Socialist Labor Process Revisited

This paper is an attempt to analyze and contrast the model of the socialist labor process in Marx and Lenin. It demonstrates that Marx's theory of socialism is closely intertwined with his theory of liberation. For Marx, freedom is an act of self-emancipation, and socialism is the voluntary association of self-empowered producers. The liberation of the working class must rest on its own initiatives and creativity, and the socialist labor process is the negation of the capitalist labor process and workers' self-estrangement. I argue that, contrary to Marx's theory and practice, Lenin's theory of liberation and his model of the socialist labor process resulted in the continuation of workers' self-estrangement and not its negation after the October Revolution. The paper demonstrates that, it is in the philosophy of liberation that the roots of the differences between Marx and Lenin are to be sought. The Paris Commune, the Factory Committee Movement in the October Revolution, and the Workers' Council Movement during the 1979 Iranian Revolution are reviewed and analyzed as three distinct historical examples in support of my reading of the differences between Marx and Lenin.