For Postone, however, such a transformation does not require a revaluation of value on our part. Postone claims that under socialism “a new social mode of production will be based upon a new technology,”5 with the result that “not only the goal of machine production but the machines themselves will be different” (emphasis in the original).6 Postone does not acknowledge that such a social transformation requires a transformation of our normative understanding of the purposes of social production. Material forces of production cannot by themselves transform the measure of value that shapes our conception of social wealth. If our machines will be different it is not only because our technological abilities will be different, but because we will design the machines for a different purpose. A difference in purpose is a normative difference, which cannot be reduced to material conditions, since machines cannot by themselves determine the purpose of their production. The purpose of production is intelligible only in light of a measure of value that cannot be derived from the machines themselves. Thus, our normative purpose necessarily informs how we reproduce our material conditions. For example, under capitalism many of our technological devices are designed to break sooner rather than later, since it is more profitable for the producer if we are forced to buy a new device. Our technological know-how is not developed and employed in service of the practical purposes of our lives, but in service of maximizing profit. Under democratic socialism, by contrast, our research into new forms of technology, our designs of actual machines, and our actual process of production will all be different because we are producing for the sake of increasing socially available free time rather than for the sake of generating profit.
In Postone’s story of the transition from capitalism to socialism, however, historical agents do not have the power to change anything. In Postone’s account, historical agents are one-sidedly conditioned by transformations in the material mode of production. He does not address what is required of us to overcome capitalism and what we will have to do to sustain our emancipation when we have achieved it. Postone rightly emphasizes that the possibility of emancipation depends on the resources of material production. But he fails to grasp that the actuality of the struggle for emancipation—and the continued striving that will be required even after emancipation has been achieved—depends on the normative commitments of historical agents. As a result, Postone’s notion of the realm of freedom is indeterminate. His only concern is that we shall be free from submitting our living labor to the process of production, but he offers no account of what we will be free to do and why our freedom matters. The only distinguishing feature of socialism in Postone’s account is that the machines will take care of the process of production, so that we will not have to do anything determinate.
Such an indeterminate conception of freedom is incompatible with democratic socialism. The point of leading a free life—both individually and collectively—is not to transcend the realm of necessity but to be able to negotiate its relation to the realm of freedom. No matter how productive dead labor may become, it will always require at least the living labor of our planning the purposes and directing the operations of technology. Furthermore, the value of dead labor itself depends on our normative commitments. It is far from given that we will want to replace living labor with dead labor as much as possible and in all areas of necessary social labor. For example, even if we could design machines to take care of the sick and the elderly, we may hold that there is an intrinsic value in having care provided by other beings who care and who can understand suffering. The principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is not the imposition of an anonymous collective will, but the condition of possibility for genuinely democratic deliberations regarding what matters to us and how we should care for one another.
II
The condition of possibility for democratic socialism is the revaluation of the capitalist measure of value. The revaluation of value makes it possible—as I will show in detail—to pursue increased productivity and profound technological advancements without being committed to economic growth understood as the accumulation of capital. We are committed to increasing the wealth of our society, but we no longer measure social wealth in terms of capital growth. Rather, our wealth is measured in terms of our actual production of goods and our socially available free time.
The revaluation of value is the most important aspect of the immanent critique of both capitalism and liberalism. For all their professed faith in our freedom, liberal thinkers have never been able to conceive that we can have a progressive, scientifically and technologically innovative society that is not based on the capitalist measure of social wealth. Yet, as we will see, the major liberal thinkers of political economy—Mill, Rawls, Keynes, and Hayek—unwittingly concede that the capitalist measure of wealth distorts the values to which they themselves are committed.
The basic premise of liberal economic thought is formulated in Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which asserts that “the laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths….It is not so with the distribution of wealth. That is a matter of human institutions solely.”7 Only the distribution of wealth is treated as a political issue that depends on our institutions and historical commitments, whereas the production of wealth is seen as obeying a natural law that we cannot change. The fact that our conception of value is a normative notion (not a natural given) is thereby ignored. Far from being a neutral standard of measure, our conception of value is a historical commitment that shapes how we plan and pursue production. That we measure our social wealth in terms of capital growth—which entails that the aim of our economy is the increase of capital wealth—is not a natural necessity but a norm to which we hold ourselves. Moreover, the norm is self-contradictory, since the means are treated as the end. Under capitalism, we produce for the sake of production and we accumulate for the sake of accumulation.
In order to resolve the contradiction, liberal thinkers of political economy are led to dream of what Mill called “the stationary state.” This would be the moment when we have accumulated enough wealth to let go of pursuing capital growth and instead have time “to cultivate freely the graces of life.”8 Versions of such a dream can be found in Rawls and Keynes (both of whom are heirs to Mill), but they fail to understand that the dynamic of capitalism will never allow such a moment to arrive.
For example, Rawls argues that the prerequisite for a good society is not the pursuit of profit and the accumulation of surplus value but rather “meaningful work in free association with others.”9 The phrase is virtually a quotation from Marx’s Capital, even though Rawls himself does not seem to be aware of it. Marx’s key description of an emancipated society in the first volume of Capital is “an association of free human beings, working with the means of production held in common,” so that the material process of production “becomes production by freely associated human beings, and stands under their conscious and planned control.”10 As Marx goes on to explain in the third volume of Capital, the freely associated producers “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power.”11 The aim of such collective self-governance, I argue, is to provide more time for the development of our spiritual freedom as an end in itself.
The crucial part of Marx’s argument is the democratic ownership of the means of production. Such democratic ownership is decisive for the actual possibility of a society that would privilege meaningful work in free association with others. As long as the means of production are privately owned, the growth of capital—rather than the creation of meaningful forms of labor—will be the aim of the system as a whole, regardless of what our individual intentions may be. Rawls holds that we may arrive at a point when “real saving (net increase in real capital) may no longer be necessary,”12 but he does not grasp that such a transformation wou
ld require a different economic system. When Rawls objects to the principle that “real saving and economic growth are to go on indefinitely, upwards and onwards, with no specified goal in sight,”13 he is objecting to the very principle of capitalism. Yet Rawls remains committed to maintaining the economic system that is based on the principle he rejects, since he thinks capitalism is necessary to generate the state of wealth.
The same contradiction can be traced in the work of John Maynard Keynes. While Keynes supports capitalism, he openly acknowledges that it is an economic system which leads us to elevate “some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.”14 Indeed, Keynes dreams of the day when “we shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value”:
The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.15
In spite of acknowledging our economic system as a pathological form of life, Keynes holds that we must refrain from recognizing the capitalist measure of wealth for the distorted form of value that it is, since capitalism will be necessary for at least another century in order to bring us to the level of economic wealth that we need. Even though the capitalist way of life according to Keynes himself is a form of mental disease, which makes us participate in activities that are at least semi-criminal and semi-pathological, we have no choice but to obey for the time being, since only capitalism can deliver the goods that will set us free. “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair,” Keynes writes, “for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight” (emphasis added).16
Keynes wrote these words in 1930. We will soon have walked in the tunnel of economic necessity for the additional one hundred years that Keynes envisaged would be required to set us free, but capitalism cannot lead us into the daylight. On the contrary, even though our material wealth is greater than ever before it is also more unevenly distributed than ever before and even those who possess astronomical amounts of capital wealth are still seeking to accumulate even more. This is not an accident but a dynamic that is intrinsic to capitalism. The accumulation of ever more capital wealth as an end in itself—with its necessary exploitation of living labor and its recurrent crises due to overproduction—is not a temporary phase of capitalism but its operating principle.
Keynes, by contrast, does not grasp the contradiction in the capitalist mode of production and the pernicious dynamic it entails. “The course of affairs will simply be,” he assures us, “that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been removed.”17 Such a development could indeed be possible, but it would require democratic socialism. A continuously increasing collective liberation from the realm of economic necessity is only possible if we measure our social wealth in terms of our actual capacity to produce the goods that we need and our actual capacity to reduce the socially necessary labor time. Under capitalism, however, the measure of our wealth is not our actual capacity to produce goods and reduce socially necessary labor time. We do not produce goods for the sake of practical purposes but for the sake of generating profit. This is why we can have housing crises and homeless families even when we have produced millions of vacant apartments, which are left empty because they cannot be sold for profit. Likewise, under capitalism we do not reduce the socially necessary labor time in order to increase the socially available free time, but in order to extract more relative surplus value from living labor. This is why the reduction of socially necessary labor time under capitalism does not lead to solutions regarding economic poverty but generates the problem of unemployment.
Keynes himself identifies the problem of “technological unemployment,” which he defines as “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”18 For Keynes, however, the problem of technological unemployment is only due to “a temporary phase of maladjustment,”19 which will eventually lead us to resolve our economic problems. He does not understand that unemployment is a positive feature of the production of capital wealth. A surplus population of the unemployed is essential to the extraction of relative surplus value, for at least three reasons. First, the reduction of socially necessary labor time through technological innovation necessarily leads to unemployment, since fewer workers are required in the process of production. Second, the unemployed have to accept less pay to find a temporary job and thereby allow capitalists to keep down the general level of wages. Third, the surplus population of the unemployed is highly useful for the irregular rhythms of capitalist production, since the unemployed are available for employment when an increase of production is profitable and can be dispensed with when production needs to be decreased for the sake of capital gain.
The dynamic of capitalism, then, is not oriented toward solving the problem of unemployment, but actively benefits from the existence of unemployment. Moreover, under capitalism we cannot transform the negative value of unemployment into the positive value of free time to lead our lives, since our measure of value is labor time. Keynes’s claim—that we must endure capitalism because eventually it will set us free—is untenable. The increase of capital wealth cannot liberate more and more of our lives from the realm of economic necessity, since the exploitation of wage labor is the only source of the surplus value that leads to a “growth” of capital wealth.
Hence, the attempt to achieve social justice through the redistribution of capital wealth is inherently contradictory. The more welfare policies and state regulations that prevent the exploitation of living labor, the more restricted are the possibilities of extracting surplus value, and the less “wealth” is available to distribute in the economy. To take a striking example, when health care, education, and other public services are run by the welfare state, they are not sold as commodities that generate a profit that is reinvested as capital, which means that they do not contribute to the “growth” of our social wealth as measured under capitalism. Inversely, when these public services are privatized and commodified—transformed into a matter of buying and selling for profit—they contribute to the growth of capital wealth. This is the economic rationale for the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and deregulation of the job market. As long as we accept the capitalist measure of wealth, social democratic reforms will tend to reduce the wealth that they aim to distribute more equally. For the same reason, social democratic policies will be vulnerable to the neoliberal critique that they cause the economy to shrink and eliminate jobs that are vital for those members of society who are most in need and deserve the chance of social mobility. Simply to put the unemployed on welfare is not a viable long-term solution for anyone. This is not to say that we should accept neoliberal reforms and deregulations, but that social democratic reforms must be understood as a means toward the end of democratic socialism.
Accordingly, I make an analytical distinction between any form of social democracy and the notion of democratic socialism that I will elaborate. I do not define these two terms—social democracy and democratic socialism—in direct correspondence with any of their various historical meanings. Social democracy in my sense is not limited to welfare state politics and my notion of democratic s
ocialism is not reducible to any previous visions of socialism. Rather, my analytical definitions are the following. What I call social democracy comprises any form of socialism or Marxism that limits itself to redistribution and does not grapple with the fundamental question of value in the mode of production. Democratic socialism, by contrast, requires a fundamental and practical revaluation of the capitalist measure of value.
During the twentieth century, social democracy developed into a “soft” form of capitalism, whose crowning achievement was the welfare state. I myself grew up in one of the most successful welfare states (Sweden), which converted the massive economic growth after 1945 into a distribution of wealth across society. While my grandparents were poor peasants in northern Sweden, my parents could ascend to stable middle-class lives thanks to free public education and a booming economy. When I grew up, everyone in Sweden received free health care and free childcare, and all education including university was free. It was the pinnacle of a development that started in the nineteenth century, when workers began to organize politically and gradually improved everything from labor conditions to voting rights and public services. Social democracy, however, restricts itself to transforming the mode of distribution and remains dependent on the capitalist mode of production.
This Life Page 32