Marx Goes on Green

"In London," Karl Marx wrote "they can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense"
Marx was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a "free gift of nature" to business."

Today, with climate change threatening life itself, the ecological contradictions of capitalism have reached truly dire proportions. The environmental crisis will undoubtedly play a far larger role in the demise of the system than Marx and Engels realised 150 years ago.

Karl Marx’s analysis of the environment under capitalism shows how saving the planet is inextricably linked to transforming our society. Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by corporations devoted to profit above all else. According to Marx, capitalism is an economic system profoundly at odds with a sustainable planet. The exploitation of nature is as fundamental to the profit system as the exploitation of working people. Capitalist farming is unsustainable because it inevitably starves the soil of nutrients. It is nothing less than "an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil" Marx also pointed out that "The development of civilisation and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Capitalism has created a metabolic rift between human beings and the Earth. Karl Marx came up with the term “metabolic rift” to explain the crack or rift that capitalism has created between social and natural systems, humans and nature. This rift, he claimed, led to the exploitation of the environment and ecological crisis. Marx argued that we humans are all part of nature and he was also the first one who saw social societies as an organism with a metabolism similar to that of humans.The general idea is that disruptions, or interruptions, in natural cycles and processes creates an metabolic rift between nature and social systems which leads to a buildup of waste and in the end to the degradation of our environment. The growth under capitalism of large-scale agriculture and long distance trade only intensifies and extends the rift. large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised agriculture work together in this destructive process, with industry and commerce supplying agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil. All of this is an expression of the antagonistic relation between town and country under capitalism. As Engels later put it: “The present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country” under “one single vast plan.” Despite its potential cost to society in terms of increased labor time, he viewed this fusion as “no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalist and wage-workers.”

The market system is incapable of preserving the environment for future generations because it cannot take into account the long-term requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning. Because capitalism promotes the accumulation of capital on a never-ending and always expanding scale it cannot be sustainable. Engels explained this destructive dynamic: "As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions"

We disrupt the natural ecosystem at our peril, Engels warned. "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first." Engels added: "At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature." On the other hand, "we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." That is, we can organise society in step with nature's limits.

This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from determining production in human society and a system of participatory democracy and rational planning is built in its stead. A rational agriculture, which needs either small independent farmers producing on their own, or the action of the associated producers, is impossible under modern capitalist conditions; and existing conditions demand a rational regulation of the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth, pointing beyond capitalist society to socialism and communism. Engels argued that only the working people organised as "associated producers" can "govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way". This "requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order."

For Marx and Engels, people and nature are not two separate things . Marx wrote that: “Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” Marx goes so far as to define communism as “the unity of being of man with nature.”

The most basic feature of communism in Marx’s projection is its overcoming of capitalism’s social separation of the producers from necessary conditions of production. This new social union entails a complete decommodification of labor power plus a new set of communal property rights. Communist or “associated” production is planned and carried out by the producers and communities themselves, without the class-based intermediaries of wage-labor, market, and state. Marx often motivates and illustrates these basic features in terms of the primary means and end of associated production: free human development.

Marx does not see this communal property as conferring a right to overexploit land and other natural conditions in order to serve the production and consumption needs of the associated producers. Instead, he foresees an eclipse of capitalist notions of land ownership by a communal system of user rights and responsibilities:

"From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition."

The Common Good

Why is it that capitalism has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome povertyand starvation? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does wealth seem to go hand in hand with squalor? Is there is something in the nature of capitalism which generates deprivation and inequality. Capitalism has developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labour harder than ever. We sweat every bit as hard as our ancestors. This, Karl Marx considered, was not because of natural scarcity. It was because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generated its fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant inequality for others, and freedom for some brought oppression and unhappiness for many. The system's voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign nations into enslaved colonies, and human beings into the playthings of economic forces beyond their control. It had blighted the planet with pollution and mass starvation, and scarred it with atrocious wars.

Were not Marx's ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labour camps and the loss of freedom for millions? The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the "communist" world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in impoverished, backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalised scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a re-cycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old shit." Marxism is a theory of how developed capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve prosperity for their people. It is not a programme by which countries totally bereft of material resources, a democratic civic culture and heritage, or a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age. Marx was not foolish enough to imagine that socialism could be built in such countries without more-advanced nations flying to their aid. And that meant that the common people of those advanced nations had to wrest the means of production from their rulers and place them at the service of the wretched of the earth. Marx's goal is leisure, not labour.

Marx was not some utopian. He believed that the world could be made a considerably better place. In this he was a realist, not an idealist. Those with their heads in the sand are those who deny that there can be any radical change. The whole of human history disproves this viewpoint. A man who witnessed the horrors of England in the midst of the industrial revolution was unlikely to be starry-eyed about his fellows . He undrstood that there are more than enough resources on the planet to resolve most of our material problems. Socialism does not depend on some miraculous change in human nature.

The way we go about our business, the way we are organised in our daily life is reflected in the way we think about things and the sort of world we created. The institutions we build, the philosophies we adhere to, the prevailing ideas of the time, the culture of society, are all determined to some extent or another by the economic structure of society. This did not mean that they were totally determined but were quite clearly a spin-off from the economic base of society. The political system, the legal system, the family, the press, the education system were all rooted, in the final analysis, to the class nature of society, which in turn was a reflection of the economic base. Marx maintained that the economic base or infrastructure generated or had built upon it a superstructure that kept it functioning. The education system, as part of the superstructure, therefore, is a reflection of the economic base and served to reproduce it. This did not mean that education and teaching is a sinister plot by the ruling class to ensure that it kept its privileges and its domination over the rest of the population. There are no conspirators hatching devious schemes. It simply means that the institutions of society, like education, are reflections of the world created by human activity and that ideas arise from and reflect the material conditions and circumstances in which they are generated. Some of those who defended feudalism against capitalist values in the late Middle Ages preached that capitalism would never work because it was contrary to human nature. Some capitalists now say the same about socialism. No doubt there is a tribe somewhere in the Amazon Basin that believes no social order can survive in which a man is allowed to marry his deceased brother's wife. We all tend to absolutise our own conditions.

Marx explained that "each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, simply in order to achieve its aims, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society i.e. ..to give its ideas the form of universality and to represent them as the only rational and universally valid ones". Ideas become presented as if they are universal, neutral, common sense. However, more subtly, we find concepts such as freedom, democracy, liberty or phrases such as "a fair days work for a fair days pay" being bandied around by opinion makers as if they were not contentious. They are, in Marxist terms, ideological constructs, in so far as they are ideas serving as weapons for social interests. They are put forward for people to accept in order to prop up the system. Ideas are not neutral. They are determined by the existing relations of production, by the economic structure of society. Ideas change according to the interests of the dominant class in society. Gramsci coined the phrase "ideological hegemony" to describe the influence the ruling class has over what counts as knowledge. For Marxists, this hegemony is exercised through institutions such as education, or the media. Again the important thing to note about this is that it is not to be regarded as part of a conspiracy by the ruling class. It is a natural effect of the way in which what we count as knowledge is socially constructed. The ideology of democracy and liberty, beliefs about freedom of the individual and competition are generated historically by the mode of production through the agency of the dominant class. They are not neutral ideas serving the common good but ruling class ideas accepted by everyone as if they were for the common good.

Marx was against people setting themselves up as superior to ‘ordinary’ workers, as if they and only they had the ability, foresight and knowledge to discern what socialist society would be like. This elitism had no place in the socialist movement for Marx. Marx was keen to emphasise the creativity and spontaneity of the drive towards socialism, and to chart and assess the practical experiments of workers in this endeavour. Thus, for example, he enthusiastically followed the course of and wrote about the Paris Commune of 1871, where workers’ power was manifested in novel and exciting ways. The tragedy of labour is that we labour to create a vast, global social structure powered by capital (which depends upon us for its existence) that oppresses us, and limits and constrains human and social possibilities. We work to build our own cages. The struggle for communism is both the struggle against the constraints and limitations of capitalist social life and for a new form of human society. Alienation, boredom, the length of the working day, and so on can be key issues. Explaining the mode of exploitation in the capitalist labour process would be essential – how it is that value and surplus value are produced. The exploration of the perverted form of human life in capitalist society, and the ways that human life is being capitalised (the human as a form of capital – human capital). Any ‘anti-capitalist’ revolution worthy of the name would have to break with the totalising and all-consuming ‘logic’ of capital from day one of any revolutionary transformation. The ‘education of the future’ is part of the struggle for a new society

Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual. The idea permeates his writings from end to end. He had a passion for the sensual. His so-called materialism is at root about the human body. Again and again, he speaks of the just society as one in which men and women will be able to realize their distinctive powers and capacities in their own distinctive ways. His goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment. To achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one's own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism, a set of institutions which will allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent, a socialist commonwealth, in which each person's participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institutions.

Quotes of the day

"Incidentally, if the bourgeoisie is politically, that is, by its state power, “maintaining injustice in property relations”, it is not creating it. The “injustice in property relations” which is determined by the modern division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition, concentration, etc., by no means arises from the political rule of the bourgeois class, but vice versa, the political rule of the bourgeois class arises from these modern relations of production which bourgeois economists proclaim to be necessary and eternal laws. If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its “movement”, the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie." [ my emphasis ]

As Martov says "It appears therefore that Marx admitted the possibility of a political victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie at a point of historic development when the previously necessary conditions for a socialist revolution were not yet mature...and he predicted with the prescience of genius that a conquest of political power by the proletariat that is premature from the historic viewpoint would “only be a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself.”

Which was exactly what the Russian Revolution proved to be - premature .

AND ANOTHER QUOTE

" The economic existence of the state is taxes.

The economic existence of the worker is wages.

To be ascertained: the relationship between taxes and wages.

Competition necessarily reduces the average wage to the minimum, that is to say, to a wage which permits the workers penuriously to eke out their lives and the lives of their race. Taxes form a part of this minimum, for the political calling of the workers consists precisely in paying taxes. If all taxes which bear on the working class were abolished root and branch, the necessary consequence would be the reduction of wages by the whole amount of taxes which today goes into them. Either the employers’ profit would rise as a direct consequence by the same quantity, or else no more than an alteration in the form of tax-collecting would have taken place. Instead of the present system, whereby the capitalist also advances, as part of the wage, the taxes which the worker has to pay, he [the capitalist] would no longer pay them in this roundabout way, but directly to the state.

If in North America wages are higher than in Europe, this is by no means the consequence of lower taxes there. It is the consequence of the territorial, commercial and industrial situation there. The demand for workers in relation to the supply of workers is significantly greater than in Europe. And any novice knows the truth of this already from Adam Smith."



BOTH QUOTES FROM Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality ,1847

a pause for humour

A joke taken and adapted from the World in Common discussion list :

Karl Marx died and is sent to Hell.

Three days later, the Devil, desperate , telephones Saint Peter, begging for an exchange.

"This one here has already unionized all the demons , nobody is working. I can't carry on like this!"

So they made the exchange and two days afterwards, the Devil telephones again to see how things were going.

"So then? How is God getting on with that Marx ?"

"God ??" answered Saint Peter. "He doesn't exist!"

All Boils down to Marx

Karl Marx, who complained of excruciating boils, actually suffered from a chronic skin disease with known psychological effects that may well have influenced his writings, a British expert said on Tuesday.

Sam Shuster, professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia, believes the revolutionary thinker had hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in which the apocrine sweat glands -- found mainly in the armpits and groin -- become blocked and inflamed.

"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem," said Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology."This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."

While HS is linked to boil-like lumps, the painful condition also causes more widespread infection, swelling, skin thickening and scarring.

It could also explain a number of Marx's other complaints, not previously linked, such as joint pain and a painful eye condition which often stopped him working.
Shuster based his diagnosis on an analysis of Marx's extensive correspondence, in which he wrote to friends about his health and described his skin lesions as "curs" and "swine."

"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867.

Marx, who died in 1883, was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century and his radical writings formed the basis of modern communism.

Notes for Talk on Trotsky and Trotskyism

1. "Permanent Revolution."

Trotsky acquired the phrase from Marx’s writings and very much like Lenin and his use of “dictatorship of the proletariat” from Marx , applied it in such a way that it was not originally intended to be used by Marx .

Marx first used the phrase in the following passage from The Holy Family , 1845 He wrote:

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. …. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.

In this passage, Marx says that Napoleon prevented the 'bourgeois revolution' in France from becoming fulfilled: that is, he prevented bourgeois political forces from achieving a total expression of their interests. According to Marx, he did this by suppressing the 'liberalism of bourgeois society'; and he did it because he saw 'the state as an end in itself', a value which supported his 'political aim of conquest'. Thus, he substituted 'permanent war for permanent revolution'. The final two sentences, however, show that the bourgeoisie did not give up hope, but continued to pursue their interests. This tells us that, for Marx, 'permanent revolution' involves a revolutionary class (in this case, the bourgeoisie) continuing to push for, and achieve, its interests despite the political dominance of actors with opposing interests.

The March 1850 Address
Marx's most famous use of the phrase 'permanent revolution' is his March 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. He enjoins the proletariat in Germany, faced with the prospect that 'the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence' - i.e. temporary political power -

to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far - not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world - that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers

In the remainder of the text, Marx outlines the content of his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power .

What permanent revolution in this sense means is that the proletariat should organise autonomously

Marx is concerned that throughout the process of this impending political change, the petty-bourgeoisie will seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy
Marx outlines how the proletariat should respond to this threat. First, he says that 'above all the [Communist] League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers' party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers' associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence'. That is, 'it is essential above all for them to be independently organized and centralized in clubs'. Marx does say that 'an association of momentary expedience' is permissible if, and only if, 'an enemy has to be fought directly' - though this is not an excuse for a long term alliance, since emergency alliances will arise satisfactorily when needed.

In an article two years earlier, Marx had referred to 'a programme of permanent revolution, of progressive taxes and death duties, and of organisation of labour' This confirms the impression that Marx's theory of 'permanent revolution' is not about revolution per se, rather more about the attitude that a revolutionary class should adopt in the period of their political subjection, including the programme of political demands they should propose. This aspect is raised in the Address. As well as overtures for organisational alliance with the petty bourgeoisie, Marx is concerned about attempts to 'bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable' Therefore, the workers' party must use their autonomous organisation to push a political programme which threatens the bourgeois status quo, along the following lines:

1. They can force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats compromise themselves; furthermore, the workers can force the concentration of as many productive forces as possible - means of transport, factories, railways, etc. - in the hands of the state.
2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. [...] The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.

In this passage, we can see that Marx believes the proletariat should refuse to moderate its demands to the petty-bourgeois consensus, and advocate extensive nationalisation. Furthermore, the demand of the workers should always seek to push the bourgeois further than they are prepared to go.
To put the Address in context Marx concludes his Address by summarising the themes elucidated above:

Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.

It is worthwhile to have some idea of how Marx saw the context in which he advocated 'permanent revolution'.
It seems that he believed that 'the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama [in Germany] will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated'. That is, the petty-bourgeois are expected to come to power in Germany at the same time as the 'direct victory' of the proletariat in France. Furthermore, Marx seems to believe of the former (and hence, of both) that it is 'imminent' (c.f. the third paragraph of the Address ). Marx clearly believes, therefore, that Europe is entering a time, and is at a level of development of the 'productive forces' in which the proletariat have the social revolution within their reach. If Marx is understood to be consistent about his emphasis on historical circumstance, it is unclear how the relevance of his theory of permanent revolution should be evaluated in times in which the social revolution is not expected to be imminent. Indeed, after 1850 there is no record of Marx or Engels ever using the term .
Summary, Marx's theory
Marx advocated 'permanent revolution' as the proletarian strategy of maintaining organisational independence along class lines, and a consistently militant series of political demands and tactics. It will be noted that at no stage does Marx make the central claim with which Trotsky's conception (see below) of 'permanent revolution' is concerned - i.e. that it is possible for a country to pass directly from the dominance of the semi-feudal aristocrats, who held political power in Russia in the early part of the 19th Century, to the dominance of the working class, without an interceding period of dominance by the bourgeois. On the contrary, Marx's statements in his March 1850 Address explicitly contradict such a view, assuming a 'period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat' .

Marx does claim, as does Trotsky, that socialism is impossible in one country, but they also say that 'in all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity' (Engels' The Principles of Communism, Sections 17 and 19 ).

The Communist Manifesto alludes to Marx's view that the dominance of the bourgeoisie is a necessary prelude to that of the proletariat: 'the bourgeoisie therefore produces ... its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable' .

In this sense, Trotsky's version of the theory represents both a different development and a contradiction of the expressed opinions of Marx

Trotsky’s theory

The basic points of this theory rest on the assumption that power could be held by Socialists in Russia long enough to enable the workers of the more advanced Western countries, helped, of course, by their Russian comrades, to introduce Socialism. Then the material backwardness of Russia could be overcome through the united efforts of a Socialist Europe.
None of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, accepted this view until after the seizure of power in October, 1917. Trotsky in fact only joined the Bolsheviks in August of that year.

Trotsky accepted the Bolshevik view that the only revolutionary class in Russia were the working class. But he argued that if, in the course of the bourgeois revolution, the workers were to get power they would not stop at introducing democracy but would begin to make inroads into capitalism. The revolution would begin as a bourgeois one and finish up socialist. This was what Trotsky meant by “permanent revolution” (a phrase borrowed from Marx as we have seen above ). Trotsky did not think that Socialism could be established in Russia alone. The success of the socialist revolution in Russia would depend, he said, on that of the socialist revolution in Europe. Trotsky's conception of Permanent Revolution is based on his understanding, drawing on the work of fellow Russian Alexander Parvus, that in 'backward' countries the tasks of the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution could not be achieved by the bourgeoisie itself. This conception was first developed in the essays later collected in his book 1905 and in his essay Results and Prospects

Trotsky's theory was developed as an alternative to the accepted Social Democratic theory that undeveloped countries must pass through two distinct revolutions. First the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, which socialists would assist, and at a later stage, the Socialist Revolution with an evolutionary period of capitalist development separating those stages. This is often referred to as the Theory of Stages, the 2-Stage Theory or as Stageism.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially held to a version of the Stagist theory, since they were still connected to the Social Democrats at the time. Lenin's earlier theory shared Trotsky's premise that the bourgeoisie would not complete a bourgeois revolution. Lenin thought that a 'Democratic Dictatorship' of the workers and peasants could complete the tasks of the bourgeoisie. Lenin was arguing by 1917 not only that the Russian bourgeoisie would not be able to carry through the tasks of the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution and therefore the proletariat had to take state power, but also that it should take economic power through the Soviets. This position was put forward to the Bolsheviks on his return to Russia, in his April Theses. .
Trotsky later generalised his Theory of Permanent Revolution, which had only been applied in the case of Russia previously, and argued that the proletariat needed to take power in a process of uninterrupted and Permanent Revolution in order to carry out the tasks of the Bourgeois Democratic revolution.

His position was put forward in his essay entitled The Permanent Revolution . Not only did Trotsky generalise his theory of Permanent Revolution in this essay but he also grounded it in the idea of combined and uneven development. This argument goes, again in contrast to the conceptions inherent within Stagist theory, that capitalist nations, indeed all class-based societies, develop unevenly and that some parts will develop more swiftly than others.

Taken from the wikipedia entry on Permanent Revolution

This theory is still the kernel of "Trotskyism," and from the S.P.G.B. standpoint that kernel is rotten with error.

Lenin himself had to admit that their hopes for a Socialist revolution in the West had been frustrated, but he and Trotsky blamed this on bad and treacherous leadership.
What the Bolsheviks did not grasp, then any more than their would-be imitators can do to-day, is the need for an understanding of Socialism by a majority of the .working-class. This understanding alone would make leadership, good or bad, impossible. We would also argue that ideas are social and that world wide interaction would reduce this uneven development
But Trotsky who himself failed to grasp all the implications of Socialism, continued to nourish these illusions to the end.

Fundamentally, Trotsky fell from power because his theory of Permanent Revolution and his consequent insistence on continued revolutionary agitation abroad would have cut off all technical aid from the Western world, and so made any attempt at industrial development more difficult in Russia.

As their dreams of a European revolution faded the Bolsheviks were forced to pursuea more realistic policy. Their aim became to get international recognition as thelegitimate government of Russia. In March 1921 an Anglo-Soviet trade agreementwas signed and in 1922 the Bolshevik government was invited to an internationalconference in Genoa. Later in the year the treaty of Rapallo with Germany wassigned. The Bolsheviks justified these moves as a means of gaining time by playingoff capitalist states against each other. But with the failure of the insurrection led bythe Comintern in Bulgaria and Germany in 1923, failure in China too , the Bolshevik government, now coming increasingly under the control of the Stalin group, began to abandon all hope of a world revolution and to concentrate on building up industrial strength at home.During the years that followed the Bolshevik government gradually gainedinternational recognition
From Socialist Standard :-Trotsky , the Prophet Debunked



2. Nature of Russia

His view that Russia under Stalin was a Workers State, not a perfect one, certainly, but a Workers State nevertheless, was set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed first published in 1936. This is the origin of the Trotskyist dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State" in which a bureaucracy had usurped political power from the working class but without changing the social basis (nationalisation and planning).

This view is so absurd as to be hardly worth considering seriously: how could the adjective "workers" be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely un-marxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production. Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism.

Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class.

As Engels explains “the state is an organisation of the possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class.” from Origin of the family , private property and the state …

Trotsky's view that Russia under Stalin was still some sort of "Workers State" was so absurd that it soon aroused criticism within the ranks of the Trotskyist movement itself which, since 1938, had been organised as the Fourth International. Two alternative views emerged. One was that Russia was neither capitalist nor a Workers State but some new kind of exploiting class society - Bureaucratic collectivism . The other was that Russia was state capitalist. The most easily accessible example of the first view is James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and of the second Tony Cliff's Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Both books are well worth reading, though in fact neither Burnham nor Cliff could claim to be the originators of the theories they put forward. The majority of Trotskyists, however, remain committed to the dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State". Cliff popularised the state capitalist thesis within the British Trotskyist movement, first of all in a discussion paper within the main Trotskyist party in Britain at the time, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and then in his book Russia: A Marxist Analysis, . The reality is that Cliff`s description of the Soviet Union as state capitalist was not even "unique" within the Trotskyist movement itself let alone outside it. Furthermore, it is a matter of record that the theory of state capitalism when applied to the Soviet Union was not an invention of the Trotskyist movement at all

Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. This meant that, in contrast to Lenin who mistakenly saw state capitalism as a necessary step towards socialism, Trotsky committed the different mistake of seeing state capitalism as the negation of capitalism. For Trotsky, economic democracy was not an issue. It played no role in determining the socialist nature of a society. Rather state ownership did. Thus he did not question one-man management in the workplace nor the capitalist social relationships it generated.
For Trotsky, it was :-

"necessary for each state-owned factory, with its technical director and with its commercial director, to be subjected not only to control from the top -- by the state organs -- but also from below, by the market which will remain the regulator of the state economy for a long time to come."

In spite of the obvious fact that the workers did not control their labour or its product, Trotsky asserted that :-

"No class exploitation exists here, and consequently neither does capitalism exist."

Ultimately, it was not self-management that mattered, it was :-

"the growth of Soviet state industry which signifies the growth of socialism itself, a direct strengthening of the power of the proletariat"

[The First 5 Years of the Communist International,

Trotsky's "opposition" in no way presented any real alternative to Stalinism. Indeed, Stalinism simply took over and applied Trotsky's demands for increased industrialisation. At no time did Trotsky question the fundamental social relationships within Soviet society. He simply wished the ruling elite to apply different policies while allowing him and his followers more space and freedom within the party structures.

What system of society exists in Russia? Trotsky, in exile, argued that although Russia was not socialist, as Stalin claimed, it could not be described as capitalist either. He held that in 1917 the working class in Russia had seized power and had begun the transition from capitalism to Socialism. However, owing to backwardness and isolation, what he called a ‘bureaucratic caste’ managed to usurp power. According to Trotsky, Russia was thus between capitalism and Socialism; it could either go forward to Socialism, but only with the rest of the world, or return to capitalism. He kept this view till his murder in 1940. Some of his followers still argue this. Others say Russia can now only be described as State capitalism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain too argues that this is the best description. We do not, however,think that Russia set off for Socialism and ended up as State capitalism, that Russia did not, and could not, have established Socialism in 1917. Capitalism has always existed in post-revolutionary Russia and theworking class there has never had political power.-
Additional Reading See:-The nature of Russian state capitalism

3. Leadership and corrupt leaders

Trotskyist theory and practice is rather neatly summed up in the opening sentence of the manifesto the Fourth International adopted at its foundation in 1938. Called The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, and drafted by Trotsky himself, it began with the absurd declaration: "The world political situation is chiefly characterised by historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". This tendency to reduce everything to a question of the right leadership (Trotsky once wrote a pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he explained its failure by the absence of a Bolshevik Party there) reminds us that Trotskyists are 102 per cent Leninists and believers in the vanguard party. They believe, in other words, that workers by their own efforts are incapable of emancipating themselves and so must be led by an enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries (generally bourgeois intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky). Thus they fall under the general criticism of Leninism and indeed of all theories which proclaim that workers need leaders.

Tactics, said Trotsky, should have been framed so as to win workers over from their Social Democratic leaders, under the command of the Communist Party:-

“We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders”. According to Trotsky, the official Communist leaders would not follow his policies because they were constituted of “not a few cowardly careerists and fakers whose little posts, whose incomes, and more than that, whose hides, are dear to them” (Trotsky, 'For a Workers United Front Against Fascism', December 1931)

“Uneven consciousness” among workers necessitates the need for leaders, and for an organisation that can bring it together with non-socialist workers in the name of immediate given ends, be those organisations trade unions, or – as above – workers' councils. Thus, the Soviets beloved of Leninists, and trade unions too, become locations for 'united front' work. This admirably demonstrates that Julius Martov's accusation in his State and Socialist Revolution that Bolsheviks supported soviets in order to help seize power as a minority was acknowledged by the very leaders of the Russian coup d'état. -

See Socialist Standard Trotsky and Stalin

"The revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party is for me not a thing that one can freely accept or reject: It is an objective necessity imposed upon us by the social realities -- the class struggle, the heterogeneity of the revolutionary class, the necessity for a selected vanguard in order to assure the victory. The dictatorship of a party belongs to the barbarian prehistory as does the state itself, but we can not jump over this chapter, which can open (not at one stroke) genuine human history. . . The revolutionary party (vanguard) which renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses to the counter-revolution . . . Abstractly speaking, it would be very well if the party dictatorship could be replaced by the 'dictatorship' of the whole toiling people without any party, but this presupposes such a high level of political development among the masses that it can never be achieved under capitalist conditions. The reason for the revolution comes from the circumstance that capitalism does not permit the material and the moral development of the masses." [Trotsky, Writings 1936-37, pp. 513-4]

In relation to the soviets , in Terrorism and Communism. 1920 we discover Trotsky arguing that:-

"We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorships of the Soviets the dictatorship of the party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the . . . party . . . [that] the Soviets . . . [became] transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this 'substitution' of the power of the party for the power of the working class these is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class."

And to demonstrate this remained his view he again writes in 1937

"Those who propose the abstraction of Soviets to the party dictatorship should understand that only thanks to the party dictatorship were the Soviets able to lift themselves out of the mud of reformism and attain the state form of the proletariat." [Trotsky, "Bolshevism and Stalinism"

More at Anarchist faq Macnally and Socialism from Below

See Anarchist faq Left opposition and Trotsky

4. Trotsky the Stalinist

Without entering the debate of Trotsky’s role in the destruction of the Kronstadt Commune or the Ukrainian anarchist Makhnovists guerrilla movement , which were expressions of non - Bolshevik resistance , how did Trotsky respond to internal dissent within the Bolshevik Party before he himself became to be the Opposition within the Bolshevik Party . Trotsky in fact actively denounced other oppositionists.


His reaction to the state repression of Miasnikov's Workers' Group as Deutscher notes in The Prophet Unarmed
Trotsky "did not protest when their adherents were thrown into prison . . . Nor was he inclined to countenance industrial unrest . . . Nor was he at all eager to support the demand for Soviet democracy in the extreme form in which the Workers' Opposition and its splinter groups [like the Workers' Group] had raised it."
Dzerzhinsky was given the task of breaking the opposition groups by the central committee. He found that even party members of unquestioned loyalty regarded them as comrades and refused to testify against them. He then turned to the Politburo and asked it to declare it was the duty of any party member to denounce to the GPU people inside the party engaged aggressive action against the official leaders.
Trotsky "did not tell the Politburo plainly that it should reject Dzerzhinsky's demand. He evaded the question."

Trotskyist Tony Cliff presents a similar picture of Trotsky's lack of concern for opposition groups and his utter failure to support working class self-activity or calls for real democracy. He notes that in July and August 1923 Moscow and Petrograd

"were shaken by industrial unrest . . . Unofficial strikes broke out in many places . . . In November 1923, rumours of a general strike circulated throughout Moscow, and the movement seems at the point of turning into a political revolt. Not since the Kronstadt rising of 1921 had there been so much tension in the working class and so much alarm in the ruling circles."

The ruling elite, including Trotsky, acted to maintain their position and the secret police turned on any political group which could influence the movement. The strike wave gave a new lease of life to the Mensheviks and so "the GPU carried out a massive round up of Mensheviks, and as many as one thousand were arrested in Moscow alone."

When it was the turn of the Workers Group and Workers Truth, Trotsky:-

"did not condemn their persecution" and he "did not support their incitement of workers to industrial unrest." Moreover, "Nor was Trotsky ready to support the demand for workers' democracy in the extreme form to which the Workers Group and Workers Truth raised it." [Trotsky, vol. 3, ]

Trotsky did not call for workers' democracy in any meaningful form.

Indeed, his "New Course Resolution" even went so far as to say that "it is obvious that there can be no toleration of the formation of groupings whose ideological content is directed against the party as a whole and against the dictatorship of the proletariat. as for instance the Workers' Truth and Workers' Group."

Thus we come to the strange fact that it was Lenin and Trotsky themselves who knowingly destroyed the groups which represent what modern day Trotskyists assert is the "real" essence of Leninism.

Furthermore, modern day Trotskyists generally ignore these opposition groups when they discuss alternatives to Stalinism or the bureaucratisation under Lenin and Trotsky .

This seems a strange fate to befall tendencies which, if we take Leninists at their word, expressed what their tradition stands for. The "Workers' Opposition" did have some constructive suggests to make as regards combating the economic bureaucratisation which existed under Lenin. Yet almost all modern Trotskyists (like their mentors Lenin and Trotsky) dismiss them as "syndicalist" and utopian.

See Anarchist faq What does these Oppositions tell us about Leninism

5. Reformism

One important point of the Fourth International was the concept of "transitional demands" , i.e. advocating reforms known not to work, in order to draw workers into “Communist” ranks through their inevitable disappointment . The manifesto contained a whole list of reform demands which was called "the transitional programme".

Trotsky urges that transitional demands should include the call for the expropriation of various groups of capitalists- sometimes translated in modern terms into the nationalisation of various sectors [ Demands for the nationalisation of the 200 big companies and banks by the Militant Tendency during the 70s and 80s ] - under the control and management of the workers. Transitional demands should include opposition to imperialist war. Such demands intend to challenge the capitalist class's right to rule. By fighting for these "transitional" demands, in the opinion of the Trotskyists, the workers will come to realize that capitalism cannot meet their needs, and they will then embrace the full program of the Fourth International.

This reform programme was said to be different from those of openly reformist parties like Labour in Britain and the Social Democratic parties on the Continent in that Trotskyists claimed to be under no illusion that the reforms demanded could be achieved within the framework of capitalism. They were posed as bait by the vanguard party to get workers to struggle for them, on the theory that the workers would learn in the course of the struggle that these demands could not be achieved within capitalism and so would come to struggle (under the leadership of the vanguard party) to abolish capitalism .

Actually, most Trotskyists are not as cynical as they pretend to be here: in discussion with them you gain the clear impression that they share the illusion that the reforms they advocate can be achieved under capitalism (as, indeed, some of them could be). In other words, they are often the victims of their own "tactics". Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism through reforms to be enacted by Labour governments. As a tiny minority, they get to work with organisations which can more easily attract members, and can thus be part of campaigns and struggles that reach out well beyond the tiny numbers of political activists in any given situation .The salient fact remains, though, that despite providing all this assistance, the “revolutionaries” are incapable of taking these campaigns and trade unions further than the bulk of the membership are willing to tolerate .

Thus - Failure of Entryism , first into the ILP during the 30s and post war , into the Labour Party attempted by Militant and by the I.S [SWP]. through “rank and file committees “ in the 70s and now Stop the War Movement and Respect or SSP /Solidarity

6. Personal attributes

From the 1940 obituary in the Socialist Standard we have this to say

Trotsky's personal qualities are of minor interests to Socialists. As a political pamphleteer he was outstanding and he was also a first-class orator.

But unless the world-proletariat can harness such gifts to serve the struggle for Socialism, they will be wasted and even harmful to workers' interests , although, and as in the case of Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that his whole life was sincerely dedicated to their cause.
His talent for military organisation and strategy helped to save the Bolsheviks from being defeated by the armies of the Czarist generals and the half-hearted intervention of the Allies.
This was often asserted by Lenin and, at the time, admitted by Stalin.

But Trotsky did not achieve this military success without ruthless discipline, a ruthlessness which showed itself again in his suppression of the revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt.
When charged by Kautsky with using methods of terrorism, Trotsky replied with a defence justifying the means by the end, as if the two could ever be separated.

Socialism, the pinnacle of human development, can never be achieved by methods that are themselves reactionary and anti-human; it is more than the irony of his logic that Trotsky himself should have met his end in such a violent manner.

Live by the sword , die by the sword - or in Trotsky’s case an ice pick .

Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism .

In the words of the Trotskyist Harry Ratner - "So were Kautsky and the Mensheviks right to oppose the October Revolution from the start, as an attempt prematurely to go beyond the 'bourgeois' stage of the Russian revolution? Were they right to declare a socialist working-class revolution in a backward Russia premature and doomed to failure because the conditions for socialism were not ripe-both as regards the economic base and the social and cultural level of the working class? On the face of it, subsequent history would seem to justify them…All one can say is that the 'workers' state' that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism. My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once told me: 'It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred'".- New Interventions



See SWP/Trot history and politics
Where is the SWP Coming From
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/SWPpaper.html
Anyone ready for the Vanguard
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/etheory/Early90's/html/93Vanguard(SWP).html
Obituary of Tony Cliff
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/may00/cliff.html
Obituary of Ted Grant
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/sep06/page12.html

The Myth of the Permanent Arms Economy
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/aug03/kidron2.html
Respect , the unity coalition
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/apr04/respect.html
Who are the Socialist Alliance
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/apr01/alliance.html

Another of Mikes Marxtoons

One night Marx set off with Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht for a drunken jaunt up the Totenham Court Rd. , intending to have a drink in every pub between Oxford St and HampsteadRd. , no fewer than 18 pubs . Liebknecht takes up the story .
"Now we had enough of our beer trip for the time being and in order to cool our heated blood , we started on a double -quick march , until Edgar Bauer stumbled upon a heap of paving stones . "Hurrah , an idea !" And in memory of mad student pranks he picked up a stone and CLASH ! CLATTER! a gas lantern went flying into splinters. Nonsense is contagious - Marx and I did not stay behind , and we broke four or five street lamps ...But the noise nevertheless attracted the attention of a policeman ..."
And all three scampered for it . Karl Marx the lager lout !!

Imagine Karl Marx

...Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

....

Me thinks Marx is a teddy boy

Many thanks to fellow postal worker and friend Mike Boyd for this cartoon of Charlie - Mike's less political cartoons and drawings can be found here

Talking With Marx

Mailstrom recently conducted a séance and employed a ouija board to make contact with the long - dead Karl Marx which resulted in the following interview .






Interview with Marx

Question 1 : Dr Marx , you are well known as the author of a book on economics but I think you studied law at university , didn’t you ?
Karl Marx: Although I studied jurisprudence , I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history . In the year 1842-43 , as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung , I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests . The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division of landed property ; the first polemic started by Herr von Schaper , then Oberpresident of the Rhine Province , against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry , and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions .

Present-day society

Q 2 : What , as a result of the studies you then undertook , would you say is the basis of present-day society ?
Marx: “Present-day society” is capitalist society , which exists in all civilised countries , more or less free from mediaeval admixture , more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country , more or less developed .
In present-day society the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the land-owners ( the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital ) and the capitalists.
The capitalist mode of production rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal conditions of productions , of labour power .


Q 3 : What would you say are the essential features of this capitalist society ?
Marx: Capitalist production is distinguished from the outset by two characteristic features.
First. It produces products as commodities .The fact that it produces commodities does not differentiate it from other modes of productions ; but rather the fact that being a commodity is the dominant and determining characteristic of its products . This implies , first and foremost , that the labourer himself comes forward merely as a seller of commodities , and thus as a free wage-labourer , so that labour appears in as wage labour . The relation between capital and wage-labour determines the entire character of the mode of production . The principal agents of this mode of production itself , the capitalist and the wage-labourer , are as such merely embodiments , personifications of capital and wage-labour .
The second distinctive feature of the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus-value as the direct aim and determining motive of production .


Q4 : You say that the relation between capital and wage-labour determines the whole character of capitalism but how , first , would you define “capital”?
Marx: Capital is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois society . Capital consists not only of means of subsistence , instruments of labour and raw materials , not only of material products; it consists just a much of exchange values. All the products of which it consists are commodities . Capital is , therefore , not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities , of exchange values, of social magnitudes.
Material wealth transforms itself into capital simply and solely because the worker sells his labour-power in order to live . The articles which are the material conditions of labour , the means of production , and the articles which are the precondition for the survival of the worker himself , the means of subsistence , both become capital only because of the phenomenon of wage-labour . Capital is not a thing , any more than money is a thing. In capital , as in money , certain specific social relations of production between people appear as relations of things to people , or else certain social relations appear as natural properties of things in society . Without a class dependent on wages , the moment individuals confront each other as free persons , there can be no production of surplus-value ;without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production , and hence no capital and no capitalist ! Capital and wage-labour ( it is thus we designate the labour of the worker of the worker who sells his own labour-power) only express two aspects of the self-same relationship.



Q5: But in some cases the means of production belong to the State . Does this make any difference to this basic relationship of capitalism?
Marx: The social capital is equal to the sum of the individual capitals ( including joint-stock capital and also state capital , in so far as governments employ productive wage-labour in mines, railways, and so on and the function as industrial capitalists) . Where the State itself is the capitalist producer , as in the exploitation of mines , woodlands and the like , its product is “commodity” and for this reason possesses the specific character of every other commodity .



Q6: How do you explain the origin of surplus-value ?
Marx: The value of a commodity is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it . But part of that quantity of labour is realised in a value , for which an equivalent has been pain in the form of wages; part of it realised in a value for which no equivalent has been paid. Part of the labour contained in the commodity is paid labour ; part is unpaid labour.
The surplus value , or the part of the total value of the commodity in which the surplus labour or unpaid labour of the working man is realised , I call Profit .
It is the employing capitalist who immediately extracts from the labourer this surplus value , whatever part of it he may ultimately be able to keep for himself . Upon this relation , therefore , between the employing capitalist and the wage labourer the whole wages system and the whole present system of production hinges.



Q7 : So you are saying that it is through the wages system that the workers are exploited ?
Marx : Wages are not what they appear to be , namely , the value , or price , of labour , but only a masked form for the value , or price , of labour power. The wage- worker has permission to work for his own subsistence , that is , to live , only in so far as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist
( and hence also for the latter’s co-consumer’s of surplus-value); the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labour by extending the working day or by developing the productivity; consequently the system of wage labour is a system of slavery , and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment.



Q8: But surely you are not saying that workers should not try to obtain “better payment” while capitalism lasts?
Marx: To clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question . The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?
The periodical resistance on the part of the working man against a reduction of wages , and their periodical attempts at a rise in wages , are inseparable from the wages system , and dictated by the very fact of labour being assimilated to commodities , and therefore subject to the laws regulating the general movement of prices.
The value of labour-power constitutes the conscious and explicit foundation of the trade unions , whose importance for the English working class can scarcely be overestimated . The trade unions aim a nothing les than to prevent the reduction of wages below the level that is traditionally maintained in the various branches of industry.
Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital . They fail partially from an injurious use of their power . They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system , instead of simultaneously trying to change it , instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class , that is to say , the ultimate abolition of the wages system .



Future Society




Q9 : Clearly then , the abolition of the wages system is one key feature of the socialist , or as I believe you prefer to call it communist , society which will achieve “the emancipation of the working class” , but what else can be said about it ?
Marx : The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class . The working class , in the course of its development , will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism , and there will be no more political power properly so-called since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society .
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production , the producers do not exchange their products ; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products , as a material quality possessed by them.
There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production , on the basis of exchange value, of money . The private exchange of all products of labour , all activities and all wealth stands in antithesis to free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production.
If we were to consider a communist society in place of a capitalist one , then money capital would immediately be done away with .


Q10 : So you are saying that the working class can only emancipate themselves by establishing a classless , stateless , and moneyless society , but , with regard to this last point , you yourself are on record as mentioning “labour-time vouchers” as a possible means of distributing consumer goods in the early stages of communist society . Is there not a contradiction here ?
Marx : Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves . If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of workers themselves , then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.
With collective production , money capital is completely dispensed with . The society distributes labour-power and means of production between the various branches of industry. There is no reason why the producers should not receive paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labour time from the social consumption stocks. But these tokens are not money ; they do not circulate .
The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour , and of his claim to a certain portion of the common product which has been set aside for consumption .



Q11 : But you are not claiming , are you , that such “tickets” or “certificates” would be a permanent or even an essential feature of a future classless society ?
Marx : What we have to deal with here is a communist society , not as it has developed on its own foundations but , on the contrary , just as it emerges from capitalist society ; which is thus in every respect , economically , morally ,and intellectually , still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.
In a higher phase of communist of communist society , after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour , and herewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour , have vanished ; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want ; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual , and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners : From each according to his ability , to each according to his needs !



The Period of Revolution




Q12: The continuing development of the forces of production over the last hundred or so years means that communist society could now proceed almost immediately to this stage of free access . But I want to move on to ask you about how you see the change-over from capitalist to socialist . Or communist , society taking place.
Marx: The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class , to win the battle of democracy . The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest , by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State , of the proletariat organised as the ruling class , and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible .


Q13: Wait a minute . Let me stop you there . What exactly do you mean by the phrase “centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State , of the proletariat organised as the working class” ? In a previous reply you told us that socialism was a society without a State .
Marx: When [ the proletariat] attains government power its enemies and the old organisation of society has not yet vanished .
The proletariat still acts , during the period of the struggle for the overthrow of the old society , on the basis of that old society , and hence also still moves within political forms which more or less belong to it . It has not yet , during this period of struggle , attained its final constitution , and employs means for its liberation which this liberation fall aside .
It can however only use such economic means as abolish its own character as salariat , hence as a class . With its complete victory its own rule thus ends . As its class character has disappeared .
When , in the course of development , class distinctions have disappeared , and all production has been concentrated in the public power will lose its political character .In place of the old bourgeois society , with its classes and class antagonisms , we shall have an association , in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.



Q14: You are saying that to establish a classless , stateless society the working class has first to organise to gain control of political power - “win the battle of democracy” , as you put it - and use it to expropriate the capitalist class . This seems reasonable enough , even if today it could again be said that this period of revolution could be passed through very quickly precisely because the centralisation and development of the means of production has now reached such a high degree. But how do you see the working class winning political power , peaceably or violently.
Marx: The workers will have to seize political power one day in order to construct the new organisation of labour; they will have to overthrow the old politics which bolster up the old institutions
We do not claim , however , that the road leading to this goal is the same everywhere . We know that heed must be paid to institutions , customs and traditions of various countries , and we do not deny that there are countries , such as America and England , where the workers may attain their goal by peaceful means . That being the case , we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force.



Q15: Today of course “most continental countries” have adopted the same political forms as America and Britain , but in any event won’t socialism or communism , have to be a world system ?
Marx: United action of the leading civilised countries at least , is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat .
Empirically , communism is only possible as an act of the dominant people “all at once” and simultaneously , which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism . Moreover , the mass of propertyless workers presupposes the world market through competition . The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically , just as communism , its activity , can only have a “world-historical” existence.



Causes of Crises



Q 16: Can we now perhaps turn to some current issues that are of immediate concern to people today . First of all , the present slump where we hear about there being over-production of steel , cars , food and other goods .
Marx: The word “over-production” in itself leads to error . So long as the most urgent needs of a large part of society are not satisfied . Or only the most immediate needs are satisfied , there can of course be absolutely no talk of an over-production of products - in the sense that the amount of products is excessive in relation to the need for them . On the contrary , it must be said that on the basis of capitalist production , there is constant under-production in this sense . The limits to production are set by the profit of the capitalist and in no way by the needs of the producers But over-production of products and over-production of commodities are two entirely different things.



Q17: Yes , that’s clear enough , but what do you think of the proposal put forward for instance by the Labour Party that the way out of the crisis is to increase spending.
Marx : The popular ascription of stagnation in the processes of production and circulation to an insufficiency of the circulating medium is a delusion .
It is pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. The capitalist system does not recognise any forms of consumer other than those who can pay , if we exclude the consumption of paupers and swindlers . The fact that commodities are unsaleable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them , no consumers ( no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption ) . If the attempt is made to give this tautology the semblance of greater profundity , by the statement that the working class receives too small a portion of its own product , and that the evil would be remedied if it received a bigger share , if its wages rose , we need only note that crises are always prepared by a period in which wages generally rise , and the working class actually does receive a greater share in the part of the annual product destined for consumption . From the standpoint of these advocates of sound and “simple” ( ! ) common sense , such periods should rather avert the crisis . It thus appears that capitalist production involves certain conditions independent of people’s good or bad intentions , which permit the relative prosperity of the working class only temporarily , and moreover always the harbinger of crisis.



Q18: What about the other aspects of crisis such as unemployment and falling real wages ?
Marx: Capitalistic production moves through certain periodical cycles . It moves through a state of quiescence , growing animation , prosperity , overtrade , crisis and stagnation . The market prices of commodities , and the market rates of profits , follow these phases , now sinking below their average , now rising above them .
Well ! During the phase of sinking market prices and the phases of crisis and stagnation , the working man , if not thrown out of employment altogether ,is sure to have his wages lowered .
A surplus population of workers is a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production . It forms a disposable industrial reserve army , which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost .
Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields . It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits .
Taking them as a whole , the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army , and this in turn corresponds to the periodical alternations of the industrial cycle.



Q19 : Lets now turn to the other big economic issue , inflation . What do you see as its cause and consequences ?
Marx: Here we are concerned only with inconvertible paper money issued by the State and given forced currency.
Pieces of paper on which money-names are printed , such as £1 , £5 , are thrown into the circulation process from outside by the State . In so far as they actually circulate in place of the same amount of gold , their movement is simply a reflection of the laws of monetary circulation itself . A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can only spring up from the proportion in which that money represents gold .In simple terms the law referred to is as follows: the issue of paper money must be restricted to the quantity of gold ( or silver ) which would actually be in circulation , and which is represented symbolically by the paper money .
If the paper money exceeds its proper limit - the amount in gold coins of the same denomination which could have been in circulation - then , quite apart from the danger of becoming universally discredited , it will still represent within the world of commodities only that quantity of gold which is fixed by its immanent laws . No greater quantity is capable of being represented . If the quantity of paper money represents twice the amount of gold available , then in practice £1 will be the money-name not of ¼ of an ounce of gold but of 1/8 of an ounce . The effect is the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as the standard of prices . The values previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2 .
In such a case nothing would have changed , either in the productive powers of labour , or in supply or demand , or in values. Nothing could have changed except the money names of those values . To say that in such a case the workingman ought not to insist upon a proportionate rise of wages , is to say that he must be content to be paid in names , instead of things . All past history proves that whenever such a depreciation of money occurs , the capitalists are on the alert to seize this opportunity for defrauding the workingman.



Q20 : What do you think of the idea of cutting taxes as a way of trying to improve the workers’ position under capitalism ?
Marx: If all taxes which bear on the working class were abolished root and branch , the necessary consequence would be the reduction of wages by the whole amount of taxes which goes into them . Either the employers’ profit would rise as a direct consequence by the same quantity , or else no more than an alteration in the form of tax-collecting would have taken place . Instead of the present system , whereby the capitalist also advances , as part of the wage , the taxes which the worker has to pay , he [ the capitalist ] would no longer pay them in this roundabout way , but directly to the State.



Ecology



Q21: Finally , there is a growing concern these days about pollution and the environment . Could you say something on this .
Marx: The capitalist mode of production completes the disintegration of the primitive familial union which bound agriculture and manufacture when they were both at an undeveloped and child-like stage. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis , a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation. Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres , and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results . On the one hand it concentrates the historic motive power of society ; on the other hand , it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth , it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing ; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil . Thus it destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker , and the intellectual life of the rural worker . But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism , which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion , it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race.
Moreover , all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art , not only of robbing the worker , but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility .
Capitalist production , therefore , only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the worker.



Q22: Would you like to address a special message to our readers?
Marx: It is the working millions of Great Britain who first have laid down the real basis of a new society - modern industry , which transformed the destructive agencies of nature into the productive power of man. The English working classes , with invincible energies , by the sweat of their brows and brains , have called to life the material means of ennobling labour itself , and of multiplying its fruits in such a degree as to make general abundance possible . By creating the inexhaustible productive powers of modern industry they have fulfilled the first condition of the emancipation of Labour . They have now to realise its other condition . They have to free those wealth - producing powers from the infamous shackles of monopoly , and subject them to the joint control of the producers , who , till now , allowed the very product of their hands to turn against them and transformed into as many instruments of their own subjugation.
The English working men are the first-born sons of modern industry . They will then , certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution prepared by that industry , a revolution , which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world , which is as universal as capital-rule and wage-slavery.



Q23: with your power from the other-side , Herr Doctor , for a Brooklyn comrade , could you perhaps tell us who will win this season’s football league , Celtic or Rangers ?
Marx: Hegel [ a Hearts fan ] remarks somewhere that history repeats itself . He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy , the second time as farce .



Mailstrom: Thank you Dr Marx
Marx: Bitte



A Note on Sources
Every word in Marx’s replies is taken from his actual writings , the only changes being to leave out , in some cases , introductory phrases or conjunctions. Nor have we indicated that we are sometimes quoting from different writings in the same reply .
Q1 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Lawrence and Wishart , 1971 , p19-20
Q2 Three separate passages from the Critique of the Gotha Programme , Progress Publishers , 1971 , p 25 , p13 , and p18 respectively
Q3 Capital Vol 3 ,FLPH , 1959, p 857-8
Q4 Wage Labour and Capital M-E Selected Works , Vol 1, 1958, p90
Results of the Immediate Process of Production , appendix to Penguin Vol 1 of Capital , 1976 p1005-6
Q5 Capital Vol 2, Penguin 1978 p177
Comments on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch , BICO . 1971, p22
Q6 Three separate passages from Value , Price and Profit ,Peking , 1969, p54, 55 and 56
Q7 Critique of the Gotha Programme p22-3
Q8 First two and fourth paragraphs from Value Price and Profit , p 46 , p71 , and 78-9 . Third paragraph from Results , p1069
Q9 The Poverty of Philosophy FLPH ,1956 p196-7, Critique of the Gotha Programme , p16 Grundisse , Pelican , 1973, p158-9
Q10 Critique of the Gotha Programme p18 , Capital Vol 2 ,p434 ,Capital Vol 1 p188-9 footnote
Q11 Critique of the Gotha Programme , p16 and p17-18
Q12 Manifesto of the Communist Party , FLPH ,1954 , p79-80
Q13 First three paragraphs from Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy , The 1st International and After , Penguin , 1974 p 332 , 338 , and 335. The fourth paragraph from the Communist Manifesto p81 and p82 [re-translated from original German]
Q14 Speech at the Hague Congress , The 1st International p324
Q15 Communist Manifesto , p77
Q16 Theories of Surplus Value , Pt2 , Progress Pub., 1968, p527
Q17 Capital ,Vol 1 , p218 , footnote , Capital , Vol 2 , p486-7
Q18 The first two paragraphs from Value , Price and Profit , p69 , the other three paragraphs from Capital Vol 1 , p784 , p788, p790,
Q19 First three paragraphs from Capital Vol 1 p224-5 . Last paragraph Value , Price and Profit , p65-66
Q20 Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality ,Collected Works , Vol 6 Lawrence and Wishart ,1976, p329
Q21 Capital , Vol 1 p637-8
Q22 Letter to the Labout Parliament , Articles On Britain , Progress Pub., 1975 , p215
Speech at the anniversary of the “Peoples Paper” , Articles On Britain , p261





From the Socialist Standard , March 1983