A Political Interpretation of Modern Social Rights

Choi, Hyung-ik

MOE-KRF Research Fellow

The Resource Center for Asian NGOs at Sungkonghoe University

cooler@hanimail.com

“Come together join the movement, Take a stand for human rights,
Fear and hatred clouds our judgement,
Free us all from endless night.”

-Song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “Attica State,” in John Lennon Anthology, Vol. 3.

Ⅰ. Introduction

Several contemporary scholars of Marxism, including Louis Althusser and Perry Anderson, characterized one of the main causes of the general crisis of Marxism as the absence of a theory of politics. Moreover, they argued that the absence of politics and the economic determinism immanent in Marxism were opposite sides of the same coin, indicating “lacunae” of Marx’s thought. I agree to the general assesment that the main cause of the crisis of Marxism lies in the absence of political theory.

To overcome that absence, however, this article presents an argument that the concept of the “political” that operated in Marx’s thought clarifies the pervasiveness of politics, which is somewhat different from others’ writings, to construct an autonomous political theory relatively distinct from economic works including Capital. In a word, it is an attempt to discover Karl Marx’s political theory through an organic constitution of Marx’s various writings. Especially, the main theme of this article is to transform Marx’s Capital into a political theorization.

This article intends to trace the concept of the rights that have been forgotten in the mainstream politics of the western Marxism. As Steven Lukes relevantly pointed out, Marxism as a body of thought has generally been inhospitable to rights and it is a peculiar and distinctive feature of marxism that it denies that these conditions of rights are inherent in human life.

According to traditional Marxism, by furnishing principles for the regulation of conflicting claims and interests, a right serves to promote class compromise and thereby delays the revolutionary change that will make possible a form of social life that has no need of rights, because the conditions of rights or the circumstances of justice will no longer obtain. A right is only inherently ideological, stabilizing class societies and concealing class interests.

Therefore, he has a reason to criticize that, by believing that the vaguely conceived ends of emancipation, i.e., “the immanence of the ultimate objectives,” would call forth the appropriate means, it has almost totally failed to bring social and political imagination to bear upon the solution of real life problems–such as the distribution of resources, social policy, economic, social, and industrial organization, political and constitutional structures, nationalism and regionalism.

On such questions, Marxism has little that is distinctive and constructive to contribute: it has not been a source of creative solutions, a living tradition inspiring inventive policy-makers. If the arguments I have advanced are right, the reasons lie deep within the structure of Marxist thought itself.

But, evidently, Marx defended various political and social rights in the course of his life, such as the right to a free press, the right to vote, i.e, universal suffrage, workers’ rights to decent factory conditions, and so on. The same goes for countless Marxists ever since. Indeed, Marxists across the world, especially the resistance to the Nazis and the ’68 revolution, have been in the forefront of struggles against political dictatorship, social oppression and economic exploitation in many countries, often in the name of human rights. In fact, the protection and the establishment of basic social rights often have depended on the existence of a strong and well-organized labor and social movements and have been obtained through their indomitable fights.

If that is so, what is the theoretical method to solve such a contradiction that appears to have existed between Marxist dogma denying rights and the real, historical fights for it? I will bet on such an eternal green pine tree as a real life, relying on one of Marx’s famous epigrams that “all social life is essentially practical, and all social mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice; the point is to change the world,” because theory must develop to follow the social realities, and not vice versa. Then, this article will ask: how do rights fit into the framework of Marx’s thought itself?

Ⅱ. General Epistemological Guide

To begin with, this article argues the history of the formation of Marx’s thought neither from a perspective of a linear or evolutionary progress nor by a sudden epistemological break excluding a theoretical continuity between “the Young Marx” and “the Old Marx”, but from the perspective of the theoretical tension and the overcoming process of it.

This context was why Garry Teeple grumbled that “first, while it is almost universally agreed that Marx was an idealist, philosopher, or Hegelian in this early period, there is very little attempt to define or demonstrate the exact nature of these characteristics. The nature of his starting point, in other words, is not accounted for in these widely accepted adjectives. And second, while almost all agree that Marx moved from this early position to a later ‘mature’ or ‘scientific’ one, there is little discussion of the nature of this transition.”

In the process of constructing his originative political thoughts and embarking on studying the modern bourgeois political economy, Marx made an attempt at two eminent theoretical turns.

First, he radically changed from an early perspective of understanding the alienation of human beings based on the anthropology of labour to a mature perspective of grasping both meaning of labor and social antagonism in historically specific and concrete modern bourgeois society, not in history or society in general.

In the early period, the so called ‘young’ Marx supported the theory of labor-alienation, one of the anthropologies of labour, which states that “the productive life is the life of the species and, in creating a world of object by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being.”

But, even though in the very same book, he cast out such an abstract perspective on labor and went on to develop the new thesis. “It is clear, therefore, that only when labor is grasped as the essence of private property, can the economic process as such be analysed in its real concreteness.” Consequently, labor is not a “vague thing.” It is always some definite labour, it is never labor in general that is sold and bought. It is not only labor which is qualitatively defined by the object, but also the object which is determined by the specific quality of labor.

Second, Marx realized that such a social antagonism would necessarily cause the appearance of conflicts between the rights of social classes. For the absence of Marxist political theory of rights, mainly, citizenship theory has developed in the twentieth century. T. H. Marshall, as a well-known theorist, has had great influence on the development of the post-world war social democratic theory. Moreover, the citizenship theory was a main theme in a recent political transition theory and a part of a democratic one. But this article proposes a critical assessment of Marshall’s theory of citizenship with Marx’s political position on the development of modern rights.

There are more or less logical defects in Marshall’s theory of citizenship. First of all, he failed to give a relevant explanation on the cause of conflict among several rights, especially between civil rights and social rights, and a relation between social class and rights, differently from his book’s title, Citizenship and Social Class. His argument was pursued, initially, through an examination of the relation between citizenship and social class, in which the movement towards greater social equality was seen as the latest phase in the evolution of citizenship over several centuries, from the achievement of civil rights to the acquisition of political rights and finally social rights. This process was elegantly conceptualized in what Marshall himself referred to as a narration of events, but there was relatively little discussion of its causes.

As T. B. Bottomore correctly noted, however, this argument gave rise to later criticisms that it had been rather misleadingly represented as a quasi-automatic, harmonious progression to better things which was in some way immanent in the development of capitalism itself.

Implicitly though and, to some extent explicitly, he recognized that there were elements of conflict involved, observing that it was reasonable to expect that “the impact of citizenship on social class should take the form of a conflict between opposing principles.” He did not, however, examine that this conflict was one between classes over the nature and he remarked indeed that “social class occupies a secondary position in my theme.” In the result, it is clear that the impact of social classes on the extension of citizenship was not his principle concern so that this article calls his theoretical tendency an addictive and evolutionary rights theory, which is a prolongation of liberalistic development perspectives on the modern society. To the contrary, Marx’s political theory of rights enables us to understand a break and antagonism between social rights and civil rights, the latter having been mainly supported by the private ownership, as Marshall acknowledged. 

In case of understanding the contents of Marx’s theoretical turns as such, the significance of the criticism of the political economy of Marx lies not on constructing a new economic theory, but on practicing a political reading against the modern capitalist economy system itself. Therefore, all the substances of this article aim at explaining what the notion of the “political” of the modern capitalistic economic system that Marx understands is, and why, and how the “political” is exposed to the right struggle of the social classes. Discussing these subjects, this paper analyzes three organic components of Marx’s political theory of rights which dynamically intertwine with one another: social time, labor process, and social rights.

Ⅲ. A Political Reading against Capitalist Society

1. Dynamics of Labour and Social Time-Project

Labor is a crucial theoretical theme to understand the social mechanism of modern capitalism. The main reason is that capitalist society prospers by exploiting labor, called surplus value extraction. “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the labor it sucks. The time during which labor works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him.”

Labor as an objective action to produce something is, however, different than workers themselves who are the living subjects, not only as immediate producers in the laboring process, but also as men/women sustaining a normal living, which is composed of subsistence and life. Therefore, in the capitalist one, the reason why workers labor with a little spontaneity is to live, not live to labor. This is, though plain and simple, the most important theoretical guide needed for a political reading on the capitalist laboring process. Let us look at things a little more closely.

Signifying the situation that capitalist classes overpower in the production process of modern society, Marx exploits the notions of “the formal subjection of labour to capital” and “the real subjection of labour to capital.” Their social and economic power in the labour process enables that class to rule all modern society. “Capital is the economic power that dominates everything in bourgeois society. Thus, Marx’s theory of the labour process is similar to Michel Foucault’s discipline power theory to subject living men’s body under modern society. For Marx, the abstract expression of this modern discipline power and ruling’s political social time-project was named (surplus) value-law.

This theoretical insight of Marx enables us to judge that, in his political economy writings, he shows that value-law is concerned not only with social labour process in sphere of economic production, but also with capitalists’ political time-project to discipline and dominate others’ humanistic social life and lively activities by means of labour action to extract the surplus-value from wage-workers. As the capitalist has brought the labor-power at its day-rate, to him its use-value belongs during one working-day. “He has thus acquired the right to make the labor work for him during one day. But, what is a working day? At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this ultima Thule, the necessary limit of the working day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital.”

Marx vividly illustrates this personified capital’s soul:
What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labor-power whose daily value it buys?(……) It has been seen that to these questions capital replies: the working-day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labor-power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the labor is nothing else, his whole life through, than labor power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labor-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday ― Moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labor, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.

The foremost scientific significance of his analysis on historic-specific social antagonism in the modern bourgeois society lies on a discovery that capitalists appropriate and exploit surplus value from live labor by their time-project to specialize social labour. It is this that makes him say:

It presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as man as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day; but this equalizing of labor is not by any means the work of M.

Proudhon’s eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry.
So that, it is proposed that the form of the time-project be capitalists’ exploitation-project, which is expressed by the so-called “value-law”, and the carcase of time in which flesh and blood is chopped into fragments by social labour time. In other words, “the relative value, measured by labor time, is inevitably the formula of the present enslavement of the worker, instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the ‘revolutionary theory’ of the emancipation of the proletariat.”

2. Karl Marx’s political theory of rights

Marx analyzes the exploitative aspect that the modern bourgeoisie’s time-project really penetrate into an immediate labour process. “The capitalistic mode production (essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labor), produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only deterioration of human labor-power by robbing it of its normal and physical, conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labor-power itself. It extends the labor’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time.”

But, at the same time, it proves that conflicts between working class and capitalist class founded on each other’s different time-project come about not in such a social production sphere where labour carries on, but in all social spheres that include labour activities and other social practices. Therefore, according to Marx, the creation of a normal working-day is, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class.

We can comprehend Marx’s arguments that the basis of workers’ social rights is free time that is presented by the needs of social life, not through labour process and laboring time. As Marx strongly and clearly expressed, Time is the room of human development. “A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to the utmost state of degradation.”

In short, the problem of men/women’s life-authenticity is the main factor to explain the contemporary laboring process, which is never destroyed or subdued by the capitalists’ incessant accumulative desires. Here, the compartment between the labor sphere and the freedom one or the right to work and the right to reject work is not important, because, in the real world, though the two elements dynamically interlace as the form of the organic unity, labor and freedom are the very distinctive characters of human social practice. Labor cannot become a game, as desired by Fourier.” So that, it in no way implies that work is pure fun, pure amusement, as in “Fourier’s childish naive conception.” Really freework, e.g.. the composition of music, is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort.

After withering away the trace of capitalist society, labor and free practice have a dynamic interaction, and will be prerequisite each other. The saving of labor time is equivalent to the increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual.

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane consideration ceases.(……) With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants.(……) But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

This is why I criticizes the autonomia movement’s voluntary labor thesis and Antonio Negri’s self-valorization theory of the living labor, which, in fact, argue that, through the transformation of labor nature itself, a post-capitalist revolution could be realized, as the remains of the anthropology of labor and another form of transcendentalism.

In summary, by a political reading on Marx’s Capital, this article argues that Marx verifies the antagonism of the time-project between working class and capitalist class in his writing. The prime direction to constitute political theory of right that Marx suggests is based on the rights antagonism between those classes, which results from a mutual different time-project.

The capital maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labor maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, rights against right, both equally bering the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the results of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labor, i.e., the working class.

While the bourgeoisie’s rights are focused on proprietary rights, i.e. what is called “real rights”, workers’ social rights are based on such a time-project for subsistence right and life right, which enable a social individual to retain a normal and refined living. “A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day. It is needed to restore the health and physical energies of the working class, that is, the great body of every nation, as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action. We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day.”

Ⅳ. Conclusion: for Rights or beyond Rights!

I have argued that Marx’s political theory of rights planned a socialist political project on the development of the modern social rights by means of reconstitution of a new workers’ and people’s democracy theory, which intend to subvert the modern bourgeois society from in-itself.

For instance, Marx sincerely celebrated and praised the Factory legislation including 10 hours bill as the “first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of the process of production”and “the victory of a principle.” In other words, “it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

” From that cause, it was argued that, in relation to the perspective of extending and deepening of Marx’s democracy theory, the acquisition process of workers’ social rights, from the beginning, cannot but be expressed by a political character.
Moreover, it is very important that we recognize that, even for the analysis and prospect of the post-capitalist era, Marx maintained the dynamics of labour and social time-project.
As with a single individual, the comprehensiveness of its development, its pleasure and its activities depends upon the saving of time. Ultimately, all economy is a matter of economy of time. Society must also allocate its time correctly to acquire knowledge in suitable proportions or to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Economy of time, as well as the planned distribution of labor time over the various branches of production, therefore, remains the first economic law if communal production is taken as the basis. It becomes a law even to a much higher degree.

In this society, however, as the form of distribution of the social labor products, equal right is still in principle, i.e., bourgeois right although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads.
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly encumbered by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply.(……) Right by its nature can exist only as the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals(……)are measurable by an equal standard only in sofar as they are made subject to an equal criterion, are taken from a certain side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Besides, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, etc., etc. Thus, given an equal amount work done, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, etc. To avoid all these defects, right would have to be unequal rather than equal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth-pang from capital society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines.

It can be inferred that, for Marx, even after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, the political grammar of right consists of the scientific bases to sustain the social individuals’ life in the commonwealth as the new constituted subjects. In contrast with the stereotyped Marxists that have given priority to the unlimited development of the only industrial labor productivity, in this society, it is the society members’ good life that Marx more emphasized, which consists of both the capacity for and the means of enjoyment, that not simple highly developed productivity like the capitalist one, although the capacity for enjoyment is a condition for it, and hence the basic means for it, and this capacity is created by development of an individual disposition, productive power.

Therefore, in conclusion, we just appreciate that such a political discourse of rights with the dynamics of labour and social time-project is the key word to politically reconstruct Marx’s thoughts.

* The work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2000-CA0017). 

1) For the arguments of ‘the general crisis’ and the absence of politics of Marxism, see L. Althusser (1990) “Marxism Today,” Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, London: Verso; P. Anderson (1979) Considerations on Western Marxism, London: Verso; R. Miliband (1977) Marxism and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

2) As a similar introductory question, see, for example, A. Negri (1984) Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers; H. Cleaver (1979) Reading Capital Politically, Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.

3) S. Lukes (1985) Marxism and Morality, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

4) Ibid., p. 35.

5) Ibid., p. 46.

6) “Theses on Feuerbach,” Collected Works, Vol. 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 4~5.

7) For the general statement and comparison of the theoretical difference between “the Young Marx” and “the Old Marx,” see A. Gouldner (1980) The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory, New York: Oxford University Press. 

8) G. Teeple (1984) Marx’s Critique of Politics 1842-1847, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 5

9) K. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 276.

10) Ibid., p. 317

11) The Poverty of Philosophy, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 130

12) For the currrent issues of modern citizenship theory, see B. Turner(ed.) (1993) Citizenship and Social Theory, London: Sage.

13) See, for example, G. O’Donnell & P. C. Schmitter (1986) Transition from Authoritarion Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press; D. Rueschemeyer (et als.)(1992) Capitalist Developement & Democracy, Chicago: Polity Press.

14) T. H. Marshall (1992) “Citzenship and Social Class,” in Marshall and Bottomore, Citzenship and Social Class, London: Pluto Press

15) T. B. Bottomore (1992) “Citzenship and Social Class: Forty Years On,” in Marshall and Bottomore, Citzenship and Social Class, London: Pluto Press, p. 55.

16) T. H. Marshall, Ibid., p. 18.

17) Ibid., p. 17.

18) Capital Ⅰ: A Critique of Political Economy, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 224.

19) Ibid., p. 478.

20) Grundrisse, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 44.

21) See M. Foucault (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York, Vintage

22) For an argument of the modern origin of the social time, see J. Le Goff, The Fontana Economic History Europe: the Middle Ages, where he says that “perhaps the most important way the urban bourgeoisie spread its culture was the revolution it effected in the mental categories of medieval man. The most spectacular of these revolutions, without a doubt, was the one that concerned the concept and measurement of time,” cited in J. Whitrow (1988) Time in History: Views of time from prehistory to the present day, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, p. 1.

23) For the arguments of the dynamic relationship between time and labor in Marx’s writings, see E. P. Thompson (1967) “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, No. 38; W. J. Booth (1991) “Economies of Time: On the Idea of Time in Marx’s Political Economy,” Political Theory, Vol. 19 No. 1.

24) Capital Ⅰ, p. 224.

25) Ibid., p. 252

26) The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 127.

27) Ibid., p. 125

28) Capital Ⅰ, p. 253.

29) Ibid., p. 283.

30) “Value, Price, And Profit,” Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 142.

31) Grundrisse, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 97.

32) Ibid., Vol.28, p. 530.

33) Ibid., p. 530.

34) Capital Ⅲ, Collected Works, Vol. 37, p. 820.

35) As the self-valorization theory, see A. Negri (1984) Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

36) Capital Ⅰ, p. 225.

37) “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council: The different Questions,” Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 187. Marx further goes on to develope this thesis. “For protection against ‘the serpent of their agonies,’ the labors must put their heads together, and as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shell prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. In place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear ‘when the time which the workers sells is ended, and when his own begins.’ Quantum mutatus ab illo!” Capital Ⅰ, pp. 285~286.

38) Capital Ⅰ, p. 451.

39) “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 11. For the history of the western labor movement for the shortening of the working-day, see G. Gross (ed.) (1988) Worktime and Industrialization: An International History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

40) “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 11. For the history of the western labor movement for the shortening of the working-day, see G. Gross (ed.) (1988) Worktime and Industrialization: An International History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

41) “After the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labor-time and the distribution of social labor among the various production groups, ultimately the book-keeping encompassing all this, become more essential than over.” Capital Ⅲ, p. 851.

42) “Critique of the Gotta Programme,” Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 86~87.

43) For the examination of the development of rights concepts in Marx’ thoughts, see M. Angelidis (1995) “The Dialectics of Rights: Transitions and Emancipatory Claims in Marxian Tradition,” in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway & K. Psychopedis (eds.) Emancipating Marxism: Open Marxism, Vol. 3, London: Pluto Press.