Since 1870 the amount of hours of waged work have decreased and GDP per capita has increased.
Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, and wish to abolish, workas such, and to critique what the critics of works deem wage slavery.
Critique of work can be existential, and focus on how labour can be and/or feel meaningless, and stands in the way for self-realisation.
But the critique of work can also highlight how excessive work may
cause harm to nature, the productivity of society, and/or society
itself. The critique of work can also take on a more utilitarian character, in which work simply stands in the way for human happiness as well as health.
History
Many thinkers have critiqued and wished for the abolishment of labour as early as in Ancient Greece. An example of an opposing view is the anonymously published treatise titled Essay on Trade and Commerce
published in 1770 which claimed that to break the spirit of idleness
and independence of the English people, ideal "work-houses" should
imprison the poor. These houses were to function as "houses of terror,
where they should work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when
meal time was deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and
complete."
Views like these propagated for in the following decades by e.g. Malthus, which led up to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.
The battle of shortening the working hours to ten hours was ongoing between around the 1840s until about 1900.
However, establishing the eight-hour working day went significantly
faster, and these short-hour social movements aligned against labour,
managed to get rid of two working hours between the mid-1880s to 1919.
During this epoch, reformers argued that mechanization was not only
supposed to provide material goods, but to free workers from "slavery"
and introduce them to the "duty" to enjoy life.
While the productive capacity rose enormously with
industrialization, people were made busier, while one might have
expected the opposite to occur. This was at least the expectation among many intellectuals such as Paul Lafargue. The liberal John Stuart Mill also predicted that society would come to a stage where growth would end when mechanization would meet all real needs. Lafargue
argued that the obsession society seemed to have with labour
paradoxically harmed the productivity, which society had as one of its
primary justifications for not working as little as possible.
During 2021, the anti-work movement has experienced rapid growth online, especially on the subreddit r/antiwork
which uses the slogan "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!". As of
July 2022, the subreddit has 2 million members, and has aided workers
in the 2021 Kellogg's strike.
Paul Lafargue
In Lafargue's book The Right To Be Lazy,
he claims that: "It is sheer madness, that people are fighting for the
"right" to an eight-hour working day. In other words, eight hours of
servitude, exploitation and suffering, when it is leisure, joy and
self-realisation that should be fought for – and as few hours of slavery
as possible."
Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time,
could easily have reduced working hours to three or four hours a day.
This would have left a large part of the day for the things which he
would claim that we really want to do – spend time with friends, relax,
enjoy life, be lazy.
The machine is the saviour of humanity, Lafargue argues, but only if the
working time it frees up becomes leisure time. It can be, it should be,
but it rarely has been. The time that is freed up is according to
Lafargue usually converted into more hours of work, which in his view is
only more hours of toil and drudgery.
Bertrand Russell
Russell's book In Praise of Idleness is a collection of essays on the themes of sociology and philosophy.
Russell argues that if the burden of work were shared equally among
all, resulting in fewer hours of work, unemployment would disappear. As a
result, human happiness would also increase as people would be able to
enjoy their newfound free time, which would further increase the amount
of science and art.
Russell for example claimed that "Modern methods of production have
given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen,
instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto
we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were
machines; in this we have been foolish".
Contemporary era
David Graeber
The anthropologist David Graeber has written about bullshit jobs, which are jobs that are meaningless and do not contribute anything worthwhile, or even damage society. Graeber also claims that bullshit jobs are often not the worst paid ones.
The bullshit-jobs can include tasks like these:
Man with sign that roughly translates to: Bullshit job example from nature: President of the Republic of Slovenia
Watching over an inbox which received emails merely to copy and paste them into another form.
Roles that exist merely because other institutions employ people in the same roles.
Employees that merely solve issues that could be fixed once and for all, or automated away.
People who are hired so that institutions can claim that they do something, which in reality they are not doing.
Jobs where the most important thing is to sit in the right place,
like working in a reception, and forwarding emails to someone who is
tasked with reading them.
Frédéric Lordon
In Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, the French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon
ponders why people accept deferring or even replacing their own desires
and goals with those of an organization. "It is ultimately quite
strange", he writes, "that people should so 'accept' to occupy
themselves in the service of a desire that was not originally their
own." Lordon argues that surrender of will occurs via the capture by organizations of workers' "basal desire" – the will to survive.
But this willingness of workers to become aligned with a
company's goals is due not only to what can be called "managerialism"
(the ways in which a company co-opts individuality via wages, rules, and
perks), but to the psychology of the workers themselves, whose
"psyches… perform at times staggering feats of compartmentalization."
So consent to work itself becomes problematic and troubling; as
captured in the title of Lordon's book, workers are "willing slaves."
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Franco Berardi, an Italian Autonomist thinker, suggests in The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, that capitalism has harnessed modern desires for autonomy and independence:
No
desire, no vitality seems to exist anymore outside the economic
enterprise, outside productive labour and business. Capital was able to
renew its psychic, ideological and economic energy, specifically thanks
to the absorption of creativity, desire, and individualistic,
libertarian drives for self-realization.
Knowledge
workers, or what Barardi calls the "cognitariat" are far from free of
this co-option. People in these jobs, he says, have suffered a kind of
Taylorization of their work via the parceling and routinization of even
creative activities.
George Alliger
In the 2022 book Anti-Work: Psychological Investigations into Its Truths, Problems, and Solutions,
work psychologist Alliger proposes to systematize anti-work thinking by
suggesting a set of almost 20 propositions that characterize this
topic. He draws on a wide variety of sources; a few of the propositions
or tenets are:
Work demands submission and is damaging to the human psyche.
The idea that work is "good" is a modern and deleterious development.
The tedious, boring, and grinding aspects of work characterize most of the time spent in many and probably even all jobs.
Work is subjectively "alienating" and meaningless due to workers’
lack of honest connection to the organization and its goals and
outcomes.
Alliger provides a discussion of each proposition and considers how
workers, as well as psychologists, can best respond to the existential
difficulties and challenges of work.
Guy Debord
One of the founders of the Situationist International in France (which helped inspire the student revolt of 1968), Guy Debord wrote the influential The Society of the Spectacle (La société du spectacle).
He suggested that since all actual activity, including work, has been
harnessed into the production of the spectacle, that there can be no
freedom from work, even if leisure time is increasing.
That is, since leisure can only be leisure within the planned
activities of the spectacle, and since alienated labour helps to
reproduce that spectacle, there is also no escape from work within the
confines of the spectacle. Debord also used the slogan "NEVER WORK", which he initially painted as graffiti, and henceforth came to emphasize "could not be considered superfluous advice".
Anti-work ethic
"Anti-work" redirects here. For the subreddit, see r/antiwork.
History
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
rejected the work ethic, viewing it as damaging to the development of
reason, as well as the development of the individual etc. In 1881, he
wrote:
The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of
'work' and the tireless talk of the 'blessings of work' I find the same
thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public
benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels
when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless
industry from early till late—that such work is the best police, that it
keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of
reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a
tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection,
brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal
before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that
way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more
security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.
The American architect, philosopher, designer, and futurist Buckminster Fuller
presented a similar argument which rejected the notion that people
should be de facto forced to sell their labor in order to have the right
to a decent life.
Contemporary era
Particularly in anarchist circles, some believe that work has become highly alienated
throughout history and is fundamentally unhappy and burdensome, and
therefore should not be enforced by economic or political means. In this context, some call for the introduction of an unconditional basic income and/or a shorter working week, such as the 4-day workweek.
Media
The Idler is a twice-monthly British magazine dedicated to the ethos of "idleness." It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and Gavin Pretor-Pinney with the intention of exploring alternative ways of working and living.
The largest organized anti-work community on the Internet is the subredditr/antiwork on Reddit with (as of November 2023) over 2.8 million members, who call themselves "idlers" and call for "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!".
In art
The Swedish Public Freedom Service is a conceptual art project which has been running since 2014, promoting an anti-work message. One of the artists involved argued in relationship to the project that "changes in the last 200 years or so have always
been shifts in power, while not much that is fundamental to the
construction of society has changed. We are largely marinated in the
belief that wage labour must be central."
Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique
that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The
critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions, and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given
or as transhistorical (true for all human societies for all time).
The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many
types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which
emerged along with modernity (post-Renaissance Western society).
Critics of political economy do not necessarily aim to create their own theories regarding how to administer economies.
Critics of economy commonly view "the economy" as a bundle of concepts
and societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of
any self-evident economic laws. Hence, they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience.
There are multiple critiques of political economy today, but what they have in common is critique of what critics of political economy tend to view as dogma, i.e. claims of the economy as a necessary and transhistorical societal category.
John Ruskin
John Ruskin portrayed in his thirties
In the 1860s, John Ruskin published his essay Unto This Last which he came to view as his central work. The essay was originally written as a series of publications in a
magazine, which ended up having to suspend the publications, due to the
severe controversy the articles caused.
While Ruskin is generally known as an important art critic, his study
of the history of art was a component that gave him some insight into
the pre-modern societies of the Middle Ages, and their social
organisation which he was able to contrast to his contemporary
condition. Ruskin attempted to mobilize a methodological/scientific critique of new political economy, as it was envisaged by the classical economists.
Ruskin viewed the concept of "the economy" as a kind of "collective mental lapse or collective concussion", and he viewed the emphasis on precision in industry as a kind of slavery. Due to the fact that Ruskin regarded the political economy of his time
as "mad", he said that it interested him as much as "a science of
gymnastics which had as its axiom that human beings in fact didn't have
skeletons."
Ruskin declared that economics rests on positions that are exactly the
same. According to Ruskin, these axioms resemble thinking, not that
human beings do not have skeletons but rather that they consist entirely
of skeletons. Ruskin wrote that he did not oppose the truth value of
this theory, he merely wrote that he denied that it could be
successfully implemented in the world in the state it was in. He took issue with the ideas of "natural laws", "economic man", and the prevailing notion of value and aimed to point out the inconsistencies in the thinking of the economists. He critiqued John Stuart Mill for thinking that "the opinions of the public" was reflected adequately by market prices.
Ruskin coined illth
to refer to unproductive wealth. Ruskin is not well known as a
political thinker today but when in 1906 a journalist asked the first
generation of Labour Party members of Parliament in the United Kingdom which book had most inspired them, Unto This Last emerged as an undisputed chart-topper.
"... the art of becoming 'rich,' in
the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating
much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours
shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the
maximum inequality in our own favour.'"
— John Ruskin, Unto This Last
Criticism
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded much of Ruskin's critique as reactionary. His idealisation of the Middle Ages made them reject him as a "feudal utopian".
Karl Marx
Karl Marx is the author of Das Kapital (Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie) [Capital: A Critique of Political Economy].
In the 21st century, Marx is probably the most famous critic of political economy, with his three-volume magnum opus, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, as one of his most famous books. Marx's companion Engels also engaged in critique of political economy in his 1844 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which helped lay down some of the foundation for what Marx was to take further.
Marx's critique of political economy encompasses the study and
exposition of the mode of production and ideology of bourgeois society,
and its critique of Realabstraktionen (real abstraction), that is, the fundamental economic, i.e. social categories present within what for Marx is the capitalist mode of production, for example abstract labour.
In contrast to the classics of political economy, Marx was concerned
with lifting the ideological veil of surface phenomena and exposing the
norms, axioms, social relations, institutions, and so on, that
reproduced capital.
The central works in Marx's critique of political economy are Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital. Marx's works are often explicitly named – for example: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Marx cited Engels' article Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy several times in Das Kapital. Trotskyists and other Leninists
tend to implicitly or explicitly argue that these works constitute and
or contain "economical theories", which can be studied independently. This was also the common understanding of Marx's work on economy that was put forward by Soviet orthodoxy.
Since this is the case, it remains a matter of controversy whether
Marx's critique of political economy is to be understood as a critique
of the political economy or, according to the orthodox interpretation
another theory of economics.
The critique of political economy is considered the most important and
central project within Marxism which has led to, and continues to lead
to a large number of advanced approaches within and outside academic
circles.
Foundational concepts
Labour and capital are historically specific forms of social relations, and labour is not the source of all wealth.
Labour is the other side of the same coin as capital, labour presupposes capital, and capital presupposes labour.
Money is not in any way something transhistorical or natural, which
goes for the whole economy as well as the other categories specific to
the mode of production, and its gains in value are constituted due to social relations rather than any inherent qualities.
The individual does not exist in some form of vacuum but is rather enmeshed in social relations.
Marx's critique of the quasi-religious and ahistorical methodology of economists
Marx described the view of contemporaneous economists and theologians on social phenomena as similarly unscientific.
"Economists have a singular method
of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them,
artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial
institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In
this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of
religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men,
while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that
present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are
natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is
created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of
nature. These relations, therefore, are themselves natural laws
independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws that must
always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no
longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of
feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite
different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which
the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal."
— Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy
Marx continued to emphasize the ahistorical thought of the modern economists in the Grundrisse, where he among other endeavors, critiqued the liberal economist Mill.
Marx also viewed the viewpoints which implicitly regarded the
institutions of modernity as transhistorical as fundamentally deprived
of historical understanding.
Individuals producing in society,
and hence the socially determined production of individuals, is, of
course, the point of departure. The solitary and isolated hunter or
fisherman, who serves Adam Smith and Ricardo as a starting point, is one
of the unimaginative fantasies of eighteenth-century romances a la
Robinson Crusoe; and despite the assertions of social historians, these
by no means signify simply a reaction against over-refinement and
reversion to a misconceived natural life. No more is Rousseau's contract
social, which by means of a contract establishes a relationship and
connection between subjects that are by nature independent, based on
this kind of naturalism. ... The individual in this society of free
competition seems to be rid of natural ties, etc., which made him an
appurtenance of a particular, limited aggregation of human beings in
previous historical epochs. The prophets of the eighteenth century, on
whose shoulders Adam Smith and Ricardo were still wholly standing,
envisaged this 18th-century individual – a product of the dissolution of
feudal society on the one hand and of the new productive forces evolved
since the sixteenth century on the other – as an ideal whose existence
belonged to the past. They saw this individual not as a historical
result, but as the starting point of history; not as something evolving
in the course of history, but posited by nature, because for them this
individual was in conformity with nature, in keeping with their idea of
human nature. This delusion has been characteristic of every new epoch
hitherto.
— Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Introduction)
German edition of Das Kapital. It is a famous critique of political economy written by Marx.
According to the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, what Marx understood, and what the economists failed to recognise was that the value-form is not something essential, but merely a part of the capitalist mode of production.
On scientifically adequate research
Marx offered a critique regarding the idea of people being able to conduct scientific research in this domain. He wrote:
"In the domain of Political
Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in
all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with,
summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean, and
malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of
private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more
readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its
income. Nowadays atheism is culpa levis [a relatively slight sin, c.f.
mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations."
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Preface to the First German Edition)
On vulgar economists
Marx
criticized what he regarded as the false critique of political economy
of his contemporaries, sometimes even more forcefully than when he
critiqued the classical economists he described as vulgar economists. In
Marx's view, the errors of some socialist authors led the workers'
movement astray. He rejected Ferdinand Lassalle's iron law of wages, which he regarded as mere phraseology. He also rejected Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's
attempts to do what Hegel did for religion, law, and so on for
political economy, as well as regarding what is social as subjective,
and what was societal as merely subjective abstractions.
Interpretations of Marx's critique of political economy
Some scholars view Marx's critique as being a critique of commodity fetishism and the manner in which this concept expresses a criticism of modernity and its modes of socialisation. Other scholars who engage with Marx's critique of political economy affirm the critique might assume a more Kantian sense, which transforms "Marx's work into a foray concerning the imminent antinomies that lie at the heart of capitalism, where politics and economy intertwine in impossible ways."
Contemporary Marxian
Regarding contemporary Marxian critiques of political economy, these are generally accompanied by a rejection of the more naturalistically influenced readings of Marx, as well as other readings later deemed weltanschaaungsmarxismus (worldview Marxism), that was popularised as late as toward the end of the 20th century.
According to some scholars in this field, contemporary critiques of political economy and contemporary German Ökonomiekritik have been at least partly neglected in the anglophone world.
Feminism
There has been a growing literature on feminist critiques of economics in the 21st century.But feminist critiques of economics can be found as early as the beginning of the 18th century.
According to Julie A. Nelson, feminist critiques of economics should start from the premise that "economics, like any science, is socially constructed." These feminists therefore argue economics is a field socially constructed to privilegeWestern, and heterosexual persons that identify as male.
They generally incorporate feminist theory
and frameworks to show how economics communities signal expectations
regarding appropriate participants to the exclusion of outsiders. Such
criticisms extend to the theories, methodologies and research areas of
economics, in order to show that accounts of economic life are deeply
influenced by biased histories, social structures, norms, cultural
practices, interpersonal interactions, and politics. Feminists often also make a critical distinction that masculine bias in economics is primarily a result of gender, not sex.
But feminist critiques of economics, and the economy, can also include
other views such as concern with an ever increasing rate of
environmental degradation.
Differences between critics of economy and critics of economical issues
One may differentiate between those who engage in critique of political economy, which takes on a more ontological character, where authors criticise the fundamental concepts and social categories which reproduce the economy as an entity.
While other authors, which the critics of political economy would
consider only to deal with the surface phenomena of the economy, have a
naturalized understanding of these social processes. Hence the
epistemological differences between critics of economy and economists
can also at times be very large.
In the eyes of the critics of political economy, the critics of
economic issues merely critique certain practices in attempts to
implicitly or explicitly rescue the political economy; these authors
might for example propose universal basic income or to implement a planned economy.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen.
Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and
outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive
ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction.
Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian
socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of
existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
The term utopian socialism is most often applied to those socialists who lived in the first quarter of the 19th century by later socialists as a pejorative in order to dismiss their ideas as fanciful and unrealistic. A similar school of thought that emerged in the early 20th century which makes the case for socialism on moral grounds is ethical socialism.
Those anarchists and Marxists who dismissed utopian socialism did so because utopian socialists generally did not believe any form of class struggle or social revolution
was necessary for socialism to emerge. Utopian socialists believed that
people of all classes could voluntarily adopt their plan for society if
it was presented convincingly.
Cooperative socialism could be established among like-minded people in
small communities that would demonstrate the feasibility of their plan
for the broader society. Because of this tendency, utopian socialism was also related to classical radicalism, a left-wing liberal ideology.
Development
The term utopian socialism was introduced by Karl Marx in "For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything" in 1843 and then developed in The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
The term was used by later socialist thinkers to describe early
socialist or quasi-socialist intellectuals who created hypothetical
visions of egalitarian, communal, meritocratic, or other notions of perfect societies without considering how these societies could be created or sustained.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx criticized the economic and philosophical arguments of Proudhon set forth in The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx accused Proudhon of wanting to rise above the bourgeoisie. In the history of Marx's thought and Marxism,
this work is pivotal in the distinction between the concepts of utopian
socialism and what Marx and the Marxists claimed as scientific
socialism. Although utopian socialists shared few political, social, or
economic perspectives, Marx and Engels argued that they shared certain
intellectual characteristics. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote:
The
undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far
superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of
every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they
habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class;
nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once
they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan
of the best possible state of society? Hence, they reject all political,
and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their
ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily
doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the
new social Gospel.
Marx and Engels associated utopian
socialism with communitarian socialism which similarly sees the
establishment of small intentional communities as both a strategy for
achieving and the final form of a socialist society. Marx and Engels used the term scientific socialism
to describe the type of socialism they saw themselves developing.
According to Engels, socialism was not "an accidental discovery of this
or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle
between two historically developed classes, namely the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of
society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historical-economic
succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had
of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus
created the means of ending the conflict". Critics have argued that
utopian socialists who established experimental communities were in fact
trying to apply the scientific method to human social organization and were therefore not utopian. On the basis of Karl Popper's definition of science as "the practice of experimentation, of hypothesis and test", Joshua Muravchik
argued that "Owen and Fourier and their followers were the real
'scientific socialists.' They hit upon the idea of socialism, and they
tested it by attempting to form socialist communities". By contrast,
Muravchik further argued that Marx made untestable predictions about the
future and that Marx's view that socialism would be created by
impersonal historical forces may lead one to conclude that it is
unnecessary to strive for socialism because it will happen anyway.
Social unrest between the employee and employer in a society
results from the growth of productive forces such as technology and
natural resources are the main causes of social and economic
development.
These productive forces require a mode of production, or an economic
system, that's based around private property rights and institutions
that determine the wage for labor. Additionally, the capitalist rulers control the modes of production.
This ideological economic structure allows the bourgeoises to undermine
the worker's sensibility of their place in society, being that the
bourgeoises rule the society in their own interests. These rulers of
society exploit the relationship between labor and capital, allowing for
them to maximize their profit.
To Marx and Engels, the profiteering through the exploitation of
workers is the core issue of capitalism, explaining their beliefs for
the oppression of the working class. Capitalism will reach a certain
stage, one of which it cannot progress society forward, resulting in the
seeding of socialism.
As a socialist, Marx theorized the internal failures of capitalism. He
described how the tensions between the productive forces and the modes
of production would lead to the downfall of capitalism through a social
revolution.
Leading the revolution would be the proletariat, being that the
preeminence of the bourgeoise would end. Marx's vision of his society
established that there would be no classes, freedom of mankind, and the
opportunity of self-interested labor to rid any alienation. In Marx's view, the socialist society would better the lives of the working class by introducing equality for all.
Since the mid-19th century, Engels overtook utopian socialism in
terms of intellectual development and number of adherents. At one time
almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed
to be Marxist. Currents such as Owenism and Fourierism
attracted the interest of numerous later authors but failed to compete
with the now dominant Marxist and Anarchist schools on a political
level. It has been noted that they exerted a significant influence on
the emergence of new religious movements such as spiritualism and occultism.
Utopian socialists were seen as wanting to expand the principles
of the French revolution in order to create a more rational society.
Despite being labeled as utopian by later socialists, their aims were
not always utopian and their values often included rigid support for the
scientific method and the creation of a society based upon scientific
understanding.
In literature and in practice
Utopian socialist pamphlet of Swiss social medical doctor Rudolf Sutermeister (1802–1868)
Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) published Looking Backward
in 1888, a utopian romance novel about a future socialist society. In
Bellamy's utopia, property was held in common and money replaced with a
system of equal credit for all. Valid for a year and non-transferable
between individuals, credit expenditure was to be tracked via
"credit-cards" (which bear no resemblance to modern credit cards which
are tools of debt-finance). Labour was compulsory from age 21 to 40 and
organised via various departments of an Industrial Army to which most
citizens belonged. Working hours were to be cut drastically due to
technological advances (including organisational). People were expected
to be motivated by a Religion of Solidarity and criminal behavior was
treated as a form of mental illness or "atavism". The book ranked as
second or third best seller of its time (after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur). In 1897, Bellamy published a sequel entitled Equality as a reply to his critics and which lacked the Industrial Army and other authoritarian aspects.
William Morris (1834–1896) published News from Nowhere in 1890, partly as a response to Bellamy's Looking Backward,
which he equated with the socialism of Fabians such as Sydney Webb.
Morris' vision of the future socialist society was centred around his
concept of useful work as opposed to useless toil and the redemption of
human labour. Morris believed that all work should be artistic, in the
sense that the worker should find it both pleasurable and an outlet for
creativity. Morris' conception of labour thus bears strong resemblance
to Fourier's, while Bellamy's (the reduction of labour) is more akin to
that of Saint-Simon or in aspects Marx.
Many participants in the historical kibbutz movement in Israel were motivated by utopian socialist ideas. Augustin Souchy
(1892–1984) spent most of his life investigating and participating in
many kinds of socialist communities. Souchy wrote about his experiences
in his autobiography Beware! Anarchist! Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) published Walden Two in 1948. The Twin Oaks Community was originally based on his ideas. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) wrote about an impoverished anarchist society in her book The Dispossessed,
published in 1974, in which the anarchists agree to leave their home
planet and colonize a barely habitable moon in order to avoid a bloody
revolution.
Utopian
communities have existed all over the world. In various forms and
locations, they have existed continuously in the United States since the
1730s, beginning with Ephrata Cloister, a religious community in what is now Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Permanent revolution is the strategy of a revolutionaryclass
pursuing its own interests independently and without compromise or
alliance with opposing sections of society. As a term within Marxist theory, it was first coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as early as 1850, but since then it has been used to refer to different concepts by different theorists, most notably Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky's permanent revolution is an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism. Trotsky's theory also argues that the bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries are incapable of developing the productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism which will fully develop an industrial proletariat; and that the proletariat can and must therefore seize social, economic and political power, leading an alliance with the peasantry. He also opposed the socialism in one country
principle, stating that socialist revolutions needed to happen across
the world in order to combat the global capitalist hegemony. According
to Russian historian Vadim Rogovin,
the success of Stalin's theoretical position had a significant and
negative impact on the entire course of the world revolutionary process.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Marx first used the term in the phrase "by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution" in the following passage from The Holy Family (1844) in which he also wrote:
Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois
society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against
its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the
modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered
development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private
interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no
terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still
regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a
treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He
perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent
revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety
but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments,
wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of
conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois
society—the political idealism of its daily practice—he showed no more
consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry,
whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of
industrial hommes d'affaires [businessmen] was the complement to
his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois
society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still
held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State
Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to
cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of
subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage
[road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event
that first shook Napoleon's power. Paris exchange-brokers forced him by
means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.
In this passage, Marx says that Napoleon prevented the bourgeois revolution
in France from becoming fulfilled; that is, he prevented bourgeois
political forces from achieving a total expression of their interests.
According to Marx, he did this by suppressing the "liberalism of
bourgeois society" and did it because he saw "the state as an end in
itself", a value which supported his "political aim of conquest". Thus,
he substituted "permanent war for permanent revolution". However, the
final two sentences show that the bourgeoisie did not give up hope, but
continued to pursue their interests. For Marx, permanent revolution
involves a revolutionary class (in this case, the bourgeoisie)
continuing to push for and achieve its interests despite the political
dominance of actors with opposing interests.
By 1849, Marx and Engels were able to quote the use of the phrase
by other writers (Eugen Alexis Schwanbeck, a journalist on the Kölnische Zeitung [Cologne Newspaper]; and Henri Druey), suggesting that it had achieved some recognition in intellectual circles.
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
Marx's most famous use of the phrase permanent revolution is his March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. His audience is the proletariat
in Germany, faced with the prospect that "the petty-bourgeois democrats
will for the moment acquire a predominant influence", i.e. temporary
political power. He enjoins them as such:
While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the
revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims
already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the
revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have
been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has
conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has
progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the
leading countries of the world – that competition between the
proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces
of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.
In the remainder of the text, Marx outlines his proposal that the
proletariat "make the revolution permanent". In essence, it consists of
the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to
politics both before, during and after the struggle which will bring the
petty-bourgeois democrats to power.
Proletariat should organise autonomously
Marx is concerned that throughout the process of this impending political change the petty-bourgeoisie
will "seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which
general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular
interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of
preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be
presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the
complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all
its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere
appendage of official bourgeois democracy".
Marx outlines how the proletariat should respond to this threat. First, he says that "above all the [Communist] League,
must work for the creation of an independent organization of the
workers' party, both secret and open, and alongside the official
democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a
center and nucleus of workers' associations in which the position and
interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois
influence". That is, "it is essential above all for them to be
independently organized and centralized in clubs".
Marx does say that "an association of momentary expedience" is
permissible if and only if "an enemy has to be fought directly",
although this is not an excuse for a long term alliance since emergency
alliances will arise satisfactorily when needed.
Political programme of demands which threaten the bourgeois consensus
In
an article two years earlier, Marx had referred to "a programme of
permanent revolution, of progressive taxes and death duties, and of
organisation of labour". This confirms the impression that Marx's theory of permanent revolution is not about revolution per se,
but rather more about the attitude that a revolutionary class should
adopt in the period of their political subjection, including the
programme of political demands they should propose. This aspect is
raised in the Address. As well as overtures for organisational alliance with the petty bourgeoisie,
Marx is concerned about attempts to "bribe the workers with a more or
less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by
temporarily rendering their situation tolerable".
Therefore, the workers' party must use their autonomous organisation to
push a political programme which threatens the bourgeois status quo along the following lines:
1. They can force the democrats to make inroads into as
many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb
its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats
compromise themselves; furthermore, the workers can force the
concentration of as many productive forces as possible – means of
transport, factories, railways, etc. – in the hands of the state.
2.
They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme
(the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a
revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks
on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the
purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that
these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without
compensation as the property of reactionaries. [...] The demands of the
workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and
concessions of the democrats.
In this passage, we can see that Marx believes the proletariat should
refuse to moderate its demands to the petty-bourgeois consensus and
advocate extensive nationalisation. Furthermore, the demand of the
workers should always seek to push the bourgeois further than they are
prepared to go, without the revolution threatening them as well.
In context
Marx concludes his Address by summarising the themes elucidated above:
Although the German workers cannot come to power and
achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through
a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be
certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will
coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will
thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to
their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class
interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as
possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical
phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute
the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat.
Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.
Since Marxism emphasises the contingency of political developments on material historical circumstances (as against idealism),
it is worthwhile to have some idea of how Marx saw the context in which
he advocated permanent revolution. It seems that he believed that "the
first act of the approaching revolutionary drama [in Germany] will
coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will
thereby be accelerated". That is, the petty-bourgeois are expected to
come to power in Germany at the same time as the direct victory of the
proletariat in France. Furthermore, Marx seems to believe that the
former and hence of both is "imminent" (c.f. the third paragraph of the Address). Therefore, Marx clearly believes that Europe is entering a time and is at a level of development of the productive forces in which the proletariat have the social revolution
within their reach. Although circumstances did not develop as
anticipated, this observation proved accurate at the dawn of the 20th
century leading into the First World War and the Russian Revolution.
Relation to Trotskyist theory
Marx
and Engels advocated permanent revolution as the proletarian strategy
of maintaining organisational independence along class lines and a
consistently militant series of political demands and tactics. However,
at no stage does Marx make the central claim with which Trotsky's
conception of permanent revolution is concerned, i.e. that it is
possible for a country to pass directly from the dominance of the
semi-feudal aristocrats, who held political power in Russia in the early
part of the 19th century, to the dominance of the working class,
without an interceding period of dominance by the bourgeoisie. On the
contrary, Marx's statements in his March 1850 Address explicitly
contradict such a view, assuming a "period of petty-bourgeois
predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the
proletariat". In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky argues that this was shortened to the period between February and October 1917.
Marx and Engels do not claim that socialism is impossible in one
country, but they do say that "in all probability, the proletarian
revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to
abolish private property only when the means of production are
available in sufficient quantity" (Engels' The Principles of Communism, Sections 17 and 19). The Communist Manifesto
alludes to Marx's view that the dominance of the bourgeoisie is a
necessary prelude to that of the proletariat, arguing that "the
bourgeoisie therefore produces [...] its own grave-diggers. Its fall and
the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable".
In this sense, Trotsky's version of the theory represents both a
development and to some observers a contradiction of the expressed
opinions of Marx and Engels.
It must be borne in mind that for Marx the dominance of the
bourgeoisie as a prerequisite for subsequent proletarian rule holds on a
world scale as The Communist Manifesto makes clear: "Though not
in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the
bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle" (loc. cit.). Trotsky's
theory took it for granted (as did Vladimir Lenin in The State and Revolution) that the domination of the world by the bourgeoisie was complete and irreversible after the emergence of imperialism
in the late 19th century. The uncertain relationship between
international and national parameters in relation to class power
underlies many of the disputes concerning the theory of the permanent
revolution.
In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly raised the issues Trotsky would later develop: "Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina,
though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of
land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership?
Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of
dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian
Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West,
so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership
of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development".
By stating that this is "[t]he only answer possible today", they
incontrovertibly emphasized the priority of the international class
situation over national developments.
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution is based on his understanding—drawing on the work of fellow Russian Alexander Parvus—that
a Marxist analysis of events begins with the international level of
development, both economic and social. National peculiarities are only
an expression of the contradictions in the world system. According to
this perspective, the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution could
not be achieved by the bourgeoisie itself in a reactionary period of
world capitalism. The situation in the backward and colonial countries,
particularly Russia, bore this out. This conception was first developed in the essays later collected in his book 1905 and in his essay Results and Prospects and later developed in his 1929 book The Permanent Revolution.
The basic idea of Trotsky's theory is that in Russia the bourgeoisie
would not carry out a thorough revolution which would institute
political democracy and solve the land question. These measures were
assumed to be essential to develop Russia economically. Therefore, it
was argued the future revolution must be led by the proletariat,
who would not only carry through the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, but would also commence a struggle to surpass the
bourgeois-democratic revolution itself.
How far the proletariat would be able to continue would depend
upon the further course of events and not upon the designation of the
revolution as bourgeois-democratic. In this sense, the revolution would
be made permanent. Trotsky believed that a new workers' state would not
be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world
unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in other countries as
well. This notion later became a point of contention with Stalinist faction within the Bolshevik Party, which held that socialism in one country could be built in the Soviet Union.
Trotsky's theory was developed in opposition to the social-democratic
theory that undeveloped countries must pass through two distinct
revolutions. First, the bourgeois-democratic revolution which socialists
would assist and at a later stage the socialist revolution with an
evolutionary period of capitalist development separating those stages.
This is often referred to as the theory of stages, the two-stage theory or stagism.
Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks
initially held to an intermediate theory. Lenin's earlier theory shared
Trotsky's premise that the bourgeoisie would not complete a bourgeois
revolution. Lenin thought that a democratic dictatorship of the workers
and peasants could complete the tasks of the bourgeoisie.
By 1917, Lenin was arguing not only that the Russian bourgeoisie would
not be able to carry through the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution and therefore the proletariat had to take state power, but
also that it should take economic power via a soviet. This position was put forward to the Bolsheviks on his return to Russia in his "April Theses". The first reaction of the majority of Bolsheviks was one of rejection. Initially, only Alexandra Kollontai rallied to Lenin's position within the Bolshevik Party.
After the October Revolution,
the Bolsheviks, now including Trotsky, did not discuss the theory of
permanent revolution as such. However, its basic theses can be found in
such popular outlines of communist theory as The ABC of Communism which sought to explain the program of the Bolshevik Party by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky and Nikolai Bukharin. According to Russian historian, Vadim Rogovin, the leadership of the German Communist party had requested that Moscow send Leon Trotsky to Germany to direct the 1923 insurrection.
However, this proposal was rejected by the Politburo which was
controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev who decided to send a
commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist party members.
Later on after Lenin's death in the 1920s, the theory did assume
importance in the internal debates within the Bolshevik Party and was a
bone of contention within the opposition to Joseph Stalin.
In essence, a section of the Bolshevik Party leadership, whose views
were voiced at the theoretical level by Bukharin, argued that socialism
could be built in a single country, even an underdeveloped one like
Russia. Bukharin argued that Russia's pre-existing economic base was
sufficient for the task at hand, provided the Soviet Union could be
militarily defended.
The question of the Chinese Revolution and the subjection of the Chinese Communist Party to control by the Kuomintang at the behest of the Bolshevik Party was a topic of argument within the opposition to Stalin in the party. On the one hand, figures such as Karl Radek
argued that a stagist strategy was correct for China, although their
writings are only known to us now second hand, having perished in the
1930s (if original copies exist in the archives, they have not been
located since the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in December 1991). On the other hand, Trotsky generalised his theory of
permanent revolution which had only been applied in the case of Russia
previously and argued that the proletariat needed to take power in a
process of uninterrupted and permanent revolution in order to not only
carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but to
implement socialism.
His position was put forward in his essay entitled The Permanent Revolution which can be found today in a single book together with Results and Prospects. Not only did Trotsky generalise his theory of permanent revolution in this essay, but he also grounded it in the idea of uneven and combined development.
In contrast to the conceptions inherent within stagist theory, this
argument goes to argue that capitalist nations, indeed all class-based
societies, develop unevenly and that some parts will develop more
swiftly than others. However, it is also argued that this development is
combined and that each part of the world economy
is increasingly bound together with all other parts. The conception of
uneven and combined development also recognises that some areas may even
regress further economically and socially as a result of their
integration into a world economy.
Theory since Trotsky
Trotskyists
Since the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, the theory of permanent revolution has been maintained by the various Trotskyist
groups which have developed since then. However, the theory has been
extended only modestly, if at all. While their conclusions differ, works
by mainstream Trotskyist theoreticians such as Robert Chester, Joseph Hansen, Michael Löwy and Livio Maitan related it to post-war political developments in Algeria, Cuba and elsewhere.
Tony Cliff's deflected permanent revolution
An attempt to elaborate an exception to the theory was made by Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party. In a 1963 essay, Cliff develops the idea that where the proletariat is unable to take power, a section of the intelligentsia
may be able to carry out a bourgeois revolution. He further argues that
the use of Marxist concepts by such elements (most notably in Cuba and China, but also for example by regimes espousing Arab socialism
or similar philosophies) is not genuine, but is the use of Marxism as
an ideology of power. This reflects his view that these countries are state capitalist societies rather than deformed workers states.
Cliff's views have been criticised by more orthodox Trotskyists
as an abandonment of Trotsky's theory in all but name in favour of the
stagist theory, countering that Cliff was more cautious than Trotsky
about the potential of the working class in underdeveloped countries to
seize power. Cliff saw such revolutions as a detour or deflection on the
road to socialist revolution rather than a necessary preliminary to it.
Saumyendranath Tagore
Saumyendranath Tagore, the founder of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India
and an international communist leader, argued that "the theory of
Permanent Revolution has two aspects, one relating to the revolution of a
particular country, the immediate passing over from the bourgeois
democratic phase of the revolution to the socialist revolution. The
second aspect [...] is related to the international tasks of the
revolution [...] which makes it imperative for the first victorious
revolution to operate as the yeast of revolution in the world arena.
[...] Trotsky became the target of Stalin's vengeance only so far as he
drew the attention of the communists throughout the world to the
betrayal of world revolution (Permanent Revolution) by Stalin". Tagore
also argued that the theory of permanent revolution has nothing to do
with Trotskyism, but it is pure Marxism and Leninism. As an example, he points out that the term permanent revolution itself was coined by Marx and Engels back in 1850 in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.
According to Tagore, Lenin was just as much a champion of the
permanent revolution as Trotsky was and with a "much more sure grasp of
revolutionary reality". However, he argues that Trotsky "certainly had
done a great service to revolutionary communism by drawing out attention
over and over again to the theory of permanent revolution since Lenin
died in 1924 and the sinister anti-revolutionary reign of Stalin
started". In the face of what Tagore termed "the next diabolical
machineries of vilification and terror of Stalinocracy", Trotsky kept
"the banner of revolutionary communism flying in the best traditions of
Marx and Lenin. Therein lies Trotsky's invaluable service in the theory
of Permanent Revolution. So far as the Theory itself is concerned, it is
pure and simple revolutionary Marxism".
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