Master's thesis
MARXISMIN WORLD HISTORY
Contents
Introduction
1 Why we need Marxist theory
2 Understanding history
3 Class struggle
4 Capitalism—how the system began
5 The labour theory of value
6 Economic crisis
7 The working class
8 How can society be changed?
9 How do workers become revolutionary?
10 The revolutionary socialist party
11 Imperialism and national liberation
12 Marxism and feminism
13 Socialism and war
Introduction
There is a widespread myth that Marxism is difficult. It is a myth propagated by the enemiesof socialism – former Labour leader Harold Wilson boasted that he was never ableto get beyond the first page of Marx’s Capital. It is a myth also encouraged bya peculiar breed of academics who declare themselves to be ‘Marxists’: they deliberatelycultivate obscure phrases and mystical expressions in order to give the impressionthat they possess a special knowledge denied to others.
So it is hardly surprising that many socialistswho work 40 hours a week in factories, mines or offices take it for granted thatMarxism is something they will never have the time or the opportunity to understand.
In fact the basic ideas of Marxism are remarkablysimple. They explain, as no other set of ideas can, the society in which we live.They make sense of a world wracked by crises, of its poverty in the midst of plenty,of its coups d’etat and military dictatorships, of the way in which marvellous inventionscan consign millions to the dole queues, of ‘democracies’ that subsidise torturersand of ‘socialist’ states that threaten each other’s people with nuclear missiles.
Meanwhile, the establishment thinkers whoso deride Marxist ideas chase each other round in a mad game of blind man’sbuff, understanding nothing and explaining less.
But though Marxism is not difficult, thereis a problem for the reader who comes across Marx’s writings for the first time.Marx wrote well over a century ago. He used the language of the time, completewith references to individuals and events then familiar to virtually everyone,now known only to specialist historians.
I remember my own bafflement when, whilestill at school, I tried to read his pamphlet The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
I didn’t know either what Brumaire was orwho Louis Bonaparte was. How many socialists have abandoned attempts to come togrips with Marxism after such experiences!
This is the justification for this shortbook. It seeks to provide an introduction to Marxist ideas, which will make it easierfor socialists to follow what Marx was on about and to understand the developmentof Marxism since then in the hands of Frederick Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, VladimirLenin, Leon Trotsky, and a whole host of lesser thinkers.
Much of this pamphlet first appeared as aseries of articles in Socialist Worker under the title ‘Marxism Made Easy’. ButI have added substantial fresh material. A little of this I have lifted wholesalefrom two previous attempts to provide a simple exposition of Marxist ideas:Duncan Hallas’s The Meaning of Marxism and Norwich SWP’s ‘Marxist Education Series’.
One final point. Space has prevented mefrom dealing in this pamphlet with some important parts of the Marxist analysisof the modern world. I have included a substantial further reading section atthe back.
1. Why we need Marxist theory
What do we need theory for? We know there is a crisis. We know we are being robbed by our employers.We know we’re all angry. We know we need socialism. All the rest is just for theintellectuals.
You often hear words such as these frommilitant socialists and trade unionists. Such views are strongly encouraged by anti-socialists,who try to give the impression that Marxism is an obscure, complicated and boringdoctrine.
Socialist ideas, they say, are ‘abstract’.They may seem all right in theory, but in real life common sense tells us somethingelse entirely.
The trouble with these arguments is thatthe people who put them forward usually have a ‘theory’ of their own, even ifthey refuse to recognise it. Ask them any question about society, and they willtry to answer it with some generalisation or other. A few examples:
‘People are naturally selfish.’
‘Anyone can get to the top if they try hardenough.’
‘If it weren’t for the rich there wouldn’tbe any money to provide work for the rest of us.’
‘If only we could educate the workers, societywould change.’
‘Declining morals have brought the countryto its present state.’
Listen to any argument in the street, onthe bus, in the canteen – you’ll hear dozens of such sayings. Each and every onecontains a view of why society is like it is and of how people can improve theircondition. Such views are all ‘theories’ of society.
When people say they do not have a theory,all they really mean is they have not clarified their views.
This is particularly dangerous for anyonewho is trying to change society. For the newspapers, the radio, the television,are all continually filling our minds with attempted explanations for the messsociety is in. They hope we will accept what they say without thinking more aboutthe issues.
But you cannot fight effectively to changesociety unless you recognise what is false in all these different arguments.
This was first shown 150 years ago. Inthe 1830s and 1840s the development of industry in areas such as the north westof England drew hundreds of thousands of men, women and children into miserablypaid jobs. They were forced to endure living conditions of unbelievable squalor.
They began to fight back against this withthe first mass workers’ organisations – the first trade unions, and in Britainthe first movement for political rights for workers. Chartism. Alongside thesemovements were the first small groups of people dedicated to winning socialism.
Immediately the problem arose as to howthe workers’ movement could achieve its aim.
Some people said it was possible to persuadesociety’s rulers to change things through peaceful means. The ‘moral force’ of amass, peaceful movement would ensure that benefits were given to the workers.Hundreds of thousands of people organised, demonstrated, worked to build a movementon the basis of such views – only to end defeated and demoralised.
Others recognised the need to use ‘physicalforce’, but thought this could be achieved by fairly small, conspiratorial groupscut off from the rest of society. These too led tens of thousands of workers intostruggles that ended in defeat and demoralisation.
Still others believed the workers could achievetheir goals by economic action, without confronting the army and the police. Again,their arguments led to mass actions. In England in 1842 the world’s first generalstrike took place in the industrial areas of the north, with tens of thousands ofworkers holding out for four weeks until forced back to work by hunger and privation.
It was towards the end of the first stageof defeated workers’ struggles, in 1848, that the German socialist Karl Marx speltout his own ideas fully, in his pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.
His ideas were not pulled out of thin air.They attempted to provide a basis for dealing with all the questions that had beenbrought up by the workers’ movement of the time.
The ideas Marx developed are still relevanttoday. It is stupid to say, as some people do, that they must be out of date becauseMarx first wrote them down more than 150 years ago. In fact, all the notions ofsociety that Marx argued with are still very widespread. Just as the Chartists arguedabout ‘moral force’ or ‘physical force’, socialists today argue about the ‘parliamentaryroad’ or the ‘revolutionary road’. Among those who are revolutionaries the argumentfor and against ‘terrorism’ is as alive as it was in 1848.
The idealists
Marx was not the first person to try todescribe what was wrong with society. At the time he was writing, new inventionsin factories were turning out wealth on a scale undreamt of by previous generations.For the first time it seemed humanity had the means to defend itself against thenatural calamities that had been the scourge of previous ages.
Yet this did not mean any improvement inthe lives of the majority of the people. Quite the opposite. The men, women andchildren who manned the new factories led lives much worse that those led by theirgrandparents who had toiled the land. Their wages barely kept them above the breadline; periodic bouts of mass unemployment thrust them well below it. They werecrammed into miserable, squalid slums, without proper sanitation, subjected tomonstrous epidemics.
Instead of the development of civilisationbringing general happiness and well being, it was giving rise to greater misery.
This was noted, not just by Marx, but bysome of the other great thinkers of the period – men such as the English poetsBlake and Shelley, the Frenchmen Fourier and Proudhon, the German philosophersHegel and Feuerbach.
Hegel and Feuerbach called the unhappystate in which humanity found itself ‘alienation’ – a term you still often hear.By alienation, Hegel and Feuerbach meant that men and women continually foundthat they were dominated and oppressed by what they themselves had done in thepast. So, Feuerbach pointed out, people had developed the idea of God –and thenhad bowed down before it, feeling miserable because they could not live up to somethingthey themselves had made. The more society advanced, the more miserable, ‘alienated’,people became.
In his own earliest writings Marx tookthis notion of ‘alienation’ and applied it to the life of those who created thewealth of society:
The worker becomes poorer the more wealthhe produces, the more his production increases in power and range… With the increasingvalue of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation ofthe world of men… The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien,as a power independent of the producer...
In Marx’s time the most popular explanationsof what was wrong with society were still of a religious kind. The misery of society,it was said, was because of the failure of people to do what God wanted them to.If only we were all to ‘renounce sin’ everything would turn out all right.
A similar view is often heard today, althoughit usually purports to be non-religious. This is the claim that ‘to change society,you must first change yourself’. If only individual men and women would cure themselvesof ‘selfishness’ or ‘materialism’ (or occasionally ‘hangups’) then society wouldautomatically get better.
A related view spoke not of changing allindividuals, but a few key ones – those who exercise power in society. The ideawas to try to make the rich and powerful ‘see reason’.
One of the first British socialists, RobertOwen, began by trying to convince industrialists that they should be kinder totheir workers. The same idea is still dominant today among the leaders of the LabourParty, including its left wing. Note how they always call the crimes of the employers‘mistakes’, as if a bit of argument will persuade big business to relax its gripon society.
Marx referred to all such views as ‘idealist’.Not because he was against people having ‘ideas’, but because such views see ideasas existing in isolation from the conditions in which people live.
People’s ideas are intimately linked tothe sort of lives they are able to live. Take, for instance, ‘selfishness’. Presentday capitalist society breeds selfishness – even in people who continually tryto put other people first. A worker who wants to do their best for their children,or to give their parents something on top of their pension, finds the only way isto struggle continually against other people – to get a better job, more overtime,to be first in the queue for redundancy. In such a society you cannot get rid of‘selfishness’ or ‘greediness’ merely by changing the minds of individuals.
It’s even more ridiculous to talk of changingsociety by changing the ideas of ‘top people’. Suppose you were successful in winninga big employer over to socialist ideas and he then stopped exploiting workers.He would just lose in competition with rival employers and be driven out of business.
Even for those who rule society what mattersis not ideas but the structure of the society in which they hold those ideas.
The point can be put another way. If ideasare what change society, where do the ideas come from? We live in a certain sortof society. The ideas put across by the press, the TV, the educational system andso on defend that sort of society. How has anyone ever been able to develop completelydifferent ideas? Because their daily experiences contradict the official ideas ofour society.
For example, you cannot explain why farfewer people are religious today than 100 years ago simply in terms of the successof atheistic propaganda. You have to explain why people listen to atheistic ideasin a way they did not 100 years ago.
Similarly, if you want to explain the impactof ‘great men’, you have to explain why other people agree to follow them. It isno good saying that, for example. Napoleon or Lenin changed history, without explainingwhy millions of people were willing to do what they suggested. After all, theywere not mass hypnotists. Something in the life of society at a certain point ledpeople to feel that what they suggested seemed correct.
You can only understand how ideas changehistory if you understand where those ideas come from and why people accept them.That means looking beyond the ideas to the material conditions of the society inwhich they occur. That is why Marx insisted, ‘It is not consciousness that determinesbeing, but social being that determines consciousness.’
2. Understanding history
Ideas by themselves cannot change society.This was one of Marx’s first conclusions. Like a number of thinkers before him,he insisted that to understand society you had to see human beings as part ofthe material world.
Human behaviour was determined by materialforces, just like the behaviour of any other natural object. The study of humanitywas part of the scientific study of the natural world. Thinkers with such viewswere called materialists.
Marx regarded materialism as a great stepforward over the various religious and idealist notions of history. It meant thatyou could argue scientifically about changing social conditions, you no longerdepended on praying to God or on ‘spiritual change’ in people.
The replacement of idealism by materialismwas the replacement of mysticism by science. But not all materialist explanationsof human behaviour are correct. Just as there have been mistaken scientific theoriesin biology, chemistry or physics, so there have been mistaken attempts to developscientific theories of society. Here are a few examples:
One very widespread, non-Marxist, materialistview holds that human beings are animals, who behave ‘naturally’ in certain ways.Just as it is in the nature of wolves to kill or in the nature of sheep to beplacid, so it is in the nature of men to be aggressive, domineering, competitiveand greedy (and, it is implied, of women to be meek, submissive, deferential andpassive).
One formulation of this view is to be foundin the best selling book The Naked Ape. The conclusions that are drawn fromsuch arguments are almost invariably reactionary. If men are naturally aggressive,it is said, then there is no point in trying to improve society. Things will alwaysturn out the same. Revolutions will ‘always fail’.
But ‘human nature’ does in fact vary fromsociety to society. For instance, competitiveness, which is taken for granted inour society, hardly existed in many previous societies. When scientists firsttried to give Sioux Indians IQ tests, they found that the Indians could not understandwhy they should not help each other do the answers. The society they lived instressed cooperation, not competition.
The same with aggressiveness. When Eskimosfirst met Europeans, they could not make any sense whatsoever of the notion of‘war’. The idea of one group of people trying to wipe out another group of peopleseemed crazy to them.
In our society it is regarded as ‘natural’that parents should love and protect their children. Yet in the Ancient Greek cityof Sparta it was regarded as ‘natural’ to leave infants out in the mountains tosee if they could survive the cold.
‘Unchanging human nature’ theories provideno explanation for the great events of history. The pyramids of Egypt, the splendoursof Ancient Greece, the empires of Rome or the Incas, the modern industrial city,are put on the same level as the illiterate peasants who lived in the mud hovelsof the Dark Ages. All that matters is the ‘naked ape’ – not the magnificent civilisationsthe ape has built. It is irrelevant that some forms of society succeed in feedingthe ‘apes’, while others leave millions to starve to death.
Many people accept a different materialisttheory, which stresses the way it is possible to change human behaviour. Just asanimals can be trained to behave differently in a circus to a jungle, so, saythe supporters of this view, human behaviour can similarly be changed. If onlythe right people got control of society, it is said, then ‘human nature’ couldbe transformed.
This view is certainly a great step forwardfrom the ‘naked ape’. But as an explanation of how society as a whole can be changedit fails. If everyone is completely conditioned in present-day society, how cananyone ever rise above society and see how to change the conditioning mechanisms?Is there some God-ordained minority that is magically immune to the pressuresthat dominate everyone else? If we are all animals in the circus, who can be thelion tamer?
Those who hold this theory either end upsaying society cannot change (like the naked apers) or they believe change isproduced by something outside society – by God, or a ‘great man’, or the power ofindividual ideas. Their ‘materialism’ lets a new version of idealism in throughthe back door.
As Marx pointed out, this doctrine necessarilyends up by dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.This ‘materialist’ view is often reactionary. One of the best known adherents ofthe view today is a right wing American psychologist called Skinner. He wants tocondition people to behave in certain ways. But since he himself is a product ofAmerican capitalist society, his ‘conditioning’ merely means trying to make peopleconform to that society.
Another materialist view blames all themisery in the world on ‘population pressure’. (This is usually called Malthusianafter Malthus, the English economist of the late 18th century who first developedit.) But it cannot explain why the United States, for instance, burns corn whilepeople in India starve. Nor can it explain why 150 years ago there was not enoughfood produced in the US to feed 10 million people, while today enough is producedto feed 200 million.
It forgets that every extra mouth to feedis also an extra person capable of working and creating wealth.
Marx called all these mistaken explanationsforms of ‘mechanical’ or ‘crude’ materialism. They all forget that as well as beingpart of the material world, human beings are also acting, living creatures whoseactions change it.
The materialist interpretation of history
Men can be distinguished from animals byconsciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin todistinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their meansof subsistence – their food, shelter and clothing.
With these words, Karl Marx first stressedwhat was distinct about his explanation of how society developed. Human beings areanimals descended from ape-like creatures. Like other animals, their first concernis feeding themselves and protecting themselves from the climate.
The way other animals do this depends ontheir inherited biological make up. A wolf stays alive by chasing and killing itsprey, in ways determined by its biologically inherited instincts. It keeps warmon cold nights because of its fur. It brings up its cubs according to inheritedpatterns of behaviour.
But human life is not fixed in this way.The humans who roamed the Earth 100,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago lived quitedifferent lives from ourselves. They lived in caves and holes in the ground. Theydid not have any containers to keep food or water in, they depended for their foodon collecting berries or throwing stones at wild animals. They could not write,or count beyond the fingers on their hands. They had no real knowledge of whatwent on beyond their immediate neighbourhood or what their forefathers had done.
Yet physically their make up 100,000 yearsago was similar to that of modern man and 30,000 years ago it was identical. Ifyou washed and shaved a caveman, put him in a suit and walked him down the highstreet, no one would think him out of place.
As the archaeologist C. Gordon Childe hasnoted:
The earliest skeletons of our own speciesbelong to the closing phases of the last Ice Age … Since the time when skeletonsof Homo sapiens first appear in the geological record … man’s bodily evolutionhas come virtually to a standstill, although his cultural progress was just beginning.
The same point is made by another archaeologist,Leakey:
The physical differences between men ofthe Aurignacian and Magdalenian cultures (25,000 years ago) on the one hand, andpresent day men on the other is negligible, while the cultural difference is immeasurable.
By ‘culture’ the archaeologist means thethings which men and women learn and teach one another (how to make clothes fromfurs or wool, how to make pots out of clay, how to make fire, how to build homes,and so forth) as opposed to those things that animals know instinctively.
The lives of the earliest humans were alreadyvastly different from those of other animals. For they were able to use thephysical features peculiar to humans – large brains, forelimbs capable of manipulatingobjects – to begin to shape their surroundings to suit their needs. This meanthumans could adapt themselves to a wide range of different conditions, without anychange in their physical make up. Humans no longer simply reacted to conditionsaround them. They could act upon those conditions, beginning to change them totheir own advantage.
At first they used sticks and stones to attackwild beasts, they lit torches from naturally occurring fires to provide themselveswith heat and light, they covered themselves with vegetation and animal skins. Overmany tens of thousands of years they learnt to make fire themselves, to shapestones using other stones, eventually to grow food from seeds they themselves hadplanted, to store it in pots made out of clay, and to domesticate certain animals.
Comparatively recently – a mere 5,000 yearsago, out of half a million years of human history – they learnt the secret ofturning ores into metals that could be shaped into reliable tools and effectiveweapons.
Each of these advances had an enormous impact,not merely in making it easier for humans to feed and clothe themselves, but alsoin transforming the very organisation of human life itself. From the beginninghuman life was social. Only the joint efforts of several humans could enable themto kill the beasts, to gather the food and keep the fires going. They had to cooperate.
This continual close cooperation also causedthem to communicate, by uttering sounds and developing languages. At first thesocial groups were simple. There was not enough naturally growing produce anywhereto support groups of humans more than perhaps a couple of dozen strong. All efforthad to be put into the basic tasks of getting the food, so everyone did the samejob and lived the same sort of life.
With no means of storing any quantities offood, there could be no private property or class divisions, nor was there anybooty to produce a motive for war.
There were, until a few years ago, stillhundreds of societies in many different parts of the globe where this was stillthe pattern – among some of the Indians of North and South America, some of thepeoples of Equatorial Africa and the Pacific Ocean, the Aborigines of Australia.
Not that these people were less cleverthan ourselves or had a more ‘primitive mentality’. The Australian Aborigines,for instance, had to learn to recognise literally thousands of plants and the habitsof scores of different animals in order to survive. The anthropologist ProfessorFirth has described how:
Australian tribes … know the habits, markings,breeding grounds and seasonal fluctuations of all the edible animals, fish andbirds of their hunting grounds. They know the external and some of the less obviousproperties of rocks, stones, waxes, gums, plants, fibres and barks; they know howto make fire; they know how to apply heat to relieve pain, stop bleeding and delaythe putrefaction of fresh food; and they also use fire and heat to harden somewoods and soften others … They know something at least of the phases of the moon,the movement of the tides, the planetary cycles, and the sequence and duration ofthe seasons; they have correlated together such climactic fluctuations as windsystems, annual patterns of humidity and temperature and fluxes in the growth andpresence of natural species … In addition they make intelligent and economicaluse of the by-products of animals killed for food; the flesh of the kangaroo iseaten; the leg bones are used as fabricators for stone tools and as pins; the sinewsbecome spear bindings; the claws are set into necklaces with wax and fibre; thefat is combined with red ochre as a cosmetic, and blood is mixed with charcoal aspaint… They have some knowledge of simple mechanical principles and will trima boomerang again and again to give it the correct curve...
They were much more ‘clever’ than us indealing with the problems of surviving in the Australian desert. What they hadnot learnt was to plant seeds and grow their own food – something our own ancestorslearnt only about 5,000 years ago, after being on the Earth for 100 times thatperiod.
The development of new techniques of producingwealth – the means of human life – has always given birth to new forms of cooperationbetween humans, to new social relations.
For example, when people first learnt togrow their own food (by planting seeds and domesticating animals) and to store it(in earthenware pots) there was a complete revolution in social life – calledby archaeologists ‘the neolithic revolution’. Humans had to cooperate togethernow to clear the land and to harvest food, as well as to hunt animals. They couldlive together in much greater numbers than before, they could store food and theycould begin to exchange goods with other settlements.
The first towns could develop. For the firsttime there was the possibility of some people leading lives that did not involvethem just in providing food: some would specialise in making pots, some in miningflints and later metal for tools and weapons, some in carrying through elementaryadministrative tasks for the settlement as a whole. More ominously, the storedsurplus of food provided a motive for war.
People had begun by discovering new waysof dealing with the world around them, or harnessing nature to their needs. Butin the process, without intending it, they had transformed the society in whichthey lived and with it their own lives. Marx summed up this process: a developmentof the ‘forces of production’ changed the ‘relations of production’ and, throughthem, society.
There are many more recent examples. Some300 years ago the vast majority of people in this country still lived on the land,producing food by techniques that had not changed for centuries. Their mental horizonwas bounded by the local village and their ideas very much influenced by the localchurch. The vast majority did not need to read and write, and never learned to.
Then, 200 years ago, industry began to develop.Tens of thousands of people were drawn into the factories. Their lives underwenta complete transformation. Now they lived in great towns, not small villages.They needed to learn skills undreamt of by their ancestors, including eventuallythe ability to read and write. Railways and steamships made it possible to travelacross half the Earth. The old ideas hammered into their heads by the priests nolonger fitted at all. The material revolution in production was also a revolutionin the way they lived and in the ideas they had.
Similar changes are still affecting vastnumbers of people. Look at the way people from villages in Bangladesh or Turkeyhave been drawn to the factories of England or Germany seeking work. Look at theway many find that their old customs and religious attitudes no longer fit.
Or look at the way in the past 50 yearsthe majority of women have got used to working outside the home and how this hasled them to challenge the old attitude that they were virtually the property oftheir husbands.
Changes in the way humans work togetherto produce the things that feed, clothe and shelter them cause changes in the wayin which society is organised and the attitude of people in it. This is the secretof social change – of history – that the thinkers before Marx (and many since),the idealists and the mechanical materialists, could not understand.
The idealists saw there was change – butsaid it must come out of the skies. The mechanical materialists saw that humanswere conditioned by the material world but could not understand how things couldever change. What Marx saw was that human beings are conditioned by the world aroundthem, but that they react back upon the world, working on it so as to make it morehabitable. But in doing so they change the conditions under which they live andtherefore themselves as well.
The key to understanding change in societylies in understanding how human beings cope with the problem of creating theirfood, shelter and clothing. That was Marx’s starting point. But that does not meanMarxists believe that improvements in technology automatically produce a bettersociety, or even that inventions automatically lead to changes in society. Marxrejected this view (sometimes called technological determinism). Again and againin history, people have rejected ideas for advancing the production of food, shelteror clothing because these clash with the attitudes or the forms of society thatalready exist.
For example, under the Roman Empire therewere many ideas about how to produce more crops from a given amount of ground,but people didn’t put them into effect because they required more devotion to workthan you could get from slaves working under fear of the whip. When the Britishruled Ireland in the 18th century they tried to stop the development of industrythere because it clashed with the interests of businessmen in London.
If someone produced a method of solvingthe food problem of India by slaughtering the sacred cows or providing everyonein Britain with succulent steaks by processing rat meat, they would be ignoredbecause of established prejudices.
Developments in production challenge oldprejudices and old ways of organising society, but they do not automatically overthrowthose old prejudices and social forms. Many human beings fight to prevent change– and those wanting to use new methods of production have to fight/or change. Ifthose who oppose change win, then the new forms of production cannot come into operationand production stagnates or even goes backwards.
In Marxist terminology: as the forces ofproduction develop they clash with the pre-existing social relations and ideasthat grew up on the basis of old forces of production. Either people identifiedwith the new forces of production win this clash, or those identified with the oldsystem do. In the one case, society moves forward, in the other it remainsstuck in a rut, or even goes backwards.
3. Class struggle
We live in a society that is divided into classes, in which a few people have vast amounts of private property, and most of us have virtually none. Naturally, we tend to take it for granted that things have alwaysbeen like this. But in fact, for the greater part of human history, there wereno classes, no private property, and no armies or police. This was the situationduring the half a million years of human development up to 5,000 or 10,000 yearsago.
Until more food could be produced by oneperson’s work than was needed to keep that person fit for work, there could beno division into classes. What was the point of keeping slaves if all that theyproduced was needed to keep them alive?
But beyond a certain point, the advance ofproduction made class divisions not only possible but necessary. Enough food couldbe produced to leave a surplus after the immediate producers had taken enough tostay alive. And the means existed to store this food and to transport it from oneplace to another.
The people whose labour produced all thisfood could simply have eaten the extra ‘surplus’ food. Since they lived fairlymeagre, miserable lives, they were strongly tempted. But that left them unprotectedagainst the ravages of nature, which might lean famine or a flood the next year,and against attacks from angry tribes from outside the area.
It was, at first, of great advantage to everyoneif a special group of people took charge of this extra wealth, storing it againstfuture disaster, using it to support craftsmen, building up means defence, exchangingpart of it with distant peoples for useful objects. These activities came to becarried out in the first towns, where administrators, merchants and craftsmen lived.Out of the markings on tablets used to keep a record of the different sorts ofwealth, writing began to develop.
Such were the first, faltering steps ofwhat we call ‘civilisation’. But – and it was a very big but – all this was basedon control of the increased wealth by a small minority of the population. Andthe minority used the wealth for its own good as well as the good of society asa whole.
The more production developed, the morewealth came into the hands of this minority – and the more it became cut off fromthe rest of society. Rules, which began as a means of benefiting society, became‘laws’, insisting that the wealth and the land that produced it was the ‘privateproperty’ of the minority. A ruling class had come into existence – and laws defendedits power.
You might perhaps ask whether it would havebeen possible for society to have developed otherwise, for those who laboured onthe land to control its produce?
The answer has to be no. Not because of‘human nature’, but because society was still very poor. The majority of the Earth’spopulation were too busy scratching the soil for a meagre living to have time todevelop systems of writing and reading, to create works of art, to build shipsfor trade, to plot the course of the stars, to discover the rudiments of mathematics,to work out when rivers would flood or how irrigation channels should be constructed.These things could only happen if some of the necessities of life were seizedfrom the mass of the population and used to maintain a privileged minority whichdid not have to toil from sunrise to sunset.
However, that does not mean that the divisioninto classes remains necessary today. The last century has seen a development ofproduction undreamt of in the previous history of humanity. Natural scarcity hasbeen overcome – what now exists is artificial scarcity, created as governmentsdestroy food stocks.
Class society today is holding humanityback, not leading it forward.
It was not just the first change frompurely agricultural societies to societies of towns and cities that gave rise,necessarily, to new class divisions. The same process was repeated every time newways of producing wealth began to develop.
So, in Britain 1,000 years ago, the rulingclass was made up of feudal barons who controlled the land and lived off the backsof the serfs. But as trade began to develop on a big scale, there grew up alongsidethem in the cities a new privileged class of wealthy merchants. And when industrybegan to develop on a substantial scale, their power in turn was disputed by theowners of industrial enterprises.
At each stage in the development of societythere was an oppressed class whose physical labour created the wealth, and aruling class who controlled that wealth. But as society developed both the oppressedand the oppressors underwent changes.
In the slave society of Ancient Rome theslaves were the personal property of the ruling class. The slave owner owned thegoods produced by the slave because he owned the slave, in exactly the same wayas he owned the milk produced by a cow because he owned the cow.
In the feudal society of the Middle Agesthe serfs had their own land, and owned what was produced from it; but in returnfor having this land they had to do a number of days work every year on the landowned by the feudal lord. Their time would be divided – perhaps half their timethey would be working for the lord, half the time for themselves. If they refusedto do work for the lord, he was entitled to punish them (through flogging, imprisonmentor worse).
In modern capitalist society the boss doesnot physically own the worker nor is he entitled to physically punish a workerwho refuses to do unpaid work for him. But the boss does own the factories wherethe worker has to get a job if he or she wants to keep alive. So it is fairly easyfor him to force the worker to put up with a wage which is much less than the valueof the goods the worker makes in the factory.
In each case the oppressing class gets controlof all the wealth that is left over once the most elementary needs of the workershave been met. The slave owner wants to keep his property in a good condition,so he feeds his slave in exactly the same way as you might oil your car. But everythingsurplus to the physical needs of the slave, the owner uses for his own enjoyment.The feudal serf has to feed and clothe himself with the work he puts in on his ownbit of land. All the extra labour he puts in on the lord’s fields goes to the lord.
The modern worker gets paid a wage. Allthe other wealth he creates goes to the employing class as profit, interest orrent.
The class struggle and the state
The workers have rarely accepted their lotwithout fighting back. There were slave revolts in Ancient Egypt and Rome, peasantrevolts in Imperial China, civil wars between the rich and poor in the cities ofAncient Greece, in Rome and Renaissance Europe.
That is why Karl Marx began his pamphletThe Communist Manifesto by insisting, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societieshas been the history of class struggles.’ The growth of civilisation had dependedon the exploitation of one class by another, and therefore on the struggle betweenthem.
However powerful an Egyptian pharaoh, aRoman emperor or a medieval prince, however luxurious their lives, however magnificenttheir palaces, they could do nothing unless they guaranteed that the productsgrown by the most miserable peasant or slave passed into their possession. Theycould only do this if alongside the division into classes there also grew somethingelse – control over the means of violence by themselves and their supporters.
In earlier societies there had been no army,police or governmental apparatus separate from the majority of the people. Evensome 50 or 60 years ago, for instance, in parts of Africa, it was still possibleto find societies in which this was still so. Many of the tasks done by the statein our society were simply done informally by the whole population, or by meetingsof representatives.
Such meetings would judge the behaviour ofany individual who was considered to have broken an important social rule. Punishmentwould be applied by the whole community – for instance by forcing miscreants toleave. Since everyone was agreed on the necessary punishment, separate police werenot needed to put it into effect. If warfare occurred all the young men would takepart, under leaders chosen for the occasion, again without any separate armystructure.
But once you had a society in which a minorityhad control over most of the wealth, these simple ways of keeping ‘law and order’and organising warfare could no longer work. Any meeting of representatives or anygathering of the armed young men would be likely to split along class lines.
The privileged group could only survive ifit began to monopolise in its own hands the making and implementation of punishments,laws, the organisation of armies, the production of weapons. So the separation intoclasses was accompanied by the growth of groups of judges, policemen and secretpolicemen, generals, bureaucrats – all of whom were given part of the wealth inthe hands of the privileged class in return for protecting its rule.
Those who served in the ranks of this‘state’ were trained to obey without hesitation the orders of their ‘superiors’and were cut off from all normal social ties with the exploited mass of people.The state developed as a killing machine in the hands of the privileged class. Anda highly effective machine it could be.
Of course, the generals who ran this machineoften fell out with a particular emperor or king, and tried to put themselves inhis place. The ruling class, having armed a monster, could often not control it.But since the wealth needed to keep the killing machine running came from the exploitationof the working masses, every such revolt would be followed by continuation of societyalong the old lines.
Throughout history people who have reallywanted to change society for the better have found themselves up against notjust the privileged class, but also an armed machine, a state, that serves its interest.
Ruling classes, together with the priests,generals, policemen and legal systems that backed them up, all grew up in the firstplace because without them civilisation could not develop. But once they are establishedin power, they come to have an interest in hindering the further development ofcivilisation. Their power is dependent upon their ability to force those who producewealth to hand it over to them. They become wary of new ways of producing wealth,even if more efficient than the old, lest control escape from their hands.
They fear anything that could lead to theexploited masses developing initiative and independence. And they also fear thegrowth of new privileged groups with enough wealth to be able to pay for arms andarmies of their own. Beyond a certain point, instead of aiding the development ofproduction, they began to hinder it.
For example, in the Chinese Empire, thepower of the ruling class rested upon its ownership of the land and its controlover the canals and dams that were necessary for irrigation and to avoid floods.This control laid the basis for a civilisation that lasted some 2,000 years.But at the end of this period production was not much more advanced than at thebeginning – despite the flourishing of Chinese art, the discovery of printing andgunpowder, all at a time when Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages.
The reason was that when new forms of productiondid begin to develop, it was in towns, through the initiative of merchants andcraftsmen. The ruling class feared this growth in power of a social grouping thatwas not completely under its control. So periodically the imperial authoritiestook harsh measures to crush the growing economies of the towns, to drive productiondown, and to destroy the power of the new social classes.
The growth of new forces of production –of new ways of producing wealth – clashed with the interests of the old rulingclass. A struggle developed, the outcome of which determined the whole future ofsociety.
Sometimes the outcome, as in China, wasthat new forms of production were prevented from emerging, and society remainedmore or less stagnant for very long periods of time.
Sometimes, as in the Roman Empire, the inabilityof new forms of production to develop meant that eventually there was no longerenough wealth being produced to maintain society on its old basis. Civilisationcollapsed, the cities were destroyed and people reverted to a crude, agriculturalform of society.
Sometimes a new class, based upon a newform of production, was able to organise to weaken and finally overthrow the oldruling class, together with its legal system, its armies, its ideology, its religion.Then society could go forward.
In each case whether society went forwardsor backwards depended on who won the war between the classes. And, as in any war,victory was not ordained in advance, but depended on the organisation, cohesionand leadership of the rival classes.
4. Capitalism – how the system began
One of the most ludicrous arguments you hear is that things could not be different to the way they are now. Yet things weredifferent. And not on some distant part of the globe, but in this country, notso long ago. A mere 250 years ago people would have regarded you as a lunatic ifyou had described to them the world we live in now, with its huge cities, itsgreat factories, its aeroplanes, its space expeditions – even its railway systemswere beyond the bounds of their imagination.
For they lived in a society which was overwhelminglyrural, in which most people had never travelled ten miles outside their local village,in which the pattern of life was determined, as it had been for thousands of years,by the alternation of the seasons.
But already, 700 or 800 years ago, a developmenthad begun which was eventually to challenge this whole system of society. Groupsof craftsmen and traders began to establish themselves in towns, not giving theirservices for nothing to some lord as the rest of the population did, but exchangingproducts with various lords and serfs for foodstuffs. Increasingly they used preciousmetals as a measure of that exchange. It was not a big step to seeing in every actof exchange an opportunity to get a little extra of the precious metal, to makea profit.
At first the towns could only survive byplaying one lord off against another. But as the skills of their craftsmen improved,they created more wealth, and they grew in influence. The ‘burghers’, the ‘bourgeois’or the ‘middle classes’ began as a class within the feudal society of the MiddleAges. But they obtained their riches in a quite different way to the feudal lordswho dominated that society.
A feudal lord lived directly off the agriculturalproduce he was able to force his serfs to produce on his land. He used his personalpower to make them do this, without having to pay them. By contrast the wealthierclasses in the towns lived off the proceeds of selling non-agricultural goods.They paid workers wages to produce these for them, by the day or week.
These workers, often escaped serfs, were‘free’ to come and go as they liked – once they had finished the work for whichthey had been paid. The ‘only’ compulsion on them to work was that they wouldstarve if they did not find employment with someone. The rich could only grow richerbecause rather than starve, the ‘free’ worker would accept less money for his workthan the goods he produced were worth.
We will return to this point later. Forthe present what matters is that the middle class burghers and the feudal lordsgot their wealth from quite different sources. This led them to want society organisedin different ways.
The feudal lord’s ideal was a society inwhich he had absolute power in his own lands, unbound by written laws, with no intrusionfrom any outside body, with his serfs unable to flee. He wanted things to stay asin the days of his father and grandfather, with everyone accepting the socialstation into which they were born.
The newly rich bourgeoisie necessarily sawthings differently. They wanted restraints on the power of individual lords orkings to interfere with their trade or steal their wealth.
They dreamed of achieving this through afixed body of written laws, to be drawn up and enforced by their own chosen representatives.They wanted to free the poorer classes from serfdom, so that they could work (andincrease the burghers’ profits) in the towns.
As for themselves, their fathers and grandfathershad often been under the thumb of feudal lords, and they certainly did not wantthat to continue.
In a word, they wanted to revolutionisesociety. Their clashes with the old order were not only economic, but also ideologicaland political. Ideological chiefly meant religious, in an illiterate society wherethe chief source of general ideas about society was church preaching.
Since the medieval church was run by bishopsand abbots who were feudal lords in their own right, it propagated pro-feudal views.attacking as ‘sinful’ many of the practices of the urban bourgeoisie.
So in Germany, Holland, Britain and Francein the 16th and 17th centuries the middle classes rallied to a religion of theirown: Protestantism – a religious ideology that preached thrift, sobriety, hardwork (especially for the workers!) and the independence of the middle class congregationfrom the power of bishops and abbots.
The middle class created a God in their image,in opposition to the God of the Middle Ages.
Today we are told at school or on televisionabout the great religious wars and civil wars of that period as if they werejust about religious differences, as if people were daft enough to fight and diemerely because they disagreed over the role of the blood and body of Christ inthe Holy Communion. But much more was at stake – the clash between two completelydifferent forms of society, based upon two different ways of organising the productionof wealth.
In Britain the bourgeoisie won. Horrificas it must seem to our sent ruling class, their ancestors consecrated their powerby ting off a king’s head, justifying the act with the rantings of Old Testamentprophets.
But elsewhere the first round went to feudalism.In France and Germany the Protestant bourgeois revolutionaries were wiped out afterbitter civil wars (although a feudal version of Protestantism survived as the religionof northern Germany). The bourgeoisie had to wait two centuries and more beforeenjoying success, in second round that began without religious clothing in 1789Paris.
Exploitation and surplus value
In slave and feudal societies the upperclasses had to have legal controls over the mass of the working population. Otherwisethose who worked for the feudal lord or the slave owner would have run away, leavingthe privileged class with no one to labour for it.
But the capitalist does not, usually, needsuch legal controls over the person of the worker. He doesn’t need to own him orher, provided he ensures that the worker who refuses to work for the capitalistwill starve. Instead of owning the worker, the capitalist can prosper providinghe owns and controls the worker’s source of livelihood – the machines and factories.
The material necessities of life are producedby the labour of human beings. But that labour is next to useless without toolsto cultivate the land and to process naturally occurring materials. The tools canvary enormously – from simple agricultural implements such as ploughs and hoesto the complicated machines you find in modern automated factories. But withoutthe tools even the most highly skilled worker is unable to produce the things neededfor physical survival.
It is the development of these tools –usually referred to as ‘the means of production’ – that separates modern humanbeings from our distant ancestors of the Stone Age. Capitalism is based on the ownershipof these means of production by a few people. In Britain today, for instance, 1percent of the population owns 84 percent of the stocks and shares in industry.In their hands is concentrated effective control over the vast majority of themeans of production – the machines, the factories, the oil fields, the best agriculturalland. The mass of the population can only get a livelihood if the capitalists allowthem to work at and with those means of production. This gives the capitalists immensepower to exploit the labour of other people – even though in the eyes of the law‘all men are equal’.
It took some centuries for the capitaliststo build up their monopoly control over the means of production. In this country,for instance, the parliaments of the 17th and 18th centuries had first to pass asuccession of Enclosure Acts, which drove peasants away from their own means ofproduction, the land which they had cultivated for centuries. The land becamethe property of a section of the capitalist class and the mass of the rural populationwere forced to sell their labour to capitalists or starve.
Once capitalism had achieved this monopolyof the means of production, it could afford to let the mass of the population enjoyapparent freedom and equality of political rights with the capitalists. For however‘free’ the workers were, they still had to work for a living.
Pro-capitalist economists have a simple explanationof what then happens. They say that by paying wages the capitalist buys the labourof the worker. He must pay a fair price for it. Otherwise the worker will go andwork for someone else. The capitalist gives a ‘fair day’s wage’. In return theworker should give a ‘fair day’s work’.
How then do they explain profit? This,they claim, is a ‘reward’ to the capitalist for his ‘sacrifice’ in allowing themeans of production (his capital) to be put to use. It is an argument that canhardly convince any worker who gives it a moment’s thought.
Take a company that announces a ‘net rateof profit’ of 10 percent. It is saying that if the cost of all the machinery, factoriesand so on that it owns is £100 million, then it is left with £10 millionprofit after paying the wages, raw material costs and the cost of replacing themachinery that wears out in a year.
You don’t have to be a genius to see thatafter ten years the company will have made a total profit of £100 million– the full cost of its original investment.
If it is ‘sacrifice’ that is being rewarded,then surely after the first ten years all profits should cease. For by then thecapitalists have been paid back completely for the money they put in in the firstplace. In fact, however, the capitalist is twice as wealthy as before. He ownshis original investment and the accumulated profits.
The workers, in the meantime, have sacrificedmost of their life’s energy to working eight hours a day, 48 weeks a year, inthe factory. Are they twice as well off at the end of that time as at the beginning?You bet your boots they’re not. Even if a worker saves assiduously, he or she won’tbe able to buy much more than a colour television set, a cheap central heatingsystem or a second hand car. The worker will never raise the money to buy the factoryhe or she works in.
The ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’has multiplied the capital of the capitalist, while leaving the worker with nocapital and no choice but to go on working for roughly the same wage. The ‘equalrights’ of the capitalist and the worker have increased inequality.
One of Karl Marx’s great discoveries wasthe explanation for this apparent anomaly. There is no mechanism that forces acapitalist to pay his workers the full value of the work they do. A worker employed,for example, in the engineering industry today might create £400 of new outputa week. But that does not mean he or she will be paid this sum. In 99 cases outof 100, they will get paid considerably less.
The alternative they have to working isto go hungry (or live on the miserable sums handed out by the social security).So they demand not the full value of what they produce, but rather just enoughto give them a more or less acceptable living standard. The worker is paid onlyenough to get him to put all his efforts, all his capacity for work (what Marxcalled his labour power) at the disposal of the capitalist each day.
From the capitalist’s point of view, providingthe workers are paid enough to keep them fit for work and to bring up their childrenas a new generation of workers, then they are being paid a fair amount for theirlabour power. But the amount of wealth needed to keep workers fit for work is considerablyless than the amount of wealth they can produce once working – the value of theirlabour power is considerably less than the value created by their labour.
The difference goes into the pocket ofthe capitalist. Marx called it ‘surplus value’.
The self expansion of capital
If you read the writing of apologists forthe present system, you will soon notice that they share a strange belief. Money,according to them, has a magical property. It can grow like a plant or animal.
When a capitalist puts his money in a bankhe expects it to increase in amount. When he invests it in the shares of ICI orUnilever he expects to be rewarded by offshoots of fresh money every year, inthe form of dividend payments. Kari Marx noted this phenomenon, which he calledthe ‘self expansion of capital’, and set out to explain it. As we saw previously,his explanation began not with money, but with labour and the means of production.In present society, those with enough wealth can buy control of the means of production.They can then force everyone else to sell to them the labour needed to work themeans of production. The secret of the ‘self expansion of capital’, of the miraculouscapacity of money to grow for those who have plenty of it, lies in the buying andselling of this labour.
Let’s take the example of a worker, whowe’ll call Jack, who gets a job with an employer. Sir Browning Browne. The workJack can do in eight hours will create an additional amount of wealth – worth perhaps£48. But Jack will be willing to work for much less than this, since the alternativeis social security. The efforts of pro-capitalist MPs, such as the obnoxious ToryPeter Lilley, ensure that he will only get £12 a day on social security tokeep himself and his family. They explain that to give more would be to ‘destroythe incentive to work’.
If Jack wants to get more than £12a day he has to sell his ability to work, his labour power, even if he is offeredmuch less than the £48 worth of wealth he can create in eight hours. He willbe willing to work for, perhaps, the average wage, £28 a day. The difference,£20 a day, goes into the pocket of Sir Browning. It is Sir Browning’ssurplus value.
Because he had enough wealth to buy controlof the means of production in the first place, Sir Browning Browne can guaranteegrowing richer by £20 a day for every worker he employs. His money keepsgrowing, his capital expanding, not because of some law of nature, but becausehis control of the means of production allows him to get someone else’s labour onthe cheap.
Of course, Sir Browning does not necessarilyhave all the £20 to himself – he may rent the factory or the land, he mayhave borrowed some of his initial wealth from other members of the ruling class.They demand in return a cut of the surplus value. So perhaps he forks out £10to them as rent, interest and dividend payments, leaving himself with only £10profit.
Those who live off dividends have probablynever seen Jack in their lives. Nevertheless, it was not the mystical power ofpound coins that gave them their income, but the all too physical sweat of Jack.The dividend, the interest payments and the profit all came out of the surplusvalue.
What decides how much Jack gets for hiswork? The employer will try to pay as little as possible. But in practice thereare limits below which he cannot go. Some of these limits are physical – it isno good giving workers such miserable wages that they suffer from malnutrition andare unable to put any effort into their work. They also have to be able to travelto and from work, to have somewhere they can rest at night, so that they do notfall asleep over the machines.
From this point of view it is worth evenpaying for what the workers think of as ‘little luxuries’ – like a few pints inthe evening, the television, the occasional holiday. These all make the workermore refreshed and capable of doing more work. They all serve to replenish hislabour power. It is an important fact that where wages are ‘held too low’ theproductivity of labour falls.
The capitalist has to worry about somethingelse as well. His firm will be in business for many years, long after the presentset of workers have died out. The firm will require the labour of their children.So they have to pay the workers enough to bring up their children. They also haveto ensure that the state provides these children with certain skills (such as readingand writing) through the educational system.
In practice, something else matters as well– what the worker thinks is a ‘decent wage’. A worker who gets paid considerablyless than this may well neglect his work, not worrying about losing his job sincehe thinks it is ‘useless’.
All these elements that determine his wagehave one thing in common. They all go towards making sure he has the life energy,the labour power, that the capitalist buys by the hour. The workers are paid thecost of keeping themselves and their families alive and fit for work.
In present capitalist society, one furtherpoint has to be noted. Huge amounts of wealth are spent on such things as policeforces and weapons. These are used in the interests of the capitalist class bythe state. In effect, they belong to the capitalist class, although they arerun by the state. The value which is spent on them belongs to the capitalists,not the workers. It too is part of the surplus value.
Surplus value = profit + rent + interest+ spending on the police, army and so on.
5. The labour theory of value
But machinery, capital, produces goods as well as labour. If so, it’s onlyfair that capital as well as labour gets a share of the wealth produced. Every‘factor of production’ has to get its reward.
That is how someone who has been taught alittle pro-capitalist economics replies to the Marxist analysis of exploitationand surplus value. And at first sight the objection seems to make some sense. For,surely, you cannot produce goods without capital?
Marxists have never argued that you could.But our starting point is rather different. We begin by asking: where does capitalcome from? How did the means of production come into existence in the first place?
The answer is not difficult to find. Everythingpeople have used historically to create wealth – whether a Neolithic stone axe ora modern computer – once had to be made by human labour. Even if the axe was shapedwith tools, the tools in turn were the product of previous labour.
That is why Karl Marx used to refer tothe means of production as ‘dead labour’. When businessmen boast of the capitalthey possess, in reality they are boasting that they have gained control of a vastpool of the labour of previous generations – and that does not mean the labour oftheir ancestors, who laboured no more than they do now.
The notion that labour was the source ofwealth – usually referred to as the ‘labour theory of value’ – was not an originaldiscovery of Marx. All the great pro-capitalist economists until his time acceptedit.
Such men, like the Scottish economist AdamSmith or the English economist David Ricardo, were writing when the system of industrialcapitalism was still fairly young – in the years just before and just after theFrench Revolution. The capitalists did not yet dominate and needed to know thereal source of their wealth if they were ever to do so. Smith and Ricardo servedtheir interests by telling them that labour created wealth, and that to buildup their wealth they had to ‘free’ labour from the control of the old pre-capitalistrulers.
But it was not long before thinkers closeto the working class began to turn the argument against the friends of Smith andRicardo: if labour creates wealth, then labour creates capital. And the ‘rightsof capital’ are no more than the rights of usurped labour.
Soon the economists who supported capitalwere pronouncing the labour theory of value to be a load of nonsense. But if youkick truth out the front door, it has a habit of creeping in the back.
Turn on the radio. Listen to it long enoughand you will hear some pundit or other claim that what is wrong with the Britisheconomy is that ‘people do not work hard enough’ or, another way of saying thesame thing, ‘productivity is too low’. Forget for a minute whether the argumentis correct or not. Instead look closely at the way it is put. They never say ‘machinesdo not work hard enough’. No, it is always people, the workers.
They claim that if only the workers workedharder, more wealth would be created, and that this would make possible more investmentin new machinery. The people who use this argument may not know it, but they aresaying that more work will create more capital. Work, labour, is the source ofwealth.
Say I have a £5 note in my pocket.Why is that of use to me? After all, it’s only a piece of printed oaper. Its valueto me lies in the fact that I can get, in exchange for it, something useful thathas been made by someone else’s labour. The £5 note, in fact, is nothingmore than an entitlement to the products of so much labour. Two £5 notes arean entitlement to the products of twice as much labour, and so on.
When we measure wealth we are really measuringthe laboul that has been expended in creating it.
Of course, not everyone produces as muchwith their labour in a given time as everyone else. If I set out, for instance,to make a table, I might take five or six times as long as a skilled carpenter.But no one in their right mind would regard what I had made as five or six timesas valuable as a table made by a skilled carpenter. They would estimate its valueaccording to how much of the carpenter’s labour would be needed to make it, notmine.
Say it would take a carpenter an hour tomake a table, then they would say that the value of the table to them was the equivalentof one hour’s labour. That would be the labour time necessary to make it, giventhe usual level of technique and skill in present society.
For this reason, Marx insisted that themeasure of the value of something was not simply the time it took an individualto make it, but the time it would take an individual working with the average levelof technology and the average level of skill – he called this average level oflabour needed ‘the socially necessary labour time’. The point is important becauseunder capitalism advances in technology are always taking place, which means thatit takes less and less labour to produce goods.
For example, when radios were made withthermionic valves they were very expensive items, because it took a great deal oflabour to make the valves, to wire them together and so on. Then the transistorwas invented, which could be made and wired together with much less labour.Suddenly, all the workers in the factories still making valve radios found thatthe value of what they were producing slumped, for the value of radios was no longerdetermined by the labour time needed to make them from valves, but instead bythe time needed to make them with transistors.
One final point. Prices of some goodsfluctuate wildly – on a day-to-day or a week-to-week basis. These changes can becaused by many other things besides changes in the amount of labour needed to makethem.
When the frost in Brazil killed all thecoffee plants the price of coffee shot up, because there was a shortage throughoutthe world and people were prepared to pay more. If tomorrow some natural catastrophewas to destroy all the televisions in Britain, there is no doubt the price of televisionswould shoot up in the same way. What economists call ‘supply and demand’ continuallycauses such fluctuations in price.
For this reason, many pro-capitalist economistssay that the labour theory of value is nonsense. They say that only supply anddemand matter. But that is nonsense. For this argument forgets that when thingsfluctuate they usually fluctuate around an average level. The sea goes up and downbecause of tides, but that doesn’t mean we cannot talk of a fixed point aroundwhich it moves, which we call ‘sea level’.
Similarly, the fact that prices go up anddown from day to day does not mean that there are not fixed values around whichthey fluctuate. For instance, if all the televisions were destroyed, the firstnew ones to be produced would be very much in demand and fetch a high price.But it would not be long before more and more were on the market, competing witheach other until the price was forced down close to their value in terms of thelabour time needed to make them.
Competition and accumulation
There was a time when capitalism did seemlike a dynamic and progressive system. For most of human history, the lives ofmost men and women have been dominated by drudgery and exploitation. Industrialcapitalism did not change this when it made its appearance in the 18th and 19thcenturies.
But it did seem to put this drudgery andexploitation to some useful purpose. Instead of wasting vast amounts of wealth onluxury for a few parasitic aristocrats or in building luxury tombs for dead monarchsor in futile wars over which son of an emperor should rule some God forsaken hole,it used wealth to build up the means of creating more wealth. The rise of capitalismwas a period of growth in industry, cities, means of transportation – on a scaleundreamt of in previous human history.
Strange as it may seem today, placessuch as Oldham, Halifax and Bingley were the home of miracles. Humanity had neverbefore seen so much raw cotton and wool turned so quickly into cloth to clothemillions. This did not happen because of any special virtues possessed by the capitalists.They were always rather noxious people, obsessed only with getting wealth intotheir own hands by paying as little as possible for the labour they used.
Many previous ruling classes had been likethem in this respect without building up industry. But the capitalists were differentin two important respects.
The first we have dealt with – that theydid not own workers, instead paying them by the hour for their ability to work,their labour power. They used wage slaves, not slaves. Secondly, they did notthemselves consume the goods their workers produced. The feudal landlord liveddirectly from the meat, bread, cheese and wine produced by his serfs. But the capitalistlived by selling to other people the goods produced by workers.
This gave the individual capitalist lessfreedom to behave as he pleased than the individual slave owner or feudal lordhad. To sell goods, the capitalist had to produce them as cheaply as possible.The capitalist owned the factory and was all-powerful within it. But he could notuse his power as he wished. He had to bow down before the demands of competitionwith other factories.
Let’s go back to our favourite capitalist.Sir Browning Browne. Assume that a certain quantity of the cotton cloth producedin his factory took ten hours of workers’ time to turn out, but that some otherfactory could produce the same amount in five hours of workers’ time. Sir Browningwould not be able to charge the price for it equivalent to ten hours of labour.No one in their right mind would pay this price when there was cheaper clothjust down the road.
Any capitalist who wanted to survive inbusiness had to ensure that his workers worked as fast as possible. But that wasnot all. He also had to make sure that his workers were working with the mostup to date machinery, so that their labour produced as many goods in an hour asdid the labour of those working for other capitalists. The capitalist who wantedto stay in business had to make sure he owned ever greater amounts of means ofproduction – or, as Marx put it, to accumulate capital!
The competition between capitalists produceda power, the market system, that had each and every one of them in its grip. Itcompelled them to speed up the work process all the time and to invest as much asthey could afford in new machinery. And they could only afford the new machinery(and, of course, have their own luxuries on the side) if they kept workers’ wagesas low as they could.
Marx writes in his major work. Capital,that the capitalist is like a miser, obsessed with getting more and more wealth.But:
What in the miser is mere idiosyncracy is,in the capitalist, the effect of a social mechanism in which he is but one ofthe wheels … The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessaryto keep increasing the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking,and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by eachindividual capitalist as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantlyextending his capital in order to preserve it. But extend it he cannot, exceptby means of progressive accumulation.
Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses andthe prophets!
Production does not take place to satisfyhuman need – even the human needs of the capitalist class – but in order to enableone capitalist to survive in competition with another capitalist. The workers employedby each capitalist find their lives dominated by the drive of their employers toaccumulate faster than their rivals.
As Marx’s The Communist Manifesto put it:
In bourgeois society living labour isbut a means to accumulate dead labour … Capital is independent and has individuality,while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
The compulsive drive for capitalists to accumulatein competition with one another explains the great rush forward of industry inthe early years of the system. But something else resulted a well – repeated economiccrisis. Crisis is not new. It is as old as the system itself.
6. Economic crisis
The accumulation of wealth on the one hand, of poverty on the other.
That was how Marx summed up the trend ofcapitalism. Every capitalist fears competition from every other, so he works hisemployees as hard as possible, paying wages as low as he can get away with.
The result is a disproportion between themassive growth of means of production on the one hand, and the limited growth inwages and the number of workers employed on the other. This, Marx insisted, wasthe basic cause of economic crisis.
The easiest way to look at this is to ask:who buys the greatly expanding quantity of goods? The low wages of the workersmean they cannot afford the goods produced by their own labour. And the capitalistscannot increase wages, because that would be to destroy profit, the driving forceof the system.
But if firms cannot sell the goods theyproduce, they have to shutdown factories and sack workers. The total amount ofwages then falls still more, and yet more firms cannot sell their goods. A ‘crisisof overproduction’ sets in, with goods piling up throughout the economy that peoplecannot afford to buy.
This has been a recurrent feature of capitalistsociety for the past 160 years.
But any quick-witted apologist for thesystem will soon point out that there should be an easy way out of the crisis. Allthat’s needed is that capitalists invest their profit in new factories and machines.That will provide jobs for workers, who in turn will then be able to buy theunsold goods. This means that as long as there’s new investment all the goodsproduced can be sold and the system can provide full employment.
Marx was no fool and recognised this. Indeed,as we’ve seen, he realised that the competitive pressure on capitalists to investwas central to the system. But, he asked, does this mean the capitalists will investall their profits, all the time?
The capitalist will only invest if he thinkshe is guaranteed a ‘reasonable’ profit.
If he doesn’t think there is such a profitto be made, he won’t risk his money in investment. He’ll put it in the bank andleave it there.
Whether the capitalist invests or not dependson how he assesses the economic situation. When it looks right, the capitalistsall rush to invest at the same time, falling over each other searching for constructionsites, buying up machines, scouring the earth for raw materials, paying over theodds for skilled labour.
This is usually called the ‘boom’.
But the frenzied competition for land, rawmaterials and skilled labour forces up the prices of these things. And suddenlya point is reached where some firms discover their costs have risen so much thatall their profits have disappeared.
The investment boom all at once gives wayto an investment ‘slump’. No one wants new factories – construction workers aresacked. No one wants new machines – the machine tool industry goes into crisis.No one wants all the iron and steel that is being produced – the steel industryis suddenly working ‘below capacity’ and becomes ‘unprofitable’. Closures andshutdowns spread from industry to industry, destroying jobs – and with them theability of workers to buy the goods of other industries.
The history of capitalism is a history ofsuch periodic lurches into crisis, into the insanity of unemployed workers goinghungry outside empty factories, while stocks of ‘unwanted’ goods rot.
Capitalism creates these crises of overproductionperiodically because there is no planning, so there’s no way to stop the stampedeof capital into and out of investment all at once.
People used to think that the state couldstop this. By intervening in the economy, increasing state investment when privateinvestment was low, then reducing it when private investment caught up, the statewould keep production on an even keel. But nowadays state investment too is partof the lunacy.
Look at British Steel. Some years ago,when the firm was still nationalised, steel workers were told their jobs were beingscrapped to make way for vast modern automatic furnaces designed to produce moresteel more cheaply. Now they are being told that yet more workers must lose theirjobs – because Britain was not the only country to embark on these massive investmentplans. France, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Eastern Europe, even South Korea,all did the same. Now there’s a world surplus of steel – a crisis of overproduction.State investment is being cut.
Steel workers, of course, suffer both ways.This is the price humanity is still paying for an economic system where the productionof massive wealth is controlled by a small privileged group interested only inprofit. It does not matter whether these small privileged groups own industry directly,or control it indirectly through their control of the state (as with British Steel).While they use this control to compete with each other for the largest share ofthe profits, whether nationally or internationally, it is the workers who suffer.
The final lunacy of the system is thatthe ‘crisis of overproduction’ is not overproduction at all. All that ‘surplus’steel, for instance, could help solve world hunger. Peasants around the world haveto plough the land with wooden ploughshares – steel ploughshares would increasefood production. But the peasants have no money anyway, so the capitalist systemisn’t interested – there’s no profit to be made.
Why crises tend to get worse
Crises do not just take place with monotonousregularity. Marx also predicted they would get worse as time went on.
Even if investment took place at an evenrate, without fits and starts, it could not stop the overall trend towards crisis.This is because the competition between capitalists (and capitalist nations) forcesthem to invest in labour saving equipment.
In Britain today almost all new investmentsare designed to cut the number of workers employed. That is why there we fewerworkers in British industry today than ten years ago, even though output has increasedover that time.
Only by ‘rationalising production’, by ‘increasingproductivity’ and by cutting the workforce can one capitalist get a bigger shareof the cake than another. But the result for the system as a whole is devastating.For it means that the number of workers does not increase at anything like thesame speed as investment.
Yet it is the labour a/workers that isthe source of the profits, the fuel that keeps the system going. If you make biggerand bigger investments, without a corresponding increase in the source of profits,you are heading for a breakdown – just as surely as if you expected to drive aJaguar on the amount of petrol needed to keep a Mini going.
That is why Marx argued 100 years ago thatthe very success of capitalism in piling up huge investments in new equipment ledto a ‘tendency of the rate of profit to decline’ which means ever-worsening crises.
His argument can be applied very simplyto capitalism today. Instead of the old picture of ‘bad times’ turning into ‘goodtimes’, of slumps turning into booms, we seem to be in a never ending slump. Anyspell of upturn, any drop in unemployment, is limited and short lived.
Apologists for the system say this is becauseinvestment is not high enough. Without new investment there are no new jobs, withoutnew jobs there’s no money to buy new goods. So far, we can agree with them –but we don’t agree with their explanation of why this is happening.
They blame wages. Wages are too high, theysay, which cuts profits to the bone. Capitalists are frightened to invest becausethey won’t get ‘sufficient reward’.
But the crisis has continued through longyears in which government pay policies have cut workers’ living standards andpushed profits up. The years 1975-78 saw the biggest cut in workers’ living standardsthis century, while the rich grew richer – the top 10 percent pushed up theirshare of the national cake from 57.8 percent in 1974 to 60 percent in 1976.
There still isn’t enough investment to endthe crisis – and that goes not just for Britain but for other countries where wageshave been cut back, for France, for Japan, for Germany.
We would do better to listen to what KarlMarx said 100 years ago than to listen to those who apologise for capitalism today.
Marx predicted that as capitalism got older,its crises would get worse because the source of profit, labour, does not increasenearly as rapidly as the investment needed to put labour to work. Marx wrote whenthe value of the plant and machinery needed to employ each worker was fairly low.It has shot up since then, until today it can be £20,000 or even £30,000.Competition between capitalist firms has forced them to use ever bigger and evermoreexpensive machinery. The point has been reached where, in most industries, it istaken for granted that new machinery means fewer workers.
The international economic agency OECD haspredicted that employment in the world’s major economies will fall, even if bysome miracle investment soars.
Which it won’t. Because capitalists careabout their profit, and if their investment increases fourfold but their profitonly doubles, they get really upset. Yet this is what must happen if industrygrows more quickly than the source of profit, labour.
As Marx put it, the rate of profit willtend to fall. He predicted that a point would eventually be reached at which anynew investment would seem a perilous venture. The scale of expenditure needed fornew plant and machinery would be colossal, but the rate of profit would be lowerthan ever before. When this point was reached, each capitalist (or capitaliststate) would fantasise about huge new investment programmes – but be afraid tomake them for fear of going bust.
The world economy today is very much likethat. Rover plans new production lines – but fears it will lose money. BritishSteel dreams of those big plants it planned – but have to keep them on ice becauseit cannot sell its present output. The Japanese shipbuilders have given up investingin new yards – and some of the old ones are being shut down.
The very success of capitalism in buildingever vaster and more productive machinery has brought the system to the point ofseemingly permanent crisis.
A point was reached in the slave societiesof the ancient world and the feudal societies of the Middle Ages where either arevolution would transform society or it would enter a permanent crisis that woulddrive it backwards. In the case of Rome, the lack of a revolution led preciselyto the destruction of Roman civilisation and to the Dark Ages. In the case of somefeudal societies – Britain and, later, France – revolution destroyed the old orderand enabled new social advance to take place, under capitalism.
Now capitalism itself faces the choice betweenpermanent crisis, which eventually will plunge humanity back into barbarism throughpoverty and war, or a socialist revolution.
7. The working class
Marx began The Communist Manifesto with the statement, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.’
The question of how the ruling class wasto force the oppressed class to keep producing wealth for it was crucial. Becauseof this, in every previous society, there had been enormous struggles betweenthe classes which often culminated in civil war – the slave uprisings in AncientRome, the peasant uprisings in medieval Europe, the great civil wars and revolutionsof the 17th and 18th centuries.
In all of these great struggles, the massof the insurgent forces were from the most oppressed section of society. But, asMarx hastened to add, at the end of the day all their efforts served only to replaceone privileged ruling minority with another. So, for example, in Ancient Chinathere were several successful peasant revolts – but they merely replaced one emperorwith another. Similarly, those who made the greatest effort in the French Revolutionwere the ‘bras nus’ – the poorer classes of Paris, but at the end of the day societywas ruled not by them but by bankers and industrialists instead of the king andcourtiers.
There were two main reasons for this failureof the lower classes to keep control of the revolutions in which they fought.
Firstly, the general level of wealth insociety was fairly low. It was only because the vast mass of people were kept inabysmal poverty that a small minority had time and leisure to develop the arts andsciences to maintain civilisation. In other words, class division was necessaryif society was to progress.
Secondly, the life of the oppressed classesdid not prepare them to run society. By and large they were illiterate, they hadlittle idea of what things were like outside their own immediate locality, and,above all, their everyday life divided each of them against the other. Each peasantwas concerned with cultivating his own plot of land. Each craftsman in the townran his own small business and was to some extent in competition with other craftsmen,not united with them.
Peasant revolts would start with vastnumbers of people rising up to divide the land of the local feudal lords, but oncethe lord was defeated they would fall to squabbling among themselves about howthey would divide the land. As Marx put it, peasants were like ‘potatoes in a sack’;they could be forced together by some outside power but were not capable of linkingpermanently to represent their own interests.
The workers who create the wealth undermodern capitalism differ from all the previous lower classes. Firstly, the divisionof classes is no longer necessary for human progress. So much wealth is createdthat capitalist society itself periodically destroys huge quantities through warsor economic crises. It could be divided up equally and society could still havea flowering of science, arts and so forth.
Secondly, life under capitalism preparesworkers in many ways to take control of society. For example, capitalism needsworkers who are skilled and educated. Also capitalism forces thousands of peopleinto huge workplaces in huge conurbations where they are in close contact with oneanother, and where they can be a powerful force for changing society.
Capitalism makes workers cooperate in productionwithin the factory, and those cooperative skills can easily be turned againstthe system, as when workers organise themselves into unions. Because they are massedtogether in huge concentrations it is much easier for workers to democraticallycontrol such bodies than it was for previously oppressed classes.
Furthermore, capitalism tends increasinglyto turn groups of people who thought of themselves as a ‘cut above’ ordinary workers(such as clerks or technicians) into wage labourers who are forced to organiseunions and so on as other workers do.
Lastly, the development of communications– railways, roads, air transport, postal systems, telephones, radio and television– allows workers to communicate outside their own locality or industry. They canorganise as a class on a national and international scale – something beyond thewildest dreams of previous oppressed classes.
All these facts mean that the working classcan not only be a force which rebels against existing society, but can organiseitself, (electing and controlling its own representatives, so as to change societyin its own interest, and not just to set up yet another emperor or group of bankers.As Karl Marx put it:
All previous historical movements were movementsof minorities in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-consciousindependent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.
8. How can society be changed?
In Britain the overwhelming majority ofsocialists and trade unionists have generally argued that society can be transformedwithout violent revolution. All that is needed, they say, is for socialists towin enough popular support to gain control of the ‘traditional’ political institutions– parliament and the local councils. Then socialists will be in a position tochange society by getting the existing state – the civil service, the judiciary,the police, the armed forces – to enforce laws to curtail the power of the employingclass.
In this way, it has been claimed, socialismcan be introduced gradually and without violence, by reforming the present setup.
This view is usually referred to as ‘reformism’,although occasionally you will hear it referred to as ‘revisionism’ (because itinvolves revising Marx’s ideas completely), ‘social democracy’ (although until1914 that meant revolutionary socialism) or Fabianism (after the Fabian Societywhich has long propagated the reformist view in Britain). It is a view acceptedby the left as well as the right of the Labour Party.
Reformism seems, at first sight, very plausible.It fits with what we are told at school, in the papers and on television – that‘parliament runs the country’ and that ‘parliament is elected according to thedemocratic wishes of the people’. Yet despite that, every attempt to introducesocialism through parliament has ended in failure. Thus there were three majorityLabour governments in Britain between 1945 and 1979 – with massive majorities in1945 and 1966 – yet we are no nearer socialism than in 1945.
The experience abroad is the same. In Chilein 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president. People claimedthat this was a ‘new way’ to move to socialism. Three years later the generalswho had been asked to join the government overthrew Allende and the Chilean workingclass movement was destroyed.
There are three interconnected reasonswhy reformism must always fail.
Firstly, while socialist majorities in parliamentsare ‘gradually’ introducing socialist measures, real economic power continues tolie in the hands of the old ruling class. They can use this economic power toshut down whole sections of industry, to create unemployment, to force up pricesthrough speculation and hoarding, to send money abroad so creating a ‘balance ofpayments’ crisis, and to launch press campaigns blaming all this on the socialistgovernment.
Thus Harold Wilson’s Labour government wasforced in 1964 and again in 1966 to drop measures which would have benefited workers– by the wholesale movement of money abroad by wealthy individuals and companies.Wilson himself describes in his memoirs how:
We had now reached the situation where anewly elected government was being told by international speculators that the policyon which we had fought the election could not be implemented… The queen’s firstminister was being asked to bring down the curtain on parliamentary democracyby accepting the doctrine that an election in Britain was a farce, that the Britishpeople could not make a choice between policies.
It only needs to be added that, despiteWilson’s alleged indignation, for the next six years he did indeed follow the sortof policies demanded by the speculators.
The same deliberate creation of balance ofpayments crises forced the Labour government elected in 1974 to introduce threeconsecutive sets of cuts in public spending in hospitals, schools and social services.
Allende’s government in Chile faced evengreater disruption at the hands of big business. Twice, whole sections of industrywere shut down by ‘bosses’ strikes’, as speculation increased prices to an enormouslevel and hoarding of goods by businessmen caused queuing for the necessities oflife.
The second reason capitalism cannot be reformedis that the existing state machine is not ‘neutral’, but designed, from top tobottom, to preserve capitalist society.
The state controls nearly all the means ofexercising physical force, the means of violence. If the organisations of thestate were neutral, and did whatever any particular government told them, whethercapitalist or socialist, then the state could be used to stop sabotage of the economyby big business. But look at the way the state machine operates and who reallygives the orders, and you can see it is not neutral.
The state machine is not simply the government.It is a vast organisation with many different branches – the police, the army,the judiciary, the civil service, the people who run the nationalised industriesand so on. Many of the people who work in these different branches of the statecome from the working class – they live and get paid like workers.
But it is not these people who make thedecisions. The rank and file soldiers don’t decide where wars are going to be foughtor whether strikes are going to be broken; the counter clerk in the social securityoffice does not decide how much dole will be paid out. The whole state machine isbased on the principle that people on one rung of the ladder obey those on therung above.
This is essentially the case in the sectionsof the state machine that exercise physical force – army, navy, air force, police.The first thing soldiers are taught when they enlist – long before they are allowedto touch weapons – is to obey orders, regardless of their personal opinions ofthose orders. That is why they are taught to do absurd drills. If they will followlunatic commands on the parade ground without thinking about it, it is reckonedthey will shoot when ordered to without thinking about that either.
The most heinous crime in any army is arefusal to obey orders – mutiny. So seriously is the offence regarded, that mutinyduring time of war is still punishable by execution in Britain. Who gives the orders?
If you look at the chain of command inthe British army (and other armies are no different) it goes: general – brigadier– colonel – lieutenant – NCO – private. At no stage in that chain of command doelected representatives – MPs or local councillors – get a look in. It is just asmuch an act of mutiny for a group of privates to obey their local MP rather thanthe officer. The army is a massive killing machine. The people who run it – andhave the power to promote other soldiers into commanding positions – are the generals.
Of course, in theory the generals are responsibleto the elected government. But soldiers are trained to obey generals, not politicians.If generals choose to give orders to their soldiers which are at variance withthe wishes of an elected government, the government cannot countermand those orders.It can only try to persuade the generals to change their minds, (/the governmentknows the sorts of orders that are being given – because military affairs are invariablysecret, it is very easy for generals to hide what they are doing from governmentsthey don’t like.
That doesn’t always mean that generals always,or even usually, ignore what governments say to them. Usually in Britain they havefound it convenient to go along with most of what the government suggests. But,in a life and death situation, the generals are able to put their killing machineinto operation without listening at all to the government, and there is littlethe government can do about it. This is what the generals eventually did in Chilewhen Allende was overthrown.
So the question, ‘Who runs the army?’ isreally, ‘Who are the generals?’ In Britain about 80 percent of the senior officerswent to fee-paying ‘public’ schools – the same proportion as 50 years ago (17 yearsof Labour government didn’t change that). They are related to the owners of bigbusiness, belong to the same posh clubs, mix at the same social functions, sharethe same ideas (if you doubt this, look at the letters column in virtually anycopy of the Daily Telegraph). The same goes for the heads of the civil service,the judges, the chief constables.
Do you think these people are going to obeygovernment orders to take economic power away from their friends and relatives inbig business, just because 330 people walk into a lobby in the House of Commons?Would they not be much more likely to copy the example of the Chilean generals,judges and senior civil servants, who sabotaged the government’s orders for threeyears and then, when the time was ripe, overthrew it?
In practice the particular ‘constitution’we have in Britain means that those who control the state machine would be ableto thwart the will of an elected left wing government far short of physically overthrowingit. If such a government were elected, it would be faced with massive economicsabotage by the employing class (factory closures, flights of money abroad, hoardingof necessities, inflationary price rises). If the government attempted to dealwith such sabotage using ‘constitutional means’ – by passing laws – it would findits hands tied behind its back.
The House of Lords would certainly refuseto ratify any such law – delaying it for nine months at a minimum. The judges would‘interpret’ any law passed in such a way as to curtail its powers. The civil servicechiefs, the generals and the police chiefs would use the decisions of the judgesand the House of Lords to justify their own unwillingness to do what ministerstold them. They would be backed by virtually the whole press, which would screamthat the government was behaving ‘illegally’ and ‘unconstitutionally’. The generalswould then use such language to justify preparations to overthrow an/illegal’ government.
The government would be powerless to dealwith the economic chaos – unless it really did act unconstitutionally and calledupon rank and file civil servants, police and soldiers to turn against theirsuperiors.
Lest anyone thinks this is all wild fantasy,it should be added that there have been at least two occasions in recent Britishhistory when generals have sabotaged government decisions they did not like.
In 1912 the House of Commons passed a billproviding for a ‘Home Rule’ parliament to run a united Ireland. The Tory leader,Bonar Law, immediately denounced the (Liberal!) government as an illegal ‘junta’who had ‘sold the constitution’. The House of Lords naturally delayed the law aslong as it could (two years then), while former Tory minister Edward Carson organiseda paramilitary force in the north of Ireland to resist the law.
When the generals who commanded the Britisharmy in Ireland were told to move their troops northwards to deal with this force,they refused and threatened to resign their commissions. It was because of thisaction, usually called the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, that Ireland north and south didn’tget a single parliament in 1914, and remains a divided nation even today.
In 1974 there was a rerun of the events of1912 in miniature. The right wing sectarian Loyalists of Northern Ireland organiseda general stoppage of industry, using barricades to prevent people going to work,against being forced to accept a joint Protestant-Catholic government in NorthernIreland. British ministers called on the British army and the Northern Irelandpolice, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to dismantle the barricades and end thestrike. The senior army officers and the police commanders told the governmentthat this would be inadvisable, and neither soldiers nor police moved againstthe Loyalists. The joint Protestant-Catholic government was forced to resign,the views of army officers proving more powerful than the views of the Britishgovernment.
If that could happen in 1914 and 1974 withmiddle-of-the-road governments trying to push through mild measures, imagine whatwould happen if a militant socialist government was elected. Any serious reformistmajority in parliament would soon be forced to make a choice: either abandon reformsin order to placate those who own industry and control the key positions in thestate, or prepare for an all out conflict, which will inevitably mean the use ofsome kind of force, against those who control those positions.
The third reason why reformism is a deadend is that parliamentary ‘democracy’ contains inbuilt mechanisms for preventingany revolutionary movement finding expression through it.
Some reformists argue that the best wayto take on the power of those who control the key positions in the state machineis for the left to obtain a majority in parliament first. This argument falls becauseparliaments always understate the level of revolutionary consciousness of the massof the population.
The mass of the people will only believethat they themselves can run society when they begin in practice to change societythrough struggle. It is when millions of people are occupying their factories ortaking part in a general strike that ideas of revolutionary socialism suddenlyseem realistic.
But such a level of struggle cannot be maintainedindefinitely unless the old ruling class is removed from power. If it hangs on,it will wait until the occupations or strikes decline, then use its control overthe army and police to break the struggle.
And once the strikes or occupations beginto falter, the feeling of unity and confidence among the workers begins to wane.Demoralisation and bitterness set in. Even the best begin to feel that changingsociety was just a wild dream.
That is why employers always prefer strikevotes to be taken when workers are at home by themselves, getting their ideasfrom the television and the newspapers, not when they are united at mass meetings,able to hear other workers’ arguments.
That is also why anti-union laws nearly alwaysinclude a clause forcing workers to call off strikes while secret, postal ballotsare taken. Such clauses are accurately called ‘cooling off’ periods – they aredesigned to pour cold water on the confidence and unity of workers.
The parliamentary electoral system containsbuilt in secret ballots and cooling off periods. For instance, if a government isbrought to its knees by a massive strike, it is likely to say, ‘OK, wait threeweeks until a general election can resolve the question democratically.’ It hopesthat in the interim the strike will be called off. The workers’ confidence andunity will then fade. Employers may well be able to blacklist militants. The capitalistpress and the television can begin functioning normally again, hammering homepro-government ideas. The police can arrest ‘troublemakers’.
Then when the election finally takes place,the vote will not reflect the high point of the workers’ struggles, but the lowpoint after the strike.
In France in 1968, the government of Generalde Gaulle used elections in precisely this way. The reformist workers’ parties andunions told workers to end their strikes, and de Gaulle won the election.
The British Prime Minister Edward Heathtried the same trick when faced with a massively successful miners’ strike in1974. But this time the miners were not conned. They kept their strike up – andHeath lost the election.
If workers wait for elections to decidethe key issues in the class struggle, they will never reach that high point.
The workers’ state
Marx, in his pamphlet The Civil War inFrance, and Lenin in The State and Revolution outlined a completely different viewof how socialism can be won. Neither simply pulled these ideas out of thin air:both developed their views by seeing the working class inaction – Marx saw theParis Commune, Lenin the Russian ‘Soviets’ (workers’ councils) of 1905 and1917.
But Marx and Lenin insisted that the workingclass could not begin to construct socialism until it had first destroyed the oldstate based on bureaucratic chains of command, and secondly created a new statebased on entirely new principles. Lenin underlined how completely different thisstate had to be from the old by calling it ‘a commune state, a state which is nota state’.
A new state, Marx and Lenin said, was necessaryif the working class was to impose its dictates on the remnants of the old rulingand middle classes. That was why they called it the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’– the working class had to dictate how society was to be run. It also had to defendits revolution against attacks from ruling classes elsewhere in the world. To dothese two jobs, it had to have armed forces of its own, some form of policing ofsociety, courts, even prisons.
But if this new army, police and legalsystem was to be controlled by the workers, and never turn against their interests,it had to be based on completely different principles from the capitalist state.It had to be the means by which the working class as a majority dictated to therest of society, not a dictatorship directed against the majority of the workingclass.
The main differences are these.
The capitalist state serves the interestsof a small minority of society. The workers’ state has to serve the interests ofthe overwhelming majority. Force in the capitalist state is exercised by a minorityof hired killers, cut off from the rest of society and trained to obey upper classofficers. But in a workers’ state, force would be needed only so the majority couldprotect themselves against anti-social acts by the remnants of the old privilegedclasses.
Soldiering and policing in a workers’ statecan be done by ordinary workers, who mix freely with their fellow workers, sharethe same ideas and lead the same lives. Indeed, to make sure that groups of soldiersand police never develop separated from the mass of workers, the ‘soldiers’ and‘police’ should be ordinary factory and office workers who take it in turns, ona rota system, to carry out these functions.
Instead of the armed forces and police beingrun by a small group of officers, they would be run by directly elected representativesof the mass of workers.
Parliamentary representatives in a capitaliststate pass laws but leave it to full time bureaucrats, police chiefs and judgesto implement them. This means that MPs and councillors can always hide behind amillion excuses when their promises are not implemented. The workers’ representativesin a workers’ state would have to see their laws put into action. They, not an eliteof top bureaucrats, would have to explain to the workers of the civil service,the army and so on how things should be done.
Again elected workers’ representatives wouldhave to interpret the laws in courts.
Parliamentary representatives in a capitaliststate are cut off from those who elect them by high salaries. In a workers’ statethe representatives would get no more than the average workers’ wage. The samegoes for those who work full time in key posts implementing the decisions of theworkers’ representatives (the equivalent of present-day civil servants).
Workers’ representatives, and all thoseconcerned with implementing workers’ decisions, would not be, as MPs, immune toremoval from office for five years (or for life in the case of senior civil servants).They would be subject to at least annual elections, and to immediate recall bythose who elected them if they did not implement their wishes.
Parliamentary representatives are electedby all the people living in a certain locality – upper class, middle class andworking class, slum landlords as well as tenants, stockbrokers as well as labourers.In a workers’ state election would be by those who work only, with voting only afteropen discussion on the issues concerned. So the core of the workers’ state wouldbe workers’ councils based on the factories, mines, docks, big offices, with groupssuch as housewives, pensioners, school students and students having their own representatives.
In this way, each section of the workingclass would have its own representative and be able directly to judge whether heor she was following their interests. In these ways, the new state cannot becomea force separate from and against the majority working class – as it was in EasternBloc countries which called themselves ‘Communist’.
At the same time, the workers’ councilsystem provides a means by which workers can coordinate their efforts in runningindustry according to a democratically decided national plan, and not end uprunning their factories in competition with each other. It is easy to see how modemcomputer technology would enable all workers to be given information on the variouseconomic options open to society, and to direct their representatives to choosewhat the majority of workers thought the best set of options – for example, whetherto spend resources on Concorde or on a cheap and reliable public transport system,whether to build nuclear bombs or kidney machines, and so on.
The withering away of the state
Because state power would not be somethingseparate from the mass of the workers, it would be much less a matter of coercionthan under capitalism. As the remnants of the old society against which it wasdirected became resigned to the success of the revolution, and as revolutions removedforeign ruling classes, there would be less and less need for coercion, until eventuallyworkers need never take time off from work to staff the ‘police’ and the ‘army’.
This is what Marx and Lenin meant whenthey said the state would wither away. Instead of coercion against people, thestate would become merely a mechanism of workers’ councils to decide how to produceand allocate goods.
Workers’ councils have come into being inone form or another whenever the struggle between the classes within capitalismhas reached a really high level. ‘Soviet’ is the word the Russians used for workers’councils in 1905 and 1917.
In 1918 in Germany workers’ councils were,briefly, the only power in the country. In Spain in 1936 the various workers’ partiesand unions were united by ‘militia committees’ which ran the localities and werevery much like workers’ councils. In Hungary in 1956 the workers elected councilsto run the factories and the localities as they fought Russian troops. In Chilein 1972-73 the workers began to build ‘cordones’ – workers’ committees that linkedthe big factories.
The workers’ council begins life as a bodyworkers use to coordinate their struggle against capitalism. It may start withmodest functions, raising strike funds maybe, but because these bodies are basedon direct election from the workers, with workers’ representatives subject to recall,they can at the highest points in the struggle coordinate the efforts of the wholeworking class. They can lay the basis for workers’ power.
9. How do workers become revolutionary?
In Britain most workers this century have looked to the Labour Party and parliament to change society. A large minority have backed the reactionary ideas of the Tory party.The supporters of revolutionary socialism have generally been few in number.
This indifference or even opposition ofworkers to revolutionary socialism is hardly surprising. We have all been broughtup in a capitalist society where it is taken for granted that everyone is selfish,where people are continually told by the newspapers and television that only aprivileged minority have the ability to take the key decisions in industry andthe state, where the mass of workers are taught from the first day they enterschool to obey orders given by ‘their elders and betters’.
As Marx put it, ‘The ruling ideas are theideas of the ruling class,’ and vast numbers of workers accept them.
Yet despite this, repeatedly in the historyof capitalism, revolutionary movements of the working class have shaken one countryafter another: France in 1871, Russia in 1917, Germany and Hungary in 1919, Italyin 1920, Spain and France in 1936, Hungary in 1956, France in 1968, Chile in1972-73, Portugal in 1975, Iran in 1979, Poland in 1980.
The explanation for these upheavals liesin the very nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism is a crisis-prone system. Inthe long run it cannot provide full employment, it cannot provide prosperity forall, it cannot secure our living standards today against the crisis it will producetomorrow. But during the capitalist ‘booms’ workers come to expect these things.
So, for instance, in the 1950s and early1960s, workers in Britain came to expect permanent full employment, a ‘welfarestate’ and gradual but real improvements in living standards. By contrast, overthe last 25 years successive governments have allowed unemployment to increaseto a real figure of more than 4 million, have cut the welfare state to shreds, andhave attempted again and again to cut living standards.
Because we are brainwashed into acceptingmany capitalist ideas, we accept some of these attacks. But inevitably a point isreached where workers find they can stand it no more. Suddenly, often when no oneexpects it, their anger suddenly flares and they take some action against employeror government. Perhaps they stage a strike, or organise a demonstration.
When this happens, whether they like it ornot, workers begin doing things that contradict all the capitalist ideas they havepreviously accepted. They begin to act in solidarity with one another, as a class,in opposition to the representatives of the capitalist class.
The ideas of revolutionary socialism thatthey used to reject out of hand now begin to fit in with what they are doing. Someat least of the workers begin to take those ideas seriously – providing those ideasare accessible.
The scale on which this takes place dependson the scale of the struggle, not on the ideas in workers’ heads to begin with.Capitalism forces them into struggle even if they begin with pro-capitalist ideas.The struggle then makes them question these ideas.
Capitalist power rests on two planks – controlof the means of production and control of the state. A real revolutionary movementbegins among the vast mass of workers when struggles over their immediate economicinterests lead them to clash with both planks of capitalist rule.
Take for example a group of workers whohave been employed in the same factory for years. The whole normal humdrum patternof their lives is dependent on their jobs there. One day the employer announcesthat he is going to close the factory down. Even the Tory voters in the workforceare horrified and want to do something. In desperation they decide that the onlyway to continue to lead the sort of lives capitalism has taught them to expect isto occupy the factory – to challenge the employer’s control over the means ofproduction.
They may soon find themselves up againstthe state as well, as the employer calls in the police to return control of ‘his’property back to him. If they are to have any chance of keeping their jobs, theworkers now must also confront the police, the state machine, as well as the employer.
Thus capitalism itself creates the conditionsof class conflict which open workers’ minds to ideas quite opposed to those whichthe system has taught them. This explains why the history of capitalism has beenmarked by periodic upsurges of revolutionary feeling among millions of workers,even if most of the time most workers accept the ideas the system feeds them.
One final point. One of the biggest thingsholding many workers back from support for revolutionary ideas is the feelingthat it is not worth them personally doing anything because other workers willnever support them. When they find that other workers are doing things, theysuddenly lose their own apathy. In the same way people, who feel that they, asworkers, are quite incapable of running society, suddenly learn otherwise whenthey find, in the course of massive struggles against existing society, that they’retaking over much of its running.
It is because of this that once revolutionarymovements start, they can snowball at amazing speed.
10. The revolutionary socialist party
The basic premise of Marxism is that the development of capitalism itself drives workers into revolt against the system.
When such revolts break out – whether amass demonstration, an armed insurrection or even a big strike – the transformationof working class consciousness is astonishing. All the mental energy that workerspreviously frittered away on a hundred and one diversions – from doing the horsesto watching the telly – is suddenly directed towards trying to deal with the problemof how to change society. Millions of people working on such problems produce solutionsof amazing ingenuity, which often leave established revolutionaries as bewilderedas the ruling class by this turn of events.
So, for instance, in the first Russian revolutionof 1905 a new form of workers’ organisation, the soviet – the workers’ council– grew out of the strike committee set up during a printing strike. At first theBolshevik Party – the most militant of the revolutionary socialists – treatedthe Soviets with distrust: they did not believe it was possible for the mass ofpreviously non-political workers to create a genuinely revolutionary instrument.
Such experiences are found in many strikes:the established militants are taken completely by surprise when workers who haveignored their advice for so long, suddenly begin to organise militant action themselves.
This spontaneity is fundamental. But it iswrong to draw the conclusion – as anarchists and near-anarchists do – that becauseof spontaneity, there is no need for a revolutionary party.
In a revolutionary situation, millions ofworkers change their ideas very, very quickly. But they do not all change alltheir ideas at once. Inside every strike, every demonstration, every armed uprisingthere are always continual arguments. A few workers will see the action they aretaking as a prelude to the working class taking control of society. Others willbe half against taking any action at all, because it is disturbing the ‘naturalorder of things’. In the middle will be the mass of workers, attracted first byone set of arguments, then by the other,
Onto one side of the balance the presentruling class will throw all the weight of its newspaper propaganda machine, denouncingthe workers’ actions. It will throw too its strikebreaking forces, whether police,army or right wing organisations.
And on the workers’ side of the argumentthere must be an organisation of socialists who can draw on the lessons of pastclass struggle, who can throw the arguments about socialism into the balance.There must be an organisation that can draw together the growing understanding ofworkers in struggle, so they can act together to change society.
And this revolutionary socialist party needsto be there before the struggle starts, for organisation is not born spontaneously.The party is built through the continual interplay of socialist ideas and experienceof the class struggle – for merely to understand society is not enough: only byapplying these ideas in the day-to-day class struggle, in strikes, demonstrations,campaigns, will workers become aware of their power to change things, and gainthe confidence to do it.
At certain points, the intervention of asocialist party can be decisive, can tip the balance towards change, towards arevolutionary transfer of power to the workers, towards a socialist society.
What sort of party?
The revolutionary socialist party needsto be democratic. To fulfil its role, the party must be continually in touch withthe class struggle, and that means with its own members and supporters in the workplaceswhere that struggle takes place. It needs to be democratic because its leadershipmust always reflect the collective experience of the struggle.
At the same time, this democracy is not merely a system of election but a continual debate within the party – a continual interaction of the socialist ideas on which the party is based with the experience of class struggle.
But the revolutionary socialist partymust also be centralised – for it is an active party, not a debating society. Itneeds to be able to intervene collectively in the class struggle, and to respondquickly, so it must have a leadership capable of taking day-to-day decisions inthe name of the party.
If the government orders the jailing ofpickets, for instance, the party needs to react at once, without the need to conveneconferences to take democratic decisions first. So the decision is made centrallyand acted upon. Democracy comes into play afterwards, when the party hammers outwhether the decision was correct or not – and maybe changes the party leadershipif it was out of touch with the needs of the struggle.
The revolutionary socialist party needsto maintain a fine and delicate balance between democracy and centralism. The keyis that the party does not exist for its own sake, but as a means for bringing arevolutionary change to socialism – and that can only be through class struggle.
So the party must continually adapt itselfto the struggle. When the struggle is low, and few workers believe in the possibilityof revolutionary change, then the party will be small – and must be content tobe so for to dilute its political ideas in order to increase its membership wouldbe pointless. But when the struggle increases, large numbers of workers can changetheir ideas very fast, realising through struggle their power to change things– and then the party must be able to open its doors, otherwise it will be left onthe sidelines.
The party cannot substitute for the workingclass. It must be part of the class struggle, continually trying to unite the mostclass-conscious workers to provide a leadership for the struggle. Nor can the partydictate to the class. It cannot simply proclaim itself the leadership, but mustwin that position, proving the correctness of socialist ideas in practice – whichmeans anything from a small strike to the revolution itself.
Some people see the revolutionary socialistparty as the precursor of socialism. This is completely wrong. Socialism can onlycome about when the working class itself takes control of the means of producingwealth and uses this to transform society.
You cannot build an island of socialism ina sea of capitalism. Attempts by small groups of socialists to cut themselves offand lead their lives according to socialist ideas always fail miserably in thelong term – for a start, the economic and ideological pressures are always there.And in cutting themselves off from capitalism, such small groups also cut themselvesoff from the only force that can bring socialism: the working class.
Of course, socialists fight against thedegrading effects of capitalism every day – against racism, against sexism, againstexploitation, against brutality. But we can only do so by taking the strength ofthe working class as our base.
11. Imperialism and national liberation
Throughout the history of capitalism the employing class has always looked to an additional source of wealth – the seizure of wealth produced in other countries.
The growth of the first forms of capitalismat the close of the Middle Ages was accompanied by the seizure by western statesof vast colonial empires – the empires of Spain and Portugal, of Holland and France,and, of course, of Britain. Wealth was pumped into the hands of the ruling classesof western Europe, while whole societies in what has become known as the ThirdWorld (Africa, Asia and South America) were destroyed.
Thus, the ‘discovery’ of America by Europeansin the 16th century produced a vast flow of gold into Europe. The other side ofthat coin was the destruction of whole societies and the enslavement of others.For example, in Haiti, where Columbus first established a settlement, the nativeHarawak Indians (perhaps half a million in all) were exterminated in just two generations.In Mexico the Indian population was reduced from 20 million in 1520 to 2 millionin 1607.
The Indian population of the West Indiesand of parts of the mainland was replaced by slaves captured in Africa and transportedacross the Atlantic under abominable conditions. An estimated 15 million slavessurvived the Atlantic crossing while about 9 million died in transit. About halfthe slaves were transported in British ships – which is one reason why Britishcapitalism was the first to expand industry.
The wealth from the slave trade providedthe means to finance industry. As an old saying put it, ‘The walls of Bristol arecemented with the blood of the negroes’ – and this applied just as much to otherports. As Karl Marx put it, ‘The veiled slavery of the wage worker in Europe requiredfor its pedestal slavery pure and simple in the New World.’
The slave trade was complemented by purelooting – as when the British conquered India. Bengal was so advanced that thefirst British visitors were stunned by the magnificence of its civilisation.But this wealth did not stay long in Bengal. As Lord Macaulay wrote in his biographyof the conqueror, Clive:
The immense population was given up asprey. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while 30 millionof human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been usedto living under tyranny, but never tyranny like this.
From that point onwards Bengal became renownednot for its wealth, but for a grinding poverty that every few years saw millionsstarve to death in famines, a poverty that continues to this day. Meanwhile, inthe 1760s, at a time when total capital investment in England was no more than £6million to £7 million, the annual tribute to England from India was £2million.
The same processes were at work in relationto England’s oldest colony – Ireland. During the Great Famine of the late 1840swhen Ireland’s population was halved by starvation and emigration, more than enoughwheat to feed the starving population was sent from the country as rent to Englishlandlords.
Today, it is usual to divide the world into‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The impression is given that the‘underdeveloped’ countries have been moving in the same direction for hundreds ofyears as the ‘developed’ countries, but at a slower speed.
But, in fact, one reason for the ‘development’of the Western countries was that the rest were robbed of wealth and pushed backwards.Many are poorer today than they were 300 years ago.
As Michael Barratt Brown has pointed out:
The wealth per head of the present underdevelopedlands, not only in India, but in China, Latin America and Africa, was higher thanin Europe in the 17th century, and fell as wealth grew in Western Europe.
The possession of an empire enabled Britainto develop as the world’s first industrial power. It was in a position to stop othercapitalist states getting their hands on the raw materials, markets and profitableareas of investment within its third of the world.
As new industrial powers such as Germany,Japan and the United States grew up, they wanted these advantages for themselves.They built up rival empires or ‘spheres of influence’. Faced with economic crisis,each of the major capitalist powers tried to solve its problems by encroaching onthe spheres of influence of its rivals. Imperialism led to world war.
This in turn produced huge changes withinthe internal organisation of capitalism. The tool for waging war, the state, becamemuch more important. It worked ever more closely with the giant firms to reorganiseindustry for foreign competition and war. Capitalism became state monopoly capitalism.
The development of imperialism meant thatcapitalists did not just exploit the working class of their own country; they alsotook physical control of other countries and exploited their populations. Forthe most oppressed classes in the colonial countries, this meant that they wereexploited by foreign imperialists as well as by their own ruling class. They weredoubly exploited.
But sections of the ruling classes in thecolonial countries also suffered. They saw many of their own opportunities to exploitthe local population stolen from them by imperialism. In the same way, the middleclasses in the colonies, who would have liked to see a rapid expansion of locallyrun industry so as to provide them with good career opportunities, suffered aswell.
The last 60 years have seen all these variousclasses in colonial and ex-colonial countries rise up against the effects of imperialism.Movements have developed that have attempted to unite the whole population againstforeign imperialist rule. Their demands have included:
• Expulsion of foreign imperialist troops.
• Unification of the whole national territoryunder a single national government, as against its division between different imperialisms.
• The re-establishment of the original languagein everyday life, as opposed to some language imposed by the foreign rulers.
• The use of the wealth produced by thecountry to expand local industry to bring about ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’of the country.
Such were the demands of successive revolutionaryupsurges in China (in 1912, 1923-27 and in 1945-48), in Iran (in 1905-12,1917-21 and in 1941-53), in Turkey (after the First World War), in the West Indies(from the 1920s onwards), in India (in 1920-48), in Africa (after 1945) and inVietnam (until the United States was defeated in 1975).
These movements were often led by sectionsof the local upper classes or middle classes, but they meant that the ruling classesof the advanced countries faced an additional opponent as well as their own workingclass. The national movement in the so-called Third World challenged the imperialistcapitalist states at the same time as did their own working classes.
For the working class movement in the advancedcountries this had great importance. It meant that in its fight against capitalism,it had an ally in the liberation movements of the Third World. So, for example,a Shell worker in Britain had an ally in the liberation forces in South Africawho were fighting to take over the property which Shell owned there. If Shell canthwart the aims of the liberation movements in the Third World, then it will bemore powerful when it comes to resisting the demands of workers in Britain.
This is true, even if the liberation movementin the Third World country does not have a socialist leadership – indeed, even ifits leadership merely wants to replace foreign rule by the rule of a local capitalistor state capitalist class.
The imperialist state which is trying tosmash that liberation movement is the same imperialist state that is the greatestenemy of the Western worker. That is why Marx insisted that ‘a nation that oppressesothers cannot itself be free’, and why Lenin argued for an alliance between theworkers of the advanced countries and the oppressed people of the Third World, evenwhen these had a non-socialist leadership.
This does not mean that socialists will agreewith the way in vhich non-socialists in an oppressed country lead a national lib-rationstruggle (any more than we necessarily agree with how [trade union leader leadsa strike). But we have to make it clear ie/ore anything else that we support thatstruggle. Otherwise we an all too easily end up supporting our own ruling classagainst ieople it is oppressing.
We have to support a liberation struggleunconditionally, before we are entitled to criticise the way it is led.
However, revolutionary socialists in a countrywhich is oppressed by imperialism cannot leave matters there. They have to argue,day in day out, with other people about how the struggle for national liberationshould be waged.
Here, the most important points are containedin the theory of permanent revolution developed by Trotsky. Trotsky began by recognisingthat often movements against oppression are initiated y people from middle classor even upper class backgrounds.
Socialists support such movements becausethey aim to ‘move one of the burdens that weighs upon the most oppressed classesand groups in society. But we also have to recognise that those from the upper ormiddle classes cannot lead such struggles consistently. They will be afraid ofunleashing a full-blooded class struggle, in case this challenges not merely oppressionfrom outside, but also their own ability to live by exploiting the most oppressedclasses.
At a certain point they will run away fromthe struggle they themselves initiated, and, if necessary, unite with the foreignoppressor to smash it. At this point, if socialist, working class does do not takethe leadership of the national liberation struggle, it will be defeated.
Trotsky also made one final point. It istrue that in most Third World countries the working class is only a minority, oftena small minority, of the population. But it is nevertheless often quite big in absoluteterms (for example in India and China it is tens of millions strong), it oftencreates a huge proportion of the national wealth in relation to its size, and itis concentrated in overwhelming numbers in the cities which are key when it comesruling the country. So in a period of revolutionary turmoil, the working classcan take the leadership of all other oppressed classes and seize control of wholecountries. The revolution can be permanent, beginning with demands for nationalliberation and ending with socialist demands. But only if socialists in the oppressedcountry have from the beginning organised the workers on an independent, classbasis – supporting the general movement for national liberation, but always warningthat its middle class or upper class leaders cannot be trusted.
12. Marxism and feminism
There are two different approaches to women’s liberation – feminism and revolutionary socialism. Feminism wasthe dominant influence on the women’s movements which sprung up in the advancedcapitalist countries during the 1960s and 1970s. It started from the view thatmen always oppress women, that there was something in men’s biology or psychologicalmake up which made them treat women as inferior. This led to the view that liberationwas possible only by the separation of women from men – either the total separationof the feminists who sought ‘liberated lifestyles’ or the partial separation ofwomen’s committees, women’s caucuses or women-only events.
Many of those who supported this partialseparation called themselves socialist feminists. But later radical feminist ideasof total separation made the running inside the women’s movement. Separatist ideasended time and again as a slightly radical wing of the social services, as withwomen’s refuges.
This failing led many feminists in anotherdirection – towards the Labour Party. They believed that getting the right womenin the right places, as MPs, trade union officials, local councillors, would somehowhelp all women to find equality.
The tradition of revolutionary socialismstarts from a very different set of ideas. Marx and Engels, writing as far backas 1848, argued, first, that women’s oppression did not arise from the ideas inmen’s heads, but from the development of private property and with it the emergenceof a society based on classes. For them, the fight for women’s liberation was inseparablefrom the fight to end all class society – the struggle for socialism.
Marx and Engels also pointed out that thedevelopment of capitalism, based on the factory system, brought profound changesin people’s lives, and especially in the lives of women. Women were brought backinto social production, from which they had been progressively excluded with thedevelopment of class society.
This gave women a potential power whichthey had never had before. Organised collectively, women as workers had greaterindependence and ability to fight for their rights. This was in great contrastto their lives previously, when their main role in production, through the family,made them completely dependent on the family head – the husband or father.
From this Marx and Engels concluded thatthe material basis of the family, and so of women’s oppression, no longer existed.What stopped women from benefiting from this was the fact that property remainedin the hands of the few. What keeps women oppressed today is the way capitalismis organised – in particular the way capitalism uses a particular form of the familyin order to make sure that its workers bring their children up to be the next generationof workers. It is a great advantage that while it pays men – and increasingly women– to work, women will devote their lives, unpaid, to making sure their men arefit to work in the factories and their children will grow up to do the same.
Socialism, by contrast, would see societytaking on many of the family functions which weigh so heavily on women.
This didn’t mean that Marx, Engels andtheir successors went about preaching the ‘abolition of the family’. The family’ssupporters have always been able to mobilise many of the most oppressed women inits support – they see the ‘abolition of the family’ as giving their husbands licenceto abandon them with the responsibility for the children. Revolutionary socialistshave always tried instead to show how in a better, socialist society, women wouldnot be forced into the miserable, cramped life provided by the present day family.
Feminists have always rejected this sortof analysis. Far from approaching women where they have the power to change theworld and end their oppression – where they are collectively strong at work –they approach women as sufferers. Campaigns of the 1980s, for example, focused onsuch issues as prostitution, rape or the threat to women and families from nuclearweapons. These all start from positions where women are weak.
Feminism starts with the assumption thatoppression overrides class division. This leads to conclusions which leave classsociety intact while improving the position of some women – a minority. The women’smovement has tended to be dominated by women from the ‘new middle class’ – journalists,writers, lecturers, higher grade white collar workers. The typists, filing clerks,machinists have got left out.
It is only during periods of radical changeand revolutionary upsurge that the question of women’s liberation becomes reality,not just for a minority, but for all working class women as well. The Bolshevikrevolution of 1917 produced a much greater equality for women than ever known inthe world before. Divorce, abortion and contraception were made freely available.Childcare and housework became the responsibility of society. There were the beginningsof communal restaurants, laundries and nurseries which gave women far more choiceand control over their lives.
Of course, the fate of these advances couldn’tbe separated from the fate of the revolution itself. Famine, civil war, the decimationof the working class, and the failure of revolution internationally meant the eventualdefeat of socialism in Russia itself. The moves towards equality were reversed.
But the early years of the soviet republicshowed what socialist revolution could achieve, even in the most unfavourable conditions.Today, the prospects for women’s liberation are far better. In Britain – andmuch the same is true of other advanced capitalist countries – two workers in everyfive are women.
Women’s liberation can be achieved onlythrough the collective power of the working class. This means rejecting the feministidea of women’s separate organisations. Only women and men workers acting togetheras part of a united revolutionary movement can destroy class society, and with itthe oppression of women.
13 Socialism and war
The present century has been a century of wars. Some 10 millionpeople were killed in the First World War, 55 million in the Second, 2 million inthe wars in Indochina. And the two great nuclear powers, the United States andRussia, still possess the means to destroy the human race many times over.
Explaining this horror is difficult forthose who take existing society for granted. They are driven to conclude thatthere is some innate, instinctive drive in human beings that leads them to enjoymass slaughter. But human society has not always known war. Gordon Childe notedof Europe in the Stone Age:
The earliest Danubians seem to have beena peaceful folk; weapons of war as against hunters' tools are absent from theirgraves. Their villages lacked military defences. [But] in the later phases ofthe Neolithic period armaments became the most conspicuous items...
War is not caused by some innate human aggressiveness.It is a product of the division of society into classes. When, between 5,000 and10,000 years ago, a class of property owners first emerged, it had to find themeans to defend its wealth. It began to construct armed forces, a state, cut offfrom the rest of society. This then became a valuable means of further increasingits wealth, by plundering other societies.
The division of society into classes meantthat war became a permanent feature of human life.
The slave owning ruling classes of AncientGreece and Rome could not survive without continual wars which procured more slaves.The feudal lords of the Middle Ages had to be heavily armed in order to subduethe local serfs and to protect their loot from other feudal lords. When the firstcapitalist ruling classes began 300 or 400 years ago, they too repeatedly had tohave recourse to war. They had to fight bitter wars in the 16th, 17th, 18th and19th centuries in order to establish their supremacy over the remnants of the oldfeudal rulers. The most successful capitalist countries, such as Britain, usedwarfare to expand their wealth—reaching overseas, looting India and Ireland, transportingmillions of people as slaves from Africa to the Americas, turning the whole worldinto a source of plunder for themselves.
Capitalist society built itself throughwar. No wonder that those who lived within it came 'to believe that war was both'inevitable' and 'just'.
Yet capitalism could never be based entirelyon war. Most of its wealth came through exploiting workers in factories and mines.And that was something which could be disrupted by any fighting within the 'homecountry' itself.
Each national capitalist class wanted peaceat home while waging war abroad. So while encouraging belief in 'military virtues'it also bitterly attacked 'violence'. The ideology of capitalism combines, in acompletely contradictory way, exaltation of militarism and pacifist phrases.
In the present century war preparationshave become more central to the system than ever before. In the 19th century capitalistproduction was based on many small firms competing with each other. The state wasa relatively small body that regulated their relations with each other and withtheir workers. But in the present century big firms have eaten up most of thesmall firms, so eliminating much of the competition within each country. Competitionis more and more international, between the giant firms of different nations.
There is no international capitalist stateto regulate this competition. Instead, each national state exerts all the pressureit can to help its capitalists get an advantage over their foreign rivals. Thelife and death struggle of different capitalists with each other can become thelife and death struggle of different states, each with its huge array of destructiveweaponry.
Twice this struggle has led to world war.The First and Second World Wars were imperialist wars, conflicts between alliancesof capitalist states over the domination of the globe. The Cold War was a continuationof that struggle, with the most powerful capitalist states lined up against eachother in NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
In addition to this global conflict, manyhot wars have raged in different parts of the world. Usually they have beenstruggles between different capitalist states over who should control a particularregion, such as the Iran-Iraq war which broke out in 1980 and the Gulf War in1991. All the major powers stoke the fires of war by selling the most sophisticatedmilitary technology to Third World states.
Many people who accept the rest of the capitalistsystem do not like this grim reality. They want capitalism but not war. Theytry to find alternatives within the system. For example, there are those who believethe United Nations can prevent war.
But the UN is merely the arena where differentstates that embody the drive to war meet together. There they compare their strengthswith each other, like boxers measuring up before a bout. If one state or allianceis easily more powerful than another, then both will see the pointlessness of awar whose outcome is known in advance. But if there is any doubt about the outcome,they know of only one way of settling the issue, and that is to go to war.
This was true of the two great nuclear alliances,NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even though the West had the military edge over the EasternBloc, the gap was not so great for the Russians to believe themselves at a hopelessdisadvantage. So, despite the fact that a Third World War would wipe out most ofthe human race, both Washington and Moscow drew up plans for fighting and winninga nuclear war.
The Cold War came to an end with the politicalupheaval in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR into its constituentrepublics in 1991. There was then much talk of a 'new world order' and a 'peacedividend'.
Instead, however, we have seen a successionof barbaric wars—the war of the West against its former ally Iraq, the war betweenAzerbaijan and Armenia in the former USSR, the horrific civil wars in Somalia andformer Yugoslavia.
No sooner is one military rivalry betweencapitalist powers resolved than another takes its place. Everywhere, ruling classesknow that war is a way of increasing their influence and of blinding workers andpeasants with nationalism.
You can loathe and fear war without opposingcapitalist society. But you cannot end it. War is the inevitable product of thedivision of society into classes. The threat of it will never be ended by beggingexisting rulers to make peace. The armaments have to be wrested from their handsby a movement fighting to overturn class society once and for all.
The peace movements which emerged in Europeand North America at the end of the 1970s did not understand this. They foughtto stop the introduction of Cruise and Pershing missiles, for unilateral disarmament,for a nuclear freeze. But they believed that the fight for peace could succeed inisolation from the struggle between capital and labour.
So they failed to mobilise the only powercapable of stopping the drive towards war, the working class. Only socialist revolutioncan end the horror of war.