|
|
|
|
||
INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM-LENINISMSECTION III: Socialism and the Tactics of Class StruggleLesson 1 – Socialism
TEXTS FOR DISCUSSION1. ‘… Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the development of contemporary society. Socialization of labor, which is advancing ever more rapidly in thousands of forms and has manifested itself very strikingly, during the half-century since Marx’s death, in the growth of large-scale production, capitalist cartels, syndicates and trusts, as well as in the gigantic increase in the dimensions and power of finance capital, provides the principal material foundation for the inevitable advent of socialism. The intellectual and moral motive force and the physical executor of this transformation is the proletariat, which capitalism itself has trained. The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards conquest of political power by the proletariat (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”). The socialization of production cannot but lead to the means of production becoming the property of society, to “expropriation of the expropriators.” A tremendous rise in labor productivity, a shorter working day, and replacement of the remnants, the ruins, of small-scale, primitive and disunited production by collective and improved labor - such are the direct consequences of this transformation. Capitalism breaks for all time the ties between agriculture and industry, but at the same time, through its highest development, prepares new elements of those ties, a union between industry and agriculture based on conscious application of science and concentration of collective labor, and on a redistribution of the human population (putting an end both to rural backwardness, isolation and barbarism and to unnatural concentration of vast masses of people in big cities). A new form of family, new conditions in status of women and in upbringing the younger generation are prepared by the highest forms of present-day capitalism: the labor of women and children and break-up of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably assume the most terrible, disastrous, and repulsive forms in modern society. Nevertheless, “modern industry, by assigning as it does, an important part in the socially organized process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historic development. Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of human development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the laborer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the laborer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.” 2. The factory system contains “the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the ease of every child over a given age, combine productive labor with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” [ibid.] 3. Marx’s socialism places problems of nationality and state on the same historical footing, not only in explaining the past but also (as) a bold forecast of the future and bold practical action for its achievement. Nations are an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois epoch of social development … The development of capitalism, however, increasingly breaks down national barriers, does away with national seclusion and substitutes class antagonisms for national antagonism. It is, therefore, perfectly true of developed capitalist countries that “the workingmen have no country” and “united action” by the workers, of civilized countries at least, “is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat” [Communist Manifesto]. The state, which is organized coercion, inevitably came into being at a definite stage in development of society, when the latter had split into irreconcilable classes, and could not exist without an “authority” ostensibly standing above, and to a certain degree separate from society. Arising out of class contradictions, the state becomes “...the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state of the slave-owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, the feudal state was the organ of the nobility to hold down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labor by capital.” (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State …) Even the democratic republic, the freest and most progressive form of the bourgeois state, does not eliminate this fact in any way, but merely modifies its form … By leading to the abolition of classes, socialism will thereby lead to the abolition of the state as well. “The first act,” Engels writes in Anti-Dühring “by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of society as a whole - the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society - is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. The state interference in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the direction of the processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished,’ it withers away” [Anti-Dühring]. “The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” Finally, as regards the attitude of Marx’s socialism towards the small peasantry, which will continue to exist in the period of the expropriation of the expropriators, we must refer to a declaration made by Engels, which expresses Marx’s views: “...when we are in possession of state power we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to co-operative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose. And then of course we shall have ample means of showing to the small peasant prospective advantages that must be obvious to him even today.”
Questions:
Click here if you would like feedback on your answers from one of our tutors.
Further and Recommended ReadingSocialism (Marxist Internet Archive: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Terms)
|
