Because the revaluation of value concerns the most fundamental ways in which we organize our lives collectively, the revaluation requires an emancipation of the forms of the state. To recall, there can be no spiritual life without some form of the state: some form of institutional organization of our life-activities governed by norms to which we have bound ourselves. As spiritually free beings, we have always lived and will always live in a state. There is not first a free individual who is then formed by a state. From the beginning, our freedom is formed by some kind of state—some kind of collective self-legislation—since we can make sense of who we are only in terms of socially instituted norms. Because the norms that govern our lives are not naturally given, however, we can challenge and change the forms of the state through revolution. Indeed, many such revolutions have already taken place and shaped our history, with the French Revolution being the most important for Marx.
The means required for a revolution depends on the historical situation, and Marx himself emphasizes that a revolution achieved through “peaceful means” of democracy is preferable to a violent one.54 In either event, the end—the purpose—of a revolution that emancipates us from capitalism must be the revaluation of value, which requires new institutional forms. Marx rightly calls for the overcoming of the state as a social form that maintains a capitalist division of classes. However, such a conception of the state is not its defining form (as Marx sometimes tends to assume). Rather, the state as an organ of competing class interests is a historically specific conception of the state, which can be overcome through the overcoming of capitalism. For life after capitalism to have any determinate form, we must reinvent rather than abolish the form of the state. As I have argued, the state as an institutional form of our lives—which can comprise a plurality of institutions—is not itself something that can be eliminated, since it is a condition for spiritual freedom to be possible.
As Marx himself points out, “the question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence that are analogous to present functions of the state?”55 I choose to describe the post-capitalist state in terms of a novel conception of democratic socialism—rather than communism—in order to underline that the commitment to democracy is indispensable for Marx’s critique of capitalism. As Marx rightly underlines, “freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.”56 To subordinate the state to society is to transform the state into an actual democracy. “All forms of states have democracy as their truth,” Marx writes, “and therefore they are untrue inasmuch as they are not democracies.”57 Emancipated forms of the state are thus required for what I call democratic socialism. Moreover, since capitalism is global, the overcoming of capitalism ultimately requires a global alliance of democratic socialist states.
As we will see in the next chapter, capitalism is incompatible with actual democracy. Actual democracy requires that our political debates and deliberations—as well as our forms of political representation—are based on competing conceptions of how best to serve the interests of society as a whole, rather than on competing private interests that are put forth in the name of society as a whole. For the same reason, actual democracy requires that our society is organized in such a way that there does not have to be an antagonism between serving our own interests and serving the interests of society as a whole. While the commitment to serve the interests of society as a whole will always be challenging and contestable, it is in principle impossible to sustain such a commitment under capitalism. Because of the social form of wage labor, democratic politics and democratic states necessarily serve as organs for representing class interests that are competing for control. We cannot actually deliberate on how best to serve the interests of society as a whole, since we must prioritize the private interests of capitalists. This prioritization is not optional, since under capitalism there can be no production of social wealth without the profits of privately owned enterprises.
All our democratic decisions regarding the distribution of wealth are thus constrained by the need to facilitate continued profiteering. Moreover, because the wealth itself is produced through unequal relations of production, the formal equality required for democracy is compromised in advance. The interests of capitalists who have the power to generate wealth for society will necessarily count for more than the interests of those who labor for a wage, even prior to any manipulation of the political process. Even the interests of wage laborers themselves are shaped by the interests of the owners of capital, since everyone who works for a wage depends on the continued growth of capital wealth in order to make a living.
For democracy to be true to its own concept of freedom and equality, capitalism must therefore be overcome. My aim is not to provide a blueprint for the institutional forms that will be required, since a blueprint would ignore that the specific forms of institutions must evolve through an ongoing democratic process. Nevertheless, it must be possible to specify the principles of democratic socialism, in light of which the specific questions of economic and political organization will have to be negotiated. Without such principles, the idea of democratic socialism is nothing but an abstract utopia with no actual claim on us. Moreover, the principles of democratic socialism cannot simply be posited but must be shown to be implicit in the Idea of freedom that is our historical achievement. Thus, in the following chapter, I derive the three principles of democratic socialism from the commitment to freedom and equality that we already avow. The principles of democratic socialism are not sufficient to determine which kinds of states and which kinds of institutions we need. However, the principles are necessary, in the sense that any kind of state and any kind of institution must be compatible with the principles in order to be democratic.
Democratic Socialism
I
From the beginning to the end of his work, Marx is guided by the commitment to freedom and equality, which come together in democracy. “Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution,” Marx writes, since only in democracy do “we find the constitution founded on its true ground; real human beings and the real people…posited as the people’s own creation.”1 Through the institution of democracy, we can achieve the profound secular recognition that we are responsible for organizing and legislating the form of our life together. Neither God nor Nature can justify the social order—only we can justify the values we promote and the principles to which we hold one another. By the same token, the form of our life together must be open to democratic negotiation. We cannot invoke religious dogma as the final word in a debate or as the founding authority of a law. We are not subjected to the law (as in religion) but subjects of the law. “In democracy,” Marx emphasizes, “human being does not exist for the sake of the law, but the law exists for the sake of human being, it is human existence.”2 In a democracy, we are answerable not to God but to one another. We have to give reasons for our conception of the common good and deliberate on the best means to achieve our goals together.
For Marx, the democratic revolution that began in the eighteenth century was an event of world-historical importance, which opened the possibility of real emancipation. Like his liberal counterparts, Marx recognizes civil rights—including the right of everyone to have an equal vote in democratic elections—as a necessary condition for a truly free society. For Marx, however, civil rights are not sufficient for actual democracy. For political democracy to be actual—for us to actually be able to negotiate the form of our life together—the purpose and practice of our economy must itself be a matter of our democratic deliberation. This is why capitalism and actual democracy are incompatible. Under capitalism, the purpose of our economic production is already decided. What matters above all is to generate a “growth” of capital in the economy. This purpose is beyond democratic discussion, since it is built into how we measure
our social wealth in the first place. We may discuss democratically how we should distribute our wealth, but how much wealth we have to distribute is determined by the growth of capital we are able to sustain in our economy. If there is a greater growth of capital in our economy, we have more wealth available for taxation and distribution. If there is a smaller growth of capital in our economy, we have less wealth available for taxation and distribution.
Accordingly—as long as we accept the capitalist measure of social wealth—the purpose of our economy will remain beyond any possible democratic deliberation. If our social wealth depends on the growth of capital, we have no choice but to promote the purpose of profit, since our wealth as a society depends on it. We can restrict the possibility of capital growth through various forms of legislation, but by the same token we restrict the possibility of generating a larger amount of wealth available for redistribution.
The critique of capitalism must therefore be aimed at the measure of value itself. This is why my previous chapter analyzed exactly how the capitalist measure of value is self-contradictory and inimical to democracy. Under capitalism, the measure of value does not reflect our actual social wealth—our socially available free time—since it does not measure our actual capacity to produce goods and reduce socially necessary labor time. Even when the necessary labor time in our society is reduced thanks to technological innovations, we cannot democratically decide which forms of labor should be available to pursue in our expanded realm of freedom. We cannot create new occupations on the basis of what would be important and meaningful to do for ourselves and for our society, but must find occupations that are profitable on the market, since only such occupations generate a growth of value in the economy. In effect, our social wealth under capitalism is not measured by actual productivity and surplus time. Rather, we are forced to measure our social wealth in terms of the surplus value we extract from the exploitation of living labor and transform into capital growth. We do not measure our real social wealth, which resides in how fast we actually can produce the goods and services we need and how much free time we actually can have to lead our lives.
For the same reason, the overcoming of capitalism and the advancement of democratic socialism require a revaluation of value, which I articulated in the previous chapter and will continue to develop here.
To begin with, democratic socialism cannot be achieved merely through a redistribution of wealth. As the pathbreaking Marx scholar Moishe Postone has shown, the problem with most forms of Marxism (and related left-wing political projects) is that their critiques are restricted to the capitalist mode of distribution and do not interrogate the measure of value that informs the mode of production itself.3 The production of value through proletarian-based labor is seen as a given condition, and socialism becomes a matter of distributing the wealth generated by proletarian labor in a more equal way across society. Socialism is thereby reduced to a mode of political administration and economic distribution, which leaves the mode of production and the measure of value intact. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, which managed to betray all of Marx’s fundamental insights. The Soviet legislation under Stalin literally changed the formulation of Marx’s core principle (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”) to the following: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor.” It is hard to imagine a greater distortion of Marx’s thought. As soon as the satisfaction of our needs depends on the contribution of our labor, we are back to the form of coercion that Marx sought to overcome through his critique of wage labor. Under Stalinism, the state effectively becomes one giant capitalist that wields its power over the citizens by forcing them to do proletarian labor in order to survive.
As Postone demonstrates, most forms of Marxism are ill equipped to provide the deepest form of critique of the Soviet Union and other allegedly socialist regimes. The problem with these regimes is not only that they failed to be politically democratic—a massive failure in its own right—but also that they failed to be socialist in their economic mode of production. Most forms of Marxism cannot grasp this point because they assume that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism resides between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. The wealth produced by proletarian labor is seen as potentially adequate to satisfy the needs of all members of society, and the critique of capitalism is restricted to a critique of the socioeconomic relations that prevent the wealth from being distributed in the right way.
As we have seen, however, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism resides within the measure of value that informs the mode of production itself. As long as we accept the measure of value that is based on labor time, the exploitation of proletarian labor will remain necessary for the production of wealth.
It is here instructive to consider the utopian vision of a socialist society proposed by the influential contemporary Marxist Fredric Jameson. In his book An American Utopia, Jameson claims to present a vision of life beyond capitalism, but he has no account of what capitalism is, since he never interrogates the measure of value as socially necessary labor time and never analyzes the contradiction in the capitalist mode of production, which is unavoidable as long as wage labor is the foundation of social wealth. Instead of engaging with the fundamental question of value, Jameson’s utopian vision retains the social form of wage labor and the concomitant necessity of proletarian labor. Indeed, Jameson advocates a universal conscription in the army, which would provide all of us with a “guaranteed annual minimum wage” and ensure that we all participate in the socially necessary labor that the army tells us needs to be done. Any democratic determination of the purposes of our social labor is absent from Jameson’s utopia. That we could conceive the purposes of production democratically—and participate in the socially necessary labor as an expression of our freedom—is not a possibility pursued by Jameson.4
For the same reason, Jameson’s notion of freedom is impoverished. Symptomatically, there are no institutions of freedom in Jameson’s utopia. All institutions that would determine the purposes of our social labor (including education) are consigned to the realm of necessity and run on the model of the army. The realm of freedom, by contrast, is for Jameson indeterminate. What counts as socially necessary labor is decided by the army, which rewards our participation with provisions for basic needs, and the rest is left to our arbitrary individual choices after working hours. When we are done with our required hours of labor under the supervision of the army, we are free to do whatever we want.
Such a view fails to grasp the conditions of possibility for leading a free life. The exercise of freedom requires a practical identity that cannot be invented out of nothing by an individual, but is formed by social institutions. To be free is not to be free from normative constraints, but to be free to negotiate, transform, and challenge the constraints of the practical identities in light of which we lead our lives. The question is not if our freedom will be formed by social institutions—there can be no freedom that does not have an institutional form—but how and by which social institutions our freedom will be formed.
The key to democratic socialism is to have institutions (including educational institutions and forms of political deliberation) that enable individuals to lead their lives in light of recognizing their dependence on others and on collective projects. Moreover, the key to democratic socialism is to have institutions in which we participate because we recognize ourselves and our freedom in their form. The participation in social institutions—including the social labor that we recognize as necessary to sustain our society—should not be secured by coercion but be motivated by our active commitment to participation. It should not be the job of the army or any other institution to force us to work. Rather, the task of our democratic society is to be organized in such a way that we are intrinsically motivated to participate in, contribute to, and transform its ongoing life, by virtue of having bee
n educated to exercise our spiritual freedom. The exercise of spiritual freedom must include the possibility of criticizing or rejecting the established forms of participation. Just as the institution of marriage is not an institution of freedom unless it grants the legal possibility of divorce, democratic socialism as an institution of freedom must grant us the practical possibility of refusing to participate in a given form of life—otherwise our participation will not be free but a matter of material need.
In contrast, Jameson has nothing to say about the values or principles that should inform our social institutions of freedom, and he does not even recognize that such institutions are needed. Rather, Jameson describes the realm of freedom as unconstrained by anything except individual, arbitrary choice. In Jameson’s utopia, collective projects of self-determination are operative only in the realm of necessity, whereas the realm of freedom is merely the liberation of individuals from constraint.
A more sophisticated version of the problem can be found in Postone. Unlike Jameson, Postone has a profound understanding of the problem of value under capitalism and its relation to the social form of wage labor. Nevertheless, Postone’s conception of freedom ultimately remains indeterminate and cannot account for the possibility of achieving a revaluation of value.
As Postone argues, capitalism creates the material conditions for its own overcoming through technological innovations that reduce the socially necessary labor time. For Postone the key to emancipation is the dead labor of technology, since it can liberate us from the need to expend our living labor on the process of production. Thus, Postone is able to avoid two classical mistakes in Marxist theories concerning the status of technology. On the one hand, technology should not be seen as something that alienates us from a natural form of labor or a primitive communism. All such forms of nostalgia are misguided and ignore Marx’s fundamental insight that the commitment to social freedom for all became possible because of the historical advent of capitalism. There has never been a natural form of labor for spiritual beings and a primitive communism is neither possible nor desirable. The labor of spiritual beings is from the beginning a matter of technology (some form of tools), and the overcoming of capitalism requires the further development of technology rather than its rejection. On the other hand, capitalism cannot be overcome through a linear continuation of the same mode of production, accompanied merely by a redistribution of the wealth generated by proletarian labor. The aim is not to glorify proletarian labor but to overcome it. The overcoming of proletarian labor requires a transformation of the mode of production itself, which should be based on the power of dead labor rather than on the value of living labor. Technological advances entail that more and more of the production time that is required for our goods can be separated from the labor time of living beings. By thus replacing living labor with dead labor in the process of production, we can overcome the capitalist measure of value in terms of labor time.
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