A “system” is, any assemblage of things forming a regular and connected whole. The name given to such a system depends upon the outstanding features of the things under consideration. For instance, we find the immediate heavenly bodies acting upon each other according to a certain order, forming a connected whole, the first of which is the sun—we call this order the solar system. We look into society at different periods and find different social forms, each as a connected whole having as outstanding features certain economic arrangements. At one time it is the exaction of dues in place of military service by the owners of the land—the feudal dues of the feudal system; at another time it is the ownership of the wealth produced by virtue of the investment of capital—as in the capitalist system.
Particular social systems are not necessarily laid down beforehand, one grows out of another owing to the development of a new form (or a latent form) in the older system. When the new form grows to such proportions that its further development is seriously hampered by the system suited to the older form, then a revolution takes place and the old system is swept away, giving place to the new. Within the feudal system, production for sale was originally a relatively minor economic form, but owing to various agencies, among them the discoveries that opened up a world market, production for sale brought into its circle of influence practically the whole of society in given countries, and those engaged in this sphere found they were constantly coming up against the laws and arrangements of feudalism. First in England and then in France, a successful effort was made to destroy the old shackling forms and remodel society according to arrangements suited to the new. Social philosophers in England and in France, prior to the revolutions, laid down very definitely “deliberate” plans “on paper” of what the new order should be like.
The coming of socialism would dispense with the need for coercive State institutions, as there would be no subject class to govern and repress. As every student of social science knows, the State did not always exist; it is a product of society at a stage of evolution. Through different forms, its essential character has been a power of coercion apart from the mass of the people. Today we know it as the parliamentary State, in which the subject class, the workers, are enfranchised. The State is the executive of the present ruling class (the capitalists), and it protects and maintains their ownership of property because the slave class politically permit it.
In our object and Principles, readers will see that production and distribution could only be vested in society, the whole people, as distinct from the capitalist few, any other method (State Capitalism, for instance) would still retain private ownership, and therefore class society.
Who would organise the maintenance of supplies in a class-free society? Who organises supplies today? The landlords and the shareholders or the working class? What the workers now do for idlers, surely with growing intelligence they can do for themselves. It is in politics they are ignorant, not in production. When wealth is no longer produced for profit, i.e., when the workers cease to be exploited. The exchange economy as a means to realise that profit or unpaid labour will be as unnecessary as the State.
Capitalism, in its development, is carrying out Marx’s predictions. It has swelled the ranks of the workers in proportion to the other section of society. Modern technology renders more and more workers redundant. Wage slavery, high or low paid, cannot prevent these worsening conditions, because the workers’ opportunity to enjoy the results of their increasing productivity is denied them by the present outworn system of production for profit. Private property in the means of life allows an idle class to monopolise the benefits, the privileges, the comforts. United and organised by the very system that enslaves them, the workers will acquire the knowledge that will set society free from the last phase of class exploitation.
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