Socialism

From the foregoing it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society wholly and exclusively from the economic law of motion of contemporary society. The socialisation of labour, which is advancing ever more rapidly in thousands of forms and which, in the half-century that has passed since Marx’s death, has shown itself with particular clarity in the growth of large-scale production, of capitalist cartels, syndicates and trusts, and also in the gigantic increase in the scale and power of finance capital, is the chief material foundation for the inevitable coming of socialism. The intellectual and moral motive force and the physical agent of this transformation is the proletariat, which capitalism itself trains. Its struggle against the bourgeoisie, which shows itself in various forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”). The socialisation of production cannot but lead to the passing of the means of production into the ownership of society, to the “expropriation of the expropriators”. An enormous rise in the productivity of labour, a shortening of the working day, and the replacement of the remnants, the ruins, of small, primitive, scattered production by collective, improved labour: such are the direct consequences of this transition. Capitalism finally breaks the bond between agriculture and industry; but at the same time, in its highest development, it prepares new elements of that bond, of a union of industry and agriculture on the basis of the conscious application of science and the combination of collective labour, and of a new distribution of humanity (with the abolition both of the neglect, isolation from the world and barbarism of the countryside and of the unnatural concentration of gigantic masses in big cities). A new form of the family, new conditions in the position of women and in the upbringing of the younger generation are being prepared by the highest forms of present-day capitalism: the labour of women and children and the break-up of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably assume the most terrible, disastrous and repulsive forms in contemporary society. Nevertheless, “modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economical foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historic development. Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery” (Capital, I, end of chapter 13). The factory system shows us “the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings” (ibid.). Marx’s socialism places the questions of nationality and of the state on the same historical ground, not only in the sense of explaining the past but also in the sense of foreseeing the future without fear and of bold practical activity directed towards its realisation. Nations are an inevitable product and an inevitable form of the bourgeois epoch of social development. And the working class could not grow strong, mature and take shape without “constituting itself within the bounds of the nation”, without being “national” (“though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”). But the development of capitalism more and more breaks down national barriers, destroys national seclusion, and puts class antagonisms in the place of national ones. In the developed capitalist countries, therefore, it is the full truth that “the working men have no country” and that “united action” of the workers, “of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat” (Communist Manifesto). The state, which is organised violence, arose inevitably at a definite stage in the development of society, when society had split into irreconcilable classes, when it could not exist without an “authority” standing supposedly above society and to some degree separated from it. Arising out of class contradictions, the state becomes “the state of the most powerful economic class that by force of its economic supremacy becomes also the ruling political class and thus acquires new means of subduing and exploiting the oppressed masses. The antique state was, therefore, the state of the slave owners for the purpose of holding the slaves in check. The feudal state was the organ of the nobility for the oppression of the serfs and dependent farmers. The modern representative state is the tool of the capitalist exploiters of wage labour” (Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, where he sets out his own and Marx’s views). Even the freest and most progressive form of the bourgeois state, the democratic republic, does not in the least remove this fact, but only changes its form (the connection of the government with the stock exchange, the corruption, direct and indirect, of officials and of the press, and so on). Socialism, by leading to the abolition of classes, thereby leads also to the abolition of the state. “The first act,” Engels writes in Anti-Dühring, “by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society, the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society, is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out.” “The society that is to reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will transfer the machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe” (Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).

Finally, on the question of the attitude of Marx’s socialism to the small peasantry, which will remain in the period of the expropriation of the expropriators, we must point to a statement by Engels, which expresses Marx’s views: “When we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task in relation to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose. And then of course we shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant all the advantages of this change, advantages which even now should be explained to him” (Engels, On the Agrarian Question in the West, Alekseyeva edition, p. 17; the Russian translation contains errors. Original in Die Neue Zeit).