Letter: Socialism and the Abolition of the State (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and the Abolition of the State

Dear Editors.

In a brief article on page 106 of the June Socialist Standard we read: "Socialists are not pacifists. If. at the time of the establishment of a socialist society, the overwhelmingly socialist majority were confronted by a recalcitrant pro-capitalist minority intent on sabotage and violence, we would have no compunction in using whatever force was necessary to suppress them"

This, however, appears to contradict the view expressed in the reply to Lynn Stabler in the April Socialist Standard. In the section headed "Counter Revolutions" we find: "Will socialism need to use the state machine to combat a counter-revolution, begun perhaps by former members of the ruling class? The answer, in a word, is no'". Apart from the fact that "Socialism", like any other abstraction, is incapable of using anything - Men make history" how. as "Marxists", do you square this latter view with Marx's own comments on the subject. as exampled in a letter to Domela Nieuwenhuis dated February 22. 1881:

One thing you can at any rate be sure of: a socialist government does not come into power in a country unless conditions are so developed that it can above all take the necessary measures for intimidating the mass of the bourgeoisie.

The working class must be in a position to dictate the terms of its own emancipation by using, if necessary, coercive force against those who would stand in its way. After all. as the Communist Manifesto proclaims, what else is political power but the power of one class to suppress another? That this transitory coercive power would recede, "wither away", as the danger of counter-revolution receded, "withered away", was. I assumed, the viewpoint of the SPGB. For instance, in the April 1979 Socialist Standard in an article reviewing, pointedly. Plekhanov's Anarchism and Socialism, we read: "The State will not be abolished; it will wither away, like an uprooted weed"

However, in a back page article in the October 1984 Socialist Standard this view was briskly dismissed: "Having gained control of the state machine for the sole purpose of democratically dispossessing the capitalist minority, the state will be abolished immediately” Before the triumphant working class could use political power, apparently.

At a meeting in September 1985 in Glasgow your speaker was emphatic that the transitory rule of the working class, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. was an outdated concept. His basic view can, justly, be summarised as follows: "If the proletariat becomes the ruling class over whom will it rule?"

Curiously enough the direct reply to this question which, of course, was raised against Marx in Statism and Anarchy by Michael Bakunin, can be found in the March 1983 Socialist Standard. Although the question is rephrased in the article, the reply to question 13 in the supposed "interview" with Marx is composed mainly of Marx's attempt to answer Bakunin. However, as the writer of the article suggests, the reader would do well to check the precise answers, in this case Fernbach's translation in The First International and After (Penguin. 1974). It will be seen that Marx's references to the proletariat's use of forcible means" (p. 333) and to "general means of coercion" (p. 335) have been omitted from his "reply" in the Socialist Standard.

In the same issue, in the article "Lenin's Legacy", you quote, correctly from a letter by Engels to van Pappen dated April 18. 1883:

With the disappearance of an exclusively wealth-possessing minority there also disappears the necessity for the power of armed suppression, or state power.

But why stop here? Why not continue with the sentence immediately following?

At the same time, however, it was always our view that in order to attain this and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organised power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organise society anew.

And, as a rejoinder to the predecessors of the "modern" SPGB, Engels continues:

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state.

Engels goes on to add that the state may require "considerable alterations", then adds the vital point:

But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.

And, Engels adds, concerning the "immediate abolition of the state":

Does it require my express assurance that Marx opposed this anarchist nonsense from the first day it was put forward in its present form by Bakunin?

And. as self-professed "Marxists'. how do you explain away Marx's biting and incisively sardonic comments in the never-ending debate with the petty-bourgeois anarchists?

If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe, for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form ("Political Indifferentism", see The First International and After, p. 328)

Yours sincerely.

Davie Donaldson

Glasgow G20

Reply:

If we have understood him correctly, our correspondent is suggesting that in our attitude towards the abolition of the state we commit the heresy of departing from the sacred texts of Marx and Engels. He attributes to us the same view as that held by the anarchist Bakunin and criticised by Engels, "that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state". But we have never expressed this view.

The passage in the October 1984 Socialist Standard — "having gained control of the state machine for the sole purpose of democratically dispossessing the capitalist minority, the state will be abolished immediately' — which our correspondent cites to back up his case does not bear such an interpretation, as he himself recognises by his comment "before the triumphant working class could use political power, apparently" This is indeed only an appearance due to the faulty grammatical construction of the sentence. Our correspondent is just as well aware as we are that the sentence means; after the state machine has been captured and used for the sole purpose of democratically dispossessing the capitalist minority, it is then immediately abolished.

Before going into the views of Marx and Engels, let us state our own position as clearly as possible. We advocate that socialism should be established by the democratic, political action of a socialist-minded working class. The establishment of socialism, as the establishment of common ownership in place of class ownership, necessarily involves depriving the capitalist class of the monopoly control they currently exercise over the means of production. As this is not something they can be expected to welcome, it will have to be imposed on them and it is in order to do this that the socialist majority must first gain control of the "general means of coercion", the "organised political power of the state". After considerably altering it. the socialist majority uses the power of the state to impose the democratically-expressed will for common ownership on the capitalist class, employing "forcible means" if necessary as a last resort. Having done this — having taken political action to dispossess the capitalist class and establish common ownership — the socialist majority then immediately abolishes the state since a society of common ownership has no need for a "power of armed suppression" but only for an unarmed democratic administration. In this sense socialism entails the immediate abolition, and not the gradual decline, of the state.

Socialism is a society without a state — without any special organ of repression — because it is a society without exploitation and class conflict. This is why the only possible answer to the question "will socialism need to use the state machine to combat a counter-revolution, begun perhaps by former members of the ruling class7" is "No, because there will no longer be any state machine in socialism" Hence our reply to the letter in this April's Socialist Standard, which of course went on to explain that it would be very unlikely, once socialism had been established, that anybody would want to return to capitalist class society, let alone be able to organise a violent conspiracy to this end

Though of course we are not bound by everything Marx and Engels may have said, they were in the same political tradition as us and. as can be seen from the quotes our correspondent cites, did take up a basically similar position to ours on this question. There is one very important difference however: being active in the relatively undeveloped political and economic conditions of the 19th century they envisaged a prolonged period before the final establishment of socialism during which the working class would be exercising political power to revolutionise society. Hence their use of terms such as "dictatorship of the proletariat", "socialist government", "revolutionary dictatorship". "working class rule" as various alternative ways of describing the exercise of political power by the working class against the capitalist class during this period. If we reject these terms today, it is not because we reject using political power against the capitalist class but because we do not believe that any prolonged period of revolutionary social reorganisation is now necessary; in fact the dispossession of the capitalist class can now be carried out as a single, short, sharp revolutionary act.

But if Marx and Engels considered that a relatively extended period of exercise of working class political power would be necessary — a position which in our view has become outdated — they were always clear that, at the end of this period when a classless society of common ownership has been established — the state would be immediately abolished or. as Engels once put it. the state would have virtually died out (absterben, sometimes also translated as "wither away") In other words, there was no question of the state continuing on into socialist society. Socialist society would be a society without a state, without a "special repressive force" as Engels put it.

The metaphor of "dying out” — which has been twisted into meaning that the state would gradually "wither away" within socialism rather than before it was established — has also become inappropriate. not that it really ever was appropriate (since it is clear that the state cannot just die out of its own accord, only the need for it can; the state machine itself has to be consciously dismantled, abolished). We never use it except when summarising the views of writers like Plekhanov

Editors.

Socialism & the State. (1910)

From the December 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist propagandist is often confronted with the assertion that the establishment of a system of Socialism would involve the subjection of the individual to a hide-bound State, that would eventually result in the enslavement of the people. 

The Socialist, on the contrary, asserts that the working class are enslaved to-day, and that only the establishment of Socialism can effect their emancipation.

The individualist attacks Socialism from the standpoint that the proposed change simply means the continuation of the present wage-system of production, in which the whole of the wealth of society shall be owned by a number of persons incorporated into a State or bureaucracy, instead of being, as at present, owned by private individuals. He maintains that the right of the individual is supreme, and condemns any action on the part of a State or collection of individuals, that interferes with his desires.

Since correct understanding implies correct interpretation of terms used, and the point revolves upon the meaning of the term “slave”, I will preface my remarks with such a definition. 

A slave is one who is owned by or controlled by another; one who is compelled to labour to satisfy the wants of another. 

The chattel-slave originally was a prisoner of war, whose life was at the disposal of his owner. He was allowed to live in order that he might produce more wealth, or greater satisfaction, for his owner, than could be obtained from his death, his owner, of course, providing him with the food, clothing and shelter necessary to keep him in a fit condition.

Later on in the development of society we find the serf, who was compelled to labour for a certain period for his lord, the remainder of his time being at his own disposal for the purpose of providing himself and his family with the necessaries of life.

To-day the worker, in order to live, is compelled to labour for a certain period. He receives, however, but a portion of the wealth created. Out of the wealth he has produced he receives (according to Mr. Chiozza Money [who estimates the wealth produced at £4. 5s. per week per family of five, while the average amount received by a working class family of five is shown to be 25s . per week] and other capitalist statisticians) about one-third. That is to say that if he produces goods to the value of £3, he receives as a wage £1, his master taking the remainder.

While there may be a difference in degree in those different forms of exploitation, the principle still remains. The under-dog is compelled to labour for the purpose of producing something to satisfy the wants of others who, holding the things necessary for his life, thereby control him. He is, therefore, still a slave.

The principle would remain if the working class was compelled to work for a State instead of for individual employers. If the whole of the wealth and the means of production are owned by a State and the worker receives a wage, then slavery is not abolished, but is intensified.

The worker to-day, while compelled to work for a master, still has some sort of a choice among those masters, but with the State as the only employer he is compelled to work for that employer and under that employer’s conditions, or take the only alternative and starve. State Capitalism would intensify slavery, but State Capitalism is not Socialism.

Our individualist opponent, if a toiler, is subject to others. Others have the power to say when he shall work and when he shall starve, how he shall work and under what conditions. His life and action are determined largely by his spending capacity; by the extent of his wage. He cannot do as he would wish because he is bound to the bench or to the counter. The greater part of his life is occupied by laborious toil or petty business – toil and worry and anxiety in the interest of others. He is robbed by the capitalist employer and oppressed by the capitalist State.

And what is this State? Merely representative of the dominant class; the class in power, whose interest lies in an opposite direction to the interest of the workers. 

The State is merely the force that enables the working class to subject the working class.

Large  bodies of drilled and armed men are only necessary where the greater number of the people are subject to the few, and those civil and military forces necessary to control the oppressed and exploited class are the “State”.

The State grew up at a certain stage of economic development with the growth of classes, and when the classes are abolished the State will go too. Socialism means no State.

The propertyless have no “rights” under capitalism — not even the right to live. Far from being in any way free they are the property, to all intents and purposes, of the propertied class. Our opponents have been misled by the so-called friends of the worker — the municipal-cum-nationaliser — by the pet theory of the Fabian, who holds that the “government of the future must be by experts”, with the Fabians, of course, as the experts.

Those who read of the conditions of the people of Peru, prior to its conquest by the Spaniards, will find therein many points of resemblance to the proposed bureaucracy of the Fabians.

The Peruvian State was not capitalism: goods being produced, not for sale, but for consumption by the people. Take the following from Prescott (p. 56):

“The Peruvian Government watched with unwearied solicitude over its subjects, provided for their physical necessities, was mindful of their morals, and showed throughout the affectionate concern of a parent for his children, who were never to act or think for themselves, but whose whole duty was comprehended in the obligation of implicit obedience”.

And on page 26 we are told “Industry was publicly commended and stimulated by rewards”.

Compare this with the following from Fabian Essays (1908 edition) under the heading of “Socialism and the State” (p. 163).

“Out of the value of the communal produce must come, rent of land payable to the local authority, rent of plant needed for working the industries, wages advanced and fixed in the usual way, taxes, reserve fund, accumulation fund, and the other charges necessary for the carrying on of the communal business. All these deducted, the remaining value should be divided among the communal workers as a bonus . . . 

"If there is one vice more than another that will be unpopular under Socialism it is laziness.”

In Peru, we are told (Prescott, p. 26) “Occupation was found for all, from the child of five to the aged matron not too infirm to hold a distaff, no one was allowed to eat the bread of idleness in Peru”.

Well may working-men who have studied the conditions of present-day capitalism resent the proposals of the “State Socialist” with his grandmotherly legislative enactments. Such a change as is proposed by him would indeed mean slavery, and would throw the propertyless class still deeper in the mire of social degradation.

The Government of the Incas was in spirit truly patriarchal since “the task imposed upon him was always proportioned to his strength, he had seasons of rest and refreshment and was well protected against the inclemency of the weather”, and “every care was shown for his personal safety”. Yet the greater number of people in Peru were slaves, and slaves of such a type that the conditions of to-day are preferable to those who, recognising the evils of wage-slavery under which they exist, are trying to find a way out. True the people were kept in subjection by the superstition that the Inca was a supreme being, a descendant of the sun, and they blindly worshipped him as omnipotent. They were prepared to toil for his benefit and for the benefit of his nobles.

But is the superstition of the Fabian worshipper in any way preferable? To blindly worship the State and toil to support the supposed experts in control (for we are told [Fabian Essays, p. 164] that it is probable that the “captains of Industry will be more highly paid than the rank and file of the industrial army”) is as great an error, as foolish a superstition, as to worship the sun and its supposed descendants.

The worker must be forced to realise that to effect his emancipation he must discard  all superstition and must refuse to be led and bossed by self-styled “superior persons”. He must understand that in order to obtain the best of things necessary for life, with the least expenditure of energy he must organise with his fellows.

Individual production is played out. Without doubt the best results are to be obtained by social production. All the evil is caused by that co-operation ending with production, and the wealth, socially produced, being owned by a small section of the community. We cannot go back to individual production, nor is it desirable. What must ultimately come is a system wherein wealth shall be socially produced and collectively owned by the producers, who shall say in what way and in what quantity it shall be produced.

In brief, the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth must be owned and controlled by the whole working community.

Twel.

William Godwin, Shelley and Communism (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over a hundred and fifty years ago died William Godwin, author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, one of the seminal works in Britain of radical criticism of existing class society. Godwin had been born in 1756, the son of a nonconformist preacher, as he himself had been for a few years before coming to see through religion as untrue. The first edition of his Political Justice appeared in 1793, his contribution to the ferment of social and political ideas sparked off by the French Revolution, then still in progress. In 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneer feminist work, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin was also the author of a number of novels expressing his views, one of which—Caleb Williams—has been a television serial. In addition his Of Population, written in 1820, was the classic contemporary refutation of the nonsense peddled by Malthus.

Godwin has been described as a “utilitarian anarchist”. This is not an unfair description since he was very much in the Age of Reason philosophical tradition which saw humans as isolated individuals pursuing happiness as a measurable quantity and he could be described as an anarchist insofar as he looked forward to the “euthanasia of government”.

In Political Justice Godwin set out to examine what form of society would have to be established to conform to the principles of justice as laid down by Reason. Defining government as “regulated force”, he came to the conclusion that this would have to be “a simple form of society without government”. What he envisaged was the division of a country like Britain into self-administrating districts which would run their own affairs without the need for laws, or prisons, or “regulated force” in any form and which would send delegates to a central confederal assembly in the rare event of any situation requiring co-ordinated action on a national scale. It is this proposal for a “society without government” that has led to anarchists regarding him as one of their forebears.

But Godwin was not simply an advocate of a society without government. He was also an advocate of “equality of conditions”, “a state of equal society” as he called it. “Equality of conditions”, he wrote, “or, in other words, an equal admission to the means of improvement and pleasure, is a law rigorously enjoined upon mankind by the voice of justice” (All quotes are from 1976 Pelican Classic edition). His argument went as follows:

Human beings are partakers of a common nature; what conduces to the benefit or pleasure of one man will conduce to the benefit or pleasure of another. Hence it follows, upon the principles of equal and impartial justice, that the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.

In every society, the produce, the means of contributing to the necessities and conveniences of its members, is of a certain amount. In every society, the bulk at least of its members contribute by their personal exertions to the creation of this produce. What can be more desirable and just than that the produce itself should, with some degree of equality, be shared among them?

This was a familiar argument with advocates of an equal society in place of existing unequal class society. It led some of them to advocate “a community of goods to be maintained by the vigilance of the state” as Godwin described one such proposal current in his day. Naturally, as an advocate of a society without government, he strongly rejected this speaking of “how pernicious the consequences would be if government were to take the whole permanently into their hands, and dispense to every man his daily bread”.

What, then, did he propose? How did he envisage goods being distributed in his “free and equal state of society”? Here a misunderstanding has sometimes arisen due to the fact that, in Book VIII (“Of Property”), Godwin defends a right to property. He distinguishes three “degrees” of property. The first is property in the goods an individual uses personally. The second is property in the product of an individual’s own labour. The third is property which entitles the beneficiary to appropriate the labour of others.

For Godwin, this third type of property was unjust as it involves exploitation:

All wealth, in a state of civilised society, is the produce of human industry. To be rich is merely to possess a patent entitling one man to dispose of the produce of another man’s industry.

Privilege entitles a favoured few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons.

This “monopoly of property”, exercised by both landlords and capitalists (Godwin actually uses the term), should simply be abolished by the state ceasing to uphold it. The other two types of property should remain inviolate. Nobody, neither another person nor the community, had a right to deprive a person of their personal effects nor the produce of their own labour. This is where the misunderstanding has arisen, with some misinterpreting this defence of a right to property as meaning that Godwin was not a “communist” but merely a “leveller”, somebody who did not want to abolish property but merely to equalise property holdings within the framework of a commodity society.

But this was not at all what Godwin meant. For although he argued that no-one, not even the community as a whole, had the right forcibly to deprive someone of the product of their own labour, he argued equally forcefully that it was the duty of everyone to make available to other people the products of their labour over and above their own needs. In other words, instead of selling their surplus produce for money and accumulating wealth from the proceeds, they ought to make it available free for other people to satisfy their needs. Godwin did not go into the practical details of how this would work but he was quite clear that buying and selling would not enter into it. Discussing the division of labour, he wrote:

Shall each man manufacture his tools, furniture and accommodations? This would perhaps be a tedious operation. Every man performs the task to which he is accustomed, more skilfully, and in a shorter time than another. It is reasonable that you should make for me that which perhaps I should be three or four times as long in making, and should make imperfectly at last. Shall we then introduce barter and exchange? By no means. The moment I require any further reason for supplying you than the cogency of your claim, the moment, in addition to the dictates of benevolence, I demand a prospect of reciprocal advantage to myself, there is an end to that political justice and pure society of which we treat.

And in The Enquirer, a collection of essays he published in 1797, he was even more explicit:

Were the members of any community sufficiently upright and disinterested, I might supply my neighbour with the corn he wanted, and he supply me with the cloth of which I was in need, without having recourse to the grovelling and ungenerous methods of barter and sale. We might supply each other for this reason only, because one party had a superfluity and the other a want, without in the smallest degree adverting to a reciprocal bounty to be by this method engendered; and we might depend upon the corresponding upright and disinterested affections of the other members of the community, for the being in like manner supplied with the commodities of which we were in want.

So Godwin resolved the problem of who, in his “free and equal state of society”, was to distribute goods according to people’s needs by saying that it would be the producers of particular goods of their own free will. His equal society was to be a “spontaneous equality of conditions” not an enforced one. Although he did not use the term “communism” (which was not then in use) or even that of” community of goods”—in fact, to tell the truth, he was too much in the individualist tradition to have used such terminology—his system was equivalent to what might be called a “voluntary” communism (as opposed to one “maintained by the vigilance of the state”). For, if we assume that the producers deposit the surplus over their needs of their particular product in some general storehouse from which they can take the products of other producers that they need, then we have the classic distribution system proposed by previous pre-industrial communists such as Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley.

Although the social change Godwin advocated—the euthanasia of government and the abolition of “the monopoly of property”—was a radical one, the method by which he saw this coming about—the slow and gradual “progress of the human mind”—was in stark contrast and led him to oppose any kind of organised political action to further the cause of an equal society. In fact the only kind of organised activity he would accept were philosophical debating societies. In this sense, Godwin was a classical armchair philosopher. However, as often happens in such cases, his radical social criticism was taken up by others who did not share his qualms about political action.

One of those to be influenced by Godwin’s ideas was the poet Shelley, who the previous year had been expelled from Oxford University for producing an atheist pamphlet. Shelley came across Godwin’s works at the age of 18 and was very impressed. He was eventually to marry Godwin’s daughter who, among things, wrote the original Frankenstein story.

So impressed was Shelley by Godwin’s proposals for a new society in which people would be motivated by “disinterestedness” rather than selfishness that he set out to express them in verse, in a long poem called Queen Mab which he published privately in 1813. This is a vision of the past, present and future of mankind. In it Shelley attacks kings, war, commerce and, in particular, priests and religion. In fact the criticism of christianity, in the poem as well as in prose notes attached to it was so hard-hitting that when it was republished in the 1820s the publisher was sent to prison for blasphemy. Queen Mab became the work that publishers used in defiance of the restrictive press laws of the time. Each time they were convicted of blasphemy. But as a result Queen Mab, and thus Godwin’s social ideas, came to be widely read in Chartist and radical circles.

In part V of Queen Mab Shelley attacks commerce which he sees as a product of selfishness in the sense of people wanting to sell their surplus for money rather than give it to others to satisfy their needs:

Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange

Of all that human art or nature yield;

Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand,

And natural kindness hasten to supply

From the full fountain of its boundless love,

For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.

Commerce! Beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But Poverty and Wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

To pining famine and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned, body and soul, scarce drags the chain,

That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind,

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:

Before whose image bow the vulgar great,

The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests and kings,

And with blind feelings reverence the power

That grinds them to the dust of misery.

But in the temple of their hireling hearts

Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn

All earthly things but virtue.

Later Shelley continues his criticism:

All things are sold: the very light of Heaven

Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love,

The smallest and most despicable of things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep,

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the laws allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man,

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively,

Are bought and sold as in a public mart

Of undisguising selfishness, that sets

On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign,

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.

It is quite clear that Shelley was expressing Godwin’s idea that, in a just society, producers would give away their surplus produce free rather than sell it for money, Hence his opening description of commerce as “the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yield; which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, and natural kindness hasten to supply”. When he later describes what will happen when people are motivated by the “consciousness of good” he naturally states that they will have no need of “mediative signs of selfishness”—of money—and that “every transfer of the earth’s natural gifts shall be a commerce of good words and works”.

This commerce of sincerest virtue needs

No mediative signs of selfishness,

No jealous intercourse of wretched gain,

No balancings of prudence, cold and long;

In just and equal measure all is weighed,

One scale contains the sum of human weal,

And one, the good man’s heart.

Part V of Queen Mab ends as follows:

But hoary-headed Selfishness has felt

Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave:

A brighter morn awaits the human day,

When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts

Shall be a commerce of good words and works;

When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,

The fear of infamy, disease and woe,

War with its million horrors, and fierce hell

Shall live but in the memory of Time,

Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,

Look back, and shudder at his younger years.

It is only by completely ignoring these passages that Paul Foot is able to claim in Red Shelley (1980) that “Shelley was not a socialist. Shelley was a leveller”. Shelley, at least at this time, was just as much an advocate of a “spontaneous equality of conditions” that amounted to a voluntary moneyless communism as was Godwin.

In one sense this argument as to whether or not Godwin and Shelley were socialists is anachronistic since the modern idea of socialism, as the solution to the problems of a majority wage-working class within a capitalist industrial society, had not yet come into being. This is partly why in this article we have used the word “communist” rather than “socialist” to describe the moneyless equal society advocated by critics of the essentially agrarian class society that existed before industrial capitalism developed. It was of course the low level of development of the means of production that accounts for the frugal, even Spartan, character which the pre-industrial communists were obliged to give to the egalitarian society they advocated, but it still remains true that people like (in England) More, Winstanley and Godwin and Shelley and (in France) Morelly, Babeuf and Buonarotti were forerunners of the socialist industrial society of abundance that we modern socialists now advocate.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: The State and Socialism (1966)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is an underlying principle of State activity that human life and liberty are minor considerations compared with the rights and safety of property. This is no new discovery. Today the fact is so glaring that it seems idle to dwell upon it. Yet it is no mere wartime principle; it arises from the very nature of the capitalist State. That State mainly exists in order to provide the force to guarantee the rights and emoluments of property to the possessors. The origin of the State was in the necessities of the institution of property. Today its predominate function is that of the armed forces of repression. In essence it has always been an armed policeman. The State and its chief function is necessitated by the antagonism of interests, the division of the people into oppressors and oppressed, propertied and propertyless, brought about by the institution of private property. It cannot live longer than the system that is based on properly. With the reabsorbtion of property into social ownership the repressive State will disappear. As a State it will die out. In its stead will arise the administration of things in common for the common weal. These are truisms to every Socialist, but how completely are most workers deluded into believing that the State exists to protect their lives, liberties and happiness. Yet the lessons have been both numerous and conclusive. Despite the veil of hypocrisy that has been thrown over the facts, they are, and always have, been plainly visible to all who have eyes to see.

[From the Socialist Standard, March 1916.]

Socialism and Industrial Unionism (1932)

From the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have been asked to reply to a criticism of the article, “Socialism and Industrial Organisation,” (see the May issue of the Socialist Standard, which appears in the July issue of the Revolutionary Socialist. Criticism, to be effective, must at least be accurate. My critic commences with the misstatement of the title of my article, which dealt with the general question of industrial organisation and not specially with “Industrial Unionism,” whether of the I.W. W. or the W.I.I.U. brand. The article did, it is true, refer to the failure of the S.L..P. to bring to birth in this country the body of which it was supposed to be the “political reflex”; but the main part of the article dealt with actual organisations, i.e., the factory committees. It showed, by quoting concrete detailed evidence, that attempts on the part of these bodies to supersede the Trade Unions had failed both in this and other countries.

The factory committees, elected in the main by non-Socialists, were as incapable as the Trade Unions of emancipating the workers from capitalist control. They were not based upon an understanding of the class struggle, and, like the Trade Unions, were found to be ready to assist the masters to carry on the existing system of exploitation once certain minor concessions had been granted.

Yet, in spite of this experience, the B.S.I.S.L.P. can think of nothing better to do than call upon workers to repeat the attempt to erect “shop committees . . . separate and apart from the Trade Unions” (see editorial article, p. 5). That they are merely camouflaged anarchists is made evident on p. 6, where their platform calls for “the abolition of the State” (para. 5). The present writer does not profess to be able to improve upon the masterly exposition of the scientific view of this aspect of the matter contained in Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (p. 87, Whitehead Library). There he shows that so far from being abolished the State must be used by the workers in order to accomplish the supreme revolutionary act, i.e., their emancipation. After that it will die out.

Eric Boden

Letters: Is there a “middle class”? (1998)

Letters to the Editors from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is there a “middle class”?

Dear Editors,

I have read with great interest your new pamphlet The Market System Must Go! on “why reformism doesn’t work” and admire the style with which you present usually obscure economic topics in a readily understandable way. I should like to comment on one of these–the distribution of wealth–dealt with in Chapter 7.

Here you explain how in modern capitalism ownership of the means of production takes the form of legal rights to claim unearned income from stocks and shares, interest-bearing bank and building society accounts, government bonds and National Savings, (perhaps rents could be added to this list?). You demonstrate the grossly unequal distribution of this income-producing wealth using tables from Social Trends published by the Central Statistical Office. These can be arranged to show that in 1992 the top 5 percent owned 53 percent of investment capital, the next 20 percent owned 29 percent and the last 75 percent owned 18 percent.

In my view these figures are slightly misleading as although they exclude the value of dwellings, they do include household goods and personal items–such as cars–which make up such a large proportion of “working-class” wealth. On the other hand the top one percent “hold more of their wealth in shares than in any other form”. (Social Trends 1996 p. 111). This reinforces the socialist case that the largest concentration of ownership of the means of production is in the hands of a small minority of the population, and the working-class majority own a very small amount of investment capital–probably in the form of modest building society or National Savings accounts.

But what about the middle group, shown here as 20 percent of the adult population owning 29 percent of investment capital?

These make up what is generally regarded as the “middle class”, except by the Socialist Party who maintain that there are only two classes–the owners of the means of production and the wage or salary earning working class. For example, in the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard, the now defunct Class War is stated to have made “one crucial error in their class analysis. Instead of a two-class society–owners and workers, they had three”. Evidently Class War (whose publications I have not read) made many errors, but this was not one of them–the three-class analysis conforms more closely to reality than the two-class model of the Socialist Party.

In the above table the population is split at 75 percent because a scrutiny of the relevant Inland Revenue statistics indicates that below this point the average holding of investment capital or “savings” (excluding dwellings, household and personal goods) does not reach £16,000–the point at which eligibility for any Social Security benefit is disqualified. For the 20 percent, this £16,000 minimum (it increased rapidly up the population scale) produces significant unearned income, but not enough to live on. The individual is forced to seek employment as a wage or salary earner, and it is this dual relationship to the means of production–as significant investor and as employee–that defines the middle class and is the economic basis for this class.

The Socialist Party’s view that the middle class are simply the “better off” working class implies that they have an identity of interest with the 75 percent wage-earning majority. While this may be true in the long-term perspective of a future socialist society, it is far from the case now. As the middle class derive an income from their “stake” in the ownership of the means of production they will, and do for the most part, identify their interests with those of capital rather than labour. This middle class (probably in fact larger than Social Trends’s tables indicate) occupy positions of power and influence in all areas of political, economic, and cultural life. They are Tony Blair’s “stakeholders” in capitalism and it is not clear how they can be converted to socialism. On the contrary, they act as a channel for capitalist ideology to permeate the working class–a formidable challenge indeed for the Socialist Party!

John Williams, 

Nottingham

Reply:

Classes are defined by the relationship of their members to the means of production, not by how rich or poor they are. Of course the members of the dominant class are generally rich and the members of the dominated class(es) are generally poor, but this is an effect not the cause of the division of society into classes.

This means that the figures for wealth ownership are only an indication of the class structure of society–they show that society is divided into classes but not how it is. So, classes should not be defined on the basis of them; classes are defined socially not statistically. And the working class is defined socially as those members of capitalist society who are excluded from the ownership and control of the means of production and are therefore forced to get a living by trying to find an employer to buy their labour power.

Most of those you want to call the “middle class” fall into this category, even if they do have savings, since these savings are not sufficient to change their social position. In the vast majority of cases their “investment income” is not going to amount to more than a few thousands pounds a year at most. Nor are we convinced that such people regard themselves as capitalists; they may not call themselves “working class” but this is because of the term’s popular (but mistaken) association with manual labour and not because they don’t regard themselves as working. In fact they get quite irate if you suggest this. On the other hand, as we said in our criticism of Class War, “making a putative middle class into an enemy is as divisive as anything dreamed up by the owning class”.

Have these better off workers (yes, that’s what they are) you want to call the “middle class” an interest in establishing Socialism? Why not? They are exploited in the sense that they produce more value (or save more time) for their employers than they are paid for (this surplus value they produce will also be more than what they get as income on their savings). Like the rest of the working class (properly understood), they suffer from pressures to work harder, stress and job insecurity.

And even if their higher income does allow them to avoid bad housing and hospital queues and dump schools they still suffer from the bad–and worsening–“quality of life” under capitalism: rampant commercialisation, lack of community feeling, social breakdown, decadent values, not to mention pollution and the threat of war.

Editors.

 

Ending Poverty

Dear Editors,

I should like to put forward a question which I think of more relevance now towards the end of the century and the beginning of the new one: what are your aims as the Socialist Party of Great Britain on the transformation of the state? Do you advocate the same theoretical line of certain other system-methodists in the prediction of the withering away of the state, and the instigation by some organised body of a working class of what Lenin referred to as “Marx’s first and second phases” of Communist society?

I know you don’t refer to yourselves as communists, but surely in certain respects your ethos is the same (please correct me if I speak out of turn). What are your thoughts on the acceptance of inevitable inequality in the evincement of the capitalist system, as it crumbles away around us, and we search the debris for the remnants of order, moving consciously towards the second, or higher, phase of the new society? I’m not speaking of “fantastical utopianism” but merely the practical acceptance of the inevitable, and the proper instigation of the new order.

I understand fully that your long term aim is, as all good socialists, the seizing of the means of production, and the property of the whole rather than the individual. But for which socio-economic system do we aim? You will of course say socialism. Perhaps you could define what you mean. Are you referring to some time in the far future, when we shall all work voluntarily as best we can, as far as our ability goes, to suit our joint needs, as part of a co-operative society, no man more independent than another? Do you see this as the conclusion to the modern life-style under the present socio-economic system?

Do you still see yourself as the aggressive enemy of the oppressors of the masses, and the benefactor of the working people? Do you advocate a revolution, or simply a democratic process which is no longer democratic in that it no longer means “for the people”? There can be no democracy under a capitalist system. Do you suffer under the illusion that you can win our case through agitation of the media and non-socialist members, as well as so-called socialist members of the government and local political constituencies? I’m not asking for a recital of your Objective as a Party, but merely a considered response to a straightforward letter.

Kimberley J. Ellis, 

Bromley, Kent

Reply:

Our aim is socialism, which we define as a world-wide society in which the Earth’s resources will be the common heritage of all humanity under democratic control at world, regional and local level as appropriate. It will be a society where, in your words, “we shall work voluntarily as best we can, as far as our ability goes, to suit our joint needs, as part of a co-operative society”. It will be a society in which the state, as the public power of repression at the disposal of a ruling class, will have been abolished and replaced by a participatory democracy. This is our immediate aim, not some long-term goal.

In short, we think that given the development of productive capacity since Marx made the distinction in 1875 between a “first” (when full free access according to needs would not be possible) and a “higher” phase of “communist society” (when it would), the so-called higher phase can-and should-be established more or less immediately.

Although we call such a society “socialism” we have no objection to it being called “communism” as long as it is clearly understood that this has nothing to do with the state-capitalist dictatorships that used to exist in Russia and East Europe.

As to your other questions, no, we don’t see ourselves as “the benefactor of the working people”. We are wage and salary workers who don’t see ourselves as a group doing anything for other fellow workers other than putting before them the basic socialist propositions that under capitalism there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between capitalists and workers; that capitalism can never be reformed so as to work in the interest of workers; that what is required is a society of common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit.

If workers want such a socialist society this is something they must do for themselves without following leaders or relying on benefactors. We can’t establish it for them. As we say in our declaration of principles “the emancipation of the working class must be the working of the working class itself”.

No, we don’t suffer from the illusion that existing MPs and local councillors can do anything to further the cause of socialism. Their job, and in fact aspiration, is merely to run the political side of capitalism in Britain, and capitalism can only be run as a profit system in which priority must always be given to making profits over meeting needs. We also agree that there can be no real democracy under capitalism in the sense of a situation in which everybody has an equal say in deciding what should be done and in which those decisions can be implemented without hindrance. This is not the case today.

Having said this, in many parts of the world including Britain a sufficient degree of democracy exists for a socialist majority to be able to use existing elective bodies, such as parliament, to win control of the state machine through the ballot box. Of course, to work, this presupposes a socialist-minded and democratically organised majority outside parliament standing firmly behind the delegates they will have sent into parliament with the single mandate to take the formal steps to stop the state supporting capitalism.

Editors

Revolution and resistance (1989)

From the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The socialist transformation of society entails the dispossession of the minority capitalist class of their ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. All of their lands and factories, mines, media and transport will be taken away from them. The machinery of production will become the common property of society.

In order for the capitalists to be dispossessed — or "the expropriators to be expropriated", as Marx put it — there is one prerequisite. The working class, who produce all the wealth and constitute a majority of society, must be conscious of what they are doing. The dispossession of the capitalists cannot be carried out by a politically ignorant workers, and nor can the task be performed for them by enlightened leaders. As The Socialist Party's Principles make clear, the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers' themselves. If the social transformation is carried out in an organised fashion by people who know what they are up against and what they want to establish as an alternative, then what can stop us?

A majority of politically conscious workers must democratically gain control of the state machine, which in this country means the conquest of parliament and local councils. The revolutionary mandate for such political action will not be like any given to MPs or councillors in the past. Socialists will enter the state bodies as delegates, not representatives or political leaders. They will be accountable at every move to the socialist movement and their sole purpose in entering the state bodies will be to abolish ruling class power. They will formally enact the abolition of class ownership; and in doing so will express the wishes of millions who have voted for socialism and nothing less.

It is crucial that the state, which controls the means of coercion including the police and armed forces, is not left in the hands of the capitalists it represents. But unlike previous contestants for state power, the working class will not seek to establish its own state: a workers' state or a socialist state. These are absurd notions. As Engels pointed out, the workers' conquest of state power will be the last act of the state. The state will be dismantled. Government over people will be replaced by the administration of things. A classless society, which will exist the moment that the capitalists are dispossessed and the means of wealth production and distribution are commonly owned and democratically controlled, must be a stateless society The Socialist Party rejects the suicidal tactic of insurrection. The idea of a minority taking up arms and shooting their way to socialism is foolish and dangerous. Even if the insurrectionaries won, they would be forced to become dictators over those they will have “liberated" against their will. The sorry history of Leninist coup d'etats is sufficient proof of that. If insurrection is advocated by those who envisage majority support for the socialist revolution, then why fight it out when we have available to us the far simpler method of expressing our decision? After all, if a majority cannot be persuaded to vote for socialism it is going to take even longer to persuade them to join an army and fight for it.

But what if the minority does not accept the majority will? We know very well that it is in the capitalists' interest to preserve their privileges against what they see as the unreasonable demands of wage slaves who ought to know their place. In The Communist Manifesto Marx predicted that some enlightened capitalists will come over to the side of the socialist revolution. Indeed, some might. They may recognise that a classless society will be better than the jungle system in which they are forced to behave as king brutes. Other capitalists may come over out of cowardice, realising that if the game is up it is better to be on the side of change rather than make enemies of the workers when we take power. So, some capitalists might support socialism. Others, who hate and detest what is happening, will just face up to the fact that the workers are in a majority and it would be futile to do anything but surrender. In short, they will take it lying down. After all. they have been "taking it" in this position for most of the history of capitalism.

But what about those who resist? How would a socialist majority deal with a recalcitrant minority? This minority may not only comprise capitalists: there may well be workers too who will be conditioned enough to retain loyalty to their dispossessed masters. Of course, there will be immense social pressure by the millions who constitute the socialist majority for the non-socialists to give the new system a try. Production solely for use and free access to all goods and services will be very powerful temptations to those who oppose socialism. There may still be some non-socialists who cannot bear the thought of living in a society of human co-operation. Well, would it be beyond the realm of possibility for socialist society to set aside some areas for these perverse characters, in which they could continue to live as if capitalism were still existence. They could exploit each other, tell lies to one another, dominate, submit... It would be hard explaining such eccentricity to children born into a socialist society, but as long as the non-socialists kept to themselves and were free to join the rest of the community should they wish, what would be wrong with that?

A recalcitrant minority might wish to carry the capitalist ethic of "To Hell With The Majority" all the way. What if they tried to use force to defeat the will of the socialist majority? By doing this they would be declaring themselves enemies of society. Only those prepared to accept the democratic will would be entitled to the community’s support. Such recalcitrants would have to be denied the freedom to operate. If they tried to form a counter-revolutionary army it would be starved into impotence. The right of free access would be denied to violent anti-democrats who. without petrol for their transport, without a munitions industry to provide them with bullets or bombs, would be brought to their knees in next to no time. If — and we here go further into the realms of hypothesis — anti-socialists tried to use violence against the socialist community, then they would have to be forcibly restrained. Without doubt, a socialist majority could never stand by while the violent tactics of the abolished capitalist system ruined socialism. As a last resort, the undemocratic minority would have to meet the fate which it will have created for itself; it would either surrender or be eliminated. We stress, however, that it will be much easier for a recalcitrant minority to be defeated by denying it access to the means of struggle, and that it will find it extremely hard to operate in conditions where the majority of people consciously oppose all that it stands for.

Compare the position of such a minority with that of today's undemocratic terrorists. The latter find it very hard to exist because most workers do not want to know them; many are willing to shop them to the police and most would refuse to endorse their acts of violence. But modern terrorist groups operate in easier circumstances than a violent, recalcitrant minority in a socialist society would. Under capitalism most workers are discontented. While they may not support terrorism, they might not be disposed actively to oppose it. In a socialist society anti-democrats would be up against determined men and women who, after centuries of class struggle, have gained control of society. Is such a community of socialists likely to accept defeat by a gang of arrogant ex-capitalists and deluded ex-wage slaves?

Opponents of socialism will have every opportunity peacefully to advocate the case against the new social system. If they are crazy enough they can argue for the restoration of capitalism, reminding workers of the good old days when nuclear weapons abounded and the corpses of malnourished children scattered the earth. It will not be in the interest of socialist society to ban ideas; those which conflict with material reality will be rejected, just as socialism, being in line with material reality, is on the agenda to succeed.

In a socialist society those who used to be capitalists will be free to live as social equals. They will be members of the community, expected to give according to their abilities and to take according to their self-defined needs. Some of them have very few abilities at the moment, as a result of a lifetime of parasitism; but if you can train a parrot to say its name, you can show an ex-millionaire how to do some socially useful work. In a socialist society humans will, for the first time in hundreds of years, be brothers and sisters: members of a free and co-operative society. Such freedom and co-operation will be difficult to want to fight against, much as they are hard to comprehend now by those who can only conceive of society as a collection of warring factions. That stage of history will be transcended with the establishment of a stateless socialist community, and the age of gunfire will have passed.

Steve Coleman

The State. (1924)

From the June 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

The popular view of Socialism is a bundle of misconceptions. One of the most common is that Socialism means nothing more than the control of everything and everybody by the State, swollen to huge dimensions and constituting in effect a distinct official class in opposition to the bulk of the people. Yet nothing is more certain than that the State, throughout its history, has been the weapon of the property-owning class (the means by which it has protected and upheld its property) and with the accomplishment of the social revolution and the disappearance of such a class, the State also will disappear.

What is the State? Those who talk most glibly about it seldom offer evidence of possessing a clear idea of its nature. They usually express themselves in vague idealistic language which serves to hide either their ignorance or their real meaning.

In brief, the State is that central body which by coercion induces the rest of society either to do things which they have no desire to do or to refrain from acts which are dictated by their desires. It is thus the element of organised force operating on a comprehensive scale which forms the essential feature of the State.

The actual organisation of the State has varied with the changes in the social order, but that feature has remained unchanged. The first form of private (as distinct from common) property was the chattel form. Domestic animals, women and children, and finally enslaved debtors and captives became chattels in turn and the State developed in the first place in order to preserve the chattel relationship. The ancient empires, centred in the city-states (such as Rome, Athens and Babylon) were gigantic chattel procuring and tribute levying machines. In these States the freemen (i.e., the non-chattels) were alone citizens, privileged to bear arms and control political affairs. They used their control to hold their chattels in subjection and to protect them from others who might covet and struggle for these principal sources of wealth.

The break up of these ancient empires was followed by the rise of feudalism, a system based on serfdom. The serfs were legally bound to the soil. The landholder was also the lord of the serfs and exploited their labour power accordingly. The land-holders as a class formed a hierarchy with the King at its head. Here we find another form of State, which, in turn, gave way to yet another form, as a new property-owning ruling-class rose to power.

The modern parasites, the Capitalist class (developed from the merchants, etc., of the cities), have brought the State to its present form. They acquired concessions from the monarch by means of their peculiar weapon, money, and finally curbed his authority along with the downfall of the feudal aristocrats by forcible revolution. In the place of the feudal State we now find representative bodies controlling affairs such as municipal councils and Parliament. The ruling classes of the ancient and medieval worlds ruled by their own right arms; the modern tyrants introduced the standing army as the mainstay of their sway. The military organisations of their predecessors gave way to the political parties of the Parliamentary arena, while the actual administration of the law was handed over to an ever-increasing professional bureaucracy.

The development of modern industry has brought to the front a new political element, i.e., the proletariat, the propertyless working class. For the first time in history the slaves are enfranchised and are openly recognised by their rulers to be the most important factor in the State. Only gradually, however, are they coming to realise the fact themselves.

The modern State, therefore, is a contradiction. It consists of a repressive machine supported by the very class which is repressed. It exists to protect private property in the means of life against the actual producers of those means. It is the political expression of the antagonism of economic interests in society.

Whence then arises the illusion that Socialism, a system of society involving a community of interests, will develop the State to a still greater extent? Partly, no doubt, from the confusing and ignorant propaganda of the so-called Socialist elements in the Labour Party ; but partly also from the fact that Socialism can only be established by means of the State in the hands of the working class. Where those who are afraid of bureaucracy make their mistake is in forgetting the phrase in italics.

Socialism cannot be established by the Capitalists. It cannot be established by the State as it exists at present. Only when the workers, organised consciously and politically, capture the State and convert it into the agent of emancipation will it be possible to convert the means of life (i.e., the land, factories, railways, etc.) into the common property of the whole people.

This revolution within the State, necessary as it is for the social revolution, so far from extending the bureaucracy will abolish it. The first act of the revolutionary administration will be to take direct control and responsibility from the hands of the officials in every department. The working class must itself become the State. As the revolution proceeds and the Capitalist class are stripped of their economic privileges, so the workers’ organisation will cease to be political and will become economic. It will be concerned, not with government of persons, but with the administration of the social means of production and distribution. Class distinctions having been abolished, class antagonism will disappear and with it the need for a repressive force.

The reader may object, “But what of the law which depends on the State, is that to go, too? How will you preserve order among individuals?” Supporters of Capitalism among the workers seldom realise how much institutions such as “the law” are part of the social system existing at a particular time and are not eternal necessities of nature. “The law” has changed along with the State that made it. The laws of the ancient patricians, the laws of the medieval barons, have followed the customs of prehistoric barbarians; the laws of the last of the exploiting classes will do likewise and there will thus be an end of laws and the beginning of social freedom.

The civil law regulates contracts and implies private property and the production of commodities. When society consciously regulates production and distribution, contracts will become meaningless. The individual will depend for the satisfaction of his economic wants, not upon some other individual or group, but upon society as a whole ; consequently, he will have no motive for entering into bargains or seeking the aid of the law to enforce their terms.

Turning to the criminal law, that also will become meaningless in a society of equals. Time was when, in the interests of Capitalism, the idea was spread that there existed a distinct criminal type with marked physical and psychological characteristics. To-day that idea is discredited even among Capitalist authorities themselves. Crime is the effect of social conditions. Crimes against property such as theft, arson, etc., are directly traceable to economic causes which will disappear along with poverty and the fear of poverty. Crimes against persons are also in the majority of cases bound up with these same economic causes; while even the so-called “crimes of passion” arise largely from the unwholesome conditions, moral as well as physical, which are inevitably engendered by Capitalism.

Socialists do not pretend that violent anti-social acts will entirely cease to occur, but that they will, undoubtedly, dwindle to such proportions as to render the existing legal methods of dealing with offenders obsolete. The concern of society under Socialism will not be repression but the development of a physical environment and mental atmosphere which will allow for the full evolution of the individual and thus secure his voluntary co-operation with his fellows. Comradeship will take the place of coercion and for the first time since the dawn of history the legal State will give way to a moral society.

Eric Boden

By The Way. (1924)

The By The Way Column from the May 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

The anti-Socialist tell us that under Socialism we should become a stereotyped humanity; but their use of the word “State,” signifies that it is really State Capitalism to which they refer, Socialism implying the abolition of the State, to-day a Capitalist institution. Commenting on a recent play in which the central idea is the invention of mechanical men, a writer says :—

  “These robots had all, and more than all, the material efficiency of human beings, but no soul, no heart, none of those attributes which make life individual and interesting. That is what your Socialist would have you and me be like in his perfect Socialist state.”—Democrat, April 12th, 1924.

Think of your individuality when the hooter goes and you clock on at the dog biscuit factory or the soap works, think how interesting the routine of the office, the beautiful scenery viewed by a carman, or watching the beer in the brewery, calculating how much you and your pals could account for if only you had it outside. Ah ! you see you’ve a soul (!), and having one, perhaps a further item, same paper, same date will interest you :—

  “Where are these small, but important details that used to make our houses feel like homes? We do not find these things to-day. All the happiness has gone out of our houses. They are all alike, all plain and dull. For all the distinction or variation there are in them, they might be so many bathing machines or hen-coops.”

And in like manner you will find most of the “ bogeys ” of Socialism right here today.

* * *

  “There is one reasoned alternative to Socialism, the very simple yet perfectly true doctrine that small families and willing work would quickly banish poverty from our country.”—New Voice, April.

This doctrine, we are told, will win the support of the wavering masses, who in desperation are inclined “to give the Socialists a trial”; and although it contains reason, truth, work, and gutta-percha economics, we remain cold and unmoved. Smaller families mean cheaper living, and in the age of competition and sliding scales, cheaper living frequently means lowered wages. The more willing you work to-day, the fewer of you will be required for the job in hand, that means more unemployment, and therefore more poverty. The “reasoned alternative” to Socialism’ may appear “very simple,” but only to simple people.

  “The nation to-day is not producing enough to satisfy the natural human demands of the workers.. . . The demands for a decent standard of life have been increasing, but the means of satisfying them have not increased ; and to demand what is not there is crying for the moon.—Daily Chronicle, 31.3.24.

What an indictment of the present system ! In the world’s richest country the “natural human demands” for its workers cannot be met, so the Chronicle leader writer informs us, and by the naive assumption that “the Nation” would be one harmonious entity but for these demands, he attempts to conceal the cause of the contrast of wealth and poverty, and the inevitable conflict between the propertyless producers of wealth and its non-working Capitalist owners. Even for the workers to demand a “decent standard of life” is with true Liberal cant considered “crying for the Moon.” But the idle shareholders; they evidently may smile complacently upon the earth. Take only one instance, typical of the average concern, and what a difference we find in the reward of abstinence— from the dignity of labour :—

  “The twenty-second annual report of the Imperial Tobacco Company (of Great Britain and Ireland), Limited, issued last night, shows a nett trading profit for twelve months ended October 31st, 1923, amounting to £7,467,925 12s. 10d”—Daily Mail, 9.2.24.

What are the facts? Man’s power over Nature reached the stage of being able to maintain an idle ruling class in the dim and remote past; this he could only do when he could produce more than was necessary for his own individual subsistence, later in the middle ages, roughly fifteen weeks’ labour of the year enabled a labourer to sustain a family of five for that period (Thorold Rogers), while to-day, modern manufacture with its giant machines, electricity, railways and applied science, makes production possible on a scale that could far outstrip societies’ needs. Yet the workers are poor! and the best reason the Capitalist Press can advance is a dirty lie. The invention and industry of countless generations of workers HAS increased the means to satisfy the most extravagant demands ever likely to be made upon them, BUT those means are the property of the few, and operated solely in their interests. Need we stress the point?

* * *

  “But we have yet to meet the Socialist who’s willing to learn anything from anybody without doubting the motive of his teachers.” (Democrat, 9/2/24.)

Within the Capitalist system there are thousands of “anybodies” laying claim to be the teachers of the working class.

All profess to be in deepest sympathy with the sufferings of that class, and every library is filled with their voluminous vapourings. The Socialist, however, did not obtain his understanding by blindly accepting every nostrum that was placed before him. His mental evolution has been through the stages of doubt, investigation to understanding. He does not consider his the final word in knowledge, but is ever prepared to enlarge that knowledge. Unlike the Capitalist supporting worker, the Socialist reasons from a class basis, his class interests, for it is only from that basis that he can judge the usefulness or otherwise of any teaching to his class. Through the method of discussion and critical enquiry men and women develop the power to reason for themselves. Our advice to the worker in this age of political chicanery is to trust none, but to acquire that learning that dispenses with the need for trust or doubt and enables them to test, the teachings offered, written or oral, on the touchstone of Socialist knowledge.

* * *

  “Socialism meant complete destruction of private property and individual liberty. God save England from Socialism.” (Harold Cox, The New Voice Feb.)

The worker may read the above and yet retain his composure. The property referred to is not his watch and chain or the odds and ends that often find their way to “Uncle,” but Capitalist property, the bulk of the wealth of modern society. It is usual for Capitalist apologists to speak or write of Marx as “exploded” or out of date, but how his words meet the whines of that class and their agents to-day.

  “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population ; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.” (Reeves, Ed., p. 18, Communist Manifesto.)

The above was written nearly eighty years ago, but Capitalist development has but served to emphasise these facts. The Capitalist pretends to see in his form of private property (the ownership of societies’ means of wealth production) a form that permits of no further development without social stagnation and the destruction of what he terms individual liberty.

  “The abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! … By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.” (Ibid.)

The freedom to exploit and plunder a working class free only to sell their labour power—if they can. Property in its present form is but a transient form, it will undergo change when there is no further room for development within the present system. The main force generated within that system and the human factor that must bring that change, is the growing conscious discontent of the working class, who in order to achieve their emancipation must realise that the barrier of freedom and comfort for all stands in the present socially operated, but privately-owned means of life. The only possible alternative is social ownership, by which the evils of to-day will be removed and the communal form of society in which the human family was cradled for so many thousands of years restored on an infinitely higher plane.

W. E. MacHaffie