7: Disturbance and Readjustment of Social Equilibrium
a. The Process of Social Changes and the Productive Forces
The process of social changes is closely connected with changes in the condition of the productive forces. This movement of the productive forces, and the movement and regrouping of all social elements, involved in it, is nothing more nor less than a process of constant disturbance of social equilibrium, followed by reestablishments of equilibrium. Indeed, a progressive movement of the productive forces implies above all that a contradiction has arisen between the social technique and the social economy: the system loses its equilibrium. The productive forces have increased to certain extent; a certain regrouping of persons must be undertaken, for otherwise there is no equilibrium, i. e., the system cannot permanently endure in its present form. This contradiction'. eliminated by means of the following regrouping of men: economy "adapts itself" to the condition of the productive forces, to the social technology. But the regrouping of persons in the economic apparatus also implies a necessary regrouping of persons in the social-political structure of society (a different combination parties, a different alignment of the forces of the parties, etc.) Furthermore, the same condition necessarily demands a change in legal, moral, and all other standards. For the contradiction can be solved only in this way, or, what amounts to the same thing, the equilibrium between the system of persons and the system of standards cannot be reestablished in any other way. The same true also of the entire psychology of society, as well as of its ideology. G. V. Plekhanov has brilliantly stated this: "The origin, change, and destruction of the association of ideas, under influence of the origin, change and destruction of certain combina nations of social forces, to a predominant extent explain the history of ideology." 1) The new "combination", i. e., the new relation between persons, comes in conflict with the old combination (the old associations of ideas). This means a destruction of the internal equilibrium, which is reestablished on a new basis, a new "combination" of ideas originates, i. e., where there is an adaptation on the part of the social psychology and the social ideology, which equilibrium is again disturbed, etc., etc.
We now encounter a problem that is of immense theoretical and practical significance.
We may conceive of the restoration of social equilibrium as proceeding in either of two ways: that of a gradual adaptation of the various elements in the social whole
(evolution), and that of violent upheaval (revolution). We have seen from history that revolutions do sometimes occur; they are historical facts. It will be interesting to learn under what circumstances the adaptation of the various elements of society proceeds by evolution, and under what circumstances by revolution.
This will involve a discussion of a number of other questions concerning the dynamics of society. We know, for instance, that any given society is constantly undergoing change, experiencing internal regroupings, alterations of form and content, etc. We know that this process is connected with the evolution of the productive forces. But we sometimes witness changes within the limits of the identical social-economic structure; and, at other times, a transition from one "species" of society to another, the substitution of one "mode of production" for another "mode of production". When will the one result, and when the other?
A general description of the process of social evolution is given by Marx in his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
"At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production" (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New York, 1904, p. 12).
Marx therefore conceives of revolution as intervening when the equilibrium between the productive forces of society and the foundations of its economic structure is disturbed; such is the content of the conflict solved by revolution; this; of course, means the transition from one form to another. But so long as the economic structure still permits the productive forces to evolve the social changes will not take the form of revolution; we shall here find evolution instead.
This question will be taken up in detail later, but we shall now emphasize the following point. According to Marx, the cause of revolution is not at all to be sought in a collision between economy' and law, as many critics of Marxism maintain, but in a collision between the productive forces and economy, which is quite a different matter, as will be shown in the sequel.
b. The Productive Forces and the Social-Economic Structure.
We have stated that the cause of revolution, of a violent transition from one type to another, must be sought in a conflict proceeding between the productive forces, and their growth, on the one hand, and the economic structure of society, i. e., the production relations, on the other hand. The following objection might be raised: since the evolution of the production relations is conditioned by the movement of the productive forces, is not the constant alteration of the production relations in itself a result of the conflict between the productive forces and the antiquated production relations? If we take the example of the growth of productive forces in capitalistic society, we shall find that this growth has involved extensive regrouping of persons in the economic process. The old middle class melted away, the artisan class disappeared, the proletariat increased, great enterprises grew up. The human network of production was constantly changing. Further more, did not one form of capitalism lead into another; for instance, was not industrial capitalism followed by financial capitalism, entirely without revolution? Yet, all these changes were the expression of a constant disturbance of equilibrium (a conflict) between the productive forces and the production relations. While the productive forces were growing, they collided with the petty artisan conditions; this was a disturbance of equilibrium; the economy of the artisan was no longer compatible with the increasing technique. The lost equilibrium was again and again restored, already on a new basis, for the new economy was also increased, corresponding to the new technique. It therefore obviously follows that not every conflict between the productive forces and the production relations results in revolution, that the case is much more complicated than that. To determine which kinds of conflict produce a revolutionary crisis we must take up an analysis of the various kinds of production relations.
Production relations are, of course, all kinds of relations between persons, arising in the process of the social economic life, i. e., in the production process, which also includes the distribution of means of production, as well as in the process of the distribution of products. Of course, these production relations are of many kinds: a broker in Paris, who buys shares of a New York trust, is thus assuming a certain production relation to the workers and owners, the superintendents and engineers, of the factories belonging to this trust. The banker who employs bookkeepers stands in a certain production relation with them. Likewise, the joiner has certain production relations with the lathe-workers in the same factory, or with the fish-wife from whom he buys a herring, or with the foreman above him. But the same joiner also has certain relations with the fisherman who catches the herring, with the weaver who is one of the many persons concerned in the manufacture of his trousers, etc., etc. In short, we have a truly endless quantity of different and varied production relations, distinct from each other according to the type of relation. Our task therefore will be to differentiate between the various species of these relations, and to determine what is the species of production relations in which a conflict would lead to revolution.
In order to have a sound actual basis for our answer, we must learn how revolutions have actually operated, i. e., in what manner they have solved the contradiction between the evolution of the productive forces and the economic basis of society. To be sure, this conflict has always been waged by men; the class struggle has been a hard one. What has been the outcome of the victorious revolution? First a different political power. Second a different place of classes in the process of production, a different distribution of instruments of production, which, as we know, are directly connected with the situation of the classes. In other words, the struggle during a revolution is waged for the control of the most important instruments of production, which in a class society in the hands of a class which consolidates its rule over things, and through them, over persons, by the additional power of its state organization. This leads us to the decisive point in our search for those production relations that require a revolution for their destruction, in order that society may continue to develop its productive forces. In the Third Volume of Capital, Marx categorically states the problem of the form of society and points out the fundamental, specific element in the total phenomenon of the productive relations: "The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relations of rulers and ruled, as it grows immediately out of production itself and reacts upon it as a determining element Upon this is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the conditions of production itself, and this also determines its specific political shape. It is always the direct relation of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers, which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden foundation of the entire social construction, and with it of the political form of the relations between sovereignty and dependence, in short, of the corresponding form of the state." 2) The matter therefore stands as follows: among all the varied production relations, one type of such relations stands foremost, namely the type that is expressive of the relations between the classes which hold the principal means of production in their hands, and the other classes which hold either subsidiary means or no such means at all. The class that is dominant in economy will also be dominant in politics and will politically fortify the specific type of production relations which will give security to the process of exploitation operating in favor of this class. "Politics," to use; the expression found in one of the resolutions of the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, "is the concentrated expression of economy."
The same thing may be stated in somewhat different words. We have observed that not all the production relations are here concerned, but only of the economic domination supported by a specific relation to things, to instruments of production. In the language of the jurists, we are concerned here with fundamental "property relations", with relations of class property in the instruments of production. These property relations are identical with the fundamental production relations; they are merely another way of saying the same thing, legally this time, instead of economically. And these relations are now associated also with the political domination of the specific class; they are maintained by this domination, fortified and extended at any price.
Within this frame, all possible variations of "evolutionary nature" may take place; but we may pass beyond the frame only with the aid of a revolutionary upheaval. For example: within the limits of capitalist property relations, artisan trades may perish, new forms of capitalist enterprises may originate, capitalist organizations of unheard-of varieties may spring into being; individual members of the bourgeois classes may become bankrupt; individual members of the working class may become petty or even large-scale industrialists; new social strata (for instance, the so called "new middle class", i. e., "the technical mental workers") may grow up. But the working class cannot become the owner of the means of production, nor can it (or its representatives) secure command of production, or dispose of the most important instruments of production. In other words: however much the production relations may shift under the influence of the increasing productive forces, their fundamental character remains the same. If this fundamental character should come in conflict with the productive forces, it will break up. This is revolution, which affords a transition to another form of society. "To the extent that the labor process is a simple process between man and nature, its simple elements remain the same in all social forms of development. But every definite historical form of this process develops more and more its material foundations and social forms. Whenever a certain maturity is reached, one definite social form is discarded and displaced by a higher one. The time for the coming of such a crisis is announced by the depth and breadth of the contradictions and antagonisms which separate the conditions of distribution, and with them the definite historical form of the corresponding conditions of production, from the productive forces, the productivity, and development of their agencies. A conflict then arises between the material development of production, and its social form."3)
Revolution therefore occurs when there is an outright conflict between the increased productive forces, which can no longer be housed within the envelope of the production relations, and which constitutes the fundamental web of these production relations, i. e. property relations, ownership in the instruments of production. This envelope is then burst asunder.
It is easy to see why this should be the case, why precisely these production relations should constitute the most immutable, the most conservative form: for they are the expression of the economic monopoly rule of a class, as affirmed and expressed in its political domination. And, of course, it is only natural that such an "envelope" as would express the fundamental interests of the class would be held together by this class to the bitter end, while alterations within the envelope, not disturbing the essential bases of the existing society, may and do proceed rather painlessly. It follows, among other things, that there are no "purely political" revolutions: every revolution is a social (class-displacing) revolution; and every social revolution is a political revolution. For the production relations cannot be overturned without also upsetting the political congelation of these relations; on the other hand, if the political power is broken, this also means the destruction of the domination of this class in economy, for "politics is the concentrated expression of economy". Some persons consider that the French Revolution differs from the Russian Revolution in the sense that the former was a political revolution and the latter a social revolution. For, in the Bolshevik Revolution, politics and political changes did not play a greater role than in the French Revolution, while the alterations in the production relations were incomparably greater.
This "objection" is merely a confirmation of the statements we have made above. Let us consider this question of the political phase. We all know that during the French Revolution the power passed from the hands of one set of owners into the hands of another set. The bourgeoisie destroyed the feudal commercial state and organized the state of the bourgeoisie. In Russia, on the other hand, the organization of all owners was swept away. The political upheaval went far deeper, corresponding to the deeper penetration of the displacement of the production relations (nationalization of industry, abolition of landed estates, beginnings of the socialist order of society, etc.).
Therefore: the cause of revolutions is the conflict between the productive forces and the productive relations, as solidified in the political organization of the ruling class. These production relations are so emphatic a brake on the evolution of the productive forces that they simply must be broken up if society is to continue to develop. If they cannot be burst asunder, they will prevent and stifle the unfolding of the productive forces, and the entire society will become stagnant or retrogressive, i. e., it will enter upon a period of decay.
From the above remarks, the reader will understand why society was able to transform itself, for instance, from the primitive communist condition, by way of evolution, into a patriarchal society, and then into a feudal society. Under primitive communism, there was no class rule over the means of production and no political power for the protection of such a rule. On the contrary, such rule, as well as the use of force, grew up by evolutionary process from the primitive communist production relations, owing to the growth of private property, etc. The productive forces expanded, accompanied by an increasing differentiation, an increasing experience on the part of the eldest of the clan, the development of private property, a segregation of the ruling class thus formed. Formerly, there had been no ruling class, no ruling power; therefore, there was nothing to be destroyed; therefore, the transition took place without a revolution.
H. Cunow, who in his two-volume work reduces Marx to an innocent liberal lamb, writes the following concerning revolution: "When Marx, accordingly, speaks in the above sentence of social conditions and social revolution (in his Critique of Political Economy. N. B.), he does not mean, as is suggested by others, a political fight for power, but the transformation of the social conditions of life following upon the blossoming forth of a new and altered mode of production". According to Marx's view, an alteration in the mode of production, particularly if the state government should seek to maintain by force the antiquated laws corresponding to an older stage in the economic relations, may lead to a political revolution or eruption of the masses of the people; but this need not necessarily be the case. The upheaval of the political and social conditions of life, as well as the ideologies, brought about by a change in the economic structure, may be achieved gradually without uprisings and street battles (for instance, by parliamentary methods)." (Heinrich Cunow: Die Maxsche Geschichts-Gesellschafts- und Staatstheorie, Berlin 1921, vol. ii, p. 315). The above quotations from the honorable Social-Democratic professor are a horrible example of the mental confusion of a vulgar-liberal eclectic. In fact, in the sentence in which Marx speaks of revolution, he considered its cause to be, as we have seen, the conflict between the productive forces and the production relations. The revolutionary solution of this conflict is precisely the breakdown of the production relations and the state forms expressing them. But in Cunow's mind, the new mode of production arises ready-made, Lord knows whence and how, perhaps later (!) leading to a political revolution. This is so gorgeous, so "brilliant," that it is hard to keep up with it. Cunow considers the case of socialism somewhat as follows: capitalism will be peacably succeeded by the socialist mode of production; the capitalists in the government will observe this miracle and marvel thereat; and then they will begin, by the use of force (or perhaps without the use of force) to battle against the alterations already accomplished in the mode of production
(i. e., they will begin - if we may put it thus - to demand their profits, which everyone has been forgetting). Then, not until then, an indignant nation, fighting behind barricades, will drive them out. This is a fine cartoon for a humorous weekly, but hardly material for a learned work. Cunow provides us with a great accumulation of erroneous views. In the first place, the essence of the conflict is not properly formulated (Cunow is here copying from Mr. P Struve, whose article in Braun's Archiv was brilliantly annihilated by G. V. Plekhanov years ago); in the second place, the actual phase of the revolutionary process are entirely distorted; in the third place, revolution itself disappears altogether from revolution. What is revolution which does not even involve a political upheaval? The preceding alteration in the mode of production here does not operate catastrophically, but quite cautiously; it is reflected in politics by parliamentary manipulations; that is all. Herr Cunow here relinquishes the Marxian theory as thoroughly and shamelessly as he has been relinquishing Marxian practice in the latter years. And this, at a time when even the stupidest bourgeois professors seem inclined to regard revolutions as phenomena which constantly arise, with a sort of inner necessity, from a given condition of society. (Cf. Schriften der deutschen Gesellschaft für Politik an der Universität Halle-Wittenberg, ed. by Prof. H. Waentig, No. 1: Die grossen Revolutionen als Entwicklungserscheinungen im Leben der Völker.)
A brief examination of the causes of revolutions will be illuminating The bourgeois revolutions (the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, the French Revolution at the end of the Eighteenth) have been excellently characterized - in a few lines - by Marx: "The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not mere English or French revolutions, but revolutions on a European scale. They were not a victory of a specific class of society over the old political order; they were the announcement of the political order of the new European society (i. e., the new production relations. N. B.). In them the bourgeoisie was victorious; but the victory of the bourgeoisie then meant the victory of the new order of society of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of division (of the soil. N. B.) over the right of primogeniture, of domination by the owner of the soil over domination of the owner by the soil, of industry over magnificent idling, of bourgeois justice over medieval privileges" (Marx: Aus dem literarischen Nachlass, vol. iii, Stuttgart 1920, pp. 211, 212). In the period of bourgeois revolution, the chief obstacles to development were the following production relations: first, feudal ownership of land; second, the guild system in the rising industry; third, trade monopoly, perpetuating the whole by means of countless legal standards. The private ownership of property by the landholders led to countless imposts; most peasants were obliged to pay a "hunger rent," and the internal market for industry was extremely limited. In order that industry might develop, the feudal ownership laws had just to be broken "The rents" says Thorold Rogers (in The Economic Interpretation of History, London, 1891, Fisher Unwin, p. 174), speaking of English rents in the Seventeenth Century, "began as competitive rents and are rapidly transformed into hunger-rents, by which I mean such rents as leave the tenant a bare subsistence, with the result that he is enabled neither to save nor to undertake improvements" (quoted by Eduard Bernstein, in Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution, Stuttgart 1908, p. 10).
In France, before the Revolution, "the people languished under the burden of taxes raised by the state, of duties paid to the landowner, of the tithes for the clergy, and compulsory service for all three. In every province, you could observe hosts of five thousand, ten thousand, of twenty thousand persons, men, women, children, wandering about on the roads. In 1777 an official estimate placed the number of beggars at 1,100,000; famine was chronic in the villages, recurring at frequent intervals and devastating entire provinces. Peasants deserted their villages in great numbers, etc." (P. Kropotkin: The Great French Revolution, London, 1921, p. 16). Taxes and tributes were of infinite number and variety (ibid., p. 36 et seq., also Luchitski: The Condition of the Agricultural Classes in France on the Eve of the Revolution, and the Agrarian Reform of 1789-1793, Kiev 1912, in Russian). All of these were different manifestations and expressions of feudal landownership. Property in land, which reduced the peasants to mendicants, simultaneously prevented the growth of industry, gave clear evidence of its retarding effect on the productive forces in Russia also. (Starvation rents, impoverishment of the peasantry, insignificant domestic markets, etc. - this combination was also the main cause of the Revolution of 1905. S. Maslov: Die Agrarfrage in Russland, Stuttgart 1907; also, Lenin's essays: On the Agrarian Question in Russia, in Russian.)
The Guild organization of industry retarded the growth of the productive forces at every step; for instance, in English history there was not only a seven-year apprenticeship, but also a rule permitting merchants and masters in many branches of production to employ only the sons of freemen, having a certain amount of land, as apprentices. A system of petty regulations prevailed. Naturally, in view of the general dispersion of production, there was no possibility of a planful economy. On the other hand, this type of production relations was a frightful hindrance to all personal initiative. Technical progress had no possibilities of growth. The machine was considered a menace. Trade monopoly was also a heavy burden, likewise the immense unproductive national expenditures. This system as a whole therefore constituted a burden which had to be eliminated under the slogan of "liberty" (particularly the economic liberty to buy, sell and exploit). Of course, before this system of production relations finally perished, new production relations, expressive of the growth of the productive forces, had undermined this growth, but they could not expand fast enough, they could not maintain themselves as the dominant system of such relations. This period was the period of the dying feudal society, its social expression was in "unsuccessful" uprisings, insurrections, etc.; such were, for instance, the peasant wars and rebellions. In England, we have Wat Tyler's Rebellion, chiefly a protest by the English peasantry against the feudal order in the social and economic sense" (D. Petrushevsky: Wat Tyler's Rebellion, Moscow 1914, in Russian, Introduction). Professor Petrushevsky neatly characterizes this period in the following generalization: the disintegration of English feudalism in its final form, achieved in the Thirteenth Century, proceeded side by side with the disintegration of the economic bases from which it grew. This disintegration resulted from the economic evolution of English society, its gradual transition from a closed system of economy in kind to a money economy, a political-economy organization" (ibid., p. 19).
Turning now to the proletarian revolution, i. e., the transition from the capitalist form of society to socialism (ultimately evolving into communism), we shall again find that the principal cause for this transition is the conflict between the evolution of the productive forces and the capitalist production relations: "The monopoly of capital (i. e., the privileged position of the capitalist class with regard to the means of production. N. B.) becomes a fetter upon the means of production which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." (Karl Marx: Capital vol. i, p. 837). Marx's remarks mean this: the growth of the productive forces is above all an immense increase and centralization of technical tools, machines, apparatus, instruments of production in general. This growth involves also a corresponding regrouping of men. In part, this occurs in the sense that the centralization of instruments of production leads to a centralization of the labor forces, or, as Marx puts it, to a socialization of labor. But this is not sufficient to bring about an internal equilibrium of society. The evolution of the productive forces requires planful relations, i. e. consciously regulated production relations. But herein lies the chief obstacle in the capitalist structure: legally speaking, in the private! property of capitalists, or in a collective capitalist property, held by national capitalist groups. If the productive forces are to develop,., the capitalist integument must be broken through, namely, the property relations of capitalism, those basic production relations that are legally expressed in capitalist property and politically perpetuated in the state organization of capital. This fundamental contradiction map express itself in various ways. Thus, the World War was an expression of this contradiction. The productive forces of world economy "demand" a world regulation; the "national-capitalist integument" is too tight; this leads to war; war leads to a disturbance of the social equilibrium, etc. The trustified form of capitalism, the artificial restriction of production in order to boost profits, the monopoly of inventions (legally expressed in the patent laws), the restriction of the domestic market (low wages, etc.), immense unproductive expenditures, the obstacles placed by private property in the way of technical progress (for example, the objections of the real estate owner to having cables laid on his land, thus preventing a general system of electrification), etc.- all these are various expressions and functions of a single quantity: the fundamental contradiction between the growth of the productive forces and the integument of capitalist production relations.
The revolutionary upheaval accompanying the transition from one form of class society to another is a clash between the production forces and the property relations in a given society is not a sudden growth, but becomes perceptible long before the revolution evolves, during a long period, terminating in a destruction of those production relations that act as a hindrance to the further evolution of the productive forces. This "boiling point" is reached when the new production relations have already matured, concealed in the entrails of the old production relations (Marx: A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, New York, 1904, p. 12 ).
Let us take a present-day example of this "hatching" of new relations in the womb of the old production relations. The capitalist structure includes the totality of production relations in capitalist society, the fundamental feature of which is the totality of relations between workers and capitalists, relations that may be expressed-as we have seen-by means of things (capital). The capitalist structure of society is therefore determined chiefly by the combination of the relations between the individual capitalists, and those between the individual workers. The capitalist structure of society is by no means fully expressed in the relations within the capitalist class nor is its "essence" to be found in the relations between the workers. This essence consists in the combination of both forms of the production relations of capitalism, the bond connecting and binding two basic classes, each of which constitutes in itself an aggregate of production relations, as stated above. The following is the picture of the manner in which a new mode of production matures within a certain old mode of production.
Within the production relations of capitalism, i. e., within the class combination, a portion of these production relations constitutes the basis for the new "socialist" order of society. We have already seen what Marx considers as the basis of the socialist order; namely, first, the centralized means of production (productive forces), second
(particularly in production relations), "socialized labor", i. e., principally the relations within the working class, the totality of the production relations within the proletariat
(production bond between all workers). It is upon this production relation of cooperation, maturing in the womb of capitalist production relations in general, that the temple of the future will rest.
We must also obtain clarity on another point; we have seen that the cause of revolution is the conflict between the productive forces and the basic production relations
(property relations). Now this fundamental contradiction is expressed in a contradiction production, particularly in a contradiction between the one phase of capitalist production relations and the other phase. It is c1ear that the social centralized labor which is embodied in the proletariat becomes more and more irreconcilable with the economic (and therefore with the political) domination of the capitalists. This "socialized labor" demands a planful economy, and will not tolerate anarchy between classes; it is an expression of the organized nature of society, which cannot be fully realized in capitalist society, particularly not in the social field. For, class society is a contradictory, i. e., unorganized society. Manifestly, the capitalists' will not and cannot relinquish their class rule. It is consequently, necessary to eliminate the rule of the capitalists, in order to achieve' the possibility of organization all along the line. We therefore encounter a conflict between the production relations embodied is the proletariat and those embodied in the bourgeoisie.
We are now prepared to understand the following. make history, the conflict between the productive forces and the production relations will not find its expression in an attack made:, by dead machines, things, on men, which would be a monstrous and ridiculous assumption. Obviously, the evolution of the productive forces places men in a position of outright opposed situations, and the conflict between the productive forces and the production relations will find its expression in a conflict between men, between classes. For, the relations of cooperation between workers find expression in the living man, in the proletariat, with its interests, aspirations, its social energy and power. The restrictive, dominant basis of the production relation of capitalism also finds u its expression in living men, in the capitalist class. The entire conflict assumes the form of a sharp struggle between classes; the revolutionary struggle between classes; the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist class.
The opportunistic troubadours of the Social-Democracy, such as H. Cunow, love to emphasize the "unreadiness" of present conditions, for which they again seek support in Marx, who said that no form of production is succeeded by another form until it has created a field for the further growth of the productive forces. These hoary sages proceed, therefore, to finecomb the surface of the earth in their search for villages - let us say in Central Africa - which are still unprovided with savings banks, and which still contain naked savages. We should like to meet such efforts with a quotation from one of our own books: "The World War, the beginning of the revolutionary era etc, is precisely an evidence of the objective `maturity here spoken of. For here we have a conflict of the greatest intensity, as a consequence of an antagonism that had developed to enormous proportions and was constantly being reproduced, having grown up in the womb of the capitalist system. Its destructive force is a fairly precise indicator of the level attained by capitalist evolution, a tragic expression of the complete incompatibility of the further growth of the productive forces with the envelope of the capitalist production relations. We are here dealing with the collapse so frequently predicted by the creator of scientific communism" (N. Bukharin : Okonomik der Transf ormationsperiode, Hamburg 1922, p. 67).
c. The Revolution and its Phases
We have seen that the starting point of revolution is the conflict between the productive forces and the production relations, which places the class that serves as the bearer of the new mode of production in a peculiar position, "determining" its consciousness and its will in a specific direction. The necessary condition for revolution is therefore a revolutionizing of the consciousness of the new class, an ideological revolution in the class that is to serve as the grave-digger of the old society.
It is worth while to dwell on this point, above all, to recognize that this revolution has a material basis. Furthermore, it is necessary to make clear why we are dealing with a violent alteration in the consciousness of a new class, namely, with a revolutionary process.
Each order of society is based, as we have again and again stated, not only on an economic basis, for all the ideologies prevalent under a given order of things serve as rivets to hold together the existing order.
These ideologies are not playthings, but in many ways serve as girders to maintain the equilibrium of the entire social body. It is obvious that if the psychology and the ideology of the oppressed classes were absolutely hostile to the existing order, the latter could not maintain itself. Any form of society will convince us that its existence is rendered possible on the whole by the psychology and ideology of class harmony, which is particularly well illustrated by the example of capitalism at the beginning of the World War of 1914-1918. While the working class had evolved an ideology that was independent of that of the bourgeoisie, the working class nevertheless was strongly imbued with a faith in the permanence of the capitalist world order, with an attachment to the capitalist state; the mentality of class harmony had great power. No true uprising of one class against the other was possible before the consummation of the entire psychological and ideological revolution. Such a mental revolution takes place when the objective evolution places the oppressed class in an "intolerable situation": causing it to feel clearly that no improvement can be obtained under the existing order. A class attains this realization when the conflict between the growth of the productive forces and the production relations has produced a collapse of the social equilibrium, and made it impossible to restore it on the old basis. If we trace the course of the proletarian revolution, we shall find that the working class had already developed a psychology and an ideology that were more or less hostile to the existing order, during the capitalist evolution of humanity. Marxism expressed this ideology in the clearest and most profound manner. But precisely for the reason that capitalism still could and did continue to develop, even paying higher wages to labor by plundering and mercilessly exploiting the colonies, the capitalists had by no means become "intolerable" in the actual consciousness of the masses of workers. In fact, in the working classes of Europe and America, a sort of "common interest" with the capitalist national state was felt Simultaneously, the Marxian Marxism, originating in the Revolution of 1848, had been replaced in the labor parties by a specific "Second International Marxism", which distorted the Marxian theory both with regard to the social revolution, as well as with regard to the doctrine of impoverishment, of collapse, of proletarian dictatorship, etc. This condition resulted in the betrayal by the Social-Democratic parties in 1914, and in the patriotic tendencies in the working class. Only the war, an expression of the contradiction in capitalist development, and its consequences, began to make clear that "things could not go on thus". The psychology and ideology of class harmony were gradually replaced by the psychology and ideology of civil war, and, in the purely ideological field, "Second International Marxism" began to be replaced by true Marxism, i. e., by what may be properly designated as scientific communism.
Therefore: this mental revolution consists in a collapse of the old psychology and ideology (they are burst asunder by the new turbulent facts of life) and the creation of a new truly revolutionary psychology and ideology.
The Social-Democrats will never understand this; in fact, they would prefer to believe that no proletarian revolution may grow from the soil of misery and starvation, wherefore no revolution growing from this soil can be a "genuine" revolution. Marx's conception of this matter, as stated in an editorial in the New York Tribune of February
2, 1854, affords an interesting contrast to this view: "Yet, we must not forget that a sixth power exists in Europe, maintaining at certain moments its domination over all five so called `great powers', and causing them all to tremble. This power is revolution. After having long dwelt in quiet retirement, it is now again summoned to the field of battle by crises and starvation". There is needed only a signal, and the sixth and greatest European power will step forth in shining armor, sword in hand, like Minerva from the brow of the Olympian. The impending European war will give the signal" (quoted by Cunow, vol. i, p. 322). Marx therefore did not engage in idiotic statements as to the impossibility of a proletarian revolution after the war, that revolution could not be built up on starvation, etc. Marx may have been mistaken as to the tempo of evolution, but he brilliantly predicted the main landmarks of the course of events: crises, starvation, war, etc.
The second phase of revolution is political revolution, i. e., the seizing of power by the new class. The revolutionary psychology of the new class becomes action. The oppressed class, encountering the concentrated power of the dominant class, namely, its state apparatus, disorganizes, in the process of struggle, the opponent's state organization, in order to break down the resistance it offers. This state organization is to a certain extent destroyed and then rebuilt, partly from elements of the old system, partly from new elements. We must here point out that the seizure of power by the new class is not and cannot be merely a transfer of the same state organization from one hand to another. Even socialist circles have been subject to this naive error. Marx and Engels specifically speak of the destruction of an old power and the creation of a new power, and naturally so, for the state organization is the highest expression of the power of the ruling class, its congelation, its concentrated authority, its principal fighting mechanism, its principal weapon of self-defense against the oppressed class. How could the oppressed class break the resistance of its oppressors without laying hands on the principal weapon of oppression? How can an economy be defeated without disorganizing its powers? Either the powers of the commanding class are on the whole uninjured, in which case the revolution may be regarded as lost; or they revolution is victorious, which usually amounts to the disorganization, the destruction of the forces (chiefly, the state organization) of the commanding class. But as the material power of the state authority finds its most important expression in the armed forces, i. e., in the army, it is evident that whatever destruction has taken place has chiefly affected the whole army. The English Revolution in the Seventeenth Century showed this by destroying the state power of the feudal kings, their army, etc., and creating the revolutionary army of the Puritans, as well as Cromwell's dictatorship. The French Revolution also showed it, by disintegrating the royal army and creating another army on a new basis. The Russian Revolution beginning in 1917 has illustrated the same point in its destruction of the state mechanism of the feudal landowners and the bourgeoisie, its disorganization and destruction of the imperialist army, and its creation of a new state of an entirely new type, and a new revolutionary army.
Both Marx and Engels were well aware of this theoretically; we shall not take pains to prove this statement, as the reader will find the necessary material in Lenin's State and Revolution, the orthodox Marxian treatment of which is now recognized even by bourgeois scholars (such as Struve and particularly P. I. Novgorodtsev: On the Social Ideal Berlin 1921, in Russian). When forced into a corner, the Social-Democratic theoreticians now find themselves obliged to attack Marx openly, and to oppose the revolutionary, "destructive" phase of his doctrine. This grateful function has devolved upon Heinrich Cunow, (ibid, vol. i, p. 310: "Marx kontra Marx"), who repeats Sombart's stupid fiction to the effect that the scholar Marx had inflicted great damage upon Marx the revolutionary. Cunow distinguishes two "divergent forms" of the theory of the founder of scientific communism; first, according to Cunow, the state is regarded by Marx, sociologically, as a thing arising from the conditions of economic evolution, an organization fulfilling social functions; second, Marx also conceives the state from a purely political point of view, as a class instrument of oppression, responsible for all evil. The first point of view is that of a scholar; the second, that of an "optimistic revolutionary" (!). It is in the latter view, according to Cunow, that we must seek an explanation for Marx's hatred of the state and his effort to overthrow the state machinery of the bourgeoisie.
It is easy to point out the error in Cunow's view. He is wrong in contrasting the "social functions" of the state machine with its class-oppressing character. "Politics is the concentrated expression of economy." Capitalist production is inconceivable without the capitalist state. The capitalist production, of course, fulfills very important functions. But the fact of the matter is that during a revolution, the "important social functions" discard one historical garment and put on another, which takes place by a shift in classes, by a break-up of the old relations. Cunow's sophistries are a repetition of Renner's sophistries. During the war, Renner supported the Fatherland of the Hapsburgs and of capitalist profit by the following reasoning: uninstructed persons imagine capital to be a thing; Marx has shown that it is a social relation; this relation necessarily possesses two phases: capitalists and workers; consequently - this is Renner's inference - when you speak of the capitalist; you necessarily imply the existence of the capitalist; consequently in defending the worker, you must also defend the capitalist, for neither can exist without the other; such are the "interests" of the whole. All such considerations of course assume in advance that the wage worker wishes to remain a wage worker forever. In actual fact, however, revolution is not concerned with the "right" to be a wage worker, but with the "right" to cease to be a wage worker.
The political phase of revolution therefore does not involve a mere seizure of the intact old machinery by a new class, but more or less (depending on which class follows upon the old society) a destruction of this machinery, followed by the erection of a new organization, i. e., a new combination of things and persons, a new coordination of the corresponding ideas.
The third stage of revolution is the economic revolution. The new class, now in power, makes use of its power as a lever for economic upheaval, breaks up the production relations of the old type and begins to erect new relations which have been maturing in the womb of the old order, and in contradiction with that order. Marx defines this period of revolution as follows, in his discussion of the proletarian revolution: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." 4)
We are now obliged to consider an important and fundamental question: in the typical case, how does this transformation, this reorganization of production relations, actually proceed, and how should it proceed?
The old Social-Democratic view on this point was quite simple. The new class - in the proletarian revolution, the proletariat - removes the commanding "heads", whom it dismisses more or less gently, and then assumes control of the social apparatus of production, which has been developed to a splendid and uninjured maturity in the bowels of the capitalist Abraham. The proletariat installs its own "heads", and the thing is done. Production goes; on without interruption, the process of production suffers no set back, the entire society sails on harmoniously on its course toward a full-blown socialist order. But a closer inspection of the revolution in the production relations will show us that these production relations, as viewed from the point of view of the labor process, are nothing more nor less than the total human labor mechanism, a system of interconnected persons, who, as we know, are related by a specific type of bond. Furthermore - an extremely important point - the labor functions of the various groups of persons in class society are connected with each other, bound up with their class function. Therefore a shifting of the class relations more or less destroys the old labor apparatus, causing the construction of a new one, precisely as in the political phase of the revolution. It is certain that a temporary decrease in the productive forces will result; every change in society must be paid for by discomfort. It is also evident that the degree to which the old apparatus is destroyed, the depth of the wound, depends above all on the extent of the shift in the class relations. In bourgeois revolutions the power of command in production passes from one group of owners to another; the principle of property remains valid; the proletariat retains its former place. Consequently, the destruction and disintegration of old institutions is far smaller than in cases in which the lowest layer of the pyramid, the proletariat, takes its place at the top. In such a case, an immense upheaval is inevitable. The old order: bourgeoisie, upper class intellectuals, middle class intellectuals, proletariat, is destroyed. The proletariat stands in splendid isolation; everyone's hand is raised against it. There results an inevitable temporary disorganization of production, which continues until the proletariat succeeds in rearranging the order of persons, uniting them with a new bond, i. e., until a new structural equilibrium of society has become effective.
This principle was enunciated by the present writer in his Ökonomik der Transformationsperiode (particularly chapter iii) to which those interested are referred. A few supplementary remarks may not be out of place. First, may this view be considered orthodox? We believe Marx interpreted the matter thus; at least, it is suggestive that Marx here uses precisely the same expression as that used in his discussion of the destruction of the state. He says that the envelope (integument) of capitalist production relations is "burst asunder" (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 837); In other passages he speaks of a dissolving a "rebuilding". Obviously, a ` bursting asunder" of production relations must interrupt the "regularity of the production process", though a different condition might be more pleasant. Very probably this is the thought that peers through-though in rudimentary form-where Mark speaks of the economic "untenability", of a "despotic inroad" by the proletariat, which nevertheless, so to say, is profitable in the long run. Second, we have heard a number of objections with regard to the New Economic Policy in Russia. The objectors point out that in the Ökonomik der Transfornaationsperiode we are too one-sided in our defense of the Russian Communist Party in its blind attack on everything; for the facts of life now show that the mechanism should not have been destroyed; now, it would appear, we have become as mild and gentle as the Scheidemanns. In other words, the destruction of the capitalist production apparatus is represented as a fact in the Russian reality, but not as a general law of revolutionary transition from one form of society (capitalist) to the other (socialist). This "objection" is apparently based on a very careless conception of the matter. The Russian workers could not readmit the capitalists, etc., before they had given them a resounding thrashing and gained a firm foothold themselves, i. e., until the conditions of the new social equilibrium had been established in their main outlines, but our critics would prefer to start from the other end. Even in our official mechanism (for instance, in the army) we are now admitting great numbers of the old officers in Russia, and giving them commanding posts. Could we have afforded to do this at the beginning of the revolution? Dared we refrain from destroying the old Czarist army? The army would then not have been ruled by workers, but would have ruled the workers, which has of course been sufficiently proved by the experiences with Ministers Scheidemann and Noske in Germany, Otto Bauer and Renner in Austria, and Vandervelde in Belgium. Third, nine-tenths of the New Economic Policy of Russia is due to the peasant character of the country, i. e., to specific Russian conditions. Fourth, we are of course speaking of the typical course of events. Under special conditions, we may have a state of affairs that will not involve destruction. For example, after the proletariat has been victorious in the most important nations, the bourgeoisie may perhaps surrender with all its mechanism.
The above point o£ view by no means maintains that all of society disintegrates into individual persons. On the contrary, it maintains that the various hierarchical strata of persons are segregated from each other; the proletariat cuts loose from the other strata (technical mental workers, bourgeoisie, etc.), but within itself, as an aggregate of persons, it closes its ranks more tightly, at least for the most part. This forms the basis for the new production relations (we have already seen that "socialized labor", chiefly represented by the proletariat, is the very element that has "become mature" within the framework of the old economic order).
The fourth (last) phase of revolution is the technical revolution. A new social equilibrium having been attained, i. e., a new and durable envelope of production relations having been created, capable of serving as an evolutionary form of the productive forces, an accelerated evolution of these forces now sets on; the barriers are down, the wounds inflicted by the social crisis are healed, an unparalleled boom begins. New tools are introduced, a new technical foundation is created, a revolution in technique takes place.. Now a "normal", "organic" period in the evolution of the new social form sets in, creating its corresponding psychology and ideology.
We shall now recapitulate. The starting point for revolutionary development was a disturbance of the equilibrium between the productive forces and the production relations, as evidenced in a disturbance of the equilibrium between the various portions of the production relations. This disturbance of the equilibrium between classes is expressed chiefly in the destruction of the psychology of class harmony. Furthermore, there is a sudden disturbance of political equilibrium, which is restored on a new basis, then a sudden disturbance of the economic structural equilibrium, also restored on a new basis, followed by the erection of a new technical foundation. Society begins its life on a new basis; all the functions of its life assume a new historical raiment.
d. Cause and Effect in the Transition Period; Cause and Effect in Periods of Decline
Our discussion of the process of revolution, which is equivalent to a process of transition from one social form to another, led us to the conclusion that this process, after its initial clash between the productive forces and the production relations, passes through a number of phases, beginning with ideology, ending in technique, a sort of reverse order, as it were. In this connection, it will be useful to examine a concrete example afforded by the proletarian revolution. Heinrich Cunow, self-appointed critic of Marx, finds a contradiction between two passages in Marx (one taken from the Poverty of Philosophy, the other from the Communist Manifesto). In the first passage we read: "The working class, in the course of evolution, will put in the place of bourgeois society an association which will exclude classes and their opposite, and there will no longer be any political authority as such, because the political authority is the expression of class hostility within bourgeois society." The other passage (Comvnunist Manifesto) defines the course of events as follows: "If the proletariat in its struggle with the bourgeoisie is forced to unite itself as a class, to make itself to eliminate the old production relations by force, in destroying these production relations it also destroys the basic conditions for the existence of class contradictions; it thus abolishes classes altogether, as well as its own class rule."5)
Cunow makes the following reply: "This (the passage in the Communist Manifesto. N. B.) is, sociologically speaking, almost the direct opposite of the above sentence from Marx's Poverty of Philosophy. In the latter work, we have, first, the abolition of class stratification, in the course of social evolution, which is followed by its political (!) conquest, since the basis of the old state authority is thus destroyed. But in the Communist Manifesto, we have, first, the conquest of the state power, followed by the application of this power to an overthrow of the capitalist production relations, upon the disappearance of which the class contradictions and finally classes as such are abolished in the sequel." 6) Cunow therefore maintains that in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx shows himself to be a learned evolutionist, while the Communist Manifesto reveals him as a crazy revolutionist. Mr. Cunow is here consciously distorting the facts, for he knows that the Poverty of Philosophy calls for a "bloody battle" ("bloody battle or non-existence; thus - only thus - does history put the question"). In the first passage, Marx is speaking of the period after the conquest of power, of the dying out of the power of the proletariat; he is not discussing any "political conquest", but he considers the political authority from the outset as a vanishing quantity. The same is the case in the Communist Manifesto. There is no doubt, therefore, that Marx considered the conquest of political power (i. e., the destruction of the old state machinery and the characteristic new machinery) as a condition for the transformation of the production relations, brought about by a forceful "expropriation of the expropriators". We are therefore dealing with things in the reverse order. The analysis is not proceeding from economy to politics, but from politics to economy. In fact, since production relations are being altered by the lever of political authority, it follows that economy is determined by policy. Cunow is absolutely wrong when he says that we are here dealing with a sociology that precisely contradicts Marx's sociology. The proper word for this procedure is forgery.
It is important not to lose sight of the point of departure of the entire process, which is the conflict between the evolution of the productive forces and the property relations. The entire social's transformation is based on this beginning, and does not cease its harsh course until a new structural equilibrium has ensued in society. In other words: a revolution begins when the property relations have become a hindrance to the evolution of the productive forces; revolution has done its work, as soon as new production relations have been established, to serve as forms favoring the evolution of the productive forces. Between this beginning and this ending lies the reverse order in the influence of the super structures.
In the previous chapters we have seen that the superstructure is not merely a "passive" portion of the social process: it is a specific force, against which it would be absurd to argue, as even Mr. Cunow will admit. But just at this point we have an extended analysis, in time, of a reversed process of influence, which analysis results from the catastrophic character of the entire process, from the disturbance of all the customary functions. In so called "normal times", any contradictions arising between the productive forces and economy, etc., are quickly obliterated, are quickly absorbed by the superstructure, which passes it on to the economy and the productive forces, the cycle then beginning all over again, etc., etc. In this case, however, the mutual adaptation of the various sections of the social mechanism proceed with dreadful slowness, with torments, with immense sacrifice; and the contradictions themselves are here contradictions of immense proportions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the process of a reversed influence of the superstructure (political ideology, conquest of power, application of this power in reshaping the production relations) is of long duration, filling an entire historical period. But precisely this is the peculiarity of the transition period, which Mr. Cunow absolutely fails to understand.
The following also must be understood. Every superstructural force, including also the concentrated authority of a class, its state authority, is a power; but this power is not unlimited. No force can transcend its own limits. The limits imposed upon the political power of a new class that has seized the power are inherent in the existing state of economic conditions and therefore of the productive forces. In other words: the alteration in the economic conditions that may be attained with the aid of the political lever itself dependent on the previous state of the economic conditions. This may be best seen from the Russian proletarian revolution. In November, 1917, the working class seized power, but it could not think of centralizing and socializing the petty bourgeois economy, particularly the peasant economy. In 1921 it transpired that the Russian economy was even stronger than had been supposed, and that the forces of the proletarian state machinery were merely sufficient to maintain a socialization of large-scale industry, and not even all of that. Let us now approach another phase of the question. Let us attempt to understand the nature of the interruption of the productive forces, introduced by the revolutionary process; also, the temporary reduction in the level of these productive forces.
Unorganized society, of which capitalist commodities society is the most striking expression, always develops by leaps and bounds. We are aware that capitalism involves wars and industrial crises. We all know that these wars and crises are an "essential phase" of the capitalist order of society. In other words, the continued existence of capitalism necessarily involves crises and capitalist wars; this is a "natural law" of capitalist evolution. What is the meaning of this law, from the point of view of the productive forces of society? First, what is it that happens during a crisis? We have a cessation of factory work, an increase of unemployment, a lower production; many enterprises, small ones particularly, disappear; in other words, there is a partial destruction of the productive forces. Parallel with this process, there is an enhancement of the organized forms of capitalism; a strengthening of the large-scale enterprises, the formation of trusts and other powerful monopoly organizations. After the crises, there is a new cycle of development, a new growth on a new basis, under higher organizational forms, affording greater opportunities for the evolution of the productive forces. The possibility of continued evolution is therefore bought at the price of a crisis and a waste of productive farces during the crisis. To a certain extent, the case in capitalist wars is the same. These wars are an expression of capitalist competition; they result in a temporary decrease in the productive forces. After wars, bourgeois states rounded out their boundaries; great powers became greater; small states were swallowed up; capital assumed world-wide proportions, obtained a greater field of exploitation, the outlines within which the productive forces could develop were extended, a temporary decline was followed by a swifter process of accumulation. It may therefore be said that the possibility of an expanded reproduction was purchased, in this case also, at the price of a temporary decline in the productive forces.
The same law may be observed from the wider point of view; from which we regard the evolution of society. The significance, of revolution is in its elimination of an obstacle to the development of the productive forces. Strange as it may seem, in destroying this hindrance, revolution temporarily destroys a portion of its productive forces. This is as inevitable as the crises under capitalism.
The destructive effects of revolution ("debit side of revolution") may be considered under the following heads:
1. Physical destruction of the elements of production. Destruction of things and persons, in any form, during the civil war process, may be included here. If barricades are constructed of railroad cars, and men are killed (civil war and class war involve such sacrifices), this is equivalent to a destruction of productive forces. The annihilation of machines, factories, railroads, cattle, etc.; the injury and ruin of instruments of production by sabotage, failure to repair or replace -absent parts, etc., absence of workers due to war, departure of mental workers, etc.; these are phases of the physical destruction of the productive forces.
2. Deterioration of the elements of production. Here belongs: deterioration of machinery for lack o£ repair and replacement; physical exhaustion of workers, intellectuals, etc, resorting to inferior substitutes (poorer metal, replacement of male labor by female and child labor; petty bourgeois elements in the factories, etc.).
3. Interruption of liaison between the elements of production. This is the main cause of the specifically revolutionary disintegration; it includes the disorganization of the production relations spoken of in our large-type text. (Destruction of liaison between the proletariat, on the one hand, and the technical mental workers and bourgeoisie on the other hand; disintegration of capitalist organizations; decay of liaison between city and country, etc., etc.). This does not mean a physical destruction of productive forces (things and persons), but their elimination from the process of production; factories not working, men idle. Also, there is the waste due to the initial "inability" of the new class, its incapacity to build up its organizations, its "mistakes", etc.
4. Shifting the production forces for unproductive consumption, including the readjustment of a great portion of the productive forces for military purposes; manufacture of cannons, rifles military supplies, other war materials. cf. Oekonomik der Transformationsperiode, chap, vi).
This enumeration is based on the proletarian revolution; obviously, any revolution will present the same classification, but the total "expense" of revolution will in general be lower in bourgeois revolutions.
History fully supports these theoretical principles. The peasant wars in Germany were followed by immense disorganization; French Revolution, with its financial crises, its monstrous price inflation, famine, etc., shows the same course. The Civil War in the United States put the country back at least ten years. Later, the social transformation having been accomplished, a boom period will ensue, advances proceeding much more rapidly than any advances in the pre-revolutionary period, since society has now found a more appropriate envelope for its productive forces.
Therefore: the transition from one form of society to another is accompanied by a temporary lowering of the productive forces, which cannot in any other way find an opportunity for further evolution.
The law of decline is distinguished from the law of the transition period by the fact that the transition in the former case does not lead to a higher economic form; in this case, the decline in the productive forces will continue until society receives some impulse from without, or until its equilibrium has been found on a lower basis, whereupon we have a "repetition", or a permanent state of stagnation, not a higher form of economic relations.
An analysis of the causes of a decline will in general show that they are due to the impossibility of breaking down the given property relations; they therefore remain fetters on evolution, and react on the productive forces, so that the latter continue "going down" all the time. This may be the case, for example, when the
opposing classes in a revolution are of about the same strength, making a victory impossible for either class; the society is doomed.
The conflict between the productive forces and the production relations has determined the will of the classes in a specific manner. But revolution has not advanced beyond its earliest phases. The classes give battle; neither is victorious; production falls asleep; society dies out. Or, we may have the case in which the victorious class is incapable of disposing of the tasks imposed upon it, or, the revolution may not mature to the "boiling point"; but the evolution of the productive forces has been proceeding in an environment in which it has determined a quite specific class alignment, namely, a completely parasitic ruling class, and a completely demoralized oppressed class. Here there will be no evolution; sooner or later a simple, one might say a "bloodless", disintegration and dissolution will take place. Or, we may have a case of mixed type. All these cases show that the evolution of the productive forces has led to an economy and to such forms of "superstructure" as have a reverse influence of such nature on the evolution of the productive forces as to oblige them to go down. Of course, when the productive forces go down, the level of the entire social life will also go down.
Greece and Rome may be taken as examples of social decay, later Spain and Portugal. The ruling classes, maintained by the slaves conquered in countless wars, became parasites, also a portion of the free burghers. Their technology permitted them to wage wars, thus conditioning a corresponding economy, which produced a specific state order; but the material condition of the classes also determined their: being, their social psychology (a mentality of parasitic degeneration;, among the rulers; of degeneration by stupefaction and oppression among the oppressed). Such a superstructure was too heavy for its basis, the productive forces, which ceased to grow, ultimately becoming a negative quantity. In place of this perfectly simple explanation, most scholars present an unspeakable confusion, of which an excellent, specimen is afforded by the latest book of P. Bitsilli: The Fall of the Roman Empire. Vassilyev, a professor at the University of Kazan,. who enumerates - in a work already quoted by us
- all the theories explaining the fall of the ancient world, particularly emphasizes the theory of biological degeneration. This degeneration, in the case of ,x: the rulers, according to Professor Vassilyev, is a necessary consequence and the natural end of any civilization (with certain reservations): for, brawn is replaced by brain, the nervous system develops its wants, a biological deterioration results. Mr. Vassilyev therefore believes that the materialist Marxian conception of history should be replaced by the materialist Vassilyev conception, which is much "profounder". Mr. Vassilyev points out that the progress of the social sciences has taken the following path: first, there was an analysis of ideology; then, of policy; then, of the social order; then, of economy (Marx). We are told that we must now penetrate still more profoundly, descending to the material nature of man, his physiological constitution, the changes in which constitute the "essence" of the historical process. There is no doubt that the material nature of man changes; but, if we proceed beyond the limits of social laws, we must advance from biology to physics and chemistry, and then we shall become fully aware of Mr. Vassilyev's error. The fact of the matter is that the law of cause and effect in social science must be a social law. If we wish to explain the social properties of man's material nature, we must determine what are the social causes whose influence has altered the physiology (and also the psychology) of man. We shall then find that this phase is determined above all by the conditions of material being, i. e., by the situation of the given groups in production. Mr. Vassilyev is therefore not digging deeper, but walking backwards; his theory is actually the time-honored theory of the inevitable aging of the human race. Besides being useless because it is based on a mere analogy with physical organisms, it is not capable of explaining the simplest phenomena. Why, for instance, has the infinitely more complicated European civilization not passed away, whereas Rome degenerated? Why did Spain "fall" and not England? Commonplaces about degeneration will explain nothing, for the simple reason that this degeneration is a product of social conditions. Only an analysis of these conditions can result in a proper view of the subject.
An analysis of the causality of the transition period and the periods of decay will also throw light on the question of what determines the evolution of the productive forces, and what is the influence under which they are changing. Obviously, they are changing under the reversed influence of the basis, and of all the superstructural forms. Marx himself recognizes this. Thus, he informs us in Capital (Chicago, 1909, Vol. iii, p. 98): "Such a development of the productive power is traceable in the last instance to the social nature of the labor engaged in production; to the division of labor in society; to the development of intellectual labor, especially of the natural sciences." Strictly speaking, the matter does not end here : Marx emphasizes only the most important factors influencing the productive forces in industry. "But," our opponents may object, "why do you begin at just this point?" Our answer is: "For the simple reason that, no matter what interactions may be taking place within society, the internal social relations at any given moment will-insofar as we are considering society in its condition of equilibrium-correspond with the relation existing between society and nature."
e. The Evolution of the Productive Forces and the Materialization of Social Phenomena (Accumulation of Civilization)
A consideration of the process of production and reproduction, where the productive forces are growing, will present us with a general law; namely, as the productive forces grow, more and more labor is applied in the production of instruments of production. With the aid of these constantly increasing instruments of production, which are a part of the social technique, a much smaller part of the work than formerly will produce a much greater quantity of useful products of all kinds. When manual labor was used, comparatively little time was devoted to the manufacture of instruments of production. Men worked in the sweat of their brows with their insignificant, wretched tools, and their work was not very productive. But in a highly evolved society a great portion of their labor is devoted to the production of immense labor tools - machines, mechanisms - in order to produce further immense instruments of production, such as huge factories, electrical power stations, mines, etc., which consume a large part of the human forces available. But the use of these tremendous instruments of production vastly increases the productivity of living labor; the investment yields more than compound interest.
In capitalist society, this law is expressed in the relative increase of constant capital as compared with variable capital. That portion of capital that has been devoted to the construction of factory plants, machines, etc., grows more rapidly than the portion put into wages. In other words, in the evolution of the productive forces in capitalist society, the constant capital grows more rapidly than the variable capital. We may state this in another manner, as the productive forces of society grow, they are being constantly realigned, with the result that an increasingly greater share of these forces goes into the branches producing instruments of production.
The growth of the productive forces, the accumulation of man's power over nature, is expressed in the higher and higher "specific" weight assigned to things, to dead labor, to the social technique.
It is reasonable to inquire whether similar phenomena are presented by other fields of social life, for we have seen that the superstructural labor is also labor, differentiated labor, which has been segregated from material labor. And we have seen that the outline of the superstructure includes both material elements and personal elements, as well as ideological elements proper. Where is there here an accumulation, an aggregation of "mental" culture? Do we here encounter anything resembling the material process of production?
Let us anticipate: Yes, there is such a similarity, expressed in the fact that the social ideology is crystallized or congealed in things which are quite material. Let us remember that we are enabled to reproduce the ancient "mental cultures" out of the so called "monuments" of earlier epochs; the remnants of old libraries, the books, inscriptions, clay tablets, statues, paintings, temples, old musical instruments, and thousands of other things. In a way, we may regard these things as a congealed, materialized ideology of ages long gone by, enabling us to judge the psychology and ideology; of their contemporaries with precision, as the remnants of working tools enable us to judge of the stage reached in the evolution of the productive forces, and even of the economy of these epochs. Furthermore, in the superstructural work, in ideological labor, instruments of consumption frequently serve also as instruments for further production. A picture gallery contains instruments of enjoyment; for the public which goes to view them, it consists of consumption products. But they are also instruments of production, not in the same sense - of course - as brushes and canvas, for the coming generations learn art, a new "tendency" in painting, from them. A new school of does not descend from heaven, but grows out of an earlier stage, even though it may renounce and denounce the old ideological system. Nothing is made of nothing. As, in the political field, the old state is destroyed during a revolution, while the new state will contain many old elements in a new arrangement, so, in the ideological field, even the greatest interruptions do not wipe out a certain succession and connection with the past: the new building is not constructed on the "bare ground". Paintings, for the painter, are an instrument of production, an accumulated artistic experience, a congealed ideology, from which any further movement in this field must take its start.
Perhaps the following objection might be made: "All this may be very fine, but what has the sublime doctrine of Christianity in common with the material symbols that have been traced on parchment or paper, or with the pigskin in which the Gospels are bound? What is the connection between the scientific ideology as such and the masses of paper that have been piled up in the libraries? Surely there is a difference between the ideologies, the most delicate product of the collective human mind, and such gross material things as books, considered as things!" But this argument may be due to a misunderstanding. To be sure, paper per se, or coloring matter, or pigskin, would in these cases have no meaning for us if they were without a social being. We have shown in chapter vi (b. Things, Men, Ideas) that a machine - considered outside of its social connection - is merely a piece of metal, wood, etc. But it has also a social being, in that men interpret it as a machine in the labor process. Similarly, the book, in addition to its physical being, as a piece of paper, also has a social being; it is considered as a book in the process of reading. Here, the book is a congealed ideology, an instrument of ideological production.
If we approach the question of the accumulation of mental culture from this angle, it will be easy to admit that this accumulation takes the form of an accumulation of things, of crystallized, material shapes. The "richer" a field of mental culture is, the more imposing, the broader the field of these "materialized social phenomena". Figuratively speaking (and not forgetting its character as an ideology), the material skeleton of mental culture is the "fundamental capital" of this culture, which increases with the "richness" of this culture, and is dependent "in the last analysis" on the stage reached in the material productive forces. The childish inscriptions, masks, rude images of idols, drawings on stones, art monuments, rolls of papyrus, other manuscripts, parchment books, temples and observatories, clay tablets, with their cuneiform writings; later, the galleries, museums, botanical and zoological gardens, huge libraries, independent scientific exhibitions, laboratories, sketches, printed books, etc., etc., are an accumulated crystallized experience of humanity. The new library stacks, with their new books, considered together with the olds stacks and books, are an interesting physical manifestation of collaboration of many generations in their uninterrupted succession.
We have become so accustomed to many phenomena in this field as to lose sight of the historical boundaries. Our present-day psychology and ideology, for instance, finds its crystallization in the daily newspaper. Yet, the newspaper itself is a modern phenomenon, beginning approximately in the Seventeenth Century. No doubt important official news was already posted on walls ("published") in ancient Rome and among the Chinese (Eighth Century A. D.), but this was barely a beginning (cf. K. Bücher: Das Zeitatngswesen in Kultur der Gegenwart, Berlin and Leipzig, 1906, part i, section i.). Books, in our sense, are also not found before the invention of printing, when there were only rolls of papyrus and parchment codices, then the most perfect method of preserving the accumulated "wisdom of centuries", clay tablets:(Babylon) preserved in gigantic libraries. For example, Ashurbanipal's famous library (cf. Pietschmann: Das Buch, in Kultur der Gegenwart). Libraries (called by Leibnitz "treasuries of all the riches of the human spirit") may therefore be found in very ancient times, and it is to the remnants of such libraries that we owe most of our information on many secrets of times long past (a short study on libraries is found in Die Bibliotheken, by Fritz Milkau, in Kultur der Gegenwart). Important examples are: the above mentioned library of Ashurbanipal (Seventh Century B. C.), also the libraries of the most ancient ecclesiastical schools (Third Century B. C.). Hermann Diels (Die Organisation der Wissenschaft, in Kultur der Gegenwart, p. 639) rightly observes: "Among all institutions of learning, libraries have ever been the most important and most essential means of preserving, disseminating and transmitting learning and of supplementing the evanescent viva vox of living teachers." Art objects, of course, play the same rôle, as preserved in collections, galleries, museums, cathedrals, etc.
The accumulation of mental culture is therefore not only an accumulation of psychological and ideological elements in the minds of men, but also an accumulation of things.
f. The Process of Reproduction of Social Life as a Whole
We are now in a position to recapitulate this subject:
A constant "metabolism" is taking place between nature and society, a process of social reproduction, a labor process operating in cycles, constantly replacing what is consumed, extending its basis as the productive forces develop, and enabling mankind to widen the boundaries of its existence.
But the process of production of material products is simultaneously a process of production of given economic relations. Marx says: Capitalist production, therefore under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other, the wage-laborer."7) This formula of Marx is not only applicable to capitalist production, but universally applicable in general. If we consider the case of the ancient slaveholding economy, each production cycle in it will be accompanied by the slaveholders' receiving his share and the slave his; in the next cycle, the slaveholder will also discharge his role, while the slave will discharge his; if reproduction should expand, the sole alteration will be in the fact that the share and power of the slaveholder, the number of his slaves, the amount of surplus labor produced by them, will become greater. Thus, the process of material production is simultaneously a process of the reproduction of those production relations, of that historical envelope, in which they are operative. On the other hand, the process of material reproduction is a process of constant reproduction of the corresponding labor forces. "Man himself," writes Marx, "viewed as the impersonation of labor power, is a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing, and labor is the manifestation of this power residing in him."8) But at various historical periods, in accordance with the social technique, the mode of production, etc., specific labor forces, i. e., labor forces with the required skill, are available. The process of reproduction is constantly reproducing this skill; it therefore reproduces not only the things, but also the "living things", i. e., workers possessing certain qualifications; it also reproduces relations among them with expanding reproduction, it makes the adjustments corresponding to the new level of the productive forces, in this case assigning the persons, who may not be the same (for new types of skill, new "living machines" are required), to posts in the labor field which may not be identical. But the fundamental texture of the production relations nevertheless remains intact (except in the case of revolutionary periods) and continues to be reproduced on a progressively larger and larger scale.
If the totality of the various types of skill of the labor forces be designated as a social physiology, it may be said that the process of reproduction is constantly reproducing the economy of society and therefore also its physiology.
All types of work have thus far required a specific physiological type, a result of specialization. We may therefore distinguish - even by his external appearance - a transport worker from a metal works clerk, butcher, stool-pigeon, etc., not to mention a musician or a member of the "liberal professions" in general. Therefore, not only is the psychology of men their social psychology, but their physiological structure is a product of social evolution. As he works upon nature, man alters his own nature. What we call "social physiology" may not be considered as opposed to economy, for it is a part of economy. The difference simply is this: in discussing economy, we analyze the connections and the type of these connections between men, their: material relation with each other, what we call social physiology is not a connection, but a property of these same elements.
Simultaneously with the process of reproduction, we have a similar motion of the entire vast machine of social life: the mutual relations between classes are reproduced, also the conditions of the state organization; also the relations within the various spheres of ideological labor. In this aggregate reproduction of the entire social life, the social contradictions are also constantly reproduced. The partial contradictions, a disturbance of equilibrium emanating from the impulses imparted by the evolution of the productive forces, are being constantly absorbed by a partial realignment of society within the frame of the given mode of production. But the basic contradictions, those arising from the very nature of the given economic structure, continue to be reproduced on a larger and larger foundation, until they attain the proportions that bring about a catastrophe. Then the entire old form of production relations will collapse, and a new form arises, if the social evolution continues. "The historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of production, is the only way in which that form of production can be dissolved and a new form established."9) This moment is succeeded by a temporary interruption in the process of reproduction, a disturbance which is expressed by the destruction of a portion of the productive forces. The general transformation of the entire human labor apparatus, the reorganization of all the human relations, brings about a new equilibrium, whereupon society enters upon a new universal cycle in its evolution, by extending its technical basis and accumulating its experience (as congealed in objects), which serves as the point of departure in any new forward step.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Plekhanov: Articles attacking Struve in the collection, Criticism of Our Critics (the best work on the analysis of the production relations from the point of view of revolution). Rosa Luxemburg: Sozialreform und Revolution. Karl Kautsky: Die soziale Revolution. Karl Kautsky: Anti-Bernstein. Heinrich Cunow: Die Marxsche Geschichts-, Gesellschafts-und Staatstlaeorie, vol. i. Werner Sombart: Sozialismus and soziale Bewegung. N. Lenin: State and Revolution. N. Lenin: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. N. Bukharin: Oekonomik der Transformationsperiode. Hermann Beck (editor): Wege und Ziele der Sozialisierung. J. Delevsky (Social-Revolutionary): Social Antagonisms and the Class Struggle in History. Karl Marx: particularly, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; also, Marx's historical writings. NOTES
1)N. Beltov (Plekhanov) : Concerning the Materialistic Interpretation History, in Criticism of Our Critics, p. 333. The italics are mine. N. B.
2)Karl Marx: Capital, vol. iii, Chicago, 1909, p. 919. My italics. N. B.
3)Karl Marx: Capital, vol. iii, Chicago, 1909, p. 1030.
4)Communist Manifesto, Chicago, 1912, pp. 40, 41; also quoted by Cunow, ibid., Vol. i, p. 321
5)Quoted by Cunow, ibid., p. 182.
6)Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 321, 222.
7)Capital, Chicago, 1915, vol. i, p. 633
8)Ibid., vol. i, v. 225.
9)Capital, vol. i, p. 534, 535.
8: The Classes and the Class a. Class, Caste, Vocation
WE have already seen the important function of the classes in the evolution of human society. Even the social structure in a class society depends chiefly on what classes exist in this society what is their mutual relation, etc. And we have seen that every great alteration in the social life is connected with a class struggle in one way or another. It is not unimportant to note that transition from one form of society to another is realized through a furious class struggle. This is why Marx and Engels opened the Communist Manifesto with the words: "The history of society existing up to the present is the history of class struggles. " We have already defined the general nature of a class. We now prepared to go into further detail.
A social class - we have seen - is the aggregate of persons playing the same part in production, standing in the same relation toward other persons in the production process, these relations being also expressed in things (instruments of labor). It follows that in the process of distribution the common element of each class is its uniform source of income, for the conditions in the distribution of products are determined by the conditions in production. Textile workers and metal workers are not two separate classes; but a single class, since they bear the same relation to certain other persons (engineers, capitalists). Similarly, the proprietors of a mine, a brick-field, a corset-factory, are all of one class; for regardless of the physical differences between the things they manufacture, they occupy a common ("commanding") position with regard to the persons engaged in the process of production, which position is also expressed in things ("capital").
The production relations are therefore at the basis of the class alignment in society. Other divisions have been made, which must now be disposed of. A frequent conception is the division into the classes of "poor" and "rich". A man having twice as much money in his pocket as another is considered as belonging to a different class, the basis of the division being in this case the amount possessed of the standard of living. An English sociologist (D'Ett) has gone so far as to draw a table of classes: the first and lowest class (paupers) have a budget of eighteen shillings per week; the second class, twenty-five shillings; the third, forty-five shillings, etc. 1)
This conception is not only very simple, but also naive and erroneous. From this point of view, a well paid metal worker in capitalist society would not be counted with the proletariat, while a poor person or artisan would fall into the working class. The lumpenproletariat would have to be considered as the most revolutionary class, as the power capable of realizing the transition to a higher form of society. On the other hand, two bankers, one of whom has twice as much money as the other, would have to be assigned to two separate classes. Yet, everyday experience shows us that the various classes of workers are far more likely to fight side by side than are the workers and artisans, or workers and peasants, etc. The peasant is not much inclined to feel any solidarity with the worker. At the other end of the scale, two bankers feel themselves to be members of the same family, though one be ten times as rich as the other. Marx already pointed out that the size of one's purse constitutes a merely quantitative difference, which may, to be sure, throw two individuals of the same class into violent opposition to each other. In other wards, the difference in "wealth" may not be considered as sufficient basis for the definition of a class, even though it have an influence within the frame of one class.
Another widely accepted theory is that which makes the process of distribution the basis of the class division o£ society, i. e., the distribution of social income. Thus, in capitalist society, the division of income into three principal groups, profits, ground rent, wages, gives rise to a distinction between three classes: capitalists, landlords, proletarians (wage workers). The share falling to each of these classes may only grow - for a given quantity of social income - at the cost of the share falling to another class. The members of one class are therefore united not only by common and uniform interests, but also by the opposition of their interests to those of other classes.
Unless we debase this theory to a mere consideration of who is getting more and who less, we at once encounter the following question: why are the persons who are united in a class reproduced as a class? How comes it that - let us say - in capitalist society certain types of income exist? What is the cause for the stability of these "types of income"? The mere putting of these questions shows the true statement of affairs. This stability depends on the relation to the means of production, which, in turn, express the relation between men in the process of production. The function of men in production, and the ownership in the interests of production, i. e., the "distribution of persons" and the "distribution of means of production" are fixed quantities within the limits of the: existing mode of production. If we are dealing with capitalism, we have therefore a category of men who command the production process, who simultaneously control all sorts of means of production, and there is also a category of men working at the command of the former, subordinating their labor power to them, and producing commodity values. This circumstance is responsible for the fact that a certain natural law process prevails in the distribution of the products of labor (i. e., in the distribution of income). We have therefore come to the point of considering the most important phases in production - the "distribution of persons" and the "distribution of things" - as the basis of class relations.
Nor could it be otherwise, as we may learn if we approach question in the most abstract terms. Every class is obviously a certain "real aggregate", i. e., it sums up all the persons related in uninterrupted mutual reactions, all the "living persons" whose roots are in production, and whose thoughts may reach into the skies. Each class is a special, definite human system within the great system known as human society. Our approach to the class must be similar, therefore, to our approach to society; in other words, the analysis of classes must begin with production. We must of course not be surprised to find classes differing from each other along various lines: in production as well as in distribution, in politics, in psychology, in ideology. For all these things are interdependent; you cannot crown a proletarian tree with bourgeois twigs; this would be worse than placing a saddle on a cow. But this connection is determined, in the last analysis, by the position of the classes in the process of production. Therefore, we must define the classes according to a production criterion.
What is the difference between a social class and a social caste? A class, as we have seen, is a category of persons united by a common role in the production process, a totality in which each member has about the same relative position with regard to the other functions in the production process. A social caste, on the other hand, is a group of persons united by their common position in the juristic or legal order of society. Landlords are a class; the nobility are a caste; the great landlords are defined by a common production type, not so the nobility. The noble has certain legal rights and privileges, due to his "noble station". Yet, economically speaking, this noble may be impoverished; he may barely vegetate; he may be a slum-dweller; but his station remains that of a noble; such is the Baron in Gorki's Lower Depths. Similarly, under the Tsarist government, workers' passports often contained the words: "Peasant from such and such a province, such and such a district, such and such a parish", although this worker had never been a peasant, had been born in a city and worked for wages since childhood. Such is the difference between class and caste. A person whose class character is that of a worker may (from the standpoint of Tsarist laws) be classified as a peasant. But have we any right to dwell on laws without descending deeper, since we know that politics (including law) is "the concentrated expression of economy"?
Of course, we must go deeper; we have ourselves pointed out that it is methodologically very important to approach the social alignments chiefly from the production angle. We find the question of caste excellently presented by Professor Solntsev, who has written the authoritative work on classes: "Socially unequal groups in the various stations appear as such and do not arise on the basis of the relations of the social labor process, of economic relations, but chiefly on the basis of legal and state relations. The caste is a legal-political category, which may express itself in various forms . . . . As distinguished from caste, the class alignment arose on the basis of economic conditions" (p. 22). Solntsev denies that caste is synonymous with class, or that it is merely a legal-political raiment for class, while he admits that in ancient times, for instance, "the division into estates necessarily reflected certain class differences" (p. 25), that "the class struggle assumes the peculiar form of a struggle between stations
(estates)" (p. 26). This somewhat vague statement obliges us to seek a somewhat clearer formulation. In the French Revolution the tiers état was a mixture of various classes, then but slightly differentiated from each other: it included the bourgeoisie, the workers and the "intermediate classes" (artisans, petty traders, etc.). All were members of the tiers état for the reason of their legal insignificance as compared with the privileged feudal landlords. This tiers état was the juristic expression for the class bloc opposing the dominant landlords. It follows that class and caste may not be taken as synonymous, while the shell of the caste may include on the whole a class kernel
(a single estate corresponding to a number of class which remain classes, in spite of the vagueness in Solntsev's mind). On the other hand, class and caste may fail to correspond in another way, as already shown: one might belong to a "lower class" but "higher caste" (an impoverished nobleman may become a janitor or stoker), or the reverse: one may belong to a lower caste and higher class (a peasant may become a wealthy merchant) Evidently the "class content under the economic envelope" is here non-existent.
A correct theoretical statement of the case may not be obtained by a consideration of individual instances, but only from the point of view of typical mutual reactions within the frame of a specific economic order. The following fundamental circumstance is worthy of attention: the "estates" are abolished by the bourgeois revolutions, by the evolution of bourgeois conditions. Capitalism was incompatible with the existence of "estates", for the following reason: in pre-capitalist forms of society, all relations are far more conservative; the tempo of life is slower; alterations are less significant than under capitalism. The dominant class is the landed aristocracy, almost a hereditary class. This striking immobility in conditions made possible a consolidation of class privileges - as well as class duties - by means of a series of legal standards; this immobility enabled classes to be enveloped in the garment of the'. "estate". On the whole, therefore, the "estates" followed the same line as the classes or groups of classes, in their opposition to a certain class. But this harmony was brusquely disturbed by the entrance of the far more mobile conditions of commodities capitalism; the insignificant man became important; the nouveaux.. riches arose, a very frequent phenomenon (some of the great landlords assumed capitalist forms, others becoming impoverished,: while still others maintained themselves on the previous level, etc.)., Thus the mobility of capitalist relations completely undermines the existence of the "estates". The transition period of the disintegration of feudal relations is also expressed in the growing disharmony between the economic content of the classes and the legal envelope of the "estates". There now ensued the conflict that led inevitably to the collapse of the entire system of "estates". Its "caste" form was incompatible with the growth of capitalist production relations, as the class envelope of the production process is now becoming incompatible with the further growth of the productive forces. Thus, Marx wrote in his Poverty of Philosophy: "The condition for the liberation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, as the significance of the liberation of the tiers état . . . was the abolition of all the estates". Engels, elucidating this passage, adds the following: "Estates here mean the estates of the feudal state in the historical sense, estates with definite, limited privileges. The revolution of the bourgeoisie abolished the estates and their privileges. The bourgeois society now recognizes only classes. To term the proletariat the fourth estate was therefore to contradict history.'
Therefore: in the period of the stable precapitalist systems, the estates were the legal expression of the classes; the increasing incompatibility of these quantities (the disturbance of equilibrium between the class content and the legal form of the estates) was called forth by the growth of capitalist relations and the disintegration of not only the higher but also the lower of the old feudal classes. Under the feudal system, the peasantry as a class coincided in general with the peasantry as an estate; but the country bourgeoisie and the city proletariat began to differentiate from the peasantry, retaining, however, the garment of their former "estate" (caste), which, being ill adapted to the new conditions, have had to be discarded.
We must now examine the third category mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Manifestly, vocation is connected with the process of production. At first glance, the difference between a vocation and class is based on the fact that the line between vocations is not drawn as a line in the relations between men, but as a line in their relations with things, depending on what things, with what things one works, what things are produced. The difference between metal turner and joiner and mason is not based on a different relation to capitalists, but simply on the fact that one works metals, the other wood, the third stone.
Yet the essence o£ the matter is not in the thing, for vocation is simultaneously a social relation; in the process of production, which unites many workers of different types, owing to the standards of the production process, a definite relation naturally prevails. However different these relations may be, they are all subsidiary to the differences that prevail in the principal phase: the differences between the work of those who command and those obey, the differences expressed in the property relations.
The classification by vocation, as a relation between person as a relation based on the relation toward technical tools, methods, objects of labor, coincides neither with the division of labor into commanding and obeying elements, nor with the corresponding distribution of instruments of production, i. e., with the proper relations in these instruments of production.
Professor Solntsev is therefore wrong in declaring that vocation "is a natural technical category (Solntsev's italics, N. B.), that it is peculiar to human communities even in the prehistoric period, as w< as in the following stages that it is not an historical category coy nected with the social order" (ibid., p. 21), in short, that it is a eternal category. Vocations become vocations for the reason that certain kind of labor is usually performed throughout the individual's life: let the shoemaker stick to his last! But this does not signify that things have always been thus and must always remain thus. The increasingly automatic nature of technology will liberate men from this necessity and will show to what extent this category also been historical rather than permanent.
We are now prepared to take up a description of the important classes.
1. The basic classes of a given social form (classes in the proper sense of the word) are two in number: on the one hand, the class which commands, monopolizing the instruments of production; on' the other hand, the executing class, with no means of production, which works for the former. The specific form of this relation of economic exploitation and servitude determines the form of the, given class society. For example: if the relation between the commanding and executing class is reproduced by the purchase of labor power in the market, we have capitalism. If it is reproduced. by the purchase of persons, by plunder, or otherwise, but not by the purchase of labor power alone, and if the commanding class gains control of not only the labor power but also of body and soul of the exploited persons, we have a slaveholding system, etc
In connection with capitalism, three classes are usually counted, as confirmed by Marx in the well-known passage at the end of volume iii of Capital, where the manuscript suddenly breaks off at the beginning of an analysis of the classes in capitalist society. "The owners of mere labor power, the owners of capital, and the landlords, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent, in other words, wage laborers, capitalists and landlords, form the three great classes of modern society resting on the capitalist mode of production." (Capital, Chicago, 1909, vol. iii, p. 1,031) But the circumstance that the land-owning group constitutes a great "class" does not imply that it is one of the essential classes. Thus, we find the following passage in Marx, which Professor Solntsev erroneously quotes in his own support: "Objectified and living labor are the two factors on the contrast between which capitalist production is based. Capitalist and wage laborer are the sole functionaries and factors in production, their relation and opposition being a result of the very essence of the capitalist mode of production . . . . Production, as observed by James Mill, might therefore continue uninterrupted, if the landlord should disappear and be replaced by the state. . . This reduction in the number of classes directly concerned in production, to capitalists and wage laborers, eliminating the landlord, who only subsequently enters into the relation, as a consequence not of property relations produced within the limits of the capitalist mode of production, but of property relations handed down to capitalism - a reduction inherent in the nature of the capitalist mode of production, distinguishing it from feudal and ancient production - makes it an adequate theoretical expression of the capitalist mode of production and manifests its differentia specifica." (Marx: Theorien über den Mehrwert, Stuttgart, 1915, vol. ii, part i, pp. 292 et seq.). Marx again makes the same statement in his treatment of nationalization of the soil.
The basic classes may be subdivided into their various elements. In capitalist society, the commanding bourgeoisie was partly industrial, partly commercial, partly banking, ere. The working class includes skilled and unskilled workers.
2. Intermediate classes: these include such social-economic groups as constitute a necessity for the society in which they live, without being a remnant of the old order. They occupy a middle position between the commanding and exploiting classes. Such are, for instance, the technical mental workers in capitalist society.
3. Transition classes: these include such groups as have emerged from the preceding form of society, and as are now disintegrating in their present form, giving rise to various classes with opposite roles in production. Such are, for example, the artisans and peasants in capitalist society, who constitute a heritage from the feudal system, and from whom both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are recruited.
Thus, the peasantry is constantly falling to pieces under capitalism; economically speaking, it is differentiated; the rich peasant grows out of the medium peasantry, becoming a trader and, one step further up, a true bourgeois. On the other hand, the proletariat is also growing out of the peasantry, by some such process as this: the peasant has no horse; he becomes a farm laborer or seasonal worker; he becomes a true proletarian.
4. Mixed class types: these include such groups as belong to of class in one respect and to another class in another respect, for example, the railroad worker who runs a farm of his own, for which he hires a laborer; he is a worker from the standpoint of the railroad company, but an "employer" from the standpoint of the hired man.
5. Finally there are the so call declassé groups, i. e.; of persons outside the outlines of social labor: the lumpenproletariat, beggars, vagrants, etc.
In an analysis of the "abstract type" of society, i. e., any form in its purest state, we are dealing almost exclusively with its basic classes; but when we take up the concrete reality, we of course find ourselves faced with the motley picture with all social-economic types and relations.
The general cause of the existence of classes is defined by Engels in his Anti-Dühring as follows "" that all previous historical contradictions between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes are explained by the same comparatively undeveloped productivity of human labor. As long, as the truly working population is so completely occupied by its necessary labor as to leave it no time' for conducting the common affairs of society - division of labor, business of the state, legal matters, art, science, etc.- so long did we necessarily have a special class which, freed from actual labor, looked after these matters; in which connection, it never failed to place more and more work upon the shoulders of the working masses, for its own advantage" ( Friedrich Engels: Herrn Eugen Dührings Unwälzung der Wissenschaft, Stuttgart, 1901, pp. 190, 191). In another passage (p. 190), practically the same remark is repeated, with the added statement that society is divided into two classes. A recapitulation of the whole matter is this: "The law of the division of labor is therefore the basic factor in the division into classes."
Professor Solntsev criticizes G. Schmoller, who finds the cause of the formation of the classes to be chiefly the division of labor, and attacks Schmoller's reference to Engels with the following words: "Engels actually shows the close connection between the process of class formation and the process of the division of labor; but " Engels regards the division of labor as only the necessary natural-technical condition for the formation of social classes, not as their cause; the causal basis of the formation of classes was found by Engels, not in the division of labor, but in the relation between production and distribution, i. e., in processes of purely economic nature" (ibid., p. 303, my italics, N. B.). As we have observed above, when considering the question of vocation, we may not oppose the division of labor to the production relations, for the division of labor is likewise one of the varieties of the production relations. Schmoller's error (in his books, Die Tatsachen der Arbeitsteilung, Jahrbücher, 1889; Das Wesen der Arbeitsteilung und Klassenbildung, Jahrbücher, 1890) is in overlooking the difference between the stratification of vocations and the stratification of classes, thus reconciling class oppositions in the spirit of the organic school. The theory of L. Gumplowicz and F. Oppenheimer, which traces the origin of classes from extra-economic force, overlooks the difference between the abstract theory of society and the concrete facts of history. In actual history, the role of the extra-economic use of force
(conquest) was very great, and had an influence on the process of class formation. But in a purely theoretical investigation, this condition may not be considered. Assuming that we are analyzing society only, "abstract society", in its evolution, we should find classes developing here also, by reason of the so called "internal" causes of development mentioned by Engels. Therefore, the role of conquests, etc., is merely a (very important) complicating factor. b. Class Interest
We have seen that classes are specific groups of persons, "real aggregates", distinguished by their role in production, which role 1s expressed in the property relations. But these two phases in the production process also are accompanied by a third phase-the process of the distribution of products in one way or another. Production is paralleled by distribution.
The forms of distribution correspond to the forms of production. The position of the classes in production determines their position in distribution. The antagonism between administrators and the administrated, between the class monopolizing the instruments of production and the class possessing no means of production, is expressed in an antagonism in income, in a contradiction between the shares held by each class in the product turned out. This different "being" of the classes also determines their "consciousness". The contradictions of the "being", of the conditions of existence, are directly reflected in the growth of class interests. The most primitive and general expression of class interest is the effort of the classes to increase their share in the distribution of the total mass of products.
In the system of class society, the process of production is at the same time a process of the economic exploitation of those who work physically.
They produce more than they receive, not only because a portion of the product turned out (of values, in capitalist society) goes for extending production ("accumulation", in capitalist society), but also because the working class is supporting the owners of the instruments of production, is working for them. The most general interest of the dominant minority may therefore be formulated as the effort to maintain and extend the opportunities for economic exploitation; while the interest of the exploited majority is to liberate itself from this exploitation. The first of these two efforts has an eye only to society as it exists at present; the second is challenge to the existence of this society.
But the economic structure of society - as we have seen - is fortified in its state organization and supported by countless superstructural forms. It is therefore not surprising to find the economic class interest clothed also in the garment of political, religious, scientific interests, etc. The class interests thus develop into an entire system, embracing the most varied domains of social life. These coordinated interests, maintained in place by the general interest of the class, condition the construction of the so called "social ideal", which is always the quintessence of the class interests.
A few additional points require our attention in a discussion of class interests
First: permanent, general interests must be distinguished from temporary, momentary interests. The "momentary" interests may even constitute an objective contradiction to the permanent interests. The English workers, for instance, were acting in accordance with their temporary interests when they accepted a class harmony with the English bourgeoisie, supporting them in the imperialist war; they acted in the interest of their wages, which were increased at the expense of the colonial workers. But because they thus destroyed the solidarity of all the workers, and made a compact with their employers, they were opposing the general and permanent interests of their class.
Second: the professional interests of a group must not be confused with the general interests of the class. Thus, the dominant bourgeoisie may, in capitalist society, win over the aristocracy of labor (skilled labor), whose special interests then do not coincide with those of the entire working class; they are group interests, not class interests. Another example: during any war, the commercial bourgeoisie violates the commercial laws with all its might, although the bourgeois state itself established these laws, and is waging war in the interest of the bourgeoisie as a class. In other words, the group interests of the commercial section of the bourgeoisie is in this case at variance with the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class.
Third: alterations in principle and tendency in the momentary interests of the class, proceeding simultaneously with the alterations in principle of its social situation, must not be left out of account. The example of the proletariat will serve to illustrate this point. In capitalist society, its most permanent and general interest is the destruction of the capitalist system. Its partial demands always have this general tendency: the conquest of strategic positions, the undermining of bourgeois society, the improving of the proletariat's material position, enhance its social strength, preparing its forces for the attack on the entire capitalist order. Now, let us assume that the proletariat has discharged its historical. task. It has destroyed the old state machinery, built up a new machinery, produced a new social equilibrium; temporarily, the proletariat assumes the place of the commanding class. Obviously, the direction of its interests has radically changed: all its partial interests, taken from the point of view of the general interests, are now subordinate to the idea of fortifying and developing the new conditions, organizing them, offering resistance to every attempt at destruction. This dialectic transformation is an outgrowth of the dialectic evolution of the proletariat itself, onice it has become a state power.
The common element behind both these opposed directions of interest is the construction of a new form of society, whose bearer is the proletariat, a construction which presupposes the destruction of the old envelope, which had become an obstacle to the evolution of the productive forces.
A new class, to be capable not only of destroying the old system of social relations, but of building up a new one, must necessarily turn its interests in the direction of production, i. e., it must not approach social questions from the standpoint of division and mere distribution, but from that of a destruction of old forms for the purpose of a construction of forms with more perfect production, with more powerful productive forces. c. Class Psychology and Class Ideology
The difference in the material conditions of existence that lie at the basis of the class stratification of society impresses its mark on the entire consciousness of the classes, i. e., on the class psychology and ideology. We already know that the psychology of a class is not always identical with the material interests of that class (for instance, the psychology of despair, escape from the world, longing for death); but it always results from the life conditions of this class, being constantly determined by the latter. Let. us consider a few examples of the manner in which the class psychology and the class ideology are actually conditioned by the economic condition of the class.
Our first example will be taken from the Russian Revolution. It is a matter of common knowledge that Russian Marxists and Social-Revolutionaries disagreed as to which class would lead society to socialism. The Marxists maintained it would be the working class, the proletariat; the Social Revolutionaries, on the other hand, claimed that the peasantry would take the lead in this field. The facts of life have supported the Marxists; the peasantry supported the proletarians in their struggle against the landlords and capitalists, because the proletariat guards the peasants' ownership of the soil and makes possible the development of peasant economy; yet the peasants are but little susceptible to communism and adhere to the old forms of tilling the soil, and of agriculture in general. It will be interesting to determine the reasons for this phenomenon, the heroic struggle of the proletariat and its incomparably, greater receptivity for communist reconstruction and communist ideology. It is not sufficient to reply that the peasants are not quite so poor, for then we might ask why the lumpenproletariat (beggars, declassed persons) did not furnish the chief detachments of fighters.
It is important to learn what are the traits that must be preset in a class in order to enable it to accomplish a transformation of society, to shunt society from the capitalist track to the socialist track.
1. Such a class must be one that has been economically exploited and politically oppressed under capitalist society; otherwise, the class will have no reason for resisting the capitalist order; it will not rebel under any circumstances.
2. It follows - to put the matter crudely - that it must be a poor class; for otherwise it will have no opportunity to feel its poverty as compared with the wealth of other classes.
3. It must be a producing class; for, if it is not, i. e., if it has no immediate share in the production of values, it may at best destroy, being unable to produce, create, organize.
4. It must be a class that is not bound by private property, for a class whose material existence is based on private property will naturally be inclined to increase its property, not to abolish private property, as is demanded by communism.
5. This class must be one which has been welded together by the conditions of its existence and its common labor, its members working side by side. Otherwise, it will be incapable of desiring - not to mention constructing - a society that is the embodiment of the social labor of comrades. Furthermore, such a class could not wage an organized struggle or create a new state power.
In the following table, the presence or absence of these characteristics in the various classes and groups is indicated by a + or - sign. Class Properties Peasantry Lumpen-proletariat Proletariat
1. Economic exploitation + - +
2. Political oppression + + +
3. Poverty + + +
4. Productivity + - +
5. Freedom from private property - + +
6. Condition of union in production, and common labor - - +
In other words, the peasantry-for instance-lack several elements necessary to make them a communist class: they are bound down by property, and it will take many years to train them to a new view, which can only be done by having the state power in the hands of the proletariat; also, the peasantry are not held together in production, in social labor and common action; on the contrary, the peasant's entire joy is in his own bit of land; he is accustomed to individual management, not to cooperation with others. The lumpenproletariat, however, is barred chiefly by the circumstance that it performs no productive work; it can tear down, but has no habit of building up. Its ideology is often represented by the anarchists, concerning whom a wag once said that their whole program consists of two paragraphs. Para. 1. There shall be no order at all; Para. 2. No one shall be obliged to comply with the preceding paragraph.
We have thus seen how the conditions of material existence determine the psychology and ideology of classes in groups; the proletariat shows: hatred against capital and its state power, revolutionary spirit, the habit of organized action, a psychology of comradeship, a productive and constructive conception of things, a rejection of the traditional, a negative attitude on the "sacredness of private property", that pillar of bourgeois society, etc.; in the peasantry: love of private property, preventing them from favoring innovation; individualism, exclusiveness, suspicion of everything lying outside the village; in the luvnpenproletariat: shiftlessness , lack of discipline hatred of the old, but impotence to construct or organize anything new, an individualistic declassed "personality", whose actions are based only on foolish caprices. In each of the above classes, we find the ideology that corresponds to its psychology: in the proletariat, revolutionary communism; in the peasantry, a property ideology; in the lumpen proletariat, a vacillating and hysterical anarchism. Obviously, once such psychological and theological nucleus is present, it will set the fundamental note for the entire psychology and ideology of the class or group concerned.
In the old discussions between Marxists and Social-Revolutionaries, the latter usually formulated the question from the point of view of philanthropy, "ethics", "compassion" for the "weaker brother", and similar rubbish of a ruling class intellectual nature. For most of these "ideologists", the question of class was an ethical question of the intellectual, with his qualms of conscience, who, in his desire to overthrow absolutism, which was an obstacle in his path, sought support in the peasant (so long as the latter did not set fire to the estates of the intellectual's aunties and uncles), whose confidence he wished to gain, thus compensating for his own guilt by his noble-minded assistance. The Marxists, however, were not concerned with lacrimose sentiments or philanthropy, but with a precise study of class peculiarities, with finding out what class would lead in the impending struggle for socialism.
A good study (although conservative and apologetic, supporting the Black Hundred) of the psychology of the peasant is to be found in the book of the evangelical pastor A. L'Houet (Zur Psychologie des Bauerntums, 2nd ed., Tübingen, 1920). This learned Christian dominie esteems Germany's peasantry "above all as its supply of bodily, mental, moral, and religious health, as the Reich's war-hoard" (p. 4; L'Houet means cannon-fodder). The pastor, who finds among the earmarks of the firmly rooted peasantry: its "homogeneous mass", its exclusiveness to the outside world, its fidelity to tradition, etc., gives an excellent description of the class psychology of the peasantry but he is inspired with feelings of rapture with those of its qualities that we regard as the "idiotism of country life" (Marx). For instance, L'Houet praises the inertia of the peasantry, its aversion to innovation. "As contrasted with this outspoken preference for everything that is new, the peasant unmistakably belongs to a world that reveres the old, that retains the ancient themes of life, continues to spin the old thread, to roll the old stones. With the disadvantage that he `remains behind the times', `does not keep abreast of the times but with the great advantage that all the achievements of his life, by reason of this one-sidedness, are characterized by reliability, solidity tried and true methods" (p. 16). This inertia is found everywhere in the preservation of the original settlement, of the old home, of the old farm-names, baptismal names, costumes, the old dialect, the old folk poetry, the old mechanism of the soul, the old faces! In all, we find the same old conservative sense." (p. 16). Herr L'Houet is delighted with the fact that peasant dwellings in 1871 were practically the same as in the Stone Age. He rejoices in the hereditary simplicity and poverty of the psyche, in the fact "that the number of life problems faced at any moment, in a religious, moral, artistic sense or whatever other sense - is not very large, that each generation hands down the same supply of these things to the next" (p. 29). He is pleased to find that these limitations, this "idiotism" - not the fault but the misfortune of the peasantry - is not destroyed by steam and electricity, for this "principle of the past" is the basis of a simple grandiose existence in the ancient sense" (!!). "Solidity", thrift and avarice, lust for possession, etc., are of course also highly esteemed by our dominie (as on p. 6, for instance). These examples fully express the character of the class psychology and class ideology of landlords and their priests, who cherish and nurse precisely those qualities of the peasantry that prevent it from "advancing with the times".
The class psychology of the country nobility (i. e., the feudal landholders) is characterized by the same outspoken conservative and reactionary spirit, which no other class possesses to the same degree. This is not hard to understand; the feudal landholders, as we know, are the representatives of feudal society, which has now passed away in almost all countries. Fidelity to tradition, to the "established forms of worship of the aristocratic family (its excellences, its fame, its worth"), symbolically expressed in the "ancestral tree"; "merit and service" the estate, the honor appropriate to "noble station", contempt for those of lower station, the attempt to limit sexual and all other intercourse to those of like station only; these are the characteristic traits of this once ruling class (cf. G. Simmel: Soziologie, p. 737 et seq.).
The psychology and ideology in the classes of bourgeois society, i. e., the urban classes, are far more mobile. The bourgeoisie, particularly when it was a rising class, not directly threatened by the proletarian by no means presented the conservatism of the nobility. Its characteristic traits were: individualism, a result of the competitive struggle, and rationalism, a result of economic calculation, these conditions being the basis of the life of this class. The liberal psychology (various "liberties"), and ideology were based on the "initiative of the entrepreneur". Very interesting observations are made by Werner Sombart and Max Weber, particularly on the economic psychology of the bourgeoisie and the various stages in its development. Thus Sombart traces the rise of the entrepreneur psychology, which arose necessarily from the fusing of three psychological types: that of the conqueror, of the organizer, of the trader; from the conqueror, it takes the ability to make plans, to carry them out; the conqueror has "toughness and persistence . . . elasticity, mental energy, high tension, an indomitable will"; the organizer must be able to "control men and things in such manner as to obtain the desired profit without any reduction"; the trader, the merchant, is capable of trading and profiting by trade (Sombart: Der Bourgeois, München and Leipzig, 1913, p. 70 et seq.). The bourgeoisie was characterized at the period of its highest development by a combination of these three traits. We have already discussed the psychology of the proletariat, as our whole book is concerned with the proletariat.
It is obvious that the psychology and ideology of the classes will change, depending on the alterations in the "`social being" of the corresponding classes, as has been repeatedly stated in the preceding chapters. One thing should still be mentioned: the psychology" of the intermediate classes also constitutes an intermediate stage, while that of the mixed groups is a mixed psychology, etc. This also explains the fact that the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, for example, are constantly "vacillating" between proletariat and bourgeoisie, for "two souls - alas! - dwell in their breast", etc. As Marx puts the matter in his Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (Hamburg 1885, p. 33): "Over the various forms of property, over the social conditions of existence, there rises an entire superstructure of various peculiarly constituted feelings, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates these out of its material foundations, as well as out of the corresponding social relations." d. The "Class in Itself", and the "Class for Itself"
Class psychology and class ideology, the consciousness of the class not only as to its momentary interests, but also as to permanent and universal interests, are a result of the position of the class in production, which by no means signifies that this position of the class will at once produce in it a consciousness of its general and basic interests. On the contrary, it may be said that this is rarely the case. For, in the first place, the process of production itself, in actual life, goes through a number of stages of evolution, and the contradictions in the economic structure do not become apparent until a later period of evolution; in the second place, a class does not descend full-grown from heaven, but grows in a crude elemental manner from a number of other social groups (transition classes, intermediate and other classes, strata, social combinations); in the third place, a certain time usually passes before a class becomes conscious of itself through experience in battle, of its special and peculiar interests, aspirations, social "ideals" and desires, which emphatically distinguish it from all the other classes in the given society; in the fourth place, we must not forget the systematic psychological and ideological manipulation conducted by the ruling class with the aid of its state machinery for the purpose of destroying the incipient class consciousness of the oppressed classes, and to imbue them with the ideology of the ruling class, or at least to influence them somewhat with this ideology. The result is that a class discharging a definite function in the process of production may already exist as an aggregate of persons before it exists as a self-conscious class; we have a class, but no class consciousness. It exists as a factor in production, as a specific aggregate of production relations; it does not yet exist as a social, independent force that knows what it wants, that feels a mission, that is conscious of its peculiar position, of the hostility of its interests to those of the other classes. As designations for these different stages in the process of class evolution, Marx makes use of two expressions: he calls class "an sich" (in itself), a class not yet conscious of itself as such; he calls class "für sich" (for itself), a class already conscious of its social role.
This has been splendidly explained by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, in the case of working class evolution:
"It is under the form of these combinations that the first attempts at association among themselves have always been made by the workers. The great industry masses together in a single place a crowd of people unknown to each other. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of their wages, this common interest which they have against their employer, unites them in the same idea of resistance - combination. (Combination here means workers' combination, N. B.) Thus combination has always a double end, that of eliminating competition among themselves while enabling them to make a general competition against the capitalist. If the first object of resistance has been merely to maintain wages, in proportion as the capitalists in their turn have combined with the idea of repression, the combinations, at first isolated, have formed in groups, and, in face of constantly united capital, the maintenance of the association became more important and necessary for them than the maintenance of wages. This is so true that the English economists are all astonished at seeing the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages on behalf of the associations which, in the eyes of these economists, were only established in support of wages. In this struggle - a veritable civil war - are united and established all the elements necessary for a future battle. Once arrived at that point, association takes on a political character.
"The economic conditions have in the first place transformed the mass of the people of the country into wage workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass of people a common situation with common interests. Thus this mass is already a class, as opposed to capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have only noted some phases, this mass unites, it is constituted as a class for itself. The interests which it defends are the interests of its class." (The Poverty of Philosophy, Chicago,
1920, pp. 188, 189, my italics, N. B.) e. Forms of a Relative Solidarity of Interests
From what has been said above, it is clear that under certain circumstances a relative class solidarity becomes possible; two principal forms may be distinguished.
In the first place, we have the form of solidarity in which the permanent interest of one class coincides with the temporary interest of another class, while this temporary interest may contradict the general class interest.
In the second place, we may have a form of solidarity in which this contradiction is lacking, and in which we may yet have a coincidence between the permanent interests of one class and the temporary interests of another class, or between temporary interests of both classes.
The first form may be illustrated by an example from the imperialist war of 1914-1918, namely, the attitude of the working classes at the beginning of this war. It is well known that in most of the great advanced capitalist countries, the workers, contrary to their internationalist class interests, rushed to the defense of their "fatherlands". Their "fatherlands" were of course only the state organizations of the bourgeoisie, i. e., class organizations of capital. We therefore find the working class defending the organizations of its employers, which had come into conflict with each other for the division of markets, sources of raw materials, spheres of investments for their funds; this was certainly a sacrifice of the workers' own class interests, due to a condition of relative solidarity between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the nations of financial capitalism. We may understand this condition by imagining the entire system of world economy to be a countless number of intersecting threads - the production relations - meeting at several points in big, thick knots: the great capitalist countries, where live the "national" groups of the bourgeoisie, organized as a state authority. They remind us of the huge enterprises, the gigantic trusts, operative in world economy. The more powerful such a state becomes, the more mercilessly will it exploit its economic periphery: the colonies, spheres of influence, semi-colonies, etc. As capitalist society develops, the condition of the working class should become poorer. But the predatory states of the bourgeoisie, which hoodwink the workers in The "spheres of influence", were feeding "their own" workers and making them take an interest in the exploitation of the colonies. This condition brought about a relative material interest between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the proletariat; these production relations gave rise to a corresponding psychology and ideology, resulting in a recognition of the duty to defend one's country. The course of reasoning was simple: if "our" industry
(which happens not to be "ours", but that of our employers) develops, wages will increase; but industry expands by obtaining markets, and spheres for the investment of capital; consequently the working class has an interest in the colonial policy of the bourgeoisie, must defend the "nation's industry", must fight for the nation's "place in the sun". All the other things followed naturally: laudation of one's mighty fatherland, the great nation, etc., and the endless high-sounding rhetoric about humanity, civilization, democracy, unselfishness, etc., so prevalent in the first stage of the World War. This was the ideology of "labor imperialism", leading the working class to sacrifice permanent and general interests for the crumbs thrown to it by the bourgeoisie as the latter squeezed the last drop out of the colonial laborers, semi-laborers, etc., etc. Ultimately, the course of the war and of the post-war period showed the working class that it had lost the game, that the permanent interests of the class are more important than its temporary interests. There ensued the process of a swift "revolutionizing" of minds.
The late Professor Tugan-Baranovsky, a "pseudo-Marxist", for a time a White Minister, in the early stage of the Russian revolution (for pure "ethics"; he always reproved Marx for his lack of ethics, his permitting himself to be carried away by class hatred, which is, of course, quite vicious) - this Tugan-Baranovsky takes up the cudgels against Marx in the following terms: Marx does not see the solidarity of interests, denies its presence in capitalist society; yet "all social classes are equally interested in the preservation of the political independence of the state, insofar as the latter has an ideal worth in their eyes. In the economic field, the state not only serves to establish class rule, but also to advance economic progress, enhancing the total national wealth, which is in accord with the interests of all classes of society. In addition, we have the cultural mission of the state, which is interested in the advance of education, and in raising the mental level of the population, if only for the reason that political and economic power cannot be separated from the advance of culture." (Theoretische Grundlagen des Marxismus, p. 114.)
Herr Cunow (ibid., vol. ii, pp. 78, 79) quotes and supports this passage from Tugan, asserting, however, that Tugan here confuses social interests with the interests of the state. In reality, Cunow is confusing the revolutionary standpoint of Marx with the traitor standpoint of the Scheidemanns. The Tugan-Cunow reasoning is truly childish. We are told that the state is not only concerned with oppression, but also concerned with it; therefore, all classes have an interest in the state. By this method anything might be proved. Since,. the trusts are not only concerned with exploitation, "but also" (!) arer concerned with production, they are of general utility. Since the detective bureaus in America not only twist the arms of revolutionary proletarians, "but also" catch thieves, all classes have an interest to them, etc. It is with stuff of this kind that Herr Cunow fills the two volumes of his study on Marxian sociology!
Cunow, however, excels all the distorters of Marxism with cynical impudence:
"According to the Marxian theory of society," we read (vol. ii, p. 77 et seq., of Cunow's work), "any such general will as so excellently served the purposes of the older social philosophy, does not exist; for society is not a unified thing with perfectly uniform interests (?! society!), but it is divided into classes (not so bad; but what is Cunow going to do with the state? Whose will is expressed by the state? N. B.). To be sure, there are also general social interests, for, since a living and working together in society is impossible without a certain order, all the members of society - with the exception of those who question the existence of society at all - are interested in maintaining this order; but, since they have different ideals of order, depending on their different positions within the social order, they have not the same interest in the various rules of this order, which they regard from various points of view, depending on the class angle of their vision." To put the matter in plain words; men may think that it is the bourgeoisie that is interested in preserving the capitalist order, while the proletariat is interested in overthrowing this order; but nothing could be further from the truth. The wise Cunow sets us right on this subject: since life is impossible without order, all have an interest in maintaining capitalism. But since the workers have a different "ideal of order", let them "criticize the various rules of the order" - so much Cunow will permit. But don't dare go beyond that, for then you will be one of the persons who "question the existence of society at all". This is Marxism as revised and supplemented by Cunow !
We may also take as an example that period in the evolution of the working class when it lived in a so called "patriarchal" relation with the entrepreneurs in each specific industry; in view of the general weakness of social institutions, the workers had an interest in the success of the enterprise. The workers and their "benefactors", their employers, afford an excellent illustration of a relative solidarity of interests at the expense of the general class interests.
A certain analogy is afforded by the community of interests between slaves and slaveholders in antiquity, so long as there were still "slaves of the slaves" (the Roman vicarii). The slaves who held slaves were themselves slave-owners, their interests thus coincided, to this extent, with the slaveholders of the "first degree". In the present-day agricultural cooperatives in Western Europe we often find the peasantry working hand in hand with the great landlords and the capitalist estate owners. The peasants unite with the others in order to dispose of their agricultural products; being sellers, they are opposed to the urban population; they desire high prices as much as does the wealthy estate-owner.
We are now already leaving the outlines of the first form of solidarity, since in this case a true agricultural bourgeoisie, recruited from the peasantry, differs in no respect from the hereditary agricultural bourgeoisie.
The best examples of the second form of relative class solidarity, namely, where this relative solidarity is not in contradiction with the permanent interests of the classes involved, are found in cases of class attacks against the common enemy, which are quite possible at a certain stage of evolution. For example, in the first phase of the French Revolution, the feudal system was opposed by different classes, both in economy as well as in politics: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the proletariat, all these groups being interested in overthrowing feudalism. Of course, this general bloc later disintegrated, and the petty bourgeoisie, in spite of its struggles against the great bourgeoisie, which had become counter-revolutionary, simultaneously fought the incipient proletarian movement ruthlessly. Here we have a temporary class solidarity at variance with the general and permanent interests of the classes. f. Class Struggle and Class Peace
Various gradations of interest give rise to various forms of struggle. As already shown, not every interest of a section of a main class is for that reason the class interest. If the interest of the workers of a single factory contradicts the interests of the remaining sections of the working class, we have not a class interest, but a group interest. But even when we are dealing with the interest of a group of workers which does not collide with the interests of other groups, the groups may yet fail to be united, class interest being absent in the consciousness of the classes; strictly speaking, there is yet no class struggle: the beginnings of a class interest, the germs of a class struggle, are present. A class interest arises when. it places one class in opposition to another. The class struggle arises when it throws one class into active conflict with the other. Class struggle, therefore, in the true sense, develops only at a specific stage in the evolution of class society. In other phases of social evolution it reveals itself as a germ-form
(individual sections of the class are fighting; the struggle has not yet advanced to embrace the class as a principle, uniting the entire class), or as a concealed, "latent" form
(open conflict does not ensue; "stolid resistance" is offered; the ruling class is forced to pay attention to this resistance). "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild member and apprentice, in short, oppressors` and oppressed all were opposed in like manner to each other, waged ¢! an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open battle, a battle that always terminated in a revolutionary transformation of the whole society or with a common destruction of the struggling classes" (The Communist Manifesto). It will be useful to consider a few more examples.
Let us suppose, in a slaveholding society, that an insurrection is taking place in a latifundium belonging to a great landowner; there is plundering, damage to things and persons, etc. We may Fl not call this a class struggle in the proper sense of the word: it is the elemental fury of a small section of the slave class. The class as a whole is calm; a small band wages a bitter struggle, but remains isolated, includes but few in its numbers. The class as such does not come into action; one class is here not opposing another. Quite different is the case when the rebellious slaves, led by Spartacus, fought a real civil war for their liberation; here the slave masses were carried away: this is class struggle.
Or, let us consider the example of a movement for higher wages among the wage workers of a factory. If all the other workers in the country remain calm, we have only the promise of a class struggle, for the class as yet is not kindled. Let us consider, however, the case of a "strike wave". This is class struggle: one class stands opposed to the other. We are no longer dealing with the interests of the group impelling another group, but with the interests of a class impelling another class.
The example of the peasant serf is also interesting. Among, these serfs, there was a vague, sullen discontent; this feeling may break out, but since the class as a whole continues to be held down, it does not do so; the slaves, in terror, do not fight, but "mutter".' This is the "concealed" form of the struggle, mentioned by Marx. Class struggle therefore means a struggle in which one class has entered into action against the other class. From this arises the extremely important principle that "every class struggle is a political struggle" (Marx). Indeed, when the oppressed class rises as a class power to oppose the oppressing class, this signifies that the oppressed class is undermining the bases of the existing order. And since the organization of power of the existing order is the state organization of the commanding class, it is obvious that each action of the oppressed class is directly aimed against the state mechanism, even though the participants in the struggle of the oppressed class may not at first be fully conscious of their hostility to the state power. Each such action is therefore necessarily political in character.
An interesting error of the I. W. W., in the United States, and of revolutionary syndicalists in general, may be detected by applying this principle. The I. W. W. reject the political struggle entirely, for they naively understand it to be synonymous with the parliamentary struggle. But if the I. W. W. should organize a general strike, or only a strike of railroad workers, miners and metal workers, it is obvious that this strike would have an immense political value, because it would have succeeded in organizing the most important armies of the proletariat, in terrifying the bourgeoisie as a class, in threatening to cut a breach in the machinery of the organized bourgeoisie; and therefore, because this strike would be directed, in reality, against the state power of the bourgeoisie.
This transformation of the individual episodes of conflict into the class struggle, in the case of the proletariat is excellently shown by Marx in the Communist Manifesto. "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the expanding unison of the workers. This unison is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, of the same character, into one national struggle between classes, but every class struggle is a political struggle:" (Communist Manifesto,. Chicago, 1912, pp. 24, 25.) Marx defines this transformation of the various conflicts into a class, i. e., political conflict, as follows: "Nota bene ad political movement: The political movement of the working class has of course, the final object of conquering the political power for that class, which requires, of course, a previous organization of the working class to a certain point, which organization is conditioned by its own economic struggle. On the other hand, any movement in which the working class is opposed as a class to its rulers, seeking to compel them by pressure from without, is a political movement" Briefe an Sorge, p. 240, also quoted by Cunow, ibid., vol. ii, p. 59) the italicized passages are in English in Marx's letter; both Marx and Engels, owing to their long stay in England, interlarded their letters with English words. Translator). Herr Cunow, in quoting this passage, interprets it as follows: "at a certain stage in evolution, various social classes develop out of the economic process as a whole, with their special economic interests, in accordance with their role in this process, and attempt to put through these interests in the political life" (ibid., vol. ii, p. 59). This commentary is not quite correct, for Cunow suppresses the most important point, the point to which Marx gives chief emphasis: the opposition of one class to the other in principle, when each struggle is a portion of the process of the general struggle for power and for domination in society.
In an exceptionally impudent article: Die Marx'sclae Geschichtsauffassung (PreussicheJlahrbücher, 1920, Vol. 182, no. 2, p. 157 et seq.), Professor Hans Delbrück "criticizes" the theory of the class struggle, simultaneously displaying a truly titanic ignorance in matters of Marxism. On p. 165 he maintains that Marx failed to distinguish classes from castes; on p. 156 he states that there was no "destruction" of the two classes in ancient Rome, while he admits the decline of the Roman Empire to be an undeniable fact. First there were civil wars, after which neither the victors nor the vanquished slaves were capable of leading society onward. On p. 167 he says that feudalism never existed in England! On p. 169 he "refutes" Marx with the fact that the peasants sometimes join hands with the Junkers (cf. our own remarks in large type), etc. But the gem of his "objections" is the following example. Delbrück quotes an ancient text discovered by the well-known Egyptologist, Ehrmann, in which we' read of the ancient Egyptian revolution, in which the slaves managed to seize power. This text is interesting in that it might have been written by Merezhkovsky or any other White Guard gentleman in his rage against the Bolsheviks; It depicts the most frightful atrocities. Herr Delbrück calls our attention to this horrible example of the class struggle? But this worthy and truly German professor falls quite unwittingly into his own trap when he adds the words that this condition lasted for "three hundred years" (p. 171). Any fool would know that there can be no possibility of maintaining life for three hundred years in a state of absolute anarchy and without production. Things, therefore, cannot have been quite so bad, and Delbrück's argument, an appeal to the emotions of the terrified bourgeois, is simply ridiculous.
Amusing objections to the Marxian theory are also raised by Mr. J. Delevsky (The Social Antagonisms and the Class Struggle in History, Petersburg, 1910, in Russian); his chief objection is the following. After quoting this passage from Engels: It was Marx,; himself who had first discovered the complete law of motion of history the law according to which all historical struggles, whether proceeding on the political, religious, philosophical, or any other ideological ground, are in fact only the more or less distinct expression of the struggles between social classes" (Marx: Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Hamburg, 1885, Engels' preface to the 2nd ed.), Mr. Delevsky states that he agrees with Sombart's opinion that the principle of the class struggle must be replaced by the principle of the struggle between nations. The objection of Plekhanov, who said that nothing need be added here, since the class struggle is a conception connected with the internal processes of society and not with the relations between societies, is considered insufficient by Mr. Delevsky. "Either - or", writes Mr. Delevsky, "either history is based on two principles or on one. If on two principles - that of the class struggle and that of the struggle between nations - what is the law which is formulated in the second principle? . . But if " we have only the principle of the class struggle, what sense is there in distinguishing the struggle within society from the struggle between societies? " Or, perhaps the societies, nations, states, are likewise classes?" (p. 92), This statement is truly delightful. Let us look into the matter; two fundamental situations are possible: either we dealing with a society ( for instance, the world-wide economy of the present day) divided into the state organizations of the "national" sections of the bourgeoisie, or with the rather loose, different societies (for instance, if war is waged between different peoples, one of which - let us say - has suddenly intruded from very remote regions, as has happened repeatedly in the course of history: the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards is an example). In this first case, the struggle between the bourgeoisies is a special form of capitalist competition. No one but Delevsky could even imagine that the theory of the class struggle would exclude, for instance, capitalist competition, which is a form of the antagonisms within the class, which have never succeeded in altering the bases of the given structure of production. While the Marxian theory recognizes the possibility of a relative clarity between classes, it also recognizes the possibility of a relative antagonism within the classes. It is hard to see how this refutes the theory of the class struggle. Second case. This is a methodological question. The theory of the evolution of society is the theory of an evolution of an abstract society, and it is quite true that this theory does not need to concern itself with the relations between societies; it analyzes the nature of society in general, ascertaining the laws of evolution of this "society in general". But if we leave these questions in favor of more concrete questions, i. e., among others, the question of the relations between the various societies, we shall again obtain special laws, which in their turn are also not in contradiction with the Marxian theory; not for the reason that the different societies are different classes (this assumption of Mr. Delevsky is simply wrong), but because "expansion" itself has economic causes, since - let us say - conquest inevitably is transformed into a regrouping of class forces; because in such cases the higher mode of production "below" always carries off the victory, etc. Nothing in this invalidates in any way the theory of the class struggle.
We have therefore seen that the oppressed classes do not always wage a class struggle in the proper sense of the word, which by no means signifies - as we have also seen - that such comparatively peaceful epochs are filled with nothing but peace and harmony. It merely signifies that the class struggle is proceeding in a concealed or incipient farm. It will later become a class struggle in the true sense of the word. Let us not forget that dialectics conceives everything as in course of motion, evolution. Even if the class struggle be absent, it is evolving, it "grows". Such is the case with the oppressed classes. As for the ruling classes, they are waging the class struggle unceasingly. For the existence of the state organization proves that the ruling class has constituted itself as a class for itself, as a state power. This implies a complete consciousness of the fundamental interests of this class, which wages war with the classes whose interests oppose it (war against the immediate danger as well as against possible dangers), for which purpose it makes use of all the instruments of the state machinery. g. The Class Struggle and the State Power
We have already considered the problem of the state as a superstructure determined by the economic basis (see first part of "The Superstructure and its Outlines," chapter vi, d, of this work). We must now approach this question from another angle, namely, that of the class struggle. We must again emphatically point out that the state organization is exclusively a class organization; it is the class which "has constituted its state power", it is the "concentrated" and organized social authority of the class
(Marx). The oppressed class, the bearer of the new mode of production, in the course of the struggle, as we have seen - becomes transformed from a class in itself into a class for itself; in this struggle, it creates its fighting organizations, which to an increasing degree build up organizations that carry with them the entire mass of the given class. When revolution, civil war, etc., is at hand, these organizations break through the enemy's front and constitute the first cells of the new state mechanism in open or concealed form. For example, in the French Revolution: "The `people's' or Jacobin groups - the former Societies of Friends of the Constitution, were at first bourgeois and now became democratic, Montagnards, Sansculottes, advocates of equality and unity . . . . They were founded for the purpose of popular enlightenment, for propaganda rather than for action; but circumstances forced them into political action, to participate directly in the administration (when the petty bourgeoisie came to the helm. N. B.). By the Decree of 14th Frimaire, the Jacobins in all of France became the electors and the purifiers of the officialdom."2) "Taking everything into consideration . . . it was precisely the Jacobin clubs that now maintained unity and saved the country."3) In the English Revolution, the revolutionary "Army Council" provided the men for the State Council. During the Russlan revolution the fighting organizations of the workers and soldiers - the soviets - and the extreme revolutionary party - the communists - became the fundamental organizations of the new state.
Two types of arguments are used in objecting to the class conception of the state authority.
The first type is of the following kind: the peculiarity of the 6tate is its centralized administration; therefore, the anarchists tell us, any centralized administration is a state authority. Therefore, even the most advanced communist society, if it has a systematic economy, will also be a state. This reasoning is based entirely on the naive bourgeois error: bourgeois science, instead of perceiving special relations, perceives relations between things, or technical relations. But it is obvious that the "essence" of the state is not in the thing but in the social relation; not in the centralized administration as such, but in the class envelope of the centralized administration. As capital is not a thing (as is, for instance, a machine), but a social relation between workers and employers, a relation expressed by means of a thing, so centralization per se by no means necessarily signifies a state organization; it does not become a state organization until it expresses a class relation.
The second objection to the class theory of the state has already been considered, in part. This objection is still more ridiculous, being based on the conception that the state discharges a number of generally useful functions (for example, the modern capitalist state builds electrical power stations, hospitals, railroads, etc.). This argument unites most pathetically in one group: the Social-Democrat Cunow, the Right Social-Revolutionary J. Delevsky, the conservative Delbrück, and even the Babylonian king Hammurabi! But this honorable company is much mistaken. For the existence of generally useful functions on the part of the state does not alter the pure class character of the state authority. The ruling class is obliged to resort to all kinds of "generally useful" enterprises in order to maintain its ability to exploit the masses, extend its field of exploitation, and secure the "normal" working of this exploitation. Capitalism can of course not develop properly without an extensive railroad system, without trade schools
(if there are no skilled laborers, no scientific institutes, there will be no improvement in capitalist technique, etc., etc.). In all these measures, the state power of the capitalists is guided by its class interests. We have already given the trusts as an example; the trust also guides production, without which society. cannot exist, but it guides production in the direction of its class advantage. Or, to take the example of some ancient despotic state of great landlords, such as that of the Egyptian Pharaohs, whose huge constructions for regulating the course of rivers were of general utility. The Pharaonic state did not, however, maintain these constructions for the purpose of averting hardship for the starving, or subserving the general weal, but merely because they were a necessary condition for the process of production, which was simultaneously a process of exploitation. Class advantage was the basic impulse in activity; such measures may not be taken, therefore, as a proof of the incorrectness of the class point of view.
Another group of generally useful measures is called forth by the oppression of the "lower classes", for example, the labor protection legislation in capitalist countries. Many hair-splitting scholars (like the Russian pseudo-sociologist, Takhtarev) therefore do not consider the state as a pure class organization, for it is based ultimately on a compromise. A moment's thought will correct this view. Does the capitalist, for instance, cease to be "pure capitalist", because his fear of strikes makes him see advantage to himself of making concessions? Likewise, the state may make concessions to other classes, as the employer, in the above example, makes concessions to the workers. But does not signify that the state ceases to be a pure class state, an organization of a class bloc, i. e., becoming a truly and generally useful organization.
Naturally, Herr Cunow does not understand this either. It is a pleasant sight to behold the impudent Professor Hans Delbrück, whom we have already mentioned, poking fun at these crack-brained distorters of Marxism: "The difference between us social-politically thinking persons, and you, is only a difference of degree. You have only to take a few steps more on the path you have begun, gentlemen, and your Marxian nebula will soon be dissipated" (Hans Delbrück; op. cit., p. 172). h. Class, Party, Leaders
A class is a group of persons connected by reason of their common situation in production, and therefore also by their common situation in distribution, in other words, by common interests l (class interests). But it would be absurd to suppose that every class is a thoroughly unified whole, all parts being of equal importance, with Tom, Dick, and Harry all on the same level. In the modern working class, for instance, there is no doubt much inequality in brain-power and ability. Even the "being" of the various parts of the working class is unequal. This is due to the fact that, first, complete uniformity of the economic units is absent, and second, the working class does not step down full-grown from heaven, but is being constantly recruited, from the peasantry, the artisan class, the urban petty bourgeoisie, i. e., from other groups of capitalist society.
A worker in a huge, splendidly equipped plant is a different person from the worker in a small shop, the cause of the difference in this case being the difference in the establishments, as well as between the entire resulting modes of work. Proletarian "age" must also be considered as an element, for a peasant who has just taken a job in a factory is different from a worker who has been in a factory since childhood.
The difference in "being" is also reflected in consciousness. The proletariat is unequal in its consciousness as it is unequal in its position. It is more or less a unit as compared with the other classes, but not with regard to its own various parts.
The working class, therefore, as to their class consciousness, i. e., their permanent, general, not their personal, not their guild or group interests, but as to the interests of the class as a whole, is divided into a number of groups and sub-groups, as a single chain consists of a number of links of varying strength.
This inequality of the class is the reason for the existence of the party. If the working class were perfectly and absolutely uniform, it could at any moment come out in its full strength; its struggles might be led by persons chosen in rotation; a permanent organization of leadership would be superfluous and unnecessary. As a matter of actual fact, the struggle of the working class is inevitable; this struggle must be guided; this guidance is the more necessary, since the opponent is powerful and cunning, and fighting him is a serious matter. We naturally expect to find the entire class led by that section of it that is most advanced, best schooled, most united: the party.
The party is not the class; in fact, it may be but a small part of the class, as the head is but a small part of the body. But it would be absurd to attempt to find an opposition between the party and the class. The party is simply the thing that best expresses the interests of the class. We may distinguish between class and party, as we distinguish between the head and the entire body, but cannot discuss them as opposites, just as we cannot cut off a man's head, unless we wish to shorten his life.
On what does the result of the struggle depend under these conditions? It depends on a proper relation between the various parts of the working class, particularly on a proper mutual relation between those in the party and those outside of it. On the one hand guidance and leadership are necessary; on the other, instruction and conviction. No leadership is possible which does not instruct and convince. On the one hand, the party must be held together and organized separately as a part of the class, on the other hand, it must secure closer and closer contact with the non-party masses and draw a greater and greater section of these` masses into its organization. The mental growth of the class will therefore find its expression in the growth of the party of this class, and, conversely, the decline of the class will be reflected in the decline of the party, or the decline of its influence on the non-party elements.
We have already seen that the lack of uniformity within the; class makes necessary the existence of the party of this class. But the capitalist conditions of "being" and the low cultural level not only of the working class, but of the other classes also, produce a situation in which even the vanguard of the proletariat, i. e., its party, also lacks internal uniformity. The party is more or less uniform as compared with the other sections of the working class, but not within itself. The same observations may here be made as in the case of the class. Let us assume - as we did before - that the party is entirely uniform in class-consciousness, experience, executive ability, etc., which is the complete reverse of the truth. Leaders would be unnecessary; the functions of the "leaders" might be performed in rotation by all the members, without detriment to the cause.
But in reality no such perfect uniformity exists even in the vanguard, and this makes necessary the formation of more or less stable groups of individual "leaders". Good leaders are leaders because they best express the proper tendencies of the party. And as it is absurd to represent party and class as opposed to each other, so it is absurd to represent the party as opposed to its leaders. To be sure, we have done this, when we opposed the working class to the Social-Democratic leaders, or the masses of organized workers to their leaders. But we did this - and still do it - in order to destroy the Social-Democracy, to destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie, operating through these social-traitor leaders. But it would be absurd to attempt to transfer these methods for the destruction of a hostile organization to ourselves, and represent this process as an expression of our peculiar form of revolution. The same situation may also be found in other classes; when, in modern England, the bourgeoisie ruled through party of Lloyd George, Lloyd George's party was ruling through the persons of its leaders.
The above will show the absurdity, among other things, of all the criticisms raised against the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, a dictatorship which is represented by the enemies of the revolution as opposed to the dictatorship of the working class. It is clear from the above that the class must necessarily rule through its head, i. e., the party; it can rule in no other way. And if its head, i. e., the party, is destroyed, the class itself and the class in itself, is also destroyed, being transformed from a conscious and independent social force into a simple factor of production and nothing more.
Herr Heinrich Cunow regards the matter differently. "A party .does not ask him who wishes to join it: Do you belong to a certain class? Not even the Social-Democratic party. He who accepts the party's principles, demands, and its platform, in all essentials, may become a member. This platform not only includes certain economic planks
(interest demands), but also, like the platforms of other parties, certain political and philosophical views lying outside the economic sphere of interests (concluding italics are mine, N. B.). To be sure, the basis of most parties is a certain class grouping; but in its structure each party is simultaneously an ideological formation, the representative of a specific political thought-complex, and many persons join a party not because they have the same special class demands as the party, but because they are attracted by " this thought-complex." (Die Marx'sche Geschichts-, Gesellschafts- und Staatstheorie, Berlin, 1921, vol. ii, p. 68. ) These observations by the now head-theoretician of the Social-Democracy are extremely instructive. Herr Cunow gaily opposes the political and philosophical conceptions in the party platform to the economic demands of this platform. But how could you, Citizen Cunow! What has become of your Marxism? The platform is the highest expression of the consciousness in all the "thought-complexes". The "political and philosophical conceptions" are not made of whole cloth but grow up from the life conditions of these classes. They are not only not opposed to these life conditions, but, on the contrary, are their expression, and insofar as we are discussing the demands of the platform, it is obvious that the philosophical and political portion of this platform serves as the envelope for its economic portion.
We may observe this fact even in Herr Cunow's party, the German Social-Democracy. Absorbing more and more non-workers, receding further and further from the working class, by supporting chiefly the aristocracy of skilled labor in that class, the German Social-Democracy has also changed the mental-political thought-complex of its "platform", which has become much more moderate in its demands; in its ideology, it therefore favors the well - groomed-pardon the word - castrated "Marxism" of Herr Cunow, chooses Herr Bernstein an old betrayer of Marxism) as interpreter of its program, and makes Herr Vorländer (an idealist Kantian) its official philosopher. i. The Classes as an Instrument of Social Transformation
If we consider society as a certain system developing objectively, we find that transitions from one class system (from one "social formation of classes") to another is accomplished through a bitter class struggle. In this objective process of social changes the classes constitute the basic apparatus of transmission for reshaping the entire body of the living conditions of society. The structure of society changes through men and not outside of men; the production relations are as much a product of human struggle and of human activity as are flax or linen (Marx). But if we seek among; the countless individual wills running in all directions, but ultimately yielding a certain social resultant, to find the basic tendency, we shall obtain certain uniform "bundles of wills": "the class wills". These are most sharply differentiated in revolution, i. e., in an upheaval of society during a transition from one class form to another.
But hidden behind the law of cause and effect in the evolution of the class will and the various permutations and combinations in the clash of the opposed class wills - differing from each other - is the profounder causality of the objective evolution, a causality that determines the phenomena of the will at every stage in evolution.
Furthermore, the phenomena of the will are limited by external conditions, i. e., each alteration in these conditions, proceeding under the reverse influence of the human will, is limited by the preceding stage in these conditions. Thus, the class struggle and the class will constitute an active transmission apparatus in the transition from one social structure to another.
The new class, in this process, serves as the organizer and bearer of the new social and economic order. A class which is not the bearer of a new mode of production cannot "transform" society. On the contrary, the class power which embodies the growing and ever advancing conditions of production, is also the fundamental living lever of social transformation. Thus, the bourgeoisie, when it was the bearer of new conditions of production and a new economic structure, shunted society from its old feudal track to that of bourgeois evolution; similarly, the proletariat, the bearer and organizer of the socialistic class formulation will shift society - no longer capable of living on the basis - from the bourgeois track to that of socialism. j. The Classless Society of the Future
Here we encounter a question that has been but little discussed in Marxian literature. We have seen that the class rules through the party, the party through its leaders; each class and each party therefore having its staff of officers. This staff is technically necessary, for we have seen that it is the result of the lack of uniformity within the class and the inequality of the party members, Each class therefore has its organizers. Viewing the evolution of society from this point of view, we may reasonably ask the following question. Is - in general - the communist classless society, of which Marxists speak, a possibility?
It is. We know that the classes themselves have risen organically as Engels described, from the division of labor, from the organizational functions that had become technically necessary for the further evolution of society. Obviously, in the society of the future, such organizational work will also be necessary. One might object that the society of the future will not involve private property, or the formation of such private property, and it is precisely this private property that constitutes this basis of the class.
But this argument need not remain unanswered. Professor Robert Michels, in his very interesting book, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie
(Leipzig 1910, p. 370) says: "Doubts again arise on this point, however, whose consistent application would lead to an outright denial of the possibility of a classless state
(the author should not have said `state' but `society' - N. B.) Their administration of boundless capital (i. e., means of production - N. B.) assigns at least as much power to the administrators as would possession of their own private property. " Viewed from this point of view, the entire evolution of society seems to be nothing more than a substitution of one group of leaders for another. Accordingly, Vilfredo Pareto speaks of a "theory of the circulation of élites" (théorie de la circulation des élites). If this view is a correct one, Michels must also be correct in his conclusion, i. e., socialists may be victorious, but not socialism. An example will show Michels' error. When the bourgeoisie is in power, it is by reason of the power - as we know - not of all the members of the class, but of its leaders. Yet it is evident that this condition does not result in a class stratification within the bourgeoisie. The landlords in Russia ruled their high officials, constituting an entire staff, an entire stratum, but this stratum did not set itself up as a class against the other landlords. The reason was that these other landlords did not have a lower standard of living than that of the former; furthermore, their cultural level was about the same, on the whole, and the rulers were constantly recruited from this class.
Engels was therefore right when he said that the classes up to a certain moment are an outgrowth of the insufficient evolution of the productive forces; administration is necessary, but there is not sufficient bread for all, so to speak. Parallel with the growth, of the socially necessary organizational functions, we therefore have also a growth of private property. But communist society' is a society with highly developed, increased productive forces. Consequently, it can have no economic basis for the creation of its peculiar ruling class. For - even assuming the power of the administrators to be stable, as does Michels - this power will be then power of specialists over machines, not over men. How could they, in fact, realize this power with regard to men? Michels neglects the fundamental decisive fact that each administratively dominant position has hitherto been an envelope for economic exploitation. This economic exploitation may not be subdivided. But there will not even exist a stable, close corporation, dominating the machines, for the fundamental basis for the formation of monopoly groups will disappear; what constitutes an eternal category in Michels presentation, namely, the "incompetence of the masses" will disappear, for this incompetence is by no means a necessary attribute of every system; it likewise is a product of the economic and technical conditions, expressing themselves in the general cultural being and in the educational conditions. We may state that in the society of the future there will be a colossal overproduction of organizers, which will nullify the stability of the ruling groups.
But the question of the transition period from capitalism to socialism, i. e., the period of the proletarian dictatorship, is far more difficult. The working class achieves victory, although it is not and cannot be a unified mass. It attains victory while the productive forces are going down and the great masses are materially insecure. There will inevitably result a tendency to "degeneration", i. e., the excretion of a leading stratum in the form of a class-germ. This tendency will be retarded by two opposing tendencies; first, by the growth of the productive forces; second, by the abolition of the educational monopoly. The increasing production of technologists and of organizers in general, out of the working class itself, will undermine this possible new class alignment. The outcome of the struggle will depend on which tendencies turn out to be the stronger.
The working class, having in its possession so fine an instrument as the Marxian theory, must be mindful of this fact: by its hands an order of society will be put through and ultimately established, differing in principle from all the preceding formations; namely, from the primitive communist horde by the fact that it will be a society of highly cultivated persons, conscious of themselves and others; and from the class forms of society by the fact that for he first time the conditions for a human existence will be realized, not only for individual groups, but for the entire aggregate of humanity, a mass which will have ceased to be a mass, and will become a single, harmoniously constructed human society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
An exhaustive study of the classes will be found in Professor Solntsev's book, The Social Classes (in Russian); Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto; Karl Marx: The Poverty of Philosophy; Karl Marx: Capital; Karl Marx: historical writings; Friedrich Engels: The Conditions of the Working Class in England; Friedrich Engels: Feuerbach
(English translation, Chicago, 1906); Friedrich Engels: Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; Karl Kautsky: Die Agrarfrage; Karl Kautsky: Widersprüche der Klasseninteressen während der grossen französischen Revolution; N. Roshkov: Karl Marx and the Class Struggle, in the Collection, To the Memory of Marx (in Russian); A. Bogdanov: Empiriomonism (in Russian), vol. iii; Victor Chernov (Social-Revolutionist): The Peasant and the Worker as Economic Categories (in Russian); J. Delevsky ,.(Social-Revolutionist): Social Antagonisms and the Class Struggle (in Russian); H. Cunow: Die Marxsche Geschichts-, Gesellschafts- und Staatstheorie.
NOTES
1)Social Classes: The Principal Factors in the Evolution of the Class Problem and the Principal Theories, Tomsk, 1919 (in Russian), pp. 268 et seq.
2)Aulard: Histoire politique de la révolution française, Paris, 1901, pp. 386, 387.
3)Ibid., p. 350.
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Evans Experientialism 
