On the "One Drop Rule" and Other Mistakes in Determining Mode of Production

Thank you! I adapted it from a response to another comment a bit ago and cleaned it up into its own post. I see a lot of issues with people familiar with the economic aspects of Socialism, but lack an appreciation for Dialectical Materialism, and run into traps that end up serving Imperialism.

my firefox doesn't seem to like html5; is there another source where i can download this from?

Thanks for the addition, comrade!

I disagree with this analysis, though I appreciate you taking it fairly seriously.

No. Capitalism is not the existence of the bourgeoisie, but rather the existence of the commodity form. When commodities are traded for their “exchange value”, some of the surplus value of labor from the worker is siphoned off, and goes elsewhere, like to grow the business.

Capitalism is dominated by such a system. Exchange-value, as it emerges and dominates, brings with it Capitalism. However, even in Communism, well beyond Socialism, this "siphoning" of value will persist in order to "pay" for new expansions, free public services, etc. Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme states as much:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour costs. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another.

That doesn't mean commodity production will always persist, but it does mean "siphoning value" is not a hallmark of commodity production. Commodity production is contradictory to Socialist production, yes, but it does not mean that Commodity Production in an economy means it isn't Socialist, but that that is a contradiction that must be worked out. How is commodity production worked out? Not by decree, but by degree, it scales with the level of development of the Productive Forces and is ended as it must be compelled to be by economic advancement.

If you only read Marx's economic works, where Marx often speaks of perfect, theoretical conditions, it can be easy to see contradictions as evidence to the contrary. However, the real world has real contradictions, all Modes of Production do. Central planning and public ownership is a contradiction for Capitalism, yet we don't call the US "Socialist" for having the USPS. Contradictions must eventually be resolved. Moreover, I was not saying cooperatives are Socialist, I was asking hypotheticals in order to address them. The idea that Socialism is simply "worker ownership of the Means of Production" is similarly wrong, I presented a number of common questions so as to show what I was to answer.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but itself life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

We are talking about a long and drawn out process even within Communist society.

No. As long as the rubber ball factory sells balls it’s capitalism.

Modes of Production are not found in the individual cogs of an economy, but the economy itself. The idea that you can "pluck" Capitalist parts of an economy and Socialist parts is thinking more in line with Mechanical Materialism than Dialectical Materialism. Just like you can't study a thrown ball and ignore the thrower you cannot untangle sectors of the economy from the whole.

If we are to assume that any commodity-producing economy is Capitalist, then Capitalism has existed for thousands of years, and will continue to exist well into Socialism.

This means that workers coops, and even other democratically ran systems, as long as items are engaged with the commodity form, are capitalism, and inherit the problems of capitalism (racism, forced labor, imperialism, etc).

I'd argue that it is utterly meaningless to determine what a quantum of the economy is when compared to its movements and direction as a whole. Cooperatives can exist in Capitalist or Socialist economies and determine neither. Cooperatives are petite bourgeois firms, they maintain classes, and thus aren't going to last into Communism, but they can't be considered on their own.

The idea that “people” control capital, though a bourgeoisie class or something of the sort is idealism. Materialist analysis says that capital selects the systems and people that “control” it, rather than the other way around. Worker coops are not socialism, but rather, systems similar to bourgeoisie democracy.

Capital controls people in Capitalism. Humans are always bound by material laws and social movements and mechanisms, but Humans can wrest control from Capitalists. See Marx's proposed direction of a revolution, in the Manifesto:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

By what measure of time can a revolution wrest by degree? By as long as it takes for the conditions for central planning to economically develop themselves, the entire thesis of Scientific Socialism. Why was Bismark not a Socialist, despite nationalizing industries? Because it was both in service of the bourgeoisie, and because it was not economically compelled, but commanded by a bourgeois state. Read Engels' footnote in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

I say is constrained to. For it is only when the means of production or communication have actually outgrown direction by joint-stock companies and therefore their nationalization has become economically inevitable -- it is only then that this nationalization, even when carried out by the state of today, represents an economic advance, the attainment of another preliminary step towards the seizure of all the productive forces by society itself. But since Bismarck became keen on nationalizing, a certain spurious socialism has recently made its appearance -- here and there even degenerating into a kind of flunkeyism -- which without more ado declares all nationalization, even the Bismarckian kind, to be socialistic. To be sure, if the nationalization of the tobacco trade were socialistic, Napoleon and Metternich would rank among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political [cont. onto p. 91. -- DJR] and financial reasons, constructed its own main railway lines, if Bismarck, without any economic compulsion, nationalized the main Prussian railway lines simply in order to be better able to organize and use them in face of war, in order to train the railway officials as the government's voting cattle, and especially in order to secure a new source of revenue independent of parliamentary votes, such actions were in no sense socialistic measures, whether direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal Porcelain Manufacture, and even the regimental tailors in the army would be socialist institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in the 'thirties, during the reign of Frederick William III, the nationalization of the -- brothels. [Note by Engels.]

Commodity production centralizes and erases itself, and a Proletarian-controlled society can wrest by the degree to which it has developed according to the natural laws of economic centralization espoused and elaborated on by Engels in the above passage. We call this "new" society Socialist, as it is one where the Proletariat has siezed control and can wield its political power to intentionally wrest from the bourgeoisie as the productive forces develop and make themselves inevitable.

By your logic, Capitalism is "magical" in that even in the microscopic it dominates the whole of an economy, and Socialism is "magical" in that it is distinct from all other Modes of Production in that it is determined by "purity." It sees Capitalism as an "impurity" to be stamped out in order for Socialism to occur, and Socialism as a mythical status determined as "pure." No such system of "purity" has ever existed, rather, as Marx says, "what we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges."

Perhaps worst of all, though, is the problem Ultraleftism like Bordiga's followers support is that it produces no real revolutions and seems to work against the working class at every turn, rather than equip it to move forward. The lack of a German Revolution did not mean the Proletariat should have given up in Russia, and their success in wielding Marxism in the favor of the Working Class is proof that they were correct to press onward. What use is Marxism if not to improve the lives of working people?