Thursday, September 05, 2013

From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International

Workers Vanguard No. 941
28 August 2009
TROTSKY
LENIN
Communism and Human Liberation
(Quote of the Week)

The goal of Marxism is to open the road to a rationally planned international division of labor based on material abundance unattainable under the anarchic and irrational capitalist profit system. Writing in 1847 in “Principles of Communism”—an alternative draft for the Communist Manifesto—Friedrich Engels emphasized that future communist society will liberate mankind from its subordination to the division of labor and thereby from the antithesis between mental and physical labor. The precondition to that is the forging of Marxist workers parties to fight for proletarian revolutions worldwide to rip the means of production out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters.
The common management of production cannot be effected by people as they are today, each one being assigned to a single branch of production, shackled to it, exploited by it, each having developed only one of his abilities at the cost of all the others and knowing only one branch, or only a branch of a branch of the total production. Even present-day industry finds less and less use for such people. Industry carried on in common and according to plan by the whole of society presupposes moreover people of all-round development, capable of surveying the entire system of production. Thus the division of labour making one man a peasant, another a shoemaker, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stockjobber, which has already been undermined by machines, will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to go through the whole system of production, it will enable them to pass from one branch of industry to another according to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will therefore free them from that one-sidedness which the present division of labour stamps on each one of them. Thus the communist organisation of society will give its members the chance of an all-round exercise of abilities that have received all-round development. With this, the various classes will necessarily disappear. Thus the communist organisation of society is, on the one hand, incompatible with the existence of classes and, on the other, the very establishment of this society furnishes the means to do away with these class differences.
—Friedrich Engels, “Principles of Communism” (1847)

************

Frederick Engels 1847

The Principles of Communism




Written: October-November 1847;
Source: Selected Works, Volume One, p. 81-97, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969;
First Published: 1914, Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party’s Vorwärts!;
Translated: Paul Sweezy;
Transcribed: Zodiac, MEA 1993; marxists.org 1999;
HTML Markup: Brian Baggins;
Proofed: and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005.




— 1 —
What is Communism?


Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.



— 2 —
What is the proletariat?


The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.[1]



— 3 —
Proletarians, then, have not always existed?


No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions.



— 4 —
How did the proletariat originate?


The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world.

This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.

Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metal industries.

Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done.

But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor.

This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of labor are performed in factories – and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. These are:

(i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.

(ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.



— 5 —
Under what conditions does this sale of the
labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place?


Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor.

But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum.

This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production.



— 6 —
What working classes were there before the industrial revolution?


The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.

In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States.

In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists.



— 7 —
In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?


The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.



— 8 —
In what way do proletarians differ from serfs?


The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor.

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product.

The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it.

The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.



— 9 —
In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen?


In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement. [2]



— 10 —
In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers?


The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, an instrument of production in his own possession – his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things.

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation.

The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.



— 11 —
What were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution and of the division of society into bourgeoisie and proletariat?


First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totally destroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based upon hand labor.

In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violently forced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of years – for example, India – were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way to a revolution.

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year’s time.

In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries.

It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class.

Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy.

The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.

The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society.

Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way.

Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.

Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital.

Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength.

Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution.



— 12 —
What were the further consequences of the industrial revolution?


Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expanding industrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs. With production thus facilitated, the free competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extreme forms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced than was needed.

As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisis broke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were without bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere.

After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose, and gradually business got better than ever.

But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis broke out, only to follow the same course as its predecessor.

Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.



— 13 —
What follows from these periodic commercial crises?


First:

That, though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition;

that, for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter;

that, so long as big industry remains on its present footing, it can be maintained only at the cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening the whole of civilization and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but also ruining large sections of the bourgeoisie;

hence, either that big industry must itself be given up, which is an absolute impossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

Second: That big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom.

It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.

We see with the greatest clarity:

(i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and

(ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.



— 14 —
What will this new social order have to be like?


Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.

It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.

Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.



— 15 —
Was not the abolition of private property possible at an earlier time?


No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations.

Private property has not always existed.

When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.

So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production – so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society’s productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development.

The agrarian Middle Ages give us the baron and the serf; the cities of the later Middle Ages show us the guildmaster and the journeyman and the day laborer; the 17th century has its manufacturing workers; the 19th has big factory owners and proletarians.

It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point where enough could be developed for all, and that private property has become a fetter and a barrier in relation to the further development of the forces of production.

Now, however, the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand to multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have been concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more and more falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easily extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, that they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary.



— 16 —
Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible?


It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but even harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes.

But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words.



— 17 —
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?


No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.



— 18 —
What will be the course of this revolution?


Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.

(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.

(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.

(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.

(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.

(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.

(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.

(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.

(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.

(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.

(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.

Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.



— 19 —
Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?


No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.

Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany.

It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace.

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.



— 20 —
What will be the consequences of the
ultimate disappearance of private property?


Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.

There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone.

The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs.

In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members.

The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development.

Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material.

People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others; they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a whole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful.

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.

A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development.

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.



— 21 —
What will be the influence of communist society on the family?


It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the “community of women”. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.



— 22 —
What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?


The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.[3]



— 23 —
What will be its attitude to existing religions?


All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance[4]



— 24 —
How do communists differ from socialists?


The so-called socialists are divided into three categories.


[ Reactionary Socialists: ]


The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end.

This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons:

(i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible.

(ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.

(iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians.


[ Bourgeois Socialists: ]


The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it.

To this end, some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society.

Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.


[ Democratic Socialists: ]


Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures the communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society.

These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat.

It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them – provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists.

It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences.



— 25 —
What is the attitude of the communists to the
other political parties of our time?


This attitude is different in the different countries.

In England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the communists still have a common interest with the various democratic parties, an interest which is all the greater the more closely the socialistic measures they champion approach the aims of the communists – that is, the more clearly and definitely they represent the interests of the proletariat and the more they depend on the proletariat for support. In England, for example, the working-class Chartists are infinitely closer to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals.

In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat – that is, with the agrarian National Reformers.

In Switzerland, the Radicals, though a very mixed party, are the only group with which the communists can co-operate, and, among these Radicals, the Vaudois and Genevese are the most advanced.

In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist

(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and

(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power.




Footnotes


The following footnotes are from the Chinese Edition of
Marx/Engels Selected Works
Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1977.
with editorial additions by marxists.org


First page of the ms
Introduction In 1847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League in the form of a catechism, one in June and the other in October. The latter, which is known as Principles of Communism, was first published in 1914. The earlier document Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith, was only found in 1968. It was first published in 1969 in Hamburg, together with four other documents pertaining to the first congress of the Communist League, in a booklet entitled Gründungs Dokumente des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847) (Founding Documents of the Communist League).

At the June 1847 Congress of the League of the Just, which was also the founding conference of the Communist League, it was decided to issue a draft “confession of faith” to be submitted for discussion to the sections of the League. The document which has now come to light is almost certainly this draft. Comparison of the two documents shows that Principles of Communism is a revised edition of this earlier draft. In Principles of Communism, Engels left three questions unanswered, in two cases with the notation “unchanged” (bleibt); this clearly refers to the answers provided in the earlier draft.

The new draft for the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the leading body of the Paris circle of the Communist League. The instructions were decided on after Engles’ sharp criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the “true socialist” Moses Hess, which was then rejected.

Still considering Principles of Communism as a preliminary draft, Engels expressed the view, in a letter to Marx dated November 23-24 1847, that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form and draw up a programme in the form of a manifesto.

“Think over the Confession of Faith a bit. I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto. As more or less history has got to be related in it, the form it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable. I am bringing what I have done here with me; it is in simple narrative form, but miserably worded, in fearful haste. ...”

At the second congress of the Communist League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engels defended the fundamental scientific principles of communism and were trusted with drafting a programme in the form of a manifesto of the Communist Party. In writing the manifesto the founders of Marxism made use of the propositions enunciated in Principles of Communism.

Engels uses the term Manufaktur, and its derivatives, which have been translated “manufacture”, “manufacturing”, etc., Engels used this word literally, to indicate production by hand, not factory production for which Engels uses “big industry”. Manufaktur differs from handicraft (guild production in mediaeval towns), in that the latter was carried out by independent artisans. Manufacktur is carried out by homeworkers working for merchant capitalists, or by groups of craftspeople working together in large workshops owned by capitalists. It is therefore a transitional mode of production, between guild (handicraft) and modern (capitalist) forms of production.

(Last paragraph paraphrased from the
Introduction by Pluto Press, London, 1971)

1. In their works written in later periods, Marx and Engels substituted the more accurate concepts of “sale of labour power”, “value of labour power” and “price of labour power” (first introduced by Marx) for “sale of labour”, “value of labour” and “price of labour”, as used here.

2. Engels left half a page blank here in the manuscript. The Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith, has the answer shown for the same question (Number 12).

3. Engels’ put “unchanged” here, referring to the answer in the June draft under No. 21 which is shown.

4. Similarly, this refers to the answer to Question 23 in the June draft.

5. The Chartists were the participants in the political movement of the British workers which lasted from the 1830s to the middle 1850s and had as its slogan the adoption of a People’s Charter, demanding universal franchise and a series of conditions guaranteeing voting rights for all workers. Lenin defined Chartism as the world’s “first broad, truly mass and politically organized proletarian revolutionary movement” (Collected Works, Eng. ed., Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 29, p. 309.) The decline of the Chartist movement was due to the strengthening of Britain’s industrial and commercial monopoly and the bribing of the upper stratum of the working class (“the labour aristocracy”) by the British bourgeoisie out of its super-profits. Both factors led to the strengthening of opportunist tendencies in this stratum as expressed, in particular, by the refusal of the trade union leaders to support Chartism.

6. Probably a references to the National Reform Association, founded during the 1840s by George H. Evans, with headquarters in New York City, which had for its motto, “Vote Yourself a Farm”.


Wednesday, September 04, 2013

One’s Own Private World


From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Out of some sense of just trying to make things connect, make sense of her life, make the jumble of thoughts she had about leaving him, about leaving Roy, about pulling up stakes and going out and starting over Laura Perkins began to keep a diary. Sure she had like many a lonely schoolgirl, or many a budding literary figure, kept little nonsense diaries filled with longings and daydreams when she was young, when she came of age, when the welter of the world’s burdens fell on her shoulders and she, shy and reticent by nature needed some way to express the confusions that made up her life about parents, boys, sex. Mostly, as she reflected now at another turning point, what to do, or what not to do about sex. She had that figured as well as any teenager had in this mega-information age, but what to do with her life was what ailed her.

No, now she needed to keep tabs on what she was going to do about Roy Bluff and his internal, infernal, eternal needs that seemed beyond her grasp now that he had become something in the music business. Also apparently had made it his life’s ambition to drink a river of whiskey, and acre of ganja (dope, marijuana for the unknowing), and taste every women with a skirt on (or maybe better off). She had put up with a lot, a lot of late and she knew she had to draw some line in the sand ever since that night that Roy, a head full of liquor and dope (cocaine, sister, snow you know), came within an inch of hitting her, maybe less, maybe less than an inch. Hence the diary to put those ten thousand conflicting thoughts together.

Make no mistake Roy Bluff, weaknesses and all, was her man, was her man ever since that first night they met at the Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers several years before. But the grind of the road, the grind of the care and protection of one Roy Bluff rising star, the grind of his excesses had taken a toll and Laura needed to get things straight in her mind, needed to take a break from Roy-ing. As she prepared to write at length in her new found diary she began to think back to those first days when love was in full bloom, or the prospect of love was in the air. And here is the gist of what she wrote as she explained it to me one night when she was “blue,”Roy Bluff blue. She kept referring to her diary as she did so but I think I got it about right:

Laura remembered back to the night that she and Roy had had their first fight as a starting point. Their first, uh, misunderstanding he called it. She more plain spoken and forthright called it a fight. It had not been long after the night she had told Roy in no uncertain terms that he was her man and so maybe he was trying to test her that night, trying to see what hold he held over her. A typical guy thing that has been going on since Adam and Eve, maybe before. It had been a tough night before a half-empty ballroom in Butte, Montana, half empty because even those hearty brethren would not fight five feet of snow swirling outside to hear a rising star. Catch him come spring one man quipped as he left to fight his own demon snows. That night whiskey-sated (maybe a little reefer too it was hard to avoid that mix in his head sometimes, or hers too when he introduced to her to dope) he, Roy Bluff, said he could have had his pick of whatever woman caught his fancy, caught his eye, or caught his momentary fashion interest.

Reason: Roy Bluff, a guy who had scrabbled and scrambled hard for a long time finally hit his stride, finally got the big pay-off for all those lonely half-filled rooms, all those small make-shift café stages, all those dank church basements replete with intermission homemade baked goods sold to help defray coffeehouse expenses, all those play louder than the drunks at midnight, when his brand of hip-hop-infused folk-rock became a craze around the turn of this century. Got his big ass break when Dave Beck, the big recording producer for Ducca Records, happened to need a midnight drink, maybe two, and heard him at the El Segundo Café in Long Beach and gave him a shot.

That night he went on and on about how being a record contract singer anything, a concert artist anything women started giving him their keys, or whatever else they had to offer back then, in order to say they had been with the rising music star Roy Bluff for one night, maybe two at the most he bragged since Roy was moving fast, as fast as a man could to catch the rising wave. Funny Roy Bluff is not his real name, although out of some male vanity, or something he failed to tell her that until a mutual musician friend of theirs gave her the skinny on it one night when she kept on hearing him call Roy Ron. His real name is Ronald Smith, but the performance stage, musical performance, ah, concert artist stage, and maybe the whole world, was filled to the brim with Smiths just when he was starting out and so one night earlier in his career, one night after a drunken fight brought on by some loudmouth cursing his music in a Memphis bar, the Be-Bop Club over off Beale, he “christened” himself with that manly name despite losing that fight, losing it badly to a smaller wiry man, So it wasn’t that he was agile, handsome or beautiful, if a man can be beautiful in this wicked old world that drew the women to him, as much as that he had a certain serious jut-jawed look borne from out in the prairies, a kind of cowboy look, that appealed to women, lots of women. Appealed to Laura for that matter.

Roy continued on that line about the women as he stated that he had run through the alphabet with such catches, blondes, brunettes, red-heads, especially a couple of wild sisters, college students, young professionals, slender, not so slender, yeah, the whole alphabet to fill his dance card and share booze, dope and whatever was at hand, sometimes, as to be expected, getting out of hand. Hell, he liked it, loved it for the while he was on edge city. And so it went as he puffed himself up in his own mind as least. That was not a good night as he ranted on unto exhaustion.

Later full of bad booze and sorrows Roy, trying to make up, said that was his act until she came along. Until she, Laura Perkins she, whom he called her “sweet angel,” called her sweet angel when he was having one of his better moments, had gotten under his skin, gotten the best of him. And wherever the winds would take them, or not take them, she would always get under his skin, that was just the way it was almost from the first, and he said he accepted that sometimes with a sly grin and sometimes with daggers in his eyes. She merely waved him off having heard that line of defense (and contrition) before, by him and others. They did, to keep the snows at bay they agreed, Laura laughed as she said this, to make love that night.


Roy used to drive her crazy when he got into his “maybes” mood, something that had been happening a lot more of late Usually he would bring it up to settle himself right at some pre-performance moment as he prepared his play-list in his head, and he was in a sly grin mood. As he set himself up for the day’s work, actually night’s work since he was giving a concert later that evening, he would start. The maybes being a little game that he, previously nothing but a love‘em and leave ‘em guy, played with himself trying to figure out just how, and the ways, that she, one Laura Perkins, got under his skin. And so the maybes it was.

The first maybe was that Laura was not judgmental, not in a public sense anyway, and not in any way that would let him know that she was. She had given him a lot of rope, had accepted his excuses, his frailties, and his rages against the night (as she tried like hell to temper them and made a point, a strong point to me of not wanting to discuss those efforts since this was about leaving him and she wanted to interject some sunnier days into what she had to say). Roy had laughed to himself as he thought about the circumstances under which they had met and he knew deep down that, publicly or privately, that judgmental was just not the way she was built.

Christ, as Roy described to her his thoughts back on that first night, he had just got into one of the ten thousand beefs that he got into when he was drinking back then. He was working his first major tour, major in those days being working steady and working in small concert halls and large ballrooms throughout the country (no more dank basements and crowded cafes, not for Ducca recording artist Roy Bluff). Some customer at the famous Hi-Lo Club in Yonkers who didn’t like his song selections told him about it, told him loudly.

Roy, having been drinking (and smoking a little reefer) all day, responded with a brawl, getting, as usual the worst of it, when Laura walked in with a girlfriend. Laura told him later that she did not really know who Roy was but her girlfriend, Patty Lyons, dear Patty, had heard his first album and was crazy to see him in person and so she had persuaded Laura to tag along. (The truth was that Laura had heard about him from a musician friend who had heard him at the Café Algiers in the Village a few weeks before and so had not so much tagged along as was intrigue by what she had heard about him. That musician friend, a woman, a woman whom Roy had slept with at it turned out, was the one who drew her attention to that jut-jawed cowboy aura and thus the intrigue.)

She had given Roy a look, an honest look, a look that said yeah I might take ride with that cowboy (laugh, cowboy from Portland up in Maine, Maine born and bred), an instant attraction look, and Roy, bloodied and all, gave one back, ditto on the attraction look. Later, just before he started his second set he asked the waitress what Laura was drinking, he then had a drink sent to her table, and she had refused it, saying that if he wanted to buy her a drink then he had better bring it to the table himself. (Funny she said since she was a struggling student over at Pace University in Tarrytown at the time she would normally accept when a guy, almost any guy who looked like he might not be a crack head or crackpot, offered to buy her a drink, or two.)

Yeah, yeah that was the start. After Roy had finished the set he did bring that drink over. She never asked him about the fight, about the cause of it, or even about how his wounds were feeling but rather stuff about his profession and the ordinary data of a first meeting. All he knew now was as close as he had come a few times afterward that was the last time he fought anybody for any reason, fought physically anyway. He would always bring that up when they were in fight mode as some virtue that would not have occurred except for her and by implication if she left him he would fall back on his wicked ways.


Then Roy moved on to a blow by blow description of what happened after that. He would start with maybe it was that at the beginning, not the beginning beginning, not that first night when after his set was finished he brought that drink over to her table (and to be sociable one for her girlfriend too) but after he had gotten used to her, had been to bed with her and she had said one night out of the blue, that he was her man (he said she had put it more elegantly than that but that was what she meant, and she agreed, agreed she put it more elegantly than that ) and that she would pack her suitcase if she was ever untrue to him. Those were the days when he was still grabbing whatever caught his eye (including that female musician friend), and what guy who was starting to get a little positive reputation in the music business wouldn’t grab what was grab-worthy. But after that he too silently and almost unconsciously took what they later called the “suitcase”pledge although he never told her that, never took her he took the pledge, it just kind of happened.

Then he went on to something that totally befuddled him maybe it was that Laura would refuse the little trinkets that men give women, hell, she wouldn’t even accept roses on her birthday. She only wanted a quiet moment alone with him away from the helter-skelter of his public life. One night when he and she had been smoking a little dope and she was “mellow” and ready to shed a little of her private thoughts she had told him about a man, an older man (older then being twenty-five she being eighteen at the time, but more that she was unworldly or really not ready to accept the wicked old world on harsher terms and so malleable) who had lavished her with gifts, money, some jewelry (later found to be some reject stuff) only to confess one night that he was married and as part of that package had beaten her up as he walked out the door after she had called the whole thing off. She said if what she and Roy had wasn’t good enough without trinkets then they were doomed anyway and she would not want reminders of that failure around.

Then the full-court press. Maybe it was as they grew closer, as they got a sense of each other without hollering and as his star started rising in the business after his first big album hits, that she tried to protect him from the jugglers and the clowns (her words), the grafters, grifters, drifters and con men (his words) who congregate around money as long as it is around. Better, she protected him against the night crawler critics and up- town intellectuals who gathered around him as they saw him as their evocation of the new wordsmith messiah and who were constantly waiting, maybe praying too if such types prayed, for him to branch out beyond the perimeters that they, yes, they had set for his work, for his words. Waiting to say “sell-out.”

Which led to maybe it was the soothing feeling he got when after raging against the blizzard monster night of the early years, those bleak years right after the turn of the new century, on stage, in his written down words, after hours in some forsaken hotel room town, nameless, nameless except its commonality with every other hotel room, east or west, she softly spoke and made sense of all the things that he raged against, the damn wars, the damn economy, hell, even his own struggling attempts to break-out of the music business mold and bring out stuff on his own label.

Maybe too it was the tough years, the years when he was still drinking high hard sweet dreams whiskey by the gallon, still smoking way to much reefer (and whatever else was available, everybody wanted to lay stuff from their own personal stash on him, some good, some bad, very bad) when she took more than her fair share of abuse, mental not physical, although one night, a night not long before he finally crashed big time and had to be hospitalized, he almost did so out of some hubristic rage, she waved him off when he tried to explain himself. She said “let by-gones be by-gones” and that ended the discussion.

Then out of the blue one Roy Bluff a bundle of walking contradictions, all tongue-tied and timid floored her with this- and she quoted it from memory-“And maybe, just maybe, it was that out in the awestruck thundering night, out in the hurling windstorms of human existence, out in the slashing muck-filled rains, out, he, didn’t know what out in, but out, she was, she just was… “ And as the tears slowly formed as she said it she floored me with this. She thought, thought hard and fast that maybe, just maybe, she would give her walking daddy, her jut-jawed cowboy walking daddy just one more chance.

Damn.


A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Nadezhda Krupskaya


 
Click on title to link to Nadezhda Krupskaya Internet Archive's copy of a section of her very important work, "Reminiscences Of Lenin". This is inside stuff and required reading for those who want to get an idea of Lenin as a developing revolutionary leader.

Markin comment:


No revolution can succeed without men and women of Krupskaya's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
We Shall Fight, We Shall Win - Paris, London, Athens, Dublin

Saturday, November 27, 2010

We Shall Fight, We Shall Win - Paris, London, Athens, Dublin

It is not everyday one gets the honour and privilege of being invited to do a Socialist Worker Student Society meeting on 'May 1968 - The Fire Last Time' amidst an actual student occupation (see also here), still less one amidst one of the largest and most significant waves of student revolt to hit University and College campuses in Britain in my living memory - see here and here. Admittedly, it would have been nice to have had more than 10 minutes notice before being asked to do the aforementioned meeting - and it would have been a bonus if the meeting had then happened at the time agreed (10pm) rather than er, just after midnight - but I guess this is the glorious messiness of real life struggle - and if twenty or so students after about 30 hours of maintaining an occupation are still up for a discussion about revolutionary politics from about half twelve until half one in the morning then who am I to refuse them such an opportunity?

Whether the student revolt in Britain has had its 'Grosvenor Square' moment - when 80,000 students protesting against the Vietnam War in March 1968 clashed with riot police outside the US Embassy yet or not is debatable, but certainly the demonstration of 50,000 students which ended with the trashing of the Tory HQ at Millbank - followed up with Day X's display of civil disobedience and mass direct action in which students were charged by the London Met's mounted police division has certainly brought student protest to the attention of the mass media - and their revolutionary spirit has acted as a beacon of inspiration and hope to millions of working people up and down the country in the face of the Tory onslaught of cuts and attacks. Britain is now well and truly part of the wave of resistance to austerity that has already been witnessed across the rest of Europe.

Theoretically, according to bourgeois social science, at least in its postmodern forms - the student revolt just shouldn't be happening. The marketisation and commodification of higher education that tuition fees represents should mean that students have lost any sense of collective identity and are now just individual consumers, buying a 'product' from The University Plc. The revolt shows students aren't prepared to just accept commodification passively, but are active agents of their own destiny - capable of raising the argument that 'another education and another world is possible'.

Just as the student revolt in 1968 detonated a wave of working class struggle, so the student revolt in Britain today is already making a political impact - what with the National Union of Teachers and the UCU lecturers union balloting for strike action in the new year, and public sector trade union leaders are making increasingly militant and fiery speeches against the government at a mushrooming number of anti-cuts meetings. Even Labour leader Ed Miliband is now, wait for it, 'listening' to the students sympathetically and, get this, is ''tempted' to maybe, possibly, even one day actually support them. The students are set to walk about again next Tuesday and again on the day the proposed massacre of higher education is voted on in Parliament. The task for socialists is to make sure that the students are not now left to fight on alone - which would see their struggle rise heroically and spectacularly like a rocket but then come down miserably like a little stick - but that when they next walk out, increasing numbers of workers are encouraged to also walk out, and stand and fight alongside the students - and ever growing numbers of networks of solidarity between students and workers are built. Building such networks would not only begin to encourage the kind of mass strike action British society so desperately needs if the Con-Dem led capitalist juggernaut is to be stopped in its tracks and British society shifted to the left politically - but such direct action by workers at the point of production can also begin to paralyse and undermine capital itself. As the great revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg put it - 'where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be

posted by Snowball @ 2:19 PM

2 Comments:
At 4:34 PM, Grim and Dim said...
The March 1968 demo was 20,000 at most, and not all of us were students. The big demo (up to 100,000) was in October, and didn't go to Grosvenor Square (just a few Maoist nutters and Mick Jagger went there).
This is not pedantry - well it is pedantry but it's also making the point that some recent demos have been considerably bigger than anything in the annus mirabilis of 1968. Grounds for hope.


At 2:43 PM, Snowball said...
Cheers for the clarification - grounds for hope indeed comrade...
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-On two essays by Trotsky:An introduction by Ken Tarbuck

 
 
Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography, Cathy Porter, Virago 1980. This is particularly interesting on the trade union debate of 1920/21.

Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, W.Bruce Lincoln, Simon & Schuster 1989. Lincoln is by no means a supporter of the Bolshevik revolution yet his scholarly recital of the horrors of this conflict is genuinely moving. If the Bolsheviks do not emerge as saints, their opponents appear as grotesque butchers.

Nearly all of these works have excellent bibliographies.


I should also mention two interesting videos now made available by the opening of Soviet archives.

The Russian Civil War and Railways of Russia. Both are available from W.H. Smith (exclusively). Both vividly portray the material losses inflicted upon Russia by the civil war. Perhaps they bring home more graphically the human and material damage of the conflict than a reading of books can.
 
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Marxist C.L.R.James  On The Russian Question-1941


Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
C.L.R. James on the Russian Question
Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other C.L.R. James texts. Standard American spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication. We have supplied a subheading (1. Introduction) where this was not present in Scott’s version, but where something was obviously required.

Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James (writing as “J.R. Johnson”) to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States.


Resolution on the Russian Question
1. Introduction

For many years the fact that in Russia the means of production were state property was sufficient for the Fourth International to characterize the working class as ruling class and the Russian state as a workers state.

Today, however, 1941, side by side with a tremendous but declining rate of industrial expansion in Russia, the working class has been reduced to a state of pauperization, slavery, and degradation unequaled in modern Europe. The real wages of the workers are approximately one-half of what they were in 1913. A bureaucrat holds all economic and political power. To continue to call the Russian workers the ruling class is to make a statement without meaning.

Yet Trotsky never wavered from this position. It led him, the direct successor of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, into calling upon the workers of Russia to be the best soldiers in an army that was, according to his own statement, acting as the tool of an imperialist power. The Workers Party, in refusing to accept this position, and in calling upon the Russian workers in this war to turn the guns in the opposite direction, made a profound break not with all that we have thought on the Russian question, but with something far more important, with how we have thought about it. So profound a difference must convince the party that what we face is not a rehash or manipulation of our previous ideas but a fundamental revaluation of the method and equipment with which we previously approached the question. Unless this is absolutely and thoroughly done, the party will live in a state of continual uncertainty, confusion, and recurrent conflict about our fundamental aims. This explains the scope and method of this resolution.

2. The Marxian Theory of Society

Marx rests his theory of society upon the technical level of the instruments of production under given historical circumstances.

“Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce, and consumption, and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, the corresponding civil society.”

These are Marx’s own words. The purely historical, i.e., the chronological analysis of society, places property first. The logical method of Marx examines the actual historical relations always as an expression of the logical analysis, which begins with the technical level of the instruments of production. This determines the relation of the people to each other and the division into classes, which then determine the relation of the classes to the instruments of production and the results of labor. These last, usually expressed in laws, are the relations of property, which, from his earliest writings, Marx always defined as an expression of the mode of production. This is the strict Marxian terminology and the strict Marxian sequence, as can be seen from a casual reading of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto.

Applying this method to Russia we find that in 1941 the technical level of production, unsupported by one or more powerful socialist states, compels a social relation of exploited wage-laborers and appropriating capitalists. In order to achieve the bourgeois- democratic revolution in 1917 the proletariat was compelled to seize power. But this seizure of political power was due chiefly to the incapacity of the ruling class and the conjunctural historical circumstances. The working class lacked the maturity in production of a proletariat which was a majority of the population and had been trained and disciplined by large-scale capitalism. All political power rests in the last analysis upon and is determined by production relations. This was the reason for the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that without the proletarian revolution on a worldwide scale, the Russian proletariat was doomed to sink back to the position of wage-slaves, i.e. the restoration of Russia to capitalism. This is exactly what has happened. The whole society has turned itself slowly over and once more the working class has been pushed back into that submissive role in production which is determined by the low technical level of the productive forces judged on a national scale. The bureaucracy is completely master in the productive process that is the bases of its political power.

No more convincing exposition of Marx’s theory of a society resting on the technical level of production can be wished for.

3. The Theory of Capitalist Society

Contrary to expectation, the role of managers of production has not been seized by members of the old ruling class. The definition of the class which is today master of Russia must rest on an analysis of the mode of production which now prevails. The historical conditions of capitalist production are as follows:

(1) the existence of the world market,
(2) the existence of a class of “nominally free” wage-laborers,
(3) the ownership or monopoly of the means of production by a class which rules production and disposes of the property,
(4) production by private persons for a free and uncertain market.

Such a society produces a certain type of product, the capitalist commodity, which has its own special commodity characteristics. The labor contained in it has the double aspect of both use-value and exchange-value. To use Marx’s own words, “all understanding of the facts depends upon this,” and any analysis of Russia which describes it as a society “unforeseen” by Marxists but yet omits a consideration of this and other aspects of the law of value is so inadequate as to be not only misleading but valueless. The law of value can be rejected. It cannot be ignored or allowed to go by default in a Marxist party.

The Marxian law of value, however, is merely an expression of a certain type of society. This society, contrary to all other societies we have known and expect to know, makes the extraction of surplus labor (called in this instance surplus value) the main aim of production. For Marx “the capitalist mode of production (is) essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor.” This is crucial.

“It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus value – the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of the this production of surplus value – is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for capitalists. This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence.”

This is the main aim of production in Stalinist society, a capitalist society. All other societies produced for consumption and enjoyment.

All previous societies produced surplus labor, but except in isolated instances, wants or use-values were the main purpose of production. It is only in a society where labor is free of all contact with the means of production, within the environment of the world market, that the contradiction between production for use and for surplus value determines the whole society. Marx speaks of the difference between the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity as the antithesis of the commodity. The contradictions and antagonisms of capitalistic society are merely embodiments of this antithesis, which is to be resolved in the synthesis of socialism, i.e., by the reuniting of the man of labor and the means of labor, and the abolition of the capitalist world market. International socialist society will produce surplus labor but it once more has as its sole aim the production of use-values.

Today this antithesis between production for use and production for surplus labor can be seen nowhere so clearly as in Stalinist Russia. And that stamps this society as being of the same inner essence as capitalism. Up to 1928, the use-value of the commodity predominated to the limited extent that this was possible in a backward society in the environment of the world market. The industrial proletariat in that year lived, at the very least, up to the standard of 1913. The first Five Year Plan predicted doubling of the subsistence of the working class by 1932.

But from 1929 a decisive change began. The lowering of agricultural prices in the world market threw the Russian plan into chaos. The competition on the world market, in its modern form of imperialist war, compelled the bureaucracy to reorganize the plan to meet the threat of Japan, at heavy cost; and with the coming to power of Hitler and his announcement that the main enemy was Russia, the change in Stalinist production and in Stalinist society became more uncontrollable. The bureaucracy was compelled to continue the process of industrialization at feverish speed. Under such circumstances, in a backward country, with an immature working class, the main aim of production inevitably must become the production of surplus labor, for the sake of more production, for the sake of still more production.

This economic necessity compelled an enormous increase in the repressive apparatus, the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy by concrete privileges, honor, and authority, and the destruction of persons and ideology connected with the October Revolution. The necessity of autarchy, attempting to produce all that Russia needed within its own border, resulted in further disruption of production, and the mounting indices of production as a consequence represented large uneconomic investment, thus increasing the strain upon the workers. Stakhanovism was a perfect expression of the qualitative change in Russian society.

The climax came in 1936-1937 with the partial breakdown of the economy as exemplified by the charges of Trotskyite sabotage in every branch of production. In the historical circumstances of Russia, the antithesis between production of surplus value and use-value has reached a stage unknown in other capitalist economies. The state of world economy today precludes any thought of a cessation of this mode of production. The economic power of the bureaucracy precludes that this can be done otherwise than at the continued and growing expense of the working class. The system has developed in every essential of production into a capitalist system, and the parasitic bureaucracy has been transformed into an exploiting capitalist class. Henceforward its law of motion must be the same as that of other capitalist societies. An approximate date for the completion of the process is 1936, the year of the Stalinist constitution.

4. The Necessary Movement of Capital and Its Forms of Manifestation

That the laws inherent in capitalist production in Russia manifest themselves in unusual forms is obvious. But their unusualness in Russia is not unique. It is exceeded by the capitalism which Marx himself invented. To deduce the laws of capitalist production, Marx constructed a capitalism such as never existed and never could exist. In it labor, like every other commodity, was always sold at its value, the capitalist found on the market whatever he wished, consumption was always equated to production, fluctuations of prices there were none, no single capitalist enterprise advanced in front of the other in organic composition, unemployment and crisis were absent, all was in complete equilibrium; no capitalist could construct for himself a more ideal haven of peaceful accumulation. Yet this is the capitalism from which Marx drew his laws of motion, and even this capitalism Marx proved was bound to collapse. From this abstraction, which was the frame in which he worked in Volumes I and II, Marx then turned and in Volume III showed the devastating manifestation of the law of motion in capitalist society as it actually was. Thus the very method on which Capital was constructed is a warning to all hasty and ill-based attempts to baptize societies as never before seen, from a consideration of their external forms of manifestation, and not from an analysis of their laws of motion.

Marx dealt extensively with the crisis of over-production, but in 1886 Engels, in a preface to Capital, calmly stated that the decennial cycle of prosperity, overproduction, and crises, seemed to have come to an end, leaving a permanent depression. A few years later he wrote that perhaps this prolonged stagnation was only the prelude to a general world wide crisis, but he was not certain. That the continued absence of the cycle of prosperity, overproduction and crisis invalidated the law of motion of capitalist society was obviously far from his thought. For Marx crisis was an expression of the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society. The crisis would express itself in different forms but the contradictions of the capital relations would continue.

The “free and uncertain” market of “pure” capitalism has been abolished before now in a national society. Lenin in 1917, before the revolution, stated that the immense majority of the capitalists in Russia were not producing for the market at all but for the state, which advanced them money. It was not commodity production for a free and uncertain market: it was not “pure” capitalism (the quotes are his own) but “a special kind of national economy.” In Germany today that process Lenin described is immensely more advanced than it was in Russia. It would be a perversion to assert that production in Germany is for a free and open market. It would be equally disastrous to see in the abolition of the traditionally free capitalist market, a basic change in the society. The law of motion is not thereby altered. To the contrary, it is the nature of the law of motion to abolish the free market. In Russia the commodity is no longer the product of private individuals. But it is, however, the law of capitalist production to abolish the private character of capital.

That Marx expected the revolution to occur before this was completed alters not one thing in his analysis of the movement of the society. The joint-stock company is “the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production.” The concentration of all available capital in the hands of the Bank of England “does away with the private character of capital and implies in itself, to that extent, the abolition of capital.” The climax of this process is the ownership of all capital in the hands of the State. The bourgeoisie continues to draw dividends, but the drawing of dividends does not make a system capitalist. The dividends can be drawn from a Workers’ State. It is the fact that the state acts as the entrepreneur and exploits the workers that is decisive. “Interest-bearing capitals represents capital as ownership compared to capital a ‘function’.” And, still more clear, “The investing capitalist derives his claim to profits of enterprise and consequently the profit of enterprise itself not from his ownership of capital, but from its production function as distinguished from its form, in which it is only inert property.” Marx in scores of other places pointed out the distinction between production and property. It is one of his great contributions to economic theory.

But all this type of argument shows not only a complete incapacity to understand Russia, but a narrowness of view which will prevent any clear understanding of further developments in traditional capitalist society. Marx’s definitions are both precise and sweeping. In all previous societies, land was the main factor in production. In capitalist society the main factor is accumulated labor, within the environment of the world market. If the laborer controls the accumulated labor we have socialism. Wherever it controls him we have capitalism. “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of Capital.” Marx repeatedly wrote these definitions. The most famous of them, just as this last, applies literally to Stalinist society:

“Capital is a definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production converted into capital and means of production by themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism.”

Such a society, whatever differences it may and must develop from classical capitalism, will move in a certain direction and in a certain way. That is the heart of the problem.

5. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

If the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is the pivot of the Marxian political economy, its second distinctive character is, on Marx’s own evaluation, his method of analyzing surplus value, i. e. surplus labor in the modern historical condition. This he treats as an entity, and his deliberate refusal in theoretical analysis to take into consideration its subdivisions into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, taxes, etc. is a fundamental of his system. It would be presumptuous to attempt to state it in words other than his own.

“With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, 8:1, so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8 is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production . . . With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labor incorporated in it also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.”

The disproportion between constant and variable capital increases and, ultimately, such will be the strain on the worker to produce the necessary surplus that, as Marx says in one place, at a certain stage, if the laborer worked all 24 hours a day, and the capitalist took all the labor instead of merely the surplus over subsistence, it would still not be sufficient. Here in the process of production, and not in the process of circulation (the market) lies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production. This is the basis of Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit.

“The fact that this analysis is made independently of the subdivisions of profit, which fall to the share of different categories of persons, shows in itself that this law, in its general workings, is independent of those subdivisions and of the mutual relations of the resulting categories of profit. The profit to which we are here referring is but another name for surplus value itself, which is merely observed in relation to the variable capital from which it arises. The fall in the rate of profit therefore expresses the falling relation of surplus value itself to the total capital, and is for this reason independent of any division of this profit among various participants.”

Here is the key to the understanding of the growing crisis in Russia. Part of the annual product goes for necessary wages. Part of it goes to replace the constant capital used up. If as has been estimated the means of production have to be renewed every ten years, then the workers have to produce, yearly, beside their wages, one-tenth of a constantly increasing capital. The rest is the surplus labor. As the mass of capital increases, the mass of surplus labor becomes proportionally less and less. The worker, with no control over the process of production, receives less and less of the product. At a certain stage, in order to make the decreasing mass of surplus value approximately adequate to its task, the capitalist has no alternative but to lower the wages and increase the exploitation of the worker. The worker resists. The capitalist class is then compelled to enslave him. Ultimately, says Engels, the worker will be driven to the level of a Chinese coolie. This is the inevitable enslavement of the worker which Marx prophesies so persistently.

If today when we see the enslavement we begin to see it in a worker no longer “free,” but attached to the factory as the slave or the serf was attached to the land, then the Party will have definitely left the road of Marxism for the most vicious and vulgar empiricism. It is on this movement in the direct process of production that is based the theoretical certainty of the collapse of capitalist production. The competition on the world market, the enormous expenses of an exploiting society, with its military apparatus, bureaucracy, clergy, police, etc., the decreasing productivity of the individual laborer, the millions who do work which can only be called work “under a miserable mode of production,” all this compels such a society to make surplus labor and surplus labor alone, the compelling force of production.

Thus at a certain stage, as in Germany in 1932, the magnificent productive apparatus stands crippled. Such is the size of the means of production and the organic composition of capital, that the enormous quantity of surplus labor necessary for the progressive functioning of a capitalist society cannot be produced. The “functioning capital” available to make this productive apparatus work is too little. It appears to be a plethora of capital, but Marx says this “so-called plethora of capital” is always a capital whose mass does not atone for the fall in the rate of profit. Capitalist production comes to a standstill, first and foremost because the system demands that surplus labor be produced, and sufficient surplus labor cannot be produced. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value has reached its apotheosis. The troubles of the market are merely the reverse side, the result of the contradictions in production.

An identical process of production in Russia moves inevitably to a similar result. The laws of capitalist production, always immanent in an isolated Workers’ State and more so in a backward economy, have been forced into action, in the environment of the world market. The organic composition of capital in Russia mounts with the growth of industrialization. Year by year, however, the mass of surplus labor must grow proportionally less and less. Marx worked out his final theory of accumulation on the basis of the total social capital in the country and denied that this altered the economic and historical characteristics of the society. The expenses of an exploiting class within the environment of the world market, the privileges necessary to differentiate the classes, a vast military apparatus, increasing degradation and slavery of the worker, the lowering of his individual productivity at a stage when it needs to be increased, all these features of Russia are rooted in the capital-wage labor relation and the world-market environment. The advantages that Russia alone enjoyed in 1928, centralization of the means of production, capacity to plan, have today been swamped by the disadvantages of the quest for surplus value.

To its traditionally capitalist troubles the bureaucracy adds one of its own, an excessive waste due to the bureaucratic administration. But Stalin today, like Hitler, contends essentially with the falling relation of the mass of surplus value to the total social capital. That is the economic basis of the constantly growing persecution of the workers by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is no worse than any other ruling class. It behaves as it does because it must. This is the law of motion of Stalinist society. Ultimately the productive apparatus of Russia will stand as impotent as Germany’s in 1932, and for the same reason, its incapacity to produce the necessary surplus labor which is the compelling motive of production for any modern class society. The struggle in Russia is not over consumption, as Trotsky thought, but over production, and the Stalinist state is organized nine-tenths, not for stealing, but for production. The Party must make this clear in all its propaganda and agitation and correct this serious error.

This is the reply to all who see some new type of society superseding capitalism and solving its contradictions. All of these theories are distinguished by their absence of economic analysis, or by the flimsiness of their assumptions. If the Party should adopt the same empirical method in its own analysis, it will completely emasculate its own capacity to answer and destroy the arguments of those who herald the managerial society, the “new” Fascist order, the garrison State, etc. This theory is the heritage that Marx left for the proletarian movement. And it is here that we must be clear or always be in confusion.

6. The Theory of Imperialism

Modern imperialism is a quest for markets in an attempt to check the always declining relation of surplus value to the total social capital. So that Lenin, following Marx, bases his theory of imperialism on production and not on circulation. The circulation process of capital, however, is important for one’s understanding of a particular manifestation of imperialism. In Volume II, Marx repeats in almost every chapter that the capitalist has to set aside some capital year after year until it is large enough for the purpose of reorganizing this enterprise on the necessary scale. Individual capitals may accumulate quickly. What is important is the total accumulation in regard to the social capital as a whole. This mass of surplus labor, embodied in money capital and waiting until it is large enough, forms a substantial part of the capital in the hands of banks, and as capitalist production develops it becomes larger and larger. This money-capital also increases as capital is withdrawn from the production of commodities through its incapacity to produce profits. This is the money-capital of which Lenin writes.

But all imperialism was not necessarily of the particular type Lenin analyzed. Japan and Russia were not, as he said, “modern, up-to-date finance-capitals,” but as he explained, their military power, their domination of colonial countries, their plunder of China, etc., made them imperialist. By 1914 imperialism was therefore a struggle for all or any kind of territory, for the sake of the territory and in order to prevent rivals from getting hold of it. This was done to control raw materials, to export capital, to expand the commodity-market, for strategic purposes, in fact for any purpose which would contribute to the increase of surplus value. That is the obvious economic basis of Stalinist imperialism. Like Hitlerism, it will seize fixed capital or agrarian territory, tin-mines or strategic ports and transport manpower. Within its own borders the bureaucracy mercilessly exploits the subject nationalities. Should it emerge victorious in the coming war, it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same reason. Trotsky’s idea that the bureaucracy seeks foreign territory merely to expand its power, prestige, and revenues lays the emphasis on the consumption of the bureaucracy. That is false. The “greed” of the capitalist class is a result of the process of production, and the greed of the bureaucracy has the same roots. With a productivity of labor as slow as it is in Russia, and the overhead expenses of an exploiting society within the environment of the world market as large as they are, equal to that of the most highly developed capitalist states, it is not possible for the bureaucracy to escape the same fundamental problems of production as an advanced capitalist state, and to move towards the same attempts at solution.

7. Fascism

If the relations of production in Russia are capitalist then the state is Fascist. Fascism is a mass petty-bourgeois movement, but the Fascist state is not a mass petty-bourgeois state. It is the political reflection of the drive towards complete centralization of production which distinguishes all national economies today.

Finance capital and interlocking directorates are a result of the growing concentration of capital and the increasing socialization of production. The contradiction between this socialization and the appropriation of the product for the benefit of a few, drives the few into a position where to survive they must act as one, against the workers and against the external bourgeoisie.

The Fascist state has deeper economic roots than we have hitherto acknowledged. In this respect the development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. In 1878 Engels (and Marx approved) made a statement of the most profound social significance for the modern world: that the growing socialization of production would compel the capitalists to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far as that was possible within the framework of capitalist relations. How far is that possible? Today life and Marx’s Capital teach us the probable extent and limits of this process. Marx treated in Volume I the direct process of production, and all the essentials of his doctrine are contained in that volume. In the next volume he treated circulation, as part of the process of production, but as “secondary” and supplementary to production. The “one fundamental condition” of the capitalist mode of production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, he tells us himself that he abstracted from circulation and treated in Volume I.

Then in Volume III, his abstract analysis complete, he for the first time, and only late in the volume, subdivided surplus-value into profit, interest, rent, etc. Today the capitalist class, impelled to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far has left the property relations intact, but the group in control manipulates the surplus value more and more as a whole. Less and less capital is apportioned to production by competition. In Germany today capital is consciously directed to different branches of production. The process will continue. The capitalists abolish the free market and shape circulation as far as possible to their own purposes, rationing every commodity, including labor-power. But the one fundamental condition of capitalist production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, and the process of production (Volume I), that they cannot alter without destroying themselves. Lenin (in the last two pages of Imperialism) as early as 1916, saw that with the increasing socialization of production, “private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction is postponed by artificial means.” The Communist Manifesto of the Third International was written around the same thesis in the most pronounced form.

If Russia today has differences with a capitalist economy where the private property relations have decayed and production is nationalized, these points are not to be detailed for their own sake as being different. Nobody denies their difference. What is to be proved is that these differences alter the law of motion of the society. And this cannot be done, because the contradictions of the whole society are rooted in the class relations of production, which are identical and determine all other relations. What was formerly private and uncontrolled by the very development of capitalist production becomes more and more state-controlled.

It is from there, where Marx placed his basic contradictions, that all capitalist troubles spring. More and more, capitalist society, in Engels’ phrase, will capitulate to the necessity for planning of the invading socialist society. We must be prepared for strange transformations. But as long as wage-labor exists, the capitalist class will have what Engels called not more than the “technical elements” of a solution. “Technically,” Hitler and Stalin have more control of the means of production and are able to do anything. In reality the social relations of production inside the country in the environment of the world market make them merely vain fighters against the general current of world economy. It is this economic necessity of organizing production as a whole (the invading socialist society) but yet the interests of a few (the old capitalist society) that finds political expression in Fascism. Whatever the method, capitalist economy forces the formation of the totalitarian state owing to the needs of production.

8. Socialism

The antithesis of Stalinist society and capitalistic society being the same, the solution of their contradictions is the same. It can be stated in a sentence. The workers must take control of the process of production on a national scale and international scale; this achieved, automatically, according to the technical development and the relations with the world market, use-values will begin to predominate. But with reasonable speed the same must take place on an international scale, or the quest for surplus labor in the world as a whole will drag down the socialist state, unless it commands an exceptionally well-developed and extensive area. “We live,” said Lenin, “not in a state but in a system of states.” The consequences of this transformation will be:

(1) The individual development of the laborer. It is in this that Marx depends with unwearying insistence for the higher productivity of labor which will be characteristic of the new society. “Variable Capital” will now, and only now, meet “Constant Capital” in coordination. In no sphere has our party been so guilty as in its utter neglect of this phase of production during the last ten years. The necessary expansion of production will take place and be maintained in socialist society through the fact that the material and intellectual advantages of society, now the prerogative of a few, will be the prerogative of all, and this, for Marx, means the certainty of an enormous development, not in the worker getting more to eat, but primarily as an agent in the process of production. The creative capacity of the worker, the joy in labor and service, hitherto seen only in the process of revolution, will be applied for the first time to production by the emancipated working class. That is the only way to solve the antithesis between use-value and exchange-value. To presume that Stalinist society has solved it is a monstrous absurdity. The degradation of the Russian worker is an economic fact. Man is the greatest of all productive forces, and once his potentialities are released, the era of human freedom will begin. “Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day.” Until then society will be increasingly like Russia and Germany, and plunging to destruction.

(2) This release of the workers for creative labor in production will be immensely encouraged by the entry into productive labor of the millions of idlers and unproductive laborer who infest modern society – the bourgeoisie, the lawyers, the publicity men, the distributors, domestic servants, agitators, storm-troopers, police, etc. All will be trained and placed in productive labor. They are the overwhelming overhead expenses of a class society, in Russia as well as in Germany.

(3) Production will be for social needs and not for millions of non-productive consumers in the army, navy, air-force, and their useless and criminal expenditure. The international division of labor will become a source not of enormous expenditure and autarchy, but a source of cooperation and continuous advance.

It is necessary to emphasize this today. For if it were understood some of the notions now prevalent in the Party could not exist. The idea that if the bourgeoisie should nationalize production and property, the hope for Socialism is utopia – that is a misunderstanding of the contradictions of capitalism which must be driven out of our movement. Such a transformation will solve nothing. The three points outlined above will be as far from realization as ever. A new society begins when the workers take power or when the world market is abolished by the domination of one capitalist state which would be an unspeakable barbarism. Marxism knows no other “new” society, far less any progressive new society. Either the emancipation of labor or increasing barbarism. Only in the most abstract sense can state-property be said the be a higher form, as monopoly capitalism was a higher form than pre- monopoly capitalism. Today we have reached a turning point. The pauperization of the worker, which was formerly relative, is now, on a world scale, absolute. Today in the most advanced capitalist societies, he is on his way to slavery. In its present state, capitalism, whatever its form, except in a few areas and for declining periods, can no longer maintain the worker even in the conditions of his previous slavery. Without the proletarian revolution the state-property form can be the vehicle of barbarism and the destruction of human society. Such terms as higher and lower forms have no meaning in the concrete circumstances. It is not the form of property but the social relations of production which are decisive. Today if the working class is master, the form is progressive. If it is not, the form is reactionary. “In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.” Any society today, in which the aim is not to promote the existence of the laborer is doomed to crisis and disorder and will go always closer to barbarism until the workers take power. That is all there is to Marx, and as he himself states, on an understanding of this, all comprehension of the facts depends.

9. Political Conclusions

On the basis of the above analysis certain political conclusions follow automatically.

They are:

(a) No defense of Russia under any circumstances.

The first condition for working out a long-term policy about Russia is to define the economic nature of the society and the historic character of the bureaucracy. It is bourgeois, and therefore has no rights over the struggles of the workers for their democratic rights. The struggle for socialism is the struggle for democracy, before, or after, the expropriation of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Russia has to be expropriated, driven away from its stranglehold over the process and the means of production. To do this the proletariat mobilizes all the poor and all the oppressed of Russia. It is prepared without hesitation to restore private property to those peasants who wish it. It rejects a united front with Kerensky and all his scores of followers in Russia who ask the proletariat to fight with them so that they may each get a factory for themselves. With Mensheviks, and with any section of the working class movement, or any other section of society, it forms a united front for what it considers to be working class demands, and for nothing else; it forms these on its own conditions, and the revolutionary proletariat keeps its hands free and makes or breaks these attempts at united action as it sees fit in the interests of the struggle for power. Nothing in Marxism compels the proletariat to form a united front with any group at any time except it thinks to the advantage of the proletariat to do so in its struggle for power.

(b) Denunciation of the CP as the agent of a Fascist power.

It appears that in the minds of some this excludes a United Front with the CP on a specific issue. The contention is not only stupid but dangerous. A United Front is formed with a section of American workers mainly on their intentions against the American bourgeoisie, or the world bourgeoisie, not on account of its belief in Stalinism. If it is not to be formed with them because the CP is the agent of a reactionary bureaucracy which is the enemy of the workers and of socialism, that excludes the United Front with the CP for all those who do not believe that the working class is still the ruling class in Russia. In the case of Browder whom the American government attacked, for obvious reasons the Party will offer a United Front. If the CP, however had called for a mass protest against the War in 1939, then with our present policy the Party should have refused. But even that refusal is not definitive. For according to the temper of the American proletariat, the strength of the Party, the stage of development or disintegration of the CP, the strength of the bourgeoisie, the Party may even, under similar circumstances, decide even to support a specific anti-war action by the CP even though the call was dictated originally by the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. The sophistry which indulges in superficial arguments of the above type must be rigorously rejected. It would be most dangerous for the Party if it allowed itself to be driven into considering the United Front as a collection of fixed laws, instead of a tactical orientation within given circumstances toward a fixed goal.

(c) Propaganda for socialism.

The Party must make it a first task, in its press and all other propaganda and agitation, to preach the necessity of socialism, to explain that no modern society of any kind offers any solution to the problems of modern society, except a society in which the workers hold power. It must with special vigor denounce and expose the ideas that Fascism, managerial society, or bureaucratic state-socialism are in any concrete sense progressive societies or even could be, and it must do this by challenging their proponents on the fundamental economic categories and analysis of Marx.

(d) The Party must initiate a serious study of Marxian economics, and devote a section of The New International regularly to studies in Capital, The Critique of Political Economy, etc. Many of the important points in Capital are still controversial, but it is certain that the development of society offers this generation an opportunity to elucidate by an observation of life many of the problems which were objects merely of speculation by previous theoreticians. This must be the basis of our theoretical work in the future. It is as an example of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, that this resolution has been written. Whatever our conclusions, the uncertainly of the present and the crises of the future demand that we solidly establish our fundamentals. If even we shall decide to abandon the Marxian law of value in the analysis of any modern society, then we should now exactly and concretely why. For it is only from there that we could develop a new method, as will be necessary for any new society.

September 19, 1941
Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY-VIctor Serge-A Book Review


Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY-Victor Serge
As I have noted in my review of Leon Trotsky’s memoir My Life ( see my review elsewhere) today’s public tastes dictate that political memoir writers expose the most intimate details of their private personal lives in the so-called public square. Here, as in Trotsky’s memoir, Serge will offer up no such tantalizing details. These old time revolutionaries seem organically averse to including personal material that would distract from their political legacies. That is fine by me. After all that is why political people, the natural audience for this form of history narrative, appreciate such works. Contemporary political memoir writers take note.

Serge was a militant from his youth. However the October 1917 Russian Revolution is the real start of his political maturation and wider political influence. I believe the reader will find the most useful information and Serge’s most insightful political analysis dates from this period. Serge became a secondary Communist leader after the Bolshevik seizure of power and in various capacities, most notably as a journalist for the Communist international, witnessed many of the important events in and out of Russia in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Moreover, for a long period of time he was a key member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition to the rise of Stalinism which formed in the Russian Communist Party and later in the Communist International in the 1920’s.

Serge eventually broke politically with Trotsky in the late 1930’s over the class nature of the Soviet state and organizational differences on the role of the revolutionary party in the struggle and in power. Serge's later politics and activities are murky, somewhat disoriented and the subject of controversy (see the Appendix in Memoirs and my review of Serge’s book Kronstadt). However, Serge’s analysis and insights as a witness to this period of history retain their value, especially his analysis of the, for leftists, very troublesome Stalinist purges and terror campaigns of the 1930’s.

Thus, as with Trotsky’s memoir, you will find a thoughtful political self-examination by a man trying to draw the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the subsequent defeats of the international working class movement, the devastating destruction of the fellow revolutionary cadre who made and administered the early Soviet state while still defending the gains of that revolution. Overshadowing these concerns is a constant personal struggle to maintain one’s revolutionary integrity at all costs. That is, not to wind up like Bukharin or Zinoviev and the like, compromised and lost to the struggle for socialism. All this, moreover, and perhaps hardest of all still maintain a sense of revolutionary optimism for the future organization of human society.

Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin once commented that in the run-up to the October Revolution the political whirlwind stirred up by that revolution inevitably brought those individuals and organizations looking for the resolution of the revolutionary dilemma into the Bolshevik orbit. This was most famously the case with Trotsky’s Petersburg Inter-District organization that fused with the Bolsheviks in the fateful summer of 1917. That same whirlwind later drew in the best elements of the Western labor movement as word of the revolution reached the outside world.

Previously, Serge had been close to the French anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movement but as happens in great revolutions he, like other militant anarchists, was drawn to the reality of the Soviet experiment despite political differences over the question of the state. Despite this he, generally, like the non-Bolshevik militants served the revolution with distinction. Thus, this fateful political decision to cast his personal fate with the Russian Revolution led him to the series of political adventures and misadventures that enliven his memoir.

At the beginning of the 21st century when socialist political programs are in decline it is hard to imagine the spirit that drove Serge to dedicate the better part of his life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only a slightly younger version of that revolutionary generation of Eastern Europeans and Russians exemplified by Lenin, Trotsky, Martov and Luxemburg who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world. Those same questions posed at the beginning of that century are still on the agenda for today’s generation of militants to help resolve. This is one of your political textbooks. Read it.