Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 2

Moreover, the commercial bourgeoisie prospers, so it is not just the ideas that these new social relations engender that take hold within the state. The commercial bourgeoisie uses its wealth to better educate its children, who, in turn, increasingly take up their positions within the personnel of the state itself. The state, consequently, becomes, objectively, a bourgeois state. Its ideas are bourgeois ideas, its personnel are increasingly bourgeois, and yet this state continues to operate for the benefit of the existing feudal ruling-class, and within the ideological, legal and political framework of the old feudal regime. It is this contradiction that the political revolution has to resolve.

In Britain, this process takes place over a long period, and is correspondingly confused and messy. The bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy inter-marry, and so on. Although the British state becomes, objectively, a bourgeois state, by the time of the Glorious Revolution, the political regime remains firmly in the hands of he feudal aristocracy well into the 19th century. In 1832, the bourgeoisie, in alliance with the petty-bourgeois commodity producers, and a nascent proletariat, carried through the first act of the political revolution. It gets the vote for bourgeois property owners, and abolishes many of the “rotten boroughs”, and so on. By 1848, the industrial bourgeoisie had become the dominant section of the bourgeoisie, and, as Engels describes, in conjunction with the industrial workers, carries through the second stage of the political revolution. But, as Marx notes, as late as 1865, in his Inaugural Address to the First International, the landed aristocracy still accounted for a majority of those sitting in the Commons, let alone the Lords.

In the US, the process was more rapid, and less messy. The vast land areas meant no landlord class could be established. The landlord class was represented by the British Crown, which acted to appropriate revenues, and by the slave owners, in the South, who produced cotton and other agricultural commodities that fed the British industrial revolution. The American Revolution swept away the first, and established a bourgeois republic, and the second was swept away by the US Civil War, which asserted the dominance of US industrial capital, and of its centralised, but still federal, state.

In France, the process was more prolonged, as in Britain, due to the existence of established land ownership by the feudal aristocracy. The 1789 Revolution was clearer, establishing the Constitutional Assembly, but, as with the English Civil War, saw an immature bourgeoisie have to cede the political regime to Bonaparte. As Marx notes, in the following decades, there were changes back and forth of the political regime, with Louis Phillippe replacing Bonaparte, and then, in 1848, Louis Bonaparte replacing Louis Phillippe, and yet the objective nature of the state remained that of a bourgeois state.

In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, led to a rapid growth in commodity production and exchange, and consequent rapid growth of the bourgeoisie. As Marx and Engels wrote at the time, this change, itself, was driven by Russia's defeat in the Crimean War by the industrial powers of Britain and France. Similar changes occurred in Japan. By the 1890's, objectively, the Russian state was a bourgeois state. Its actions, as Lenin pointed out to the Narodniks, were geared to a more rapid development of industrial capital in Russia. It was as utopian for the Narodniks to make their appeals to that state, to foster their petty-bourgeois schemes, as it is, today, for statists to appeal to the bourgeois state, in Britain, or elsewhere, to act in the interests of workers, or small business; the latter appeal, itself, being reactionary.

In all these cases, the social revolution, which happens purposively, but unconsciously, behind society's back, transforms social relations and ideas. It changes the ideas and personnel that guide the actions of the state. It does all this, whilst, all the time, the old ruling-class continues to control the political regime/parliament etc., and also, continues, thereby, to expand its own revenues, as deductions from the rapidly expanding industrial profits. A spark for the bourgeois revolutions after all was the demands for yet more revenues. In England, it was Charles I's demand for more taxes to fund his army; in the US, it took the form of “No taxation without representation”.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical - Part 1

Part III – Socialism, II – Theoretical

“The materialist conception of history starts from the principle that production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of every social order; that in every society that has appeared in history, the distribution of wealth and with it the division of society into classes or estates are dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. Accordingly, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in their growing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.” (p 343)

In other words, as I set out a long time ago, and contrary to the statist/idealist interpretations of Marxism that became dominant in the last century, the “social revolution” precedes the political revolution. The social revolution, the transformation of the way society produces and exchanges, and so creates new social classes – new forms of property – and new social relations between them, takes place purposively, but unconsciously, behind society's back.

Societies did not, one morning, wake up and decide to produce commodities rather than engage in direct production, any more than, one morning, a plant decides to grow towards the sun, or develops spikes to protect itself from being eaten. There is purpose in the evolution of such characteristics, but not conscious action by the plant or “Nature”. Similarly, a moth does not consciously decide to become darker or lighter, in order to be better camouflaged when it settles on trees, but there is definite purpose in an evolution, over time of such adaptation.  Its not random or inexplicable.

Of course, what makes humans and human societies different to plants or moths is that they do not simply adapt to the given environment, but also do, consciously, change that environment. They do not have to simply accept what Nature provides for them gratis. They learned to utilise fire, for example. That one thing enabled them to cook food, which has been identified as a major factor in enabling humans to more easily obtain the nutrition required to develop larger brains. Fire, also, enabled humans to make pottery, and to smelt metals.

The fact that humans established settled agriculture, rather than remaining as hunter-gatherers, has, also, been mentioned in enabling a large rise in agricultural production, which, also, facilitated the release of labour for other activities, not just for the production of new use-values, such as the pottery and metals referred to above, but, also, to engage in mental labour. It creates the material basis for a social division of labour, and specialisation, which, in turn, creates the conditions for new forms of property, private property, rather than communal property, and new social relations arising from it.

In order to consolidate itself into a new ruling-class, however, the section of society – inevitably a small minority – must become actually conscious of this change in social relations that has occurred, and draw the necessary conclusions from it. It must take the social revolution that has already taken place behind its back, which, objectively transformed it into the ruling-class, the personification of this new mode of production, and complete it, by carrying through a political revolution, the bringing into line of the ideological, juridical and political superstructure with the new economic and social base on which it rests.

Nor is this simply a matter of a single event, a storming of the Bastille, Winter Palace, and so on, which represents only the final insurrectionary act. In previous revolutions, the functionaries of the state change over a long period of time, reflecting, themselves, the new social relations and ideas, which these relations engender. Only in static modes of production, in which no new social relations, and so no new ideas, develop is that not the case. In the AMP, for example, there is no real political revolution only changes of dynasty, changes of personnel, but representing the same forms of property, and sets of ideas.

The bourgeoisie developed, across Europe, in the pores of the existing feudal society. At first, the bourgeoisie is a commercial class, which expands rapidly, along with the towns, as trade expands, and the world is opened up by the merchant adventurers – privateers and pirates like Drake, Raleigh and Columbus. Its material basis is the expansion of trade. Necessarily, as Marx describes in Theories of Surplus Value, this development finds a reflection in the realm of ideas – Monetary School and Mercantilism. These are the ideas that guide the academics in the universities, and, as this becomes clearly seen as the means by which the existing state, and its ruling-class prosper, it is these ideas that the state itself pursues to that end.

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Anti-Duhring, Part III – Socialism, I – Historical - Part 21

In other words, Engels argues, the cooperatives were to be developed, not as islands of socialism within a sea of of capitalism, but as workers' bastions and bulwarks, used to provide practical examples to workers of the way they could organise society, encouraging the workers to extend them throughout the economy, as Marx had noted in Capital III, Chapter 27.

“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”

So, also, when Duhring wrote 80 years after the time of the utopians, setting out his own schema, differing only in it being based upon his revelation of absolute truths, he became “the latest utopian”.

In fact, as Marx had set out in Capital III, Chapter 27, and, as he and Engels set out later in this book, the worker cooperatives, by the end of the 19th century, were not the only, or even main, form of socialised capital, the transitional form of property between capitalism and socialism. The joint stock companies, today's giant multinational corporations are, also, the collective property of “the associated producers”.

Engels criticism of Duhring was that he sought to draw up this schema of the future society out of his head, rather than evolving it “out of the historically developed material at his disposal, as its necessary result”. (p 342)

By the end of the 19th century, and start of the 20th century, those material conditions, reflected in the development o those huge corporations, with their long-term plans, their need for the planning and regulation of the whole economy, by the state, and the need to ever increase the size of the market – imperialism – and so to move beyond the fetters of the nation state, were clear. Yet, so much of the focus of “socialist” organisations, in the last century, has been to oppose those same large corporations, to cling to the reactionary notions of the nation state, and to fail to recognise the nature of of that socialised capital, as the collective property of the workers. Instead of demanding that workers be given their rightful democratic control over their own property, they have instead demanded that the capitalist state be granted that control, via policies of nationalisation.

“... large-scale industry has developed the contradictions lying dormant in the capitalist mode of production into such crying antagonisms that the approaching collapse of this mode of production is, so to speak, palpable; that the new productive forces themselves can only be maintained and further developed by the introduction of a new mode of production corresponding to their present stage of development; that the struggle between the two classes engendered by the hitherto prevailing mode of production and constantly reproduced in ever sharper antagonism has gripped all civilised countries and is daily becoming more violent; and that this historical chain of connections, the conditions of the social transformation which it makes necessary, and the basic features of this transformation likewise determined by it, have already been apprehended.” (p 342)

Note that Engels does not say, here, that these sharpening contradictions are economic contradictions leading to some economic collapse, but are sharpening contradictions between the two classes – proletariat and bourgeoisie. The point is detailed further, later in the book. Those sharpening contradictions are heightened even more, when the bourgeoisie, as ruling class, becomes almost exclusively a rentier class, living off its interest/dividends and rent, as deductions from profit, and does so whilst denying the workers the right to control their own collective property, which produces those profits.

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