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Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism
ONE OF THE most common explanations of the scenes of mass starvation in Ethiopia and of the appalling phenomenon of third world poverty is that these countries suffer from ‘overpopulation’. There are simply too many mouths to feed, or so it is said.
This argument is given added force by the fact that it seems to be believed by a number of third world governments. In recent years, for example, there have been the late Sanjay Gandhi’s forcible sterilisation campaign in India, and the one-child policy in ‘communist’ China.
Nevertheless despite this powerful backing it is an argument that cannot withstand the slightest contact with the facts. Let us begin with the example of Ethiopia itself. Ethiopia has a population of 31 million in an area of 1,222,000 square kilometres (five times the size of the UK). This gives it a population density of 25 per square kilometre, as compared with 228 per square kilometre in Britain. Comparisons could also be made with West Germany (population density 248 per square kilometre), the Netherlands (347), and Japan (315). In other words, far from being ‘overpopulated’, Ethiopia is, in reality, very sparsely populated.
But perhaps Ethiopia is an exception, or perhaps it is unreasonable to compare a largely rural third world country with advanced industrial nations. Let us have a look at a number of third world countries.
First of all the large majority of third world countries have relatively low population densities. Not that this helps them much. For example, Chad, the Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Paraguay and Bolivia all have population densities of less than 10 per square kilometre, yet all remain desperately poor.
But what of India and China with their so-called ‘teeming millions’ and their attempts at state population control? In fact, both have a population density less than Britain – India 208 per square kilometre, and China 102.
Finally, there are those areas of the third world that are densely populated: Bangladesh (616 per square kilometre), Hong Kong (4,827), Singapore (4,122), South Korea (382), Taiwan (486), Mauritius (480). Strangely – at least strangely for the ‘overpopulation’ theory – many of these areas turn out to be among the most prosperous anywhere in die third world. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan are, after Japan, the three richest places in the whole of southern and eastern Asia, with South Korea making rapid progress in the same direction. Mauritius, off the east coast of Africa, is undoubtedly poor, but it has wealth per head more than four times the average for the area.
In short, an examination of the facts shows that there is absolutely no causal connection between high population and poverty. Nor should this be surprising, for it is a question not only of facts but also of simple logic. Every extra person is not only an extra mouth to feed, but also an extra worker to produce goods.
Also, it is important to ask why the population is growing in third world countries. The answer is not that people are having more children – the birth rate for the third world as a whole is 33 per thousand per year, slightly less than it was in Britain until the end of the 19th century – but that the death rate, in particular the infant mortality rate, is falling. This in turn comes from an improvement, albeit slight, in general living standards (diet, medical care, sanitation and so on). Far from population growth causing poverty, it is in general a result of a small increase in prosperity.
Why then, if it is such nonsense, is the overpopulation argument so popular? The answer is simple. It is because, for the world’s ruling classes in both the developed countries and the third world itself, it is the perfect alibi. It distracts attention from the vast sums spent on arms which, if redirected, could solve the world’s malnutrition problem, from the obscenity of ‘food mountains’ hoarded because there is no profit in selling to the poor, and from the looting of the third world by imperialism and the multinationals. Like so many capitalist ideas it shifts the blame for the results of oppression from the system onto the oppressed themselves.
The myth of overpopulation can be compared to society’s other myths. For example that ‘people are unemployed because they’re too lazy to work’; that women are raped and battered ‘because they ask for it’; that people are poor because they are idle and spendthrift.
The origins of the whole ‘overpopulation’ theory date back to the 18th-century parson and economist, Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on Population, published in 1798, was designed to counter radical ideas coming from the French Revolution. Marx scathingly dismissed Malthus’ theory as ‘a libel on the human race’. 186 years have not improved it.
‘Criticism of religion,’ wrote the young Marx, ‘is the foundation of all criticism’, and when he wrote this, in Germany in 1843, it was certainly true. At that time society and social thought were very much dominated by religion.
Today in Britain the criticism of religion may seem a much less urgent matter. However a glance round the world, at countries as different as Poland, Iran, Ireland, and Nicaragua, reveals many instances of religion exerting a major influence on the course of the class struggle. It is not, therefore, a question Marxists can afford to forget or ignore.
What, then, is the Marxist attitude to religion? Consistent Marxists are, of course, atheists. The Marxist outlook is materialist. It regards the ideas in people’s heads, including religious ideas, as a response to the material conditions of their lives. As Marx put it, ‘Man makes religion, religion does not make man.’ For Marx religion is an upside-down world view produced by an upside-down world. People deprived by class society of control of their own labour and the product of that labour are thereby deprived of control of their lives and of their society. They respond by projecting their aspirations to control their own destiny on to a supernatural omnipotent god, by projecting their dreams of happiness, peace and fulfilment on to an imaginary afterlife.
Religion arose first in circumstances where the low level of the productive forces made starvation, suffering and alienation inevitable. It gave illusory hope to those whose real situation was hopeless. It was, in Marx’s words, ‘The sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world ... the opium of the people’.
Arising in this way, religion also serves to reinforce the conditions which generate it. Now that these conditions are no longer inevitable, it impedes the struggle to control the bakery on earth by promising ‘pie in the sky’ hereafter. Religion therefore becomes a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. It sanctifies their laws as god’s laws, their order as god’s order, and their wars as god’s wars. In preaching submission to divine authority it simultaneously encourages submission to worldly power.
For Marxists, the struggle against religious illusions is a necessary part of the struggle against the social system that produces those illusions. But in seeking to combat the influence of religion we should not oversimplify its political role. Religion is not always the straightforward ally of all reaction. It can only sustain the class society on which it rests if it retains its hold on the minds of the masses. It therefore has to be adaptable, move with the times, proclaim its sympathy with the poor and even at times for popular movements. Thus the Catholic church in Poland could only exercise its moderating influence on Solidarity if it presented itself as an ally of the workers’ movement.
Because religion is ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature’ as well as the ‘opium of the people’, and because the consciousness of the oppressed has been dominated by religion for centuries, it is often the case that genuine popular movements assume a religious form.
This is particularly the case where the influence of Marxism is weak and where the peasantry plays the major role. It is in these cases that religion assumes its most radical form.
Obviously Marxists should not confuse the religious illusions of the oppressed with the established churches of the oppressors, any more than we confuse the reformist illusions of workers with the reformism of right-wing politicians. The drug addict is not the same as the drugs racketeer. Nor do we use these religious illusions (as the Stalinists did over Poland) to refuse solidarity with those in struggle.
Nonetheless, even in its most left-wing forms religion remains an obstacle to the self-emancipation of the working class, always opening the way to notions of class peace and reconciliation. Above all it cannot provide the scientific understanding of society which is the precondition of transforming society. Only Marxism can do that.
The rise of the anti-nuclear movement has brought with it a resurgence of pacifism. Marxists, of course, support all movements to disarm the bourgeois state and share with the pacifists the desire to put an end to war and violence. The creation of a society totally free from war is in fact one of our central aims.
But Marxists are not pacifists. Indeed, we are opposed to pacifism.
The first reason for this is that pacifism is completely ineffective as an instrument for preventing or resisting war. This has been proved time and again in the twentieth century.
Both the First and the Second World Wars were preceded by widespread pacifist moods and powerful pacifist movements. A form of pacifism was the dominant ideology of the majority of the Second International, which organised millions of workers before 1914. And in the 1930s pacifist hopes were concentrated in the League of Nations. In both cases these pacifist movements not only failed to stop the war, but also collapsed into total impotence once the wars began.
The root of pacifism’s weakness lies in its failure to diagnose the causes of war. Pacifism tends to regard war as simply the product of misguided violent people with misguided violent attitudes. It therefore sees the remedy as lying in the large-scale conversion of people to peaceful attitudes. In reality war has much deeper roots. Its main cause in the modern world is the capitalist system, which subordinates all production, and with it the whole of society, to the struggle for capital accumulation, which by its very nature is competitive.
If the outbreak of violence between individual capitalists is prevented by the existence of the capitalist state, which has a monopoly of armed force, the existence of many such states only makes war between them all the more inevitable. Moreover, the power of the capitalist state is such that it can impose war on its population regardless of whether they want it or not, just as Thatcher can site Cruise missiles in Britain regardless of the opinion polls.
So even if pacifism succeeded in converting a huge majority to ‘non-violence’ it would still not be able to prevent war. The only way to abolish war is to abolish the system that generates it, and replace competitive production for profit by collective, cooperative, production for need. And this brings us to the second reason why Marxists are opposed to pacifism.
In the struggle to change society, pacifism is not only ineffective, it is positively reactionary. Pacifism preaches non-violence equally to all classes in society, but the only class it has any chance of influencing (apart from the petty bourgeoisie where it generally originates) are the oppressed. The prospect of converting the ruling classes of the world, who know perfectly well that their wealth and power has always rested on the use of violence, is as remote as the prospect of the second coming.
Apply this to such situations as Nicaragua, Vietnam or South Africa. Unless one hopes for the pacifist conversion of the likes of Somoza, Nixon, Reagan, Botha and others, what pacifism would actually mean is telling the Nicaraguans, Vietnamese and black South Africans they mustn’t resist imperialism, genocide and apartheid because that would involve ‘violence’.
Pacifism therefore disarms the oppressed in the face of capitalist and imperialist repression. It’s exactly the same where the class struggle is concerned.
Finally, pacifism paints capitalism in far more rosy colours than it deserves. By counter-posing the struggle for peace to the struggle for socialism pacifism encourages the idea that mere could be a violence-free, war-free capitalism. This can only play into the hands of the cynical politicians, both bourgeois and reformist, who have much experience in deceiving the working class with hypocritical rhetoric about peace, while preparing to plunge them into war.
Marxists see the pre-eminent divisions of the world not as those between nations, but between classes. Workers have nothing to gain from the waging of war between their capitalist rulers, except hardship, suffering, and death. Nor will they gain by victory in war – since this only strengthens the ruling class, the better to exploit the workers. As internationalists, Marxists call on workers of all countries to unite. In the case of an imperialist war between nations, we would call on workers of both countries to oppose the war and work for the defeat and overthrow of their own ruling class.
Marxism equals revolution. Revolution equals violence. Violence equals terrorism. Therefore Marxism equals terrorism. This line of argument is repeatedly insinuated by the ruling class and the media. However, the mainstream of the Marxist tradition has always been strongly opposed to the use of terrorism.
The matter was first fully debated in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century when the Narodniks – or ‘Friends of the people’ – were waging terrorist campaigns in their struggle against tsarism. At that time the leading figures of the Russian Marxist movement – Lenin, Plekhanov, Trotsky and others – came out firmly against terrorism and that has remained the position of our movement ever since.
The exploitation and oppression that we are fighting against are the products not of particular government ministers, or even particular governments, but of the world economic system of capitalism. They can be ended only by the overthrow of this system and that requires mass action by many millions of workers, not the assassination of individuals or the blowing up of particular targets, whatever their nature. Equally the society which we want to put in the place of capitalism, one in which working people own and control industry and the state, can only be created by the mass activity of workers themselves, not the actions of a minority.
Terrorism, whatever its subjective motive, represents an attempt by a tiny minority to substitute themselves for this mass action, to do for the working class what the working class can only do for itself.
Even where the terrorist forces are large, the very nature of the enterprise obliges them to operate independently of and behind the back of the working class. And even when terrorism has mass support, it cannot help but encourage in those masses an attitude of passivity, an expectation of liberation from above.
Additionally, terrorism, if it results in the loss of innocent lives, alienates working-class people from causes they might otherwise be won to support. In so doing it creates a favourable atmosphere for increased state repression, which can be, and will be, directed against the left and the workers’ movement in general. Finally, it frequently destroys or wastes the lives of many ardent young revolutionaries.
Terrorism, therefore, is not a weapon of struggle of the working class, but of other classes. Trotsky once described the terrorist as ‘a liberal with a bomb’.
Although some deluded would-be Marxists or anarchists (the Baader-Meinhof group, the Italian Red Brigades for instance) have turned to terrorism, it is the middle-class-led nationalist or communal movement that is most characteristic of terrorist organisation. It is therefore no surprise that terrorism should now be rampant in the Lebanon, where there exist a number of national and religious communities all driven to utter desperation by a veritable avalanche of oppression, while at the same time there is no socialist or working-class alternative even in sight.
But Marxist criticism of terrorism has nothing in common with the hypocritical condemnations and denunciations issued ceaselessly by the ruling-class politicians and the media. When it comes to violence and the slaughter of innocents, the likes of Reagan and Thatcher can and do commit worse atrocities than the most extreme terrorists. In any conflict between the forces of the imperialist or capitalist states and the terrorist who represents the oppressed, our sympathies are unreservedly with the terrorist.
Nor do we accept the alternative which the bourgeois politicians counter-pose to terrorism, namely passive acquiescence to oppression or, at best, a vote in parliamentary elections.
From the Marxist viewpoint, parliamentary democracy suffers from the same basic flaw as terrorism – it is a matter of expecting a small elite, albeit MPs instead of gunmen, to act on behalf of the workers themselves. The ballot and the bomb are at bottom two sides of the substitutionist coin.
We do not deny to the working class and the oppressed the right to use violence against their oppressors. On the contrary, we think such violence is unavoidable because the ruling classes of the world will not surrender their power and privileges without a bitter struggle. We simply insist that, to achieve its aims, such violence must be exercised not by small elites, but by the mass of the working class, and directed not against individuals, but against the roots of the capitalist system.
The term ‘class’ is commonly used in a loose and confused way to refer to such things as a person’s family background, education and social standing. Sociologists also employ class as a category in surveys. Usually they regard a person’s class as being defined by their occupation, with occupations ranked in five or six ‘classes’ according to their supposed social status. In both its ‘everyday’ and sociological usage, the purpose of the concept is to serve as a convenient label which can be attached to individuals so as to give some general idea of their ‘life-style’ and attitudes.
For Marxists, the concept of class serves a very different purpose. Its aim is not to determine the appropriate label for every individual, nor to depict exactly every gradation and shading of the social hierarchy. It is to identify the fundamental social forces whose conflict is the driving force of history.
The Marxist theory of class is therefore, first and foremost, a theory of class struggle.
What makes an aggregate of individuals into a ‘class’ is not that they all have the same ‘life-style’ or attitudes, or that they all receive the same pay, but that they have certain basic common interests in opposition to the interests of another class or classes. It is this conflict of interests that generates class struggle.
There are of course innumerable conflicts of interests in society, ranging from the trivial squabble between neighbours to the tragic conflicts between people of different races or nations. But what makes class conflict more fundamental than all these other divisions is that it concerns conflicts of interest in the process of production – that is, in the very basis of society, in the starting point of all historical development.
Antagonistic interests in the process of production are the result of exploitation, that is the extraction by one group of people of surplus from the labour of another group. It is exploitation that divides society into opposed classes. The key to exploitation is the effective possession (ownership or control) of the major means of production by one social group to the exclusion of the other group, who are thereby forced to work for the dominant group and to yield to them control of the social surplus.
Historically these exploitative relations of production have taken many forms and have given rise to different sets of opposed classes, such as slave owners and slaves, lords and serfs, landowners and peasants.
In capitalist society the class struggle is principally between the capitalists (those who own and control capital) and the working class (those who live by the sale of their labour power).
It is now nearly 140 years since Marx advanced the view that this is the fundamental division in modern society. Since then sociologists (the main bourgeois ideologists in this field) have never ceased to claim that changes in the class structures of capitalism have refuted Marx’s proposition and made it ‘out of date’. In particular they have argued that as capitalism develops so the working class declines as a proportion of society while the middle class expands. Recently this old bourgeois argument has been given a new lease of life by certain well-known ‘Marxists’ such as Eric Hobsbawm and Andre Gorz.
In fact the argument rests entirely on the notion of class as a matter of attitudes, lifestyle and occupational category. The vast majority of those claimed for the expanding ‘middle class’ – clerical and office workers, shop assistants, health workers (including nurses), teachers and the like – are, in terms of the relations of production, clearly workers. They neither own nor control the means of production. They live entirely by the sale of their labour power, and they are exploited by capital. They share the same basic economic interests as miners and carworkers, dockers and factory workers.
There are indeed intermediate layers (the ‘middle classes’) – managers and administrators – who are not themselves big capitalists, but who have some control over the means of production and who also direct the labour of others. But these remain relatively few in number. In terms of shaping history, it is not this layer that is decisive. The fundamental division and the fundamental struggle is now, more than ever, between capital and labour.
The capitalist class has a love-hate relationship with crime, as can be seen from a glance at the capitalist media. The newspapers dutifully condemn crime but they also delight in crime stories. ‘Sex Monster’, ‘The Beast’ and ‘Crime Rate Soars’ are among Fleet Street’s favourite headlines. TV and films are the same. There must be a thousand cops and robbers shows for every film or play dealing with a strike (the capitalists are unequivocally opposed to strikes).
Nor is this just a matter of boosting sales and chasing ratings. The ambivalence reflects deep-rooted class interests.
On the one hand the ruling class is officially, and in a sense genuinely, opposed to crime. It needs the ‘rule of law’ to prevent the poor helping themselves to the property of the rich, who do not appreciate being arbitrarily deprived of their Rolls-Royces and diamond tiaras, even if they are insured. Moreover, the smooth running of capitalism requires a degree of order in its business transactions, though this does not prevent numerous capitalists and capitalist officials committing all sorts of crimes.
On the other hand, the ruling class knows that crime does not really threaten it – a class cannot be dispossessed by any number of individual robberies – and it knows that it reaps considerable benefits from the existence of crime. Every time the state is seen to deal with a crime it reinforces its claims to represent the general good of society against anti-social elements – to be the defender of the weak against the strong – and masks its essential function of defending the rich against the poor.
There is nothing like a real or imaginary crime wave for giving the state an excuse to strengthen its repressive powers. There is nothing like the ‘law-and-order’ issue for electing right-wing governments and putting ‘moderates’ on the defensive. For the capitalists, crime plays the same role as the external ‘enemy’. If crime did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
Anyway the capitalist system produces crime like running produces sweat. An economy based on competition, greed, exploitation and alienation cannot do otherwise. Engels summed up the matter in a speech in 1845. ‘Present day society,’ he said, ‘which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all which inevitably in individual cases assumes a brutal, barbarously violent form – that of crime.’
Consequently, all those politicians’ speeches promising a crackdown on crime are so much hot air. Capitalist governments can no more end crime than they can end capitalism.
But what of socialism? In the speech quoted above Engels also maintained that a socialist society would ‘put an axe to the root of crime’. To many this might seem a far-fetched claim. But provided we understand by ‘socialism’ what Marx and Engels understood by it, and don’t confuse it with Russian-type state capitalism masquerading as socialism, men it is not hard to see how crime could be abolished.
A fully socialist society, in the Marxist sense, would be a society in which there was an abundance of the necessities of life (this is quite within reach of modern technology), and in which goods were distributed according to need – that is, truly equally. In such a society, economic crime would become progressively pointless and impossible.
Assume, for example, that everyone wanting a car could have one supplied free and that all cars were designed for use, not prestige or status. There would then be no reason to steal cars – they couldn’t be sold – and if some eccentric wanted to accumulate cars for personal use it would both be glaringly obvious and not matter much. Alternatively, assume that cars are discontinued and that instead there is a free and comprehensive public transport system which takes everyone wherever they want to go. Again, the opportunity and motive for crime would disappear.
Socialism would mean that eventually all goods and services would be put on this kind of footing.
This leaves crimes against the person, committed not from economic motives but from anger, passion, jealousy, bitterness – crimes such as murder, rape and assault. Even today these are only a tiny proportion of crimes and they too have social roots – roots socialism will put an axe to.
At present one of the main causes and arenas of such crime is the restrictive capitalist family, which binds people – through social pressure and economic dependency – in relationships they find intolerable. Socialism will abolish this oppressive family by spreading the responsibility for childcare and housework and cutting all ties of dependency. People will be free to live, or not live, with who they want. In fact socialism will humanise and liberate all personal relationships. This cannot help, at the very least, but greatly reduce all crimes against the person.
The conclusion is simple. The only real fight against crime is the fight against capitalism – itself, the biggest crime of all.
Conservative politicians of all parties never cease singing the praises of ‘the family’. This phenomenon reflects the fact that ‘Defend the family’ has always been a key slogan and rallying cry for the ruling class. In view of these people’s attitudes to such things as child benefit, cuts in education, health and social services, housing provision and the rest, all this pro-family propaganda could easily be dismissed as just monstrous hypocrisy.
Nevertheless it is important to recognise that there is an element of sincere class interest involved here. The ruling class recognises, and has always recognised, that the family is a deeply conservative institution. They know that in so far as they can get working-class men and above all working-class women to view the world exclusively from the perspective of their individual family unit they can create a powerful counterweight to class identification and class consciousness. They know that ‘protecting my family’ was ever the alibi of the scab; that in so far as women remain mentally imprisoned in the home (even when they do go out to work) they will not develop a perspective of changing society; and that 99 times out of 100 the first authority confronted by the young rebel and revolutionary is the authority of the family.
Consequently the ruling class has carefully nurtured a mythology of the family. This mythology has two main elements. First, the family is projected as a universal, eternal, unchanging institution reflecting fixed biological and psychological drives. The family is ‘normal’; the family is a matter of human nature. Anyone not living within the accepted family structure or challenging this structure (by being gay, for example) is therefore labelled ‘abnormal’, ‘unnatural’ and ‘deviant’.
Secondly, the family is presented as an idyllic haven of harmony, love and security; an institution which is perfectly adapted to the needs of both society and the individual. Anyone outside the family is therefore not only ‘abnormal’ but also ‘deprived’.
Marxism rejects this reactionary nonsense. The family is not a natural but a social institution. Like any other social institution it has historical origins, roughly coinciding with the emergence of private property and the division of society into classes between five and ten thousand years ago. It has since undergone a long process of historical development in which it has assumed widely differing forms.
The result of this development is that the contemporary nuclear family is a structure adapted primarily not to the needs of men, women and children but to the needs of a particular form of society, namely capitalism, and to its overriding aim, the accumulation of capital.
In the capitalist class it is a mechanism for the maintenance and inheritance of private property and class position. In the working class it serves to produce and reproduce supplies of proficient labour power at very little cost to the employers or their state.
This makes the reality of family life (in all social classes but especially the working class) bear little or no relation to the idealised image. On the contrary, the family constitutes a major arena of oppression in which innumerable unhappy couples are bound together by economic and social dependence; in which half the working class, women, are confined and confirmed in the socially subordinate role of housewife.
The family is also, far more often than is generally acknowledged, an arena of appalling physical and psychological violence, of wife beating and child battering, of father-daughter rape, of repression, inhibition and victimisation of its own members.
Of course, despite this most people still do choose to live in families. The social pressures on them to do so are considerable and the alternative under capitalism can be grim – loneliness and isolation in most cases.
This brings us to the Marxist attitude to the family in the future. Marxists are opposed to the family as it is presently constituted. But the family cannot be banned or simply abolished. It must be replaced and what replaces it must be experienced by the vast majority as something better, more liberating and more fulfilling.
This involves complete equal pay and job opportunities for women in a context of full employment. It involves socialising the burden of housework by means of good communal restaurants and laundries in every neighbourhood. It involves sharing childcare through nursery places for all children. It involves a lot of other far-reaching changes in the organisation of society. So far-reaching, indeed, that they are inconceivable without a total transformation of society, a social revolution.
John Molyneux Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 5 June 2015