In the 19th century, the bourgeois-democratic revolutions that were being undertaken, attempted to establish political democracy by giving everyone a vote, in the election of parliaments. It was natural that socialists would see the extension of this being that, as workers formed the majority of such an electorate, the creation of Workers' Parties, would lead inexorably towards the election of Workers' Governments that would be the vehicle by which the social revolution taking place in the relations of production, would find its reflection in the realm of ideas, and in the legal and political superstructure.
Engels, for example, noted,
“It seems that the most advanced workers in Germany are demanding the emancipation of the workers from the capitalists by the transfer of state capital to associations of workers, so that production can be organised, without capitalists, for general account; and as a means to the achievement of this end: the conquest of political power by universal direct suffrage.”
Here, in 1865, however, is the recognition, by Engels, that it could not simply be a matter of a peaceful transition of power to workers, because the bourgeoisie would inevitably attempt to prevent any such peaceful transition of power to workers. In Marx's words, they would stage a “slaveholders' revolt”, and utilise their existing control over the state apparatus, to violently prevent any such transition, if possible. For Engels, universal direct suffrage, and the election of a democratic government of the majority could only be effective, in the face of such opposition from the minority, if the majority itself was permanently armed and trained so as to defend its government.
“The more workers who are trained in the use of weapons the better. Universal conscription is the necessary and natural corollary of universal suffrage; it puts the voters in the position of being able to enforce their decisions gun in hand against any attempt at a coup d'état.”
(ibid)
Marx, in the same year, makes the same point in his Inaugural Address to the First International. Marx, like Engels, notes the social revolution that has taken place, and is continuing to unfold, in terms of the change in the relations of production. In other words, both refer to the development of the workers' cooperatives, as the clearest manifestation of this social revolution. In Capital, Marx had noted the nature of this social revolution, not only in relation to the cooperatives, but also in relation to the joint stock companies, which were growing rapidly following the introduction of the Limited Liabilities Act in 1855, in Britain, and similar developments in other countries.
Marx says, that the development of socialised capital, in the form of the cooperatives and joint stock companies, represents
“... the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production.”
And,
“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... 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.”
(Capital, III, Chapter 27)
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