VII. The Premises of Socialism

Marxism turned socialism into a science. That does not prevent certain “Marxists” from turning Marxism into a utopia.

Rozhkov, arguing against the programme of socialisation and co-operation, depicts “the necessary premises of the future order, which have been firmly established by Marx”, as follows.

With all respect for Comrade Rozhkov’s good intentions, we must regretfully admit that even in bourgeois literature we have seldom come across greater confusion on the subject of the so-called premises of socialism. This confusion is worth dwelling on, if not for Rozhkov’s sake, then for the sake of the question.

Rozhkov declares that there is not yet “such a development of technique as would reduce the motive of personal gain and the presence (?) of personal energy, enterprise and risk to a minimum, and thereby bring social production to the fore”. The meaning of this phrase is not easy to discover. It seems, all the same, that Comrade Rozhkov wants to say, first, that modern technique has not yet sufficiently displaced living human labour from industry; and second, that such displacement presupposes the “almost” complete domination of large enterprises in all branches of the economy, and therefore the “almost” complete proletarianisation of the whole population of the country.

These are the two premises supposedly “firmly established by Marx”.

Let us try to imagine the picture of capitalist relations that socialism will find on arrival by Rozhkov’s method. “The almost complete domination of large enterprises in all branches of industry” under capitalism means, as has been said, the proletarianisation of all the small and middle producers in agriculture and industry, that is, the transformation of the whole population into proletarians. But the complete domination of machine technique in these large enterprises reduces the consumption of living labour to a minimum, and so the enormous majority of the country’s population, presumably some 90 per cent, turns into a reserve army living at the state’s expense in workhouses. We have taken 90 per cent; but nothing prevents us from being logical and imagining a state of things in which the whole of production is a single automatic mechanism, belonging to a single syndicate and requiring as living labour only one trained orang-utan. This, as is well known, is precisely Tugan-Baranovsky’s dazzlingly consistent theory. Under such conditions “social production” not only comes “to the fore” but takes possession of the whole field; more than that, side by side with it, and quite naturally, social consumption is organised too, since obviously the whole nation, apart from the 10 per cent of the trust, will be living at the public expense in workhouses. So from behind Comrade Rozhkov’s back the familiar face of Mr Tugan-Baranovsky smiles at us. Next comes socialism: the population leaves the workhouses and expropriates the group of expropriators. Neither a revolution nor a dictatorship of the proletariat will, of course, be needed for this.

The second, economic sign of a country’s ripeness for socialism, according to Rozhkov, is the possibility of the domination of co-operative production in it. Even in France the co-operative works at Albi is no higher than other capitalist enterprises. Socialist production will become possible only when the co-operatives are at the head of industrial development, as the leading enterprises.

The whole argument is turned inside out from beginning to end. The co-operatives cannot take the lead in industrial development not because economic development has not yet advanced far enough, but because it has advanced too far. Undoubtedly economic development creates the ground for co-operation; but for what kind? For capitalist co-operation, based on wage-labour: every factory presents a picture of such capitalist co-operation. With the development of technique the importance of this co-operation grows. But how can the development of capitalism give the place “at the head of industry” to associative enterprises? On what does Comrade Rozhkov base his hopes that the co-operatives will push aside the syndicates and trusts and take their leading place at the head of industrial development? Obviously, if this were to happen, the co-operatives would then have to expropriate all the capitalist enterprises purely automatically; after which it would only remain for them to shorten the working day accordingly, so as to give work to all citizens, and to bring the scale of production in the various branches into correspondence, so as to avoid crises. In this way socialism would have been established in its main features. Again it is clear that there would be no need whatever either for a revolution or for a dictatorship of the working class.

The third premise is a psychological one: what is needed is “the growth of the class consciousness of the proletariat to the point of the spiritual unification of the overwhelming majority of the masses of the people”. Since by spiritual unification we must obviously understand, in this case, conscious socialist solidarity, it follows that Comrade Rozhkov considers the psychological premise of socialism to be the unification of “the overwhelming majority of the masses of the people” in the ranks of Social-Democracy. Rozhkov obviously supposes, then, that capitalism, which casts the small producers into the ranks of the proletariat and the masses of proletarians into the ranks of the reserve army, will give Social-Democracy the possibility of spiritually uniting and enlightening the overwhelming majority (90 per cent?) of the masses of the people.

This is as little realisable in the world of capitalist barbarism as the domination of co-operation in the realm of capitalist competition. But if it were realisable, then naturally a consciously and spiritually united “overwhelming majority” of the nation would without any difficulty remove the few magnates of capital and organise a socialist economy without any revolutions or dictatorships.

We are involuntarily faced with the following question. Rozhkov considers himself a disciple of Marx. And yet Marx, who set out “the firmly established premises of socialism” in the Communist Manifesto, regarded the revolution of 1848 as the immediate prologue to the socialist revolution. Of course, now, sixty years later, it needs no great penetration to see that Marx was mistaken, for the capitalist world, as we know, still exists. But how could Marx make such a mistake? Did he not see that large enterprises did not yet dominate all branches of industry? That producers’ associations did not yet stand at the head of the large enterprises? That the overwhelming majority of the people was not yet united on the ground of the ideas of the Communist Manifesto? If we see that none of this exists even now, how could Marx fail to see that nothing of the kind existed in 1848? Truly, the Marx of 1848 is a utopian infant beside many of today’s infallible automata of Marxism!…

We see, then, that Comrade Rozhkov, who by no means belongs to the critics of Marx, nevertheless completely abolishes the proletarian revolution as a necessary premise of socialism. Since Rozhkov has only expressed, too consistently, views shared by no small number of Marxists in both tendencies of our party, it is worth dwelling on the fundamental, methodological basis of his errors.

It must be said, by the way, that Rozhkov’s reflections on the fate of the co-operatives are his own individual property. We personally have never anywhere come across socialists who on the one hand believed in so simple and irresistible a course of the concentration of production and the proletarianisation of the masses of the people, and at the same time held faith in a leading role of producers’ associations before the proletarian revolution. To combine these two premises in economic evolution is far harder than to combine them in one head; although even the latter has always seemed impossible to us.

But we shall dwell on the two other “premises”, which formulate more typical prejudices.

Undoubtedly the development of technique, the concentration of production and the growth of the consciousness of the masses are all premises of socialism. But all these processes go on at the same time, and they not only push and hurry one another on, but also hold one another back and limit one another. Each of these processes at its higher stage requires a certain development of another process at its lower stage; but the full development of any one of them is irreconcilable with the full development of the others.

The development of technique has, unquestionably, as its ideal limit a single automatic mechanism that takes raw materials from the bowels of nature and throws finished articles of consumption at the feet of man. If the existence of capitalism were not limited by class relations and the revolutionary struggle that flows from them, we should have the right to suppose that technique, having approached the ideal of a single automatic mechanism within the framework of the capitalist economy, would thereby automatically abolish capitalism.

The concentration of production that follows from the laws of competition has as its internal tendency the proletarianisation of the whole population. And, isolating this tendency, we should have the right to suppose that capitalism would carry its work through to the end, were the process of proletarianisation not interrupted by a revolutionary upheaval, inevitable at a certain relation of class forces, long before it had turned the majority of the population into a reserve army inhabiting prison barracks.

Further. The growth of consciousness, thanks to the experience of the everyday struggle and the conscious efforts of the socialist parties, undoubtedly goes steadily forward; and, isolating this process, we can in thought carry it on to the moment when the overwhelming majority of the people will be embraced by trade-union and political organisations and united by a feeling of solidarity and a unity of aim. And if this process could really grow quantitatively without changing qualitatively, socialism could be realised peacefully, by a unanimous conscious act of the citizens of the twenty-first or twenty-second century.

But the whole point is that these processes, which history presupposes for socialism, do not develop in isolation but limit one another, and on reaching a certain moment, determined by many circumstances but in any case very far from their mathematical limit, they are transformed qualitatively and in their complex combination produce what we understand by the name of social revolution.

Let us begin with the last process, the growth of consciousness. It takes place, as we know, not in academies, in which the proletariat could be artificially detained for fifty, a hundred or five hundred years, but in a capitalist society living its full life, on the basis of an unceasing class struggle. The growth of the consciousness of the proletariat transforms this class struggle, gives it a deeper character, a character of principle, and calls forth a corresponding reaction from the ruling classes. The struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has its own logic, which, growing ever sharper, will bring matters to a head long before large enterprises begin to dominate all branches of the economy completely.

Further, it goes without saying that the growth of political consciousness rests on the growth in the numbers of the proletariat; and the proletarian dictatorship presupposes that the proletariat has reached such numbers that it can overcome the resistance of the bourgeois counter-revolution. This does not at all mean, however, that the “overwhelming majority” of the population must consist of proletarians, and the “overwhelming majority” of the proletariat of conscious socialists. In any case it is clear that the consciously revolutionary army of the proletariat must be stronger than the counter-revolutionary army of capital, while the intermediate, doubtful or indifferent strata of the population must be in such a position that the regime of the proletarian dictatorship draws them to the side of the revolution and does not push them into the ranks of its enemies. The policy of the proletariat must of course consciously take account of this.

All this in its turn presupposes the hegemony of industry over agriculture and the preponderance of the town over the country.

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Let us try to examine the premises of socialism in the order of their decreasing generality and increasing complexity.

1. Socialism is not only a question of equal distribution but also a question of planned production. Socialist, that is, co-operative, production on a large scale is possible only given such a development of the productive forces as makes the large enterprise more productive than the small one. The greater the advantage of the large enterprise over the small, that is, the more developed technique is, the greater must be the economic gains from the socialisation of production, and the higher, therefore, must be the cultural level of the whole population under an equal distribution based on planned production.

This first objective premise of socialism has been present for a long time. Ever since the social division of labour led to the division of labour in manufacture, and still more since manufacture began to give way to the factory using a system of machines, the large enterprise has become more and more advantageous, and therefore the socialisation of the large enterprise must have made society richer and richer. It is clear that the passing of all the handicraft workshops into the common ownership of all the craftsmen would not have enriched them in the least; whereas the passing of a manufactory into the common ownership of its detail workers, or the passing of a factory into the hands of its wage-earning producers, or better still the passing of all the means of large-scale factory production into the hands of the whole population, would undoubtedly have raised its material level, and the more so, the higher the stage that large-scale production had reached.

In socialist literature the proposal of John Bellers, a member of the English House of Commons, has been cited: a hundred years before Babeuf’s conspiracy, namely in 1696, he brought before Parliament a plan for organising co-operative associations that would satisfy all their own needs independently. By the Englishman’s calculations such a productive collective was to consist of 200–300 people. We cannot check his conclusions here, nor is it essential for us; what matters is only that a collectivist economy, even on the scale of 100, 200, 300 or 500 people, already offered productive advantages at the end of the seventeenth century.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Fourier designed associations of production and consumption, phalansteries, of 2,000–3,000 people each. Fourier’s calculations were by no means distinguished by their accuracy; but in any case the development of the manufacturing system by his time already suggested to him an incomparably larger size for economic collectives than in the example given above. It is clear, however, that both John Bellers’s associations and Fourier’s phalansteries are much closer in character to the free economic communities of which the anarchists dream; and the utopianism of these lies not in their being “impossible” or “unnatural” in general (the communist communities of America have proved that they are possible), but in their having fallen 100–200 years behind the course of economic development.

The development of the social division of labour on the one hand, and of machine production on the other, has led to a situation in which at the present time the only co-operative body that can use the advantages of a collectivist economy on a broad scale is the state. And even within the closed frontiers of separate states socialist production could no longer be contained, for economic as well as political reasons.

Atlanticus, a German socialist who does not stand on Marx’s point of view, calculated at the end of the last century the economic advantages of a socialist economy as applied to a unit such as Germany. Atlanticus is the last man to be distinguished by flights of fancy; his thought in general moves in the rut of the economic routine of capitalism, and he relies on the authoritative writers of present-day agronomy and technology; and in this lies not only his weakness but his strength, since it at any rate guards him against immoderate optimism. Be that as it may, Atlanticus comes to the conclusion that with an expedient organisation of a socialist economy, using the technical means of the mid-nineties of the nineteenth century, the income of the worker could be doubled or trebled and the working time cut to half its present length.

It must not be thought, of course, that Atlanticus was the first to prove the advantages of socialism: the higher productivity of labour in large enterprises on the one hand, and the necessity of planned production demonstrated by crises on the other, testified to the economic advantages of socialism far more eloquently than Atlanticus’s socialist book-keeping. His merit lies only in having expressed this advantage in approximate figures.

From all that has been said we have the right to conclude that if the further growth of man’s technical power makes socialism more and more advantageous, sufficient technical premises for collectivist production, on one scale or another, have existed for one or two centuries already, and at the present time socialism is technically advantageous not only on a national scale but to an enormous extent on a world scale too.

The technical advantages of socialism alone, however, are quite insufficient for its realisation. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries large-scale production displayed its advantages not in a socialist but in a capitalist form. Neither Bellers’s plan nor Fourier’s was carried out. Why? Because at that time there was no social force ready and able to carry them out.

2. Here we pass from the technical premise of production to the social and economic premise, which is less general but more complex. If we were dealing not with an antagonistic class society but with a homogeneous association that consciously chose its own system of economy, then undoubtedly Atlanticus’s calculations alone would be quite sufficient for setting about socialist construction. Atlanticus himself, a socialist of a very vulgar type, regards his work in precisely this way.

Under present conditions such a point of view could be applicable only within the bounds of a private economy, individual or joint-stock. It can always be supposed that any plan of economic reform (the introduction of new machines, new raw materials, a different arrangement of work, a different system of pay) will be accepted by the owner provided only that the plan shows beyond doubt the commercial advantage of the reform. But in so far as we are dealing with the economy of society, that alone is not enough. Here hostile interests are in conflict. What is advantageous to one is disadvantageous to another. Class egoism comes out not only against class egoism but against the advantage of the whole. Consequently, for socialism to be realised, there must be present within the antagonistic classes of capitalist society a social force that by its objective position is interested in the realisation of socialism and by its power is capable of realising it, overcoming hostile interests and resistance.

One of the chief merits of scientific socialism lies precisely in its having discovered such a social force theoretically in the proletariat, and in having shown that this class, which inevitably grows together with capitalism, can find its salvation only in socialism; that its whole position pushes it towards socialism; and that the doctrine of socialism in capitalist society cannot fail in the end to become the ideology of the proletariat.

It is easy to understand, therefore, what a colossal step backward from Marxism Atlanticus takes when he assures us that once it has been proved that

Objecting to the purely oppositional tactics of Social-Democracy and proposing to “set about” preparing the socialist transformation at once, Atlanticus forgets that Social-Democracy does not yet have the power necessary for this, while Wilhelm II, Bülow and the majority of the German Reichstag, though they have power in their hands, have no intention whatever of setting about the introduction of socialism. Atlanticus’s socialist plan is as little convincing to the Hohenzollerns as Fourier’s plan was to the restored Bourbons; though the latter based his political utopianism on an ardent imagination in the field of economic creation, while Atlanticus bases his political utopianism, which is in no way less, on a convincing, philistine-sober book-keeping.

What, then, must be the level of social differentiation for the second premise to be present? In other words, what must be the relative numbers of the proletariat? Must it make up half the population, two-thirds, or nine-tenths?

It would be a quite hopeless undertaking to try to mark out the bare arithmetical limits of this second premise of socialism. In the first place, with such schematism the question would arise of whom to count as proletarians: should the broad stratum of half-proletarians, half-peasants be counted? Should the reserve masses of urban proletarians be counted, who on the one hand pass over into the parasitic proletariat of beggars and thieves, and on the other fill the streets of the towns as petty traders, playing a parasitic role in relation to the economy as a whole? This question is far from being so simple.

The significance of the proletariat rests entirely on its role in large-scale production. The bourgeoisie, in its struggle for political rule, relies on its economic might. Before it manages to take state power into its hands, it concentrates the country’s means of production in its hands; and this determines its specific weight. The proletariat, on the other hand, despite all co-operativist phantasmagorias, will be deprived of the means of production right up to the socialist revolution. Its social power comes from the fact that the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie can be set in motion only by it, the proletariat. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie the proletariat is also one of the means of production, forming together with the others a single integral mechanism; but the proletariat is the only non-automatic part of this mechanism, and, for all efforts, it cannot be reduced to a state of automatism. This position gives the proletariat the possibility of stopping the regular functioning of the social economy at its will, in part or as a whole (partial or general strikes).

Hence it is clear that the significance of the proletariat, with equal numbers, is the greater the larger the mass of productive forces it sets in motion: the proletarian of a large factory represents, other things being equal, a greater social magnitude than the handicraft worker, and the proletarian of the town a greater magnitude than the proletarian of the village. In other words, the political role of the proletariat is the more significant the more large-scale production dominates small, industry dominates agriculture, and the town dominates the country.

If we take the epoch in the history of Germany or England when its proletariat made up the same share of the nation as the proletariat of Russia now does, we shall see that it not only did not play, but by its objective significance could not play, the role that our working class now plays.

The very same, as we have seen, can be said of the role of the town. When the urban population of Germany made up only 15 per cent, as with us, there could be no question of the German towns playing such a role in the general economic and political life of the country as our towns play. The concentration of large industrial and commercial establishments in the towns, and the linking of the towns with the provinces by a system of railways, have given the towns a significance far exceeding the mere size of their population; and the growth of their significance has far outstripped the growth of their population, while the growth of their inhabitants in its turn has outstripped the natural increase of the population as a whole… If in Italy in 1848 the number of craftsmen, not only proletarians but independent masters too, made up about 15 per cent of the whole population, that is, no less than the craftsmen and proletarians of present-day Russia, their role was incomparably smaller than the role of the Russian industrial proletariat.

From all that has been said it is clear that to try to determine in advance what part of the whole population the proletariat must make up at the moment it takes possession of state power is a fruitless occupation. Instead we shall give a few approximate figures to show what part of the population the proletariat makes up at the present time in the advanced countries.

In Germany in 1895, out of a total occupied population of 20.5 million (not counting the army, state officials and persons without definite occupation), the proletariat accounted for 12.5 million (counting wage-workers in agriculture, industry and trade, and also domestic servants); agricultural and industrial workers proper numbered 10.75 million. As for the remaining eight million souls, very many of them are in essence proletarians (domestic industry, working members of families and so on). The number of wage-workers in agriculture alone came to 5.75 million. The whole rural population made up about 36 per cent of the country’s population. These figures, we repeat, relate to 1895. In the eleven years that have passed, enormous changes have unquestionably taken place, and in general in one direction: the ratio of the urban to the rural population has increased (in 1882 the rural population made up 42 per cent), the ratio of the whole proletariat to the whole population has increased, and that of the industrial proletariat to the agricultural; and finally, there is more productive capital to each industrial proletarian than in 1895. But even the figures for 1895 show that the German proletariat has long been the dominant productive force of the country.

Belgium, with its population of seven million, is a purely industrial country. Of every 100 persons engaged in any occupation, 41 fall to industry in the narrow sense and only 21 to agriculture. Out of rather more than three million of the gainfully occupied population, about 1,800,000 souls are proletarians, that is, about 60 per cent. These figures would become still more eloquent if we added to the sharply differentiated proletariat the social elements related to it: producers “independent” in form but in reality enslaved to capital, minor officials, soldiers and so on.

But first place in the industrialisation of the economy and the proletarianisation of the population unquestionably belongs to England. In 1901 the number of persons engaged in agriculture, forestry and fishing was 2.3 million, while industry, trade and transport embraced 12.5 million souls.

Thus in the chief European countries the urban population predominates over the rural in numbers. But its predominance is immeasurably greater, not only in the mass of productive forces it represents but in the quality of its personnel. The town draws to itself the most energetic, able and intelligent elements of the country. This is hard to show statistically, although indirect confirmation of it is given by the age composition of the urban and rural populations, which is also of independent significance. Thus in Germany in 1895 there were eight million persons engaged in agricultural production and eight million in industry. But if we divide the population by age groups, it turns out that agriculture falls short of industry by a million of the most able-bodied workers between the ages of 14 and 40. This shows that it is chiefly “the old and the young” who remain in the countryside.

As a result of all the considerations given above, we can come to the conclusion that economic evolution, the growth of industry, the growth of large enterprises, the growth of the towns, the growth of the proletariat in general and of the industrial proletariat in particular, has already prepared the arena not only for the struggle of the proletariat for state power but for the conquest of that power.

3. Here we pass to the third premise of socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Politics is the plane on which the objective premises intersect with the subjective. On the ground of definite technical and social-economic conditions, a class consciously sets itself a definite task, the conquest of power; it unites its forces, weighs the forces of its adversary, assesses the circumstances.

Yet even in this third field the proletariat is not absolutely free. Besides the subjective factors, consciousness, readiness, initiative, which also have their own logic of development, the proletariat comes up in its policy against a whole series of objective factors, such as the policy of the ruling classes, the existing institutions of state (the army, the class school, the state church), international relations, and so on.

Let us dwell first of all on the subjective factor: the preparedness of the proletariat for the socialist overturn.

Unquestionably it is not enough that the level of technique should make a socialist economy advantageous from the point of view of the productivity of social labour. Nor is it enough that the social differentiation that has developed on the basis of this technique should have created a proletariat as the class that is chief in numbers and economic role and objectively interested in socialism. It is necessary as well that this class should become conscious of its objective interest. It is necessary that it should understand that there is no way out for it outside socialism; it is necessary that it should close its ranks into an army powerful enough to conquer state power in open struggle.

It would be absurd at the present time to deny the necessity of such a preparation of the proletariat. Only the old Blanquists could hope for salvation from the initiative of a conspiratorial organisation formed independently of the masses; or their antipodes, the anarchists, may hope for a spontaneous, elemental explosion of the masses with no telling what outcome. Social-Democracy speaks of the conquest of power as the conscious action of the revolutionary class.

But many socialist ideologists (ideologists in the bad sense of the word, of the kind who turn everything upside down) speak of the preparation of the proletariat for socialism in the sense of its moral regeneration. The proletariat, and even “humanity” in general, must first throw off its old egoistic nature; altruistic impulses must gain the upper hand in social life, and so on. Since at the present time we are still very far from such a condition, and since “human nature” changes extremely slowly, the coming of socialism is put off for several centuries. Such a view seems very realistic, evolutionary and so forth. But in reality it is made up entirely of flat moralising considerations.

It is assumed that a socialist psychology must be acquired before socialism comes; in other words, it is assumed that it is possible to instil a socialist psychology into the masses on the basis of capitalist relations. One must not confuse a conscious striving for socialism with a socialist psychology. The latter presupposes the absence of egoistic motives in the sphere of economic life; whereas the striving for socialism and the struggle for it flow from the class psychology of the proletariat. However many points of contact there may be between the class psychology of the proletariat and a classless socialist psychology, there is still a whole abyss between them.

The common struggle against exploitation brings forth in the soul of the worker splendid shoots of idealism, comradely solidarity and personal self-sacrifice; but at the same time the individual struggle for existence, the ever-open jaws of poverty, the differentiation within the ranks of the workers themselves, the pressure of the ignorant masses from below and the corrupting activity of the bourgeois parties do not allow these splendid shoots to develop fully.

But the point is that, even while remaining petty-bourgeois and egoistic, and not rising in his “human” worth above the average representatives of the bourgeois classes, the average worker becomes convinced by the experience of life that his most primitive desires and most natural needs can be satisfied only on the ruins of the capitalist order.

The idealists picture the distant future generation that will be found worthy of socialism exactly as the Christians picture the members of the first Christian communities.

Whatever the psychology of the first proselytes of Christianity may have been (we know from the Acts of the Apostles of cases where property was hidden from the community), in any case Christianity in its further spread not only failed to regenerate the soul of the whole people but was itself regenerated: it became materialised and bureaucratised, passed from brotherly guidance to papism, from wandering poverty to monastic parasitism; in a word, not only did it fail to subordinate to itself the social conditions of the milieu in which it spread, but it subordinated itself to them. And this happened not through the clumsiness or the greed of the fathers and teachers of Christianity, but through the irresistible laws of the dependence of human psychology on the conditions of social labour and existence. And the fathers and teachers of Christianity demonstrated this dependence in their own persons.

If socialism aimed to create a new human nature within the framework of the old society, it would be nothing but a new edition of the moralising utopias… Socialism sets itself the task not of creating a socialist psychology as the premise of socialism, but of creating socialist conditions of life as the premise of a socialist psychology.