![[Diagram 19: American Class Divisions 1870-1929]](diagram19-small.jpg)
MIA > Archive > Fraina/Corey Archive > Decline of Am. Cap.
THE decline of American capitalism and its class-ideological crisis set in motion the forces preparing a new American, the coming communist, revolution. Apologists insist that revolution is alien to the traditions of the American people. That means simply this: revolution is now alien to the exploiting and decaying capitalist class whose interests are rationalized by the apologists and menaced by revolution.
Revolution has played a decisive part in American development. Colonial migrations were thrust forth by the developing bourgeois revolution in Europe and its transformation of the old feudal order. Some of the most fundamental and uncompromising aspects of the revolution were represented by the Puritan settlers. Their ideals of individual and social freedom, created in the struggle against the old order, were progressive in spite of their theological forms and class limitations. Many Puritan sects broke through the limitations and urged equalitarian democratic reforms, including in some cases ownership of property in common. Colonial class struggles produced several minor revolts. The bourgeoisie secured its independence of Britain by means of revolution, and sounded the tocsin for the French Revolution of 1789. The revolutionary American bourgeoisie organized itself as a practical dictatorship. Nor was it bothered by the fact that it represented a militant minority only, for roughly two-thirds of the people were either indifferent or actively antagonistic: the opposition was violently coerced, where necessary, and Loyalists were expropriated. Tom Paine and Sam Adams were professional revolutionists who deliberately and consciously planned the revolution through years of agitation and organization. [1*] The Committees of Correspondence were really a revolutionary party measurably aware of purposes and means, including the extra-legal. Shays’ Rebellion, an agrarian revolt against reactionary class aspects of the new government’s policy, led Thomas Jefferson to hope there would be a rebellion every twenty years, because “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants.” After independence was secured, the French Revolution became an ideological rallying force in the American struggle between “the masses” and “the classes.” The new republic encouraged revolutions in Latin America, declared it would oppose European efforts to restore or extend colonial rule, and became the refuge of political exiles.
In the essentially revolutionary struggle of the Civil War, the bourgeoisie completed its revolution by destroying the slave power, industrial capitalists acquired control of the government, and the conquest of power was implemented by the ruthless dictatorship and expropriation of Reconstruction. Then the dominant capitalist class set itself as flint against revolutionary ideas (which, in the case of the Civil War, had been forced to break the barriers of an inept, cowardly policy of compromise with the slave South). The dominant class increasingly rejected the older ideals of liberty and democracy, while imperialism made the United States an international reactionary force instead of a progressive one. Sam Adams, the organizer of the American Revolution, had long since been thrust into obscurity. Now they “reinterpreted” Reconstruction, which offers the proletariat an example of dictatorship and force, and blackened the character of Thaddeus Stevens, the most revolutionary and implacable enemy of slavery. Yet they cannot alter the indisputable historical fact: the American bourgeoisie rose to power by means of one revolution and consolidated that power by means of another ...
Revolutions are inevitable. That is the conclusion of a bourgeois student of the “natural history” of revolution. Social-economic and class forces develop to a point where a sharp revolutionary break becomes necessary. The conclusion is thus amplified:
“This country, in common with all others in which the industrial revolution has developed, is destined to evolve through capitalism into some sort of social control of industry ... A laboring man of to-day is a person still insignificant compared with the capitalist. But through the agency of his organization he is superior to the farmer. The laboring man seems destined to be the ruler of the future ... We may take it for granted that revolutions, even violent revolutions, will occur periodically for a long time to come. We hear some talk of substituting peaceable evolution for violent revolution, but such talk is only what the theologians call ‘pious opinion’ – laudable, but imaginative. No technology is being developed for the purpose of translating this talk into action.” [1]
The bourgeois student of revolutions portrays their characteristics in meaningless social-psychological terms: the Puritan revolution was “pious,” the American “mild,” the French “ferocious.” But all three were manifestations of the onward sweep of the bourgeois struggle for power. The piety of the Puritans did not prevent the execution of a king nor the use of dictatorship and force to crush the opposition, while the two American revolutions were far from mild in suppressing and expropriating their enemies. Revolutionary force is conditioned almost wholly by the scope and intensity of the old order’s resort to violence to regain its power.
In terms of history and sociology the “natural history” of revolutions must include:
The general unity of revolutions appears in the fact that they are a completion of fundamental social-economic changes. At the basis of revolution is the development of new forms of production and their increasing clash with the old, not merely in their technical-economic but in their class-political aspects. The clash might be resolved in terms of necessity and efficiency if technology and economics were the only conditioning factors and not themselves conditioned by a series of other factors. The technical-economic foundations of the clashing forms of production are interwoven with definite class, cultural, and political relations and institutions. Consequently the clash between old and new is resolved socially, by means of the class struggle and its economic, cultural, and political impacts. Economic, as old and new forms and relations of production clash; cultural, as the dominant culture and ideology represent the older relations of production, class interests, and class rule, against which arises the cultural and ideological revolt of the class representing the new relations of production; political, as the class struggle, the purposive or “subjective” factor in social change and revolution, is directed toward the retention or conquest of political power. Two general sets of factors underly the revolutionary struggle:
But within the general unity of revolutions there is a diversity which does not contradict the unity but historically complements it. Unity is in the purpose, the conquest of political power and the consolidation of the new order; diversity is in the means adopted to accomplish the purpose and in the forms of the new order. Means change because of changes in the technical-economic foundations of production and its social relations, in class alignments and political forms, in the character of the revolutionary class; the two constants in the means, force and dictatorship, change in their bases, application, and class objectives. The most fundamental difference in means is determined by the fact that the bourgeoisie was a propertied class, the proletariat is a non-propertied class. [2*] The fundamental difference in forms of the new order is this: Bourgeois revolution meant the rise to power of another propertied, exploiting class and a new system of class rule and exploitation: capitalism represents partly and only for a time the progressive forces of society, stifles new progressive forces, and eventually reacts against progress to maintain its rule. Proletarian revolution means the rise to power of a non-propertied, non-exploiting class and the resulting abolition of class rule and exploitation: socialism represents all and continuously the progressive forces of society, and liberates the forces of the onward movement toward the higher social system of communism.
While the major aspects of diversity are determined by differences in the successive revolutionary classes and the new social-economic conditions under which they operate, there are minor aspects of diversity in the revolutions of a particular class. The classical bourgeois revolutions were marked by considerable diversity within the limits of their essential unity. A belated bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia was succeeded almost immediately by the proletarian revolution. In colonial and semi-colonial lands, the bourgeois democratic revolution is now bound up with the anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation and the independent revolutionary upsurge of the workers and peasants. National differences in class-economic development, traditions, and ideology also impart diversity to the proletarian revolution, although it is much more unified than its predecessors.
One of the most important aspects of the diversity of revolutions is an acceleration of the revolutionary process, progressively shortening the intervals between one revolution and another. This is the joint result of differences in the technical-economic foundations of society and of an increasingly purposive character in revolution involving a larger awareness of purposes and means. [3*]
The revolutionary process was extremely slow, almost non-existent, in the ancient world. A commercial bourgeoisie arose, but it was unable to break through the barriers of the old order (this was also true later, and on a much larger scale, in India and China). Civilization after civilization stagnated or collapsed because of the slow growth of new social-economic forces. The class struggles which rent the Roman Empire for 500 years resulted in “the common ruin of the contending classes,” [2] in spite of the economic beginnings of serfdom which anticipated feudalism: the Empire broke down under the weight of its inner decomposition and the outer impact of the barbarian invasions (the whole constituting a social revolution). Although feudalism had a shorter span of life than the ancient world, it endured nearly 1,000 years before a revolutionary process began with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose free towns and free wage labor upset feudal-serf relations. Within 300 years in England and 400 years in France, the bourgeois revolution was triumphant; 100 years later, capitalism, dominating the world, began to decline and decay. Acceleration was marked in the bourgeois revolution and its social changes. It is still more marked in the proletarian revolution. Capitalism was challenged in 1848, by a small insignificant group of communist exiles who issued the Communist Manifesto. The proletariat was a small class, isolated, brutally exploited, despised. Yet, with the creative insight of scientific understanding, Marx saw in the proletariat the class destined to overthrow capitalism, end class rule and exploitation, and transform the world. This was sheer madness to the vulgarly comfortable bourgeois and philanthropic reformers. But the proletariat was the typical, permanent class creation of capitalism, a class growing in numbers, organized by the mechanism of capitalist production itself, becoming increasingly aware of its revolutionary tasks. Seventy years after the Communist Manifesto was issued, the proletarian revolution was triumphant in Russia, the Soviet Union celebrated its sixteenth anniversary fifty years after the death of Marx, and now capitalism everywhere is not merely challenged but threatened by international communism. Acceleration is cumulative.
Objectively, the acceleration of the proletarian revolutionary process is determined by the constantly swifter tempo of technical-economic change under capitalism and its impact on social relations. Former social systems were comparatively static, capitalism is demoniacally dynamic, its technical-economic conditions perpetually changed by the technological application of science and the pressure of accumulation. Capitalist production must expand or break down. Yet capitalism itself develops the forces which impose iron fetters upon its expansion. This appears in relative form in the increasingly disastrous cyclical disturbances, and in absolute form in the decline and decay of capitalism. Decline and decay flourish in the midst of all the class-economic factors necessary for the transition to a new social order: the collective forms of production, which are the objective basis of socialism, and the proletariat, which is the carrier of socialism. Capitalism is not merely transitional, it is the most transitional of all social systems. It has neither the economic nor the cultural stability and “wholeness” of earlier systems; more than its predecessors, capitalism is driven onward by social-economic change. Any society based on class antagonisms must end in revolution or decline. But capitalism endures least of all. It is driven mercilessly and swiftly to create its own negation. It is merely a promise of socialism. Precisely because it has been the most progressive of systems, capitalism speeds up the process of social change and revolutionary action.
Subjectively, the acceleration of the revolutionary process is determined by the constantly more conscious and purposive factors in revolution. There was no awareness of the purposes and means of revolution in the ancient world. Awareness appears in the bourgeois revolutions, if incompletely and mainly in the later phases. The conscious and purposive factors appear completely only in the proletarian revolution, for Marxism-Leninism, which is communism, is scientifically aware of the laws of social development underlying and conditioning program and action. Because of awareness of purposes and means, immediate and final, Marxism-Leninism consciously and creatively acts upon class-economic forces to accomplish its purposes. It is no longer largely a case of the impact of social forces upon revolutionary purposes and means, but of the impact as well of purposes and means upon social forces. Awareness becomes itself a social force. This manifested itself on a magnificent scale in the proletarian revolution in Russia, where Bolshevik awareness of purposes and means creatively acted upon the class-ideological crisis produced by an unusual combination of circumstances to accelerate the revolutionary process, to drive on to a socialist conclusion while mechanical Menshevik “Marxists” insisted that only a capitalist conclusion was possible and advisable. Marxism is a form of social engineering. [4*] Man, the worker, dominates this revolution.
This communist awareness of purposes and means is becoming a creative social force in American society, which is definitely moving toward the conditions of a revolutionary struggle for power. The struggle has been slow in coming, primarily because the unusually swift tempo and great magnitude of American economic progress checked and distorted the elements of proletarian class-consciousness and action. But the tempo and the magnitude, now in reverse action, will henceforth as effectively hasten revolutionary action as formerly they retarded it. They make the crisis and its pressure more acute. Nowhere are the collective forms of production as highly developed; nowhere is the clash as sharp between them and the older relations of individual ownership and appropriation. The new order strains insistently against the class-economic fetters of the old relations. The new revolutionary class strains insistently against the class-ideological fetters restraining its independence and action. Communist awareness intervenes in a situation which is the product of the whole development of American society. The immediate factors involved are fivefold:
In the struggle for power the two decisive classes are the proletariat and the upper bourgeoisie (who struggle for hegemony over the other classes and groups) – the one as representative of the relations of the new social order, the other as representative of the old. The interests of the proletariat are class interests, but they express the progressive interests of society in general. For if the revolutionary workers do not act, if the basic economic drive of capitalism – production and realization of surplus value, the accumulation of capital – is left to work itself out unchecked, then decline and decay must doom civilization itself. Hence the significance of the proletariat as the carrier of the new social order, of socialism.
The struggle is irreconcilable as it represents the clash of two systems. If capitalism prevents the emergence of socialism, decline and decay must ensue. If socialism emerges, capitalism is crushed. Liberals who catch ideas on the wing, combine them haphazardly, never bother with fundamentals, and scornfully reject the Marxist analysis of class-economic forces, antagonisms, and development – these liberals propose to “reconcile” the struggle, combine the “best” features of capitalism and socialism: “Beyond lies the struggle between the systems called communism and capitalism, Russia being champion of one, the United States of the other ... Both systems in the last analysis have similar goals, of which the most immediate and important is the abolition of poverty [!] ... Conceivably the two systems might ultimately fuse into one basic pattern. In it the best features of both private enterprise and state control would be retained.” [3] This is state capitalism, the bastardized socialism used by the ruling class to maintain its power. It is not the “fusing” of two systems “into one basic pattern.” It is merely an aspect of the capitalist struggle for power, against which the proletariat must thrust its own revolutionary force and Marxist consciousness.
But, answer the liberals, Marxism is alien to the “American mind,” an imported ideology. Yet the “American mind” of the colonial era accepted an imported revolutionary ideology that met the needs of the rising bourgeois class. The social or national “mind,” moreover, changes in accordance with changes in social-economic relations and class needs. An ideology may linger beyond its material basis, but only precariously and under sentence of death. The “American mind” has accepted ideas and institutions which it subsequently rejected, and this process has not come to a standstill (except in the minds of the ruling class and its apologists). Marxism is alien neither to the American nor any other national “mind.” For Marxism is the scientific, dynamic, always enriched crystallization of the needs and experiences of the working class in its struggle for emancipation, and it is acceptable to any working class moving toward the struggle for power.
They say the American labor movement has no Marxist or revolutionary traditions. But this, even if it were true, is not particularly relevant. Revolutions do not arise because of revolutionary traditions, and they may arise without any traditions. A class in action to overthrow an outworn social order creates its own revolutionary traditions.
The implication is not merely that American labor has developed on a non-Marxist basis, but contrary to the Marxist analysis of the class struggle and its revolutionary function. This is a complete misunderstanding both of the American labor movement and of Marxism.
One may say with strict Marxist accuracy: the development of capitalism creates the objective conditions for socialism by socializing production and making the proletariat the most important class economically; the pressure of capitalist exploitation forces the workers to organize against the exploiters in an independent class movement; struggle and experience, plus the theoretical activity of the more conscious and revolutionary minority, impart to the labor movement increasingly larger objectives, militancy, and awareness, until eventually it initiates a revolutionary struggle for power and the overthrow of capitalism.
This formulation apparently excludes the American labor movement. Capitalism was most highly developed in the United States, yet the revolutionary aspects of its labor movement were insignificant. But the Marxist conception is more dialectical, richer, more varied than its general formulation, which characterizes the main features of a whole historical epoch. Within this epoch, peculiarities of national development due to the uneven growth of capitalism, cultural lag, and other factors may temporarily produce combinations apparently contradictory of the general formulation: capitalism + proletariat = revolutionary labor movement. Marx himself said:
“The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relation of rulers and ruled, as it grows immediately out of production itself and reacts upon it as a determining element ... The form of this relation between rulers and ruled naturally corresponds always with a definite stage in the development of the methods of labor and of its productive social power. This does not prevent the same economic basis from showing infinite variations and gradations in its appearance, even though its principal conditions are everywhere the same. This is due to innumerable outside circumstances, natural environment, race peculiarities, outside historical influences, and so forth, all of which must be ascertained by careful analysis.” [4]
It was primarily the peculiarity that Britain, from 1870 to 1900, had almost a monopoly of imperialist exploitation, in the profits of which the upper layers of the working class shared, that retarded the growth of a class-conscious labor movement. This peculiarity of economic development intensified the separation of organized skilled workers from the unorganized unskilled, while the prevailing class relations permitted an alliance between laborites and liberals. Yet out of the pressure of events and capitalist decline emerged a class labor movement, which to-day objectively challenges capitalism and whose reformist limitations and frustration project the necessity of communist struggle and revolution.
What are the peculiarities of the American labor movement and how are they explicable in terms of concrete application of the Marxist conception?
The development of the labor movement in the more industrial nations of Europe may roughly be divided into three stages:
Thus far the American labor movement has also had three stages. But one of its stages never appeared in Europe, it is only now in the stage of capitalist decline and approaching revolutionary struggle, and its whole development was profoundly influenced by national peculiarities in economic development and class relations.
There was no upthrust of left wing proletarian elements in the American Revolution, as in the English and the French (Levellers, Babeuf). Nor was the American Revolution as drastic, for there was no feudalism and the farmers were not an oppressed peasantry. Shays’ Rebellion was one of those agrarian-debtor revolts which run like a red thread through American history. Thus, unlike Europe, the American bourgeois revolution did not lead to the appearance of a revolutionary proletarian left wing.
While in Europe, in the period 1820-50, the workers emerged as a measurably independent class, engaged in militant struggle, and forged the theory and tactics of socialism, the American workers were not only still inchoate as a class but were almost wholly under the influence of agrarian radicalism. Nowhere in Europe was there an aggressive agrarian class in action (except later in Russia, and there in a form different from the American). The agrarian class was insignificant in Britain, subordinate to Junkertum in Germany, and satisfied with its small holdings in France. American agrarians, on the contrary, constituted a class infinitely larger than the working class, increasing twice as rapidly as the rest of the population, and markedly independent, which dominated social protest and politics for two generations. Agrarian radicalism, from its philosophical expression in Jefferson to the practical politics of Jackson, was crudely but militantly anti-capitalist and impressed itself on labor’s program and ideology. But agrarian radicalism is anti-capitalist only in the most petty-bourgeois sense, and this was particularly true of the American variety. American agriculture, owing to the perpetual renewal of the frontier and its new lands, acquired, along with its democratic propertied independence, an intensely speculative capitalist character. In spite of its radicalism, American agriculture strengthened capitalism economically and ideologically.
The early American labor movement (1825-35) was composed mainly of craftsmen and mechanics, either independent or employed in petty enterprises. Typical industrial workers, except in textiles, were scarce; the American factory system was not only infinitely smaller than in England but even smaller than in France and Germany, where the output of manufactures considerably exceeded the output in the United States. Thus, in 1840, while England produced 1,390,000 tons of pig iron and France 350,000 tons, the United States produced only 290,000 tons, not much more than Germany’s 170,000 tons. [5] The individualism of the craftsmen and mechanics (many of whom, including some of the union organizers, were alternately employers and workers while employers were frequently members of the unions), predisposed them to agrarian radicalism and ideology. Labor supported the Jacksonian revolt, and independent labor parties had major agrarian radical demands along with specific labor and democratic demands, while the philosophers of the movement were almost wholly agrarians. These philosophers appealed to “the dispossessed” and urged an “equal division of property.” [6]
Agrarianism was rooted in strong and persistent economic conditions and class relations. Migration to the frontier now assumed larger proportions, with the opening of the Ohio Valley, and intensified the struggle for free land. It was not, however, simply a matter of the more aggressive workers in revolt against conditions of life and labor migrating to the frontier and thus depriving the working class of the elements most capable of building a militant movement. This was undoubtedly significant, but the majority of workers did not migrate, and the migration overseas of workers did not prevent the growth of a class labor movement in Europe. More significant was the perpetual renewal of classes by successive sectional development, which prevented coalescence of the workers as a conscious and independent class and by the fluidity of classes within the older settled regions. Workers in the older regions might begin to develop a class program and ideology; this development was retarded, distorted, and upset by the emergence of workers in the newly settled regions who were submerged by the petty-bourgeois agrarian ideology and radicalism. In Europe there was an economic expansion within the old circles of class relations; in the United States new circles were formed by sectional expansion, which recapitulated the development from lower to higher, from older to newer, forms both in economy and class relations. Moreover, the agrarian class was much larger and grew more rapidly than the workers; it was a petty-bourgeois class waging war against developing capitalism and consequently distorted the ideology and program of the workers, as industrialism was still to conquer the American scene. There was militant struggle and organization among the workers, but whenever they went beyond ordinary shop and specific labor demands and formulated general political demands the labor parties, for the most part, accepted the slogans, program, and ideology of the agrarian radicals. The instability of class relations and agrarian influences prevented labor from separating itself from alien class influences, of developing an independent class movement such as developed in Europe during this period. There was no comparable European stage, as there was no comparable phenomenon of the successive sectional development of an expanding frontier and its influence on class relations.
All these elements were bound up with the prevalence of democracy and the absence of those petty-bourgeois revolutionary democratic struggles which were so important in developing the militancy and consciousness of European workers. Of this peculiarity, Marx said in 1852:
“With nations enjoying an older civilization, having developed class distinctions, modern conditions of production, an intellectual consciousness wherein all traditions of old have been dissolved through the work of centuries ... the republic means only the political revolutionary form of bourgeois society, not its conservative form of existence, as is the case in the United States of America, where, true enough, the classes already exist, but have not yet acquired permanent character, are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another; where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant population, rather compensate for the relative scarcity of heads and hands; and, finally, where the feverishly youthful life of material production, which has to appropriate a new world to itself, has so far left neither time nor opportunity to abolish the illusions of old.” [7] ...
Industrialism had made great progress by 1850-60, but the older class relations and ideology persisted, although the newly revived unions had partly shaken off alien class influences (employers were now excluded from membership). The unions were still composed mainly of craftsmen and mechanics. Progressive labor was caught in the struggle for free land and over slave or free labor. Slavery was a vital issue, but the workers’ attitude was more a reflection of the interests of Western agrarians than of their own class interests. Unionism was practically destroyed by the crisis of 1857, and then the Civil War intervened. During the war, labor had no independent program. It was the passive ally of Western farmers and Northern capitalists.
The Civil War, with its objective purpose of smashing slavery, was measurably a completion of the bourgeois revolution, with these important differences: it was a sectional struggle, there was no feudal class to fight and to arouse comprehensive revolutionary ideas and energy (which also, in general, explains the vulgar character of American liberalism), and the Northern victory signalized the conquest of commercial capitalism by industrial capitalism. One of the war’s decisive phases was the capitalist struggle against the middle class (small producers, merchant capitalists) – economically, in the increasing power of the big manufacturers, bankers, and speculators, and politically, in their increasing control of government, the repression of the Copperheads, who constituted an essentially petty-bourgeois opposition, and the subordination of the farmers to the capitalists. These circumstances determined the historical character of Reconstruction – it was only secondarily bourgeois democratic. The decisive measure of Reconstruction, political expropriation of the Southern states, was determined not only by the struggle against the slave power, but by the need to prevent the unity of Northern petty-bourgeois malcontents with the South, which would have swept the Republican party out of power and broken the industrial capitalist control of the national government. Despite their many revolutionary aspects (destruction of the slave system, expropriation of a class, and dictatorship as a means of class struggle), the Civil War and Reconstruction left no revolutionary imprint on labor’s mind.
Unionism revived under the impact of the war, increasing industrialization, and falling real wages. By 1870 there was a strong labor union movement, and during the next twenty-five years American labor was in the militant stage which had appeared in Europe before 1860. The early post-war labor leaders (e.g., William Silvis) were militant, even revolutionary, and they thought measurably in class terms. They recognized neither skill nor race nor color in the organization of labor – the Negro worker was accepted. The swiftly accelerated pace of industrialization forced the workers into action, and it was aggressive class action. Workers flocked into the Knights of Labor, the unionism of which was an inclusive class unionism embracing skilled and unskilled, all races and colors. The great strikes of 1877 assumed the character of mass insurrections, and were followed by strikes of an equally militant character, culminating in the 8-hour strikes of 1886 and ending with the great Pullman strike of 1894 (the “Debs Rebellion”). The militancy of American labor in this stage is indisputable, comparable with the militancy of any labor movement anywhere, and is of enormous theoretical, ideological, and practical significance to the revolutionary movement of to-day.
But while the earlier militant stage in Europe forged the theory and tactics of socialism and prepared the proletariat to act as an independent class, no similar development appeared in the United States. (No group of socially conscious intellectuals pioneered socialism, but this was itself a product of other factors.) The unions developed before socialism arose, and were not under socialist influence. There was a fundamental contradiction in the Knights of Labor: while the workers were militant, almost revolutionary, the leadership and ideology were not. The masses had to impose action upon the leaders, who did not believe in strikes. Although the movement was definitely anti-capitalist, this spirit was deflected into alien class politics. Free land was still an important (although vanishing) influence, and the workers were still under the influence of agrarian radicalism, manifested in their support of greenbackism and populism. In addition, the workers were now influenced by another alien class, the middle class. In Europe this class of small producers never led any considerable struggle against trustification of industry, partly because its subordination to trustified industry was relatively slow and incomplete, partly because it was afraid of the independent class action of labor. Lower middle class elements in revolt were forced into the socialist movement, which they influenced but could not wholly dominate. Industrialization and the growth of concentration and trustification, which in Europe were measurably separated, developed in the United States almost inseparably and with the speed of a locomotive. The growth of new industries increased the middle class of small producers, particularly in the newly settled regions of the frontier; simultaneously, concentration and trustification expropriated many small producers and inexorably transformed the middle class of independent employers into a new middle class of managerial and supervisory employees in corporate industry.
The old middle class led a struggle against trustified capitalism and its control of the government, and combined with the agrarian radicals in a movement for political power. (No such movement appeared in Europe: the demand there was not to “bust the trusts” but to nationalize them.) This petty-bourgeois movement submerged the workers in spite of their attempts at independent political action and the appearance of a socialist movement. Thus labor’s anti-capitalist spirit was again deflected into alien class politics, as well as into futile proposals for producers’ cooperation by the Knights of Labor (comparable to the earlier Proudhonism in France). There was an extremely suggestive contradiction between the workers’ militant mass movement and its political domination by agrarian and middle class radicals.
The Knights of Labor collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. By 1890 the organized workers broke away from middle class and agrarian radical leadership. Unfortunately, however, the break was bound up with the revolt of exclusive craft unionism against the inclusive class unionism of the Knights of Labor and rejection of all independent political opposition to capitalism. In separating from politics (which reappeared as the labor leaders’ individual scramble for political jobs), the American Federation of Labor also separated itself from the working class as a whole. The trade unions developed as an organized aristocracy of the upper layers of skilled labor, contemptuous of the unorganized and the unskilled. This was the exclusive, non-political unionism which prevailed in England, but which there was changed by the “new unionism” of the unskilled workers. One result of this was a class political party of the workers, the Labor Party. In the United States, however, although the peculiarities of class relations were disappearing, exclusive unionism and the backward character of the labor movement were perpetuated by hangovers of an older ideology which had become institutionalized and bureaucratized, and by two other peculiar American developments. Accelerated growth of industrial integration and trustification on a scale unparalleled in Europe made it extremely difficult to organize workers in the plants of massed capital. [6*] The difficulty was aggravated by an unprecedented influx of immigrants and their calculated concentration in basic trustified industries; most of these workers were former peasants of many stocks, whose racial antagonisms and language barriers were deliberately exploited by management (e.g., by the United States Steel Corporation). That some immigrant workers waged many militant strikes and organized progressive unions does not alter their general role but dialectically complements it. Immigration, moreover, as in the past, only more so, permitted workers of the older American stocks to rise to superior jobs in trustified industries and practically to monopolize the better-paid occupations in other industries. Unionism was split three ways: it was isolated from the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, it was limited almost wholly to the sheltered trades, and it comprised mainly American workers. The organized workers, largely because they represented a small minority of the working class, were able in the period 1896-1914 to secure higher real wages, while the wages of other workers were either stationary or moved downward. Hence the unions were not interested in a general class struggle against capitalism. On the contrary, unionism became a bulwark of capitalism, led by bureaucrats who acted as “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class” in the struggle against militant labor action.
The peculiarities of the American labor movement have been generalized into a theory by petty-bourgeois “labor experts” who consider the peculiarities permanent instead of exceptional and temporary. They consider the ideas of Samuel Gompers the “philosophy of stable trade unionism,” and saw progress in the German trade union bureaucracy’s increasing rejection of socialism. [8] The experts forget, however, that similar peculiarities of organization and policy in the English labor movement broke down under pressure of the organization of the unorganized mass of workers (and of the imperialist decay of capitalism): a movement embracing the majority of workers cannot wage a simple economic struggle, particularly where capitalism is declining. Moreover, despite national peculiarities and backwardness, the American labor movement concretely manifested in all stages the universal tendency to limit the employers’ authority in the shops and usurp some of their functions (“job control,” stressed by American labor) – an elementary form of labor’s struggle for power which assumes higher forms under pressure of favorable circumstances and in which is implicit the final revolutionary struggle for power.
By 1900 the objective peculiarities of American class relations had almost disappeared, although the older ideology persisted. There was no longer any frontier, with its perpetual renewal of classes and its influence on the instability of class relations. [7*] Agrarian radicalism was dead; the revolt of the farmers had been crushed in 1896, and their class-political importance declined rapidly with the end of the sectional expansion of agriculture and the growth of industry. These developments constituted the fundamental cause of the death of agrarian radicalism, although a contributing cause was the temporary and relative prosperity of agriculture produced by rising prices from 1896 to the World War. The sectional development of industry continued as the newly settled agricultural regions were industrialized, and added new elements to the middle class of small producers. Both the new and the older small producers were measurably crushed by the concentration of industry and centralization of financial control. The struggle of the “radical” middle class against the trusts persisted, affecting labor. But by 1914 monopoly capitalism was triumphant.
Monopoly capitalism was the decisive factor in the new economic set-up and class relations. The closing of the frontier contributed enormously to the decline of the agrarian class, but the closing was accelerated by industrial expansion under the influence primarily of monopoly capitalism, which was the agency also in the final subordination of agriculture to industry (and the development of the present agrarian crisis). Monopoly capitalism, moreover, crushed petty-bourgeois radicalism by transforming the middle class – expropriating many of the small producers, making the others dependent upon the larger corporations, and strengthening those elements of the middle class which are a direct product of monopoly capitalism (executives, experts, technicians, managerial and supervisory employees, small investors). Finally, the unusually rapid and great development of monopoly capitalism in the United States prevented organization of the unorganized masses and facilitated the institutionalization of exclusive unionism in the sheltered trades, while the super-profits of monopoly, directly or indirectly, made possible the higher wages which conservatized the upper layers of skilled workers and separated them from the working class.
The development of monopoly capitalism was enormously accelerated during the World War and the post-war period; it now dominates American economic life. Monopoly capitalism has completed the liquidation of the former objective peculiarities of American class relations begun by the closing of the frontier, and these class relations are now essentially the same as in any other highly industrial country (Table I).
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TABLE I |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
1870 |
% |
1920 |
% |
1929 |
% |
|
Working Class |
5,860,000 |
46.9 |
27,015,000 |
64.9 |
33,000,000 |
68.5 |
|
Farmers |
4,550,000 |
36.4 |
8,500,000 |
20.5 |
7,500,000 |
15.5 |
|
Bourgeoisie |
2,090,000 |
16.7 |
6,085,000 |
14.6 |
7,700,000 |
16.0 |
|
* Not available. |
||||||
The upper, or capitalist, bourgeoisie, 0.8% of the gainfully occupied, received in 1928 nearly 22% of the national income and 77% of all corporate dividends, and owned 46% of the nation’s capital resources (an ownership concentrated in the decisive corporations, yielding control over industry). This class dominates economics and politics; it is essentially a class of financial, not industrial, capitalists and rentiers, a small, wholly predatory oligarchy.
Farmers in 1929 were only 15.5% of the gainfully occupied, where they constituted 70% a century ago and over 36% sixty years ago. Still more important, the farmers are no longer primarily an independent propertied class. Mortgages rose from $7,875 million in 1920 to $9,468 million in 1928 (not including $3,500 million of other indebtedness); mortgage interest practically tripled between 1909 and 1927, while the share in agricultural income of the owners of leased farms increased 60%. The farmers’ share of the national income declined absolutely and relatively. Tenancy rose from 25.6% in 1880 to 38.1% in 1920 and 42.4% in 1930. While the number of farms decreased from 6,448,343 in 1920 to 6,288,648 in 1930, farms of 500 acres up rose from 217,224 to 240,316; the largest increase was in farms of 1,000 acres up, which rose from 67,405 to 80,620. Class divisions among the farmers may be thus roughly classified: 500,000 capitalist farmers, owners of fairly large farms, some of whom also rent land, and the “farmers” whose sole business is leasing the farms they own; 2,000,000 middle class farmers, owners and tenants of medium-sized farms, whose position becomes continuously more precarious; 3,500,000 poor farmers, the majority of small owners and tenants, pauperized American peasants deprived of nearly all possibility of rising in the economic scale. (The balance are farm laborers on home farms.) The farmers are no longer an independent, homogeneous, powerful class; they are now incapable of leading a great mass movement against capitalist abuses, of developing an agrarian radicalism which can dominate the ideology and political program of the workers. With a permanent crisis and surplus population in agriculture, it becomes possible, under the new economic set-up and class relations, to rally the mass of the farmers to the revolutionary struggle of the workers. The immediate program must include the repudiation of debts and expropriation of non-operators. The final program must include the socialization of farming, its socialist unity with industry. For American agriculture, with its many large-scale farms, its increasing efficiency and labor displacement, cannot prosper (except in exceptional cases and regions) on the basis of small business production.
The lower and intermediate bourgeoisie, as a class in between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the working class, is of extreme importance in the social-economic structure of American capitalism; they made the most striking gains of any class during the 1923-1929 prosperity. The middle class in 1929 constituted 15.2% of the gainfully occupied (the same as the farmers in numbers), received, in 1928, 30% of the national income and 20% of corporate dividends, and owned 34% of the nation’s capital resources. But this is not the same middle class whose decay Marx correctly predicted. The old middle class was essentially a class of independent small producers, who are now comparatively unimportant, completely subordinate to the monopolist combinations of capital. The new middle class is essentially a class of technical, managerial, and supervisory employees in corporate industry and investors (along with small producers, storekeepers, professionals and other elements which constituted the old middle class). The lower bourgeoisie is mainly composed of the older middle-class elements, and is deprived of economic or political independence. The intermediate bourgeoisie, or upper middle class, is composed mainly of the newer middle class elements; it is a direct product of monopoly capitalism, upon which it is wholly dependent. This upper middle class in 1929 comprised 2,750,000 persons gainfully occupied, 5.7% of the total, received, in 1928, 17% of the national income and 14% of corporate dividends, and owned 20% of total capital resources. Middle class “radical” revolt against trustified capitalism is now impossible on any considerable scale; the lower middle class has not the strength, the upper middle class has not the desire. Any “revolt” of the middle class, independent of the workers, can today proceed only within the orbit of monopoly capitalism and fascism. But the lower bourgeoisie may be won over to the cause of the workers. From 40% to 50% of its members are hired employees. In 1927, only 353,000 were independent entrepreneurs in manufactures, mining, and construction, and 1,499,000 in retail trade. [9] The functional groups in the lower bourgeoisie – the technicians, teachers, professionals – can be approached on the basis of their functional interests: they are increasingly unemployed, and only socialism can release their craft function for social service.
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The working class is now the largest and economically most important class; in 1929 it constituted (wage and clerical) 68.5% of the gainfully occupied, but received, in 1928, only 41% of the national income and 1.2% of corporate dividends, and owned only 4.7% of total capital resources (concentrated in a small minority of better-paid skilled and clerical workers). There is no longer the old fluidity of classes and instability of class relations, whether due to the frontier, sectional industrial development, or immigration; the workers have coalesced as a class, particularly the industrial proletariat which constitutes the spearhead of the working class. Once it could be said: revolutionary movements are not possible in the United States because there is no class stratification, as in Europe; American class stratification is now definite and final. The new class relations and balance of class power permit the working class to separate itself ideologically from all other classes in conformity with its objective separation. Any considerable revolt of the workers against capitalism can no longer be deflected into alien agrarian or middle class radical politics. The new class relations and the multiplying contradictions and antagonisms of monopoly capitalism (and imperialism) prepare the objective conditions for the revolutionary struggle of the working class against capitalism.
One of the “new” liberals nonchalantly says: “Already the middle class in America, not including the farmers, outnumbers the working class ... Adding farmers to the middle class, the majority in sheer numbers is large ... America still has a proletariat, but every automatic process, every battery of photoelectric cells, diminishes its numbers and its political importance.” [10] This is sheer fantasy. In 1929, the wage-workers alone, excluding clerical workers, constituted 58.1% of the gainfully occupied a clear majority. In spite of its numerical increase, the bourgeoisie, which includes the middle class, stands, if anything, in a slightly smaller ratio than in 1870. It is another fantasy to assume that technology will proceed smoothly, uninterruptedly toward the abolition of the proletariat. [8*] The proletariat, the industrial workers, is a majority of all wage-workers, and in a larger proportion than it was in 1870. This class is the carrier of socialism. It is the heart of the working class, and its might flows from control of industry – a control more mighty than in 1870, because industry is now more pervasive and more complex. A revolutionary class, moreover, does not come to power because of numerical superiority; it comes to power because it represents new forms of production, the forces of social progress. This is the answer to fascism. It is the answer to the wavering of petty-bourgeois elements, for these elements can be won over or neutralized if the proletariat manifests its revolutionary might, if it shows itself capable of carrying on the struggle for power to a successful conclusion.
Yet there was no revolutionary upsurge of the working class in the period 1923-29, despite the new class relations; except for the Communist party, all labor organizations became more and more conservative under the influence of the “new capitalism.” The explanation is simple: the institutionalized ideology of older class relations was still dominant and was strengthened by an unusual upswing of prosperity, due to an unusual combination of circumstances which had appeared only once before in American history, in the seven years after the Civil War. Prosperity was the product mainly of an exceptional expansion of old and new industries and the increasing export of capital and imperialism, in which the imperialist decline of Europe was of crucial importance. But these same forces produced an aggravated depression and introduced the period of decline of American capitalism.
Monopoly capitalism has two contradictory aspects. It is capitalism at its highest, based on the technical integration and corporate concentration of industry – a socialization of production which constitutes the objective basis of socialism. But monopoly capitalism is also capitalism in decay, rent asunder by aggravated contradictions. Capitalist “organization” turns into its opposite and produces more disorganization. Finance capital, speculative and adventurous, intensifies the basic instability of capitalist production. Monopoly, however incomplete, relatively restricts the technological and social development of production. This is aggravated by decline. Capitalism becomes more of a fetter upon the productive forces, begins to decay.
The American ruling class will try to “solve” the mounting contradictions involved in restricted home markets and economic decline by an intensification of imperialism to secure foreign markets for surplus goods and surplus capital. But while that may solve some problems it produces other problems and ultimately makes worse the economic decline, as imperialism is the extension and aggravation on a world scale of all the inner contradictions and antagonisms of capitalist production. Imperialist powers in Europe and Asia also seek foreign markets to absorb surplus goods and surplus capital. Foreign markets become relatively restricted; colonial and other economically backward countries tend to develop their own industries and capital resources, and are infected by the general capitalist decay as their “normal” economic development is hampered by monopoly capitalism and imperialism (economic tribute, political pressure). Intensified competition among the imperialist powers sharpens the danger of war, including war against the Soviet Union, and accelerates the general economic decline, although this decline may be interrupted by temporary up-swings of prosperity in different countries and at different times. These developments mean more exploitation of the workers, driving them to revolt, aided ideologically by the example of the working class building socialism in the Soviet Union. Imperialism converts the world into a revolutionary arena, where the struggle ranges from colonial revolts to the direct proletarian struggle for the seizure of power. War is transformed into civil war against capitalism and for socialism.
Thus the very forces which produced the “resplendent” prosperity of 1923-29 are now creating its negation, the decay and decline of capitalism, creating the negation of labor conservatism.
The basic cause of union conservatism in the years of 1923-29 was not the general rise of real wages – the rise was very small among the majority of workers and was partly offset by increasing technological unemployment; the basic cause was an unusually high rise of real wages among the organized skilled workers, with some few exceptions such as the miners, large gains in some cases (e.g., building trades). The wages of skilled workers, moreover, kept on rising after 1923, although real wages were stationary or decreased among the majority of unorganized workers. The unions were satisfied; they considered prosperity and rising wages everlasting. But union loyalty and membership declined – the American Federation of Labor lost 2,000,000 members, and “welfare” capitalism and company unions developed great strength. While the labor union bureaucracy urged “class peace” the capitalists waged class war upon labor in the form of welfare capitalism and company unions, which are an expression of the class struggle. Union wages rose but the unions were threatened by technological changes and by the base of unionism becoming still more narrowly one of privileged skilled workers. There were many predictions that unionism might wholly disappear. Many of the union bureaucrats felt that new tactics were necessary, but they characteristically evaded the issue by proposing to “sell” unionism to the employers on a business basis, to foster labor-management cooperation, to develop a vulgar philosophy of “trade union” capitalism, to organize labor banks which the Grand Chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers considered the “American answer to Marx and Lenin.” The banks are now a mass of ruins.
This decline of unionism was not merely the result of prosperity but of the new economic set-up. Craft unionism, adapted to small-scale competitive capitalism, cannot survive in its old form the coming of monopoly capitalism, of the concentration of industry in larger aggregations of capital. This was admitted by John R. Commons, the father of the theory that the older American unionism and its limited objectives are eternal and the basis of the labor movement:
“The period of banker capitalism is the modern variation of Karl Marx’ theory of the ultimate concentration of all industry ... Labor movements now face a new problem and take on a puzzling new formation ... In the face of this situation of the twentieth century all labor movements except in Russia seem to be helpless and their leaders despondent ... It may be that labor movements will be relegated to the history which now shrouds the guilds of the Middle Ages or that craft unionism will turn to industrial unionism or communism.” [11]
The “banker capitalism” is monopoly capitalism, against which craft unionism is helpless. But the events of 1923-29 did not mean the end of unionism. Now, under the conditions of economic decline, intensified class struggle, and an influx of new members, the unions are becoming stronger, more militant, moving toward industrial unionism, responding to new conditions and new tasks. One expression of this was the great series of strikes in 1934 (in which a new tactic was evolved of cooperation with organizations of the unemployed and the farmers), including the magnificent general strike in San Francisco.
Left wings within the old unions will urge more militant class action and the broadening of the basis of unionism. The unorganized workers, tormented by economic decline, will move toward action and the organization of industrial unions. Unions will become organs of struggle, and can survive and develop only as organs of struggle. This awakening to organization and action, limiting the possibility of capitalist concessions to comparatively small groups of privileged workers, will force the workers to independent political action, which, under American conditions, may at first mean a labor party. We are not, however, in England, in the year 1900, but in a revolutionary epoch of larger perspectives and struggle. A labor party, despite its significance, presents infinitely more problems than it solves. Organization of a labor party means simply that the masses are in motion, that they accept independent political action, and are prepared for larger objectives. These larger objectives must inevitably become a revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, which laborism has proven itself incapable of waging. That is the task of the communist party and its Marxist program, disciplined organization, and awareness of purposes and means, unifying all phases of the proletarian struggle.
As the objective conditions are favorable for the development of an American revolutionary labor movement and communism, the ideological backwardness of the workers must disappear, although it is still an important problem of approach.
But where ideological backwardness formerly represented the overwhelming weight of objective economic conditions and class relations, backwardness now is simply a weakening cultural lag. Already unemployment, mass starvation, and capitalist repression are creating deep scars in the workers’ consciousness, accompanied by a process of submerged ideological transformation which is slowly but surely becoming articulate. Capitalist relations are being undermined by the crisis of the system; the prospect is one of successively more violent cyclical collapses, of chronic hard times and short-lived spotty prosperity, of imperialist war and growing world revolutionary struggles. The ideological transformation now being wrought will be intensified by coming events and struggles. Communist agitation and action are conscious, purposive factors in the process of ideological transformation, stimulating, clarifying, organizing, the combination of mass struggle and the “patient explanation” of which Lenin spoke (six months before the conquest of power).
The American revolutionary movement, moreover, is not a clean slate. Despite its agrarian and petty-bourgeois reformist ideology and illusions, the American working class repeatedly demonstrated its capacity for militant struggle in the years 1877-94 – the railroad strikes of 1877, which spread to other industries and became almost a national general strike; the mighty 8-hour demonstrations ten years later; the great Pullman strike of 1894. The ensuing twenty years were marked by another series of great strikes among the coal and copper miners, the textile workers and other groups of the working class. In these actions the workers manifested an incomparable spirit of solidarity and courage, their militancy often assuming the form of a struggle verging on civil war. There is nothing finer in the strike annals of European labor.
Most of these strikes were waged within the circumscribed limits of an ideology which rejected the larger class character and class objectives of the labor movement. After 1900, however, changing class relations and relative economic decline produced the beginnings of ideological change in American labor. There was increasing discontent among the unions of skilled workers, demands for amalgamation, more aggressive struggle and independent political action. Socialism was becoming a force; although the Socialist party represented mainly petty-bourgeois reformism and the unionism of the aristocracy of labor, it had significant proletarian elements which subsequently became the basis of the American Communist party. The Socialist Labor party and the Industrial Workers of the World built up traditions of real value to the contemporary revolutionary movement – the one in its struggle against opportunism, both socialist and trades union, its emphasis on the importance of a disciplined party of uncompromising revolutionists, and its Marxist conception of industrial unionism; the other in the great strikes it waged and its stirring to action of the unorganized unskilled workers. The labor movement was approaching the European model, both in its general character and in the struggle between reformist and revolutionary tendencies. American labor was not exceptional, the tempo of its progress was simply slower.
This progress was interrupted by the World War, when Gompersism became still more reactionary. But the Socialist party, under mighty pressure of the left wing, adopted an anti-war program, which was, however, practically sabotaged by the party leaders. Out of the party’s left wing emerged the Communist party. Immediately after the war, in 1919, accumulated working class resentment flared up in a series of great strikes – the steel strike, in which unskilled workers waged one of the greatest labor struggles in American history, and the Seattle and Winnipeg general strikes, in which the strike committees, particularly in Seattle, usurped many of the functions of government in the manner of Soviets. Labor and the unions were being radicalized, the American Federation of Labor accepted the Plumb Plan for a sort of workers’ control of the railroads, and the capitalist press spoke fearfully of revolution. The government let loose an unprecedented campaign of terrorism against the workers, and particularly against the communists. There was another upsurge of militant strikes in 1921-22, when the workers’ stubborn resistance to wage cuts was largely responsible for the rise in real wages by preventing a fall in money wages as great as the fall in prices. The process of radicalization culminated in 1924 in the acceptance of independent political action by the American Federation of Labor and the railroad brotherhoods. But the acceptance of independent political action was an empty gesture, for the process of radicalization had temporarily stopped. Under the impact of prosperity the unions became more and more conservative.
A repetition of the 1923-29 experience, when radicalization was submerged by prosperity, is now impossible, as the decline of capitalism prevents the revival of prosperity on any considerable scale. The forces which produced that submergence, it is now clear, multiplied economic and class contradictions, weakened the conservative unions, and prepared the appearance of an American revolutionary movement. Militant struggles will break loose again; but unlike the struggles of former years they will, under the impact of economic decline, favorable class relations, and communist awareness of purposes and means, assume larger dimensions and objectives, press onward to the struggle for the conquest of political power.
Communism thus builds upon the dialectic movement of economic and class forces in this country, the heritage of the militant experience and traditions of the American working class, and the determination to utilize realistically and creatively every favorable element in the American scene for proletarian revolution, which alone can overthrow capitalism and prepare the coming of socialism.
Are the communists isolated? Are they rejected by the American working class? But communism represents the larger historical interests of the working class (as well as its immediate interests) and the only alternative to social decline and decay. It is a minority, but it is also the advance guard of a class, issuing a challenge, creating an ideology, rallying the iron battalions for the coming struggle. A century ago the American Abolitionists were also isolated, spurned and repressed by the very class whose interests they served, yet that class was eventually compelled to wage a civil war to settle the issue of slavery. The working class will increasingly accept the program of its conscious representatives, the communists, the Abolitionists of to-day who are waging war to abolish capitalism and wage-slavery. Ideological struggle and preparation are an indispensable preliminary of revolution.
There is no conflict, but harmony, between the tasks imposed upon labor by American capitalist decline and the aspirations of communism. Nor is there any conflict between communism and the special problems created by the hangovers of peculiarities in the development of the American economy, class relations, and labor movement. That it is necessary to consider such problems was urged by Marx and Lenin. In 1920, when the Communist International emerged as a definite organization, Lenin stressed that the communist approach means “to investigate, study, ascertain, grasp the nationally peculiar, nationally specific features in the concrete attempts of every country to solve the aspects of a single international problem.” [12] Thus communism does not exclude consideration of national differences, but it considers them to facilitate and not to evade the revolutionary struggle.
The moderate reformist socialists, echoing (as usual) the vulgar petty-bourgeois radicals, argue that communism is alien to the American scene, a sort of unnaturalized stranger in our midst. But that is precisely what was said of the Socialist party when it still clung to some of its revolutionary pretensions. It considers peculiar national problems simply as another argument for democratic reform and opportunism, for the renunciation of revolutionary struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. That is everywhere characteristic of contemporary socialism, which represents the vestigial remains of the pre-war opportunist labor movement. Marxism was met by peculiar national problems in Russia; the Menshevik socialists made of them an argument against proletarian revolution, the Bolsheviks utilized them to facilitate the revolution. Mensheviks opposed the Bolshevik revolution on the plea that capitalism was insufficiently developed for proletarian revolution. But capitalism was sufficiently developed in Germany, yet the socialists opposed proletarian revolution on the plea that democracy was insufficiently developed to realize socialism. Both evasions are combined in the policy of the Spanish socialists – they plead that both capitalism and democracy are insufficiently developed in Spain to make socialism the immediate issue. Thus the socialists defend capitalism. Meanwhile the communists in the Soviet Union build socialism ...
More worthy of analysis are the arguments on the need of “Americanizing” communism which are being discussed among intellectuals moving toward communism. (This leftward movement of the intellectuals is an enormously significant social symptom, unprecedented in American history, as one of the indications of coming revolution is desertion of the ruling class by intellectuals who accept the cause of an oppressed class struggling for power.)
One group of intellectuals “Americanize” by stressing technology and the engineers – either as an argument against communism or as an argument for some not clearly defined change in the communist approach. Technology and engineers, of course, are not unknown in Europe, and their significance is not exclusively American. The high development of technology offers more aids than obstacles to revolution. Engineers as a class are not capable of becoming revolutionary, as they are bound up with all the exploiting relations of capitalist production. Marxism envisages the significance of technology – its accelerated development complicates all the contradictions and antagonisms of capitalism and it is one of the factors in revolutionary tactics. To offer, however, the “technological” conception of revolution as a substitute for communism and its reliance on an inclusive social theory and on the proletariat can lead only to adventurism – or fascism.
Another group stresses the “American spirit.” It has discovered a “vital mysticism” in Karl Marx of which no one was previously aware. “One must needs defend the Soviet Union ... But we must forge our part of the world future in the form of our own genius.” Yes, but ...? What does it mean in terms of concrete revolutionary problems and definite communist tasks? It means too much or too little. If it means that communism must draw its inspiration only or even mainly from “our own genius,” it is too much, as that is the conception of petty-bourgeois philistines. If it means that communism must necessarily be colored by its American environment, it is too little, for the question is, “In what way?” The general, abstract formulation of the problem invites non-communist interpretation.
Still another group stresses what may be called “understandability.” It insists that the “supremely important job” now is to “Americanize” communism; it is slightly more concrete than other “Americanizers” but offers only substitutions – the substitution of “equity” for communism, of “unearned increment” for surplus value, and “interactions of social groups” for class struggle. These substitutions might be justified on one or both of two counts: they are more easily understood by the American masses and they are more realistic or scientific than the Marxist terminology. But the substitutions do not possess more understandability – communism is acquiring definite meaning among the masses (it is identified with the Soviet Union’s achievements; with what is “equity” identified?), “unearned increment” would have to be explained as much as surplus value, and class struggle and class war are as elemental as the masses whom “interactions of social groups” would completely baffle. Nor are the substitutions more realistic or scientific – “equity” is all things to all men and is claimed alike by religion, capitalism, and fascism, the bourgeois economists are not agreed upon the meaning of “unearned increment,” which, moreover, justifies part of the capitalist plunder, and “interactions of social groups” (a typical product of evasive and apologetic American sociology) is as indefinite as class struggle is definite. These abstract approaches to the problem not only vulgarize the issues involved but may lead to liquidation of communism. In one of its aspects “Americanization” becomes the product of practical revolutionary development, of class and party action and experience. In another and correlative aspect “Americanization” means the necessity of concrete Marxist analysis of the special problems created by peculiarities in the development of the American economy, class relations, and labor movement – and this is necessary not only in the United States, but in all countries.
The fundamental “special” problem which confronts American communism is the necessity of combining two stages in the development of the labor movement – the stage of elementary class action and the stage of preparatory revolutionary action. Despite their considerable militant traditions, the American workers have still to take the first real steps toward larger independent class action, often the most primitive forms of such action. The working class cannot skip stages, but neither can stages be rigidly separated. Communism cannot isolate itself from the elementary forms of developing class action, but neither can this action be isolated from the necessity of more conscious revolutionary action and organization. For the epoch is revolutionary. Thus the struggle to organize unions among the unorganized workers may at any moment become a struggle to throw them into larger mass actions, to organize them into Soviets. This “special” American problem is an aspect of the necessity of linking up the final objectives of communism with the most elementary needs and struggles of the workers, with their every immediate problem and action, which become the starting point of communist preparation for the final direct struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Among the more specific “special” problems are:
Not all of these problems are peculiarly American, for most of them, in some form or other, exist in other countries. Concrete Marxist analysis of the problems is necessary not merely to “Americanize” communism but creatively and dynamically to utilize the peculiarities of our economic and class development to hasten the coming of communist struggle and revolution. These peculiarities have their positive, as well as negative, aspects. The necessity of considering the more elementary forms of class action in setting the masses in motion provides communism with the opportunity of rallying the unorganized workers unopposed by an intrenched bureaucracy. The Negro offers a twofold approach – class and racial. The absence of a considerable American Marxist literature and tradition means that communism does not have to overcome any generally accepted or influential reformist socialist distortion of Marxism. Dialectically investigated and grasped, the special problems created by national differences offer means of accelerating communist struggle. Communism, which is Marxism and Leninism, is both a science of social development and a philosophy of revolution; it approaches the problems and tasks involved in the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism with a creative awareness of purposes and means.
For communism is a conscious and determined struggle by a whole class to realize objectives clearly perceived and understood. The objectives are not the artificial creation of the communist; they arise out of the development of capitalism itself, including its American form. The American revolution is necessary; development of social-economic forces provides the means for making the necessity a reality. It is the fulfillment of history, of its progressive struggles and aspirations. American civilization depends upon communist revolution, and, given the dominant economic position of the United States, the victory of the American working class will make a mighty contribution to the building of world socialism and a new world civilization.
1*. “Two – Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine – may almost be called professionals, save that their interests alone employed them. Emerson’s explanation of great men illuminates our knowledge of these two: ‘Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought in.’ At hand for their use were the accumulated discontent of a hundred and fifty years’ restive development under English control, the turbulent forces creating the inchoate Americanism they perceived, and the eighteenth century compact philosophy that was to make them free. To unite all America in one pulsating hope, to vitalize that hope with the new philosophy, this was their task. They could succeed, for they had a secret knowledge of what the people thought, wished, feared, and hated, and the power to interpret for the public ‘its own conscience and its own consciousness’ – therein lay their strength.” Philip G. Davidson, Whig Propagandists of the Revolution, American Historical Review, April 1934, p.443. These are the background and the course, under other class-economic relations and with other class purposes, of the communist agitators and organizers who prepare the coming American proletarian revolution.
2*. This subject was discussed in Chapter XXIV, State Capitalism, Planning, and Fascism.
3*. Cultural borrowing and diffusion are important factors in the increasingly purposive character of revolutions. France secured many of its revolutionary ideas from England, which in turn had borrowed from the Italian and Dutch bourgeoisie. The ideology of the American Revolution was imported bodily from Europe. Yet the bourgeoisie to-day objects to “foreign” ideas of revolution! While cultural borrowing and diffusion were present in the bourgeois revolutions, they appear most clearly and creatively in the proletarian revolution, particularly the Russian. They are of exceptional creative significance in economically backward lands.
4*. But in only one of its aspects. The engineering aspect of Marxism, which is simply the concrete application of its scientific awareness, is not the whole of Marxism, nor does it imply acceptance of science to the exclusion of philosophy. Engineering is merely the technological application of science; it does not set goals but realizes goals set for it and with the means science and society provide. Hence engineering may be distorted for stupid and reactionary ends. As science expands, the necessity of a philosophical synthesis becomes increasingly apparent, and it is only the pedestrian or reactionary scientist who casts loose from philosophy (or seeks to restore Deity in the universe under new forms). The engineering aspect of Marxism is the concrete expression of the unity of theory and practice, based upon a conception of history, economics, and society and a method of revolution, all implemented in the philosophy of dialectical materialism. A whole cultural revolution is involved in the social-economic reorganization envisaged by Marxism, whose essential oneness appears in the creative unity of its philosophy.
5*. In the case of Russia the first and third stages practically coincided. The workers’ militant resistance to developing industrialism persisted into the epoch of imperialist war and intensification of the class struggle, and coincided with a belated bourgeois democratic revolution. The creative Marxist theory and practice of the Bolshevik party decisively used the favorable combination of circumstances for the proletarian revolution. Peculiarities of Russian development accelerated the revolutionary process, where the process was elsewhere retarded by other peculiarities.
6*. Where industrial integration and trustification on the accelerated American scale have appeared in Europe, there the unions are weak or non-existent. The heavy iron and steel industry in Germany and France are highly integrated and trustified, and unionism is negligible (the companies also use the American methods of company unions, employee stock ownership, welfare, spies, blacklists, and terrorism to prevent organization). In England, on the contrary, the industry is not highly integrated and trustified, what integration and trustification there are developed slowly, and the iron and steel workers are relatively well organized. Since the war the problem of organization in France is complicated by an influx of foreign labor.
7*. With the closing of the frontier around 1890, and particularly from 1900 to the World War, immigration was a major factor in whatever class fluidity still persisted. Immigration still permitted Americans of the older stocks to rise in the social scale who otherwise would not have risen, while social-economic differentiation among the immigrants produced a petty bourgeoisie in each racial group. (This was true also among the Negro people.)
8*. This is simply an argument against communism and for a middle class “revolution,” whatever that may be, and it ignores the fact that the middle class is capable of “independent” action only within the orbit of capitalist relations. A variant of the argument is that the workers are increasingly an unemployed class, and thus cannot make a revolution. But the conditions which thrust the workers into disemployment also thrust large groups of the middle class into the same condition. Can the unemployed of the middle class make a revolution, if any?
1. L.P. Edwards, The Natural History of Revolution (1927), pp.6, 211, 218.
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p.1.
3. Stuart Chase, Out of the Depression and After (1931), p.15.
4. Karl Marx, Capital, v.III, p.919.
5. Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (1900), p.3.
6. John R. Commons and Associates, A History of Labour in the United States, 2 vols. (1918), v.I, pp.237, 527.
7. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, pp.21-22.
8. Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928), pp.232, 304-18.
9. W.I. King, The National Income and Its Purchasing Power (1930), p.62.
10. Stuart Chase, The Economy of Abundance (1934), p.257.
11. John R. Commons, Labor Movement, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, v.VIII (1932), p.684.
12. V.I. Lenin, “Left” Communism, An Infantile Disorder (1920), p.73.
Last updated on 29.9.2007