the centerpiece of a proposed utopia. Even if the wage is paid in tokens, you must still apply the abstracting and irrational framework of "socially necessary labor time" in order to calculate it (at least, that's what he says now). What Marx wants instead is a system that dispenses with the "socially necessary" framework entirely and compensates workers for labor as they can and choose to contribute it, while deciding what should be produced and how in an independent process. He clarifies this distinction with the example of a workers' coop: even if the workers own the means of production and decide its use democratically within a single business, market forces will still circumscribe the choice they make to a degree Marx finds stifling.

It's widely known that Marx didn't see capitalism as a pure evil so much as an unpleasant but necessary transition to communism. The thing that makes his ideal social relations imaginable in the future, as they weren't before capitalism, is a dramatic increase in labor productivity. Necessary labor is minimized, so individuals can make their contributions to society and enjoy their free time without worrying too much if they're working as efficiently as possible. The accumulation of "dead labor" in the form of labor-saving capital will create a world in which communism is a fruit ripe for the plucking. This will be especially true because the proletariat will be the possessors of all the ideas and knowledge that built and maintain this infrastructure, so once it exists, capitalists will be irrelevant. At some point, the workers will simply retake control of all the means of production they and their forebears have built, and value-production will wither away.

By the end of his life, Hudis finds Marx making more explicit statements about what the economy after capitalism might be like. And the key element is. . . . labor tokens! Whereas in capitalism, and apparently in Proudhon's labor token system, workers are paid in tokens based on their productive output, in Marx's socialism they'd be paid on something proportional to their effort. Time*intensity of work. Harder, riskier, more taxing jobs would pay more, regardless of how efficient or useful they were relative to what other workers could do. (I'm not convinced this is genuinely any different from what Proudhon actually had in mind, but Marx was vociferously sure of it at one point so who knows, maybe I'm missing something.) Eventually, in "perfect communism," labor is no longer measured at all. Work is an end in itself, and it no longer needs to be incentivized through unequal shares of the spoils. From each, to each.

With all that in mind, it's much more apparent why Marxists, in order to be Marxists, *must* reject marginalism. You can keep Marx's values and goals, update his macroeconomic analysis with the clearer terms of marginalism, retain his focus on working conditions and the economic situation of the working class and even the analysis of how the working class came to be (and continues to be made) worse off than it would have been in a just world. But you can't retain any of the analysis that makes socialism/communism dichotomously opposed to capitalism. So much of what Marx envisioned for the world capitalism would bring into being has obviously already happened--the shortened work hours, the freedom to pursue hobbies and interests and choose careers out of interest rather than desperation, to change and mix careers, even, occasionally, the luxury to engage in exchanges "as people." Many people alive today have the freedom to reject the whims of both market and state. It's just that all of this has happened to degrees, in particular nations, races, and classes, and within the broader context of a very and increasingly capitalist global economy. This turns the idea that marginalism is a "justification" for the inherent exploitation of capitalism on its head. Marginalist economic policy aspires to achieve, and often delivers on, the same conditions Marx dreamed of.

There a dozen ways to state what marginalism does to Marxism. In short, either by synonymizing or redundancy, it eliminates everything I found here that wasn't in Marx's descriptive analysis in Capital. It simultaneously takes the possibility of "post-capitalism" off the table (thus negating "anti-capitalism") and makes it completely unnecessary by subsuming all of its goals. Marx claims that market forces are "irrational" and fail to express human intelligence and intention; marginalism shows they are the naturally emergent product of human intelligence and intention. Marx claims that capitalism is defined by the production of value for its own sake; marginalism shows that capitalism is necessarily directly linked to meeting human needs. Marx complains that "socially necessary labor time" is a tyranny that would be better replaced by "transparent" interactions between producer and consumer; marginalism shows that SNLT is set where it is for good reasons.

If Capital is an analysis of capitalism that seeks to prove capitalism can and must end, marginalism is an analysis that transcends "capitalism" and has no relevant bounds. Modern leftists complain that marginalism downplays or outright ignores exploitation, where Marx makes it central, but I think this is a confusion. Exploitation is downplayed in marginalism because it's almost too obvious. The idea that we need to recognize the importance of exploitation in capitalist economics by creating a special analytical category for it seems silly to me. Marginalism decomposes the "expropriation of surplus value" into plain old state-sanctioned-and-enforced violence (the enclosure of the commons, eviction of the peasants, labor regulations, on top of actual slavery, indenture, and imperialism) and subsequent trade under those terms. The idea that some unique theory is needed to explain this seems paradoxical to me--the fact that Marx and his fellow socialists already understood it and knew it was wrong proves the theory was superfluous.

That might suggest that marginalism makes exploitation a galaxy of particular crimes and thus impossible to conceive and combat as a social force of its own right, but I think this is wrong too. I think marginalism makes exploitation even more fundamental to society than Marx's simple "surplus value" formulation allows. Practically every instance of past violence--overt or structural, by commission or omission--has ramified forward to impact the relative bargaining positions of people in different countries and classes and races etc. On one hand this means that there's no silver bullet of justice, no revolutionary change to be made that can make up for all those generations of lost opportunity and accumulation. On the other, it provides a neat moral justification for the sorts of policies that will bring Marx's goals into reality--the welfare state.

Because despite all the angles Hudis gives us on Marx's vision of post-capitalism, there's still one enormous, glaring blind spot: what actually changes such that accumulating value through capital is no longer possible or desirable? Without a theory like marginalism, which explains why capitalists are motivated to do what they do in the first place, capital becomes like a ghost in Marx's theory, something that imposes goals on people, for its own mysterious ends. Without an explanation of how it began, there's no need to explain how it will end. It just does, and then everything will be different. What marginalism tells us is that people will always pursue their own perceived utility, and the only things that can change within the organization of the economy are the role of violence and the distribution of resources: how thoroughly can we limit the effect of past and present violence in unfairly disadvantaging its victims, such that market forces can move the current distribution of resources toward the ideal possible distribution?

[Oscar Dybedahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a first rate book! However the subject is extremely difficult and Hudis leaves a lot of problems to be resolved.

First of all there are certain problems of interpretation. To name one: In what sense does Marx' reference to "the association of free laborers" in the first chapter of Capital represent a "concept of the alternative to capitalism"? This is mentioned in the part about commodity fetishism, and I think Nicole Pepperell is right in that this is simply mentioned in order to discuss the causes of the fetish character. While demonstrating that this fetish is characteristic of modern social life, he mentions Robinson on his island, medieval society and the society of freely associated laborers as "alternative configurations" (Pepperell) where the fetish character does not arise.

This points to a more general problem with the project of exploring alternatives to capitalism. Perhaps Marx' point is simply to show how the categories (value, use value, abstract labor etc.) and institutions of capitalist society are emergent upon (to use a modern metaphor) diverse and contingent forms of social practice. Marx painstakingly outlines this diversity in Capital. In part this demonstrates the possibility of transcending capitalism by reconfiguring these practices in new ways. Thus the possibility of a post-capitalist society is rooted in the diverse forms of practice in capitalism and the possibility of reconfiguring these in new and emancipatory ways. Therefore, Marx never outlines any notion of "the" post-capitalist society; he simply supplies future movements with the conceptual tools for developing notions of these kinds of societies. This does not mean that Marx had no concept of post-capitalism (communism), Hudis demonstrates that he did and elaborates the content of this notion in an exemplary manner. However I think it means that any concept of a post-capitalist society is secondary (both theoretically and politically), the analysis of the diverse forms of social practice underlying capitalist society being the more fundamental and critical one. The first is simply an attempt at doing what the second type of analysis makes possible. The elements of capitalism can be reconfigured in a number of different ways; there is certainly no deductive relationship between the second and first levels. Future movements would therefore have to develop different notions than present ones.

This raises the problem of what role specific concepts of post-capitalism should play in Marxist politics. Marx is generally very adamant that its role would necessarily be secondary, while the “real movement” abolishing the current state of affairs is what really matters. The real movement in this case is the developing working class movement. If we follow this line of reasoning, "utopias" of the future seem irrelevant because the only interesting question is what sort of society the working class would "have to" create (in order to defend its interests) while in power. This is a powerful anti-utopian notion of socialist politics, and it has been elaborated by all the good writers on the subject (Draper, Collier, Miliband).

However there seems to a tension between this thought and the previous one. Ideas about the future society can only be secondary in this manner -- it seems to me -- if there, in essence, is (largely) only one way of breaking with capitalism that is open to the working class in power. The political resolution of the contradictions of capitalism have a limited amount of possible solutions, and all of them share the basic and essential characteristics (a special form of state power, collective ownership and control etc. etc.). If this is true, the point about Marx' analysis of capitalist society supplying the tools for developing different notions of post-capitalism seems wrong. In that case, what alternative is open except some form of Utopian or teleological politics, fundamentally aimed at imposing a certain new form of society, and not at representing a class movement?

If this is right, this is a tension, perhaps even a contradiction, in the thought of Marx and Engels. If it is possible to develop a coherent Marxist politics (and this is certainly a fundamental task) this would have to be resolved.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Hudis compiles all of the instances Marx talks about socialism and communism, there is a clearly reactionary stance against socialist movements.

Hudis ignores other marxist-leninist authors and treats Marx (from his youth to adulthood) as the only prophet of "postcapitalism". As it is expected in this point, Hudis repudiates all the socialist states that were constructed in the XXth century: his use of the term "postcapitalism" is no coincidence; he despises anything related to socialism and communism (in the discussion of the Gotha Program he deliberately misrepresents Marx's theory of communism with a "postcapilist" proposal).

Also he thinks communist states have existed (which is an oxymoron: either you have a State or communism, not both of them at the same time).

Let's be real here: we have to learn from the socialist realities to propose an alternative to capitalism. Marx had the theoretical basis but other socialist countries have/had the practical experience. Hudis ignoring these experiences shows his poorly commitment to transcend capitalism.

At the end of the day, I think Marx would have say of this text (and many others) that it is about the "gnawing criticism of the mice".

[Jehiel L · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book portrays an anti-political Marx, though it raises issues of real theoretical significance. There is a legitimacy in theorising the post-capitalist future, because it bears upon political and strategic questions. See Lenin's discussion of the transition in State and Revolution. But Hudis doesn't go beyond seeing such theorising as being about expanding the public imagination. This is an anti-strategic conception of Marxism typical of the academy. It is also wrong: revolutionary Marxism must be understood as necessarily a materialist political movement. There are a few issues raised by the book which contribute to the project which this book stops short of.

Firstly, the critique of labour. It was not Marx, but classical political economy which posited that all value comes from labour. In Capital, Marx does not prove that labour is the source of surplus value, it is basically taken for granted as a feature of classical political economy, the object of Marx's immanent critique. Marx thought inadequate the idea that all value comes from labour. For Marx it is a specific kind of labour which creates value: abstract labour. Wages are made necessary by the existence of alienated labour. Alienated labour requires a ruling class to enforce. That ruling class can be the proletariat, i.e. the proletariat as a political force ruling over workers and toiling people themselves. It is crucial to understand that proletarian dictatorship rules over bourgeois social relations. Proudhon in contrast mirrored the bourgeois political economists by favouring labour over capital. Proudhon did not realise that the property relations he was against were themselves a product of the contradictions of estranged labour.

The Ricardian socialists believed that money could be replaced with labour tokens, but this was an error of identifying money with value. They thought ending the anarchy or the market sufficient for overcoming capitalism. For Marx, price formation on the market is not arbitrary as against the order of value, but is a significant process in dialectical interaction with value, both of which are contradictory and irrational. A similar wrong political position was the idea that abolishing interest-bearing capital was sufficient to abolish capitalism. For Marx, bourgeois production must not be identified with production in general.

When labour tokens are relevant is when value has been abolished, and labourers are not paid according to socially necessary labour time but according to their labour time. Claims on the social product for consumption is not based on output, but upon concrete time worked. The labour tokens do not circulate hence they are not money, they are instead a claim on the social product. Note though that this is not yet higher communism, where distribution is according to need and not labour time.

Secondly, private property. The abolition of private property is not the end of capitalist social relations. Marx in his discussion of the abolition of private capital within the confines of the capitalist mode of production implies that capitalism does not require private property; capital can be socialised and still be capital. The joint stock company because completely autonomous. It is not socialism, but prepared the ground for it with a certain kind of socialisation, one that is not an impulsion towards socialism but one that can be taken hold of and wielded. It is the highest expression of the capitalist mode of production, of swindling and cheating, and at the same time is a transitional form towards socialism if wielded to that end. Private property can be eliminated without the elimination of private production.

This view is extended by Engels' argument about the state as capital against wage labour. But the state is another point of discussion not adequately addressed in this book.

Thirdly, philosophy and politics. Nowhere in this book is there discussion of the 'standpoint of the proletariat'. What Marx does instead is take different theoretical and historical standpoints in his interrogation of the capitalist mode of production. The realm of freedom is one where labour no longer defines society. This does not mean that labour disappears. Rather it means that society is no longer determined as it was by the forces and corresponding relations of production. Marxism as a science would be superceded. But that is only in the higher phase of communism. Leadership is just as important after the seizure of power as before.

Marx introduces the idea of two stages of the new society in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. They are not synonymous with socialism and communism, a distinction of stages introduced only after Marx's death. One can refer to the Critique itself for particularly the discussion of the perseverance of bourgeois right in the lower phase of communism.

Lastly, a short philosophical point. Marx's materialism defends but does not worship spontaneity. Spontaneity is spontaneous because it is concrete. Attempting to erase spontaneity is to impose abstractions on the world. The concrete is not undetermined, it is concrete because it is comprised of many determinations. Capitalism attempts to erase spontaneity when it tries to totally subordinate nature to its laws. This goes with capitalism's attempt to ignore natural laws, i.e. ignore laws which are outside its own. Marx does not adopt an abstract humanism which conceives of freedom as the absence of natural laws. Rather, nature cannot be separated from human nature, because humanity has its nature outside itself. The struggle against nature is the only sufficient respect for nature. The dialectics of history are not identical to those of nature, but are not so different either.

[Jason Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter's book is superb. Even though I have some minor disagreements with it -- on mostly secondary matters -- it's a must read. See my review at http://logosjournal.com/2014/schulman...

[Kevin Carson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as a followup to James White's book on the origins of dialectical materialism, and they're a great pair of books to read together.

[Kaveh RezaeiShiraz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Please edit Persian translate of book, this translate has 320 pages
You can't find book with zero page

[Victor Shreiber]

Review without previous reading? In Russian I would say "Это круто" - unfortunately, I don't know the English equivalent. But I hope it will be no less impressivet