Socialism and the State

 The impregnation of the worker’s mind with individualist beliefs and delusions of freedom are obviously a tremendous asset— practically a necessity—to the smooth running and perpetuation of the capitalist order. This was early recognised by the employing class, and, from the dawn of the system, the deliberate fostering and strengthening of such ideas by propaganda were attempted. But after the workers had won the franchise, definite organs for their “instruction” in the “way they should think” were necessary. “Now, if ever,” says Engels, “the people must be kept in order by moral means.” Engels, in his introduction to “Socialism—Utopian and Scientific” goes on to show the use the English bourgeoisie made of religion. Here we will consider three other agents—educational institutions, the media, and the public platform.

 No worker could now escape from acquiring not only the groundwork of bourgeois ideology in his or her most impressionable years but also the special national applications of it through falsified history and the glorification of his “heritage”—the constitutional “charter” of supposed “liberties.” The training of the young was a masterstroke of the ruling class.

When the workers had the power of the vote, the media developed a new purpose and with it new methods and characteristics.

The modern media sets before the worker distorted “news” and a view of affairs deliberately calculated to foster the hold of bourgeois ideology. It does not produce this ideology, but constantly provides fresh details acceptable to it—the “evidence” upon which it feeds and thrives.

"That unique political fact, an enfranchised slave-class, furthermore, meant the unqualified triumph of the type of politician whose business it is to deliberately cajole and mislead the electorate.  The new political show-men were a necessity of the new political situation. They became the latest popular “heroes of society.” To regularly give a semblance of intense sincerity to the most hypocritical arguments is no light task, and men who excelled in it won the gratitude of the ruling class."

 It is significant that in the United States—the land of “liberty” —where the workers have been enfranchised for a longer period than in any other capitalist State, the art of the “spell-binder”—of gushing, emotional, meaningless, wordy rhetoric—has achieved its most exquisite development.

The Modern State. 

Schools and colleges, the media, are used assiduously to foster the “great illusion” of capitalism—that the worker is free, possessing freedom of opportunity with every other person, and liberty of contract. The preservation of this illusion is almost a necessity to, and is certainly one of the greatest safeguards of, the present system—and is recognised as such by the clear-sighted agents of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie is compelled to avoid anything that will tend to destroy this illusion. Even the “right to strike,” apparently menaced from time to time by “compulsory arbitration” schemes, is a necessity to the capitalists as well as to the workers—and the more far-seeing members of the employing class well know it. If ever the capitalists, in the height of fear and folly, endeavour to force the proletariat, as a class, to labour by law, and thus to thrust them into a legally recognised worker’s “status,” then indeed their days of power will be numbered.

For the same reason, we may regard the enfranchisement of the workers, once established, as a necessity for the continued existence of the system. The ideology of the proletariat, flowing, as we have seen, from the relations of production, makes it inevitable. Engels says :

“The highest form of the State, the democratic republic, know officially nothing of property distinctions. It is that form of the State which, under modern conditions of society, becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity. The last decisive struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie can only be fought out under this State form” (“Origin of the Family,” )

But we must not, of course, overlook the fact that the capitalist system and its State forms are still in process of development, and that there exists today in concrete reality a number of capitalist societies, each with a different history and each showing minor traits peculiar to itself. In Europe, nearly every State contains vestigial institutions leftover from Feudalism which affect its activities to a greater or less degree. More important, however, is the fact that capitalist production has by no means completely eliminated petty industry, and, in particular, wherever the peasantry is numerically very strong, as in Spain, France, and Italy, democratic forms can at least be temporarily suspended without immediate injury to the ruling class. Were the majority of the Italian population, for instance, proletarians, it is certain that the Fascist reaction would have been much more hazardous, if not impossible.

The necessity of the Parliamentary State, with an enfranchised working class, where capitalism is highly developed and the industrial proletariat strong, was vividly demonstrated after the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, when, amid an unprecedented political crisis, when larger masses of workers were agitated and organised for revolt than probably at any other time in capitalist history, the bourgeoisie was compelled to set up the most democratic republican constitution in the world, with male and female suffrage over the age of twenty, proportional representation, and the referendum.

The State, however, of no matter what period or what form—monarchic, oligarchic, or parliamentary—remains, in essence, the same. It has one function, and one essential function alone—the preservation of the property of the exploiting class, and, accordingly, the suppression of the exploited. Throughout the history of capitalism, the State has served as the instrument of the bourgeoisie. The slaughter of the Communards of Paris, the bloody suppression of strikes all over the world are evidence that it has served right well its historic function.

The capitalist class dominate society today because they control the public forces of coercion. But, unlike the ruling classes of other ages, this control does not arise from the fact that they themselves are the essential part of those forces. The bourgeoisie is not, and never have been, a military class. They, unlike their predecessors at the helm of State, are not only economically, but politically and militarily, entirely dependent upon the working masses. The workers make up almost in entirety the armed forces, and the workers, through the political machinery and through their bourgeois ideas, place these forces in the hands of their oppressors. The capitalists rule the immense majority of society because that immense majority sanctions their rule. The slave and the serf knew they were enslaved and exploited; the wage worker does not. The economic relations of modern production serve to disguise the fact of exploitation, and, furthermore, tend to generate that widespread individualism and the illusion of freedom that facilitates the inculcation of ideas and opinions favourable to bourgeois rule.

As Engels says :

“The possessing class rule directly through universal suffrage. For so long as the oppressed class, in this case the proletariat, is not ripe for its economic emancipation, just so long will its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible” (“Origin of the Family,”)

And when will the proletariat be “ripe for its emancipation”— except just when they realise that they require emancipating and understand the facts of their exploitation? Not when they begin to know that there is something rotten in the state of capitalism—for they know that now—but when they realise the cause of that rottenness. Then, when they grasp the truth that the evils of capitalism are inherent and inevitable, not accidental and curable, will they set about its destruction and the inauguration of a socialist society in which the producers will control production and the distribution of its product. This transformation of attitude towards the system will involve, necessarily, the shattering of the illusion of “freedom,” and the replacement of economic individualism by a realisation of the possibilities of social ownership.

The essential process that must precede the proletarian revolution is the preparation and education of the workers for their revolutionary task. By “education” we mean, primarily, the education flowing from observation and reasoning—the instruction of experience. Today, socialists as a body are largely students who have acquired their mental outlook on society to a great extent by books and lectures—second-hand, so to speak. So long as the simple elements of socialist thought generally necessitate this kind of preparation, the World Socialist Movement is in its early, almost embryonic, stage. Not until the basic proposition of socialist theory takes root in the minds of masses of men because they are the inescapable inferences from the facts of social life, provide the obvious solution for the pressing, immediate problems of the social situation, and are so self-evident that no counter-propaganda can efface them—not until then can we consider that the movement has reached maturity.

There is evidence that capitalism has yet a considerable future before it; a future of intensive exploitation of the yet untouched areas of the earth; a future of economic centralisation crushing out the last effective remnants of individualism; a future of imperialism and war, of industrial and political anarchy without parallel; a future in which the workers will be hammered and battered into recognition of social realities.

But alongside the education of experience and practice will go also the education in theoretical principles and tactics born of the conception of history we owe so greatly to Marx. The first form will provide the necessary groundwork of class-consciousness; the second, the essential guidance to a policy avoiding the pitfalls and errors that beset a revolutionary class groping its way amid endless problems along the path towards emancipation.

When the “knell of capitalist private property sounds” and the workers are massed in their might to overwhelm the puny masqueraders—fossil guardians of order and civilisation—they will move with a resolute intention that nothing can frustrate, win the powers of society from the paralysed hands of the parasites of property, and, with confidence born of knowledge, forged in struggle, build upon the basis of humanity’s conquests over nature the Co-operative Commonwealth.

 

Against Patriotism

 

Patriotism has always proved stumbling blocks to the workers and to their immature organisations, and nothing has more clearly shown the danger of half-knowledge than the ease with which the ruling class have been able to muddle their minds and inflame their passions by raising such issues as nationalism and xenophobia.

We must have a clear idea of the economic position and class interests of the workers because it is from this foundation that they ought always to approach the issues presented to them.

The Position of the Workers.

Wealth (excluding the air and other things abundantly supplied by nature) is produced by work. The work is performed by the great propertyless mass, the working class, but the means of wealth production, the machines, the land and so on, are owned by a class of non-workers, the capitalists. From this arises a great cleavage of interests, for it makes the workers dependent upon the owning-class since they cannot live except by entering the service of the owners. Out of the total wealth produced by their labour, the workers receive but a portion as wages, the remainder being retained by those who employ them. The one class lives by selling its services and the other by owning property. The everyday struggle over the division of the product sets these classes in perpetual antagonism, but the socialist urges the workers to aim consciously not merely at increasing their share but at destroying the system of society which compels them to maintain a propertied class at their expense.

For the socialist all forms of “living by owning,” rent, interest and profit are in effect nothing more than forms of exploitation, or robbery, of the wealth producers.

If this is correct, then it follows naturally that it is in the interest of the workers all over the world to act jointly in resisting any attempt to heighten the degree of that exploitation, and in overthrowing the system which is based upon exploitation. The enemy of the working class is the capitalist class.

But certain complications exist which prevent many workers from seeing where their interests lie. Lack of knowledge and race prejudices prevent those in one country from realising how essentially similar is their condition to that of workers in foreign countries. There are too real differences between the present circumstances of the workers in the more advanced and the more backward countries. Standards of living, of education, of political and personal freedom, and of political knowledge vary from, say, Europe to the hardly developed African countries; this in spite of the quite marked tendency towards a general equalising of conditions as industrial developments become more uniform all over the world under the pressure of competition.

This very competition leads many workers astray. Exceptional prosperity in  British industry at a given time is gained at the expense of some foreign competitors. Viewing the matter from an individual and local standpoint, British workers are only too liable to agree with their employers who argue that their interests and owners are as one against those of their German or American rivals. Extending our view from one section of a capitalist industry to the whole of the industries of a country or group of countries, national rivalry often presents itself in such a form—war, for instance—as to induce great numbers of workers to join their own section of the ruling class against other sections which are likewise supported by their workers.

The Position of the Capitalist.

Capitalist countries—all of them—must organise their forces and direct their policy to ends which are vital to capitalist society, they must seek markets for surplus products, endeavour to monopolise sources of supply of raw materials where these are geographically limited, and protect ocean and overland communications to these areas. Foreign markets are of prime importance for the profitable investment of surplus profit gained by the exploitation of workers at home. The necessities of such imperialist policy bring our ruling class into inevitable conflict with other imperialist powers who also seek markets and monopolies, and into conflict with the native-born capitalists who resent having to share with foreign investors the profits of the exploitation of their own working class.

The Socialist Position.

The only safe rule of conduct for the workers is to stand firmly on the basis of their class economic interests. From this standpoint, there can be no circumstances requiring them to participate in capitalist wars or trade rivalries. Even the supposed hardships resulting from military defeat do not outweigh the arguments in favour of the socialist course of action. We have always urged that reparations like rates and taxes are and must be a burden only on the propertied class. In victory and defeat the workers are still wage slaves, their poverty and insecurity are their only lifelong possession. They should not fight for “country and empire,” because they have nothing to fight for. They should refuse to help solve the economic problems of capitalist industry, or the political problems of capitalist empires and concentrate all their energies on the fight for socialism.

 

 

Socialism Will End Slavery

 

The first and most important question is  “How will Socialism be organised?”

If a defender of capitalism were asked to say how the capitalist system is organised all he or she could say would be that the means of production and distribution are privately owned and that production is carried on by a propertyless class in exchange for wages under permission from the owning class who control production and draw profits from industry. That is the base on which the present superstructure is raised, but the buildings are many and various. Municipal transit systems, monopolies, private family concerns,  public oned undertakings,  all differ from one another in detail, and yet are all capitalistic in that they are based on one thing—the existence of a propertyless wage-earning class.

If therefore, it is impossible to say how industry is organised under capitalism without writing a book, it is not surprising that more details cannot be given of industrial and social organisation under socialism. Any attempt at prophesying is foolish, for the co-operative commonwealth would obviously be a very different thing if it came in 2022 from what it would be if it came in 2122. Its form will depend upon the stage reached in industrial development and techniques when the revolution takes place.

 Socialism is not a matter of crystal gazing, Socialists are not prophets of the future but interpreters of past history. Socialism is a theory that claims to explain past history as a series of class struggles, and more than that it does not seek to do. And as socialism will be brought about by the united efforts of the workers, it is impossible for anyone socialist, or any party of socialists now existing, to interpret what exactly all the workers of the future will want.

Socialism will be prepared by the development of capitalism and the form of its society will therefore be evolved in the womb of capitalism. It is only “middle class” thinkers and intellectuals who are so impressed with their own intellects that they think that they can super-impose some organisation from without and that the child of their imagination will be cheerfully adopted by the whole working class.

The modern worker is the counterpart of the chattel-slaves of Classical Times and the serfs of the Middle Ages. In economic function, there is little or no distinction between these forms of exploitation. As economic relations, however, they have distinct differences which among other things determine the respective attitudes in the three systems, of the exploited class towards the social order that enslaves them. The slave’s attitude may be generally summed up as “ineffective opposition,” that of the serf as “passive acquiescence,” whilst that of the modern wage-worker is the apparently extraordinary one of “active support.”

It is often declared that this attitude of the mass of workers under capitalism is the result of capitalist propaganda. The truth is, of course, that it results from the conditions of society as a whole—propaganda forms a part of these conditions, but its seed cannot take deep root and flourish, except it falls on fertile soil.

Let us contrast the historic modes of exploitation, paying special attention to the peculiarities of the wages system. The chattel slave, the serf and the wage-worker are all compelled to labour and to surrender all the wealth they produce, except on the average that required for their own maintenance at the customary standard of living. Here, however, the resemblance ends for the social machinery whereby the exploitation is effected differs in each case. The kind of pressure used is different—with chattel-slavery it is naked force, the fear of the lash or torture; with serfdom, it consists largely of the overwhelming power of custom and tradition, whilst with wage-slavery, it is “economic need”—the fear of starvation.

Under chattel-slavery and serfdom, the workers were an openly subjected class having a definitely inferior legal “status.” The chattel slave had no legal rights, the serf had only those of the serf “status.” Moreover, between the subjected and the dominant classes, there were usually definite barriers of culture and often of race, language and religion. All these facts combined to make the class separation a fixed one and to prevent any interchange between the classes. The facts of slavery and exploitation were clear and undeniable. No slave or serf could make any mistake about it—if he did give way to the illusion that he was a free-man—he was promptly and painfully reminded of his true position.

The condition of the wage slave is very different. His is not a personal servitude. He and his fellows are subjected as a class solely by being excluded from the essential instruments and materials of production. Between he or her and the capitalist, there is no difference in legal status, no essential cultural distinction and none of race or religion. There is but one essential mark of distinction between the classes—the ownership of capital.

Now this talisman “capital” that divides exploiter from exploited has two important characteristics that make it unique as a class barrier and produce social and intellectual results that were impossible and inconceivable in previous slave systems. First, capital—the “giver of power”—is not a factor inherent in and inseparable from its possessor, but is something external and accessory to the individual that can be acquired, transmitted from person to person, and can be lost. Secondly, it is a quantitative thing. In practice, it implies sufficient money to carry on profit-making. Now, two sums of money can differ only in quantity. A quantitative change can, however, produce a qualitative difference, and the exploited wage-worker possessing a small sum of money has only to perform a multiplication sum to “see” himself a capitalist, and has only to make that imaginary increase a fact to become one in reality, and achieve, the distinction of living without working by the exploitation of his erstwhile fellows.

By the very nature of the class barrier under capitalism, it is possible to surmount it—and in both directions. A member of the exploited class may become one of the exploiters and one of the leisured may be “dropped” into the ranks of the toilers. However exceptional in the nature of things such interchanges necessarily must be, they can happen, do happen, and may even occur overnight without the knowledge of the individual and from causes altogether outside his control.

Such economic relations by their very nature deny the ancient traditional belief, inseparable from the older systems, that classes are based upon inalienable class rights and distinctions and that social status is a divinely ordained thing and unalterable, whilst just as obviously they must tend to promote the view that all men have equal “natural rights,” a dogma that to-day is almost universally accepted and is the basis of bourgeois political philosophy.

Furthermore, with the rise of capitalism and the extinction of the village and family as productive groups, the workers became isolated units individually contracting for employment. This and the further facts that under capitalism a person’s welfare depends upon the amount of wealth he can acquire, and that workers, as well as capitalist, must engage in a competitive struggle to obtain such wealth or increase it, necessarily breeds the attitude of “individualism”—”each for oneself.” Now when the idea of equal social rights merges with that of individualism the outcome inevitably is the raising to a moral ideal of “liberty”—liberty to “make the best of circumstances,” to “get what one can,” to do what one wills with one’s own—limited only by the equal rights and liberty of other men. “The law of right social relationships” is “that—Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man,” says Spencer, the supreme theorist of bourgeois individualism, in his “Social Statics.”

These ideas are, of course, precisely those of the revolutionary philosophers of the eighteenth century who attacked feudal rights and absolutism. What was new in the nineteenth century was that ideas of “equal rights” and “freedom” began to infect and take deep root in the heads of the workers and that they used them not to attack the dead-horse of feudalism, but against the legal and political inferiorities under which they laboured in the youthful capitalist state. Eventually, they achieved the removal of these disabilities, and thus of the contradiction between the facts of the political system and the political ideas necessarily flowing from the relations of economic life.

The workers demand the franchise.

In the early years of the new factory system—when the hand workers were dying out when the machines were new and appeared as devilish instruments of death, when the workers, men, women and children, were forced from field and home into the new factories to grind out their lives for the new lords of industry—there was no shadow of pretence at equal rights for rich and poor. To the cultured upper-classes the restless, stirring workers were a dangerous mob, a horde of barbarians in the heart of a civilisation, a “swinish multitude,” as Burke in an outspoken moment called them. The industrial masters candidly regarded and spoke of their labourers as beings inferior to themselves, fit only for a life of labour. In them, the idea of “status” lived on in a caricatured form and, transferred now to the economic field, “directive genius” was its alleged basis in place of ancestral prestige and “blue-blood.”

 "The savage rebellion of the tortured workers again and again broke out in violent rebellion that filled the ruling class with the fear of general insurrection. This fear was intensified to panic by the “Jacobinism” of the French Revolution. Military were taken from the old garrison towns and distributed over the industrial areas."

Every political and legal device was used to suppress all signs of revolt amongst the “lower orders.”

  

Our Aim is Revolution

 

The aim of trade unionists is not socialism and, therefore, the principles and policy of The Socialist Party is quite distinct from those of trade unions which are organised within capitalism to “collectively bargain” with employers terms of wage slavery. The Socialist Party’s aim is to abolish wage slavery and establish socialism.

 

We fully acknowledge and accept the necessity of trade unions under capitalism, and, therefore, endeavour to make them more effective by urging the workers to recognise the class struggle and its implications. The spread of socialist knowledge is the best antidote to the poison of union bureaucrats and is the only policy to hasten the abolition of wage slavery which trade unions are powerless to accomplish. 

 

The workers are today expressing dissatisfaction with their standard of living. This discontent is manifested in the trade unions in which each member aims at promoting his own individual interest, or rather, we should say, apparent interest. To do this more effectively, one is obliged, often against his or her immediate desire, to unite with fellow workers and employ the machinery of the trade union to fulfil the common collective demands of the whole body of workers. In order to benefit individually, the workers must act collectively; it is a condition forced upon them by the very magnitude of the modern economic system.

 

Under the present economic system the worker receives only a small fraction of the wealth he or she produces. The scale of wages is determined, on average, by the cost of one's subsistence and reproduction. An increased wage scale is, therefore, only of temporary benefit to the workers. The solution of the Socialist Party, briefly stated, is to secure, not a larger fraction of the wealth produced, but actually the whole value of the productions. It is the one indispensable condition by which capitalist exploitation will definitely cease to exist and for which the class war, as the collective endeavour of individuals, must be waged.

 

The secret of the capitalists’ power is the fact that they own the means of production, giving them illimitable authority over the whole social system. The worker’s aim, therefore, must be to capture the means of production. This is a task in which the solemn worship of divinity in any form will avail nothing. It will be accomplished only when a workers’ class-conscious majority has achieved political power and wields it in the communal interest. This being established, social progress enters upon a new lease of life which is the only socialism.

 

Socialism, therefore, far from advocating escape from self really teaches the doctrine of self-interest as the essential feature of a contented community. It is the ideal by the attainment of which the emancipation of the working class and, with it, of society at large will be established. The workers must learn to cease being satisfied with the crumbs which fall from the richly spread table of capitalism, Nor is it enough that when the crumbs cease to fall, they beg like Oliver Twist for more. They must stimulate their individual interests to the fullest limit and vote for socialism, i.e., the collective ownership of the means of life It is a simple doctrine, but an all-engaging one. 

 

After the socialist has demolished in argument the case for capitalism opponents fall back on one stock defence. We are asked for a description of socialistic society, and when informed that all that can be said about it with certainty is that it will be a society in which the means of production and distribution will be communally owned, and democratically controlled, in which production will be for use and not for profit, critics cry, “There you are. You’ve got nothing constructive to offer. Your policy is wholly destructive, and your remedies vague and nebulous.” And that allegation comforts  and provides our opponents with a justification for supporting capitalism which in argument they have had to admit cannot itself be justified. It is an old cry, but because it is being raised continuously it is worth while dealing with it.

 

The main charge made by socialists against capitalism is that it fails to deliver the goods. The contradictions inherent in the system which is based on individual ownership and social productions prevent goods being produced in the quantities they might be. The system acts as a “fetter on production,” and it is because of that that we condemn it.

 

The question of distribution is only of secondary importance as compared with that of removing those fetters on production. Capitalism maintains an army of unemployed at both ends of society, under it many workers are employed unproductively, it presents the spectacle of equipment standing idle while those who could use it starve, it reveals putting checks on the bounty of nature and restricting the production of rubber, tea, etc. It should be apparent then, even to a radical, that anything that removes these evils will increase the wealth of the community. As they are inherent in capitalism they can only be ended by abolishing the system. To tinker about with reforms will do nothing. It can only be the product of the class conscious desire of the workers themselves.