Socialism and Marx’s ‘Universal Sun’ of Freedom for All
Sanjay Roy
CAPITALISM seems to be approaching its metabolic limits. Global capitalism is facing stagnation in growth with rising inequality together with a planetary crisis related to climate change. Also, there is growing tension between use of new technology and the distribution of gains. This is notwithstanding the fact that the socialist agenda and socialist politics are currently pushed to the back seat and the space for agony and dissent against the neoliberal crisis is largely being occupied by right wing forces across the world who are cable of obfuscating the real enemy, namely capitalism, by the imaginary ‘other’ defined by race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, language or caste. This provides breathing space to capitalism, which is bereft of solutions to any of its crisis and instead sustains itself by simply managing the class antagonism by deflating it. The growth of productive forces in terms of technological development relies increasingly on socialisation of production, but comes into conflict with capital relations that aim to establish private property rights of a few tech companies on the produced knowledge and data. These few companies want to control not only our present choices but also colonise our future tastes and preferences. Contrary to this inhuman project, socialism is the answer for free development of technologies that instead of skyrocketing profits of tech giants could have augmented human well-being by increasing free time for individuals.
The idea of socialism is not about creating heaven on earth but of finding mundane solutions, which are real but irreconcilable under capital relations. Marx’s rational abstraction of socialism begins from concrete abstraction of capital relations: those are real and present. Understanding the present in motion enables the thinker to project a scientifically conceived conjecture following from the present. Socialism is essentially a project of bringing individuals once again into a realised social identity. To liberals, this is an anathema to individual freedom or a subversion of free individualism that hardly any liberal would be ready to risk. Hence, they portray socialism as a social system that suffocates free will.
SOCIALISM AND RICH INDIVIDUALITY
Society or any human conglomerate, tribe or kinship of any sort assumes an implicit contract of reciprocity and collective existence. There hasn’t been any human society where individuals enjoy absolute free will simply because that can risk the right to free will of other members of the society. It is the liberal bourgeois assumption and portrayal of human existence that assumes that free individuality and entrepreneurial initiatives are natural qualities independent of the society and hence such free individuality is above all and non-negotiable. Marx in Grundrisse raises the question that if it is naturally acquired, then why do wage slavery and propertyless people exist in capitalism. The realm of freedom according to Marx begins where the realm of necessity ends and the fullest realisation of freedom is impossible without fulfilling the necessities of all. Hence the precondition to ensuring freedom for all is to fulfil the necessities of all, which capitalism tries to restrict. The imagination of socialism therefore fundamentally rests on the idea of ensuring freedom for all, which appears to bourgeois liberals suffocating for the rich who alone enjoy the privilege of freedom in capitalism to the extent of exploiting others.
The rise of the market society, or a society in which commodity production and exchange value dominates, reifies the real reciprocity among human beings as an exchange between commodity owners. As a result, private property assumes utmost importance in the functioning of such society. The power of the market appears as a force external to individual pursuits where individual actions are guided by ‘objective’ laws of the market external to individual control. All human qualities have to be valorised according to the rule of the market which is beyond his control. This is not only applicable to the worker but also to a capitalist who can continue existing as capitalist only by way of personifying capital relations. Rich individuality therefore cannot thrive in a society where a particular kind of human existence driven by the profit motive validates human action. Instead, it is by destroying this ‘phantom of objectivity’ and reestablishing direct relationships of mutual reciprocity, interdependence and solidarity that authentic human freedom can be ensured.
In the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscript, Marx talked about unity of human beings based on their differences, meaning unity based on complementarity where each is dependent on the other because they are not identical to each other. Here, individuality and differences are subsumed in relations between human beings and not upon separation between them as conceived in bourgeois individualism. Marx conceives rich individuality as ‘all sided in its production and consumption’. In capitalism, Marx sees the impoverished human being who is ‘wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice’ and ‘all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses: the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order to be able to give birth to all his inner wealth’. Hence capitalism has to be overthrown for the fullest nourishment of rich individuality: socialism is the answer that rests on the idea ‘free development of each is the condition for free development of all’
SOCIALISM AS ORGANIC SYSTEM
Marx’s system is crucially different from classical political economists like Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s as he saw capitalism in its totality. A system as a mutual constitution of production, consumption, distribution and exchange, where each of these moments are equally important to defining capitalism as an organic whole. In Marx an organic system means where each of its parts creates the precondition for the existence of the other. Hence the ontological primacy of production in classical political economy has not been the feature of a Marxian system; rather production, consumption distribution are equally important in the Marxian frame of analyses. Therefore, the scope of an alternative to capitalism is not restricted to ensuring higher growth of production alone, but also about arranging production, consumption and distribution in a different way. Capitalism emerged as an organic system through phases. Initially, it established capital relations and control over the existing means of production, but eventually gave rise to production structures conducive for its own spontaneous growth. It gradually emerged as an organic system where production, consumption and distribution or exchange all became suitable particularly for capital relations and each became the presupposition of the other. This, however, was a long journey and development of capital relations in different countries continues to be different because they neither started from the same point of development, nor did they grow uniformly across countries. Similarly, development of a new system, socialism, should begin with establishing social control over the existing means of production, but to emerge as an organic system it must evolve its particularly socialist arrangement of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. This once again involves a long journey marked by episodes of successes and failures as it had been the case for all earlier societies. But, most importantly, the level of realisation of this trajectory essentially depends on the growth and development of productive forces and its facilitating production relations.
Marx’s idea of totality, however, is different from Hegelian totality as the latter is absolute and predetermined while Marx’s idea of totality is ever changing and evolving, it is never predetermined. Hence, conceiving something as ideal socialism is unreal, just like talking about ideal capitalism is meaningless. In Marx’s system, the totality not only defines its moments, but the changing parts are also constituting the whole, hence, they mutually constitute each other. Therefore, socialism itself is an evolving project: how it will be realised in different countries and the stages it would pass through depend on the concrete development of productive forces of respective countries. But essentially it is a journey towards a society of ‘associated producers’ where the state eventually loses its relevance and gets dissolved into a society governed by the will of the majority working people. This is when mutual reciprocity and solidarity reunite human beings in a society where rich individuality blossoms and free development of each becomes the precondition for free development of all. This is the quest for the ‘universal sun’ which young Marx had at the age of twenty-one and wrote in his doctoral thesis: ‘Thus when the universal sun has set, does the moth seek the lamp light of privacy’. Socialism is the idea of reestablishing Marx’s universal sun.
