500 hundred jobs to go at First Active...

and 290 on the buses....here's a flyer for comrades in ireland to distribute....

Redundancy is a shocking experience.
It disrupts your plans and hopes for your future.
Your company is also conveying a message: We do not care about you
– profit is all that counts. Of course, they don’t put it as bluntly as this.
Your CEO or manager will probably appear on the media and
talk about how sad they are but it had to be done for ‘competitiveness’.
But they mean: workers are worth nothing, profit is all that counts.
Our society is experiencing a 1930s style crash and we can no longer accept this.
This is the 21st century and all of us have a Right to Work.
It is time to assert that people and our lives are more important
than a company’s ‘bottom line’
If you are facing redundancy,
socialists advise you to take the following steps:
❶ Call a meeting of your workmates to discuss the
situation.
Elect people to represent you, either by endorsing your existing
shop stewards or electing new representatives. Make sure that the
meeting is conducted properly by asking people to vote for what they
want.
❷ The first thing you need to decide is whether you want to
oppose the redundancies or accept voluntary redundancies.
Your union officials will almost invariably urge you to accept
voluntary redundancies. Socialists, however, urge you to
consider resistance: There is very little work out there and you need a
wage packet now.
❸ Do some research on your company. Find out the following items:
■ Are they making a profit? If they are suffering a temporary loss,
what sort of profits did they make in recent years? How much do they
pay their CEO?
■ How much did your company get in state grants? Have they been
paying proper taxes in this country?
■ Are they re-locating or closing down in order to benefit from
cheap labour? Or are they trying to intensify work for the remaining
staff.
❹ Organise an occupation of your workplace to resist
redundancy. It is the only message that profit
addicts understand. Remember: You
have two great levers that help you.
■ First, the company will want to get hold of the machines, office
space or factory space to sell off or use elsewhere. You should use
these as a bargaining lever to secure concessions.
■ Second, as the government has been bailing out banks, the obvious
question is: why can’t they bail out redundant workers?
❺ You should use the occupation as a base to
launch a major campaign to demand that the government protect
your right to work. Tell them to recover any grants
given to a company that has treated its workers like disposable products
and to use that money to fund alternative employment.
Demand that the government either get you all places on
community employment schemes on Pay Related Benefit or that they take
the company into public ownership to guarantee jobs.
❻ Resistance will bring you some results – acceptance
will give you nothing. Some might argue that this is very ‘radical’. But
we are living in changed times. When a US President like
Barack Obama promises that the US state will help fund the creation of
3 million jobs, you know ‘the times they are a changing’.
We need real, radical change here and that will come through
‘people power’ – not taskforces, committees and crocodile tears.

If you want any further advice on resisting redundancies or want
support for your actions, you can contact the industrial desk
of the Socialist Workers Party on 01 8722682 or simply
text - REDUNDANCY to 086 3074060
and we will ring you back.

Socialist Worker
www.swp.ie

more of the same?

(pic barack obama with 'warlords' in afghanistan)
so i see obama has begun to announce his foreign policy objectives and has been in discussions with general patraeus with regard to shifting focus from iraq to afghanistan (although he still intends to leave at least 30,000 troops in iraq). the obama administration is trying to sell the idea of a 'dream ticket' government in afghanistan to replace the karzai clique. let's have a look at one of the wonderful characters destined to replace karzai and who is being placed in line to rule the afghan people and assist in the furtherance of the United States' shift in policy towards tackling militants in afghanistan and pakistan (a shift which already has the hindu chauvanists in india screaming that they always knew pakistan was the problem).

Gul Agha Sherzai

"A veteran of the wars against the Soviets, Mr Sherzai (whose name means "son of a lion") is a former governor of Kandahar criticised for human rights abuses. He escaped assassination in 2006."

this man is responsible for bloody crimes that makes ridiculous the claim from the obama gang that he could be part of any 'dream ticket'. from 1992 to 94 he was governer of kandahar and was regarded as particularly vicious even by afghan warlord standards. he was known to have been heavily involved in drug dealing, murder, bribery and corruption. in 2001 with the assistance of U.S military planes he retook kandahar from the taliban as part of the U.S. war.

he was appointed governer of nangarhar province in 2004 and again recieved criticism for his warlord like behaviour and his known involvment with the drugs trade.

these are obama's allies in the war on terror? the people of afghanistan have suffered enough, decades of war, against the british empire, the soviet empire, and now, the U.S. empire. 1445 afghan civilians were killed in 2008 alone.this is the 'noble' war that our rulers like to contrast to the occupation of iraq. every year has seen similar death rates for civilians since the 23,000 deaths in the initial invasion in 2001-2003.

they have a saying amongst the poor in afghanistan, 'afghanistan zulumistan' which translates as- 'afghanistan land of tyrants'. it seems that obama is determined to inflict more tyrants on the people of that region, to continue the policy of spreading the 'war on terror' into pakistan and to fuel ,by these actions, recruitment to groups like the taliban.

his 'dream' ticket for the afghan people is just another extension of their long long nightmare.

obama...

obama....

So the cheering smiling crowds go wild, the poor of America have found, they believe, a new champion and the Rich smile and rub their grubby hands because the State is in the hands of someone the masses really believe in...all the better to convince them of the nesessity of massive cuts in all social provisions in order to save the bankers and the continuance of the war in Afghanistan, for which, Obama has already requested more troops.

We live in a society where the economy of certain corporations is larger than the income of many small countries and yet within each of these giant corporate economies we have absolutely no democratic voice, every company is a hierarchy, the boss or shareholders at the top, middle management and then the foot soldiers, the pawns who do all the labour but have no say in the distribution of the products of their labour. No change in the personell of the State can shake this despotism ruling in the economy. The only choice you get is between which members of the ruling class you think should oppress you for the next four years. Of course the state has some 'autonomy' and can sometimes come into conflict with the ruling class as a whole but in essence the state, as a state of that class, as a system of armed men, judges and laws for the managing of the working class, can only ever really do one of 3 things- it can retard economic development, it can promote economic development, or it can do nothing...but the State can never challenge the prevailing economic order as it is a product of the irreconcilable class conflict engendered by that very same economic order.
Even when, in rare circumstances, the State comes into the possession of a group of reformers dedicated to change, then as we have seen time and time again, the state purifies itself of this 'abberation' i.e. the judges and the generals and the police force overthrow those who have 'infected' the capitalist's state with thier ideas of change. We saw this clearly in Chile in 73 when the socialist Salvador Allende put his faith in the state, the weapon of the ruling classes, to change things in favour of the working classes.He paid not only with his own life, but with the lives of thousands of workers massacred by Thatcher's good friend, General Pinochet.

So why cant real change ever come through Obama? Because the tyranny in the economy remains untouched. Although Obama represents a positive shift in American politics he will never deliver on the hopes and aspirations of the millions who voted him in. The New Deal of the 30's he's so fond of referencing ever did tackle the economic problems of that time, the Crash of the 1930's melted into the mobilisation for the World War.
No mainstream politician ever can. Only a movement that begins in the working class communities and on the streets, that develops it's own local and workplace based organs of democracy,which take over sphere by sphere the activites of working life,only this kind of movement can bring to life true democracy and liberate us from banking collapses and war.

james

essay on the dialectic

D is for Dialectic....
By james o’toole

”When he directs his keenest arrows against our dialectic system, he is really attacking the specific mode of thought employed by the conscious proletariat in its struggle for liberation. It is an attempt to break the sword that has helped the proletariat to pierce the darkness of its future. It is an attempt to shatter the intellectual arm with the aid of which the proletariat, though materially under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, is yet enabled to triumph over the bourgeoisie. For it is our dialectical system that shows to the working class the transitory nature of this yoke, proving to workers the inevitability of their victory and is already realising a revolution in the domain of thought.”

Rosa Luxembourg on Bernstien

In the above quote Rosa Luxembourg defends the Marxist use of ’dialectics’ against attack by the revisionism of the reformist Bernstien of the German SPD in the early 1900’s. Throughout the history of Marxism as a movement and body of thought there have been attempts to ’remove’ the dialectic from marxism, to label it as an influence of the Idealist German philosopher,Hegel, or to label Marx’s use of dialectic terms in the writing of his major work ,’Capital’, as ’flirtation’ with Hegelian phrases for the purposes of poetical flourish. Right up to the present there are those who insist that the dialectic is not integral to Marx’s method. This is just not true, the dialectic is central to marxist theory and practice.

There have been many ’dialectic’ logics throughout history. In classical philosophy the term ’dialectic’ meant a form of argument based on the presentation of a particular ’thesis’ to which is then contrasted a counter-argument or ’counter-thesis’ and finally there results a ’synthesis’ which may contain elements of truth from both sides of the dialogue. Different versions of dialectic logic developed through the ages from Plato down through the Middle Ages finally obtaining it’s fullest expression in the systems of the German Idealist philosophers of the early 19th Century, especially in the works of G.F.Hegel.

”Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are
conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.”

Here Engel’s clearly defines the huge difference between static and dialectic views of how change occurs, how seemingly opposed entities ’inter-penetrate’.

Hegel’s ’Notion’....

Hegel lived through the period of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and was witness to the epic Rise and Fall of that entire historical movement. This period of economic and political, and thus philosophical, turmoil gave an enormous stimulus to thought. Germany at the time of Hegel’s birth was not a nation state, it existed as hundreds of small kingdoms, imperial free cities and petty principalities under the Hapsburg Crown. Despite being ’backward’ in comparison with French, and especially, English economic development, there was the emergence of capitalist forms of enterprise. Saxony, for example, had a mining industry which pre- dated the Reformation and various towns were engaged in iron founding, engineering etc. But the Bourgeois or Capitalist ’middle’ class were weak
economically and dependent politically.

There was another sort of ’middle’ class who were more forthright in their demands - there were 37 universities in the Holy Roman Empire, 3 in Saxony alone, and in every petty court a series of clerks, lawyers, intellectuals and artists. It was this layer that created a
period of boom for intellectual debate.These lawyers, lecturers and artists were capable of seeing in the French Revolution the ’master theme’ of the epoch but their own protests
never successfully extended beyond the realm of thought.

Hegel’s Dialectic emerged from German Idealism’s attempts to solve problems inherited from Kant and this period of immense upheaval and change. Social institutions, such as the French Monarchy, collapsed only to be replaced by other institutions which themselves fell in quick succession, things seemed to melt into their opposites. Napoleon marched across the continent uprooting feudalism and instituting the ’code napoleon’. It seemed as if the old world had been ’stood on it’s head’.

Hegel’s ’Phenomenology of mind’ ....

The ’phenomenology of mind’ was completed in 1806 in the town of Jena, which had been a centre of the ’storm and stress’ movement in art and literature. Napoleon was engaged in battle with Prussian troops on the plateau outside the town as Hegel was finishing the manuscript. This work takes us on a journey from the most basic forms of consciousness, such as sense- certainty (a form of consciousness which only grasps that which is directly given), and demonstrates how these consciounesses are self contradictory and necessarily move through contradiction to ever more complex relations of consciousness to itself, the subject, and to the object.
The ’phenomenology’ is famous for it’s Introduction where Hegel relates the need for a ’ladder to science’, that the whole of the ’phenomenology’ was a critique of various forms of thinking about the world which inexorably progress through their failings toward the need for dialectical thinking as the highest form of understanding. Hegel referred to the dialectic method as ’the Notion’.

”The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we
might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the
fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s
existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom.
These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being
incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent
nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not
merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the
other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby
the life of the whole.”

Here some important aspects of Hegel’s thought emerge, different philosophical systems and scientific positions are understood not in terms of some ’objective’ incorrectness but as ’true’ in a relative sense, as different ’moments’ of an organic ’totality’ or whole in a constant process of transformation. They are analysed in terms of their origin, development,
inter-relationships (to other parts and the whole) and their cessation. Everything is in a process of coming to be and ceasing to be. The whole cannot be reduced to any of it’s constituent elements, and the whole is more than just the sum of the constituent parts. The whole and the parts form a ’unity of opposites’.

They call it ’Master and Servant’

One of the most famous sections of the ’phenomenology’ is Hegel’s description of the ’master slave’ dialectic. Hegel begins with two subjects struggling for ’recognition’, this battle for recognition leads to a ’life or death’ struggle, after which, one consciousness is Master and one is Slave. The Master is the dominant consciouness whose whole existence is ’being-for-self’, while the Slave is ’being-for-another’. The Slave exists only to fulfill the Master’s desires. The Lord can only achieve the ’negation’ of things, that is, he only consumes, whereas, the Slave works on the world to produce the things the Master needs.
So the Slave affirms himself as capable of altering the world.

”work… is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing”

In fashioning things the Slave gains an awareness of the fact that he exists in his own right and in his work, where before, he only had an alienated existense, he acquires a mind of his own. The situation first found ourselves in is reversed. The Master now only exists through
another, through the labour of the Slave, whereas, the Slave has now achieved power over the objective world though his labour, has gained a ’mind of his own’. It’s important to note that the change or advance in consciousness goes through the mind of the Slave and not the Master. It’s also worth noting that for Hegel all that changes is the consciousness of the Slave. Hegel’s dialectic starts with the Slave’s consciousness, posits the world of labour and then returns to a transformed consciousness leaving reality unchanged. For Marx we
start with material reality, consciouness attempts to understand that reality and then, finally, we transform reality.

Hegel’s ’Science of Logic’....

Hegel begins his Science of Logic with the most basic and fundamental of all concepts, that of ’being’. Every thing ’is’, that is everything has ’being’. Every determinate thing has this property, it has ’being’. But Hegel asks what is ’being’ itself? What is ’being’ as opposed to
every determinate thing? The table has ’being’ in that it exists, the cup has ’being’, but neither of these particular things is ’being’ itself. It seems that ’being’ itself is ’nothing’. We see that the attempt to grasp ’being’ leads to it’s opposite, ’nothing’. But ’nothing’ has at least the property of being defined.We can describe ’nothing’ as the lack of determinate particular ’being’. We end up in a situation were the attempt to grasp one melts into it’s
opposite before once more returning to itself. Hegel’s solution is the category of ’becoming’, he captures the ’movement’ between both poles in a higher category which captures the existence and dissolution of both previous categories, that captures their ’coming to be’ and ’ceasing to be’. That captures their self movement.....

This may seem like pointless philosophising but has it’s uses as the processes of actual life move in a dialectic manner as opposed to the cause and effect mechanical schemas of most science and philosophies. Lenin remarks upon reading this part of the Logic ’ shrewd and clever! Hegel analyses concepts that usually appear dead and shows movement in them’.

It’s always important to keep in mind that for Hegel the movement of concepts governs the movement of the real world, this suited a german middle class who never practically achieved their ’bourgeois’ revolution, as opposed to the French who achieved a Revolution in reality. But in a way the enthusiastic declaration of the power of human thought to shape the world was progressive in relation to the eternal order of the feudal world with its never
changing orders of bishops, priests, princes and kings. Marx himself in his ’theses on feuerbach’ pointed out that although materialism had investigated the objective world, it never grasped the objective world ’subjectively’, in terms of human pratice.This side was developed by idealism. Unfortunately the only practice Hegel knew was the labour of philosophy but in Marx we find a materialism that acknowledges nature and the objective world as the basis of all human thought and action but is a ’dialectic’ materialism, a materialism that understands objective history as the product of the labour of a human subject.But Engels here captures the positive side of Hegel’s thought-

”In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the
first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented
as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation,
development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that
makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point
of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless
deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature
philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as
the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect
to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and
to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental
phenomena.”

’The sword of the proletariat’....

Marx once wrote that he wanted to write ’3 sheets’ that would explain the materialist application of the Dialectic. He never did, but the dialectic method was central to all of Marx’s works, and the works of all the major Marxists to follow. To quote Trotsky, Marxism without the Dialectic is ’a clock without a spring’. Marx completely transformed the categories of the dialectic in relation to Hegel, in Marx the dialectic becomes ,not the self-development of the ’Idea’ captured in categories that develop through their own inherent contradictions into one another, but, a dialectic of real material change, a
dialectic drawn from the actual contradictions of the objective life process of humanity, from the actual material of history.

The world had changed since Hegel’s death in 1831, the working class, who had formed a wing of the capitalist class in the French Revolution, were beginning to make their own demands. There had been a worker’s uprising in Lyons in 1834. The working class was stirring,in Britain and across the Continent, and beginning to make demands that pointed beyond the limits of the bourgeois system. Marx began his work as a journalist and activist on the left of the democratic movement, but in the course of his investigations and in the face of severe censorship, he undertook anew a study of French politics, British economics and a critique of German Idealist philosophy.

For Marx capitalist society forms a ’totality’, an organic whole in a constant process of change where ’all that is solid melts into air’, but a totality torn by contradictions.

”In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of thier will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of the material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society…on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciouness…at a certain stage of development , the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or- this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms- with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their
fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution”

It’s a natural law that we must labour on nature to provide ourselves with food, shelter and clothing and that in the ’social production’ of life we enter into certain ’relations’ with one another. These ’relations of production’ give rise to certain forms of thought which correspond to certain roles in the productive process.

Social consciouness is determined by social being. The ’contradiction’ at the heart of this totality between ’forces of production’ (tools, technology and the labour force) and ’relations of production’ which gives rise to an era of conflict, of potential revolution, is no automatic process, this is a conflict that can result in the reconstitution of the society at large or in the ’common ruin’ of the classes in conflict. The battle engendered by the fact of social production and private appropriation of profit, the war ,sometimes hidden sometimes open, between the classes has to be fought out, everything can be lost, or won. And we must emphasise that Marx never adhered to a ’refection’ view of knowledge,he never stated that knowledge was just the automatic reflex of the social process. As Engels often pointed out, the economy creates no body of ideas ’a novo’,from scratch. But as the italian marxist, Antonio Labriola, pointed out , nothing comes to us in a dream and ideas dont fall from heaven either. This shows how , in Marx, the dialectic is no dead formalism, has no relation to determinism nor is it in any way idealist.The two ’poles’ of any dialectic contradiction, it has to be remembered, should never be seen as external forces acting upon one another like billiard balls, it’s important to see each part as grounded in the substance of the whole. Franz Jakubowski gives a good description of the dialectic of consciousness and being-

”Consciousness no longer stands outside being and is no longer seperated from it’s object.conciousness is determined by the transformations of being; but, as the consciousness of acting men, it in turn transforms this being. Consciousness is no longer consciousness above an object, the duplicated ’reflection’ of an object, but a constituent part of changing relations, which are what they are only in conjunction with the consciousness that corresponds to material existence. Consciousness is the self-knowledge of reality..”

Social consciousness and social being are distinct but also form a unity, which cant be reduced one to the other, although the economic basis takes precedence, new ideas and the transformation of old ideas is a complex organic process which is ’mediated’ e.g. even legal terms, which Marx viewed as a direct expression of economic and property relations, because they have to remain logically consistent, cant be a mere reflection of a
contradictory reality.

As the division of labour becomes more and more complex and people are appointed, more and more, to limited tasks the view of the ’whole’ is lost. This loss of a view of the whole as an organic social process is made worse by the dominance of the market (see article ’c is for commodity fetishism’). As each seperate sphere develops it’s own body of thought, these
bodies of thought tend towards internal coherence, they develop their own ’laws’. Ultimately they have their basis in economic development but they are more and more ’mediated’.

Quantity and Quality

Suppose you add one degree of heat to water, nothing at all happens. Add another degree and another, still nothing. It seems that these small ’quantitative’ changes in temperature have no overall effect. Eventually we reach 99 degrees and the addition of one more quantity or degree of heat leads to a transformation, a qualitative shift. The water has changed ’form’ it has become steam. The transformation of quantity into quality is an important aspect of dialectic analysis as it demonstrates how a political or economic
’leap’ can develop unseen beneath the surface and then suddenly a new formation emerges or suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of a crisis. It’s vital we grasp and understand how development proceeds ’gradually’ and in ’leaps’.We revolutionary party has to understand these developments, has to prepare for the ’leap’.

Marx also notes how the qualitative is transformed into the quantitative in a commodity economy, the concrete or particular labour of each individual commodity producer only realises it’s ’social’ aspect by becoming ’abstract’ labour, that is, labour that can be equalised on the market, through money, with any other product of labour, and thus, through the products of labour, with all other forms of particular or concrete labour. The
’quantity’ of exchange-value is indifferent to the concrete labour, to the ’quality’, to the particular labour i.e. whether you make shoes or cars they all become equalised in exchange, as commodities, through money with all other forms of labour. The material-technical content (concrete labour which produces use-values i.e, useful objects) takes on a social form (abstract labour which determines exchange value). The qualitative becomes quantitative.

Negation of the negation

In Hegel the ’negation of the negation’ was a means of asserting the rule of thought over the objective world. For Hegel the ’real’ world was the world of alienation, that any objectification (to make an object) was to alienate oneself. Hegel never saw alienation in terms of a specific mode of production under which the labour of one class in appropriated by another, where the rule of things grows in proportion to their labour. Hegel starts with, for example, a form of consciousness about the world ,say religion, then ’negates’ that in the name of objective reality (which he sees as alienation) and then restores the realm of thought by ’negating the negation’.Thereby leaving religion intact. The whole movement starts with the ideal and ends with the ideal, the real world is nothing but an alienated realm and thought just has to realise this ’other’ as it’s own creation.

Marx completely transformed ’the negation of the negation’ in his application of the Dialectic. In Hegel this ’law’ of the dialectic justifies what exists- the state, christianity etc. Marx and Engels start with real social contradictions, they dont force a preconcieved logic onto any given situation but from any given situation they work out the actual conflicts that are ’going on under our noses’.

”The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach a point where they become incompatible with thier capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated'

Conclusion

Attempts to remove the dialectic method from marxism are attempts to disarm the working class intellectually, the dialectic is the method that finds movement in all things, to the dialectic thinker capitalism is just one passing stage in the development of mankind. It realises in thought what the working class according to it’s nature must realise in practice- the dissolution of class rule. The marxist dialectic is not just a scientific method it is also an ’art’ and must be ’practiced’, it must develop in a tight relationship with an actual working
class movement. As Marxism is the theoretical expression of working class activity it is both educating and educated by the working class. We are living right now in a period of great change and great danger, institutions falling, war on the increase, rising racism and a threat to the natural world upon which our whole existence depends, but also, a period of resistance, of questioning and hope. More than ever we have to prove the ’this sided-ness’ of our thinking, to put our ideas to the test. Social theories which rupture the unity of the living process of society suffer from a lack of engagement with a living breathing working class movement which posits itself as the subject and the object of the historical process, this lack of involvement leads to determinism and fatalism or idealism and mysticism (or systems which eclectically contain elements of both). To quote Trotsky in response to members of the U.S left who dismissed the dialectic-.... ”The struggle against materialist dialectics… expresses a distant past conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, the self-conceit of university routinists and . . . a spark of hope for an afterlife.”....

The Dialectic is, as Rosa Luxembourg pointed out, the ’sword of the proletariat’ and all those who stand for the ’disarming’ of the working class have to be challenged. For the dialectic materialist nothing is inevitable, imperialism may be a historic necessity but so is the opposition it engenders in the oppressed nations. Capitalist exploitation, in the form of neo-liberalism, is another historic necessity but so is it’s overthrow. Society is in a state of constant war. Necessity confronts necessity. And the matter must, and will, be settled by force.

essay on commodity fetishism by james

THE THEORY OF COMMODITY FETISHISM

by JAMES O'TOOLE

1.Importance of the theory

"..an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre (Land) do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things" (1)

One of the things that always struck me as being one of the most powerful arguments against Capitalism was the idea that human working activity was regulated through and by 'things', that 'Capital', the product of a productive relationship between people, could also be the producer of working relations between people, the idea that 'Value' was not only the product of human labour and particular productive relations but, in a Commodity society, is the regulator of Labour. Just stop and think about that for a second…just think about how obscene that is. The rule of 'things' over people.

Marx's theory of Commodity Fetishism is central to a complete understanding of much of his economic theory and represents a concrete expression and further development of his theory of Alienation.

We can see that the theory that "a definite social relation between men.." takes on "the fantastic form of a relation between things" not only is of utmost importance in unravelling the secrets of economic categories such as 'value' and 'capital' and demonstrating that these 'things' veil and bear productive relations amongst people but also is an important generalisation which is key to an understanding of consciousness under Capitalism.

2.Basis of Commodity Fetishism

'Every child knows', stated Marx in a letter, that a society that ceased to work would, in a very short period, starve to death, and so the fundamental basis of every society is this 'natural law'. So in any given type of society there must be a division of labour i.e. people appointed to different tasks based on his necessity of labouring on nature as a basis. In a commodity society where no overall plan exists and where the unity of society and the productive process is only established through exchange people are appointed to differing tasks according.not to need, but according to the profitability of each task. Obviously the product of each sphere must satisfy a particular need (that is have a use value) but what's important in this society is it's exchange value, the ability to exchange this commodity for any other or for a commodity that acts as a general equivalent (money).

A change in productive technique in a certain sector, an improvement of machinery. Leads to a change in the value of the product as less of society's total labour is expended on each unit.

This change in value leads to a drop in prices . We see that the fall and rise of value in different spheres on production would then lead, due to the profitability or non- profitability of a sphere of production to the transfer of workers. The 'thing' value . a product of human working activity, becomes a social regulator, it moves workers from one area to another.

"because of the atomistic structure of the commodity society, because of the absense of direct social regulation of the working activity of the members of society, the connections between, individual, autonomous,private firms are realised and maintained through commodities, things" (2)

In a Commodity society, like Capitalism, where there is no overall plan for production the connections between seperate commodity owners are only established through exchange. When Capitalist 'A' exchanges with Capitalist 'B' he not only enters into a direct relation with 'B' but also enters into indirect relations with all other members of society (with all manufacturers of the same product, with buyers of the product etc). The individual must take the market into account before he begins production ('is it profitable to produce a certain product?' and 'how much?' etc) and when he takes his product to market he is connected to all other producers of the same product ,for example, if there is an improvement in productive technique by one manufacturer of the same product ,which means the lowering of the value of the product, then he must introduce improved techniques (or sell his product below cost which would be suicide). We can see that a close connection is brought about only through exchange, through things.

Ownership of the thing 'Capital', itself the product of a relationship between capitalists and workers (a relationship established through ownership of the things 'labour-power' and 'capital' and realised by the exchange of a sum of value i.e. through a 'thing') directs it's onwer to set up particular set working relationships with other people. The capitalist must combine the elements of production which belong to 3 different classes under capitalism into one enterprise (Land, Labour-Power and Means of Production(factories,offices etc) belong to the Landlord,Worker and Capitalist). So we can see the Ownership of the thing 'Capital', not only is established by but ,establishes working relations between people.

This is the true horror of the Capitalist system, human labour is congealed in things which then come to rule over human labour.Fetishism then isnt just an aspect of social consciouness of thought under capitalsim i.e. it's not just an illusion or a habit that can be shaken off, commodity fetishism is the product of social being. It doesnt just 'seem' that human productive relations are realised through things or productive relations are 'hidden' under things. Human working relations in a commodity market society can only be realised through things, the things are the bearers of the relationship,but not only that, the things come to determine these relationships.

The Capitalist enters into a relationship with the Landlord through an act of purchase, he enters into a relationship with the worker through an act of purchase.The exploitation of the worker 'dissappears' under a seemingly fair exchange of one thing for another (variable capital, i.e.wages, for labour power). The exchange takes place between formally equal commodity producers and thus disguises class etc.

The owership of a 'thing' dictates how you enter into the productive process.Once 'things' posess a given social form they influence people shaping decisions and motivations. The capitalist 'glows' with the reflected glory of his capital because it reflects a given productive relationship amongst people which is realised in a thing. The capitalist is 'subsumed' (he is covered or integrated) under the thing 'capital'. It is no longer his human traits that matter, in the process of the production of commodities and human life he acts as the representative of capital.

Vulgar Economics (as Marx termed the economics of the bourgeois thinkers) sees Money, Capital, Value etc as attribute of things ,that is, from their purely material existance. Whereas Marx saw that these things had both a material content (a physical body) but also a social form (depending on which relations between people they realise). In Dialectics (a from of logic used by Marx and developed from the philospher Hegel) a particular thing should not only be examined as an isolated atom but we need to show it's relationship to the 'whole' and see it as a process in constant interaction with both the whole and the other parts. It's important to emphasise the difference between Marx's method and both Empiricist and Idealist methods. Marx took the material-technical process of production into account as the basis of his anaysis but it's important to remember that although you have to have use-value (the property of a thing to satisfy a need) before you can have exchange value that you cant reduce exchange value to use value. Exchange value represents a paticular productive relationship between people. And is not the attribute of the 'thing'.

For example, if you look at Money from the point of view of it's material existance you can examine the paper, you can point to the differences between coin and paper money but as soon as you turn to how money functions in society and the different relationships it bears and establishes then you get quite lost. But money is not just a symbol either because money is the bearer of certain social relationships. Money can serve various differing functions without any alteration of it's physical body. Money can serve as a Means of Payment , a Medium of Circulation or as a Hoard, each of these differing functions representing a different productive relationship.

Vulgar economy tries to find in the material existance of a thing it's social form and ends up assigning social properties to things.They believe Capital is a thing that has the property to produce Profit, Labour's return is Wages and Land produces Rent. Marx sarcastically called this the 'Holy Trinity'.As i quoted above this is the magical mystical world where Mister Capital and Mistress Land walk about as social characters and at the same time as mere things! This is no accident as this consciouness, assigning things social traits and the objectification of relations between people, is itself a product of commodity fetishism!

As we've already seen - Money, for example, isnt just a 'symbol' of productive relations nor can it be reduced to it's material existance. In the exchange of commodities money acts as a medium of exchange, it enables the transfer of goods. Paper money can enable this transfer of goods just a easily, in fact money's social function is indifferent to it's material existence.What matters is the productive relations amongst people it bears and, because profits for example are taken into account before production begins etc, establishes.

"The value of the worker rises or falls in accordance with supply and demand,and even in the physical sense his existence, his life,was and is treated as a supply of a commodity, like any other….as soon as it occurs to capital…not to exist any longer for the worker, he no longer exists for himself; he has no work, and hence no wages, and since he exists not as a man but as a worker, he might as well have himself buried, starve to death.." (3)

The system of class and human relations becomes a world of relations through things. If the bearer of the 'thing' labour-power cant enter into a relation with the owner of the thing 'capital' then he starves. Society functions as a whole only through exchange and we live under the blind tyranny of things.

3. Breaking Free

"there is both an objective and subjective side to this phenomena. Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the market).The laws governing these objects… confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power…Subjectively…a man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity..just like any other consumer article" (4)

So how do we break out of this world of things and end the domination by 'dead labour' of 'living labour' and free ourselves from the rule of the market? The Objective rule of Commodity Fetishism and the Alienation from one's self and others?

Well in a world based on the sale of commodities one of those commodites (labour-power) has the unfortunate (for the capitalists) attribute of also being a human, a worker. According to the laws of the market the Capitalist is within his right as the purchaser of labour-power to try to squeeze as much from it as he can but the 'thing' labour-power is a worker's activity and he accompanies it wherever he goes, in work he argues day in and day out for a better deal for the sale of his labour.

"there is an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges .Between equal rights force decides." (5)

The very heart of the system belongs to a contradiction which constantly tears at the grip of commodity fetishism, Once the truth of the commodity 'Labour' is revealed it becomes possible to understand that human relations, and relations of class exploitation, are the truth of economic categories. But the smashing of the rule of 'things' is no shaking off of 'phantoms' Capital is a physical force and the rule of Capital and it's representatives can only come to an end through the revolutionary overthrow of the entire system.

notes-

(1)Marx Capital III p.830

(2)Rubin Essays on Marx's theory of value p.8

(3)Marx Economic Philosophical manuscript 1844 in Early Writings p.335

(4)Luckacs history and class consciousness p.87

(5)Marx Capital Vol I quoted in Luckacs ibid p.178