BECAUSE the pattern of a particular crisis is influenced by the concrete circumstances of the time no crisis is merely a repetition of those which have preceded it. While there are elements common to all crises we cannot say in advance how these elements will interact in a specific situation or what is the relative strength of other factors associated with it. Consequently to understand all the relevant details of a particular crisis, we can only be wise after the event.
Nevertheless we can say that all crises are intimately connected with two fundamental features of the system, viz., " anarchy of production " and " disproportional industrial development." These two features are again intimately bound up with each other.
By anarchy of production we do not infer economic chaos, on the contrary capitalism is a system ruled by laws and compulsions of its own. What is meant is that Capitalism is not a system consciously regulated by social aims. Capitalists do not meet beforehand to harmonise production in accordance with social ends. Capitalism being profit motivated production, capitalists invest in industry for no other motive and without regard for and little knowledge of other investments being carried out at the same time. But capitalist production is social production and the different branches of industry form an interlocking whole. It can be seen then that the different yet integrated industrial spheres, governed as they are by autonomous decisions being made simultaneously, there exists in the system an inherent bias towards uneven development between the various branches of industry. When this disproportionality reaches a certain level the possibility of a crisis emerges.
To put the matter concretely we can begin by saying that the market for any product is dependent on the volume of production in other spheres and therefore cannot be accurately gauged. Now if we assume that Capitalists in a particular industry have overestimated the demands for their product and so produced more than the market can absorb at a remunerative price and if we take it that other industries have not similarly expanded, then it can be said that this particular industry has over-expanded relative to other industries, i.e. a disproportionality of industrial development has taken place.
This relative over-expansion of industry will, however, generate cumulative effects. Not only will the industry affected cut investment and hence production but in doin'g so it reduces its demands for commodities, including labour-power, to those industries linked to it. They in turn will cut their orders to other concerns and so on. As a result a widespread decline in production will occur.
If the initial over-expansion is big enough it may permeate the entire economy and precipitate a crisis. Large scale unemployment will appear, purchasing power suffer a sharp decline and surplus products will then begin to appear on the market as a matter of course.
It can be seen then that over-production in one branch of industry brings elements of over-production in other branches of industry, and by rupturing the conditions of equilibrium, initiates relative overproduction, which is indistinguishable from general overproduction. All crises then are crises of relative overproduction. An industry can only overexpand in relation to other industries although the effect which this produces is, as has been already stated, indistinquishable from general overproduction.
Crises, as Marx pointed out, do not arise through a lack of paying consumption of the mass of the population. They arise because disproportional development in one industrial sector leads to a curtailment of investment (and so production) which by upsetting the balance of the different industrial branches brings about a general slowing down of production. It is this disproportional development which starts the downward spiral of wages and employment with its corallary of shrinking purchasing power. The lack of paying consumption is then a consequence not a.cause of crises.
To elucidate the point further we might add that the effect of a boom is to generate rising levels of purchasing power, and further that wage payments seem to increase more rapidly in the latter stages of the boom than at the beginning. But rising wages tend to reduce profit margins. Further, when an over expansion of one industrial sphere has been big enough to start a downward spiral of investment, and profits, there comes into existence a volume of capital investment too great to be consistent with former profit levels. As Marx says, " Since production depends on investment [such a situation] constitutes an overproduction of capital which takes the form of an overproduction of commodities."
From the standpoint of the employers one of the prime factors for ending boom conditions is that wages are too high to make increasing investment desirable. Any return to a new stage of profitable investment depends then on labour-power becoming cheap enough to increase profit margins to the point which makes an expansion of production worthwhile.
A crisis is made possible in Capitalism not because the workers have too little purchasing power — in fact as already stated their purchasing power is at its height prior to the boom breaking — but because of the antagonistic class distribution of income inherent in a system of antagonistic class relations of production. Capitalists cut back investment because there is an unsatisfactory income distribution for them, in that profit margins are too small and wage levels too high. They are not concerned with some abstract purchasing power but in the concrete fact that the purchasing power in the form of wages is too high for the existing volume of capital to earn a given return.
To say, as under-consumptionists say, that crises are caused by too much of everything being produced is not in accordance with the facts. A crisis does not mean there is a total deficit of purchasing power unable to buy back an absolute over-production of consumers goods. The decline in purchasing power of the workers in a crisis situation is the outcome of an unfavourable distribution of income as the result of the system failing to expand proportionally and so bringing about elements of over-production in the various sectors of industry whose net effect is general over-production. It is this that originates a falling spiral of wages and employment and makes inevitable the appearance of market " surplus stock '' in the shape of articles consumed by the working class. There is still, nevertheless, plenty of purchasing power in the pockets, holdings, banks, etc of the Capitalists, to buy this surplus stock but of course they do not choose to spend their money that way.
Muddle-headed theorists have argued that crises could be assuaged and even cured, if at the first sign of a slump, the Capitalists went in for increased personal consumption, buying more Rolls Royces presumably and having nightly champagne parties. But it is forgotten, or is not known by these theorists, that boom or slump, the accumulation of capital i.e. the self-expansion of capital is still the basic urge of the Capitalists. At least the Capitalists are realists who know that they must husband their resources and even increase them as far as conditions permit, if they are to successfully ride the crest of the next boom wave. Like the workers they tighten their belts even though the belts are larger and the stomach more capacious. In more theoretical language it can be said that the primary motive of Capitalists is the expansion of exchange value not the production of immediate articles of consumption.
Marx himself took the view that the system in relation to human needs does not produce too much but too little. He held it to be a system of organised scarcity. In Vol. 3 of " Capital " he states, " It is not a fact that too much wealth is produced. But it is a fact that there is periodical over-production in its capitalistic and contradictory form."
Which brings us to Mr. Strachey again. In the 1930's he wrote a much hailed book, " The Nature of Capitalist Crises." Nowhere in it did he provide any coherent account of crises. One could detect, however, the over-tones of an under-consumptionist view of crises. Thus on (p. 248) we are told " that the essence of every capitalist crisis is that the population is unable to purchase the evergrowing quantity of consumers commodities which come pouring on to the market." One page 289 he adds, " the under-consumptionists were not wrong in one sense but they were wrong in thinking that the payment of high wages was the solution to crises." All of which shows the confused nature of Mr. Strachey's thinking on the subject of crises.
What was more serious was his attempt to link what Marx termed the tendency of the law of the falling rate of profit to crises and to establish it as the crucial cause. It is true that Marx had listed a number of tendencies which worked in an opposite direction and Mr. Strachey dutifully enumerated them. But in " The Nature of Capitalist Crisis " he contended that " they can check but not overcome the main downward tendency of the rate of profit." P. 264).
This view that the tendency of the law of the falling rate of profit is the main agency for encompassing the downfall of capitalism can be briefly stated. It is held that the rate of profit falls in a continuous downward curve and finally reaches a point which provides no further impetus for capital accumulation, just as the steady drop in potential of a power source would reach a point where it could no longer supply a. driving force to machinery.
Not only would the falling rate of profit as it reached a new low level precipitate a crisis but as a result each crisis would become more catastrophic. Bound up with this view is the belief of some ultimate breakdown of the system. This mechanistic and fatalistic view of capitalism was fashionable for years among Communist theorists and Mr. Strachey fashionably followed it.
Marx's own formulation of the tendency of the falling rate of profit can be briefly enumerated. Marx divided capital outlay into two parts, one part he called constant capital, which consists of tools, machinery, etc. The other part he termed variable capital constitutes wage payments in order to buy labour-power and set it to productive activity. It is this active labour power which alone produces value and a value greater than its upkeep. It is thus the sole source of surplus value and hence profits.
Nevertheless, a marked trend of capitalism is the increasing mechanisation of the process of production. This means that as capital outlay grows, a proportionally greater amount will be spent on means of production than on wage bills. But as we have seen, variable capital provides the sole source of value and hence profit. It follows then that as capital grows and with it the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, then less value and profit is produced in a given unit of capital. And the rate of profit which is computed on the total capital outlay must fall.
We can illustrate this by assuming that a given capital outlay of £10,000 is divided into £5,000 constant and £5,000 variable and that the rate of exploitation is 100%. In that case the profit will be £5,000 and the rate of profit 50%. If, however, the capital grows to £30,000, of which £20,000 is laid out in constant capital and £10,000 in variable capital and the rate of exploitation is 100%, then the profit will be £10,000. Thus proportionately less value and profit has been produced on the larger capital and the rate of profit has fallen from 50% to 33 1/2 %.
But Marx was quick to enumerate counter teadences for keeping the rate of profit up. The main ones being, increasing productivity of labour due to the increasing efficiency of mechanisation. The cheapening of the elements of constant capital, resulting from increased productivity, which means that although the physical volume of constant capital increases, the value composition does not increase at the same rate. Then there is the existence of an industrial reserve army which acts as a reservoir of cheap labour-power and stimulates the setting up of new industries with a low ratio of constant to variable capital and hence a high rate of profit. The averaging-in these higher profit rates with the lower profit rate of the older industries raises the overall rate of profit.
Thus the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is merely a tendency among counter tendencies. Marx's own analysis of the matter gave no grounds for supposing which, if any, tendencies would prevail. Indeed for Marx to have advanced some economic law in abstraction to which capitalism must conform would have been contrary to his empirical method. For him such tendencies or counter tendencies could only be relevant to the concrete circumstances of any given stage of capitalism. It was left to Communist theorists and the facile Mr. Strachey to elevate this mere tendency to some law of social gravity.
In actual fact there is no direct evidence of some steady decline in the rate of profit over a long period. There are, of course, several profit rates in capitalism and a decline or drop in one of them is not necessarily a cause or even a factor for precipitating a crisis. And even if there did exist a tendency for the rate of profit to fall due to growth of the ratio of constant to variable capital, over a long period, it would be very slow and could not account for the sharp decline in profit levels and the widespread curtailment of investment associated with crises. Again the idea of what constitutes a profit norm for capitalists can undergo change and the norm of one period might be lower than the preceding one. Thus a lower rate of profit would constitute no disincentive for investment which is characteristic of a crisis situation. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that some alleged long term tendency of a falling rate of profit is organically connected with crises and ultimately the demise of capitalism. Such views are not propositions of Marx but projections of Communist politics.
Mr. Strachey in combatting the false assumptions he once held, believes he is combatting Marxism whereas it is the present Mr. Strachey quarrelling with the past Mr. Strachey without understanding what the quarrel is really all about.
We might add Mr. Strachey makes no reference in his latest book to his past errors. To these "errors" it seems we must also add, sins of commission and omission.
E.W., Socialist Standard April 1957
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Crises, Catastrophy and Mr. Strachey
DID Marx really believe that crises would be so catastrophic in their effects as to ensure the economic collapse of Capitalism? It is a convention of many of his critics and the so-called Marxist revisionists to say he did. None of them have ever given substance to their assertions with any worth while evidence.
It is true that the young Marx in Wage Labour and Capital (p. 45), spoke of " crises becoming more frequent and violent." And again in the Communist Manifesto (p. 18), we are told —" Crises by their periodical return put the existence of bourgeois society on its trial and each time more threateningly." But it is to Marx's detailed and mature economic investigation to which we must turn in order to estimate what he thought was the nature and role of Capitalist crises. And here we find no specific reference or concrete indication of a view that some mounting crescendo of crises will ultimately crash to economic ruin.
In point of fact, Marx never formulated a theory of crises, at least not in any systematic or cohesive form. Instead we get a treatment of the different aspects of crises, scattered through the 2nd and 3rd volumes of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. So far from Marx laying down any hard and fast rules on the subject of crises, we get instead an analysis of a number of tendencies which are bound up with the production of crisis situations.
It seems fairly safe to assume then that Marx in his later and mature investigation of the actual trends in Capitalism, never regarded crises as the agent of the final destruction of extant society. On the contrary there is no little evidence to indicate that he saw crises as a normal but essential phase of the trade cycle which, he said, was peculiar to the Capitalist mode of production.
Indeed it was no other than Marx who pioneered the investigation into the nature of the antithetical yet mutually reciprocal trade cycle. It was Marx who showed one phase of the trade cycle is characterised by an acceleration of capital investment and as a corollary to this an increased tempo of industrial activity, rising employment, rising wages and increasing profits.
Because the different branches of industry are atomistically controlled or to state it alternatively because "anarchy of production," prevails in Capitalism, decisions for capital investment are carried out by Capitalists without knowledge or regard for investment decisions being made at the same time by other Capitalists elsewhere.
As a result of these autonomous and unrelated decisions to invest in a period of expansion, it is hardly surprising that overexpansion of a particular line of industry takes place or what comes to the same thing disproportionality of industrial development between the various branches of production. Thus one industrial sphere may have overexpanded relatively to other spheres and as a result it will be unable to sell its goods at a remunerative price. Consequently there will be in this particular sphere a contraction of investment and hence production. This action will have cumulative effects by leading to a reduction of demand of products and services of those industries which are linked with this particular industrial branch and which in turn will reduce their orders to other concerns likewise linked with them. If the initial overexpansion or disproportionality of industrial development is big enough a general fall in the demand for goods and services will spread from point to point and a general relative over-production will ensue.
Thus the phase of the business cycle associated with accelerating investment, rising wages, rising employment and increasing profits, will come to an end and be replaced by the antithetical phase of reduced investment, falling employment and declining wages and profits.
The orthodox economists also treat of what is termed in modern economic usage the business cycle theory. For them a period of brisk trade activity is linked with a high return on invested capital. While the antithetical phase i.e. a recession, is associated with a decline in the rate of profit below the normal range for investment purposes. Thus for them crises are analysed from the formal level of the supply and demand of investment funds. Marx, however, probed deeper and showed that the behaviour of the Capitalist class springs from the basic features of Capitalist society which constitute a particular set of antagonistic class relations of production and gives rise to an antagonistic form of income distribution. From the general standpoint of the Capitalist class a "recession" is the outcome of an unfavourable distribution of income in that the form of income going to the working class as wages, is too high and that part of income going to them as profits is too low, to make it worth their while to maintain a high level of investment.
If Capitalism could operate on some master plan then the correct proportional expansion between the different branches of industry might be attempted and investment decisions synchronised in respect of the entire economy. But Capitalism does not work like that. Each Capitalist or group of Capitalists produce for a market of whose size they have only an imperfect knowledge, let alone the entire network of markets operating in Capitalism. Hence whether too little or too much is produced cannot be known until after the event and it is only a major upset in the price mechanism which reveals that a number of unrelated and separate investment. decisions have brought about a rupture of equilibrium conditions.
Crises are not as some theorists of under-consumption imagine the outcome of expanded production, outstripping total consumption, demand, and so bringing about some permanent market decline.
It was never Marx's view that crises arise as the result of a chronic bias towards overproduction and an ever-increasing inability of the Capitalists to dispose of their products in a perpetually shrinking market. In Capital, Vol. 3 (p. 299), Marx, commenting on the upward swing of the trade cycle ends thus: " And in this way the cycle would run once more. One portion of capital which had been depreciated by the stagnation of its function would recover its old value. For the rest the same vicious cycle would be described once more in an expanded market and with increased productive forces."
From what has been said it is evident that Marx never viewed crises as an ineluctable agent for the ultimate destruction of existing society but as an antithetical but inseperable phase of the trade cycle.
In the light of the foregoing it would seem that periods of prosperity for the Capitalists i.e., periods of accelerating capital investment bring nemesis in the way of rising wages, rising costs, etc., which sooner or later tend to appreciably diminish profit margins. Crises would then seem the specific remedy for the evils arising from " prosperity." Stated from the more fundamental standpoint of Marx's analysis these evils are, "a production of too many means of production and necessities of life to serve as a means.of exploitation of the labourer at a certain rate of profit."
Nevertheless if crises can be looked upon from one point of view as a retribution for prosperity they can also be regarded as acting as a purgative to the body-economic, allowing it to be. restored to the healthier state of equilibrium. To put the matter specifically, crises contain the germ of a trade recovery. In the first place the existence of a large industrial reserve army will serve to cheapen the price of labour-power and so raise the rate of profit and because of the cheapness of labour-power, tend to retard the introduction of machinery and new methods and so make possible the more primitive technical concerns to become profitable once more. At the same time the sharp depreciation of capital values will lower the organic composition of capital, i.e. lower the ratio of constant capital (means of production) to variable capital (wage payments) and so assist in raising the rate of profit. Again during a crisis there are cheap and abundant resources available, including large reserves of labour-power. Thus the conditions are prepared in a shorter or longer period, for a resumption of increased investment and rising profit margins.
Crises are not then incidental interludes between periods of high trade activity but an essential corrective for the uninhibited self-expansion of capital. As Marx states it: " Periodically the conflict of antagonistic agencies seek vent in crises. The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions, violent eruptions which restore the disturbed equilibrium for a while." (Capital, Vol. 3, p. 292).
To say then that Marx tied up his views on crises with an automatic breakdown theory is either to misunderstand or misrepresent him. While it is true that crises subject Capitalism to stresses and strains, to suggest that they will bring about the social and physical collapse of the system is something quite different. Marx so far as the present writer is aware never used the term " economic collapse of Capitalism."
For Marx, however, crises were a significant part of the dynamics of Capitalism and he regarded his own treatment of them as an important contribution to the understanding of the system. He saw them as not only an outcome of antagonistic agencies but as a means of resolving the conflict in a new equilibrium. The crisis plays then a definite role in influencing the long term trends of the system.
Capitalism may thus be described as a system of unstable equilibrium. Which brings us to Mr. Strachey. who states in Contemporary Capitalism (p. 218) that " Marx regarded the instabilities of Capitalism as a secondary matter and did not expect them to prove fatal to the system." But in that case the economic collapse theory which Mr. Strachey accuses Marx of holding, cannot be explained from Marx's theory of the production cycle of Capitalism. Marx, says Mr. Strachey, formulated something different. Marx's view of economic collapse is deduced from Marx's contention, according to Mr. Strachey, that Capitalism undergoes a continuous process of mass underconsumption and thus an ever-increasing inability of Capitalists to dispose of their products in an ever-decreasing market. Intense mass poverty would result, the workers would revolt and Capitalism would perish.
We are asked to believe, minus any evidence, that Marx gave up his formulation of the trade cycle concept and substituted a view of permanent stagnation, i.e. of falling wages, profits and investment, and ever increasing massive unemployment. Thus the system would run down like a clock. Crises would no longer play an active part; no new equilibrium could be established; capital accumulation would go on contracting and the basic feature of Capitalism, the self-expansion of capital would atrophy. Both employers and workers would become ever poorer, even if at different levels. Mr. Strachey consistent in his confusion, would have us believe nevertheless that Marx thought that in all this process the Capitalists would in some way grow ever richer.
Mr. Strachey, however, flatly contradicts himself in the same paragraph by stating that the instabilities of the system and Marx's alleged underconsumption views of crises are in some way clearly related. He adds lamely " but Marx never fully elucidated the connection between them." Marx did, of course, fully elucidate the connection between the instabilities of Capitalism and the emergence of crises. Mr. Strachey has never fully understood this connection, even though he wrote a book called The Nature of Capitalist Crisis. When Marx in the preface of Capital presupposed a reader willing to think for himself, he was perhaps a little optimistic. But a person who can state on one page that Marx regarded the instabilities of the system as secondary and then on the previous page aver that " Marx and Engels lived in the confident expectation that each crisis would be the system's last" i.e. fatal, is incorrigible.
Marx never constructed a catastrophic theory of crises. Nor did he say, as Mr. Strachey avers, that crises are due to the inability of the workers to buy back what they have produced. Although Mr. Stratchey was posing as a Marxist, he put this view forward in the name of Marx. Nevertheless Marx repudiated Rodbertus' view that crises were caused by a lack of paying consumption and could be remedied by highering wages. Marx also showed that it was " high wages " which constituted a factor for producing a crisis and a plentiful supply of cheap labour-power as a factor for initiating a boom.
Mr. Strachey, however, is not really an economist. He is a politician trying to explain the errors and illusions of the past but in fact only explaining them away. It becomes necessary therefore to set up a lot of false assumptions and with great gusto, knock 'em down. Like most politicians, he has a favourite aunt called Sally.
E.W , Socialist Standard March 1957
It is true that the young Marx in Wage Labour and Capital (p. 45), spoke of " crises becoming more frequent and violent." And again in the Communist Manifesto (p. 18), we are told —" Crises by their periodical return put the existence of bourgeois society on its trial and each time more threateningly." But it is to Marx's detailed and mature economic investigation to which we must turn in order to estimate what he thought was the nature and role of Capitalist crises. And here we find no specific reference or concrete indication of a view that some mounting crescendo of crises will ultimately crash to economic ruin.
In point of fact, Marx never formulated a theory of crises, at least not in any systematic or cohesive form. Instead we get a treatment of the different aspects of crises, scattered through the 2nd and 3rd volumes of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. So far from Marx laying down any hard and fast rules on the subject of crises, we get instead an analysis of a number of tendencies which are bound up with the production of crisis situations.
It seems fairly safe to assume then that Marx in his later and mature investigation of the actual trends in Capitalism, never regarded crises as the agent of the final destruction of extant society. On the contrary there is no little evidence to indicate that he saw crises as a normal but essential phase of the trade cycle which, he said, was peculiar to the Capitalist mode of production.
Indeed it was no other than Marx who pioneered the investigation into the nature of the antithetical yet mutually reciprocal trade cycle. It was Marx who showed one phase of the trade cycle is characterised by an acceleration of capital investment and as a corollary to this an increased tempo of industrial activity, rising employment, rising wages and increasing profits.
Because the different branches of industry are atomistically controlled or to state it alternatively because "anarchy of production," prevails in Capitalism, decisions for capital investment are carried out by Capitalists without knowledge or regard for investment decisions being made at the same time by other Capitalists elsewhere.
As a result of these autonomous and unrelated decisions to invest in a period of expansion, it is hardly surprising that overexpansion of a particular line of industry takes place or what comes to the same thing disproportionality of industrial development between the various branches of production. Thus one industrial sphere may have overexpanded relatively to other spheres and as a result it will be unable to sell its goods at a remunerative price. Consequently there will be in this particular sphere a contraction of investment and hence production. This action will have cumulative effects by leading to a reduction of demand of products and services of those industries which are linked with this particular industrial branch and which in turn will reduce their orders to other concerns likewise linked with them. If the initial overexpansion or disproportionality of industrial development is big enough a general fall in the demand for goods and services will spread from point to point and a general relative over-production will ensue.
Thus the phase of the business cycle associated with accelerating investment, rising wages, rising employment and increasing profits, will come to an end and be replaced by the antithetical phase of reduced investment, falling employment and declining wages and profits.
The orthodox economists also treat of what is termed in modern economic usage the business cycle theory. For them a period of brisk trade activity is linked with a high return on invested capital. While the antithetical phase i.e. a recession, is associated with a decline in the rate of profit below the normal range for investment purposes. Thus for them crises are analysed from the formal level of the supply and demand of investment funds. Marx, however, probed deeper and showed that the behaviour of the Capitalist class springs from the basic features of Capitalist society which constitute a particular set of antagonistic class relations of production and gives rise to an antagonistic form of income distribution. From the general standpoint of the Capitalist class a "recession" is the outcome of an unfavourable distribution of income in that the form of income going to the working class as wages, is too high and that part of income going to them as profits is too low, to make it worth their while to maintain a high level of investment.
If Capitalism could operate on some master plan then the correct proportional expansion between the different branches of industry might be attempted and investment decisions synchronised in respect of the entire economy. But Capitalism does not work like that. Each Capitalist or group of Capitalists produce for a market of whose size they have only an imperfect knowledge, let alone the entire network of markets operating in Capitalism. Hence whether too little or too much is produced cannot be known until after the event and it is only a major upset in the price mechanism which reveals that a number of unrelated and separate investment. decisions have brought about a rupture of equilibrium conditions.
Crises are not as some theorists of under-consumption imagine the outcome of expanded production, outstripping total consumption, demand, and so bringing about some permanent market decline.
It was never Marx's view that crises arise as the result of a chronic bias towards overproduction and an ever-increasing inability of the Capitalists to dispose of their products in a perpetually shrinking market. In Capital, Vol. 3 (p. 299), Marx, commenting on the upward swing of the trade cycle ends thus: " And in this way the cycle would run once more. One portion of capital which had been depreciated by the stagnation of its function would recover its old value. For the rest the same vicious cycle would be described once more in an expanded market and with increased productive forces."
From what has been said it is evident that Marx never viewed crises as an ineluctable agent for the ultimate destruction of existing society but as an antithetical but inseperable phase of the trade cycle.
In the light of the foregoing it would seem that periods of prosperity for the Capitalists i.e., periods of accelerating capital investment bring nemesis in the way of rising wages, rising costs, etc., which sooner or later tend to appreciably diminish profit margins. Crises would then seem the specific remedy for the evils arising from " prosperity." Stated from the more fundamental standpoint of Marx's analysis these evils are, "a production of too many means of production and necessities of life to serve as a means.of exploitation of the labourer at a certain rate of profit."
Nevertheless if crises can be looked upon from one point of view as a retribution for prosperity they can also be regarded as acting as a purgative to the body-economic, allowing it to be. restored to the healthier state of equilibrium. To put the matter specifically, crises contain the germ of a trade recovery. In the first place the existence of a large industrial reserve army will serve to cheapen the price of labour-power and so raise the rate of profit and because of the cheapness of labour-power, tend to retard the introduction of machinery and new methods and so make possible the more primitive technical concerns to become profitable once more. At the same time the sharp depreciation of capital values will lower the organic composition of capital, i.e. lower the ratio of constant capital (means of production) to variable capital (wage payments) and so assist in raising the rate of profit. Again during a crisis there are cheap and abundant resources available, including large reserves of labour-power. Thus the conditions are prepared in a shorter or longer period, for a resumption of increased investment and rising profit margins.
Crises are not then incidental interludes between periods of high trade activity but an essential corrective for the uninhibited self-expansion of capital. As Marx states it: " Periodically the conflict of antagonistic agencies seek vent in crises. The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions, violent eruptions which restore the disturbed equilibrium for a while." (Capital, Vol. 3, p. 292).
To say then that Marx tied up his views on crises with an automatic breakdown theory is either to misunderstand or misrepresent him. While it is true that crises subject Capitalism to stresses and strains, to suggest that they will bring about the social and physical collapse of the system is something quite different. Marx so far as the present writer is aware never used the term " economic collapse of Capitalism."
For Marx, however, crises were a significant part of the dynamics of Capitalism and he regarded his own treatment of them as an important contribution to the understanding of the system. He saw them as not only an outcome of antagonistic agencies but as a means of resolving the conflict in a new equilibrium. The crisis plays then a definite role in influencing the long term trends of the system.
Capitalism may thus be described as a system of unstable equilibrium. Which brings us to Mr. Strachey. who states in Contemporary Capitalism (p. 218) that " Marx regarded the instabilities of Capitalism as a secondary matter and did not expect them to prove fatal to the system." But in that case the economic collapse theory which Mr. Strachey accuses Marx of holding, cannot be explained from Marx's theory of the production cycle of Capitalism. Marx, says Mr. Strachey, formulated something different. Marx's view of economic collapse is deduced from Marx's contention, according to Mr. Strachey, that Capitalism undergoes a continuous process of mass underconsumption and thus an ever-increasing inability of Capitalists to dispose of their products in an ever-decreasing market. Intense mass poverty would result, the workers would revolt and Capitalism would perish.
We are asked to believe, minus any evidence, that Marx gave up his formulation of the trade cycle concept and substituted a view of permanent stagnation, i.e. of falling wages, profits and investment, and ever increasing massive unemployment. Thus the system would run down like a clock. Crises would no longer play an active part; no new equilibrium could be established; capital accumulation would go on contracting and the basic feature of Capitalism, the self-expansion of capital would atrophy. Both employers and workers would become ever poorer, even if at different levels. Mr. Strachey consistent in his confusion, would have us believe nevertheless that Marx thought that in all this process the Capitalists would in some way grow ever richer.
Mr. Strachey, however, flatly contradicts himself in the same paragraph by stating that the instabilities of the system and Marx's alleged underconsumption views of crises are in some way clearly related. He adds lamely " but Marx never fully elucidated the connection between them." Marx did, of course, fully elucidate the connection between the instabilities of Capitalism and the emergence of crises. Mr. Strachey has never fully understood this connection, even though he wrote a book called The Nature of Capitalist Crisis. When Marx in the preface of Capital presupposed a reader willing to think for himself, he was perhaps a little optimistic. But a person who can state on one page that Marx regarded the instabilities of the system as secondary and then on the previous page aver that " Marx and Engels lived in the confident expectation that each crisis would be the system's last" i.e. fatal, is incorrigible.
Marx never constructed a catastrophic theory of crises. Nor did he say, as Mr. Strachey avers, that crises are due to the inability of the workers to buy back what they have produced. Although Mr. Stratchey was posing as a Marxist, he put this view forward in the name of Marx. Nevertheless Marx repudiated Rodbertus' view that crises were caused by a lack of paying consumption and could be remedied by highering wages. Marx also showed that it was " high wages " which constituted a factor for producing a crisis and a plentiful supply of cheap labour-power as a factor for initiating a boom.
Mr. Strachey, however, is not really an economist. He is a politician trying to explain the errors and illusions of the past but in fact only explaining them away. It becomes necessary therefore to set up a lot of false assumptions and with great gusto, knock 'em down. Like most politicians, he has a favourite aunt called Sally.
E.W , Socialist Standard March 1957
Marx and Engels and the 'Collapse' of Capitalism
In 1786, three years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf wrote:
The events of 17S9 disproved his gloomy predictions but, by the time Babeuf became prominent, the reaction was already setting in. His slogan of "The revolution is not finished, because the rich absorb ail wealth and rule exclusively, while the poor work like veritable slaves, languishing in poverty and counting for nothing in the State" was not taken up by the peasants and artisans. Faced with this, Babeuf and his followers planned an insurrection in which they would seize power, constitute themselves as the 'Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety', crush all opposition and — only then — introduce democracy. It was this method of conspiracy and coup d'etat which became the standard technique for 19th-century insurrectionaries such as Blanqui and which formed the inspiration for their innumerable secret societies and abortive rebellions.
From the start, Marx and Engels were scathing about this concept of revolution. For them it was self-evident that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself" and that, in any case, "revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily" as the plotters imagined.
Yet, however devastating the attack which Marx might make on the Blanquists and others, in one aspect he and Engels were in a very weak position. If they maintained that it was the entire working class which would be responsible for establishing socialism, how wouid they square this with the obvious fact that the mass of workers still gave every sign of being as "unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic" as they had been in Babeuf's time? To counter this, Marx and Engels fell back on the theory that it was the crisis in capitalist production which would galvanise the masses into revolutionary activity.
Even in their earliest writings both Marx and Engels attached great importance to crises: but over the years their observations caused them to modify their ideas, especially in relation to the business cycle. In his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbucher. 1844) Engels mentioned that slumps occur every five to seven years, "just as regularly as the great plagues did in the past". He repeated this in Principles of Communism (1S47) while, in the Condition of rhe Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), there are references to five-year and five to six-year cycles. Marx held similar views during this period. for in an Address on Free Trade delivered in Brussels in 1848 he drew attention to "the average period of from six to seven years — a period of time during which modern industry passes through the various phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, crisis and completes its inevitable cycle". At the same time they both expected crises to become "more frequent and more violent" Wage Labour annd Capital. Marx. 1847) and "more serious and more universal" (Outlines of a Critique of political Economy Engels. 1844).
Ten-year cycle
By the time Marx came to publish Capital (Volume I. 1867) he was writing that "the course characteristic of modern industry" was "a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations" — and adding that as accumulation advanced the "irregular oscillations" would follow each other more and more quickly. This perspective was echoed by Engels in most of his writings in the 1870s and early 80s as well. (See Dialectics of Nature. Anti-Duhring (1878), articles in the Labour Standard (1881), for example). Although Engels continued to put this line for some time after Marx's death (see his letter to Kautsky. November 8 1884) there was a new development during his last ten years in that more and more he came to maintain that an era of chronic stagnation had overwhelmed capitalism. As early as January 1884 in a letter to Bebel (January 18 1884), he wrote that "the ten-year cycle seems to have broken down" and, that same year, he made a similar point — although more hesitantly — in his Preface to Marx's Poverty of Philosophy:
From then until his death in 1895 his writings were full of references to "permanent and chronic depression" (Preface to the English edition of Capital, Volume I. 1886), to the "chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry" (Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1892) and to "chronic overproduction, depressed prices, falling or disappearing profits" (Capital, Volume III, 1894).
Parallel to this development of their ideas on the business cycle, Marx's and Engels' theories on the relationship between crises and revolution also went through a number of phases. As we have seen, in their early writings both held that the crises in capitalist production would become "more frequent and more violent". But, if this is seen as an absolute tendency, it must mean that eventually capitalism will be brought to a point where it can no longer recover. At any rate, this was certainly Engels' interpretation of the trends taking place in the 1840s and he repeatedly implied that crises would produce a revolution independently of the level of socialist consciousness reached by the working class:
Thus, although the extent to which socialist ideas had penetrated the working class might be important in influencing the revolution which Engels thought he saw emerging in England, that was the limit of their role. In both these works, it is the increase in misery of the workers which Engels stresses as the vital factor in the development of their revolutionary activity — rather than their growing understanding of socialism as an alternative method of organising society to capitalism. This contrasts sharply with some of Marx's writings of the same period, where he puts all his emphasis on the spread of socialist concepts among the working class.
In fact, socialist consciousness was considered of such vital importance by Marx that he grossly exaggerated its depth and extent
The upheavals in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in 1848, however, had a profound influence on Marx, and for a time at any rate his enthusiasm got the better of him and he was evidently prepared to suspend his former commitment to socialist consciousness. His writings of this period suggest that it is the commercial crisis and the resulting hardship of the workers which are the critical factors in inducing the working class to turn to revolution. The articles he wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850 all revolve around the axiom that "crises produce revolution", and since the revolutionary tide had by then ebbed away, that "a new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis". Naturally, Engels' earlier ideas readily accommodated themselves to this new development in Marx's thought and together they wrote;
This was the line they they were to take throughout the 1850s. Living in exile in London and Manchester, they anxiously searched for any signs of the next crisis — and oscillated between wild optimism and more justified impatience in time with the fluctuations in world trade. In September 1852 Engels is writing to Marx that "with the the temporary prosperity ... the workers (in France) seem to have become completely bourgeois after all. It will take a severe chastisement by crises if they are to become good for anything again soon." By April 1853, however. "Europe is admirably prepared; it needs only the spark of a crisis". (Engels to Weydemeyer). When the required spark didn't materialise he became more cautious but in 1857, when a crisis really did develop, they were both certain that "now our time is coming". As early as September 1856, Marx had recognised the symptoms of the approaching disruption in industry and had written to Engels: "This time, moreover, the thing is on a European scale never reached before and I do not think we shall be able to sit here as spectators much longer". The following year, in the midst of the crisis, he is "working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes." (Letter to Engels, December 8, 1857). Meanwhile Engels was maintaining that a really chronic crisis would be needed to stir the workers into revolution since "the masses must have got damned lethargic after such long prosperity" (Engels to Marx, November 15, 1857). When trade started to pick up again at the end of December 1857 both of them were sadly disappointed and, a year later, we find Engels returning to a familiar theme: "The English proletariat is 'becoming more and more bourgeois".
The crisis of 1857 and its failure to evoke a revolutionary response from the working class had a big impact on Marx. So when he came to publish Capital (Volume I, 1867), although he outlined the cycle of modern industry as "a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over¬production, crisis and stagnation", there were no references to revolution automatically arising from this sequence. But if Marx seems to have largely shaken himself free of his former romantic notions, they remained well in evidence in Engel's writings. Anti-Duhring (1878) in particular was as outspoken in its commitment to the idea that capitalism would 'collapse' as any of his earlier works had been.
Anticipating Rosa Luxemburg, Engels wrote that "if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place" and that the working class would be "forced to accomplish this revolution", "under penalty of its own destruction". Crises, then, were still seen as "means of compelling the social revolution".
Until the early 1880s Engels's ideas on crises and revolution hardly showed any advance on those he had held 30 years before. This is made clear enough by a letter he wrote to Bernstein in January 1882.
But after Marx's death in 1883, with Engels deciding that capitalism might well be entering a phase of chronic stagnation with correspondingly less chance of acute crises occuring, his emphasis naturally shifted from the earlier concept of a crisis-provoked revolution to the view that the capitalist system would be driven into an economic impasse. Thus in his preface to the first German edition of Marx's Poverty of Philosophy (1884) he refers to "the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree". Four years later, in his introduction to Marx's Address on Free Trade, he writes that society will be "brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodelling of the economic structure which forms its basis".
Engels's correspondence during his last ten years is also an interesting record of his tendency to imagine that capitalism would 'collapse'. In a letter to J. P. Becker in June 1885 he assessed the political currents at work in England and concluded that "the masses will turn socialist here too. Industrial over-production will do the rest". As late as 1893, in a letter to Danielson (February 24, 1893), he is still convinced that there are "economic consequences of the capitalist system which must bring it up to the critical point", that "the crisis must come".
Yet although at times during this final period of his life, Engels was to foreshadow the determinism of the leaders of the Second International on this question, at others he came near to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties. As we have shown, as long as Marx was alive, it was he rather than Engels who emphasised the need for socialist consciousness as a precondition for the overthrowing of capitalism by the working class. But with Marx dead, Engels seems to have become aware of the need to stress this himself. Although he could not free himself entirely from the ideas which had dominated his thinking on revolution for over 40 years, yet he could also write that:
When this is coupled with other statements he was to make, to the effect that "where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses them¬selves must also be in it, must themselves have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul" (Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, 1895), one gets an entirely different slant from that conveyed in some of his other writings.
This study of the attitude of Marx and Engels towards crises and the concept of capitalism 'collapsing' shows, then, the extent to which they were influenced by the various phases which capitalism passed through in 19th-century Europe. If we have outlined some of the mistaken attitudes they adopted this is not to detract from the immense contributions they made to socialist thought. What it does mean, however, is that it was left to other socialists to produce a more penetrating analysis of the role of crises in capitalist production. What was most useful in their work on this topic was later summed up in the pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse which the Socialist Party published in 1932:
J.C., Socialist Standard April 1969
The majority is always on the side of routine and immob¬ility, so much is it unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic . . . Those who do not want to move forward are the enemies of those who do, and unhappily it is the mass which persists stubbornly in never budging at all.
The events of 17S9 disproved his gloomy predictions but, by the time Babeuf became prominent, the reaction was already setting in. His slogan of "The revolution is not finished, because the rich absorb ail wealth and rule exclusively, while the poor work like veritable slaves, languishing in poverty and counting for nothing in the State" was not taken up by the peasants and artisans. Faced with this, Babeuf and his followers planned an insurrection in which they would seize power, constitute themselves as the 'Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety', crush all opposition and — only then — introduce democracy. It was this method of conspiracy and coup d'etat which became the standard technique for 19th-century insurrectionaries such as Blanqui and which formed the inspiration for their innumerable secret societies and abortive rebellions.
From the start, Marx and Engels were scathing about this concept of revolution. For them it was self-evident that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself" and that, in any case, "revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily" as the plotters imagined.
It goes without saying that these conspirators by no means confine themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat. Tneir business consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, spurring it in to artificial crises, making revolutions extempore without the conditions for revolution. For them the only condition required for the revolution is a sufficient organisation of their own conspiracy. They are the alchemists of she revolution.
Yet, however devastating the attack which Marx might make on the Blanquists and others, in one aspect he and Engels were in a very weak position. If they maintained that it was the entire working class which would be responsible for establishing socialism, how wouid they square this with the obvious fact that the mass of workers still gave every sign of being as "unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic" as they had been in Babeuf's time? To counter this, Marx and Engels fell back on the theory that it was the crisis in capitalist production which would galvanise the masses into revolutionary activity.
Even in their earliest writings both Marx and Engels attached great importance to crises: but over the years their observations caused them to modify their ideas, especially in relation to the business cycle. In his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbucher. 1844) Engels mentioned that slumps occur every five to seven years, "just as regularly as the great plagues did in the past". He repeated this in Principles of Communism (1S47) while, in the Condition of rhe Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), there are references to five-year and five to six-year cycles. Marx held similar views during this period. for in an Address on Free Trade delivered in Brussels in 1848 he drew attention to "the average period of from six to seven years — a period of time during which modern industry passes through the various phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, crisis and completes its inevitable cycle". At the same time they both expected crises to become "more frequent and more violent" Wage Labour annd Capital. Marx. 1847) and "more serious and more universal" (Outlines of a Critique of political Economy Engels. 1844).
Ten-year cycle
By the time Marx came to publish Capital (Volume I. 1867) he was writing that "the course characteristic of modern industry" was "a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations" — and adding that as accumulation advanced the "irregular oscillations" would follow each other more and more quickly. This perspective was echoed by Engels in most of his writings in the 1870s and early 80s as well. (See Dialectics of Nature. Anti-Duhring (1878), articles in the Labour Standard (1881), for example). Although Engels continued to put this line for some time after Marx's death (see his letter to Kautsky. November 8 1884) there was a new development during his last ten years in that more and more he came to maintain that an era of chronic stagnation had overwhelmed capitalism. As early as January 1884 in a letter to Bebel (January 18 1884), he wrote that "the ten-year cycle seems to have broken down" and, that same year, he made a similar point — although more hesitantly — in his Preface to Marx's Poverty of Philosophy:
The period of general prosperity proeeceding the crisis still fails to appear. If it should fail altogether, then chronic stagnation would necessarily become the normal condition of modern industry, with only insignificant fluctuations.
From then until his death in 1895 his writings were full of references to "permanent and chronic depression" (Preface to the English edition of Capital, Volume I. 1886), to the "chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry" (Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1892) and to "chronic overproduction, depressed prices, falling or disappearing profits" (Capital, Volume III, 1894).
Parallel to this development of their ideas on the business cycle, Marx's and Engels' theories on the relationship between crises and revolution also went through a number of phases. As we have seen, in their early writings both held that the crises in capitalist production would become "more frequent and more violent". But, if this is seen as an absolute tendency, it must mean that eventually capitalism will be brought to a point where it can no longer recover. At any rate, this was certainly Engels' interpretation of the trends taking place in the 1840s and he repeatedly implied that crises would produce a revolution independently of the level of socialist consciousness reached by the working class:
Every new crisis must be more serious and more universal than the last. Every fresh slump must ruin more small capitalists and increase the workers who live only by their labour. This will increase the number of the unemployed and this is the main problem that worries economists. In the end commercial crises will lead to a social revolution far beyond the comprehension of the economists with their scholastic wisdom. (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844.)
The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution: but it can be made more gentle than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery. (Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845).
Thus, although the extent to which socialist ideas had penetrated the working class might be important in influencing the revolution which Engels thought he saw emerging in England, that was the limit of their role. In both these works, it is the increase in misery of the workers which Engels stresses as the vital factor in the development of their revolutionary activity — rather than their growing understanding of socialism as an alternative method of organising society to capitalism. This contrasts sharply with some of Marx's writings of the same period, where he puts all his emphasis on the spread of socialist concepts among the working class.
It is true that, in its economic development, private property advances towards its own dissolution; but it only does this through a development which is independent of itself, unconscious and achieved against its will — solely because it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of its moral and physical poverty, degradation conscious of its degradation, and for this reason trying to abolish itself. (Holy Family, 1845.)
In fact, socialist consciousness was considered of such vital importance by Marx that he grossly exaggerated its depth and extent
There is no need to dwell here upon the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historical task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity. [In 1845!]
The upheavals in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in 1848, however, had a profound influence on Marx, and for a time at any rate his enthusiasm got the better of him and he was evidently prepared to suspend his former commitment to socialist consciousness. His writings of this period suggest that it is the commercial crisis and the resulting hardship of the workers which are the critical factors in inducing the working class to turn to revolution. The articles he wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850 all revolve around the axiom that "crises produce revolution", and since the revolutionary tide had by then ebbed away, that "a new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis". Naturally, Engels' earlier ideas readily accommodated themselves to this new development in Marx's thought and together they wrote;
With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other.
This was the line they they were to take throughout the 1850s. Living in exile in London and Manchester, they anxiously searched for any signs of the next crisis — and oscillated between wild optimism and more justified impatience in time with the fluctuations in world trade. In September 1852 Engels is writing to Marx that "with the the temporary prosperity ... the workers (in France) seem to have become completely bourgeois after all. It will take a severe chastisement by crises if they are to become good for anything again soon." By April 1853, however. "Europe is admirably prepared; it needs only the spark of a crisis". (Engels to Weydemeyer). When the required spark didn't materialise he became more cautious but in 1857, when a crisis really did develop, they were both certain that "now our time is coming". As early as September 1856, Marx had recognised the symptoms of the approaching disruption in industry and had written to Engels: "This time, moreover, the thing is on a European scale never reached before and I do not think we shall be able to sit here as spectators much longer". The following year, in the midst of the crisis, he is "working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes." (Letter to Engels, December 8, 1857). Meanwhile Engels was maintaining that a really chronic crisis would be needed to stir the workers into revolution since "the masses must have got damned lethargic after such long prosperity" (Engels to Marx, November 15, 1857). When trade started to pick up again at the end of December 1857 both of them were sadly disappointed and, a year later, we find Engels returning to a familiar theme: "The English proletariat is 'becoming more and more bourgeois".
The crisis of 1857 and its failure to evoke a revolutionary response from the working class had a big impact on Marx. So when he came to publish Capital (Volume I, 1867), although he outlined the cycle of modern industry as "a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over¬production, crisis and stagnation", there were no references to revolution automatically arising from this sequence. But if Marx seems to have largely shaken himself free of his former romantic notions, they remained well in evidence in Engel's writings. Anti-Duhring (1878) in particular was as outspoken in its commitment to the idea that capitalism would 'collapse' as any of his earlier works had been.
... this mode of production (capitalism), by virtue of its own development, drives towards the point at which it makes itself impossible.
Anticipating Rosa Luxemburg, Engels wrote that "if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place" and that the working class would be "forced to accomplish this revolution", "under penalty of its own destruction". Crises, then, were still seen as "means of compelling the social revolution".
Until the early 1880s Engels's ideas on crises and revolution hardly showed any advance on those he had held 30 years before. This is made clear enough by a letter he wrote to Bernstein in January 1882.
That crises are one of the most powerful levels of revolutionary upheaval was already stated in The Communist Manifesto and was treated in detail up to 1848 inclusive in the review in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where, however, it was shown too that returning prosperity also breaks revolutions and lays the basis for the victory of reaction.
But after Marx's death in 1883, with Engels deciding that capitalism might well be entering a phase of chronic stagnation with correspondingly less chance of acute crises occuring, his emphasis naturally shifted from the earlier concept of a crisis-provoked revolution to the view that the capitalist system would be driven into an economic impasse. Thus in his preface to the first German edition of Marx's Poverty of Philosophy (1884) he refers to "the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree". Four years later, in his introduction to Marx's Address on Free Trade, he writes that society will be "brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodelling of the economic structure which forms its basis".
Engels's correspondence during his last ten years is also an interesting record of his tendency to imagine that capitalism would 'collapse'. In a letter to J. P. Becker in June 1885 he assessed the political currents at work in England and concluded that "the masses will turn socialist here too. Industrial over-production will do the rest". As late as 1893, in a letter to Danielson (February 24, 1893), he is still convinced that there are "economic consequences of the capitalist system which must bring it up to the critical point", that "the crisis must come".
Yet although at times during this final period of his life, Engels was to foreshadow the determinism of the leaders of the Second International on this question, at others he came near to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties. As we have shown, as long as Marx was alive, it was he rather than Engels who emphasised the need for socialist consciousness as a precondition for the overthrowing of capitalism by the working class. But with Marx dead, Engels seems to have become aware of the need to stress this himself. Although he could not free himself entirely from the ideas which had dominated his thinking on revolution for over 40 years, yet he could also write that:
... the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed. So I should be very cautious about prophesying such a thing (the collapse of bourgeois society). (Letter to Bebel, October 24, 1891).
When this is coupled with other statements he was to make, to the effect that "where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses them¬selves must also be in it, must themselves have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul" (Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, 1895), one gets an entirely different slant from that conveyed in some of his other writings.
This study of the attitude of Marx and Engels towards crises and the concept of capitalism 'collapsing' shows, then, the extent to which they were influenced by the various phases which capitalism passed through in 19th-century Europe. If we have outlined some of the mistaken attitudes they adopted this is not to detract from the immense contributions they made to socialist thought. What it does mean, however, is that it was left to other socialists to produce a more penetrating analysis of the role of crises in capitalist production. What was most useful in their work on this topic was later summed up in the pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse which the Socialist Party published in 1932:
Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely from one crisis to another.
J.C., Socialist Standard April 1969
lørdag den 23. august 2008
Rosa Luxemburg and the Collapse of Capitalism
Fifty years ago on 6th January began the hopeless Spartakist rising against the Social Democrat government of Germany. It led to the brutal murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, two well-known and courageous opponents of the first world slaughter. Luxemburg, as an opponent of both reformism and Bolshevism who understood the worldwide and democratic nature of socialism, had views on many subjects near to those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. However, there were certain basic differences between our views and hers. The following article discusses one of them: the collapse of capitalism.
(1)
Rosa Luxemburg was murdered on January 15 1919. Her head was first smashed in with the butt of a soldier's rifle and she was then dumped in the Landwehr Canal. With her death, the uprising of the Spartakus Bund in Berlin collapsed—as it had been doomed to do all along. In fact, the real tragedy of this affair was not its brutality but the waste of it all. Why had Luxemburg allowed herself to become involved in such a useless adventure in the first place?
The only adequate explanation seems to lay in her conviction that capitalism had been driven to an impasse, that its internal contradictions had brought it to the point of breaking down. Speaking to the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany on 3Oth December 1918, she had outlined her analysis of the current situation:
This was not a new idea, which Rosa Luxemburg had suddenly come up with in 1918. The implication that at some time capitalism would almost mechanically collapse had run like a thread through her writings over the previous twenty years. At the time of the revisionist controversy, she had used this as one of her main weapons against Bernstein and his supporters. Bernstein had written in Neue Zeit that "with the growing development of society a complete and almost general collapse of the present system of production becomes more and more improbable because capitalist development increases on the one hand the capacity of adaptation and, on the other—that is at the same time—the differentiation of industry." The development of the credit system, of employers' organisations, improved means of communication and information services were all tending to stabilise capitalism suggested Bernstein. Quite apart from his other heresies, Luxemburg was especially indignant about this because it seemed to her that the revisionists were undermining one of the "fundamental supports of scientific socialism". Hitting back in her Reform or Revolution (1899), she put what she took to be the orthodox position:
It ought to be mentioned that Luxemburg is here overstating her case, since Bernstein was not disputing the theory that the capitalist system could collapse but merely suggesting that in practice this possibility had been eliminated by the modifications which capitalism had undergone. However the failure of a major crisis to develop during the years before the First World War served to make the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) more adamant than ever that capitalism's breakdown was on the way. This was one of the main points which Luxemburg set out to demonstrate in her principal theoretical work—the Accumulation of Capital—written in 1912. Here she argued that capital was undermining its own ability to accumulate by its inevitable tendency to eliminate the peasantry in the advanced countries and by also destroying the pre-capitalist economies of the colonies. Capital is ruthless in its drive to achieve this end, says Luxemburg. but at the same time it is producing an 'economic impasse', since capitalism is "the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic system as a medium and soil."
In stressing Luxernburg's emphasis on 'collapse' we must be careful not to attribute too crude a theory to her. Of course, she also pointed out that the working class had a positive role to play in this process and even suggested that the workers might be able to seize power before the actual breakdown stage had been reached. But, while recognising this, it is even more important not to underestimate the grip which this idea had on her. Luxemburg was a woman of immense experience in the German and Polish social-democratic movements and was also one of the foremost Marxist scholars of her day. Her intransigence had even won her the admiration of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. She was altogether superior to the romantic and volatile Liebknecht and yet when it came to the crunch, she was as confused as him in her estimate of the situation. A week before her death she was writing: "The masses are ready to support any revolutionary action, to go through fire and water for Socialism." This, of course, was patent nonsense. The working class in Germany had no clear idea of what Socialism was or how it could be achieved. Not only was there no chance of overthrowing capitalism, but even the limited aim of unseating the government was hopeless—as J. P. Nettl in his sympathetic biography records:
Luxemburg, then, had mistaken the economic dislocation following Germany's defeat for the 'collapse' of the capitalist system and since to her the choice seemed one of a desperate gamble for Socialism or else "crashing down to a common doom" she staked her life on the former.
(2)
What distinguished Rosa Luxemburg from the other leaders of the Second International was not her emphasis on the theory that capitalism would 'collapse' but rather, her exceptional courage which caused her to pursue her ideas at whatever he risk to herself. In fact, over the years, most prominent leaders of the social-democratic parties had at various times expounded the view that capitalism would crash down in some form of immense economic crisis.
Kautsky, as the principal theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party, deserves special attention in this respect. When the SPD congress adopted a new programme at Erfurt in 1891 this was taken as a model for the other parties of the Second International and Kautsky's commentary on, and elaboration of, this document in Das Erfurter Program (1892) was accepted as one of the classic texts of social democracy. Here he predicted a very grim and uncertain future for world capitalism. The general tendencies he saw, or thought he saw, were a steady rise in the reserve army of the unemployed, a "constant increase in chronic over-production", and a virtually complete saturation of the markets. He conceded the point which Bernstein was later to make, that the credit system is a means of developing capitalist production but remarked that it also causes the ground on which the capitalists stand to "vibrate ever more strongly". His conclusion was that:
By and large, Kautsky stuck to this position—and the revisionist controversy forced him to go even further. For example, in his Krisentheorien (Neut Zeit, 1901-2), he rejected the suggestions of Bernstein and Tugan-Barnovsky that capitalism's periods of depression were becoming milder and maintained instead that they were becoming sharper and more prolonged. Again, he predicted that a period of chronic stagnation was approaching. Only much later was he to put forward a more sophisticated view. In The High Cost of Living (Kerr edition 1914), he admitted that his earlier predictions of chronic overproduction had been wrong. Here he puts far greater stress on the role of the working class in the overthrowing of capitalism, although he still thinks that the business cycle is of vital importance. During boom periods, says Kautsky, the working class is best able to organise itself, but high wages and full employment make it less revolutionary. The subsequent crisis and slump increase the misery of the workers and this gives rise to an upsurge in class consciousness. This alternation of boom and slump would alternately organise and revolutionise the workers, each time leaving them better equipped to establish Socialism, and in the end, the working class would be "compelled to cause the overthrow of the capitalist system on pain of its own destruction."
A particularly crude variant of the collapse' theory is that based on the idea of under consumption—that is, the concept that since the workers' wages are insufficient to buy up all the commodities which they alone produce, this will eventually cause capitalist production to seize up. Although this train of thought suffers from the obvious weakness of completely overlooking the role of the capitalist class as consumers, it was widely accepted among the parties of the Second International. Bogdanov, the principal economist in the Russian social-democratic parties, referred in his Short Course of Economic Science to the 'relative shrinking of the market for articles of consumption' which would set in motion "the conditions which lead to the destruction of the whole system of capitalist production" and Ernest Untermann of the Socialist' Party of America in his Marxian Economics makes the same point:
Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation was another leader who continually exaggerated the impact of crises. Echoing Kautsky, he predicted that they would "follow one another at ever-shortening distances" and that they would "last longer each time that they come". He also shared the general belief in their magical properties, maintaining that if the workers failed to take conscious action to substitute "organised co-operation for anarchical competition" then this would be achieved anyway ("unconsciously and forcibly") by the commercial crisis and its aftermath.
One could go on indefinitely quoting such examples but perhaps it is more important to spotlight those who criticised the theory of collapse. Louis Boudin in his Theoretical System of Karl Marx more than once pointed out that the "cataclysmic conception of the breakdown of capitalism is not part of the Marxian theory" and that the "theory of a final catastrophe which has been much exploited by Marx-critics is the result of their woeful ignorance of the Marxian philosophy". But, despite this, there are references to capitalism breaking down elsewhere in Boudin's book and presumably inconsistencies are due to the fact that he wrote it as a series of articles for the International Socialist Review over a relatively long period. Apart from Boudin, however, there were two distinct tendencies which consistently opposed the collapse theory.
Revisionists such as Bernstein, Otto Bauer and Hilferding did so because, in this way, they sought to justify and strengthen the reformist tendencies within the social-democratic parties. This accounts for the gusto with which Bauer and Hilferding (and Pannekoek—but for different reasons) attempted to refute the arguments in Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. To them it seemed that if it could be demonstrated that capitalism would not break down, then this would he ample justification for abandoning revolution altogether and for simply concentrating on modifying the harsher injustices of capitalist society. Of course, they did not put it as blatantly as this and still clung to the face-saving formula that gradually the expropriators would be expropriated But, arguing theoretically, they were quite prepared to suggest that capitalism could maintain itself indefinetly by adopting what today we would call a state-capitalist form. Thus Otto Bauer wrote in his Finance Capital (Der Kampf. June 1910):
The most coherent opposition to the theory of capitalist collapse, however, came from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is not to imply that in the period before the First World War our early members disregarded the importance of the crises in capitalist production altogether. On the contrary, they were naturally influenced by social-democratic ideas and as result tended to exaggerate the repercussions of the crisis more than we would today. But, despite this, the Socialist Party was clearly distinguished from all shades of social democrats by its emphasis on socialist understanding as the critical factor in any potentially revolutionary situation. Certainly, some statements appearing in the Socialist Standard had mechanistic undertones:
(June 1 1907).
and these provoked one correspondent into writing that "the whole of your teaching may, in fact be summed up a 'Preach economic consideration as the sole factor in social development, and wait until the crash comes!' " But the editorial committee made our position quite clear in its reply to this critics:
In other words, even conceding that a crisis might be the most opportune moment for stripping the capitalist class of its wealth and instituting Socialism, the Socialist Party hammered home the simple point which it has since never failed to stress—that there can be no Socialism without a majority of the working class understanding what needs to be done and prepared to take decisive action to establish the new society.
J.C. Socialist Standard, January 1969.
(1)
Rosa Luxemburg was murdered on January 15 1919. Her head was first smashed in with the butt of a soldier's rifle and she was then dumped in the Landwehr Canal. With her death, the uprising of the Spartakus Bund in Berlin collapsed—as it had been doomed to do all along. In fact, the real tragedy of this affair was not its brutality but the waste of it all. Why had Luxemburg allowed herself to become involved in such a useless adventure in the first place?
The only adequate explanation seems to lay in her conviction that capitalism had been driven to an impasse, that its internal contradictions had brought it to the point of breaking down. Speaking to the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany on 3Oth December 1918, she had outlined her analysis of the current situation:
I need hardly say that no serious thinker has ever been inclined to fix upon a definite date for the collapse of capitalism; but after the failures of 1848, the day for that collapse seemed to lie in the distant future. We are now in a position to cast up the account, and we are able to see that the time has really been short in comparison with that occupied by the sequence of class struggles throughout history... what has the war left of bourgeois society beyond a gigantic rubbish heap? Formally, of course, all the means of production and most of the instruments of power, practically all the decisive instruments of power, are still in the hands of the dominant classes. We are under no illusions here. But what our rulers will be able to achieve with the powers they possess, over and above frantic attempts to re-establish their system of spoliation through blood and slaughter, will be nothing more than chaos. Matters have reached such a pitch that today mankind is faced with two alternatives: it may perish amid chaos, or it may find salvation in socialism …. Socialism is inevitable, not merely because the proletarians are no longer willing to live under the conditions imposed by the capitalist class, but, further, because if the proletariat fail to fulfil its duties as a class, if it fails to realise socialism, we shall crash down together to a common doom.
This was not a new idea, which Rosa Luxemburg had suddenly come up with in 1918. The implication that at some time capitalism would almost mechanically collapse had run like a thread through her writings over the previous twenty years. At the time of the revisionist controversy, she had used this as one of her main weapons against Bernstein and his supporters. Bernstein had written in Neue Zeit that "with the growing development of society a complete and almost general collapse of the present system of production becomes more and more improbable because capitalist development increases on the one hand the capacity of adaptation and, on the other—that is at the same time—the differentiation of industry." The development of the credit system, of employers' organisations, improved means of communication and information services were all tending to stabilise capitalism suggested Bernstein. Quite apart from his other heresies, Luxemburg was especially indignant about this because it seemed to her that the revisionists were undermining one of the "fundamental supports of scientific socialism". Hitting back in her Reform or Revolution (1899), she put what she took to be the orthodox position:
Socialist theory up to now declared that the point of departure for a transformation to socialism would be a general and catastrophic crisis…. The fundamental idea consists of the affirmation that capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible . . . Bernstein began his revision of the Social Democracy by abandoning the theory of capitalist collapse. The latter, however, is the corner stone of scientific socialism. Rejecting it, Bernstein also rejects the whole doctrine of socialism . . . Without the collapse of capitalism the expropriation of the capitalist class is impossible.
It ought to be mentioned that Luxemburg is here overstating her case, since Bernstein was not disputing the theory that the capitalist system could collapse but merely suggesting that in practice this possibility had been eliminated by the modifications which capitalism had undergone. However the failure of a major crisis to develop during the years before the First World War served to make the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) more adamant than ever that capitalism's breakdown was on the way. This was one of the main points which Luxemburg set out to demonstrate in her principal theoretical work—the Accumulation of Capital—written in 1912. Here she argued that capital was undermining its own ability to accumulate by its inevitable tendency to eliminate the peasantry in the advanced countries and by also destroying the pre-capitalist economies of the colonies. Capital is ruthless in its drive to achieve this end, says Luxemburg. but at the same time it is producing an 'economic impasse', since capitalism is "the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic system as a medium and soil."
Although it strives to become universal, and, indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down — because it is immanently incapable of a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles.
In stressing Luxernburg's emphasis on 'collapse' we must be careful not to attribute too crude a theory to her. Of course, she also pointed out that the working class had a positive role to play in this process and even suggested that the workers might be able to seize power before the actual breakdown stage had been reached. But, while recognising this, it is even more important not to underestimate the grip which this idea had on her. Luxemburg was a woman of immense experience in the German and Polish social-democratic movements and was also one of the foremost Marxist scholars of her day. Her intransigence had even won her the admiration of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. She was altogether superior to the romantic and volatile Liebknecht and yet when it came to the crunch, she was as confused as him in her estimate of the situation. A week before her death she was writing: "The masses are ready to support any revolutionary action, to go through fire and water for Socialism." This, of course, was patent nonsense. The working class in Germany had no clear idea of what Socialism was or how it could be achieved. Not only was there no chance of overthrowing capitalism, but even the limited aim of unseating the government was hopeless—as J. P. Nettl in his sympathetic biography records:
It was clear probably by the evening of the 6th (January 1919) certainly by the morning of the 7th that there was no chance of overturning the government, and troops were known to be moving steadily into Berlin.
Luxemburg, then, had mistaken the economic dislocation following Germany's defeat for the 'collapse' of the capitalist system and since to her the choice seemed one of a desperate gamble for Socialism or else "crashing down to a common doom" she staked her life on the former.
(2)
What distinguished Rosa Luxemburg from the other leaders of the Second International was not her emphasis on the theory that capitalism would 'collapse' but rather, her exceptional courage which caused her to pursue her ideas at whatever he risk to herself. In fact, over the years, most prominent leaders of the social-democratic parties had at various times expounded the view that capitalism would crash down in some form of immense economic crisis.
Kautsky, as the principal theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party, deserves special attention in this respect. When the SPD congress adopted a new programme at Erfurt in 1891 this was taken as a model for the other parties of the Second International and Kautsky's commentary on, and elaboration of, this document in Das Erfurter Program (1892) was accepted as one of the classic texts of social democracy. Here he predicted a very grim and uncertain future for world capitalism. The general tendencies he saw, or thought he saw, were a steady rise in the reserve army of the unemployed, a "constant increase in chronic over-production", and a virtually complete saturation of the markets. He conceded the point which Bernstein was later to make, that the credit system is a means of developing capitalist production but remarked that it also causes the ground on which the capitalists stand to "vibrate ever more strongly". His conclusion was that:
…in short, the moment seems to be near, when the market for European industry not only becomes incapable of expansion but begins to contract. But that would spell the bankruptcy of the entire capitalist society.
By and large, Kautsky stuck to this position—and the revisionist controversy forced him to go even further. For example, in his Krisentheorien (Neut Zeit, 1901-2), he rejected the suggestions of Bernstein and Tugan-Barnovsky that capitalism's periods of depression were becoming milder and maintained instead that they were becoming sharper and more prolonged. Again, he predicted that a period of chronic stagnation was approaching. Only much later was he to put forward a more sophisticated view. In The High Cost of Living (Kerr edition 1914), he admitted that his earlier predictions of chronic overproduction had been wrong. Here he puts far greater stress on the role of the working class in the overthrowing of capitalism, although he still thinks that the business cycle is of vital importance. During boom periods, says Kautsky, the working class is best able to organise itself, but high wages and full employment make it less revolutionary. The subsequent crisis and slump increase the misery of the workers and this gives rise to an upsurge in class consciousness. This alternation of boom and slump would alternately organise and revolutionise the workers, each time leaving them better equipped to establish Socialism, and in the end, the working class would be "compelled to cause the overthrow of the capitalist system on pain of its own destruction."
A particularly crude variant of the collapse' theory is that based on the idea of under consumption—that is, the concept that since the workers' wages are insufficient to buy up all the commodities which they alone produce, this will eventually cause capitalist production to seize up. Although this train of thought suffers from the obvious weakness of completely overlooking the role of the capitalist class as consumers, it was widely accepted among the parties of the Second International. Bogdanov, the principal economist in the Russian social-democratic parties, referred in his Short Course of Economic Science to the 'relative shrinking of the market for articles of consumption' which would set in motion "the conditions which lead to the destruction of the whole system of capitalist production" and Ernest Untermann of the Socialist' Party of America in his Marxian Economics makes the same point:
the keeping of wages at the lowest level of subsistence threatens periodically to wreck the entire capitalist system, because the working people are the principal consumers, and they cannot begin to absorb the immense quantity of goods made by them.
Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation was another leader who continually exaggerated the impact of crises. Echoing Kautsky, he predicted that they would "follow one another at ever-shortening distances" and that they would "last longer each time that they come". He also shared the general belief in their magical properties, maintaining that if the workers failed to take conscious action to substitute "organised co-operation for anarchical competition" then this would be achieved anyway ("unconsciously and forcibly") by the commercial crisis and its aftermath.
One could go on indefinitely quoting such examples but perhaps it is more important to spotlight those who criticised the theory of collapse. Louis Boudin in his Theoretical System of Karl Marx more than once pointed out that the "cataclysmic conception of the breakdown of capitalism is not part of the Marxian theory" and that the "theory of a final catastrophe which has been much exploited by Marx-critics is the result of their woeful ignorance of the Marxian philosophy". But, despite this, there are references to capitalism breaking down elsewhere in Boudin's book and presumably inconsistencies are due to the fact that he wrote it as a series of articles for the International Socialist Review over a relatively long period. Apart from Boudin, however, there were two distinct tendencies which consistently opposed the collapse theory.
Revisionists such as Bernstein, Otto Bauer and Hilferding did so because, in this way, they sought to justify and strengthen the reformist tendencies within the social-democratic parties. This accounts for the gusto with which Bauer and Hilferding (and Pannekoek—but for different reasons) attempted to refute the arguments in Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. To them it seemed that if it could be demonstrated that capitalism would not break down, then this would he ample justification for abandoning revolution altogether and for simply concentrating on modifying the harsher injustices of capitalist society. Of course, they did not put it as blatantly as this and still clung to the face-saving formula that gradually the expropriators would be expropriated But, arguing theoretically, they were quite prepared to suggest that capitalism could maintain itself indefinetly by adopting what today we would call a state-capitalist form. Thus Otto Bauer wrote in his Finance Capital (Der Kampf. June 1910):
The entire capitalistic society would be consciously controlled by a single tribunal, by which the extent of production in all departments would be determined, and by, which by means of a scale of prices, the product of labour would be divided between the cartel magnates on the one hand, and the whole mass of the other members of society on the other, The anarchy of production at present prevailing would thus be brought to an end: we should have a consciously regulated society in an antagonistic form.
The most coherent opposition to the theory of capitalist collapse, however, came from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is not to imply that in the period before the First World War our early members disregarded the importance of the crises in capitalist production altogether. On the contrary, they were naturally influenced by social-democratic ideas and as result tended to exaggerate the repercussions of the crisis more than we would today. But, despite this, the Socialist Party was clearly distinguished from all shades of social democrats by its emphasis on socialist understanding as the critical factor in any potentially revolutionary situation. Certainly, some statements appearing in the Socialist Standard had mechanistic undertones:
The revolutionary forces at work within the capitalist society must eventually evolve to the point of upheaval. The result will be the downfall of capitalism and the consequent exhaustion of the forces which have destroyed it. Having accomplished its mission, revolution disappears and the new system starts to grow, not from a revolutionary base, but from an evolutionary base.
(June 1 1907).
and these provoked one correspondent into writing that "the whole of your teaching may, in fact be summed up a 'Preach economic consideration as the sole factor in social development, and wait until the crash comes!' " But the editorial committee made our position quite clear in its reply to this critics:
It is inevitable that economic development will bring things to a crisis, but whether from out: of this crisis will arise the Socialist Commonwealth depends upon whether sufficient of the working-class have been made Socialists, and have been class consciously organised. Obviously, then, to, ´wait until the crash comes' may be the policy of reform pedlars, but is decidedly not the policy of THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN.
In other words, even conceding that a crisis might be the most opportune moment for stripping the capitalist class of its wealth and instituting Socialism, the Socialist Party hammered home the simple point which it has since never failed to stress—that there can be no Socialism without a majority of the working class understanding what needs to be done and prepared to take decisive action to establish the new society.
J.C. Socialist Standard, January 1969.
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