Socialism
liberation.us.to

Part of This Series of Posts:

When defining something it is important that the definition includes all instances of the use of the word (that have real material basis) at hand. It is also necessary to note that characteristics of a word do not equal a definition as if a word was to meet a checklist criteria to be defined as something then nothing would be definable. In the case of socialism we would get the ‘not real socialism’ meme from leftcoms and other ultra-leftists, and in the case of capitalism we would get the ‘not real capitalism’ in the case of some libertarians towards all capitalism currently existing or in a more general sense towards earlier instances of capitalism such as mercantile capitalism that were not as developed as the capitalism of the industrial era today. The point is that everything is in motion and developing and to reduce everything down to a dogmatic definition, a string of words that is universal, is an incorrect line of thinking and one which gives precedence to established institutions. As Marx and Engels said:

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” - Karl Marx

“The thing to be done at any definite given moment of the future, the thing immediately to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical conditions in which one has to act. But this question is in the clouds and therefore is really the statement of a phantom problem to which the answer can be - the criticism of the question itself” - Karl Marx

“[V]ery anticipation of yet to be proven results seem disrupting to me, and the reader who wants to follow me at all must resolve to ascend from the particular to the general” - Karl Marx

“[Hegel] develops his thinking not out of the object, rather he develops the object in accordance with ready-made thinking put together in the abstract sphere of logic” - Karl Marx

“But had any eighteenth-century Frenchman in the faintest idea, a priori, of the way in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be acomplished? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action for a revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present” - Karl Marx

“[Communists] develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. I am therefore not in favour of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists clarify their ideas” - Karl Marx

“To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence” - Karl Marx

“Mr. Bray does not see that this egalitarian reflection, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world, and therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on a basis which is nothing but an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as the shadow becomes embodied again, we perceive that this body, far from being the dreamt transfiguration, is the actual body of existing society” - Karl Marx

“Mr. Proudhon does not directly assert that bourgeois life is an eternal truth for him. He says it indirectly, in that he divinises the categories which express the bourgeois relations under the form of thought” - Karl Marx

“The principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history” - Friedrich Engels

“Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day. An image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head” - Friedrich Engels

“[We should not expect to find] fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation and they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formation” - Friedrich Engels

“Our definition of life is naturally very inadequate… All definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest; To science definitions are worthless because (they are) always inadequate. The only real definition is the development of the thing itself, but this is no longer a definition” - Friedrich Engels

To define socialism we first have to define capitalism. Capitalism is defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated to make profits for those who own them. Marx described capitalism as “the anarchy of production”. Engels explained:

“For in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital” - Friedrich Engels

Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, said that:

“[Capitalism is a system of] profits in command” - Mao Zedong

Simply put capitalism is a system where profits are in command, society produces for the sake of profits. Hence from the negation of the negation: Socialism is a rational system where social ends are the primary motivator/determinant of society.

This is the end of the definition anglo box -1 -2 -3.

My way of looking at it is that capitalism being when profits are in command fits every instance of capitalism and socialism being when social ends are dominant fits every instance of socialism to have existed in material reality.

Now I know that some people will point out that Stalin described a socialist society:

“Yes, you are right, we have not yet built Communist society. It is not so easy to build such a society. You are probably aware of the difference between socialist society and Communist society. In socialist society certain inequalities in property still exist. But in socialist society there is no longer unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities. In socialist society everyone is obliged to work, although he does not, in return for his labour receive according to his requirements, but according to the quantity and quality of the work he has performed. That is why wages, and, moreover, unequal, differentiated wages, still exist. Only when we have succeeded in creating a system under which, in return for their labour, people will receive from society, not according to the quantity and quality of the labour they perform, but according to their requirements, will it be possible to say that we have built Communist society" - J.V. Stalin

However, here he is giving a description, and it is not the only description he gave of socialism. The point is that you are not supposed to take the characteristics he describes and see this as the essence of socialism, or ahistorical criteria that define socialism. A description of characteristics is not itself a definition. To summarise the descriptors of socialism he provides, it is each according to his needs to each according to his work, abolition of unemployment, exploitation/the extraction of surplus value/wage labour and oppression of nationalities. These are of course characteristics of a socialist society. However they are not the definition of socialism itself. The definition I have outlined of socialism is a "system where social ends are the primary motivator/determinant of society” is hence correct.

  • enigmaOP
    1•2 years ago

    The foremost proof of this (and beginning of this process) was the end of the gold standard in 1931 by the Bank of England. This was done due to Great Depression that occured from the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which caused the bank to nearly run out of gold. Gold was the direct measure of value as understood by Marx as all commodities were tied to it:

    “[Measure of Value] The first phase of circulation is, as it were, a theoretical phases preparatory to real circulation. Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all assume a form in which they appear to one another nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of materialised universal labour-time. The first necessary move in this process is, as we have seen, that the commodities set apart a specific commodity, say, gold, which becomes the direct reification of universal labour-time or the universal equivalent; gold is converted into money by commodities” - Karl Marx

    Marx himself stated that as soon as labour in it’s direct form has ceased to be the creation of wealth, that exchange value breaks down. I will explain this in further detail later:

    “As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down” - Karl Marx

    Marx also recognised that gold was the one true universal commodity. In order for money to serve as the universal measure of value, it has to contain intrinsic value, i.e. it has to itself be a commodity imbued with a definite magnitude of labour. Marx stated that it would be impossible for the capitalist class to get around this:

    “Money - the common form into which all commodities as exchange values are transformed, i.e. the universal commodity - must itself exist as a particular commodity alongside the others, since what is required is not only that they can be measured against it in the head, but that they can be changed and exchanged for it in the actual exchange process. The contradiction which thereby enters, to be developed elsewhere. Money does not arise by convention, any more than the state does. It arises out of exchange, and arises naturally out of exchange; it is a product of the same; Gold becomes the measure of value because the exchange-value of all commodities is measured in gold, is expressed in the relation of a definite quantity of gold and a definite quantity of commodity containing equal amounts of laobur-time. To begin with, gold becomes the universal equivalent, or money, only because it thus functions as the measure of value and as such its own value is measured directly in all commodity equivalents; Their golden equivalent reflects the universal character of the labour-time contained in them” - Karl Marx

    “But it should never be forgotten, that money, in the first place, in the form of precious metals, remains the basis from which the credit system naturally can never detach itself; Secondly, that the credit system presupposes the monopoly of social means of production by private persons; capitalist production forever strives to overcome this metallic barrier, the material and fantastic barrier of wealth and its movements, in proportion as the credit system develops, but forever breaks its head on this same barrier” - Karl Marx

    This is also further elaborated on in ‘An Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital’:

    “In Capital, Marx assumes that money always has to be linked to a particular commodity. During Marx’s time, gold played the role of this ‘money commodity.’ But even back then it was hardly the case that pieces of gold were widely used in everyday commerce; small sums were paid with silver or copper coins, larger sums with ‘banknotes.’ Banknotes were originally issued by individual banks, which promised to honour the notes in gold. Ultimately, banknotes were only issued by state central banks, which also promisesd to honour the notes in gold. As a rule, the central banks of individual countries were not allowed to print an arbitrary amount of banknotes, but rather had to ensure that the banknotes were covered by a proportionate amount of gold reserves. Gold was hardly circulated, but the paper money in circulation acted as a representative of gold. At the end of the Second World War, at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, an international currency system was agreed upon that was still based upon a gold standard. But only the U.S. dollar was covered by gold, thirty-five dollars corresponding to an ounce of gold. All other currencies had a fixed exchange rate to the dollar. However, the obligation to honour dollars in gold was not valid for private individuals, only for state central banks. At the end of the 1960s, it had become clear that the massive amount of dollars in circulation had rendered the coupling of the dollar to gold a fiction. At the beginning of the 1970s, the gold standard was formally abolished, as were fixed currency exchange rates. Since then, there is no longer any commodity that functions at a national or international level as a money commodity. Now money is essentially the paper money issued by the state central banks, and there is nothing for which this paper money can be redeemed. Of course, one can still buy gold with this paper money, but now gold is just another commodity like silver or iron, and no longer plays the special role of a money commodity, neither legally nor by default. Marx could not imagine a capitalist system existing without a money commodity, but the existence of such a commodity is in no way a necessary consequence of his analysis of the commodity and money. Within the framework of the analysis of the commodity form, he developed the form-determinations of the general equivalent, and the analysis of the exchange process yields the result that commodity owners do in fact have to relate their commodities to a general equivalent. But that the general equivalent must be a specific commodity was not proven by Marx, merely assumed. That which serves as a general equivalent (whether an actual physical commodity or merely paper money) cannot be determined at the level of simple commodity circulation (for a more extensive analysis, see Heinrich 1999, 233). Only when the capitalist credit system is taken into consideration does it become clear that the existence of a money commodity is merely a historically transitional state of affairs, but does not correspond to ‘the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average’ that Marx sought to analyse” - (Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to Karl Marx’s Capital)

    Where it is stated that “Marx could not imagine a capitalist system existing without a money commodity”. The collapse of the exchange value means the collapse of the countervailing tendency for the rate of profit, Marx talks about this in Capital Volume 3. Clearly you do not understand the LTV if you think otherwise. Surplus value is not guiding the economy. Capitalists make more money off of ground rent, which Marx predicted would be the last bit of surplus value left. the prerequisite of exchange value is commodity money.

    Marx explains the collapse of exchange value via absolute overproduction of capital. Commodities can still be sold, but capitalists would not make a profit by selling them. Production based on exchange value has become incompatible with production for profit; which is to say, the capitalist cannot make a profit selling commodities at their values. How can surplus value be said to drive the economy when products are no longer profitable? Hence the M-C-M’ circuit no longer applies. Price has drastically fallen below value… so much so that it cannot be said wage labour is the primary driver of the economy. This is why Marx introduced a theory of absolute overproduction of capital, and why capitalists become national capitalists. Both Marx and Engels said “the expropriators expropriate themselves…”. Clearly something fundamental occurs in the production of commodity’s, however Commodity-Money does not exist today. Meaning the value of money is socially and politically determined, not rooted in a universal commodity. What we have since 1971 is Fiat currency. Fiat has no value in a Marxist sense because the more that is printed the less valuable it becomes as it is not tied to a universal commodity.

    The point is the money made from surplus today, is not commodity money or even money as Marx defined it, it is government credit being redistributed through speculative market signals. Financial profits are nothing more than redistributed government credit, backed not by any ‘real profits’ or even production, but information signals that themselves direct production. Marx explicitly outlied how, as a prerequisite for general commodity production, abstract labour and universal exchange, there has to be a universal commodity that crystalises a definite magnitude of labour value. The need to ‘socialise’ production by using the state so as to fulfill ‘social’ interests of any kind, was precisely why Marx said socialism was inevitable, and arising out of capitalist production itself.