Abstract
Michael Lebowitz sets out a “triangular” vision of socialism that is the “inversion” of capitalism. (1) As against capitalism with its private ownership of capital by a small class, socialism consists of social ownership of capital, including human capital. (2) As against the despotism of the capitalist workplace, which exploits and alienates workers, socialism mandates worker self-management, breakdown of job fragmentation, solidarity, and the development of capabilities, “a condition for the production of rich human beings.” (3) In contrast to capitalist production, driven by maximizing exchange-value through markets and motivated by self-interest, production in socialism is geared toward use-values and ultimately the elimination of commodities and their replacement by public goods so that “productive activity is oriented to the needs of others, [thus building] both solidarity among people and [producing] socialist human beings.”
(1)-(3) are triangular in the sense they connect organically, that is, they are “mutually dependent and support one another.” This “partial charter for human development” is based on a paper Lebowitz wrote for Hugo Chavez in December 2006 when he directed (2006-2011) the Program in Transformative Practice and Human Development, Caracas, Venezuela. The charter pops up throughout the book, mantra-like, so that there can be no doubt about the heavy motif that guides the thesis of the book.
In (1), Lebowitz favors the term “social ownership” which opposes both private and “group ownership,” the latter referring to workers’ cooperatives. Workers’ co-ops reproduce many of the defects of capitalism because they do not go beyond profit-seeking and competition with other co-ops. So what does social ownership mean? Lebowitz is fuzzy here. “Social ownership . . . is an assertion that all living human beings have the right to the full development of their potential - to real wealth, the development of human capacity.” But this tells us nothing about the system of property rights, about who owns the means of production. It takes some deciphering to figure out what Lebowitz has in mind, which is state ownership. On the one hand, he says that “social ownership is not the same as state ownership,” but he also says that “the state is the owner of the means of production.” I think that what he means to say is that social ownership is not the same as state control free of democratic discipline. So Lebowitz, as I read him, is for state ownership and a planned economy under the direction of a democratic and decentralized polity.
What are these means of production that the state owns? Here Lebowitz adopts a controversial stance as he questions Marx’s dictum that under socialism workers, in addition to the income-in-kind they receive from the provision of public goods, get rewarded in proportion to work. This assumes that workers have a property in their labor-power, a component of the means of production, but Lebowitz takes exception. The private ownership of labor power is a “defect” that Marx relegated to the early stage of socialism and which would be overcome as socialism moves to communism; Marx thought that it would be transcended thanks to the development of the forces of production which provided the conditions for abundance. In contrast to Marx, Lebowitz argues that it should be overcome irrespective of the development of the forces. He “rejects the assumption that cultural development is inevitably determined by a given level of production,” and instead emphasizes the role of egalitarian ideas in forging the path to socialism and, ultimately, to communism. He calls this the “battle of ideas,” drawing on the work of Che Guevara, Istvan Mezaros, and mainly from passages skillfully culled from the corpus of Marx’s writings. For example, he cites Marx’s stage-skipping flirtation with the Russian mir and makes much of Marx’s appeal to the Paris Commune (1871) as a model of socialist democracy, though he overlooks Marx’s retrospective assessment of the Commune (his letter to Domela-Nieuwnhaus, 1881) that “the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be.” In other words, it was premature, as you would expect Marx to say in light of his succinct statement of historical materialism in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy which accords explanatory primacy not to ideas but to the development of the productive forces.
For Lebowitz, the state’s ownership of labor power authorizes it to determine its compensation, which is equal wages for unequal labor time, thus correcting Marx’s “vast understatement” of inequality resulting from the maxim “to each according to work,” which allows workers to cash in on the morally arbitrary basis of their differential natural endowments for which they are not responsible. Still, neither Marx nor Lebowitz takes up the question of whether relatively onerous, disagreeable, or dangerous labor merits compensatory pay. Is it “selfish” for workers to expect such compensation? Further, if the state owns workers’ labor power, what happens to freedom of employment? Is the state authorized to allocate labor in accord with its central plan? These questions go unanswered.
Why did Marx reluctantly advocate “to each according to work” for the transitional phase? He wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). Consistent with the voluntarist undercurrent running through his book, Lebowitz plays up the idea that people make history but forgets that in doing so they are constrained when framing and realizing their ambitions. That is why Marx puts up with the defective transitional distributive principle.
In (2), Lebowitz stresses “human development” as the goal of socialism. “Real wealth is the development of human capacity . . . of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as it is in its consumption.” Development of the forces of production, as measured in GDP, does not capture this, and Lebowitz gives a hands up to the work of economist Amartya Sen whose “capabilities approach” to human well-being bears some similarity to the humanist writings of Marx. But Lebowitz dismisses Sen as a “reformist liberal” because he stops at “broadening and equalizing opportunities” whereas Lebowitz wants his “solidarian society” to shape the outcomes of those opportunities through its political, economic, and educational institutions. The aim is to produce “new socialist human beings,” to “build the new man” (Che) by “consciously fostering institutional arrangements and ideological campaigns to support the reproduction of the new productive relations” (Lebowitz).
Accordingly, Lebowitz’s socialist alternative mandates worker control of enterprises as a way of creating “new subjects with new capacities.” This may include “several hours a day of instruction in worker management.” But suppose some workers are content to leave it to managers, subject to periodic direct and indirect elections, to run the show? Enter Sen’s liberalism, which gives ample room for individuals to choose what to do with their opportunities. Why is this objectionable, especially if one subscribes to the idea of “rich individuality?” Lebowitz’s version of socialism is not only an alternative to capitalism but to liberal socialism as well.
In (3), planning replaces markets. Lebowitz’s criticism of markets is mainly moral. Market exchange is motivated by selfishness and so violates the communitarian ethic of the solidarian society in which production “is consciously undertaken for the needs of others . . . . There is an exchange of not exchange values but of activities, determined by communal needs and purposes.” “The socialist alternative is to decommodify. Everything.” What he has in mind is a vertically integrated complex that follows primary production to final consumers. “An example might be a complex that includes milk production, the processing of milk products and cheese, plastic production for packaging, and a distribution process - with delivery to final consumers in schools and hospitals. As a vertically integrated process, there would be no place for prices between steps in this production chain . . . . Further, individual units within this complex would not have the option of producing and selling to whomever they want.” Unfortunately, this quick treatment of the calculation problem in socialist planning is all we get! The book is dead silent on market socialism and the decades-old debates about whether planning can work efficiently without some kind of price mechanism that mimics markets.
The last part of the book considers paths to get to Lebowitz’s version of socialism. He treats three hypothetical cases: (1) in which the battle for socialism has already been won, (2) in which that battle has hardly been fought and “capital rules the existing governments,” and (3) one upon which Lebowitz focuses, no doubt inspired by his stay in Venezuela, “where a government representing workers has been elected but the balance of forces favors capital.” In (3) the state taxes surplus value and shifts it to workers, opens the books of capitalist enterprises, and gives workers and their organizations the power to make transparent what capitalist accounting mystifies. The state, under these circumstances, makes despotic inroads against capitalists, and if the latter resist by going on capital strike, the workers’ state ups the ante by assisting worker struggles in the workplace “through police and military support for land and workplace occupations and seizures . . . and so allows the [revolutionary process] to proceed.”
The socialist state is a complex institution in Lebowitz’s view, and he has interesting things to say about it, in the context of (3). It is something of a dual state, the old one with its bureaucratic structure staffed by bourgeois carry-overs, and the new one based on worker and neighborhood councils, the latter constituting the “emerging new state.” Lebowitz sees a conflict of interests here and sides with the embryonic state, though at the same time he sees important roles for both the old-type state and for “the party” during the beginning of the revolutionary process. The battle of ideas is “not the product of spontaneity.” There “is need for leadership in the struggle for socialism,” which “mediates” the heterogeneity of the proletariat. This party is of a “different type” than the party of the former “actually existing socialisms” of Eastern Europe and instead one of a “new type,” one consisting of members close to the grass roots, always “learning from below,” like “guerilla units functioning under a general line.”
This is all very fine, but lacks important particulars. Is there to be only one political party in Lebowitz’s case #3? What about the structure of the state, e.g. separation of powers as among the legislature, judiciary, and executive? What do the institutional structures that work out political differences look like? This is not a book that details these important practical issues, but it is not designed to do that, so maybe my qualms are misplaced. The book is definitely worth a read, as is his more recent book, The Contradictions of Real Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), where he contrasts his vision of socialism to that of the former USSR.