In addition to defining the general foundations of the new system of production, Marx also indicated the method of social regulation and accounting control which would find application in the new society, and which we describe as accounting according to average social labour-time. The precondition for the establishment of the general foundations of communism were that money and the market must completely disappear, and that the disciples of Marx, insofar as they concerned themselves at all with the foundations of communist production, did not proceed any further than this. In communism they saw fundamentally nothing other than a continuation of the concentration of economic resources as we have known this under capitalism, which would then bring communism into being quite spontaneously. This outlook is revealed most clearly in the case of Hilferding, who subjects to examination the consequences of a total concentration of capital in the hands of one single owner. He draws the imaginary picture of a mammoth trust and describes this in the following words:
"The whole of capitalist production would then be consciously regulated by a single body which would determine the volume of production in all branches of industry. Price determination would become a purely nominal matter, involving only the distribution of the total product between the cartel magnates on one side and all the other members of society on the other. Price would then cease to become the outcome of factual relationships into which people have entered, and would become a mere accounting device by which things would be allocated among people. Money would have no role. In fact, it could well disappear completely, since the task to be accomplished would be the allocation of things, not the distribution of values. The illusion of the objective value of the commodity would disappear along with the anarchy of production, and money itself would cease to exist. The cartel would distribute the product. The material elements of production would be reproduced and used in new production. A part of the output would be distributed to the working class and the intellectuals, while the rest would be retained by the cartel to use as it saw fit. This would be a consciously regulated society, but in an antagonistic form. This antagonism, however, would express itself in the sphere of distribution, which itself would be consciously regulated and hence able to dispense with money. In its perfected form finance-capital is thus uprooted from the soil which nourished its beginnings. The circulation of money has become unnecessary, the ceaseless turnover of money has attained its goal in the regulated society, and the perpetuum mobile of circulation finds its ultimate resting place." (2)
According to this theory, the development towards communism is an unproblematical matter. It is an automatic and contradictionless process, which capitalism itself completes. Capitalist competition leads to the concentration of capital, and by these means large aggregations develop in industry. Within such an aggregation - for instance, a trust which combines transport, mining, rolling mills, etc., in one integrated economic community - a sphere of distribution without money develops. The higher management simply decides to which factory the new means of production (extended reproduction) are to be delivered, what and how much is to be produced, etc. According to this theory the problem of communist production is fundamentally nothing other than the further implementation of this kind of concentration, which then leads to communism quite spontaneously. Private ownership of the means of production will be superseded, for the simple reason it becomes a hindrance to the further combination of industrial establishments. With its elimination the process of concentration can develop to the full and nothing then stands in the way of combining the whole of economic life into one mammoth trust, which is then administered from above. The preconditions which Marx laid down for a communist society would thereby have been fulfilled. The market will have disappeared, because one single concern does not sell to or buy from itself. The prices attached to products also then vanish, whilst the higher administration directs the stream of products from one industrial unit to another, according to what they find to be expedient. That it should ever have been thought necessary to measure how much labour each product embodies was obviously a naive error committed by Marx and Engels.
Thus the course of development taken by the science which concerns itself with the communist economy does not assume the form of a straight line, but takes, after Marx, a different direction , to return to its former classic position only at around 1920. In this connection, it is surely a bitter irony that it was precisely the bourgeois economists who unintentionally helped the science of communism to take a generous step forward in its own development. At a time when it seemed as if the downfall of capitalism was within foreseeable reach and that communism was on the point of taking the world by storm, Max Weber and Ludwig Mises began to develop their criticism of communism. They were of course able to relate that criticism only to the Hilferdingian brand of 'socialism' and - what is essentially the same thing - Russian 'communism', whilst Neurath , the thoroughgoing disciple of Hilferding, was compelled to suffer the consequences of this. Their criticism concluded by demonstrating that an economy without any means of regulation or accounting control, without a general denominator by means of which to measure the value of products, is an impossibility. And indeed their shot had found the right mark. The result was considerable despondency and confusion in the 'Marxist' camp. In the field of economic science the impossibility of communism had been proven, simply on the grounds that, in the case of such an economy, each and every form of planned production would have ceased. Communism, which sought to prove its very right to exist precisely on the basis of the anarchy of capitalist production, showed itself to be even less amenable to a planned mode of operation than capitalism! Block then added his voice by saying their could be no question of communism before it had been demonstrated what means of control was to replace the "market mechanism". Even Kautsky lost his composure and so arrived at the most non-sensical proposals, such as fixing of prices over long periods, etc. These wild somersaults of Kautsky's nevertheless has a positive content, in that, through them, the necessity for a system of social regulation and accounting control became recognised, even if Kautsky did then conceive of this coming into being on the basis of present-day money. He believed that money would be indispensable "as a measure of value for book keeping purposes and as a method of keeping account of exchange relations in a socialist society", as well as "a means of circulation" . (K. Kautsky: The Proletarian Revolution and its programme, p.318).
The destructive criticism of communism wrought by Weber and Mises had in reality the effect of helping the study of communist economy over its moment of inertia and to place it on real foundations. It was they who summoned to life those intellectual forces which from that moment on have allowed themselves no further rest, since it was from that moment that it became possible to persue further the Marxist method of thought in relation to the concept of the average social hour of labour.
As an opposite pole to that of state communism, various syndicalist currents began to appear around the year 1910, which sought to continue capitalist production through "syndicates", "industrial unions" or "guilds". These would then distribute their profits amongst the workers, or profits would be allowed to accumulate in a central social fund. This form of 'communism' was never subjected to any theoretical elaboration, unless we can consider as such the work of Otto Leichter entitled Economic Regulation and Control in a Socialist Society which was published in Vienna in 1923. This study is based in general upon the method of social regulation and accounting control founded upon labour-time computation, and is without doubt the best effort hitherto produced in this field. The theory of autonomous economic administration at the hands of the producer-consumers themselves here takes a good stride forwards. In it, the problems are posed quite truthfully, although in our view Leichter fails to develop them to a satisfactory solution. He also declares that, before him, Maurice Bourguin had sought to place the communist economy on the foundation of accounting control on the basis of labour-time expended, and according to Leichter the latter's methods of thought corresponded almost exactly with his own. There were, in addition, various other Marxist economists who recognised the necessity for accounting control in a communist economy to be effected through labour-hours, although none of these adopted the means of production as a category in their method of accounting. For instance Varga , in Communism, Year 2, issue 9-10, published an article on this theme. Needless to say, because of the above-mentioned error the result is valueless.
It is however not only in the sphere of economic science that progress can be seen in the definition of the problem, but also in the sphere of the political factors. The economic experts consider communism only from the standpoint of production and distribution. The revolutionary proletariat, however, in reality persues other motives. The extent to which state communism is economically viable or not is for it fairly irrelevant. For this reason it too rejects it, because practice has proved that the productive apparatus can be taken into social ownership whilst still continuing to function as an exploitative apparatus. The Russian revolution, for instance, has indeed revealed the problem in this political light.
Were we to enquire as to what positive ideas and conceptions are today in circulation within the revolutionary proletariat concerning the new communist economy, then we would find that the idea of autonomous administration and management is fairly well developed, but that any closer indication as to how this is to be realised is lacking. Nevertheless everyone now believes that it is absolutely necessary to achieve clarity on these matters.
1. Paragraph ending : "And so this problem has become ... a fruit from the tree of forbidden knowledge, and this it has remained ... in spite of the fact that the Russian revolution has proved that it is precisely at this historical juncture that it must be solved".
We find here yet a further example of the view, universally current amongst socialists and communists at the time of the First World War and the wave of revolutions which followed in its wake, that the proletarian revolution would be fought to a relatively rapid conclusion primarily within the European arena and within the same historical era - in short, that the First World War and the wave of European revolutions which followed it would mark the end of capitalism and the dawn of communism as a result of the proletarian revolution.
Apart from the rather obvious fact that a significant element in this belief reflected the primarily emotively based euphoria then quite understandably prevalent amongst the participating revolutionary groups, it has since come to be understood by Marxists that the resilience of the capitalist system and its capacity to absorb intense contradictory upheavals and social antagonisms is and was immense, and that consequently a great deal of further capitalist 'development' would have to take place throughout the world, but particularly in its underdeveloped periphery, before conditions would be ripe for successful proletarian revolutions in any part of the world.return to text
2. R. Hilferding: Finance Capital, trans. T. Bottomore, p.234.return to text
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