This essays is excerpted from the Zed Press book, Realizing Hope

 

This chapter addresses the relationship between participatory economics and the theory and strategy of social democratic, Leninist/Trotskyist, and libertarian Marxist frameworks. Next chapter addresses parecon and anarchism. Chapter seventeen addresses parecon and broader left perspectives.

 

My discussions of anarchism and particularly of Marxism are contentious and controversial. It has seemed that my past presentations of this material have often failed to communicate my actual thoughts. To correct misinterpretation, here I argue positions from multiple angles and in multiple ways. This lengthens the delivery, but I hope readers will bear with it.

 

Marxism’s Features

 

Marxism is a wide and deep toolbox of concepts that label aspects of history and provide claims about their interrelations. Key to Marxism are the ideas that production and consumption are central to human existence, that accomplishing economic functions entails institutions or modes of production, and that modes of production in turn impose requirements that delimit virtually all outcomes and possibilities. 

 

As Engels famously summarized: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history. He discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, religion, science, art, etc. And that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art, and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which those things must be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.” 

 

Of course, for Marxists the economy isn’t the only factor affecting society, nor does influence run only one way. Instead, again according to Engels, “political, juridical, philosophical religious, literary, artistic, etc. development is based on economic development. But all of these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else has a passive effect. There is rather interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.”

 

Thus, history unfolds in light of the pressures and conflicts occurring largely in society’s technology and social relations of production. “At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production in a society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or what is but a legal expression for the same thing, with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”

 

Critical to the Marxist framework is the idea that in accomplishing economic functions the economy casts people into contending classes with different ownership relations to the means of production. Some people own means of production. They are capitalists, and gain income as profit. Other people own only their ability to do work, which they sell for a wage to the capitalists. They are workers, or wage slaves.

 

The conflict or class struggle between owners and workers in capitalism shapes all society’s aspects including politics, culture, and gender relations, so that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

 

In capitalism itself, capitalists seek to maximize their profit, both for their own direct benefit, and because to maintain their position entails that they compete for market share and for revenues to invest. Workers, in contrast, seek to earn as high a wage as possible, both to stay above destitution, and, when possible, to eke out a better existence. The capitalist pays as low a wage and provides the cheapest conditions for as much labor as he can extract. The worker seeks as good conditions for doing as little labor for as much wage as he or she can extract. 

 

The conflict that ensues between owners and workers over wage rates, unemployment levels, work conditions, and broader cultural and political policies composes class struggle and in turn contours the unfolding logic of capitalism. 

 

Capitalism thus reprises the class struggles of all past history in a specific and new manner. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, the guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” With the arrival of capitalism the class struggle becomes that of workers and owners.”

 

On top of these core Marxist conceptual commitments there arise additional insights and interpretations which inform diverse Marxism-based strategies. 

 

Marxist Economism

 

Do Marxism’s concepts highlight what’s most important and leave out only what’s peripheral? Do they reveal the roots of oppression? Do they conceive liberating relationships? Do they comprehensively inform activist interventions? Finally, is parecon entirely and comfortably Marxist, or is parecon a reaction to failings in Marxism?

 

Marxism’s virtues include that it tells us that economics is important (with which parecon concurs), it rejects capitalist ownership relations and profit-seeking (as does parecon), it reveals many horrible effects of markets (which insights parecon extends), and it highlights the importance of class dynamics (which parecon also highlights). So far, so good. But what are Marxism’s problems?

 

First, when real existing people utilize Marxism’s concepts they tend to systematically under-value and misunderstand social relations of gender, political, cultural, and ecological origin. Used under trying circumstances, Marxism tends to exaggerate in its users minds the centrality of economics and to insufficiently prioritize gender, race, polity, and the environment. 

 

Most Marxists feel that race, gender, polity, and environment are of course important and often even very important – but also think that non-economic features attain their importance precisely through their relations to economics. 

 

The lenses Marxists use to understand society are not confined to but are certainly rooted in attention to class relations. Marxists examine how economic relations affect classes and how class relations in turn affect potentials for change. Marxists in turn examine how race, gender, sexuality, power, ecology, and other factors impact class struggle by propelling or impeding working class gains, which, in turn, they believe, will auger gains of all kinds.

 

A pareconist perspective agrees that economics is a profoundly important aspect of society and that the class divisions and struggles economics produces are hugely instrumental in affecting the quality of our lives. But a pareconist, or at least this pareconist, sees that the same claim can be made for cultural relations, for sexual and gender relations, and for political relations. 

 

Rather than understanding the latter three arenas of social life and the divisions and struggles they engender largely, or even primarily, as they are affected by class, a pareconist perspective asserts that we need to understand each, and economics too, insofar as they are all affected by one another. 

 

Put differently, Marxism says that the mode of production of a society emanates a force field that affects all of society, often very dramatically. I agree with this claim and to me, in fact, it seems utterly uncontestable. But then I also agree with the feminist who says that the organization and relations of socialization and nurturance emanate a force field that affects all of society. And I agree as well with the multiculturalist who says the same thing about cultural and community relations, and with the anarchist who says the same thing about political and power relations. 

 

All these viewpoints rightly identify a locus of important influence, but each is wrong whenever it (explicitly or even just implicitly) denies the comparable importance of the other loci of influence. The conclusion is that there are at least four sources of profound influence in society rather than only one, as Marxism typically concludes.

 

The claim is that giving attention to matters of race, gender, authority, and also ecology primarily via examining their impact on and implications for class struggle often undercuts seeing their importance in their own right and compromises attention to their own dynamics. It may emphasize them but it will be mainly or even only in their economic implications. 

 

The mistake of "monism" – even when it is a very flexible and enlightened monism – is to tend, under pressure, to elevate one realm to predominance and lose track of the priority of other realms. The point is, if we prioritize economics and class as the primary focus of conceptual attention and raise its concepts above all others in importance, we will likely not only misperceive a more complex reality, we will also relegate other comparably important focuses to a wrongly subordinate position. 

 

The solution isn’t to reduce attention to economics, but to elevate attention to other spheres and to their mutually defining influences without presupposing any to be prior or dominant. To overcome Marxism’s over attentiveness and over elevation of economics would therefore require a twofold alteration the way most Marxists construct and utilize their world view. They would need to admit:

 

1.       That Marxism mainly conceptualizes economics and not all of society and history, and 

 

2.       That feminist, multiculturalist, and anarchist conceptualizations offer equally central insights into society and history, and in particular, that influences from other domains can centrally shape economic relations just as the reverse can occur. 

 

That is, for real world Marxist practice to be desirably multi-focused, Marxists would need to jettison their claims of an economic base pushing and pulling a social and cultural superstructure and instead highlight that gender, race, and political dynamics all affect what goes on in workplaces, allocation, and consumption just as significantly as economics affects what goes on in religions, racial communities, families, and governments.

 

Marxism would need to recognize all directions of causality instead of exclusively or even just primarily emphasizing only causality from economics to the rest of society, and would have to refine many of its concepts accordingly. 

 

This type of critique has in the past propelled feminists to create socialist feminism (to try to merge insights from gender-focused and class-focused analyses), and has led as well to variants of anarcho-marxism, Marxist nationalism, and other approaches, right up to frameworks that centrally address economics, polity, culture, and kinship on a par.

 

The upshot is that while the observation/criticism that Marxism has been overly economic is important, I don’t think it is devastating. Many Marxists accept this criticism already and all Marxists could relatively easily adopt the more complex formulation described above that incorporates that influences from race, gender, sexuality, and authority can mold the economy just as the reverse can occur and that groups defined by those other core features can be as central actors in historical struggle and change as classes can. If insufficiently highlighting and comprehending other spheres of social life in their own right were Marxism’s only problem, it wouldn’t cause me to reject Marxism, but to try, like others have, to incorporate new insights to it.

 

Marxism and Class

 

But an overly economic emphasis is not the problem of Marxism that I wish to feature in this chapter, partly because it is straightforward to correct and a great many Marxists have worked hard on doing so, and partly because it isn’t as directly germane to concerns about parecon as matters that I will now take up.

 

Indeed, suppose all Marxists soon achieve an enrichment and diversification of their concepts to incorporate race, gender, power, and also ecological influences as also primary. Would I be satisfied with such a renovated Marxism and then urge that parecon is a Marxist vision? 

 

I would certainly be happy about the change, yes, but no, I wouldn’t yet celebrate Marxism, because the pareconist perspective indicates that Marxism has a second much more damning and less tractable problem than over prioritizing economics. Marxism, ironically, not only over prioritizes economy, it gets economics wrong. 

 

On the one hand, in its orthodox variants, the Marxist concepts for explaining how economic inputs and outputs exchange misunderstand the determination of wages, prices, and profits in capitalist economies. Marxism’s conceptualization of relative valuations and wages tends to direct activists’ thoughts away from seeing how wages are largely functions of bargaining power and control, which are categories that the Marxist labor theory of value largely ignores, and toward accounts of labor hours and subsistence (which are categories the Marxist labor theory of value highlights), as if the latter are objective, numerical, factors. 

 

Likewise, orthodox Marxist crisis theory distorts understanding of capitalist economies and anti-capitalist prospects by theorizing intrinsic collapse where no such prospect exists, and by orienting activists away from the importance of their own organizing for change and toward presumed historic contradictions that will inevitably arise within capitalism itself. 

 

But here too one can imagine Marxists transcending these orthodox ills, like they can overcome the monism described earlier – as indeed many have. So, just as we assumed away an overemphasis on economics, let’s assume these two problems away as well.

 

The remaining problem with Marxism is that in virtually every variant, however flexible and enriched it is, Marxist class theory denies the existence of what I call the coordinator (or professional-managerial or technocratic) class and underemphasizes, or more often literally denies its antagonisms with the working class as well as with capitalists. This failing obstructs class analysis of the old Soviet, Eastern European, and Third World non-capitalist economies, and of capitalism itself. Worse, it interferes with attaining worthy goals. Let’s see.

 

Marxism rightly reveals that class differences can arise from differences in ownership. Capitalists own means of production. Workers own only their labor power, which they sell for a wage. The capitalist pursues profit by trying to extract as much work as possible at the lowest expenditure possible. The worker tries to increase wages, improve conditions, and work for as few hours and at as low an intensity as possible. This is class struggle. What’s the problem? 

 

The problem is that while this Marxist picture rings true as far as it goes, it only asserts, and never really proves, or even argues, that we should see property relations as the only cause of class difference. Marxism never investigates the possibility that other relations of work and economic life can divide people into critically important opposed groups with different circumstances, motives, and means. Marxism’s fatal weakness is that it ignores the possibility that factors other than ownership can also produce classes, and that overlooking additional possibilities compromises many core insights of the framework. 

 

In capitalism, for example, some employees monopolize empowering conditions and tasks and as a result have considerable say over their own jobs and the jobs of other workers below them. Also, other less powerful workers control virtually no assets beyond their own energies and as a result endure only disempowering conditions and have virtually no say over their own or anyone else’s conditions. The more powerful employees try to maintain their monopoly on empowering circumstances and greater income so as to continue ruling over employees lower down the hierarchy. 

 

Within capitalism, we thus have not only capitalists and workers, but in between these two classes, also a group of empowered individuals who defend their advantages against workers below and who struggle to enlarge their bargaining power against owners above. I call this the coordinator class.

 

A Marxist might reasonably look at this claim and ask why we should introduce a third class label for this intermediate group? Why not just say it is a strata of one of the other two classes?

 

I respond that we should given it a new class label because the position of those who monopolize empowering work isn’t just confused or contradictory. They aren’t workers with a slight difference from most other workers. They aren’t capitalists with a slight difference from most other capitalists. Nor are they some kind of amalgam of the two, or the bottom strata of capitalists merging into the top strata of workers, thereby occupying what some might call a contradictory position. Instead this group has its own well defined position, its own clear definition, and as a result, its own views and interests. 

 

Calling it the petit bourgeoisie, as some Marxists do, continues to narrow our thought in accord with the old ownership viewpoint. It pays attention to the wrong attribute of these people’s position – that they in some cases own a little but not too much capital – and it overlooks that something other than ownership is the source of this group’s class interests, and can even lead to a new form of class rule.

 

Parecon’s view, in contrast to Marxism’s, says that the coordinator class between labor and capital is defined by having a relative monopoly on empowering work. It controls its own situation to a great extent. It controls or defines the situation of workers below to a great extent. It works to enlarge and defend its comforts and power against capital above, as well as against workers below even as it sometimes also does the bidding of those above, of course. 

 

Who composes this class? Wealthy and powerful doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers, and professionals of many kinds. These are people who self-servingly see capitalists, by and large, as an annoying obstacle to the fullest elaboration of their personal genius. They are people who self-servingly see workers, by and large, as more or less dumb folks to be taken care of, and, of course, kept below.

 

At this point, the Marxist might ask, "What could possibly be the basis for political and social unity between a high level supervisor of the production process, the comptroller for the same company, a creative director at the advertising agency hired by that company, an engineer designer of the tools of the workplace, a legal partner at the company’s law firm, and the surgeon who works on them all, if they come to need it?"

 

My answer is that the coordinators all get their status, power, income, and identity from monopolizing empowering skills and knowledge, as well as from their access to daily levers of economic control and influence. 

 

What they have in common is that on average they all tell themselves that they have their considerable material and social advantages not because they rip off their greater wealth and status from others by monopolizing domineering circumstances, but because they are smarter than others. 

 

What they have in common is that they see capitalists as a painful impediment to the fullest manifestation of their capacities – though also, of course, that they frequently have to serve capital (like workers often do, as well). 

 

What they have in common is that they see workers as inferior and subordinate, as maybe worth saving and even lifting out of destitution, but as not worthy of having serious influence over economic life. 

 

And what they have in common can be, under certain historical conditions, that if they manage to eliminate private ownership they can run the economy without capitalists above them and with workers still below them. 

 

The still skeptical Marxist might then ask, "Under what circumstances would they all unite against both workers below and capitalists above? Surely you can’t mean they would do that." 

 

My reply is that yes, to publicly adopt such a stance would be suicidal, of course. Rather, what this class or its foremost elements would do if they wanted to usher in a new economy in their own interests is wage a class war against capital by identifying capitalism’s many horrors to facilitate appealing to all those who suffer capitalism’s indignities and impoverishment. In the course of the ensuing anti-capitalist struggles, however, the coordinator class, seeking its own domination and not just an end to capital’s rule, would monopolize into its own hands control over institutions, elevate its own culture and values, and impose its rule on more grass roots movements and new institutions, all as a kind of reflex of their self image and their image of others. In this way the coordinator class would wind up dominating the new society, not only theoretically as I have just described, but as has actually occurred in historical practice, in all countries where Leninists have taken power. 

 

The Marxist might then reply, "In the real world, you mean to tell me that you can actually imagine these coordinators uniting to overthrow capital and establish their own independent mode of production?"

 

Yes, I might then answer, I mean to say exactly that. Not in the trivial way that some might think, such as coordinators dressing up in fancy clothes and holding aloft their graduate degrees while standing behind banners saying capitalists suck and workers suck too, but in a social process that throws off the capitalists as the enemy due to the immoral exploitation capitalism wrecks on all citizens and particularly on workers, all while employing the working class as allies – really, as troops – and then selling out the working class once victory over capital is attained. Indeed, to my mind this is what Bolshevism did.

 

The key point of all this analysis regarding parecon’s relation to Marxist perspectives, is that this coordinator class can actually become the ruling class of a new economy with capitalists removed but workers still subordinate. 

 

The key problem this analysis raises about Marxism, then, is that Marxism’s concepts obscure the existence of a class which not only contends with capitalists and workers within capitalism, but which can become rulers of a new noncapitalist economy, most usefully called, I think, coordinatorism.

 

Finally, the absolutely damning point for Marxism is that this coordinator-class ruled economy is in fact historically familiar. It has public or state ownership of productive assets and corporate divisions of labor. It remunerates power and/or output. It utilizes central planning and/or markets for allocation. And it is typically called by its advocates “market socialism” or “centrally planned socialism.” It is celebrated, that is, as the goal of struggle in every serious Marxist economic text that gets beyond glorious economic rhetoric to actual institutional prescriptions for economic life. It has been imposed by every Marxist party that has transformed a society’s economic relations. Yet although this coordinatorism is prevalent in history, in Marxist theoretical literature, from its origins to the present, coordinatorism is barely conceptualized at all. When the actual system we call coordinatorism is discussed by Marxists, its class features are obscured.

 

Marxism and Vision and Strategy

 

It turns out that Marxism is counterproductive to attaining a desirable society in a few ways. 

 

First, and most easily overcome, is Marxism’s general taboo against "utopian" speculation. Interestingly, what this taboo tends to do in practice, like an ironically parallel anarchist taboo of the same sort, is to cause folks concerned about over-reaching into inaccessible details and especially concerned about authoritarianism, to foreswear vision entirely, thus leaving coordinator-inclined folks to take up prescriptive tasks alone.

 

Second, and also manageably overcome, Marxism tends to presume that if economic relations are made desirable, other social relations will fall into place. This leaves activists without any reason to generate vision of other spheres of social life.

 

Third, and a bit more troubling, Marxism confuses what constitutes an equitable distribution of income. The instruction that we ought to strive for "from each according to ability to each according to need" is not only utopian in being unattainable, even if we could do attain it, it would curtail needed information transfer obscuring the relative preferences people have for different economic choices. Moreover, it has, in any event, never been more than rhetoric for empowered Marxists, whose operational priority has been that we should seek "from each according to ability” and remunerate “to each according to contribution" (if not power). This is not a morally worthy maxim because it would reward not just effort but also genetic endowment and advantages from tools, conditions, and even luck. 

 

Fourth, and most damning and intractable, in practice and in its substantive prescriptions, Marxism approves hierarchical corporate divisions of labor for production and either command planning or markets for allocation, thus imposing coordinator class rule. 

 

In other words, the heart of the problem that should make a pareconist reject Marxism is that due to Marxism’s underlying concepts, Marxism’s economic goals amount to advocating a coordinator mode of economic organization that elevates to ruling status administrators, intellectual workers, and planners. 

 

Marxism uses the label “socialism” for this goal, of course, but this is to appeal to workers and other people of good will. When Marxists are in position to affect societal outcomes, Marxism does not, in fact, structurally implement “socialist ideals,” nor does it offer even in theory a vision that does so. 

 

The situation is analogous, Marx himself would surely point out, to how bourgeois movements use the labels democratic, free, and equitable, to rally support from diverse sectors to their capitalist agendas – even though, when implemented the agendas do not structurally engender truly democratic, free, or equitable outcomes. 

 

Finally, Leninism, which is a strategic orientation to win change, is a natural and by far the most frequent activist outgrowth of Marxism in capitalist societies. Marxism Leninism, however, far from being the "theory and strategy for the working class,” is, instead, the theory and strategy of the coordinator class due to its focus, concepts, values, goals and organizational and tactical commitments. 

 

Marxism Leninism employs coordinator class organizational and decision making logic and structure. Even against its advocates’ intentions, it imposes coordinator class rule.

 

Council self management is what the Leninist Bolsheviks destroyed in the Soviet Union. Remuneration for effort and sacrifice is denied by rewarding power or output, the typical approach of coordinatorist models. Balanced job complexes are obliterated by corporate workplace organization which imposes the coordinator rule that is present in all actual Marxist economies and substantive accounts of Marxist economic goals. Participatory planning is destroyed by markets and or central planning, which are also present in virtually all Marxist program and practice, thereby imposing the allocative basis for coordinator rule. 

 

Coordinatorism has roots in various Marxist and Leninist theoretical concepts and strategic commitments, even counter to the broad aspirations of most members of Marxist and Leninist movements, which is why these movements need to be transcended.

 

What if a Marxist or Marxist Leninist disavows economism and additionally enriches their framework with concepts focused on other domains of life, rejects failed economic aspects of the framework, and in particular rejects its two-class conceptualization and adopts the three-class view and also parecon as a vision? Do I then say okay, I embrace your type of Marxism? 

 

Yes, I in fact would happily do just that – but for one problem. At that point, I would have to wonder, what is gained by still calling the revamped framework Marxism or Marxism Leninism? These labels imply to virtually everyone who hears them very different views than the hypothetical person holds. Why not find a new label that can convey the new allegiances instead of tainting the new allegiances with the associations conjured to mind by old labels? 

 

I suspect the answer is that folks who call themselves Marxist and Marxist Leninist do so overwhelmingly to see themselves as part of a heritage – not the heritage of the actual systems that have been put in place and have brutishly curtailed options and even snuffed out lives and aspirations, and not the heritage of top-down authority and internecine sectarianism that often persists in Marxist Leninist oppositional organizations that have lacked power, but the heritage of courageous resistance and struggle from below, grassroots aspirations, and solidarity and mutual support that has existed among large populations seeking change. 

 

Well, I too wish to see myself in that heritage and to be worthy of helping it continue, but I am also concerned with the meaning of my words – not their meaning for me, and not their meaning for people who agree with me, but their meaning for the huge numbers of people who justifiably understand the words differently than I may mean them. And so, no, even if a particular Marxist or Marxist Leninist party makes all the changes noted above – something that could certainly happen – I would not join up just due to their use of the label, however much I would feel affinity for their choice and happily respect them and presumably ally with them.

 

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