Marxism and Freedom

Author: (American) Dunya Yevsyakova, translated by Fu Xiaoping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-12-01
Features: Re-examining Marxist theory is one of the urgent tasks for understanding the contemporary situation. The theoretical research in this book will refresh all those interested in Marxism. Everyone committed to fighting for a free and humane society can benefit from Dunya Yevsyakova's work. "The New Century Universal Library" focuses on the popularization and dissemination of culture, selecting and collecting rare and valuable editions of Chinese and foreign classics in accordance with the principles of necessity, practicality, durability, and ease of preservation, under the guidance of experts from various disciplines at home and abroad. The entire library aims to reflect the general outline of the development of human culture and to select a basic reading list for modern households in the 21st century. This book is part of the "Foreign Culture Series" of "The New Century Universal Library." As the author herself admitted, the transformation of socialist countries was a significant impetus for her writing this book. In this book, Dunya Yevsyakova offers a new interpretation of Marxism, termed "New Humanism" or "Marxism with a Humanist Dimension." The revolutionary dialectics covered range from the 1905 Russian Revolution and its echoes in 1906, the 1911 Iranian Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and its global impact, the failed 1919 German Revolution, and other revolutions of that era. Some key parts of her analysis of post-Marxian development involve the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism, the major changes in Eastern Europe, and an analysis of the status, structure, and consciousness of the contemporary working class. From this perspective, she not only criticizes Khrushchev but also harshly criticizes Stalin and others. Official Marxism has repeatedly parroted a cliché that Marx overturned Hegel, bringing him back to his feet. As Lenin discovered during World War I, if one merely verbally endorses dialectics and endlessly claims that without Marx and Hegel, nothing is valuable, it turns Marx into a vulgar materialist. If this was just an attractive pie during World War I, today it has become a serious decline and degradation of all of Marx's doctrines. Russian communism is the ringleader of this overall historical decline. Most Hegelians in academia keep the "secret" of Hegel to themselves, thus closing off a path to studying Hegel. They have contributed to this decline. What else can one say?
1. Critique of Political Economy: The Limits of Rational Work
Marx begins with what people take for granted—the commodity. He explicitly points out its duality; it is both use value and exchange value. That is to say, it is not only an object, a useful item, but also value. If labor itself did not have this duality, the commodity as a product of labor would not possess such a nature. It is precisely because of the contradictory nature of labor that the commodity contains in its embryonic form all the contradictions of the capitalist system. This is the key to understanding all contradictions. Marx repeatedly pointed out in Capital that this is his most fundamental contribution to political economy. Without this, it is impossible to understand political economy at all. Marx further argues that exchange value is merely a quantitative relationship on the surface, for example, the time embodied in a certain amount of wheat exchanging with the time embodied in a certain amount of flax. The problem is, which kind of labor creates value? Value cannot be created by concrete labor. "Taking the tailor's labor as an example, in its material specificity as a special form of production activity, it produces clothes but not the exchange value of clothes. It produces the latter not as tailor's labor but as abstract general labor, and abstract general labor belongs to a social relationship, which is not created by the tailor sewing." This social organization, not created by the tailor, is the capitalist organization. In this organization, all labor, regardless of its specific nature, is measured by socially necessary labor time. It becomes a pile of abstract labor because the laborers themselves are also compensated according to value, that is to say, according to what is necessary to sustain their lives. "Thus, the relative value measured by labor time is destined to become the formula for modern wage slavery, rather than the revolutionary formula for the liberation of the proletariat, as Proudhon believed." It is precisely because of the duality of labor and the duality within the commodity that the only commodity, money, necessarily functions as the measure of value. Because capitalists purchase this commodity not to obtain another use value but to obtain money that can "buy everything." And the relationship between the commodity and money...