This reality that the world is unfair, that it favours the more able to adapt and survive within it, whether that be a stronger, or more skilled or intelligent labourer, or a large producer as against a smaller producer, or an imperialist state as against a less developed state, is the foundation of the world outlook and philosophy of the moral socialist. It is an outlook, as a basis for understanding the world and its development, that Marxists reject. As Marx and Engels set out as against the likes of Sismondi, Proudhon and Duhring, and as Lenin set out in response to the Narodniks, and Trotsky set out in response to Burnham and Shachtman, it is a thoroughly reactionary outlook.
Writing to Nikolai Danielson, Engels, noting that Danielson and others were still looking to the old Russian village communes as the basis of their vision of the future, as their “anti-capitalism” took the form of resisting the capitalist development of Russia, which they saw as an alien imposition imposed by imperialist powers in the West, and a diversion from Russia's true path, says,
“... capitalism opens out new views and new hopes. Look at what it has done and is doing in the West.”
Marx and Engels noted that, although the introduction of laws, regulations and even planning were only introduced by the big industrial capitalists because, at the stage of development of state-monopoly capitalism (imperialism), it was to their benefit, that did not, also, mean that it was not to the benefit of society and its development, overall, including that of the industrial labourer. Not only did it provide them with higher living standards, and better conditions, but, by replacing the anarchy and chaos of unfettered markets with the need to increasingly regulate and plan production across the economy, and, as the minimum scale of production continually rose, to continually increase the size of the economy, ultimately, the creation of a world economy, it created the very conditions required for Socialism. Our outlook is not to hold back that progressive development, as the petty-bourgeois moralists would have us do, in the interests of the small capitalists, the self-employed and so on, or the small, less developed economies. It is to continually defend the interests of the global working-class within it, in preparation for the working-class seizing control over it.
We do not advocate for a large capitalist monopoly, be it one controlled by shareholders, or a state controlled monopoly, but nor do we advocate against it. We simply point out the progressive, but limited, nature of such a development. And that applies to the development of the world economy too. As Trotsky put it,
“Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers. The more developed the technique of capitalism, the greater the role played by finance capital and the higher the demands of militarism, all the more grows the dependency of the small states on the great powers. This process, forming as it does an integral element of imperialist mechanics, flourishes undisturbed also in times of peace by means of state loans, railway and other concessions, military-diplomatic agreements, etc. The war uncovered and accelerated this process by introducing the factor of open violence. The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome, of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.”
And our response to that is not to moralistically argue for clinging to the past, for the rights of national self-determination of small nations.
“For the revolutionary proletarian the peace programme does not mean the demands which national militarism must fulfil, but those demands which the international proletariat intends to impose by its revolutionary struggle against militarism of all countries. The more the world revolutionary movement unfolds the less do the peace questions depend on the purely military position of the belligerents, the less becomes the danger that peace conditions may be understood by the masses as war aims.”
(ibid)
Trump at least, in his idiocy, simply lays bare what the imperialists of NATO tried to obfuscate. His mafia regime makes no secret of its intentions in seeking to use war for its ends, to seize Venezuela, Greenland, the Panama Canal, or The Straits of Hormuz. He even strips away the previous façade and describes the Department of War of the US, honestly, in place of the lying label of Department of Defence.
If workers in a small company are faced by being taken over by a larger company, Marxists do not argue against the takeover. We seek to ensure the greatest unity of the workers in both companies. We point to the benefits of being within the larger company structure, for the purposes of the workers strength and bargaining capacity, and the fact that the larger capital is better able to make these concessions. But, nor do we suggest to the workers of either company that this is a solution to their problems, which rest on the exploitation of their labour by capital. Similarly, its clear that the interests of workers in small nations are advanced by being part of a larger state, and so the ability to join with other workers within that state.
As Lenin and the Bolsheviks put it,
“The Social-Democrats will always combat every attempt to influence national self-determination from without by violence or by any injustice. However, our unreserved recognition of the struggle for freedom of self-determination does not in any way commit us to supporting every demand for national self-determination. As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”
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