RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA

THE REVOLT OF THE WORKERS AND THE PLAN OF THE INTELLECTUALS

1944


II. The Marxian Economic Categories, and the Class Struggle

Comrades Warde and Wright accuse "Johnson-Forest" of the heinous crime of identifying the capitalist economy with the "Soviet economy". They mean the economy of Stalinist Russia, which since 1943-44, the Stalinist theoreticians themselves have admitted operates according to the law of value. The admission was forced upon them by the Russian reality. Long before the admission was made, "Johnson-Forest" had demonstrated that the existence in Russia of the economic categories analyzed in Marx's CAPITAL was not a matter of coincidence.1 Rather it was due to a fundamental kinship between the Russian economy and capitalism.a In summarizing the facts and conclusions of the extensive study, "Johnson-Forest" used the concise original formula Marx created for analyzing specifically capitalistic production relations: C/V, that is to say, the domination of constant capital (or dead labor) over variable capital (or living labor).

For this, "Johnson-Forest" is taken to task. "In dealing with the C/V relation," write Comrades Warde and Wright, "one remains in the general sphere of productivity, equally applicable in this abstract form to any and all economic systems" (p. 14).2

I beg to differ. Far from being "an abstract form" equally applicable "to any and all economic systems," C/V ARE TWO OF THE ONLY THREE ORIGINAL CATEGORIES MARX CONTRIBUTED TO THE FIELD OF ECONOMICS TO DEFINE THE SPECIFICALLY CAPITALISTIC LAW OF MOVEMENT OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY.b

Reflect on this a moment. Marx transformed the entire science of political economy. From a study of things, it became an analysis of production relations. He wrote some 4,000 pages, or 2,000,000 words, in his analysis of the economic system of capitalism. And for all that, except in three instances, he could use the categories of classical political economy. For those three, however, he had to create new categories altogether. Now Comrades Warde and Wright take two of these three new categories and assert that they are applicable "to any and all societies".3

How is it possible for Marxists to go so completely off the class rails theoretically? The error is no accident. It never fails to appear among Marxist theoreticians who have failed to grasp the essence of Marxism for their specific epoch in strict relationship to the revolutionary activity of the masses. Each stage of capitalist production has posed only two alternatives: either the self-activity of the workers or the plan over the workers. A terrible trap awaits those who do not hold tight to this.

(1) Marx's CAPITAL and 'the Planners'

The theoretical axis of Marx's CAPITAL is the question of plan - the plan of the capitalist against the plan of free, associated workers. Chapter XIII in particular is unmistakable in its dialectical opposition between the despotic plan inherent in capital and the plan of the proletariat in the cooperative labor process.4 The cooperative form of the labor process unleashed a new productive power. The attempt to control this power within capitalistic confines is the basis of the despotic plan of capital. Marx affirms that there can no longer be any doubt about this: The workers' resistance has disclosed that what appeared ideally as plan was in practice the undisputed authority of the capitalist.

We say that today only the actual revolution of the proletariat in the process of production itself can save society. We have written and repeat: future generations will stand in amazement at the equivocal but relentless resistance that the Fourth International carries on against this. Yet it is one of the unique contributions to the analysis of human society that this very revolt, this and no other, saved society in the middle of the last century. Capital, in its inherent tendency to appropriate the 24 hours of the laborer's day for itself, had broken all bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day and night. Marx tells us that society itself was threatened. The revolt of the workers established the shortening of the working day. This revolt and its consequences led to the intensive development of machinery. Bourgeois scientists, as usual, claimed the legally limited working day as a result of their science, their intellect, their plan. The bourgeoisie claimed the invention of machinery as their contribution to human welfare and progress. Marx poured scorn on these Pharisees. The determination of what is a working day "presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labor, i.e., the working class" (CAPITAL, Volume I, p. 259).5 It was "the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class" (p. 337).6 The influence of the workers' revolt on the development of machinery should be studied in Volume I, pages 447-457.7 But even that revolt, because it did not overthrow capitalism, meant increased despotism.

Marx categorically asserts that since all labor under capitalism is forced labor, plan can be nothing but the organization of production under the domination of the machine. To try to bring order, therefore, into the anarchy of the market of a society based on the factory plan, could only mean subjecting society to "one single master".

On the other hand, the cooperative form of the labor process discloses the socialism imbedded in capitalism. The discipline, unity, cooperative action of the proletariat proves once and for all, 1) that its existence as a class presupposed that the fundamental types of all the productive forces of the future have been developed. What is now required is a new method of uniting them. And 2) that the self-development of the proletariat is the new method of uniting them. Without this no higher form of production is possible. Do Comrades Warde and Wright agree with this or not? In THE INVADING SOCIALIST SOCIETY we asked Germain that question.8 He did not answer.

Marx's point is that under capitalist production, on the other hand, the only way a rise in productivity can be achieved is the ever-greater domination of machines over living labor. "Johnson-Forest" did not discover this. That is what CAPITAL is about.

The consequence of the complete inversion in the relationship of machines to men, with its misery for labor and anarchy of the market, could not help but impress the intellectuals. They were ready with plans for everything except the reorganization of the productive process by labor itself. Consistently Marx posed the cooperative form of the labor process in opposition to these intellectual planners who could not comprehend this new power. Marx warned: not to see the plan inherent in the activity of the revolutionary proletariat must force one to pose an external factor to do the planning. He dismissed with utter contempt Proudhon's plan to do away with exchange. For the practical and violent actions of the proletariat, Marx wrote, Proudhon substitutes the "evacuating motion of his head".9

Proudhon was neither the first nor the last of the planners. Planning is not limited to idealists. The abstract materialist who views technological development outside of the class relationship also slips back into considering the capitalistic factors of production as mere factors of any social form of production. That is why Marx created new categories - constant and variable capital - to describe the manner in which machines and labor united under a capitalist economy. In opposition to all the planners - abstract materialist as well as idealist - Marx elaborated his analysis of capitalist production.

In Volume I of CAPITAL, the socialistic nature of the cooperative form of the labor process is held out in sharp contrast to the hierarchic structure of capitalist control. In Volume II Marx isolates the capitalist nation and analyzes it as unit:

"...we must not follow the manner copied by Proudhon from bourgeois economics, which looks upon this matter as though a society with a capitalist mode of production would lose its specific historical and economic characteristics by being taken as a unit. Not at all. We have in that case to deal with the aggregate capitalist" (CAPITAL, Volume II, p. 503).10

It is not "Johnson-Forest" who preach that piece of Proudhonism. It is the Fourth International.

The whole of Volume II is built not on individual, private capital, but on aggregate, national capital.c

In Volume III, Marx returns to the creative plan of the workers as the plan most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. So that the creative plan of the workers in opposition to the authoritarian plan of the capitalist runs like a red thread through all three volumes of CAPITAL.

Now Lenin in 1915 realized that there were aspects to CAPITAL that no Marxist, including himself, had understood for 50 years. We, in 1951, can see still further, for the problem posed theoretically by Marx in CAPITAL is the very one posed so forcefully in a concrete manner by our epoch. The Marxist theoretician who has failed to grasp this has invariably fallen into the same trap as the abstract materialist, and singled out some basic element of capitalist production as a mere technical problem. The inescapable next step is to spirit away the class content of the economic categories Marx created. This happened to the great revolutionary martyr, Rosa Luxemburg.

Where Proudhon poured forth all his wrath against the machine but had nothing to say about the modern workshop, that is, the factory, Comrade Luxemburg poured forth her wrath against the modern workshop but let the machine stand as if that could be divorced from its factory environment. Having divided what Marx had united, she followed the pattern as if she had been stage directed. She said that there is nothing specifically capitalistic in the categories C/V. These, she contended, were merely expressions of machine production in "any and all" societies. That is how she began. She ended by revising the Marxist theory of accumulation.11 The same, in different circumstances, was true of Bukharin, and precisely, I might add, on the questions of state capitalism and of the economy of the transition period. Both errors were inevitable. The crisis at each new stage of capitalist production needs some solution. There is always a radical bourgeois solution which, of course, only intensifies the crisis. Let the Marxist theoretician beware. He must find in the specific circumstances the basis for the specific revolutionary action of the masses. If he does not, he is drawn fatally toward the solution posed by the radical bourgeois.

By her theory of accumulation, Rosa Luxemburg anticipated the underconsumptionist theory of Keynes.12 By his theory of state capitalism and the economics of the transition period, Bukharin anticipated Stalin.13

It may interest Comrades Warde and Wright to learn that before the theory of bureaucratic collectivism could be fought politically, it had become necessary to destroy the Marxist pretensions of Joe Carter, the theoretician of bureaucratic collectivism in this country, precisely in this field.14 He, too, had taken exception to the Marxian categories, C/V.15

(2) Once Again, the Marxian Economic Categories

Comrades Warde and Wright quote Marx to the effect that laborers and means of production remain the basic factors of production, whatever be its social form. Without, however, specifying that they are inserting parenthetical expressions of their own, they make the following two additions:

1) Next to the word, laborers, Comradres Warde and Wright insert: "(or V)";

2) Next to the words, means of production, they insert: "(or C)".16

Now it is true that "V" and "C" are synonymous with laborers and means of production, but only if one is speaking of capitalist production. Because Marx's subject at that point of the question was not capitalist production, but any form of social production, he specifically excluded them. If, for reasons of their own, Comrades Warde and Wright felt compelled to include them, they should have told the reader why, and, in any case, specified that these were their own, not Marx's parenthetical additions.

Marx follows up the sentence about the union of the two factors of production with: "The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs from one another" (CAPITAL, Volume II, p. 44).17 There, Comrades Warde and Wright stop.

They have thus missed the whole point. It is only after this generalization that Marx specifies in what manner they united under capitalism. Of such great historical importance does Marx consider his analysis of the two factors of production, "as the productive mode of existence" of capital, the he refers the reader to its full analysis in Volume I. There, Marx had put his entire emphasis on the fact that he had to call both labor and means of production capital. In truth, he stresses, it is now the means of production that employ the laborer, not the laborer the means of production. To describe this special manner in which machines and labor united, Marx created the categories, C/V, constant and variable capital.

Comrades Warde and Wright stand this on its head. Instead of having labor and means of production unite in a special manner, they have C/V do so. They write: "It is the special manner in which C/V relationship is established that marks off capitalism from the transitional Soviet economy".18 So, first they "telescoped" machines and labor with C/V to make them synonymous. Now they have C/V establish itself in various ways and, since under capitalism, it manifests itself as S/V (the relation of surplus value to variable capital), they conclude: "In dealing with the S/V relation, we are dealing with one and only one economic epoch, that of capitalism".19

The last sentence is the one that finally stands on its feet. But far from proving that C/V is not such a capitalistic relation, it only leaves unanswered the question: how was S/V, that is, the degree of exploitation, extracted. The answer is C/V. As Engels explained it:

"By ascertaining the distinction between constant and variable capital he was enabled to trace the process of the formation of surplus value in all its details and thus to explain it, a feat none of his predecessors had accomplished" (Preface, CAPITAL, Volume II, p. 15).20

Had Marx not created the categories C/V, and had worked only with the categories S/V, the leap from the distributive sphere of utopian socialism into the production sphere of scientific socialism would have been impossible.

The very structure of CAPITAL tells us that S/V are derivatives of C/V, for Marx deals with the "Rate of Surplus Value" (Chapter IX) only after he has dealt with the "Constant Capital and Variable Capital" (Chapter VIII). Because, however, Comrades Warde and Wright had reduced the economic categories dealing with the exploitative extraction of labor under capitalism to mere factors of production of "any" form of production, they were oblivious to this and found instead, that they had to divide what Marx had united: the question of productivity and the question of class struggle.

Comrades Warde and Wright accuse "Johnson-Forest" of shifting the whole axis from the class struggle to the question of productivity. But what is the class struggle if it is not the never-ending struggle in the factory against what Marx called "the strictly regulating authority of the social mechanism of the labor process graduated into a complete hierarchy".21 How far removed is that from the academic play of words, "agents and principals"! The agent Marx has in mind is the agent of capital, that third force that stands in the way of labor united with means of production in a natural way, and not by the intervention of an outside force, the hierarchy capital creates, a relation of class. The hierarchy built up in the factory has little to do with the "ownership" of a "principal". It is something a great deal more basic, with a more solid foundation and deeper roots. The "agent" that Marx is analyzing is that tough bureaucracy which he compares always to a military hierarchy which has a stranglehold on the workers as they work cooperatively. This hierarchy is no simple "agent of a principal". It is the division of labor which makes of the workers mere automatons who must not move from their niche in the assembly line, while everyone from the "principal" to the "agent", that whole gang of foremen, disciplines the worker. This discipline forces from him ever-greater amounts of surplus value through more machines and through the greater intensity with which they are operated. Marx's point was that so long as there is a group of "special agents" in opposition to the direct producer, that is how long that "social mechanism", C/V, will continue to dominate. That is why Marx, from the very first draft of Capital, never tired of reiterating that:

"The mastery of the capitalist over the worker is in reality the mastery of dead over living labor" (ARCHIVES OF MARX-ENGELS, Vol. II (VII), Russian).22

Marx says the same thing in a thousand different ways throughout the three volumes of CAPITAL and THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE, because it is this which sums up the whole essence of capitalism. It is for this reason that Marx had not divided, as Comrades Warde and Wright had divided, the class struggle from the question of productivity. Far from being anything abstract, productivity is the most concrete, the most oppressive way of making workers sweat the more. That is precisely what Marx was saying with his formula C/V. Comrades Warde and Wright, however, who theoretically had stripped these categories of their class content, and practically spoke of some abstract "Soviet economy" instead of the specific class relations in the factory, saw, and can see, "nothing in common" between the Russian economy and capitalism.

(3) Fethishisms and Freely Associated Men

Comrades Warde and Wright stand everything on its head. Where Marx says the property relationship is nothing but a legal expression for the production relationship, they make the productive relationship nothing but an expression of the property form or relationship. Where Marx says that outside the production relationship, property is nothing but a juristic illusion, Comrades Warde and Wright say: "Productive relations of the economy transitional to socialism is contained in collectivized property".23 Where Marx says that if you understand bourgeois private property to be but a legal expression for class antagonisms, then "In this sense" (my emphasis, Dunayevskaya) "the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property", there Comrades Warde and Wright leave out the phrase, "In this sense", altogether, and, with a century of capitalist development behind them, equate the abolition of class antagonisms with the abolition of private property.

Marx, on the other hand, found, with less than two decades of development separating the writing of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO from the writing of the RULES of the First International, that he had more reason to emphasize the word, "monopolizer" than the word, "private". Thus the RULES proclaimed "the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the source of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence".24 And when a few years later the Paris Commune came out of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat, Marx, far from shouting, private property, private property, private property, warned against even "cooperative production" becoming a mere "sham and snare".25 The only way to prevent that, wrote Marx, in THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE, is to see that all control remains in the hands of "free and associated labor".26 All the emphasis now shifts to "free and associated labor" for the state is being smashed up and in its stead is to be a Commune. And, on the eve of October, Lenin puts his stress on the fact that the Commune was "not a state at all".27 Is Stalinist Russia with its ubiquitous army, with its ever-expanding prisons, forced labor camps "not a state at all"? Or in transition to that? Does its property form really contain "the productive relations of the economy transitional to socialism?".28

Even where Comrades Warde and Wright state a simple Marxist truth, it somehow gets transformed into its opposite. They state, for instance, that the real contradiction is between productive forces and production relations. Absolutely true. But where Marx includes the revolutionary proletariat as the greatest productive force, the productive forces with them are only the simple material means of production. No wonder that the "quest for universality" is to them "an ideological, not a material force". No wonder that, though they quote from Marx's POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY so often, they failed to grasp its essence: "But from the moment that all special development ceases, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to make itself felt".29

This was not "just" the young Marx of the early PHILOSOPHIC ESSAYS, nor "only" the Marx of POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY. Nor is it absent from the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO which Comrades Warde and Wright see as a manifesto for the abolition of private property in order to institute state property. The aim is better stated by Marx who writes that the abolition of class antagonisms means to have "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all".30 I put it bluntly. "Johnson-Forest" say that this free association is the new material force, the greatest of all productive forces. "Johnson-Forest" have asked the question often enough, and I ask it again: Do Comrades Warde and Wright accept this or is it for them idealism?

It is the mature Marx of CAPITAL who says that even for the simple task of getting rid of the fetishism of commodities, it is not enough to see labor as the source of value and "know" that class relations are involved. Thus we see that Marx from the first chapter of CAPITAL poses the question of the plan of freely associated laborers. This time it is posed in opposition to the fetishism of the commodity form.

What is needed is clear: it is to see labor not as substance, that is to say, thing, but as subject that is to say, an active, developing human being. Hence, where the political economists began their analysis of capitalism with labor as the source of value, Marx began CAPITAL with the concept of labor-power, the worker as creative subject. With this new concept of the worker as a human being, he could see what the political economists could not see - that under capitalism human relations assumed the form of material relations, social relations assumed the form of relations between things. Marx says that such relations between men must assume "the fantastic form of a relation between things" because that is, in truth, what they are. Under the perverse relationship of dead to living labor characteristic of capitalism, social relations, writes Marx, "really are material relations between persons and social relations between things".31 Indeed, the product of labor under capitalism can have no other form but that of the commodity. Tens of millions of workers in Russia, in their own way, know this. That is why the Stalinists are so anxious to have Chapter I of Volume I omitted from the study of CAPITAL.

The fetishism of commodities expresses on the market level what the C/V relationship expresses at the level of production - that the human being does not control the thing, but the thing controls the human being. It was only by beginning with this new universal concept of the worker as creative subject that Marx could pose the fundamental negations inherent in capitalist production: (a) the negation of the fetishism of commodities, and (b) the negation of the workers as part of the mechanism of capital. That is why, as has been shown above, Marx called the worker variable capital. For Marx the negation of both of these could take place only by the workers becoming freely associated. To substitute for this, nationalized property and "planned economy," is to turn Marx into nothing more than the vulgar materialist the bourgeoisie say he is.

It was because Marx had this general concept of the worker that he could have the more concrete concept of the socialized workers - freely associated men.

Marx's whole point is that the commodity-form only became general when it extended to the particular commodity, labor itself or rather the capacity to labor. To this end Marx created his third original economic category: labor power. In Volume II he reiterates once again:

"The peculiar characteristic is not that the commodity, labor power, is saleable, but that labor power appears in the shape of a commodity".32

Now read this:

"An economic system is first of all determined by its class structure... And capitalist society - by the sale of labor power to the capitalist class which owns the means of production".

It is by Comrade Weiss in his report to the National Convention.33

Where Marx made the commodity-form appearance of living labor the quintessence of capitalism, Comrade Weiss made the saleability that quintessence. Marx's point is that the form of appearance of living labor as mere labor power reveals the class structure of society and thus belies the equality of exchange. Comrade Weiss's point seems to be that the ownership determines the class structure. Comrade Weiss thus leaves the fetishism inherent in commodities where classical political economy had left it. Marx was most categoric on the matter. The only way that the fetishism can be stripped off is through the workers' revolt against the conditions which have produced it and thenceforward as freely-associated men planning their own lives. Should an intellectual ever lose sight of this type of plan in strict relationship to this revolt and this self-activity of the workers, Marx concluded, it would be impossible to advance from the position of the classical economists who, despite their discovery of labor as the source of value, "remained more or less prisoners of the world of illusion which they had dissolved critically".34

Theoretically there is no other road. That is why Comrade Weiss could not help but fall into the trap that always lies waiting for the Marxist theoretician who leaves out this central point of CAPITAL.

Author Footnotes

a Fundamental kinship does not mean identical twins. As State Capitalism and World Revolution puts it: "We have never said that the economy of the United States is the same as the economy of Russia. What we say is that, however great the differences, the fundamental laws of capitalism operate".

b Labor power - and with it the split of the category of labor into abstract labor and concrete labor - is the third original Marxian category. (We'll deal with this later). Commodity, value - and with it surplus value - Marx refined, but the categories themselves he took over from classical political economy. Characteristic of Marx was this insistence of his upon crediting classical political economy with a theory of surplus value it had never elaborated just because it was implicit in their labor theory of value.

c Anyone aware of the voluminous debates around Vol. II will count 1,000 and 1 before he abandons himself to the assertion that the society Marx dealt with was only an "abstraction".

Editor Footnotes

1 In the early 1940s, while the Johnson-Forest Tendency were in the Workers' Party (WP-USA), Raya Dunayevskaya undertook a detailed analysis of the economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The results of this analysis was published in An Analysis of the Russian Economy, (1942) and The Nature of the Russian Economy, (1946).

In the early 1940s the Stalinist regime published an article which revised the way that Marx's Capital was to be taught in the USSR. Raya Dunayevskaya translated the article and managed to get it published in the American Economic Review, (Vol. 34, No. 3, September 1944) under the title: 'Teaching of Economics in the Soviet Union'. Dunayevskaya's translation was accompanied by an article with her commentary 'A New Revision of Marxian Economics', published in the same issue.

Dunayevskaya's commentary elicited responses from: Paul A. Baran, 'New Trends in Russian Economic Thinking?', American Economic Review, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Dec., 1944), pp. 862-871 (Baran went on to collaborate in writing with Paul M. Sweezy in their classic underconsumptionist work Monopoly Capital: An essay on the American economic and social order, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1966); Oscar Lange, 'Marxian Economics in the Soviet Union', American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1945), pp. 127-133; Brooks Otis, 'The Communists and the Labor Theory of Value', American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1945), pp. 134-137, and; Leo Rogin, 'Marx and Engels on Distribution in a Socialist Society', American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1945), pp. 137-143. Dunayevskay's response to Baran, Lange and Rogin was published as 'Revision or Reaffirmation of Marxism?', American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Sep., 1945), pp. 660-664.

2 William F. Warde & John G. Wright "Marxist Method and Ideas and the Methods and Ideas of 'Johnson-Forest'", Discussion Bulletin No. 7, April 1951, Socialist Workers' Party: New York.

3 Ibid..

4 Karl Marx, "Chapter 13: Co-operation", of Capital: Volume I.

5 Karl Marx, "The Limits of the Working-Day", Capital: Volume I.

6 Karl Marx, "The Struggle for the Normal Working-Day", Capital: Volume I.

7 Karl Marx, "The Strife Between Workman and Machine", Capital: Volume I.

8 Germain was a pseudonym used by Ernest Mandel, one of the leading Marxist theorists in Europe from the time of the Second World War until his death in 1995.

C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace lee, The Invading Socialist Society, (1947).

9 Karl Marx letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 28th December 1846.

10 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume II, (1885). The quote is from the final paragraph of the section 'The Constant Capital in Both Departments' of Chapter 20.

11 See Raya Dunayevskaya, 'Luxemburg's Theory of Accumulation', (1946).

12 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, (1915). John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was one of the most influential bourgeois economists of the twentieth century. His critique of classical liberal economics - outlined most extensively in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, (1935) - provided the intellectual underpinnings for state intervention aimed at avoiding the recurrence of the economic crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

13 Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a leading Bolshevik, who worked with Lenin and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) in exile, before 1917. And was a leading theoretician in the Bolshevik party, before being purged by Stalin in 1938. The reference is to Bukharin's Economics of the Transition Period (1920). This work was not translated into English until 1979, Dunayevskaya often read the Bolshevik authors' works in their original Russian.

14 Joseph Carter was a pseudonym used by Joseph Friedman (1910-1970). Friedman joined the American Trotskyist movement after he was expelled from the youth wing of the Communist Party of America in 1929. Friedman was a key theorist of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, the main alternative to the orthodox Trotskyist "degenerated workers' state" understanding of the nature of the Soviet Union. He was instrumental in bringing about the Workers' Party (USA) split from the Socialist Workers' Party in 1940. Within the Workers' Party he was an advocate of the "bureaucratic collectivist" perspective of the majority, and he engaged in polemics against the "state capitalist" thesis of the Johnson-Forest minority within the Workers' Party (see e.g. Joseph Carter 'Bureaucratic Collectivism', (1941). C. L. R. James 'A Letter', (1942). Joseph Carter, 'The Reply', (1942)). By the time the Johnson-Forest Tendency left the Workers' Party and rejoined the Socialist Workers' Party, (1947), Friedman had left the Trotskyist movement completely.

15 C. L. R. James, 'Production for the Sake of Production', (1943). Raya Dunayevskaya, A Restatement of Some Fundamentals of Marxism Against Carter's Vulgarization', (March, 1944).

16 Warde & Wright, 'Marxist Method...', p. 15.

17 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume II, (1885). The quote is from the section 'II. Second Stage. Function of Productive Capital of Chapter I.

18 Warde & Wright, 'Marxist Method...', p. 14.

19 Ibid..

20 Frederick Engels, 'Preface' to Karl Marx, Capital: Volume II, (1885).

21 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, (1894). The quote is from Chapter LI: Distribution Relations and Production Relations.

22 Karl Marx, Results of the Direct Production Process, this text, which was not published in Marx's lifetime, is sometimes referred to as the "Sixth Chapter" of CAPITAL. The quote is from the section '2) Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus Value'. In the translation available on the Marxist Internet Archive this phrase is translated as:

"The rule of the capitalist over the worker is therefore the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living".

23 Warde & Wright, 'Marxist Method...'. p. 6.

24 The International Working Men's Association, 'General Rules, (1871).

25 Karl Marx, The Paris Commune', in The Civil War in France, (1871).

26 Ibid..

27 V. I. Lenin, 'What Should be the Name of Our Party?, section of The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution', (1917).

28 Warde & Wright, 'Marxist Method...'. p. 6.

29 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, (1847). The quote is from near the end of the section 'Division of Labour and Society' of Chapter II.

30 Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Chapter II: Proletarians and Communists", of The Communist Manifesto, (1848).

31 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, (1867). The quote is from the final section, 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof', of Chapter I.

32 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume II, (1885). The quote is from the section 'I. First Stage. M-C of Chapter I.

33 Murry Weiss, 'Report on Yugoslavia and Related Questions', SWP Discussion Bulletin, No. 6, January, 1951. Weiss, (1915-1981), became a Trotskyist while a teenager. He acted as an editor for SWP publications and served as a member of the SWP's National Committee for nearly 25 years.

34 Karl Marx Capital: Volume III, (1894). The quote is from Chapter 48: The Trinity Formula.