By VALERIO ARCARY*
For Marxist currents that excluded the hypothesis of a gradualist transition, which had a more politically evolutionary than economic focus, the theoretical problem remained
“The political advent of a situation of dual power, accompanied by the onset of an economic crisis, does not allow for a gradual resolution. When the unity of the bourgeois state and the reproduction of the capitalist economy are broken, the resulting social shock must quickly and fatally oppose revolution and counter-revolution in a violent convulsion. In such a conflict, capital will always have a mass base, larger than a handful of monopolists (…) Capitalism has not triumphed in any advanced country of the world today (England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan or the United States) without armed conflict or civil war. The economic transition from feudalism to capitalism is, however, the transition from one form of private property to another. Is it imaginable that a much greater historical change implicit in the transition from private to collective property, which requires more drastic measures of expropriation of power and wealth, assumes less harsh political forms (…) To what tradition do these conceptions belong? is, generally speaking, that of Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci.” (Perry Anderson, Theory, Politics and History: A Debate with EP Thompson, p. 215).
The transition from feudalism to capitalism was simultaneously a gradual and slow process, in which pre-capitalist and capitalist social relations coexisted for centuries, and there was a political struggle for power between two propertied classes. But if the bourgeois transition to capitalism was only completed after revolutions and civil wars, why could the socialist transition be more painless?
This peremptory conclusion, irrefutably confirmed in the laboratory of history, is not enough to put an end to the debate on the possibility that elements that anticipate a socialist mode of production may develop in the depths of capitalism. Regarding the gradualist hypotheses of a transition without rupture, the Marxist tradition has been divided over the last century into different opinions.
Perry Anderson's argument is suggestive: if the most important bourgeois transitions, after all a transfer of power from one propertied class to another, required the revolutionary struggle against the resistance of archaic social forces, how can we not foresee convulsions that are just as violent or even more so, in a transition in which the struggle develops against all forms of privilege?
Regarding the historical parallels between the transition from feudalism to capitalism – understood as, simultaneously, a process of social revolution and political revolution – and the post-capitalist transition, there is a thought-provoking text by Paul Singer in which the possibility of a gradualist transition is revisited.
Paulo Singer insists on the importance of trade unionism, cooperativism and social security as elements that anticipate, within capitalism, aspects of socialist economic and social relations: “Examining the cooperative movement as a whole, one gets the impression that, of all the anti-capitalist implants with socialist potential, this one – despite everything – has the greatest potential and is the one most exposed to the contingency of losing its essence in order to adapt to the environment and the demands of competition with capitalist companies. The workers’ cooperative largely fulfills all the conditions for the de-alienation of labor and, therefore, for the realization of socialism in the production plan. It is managed by the workers, labor relations are democratic, and it translates into practice the motto: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (…) Marx recognizes both the workers’ cooperative and the joint-stock company as ‘transitional forms’ from capitalism to socialism. (…) Now, as for the workers’ cooperative, Marx’s vision is revealed to be acute and accurate. In its design, it positively overcomes the contradiction between capital and labor, constituting an element of the socialist mode of production, which develops from the capitalist mode of production.”[I]
This hypothesis shifts the centrality of the concept of revolutionary crisis as the crucial moment of strategy, and moves away from the idea of rupture. It rests on the possibility of an economic gradualism associated with a political gradualism to think about the process of historical transition, thus resuming the inspiration of pre-Marxist socialism.
Marx himself was in his time a keen observer of production cooperatives as an economic phenomenon. sui generis: “The workers’ own cooperative factories are, within the old form, the first rupture with the old form, although they naturally reproduce and must reproduce everywhere, in their actual organization, the ills of the existing system. But within them the contradiction between capital and labor is overcome, even if initially only in the form that the workers, as an association, are their own capitalists, which means that they use the means of production for the valorization of their own labor. They show how, at a given level of development of the material productive forces and their corresponding social forms of production, a new mode of production develops and takes shape out of one mode of production. (…) Capitalist joint-stock enterprises must be considered, just as cooperative factories, as forms of transition from the capitalist to the associated (or socialist) mode of production, only that in one the contradiction is overcome negatively and in the other positively.”[ii]
As can be seen, Karl Marx was aware that cooperatives expressed, in an embryonic way, the possibilities that would be open when socialized forms of production corresponded to socialized forms of appropriation. And, as always, he sought in the present the elements of anticipation of the future.
However, it is necessary to point out that Marx's position regarding cooperatives also evolved several times throughout his life: (i) based on the concrete experiences of cooperatives in the 1850s, as can be inferred from reading The 18th Brumaire, was skeptical about its economic prospects, given its necessarily modest dimensions, and the resulting low profitability, which could, at best, be a trial run to accumulate experience; (ii) in a second moment, in the 1860s, which corresponds to the resolution of the Geneva Congress of the First International, he defends the precursory and educational importance of cooperatives as a socialized form of production and appropriation.
(iii) Already in Criticism of the Gotha program, Marx is severe in relation to cooperatives, probably as a result of a double reflection, (a) the political-revolutionary conclusions he drew from the defeat of the Paris Commune, which led him to once again place emphasis on the need for a program centered on the axis of the dispute for political power, and (b) because he considered it important for the German party to free itself from the elements of Lassaleanism, still very present after the unification that gave rise to the SPD, because he viewed with reservations the demands formulated by “possibilism” and, finally, he must have weighed the balance of the impasse that the cooperative movement in England had reached, frustrating initial hopes.
(iv) Finally, his final position, which seems to be the result of long reflection and several oscillations, would be the famous passage from Book III of The capital (which we transcribed above) in which he returns to a hopeful position, and develops the hypothesis that cooperatives could be an element of anticipation of the process and forms of socialization of property.
However, 150 years later, even though there are successful experiences in the cooperative movement (although, in general, credit cooperatives are more perennial and stable than production cooperatives) and also willingly admitting the pedagogical role of the new relations of class solidarity that they stimulate, it seems at least a little exaggerated, in an era of corporations that have revenues greater than GDP, to consider them a phenomenon, in the strictly economic sense, important enough to somehow counterbalance the role of monopolies and cartels.
Public funds, particularly pension funds, which attract the attention of a very influential section of socialist economic opinion, have undoubtedly played a central role in post-war social pacts. But to consider them an element of socialism within capitalist social relations requires a huge theoretical effort of imagination: or can we forget that the reserves of these funds, which accumulated deposits made over decades by older generations, were plundered by the state for the most varied and obscure purposes?[iii]
Regarding this new historical-theoretical claim for public funds based on the category of anti-value, it is worth checking out Chico de Oliveira's elaboration: “The path taken by the capitalist system, and particularly the transformations operated by the welfare state, raises the old question of the limits of the system. Marx's famous prediction of the end of the system was read literally, and commonly interpreted as a catastrophe in the style of Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. Now, the history of capitalist development has shown, with special emphasis after the welfare state, that the limits of the capitalist system can only be found in the negation of its real categories, capital and labor power (…) The public fund, in short, is anti-value, less in the sense that the system no longer produces value, and more in the sense that the assumptions of the reproduction of value contain, within themselves, the most fundamental elements of its negation. After all, what is glimpsed with the emergence of anti-value is the capacity to move on to another phase, in which the production of value, or its substitute, the production of social surplus, takes on new forms. And these new forms, to recall the classical assertion, appear not as deviations from the capitalist system, but as a necessity of its internal logic of expansion.”
As long as these resources from the Public Fund continue to be controlled by bourgeois governments, long before they become a mechanism for income redistribution, they will always be a reserve that the State can use to guarantee the economic policy objectives of governments that respond to the interests of capital. Let us not forget the freezing of pensions and retirement benefits and the introduction of new taxes, such as the contribution discount for retirees, which mean the decapitalization of social security and an important part of the fiscal adjustments that guarantee the rollover of public debts: this process did not occur only in Brazil; on the contrary, it is part of an international dynamic.
However, it is also true that one of the most important agendas of the neoliberal counteroffensive has been, in the last forty years after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to reduce state contributions to the funds, as a way of rebalancing budgets and, at the same time, increasing tax exemptions for capital, without running the risk of a return to the inflationary pressures of Europe in the 1970s, which would threaten the convertibility of currencies (the fundamentalist dogma that protects capital from devaluation) in free float, since the unpegging of the dollar to gold by Richard Nixon.
Would the thesis of gradualist transition be revisionist? Yes. But revisionism (as well as the qualification of orthodox, for inverse reasons) lends itself to confusion and requires some clarification. It has acquired a pejorative connotation, in a way. Due to the victory of October, it has often been associated with reformism and opportunism. But there have been and there are different types of revisionism.
Any theoretical-political current that has not been sterilized undergoes a permanent process of revisionism, and in this sense, all Marxist thinkers have been revisionists, at least to some extent. Because by revisionism, one should not strictly understand anything other than a process of revision of previously established ideas. The meaning or substance of the revision is something that can only be analyzed in each specific case. In this sense, Marx himself was therefore a permanent revisionist of his work. And it could not have been otherwise, unless he categorically refused to reevaluate the changes that were occurring in the reality that surrounded him, and refused to readjust his ideas to these transformations.
An interpretation of Marx's work that ignores the fact that it is a thought under construction would, of course, be nonsense. On the other hand, it is worth noting that revisionism is not the same as reformism, and reformism in turn is not the same as opportunism. Reformism is a political doctrine and opportunism is political behavior.
But for the Marxist currents that ruled out the hypothesis of a gradualist transition at the beginning of the century, and for all those in the Second International who opposed the so-called German revisionism grouped around Eduard Bernstein, who had a more politically evolutionary than economic approach, the theoretical problem remained. How to resolve the question of transition? The theoretical answer that was offered to this apparent dead end was the definition of the socialist revolution as the first social revolution that presupposes a level of consciousness, adherence and organization around a strategic project prior to the open struggle for power that would be unique in history.
* Valerio Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc]
Notes
[I] SINGER, Paul. A militant utopia: rethinking socialism. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1998. p.128-9.
[ii] MARX, Carl. The capital. Third book, p. 481, apud SINGER, Paul. A militant utopia: rethinking socialism. Petropolis, Voices, 1998.
[iii] OLIVEIRA, Francisco de. The rights of anti-value. Petropolis, Voices, 1998. p. 34-5.
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