We live in a world rife with misery and oppression in many various
forms. Hunger, poverty, unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and political
repression are still the lot of the majority of the people of the world. Ever
since the earliest class-divided societies, the exploited have aspired to a
better life. They have yearned for a society where all injustice would be
banished forever. The dreams of the past have become real possibilities for a
future. Socialist revolution is the only way that working people can ensure the
abolition of all exploitation.
Socialism will mean the rule of the working class. It will
put an end to the exploitation of man by man. It will bring freedom to all
those oppressed by capital and open up a new period of history for people. The
enormous waste of capitalism will end. Socialism is the future of humanity, a
radically new society where classes and the state will have been completely
eliminated.
In the end it is possible to do away with classes and the
state since these only exist during a specific period of society’s development.
Humanity has not always been divided into classes. In the primitive communal
societies all the members cooperated together to assure their survival. But as
mankind progressed, as the productive forces – the way in which man made his
living – developed and it became possible to accumulate wealth, society was
split into antagonistic classes. Since that time all of human history has been
the history of class struggle; the struggle between slave and slave owner,
between serf and feudal lord, between worker and capitalist. Each of these
major periods in the development of society – slavery, feudalism and capitalism
– corresponds to a particular level of development of the productive forces.
Each of these societies is marked by a sharp division between the masses of
toilers on the one hand, and a small handful of exploiters who live in luxury
on the other.
Socialism means tremendous progress. In all the former
societies, the state was an instrument for the domination of a minority of
exploiters over the vast majority of working people. Under socialism, the state
serves the vast majority allowing it to keep its hold over a minority of
capitalists. In socialist society all social inequalities will have been
banished; there will be no rich and no poor, and all members of society will
contribute to the common good. With socialism, the immense advance of the
productive forces and the tremendous abundance of social wealth will allow for
the application of the principle: “From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs.” Each person will contribute to society according to
his or her ability, while society in turn provides for his or her needs. The
differences between workers and farmers, town and country, and manual and
intellectual work will have disappeared. In socialist society, each individual
will develop to his full potential. Socialism is not an end to human
development but just the beginning – the beginning of a further development of
production, the people’s well-being and all facets of human society. But before
we arrive at this goal we must take the first steps forward. We must take power
from the ruling class. Reformism regards socialism as a remote goal and nothing
more. Reformism advocates not class struggle, but class collaboration. We must
draw a clear line of distinction between ourselves and the enemy, i.e. the
bosses and their bureaucrats.
For Marx, the wage-system is not a feature of socialism but
of quite a different system, capitalism. Marx spoke of the ‘free association of
real producers’. It is through such a free association, when labour in all its
aspects becomes controlled by the workers themselves that production will rest
not upon decisions of the planners, but of the freely determined wishes of the
producers themselves. Socialism will have no need of the irrational remnants of
a past age, such as money and prices. The Marxists strive for the free
association of completely free men, where no separation between ‘private and
common interest’ existed: a society where ‘everyone could give himself a
complete education in whatever domain he fancied’. For ‘man’s activity becomes
an adverse force which subjugates him, instead of his being its master’ when
there is ‘a division of labour’; everyone must then have a profession, that is
a ‘determined, exclusive sphere of activity’ he has not chosen and in which ‘he
is forced to remain if he does not want to lose his means of existence’. In a
socialist society, on the contrary, a man would be given ‘the possibility to do
this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to go fishing in the
afternoon, to do cattle breeding in the evening, to criticise after dinner’, as
he chose’ (The German Ideology).
Marx designated the working class the ’grave-diggers of
capitalism’ – the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working
class itself. The working class is not the gravedigger of capitalism by virtue
of any intrinsic merit it possesses as a class qualifying it for that role, but
because of the objective role it plays in the production process of capitalism.
Thus it can be, and indeed has always been, that the very class which alone is
capable of destroying capitalism and with it all class society, is itself
deeply imbued with the ideology of the ruling class it is historically destined
to overthrow. The contradiction between the objective role of the working class
as an agent of social revolution, and its own lack of consciousness of that role,
makes necessary a battlefield of ideas so that workers are conscious of their
role as the agent of social revolution.
According to socialist theory, the development of capitalism
implies the polarisation of society into a small minority of capital owners and
a large majority of wage-workers. This concentration of productive property and
general wealth into always fewer hands appears as an incarnation of ‘feudalism’
in the garb of modern industrial society. Small ruling classes determine the
life and death of all of society by owning and controlling the productive
resources and therewith the governments. That their decisions are controlled,
in turn, by impersonal market forces and the compulsive quest for capital does
not alter the fact that these reactions to uncontrollable economic events are
also their exclusive privilege. The producers have no direct control over
production and the products it brings forth. At times, they may exert a kind of
indirect control by way of wage struggles, which may alter the wage-profit
ratio and therewith the course or tempo of the capital expansion process, but generally,
it is the capitalist who determines the conditions of production. Unless the
worker accepts the exploitative conditions of capitalist production, he is
‘free’ only in the sense that he is free to starve. This was recognised long
before there was a socialist movement. As early as 1767, Simon Linguet declared
that wage-labour is merely a form of slave labour:
“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that
compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and
our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags
them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of
buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich
man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... What effective gain
has the suppression of slavery brought him? ... He is free, you say. Ah. That
is his misfortune. The slave was precious to his master because of the money he
had cost him. But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who
employs him ... These men, it is said, have no master – they have one, and the
most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this that
reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”
Almost three hundred years later, this is essentially still
the same. Although it is no longer outright misery which forces the workers in
the advanced capitalist nations to submit to the rule of capital and to the
wiles of capitalists, their lack of control over the means of production, their
position as wage-workers, still marks them as a ruled class unable to determine
its own destiny.
The goal of socialists is the abolition of the wage system,
which implies the end of capitalism. Social development will no longer be
determined by the uncontrollable fetishistic expansion and contraction of
capital but by the collective conscious decisions of the producers in a
classless society.
The cooperative movement came into being as a medium of
escape from wage-abour and as a futile opposition to the ruling principle of
general competition. Producers’
cooperatives were voluntary groupings for self-employment and self-government
with respect to their own activities. Some of these cooperatives developed
independently, others in conjunction with the working class movements. By
pooling their resources, workers were able to establish their own workshops and
produce without the intervention of capitalists. But their opportunities were
from the very beginning circumscribed by the general conditions of capitalist
society and its developmental tendencies, which granted them a mere marginal
existence. Capitalist development implies the competitive concentration and
centralisation of capital. The larger capital destroys the smaller. The
cooperative workshops were restricted to special small-scale industries requiring
little capital. If they became a threat, the better resourced capitalist
companies drove them out of business.
Consumers’ cooperatives proved to be a little more
successful and some of them absorbed producers’ cooperatives as sources of
supply. But consumers’ cooperatives can hardly be considered as attempts at
working class control, even where they were the creation of working class
aspirations. At best, they may secure a measure of control in the disposal of
wages, for labourers can be robbed twice – at the point of production and at
the market place. The costs of commodity circulation are an unavoidable faux
frais of capital production [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux_frais_of_production],
dividing the capitalists into merchants and entrepreneurs. Since each tries for
the profit maximum in its own sphere of operation, their economic interests are
not identical. Entrepreneurs thus have no reason to object to consumers’
cooperatives. Currently, they are themselves engaged in dissolving the division
of productive and merchant capital by combining the functions of both in the
single production and marketing corporation.
The cooperative movement was easily integrated into the
capitalist system and, in fact, was to a large extent an element of capitalist
development. Even in bourgeois economic theory it was considered an instrument
of social conservatism by fostering the savings propensities of the lower
layers of society, by increasing economic activities through credit unions, by
improving agriculture through cooperative production and marketing
organisations, and by shifting working class attention from the sphere of
production to that of consumption. As a capitalistically-oriented institution
the cooperative movement flourished, finally to become one form of capitalist
enterprise among others, bent on the exploitation of the workers in its employ,
and facing the latter as their opponents in strikes for higher wages and better
working conditions. The general support of consumers’ cooperatives by the official
labour movement – in sharp distinction to an earlier scepticism and even
outright rejection – was merely an additional sign of the increasing
‘capitalisation’ of the reformist labour movement. The division of ‘collectivism’ into
producers’ and consumers cooperatives reflected, in a sense, the opposition of
the syndicalist to the socialist movement. Consumers’ cooperatives incorporated
members of all classes and were seeking access to all markets. They were not
opposed to centralisation on a national and even international scale. The
market of producers’ cooperatives, however, was as limited as their production
and they could not combine into larger units without losing the self-control
which was the rationale for their existence.
It was the problem of
workers’ control over their production and products which differentiated the
syndicalists from the socialist movement. In so far as the problem still
existed for the latter, it solved it for itself with the concept of
nationalisation, which made the socialist state the guardian of society’s
productive resources and the regulator of its economic life with respect to
both production and distribution. Only at a later stage of development would
this arrangement make room for a free association of socialised producers and
the withering away of the state. The syndicalists feared, however, that the
state with its centralised controls would merely perpetuate itself and prevent
the working population’s self-determination. The syndicalists envisioned a
society in which each industry is managed by its own workers. All the
syndicates together would form national federations which would not have the
characteristics of government but would merely serve statistical and
administrative functions for the realisation of a truly collectivist production
and distribution system. To speak of workers’ control within the framework of
capitalist production can mean only control of their own organisations, for
capitalism implies that the workers are deprived of all effective social control.
But with the ‘capitalisation’ of their organisations, when they become the
‘property’ of a bureaucracy and the vehicle of its existence and reproduction,
it follows that the only possible form of direct workers’ control vanishes. It
is true that even then workers fight for higher wages, shorter hours and better
working conditions, but these struggles do not affect their lack of power
within their own organisations. To call these activities a form of workers’
control is a misnomer in any case, for these struggles are not concerned with
the self-determination of the working class but with the improvement of
conditions within the confines of capitalism. This is, of course, possible so
long as it is possible to increase the productivity of labour at a rate faster
than that by which the workers’ living standards are raised.
The basic control over the conditions of work and the
surplus-yields of production remain always in the hands of the capitalists.
When workers succeed in reducing the hours of their working day, they will not
succeed in cutting the quantity of surplus labour extracted by the capitalists.
For there are two ways of extracting surplus-labour prolonging the working day
and shortening the working time required to produce the wage-equivalent by way
of technical and organisational innovations. Because capital must yield a
definite rate of profit, capitalists will stop producing when this rate is
threatened. The compulsion to accumulate capital controls the capitalist and
forces him to control his workers to get that amount of surplus-labour
necessary to consummate the accumulation process. He will try for the profit
maximum and may only get the minimum for reasons beyond his control, one of
which may be the resistance of the workers to the conditions of exploitation
bound up with the profit maximum. But that is as far as working class exertions
can reach within the capitalist system.
The workers’ loss of control over their own organisations
was, of course, a consequence of their acquiescence in the capitalist system.
Organised and unorganised workers alike accommodated themselves to the market
economy because it was able to ameliorate their conditions and promised further
improvements in the course of its own development. Types of organisations
effective in such a non-revolutionary situation were precisely reformist
socialist parties and centrally-controlled business unions. Capitalists no
longer confronted the workers but their representatives, whose existence was
based on the existence of the capital-labour market, that is, on the continued
existence of capitalism. The workers’ satisfaction with their organisations
reflected their own loss of interest in social change. While it may still be necessary
to fight for immediate demands, such struggles no longer bring the entire order
into radical question. In the fight for socialism more stress must be laid upon
the qualitative rather than the quantitative needs of the workers. While there
cannot be socialism without workers’ control, neither can there be real
workers’ control without socialism. To assert that gradual increase of workers’
control in capitalism is an actual possibility merely plays into the hands of
the widespread demagoguery of the ruling classes to hide their absolute
class-rule by false social reforms dressed in terms such as co-management,
participation or determination. Workers’ control excludes class-collaboration;
it cannot partake in but instead abolishes the system of capital production.
Neither socialism nor workers’ control has anywhere become a reality.
State-capitalism and market-socialism, or the combination of both, still find
the working class in the position of wage workers without effective control
over their production and its distribution. Their social position does not
differ from that of workers in the mixed or unmixed capitalist economy.
Everywhere, the struggle for working class emancipation has still to begin and
will not end short of the socialisation of production and the abolition of
classes through the elimination of wage labour.
Reforms presuppose a reformable capitalism. Improved
conditions have become the customary conditions, and continued acquiescence of
the workers requires the maintenance of these conditions. Should they
deteriorate, it will arouse working class opposition. Even though the ‘value’
of labour power must always be smaller than the ‘value’ of the products it
creates, the ‘value’ of labour-power may imply different living conditions. It
may be expressed in a eight-hour day, in good or in bad housing, in more or
less consumer goods. At any particular time, however, the given wages and their
buying power determine the conditions of the labouring population as well as
their complaints and aspirations. When capitalism is forced by economic developments
that brings the conditions which lead to the formation of class consciousness,
it will also bring back the revolutionary demand for socialism.
