But, there is one other component required for Socialism, and that is the creation of the social agent that brings it about – the industrial working-class. Capitalism also produces this social force, and this too comprises the historic mission of capital. In previous modes of production, whenever the producers were ruined they became slaves or serfs. But, under capitalism, when independent producers are ruined they become wage labourers, and form part of the industrial working-class. Unlike the independent producer who is isolated, whose individual existence instils in them an individualist mentality, enhanced by the requirements of competition, as commodity production for the market increases, the industrial workers are brought together, each facing the same conditions as each other, their individual interests increasingly seen as coexisting with their collective interests, and only capable of being advanced by collective class action.
It is not just that capital brings them together in this way as a class in itself. The very workings of capital, the continual revolutionising of the forces of production, and rise in social productivity, means that it must also continually expand the range of use values it produces, so as to expand the market not just in depth, but also in breadth. It must continually develop new forms of concrete labour as it produces these new types of use value, it must develop the division of labour to ever new levels, and as the market expands, it must sell an increasing range of these commodities to the workers, as the working-class itself becomes the largest class, and thereby the largest consumer. This is the process that Marx describes, in The Grundrisse, of The Civilising Mission of Capital. As a consequence of it, the working-class not only sees its living standards rise, as it consumes more goods and services, but it also consumes a wider range of goods and services, including education and culture. It is able to obtain greater amounts of leisure time in order to engage in such activities, and thereby to equip itself with the tools required to take on the function of ruling class. In his Programme for the First International, talking about this in relation to the development of education for the workers children, Marx notes,
“The combination of paid productive labour, mental education bodily exercise and polytechnic training, will raise the working class far above the level of the higher and middle classes.”
And, the fact was that, by the latter part of the 19th century, the extension of free public education was required as the role of functioning capitalist was taken on by members of the working-class itself, as managers, administrators, accountants, technicians and so on. As Engels put it,
“All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist no longer has any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the clipping of coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists fleece each other of their capital. Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it is displacing the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population, although not immediately to the industrial reserve army.”
(Anti-Duhring, p 359-60)
Capital, therefore, creates the objective material conditions for Socialism by socialising production, raising the level of social productivity, creating a world market and world economy, and thereby breaking down national borders; it destroys capital as private property and creates socialised capital, as the collective property of the “associated producers”; it raises the living standards of workers and enables them to obtain the education and culture to take on the role of ruling class; it enables them, through the extension of free public education, to become the “functioning capitalists”, taking over the social function of the private capitalist, who is thereby reduced to the role of money-lending capitalist and coupon clipper. In short, it creates all of the material conditions for the working-class to become not simply a class in itself but for itself, a class that recognises its own class interests as the collective owner of this socialised capital that it must now grasp control over.
The Lassalleans viewed Socialism as something that the working-class must strive for in order to end the misery and poverty of workers, but Marx showed that this view was wrong.
“It was made clear that the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labour by extending the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing the intensity of labour power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment. And after this understanding has gained more and more ground in our party, some return to Lassalle's dogma although they must have known that Lassalle did not know what wages were, but, following in the wake of the bourgeois economists, took the appearance for the essence of the matter.
It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!”
(Marx – Critique of The Gotha Programme)
In other words, the foundation for Socialism is not that, under capitalism, the workers must be immiserated, or kept to some low standard of living, because, as Marx demonstrates, that is not at all the case, nor even that it is only by such means that the periodic crises can be brought to an end, because, as Marx also describes, those crises are always only temporary phenomena, the means by which it resolves its own contradictions and creates the conditions for a new expansion. The foundation is that, no matter how extravagant the standard of living of the workers, without Socialism, they remain a slave class, able to work only at the discretion of capital, and ever more exploited by it, as the level of social productivity is increased by it. Capitalism creates the material conditions by which Socialism eventually becomes possible, and it creates the social force, the industrial working-class that can create it, which has an incentive for doing so, because only in that way does it liberate itself, and end its exploitation, but, in doing so liberates the whole of mankind.
The workers “ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.”
(Marx – Value, Price and Profit)
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