The Law and the State

 

Socialism can only be realised by the triumph of the working people in their struggle against the owning class. Necessary though it is that the workers should struggle on the economic field, the most important battleground of the class struggle is on the political field. It is the only battlefield where the workers can finally win and abolish the struggle altogether by abolishing classes and capitalism altogether.

A wage is a sign of servitude and while the wage system remains employers will act as they do today. They will use their wealth and political power to ensure the subjugation of the worker and the smallness, of his “share.” The unions are trying to effect changes in wages, but not the abolition of the wage system. Even higher wages and shorter hours result in speeding up the workers more and the use of more and better machinery and the careful selection of the most efficient workers, so that the employers are compensated for the increased wages by greater output. The wage is the price of a commodity possessed by the worker, and in selling his labour-power to the master the worker is really selling himself piecemeal.

A popular misconception of socialism is it means nothing more than the control of everything and everybody by the State. Socialism cannot be established by the State as it exists at present. Only when the workers, organised consciously and politically, capture the State and convert it into the agent of emancipation will it be possible to convert the means of life (i.e., the land, factories, transport and communications) into the common property of the whole people.

This revolution within the State, necessary as it is for the social revolution, so far from extending the bureaucracy, will abolish it. The first act of the revolutionary administration will be to take direct control and responsibility from the hands of the officials in every department. The working class must itself become the State. As the revolution proceeds and the capitalist class are stripped of their economic privileges, so the workers’ organisation will cease to be political and will become economic. It will be concerned, not with the government of persons, but with the administration of the social means of production and distribution. Class distinctions having been abolished, class antagonism will disappear and with it the need for a repressive force.

Defenders of capitalism seldom realise how much institutions such as “the law” are part of the social system existing at a particular time and are not eternal necessities of nature. “The law” has changed along with the State that made it. The laws of the ancient patricians, the laws of the medieval barons, have followed the customs of prehistoric barbarians; the laws of the last of the exploiting classes will do likewise and there will thus be an end of laws and the beginning of social freedom.

Civil law regulates contracts and implies private property and the production of commodities. When society consciously regulates production and distribution, contracts will become meaningless. The individual will depend for the satisfaction of his economic wants, not upon some other individual or group, but upon society as a whole; consequently, he will have no motive for entering into bargains or seeking the aid of the law to enforce their terms.

Criminal law also will become meaningless in a society of equals. Time was when, in the interests of capitalism, the idea was spread that there existed a distinct criminal type with marked physical and psychological characteristics. To-day that idea is discredited even among Capitalist authorities themselves. Crime is the effect of social conditions. Crimes against property such as theft, arson, etc., are directly traceable to economic causes which will disappear along with poverty and the fear of poverty. Crimes against persons are also in the majority of cases bound up with these same economic causes; while even the so-called “crimes of passion” arise largely from the unwholesome conditions, moral as well as physical, which are inevitably engendered by capitalism.

Socialists do not pretend that violent anti-social acts will entirely cease to occur, but that they will, undoubtedly, dwindle to such proportions as to render the existing legal methods of dealing with offenders obsolete. The concern of society under Socialism will not be repression but the development of a physical environment and mental atmosphere which will allow for the full evolution of the individual and thus secure his voluntary cooperation with his fellows. Comradeship will take the place of coercion.