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UDC 02.41
DOI: 10.18413/2408-932X-2015-1-4-37-44
Maidansky A. D.
RUSSIAN LEVIATHAN AND THE MARXIST IDEA OF DYING OUT OF THE STATE
Doctor of Philosophy, Professor. Belgorod State National Research University 85 Pobedy St., Belgorod, 308015, Russia. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
This paper deals with the causes of blatant discrepancies of Marxist idea of the state dying-off with the historical practice of «real socialism». The author concludes that the real possibility of the state dying-off is opened by the process of decentralization, personalization of production that results from the emergence of a new type of technology such as the programmable, automatically operating machines.
Key words: Marx; Lenin; Ilyenkov; state; socialism; communism; technology; machinery.
Майданский А. Д.
РУССКИЙ ЛЕВИАФАН
И МАРКСИСТСКАЯ ИДЕЯ ОТМИРАНИЯ ГОСУДАРСТВА
The categorical imperative of Marx’s communism could sound like this: act and
communicate with people directly. All social processes must be carried out and managed by the people directly, without the involvement of superpersonal mediating institutions such as the state, the market, and (or) the church. Marx referred the ascendancy of human activity products and tools over the living human personality to alienation».
So, how did it happen that the history consecrated in the name of Marx the establishment of a global superpower, which rule over the human personality, became almost limitless? Obviously, something went wrong in the history. The architect of «scientific communism» made a mistake somewhere. What was that mistake? This question has been disturbing the minds of all more or less critically minded Marxists for a century.
I
A litmus test that allows distinguishing a true Marxist from a false one is the attitude towards the state. For Marx himself, a good state is a dead state, or at least, a dying-out state. While false Marxists hope to build a kind of people’s state, which will be rightly arranged and will serve the people and take care of them. This is what the vast majority of modern socialist parties struggle for.
This «sheepish» socialist ideal was perfectly familiar to Marx. It is based on the idea that the masses need a shepherd, a special management apparatus to coordinate their actions and resolve conflicts. No other scenario is possible for the society that is based on private labor and private property. On the contrary, Marx foretold the onset of a new type of society where all control functions will be transferred from social megamachines to the
«associated individuals»1. Their «complete,
unrestricted amateur activity»2 is absolutely
incompatible with the existence of the state. Global communism will be built by the «people acting by themselves and for themselves»3.
The fathers of the «scientific communism» had everything clear in words and not in deed: as soon as the proletariat deals with the bourgeoisie, the state immediately begins to «die out», because of its total uselessness. Its administrative functions will be transferred to the workers, while the political functions will disappear like smoke.
But it will be later, after making the society classless. Initially, the state will be very useful for the proletarians. The Manifesto of the Communist Party contains the plan of the total nationalization of the economy of «the most advanced countries»: the expropriation of land, the centralization of financial capital with the «exclusive monopoly» of the state and, as a finale, «the abolition of the right of inheritance» that within a generation would lead to transition of the entire industry, real estate and transportation to the state ownership.
Any of the ten communist recipes from the Manifesto can be easily found in utopias starting
1 «Alle Produktion in den Handen der assoziierten Individuen konzentriert» [14, p. 482] (Italics mine. -A.M.). Marx used the term «(direkt) assoziierter Individuen» also in his three major works: The Poverty of Philosophy, Towards the Critique of Political Economy and Capital. However, in the English version of Manifesto (translated by Samuel Moore, revised by Engels), there is «a vast association of the whole nation» instead of «associated individuals».
2 «Vollstandige, nicht mehr bornierte Selbstbetatigung» [13, p. 68].
3 Marx described the Communards of Paris with the note of admiration: «das Volk, das selbst und fur sich selbst handelt» [10, p. 520].
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Maidansky A. D. Russian Leviathan and the Marxist idea of dying out of the State // Сетевой журнал «Научный результат». Серия «Социальные и гуманитарные
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38
from More to Fourier. The latter was the author of the term «industrial army» to describe the organization of the production process. The slogan «Down with inheritance!» was advocated by Saint-Simonians (Fourier sharply objected) and later - Bakunin1.
Even Lenin and Mao did not dare to carry out some of the Manifesto messages. Perhaps, they did not consider their people «advanced» enough for such reforms. Nevertheless, they got the gist fully well: the absolute monopoly of the state. Having accomplished its first and last «independent act» -expropriation of the means of production, - the state of the whole people would become superfluous and «fall asleep naturally», as Engels predicted.
The previous, bourgeois state machine was not suitable for this high goal. After the proletarian revolution, it must be immediately «broken and destroyed». Lenin repeated these words as a mantra on every page of The State and Revolution (1917). The proletarian state, in contrast to all previous states, should not have any professional caste of officials and the military servants.
Lenin traced the historical example of the dying-out state in the Paris Commune. Commenting on the Engels’s words that this «Commune was no longer a state in its proper sense», Lenin formulated a bold hypothesis: «And if the Commune took root firmly, then the state traces would be withered away by themselves, and the commune would not have to ‘abolish’ its institutions: they would stop to function as they would have nothing to do» [8, p. 66]2.
Nowadays, only the most faithful Leninists can subscribe under this «and if». Rich in experiments, the XX century did not present to the world any successful experience of direct, non-state democracy. The revolutionary (post-) Marxists have to look for «absolute democracy» with a microscope,
somewhere «in the working-class Milan
neighborhoods of the 70s» (Antonio Negri).
II
Hopes of Evald Ilyenkov for the state dying-out, if any, dissipated by the end of 1960. In his letter to Yu.A. Zhdanov3 all the considerations were about the way to reconcile the market and the state by marking the limit between their powers. More precisely, how to save the market from the devastating «diffusion» with the (socialist) state. Using the categories of dialectical Logic, the state is characterized as «the
1 At the Basle Congress of the First International, Bakunin declared the abolition of inheritance as a starting point for the creation of a socialist society.
2 Italics mine. - A.M.
^The^on-m-lowof^talin^^hemist^y^rofession^^^^
Abstract Universal, i.e. pseudo-universal» institution. And it is ruled again by «different dregs, having forgotten nothing and having learned nothing, who have just become even angrier and lousier since they got hungry» [3, p. 258].
In the conflict between the market and state, Ilyenkov stands for the market. Both of these public machines represent «partial labor», but they do this in a diametrically opposite manner. The market acts openly and honestly, while the state - in an ugly and mendacious way, posing itself as the concretely universal. The dilemma in Ilyenkov’s formulation is as follows: «The market or its polar opposite - the partial under the guise of the Universal? The partial that has conceited itself to be the actual universality, or the partial that honestly realizes that it is the partial only and nothing more?» [3, p. 260].
The question itself makes the answer obvious. Ilyenkov encourages to reinstate the market machine, accepting its organically inherent deformities, such as division of labor, exploitation and effect of mutual «alienation» of people, the anarchy and the cyclical crises, etc.: «Let market laws dominate in the market. With all their shortcomings. Since there will be no advantages without these shortcomings» [ibid.].
Ilyenkov’s «relatively reasonable ‘synthesis‘» of two inhuman machines has nothing common with the Paris-type self-governing commune, which Marx and Lenin dreamed to establish. Apparently, Ilyenkov looked up to the Swedish or Austrian model of social organization: capitalism / socialism «with a human face» - a hybrid of «fair» market and «pseudo-universal» state ownership.
Lenin ridiculed and stigmatized with vulgar «terms» all the theorists who designed the similar (convergent) models. Just as well as his former colleagues who stumbled at the appropriateness of immediate revolutionary destruction of the market and the state. Among them - a «notorious Russian renegade of Marxism» Plekhanov and opportunist Kautsky who «distorted Marxism», and many others, less important figures. Lenin did not want to hear about any «synthesis» of market and state until the October Revolution. Both these machines of exploitation of a man by a man must be broken and destroyed - that is the original Lenin’s platform. The bourgeois state and the market are subject to immediate liquidation, while the proletarian state will die out by itself by breaking the resistance of the exploiting classes.
The idea of the state dying-out is the main blunder of classical Marxism, its Achilles’ heel. Each and every proletarian revolution led to enormous
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hypertrophy of the state. One state has even become a «superpower».
Marx’s dream «to turn the state from a body standing above the society into a body entirely subordinated to this society»1 became true in a completely opposite way. The process of the state dying-out in terms of delegating its powers to the working masses has never started. The dying-out thing was a «civil society» - the forms of economic and political self-activity obtained in the course of bourgeois-democratic revolutions. General secretaries were growing decrepit and «dying out» one by one. While the state, this Leviathan, only changed, mutated, first assigning the portion of powers to the market, and then taking them back.
The state vertical and the market horizontal are two axes, «X» and «Y» on the coordinate plane of bourgeois socio-economic formation. This plane also entirely locates a real socialism. The accent of social development has shifted sharply to the vertical, resulting in the «diffusion of the state and the market», which Ilyenkov feared of so much. It would be foolish to deny the considerable achievements of the states of the socialist «camp», but even more foolish would be to consider the economically hindward (primarily in terms of labor productivity) and having destroyed many «degrees of freedom» social order as a new, higher formation.
The historical materialism postulate about that capitalism and socialism belong to different economic formations rested on the illusion that still reigns over the minds of a large part of leftist ideologues: the state property is not privately owned. Or at least, it stops being private when a proletarian party starts running the state and liquidates the bourgeoisie as a class. As the property is not owned by individuals and is used for the benefit of all the people, then it is nationwide...
Ilyenkov for dear life fought with this illusion, almost as powerful in practical as shabby in theoretical terms. He called the form of property established by the proletarian revolution as an abstract, formally legal negation of private property. But in its very essence, the property remained private.
State monopoly on working conditions does not abolish private property but, otherwise, raises it to the level of the universality. The nature of this «common private property» (das allgemeine Privateigentum) was studied already by young Marx. He called communism, which required the transition of private
1 «Die Freiheit besteht darin, den Staat aus einem der Gesellschaft ubergeordneten in ein ihr durchaus untergeordnetes Organ zu verwandeln» [11, p. 27]._______
property from individuals to the state, as «quite rough and thoughtless» (ganz roher und gedankenloser Kommunismus). The state, which has monopolized any public wealth, is a «community as a universal capitalist» (die Gemeinschaft als der allgemeine Kapitalist). The state does not simply serve the interests of the ruling class, but it is itself a universal, perfect capitalist. And the «rough Communists» (Cabet, Dezamy, Weitling and others) are going to transfer all the means of production and all other public wealth into exclusive ownership of the state...
And there is no trace of real socialization of property in this action. Nationalization of property is the relationship of universal prostitution with the society2. The state in this situation acts as a pimp. It generates revenue by making the worker face with the objective conditions of labor. It panders for money, like any capitalist.
Young Marx regarded this sort of communism as «a form of manifestation of vileness of private property that wants to establish itself as the positive commonality»3. In the XX century, this vile wish came true in the Soviet Union and its associate «socialist camp». The process of alienation of property completed here and became absolute: alienation is not any more distributed between the classes of society, but covers the society as a whole. State communism is an absolute capitalism.
After elimination of class inequality, the contradiction between labor and property has not at all been removed. On the contrary, it exacerbated to the limit: now every individual is both a worker and an owner of the objective working conditions. Alienation shifts from the plane of relationship of social classes inwards the individual: a working man confronts himself as the owner, like commodity, which exists simultaneously in two mutually exclusive value forms - relative and equivalent.
Under the pressure of this contradiction the socialist society is stratified to workers and managers. The latter act as intermediaries in the production process (as well as some products serve as intermediaries - money - in the process of commodity exchange). And one of their number was bound to become a «universal equivalent» - a leader, 2 3
2 «So tritt die ganze Welt des Reichtums, d.h. des gegenstandlichen Wesens des Menschen, aus dem Verhaltnis der exklusiven Ehe mit dem Privateigentumer in das Verhaltnis der universellen Prostitution mit der Gemeinschaft» [12, p. 45].
3 «... Eine Erscheinungsform von der Niedertracht des
Privateigentums, das sich als das positive Gemeinwesen setzen will» [12, p. 116]._____________________________
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making decisions and assessing on behalf of society as a whole. In this regard, there is a striking similarity between socialist cults of the leaders / parties and «commodity fetishism» described in the first chapter of Capital: the mystification of social relations that places them upside down, with the characteristic transformation of the intermediary - either a leader, or the Communist Party, or money - into an object of worship, the earthly god. The cult of personality, impersonality, and liquidity.
The private and the abstract-universal in the guise of the collective, concrete public - this is the socialist pseudomorphosis of ownership. The state itself is an institution of private property, its superpersonal subspecies. A flesh of the flesh of the divided labor, the state has always and everywhere hindered, impeded the real socialization of labor and property, wedging between the working man and the objective conditions of his labor.
In all bourgeois societies, without exception, the state plays the role of the largest private owner. Socialism converts state property into a monopoly, and that’s all. With the tendency, typical for monopoly, to decay and degeneration of civil society into the «Animal farm».
Until the society needs the divided labour (and therefore the private property, because it is essentially the same thing1), the state as the mediating institution that connects experts by means of experts (managers) will stay with it. Another competing mediatory is a market, the institution of selfregulation of commodity-money relations. Both the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the state hog the cover of the economy. The balance of their powers determines the form of the capitalist property. The whole palette of societies of the bourgeois economic formation lies between the two extremes - the principles of laissez faire and the governmental planning.
III
Ilyenkov considered state property to be «the first (although the necessary first) step towards the creation of a state-free society» [4, p. 107]. How could the transition of the reified social wealth (capital) from the hands of «honestly private» individuals and classes to the impersonal, «pseudo-universal» Machine bring
1 «Division of labour and private property are, after all, identical expressions: the same is said about the activity in the first case and the product of activity in another case (Ubrigens sind Teilung der Arbeit und Privateigentum identische Ausdrucke - in dem Einen wird in Beziehung auf die Tatigkeit dasselbe ausgesagt, was in dem Andern in bezug auf das Produkt der Tatigkeit ausgesagt wird)» [13, p. 32].__
humanity to the «realm of freedom»? Ilyenkov did not explain this. The transition from an adequate («honest», in his terms) private property form to its inadequate, «pseudo-universal» form cannot be the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. It is rather the degradation of the abstract, the historical regression of private property.
State (impersonally private) property reached its historical maturity much earlier: it flourished already in ancient Egypt. Meanwhile, «honest», individually private ownership established as the dominant only five hundred years ago. Until recently, the historical vector of development of private property was its individualization, crowned with the occurrence of the bourgeois-capitalist property. The latter constitutes the highest form of development of private property (proved by Marx).
Marx believed that capital had already exhausted its possibilities as a growth factor of the productive forces and turned from the stimulus into the «fetters». The fallacy of this point of view is obvious today. For half a century after his famous prophecy («The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated2», etc.), capitalism made an immense scientific and technological revolution and created productive forces, of which the author of Capital had little dreamed. Moreover, this bourgeois revolution, against which all proletarian revolutions together are only a vanity of vanities, is still far from finish.
Together with the very beginning of the computer era, there occurred a plan to replace the state machine with a supercomputer. Does the machine of alienation not want to die out «by itself»? So we will construct an electronic machine, and empower it with all the functions of the state, starting from the planning to the operational management of social life.
Ilyenkov and his companions mocked at this technocratic utopia: «When some people think that the whole problem boils down to replacing the current state bodies with the thinking - planning and managing -machines, boxes similar to refrigerators, they step on the ground of a kind of cybernetic bureaucratic illusion, mythology. They think that communism can be built on the way of mathematically-electronic improvement of the current system of relations, i.e. on the way to perpetuation of the current state of affairs, to the transfer of the current administrative functions of the state machine not to a democratically organized human collective but to another machines» [1, p. 280]. 2
2 «Die Stunde des kapitalistischen Privateigentums schlagt. Die Expropriateurs werden expropriiert» [9, p. 791]._________________________________________________
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Not a Machine, but the Human himself, the real persons should plan and manage their human relationships. This is an elementary axiom of the Marx’s communism. The question is, what is required for this purpose? One just needs to learn, as Lenin replied. «Learn communism» not only at the school desks, but above all practically. The masses of people should immediately and directly participate in the management of social activities: «The living creativity of the masses is the main factor of the new social order... Living and creative socialism is a creation of the masses of the people themselves» [7, p. 57].
Lenin’s pedagogical idea has failed. Stalinism has only witnessed its complete collapse. Neither due to the fact that the stagnant masses were unable or unwilling to study. Nor because of the fact that the democracy of the masses, as Plato showed, ends inevitably with the tyranny of a demagogue. Modern society simply cannot be controlled manually as an iron or a bicycle. Effective management requires more and more sophisticated machines and technologies. And the machine «operators» as well.
Ilyenkov unaccepted, rejected this simple truth. He continued to believe in the power of pedagogy (though a concrete, technically feasible solution to the problem of the state dying-out has been shown by history to him, not to Marx and Lenin). Relying upon the achievements of cultural-historical psychology, the pedagogical science is intended to raise the critical mass of the universally developed individuals that is necessary for the «appropriation,
reconquering» the human functions and our «objective essence» (property) from the machines of the state and the market, as Ilyenkov believed. Since the late 60s, when the state put a bold cross on the «living creativity of the masses», the philosopher came to grips with the pedagogical experiment on «synchrophasotron» of Zagorsk boarding school for deaf-blind children.
Could the attempt to educate the masses of creative, universally developed persons be successful at a time when the Soviet economy was choking from a lack of proletarians and the overproduction of intellectuals? While the state was sending engineers and doctors to harvest onion and potatoes, the philosopher Ilyenkov called one and all to «Learn thinking!»... The pedagogical utopia, that has obscured so many lucid minds, is stronger and more dangerous than the technocratic one, because of using energy of the humanistic ideal. And they both have nothing in common with the materialistic conception of history.
Like all the ideal, the human person only reflects the social being, the production process of the material life of society. To educate self-active
individuals, it is required to change the conditions of their material being, and, above all, the character of human labor. The reified, abstract labor must stop and disappear forever from the face of the earth. As long as there is a «labor, where the person by himself does what he can make things do for him and for people» (Marx), the reification of human relations (private property, the market, the state, etc.) will remain. Communist relations between people are principally impossible in the world of reified labor. The reified labor dictates private forms of appropriation of the labor conditions and products.
That was the discovery of Marx, and he was the first who ignored it. Marxism as a political doctrine is not on friendly terms with the historical-materialistic theory of Marx. No dictatorships or communes can eliminate the reification of labor, and, therefore, the private property, the market and the state as well. Only the automatically operating machines are able to solve this problem. As soon as they bring the reified labor to naught, the capitalism will immediately «fall asleep», because the capital is nothing but the reified labor.
IV
Talking about how capitalism complicates, binds, and inhibits the development of technology has lasted since the time of Marx, for nearly one hundred and fifty years. All the while, the Communists themselves were engaged in ludditing -they broke the market and the state, built the Gulag and the Berlin wall, invented new forms of inhuman exploitation of the proletariat, sold raw materials, jewelry and objects of art to the «bourgeois». The impoverished country, having barely survived a devastating war, was able to put in commission the world’s first nuclear power plant and to make a journey into outer space, to create the advanced systems of education and sports, to equip a first-class army, - but was hopelessly behind in the industry, which could open the door to the «bright tomorrow». The computer revolution has happened in the bourgeois West.
How will total computerization of production affect the Human? That is the question. What if the previous slavery of the market and state machines is replaced with a more terrible, as some futurologists say, yoke of electronics and robotics?
These concerns stem from a false idea of a «Machine smarter than a Human», which was justly ridiculed in Ilyenkov’s pamphlet [see: 5]1. The computer is perfect in that it completely lacks any
1 Ilyenkov included an extended version of the pamphlet in his book «About Idols and Ideals».
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human qualities, including intelligence. The only thing it can do is to count to one, to line up 0 and 1. However, the computer is unable to line up us, people, as the market and the state do. But, in contrast to the market and the state, the digital machine is greatly programmable. This is what it was designed for. These features make the computer an ideal candidate to replace the old social megamachines such as the state and the market.
Ilyenkov formulated the history puzzle as follows: «The problem is that to return the Human his lost power over the world of machines in order to turn the Human into a smart and powerful Owner and Master of the entire grand, ingenious and powerful mechanism of modern machine production that he has created, and to make him smarter and stronger than the Machine» [2, p. 36]1.
Briefly speaking, it requires to invent the Machine more stupid and weaker than the Human. The Machine, completely lacking creativity and capable of acting only on the human-designed program. The Machine, whose whole strength is in its weakness as compared to the Human. And then improve and develop its «strong weaknesses» unless the electronic machine pushes the man-like machines of the market and the state out of social life. It will not push it out like a sumo wrestler pushes his opponent, but by permeating the market and the state from the inside, digitizing them entirely, to the core. Those can die out not otherwise than in the course of binarization, informatization, virtualization of their invisible power structures. The digit kills all living things, like Gorgon Medusa, at a one glance. A digitized state is not the state any more, as well as the horsepower of the engine is not a horse. This historic process of «dying out» has recently started right before our eyes.
Is it possible to «kill the dragon» by getting the whole population into the state affairs? Even if we assume that every housewife has managed to govern the state... Is this machine ever controllable? Lenin believed that it is controllable, but presented no evidence. The state machine crushed his dream of a global commune as soon as Lenin personally stood at the helm. Another Bolshevik, Alexander Bogdanov, conceived an idea to govern the state scientifically, by using the «universal organizational science», the tectology. The ideologists of «systematic approach», including a close friend of Ilyenkov, Pobisk Kuznetsov, picked up his utopian undertaking in the 60s.
The attempts of the Communists to steer the market and the state at their own wish or at Lenin’s
1 Italics mine. - A.M.
behest ended always in the same way: either the country breaks its limbs or the leaders - their heads. There are gas and brake, so it is possible to speed up or slow down the machine, but driving fails, whatever you do. The state machine has an automatic pilot instead of a steer. Nevertheless, it easily operates with us, selecting and training the suitable «statesman minds» at the law faculties. While there is a state machine, the Human is doomed to be its cogwheel and screw, a citizen of the machine. The only force, able to resist it, is another, market machine.
On finding the Human’s powerlessness in the face of machinery, created by human labor, Ilyenkov sank into «hypochondria», according to his own words. The philosopher proposed to return to «the rule of market laws, with all their shortcomings», not because of his love of the commodity-money Machine, but of despair: at least to weaken in this way the absolute power of the state Machinery over a living human personality.
V
Competition of megamachines is a useful thing. The more important is to draw the masses of people in the management of public affairs. However, this cannot solve the problem of the dying-out of the state and the market. Moreover, it cannot be solved by blood and iron. Of course, any machine can be broken and damaged, including the market and the state. The Great October Revolution demonstrated the results of such actions. Very soon, the nouveau Luddites had to somehow hastily glue the broken Machine from the survived fragments. As a result, a new monster came into being, much more terrible than the old-regime Leviathan. An industrial cyborg, which stifled people like bedbugs.
It turns out that one just can’t up and replace the Machine with the Human - either in industry or in public life management. The Human is unable to perform the machine functions, and there is no need to do so. Public self-governance on a global scale is possible just with the help of machines. The question is only what specific activities can be done by the Human, and what can and should be transferred to the «unintelligent Machine».
Breaking machines is luddition and vandalism. Even in case of such superpersonal machines of alienation, as the market and the state. Any machine is a part of the human being. By breaking it, the Human corrupts and disfigures himself / herself, losing some part of his/ her own productive forces. For many thousands of years both the state and the market have been necessary for people and can bring
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more benefits, despite all their innate «shortcomings».
«Do the interests of the development of machinery coincide automatically with the interests of a living person? Yes or no?», Ilyenkov asked the readers [6, p. 35]. Automatically - no, because one and the same machine can treat and maim, destroy and build, lift up or strike the ground. Integrally -yes: by developing the machinery, the human develops himself. Global challenges and risks the machinery creates can be eliminated only through the development of the technology itself. After creation of more perfect Machine, and only after that, the less perfect ones will die out by themselves, due to their complete uselessness. So and in no other way - by improving the machinery, one may send the «whole state machine where it will be appropriate: to the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax» (Engels).
While the Human’s attempts to take away the power from the Machine and perform by himself, with his hands and head, every single function of the Machine (Lenin’s and Marx’s «direct democracy») cannot succeed. The end will be the same as in the sad Russian joke about «people’s space rocket»: «a million of Chinese got a hernia and another million was crushed by debris».
The great historical role of the division of labor is that all the creative is separated from the routine and mechanical, and therefore programmable. The Human will save the first, and leave the second entirely for the Machine. The Human becomes a programmer. This is the principle of progress both in the economy and in politics, and in all other areas of public life.
The Human will have to do the same thing with the market and the state machines, as he is already doing with the machines at the automated factories. He will have to take upon himself/ herself all programming functions of the state, and transfer mechanical functions to the programmable machines. (One should not be afraid of «robot riots» and similar scenarios that anthropomorphize digital machines. The beauty of these machines is just in the fact that they are not able in principle to perform any human function, even the easiest one. Instead, one should beware of bad programmers.)
This is the only way to eliminate the notorious «alienation of labor» when an abstract, reified, noncreative labor accrues to the worker, while the concrete labor, such as planning and management of the production of life, accrues to the market and state machines. Alienation can be removed by developing the machinery, overcome through the creation of new
types of machines, automates that can take upon themselves the abstract labor of the proletariat. With their help, people will be able to plan and manage their relationships as properly and freely as external physical processes.
The more personal the main instrument of production - the computer - becomes, the more individual nature the process of social labor acquires. At the same time, the alienation of the Human from the conditions (and hence the products) of his labor fades away. Personal computer allows each individual to participate directly, bypassing the superpersonal intermediary institutions, in social production, and make the product of his labor available to all persons concerned and to the entire society.
By individualizing social labor, personal computer, thereby, unlocks for the mankind the door to the coveted «realm of freedom». While the «centralization of the means of production», which Marx considered to be an embryo of a new formation, has only led to the monopolization of the property. The centralized production showed an excellent, almost perfect compatibility with the «capitalist shell», i.e. with relationships of private property.
This miscount was the basis where messianic dreams of Marx about the world revolution and the state dying-out were resting. They do not deny the status of Marx as the greatest thinker and humanist -Copernicus in the «science of history»1. Yet, these dreams must be dispelled, since the world is still full of Marxists who live and think this way.
The Copernican discovery of Marx was the postulate of labor as the primary source of world history. Machines and technologies define the orbits, along which the societies of different formations go around «the sun of labor». The mankind will achieve an orbit of communism with the help of the programmable machine driven by the forces of nature and excluding any reified labor. Unless this machine is created, the «global communism» will always stay a simple utopia.
But even this utopian communistic ideal is better, more high-minded than the theoretical worship of the idols of the market and state machines. Both liberals and etatists, «marketeers» and «statesmen» are two rival idolatrous sects. The interests of the market and the state are the interests of the machines of human exploitation, which only partially coincide with the interests of society, the most important of
1 This analogy is quite appropriate, considering that Copernicus himself had many theological fantasies (about the Sun as «the visible God», etc.), which Kepler and Newton used to multiply considerably.
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which is the interest of the personality as «the ensemble of social relations».
References
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