Capital & Class. - 1979. - Issue 7

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE DIVISION OF THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT : WORKERS AND POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE FRANKFURT AREA 1929/1930 James Wickham

How could the working class movement split when confronted by the obvious menace of Nazism? This paper argues that this split, represented by the 'social fascism' line of the European communist parties in the late 1920s, cannot be adequately assessed by a political critique of the workers parties or by a sociological analysis of the composition of the working class . Instead it develops an historical analysis of the formal and informal institutions of the German working class movement which breaks down the artificial dichotomy between 'organisation' and 'spontaneity' . This analysis reveals how the decline of informal class organisations in the mid-1920s created a situation in which the 'social fascism' line could become a self-fulfilling prophecy .

Increasingly British socialists are claiming that it is possible to learn from the rise of Nazism over forty years ago how to fight the growing threat of the National Front in England today . Obviously there are similarities between the two situations : historically high unemployment, capital re-structuring, political crisis within the bourgeoisie itself . However, not the least of the differences is the fact that in Germany before 1933 there existed two mass parties which claimed to represent the German working class-the KPD (Communists) and the SPD (Social Democrats) two parties which both refused to undertake any joint action against the Nazis . This paper attempts to explain how this mutual antagonism came about and how it could be sustained in the face of apparently obvious evidence of its fatal consequences . This will involve taking as the object of enquiry not the political parties as such, but the working class movement itself. Here we are immediately on uncharted territory, for while socialists continually talk of 'the working class movement', it is by no means clear



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what this actually is. Working class political history is usually written either as a history of political institutions (parties, trade unions etc .), or as the 'social history' of the bases of these formal institutions . Accordingly, after a brief historical outline of the main developments of working class politics during the Weimar Republic[1 ] which suggests the relevance of this focus, the second part of the paper attempts to 'theorise' the concept of the working class movement : subsequent sections examine political organisation in one local area of Germany primarily in the period 1929/1930 . The local focus is important, because it is only at this level that it is possible to answer the questions which the stress on the working class movement raises-namely the nature of the 'rank-and-file' situation in which political organisation occurs . 1 . THE WORKERS, THE PARTIES AND THE MOVEMENT The victory of Nazism was at the same time the defeat of both the largest communist party and the largest social democratic party in Europe . The SPD, founded in 1875, had been the largest party of pre-War social democracy within the Second International, with more than 1 m . members by 1914 and polling 34.7% of the vote in the 1912 elections to the largely powerless Reichstag (parliament) (Hunt, 1970, p . 2) . Like most of the other parties in the Second International, in August 1914 the SPD rallied to the support of 'its' nation, but by 1917 a minority had split off to form the USPD (Independent Social Democrats) on a platform of opposition to the War; within the USPD the Spartakusbund, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, formed an explicitly revolutionary left-wing which in December 1918 declared itself the German communist party and became one of the founding sections of the Third International . Despite these divisions, the period from November 1918 to October 1923 in Germany can be characterised as one of 'working class offensive'-a period of mass movements which repeatedly frontally challenged the power of the bourgeois state and a period in which the strike rate reached never-to-berepeated levels . The November Revolution which ended the War took the form of Rate (councils or soviets) that were set up in almost every town . The council's members were drawn from all three working class political parties and they controlled the administration and supervised, even if they did not replace, the authorities . The final suppression of the councils during 1919 was followed in 1920 by a right-wing military putsch, defeated by a universal general strike supported by all three parties-a strike which in the Ruhr area culminated in an armed workers' rising . In 1921 there was another workers' armed insurrection in Central Germany ; in mid-1923 another general strike forced the resignation of the right wing government of Chancellor Cuno, at a time when arguably the KPD had the support of the majority of German workers (Rosenberg, 1970, p . 137) . Although the autumn of the same year saw the first openly fascist attempt to seize state power (Hitler's 'beer hall putsch' in Munich,)[2] at the same time the army (with the toleration of the SPD leadership) forcibly deposed the state governments of Saxony and Thuringia where a coalition between the KPD



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and the local left-wing SPD was openly forming workers' militias . The KPD's attempt to launch a 'German October' in autumn 1923 had been a complete fiasco,[3] but after a brief and equally disastrous 'ultra-left' period under the leadership of Ruth Fischer and Ernst Maslow the party consolidated its strength . again, membership for example rising from 95,000 in 1924 to 130,000 in 1928 and the share of the vote rising from 9% in December 1924 to 10 .6% in 1928, both members and voters being overwhelmingly working class . For its part the SPD, which since 1922 included the right wing of the now defunct USPD, was in government from 1928 and had in the same year a total membership of over 0 .8m . and a popular vote of 29 .8% . Although both members and voters clearly included a large petty bourgeois element, it is clear that the majority of them were also drawn from the working class . Purely in terms of votes and members then, both KPD and SPD) remained major political forces during the years of relative political and economic stability between 1924 and 1929 . However, the subsequent period was to bring not a revitalised working class offensive, building on this apparently existing strength, but working class defeat . In the renewed political crisis which roughly coincided with the world-wide Great Depression from 1929 onwards, the Nazi party developed for the first time into a mass movement, its votes rising from 2 .6% in 1928 to a peak of 33 .9% in July 1932 (Lipset, 1963, p . 141), a growth which was at minimum facilitated by the conflict between the SPD and the KPD . The SPD, ejected from government in 1930, clung desperately to its policy of 'the lesser evil', tolerating increasingly reactionary governments because of its fear of admitting the Nazis into the state and essentially treated the Nazis and the Communists as equally dangerous extremists . Conversely the KPD, following the Comintern theory of 'social fascism', declared that fighting the SPD was at least as important as fighting the Nazis, and, just like the SPD, refused to countenance any attempts by its members to co-operate with the rival party against the fascist threat . This brief chronological account highlights two important differences between the period of working class offensive and the two subsequent periods . Firstly, the period of working class offensive was one in which the mass movements were always larger than the political parties involved in them : the movements dominated the parties, and not vice versa. Secondly, solely in the first period did what can only be called successful political innovation occur-only in the period of mass movements was it also possible for new organisations to form which subsequently became mass parties . This rather obvious linkage suggests however a perhaps less obvious conclusion : in order to explain in any situation the policies which parties adopt and their members actually follow, it is necessary to examine not the parties as such, nor their social basis, but the wider movement within which the parties are located . This movement can after all be thought of existing not just as the 'mass movements' of strikes and demonstrations, but as that whole informal and usually uncharted political world within which socialists talk, agitate and organise . Since this political world undergoes changes just as important as either the policies of the parties . or the

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economic and social situation of their supporters, it is to specifying what such an understanding of 'the working class movement' involves that we now turn . 2 . THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT[4] Any account of the final defeat of the German working class movement by Nazism has to be able to explain the 'ultra-left' policy of the KPD . This is not to place all the blame for Nazism's success on the communists, as contemporary social democratic accounts tend to do, nor is it to claim that the SPD leadership itself was particularly willing to co-operate with the KPD, even if only in a defensive alliance against the Nazis . The analysis of the conjuncture of 1929/1930 starts with the problem of the KPD simply because this party claimed to be able to lead both the fight against fascism and the fight for socialism : any assessment of KPD policy has to explain how, given the anti-communism of the SPD, the KPD came to adopt a policy which in retrospect made achievement of its aims impossible . As will become clear, formulating such an explanation raises general problems of the analysis of working class politics which are hardly confined to the problem of the KPD in the Weimar Republic ; at the same time, if such an explanation involves recourse to concepts more familiar in sociological than strictly marxist discourse, this is because one remarkable weakness of conventional marxist theory is precisely its inability to analyse the forms of working class politics in specific conjunctures . Normal accounts of social fascism, like most accounts of any other specific form of working class politics, usually rely on a varying mixture of two in fact opposed arguments . On the one hand there is what might be called an economistic approach, as for instance in studies in the 'mass society' tradition (cf . Barbu, 1956 ; Kornhauser, 1960) . The mass unemployment of the Great Depression is seen as dividing the working class into two opposed camps of employed and unemployed workers, organised politically in the SPD and the KPD respectively : politics are explained in terms of an assumed economic situation, from which political action is simply derived . In fact, a more accurate description of this argument is that it is sociological, since it assumed that the employed and unemployed formed two distinct social groups which different parties merely reflected . The empirical problems with such an argument are clear : it is easy to find counter-examples outside of Germany in the Depression where mass unemployment led to political apathy rather than revolutionary politics, [5] just as it is clear that within Germany the membership, let alone the electorate, of the SPD and KPD were not simply identical with employed and unemployed workers . "At a theoretical level, the sociological argument assumes that 'the unemployed' can be treated as a given social group, and further, as one which is automatically radical without the actual politics of this radicalism having to be further examined . By contrast, what will be called the 'political' argument operates the other way round, explaining the politics of the KPD purely in terms of the decisions of the leadership and treating the social basis of the party as unimportant (cf . Weber, 1969 ; Bahne, 1976) . Consequently, it becomes impossible to ask why a particular



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policy should actually have been accepted by the party membership, since these are seen as carrying out whatever orders they receive from on high . In practice most accounts use a mixture of these arguments, yet if both arguments are theoretically untenable, one because it reduces politics to the mere expression of social situation, the other because policies are unrelated to the situation of their adherents, then merely adding the two together will not help-it is necessary to change the very terms of the discussion within which the two positions are the opposing poles . Before outlining how this can be done, it will be useful to consider two influential recent marxist works, each of which expresses with particular clarity one of the two arguments-firstly Poulantzas' Fascism and Dictatorship, and secondly Roth's Die andere'Arbeiterbewegung . Poulantzas sees the policy of the KPD as one position within the general line of the Comintern, a line which is for him characterised in its entirety as an 'economistic deviation', that is to say, the assumption that the advance of the productive forces ensures the ultimate victory of socialism, and closely linked to this, that capitalism can be reduced to a simple contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat . Within this overall perspective, the apparent opposites of the strategies of 'Popular Front' and 'Class Against Class' were simply right and left wing variants of a common theme, the choice between which was in the last resort determined by the situation of the class struggle in Russia itself. Poulantzas' discussion of Comintern theory is important, because it suggests how in many ways the conventional Trotskyist critique rests on similar assumptions to the position it criticises . However, the restriction of the analysis to the explicit pronouncements of the Comintern entails certain problems . Firstly, Poulantzas assumes that the Comintern leaders' actual policies were the same as what they were announced to be . Yet this is untenable . For example, there is considerable (and long available) evidence that the leaders of the Comintern, unlike perhaps the average KPD militant, did not in fact consider revolution in Germany to be a realistic possibility at the end of the Weimar Republic . Further, the Russian determinants of KPD policy can hardly be reduced to a deviation within Comintern theory . However much the KPD and the Comintern might inveigh in public against the 'reactionary monopoly capitalists', in fact for the foreign policy of the Russian state the main aim was the prevention of a Franco-German alliance . Accordingly, these same reactionary monopolists were potential if temporary allies since they were revanchist and Francophobe, while the SPD was necessarily the chief enemy because of its commitment to 'fulfilment' of the conditions of the Versailles Treaty (cf. Weingartner, 1970, esp . p . 21 f, pp . 77ff.) More seriously, since Poulantzas locates the origins of social fascism in Russia, he, like conventional histories of the KPD, is unable to explain why such a policy could have been supported, or at least passively tolerated, by more than a quarter of a million KPD members : the 'Bolshevisation' of the KPD legitimates treating the party in isolation from the working class of which it claimed to be a part . This weakness cannot be overcome merely by stressing the effects of the SPD's participation in the Great Coalition government of 1928-1930 and the linked increased



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repression of communist opposition within the trade unions-both factors which are claimed by Lehndorff to have pushed the KPD towards the social fascism theory . Just because the social democratic and trade union leaderships shifted rightwards, this does not by itself mean that KPD members automatically had no realistic option but to treat these organisations as inherently reactionary . It was after all an SPD minister who used the army to smash the councils in 1919, it was an SPD minister who was largely responsible for defeating the Ruhr rising in 1920, but none of this made KPD members refuse to co-operate with members of the SPD at local level, or refuse to work within the trade unions, yet by 1929 many KPD members were prepared to do both . Clearly, this problem cannot be tackled by arguments which concentrate solely on policies without considering the class to which such policies were intended to appeal . It is this that makes, relevant the contribution of recent German socialist historians who have examined the internal structure of the working class .[6] Thus, in a pathbreaking and extremely influential re-analysis of the course of German working . class history, Roth has argued that the history of the class is the history of its continual division by capital through the creation of a privileged, skilled and reformist section-that section of the working class upon which all the official organisations are based . By contrast, it is in the 'massed working class', the unskilled and semi-skilled workers exposed to the direct command of capital, workers who are often foreigners, always culturally and politically unintegrated, despised by the conventional political organisations and neglected by traditional socialist history, that the real revolutionary force of capitalism lies . Roth's 'history from below' has certainly rescued from the contempt and even ignorance of conventional historians the mass of unorganised, unskilled and even apparently 'unpolitical' workers . However, as it stands, the argument is in fact the mirror image of that of Poulantzas, for Roth treats questions of political theory and strategy as the direct expression of a particular social group-the division between reformist and revolutionary politics merely reflects the division between privileged and unprivileged workers .[7] Because Roth argues in this way, and because in his rather cursory discussion of the final years of the Weimar Republic, he treats the unemployed and the unskilled 'massified' workers as socially identical, it would seem legitimate to take Roth as presenting a marxist version of the automatic radicalism of the unemployed argument criticised above . The first problem with Roth's approach is that he assumes that only the actions of the 'other working class movement' really matter .[8] Thus, in a surprising convergence with the official Comintern analyses of the final period of the Weimar Republic situation, Roth sees this as a time of renewed mass offensive in which the mass of unskilled and unemployed workers again move onto the attack . Yet this not only completely exaggerates the importance of the strikes and unemployed demonstrations which did occur, but more importantly, it fails to notice their key feature, namely their isolation from the bulk of the class . Secondly, Roth has an inadequate theory of organisation .[9] A



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revolutionary struggle, so it appears, is one which directly challenges the power of capital, and in turn is defined as any struggle which takes place outside the official organisations of the working class. Strikes which occur outside the official trade unions are seen as automatically challenging the division between economic and political conflict which such organisations institutionalise-'wild' or 'unofficial' strikes are de facto 'revolutionary' . This fetishism of 'spontaneity' operates to prevent any investigation of the actual organisational form of these struggles-it is simply assumed that because there were no paid bureaucracies and written records, such struggles were spontaneous . While amongst German socialist historians, Roth has been the first to pose the question of the political significance of divisions within the working class, he does this by counterposing the elite workers to the mass of workers, and, like an old-fashioned conservative historian, he sees the masses as precisely a mass-unorganised, leaderless, impulsive, elemental -the categories are the same, merely the moral evaluation is reversed . The arguments of both Roth and Poulantzas turn out then to operate within the same conceptual space : the polarities of leaders and led, organisation and spontaneity . Instead of adopting the conventional solution, the eclectic combination of the two positions, it is necessary to break down these dichotomies, and to focus on the organisation of the working class movement itself. The organisation of the working class movement because, against Roth, however elemental class struggle may appear, it always involves organisation and at the same time is never the movement of all members of a specified social category . The organisation of the working class movement because, against Poulantzas, class struggle is never the private property of specific institutions, not even of revolutionary parties . Such an approach takes as its starting point neither policies nor social bases, but the everyday activity of militants . Immediately, this makes clear that organisation can hardly be treated as restricted to the activities of institutions such as unions or political parties, for these are only the formalised pinnacle of a potentially much wider network of activity . Accordingly, the term working class movement must be taken as referring to all resistance to capitalist domination and exploitation which is both collective and explicit . To make clear that what is involved is a social movement, it is useful to distinguish between institutions and quasi-institutions . Institutions refer to formal organisations with a codified organisational structure, a defined membership and often paid officials . The institutions of the working class movement are centrally then the political parties and the trade unions, together with their ancillary organisations . Further, in Weimar Germany these institutions also included the massive workers' sporting and singing clubs, for these too were formal organisations (complete with their own full-time officials) which were explicitly linked to working class political positions . Quasi-institutions by contrast are less formalised and range from shop stewards' committees and tenants' associations (some of which become institutions in the full sense of the word), through organisations such as factory delegate meetings to friendship networks and other 'informal' contacts. All of these involve political organisation -they are all



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ways in which people come together to resist together . Defining the working class movement in this way is important for two reasons . Firstly, it overcomes many of the problems associated with the notion of 'class consciousness' . Not only does it analyse locatable practices rather than imputed ideas, it also overcomes the perennial problem that 'working class' political action never actually involves all members of 'the working class', but nearly always also involves non-workers as well (cf . Hindess, 1977) . Taking the working class movement, and not the working class as such, as the object of analysis dispenses with the problematic notion of class subjects . Secondly, this approach allows us to break down the whole dichotomy between spontaneity and organisation, which is largely the dubious legacy of leninism within marxist political theory . It allows us to grasp the full political importance of Gramsci's claim that spontaneity as such does not exist, and restore to their rightful place everyday organisational activities without falling into theoretical spontaneism . [ 10] However, just as it is important to treat the working class movement as wider than official institutions, it is equally important to delimit it . The working class movement does not include forms of resistance which are either individual, or more importantly, subcultural, nor is it the same as the concept of 'proletarian public' developed by Negt and Kluge . Not only do these authors essentially treat 'public' as an extension of 'consciousness', but the concept is continually treated as including questions of life style, so that the domain of the political is dramatically over-extended . Forms of adaptation and resistance to capitalism such as either the traditional extended working class family or contemporary forms of youth culture may well be actually more of an impediment to the smooth accumulation of capital than a well integrated trade union movement (cf . Hall and Jefferson, 1976), but this 'resistance' is largely 'unconscious' . It does not have the distinguishing feature of a social movement, that of an organised practice orientated towards the achievement of a (however limitedly) different state of affairs . The working class movement, in contrast then to working class culture, involves explicit resistance . As such, despite the rhetoric of its members, it is not the class itself : the world of the working class movement is the world of the rank and file militant attempting to mobilise support for economic, political and ideological change . This stratum of militants is variable in a number of ways . The crucial questions for a materialist analysis of the origins and effects of social fascism concern not just the number and social location of these militants, although this is obviously important, but above all the organisational form of the working class movement which they made up . Firstly, it is necessary to examine the degree to which a unified working class movement existed before the advent of the social fascism line . This is not, it cannot be stressed enough, a question merely of the degree of co-operation between the SPD and KPD at a party level, but of the extent to which it was possible for party militants to co-operate with each other across party boundaries . To the extent that this did occur, what forms did this co-operation take and what was its quasi-institutional basis?



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To what extent, in other words, were there quasi-institutions which enabled such co-operation independent of the parties themselves? Further, in order to gauge the effects of social fascism, it is necessary to know what the policy of social fascism meant for these quasi-institutional links : the division of the working class movement for which the policy of social fascism is often blamed can only be said to have occurred if in fact it made such 'informal' co-operation impossible . Secondly, to what extent was the working class movement independent of the political parties as such? To the extent that militants could operate within a quasi-institutional area which was outside of the control of any one political party, they would have had a power basis to which the leadership would have had to respond . For example, if KPD oppositionalists had no other area of activity open to them apart from the KPD itself, then if they were expelled they would be faced with the alternative of inactivity or joining the SPD, for forming a new and competing n political party would be an unrealistic possibility . In other words, to the extent that the working class movement in its entirety was actually co-extensive with the political parties, then opposition within them could be relatively easily over-ridden by the party leaderships . Thirdly, what was the relationship between the working class movement and the different sections of the working class itself? Did above all quasi-institutions exist which spanned the different economic divisions within the class, such as between unskilled and skilled, between employed and unemployed, even between men and women? To the extent that this was the case, then revolutionary politics would have a realistic chance of reaching wide areas of the class, but to the extent that this was not the case, then such social divisions could also become political divisions and revolutionary politics could be encapsulated in the ghetto of one particular section of the class . Obviously, to begin to tackle such questions in historical research involves methodological as well as theoretical problems . After all, one reason why the history of the working class is written so often as a history of institutions and of formal ideologies is that this is so much easier, even if the unfortunate result is inevitably that official definitions of politics and organisation are thus accepted . Such problems are particularly acute in the case of Weimar Germany, where the very strength of the working class movement involved massively organised institutions, continually churning out documentation of their own existence . As a result, the existence of the movement itself, apart from its institutional pinnacles, is not nearly so clear as in the British case, where the working class movement, because weaker, was also less institutionalised, and so its existence was and is paradoxically clearer . Nonetheless, the conventional sources of local political history-above all newspapers and police reports-can be used to reconstruct the form of the working class movement in Weimar Germany . This will allow an analysis of social fascism which goes beyond both the 'political' critique of the KPD's explicit theory and the 'sociological' analysis of the party's social basis . Assessing the strategy of social fascism within this perspective involves gauging the strategy's effects not on 'working class consciousness',



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but on the organisation of the working class movement itself . The KPD's effectiveness against fascism then was the extent to which the party could unify and extend the movement and in so doing overcome the divisions which rationalisation and subsequent mass unemployment tended to create ; the KPD's effectiveness as a party of socialist transformation was the extent to which it enabled political practices that aimed at the achievement of socialism to be hegemonic within the working class movement itself . As we shall now see, the KPD completely failed to achieve such ends . Instead, it systematically exacerbated existing pressures towards the division of the movement and hence towards the isolation of the party, even though it was these same pressures-in interaction with the policies of both the SPD and the KPD itself-on the organisation of the movement which also explains the undoubted attractiveness and 'rationality' of social fascism to many of the KPD's own adherents . 3 . THE KPD AND THE PRE-CONDITIONS FOR DEFEAT The essential pre-conditions of the KPD's policy of social fascism, and hence of the party's ultimate defeat in 1933, were the changes that had occurred within the working class movement before the onset of renewed political and economic crisis . As this first section of the local study of the Frankfurt area will now attempt to demonstrate,(11 ] between 1923 and 1929 theree were major alterations on the forms of organisation of the movement itself, in the relationship between the movement as such and the KPD and the SPD, and finally in the relationship between the movement and the working class . That is to say, the first stage of an explanation of social fascism lies not just in the evolution of the KPD's own strategy, nor merely in economic changes as such, but in how these interacted to produce changes within the working class movement itself . Recent work on the KPD in the Weimar Republic, and in particular the important study of unemployment and rationalisation by Eva-Cornelia Schock, has tended to argue that the KPD was already both socially and politically isolated by 1929 . This argument however has to be heavily qualified . Thus it is clear for example that during this period the party was by no means merely a party of unemployed workers : by 1927 not only were a majority of members employed, but 62% were also trade union members; in the party's Hessen-Frankfurt regional area indeed this proportion stood above the average at 70% .(12] Like elsewhere in Germany, during the period of relative stability in the Frankfurt area the party had made considerable gains, in particular outside the city itself . Thus both in adjacent Offenbach, a town based on small scale production in the leather and metal industries, and in nearby Hanau, an entirely industrial town centred around predominantly small-scale metal-working, the KPD played an important role in local town politics and above all in local trade union affairs, in Hanau controlling the local branch of the DMV (the metalworkers' union), in Offenbach that of the leatherworkers' union . In Frankfurt itself the KPD was much less influential than this in trade union affairs, but this did not mean to say that it was politically



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isolated . After the defeat of the mass movements of 1923, the KPD was still able to initiate such popular mass campaigns as the solidarity movement with the British General Strike in 1926 (a campaign which culminated in a meeting of 20,000 in the city's largest hall), the campaign for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, and above all the referendum movement for the expropriation of the property of the old princely families . By 1928 the SPD fraction in the city parliament was increasingly distancing itself from the mayor's policy of liberal and progressivist municipal expansion, and it was possible for the fraction chairman, Karl Kirchner, to be seriously considering the policy advocated by the left wing of his party-a local alliance with the KPD .[13] Furthermore, and not to be underestimated, although the SPD controlled the 'cultural' organisations such as the workers' sporting clubs and the workers' singing clubs, and indeed ensured that they received municipal subsidies, these were open to KPD members and definitely provided an arena which could be regarded as the common meeting ground of the mass demonstrations and the everyday club life of workers' recreational associations then ensured that the 1,300 members which the Frankfurt city KPD claimed in 1929 were hardly isolated in terms of their political contacts . However, this list of activities also indicates the potential weakness of the KPD, and here Schock's thesis of the importance of changes in unemployment after 1923 is borne out, even though it needs to be complemented somewhat . All these activities occur in organised arenas which are completely separated from immediate production : organised political communication between KPD and SPD members was located increasingly outside the factories, while both within the factories and within the trade unions the KPD was powerless . From 1918 through to 1923 the central arena of Frankfurt working class politics had been the Betriebsrateversammlungen factory delegate meetings)' where representatives from all the factories joined significantly by representatives of the unemployed) had met in public . These meetings had been the quasi-institutional basis of the series of revolutionary and semi-revolutionary upsurges of the period forming, for example, the core of the general strike called by the KPD in support of the socialist governments of Saxony and Thuringia . How this movement was defeated is important for later developments : the SPD got the strike called off by mobilising the official shop stewards of the metalworkers' union against the unofficial factory delegate meeting . [14] After this, such meetings never recurred . The organisational change that occured in the period of stabilisation was the 'officialisation' of factory organisation : after the defeat of 1923, organised communication between factories occured solely through the trade unions, and in parallel to this, the locus of wage negotiations moved 'upwards' into the hands of full-time trade union officials . One crucial precondition for this process was the changed economic situation in the metal industry, the key industry in the city . Up until 1923 the industry had been in export led boom-gaining easy foreign orders, employers continually expanded production on a largely quantitative basis, and faced with the extreme shortage of skilled labour, tolerated a high



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degree of informal shop floor control over immediate production and granted wage demands relatively easily . The boom in the metal industry also affected other industries : with a general labour shortage, the wages policy (or lack of it) in the metal industry was a source of continual tension within the employers' organisations as the metalworkers became wage leaders in the area and individual metal firms granted wage demands rather than face loss of orders. Further, the boom meant not only low unemployment and a continual demand for skilled workers, it also enabled a high degree of mobility, in particular of skilled workers, between the factories of the area . Young workers who had just finished their apprenticeship could move from one factory to another to gain greater experience in their trade and better wages, political militants dismissed from one factory could be sure of getting another job elsewhere almost immediately . In other words, on the basis of their non-factory specific skills and the full employment, the metalworkers of Frankfurt were independent of any one particular employer, and this was the pre-condition for the strong factory-based organisation of that period . [15]

From late 1923 onwards the situation changed dramatically . Employment collapsed at the end of the year, revived slightly in 1924/1925 and after another major relapse, revived more strongly for a brief period for

most of 1928 . Although in both periods of revival there was full time working (i .e . a 54 hour week), and in 1928 even some over-time was being worked, the situation remained qualitatively different to that of the previous period . Firstly, and easiest to document, there is the very extent of unemployment which, as Schock rightly argues, now clearly became a threat for all workers in the industry . According to the local office of the metalworkers' union (the DMV), in December 1925 over 7,000 metal-

workers were dismissed, a further 2,000 laid off temporarily ; in 1926 there were 10,000 workers less employed in the local metal industry, which would have meant that employment in the industry had effectively been halved! Although as the table below shows, these claims were slightly exaggerated, employment did clearly fluctuate dramatically . Even more important, both the fluctuation and the overall decline in jobs were largest in the two sectors where both wage militancy and trade union organisation had previously been strongest, namely machine-building and cars . Secondly, as the result of increased competition and concentration within the industry, there was the closure of a series of smaller factories,

such as the Veisawerke, closed in March 1927 after the firm had been taken over by Siemens and production moved to Berlin . Thirdly, there is of course rationalisation within production itself . Although it is impossible to make any definite overall generalisation about the extent and effects of rationalisation within so variegated a metal industry as that of Frankfurt at this period, the DMV at least complained that women were now replacing men on many jobs (prima facie evidence of 'deskilling') and that many factories were now employing women for the first time . Before however the consequences of these economic changes can be seen, it is necessary to examine also the role of the political parties, in particular the USPD and KPD . The situation of full employment combined



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Employment in the Frankfurt Metal Industry 1925-1932 (1925 = 100)

1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932

ElectroTechnical 100 (6,784) 83 .9 84 .4 90 .5 100 .0 96 .0 78 .1 60 .6

Machine Building 100 (7,717) 62 .9 74 .2 90 .4 74 .6 77 .2 41 .1 26 .8

Autos, Typewriters 100 (7,754) 72 .3 74 .0 80 .0 78 .1 56 .2 40 .9 53 .4

Metal Products 100 (6,134) 61 .6 81 .2 83 .4 121 .2 97 .2 75 .9 68 .0

Total 100 (28,389) 70 .4 76 .2 86 .1 91 .8 80 .9 63 .0 51 .0

Source : calculated from Industr-und Handelskammer Frankfurt a .m ., Jahresberichte (relevant years) . In brackets : absolute figures for 1925 . with the continuing political crisis and (towards 1923) accelerating inflation provided the basis for important political effects of the strong factory organisation within the metal industry . Behind the delegate meetings of the factory workers stood the factory work-forces as an organised political force . Thus it is striking that up to 1923 (but not afterwards) the mass demonstrations always took the form of the workers leaving their factories early and marching en bloc to a central meeting place . Workers who were employed in the metal industry at the time still today stress (perhaps with some exaggeration) the unity and the resulting political power of the work-forces : employers for example did not dare to take any reprisals for political strikes . Although this rank-and-file strength was a constant of the period from the end of the War until October 1923, it was accompanied by decisive shifts in political allegiances . From about 1917 onwards the UPSD was clearly the leading political force amongst the shop stewards of the industry : it was on the basis of contacts between them for example that the party organised the initital seizure of local political power in November 1918 (cf . Sender, 1940, pp . 99ff, Lucas, 1969, pp . 16ff) . Some measure of the importance of the metalworkers for the USPD is indicated by the fact that in the local elections of March 1919 fully 35 of the party's 95 candidates were metalworkers, a proportion never reached subsequently by the KPD, let alone the SPD . During 1919 the local USPD consolidated its hold in the DMV when its candidates won all posts in local union elections, despite a vicious campaign by the SPD complete with allegations of ballotrigging . However, when the USPD split in 1921, all the leading local DMV functionaries rejoined the SPD, and the KPD was never able to subsequently seriously challenge the SPD's control of the union apparatus . While in the period of inflation this made effectively no difference to the power of the factory workforces who were able to force the union into continual militant wage bargaining, this shift did provide the basis for the defeat of 1923 .



14

CAPITAL & CLASS

As we have seen, the immediate isolation of the KPD in October 1923 occurred through the SPD pitting the official trade union organisation against the directly elected factory delegates, a move which immediately underlined the division between employed and unemployed since, while the latter were able to participate in the central factory delegate meetings, they had of course no formal or informal influence on the shop stewards

themselves . After the defeat, many party members in Frankfurt, as elsewhere in Germany, responded to this immediate political isolation by moving to positions which were close to those of five years later . Many left the unions in disgust, some of them now(!) began secretly to gather weapons, and in general it is clear that the new `left-wing' leadership of Ruth Fischer and Ernst Maslow had the support of many at least of the party's members (cf . Abendroth, 1976, pp . 61ff) . Indeed, it took the intervention of the Comintern and its effective deposition of the 'ultra-left' leadership to change the party's policies (Flechtheim, 1968, pp . 228ff) . In one way this episode shows that the Comintern by itself can hardly be held solely responsible for every ultra-left position within the KPD, for clearly the policy was this time adopted against the Comintern's wishes. However, unlike after 1929, there was no way in which the left-turn could be construed as successful by either local militants or party leaders-membership and votes slumped disastrously ; the party's involvement in mass actions of any sort became non-existent . Quite probably this setback by itself would have ultimately brought about a change within the KPD even without the intervention of the Comintern . It is equally clear that this brief left-turn exacerbated the weakness of the KPD which had shown itself in 1923 : its vulnerability to counterattack by the official union organisation within the factories themselves, resulting from the party's lack of influence within the unions at least at local level . The situation in 1924 however was particularly disastrous, for now the rejection of the union by many KPD members went with an economic slump which by itself meant a decline in trade union membership . Significantly, decline in trade union membership was most pronounced within the union of the metalworkers : in Frankfurt DMV membership had reached an all-time peak of over 29,000 in 1922, falling by the end of 1923 to 14,600 and by the end of 1924 to a low of 10,600 : while in 1922 over 40% of all Frankfurt trade unionists had been in the DMV, by 1924 this proportion had fallen to nearly 18% . These economic and political processes together destroyed the metal industry as a basis for the KPD . The new instability of employment plus the SPD control over the union machinery together ensured that quasiinstitutions such as the factory delegate meetings could no longer exist, and meetings of shop stewards now took place entirely on the instigation

of the union leadership . While this much is clear, it also appears that movement of workers between the factories, in particular movement of young skilled wokers, also declined, and this, so oral evidence suggests, meant that politically based contacts between the factories through the circulation of individual militants also diminished . As far as the sphere of immediate production was concerned then, militants could now operate within the union or within the factory based organisations of their party



SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

15

(e .g . the factory cells of the KPD), but nowhere else . Further, should militants be dismissed, they now were unlikely to be 'replaced' by other militants . Take for example the situation in the Adlerwerke, the largest metal factory in the city with a militant tradition dating back at least to the major metal strike of 1912 . In 1921 the factory had been 'purged' of communist cadres after the very strength of the party within the factory had enabled the party to call a partial strike in solidarity with the 'March uprising' ; while these workers could not return to Adler, they were to some extent replaced by other communists . When however in August 1924 the firm announced plans to lay off 1,500 workers a communist meeting within the factory was attended by only 100 and the dismissals proceeded without any opposition and indeed with the explicit agreement of the unions and the official Betriebsrat (factory council) members . Although in 1929 the factory was, at least in its car production section, the best trade union organised car plant in Germany with 97 .3% of the car workforce trade union members, there is no evidence of any effective KPD activity in the factory after 1924. The example of Adler illustrates a tendency noticeable within the KPD in the whole of Germany, and suggested in the HessenFrankfurt region by the relative importance of Offenbach and Hanau for the party's trade union work : even though the party regained ground amongst employed workers, its basis now shifted to the smaller factories . These changes also affected the nature of trade union organisation . In the metal industry as a whole during the period of stability there were in the Frankfurt area only a few minor strikes in smaller factories . Certainly in 1929 There was a general increase in trade union activity, and not just in the metal industry-an official strike of the municipal workers, militant wage movements in the railways and in the chemical industry . However, these all occurred within the framework of the official trade union organisation : thus although the DMV regional committee faced considerable opposition to its acceptance of a final arbitration offer in 1929 (the offer being itself an improvement on the employers' original proposals), this opposition was enacted solely within DMV meetings . The trade union, in other words, became the only basis for 'economic' conflict . During the period of stabilisation then, the decisive changes within the working class movement were not in the number of militants as such, but in the form of the movement . Firstly, its organisational basis shiftedaway from the unofficial quasi-institutions, based largely on the factory workforces of the metal industry, and into the official institutions, the trade unions, the political parties and the sporting and singing clubs . Within this new context KPD and SPD members were still united in the trade unions and the cultural associations, but links between them at a quasi-institutional level could only remain at the most informal level of all, namely friendship and family connections . This meant, secondly, changes in the relationship between the movement and the political parties, for now political activity was focussed on the parties, on whose policies the unity of the movement now depended . Since the 'Bolshevisation' of the KPD meant that party theory increasingly saw the force for revolutionary change as solely the party, this was a change which the party was utterly



16

CAPITAL & CLASS

unable to theorise, for the question of mass influence was now posed in terms of the party on the one hand, the class on the other . Thirdly, the officialisation of the movement meant that now almost the only linkage between it and the unskilled, 'lower' sections of the class itself was again solely through the parties, since both the trade unions and the cultural organisations were predominantly organisations of skilled workers . These three factors together were the essential preconditions of the social fascism line, for they made it both an extremely credible and an extremely disastrous response to certain actions of the SPD . As the SPD leadership moved increasingly to the right after its entry into government in 1928 (Lehndorff, 1975, pp . 90ff), the results would be very different to similar moves before 1923, for now for the KPD member the only area which was not controlled by the reformists could well appear to be the KPD itself. At the end of the period of stabilisation, and unlike earlier, what appeared as openly reactionary measures of the SPD leadership could be interpreted as proving the completely reactionary nature of reformism as a whole . The consequence was clear: complete break with the reformists, whether in their party, their cultural organisations, their trade unions . Yet given the nonexistence of quasi-institutions which spanned most of the class, the social fascism line would be disastrous for the KPD, for this interpretation involved a flight back into the party which now could only divide the working class movement and ghettoise the party amongst the unemployed . 4 . SOCIAL FASCISM-THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY The previous section has shown how by 1929 the quasi-institutional elements of the working class movement had largely disappeared . The consequence of this organisational shift would be decisive in the changed conjuncture of 1929 : once the unity of the movement had become a unity only of institutions, then this unity depended solely on the policies of the existing party leaderships . In other words, the pre-conditions of the social fascism line do not by themselves explain the actions of the KPD or the situation after 1929, but merely set the stage-a different policy by the KPD would certainly have had very different consequences . However, once the KPD had declared its main enemy to be the SPD itself, then in 1929 this necessarily destroyed the unity of the movement, since there was now no quasi-institutional arena where militants could co-operate . How this division occurred is shown in this section by an examination of the KPD's attempts to organise the unemployed in Berlin and above all in Frankfurt itself . The importance of existing organisations is then indicated by the contrast with nearby Offenbach, where a rather different (and in national terms, rather unusual) local situation enabled the opposition within the KPD to take over the existing party apparatus and to organise locally on the basis of policies which strengthened rather than weakened the overall movement . Conversely, the destruction 'of quasiinstitutions in Frankfurt itself explains the defeat of the unusually strong left within the city's SPD, for within the SPD too, opposition now could only have an institutional (and not a quasi-institutional) basis . In other



~ bCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

17

words, in 1929 the situation was such that the policies of the existing parties were crucial : writers such as Poulantzas are correct to analyse these in detail, but what they fail to see is why from 1929 onwards these policies should be so unusually decisive . The actual strategy of 'class against class' and the accompanying theory of social fascism was finally adopted by the KPD at its 12th Congress in June 1929, although the origins of the new line can be traced back to Comintern meetings in 1928 .[16] The Congress declared the existence of a period of revolutionary upswing in which all non-revolutionary forces formed a solid front of reaction, externally against the Soviet Union, internally against the working class . Social democracy was accordingly defined as 'social fascist', as in no way progressive, as merely an organ re presenting solely the interests of the bourgeoisie against the increasingly revolutionary working class.[ 171 For the KPD this new left turn was intended to make the party doubly independent of reformism : organisationally independent, in that now new 'rank-and-file' organisations were to allow the party to take the initiative outside the official reformist institutions, and socially independent in that these organisations were to be based on layers of the working class-the unorganised and above all the unemployed-which the reformists had ignored . It is clear that such a strategy was given much credibility by the actions of the SPD itself : entering the Grand Coalition in late June 1928, the SPD became part of a government which then introduced the very measures of naval rearmament the party had campaigned against in the previous election (cf. Caspar, 1959, pp . 78ff) . The SPD's acceptance of responsibility for the Weimar State, and in particular its involvement in government at national and local level, meant that it was forced to justify measures which were widely unpopular with many of its own membership . The politics of the KPD in this period therefore cannot be written off as mere mindless agitation, as the conventional historiography of the Weimar Republic usually does, for its slogans had considerable popular resonance . The problem however was that the theory and strategy of social fascism meant that the party organised in such a way as to make 'social fascism' into a self-fulfilling prophecy-the SPD was driven further to the right but at the same time the KPD became condemned to a radicalism that was ineffectual and isolated, above all because in the situation of 1929 a frontal onslaught on the SPD meant a division of the working class movement, and not merely a conflict between political parties . These processes first became clear in the May riots in Berlin in 1929 . The KPD attempted to set up rank-and-file committees as the basis of 'revolutionary' demonstrations which would be carried out separately from those of the SPD and the trade unions and if necessary in defiance of any police bans . When Zorgiebel, the SPD police president of Berlin, did ban the KPD May Day demonstrations,[18] this must have confirmed for many the correctness of the theory of social fascism-the SPD could hardly have chosen a better way of showing how far it had come from the days before 1914 when it had campaigned for the right to strike and demonstrate on May Day (cf . Anderson, 1948, pp . 184ff) . On May 1, 1929 there was street fighting between communists and



18

CAPITAL & CLASS

the police in Berlin : it was not until May 4 that the police were again in full control of Neukoln and Wedding, the two most working class areas of the city . The extent of popular support for the KPD is further suggested by the form of the demonstrations-street barricades and actions such as the extinguishing of the street lights required at least the passive support of much of the local population . Nor were the activists mere young 'rowdies' as the SPD press tried to claim : of the 1,228(!) arrests made by the police, 320 were under 20, but 599 between 20 and 30 and 147 over 60 . The problem the KPD faced was not so much lack of immediate support as the inability to organise this support . On the one hand the party was unable to co-ordinate the demonstrations, for the illegal organisation of the party did not function at all and the courier service between the areas collapsed ; on the other hand, sections of the party acted as if they were in an immediately revolutionary situation, and were only brought under control again by the Berlin leadership with considerable difficulty . Further, the extent to which the KPD's new factory organisations were ineffective is shown by the complete failure of the general strike on May Day itself, and by the mere 14,000 who followed the call for solidarity strikes on the next day . The nature of this combination of popular support and political ineffectivity becomes clearer when we examine the unemployed riots in Frankfurt 6 months later . In Frankfurt, as elsewhere in Germany, unemployment was rising rapidly towards the end of 1929 . Indeed, unemployment in the city was above the national average, in particular because of the weakness of the metal industry . During November dismissals continued in the chemical and in the car factories, one metal factory closed completely, so that by the new year, of the total population of the city, roughly every 12th person was unemployed . Particularly important was the rising number of unemployed who, having exhausted their insurance payments, depended solely on city welfare : within the city itself this rose from only 2,000 in September to over 9,000 in January 1930 . It was in this situation that the KPD increased its attempt to organise the unemployed . In the local elections in November 1929 both the KPD and the NSDAP had gained seats, while the SPD had lost .[19] In the first meeting of the new city parliament the KPD put forward an emergency motion calling for a Winterbeihilfe-an extra welfare payment-of 50RM for all unemployed, the costs to be covered by extra taxes on high income groups . Although such motions can easily be dismissed as purely agitational,[201 all speakers in the city parliament accepted the need for some form of special help for the unemployed ; further, not only did the existing city budget include funds for such extra welfare payments, but in the previous year a Winterbeihilfe of 50RM had in fact been paid to the unemployed . Within the city parliament the KPD motion was passed on December 10 with the votes of the KPD, the SPD and the NSDAP fractions . Outside the building several thousand communist supporters demonstrated, shouting 'we want work and bread, or we'll beat you dead' . For the KPD it was the demonstration which had forced the issue, and in Berlin Die



SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

19

Rote Fahne reported jubilantly, `communists force winter aid'. However the town council, with whom the decision to actually make the payments rested, was not so easily persuaded . Facing an increasing and unplanned budget deficit in the city's finances, it rejected the KPD's proposals and suggested that Winterbeihilfe should be limited to only 10RM for each unemployed . The result was a direct confrontation with the KPD, which was now campaigning in other towns for increased welfare in the same way that it was in Frankfurt . On Tuesday December 17 the city parliament met to discuss the issue again and the KPD now stepped up its campaign . The local KPD newspaper, Die Arbeiterzeitung, accused the SPD police president Steinberg of attempting to provoke 'a bloodbath' and KPD leaflets announced 'the street belongs to us, we won't give way till our demands are met' . In the afternoon the KPD led a march of several thousand through the streets and until late into the evening the police were continually in action as groups of demonstrators tried to force their way into the Romerberg (the main square in front of the town hall), others pushed in windows in the Zeil (the main shopping street of the city) and police cars were bombarded with stones and several times fired on . During the Christmas week the Frankfurt police repeatedly dispersed crowds which appeared to be preparing to break the complete ban imposed on all KPD open-air meetings . As far as parliamentary politics are concerned, the conflict ended with the SPD accepting that some extra benefits would be paid out at the cost of further reductions in expenditures, such as on a new swimming pool, for which the party had earlier campaigned and which would have primarily benefitted the working class population . That is to say, the KPD was unable to bring even sections of the SPD away from their policy of government responsibility at all costs . As far as the politics of the street are concerned, the KPD again proved unable to mobilise and organise more than a small section of the unemployed . Although the increase in unemployment in Frankfurt in the autumn of 1929 came in particular from the chemical and above all the metal industry, not a single metal or chemical worker was amongst those arrested during the demonstrations . Further, instead of the mass marches of the factory workforces which had characterised the period up to 1923, or the organised popular demonstrations of the period of stability, the demonstrations themselves were a series of isolated clashes with the police, even if they culminated in a semiinsurrectionary situation in the Altstadt, the picturesque slum area in the centre of the city . The Altstadt itself was no solidly proletarian area, but included both a substantial criminalised population and a large proportion of traditional petty bourgeois (small shopkeepers, traders and self-employed craftsmen), so that the demonstrations were thus physically isolated from the core working class housing areas in the industrial parts of the city .[21 ] Unlike the demonstrations of the two previous periods then, the riots of 1929/1930 were at most the temporary organisation of one isolated section of the working class . It is of course easy to argue that all this was the inevitable consequence of mass unemployment, but such an argument not only makes politics the automatic result of a given 'social situation' in the manner



20

CAPITAL & CLASS

criticised earlier, it can conveniently be challenged by examining the case of nearby Offenbach . Under the leadership of Heinrich Galm, the Offenbach KPD had been one of the key bases of the right-wing opposition within the party which had opposed the party's new ultra left line,[221 and Offenbach was one of the few areas where the new 'right wing' KPO was able to win over the existing local KPD party organisation . One reason for this is clear : until 1928 the strength of the KPD in Offenbach, in complete contrast to the situation in Frankfurt, had been its detailed work in local trade union and communal affairs, and it is clear that Galm and his supporters were not prepared to see this jeopardized .[231 Significantly, the KPO's campaign for the local elections of 1929 stressed its local commitment and competence : local issues, such as an ongoing controversy with the city of Frankfurt over the gas supply, were an integral part of its propaganda, and Galm's good humoured speeches, replete with local jokes, indicated his stature as a successful local politician . At the same time, the KPO attempted to utilise and expand the existing institutions of the working class movement, organising successful election meetings for members of the leather workers' union and for the local unemployed . The election results confirmed the value of this approach : while the KPD lost three seats, the KPO gained five, and now had an 11 strong fraction in the Offenbach city parliament . Work amongst the unemployed was one of the main activities of the KPO in 1929/1930 . However, its agitation was utterly different in style to that of the KPD, a typical KPO unemployed meeting being attended largely by older workers with their wives and children . Like the KPD, the KPO campaigned for Winterbeihilfe in December 1929, calling meetings attended by up to 1,000 people . Certainly, these demonstrations themselves do suggest how the different unemployed agitation of the KPD could also become successful . For example, on December 12, 1929 the KPO held an unemployed demonstration attended by about 800 despite pouring rain . After singing the "Internationale", the demonstrators marched through the city-as they passed the town hall they shouted the KPD slogan "give us work and bread or we'll beat you dead" and the trade union office was greeted with boos and groans . However, and this is decisive, at the same time as the demonstration Galm was negotiating directly with the mayor on behalf of the unemployed . The aim of the KPO unemployed organisation was both to force real concessions and on this basis precisely to organise the unemployed . Thus, while the KPD agitation merely stressed what the unemployed already knew-the bleakness of their situation-the KPO attempted to show that through organisation real if limited gains could be achieved .[241 Further, the KPO utilised its strong local position to put pressure on the SPD . Although immediately after May 1 1929 the KPO in Offenbach had called protest meetings against what it too called 'Zorgeibel's bloodbath' in Berlin, it never rejected negotiations with the SPD . Thus after the November elections the KPO attempted to persuade the SPD that the two parties should form a 'red majority' in the city parliament . On January 15 a public meeting of over 1,200 was called by the KPO on this slogan . Although the SPD at the last minute refused to send a speaker, Galm con-



SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

21

tinued to argue that only a local alliance with the SPD could safeguard the city's financial autonomy and so prevent cuts in social welfare . The KPO's strategy in Offenbach stands then in complete contrast to that of the KPD in Frankfurt . While the KPD isolated its own supporters and would not organise them effectively even in this isolation, the KPO was continually concerned to strengthen and move leftwards the working class movement as a whole . This is shown not only in its attempt to compel the SPD to resist (instead of passively accepting) the cuts in social welfare, but more importantly, in its attempts both to utilise existing working class institutions and to create new ones-institutions which could form the basis of a proletarian public. Within one local area then, a different politics to those of the KPD were able to some extent to prevent unemployment from dividing the working class movement . However, in Frankfurt itself, the left within the SPD was unable to make a similar breakthrough, despite apparent favourable conditions . As elsewhere in Germany, in Frankfurt the decisive issue for the left in the SPD was the extent to which the party should form coalitions with bourgeois parties . In preparation for the party's congress in Magdeburg which debated the issue in May 1929 (cf . Hunt, 1970, pp . 228ff; Drechsler, 1965, pp . 40ff), the Frankfurt local organisation had passed a motion critical of the coalition policy and two of its three delegates were opposed to coalition . Significantly, while the bulk of the SPD Frankfurt leadership were full-time trade union or party officials, these delegates-Karl Beul and Andreas Portune-were shop stewards in the DMV and had a personal history which went back to activity in the USPD and the factory committees of the Revolution of 1918 .[25] However, unlike ten years earlier, these same leaders were now unable to develop any real mass basis . For people such as Portune and Beul, the SPD's election losses in 1929 were the deserved result of coalition with bourgeois parties in government, and they proceeded to call a series of party membership meetings to make their point . The extent of discontent within the party in early 1930 is shown by the fact that Portune's motion that the SPD immediately leave the coalition was finally only defeated by 112 to 136 votes . Indeed, the subsequent attempt of the Bezirk (regional) party organisation to counter the growing strength of the Frankfurt left at first misfired, cementing the emerging alliance between the marxist left and other elements within the local party leadership critical of party policy . Determined to break the left's editorial control of the local party newspaper, without any warning the regional press commission dismissed Hans Marckwald, a left-wing member of the editorial committee. This was clearly perceived by nearly all the Frankfurt SPD as an unwarranted step, and their opposition was made particularly vehement by the fact that under the shock of his dismissal, Marckwald and his wife attempted joint suicide . It was Kirchner himself who now led the attack on the regional secretary, Paul Rohle, whom he accused of engineering Marckwald's dismissal . When Rohle appeared at a membership meeting of the Frankfurt party he was hardly able to make himself heard, Kirchner demanded his resignation, and a motion along these lines proposed by Portune was passed by an overwhelming majority .



22

CAPITAL & CLASS

Nonetheless, although the call for Rohle's dismissal was confirmed at the quarterly delegate meeting of the Frankfurt party in June 1930, Rohle was able to ignore the storm in the local organisation and Marckwald remained dismissed . Indeed, these events marked the peak of the left's influence within the Frankfurt party . When the left finally broke with the SPD to form the new Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD), individuals such as Marckwald and Portune, despite their undoubted popularity within the local organisation, were joined by less than 400 of the party's Frankfurt members and were completely unable to even begin to attract to their new organisation important moderate critics of the party's policy such as Kirchner . By the end of 1931 in the Hessen-Nassau region as a whole, less than 400 SPD members had resigned to join the SAPD, and the new party was politically and organisationally isolated . It was a dramatic contrast to the founding of the USPD twelve years earlier . What is decisive about the defeat of the SPD left is the arena within which it occurred, namely solely within the SPD itself . Indeed, the case of Portune is almost exemplary . Portune always stressed that he would remain, in his terms, a member of the working class, and this meant that even when elected to the Reichstag on the SPD list in 1930 he attempted to continue in his occupation of metalworker . And this demonstrative commitment to his origins was undoubtedly popular-it was indeed one of the reasons for his drawing power as the SPD's most popular local speaker in the election campaign of 1930 . However, Portune was completely unable to utilise this support in any organised fashion, just as he was unable to use his position within the local DMV to develop an independent power base . Once the working class movement had become identical with the official institutions with which it is usually identified, the chances for political innovation were slim indeed . 5 . THE KPD AND THE RGO STRATEGY : THE ISOLATION OF RADICALISM So far we have seen that the crucial feature of the conjuncture of

1929/1930 was that the politics of the KPD and the SPD operated together to divide the working class movement . This was possible because in the previous period the movement had already become a movement of institutions without any developed quasi-institutional sub-structure . It was this combination of a specific set of policies of the parties and a specific organisational form of the movement that ensured the ineffectiveness both of the KPD's agitation amongst the unemployed and of the attempts of the SPD left to challenge the coalition policy of their own party . However, the official institutions of the working class movement included not simply the political parties, but also of course the trade unions to which until 1929 most employed communists belonged . It is here that the new strategy of the KPD was most disastrous, because the new line of the RGO (Revolutionare Gewerkschaftsopposition) operated to confirm the SPD's definition of the communists as dividers and wreckers . As such the RGO strategy is a vital part of the defeat of the left within the SPD it-

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

23

self : while the SPD left called for a working class mobilisation against the government, and this implied at least limited co-operation with the KPD, the RGO strategy made such co-operation effectively impossible (quite apart from the fact that the theory of social fascism defined the SPD left wingers as the most dangerous social fascists of all) (Lehndorff, 1975, pp . 86f) . Central to the KPD's analysis of the role of the official trade unions was the assumption that, just like the SPD, the German trade union bureaucracy had now become merely an instrument of repression . Accordingly, instead of (as previously) attempting to compel the trade union leadership to support rank-and-file demands, the new strategy aimed at creating new mass organisations based primarily on workers who were unskilled and not trade union members .[26] Given what was seen as the complete integration of the trade unions into capitalism, it followed that the RGO would have to organise economic struggles independently of the trade unions ; such struggles would automatically become political struggles, and the form of struggle would be the political mass strike . Hence the necessity of opposing revolutionary candidates to the official trade union candidates in the works council elections, hence too the necessity of organising struggles under elected strike leaderships and of ignoring the official trade union institutions . [271 As we shall now see, this strategy meant that the KPD now lost much of its traditional support in the skilled and trade union organised sections of the working class, while it could only appeal to the unorganised and to the least privileged amongst employed workers at the cost of completely isolating them from the rest of the working class movement . Within the Frankfurt area there was one factory where if anywhere the RGO strategy should have been successful, namely the works of the firm of Adam Opel in the town of Russelsheim to the West of the city . In complete contrast to the small-scale factories and the skilled workers of Offenbach and Hanau to the East, and to the variegated metal industry of Frankfurt itself, Opel had almost from its beginning in 1862 been based on mass production techniques . Always producing mass consumption goods, first sewing machines, then bicycles, during the 1920s Opel became the largest car factory in Germany .[28] During the Weimar period Opel's strategy was in sharp distinction to the rest of the German car industry . While during the inflation period the other car firms simply expanded production on the basis of existing machinery, and then campaigned vehemently for tariff protection, Opel orientated towards the new possibilities of mass production through a policy of continual investment and innovation. In 1923 one of the first assembly lines in Europe was installed,[29] enabling the introduction of the 'Laubfrosch', the first German mass produced car . A smaller, random example of innovation : in 1928 new railway bays were built so that cars could be loaded direct from the assembly line and test track onto the railway wagons, cutting the number of workers involved from 56 to 25 and the time per car from 20 minutes to 4 (Seherr-Thoss 1974, p . 152) . By 1928, Opel employed nearly 10% of all workers in the German car industry and was producing 42,000 cars a year .[30] Precisely because



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Russelsheim was the most advanced car factory in Germany, perhaps in Europe, in 1928/1929 Opel was bought by General Motors (Sloan, 1964, pp . 197, 332-327) . More than European manufacturers, more even than Opel itself, American firms were able to finance and market the new mass consumption goods on the hitherto unprecedented scale towards which they were moving the industry : in 1929 General Motors' Vice-President, Alfred P . Sloan, told an incredulous gathering of RUsselsheim works councillors that in the next five years production would rise from 40,000 cars per year to 200,000 .[31 ] Such a form and scale of production should have meant that in Opel, if anywhere in the Frankfurt area, there existed a 'massified' working class, according to Roth, the basis for' the `other' working class movement . But closer examination shows that such a categorisation is questionable . Although Opel had certainly the most advanced form of mass car production in Germany at the time, this does not mean to say that the workers were predominantly semi-skilled . according to the DMV in 1929 66% of the 4,800 metal workers employed in car production in Opel were skilled ('Gelernte') workers, against an average of 56 .6% for the industry as a whole, and interestingly, against 57 .4% for Adler in Frankfurt, where production methods were much less aavanced .[321 It is of course possible that these skilled workers actually carried out basically semi-skilled tasks, but on this the evidence is contradictory . Further, although Opel was renowned for the uncertainty of its employment (not only did production in the auto industry in general fluctuate according to the season, but in Opel itself it was common for the factory to be shut down for several weeks at a time while production was reorganised or work on new models prepared), at the same time the firm was well known locally for its relatively high wages .[33] Crucially, with 88% of all car workers unionised, Opel was the third best organised car factory in Germany and was way above the (itself high) industry average of 70 .6% . Any revolutionary strategy which ignored this would clearly face enormous difficulties . After the take-over of Opel by GM the KPD increased its agitational work in the factory .[34] However, up until mid-1929 the party appears to have attempted to overcome the divisions within the work-force through strengthening and radicalising the trade unions-the party members, in line with the party's general trade union strategy, presented themselves as more effective trade unionists than the SPD and the reformists . Thus the first number of the KPD's factory newspaper in Opel, Der Opel Prolet, urged all Opel workers to join the DMV . In the factory council election campaign in spring 1929 the paper pointed out that, while the SPD accused the communists of putting forward a candidate list of unorganised workers, all the KPD candidates were in fact trade union members ; later in the year, defending themselves against the charge of splitting the trade unions, the communists could still argue that the limitation of the reformist trade union strategy was that it actually weakened the unions by being concerned only with those workers who were already trade union members, instead of trying to involve all workers in the union . The situation in 1929 was in fact extremely favourable for such a

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

25

militant trade union based offensive within Opel . American ownership meant that now as total sales began to fall,[35] rationalisation and speedup continued and intensified, however with American trained supervisors and increased use of time-and-motion studies, in 1929 the work-force was cut from 10,500 to around 6,000, and it was alleged that the firm was now only interested in employing young workers . Indeed, the Frankfurt SPD newspaper repeated an argument common in the KPD's factory agitation when it commented that the factory combined American standards of high productivity with European standards of low wages and bad working conditions . Instead of defending its membership against such rationalisation, the DMV officially encouraged it . Throughout the 1920s the union had campaigned for greater concentration and rationalisation in the industry, claiming that the resulting increase in productivity would enable firms to afford higher wages . Not only was nationalisation never demanded and issues of working conditions never raised, but the American industry was explicitly held up as an example for Germany to emulate : not surprisingly therefore, the DMV never mentioned the low trade union organisation and the bad working conditions in the American car plants . The union leadership's commitment to such a position opened up new possibilities for successful opposition . Firstly, to the extent that rationalisation was an attack on the position of the more skilled workers, those more conservative union functionaries who were nonetheless actually based within the factories were now under pressure .[36] Secondly, and more obviously, support for rationalisation and concentration, because of its long term benefits of higher pay, could well have been credible for trade union members in the modest expansion of the 1920s . In the current depression however, even Opel was dismissing workers : the costs of the policy were clear, the benefits rather less obvious . The RGO strategy however meant that such possibilities could not be exploited by the KPD . In Opel itself, while communists were never explicitly told to leave the DMV, the party's propaganda began to treat the union as unambiguously reactionary . This was all the more easy to do since in October the two leading communist members of the works council, Mauer and Jiilich, were expelled from the union for anti-trade union behaviour, in particular for having stood on an opposition candidate list in the works council elections . By early 1930 communist policy in the factory had moved even further left in line with a shift of the entire RGO . In January 1930, articles in the Berlin Rote Fahne openly argued for the mass political strike as an immediate aim and this would appear to have been the theme of the RGO area conference for Hessen-Nassau held in Frankfurt on January 25-26 . Now, precisely when employment in the factory was insecure, the communists were ordered to go onto the offensive . Already in November the social democratic works councillors had been described as mere agents of the employers, now the coming wage cuts and dismissals were to be opposed in a way that would expose the communist works councillors to immediate repression . In January 1930 the communist factory newspaper explicitly criticised the KPD works councillors for `passivity' which, so

26

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it was claimed, showed that the communist cadres in the factory were more conservative than the allegedly radical masses, and that this isolation could only be overcome by a more radical strategy, the mobilisation of the masses themselves under the leadership of directly elected 'struggle committees'. The immediate issue chosen in Opel was the factory wage agreement, negotiated in mid-1929 and vehemently opposed by the RGO at the time . After agitation in some of the lowest-paid shops where there had already been brief strikes, the communists called for a strike of the entire factory . The firm responded by immediately dismissing the three communist councillors claiming that by calling a strike in this way they had illegally misused their posts . Even though it was later admitted that to dismiss councillors without the permission of a labour court was itself illegal, the firm was fully supported in this action by all the other works council members . Thus, while for the leading social democrats in the factory the communists' demands merely showed their complete irresponsibility, for the communists themselves all their own arguments were now vindicated-the `social fascists' would do anything to engineer the dismissal of revolutionaries . The communists attempted to use the dismissals as an issue around which to call a mass strike which would directly challenge the works council as well as the firm . The next morning, February 12, a newly formed KPD-led strike committee issued leaflets demanding the dismissal of the works council chairman Reviol from the firm, the dissolution of the entire works council pending new elections, as well as the re-instatement of the three dismissed communists and the granting of the original wage demands . In line with the new RGO strategy, the strike call was backed up from outside : a crowd of unemployed (including workers recently dismissed from Opel), led by Hermann Sumpf and Oskar Muller, communist members of the Hessen state parliament, attempted to force its way into the factory . Although the factory gates were shut against them, some of the crowd were able to break their way through while others managed to scale the perimeter wall . Inside the factory MUller addressed a mass meeting in the factory yard and called for a total strike . Then some strikers attempted to put the main boiler of the factory out of action and the communists marched through the buildings trying to gain support . How much success they had is doubtful . Although all work stopped within the factory, most of the workers appeared to have reacted passively and not to have joined the subsequent demonstration in front of the management building . Although one participant insists that the several hundred police who rapidly arrived on the scene did not dare enter the factory for fear of the resistance they would have met, the police were able to seal off the factory with little difficulty . Despite small demonstrations in front of the gates, the police with the aid of factory guards were soon able to arrest the three dismissed councillors as well as Killer and Sumpf. Despite some alleged sabotage, the next day work resumed as normal . As would be expected, communist and social democratic accounts of what the non-communist press rapidly termed the 'Opel putsch' were wildly divergent. Even more than the bourgeois press, the local SPD



SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

27

paper's account stressed the alleged machine breaking and, unlike any other paper, described the crowd that tried to enter the factory as including 700 uniformed KPD members .[37] Nonetheless, all the nonKPD press agreed that very few Opel workers had been involved . While the later issues of the KPD factory newspapers claimed that such accounts were completely distorted, they are nonetheless probably nearer the truth

than the version published by Rote Fahne in Berlin, according to which all but a few social democratic functionaries had elected the leadership of the strike, which was only defeated by the violent military repression of 700 armed police (together with representatives of the French and British occupation forces) rampaging in the factory . Nonetheless, the Opel workers themselves were clearly unconvinced by such hyperbole . The RGO had criticised its own works councillors for 'legalistic' tendencies in 1929-now the new 'revolutionary' candidates were severely defeated in the April works council elections, the RGO vote falling from 40% in 1929 to a mere 22% in 1930 . The defeat of the February 'putsch' opened the way for massive repression in the factory . During 1930 work-discipline was continually increased : there was increased use of time-and-motion studies and the first introduction of uniforms, there was instant dismissal for any strike action which was either illegal or against already negotiated agreements, and by 1931, even for bad work-standards . At the same time control over workers' representatives was increased : a new complaints procedure was introduced which obliged all communication between workers and works councillors to be made known to the management ; while the six most senior works councillors were made full-time representatives and paid by the firm, the other councillors were strictly limited to holding only one meeting a month . Not surprisingly in this situation, all attempts by the KPD to revive the wages issue were completely ineffective, and although the party's factory cell still included 50 people, its members were now completely demoralised .[38] On the other side, the SPD and the trade union could only offer a policy of complete passivity . The SPD factory newspaper concentrated almost entirely upon attacking the communists for their alleged incompetence, their utopianism and their deceitfulness, while pointing out the lack of trade union rights in the USSR . As far as conditions in the factory went, the paper could only complain that the work was inhuman and issue vague appeals in support of the trade union . Yet the combination of anti-communism and warnings against hasty action could provide no solution to the increasingly desperate situation in the factory . When in mid-1931 the firm threatened either a further 2,000 permanent dismissals or the complete closure of the factory, the SPD could only argue that it was important that the factory stay open, however few people were left . . . so that at least the works council could remain in existence! The inability of the KPD to even put forward any alternative shows how the party's effective strength in the factory had been decimated, not simply by mass unemployment, but by its own tactics, tactics which were doomed to failure, however attractive and realistic they may have appeared to its own supporters .

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6 . CONCLUSIONS In 1929/1930, for the first time in the entire Weimar Republic, the entire working class movement was divided . Underneath the increased conflict between the KPD and SPD lay the disappearance of any common institutional or quasi-institutional arena within which activists of both parties could operate. The mutually hostile parties and the trade unions now were the divided movement, and once the communists allowed themselves to be driven out of the unions and the two parties no longer engaged in any common activities, the working class movement was reduced to the common language and rhetoric of the proletarian political public, but nothing else . In this new situation the radicalism of the KPD's supporters could become the isolated radicalism of only a section of the working class, for the very precondition of this radicalism was the destruction of the institutional and quasi-institutional links which had tied the party's supporters to other sections of the class . As such the theory of social fascism was by no means merely imposed by Stalin or the Comintern, but was perfectly acceptable to many of the KPD's own members-but this hardly prevented it from being completely self-defeating . The approach of this paper attempts to break with much Marxist and neo-Marxist historical work which, particularly perhaps in Germany, often collapses either into narrowly political history (the institutional and theoretical development of particular organisations) or alternatively into social history in the usual sense . Such analyses clearly have their relevance, but they cannot answer a question such as the reason for both the credibility and the self-destructiveness of `social fascism' . However, the focus on the working class movement as such is not just important for historical research, it also has political implications for today which can now be very briefly suggested . Firstly, although the. theory of social fascism as such is dead and buried, its core-the twin beliefs in the total integration of social democracy and the implied uncritical acceptance of any mass radicalism -lives on in often unexpected quarters (cf. Holloway and Picciotto, 1977) . By contrast, the focus on the working class movement, far from justifying spontaneism, has indicated both the crucial importance of social democratic organisations and the potentially (and only that) self-destructive nature of radical movements which are isolated from the movement as a whole . The consequences for strategy in the organisation of the unemployed or for campaigning against the National Front are hopefully obvious . Secondly, while a position such as Roth's is criticised here for its 'spontaneist' understanding of organisation, this is not the usual `Leninist' critique . That is to say, both Roth and Poulantzas are criticised for equating organisation solely with formal institutions ; by contrast, the purpose of this paper has been to stress the importance of quasi-institutions, and on this basis, to understand the working class movement itself as organisation, something clearly that cannot be done if analysis is restricted to the institutions as such . Accordingly the approach of a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist such as Poulantzas appears inadequate, for it gives the



SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

29

politics of the party priority over the politics of the movement, the latter indeed being something which to Poulantzas is almost invisible . If the organisation of the movement was decisive in Weimar Germany, it is arguable that it is even more important today . It is at least plausible that the political structures of advanced capitalism are such that it is now impossible for any one organisation to totally dominate the movement, and that any party which attempts to do this is doomed to defeat (here Louis Althusser's comments in Le Monde on the defeat of the French Communist Party in the recent elections are instructive) . Consequently, Marxists must begin to break with the long tradition, inherited largely from Lenin, that treats 'the party' as the sole theorisable locus of political initiative, and equally importantly, begin to reformulate the problem of democracy within socialist organisations . Once we accept the importance of the movement, then the question of socialist democracy is not just a question of inner-party democracy, nor even of commitment to a multiparty situation, but involves an awareness of the location of these organisations within a wider movement . The best guarantee of democracy in formal organisations is that they be located within a strong movement, one which can provide a continual basis for political innovation, if necessary against the established leaderships . In other words, today, even more so than in Weimar, it is the unity, strength and dominant politics of the working class movement, and not the nature of 'the party' in isolation, which form the decisive political questions for socialists.

REFERENCES James Wickham lectures in sociology at Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland . This paper derives from ongoing work on local working class politics in the Weimar Republic . For a summary cf . my "Outline-Nazism and the German Working Class : Class Organisation and the Working Class Movement in Frankfurt am Main during the Weimar Republic" in Radika/er Historiker no. 1 March, 1978) . I have been helped a great deal by discussions with in particular Erhard Lucas, Dieter Rebentisch, Eva-Cornelia Schock, Lothar Wentzel ; my thanks also to Mark Jones, Sol Picciotto, Tim Putnam and Nick Sage for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft . For the arguments developed here I take sole responsibility! 1 The standard, if narrow, account in English remains Grebing, 1969 ; Anderson, 1946, provides a useful participant's over-view . 2 However, as above all Gordon 1972 makes clear the role of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in the Munich putsch was qualitatively different to the situation after 1929, since in 1923 the party relied almost totally on co-operation with other right-wing organisations . 3 Cf. Angress, 1963 ; Flechtheim 1969, pp . 182ff ; Weber, 1969, I, pp . 43ff. 4 For an overview of the current state of discussion cf . Lucas, et. a/., c.&c .-c



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1977 . In his contribution to this volume, Roth qualifies but does not basically change his earlier arguments . 5 For the best contemporary study cf. Jahoda et. al., 1972 (a study of unemployment in an Austrian industrial village in the early 1930s) . 6 Cf. also Brockhaus, 1974 . These studies derive from the thesis of the 'massified worker' developed by Italian Marxists in the late 1950s and 1960s as a generalisation from an analysis of changes in the Italian working class. Cf . above all Tronti, 1974 and, for the starting point of Roth's argument, Bologna, 1976. A critical overview from a conventional Marxist position is provided by Minssen & Sauerborn, 1977 . The first sustained empirical historical confrontation with the arguments of these writers is the brilliant study by Lucas, 1976 ; cf . my review in Capital and Class no . 1 (Spring, 1977), pp . 122-125 . 7 Roth clearly implies this for the period of the Depression . For the previous periods Roth, following Bologna, treats the SPD and the KPD as reformist because of what is claimed to be their skilled working class basis . In many ways the thesis of the massified working class is a left wing 8 version of mass society theory and of the political analyses of modernisation theory . It is from such perspectives, for example, that Comfort analyses radicalism in Hamburg after 1918 in terms of the entry into politics of a new 'mass' working class. Cf . Comfort, 1966 . Roth argues, in almost conventional Leninist fashion, that the revo9 lutionary movement after 1918 was defeated because of its lack of coordination ; how such organisation could have been reconciled with the 'spontaneity' which apparently distinguished the 'other' working class is something Roth does not discuss . 10 Cf. my paper, "Nicos Poulantzas and the Dilemmas of Leninism", British Sociological Association Conference, 1977 . 11 To save space, detailed sources for the following account are not indicated separately (full documentation will be available in my forthcoming thesis for the University of Sussex, "Nazism and the German Working Class: Class Organisation and Class Politics in the Weimar Republic") . The main sources used are : a) newspapers : Die Volksstimme (the Frankfurt SPD daily newspaper), Frankfurter Nachrichten and Frankfurter Zeitung (two of the leading Frankfurt bourgeois newspapers) together with individual numbers of other local newspapers and of Die Rote Fahne (the KPD's central organ, published daily in Berlin) ; b) police reports for Berlin and Hessen state from the Staatsarchiv, Bremen ; c) other archival material from the Stadtische Archiv (Frankfurt), the Hessische Hauptarchiv (Weisbaden), and the Firmen Archiv Hoechst AG (Frankfurt-Hochst) ; d) annual reports and other publications of the Frankfurt office of the DMV ; e) published administrative reports of the Frankfurt city administration and the protocols of the meetings of the Frankfurt city council ;

SOCIAL FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS

31

f) tape-recorded interviews with members of working-class organisations in the Weimar period from Frankfurt and the surrounding area . 12 Cf . Weber, pp 280ff; Flechtheim, pp . 311 ff ; Wunderer . 1976 . 13 Cf . also Rebentisch, 1975, esp . p . 228 . 14 An insightful account of these events by one of the local USPD leaders is Sender 1940 . 15 The importance of craft skills as a basis for independence from specific employers has been analysed by labour market theory : cf. Doeringer & Piore, 1971 ; also Mann 1973 . 16 Notably the 9th ECCI Plenum (February, 1928), the 4th RGI Congress (July/September, 1928) . 17 Weber, I, pp . 223ff; Bahne, p . 12 ; Flechtheim, pp. 248ff. 18 Grzesinski, the Prussian Minister of the interior, had in fact gone so far as to demand that the KPD itself be banned . Cf . Severing, 1950, 11, pp . 186f. 19 This is not to argue that the general correlation between rising unemployment and rising NSDAP vote means that it was the unemployed who were voting for the NSDAP, as is often argued . That active Nazi support (in particular within the SA) came partially from unemployed (and working class) youth is undeniable, but it is clear that this could not have provided the first wave of mass Nazi support in 1929 . Cf. McKibbin, 1969 . 20 As Rebentisch in particular argues ; cf. Rebentisch, 1975, pp . 233, 259f, 268 . 21 This account of the Altstadt draws from an unpublished study of the area kindly made available to me by Professor Franz Lerner and from ongoing work on the social structure of the Frankfurt working class . 22 Cf. Tjaden, 1963 which contains a brief biography of Galm . 23 A rather similar situation appears to have existed in Hanau, where Karl Rehbein, one of the local leaders, considered that the new policy of the KPD jeopardised the party's basis within the DMV . Rehbein was in close contact with Heinrich Galm, but much to the latter's disappointment, subsequently rejoined the SPD . 24 For a similar criticism of the KPD's unemployment agitation cf . Huber-Koller, 1977, esp . p . 116 . 25 Lucas, 1969, p . 15 ; Drechsler, 1965, pp . 207-208 (Drechsler's study contains a brief biography of Portune) . 26 'Was wir wollen', Betrieb and Gewerkschaft 4 .18 (1 . Juli 1929), p . 317 . 27 Cf. 'Massenstreik', Betrieb and Gewerkschaft 2 .2 (15 January 1930), pp . 38-41 ; Paul Merker, 'Zwei Fronten zu den Betriebsratewahlen', Betrieb and Gewerkschaft 2 .3 (1 February 1930), pp . 68-70 ; Paul Merker, 'Das nachste Kettengleid', Betrieb and Gewerkschaft 2 .4 (15 February 1930), pp . 97-100 . 28 Cf . K . Weigand, 'Russelsheim and die Funktion der Stadt im RheinMain Gebiet (Frankfurt, 1955), esp . pp . 28f; SPD Russelsheim am Main, Festschrift zum 60 jahrigen Jubiloum der Sozialdemokratische

Partei Deutschlands Russelsheim and zum Bezirksparteitag Hessen-



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Slid (Russelsheim, 1955) . 29 M . Hammer, Vergleichende Morphologie der Arbeit in der europdischen Automobilindustrie (Basel -Tiibingen, 1959), p . '18 (cited in Roth, p . 85) ; DMV, Die deutsche Automobilindustrie, 1924 (Stuttgart (1924), p . 22 ; idem ., Die deutsche Autoindustrie An fang 1928 (Stuttgart 1928)), pp . 8f. 30 Seherr-Thoss, 1974, pp . 223, 557 ; Adam Opel AG, Verkauf-Statistik, 1976 ; DMV, Die deutsche Autoindustrie Ende 1925 ; DMV, Die deutsche Automobilindustrie Ende 1929; Weigand, p . 29 . 31 In fact Sloan was rather optimistic : the first year in which more than 200,000 cars were produced was 1956 . Cf . also Sloan, 1964, p . 327 . 32 DMV, Die deutsche A utoindustrie Ende 1929, pp . 13ff. 33 Cf. also H . Ludwig, 'Die Arbeitslosigkeit in der deutschen Automobilindustrie', in DerArbeitslosigkeitderGegenwart (Munich & Leipzig, 1932), pp . 121-154, esp . pp . 123ff. 34 In addition to the sources cited above, this account of events at Opel draws on a collection of KPD and SPD factory newspapers in the Stadtische Archiv, Russelsheim . I would like to thank Peter Schirmbeck and his colleagues of the city museum Russelsheim, as well as Wolfgang Ebenloh and Sigi Roth, for their help in gathering material for this section . 35 During the Depression Opel's total sales did not in fact decline as much as those of other German car manufacturers, largely because of its high exports : in June 1931 Opel exported over a quarter of total production, in June of that year producing 77% of all German car exports. Cf. Seherr-Thoss, p . 186 ; Adam Opel AG, Verkauf-Statistik . 36 DMV, "Protokoll der Reichskonferenz der in der Autoindustrie beschaftigen Arbeiter, abgehalten am 23 . Februar in Frankfurt a .M ." (Stuttgart (1930)), pp . 9, 11 . 37 The 'machine breaking' which the social democrats made so much of in fact seems to have basically involved the cutting of the transmission belts which drove most of the machinery from overhead shafts . 38 Information supplied by the then KPD 'Instrukteur' to the Opel factory cell . It is notable that whereas at a meeting in Russelsheim after the strike, a representative of the KPD's central organisation such as Paul Merker could claim that 'the recent events in the Opel works have had a favourable response far beyond the German frontiers' ; on the same occasion an actual participant such as Oskar Muller admitted publicly that the strike had been a defeat .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abendroth, Wolfgang, 1976, Ein Leben in der Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt, Surhkamp) . Anderson, Evelyn, 1948, Hammer oder Amboss : Zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Nuremberg) ; English original : Hammer or Anvil, the Story of the German Working Class Movement (London,

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Gollancz, 1945) . Angress, Werner, 1963 Stillborn Revolution : The Communist Bid for Power in Germany 1921-1923 (Princeton University Press) . Bahne, Seigfried, 1976, Die KPD and das Ende von Weimar : das Scheitern einer Politik 1932-35 (New York and Frankfurt, Campus Verlag) . Barbu, Zevedei, 1956, Democracy and Dictatorship : Their Psychology and Patterns of Life (London, Routledge Kegan Paul) . Bologna, Sergio, 1976, "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers' Movement", in C.S .E . : Labour Process and Class Strategies, pp . 68-91 (London, Stage 1) . Brockhaus, Erhart, 1975, Zusammensetzung and Neustrukturierung der Arbeiterklasse vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, Trikont) . Caspar, Gustav, 1959, Die Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and das deutsche Wehrproblem in den Jahren der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, Mittler) . Comfort, Richard, 1966, Revolutionary Hamburg (Stanford University Press). Doeringer, Peter, and Piore, Michael, 1971, Internal Labour Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, Heath) . Drechsler, Hanno, 1964, Die SAPD (Meisenheim am Glam, Verlag Anton Hain) . Flechtheim, Ossip, 1968, Die KPD in der Weimarer Republik, (Frankfurt, Europaische Verlagsanstalt) . Gordon, Harold, 1971, Hitlerputsch, 1923 (Frankfurt, Bernard u . Grafe Verlag) ; also as : Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton, 1972) . Grebing, Helga, 1966, History of the German Labour Movement (London, Oswald Wolff) . Hall, Stuart, and Jefferson, T . (eds .), 1976, Resistance through Rituals : Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London, Hutchinson) . Hindess, Barry, 1977, "The Concept of Class in Marxist Theory and Marxist Politics", in Jon Bloomfield (ed .), Class Hegemony and Party (London, Lawrence & Wishart) . Holloway, John and Picciotto, Sol, 1977, "Capital, Crisis and the State", Capital and Class 2, pp . 76-101 . Huber-Koller, Rose-Marie, 1977, "Die kommunistische Erwerbslosenbewegung in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik", GesellschaftBeitrdge zur Marxschen Theorie 10, pp. 89-140 . Hunt, Richard, 1970, German Social Democracy (Chicago, Quadrangle) . Jahoda, Marie, Lazarsfeld, Paul, and Zersel, Hans, 1972, Marienthal : the Sociography of an Unemployed Community (trans.) . Regnalt & T . Elsarsser) (London, Tavistock) . Kornhauser, William, 1960, The Politics of Mass Society (London, Routledge Kegan Paul) . Lehndorff, Steffen, 1975, Wie Kam es zur RGO? (Frankfurt, Verlag Marxistische Blatter) . Lipset, Seymour, 1963, "Fascism Left Right and Centre", in his Political Man pp . 131-176 (London, Mercury) . Lucas, Erhard, 1969, Frankfurt unter der Herrschaft des Arbeiterund Soldatenrats 1918-19 (Frankfurt, Verlag Neue Kritik) .



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1976, Arbeiterradikalismus : zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt, Verlag Roter Stern) . Lucas, Erhard, Wickham, James, and Roth, Karl-Heinz, 1977, Arbeiterradikalismus and die andere' Arbeiterbewegung (Bochum, Edition Egalite) . Mann, Michael, 1973, Workers on the Move (Cambridge University Press) . McKibbin, R .L ., 1969, "The Myth of the Unemployed : Who did vote for the Nazis?", Australian journal of Politics and History (August), pp .

25-40 . Minssen, Heiner and Sauerborn, Werner, "Der Massenarbeiter and das Kapital", Gesellschaft-Beitroge zur Marxischen Theorie 10, pp . 141-

186 . Negt, Oskar and Kluge, Alexander, 1972, Oeffentlichkeit and Erfahrung (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp) . Poulantzas, Nicos, 1974, Fascism and Dictatorship : The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (London, New Left Books) . Rebentisch, Dietrich, 1975, Ludwig Landmann : Frankfurter Oberbiirgermeister der Weimarar Zeit (Weisbaden, Steiner) . Rosenberg, Arthur, 1970, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, Europaische Verlagsanstalt) . Roth, Karl-Heinz, 1973, Die `andere' Arbeiterbewegung and die Ent-

wicklung der kapitalistischen Repression von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, Trikont) . Schock, Eva-Cornelia, 1977, Arbeitslosigkeit and Rationalisierung (New York and Frankfurt, Campus Verlag) . Seherr-Thoss, Hans, Graf von, 1974, Die deutsche Automobilindustrie : Eine Dokumentation von 1886 bis Heute (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt) . Sender, Toni, 1940, Autobiography of a German Rebel (London, Labour Book Service) . Severing, Carl, 1950, Mein Lebensweg (2 vols .) (Cologne, Greven Verlag) . Sloan, Alfred, 1964, My Years with General Motors (New York, Doubleday) . Tjaden, Karl-Hermann, 1964, Struktur and Funktion der 'KPD-Opposition'

(KPO): Eine organisationssoziologische Untersuchung zur 'Rechts' Opposition im deutschen Kommunismus zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Meissenheim am Glam Verlag Anton Hain) . Tronti, Mario, 1974, Arbeiter and Kapital (Frankfurt, Verlag Neue Kritik) . Weber, Hermann, 1969, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (2 vols .) (Frankfurt, Europaische Verlagsanstalt) . Weingartner, Thomas, 1970, Stalin and der Aufsteig Hitlers : Die Deutschland Politik derSowjetunion undderKl 1929-7934 (Berlin, de Gruyter) . Wunderer, Hartmann, 1976, "Materialien zur Soziologie der Mitgliedschaft and Wahlerschaft der KPD zur Zeit zur der Weimarer Republik",

Gesellschaft-Beitrage zur Marxschen Theorie 5, pp . 257-277 .

HEALTH POLICY AND THE CUTS Tom Manson

Since the policy of cutting public expenditure was announced by the government attention has tended to be focussed on the nature of the crisis that made such a policy necessary . Within this general discussion, the National Health Service has seemed to be one arena in which struggles against the cuts were capable of drawing together workers and consumers in common action to prevent the standards of health care from falling . The impression is often given that all the cuts in the NHS can be directly related to the particular crisis which faced the state in the mid seventies, and the various policies that were imposed at the time could be directly related to the cuts . This impression is misleading in certain respects however . Many of the best known struggles over the cuts have arisen not from short term policies applied in a crisis but from long term policies either deriving from plans for expansion or from problems that arose in this expansion . This is not to devalue the cuts campaign, which has clearly been of great importance in raising the consciousness and organisation of workers and consumers . On the other hand, a full understanding of these long term policies and the way in which they are related to fundamental perceptions as to the nature of the health service is necessary if conclusions are to be drawn about the nature of Health services within the state . This paper will fall into five sections . The first will point to essential features of the health service which provide the framework within which decisions about the development of the service were placed . The second, third and fourth parts will examine the policies of capital investment, resource reallocation and priorities of health care. A concluding part will discuss some of the issues that are raised by the coincidence of long term policy change and short term financial stringency . 1.

SOME PROBLEMS OF THE FIFTIES When the NHS was set up in 1948 there was considerable uncertainty



36

CAPITAL & CLASS

as to how much it would cost . The predicted figure of f11Om was little more than guesswork, and proved to be very much on the low side . In 1949 supplementary estimates had to be voted through Parliament, and in 1948/9 costs had risen to £228m and by 1951/52 the figure was £348m . This unexpected escalation of costs-thought by some to be 'out of control'-was one of the reasons why the Labour Government imposed some charges in 1951 . One of the hopes of those who set up the service was that after an initial 'backlog' had been satisfied, that is after diseases that in the population that had not been treated because of the cost to the patient had been cured, then a healthy population would be created which would have less need for medical services . This hope was confounded, and though costs were kept more in control by the Treasury, as much attention was paid to keeping costs down as was paid to expanding and improving the services . A major objective was then to keep costs down and to improve the nature of health care . Examination of what cost the most money showed policy makers another feature of the service that had to be taken into consideration . The Health Service was, and is highly labour intensive : somewhere between 60% and 70% of its costs go to paying the salaries of its staff. This has had a major effect on the Service . First any expansion of the Service means an expansion in staff . The NHS has more than doubled its employment since 1948 : Nursing has seen a very high rate of increase and is now the single largest group of NHS workers, followed by Ancillary workers who have 'only' increased their numbers by some 80% . Appendix 1 shows the employment figures for 1975/6 . The labour intensive nature of the Service means that pressure on costs is a permanent feature . Wages in labour intensive industries cannot fall too far behind the level prevailing in more capital intensive sectors-if only because if they do, labour is hard to attract-so the relative position of these industries is roughly maintained . But since wage costs are a high proportion of total costs, these tend to rise faster than those in capital intensive industries . It has been suggested-by Ian Gough (1975) amongst others-that in order to maintain existing standards, the cost of service industries have to rise each year . One way out of this dilemma is to substitute, insofar as it is possible, capital for labour . This was not done in the 50s, partly because most building resources went into the housing programme, and the expansion that did take place was mainly achieved by employing more staff, and keeping on the capital stock that had been inherited in 1948 . Indeed during the 50s, attention was drawn to the fact that many of these old hospitals were inadequate to modern needs, and that by replacing them, not only could standards be increased, but also capital expenditure could save current expenditure . This was perhaps the main message of Abel Smith and Titmuss' (1956 work for the Guillebaud committee, and thus the groundwork was laid for Enoch Powell's hospital plan of 1960 . In summary, therefore, the context within which the 'Hospital Plan' must be seen was three interelated problems : escalating costs, labour intensity and lack of capital investment . It was hoped that by providing a network of new, larger, technologically advanced hospitals, costs could be



HEALTHPOLICYAND THE CUTS

37

kept down or reduced by using more efficient methods of organising the vast amount of labour in the NHS . 2.

THE HOSPITAL PLAN AND CAPITAL INVESTMENT

In 1962, Enoch Powell as Minister of Health, published a major hospital building programme which would eventually lead to the replacement of old inefficient hospitals by new larger hospitals each based on a 'District' . As the British Medical journal put it "the District General Hospital is the cornerstone of the Hospital plan" . Whilst the timing of the plan has been affected by the periodic crises facing governments (such as the cuts imposed in 1966-7 which like the present series of cuts attacked new building first of all) the plan itself still remains in its fundamental form, though very recently the DGH concept has come under some attack . Thus the reorganisation of the NHS in 1974 resulted in Health Districts being created below the Area Health Authority, and each district was eventually to be based on one major hospital . As recently as May 1978 one of the showpiece DGHs was opened in Liverpool, a hospital that was conceived in the original hospital plan but which had been subject to a large number of delays . It is worthwhile to see how the capital investment projects of the 60s were supposed to solve so many of the problems noted in the first section . One feature of the Hospital plan was that larger and more modern hospitals would enable the Health Service actually to reduce the number of beds in the community . This reduction derived from the concept of effective use of medical services which was increasingly becoming one of the major planks of health planners . One means whereby effective use could be achieved did not derive necessarily from the size of hospital : surveys showed that it was possible simply to reduce average length of stay in hospitals without any obvious dangers to the patient . Thus optimum lengths of stay after operations or childbirth-to quote two examples-were derived from research, and strong encouragement to keep to the 'norms' so derived was given by the Ministry of Health and subsequently by the Department of Health and Social Security . In Psychiatry, the optimism gained from the discovery of new drugs and general consideration of the cost of long stay mental patients led to a policy of returning as many as possible to community care . A second implication of the effective use of beds was directly related to the size of the hospital . It was argued that effective treatment required a high level of skilled manpower and the best in technological hardware that was available . Only a large hospital could support the skilled workers -and by skilled workers, consultants are generally meant-by giving them enough cases to be fully occupied without having to waste their expensive time travelling from hospital to hospital . Similarly the high technology machines-generally even less mobile than consultants -needed frequent use to justify their high cost . The large District General Hospital was seen as providing a framework where the best use could be made of skilled manpower and expensive



CAPITAL & CLASS

38

equipment by increasing the intensity of their use . In a similar fashion, the other services provided by Hospitals could respond to economies of scale via better organisation of manpower and mechanisation . Abel Smith and Titmuss (1956) had pointed to the savings that could ensue from mechanising launderies and catering . This process was a feature of the sixties as was the rationalisation of work methods, via incentive schemes for ancillary workers . Both forms of rationalisation were significantly easier in the larger hospitals . The policy implications that flow from the Hospital plan and from attempts to increase the "effective" use of beds are important to understand . As the plan was implemented, the smaller out of date hospitals would be closed down . While this would certainly improve the capital stock and would overcome the problems arising from the fact that in 1948 nearly half of all the hospitals inherited by the NHS had been built before 1891 and one in five before 1861, it would also make the hospitals catchment area much larger, thereby causing problems of remoteness for the community . Furthermore many of the small specialist hospitals were faced with closure . Into the former category falls Poplar hospital, and into the latter, me Elizabeth Garret Anderson hospital, whose closure was decided well nefore the cuts were imposed . A second implication of the hospital plan and the intensification of bed use was the way in which this policy had implications in the other services provided by the NHS (primarily the GPs), by the local authorities and amongst patients' families . Patients were released into the community needing further care and assistance and often this was not planned for . It was. often considered, therefore, that the Hospital Sector was 'hiving off' its responsibilities into others, rather than actually saving cost . The full implications of this and other considerations will be discussed more fully in the fourth section of this paper . Before that, it is necessary to look at the problem of overall resource allocations which feeds into the problem of priorities in health care as well . 3.

THE REALLOCATION OF RESOURCES

The policy of the Hospitals plan was one of expansion . It was optimistic because it was based on the belief that high technology medicine could be effective, it was expansionary because it meant spending significant amounts of money . There remained however the difficulty of how the money should be allocated throughout the country ; which regions should have priority ; which parts of the country were most in 'need' . In attempting to grapple with the problem-accepted by almost everyone-of unequal health facilities, a problem that has bedevilled the Service from the outset, policy makers have injected into the cuts debate a new argument of priority . What has happened in this area is that in accepting the criticism of the service, made mainly from the left, the government has made it difficult for its solution not to be accepted . In 1948, due to the fact that significant areas of health care had been in private hands, resources were distributed throughout the country in an

HEALTH POLICY AND THE CUTS

39

uneven way . Working class districts had few GPs per head of population whilst prosperous middle class districts were 'over doctored' . Planning was undertaken to attempt to rectify this distortion by making it difficult for GPs to set up practice in 'over doctored' areas, but the problem of hospitals was more difficult to overcome . London stood out : it contained many of the most prestigious ex-Private Hospitals, whilst at the same time, the old London County Council had expanded Local Authority hospitals as well . Liverpool too-for reasons that are unclear-had more hospitals than one might have expected . By contrast, other regions, primarily but not exclusively, in the North of England, had few resources . Since Hospitals take up such a high proportion of expenditure, overall health resources were distributed in a highly unequal way . It might have been thought that an urgent priority was the removal of this inequality . However, during the 1950s and 1960s, if anything, the inequality became worse . The system of annual budgeting added a percentage increment to each of the regions' previous year's budget, and therefore those regions which had a large budget received a greater real increase than the relatively poor regions . 'incrementalism' as the system was known, came under attack from two main standpoints : on the one hand it was claimed that it was unfair in social policy terms in that the disparities of health care were not being overcome, on the other hand incrementalism was seen as unscientific, in that it relied on historical accident rather than on assessment of need . In the debate about social policy, the arguments put forward were simple enough : the most deprived parts of the country in social terms were in general the parts of the country which received lower standards of health care . Tudor Hart (1975) produced evidence to show that those areas that suffered the most from poor housing, high unemployment etc . were also the regions that tended to have higher rates of illness per head of the population . Yet, as his 'inverse care law' stated, these regions actually receive less health care (measured by the amount of money spent) per head than the regions that did not suffer in this way so much from social deprivation . In other words, one of the stated objectives of the National Health Service, to provide a service that met all the needs of the population, had not been achieved . The scientific attack on incrementalism concentrated on the problem of assessing need, and also had important ramifications for the way health services were organised . Merely to take the previous year's budget as a starting point for the next year's allocation was to ignore the crucial question as to how effectively the money was being spent . Some economists suspected that incrementalism, moreover, was an incentive to waste money rather than cut back on services whose value could not be proved . This latter point had been taken up in the reorganisation of the NHS, one of the major objectives of which was to improve the system of monitoring the effectiveness of services, but the major change in policy came when the Labour Government came into office in 1974, accepting many of the arguments about unfairness, and determined to break with the traditional pattern of resource allocation . Accordingly they set up a working party whose first report was published in 1976 . RAWP, as this report is



40

CAPITAL & CLASS

universally known is an attempt to use a scientific assessment of need as a basis for the fair allocation of resources, and the implementation of the report has been a cause of many of the struggles over the cuts, as London and Liverpool in particular are having their resources held down severely, thus increasing for these regions the effects of the overall cuts in expenditure that were imposed, primarily through a system of cash limits . RAWP's scientific method is open to a significant number of questions in that many of its assumptions are debatable . But it remains to be asked why it was that it took so long to impose on the NHS a system of resource allocation that bears many ressemblances to the rate support grant calculations that have been applied to local government in one way or another since 1929 . The answer to this lies in the way in which the senior member of the medical profession had been granted such great influence over the running of the NHS . The elite of the medical profession is primarily a London elite, based on the old teaching Hospitals, and the various Royal Colleges . Such an elite resists any attempt to undermine its position by taking resources away from London's 'centres of excellence', and thus successive governments who have been reluctant to jeopardise their relationship with this key level of medical manpower have ensured that London and the South East of England receive a greater share of the health resources than many other more deprived areas . The problem of resource allocation between geographic regions is, therefore, a longstanding one, and one which present policy appears to be attacking by holding down the growth of expenditure in some areas and by allowing it to grow faster in others . RAWP has been implemented however in a period of overall limitation on spending, and thus the 'rich' areas are facing actual cutbacks in expenditure-especially since cash limits have been imposed . Thus RAWP has become, in many people's minds, synonymous with the cuts and this is something that has to be resisted . While there is much justification for criticising the way in which the reallocation has taken place-in particular the problem of allocating resources within the regions has led to many working class areas within the

"rich" regions suffering badly-RAWP needs to be seen in the wider perspective of the difficulty in assessing the 'need' for health in particular parts of the country, and whether or not technical or economic solutions to this problem can be found . This question will be raised in the final section.



HEALTH POLICY AND THE CUTS 4.

41

PRIORITIES IN HEALTH CARE

RAWP is an attempt to change the allocation of - resources between regions, and as such is a solution to a long-standing problem . Recently, however, there have been attempts to alter the distribution of resources between types of medicine . This change is based in part on the acceptance of some of the radical critiques of the way in which medicine has developed since the war and thus it is important to be aware of these before seeing how solutions have been implemented . The development of health care is often seen as the growth of health technology based on the hospital . Dramatic improvements in surgery, for instance, have been hailed as the most important features of modern medicine and in order to achieve these surgical breakthroughs, increasing amounts of sophisticated machinery has been invented . To most people, in other words, medical advance has come to mean heart transplants, kidney machines and cardiac arrest units . The high technology sector of medicine has in fact expanded considerably since the war, and it is only partly because of the accepted image of medical progress . The high technology sector has been better placed to benefit from the various measures of economic planning that have increasingly been a part of the state's policy for health . The modern acute hospital can be seen in almost production-line terms-with an input (ill patients), a production process supervised by skilled workers, and an end product (discharged patient) . Hence the economic language of efficiency can easily be applied . Perhaps the best example of this is in the maternity services-where "inputs" and "outputs" (defined as above) are easily recognisable . It is in this area that the plan to ensure all confinements take place in hospital has most nearly been achieved . There have been two main criticisms of the increasing use of high technology medicine-the first has already been alluded to in Section two : the efficiency of this one sector of medicine has often in fact been achieved at great cost to other sectors . On the one hand, patients are being discharged earlier after operations, resulting in greater costs for the other services and for those who have to look after patients at home-primarily women . On the other hand, those sectors of medicine which cannot justify themselves in such terms so easily are faced with limited resources . Into this category geriatric and psychiatric medicine fall -even though great attempts have been made here too to introduce concepts of "community care" with the resulting burden on social services and women . A second, more fundamental critique of high technology medicine has come from those who believe that the increased resources swallowed up in this sector are wasted as diminishing returns are being registered . This critique is based on the fact that in societal terms, all the successes in medicine have not made much difference to the health of the population . Instead of spending money on heart transplants (for instance) money should be spent on those social factors that affect the health of the whole population, such as environmental factors and indeed the distribution of wealth . Health (measured by rates of mortality and morbidity) is strongly related to class and thus a fundamental attack on class-rather than cosmetic attempts to

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CAPITAL & CLASS

relieve symptoms, is the only effective way forward for health . The unified management structure of the reorganised NHS was in part designed so that co-ordinated planning decisions could be made about the allocation of resources between the various sectors of the Health care system . Its success is difficult to assess-especially as the medical power structure remains largely unchanged, with the 'prestigious' specialities still remaining in positions of power . Prestige in this context means those specialities, such as surgery, which benefit from high technology : other specialities, such as geriatrics, have not been in a position to exercise much power in the decision making process . Government policy is now, however, to increase the share of resources in many sectors . 'Priorities for Health . . .', and 'The Way Forward' (DHSS 1976 and 1977) are statements of intent to limit the growth of the hospital sector, and to increase the rate of growth of services for the elderly, the mentally and physically handicapped, and also to improve preventive medicine . Implicitly, therefore, parts of the radical critique appear to have been accepted . In 'Prevention and Health : everybody's business', the acceptance of the need for a different approach to health is accepted : but in highlighting individual failings-such as smoking, and lack of exercise, the general problem of class and deprivation is largely ignored . Hence although prevention is now much more accepted within the NHS, it still lacks real resources, and fundamental attacks on the causes of ill health are not made . Furthermore, the reallocation of resources away from Hospitals in a period of cuts has not always meant an increase in the services that were supposed to replace hospital medicine . In short, radical critiques have often been used to impose disguised cuts . CONCLUSION Many of the Health policies being implemented at the present time have deep historical roots, and cannot be solely put down to a crisis of public expenditure triggered off by an IMF loan . The Hospital Plan, published as early as 1962, envisaged the closing down of many small hospitals, in the name of modernity and efficiency . The large, technologically advanced district General Hospitals which have by and large replaced the neighbourhood hospitals are therefore directly related to some of the most notable struggles against the cuts . The policy of hospital building can be seen as a means of injecting capitalist rationality into a sector of health services . Yet the impact of such a rationality has had side effects that have led policy makers and others to become critical of the nature of Health care . The dilemma that is presented to those who are concerned with the improvement of the Health Service is that often their criticism can be used by policy makers to undermine the present system, to impose changes even, but when the exact nature of the changes are examined, it is seen that the solution imposed in a period of cuts actually lowers the standards of Health Care . Thus much of the driving force behind the RAWP exercise was dissatisfaction with the relative poverty of the Health Service in many of the parts of the country which suffered most from social deprivation . Clearly some form of reallocation of



HEALTH POLICY AND THE CUTS

43

resources was necessary . Yet the actual result of RAWP has been not so much an improvement in the poor areas, but a worsening of the standards of Health Care in the `rich' regions, many of which have pockets of social deprivation . Similarly, criticism of the way in which expansion in the high technology areas come from the ability of these sectors to demonstrate their efficiency in terms of bed usage and other indicators and the high status within the medical profession of these specialities has been used to justify policy changes whose result, it can be argued, has been to increase even more the pressure on the Health Service by starving hospitals of funds, but not releasing these funds adequately for the other services which are supposed to take up where the Hospitals have left off . Furthermore, discussion of preventive medicine has led to few concrete proposals, and often the impression is given that preventive medicine should concentrate on moral suasion of the individual, rather than collective action to attack the social causes of illness . In the struggle against the cuts, the dilemma is obvious . Defence of jobs has been a priority in the hospital sector ; defence of local hospitals is another priority, yet many of the smaller hospitals are in fact suffering from their age and construction . Defence of the National Health Service against those who wish to reintroduce charges (such as the BMA, who suggested "Hotel" charges for Hospital patients in their evidence to the Royal Commission) is clearly an important feature of the cuts campaign, but the NHS maintains an undemocratic structure, within which professional dominance is scarcely ever questioned . This discussion paper cannot provide the arguments to solve these dilemmas. But if it integrates a wide ranging discussion on what is happening at the present, and the various long term causes it will at least advance the argument beyond sterile restatement of previously held positions . APPENDIX 1 EMPLOYMENT IN THE NHS IN ENGLAND . (IN THOUSANDS) Group Total Ancillary (a) 212 Nurses and Midwives (b) 349 Admin and Clerical (a) 112 Professional and Technical (a) (c) 67 Works etc . (a) 19 Hospital Medical Staff (b) (d) 29

Ft

Male Pt Total

Ft

Female Pt Total

56 33 23

4 3 1

60 36 24

55 177 58

97 136 30

152 313 88

19

-

19

17

5

24

4

1

5

a) Figures for 1976 supplied by the DHSS b) Source (1975) : Health and Personal Services Statistics for England and Wales . (c) Figures not kept on a male female basis .



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CAPITAL & CLASS

(d) Part time work for consultants is based on the nature of their contract with the NHS . Most part timers spend the remainder of their hours working in private practice . NOTES Tom Manson teaches at the University of Salford . This discussion paper is designed as a brief introduction to the problems associated with the development of health policy in the National Health Service, and is not therefore as detailed as it might be . Most of the ideas contained in the paper arose out of discussion in the "Politics of Health" group and I would like to thank all the members of this group for their help in examining the complex relationship between the state and the system of health care . The bibliography lists those books, articles and other publications referred to in the text, as well as some others that would be of value to a discussion of the development of health policy .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel Smith, B . and Titmuss, B . 1956 The Costs of the National Health Service in England and Wales Cambridge University Press, Cambridge . Abel Smith, B . 1976, Value for Money in Health Services Heinemann London . British Medical Association, 1977, "Evidence to the Royal Commission on the National Health Service" British Medical Journal . Department of Health and Social Security, 1976, Sharing Resources for Health in England HMSO . Department of Health and Social Security, 1976, Priorities for Health and Personal Social Services . The Way Forward HMSO . Draper, P., Best, G ., Dennis, J, 1976, Health, Money and the National Health Service, Unit for the Study of Health Policy, Guys Hospital Medical School . Fryer, R .H ., Fairclough, A .J . and Manson, T .B ., 1978, "Employment and Trade Unionism in the Public Services" Capital and Class 4 . Gough, I ., 1975, "State expenditure and advanced capitalism" New Left Review 92 . McKeown, T ., 1976, The role of medicine . Dream, mirage or nemesis? Nuffield Provincial Hospital Trust London . Manson, T .B ., 1977, "Management the profession and the Unions" in M . Stacey (ed .) Health and the Division of Labour Croom Helm London . Mullen, P ., 1977, Reflections on RAWP Health Services Management Centre Occasional Paper no . 13 . HSMC University of Birmingham . Powell, J . Enoch, 1966, A new look at Medicine and Politics Pitman London .

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Powles, J ., 1973, "On the limitations of modern medicine" Science

medicine and man Vol . 1 Radical Statistics Health Group, 1976, Whose priorities? Radical Statistics London . Tudor Hart, J ., 1975, "The inverse care law" in Cox and Mead (ed .) A sociology of medical practice Collier MacMillan London . Watkin, B ., 1975, Documents on Health and Social Services Methuen .

Back numbers of Capital & Class are available at current cover price . Contents of recent issues include : Capital & Class 3 : Banaji : Modes of Production in a Materialist Theory of History/ Beechey : Women and Wage Labour/ Murray : Modern Landed Property and Rent, part 1 / Grossman : Theories of Use and Exchange, part 2 . Capital & Class 4 : Marx : The Value Form/ Itoh : The inflational Crisis of Capitalism/ McDonnell : Ideology, Crisis and the Cuts/ Murray : Modern Landed Property and Rent, part 2/ Ball : British Housing Policy and the House Building Industry/ Horton : The Revolution of Hope and its Results/ Manson et al : Employment and Trade Unionism in the Public Service . Capital & Class 5 : Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison : In defence of Value/ Clarke : Capital, Fractions of Capital and the State/ Rubin : On Value/ Harrison : The USSR in the 1920s and 1930s . Capital & Class 6 : Hemson : Trade Unionism in South Africa/ Aumeeruddy et al : Labour Power and the State/ Himmelweit and Mohun : The Anomalies of Capital/ Massey : Regionalism/ Reinfelder & Slater : Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual &

Manual Labour . Available from CSE, 55 Mount Pleasant, London W .C .1 . Back issues of Capital & Class are available to our readers in the United States from our U .S. distributor . Issues 2-5 are S3 .00 each ; issues after that are S3 .50 . (Number 1 is out of print .) Please add 50 cents postage per order, and send to Carrier Pigeon, Box 590, Central Square Station, Cambridge, Mass . 02139 .

THE FISCAL CRISIS OF THE STATE : NOTES ON THE ITALIAN CASE Daniele Fano and Claudio Sardoni

INTRODUCTION The simultaneous flourishing of a number of analyses and theories of the fiscal crisis of the State in various capitalist countries-a comprehensive survey of which was recently made by Bob Jessop (1977)-is certainly not fortuitous . It corresponds to a period of general social struggle and economic recession in the Western World in which the slowing down of the rates of growth and full employment policies have gone along with a more or less extensive questioning of the public social welfare programs . In no country, however, has the most apparent aspect of the fiscal crisis of the State-the public sector deficit-reached the scale experienced in Italy : TABLE 1 PUBLIC SECTOR DEFICIT IN SOME CAPITALIST COUNTRIES (PERCENT OF GNP) . '74 '75 '76 '77* 1973 . - 5 .8 - 3 .7 - 3 .0 W . GERMANY 1 .4 - 1 .2 - 2 .2 - 0 .8 - 0 .9 FRANCE .5 .6 - 5 .0 - 3 .4 - 3 .6 - 4 .5 - 5 .3 UK - 9 .2 - 9 .2 - 6 .3 - 5 .9 -13 .3 ITALY - 2 .1 - 1 .1 .5 - 0 .2 - 4 .2 USA - 7 .0 - 6 .2 .3 - 2 .5 - 6 .8 JAPAN *Estimates . Source : Report of ISCO to CNEL . Therefore, it seems to us quite interesting to investigate the origins and main features of the fiscal crisis in our country . As we will show in the following pages, such a task is impossible without taking into account the evolution of class struggle as well as the relationship between classes in the last fifteen years . However, it seems to us incorrect to understand and explain the fiscal crisis only through an analysis of the evolution of the eco-



47

ITALIAN FISCAL CRISIS-

nomic crisis and the working out of the "laws" of capitalist development which, at any rate, played an important role in determining it .[1 ] However, before trying to describe the interplay between class struggle, economic crisis and fiscal crisis in Italy it seems to us necessary to provide some more detailed information about the crisis of the State and its development during the last years . THE MAIN INDICATORS OF THE CRISIS The first symptoms of the fiscal crisis in Italy had already been appearing, although not obtrusively, in the years from the 1963-64 slump to the end of the 60s . During that period the difference between tax revenue and expenditure in the public sector had been gradually increasing and approximately reached 5 per cent of national income .[2] This discrepancy was mainly due to the very limited increase in tax receipts (deriving, first of all, from tax evasion in higher income classes) along with a marked and growing expansion in current expenditure only partly compensated by delaying the implementation of public investment programs . These tendencies developed at an increasing rate between 1970 and 1975 . Public expenditure (general government) jumped from 36 per cent to 43 .5 per cent of GDP (at current prices, it increased by 134% p .a .) . This reflected the expansion of current expenditure and, within it, of transfers and subsidies . In 1975, current transfers were 55% of current expenditure and a large part of them was directed to households . Only in the last years of the period did transfers to private and public enterprises experience a more accentuated dynamic .[3] Meanwhile tax revenue stagnated and, in 1971 for the first time, current expenditure exceeded tax receipts . Tax revenue was 29 .8% of GPD in 1970 and reached only 31 .4% in 1975 . Further information about public expenditure in those years is summarised in table 2 . TABLE 2

Public Exp ./GDP% (general gov't) Current Exp ./GDP% Current Trans/GDP%

1970 36 .0 31 .3 16 .2

1975 43 .5 38 .1 21 .8

What factors lie behind these economic indicators of the fiscal crisis? There exist two kinds of problem in dealing with the fiscal crisis in Italy and its origins which make an analysis quite difficult . Firstly it seems to have been caused by a lot of factors which cannot be easily ordered and explained in a synthetic way ; secondly, the available official statistics are not satisfactory to carry out a detailed quantitative analysis, not being sufficiently disaggregated and complete . Moreover, as shown by O'Connor and Gough, the functional analysis used in national income statistics is not satisfactory in studying the structural factors underlying the development of public sector because they were constructed mainly for the purposes of short-term control of demand in capitalist economies . None the less, it seems to us that some important conclusions can be



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CAPITAL & CLASS

drawn from the available information . In so doing we will pay particular attention to the social factors underlying such a crisis and some structural reatures of Italian capitalist development since the end of the second world war . O'Connor's distinction and classification of public expenditure into social investment, social consumption and social expenses appear to correspond to the need for this analysis, although they make quantifying even more difficult (O'Connor, 1973, pp . 97-178) . We should keep them in mind in the following pages . SOCIAL INVESTMENT, SOCIAL CONSUMPTION AND EXPENSES AND THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN ITALY

SOCIAL

Although since the end of the second world war until the crisis in the early 70s Italian capitalism has scored unprecedented rates of growth, it still remains much weaker, from a structural point of view, than many other western capitalist competitors . Such a structural weakness implies the existence of deep contradictions affecting the Italian economy and social system as well . The Italian economy is characterised by unequal development in particular between North and South-and the presence, together with some modern and technologically advanced industrial sectors, of a vast area of backward sectors and firms (in agriculture as well as in industry and services) which employ a lot of precarious workers with low wages and incomes . Moreover the massive emigration from agriculture has not been compensated by an equal increase in employment in the private industrial and services sectors . Within this framework the State, through its sectoral and regional agencies, has indeed directed social investment towards securing the basic infrastructures for the development of new industries, has directly intervened in some southern areas essentially through enterprises with public majority shareholdings, and has favoured the rising of advanced capitalist firms in agriculture . Anyway, it seems to us that the greatest flow of public expenditure has been rather directed towards making more malleable the social contradictions engendered by capitalist development itself without any direct contribution to productive growth . Disposable income in Southern Italy is traditionally higher than produced income, that gap being essentially filled by public transfers to households . It is quite certain that many private firms in Northern or Central Italy have preferred to have the demand for their products secured by public transfers, rather than assist the growth of competitors in the most depressed areas which, in addition provided an apparently inexhaustible industrial reserve army . However, in the long-run that policy has given place to a vicious spiral requiring an increasing outflow of public transfers and subsidies . Augusto Graziani writes in this connection : "the lack of industrial development in Southern Italy has probably given the Northern Regions an immediate advantage having put at the



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disposal of Northern Italy's firms an apparently unlimited reserve of workers ; in the long-run, however, this has appeared as a factor of great weakness for the country's structure, by requiring a perpetual outflow of substitutive public expenditure towards Southern Regions and creating there a ruling class separated from productive activities whose only interest is the continuous growth of public subsidies such as to require political alliances which, at the end, show themselves unproductive for the Northern Regions too ." (Graziani 1972, p . 95) These transfers and subsidies have been instrumental in making malleable the contradictions between the ruling classes and Southern Italy's population and kept alive the not always peaceful alliance between the northern industrial bourgeoisie and the bureaucracies to whom the management of the public transfers and subsidies is attributed . But such expenditure, not being in most cases directed to the objective of an autonomous capitalist development, must probably go on growing and prevent the State from channelling expenditure towards more productive directions . Continuous growth of public expenditure, on the other hand, is also caused by transfers to the weaker industrial sectors which benefitted many firms throughout the country in several ways (e .g . through special access to cheap credit, tax rebates, direct capital transfers and so on) . This expenditure, although not efficient from a "pure" capitalist viewpoint, made many firms survive and undoubtedly limited workers' redundancy .[6] In such a way the State prevented the deepening of contradictions between working class and bourgeoisie as well as within the bourgeoisie itself, i .e . between what O'Connor has called the monopoly bourgeoisie and the competitive one, using a terminology we do not fully share (O'Connor 1973, pp . 13-15) . Another field of "physiological" expansion of public expenditure has been given by the necessity for the State to secure a direct growth of employment depending on the insufficient growth in private sectors . If we look at employment in Italy between 1951 and 1971, i .e. before the 197374 slump, we realise that not only did it not increase but decreased by 1 .5%. Moreover, so small a decrease was entirely due to the huge increase in the number of employees within the public sector (general government plus transport), whose percentage growth was 62 .7% while employment in industry and services grew by 38% against a decrease in agriculture by 57 .7% .[7] In other words the expansion of employment in the capitalist sector alone was not sufficient to compensate for the dramatic "exodus" experienced in agriculture . Of course increases in public employment were experienced by many capitalist countries, as an effect of the growth of the State's role , but in Italy such a trend was much more accentuated . S6^the - main items of public sector expenditure in Italy until the end of the 60s were social investment, directed to stimulate and sustain the development of some advanced industrial or agricultural sectors and firms, and a relevant outflow of social expenses aimed at making more malleable many of the contradictions engendered by this type of capitalist development, in turn imposed by the structural weakness of our country . Social



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investment was mainly channelled towards the building of infrastructures and social expenses, which above all took the form of transfers and subsidies, were directed to some strata who were harder hit by conditions of backwardness, and to the weaker factions of the bourgeoisie as well . But, between the end of the 60s and the early 70s, such a framework becomes more complex and fiscal crisis takes on those features which were briefly described above, because of the intervention of two important factors ; that is the dramatic wave of working class struggles starting from 1969-70 and the oil crisis in 1973-74, in which Italy was very deeply involved . REPERCUSSIONS OF THE "HOT AUTUMN" Through the great strikes in the years 1969-70-the so-called "Autunno Caldo"-workers not only succeeded in getting huge wage increases and improvements in the organisation of labour within the factories but a significant increase in social consumption expenditures, or social wage, too .[81 There were increases in public expenditure-in particular in the fields of pensions, health, housing and through restrictions on increases in some public services rates . A large part of this demand for a higher social wage by workers was due to the more or less extensive objective absence of some social services and the utterly unsatisfactory way the others were supplied . Pensions and family allowances grew from 9 .2% of GNP in 1970 to 12 .5% in 1975 and health expenditure from 4 .8 to 7 .4% and public services rates in most sectors, e .g. transport and electricity, were frozen or allowed to increase in a very limited way . So pensions funds[9], hospital budgets, municipal transport agencies and other public services have been characterised by escalating deficits . But, unlike what happened in other countries, the increased involvement of the State in social policy was not followed by a reorganisation and restructuring of its apparatuses, essentially because the ruling classes have not been willing to grant durable recognition to the conquests of the working class . The Regional Reform which has realised a partial devolution to the newly created regional authorities (1972) of competence related to health, transport and so on, was aimed at such a reorganisation in the programs of some political forces (in particular PCI) . But, in fact, powers of regions are very limited and, moreover, only a few of themparticularly those governed by left-wing parties and even there with much uncertainty-have been attempting to use them . So large social-infrastructural investment programs, although promised, were never started, and greater successes, after the 1969 strikes, were achieved in such fields as pensions, where bargaining could obtain immediate monetary results . This is a reason why public expenditure growth was above all due to increases in transfers and other kinds of current expenditure . But it seems to us that it would be naive to attribute the State's financial crisis only to the growth of the social wage accruing to the working class thanks to struggles and strikes . In fact even if the social



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struggles following the "Autunno Caldo" have indeed caused an initial change in the balance of power more favourable to classes traditionally linked to and represented by Trade Unions and Left-wing parties, ruling classes -essentially through Democrazia Cristiana- immediately reacted, trying to secure equivalent or greater privileges for themselves and their traditional allies . The pensions' case is very indicative of the working of such a compensatory mechanism . Old-age pensions (to retired workers and their families) after an agreement reached by Trade Unions with government, have increased by 160% between 1970 and 1975, but pensions to the disabled have increased by 250% in the same period (this reflecting an increase in the number of beneficiaries and benefits as well) . Obviously there is no reason why the number of disabled should have increased so much in Italy during that period : in fact it is not a mystery that such kinds of pensions do not traditionally accrue to really disabled people but to social strata and groups linked more or less strongly to lobbies supporting government and the major Italian Party, Democrazia Cristiana, which have wide discretion in establishing criteria for the award of such pensions and subsidies .[10] Moreover pensions to autonomous workers (e .g . craft workers, tradespeople, peasants, etc .)-who also are traditionally linked to the ruling block of power-have dramatically increased while contributions paid by them remained at very low levels with relevant consequences for the budget of INPS (the agency for social security) as clearly shown by the following figures . The INPS' budget, in 1975, scored a surplus amounting to L . 935 billion as to wage and salary earners but a deficit of L . 2,458 billion for peasants', craft workers' and trades peoples' pensions . In addition it has been estimated that, in 1980, surplus in the first case will reach L . 2,428 billion and deficit, in the second one, L . 13,111 billion .[11 ] We have paid particular attention to the working of the compensatory mechanism in the pensions' case because of its significance but many other examples could be made with respect to other fields in social policy, showing the State's role in managing relations between classes through its budget too . However we preferred not to deal with them and rather analyse other effects produced by the initial increases in social wage and compensatory expenses .[121 The relevance of these kinds of social expenditure is not only given so

much by the dimensions of monetary increases as by the automatic mechanisms that regulate them once they are granted . These mechanisms leave central government with very little discretionary power as to subsequent increases . The pensions' case, again, is regarded as very significant . Thanks to the workers' struggles Trade Unions were able to obtain the linkage of increases in pensions to the increase in minimum wages and prices, and this was later extended to all types of pensions, contributing to put them "out of control" because of their high rigidity irrespective of the policy needs at different stages of the capitalist cycle . Moreover the existence of automatic mechanisms regulating the expansion of public expenditure is coupled with the absence of a reliable information system . The Italian Public Administration is formed by a set



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of institutions which were created in different historical periods and have various degrees of autonomy with respect to central government: for example, many local or sectoral agencies have autonomous access to credit . In addition, as we said, there is no consolidated account for the whole public sector and there are no regular forecasts of cash expenditure . This institutional framework has certainly been favourable to the development of the compensatory mechanism we illustrated above . The various levels of government have been able to respond to the pressure coming from different social strata without causing a prompt reaction from central government whose policy, moreover, was still influenced by the previous period of high growth when the necessity of a tight control system had not been felt but, on the contrary, the Treasury had acted as an important centre financing Christian Democrat clienteles . Anyway it would be impossible to fully understand the depth of the fiscal crisis in Italy without taking into account the economic crisis which has been shaking the country since the early 70s . Victories won by workers as to wage levels and labour conditions together with the 197374 oil crisis which struck Italy very hard have caused a huge fall in profitability of capitalist firms and the economy has experienced a dramatic reduction in the rate of accumulation, a deep balance of payments crisis, and high inflation and unemployment . This has induced a more relevant State intervention into the economy, trying to sustain and subsidise private and public firms in order to prevent a further worsening of the crisis and unemployment . But in this case too, the State's intervention has taken the form of an increasing outflow of current transfers towards firms . Total transfers to private firms between 1970 and 1975 jumped from L . 1,827 to L . 4,014 billion (+120% p .a.) and it is estimated they will further increase in the following years . But the absence of general control of the way which these transfers took place could hardly give Italian economy a real incentive to restructuring and rather worsened the climate of uncertainty .[13] So, in the middle of the 70s, Italy's social unrest and economic crisis had produced a deep fiscal crisis of the State which in turn contributed to a further worsening of the crisis itself . The rigidity of a relevant share of public expenditure, the absence of an efficient system of control and planning, as well as the forms taken by a large part of expenditure, prevented public expenditure being used in an effective way in order to overcome social and economic troubles ; while the wide indebtedness of public sector affects monetary and credit systems and increases expenditure further, because of interest payments .[14] This is why, after 1975, within ruling classes and political forces strong pressures to deal with the fiscal crisis took place and international authorities too (CEE, FMI, etc .) exerted all their influence in order to push the Italian government in that direction . However the complexity of factors underlying the crisis and their very direct social and political consequences have so far made it very hard to overcome . In the next paragraph we will try to describe some of the attempts made and the difficulties met.



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THE NEED FOR AND THE DIFFICULTY OF IMPOSING EXPENDITURE CUTS AND PUBLIC SECTOR RESTRUCTURING As we saw above, the main factors which caused the fiscal crisis' explosion in Italy during the 70s were the huge outflow of social expenses and social consumption expenditures (social wage) and the deepening of the economic crisis affecting the whole economy which, on one hand, required a further increase of social expenses themselves and, on the other, dramatic increases in aids and subsidies to public and private firms . The existence of many automatic mechanisms regulating the growth of a large part of the social wage and social expenses has given rise to an almost uncontrolled growth of public expenditure (above all current expenditure), and the State's increasing interventionism in favour of productive firms (in particular through current transfers), did not so far succeed in carrying out an actual strengthening and recovery of the economy . On the contrary, it has caused a further worsening because of the perverse effects of a wide and growing budget deficit . In a situation the most urgent task which is to be accomplished by the State is to gain an effective power of control over expenditure so that it could put into practice the cuts and the restructuring of its apparatuses needed to try to solve the fiscal crisis and channel its interventionism in a more favourable direction for capitalist recovery and growth . So the most significant attempts so far made by political forces in order to solve the State's crisis were concerned with organisational and administrative issues, even if there have been expenditure cuts and increases in tax revenue aimed at reducing the deficit . First of all, there will be a law which requires the checking of all expenditures passed by Parliament during the year so that their consistency with the goals of the budget policy may be assured . In such a way the State is trying to provide a tool which allows public expenditure cuts in an automatic way once the budget has been passed . Secondly, the formulation of consolidated accounts of the whole public sector is expected so that all public agencies making expenditure decisions can be put under central government control . While in recent years many agencies could make autonomous expenditure decisions, now actual steps to prevent-in particular-Local Authorities' free access to credit for financing their current expenditures are being made . Moreover, Local Authorities were the first public bodies to experience actual cuts in their expenditure plans in 1978 . Thirdly, as in the other European countries, a multiperiod estimates system for planning public sector expenditure as well as quarterly cash statements at all government levels will probably be carried out . The multiperiod estimates system would be employed as a middle and long run tool and quarterly statements as a short run tool for the control of expenditure . Finally a Public Expenditure Parliamentary Committee would be formed being essentially responsible for control of bills requiring expenditures . Meanwhile some tax rates and public service tariffs have been raised in order to make the 1979 public sector deficit decrease, and further current expenditure cuts are expected to be proposed by government .[15]



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However the fiscal crisis in Italy appears to be very far from its actual solution . All major problems are still to be solved and, although all political forces are continuously proclaiming their firm willingness to solve them, there exist many difficulties in doing that . Which difficulties does a rigorous policy against fiscal crisis meet? It seems to us that they are essentially social and political ones . Obviously solving or extenuating the fiscal crisis in Italy and making State intervention more efficient meets a lot of difficulties of an economic and technological nature deriving from the complexity of the State apparatus and the breadth of the economic problems . But, as we have said, the main difficulties are social and political ; in the following pages we will try to describe them . An actual solution of the State's crisis requires, first of all, that automatic mechanisms underlying the continuous growth of public expenditure be stopped and tax revenue further raised, in order to decrease the Public Sector deficit and make the control of expenditure possible, so that the State could better deal with the capitalist crisis through a more rational and effective budget policy in favour of capitalist accumulation . This means that a share of direct and indirect social expenses and social wage is to be curtailed . Some transfers are to be reduced, the expansion of the State unproductive employment stopped and so on ; while direct State intervention in favour of capitalist restructuring is increased in a more efficient way . But all this has immediate social and political consequences . In fact significant cuts in social expenses and social wage would immediately affect incomes and living standards of vast social strata (precarious workers, autonomous workers, unemployed, industrial working class and so on) . They are the electoral and social bases of the two most important Italian parties, DC and PCI, which today share government responsibility (the Communist Party only indirectly) and which since the end of the war have succeeded in managing or influencing public expenditure by assuring benefits to them . Obviously all those social strata and classes are now opposing drastic reductions in public expenditure, and political parties must take this into account in order to avoid the weakening of their power and a further worsening of the already precarious social consensus . So all political forces have so far been very cautious in proposing and, above all, carrying out actual cuts in public expenditure . Moreover each party has been attempting to impose expenditure cuts primarily affecting social strata linked to the other ones . The case of pensions is again symptomatic : Some time ago the DC government, trying to reduce pension fund deficit, proposed a bill which made cumulating wages or salaries with pensions impossible . Immediately, Trades Unions, Left-wing parties and a part of DC itself reacted and rejected such proposals, holding that the very low contributions from autonomous workers are the main reason for the pension fund deficit and they should have been raised first . The result was that the situation has so far remained unchanged . The political significance of this is quite apparent : the need for ex-



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penditure cuts deepens social contradictions and each party tries to make the others take the major consequences of the necessary restructuring of public expenditure. This has led to a situation in which, up to now, actual significant steps towards the necessary solution of the fiscal crisis have been few . However, we do not believe that the fiscal crisis of the State in Italy must remain unresolved and that the social and economic crisis is doomed to get deeper and deeper while the balance of power between classes and political parties creates a state of paralysis . .We indeed believe that only a change in that balance of power can permit an actual fiscal solution to begin . In other words it depends on the evolution of the power relationship between classes . In recent years, through the working of a compensatory mechanism, i .e . a general growth of public expenditure in favour of all classes, the balance of power between classes could be maintained almost unchanged in spite of the victories won by the working class within the factories as well as at a social level . But this led to the crisis we have talked about which made the situation unbearable and requiring a turning point . Anyway, State restructuring and public expenditure cuts cannot take place without taking into account the fundamental role played by the State itself in assuring a certain degree of social consensus and this implies that social expenses and social wage, although partly decreased according to the needs of capitalist accumulation, cannot be dramatically reduced .[16] Which items of social expenses and social wage are to be curtailed and which classes or social strata have to experience the heaviest cuts and worsening of living standards depends on the evolution of power relations within society . So it seems to us that a full understanding of the evolution of the fiscal crisis in Italy and which direction it could be driven in the search for a solution requires the analysis of the Italian situation at a more general level than the economic one . But this would take us beyond the scope of the present article, which was essentially concerned with a brief analysis of some structural and social factors underlying the fiscal crisis in our country .

NOTES Daniele Fano and Claudio Sardoni work in the State Expenditure Group of the Institute for Economics, Via Nomentana 41, Rome . The present paper is an abridged and reduced version of a previous one written in Italian, where some theoretical issues were also dealt with . In order to avoid too many and heavy footnotes we preferred not to quote a lot of Italian books and statistical sources hardly available to English readers . The Italian version of the paper was read and commented by E . Fano Damascelli and J . Holloway whose assistance was very helpful in writing the present English one ; responsibility for all remaining defects is obviously ours .



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In other words, in our opinion, the Italian case confirms Gouge's view of the need to reject a functionalist conception of the State and its crisis (Gough, 1975) which is to some extent present in J . O'Connor's analysis of the State (O'Connor, 1973) in which the crisis stems from the underlying laws of the capitalist economy . Certainly the economic situation imposes constraints and modes of action on the State but does not fully explain its behaviour . The consolidated statistics of the public sector in Italy are limited to "general government", i .e . they do not include net income and expenditure of hospitals, nationalised industries, public transport agencies and other minor public sector components . As we will show in the following pages this lack of information has been criticised and more comprehensive statistics have been experimentally constructed and will be systematically calculated in order to meet the need for tighter control of public expenditure . During the period 1970-75, on an average, 68% of current transfers went to households . A large part of the figures used in the paper was provided by the important work by F . Reviglio (1977) . As to the construction of infrastructures, the building of roads by the State is very significant : between 1960 and 1971, the extension of the motorway system jumped from about 1,200 km . to 4,350 . This favoured not only the monopolistic firms manufacturing means of transport but many other sectors, too, which experienced a relevant decrease in their transport costs . A. Pedone (1976) holds : "The relationship between the State and firms has also contributed to the huge increase in public expenditure and the contracted growth of tax revenue (State subsidies to the firms having often taken the form of 'tax expenditures') . The role in sustaining the accumulation process which such a relationship produced was influenced by two typical features of the Italian situation : the existence of many public enterprises, ( . . .) ; and the existence of a vast area of small firms and backward sectors which play a role in dampening and stabilising the economic and political situation . In this setting, the expansion of the relation between the State and firms has hardly contributed to an adequate accumulation as required by market or policy indications . . ." It seems to us that the present capitalist mode of production as a whole is characterised as a monopolistic system and weaker sectors or firms within it cannot be called competitive . They rather represent a result of the development of such a system, which does not necessarily imply that all the economy should be characterised by the existence of technologically advanced corporations . Transport in Italy is almost entirely nationalised . By "social wage"-a term used by Gough (1975)-we mean those items of public expenditure involving production and reproduction of labour-force (health, education as well as pensions, transport, etc .) . O'Connor names such expenditures "social consumption" holding that its growth within capitalism is essentially due to the need for a reduction in costs for private firms, who transfer part of them to the State



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through the socialisation of costs of production of labour-force . We prefer the term "social wage" because it is easier to point out by it that such expenditure by the State is not simply determined by the capitalists' interests-a functionalist viewpoint-but is directly influenced by struggles and power relations between the working class and the bourgeoisie, as are capitalist wages . 9 Deficits in pension funds require a more detailed explanation which will be given later . 10 A useful analysis of this problem is provided by Amato (1976) . 11 The figures are drawn from CNEL's 10th Report on the country's social situation . 12 See Amato (1976) for a wider analysis of the working of the compensatory mechanism in fields other than pensions . 13 By total transfers we mean current and capital transfers plus credit concessions to private firms and special lending institutes . 14 Total public sector interest payments grew from 2 .75% to 4.52% of GPD between 1970 and 1975 . 15 In particular rail transport and electricity rates were raised while various tax rates-above all indirect taxes were-increased . 16 Moreover, public expenditure for social wage or social consumption plays an important role in reducing capitalists' costs, as O'Connor and Gough point out .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amato, Giuliano, 1976, Economic politico ed istituzioni in Italic ; Bologna . Gough, Ian, 1975, "State Expenditure in Advanced Capitalism" ; New Left Review, July-August . Graziani, Augusto, 1972, L'economic italiana 1945-1970 ; Bologna. Jessop, Bob, 1977, "Recent Theories of the Capitalist State" ; Cambridge Journal of Economics, December . O'Connor, James, 1973, The Fiscal Crisis of The State ; New York . Pedone, Antonio, 1976, "Un terzo e piu difficile dopoguerra" ; Rinascita 10 dicembre . Reviglio, Franco, 1977, Spesa pubblica e stagnazione dell economia italiana ; Bologna .

VALORISATION AND `DESKILLING' : A CRITIQUE OF BRAVERMAN Tony Elger

Braverman's work has been central to the return of attention to the study of the capitalist labour process . This paper focusses on his major theme, and rejects as inadequate both his analysis of capital's generic impulsion to deskill and his location of the consummation of that impulsion in monopoly capitalism . Instead it argues for an historically located theorisation of the transformation of the labour process, which would explicitly locate that transformation in relation to phases of valorisation and accumulation and their contradictions . Some features of such an account are discussed, with particular reference to debate about the 'labour aristocracy', analyses of the role of Taylorism and contemporary discussions of automation .

INTRODUCTION[l] The Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process is a relatively recent but increasingly significant aspect of the general renewal and development of Marxist analysis of contemporary capitalism . Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital has been one of the most influential contributions to this development and remains the fullest restatement to date of some of the fundamental themes of such an analysis. His work has served as both point of reference and inspiration for many current analyses of the transformation undergone by the labour process, the changing structure of employment and class composition, and the sources of wage labour in the era of 'monopoly capitalism' . Indeed Braverman's eloquent contribution is reminiscent of that of his mentors, Baran and Sweezy, in the manner in which it has confronted some of the major orthodoxies of bourgois social science and provided a focus for debate of issues which should be central to Marxist theory .



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The scope and significance of Braverman's analysis can be characterised in terms of the following features . First it reinstates the imperative of capital accumulation as the fundamental dynamic determining the 'incessant transformation' and 'tendential degradation' of labour in capitalist societies. Second it attempts to locate specific aspects of such transformation and degradation within the totality of developments in capitalist production set in motion by capital accumulation . In relation to this concern with the totality of capitalist production Braverman is centrally concerned to grasp the interrelations of the whole complex of features which appear to characterise 'monopoly capital' : the rise of oligopolistic competition among giant corporations ; the process of rationalisation of production ; the elaboration of the administrative apparatus of corporate capital ; the encroachment of capitalist commodity production into enclaves of non-capitalist production ; changes in the character and composition of the industrial reserve army ; and the consequent relationships between the modes of organisation of the labour process in different sectors . Two particularly notable features of Braverman's work are integral to this attempt to grasp the totality of production relations of monopoly capitalism . One is the novel attention he gives to analysing changes in the labour process in the 'new' service industries and occupations . The other is his recognition-unusual among Marxists and bourgeois social scientists alike-of the importance of the sexual division of labour in the changing structure of employment of different sectors of production . These achievements have been recognised by the wide and appreciative audience gained for Braverman's work and must be sustained in any critical assessment. At the same time the scope and power of his account suggests the value of such critical evaluation, as a basis for further developing the Marxist analysis of the capitalist labour process . In this paper I do not attempt to provide a comprehensive critique but instead limit myself to a consideration of the manner in which Braverman conceptualises the relationship between capital accumulation and the degradation of work, and the manner in which he characterises and periodises transformations in the organisation of production . Together these lines of criticism constitute an initial attempt to locate processes of deskilling within a Marxist analysis of the labour process, in a more adequate manner, by engaging in debate with Braverman's bold and impressive synthesis. Though Braverman's account serves as the focus of discussion this necessarily involves consideration of other recent Marxist analyses of the transformation of the capitalist labour process . Before turning to these specific arguments however I shall comment on the relationship between some general criticisms of Braverman's discussion of the degradation of work and the critique of his analysis of the relationship between capital accumulation and deskilling . GENERAL CRITICISM OF LMC Two dominant themes emerge from many of the Marxist critiques of Braverman .[2] The first concerns the inadequacy of his objectivist



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conceptualisation of the working class, which fails to address the manner in which class struggle is integral to the course of development of the capitalist labour process .[3] The second focusses on the implication, in the structure and discourse of LMC, that analyses of both the obstacles confronting the accumulation process and their resolution in the reorganisation of the labour process can be divorced from analysis of broader forms of political domination and struggle .[4] The first criticism focusses on the much quoted self-denying ordinance announced by Braverman in his introduction : "no attempt will be made to deal wtih the modern working class on the level of its consciousness, organisation or activities . This is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself." (LMC p . 27) However valuable this disclaimer may be in relation to much conventional subjectivist sociology or other vague discussions of class consciousness it is evident that this conceptualisation remains seriously disabling . It warrants a treatment of the working class as an object of capital, which, while underlining the capacity of capital to reorganise the labour process, degrade the labourer, and propel her/him from sector to sector, forgets that the working class remains an active agency in the capital relation . As Schwarz remarks Braverman's approach fails to recognise "the working class as an active and problematical presence within the mechanism of accumulation ." [5] The second criticism is closely bound in with the first because it is primarily (though not exclusively) in relation to the problematical character of class relations in production that the critical significance of political relations and state institutions in reconstructing class relations has become a major focus of contemporary Marxist discussion of capitalist hegemony . In relation to such debate Braverman notices the central significance of economistic trade unionism for the character of working class accommodation with advanced capitalism . He implies however that this mode of accommodation 'arises directly out of the forms taken by capital accumulation and the capitalist labour process in the era of 'monopoly capitalism', rather than being a complex and contradictory product of the interrelations between such developments and the organisation of politics and state activity in capitalist society . [6] It is important to recognise that these criticisms do not merely suggest that Braverman's discussion is the necessarily incomplete account of one author, to be supplemented by that of others . The boundaries marked out by these criticisms delineate a more coherent project than that would imply : for the underlying theme of LMC is that a fundamental feature of monopoly capitalism is that capitalist control and domination is secured in a thoroughgoing fashion within production . For Braverman the process of degradation of work and the disciplining effect of the reserve army of labour together appear to produce a virtually inert working class, unable to pose any substantial problems for capital either within production or beyond it . This interpretation is, in my view, supported by the terms of Braverman's rejoinder to some of his critics-his response to the critique of objectivism focusses on the ultimate emergence of a revolutionary consciousness under the spur of "an enormous intensification of the pressures which have only just begun to bear upon the working class",



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with minimal recognition of the need to explore the complex relations between current problems of accumulation and forms of class struggle and such a possible future .[71 Of course, this in no way denies the significance of an analysis of the development of the capitalist labour process, but it does argue that such an analysis must (a) locate the forms of class struggle, characteristic of specific phases in the transformation of the capitalist labour process, as integral features of that transformation, and (b) remain sensitive to the complex relationships between class relations in production and broader forms of political domination and struggle . If the structure of Braverman's analysis enables him to forclose such crucial questions it is important to go beyond a reassertion of their importance to examine the features of his account of the capitalist labour process which facilitate this closure, and to consider alternative conceptualisations which do not have similar consequences . In accordance with this objective I will now turn to an examination of Braverman's analysis of the transformation of the capitalist labour process, and to a consideration of alternative accounts . THE DEGRADATION OF CRAFT WORK The most sustained theme of LMC concerns the degradation of craft work into common detailed labour as the capitalist labour process is "rendered independent of craft, tradition and the workers' knowledge" (p . 113) . Braverman's most vivid passages depict the process-or more often the capitalist theorisation of the process-of the arrogation of established 'rounded' craft expertise by capital and its transformation into a body of principles and practises from which the worker is excluded, and through which she/he is thoroughly subordinated to the imperatives of capital accumulation . This theme provides the focus of the discussion of 'scientific management' but is also central to the discussion of machinery and to the analysis of the degradation of clerical labour . Thus in the latter case Braverman notes that while "clerical work in its earliest stages has been likened to a craft" (p . 298) the increasingly predominant form of office labour is routinised, mechanically paced paper processing, in many ways analogous to other forms of routinised manual labour within manufacturing industry . Braverman's treatment of the degradation of craft work focusses upon two central imperatives of the capitalist organisation of the labour process . The first is the concern to cheapen labour : in Marxian terms, to reduce the value of labour power by substituting simple for complex labour . The second, and more fundamental imperative for Braverman, is to guarantee effective capitalist control of the labour process-by dissolving those esoteric skills which underpinned effective craft opposition to the reorganisation of production in the hands of capital and its agents . "In destroying the craft as a process under the control of the worker, he reconstitutes it as a process under his own control" . For Braverman, these developments are seen to gain their most significant momentum and their most coherent theoretical expression for capital in the last decades of the 19th century, in the 'scientific managec. & c .

I



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ment' movement, and to achieve unrivalled dominance during the first half of this century, thus constituting the most crucial form of 'the degradation of work in the 20th century' . The central thrust of this major theme of LMC is succinctly outlined in Braverman's summary of the logic of Taylorism : "Workers who are controlled only by general orders and discipline are not adequately controlled, because they retain their grip on the actual processes of labour . . . (and) they will thwart efforts to realise to the full the potential in their labour power . To change this situation control over the labour process must pass into the hands of management, not only in a formal sense but by the control and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance ." (p . 100) Thus Braverman's discussion of the theory, practises and consequences for workers of the process of deskilling constitutes an impressively concrete restatement of Marx's analysis of the tendency for capital to transform the labour process in the direction of simple, specialised and determined labour . I now turn to the mode of conceptualisation which underlies this account . Braverman's point of departure for an analysis of the unity of the labour process and capital accumulation is a restatement of the classical Marxist account of the exchange between capital and wage labour : "The worker enters into the employment agreement because social conditions leave him or her no other way to gain a livelihood . The employer, on the other hand, is the possessor of a unit of capital which he is endeavouring to enlarge . . . in everything that follows therefore we shall be considering the manner in which the labour process is dominated by and shaped by the accumulation of capital ." (p . 53) This formulation does not, significantly, lead to any extensive discussion of the forms of extraction of surplus value and exigencies of accumulation which have dominated successive phases of the capitalist labour process . Rather it is simply accompanied by general references to the character of accumulation as a structural imperative of capitalism .[8] Braverman then proceeds to a general diagnosis of what he sees as the fundamental obstacle confronting capital accumulation . This diagnosis hinges on the manner in which, in the context of antagonistic class relations, the "infinite potentiality" of labour power may remain inadequately realised because of entrenched working-class routines : "If the capitalist builds upon this distinctive quality and potential of human labour power, it is also this quality by its very indeterminacy, which places before him his greatest challenge and problem . . . what he buys is infinite in potential but in its realisation it is limited by the subjective state of the workers, by their previous history, by the general social conditions under which they work, as well as the particular conditions of the enterprise and by the technical setting of their labour" . (p . 57)



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The dynamics of the transformation of the labour process are located in a general contradiction between capitalist control of the product of wage labour on one hand, and customary and worker regulated modes of labour (equated with craft skills) on the other . Thus Braverman establishes the basis for a general and abstract impulsion of capital towards the `real' subordination of labour and directly identifies this abstract impulsion with a uniform process of degradation of craft skills . I now want to draw out some of the deficiencies of this formulation and relate these to Marx's own discussion . CAPITAL ACCUMULATION AND THE REAL SUBORDINATION OF THE LABOUR PROCESS The major deficiencies of Braverman's discussion relate on one hand to the inadequately located character of the impulsion to control imputed to capital, and on the other to the singular role attributed to craft skill as obstacle to capital . 1 . A central feature of an adequate analysis of the transformation of the capitalist labour process, and one inadequately acknowledged by Braverman, must be an attempt to locate the forms, and phases of development, of capitalist control over the labour process more precisely than he attempts to do . This is not merely. a matter of specifying the discrete conjunctural conditions which affect the general tendencies which he delineates . It involves a commitment to the specification of the relationship between forms of the extraction of surplus value in the process of capital accumulation and phases in the organisation of the capitalist labour process . While Braverman acknowledges the distinct forms of appropriation analysed in Capital under the headings of absolute and relative surplus value, the relationship between these forms and the development from the `formal' to the 'real' subordination of the labour process to capital accumulation remains virtually unexplored . In Marx's discussion of the development of 'real' subordination, however, the forms of capitalist reorganisation of the labour process are situated in alternative strategies of surplus value production, each with inherent limits and contradictions and characteristic forms of class struggle .[9] 2 . There is a strong tendency in Braverman's account to conceptualise the transformation in terms of a switch from thoroughgoing craft controls to pervasive capitalist direction of the labour process . Even when he recognises that capital faces a recurrent task of reestablishing its control over the labour process he conceptualises worker opposition in the inadequate terms of a polarity : either renascent craft expertise or generalised subterranean hostility (for examples see LMC p . 120n, p . 172 and p . 180n) . As the Brighton Group have emphasised such an approach fails to recognise the complex form of the 'real' subordination of the labour process to capital, and in particular fails to appreciate the manner in which forms of specialised expertise and craft competence may be embedded within a complex structure of collective labour effectively subordinated to capital accumulation . In addition it loses sight of those forms and bases of organised working class resistance which cannot be understood in terms of



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rounded craft skills . 3 . As the previous point implies Braverman's conception of the craft worker as obstacle to capital equates complex competences,' a high value of labour power and effective collective opposition to capitalist initiatives . There is little discussion of the problematic character of this equation where : i . complex competences may be thoroughly subordinated to capital and be subjected to both an extended working day and intensification (as in Marx's conception of modern manufacture and domestic industry), or ii . collective organisation may gain increased wages and the status of skilled worker with little evidence of craft expertise .[ 10] 4 . Finally, Braverman's discussion of the organisation of the labour process remains for the most part at the level of its theorisation by 'management scientists' . His reliance on such programmatic material gives a spurious concreteness to his account of a general impulsion to control directly realised in deskilling . However, a critical consequence is that insufficient consideration is given to the conditions in which such strategies are implemented, and in particular to the effectiveness of workers' resistance to changes in the labour process . Having outlined some of the major weaknesses of Braverman's discussion I now turn to a brief examination of Marx's conceptualisation to provide a more coherent indication of the implications of, in particular, the first two of these criticisms . Marx's discussion of the relationship between the logic of capital accumulation and the reorganisation of the capitalist labour process is a complex one and his treatment of absolute and relative surplus value is developed in the course of separate discussions of the historical development of struggles over the length of the working day on one hand, and of the sequential development of co-operation, the manufacturing division of labour and modern mechanised industry on the other . Thus I shall only provide a sketch of the form of Marx's argument in order to suggest the importance of an analysis couched in these terms, especially in relation to the issues which arise out of Braverman's account of the degradation of work . Marx's analysis of the extraction of absolute surplus value takes as its point of departure opportunities for valorisation open to the capitalist in the context of the given conditions of organisation of the labour process which capital inherits from previous modes of production . In this context surplus value is extracted under conditions where the capitalist deploys his market power to extend the length of the working day while the labourer retains some control over the actual process of production . In addition capital may impose a greater intensity and continuity of labourwhat Marx sometimes calls a reduction in the 'porosity' of the working day-without transforming the customary organisation of labour . However, this situation of the 'merely' formal subordination of the labour process to capital sets definite limits to extraction of surplus value -limits which are crucially defined by the market power and political organisation of capital and labour . In the context of competition among



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capitals and working class resistance to the lengthening of the working day and to reduce 'porosity' capital tends to turn increasingly to the extraction of relative surplus value . The development of co-operation and the manufacturing division of labour constitute the initial phases in this tendency towards the extraction of relative surplus value . The development of a complex organisation of specialised labourers, and the intensification and co-ordination of work in that context, constitute the initial transformation of the labour process from its inherited basis into a specifically capitalist mode of production even though one in which capital exercises its domination subjectively rather than in the objective form of machinery . [11 j In the context of manufacture and even more so in the context of modern industry capital turns to the extraction of relative surplus value on the basis of (i) the intensification of labour, and (ii) increasing productiveness of labour, which (a) provides the basis for relatively transitory increments in surplus value while specific capitals enjoy productivity above the social average, and (b) insofar as it cheapens the roduction of consumption goods, reduces the value of labour power .[ 12J Marx's account clearly does not represent a simple transition from absolute to relative surplus value . The era of machine production and modern industry becomes characterised by the pursuit of both, in relationships conditioned by the pressure on the rate of profit unleashed by investment directed at increasing the productivity of labour (summarised in the tendency towards a rising organic composition of capital), and by the specific conditions of class struggle which mediate such pressure influenced by the development of the reserve army of labour) . In relation to these tendencies the transition from 'formal' to 'real' subordination is seen as a complex process beset with contradictions . Thus the phase of the elaboration of the manufacturing division of labour represents, Marx argues, a distinctively capitalist mode of production in which the power of capital subsists not merely in the relation of capitalist and propertyless wage labourer but further in the necessary dependence of the specialised worker (whether relatively skilled or unskilled) upon the collective organisation of the capitalist workshop . At the same time this real subordination of the labour process to capital contains and is qualified by the forms of competence which remain embodied in the specialised skills of craft workers, which represent an important obstacle to valorisation . The significance of modern mechanised industry in this context is discussed in terms of the interrelationship between the strategy of relative surplus value production and the deepening of the real subordination of the labour process and the labourer to capital . First it represents the most substantial advance in the extraction of relative surplus value on the basis of increasing both the productiveness and intensity of labour ; an advance which is guaranteed for individual capitals only through the continual revolutionising of production, but which confronts its own contradictions summarised in the tendency and counter-tendencies to the falling rate of profit. Secondly, this pursuit of relative surplus value through mechanisation forms the bases for the 'completion' of the development of the real



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subordination of the labour process and the labourer to capital, as capitalist control is objectified in machinery, as technical calculation and organisation by capital displaces craft expertise, and as the development of the reserve army of labour exerts its discipline on workers in both modern mechanised industry and modern manufacture . However this 'completion' of real subordination is not uniform or entirely coherent-for example the objectification of capitalist control in machinery, and the augmentation of the reserve army of labour press variously on different sectors, and in different phases of the cycle of accumulation-and confronts its own contradictions both in the increasingly general organisation of workers and in the tensions between the specialisation and flexibility demanded of workers in modern industry .[13] Having outlined Marx's discussion of accumulation and the development of real subordination I do not simply wish to contrast it with Braverman's exposition of the deskilling thesis . Marx's own treatment is ambiguous enough to be susceptible to varied interpretations and it is quite possible to read him as an exponent of a straightforward deskilling thesis particularly in his discussions of the relationship between machine and worker . However I do want to argue that an alternative interpretation is warranted by Marx's discussion and offers a more adequate basis for the analysis of the development of the capitalist labour process, and as one aspect of that development the tendency towards deskilling . This alternative approach would emphasise : (i) the complex character of the development of the real subordination of the labour process to capital, as the development of a large scale collective organisation of production which dominates any specific form of labour . (ii)the importance of analysing the development of the complex organisation of collective labour in relation to specific strategies of valorisation and accumulation and their characteristic contradictions and forms of class struggle . These emphases have not of course gone unnoticed among Marxists and at this point I would like to comment briefly on some discussions which in various ways represent different and more adequate analyses of these issues than that of Braverman .

(a) The Brighton Labour Process Group [ 14] The Brighton paper offers an account of the transformation of the labour process which is strongly influenced by the `additional' chapter of Capital vol . 1, and which is explicitly organised in terms of the distinction (which Marx develops most fully in that chapter) between formal and real subordination . The crucial implication of this approach is that capital transforms the general social and technical organisation of the labour process, in the manner already discussed, to achieve a more adequate basis for valorisation . The key aspect of this argument is that real subordination is the achievement of the reorganisation of the whole complex of the capitalist labour process . It cannot be understood at the level of the indi-



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vidual worker's relation to the mechanisms of production as it is in Braverman's discussion of deskilling .[15] On the basis of this argument the Brighton Group emphasise that : (i) certain modes of skilled work may find a place within the framework of real subordination, not only in manufacture but also in modern industry ; (ii) major aspects of the transformation of the labour process may not best be understood in terms of deskilling-for example, the transition to machine production constitutes an objectification of the power of capital which cannot be reduced to a process of deskilling ; and (iii) analyses of the initiatives of capital which may slightly increase workers' decision-making or team work must be located within the overall structure of capitalist domination summarised in the conception of real subordination .[16] These important insights are, however, developed at a level of abstraction which in itself has critical limitations in relation to the analysis of class struggle and the labour process . The Brighton paper seeks to "establish the specificity of the labour process as a particular and irreducible functional form in the circuit of industrial capital" through an analysis of the generic dynamic of the valorisation process, abstracted from (a) specific phases in the development of capital accumulation, as these articulate with (b) changes in the relations of capital and labour beyond production .[17] This limitation of the scope of the analysis has important consequences for the discussion of the forms of development of the capitalist labour process within 'modern industry' and in particular for the conceptualisation of class struggle given 'real subordination' . Workers' resistance and struggle against capital in the phase of 'formal subordination' is located in the non-correspondence of the form of the labour process to the exigencies of valorisation .[18] However, in the context of real subordination and valorisation on the basis of relative surplus value, class struggle cannot be located in such fundamental non-correspondence, but must be related to the specific exigencies and contradictions of valorisation and accumulation which beset capitalist production and undermine the specific adequacy of real subordination . The level of abstraction of the Brighton analysis is made to exclude consideration of these features, with the result that the emphasis on the capacity of capital to pursue its objectives within the transformed labour process clashes with and overshadows the emphasis on the continuing centrality of class struggle . [ 191 It should be noted that it is this limitation which gives superficial plausibility to Cutler's diagnosis within the Brighton paper of an historical anthropology of labour-resistance paralleled by a capitalist impulsion to control equivalent to that discernible in Braverman .[20] However, this critique fails to register the self-declared limitations of the analysis mounted by the Brighton group, and the manner in which the elaboration of an analysis of the specific exigencies of valorisation and accumulation would locate more concretely the terrain of class struggle within production, and allow some specification of the forms of fragmentation, deskilling and hierarchy characteristic of specific capitalist labour processes .

(b) Palloix[21 ] Palloix's analysis of Fordism and neo-Fordism represents one attempt to move in the direction just mentioned . He attempts to relate develop-



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ments in the labour process to phase in the processes of valorisation and accumulation in a manner which comprehends contradictions and transformation within the development of modern industry as well as in the earlier capitalist forms of co-operation and the manufacturing division of labour . He also suggests how these changes may interplay with changes in the organisation of the labour market and with ideological divisions between mental and manual labour to produce "the complex forms of the organisation of labour processes in contemporary capitalism". [22] Palloix's account of changes in the labour process focusses on the contradictory interrelation of intensification and productiveness in the development of modern industry .[23] He views mechanisation as having been initially adopted in pursuit of intensification beyond that gained through manufacture, while intensification also constitutes the major mode of extracting absolute surplus value accompanying the emergence and development of relative surplus value (through increasing productiveness) associated with continuing developments in the mechanisation of capitalist production .[24] Mechanisation advances both intensification and productiveness but in each case confronts limits and contradictions . On one hand intensification directly confronts working class resistance while on the other productiveness implies a rising organic composition of capital and, as it directly implicates the whole circuit of accumulation, problems of disproportionality . The various phases of mechanisation and social reorganisation of production (Taylorism, Fordism, automation and `job enrich ment'/neoFordism) can then be seen as strategies for increasing intensity and productiveness while minimising the problems posed for capital . Thus, for example Palloix analyses automation as such a strategy, involving deskilling and machine-pacing of labour-power and reduction of the turnover time of capital, in the following terms : "In mechanised production, the worker at the machine is surrounded by many other necessary operations, such as setting up the job, feeding the machine, regulating its operation and checking the product . . . this gives rise to a certain `porosity' in the utilisation of machines and in the degree of co-ordination between different machines within the whole mechanised system, which affects the rate of profit . . . By integrating machinery into a machine system which eliminates the `porosity', automation ensures the maximum turnover of capital for the production of an intensive (relative) surplus while carryin the `dequalification' of productive labour to its most extreme point."[25] However, while such arguments are suggestive his account, and hence his discussion of tendencies for 'dequalification' and 'hyperqualification' remains in general highly schematic and tends to imply the simultaneous progressive resolution of the strategic problems of valorisation and accumulation confronting capital, rather than their contradictory and problematical pursuit. The implication of the uniformly advancing hegemony of capital within production does become qualified in his discussion of the 'complex forms of organisation of the labour process' . Thus he argues that trans-



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formations in the labour process articulate with (a) the elaboration and internationalisation of dual labour markets, which may sustain concentrations of hyperqualified workers in capital-intensive sectors in the metropoles, and (b) the reproduction of capitalist domination of the labour process through the division of mental labour, in conception and realisation, from manual labour (even less specialised, 'semi-autonomous' manual labour) in production . However, these remarks on the dual-labour market and mental and manual labour are themselves highly schematic and assimilate together some quite diverse relations and processes, while contradictions arising in the organisation of the labour process, which might articulate with and be partially resolved through these processes, remain unexplored .

(c) Mandel [ 26 J Mandel's recent work in Late Capitalism constitutes a major attempt to develop an historically located analysis of specific phases of valorisation and accumulation and the characteristic forms of appearance of contradictions within those phases . In the course of this analysis, Mandel provides a brief discussion of the development of the capitalist labour process similar to that outlined by the Brighton Group, emphasising the development of a large-scale collective labour process within which specific forms of skill and competences may be lodged . However-and without attempting a general exposition and critique-the value of Mandel's account lies in his attempt to locate such an analysis of the labour process within his discussion of the historical development of capital accumulation .[27] It is this broader discussion which provides a suggestive basis for an analysis of the forms of development, contradiction and conflict which might characterise the organisation of the capitalist labour process . Of particular significance here are Mandel's arguments concerning : i . the contradictions which may develop, in specific phases of accumulation, between increasing the productiveness of labour through technical transformation and increasing or controlling the intensification of labour, when the former imperative creates forms of expertise and independence which militate against the latter, ii . the complex relationships between the pace of capital accumulation and the dimensions of the reserve army of labour, and between those dimensions and forms of working class organisation ; within which can be located the capacity of workers to effectively resist initiatives aimed at the intensification of labour and their capacity to incorporate an increasing value of wage goods in their consumption, thus depressing the rate of surplus value, iii . finally Mandel discusses the underlying incipient contradiction, mitigated by specifically located opportunities for the devalorisation of constant capital, that increasing the productiveness of labour may increase the organic composition of capital with consequent pressure on the rate of profit .



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Thus the Brighton Group, Palloix and Mandel in different ways offer approaches to the conceptualisation of the relationship between capital accumulation and the development of the capitalist labour process which suggest more adequate bases than that provided by Braverman for a Marxian analysis of the process of deskilling . The implications of their arguments can be summarised as follows : 1 . the development of the real subordination of labour to capital must be interpreted in terms of forms of subordination appropriate to the imperatives of valorisation and accumulation . In this sense it is necessary to recognise that the continually revolutionised character of modern mechanised production persistently renders 'incomplete' the subordination of labour to capital (in the sense of total direction and control by capital) . On one hand it creates new skills, competencies and other opportunities for bargaining leverage arising from the complex co-ordination and interdependence of the collective labourer ; on the other hand, in phases of rapid accumulation unaccompanied by massive displacement of living by dead labour, it depletes the reserve army of labour and provides the basis for powerful worker organisation .[281 2 . Such developments can in no sense be interpreted in terms of a simple contradiction or non-correspondence between capitalist property relations and the social forces of production-in terms, that is, of the 'merely' formal subordination of labour to capital-since they are embedded within a complex capitalist apparatus of production subordinated to the imperatives of valorisation and accumulation . Rather these features define an arena within which subordination of labour adequate to those imperatives is sought by capital and meets various forms of working class opposition . 3 . This form of argument makes it quite clear that the analysis of the development of the capitalist labour process must be set within an analysis of the organisation of capitalist production as a whole . This would eventually involve articulation of the discussion of changes in the labour process with analyses of the relationship of capital and labour as it is mediated by the capitalist state and at the level of class organisation and conflict beyond production . The implication of these analyses is, then, that Braverman's account moves too directly from an abstract impulsion to control labour power to the concrete strategy of deskilling, in a way which provides a partial and telescoped view of the development of the capitalist labour process . They suggest the importance of locating an account of that development within a more complex and sustained analysis of the historical development of capital accumulation, the contradictions to which accumulation gives rise, and the manner in which such contradictions develop and are resolved in class struggle within and beyond production . BRAVERMAN AND 'MONOPOLY CAPITAL' Of course, as the very title of his book emphasises, Braverman's account is not simply of a uniform trajectory towards the realisation of



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real subordination throughh deskilling. What he does is to locate the crucial phase of development of such real subordination in relation to the emergence of 'monopoly capitalism', but the above analyses suggest that this association itself radically simplifies a more complex pattern of development . It is at this point that the work of Baran and Sweezy so powerfully, but largely implicitly, structures Braverman's whole analysis . Their work enables him (a) to ignore any exploration of the contradictions and struggles which beset mechanisation in the form of the tendency and countertendencies to the falling rate of profit, and (b) to take for granted the capacity of capitals to finance the apparatus of 'conception' and control, which constitutes the counterpoint to deskilling, out of a rising surplus . These features follow directly from Baran and Sweezy's analysis of the fundamental determining features of capitalist accumulation in the era of monopoly capitalism : namely (i)their claim concerning the insignificance of tendencies for the organic composition of capital to rise once transformations are taking place within an already mechanised form of production, and (ii) their argument that monopoly capital has the capacity to generate an increasing surplus-since price competition is suspended while investment multiplies productivity and, given solutions to problems of realisation, production .[29] The critics of Baran and Sweezy challenge precisely these assumptions and thus suggest that 'monopoly capitalism' cannot be analysed in terms of such fundamental discontinuities in the logic of capital accumulation . Rather, Mandel and others argue that, while oligopolisation may tend to create distinct levels of profit in oligopolised and non-oligopolised sectors, this pattern is subject to fundamental processes of both long-term competition among capitals, and tendencies and countertendencies to a falling rate of profit associated with movements in the organic composition of capital .[30] Such criticisms underline the inadequacy of Braverman's treatment of the significance of monopoly capitalism merely in terms of the precipitation or facilitation of a generalised impulsion of capital towards deskilling, and they cohere with the earlier argument for a more complex and historically located analysis of the relations between valorisation and accumulation and the development of the capitalist labour process, before, during and after the phase of monopolisation identified as crucial by Baran and Sweezy, and Braverman . In the remainder of this paper I attempt to contribute to the development of such an analysis by undertaking a more limited task . That of analysing the transformation of skills and competences characteristic of specific phases in the development of the capitalist labour process, and considering their relationship to both phases of valorisation and accumulation, and developments in ideological and political relations beyond production . Before moving to such a discussion however some brief comments on Braverman's treatment of the reserve army of labour are appropriate . BRAVERMAN ON THE RESERVE ARMY OF LABOUR Braverman's analysis of the reserve army of labour follows Marx in emphasising the analytical importance of mechanisation in displacing workers



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from established sectors of modern industry and thus furnishing a readily available pool of workers for employment by capital in other sectors . He also seeks to demonstrate the contemporary descriptive appropriateness of the categories of floating, latent and stagnant forms of the reserve army . Through the powerful development of these themes the reserve army of labour is given an equivalent place in Braverman's analysis to that of deskilling, as a process which disciplines and constrains the working class in its objective existence as a moment of capital .[31 ] However, there are a number of problems with this account which parallel those discussed in relation to deskilling, since this generic invocation of the reserve army of labour gives insufficient attention to the specific impacts of the reserve army during different phases of the cycle of accumulation . The first problem concerns the interplay between reserve army and reorganisation of the labour process in periods of stagnation or depression . In such contexts the reserve army of labour may allow adequate conditions for valorisation through both intensification and wage-cutting without major reorganisations of the labour process involving deskilling . While Braverman acknowledges the mutually conditioning effects of mechanisation and the reserve army (L .M .C . pp . 236-7) these implications are not adequately drawn out in relation to his broader treatment of deskilling . Other major problems arise in relation to periods of relative prosperity and accelerated accumulation . Once more Braverman acknowledges the manner in which in this case the reserve army of labour is depleted : "in periods of rapid capital accumulation such as that which has taken place throughout the capitalist world since World War II, the relative surplus population which is the 'natural' product of the capital accumulation process is supplemented with other sources of labour" (L .M .C . p . 384) . One difficulty which arises from this statement concerns the presentation of such 'supplementation' as unproblematic . Braverman's descriptive demonstration of the central significance of female labour for the reconstruction of the reserve army is, as Beechey argues, unaccompanied by any theoretical analysis of the problems of this reconstruction or of the specific conditions under which women have become a preferred source of the reserve army .[32] The other major difficulty concerns Braverman's failure to confront the mediated and varied impact of the reserve army upon working class organisation and struggle, a theme which is central to Mandel's historical analysis of valorisation and class struggle .[331 The elaboration of analyses of these features of the reserve army of labour must be central to any understanding of the effectiveness of the economic and non-economic combativity of some sectors of the working class alongside the relatively helpless condition of other sections in, for example, the post-war period .[34] Having noted these weaknesses of Braverman's treatment of the reserve army of labour, I will now return to discussion of the historical development of the capitalist labour process . CRAFT AND CAPITAL IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY As has already been noted Braverman's major concern is to analyse the de-



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gradation of work in the era of 'monopoly capitalism', but his understanding of that process is necessarily underpinned by a view of the earlier phases of capitalist development . Indeed a major premise of his account appears to be a periodisation of the degradation of craft work which emphasises the initiatives of nascent 'monopoly capital' in the final years of the 19th century rather than features of reorganisation of the labour process which characterised the development of machinery and modern industry throughout that century . This emphasis underwrites the account of the general deskilling of craft work in the monopoly era and the centrality attributed to Taylorism in that transformation . However, it requires rather serious qualification-both from the point of view of an analysis of the capitalist labour process in the 19th century, and in terms of the foreshortened perspective it offers on developments in the 20th . Two related problems can be posed in relation to the emphasis of Braverman's account: 1 . It fails to grant adequate recognition to the rapid development of the real subordination of the labour process to capital on the basis of mechanisation in some of the leading sectors of the capitalist economy of the period-a development which variously by-passed established craft skills, attacked and destroyed them directly to replace them with other forms of organisation of labour and expertise, or quite often incorporated them in modified form in a radically transformed organisation of the labour process. 2 . It tends to portray the craftsmen of the second half of the nineteenth century in terms of the 'artisan ideal' when clearly their positions must be seen as in various ways transitional, marked to a substantial degree by real subordination to capital .[35] This latter point, in particular, has been underlined by recent contributions to the 'labour aristocracy' debate, which have been concerned to specify more closely the interplay between changes in the organisation of the labour process and the nexus of political initiatives and commitments which have generally been associated with that notion . For example Foster, in his analysis of class struggle in Oldham, has argued that working class militancy, within and beyond the workplace, together with a crisis of declining profitability, precipitated major efforts to reorganise the labour process of both engineering and spinning . He suggests that skilled workers were placed in a more distinct relation of subordination to capital, while responsibilities for pace-making and direction of non-skilled workers were more explicitly delegated to them . His account also outlines some of the complex interrelations between such changes in the organisation of the labour process and the forms of capitalist political initiative concerned to secure local and national political hegemony .[36] Foster's account dwells overmuch on particular forms of this subordination, such as piecemastering, and it is evident that a variety of specific forms of hierarchy, subordination and relative 'privilege' constitute bases in production of the political phenomenon of the labour aristocracy . Nevertheless Foster does demonstrate the importance of changes in the



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location and subordination of craft skills within the capitalist organisation of the labour process . Such considerations have led Stedman-Jones to argue that : "even the skilled sectors of modern industry bore only a superficial resemblance to those of handicraft . Such skills were precarious and transformable at the will of the capitalist in a way which those of handicraft had not been . In the cotton industry, the artificial position of the cotton spinner has already been noted . In engineering, apart from a residuum of semi-handicraft skills, the new forms of skill were based upon a quantum of literacy and technical instruction, and often included quasi-supervisory functions . They did not possess the direct purchase over the production process enjoyed by handicrafts, and were unusable except in the factories for which they had been acquired . This is part of what is meant by the 'real' subordination of wage labour to capital . . .What was decisive was the effect of modern industry upon their technical role in the labour process . It was not so much their privileged position as the vulnerability of that position that changed their industrial outlook ."[37] This account of the reorganisation of the capitalist labour process in terms of the increasing subordination and vulnerability of craft skills, coupled with (i) an emphasis on the distinctive forms of hierarchisation characterising different industries (notably the specific significance of the sexual division of labour in cotton), and, (ii) an insistence on the specifically social and ideological location of the labour aristocracy in relation to those forms, represents an important advance over Foster's preoccupation with pace-makers (and capital exports) . However, Stedman-Jones himself misplaces its significance when he formulates the transformation as "the breach in craft controls and then a restabilisation of the labour process which left formal distinctions of status untouched" . This implies that skills became purely artificial and illusory, when to an important though variable extent they were transformed and encapsulated within modern industry in ways which sustained significant forms of expertise . Indeed such skills became the locus of vigorous organisation by elite groups of workers, who, in the context of rapid capital accumulation based on established levels of mechanisation, were effective in defending relative privilege and parochial autonomy within the capitalist organisation of the labour process . Thus the relationship between 'real' expertise and craft privilege in this phase of development of the labour process was mediated by the specific relation of accumulation and mechanisation, by the ideological role of elite groups of workers, and by their established forms of collective organisation . These features clearly characterise the engineering industry during the second half of the nineteenth century, for, as both Foster and StedmanJones recognise and Burgess emphasises, the transformation of skills in that sector before mid-century (from millwright to more specialised fitters and turners) was followed by a long period in which, with expanding markets and a tendency towards labour-using investment, the newer



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categories of skilled worker were able, on the basis of powerful collective organisation, to sustain wage differentials and job controls which militated against the control of capital . Hinton suggests that these features of the 'craft tradition' became increasingly precarious, in the forms in which they had become stabilised after the 1850s, as a further wave of capital intensive mechanisation was unleashed in the last decades of the nineteenth century .[38] While engineering represents the outstanding case of the relative stabilisation of specialised skills for a significant interval within modern mechanised industry, the experience of cotton also reveals the scope for some sections of workers to develop 'skill niches' within the increasingly effective subordination of the labour process to capital represented by modern industry, again especially in the context of a phase of labourusing investment following a phase of increasing capital-intensity . It is in this context that the historian of the cotton unions can argue that "few occupations 'in the cotton' are intrinsically skilled in the sense that their adequate performance necessarily requires any long preliminary training", but "several textile occupations that are usually regarded as more skilled, are so because other duties-like the supervision of other operatives, or the maintenance and setting of machinery-have been added to the fundamental task of machine tending", while "there are cases . . . in which a 'skill' has been quite artificially created, by the workers' gradual imposition of labour supply controls on a formerly 'unskilled' occupation" .[39] Engineering and cotton represent sectors in which the changing forms of the real subordination of wage labour and the labour process to capital encapsulate groups of workers who, albeit on a changing basis, experience some continuity of skilled organisation and status . Other sectors exemplify, especially towards the end of the century, more thoroughgoing transformations which nevertheless involve important residual or emergent forms of competence and bargaining leverage . Stone's study of the transformation of production in the United States' steel industry is of particular interest in this respect, as it exemplifies one influential approach to such developments which is compatible with Braverman and suffers from similar deficiencies . There are two dominant themes in her account. The first concerns the capitalist offensive against long entrenched craft sub-contract domination of the labour process in the context of intensified competition among increasingly capital-intensive corporations . The second concerns the specific manner in which capital secured its hegemony over the reorganised labour process by removing planning and co-ordinating activities from the shop-floor and by differentiating a potentially homogeneous mass of semi-skilled workers through individual piecework and the elaboration of hierarchical job ladders . Stone's sharp and justified critique of technical determinist apologetics for the emergent organisation of production leads her to imply that the hierarchical organisation of jobs was a simply ideological differentiation of thoroughly homogeneous work tasks . However the detailed development of her argument suggests something different . It shows that the employers' strategy addressed a cluster of limited forms of expertise radically dependent for their deployment upon the whole edifice of



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capitalist controlled organisation and machinery (the forms of semiskilled work associated with the mechanisation which followed the defeat of the crafts) . This strategy deepened that dependency by encapsulating such narrowly specified skills within job hierarchies . Thus : "the new skilled workers had skills of a specific nature that enabled them to perform specific tasks, but did not have a general knowledge of the process of production . . . these workers had skills which were only good for one job . They did not have the independence of the nineteenth century skilled workmen, whose skills were transferable to other jobs and plants ."[40] This account of the development of the real subordination of labour to capital in U .S . steel can usefully be compared with developments in the U .K . steel industry chronicled by Wilkinson . In the latter case a parallel development of job hierarchies of limited and plant-specific skills was accomplished by a somewhat different route which underlines the inadequacy of an account in terms of a capitalist strategy of divide and rule . In the British case job-specific skills and the absence of cohesive worker opposition to capital did not result from the direct defeat and exclusion of craft subcontractors, but rather from changes in the labour process accompanied by the extension and dilution of forms of collaborative collective bargaining originating in the capital/sub-contractor relation . The resultant mutations of collective bargaining (involving the transmutation of wage and promotion hierarchies, sliding-scale agreements and arbitration machinery) need to be understood in relation to both (a) the increasingly effective domination of capital over the labour process signalled by the development of more specific skills embedded within a complex apparatus of collective labour associated with intensive mechanisation, and (b) the specific phasing of increases in productiveness, levels of unemployment and levels of international competition which conditioned the combativity of labour and capital and hence the organisation of the collective labourer. [41 ] It is evident that the specialisation of labour and proliferation of semiskilled workers characteristic of much mechanisation in the last decades of the nineteenth century represent major advances in the real subordination of labour to capital . However it remains important to recognise the residual forms of expertise and skill, and the conditions in which they may constitute effective obstacles to capitalist initiative . Hobsbawm's study of the organisation of gas-workers focusses attention on some of the possible implications of these developments for worker organisation . He traces the manner in which stokers (workers with important but easily replicable expertise and dexterity) constituted a nucleus for the general organisation of gas works labour . This organisation was achieved in a boom period following a phase in which capital pursued increasing output primarily through the intensification of labour . It was followed, in the context of increasing competition, by a phase of increasing mechanisation which, however, did not destroy the organisation . For, Hobsbawm argues :



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"labour-saving and labour-simplifying devices do not, however, automatically dislodge key groups of workers from their strongholds . They do so only when such groups are unable to maintain their relative indispensibility (i .e . their bargaining strength) during the crucial transition period, and cannot therefore 'capture' the new devices for recognised unionism, the standard rate, and standard working conditions" .[42] In this example the pace of technical advance was relatively slow while the industry was comparatively sheltered and partially municipalised : in these circumstances the semi-skilled stokers sustained their organisation and leverage . The theme of all of these studies of skills and the labour process in the mid to late nineteenth century can be summarised as follows : the 'real' subordination of labour to capital, understood in terms of the adequate conditions for valorisation, cannot be simply equated with the thoroughgoing destruction of crafts and skills, but such tendencies for the degradation of work must be related to the specific obstacles to valorisation confronted by capital, and to the forms of political and economic domination of labour by capital . In particular they emphasise (a) the complex interplay between the ideological and immediately productive aspects of relations of hierarchy and privilege in the organisation of the collective labourer by capital, and (b) the manner in which forms of worker competence and initiative lodged within the real subordination of the labour process to capital may continue to constitute significant bases of both parochial worker resistance and counter-control and divisions within the working class . As has already been argued, it is necessary to locate the specific character of such features in relation to the specific strategies of valorisation dominating particular periods and sectors of nineteenth century capital accumulation . In relation to this task, Samuel has recently emphasised that characterisations of the transformation of the labour process in

this period merely in terms of the advance of mechanisation, and resultant increases in productiveness, are highly misleading. He stresses instead

that (i) mechanisation was adopted very unevenly and was combined with advances in the capitalist domination of the labour process which owed little directly to mechanisation but were founded on the further subdivision of labour and upon the existence of a surplus of cheap labour ; and (ii) the adoption of mechanisation was itself significantly characterised by a 'capita/-saving' bias in the context of relatively cheap labour, so that labour intensity, manual dexterity and expertise remained major features of the reorganised labour process . The latter feature has already been noted as characteristic of British engineering and cotton during specific phases of their development in the second half of the nineteenth century, and significantly makes a commonly argued point of contrast between the strategies of British and American capital in this period . Samuel's discussion hints at an important specification of the context within which the developing forms of vulnerability and strategies of counter-control characteristic of skilled and quasi-skilled workers in this C. & C.-F



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period, might be analysed . However, as yet his argument remains at the more primitive level of a general emphasis upon the continuing centrality of labour power within the labour process, coupled with a rudimentary recognition of these developing forms . The argument that "nineteenth century capitalism created many more skills than it destroyed, though they were different in kind from those of the all-round craftsman, and subject to a wholly new level of exploitation now requires further explication along the lines indicated above, if we are to avoid either the romanticisation of craft or the imagery of precipitate deskilling which tends to seduce Braverman, whether that imagery is applied to the earlier development of modern industry or the later capitalist offensive constituted by 'scientific management' . [43 ] SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT Braverman's analysis of `scientific management' is the pivotal feature of his whole account of the degradation of work in the 20th century and represents a fine dissection of the manner in which the capitalist control of the labour process was theorised by some agents of capital . However, this account, while it rests firmly within Braverman's characterisation of the long-term tendency of capital to wrest the labour process from craft control, remains unsatisfactory in a number of important respects . Firstly, as has already been suggested, it fails to provide an adequate account of the pre-existing organisational and political bases of capitalist domination and extraction of surplus value, or the crises which confronted valorisation on that basis . Secondly, it appears to assume that an adequate level of subordination was then secured almost entirely at the level of the reorganisation of the labour process, in accordance with the theoretical logic of the Taylorist attack on craft skills . The inadequate analysis of pre-existing forms of the subordination of the labour process to capital, discussed in the previous section, makes it difficult for Braverman to locate the specific context and targets of 'scientific management' . Thus his discussion of the emergence of Taylorism is couched only in terms of a congeries of enabling features : "The separation of hand and brain is the most decisive single step in the division of labour taken by the capitalist mode of production . It is inherent in that mode of production from its beginnings, and it develops, under capitalist management throughout the history of capitalism, but it is only during the past century that the scale of production, the resources made available to the modern corporation by the rapid accumulation of capital, and the conceptual apparatus and trained personnel have become available to institutionalise this separation in a systematic and formal fashion ." (p . 126, see also p . 85) In this account it seems that the immanent tendency of capital to establish real control over the labour process reaches its culmination simply when capital has accumulated sufficient resources . There is little indication of the manner in which scientific management and related



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initiatives arose out of any crisis in the process of accumulation of capital, of the manner in which capital was compelled to increase its scale and intensify its control over the labour process and create a complex corporate apparatus in an effort-itself not contradiction free-to transcend these constraints . [441 Hobsbawm provides an analysis, focussed upon the British experience, which constitutes an instructive comparison with Braverman in this respect . In his account, the development of major crises in the extraction of surplus value is seen as the underlying context of strategies for the reorganisation of production which were concerned with both the intensification of labour and the facilitation of technical reorganisation of production : "It was safer if less efficient to stick to the old ways, unless pressure of profit margins, increased competition, the demands of labour or other inescapable facts forced a change . But the periods of major economic adjustment after the Napoleonic Wars and the slump of 1873 subjected employers to just this kind of pressure, and hence led to major modifications in the methods of labour utilisation . In the post-Napoleonic period the effect was delayed, since employers first attempted to exhaust the possibilities of cutting labour costs by extending hours and cutting money wage-rates . During the Great Depression (1873-96), new methods tended to be adopted more quickly . Roughly speaking, the mid-century brought the beginning of the substitution of 'intensive' for 'extensive' labour utilisation, the latter part of the Great Depression the beginning of the substitution of rational for empirical 'intensive' utilisation, or of 'scientific management' ."[45] Thus Hobsbawm indicates the basis on which valorisation had been accomplished in the preceding phase of capital accumulation : mechanisation, coupled with the subjection of unskilled labourers to driving discipline and the cultivation of craft workers reliance on more-or-less customary wage-effort relationships . However, the development of a crisis of profitability in the last quarter of the nineteenth century-as a consequence of both intensified competition (marked in particular by emergence of overcapacity) and increasingly effective working class demandsconstituted the conditions for the 'efficiency movement' as a major capitalist initiative directed preeminently at the increasingly sophisticated intensification of labour . Two features of this account deserve particular attention, as bases for the location and qualification of Braverman's discussion of 'scientific management' and thus the development of a more adequate Marxist analysis of capitalist strategy . Firstly, Hobsbawm makes a real attempt to locate the crisis of accumulation which prompted these new forms of capitalist initiative . This allows us to address such issues as the uneven international adoption of 'scientific management', where it is evident that the United States was the pioneer in relation to Britain and the rest of Europe . Here Hobsbawm's focus on the Great Depression, together with the earlier discussion of differential wages and capital-intensive mechani-



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sation, can be related to Sohn-Rethel's discussion of this issue . He suggests that the impact of crisis led U .S . employers to early attempts to reorganise the labour process, as they confronted both higher wages and the competitive disadvantage of lack of secure imperial markets . In Europe, however, such attempts were retarded, until the First World War, by lower wages and the cushion of imperialism .[46] In addition Hobsbawm indicates the cluster of initiatives aimed at the intensification of labour within which the pursuit of deskilling must be located . Thus he recognises that the most sophisticated schemes were devised against, and fought out with, the most organised and highly paid workers, and involved major moves towards fragmentation and specification of labour . However, they formed part of a broader array of techniques of wage payment, aimed at the direct intensification of both skilled and nonskilled labour, and of technical and organisational changes, aimed at increasing productiveness . I now want to turn to one of the few specific Marxian critiques of Labour and Monopoly Capital, Palmer's discussion of the American experience of the 'efficiency movement' between 1903 and 1922 . Palmer takes up this theme of the heterogeneity of capitalist initiatives but broadens the analysis in a crucial way by tracing the significance of working class resistance to Taylorism and by examining the ideological role of 'scientific management' in the pursuit of capitalist hegemony . He begins by relocating Taylorism within a broad range of technical innovations, and systems of wage payment and work rationalisation, which represented responses to the intensification of capitalist competition in the last decades of the nineteenth century . Thus he queries the adequacy of a discussion of the Taylorist programme which does not relate that programme to the role of technical innovations in generating relative surplus value, and underlines the perversity of Braverman's insistence on the lack of any basic interconnections between technical innovations and strategies for reorganising the work process . (L .M .C. pp . 85, 110) Within this complex of initiatives the attack on craft and quasi-craft controls is properly seen as a central feature, though one which was rather variably applied because of both the period of war-time boom and the specific exigencies of production in various sectors, and the forms of effective worker resistance developed in these contexts . Thus the pursuit of capitalist control of the labour process adequate to the requirements of valorisation led to a major but uneven advance of the practises of intensification of labour and of deskilling . It is in this context that Palmer's central criticism of Braverman, that he "is limited in his understanding of the extent to which working class opposition 'defeated' Taylorism and pushed capital to employ more subtle means of control in its quest for authority", must be interpreted . [47 ] Palmer's attention to working-class opposition, and in particular to the persistence of organised resistance through the second and into the third decade of the twentieth century, is not meant to deny the real importance of the processes of deskilling delineated by Braverman . It does, however, suggest that under certain technical and economic conditions craft workers rather effectively defended their autonomy, while the broader efforts to



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intensify labour which were intrinsic to the Taylor strategy also met more or less effective organised and unorganised resistance, most obviously during the war boom . It is this pattern of resistance and rebellion which has been discussed in greater detail by Montgomery, who draws out more fully the conclusions of a conflict over control of the labour process which became an important feature of these struggles, and the predominantly parochial control demands and counter-control strategies which issued from them .[48] Finally Palmer uses his discussion of the piecemeal application of Taylorist principles and the reality of working-class resistance as the basis for an appreciation of the significant ideological role of Taylorism and the (efficiency movement' more generally . This he portrays in terms of its significance in undermining a 'populist' conception of labour as the sole creative agent in production-a conception rooted in earlier modes of workers' control over the labour process and supportive of the remaining forms of counter-control characteristic of labour within the developing complex of the collective labourer in modern industry-and substituting a conception of labour as a passive factor of production . Palmer's discussion of this feature of Taylorism suggests that, while it informed and gained credence from developments in the practical degradation of work, it played a more general role, especially in the context of relatively effective parochial working class resistance . Thus it is to be s eer. a s a key component among a series of 'personnel' and 'welfare' initiatives which strengthened and sustained capitalist hegemony beyond and within production . Thus Palmer poses central questions about the relationship between capitalist initiatives in the reorganisation of the labour process and the broader ideological and political conditions of capitalist hegemony and valorisation which are glossed over in Braverman's treatment .[49] The decades spanning the turn of the century, then, marked a period of major capitalist initiatives concerned to secure adequate conditions for valorisation and accumulation in the context of intensifying international oligopolistic competition and increased worker organisation . A substantial deepening of the real subordination of the labour process to capital, accomplished through a combination of mechanisation and Taylorist specialisation and simplification of labour, was and remains central to, but not exhaustive of, the strategy of capital . The reorganisation of the labour process by capital interplayed with broader ideological and political strategies of incorporation and with specific attempts to intensify the exploitation of labour power . Without doubt capital, in for example the engineering sector, substantially advanced its domination of the labour process and of the increasingly specialised worker between the 1880s and the 1920s . Such changes, together with the evident dexterity and competence of significant nineteenth century 'labouring' occupations, justify Braverman's sharp critique of both the method of construction, and the conventional 'upgrading' interpretation, of occupational census data trends concerning the increasing prominence of 'semi-skilled' workers (see L .M .C . pp . 426-435) . However Braverman's own discussion of the semi-skilled, coloured as it is by an idealised conception of craft skills to which he assimilates very



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heterogeneous instances of nineteenth century labour power, is itself severely inadequate in failing to locate the specificity of 'semi-skilled' work within the process of capital accumulation . The deepening of subordination of the labour process to capital associated with Taylorism and the advance of mechanisation did not, as Braverman tends to imply, create a simply homogeneous mass of deskilled labour on the shop-floor, but meant the elaboration of a complex, internally differentiated apparatus of collective labour which contained an uneven variety of narrow skills and specific dexterities . Hyman offers a valuable glimpse of these features in his account of the growth of a major trade-union organisation of semi-skilled workers in Britain in the first decades of the century : "automatic machines could be run by a novice after a minimum of instruction ; other, more complex machine tools could be operated by workers without a full craft training . . .By 1914 they (the semiskilled) accounted for a fifth of the engineering labour force, covering a wide range of operations ; indeed, the gap between such semi-skilled workers as the automatic stamper and the universal driller was far greater in terms of skill than was that between the driller and the fully-skilled turner . . . the situation of the semi-skilled worker who had become proficient on a complex machine tool was closer to that of the craftsman than that of the labourer ; he was difficult to replace quickly, and his employers suffered heavy losses if expensive mechanical plant was standing idle ."[50] Such a form of organisation of the labour process by capital cannot be understood merely as some transitional phase in the trajectory of a general process of deski.ll.ing; it must be analysed in relation to the conditions of valorisation and class struggle characterising the relevant sector and period . Thus it is necessary to consider the contributions which specific forms of mechanisation and semi-skilled labour make to the valorisation and accumulation process, in terms of increased productiveness, reductions in the value of labour power and intensification of labour, and the manner in which contradictions among these aspects constitute problems for capital and bases of organisation and resistance for sections of the working class . The emergence of new forms of expertise around specific phases of technical innovation may, for example, be significantly tolerated by capital during periods of expansion and valorisation predominantly on the basis of increasing productiveness of labour . Certainly the displacement of organised and costly. skilled labour by unorganised and cheaper 'semi-skilled' labour may constitute a major opportunity for increased profitability, but the discovery of bargaining leverage and increasing opposition to speed-up by semi-skilled workers will not automatically trigger afresh round of mechanisation aimed at further deskilling . The relations between the advantages and disadvantages to capital of the specific form of the labour process will be related to the relative significance of the aspects of valorisation mentioned above, and 'to the combativity of the labourers, as that is influenced by both the specific manner



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in which `skills' or dexterities are lodged within the collective labourer and the broader context of forms of political and ideological domination and struggle . THE CONTEMPORARY DEGRADATION OF WORK The above argument is of particular importance in relation to Braverman's account of the central role of mechanisation in the contemporary degradation of work in factory and office . In that account he effectively challenges orthodox myths concerning the general upgrading of labour associated with, in particular, automation . However, because his analysis is developed at the general level of an abstract compulsion towards the destruction of craft expertise and its replacement by pervasive capitalist control of the labour process, he is unable to address the complex, uneven and contradictory character of the organisation of collective labour . Braverman does not entirely ignore the complex and contradictory role of mechanisation and reorganisation of the labour process in the process of capital accumulation : "This displacement of labour as the subjective element of the process, and its subordination as an objective element in a production process now conducted by management, is an ideal realised by capital only within definite limits, and unevenly among industries . The principle is itself restrained in its application by the nature of the various specific and determinate processes of production . Moreover, its very application brings into being new crafts and skills and technical specialities which are first the province of labour rather than management . Thus in industry all forms of labour ; oexist : the craft, the hand or machine detail worker, the automatic machine or flow process" . (L.M .C . p . 172) However, this recognition does not become the basis for an analysis of the manner in which particular forms of organisation of the collective labourer and the labour process arise out of specific exigencies of valorisation . Instead, in his discussions of mechanisation, Braverman tends to assume a general congruence between strategies of valorisation and accumulation and deskilling, in which the former is lodged directly within the latter : "In the capitalist mode of production, new methods and new machinery are incorporated within a management effort to dissolve the labour process as a process conducted by the worker and reconstitute it as a process conducted by management ." (L .M .C . p . 170) In such an analysis (i) the advance of mechanisation ultimately becomes a matter of the evolution of techniques adequate to the deskilling imperative, rather than an outcome of the relation between forms of potential technical transformation and other conditions of the process of accumulation, while (ii) working class struggle is accorded the status of



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a merely transient or frictional reaction to capital (see e .g . L .M .C . pp . 129, 180, 203), rather than being located as the articulation of contradictions within the forms of valorisation dominating a specific period of capital accumulation . My earlier discussion of semi-skilled work has, in contrast with Braverman's treatment, underlined the importance of analysing the ways in which mechanisation, as a strategy of accumulation, might (in conjunction with changes in the reserve army of labour) afford opportunities for relatively effective worker organisation and struggle . On the one hand this would involve an attempt to specify the features of collective labour which arise out of the interrelation of mechanism and labour power required for valorisation ; both such 'positive' features as the need for labour with narrow expertise and experience, and such 'negative' features as dependence upon a disposition among workers to facilitate (rather than disrupt) the logic of integrated production . On the other hand it would be necessary to locate the organisation of these features as the outcome of conflict between capital and labour.[51) The limitations which the deskilling discourse imposes upon the analysis of mechanisation can be clearly traced in Braverman's critique of conventional interpretations of process production and automation . There they underwrite his reliance on Bright's account of transformations in the worker-machine nexus with the secular advance of mechanisation, and overshadow any consideration of specific exigencies of accumulation and their interrelation with the forms of expertise, dexterity, responsibility and leverage embodied in the organisation of the collective labourer . The importance of developing a more complex account of the organisation of the labour process in process production, in which the latter questions would become central, can be indicated by examining a recent study which, unlike Braverman, focusses upon worker organisation and struggle . Nichols and Beynon provide an account of the organisation of the labour process, capitalist strategy and worker organisation in one chemicals complex during the last decade . They, like Braverman, frame their analysis of the labour process in terms of deskilling : both contrast the realities of labour in process production with the real skills of nineteenth century craftsmen and with the spurious sociological idealisations of the upgrading of skills in process production . However, in their account of the workplace they also go beyond the simple conception of deskilling to expose the complex and differentiated character of the apparatus of 'deskilled' collective labour produced by the accumulation strategies of one sector of 'modern industry', and the manner in which contradictory features of that apparatus pose problems for capital at particular junctures in the accumulation process . Their discussion emphasises : (i) the persistent significance of heavy manual labour in the shadow of highly capital intensive production, conditioned by the trade-off for capital between, on the one hand, the wage levels of the labourers and the capacity of capital to intensify that labour, and on the other the costs of investment and gains in production from further mechanisation ;



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(ii) The development of job hierarchies, associated with specific production processes, in which forms of limited expertise and empirical skill are radically subordinated to the demands of valorisation . The experience of these workers is summarised thus : "they know their present job, for all its stresses and problems, is the 'best job I could hope for-being unskilled' . They have escaped the tyranny of the bagging line but they live with the fear that it is a temporary release . . . the operator who is paid for being able to operate a particular chemical process is well aware of the transient nature of his skills . These skills 'cannot be bought'-it 'takes years to really get to know one of these plants'-but equally, by their very nature, they are tied to the continuance of a particular chemical process".[52] and (iii) the growing importance, for capital, of engineering an active vigilance, responsibility and initiative among workers on its behalf, as a result of the increasing integration, interdependency, and capitalintensity of the production process . This requirement gains particular prominence as capital responds to increased international competition by intensifying the process of labour and cutting manning levels . This provides the crucial context for the authors' discussion of such capitalist initiatives as 'job enrichment', which may then be located as complex responses to the specific problems of valorisation and accumulation confronting this sector of capital, rather than being seen in generic terms as a qualification of, or retreat from, 'deskilling' .[53] Nichols and Beynon's account of the labour process invites an analysis of the manner in which the organisation of the apparatus of collective labour articulates with the exigencies and contradictions of accumulation, but they do not pursue the issue very far . They move rapidly on to a discussion of the character of struggle in production defined on one hand by developments in the labour process and on the other by the forms of accommodation to capital represented by national trade unionism and the organisation and ideology of 'Iabourism' .[54] Some of the issues which require more systematic discussion in an analysis of the labour process in this sector are suggested by another account of the organisation of 'skills', in oil refining : "The problem of inter-unit mobility was even more intractable . There was clearly good reason for management to encourage people to develop skills in handling jobs on different units . It made it much easier to cover illnesses, and the manpower shortfalls due to holidays . In each refinery there was a small group of workers that were officially polyvalent, that is to say, whose job was to fill gaps in different teams as the need arose, and they had to possess the range of skills necessary to do this . But the real aim of management was to create a much more general capacity for flexibility among those who were



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normally attached to a particular unit . This seemed, however, to have run into a number of problems . On the one hand the question of payment for new skills once more raised its head in an even more acute form, on the other there seems to have been some reluctance on the part of older operatives to actually pass on their knowledge to other people . Finally, management itself accepted a considerable degree of responsibility for failing to provide enough time for adequate training. What seemed to have happened is that the size of the workforce had to be reduced to a point at which it was difficult to spare people from their everyday work ."[551 Here the contradictory pressures of capital for the ossification of specialised competencies, for the flexibility and general reliability of labour power, and for de-manning and intensification of work ; and the forms of resistance and struggle which workers develop around these contradictions, are sharply focussed as capital attempts to respond to a crisis of accumulation . In a period of rapid accumulation, on the basis of new technology, capital in this sector had moved towards the organisation of the collective labourer as series of specialised job hierarchies comparable to those discussed by Stone and Wilkinson, but a phase of increasing international competition has shifted capitalist strategy towards the intensifcation of labour and expulsion of workers from the industry . In this context, workers' struggles over manning and relocation have gained some limited leverage, both from their command over specific forms of quasiskills and from the more general susceptibility of integrated, highly capitalintensive plant to their non co-operation or disruption . Such an analysis of the development of the labour process in chemical process production constitutes an attempt to locate the specific and uneven character of the process characterised by Braverman and others as deskilling, in relation to the exigencies of valorisation and accumulation . In that sector capital has, for a period, cultivated residual forms of expertise organised in a manner which enhances their subordination to the requirements of accumulation, as well as developing a more general ideological offensive designed to engineer the forms of `responsibility' required by capital in the context of 'capital-intensive' production . The development of the labour process in motors represents a somewhat different variant of these features of mechanisation and struggle arising from the persistent transformation of the immediate process of production in response to exigencies of valorisation and accumulation . There the introduction of flow-line production, adopted throughout the industry during the 1920s and 1930s, had a massive impact in the displacement of skilled by semi-skilled workers during that period, as capital sought to reduce the turnover time of capital, to reduce the value of labour power and to intensify labour . In the post-war period the continuing advance of mechanisation and automation in motors has brought increasing productivity and a more tightly integrated flow production without further pronounced effects on the narrow and specialised tasks of the workers :



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"the replacement of the craftsmen on direct production work by semi-skilled operators was brought about by the mass production techniques of the 1930s . Consequently, the subsequent mechanisation has had little further effect on the composition of the direct labour force . The introduction of transfer machines for example, has meant that fewer semi-skilled machine operators are required to produce any output desired ; but the machines are still tended by semi-skilled operators".[ 561 Thus the post-war valorisation and accumulation strategies of capital in motors have not created a totally homogeneous unskilled stratum of workers but a mass of semi-skilled workers embodying a limited heterogeneity of forms of training and experience . This mass of semi-skilled work tasks has constituted a terrain on which major struggles have developed between capital and labour, both around attempts at the intensification of labour and around the structuring and advancement of wages . The increasing integration and capital intensity of production, as it has interplayed with the intensification of international competition in the industry, has led to recurrent attempts by capital to intensify production . Thus the previously quoted study of labour relations in the motor industry argues that "under the less mechanised and integrated production systems . . . superficially scientific methods of labour measurement still allow considerable room for shop-floor negotiation : the 'allowances' to be added to the 'elements' of which particular operations are composed, the 'effort-rating' of ' the workers studied, and even the 'elements' themselves, may all be adjusted to make a specified work load acceptable . The mechanisation of handling, however, combined particularly with the use of automatic data processing and other control devices, has very much reduced the margin of managerial uncertainty in workload assessment-and thus also reduced the area within which the 'effort bargaining' which is a major function of union workplace organisation can operate . At the same time, the high capital costs of the new equipments puts a considerable pressure on management to work it as intensively as possible, so that its own front in bargaining is likely to be stiffened . "[571 However it is not merely a question of the reduction of management uncertainty . Such developments, in the context of relatively full employment during the post-war boom, have also generated important sources of leverage for effective workplace worker organisations which can sometimes exploit the integration and capital intensity of the plant to effectively resist intensification and to recover some porosity in the working day . Thus, as Beynon argues in his important study of conflict on the frontier of control at Ford's Halewood plant "these controls over the job gained the operative a degree of autonomy from both supervision and higher management . Through their



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steward they were able to regulate the distribution achieve a degree of job rotation within the section, and sub-assembly workers, in particular, were able to obtain schedules . But there were quite precise limits to the workers can run the section . " [ 58 ]

of overtime, occasionally `slack' work way in which

As Beynon has emphasised such precarious counter-controls cannot be understood through an analysis of developments in the labour process alone but must be seen in the wider contexts of both the post-war development of workplace union organisation and changes in class relations beyond production . One important component of the articulation of transformations in the labour process with these developments concerns the specific character of wages struggles in motors, which have involved attempts by capital to develop forms of grading and wage payment which most effectively compel the exercise of specific dexterity and experience to maximise intensity and productiveness, and attempts by workers, both sectionally and more generally, to adopt the rhetoric of 'skills' to gain skilled wages and conditions on the terrain of semi-skilled mass production . CONCLUSION Braverman's work has not merely 'completed' Baran and Sweezy's analysis of monopoly capitalism by extending it to embrace the labour process but has performed the more substantial service of returning attention more generally among Marxists to the study of the development of the capitalist labour process . My discussion has focussed on 'deskilling' as the major theme of Braverman's own return to that study . I have argued that it is necessary to advance beyond both the spurious concreteness of the generic impulse towards deskilling, which governs Braverman's account, and the truncated mode of formal analysis developed by the Brighton Labour Process Group, towards a historically located theorisation of the transformation of the capitalist labour process within which deskilling may be adequately located as a tendency . Such a theorisation, to which this paper serves only as a preliminary contribution, would explicitly locate the forms of transformation of the labour process in relation to phases of valorisation and accumulation, and trace their articulation with class relations beyond production . Only on that basis would it appear possible to develop an analysis of the labour process which will be of real value in the formulation of working class strategy and appropriate forms of political intervention in struggles within production .

NOTES The author teaches sociology at the University of Warwick . 1 This article is a revised version of papers read at the C .S .E . 1977 Annual Conference and at a B .S .A . Industrial Sociology Group conference on "Skill and the labour process" . I have benefitted from dis-



VALORISATION AND DESKILLING

2

3

4 5 6

7

89

cussion with members of the Warwick C .S .E . and Trade Unionism groups, and from comments by Bill Schwarz and John Humphreys . Early reviews of Braverman concentrated on exposition of his analysis while more recent reviews have developed more critical assessments . Among the major reviews are Heilbroner, 1975 ; Davies and Brodhead, 1975 ; de Kadt, 1975 ; Monthly Review, 1976 ; Young, 1976 ; Jacoby, 1977 ; Schwarz, 1977 ; Lazonick, 1977 ; Nichols, 1977 ; Coombes, 1978 ; Cutler, 1978 and MacKenzie, 1977 . Among examples of this criticism see in particular Schwarz, 1977 ; Jacoby, 1977 ; Coombes, 1978 ; Nichols, 1977 ; Palmer, 1975 ; Friedman, 1977 and MacKenzie, 1977 . See in particular Schwarz, 1977 ; Lazonick, 1977 ; Jacoby, 1977 ; Coombes, 1978 and Palmer, 1975 . Schwarz, 1977, p . 162 . His discussion of economism (LMC pp . 150-151) is underpinned by assumptions concerning the capacity of capital in the monopoly sector to finance wage gains out of monopoly superprofits, which clearly articulate with the position of Baran and Sweezy-see discussion below . Braverman, 1976, p . 124 . At one point in Labour and Monopoly Capital Braverman recognises working class self-activity outside production only to counterpose to it the total domination secured by capital through and within production : "This working class lives a social and political existence of its own, outside the direct grip of capital . It protests and submits, rebels or is integrated into bourgeois society, sees itself as a class or loses sight of its own existence, in accordance with the forces that act upon it and the moods, conjunctions and conflicts of social and political life . But since, in its permanent existence, it is the living part of capital, its occupational structure, modes of work, and distribution through the industries of society are determined by the ongoing processes of the accumulation of capital . It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord wtih its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital ." (LMC p . 378)

8

LMC pp . 53-54, where the discussion of accumulation in Marx (1 976a) and Baran and Sweezy (1966) is footnoted . Braverman provides a casual reference to the predominance of absolute surplus value in the earliest stages of capitalist production (p . 45), and a brief discussion of the significance of relative surplus value in the context of commentary upon the scientific and technical transformation of the capitalist labour process (p . 70) but they do not constitute an integral part of his analysis of the degradation of work . As Braverman conceptualises deskilling in generic terms of capitalist control he has no need to elaborate an analysis of valorisation and accumulation, and merely acknowledges en passant the analysis of Baran and Sweezy (1966) . However he nowhere repudiates their concept of the surplus . Jacoby,



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1977, p . 200 claims that "Braverman parts from Baran and Sweezy in their most 'revisionist' concept-their concept of surplus" and returns to the orthodox concept of surplus value, but this rests upon a misreading of another distinction drawn by Braverman, between his preoccupation with movements of the surplus labouring population and Baran and Sweezy's focus on the surplus . (see J acoby, 1977 p . 200, quoting LMC p . 255) 9 The analysis developed by Marx, 1976b, makes explicit the theori-, sation of the transformation of the labour process from its inherited form to a form appropriate to capital accumulation-from 'formal' to 'real' subordination of the labour process to capital-in a manner hardly visible in Capital itself . However it is only in Capital that the transformation of the labour process is effectively related to the limits and contradictions besetting specific phases of . valorisation and accumulation . 10 This is implied in Marx's caution concerning the ideological and organisational features of skill within the developed capitalist labour process : "The distinction between higher and simple labour, 'skilled labour' and 'unskilled labour' rests in part upon pure illusion, or, to say the least, on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive only by virtue of a traditional convention ; in part on the helpless condition of some sections of the working class, a condition that prevents them from exacting equally with the rest the value of their labour power. Accidental circumstances here play so great a part that these two forms of labour sometimes change places ." (Marx, 1976a, p . 305, footnote) 11 Some commentators, . for instance Mandel in his introduction to Marx, 1976b, p . 944, identify real subordination with mechanisation and modern industry while manufacture is identified with formal subordination. While Marx clearly considers modern industry as the culmination of `real subordination' it is also clear that the manufacturing division of labour represents a form of 'real subordination' . Thus Marx, 1976b, argues that : "The real subsumption of labour under capital is developed in all the forms evolved by relative as opposed to absolute surplus value . With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete (and constantly repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists ." (p . 1034) and "The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialised (collective) labour come into being through co-operation, division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in • general the transformation of the production by the conscious use of the sciences, of machines, chemistry, etc . for



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specific ends, technology etc ., and similarly, through the enormous increase in scale corresponding to such developments." (p . 1024 and see also the discussion on pp . 1054-1055)

12

13

14 15

This conceptualisation underlines the central significance of scale and development of a complex apparatus of collective labour as well as machinery in Marx's analysis of the mystification of the capital relation arising through the real subordination of labour and the labour process to capital . It should be noted that this usage is carried over into Capital itself, both in the organisation of the material under the heading of the 'Production of Relative Surplus Value', and in the occasional specific usage of the notion of real subordination (e .g. Marx, 1976a, pp . 448, 453, 481 and Marx, 1972, p . 236 where reference is made to "the more or less imperfect subordination of labour to capital".) The specific place of the 'intensification' of labour in the analyses of Absolute and Relative Surplus Value is ambiguous in some respects, but must primarily be located as an element of Relative Surplus Value production . See the discussion of Palloix, 1976, in footnote 23 . In this context Marx's celebrated discussion of the contradictions between specialisation and the flexible development of human competences in modern industry (Marx, 1976a, pp . 614-619) cannot be interpreted only as a contrast between capitalist reality and potential forms of the organisation of labour in a socialist society, nor only as a contrast between forced specialisation of labour powers within the capitalist factory and the crippling obsolescence of such specialisation when the labourer is thrown out of employment, but also as a contradiction besetting the capitalist organisation of the labour process itself in relation to the pursuit of valorisation . Brighton Labour Process Group 1976, 1977 . Thus they emphasise that: "It is important to note that when Marx talks of the development of the productive forces he explicitly does not refer solely to the development of the technical basis of production . The development of the productive forces that is the basis for the real subordination of labour to capital is a development of both the objective conditions of labour, and of the social combinations of labour . The capitalist labour process cannot be specified on the basis of its technological components . But also note that it cannot be specified on the basis of the relation established within it between the individual worker and the instruments of production . It can only be specified as a particular form of organisation of labour, a form which is a specific form of coercion and the realisation on an adequate basis of the objective of valorisation ." Brighton Labour Process Group, 1977, p . 6 .

16 Ibid . On deskilling and job enlargement pp . 19-20 and for a sharp statement of the argument concerning the lodging of skills within a large-scale collective labour process, p . 11 .



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17

Ibid, p . 23 . The paper is prefaced and concluded by clear statements of the 'level of analysis' adopted . Note, however, the rather different form of abstraction, including accumulation, adopted by Palloix . 18 Thus they argue that :

19

20

21

22 23

"There is still a relationship between labour and the conditions of labour within production which provides labour with a degree of control and hence with a lever with which to enforce its class objectives which may, of course, be different from those of the fully developed proletarian labour of the mature capitalist mode of production ." Ibid, pp . 6-7 . Thus they note, on the one hand, that "capital, having a monopoly of knowledge and power over the relations between labour and the means of production, uses this power, this real domination, in order to enforce the objective of valorisation", while, on the other, they remark that "this relation of capital to labour is not a static one, but is constantly reproduced in new conditions, it is the site of constantly renewed class struggle" . Ibid, pp . 13 and 11 respectively . Indeed, despite the slogan 'valorisation in command', the extraction of relative surplus value is given the same analytical status as mechanisation or large-scale production in the characterisation of real subordination, rather than being understood as the strategic objective which is pursued through these related forms . See p . 9 . Cutler, 1978 . In addition the Brighton paper explicitly locates distinctive forms of working class demands and struggle characteristic of the phase of formal subordination, as noted above, in a manner which contradicts Cutler's claim . I cannot, within the limits of this paper, confront the underlying grounds of Cutler's criticism in the repudiation of the labour theory of value by Cutler et al . 1978 . Palloix, 1976 . All comments refer to this translation . I have abstracted what I take to be the core of Palloix's argument from a text which in translation remains sometimes rather opaque . Palloix, 1976, p. 56 . Palloix's conceptualisation of aspects of valorisation diverges from that of Marx, as sketched out earlier, in that the production of absolute surplus value is made to embrace the extension of the working day and intensification of labour/reduction of porosity while relative surplus value is identified solely with technical transformations which ultimately reduce the value of labour power . (Palloix also, somewhat confusingly, terms absolute and relative surplus value extensive and intensive surplus respectively .) Despite certain ambiguities Marx's treatment of intensification is clearly at variance with that adopted by Palloix as is shown in the following explicit formulation : "Once the capitalist mode of production has become the established and universal mode of production, the difference between absolute and relative surplus value makes itself felt whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value . Assuming that labour power is paid for at its value, we are confronted with this alternative : on the one



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hand, if the productivity of labour and its normal degree of intensity is given, the rate of surplus value can be raised only by prolonging the working day in absolute terms ; on the other hand, if the length of the working day is given, the rate of surplus value can be raised only by a change in the relative magnitutes of the components of the working day, i .e . necessary labour and surplus labour . . . this change presupposes a change in either the productivity or intensity of the labour ." (Marx, 1976a, p . 646, and see also the discussion on pp . 533-534) While this represents a clear difference of conceptualisation it is less one of substance than of analytical focus . In this context Marx clearly treats as the crucial differentiating feature of relative from absolute surplus value the fact that a transformation of the labour process is integral to both increasing productiveness and this phase of the intensification of work (thus it remains appropriate to treat porosity in the context of formal subordination as a form of absolute surplus value production), while for Palloix the dominant considerations are the distinctive manner in which productivity of labour is related to the circuit of accumulation, and the similar manner in which working class resistance may confront both the extension of the working day and the intensification of work . The implication of these different emphases is only that Palloix's discussion of valorisation and accumulation within modern industry is conceptualised in terms of the relation of absolute and relative surplus value production whereas Marx analyses the relation of intensification and productivity as aspects within the form of relative surplus value . At the same time Palloix acknowledges the co-relation of productivity and intensity which is the basis of Marx's conceptualisation : "The intensification of work involves reducing the amount of time during which labour power produces no value . It thus promotes the production of an extensive (absolute) surplus . But this form of production of an extensive (absolute) surplus, linked to mass production, is necessarily related to the production of an intensive (relative) surplus . Nevertheless, the limits of the production of an extensive (absolute) surplus are determined by the resistance of the working class to the intensification of the system of work ." (Palloix, 1976, p . 50) 24 Palloix, 1976, pp . 49-50 . The first point seems to displace Marx's discussion of the role of transient gains for individual capitals based on reduction of labour-time below the social average . It should be noted, however, that Marx sometimes treats as analogous 'exceptionally productive labour' and 'intensified labour' . See Marx, 1976, p . 435 . 25 lbid, p . 54 . 26 Mandel, 1975 . 27 For a sympathetic critique see Rowthorne, 1976 . While Rowthorne



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CAPITAL & CLASS emphasises the value of Mandel's attempt to develop an historically located account of the complex interplay of fundamental processes implicated in the accumulation of capital he is critical of - Mandel's too ready reliance on rising organic composition/falling rate of profit arguments, both theoretically and in relation to post-war capitalist development . This he relates to an incipient technicism in Mandel's account of waves of technical innovation which, despite his treatment of the reserve army of labour, gives insufficient attention to the structural mediation of technical innovation in state and capital's strategy . As Rowthorne recognises these important criticisms do not undermine the value of Mandel's contribution as outlined in the text .

28 29

30

31

32 33

34

For brief comments on Braverman's conceptualisation of the reserve army of labour see below pp . 24-26 . See Sweezy, 1942 ; Baran and Sweezy, 1965 ; and Sweezy, 1974 . For critiques see Mandel, 1575, esp . chapter 17 ; Gamble and Walton, 1976, chapters 3-4 ; and also Rowthorne's critique of Mandel which underlines the point that the critics should not and need not rest their case on a mechanical invocation of rising organic composition/falling rate of profit arguments (see also Fine and Harris, 1976) . It is worth adding that these strictures do nothing to undermine the emphasis Baran and Sweezy place on the increasing centrality of advertising and marketing strategies for oligopolistic capitalism, or Braverman's related analysis of the elaboration of this part of the corporate apparatus and personnel, in LMC, chapter 12 . LMC, chapters 10, 11 and esp . 17 . See Beechey, 1977, who develops an analysis of the specificity of female wage labour in capitalist production . Mandel, 1975, esp . chapter 5 ; see also Rosdolsky, 1977, pp . 282-313 . As Jacoby, 1977, notes, many American socialists have adopted a `dual labour market' theory to address such systematic divisions within the working class . Most such analyses of dual labour markets have been merely descriptive taxonomies, limited to (a) the characterisation of employer strategies of labour-market segmentation designed, for example, to secure the stability of a pool of trained and experienced workers ; as (b) such strategies articulate with, and amplify, pregiven divisions within the working class . Marxian authors have made some attempt to integrate and qualify such taxonomies by locating them within the process of capital accumulation (see Gordon, 1971, and Edwards, 1975) but such syntheses have tended to identify dualism directly with the contrast between monopoly and competitive sectors of capital, and to treat hierarchisation simply as a strategy of ideological division, thus loosing sight of the dynamic and contradictions of such strategies for capital, and the terrain this provides for class struggle . Rubery (1978} provides a valuable assessment of these different approaches to the analysis of the internal differentiation of the working class, and begins to discuss the manner in which such differentiation develops in class struggle . She emphasises the central role of sectional worker organisation, but also attempts to locate that sectionalism in the interplay between (i) established forms of worker



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organisation, and (ii) the terrain of struggle afforded by capital's strategies of transformation of the labour process . (See also footnote

51 .) 35

36 37

38

39 40 41

42 43 44

45

For a vivid account of the realities of subordination inherent in the reorganisation of craft work under the auspices of capitalist manufacture, see McKendrick, 1961 . . Foster, 1974, esp . chapter 7 . Stedman-Jones, 1975, p . 65 . It should be obvious that I agree with Stedman-Jones that the notion of the 'labour aristocracy' does not, in itself, constitute an analysis, but is rather, a label for a nexus of interrelations between labour process, phases of accumulation, and working class politics and culture . Moorhouse (1978) provides a hostile assessment of attempts to develop an analysis of the 'labour aristocracy', which usefully summarises the problems, and emphasises in particular (a) the number of different accounts of this nexus on offer, and (b) the problematical character of the relation between working class politics and developments in the labour process . However, on the basis of this argument he seeks to absorb the debate into general analyses of working class sectionalism and the cultural hegemony of capital, in a manner which denies the evident significance of vertical divisions, between skilled and quasi-skilled workers and non-skilled workers, as a basis for cultural and political divisions . Hinton, 1971, esp . chapter 2 . In addition Burgess, 1975, provides a useful account of the phases of development over the whole second half of the nineteenth century, and Burgess, 1969, focusses on the transformation in engineering in mid-century . Turner, 1962, pp . 110-112 . Stone, 1973, quotation from p . 47 . Wilkinson, 1977 . Rubery (1978) provides a more explicit critique of Stone than Wilkinson along the lines suggested by his account . See also the critical comments by Palmer (1975) p . 31 . Hobsbawm, 1964, quotation from p . 170 . Samuel, 1977, quotation from p . 59 . Though lack of space precludes further discussion, it should be noted that a valuable aspect of Braverman's analysis of Taylorism is his account of the development of a corporate apparatus of planning and control (LMC esp . chapters 5, 15 and 18) . However, it is doubtful whether the notion of a shrinking elite of conceptualisers counterposed to a mass of deskilled clerical labourers constitutes an adequate basis for the analysis of that apparatus . Hobsbawm, 1964, quotation from p . 356 . See also Landes, 1969,

pp . 301-323 . 46 Sohn-Rethel, 1976, 1978 . 47 Palmer, 1975, quotation from p . 32. 48 Montgomery, 1976, and the commentary by Green, 1976, who emphasises the parochial character of the control demands of craft groups, and the preoccupation with wages and effort among the semi-skilled . 49 Palmer's discussion of Braverman has been characterised by deKadt



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(1976) in terms of the distinct levels of analysis at which they have worked : Braverman at the most general level of the logic of capital, and Palmer at the more particular level of specific forms of worker resistance and diverse employers' strategies . Palmer (1976) seems to accept this characterisation and equate it with the distinct preoccupations of political economists (laws of motion) and social historians (resistance and struggle of the 'losers'), adding only that the later constitutes a countervailing logic which qualifies the former . However, this concedes too much, both in general and in relation to aspects of Palmer's argument: the bases and forms of resistance must themselves be theorised in relation to the dynamic of accumulation if class (resistance and struggle of the 'losers'), adding only that the latter struggle is to be analysed as integral to the laws of motion of capital, and not be merely tacked on at the end . 50 Hyman, 1971, pp . 40-41 and p. 70 . See also Fox, 1958, pp . 359-360 for related observations on changes in the organisation of narrow skills in the boot and shoe industry . 51 Rubery (1978) offers a useful analysis of the bases of bargaining leverage among semi-skilled workers in mechanised production . She emphasises that : "the development of capitalism not only presents problems for worker control and organisation, inducing defensive tactics on the part of existing trade union organisations, but also offers new opportunities for organisation . Thus the development of machine technology may to some extent have undermined the skilled union's basis for organisation and control but, by transforming much unskilled labour into semi-skilled labour or, rather, by increasing the proportion of the labour force directly involved in the mechanised production process, it increased the bargaining power of a large section of the labour force . Semi-skilled workers were now in control of a greater volume of production, and further represented a threat to some skilled workers as the real skill differential declined, thus forcing some skilled unions to recruit semi-skilled workers, whilst in other industries organisation of semi-skilled workers proceeded independently ." Ibid, p . 30. This focus on the bargaining terrain afforded by mechanisation must clearly be seen in relation to changes in the reserve army, of labour, but appears more satisfactory than Friedman's (1977) almost total reliance on the 'drying up of the active reserve army' as a basis for analysing worker resistance among the less skilled . 52 Nichols and Beynon, 1977, quotation from p . 23 . 53 This suggests that neither deskilling nor 'responsible autonomy' (see Friedman, 1977) can adequately be analysed as generic control strategies . For a critical assessment of Friedman see Schwarz, 1978 . 54 Indeed, the authors move on so rapidly that they make little attempt to theorise their discussion of the labour process, so that, inevitably, their treatment of the tactics of worker organisation remains only



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tenuously related to that discussion . 55 Gallie, 1978, p . 80 . 56 Turner et al . 1967, chapter 3, quotation from p . 86 . The authors also note that the numbers of somewhat skilled indirect workers have increased . 57 Turner et al . 1967, p . 92 . 58 Beynon, 1973, p . 148 .

REFERENCES Baran, P . and Sweezy, P ., 1966, Monopoly Capital, Penguin, Harmondsworth . Braverman, H ., 1974, Labour and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, New York . Braverman, H ., 1976, "Two Comments", Monthly Review, 28, 3 . Beechey, V ., 1977, "Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production" Capital and Class, 3 . Brighton Labour Process Group, 1976, "Production Process of Capital and Capitalist Labour Process", C .S.E . Conference Paper . Brighton Labour Process Group, 1977, "The Capitalist Labour Process", Capital and C/ass, 1 . Beynon, H ., 1973, Working for Ford, Penguin, Harmondsworth (republished by E .P . Publishing, 1975) . Burgess, K ., 1975, The Origins of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, Croom Helm, London . Burgess, K ., 1969, "Technological change and the 1852 Lockout in the British Engineering Industry", Int. J. Soc. Hist. 14, pt . 2 . Coombes, R ., 1978, "Labor and Monopoly Capital", N.L .R. 107 . Cutler, T ., 1978, "The Romance of 'Labour', Economy and Society, 7, 1 . Cutler, T . et al, 1978, Marx's Capital and Capitalism Today, Routledge Kegan Paul, London. Davies, M ., and Brodhead, F ., 1975, "Labour and Monopoly Capital : A Review", Radical America 9 . deKadt, M ., 1976, "The Importance of Distinguishing Between Levels of Generality" Review of Radical Political Economy . 7, 1 . Edwards, R .C., 1975, "The Social Relations of Production in the Firm and Labor Market Structure", Politics and Society . Friedman, A ., 1977, Industry and Labour, MacMillan, London . Friedman, A ., 1977, "Responsible Autonomy versus Direct Control over the Labour Process", Capital and Class 1 . Fine, B ., and Harris, L ., 1976, "Controversial Issues in Marxist Economic Theory", Socialist Register . Foster, J ., 1974, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London . Fox, A ., 1958, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, Basil Blackwell, Oxford . Gallie, D ., 1978, In Search of the New Working Class, Cambridge U .P . Gamble, A . and Walton, P ., 1976, Capitalism in Crisis, MacMillan, London .



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Gordon, D .M ., 1972, Theories of Poverty and Underemployment Lexington Books, Lexington . Green, J ., 1974, "Comments on Montgomery", Journal of Social History . Heilbroner, J ., 1971, "Men at Work", New York Review of Books . Hinton, J ., 1971, The first Shop Stewards Movement, Allen Unwin, London . Hobsbawm, E ., 1964, Labouring Men, Weidenfeld, London . Hyman, R ., 1971, The Workers Union, Oxford U .P . Jacoby, R ., 1977, "Review of Braverman", Telos . Landes, D .S ., 1969, The Unbound Prometheus, Cambridge U .P . Lazonick, W ., 1977 "The Appropriation and Reproduction of Labor", Socialist Revolution, 38 . MacKenzie, G ., 1977, "The Political Economy of the American Working Class", B/S . Mandel, E ., 1975 ; Late Capitalism, N .L .B . London . Marx, K ., 1976a, Capital I, Penguin, London . Marx, K ., 1976b, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production", in Marx (1976a) . Marx, K ., 1972, Capital Ill, Lawrence and Wishart, London . McKendrick, N ., 1961, "Josiah Wedgewood and Factory Discipline", Historical Journal . Montgomery, D ., 1974, "The `New Unionism' and the Transformation of Workers Consciousness in America, 1909-1922", journal of Social History. Monthly Review, 1976, Special issue on "Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class" . Moorhouse, H ., "The Marxist theory of the labour aristocracy" Social History . Nichols, T ., 1977, "Labour and Monopoly Capital", Sociological Review . Nichols, T ., and Beynon, H., 1977, Living with Capitalism : Class Relations and the Modern Factory, Routledge Kegan Paul, London . Palmer, B ., 1975, "Class, Conception and Conflict : The Thrust for Efficiency, Managerial Views of Labour, and the Working Class Rebellion, 1903-1922" Review of Radical Political Economy, 7, 2 . Palmer, B ., 1976, "Political Economists, Historians and Generalisation" Review of Radical Political Economy . Palloix, C ., 1976, "The labour process : from Fordism to neo-Fordism" in The Labour Process and Class Strategies, C .S .E . Pamphlet 1, London . Rodsolsky, R ., 1977, The Making of Marx's 'Capital', Pluto Press, London . Rowthorne, B ., 1976, "'Late Capitalism"' N.L.R . 98 . Rubery, J ., 1978, "Structured labour markets, worker organisation and low pay" Cambridge journal of Economics . Samuel, R ., 1977, "The Workshop of the World : Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain", History Workshop 3 . Sohn-Rethel, A., 1978, Intellectual and Manual Labour, MacMillan, London . Sohn-Rethel, A ., 1976, "The Dual Economics of Transition" in The Labour Process and Class Strategies C .S .E . Pamphlet 1, London .



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Stedman-Jones, G ., 1975, "Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution" N.L .R. Stone, K ., 1973, "The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry", Radical America . Schwarz, B ., 1977, "On the Monopoly Capitalist Degradation of Work", Dialectical Anthropology, 2, 2 . Schwarz, B ., 1978, "Friedman's Frontier of Control" (mimeo) . Sweezy, P ., 1942, -Theory of Capitalist Development, Monthly Review Press, New York . Sweezy, P ., 1974, "Some Problems in the Theory of Capital Accumulation", Monthly Review . Turner, H . A., 1962, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy Allen and Unwin, London . Turner, H . A. et al ., 1967, Labour Relations in the Motor Industry, Allen and Unwin, London . Wilkinson, F ., 1977, "Collective Bargaining in the Steel Industry in the 1920s" in Briggs, A ., and Saville, J . (eds.) Essays in Labour History, 1918-1939. Young, B ., 1976, "Review of Braverman" Radical Science journal.

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REVIEW ARTICLE "MARX'S CAPITAL AND CAPITALISM TODAY" by A Cutler, B Hindess, P Hirst, and A Hussain Routledge Kegan_Paul, London, 1977/8 by Michael Ball, Doreen Massey and John Taylor

A number of fundamental political and theoretical problems have existed within British marxism over recent years, centring largely around the issues of economism and humanism . The writings of Althusser and some of the streams of work which have developed from it, including the two volumes under review, [1] are in different ways attempts to confront aspects of these deficiencies . Given that these are important issues with strategic political implications, it is unfortunate that Marx's Capital and Capitalism Today (MCCT) will be (and indeed already is) subject to two predictable and, in our view, inadequate reactions . The first of these will come from those who have an automatically negative reaction to anything appearing to be part of something they like to term 'the Althusserian school' . There is on the other hand a growing school of thought based around the recent work of Hirst and Hindess. It is characterised by a concern predominantly with problems surrounding the analysis of ideology, and the ideas of writers such as Foucault and Lacan . The response here is likely to be one of enthusiastic and uncritical acceptance . We would argue that it would be unfortunate if reaction to these volumes were polarised in this way . Some of the issues raised by the authors are important for the further development and use of marxist theory, but the answers to be found in these volumes (and, to use the authors' own oft-repeated phrase, the very nature of the posing of the questions) are wrong . THE SEARCH FOR SCIENTIFICITY MCCT must be understood as the latest stage in a much larger theoretical process . Prior to the publication of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (PCMP) (Hindess and Hirst, 1975) the overriding aim of the theoretical project of Hindess and Hirst (H/H) was to establish the nature of marxism



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as a science . The analysis and conclusions of MCCT mark the final rejection of the reading of Marx which they made in the course of that project . It is necessary therefore for us to outline certain key aspects of that reading . The project began with articles, published in the journal Theoretical Practice, whose primary purpose was to establish the scientificity of marxism . In the course of pursuing this purpose, -and despite their own general criticism of philosophy for seeking guarantees of the 'truth' of its knowledge, H/H consistently attempted to insert into marxism the philosophical problem of guaranteeing truth or falsity . This was done by defining dialectical materialism as a theory which legislates on the scientific status of all other theories . Since dialectical materialism -as the philosophy 'hidden' in Capital-specifies the object and concepts of historical materialism, and provides rules for investigating a necessarily ideologicallygiven understanding of reality, it became for H/H the theory through which all other theories could be categorised as 'scientific' or 'ideological' . In much the same way that Bachelard hoped to construct philosophies for each science, by showing how the sciences establish their forms of proof, dialectical materialism was approached by H/H as a rationalist discourse that could do the same for the 'science' of marxism . But to view marxism in this way, through a particular reading of Althusser's texts, required an adherence to three major theoretical tenets . It is important to specify these tenets, since MCCT is the culminating point of H/H's subsequent rejection of them . This rejection, moreover, is undertaken on the assumption that these tenets are the foundation of all marxist analysis prior to MCCT . It is on this assumption that a critique is presented in MCCT of most of the fundamental concepts of marxism . The tenets concern three inter-related issues . Firstly, given the authors' overall aim, it was essential to make a general distinction between science and ideology . Scientific concepts were distinguished from concepts derived from ideologically formulated theories . This distinction was made on the basis that ideological theories depended on assuming a particular relation between subject and object . In other words, what was being rejected was the notion that science consisted of a thinking individual attempting to comprehend externally-defined phenomena . This notion is common to empiricism and positivism, for instance . Both of these conceal the fact that the knowing subject and its object of study are structured by ideology . This concealment is achieved by the argument that 'a subject' directly confronting 'reality' is ultimately the basis of all theoretical knowledge . For Althusser, science was understood as being founded through a radical break with such ideological notions, and as necessitating a specific process of transformation (theoretical practice) of alreadygiven notions of reality .[2] On this basis, however, H/H then conceived of science and ideology as being fundamentally opposed to each other . Ideology was thought of as simply being a 'barrier' to scientific development, rather than its precondition and context . Secondly, since the focus was on such a rigid science/ideology opposition, crucial political problems had to be ignored . These concerned the



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relationship between theory and political struggles . How should issues arising in political struggles be analysed within historical materialism? For those struggles must operate on an ideological terrain, and thus present 'science' with an ideological - raw material . Conversely, how does the product of theory relate to the ideologies in which it must be expressed politically? How can the conclusions of a conjunctural analysis be represented in ideological forms that are politically relevant (in the programme, the slogan, etc .)? These inter-relations . between ideology, dialectical materialism and historical materialism, which -in one form or another-have always been crucial for the analysis of particular concrete situations, remained unanalysed . But rather than asking how the conclusions of theoretical . analyses can exist in a form •appropriate to political struggles (historical materialism - ideology), H/H asked how these conclusions appropriated reality itself. This produced a curious paradox : whilst their criticism of 'non-scientific' theories, such as empiricism, involved the argument that, contrary to the claim of such theories, they never appropriated reality, but always an ideological construct of this reality, H/H's own analysis of the product of science held that it always had to appropriate reality . This conception was therefore both contradictory and also prevented them from ever seriously examining the relationship between marxist theory, politics and ideology . Thirdly, the need for a rigorous demarcation between science and ideology (in general) required a theory of ideology (in general) . H/H took as their basis Marx's analysis in volume II I of Capitol [3] of the constraints placed upon capitalist methods of calculation by the dynamics of the capitalism mode of production . However, they then assumed that this in itself provided a means for theorising the basic elements governing all forms of ideology in capitalist societies . This economistic and highly generalised conclusion, when used to analyse particular ideologies, soon began to reveal its limitations . How, for example, could a theory of ideology be used which required a determination of individual subjectivity solely be the economic structure ; this merely replicated the economism they were supposedly attacking . Further, their interpretaion also required a pre-given individual as a cognising subject, able to recognise its place in the structure, and to act on it . This reading was then interpreted as implying precisely the subject-object relationship they were at pains to deny. Beginning with the concluding chapters of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, but primarily in Mode of Production and Social Formation (MPSF), Hindess and Hirst (1976) have undertaken a rejection of their particular understanding of Althusser . This has been done primarily by criticising the tenets we have outlined above . Entailed in this rejection, however, there has been-for H/H and for many of their readers-a rejection of a whole number of marxist concepts . We thus need to focus on two main points : firstly to show how the criticisms of marxist concepts in MCCT are based on a rejection of the fundamental tenets of the H/H reading of Althusser ; secondly to analyse the extent to which their criticisms are valid in relation to Marx's discourse in



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Capital . MCCT must be approached with these two points in mind . LEVELS OF CRITICISM The conceptual criticisms contained in MCCT operate on three levels . First, there is a rejection of concepts such as value, surplus-value, and productive and non-productive labour . This rejection rests on an attempt to establish the arbitrariness of these concepts or their inconsistency with other concepts in Capital . Value, for example, is rejected, amongst other reasons, because it is supposedly defined on the basis of an unproven assumption (that commodity exchange is undertaken on the basis of an equation of labour-times) and that, furthermore, this analysis of value in Capital is elaborated in terms of the social relations of simple commodity production and then illegitimately transposed to capitalism . Similarly, the productive/non-productive dichotomy is abandoned because it is claimed to rest on two different sets of propositions which are mutually incompatible . In this case these are those of social ownership (possession/nonpossession of the means of production) on the one hand, and place within the overall division of labour (as a technical function) on the other . Secondly, there are criticisms of concepts which function at such a level of generality in relation to objects given for analysis, that their explanatory value must necessarily be limited . These concepts must be rejected because they cannot adequately explain the particularities of individual phenomena . Labourer and non-labour, possession and nonpossession, and separation and non-separation are all dismissed in this way . Thirdly, a whole series of formulations is rejected on the basis of the criticisms made by the authors of MCCT in rejecting the tenets of their own, particular, reading . Determination in the last instance, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and the combination of relations and forces of production are rejected primarily because they require an untenable rationalist imposition on the real . Similarly, contemporary marxist theories of class are rejected because they require unfounded structural or subjective determinations, or (as in Poulantzas) a contradictory combination of the two . The first two levels of criticism undoubtedly raise serious problems for a number of generally accepted interpretations of marxist concepts ; we return to some of these below . For the moment, we must focus on the arguments which are based on the rejection of H/H's earlier reading since it is here that the most fundamental criticisms of marxism are made . FROM THE REJECTION OF A READING TO THE REJECTION OF CONCEPTS? Take, for example, the critique of marxism as a rationalism . In MPSF, H/H argue that it is necessary to distinguish between two realms-that of independent objects existing outside theoretical discourse, and that of discourse itself. If the latter is to provide a knowledge of the former (through representing it, expressing it) then there must be a means by which this knowledge can be evaluated . This evaluation is achieved by



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referring the knowledge to a discourse which is held to be privileged . Depending on the theoretical position, this privileging can be a function of 'the dialectic', 'the problematic', 'a philosophy of scientific discovery', or at a more general level, the elementary propositions of language, and so on . Whatever the form of privileging, H/H argue that the exercise is untenable . It requires a circularity in which the privileged discourse can only by demonstrated to be such by referring it to itself-which can never be anything more than an unproven dogmatism .. In addition, since the reading of one theoretical discourse is always from within the confines of another discourse, and each of these structures reality in a way that cannot be proven (except by a dogmatic privileging), nothing more can ever be done than assess one discourse from within another . As a result, reality is never knowable . Given this, it is clearly untenable for a theoretical discourse such as marxism to claim to know reality be arguing that its conclusions are produced by the deployment of its concepts to produce a knowledge of that reality . Such a claim rests on a rationalist assumption that real phenomena are a manifest form of theoretical relations and that these relations are in turn identical to the real object of their analysis . But this itself can only be established by reference to a discourse-dialectical materialism-which simply asserts that this is so . Consequently, one of the major contentions of H/H's reading of Marx through Althusser-that the theoretical product of historical materialist analysis directly appropriates reality, and in so doing provides a knowledge of it-can now be rejected . The implication is that theoretical discourses can only be assessed in terms of their internal consistencies and logic . Marxism becomes something we use in order to obtain an objective which we desire because of the ideologies we live in . We can never deny that reality exists, but we must conclude that it can never be proven knowable . A political practice calling itself 'socialist' or 'marxist' must be completely transformed by these conclusions . We will return to this later. For the moment, consider what is perhaps MCCT's most fundamental conclusion -that marxism entails a rationalist epistemology . The major aspect of the argument here concerns the unprovable assumption of dogmatic privilege . Yet, pradoxically, this argument itself depends on certain a priori assumptions . Both MPSF and MCCT contain assumptions which are necessary for the coherence of their argument . For example : MCCT states that the 'real world' consists of 'distinct and independently existing objects' having intrinsic properties (even a' discourse is 'independent') . This assumption is necessary for the critique to operate . Yet, given the position put forward in MCCT, how can we know that the real world exists as a series of independently specifiable entities? Again, on what basis should we accept the assumption that there can be no relation between discourse and its objectives that is not representational or correlative? Similarly, if reality cannot be represented or expressed in discourse, then for the authors to know this, it must be conceived as being externally limited-yet on the basis of their analysis, how can we know this? Other similar inconsistencies will be referred to below, but it is



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already clear that MCCT's critique of marxism as a rationalism is not only primarily a critique of the authors' own previous reading, but is also a critique of dogmatic privilege which itself inevitably entails implicit (or dogmatic!) privileging . It is, moreover, a critique which leads to an arbitrary theoretical procedure . We are presented with an object for analysis, and we select concepts for this from within bodies of theory which we assess (from within our discourse) through criteria such as consistency, logical ordering, etc . All that remains, in other words, is the assessment of one theoretical discourse from within another . The irony is that arriving at this position requires the adoption of assumptions which represent-in MCCT's terms-a form of dogmatism . In much the same way that the rejection of marxism is a rationalism rests upon the adoption of questionable assumptions in a critique of a particular reading, so do other rejections . For example, in relation to the debate on ideology, mentioned earlier, it is only necessary to reject in toto Marx's theory of the limits placed upon the nature of capitalist calculation if it is seen as a basis for a general theory of ideology . Some of the most fundamental rejections in MCCT therefore rest upon conclusions reached in the critique of a specific reading . Neither this reading, nor its rejection, nor the assumptions entailed in the latter are adequate for performing the tasks which H/H have successively required . They are adequate neither for a validation of marxism through the establishment of a general epistemology, nor for a rejection of its basic concepts . 'UNFOUNDED' AND 'GENERAL' CONCEPTS Within MCCT, there are, however, other levels of criticism . These concern firstly concepts founded on what the authors see as inadequate and inconsistent bases, and secondly the level of generality of the concepts contained in Capital. In a review of this length, we can do no more than briefly refer to these criticisms, indicating their overall limitations . Take, for example, the authors' reading of Marx's exposition of the value-form . This, they argue, is ultimately derived from a conception of exchange as an equation of labour-times, an exchange of equivalents appropriate only to simple commodity production . The attempt to extend it to modes of production where there is no simple correspondence between value and exchange-value places severe restrictions on the analysis of production, circulation and distribution . The critique follows a course here that is also found in the 'rejection' of other concepts-notably those concerning the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall . The authors effectively demolish one position on

value-that it supposedly rests on an equivalence of labour-times-and then claim that, as a result, the concept must be rejected in toto . There are

several different analyses of the value form, none of which rely on a confusion between exposition and proof in Capital to establish the validity of value, as does MCCT's rejection of it.[4] The notion of 'equivalence in exchange' as an idealisation of a particular state within theory, constructed solely for the purpose of exposition, and not as the basis for a 'proof', is



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never considered in MCCT . We are thus presented with a highly questionable `rejection' of value as a concept, without any consideration of the more rigorous theoretical formulations available . In a similar vein, the authors summarily introduce and dismiss notions of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall which are based either on pure deductions from a model or only on empirical measurement . This leaves (for them) Balibar's interpretation, which is not easily dismissable in such terms . The final level of criticism is then invoked, and Balibar's interpretation is rejected as a rationalist imposition on the real . The entry of the unassailable 'rationalist' axiom thus saves the day, and rejection in toto can continue . In all these cases, one position is ultimately adopted, taken to be the essence of the concept, and rejected through the introduction of an unfounded assertion or a pre-existing critique . Neither of these need to be accepted as a basis for rejection of the concept . The authors also reject a series of concepts because their level of generality cannot deal with the particularity of the objects to which they supposedly refer . They argue that an object such as 'social relations of production', for example, cannot be conceived solely in terms of relations between 'producers' and 'non-producers' . Similarly, 'class relations' cannot be explained in terms of relations between labourers/non-labourers, or possessors/nonpossessors, and so on . Such criticisms are, of course, relevant for any analysis which attempts formally to deduce specific economic relations from the basic concepts enabling the theoretical formulation of a mode of production . To argue however that they undermine all possible forms of historical materialist analysis involves an unjustified theoretical displacement . Why, for example, should concepts relevant for analysing the basic structure of a mode of production generate a theorisation of particular social relations of production? If one is analysing the latter, different concepts have to be deployed. These concepts, whilst structured and limited by the basic concepts, nevertheless exist at different level of conceptual isation . Such levels are not necessarily deducible simply from each other . The invocation of basic concepts such as labourer and non-labourer, or absolute and relative surplus value, does not itself constitute an analysis . Concepts such as technical division of labour and labour process are never formally deducible from the division of labour dominant at a particular moment in the dynamics of a mode of production, although this moment -whose theorisation is required-nevertheless structures the operation of the labour process subsumed under particular relations of production . The crucial issue for historical materialist analyses, of levels of conceptualisation within its discourse in relation to a given object, is incorrectly conflated by the authors of MCCT into one of a simple mapping of concepts . DETERMINATION IN THE LAST INSTANCE Having shown how the critique in MCCT operates on a number of different levels, we can now turn briefly to one of the most important aspects of its analysis, namely the discussions of determination in the last



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instance and historical necessity/economic determinism, indicating how the various levels we have outlined operate in the rejection of these notions . The criticisms operate along a number of lines : an opposition to `economic determinism' as a particular form of assumed correspondence with the real, an opposition to, determination in the last instance as a gestural attempt to escape the implications of economic determinism (here the issue relates to, and is confused with, that of relative autonomy), and a number of specific criticisms of particular formulations of such determinism . Some of the points made are excellent criticisms of particular methods of analysis current within marxism . Thus, the criticisms of various attempts to escape what are often read as the implications of `economic determinism' undermine many of the cruder formulations which are currently in use . Under this heading the books deal with attempts to `soften' economic determinism merely by complicating the causal process, with the economic being brought in as the final, rather than the immediate, step ; with attempts to pass off economic determination as only an empirical generalisation which may, in any given instance, not hold ; and with the formulation of such determination as an abstract model whose tendencies may be counteracted by "concrete conditions too specific to be abstracted" (pp . 125-8) . Such illicit dodges are by no means uncommon, and a rigorous criticism of them is to be welcomed . Moreover, some of the points are of immediate relevance in relation to certain political questions being raised, for instance in the women's movement .[5] It would be unfortunate if critics of the book were to ignore the need to answer, or agree with, some of these arguments . But criticisms of bad formulations are hardly sufficient. Moreover, the manner in which MCCT goes on to pursue the ultimate `logic' of its argument is equally unfortunate . Indeed, the authors often seem to share the same (mis)understanding of concepts which underlies the formulations they correctly criticise . Although it is clear that in a formal sense the authors recognise the differences between the dominance of the economic and determination in the last instance, in their actual discussions the two conceptions are elided, a position made possible by their understanding and use of the concept `expressive totality' . There is no sensitivity either to the different theoretical levels on which these concepts are supposed to operate, nor to the difference between determination and determinism, nor to the necessarily different interpretation of the term `economic' in each case . One effect of this is that economic determinism is equated with materialism, and the two are jettisoned together . The abandonment of materialism is not argued explicitly because-in the authors' formulation-it is encapsulated in two other arguments . On the one hand there is the argument about economic determinism referred to above . They quote Marx : "This much is, however clear that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics . On the contrary, it is



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the economic conditions of the time that explain why here politics and there Catholicism play the chief part ." The first comment on this passage disposes with materialism thus : "First, it is trivially true that all social life depends on production, for those who do not eat do not live long enough to participate in politics or religion" (p . 176) . So here materialism is confused with direct economic determinism . From the standpoint, then, of the specification of particular mechanisms of determination, a general position on materialism is thrown out as being irrelevant (as a "truism which tells nothing about how the economic structure of society is supposed to determine the character of the rest") (p . 176) . But while at this point the matter is dubbed 'trivial', at other points in the argument the question is considered to be totally problematic . Thus, in an again-often-insightful critique of common formulations of the forces/ relations of production contradiction [61, they write : "This conception of contradiction is written within a general doctrine of historical causality : first, it distributes entities to distinct classes (structure/superstructure, forces/relations) ; second, it gives them the order of a necessary hierarchy, one class of entities (structure/forces) is causally privileged with respect to another (superstructure/relations) ; and third, it raises the question of the grounding of this privilege (why

is it that 'the mode of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life?'J" (p . 137) (our emphasis) . But is this not, once again, to seek a guarantee? A guarantee which is clearly impossible to give, which is fundamental to the theoretically (but

not politically) irresolvable battle between materialism and idealism ; Is it not possible to establish a relation between theory and politics at this basic epistemological level, and not only (as the authors would have it) with each new piece of empirical investigation? But as we argued earlier, the nature of H/H's initial quest isolated science as the bastion of truth against an incorrect world . In a slightly different way, we see here a result of this formulation . The authors are in search of a guarantee . Predictably, they cannot find one . This destroys rationalism . Having equated their understanding of materialism (as an element of 'marxist philosophy') with a rationalist guarantee, in need of proof within theory, it too can be rejected . Materialism thus falls both because it is equated with the dominance of the economic instance and because it is equated with a rationalist epistemological guarantee . THE NEW ALTERNATIVE An adequate examination of the alternatives which the authors attempt to construct would take far more space than this review allows . It is, however, worth making one or two very brief-and indicative-points, since the problems which their own analysis runs into are symptomatic of the impossibility of their fundamental questions .



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We shall use, as an example, the concept `social formation' . Having rejected "the concepts of determination in the last instance, correspondence of relations and forces of production and mode of production", they write : "The more general point to notice is that the conception of the social formation as having a definite and necessary structure with definite and necessary relations of effectivity between its parts cannot be sustained either" (p . 229) . They go on : "We are left then with the concepts of definite social relations and practices, relations and forces of production, law, and so on, but there is no necessary form in which these concepts must be articulated into the concept of the essential structure of a social formation" . Two points arise immediately . First, to be "left with" is a rather curious, and unsubstantiated, method of selection of concepts . Second, the use of the word "definite" indicates their (in general correct) concern with historical particularity . Social relations, practices, and the causal connections between them, can only be analysed in the particular . But a concept of definite social relations must still require a more general concept of social relations of which this is a definite form . Otherwise a new concept would have to be constructed for every object . In what sense is their concept of social relations less transhistorical? Now, it would be foolish not to admit that there are some real problems here for marxist analysis, which do need to be faced, and which too few people recognise . But the authors ignore their own exhortations to frame questions as a result of political needs, and their relentless pursuit of 'pure logic' will not enable them to escape the fundamental contradiction . They do, then, have a general concept of a social formation . They write : "The conceptualisation of social formations therefore involves conceptualisation of: 1 relations of production and economic class-relations ; 2 the specific means and processes of production and forms of distribution of the products and their relationship to the specific forms of possession of and separation from the means and conditions of production and of economic class-relations ; 3 forms of State and of politics ; 4 cultural and ideological forms, for example, the forms of calculation employed in the organisation of production and of trade, forms of political calculation, etc . ; 5 relations with other social formations ; 6 conditions and possibilities of transformation of some of these forms and relations-for example, of the transition from capitalism to socialism" (pp . 230-231) . C . & C.--H



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One obvious question to ask of this formulation is why, after their earlier arguments about economic dominance, etc ., it is relations of production and economic class-relations which are conceptualised first, and which in subsequent discussions are given discursive primacy . They reject "the classical conception (in which) the discursive primacy accorded to the economy and to production in particular involves a definite conception of the ontological structure of a realm of modes of production and social formations existing independently of Marxist discourse" (p . 229) . The discursive primacy which they establish "Can only be a function of the posing of definite problems for theorisation . If relations of production and their conditions of existence are presented as a problem for theorisation then those relations must be accorded primacy in the discursive resolution of that problem" (pp . 229-230) . The next question must therefore be : what was the problem posed for theorisation which did indeed warrant this discursive primacy? The answer is that "The political objectives of a socialist transformation of economic class relations pose the problem of relations of production and their political and cultural conditions of existence as primary objects of theorisation for Marxism" (p . 230) . and again "The order of discourse in the analysis of social relations and the connections between them is not given in the order of social relations themselves : it is a consequence of definite political ideologies and specific political objectives . The discursive primacy accorded to economic relations in Marxism and more generally in socialist discourses cannot be conceived as an effect of the ontological structure of reality . On the contrary it is the effect of a definite political objective, namely, the objective of a socialist transformation of capitalist relations of production" (p . 315) . Among the more obvious comments one can make on this position are the following . Both quotes do indicate a general position on the dominance of the economic, and not one which results from particular empirical problems . In this sense, then, the difference between MCCT and classical marxism is that the latter argues that theoretical analyses can have a relation, through epistemology, with political practice . The authors' theoretical analyses are also established by a relation with politics-but only in an immediate way, in direct relation to individual and particular



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theoretical analyses . But, again, why is the relation between theory anu politics allowed only at this level? If their arguments were accepted, it would be entirely possible to come up with thoroughly political arguments (for example against social democracy) to justify the concept of 'mode of production' . Is it possible in their terms to re-establish, on political grounds, concepts which have been demolished as based on rationalism? If not what privileged level of discourse forbids it? Finally, of course, how do they know that the establishment of socialism demands the "socialist transformation of capitalist relations of production"? (In particular, one might add, how do they know this when they have abandoned the concept of exploitation?) There are many people who have concepts of 'socialism' which do not require such a revolutionary transformation . Such questions in the end lead into either inconsistency or a nonsense circularity, an infinite regression . Such circularity is symptomatic of the project of these volumes . POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS The political implications of the rejection of epistemology in MCCT are clear. Since we must reject the theoretical notion of a structural explanation of phenomena (provided for analysis from political struggles), we can no longer base our political practice on conclusions reached in theory ; or, rather, we can, but there is no reason to accept these conclusions as any more valid than others . Those conclusions must be selected which are considered most politically useful, but with no developed criteria on which to base this selection . Take, for example, MCCT's account of what Lenin was doing when he analysed a particular combination of modes of production, and their effects on the class structure, in the Development of Capitalism in Russia . He merely used and developed certain marxist concepts because they were 'useful' for the contemporary political problems he was confronting-such as the rural support for Narodnism . He was not providing a knowledge that could assist the formation of a political strategy and programme . He simply used marxist concepts as a means of waging a political struggle . For different issues and conjunctures concepts derived from other discourses could be just as politically useful . The notion of a politics being governed by a theory of the social formation, with the latter providing a knowledge for that politics, is thus rejected (and with it also the possibility of political struggles determining the development and nature of that theory) . This notion is expelled in MCCT as being a rationalist imposition on the real . In its place, the authors formulate notions that are close to what Foucault has described as a 'progressive politics' (Foucault, 1978) . This 'progressive politics' of MCCT can be characterised briefly in the following way : the political discourse in which socialists exist has a specific ideological objective-'socialism' . This is defined in MCCT's terms as the " . . . communal possession of the means and conditions of production under popular democratic control" . In order to achieve this



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objective, society needs to be transformed, requiring both an ideological transformation and a change in particular aspects of society (the relations of production, the class structure, etc .) . But the former is the most crucial political issue, since an ideological commitment to socialist forms is a precondition for the achievement of socialism . A transformation of the basic notions prevalent in capitalist society is consequently required . This can only be achieved by transforming the ideologies in which these notions exist . So an analysis is necessary of the conditions of existence of these ideologies, as a pre-condition for their undermining and eventual transformation . At this point the arbitrariness of the line of reasoning becomes apparent. Where should the analysis start and what should it do? In MCCT we are presented with an object for analysis in the form of 'capitalist relations of production' . But, this object is only given for investigation by a political discourse which assumes-given its concept of socialism -that a transformation in the relations of production is necessary. Any element within the current social structure could have been selected in the name of 'socialism' ; why pick on this one? No answer can be given, the line of reasoning in MCCT does not allow it . Moreover, given that all concepts of structure and structuring effects have been abandoned, the aim of transforming the relations of production is itself redefined . With no concept of mode of production, and no concept of social formations dominated by such modes, the process of transformation is conceived at the level of the individual institution-the individual firm, for example . There is no structural break between capitalism and socialism . Perhaps even more significantly for immediate political practice, neither can there be any structural constraint placed on action, and the results of action, by the fact that the social formation as a whole is capitalist. Analysis of relations of production as being governed by the structure and reproduction of a specific mode of production is ruled out . So the most that can be done is to specify what appear to be the immediate conditions of existence of these relations . These can be conceived as being in legal ideology, political policies, forms of economic calculation, and so on, since these all have referents in capitalist relations (and vice versa) . Proceeding in this way, a description can be generated of the phenomena that appear to condition the politically-determined object of study . Once this conditioning is specified, a reference is given for the political work of transformation . The adequacy of the conditions of existence selected in this process can, however, never be assessed . Those that "appear" to be "immediate" conditions of existence are selected . But how are they to be recognised? Once again this can be done only by assertion . Completely different political strategies can be derived depending on which conditions of existence are chosen as the most crucial . The dogmatism which the authors have correctly recognised in some positions within marxism is not removed by their own analysis . Basing our political practice on MCCT would appear to leave us with a politics guided entirely by a personal definition of 'socialism' . MCCT's



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own conclusions require that we become social democrats and begin a long march through capitalist institutions in the hope that the idea of socialism will gradually filter through . This review has been largely critical . Nevertheless, it would be unfortunate if the rejection of the answers presented in these volumes also led to a dismissal of serious problems raised in them . For undoubtedly some of the inadequacies in contemporary marxist analysis which Althusser's project indicated, and to which these volumes are directed, remain to be answered .

NOTES Michael Ball lectures in the Economics Department, Birkbeck College, University of London ; Doreen Massey works at the Centre for Environmental Studies, London ; John Taylor lectures in the Social Science Department, Polytechnic of the South Bank, London . The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of members of and readers for the Editorial Committee of Capital and Class . 1 This review concentrates on Volume I, which contains the authors' main criticisms of other positions and the basis of their own approach . 2 For elaboration of this argument see On the materialistic dialectic, in Althusser (1969) . 3 Marx's comments on this are scattered throughout Parts 2, 3 and 7, but see especially Chapters 12, 18, 48 and 50 . 4 See, for example, the recent debate in Capital and Class and the references therein . 5 For example, in the analysis of patriarchial ideology and its effects . 6 It might also be noted that the authors' position leaves no room, not just for materialism, but also for contradiction .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Althusser, L ., 1969, For Marx, Penguin Press, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England . Foucault, M ., 1978, Interview with Michel Foucault : Ideology and Consciousness, No . 3 . Hindess, B . and Hirst, P ., 1975, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London . Hindess, B . and Hirst, P ., 1976, Mode of Production and Social Formation, MacMillan, London .

ARCHIVE :

ECONOMICS FOR WORKERS IN THE 1920s Beginning with the Beginner Introduction by Tim Putnam

How does 'theory' become politically effective in the labour movement? It informs the interventions of political organisations and thus has a powerful if indirect effect on working class experience . It is used to generate counter-ideology, and is itself changed in the process . And by directly entering the education of militants, it becomes bound up in the structure of political organisation . Considering all the labour expended by intellectuals in the development of theory as a knowledge about the world intended to be a means of changing it, relatively little is known about the modes in which this knowledge actually is effective . The following article shows something of the process by which one British group approached these problems in the early part of this century . It appeared in Plebs, the journal of the Plebs League-for Independent Working Class Education-in 1920. Its author, Fred Casey, was a tutor in the Manchester Labour College who later gained a reputation as an expositor of Joseph Dietzgen's 'monist' philosophy in his Methods of Thinking . Here, however, Casey was intervening in a discussion in the Plebs League and related Labour College movement of how education in basic (Marxist) political economy should be inserted into workers' political selfeducation . His paper was adopted by the April 1920 Plebs conference as the basis for one of a series of small texts for evening classes, and sold over 50,000 copies in the first few years after its publication . The movement for Independent Working Class Education became one of the most important forms of class organisation in this country during and immediately after the First World War . The Plebs League grew out of a revolt by trade union students at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1908 against an attempt by the University to take over the college, sack radical staff and replace socialist curricula with safer material . The League developed an extensive network of part-time and full-time study under working class control at a time when various state agencies were perceiving the need to



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integrate working class representatives into public institutions . Vehemently opposing any notion of class-impartial 'objective' knowledge, the League and the National Council for Labour Colleges with which it merged struggled against the W .E .A . under the banner of: "No compromise with bourgeois culture!" In this article, Casey puts forward a scheme of organisation for evening classes which became the characteristic style of the Labour College movement in the early twenties . Short courses offered large numbers of workers a stimulating introduction to basic issues, while the opportunity to do more advanced study was linked with the responsibility for teaching basic courses to new groups of workers . It is worth noting that Casey did not find his worker-students 'apathetic', particularly as some historians (e .g. Maclntyre, 1977), neglecting the important differences between organisations, would have us believe that 'working class apathy' was a problem recognised by all would-be socialist leaders at this time . Casey implicitly asks us to look again at the aspirations and expectations of political leaders who encountered apathy, suggesting either that their analysis was insufficiently materialist or that their political practice itself created the apathy it pretended to discover . The short time it took Plebs to achieve a monthly circulation of over 10,000 and the National Council for Labour Colleges to build a national organisation which reached ten times as many workers certainly bears out Casey's point . Nor was the activity limited to study ; as 1926 approached the League's position as a class organisation made its meetings an important forum of strategy and tactics for the anticipated trial of strength . Although history of class struggle and the analysis of contemporary imperialism came to the fore after 1924, Political Economy remained one of the key . subjects in Labour College curricula throughout the move-

ment's history . The range of economic theory considered in Plebs was wide : a post-war debate on inflation brought together Kautsky, Keynes and Marshall, among others . But it was always important to the notion of Independent Working Class Education to be able to put forward Marxism in opposition to conventional economics, and Casey's outline gives interesting evidence as to how these positions were put over to a mass audience . Particularly striking is the extent to which Casey chooses, even in a short course on basic issues, to give an outline of the development of the world, and that human history in this account is technologically determined . Against this is juxtaposed an implicit syndicalist politics, which is underpinned in the analysis of capitalist development by the theory that the increase of the reserve army of labour was producing a more militant and class conscious unionism .

REFERENCES Craik, W., 1964, The Central Labour College 1909-29 Lawrence & Wishart, London . Maclntyre, S ., 1977, British Labour, Marxism and Working class Apathy in

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the 1 920s Historical Journal, v . 20, 2 . Paul, E . & C ., 1921, Proletcult (Proletarian Culture) Leonard Parsons, London . Simon, B ., 1965, Education and the Labour Movement 1870-1920 Lawrence & Wishart, London .

PLEBS may be consulted at the Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green, London.

BEGINNING WITH THE BEGINNER FRED CASEY Educate, educate, educate! Um-yes, but how? Just precisely how? Our object is to make the working class realise its position in relation to the master class . To that end we conduct classes in social science which, if others' experiences are at all like mine, work out something like this : The promoters advertise a course of, say, 24 weekly lectures on Economics, starting in October-twenty enthusiastic students turn uplecture starts on time-students studiously attentive-lively questionsslight shrinking in numbers as Christmas approaches-after Christmas, slump in attendance-students coming late-occasional good question and some poor ones-attention not really bad (in between yawns) but indefinable dullness pervading atmosphere-teacher tries to rouse things by questions of his own-after that, a few have urgent appointments elsewhere at question time, excuse themselves graciously and go out on tiptoe-very few studying at all after first couple of months and hardly one with a view to teaching . During one course I have in mind we started with twenty students and finished with three . Some people believe the workers are apathetic . I don't. With some exceptions they seem to me very energetic . Think of the energy displayed in football ; in practising the piano ; at choir ; orchestral or dramatic rehearsals ; at club houses ; at whist drives or in cycling ; some are even energetic in drinking beer . Then why all this apathy when it comes to study? I conclude the majority of working class students are not students either by nature or training . True enough they are anxious to know our conclusions -high prices and bad conditions force them to want these-but they will

not cover a long line of detailed argument, so why weary them and waste time when conclusions are all they will get when we have finished? Why not give the original twenty the conclusions before they dwindle to three, and reserve the detailed work for the training of teachers who certainly must have it? One of the principles of our materialistic science teaches us to fashion our tools and methods to correspond with the nature of the material we are using, otherwise we FAIL . Now get that and grip tight! Very well! We want to make a present of our information to every worker, but, it is impossible to a man who won't have it . If I argue that he has to have a shave



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somehow (the revolution) and, therefore he ought to accept it because it would save making a bloody mess out of his face, I miss the point . Even if I put it into his hand, as we do in the classes, and he puts it away in a drawer and forgets all about it, again I have failed . Not until I have suc-

ceeded in making him

desire

to possess and use it can I make the presen-

tation successfully . With some such thoughts in my mind I decided on a change of tactics . I would give a short course, say, half a dozen lectures, which could be repeated three or four times in one season . In it I would avoid the technical phrases, e .g., I would tell my audience that value was labour, and if they wanted to know any more about it, let them ask . And beyond telling them that money was only another form of the labour embodied in commodities, I

would not mention its functions ; that also could come out in

questions (it did, with excellent effect) . The idea was to keep within the limit of what interested them, and to tell them only as much as would excite further interest and make them want more . From such students I would select a very few individuals, force them to guarantee time for study or otherwise have nothing to do with them ; these I would take on another evening, give them the best detail study I could, and then let them go to the Trade Unions in the district with the same summary as the general class was having . And I would continue that treatment until the Trade

Unions were sufficiently alive to the necessity of

finding money

to equip

residential Labour Colleges for training their own men in a proper manner. I have had only one opportunity for putting the plan into practice ; I give the results for the sake of comparison . The first lecture, an extremely simple affair, led, apart from some brilliant questions, to a unanimous request to go over it again with special reference to the 'socially necessary', mention of which had been brought out in questions . The course of six lectures was extended by request to eight . No late starts . Questions, the most searching I had ever had, were continued beyond what ought to have been the closing time, so that the caretaker told us we could not have the room again unless we would get out to time ; we did so and stood outside in groups discussing matters-and the month was February . The attendance rose in eight weeks from twenty-six to thirty-six-the only time in my experience when the number of students increased . They 'sat up and begged' for a text-book, but the cupboard was bare . Now, if the above plan is considered to be good, it should be extended . But it can't be extended without a suitable book, and the purport of my writing is to supply a proposal concerning the form such a book should take . The proposal is only intended to serve as a basis for discussion of this very important question at the forthcoming April Conference . It is, therefore, hoped that before they come intending delegates will give some critical thought to the suggestion and that they will formulate any desirable counter-proposals beforehand, thereby saving time at the Conference and enabling the idea to take some definite shape on that occasion . In the foregoing I have treated the idea as though it belonged entirely to myself. Of course that is not so . Many people hold similar ideas, and several variations of it were introduced by different delegates at the recent Manchester Conference .



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My suggestion is a simple preliminary booklet-more like a chat with the reader. Although I realise there is no one way which could be said to be the best (for some audiences are more intellectual than others), yet I suggest the following series of leading ideas as a basis for the discussion of the form our book should take ; and will venture to remind intending delegates that we want helpful criticism towards the production of a book at once simple and impressive enough to help our teachers to move the "masses" better than even do the "movies" . ELEMENTARY MARXISM-AN IMPRESSIONIST SERIES OF LECTURES Lecture 1 : Commodities and Money Refer to social evils . Contrast riches with poverty . What is wealth and how got? Wealth a combination of matter and useful labour . Nature supplies the matter and charges nothing for it . Man supplies the labour . Where does wealth go? National Income divided into Wages and Profit . Wages paid to people who work ; Profit taken by people who do nothing for it. How is this done? By buying and using a certain commodity . How are quantities of commodities determined in buying and selling? Commodities being exchanged for commodities (C-C), the quantities being measured by the quantities of labour in them, say 10 hours labour in one form exchanged for 10 hours labour in some other form . Explain this by a simple imaginary picture of pre-exchange times-exchange beginning with direct barter (C-C) . .leading to the idea of indirect exchange (C-C-C) . The middle one grows to become money . So, money is only a separate-i .e . independent, in-between -form of labour (C-M-C) . Since M is only another form of some commodity's value, profit cannot be made in exchange, for where one commodity has a price that exceeds its value, some other eommodity must have a price below its value because .the extra price of the one can't come from nowhere . So, if one man's gain is another's loss how do the profit takers get the profit? Lecture 2: Capital and Profit Recall the question of profit left over from Lecture 1 . Go Back to the savage and his poor tools-he had not enough to eat, let alone sell . Better tools produce more wealth, so buying and selling becomes possible . Further development of tools (and methods) begets the 'one man one job' (division of labour in society), more buying and selling results in some folks' getting a stock of other folks' labour (value) stored up in money form . With this M a trader would buy raw materials • and get some workman who possessed his own tools to work it into commodities ; he would pay the workman and sell the commodities elsewhere . Later, he gets a workshop and tools of his own and gets a worker to work for him for wages . The worker gradually gets separated from his own tools and even tually has nothing to sell but his own strength (labour power) . The price of labour power (wages) is determined like the price of any other commodity -by the quantity of labour. consumed by (embodied in) the man, in the form of necessaries of life . Assume this quantity of labour to be 4 hours



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and that in the factory the man works 12 hours. This 12 hours is new in the form of some commodity that belongs to the master . The

labour

master sells it and converts that labour into the form of money, out of which he gives 4 hours in wages so that the worker can reappear the day after . This leaves the master with 8 hours profit . We see that the capitalist advances nothing, for the workman has created his own wages before they are paid to him . If you were a capitalist would you tell your workmen how the trick is done? You'd be a fool if you did . Draw the moral as expressed in all forms of capitalist education (the press, platform schools, W.E .A., Whitley camouflage, etc .,) and contrast it with his struggles in the workshop against more wages and more hours .

Lecture 3: Shorter Hours and More Profit Summarise chief points concerning profit, in Lecture 2 . Longer hours mean more profit . From the Great Plague onwards Acts of Parliament (Labour Statutes) forced workers to conform to capitalists' wishesshowing the capitalist nature of the State . Why then did they pass the Factory Acts to shorten hours . Tools again! Some people had better and quicker machinery than others . They could produce more goods in the same time which, when sold, resulted in more profit, so it paid these people to have an Act passed limiting hours of labour . (Legislation can

only go as quick as capital will let it-it must pay

first,

otherwise no Act .)

But, how could it pay-machinery reduces labour and consequently price, doesn't it? It surely does, but if similar goods were sold on the same market at an average price, then those who produced with machinery gained in the form of money part of the labour put in by those who had no machinery, because the money can only represent labour that has been put in somewhere and what one gained the other lost . But even so, was there not a general loss, e.g., if the total wages remained the same and the total labour

embodied in the total goods was reduced, wouldn't the total

profit be reduced? True again, but when machinery makes it possible to produce the workers' necessaries of life in 2 hours, wages can be reduced to 2 hours (the workman still getting the same quantity of stuff to live on-though it would be worth less), and then where it used to be a 12

hour day with wages 4 and profits 8, you can think of it as an 11 hour day with wages 2 and profits 9 . With increased profits the capitalist could buy still more machinery, and the game goes on .

Lecture 4: Wages Increase of machinery (tools again!) is changing the character of society . More capital is put into tools and materials, and relatively less into labour power ; machinery is no use to a capitalist unless it enables him to pay in wages less proportion of every f100 invested than formerly . Capital is constantly managing with less labour per £100 and long ago we reached the point where the natural increase of the working population exceeds the number of workers required to work the other portion of capital -Viz, that in the form of machinery and raw materials . Result-a permanent unemployed class, enabling capitalists to beat down wages . This gives rise



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to the fighting trade unions . There can be no conciliation about the matter . Wages are of different kinds . Nominal wage-how much money you get . Real wage-how much wealth you can get with your money . Even if real wage rises, it can only do so if profits rise still more, otherwise the system becomes crippled . Though wages are the price of labour power they are always reckoned on as payment for time, e .g., if the price of a day's power is 6s ., and a man works 6 hours, it would be called 1 s . a n hour, if he worked 9 hours, 8 d . an hour, or if 12 hours, 6d an hour and so on . All wages are at bottom time wages, po matter what form they take . Wages do not affect prices of commodities ; they are themselves the price

of a commodity whose value is consumed and done with, and, therefore, not carried forward to the product . Lecture 5: The Distribution of Wealth The National Income is divided into Wages and Profits . Profits are divided into producers', merchants', wholesalers' and retailers' profits . Parts of all these profits are taken by other people to form interest and rent . Profit takers fight among themselves as to the division, but on questions of wages and hours they stand together as a solid 'freemasonry' arrayed against the workers . For if the workers get more wages or shorter hours (other things remaining the same) there is less profit then to divide . Taxes are not part of wages. Workers only pay taxes by proxy . Nominal wage is considerably reduced by National and local taxes (rates), cottage rents, monopolies and adulterations of goods-another form of monopoly .

Lecture 6: The Story of Society (Up to the concentration of capital, give no more detail than is sufficient to leave a strong impression that the world and its people, its laws, moral codes, literature, art etc. are in a perpetual state of change consequent upon changes in the material basis of life . Afterwards, develop as much as time will permit, it being the last lecture they will stand a bit more .) Stellar space-collision of dark stars-nebula and its condensationgeological formations -protozoa -plants -animals (tool users)-man (a tool maker) . Savages and their poor tools-little wealth . Better tools beget more wealth and exchange . Exchange begets money . Money begets international trade . All the time customs, laws, moral codes, politics, etc . are keeping pace . Division of labour in society has already taken place . The merchant trader gets a workshop and separates the workman from his tools . Division of labour in the workshop develops special skill . Capitalists to some extent at mercy of workmen . Special skill and tools leads to machines . Skill no longer needed . Worker now at the mercy of the capitalist who owns the machines . Peasants driven off the land to make room for sheep (wool) and for other reasons . Workers now own neither tools nor land . In the beginning of capitalism (16C to 19C) tools and machines were small and could be got by many individuals . There were a great number of small capitalists competing for the market . Cheapness is the weapon of competition . They each saved up their profit (concentration of capital) to enlarge their respective businesses. The bigger ones beat the smaller ones with cheaper goods and drove them into the ranks of the workers . Then



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several capitalists joined their capitals together in a company (centralisation of capital) . In this way it comes about that today a few big capitalists own all the means of life and consequently control everybody else . On the other hand there is an immense army of workers who own nothing but their labour power . They combine in unions to avoid underselling each other . In this way the workers are reforming society and arranging to produce and distribute wealth in the interests of all . With this economic organisation as a base, they will seize social power, destroy all capitalist parliaments and establish Communism . Conclude with an appeal re Independent Working Class Education . Note : The book should contain examples of blackboard demonstrations and notes for use on blackboard . First published : PLEBS VII, 4 (April 1920), pp . 54-8 .

Cambridge journal of Economics Editors Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, Jo Bradley (Managing Editor), Francis Cripps, John Eatwell, Mario Nuti, Suzy Paine, Bob Rowthorn, Ajit Singh, John Wells, Frank Wilkinson Publication Quarterly, March-December Subscription £10.00 (UK), £12 .00/$ 22 .80 (overseas) Prices include postage This Journal publishes theoretical and applied articles on major contemporary issues, with a strong emphasis on the provision and use of empirical evidence and the formulation of economic policies . In this it differs from most existing journals, devoted as they are to a sterile body of theory divorced from practical questions . The editors break with conventional practice by including a regular commentary on current affairs. There are also review articles and commissioned articles on subjects of importance. Contents of Volume 1 No .3 R.E. Rowthorn : Conflict and money Jane Humphries : Class struggle and the persistence of the workingclass family John Wells : The diffusion of durables in Brazil and its implications for recent controversies concerning Brazilian development Commentary Michael Ellman : Report from Holland : the economics of North Sea hydrocarbons R .A . de Klerk, H .B.M. van der Lean and K.B.T. Thio: Unemployment in the Netherlands : a criticism of the den Hartog-Tjan vintage model Themes Murray Milgate: Keynes on the 'classical' theory of interest Academic Press London New York San Francisco A Subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers 24-28 Oval Road, London NW1, England 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, USA

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DIE NEUE INTERNATIONALE ARBEITSTEILUNG (THE NEW INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR) By Folker Frobel, J urgen Heinrichs, Otto Kreye Rowolt, (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1977) . DM 10 .80 (Paperback) (1) By Stephen Castles This new product of the leftish think-tank at the Starnberg "Max-Planck Institute for Research on living conditions of the scientific-technical world" (sic) seems worth reviewing for English readers, even though only published in German . The study's point of departure is the decline in investment and employment in the developed industrial countries and the simultaneous growth in industrial investment and employment in Third World countries . The authors describe a growing tendency towards "transnational production" : national and multinational companies move parts of production processes out of high-wage economies, into countries where there is a virtually unlimited industrial reserve army to keep wages down . Typically, only part of a product is made in the "off-shore factory" (this seems to be the usual English term for the phenomenon) . For instance, trousers are cut out in Germany, then flown in air-containers to Tunisia, where they are sewn together and packed and then flown back for sale in Germany . Or : an American electronics company produces masks and wafers for integrated circuits in the USA (a highly automated process) flies them to S .E .Asia, where they are soldered into capsules (labour intensive) and then brings them back to the USA for testing and marketing . The authors' framework of analysis is a single world capitalist economy, within which the individual economies of industrial or underdeveloped countries are dealt with as organic parts . (Socialist or state-capitalist countries are not dealt with, except insofar as they produce under contract for private-capital companies, e.g. contract production in Hungary for W .German clothing firms) . The central thesis of the book is that the "classical international division of labour", in which Africa, Asia and Latinamerica



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were pulled into the world economy as sources of agricultural and mineral raw materials and sometimes of labour power (slaves), and their own industrial production was prevented or destroyed (the "development of underdevelopment") has been replaced by a "new international division of labour" . This is characterized by a world market for labour, a worldwide industrial reserve army and a world market for production sites . (p .30) . Production processes are split into sub-processes which are carried out anywhere in the world, according to where the most profitable combination of capital and labour can be found . For the first time in the five hundred year history of the world economy, manufacturing plants producing for the world economy can be profitably situated in the Third World . There are three basic reasons for this : 1 . The breakdown of tradition economic and social structures in underdeveloped countries (the "Green Revolution" being the most recent form for this process) has led to an inexhaustible industrial reserve army, which is cheap and available at all times for any kind of work . 2 . The fragmentation of the production process makes it possible for most sub-processes to be carried out by unskilled workers after very short training periods . 3 . The development of transportation and communication technology makes it possible to carry out complete or partial production processes at any site throughout the world without prohibitive technical, organisational or cost problems . Although these hypothese are stated with admirable coherence and clarity, they are not in themselves particularly new . The strength of the work lies in the great wealth of empirical evidence presented to substantiate them . Its sources are company, union and government reports, studies by international economic bodies, research reports from various institutes, and observation and interviews by the authors in various underdeveloped countries . The sheer size of the book gives some idea of the amount of statistical and descriptive material - over 600 pages, which makes it all the more remarkable that it is put out by one of W . Germany's largest paperback publishers at a relatively low price . The longest single table - a summary of the foreign investments of all important W . Germany companies - takes up more than seventy pages . The empirical evidence is divided up . into three casestudies . 1 . An account of recent development in the .W . Germany textile and clothing industries . Data on 214 textile and 185 clothing firms show how-the number of employees within the Federal Republic has steadily fallen, while at the same time employment by the same companies abroad has grown . In 1974/75 the W . German textile industry employed at least 29,500 workers abroad and the clothing industry at least 31,000 . That made up respectively at least 7 .5% and 10% respectively of domestic employment in these industries. Up to the midsixties, most W .German owned factories abroad were in developed countries : in the European Community or Austria . Since then, most new plants have been set up in underdeveloped areas, particularly North Africa or S .E . Asia . Textiles and clothing have for years been regarded as crisis sectors within the otherwise prosperous W .German



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3.

CAPITAL & CLASS economy . This study shows that the crisis only affected the workers and the regions where plants closed down - the companies contined to thrive by moving production to low-wage countries . The second study examines the foreign investments of 602 W .German companies (excluding textiles and clothing) . Although some small and medium sized enterprises produce abroad, the study makes it clear that virtually all major companies do so . Production abroad is carried out by all branches of industry, the largest part being played by engineering, chemicals and electrical goods . Twelve major companies have over twenty participations abroad each . As with textiles and clothing, pre-1965 investments were mainly in Europe . After that, there was a switch to Third World countries - Taiwan, Malaya and Brazil are important areas at present . The authors managed to get data on employment abroad for 1178 of the 1760 participations covered by the study : no less than 560,788 persons were employed in these W .German factories in other countries in 1975 . In other words : the structural change in the early seventies which led to a decline in domestic manufacturing employment, does not mean - as often claimed - that W.German capital is shifting its orientation from manufacturing to services, but rather that manufacturing is being moved out of Germany and into Third World countries . This trend is closely linked to the economic stagnation since 1973 : W .German overseas investment lept from DM19,932 Million in 1971 to DM47,048 Million in 1976 . The third study, on "off-shore" production areas, is less concerned with specifically W .German investments . It presents data on 103 Asian, African and Latin American countries . In the mid-sixties there was virtually no manufacturing industry in underdeveloped areas producing for the markets of industrial countries . Ten years later, thousands of factories in 39 Third World countries were producing almost exclusively for the markets of the developed countries . One might think that this meant a successful move towards industrialization and development . The truth is far from this, because the trend has been towards a new type of industrial siting : in duty-free enclaves. The first of these was in Taiwan in 1966 . Since then about eight further such enclaves have been created . In addition, the factory estates of Singapore, Hong Kong and the Mexican frontier area have a similar status . In such areas a new type of factory has been established : the authors call it the "world-market-factory" . Products or - more often- parts of products are made using cheap unskilled local labour . Machines, designs, managements and sometimes raw materials and pre-products come from the developed countries . Usually, 100% of production is for export . Governmensts have been persuaded to set up duty-free enclaves in the hope of combatting unemployment, gaining industrial experience and training, and getting multiplicator-effects in industrialization . All these hopes seem in vain : the number employed is so low in relation to the unemployed and under-employed population that wage-levels are not raised . If they are-as in Singapore to some extentthe foreign investors pull out . There is little training, as the companies are only interested in cheap unskilled labour . Supporting industries



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have not developed - the authors speak of a tendency towards "monoindustrialization" . But the populations of the areas concerned have to pay a high rpice for the non-attained aims of their rulers . The sharp competition between the enclaves to attract investors forces tax-concessions and special laws on capital and profit repatriation . The investors put pressure on governments to remove restrictions on wages, hours and working conditions, to discipline unions and to keep labour in line . The favourite form of government among Western companies is the military dictatorship, and they often help to create it . Investors demand ready-made factory buildings with energy, water and harbour facilities . On balance, it often costs more to set up a production enclave than it ever brings in . The authors present a lot of evidence to support their contention that the predominant reason for investment in such enclaves is the low wages (in nearly every enclave below US 50.50 per

hour) and the long working hours (48 per week is common) . Interestingly, the flexibility of labour means that it even pays to bring in capitalintensive forms of production : four-shift working means better ulitization of machinery . In summary : the "world-market" factory allows capital a form of labour exploitation comparable to the Industrial Revolution, combined with the most modern technology . The abysmal wages, the rapid draining of the labour power of the easily replaceable workers means that the traditional sectors of the economy are subsidizing the modern sector, rather than the other way round - a new form of primitive accumulation for modern capital . The book's weakness is an almost total lack of theory . No serious attempt is made to explain the causes of the "new international division of labour" in the light of the Marxist theory of accumulation (although the need for such an analysis is stated) . The only bit of theory in the book is a rather unclear and unnecessary attempt to relate the phenomenon to - of all things - Charles Babbage's theory of the division of labour . As if a theory meant to explain the development of pre-industrial manufacturing a century and a half ago was the last important thing said on the subject . Another deficiency is a lack of discussion of the relationship between national and multinational capital in the development of the world economy . The fact that many of the W .German firms involved are US-controlled is not even mentioned . Of course, US and British capital started large-scale overseas investment long before W.German . In this respect, W.Germany is, for all its prosperity, a backward economy . The "new international division of labour" is perhaps not quite so new as Frobel, Heinrichs and Kreye suppose . All the same, their study is extremely useful, and could provide the basic data for a deeper-going analysis of modern world capitalist development . An English translation is in preparation . 2 . By David Jacobson, Ann Wickham, James Wickham (Dublin CSE Group)

For all their alleged internationalism, it is arguable that marxists are in fact peculiarly afflicted by nationalism . That is to say, just as analyses of C . & C .--1



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the state often confuse general features of the state with particular aspects

of specific national states, so too discussion of political strategy tends to be peculiarly nationalistic in that it is automatically assumed that the arena for the struggle for socialism is the particular existing national state withi which one is located . As examples of such tacit nationalism we could instance the almost complete absence of any serious political discussion within Britain of the EEC and the equation of internationalism with `Third World' solidarity . Moreover, and at a different level, it is striking that in Europe today the traditional working class movement has shown itself less able to develop any international organization and forms of action than either European farmers or the emerging anti-atomic power movement, both of which in very different ways already operate on a European scale . However, the comforting illusion that the national state is in fact the world is becoming increasingly untenable, even for marxists . For example, within the European context, Britain is now becoming a relatively cheap labour area and this, combined with its high level of state grants to industry, means that one problem British workers will have to face is something that Irish workers have contended with for some time : the combination of a decline in traditional industries (e .g. textiles) in the face of increasing imports from `cheap labour' countries, and the rise of a foreign-owned sec-

tor where the threat of relocation is a particularly credible weapon for capital to use. In a situation where one of the main issues for the working class movement is the struggle for jobs, a strategy which fails to take account of the ability of capital to organise production trans-nationally is perilously short-sighted . It is this context which gives this book by a research team from the Max-Planck Institute in Starnberg (FRG) its importance . The Starnberg group provide the first detailed left-wing account of the development of what they term an international market for production locations, seeing this as part of the emerging new structure of world capitalism . Paradoxically, our criticisms - which are major - actually increase the political importance of the subject . While the Starnberg group's essentially non-marxist understanding of the division of labour and their almost total neglect of political factors allows them to see internationalization of production as resulting in a simple hierarchy of countries within an international division of labour, we suggest that it involves not just the increased mobility but above all the increased international interpenetration of capital within all areas of the world capitalist system - a situation which

poses completely new political questions . This study's starting point is the co-existence today of on the one hand clear, if limited, industrialization in parts of the Third World, notably for

example in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Brazil, and on the other hand, the rising levels of unemployment in the 'developed' countries . This combination indicates that the much discussed crisis of capitalism is not in fact a crisis of capitalism qua system at all, but rather a crisis of the traditional centres of manufacturing industry . The crisis in the developed countries is merely a symptom of a major shift in the organization of capitalism as a world system towards a new international division of labour . Following A . G . Frank, but above all, Immanuel Wallerstain, they argue that capitalism from its beginnings (for them the 16th century) rested on a world



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division of labour, essentially one where manufacturing was carried out at the centre and raw material production at the periphery . The novelty of the current situation is that the periphery is now for the first time becoming the location of manufacturing, yet this merely perpetuates the previous division of labour in a new form, since such manufacturing is comprised only of the unskilled sections of the labour process . As such it reproduced dependence in a new form and does not indicate any `real' development of the Third World . The basis for the new international division of labour is the application of the 'Babbage principle' on a world scale . Babbage provides the first analysis of the capitalist labour process, for he demonstrated that an increased division of labour (a decomposition of the labour process) has two central advantages. Firstly, a labour process which is fragmented into its component parts will lead to a reduced expenditure on wages, since the fragmentation allows the restriction of skilled expensive labour to those few tasks where it is actually necessary, while the majority of tasks become simple and repetitive, and can be undertaken by unskilled cheap labour . Secondly, such a division allows greater control of the individual workers, because no one workers or group of workers controls all of the production processes, and moreover unskilled labour can always be replaced by others more willing to work . The new international division of labour, as the internationalization of Babbage, rests on three elements : 1 . The existence of unlimited supplies of such cheap labour in the 'Third World' 2. The international fragmentation of the production process, the cheap labour sections being split off and relocated in cheap labour areas of the world . 3 . The development of both adequate communications and adequate transport on a world scale . All three factors together produce a world-wide labour market, in which workers from both developed and undeveloped countries now compete with one another . On this theoretical basis the study proceeds to an empirical analysis of the new international division of labour . It examines firstly the West German textile and clothing industries as those industries where the new international division of labour is most advanced ; secondly the export of manufacturing processes by West German capital as a whole ; and finally the new free trade zones in the Third World as best indicating the work processes and labour forces which the new international division of labour produces . As the preceeding summary has already suggested, this study presents not merely an empirical description of certain changes in the contemporary international capitalist system, but also claims to provide a theoretical explanation of these changes . Certainly their stress on capitalism as an international system is extremely welcome, and it is here, together with their attempt to analyse the incipient industrialization of much of the Third World, that the importance of the book lies . Yet, as we shall now attempt to show, its importance lies more in initiating debate rather than in the approach itself, which we believe, is seriously and indeed dangerously flawed,



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in particular because it reproduces, and indeed exacerbates, many of the problems of the theoretical tradition within which it is located . Many of the obvious problems may appear at first to result from merely over-enthusiastic simplication and extrapolation : the result of attempting to explain too much from a very limited theoretical position . Examples of this abound : (1) it is clear that free trade zones are not analogous, as they would suggest, to all production in the Third World (the total of 725m employed here is tiny even in proportion to the total employed in manufacuting in the Third World) ; (2) Their identification of the rise in the imports of cheap labour products from the Third World with the `metropolitan' ownership of such production is not justified (in other words, the majority of such imports are not from firms which are in any sense owned by capital in the developed countries, as the example of Hong Kong makes clear) ; (3) all direct foreign investment appears to be identified with the export of the deskilled sections of a decomposed labour process, and it is argued that the major reason for such investment is the search for cheap labour : as such the importance of direct investment as a means of gaining access to a protected market is ignored ; (4) the most glaring over-simplification is the analysis of German investment in the United States : since the United States trade unions were far weaker than European trade unions long before the expansion of United States investment abroad after World War II, the latter can hardly be used to explain the former! Such problems indicate the study's basic weakness : its uncritical acceptance of the entire tradition of dependency theory, a theory which is basically useless to explain current changes in capitalism, for it actually cannot explain change at all . Thus, foreign investment expressed the new international division of labour, and if this is equivalent to increasing dependency, then clearly any country receiving such investment is doomed to deepening dependency . In this case it is of course impossible to explain how the major recipient of United States foreign investment in Europe, namely the Federal Republic of Germany, should now be in a position where apparently it is now threatening the United States with dependency! That is to say, the thesis of the new international division of labour, like the theory of dependency within which it is located, is unable to comprehend changes within the `imperialist chain', for dependency is understood as a completely self-reproducing process . Ultimately, the reason for this lies in a feature which dependency theory shares with many marxist and neo •m arxist theories of imperialism and uneven development : instead of attempting to work out theoretically those mechanisms within the development of the capitalist mode of production which ensure that accumulation proceeds unevenly, particular existing trends are described and automatically identified with alleged general laws of capitalist development (for example, Lenin's confusion of the importance of banking capital in German industrialization with an alleged general tendency within the capitalist mode towards the domination of `finance capital') . By contrast, we would wish to argue that while it is possible to theorize as tendencies of capitalist development both the increasing internationalization of production and the inherently uneven nature of the accumulation process, it is not possible to specify theoretically the geographical location of such production out-



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side of concrete analyses of specific social formations . If we turn to the Starnberg group's understanding of capitalist accumulation, we find that this is fundametnally flawed . For them the capitalist division of labour can be understood solely in terms of the Babbage principle, and occurs merely to take advantage of abundant cheap unskilled or semi-skilled labour. However, since Babbage's argument is concerned solely with the sub-division of existing labour processes, the result is that internationalization of production is merely the fragmentation and relocation of existing labour processes . Consequently it becomes absolutely impossible to explain either the development of new labour processes (in fact the normal form of technological as opposed to organizational innovation) or the production of new use values . Worse still, since increases in the productivity of labour in general are solely the result of increases in the division of labour, and since it appears that any division of labour involves the Babbage principle, then logically it is impossible for communism to be anything more than primitive communism involving low productivity of labour . Like the tradition within which they locate themselves, the Starnberg group identify capitalism with the market . Not only does this mean that any accumulation which involves money is de facto capitalist accumulation, but also that the price of labour power can only be understood in terms of the conditions of supply and demands . As we have seen, for them the low wage rates of the Third World are understood as the result simply of the competition between the sellers of labour power, whereas Marx quite validly insisted that the conditions under which a commodity is sold are always secondary to the conditions under which it is produced. (1) Perhaps the most basic problem of all however is the Smithian legacy of the assumed link between free trade and the division of labour . In a important recent article Brenner has shown that whereas for Adam Smith the origins of capitalism lie in the growth of trade, producing a greater division of labour and an increase in total wealth, the dependency tradition retains the equation of capitalism, trade and the division of labour, but merely insists that this division of labour is uneven. (2) Brenner's point can be taken further : the arguments of both Smith and his radical followers assume not just that capitalism is identical with the market, but that the reality of capitalism is the untrammeled working of the market, vis free trade . In other words : capitalism can be analysed without analysing the state . Just as for Smith the operation of the state 'interferes' with the market, so for the Starnberg group the role of the state in the internationalization of production is merely ancillary . Consequently, the role of states in creating tariff barriers (one major reason for the internationalization of production) and defining specific 'national' markets is ignored, so that in particular it becomes impossible to account for much foreign investment within the developed countries . Equally in the analysis of industrialization in the Third World the state is seen as simply aiding and abetting the plans of international capital, so that apparently the whole question of Third World industrialization can be reduced to that area where the state's role does appear as merely ancillary, namely the free trade zones themselves . The thesis of the 'new international division of labour' suggests a gloomy political prospect for the left . It is perhaps possible, as the Starn-



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berg group suggest, that the growing structural unemployment in the metropolitan countries will end the alleged elite consciousness of the working classes, but far more likely is surely an oscillation between sullen resentment and nationalist protectionism . Equally, the predicted continuation of mass unemployment in the periphery,combined with the extreme mobility of capital in the face of any threat to its survival, suggests a prospect there of continued capitalist accumulation punctuated by the odd ineffectual riot . Fortunately however there is no need to base political discussion on such apocalyptic predictions . Certainly, the export of deskilled labour processes from the Federal Republic of Germany is not the mere invention of Frobel, Heinrichs and Kreye ; certainly it is a policy explicitly argued for by bourgeois writers and planners . However, instead of merely elevating such technocratic fantasies into the basic reality of capitalist development, the Starnberg group could have usefully also examined the obvious countertendencies . These include the re-importation to the centre of some labour processes with technological innovation, the rise of foreign investment in the `developed' countries as a means of access to markets and finally, and perhaps not just restricted to the Third World, increased state intervention to strengthen `national' capital and national economic development . Such tendencies suggest that increasing internationalization of production will result not in the simple hierarchialization of the capitalist world on the basis of a vertical division of labour, but continued uneven accumulation with changing geographical `centres' and an increasing degree of international interpenetration . The prognostications of the Starnberg group in fact lead politically to the conventional alternative : the choice between a nationalist protectionism (and here once again the slogans raised in Ireland today may well foreshadow a trend in Britain tomorrow) and a vapid internationalism (ineffectual attempts to set up world wide rank-and-file combine committees) . Once however the reality of economic inter-dependence rather than simple hierarchialization is accepted, and once the decisive and non-reduceable role of the state is taken seriously, then the theoretical ground is cleared for a serious discussion of the political options open . Such a discussion will certainly be stimulated by the Starnberg group's insistence that capitalism can only be understood as an international system, but it can only be harmed by their attempt to collapse everything into one (false) slogan .

FOOTNOTE 1

There is in fact a contradiction in the argument here, since although it is claimed that the value of labour power is irrelevant in explaining the differences between wage rates in the developed and in the underdeveloped countries, i .e . that the concept of the value of labour power is actually irrelevant, it is also claimed that in the free trade zones labour power is sold below its value!

R . Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development : A Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism" NLR 104 (July-August 1977), pp .25-92 .

ON THE THEORETICAL CONSISTENCY OF SRAFFA'S ECONOMICS Sungur Savran

In the debate on value theory, a debate with profound theoretical and political implications, one of the main arguments of the followers of Sraffa has been the purportedly unique and impeccable nature of the latter's work in terms of its internal theoretical consistency . This paper provides an initial attempt to show that, contrary to widespread belief, Sraffa's economics is in fact inconsistent and untenable even within its own theoretical framework .

INTRODUCTION In the nearly two decades that have passed since the publication of

Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, there has appeared very little on Sraffa's economics which is of a critical nature . There have, of course, been attempts at Marxist criticism, valid in my opinion, of the epistemological and methodological bases of his approach to the analysis of the capitalist economy and these will certainly be of vital use in an overall critique of Sraffa .[1 ] But a critical analysis of the internal theoretical

coherence of his economics has, to the limits of my knowledge, never been undertaken . On the contrary, commentators of all hues have taken for granted the internal logical and theoretical consistency of the set of propositions put forward by Sraffa. The purpose of this short article is to show that, contrary to common belief, the internal structure of Sraffa's work is inconsistent, in other words, it fails to provide logically and theoretically tenable solutions to the problems it sets itself within its own

framework and on its own criteria of adequacy . A few words of warning are in order : it should be clear from the above formulation that the object of the article is not the adequacy of Sraffa's

theory to the global analysis of capitalism, although a theory which is



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internally unsatisfactory can hardly provide the basis for this purpose . Neither is it my intention to criticize Sraffa from a Marxist perspective, that is to criticize him for remaining within the terrain of political economy and thus falling prey to Marx's critique of this science or for failing to understand capitalism as an historically transient mode of production . Both lines of criticism are necessary but beyond the scope of this brief note . Finally, the object of criticism here is Sraffa's own work : that is, the theoretical system that Sraffa constructs in his book for the analysis of various aspects of the capitalist economy, the most fundamental being the relationship between prices and distribution . No ulterior development or revision of this theory by the followers of Sraffa will be considered here. This neglect is due to a simple methodological principle, namely that the object at hand should be studied in isolation from secondary modifying effects . Only on the basis of a correct understanding of Sraffa's own theory, can we proceed to investigate further developments in his tradition .[2) There is an obvious corollary to this procedure : objections of the sort 'but other Sraffians, etc .', which usually serve to muddle the issues, are ruled out from the outset . THE PROBLEM The fundamental purpose of Sraffa's theory is the investigation of the relationship between distribution and prices in isolation from other aspects of the economy, not relevant to this specific question, such as variations in the structure of output and changes in the techniques of production .[3] With this purpose, Sraffa constructs a formal system off equations based on the technological requirements of production : this set of equations, which he alternatively calls the 'conditions of production' or 'the system' (see 4, 6) is the basis for the derivation of a unique and coherent set of solutions for the unknowns of the system, namely prices and the two distributional variables, i .e . the rate of profit and the wage . This unique set of values has to meet a double requirement: (1) it has, first and foremost, to provide for the reproduction of the system . This it does by redistributing the commodities among the various sectors of the economy in those proportions in which they have originally been used, that is in which they appear in 'the conditions of production' . This is, in fact, how Sraffa defines prices of production, i .e . as 'a unique set of exchange-values which if adopted by the market restores the original distribution of the products and makes it possible for the process to be repeated' . (3 . See also pp . 4 and 8) (2) It has, secondly, to provide for the distribution of the surplus both between workers and capitalists and among the various capitalists, in such a way as to satisfy the condition of an equal rate of profit in each branch of production . Naturally, these two tasks, set by Sraffa himself on the system of prices of production, have to be fulfilled simultaneously and consistently . It is well-known that in the system constructed by Sraffa, the number of unknowns exceeds the number of equations by one . Sraffa concludes from this that if one of the variables of distribution is 'fixed', "'given" before the prices are fixed', 'determined from outside the system of production' etc . (11 and 33), then the remaining variables will also be



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determined . Whatever one chooses to call this theory, whether a theory of 4 exogeneous distribution' as some have called it, or anything else, the fact remains that, in Sraffa's system, one of the distributional variables has to bean 'independent variable' .[33] THE CHOICE OF THE INDEPENDENT VARIABLE Logically there are only three alternative methods of fixing the independent variable . (The question of Sraffa's own actual procedure will be dealt with below .) One can, of course, either choose the wage or the rate of profit as the independent variable, but in the former case there are two different alternatives : taking the wage as an aggregate of commodities or as a price (in terms of a standard of prices) . I will now proceed to show that none of these methods can logically yield a solution which satisfies the tasks set by Sraffa for the system of prices of production . (1) The wage as an aggregate of commodities : It has already been established[4] that this method, adopted by some later Sraffians, cannot be used in the framework of Sraffa's own work . This is because the specification of the wage as an aggregate of commodities is in contradiction with the construction of the standard commodity . This method of specifying the wage implies the inclusion of all wage commodities among the inputs of production .[5] In this case, of course, with every change in the wage, the whole input-structure of the system will change . In other words, for every level of the wage, the system will have a different technological matrix . Now, to every economic system constituted by a given technological matrix, there corresponds a unique standard commodity . If the technological matrix changes, so does the standard commodity . Hence, if the method of fixing the wage as an aggregate of commodities is adopted, with every change in distribution, the standard commodity, designed precisely to remain constant under such conditions, itself changes . Therefore, this method cannot be used by Sraffa . This proposition cannot be dismissed by claiming that the standard commodity is not essential to the analysis . According to Sraffa, unless a standard of prices invariable with respect to distribution is found, 'it is impossible to tell of any particular price-fluctuation whether it arises from the peculiarities of the commodity which is being measured or from those of the measuring standard' . (18) The standard commodity, which is the answer to this problem, is therefore, first, a means by which to isolate the movements of particular prices . But this is not at all the end of the matter . Whereas in Part 1 of Production of Commodities, the task of the standard commodity is relatively restricted, in Part II, as soon as joint production is introduced, its existence acquires a renewed urgency : its tasks are now extended so as to include a rigorous analysis not only of prices but also of distribution . This for two simple reasons : in the absence of the standard commodity, under joint production, (1) the inverse (and not only the linear as before) relationship between the wage and the rate of profit no longer necessarily holds (i .e . the wage and the rate of profit may fall simultaneously) and (2) there is no unique relationship between the level of the wage and the rate of profit (i .e . different rates of profit may corres-



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pond to the same wage level) . (For details see Sraffa, 1960 : 61-62) The standard commodity is, therefore, absolutely indispensible to Sraffa's analysis . Those who hold the contrary are also, thereby, advocating that Production of Commodities be cut down to its first part, that the whole analysis regarding joint production, fixed capital and rent be discarded . This, incidentally, is one reason why Sraffa himself never attempts to fix the wage as an aggregate of commodities .[6] (2) The wage as a price : This method gives rise to two problems, the second being the more important . The first problem has to do with the nature of the necessaries of workers in relation to the rate of profit . Since in Sraffa's scheme, the workers receive a share of the surplus, the wage is made up of two components : the subsistence component and the surplus component . Now, the commodities that enter the subsistence component, i .e . the necessaries, are according to Sraffa, by their very nature basic commodities . But the specification of an abstract, post factum wage excludes these from the set of basic commodities since they do not now appear as inputs in the equation of production . It is worthwhile to quote Sraffa at length to see how he characterizes this problem and how he attempts to solve it . The drawback of this course is that it involves relegating the necessaries of consumption to the limbo of non-basic products . This is due to their no longer appearing among the left-hand side of the equations : so that an improvement in the methods of production of the necessaries of life will no longer directly affect the rate of profits and the prices of other products . Necessaries however are essentially basic and if they are prevented from exerting their influence on prices and profits under that label, they must do so in devious ways (e .g . by setting a limit below which the wage cannot fall ; a limit which would itself fall with any improvement in the methods of production of necessaries, carrying with it a rise in the rate of profits and a change in the prices of other products) . (10) It is clear from this passage that for Sraffa necessaries are basic commodities . He, therefore, does recognize a problem and tries to bring a solution to it: the concept of a minimum limit to the wage, a limit liable to shrink with the improvement of the production conditions of necessaries . However, this solution totally fails to achieve its purpose : since the entire wage is conceived as a price, a decrease in the necessary part may well result in an increase in the surplus part so that the purchasing power of the worker may increase but not the rate of profit . Hence it follows that, if this method is adopted, some basic goods, i .e . necessaries, do not influence the rate of profit . This is, of course, in contradiction with one of Sraffa's fundamental propositions, namely that 'if a [technical] change occurred in the production of a [basic] commodity . . . all prices would be affected and the rate of profits would be changed' .[7] (8) This, however, though sufficient, is not the fundamental reason why the wage cannot be fixed as the independent variable as a price . Much more important is the fact that when the wage is given as a price before



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the prices themselves are known, there is nothing to guarantee that the commodities necessary for the subsistence of the workers will accrue to them . When the prices are determined, the wage may well turn out to be below this subsistence level . Now, it may be retorted that the necessity of paying the workers a minimum subsistence wage appears nowhere in Sraffa's work so that this criticism uses a yardstick which is by no means internal to the logic of Sraffa's theory but would amount, at best, to its indictment on grounds of plausibility or adequacy to reality . Yet this objection misconceives the fundamental tasks that Sraffa sets himself. The truth is that the necessity of the accrual of a subsistence wage to the workers is engrained in the logic of Sraffa's own system . The reason is simple : I have already noted that one of the requirements which Sraffa expects the system of prices of production to meet is the provision of the reproduction of the system . The failure to provide the workers with a subsistence wage contradicts this fundamental requirement. Not in a general, common sense perspective : in the real world this would of course imply the starvation of the workers and an end to the system . But this is irrelevant to the argument here which concerns solely the internal coherence of Sraffa's thought . The point made here is that, under these conditions, reproduction in Sraffa's specific sense, i .e . the restoration of the original distribution of a part of the gross product to the various branches, cannot be provided for .[8] For this, every commodity that goes into the production of other commodities must reappear, at the beginning of the new period of production, among the inputs precisely in the same quantity as in the previous, original period of production . But the subsistence commodities of the worker are also an element of this input structure . To see this one only has to remember, firstly, that Sraffa represents the wage explicitly only because there is also a surplus component of the wage, and secondly, that in spite of this explicit representation, the components of the necessary wage, i .e . the subsistence commodities, remain basic commodities, in other words, commodities which enter the production of all other commodities .[9] Furthermore, the concept 'methods of production' is, in fact, nothing but a shorthand for 'methods of production and productive consumption' (3) . Hence the necessaries are part of the input structure and the original quantities used of these commodities have to be returned to the production process . But since the adoption of the wage as an abstract price does not guarantee that this condition will be satisfied, it is incapable of meeting the selfimposed requirements of Sraffa's system .[10] (3) The rate of profit: The third alternative method is to determine the rate of profit 'from outside the system of production' . (33) However,

this method is no more immune to the second criticism advanced against the method of fixing the wage as an abstract price . There is nothing, in fact, to guarantee the consistency of the rate of profit so determined with the requirement of a subsistence wage level for workers : since the determination of the rate of profit is divorced from the system of production, its level can totally preclude a minimum wage .[11 ] None of the methods available for fixing one of the distributional variables is consistent with the total structure of Sraffa's system . This



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system therefore cannot supply a coherent answer to the very problems that it has formulated and therefore fails as a theoretical system on its own criteria of adequacy. SRAFFA'S OWN PROCEDURE Since it has been shown that none of the alternative methods in question can successfully be used, it is immaterial to the main argument of this article which of these methods was actually followed by Sraffa . However, a particular circumstance with respect to Sraffa's procedure makes it advisable to deal with this secondary question, lest the argument of this article be misunderstood . It is well-known that at the initial stages of his construction (especially in chapters three and four) Sraffa takes the wage as the independent variable and investigates the impact of a change in it on the rate of profit and prices . However, he later conclusively switches to the rate of profit as the appropriate independent variable . Since this operation of switching is not without reason and the reason may well be misinterpreted, it is as well to quote Sraffa at length on this point : The choice of the wage as the independent variable in the preliminary stages was due to, its being there regarded as consisting of specified necessaries determined by physiological or social conditions which are independent of prices or the rate of profits . But as soon as the possibility of variations in the division of the product is admitted, this consideration loses much of its force . And when the wage is to be regarded as "given" in terms of a more or less abstract standard, and does not acquire a definite meaning until the prices of commodities are determined, the position is reversed . The rate of profits, as a ratio, has a significance which is independent of any prices, and can well be "given" before the prices are fixed . It is accordingly susceptible of being determined from outside the system of production, in particular by the level of the money rates of interest . (33) We should immediately remark that Sraffa's argument here is fundamentally different from the argument presented in this paper . The latter concerns the consequences for the internal theoretical coherence of Sraffa's work of 'giving' the wage from outside, while Sraffa's own reasoning is based on the implausibility of a determination before prices of a wage conceived in terms of an . abstract standard . What Sraffa in effect is saying in the foregoing passage is that capitalists and workers cannot reasonably be expected to struggle over an unknown and unknowable quantity .[12] Accordingly, the conclusions reached in each case are radically different . The conclusion reached in this paper is that it is logically impossible, within Sraffa's framework, to fix the wage as a price . Sraffa's conclusion, on the other hand, is that it is preferable, more plausible, more adequate to reality to fix the rate of profit and to abandon the method of giving the wage as the independent variable . What conclusively demonstrates the essential divergence between the two conclusions is the fact that Sraffa does still believe that it is logically possible, that it would



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cause no contradiction, to fix the wage as the independent variable . To see that this is so, one need only realize that later on in the book he proceeds as if one were free to choose between the rate of profit and the wage as the independent variable . To quote a single example : 'The rate of profit is taken as the independent variable in this connection ; but the argument would not be affected if the wage, expressed in any given commodity or composite commodity, were taken instead' . (81n) Not only that: at least on one occasion, he does take the wage as the independent variable : 'if we regard the wage, instead of the rate of profits, as being given, we shall find that this system will also be the most profitable one since, given any of those wages, it will etc. etc.' (87) Hence, Sraffa's conclusion in the passage in question does not involve the condition of logical impossibility . But if it does not, then his argument cannot be identical with the argument here which demonstrates precisely such a logical impossibility . Therefore, neither the conclusions, nor the arguments are the same . If the reader is still not convinced that Sraffa was unaware (in spite of the existence of the quoted passage) of the contradiction pointed out in this paper, it should be sufficient to recall the fact that the some contradiction applies to his own choice, viz . the fixing of the rate of profit, with equal, if not more,[13] force. This, incidentally, also shows that the arguments of this paper are directed not only against those followers of Sraffa who take the wage as a price as the independent variable, but equally, and more importantly, against Sraffa himself, who ends up by opting for the rate of profit . CONCLUSION The system of prices of production constructed by Sraffa, it has been noted, faces a double task : it has to make possible both the reproduction of the system of production and the distribution of the surplus according to the rule of equal profitability for different capitals . However, it fails to meet these requirements simultaneously and consistently : whether it is the wage or the rate of profit that is given as the independent variable, the system of prices that is obtained can provide for the distribution of the surplus but does not satisfy the first condition set upon it by Sraffa : it is incompatible with the redistribution of the commodities in the old proportions to the system of production, or, in short, with the reproduction of the system . Hence, within the limits of its own framework, the system is inconsistent : its premisses-the requirements which need to be met by the system of prices of production-and its conclusions are at variance with each other . The importance of this result lies in that it destroys the myth of the perfect internal coherence of Sraffa's theory . The destruction of this myth deals an equally serious blow to the assertion, often employed in the controversy between Sraffians and Marxists, that, whether Marxist or not, `economic theory' can dispense with Sraffa's work only at the expense of abandoning logical consistency .[ 141 The ultimate conclusion of this article is the contrary : that logical consistency requires that Sraffa's theory itself be abandoned .



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NOTES The author is a lecturer in the Faculty of Economics, University of Istanbul, Turkey . He would like to acknowledge the helpful and very diverse comments received from various members of the CSE on an earlier draft . 1 The best commentaries in this vein are the following : Lebowitz (1973), Salama (1974), Rowthorn (1974), Benetti/Cartelier (1975), Fine/Harris (1977) . 2 This is not to say that the work of what may be broadly termed the

followers of Sraffa is necessarily vulnerable to the same criticisms directed to Sraffa's work in this note . Each of these cases must be specifically dealt with on its own terms .

3

'The investigation is concerned exclusively with such properties of an economic system as do not depend on changes in the scale of pro-

duction or in the proportions of "factors"' . Sraffa (1960 :v) . This is

4 5

6

valid all throughout Sraffa's book except for Part Ill . (Hereafter, references to this book will be given in the text with page numbers in parentheses .) Cf. Benetti (1974 : 129-130) . The reason being that even if the wage were paid post factum, the production conditions of all wage commodities, those belonging to the surplus component as well as the subsistence component, would influence the rate of profit . This would mean that all wage commodities are basics and that, hence, they all go into the production of every other commodity .

There are indeed even deeper-lying reasons why the wage as an aggregate of commodities is incompatible with Sraffa's conception of the capitalist economy, especially with respect to his understanding of the surplus, the wage and basic goods . However, to go into these reasons would require a more fully detailed exposition of the fundamentals of Sraffa's system .

7

It should be noted that neither the conclusion reached here, nor the reasoning is the same as Sraffa's in the quoted passage . The latter identifies a problem but believes, by the end of the paragraph, that he has solved it . His conclusion may be formulated thus : 'if the wage is

given as a price, necessaries will influence the rate of profit but through devious ways' . My reasoning starts where Sraffa has left off

and shows that his solution does not solve the problem . My conclusion can be counterposed to Sraffa's in the following way : 'if the

wage is given as a price, necessaries cannot influence the rate of profit -not even in devious ways' . But Sraffa has said that they must; since they cannot, this surely is a contradiction of the purest kind .

8

To see that for Sraffa this restoration and reproduction are identical see, above, the quotation concerning his definition of the prices of production .

9

Both of these points are explicitly expressed by Sraffa himself . (10)

10 The problem invoked here cannot be dismissed by asserting that Sraffa even talks of zero wages (and presumably reinforcing this



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assertion by pointing out that this procedure is rooted in Marx) . The use of provisional assumptions which clarify certain issues in the course of the investigation is a commonplace in science . But it is utterly absurd to presume that the theoretical structure in its finished form can preserve such assumptions which conflict with the fundamentals of this structure . An example from Marx's work : in his analysis of the rate of surplus-value, Marx explicitly assumes the value of constant capital to be zero . But no one in his right mind would hold that at the end of Capital this assumption could still be clung to . It would indeed be a fine argument (though not necessary) if, to those who point out alleged problems in Marx's analysis of fixed capital, Marxists replied : 'but there is no problem : Marx even assumes zero constant capital'! (Moreover see footnote below) 11 This is a rather generous interpretation of Sraffa's procedure : there is, in fact, nothing to guarantee the consistency of a rate of profit so determined with the system of production even if the wage were reduced to zero . It may well be (there is no reason to expect the contrary) that the 'monetary rate of interest' which Sraffa mentions, is higher than the maximum possible rate of profit warranted by the system of production. The reasoning in the text assumes a maximum limit (that is the maximum possible rate of profit given by the technology in use) to the value which the independently determined rate of profit can take . This condition is never mentioned by Sraffa himself. Moreover, it is very difficult to establish except in mathematical speculation . Such an assumption would have no economic meaning since the rate of profit is presumed to be determined in total independence from the system of production . 12 The argument in the text again abstracts from a further problem with Sraffa's own formulation . In effect, Sraffa tries to justify his earlier choice of the wage as the independent variable on the grounds that it can possibly be determined in the form of specified necessaries . This, of course, implies the determination of the wage as an aggregate of commodities . But at no point has Sraffa specified the wage as an aggregate of commodities . (Except in the preliminary, trivial case where the wage is represented by the necessaries of the worker as inputs . But that case, preceding the situation where the number of unknowns exceeds the number of equations and, therefore, not requiring the fixing of an independent variable, is totally irrelevant to the argument.) Whether in terms of the national income (Chapter 3) or the standard commodity (Chapter 4), the wage is always 'given' in terms of an abstract standard, that is as a price . (The reasons are not difficult to detect : see pp . 3-4 and footnote 6 above .) So that his own objections to the choice of the wage as an 'independent variable' are, in fact, valid from the very beginning . 13 See footnote 11 above . The reasoning in the text means, of course, that even if he were aware of the problem here raised, his system would still be inconsistent. 14 See Hodgson (1976 : 20 and 1977 : 91) and Steadman (1977 : 33) . Numbers in ( ) refer to sections of Sraffa's book .



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REFERENCES Benetti, C ., 1974, Valeur et repartition, Paris . Benetti, C . and Cartelier, J ., 1975, 'Prix de production et etalon', Economie classique, economie vulgaire, Paris . Fine, B and Harris, L ., 1977, 'Surveying the Foundations', The Socialist

Register . Hodgson, G ., 1976, 'Exploitation and Embodied Labour Time', Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists, 13, March . Hodgson, G ., 1977, 'Papering over the Cracks', The Socialist Register . Lebowitz, M ., 1973, 'The Current Crisis of Economic Theory', Science and Society, v. 37, No . 4, Winter . Rowthorn, B ., 1974, 'Neo-Classicism, Neo-Ricardianism and Marxism', New Left Review, 86, July/August . Salama, P ., 1975, Sur la valeur. Elements pour une critique, Paris . Sraffa, P ., 1960, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, Cambridge . Steedman, L, 1977, Marx After Sraffa, London .

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DEBATE THE MARXIST THEORY OF THE STATE AND THE PROBLEM OF FRACTIONS : SOME THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS . Comments on : Simon Clarke, "Capital, 'Fractions' of Capital and the State : 'Neo-Marxist Analyses of the South African State" . Capital and Class, 5 . John Solomons In his paper on Poulantzas in Capital and C/ass 2, Simon Clarke makes it clear that what is involved for him is not a discussion with other Marxists, for his 'Poulantzian-fractionalists' are portrayed as bourgeois theoreticians with a 'Marxist rhetoric' . They are a cancerous growth upon the sacred body of Marxism (as he defines it) which he aims to stop . It will be my basic contention in these short remarks that his attempt to do so is fraudulent and his own alternative theoretically untenable . Since I am writing from within a different problematic I shall do Clarke the honour, which he unfortunately does not see fit to accord to his opponents, of treating his approach as one possible variant of a Marxist theory of class fractions and the capitalist state . My specific comments relate to the following areas : 1) The Mode of Presentation and Critique of Opponents . 2) The Problem of an Analysis of Fractions . 3) The Relation of Capital, Class Struggle and the State. 4) The Mode of Analyzing Political Questions . THE MODE OF PRESENTATION AND CRITIQUE OF OPPONENTS A central problem with this paper is not just the virulence of its attack on the 'fractionalists', but its mishandling of the sources in such a way that it , sets up a theoretical "strawman", which falls down under the weight of its own incoherence . This seems to me to be objectionable under any circumstances, but even more so in a discussion among Marxists which is far from finished . On page 5, and this can only serve as one example from among many, Clarke puts together a whole mish-mash of terms and categories used to differentiate the South African dominant classes and to locate their relation to the state, which were developed during a long debate and a movement of positions (involving rejection and clarification of preliminary work) to assert the inherent weaknesses of the 'fractionalist' C. & C : -i



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framework . The subjects of Clarke's critique, most importantly David Kaplan, Rob Davies, Mike Morris and Martin Fransman, do share a position that has much in common, but in the process of their investigation of the South African state they have attempted to develop both general categories as well as categories specific to the concrete social formation . No wonder then that Clarke is able to detect a 'lack of agreement' and uncertainty in the work of these authors ; for what was involved was not a clarification of concepts but a method (developed along the lines of Poulantzas's work) of investigating a specific capitalist state, with its specific process of capitalist accumulation, a specific form of capitalist state, specific class relations, political structures and organizations . Clarke's method of criticizing his opponents is objectionable on two fundamental grounds : (1) It assumes that the problem at issue, whether one's approach to the state is Marxist or not, can be approached at the level of providing a proper 'reading' of Marx ; which by definition would then exclude the fractionalists from Marxism, (2) It conflates a specific approach to its supposed unity with another ; for example the comparison of the approach of the fractionalists with the vulgar economists' theory of the 'trinity formula' . Thus Clarke throughout this article has the tendency to assert not only the positions the 'fractionalists' hold, but also those which he thinks they really (logically) should hold . In doing this he engages in the kind of negative critique which actually misrepresents the positions of the 'fractionalists' on quite crucial issues . Let us take some important examples of this kind of critique : (a) On page 10 the quotation from Kaplan is a total misrepresentation . Kaplan was not arguing that the relations between capital and labour could be seen as a "congruence of interests" and therefore ignored . He was arguing that the previous analyses by Wolpe and Legassick, which had apparently established that there was a "congruence of interest" within the bourgeoisie with reference to a number of specific policies affecting African labour, were inadequate as a total explanation of segregation and apartheid because they took no account of fractional struggles within the bourgeoisie . (b) On page 15 Clarke argues that it is an inherent part of the fractionalist argument that all surplus reallocation takes place through the state . But the work of Kaplan and Davies merely aims to show that the state can affect the distribution of surplus value in various ways, and that the hegemony of one or other fraction of capital therefore had determinate effects on the process of surplus reallocation . (c) On page 21 Clarke argues that for the fractionalists hegemony is simply equated with election victories, while these writers are arguing that it results from the capacity to pursue a number of particular fractional interests . Changes in hegemony are identified in terms of a complex series of struggles in the state apparatuses (not parliament per se) and it is illegitimate to argue that fractionalists merely equate changes in hegemony with changes at the party political level on the basis of one (loosely formulated) quotation from Davies-which in



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any case identified the change in government as an index of the change in hegemony . On a similar level Clarke's assertion about the 'fractionalists' concentrating only on the struggle between fractions of the bourgeoisie is one of the most blatant and perhaps most significant of the misinterpretations . The fractionalist case is that an analysis of the struggles between fractions of the bourgeoisie should complement (not replace) an analysis of the struggle between capital and labour, which is recognized as the principal contradiction . These are merely three examples of the way that Clarke attempts not only to represent the ideas of his opponents, but to set up a strawman theory that falls down under the weight of its own incoherence . The purulous nature of Clarke's method of critique is, then, the first fundamental weakness of this article . THE PROBLEM OF AN ANALYSIS OF FRACTIONS It is a central aim of Clarke's paper to assert (a) that the 'fractionalist' concept of 'fractions' can be equated to the orthodox sociological-political concept of 'interest groups' ; (b) that there is a "materially based" approach that can be derived from the work of Marx (p . 5ff) . This is asserted as I have argued by mishandling and conflation of the position of the authors concerned . Nevertheless, given the important nature of this concept for the fractionalists, Clarke's aim of criticizing it shows some promise . But he negates this with his assertion that for Poulantzianfractionalists classes and fractions are constituted only at the political level, by purely political factors . This is not their position, as even a cursory knowledge of their works would show . Yet on the basis of this assertion Clarke feels confident that his own 'properly Marxist' approach to fractions is what is needed, and he founds this approach on a series of

lengthy quotations from the Grundrisse and Capital about 'capital in general' and 'many capitals', making the central point that classes and fractions are constituted at the level of production per se : "Fractions have to be defined in terms of the various objective criteria of social differentiation, and not on the basis of the more or less contingent coincidence of

independently constituted particular interests" (p . 42) . This is an essential point of difference between Clarke's and the Poulantzian-fractionalist approach . But the nature of this difference is not between a "materially based" and a "purely political" form of analysis . Essentially the Poulantzian-factionalist analysis of classes-fractions is founded on two theses : (1) Firstly it is argued that social classes are not just to be analyzed in terms of production relations, rather they have to be shown to exist in terms of a definite articulation of economic, political and ideological factors .

(2) Secondly it is argued that the positions of classes and fractions in definite class struggles cannot be immediately determined from the relations of production . This approach is different from the reading of Marx provided by Clarke, but can it really be categorized as "purely political"? It is this kind of



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unwarranted conflation of an approach which seeks to understand the complex unity of class determination (and which specifically does not ignore relations of production) with a purely political approach, that allows Clarke to assert that what Poulantzas means by fraction is essentially an interest group . What seems to me to be more unsatisfactory is Clarke's own essentially formalist analysis of 'fractions' and 'interest groups' . Essentially, a few quotations from the Grundrisse are adduced to support a productionist definition of fractions . It is a concomitant of the essentially reductionist distinction between 'capital in general' and 'many capitals' that Clarke ends with this distinction of 'fractions' from 'interest groups' : "We would expect particular capitals to organize themselves in various ways in accordance with their particular interests in this or that policy . This kind of organization cannot properly be called a 'fraction' of capital, but is rather a 'capitalist interest group"' (p . 51) . The assertion that interest groups are determined by 'capital in general' then becomes a solution for Clarke ; it provides the 'materialist' badge to his analysis of politics . This is a ridiculous assertion . At the most general level he explains everything, while in reality his method of doing so proves nothing . In fact by denying the essential political questions that Poulantzas poses, he puts himself in a position where the only way he can move from 'capital in general' to concrete reality is through reductionism . THE RELATION OF CAPITAL, CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE STATE Given Clarke's complete dismissal of the Poulantzian-fractionalist contribution to a theory of the state, it is easy to miss the essential preconditions which have influenced the development of this approach . There are essentially two preconditions that have to be noted : (i) Firstly the need to overcome the economic determinism associated with the concept of the productive forces and the economic developed by the Second and Third Internationals, which essentially reduced the question of the 'superstructure' to an epiphemenon of the economic . (ii) Secondly the need to confront and explain some of the most important questions of the twentieth-century capitalism-such as parliamentary democracy, the welfare state, the possibility and the limits of the direct intervention of the state in the reproduction cycle itself . This is the background to the critique that Poulantzas developed in his works, Political Power and Social C/asses, Fascism and Dictatorship, and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism . For Poulantzas the central question in these texts was to lay the theoretical basis for an approach to the capitalist state, forms of regime, and such central questions as the strategy of the working class to the state . For Clarke this attempt to provide a new Marxist approach to the state has failed, because it merely reverses the old economism by "overpoliticizing" everything : "The state becomes the central and determining institution of capitalist production" (p . 26) . This is a very specific interpretation of the Poulantzian theory ; for it distorts the essential tenet of this approach, which is, that under the capitalist



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mode of production there is a relative autonomy of the political from the economic . The PouIantzian-fractional ist approach does not replace the `determination in the last instance by the economic', nor does it have a `purely political' theory of the state . But once these points have been made, it might serve our purposes better to look - at Clarke's own 'materialist' foundation of the capitalist state . Essentially Clarke asks the question : What are the real characteristics of the economic which imply the capitalist state? Clarke's answer is : A concept of capital which can be defined independently of the state and the political process so that it becomes possible to theorize coherently the social limits imposed on the state by the relations of production dominated by capital . This concept is 'capital in general' . For Clarke it is quite possible for capital in general to impose itself on the state quite independently of the representation of capitalist interests or of fractional struggles. Thus he argues : "The state is simply a specific institution that has abrogated to itself certain powers and that is inserted in a particular society . As such the state is subordinate to the domination of capital that characterizes that society, a domination that does not have to be reproduced anew at the level of the state since it already exists . Thus the state is subordinate to capital because it is inserted in social relations that are themselves defined by the dominance of capital . Thus political relations do not reproduce economic relations, rather they complement them as different forms of the same fundamental social relations . Thus, for example, competition between capitals, as the economic form, and the political regulation of the relations between capitals, as the political form, are clearly complementary forms through which the independence of capitals as parts of the total social capital can be regulated" (p . 55) . This is the least evasive of Clarke's attempts to define the relation of capital in general to the state . I would argue that Clarke is offering a novel but not original economist reduction of the state . Firstly the state in his theory becomes the expression of capital in general ; he is not clear how this is possible, but he attempts to build this relation on the connection between 'money capital' (the Central Bank) and the state . Therefore the definition of the capitalist nature of the state is reductionist : because capitalist relations of production are dominated by capital the state is capitalist . Secondly this approach effectively stops Clarke from analyzing the political, except by its subsumption under the general concept of capital in general . This allows him to dismiss the so-called 'overpoliticized' approaches to the state, but his attempt to do so in effect means a return to a much older problematic within Marxism . It is the problematic which assumes that the determination of all moments (aspects) and their interrelations are absorbed in the meaning of the core concept .



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THE MODE OF ANALYZING POLITICAL QUESTIONS It seems to me to be a major problem with Clarke's approach that it cannot allow for a sound understanding of concrete political events, despite his own claim that he provides a better basis for doing this than the 'fractionalists' . His basic argument is that current political events can be most adequately analyzed by the various modalities by which 'capital in general' imposes itself on the state, particularly monetary relations and the balance of payments (referring not only to South Africa, but in an earlier paper also to Britain and the 1973 coup in Chile as examples) . The emphasis of Clarke on the need to look at concrete political events in their concrete totality is fundamentally correct, something that even the 'fractionalists' would agree with . But unfortunately when he moves from the consideration of capital in general to the current conjuncture he provides a crude methodology for analyzing central political questions, such as the strategy and tactics of the working class and the bourgeosie in a concrete situation . The question of class struggle is present in his analysis only through its absence, nor does he carefully consider the question of different strategies of exploitation on the part of the bourgeoisie . It is notable for example in his analysis of the crisis of the South African state (which is in fact a central concern of the 'fractionalists' as well) that the question of fractions is hardly considered, while the role of the dominated classes vis-a-vis the state apparatuses is hardly mentioned, except by reference to the increasing economic crisis of the system . The crisis of the Apartheid system does need to be analyzed, as Clarke emphasizes (and the work of the fractionalists, particularly Kaplan, does attempt to do this), but the tools for such an analysis have to be developed . To adopt Clarke's method of analyzing political events and struggles is to shirk this important task . Concluding Remark: The aim of these comments has been to raise the major problems in Clarke's critique, and I hope I have done this . One final remark is nevertheless necessary . It seems to me that the religious fervour with which Clarke has sought to construct his own "properly Marxist" approach (to the state, class, fractions) is matched by his seemingly firm belief that a few quotations from the Grundrisse or Capital are enough to provide a scientific starting point for an analysis of the state . But what does it mean to hold that what Marx wrote on the state, which was very fragmentary, contained the kernel of truth on the subject? Does it mean that once one gets the 'correct starting point' from Marx (one of many?) one has solved the problem of a theory of the capitalist state? To Clarke the answer seems to be yes, and therefore he feels confident that he has the correct understanding of Marx that allows him to dismiss the work of the 'fractionalists' . Unfortunately it seems to me that this is to delude oneself that philology, and not theoretical and concrete work, provides the basis for a scientific understanding of capitalism . What has been the function of the latest debate on the state? It has



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been to provide some (but not all) of the necessary elements for a Marxist theory of the capitalist state . Unfortunately Clarke's paper can only be seen as another hatchet job which takes the debate backwards rather than forwards . I have made these remarks because I believe, and for me this would be a great pity, that the debate on the state in the CSE is going to be sidetracked by this type of critique into simply another dogmatic approach that relies on the concept of `capital in general' to derive not only the specificity of the capitalist state, but to explain everything in the field of ideology and politics . If this happens it would be a retrograde step from the critical task of Marxist theoretical and concrete work on the state, which is to approach the problem not with a certain quantity of quotations from the classics, but from the presupposition that much of the work of developing a theory of the state has to be done . Essentially the Poulantzian-fractionalists have seen this, and it is the greater pity that Clarke does not advance this work but hinders it .

FOOTNOTE John Solomons is at the University of Sussex ; address : Post Graduate, Arts D, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, Sussex . The author would like to acknowledge discussions with Rob Davies, David Kaplan and Teddy Brett, which initially helped in the formulation of these remarks .

Pluto qa Press Suzanne de Brunhoff THE STATE, CAPITAL AND ECONOMIC POLICY An investigation into the profound changes in the relationship between the State and Capital since the depression of the 1930s . By the author of MARX ON MONEY (also available from Pluto) £2 .95 paperback £6 .60 hardback John Irvine, Ian Miles and Jeff Evans eds DEMYSTIFYING SOCIAL STATISTICS An ambitious critical appraisal of the development, content and use of social statistics . . Amongst the areas covered are : the historical development and philosophical assumptions of statistics ; the role of the state in producing official statistics and their use by radicals ; significance tests ; positivism and quantification ; opinion polls ; sexism in statistics teaching ; and the prospects for a radical statistics . £3 .95 paperback £8 .50 hardback, published May

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REVIEWS

ECONOMIC STUDIES : CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC THEORY and ECONOMIC THEORY, VOLUME 1 . by D . P. Levine Routledge (London, 1977, 1978), f9 .50 per volume . Reviewed by Geoff Hodgson . These two weighty volumes are part of a promised trilogy : a critique and development of modern economic theory . Whilst tracing the development of fundamental economic categories and relations from the Classical economists to the present day Levine develops a forceful critique of economic orthodoxy from a Marxist perspective . Furthermore, the writer manages to incorporate the work of such modern theorists as Sraffa in his theoretical reconstruction, and never lapses into fundamentalism or obscurantism in his efforts to assert the enduring importance of the analysis of Marx himself. Partly as a consequence of this attitude these books make refreshing and stimulating reading . These works appear at a convenient point in the development of the debate on value theory . As is well known, for some years this debate has simply been over the veracity or applicability of the Sraffian formal analysis . One side has tried to reject Sraffa (for invalid reasons, in my view) and the other side has been forced to spend most of its time just defending matters of pure logic and formal theory . The substantial and conceptual analysis of capitalist production has been ignored . In my view it would have been a more productiove situation if the matters of logic and formal analysis were explicitly agreed upon by both sides and then the debate could shift onto more productive areas . There are signs that the debate is now moving in that direction . For example, Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison, in Capital and Class 5, have clearly accepted the veracity of the Sraffian results, but then gone on to the more substantial matters of interpretation that are in dispute . I do not accept their conclusions, but their attitude is much more productive than that of those who have still not accepted that Sraffa is right, without finding any formal fault in his argument . Levine is one of the few writers to attempt an original and conceptual (i .e . non-formal) analysis of the capitalist mode of production . His slogan is as follows : "In economics there is nothing more elementary than the



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most complex of mathematical formulae, nor anything more complex than the most elementary of concepts ." (Economic Studies, p . ix .) If we can find no fault in the formulae, then let us accept them ; the rich terrain of conceptual analysis lies beyond . Levine's work is a highly useful preliminary survey of this terrain ; a survey that owes an enormous amount to Marx but also makes an effort to correct errors in the latter and to advance our understanding . However, I cannot agree with all he has to say . In some cases he lapses into exaggeration ; occasionally his exposition is confusing, and sometimes long-winded . Errors of a more elementary nature can be found . For example, in one place we are reminded of the distinction between "labor as laboring activity and labor as a commodity in the market" . Surely the latter should be "labor-power"? (Economic Studies, p . 59 .) In the same volume Levine writes : "once production is considered as the foundation of supply the problem becomes more complex . The identity of supply and demand . . . breaks down" (p . 251) . This proposition is false if "production" includes the reproduction of labour-power in the household . In a barter economy the "demand" for consumer goods is nothing else but the "supply" of labour-power on the market . They are indistinguishable . As Marx pointed out in Theories of Surplus- Value, it is the intrusion of money which breaks down the identity of supply and demand . On the whole I find Levine's treatment of money, monetary phenomena, and uncertainty a little weak . Perhaps this will be rectified in the last volume . One criticism I have is more substantial . Much of Levine's argument, including his rejection of the labour theory of value, rests on a rigid distinction between what is called 'social' on the one hand, and 'natural' or 'physical' on the other . This rigid distinction is highly questionable . It has been rejected by such writers as Colletti, and by Cutler, Hindess, Hirst and Hussain in their recent book . Levine never manages clearly to define 'social' or 'natural' in an economic context, and in my view the rigid distinction cannot be sustained . Colletti has shown, in a discussion of Marx's Wage Labour and Capital, that in Marx the social relation between man and man is conditioned by, and . indeed is indistinguishable from, the relation between man and thing, between man and nature . Whilst not wishing to appear fundamentalist I must admit that I agree with Marx . In contrast, it appears, Levine's work is in the tradition of Hilferding and Sweezy who have seen economics simply as the study of social relations between man and man . Finally, the mode of construction of these volumes will reduce their impact, and make them less accessible and understandable . I refer in particular to the extremely limited discussion of relevant and preceding bibliographical material in the text. There are direct references to no more than fifty theoreticians in over 600 pages! Levine has neglected a vast amount of material in his ambitious attempt to reconstruct the foundations of economic theory . Amongst the names of those that receive



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mention in no more than a footnote are : Hilferding, Levi-Strauss, Von Neumann and Sweezy. Althusser, Balibar, Colletti, Dobb, Lenin, Leontiev, Mandel, Joan Robinson, Rubin and many others do not receive a mention . These faults should not be sufficient to condemn the work to oblivion . In contrast it must be read by anyone who takes the task of reconstruction of Marxist theory seriously . There is much perceptive and useful analysis in these volumes . The discussion of Smith and Ricardo is illuminating, there are many devastating criticisms of the neoclassical approach, and Levine's attempt to reconstruct value theory has many strengths . The task of reconstruction has not finished . In fact it has only started . But it is to Levine's credit that he has got out his bricks and mortar whilst others, as I have stated elsewhere, are still engaged in papering over the cracks . BIBLIOGRAPHY Colletti, L ., From Rousseau to Lenin, NLB, 1972 . Colletti, L ., Marxism and Hegel, NLB, 1973 . Cutler, A ., Hindess, B ., Hirst, P . and Hussain, A., Marx's 'Capital' and Capitalism Today . Routledge and Kegan Paul, Vol . 1, 1977 .

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRITISH WELFARE STATE, 1880-1975 by J . R Hay . Edward Arnold (London, 1978) pp . 116, f2 .25 . THE ORIGINS OF BRITISH SOCIAL POLICY Edited by Pat Thane . Croom Helm (London, 1978) pp . 209, £7 .95 hardback . Reviewed by Norman Ginsburg . These books contribute to the long overdue reappraisal of welfare history developing out of the new schools of labour and social history . These historians have begun to challenge the predominating accounts of the 'evolution' of the welfare state, described by Pat Thane as "the 'broad path of social betterment' school of the history of social policy", which have been written from, as Hay puts it, "a centralist, establishment and civil service perspective, concentrating on the role of experts in the process of reform". p• 104 Pat Thane's book is a collection of eight papers on particular aspects of poor law and social security policy in the period of classical imperialism . To my mind the outstanding contribution is Pat Ryan's account of Poplarism, the long-drawn-out struggle of the locally-elected labour guardians over the administration and levels of poor relief . This study shows vividly how the use of the machinery of bourgeois democracy by the representatives of labour can in certain circumstances present something of



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a fundamental, if short-lived, threat to capitalist welfare principles and the enforcement of 'work incentive' . Pat Thane's account of the emergence of the state old age pensions suggests that the very success of the 1908 noncontributory scheme for the very old and very poor, and the failure to apply tests of deservingness to the claimants thereof ensured that subsequent state welfare relied on the social insurance model for the deserving . The papers by Roy Hay and John Brown show how the national insurance system was imbued from the beginning with quite specific functions of 'social control' concerned with the enforcement of labour discipline and the regulation of family life . Employers exerted considerable control over the work of the 'approved societies' who ran the national insurance system and the continual administrative obsession with malingering and work-incentive sought to ensure that levels and accessibility of benefit did not threaten the wage relation or relations of dependence within the extended family . John McNicol's study of the campaign for family allowances suggests that here too concern amongst employers and government officials over work-incentives contributed in large measure to the failure of the interwar campaign for family allowances and the low level of the allowances finally introduced in 1946 . The book by Roy Hay consists of seventy-five short extracts from various historical sources, again largely concerning social security, with a few pages of discussion . The extracts from the views of workers and working class organisations on welfare convey clearly the dilemmas which labour exchanges and national insurance, for example, posed in the Edwardian era and which legislation still presents to the working class today . This theme also recurs several times in Pat Thane's book . On the one hand, there was the view that "the aim of the working class ought to be to bring about economic conditions in which there should be no need for the distribution of state alms" (Hay p . 17), that the wage itself should fully cover workers' and their families' needs and that state welfare interfered with the independence of working class organisation and control . On the other hand, the degradation and inadequacy of the poor law, and the gathering parliamentary strength of the organised working class ensured that the T .U .C . pushed for an extension of state welfare, from pensions reform at the turn of the century to the establishment of the Beveridge committee in 1941 . The suggestion left implicit in Roy Hay's book is that the welfare state has been shaped . by a struggle of articulated views and ideology . Hence the value of such a book of short extracts is somewhat limited, since the nature of the state and the socioeconomic context of policy-making is necessarily left untouched . In the search for a more adequate and critical welfare history, the authors seem to be moving towards a tentative use of various sociological tools such as the concept of social control and the more radical if somewhat eclectic pluralism which emphasises the conflicting views of workers and employers over welfare, as well as the ideas of leading social reformers, administrators and politicians, which dominate conventional accounts . This throws up considerable insights into the fine detail of the political and ideological struggle and debate over state welfare particularly in the Edwardian era. It is nevertheless debilitated by the failure, firstly to reflect



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upon the shortcomings of either functionalist or pluralist methodology, and secondly to relate however tentatively to a Marxist political economy . Hay's contribution to Pat Thane's book at least shows a rather confused awareness of these limitations, and in general both these books must be welcomed as a move forward towards a political economy of welfare .

Radical Science Journal No . 5 now available £1 .00 136 pages Contents : PATRICK PAR R I NDE R-The Black Wave : science and social consciousness in modern science fiction ; DAVID TRIESMAN-The Institute of Psychiatry Sackings; BOB YOUNG-Science Is Social Relations . Letter : LOUP VERLET-La Course ou la Vie (Publish or Live) No. 4 still available 60p 104 pages Contents: SIMON PICKVANCE-"Life" in a biology lab ; LUKE HODGKIN-Politics and physical sciences ; CHARLIE CLUTTERBUCK-Death in the plastics industry ; Reviews : BOB YOUNG-'Labour and Monopoly Capital', by Harry Braverman ; DAVE ELLIOTT-Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change' by David Dickson .

Subscription: £3 .00 (individual), £9 .00 (institutional) for 3 issues post paid . Individual copies : please add 15p each for postage, etc . Bulk orders : one-third reduction on 10 or more copies . RSJ CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY The RSJ Collective has prepared an annotated bibliography which includes the resources which we think are relevant to the development of a revolutionary politics of science . It contains over 500 books, articles, and pamphlets-all categorised according to disciplines, critical traditions, and current and historical controversies, e .g ., Marxist Critiques of Physics ; Reification ; Fetishism ; Scientific Management ; Deviance Theory ; Althusser ; Science and Ideology ; Biologism ; Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science ; Hazards of Work ; Labor Process ; Trade Union Issues . To order a copy, send 60p plus 15p postage . Sorry-we have to ask for 50p extra for cashing cheques in foreign currency, since that's what the bank charges us . Radical Science Journal, 9 Poland St, London W 1



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Legal : A Street A look at demonstrations Left out of the Media Racism : Anti Infection of Language Left Press : A critical view Art & Society Workshop : report Harlan County : Behind the Screen Socialist Centres in Hammersmith Newsreel Collective :,0`' 5 Years on ART ATTACKS

PANNEKOEK AND GORTER'S MARXISM Edited and Introduced by D . A . Smart . Pluto (London, 1978), pp . 176, £2 .95 . Reviewed by John Holloway . Now that the failures of the past few years have led more and more socialists to question the idees recues of the revolutionary tradition, any publication of the writings of Pannekoek and Gorter is timely . Pannekoek especially was the supreme theorist of change in the forms of working class struggle . His political writings stretch from the controversies of the very first years of this century to an article on nuclear policy in 1955, and through them all runs a very powerful sense of history, of



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revolution as process : "Socialism is not a fixed, unchanging doctrine . As the world develops, people's insight increases and as new relations come into being, there arise new methods for achieving our goal ." (Brendel, p . 52) . Thus, as the working class movement develops, so too do its tasks, its methods and its theories . In his important polemic with Kautsky on the question of mass action, Pannekoek criticises Kautsky not for being a renegade but for being the theorist of a bygone age : the essential difference between their views "is simply that our perspectives correspond to different stages in the development of the organisation, Kautsky's to the organisation in its first flowering, ours to a more mature level of development" (Smart, p . 61, Pannekoek's emphasis) . After the First world War he comes increasingly to distinguish between social democracy as the politics of an earlier period of the working class movement with its own methods of party, parliamentary and trade union struggle, methods now transformed into the instruments of working class oppression, and communism or "the new workers' movement", finding expression in new forms of mass action, most fully developed in workers' councils . His criticism of Lenin in the early 1920s was that he tried to impose upon the struggles in Western Europe the old forms, still appropriate in Russia but not in the West . The other theme running through all of Pannekoek's writings is the simple message that socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class, the control of production by the working class itself, not by its party and not by its leaders . His principal criticism of parliamentarism is that, even if successful, it inevitably means power for the leaders of the working class, exclusion of the class itself . This combination of stress on control by the workers and the importance of historical change accompanied Pannekoek through various phases of the movement . Active on the left of the Dutch and German Social Democratic Parties in the early years of the century, his views led him to break with the Second International and join the Zimmerwald conference in 1915, to welcome the Russian revolution in 1917 and especially the upsurge of soviet democracy, and then to become increasingly critical of the Bolsheviks and the bureaucratisation of that revolution . In many ways, his criticisms of Russian development prefigure Trotsky's, but they are much more radical in their implications and in the conclusions they draw : he attacks not just stalinism but the whole concept of the vanguard party : "Those who dream of a revolutionary party have only learnt a half, limited lesson from developments up to now . Because the workers' parties, the Socialist Parties and the Communist Parties have become organs of bourgeois domination for the maintenance of exploitation, they merely draw the conclusion that they must do it better . They do not see that behind the failure of those parties lies a much deeper conflict, the conflict between the self-liberation of the whole class by its own strength and the smothering of the revolution by a new



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rule friendly to the workers ." (Bricianer, p . 265) . From the Russian revolution onwards, Pannekoek became increasingly critical of the party as a form of working class organisation . As one of the leading theorists of "council communism" in the twenties and thirties, many of his most stimulating writings are devoted to the theory of workers' councils as a peculiarly proletarian form of organisation, culminating in his book Workers' Councils, published in 1950 and considered by himself to be his only significant work . Any collection of the writings of Pannekoek .and his friend Gorter is therefore welcome . What is disappointing in the present collection is not only that it is too short (120 pp . apart from the introduction), but that all the articles included come from the period 1912-1921 . There is a, full and informative introduction by the editor, but, amazingly, his detailed historical account stops short in 1923, the rest of Gorter's and Pannekoek's lives being dismissed in two very short sentences . The work of Gorter and Pannekoek is defined, in other words by their relation to Kautsky, Lenin and the classical debates of Lenin's lifetime . This confinement of their work within a context against which they directed all their energy, this straightjacketing which is so symptomatic of our revolutionary tradition, is not only a sad insult to the memory of the two authors but leads to the ommission of much that might have enlivened the perspectives of current debate . Despite that, the book is very well worth reading . The essay by Pannekoek on "World Revolution and Communist Tactics", the longest of the four essays in the book, is a particularly fine example of his work . His style, always clear and stimulating, is sharp but never marred by personal invective, even in the Afterword to this article, written as a reply to Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder" . These authors are far from being historical curiosities and it is to be hoped that more of their work will be published in English . That may not give us all the answers, but it should help to dissolve some of the hallowed concepts, hardened by age, which still dominate our political thought : "Concepts are by their nature fixed, hard, sharply defined, while the reality which is crystallised in the concepts flows past us like a raging torrent, always different and endlessly variable . But this means that the concepts themselves cannot continue to exist in peace ; they must constantly be changed, remoulded, redefined, replaced by others and so adjusted to the changing reality ." (Brendel, p . 42) .

REFERENCES All quotations are from Pannekoek's works : the names refer to the editors of the anthologies : C . Brendel -Anton Pannekoek : Neubestimmung des Marxism us . Berlin, 1974 .

S . Bricianer-Pannekoek et les Conseils Ouvriers . Paris, 1969 .

"The most consistently interesting book on Marx I have ever read, and one of the most consistently interesting on any philosophical topic ." DR. TERRELL CARVER, University of Liverpool .

Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge DAVID-HILLEL RUBEN A discussion of the need for a reflection theory of knowledge within an overall materialist perspective . The author describes two opposing epistemological points of view : that which sees thought as interpretive of the world in an a priori fashion, and that which sees at least some place for thought as reflective of a world, some of whose forms and structures exist independently of thought . Available. £10.50

Class Struggles in the USSR :

Women in Russia .

2nd Period : 1923-30 CHARLES BETTELHEIM Available . £12 .95

D. ATKINSON, A. DALLIN, & G . LAPIDUS (eds .) Available . £11 .50

The Marxist Theory of Art

Bard of Savagery :

DAVE LAING Available . £3.50 and £8.50

Imperialism and Unequal Development SAMIR AMIN Available . £8 .50

Veblen and Modern Social Theory J. P . DIGGINS Available . £10.50

Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. SAMIR AMIN Available . £5 .00

Accumulation on a World Scale

The Division of Labour

SAMIR AMIN E5.50.2 Vols. in 1

ANDRE GORZ (ed .) Available . £3.50

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