Archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered much
about early pre-class societies. We know that when people lived co-operatively
and there was no division into classes. The end of these egalitarian societies
came because of the division of society into classes – one class in which the
overwhelming majority of people, women and men, work to produce everything and
the other, ruling, class which steals from us the wealth we produce. This
transformation did not come about overnight. It was the result of the
development of society’s productive forces, and the production of much greater
material wealth than had been possible in earlier societies. As human beings
worked to control the world in which they lived, they developed tools like the
wheel, the plough and irrigation channels, which allowed them to settle in one
place, and to produce a surplus to put by for the next season’s planting and
for times of scarcity. But the surplus produced was small. It was not enough to
be divided out and had to be ‘protected’ by a small minority on behalf of the
rest of the group. Gradually this minority grew to have different interests to
the rest of their group and started to treat the surplus as ‘theirs’ rather
than everyone’s. They employed bands of armed men to protect the surplus from
the majority and used metal tools to develop a monopoly on the best weaponry.
The emergence of private property and of embryo states.
Profits are the heart of capitalism, markets its circulating
system but it is the working class that is its muscles which transforms nature
into saleable goods. Capitalist production needs propertyless workers to work
for wages anywhere, and this was accomplished by expropriating peasants,
driving them from the land.
Capitalism is full of inherent contradictions:
(a) the contradiction between use value and exchange value;
between production for use and production for the market, for profit.
(b) the contradiction
between social production and individual appropriation.
(c) the contradiction between increased use of science in
production and the tremendous waste (of the soil, of labour-power, and of materials
and means of production).
(d) the contradiction between the rational planning in the
factory and the chaos and anarchy in the market.
(e) The contradiction between the unlimited possibility for
scientific and technological advancement with increased output and the
imposition of artificial rationing.
(f) The contradiction
between the falling tendency of the rate of profit and the rising proportion of
constant to variable capital resulting the increasing hold of dead labour over
living labor.
(g) The growth of the
unemployed with the growth in strength and energy of capitalism.
(h) The development
of private property contradicted by the expropriation of the direct producer
from the means of production and the separation of the owner from the
productive process. (i) The contradiction between city and country, between
industry and agriculture.
(j) The rise of monopolies concurrently with the intensification
of competition.
(k) The ruin of ‘middle classes’ and the consolidation of
the rentier class.
(l) The development of nationalism with the further
internationalisation of markets and division of labour.
The social system is made up of a net of social relations,
the most decisive of which are the economic, that is, those productive
relations which result in the satisfaction of our basic needs, food, clothing,
shelter. In the close to 300 years since the beginning of the industrial
revolution, modern capitalism has greatly developed the productive powers of
society. But more and more capitalism is now choking these productive powers.
The last world war and the present great economic crisis are two outstanding
proofs of the fact that capitalism is played out and is hindering the
development of humanity.
Again, the contradictions of capitalism:
1. Capitalism is tremendously wasteful and destructive of
men, goods, power, land. The ultimate destiny of all useful goods is to be
consumed. Yet under capitalism goods are not produced to be consumed, but for
profit, and if a greater profit can be made by destroying the goods, the
destruction takes place.
2. While production is a social act, the appropriation of
the product, under the present system, is individual. As capitalism develops,
larger and larger factories are built, thousands of workers co-operate in the
production of a single article, yet the article does not belong to them but to
the owner of the means of production. The workers are merely paid wages for the
use of their labour power, wages which constantly grow less and less an aliquot
part of the total product as the total product ever increases. Simultaneously
the owner of the industries becomes progressively more divorced from the
productive process. As small partnerships become big corporations or are driven
out of business by the trusts and monopolies, the original entrepreneurs become
mere rentiers. The corporation also develops, becomes more and more a public
utility. The state begins to take a hand, and to run the industry. The former
individual owner now becomes a purely parasitic hanger-on, his dividends paid
regularly by the state apparatus which he controls.
3. While the productivity of man is unlimited and increases
in geometric ratio, the markets are limited, increase in arithmetic ratio,
later do not increase at all and even decrease. The greater the productivity of
labour, and the greater the amount of production, the greater becomes the
surplus product in the hands of the owners, the greater the need for markets,
the greater, therefore, the competition among the capitalists, and the greater
the tendency to lower the rate of profit, the greater the lowering of the wages
of the workers, the larger the army of unemployed and paupers, the more
vigorous the drive for foreign markets and colonies for exploitation, and the
more violent the military struggles to control the world.
4. The greater the internationalisation of markets, the
greater the need to have a military machine to defend the market interests, the
greater grow the oppressive burdens of the state apparatus, the greater grows
the necessity to transform the whole nation into an armed, economically
self-sufficient, ruthless, chauvinistic state.
Thus is it not clear that although in the beginning
capitalism developed the productive forces, as capitalism reached its maturity,
capitalist relations throttle and destroy these productive forces. With what a
system are the products we need and want produced? Within the factory a rigid
dictatorship, a terrible “rationalization” where the dead machine rules living
labour, where the man is transformed into a cog of the machine, where labour
becomes wage-slavery. Outside the factory dictatorship is replaced by economic
chaos, man is ruled by prices which he cannot control, by the wild forces of
the market of which he can be only the victim. It is only through the hectic
fluctuations of supply and demand, it is only through the frantic rush of
“successes” and bankruptcies that society “decides” and “plans” the division of
its labour.
What is the way out of these contradictions? The present
economic relations breed different classes, the capitalist class and the
working class, with opposing interests. Inasmuch as our ideas rationalize our
interests, the ideas of the ruling, capitalist class will be along the line of
preserving their property and their right to exploit laborers, while the ideas
of the working class will follow their interests and go along the path of
solving the contradictions by removing their causes. The capitalists and their
agents in the seats of government are blinded by their self-interest, by the
profits which they make as beneficiaries of the present system. The workers, on
the other hand, having nothing to lose, are free to see that the present
society must evolve into a new one; they see that nothing can free society from
its convulsions save the change in the mode of production from a capitalist
one, of private ownership of the means of production, to a socialist one, where
the means of production are socialised and classes are no more.
Who can provide the way out? Certainly, not the capitalist
class, the beneficiaries of the present system. But rather the working class
who bear the full weight of capitalism upon their backs and who are in a
position to see that capitalism is redundant. As the working class fights
against its increasingly worsened position it comes to the realisation that the
only way out is for they to take what it has produced for itself. To take over
the means of production, the mines, mills, factories, resources, utilities and
run them for their own benefit. Then we will have production for use and not
for profit. Then we will end both despotism in the factory and anarchy in the
market. Then society will allocate its resources according to a social plan
that will benefit all.
The interest of the workers are diametrically opposed to the
interest of the capitalists and exploiters of the workers who, controlling the
government strive to keep the workers down. The productive forces have created
capitalist relations, capitalist relations have created classes which have
opposite economic and thus opposite political interests. The capitalists want
to keep the old relations of exploitation. They fight the rise of the workers.
But their only alternative is to plunge society into one crisis and one war
after another. The victory of the workers cannot be forever delayed. The old
relations must be burst asunder. And if the capitalists, blinded by their
interests, try to stop the wheels of progress they are ruthlessly pushed aside
by the workers just as in the past they themselves pushed aside the feudal
lords. When the workers of the world unite to take power then the rule over persons will begin
to give way to an administration over things. The state, along with religion,
will begin to wither away. There will be no exploitation. There will be no
classes. Each will receive according to needs, giving according to ability and
as the productivity of labour will greatly increase. Humanity will have reached
a rational system of society where development of mankind will no longer be
choked by social relations, where, therefore, society will be a free one and
mankind emancipated.
