The Theories of Collapse and Organized Capitalism in the
Debates of “Historical Extremism”
GiacomoMarramao
Table of
Contents
Introduction
1.
Capitalism
and Crisis in the Debate on Organization: between
Lenin and Kautsky.
2.
The
Vicissitudes of the “Theory of Collapse” and the Genesis of “Linksradikalismus”.
3.
Imperialist
Crisis and the “Imminence of Revolution”: the Leninist
Phase of “Linksradikalismus”.
4.
The
“Two Souls” of Linkskommunismus.
5.
The
Theoretical Phase of Left Communism and the New Framework for the Question of Crisis.
6.
Grossmann’s
Dynamic Model and the Common Matrix of Plan-ism
and Collapse-ism. From “Generalized Imperialist Crisis” to “State Capitalism”.
Introduction
The
constantly recurring refrain “Collapse or Revolution” in the various phases of
the development of Marxism is today rightly considered as a fact established by
the recent historiography of the workers movement. What has not yet received
the attention it deserves, however, is how, in the periodic re-articulation of
their diverse theoretical expressions, the two terms of this alternative were
taken up by various political positions, often combining under a common
denominator heterogeneous and occasionally opposed currents or political
positions. Hence our conviction concerning the disorienting character—for a
correct historical understanding of the crucial moments of the western workers
movement and, consequently, for a theoretical rehabilitation of socialist
strategy in the countries of highly-developed capitalism—of the interpretive
schema which reduces this picture to the clash of social democracy and Leninism
and, more generally as well as within each of the two “domains”, to a
reproduction as sterile as it is mythological of the split between the
reformist spirit and the revolutionary spirit.
An obvious example
of the fruitlessness of such a schema is paradoxically provided by the trajectory
of that “left radicalism” which, having arisen at the beginning of the century
within the European socialist parties (especially the German and Dutch social
democracies), later gave way in the course of its development to an array of
complex and disparate positions. What interests us here, however, is not so
much to emphasize the historiographical implausibility of those studies that
persist in dealing with the phenomenon of Linksradikalismus under the generic
aegis of “extremism” (which is true of its defenders as often as of its
opponents, as is proven by the continuing failure to distinguish, even in the
most recent research in this field, between “Left Communism” or Linkskommunismus
and Council Communism or Rätekommunismus, a truly serious defect); we are more
interested in showing that the positions of the radical left with respect to
the problematicof the destiny of capitalism—which is still very relevant for
us—were far from homogeneous and that it is therefore arbitrary and
ideologically retrograde to presuppose the existence of a revolutionary line in
its pure state, that is, beyond the day to day routine of the workers movement
and the contradictions of “reformism”.
Of course, tracing
the complex and contradictory trajectory of Linkskommunismus—situated at the
key point of collusion and collision between the “Marxism of the Second
International” and “Leninism”—to a large extent involves following the
processes of class struggle and the theoretical-strategic debate that took
place between the turn of the century and the years of the war and the October
Revolution; above all, however, it involves the later complication of the
shifting positions and terms of debate evident in the period between the
beginning of the “stabilization phase” and the great crisis of 1929 (which was
also the era of the Communist International’s “Left Turn”). In the period
between the wars, in the face of the resistance of the capitalist States and
the stagnation of the movement, a problem arose and became increasingly obvious
which was responsible for the strategic impotence of the European Left (a
problem which had remained in the background as a result of the unfolding of an
objective political dynamic during the years of frontal confrontations): crisis
theory and the theory of development—“collapse” and “organized
capitalism”—were, taken separately or posed as abstract alternatives, hard to
square with a precise political position. One need only consider that, if among
the supporters of the Zusammenbruchstheorie one finds, together with Kautsky
(or at least the “orthodox” Kautsky), an evolutionist like Heinrich Cunow and a
revolutionary like Rosa Luxemburg, among its opponents we also discover,
together with another one of the outstanding leaders of social democracy like
Otto Bauer, one of the leading theoreticians of left communism, Anton
Pannekoek, as well as the “reformist” Rudolf Hilferding. Nor do I think it was
merely by chance that it was precisely the latter who, in a report presented in
1927 at the SPD’s Kiel Congress—a report justly reckoned among the key texts in
the debate on organized capitalism—insisted that in his opposition to
“collapse-ism” he had not hesitated to embrace the activist postulate of “Linksradikalismus”:
“We have always been of the opinion,” Hilferding claimed, “that the collapse of
the capitalist system must not be fatalistically awaited since, far from being
the product of the system’s internal laws, it must be the result of the
conscious action and the will of the working class. Marxism has never been
fatalism, but to the contrary a maximum activism.”
This tangle of
positions, which at first glance could give the impression of a paradoxical quid
pro quo between extremism and reformism, must not however lead us to the
all-too-convenient and sterile denunciation of the “limits” of the “western”
left (or “western” Marxism), but instead should encourage us to understand the
complexity and richness (although certainly not free of contradictions or
shortcomings) of its problematic, which—far from constituting a dead
end—interacts profoundly with the problems of Leninism and with the most
advanced organizational and ideological levels reached by bourgeois hegemony.
To acquire an idea,
even a partial one, of the complexity of this problematic, it will be necessary
to highlight three of its aspects which until now have remained obscure but, in
our opinion, are nevertheless fundamental:
1.
The
convergences and points of intersection of certain positions of Linkskommunismus
and certain “varieties” of the Marxism of the Second International.
2.
The
multifaceted character—in the determinist sense—of the “theory of collapse”,
whose fate must be viewed in connection with the distinct historical phases of
the dialectic between capitalist development and the workers movement, in which
it not only plays various roles by being attached sometimes to opposed
political positions, but also undergoes its own internal transformations,
assuming distinct epistemological “statutes” and distinct ways of focusing on the
theme of crisis.
3.
The
change of function of the theoretical moment of analysis of capitalism and its
developmental tendencies, through the work of the most sensible and advanced
part of “left communism”, in the post-war era and, above all, at the end of the
1920s.
For all these
reasons, the considerations we shall articulate, while not allowing of a
restricted frame of reference in the positions of Linkskommunismus, are not on
other hand intended as a specialized treatment of the debate on the destiny of
capitalism within Central European Marxism. We instead propose to
examine—within the framework of a broad-based investigation—the outstanding
points in which this debate was later framed, in the magnetic field between the
two poles of “Leninism” and the “Marxism of the Second International”. During
the course of our essay we shall try to specify the diverse venues and moments
of this complex framework of debate, with reference to polemics and thematic
aspects that, due to the particular conjuncture in which they were written or
because of their value in characterizing a certain period, seem to us to
possess an emblematic prominence.
1. Capitalism and Crisis in the Debate on Organization: between Lenin and Kautsky.
In January 1916
Lenin’s article “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International”
appeared in the German journal Vorbote. The reason for starting with this
article, for the purposes of the general economy of this essay, is based not so
much on the fact (which is otherwise of such great historical importance) that
it is a lucid balance sheet of the regression of German social democracy, but
rather on the circumstance that a specific connection is adduced within it.
That is, Lenin strictly relates the method and the merit of this critique of
what he considers to be the extremely virulent stage of the opportunism of the
Second International—social chauvinism—to the rehabilitation of the theory of
the final crisis, seen as a fundamental basis for the possibility of an imminent
revolution: “The epoch of capitalist imperialism is the epoch of mature
capitalism, which is overripe and on the verge of collapse.”
Despite
appearances, Lenin was not proposing to dust off the old Zusammenbruchstheorie,
which was integral to the doctrinal corpus of the first phase of the Second
International, but was instead proposing to resolve the collapse/revolution
duality in the concept of revolutionary crisis. If we situate this work of
reflection in the world-historical moment when it was written—we are in the
midst of full-scale war and on the eve of revolution—we also discover its
powerful political burden: a lot of water has passed under the bridge, in the
course of long and embittered tactical-organizational debates in the Russian
and German social democracies. Nor is it by accident that one of the principle
targets of the Leninist critique in this article should be Kautsky’s theory of
“super-imperialism”. The “completely political” character of Lenin’s discourse
does not arise from the contingencies of a particular historical moment,
especially favorable to the revolutionary forces in Russia, but from a more
than decade-long strategic inquiry, characterized by the hypothesis of a new
organic connection between the theoretical form and the organizational form of
the class struggle on a world scale. The Leninist category of imperialism can
be read, in its totality, from this perspective: it presupposes a necessary
interpretation of the social tendencies of development which cause the
relations of force between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to undergo rapid
dislocation in a new phase which favors the former. His “theory” of imperialism
(which has frequently been subjected to perfectly legitimate, although abstract
criticisms, as a result of their having been conducted on a purely
scientific-economic terrain) directly derives from and depends on this
evaluation of the entirety of the relations of force on a world scale, and
therefore fits into a tactical-organizational model which had already been
prepared: the Bolshevik model.
Lenin was certainly
not alone in this effort of elaboration, which lasted from 1905 to 1917. He
neither acted nor thought within the splendid isolation of the
cosmic-historical individual as he has been preferably depicted by the sterile
hagiography of a stereotyped Marxism-Leninism reduced to an empty formula, but
was instead engaged in a dense and heated debate which pitted the leading
exponents of the workers movement against each other and which had its origins
in the Bernstein-Debatte. Ten years before Lenin wrote the article referred to
above, Rosa Luxemburg, in her famous essay “Mass Strike, Party and Trade
Unions” (1906), had in effect made a completely analogous use of the categories
of “crisis” and “imperialism”: the imperialist and militarist phase of the
bourgeoisie starkly posed the alternative “socialism” or “imperialism” and
objectively determined a qualitative leap in spontaneous mass action. The mass
strike then became a form of expression and also at the same time an instrument
of a relation of force between the classes in struggle, which is the product of
an objective situation. The controversy over tactics, the Organisationsfrage,
provided an enormous impetus to the internal political struggle of social democracy,
and also led to a qualitative leap with respect to the debate over revisionism,
where it had originally started; it is precisely this, at the nerve center of
the polemic on the mass strike, which led, in effect, to a split within the
party’s “orthodox front” (the break between Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg), with
the characterization of a new “radical” tendency (that would be joined, as we
shall see, by Pannekoek as well).
It is important to
emphasize that, by combining the theory of the inevitability of the imperialist
tendency of the capitalist mode of production with the debate on the tactics of
social democracy, Rosa came to assert the organizational centrality of the Massenstreik,
basing it on the objective proof of a reduction in the space of maneuver for
the bourgeois class, from which she deduced the consequence of the latter’s
increasing radicalization in a reactionary, aggressive and anti-worker sense. “Thus,”
she wrote in her now-famous pamphlet, reflecting on the Russian Revolution, “the
mass strike is shown to be not a specifically Russian product, springing from
absolutism, but a universal form of the proletarian struggle resulting from the
present stage of capitalist development and class relations (. . .) the present
Russian Revolution stands at a point of the historical path which is already
over the summit, which is on the other side of the culminating point of
capitalist society, at which the bourgeois revolution cannot again be smothered
by the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but will, on the
contrary,expand into a new lengthy period of violent social struggles, at which
the balancing of the account with absolutism appears as a trifle in comparison
with the many new accounts opened up by the revolution itself. The present
revolution realizes in the particular affairs of absolutist Russia the general
results of international capitalist development, and appears not so much as the
last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new
series of proletarian revolutions in the West. The most backward country of
all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois
revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat
of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries.”
From the context of
the Luxemburgian discourse emerges not only an analysis of the relations of
forces on an international scale similar to that of Lenin, but also the belief
that the irrevocably reactionary and authoritarian character of the development
of mature capitalism made the reformist project not just mistaken but obsolete
and paradoxically made the revolutionary perspective of backward Russia
pertinent for the most advanced countries. Thus the alternative “imperialism or
socialism”, which Kautsky had also posed, at least verbally, in his 1909 work The
Road to Power, made its appearance. For here, too, the concept of the
inevitability of the end of capitalism and of the revolution was based on the
prediction of an increasing polarization in the class confrontation between a
reactionary (and necessarily imperialist) bourgeoisie on the one side and the
proletariat (firmly attached to the social democratic party) on the other.
Beyond surface appearances and verbal similarities, however, the adoption of
the “orthodox” schema played a completely different, if not totally opposed,
function for Kautsky than it did for Rosa Luxemburg. This difference, moreover,
can never be grasped if we restrict ourselves to textual analysis; and this is
true for the simple but fundamental reason that the center of the debate had
shifted from the strictly ideological to the organizational plane. In this
latter sense the principles and the very “statutes” of the theory were now
reformulated. That this was, on the other hand, the root of the movement’s
weaknesses, of the underestimation of the adversary’s capacity for resistance
and reorganization which revealed the insufficiency of “orthodox Marxism” for
the purpose of scientifically penetrating the complexity of the historical
process of the capitalist social formation, is another problem, which we shall
address below. It is on the level of the strategic option, however, that we can
discover the clear divergence between Kautsky and Rosa, the profoundly different
uses to which they put the theory of collapse. While Rosa Luxemburg
subordinated the overall analysis of the catastrophic destiny of capitalism to
the objective establishment of a new form of organization and action (it was
not by accident that she wrote The Accumulation of Capital six years after the
pamphlet on the Massenstreik), Kautsky sought to deduce from that analysis a
depiction of the relation of forces between the classes which could be
harmonized with a gradualist tactic. In an important article published in 1909
in Die NeueZeit, he introduced the usual contrast between advanced Europe and
backwards Russia precisely in order to prove, in his polemic with Rosa, the
absurdity of an open offensive in the mature phase of the development of the
class struggle; the polarization of the conflict into a bourgeois bloc (which
is increasingly prone to reaction) and a proletarian bloc, inevitably produced
by the imperialist tendencies of capitalism, leads to the avoidance of the use
of a form of struggle like the mass strike, which would constitute an
adventurous attempt to forcibly bring about an era of rupture. Hence the
necessity for Kautsky of drawing a distinct line separating the “strategy of
annihilation” from the “strategy of attrition”, which respond to different
situations and stages of the relation of forces.
Kautsky’s reasoning
was undoubtedly acute and valid, but not to the point of obscuring the
pragmatic substance of the operation. I think that we would be committing a
serious mistake if we allow ourselves to be led to see in this Kautskian
discrimination a presaging note of the subsequent theoretical-strategic
reflection of the western workers movement, or even of the Gramscian
distinction between a “war of movement” and a “war of position”. Leaving aside
the historiographical consideration of both situations, in this connection it
is necessary not to lose sight—precisely for a correct “historicization”—of a
theoretical aspect which in our opinion cannot be ignored: all of Kautsky’s
works lack the moment which in Gramsci underlies the strategic option for a war
of position in the advanced capitalist countries: the reactivation and
rediscovery of Marx’s critique of political economy and theory of revolution by
way of the analysis of the structural ruptures and transformations of the mode
of production, which, by determining a specific relation between State and
society, politics and economy, in the various social formations, profoundly
influence the composition and methods of struggle and the forms of
consciousness of the contending classes. The gradualist postulate, grafted onto
the trunk of a natural-evolutionist view of the genesis and passing of
society’s forms, in turn prevented Kautsky from taking into account the
possibility of a productive comparison with the specific morphological
framework of the distinct historical moments of capitalist development,
obliging him to resort to ascribing the choice of strategy to “superstructural”
or purely “political-institutional” factors. Here, if we see clearly, is the
root of that juxtaposition of categories (which is also found in various phases
of the Kautskian conception) and of that oscillation between economism and
politicism which, if it is also typical of the Marxism of the Second
International, is nonetheless not a characteristic pertaining to the Second
International alone, but which was transmitted to theoretical tendencies and
political currents which were declared enemies of that kind of Marxism, such as
those later lumped together by Arthur Rosenberg, the great historian of the
Weimar Republic, under the rubric “radikalerUtopismus”. In conclusion, although
we accept the important critical observations contained in the most recent
research concerning the evolution of Kautskian thought, we must point out here
that not even in Kautsky at his best did the theory of collapse ever serve as
the basis for an autonomous and activist strategy of the working class or for
that concept of the “imminence of the revolution” by means of which, after the
1905 Russian insurrection, the European left began to address the
discontinuities of the historical process and the unevenness and chronological
disjunctions of the processes of economic-social transformation.
2. The Vicissitudes of the “Theory of
Collapse” and the Genesis of “Linksradikalismus”
It was therefore
around 1910 that the rupture within the “orthodox” wing matured, and an
autonomous “radical” tendency took shape in the German social democracy and the
Second International—while Kautsky, for his part, upon the occasion of the
electoral success of 1912 (which was obtained by the SPD by conducting a very
moderate campaign, which allowed it to lay claim to being, with 34.8% of the
vote, the strongest party in the Reichstag), definitively opted for the path of
centrism. At this point, however, a fundamental circumstance for the purposes
of our discourse must be highlighted, to which we already referred in the
preceding paragraph: the emergence of a new way of approaching the problematic
of the destiny of capitalism, one that has little in common with the Zusammenbruchstheorieof
the early Second International (as eloquently expressed in Cunow’s determinist
collapse-ism).
Contrary to the
canons of the doctrinaire corpus of Marxism (against which Eduard Bernstein had
fought with a series of articles entitled “Probleme des sozialismus” which
would serve as the basis for his Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of
Social Democracy—published in English as Evolutionary Socialism), the theory of
crisis, or of “collapse” (as Rosa Luxemburg called it), which was elaborated
and heatedly debated during these years, was not limited to the contemplation
of the unfolding of an ineluctable law but was intended to activate the
revolutionary consciousness of the masses. We have already seen, furthermore,
that Kautsky himself had adapted to this new stage of the debate by dropping
his previous collapse-ism and elaborating a pragmatic approach—from the
political point of view—to the Zusammenbruchstheorie within the framework of a
gradualist tactic. The strong symmetry exhibited by the various possible
courses of this “objective” trend exhibited by the logic of Capital, which for
the revisionists seemed to lead to an algebra of collapse which was just as
mythical as that “algebra of the revolution” that Lenin saw was contained in
Hegel’s Logic, thus seems to fully justify the retrospective judgment
formulated by Korsch immediately after the advent of Nazism, according to whom
there had never been a revolutionary theory of crisis per se, which is why those
who sought to discriminate among them had to have recourse to fundamental
political attitudes which more or less represented crisis theories. For now, we
shall set aside Korsch’s acute diagnosis (which was made in the context of a
significant discussion of Linkskommunismus) for later analysis, and shall
instead attempt to distinguish—precisely in order to facilitate the
understanding of the various vicissitudes of the theory of the final crisis in
the debates of historical extremism—the forms which the concept of the
inevitable end of capitalism assumed in the different stages of the workers
movement.
It is in my opinion
possible to distinguish three stages of the Zusammenbruchstheorie:
1. The first stage is the theory of collapse
that we can define as the “classic theory of the Second International”,
developed during the 1890s and set out in exemplary form in the pages of Die
NeueZeit by Heinrich Cunow. Cunow made no distinction between the objective and
subjective sides of the Marxian exposition of crisis, which is why he did not
hesitate to attribute to Marx the naïve catastrophism criticized by Bernstein:
“Bernstein claims (…) that we have no reason to expect an imminent collapse of
the current system because the atomization of enterprises, which still
prevails, would set before us an unrealizable task in a scientific debate
concerning the validity of the Marxian view of the capitalist developmental
process. This would be justified if it were a matter of provoking the collapse
by force, by way of any violent methods, an insurrection, a general strike,
etc. But in this case such methods are out of the question; all we want to know
is whether the preconditions for a collapse are present or whether they are
possible, and in relation to this inquiry neither our will nor our desires
matter. The crux of the whole problem is whether our economic development is
generating the operative tendencies leading to a general catastrophe; and in
regard to this question no desire of ours carries any more weight than the
desires of any other party, the national-liberals or the anti-semites, for
example.” As one can immediately recognize, this is almost exactly the opposite
of Hilferding’s position cited above, but it is also distant enough from the
revolutionary collapse-ism of Rosa Luxemburg, who set out precisely to end the
divorce of science and action, theory and politics, of the sort rigidly
asserted in the Cunowian (and Kautskian) emphasis on the absolute Gesetzmässigkeit
of economic development.
2. The second stage began in 1905, after
the Russian events, with the debate—aspects of which we have already examined
above—concerning the role of the mass strike in the proletarian revolution in
relation to the dynamic of imperialist crisis. This gave rise to the tendency
which would later take the form of “left communism”; and it was during these
same years that the alternative “collapse or revolution” was first posed, that
is, the militant debate about whether or not the Zusammenbruchstheorie was
compatible with an activist-revolutionary perspective. This stage lasted until
about 1924—i.e., until the Stabilisierungsperiode—and also contained the
beginnings of so-called “western Marxism”, which has until now been studied, in
most cases, in an exclusively ideological,geschichtsphilosophisch key, but
never in relation to the concrete dimension of the theoretical-political
discussion of those dramatic years in Weimar Germany (and here it is legitimate
to ask how it is possible to understand the “Luxemburgism” of the Lukács of History
and Class Consciousness and the “radical Leninism” of the Korsch of Marxism and
Philosophy without taking into account the impact of the Organisationsfrage,
the contradictions of the councils movement and the “theory of the offensive”
of Radek and Bela Kun).
3. The third stage—which coincides with
the decline and then the defeat of the European workers movement—extended from
the mid-1920s to the debate on crisis and state capitalism that took place
during the 1920s and 1930s. This stage is emblematically expressed by the
stagnation of the catastrophist theory of the Communist International on the
one side, and by the development and completion of the theory of cycles “in the
bourgeois camp”, on the other. Insofar as it affected the Linksradikalen, the
crucial and theoretically most significant point is the debate over Grossmann’s
book, which indicates the presence of an organic Zusammenbruchstheorie outside
of the Second and Third Internationals. What distinguishes this stage from the
previous one is the decline of the debate on “tactics”, which reduced the
theory of collapse to a political slogan; hence the impression of a greater
separation from politics, directly proportional to the requirement for a
scientific-predictive focus on the developmental tendencies of the capitalist
mode of production. In its mature analytic and theoretical productions, as we
shall see, this perspective would produce a sharp and fertile confrontation
with bourgeois economic thought—Keynes in particular—and with the problematic
of State intervention.
In order to
understand the importance of these stages of the debate on the destiny of
capitalism it will now be necessary to first of all examine the internal
differences within “left radicalism” during this period—already partly
delineated by the polemic between Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg—of the second
stage.
In his 1914 book on
the political strike Heinrich Laufenberg—who would later, with Wolffheim,
become the leader and theoretician of “national bolshevism”—while drawing up a
balance sheet of the Massenstreikdebatte instigated by the radical left,
claimed that the mass strike was the organic effect of a particular social epoch,
characterized by the imperialist phase of capitalism. But if it is true that in
regard to this general claim, in which “imperialism” and “the imminence of
revolution” were used synonymously, all the Linksradikalen were in agreement
(they based their initial support for Lenin on precisely this issue), one
cannot say the same about the consequences they deduced from this in terms of
the analysis of the objective contradictions of capitalism. In reality the
corollaries of this theorem were very far from being taken for granted among
the central European left; and, as we shall see, they would not even be
accepted as valid within the milieu of Linkskommunismus, when it became
organizationally autonomous and separated from the Communist Party. In this
connection it is significant that in the polemic that saw them unite against
Kautsky, one could already discern the outlines of a divergence between Rosa
Luxemburg and Pannekoek.
3. Imperialist Crisis and “The Imminence
of the Revolution”: The Leninist Phase of “Linksradikalismus”.
Although he
accepted the Luxemburgian connection between imperialism and mass action,
Pannekoek tended to view the crisis-revolution problematic from a decidedly
subjectivist angle. His analysis is totally concentrated on the process of the
progressive emancipation of the masses from the pedagogic-enlightenment
tutelage of political and trade union organizations. In two articles published
in Die NeueZeit, which in other respects constituted interventions of notable
importance in the debate on the tactics of social democracy, Pannekoek stated
that while it is true that revolutionary subjectivity is the result of
objective contradictions inherent in economic development, in the current phase
the train had overshot the station platform: while the material preconditions
for socialism currently exist (i.e., economic objectivity has practically
fulfilled and completed its proper function), what was needed now was to
produce a true spiritual animation of the proletariat (i.e., the role of subjectivity
must acquire unquestionable predominance). The means of activation are exactly
those mass actions which reformist passivity denigrates as adventurism. Driven
forward in this fashion, the autonomous action of the working class will
spontaneously move towards the revolutionary break with the bourgeois State.
The theme of proletarian spiritual autonomy is stressed even more in the second
article, “MarxistischeTheorie und RevolutionareTaktik”: what is unique about
the imperialist stage is not to be found so much in structural aspects, or in a
particular new morphological configuration of the capitalist relations of
production, but instead in the fact that in the imperialist period the
proletariat has conquered the ability to organize itself, its term of
apprenticeship in the “classical” competitive capitalism having come to an end,
now that it has definitively constituted itself as an autonomous class;
furthermore, now that they have acquired the permanent disposition towards a
spontaneous sense of organization and solidarity, the workers must emancipate
themselves from the tutelage of the party and, more generally, of their
historic organizations. In this diagnosis Pannekoek went far beyond Rosa
Luxemburg’s theoretical-political positions: while she criticized the fetishism
of the organizational apparatus, without thereby denying the necessity for and
the function of the party, Pannekoek saw in the latter a bad habit of the past,
a superfluous residue destined to be consumed in thefurnace of the “spirit of
solidarity” which—in parallel with the tendency of the imperialist bourgeoisie,
out of a fear of the approaching end of their system of exploitation, to adopt
more aggressive and reactionary positions—will spread over the whole
proletariat.
It must immediately
be pointed out that, besides the already-mentioned subjectivist tone,
Pannekoek’s position also displays an ingenuous bipolar economistic-ethical
schema, which renders meaningless any requirement for an analysis of the
social-economic structures and institutions of the capitalist system and is
thus unable to discern the internal dislocations of the class structure on the
basis of the modifications of and the processes of transformation that were
revolutionizing the physiognomy of the “classical” capitalism of the 19th
century.
It was no mere
coincidence, then, that he proposed to integrate Marx’s work—which he
considered to be insufficient with regard to the elaboration of the concept of
emancipation—with the Dietzgenian theory of the “spirit of the proletariat”:
whereas Marx only analyzed the conditioning of the subjective spirit by the
economy, Dietzgen, on the other hand, focused the way the spirit operates
within the framework of its autonomous activity. If we were to want to make
explicit the assumption which constitutes the basis for this view, we would say
that, for Pannekoek, Marxian theory is conditioned by an Enlightenment residue,
precisely from an historical phase when it was still necessary to “educate” the
proletariat, because the latter had not yet reached its full independence and
voluntary activity. The root of this Jacobinism was alleged to be the
unilateral concept of science (substantially positivist and very much a product
of the 18th century) accepted—as a result of the particular
historical situation—in Marxian theory, which therefore remained a kind of
incomplete revolution in the sphere of social thought: “the revolutionary
significance of Marxism,” Pannekoek wrote,“consists in having made the doctrine
of history and of society into a science of the same character and subject to
the same strict rule of law as the natural sciences; its conclusions, which
refuted all the old bourgeois conceptions, therefore assumed the certainty of
universally accepted natural laws.” The task now posed to the workers movement
is to transfer this struggle and this inquiry from the plane of separate
objective science to the plane of consciousness and ideologies. The need to “take
advantage of Dietzgen’s philosophical clarity in the controversies over tactics”
is negatively demonstrated by the enormous influence exercised by “bourgeois
philosophical ideas” over the revisionist current, which opened hostilities
with the Bernstein-Debatte, that is, with the “first theoretical discussions
concerning the fundamentals of Marxism”. Pannekoek justified this operation by
pointing to the fact that Marxism must be profoundly renovated in order to
adapt to the new situation of the relation between objective conditioning and
subjective maturation (the capitalist and working class domains): while at that
time “the struggle of the proletariat was essentially preparation and gathering
of forces”—which is why theoretical investigation had to assume during that
period a predominantly historical and economic character and, symmetrically,
the general theory of Marxism never went beyond the statement that “the
revolution in the mode of production is also necessarily accompanied by a
revolution in the political superstructure, that the spirit is determined by
the real material world and that the reality of the economic world
progressively gives rise to the existence of the material preconditions for
socialism”—in the current imperialist stage the primary task is instead the
rediscovery of that “active side” (tätigeSeite) which had remained in the
shadows in Marx’s “economic materialism” and which must be recovered with the
analysis of the autonomy of the proletariat, of its will and its action. Only
in this way can theory be fully realized, that is, find a way out of its own scientistic
“separation” and materialize in the activity of the masses.
Imperialism
therefore signifies the terminal stage of capitalism, as the imminence of the
revolution and its ongoing manifestation as autonomous mass action: if it is
true that this general assumption contains the whole internal conundrum of
Pannekoek’s discourse, it is nonetheless equally true that it is precisely the
coordinates of its generality which provide the reason for his momentary
support for Lenin. The reasons for the conjunctural convergence between the
Bolshevik praxis and the positions of the Linksradikalen are to be found in the
common demand for a new tactic for the workers movement, mediated by the
critique of the “old” theoretical form of Marxism, but above all in the political
character—referred to above—of the Leninist theory of crisis; which explains
the extraordinary effect his theory immediately had on the movement, but also
the analytical weakness and precariousness of Lenin’s focus on the theme of
imperialism, as would become clear during the course of the 1920s and, above
all, after the great crisis of 1929.
In fact, between
1912 and 1917 the main reason for the convergence of Lenin’s position and that
of the “radicals” was an apparent, concrete and striking fact: their attitudes
towards imperialist war. Between 1911 and 1914 Kautsky defined and completed
his conception of imperialist superimperialism based on the alleged
contradiction between finance capital, which was supposed to be the true
subject and protagonist of imperialist policy, and industrial capital, which
was instead said to have an innate vocation for peaceful expansion and
coexistence, as it is capable of expansion only when there is an harmonious
extension of markets based on free trade: it was from this latter sector, then,
that Kautsky saw positive impulses towards international understanding and
peace. On the basis of this analysis he arrived at the conclusion that it was
possible to break the bourgeois front by promoting an alliance with the progressive
sectors of the bourgeoisie, precisely those that represented industrial
capital. Which is why, furthermore, Kautsky predicted that, once nationalist
and imperialist militarism, supported by the predatory clique of finance
capital, was defeated, there would be a shift from inter-imperialist
competition (i.e., from that state of tension which permanently threatens to
assume the form of open war) to a new form of international organization of
capitalist production, which we could define as a kind of cartel of States.
When, at the SPD’s
Chemnitz Congress (1912), the party’s president (Haase), Ledebour, Bernstein
and Liebknecht himself (who, on the other hand, would in December 1915 take a
radical position, breaking party discipline with his personal vote against
renewing war credits, and would be punished with expulsion from the
parliamentary group) supported this position of Kautsky’s (the Congress
concluded with a resolution in favor of peace, understanding between nations,
disarmament and free trade), Pannekoek—demonstrating impressive understanding
and long-range political vision—did not hesitate to define the Kautskyan hopes
as illusory and stressed that the only solution was the final revolution
carried out by the workers themselves. He thus anticipated Karl Liebknecht’s
position by three years, who would define Kautsky’s struggle against the
“domestic truce” (Burgfrieden) as “utopian”; Kautsky wanted the SPD majority
who voted for war credits to support a peace without annexations and create a
situation where the proletariat would have the best democratic opportunities.
The war thus became the moment of truth in the political confrontation between
the moderate and opportunist fraction of social democracy and the revolutionary
fraction, and it was therefore the practical attitude towards the war that drew
the line between the reformist right and the Linksradikalen.
Until 1920, the
various components of “historical extremism” were united first of all by their
rejection of all compromise with the bourgeoisie, then by the critique of the
Second International’s “exogenism”, which viewed the war as a momentary
perturbation of the “normal” socio-economic course of events, with the
resumption of which, as Kautsky said, the movement’s internal “disagreements” would
also disappear (it is significant that, even during the latter half of the
1920s, Hilferding still conceived of war as external violence crashing down on
the natural rhythm of economic law: to complete this thought, it would have
been enough to restart the mechanism, almost as if it were not a matter of its
own organic character, but a transitory interruption of an intrinsically
perfect automatic mechanism).
For the left, on
the other hand, the war was not an episodic event, just as the victorious October
Revolution, which survived long enough to confirm its analysis, was the
world-historical manifest form of the system’s imminent end and the reality of
the revolution.
In 1918, Herman
Gorter, the other great Dutch leader and theoretician of Linkskommunismus,
welcoming the October Revolution as the advent of the era of the workers
councils, which he said constituted “a striking example (…) offered by the
development of imperialism to the workers of western Europe, of how they must
act to achieve unity and victory,” declared: “the Russian Revolution is the
first revolution made entirely by Marxists according to Marxist theory.
Anarchist, syndicalist, reformist and pseudo-Marxist theories (such as, for
example, the Kautskyan theories) are proven to be unusable in the revolution.”
The October
Revolution thus served to trigger an extraordinary accelerating impulse to the
ideological-political development of the whole European left. In 1918, the
activities of the Linksradikalen, which had until then evolved within social
democracy, began to take on a politically important autonomous role.
However—and here we come to a crucial point in our essay—if it can be said
that, prior to the 1920s, it was a matter of complete indifference what
practical positions were assumed with regard to being a defender or an
adversary of the theory of collapse, this aspect will henceforth constitute a
primary rallying point, on the political plane as well, within “left
communism”.
4. The “Two Souls” of Linkskommunismus
The Bremer Linke (InternationaleKommunistenDeutschlands)
and the Spartakusbund merged into the KPD(S). But within the KPD itself two
souls continued to exist: that of the “Bremen Left”, inspired by Anton
Pannekoek, and that of the Luxemburgian current. So we once again pick up the
thread of the disagreement that, as we have seen, ran just under the surface
across the leftist front, in the form of the varied inflexions of the attitudes
of Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg between 1906 and 1913. Now, at the beginning of
the 1920s, the internal disagreement of the radicals broke out into the open.
We shall synthetically set out its stages of development.
In 1922, after
having attempted to form a left opposition in the Comintern (at the Third
Congress), Karl Schröder’s Berlin group—linked to what was known as the EssenerRichtung
(the “Essen Tendency”)—called for the immediate foundation of a communist
workers international. The Berliner Richtung(the “Berlin Tendency”) did not
support the proposal, in consideration of the still-inadequate
political-subjective conditions. The radicals’ International (InternationaleArbeiter-Assoziation)—which
would immediately be re-baptized as the “KommunistischeArbeiter-Internationale”—was
founded only by the EssenerRichtung and the corresponding current within the
Dutch Communist Workers Party (the KAPN).
The theme of the
ensuing debate was precisely the prognosis for the short-term future of
capitalism. While the “Essen Tendency” embraced the “Theory of the Death
Crisis” (Todeskrisentheorie), the “Berlin Tendency” saw the revolutionary
solution, brought about by the exclusive autonomous subjectivity of the working
class, as the determinant factor in the end of the system. It is interesting to
observe that these two opposed wings cited Gorter and Pannekoek, respectively,
whom Lenin had lumped together in his polemic against “extremism”. In fact, the
founding theses of the KAI (KommunistischeArbeiter-Internationale)
substantially reiterate positions set forth in the “Open Letter to Comrade
Lenin”, written by Gorter in 1920 in response to Lenin’s essay on extremism.
In this work of the
Dutch “Tribunist” we find, besides the thesis, common to all Linkskommunismus,
concerning the “bourgeois” character of the Russian Revolution as a peasant
revolution, a nexus between the strategic need to guarantee and safeguard the
“pure” working class character of the European revolution and the prediction of
the “death crisis”, which is why it is of such vital and immediate importance
to form a “workers international”: “Theory,” Gorter wrote, “teaches us that
capital is formidably concentrated in banks, trusts and monopolies. In the West
and especially in
Gorter’s diagnostic
thus exemplifies the oscillation between capitalism’s collapse and its
authoritarian reorganization which would characterize Linkskommunismus
throughout the period between the two wars and whose roots are to be found
precisely in that Marxism of the Second International the radicals believed to
have been definitively superseded. It was not by chance that in his response to
Lenin the Dutch Tribunist once again took up the theory (previously championed
by Kautsky) of the predominance of finance capital as the ultimate factor in
the concentration and coordination of all industries and as the common fabric,
which is all the stronger for its elasticity, of all the social strata with an
anti-worker function: “the modern western European (and American) society and
State form a vast whole articulated even to its most distant industries, and
ruled, put into motion and regulated by finance capital; (…) society is here an
organized body, organized according to the capitalist model but organized
nonetheless; (…) finance capital is the blood of this body which flows through
all its limbs and nourishes them; (…) this body is an organic whole and (…) all
its parts owe their extreme vitality to this unity so that they will remain
bound to it until death. All except the proletariat, which is the creator of
the blood, surplus value. Due to this dependence of all the classes of capital
and the formidable power at its disposal, all these classes are hostile to
revolution and the proletariat stands alone. And since finance capital is the
most elastic and malleable power in the world, and since it knows how to
multiply its influence a hundred-fold by means of credit, it succeeds in
keeping the capitalist class, society and State united, even after this
horrible war, after the loss of millions, and in a situation which seems to us
to be its bankruptcy. Even so, it succeeds in unifying all the classes more
solidly around it (with the exception of the proletariat) and organizes their
common fight against the proletariat. This power, this elasticity, and this
mutual support of all classes, are capable of lasting a very long time even
after the outbreak of the revolution.”
The lack of any
relation between the moments of the analysis of autonomous workers action as an
inherent phase of revolutionary crisisand of the description of the tendencies
toward concentration under the aegis of finance capital, explains the absence
in Gorter’s discussion (which is otherwise so stimulating and rich in insights)
of any interest in the structural-institutional effects of the passage from the
anarchy of competition to the “despotic” reorganization of society and the
economy under the control of a single authority. But if the growing
emphasis—which is in many respects ideological, insofar as it is not supported
by specific economic research—on the importance of finance capital must be seen
in relation to the theoretical limitations of the workers movement of those
years (which was not even aware of Lenin’s Imperialism), the simplistic
diagnosis that reduces the complex problem of the class structure of western
societies to a fragile bipolar schema based on the juxtaposition of the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie (in which the support of all the other social
layers for the policies of finance capital is taken for granted) was in reality
a legend derived from the Kautskian tradition of the Second International, but
which we shall find expressed, after the “left turn” of 1929, in the “class
against class” tactic of the Communist International. At the root of the
conundrums of Linkskommunismus, then, was undoubtedly a profound inadequacy of
the instruments of analysis of capitalist development, which prevented it from
understanding the endogenous, that is, organic character of the crisis, and the
intimate relation between crisis and political-institutional reorganization,
and consequently also prevented it from grasping the changing tendency of the
class dynamic and focusing on its roots in the reorganization of the factory
system and social labor as a whole. The fact, however, that this theoretical
difficulty was so flagrantly manifested among the classic representatives of
“left communism” does not mean that it was an exclusive attribute of the
latter.
It was, rather, a
limitation also shared by the “majority tendencies”—socialist and communist—of
the workers movement, something which, going beyond paradox, “historical
extremism” had in common with the Third International. As we shall see, few and
far between were the reflections in the Marxist camp that would be based upon
the highest levels of the social and economic reorganization of the capitalist
relation in order to reformulate the terms of discourse concerning the crisis
and its relation to strategy at this level.
5. The Theoretical Phase of Left Communism
and the New Terminology for the Problem of Crisis
The internal
division within Linkskommunismus—officially sanctioned by the 1924
split—between those who engaged in further elaboration of the subjective aspect
of the discourse (and therefore put the accent on the possibility that economic
crises would be absorbed and anticipating the progressive concentration of the
system of exploitation) and the “neo-collapsists”, concealed an unresolved
issue, which both views had in common: in neither of the two tendencies could
one find a combined analysis of structural transformations and social-political
changes. Instead, both turned to the “classic” dualism of economic law and the
subjective factor which, by dissolving the problem of the State within the
“ideological” or “spiritual rule” of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, made
both sides in fact equal in their political sterility. It is not by chance that
even in Gorter’s reflections discussed above, the hypostasis of the process of
concentration of finance capital corresponds to that aspect of “spiritual
power”, of geistigeMacht, on the supposedly political field, which played a
decisive role in Pannekoek’s “anti-collapse” conception (and which, in the final
analysis, was not so different from social democratic thought, which sought the
reason for the crisis or the success of capitalism in the “moral factor”).
The fact that this
inability to achieve a strategic reconstruction of its foundations cast doubt,
in the tragic Weimar years, upon the most fundamental postulates of the
movement’s Weltanschauung, was already clear to the most lucid and well-known
intellects of the “western European left”. It is enough to recall that,
precisely at the beginning of the 1930s, an intellectual like Karl Korsch
unhesitatingly began to speak of a “crisis of Marxism”: “Marxism today is in
the midst of an historical and theoretical crisis. It is not simply a crisis
within the Marxist movement, but a crisis of Marxism itself. This crisis
reveals itself externally in the complete collapse of the dominant
position—partially illusory, but also partially real—that Marxism held during
the pre-World War I era in the European working class movement. It reveals
itself internally in the transformation of Marxist theory and practice, a
transformation which is most immediately apparent in Marxists’ altered position
vis-à-vis their own national state as well as with respect to the bourgeois system
of national states as a whole. It is deceptive and even false to see the
theoretical origins of the present crisis as resulting either from a perversion
or an oversimplification of Marx and Engels’ revolutionary theory at the hands
of their successors. It is equally misleading to juxtapose this degenerated,
falsified Marxism to the ‘pure theory’ of Marx and Engels themselves. In the
final analysis, today’s crisis is the crisis of Marx and Engels’ theory as
well. The ideological and doctrinaire separation of ‘pure theory’ from the real
historical movement, as well as the further development of theory, is itself an
expression of the present crisis.”
What nonetheless
remained obscure in the Korschian denunciation of the fissure which had opened
up between theory and movement was the problem of the verification of the
methodological assumptions and conceptual framework of the analysis of
capitalist development accepted at that time in the workers movement; a
verification which was all the more necessary when one considers that it was
precisely during the 1920s and 1930s that bourgeois social and economic thought
underwent a burst of extraordinary fecundity. It was precisely this
circumstance that made the poverty and inadequacy of the internal debate within
Linkskommunismusso striking.
The work of Henryk
Grossmann, occupying the point of intersection between “bourgeois theory” and
the workers movement, heralded a decisive turning point, facilitating a partial
escape from this impasse and opening a new phase of debate, characterized by a
multifaceted focus on the problematic of the destiny of capitalism, and
bequeathing a heritage which—during the years of workers defeat and
fascism—would allow a whole group of Weimar intellectuals and “council
communists” to confront the new tendencies and organizational forms of the
capitalist economy, from the nazi-fascist regimes to the New Deal, by means of
a deepening of the category of “state capitalism”. Grossmann’s book The Law of
Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System was published in 1929, the
year when the depression began, and circulated during the phase of the
movement’s reflux and liquidation. His elliptical revision of Zusammenbruchstheorie,
however, could not (and furthermore did not attempt to) serve as a direct
instrument of political combat: that is, it was not a book for activists in the
strict sense of the term. This fact, however, does not detract from its
historical importance, which can only be understood by those who make the
effort to grasp its innovative aspects in connection with the general problems
of the workers movement of those years. The Grossmannian program of a
scientific exposition of the developmental tendencies of capitalism is not
formulated on the basis of (or at the same level as) the earlier crisis
theories. What is more, the latter are at first subjected to a dual critique:
1) because they remain anchored in a rigid preconceived assumption of
underconsumption; 2) because they did not differentiate (and therefore made unjustified
inferences) between the “logical plane” and the “historical plane” (the
scientific exposition of the tendential laws and the real movement), both in
defense of as well as in the criticism of the Marxian analysis of capitalism.
We cannot take the time here to consider the extremely well-articulated way
Grossmann develops this two-pronged critique in his major works and in his
“epistemological” essays, but shall focus our attention on providing an outline
of their most general aspects, which will nonetheless give the gist of their
originality and qualitative rupture with respect to the previous debates on
crisis.
The characteristic
feature of Grossmann’s theory—which is especially noteworthy when compared with
Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, or with the analyses of
imperialism made during the 1920s by the Luxemburgian Sternberg—is the
deepening of the elements of epistemological discrimination between the logical
structure (and internal functionality) of Marx’s categories and that of the two
classical epigones. This allowed Grossmann to recover the hermeneutical
capacity of the theory of value in relation to the nexus of production and
reproduction. Hence his critique calls attention to the various forms of
underconsumption and the recognition of the common “exogenist” cast of the
collapse-ist and plan-ist explanations of the developmental mechanisms of
capitalism. Despite the continuing survival of vestiges of Second International
sociologism (visible in the definition of the abstract-concrete relation in
terms of “procedures of approximation” or “methods of isolation”), the
Grossmannian critique of the shifting of the axis of the development of crisis
towards the realization of surplus value (the market) expressed a powerful
demand that Marxist analysis must measure up to the complex character of the
system’s development, which must be grasped in its productive-reproductive
unity, rather than by means of the dual schema of production-underconsumption.
During the early
1930s, Grossmann’s work was read and debated not only within the European left
but also among the emigrant groups of Linksradikalen in the
In his article
Pannekoek substantially reiterated the anti-collapse arguments he had employed
twenty years earlier in the crisis debates, and accused Grossmann of having a
bourgeois view of “economic necessity”, which he claimed was a mythical
“extra-human power” for Grossmann. The theoretical basis for the critique was
once again the abstract postulate (that is, it was not analytically mediated)
of the unity and reciprocal interpenetration of the objective side and the
subjective side, the economy and politics: “Economics, as the totality of men
working and striving to satisfy their subsistence needs, and politics (in its
widest sense), as the action and struggle of these men as classes to satisfy
these needs, form a single unified domain of law-governed development.” It is
thus evident that Pannekoek’s activist subjectivism was not only incapable of
confronting the methodological instrumentation of Grossmann’s book, but, when
faced with the need to set forth theoretical alternatives, was obliged to fall
back to the safe haven of the Second International’s old concept of Gesetzmässigkeit,
of which the two attitudes of economism and ethical voluntarism ultimately were
variants. But the aspect we would most like to emphasize here is the appearance,
in the last part of his article, of the prediction of an “organized capitalism”
of an authoritarian type, which, however, would still not necessarily result in
the integration (or irreversible defeat) of the working class, but in an
acceleration and spread of the process of the total unification of the latter.
“It is not due to the economic collapse of capitalism but to the enormous
development of its strength, to its expansion all over the Earth, to its
exacerbation of political oppositions, to the violent reinforcement of its
inner strength, that the proletariat must take mass action, summoning up the
strength of the whole class. It is this shift in the relations of power that is
the basis for the new direction for the workers’ movement.” Even though it is
possible to discern in this prognosis the faint outline of that overwrought
ideologization of the category of “state capitalism” that would be carried out
during the 1940s by some theoreticians of the ultra-left (among others,
Korsch), for which the process of the total socialization of the working class
was the mirror image of the capitalist concentration process, Pannekoek’s
intervention once again proved to be very impoverished in terms of any
indications concerning the strategic problem of the analysis of the new
phenomena of the capitalist process. Nor was it by chance, furthermore, that
this critique of Grossmann should denounce an approach to theory and crisis in
a way that was methodologically much less differentiated and articulated than
the attempt made years before by Korsch in the journal Proletarier in his essay
“Some Fundamental Presuppositions for a Materialist Discussion of Crisis
Theory”, referred to in Part 1 above.
“A great
shortcoming of the form in which the discussion of crisis took place hitherto,
especially in the circles of the left and far-left wings of the workers’
movement, was to be found in their search for a ‘revolutionary’ crisis theory
per se, just as in the middle ages one searched of the philosopher’s stone.
Historical examples, however, can demonstrate quite easily that possession of
such a supposedly highly revolutionary crisis theory says little about the
actual level of class consciousness and revolutionary preparedness for action
of a group or individual believing in the theory.” If we momentarily disregard
the implicit assumption of the Korschian approach (which is immediately obvious
if it is compared to the earlier piece on the crisis of Marxism), one cannot
help but appreciate the implicit novelty of the distinction between political
positions and the scientific “paradigms” of Krisentheorie. The distinguishing
element of the various crisis theories that appeared on the stage of the
workers movement must not be sought in their internal conceptual construction
or their methodological bases, but in the attitude that animated them.
Korsch then
extracted from this criterion of orientation to realize a total balance sheet
of the crisis debates and distinguished two basic types of Krisentheorie:
1. The first kind was the “official social
democratic crisis theory” which—descended directly from Bernstein—found its
greatest representatives in Hilferding, Lederer,
2. The second kind was the “objectivist
theory of crisis”, classically formulated by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation
of Capital, and later upheld by Sternberg and Grossmann.
The characteristic
trait of the subjectivist crisis theories—which culminated during the 1920s in
the concept of “organized capitalism”—is the “ideological reflection of past
stages of the real movement of capitalist economy, counter-posing it to the
present changed reality as fixed and rigid ‘theory’”. Unlike Pannekoek, Korsch
had a good grasp of the political risks of such a conception, which in reality
destroys “all the objective bases of the proletarian class movement”, reducing
socialism’s strategy to a mere “moral demand”.
On the other hand,
the objectivist theory of crisis which conceives of “an objectively given
economic tendency of development whose ultimate goal can be grasped in advance
employs pictorial notions rather than unequivocally determined scientific
concepts. Furthermore, it is founded inevitably on insufficient induction” and
appears to Korsch “as not suitable for bringing forward that full earnestness
of self-disciplined activity of the proletarian class struggling for its own
goals, which is as much necessary for the class war of the workers as it is for
every other kind of war.”
To these two
positions Korsch opposes “a third fundamental stance to the crisis question”
which “alone deserves the designation of a truly Marxian materialist stance.
This position explains the whole question of the objective necessity or
avoidability of capitalist crises as a senseless question in this general form(within
the framework of a practical theory of the revolution of the proletariat). It
agrees with the revolutionary critic of Marx Georges Sorelwho will not consider
Marx’s general tendency of capitalism to catastrophe generated by the
insurrection of the working class—colored in a strong idealist-philosophical
‘dialectical’ manner of speech—as valid scientific prognosis, but merely as a
‘myth’ whose whole significance is limited to determine the currentaction of
the working class.” Despite his strong subjectivist inflection, Korsch was not
attempting here to dissolve the categorical framework of Marxian analysis in a
generic activism, nor much less to reformulate a new form of revolutionary
syndicalism, but was instead provocatively expressing the requirement of a
“disaggregation” of Marx’s morphological prediction (consider, furthermore, the
function of “myth” within Gramsci’s rehabilitation of Marxism, after the real
“split” reflected in the Revisionismus-Debatte) as a condition sine qua non to
make it hermeneutically and practically effective. “The materialist stance”, he
hastily adds, “is, however, not in accord with
However, by
defining the “activist-materialist attitude” in such an undoubtedly evocative
way (which hearkens back to Lenin’s 1894 critique of “the subjectivism of the
revolutionary populist Mijailovski and the objectivism of the erstwhile Marxist
theoretical guide Struve”) Korsch passed over a basic theoretical problem: the
non-linear nature of the relation between what is “logical” and what is
“historical” in the Marxian analysis of capitalism. As I have tried to demonstrate
elsewhere, this gap in the Korschian discourse—which is manifested in a
declared indifference towards the specific modality by which the “laws” which
explain capitalist reality operate—must be viewed in the context of a lack of
understanding of the strategic role that the distinction between the mode of
research and the mode of exposition (Forschungs und Darstellungsweise) plays in
Capital. In this connection, the important theoretical points made by Paul
Mattick in Rätekorrespondenz in defense of Grossmann sound like a response not
only to Pannekoek’s critique, but also to the more complex Korschian attempt to
carry out a “pragmatization of the dialectic”. What was criticized in Grossmann
as an “economistic” perspective, as a limitation of analysis to “purely
economic” aspects, was in reality the result of a scientific application of the
Marxian idea of dialectics, which coincides with neither a generic “holism” nor
with the philosophical postulate of the “unity of opposites”: “For Grossmann,
too”, Mattick wrote, “purely economic problems do not exist. This does not
prevent him, however, from limiting himself in his analysis of the law of
accumulation, formethodological reasons, to the definition of purely economic
assumptions, and thus from theoretically grasping an objective limiting-point
of the system. The theoretical understanding that the capitalist system,
through its internal contradictions, must necessarily move towards collapse by
no means leads him to consider that the real collapse is an automatic process,
independent of men.”The Marxian analysis of the capitalist system is scientific
not because it reflects the real history of the mode of production, but because
it defines its structural prerogatives through the study of the forms in which the
basic contradiction between productive forces and relations of production are
reproduced in the passage from simple reproduction to extended reproduction.
If on the one hand
disequilibrium and crisis do not arise from the disproportion between
production and market (that is, as a result of the difficulties of realization)
but are already present in simple reproduction, on the other hand what is
constant in this process of transformation is the affirmation of the value-form
as a totality on the scale of society: in this sense, Mattick concludes, the
“movement of capital on the basis of value is nothing but (…) the dialectical
movement of society itself”. Ignorance of the irreducible specificity of the
Marxian dialectical method has prevented the orthodox as well as the
revisionists from grasping the profound meaning of this self-movement of
capital” on which the Marxian theory of crisis is based. It is interesting to
observe that it was via this route that Mattick would later come to denounce
the “epistemological vice” which lay at the root of the celebrated controversy
between Böhm-Bawerk and Hilferding concerning the problem of the transformation
of values into prices: Marx’s efforts in this regard referred to “the
theoretical requirement of proving the validity of the law (of value) in the
face of a reality which appears to contradict it. In order to discover whether
value relations determine price and market relations, a price theory consonant
with value theory was needed. The ‘transformation’ of values into prices of
production satisfied this theoretical requirement. For Marx, the problem of the
determination of individual prices was of no real interest; all that mattered
were value relations and the certainty that the divergence of value and price
in reality did not either logically or practically invalidate the concept of
value as the key to the fundamental laws of capitalist production.” The
divergence of value and price therefore does not invalidate the labor theory of
value precisely because the essential nature of the concept from which the
“fundamental laws” of the system and its predominant developmental tendency are
deduced is not conceived in a linear relation of direct determination with
respect to the historical phenomena of development. This central
epistemological assumption of Marxian “science” remained completely alien to
Hilferding’s point of view, which is why, precisely when he takes up the defense
of the theory of value, he actually empties it of its critical substance in
order to accept it as an interpretive schema for the real market relations: “For
Hilferding, in capitalism social necessity is transformed into the law of value
because social relations relate to things and appear as things, as relations
between commodities and not as what they really are, that is, social relations
of production. Once liberated from the fetishism of commodity production,
Hilferding thought that the law of value would be revealed as what it really
is—the necessity of regulating the social labor process in accordance with
social needs as directly recognized in the needs of men. For Hilferding, it is
only in this sense that the law of value is a historical law.”
The analytic effect
of this epistemological deformation of the law of value is the
inability—shared, as we have seen, by almost all parties to the debate—to
explain the crisis as an organic phenomenon of the capitalist system; this
inability to penetrate the contradictory dynamic of development nourished not
only naïve catastrophism but also the success the idea of an “exogenous” Regulierung
enjoyed during the 1920s, which gave rise to the famous “theory of organized
capitalism”. “The fact that the clique of neo-harmonists”, Grossmann wrote to
Mattick in 1937, “the Hilferdings and the Bauers, have been systematically
trying to distort Marx(…) is noreason for us to collaborate with the
neo-harmonists. Having consistently followed Marx’s reasoning to the end, how
is it possible that, in simple reproduction, where such a harmonious
equilibrium seems to reign everywhere, a crisis develops? Only then will you
discover in Marx some theoretical elaborations which the ‘philosophers’ have
never even heard of, not even those who, like Karl Korsch, imagined that they
understood some Marxian economics.” Significantly, these harsh words came three
years after the important anti-critique in which Mattick, polemicizing against
Pannekoek, indirectly called attention to the fact that, despite the
insightfulness of his summary of the debates concerning crisis theory, Korsch
had not grasped the novelty and originality of Grossmann’s work in a workers
movement which was divided and oscillating between underconsumptionism and plan-ism.
6. Grossmann’s Dynamic Model and the
Common Source of Plan-ism and Collapse-ism. From “Generalized Imperialist
Crisis” to “State Capitalism”.
While, in the
period between 1928 and 1934, the Communist International established an
extremely close connection between imperialism and crisis which clearly pointed
towards a theory of collapse—assuming, above all in Varga’s works, an
underconsumptionist reading of crisis—in the European social democracy the
debate concerning organized capitalism took shape. In the report to the Kiel
Congress mentioned above, Hilferding defined this controversial concept in the
following terms: “Organized capitalism means (…) the replacement of the
capitalist principle of free competition by the socialist principle of planned production.”
Such a task immediately posed the problem of the relations between the program
of economic planning and the State as the centralized technical hub of
organization and fulfillment of that program, by means of which the working
class takes the productive apparatus under its control: “This means nothing
less than the fact that our generation is faced by the task of transforming,
with the help of the State, that is, with the help of conscious social
regulation, this economy organized and directed by the capitalists into an
economy directed by the democratic State.” Hilferding integrates this scheme of
(techno-) political democracy by combining the elements of “enterprise
democracy”, or Betriebsdemokratie, with those of “economic democracy”, or Wirtschaftsdemokratie
(the latter theme having been most fully elaborated by Naphtali), which were to
be realized by way of trade union action, and which were to be related to the
State in accordance with a ready-made rigorous framework of representation,
which—symptomatically—says not one word about the councils or any other
instrument of rank and file democracy.
The fact that the
plan-ist perspective failed to discuss the sources of surplus value and the
“simple dynamics” of the system (which was considered to be exempt from any
disequilibrium or disharmony), and thus remained imprisoned within the
“juridical illusion” of resolving the cyclical downturns of the economy by way
of a conscious regulation of the anarchy of circulation, was made clear not
only by the Hilferdingian version, but also by other planning projects such as
those of Henri DeMan or the “French socialists” (Deat). In any case, despite
its serious analytic limitations and the ideology with which it was suffused,
the theory of organized capitalism reflected, in a certain sense, all the
difficulties and contradictions of the workers movement confronted by the vast
economic-institutional reorganization processes of western societies. It was
this aspect that completely overshadowed the selective class-ism of the
European communist (and socialist) left as well as the sectarian perspective of
the Communist International.
In 1934, barely one
year before the Seventh Congress, Varga liquidated the problem of the planned
economy while showing total indifference to the organizational forms of
capitalist society, which he viewed as all the same due to the fact that they
were utterly incapable of eliminating the exploitation of the workers and
crises. But what is of more interest within the context of our discussion is
the fact that, in order to supply a bit of “scientific” support to his polemic,
the official economist of the Comintern was obliged to resort to the “classic”
underconsumptionist explanation which had dominated the Zusammenbruchstheorie
side of the debates of the Second International: “capitalism,” Varga wrote, “whether
it is based in whole or in part on free competition, or is totally or partially
spiced with ingredients of State capitalism, necessarily leads to periodic
crises (…) the ‘nationalization’ of credit or a State monopoly in raw materials
changes nothing in the framework of the bourgeois State; and ‘underconsumption’
cannot end because the working class will continue to receive only a part of
the value it produces in the form of wages, while the other part remains with
the capitalists in the form of surplus value and will be used to augment their
capital. There is no capitalism without underconsumption, without the
limitation of the earnings of the workers to the minimum, as determined by the
profits of the capitalists.”
Aside from the
facile denunciation of the political incompatibilities and the democratist
ideology of the theory of organized capitalism, the new historical fact which
the Communist International failed to grasp was precisely that tendency on the
part of the capitalists to introduce elements of regulation and control of the
economy which, far from being mere tactical instrumentalities for the purpose
of obtaining a temporary adjustment of the anarchic market mechanism, implied a
direct intervention of the State in the social reorganization of production
and, consequently, an increasingly closer connection between the “political”
and the “economic”. But the fact that this “detail” escaped its notice was only
a consequence of an inability to provide a rigorously “endogenous” explanation
of the dynamic of the capitalist crisis, that is, of grasping the contradictory
nexus of crisis and development, “anarchy” and “planning”, as an internal
structural connotation of the mode of production. Viewed in this light, if we
look closely, there was not much difference between the thinly disguised
collapse-ism of the Comintern and the plan-ism of the social democrats. To have
provided all the elements for a demonstration of the common source (and of the
paradoxical interchangeability) of the opposed theories of “generalized
imperialist crisis” and “democratic planning” constitutes the most original
aspect of Grossmann’s contribution. It is not by accident that his critique
applies equally to collapse-ist supporters of the underconsumptionist
hypothesis and the “neo-harmonists”: both proved incapable of penetrating the
consubstantiality of the crisis of capitalist development, explaining the
vicissitudes of the period extending from 1914 to 1919 as “catastrophes” or as
“disturbances”, produced in any event by external causes. Both Hilferding and
Varga conceived of the war as a consequence of an external accident, a hiatus
or momentary interruption of the accumulation process: for Hilferding, the
Marxian nexus between crisis and the process of reconstituting the conditions
for accumulation disappears, and is replaced by a distribution of the
already-attained level of capital accumulation, a mere regression or relapse to
a previous stage. The ostensible contrary objectives of the two positions do
not contradict this symmetry (Varga’s absolute indifference to any kind of plan
corresponds to Hilferding’s exclusive attention to the mere organizational
form), which Grossmann even connects to the Hilferdingian tendency—already
outlined in Finance Capital (1910)—to extrapolate the analysis of monetary
phenomena and financial concentration from the context of the Marxian theory of
value, elaborating his own theory of money. As a result neither the debates
concerning imperialism nor the investigations into monopolist forms of
organization really came to terms with the authentic theoretical structure of
the Marxian undertaking, which “explains all of the phenomena of the capitalist
mode of production on the basis of the law of value”.
Although having
ultimately failed—with its drastic denial of the possibility of any capitalist
control over the economy—to have an impact on the historical limits of the
debate, Grossmann’s theory possessed the seeds of instrumentalities that would
prove decisive for the purposes of analyses of the “morphological”
modifications of the system. It would be Friedrich Pollock—who had also, like
Grossmann, been formed by that extraordinary meeting-point of the bourgeois
social sciences and Marxism represented by the Grünberg-Archiv—who would
verify, over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, the possibilities and the
limitations of a capitalist planned economy, on the basis of a complex and
highly-articulated analysis of the morphology of the international crisis, and
to single out a new mode of the functioning of the economy, based on a
displacement of the Marxian contradiction between the productive forces and the
relations of production. If the novelty of Pollock’s research resides in its
confrontation with the real historical form of “organized capitalism” which
represents state capitalism within the framework of an “endogenous” explanation
of the crisis (which is therefore viewed strictly in relation to developmental
trends) this was nonetheless unthinkable without Grossmann’s fundamental
prolegomena, which constituted the constant methodological rearguard of the
work carried out by that Weimar intellectual left that would later become
famous under the name of “The Frankfurt School”.
Another aspect of
Grossmann’s work that would prove seminal not only for the analyses of the
Frankfurt School but also for those of Paul Mattick and his group in the United
States, is the attention devoted to the problem of dynamics which, in certain
respects aligns the Polish economist with the research on cycles carried out
during those same years by Schumpeter and Mitchell, rather than with the
“Marxism” of that time—the research of the former took as its starting point
the rejection of static systems and the central position of dynamics as the
scientific criterion for the analysis of capitalist development. In this
context, what Grossmann wrote to Mattick in a 1933 letter seems highly
significant: “until now, all Marxists have been the victims of a ‘little
misfortune’: they did not understand Marx’s simple reproduction, its real
meaning. All of them addressed only extended reproduction as a real problem. In
the schema for simple reproduction everything functions perfectly. But Marx
wanted to prove precisely the contrary. In simple reproduction, too, crises are
inevitable. And this is precisely why Marx is a true dynamicist, in contrast to
bourgeois economics, which is essentially static (the ‘tendency to equilibrium’
which automatically asserts itself—crises must therefore arrive like a deus ex
machina from outside the system). In Marx disequilibrium is connected with the
essence of the system.”
To confirm the
points of contact which, despite notable differences, link Grossmann’s research
to cycle theory, it is enough to once again cite his continuing confrontation
with Tugan-Baranowski, whose text on commercial crises in
On turning our
attention now to the diagnostic of the debate on the destiny of capitalism
carried out between 1920 and 1939, as viewed in the light of our previous
considerations concerning Grossmann’s work, we cannot but be surprised by the
position of those who believe it is possible to conveniently draw a sharp
dividing line between a stance which affirmed the necessity of collapse through
“purely economic” causes, and another stance which instead links the downfall
of the system to the “proletariat’s subversive intervention”. Using a
touchstone of this kind amounts to erasing in one stroke the characteristic
note of the third phase of the debate concerning capitalism’s destiny: the
differentiation within the crisis theories along not only political-strategic,
but also “epistemological” lines. After 1929, in short, what was imposed upon
the movement was not so much an empirical retouching or an “adjustment” of
analysis (proposed by the Communist International), but rather a new foundation
and a change of form for Marxism: a distinct expression of theory with respect
to the entire capitalist social formation, as a precondition for a new relation
to revolutionary politics and praxis. If these were the problems of the
movement, the recovery of the hermeneutic capacity of the theory of value, the
establishment of the moment of reproduction at the center of strategic
elaboration, and thus the shifting of the center of gravity of a debate which
had until then revolved in a vacuum, the prisoner of the production-consumption
opposition, were certainly notmerely academic propositions. Untying the knot of
reproduction therefore implied the elaboration of a theoretical model capable
of explaining the dynamic of the whole capitalist mechanism, on the basis of
that accumulation-crisis nexus, rejected by both social democratic
“revisionism” as well as by the Cominterm’s “left radicalism”, by Hilferding as
well as by Varga, and—therefore—capable of providing a foundation, by means of
scientifically-controlled passages, for the terrain of politics. All of this,
for obvious historical reasons, could only have been present in Grossmann in an
embryonic state. It would be Marxist economists of the stamp of Mattick and
Kalecki who would continue, during the following years, the discourse which
began at the end of the 1920s, tackling the problems of state intervention and
the dynamics of the capitalist cycle, in a frontal confrontation with
Keynesianism and bourgeois economic thought.
The analyses
carried out between the wars by Paul Mattick and the working group he organized
and led, which published the “councilist” journals International Council
Correspondence, Living Marxism and New Essays, are important because they
reformulated crisis theory in a manner that was no longer ideological and/or
empiricist, but by way of a more profound understanding of the
circulation-production nexus and of the relation between the State and the
process of reproduction. In this sense they also provided the key to an
interpretation which is not purely sociological, but
“structural-morphological”, of fascism and the various forms of state
capitalism. If, then, during the 1930s and 1940s the most vital component of Linkskommunismus
could productively take on phenomena and aspects unknown to the debate of the
1920s, this was due in no small part to the fact that—in the study of the
various forms of capitalist concentration and organization—it had taken from
Grossmann the theoretical instruments required for the avoidance of the
repeated suggestions offered by the underconsumptionist hypotheses (which, in a
new guise, made notable headway during the 1960s with Baran and Sweezy’sMonopoly
Capital) and also for going beyond the Hilferdingian conception, which had
weighed just as heavily on the development of collapse-ist theory of
imperialist concentration as on the plan-ist theory of organized capitalism. We
shall subject this last point to closer examination and attempt to arrive at
some kind of conclusion.
His critique of
Hilferding allowed Grossmann to make further distinctions concerning the
relation between finance capital and industrial capital and also to recover an
aspect of Lenin’s analysis that he considered to be valid and seminal: “As for
your questions,” he wrote in a letter to Mattick dated June 21, 1931, “I want
to make it clear first of all that I oppose Hilferding’s concept of ‘finance
capital’ but not Lenin’s. The two concepts are fundamentally different.
Hilferding understands by finance capital, bank capital; he does not ask
himself what lies behind this bank capital. I fought against this conception of
the decisive role of bank capital. Lenin, on the other hand, did not define
finance capital as bank capital, but as the fusion of monopolist capital, above
all of industrial capital, with state power and state policy which is an
instrument of that capital. It is a completely different thing. It is obvious
that the banks are mediators of capital expansion. But we must ask ourselves
whether, for example, the North American bankers play the principal role in the
economic life of the
As he wanted this
judgment of the Leninist concept of imperialism to be assessed in the strictly
economic sense, Grossmann thus sought to assert—utilizing Lenin against the
“neo-harmonists”—a theoretical demand that was also implicitly (for the whole
European workers movement) a strategic demand: the analysis of the mode of
functioning of capitalist society on the basis of the mutual interpenetration
of circulation and production, reproduction and production, politics and economics.
Based on the process of restructuring which, at the highest levels of
development, was then taking place in the big factories and seemed to be the
unavoidable precondition for grasping and verifying the efficacy of that mutual
interpenetration in the process of the social reorganization of labor and
capital in their entirety, which reproduced on an extended scale (and, as
Pollock would later define it, displaced) the contradiction between forces of
production and relations of production. In the final pages of his book
Grossmann sees the relation between banks and big industry in a way completely
opposite to Hilferding’s position: the resulting accumulation allowed very high
rates of self-financing; thecontrol and distribution of surplus value is carried
out directly from the brain of the big corporation, as a result of which—as has
recently been observed—“the bank lost its unifying, centralizing and
controlling power, which according to Hilferding’s hypothesis created the
conditions of a pre-socialist economic organization”. But if one acknowledges
that the implicit subject of Grossmann’s analysis is the big corporation which
revolutionizes the techniques and organization of labor, one must also conclude
that the natural theoretical-political complement of his “model” is not the
attitude of waiting characteristic of the ideology of the Second International,
but the analysis of the structural effects of Taylorism and Fordism carried out
by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. The fact that Gramsci understood the
importance of Grossmann’s book (with which he was only indirectly acquainted)
and that he treated “Americanization” as a countertendency to, though outside
the scope of, the fall of the rate of profit, is by itself indicative of how
the solution of the great strategic problems of the movement necessarily had to
pass through the reactivation of the categories of the critique of political
economy and through the new theoretical foundation of Marxism at the level of
the new morphology of the mode of production.
With Gramsci we are
certainly far beyond the limitations of Linkskommunismus, as we are also far
beyond those of the “Marxism of the Third International” (including its most
“heretical” variants)—but, at the same time, we find ourselves in a perspective
which addresses and explains the problems, the contradictions and the fearsome
backward steps of the western workers movement as a whole. From Gramsci, we
have not only obtained a great contribution to the generic demand for a
creative development of Marxism. We have also learned the strategic importance
of the relation between the critique of political economy and the science of
politics: that is, of the problem of how the crisis dynamic functions in the
current phase of “state capitalism” and, within that phase, the dynamic of that
reproductive process which is not just the reproduction of “dead labor” and
wealth (commodity), but of relations of production—therefore: the reproduction
of classes. If, in order to grasp the complexity of this tangled knot, it is
indispensable to retrace, by secularizing it, the history of Marxism and the
workers movement, in order to untie it, today it is necessary to theoretically
penetrate the internal dynamic of that “integral politicity” (the “political
cycle”, as Kalecki calls it) which is the unique mechanism of contemporary
capitalism: without taking these steps it is impossible (or it is a mere
ethical postulate)—as the contradictory trajectory of “historical extremism”
shows us ex negativo—to translate the problem of the destiny of capitalism into
the political problem of the revolutionary transformation of the existing
relations by organized subjectivity.
GiacomoMarramao
From Derrumbe del
Capitalismo o SujetoRevolucionario?(Collapse of Capitalism or Revolutionary
Subject?), Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente, 1978.