France – Here We Are Again (1970)

From the April 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The trouble at the Universities and the lycées in France is reported to be the worst since May 1968—”Revolutionaries” optimistically predict another situation like May 1968 for the spring.

It is interesting to analyse the new situation. Since the new year, there have been twelve suicides by burning, and the protesters are getting younger. A new group, who call themselves “Barricades”, has made a dynamic appearance on the scene. The majority of their numbers come from the Lycée Michelet, one of the most respected high schools of France. They claim to have a thousand followers.

Besides this trouble at the lycées, the universities are in revolt. At Nanterre, where troubles led to the events of May and June, there have been renewed clashes with Left wing and Right wing students fighting it out with result that the University was closed down for a weekend. At the Sorbonne, too, students occupied the university compound; the police came to disperse them; the students reacted and molotov cocktails were thrown at the police.

This all seems to emphasise the predictions of the so-called revolutionaries. However, if we take a close look at these groups we find there is nothing new or revolutionary about them. Reports tell us that the headquarters of “Barricades” have pictures of Che Guevera plastered on the wall and Thoughts of Mao in their pockets. Again, in the Universities there are the traditional Bolshevik varieties of Mao, Stalin, Trotsky and Che. Even the more advanced groups such as Cohn-Bendit’s March 22 Movement, who have at least rejected the traditional Bolshevik line, still cling on to the archaic and anarchistic line of the “revolutionary situation” accompanied by barricades in the streets.

Working class emancipation must be the work of the working class itself and that no “vanguard of the proletariat” can bring about. The traditional Bolshevik theory has been proven wrong. Following leadership is doomed to failure. The “revolutionary situations” or barricades in the street cannot bring about Socialism. Only when the majority of workers understand and want Socialism can it be achieved and then there is no need for barricades in the street. The task for Socialists in France is not to go out and lead or to go out and destroy; the task is to spread Socialist propaganda, to organise into groups and to form a revolutionary party as a companion to ours with one aim – Socialism.

P. C.

Le Chienlit de France (1968)

From the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barricades in Paris! Paris, the storm-centre of every 19th century European insurrectionary wave—1830, 1848, 1871—once again the scene of street battles. Is this the beginning of a new revolutionary era? Many would like to think so but let us look at the facts.

De Gaulle retired from active politics in 1953 and retreated to his country house at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises awaiting the call to come back. For the previous six years he had been the leader of a movement demanding strong government. He had long realised what, from the French capitalists’ point of view, was wrong with the parliamentary regime of the Fourth Republic. After an enthusiastic new start in 1945, within a few years politics was back to what it had been in the Third Republic (which began with the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune and ended when Petain took over). Prime Ministers came and went at frequent intervals; parliament overthrew governments rather than accept tough economic measures. The parliamentary regime, with the Communist Party (PCF) in permanent isolation and opposition, gave power to the most backward elements of the French capitalist class, the small provincial bourgeoisie drawing their profits from out dated productive methods. The tax system also favoured them at the expense of modern industry, including the large nationalised sector. Any deputy had the right to propose financial legislation. Thus, just before an election, there was a spate of measures to cut taxes. The French state could never be sure what funds it would get, and inflated the currency. In all the state was weak and unable to take decisive action.

But serious problems there were requiring such action, notably the wind-up of the French Empire in Indo-China and Algeria. The parliamentary regime was unable to solve either; a strong man was called in both times. The first was Pierre Mendès-France, prime minister from 1954 to 1955, whose tough measures with regard to the withdrawal from Indo-China earned him some respect, but also the hatred of the other politicians who saw his power as a threat to theirs. They threw him out. The second was Charles de Gaulle. Almost exactly ten years before the recent crisis, on 13 May 1958, the army and settlers in Algeria rose up against the parliamentary regime. The revolt spread to Corsica, and the government was panic-stricken. Reluctantly President Coty appealed to de Gaulle. De Gaulle dictated his terms to the frightened politicians and took over. At the time many saw de Gaulle as the figurehead for a military-fascist dictatorship. This was a mistake. It is certainly true that de Gaulle came to power on the backs of reactionary elements, but they soon turned against him. Witness the many OAS attempts on his life.

De Gaulle was a strong man, not over French capitalism, but for it. The constitution for the new Fifth Republic, drafted by Debré (then prime minister), provided for a great strengthening of the executive at the expense of parliament. The traditional parties, too, were got at. The complicated system of proportional representation was replaced by the second ballot in single-member constituencies to encourage the emergence of a two-party system. Thus the power of parliament, where the backward elements of the French bourgeoisie were entrenched, was weakened.

The first act of the Gaullist regime, then, was to reshape the state in the interests of big business. This done, they set about solving the many problems of French capitalism that had accumulated over the years of weak government: peace in Algeria, tax reform, currency reform, modernisation and centralisation of industry. These were all carried through. The Gaullist regime seemed to have succeeded, so why the insurrection?

De Gaulle against the politicians of the Fourth Republic was not an issue that interested (or concerned) the French working class. They scarcely lifted a finger to defend the parliamentary regime in 1958. The French workers, weak organisationally, have always made up for this with bouts of enthusiasm. The Gaullist regime, of course, governed in the interests of French capitalism, and any capitalist government is inevitably brought into conflict with the workers. De Gaulle and his Ministers adopted the same arrogant attitude toward the working class as to the old parties and politicians. Last year, for instance, after scraping home in the elections to the National Assembly, the government took powers to rule by decree to deal with the economic situation. It is interesting to note that a token general strike called by the unions at that time was only moderately successful. One of the first economic decrees was aimed at reforming the social security system. The unions were removed from its national management and benefits cut. Coupled with mounting unemployment and wages lagging behind prices, these were the ground for discontent.

As the working class in Britain has shown, although workers now see no alternative to capitalism there are limits to how far they are prepared to be pushed around by a capitalist government. In Britain they refuse to vote Labour. In France, with its tradition of “direct action” and weak organisation (the two go together), the reaction has been more dramatic: sit-in strikes, monster demonstrations, far- reaching wage demands.

The whole thing was sparked off by student unrest and violent student-police clashes. The students in France, overcrowded, subject to petty rules of discipline and central control, certainly had grounds to complain. But their leaders —the Cohn-Bendits and others—have wider aims than mere university reform. They are out no less than to topple the government or, as they would put it, “to smash the bourgeois state” and open the way for “the workers to take power". These demagogues call themselves “revolutionary socialists” and “anarchists”, and are greatly influenced by the mistaken and dangerous views of Debray and Che Guevara: that it is a vanguard that makes history. The reaction of the workers, with the younger ones pushing the more conservative union officials, seemed to confirm their theories. They had created “a revolutionary situation”. Now, to exploit it. In Trotskyist theory—and if reports were correct leaders of trotskyist groupuscles found themselves addressing thousands rather than hundreds; they were heard with respect by students while the PCF speakers were jeered — what is needed to do this is a Bolshevik-type party, centralised, highly-disciplined and ruthless in pursuit of its aims. No such party — thank goodness! — exists in France. That is why the student demagogues and their trotskyist friends are so annoyed at the attitude of the PCF. Cohn-Bendit has called them “stalinist scum". They should not really have been surprised. The PCF has long been a patriotic, reformist party. Yet they are still expected to act as if they were an organisation of professional revolutionaries! But the PCF, and its trade union wing the CGT, have also been timid over wages and working condition! One thing is clear. Out of this, the PCF will emerge as discredited as the Gaullists.

A crisis may have existed in the sense that for a time the Gaullist regime seemed to be breaking up (but it still controlled the army), offering an opportunity for a determined vanguard to seize power — and if that happens, heaven help the French workers. But as the French workers are not socialist-minded the outcome will not be the start of a world-wide socialist revolution. The key opposition figures are leaders of the other two so-called socialist parties in France. Mitterrand, of the Left Federation of Democratic Socialist (FGDS), an alliance of the Social Democrats and some radicals, and Mendès-France of United Socialist Party, (PSU), a small leftwing breakaway from the old Social Democrats. Ironically, both have only recently embraced “Socialism”. Before that they were Radicals (very roughly the equivalent of the Liberals in Britain).

What Mendès-France is doing in a party that is to the left of the PCF (Barjonet, economic adviser to the CGT, who resigned because of its timid attitude, joined the PSU) is a mystery. He, like de Gaulle, believes in strong government. He, too, saw what was wrong with the Fourth Republic. He, too, is not linked with the discredited pre-1958 politicians. Mendès-France talks of the “new Socialism” which is recognised even by some of his fellow party members to be merely state capitalism.

If a new government emerges under Mitterrand or Mendès-France, perhaps with PCF participation, what then? In the initial stages it will be friendly to the workers and their organisations. Social reforms will be made. But capitalism is capitalism and sooner or later that government must itself come into conflict with the working class, especially when it faces the problem of the competitiveness of French goods in the world market. Then will begin the failure of yet another Left-wing government to make capitalism work in the interests of the workers.

The shaking of the Gaullist regime should be a standing warning to governments everywhere not to push the working class too far, and certainly not to push the students at the same time. It shows too how, in the end, every government depends on a certain amount of popular assent.

Adam Buick

Letter: Correspondence (1918)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sirs,

—in your issue for June 1918 your contributor, S.H.S., in an article entitled “The Passing of the Barricade," declares the futility of armed action by the workers, and advocates political action as “the only way to achieve the Social Revolution and establish Socialism.” Now in my opinion S.H.S. ends his article just when it becomes most interesting—at the very point where it should begin. Other of your writers do the same sort of thing. For instance, in your journal for April W. L. Wake writes on p. 59, col. 3, “The first step, therefore, towards their overthrow, is to secure political power.” In the same issue F.F. writes (p. 61, col. 3.) “they will organise with us to capture the machinery of government . . . " In the issue for May A. E. J. writes (p. 67, col. 3) “For politics are the means which will give them control over the armed forces . . . ” And on p. 70, col. 1 J. Fitzgerald writes : “As they do this they will realise the. . . correctness of the teachings of Marx, Morgan, and Engels, and will organise to take control of political power.” I want you to note that each of the foregoing quotations is taken from about the end of the article, so that in effect the writer takes the reader along the road only as far as a certain point, labelled "Political Action,” and says: “There you are, Mr. Reader, you can go on or stick where you are, just as you like” ; after saying which he vanishes into thin air.

Now, let us see where the phrase “political action” leads to. When you use these words I understand you to infer that when you consider the time ripe and the conditions suitable you will put up candidates to “run” at every election that occurs, who will represent the workers’ interest in Parliament. And as each election is fought, so shall we see Socialists sailing merrily into the House of Commons to “collar” those seats.

But do you think that the capitalists or their agents will watch the tide of Socialists in Parliament rise higher and higher, growing ever stronger, whilst they (the capitalists) remain dumb and inactive? I am sure you don’t. It would be an insult to your super-intellects to even think it!

Equally I am sure that you are acquainted with political corruption, bribery, intrigue, and so forth. When governments or parties want a majority on their side they trot round offering official posts with fat salaries or “birthday honours” to as many members as will take them. And since bureaucratic government has grown largely recently, the opportunity to offer posts in the various departments has increased enormously.

So that if, at any time, Socialists in Parliament make such powerful, damaging, and brilliant speeches against the Government as to leave them dumb it won’t matter, for when voting time comes they can rest assured that their money will do its work.

Now, suppose a general election comes round and the number of Socialists returned to Parliament amounts to 90 per cent. of the whole membership. What then? The capitalists may re-organise Parliament, put it on an entirely new basis to enable them to retain a voting majority. But suppose, no matter how they scheme, wriggle, twist, or turn, that in a very short time they fail utterly. Again, what then?

They have still one card to play. They can close Parliament and say to the workers: “We've got the armed forces, you can go and hang yourselves. If you declare a general strike you'll starve first. If you continue to work but ‘go slow' we can send soldiers with bayonets to speed you up. Or if you become troublesome in any way we’ll give you an unrestricted diet of bullets, bombs, and gas—and see how you like that! Submit— or be damned! ”

So we arrive at the following position of the workers:

Political action is denied them; physical force is futile (because the capitalists control the armed forces); and passive resistance, that is, the strike, means starvation.

Now, I ask you, as guardians of the condensed cream of working-class knowledge, of what use would your “political action” be in such circumstances?

Yours sincerely, 

“Slim.”

Reply:

First of all, do you really know what it is you want ? Our correspondent “S.H S.” saw that the “march of Time has left behind the barricade and established the truth of our contention that the working class can only emancipate themselves by capturing the political machinery” and he expressed himself thusly. He did not declare “the futility of armed action by the workers" but the hopelessness of opposing “overturned carts and piled paving stones and sniping from roofs”—the methods of the barricade—to the mighty forces controlled by the capitalists so long as they are in possession of the political machinery. That is one of your misstatements corrected.

As regards your point against E. L. Wake, you very conveniently overlook that the immediately preceding passage to that you quote is: “Since, therefore, the whole of the evil conditions of working-class existence spring from this property condition, the workers must make those things needed for the production and distribution of wealth the common property of society. The defenders of private property having, through their political power, control of the armed forces, use them to support their position.” Then follows your quotation: “The first step, therefore, towards their overthrow, is to secure political power.” Clearly, in this instance, at all events, it is incorrect to say that “ the writer takes the reader along the road only as far as a certain point, labelled 'political action' ” for the political action is plainly indicated as the means to a point further on—a point, indeed, which is the realisation of the object of Socialist organisation—the point of making the means of producing and distributing wealth the common property of society.

Exactly the same remark applies in the case of your quotation of our correspondent “F.F.,” for, far from carrying “the reader along the road only as far as a certain point, labelled 'political action' ” and then leaving him to “go on or stick where you are,” when he has said that the workers “will organise with us to capture the machinery of government,” proceeds to say that they will do this “in order that they may establish a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of all the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution—which is ‘Socialism.” Your statements, therefore, are incorrect.

We will endeavour to deal with your other points in our next issue.

Editorial Committee

Violence in politics (1970)

From the May 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The upsurge of violence in modern society probably means that “Law and Order” will be the most explosive single political issue of the 1970’s. What concerns socialists most is the political violence which has been seen of late in Paris, London, Tokyo and many large American cities. This has been carried out by large numbers of people, mostly young, who have the avowed intention of changing society and of even instituting “Socialism”. Indeed, many of these insurgents claim to adhere to the theories of Karl Marx. Not surprisingly, Marx is once again widely regarded as the apostle of violent revolution, barricades and fighting in the streets.

At a recent debate in Edinburgh the audience heard our opponent claim that Marx had never supported the use of the ballot in achieving Socialism and had always advocated using force of arms. Whether this statement was due to ignorance or “tactics” is unknown. We say Marx’s views on the revolutionary use of the ballot by the working class are not a matter for debate, they are a matter of record and were dealt with by us in the April issue of the Socialist Standard.

Why this obsession with violence, then? After all, it is only a few years since the emphasis in the protest movement was on the non-violent. The theme of the earlier Aldermaston marches was that “we shall overcome” by pacifist methods, a far cry from the bloodthirsty spectacle of recent Easters.

The key lies in the fact that as capitalism continues on its not-so-merry way its problems not only increase but intensify. For example, the Spanish Civil War pales to insignificance with its post-war parallel in Vietnam, and prior to 1939 the disarmers were aghast at the thought of submarines and mustard gas. Today, it is thermonuclear and bacteriological warfare.

Most of the current crop of “revolutionaries” came into politics through their disgust at one or another of capitalism’s evils. Many of them were originally supporters of the Labour Party and helped get it elected in the belief that this would be a step towards eliminating certain social problems. Of course, the reality has been very different. To many it has seemed that governments lack the will or are too treacherous to deal with the problems and that it doesn’t matter who the votes are cast for, the result is the same — human misery on a vast scale. Thus they come to the conclusion that the ballot is useless, a kiss on a piece of paper.

Is it as simple as that? Is it really lack of will that prevents governments solving the problems? The myth is that governments could take capitalism by the scruff of the neck if they really wanted to. Actually, it is the other way round. How can a government determine or forecast the actions of the rest of the world? And how can it deny — if it wishes to retain popular support — the wishes of the majority? For there is another myth dearly held by the protesters, that the majority is really on their side. The fact is that the majority either supports capitalism or can see no alternative way of running society except on a production for profit basis.

So, it is a lack of desire for Socialism (production for use) that keeps capitalism going. Governments have no choice but to run the system the best way they know how. The vote, then, is not necessarily useless. Rather it is like a razor which can be used to separate a man from his whiskers or his breath. Likewise, a vote can be a weapon of emancipation or self-inflicted wage slavery, depending on the man using it.

In their frustration the protesters must turn to solutions outside of majority support, and there is no lack of would-be leaders to provide such solutions from the rehashed theories of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, etc., and their insistence that since all previous revolutions have been violent so must the next one be, too.

We deny this most unMarxian viewpoint on the grounds that the factors involved in revolutions do not remain constant. The bourgeois revolutions of 19th century Europe took place against a background where the bourgeois had no option but to take up arms. The existing legality was often undemocratic, so the only way to change things was by illegal means.

Also, these upheavals occurred when the level of weaponry was low by today’s standards. Then it was a case of rifle against rifle, horseman against horseman. In such a situation it was possible that revolutionaries fired by the “justice” of their cause and as well, or as poorly, armed as the mere hirelings of the state could take on and beat them. Nowadays, the situation is vastly different. No group outside of the state machine could possibly seize power in a modern country in the face of the sophisticated weaponry ranged against them. Much wiser to win control of the state machine first.

The most important changed factor is that previous revolutions have always been carried out in the interest of a minority who understood what was at stake. The socialist revolution will be the first one in the interest of a majority, so, along with Marx and Engels, we hold that the majority must also understand what is at stake.

In any case, those who have actually tried to seize power without first winning political control in more recent times have failed miserably. The May 1968 Paris affair was crushed without any real force having to be used. Probably the only shots fired came from the students, themselves. No tanks, aircraft or artillery were required. Indeed, this writer has a vivid memory of seeing on TV how a Paris Municipal street cleaning vehicle made short work of a barricade.

Ignoring the myth of Mussolini’s march on Rome, the most serious attempt was Hitler’s Munich putsch in 1923. The rebels were desperate, trained and armed men, many of whom had fought in world war one, and they constituted a more potent force than anything today’s barricadists are likely to provide. Through the streets of Munich they marched until confronted by the state machine in the form of some policemen armed only with rifles. A volley of shots rang out and some of the marchers fell dead or wounded. Alan Bullock, in his Hitler — A Study in Tyranny, tells of the ensuing panic and collapse of the putsch. Although Hitler dislocated his arm in the stampede to get away, his brain continued to function. There and then he realised that attempts to bypass the state machine were useless. From then on he set out to win the minds of the German electorate and to win power legally. Once this had been achieved the military had no option but to accept Nazi rule.

Of course, the widely held view among the “revolutionaries” is that it is impossible for socialists to capture the forces of the state; that in the event of a socialist majority the armed forces and the police will be used to cow that majority into submission. How valid is this idea?

Socialists claim that the idea of Socialism — a world without social classes in which the means of production will be commonly owned — is produced out of the revulsion of capitalism’s problems, its wars, crime, poverty, alienation. that the values and institutions of capitalism increasingly come into conflict with the growing desire of the working class to live in a society more in harmony with their needs. In short, socialist consciousness is a product of capitalism’s problems. Now, there is no evidence to suggest that members of the armed forces are any more backward than other workers in factories or offices. Their ideas are pretty much the same on matters of sport, sex or politics. They do not live in a vacuum.

So, how likely is the soldier to obey a command to suppress a socialist working class? Not so long ago this writer did his National Service and can, accordingly, speak from first-hand experience. Did we obey our officers because we loved them or regarded them as superior beings? Actually, a chief topic in the NAAFI any night of the week was what a useless shower officers were. Also, any officer issuing an order which we knew to be unauthorised could be safely, and often was, ignored. During the years of National Service the newspapers often carried exposures of servicemen being misused, supplied by the men themselves.

The reason why we obeyed the officers was that even we, without a socialist idea in our heads, knew that those in command are backed by the populace at large. The working class today, as before, thinks the armed forces are necessary, so, logically, it regards discipline as a must. Officers with no authority telling soldiers exposed to socialist ideas to do what they certainly won’t want to do — shoot their own families — will be more likely to have the arms turned on them!

The most urgent task, then, for those who wish to abolish capitalism and institute Socialism, is to organise with others of like mind. No need to form another organisation when the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been in existence for 66 years. There is a great need to carry the socialist case out into the ranks of the working class, particularly now as capitalism’s rottenness becomes more exposed to the public gaze. First, it is necessary to understand that case, and a start can be made by discarding the romantic nonsense of the barricades. Those who most loudly proclaim their hatred of the bourgeoisie show it in a strange way by aping it.

We do not see the ballot as a cure-all ; it is majority understanding of Socialism which counts most. How will we know when we are a majority? there may be better methods of finding this out, but, meantime we still think that the ballot is the best way of finding out what people are thinking at any particular time.

Vic Vanni

Engels and Russia (1946)

Book Review from the July 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a revised edition of “The Life and Teachings of Friedrich Engels” (published in 1945 by Lawrence & Wishart, 100 pages, 4s.), Zelda K. Coates quotes Engels in support of Russia’s economy and institutions. She approvingly quotes from Engels’ “Origin of the Family,” wherein is shown the development of woman from the equality of early communal society to that of her modern legal status of a monetarily assessed "chattel,” and where he prophesied that: — 

   "With the transformation of the means of production into collective property, wage labour will also disappear and with it the necessity for a certain statistically ascertainable number of women to surrender for money ” (p. 91, Kerr Edition).

The view of Engels was that with the end of the wages system, which typifies capitalism everywhere, marriages based on property and money would give way to sex unions based solely on mutual affection. Believing that Socialism has been established in Russia, Coates declares:—

   "It is certainly no accident that this [mutual love as the only tie] has been attained almost completely and in actual fact and not merely in theory in the U.S.S.R.—the first really Socialist country, the national economy of which is based on a social collectivist system ” (p. 77).

The facts easily dispose of this assumption. Divorce, for instance, is only for those who have money in Russia, where legal costs make it prohibitive for most of the lower-paid workers. Russia’s easy divorce proceedings were ended recently by decree, as was legal abortion, while money grants and medals are offered as an inducement to women to raise large families. Furthermore, the likelihood of those in the large income and privileged stratum to wed in their own circle rather than with the lower-paid wage-labourers is too obvious to be stressed. Coates advances the usual case that Russia, under Lenin, established the "dictatorship of the proletariat,” but significantly adds that the peasantry have now attained political equality with the workers and, while not denying different modes of life and earnings of different "sections” of Soviet society, she says : —

    "In general the difference between the early Soviet Constitutions and the Stalin Constitution of 1936 reflects the progress of the U.S.S.R. towards a completely class-less society ” (p. 88).

The logic of which is that Russia’s "class-less” society now ceases to need the dictatorship of the proletariat, there being no other class to dictate to. Before the phrase therefore sinks again into its intended oblivion, from which it was dragged by the "communists,” it would be interesting to consider its origin and meaning. It occurs in the early views of Marx and Engels in the epoch of violent capitalist revolutions, where the newly formed political organisations of the wage-workers of Europe (often in a minority compared with the peasantry) could, thought Marx, lead a government over the feudalists and early capitalists—the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor was armed force excluded, as witness Marx’s "Address to the Communist League,” 1850, in which Marx advised the workers to organise on military lines while yet emphasising that "the proletariat must see to it that no worker shall be deprived of his suffrage by the trickery of the Local Authorities or Government commissioners.” In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875), Marx deals with some proposals of Lassalle and makes the point that the proletarian dictatorship is the transition stage to communism. Arguing a like case, Lenin and his party —the Bolsheviks—won support in 1917 from the land-hungry peasantry and war-weary soldiers of Russia for the slogan of peace, land and bread. Czardom abolished, the "communists” created a state apparatus in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, now under Stalin, acts ruthlessly to any political opposition. But to return to Marx's "Critique,” which Lenin publicised so much. Marx envisaged a lower and higher phase of communism, first the transitional stage of inequality, based on the amount of each individual’s labour, for which he receives a certificate from society, drawing its equal in labour terms from the social stock of the means of consumption, a society where "everyone is only a worker like everyone else.” With the development of the means of production and the individual the stage is reached where society can say "From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” The state, as such, once needed by the proletariat to hold down its adversaries, "ceases to exist.” The "communists” revised Marx’s lower and higher phases as "socialism” and “communism” respectively, and proclaimed that socialism, i.e., the lower phase of communism, had been set up in Russia. Since then, the rise of Russia’s rouble millionaires, priests with substantial fortunes to invest, the charging of education fees, banking, inheritance, national debt, etc., and a huge armed state, that refuses, in Engels words, to “wither away,” must provide a first-class headache for the most ingenious "communist” apologist trying to square Marx’s transitional period with Russia’s economy. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, for the march of social history shows that backward countries, whatever their political set-up, cannot go ahead to a class-less, moneyless society, especially as an isolated unit.

Marx, with this obviously in mind, wrote in his preface to "Capital” that:—

   "Even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development, but it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs.”

Coates book gives no indication of the altered views of the later Engels; and a serious omission in this respect is Engels’ preface to Marx’s "Class Struggles in France,” one of the last things he wrote, revising his earlier opinions on insurrection and favouring the use of the franchise.

In this preface, written in 1895, Engels first refers to the views held by Marx and himself in 1848:—

   "History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production. . . .”

(“Class Struggles in France,” by Karl Marx. Preface by Engels. Published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1936. Page 16.)

Engels then refers to the period of the Paris Commune, 1871, and writes: ". . . once again, twenty years after the time described in this work of ours, it was proved how impossible, even then, was this rule of the working class ” (p. 19).

In his 1895 Preface, Engels goes on to extol the growth of the German Social Democracy; he was spared the knowledge of its later reformist development. ". . .  the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the Workers’ Party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion ” (p. 23).

He had remarked a little earlier (Page 22) that "the franchise has been, in the words of the French Marxist programme . . . transformed . . . from a means of deception, which it was heretofore, into an instrument of emancipation.”

Engels describes armed revolts, street fighting and the barricades as obsolete. The soldiers see, not the people behind the revolts, but agitators, rebels and plunderers; on the other hand he lists the new weapons and training of the state military forces. The workers of the “atomic age” can now add more to Engels' list, and thus reinforce Engels' case of the hopelessness of insurrection in ending capitalism.

Engels, as the faithful collaborator of Marx, helped to bring to the working class the epoch-making work “Capital.” Its analysis of capitalist society describes the main features as commodity production, wage labour, surplus value and money. It follows, therefore, that Marxists must perforce describe Russia as a capitalist country, even though the Russian State directs and controls the whole economy, and where capital in the main is nationalised. Notwithstanding those who, like Coates, point to nationalisation as the substance of socialism, socialists agree with Engels, who, in his “Anti-Dühring,” wrote; — 

   “The modern stale, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over the more it becomes the real collective body of all the capitalists. The workers remain wage earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished, it is rather pushed to an extreme. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the handle to the solution.” (Martin Lawrence Edition, p. 313.)

The challenging stand of the S.P.G.B., with its companion parties abroad, in that we alone stand for the abolition of capitalism and its wage system, is firmly upheld by political history and endorsed by the matured opinions of Engels and Marx.

Engels recognised that modern developed capitalism must cede, for inherent social reasons, the legal means of revolution to the workers. The duty of the socialists is to see that the vote is used not for reforming capitalism, but to abolish the relationship of capitalist and wage worker and establish not state capitalism, but common ownership of the means of life.

Frank Dawe

Romantic rebels (1988)

Editorial from the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago this month the French took an unscheduled holiday together. For three romantic weeks a minority of revellers bathed in a glorious self-deception, erecting barricades, occupying their places of work, popularising a critique of consumer culture and sending wish-you-were-here cards to the workers, who responded with a General Strike for better wages and conditions but refused to "take power and overthrow capitalism". Here and there legal authority was replaced by self-catering communes, which actually managed nothing more productive than festivals, traffic and 24-hour talking shops. General de Gaulle's five-minute television broadcast of 30 May called a halt to the entertainment and within a few days the radicals - like naughty pupils caught misbehaving - were back in class with their heads down. Tedious normality returned, leaving a handful of Redcoats without audiences and British and American sociologists to ponder whether we had witnessed a "revolutionary situation" or an extended lunch break.

The student revolt which triggered worker unrest had its roots in the strict subordination of universities to the Ministry of Education, a factor which served to create a uniformly militant state of mind amongst the young elite. The libertarian spirit of the time had also fostered a New Left rebellion against Communist orthodoxy and liberalism, but the practical result of its propaganda was limited to a number of wildcat strikes in the aftermath of the Communist-led General Strike of 13 May. Cold reality was that the majority of wage and salary earners wanted nothing more than improvements and reforms -  a fact confirmed by the overwhelming ratification of representative democracy in the June general election, when the Gaullists were returned with an increased majority.

The events of May'68 are of concern to socialists because they probably represent most people's ideas of what a revolution would entail - blood and barricades, factory occupations and the violent overthrow of legal authority. The leading actors in the drama may have represented different strands of left-wing ideology but they all shared a belief in the primacy of industrial action and force as the means to effect social change, the central arguments of syndicalists and anarchists being repeated by Bolsheviks of all varieties. The backbone of their theory was and remains the General Strike, which begins in a small way, spreads in sympathy strikes and occupations and develops into the overthrow of the entire system. A fundamentally elitist approach, it assumes the working class to be a simple giant that needs taking by the hand and leading into the class struggle. Revolution is viewed as the culmination of hundreds of industrial struggles in which workers gain experience and an ever-stronger sense of solidarity, and rests on their ability to take and hold the means of production in face of the combined forces of the state. Its advocates dismiss the possibility that workers can ever reach their exalted level of consciousness without such vigorous exercise.

It is impossible to deny that ideas are conditioned by people's material experience, but this is a long way from suggesting that industrial struggle will, in itself, automatically produce socialist consciousness. Activists who took to the streets of France in 1968 were not preoccupied with the abolition of the wage labour and capital relationship and its replacement with free access, and no amount of struggle could have conjured these concepts out of the air and into the majority of heads. Had the French left been able to turn their dreams into reality (let's assume for argument's sake that the armed forces all happened to be on holiday) they would have had no choice but to administer capitalism since their followers would have gained as little knowledge as they had of its alternative.

Spontaneity may be an asset for the stand-up comic but it is of no use when attempting to dispose of capitalism. The ownership of the means of life  cannot be settled at the factory gate or the barricade because such methods leave the coercive state in the hands of the owning class. When workers are sufficiently class conscious to capture the political machinery for socialism, they will have already used their knowledge to bring their workplace organisations to a similar state of development. They will talk not of mines for the miners or factories for the factory workers, but of the democratic control of the world's resources by the whole community.

The only movement in the interest of the great majority that can ever be successful is one they understand, desire and vote for. Industrial action for political ends can produce conditions of chaos. But chaos is not socialism, and so long as the great majority do not want socialism, socialism cannot be the outcome.