Letter: Russian steps (1985)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russian steps

Dear Editors

In the November Socialist Standard the nature of the Russian socio-economic system is discussed and "bureaucratic collectivism", as suggested by Bruno Rizzi. rejected in favour of "state capitalism".

It may therefore be of interest to note that Lenin, in a speech delivered to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in 1918. had this to say about the situation:

Reality says that State Capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about in Russia in a short time State Capitalism it would be a victory for us. How could they [Lenin's critics] be so blind as not to see that our enemy is the small capitalist, the small owner? . . . What is State Capitalism in the hands of the Soviet Power? To bring about State Capitalism at the present time means to establish that control and order formerly achieved by the propertied classes. (Translated from the Official Version in Isvestia, 30 May 1918.)

The "transition to complete Socialism" to which Lenin also refers has of course never taken place.

J E Moore,

Evenley, 

Northamptonshire

Between the Lines: Some riots you see . . . (1985)

The Between the Lines column from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some riots you see . . .

Riots on TV are not what they used to be. In the early 1980s we used to get panicky reporters appearing live on the scene, not quite knowing whether the BBC had insured their limbs. These days no sooner does a riot start than a team of dull-witted politicians are in the studio, there to throw cliches at us like chucking nuts at monkeys The Tory says that it's all caused by criminal elements who are taking advantage of easily-led workers. Then comes the Labourite — usually Gerald Kaufman whose jackets are worn to remind us what value we're getting for our colour TV licence — who talks about how the Tories invented unemployment and while the rioters are wrong they can be sympathised with, but then again the police are doing a good job, but then again they really shouldn't shoot people if they can possibly avoid it. but then again reports have shown . . . Riots on telly are becoming more boring than The Horse of the Year Show. One good thing about the revolution: it will only happen once.

. . . and some you don’t

Remember the pictures of the Orgreave riot shown during the miners' strike? Remember how we were urged to have pity on those poor police who were doing their best to defend the peace against the violent tactics of those horrible strikers? And now, long after the strike is over, we see another view of the riot (People to People, C4. 9pm. 27 September). Clear pictures and accounts demonstrated very forcefully that what occurred at Orgreave was a police riot that the police were out of control and dished out violence to peaceful pickets in a manner which would be more typical of the Polish or South African state machine. Those with eyes to see. and minds unblocked by prejudices which tell them that the police can never be the aggressors, saw camera shots of police beating up workers who had gone to Orgreave to further their trade-union interests. Why were these pictures never shown while the strike was on? The fact is that while the camera never lies, the liars are very capable of manipulating the evidence of the camera when it so suits them.

Real lives

The banned and then censored BBC2 documentary on "political extremism" in Northern Ireland turned out to be nothing very original or surprising. Both nationalists in the programme (for let it not be forgotten that the Unionists are nationalists too) showed themselves to be buried in the politics of working-class disunity, sloganising and violence. McGuinness came across as somewhat saner than the Unionist clown whose response to the murder of some Catholics was to declare that "Christmas has come early this year". In fact, most workers are more advanced in their thinking than the sort of politically retarded mis-leaders portrayed in this film.

If only every town . . .

Have you seen that appalling advert which concludes. "If only every town could be like Milton Keynes '. Have you ever been to Milton Keynes? Has the joker who dreamed up the advert ever lived in Milton Keynes? Perhaps he should be given a chance to live in one of the uniform workers' houses in the land of his dreams. And while we're at it. why not give Jimmy Savile a free pensioners' travel pass and let him travel round the country on second-class British Rail trains instead of the Rolls which he is more accustomed to sitting in? And why not let old Barratt live in one of the poverty-homes he is so eager to advertise on TV instead of the expensive mansion near Hexham which he lives in now? Let the shoddy goods which the ad-men try to sell us be consumed by the idle parasites — they are not good enough for the wealth- producers. For workers nothing but the best is good enough — and to be sure. Milton Keynes is nothing like the best.

Showing it like it is

There is a popular view on the Left that everything shown on television is lies. Plenty of what we see on TV is lies and distortion, but much of it is both useful in providing an insight into aspects of life which most of us never experience and helpful in indicating the manifold contradictions of capitalism. Of late we have been offered several documentary series worthy of note. BBC2's series Probation (Tuesdays. 9.30pm. ended 29 October) was one of those "fly-on-the-wall" efforts in which we were allowed to look in on the ruined lives and confused existences of workers dependent on probation officers. Two points emerged from the series: firstly, that, despite the claims of the human nature brigade, there are plenty of workers in our society who are genuinely eager to help other workers to get out of their mess: secondly, it became clear that those society sees fit to punish or cure are inevitably the victims of a system in need of punishment or cure. A society which leaves thousands of workers ill-educated, unemployed, frustratedly aggressive, vulnerable to dangerous escapism and tempted by goodies beyond their reach creates more casualties than the over-burdened probation officers can hope to help satisfactorily. At best, the probation service can ameliorate the difficulties of those who attract problems like light attracts moths; at worst it serves as a rather authoritarian, patronising and sermonising outfit which seeks to normalise those capitalist normality can do without.

Infuriating though it has been. Queens': a Cambridge College (Wednesdays. 8.20pm. BBC2) provides a glimpse into an institution where students are taught that they are part of an intellectual élite. The evidence of the cameras (which could be discriminate) is that an awful lot of Cambridge geniuses are bores, morons or both. In the first programme in the series we were shown a public school twit in an interview, attempting to gain a place to "read" history. He is asked why he wants to read history and answers that it is because looking at the past will help us to understand the present Fair enough. Then he is asked to give an example of this. He mumbles vaguely that if you look at the origins of the Middle East you will understand the Arab-Israeli war. He lists as his hobby "fantasy war games" highly appropriate for a Cambridge history scholar. Asked why he wants to "come up" to Cambridge he answers that he wants to be trained for leadership. He gets in. As does the Sloane Ranger who is applying for medicine, whose parents live in the Sudan, has enjoyed "surfing on the Nile", working on a leper colony (which was absolutely amazing") and wants to work "with Third World people in North London".

In the second programme we see a crowd of these "intellectuals" joining the Christian Society and one of them (a science student) recounting how Christ appeared to him one night in his study after he had screwed up his packet of cigarettes. Nobody asked him what he had in them. In the third programme we were irritated by an offensive law student with pretensions to being an orator. He addressed the Cambridge Union (membership. £18 a year) on why public schools must exist. Apparently they produce academic excellence. Odd that: he came from one and seemed exceptionally unoriginal in his thinking.

After The War Is Over (Fridays. 9.25pm. BBC2) showed very clearly that after the suffering of the Second World War workers had big expectations. Returning from the war, the wage slaves came to something other than a land fit for heroes. The series has been very successful in showing both the utter impotence of the reformism of the patronising post-war Labour government and the shoddiness to which workers had access in those days of never having it so good. The Ministry of Information propaganda films are particularly striking in their transparent aim of bluffing the workers into continuing the war effort after the war had supposedly been won.

All three series helped to show workers more about what has been and is going on in society. They were not exercises in deception, but full-scale. uncensored pictures of capitalist reality. Proof that television can be used in the battle for working-class knowledge.

Charles and Di

Your reviewer did not watch the interview of the happy Royals on ITV (Sunday. 20 October), but is expecting at any time now a letter from the Palace calling on him to meet with Charlie for a serious discussion about how to abolish poverty and other related matters which our heir contemplates in his spare time. Let it be noted here that whatever passes between us will be in confidence. Suffice to say that I can offer him some definite advice about how to avoid becoming the ruler of a divided nation — and it doesn't involve doing yoga and keeping off red meat.

Steve Coleman

SPGB Advert (1985)

Advert from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

The Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist is available at the following link.

SPGB Meetings (1985)

Party News from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

A World of Abundance (1997)

From issue 13 of the World Socialist Review

All work done in this society called capitalism can be classified as necessary, because no employer would pay for unnecessary work. We must assume that all the work we do is “useful — in the defense industry, the prison system, advertising, banking, brokerages, the judicial system and many more activities that do not produce “wealth.” I regard wealth as something tangible, like a jumbo jet or silk stockings.

Socialists advocate the establishment of a system of production for use rather than the present system of production for profit. It would result in all the above work becoming unnecessary. These workers could then spend their time building jumbo jets or perhaps making silk stockings . . . or whatever.

I dare say that there are millions of folks engaged in professional sports, music, movie making and many other fields of what we call entertainment. The boss obviously thinks that this is a useful part of his system. I would think that it makes the worker’s life more tolerable, and this is the main reason for its existence, though I’m sure the boss likes to be entertained also. The socialist has no objection to being entertained. Since there would be no money involved in a socialist society, the entertainers would be truly dedicated to what they do.

In a socialist society, as in any other society, mankind must, as the first requirement, produce necessities such as food, clothing and shelter; after that, anything goes — perhaps a trip to the moon? It all depends on your priorities.

I urge you to give some thought to the establishment of socialism . . . where fabulous salaries, dividends, landlords and bosses will no longer exist: no wars, no countries, no national boundaries. Instead, a worldwide community of people who for the first time will be able to control their destiny (within the limits of time and space).

With the aid of nature, the workers of the world produce everything you see around you, everything, I mean everything. Why must we buy what we produce? Socialists want free access to all goods produced, owning everything in common with all five and a half billion of our neighbors: true democracy, an administration of things, not a governing of beings.

Raise your sights, folks. Make it happen . . .

William Hewitson

Letters on Socialism (1997)

From issue 13 of the World Socialist Review

The following two letters, written by socialists to their local newspapers, found their way into our mailbox not too long ago. We reprint them here to show that, even with a tightening corporate lock on the free expression of opinion in the media, it really is possible to put the case for socialism before thousands of readers who have never before heard of it. Any other comrades who writers to editors (whether or not they get them printed) can send copies on to the World Socialist Review, and we will print them too.

The first letter is addressed to the editor of the Santa Maria Times (California), and the second, to the Arizona Daily Star of Tucson, Arizona.

Marx may have been right*

I’m going to garner a few passages from a book written 150 years ago . . . I write in response to the article, “Working with nothing to show.”

The “division of labor” has been going on for more than 150 years . . . One author explained what was happening and what would continue to happen, and I quote, “the special skill of the laborer becomes |worthless. It is changed into a monotonous force which gives play to neither bodily nor to intellectual elasticity, his labor becomes accessible to all.” He goes on, “In the same measure, therefore, in which labor becomes more unsatisfactory and more repulsive, in that same proportion, competition increases and wages decline.” And again, “the capitalists vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of employees.”

He adds a little humor: “If the whole class of wage-workers were annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for 'capital,' which without wage-labor ceases to be ‘capital’.”

“Thus the forest of outstretched hands entreating for work becomes ever thicker, and the arms themselves become ever leaner . . . Crises increase and become more violent.”

The author whom I have been quoting was Karl Marx, and of course we all know that the owners of the communication networks would never give any supportive information about him.  . . I simply write to let you know that the present conditions were forecast many years ago and they will certainly get worse.

No one can fix Capitalism.

—William Hewitson 

* Heading added by the editor.

The Classless Society

I can still recall my first encounter with racism. It occurred many decades ago at an English elementary school when I was called “Jew-boy.”

But I also recall that throughout my life there has not been one day without either a major or minor war. Poverty (which is the economic status of the working class compared to that of the capitalist class) has been continuous and pervasive worldwide — together with unemployment, insecurity and, of course, racism.

All these social evils have been, and always will be, impervious to reformism for their eradication.

I ask the rhetorical question. What is there so sacrosanct about capitalism that the accusing finger is never pointed at it as the culprit and cause of all these prevailing miseries — except by only a handful of the population?

As long as the vast majority does not understand how capitalism functions, scapegoats and racism will flourish as red herrings, diverting the working class from its historic mission — the peaceful and democratic elimination of capitalism.

Technologically, wealth can be produced with comparative ease to satisfy the needs of all. Buying, selling and profit are therefore no longer required. They should be replaced with production and distribution solely for use with free access to all goods and services, eliminating money and the wages system.

This will never happen until the world working class realizes, amongst a multitude of other concepts, that the society’s fundamental problem is its division into classes — not races. We all belong to only one race — the human race, and we merit a new system of society worthy of our potential and intelligence.

—Samuel Leight

Only a socialist working class can replace capitalism (1994)

From issue 11 of the World Socialist Review

The concept of an industrial union implies a condition of wage-slavery. When workers organize in unions, they are carrying out a defensive strategy—exerting pressure on their employers (the owners of capital) to increase wages and improve working conditions. By doing this they hope to counteract the continuous tendency on the part of the capitalist class to keep wages down. Employers want to maximize profits, and the way they do that is to exploit the working class as much as possible. Employers deploy a battery of pressures to keep wages down (and profits high)—pressures ranging all the way from lockouts to death squads—that workers resist by organizing into unions.

Unions—a tool of resistance

Before capitalism trade unions did not exist. No one had ever heard of one, and no one had ever formed one. Artisans had formed guilds to regulate standards (although they also wanted to keep out unwanted competition); peasants and slaves had risen up in insurrectionat intervals. But only wage-laborers, those possessing nothing but their own working abilities, could experiment doggedly with what the bourgeoisie once liked to style “combinations against trade” until they had fashioned a tool of resistance to use against the owners of capital.

Wage-earners have in principle no other means of survival than selling their working abilities to some employer for a wage or salary—no means, at least, recognized by what passes for economic “science.” This alone suffices to make employment slavery; but the whole reason for employing anyone is that, by reducing the bulk of the population to depending for its survival on employment, capital can accumulate itself by maximizing the difference between wages and the total value of the product reaching the market (surplus value or profit). [1]

Empirically speaking, people are compelled to pay to stay alive via this system of legalized robbery. Most people have considerable difficulty obtaining the money to pay with. Only in this context do unions (trade or industrial) make sense. The very notion of a union assumes a condition of wage-slavery—of employment—whether or not the union itself aims to eliminate production for profit.

The only “mission” of unions is to improve the conditions of wage-slavery within the capitalist system. To accomplish this, unions need only be anti-capital. Nothing requires them to be anti-capitalist; and ordinarily they aren’t. Workers may be anti-employer some or all of the time—but the most compelling argument for unions is that they enable workers to sell their labor-power on the market at its value. One way or the other, unions promote employment (which, again, is slavery). In system terms, they favor the continuation of a system that requires poverty to be the lot of the majority. Daniel De Leon’s notion that “the mission ofUnionism is to organize and drill the Working Class for final victory” [2] in the class struggle between workers and capitalists has little basis in history and no basis in fact.

Economic organization

Resistance to capital, furthermore, can take innumerable forms that don’t need to originate in the workplace. It can appear as political action, as social protest or as some combination of the two. While these are in the main reformist initiatives intended merely to improve the functioning of a bad system, they foreshadow the growing importance political action will assume as the number of socialist workers grows worldwide. If anything, the role of unions in the class struggles of late capitalism faces an uncertain future. As the “economic organization of the working class,” they do not bid fair to “organize and drill” it for anything but short-term resistance.

The need for unions implies the poverty of a class-divided society; their persistence into a classless society is in any case unlikely, since common ownership is grounded in free access to abundantly available goods and services. What differentiates socialism from capitalism is precisely that no one can conveniently “accumulate” the usefulness of goods and services, and no one can be denied the use of what they need. Abundance cannot coexist (as a basis for organizing society) with employment and poverty—with exploitation, the very condition whose intensification, at the dawn of capitalism, gave rise to the need for unions in the first place. A world of abundance will require no defense against exploitation. (Unions might very well on the other hand—after the revolution—serve as a good point of departure for organizing the production and distribution of wealth.)

Reorganizing production

The free associations of workers that under socialism will replace capitalism’s companies and enterprises (as we know them today) will take forms that must remain hidden from our eyes even at this late date; for the working class as a whole has yet to put the same originality into experimenting with ways of reorganizing production as it had earlier demonstrated in learning to resist capital—transforming the wild, inchoate rebellion of individuals into a socialized, organized resistance. Not until such experimenting has reached a fairly advanced stage on a fairly large scale will we be able to make intelligent guesses as to how society may organize the production and distribution of wealth after capitalism. Such experiments (under capitalism) could even, to take a hypothetical instance, assume the form of organized labor “taking and holding” the function of capital investment in a reactionary effort to save the system from revolution.

Without faulting De Leon’s Marxism, his “socialist” industrial unions seem more explicitly designed to fit into this hypothetically described scenario than to cultivate a socialist majority determined to replace capitalism entirely with common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole of society. His theory does not give workers an adequate basis for uniting to cast off the chains of wage-slavery. 

[1] Workers who don’t actually produce wealth—and these are in the majority nowadays—have the dubious privilege of suffering their employers to preserve the surplus value the latter have scooped up at the point of sale. The same pressure tactics work just as well, and for the same reason: cheaper workers mean a higher return on invested capital.

[2] Preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World.

Talking about a revolution. No apologies to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or Mao! (1993)

A Short Story from issue 10 of the World Socialist Review

Overheard in the lobby off a welfare hotel . . . 

Nick L: I say with a well-organized team and enough support from the general public at the right time, we can do it: we can take over the state and reorganize it from top to bottom.

Karl M: But wouldn’t that make you just another management team?

Nick L: No, no, no! Of course the team’s head would be in the right place. Once we took over, we’d make sure things moved in the right direction. OK, we’d have to plan on a complete renovation of the playing field, and sure, it probably would take quite a while before we were off and running . . . 

Karl M: I still don’t see how the “general public” fits into this. Nothing seems to change for them. You keep all the old rules—work for pay, return on investment, everybody still needs money to get what they need, and nobody sinks any capital into anything unless they’re sure they’ll at least get it back. Where’s your revolution?

Nick L: Eventually, everything will work out.

Leo T: Yeah, provided all the team members play by the rules—

Joe S: You heard him, everything works out. Period.

Nick L: Things just sort of unfold automatically: A team with its head on its shoulders, sticking together and teaching the public, step by step, how to end the game of exploitation, you know, with lots of feedback and all that crap—I mean, hey! How can we go wrong?

Karl M: You call it a revolution, but there’s nothing socialist about it—that’s what can go wrong! You can’t just expect to replace one set of managers with another. “Eventually” never comes. The only change that works is right now.

Mao Z: Oh, come on! You mean right here—in this room?

Leo T: [Sotto voce] Hey, be careful! There’s somebody over there who might be listening . . .They might be police—

Karl M: No, that isn’t what I mean: that’s closer to what you meant, in fact. What I meant was, you have to get rid of capital and wage labor everywhere as your first move. If you don’t do that, no amount of screwing around with the machinery of state is going to matter. Your “team” will only get caught up in making it work. You’re dreaming if you think you can “guide the masses” like that. The relations of exploitation you start out with—based on wage-labor and capital—won’t waste any time telling you what to do.

Mao Z: Oh, now wait a minute . . . You don’t just announce to the public that the game is over as soon as they’ve all sat down! The struggle against exploitation is like any good match: it could last forever if need be. The play is everything.

Leo T: The public needs to be led!

Nick L: There—you see? Outvoted!

Karl M: We’ll see about that.

Leo T: Listen, keep your voice down—someone could be listening!

Karl M: The point is simply to end the game. According to the rules, certain people own capital and they invest it, deciding in the process how everyone else will live and work. That just isn’t a community in any basic sense of the word. What we need is another set of rules: people in general decide what they can’t do without and make it known to whoever produces it. In the process everybody decides for themselves how they will live and work. We all take turns making sure production happens.

Nick L: Hello-o! Hello-o! I’m sure that’ll work just fine. How will you manage all of a sudden to turn people made passive or lazy and irresponsible by centuries of repression into paragons of reason? Think! Think!

Karl M: Think for yourself! Sooner or later, we’ll all have to.

Joe S: But without capital, how can you run the state? And who’s going to invest what you, sitting there in your nice easy chair, have “abolished” in your head? We’ve got to have a ruling class to struggle against—or are you just thick?

Karl M: Enough people have to abolish capital “in their heads” before any revolution can get off the ground. Without capital— you’re so right—the ruling class disappears. Like smoke from an extinguished fire. But it can’t just be in my head: it’s got to be in everyone’s head. No more goods and services for sale at a profit. The ending of the game means the starting of the real play, a game without spectators! People say they need certain items— wealth; producing and distributing those items implies only the administration of wealth. No one “rules” anyone, and everyone has control. From each according to ability and to each according to need.

Nick L: Oh, hey, look, I can see you don’t really belong in this group; you’re just too weird to be a real activist like us . . .

Karl M: You’ve just got to start out by replacing the wages system with a system of free access. I can say that here and now, in this lobby, but the only way anything’s going to happen is if a large enough majority of people come to have some idea of how they want to reorganize production the world over—

Mao Z: Will somebody please shut him up?

Karl M: No, I’m serious! Without ending the class struggle first, people will be unable to see an end to their powerless, downtrodden status and will just go on trying to make the world “a better place”; what we all really need is to replace this reality of fragments with an interconnected reality of whole people. Around the world, now . . . 

Nick L: So you’re saying history won’t be able to distinguish my team from—

Joe S: [Walking to the doorway] That does it! I’m leaving.

Mao Z: [Getting up] Yeah, I really can’t deal with this doctrinaire stuff, either. See you in St. Louie.

Leo T: [Huffily] I’m history. [The door to the stairwell slams closed]

Nick L: [Rising and turning around] Happy? You just ruined a perfectly good revolution!

Karl M: I didn’t ruin mine. Look, I really have done a lot of work on the subject. People have fought the introduction or confronted the reality of the wages system with a persistence that is positively impressive: the German Anabaptists who followed Thomas Muenzer in the Peasant Wars around 1525; the English “true Levellers” or Diggers in 1649; 19th- and 20th-century Utopian experiments too numerous to mention—among them, communities based on the writings of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Each of these tried, in its own way, to break with the system of wage labor and capital—and all of them failed for lack of ability to reorganize the entire system of production—

[The stairwell door slams shut] 

Ron Elbert

Life under capitalism: 50 Ways to Leave the System (1992)

From issue 8 of the World Socialist Review

How many ghosts can dance on the medal of honor?

David S. Rubitsky, 72, was denied the Medal of Honor—the U.S.’s highest combat decoration given to a wage-slave demented enough to slaughter fellow human beings on behalf of our capitalist masters.

The reason Mr. Rubitsky did not receive this medal of dubious distinction was that a military review board did not believe his tale of killing 500 Japanese wage-slaves in a single day during world war II. He asserts the real reason he was denied the “honor” has to do with anti-Semitic bigotry.

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B’rith supports David Rubitsky in trying to convince the world that he did indeed perform the near-miracle of slaughtering 500 fellow human beings in one whoop. They termed the military’s refusal of recognition “unconscionable.”

Unconscionable? Seeking praise for someone who claims to have killed 500 people is what’s really "unconscionable.” Only in our capitalist society, with its sick morality of pursuing profit over human needs—and, where necessary, at the expense of human needs—would a massacre qualify one for the status of hero. The fact that what passes for a human rights organization throws its weight behind rationalizing such atrocious behavior just goes to show how warped this society is, how morbid is its mentality.

In socialist society no one will get decorated with medals for being the “most ferocious one alive.” No markets to fight over, thus no wars. Only one world where we all have a common interest in each other’s well-being. Pathetic scenes of old men taking pride in killing fellow human beings will be a thing of the past. It is a future that is long overdue.

W. J. Lawrimore

The working class Joe meets the boss (1986)

From issue 1 of the World Socialist Review

Is there a "Road" to Socialism? (1988)

Book Review from issue 5 of the World Socialist Review

State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management by Adam Buick & John Crump (The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1986)

You have only to attend a meeting of any of numerous groups identifying themselves as "socialist" or ’'communist” to find out one thing: with few exceptions, they do not define their immediate goal as being worldwide in scope. They regard replacing the buying and selling of necessary goods and services with free access to the same as a very long-term aspiration (though the notion enjoys wide acceptance as an abstraction). Between the cup of communism and the lip of capitalism, they claim, there lies a wide gap, and that gap can only be bridged by a complicated and unpredictable series of short-term objectives. Eventually society will be transformed, it is true, but not starting from the present reality as we currently understand it.

Those groups organized as formal political parties seeking to attract the support and/or the votes of workers and other sectors of the population thus find themselves nailed fairly tightly to a framework of nationalism which has to justify itself through an appeal to "proletarian internationalism" or something similar. Followers of Lenin and Trotsky. for example, advocate setting up a "workers’ state" which will liquidate the institutions and mechanisms by which private owners of the means of production perpetuated their legal monopoly over the output of goods and services. According to this scenario, the exploiting (capitalist) class continues in existence for a while but is sternly regimented by the party in control of the machinery of state and enjoying the well-informed support of the majority.

In State Capitalism Adam Buick and John Crump carefully dissect the concept of state ownership of the means of wealth production and lay bare the mass of rationalizations leading up to it. First they establish the general boundaries of discussion by defining what the term capitalism means, then they distinguish between two models of capitalism: the one traditionally accepted as such (private capitalism, the earliest form) and the other representing a number of historic adaptations or variants of capitalist monopoly over social production (in response to some structural failure on the part of the "private" model). Since this second type is characterized by the nationalization of enterprises--with or without a thoroughgoing state management of the system of production—it is of course best described as "state” capitalism.

This result can be accomplished in two ways. Either the state can bail out individual capitalists by taking over the legal proprietorship and control of their businesses without a major political upheaval occurring (as has become common in western Europe); or a revolutionary opposition can develop within the bosom of capitalist society and, with varying degrees of majority support, raze the preceding regime to the ground, totally reorganizing the system of exploitation (as in eastern Europe, Russia and China). In the second case, a new capitalist minority replaces the old, leaving the same or equivalent relations of production intact. Though from a narrowly legal angle the new minority renounces all private title to the system of production, they nevertheless retain monopoly control over it.

"Socialist” Profits?

In the fourth chapter, the authors deal with a question which everyone has sooner or later asked: What makes a state-capitalist economy different from a "classical" one? They tackle a couple of familiar old fallacies: namely, the belief that

"Socialist" profit is not capitalist profit because "all profits belong to the people" or, to put it another way, because "the state distributes profit for the benefit of the people. "Socialist" wages are not the mark of an exploited working class, but are the means by which social wealth is distributed according to each individual's contribution to production.

(Ch. 4, "The Capitalist Dynamic of State Capitalist Economies")

In the end, however, no matter on what ideological grounds wage exploitation is put into effect, the leopard cannot avoid keeping its spots. 

"Profit is pursued because, due to the competition which is inherent in world capitalism, state capital continually has to invest newly acquired surplus value in a compulsive effort to accumulate and hence expand itself." (p 101)

Before going on to socialism as the alternative to either state or private capitalism, they briefly outline some of the ideological underpinnings on which the justification for state capitalism rests, showing how the thinking of its advocates evolved out of "classical" socialist theory (as found in the writings of Marx or Engels) into its Leninist and post-Leninist forms.

Basic Features of Socialism

Having comprehensively sapped out the state-capitalist terrain, Buick and Crump have no difficulty elucidating the basic features of a socialist society: It must be worldwide; all goods and services will be produced for use only and distributed free; it will have no classes, states or national frontiers; no exchange of goods and services will take place—since there will no longer be any market to regulate consumption.

The disappearance of economic value would mean the end of "economic calculation" in the sense of calculation in units of "value" whether measured by money or directly in some unit of labour time. (Ch. 6, "The Alternative to Capitalism")

The need for planning will be met by establishing "a rationalized network of planned links" occupying the successive phases through which the cycle of production/consumption passes. "Planning" in that context will mean only the coordinating of "a direct interaction between hunan beings and nature." (The authority of economists rests partly in fact on the working class’s uncritical acceptance of their doctrine of an inherent natural scarcity. )

If the language in the last chapter makes heavy use of the conditional tense, this does not imply any prediction of utopia. It only acknowledges that workers have so far failed to shake themselves out of the slumber of poverty. This is a process which necessarily must take place on a world scale (if not everywhere at precisely the sane time); for a whole society to make the changeover to production for use requires a conscious understanding of the stakes by enough of the world's population to constitute a political force greater than any that capital can muster in its own defense.

Such an intense concentration of well-informed opinion has not yet occurred nor will it ever—if workers (including both highly paid professionals and exploited agriculturalists) continue to limit their thought horizons to those of the national state into which their destiny as wage slaves has thrust then. The admirable thing about State Capitalism is that it provides a sorely needed theoretical framework for tearing loose of the deadly embrace of nationalism This framework (as noted in the book) has been slowly emerging within the world socialist movement in the decades since the Bolshevik revolution, most significantly in the propaganda of our companion party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The book itself makes a highly readable contribution to this ongoing effort to create a class-conscious, socialist majority—one that will finally get capitalism's funeral cortege rolling toward the cemetery.

Blogger's Note:

Buick and Crump's book was also reviewed in the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard.  

Let Them Eat Glasnost (1987)

Editorial from Issue 4 of the World Socialist Review

Everyone knows the old joke about Russia's top-down brand of state capitalism: capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism is the opposite. In fact, of course, there are no socialist republics (socialism not being compatible with government), nor are any of the Soviet Union’s republics examples of socialism (which requires a classless, moneyless society functioning on a worldwide basis), nor are there even any soviets (councils acting as the workers' democratically elected delegates) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What's in the name, then? An immense majority who go to the market everyday to sell their only commodity—their ability to do work—to a small minority who. . . . roll up their shirtsleeves and plunge into the "work” of supervising and directing the country’s capital investments so as to make them yield a profit (someone' s got to do it, after all!).

And now that the USSR’s workers, women and men alike, have glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of ’’openness,” they will presumably become happier and more productive and, not least, more accessible to multinational penetration. For even the spectre of communism has at last been incorporated into the marketplace!

Common Ownership

It is no academic exercise to point out that the word ’’communism” means only common ownership of the means of producing wealth: the right to decide on the use of the mechanisms by which society recreates and reproduces itself. The state is designed, on the contrary, to enforce the will of a minority against the wishes of the majority (in modern times, perversely enough, through the use of "majority rule”). As "open” as the CPSU and its politburo may now be projecting themselves, all the glasnost in the world (though there isn’t that much of it floating around anyhow) will not make them communists.

Are We “Commies” ?

As communists (socialists) ourselves, our policy has often been confused with theirs. During the second world war, when the Allied Powers calculated it was to their advantage to court Russia’s ersatz ruling élite, a great deal of treacle and syrup poured forth from the US government about the heroic Soviet Union, led by that epic working-class genius, Joseph Stalin.

If you were too young during the days of world war II, or not yet born, there are books and articles readily available dealing with the cooperation and friendship between the bolshevik-style Communists on the one hand, and the professed champions of "democratic” capitalism on the other. (For starters, try The Pocket Book of the War, Quincy Howe, Ed., Pocket Books, Inc., Hew York, 1941.)

However, when the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain were wining, dining and dealing with Stalin in the Kremlin, the World Socialist Party and its Companion Parties in other countries were openly opposing the war as a carnage not worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood. When the secret police of the Soviet Union and the secret police of the United States (the forerunner of the present CIA) were acting in unison, we were speaking out and writing articles attacking the war.

When the Communist Party was recruiting for the war effort, selling Victory Bonds, waving the flag and singing the national anthem of America, as well as that of Russia, we of the World Socialist Party were speaking from the rostrum on Boston Common as our comrades in England spoke in Hyde Park; continuing to urge our fellow workers to organize for the abolition of capitalism everywhere—the basic cause of war.

Are They Communists?

Thus, we are not Communists in the popularly accepted meaning of that much-maligned word. We do not support or sympathize with Russian or Chinese or Cuban or any other state capitalism. We are communists, though, in the classical meaning of the term. We are scientific socialists who advocate the complete and immediate abolition of the buying and selling system in all its forms around the world and the immediate introduction of a system of production for use.

If the workers of the Soviet Union want an ’’opening” that is socially authentic, they would do well to press for the immediate elimination of the system that keeps them exploited in more or less the same way as it does everywhere else. Perhaps glasnost will inadvertently give them some space in which to think about organizing for a real socialist revolution.

Equal time for the capitalist view (1986)

From issue 2 of the World Socialist Review

With the heating up of the situation in Nicaragua, the bombing of Libya and the flood of Rambo-type films in the theatres, the subject of war is once again in the forefront of topics being discussed.

We of the WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT for over eighty years have put forth our views on the causes of war. We claim that war is nothing but the clashing of economic rivalries over such things as markets, private property issues, trade routes and spheres of influence. Of course, the capitalists of various nations are always quarrelling over such things, but once in a while these items cannot be resolved peacefully. When such a time comes, wars begin. We claim that wars are therefore fought for the capitalist class interests and do not, in any way, benefit the working class. Therefore, we oppose all wars during peacetime and wartime. We also claim that the only way to end wars is to end capitalism.

Now that we have presented a brief outline on our position to war, we would like to take this opportunity to give the capitalist class and its supporters a chance to present their views in our journal (something that they almost never grant us in their publications).

1. Rear Admiral French E. Chadwick, U.S.N.

"Navies and armies are insurance for capital owned abroad by the leisure class of a nation/ It is for them that empires and spheres of influence exist. The great war now waging is a culmination of efforts to maintain and extend these spheres." 

(NY Evening Post, Dec. 17, 1915)

2.  Lammot duPont

"War is caused by economic and political rivalries."

(NY Herald Tribune, Nov. 19, 1934)

3. National Hughes Alliance Declaration, issued in 1916, signed by two ex-Presidenta, T. Roosevelt and Wm. Howard Taft and 25 leading bankers and captains of industry.

"Our business is business. We are producers, manufacturers and traders, without sufficient home demands to absorb the full yield of fields and the output of factories, Year by year it becomes more apparent that the markets of the world must be kept open to American industries.

We cannot extend our trade further than we are able to defend it. The rivalries that begin in commerce end on the battlefields. The history of war is green with international jealousies. Whatever the diplomatic excuse, every conflict in modern times had its origin in the question of property rights."

4.  Institutions magazine

"This is more than war of mechanical monsters clashing in the night . . .  more than a war of production. It is a war for markets—YOUR markets! The Axis wants your business—wants to destroy it once and for all."

(Quoted from a Treasury Department Ad placed in Institutions magazine, April 1943. Ad was captioned, "The Axis Wants Your Business")

5. Bernard M. Baruch

"Before I go any further in this expression of my views, I think it wise to remind you gentlemen of the fact that wars are not fought merely for immediate results. Each participant makes an effort to impose his will upon his enemies by military and economic destruction. But at the same time he keeps in mind the after results—new markets, new trade and new intercourse, always at the expense of the defeated and neutrals."

(Senate Comm., NY Times, April 7, 1939)

6. David Lawrence

"It makes one shudder to think what the sudden outbreak of peace might mean to the American economy."

(NY Sun, April 5, 1949)

7. George F. Taubeneck

"If you are one of those domestic-minded businessmen who are unimpressed with this view (that prosperity hinges on foreign trade) ponder for a bit the thinking of a gentleman who ought to know about such things. . . .  He is R.W. Gifford, vice-president and assistant general manager of Norge Division, Borg-Warner Corp., and chairman of the board of Borg-Warner International Corp.

He'll tell you in just ten words why he considers foreign trade important to this country: Because "all wars are basically economic" and because "we actually need the business."

(from 'Inside Dope' from Air Conditioning and Refrigeration News, Dec. 9, 1946.)

8. Woodrow Wilson

"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."

(as quoted in The Forging of the American Empire by S. Lens, 1971)

9. U.S. NAVY

"Realistically, all wars have been for economic reasons. To make them politically palatable, idealogical issues have always been provoked.

Any possible future war will undoubtedly conform to historical precedent.

Present differences with our world neighbors, naow in the diplomatic stage, we can hope can be kept there. But after all, war is merely diplomacy by force of arms."

(official document distributed by Office of Naval Intell. to U.S. Senate Comm, on Armed Services-April 15, 1947)

So, there you have it. The real causes of war, straight from the capitalist class and its supporters. Remember, the next time we have a war for "making the world safe for democracy" or for "to end all wars," that the real reason is not these idealogical phrases, but instead conflicts for the benefit of the capitalists and their markets.

Let's end wars by ending the system that creates wars. Join the World Socialist Party, Now!

Why you need a Socialist Party (1992)

From issue 9 of the World Socialist Review

Presently, everything we humans need to live is locked up tightly under the control of investors who accumulate capital (capitalists)—people who can deny everyone else access to “survival goods.” Because they have this power, they can force as many people as market conditions will allow to work for them, at rates they set low enough to allow them a profit on their investments. If the state does the investing and controls the capital, then the state is the capitalist; it all comes to the same thing. The owners and controllers of capital monopolize the production of virtually everything useful or enjoyable (wealth), which economists facelessly describe as “goods and services.”

This monopolization creates two classes of people—capitalists and workers. Anyone who works for a living—blue-collar, white-collar or professional—is a worker (whether this fits the currently fashionable image or not). Although not all workers produce wealth, the conditions prevailing in the factories, on the land, in transportation, set the standard for conditions elsewhere in the system. Workers alone produce wealth, and employment is just an evolved form of slavery.

Capitalists have to stay in business. This means they need to keep their costs down and their profit opportunities maximal. They must pay their employees the least amount they calculate will keep them alive; and their system allows the use of a "sliding scale" of valuation which gives them the right to pay employees as close to nothing as they can get away with, providing this is compatible with the maintenance of a profit-producing workforce.

Workers have to stay alive. This means they need to keep their earnings as high as they can and to maximize their purchasing power as consumers. If they don’t bother to draw their own conclusions about being forced into such a position, they will at least manage to respond to the initiatives taken by their employers; by organizing into unions, they can, when the economy is expanding, enforce the terms of their maintenance that capitalism normally requires in the abstract.

The attempt by employers to drive wages or salaries down below the survival minimum is part of a process we call “exploitation.” The driving mechanism of the process is the quest for profit, which requires producing the greatest possible surplus over workers’ needs at any given time. We say “producing” because it is in the sector of wealth production that the most direct and explicit form of exploitation occurs. But employment in general is exploitation, even where workers produce no direct wealth themselves.

The result of a system based on these two all-inclusive sets of conflicting needs is an unending and often vicious struggle between the two classes (the class struggle). All political conflicts, based on this premise, form part of the same evil tree— all of them ultimately generated by the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Ownership of the means of producing wealth requires no work, and work—in any sector of the economy—implies no control over the system in any of its parts.

What is the solution?

Obviously, this state of affairs could go on forever—conditions permitting, which is arguable all by itself—if workers (a) either tamely submitted to their enslavement or (b) actively "improved” its quality

by organizing against their employers. The only way out of the whole vicious cycle is to eliminate its basis, the use of capital.

How do you do that? Abstractly speaking, on the one hand, by transferring ownership and control of the means of wealth production to the community at large, so that all who ask for what they need can give it directly to themselves. (This implies a democratically controlled administration, naturally; see below.)

More concretely, enough workers to constitute a majority of the population remove the obligation of obtaining money for the things they need, based on the work they perform. They abolish the wages system. If everyone, as the community, disposes of a common ownership over the means of creating useful and/or enjoyable effects, no one can have power over others in that community.

Why the working class?

Because capitalism has triumphed worldwide, eliminating all competing systems of wealth production, it has consequently consolidated the struggles between exploiters and exploited into one between capitalists and workers. No other social classes are left anymore. Workers are almost all the people there are in the world. Businessmen constitute the remainder. By eliminating capital altogether—which rests squarely on the payment of wages, salaries and other types of payment for services rendered—workers in effect constitute a new form of society. Only they can do this; to their employers (and anyone using employer-logic) the whole idea sounds perfectly insane.

Getting there

The working class needs first of all—schematically speaking—to gain control of both the machinery of state and the world of work. A socialist party cannot help it do the latter, but— once workers realize the need to carry out this purpose—such a party is the best vehicle available for accomplishing the former.

Why gain control of the state? Because it is a command center for the economy, easily converted into a “war machine” for defeating working class initiatives aimed at wresting control from the capitalist class. It is a strategic line of retreat that can otherwise save the day for the capitalist class when all else seems lost. Capitalism is replete with instances of the military taking control of the state to tide over the system for indefinite “emergencies,” when workers get too close. Workers do, however, operate the system to a degree that has become virtually total. Economically they are already dominant within the capitalist system, but of course the capital-accumulating class denies them the political control that should go with that.

Workers need to pursue this goal very single-mindedly. Less than the system itself will not suffice: leaving “parts” of it intact will only force it to adapt itself to the change of rules imposed on it, largely at working class insistence. Basing an economy on payment for goods and services— specifically, on the payment of wages and salaries—itself must go, or we will never be rid of the beast.

Any organization failing to recognize this will never enjoy real or lasting success in seeking to promote goals it sees as opposed to the effects or the operations of capitalism. A socialist party cannot therefore allow itself to pursue other objectives than the replacement of restricted access to goods and services with the objective of free access, which means it can only seek the abolition of the wages system. It must oppose all other goals and those who espouse them; the logic of its very existence requires this.

Why a socialist party?

What people in different countries around the globe should seek to accomplish through their respective socialist parties, as an immediate goal, is to place everything related to the production of anything useful or enjoyable—wealth—in the hands of the community—not the state. This includes distribution from the places where wealth is created to the places where it is used, with the community being made up of everyone without distinction of race or sex: each person having the same right to decide and procure what he or she needs. This arrangement implies the lack of necessity for money or for any other sort of bartering device, and the consequent lack of a basis for the institutions related to exchange—banks, insurance companies, governments and states; of everything, including legislation, designed to force people to do things.

Making it happen

We live under a pernicious system that denies and punishes our best instincts as community animals. Either we can all wait until crisis conditions get so terrible that a confused collision (and possibly an explosively destructive one) between capitalism and reality forces everybody to recognize the benefits of common ownership; or we can do things as befits our human intelligence and organize to secure these benefits, restricting the pain of an enforced transition to our thought processes. We could all permit ourselves the luxury of betting on the luck of posterity, or we could make the change now ourselves while our chances of success remain optimal.

One cannot expect parties and groups committed to partial solutions (reforms) or indirect expedients (workers' states, minority led revolutions and the like) to know how to deal with the problem. As a socialist, you can work for an outcome that is a real possibility—although in the process you will find yourself opposed to these other promotions (and if you don’t realize it at the outset, the other parties and groups will waste no time in disabusing you).

Organizing for socialism—joining the World Socialist Party in this country—therefore implies your understanding of what socialism is and of what is required to achieve it, as well as a firm commitment to avoid embracing or endorsing any partial solutions to the crises of capitalism. While this is certainly not to everyone’s taste, adopting this rule is the only way to build a movement that really will have the eventual ability to act at the critical moment: when the working class, in a mood of historic revulsion, will finally move to end a system that only causes it pain, that trades it poverty for comfort, privileges for equality and slavery for freedom. 

Propaganda War (1992)

From issue 9 of the World Socialist Review