Election fever is on the rise. Paraphrasing Lenin, elections are those things when every few years we rise up as alienated subjects and entrust our lives to a bunch of the paid servants of capital. That makes us slaves of capital. Bourgeois parliament is a fig-leaf for bourgeois class rule in a state that is the “organising committee of the capitalist class”. Elections therefore only legitimate capitalist class rule in the name of democracy, which, when examined, turns out to be a fraud.
Yet elections only serve the purpose of keeping the wages slaves down because the wages slaves do not rise up. Of course that assumes that such slaves can recognise that they are slaves. Marx used the term ‘wage slaves’ to highlight both the essence of being ‘owned’ by capital, and the specific form of ‘free labour’, an apparent contradiction. Wage workers bodies are not private property in the sense of ‘pure slavery’. For example the Haitian revolution freed the slaves, but then enslaved all Haitians to pay the French slave-owners for the loss of their slaves. Under capitalism, wage workers own their own bodies, what they are forced to sell is their labour-power. They have to work for the capitalist and exchange their labour-power or perish since capitalists have appropriated all property as their private property.
So while a wage-labour is a form of slavery it is a special form that masks the consciousness of capitalist exploitation behind the veil of formal equality. There is no transparent relationship to owners that is clearly unequal as is the case of slavery. When the slave owner worked his slaves to death, the slaves rebel as in Haiti, overthrowing the slave owners and taking control of his property. Slaves who escaped into freedom in the mountains were called maroons, ‘free’ wo/men who produced what they needed on land they had commandeered.To be free they had to escape their existence as the property of slave owners. Of course we don’t discount the survival of modern forms of ‘pure’ slavery in the margins of capitalist society.
Wage-slavery, however, involves what Marx, not entirely ironically, called ‘free labour’ because it means the ‘free’ sale of labour power as a commodity on the labour market. Such ‘freedom’ meant that if exploitation existed it had to be a deviation from the norm – the result of unequal exchange where the worker was paid less for labour-power than its value. But according to the freedom junkies, market forces of supply and demand would correct this inequality and restore equal exchange.You will recognise that this is the basic ideology of bourgeois ‘freedom’, a la Hayek, the right to buy and sell commodities at their value. Since the market self-corrects there can be no intrinsic exploitation!
But, big but, if you define value as price set by market forces then you over-look the hidden truth that labour-power is a commodity different from any other. While the value of labour-power as a commodity, exchanges at its ‘price’, that value is not determined by supply and demand, but the cost of its social reproduction. Meaning, the labour-power used-up in the process of production must be reproduced by paying for its equivalent in other commodities consumed to replenish its capacity to work. If that is the case how do we explain the ‘surplus value’ that ends up as the profit of capital, the rent of landowners and the interest of banks? Marx addresses this problem in “The Holy Trinity” (Capital, Vol 3, Chapter 48, ‘The Trinity Formula.’) The distribution of income gives rise to three ‘revenue classes’, labour, capital, land – the ‘Holy Trinity’. Like the original Bible story, this is fiction diverting us from the truth.
Wages, rents and profits (minus interest) do not fall from heaven, they are all shares in the value produced by wage-slaves. As poor Mr Peel, a British settler in West Australia in the early 1800s proved, only one class produces value sufficient to reproduce itself, and a surplus to fill the pockets of the landlords, the capitalists and the bankers. Mr Peel took with him workers and machines (capital) to put to work on land he ‘acquired’. When the workers ‘shot through’ to go and work on their own land, Mr Peels machines rusted and his capitalist enterprise foundered. No revenue classes arose to fulfill the bourgeois idyll of the yeoman farmer. Mr Peel ended up as a land agent, clipping his commission from the theft of Aboriginal land. (Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 33, ‘The Modern Theory of Colonisation’).
So, inevitably, life itself continues to furnish the proof that wage-slavery is the fountain of all wealth. Nature supplies the means but labour converts it into goods, or commodities of value. But who would know because under capitalism, the form of slavery misrepresents its essence. Unequal production relations appear in the guise of equal exchange relations, Marx’s famous ‘fetishism of commodities’.(Capital Vol 1, Chapter 1. ‘The Commodity’). The appearance of equal exchange cannot explain the dependence of capital and land on wage labour. Marx’s Copernican moment was his discovery that labour-power is the only commodity that creates more value than its own value. Capital forces labour to work for longer than is necessary to earn the wage to produce profits and rents. Labour is deprived by capital’s ownership of private property to produce more value than the value of its own labour-power. And as capitalism develops this relationship it becomes more and more unequal as the proportion of surplus-value rises inexorably compared to the value of labour-power. Piketty’s moment, in contrast, was to snub Marx and render this sublime truth into a banal tome on income inequality statistics.
My point then, is that voting in bourgeois elections for parties of left, right and centre, can never do more than reproduce and legitimise this unequal relation between slave-labour and capital. Parties of the right wallow in their ‘Holy Trinity’ ideology; parties of the liberal/labour centre/left, want to reform ‘unequal exchange’ and so legitimise wage-slavery as trivial, passing or non-existent. Only revolutionary parties recognise that bourgeois parliaments and the whole apparatus of the capitalist state have to be overthrown. This may involve a long process that requires standing for parliament, and proving through experience that the working class can never escape its wage-slavery on the parliamentary road. Arising out of this process will come a real mass working class party, that stands for socialism as the collective ownership of the means of production and sharing of the results of production to meet the needs of all.
Dave Brownz is TDBs guest Marxist blogger because all left wing blogs need Marx.
If you are going to write in Marxian terms your audience will leave in droves. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about Mr Peel in the 1800s.This same message, which I agree with , could have been written in every day colloquial English , and used contemporary examples, and would reach a far wider audience!
Pete, give it a go. I am sure that TDB would benefit from a blog that reaches a far wider audience.
Thanks for the job offer Dave,but I am already engaged on the DB ,as a poster.I am just giving you the benefit of 33 years I have spent educating pupils and workers. Ages ranging from 3 to 73 . The secret in my opinion is to not construct a system and then try to fit the recipient into it .It is to start with the individual or the group, and to tailor what you communicate to their experiences,their aspirations. If it is relevant to them and you gain their interest ,you can then start to build on this and to lead them in the direction you want.It has to be contemporary.Lenin gained a following by promising “peace, land and bread” ,absolutely relevant to his situation. Incidently I was recruited into a Marxist group in 1968. I did not know that it was a Marxist group until several weeks after I joined , however their message reflected my alienation in language relevant to me. Keep up the struggle!
Pete those are all good points. Thanks. I became a Marxist about the same time as you. Will try to flesh out this post in following posts.
Its time for a radical change as we had when the 1930’s generated “The new deal” and then Egalitarianism which is when I was raised through a stormy time of right wing resistance Sid Holland and his 1951 Wharf strike which forced Dad as a “black-listed picket sticker” Holland forced me and our family to leave Auckland and we take our hat off to those freedom fighters who followed to make our country better until Holland’s replacements turned up again to haunt us all as they do now.
Yes it’s time to rise up again.
Marx was wrong in the fact that the lumpenproletariat is the true revolutionary class
Castro, do you really think that workers who steal from other workers are part of a revolutionary class?
John A Lee led the way in the 1930 Labour movement. He was a prolific writer and among many texts he generated was a widely distributed booklet on the debt finance system that gives the banks money and power to control countries and their politicians.
The banks defeated the Labour party before they could nationalise the money system. Banks have increased their wealth and power since.
http://www.wow.com/wiki/John_A._Lee
Pepe recognised the stupidity of having rich men in Govt.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/mujica-rich-people-politics_n_6036892.html
Interested, but can’t read Marx at my age. Just to be smart-arse, how much did Lenin dismissal of elections do for the ‘Russian Empire’ ? Much rather the social-democratic tradition on reflex. Persuasion for the people’s dominion. The quiet kindness of Chekhov has been proved better than the flaming ideologies of Tolstoy and Gorky. Scandinavia is a persuaded place, in defence.
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