Mаrxіsm іn wоrld hіstоry

Only by `rationalising production', by `increasing productivity' and by cutting the workforce can one capitalist get a bigger share of the cake than another. But the result for the system as a whole is devastating. For it means that the number of workers does not increase at anything like the same speed as investment.

Yet it is the labour a/workers that is the source of the profits, the fuel that keeps the system going. If you make bigger and bigger investments, without a corresponding increase in the source of profits, you are heading for a breakdown - just as surely as if you expected to drive a Jaguar on the amount of petrol needed to keep a Mini going.

That is why Marx argued 100 years ago that the very success of capitalism in piling up huge investments in new equipment led to a `tendency of the rate of profit to decline' which means ever-worsening crises.

His argument can be applied very simply to capitalism today. Instead of the old picture of `bad times' turning into `good times', of slumps turning into booms, we seem to be in a never ending slump. Any spell of upturn, any drop in unemployment, is limited and short lived.

Apologists for the system say this is because investment is not high enough. Without new investment there are no new jobs, without new jobs there's no money to buy new goods. So far, we can agree with them - but we don't agree with their explanation of why this is happening.

They blame wages. Wages are too high, they say, which cuts profits to the bone. Capitalists are frightened to invest because they won't get `sufficient reward'.

But the crisis has continued through long years in which government pay policies have cut workers' living standards and pushed profits up. The years 1975-78 saw the biggest cut in workers' living standards this century, while the rich grew richer - the top 10 percent pushed up their share of the national cake from 57.8 percent in 1974 to 60 percent in 1976.

There still isn't enough investment to end the crisis - and that goes not just for Britain but for other countries where wages have been cut back, for France, for Japan, for Germany.

We would do better to listen to what Karl Marx said 100 years ago than to listen to those who apologise for capitalism today.

Marx predicted that as capitalism got older, its crises would get worse because the source of profit, labour, does not increase nearly as rapidly as the investment needed to put labour to work. Marx wrote when the value of the plant and machinery needed to employ each worker was fairly low. It has shot up since then, until today it can be ?20,000 or even ?30,000. Competition between capitalist firms has forced them to use ever bigger and evermore expensive machinery. The point has been reached where, in most industries, it is taken for granted that new machinery means fewer workers.

The international economic agency OECD has predicted that employment in the world's major economies will fall, even if by some miracle investment soars.

Which it won't. Because capitalists care about their profit, and if their investment increases fourfold but their profit only doubles, they get really upset. Yet this is what must happen if industry grows more quickly than the source of profit, labour.

As Marx put it, the rate of profit will tend to fall. He predicted that a point would eventually be reached at which any new investment would seem a perilous venture. The scale of expenditure needed for new plant and machinery would be colossal, but the rate of profit would be lower than ever before. When this point was reached, each capitalist (or capitalist state) would fantasise about huge new investment programmes - but be afraid to make them for fear of going bust.

The world economy today is very much like that. Rover plans new production lines - but fears it will lose money. British Steel dreams of those big plants it planned - but have to keep them on ice because it cannot sell its present output. The Japanese shipbuilders have given up investing in new yards - and some of the old ones are being shut down.

The very success of capitalism in building ever vaster and more productive machinery has brought the system to the point of seemingly permanent crisis.

A point was reached in the slave societies of the ancient world and the feudal societies of the Middle Ages where either a revolution would transform society or it would enter a permanent crisis that would drive it backwards. In the case of Rome, the lack of a revolution led precisely to the destruction of Roman civilisation and to the Dark Ages. In the case of some feudal societies - Britain and, later, France - revolution destroyed the old order and enabled new social advance to take place, under capitalism.

Now capitalism itself faces the choice between permanent crisis, which eventually will plunge humanity back into barbarism through poverty and war, or a socialist revolution.

7. The working class

Marx began The Communist Manifesto with the statement, `The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.'

The question of how the ruling class was to force the oppressed class to keep producing wealth for it was crucial. Because of this, in every previous society, there had been enormous struggles between the classes which often culminated in civil war - the slave uprisings in Ancient Rome, the peasant uprisings in medieval Europe, the great civil wars and revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In all of these great struggles, the mass of the insurgent forces were from the most oppressed section of society. But, as Marx hastened to add, at the end of the day all their efforts served only to replace one privileged ruling minority with another. So, for example, in Ancient China there were several successful peasant revolts - but they merely replaced one emperor with another. Similarly, those who made the greatest effort in the French Revolution were the `bras nus' - the poorer classes of Paris, but at the end of the day society was ruled not by them but by bankers and industrialists instead of the king and courtiers.

There were two main reasons for this failure of the lower classes to keep control of the revolutions in which they fought.

Firstly, the general level of wealth in society was fairly low. It was only because the vast mass of people were kept in abysmal poverty that a small minority had time and leisure to develop the arts and sciences to maintain civilisation. In other words, class division was necessary if society was to progress.

Secondly, the life of the oppressed classes did not prepare them to run society. By and large they were illiterate, they had little idea of what things were like outside their own immediate locality, and, above all, their everyday life divided each of them against the other. Each peasant was concerned with cultivating his own plot of land. Each craftsman in the town ran his own small business and was to some extent in competition with other craftsmen, not united with them.

Peasant revolts would start with vast numbers of people rising up to divide the land of the local feudal lords, but once the lord was defeated they would fall to squabbling among themselves about how they would divide the land. As Marx put it, peasants were like `potatoes in a sack'; they could be forced together by some outside power but were not capable of linking permanently to represent their own interests.

The workers who create the wealth under modern capitalism differ from all the previous lower classes. Firstly, the division of classes is no longer necessary for human progress. So much wealth is created that capitalist society itself periodically destroys huge quantities through wars or economic crises. It could be divided up equally and society could still have a flowering of science, arts and so forth.

Secondly, life under capitalism prepares workers in many ways to take control of society. For example, capitalism needs workers who are skilled and educated. Also capitalism forces thousands of people into huge workplaces in huge conurbations where they are in close contact with one another, and where they can be a powerful force for changing society.

Capitalism makes workers cooperate in production within the factory, and those cooperative skills can easily be turned against the system, as when workers organise themselves into unions. Because they are massed together in huge concentrations it is much easier for workers to democratically control such bodies than it was for previously oppressed classes.

Furthermore, capitalism tends increasingly to turn groups of people who thought of themselves as a `cut above' ordinary workers (such as clerks or technicians) into wage labourers who are forced to organise unions and so on as other workers do.

Lastly, the development of communications - railways, roads, air transport, postal systems, telephones, radio and television - allows workers to communicate outside their own locality or industry. They can organise as a class on a national and international scale - something beyond the wildest dreams of previous oppressed classes.

All these facts mean that the working class can not only be a force which rebels against existing society, but can organise itself, (electing and controlling its own representatives, so as to change society in its own interest, and not just to set up yet another emperor or group of bankers. As Karl Marx put it:

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.

8. How can society be changed?

In Britain the overwhelming majority of socialists and trade unionists have generally argued that society can be transformed without violent revolution. All that is needed, they say, is for socialists to win enough popular support to gain control of the `traditional' political institutions - parliament and the local councils. Then socialists will be in a position to change society by getting the existing state - the civil service, the judiciary, the police, the armed forces - to enforce laws to curtail the power of the employing class.

In this way, it has been claimed, socialism can be introduced gradually and without violence, by reforming the present set up.

This view is usually referred to as `reformism', although occasionally you will hear it referred to as `revisionism' (because it involves revising Marx's ideas completely), `social democracy' (although until 1914 that meant revolutionary socialism) or Fabianism (after the Fabian Society which has long propagated the reformist view in Britain). It is a view accepted by the left as well as the right of the Labour Party.

Reformism seems, at first sight, very plausible. It fits with what we are told at school, in the papers and on television - that `parliament runs the country' and that `parliament is elected according to the democratic wishes of the people'. Yet despite that, every attempt to introduce socialism through parliament has ended in failure. Thus there were three majority Labour governments in Britain between 1945 and 1979 - with massive majorities in 1945 and 1966 - yet we are no nearer socialism than in 1945.

The experience abroad is the same. In Chile in 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president. People claimed that this was a `new way' to move to socialism. Three years later the generals who had been asked to join the government overthrew Allende and the Chilean working class movement was destroyed.

There are three interconnected reasons why reformism must always fail.

Firstly, while socialist majorities in parliaments are `gradually' introducing socialist measures, real economic power continues to lie in the hands of the old ruling class. They can use this economic power to shut down whole sections of industry, to create unemployment, to force up prices through speculation and hoarding, to send money abroad so creating a `balance of payments' crisis, and to launch press campaigns blaming all this on the socialist government.

Thus Harold Wilson's Labour government was forced in 1964 and again in 1966 to drop measures which would have benefited workers - by the wholesale movement of money abroad by wealthy individuals and companies. Wilson himself describes in his memoirs how:

We had now reached the situation where a newly elected government was being told by international speculators that the policy on which we had fought the election could not be implemented... The queen's first minister was being asked to bring down the curtain on parliamentary democracy by accepting the doctrine that an election in Britain was a farce, that the British people could not make a choice between policies.

It only needs to be added that, despite Wilson's alleged indignation, for the next six years he did indeed follow the sort of policies demanded by the speculators.

The same deliberate creation of balance of payments crises forced the Labour government elected in 1974 to introduce three consecutive sets of cuts in public spending in hospitals, schools and social services.

Allende's government in Chile faced even greater disruption at the hands of big business. Twice, whole sections of industry were shut down by `bosses' strikes', as speculation increased prices to an enormous level and hoarding of goods by businessmen caused queuing for the necessities of life.

The second reason capitalism cannot be reformed is that the existing state machine is not `neutral', but designed, from top to bottom, to preserve capitalist society.

The state controls nearly all the means of exercising physical force, the means of violence. If the organisations of the state were neutral, and did whatever any particular government told them, whether capitalist or socialist, then the state could be used to stop sabotage of the economy by big business. But look at the way the state machine operates and who really gives the orders, and you can see it is not neutral.

The state machine is not simply the government. It is a vast organisation with many different branches - the police, the army, the judiciary, the civil service, the people who run the nationalised industries and so on. Many of the people who work in these different branches of the state come from the working class - they live and get paid like workers.

But it is not these people who make the decisions. The rank and file soldiers don't decide where wars are going to be fought or whether strikes are going to be broken; the counter clerk in the social security office does not decide how much dole will be paid out. The whole state machine is based on the principle that people on one rung of the ladder obey those on the rung above.

This is essentially the case in the sections of the state machine that exercise physical force - army, navy, air force, police. The first thing soldiers are taught when they enlist - long before they are allowed to touch weapons - is to obey orders, regardless of their personal opinions of those orders. That is why they are taught to do absurd drills. If they will follow lunatic commands on the parade ground without thinking about it, it is reckoned they will shoot when ordered to without thinking about that either.

The most heinous crime in any army is a refusal to obey orders - mutiny. So seriously is the offence regarded, that mutiny during time of war is still punishable by execution in Britain. Who gives the orders?

If you look at the chain of command in the British army (and other armies are no different) it goes: general - brigadier - colonel - lieutenant - NCO - private. At no stage in that chain of command do elected representatives - MPs or local councillors - get a look in. It is just as much an act of mutiny for a group of privates to obey their local MP rather than the officer. The army is a massive killing machine. The people who run it - and have the power to promote other soldiers into commanding positions - are the generals.

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