Labor vouchers and radical democracy: is that the post-capitalist road to a human community?

A Critical Review of:

“LABOR-TIME ACCOUNTING AND THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE

Contributions to the critique of common misconceptions”

By David Adam

Published this year by Red & Black Books is a collection of essays by David Adam. The scope of his booklet is a defense of a transition from capitalism to communism as a political takeover of the bourgeois state by a proletarian power, which, during this transition, will self-manage its own labor.

In the first section, Adam sets out to defend the GIC’s text Fundamental Principles of Production and Distribution which describes a system of labor-time vouchers. To reassert the validity of such a system he directs his criticism to the writings of Gilles Dauvé who characterizes labor vouchers as a “wage in disguise.” For Adam this cannot be true since what is exchanged is “direct” labor-time that represents the concrete labor of each worker, as opposed to the exchange of abstract labor.

Two things need to be said.

The first is that the notion of direct exchange between labor-time (represented by a voucher) and the corresponding distribution of wealth from a social fund, maintains the same principle that regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is an exchange of equivalents. In Marx’s own words, “this equal right [to exchange one’s labor] is still perpetually burdened with a bourgeois limitation^[1].” Even if there is a direct and therefore a supposedly more precise swop between producers and products, this in no way rids the system of the law of commodity exchange^[2] in which human labor becomes reduced to a commensurable quantity vis-à-vis an equivalent proportion of product. Moreover, it is precisely the notion of equivalence that masks the capitalist character of production and exploitation, in which the metabolism between human industry and nature is mediated by such exchange.^[3]

Secondly, Adam fails to attack labor itself. It seems that in his view labor is a non-specific form of human activity –instead of a historically specific category that emerges as a form of domination in and of itself under the capitalist mode of production. In our view, it will not be enough to alter the way in which labor is measured, whether in money, vouchers or whatever else; it is rather that in an exit from capitalist society human activity itself will cease to be a social form of currency.

In the next section, David Adam trains his focus on Moishe Postone. His point of criticism is that Postone needlessly complicates Marx’s discussion of the “dual-nature-of-labor” in which the commodity-form imbues labor with both a use-value and an exchange-value. Adam correctly notices that Postone’s focus on the value-form precludes him from considering that labor under capitalist domination also produces real wealth. In Postone’s analysis, labor is indeed reduced purely to a source of value, a simple internal function of capital’s reproduction. Postone therefore fails to make a link between the concrete labor expended in production and abstract labor as a category of domination. Thus, the reading that Postone gives does not envision labor as an alienated power potentially in the hands of a revolutionary subject. On this, we can agree^[4]. But David Adam takes his critique too far in the other direction.

In order to explain abstract labor Adam focuses on what he considers to be the nature of abstraction, the essence of which, he finds in the “indifference” that labor -like any commodity- has towards every other type of labor in its relative form of value. That is to say that each concrete (physiological) expenditure of labor is in a relation of “indifference” towards all other forms of labor when taken as “human labor in general”^[5]. To support his discussion Adam quotes from Marx on the value-form.^[6] For Adam, what Marx calls the “abstractly general” takes on a “definite form” by which labor becomes socially mediated as value. This is correct. However, for Adam that “definite form” is money in so far as it expresses the equivalent of “labor in general.” But contrary to Adam’s analysis, it is clear to me that the “definite form” of the “abstractly general” is not its expression in money (which is merely a “token” of its price) –but the socially quantifiable dimension of labor-time. Thus, while Adam sees labor as a positive source of wealth in a trans-historical sense, he fails to understand labor itself as measure of value^[7]. And for this reason fails to see that labor, as a historically specific social form, i.e. labor time, should be attacked at all cost! It is no wonder that in Adam’s vision of communism people happily continue to exchange their labor-time for social wealth, the only difference being that this exchange would be expressed in a voucher and this voucher would express a commensurate quantity of concrete labor.

In the Third part of the book Adam argues that the transition to a communist society will take place foremost when the working class will appropriate the state’s coercive apparatus thereby wielding it for the purpose of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The assurance he gives us that this transition will happen successfully is that a politics of “radical democracy” will shape the state in favor of the working class who will administer its own universal interests. Adam proposes that this political view, which he supports by copious quotations from Marx’s book on the Paris Commune, the Civil War in France, is the only path towards communism.

Adam maintains a vision of revolution that is dubious at best. At its worst, it is a bourgeois conception of revolution as a violent insurrection in which an army occupies an enemy territory. We cannot say that we are close to his politics even in the slightest. There are more than a few reasons for this but two perhaps are fundamental. The first is his conception of the state. Adam implies that the state is an entity partially if not entirely separate from capitalism since he claims that the state can be conquered and steered towards the interests of the working class. In our view, the modern state emerged as part and parcel to the capitalist mode of production. The state’s very raison d’être is a violent defense of the logic by which capital proceeds, that is, the maintenance of an economic sphere that controls the accumulation of wealth based on exploitation.

It is a pernicious myth to suggest that a state apparatus, which employs violent means to maintain class divisions, could ever be something else in the hands of the workers, who, in Adam’s view, during a period of transition would use these violent means against the “enemy class”. Why, I wonder, would workers need a state? In the absence of class divisions, would there not also be the absence of an “enemy class”? What would such a “worker’s state” look like? I am reminded of A. Ciliga, who, while living in the Soviet Union under the Five Year Plan jested, “there are no classes, just categories.^[8]”

In defense of his idea of a worker’s rule Adam juxtaposes the dangers of the “authoritarian” dictatorship of a bourgeois state to a completely undefined idea of “radical democracy,” which would presumably represent the general interests of the working class. Supposedly, the working class once in power would subordinate the forces of the state to its own economic interests. He goes on to admit that “Any state requires some organization of armed force, legislation, justice, etc., and a “worker’s state” would be no exception.^[9]” For us the point of revolution is not to supplant the bourgeoisie with a class rule of the proletariat. What would change? The point is to abolish class society.

Connected with Adam’s optimism of a violent takeover of the state by a majority, is his enthusiasm for democracy. Instead of taking existing democracy as a point of departure, Adam prefers the magic formula of “direct democracy” or “radical democracy” to explain how the state will reflect the universal interests of the working class through “responsible delegates”. Yet beyond these formulas, Adam never explains what so called “true democracy” actually is.

We cannot accept how Adam speaks of democracy, as if it were a magic solution rained down from heaven.

The democratic claim, as Marx understood it in his critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, is the possible reconciliation of individual interests with the interests of all. In the political sphere, this rather abstract “unity-in-difference” is repeatedly posited as a self-evident and universal goal. But this spurious unity is not without its historical and material foundation. The “democratic-form,” –the “solution to the riddle of all constitutions”, as Marx once put it –finds its direct and concrete embodiment in the nation-state. Indeed the state, through its governing institutions, mediates the contradictions between individual freedom and universal equality: it subjects the sovereign rights of the individual to the universal rule of law. And it is precisely the rule of law that insures the continued functioning of the law of commodity exchange, i.e. the mediation of concrete labor through its abstractions in the exchange of equivalents; that is, the very bedrock of the wage-system.

For us, to speak of democracy in any real way is to recognize democracy as a historically specific set of propositions, a form of governance that finds its origins with the emergence of capitalism as an essential instrument that was constitutive of those same capitalist social relations; a form of governance that helped to give shape to the modern state. As such, democracy has functioned as a specialized form of social domination and a principle locus of class collaboration. And this, not in the least, as ideological cry for nationalism^[10].

Conclusion

To judge this book by its cover it would seem that it belongs somewhere in a pro-revolutionary Marxist tradition. However, in essence this is not true. David Adam maintains a vision that seems to draw no lessons from the history of the Communist Left. Nor for that matter does he seem to draw lessons from history at all.

It is clear that David Adam’s rejection of the “critique of value” by “communizers” leads him astray from a critique of labor in its historically specific form of labor-time. Adam’s reading of the value-form is not unconnected from his understanding of the tasks of the revolutionary subject, who for him, seems to confront the same world today as it did in 1840. Moreover, in every practical sense Adam embraces reformism when he claims “some democracy is better than none and that even a limited bourgeois democracy can point beyond itself just by allowing a degree of popular participation in politics.^[11]”

This book is a defense of the state, labor-time, and democracy. And as such defends interests that are alien to the working class.

One thing is clear, aside from disagreements we find with this text, that a fresh discussion on both the State and on Democracy are sorely needed.

S.Y.

July 2024

1. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme ↑

2. Described in Marx’s chapter on the Working Day, in Capital vol. 1 ↑

3. A more in depth exchange (2016) on the debate over “labor coupons” between Raul Victor and Kees can be found here ↑

4. A noteworthy text on this topic was written by MacIntosh in 2012 “Communization and the Abolition of the Value Form” ↑

5. Some explanation might be needed here. Adam’s use of the word “indifference” refers to a specific quality of abstraction as opposed to the concrete. If I take plumbing and bricklaying as concrete activities, it is easy to see that they confront one another as physiologically different, that is, they cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They are incommensurate activities. However, when plumbing and bricklaying are posited only as relative to activity in general then all those differences that make them incommensurable disappear, since activity in general potentially includes any particular type. The point being that when specific activities are abstracted from their physiological particularities, they can occupy the same mental space as one in the same, because activity in its general abstraction is indifferent to –or uninvolved in- all those physiological characteristics that otherwise make those activities concrete.

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6. “Within the value relation and the value expression included in it, the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real; but on the contrary the sensibly-concrete counts as mere form of appearance or definite form of realization of the abstractly general.”, Karl Marx The Value-Form, quoted in David Adam page 71 ↑

7. “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (notebook VII) ↑

8. On Siberia, Anton Ciliga ↑

9. David Adam, Labor-Time Accounting and the Withering Away of the State page 97 ↑

10. Two relevant articles on democracy by B. York A Democracy to Die For and Towards a Critique of the Democratic Form ↑

11. David Adam, Labor-Time Accounting and the Withering Away of the State, page 121 ↑