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Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism
LOOK AT human history and you will see a tale of misery. Exploitation and oppression, barbarous cruelty, rebellion and repression, the horror of war – for thousands of years these have not been the exception but the rule.
On the one hand a tiny minority have lived in all the luxury and splendour the times would allow. On the other a perpetual majority – the poor – have waged a life-long struggle simply to survive.
This is one side of history but not the only side. It can also be seen as the triumphant march of human progress, the ceaseless expansion of humanity’s productive capacities, of knowledge and of the ability to harness the natural environment to make life better, freer, more human.
The point is that up to now these two sides of history have seemed inseparable. The amazing growth of the productive forces, the staggering advances in science and technology have not lessened the barbarities inflicted by humans on humans, but refined and perfected them. The enormous increase in the collective material wealth of the world has not narrowed the gap between rich and poor. To look at the world today – the world of modern capitalism – is to see these age-old contradictions pushed to their extreme limits. On one side live the millionaires and billionaires jet-setting from one luxury watering hole to another, on the other are the hideous shanty towns of Calcutta, Sao Paolo or Manila, and die emaciated famine victims of Ethiopia.
And then, of course, there is the final madness: great scientific breakthroughs which reveal the structure of the atom and are put to a hideous application – nuclear weapons.
What distinguishes Marxism from all other theories and ideologies, past and present, is that it has identified a realistic way out of this impasse. A way of abolishing class divisions, of ending exploitation and war, of freeing the world’s workers from unending poverty and drudgery – a way forward for the human race. The key word here is realistic, for the aspiration to freedom and equality long predates Marxm.
From Spartacus onwards the oppressed have rebelled against their oppression, and thinkers have dreamed of a harmonious society. Christianity itself, like all religions, is a distorted expression of these aspirations.
What Marx did, and was the first to do, was to place these aspirations on a scientific foundation. He showed that human emancipation was actually possible, not on the basis of his or anyone else’s special plan or divine inspiration, but on the basis of forces and tendencies already at work in society.
Above all, Marx showed that capitalism itself produced a social force – the working class – whose conditions not only drove it to rebel but gave it the capacity to overthrow capitalism and put an end to all forms of class rule.
This – the workers’ struggle for freedom – is the heart of Marxism, its essential message for all those who want to change the world. Lenin put it this way: ‘The main thing in the teaching of Marx is the elucidation of the world-wide historical role of the proletariat as the builder of a socialist society.’
‘Roll on Friday’. This familiar phrase expresses the fact that for most of us the work we do is tedious and meaningless. We wish away our lives clock-watching because we only begin to feel free when we are not at work.
The content of our work, what we actually make or do, is of secondary importance. We do it neither to meet our own needs, nor the needs of others, but simply to earn a living, not as part of our real life activity, but an unavoidable means to carry on with life. Marx recognised that work under capitalism is like this. He called it ‘alienated labour’, and he showed it was bound up with wage labour. Wage labour ensures that most people have to sell then-ability to work to those who control the means of production.
Labour – alienated or not – is the very foundation of society. What is produced and how that production is organised are the basic factors shaping the course of history. The simple fact, as Engels put it, ‘is that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue science, art, religion, etc’. This is such a simple statement that it is worth considering for a moment why it remained hidden for so long.
First, because for thousands of years the people who actually worked were always the lowest stratum of society. The significance of their work could be ignored. Secondly, because those who run society, slave-owners, landlords, industrialists or bankers, do no productive work themselves, they can flatter themselves that it’s their decrees and commands which make society tick. Moreover, they have an interest in ensuring the rest of us believe this too. Hence the ‘great man’ view of history taught in schools. In contrast it was precisely because Marx had grasped the potential of the working class to master society that he was able to see the real importance of labour.
Marx distinguished two aspects of work. Firstly, he focussed on the actual business of making things, the use of tools to transform raw material into products that can be consumed to sustain human life. A society’s capacity to do this he called its forces of production. Secondly, Marx analysed relationships between people that are necessary for production to take place. These relationships involve both co-operation, as when a tribe goes out to hunt, and subordination, as between worker and capitalist. They are called by Marx the relations of production.
The level reached by the forces of production conditions the relations of production. The earliest stage of the productive forces, the use of primitive tools for hunting, gave rise to the tribe. The development of the extensive cultivation of land produced the social relations of slavery and then serfdom. The growth of trade, manufacture and then industry produced the dominant production relation of wage labour. The sum total of these relations of production within society Marx called the ‘mode of production’.
Marx pointed to four such modes of production (he called them the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist) as the main periods in past history. The fifth, socialism, he predicted as the coming epoch.
What happens when workers sell their labour power to the capitalist? The employer gets the worker’s labour for a certain number of hours, and in return the worker receives a wage. It seems a fair deal – a certain amount of money is exchanged for a certain amount of labour. Both sides agree to the arrangement; exchange is no robbery.
’Exploitation’ is said to be something that occurs only exceptionally, when the employer somehow cheats the workers. The popularity of the slogan ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ shows that many workers also accept this view.
Marx, however, showed that exploitation was not the exception but the rule, and that it was built into wage labour. He began by analysing the ‘commodity’, for under capitalism both capital and labour power are ‘commodities’, goods produced for exchange.
Commodities come in all shapes and sizes, and serve a large variety of purposes. They can be anything from an ocean liner to a packet of cornflakes. Yet they can all (through money) be exchanged for each other. This is only possible because they have one thing in common – they are all the products of definite amounts of human labour time. The value of a commodity is determined by die amount of labour time society has to spend on producing it. (Marx calls this ‘socially necessary labour time’.)
Now apply this ‘labour theory of value’ to the commodity of labour power itself. The value of labour power is also determined by the amount of labour time needed to produce it – that is, by what it takes to feed, clothe, house, educate and reproduce the worker. The worker’s wages pay for the cost of ‘producing’ the worker’s ability to work. In this sense the buying of labour power is a ‘fair’ exchange like any other.
But labour power is different from all other commodities. It is creative. It produces more value than it takes to maintain itself. (If human labour didn’t produce more than it consumed there would have been no development of the productive forces and no history.) But this ‘surplus’ value goes to the capitalist, not the worker.
Thus if a worker sells, say, 40 hours of labour time to die capitalist and is paid £100, enough to support him or her for that week, he or she will produce £100 worth of goods in, say, only 20 hours. The remaining 20 hours of the working week will be unpaid labour for the capitalist.
The unpaid labour is the hidden secret of capitalist exploitation. Beneath the apparent ‘fair’ exchange, it is the source of all profit. For in those extra 20 hours – the figure will of course vary with the circumstances – the worker will produce another £100 worth of goods for the capitalist. This Marx called ‘surplus value’. It is the capitalist’s profit.
Marx’s theory of surplus value does more than prove that capitalism is based on exploitation. It also reveals the irreconcilable conflict of interest that lies at the heart of the system and divides it into warring classes. Driven by competition, capitalists seek always to extend the unpaid labour time they extract from the workers. Driven by human need, the workers seek to reduce it. Hence – on one side – speed-ups, productivity deals, wages cuts; and on the other side wage demands, strikes and the whole trade union struggle.
The only solution to the conflict is for the workers to go beyond struggle over the role of exploitation, and abolish it by seizing the means of production and ending die sale of labour power.
Capitalism is a system dominated by capital. But what is capital? The everyday view, which quite suits our rulers, is that capital is simply a large amount of money, machinery and other means of production. From this it appears that you can’t have any production without capital, and capitalism seems to be an eternal system.
Marx, however, penetrated beneath this appearance to show that capital is not just a thing (money, machines, etc.) but also a social relationship, a relation of production. Capital doesn’t grow on trees, it has to be produced. Capital is therefore ‘stored up’ or ‘accumulated labour’. (Marx also calls it dead labour.) But stored-up labour is necessary for any system of production, including socialism – it only becomes capital in certain social relations.
Firstly, stored-up labour becomes capital when it can be exchanged with the live labour power of workers in a way which increases the value of that stored-up labour. For capitalism to develop there must be a class of people who have been separated from the means of production, and are therefore forced to sell their ability to work to those who own and control the means of production.
Capital, therefore, implies wage labour. They are two sides of the same equation.
Secondly, capital can only exist as many capitals, in other words as production units working separately and in competition with each other. It is this competition which compels those who possess stored-up labour to use it as capital, to strive to expand its value by employing workers, rather than just consuming it themselves. Henry Ford isn’t driven to make more and more profits by personal greed alone, but by competition with General Motors, Fiat, Volkswagen and other giant car firms.
Production for production’s sake, accumulation for accumulation’s sake. This is the basic dynamic of capitalism.
The question of private ownership is of secondary importance. It was the typical form in which capitalism developed, but as long as the workers are separated from the means of production, and as long as the minority who control those means of production are compelled by competition to increase their value and exploit their workers, you still have capital and capitalism.
State-owned British Steel and BL are just as much capitalist enterprises as privately-owned Unilever or ICI. State-owned USSR Ltd is just as capitalist as partially state-owned Great Britain Ltd.
Capitalism is therefore a system in which the living labour of workers is only a means to increase accumulated labour. Living labour is dominated by dead labour. The worker is an appendage to the machine. Socialism, through social ownership and workers’ control, will reverse this relationship. Accumulated labour will serve living labour. Production will be for need not profit.
Capitalism is a system of recurring economic crises. At the moment we’re living through the latest of these. To the ruling class and its hangers-on – its journalists, politicians, economists and the rest – the explanations for these crises vary. Sometimes they are seen as accidents, sometimes as ‘acts of God’ like the weather, sometimes greedy workers are to blame, and sometimes government mismanagement.
What is always clear is that the working class suffers most. Unemployment officially passed the two million mark in 1980. We have now had years of mass unemployment, on a scale comparable to the 1930s, and there is no end in sight. With the real number of unemployed well over four million there can hardly be a working-class family whose lives are not directly or indirectly affected by the misery of the dole queue.
The Marxist explanation of unemployment starts from the fact that capitalist production is production for profit. It follows from this that under capitalism people are only employed when their employment, directly or indirectly, assists in the making of profits. When it ceases to do so they cease to be employed.
The key to the overall level of employment at any time is therefore the average rate of profit across industry as a whole. When the average rate of profit is high capitalists are keen to invest, to expand their operations, to launch new projects and to take on new labour. When the average rate of profit is low, capitalists are reluctant to invest; old industries become out of date and uncompetitive for lack of new plant and are forced to close; new industries fail to take their place. Unemployment rises.
Each of these situations creates a certain momentum of its own. When new workers are taken on they have more money to spend. Demand for goods increases and production rises to meet the demand. Yet more workers are then employed to raise production, and so on. On the other hand, when unemployment rises workers on the dole have less to spend. Demand for goods falls, production falls and more workers are made redundant. There is a slump.
The key question is what makes the rate of profit high or low in the first place? What decides whether the economy spirals upwards into boom or downwards into slump? There are two processes at work here. The first is cyclical. It causes the system to alternate, more or less regularly, from boom to slump and back again. In the boom the increased demand for labour enables workers to push up wages to the point where they cut into profits. The rate of profit falls and the boom collapses into slump. In the slump unemployment cuts the bargaining power of workers and wages fall until eventually the rate of profit is restored. The slump turns into boom.
The second process is more fundamental. It is an underlying long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Because capitalism is competitive, each capitalist unit strives to produce as much as possible, to grab as large a share of die market as it can. But because it is exploitative, it never pays die workers enough for them to buy up all die goods they produce. As a result, it is always faced with the danger of overproduction – of producing more than can be sold.
Capitalism cannot solve this problem by raising wages, because that would cut into its profits. What is a solution to this problem is for capitalists themselves continually to reinvest their profits by producing ever more ‘means of production’: more machines, and machines for making more machines. This can work as long as the capitalists invest, and this they will do only as long as it produces profits.
However, this investment in means of production itself contributes to a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The reason is that profit itself derives only from the exploitation of labour power – from the living labour of workers, not from the accumulated labour represented by machines. As capitalists buy more and more machinery, the amount of living labour becomes a proportionally smaller part of the capitalist’s outlay (we have seen this happen enormously in our own time as computers have enabled one worker to perform the task previously done by several).
The result is that the rate of profit – the amount of profit in relation to the capitalist’s total outlay – declines, even though the capitalist will try to counter-balance this by driving the workers harder or for longer hours.
Once the rate of profit falls below a certain level, capitalists lose the incentive to invest and the system faces a crisis of overproduction as ‘means of production’ go unbought – machinery goes unsold, factory buildings and office blocks stand empty. This spirals into recession and slump, firms go bankrupt, workers are laid off, and unemployment soars.
There are a number of factors which can offset the falling rate of profit. In the heyday of British imperialism, for example, huge amounts of capital were exported to pre-capitalist countries – which meant there was less capital to invest in Britain, so less danger of overproduction. The destruction of even larger amounts of capital in war, or by permanent high levels of spending on armaments during peacetime, can also stave off, for a period, the growth of capital in proportion to labour power.
Economic crisis itself destroys or devalues a lot of capital by bankrupting the weaker firms. That makes possible a higher rate of profit for those who survive. This is why capitalism generally alternates between boom and slump and why the system was capable of sustained growth in the 1880s and ’90s and, even more so, in the period 1950–73.
Sooner or later, however, this very growth ensures that the basic tendency for the rate of profit to fall reasserts itself. It’s just such a fall which underlies the present world recession. Moreover, the fact that today’s units of capital are both larger and more concentrated than in the past makes it much more difficult for them to simply go bankrupt. When Britain had a dozen or more car manufacturers, one or two could be sacrificed in a recession to the advantage of the rest. Today BL, the only remaining car firm, cannot be allowed to go under without the risk of irreparable damage to the rest of the economy.
The result is that capitalism finds it more difficult to use a short, sharp crisis to destroy sections of capital and so restore the rate of profit. Instead we have a somewhat less sharp collapse. But one which drags on and on without hope of any recovery.
The tendency of the rate of profit to decline is a fundamental and insoluble contradiction of capitalism. It is a concrete expression of the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to humanity’s further development of its productive forces. Mass unemployment is a result of contradictions built into the very nature of capitalism, of a system based on the search for profit. Only when production is for need, not profit, will humanity be free of economic crises and the untold misery they cause, free to move forward.
The basis of society is production. Social relations between people, the form of law and government, depend ultimately on the ability of humanity to produce the necessities of life. This is the first premise of Marx’s theory of history. But how can one mode of production be transformed into another?
It cannot be done simply by will. Nor is it just a matter of convincing people that it’s a good idea. For Marx the first basis for such a change is that, within a particular mode of production, the forces of production should have developed to a level where new relationships of production become possible. Until this has happened all revolutions are doomed to fail.
But once the productive forces have reached this level, the existing relations of production become reactionary. They hold back the further development of society and are ready to be overturned.
Capitalism has long since reached this stage. It has created a world economy and a world division of labour. It has raised productivity to the point that the working day could be drastically reduced. It has increased production to the point where, potentially, there is more than enough to ensure a decent life for all.
But the continued existence of capitalist relations of production prevents this potential being realised. The division of society into bosses and workers, and the competitive struggle between bosses for profits, ensures that poverty and starvation continue, that working hours remain long, and that the world remains divided into hostile, warring states.
The fact that capitalism is still with us shows that the development of the productive forces doesn’t, by itself, change the system. Relations of production are class relations. They imply a ruling class which controls production – and an oppressed class (or classes) that produces. The ruling class has a vested interest in maintaining the reactionary relations of production. Changing die mode of production involves a struggle by the oppressed class that is linked to, and embodies, the rising forces of production, to overthrow the ruling class. The motor of history, therefore, is class struggle.
The change from feudalism to capitalism was one example of this process. It involved a struggle by the middle class – or bourgeoisie – supported by other oppressed classes, to destroy the power of the monarchy and sweep away the feudal restrictions which were blocking the development of capitalism. The decisive moments in that struggle were two great revolutions: the English Revolution of 1642 and the French Revolution of 1789.
The change from capitalism to socialism will be another example. It will involve the struggle of the working class, at the head of all the oppressed, to destroy the power of the bourgeoisie and establish social control of production. Its decisive moment will also be a revolution.
The advance to socialism, however, is far from inevitable. Human history is no mere mechanical process – its advance, or retreat, depends upon the collective class actions and decisions of human beings. Friedrich Engels once wrote: ‘Capitalist society faces a dilemma, either an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism.’ What happens depends on the outcome of class struggle.
One possible product of capitalism in crisis has already revealed itself once this century: fascism, with the Nazi domination of much of Europe, brought war, devastation, and the extermination of millions of people simply because they belonged to a different race, nationality, or political persuasion.
At the moment the fascists are isolated, fragmented and confined to the margins of the political scene. But this doesn’t mean that we can sink into a complacent ‘it can’t happen here’ attitude. Only a few years ago, before it was thrown back by the Anti-Nazi League, the British National Front was a growing threat. In Germany, in 1928, Hitler’s Nazis seemed insignificant. Yet within five years they were in power, and one has only to look at Mitterrand’s France to see a neo-Nazi movement making rapid advances.
For all these reasons an analysis of fascism remains an essential weapon in the Marxist theoretical arsenal. It is also essential that this analysis should be precise. It mustn’t blur the distinction between real fascism and every other form of right-wing authoritarianism. Such confusion not only spreads unnecessary panic but also leads to an underestimation of the brutality and danger of the real thing.
The first point to be made in analysing fascism is that it is not some collective madness that suddenly seizes the whole of society. Nor is it a freak of the German (or Italian) national character, or the product of the evil genius of a demonic charismatic leader. Nor on the other hand is it just any violation of democracy or human rights (under capitalism such violations occur all the time). Rather, fascism is a phenomenon generated by the very nature of capitalism, but which has quite specific class roots. In power, it is a form of bourgeois rule sharply different from ordinary capitalist democracy in that it involves the annihilation of all independent working-class organisations.
The class basis of fascism is, in the first place, the petty bourgeoisie – small shopkeepers, self-employed and the like – and it is from here that the core of a fascist movement is recruited. The petty bourgeoisie feels crushed between big capital on the one hand and the organised working class on the other. In times of severe economic crisis this double pressure becomes more acute and, under the threat of mass bankruptcy, the petty bourgeoisie searches desperately for a way out.
If in this situation the working class, under revolutionary leadership, shows its capacity and determination to resolve the crisis it can draw large sections of the middle class behind it. If, however, the working class fails to give a clear lead then the petty bourgeoisie can swing wildly to the right and turn to fascism.
This is because the ideology of fascism appears to reflect the experience of the enraged petty bourgeoisie. It combines vague rhetoric against international finance with bitter hostility to the labour movement. These contradictory attitudes are cemented together by the racist fantasy that international capitalism and communism are parts of a world conspiracy to undermine the purity of race and nation. (In Germany the Nazis made the Jews their victims; the British National Front in the 1970s tried to blame black people.)
The petty bourgeoisie, however, cannot become the ruling class in modern capitalism. Consequently fascism – basing itself on this class – cannot come to power solely by its own efforts. It needs the backing of the ruling class itself.
But for the ruling class, fascism is a risky option which involves handing the reins of power to people it regards as vulgar fanatics. It will take this step only in very pressing circumstances. Firstly, the economic crisis must be so severe that the profitability of capitalism cannot be restored without the wholesale destruction of the labour movement. Secondly, the ruling class must have been put in fear of its life by that labour movement. Thirdly, it must be confident that the working class is weak enough for the fascist solution to succeed. It has no desire to provoke its own overthrow.
These conditions are most likely to occur in the aftermath of revolutionary situations that have been wasted by reformist leadership. So it was in Italy in 1921, in Germany in 1933 and in Spain in 1936. The price of failing to make the socialist revolution is horrifically high.
What effect does the state of the economy have on the state of the class struggle? Is it necessary for the slump to become even more severe and for workers to be reduced to extreme poverty before there will be mass rebellion against capitalism? Or does there have to be a new boom in order to restore workers’ confidence?
These are obviously important questions for Marxism, especially at a time when the working-class movement has been seriously damaged and undermined by mass unemployment. They are also difficult to answer – for there is no simple, mechanical or automatic relationship between economic conditions and the level of working-class resistance. Factors such as the historical traditions of the class, the degree of consciousness and organisation, and the quality of its leadership, all have their effect.
Nevertheless on the basis of previous experience of booms and slumps it is possible to make certain broad generalisations.
First of all, conditions of prolonged boom (such as from the Second World War to the mid-1960s) create favourable conditions for the development of a high level of confidence and organisation. However the readiness and capacity of employers to make concessions restricts the scale of the struggle. Strikes tend to be successful but small and short. There are no class-wide life and death battles. Consequently workers feel no compulsion to generalise die struggle politically, and show little interest in revolutionary socialist ideas. In a period of sustained expansion reforms can be won but capitalism cannot be overthrown.
In contrast, conditions of slump or economic crisis sharply raise the stakes of the struggle. The employers, with the threat of bankruptcy at their backs, are much more determined and more likely to enlist the aid of the state.
To make gains, or even to hold on to the gains of the past, workers have to fight much harder and on a much wider scale. The whole struggle becomes more bitter and more generalised and the question of political leadership becomes much more important. The slump creates the potential for both greater victories (up to and including the overthrow of the system) and greater defeats. Moreover defeats in conditions of mass unemployment are likely to be more demoralising.
In general, revolutionary struggle and revolutionary consciousness combine two elements: bitterness at the exploiters and their system and confidence in the possibility of fighting. The former tends to be a product of the slump, the latter of the boom. We can therefore say that it is neither the boom by itself, nor the slump by itself, that raises the class struggle to its highest level, but rather the rapid alternation between one and the other.
Three variations are possible here. First, a boom in which workers’ expectations, confidence and organisation rise, followed by the onset of a slump to which workers respond with mass struggles. Second, a slump in which bitterness accumulates, followed by a boom which gives workers the confidence to fight. And a third possibility is a prolonged crisis with the ruling class continually on the attack and the working class falling back until the former finally overreaches itself and provokes a desperate mass resistance. If this resistance proves successful it can give workers the confidence to return to the offensive.
Situations are possible which combine elements of these three different variations. A small recovery within an overall crisis, for instance, will give some workers slightly more confidence, against a ruling class driven by the crisis to press on and on with its attacks on living standards and thus compelled time and again to risk overreaching itself.
Apart from the 1984–5 miners’ strike, the present bosses’ offensive in Britain has not met with a serious fight back, and the workers’ movement as a whole remains weakened. But the long-term prospects for the ruling class are bleak. Capitalism is not going to return to sustained boom. However, within the continuing crisis there will be repeated oscillations up and down. Each such oscillation carries with it the possibility of an upsurge in the class struggle, as does each new ruling-class assault.
Sooner or later, therefore, the tide will turn, and when it does the stakes will be very high indeed.
Any well-organised strike needs a strike committee made up of shop stewards or other representatives elected by the rank and file. Its job is to organise picketing, blacking and support from other workers. If the strike spreads throughout the industry or to other industries the strike committee will need to expand to include representatives from all the workers involved, and its tasks and responsibilities will grow too.
If there is a general strike or a succession of mass strikes and occupations, and the working class mounts a serious challenge to I the system, then hundreds of such organisations will be needed. And they will face a host of new tasks: calling demonstrations, maintaining essential supplies and transport, defending picket lines and workers’ organisations against attack, creating an alternative news service to counteract government propaganda, perhaps the co-ordination of rent strikes and the protection of working-class areas.
Such workers’ councils – or ‘Soviets’, to use the Russian word – have always risen from the needs of the struggle itself – and not as an abstract scheme imposed by theorists. This was true of the Russian Soviets of 1905 and 1917, the workers’ councils of the German Revolution 1918–19, those of Spain 1936 and of Hungary 1956.
In the British General Strike there were Councils of Action which could have developed in this direction if the struggle had continued. The inter-factory committees in Poland in 1980, which linked the Gdansk shipyard occupation with hundreds of other workplaces across the country, had the same potential.
Soviets, in taking on many of the functions of government, become alternative centres of power, rivalling those of the state.
This is called ‘dual power’. Dual power cannot last long. It will be ended either by ruling-class repression, as in Germany 1919, or Poland 1981, or by workers’ revolution as in Russia in 1917.
That revolution will mean destroying the bourgeois state and replacing it with the workers’ councils as the basis of the new state power – workers’ power, what Marx called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Based on elections in workplaces where collective debate and discussion are possible, the workers’ councils will directly represent the interests of the workers as a class. Delegates will be instantly recallable simply by holding mass meeting, in the workplace, and like all state officials they will receive only the average worker’s wage.
The councils, in conjunction with factory committees and die trade unions, will place all production under workers’ control. They will requisition the hotels, mansions and extra houses of the rich to house the homeless. They will place the millionaire press and TV stations at the disposal of workers’ organisations according to their support among the people.
They will organise community nurseries, creches, restaurants and laundries to free women from the oppressive burden of housework. They will put colleges and schools under the control of those who use them, especially the students. The huge waste of resources on fat salaries, pomp and ceremony, Rolls-Royces, banquets and other junketings that accompany the capitalist state, will be ended at a stroke.
Every working person will be able to take part in running the state. By arming the workers and forming workers’ militias the new state will be able to mobilise the necessary force to deal with attempts at counter-revolution. But as this threat recedes, as it will in so far as the revolution is able to defeat the capitalists at home and abroad, so these repressive functions of the state will fade, leaving only the organisation of the whole people in pursuit of its needs. The state as such will wither away.
This is the real meaning of workers’ power. Contrary to all the propaganda about left totalitarianism, it would be a million times more democratic than any bourgeois parliament, enabling ordinary people, for the first time in history, to take control of their lives.
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Last updated: 6 June 2015