Historical Materialism and Democratic Firm Management

Abstract

This article starts from the premise that the precondition for the unreserved acceptance of historical materialism and, hence, Marxism is the belief that a new production mode will arise and take the place of capitalism after its suppression. From this perspective, however, the new production mode to rise from the ashes of capitalism is not the Soviet-type central planning model, but a system of democratically managed firms. If socialism is equated with worker control of firms, it is contended, Marxism will become more viable than ever, although it will need to be approached from a different viewpoint.

Keywords:

• democracy
• historical materialism
• Marxism
• self-management
• worker control

JEL Codes:

• B51
• J54
• P2
• P13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹By general agreement (see, inter alia, Buchanan 1982, p. 27), the earliest systematic attempt at theorising a materialist conception of history dates back to The German Ideology (1946).

²From Orfeo (1970, p. 271) we learn that Antonio Labriola described the materialist conception of history as ‘an effective means of splitting the huge and extremely complex working mechanism of society into its simplest constituent parts'. In the opinion of Kautsky, for instance, the key ideas of Marxism were the materialist conception of history and the role of the proletariat as the driving force behind the socialist revolution. Unlike them, Croce categorised historical materialism as ‘neither a philosophy of history nor a philosophical approach proper, but rather as an empirical interpretative canon, a recommendation to historians for them to focus on economic activity and give it the attention its major place in human life entitles it to’ (see Labriola 1942, p. 292; Croce [1896] 1968, pp. 1–19).

³Marx's most pregnant finding is the idea that society is shaped by its production methods. In agreement, Stedman Jones (1978, p. 341) wrote that the mode of production is the core notion based on which the new theory of the materialist conception of history was fleshed out between 1845 and 1847. In contrast, some authors maintain that economic approaches to history pre-date Marxism since the relevance of the economic factor in human affairs was emphasised by Swift, Mandeville, Turgot, Smith and a wealth of Enlightenment thinkers well before Marx.

⁴Balibar (1965, p. 222) argued that the overriding importance of the notion of modes of production is apparent to any Marxist: ‘In order to periodize the history of mankind we must approach it from the side of economic science rather than from that of art, politics, science or law.’

⁵This would suggest that the materialist conception of history is a socialist or proletarian notion. As argued by Kautsky (1907, p. 97), the progress and discoveries made in the 1940s were in line with the basic tenets of the materialist conception of history, but ‘despite their genius and despite the preparatory work which the new sciences had achieved’ even in the 1840s Marx and Engels would not have been able to discover it if, as socialists, ‘they had not stood on the standpoint of the proletariat’. In Kautsky's celebrated definition—Haupt writes (1978, p. 310)—Marxism is the scientific study of history from the vantage point of the proletariat.

⁶Ragionieri ([1965] 1968, pp. 129 ff.) traces the socialism-central planning equation to the powerful influence of Engels and his Antidühring on the Second International. Aron (1965, p. 2), too, holds that the main source of classical Marxism is Engels's Antidühring, although he emphasises that despite his appreciative reading of this book, Marx was hardly aware of the problems associated with centralised planning. The main reasons explaining the association of Marxism with planning are obviously the success of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the adoption of centralised planning in the USSR for over 70 years running. In this connection, Russell (1935, p. 263) remarked that socialism did not catch on immediately in political practice and remained the creed of a minority with no noticeable bearing on reality until 1917. Considering that socialism was, as a rule, implemented in centrally planned systems, it can hardly come as a surprise that Marxism, the offshoot of scientific socialism, has invariably been associated with planning.

⁷For the claim that the decline of Marxism was caused by the failure of the centrally planned Soviet system, see, inter alia, Sartori (1969, pp. 316–317) and Fukuyama (1989). For different views, see Kellner (1995) and, above all, Cohen ([1978] 2000, 389), who argues that the failure of the Soviet system should actually be rated as a triumph of Marxism.

⁸The movement for worker control in enterprises is the central issue of class struggle in our generation, and Lange (1957) described it as the goal expected to rekindle the activism of the working class.

⁹According to Chomsky (1971, p. 79), whether and to what extent state tyranny in Russia was caused by the Bolshevik doctrine or the circumstances under which the State arose and developed remains a matter for debate, but it is simply outrageous to describe that system as socialist. Gunn (2011), for his part, has remarked that there are a great many intermediate steps between worker participation in decision-making and full worker management.

¹⁰For Marx's approach to cooperative firms, see Jossa (2005).

¹¹In the opinion of Bloch (1968, p. 98), the point is that ‘the material base in every society is again activated by the superstructure of consciousness'.

¹²This view is shared by Habermas (1975, p. 5), who writes: ‘crisis arises when the structure of the system allows for fewer problem-solving options than are necessary to the existence of the system’.

¹³Concerning this debate, see, also Elster (1985, pp. 167–72) who dissents from Cohen.

¹⁴This is what Lange (1958, p. 111) had in mind when he wrote the economic theory of a social form ‘exists in a fully developed form only as far as the capitalistic mode of production is concerned’.

¹⁵Similarly, Carandini (2005, p. 24) observed that historical materialism was of help only in analysing capitalistic societies. A comparable criticism of historical materialism is Giddens’ (1981) argument that class conflict is unable to account for the emergence of all forms of social organisation and its effects in capitalism were much less pervasive than suggested by Marx. In support of this argument, Giddens mentions forms of social organisation, including capitalism, in which the social structure was characterised by forms of exploitation and oppression that were unrelated to the conflict between opposed classes. Vacca (1969, pp. 105–106, original emphasis) correctly remarked that Korsch conceived of the principles underlying Marx's analysis (i.e. his critique of political economy) not as ‘more or less arbitrary research hypotheses, but as realities on a par with the social relations they connote’ and that consequently each social organisation mode was to be consistently approached with a focus on its dominant production mode. Engels (1890) too, specified that the materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and the exchange of things produced, are the basis of all social structures.

¹⁶According to Wetter (1948, p. 51), in ancient times, economic considerations carried an even greater weight in human life since the means of production were much less sophisticated than they are today.

¹⁷Analysing the notion of historical materialism, Korsch (1891) remarked that it was not necessarily a faithful or exhaustive reflection of truth. Although Marx had identified all of the interconnections between the relations and ideas underpinning a given social order and had correctly traced each such order to its historical period and social organisation mode—he argued—his theoretical approach was nothing but a historical construct linked to a precise step in social evolution and a specific social class. In his opinion, this conclusion was perfectly in keeping with the ‘critical and materialist’ essence of Marx and Engels' theoretical approach.

¹⁸Bruni (2006, pp. 77–78) observes that both Adam Smith and Antonio Genovesi rated markets as a necessary precondition for free and disinterested interpersonal relations and both held that such free interplay would be greatly enhanced in an economic system freed from the oppression of capital.

¹⁹Commenting on Snow's well-known book on ‘the two cultures' ([1959] 1963), Longo (2005, p. 122) pointed to humanities as a powerful antidote to all such homologation processes as are caused by an excessive impact of the economy on human life. The two criteria—he wrote—by which man reconstructs the world by reference to economic or even subsistence criteria make for uniformity, whereas the strong subjective components that arise during poetical and artistic work in connection with emotional, expressive, ethical and aesthetic needs have a potential for counteracting homologation. If our approach so far has been correct, it follows that the homologating power is capitalism, an economic system that is still under the iron grip of capital, whereas a fully democratic system would create the assumptions for the free development of poetry and the arts, effective antidotes to homologation.

²⁰In 1977, the journal Capital & Class was founded with the specific aim of vindicating the validity of the labour theory of value and open a forum on it (Freeman 2010, p. 87).

²¹In the opinion of Fineschi (2007, p. 191), Marx can be interpreted in Ricardian terms and is the first neo-Ricardian in the history of Marxian interpretations.

²²As argued by Habermas (1975, p. 5), ‘crisis arises when the structure of a social system offers fewer opportunities for solving problems than would be required for the system to survive’. What link is there between this and the labour theory of value?

²³It goes without saying that Marxists who associate the feasibility of socialism with the labour theory of value will hardly accept this conclusion (Becker 1977, pp. 263–254).

²⁴As has repeatedly been observed, criticising capitalism without simultaneously making positive proposals is like combating capitalism with its own weapons: in the end, you will be on the losing side even though you seem to have been victorious (see, inter alia, Holloway 2005, p. 213). This is why we maintain that, provided Marxists devise an effective proposal for the establishment of a new kind of society, Marxism will gain strength and will be more alive than ever.

²⁵Marx's critique of political economy amounts to, in the words of Tronti (1966, p. 33) ‘the utter condemnation of everything that exists'.

²⁶The overriding importance of the prospect of a feasible revolution is confirmed by the fact that following the criticisms raised against the Soviet model and its serious crisis, some Marxists went so far as to rehabilitate utopian thought (Marcuse 1967, p. 10).

²⁷The categorisation of Marxism as a theory of revolution is accepted, at least implicitly, even by those who term it a ‘gospel’ or ‘creed’ of sorts (see, inter alia, Schumpeter 1942, p. 5; Keynes 1966, pp. 54–65).