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ENVISIONING SOCIALISM
A Socialist Education
Project (SEP) Module
Table of Contents
Introduction
Suggested Additional
Discussion Questions
Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?”
Fredrick Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”
“The Development of Utopian Socialism”
“The Science of Dialectics”
“Historical Materialism”
Carl Bloice, “Our Socialist Vision”
Ricardo Alarcon, “Marx After Marxism”
Michael A. Lebowitz,
“New Wings for Socialism”
Introduction
After the collapse of the Eastern European socialist states and the economic and political crises engendered among those states that remained socialist interest in socialism diminished. Some progressives embraced the slogan of Margaret Thatcher: “There is no Alternative.” Other progressives looked inward, taking a self-critical attitude toward all that they had believed in, and embraced various forms of nihilism. And other progressives embraced identity and single issue politics and post-modern philosophies. Clearly, socialist movements and socialist ideas were in crisis.
While the end of the Cold War brought some repose from aspects of the arms race, the threat of
nuclear war, and certain forms of authoritarian government, the period since
1991 has not lived up to the promise of declining war and violence, a
people-oriented economic development, and real democratization. We have
witnessed the disintegration of states; rising internal war; imperial wars
against the former
Slowly but surely, progressives are revisiting the socialist vision as the issues of war, and poverty, and environmental devastation have made clear that there must be alternatives to global capitalism. More and more progressives (those imbued with a sensitivity to the needs of reform) are interested in revisiting the socialist vision. They are asking: “Why did socialism ‘fail?’ Can it be revived? Can we create a cooperative society based on principles of equality, democracy, and human dignity? What have the great socialist theorists of the past said about the conditions for and prospects of building socialism? How do contemporary writers answer these questions?”
This SEP module offers a set of readings that begin to address these questions. Obviously they can only scratch the surface in describing the history of socialist politics and vision. But they can serve as a vehicle for study groups to begin to struggle over the proposition that creating a new society is possible. Students of socialism can read these pieces and raise questions about what they are saying. Students can then move to construct their own modules to create “advanced” courses on socialism.
The first essay by Albert Einstein illustrates why one of the preeminent intellectuals of the twentieth century, indeed a scientist, embraced socialism. He defends the proposition that humans are social beings and dependent on society for their wellbeing. The idea of the symbiotic relationship between humans and society is denied by capitalism, an economic system that breeds an ethos of each against all. Profit, which drives the capitalist system, he claimed, was antithetical to human development. Einstein implies that peoples’ alienation from each other, from the product of their labors, and from the right to decide how ones’ labors are used are endemic to capitalism. Only a socialist society could foster full human fulfillment.
Fredrick Engels, Karl Marx’s life long intellectual partner, wrote an essay on the history of socialism that is presented here. In it he describes the visions of the great “utopian socialists” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who imagined new societies but did not have the benefit of envisioning alternatives to capitalism since capitalism was in its infancy when they wrote. He then describes how nature and societies develop “dialectically.” History is the unfolding of human activity and institutions along contradictory paths. Socialist movements, in this sense, can evolve only in the context of opposition to the development of capitalism. Finally, Engels discusses “historical materialism,” the conception of history that links ideas to changes in the material conditions of peoples’ lives, labor as the creator of all wealth, and class struggle. Contrary to the utopian socialists, the drive to create socialist society will result from changes in material conditions, in economic necessity and the practical activities of men and women who will bring it about.
Turning to modern writings, Carl Bloice addresses economic inequality and poverty and suggests that equality, access to basic economic resources, and human development are basic to any socialist vision. Ricardo Alarcon celebrates Marxist theory but points to one of its fundamental precepts; that practical political activity and alternative visions are grounded in the historical context in which they occur. He suggests to the reader that twenty-first century socialist struggles will be grounded in the realities of neo-liberal globalization and an anti-globalization activism that embraces multiple sectors of developed and exploited countries and addresses economic, environmental, racial and gender issues as well as class ones.
Finally, Michael Lebowitz describes a vision of socialism for
the twenty-first century. He refers to the survival of the Cuban revolution and
more recently the innovative moves toward socialism in
Some Additional
Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, Toward a New Socialism, 2006.
Emile Burns, What is
Marxism? An Introduction to the Study of Scientific Socialism, 1943.
Leo Huberman, Introduction
to Socialism, 1968.
Michael A. Lebowitz, Build
It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, 2006.
David Schweickart, After Capitalism, 2002.
Discussion Questions
1.
Is it capitalism,
rather than human nature, that makes human beings greedy, aggressive and
competitive?
2.
Is it true that good
institutions (economic systems, governments) come primarily from good ideas or
the coming together of ideas in historical circumstances when the ideas can be
made a reality?
3.
What do Engels and
Marx mean by “idealism?” What do they mean by “materialism?”
4.
Discuss the
“dialectical” method. Is it relevant to understanding the world and to engaging
in political activism?
5.
Is there a
relationship between the evolving mode of production and the possibility of
creating socialism?
6.
Why does understanding
history matter?
7.
Is the principle of
equality important to building a socialist society? Why or why not?
8.
Several modern writers
suggest that “market socialism” constitutes a constructive possibility for
human transformation, with examples today such as
9.
Is economic democracy,
such as workers’ control of the workplace, a good beginning for creating a
socialist society?
10.
Can we learn about
building socialism from countries like
11.
What are the “elements
of the new socialism?” Do they
constitute a useful list to guide action?
"We
shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to
survive."
Why Socialism?
By Albert Einstein
From Monthly Review,
[Re-printed in Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein]
Transcribed by Lenny Gray
Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to
express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons
that it is.
Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific
knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological
differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt
to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of
phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly
understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do
exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made
difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often
affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In
addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the
so-called civilized period of human history has -- as is well known -- been
largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively
economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their
existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally
and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized
for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from
among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class
division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values
by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided
in their social behavior.
But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really
overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human
development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such
laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the
real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the
predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can
throw little light on the socialist society of the future.
Second, socialism is directed toward a social-ethical end. Science, however,
cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at
most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends
themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and -- if
these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous -- are adopted and carried
forward by those many human beings who, half-unconsciously, determine the slow
evolution of society.
For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and
scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not
assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on
questions affecting the organization of society.
Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is
passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is
characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even
hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to
illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently
discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war,
which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I
remarked that only a supranational organization would offer protection from
that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me:
"Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human
race?"
I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a
statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to
attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of
succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which
so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way
out?
It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any
degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very
conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory
and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.
Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a
solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who
are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate
abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of
his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their
sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these
varied, frequently conflicting strivings accounts for the special character of
a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an
individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the
well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these
two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that
finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to
find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which
he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of
particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to
the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations
to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The
individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends
so much upon society -- in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence
-- that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the
framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food,
clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most
of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the
accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind
the small word "society."
It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is
a fact of nature which cannot be abolished -- just as in the case of ants and
bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to
the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and
interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change.
Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication
have made possible developments among human beings which are not dictated by
biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions,
institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering
accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a
certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in
this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.
Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we
must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are
characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he
acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through
communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural
constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which
determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and
society Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of
so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may
differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of
organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are
striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not
condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other
or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.
If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of
man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we
should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions
which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of
man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore,
technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have
created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled
populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued
existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly centralized productive
apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time -- which, looking back, seems so
idyllic -- is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be
completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that
mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and
consumption.
I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me
constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship
of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than
ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence
as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a
threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position
in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly
being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker,
progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in
society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly
prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the
naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in
life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my
opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of
producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other
of the fruits of their collective labor -- not by force, but on the whole in
faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is
important to realize that the means of production -- that is to say, the entire
productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as
additional capital goods -- may legally be, and for the most part are, the
private property of individuals.
For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call
"workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of
production -- although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of
the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the
labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker
produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential
point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and
what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. In so far as the labor
contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the
real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the
capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers
competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the
payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of
competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development
and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of
production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments
is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be
effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This
is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political
parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who,
for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The
consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact
sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the
population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably
control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio,
education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite
impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to
make intelligent use of his political rights.
The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of
capital is thus characterized main principles: first, means of production
(capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit;
second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure
capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the
workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in
securing a somewhat improved form of the "free labor contract" for
certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present-day economy
does not differ much from "pure" capitalism.
Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that
all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find
employment; an "army of unemployed" almost always exists. The worker
is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid
workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods
is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress
frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden
of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among
capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and
utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions.
Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of
the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.
This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our
whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive
attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive
success as a preparation for his future career.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an
educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an
economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized
in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs
of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to
work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The
education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities,
would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in
place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet
socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete
enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the
solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it
possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic
power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How
can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic
counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?
Fredrick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.
The great men, who in
We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.
But, side by side with the antagonisms of the feudal nobility and the burghers, who claimed to represent all the rest of society, was the general antagonism of exploiters and exploited, of rich idlers and poor workers. It was this very circumstance that made it possible for the representatives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing not one special class, but the whole of suffering humanity. Still further. From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage-workers, and, in the same proportion as the mediaeval burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Munzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.
These were theoretical enunciations, corresponding with these revolutionary uprisings of a class not yet developed; in the 16th and 17th centuries, Utopian pictures of ideal social conditions 2); in the 18th century, actual communistic theories (Morelly and Mably). The demand for equality was no longer limited to political rights; it was extended also to the social conditions of individuals. It was not simply class privileges that were to be abolished, but class distinctions themselves. A Communism, ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan, was the first form of the new teaching. Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; Fourier and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.
One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.
For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust, and, therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.
We saw how the French philosophers of the 18th century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reasons was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understand of the 18th century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this rational society and government.
But the new order of things, rational enough as compared with earlier conditions, turned out to be by no means absolutely rational. The state based upon reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Contrat Social had found its realization in the Reign of Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The "freedom of property" from feudal fetters, now veritably accomplished, turned out to be, for the small capitalists and small proprietors, the freedom to sell their small property, crushed under the overmastering competition of the large capitalists and landlords, to these great lords, and thus, as far as the small capitalists and peasant proprietors were concerned, became "freedom from property". The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year. Formerly, the feudal vices had openly stalked about in broad daylight; though not eradicated, they were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto practiced in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating. The "fraternity" of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the first social lever, by gold. The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution increased to an extent never head of. Marriage itself remained, as before, the legally recognized form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was supplemented by rich crops of adultery.
In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the
social and political institutions born of the "triumph of reason"
were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to
formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century. In
1802, Saint-Simon's
At this time, however, the capitalist mode of production, and with it the
antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, was still very
incompletely developed. Modern Industry, which had just arisen in
This historical situation also dominated the founders of Socialism. To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.
These facts once established, we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such "insanity". For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.
Saint-Simon was a son of the great French Revolution, at the outbreak of
which he was not yet 30. The Revolution was the victory of the 3rd estate —
i.e., of the great masses of the nation, working in production and in
trade, over the privileged idle classes, the nobles and the priests.
But the victory of the 3rd estate soon revealed itself as exclusively the
victory of a smaller part of this "estate", as the conquest of
political power by the socially privileged section of it — i.e., the propertied
bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie had certainly developed rapidly during the
Revolution, partly by speculation in the lands of the nobility and of the
Church, confiscated and afterwards put up for sale, and partly by frauds upon
the nation by means of army contracts. It was the domination of these swindlers
that, under the Directorate, brought
Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate and the
privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between "workers"
and "idlers". The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes,
but also all who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived
on their incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the
manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the
capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved,
and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had
not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign
of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science
and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that
unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation
— a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic "new Christianity". But
science, that was the scholars; and industry, that was, in the first place, the
working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeois were,
certainly, intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of
public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-a-vis of
the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers
especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by
the regulation of credit. This conception was in exact keeping with a time in
which Modern Industry in
Already in his
"See," says he to them, "what happened in
But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production — that is to say, the "abolition of the state", about which recently there has been so much noise.
Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in
1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815,
during the Hundred Days' War, he proclaims the alliance of France and England,
and then of both of these countries, with Germany, as the only guarantee for
the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach to the French in 1815
an alliance with the victors of
If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers' dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.
Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.
But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution — savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today — i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves "that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical" — that civilization moves "in a vicious circle", in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., "under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself".
Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race. As Kant introduced into natural science the idea of the ultimate destruction of the Earth, Fourier introduced into historical science that of the ultimate destruction of the human race.
Whilst in
The new mode of production was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production — the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses — the herding together of a homeless population in the worst quarters of the large towns; the loosening of all traditional moral bonds, of patriarchal subordination, of family relations; overwork, especially of women and children, to a frightful extent; complete demoralization of the working-class, suddenly flung into altogether new conditions, from the country into the town, from agriculture into modern industry, from stable conditions of existence into insecure ones that change from day to day.
At this juncture, there came forward as a reformer a manufacturer
29-years-old — a man of almost sublime, childlike simplicity of character, and
at the same time one of the few born leaders of men. Robert Owen had adopted
the teaching of the materialistic philosophers: that man's character is the
product, on the one hand, of heredity; on the other, of the environment of the
individual during his lifetime, and especially during his period of development.
In the industrial revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion,
and the opportunity of fishing in these troubled waters and making large
fortunes quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting into practice his
favorite theory, and so of bringing order out of chaos. He had already tried it
with success, as superintendent of more than 500 men in a
In spite of all this, Owen was not content. The existence which he secured for his workers was, in his eyes, still far from being worthy of human beings. "The people were slaves at my mercy." The relatively favorable conditions in which he had placed them were still far from allowing a rational development of the character and of the intellect in all directions, much less of the free exercise of all their faculties.
"And yet, the working part of this population of 2,500 persons was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 600,000 to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed by 600,000?" [3]
The answer was clear. It had been used to pay the proprietors of the
establishment 5 per cent on the capital they had laid out, in addition to over
300,000 pounds clear profit. And that which held for New Lanark held to a still
greater extent for all the factories in
"If this new wealth had not been created by machinery,
imperfectly as it has been applied, the wars of
To them, therefore, the fruits of this new power belonged. The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all.
Owen's communism was based upon this purely business foundation, the
outcome, so to say, of commercial calculation. Throughout, it maintained this
practical character. Thus, in 1823, Owen proposed the relief of the distress in
His advance in the direction of Communism was the turning-point in Owen's
life. As long as he was simply a philanthropist, he was rewarded with nothing
but wealth, applause, honor, and glory. He was the most popular man in
He knew what confronted him if he attacked these — outlawry, excommunication
from official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of
this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what
he had foreseen happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of
silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist
experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned
directly to the working-class and continued working in their midst for 30
years. Every social movement, every real advance in
The Utopians' mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist
ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently,
all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German
Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these,
Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only
to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an
absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development
of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this,
absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each
different school. And as each one's special kind of absolute truth, reason, and
justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of
existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is
no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they
shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come
but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up
to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in
To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.
Next: The Science of Dialectics
[1] This is the passage of the French Revolution:
"Thought, the concept of law, all at once made itself felt, and against this the old scaffolding of wrong could make no stand. In this conception of law, therefore, a constitution has now been established, and henceforth everything must be cased upon this. Since the Sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head — i.e., on the Idea — and building reality after this image. Anaxagoras first said that the Nous, reason, rules the world; but now, for the first time, had men come to recognize that the Idea must rule the mental reality. And this was a magnificent sunrise. All thinking Beings have participated in celebrating this holy day. A sublime emotion swayed men at that time, an enthusiasm of reason pervaded the world, as if now had come the reconciliation of the Divine Principle with the world."
[Hegel: "The Philosophy of history", 1840, p.535]
Is it not high time to set the anti-Socialist law in action against such teachings, subversive and to the common danger, by the late Professor Hegel?
(2 Engels refers here to the works of the utopian Socialists Thomas More (16th century) and Tommaso Campanella (17th century).
[3] From The Revolution in Mind and Practice, p.21, a memorial
addressed to all the "red Republicans, Communists and Socialists of
Europe", and sent to the provisional government of
Fredrick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.
Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.
When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see, therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions, connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details, we must detach them from their natural, special causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical times, on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because they had first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon. A certain amount of natural and historical material must be collected before there can be any critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in classes, orders, and species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences were, therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period 1), and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science dates from the second half of the 15th century, and thence onward it had advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.
To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is 'yea, yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude on another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.
At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, if forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.
For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.
In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.
Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.
None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of procedure.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science
that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily,
and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not
metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually
recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this
connection,
An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the
development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of
men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its
constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of
progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit, the new German
philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable Solar
system of
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. to these limits, a third must be added. Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.
This law, indeed, by no means excludes, but, on the contrary, includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make giant strides from age to age.
The perception of the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if Nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer requires the assistance of that sort of philosophy which, queen-like, pretended to rule the remaining mob of sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous or unnecessary. That which still survives of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its law — formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of Nature and history.
Whilst, however, the revolution in the conception of Nature could only be
made in proportion to the corresponding positive materials furnished by
research, already much earlier certain historical facts had occurred which led
to a decisive change in the conception of history. In 1831, the first
working-class rising took place in
The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange — in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's "knowing" by his "being", instead of, as heretofore, his "being" by his "knowing".
From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict. But the Socialism of earlier days was as incompatible with this materialist conception as the conception of Nature of the French materialists was with dialectics and modern natural science. The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier Socialism denounced the exploitations of the working-class, inevitable under Capitalism, the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. but for this it was necessary — to present the capitalistic mode of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus-value.
It was shown that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.
These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all its details and relations.
Next: Historical Materialism
(1
The Alexandrian period of the development of science comprises the period
extending from the 3rd century B.C. to the 17th century A.D. It derives its
name from the town of
Fredrick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong 1), is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.
What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?
The present situation of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organization. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward, the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces, evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie, developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
Now, in what does this conflict consist?
Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is my product."
But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labor which creeps in gradually and not upon any preconceived plan, there the products take on the form of commodities, whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labor, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labor upon a definite plan, as organized in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organization upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labor. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual producers succumbed in one department after another. Socialized production revolutionized all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognized that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found ready-made, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants' capital, handicraft, wage-labor. Socialized production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.
In the medieval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labor could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labor of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labor. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves.
Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. [2]
This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.
The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the journeyman to today became the master of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.
We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.
In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.
The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the country; in the town, the guild.
But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in their turn, national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.
The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with the centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.
But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845 [3], available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.
Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that they very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation.
Thus it comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labor functions; that machinery,
"the most powerful instrument for shortening labor time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." (Capital, English edition, p. 406)
Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market.
"The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital (Marx's Capital, p. 661)
And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalist mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with they battery.
We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similarly compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as a necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another "vicious circle".
As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a stand-still, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation last for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877), we are going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when he described the first "crise plethorique", a crisis from plethora.
In these crises, the contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange.
The fact that the socialized organization of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalist themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labor-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers to work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social production forces.
This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character shall be recognized, forces the capital class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialization of great masses of the means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of distribution are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic expansion. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of an industry in a particular country unite in a "Trust", a union for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are generally liable to break up, and on this very account compel a yet greater concentration of association. The whole of a particular industry is turned into one gigantic joint-stock company; internal competition gives place to the internal monopoly of this one company. This has happened in 1890 with the English alkali production, which is now, after the fusion of 48 large works, in the hands of one company, conducted upon a single plan, and with a capital of 6,000,000 pounds.
In the trusts, freedom of competition changes into its very opposite — into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production upon a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly, this is so far still to the benefit and advantage of the capitalists. But, in this case, the exploitation is so palpable, that it must break down. No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers.
In any case, with trusts or without, the official representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. [4] This necessity for conversion into State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.
If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.
But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonizing with the socialized character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control, except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But,with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.
Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with, them. But, when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to reach our own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production, and its defenders — so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have shown above in detail.
But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hand working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning in the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer, and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production; upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production — on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.
Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:
in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;
in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;
in our own times, the bourgeoisie.
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society,
it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class
to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle
for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions
and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be
repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The
first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the
representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of
production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last
independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in
one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the
government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the
conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It
dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a
Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequences of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which looks after the general affairs of society: the direction of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labor that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. it does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working-class, from turning its social leadership into an intensified exploitation of the masses.
But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself, has become a obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to development.
This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every 10 years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production burst the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly-accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialized appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today, and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by mens of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here. [5]
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history,pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
Let us briefly sum up our sketch of historical evolution.
I. Mediaeval Society — Individual production on a small scale. Means of production adapted for individual use; hence primitive, ungainly, petty, dwarfed in action. Production for immediate consumption, either of the producer himself or his feudal lord. Only where an excess of production over this consumption occurs is such excess offered for sale, enters into exchange. Production of commodities, therefore, only in its infancy. But already it contains within itself, in embryo, anarchy in the production of society at large.
II. Capitalist Revolution — transformation of industry, at first be means of simple cooperation and manufacture. Concentration of the means of production, hitherto scattered, into great workshops. As a consequence, their transformation from individual to social means of production — a transformation which does not, on the whole, affect the form of exchange. The old forms of appropriation remain in force. The capitalist appears. In his capacity as owner of the means of production, he also appropriates the products and turns them into commodities. Production has become a social act. Exchange and appropriation continue to be individual acts, the acts of individuals. The social product is appropriated by the individual capitalist. Fundamental contradiction, whence arise all the contradictions in which our present-day society moves, and which modern industry brings to light.
A. Severance of the producer from the means of production. Condemnation of the worker to wage-labor for life. Antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
B. Growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws governing the production of commodities. Unbridled competition. Contradiction between socialized organization in the individual factory and social anarchy in the production as a whole.
C. On the one hand, perfecting of machinery, made by competition compulsory for each individual manufacturer, and complemented by a constantly growing displacement of laborers. Industrial reserve-army. On the other hand, unlimited extension of production, also compulsory under competition, for every manufacturer. On both sides, unheard-of development of productive forces, excess of supply over demand, over-production and products — excess there, of laborers, without employment and without means of existence. But these two levers of production and of social well-being are unable to work together, because the capitalist form of production prevents the productive forces from working and the products from circulating, unless they are first turned into capital — which their very superabundance prevents. The contradiction has grown into an absurdity. The mode of production rises in rebellion against the form of exchange.
D. Partial recognition of the social character of the productive forces forced upon the capitalists themselves. Taking over of the great institutions for production and communication, first by joint-stock companies, later in by trusts, then by the State. The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class. All its social functions are now performed by salaried employees.
III. Proletarian Revolution — Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out. Socialized production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of production makes the existence of different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at the same time the lord over Nature, his own master — free.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.
(1 Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust
[2] It is hardly necessary in this connection to point out that, even if the form of appropriation remains the same, the character of the appropriation is just as much revolutionized as production is by the changes described above. It is, of course, a very different matter whether I appropriate to myself my own product or that of another. Note in passing that wage-labor, which contains the whole capitalist mode of production in embryo, is very ancient; in a sporadic, scattered form, it existed for centuries alongside slave-labor. But the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic mode of production only when the necessary historical pre-conditions had been furnished.
[3]
"The Conditions of the Working-Class in
[4] I say "have to". For only when the means of production
and distribution have _actually_ outgrown the form of management by joint-stock
companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become
_economically_ inevitable, only then — even if it is the State of today that
effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step
preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But
of late, since
If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels.
[5] A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of the enormous
expansive force of the modern means of production, even under capitalist
pressure. According to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of
1814 to £ 2,200,000,000,
1865 to £ 6,100,000,000,
1875 to £ 8,500,000,000.
As an instance of the squandering of means of production and of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone, in the crisis of 1873-78, was given at the second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878), as 22,750,000 pounds.
Our Socialist Vision Carl Bloice
(The
following was presented at the National Convention of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), July 21, 2006 in
I recently encountered what I consider one of the most relevant and insightful articles appearing in the left of liberal press in a long time. In The Nation, it was called “The Left Needs More Socialism.” When I reread it the other day one line caught my attention. It was: “The reigning economic system will continue to generate opposition as long as it speaks of equality (which it must) yet continues to be unequal and undemocratic …”
Not necessarily, I thought. On more than one occasion over recent months I’ve heard or read something actually defending inequality. Inequality, it is said, is what keeps the system going - a motive force propelling capitalism to ever new heights. At first, I found it hard to believe what I was hearing. After a lifetime of hearing about the idea of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” I was hearing educated people saying inequality is good for us. Then, I thought, perversely if a little inequity is good for us, a lot of it must be better. After all, that seems to be the operating principle of the people currently in power in the nation’s capital. They keep pushing in that direction.
Belittling those it says “who would discredit American capitalism,” the editor of The Economist wrote: “Any system in which the spoils are distributed so unevenly is morally wrong, they say. This newspaper disagrees. Inequality is not inherently wrong. The capitalist magazine editor went on to say inequality is not wrong if the society as a whole is getting richer, there is a safety net for the “very poor” and everybody has the chance to climb up through the system.
Well, that’s not saying much for the market economy today – at least in this country. The safety net is in shred and the most tattered parts are those designed to help the very poor. As far as everybody – “regardless of class, race, creed or sex” – has the ability to move upward, well, there’s ample evidence it just ain’t happening. As the editor of the Monthly Review put it: “The well-to-do get better education, enjoy better health, have more opportunities to travel, benefit from a wide array of personal services (derived from purchase of the labor services of others), etc.—all of which translates into class advantages passed on to their children.”
Last
month, The Economist did a special issue on “Inequality and the American Dream.
It described the
We’ve come a long way from the days when Marxists were roundly castigated for suggesting that capitalism inevitably produces poverty, that even when economies seemed to be operating optimum economic and social polarization increases. We have arrived at a point where this is described as progress. But here we are - in the richest country on the planet where one in five children lives in poverty. Where a worker who earns the minimum wage takes in $10,700 which $6,000 below the federal poverty level for a family of three. Sixty-one percent of minimum wage earners are women, many of them single. For a family of three, the minimum wage of $10,700, last adjusted in 1997, is now more than $5,000 below the federal definition of poverty.
While corporate profits have soared inflation-adjusted wage growth has stagnated and the wages of the lowest paid workers amongst us have not kept up with inflation. At the same time, real income for the bottom 40 percent of African-American households fell by nearly 6 percent. From 2001 to 2003, inflation-adjusted income among households in the lowest 20 percent of the population decreased 5.1 percent. Much is being made by some commentators about the income differences between workers at the lower end of so-called middle class and those employed at the higher more-skilled jobs. Much of this is statistical mirage. Income inequality in growing for the 80 percent of American workers who are characterized as "production and non-supervisory." – that is, the working class.
Between 2002 and 2003 the number of Americans in poverty increased by 1.3 million people and poverty rates for African American and Latino workers stood at over 20 percent. The income disparity of African American families as compared to whites actually increased over the past decade.The percentage of children living in poverty rose over a percent point over the same period.
As
columnist Paul Krugman recently observed, “economic disparities in
We should put an end to the silly notion that poor people are of a different class than the working class; stop tolerating the notion that there is something called a “middle class” on one hand and an “underclass” on the other. Actually, I think we should get rid of the notion that there are “good” jobs and not-good jobs. Labor is noble and while no one would argue that everybody should earn the same amount; every worker is making a contribution our general welfare. Every worker earns the right to never be afraid of not having quality medical care, never being afraid of having no security in retirement, never being afraid to being rendered homeless and never being afraid that their children will not have the best education the society is able to provide.
We have reacquainted ourselves with the notion that it is possible to alter our economic and social environment to the point that “the development of the individual is ….” For a long time people have said that this is a noble concept, one worthy of being struggled for. We should not turn out backs on that idea just because the rich and power and their theorists say it is misplaced altruism and that the reality is that inequality is good for us.
Our lives are not determined solely by numbers, percentage and curves. There’s much more to it than that. The number, percentages and curves provide the context in which we grow up, interact with each other, raise families and express our respect, love and solidarity with each other. They have serious consequences.
The Nation article to which I referred earlier was written by Ronald Aronson and while we certainly don’t come from the same left political tradition and I have a few points of disagreement, it is, I believe a valuable and much-need contribution to the contemporary dialogue on the left. Aronson writes: “Most of the world's main problems today are inseparable from the dynamics of the capitalist system itself. With corporate capitalism everywhere in command, the outlook is for increased poverty, more environmental degradation, ever more uneven distribution of resources and the undermining of traditional societies and ways of life, for a culture dominated by marketing, advertising and uneven global development.”
Later, he addresses the matter that I believe is key to our discussion today, observing that: “There can be no future social movements without key socialist themes: the importance of economic class, the centrality of labor and workers in shaping the world, the idea that people must act to create their own destiny. Not to mention themes already suggested: the decisive role of the economy in determining the rest of our life, the fact that today it is above all driven by the pursuit of profit, the insistence on freeing people from its domination and the need to think and act politically in terms of the socioeconomic system rather than in terms of individual policies. Whatever language people use, socialist ideas, experience, models, aspirations and analyses will help form the heart and soul of the alternative-in-the-making, or there will be no alternative. Equality is the most important among these.”
If we speak of social a class analysis must be central to our discourse about the past, the present and the future. It is absolutely essential to keep central to the discussion the observation by John Bellamy Foster in the latest tremendously important issue of the Monthly Review. “… it is crucial to ascertain how class articulates itself in relation to other social relations and forms of oppression, such as race and gender,” write Foster, “An investigation of class thus leads to the analysis of society as a whole, its relationships of power, conflict, and change.”
Thomas Frank’s book “One Market, Under God,” Thomas Frank writes: “Today, American opinion leaders seem generally convinced that democracy and the free market are simply identical. ... What’s ‘new’ is this idea’s triumph over all its rivals: the determination of American leaders to extend it to the entire world; the general belief among opinion-makers that there is something natural, something divine, something inherently democratic about markets.”
And don’t think that madperson Ann Coulter is the only person questioning our sanity about such matters as equality and justice. Back in April the usually-sane Martin Wolf of the Financial Times described the idea that there could be “absolute job security with rising prosperity” in “a rapidly changing world” as “a form of collective cognitive disorder.” No Mr. Wolf, we’re not mad.
In a world of expanding production and wealth creation there ought to be more no less job security and prosperity. Instead under capitalism, the already well-to-do and their progeny get more security and prosperity and working men and women and their families get less. That may be how the “market economy works” but it ain’t right and it doesn’t have to be.
There is no reason why our country with its great wealth and resources cannot decide to launch major redevelopment of our crumbling physical infrastructure, rebuild and retrofitting highway and bridges and providing jobs for the unemployment. There is no reason why our country with its great wealth and resources cannot decide to rescue and expand the nation’s passenger railroads – now in danger of extinction and consequently relieving congestion, reducing pollution, curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, proving safe, efficient and more pleasurably travel and opening up new job opportunities.
There is no reason why our country with its great wealth and resources cannot decide to come up with a massive plan to overhaul upgrade the nation’s school systems, with emphasis starting with inner-city schools that are failing our young people so miserably today.
There is no reason why our country with its great wealth and resources cannot decide to have socialized medicine, or in lieu of that a single-payer system.
There is no reason why our country with its great wealth and resources cannot decide to nationalize the pharmaceutical industry and thus place decisions about research and development, marketing and distribution out of the hands of the greedy, amoral people who run it today.
I could go one, but I think you get my drift.
Such projects are hardly communism but if opponents want to call them socialism so be it. At least when we talk about socialism the people in my neighborhood will have some idea what we’re talking about. And, with time, it will become clear that the reasons such project are not undertaken is because they are not at the service of “market forces,” that they do not produce vast profits for the profiteers, they spread the wealth around.
One of the central tenets of Marx’s thought is that situations of scarcity, limited resources and limited production evolve systems that are inherently unequal in their distribution. But we are no faced with scarcity, limited resources and production but growing wealth and productivity. Oh, they try to scare us with threats like foreign competition and an aging population. But that’s all so much bunk. Sure adjustments must be made but they don’t have to involve ever-increasing institutionalized economic and social inequality.
Marx
After Marxism: The Global Fight for Immigrant Rights in a Neo-Liberal Economy
By RICARDO
ALARCÓN
May 8, 2006
"Let us remember that he said that it was not enough that the idea clamored to be made reality, but that it was also necessary that reality shout out to be made into idea." -- Franz Mehring
I will not attempt to delineate here the ample and rich intellectual production of Karl Marx, his deep analysis of capitalism or the principal events of his era, nor will I touch upon his exemplary life as a social fighter and revolutionary leader. I know that these themes are familiar to you all.
I propose, if you allow me, to separate Marx from Marxism. With that I allude to the necessity of thinking of Marx as Marx, rather than from any of the versions of Marxism, to imagine him declaring the challenges of the twenty-first century, separating what is essential of his work from what others made of his work. Instead of embarking on the endless succession of reviews of his thinking that goes along with those who have claimed him as their own, as well as with those who have tried unsuccessfully to bury him, it is necessary to rescue his fundamental legacy, that which makes him transcend his era to be [with us] here and now in the struggle for human emancipation.
I take as a starting point the warning, not always heeded, of Rosa Luxemburg: "The work Capital of Marx, like all his ideology, is not gospel in which we are given Revealed Truth, set in stone and eternal, but an endless flow of suggestions to keep working on with intelligence, in order to continue researching and struggling for truth." To take his work, on top of any other consideration, as a source of inspiration and guide for those who, like he, want not only to explain the world but, more than anything, transform it, fighting until achieving socialism.
We are not trying to find in his texts data that may seem useful to the analysis of contemporary reality, of capitalism as it is today, something which he didn't try to do nor would have been able to propose doing. Our obligation is to arm ourselves with all of his ideology and from that build a theory and practice that corresponds with that reality and helps to transform it.
There is probably no higher nor more urgent priority for socialists than this: to define a strategic conception and precisely delineate the tactics and methods of struggle adequate for confronting the capitalism that exists now. The theoretical tools at our disposal need to be sharpened for their efficient employment in this era that presents new challenges for the revolutionary movement.
These notes do not have any other aim than contributing to the discussion of that crucial theme and obviously lack any pretension of exhausting it. They have been edited having in mind that which from the great unfinished text declared Rosa Luxembourg:
"Incomplete as they are, these two volumes enclose values infinitely more
precious than any definitive and perfect truth, the spur for the labor of thought
and that critical analysis and judgment of ideas, which is what is most genuine
in the theory that Karl Marx has left to us."
Another indispensable observation: The necessity of elaborating a revolutionary theory that brings victory confronted with what has been called neo-liberal globalization has absolutely nothing to do with a supposed liquidation of Marxism and much less with the imaginary disappearance of class struggle, which some intended to convert in immoveable dogmas in rushed texts that inundated the planet at the beginnings of the last decade of the twentieth century.
The
collapse of the
That
paradox perhaps may explain the short duration of that triumphalism in the
academic level. Few today repeat that nonsense about the "end of
history." Not even
Self-critical reflection is called for on our side as well.
We should admit our own errors, especially those that served as fertile ground for the bourgeois manipulation of the destruction of the Soviet model. This is not the time for profound analysis of the failure of an experience that now belongs to historians. But it is inevitable that we underline here something that led to the defeat and to its advantageous use by the enemy.
That project--independently of Lenin and of the creative spirit that animated the first years of the Bolshevik revolution--reduced Marxism to a determinist and mechanist school of thought, transformed research into dogma, thought into propaganda, until the point of confining it to a condition of terminal hardening of the arteries. It constructed a simplified "science" that thought it had demonstrated that socialism would inevitably come about, by itself, as an unavoidable consequence of a predetermined history and that that socialism would continue its march, also uncontestable, according to laws and rules codified in a strange ritual. Socialism, therefore, was inevitable and invincible; with it one would truly arrive to the end of history. Not any socialism, but that one in particular, that which, with admirable struggle, Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to achieve, whose enormous meaning no one will be able to tear out of the memory of the proletariat but which was a specific project--that is to say, a human work, with virtues and defects, glories and shadows, a result of immense sacrifice of a concrete people in circumstances and conditions likewise concrete--and not the outcome of a predestined and universal idea.
The
conversion of the Soviet experience into a paradigm for those who in other
places fought their own anti-capitalist battles, and the imperative obligation
of defending it from its inflamed and powerful enemies, led to the
subordination of a great part of the revolutionary movement to the policies and
interests of the
In honor of the truth one must render homage to the numberless men and women who sacrificed their lives, the greater part in total anonymity, and died heroically in any corner of the planet defending the land of the Soviets, its policies and its application in its own native soil, as wrong as it may have been in more than a few cases. For them, respect and admiration. But what is being considered now is recognizing the very harmful consequences of that tendency.
The tendency to blindly "tail" thoroughly penetrated many organizations and individuals, and they couldn't react rationally when the system that supported their faith collapsed. They had lived convinced that they were part of an unbeatable force, owners and administrators of truths scientifically demonstrated, and they marched in an enthusiastic procession in which, curiously, the founder did not march, having declared, with all naturalness, "I am not a Marxist."
The myth destroyed, old dogmatists were incapable of appreciating the new possibilities in the revolutionary movement, the spaces heretofore nonexistent that were necessary to explore with audacity and creativity. There were those who, in unsurpassed acrobatics, joined the "conquerors," converting treason into their new religion.
But there is a growing number of those who do not conform, are unsatisfied and rebel. All the rhetoric about U.S. hegemony falls to pieces with its bogging down in Iraq, the undeniable contradictions and limitations of its economy, the awakening of masses that were supposed to be asleep there, and the corruption and moral fissure that undermine its political system.
Their
associates in
In
Latin America and in other parts of the
For the first time, anti-capitalist malaise is manifested, simultaneously and everywhere, in advanced countries and in those left behind and is not limited to the proletariat and other exploited sectors. This is not only expressed today in the struggles that we could call "classics"--between classes and nations that are exploited and exploiters--but in those that are added, at times with more vigor, those that demand the preservation of the environment, or work for the rights of women and discriminated people and those excluded because of gender, ethnicity or religion.
A diverse group, multicolor, in which there is no shortage of contradictions and paradoxes grows in front of the dominant system. It is not yet the rainbow that announces the end of the storm. Spontaneity characterizes it; it needs articulation and coherence that need to be stimulated without sectarianism, without being carried away with wildness. The great challenge of revolutionaries, of communists, is to define our part, the place that we should occupy in this battle. For that we need a theory.
In that sense one must return to the well known but forgotten definition of Lenin: "A correct revolutionary theory is only formed in a definitive manner in close connection with practical experience in a movement that is truly mass and truly revolutionary."
That theory, on a world scale, does not exist in fact, to serve as a guide in the struggle to substitute the present order and transform it in the direction toward socialism. That theory has to be formed and its definitive formation has to take place in constant interrelation with practice, in a process in which both form an inseparable whole. But we are not speaking of just any practice but that of a movement that is both "truly mass and truly revolutionary."
When can a movement be defined as truly a mass movement and when does it acquire the quality of being truly revolutionary? The answers will not be found in a research laboratory, nor will they erupt from academic debate. Revolutionaries themselves will have to create them, men and women of flesh and blood, acting from the masses, building their movement and trying to make it ever more revolutionary. The entire life of the genial Bolshevik leader can be described in that commitment. A persistent legend attributes to the author of Capital the saying "Man [sic] thinks as he lives," which more than a few militants still repeat, without warning of the mistake nor of its paralyzing effects. The relation between man and his surroundings is of decisive importance for ethics and politics and in order to understand the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. To transform the world the key is in the Third Thesis. Let's remember the statements of Marx:
"The materialist theory that men are product of circumstances and of education,
and that, therefore, changed men are a product of different circumstances and of
a modified education, forgets that it is men, precisely, who make circumstances
change and that even the educator needs to be educated. This leads, then,
inevitably, to the division of society in two parts, one of which is on top of
society (this, for example, in Robert Owen)
"The coincidence of the modification of circumstances and of human activity
can only be conceived and understood rationally as revolutionary practice."
In the Second Declaration of Havana, Cubans proclaimed that "the duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution." To make it means to create a new world in spite of the obstacles and limitations that circumstances impose, in a ceaseless battle in which both man and reality will go on transforming each other reciprocally.
* * *
"A certain form of socialism will emerge inevitably from the also inevitable
decay of capitalism"
-- Joseph A. Schumpeter
The prediction that I just cited has been the object of implacable denunciation on the part of bourgeois thinkers. In 1942 it was difficult to see the fall of capitalism as something inevitable. Its author, nevertheless, did not cease believing in it until the end.
Eight years afterward, just before dying, he said: "Marx was wrong in his diagnosis of how capitalist society would fall; but he was not wrong in the prediction that finally it would fall."
In
1950
At the middle of the last century the world was quite different from what it is today. By a route that they probably did not foresee we are now nearer the fulfillment of the prophecy in which, paradoxically, both the author of Capital and his tenacious Austro-North American critic coincided.
The protagonist has changed, the subject of history, man. The world population has grown in an exponential manner since the days of the publication of the Communist Manifesto and it continues doing so. Man traveled through tens of thousands of years to arrive at the first billion. It took a century to triple the double of that figure. Each 25 years is added to that figure a quantity similar to that which represented the whole planet when Karl Marx was born. At a similar rhythm the natural resources of the earth is exhausted and animal and vegetable species are annihilated forever. Man is the only being that has dedicated himself with so much fury and efficiency to destroy life.
Irreversible climactic changes, forests transformed into deserts, poisoned waters, unbreathable air, irremediably degraded soils, astounding conglomerations of human beings in uninhabitable and always growing urban clogs are distressing worries that compose a reality not known before.
Beyond
ideologies the people continue discovering that which is obvious. In 1992, at
the Earth Summit at
The subject, besides, inevitably moves. Population grows exponentially but it doesn't do so equally in all parts of the world. In the so-called developed countries it is frozen and even tends to shrink. In the rest, in that part of the world that was baptized as the Third, they are more, ever many more--in spite of early death, misery, hunger--and also those who in an unstoppable spiral, are displaced toward the enclaves of opulence.
The
The
migratory phenomenon will be maintained and will gain in size along with
capitalism, with its present characteristics, as it is expanded through the
whole world. Capitalism cannot stop it, just as it is neither capable of
abandoning those characteristics and much less transform itself into another
thing. The Central Intelligence Agency
of the
The
presence of millions of people discriminated against and lacking civil and
political rights raises an essential question that goes to the very roots of
the political system that the West has attempted to set as an obligatory model
for all. There is an increasingly growing number of those who work hard there,
pay their taxes, die in their wars, but cannot vote nor be elected. In today's
The
end of that exclusion, the struggle for democracy, specifically including the
democratization of Western societies, should be a priority for those who wish
to transform the world. This is yet more urgent if we perceive the other face
of the migratory phenomenon together with it grows, in parallel, racial hatred,
xenophobia, which feeds fascist tendencies today present in an obvious manner
in those societies. The migratory problem reflects, thus, an aspect of
capitalism today that it is also worthwhile reflecting on. While the emigrants
are humiliated and super exploited in the countries where they end up, there
they are used also as instruments for the oppression of the local workers.
Being used as the international reserve army, stripped of rights, and until now
not organized, they serve to lower wages, are forced to accept conditions that,
as Bush the lesser likes to say,
To free the immigrants from their exploitation becomes, therefore, essential for the emancipation of the workers in the developed countries. To forge a union between both exploited sectors, in an area that has had advances that are still insufficient but whose importance cannot be underestimated, is today a task that cannot be postponed. To rescue the role of the labor union, true bulwark of civil society and to guarantee the rights of all workers, without exceptions, to organize oneself is an indispensable response to a capitalism that ever more openly casts off its "liberal" mask and demonstrates the perverse face of tyranny.
Fascism
must be stopped. It is necessary to prevent it from being able to gather its
own victims into a senseless opposition. Never again should a Nixon be able to
mobilize construction workers against the youth who, in the seventies of the
last century, rebelled against the war in
The
poor try to emigrate to the rich world to escape poverty. The rich, meanwhile,
try to place their capital in the poor countries in order to increase their
profits with the misery of others and inevitably worsen the conditions of work
and of life for workers in the developed countries. Few in the
To
forge convergence, to later on reach unity between the exploited people of the
First and
To struggle so that the antiwar and anti-globalization movements flow into the same great stream and that all those discriminated against, all the marginalized be included is the main duty of revolutionaries today. It is the way to create a better world. It is the road to take in advancing toward socialism. To achieve socialism in this century there must be "heroic creation," a creation that is authentic, independent, and therefore diverse and unique.
Ricardo
Alarcon de Quesada is
Translation by Joe Bryak for CubaNews.
New
Wings for Socialism
by Michael A. Lebowitz
Monthly Review, April 2007
An Old Essay
Seventeen years ago, in 1990, I began an essay with a poem of Bertolt Brecht. It was a poem about a man in Europe in the Middle Ages who put on "things that looked like wings," climbed to the roof of a church, and tried to fly. He crashed, and the bishop who passed by said, "No one will ever fly."*
In 1990, what was called the socialist world had crashed. And, everywhere there were experts who saw this as proof: socialism had failed. No one would ever fly.
What I attempted to do in that essay was to challenge the theoretical arguments against socialism, theoretical arguments, in particular, against the Marxist case for socialism. And, I proposed that there had been a distortion of Marxism both in theory and in practice -- a distortion that forgot about human beings, a determinist message focusing upon productive forces that was silent about "the nature of human beings produced within an economic system." The determinist argument which stresses the primacy of productive forces, I argued, could never understand why Marx sacrificed his "health, happiness and family" to write Capital. Nor could it make sense of why Marx never stopped stressing that workers could make themselves fit to create a new society only through the process of struggle.
What was my essential point? It was to emphasize the importance of developing a new common sense -- one which sees the logic of producing together in order to satisfy human needs. The failure to do this and to stress instead the development of productive forces, I proposed, leads inevitably to a dead end -- the dead end which we could see in front of us. The point was simple: as Che Guevara had stressed in his classic "Man and Socialism in Cuba," to build socialism it is essential, along with building new material foundations, to build new human beings.
But, how? I focused upon a number of elements. Self-management in the process of production, I argued, was an essential element: "Insofar as people produce themselves in the course of all their activities, the very process of engaging in democratic forms of production is an essential part of producing people for whom the need for cooperation is second nature." But, self-management in particular productive units is not sufficient. You need, I argued, to replace a focus upon selfishness and self-orientation with a focus upon community and solidarity, a conscious emphasis upon human needs; i.e., the necessity to engage in collective solutions to satisfy human needs must be "recognised as a responsibility of all individuals." And, producing people with these characteristics could never be achieved by a state standing over and above civil society. "Rather, only through their own activities through autonomous organisations -- at the neighbourhood, community and national levels -- can people transform both circumstances and themselves." What, in short, was necessary was "the conscious development of a socialist civil society."
Thus, rather than a focus upon the development of productive forces, I stressed the centrality of human beings and the development of the institutions which permit them to transform themselves. This had not occurred in the Soviet model. "With its lack of democratic and cooperative production, its absence of a socialist civil society and its actually existing bureaucratic rule," so-called real socialism had not produced the new human beings who could build a better world. And, that, I proposed, was the lesson we had to learn from this experience. Rather than concluding from the crash that socialism had failed and that no one would ever fly, the lesson for socialists was different. My concluding line was: "No one should ever again try to fly with those things that only look like wings."
A Confession, a Miracle, and a New Beginning
But,
let me make a confession. That argument sounds a lot more confident than
I really was. Nineteen-ninety was a time of demoralization. However
critical one might be about the inadequacy of the socialist experiments that
had now crashed, no one who believed in a society of social justice could
escape a sick feeling in the stomach from seeing the apparent victory of
capitalism.
Yet,
this was all before what I think of as the "Cuban Miracle."
Here was a small, poor country which had been blockaded for decades by
U.S. imperialism and that had survived by establishing trade relations and
economic integration with the Eastern "real socialist" bloc.
And, suddenly that bloc, which accounted for 80 percent of
But,
Of
course, it wasn't really a miracle -- if we mean by that something which drops
from the sky and which cannot be explained as a product of human activity. What
happened in
In
a world where the mantra was TINA -- that there is no alternative to
neoliberalism -- this was indeed a miracle. It was a miracle in the
literal sense: a wonderful thing to behold. And, I think that we do not
give this Cuban miracle sufficient credit. Because it demonstrated that
there was an alternative, an alternative based on concepts of solidarity and
human development. And, that example, an example which demonstrates the
importance of the battle of ideas in building new human beings, has been
essential especially in
The Vision of Socialism for the Twenty-First Century
What do we mean by socialism for the twenty-first century? I think it is precisely what President Chávez called for when he spoke of the need to reinvent socialism: "We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything."
That vision can be seen in the Bolivarian Constitution which talks about "ensuring overall human development," about "developing the creative potential of every human being and the full exercise of his or her personality in a democratic society," about participation being "the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective," and in the identification of democratic planning and participatory budgeting at all levels of society and "self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms" as examples of "forms of association guided by the values of mutual cooperation and solidarity."
That vision was further articulated by President Chávez, when he talked in 2003 about the nature of the "social economy" which "bases its logic on the human being, on work, that is to say, on the worker and the worker's family, that is to say, in the human being." This is the concept of an economy which is not dominated by the idea of economic gain and exchange values; rather, he stressed, "the social economy generates mainly use-value." Its purpose is "the construction of the new man, of the new woman, of the new society." This is a familiar vision: it is the ideal of the great religions, of humanist traditions, of indigenous societies -- the idea of a human family, of human beings linked by solidarity rather than self-interest.
Certainly, too, this is a vision which rejects the perverse logic of capital and the idea that the criterion for what is good is what is profitable. It rejects the linking of people, too, through exchange of commodities, where our criterion for satisfying the needs of others is whether this benefits us as individuals or groups of individuals. This is a vision expressed so clearly by István Mészáros when he drew upon Marx to talk about a society in which, rather than the exchange of commodities, there is an exchange of activities based upon communal needs and communal purposes. And, that vision was embraced by President Chávez in 2005 when he said "we have to create a communal system of production and consumption, a new system." We have to build, he insisted, "this communal system of production and consumption, to help to create it, from the popular bases, with the participation of the communities, through the community organizations, the cooperatives, self-management and different ways to create this system."
Elements of the New socialism
But, how do you go beyond a vision to create this new system? What steps do you take? Mészáros emphasizes that in the complex dialectic of production-distribution-consumption, no one part can stand alone -- it is necessary to radically restructure the whole of these relations. If we think of socialism, like capitalism, as a "structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another" (Marx), how can you build this new system? How can you make any real change if you have to change all relations -- and you can't change them all simultaneously?
It must be done the same way that capitalism developed. Capitalism developed through a process, a process of "subordinating all elements of society to itself" and by creating for itself the organs which it lacked. The new socialist society similarly must develop through a process of subordinating all the elements of capitalism and the logic of capital and by a process of inserting its own logic centered in human beings in its place. It proceeds by assembling the elements of a new dialectic of production-distribution-consumption.
What are those elements? At the core of this new combination are three characteristics: (a) social ownership of the means of production, which is a basis for (b) social production organized by workers in order to (c) satisfy communal needs and communal purposes. Let us consider each in its turn and their combination.
A. Social ownership of the means of production is critical because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of individuals, or state bureaucrats. Social ownership, however, is not the same as state ownership. State property is consistent with state capitalist enterprises, hierarchical statist firms, or firms in which particular groups of workers (rather than society as a whole) capture the major benefits of this state property. Social ownership implies a profound democracy -- one in which people function as subjects, both as producers and as members of society.
B. Production organized by workers builds new relations among producers -- relations of cooperation and solidarity; it furthermore allows workers to end "the crippling of body and mind" and the loss of "every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity" (Marx) that comes from the separation of head and hand characteristic of capitalist production. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated and fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. Further, as long as this production is carried out for their private gain rather than that of society, they look upon others (and, indeed, each other) as means to their own ends and thus remain alienated, fragmented, and crippled. Social production, thus, is a condition for the full development of the producers.
C. Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes has as its necessary condition a means of identifying and communicating those needs and purposes. Thus, it requires the development of the democratic institutions at every level which can express the needs of society. Production reflects communal needs only with information and decisions which flow from the bottom up. However, in the absence of the transformation of society, the needs transmitted upward are the needs of people formed within capitalism -- people who are "in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society" (Marx). Within the new socialist society, the "primacy of needs" is based not upon the individual right to consume things without limit but, rather, upon "the worker's own need for development"; these are the needs of people in a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. In a society like this, where our productive activity for others is rewarding in itself and where there is all-round development of individuals, society can place upon its banner: to each according to his/her need for development.
As consideration of these three specific elements suggests, realization of each element depends upon the existence of the other two -- precisely Mészáros's point about the inseparability of this distribution-production-consumption complex: Without production for social needs, no real social property; without social property, no worker decision-making oriented toward society's needs; without worker decision-making, no transformation of people and their needs.
The presence of the defects inherited from the old society in any one element poisons the others. Thus, we return to the essential question: how is a transition possible when everything depends upon everything else?
Building Revolutionary Subjects
In order to identify the measures necessary to build this new socialist society, it is absolutely critical to understand Marx's concept of "revolutionary practice" -- the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change. To change a structure in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another, you have to do more than try to change a few elements in that structure, you must stress at all times the hub of all these relations -- human beings as subjects and products of their own activity.
Every activity in which people engage forms them. Thus, there are two products of every activity -- the changing of circumstance or things (e.g., in the production process) and the human product. This second side of production is easily forgotten when talking about structural changes; however, it was not forgotten in the emphasis of the Bolivarian Constitution upon practice and protagonism -- in particular, the stress upon participation as "the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective."
What is the significance of recognizing this process of producing people explicitly? First, it helps us to understand why changes must occur in all spheres -- every moment that people act within old relations is a process of reproducing old ideas and attitudes. Working under hierarchical relations, functioning without the ability to make decisions in the workplace and society, and focusing upon self-interest rather than upon solidarity within society -- these activities produce people on a daily basis; it is the reproduction of the conservatism of everyday life.
Recognizing this second side also directs us to focus upon the introduction of concrete measures which explicitly take into account the effect of those measures upon human development. Thus, for every step two questions must be asked: (1) how does this change circumstances and (2) how does this help to produce revolutionary subjects and increase their capacities?
We are back, then, at the question of what was missing in the old efforts to build a new socialist society. In forgetting what Che knew -- the necessity to build new socialist human beings simultaneously, those early attempts tried to fly with things that only looked like wings. When you begin, however, from the centrality of human subjects, you never forget that democratic, participatory, and protagonistic practices are at the heart of creating the new socialist human beings and a new socialist society.
Let
me return explicitly to the subject of my book -- or, more accurately, to its
title. We have learned from the failures of the past. And, we no
longer accept the story that man will never fly.
*Bertolt Brecht, "Ulm 1592," quoted in Michael A. Lebowitz, "The Socialist Fetter: A Cautionary Tale," in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, eds., Socialist Register 1991, Communist Regimes: The Aftermath (London: Merlin Press, 1991).
Michael
A. Lebowitz is the author of Beyond
Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan,
2003); Build it Now:
Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2006); and
The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (Monthly Review Press,
forthcoming). He is currently living and working in
bravenet.com