The Historical Need for Communism

It is clear to all that we are currently going through a deepening crisis. It is steadily getting worse, and global capitalism is continuing on its downward slope, spiralling towards the inevitable collapse of this inhumane and now historically superfluous system of production.

But the true causes of this crisis do not lie in the financial sector but in the underlying laws of capitalism itself, in production, where the workers’ labour creates surplus value for the capitalist: overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are the two unstoppable processes of the capitalist economy which make it more and more difficult for Capital to sell the enormous mass of often useless commodities that it produces. The bursting of the massive speculative bubble in the financial sphere is in fact only the consequence of the crisis: Capital’s obsession with playing the financial markets is part of its search for a remedy for its problems; a quick fix to try to make everything better. But no amount of financial regulation can resolve the causes of the crisis and save capitalism from catastrophe.

The crisis of capitalism is inevitable and irresolvable. All the bourgeoisie can do is to try and stop it getting worse. And that is what it has been trying to do since the crisis first made its appearance in the 1970s, when the thirty years of strong growth after the Second World War finally ground to a halt. In England it was the decade of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the Miners Strike.

The way capitalism has tried to head off the inevitable crash over the last 35 years has been by applying three main levers: extension of the global market; increasing debt; and increasing the exploitation of the working class.

The increase of the public debt, which began precisely in 1973-4, and the extension of the global market, which had gone about as far as it could by the mid 1980s, would allow the bourgeoisie to apply the third lever – increasing the exploitation of the working class – in a more careful and graduated way.

In Great Britain, since 1979, more and more legal restrictions on industrial action have been accumulating, with the first phase of the legislative attacks summed up in the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act in 1992. These legal restrictions have severely curtailed the capacity of workers to engage in unofficial struggles to defend wages and standard of living. The curtailment of ‘Secondary’ industrial action and the putting in place of restrictions on picketing; making industrial action illegal without the statutorily required ballot, and thereby restricting lightning strikes and unofficial action etc, etc, mean that workers are now easily isolated in their particular sectors, and the authorities have adequate time to prepare for, and undermine the effect of, any industrial action. Meanwhile it has been made easier and easier to hire on short-term contracts, to alter already existing contracts, to hire and fire, and so on and so forth, until now we have workers being paid… nothing at all with the advent of the ethos of voluntary labour, which is particularly affecting the social sector.

All these cuts and attacks have been effectively signed off by both the employers and the union bosses – for by their inaction and lack of opposition the union bosses have effectively endorsed these changes. Always they are justified in the same way: ‘Better take the hit today to be better off tomorrow’. It is nevertheless clear that the opposite is the case: each new sacrifice is never the last, but just an intermediate stage on the way to even greater sacrifices. Just accepting cut-backs in wages, and working conditions, only encourages the bosses to make even more drastic attacks.

In this way capitalism has diluted the crisis and given itself a bit of respite, but it hasn’t been able to halt the crisis. Four years ago it finally exploded, and it won’t go away until the entire capitalist economic system, now inextricably bound up in an indissoluble global network, collapses.

Now that the extension of the global market is more or less complete, and the more that private and public debt becomes ever more unsustainable, all the bourgeoisie can now do is step up its exploitation of the working class. As we are sure most of those here know only too well, the attack on the working class has now become a clear and frontal attack.

The old notion that the standard of living achieved by the workers in a handful of dominant countries would eventually be achieved by the working class throughout the world is now exposed as a myth. Our celebrated high standard of living in the West is obviously just a passing phase. Over the last twenty years workers in the West have seen their standard of living deteriorate at an ever increasing rate, such that now it isn’t much better than workers in the rest of the world. The crisis is the proof of what revolutionary Marxism has said from the start, when it stated in the Communist Manifesto that the laws of capitalism entail increasing poverty for the working class.

Faced with the unstoppable advance of the crisis, the bourgeoisie, through its newspapers and television networks, bombards the workers with the slogan: ‘capitalism or death’! In a mainly subliminal way, and often successfully, the ruling class brainwashes the workers into believing that there is no alternative, and that their very existence depends on capitalism’s survival, as a socially neutral ‘provider of jobs’.

All the bourgeois political parties, whether ‘right’ or ‘left’, ‘moderate’ or ‘radical’, repeat the refrain: ‘Save the Country!’; ‘We must all work together to ensure a return to growth!’

But these are not working class objectives they are only achievable at the cost of its total submission, at the cost of its total sacrifice – today in peace, tomorrow in war – to the requirements of Capital and the class that owns it all and manages it all: the bourgeoisie.

But the workers needn’t go along with all this. It shouldn’t be trying to ‘save the country’ – i.e. global capitalism in each country – but defending themselves against the attacks of this mode of production which wants to crush them into submission to ensure its own survival.

That means, at all times, mounting an intransigent defence of living standards, regardless of the interests of the national economy. But that will only be possible by mountinggenuine strikes, which need to be as broad and unrestricted by time limits as possible; strikes designed, in the teeth of all the swathes of anti-union legislation, to bring ‘the country’, i.e. Capital, to its knees and force the bourgeoisie to stop its repeated attacks.

This objective can only be carried out by rebuilding a workers’ organisation genuinely committed to struggle: a real workers economic union prepared to fight for its class; a class union. The bourgeoisie is only able to successfully mount its attacks against the workers because the main trade unions are totally integrated into the State apparatus; a process which is bolstered by their unholy pact with the Labour Party; a system in which particularly obliging trade union leaders can even expect to sleep their way through a lucrative retirement in the House of Lords!

The idea that the famous ‘special relationship’ between the trade unions and Labour Party could be of any benefit to the working class has been well and truly exposed as a lie after the Labour Party’s three terms in power, headed by a prime minister who was a lawyer specialising in employment legislation (and his wife for that matter). ‘Victory!’ their trotskist cheerleaders proclaimed. But was the anti-union legislation of the so-called Thatcher years thrown out? Not a bit of it! The legislation – now shored up by the Labour Party – is still, all of it, firmly in place.

Why then did the trade union leaders not immediately threaten to remove all funding to the Labour Party? Because as far as they were concerned – for what else can we deduce from their resounding silence, and lack of leadership in campaigning against this legislation – the legislation actually rather suited them, for it served as a convenient excuse to do… nothing. They haven’t even campaigned to have the clauses in the employment legislation removed which threaten to sequester their funds if they illegally launch industrial action! Why? Because it is the most wonderful excuse NOT to break the law, and to prove how law-abiding, and obedient, they are!

The fact is the official ‘Union Jack’ trade union leaders continue to link the fate of the working class to that of the country, i.e. of capitalism, and the only campaigns they generally mount are symbolic one-day processions which invariably lead expectant workers along a carefully policed route to a depressing and disappointing rally, where a miscellaneous selection of Labour Party ‘luminaries’ guiltily assure them that voting for Labour is the only solution; or that when Labour is in power, the necessary sacrifices the workers will be asked to make will be less severe than under the Tories! No wonder less and less workers bother to vote; although this abstinence will have to eventually translate from negative rejection of al the pro-capitalism parties, to positive support of their own revolutionary party!

Although we cannot rule out that some left-leaning unions might, and it’s a big might, break entirely with the Labour Party and play their part in the formation of a class union, we believe that a genuine class union will almost certainly arise outside and against the existing state-registered trade unions. Certainly in Italy this is the conclusion our party arrived at a number of years ago, when a mass desertion from the official unions occurred and a number of new rank-and-file unions formed outside the big confederated unions (and please take a copy of the article ‘Outside and Against the Today’s Trade Unions’, which we translated from our Italian press to accompany this presentation).

In Italy, faced with many of these new organisations calling separate strikes, we declared that the rebirth of the working class trade union must set out from the building of a united front from below of all workers, with the aim of organising an all-out general strike in reply to the attacks of the bourgeoisie.

In the British isles, where the unions, with a few honourable exceptions, content themselves with merely symbolic action, or at best one day strikes, designed to head off struggle rather than co-ordinate it and make it effective, the workers will also have to build a class union to express their demands. This is what the most combative and militant workers need to fight for, and it will not be achieved by calls to ‘democratise’ the unions.

Class unity, the reconstruction of the class union, will need to be backed up with genuine class based demands. The ‘debt question’; the issue of whether or not to remain in the European Union; the nationalisation of the banks and enterprises, all these are political and economic options of concern to the bourgeoisie and are irrelevant to workers. Whether or not the bourgeoisie pays its debts, whether or not it stays in the European Union, whether or not its banks or enterprises are put under the control of its State, workers’ conditions will deteriorate anyway unless they are able to organise a general struggle in defence of their fundamental interest: wages.

The struggle in defence of the combined salary of the working class is the fulcrum of the defensive economic struggle. The general workers’ movement must once again put forward the historical demands of the workers’ movement.

• Significant wage rises, more in the worse paid sectors;
• Pay for workers who lose their jobs linked to the cost of living;
• Reduction of working hours but with wages remaining the same;
• No inequality of working conditions on grounds of sex, nationality or race;
• Rights of citizenship for immigrant workers and their families.

Comrades! Workers!

There is no bourgeois economic policy which can resolve the crisis. The only solution capitalism has available to it is war: in order to destroy surplus commodities, amongst which the ‘labour-power’ commodity, to subjugate the working class to a regime which exploits it to the very maximum and thus to start up a new insane cycle of growth, that is, of accumulation of capital on an even greater scale. The Great Depression of 1929 – from which the present crisis will only differ by being yet more devastating – wasn’t overcome by the State’s intervention with its ‘Keynesian’ economic policy (still invoked today by the moderate and ‘radical’ bourgeois Left); it was overcome by the Second World War. It was the war which rendered the thirty year post-war ‘boom’ possible, but only at the cost of millions of lives lost during the war, and just as many proletarian lives shattered and destroyed during the rebuilding of what the bourgeoisie had destroyed. The ‘return to growth’, the objective which all the bourgeois parties and pro-government trade unions tell us is in the common interest of workers and bosses, will only be possible at the cost of the total sacrifice of the working class total in another global imperialist war.

The economic struggle is absolutely necessary for workers, but it is only ever a fight against the effects of capitalism. The deeper the crisis gets the clearer it becomes that even fighting for immediate interests, to preserve a decent standard of living and to fight wage cuts, etc, is only possible at the expense of the ‘good of the country’, that is, the good of the local and international capitalists.

In other words, what is good for the workers is bad for capitalism, and vice versa.

And thus we come, finally, to the theme of our presentation – the historical need for communism. Now we have established that the workers’ struggles to defend their interests is incompatible with the drive to greater profits, with the national interest, with the country’s interest, in a word, with capital’s interests, we can further say that the workers’ fight for better pay and conditions is, on the contrary, compatible with the general and long-term interests of the international working class in its inexorable drive towards a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and the installation of a society that can manage human resources in a rational way. As the Communist Manifesto states, ‘now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers’. This union, as it grows, discovers the common interest of its participants and the need to express its own unique class programme, which can no longer consist of winning concessions from a capitalism no longer able to grant them, but of preparing to overthrow capitalist society’s restrictive and sclerotic structure and install a new social structure within which a new humanity, no longer divided into classes, can rediscover the human need to co-operate and work in community.

Capital has unleashed forces it can no longer control. More and more the increasing socialisation of production that is occurring in practice – in terms of the increasing interdependence of millions of individuals in vast global networks of production – is making individual ownership of the means of production an anachronism and an obstacle. Every conference of the powerful nations to address issues on the macro scale, such as protecting endangered species, prevention of global warming, regulation of population and poverty, prevention of atrocities and wars, prevention of famine, management of waste, sees its heavily watered down good intentions undermined by the ‘reality’ of capitalist competition, leaving behind merely a few bedraggled good intentions, postponed to an indefinite future. The fact is that Capital can focus on one thing and one thing alone: increasing its profit margins, and that can only be at the expense of the working class.

Thus the interests of the working class, in throwing off the burden of capitalist exploitation, coincides with the drive to establish a new form of society; a new system that can manage society in a rational way.

Let us look around us and see what we have: there is nature and natural resources; there are the results of past labour, in the form of the products of past labour and means of production, and the knowledge bequeathed from previous generations,; and there is living labour. The future task of the human species, which we call communism, can be simply conceived as making rational decisions about how to allocate those resources. The remarkable thing is that money – and therefore capital, and capitalists – will not feature at all in a vision of a future society! In fact it would be much easier to just produce what people actually need and provide them to the population without the useless financial records and systems of ownership. As Marx pointed out, a voucher system that allocated resources would be a viable means of preventing social capital, that is, society’s surplus, from falling into the hands of individuals who would try and hold the rest of society to ransom.

In any case, economic systems have come and gone. The capitalists themselves established their own power by revolutionary means, and they will be overthrown by revolutionary means. The working class will have to overthrow the bourgeoisie just as the bourgeoisie had to overthrow the feudal classes – in order to break free of social structures that, after a necessary and socially useful phase, became fetters holding back the new productive forces. In order to realise its goals – freedom from poverty and insecurity and mind-numbing repetitive and often pointless work – the working class will have to discover, and apply, its immense latent force. The slumbering giant will have to awake and establish its own unassailable bastion of power, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, from which position of strength it can bring about the necessary changes required to finally bring about that state of affairs in which society can finally inscribe on its banner ‘from each according to their ability; to each according to their need’.

To achieve its emancipation the proletariat (a class without ownership of the means of production, or reserves) must conquer power and transform society in its interests. The working class will be impelled to make this transformation, this revolution, in order to free itself from the increasingly unbearable pressure brought to bear on it by its class enemy. It will be forced to resist the increasingly frontal attacks on its wages and living conditions and to organise in class based economic organisations, equipped with a map of the road ahead; a programme and a theory of struggle by its class party. The organisational expression of the revolutionary proletariat is that of Soviets, the workers organised territorially. In the build up to revolution the organisation of workers on a territorial basis will be crucial in bolstering class identity, opening the eyes of workers to see beyond their particular sector or particular workplace and factory. Thus have we always fought to ensure that the ‘factory cell’ form of organisation wasn’t isolated from the wider body of organised workers, pointing out that only the bourgeoisie could benefit from such isolation.

Previous revolutions, or reorganisations of society, have been based upon property ownership, and the different forms of competing property interests led to a multiplicity of parties and groupings. The proletariat, a class not owning property, has the need for only one party, because its needs and its way ahead are not open to discussion, but are determined by the tasks it has to carry out. Just as we were given no choice about being born into this ‘vale of tears’, the extinction of this global madhouse is similarly a practical task we have no choice about. We map out the road ahead, and leave it to cabals of chatterers to wander off down the cul-de-sacs of history.

The seizing of state power is the necessary prerequisite for the ‘economic’ transformation of society. Because the proletariat cannot use the bourgeoisie’s own state apparatus; as evidenced at the time of the Paris Commune, it has to smash it and displace it with its own rule.

The assumption of the working class to power – or more precisely, of its party to power, operating through territorial organisations of workers – will clear the way for the economic transformation of society. This economic transformation will involve not just cutting down on waste and unnecessary over-production, it will also examine what is produced and where and how the necessities of life are created and distributed. Society will not be determined by the factories and industries acquired from the bourgeoisie; it will have the opportunity to re-examine what society needs, how it is produced and distributed, and how the population can live for its own benefit, in tune with the environment. Communism will be the only form of society that is not contrary to the functioning of the environment. There will ‘the naturalisation of humanity, and humanisation of nature’ as Marx put it.

The transformation of society will be carried out to fulfil the needs of the whole of the working class, and will overtake any narrow ‘sectional’ interests. We have no interest in maintaining the forms of organisation determined by the former owners of the means of production. The bourgeois factory form itself will be out-moded, and factory committees will have no veto over the reorganisations of society. The slimming (even drastic shrinking) of the means of (over)production will require a certain amount of de-industrialisation, and there will no more need to continue the mind-bending and back-straining dash to produce just to realise surplus value for its own sake. What surplus production there is will be as part of a socially-planned cycle of production, with society’s needs and interests no longer having to be mediated by the market and the profit motive.

When the proletariat has finally extended to embrace all of the population, then there will be no other classes in society. The proletariat itself will cease to be a class, and so we will have a classless population, and be able to talk about true humanity having finally been established, and the ancient dream/ memory of the ‘Golden Age’ finally realised. We can then live in a truly human way, divesting ourselves of all the burdens and immoralities of class rule. We will have, as Marx said, left the pre-history of the human race.

The crises of capitalist society, and the consequent class struggle, are a prerequisite for the future of human society. The proletarian revolution is a vital necessity – we have nothing to lose but our chains, and we have a world to win!