International Notes. (1908)

From the June 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Interesting Experiment

Paul Grados, in the May Day number of the Guesdist organ, states that in the course of an address at Limoges in 1892, Dr. Napias – who was later appointed chief of the Assistance Publique – recalled an experiment by Pattenkofer and Voit on the degree of resistance of the human organism to bodily fatigue.

A vigorous workman was selected who could take a normal repose, and who received a substantial nourishment; then, said Dr. Napias, he was made to exert a muscular effort that was calculated mathematically and which corresponded to the expenditure of average labour – and that during nine hours.

Well, it was ascertained that at the end of twenty-four hours his organism had a deficit of 192 grammes of oxygen which he had had to borrow from his own tissues. Neither the rest that he had taken nor the food that had been given him had sufficed to completely repair the tissues used up during nine hours’ work.

It is therefore shown scientifically that nine hours of daily labour exceed the forces of the human economy. This is doubtless mainly responsible for the much shorter duration of the lives of working men as compared with the longevity of members of the leisured class. The movement toward a lessening of the working day that is favoured by many capitalists is therefore not surprising. Its object, indeed, is simply to extort the maximum of effort – from the human machine.

#    #    #    #

The Fetish of Unity.

To the gushing sentimentalist the word Unity is as the Ark of the Covenant. Insistence upon the necessity for agreement on principles, on methods, and above all on the object in view, is scorned as sectarianism and as heresy against most holy Unity by such worshippers of empty forms. True unity is a means to an end. First of all the essentials regarding the end to be sought and the means to that end must be agreed upon, for “unity”without this is unity in impotence, being without everything that makes unity useful, namely, common principles, methods, and aims. Unity under any other conditions than that of agreement on the essentials of aims and methods is like tying cats together by their tails.

Our French comrades are finding this out. Rappoport, after a word in praise of what he calls international discipline, lets the cats out of the bag when he says in Le Socialisme: “Besides, unity is not a restriction. It does not hinder even those who pine for the old ‘dangerous alliances’, and of the false households of three with the ‘Democracy’. It does not even prevent certain members of the party from calumniating fraternally their ‘dear comrades’, and from persecuting them with their deadly hate. Unity is therefore an excellent thing from every point of view, especially if, as we hope, American comrades will not inflict anarchists and those with anarchist methods upon themselves as companions of the road – the false road.”

Ch. Bonnier, in a later issue of the same journal, also confesses that “the great trouble with the French Parti Socialiste is that it falls continually from the fever of anarchism into the heat-sickness of radicalism; never can it grasp its true class policy, never can it understand that it is entirely apart, and that it has not to do the work of the others. How many times has not the spook of reaction caused it to fall into the arms of its born exploiters – the radicals?”

In short, the only unity worth worrying about is Socialist unity, and most of those who gush about the words have still to realise what they mean.

F. C. Watts

Fatalism and Historic Necessity. A Vindication of the Socialist Position. (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Perverted Vision.

The opponents of our method and theory – bourgeois scientists, and Syndicalist or Anarchist doctrinaires – are in accord in urging against Marxism the accusation which men like Guyot, of vulgar political economy, levelled of old against Socialism in general: they say we are guilty of an attack upon the individual, of an attempt upon liberty.

It is not the capitalist system which sacrifices the liberty of the many to the greater liberty of the privileged few; it is we who do so. It is not the regime of capitalist property which makes the “free” will of the immense majority of the population obey the hard law of labour for another; it is Socialism!

From the Frenchman De Molinari to the Prussian Eugene Richter, from the Englishman Herbert Spencer to the Italian Syndicalist Arturo Labriola, from the extreme right of the political horizon to the extreme left of “Socialist” opportunism, we hear vituperation against “the Socialist tyranny”, against “the future slavery”, and, above all, against the “suppression of individual liberty” – of capitalists!

But among our opponent there are, it seems, men of good faith who sincerely imagine that Marxism replaces "liberty" with the "fatalism" of immutable economic laws.

Note, in the first place, that the same accusation of fatalism has been made against all modern philosophers who proclaim the subordination of so-called moral phenomena to natural law. When Hippolyte Taine, the author of L’Intelligence, wrote that vice and virtue are as necessary products of certain conditions “as are vitriol and sugar”, he was stupidly accused of recommending the replacing of the consumption of sugar by that of vitriol. The minds of many moderns are so degraded by centuries of theological and metaphysical education that they take plain statements of fact for approvals or condemnations. They resemble the capricious woman who broke her mirror because it revealed the decline of her beauty.

This accusation of fatalism is somewhat comprehensible, and even excusable, when applied to those theories which subordinate human history to the influence of climate or the geographical environment. The climate, within certain limits, is practically invariable. The sky of Greece and of France has varied little from the most remote times; but how many revolutions have occurred under the same sun!

Man Makes History.

Thomas Buckle has been reproached for his climatic fatalism; but hardly with justice, because the celebration author of The History of Civilisation proved that as men developed they emancipated themselves from the influence of the geographical and climatic factors, and began to dominate nature.

But, I repeat, the geographical interpretation of history may well give rise to a fatalistic tendency. The semi-invariable nature of the geographical factor lends itself easily to this. One may say the same of all historic theories which subordinate history to external nature.

Such is not the case with the Marxian theory. Nothing is more human or more varied than the mode of production. To produce, said Marx in his Capital, man needs a plan, a consciousness of the work to be done. He know what he is doing. He thinks his work. After Vico,  Marx affirmed that history is made by man. Revolutions in the method of production which generate political and social revolutions are due to the great and small “inventions” – that is to say, to the products of human talents and genius.

Therefore Marx has not excluded man from history. He did not consider individuals as mannequins launching “new modes of production”, like modes of another kind are “launched” – that of the harem skirt, for example.

That is not all; it is the “dogmatic”, “sectarian”, and “orthodox” Marxians who have insisted, against Bernstein and his more or less idealistic school, on the necessity of affirming and propagating the “final aim” of Socialism.

Marxists alone are Constant.

It is they, and they alone, who have, in the great crisis of International Socialism (which is far from being terminated) remained unshakeably faithful to the Socialist ideal – without stupidly repeating the word – while opportunists of every order, or even of disorder, have allowed themselves to drift at the mercy of the political events of the day, along with the blind and fatal forces of the system which knows only the inexorable struggle of appetites and interests.

But the dialectical method is the enemy of all that is arbitrary. It does not place history in an aeroplane at the mercy of the winds of “His Majesty, Chance”. The movement of history is nothing like the zig-zag of a drunken man. It is governed by necessities. Humanity is not free to renounce its physical and intellectual needs. As it is not suicidally disposed, it submits, in order to live, to the necessities of production. Production gives rise to and determines the social system. To a given social system there correspond definite ideas and conceptions; religion, morality, philosophy, science.

It requires all the interested blindness, all the brutal selfishness, of the capitalist to say to the worker: You are free to cease to work. Absolute liberty is death.

A society is not transformed by the force of The Word, nor by strokes of will. It is necessary that all the forces of the past and present collaborate therein. Already Saint Simon, the true precursor of Marx, had clearly shown that the elements of the new system accumulate during centuries, and prepare themselves within the framework of ancient systems. according to him, the capitalist class has taken seven or eight centuries to become the dominant force in society.

Evolution Includes Revolution.

Isolated men, or small minorities, may, from time to time, indulge their gentle fantasies. They may dream of transformations in the twinkling of an eye. In the name of the “right of abortion” they may apply the forceps of “direct action” to the body social in order to bring the new society into the world before its time. But society as a whole – an entire class – only gives itself such aims as are in the domain of the realisable and possible. And when the time comes it shrinks from no necessary means. Evolution does not exclude revolution, any more than the gradual transformation of the earth excludes cataclysms. Births occur in blood, and are associated with cries and painful rendering. But only monsters come into the world before the normal hour.

A ship is launched. Does it deprive its captain of liberty to give him a nautical chart, prepared with scientific accuracy, and a compass? Would he be more free if he drifted at the will of the waves? The dialectic method, as used by Marx and Engels, provides us with chart and compass to determine the movement of history. It does not fetter us. It simply shows the way. In helping us toward the desired goal, it emancipates us from blind forces, from the fatality of chance. It is, therefore, an influence of freedom – not of slavery.

Primitive man is the slave of Nature. He is literally terrorised by natural phenomena. He seeks by cruel human sacrifices to obtain a mitigation of his lot. Natural science emancipates him. From being the slave of Nature he becomes master. Modern society is still at the mercy of blind, semi-natural forces. We are, in relation to society, what primitive man was in relation to nature. It is necessary to conquer our liberty. We must emancipate ourselves from the blind social forces which bind and oppress us. Society must become our thing, as the great forces of nature have become. We must become masters of society, just as we have become, more or less, the masters of our natural environment.

Science is Liberty.

But how have we conquered nature? By studying it; by learning its laws and making them serve our ends. It is the same with social laws. We shall only vanquish social oppression when we have discovered the laws of the working of society. Science is liberty. And the dialectical method, which powerfully aids toward that discovery, toward the edification of social science, is the tool of liberty, the instrument of precision of our emancipation.

The dialectical method is therefore quite the contrary of fatalism. In making us cognisant of historical necessities, it makes us able to effectively combat the fatalist decree of capitalist ignorance that there always have been poor, and always will be!

No, replies the dialectical method. Capitalist poverty is an “historical category”, which will disappear with the historical conditions which create and nourish it.

The dialectical method of Socialism is the method of science and of liberty.

[Ch. Rappoport in Le Socialisme. Translated by F. C. Watts.]

Evolution and Revolution. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The “New Method” is evolutionist. The “New Method” is reformist. The “New Method” stands above all for legality. In order to fully understand it in all its beauty, in all its power, we must first study its conceptions of evolution, reform, and legal revolution. Let us proceed in this order and commence with evolution.

The partisans of the “New Method”, quite honestly, without doubt, put certain stupidities into the mouths of revolutionists, which naturally appear to them quite in order. The revolutionists, they say, believe that the social revolution will be the result of a coup, a struggle with the police, or, better, to employ the favourite expression of (is it necessary to name the minister?) “the stroke of a magic wand”. The revolutionists are travestied as social magicians or miracle-workers; and the realists of state Socialism — in theory very idealist — never miss an occasion of showing their sovereign contempt for these dreamers of impossible catastrophes. They alone are in complete agreement with modern science, founded on the principle of evolution. The revolutionists are romanticists, Utopians. Has not Bernstein himself said that Marx even was but a common Blanquist?

What is the truth?

Let us first point out that all the great masters of contemporary Socialism, those very men who introduced into it the idea of evolution, and who have in some measure saturated the spirits of man with their ideas, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, Peter Lavroff, were throughout their entire lives convinced revolutionists. It is an incontrovertible fact, and we will prove it.

The social work of Marx has been compared with that of Darwin in the domain of Nature. In fact, his classic work, the "Manifesto," which alone perhaps, of all books of our time, contains in a small space (some thirty pages) so many great and fertile ideas, develops quite a system of evolution in capitalist society. In the "Manifesto" we see Socialism burst forth, as the very consequence of things, from the very entrails of capitalist society. It is capitalism itself which fashions its own “grave-digger”, the proletariat organised as a class party.

The Manifesto concludes with the ultra-revolutionary declaration which follows:

  “The communists consider it beneath them to cloak their ideas and designs. They declare openly that their end cannot be realised but by the violent destruction of the existing social order. Let the ruling classes tremble before a communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain”.

Here we are very far from the theory “take care to make fear” (“Ayons peur de faire peur”) which has conducted its author to the ministry of commerce. Yet, Marx put to flight all the miracle-workers, all the manufacturers of little projects put forward as so many panaceas guaranteed to save society from the misery of capitalism. It is true that he had not foreseen the project for the participation of socialists in the central power of the bourgeois state, which renders the revolution altogether unnecessary, and, above all, dangerous. A revolutionary party which does not inspire its adversaries with fear is ripe for government. But, it will never “conquer the world”.

The idealist, Peter Lavroff, was in complete agreement with Marx, the materialist, on the question of violent revolution. Throughout all his glorious life he preached the Revolution in the name of reason, “justice and humanity”. He sought to establish scientifically that “every Socialist who thinks logically must be a revolutionist”. And he always added that the Revolution cannot be brought about without violence. Peter Lavroff introduced scientific philosophy into Russia, thus contributing more than anyone else to the overthrow of metaphysical and theological ideas in his country. He was the sworn enemy of miracles, and understood the miracle of social transformation by the word participation.

The partisans of legality are often pleased to quote a Preface of Engels where he traces a magnificent picture of the growth of the Socialist Party during the legal period. But the rascals forget to add that Engels himself protested against the publication, declaring that his ideas had been falsified through the omission of a conclusion containing an affirmation thoroughly revolutionist.

The statement of Marx is likewise invoked, that in England the Revolution could be achieved pacifically and legally. In his preface to the English translation of Capital, Engels, on including the words of his great friend, wrote: “But he never omitted to mention that he doubted very much if the ruling classes in England would ever accede to a pacific and legal revolution” (Capital. Introduction. 1887). Otherwise stated: the revolution will be superfluous if the dominant classes are in humour for committing suicide. It is perfectly evident that Marx, who thoroughly understood the economic condition of England, wished to say nothing more than that all the material and technical conditions were at hand.

In order to accomplish the Revolution nothing was wanted but the revolutionary lever. “Force is the midwife of every new society”. The pains and violence of birth cannot be overlooked on the grounds that the embryo should be allowed to develop in an easy and regular manner. One might as well overlook volcanic eruptions on considering that modern geology has abandoned the catastrophic theory of the formation of the earth. The new-born will develop pacifically, “legally”, but he comes into being revolutionary. The subterranean forces accumulate slowly, invisibly, but once arrived at a certain degree of intensity, they explode. “Revolutions in history are as necessary as tempests in nature”, writes Malon, whom our good evolutionists do not qualify as “sectary”. In truth, this class of “tempest” does not agree with ministerial combinations. But, since when do the phenomena of nature and history rest on the decrees of ministers, being “out of control”.

In 1887 at the Congress of Saint-Gall, Bebel, who of course is nothing but a romantic dreamer, declared:

“He who says that the final end of Socialism will be realised in a pacific manner does not know the final end, or, mocks us”.

Further. It is only during its scientific period that, based on the principle of evolution, Socialism becomes revolutionary. The great Utopians, Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon were pacific in their methods. They preached the social transformation to make the “revolution” needless.

It was exactly at the time that the social reformers addressed the monarchs, assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, soliciting their “Collaboration” in social reform in the name of “social conservation”. That was also the good old time when the noble dreamer Fourier used to look daily for his “millionaire”, pacific redeemer of suffering humanity.

The triumph of the truly realistic spirit was at the same time that of the revolutionary spirit. None but empiric minds who see no farther than the tips of their noses or who have some interest in cloaking historic truth, believe that revolution is contrary to evolution of which it is, in reality, only the fatal and irresistible outcome. Thus, the Utopian period of Socialism was pacific. The scientific period adopts revolutionary tactics.

Ferdinand Lassalle, who was the promoter of universal suffrage in Germany, a man of immediate action and pacific par excellence, recognised the revolution as a means of achieving any serious reform. He pointed out that many great reforms were brought about only by revolution. For him, as well as for every modern Socialist, revolution is but a moment, a period of crisis in the “normal” evolution of society, an evolution which comes to a head.

The abyss which our ministerialists seek to find between evolution and revolution under its sudden and violent form exists but in their imagination. But there exists an insuperable abyss between revolution and ministerialism.

Translated from the French of Charles Rappoport by P. J. Tobin

The Society of Tomorrow. (1908)

From the September 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The result of all the more or less ingenious plans of the future society is but to demonstrate the possibility of the Socialist System. All who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by the social transformation easily persuade themselves of the excellence of the future society. Even the petit bourgeois – the small capitalist – having the presentiment of his impending ruin, being tormented by the knowledge of his insecurity and filled with a feeling of vagueness, is quite ready to say “Yes, Socialism is an excellent thing, but, alas! it is Utopia!” And to show you the Utopian character of Socialism he invokes, first, human nature; secondly, the indestructible selfishness of humanity that results in the war of each against all; and thirdly, the opposition of those who possess, which he declares impossible to overcome.

How does the Marxian conception comport itself in order to reduce to nothing this triple impossibility?

Human nature! This has been invoked every time there has been any question of advancing a stage in history. The slave-holders called to witness this same human nature in order to clinch the absolute impossibility of the abolition of chattel slavery. In his “Politics”, Aristotle, “the giant of antique thought”, sought to demonstrate that the Greeks are by their very nature destined to dominate the rest of human kind as masters. Nature is eternal. And every dominant class desires – quite naturally – to eternally prolong the régime which secures its domination and enjoyment: it considers, therefore, its own system as natural. Its nature becomes Nature itself. It does not see beyond its own interests, and it confounds the laws of its own conservation with those of the universe. It suppresses history – which only exists by changes – and invents a physical theory of society, which theory seeks to persuade us that inequality between men socially is as eternal and necessary as that between the organs of the body. The laws of Nature are not slighted with impunity, therefore the system of the exploitation of man by man is, according to the exploiters, a law of Nature. Every revolt against it is consequently madness or a material impossibility.

To these interested sophisms the Marxian conception opposes the true history of humanity. It demonstrates the fact of the perpetual changes that occur and have occurred in forms of production and appropriation.

Human society is a particular case in universal evolution. Nothing is eternal and unchangeable. Everything is variable. By showing that the struggle of the classes is at the base of history, Marxism unveils the historical mechanism and shows that every given social form is entirely relative, entirely conditional.

Classes and systems succeed each other and differ from each other. Thus all objections drawn – by the hair – from that much invoked “human nature” are destroyed. Marxism does not recognise man in abstracto. It knows only the owner of the slave, the feudal lord, the capitalist, the proletarian, and other “historic categories”. It replaces the vague and confused by that which is concrete and clear, and abandons generalities to the psychologists, philosophers, and metaphysicians.

Better still – by analysing scientifically the capitalist system, the Marxian shows not only that Socialist society is possible, but also that it is necessary. Collective organisation of labour is possible because it exists. It is present in the factory, in the mines, in the great stores, in the great financial establishments. It circles the world by railway and ploughs the ocean in Dreadnoughts. Individual exploitation is in flagrant contradiction with this collective organisation. From this come crises – catastrophes which demonstrate more and more that the capitalist system is becoming impossible. Soon it will be no longer for us to show the possibility of Socialism. It will be the task of the partisans of the present tottering system to prove the possibility of its continuation by any normal and progressive development.

As to the selfishness of individuals and of classes, not only does Marxism not deny it, but it utilises it to organise the proletarians into a class party, preoccupied above all with its interests, which, happily, are in complete accord with those of the social organism and of true civilisation.

There remains the third objection – the third pretended impossibility of Socialism – the resistance of those who possess. The Marxian conception is easily victorious. Socialism becomes possible just in the same degree as great capital absorbs smaller capitals, and production on a great scale supersedes small-scale production. Socialists have not to expropriate the owners – they will only expropriate the expropriators. They will restore to society the property which has been stolen from society. They do not fight private ownership of objects of immediate consumption. They struggle against capitalist property, against the oligarchy of property – the monopoly of the means of production.

The possibility – nay, more, the inevitable historic necessity – of Socialism springs thus from the play of economic forces. The organisation of the working class and the conquest of political power by this class indicate the first stages on the route to be followed.

(Ch. Rappoport in Le Socialisme. Translated for the Socialist Standard.)