Ana Cecilia Dinerstein - Open Marxism 4: Against a Closing World

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Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis

Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis

Edited by Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn, John Holloway and Kosmas Psychopedis

First published 2020 by Pluto Press

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Copyright Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Alfonso Garca Vela, Edith Gonzlez and John Holloway 2020

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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The previous three volumes of Open Marxism were published between 1992 and 1995. What a time that was! The Soviet Empire had collapsed, and with great fanfare capitalism was duly celebrated as not only victorious but also as the epitome of civilisation that had now been confirmed as historys end as if history maintains a class of dispossessed producers of surplus value in the service of vast wealth. History does not pursue its own ends and it does not assert itself in the interests of bourgeois civilisation, morality and profitability. History does not make society. Nor does it take sides. History as it actually unfolded was no history in any meaningful sense. It does not unfold. It is rather that, in the pursuit of their own interests, definite human beings make history, just as they make society. What eventually unfolded is what endures in the present. History was truly made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. About this there is no doubt.

Amidst the fanfare, the debt crisis of the 1980s had started to move from the global South to the global North, from the crash of 1987 via the third global recession in less than 20 years in the early 1990s to the various currency crises, including those of the British Pound and the Mexican Peso in 1992 and 1994 respectively. The Peso crisis coincided with the uprising of the Zapatistas in 1994. Then there was the emergence of China as a world power, founded on a labour economy that combined, and continues to combine, authoritarian government with the provision of cheap labour and disciplined labour relations. It was the time of the first Gulf War, the mere posturing of deadly might in search of a global enemy that was needed to secure the domestic containment of the querulous rabble, as Hegel put it when he remarked on how a successful war can check domestic unrest and consolidate the power of the state at home.

Since the early 1990s, with the passing into oblivion of the Soviet Empire, the entire edifice of Marxism-Leninism has crumbled. It had served as the official doctrine and the source of legitimation for state socialism and its various derivative ideologies that found expression in Gramscian or Althusserian Eurocommunism or in the manifold sectarian organisations that proclaimed their allegiance to Trotsky, Lenins military commander and suppressor of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, and bearer of an anti-Stalinist Lenin. Although these traditions continue to force themselves onto the critique of political economy, their history has come to an end. They no longer provide the ideological foundation for what is now yesterdays idea of the forward march of state socialism. To be sure, some still believe in the revolutionary party as a means of socialist transformation. Yet, in reality, the party is no more it had in fact been a mirage for a long time. It died in Spain during the Civil War and during the show trails in Stalinist Russia, and its morbid foundation perished finally in either 1953 or 1956, or indeed 1968. Like Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, Jean-Luc Mlenchon in France is just a ghost of yesterday. Neither is a Chvez or a Maduro, or indeed an Ortega and that is a relief. Both Corbyn and Mlenchon seek political power for the sake of justice in an unjust world. Instead of the critique of political economy, the endeavour now is to moralise, and lament by way of political philosophy conceptions of well-being.

In distinction, the Open Marxism volumes did not argue for justice in an unjust world by means of Leninist forms of state socialist planning of a labour economy or of social democratic reforms of a capitalist labour economy through progressive schemes of taxation and just ideas for redistribution. Nor did they argue in favour of hegemonic strategies for the achievement of political power on behalf of the many. They did not endorse the state as the institution of institutions. Rather, they understood that the production and realisation of surplus value is the purpose of capital and that the state is the political form of that purpose. The contributors to those volumes also understood that world market competition compels each nation state to achieve competitive labour markets, which are the condition for achieving a measure of social integration. The politics of competitiveness, sound money, fiscal prudence, enhanced labour productivity, belong to a system of wealth that sustains the welfare of workers on the condition that their labour yields a profit. In this system of wealth, the profitability of labour is a means not only of avoiding bankruptcy. It is also a means of sustaining the employment of labour, allowing workers to maintain access to the means of subsistence through wage income.

There is a fate far worse than being an exploited worker, and that is to be an unexploitable worker. If labour power cannot be traded, what else can be sold to make a living and achieve a connection to the means of subsistence? First, the producers of surplus value, dispossessed sellers of labour power, are free to struggle to make ends meet. Their struggle belongs to the conceptuality of capitalist wealth that is, money that yields more money. In this conception of wealth, the satisfaction of human needs is a mere sideshow. What counts is the time of money. What counts therefore is the valorisation of value through the extraction of surplus value. There is no time to spare. Time is money. And then suddenly society finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence to the class that works for its supper. Second, the understanding of the mysterious character of an equivalent exchange between unequal values, of money that yields more money, lies in the concept of surplus value. There is the purchase of labour power, and then the consumption of labour that produces a total value that is greater than the value of labour power. The equivalent exchange relations are thus founded on the class relationship between the buyers of labour power and the producers of surplus value. This social relationship, which entails a history of suffering, vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange between one quantity of money and another.