A Clock without a Spring: Epitaph for the USSR - Chris Arthur

It is important following the ‘fall’ to point out that the debate over the nature of the Soviet Union is still germane to socialist theory and practice. Analysis of no-longer-existing socialism is significant more generally, for it is clear that the lessons are not specific to the extremes of the Russian situation but are relevant to the theory and practice of transition in general. Indeed it makes more pressing the question of what a real and permanent supersession of capitalism requires. Anyone interested in such a question must draw the lessons of this failed attempt; and anyone who is a Marxist must give an account of ‘what went wrong’ consonant with Marxist theory itself.¹ In the second part of this chapter I sketch some views on these questions. In the third part I consider the views of István Mészáros, embedded in his larger work Beyond Capital. But first let us set the scene for our analysis of the transition from capitalism to the USSR by addressing the question of the dialectic of form and content.

Form and Content

It is necessary first to distinguish between matter and form on the one hand, and content and form on the other. If I cut a gingerbread man out of dough, the dough is the matter out of which the form is made but it is not a content; the same form could be made out of any workable material; and the matter is indifferent to the form externally imposed on it. (A more interesting case is the logical form of a proposition being independent of the variables in it.) We speak here then of the two sides indifferently united.² When we have a case of form and content the two sides penetrate one another such that just this form fits just this content. We require this of a book in which the contents should take the form of an orderly arrangement but in which what counts as orderly is not determined solely by formal considerations but is itself a function of the content, for example certain statements function as beginnings (‘once upon a time’) and certain statements as endings (‘they lived happily ever after’).
 
Let us now apply these categories to the history of capitalism. Capital is in form self-valorising value; but for the purposes of this discussion the process of valorisation may be taken as embodied in the material process of production and the latter treated as a content taking the shape of capital’s production of itself through appropriating surplus labour. It is often said that capital precedes capitalism, by which is meant that other forms of capital preceded industrial capital. Although Marx himself said this, in one place at least he recognised that strictly speaking this is false because sheer form without adequate content is not capital.

Money can be lent out to productive purposes, hence formally as capital, although capital has not yet taken control of production, there is no capitalist production yet, hence no capital exists yet in the strict sense of the word…. Like merchant’s wealth it only needs to be formally capital, capital in a function in which it can exist before it has taken control of production; the latter capital alone is the basis of an historical mode of social production of its own.³

Only in this latter form does capital gain an adequate content. Merchant and money-lending capital have the form of self-valorising value but lack an adequate content. The merchant certainly profits from circulating commodities but since he does not produce these commodities himself the ‘matter’ of his valorising process is externally given.⁴ Marx shows that capital (in the hands of usurers and merchants) may exploit the direct producer, through the exercise of market power, even when the latter is not formally subsumed under capital.⁵ Then he distinguishes within capitalism two different stages of development of the capital relation, the formal subsumption of the pre-capitalist labour process, which remains materially the same in this first stage, and the real subsumption of labour as capital transforms the labour process into an adequate content for capital. The ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’ obtains simply when ‘the labour process is subsumed under capital (it is capital’s own process) and the capitalist enters the process as its conductor, its director….’⁶ But this ‘subsumption under capital of a mode of labour already developed before the emergence of the capital relation’ forms a great contrast ‘to the specifically capitalist mode of production (labour on a large scale etc.) … which revolutionises the kind of labour done and the real mode of the entire labour process.’⁷ ‘The capital-relation as a relation of compulsion is common to both modes of production, but the specifically capitalist mode of production also possesses other ways of extracting surplus-value.’⁸ With industrial capital the unity of form and matter is at first still somewhat external insofar as the material process of production is that inherited from the past, and merely formally subsumed under capital’s categories. However, as Marx has shown, the process of production becomes really subsumed under capital when it is no longer possible for it to recover its pre-capitalist form; when the formerly independent artisan is reduced to a functional role within the ‘collective labourer’ organised by capital, and when the scale and intensity of production become determined by the requirements of big industry. In sum capital as form (self-valorising value) now produces from within itself a content adequate to it: the factory system. The key is its subordination of the workers through a reorganisation of the division of labour and the construction of a hierarchy of control. Only when form and content of a mode of production perfectly complement one another can one speak of an ‘organic system’,⁹ of a ‘social metabolism’ (something that will be important when we assess Mészáros’s contribution). If they come into conflict it spells decline and the objective necessity for a supersession.
 
Let us now investigate what Marx had to say about the notion of ‘metabolism’, starting with the simplest idea, introduced by Marx right at the beginning of Capital: ‘Labour … is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] between men and nature, and therefore human life itself.’¹⁰ Not surprisingly the same theme is explored at greater length in the chapter on the labour process.¹¹ The idea here refers to the immediate material life of human beings working upon nature; and in the chapter on the labour process Marx considers it without references to social forms, such as exchange. However, exchange introduces a definite social dimension to Stoffwechsel because in commodity production no material consumption is possible unless products first change hands in the commodity form. Marx says ‘We therefore have to consider the whole process in its formal aspect, that is to say, the change in form [Formwechsel] or the metamorphosis of commodities through which the social metabolism [Stoffwechsel] is mediated.’¹² And a little later he refers to the ‘Formwechsel’ wherein the ‘Stoffwechsel’ of the products of labour is accomplished.¹³ The emphasis is here not on a relation between ‘man and nature’ but the exchange of products between ‘man and man’ mediated in the social form of circulation.
 
These two different aspects of the social metabolism are dialectically integrated in the process of capitalist production and circulation, a matter first explored in the Grundrisse: ‘In the circulation of capital we have … a system of exchanges, exchange of matter [Stoffwechsel] if seen from the angle of use-value, a change of form [Formwechsel] if seen from the angle of value as such.’¹⁴ In Volume Two of Capital Marx returns to this subject in the first part, on the Metamorphoses of Capital, in which he demonstrates that the unity of the change in matter effected in production with the exchange of matter in circulation is accomplished in the circuit of forms of capital, namely money capital, production capital, and commodity capital. It is ‘within the circuit of capital … that the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] of social labour takes place.’¹⁵ Finally in the last part of Volume Two Marx shows that the system of reproduction, embracing the formal and material interchanges between ‘Departments’, constitutes the social metabolism of the entire capitalist economy within which production, exchange and consumption are interior ‘moments’.
 
The investigation of these coincident exchanges is crucial to the secret of value and use value, and their interpenetration. In particular, one must speak here of ‘form-determination’: capital goes beyond mere form in penetrating (rather than abstractly counterposing itself to) the matter it regulates in order to shape it into its own content (real subsumption of labour for example). Valorisation is something which can be discovered in a factory no more than can value in a commodity, but it is nevertheless the key to comprehending what is occurring.
 
The theoretical problem in rightly elucidating the effectivity of formal and material determination is to conceptualise how Formwechsel and Stoffwechsel work together in a unified system of capitalist social metabolism. This point is missed by those ‘materialists’ such as G. Stedman Jones, writing here in the New Palgrave article on ‘Dialectical reasoning’:

The relationship between matter and form in Hegel is only one of apparent exteriority. Matter relates to form as other only because form is not yet posited within it. Once the terms are related, they are declared to be identical. Marx, on the other hand, insists upon the irreducible difference between matter and form, between the material and the social. … Not only are matter and form different, but the one determines the other: value is determined in relation to the material production of use value; the opposite is not true.¹⁶

There has to be something wrong with the last sentence of this passage. No amount of dissection of material use value or the process of its production will turn up value. So in what sense is value conceivably determined by it? Capital creates value in virtue of its sui generis form. Of course, for Marx, it is relative labour times that determine relative values but value as a form is clearly constituted in exchange and insofar as the Marxian point about relative magnitudes is accepted it is the value form of capital itself that determines that labour time is to be the necessary dimension of its content. What is missing in Stedman Jones is the concept of mediation, a unity of opposites that keeps the two sides distinct as he insists, but allows that they inform each other, not that one is either reducible to the other or else its mere epiphenomenon. The distinction between formal and material determination and their unity must be considered.¹⁷ The former ‘ideally’ gives sense and purpose while the latter conditions the former by the potentials and limits of the matter concerned.
 
If it were not for the real historical existence of labour-power, and of the general framework of capitalist social relations which ensures its exploitation, then there would be no self-expansion of value. But Marx also investigates the logic of social forms such as exchange, money and capital. These real forms have a specific effectivity, whereas on Stedman Jones’s account all the weight is given to the material content regulated and directed by such forms. While it is true that the forms cannot realise their logical potential unless materially supported (there is no surplus-value without the exploitation of labour), it is equally true that the material potential is not realised without the compulsion exercised by the social form. It is capital that demands the continual reduction of socially necessary labour time. In sum, a full account of valorisation requires both formal and material explanation.
 
The key point is that the form-determination of capital as infinitely selfexpanding value means capitalism is utterly different from any other mode of production. In all modes of production it is possible to seek ways of improving the productivity of labour, and all exploitative modes rely on some form of ‘pumping out’ surplus labour. Only capital is in point of form as such driven by this interest under the necessity to accumulate ‘wealth’. Capital is an original unity of form and content in the sense that form has a certain unique effectivity arising from its purely self-mediating character granted in circulation. The following quotation from Marx gives some sense of this in that what is emphasised in it is the value form rather than the so-called ‘substance’.

To develop the concept of capital it is necessary to begin not with labour but with value, and precisely, with exchange value in an already developed movement of circulation. It is just as impossible to make the transition directly from labour to capital as it is to go from the different human races to the banker….¹⁸

Of course, systematic valorisation depends upon capital sinking into production and appropriating labour; but value is not a form ‘naturally’ taken on by labour (hence the impossibility of starting from labour), it is rather a form arising elsewhere and imposed on it. In virtue of its form capital is embarked on an endless drive for accumulation, but its self-determination as accumulative is limited by its reliance on land and labour as inputs to the production process. But, as we know from Marx, capital first formally subsumes these factors under itself and then subordinates labour and machinery to its purposes through a material transformation of them and their organisation (real subsumption).
 
What is capital? It is value in process. It takes the form first of money, then of factors of production, then of commodities, then of more money. Whence this ‘more’? – from the process of production where valorisation of capital takes place. At the ideal level capital is self-valorising value. At the material level it is the pumping out of surplus labour in the factory system. In a very real sense we may speak of the organisation established to accomplish this operation as the materialisation of capital. (Just as a chain-gang is the materialisation of slavery.)
 
Marx makes the point in his Grundrisse, using the language of matter and form we already discussed:

In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it….
 
The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion….
 
The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital….
 
However, while capital gives itself its adequate form as use value within the production process only in the form of machinery and other material manifestations of fixed capital, such as railways etc., this in no way means that this use value – machinery as such – is capital, or that its existence as machinery is identical with its existence as capital.’¹⁹

Mark well! Just because it is impossible to understand the development of the factory system without grasping that it was shaped by capital, so as to become its adequate content, this does not make it capital itself.

The Soviet Union

Let us now turn to those post-revolutionary systems that claimed to have superseded capitalism, in brief to the ‘Soviet model’.
 
As far as social form is concerned capitalism was destroyed in the USSR. It is not meaningful to speak of the system as having had value, surplus-value, or capital accumulation (it should go without saying that development of heavy industry is not itself any sign of capital accumulation). There was the price form, and the wage form, but this in no way represented some appearance-form of value, since they were fixed within a totally administered system (although of course such forms provide a point of transition to capitalism when political conditions put this on the agenda, as we see today).
 
What remained, however, was the materialisation of capital, namely the factory system. For various historical reasons this was never questioned: socialism was proclaimed without radically overcoming the material embodiment of capital. Hence the global factory in the USSR started from this capitalist model, of which the key element is the hierarchical division of labour, from those at the bottom who execute orders of others, up to those involved in the five-year plan process. The entire human/material configuration of capital’s technique was replicated. But without the objective economic regulator of value measures. A factory is not a mode of production. It has to be specified further by what social form regulates it. Since the factory system was laid down through capital’s own development it followed that, once separated from capital itself as a social form, this content lost the character precisely of being a content and became a material foundation of the new order. The great difference with capitalism is that the lack of an objective value regulator leaves the mechanism without a spring, i.e. there is no drive for capital accumulation. Furthermore, without being continually regulated by capital this material presupposition ceased to be posited by capital as its presupposition and hence became subject to a kind of ‘drift’ – the Soviet factory became unlike capitalist factories in many respects.²⁰
 
What was this new social form? It was certainly not socialism. Rather, the requirements of the inherited material basis for some kind of direction led with extraordinary rapidity to a bureaucratic dictatorship. As Ticktin has pointed out, to speak here of a ‘planned economy’ is wildly inaccurate, for the basic information and monitoring systems were not in place because of the antagonism between planners and planned; at most one can speak of an administered economy within which enterprise managers and workers survived as best they could. If it had been planned there would have been a good ‘fit’ between form and content and it would have survived. The trouble arose precisely because the materialisation of capital was freed from capital’s controlling form but without another organic system of social metabolism taking root and transforming more or less rapidly and radically the material basis of the economy. Being neither capitalism nor socialism the USSR lacked organic coherence. According to Ticktin ‘there are only capitalism and its essence, the law of value, and socialism with its essence, the law of planning; anything in between … has no essence, no laws except ones of formation and decay.’²¹ This paradoxical character is expressed by Ticktin when he says it was not a mode of production at all (a fortiori neither ‘state capitalism’ nor ‘bureaucratic collectivism’). The politically enforced directives were incapable of controlling the factories in such a manner as to promote the development of the productive forces in a stable and permanent fashion.
 
Lenin (surprisingly for such a political thinker) was enthusiastic about the ‘scientific management’ pioneered theoretically by Taylor and practically by Ford. But the truth is that Taylorism was never applied in the USSR! (Stakhanovism, besides being purely a publicity stunt, was not scientific in Taylor’s sense.) The Soviets had no theoretical objection to it; they wanted to apply scientific management; but they were unable to do so because production was governed by a non-capitalist social form. It could not be applied in the USSR because it was tailor-made for capitalism; it is not, as Lenin seemed to imagine, a socially neutral body of knowledge. Moreover, Taylor would roll in his grave if anyone dared to associate him with the gross overmanning characteristic of Soviet industry. Fiat built a factory for the Soviets: it took four times as many workers to run as exactly the same factory in Italy.
 
The Soviet system was not a labour-saving system but a labour-hoarding one. Clearly where it was illegal to fire workers managers had not much interest in saving labour time. Furthermore they could not organise a just-in-time system because in the USSR supply was never in time. Hence it was important to build up and hoard stocks against such a drying up of supply for more or less long periods. Thus Soviet production worked on the ‘never-in-time’ system; it took most of the month to get the machinery in order and the inputs delivered, then to meet the monthly targets the factory engaged in a process known as ‘storming’ when everyone available worked until they dropped; then another hiatus occurred, and so on. In fact managers hoarded labour in case a period of ‘storming’ to meet a plan deadline is required. I do not think Taylor would call this scientific management! Certainly the workers did not like the hanging about or the storming. And the consumer discovers the products of storming are defective. In sum Taylorism makes no sense when workers jobs are guaranteed.
 
The inefficiency of the central planning system, combined with the absence of a proper market, resulted in a paradoxical retrogression in the social division of labour. Füredi explains: ‘The response of individual production units to the problem caused by the absence of economic regulation is to strive for a measure of self-sufficiency. Thus instead of a mutually beneficial division of labour between enterprises, industries and regions, the pattern is for the division of labour to be reproduced within each sector of the economy.’²² Hence there was a fragmentation of the economy and inefficiency. Because ‘the goal of any enterprise manager is to reduce his reliance on the overall division of labour to a minimum, to give the best chance of reaching centrally imposed performance targets,’²³ resources were kept hidden from the planners and thus they could not effectively plan for they did not know where the resources were.
 
I have said, following Hillel Ticktin, that there was no mode of production in the USSR. This purely negative definition does not mean much, except as a promissory note on its collapse. Let me try to give the theory more substance. What is a mode of production? It is a stable, relatively harmonious, combination of a social form and a material content. In Marx’s glib aphorism, ‘the handmill gives us society with the feudal lord, the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist’. It must be understood that, in the combination, the elements are not indifferent to one another, nor do they exhibit a oneway determination (the Marx passage has been misread as a technological determinism), rather they are dialectically interrelated. Just this form shapes and develops just this content; just this content embodies and reproduces materially just this form. Thus it is the social form of capital that, through its tendency towards competition and enlarged production, brought forth the steam engine; and it was the enormous boost to labour productivity occasioned by it that enabled capitalism to stomp all over pre-capitalist forms. If the social form and material content come into contradiction this spells trouble. For example Marx believed that the increasing socialisation of the productive forces, and associated labour processes, will prove incompatible with their capitalist integument.
 
What I argue is that the relations of production in the USSR always suffered from an incoherence of form and content. It was a self-aborting montrosity. The matter is not unrelated to its inauspicious beginnings. Apart from the much canvassed political dimensions, the isolated USSR had not the human and technical resources to avoid copying capitalist technique. But when the factory is brought under a quite different social form characterised by the absence of capital’s logic, and by employment guarantees, productivity goes out of the window, exploitation is inefficient, and control must be exercised in a new way, i.e. by a bureaucratic apparatus backed up by a police state. This was then reinforced and reproduced as the emerging bureaucracy opted for maintaining their own position at the head of a hierarchical command structure.
 
The interests of the capitalist are congruent with the growth of social wealth, but the individual interest of the bureaucrat is not. This is why there was no new mode of production. Adam Smith showed long ago that the capitalist benefitted society simply in pursuit of his own interest. The interest of the worker however, was not so self-evidently connected with social wealth; for doubling productivity is immediately in the interests of the capitalist but leaves up to half the workforce unemployed. Now bourgeois apologists may argue that the increase in social wealth will somehow generate new industries to re-employ these people, but this is a very indirect link and the workers may be forgiven for trying to hold on to the jobs they have. The argument for socialism has always appealed to the idea that when the workers work ‘for themselves’ they will become interested in increasing production and it will be possible to reorganise the technology of the factory to gain the full benefit of this. But in the USSR the factory provided no avenue for workers’ initiative and in any case their exclusion from control over the surplus gave them no guarantee that such efforts would benefit themselves or their families. Thus far not much different from capitalism: but in fact worse than capitalism for the individual bureaucrat had no immediate interest of his own in increasing social wealth either. Remember they were not stock holders in the industries under their control. Their rewards depended upon political favour. Hence the resistance to innovation, the tendency to pass the buck and blame others when things went wrong, the hoarding of labour and materials against a future episode of ‘storming’. What a bureaucrat wants is above all a quiet life. The reason for what happened was not ‘the adoption of Taylorism’ but the necessity to maintain distinctions to justify bureaucratic privilege and prevent the self-organisation of the workers.
 
If we return to basics we must start the social analysis not from the form of state but from the form of production. It was not production for profit; it was not production for need; it was production for targets laid down external to the logic of the production process itself. In the case of capitalism we know that the law of value transmits from factory to factory the socially necessary labour times for any item, and that capital flows and technological innovation are mutually reinforcing. In the case of production for need we might imagine some mutually informative institutionalisation of producer/consumer relations. But the USSR had no such feed back loops! The targets had no relation to real needs, nor, more importantly, to the real resources and the real capabilites of the factories. No five year plan ever succeeded but had to be drastically reworked year on year. The so-called plans were meaningless because the information available was so corrupted by the political distortions of the system. And where the plan was fulfilled it was often only in the letter and not the substance. The state interfered in the economy, but the system did not regulate itself in accordance with some inherent logic of its productive capacity. Thus I would argue that the well-known phenomenon of a rapid expansion of basic factors of production, followed by chronic paralysis when diverse sophisticated products were required, should not be interpreted as effects of some economic law but as a sign of a lack of law. A combination of political factors (coercion and voluntarist enthusiasm) got things off the ground, but because no new mode of production was stabilised the system could not run itself when these political pressures diminished.²⁴
 
Although the general run of commodites were defective the system was capable of prioritising allocation of materials, machinery and men to certain uses. That is why it worked in war, and why the concentration of scarce resouces, and the best talent, in the armament sector could produce Sputnik. (Of course the presence of imperialism forced this priority on the system which otherwise might have been more rewarding for certain layers of the population.) While there was considerable extensive growth this process itself was enormously wasteful; but the crucial problem was the retardation of intensive growth. Just to cite one problem here; how can the intellectual productive forces be developed on a broad scale when the rulers did not trust people with photocopiers?
 
In order to make more plausible the claim that no mode of production existed in the USSR let us observe that Ernest Mandel distinguished between specific relations of production, which must characterise any social formation, and a mode of production. This is ‘one of the essential distinctions between periods of transition and the great “progressive stages” of history outlined by Marx.’²⁵ A mode of production is an organic whole that reproduces itself almost automatically. It can only be replaced by violent social revolution. ‘On the other hand, precisely because of their generally hybrid character the relations of production of a society in transition between two modes of production can decompose of their own accord, evolve in various directions without necessarily experiencing revolutionary perturbations of the same type as the social revolutions necessary for the passage from one mode of production to another.’²⁶ So there were certainly relations of production of a sort but no organic system of social metabolism.
 
The whole experience demonstrates the wisdom of Marx’s insight that economics is decisive over politics. The elite wanted to be a true ruling class, and it seemed they had all the power anyone could wish for, with the KGB, the GULAG and the house-trained party milllions; but they could not ground themselves on production; they poured out ‘plans’, ‘decrees’, ‘orders’, ‘reforms’, but they could not deliver the goods. It was as simple as that.
 
To summarise this sketch of history: in the pre-capitalist period the form of capital emerged; in the capitalist period it seized hold of production and shaped this matter into a content adequate to it; in the post-capitalist period this form of capital was extinguished but its material presuppositions were not radically transformed but merely administered within new social relations, resulting in an uncontrolled process of deformation of the material basis in the context of a continued failure for the form and matter to achieve a new organicity.²⁷

Beyond Capital

In the final part of this paper I look closely at an impressively argued new book by István Mészáros, which contains a theory of transition worth discussing on its own account, and also for the purpose of further illuminating my own view of the Soviet Union, which overlaps with his. While the necessity of the socialist alternative is reasserted, Mészáros also investigates the reasons for the collapse of the USSR. As the title, Beyond Capital, indicates, central to the book is the thesis that it is necessary not merely to go beyond ‘capitalism’ but beyond ‘capital’ itself. A lot hangs on the coherence of this distinction, therefore. In particular it is used to characterise Soviettype régimes of production as being ‘post-capitalist’ yet still under the sway of ‘capital’. He says ‘the tragedy of Soviet-type post-capitalist societies was that they followed the line of least resistance by positing socialism without radically overcoming the material presuppositions of the capital system’.²⁸ This is outlined in a fascinating chapter on ‘changing forms of the rule of capital’. Capital’s metabolism, based on its domination of alienated labour, on the predominance of exchange over use value, and on a hierarchical division of labour, is driven by the imperative of expansion. As a system with its own logic and coherence it cannot be changed without tackling this central metabolic order and replacing it; tinkering with surface phenomena (e.g. juridical arrangements) will not change such fundamentals. Thus Mészáros argues that without the positive transcendence of capital’s metabolic functioning ‘labour itself self-defeatingly continues to reproduce the power of capital over against itself’.²⁹
 
Mészáros concludes that ‘the real target of emancipatory transformation is the complete eradication of capital as a totalising mode of control from the social reproductive metabolism itself, and not simply the displacement of the capitalist as the historically specific “personification of capital”.’³⁰ In an interview he expanded on this: ‘The bureaucracy is a function of this command structure under the changed circumstances where in the absence of the private capitalist you have to find an equivalent to that control.’³¹
 
In one version the distinction between capital and capitalism is already familiar to us; for it is a commonplace that merchants and usurers employed money as capital long before capital seized hold of production and established the modern system of industrial capitalism. But it is novel to argue that capital may survive capitalism. So let us look first at his definition of capitalism: he argues that the capitalist formation extends over only that particular phase of capital production in which:

(1) production for exchange is all pervasive; (2) labour-power itself is a commodity; (3) the drive for profit is the fundamental regulator; (4) the vital mechanism for the extraction of surplus-value, the radical separation of the means of production from the producers, assumes an inherently economic form; (5) surplus-value is privately appropriated by the members of the capitalist class; (6) following its economic imperative of growth and expansion capital production tends towards a global integration.³²

It follows from this definition, according to Mészáros, that one cannot speak of ‘capitalism’ in post-capitalist societies as we have known them.³³ Yet at the same time he argues that ‘capital’ maintains its rule in such societies. What then is the definition of ‘capital’ that would be consistent with this survival? He says the necessary conditions of all conceivable forms of the capital relation – including the post-capitalist forms – are:

(1) the separation and alienation of the objective conditions of the labour process from labour itself; (2) the superimposition of such alienated conditions over the workers as a separate power exercising command over labour; (3) the personification of capital as ‘egotistic value’³⁴ pursuing its own selfexpansion – the bureaucrat is the post-capitalist equivalent of the private capitalist; (4) the equivalent personification of labour whether as wagelabourer under capitalism or as the norm-fulfilling ‘socialist worker’ under the post-capitalist system.

‘Capital can change the form of its rule as long as these four basic conditions which are constitutive of its “organic system” – are not radically superseded’, he concludes.³⁵
 
The key conceptual innovation introduced by Mészáros, then, is a distinction between capital and capitalism. Let us now examine Mészáros’s definitions of these. The five point definition of capitalism he gives is generally plausible, but I would challenge it at what might seem its strongest point, namely the criterion that surplus-value is privately appropriated by the members of the capitalist class. Capitalism does not at all refer essentially to such personal appropriation in any simple sense. It is well-known that for Marx the enemy is capital itself, the capitalist featuring merely as ‘capital personified’. If capital originally took the shape of such a ‘capitalist’ this is not definitional of the capital relation, which is purely a matter of capitals being individuated from one another as value bodies and of the subordination of living labour by dead labour. Marx made an error in Volume III when he spoke of the joint stock company (made necessary by the increasing scale of the social productive forces) as the negation of capitalism within capitalism.³⁶ On the contrary, the elimination of any idiosyncrasy, which the person of an individual capitalist may introduce, when he is replaced by the corporate person (which in law is solely concerned with protecting the investments of the shareholders), results in a purer form of capital. It is even possible as an imaginary experiment to see that capital can survive the elimination of the capitalist class. Already the institutions, such as pension funds and insurance companies, have a preponderant role in shareholdings; it is only necessary to imagine that as a result of a punitive inheritance tax the individual capitalists are driven out and the slack taken up by these institutions. But if the corporations were all owned by pension funds this would change nothing about the fundamental metabolism (just as in feudalism Church estates, the beneficiaries of which owned no property, were generally run in the same way as those of the Lords temporal).
 
Now let us turn to Mészáros’s definition of capital. It is a structural requirement of his argument that the criteria be more abstract than those for capitalism so that capitalism may be relegated to one form of the capital system, but it must not be so abstract as to comprehend systems in which no capital relation could plausibly be said to exist. I think this remit is impossible to fulfil and is not in truth fulfilled by Mészáros. His four part definition of capital may be reduced to a two part one because items 1, 2 & 4 are all about the alienation of the labourer, while only point 3 refers to the presence of capital which is defined here as ‘egotistic value pursuing its own self-expansion’. However it is unclear how seriously we are meant to take the term ‘value’ here because Mészáros generally talks not of surplus-value but of surplus labour, for example he says ‘capital accumulation’ in the USSR was ‘secured by means of politically controlled extraction of surplus labour’.³⁷ But it is impermissible to play fast and loose with ‘surplus-value’ and ‘surplus labour’ – the existence of the latter (as it is common to all exploitative modes of production) does not at all prove the existence of capital which is accumulated value via profit on any reasonable reading of Marx.
 
What on earth is his concept of capital if it has no reference to value, surplus-value, or profit?
 
It can only relate to the so-called organic system of metabolic control understood in use value terms, that the very organisation of material production qualifies here as capital and that in virtue of that material organisation it subordinates labour to its purpose of uncontrolled self-expansion in which the latter must be understood not as valorisation, but as expansion of physical plant. There are two things wrong here. Such a system would not constitute capital accumulation which is necessarily a value form; and there was in the USSR no immanent tendency to self-expansion. But everyone would agree that capital is inherently accumulation driven. Indeed Mészáros goes out of his way to argue that this was still true of the USSR:

The imperative of accumulation driven expansion can be satisfied under changed economic circumstances not only without the subjective ‘profit motive’ but even without the objective requirement of profit, which happens to be an absolute necessity only in the capitalist variety of the capital system…. During several decades of Soviet economic development high levels of capital accumulation [were] secured by means of the politically controlled extraction of surplus labour, without remotely resembling the capitalist system in its necessary orientation towards profit.³⁸

This seems very odd to me; in capitalism we see the hegemony over production of value forms including, especially, capital – not production for production’s sake but for the sake of profit. Capital as a subject is essentially a value form and cannot survive the abolition of profit. What was accumulated in the USSR, however, was not capital but means of production lacking the form of capital. Moreover the accumulation-fetish was not rooted in ‘the metabolic order’ but in the hopes of the controllers, who imposed external ‘targets’, terroristically driven. If the USSR as a ‘capital’ system was really expansion orientated, how is that compatible with the failure to innovate which led to permanent stagnation? No matter how the political authority, for external reasons of state, tried to coerce or stimulate the producers, the economy responded only sluggishly in quantitative terms, and innovation became completely bogged down.³⁹ This was crucial politically; for the failure to ‘catch up’ with the West, and the failure to achieve real growth in the Brezhnev years, stripped the system of legitimacy, even in the eyes of its beneficiaries, and brought about the implosion. Mészáros argues in his point 3 that the bureaucrat is the post-capitalist equivalent of the private capitalist as the representative of capital. The bureaucrat is certainly the representative of a material metabolism so structured as to expropriate the subjectivity of the workers; but his interest in controlling the workers is not in expansion per se but simply in meeting externally imposed targets; hence neither capital nor any new personification of it (the bureaucracy) can be present. What is true is that, as it inherited the materialisation of capital, the Soviet factory was characterised by a hierarchical division of labour and the subordination of the immediate producer to alien purposes. Saying this we have now reduced Mészáros’s definition effectively to the other three points to do with the claim the USSR, like capitalism, rested on the exploitation of alienated labour.
 
Let us examine Mészáros’s claims in relation to this other part of his core definition of capital namely the following: ‘the separation and alienation of the objective conditions of the labour process from labour itself’; ‘the superimposition of such objectified and alienated conditions over the workers as a separate power exercising command over labour’; for the sake of the pursuit of ‘self-expansion’. Clearly there is considerable room for discussion about such a definition of capital. As I have already argued, without the drive of selfvalorisation infusing the conditions of production there is no immanent tendency to expansion. On the other hand it is true that the organisation of labour both materially and socially is at first sight directed towards exercising ‘command over labour’; however the empirical record (see books cited earlier) shows that this failed miserably to achieve its objectives precisely because the ‘mode of production’ within which the factories were now set was radically changed.
 
There is an interesting contrast between the Marx of 1844 who assimilated feudalism and capitalism under the general category of alienation of the conditions of labour from the worker, and the Marx of 1857 who was concerned to sharply demarcate capitalist from pre-capitalist forms on the grounds that in capitalism the worker was at the mercy of the decisions of the private owner in finding work, whereas in feudalism the communal system of production was prior to and included the immediate producer. Now if we think about this distinction of 1857 then we can see that in the USSR the 'community' was also prior to labour in that, just as in feudalism, the worker must work but cannot be fired. Therefore Mészáros’s inclusion of the term ‘separation’ in the above definition is mistaken. Strictly speaking there was no separation of workers from the conditions of production – the Soviet manager was stuck with the workers just as the feudal estate carried its complement of serfs. The Marx of 1844 read feudalism as another system in which the conditions of labour are dominant over the workers; the Marx of 1857 insists that capitalism is different from feudalism in that in feudalism the worker is presupposed as in unity with the conditions whereas in capitalism he is separated from them and ‘seeking work’. Now it is obvious that the USSR conforms to the feudal model. Even if the conditions are dominant over the worker it is still true that there is the presupposed community which both forces people to work and supposedly guarantees work. Just as in feudalism, the powerlessness of the immediate producer was politically grounded in the USSR, rather than on the economic ‘separation’ from the conditions of production; if anything they were part of these conditions.
 
Mészáros’s strongest argument is that real subsumption of labour under capital was retained in the USSR. Originally this was organised in capital’s interest to produce value: hence capital’s obsession with time saving and the expropriation of control over the production process from the immediate producer. But when the factory is detached from the value regulator and enters into a new relation of production there is a significant loss of such ‘command’ as the empirical studies show; yet Mészáros rightly includes ‘command’ as a sine qua non of the capital relation, and hopes for ‘the total eradication of capital from the social metabolism as command over labour’.⁴⁰ He supports himself with a couple of quotations which do lend some colour to his position, in particular a passage from the Grundrisse in which Marx speaks of ‘the monstrous objective power’ belonging to ‘the personified conditions of production. i.e. to capital’.⁴¹ This is key to Mészáros’s whole position. My own position is the converse: that the monstrous power of the conditions of production over labour is due to its being the materialisation of the capital form where capital’s personification arises from the acquired independence of value and more specifically the domination of self-valorising value as a form, the objective conditions being shaped into its content. The ‘monstrous power’ of the factory organisation is shaped by the imperative of valorisation and is hence the materialisation of capital. Although the factory system is tailor-made to expropriate the subjectivity of the worker the counter-subject that exercises command is self-valorising value not its material integument. To identify the source of the problem with the factories, rather than their social form, is an easy mistake when the conditions of labour are form-determined by capital. But that organisation extracted from its social form has no inherent drive to expand. This view falsely assumes the only way it can function is as it was designed to do, and hence calls forth for its appropriate personification a replacement for the private capitalist. So if it functions in the same way as in capitalism we might as well say it is capital. This is what Mészáros seems to imagine.
 
At the deepest philosophical level Mészáros overgeneralises the notion of a subject-object reversal. ‘Originally’ the subject is the producer and the object is the conditions of production, including the tools wielded by the worker. If one simply inverts this then the worker becomes the object to be ‘commanded’ and the subject becomes ‘the personified conditions of production’ which is clearly how Mészáros understands capital. But, even though Marx gives warrant for this reading in some of his remarks, this is a wrong-headed account of what actually occurs in capitalism. For what it is worth, in 1867 Marx defines capital as a ‘subject’⁴² long before he discusses production; he clearly bases it on the ‘developed movement of circulation’ namely M-C-M.
 
In practice when Mészáros discusses in detail how exactly capital has established itself he concentrates not on the forms of circulation but on the level of production. Even though it is true that the worker experiences the conditions of production as an alien power, indeed he experiences even his own labour as alien, this is misleading, for the true subject, namely capital, is not the personified conditions of production but self-valorising value defined by the formula M-C-M; when this circuit sinks into production, and becomes M-C … P … C-M, it constitutes the conditions of labour as alien to the worker.
 
Mészáros tries to go from labour (that is alienated labour) to capital without taking seriously ‘developed circulation’; thus the way is open for him to identify alienated labour in the Soviet Union with the rule of capital for he takes capital as identical with the estrangement of the material conditions of labour from the worker. Since such alienation continued in the USSR he misidentifies it as founded on capital. He thinks that in capital it is the autonomy of the material conditions of production that is the problem, whereas in fact it is the autonomy of value and the imposition on production of self-valorising value that is the root of the problem, the factory organisation being the materialisation of capital.
 
Time and again Mészáros argues that capital continues in being until replaced by another organic system namely socialism.⁴³ What is missed here is the possibility of something stalled, the negation of capital which is not yet the supersession of capital, an existent contradiction therefore, thus precisely a system not organically coherent and therefore lacking any immanent motor of reproduction. But a negation of capital that fails to go beyond capital is necessarily a negation of capital that falls behind capital. (Hence the perception of Soviet workers that they were serfs and their initial enthusiasm for the market as a liberation.)
 
Mészáros is clearly right to argue that socialist revolution is not merely a matter of a transfer of political power, or of redistribution, but of changing the fundamental social metabolism established by capital; it means transforming the very structure of material production and abolishing the hierarchical division of labour. He is clearly right that post-capitalist social formations failed to achieve this positive transcendence; and the emergence of ‘the bureaucracy’ is explicable primarily on that basis. His conceptualisation of the problem in terms of the survival of ‘capital’ beyond ‘capitalism’ is most interesting; but although we both see ‘the moment of capital’ in the USSR, what I call the materialisation of capital Mészáros identifies with capital itself. In the sense that something survives from the previous period our views overlap; my difference with his account relates to what survives. This raises interesting issues about the concepts involved. Mészáros identifies capital’s social metabolism with the system of material interchanges; he focusses on the factory system. This sounds thoroughly materialist, but in my view this level of the social metabolism cannot be understood as having its own organic coherence and dynamic. It is only comprehensible as the bearer of, and subordinated to, an ideal metabolism, the interchange of values constitutive of the life of capital. Thus the general line of my critique of Mészáros is that he pays insufficient attention to the value form of capital, and the positing of expansion inherent in its search for profit.
 
Does this difference between my claim that the materialisation of capital survives, and the view of Mészáros that capital survives, amount to no more than semantics? No, because my view gives a better explanation of collapse.

Conclusion

I argue that in the Soviet Union capital’s metabolism was disrupted without an alternative being established; lacking organic coherence, the system could not survive once the exceptional conditions of revolutionary mobilisation, of terror, and of war, passed. The USSR has to be seen as the negation of socialism within socialism, and tendentially refounding capitalism as indeed occurred. This is because the benefits of social ownership are only possible with self-management; but where materialised capital remained, without the capitalist economic form to direct it, there was nothing to motivate efficiency; voluntarism, coercion, incentives, all failed. Hence the chronic crisis of underutilisation of resources, massive waste, defective products, and final collapse. Certainly, if the factory system in which capital materialised itself remains, then one cannot speak of socialism; but, conversely, if the law of value enforced through capitalist competition is no longer operative we have a clock without a spring.

1. The first such attempt was Leon Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed (1936). For a critique of Trotsky see: Arthur, C. J. 1972 ‘The Coming Soviet Revolution’.
2. The form-matter distinction is not absolute; there is no such thing as completely formless matter. It is more a question of the reforming of matter that is at issue.
3. Marx, K. 1988 ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’, p. 32.
4. For more on this see Arthur, C. J. 2000 ‘From the Critique of Hegel to the Critique of Capital’.
5. Marx, K. 1988 ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’ p. 428; Marx, K. 1994 ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’ pp. 117–121.
6. Marx, K. 1994 ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’ p. 424.
7. Marx, K. 1994 ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’ p. 426.
8. Marx, K. 1994 ‘Economic Manuscript of 1861–63’, p. 426.
9. For Marx on the nature of an ‘organic system’ see Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse, p. 278 and p. 100.
10. Marx, K. 1976 Capital Volume I, p. 133; Marx, K. 1962 Das Kapital: Erster Band p. 57.
11. Marx, K. 1976 Capital Volume I, p. 283, and p. 290.
12. Marx, K. 1976 Capital Volume I, pp. 198–9; Marx, K. 1962 Das Kapital: Erster Band p. 119. Contrary to the Penguin translator Ben Fowkes (p. 198n), this was not the first place Marx uses the term Stoffwechsel: we have seen it earlier in Capital itself (p. 133), and it was first employed ten years before in Marx’s Grundrisse as we shall see below.
13. Marx, K. 1976 Capital Volume I, p. 210; Marx, K. 1962 Das Kapital: Erster Band, p. 128.
14. Marx, K. 1987 ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58’ p. 25. In German: ‘Ein System von Austauschen, Stoffwechsel, so weit der Gebrauchswerth betrachtet, Formwechsel, so weit der Werth als solcher betrachtet wird.’ Marx, K. 1981 Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/58 p. 522. (For some reason Nicolaus gets it the wrong way round: Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse p. 637.)
15. Marx, K. 1978 Capital Volume II, p. 226 The translator’s note referring us back to the chapter on the labour process is in my view slightly inaccurate; the context seems to indicate Marx was thinking more of the exchange of products discussed in Capital Volume 1, pp. 198–9.
16. Stedman Jones, G. 1990, ‘Dialectical reasoning’ p. 127.
17. A good analogy is computing. There is the software logic, which is here the demand of valorisation flowing from the form, and the firing sequence in the hardware, which is here the production process. The question is how far the hardware supports the software. One could argue that at a minimum it must have the labour-power chip in it.
18. Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse p. 259.
19. Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse p. 692, p. 693, p. 694, p. 699.
20. See these informative studies: Filtzer, D. 1986 Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation; Füredi, F. 1986 The Soviet Union demystified; Ticktin, H. 1992 Origins of the Crisis in the USSR; Arnot, B. 1988 Controlling Soviet Labour.
21. Ticktin, H. 1992 Origins of the Crisis in the USSR p. 14. The ‘law of planning’ does not necessarily mean central planning of all details. Local self-management is necessary in order to integrate what Hilary Wainwright has called ‘tacit knowledge’ possessed by the workers of a given enterprise founded in experience and a tradition of ‘know-how’.
22. Füredi, F. 1986 The Soviet Union demystified, p. 103.
23. Füredi, F. 1986 The Soviet Union demystified, p. 124.
24. A fascinating, but imponderable, question (asked of me by Riccardo Bellofiore) is whether or not, if there had been no more advanced external world competing with it, the USSR could have carried on indefinitely absorbing its own inefficiencies. One recalls that it took war with superior economies to break down Tsarism.
25. Mandel, E. 1978 ‘On the Nature of the Soviet State’ p. 28.
26. Mandel, E. 1978 ‘On the Nature of the Soviet State’ p. 29.
27. Of course a more or less long period of transition to socialism is inevitable, but it can be argued that things would be very different if a transition were to occur with an educated work-force and a democratic tradition; then self-management and political progress could be a real possibility.
28. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 621.
29. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 494.
30. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 369.
31. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 981.
32. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 630.
33. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 631.
34. Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse, p. 303.
35. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 617.
36. Marx, K. 1981 Capital Volume III pp. 567–69.
37. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 780.
38. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 780.
39. An important technical point is that where relative surplus-value is concerned this is premised on competition between capitals. Without this the relations of domination may well promote absolute surplus-value production, and extensive growth, but this is insufficient to power dynamic growth intensively.
40. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 619.
41. Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse, p. 831, quoted Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 620.
42. Capital Volume 1, p. 255, and Marx, K. 1973 Grundrisse, p. 266.
43. Mészáros, I 1995 Beyond Capital, p. 617, p. 622.