Socialism is the political rule of the proletariat, it is social appropriation of socialized production. Socialism is the control of the means of production by the proletariat as a class. Socialism is where the proletariat has successfully captured state power, built its own state, and begun the process of abolishing classes. But what is the basis of socialism? Why will socialism develop? What makes socialism viable?
Historic and modern utopian socialists would answer that the moral superiority of socialism is what gives it advantage over the bourgeois order, that socialism will prevail as the victory of so-called justice. Many even, incorrectly, claim Marx opposed capitalism and supported socialism, as a perfect, utopian society, on the basis of morality or justice, whether they are lauding him or disparaging him. Typically, they misattribute the ideas of Sismondi, Owen, and Lasalle in making these claims about his analysis of capitalism. I digress, these utopian socialists and the critics of Marxism claim that socialism’s basis is on morality and justice. This, however, can be recognized as deluded idealism by any materialist. Justice and morality exist in the realm of ideas, and particular social definitions of them do not merely fall from the sky into the minds of people. Rather, people’s conceptions of them are formed through experiencing the material world, its social relations, its tendencies of development, etc. Any perception of something as just or unjust, moral or immoral, is either a reflection of the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, or merely an indirect manner of expressing one’s laboring class interests. To claim justice or morality as the basis of socialism, besides, is greatly harmful to revolutionary practice, and is inaccurate regardless. As Friedrich Engels says in Anti-Dühring:
If for the imminent overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour… we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust, and that justice must eventually triumph, we should be in a pretty bad way, and we might have a long time to wait… The most important thing in this is that the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution of the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class divisions. On this tangible, material fact… and not on the conceptions of justice and injustice held by any armchair philosopher, is modern socialism’s confidence of victory founded.
Here Engels puts us on the correct path toward identifying the true basis of socialism. Socialism does not come about due to metaphysical expressions of opposition to bourgeois order, but due to very material developments and interests which carve out the preconditions for socialist society. The tendencies of capitalist development themselves represent a trajectory toward socialism. This is not a logical contradiction. In Reform or Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg identifies that:
The scientific basis of Socialism rests… on three principal results of capitalist development. First, on the growing anarchy of capitalist economy, leading inevitably to its ruin. Second, on the progressive socialization of the process of production, which creates the germs of the future social order. And third, on the increased organization and consciousness of the proletarian class, which constitutes the active factor in the coming revolution.
Let us elaborate on these three trajectories of capitalism one-by-one in order to better understand the basis of socialism.
The anarchy of capitalist production is very clear to see for even those untrained in socialist analysis, including bourgeois economists. In bourgeois political economy, the fact that major crises happen every few years is merely taken as a given, and seen as a fact of reality. Few bourgeois economists see the inevitability of crises under capitalism as a sign of its inviability, or of its nature as a finite mode of production. Further, few find success in identifying the cause of these crises. Thankfully for us, Marxism offers us an explanation of these crises, and identifies that they are inherent to capitalism, they cannot merely be done away with through reform. As Marx identifies in the third volume of Capital, capitalist development is inevitably defined by a decline in the rate of profit, although the absolute quantity of profit may increase. The foundation for this is in the very technological development of productive forces, which reduces the labor time needed for the production of a commodity, and thus cheapens both the commodity’s value and labor-power itself, while greatly increasing the productivity of the latter. Due to this development, fewer workers are hired in production, as the larger labor armies of the time before the new technological development, along with their higher cost, are no longer needed. The same productivity can be met with fewer workers. However, with the reduction in the size of the labor force also comes a reduction in the quantity of surplus-value relative to the total cost of production. Surplus-value, as value created beyond necessary labor time (time needed to reproduce the value of the worker’s wages), is directly tied to wage laborers. An increase in constant, particularly fixed (means of production), capital relative to other factors of production (technology used in production), does not increase surplus value, as machines or raw materials cannot have unpaid labor time, their “pay” is in their purchase or maintenance. Only a worker can have unpaid labor time, and fewer workers means less labor time. Thus, as the cost of production grows with its growing scale, the rate of profit, an expression of the quantity of surplus-value reaped relative to the cost of production, falls. In the aforementioned third volume of Capital, Marx expresses the significance of this thusly:
The rate of profit, i.e. the relative growth in capital, is particularly important for all new off-shoots of capital that organize themselves independently. And if capital formation were to fall exclusively into the hands of a few existing big capitals, for whom the mass of profit outweighs the rate, the animating fire of production would be totally extinguished. It would die out. It is the rate of profit that is the driving force in capitalist production, and nothing is produced save what can be produced at a profit. Hence the concern of the English economists over the decline in the profit rate. If Ricardo is disquieted even by the very possibility of this, that precisely shows his deep understanding of the conditions of capitalist production. What other people reproach him for, i.e. that he is unconcerned with ‘human beings’ and concentrates exclusively on the development of the productive forces when considering capitalist production — whatever sacrifices of human beings and capital values this is bought with — is precisely his significant contribution. The development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production. What disturbs Ricardo is the way that the rate of profit, which is the stimulus of capitalist production and both the condition for and the driving force in accumulation, is endangered by the development of production itself. And the quantitative relation is everything here. In actual fact, the underlying reason is something deeper, about which he has no more than a suspicion. What is visible here in a purely economic manner, i.e. from the bourgeois standpoint, within the limits of capitalist understanding, from the standpoint of capitalist production itself, are its barriers, its relativity, the fact that it is not an absolute but only a historical mode of production, corresponding to a specific and limited epoch in the development of the material conditions of production.
Capitalism is not an eternal system. It has not existed forever (contrary to those who define capitalism as mere commodity exchange), and it will not continue to exist without cessation. The tendency of the rate of profit to decline, and resulting crises, represents the border of capitalism. While capitalism can desperately tear for new markets, this cannot satisfy its need for infinite expansion in a finite world. In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism engaged in global imperialism in order to dominate new markets where profit rates would be higher and consumers outside the production of the home country could be found, or made. Today, the imperialist world order continues to hold hegemony, although capitalism has fewer and fewer markets to expand into. The end product of capitalist production is found to be in an ever larger quantity as capitalism grows through the realization of surplus-value. However, within a fully capitalist society, with only the proletariat and bourgeoisie, there is no one to purchase these products, and thus enable the realization of surplus-value. The workers can only buy the equivalent of the wages paid to them by the capitalists, and thus their consumption merely represents a recovery of value lost for the collective bourgeoisie in their payment. The bourgeoisie can only consume the equivalent of the component of surplus-value which goes into their consumption fund, although their expenditure of surplus-value on insurance, maintenance of the means of production, and the expansion of the production process can be counted as well. The bourgeoisie cannot, as a class, consume beyond their collective appropriated surplus-value in order to realize a greater quantity of surplus-value. If they merely consumed their own product, or each other’s product, this would not lead to expanded reproduction, merely simple reproduction. Further, the existence of liberal professionals (artists, actors, academics, etc) or religious figures cannot represent the consumption of this surplus-value, as their incomes are merely either payment from surplus-value appropriated by the bourgeoisie or payment from the wages of the proletariat. So, where does capitalism turn to for the realization of this surplus value? Rosa Luxemburg identifies, in The Accumulation of Capital, the functions of capitalism which “resolve” this, as well as the continuing tendency toward crises and limits of capitalism:
Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang — the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns — and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-European civilization ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. This is the setting for the accumulation of capital. We must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation. The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. For all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are of no use to capital. In all social organisations where natural economy common ownership of the land, a feudal system of bondage or anything of this nature, economic organization is essentially in response to the internal demand; and therefore there is no demand, or very little, for foreign goods, and also, as a rule, no surplus production, or at least no urgent need to dispose of surplus products. What is most important, however, is that, in any natural economy, production only goes on because both means of production and labour power are bound in one form or another. The communist peasant community no less than the feudal corvée farm and similar institutions maintain their economic organization by subjecting the labour power, and the most important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom. A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or patriarchal peasant economy. The principal methods in this struggle are political force (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by the state, and cheap goods; they are partly applied simultaneously, and partly they succeed and complement one another. In Europe, force assumed revolutionary forms in the fight against feudalism (this is the ultimate explanation of the bourgeois revolutions in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); in the non-European countries, where it fights more primitive social organizations, it assumes the forms of colonial policy. These methods, together with the systems of taxation applied in such cases, and commercial relations also, particularly with primitive communities, form an alliance in which political power and economic factors go hand in hand.
While capitalism continues to seek new consumers through imperialism, and by divorcing people from direct access to the means of subsistence, it cannot escape its limits, or its crises resulting in the failure to realize surplus-value. Capitalism has overproduction because it does not hold the social elements to sustainably promote the consumption, and therefore the realization, of its surplus-value. As capitalism develops further, and continues to socialize production (which ensures the spread of crises), crises become more pronounced, and tend further and further toward total collapse.
The contradiction of socialized production and private appropriation is the characteristic of capitalism which produces the strongest tendency toward socialism. If capitalism did not do this, but somehow continued to result in crises, socialism would be far less likely than complete social disintegration. But because this is a tendency of capitalism, socialism is made strong in the trajectory of historic development. Friedrich Engels describes this tendency in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:
Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.
With socialized production, all of the elements of society become reliant upon large scale production. For their incomes, they must either own the means of production (or the land which these owners rent), or they must sell their labor-power as participants in the process of socialized production. To access the means of subsistence, they use these incomes to buy commodities which are the end result of this socialized production. Capitalism divorces the laborer from accessing the means of subsistence directly through primitive accumulation, thus forcing them to become proletarians and consumers of the product of capitalistic production. And yet, although production is socialized, and the development of monopolies creates large, centralized combines which constitute a truly high development in social production, appropriation of this production is private, it falls to the capitalists. They own the means of production, and thus appropriate the surplus-value created in the production process and command production. This is a contradiction of the characteristics of production. As this trait of capitalism becomes more pronounced as monopolies grow larger and greater and greater swathes of society are drawn in closer and closer into dependency on social production, the development of socialism becomes stronger daily as a necessary resolution to this contradiction. Socialism is the social appropriation of social production. With production already centralized and socialized by capitalist development, socialism is favored in historic development.
Capitalist development forms the class of the proletariat by dispossessing non-capitalist classes from their means of subsistence. In order to force them to sell their labor-power in order to access the means of subsistence, capitalism must remove any access to the means of subsistence outside of capitalist economy. This means accumulating small property and commons. By daily growing the propertyless class of the proletariat, capitalism digs its own grave. Because it owns no private property, and only its own labor-power, the proletariat holds little stake in capitalist society. While the peasant has their own small property, and thus tends to prefer to avoid revolutionary change, save for instances where they are threatened by imminent proletarianization or pauperization, the proletariat quite literally has nothing to lose but its chains. However, the proletariat’s consciousness and organization does not merely arise spontaneously, due to a sudden enlightenment. As Luxemburg says in Reform or Revolution?:
It is not true that Socialism will arise automatically from the daily struggle of the working class. Socialism will be the consequence of (1), the growing contradictions of capitalist economy and (2), of the comprehension by the working class of the unavoidability of the suppression of these contradictions through a social transformation.
The proletariat’s consciousness grows as it witnesses the contradiction of socialized production and private appropriation, the increasing industrial reserve army of the unemployed created by the development of technological productiveness, the increasing frequency and severity of crises, and so on. It is those sections of the proletariat who are in a position to most clearly identify the contradictions of capitalism, and inflict the greatest damage upon bourgeois order, who become the most revolutionary (for example, the colonized proletariat in North America). But merely identifying these as inherent to capitalism does not alone lead to socialist development. The proletariat adopts political organization by its own tendencies of centralization (as a result of the centralization of production and of populations into cities) and discipline. The most advanced proletarians form a vanguard party, and become the leaders of their class in political action. Mere spontaneity cannot fulfill the need for successful organization, and spontaneous movements sputter out without such organization and centralization. With a vanguard, there is salience, strength, and viability. Organizational unity can be found, and a group of professional revolutionaries is created, who can dedicate all their time to the study of theory and implementation of revolutionary practice, rather than pursuing a tactic of workers partaking in revolutionary access in their free time. With the vanguard is found the height of proletarian political organization, and the form which has thus far seen the greatest success in the victory and survival of socialist revolutions.
Now, as an aside, I will deal with the very common conception of communism as a utopian fantasy. Marx is often portrayed as seeing communism as the fulfillment of a perfect system, one which he sought because he felt it was morally good. This is an incorrect perception. Marx took a much more scientific view of communism. He did not see communism as absolute equality, but the abolition of class distinctions. Yes, he did define communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless (or, more accurately, sans-commodity production) society. However, what he identified as the basis for communist development was nowhere near the popular perception. In The German Ideology, he writes of the subject:
Finally, from the conception of history set forth by us we obtain these further conclusions: 1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing relations, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth which has to bear the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which ousted from society and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class. 2) The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the state and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class which till then has been in power. 3) In all previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons whilst the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not recognized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes nationalities, etc., within present society; and 4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
With the development of productive forces in an even way (abolishing the antithesis of town and country, imperial core and periphery, etc) comes the abolition of scarcity, and thus the end of the basis of commodity production. The proletariat, as a propertyless laboring class, can destroy the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie is not necessary for the production process (by contrast, the bourgeoisie cannot destroy the proletariat, as the latter is its source of labor). With the destruction of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, of the colonial system by the colonized, of the gendered division of labor by its victims, comes the end of classes, and thus class antagonism, which is the basis of the state. With no more cleavage in social interests, what benefits one benefits all the same, with no resulting detriment to another. Thus, the state, existing to promote social cohesion in an antagonistic context, and to enforce the rule of the dominant class, withers away. Capitalism lays the foundation for both socialism and, eventually, communism. Capitalism’s main role is developing productive forces. Socialism’s main role is the abolition of class distinctions, which represents a tendency toward the eventual withering away of the state. With these developments comes communism. It does not emerge from conceptions of morality and perfection, which are simply reflections of material existence, but from real tendencies in historical development.
