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Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism
ONE OF the main charges made against Marxism by the ruling class and by reformists is that it is anti-democratic. Thus Labour Party leaders often describe themselves as democratic socialists in opposition to Marxists. Partly this is based on the experiences of Stalinism, but also it’s because Marxists advocate revolution.
Revolution, they argue, would be against the rule of parliament and for them parliament is synonymous with democracy. They’re right, of course. Revolution cannot come through parliament, and indeed revolution would overthrow parliament. But they are quite wrong to identify parliament with democracy.
In reality the democracy offered by a capitalist parliament is always extraordinarily limited. Firstly, parliamentary democracy offers no means by which electors can control their representatives. Once elected there is nothing to stop MPs breaking all their pre-election promises. Secondly, MPs do not, in practice, control government. Rather it is the government through a mixture of patronage and pressure that controls the MPs. Thirdly, the government does not control the decisive area of society, namely the economy, which remains in the hands of big business.
Finally, it must be remembered that apart from parliament almost every important institution in society is run without any democracy whatsoever. In the police, the army, in every industry and business (private or nationalised), in the civil service, the schools and colleges, the hospitals, the mass media and so on, the principle of administration is the same – authoritarian appointment from above. In all those areas democratic decisions are never even considered.
In short, the idea that parliament equals democracy, the ‘rule of the people’, is nonsense. It is little more than a democratic fig leaf covering the nakedness of capitalist rule. What’s more, as the example of Chile proved for the umpteenth time – where in 1973 the elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the army with the most horrific bloodshed and repression – ‘parliamentary democracy’ is a fig leaf the ruling class is always willing to dispense with if it interferes with their vital interests.
In contrast, workers’ revolution would produce a society far more democratic in every way than any bourgeois democracy. It would begin by destroying the capitalist state and establishing a new state of workers’ councils. These would be made up of delegates from workplaces, where collective discussion would take place, and who would thus be accountable to, and recallable by, those who elected them. The undemocratic and authoritarian armed forces and police would be replaced by democratically controlled workers’ militia responsible to die workers’ councils. This workers’ power would then be used to establish the foundation of real ‘rule by the people’ – the social ownership and control of the means of production.
Whatever the political set-up, ultimate power in any society rests with those who control the decisive forces of production. Unless these are controlled by the working class all talk of democracy remains a sham.
Furthermore, Marxists not only advocate workers’ democracy in the future, but also fight to defend and extend it in the present. We defend all those democratic rights won by struggle in the past – the right to vote, to strike, to independent trade unions, to free speech – against all attempts by the ruling class to restrict or remove them. We stand for the equal application of those rights to all workers regardless of race, nationality or sex. In all this Marxists are consistent democrats.
When the police arrest you on a picket line they are not ‘interfering in politics’, merely ‘maintaining public order’. When the judge or magistrate sentences you he is not interested in the politics of the case, only in ‘upholding the law’. The armed forces, likewise, are ‘outside polities’, they merely ‘defend the nation’ in the Falklands, ‘keep the peace’ in Belfast, and ‘maintain essential services’ when they scab on strikes.
Senior civil servants are non-political too, they simply follow instructions from the government, which, in turn, exercises its power ‘in the national interest’. Over the lot stands the Queen. She is ‘above’ politics, symbolising the unity of the nation.
So run the myths of the ruling class about its state. They reflect a theory of the state developed over centuries by the bourgeoisie. It contains two central ideas. First that the state represents the interests of society as a whole, it is above class. Second, that it is indispensable; without it society would disintegrate into a war of all against all, because ordinary people are ‘naturally’ bad/greedy/stupid, and so need to be ruled.
Marx rejected this view root and branch. He argued that society would disintegrate without a state not because of people’s natural inadequacies but because society is divided into classes with conflicting interests. Societies existed for thousands of years without any state apparatus because classes had not yet emerged. Similarly, after class divisions have been abolished a state will no longer be needed. Public order in a classless society will be kept simply by organisations of the general public without any need for ‘armed bodies of men’ standing over society. The very existence of the state testifies to class antagonisms.
Consequently the state is anything but non-political, rather it is the essence of political power. It is never the representative of the people ‘as a whole’, but always an instrument through which one class maintains its rule over other classes.
The existence of parliamentary democracy doesn’t change this, for every state rests ultimately on economic foundations. Police, judges, soldiers, are not themselves productive; they and their activities have to be paid for. So, in the final analysis, it is always the class that controls the economy that controls the State. Usually the ruling class exercises this control directly by ensuring that senior positions in the state are held by loyal members of its own class. (Thus in Britain today more than 80 percent of judges and generals went to public school.) But even when sections of the state pass into other hands, as in Nazi Germany, the ruling class can still use its economic power to make sure the state protects its interests (German big business did very well under Hitler).
Because of this, the old reformist idea that by winning a majority in parliament, the state can be taken over and used for socialist purposes, is a complete pipe dream. Faced with a reforming government whose policies represent a challenge to capitalist priorities the state machine – acting in concert with big business – has immense resources of obstructions and pressure. Should the government resist those pressures (a highly unlikely event where the Labour Party is concerned) it can still resort to direct force, as the Chilean state did ten years ago.
The working class cannot ‘take over’ the bourgeois state; it must smash it. This is the central conclusion of the theory of the state developed by Marx and Engels and re-emphasised by Lenin in his great book The State and Revolution. Smashing the state means disbanding the police, sacking the judges, breaking the bourgeois army by winning the rank and file over to the workers, and removing the bureaucratic ministries of Whitehall. Above all it involves completely replacing the old state apparatus with a new apparatus arising directly from working-class struggle.
The Tory Party is the enthusiastic party of law and order. Everyone must obey the law they say, because it is the law that makes civilisation possible. The law, they claim, protects society as a whole, and individuals within it, from the threat posed by a minority of anti-social elements. Conjuring up their favourite image of the ‘grannie mugged by thugs’, they go so far as to proclaim that the law protects the weak from the strong.
The Labour right shares this view, except for arguing that their own ‘moderate’ and ‘reasonable’ policies would make the maintenance of law and order easier. The Labour lefts are slightly more sceptical. Where they consider a law to be especially bad (for example anti-union laws) or a cause especially important (such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) they sometimes argue that breaking the law is justified. But fundamentally they go along with the right in accepting the overall framework of the law as it stands.
The Marxist view of the law however is different. It sees the law as defending not society in general, or people in general, but the existing system of society, namely capitalism. Contemporary law is, first and foremost, a set of rules requiring behaviour appropriate to the smooth running of a capitalist economy. Since a capitalist economy necessarily produces a society dominated by a capitalist class, the law necessarily defends the interests of that class.
One reason – in addition to the constant flow of law and order propaganda – why the right-wing view retains a certain plausibility is that most people take the capitalist functioning of the law more or less for granted. They are so used to it that they regard it as ‘natural’. But consider what would happen if the law didn’t reflect and reinforce the property relations of capitalism. What if, for example, it was illegal to charge interest on money loaned? What if judges were in the habit of ruling that millionaires riding around in Rolls-Royces in broad daylight were asking to be robbed, in the same way they suggest that women on their own at night are asking to be raped? Or even more fundamentally, what if the law prohibited the sale of labour power in the same way it does the sale of children? Clearly if the law were changed in any of these ways the capitalist system would break down within weeks if not days.
Not surprisingly the administration of the law reflects its inherent class character. The ruling class retains a firm grip on the higher echelons of the legal profession. About 80 per cent of judges were educated at public schools, and it is still extremely difficult to become a barrister without private means. Anyone who has observed court proceedings at any level cannot fail to notice that they consist overwhelmingly of the middle and upper classes sitting in judgement on the working classes.
These facts give the lie to another cherished myth about British justice – the alleged ‘independence of the judiciary from politics’. Now judges are often independent from parliament. Given that parliament is an elected institution this is actually an advantage for the ruling class. It means that should the ‘wrong’ people get elected to parliament, and should these people by some mischance pass some inconvenient legislation, the judges will always be there to come up with an ‘interpretation’ of the law that sets matters right again. It means that should the right wing decide that parliamentary democracy itself is inconvenient then there are some judges around to provide a legal rubber stamp for the counter-revolutionary activities of the generals and police chiefs.
The real function of the law therefore is the opposite of that claimed by the right. Far from protecting civilisation it protects a social order that threatens the existence of any civilisation. Far from protecting the weak from the strong it protects the rich from the poor, the exploiters from the exploited, the powerful from the potentially powerful. Any movement for serious social change cannot fail to come into conflict with the law. If it has illusions about it, it is hamstrung from the beginning.
All ruling classes maintain their rule by a combination of force and persuasion. These two aspects of ruling-class power always complement and reinforce each other. In the middle ages the feudal lord had his soldiers to ensure the peasants performed their work and paid their taxes and the Catholic church to explain to them that the feudal order was God’s order. If the peasants rebelled, the church was on hand to condemn their revolt as sinful. If anyone questioned the teachings of the church, the soldiers were on hand to burn them as heretics.
Today the ruling class has the police – and ultimately the army – to arrest pickets and demonstrators, and the mass media to explain that pickets and demonstrators are extremist monsters who threaten ‘civilisation as we know it’. In so far as the media is successful with its propaganda, it is easier for the police to smash picket lines. Equally, every success of the police in breaking a picket line reinforces the central message of ruling-class ideology, that working people are powerless.
The use of these two methods of control is something that does not change. It is a feature of all class-divided society. The fundamental antagonism between the classes is such that no ruling class is ever able to rule purely by consent. On the other hand, the fact that the exploited and the ‘have-nots’ always vastly outnumber the exploiters and the ‘haves’ means that no ruling class can survive purely by force.
What does change – and sometimes very dramatically – is the balance between repression and ideological control. In some cases, such as South Africa, it is clear that the existing regime has lost practically all legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of the majority of the population and therefore has to depend primarily on force. In comparison, in Britain and Western Europe the element of force, though undoubtedly increasing in recent years, is still a secondary factor. The existing political and economic order – though not necessarily the particular government – still retains the support of the large majority.
One of the most important features of bourgeois rule in modern capitalism is that simple ruling-class manipulation of the education system and the mass media is insufficient to maintain ideological control. The size, strength and organisation of the working class is too great, and the daily clash of interests at the point of production too all-pervasive, for straightforward capitalist propaganda to be enough. Besides, propaganda may be powerful but there is a limit to the extent to which it can get people to believe things that run directly counter to their own experience.
Consequently, the crucial role in the stabilisation of advanced capitalism is played by institutions which have their base not in the ruling class but in the working class, and which are seen as expressing working-class interests and working-class opposition to the system’s worst excesses. Nonetheless, they accept and purvey the basic premises of the system and thereby serve to integrate the working class within it.
In Britain this role is played primarily by the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party. If one looks at the strategy of the British ruling class in this light, it is clear that over the last quarter of a century it has pursued one single, central aim – that of raising the rate of profit of British capital – but has done so by different means. Essentially, it has oscillated between a strategy with the balance tilted towards force and one with the balance tilted towards consent.
In the former strategy the ruling class relies principally on its own party – the Tories – and on the law, the police and the willingness of employers to take on the trade unions, combined with an economic policy that stresses market forces and encourages unemployment to rise. It attempts to impose cuts in working-class living standards and weaken trade union resistance by more or less frontal assault. This has been the dominant approach in the Thatcher years.
In the latter strategy it relies principally on the trade union bureaucracy. It attempts to reach an accommodation with the trade union leaders so that they in turn will sell the deal to their rank and file and impose the necessary discipline to make it stick. This was the approach of the Social Contract made between the trade union leaders and the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1970s.
As one strategy fails, so the ruling class switches its allegiance to the other.
‘Ye are many – they are few’, wrote the poet Shelley in 1819, when urging the workers to ‘rise like lions’ against their oppressors. It was true then and it remains true today. The ruling class proper – the big shareholders and financiers, the holders of key posts in industry, the City and the state – is tiny, amounting to only one or two per cent of the population. How then does this small minority of exploiters maintain its power over the vast majority of exploited? Clearly part of the answer is through the use of direct force – such as the massive police operation against the miners in the 1984-5 strike. Equally clearly another part of the answer lies in the ruling class’s control of the media and the education system, which enables it to indoctrinate much of the working class with capitalist reactionary ideas.
However, both these mechanisms of control – the head-bashing and the head-fixing – are made easier and more effective by the divisions which exist within the working class – divisions of craft, locality, nationality, race, sex and so on. Let’s take two examples of how this works.
First the division between British workers and Irish workers. The view that the Irish are stupid (perpetually reinforced in innumerable non-jokes by innumerable non-comedians), and that the war in Northern Ireland is an incomprehensible conflict between religious maniacs, has permitted the army and police to develop there techniques of repression (such as snatch squads) which if first used in Britain would have provoked a chorus of liberal protest. Once perfected and accepted these techniques can then be transferred to Britain for use against workers here with relative impunity.
Second, the division between men and women. The traditional stereotype of the working-class woman as housewife and mother who leaves the world of work, trade unionism, and politics to her husband gives the working-class man a position of relative privilege and dominance in the home. But immediately a strike or dispute breaks out this dubious advantage backfires. The wife, if previously uninvolved and uninformed, experiences the strike not as a positive collective struggle but as a loss of family income, and so as a threat to the security of the home. She is therefore vulnerable to the mass media’s anti-strike propaganda.
What then is the root of these many divisions and how can they be overcome? The root lies in the nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism is a system based on competition between independent producing units, be they small shops, giant multinational companies or even capitalist states. And this competition, Marx pointed out, ‘separates individuals one from another, not only the bourgeois but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together’.
Under capitalism labour power becomes a commodity which every worker has to sell to live. This makes every other worker a potential competitor in the labour market, and so long as workers see each other as competitors they are prey to every prejudice about their rivals – the Japanese, German, Korean, black, women – workers who are supposed to be ‘taking their jobs’. And obviously the ruling class does everything it can to foster these prejudices.
But if the divisions derive from the nature of capitalism it is only in the course of struggle that they can be overcome. Clearly socialists must oppose all divisions in the working class at all times, exposing their consequences. However, socialist propaganda by itself cannot defeat the propaganda of the system. Only when it connects with workers’ actual experience in struggle can it be really effective.
The best illustration of this is the question of racism. This is one of the deepest divisions in the working class, and at present most white workers are to some extent racist, not violently racist like the National Front, but racist nevertheless. Moreover it is a racism which is highly resistant to any amount of well-intentioned liberal moralising.
But consider what happens when black and white workers find themselves on strike together and on the same picket line. At once there is created the bond of being in the same struggle against the same enemy. The argument about class unity as opposed to racial division becomes concrete – it fits the immediate situation. When strike-breakers approach, either the white workers overcome their prejudices and link arms with their black workmates, or they hand an obvious present to the boss. Thus the class is unified in struggle.
Of course divisions are not always overcome and often workers are defeated because of them. But this we can say: the moment of the working class’s unification will coincide with the moment of its victory for the very simple reason that ‘We are many and they are few’.
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Last updated: 5 June 2015