Marxism

Marxism January 18, 2007

In his chapter on the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy spends a number of pages digressing about Marx and Marxism. The following notes summarize his treatment of Marxism.

Marx, Rosenstock-Huessy begins, is the culmination of the protest against the “order of things” from within Western civilization itself. Marx is biographically well-positioned for this protest, since “he grew up in its actual centre, between the rivers Seine and Weser.”


Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes Marx under several principles. Marx’s first principle was that “For any real change in humanity the category of ‘World-Wide’ is essential.” Revolutions must be total or they will be failures. Fascism expresses this totality in its totalization of the nation, its effort to “built a totalitarian order within the boundaries of a single state.” But this is inhuman: “No European, no human being, can preserve his full humanity and his true countenance as a member of his nation alone. Mankind must be reflected across the border lines of nations.” (The growing recognition of this singleness of humanity is the reason why Rosenstock-Huessy claims that all wars have become civil wars.)

The Marxist principle of totality is “immensely fruitful.” After Marx, no historian could continue to write his national history without reference to events in other nations. No history of the Civil War is complete unless it recognizes that Russia emancipated the serfs at the same time. Genuinely historical events are not repeated, everyday events like battles and assassinations. Guided by Marx’s principle of totality, the historian recognizes that historical events are ones that that have a total effect. They happen once for all, but once they occur they become fixed in history, ineradicable from the human race. The Revolutionary idea of “equal right of every human being” might fail, and equal rights be abolished. But this “would diminish the significance of the French Revolution, because an event which had not settled something once-for-all is of no importance to living men and women.” Marxism helps to sift out important events “by virtue of its inheriting from the history of philosophy this principle of totality.”

Marx’s second principle is, to borrow Nietzsche’s formula, “the permanent recurrence of the same.” In part, this notion of “reproduction” is an economic one: Production is the making of goods or provision of services; but what if the resources of production dry up? Then they must be “reproduced” – some new method of production must be discovered. But Marx and Engels, Rosenstock-Huessy says, applied the notion of reproduction beyond the economic sphere. Governments must be reproduced as well as means of production: “The two-party system may prove too lukewarm; and it may take a revolution to get, not new president, but a new type of president.” Men are content with a new president, but don’t realize that good men must be reproduced in order to ensure good government. Revolutions force the questions about new types of presidents, new constitutions, not merely a new individual to fill the slot.

The third principle of Marxism is that it understands the sufferings of the proletariat better than anyone else. Marxism can see the exploitation inherent in capitalism as no other viewpoint can see it. Rosenstock-Huessy spends a good bit of time analyzing the notion of exploitation at work here. He notes that Marx operates with a notion of cost-accounting that pays attention to the hours of labor for the manual laborers, and their production of individual pieces. But much of a factory’s operations are left out – the work of “director, agents, char-women, porter, or calculators” cannot be tied to the production of individual pieces, and so they are all considered secondary. The “white collar” functions of a factory are not essential to the factory but mere “superstructure” or “overhead”: “All the higher social functions are apt to be taken as a superstructure on this foundation of manual labor.” Yet, they receive the profit, extracting it from the productivity of the manual laborers, who alone are paid wages in terms of their actual production of goods.

Contrary to Marx, this does not necessarily mean that the workers receive lower wages: “Computation by the piece leads quite as often to a wage that is too high as to one that is too low. Profit-sharing by the workers is no solution of the social question, because profits are not the exploiting factor of industry.” Capital and labor may be at war, or they may not, just as there may or may not be struggle between a man and woman in marriage. Capital can exploit labor, but the opposite can also happen, or they can marry and happily exploit everyone else together: “English workers exploited the world in peaceful co-operation with English capitalists from 1846-1914.”

Capitalism, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is inherently colonialist and imperialist, and the real exploitation takes place when capital and labor cooperate in their exploitation of pre-capitalist economies. Capitalist concerns flood a non-capitalist market with cheap goods, and ruin the traditional trade industry. This was the real source of the protest of Russia against the West, and the real driving force of the Russian Revolution, and the reason why Russia, the least proletarianized nation in Europe, was the first to pursue a Marxist revolution: “Russia mutinied not because her proletariat had nothing to lose, but because she was much more of a pre-capitalistic world exploited by capitalism than any other European country.” The Russian revolution was an effort to take some revenge and jump ahead of the West, the “market-seeking economy of Western nationalism.”

The real exploitation and evils of the economy are not issues of production and wages, but human concerns about reproduction and market-seeking. Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes the modern economy as a “market-seeking economy,” and the exploitation is really between those who are seeking a market and the non-capitalist systems where the capitalists want to erect their markets. The great expansion of goods available in the last century is due to this impulse toward market-seeking: “If a factory produces cars, it can hope to sell more cars next year on condition of seeking new markets.” And if they raise productivity, then the prices will fall and they can sell more of their cars. This leads inevitably, he notes, to volatile prices: “How can [prices] be otherwise in a world of perpetual expansion and contraction of markets.”

The first human cost of this market-seeking economy is that the employer begins to lose his earlier familial or feudal sense of responsibility for his employees: “Starting on a race for bigger markets, he had to be freed from all responsibility for the political, moral and educational order of his country.” Employers don’t care about the lives of their employees, only their work: “The relationship in the modern factory is not a relationship of exploitation. Nobody is deprived of the fruits of his labour. Only the relationship is cut down to a certain number of hours in the day.” The innovation of the factory system is the introduction of the hourly wage. Instead of buying a day in the life of the employee, employers buy hours. The hour that the employer buys no longer belongs to the employee, and it is organized by “abstract units” that are interchangeable as far as the personnel.

The employer thus treats his employee as another “force” that he needs to pay for and harness to produce his goods. And this deprives the wor

ker of his “own time rhythm.” This is a change in status: “Instead of a person with his own time of life, consisting of year, lustrum, and score of years, he becomes a labour-force.” Workers working in shifts, as in mining, lose “anchorage in the rhythm of a community.” Rosenstock-Huessy wonders “Who will regenerate the forms of social life which function like harvest home, and funerals, and sunsets, as the framework of our life?” He is given days off, but his holiday is detached from the rhythms of life and he “no longer knows what is arbitrary and what is necessary.”

Marx and Engels missed the heart of the problem, which is a robbery not of money but of time: “It is not valid to pretend that the workers are exploited by the capitalists because they get low wages. The real outcry of man’s offended nature should be that he is degraded because his boss does not care for his past or his future, and because he, the worker, is deprived of the power to weave past and future into his own day of work.” Employers hire men with skills that can produce goods, treating the workers as a “ready-made product.” He pays not attention to the employee’s personality or his development: “Schools, parents, friends, foundations, can take care of his personality.” The employer treats him not as a “growing child of God” but as a part of a “standardized labour force,” without past or future. Outside the factory, he has a past and future, in his home or church. The factory is a world of bodies, a world of mechanized, organized, timetabled time; but man is a soul, with past and future, as well as a body. Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes the point by saying that the “curse of capitalism” is “the irresponsibility of the employer for the reproduction of the forces his hires, uses, and eventually destroys or wastes.”


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