Professor Richard Wolff on Capitalism and Socialism

[marmar]

Richard Wolff on Capitalism and Socialism: An Interview with C. J. Polychroniou

by Richard Wolff and C. J. Polychroniou.
Published on January 5, 2014

This article originally appeared at www.enet.gr

1. In a paper you co-authored nearly twenty years ago with Stephen Resnick for a co-edited book of mine, you highlighted the fact that here was a time when it was thought that societies can follow “one of two mutually exclusive forms. The first form, capitalism, is usually defined in terms of three key components: markets (determining prices and wages), private ownership of the means of production (including labor power), and, thus wage labor. The second, communism (or socialism), is generally defined as the absence of the same three components.” Ever since, you have been a leading advocate of the idea that these variables do not distinguish capitalism from socialism or communism, relying on a particular Marxist class analysis approach. Let’s start by asking you to highlight your understanding of class processes and class analysis.

In my analysis, capitalist and socialist are adjectives referring to class processes. The class processes are different from – other than – the processes that comprise ownership of property and also different from the processes of market exchanges, including the exchange between wages and labor power. Class processes are defined precisely as the producing, receiving, and distributing of surplus labor. It is these processes together that comprise a class structure. Thus, my approach differs from the traditional debates over capitalism and socialism by focusing attention upon a different variable that others choose to make the distinction between the systems. In my approach, capitalism and socialism or communism refer to the issue of class structure, the particular form of the processes of producing, receiving, and distributing surplus labor. Class processes so defined are interactive and interdependent with, but also irreducibly different from such nonclass processes as ownership (private, collective, or state), distribution (markets, command allocation, custom), and power (distribution of authority among individuals, levels of government, and so on).

2.If it is not wage labor, markets, and private property that determine capitalist class processes, what exactly is capitalism?

Crucial to my argument about systems is that there is no necessary or mechanical linkage between any of these factors and the presence of a particular form of the class process. It is not wage labor, markets, private property, parliamentary democracy, natural resource availability, or any other one or a subset of factors that are the key or essential determinants of, say, capitalist class processes. It is, rather, the ensemble of conditions, the totality of all the factors that interact and thereby generate the particular form of the class processes. So capitalism is that particular class process, i.e. organization of the surplus, in which those who produce the surplus are different people from those who appropriate and then socially distribute that surplus with the goal of reproducing that capitalist class process. In this way, capitalism is like feudalism and slavery. What differentiates capitalism from feudalism and slavery is the relationship between the surplus producers and appropriators. In capitalism, there is a contractual relationship (unlike ownership, as in slavery, or the personal relation of serfdom, as in feudalism) between surplus producer and appropriator via the wage system. But to push the argument to a logical extreme, if capitalist class processes can coexist in a society without wage labor, without markets and without private property, can this society still be called capitalist? The answer that flows from the definition I am advancing is, yes, if we can demonstrate that all the other social factors (other than wage labor, markets, and private property) impacting on its particular organization of the production, receipt, and distribution of surplus labor have overdetermined a capitalist form.

3. This is to say, then, that who predominates in state, economy and society, which has been the position of various socialists and communists, from Lenin to Lange and Sweezy, is not what differentiates capitalism from socialism?

Yes, exactly. What differentiates a systems is, as Marx showed, “how the surplus is pumped out of the producers.” If the surplus producers themselves collectively (i) determine the size of the surplus they produce, (ii) appropriate it, and (iii) distribute it socially, then you have socialism or communism as clearly differentiated from capitalism in which the surplus producers are precisely excluded from making that determination or that appropriation or that distribution. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://rdwolff.com/content/richard-wolff-capitalism-and-socialism-interview-c-j-polychroniou

[The Magistrate]

1. An Excellent And Useful Piece, Sir

[marmar]

2. Sometimes you kick, sometimes you get kicked......