FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION - CHAPTER I
TECHNIQUE AND REVOLUTION
IN the issue of the Automobile Engineer for March 1931, appeared an article on "The Machine Tool: An Analysis of the Factors Determining Obsolescence."
This article was not written as a criticism of existing society. It was written, with considerable detail statistical calculations, to assist employers or their technical managers to determine under what conditions the installation of new high-production machinery can be profitable. Nevertheless the conclusions reached were in the highest degree revolutionary.
The first conclusion was to the effect that, quoting the words of a paper of Mr. H. C. Armitage to the Institute of Automobile Engineers: "high-production machines that are being developed in America cannot be economically used in this country." The reason given was "because existing British plants can already produce more rapidly than the products can be disposed of. . . . The statement has been made many times that American factories in the main industries could more than supply the world's needs, even if all other supply sources closed down." On this ground, objection was taken to the common complaint Πof "uninformed critics of British industry" that British employers had fallen behind in the race because of maintaining "hopelessly out-of- date factory equipment."
On the contrary, in fact, the British capitalists knew very well what they were doing when they left their German and American rivals during the decade after the war to install gigantic modern equipment of large-scale production at heavy expense, requiring heavy maintenance costs and an enormous market, while they themselves preferred mainly to concentrate on speeding up and driving harder their labour on relatively older machinery, requiring less maintenance costs and a smaller market; on this basis they have been better able to meet the crisis than their German and American rivals.
The second conclusion went even further and declared that this principle now applied also to American industry:
The time has now arrived when Mr. Armitage's remarks may be widened to a statement that the latest machine tools now being developed in America cannot even be economically used in the United States.
That is to say, the most modern developments of technique can no longer be utilised in even the most advanced countries of capitalism.
The third conclusion provides the complement to the first two. One market, it is pointed out, still remains for the most advanced machine tools. That market is the Soviet Union.
American machine-tool makers, having a range of equipment sufficient to meet the needs of the American production plants, have supplied to Russia machine tools outside this range, specially designed to obtain still faster production. An excessive price has been demanded for these special machines on the ground that, while the tools show an improvement in output speed on their standard lines, they have no immediate prospects of finding other customers for them, there being no demand outside Russia for faster production than can be obtained with existing models.
Thus, according to the testimony of this technical engineering journal, the most modern developments of technique, making possible the most extensive and rapid production with the minimum of labour, can no longer be utilised in the countries of capitalism, where they have originated, but can only be utilised to-day in the country of socialist construction, in the Soviet Union.
The significance of this present stage of technique and society here revealed-and this example is only one of ten thousand constantly arising in every direction in the present periodrequires no emphasis. Here, as in a single crystal, is expressed the whole present stage of the general crisis of capitalism, of the exhaustion of the possibilities of Πproductive advance within the fetters of the old private property ownership, and the necessity of the socialisation of production as the sole condition for further development.
In the situation that this picture reveals lies the real root of the issue of Fascism or Communism. In this situation lies the basic cause why precisely at the present stage of social development
23. THE GROWTH OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
the issue of Fascism or Communism inescapably confronts existing society.
I. The Growth of the Productive Porces.
A century ago, Robert Owen, on the basis of his experience as a successful manufacturer, noted the contradiction between the new social productive labour and the private appropriation of the f ruits:
The working part of this population Of 2,500 persons (in New Lanark) was daily producing as much real wealth for society as, less than half a century before, it would have required the working part of a population of 6oo,ooo to create. I asked myself, what became of the difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons and that which would have been consumed (Robert Owen, The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race, 1849.)
The contradiction of capitalism was thus already clearly seen by Owen on the basis of his conduct of the model factory of New Lanark from 18oo, to 1829. But the criticism remained an idealist criticism. For capitalism in this period, despite all the cruelty and poverty involved in its process, was still ascending; it was still able to organise and develop the productive forces; it was still a progressive factor, carrying through the transformation from wasteful and uneconomic small-scale production to modern large-scale production, and thus preparing the material basis for the future society. The critique of capitalism in this period by Owen and others remained utopian.
The answer to this type of critique of capitalism was provided by Marx in his discussion of a similar line of argument of Proudhon: am Al
In 1770 the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain was fifteen millions and the productive population three millions. The scientific power of production would about equal a population of twelve more millions; thus making a total of fifteen millions of productive forces. Thus the productive power was to the population as I is to I, and the scientific power was to manual power as 4 is to I. ΠIn 1840 the population did not exceed thirty millions; the productive population was six millions, while the scientific power amounted to 650 millions, that is to say, it was to the whole population as 2 1 to I, and to manual power as 108 to I.
In English society the day of tabour had thus acquired in seventy years a surplus Of 2,700 per cent. of productivity, that is to say that in 1840 it produced twenty-seven times as much as in 17 7 o. According to M. Proudhon it is necessary to put the following question: Why is the English workman of 184o not twenty-seven times richer than the workman of 1770?
In putting such a question one would naturally suppose that the English had been able to produce these riches without the historical conditions in which they were produced-such as: the private accumulation of capital; the modern division of labour; the automatic workshop; anarchic competition; the wage system, and, in fine, all that which is based upon the antagonism of classes-having to exist. But these were precisely the necessary conditions for the development of the productive forces and of the surplus of labour. Thus it was necessary, in order to obtain this development of the productive forces, and this surplus of labour, that there should be some classes which thrive and others which perish.
(Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1, 3.)
This basic conception of the capacity of development of the productive forces as the measure of a progressive or reactionary social order is no less strongly expressed in Marx's praise of Ricardo:
The reproach moved against him, that he has an eye only to the development of the productive forces regardless of "human beings," regardless of the sacrifice in human beings and capital values incurred, strikes precisely his strong point. The development of the productive forces of social labour is the historical task and privilege of capital. It is precisely in this way that it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production.
(Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Kerr edition, P. 304.)
The Marxist critique of capitalism thus basically differs from the utopian school still surviving in the so-called "English Socialism." The Marxist critique recognises the historical role of capitalism in the development of the productive forces. But the Marxist critique laid bare, already nearly a century ago when no other economists or Πthinkers had the slightest glimmering of the future line of development, that the inner laws of capitalist development would inevitably lead to a stage at which capitalism could no longer organise the productive forces, but could only result in successively more violent crises, stagnation and decay, and at which only the new social class, the proletariat, freed from the limitations of private property, could alone organise the social productive forces to a higher level. This is the heart of Marxism, whose political expression is the dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary condition of the solution of the problems of the present epoch.
It is this culminating stage of capitalism that we are at present living through-the stage of imperialism or capitalism in decay, and, more particularly now since 1914, the stage of the general crisis of capitalism, or final phase within imperialism, when the forces of production are in ever more violent conflict with the cramping fetters of the existing property relations of production, when capitalism in more and more obvious decay is faced with the advance of victory of the proletarian social revolution, and when capitalism in decay is resorting to every device and expedient to maintain its power.
Let us note first the gigantic growth of the productive forces since the early criticisms of a century ago.
The following table gives the growth of industrial machinepower, omitting motor-transport power, in the past century, in millions of horse power (one horse power is commonly calculated as equivalent to the muscular power of six men).
GROWTH OF INDUSTRIAL MACHINE POWER. (in million horse power)
United Kingdom 1835 0.3, 1875 6, 1913 28.5, 1928 37. France 1835 0.02, 18753, 1913 12.5, 1928 18.5. Germany 1835 0.01, 1875 4, 1913 21, 1928 32. USA 1835 0.3, 1875 7.8, 1913 86, 1928 162. Extra-European countries (other than U.S.): 1835 0.01, 1875 1.9, 1913 31, 1928 93. World 1835 0.65, 1875 26.5, 1913 211, 1928 390.
(Hausleiter, Revolution in der Weltwirtschaft, 1932, published in English under the title The Machine Unchained, 1933.) ΠA century ago, we have seen, it was already complained that productive power bad increased twenty-seven times over in England in the previous seventy years without any corresponding improvement in the standards of the workers.
But in the century since 1835 industrial machine power multiplied a further hundred times over in England, and six hundred times over in the whole world-and has ended in mass starvation and unemployment without equal.
In the decade and a half alone between 1913 and 1928 industrial machine power in Europe has increased So per cent.,
in the United States 100 per cent., and in the extra-European countries other than the United States 200 per cent.
The inclusion of all forms of power would bring the world total to something like 1,500 million horse power.
On this basis Stuart Chase in his Machines and Men (1929) has estimated the machine power of the world as representing the muscular power of 9,000 million additional men, or equivalent to five slaves for every man, woman and child of the human race.
Between 1913 and 1927 electrical power production, according to the report on "Power Resources of the World," presented to the World Power Conference in 1930, increased from 47,000 million units to 200,000 million units. Between the first and second World Power Conferences in 1924 and 1930, electrical output doubled from 150,000 million units to 300,000 million units (Economist, 21 June, 1930).
This expansion of productive power has most strongly affected manufacturing industry, but has also affected agriculture and the output of raw materials, not in equal degree, but far outstripping the growth of human population.
Already by 1890, according to Hausleiter (op. cit.) the costs of agricultural production in the great Grain Circle (United States, Canada, Argentine, Australia) had been reduced by mechanisation to one quarter of the costs of the old production by hand-labour in 1830.
Between 1 890 and 192 1, according to the report of the Senior Trade Commissioner in Canada for May 1930, further mechanisation of agriculture and extension of the area of cultivation had multiplied the yield of wheat per agricultural worker fivefold:
Mr. Field lays great stress on the rapidity with which power-driven machinery is displacing labour in Canadian agriculture. Whereas in 1890 133/2 bushels of wheat were grown for each rural dweller, there were seventy in 1921; and as the most revolutionary machine, the Πcombined reaper and thresher was only introduced in 1924, the output per worker must now be a great deal higher. Moreover, the scope for the mechanisation of agriculture has by no means yet been fully exploited.- (Economist, September 8, 1930).
Between 1920 and 1929 the number of tractors in the United States increased from 246,000 to 843,000 (U. S. Yearbook of Agriculture, 1930).
27. THE GROWTH OF THE PROD CTIVE FORCES
Between 1900 and 1924-8 the harvests of all cereals increased in Australia 104 per cent., in the Argentine 172 per cent., and in Canada 330 per cent. Between 1913 and 1928 the volume of world grain exports increased 147 per cent. In the same period world population increased 11.6 per cent.
The old ignorant Malthusian notions of absolute "overpopulation," or the modern lugubrious chants of birth-control as the necessary solution of poverty, are thus abundantly exploded by facts. It is worth noting that this reactionary propaganda is still maintained, not only in clerical and conservative quarters, but also by the would-be "progressive" (actually, as we shall have occasion to see, one of the real bulwarks of conservatism in England) Labour Party. The Labour official organ writes:
The figures published by the League of Nations show that the world population, already 2,012,000,000, is increasing by 20,000,000 a year.
That means that unless the rate of increase is checked, it will have doubled in far less than a century; for the increase is, as it were, at compound interest.
There is not the least reason for assuming that the "march of progress" will automatically provide ways and means of feeding and supporting that doubled population.
There is only too much evidence-in India and China for example - that the overcrowding of a too big population brings with it appalling conditions of misery.
Either an unendurable suffering, or the "natural checks" of famine and pestilence and a high death rate. Or, on the other hand, a deliberate and conscious lowering and controlling of the birth rate.
Those are the alternatives that face humanity.
(Daily Herald editorial, August 8, 1932.) ΠFortunately, these are not the alternatives that confront humanity to-day. The alternatives that confront humanity to-day are serious enough; but they are alternatives of the destruction and anarchy of capitalism, involving still greater poverty and misery in the midst of abundance and rising productive power, or the social organisation of production, bringing abundance for all. The "overpopulation" (like the simultaneous "overproduction") is only relative to the capitalist conditions of production. Against this reactionary and vicious propaganda, concealing under cover of obsolete clerical superstitions the true social causes of poverty and misery (concealing
also, characteristically enough, the role of imperialism in India in creating poverty) may be quoted the opinion of the leading international statistician, Sir George Knibbs, who estimated that even with present resources and technique the earth could easily maintain four times the present population at a good standard.
The late Sir George Knibbs . . . estimated after a careful survey that the earth could well support a population four times as great as at present, or about eight thousand million.
(Dr. R. A. Fisher, of the Statistical Department of the Rothamstead Experimental Station, Spectator, March 7, 1931.)
The facts of the crisis show a very different picture to the cant of "overpopulation" outstripping natural resources. Already by 1925, according to the reports presented to the 1927 International Economic Conference at Geneva, despite the destruction of the world war, world production of foodstuffs and raw materials had risen over pre-war by 16 to -18 per cent., against an estimated increase of population by 5 per cent. Between 1913 and 1928, according to the League of Nations Economic Section, world production of foodstuffs and raw materials had increased by 25 per cent., of foodstuffs by 16 per cent., of raw materials by 40 per cent. (of industrial products enormously more), against an estimated increase of world population by 10 per cent.
World stocks of primary products, on the basis of 1923-5 as 100, increased by the end of 1926 to 134, by 1928 to 161, by 1929 to 192, by 1930 to 235, by 1931 to 264, and by the end of 1932, despite all the destruction of stocks, still stood at 263, or more than two and a half times the volume of eight years before (Economist, May 6, 1933). World stocks of manufactures showed a less overwhelming accumulation only because "the existence of a large volume of unemployed but immediately available factors of production" has the Πsame effect in the sphere of manufactures "corresponding to that exercised by enormous stocks of primary products" (ibid., May 13, 1933).
The growth of production in every direction, whether of foodstuffs, raw materials or manufactures, has thus greatly exceeded the growth of world population. And the increase of productive power, which has only been partially and incompletely used under capitalist conditions, with many artificial
limitations and restrictions, has been in reality enormously greater than the actual growth of production.
But this gigantic increase of productive power has outstripped the capacity of capitalism to organise it.
The outcome of this gigantic increase of productive power has been world crisis, stagnation and closing down of production, mass unemployment, mass impoverishment and the lowering of standards, on a scale without parallel since the beginning of capitalism, accompanied by growing social and political disturbance and recurrent war.
This problem is the basic problem confronting present-day society.
2. The Conflict of the Productive Forces Against Existing Society.
This is the world situation which reveals that the system of capitalist relations, the capitalist class ownership of the means of production, has outlived its progressive role, and has become a fetter on the Organisation of production.
The world war was the beginning of the violent explosion of this conflict, of the conflict between the ever-growing productive forces and the limits of existing property-society. Since 1914 we have entered into a new era, the era of the general crisis of capitalism and of the advance of the world socialist revolution. The world economic crisis which opened in 1929 has brought these issues of the present stage of society, and of the basic economic contradictions underlying them, more sharply to the general consciousness than ever before. But the significance of this world economic crisis is commonly seen through too narrow spectacles. It is seen as a special temporary disorganisation breaking in on an otherwise harmonious and smoothly working economic Πmechanism. Alike in the pessimistic and the optimistic readings of its significance the proportions have tended to be lost. just as the extreme low depths of depression produced almost universal utterances of pessimism and apocalyptic gloom from the leaders and professors of capitalism, so the first signs of an upward movement produced a universal sigh of relief and reprieve, as if the worst were over and all might yet be wen again. In fact, "the devil was sick."
But the real significance of the world economic crisis, which has so greatly exceeded in its scope all previous economic crises,
can only be correctly understood in relation to the whole development of capitalism, and in particular the development of capitalism during the last two decades-that is, in relation to the general crisis of capitalism which opened in 19 14.
The general crisis of capitalism should not be confused with the old cyclical crises of capitalism which, although demonstrating the inherent contradictions of capitalist relations, nevertheless constituted an integral part and direct factor in the ascent of capitalism. The cyclical crises, as illustrated in 1920-I and 1929, continue, but take on a new and intensified character in the period of the general crisis.
The old cyclical crises were, according to Marx, "always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions, violent eruptions, which restore the disturbed equilibrium for a while" (Capital III, P. 2 92 ). Their characteristic f eature was to solve the contradictions, albeit by anarchically violent and destructive means, to restore the equilibrium, and permit of the resumption of production on a higher plane. They weeded out the smaller and less efficient concerns; they wiped out a portion of capital values in order to save the remainder; they effected a concentration of capital; they compelled a drive to open up new markets. On this basis they permitted, after a relatively short period, the resumption of capitalist production at a higher level.
Elements of this character can also be traced in the post-war world economic crisis; but these "progressive" elements are overshadowed by the major, negative effects of the whole process of the development of the cyclical crisis on the basis of the general crisis of capitalism, in the consequent destruction of stabilisation and hastening of revolutionising processes.
For the general crisis of capitalism admits of no such solution. The domination of the imperialist Powers has already been expanded to its maximum extent throughout the world; monopoly capitalism, which Πhad already divided up the greater part of the world by the beginning of the twentieth century, and by 1914 was at war over its re-division, is now faced with a still sharper situation of contradictions, not only between the imperialist Powers, but also between imperialism and socialism, So far from there being available new regions to open up, one sixth of the world has passed out of the sphere of capitalism into that of the social revolution; the colonial peoples are rising in revolt; the world available for capitalist exploitation has begun
to contract. At the same time the growth of productive power is greater than ever, the extreme crisis, competition and war forcing forward technical development at an unheard of pace. Under these conditions there is no room for a harmonious solution, but only for ever more violent conflict. The upward movements within the general crisis become ever shorter; depression becomes the normal, broken by short upward movements and violent social and political explosions; the recurrence of the old cyclical crisis within the general crisis takes on a new intensity.
The general crisis of capitalism has now continued for twenty years without a break, only changing one form for another. The violent explosion of the world war only gave place to the still more profound struggle of revolution and counterrevolution throughout the world. The defeat of the revolution in the countries outside the Soviet Union brought no solution and peaceful development, but only laid bare the post-war chaos of capitalism. The temporary stabilisation and upward movement of the middle 'twenties proved only a false and illusory stabilisation; "the prosperity of the period 1923-29 was to a large extent illusory; and the seeds of future trouble had already been sown" (British Government Note to the United States, December 1, 1932). Its only outcome was the new form of the basic contradiction expressed in the extreme world economic crisis which began in 1929 and continues now in its fifth year. This in its turn breaks out into new and violent explosions in the spread of Fascism and the visibly approaching second world-war.
Already in the closing years of his life Engels noted the approach of a new era: "there is now no doubt that the position has changed fundamentally by comparison with formerly"; "we have entered upon a period much more dangerous for the old society than that of the ten- year cycles"; "the crises become chronic" (Engels, letter to Bebel, January 20, ISM). In 1909 Kautsky, writing then as a Marxist theorist, in his Path to Power, exposed the revisionist illusions of gradual and peaceful progress, and demonstrated the now close entry of capitalism into a period of violent explosions. In 1916 Lenin in his Imperialism laid bare the foundations of the new period as the period Πof monopoly capitalism, in which all the contradictions come to a head, of decaying capitalism, of the eve of the
socialist revolution, the period which broke into violent explosion in 19 14.
UP to 1913 capitalist production, despite the increasing tendencies of decay already visible in imperialism, was still able to maintain an almost continuous ascending line.
For many decades before the war, world production, according to the best estimates available, increased with remarkable regularity of trend, broken only in minor degree by successive crises. This trend of increase ran through both the period of declining prices from 1873 to 1895, and the period of rising prices from 1895 onwards.
(League of Nations World Economic Survey 1932-3, p. 68.)
Between 1860 and 1913, according to the tables presented in this publication, world production of basic commodities ascended in an almost continuous line and multiplied from four to five times. World industrial production ascended in an almost continuous line and multiplied over six times.
But the twenty years since 19 14 reveal a different picture.
If the line of trend from 186o to 1913 is extended to 1932, the rather startling conclusion is reached that the index of world production, on the hypothesis that nothing bad occurred to alter its regular upward trend for the fifty preceding years, would to-day be rather more than twice as great as it actually is. (ibid., p. 82.)
The present world economic crisis is without precedent:
There is no precedent for such a marked decline. Statistical series ranging back to 186o fail to reveal any previous period in which the decline in either raw material production or manufactures has been so precipitate or so severe. Independent estimates agree that in 1932 the level of industrial production in the world as a whole fell below that of 1913. (ibid., p. 82.)
Thus the war and post-war period, taken as a whole, reveals the first large-scale absolute setback of capitalist production.
The attempt is often made, on the basis of the above facts and figures, to argue that, since 1914 appears as the great dividing point, Πtherefore the war is the cause of all the present maladies. Comparisons are sometimes made to the postNapoleonic period of unsettlement, revolutionary unrest and the industrial revolution; and the inference is drawn that the troubles of the present period are also troubles of post- war unsettlement and of the "second industrial revolution,
heralding a no less great expansion within the forms of capitalism.
This very superficial approach to the real historical move. ment of two entirely different periods, and to the crux of modern world problems, is demonstrably incorrect both in fact and in reasoning.
In the first place, no comparison is possible between the post- Napoleonic period of young and ascending capitalism and the twentieth century period of old and declining capitalism. Fifteen years after the Napoleonic wars, production, trade and employment were gigantically above the pre-war level; capitalist society was bounding forward. Fifteen years after the war of 1914-18 production, trade and employment are actually below the pre-war level; capitalist society is in a greater dilemma than ever, greater than even in the period succeeding the war. The dislocation, instead of diminishing as the war recedes, actually increases; it is greater fifteen years after the war than it was ten years after the war. It is obvious that some deeper factor is at work than the disturbances consequent on the war. At the same time, the social and political issues of the two periods are basically different. The issue of the first half of the nineteenth century was still the issue of the bourgeois revolution, which swept forward through the processes of the Napoleonic wars and after, despite the seeming victories of reaction. The issue of the first half of the twentieth century is the issue of the proletarian social revolution, which began its advance in the conditions of the war of 1914-18, and which maintains its growing strength in the midst of the capitalist reaction.
In the second place, it is not correct that the division between before 1914 and after 1914 is a simple and absolute division between the ascent and the descent of the level of production. On the contrary, the actual level of production in 1927-9 was for the short period of the boom higher than the pre-war level; the real growth of the contradictions, which was to find expression in the subsequent slump falling below the pre-war level, lay elsewhere. The true measure of the decline and bankruptcy of the existing capitalist order lies, not in any simple arithmetical figures of the level of production, but in the growth of the contradictions of the existing society to bursting point, in the growth of the contradiction between the potential productive power and the actual production, between the conditions of existence of the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat, between the rival imperialist Powers, and the consequent expression of these in social and political explosions. It is in this sense that the general crisis of capitalism dates from 1914, but its causes lie in the whole conditions of the imperialist epoch *
Finally, and in consequence of the above, the world war of 1914-18, so far from being the cause of the crisis of capitalism, was on the contrary itself only an expression and breaking out of the crisis-a link in the chain of imperialist development. The war was no arbitrary, accidental, unforeseeable first cause, suddenly breaking in from nowhere to change the whole course of development. It was the direct consequence of the conditions of imperialism, which was itself the direct outcome of the previous nineteenth-century capitalist epoch. It was fully foreseen, and even predicted in detail for years beforehand, as the outcome of the growing tensions of imperialism. Its outbreak coincided with the gathering industrial crisis which was already beginning in America in 1913, and spreading therefrom to hover menacingly over Europe. As the war-leader, Lloyd George, confessed nearly twenty years after, the war appeared as the way out from the gathering crisis, which he is now convinced would have in any case developed, even had the war not broken out at that point:
If we had not had a great war, if we bad gone on as we were going, I am sure that sooner or later we would have been confronted with something approximately like the present chaos. There must be something fundamentally wrong with our economic system, because abundance produce(Lloyd George, speech at Cambridge, Manchester Guardian Weekly, April 7, 1933.)
The fact that the dynamic of capitalist development, even after the direct destruction caused by the first world-war has been repaired, only reverts to the recurrence of still more gigantic economic crisis and the visible approach to a second world-war, shows how little of "accident" there was in the basic development of capitalism through imperialism to world war, however large the role of "accident" may appear to be in the particular historical Πmanifestations of the process.
In order to understand the problems of the present epoch of the general crisis of capitalism, it is essential to be able to see
deeper than the immediate surface manifestations and episodes, whether of the world war of 1914 or the world economic crisis Of 1929, and to understand these in relation to the general line of development, of which they are expressions. The general crisis of capitalism, the conflict of the productive forces against the existing relations of production, expresses itself in a whole series of successively growing conflicts and explosions, up to the final victory of the proletarian social revolution. It is in relation to this development of the general crisis of capitalism that Fascism is a further stage and episode.
3. Productivity and Unemployment.
The development of the productive forces has rendered the old class-society obsolete.
Already before the end of the war the leading trust magnate, Lord Leverhulme, estimated that, if the then existing productivity were organised, one hour's work per week of all citizens would provide the necessaries of life for all:
With the means that science has already placed at our disposal, we might provide for all the wants of each of us in food, shelter and clothing by one hour's work per week for each of us from school age to dotage.
(Lord Leverhulme: Preface to Professor Spencer's Wealth from Waste, Routledge, 1918.)
That was fifteen years ago. In the intervening decade and a half, according to the engineer, J. L. Hodgson, in his paper on "Industrial and Communal Waste" before the Royal Society of Arts on June 20, 1932, in the course of which he quoted and accepted Lord Leverhulme's statement, "since that date our average potential productivity has nearly doubled." One halfhour's work per week should thus provide a minimum standard for all, and one hour's work per week an overwhelming abundance.
Why should this almost immeasurable increase in productive power and the possibility of universal abundance result in universal impoverishment and lowering of standards? ΠThis is the question that confronts the whole human race, that is becoming a life and death question for the nineteen hundred million human beings of the capitalist world outside the Soviet Union, to which these hundreds of millions must find the answer or go down in catastrophe.
It is evident that what is here in question is no natural or technical causes, but only social causes-that there is no social organisation of production.
This question is sharpened by the contrast of the productive increase in the Soviet Union alongside the actual decline of capitalist production. Between 1925 and 1932 industrial production in the Soviet Union (on the base of 1025-9 as 100) increased from 59 to 240; the corresponding figure for the United States decreased from 95 to 58, for Britain from 99 to 86, and for Germany from 89 to 66 (League of Nations World Production and Prices 1925-1932, P. 49). Between 1929 and 11932 industrial production in the Soviet Union increased by 65 per cent. and in the capitalist world as a whole decreased by 37 percent. (League of Nations World Economic Survey, 19321933, pp. 85 and 7 0
The most glaring and direct living expression of this present stage of the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces and existing society is the spread of mass unemployment throughout the capitalist world, already before the onset of the world economic crisis, and reaching a total at the height of the world economic crisis, in 1933, according to official figures, of thirty millions, and according to unofficial figures of fifty millions.
Britain, the oldest capitalist country, and the most advanced in decay, first reached this basis of permanent mass unemployment. This situation revealed itself in the winter of 1920-2 1, and has continued up to the present without a break; in the beginning of 1933 the Chancellor of the Exchequer staggered the House of Commons by announcing that he calculated on the continuance of such mass unemployment for the next ten years. The other countries in the succeeding years reached a similar and even more extreme basis (running at the highest point to eight millions in Germany and fourteen millions in the United States).
Unemployment at a certain level has always been present in capitalism. The development of production in capitalist conditions has always displaced workers and independent producers, and thus created the industrial reserve army which was indispensable to meet the fluctuations of capitalist production and to maintain the proletariat in Πsubjection. But this industrial reserve army was a part of the machinery of expanding
capitalist production; the absolute number of productive workers employed successively grew. It is only since the war that the new phenomenon appeared of a permanent unemployed army, grudgingly kept just alive at the lowest level of subsistence by the bourgeoisie, while the absolute number of productive workers employed has directly decreased.
Of the possibility of such a stage of chronic unemployment and absolute decline of the productive workers, Marx wrote:
A development of the productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of labourers, that is, which would enable the entire nation to accomplish its total production in a shorter time, would cause a revolution, because it would render the majority of the population superfluous.
(Marx, Capital, 111,
Engels wrote in 1886: p.309.)
America will smash up England's industrial monopoly-whatever there is left of it-but America cannot herself succeed to that monopoly. And unless one country has the monopoly of the markets of the world at least in the decisive branches of trade, the conditionsrelatively favourable-which existed here in England from 1848 to 1870 cannot anywhere be reproduced, and even in America the condition of the working class must gradually sink lower and lower. For if there are three countries (say, England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the world market, there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required.
(Engels, letter to Mrs. Wischnewetzky, February 3, 1886, reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, London and New York, 1935, P. 443.)
To-day we are face to face with this situation. The position in America is reported as follows:
The United States Commissioner for Labour Statistics recently stated that if 200 Out of the 1,357 boot and shoe factories in the Πcountry worked full time, they could satisfy the whole existing demand, and the remaining 1,157 establishments could be closed down. Similarly, 1,487 out of the 6,057 bituminous coal mines could produce all the coal that was needed.
(H. B. Butler in the International Labour Review, March 1931.)
Between 1919 and 1927 factory output in the United States rose from 147 to 170, on the basis of 1914 as 100, while the
employment index fell from 12 9 to I 15 (Times, March 8, ' Between 1919 and 1929 the Federal Reserve Board index of industrial production (1923-5 as 100) rose from 84 to 119; while the number of industrial wage workers fell from 9,039,000 to 8,742,000 (United States Statistical Abstract, 1932). This absolute decline in employment was before the collapse, during the great upward boom.
Britain reveals a similar picture. Between 1913 and 1928 the increase in output per head of workers employed in thirty principal industries in Great Britain was 33 per cent., but the increase in employment was 2.2 per cent., or less than the increase in population (Times Trade Supplement, July 23,1932). Still more marked is the process if the post-war period is taken alone. Between 1923 and 1928 the number of insured workers in employment fell from 8,368,000 to 7,898,000; the index of production (London and Cambridge Economic Service, based on1913 as 100)rose from 88.7 to 96.3. Production rose 7.6 per cent.; employment fell 5.6 per cent. And all this before the world economic crisis began to make the heaviest effects of the process felt.
What is to happen to the "superfluous" workers? For long the old theory of "alternative employment" was still endeavoured to be put forward as applicable to this situation. The decline in the industrial productive workers was to be "compensated" by the increase of auxiliary "services" and luxury occupations (clerical, distributive, advertising, commercial, and luxury services). Certainly, a very considerable increase in these auxiliary and in the main non-productive occupations is to be traced in the United States, Britain and other countries during the post-war period, thus providing the basis of the rapid expansion of the so-called "new middle class," which became one of the breeding-grounds of Fascism; just as the growth of the permanent unemployed army provided a further breeding-ground. The expansion of the rentier class on the one side, and of luxury services and endlessly multiplied salesmanship" services on the other, is a measure of the degeneration of capitalism. ΠThe capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand enforcing economy in each individual business, on the other hand begets by its anarchical system of competition the most outrageous squandering of labour power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.
(Marx, Capital, I, p. 540.)
Nevertheless, this supposed "compensation" was soon revealed as a doubtful solution. In the first place, it was manifestly no solution for the millions of miners and heavy industry workers thrown out of work. In the second place, the extent of "compensation" had obvious limits which were soon reached. For in these occupations, too, rationalisation begins to get to work and to repeat the process of throwing off the superfluous workers. Mechanisation transforms clerical work, and begins increasingly to replace clerks by more and more elaborate calculating and book-keeping machines; centralisation cuts down the number of competing businesses; staffs are reduced. The "white-collar workers" also find themselves increasingly thrown on the market alongside their industrial brothers.
Increasing doubts of the whole process and its outcome, as well as of the stock explanations and solutions, found expression in an editorial of the London Times in 1930 on "American Unemployment" (characteristically endeavouring to treat the problem as an "American" problem, but in fact describing equally unemployment in Britain):
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that unemployment must henceforth be counted as a permanent American (!) problem. To ascribe its occasional recurrence in an acute form to some special event is no less delusive than to explain it as a merely "seasonal" manifestation. . . . The experience of recent years has gone to prove that recovery is less and less complete after each crisis, and to show that forces other than the seasonal and the accidental are at work. There is little reason to doubt that permanent unemployment is to-day the lot of an always growing number of American men and women.
On this basis doubt is expressed of the whole system of "mass production," i.e., of capitalist large-scale production:
The advantages residing in a system which relies on the mass production of standardised articles deserve more critical examination Πthan they have yet been given.
The current answers of "the apologists of the system," that the reduced costs of production and therefore reduced price means increased demand and consequent re-absorption of the unemployed, are "no longer altogether convincing":
It is still doubtful whether the increased production can always be absorbed; it is a very large question whether new industries are created quickly enough to employ the displaced workers. In other words, it remains to be seen how perilously the machine has run ahead of man, and whether some re-adjustment of social condition may not ultimately be imperative. The question drives like rain to the roots of American (!) life. (Times editorial, March 8, 1930.) Under the thin disguise of "America" it is obvious that "the question drives like rain to the roots" of capitalism in all countries, and not least in Britain, with its longest record of permanent mass unemployment.
What prevents capitalism from carrying out the alternative solution universally proposed by all the myriad schools of reformers of capitalism (reformist socialists, social credit theorists, currency reformers, etc.)-i.e., the general raising of the standards of the workers to a point compatible with the consumption of the increased production alongside higher profits for the capitalists? The answer why capitalism is unable to carry out this apparently simple solution, but is in fact actively engaged in carrying out the opposite, lies in the whole character of capitalism. The reformist dream of grafting on to the capitalist mode of production an entirely different and incompatible system of distribution (whether by legislative means, raising wages, social services, a "national dividend," or the like) only reveals its advocates' failure to understand the elementary workings of capitalism and the necessary conditions of the capitalist mode of production. The reformists apply in their fantasy the conceptions of an organised society directly to the jungle of capitalism, which, by the very conditions of private property and production for profit, cannot follow the principles of an organised economy, but can only follow entirely different laws. In fact, even the very limited measure of social reform which could be achieved, under the pressure of the working class, in the conditions of ascending capitalism become increasingly circumscribed and even in part diminished and withdrawn in the conditions of declining capitalism and of the capitalist crisis. ΠThe realities of capitalism are both in fact and in iron necessity entirely different. The greater the crisis, the greater becomes the need of the rival capitalist concerns to lower the costs of production, to increase the rate of exploitation, to drive the dwindling number of employed workers harder, to attack the workers' standards and the social services, in order to compete more successfully for the dwindling market. At the same time the growth of unemployment facilitates these attacks. The development of the crisis has been accompanied in every country by successively renewed and intensified attacks on the workers' standards. The authentic voice of capitalism is the voice of the American capitalist magnate, Owen D. Young, the sponsor of the Young Plan, when he declared: "Let no man think that the living standards of America can be permanently maintained at a measurably higher level than those of the other civilised countries" (Economist, April 12, 1930.)
The Roosevelt "experiment," which has skilfully utilised the reformist propaganda of higher standards as the solution of the capitalist crisis, but utilised it in fact for the exactly opposite purpose to carry through intensified exploitation and lowered standards (just as President Wilson of old utilised pacifist propaganda for the purposes of war), is proving in practice, as we shall later have occasion to see, only a more complete demonstration of this reality.
The growth of productivity has been accompanied, not by an increase of the workers' share, but by a decrease of the workers' share. Between 1913 and 192 8 the percentages of the national income going to wages fell in the United States from 36.4 to 36, and in the United Kingdom from 42.7 to 40.9 (World Economic Survey, 1932-3, p.101). In the United States, between 1921 and 1927, the value of the product of industry rose from 18.3 thousand million dollars to 27.5 thousand million dollars (U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Manufactures); but in the same period the percentages of the value of the product of industry going to wages and salaries fell loom 58.7 per cent. in 1921 (54.2 per cent. in 19'4) to 51 percent. in 1927 (P. H. Douglas, Real Wages in the United States). in Great Britain, between 1924 and 1930, according to Colin
Clark's The National Income 1924-31, the output per person employed rose from 100 to 113, while the proportion of wages to home-produced income fell from 41.5 per cent. (42.5 percent Πin 1911) to 38 per cent.
I 'The effect of the world economic crisis has been, not to reverse this process, but to carry it enormously further forward. The drive to rationalisation to speeding up, to extracting a still higher output per worker for less return, has been intensified under the conditions of the crisis. Between 1929 and 1932 the output per man- hour has actually been forced up by 12 per cent. in the United States, alongside twelve million unemployed!
Labour costs per unit of output have been substantially reduced by an improvement in productive efficiency. The output per manhour in the United States increased by about 12 per cent. between 1929 and 193 2 (Economist, May 5, 1933.)
It is obvious that the effect of this is still further to intensify the contradiction which already led to the economic crisis.
In the face of these facts increasing doubts begin to assail the capitalists whether there can ever be full-scale employment again, even if the extreme intensity of the crisis of 1929-33 should give place to a considerable upward movement. Thus it is reported from America:
American employment reached its highest point in 1918, American production in 1929, and it is carefully and accurately computable to- day that if by some magic a return could be made to the productive maximum of three years ago, there would still be no work for 45 per cent. of the present twelve million unemployed. (Washington Correspondent of the London Times, November 2, 1932.)
From Britain comes the same tale:
If the 21/2 millions of unemployed were absorbed in factory occupa. tions, the national output of manufactured articles would be on such a scale that the available buying markets . . . would be inadequate to absorb it. Hence, if such a method of labour absorption could and did take place, it would only precipitate a new crisis.
(Times Trade Supplement, July 23, 1932.)
Such are the alternatives which begin to be seen by the I capitalists, even if the present crisis should give place to the Πmost extensive upward movement. Either continued mass unemployment of millions, even if
"by some magic" the record level of the previous production boom could be attained.
Or, if all the unemployed are absorbed into productive
labour, then inevitably the immediate precipitation of a new crisis.
PRODUCTIVITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT 43
As this new situation begins to be realised, the beckoning phantom of a new world war as the only "solution" to utilise the productive forces and wipe off the "superfluous" population begins to exercise a visibly increasing attraction on capitalist thought and policy as the final gamble.
Nearly a century ago Engels wrote of the necessary consequences of the inevitable future breakdown of the British capitalist monopoly: "Should English manufactures be thus vanquished . . . the majority of the proletariat must become forever superfluous and has no other choice than to starve or to rebel." (Engels: Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Ch. xi.)
In 1932, eighty-seven years later, the British Prime Minister spoke in the House of Commons of the prospect, even if trade should recover and prosperity return, of having to find "great bodies of men and women, perhaps even amounting to a couple of millions, to be, to all intents and purposes, in our society, superfluous scrap." (J. R. MacDonald in the House of Commons, November 2 2, 1932.)
In 1933 the leader of British Conservatism had to make the same melancholy admission:
There is the great core of unemployment. We do not know what the numbers may be. There may be a million, a million and a half, or less than a million; but there will be a vast number for whom there is but little hope of employment being found in this country. The gates of migration are closed against us. What can we do? That is a problem that has baffled the country completely up to now.
(Stanley Baldwin in the House of Commons, November 27, 1933.)
"What can we do?" This is the final answer of what was once the most powerful capitalism in the world, when faced today with the problem of millions who seek only to work and live. ΠThere could be no sharper expression of the bankruptcy of capitalism than when, in the midst of wealth and unexampled productive power, it can no longer even find the means to exploit a growing proportion of its slaves, and is compelled to proclaim millions of human beings, living, strong, and able and willing to labour, as "superfluous scrap." The time draws close for the second half of the alternative-"to rebel"-as the only solution for the extending millions of producers cut off from production, no less than for the millions whose growing output is accompanied by growing poverty.
4. The Alternative-Social Revolution or Destruction.
The alternatives which confront society at the present stage are thus clear.
Capital can no longer utilise the productive forces. Capital can no longer utilise the full labour-power of the productive population. Monopoly capitalism is more and more visibly choking the whole Organisation of production and exchange.
The working masses can no longer find even the former limited conditions of existence within the conditions of capitalism. Increasing millions are thrown aside as "superfluous." The standards of all are successively attacked. Intensification of labour of the dwindling numbers employed is accompanied by worsening of standards.
The class struggle grows more intense. New forms of widening mass struggle develop. New and intenser methods of repression and coercion are brought into play by the ruling class.
Against this situation the knowledge and understanding, which begins to grow more and more widely spread, of the scientific and technical possibilities of unlimited production and abundance for all, confronts existing society like a mockery and a torment: creating on the one side, among a growing section of the dispossessed, revolutionary anger and determination; creating on the other side, among the doomed possessing classes, growing desperation and recklessness, the revolt against science, the revolt against mechanical technique, and readiness to embark on ever more frenzied courses of violence and destruction.
Two alternatives, and only two, confront existing society at the present stage of development of the productive forces and of social organisation. ΠOne is to throttle the development of the productive forces in order to save class-society, to destroy material wealth, to destroy millions of "superfluous" human beings in the slow rot of starvation and the quick furnace of war, to crush down the working-class movement with limitless violence, to arrest the development of science and culture and education and technique, to revert to more primitive forms of limited, isolated societies, and thus to save for a while the rule of the possessing classes at the expense of a return to barbarism and spreading decay. This is the path which finds its most complete and organised expression in Fascism.
THE ALTERNATIVE-REVOLUTION OR DESTRUCTION 45
The other is to organise the productive forces for the whole society by abolishing the class ownership of the means of production, and building up the classless communist society which can alone utilise and organise the modern productive forces. This is the path of Communism, of the revolutionary working class.
The issue of these two paths is the issue of the present epoch.
It is to the former of these two alternatives that the existing capitalist world is to-day moving at an increasing pace, and to which it will more and more visibly develop in the period ahead, if the revolutionary working class does not succeed in time in saving the whole future of civilisation and of human culture.
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