The
major division that exists today, in practice, in the US and in
Europe, is not a division between capital and labour – that
division is the fundamental division, but it is not practically the
current major division – but a division between conservatism and
social democracy; between progress, or at least the status quo, and
reaction; between small capital and those that share its outlook and
want to turn the clock back to a less mature form of capitalism –
and in cases, even further back than that – and the big capital and
organised working-class, that for the last more than 100 years has
reached a working compromise, based on the idea that only by
development of big capital could the organised workers ensure a
general improvement in its condition. That is the basis on which
modern bourgeois social democracies rest.
Although
the division between Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Tories is
then a thoroughly bogus division between two essentially bourgeois
camps, and whose verbal and personal animosity often assumes the
greater ferocity, the more the division between those camps is
ideologically narrowed, on the other hand, this division is just as
real as that which existed between the political representatives of
the landlords and the capitalists, in the 19th century.
In
those battles, Marx was unreservedly on the side of the latter,
whilst advocating that workers needed to maintain their independence
from both. When that division became the division described above,
between small capital and big capital, Engels made clear that he came
down decisively for the latter. It is an indication of the lack of
progress of the Labour Movement that the main division remains on
that ground. But, a condition of moving forward is that the labour
movement not only maintains its independence, but also resists
attempts to reverse the progress already made.
Lenin,
for example, in “Imperialism”, argues that, although socialists
would not advocate monopolies, they oppose attempts to break up
monopolies, as a reactionary step, designed to promote a less
developed form of capital.
Most
of the policies that Obama and other social democrats advocate would
not be proposed by Marxists, but to the extent they are progressive,
Marxists would defend them against attempts by conservatives to
reverse them. Of course, Marxists would argue that the best means of
defence is attack, that the best way of defending existing progress,
is to go beyond it. For example, Marxists would not have advocated
the establishment of the NHS, as a state capitalist form of
healthcare provision – Engels specifically opposed including a
demand for such welfarist programmes in the Erfurt Programme – but
we defend it against conservative attempts to go back to more
reactionary forms of healthcare, based on individual private
provision. However, in the process, we argue that the best means of
preventing such a reversal is to take the NHS out of the hands of the
capitalist state, and put it directly into the ownership and control
of workers by the establishment of worker owned co-ops, that provide
workers' social insurance, and also deliver the health and social care
itself. Similarly, the best means of preventing councils selling off
council houses, is to legally transfer council estates directly to
the collective ownership and control of the tenants that live on
them.
In
his article on Political Indifferentism, for example, Marx sets out
why socialists could not refuse to defend things like free state
education where it was established, because it represented real
progress for workers. Nevertheless, Marx continued to argue that the
state had no place in education. We defend free, universal education
by arguing for going beyond existing state education, to the
provision of education by working-class communities themselves, under
their own ownership and control, with the state reduced to only
defining minimum standards for teachers, etc.
Trotsky
argued that we would not have argued for the Kaiser to create a
single European state, but had that been accomplished by World War I,
nor would we have called for it to be dismantled. We would take it
as the new starting point, from which workers would fight for their
own interests and further progress to the creation of a Socialist United States of Europe.
In
the same way, Marxists would not advocate Obamacare. We propose that
workers need to organise their own social insurance via their own
worker owned and controlled co-operatives, and the provision of their
health and social care by the same means. But, we advocate this as a
means of going forward from the present situation, and a condition
for that is to oppose the attempts of conservatives to move back from
the current situation.
Marxists
do not believe that Keynesian state intervention can provide a
solution for workers, for the fact that capitalism is a system racked
by contradictions, and prone to crises that repeatedly throw large
numbers of workers into poverty. We propose that workers take over
the means of production and establish worker owned co-operative
property, organised on at least a national, and preferably
international level, via a co-operative federation, which could
increasingly plan its output at an international level, in
co-ordination with the needs of society. But,
given a choice between the use of fiscal stimulus by governments, or
simply a refusal to implement fiscal austerity, as opposed to
conservative proposals to implement austerity measures, we defend
the former and oppose the latter, for the simple reason that the
former strengthen the position of workers, and the latter weakens it.
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