Richard Wolff in his democracy@work youtube video recently defined the present era in a new way. His definition can be summarized as world is moving towards Multi-polar world by defeating US led Uni-polar world, neo-liberal economics is giving way to economic nationalism and the struggle between state led capitalism vs private capitalism is now gone and instead a combination of state and private owned capitalism is emerging.
Richard Wolff is a serious New York based American Marxist economist. He upheld that socialism means end of wage labor i.e. employer-employee relations and production will be organized by workers' cooperatives where workers will control management democratically. Each worker will vote and their votes will elect management people like board of directors, CEO, CFO, etc. Since USSR had wage labor and only private employer was replaced by state employer, USSR was pure state capitalism. USA has wage labor too and its employers are mainly private. So USA is private capitalism. People's Republic of China is simply a third model of hybrid state-private capitalism as it has wage labor and private and state both have a significant role as employers.
Professor Wolff further pointed out that market led neo-liberal economics is no longer working and state is now forced to take actions against free flow of capital, goods, services and technology even in USA and EU. So a new economic nationalism is taking shape not only in the West but also throughout the world.
Professor Wolff's third point is that capital accumulation process is now gaining momentum outside the Western world and so many geopolitical powers have emerged who are no longer ready to toe US line.
In this article, we will refute his point that China is a state-private hybrid capitalism. We will show that his way of understanding is static and not dynamic and devoid of historical evidence. We will also prove that People's Republic of China is gradually evolving from capitalism to communism and hence must be called socialism.
Firstly, he said that any society having employer-employee relation is capitalism and socialism needs workers' cooperative and workers elected management. But history tells us that mankind has seen many such workers' cooperative experiments. In 20th century we had Yugoslavia who claimed itself to be real socialism of cooperatives as opposed to USSR type state ownership based socialism. In 21st century too we had such cooperative experiments in Venezuela. These countries had failed to generate enough economic momentum. A primary reason for this is workers or any humans work for money. Their main point of concern are their own families, friends and neighbors. They compete with friends and neighbors and have enjoyment from buying consumer goods at least same or better than what their friends and neighbors are buying. Their primary concern is not working time or the production they are in. Rather working time for them is a way to achieve the best in non-working time i.e. leisure time. So workers or any humans find it unattractive to work first and then get a share of revenue or profit after selling the product. It is risky as even after working the product may remain non-saleable in the market. So workers in no way are willing to take the risk of working first and share revenue later. Wage labor on the other hand ensures work for money without any condition on salability of the product. Since the primary concern of workers is raising families and compete with friends and neighbors, they are unlikely to take the risk of getting paid only if the products are salable. So workers will always opt for wage labor i.e. employer-employee relation and will avoid forming cooperative as the former relation is riskless for the workers or employees.
Second, socialism is mainly a transitory period between capitalism and communism. This transition is bound to happen gradually through many centuries. Suppose an individual is to move from hills to sea-beach. Suppose the journey to take 24 hours. In the first 6 hours, he or she will see hilly areas, next 12 hours will see plain land only, next will face lot of rivers and finally after 24 hours will reach sea beach. So as the journey begins many characteristics of hills will accompany the individual. These characteristics do not prove the individual is in the hills and not moving towards sea beach. Similarly, as a society starts moving from capitalism to communism it will show many capitalist features. Capitalism cannot be defined simply as wage labor or employer-employee relation. Capitalism is more than that. Capitalism implies investment for profit i.e. M-C-M'. A society cannot be said capitalist if capital is invested non-profitably. So when we see USSR and People's Republic of China we see capitalist feature like employer-employee relation on one hand and communist feature like non profitable investments by State owned employers on the other. Given the significant amount of non profitable long gestation investments in erstwhile USSR and present People's Republic of China we can easily claim that profit is no longer the primary motive of production and such societies can definitely be called socialism.
Third, Huawei is world's largest cooperative operating from Shenzhen city of China. Will Professor Wolf accept Huawei as a true socialist model?
Fourth, Professor Wolf has defined communism as a work-place where working life in full control of the workers. He has assumed that workers elected management means working life of workers will be under control of the workers. But he failed to appreciate the gravity of the fact that workers will have factions inside the work place and those who lost the election can have miserable working life. Victorious factions can make working life of defeated workers' factions disastrous. So elected management is in no way a guaranty for workers' control on working life.
Fifth, communism does not simply mean control of working life by workers. It means an enjoyable working life. Communism means a society where all involuntary but necessary activities are done by machines and humans are left to do voluntary activities only. Thus there is no difference between work and leisure, there is no question of work for money/any equivalent exchange and there is no need of a class of humans to make other humans work for the former class using fear and lust. Hence communism is a commodity-less (without money motivation) and class-less society. Wolf described elected management cannot be said communism or socialism. It has lot of room for commodity and class. Such a society needs a high level of productive forces which allow people to solely concentrate in voluntary activities. So forming cooperatives at low level of productive forces will not help in moving towards communism. Rather giving more space to demand making non profitable investments as more automation and growth in human resources will entail over production in economy. Thus the first priority of socialism must be growing productive forces which means more auitomation, more human resources, more productivity. Just making cooperatives with elected management will lead us to nowhere.
To move towards communism mankind needs to remove difference in productive forces and hence wages between developed and developing countries and between various sectors of the economy. Only if wage difference among countries is reduced, capital's bargaining power with working class by moving across countries will be reduced. For this first priority must developing productive forces in a developing country to the level of developed countries. Low birth crisis of future must also be tackled. Forming cooperatives can be one way but it is not the only way. In fact, if cooperatives result in slow growth of productive forces, it is better to abandon cooperative model and only if it works like Huawei then it is good to follow.
