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Perspectives
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 35, 15 July 1933, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
It is a fundamental teaching of Marxism that capitalism, once out of its swaddling clothes, extends the scale of production at the same time as it constricts the available market. As capital accumulates, an ever larger share of its total is expended on the means of production in proportion to that expanded for labor power. Competition between various capitalistic units compels the production of commodities at a lower cost, that is, with each commodity containing a smaller amount of necessary labor power. In an effort to do this, more and more capital is expended for labor-saving machinery with the result that unemployment grows, at first relatively, and after, absolutely, as well.
For example, the Hoover committee report, Recent Economic Changes, tells us that the number of workers employed in the major branches of industry (agriculture, manufacturing, mining and railways) in the U.S. fell from 25,165,000 in 1918–20 to 23,428,000 in 1924–26. At the same time, production was increased 18 percent – an increase of 21 percent per worker, in manufacturing alone the number of workers tell from 10,780,000 to 9,810,000 and production was increased 22.0 percent – an increase of 34.5 percent per worker. Between 1923–29, according to Lewis Corey, while production was increasing, unemployment was also increasing by about 1–2 millions yearly, due to the displacement of workers by machinery and other technological causes.
On one hand, this process causes the rate of profit to fall, thereby compelling the capitalists to seek to increase the mass of profit by extending the scale of operation and also to seek to increase the rate of exploitation or production of surplus value per worker by means of wage-cuts, speed-up, etc., and on the other hand, it reduces the number of effective consumers and the extent of individual consumption It sets in motion a contradiction capitalism can never permanently solve.
Add to this the facts that capitalism has already developed its productive forces beyond the effective capacity of the world market that its national aspects, that is its contradictions, competition between its various units, etc., are international in scope, that capitalism is in the fourth year of a violent process which attempts to re-establish temporarily its lost equilibrium, that there has been a general narrowing of markets due to unemployment, lowered living standards and the development in many formerly backward countries of native industrial workers, and you have a rough picture of the world situation today.
The United States, as a national unit of world capitalism, is compelled to find additional foreign markets. That it will succeed in this there is little doubt. It is in the position of a highly efficient manufacturing plant competing with a less advanced one. Its superior technique and greater resources, as well as the burden imposed on its foreign competitors by means of war debts and loans, give it an advantage that cannot be overcome.
However, as the United States expands it will do so at the expense of other exporting powers, primarily England, thereby heightening their internal contradiction and driving their workers ever closer to revolutionary action. At the same time, the prerequisites for such expansion include a lowering of the standard of living of American workers by all the means at the capitalists’ disposal as well as a tightening of the noose of centralization around the necks of weaker capitalist enterprises to the point where ever larger numbers of them are driven out of existence, thereby hastening the already rapid and extensive monopolization of American industry.
By the very process of attempting to escape the effects of its contradictions America will weld its workers into a class-conscious mass. As wages continue to fall and unemployment to rise, the pretty fable of American class collaboration will disappear in favor of a growth of labor militancy.
In this connection it is well to remember that the use of militant action is not alien to American shores. America is not devoid of revolutionary traditions. It has had many a stormy outburst in the past and the political lag of the American workers behind their European, brothers can best be explained not by reference to something inherently conservative in their nature but rather by the absence of material conditions necessary to give their philosophy its proper social direction.
In conclusion, however, it might be well to point out that capitalism will never collapse of its own accord. As Lenin once said “there is no situation from which there is absolutely no way out for the bourgeoisie.” While the shocks of economic crises open wide cracks in the structure of capitalism, to bring about its collapse more than an economic crisis is needed. The workers’ will to revolution must rise to the point where it is strong enough to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in contradistinction to the present more or less concealed dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. A section of the working class known as “the vanguard” must have sufficient strength, both numerically and ideologically, to lead the revolutionary proletariat onto the broad highway outlined by Marx and Lenin. And, in the opinion of the writer, it is precisely this point which constitutes the fundamental task of the American revolutionary parties today. It is one of building the “vanguard”, of drawing into a state of revolutionary consciousness a larger number of American workers, of educating them in the strategy and tactics of the coming struggle. Tomorrow the nature of our tasks may change. But, until that happens, they must be considered in their proper chronological order.
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