Socialism and Commodity Production: Essay in Marx Revival

Historical Materialism #165

by Paresh Chattopadhyay

'Socialism' is a word that is now habitually taken to refer to a particular social system that prevailed in different parts of the globe during the twentieth century. This system was defined primarily by single-party rule with public (mainly state) ownership of the means of production along with a centrally planned economy. Its material base was generalised commodity production. The spokespersons of this system claim that this socialism was derived from Marx.

Paresh Chattopadhyay's Socialism and Commodity Production argues the falsity of this claim. On the basis of a comprehensive study of Marx's own texts, as well as a detailed engagement with a wide variety of theorists of socialist economics, it shows that Marx's socialism constituted an 'Association' of free individuals in which private ownership, the commodity, wage labour and the state have no place.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Essays

316 pages, ebook

Published August 16, 2018

About the author

Teacher of political economy at the Department of Sociology at University of Quebec at Montreal. He mainly offers courses on Marx, but also on the political economy of development and on quantitative methods in social sciences. His interest is in Marx’s critique of political economy and is explicitly based on the Marxist categories as they appear in Marx’s original works. He has also extensively written on the question of the development of the third world, the agrarian question in India, and on the (ex)soviet economy in the light of Marx’s Capital, and the theory of accumulation of capital. He is involved in the project of multi-volume Marx-Engels Historisch Kritisches Woerterbuch published under the sponsorship of the Philosophy Department of the Free University of Berlin and is connected with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin. His work has been published in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese.

Reviews

[Donald]

Chattopadhyay provides a libertarian communist interpretation of Marx. He shows that Marx believed a socialist society would be classless, stateless and regulated by labour time and not money. Virtually everyone after Marx, save for some anarchists and council-communists, thought this was impossible and relabelled or retheorized socialism to mean a form of capitalism where the state acted as an elightened planner interacting with more rational prices. Much of the book is idiosyncratic riffing on the contradictions in these positions, based on a deep understanding of the source texts. My first reaction was that this was very refreshing and helped me understand the debate around planning much better, if from a heterodox viewpoint. I understand most people would probably be annoyed by his anti-Bolshevik arguments but they didn't bother me because I found myself bouncing between dozens of interesting questions he raised.

[Bearkunin]

This is a (relatively) easy and convincing overview of Marxism as written by Marx and Engels, rather than as interpreted by Lenin or others.

From 2020, Paresh has some advantage with almost all of Marx's entire corpus available to study. Paresh is able to refer to texts previously unavailable, and is able to find insights in drafts and other editions to trace Marx's thought. At times, I am a little wary of this, as it is possible Paresh is cherry picking particular things to support his argument (flitting between the French, German or English translation of Capital for whatever best supports his point, for example).

The general conclusions align broadly with a Left Communist perspective, but importantly, highly critical of Lenin.

Marx, as interpreted by Paresh, described a *mass* movement and fundamentally democratic revolution antithetical to Lenin's vanguard. From this perspective, Lenin (and subsequent ML revolutions) were doomed to fail because while they changed the juridical nature of "capitalism" they failed to change the actual real and material relations of production. Commodity production and wage work was maintained, and thus the 20th century "socialist" experiments remained fundamentally capitalist.

Overall I found it deeply informative of Marx's Marxism, and while I remain sceptical on some points I would certainly recommend to people looking for a better understanding of Marx's Marxism!

[Wujianan]

This author was recommended by a friend on Douban, but I simply couldn't stand it after reading it. Regarding the book's theme and content, the three most relevant chapters on "Commodity Production under Socialism" offer very little new insight. Most of it is direct interpretation of the original text of *Capital* or a review of previous research literature, without any original theoretical construction or historical data to support its arguments. I really don't understand why such a book was included in this series by HM magazine.

Furthermore, the author harbors numerous prejudices against Leninism and the practice and experimentation of "real socialism." The latter is controversial, so I won't discuss it further. As for the former, the author still adheres to the bourgeois academic prejudices and slanders against Lenin's "elitism" and "Blanquism," completely ignoring the new achievements of revisionist historiography, and even the complete texts of Lenin himself and his contemporaries.

Another point I really dislike is the way the author argues that "xxx does not conform to Marxism," which mainly involves picking and choosing passages from classical texts as precepts for judgment. "This is different from what Marx said, so it is anti-Marxist," which is even less effective than the "immersion in the principles" of Song Dynasty Confucian scholars, let alone the Qianlong-Jiaqing school of textual criticism.

[lena ∵]

Despite being relatively short (as compared to other books in the Historical Materialism series) Paresh's text is dense and thoroughly researched. This density doesn't make the book hard to read, he offers a very concise reading of Marx and Engels (but, importantly, as stressed by Heinrich in his An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, this doesn't substite your own reading of the fundamental texts of Marx and Engels). Some important takeaways are Chattopadhyay's 'defense' of Engels against those, who proclaim that he somehow negatively influenced Marx and was detrimental to marxism. He's highly critical of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which is fair, without ruthless criticism there would be no positive movement forward, but there are some things I disagree with him on concerning Lenin - mainly that Lenin himself did recognise that the failure of German revolution would hinder and finally make the Russian revolution fail, completely in line with "late" Marx. His reading is very humanist and does, I feel, come very close to the leftcommunist and council communist tradition, though he doesn't express so out right. The Russian revolution and its final demise was, of course, a great failure and produced a huge humanitarian crisis which hasn't yet been resolved and probably won't be for a long time, but it is important to understand that capitalism can and does have positives, which Paresh doesn't fail to acknowledge, but this slow descent can't be equated with the failure of socialism.

[Kelton]

This was an incredible read, I’ll be recommending it to anyone interested in Marxian Socialism. A must read for those critical of both ‘state’ socialism and ‘market’ socialism!