Communist Party, USA
Sam Webb
| Revision History | ||
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| • Spring 1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 56,53-55) | ||
| • October 10, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
By Sam Webb (Member, National Board, Communist Party of India)
The concept of class struggle is a matter of great controversy in the contemporary world. Never before has this elementary concept of Marxism been the object of such a sustained discussion and debate.
Perhaps this is to be expected given the turn of events in the 1980s, namely, the ascendancy of right wing regimes in the advanced capitalist countries and the nearly concurrent collapse of socialist societies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Nevertheless, this ‘retreat from class’, that is entirely fashionable amongst some progressives and socialists caught many unawares.
Why it did is at once interesting and worthy of discussion, but beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that at other turning points in world history a similar pattern has been evident with some notable personalities in the socialist and communist movement bidding farewell and taking up the cudgel of anti-Marxism.
At the center of this current controversy is not whether the forms of class struggle should be modified in light of changing conditions. Nearly everyone agrees that this is always obligatory. After all, we live in a dynamic and changing world. And, in recent decades, we have observed some unforeseen and quite dramatic turns in the historical process.
What is at issue is the very relevance of the concept of class struggle to the modern world.
Of course, this would not be the first attempt to turn the class struggle into a vestigial structure or relic of a bygone era. And, just as earlier efforts fell on their face, a similar fate awaits this newest assault. For ‘life’ as Lenin was fond of saying, “will assert itself.” And in so doing, will provide fresh evidence of the vitality of the class struggle.
Class and class struggle were foundational concepts of Marx’s theoretical and practical work. Now as well as then these concepts help to illuminate the inner, multilayered texture of societies and how they change. They have lost none of their analytic power.
No less important, they are also weapons of struggle. Class concepts impart a militant revolutionary character and outlook to the working class movement. What eventuated in the Soviet Union in recent years, to mention the most prominent example, demonstrates tellingly and tragically the dangers associated with a classless approach to politics.
Notwithstanding the claims of bourgeois ideologies, class concepts are not self-enclosed, unbending, and abstract but rather open ended, pliant and concrete. They are not imposed on society, but reflect the real relationships in society, [sic.] They are not transitional, but are historically specific.
This may be self evident, but it deserves repeating because many of the present day critics turn Marx’s class categories into caricatures of themselves, far removed from his conceptual understanding and application of them.
The Main Features of the Class Struggle
The class struggle is the overarching feature of capitalist society. It expresses the inevitable conflict, antagonism, and tension between the two main classes of capitalist society. It is the mainspring of social transformation.
The class struggle is not episodic, intermittent, and occasional, but a permanent feature of capitalist society. It is not grafted on the social, economic and political landscape, but rather reflects the intrinsic antagonisms embedded in the class structure.
It operates on the surface as well as in the inner recesses of society. It conditions, without subsuming, other struggles. Indeed, other struggles react back on class struggle.
This indubitably is not the image of capitalist society conjured up and promoted by capitalism’s well paid image makers. They like us to believe that the class struggle is an invention or a remnant of a bygone era. Even the language of class conflict, these unabashed apologists would like to evict from everyday discourse. They say that the use of the words ‘class struggle’ is not only an unaffordable luxury in view of US capitalism’s competitive struggle on a global scale, but also grounds for antagonizing sectors of the population. Cooperation, not conflict, must be labor’s compelling imperative.
But this conflicts with reality. The class struggle is not the invention of Communists or anyone else. Communists ‘merely express the relations springing from an existing class struggle going on before our eyes’ (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto).
Nor do allusions to the class realities of capitalism alienate potential supporters. The fact is that millions of white collar workers, technicians, professional people, etc., subjected to exploitation and oppression, increasingly respond to class concepts and rely on working class methods of struggle—strikes, marches, demonstrations—to maintain their standard of living as well as their professional standards. In a real sense, these new sectors of working people are coming to think and act in class ways which is exactly what Marx and Engels foresaw.
Finally, the class struggle is hardly on the wane. In fact, the class struggle has intensified on both sides of the class divide over the past decade. And the new administration in the White House does not alter this in any fundamental sense.
Capitalism and the Class Struggle
The class struggle is not peculiar to capitalism. Slave and feudal societies were marked by sharp class conflicts as well. As Marx and Engels observed in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.”
The class struggle under capitalism, however, does have some features which distinguish it from slave and feudal societies: its class structure, its forms of class struggle and organization, and its conditions of exploitation and oppression, for example, are different.
So how do we explain this?
Obviously, the material fact of exploitation cannot account for it. After all, the dominant classes in each of these societies appropriated the surplus labor of the primary producers, which is the essence of exploitation and, in turn, the motive force of class struggle. Thus, we have to look elsewhere for an answer.
According to Marx, the answer is to be found in the way in which surplus labor is extracted from the primary producers in the labor process. What do we find when we compare capitalist society with slave and feudal societies?
Firstly, the direct producers under capitalism, through an historical process of primitive accumulation, are forcibly separated from the means of labor and production and thus transformed into a propertyless class with nothing but their labor power at their disposal.
Stripped of any claim over the means of production, these propertyless workers sell their labor power, that is, their ability to work, as a commodity on the labor market. There it is bought by the owners of the means of production. The workers then set the means of production into motion and produce commodities, which the owners appropriate by virtue of their ownership rights and then sell on the market for private profit.
In its outward form, the transaction between the worker and the capitalist appears to be an exchange of equivalents—wages for labor power. But what appears on the surface as an exchange of equivalents is nothing of the sort.
In the course of the work day, the worker creates value in excess of the wage which he or she receives from the capitalist owner. Thus only a portion of the work day is paid for which is more or less equal to what is necessary for the worker’s survival, that is, for the worker’s social reproduction. The other portion is unpaid and the value created is appropriated by the capitalist in the form of surplus value. The wage form (which could be hourly, daily, or weekly) therefore conceals the exploitative nature of capitalism in so far as it gives the appearance that a worker’s wages are more less [sic.] equal to the full value of his or her labor. In other words, labor power is appropriated by capital “without equal exchange, without equivalence, but with the appearance of equal exchange” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 449).
This contrasts with the form of appropriation of surplus labor in slave and feudal societies. In these societies the exploitation of the primary producers by the dominant is open and unconcealed.
No wage form, no market mechanism, masks the unequal nature of
the transaction between producers and non-producers in
pre-capitalist societies. Contrasting wage labor in capitalist
society with labor in pre-capitalist societies, Marx made the
following observation:
The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the
working-day into socially necessary labor and surplus labor. All
labor appears as paid labor. In the course of the pre-capitalist
working day, the labor of the worker for himself, and his compulsory
labor for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest
possible way. In slave-labor, even that part of the working-day in
which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of
existence, appears as labor for his master. All the slave’s
labor appears as unpaid
labor; in wage-labor on the contrary, even
surplus-labor appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals
the labor of the slave for himself; here the money relation conceals
the unrequited (unpaid) labor of the wage-laborer" (Karl Marx,
Capital Vol. 1,
P.540-541).
Secondly, the wage worker is not bound to a particular capitalist. He or she is formally free. The political and juridical constraints which bound serf and slave to their lord or master are not operative with respect to the wage worker. But there is a hitch. Having no access to the means of production, the worker either sells his or her labor power or starves. The worker therefore, is subjected to economic pressure, if not coercion.
The appropriation of surplus labor in pre-capitalist societies, on the other hand, rested primarily on extra-economic coercion, on force, on political domination. The chattel slave and serf were not free. They were bound to their master and/or land. Aristotle described the slave in Ancient Greek society as an ‘inanimate tool’. Finally, the worker under capitalism finds himself or herself locked into a dynamic system of production, its aim is to accumulate capital, to maximize profits. The production circuit is—Money (M)-Commodity-Money (M’) with M’ being more than M. Otherwise there would be no purpose to the production circuit. This gives capitalism an inherently self-expanding character which is further reinforced by the competitive pressures which also are internal to the system. By contrast, modes of production anterior to capitalism are essentially conservative. Commodity production is not yet generalized in pre-capitalist societies, but rather confined to a limited number of goods. Production is largely for use in pre-capitalist societies. The production circuit, as Marx pointed out in Volume I of Capital, is the inverse of capitalist society: Commodity-Money-Commodity.
Capitalism, therefore, has an internal tendency to “constantly revolutionize the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” In fact, Marx and Engels said that the capitalist class “cannot exist without more or less constant technical changes in the production apparatus” (Communist Manifesto). Individual productive units are forced by the law of competition to organize production in the most efficient way and adopt the most advanced forms of productive technique. Either that or they fall by the wayside which many businesses do.
Not only does this bring about the rapid growth of the productive forces, accelerate the centralization and concentration of capital, and result in the extraction of surplus labor or unpaid labor at a rate and on a scale never before seen, but they bring together a class whose interests are incompatible, irreconcilable, and antagonistic to those of the exploiting capitalist class.
“Of all classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,” wrote Marx and Engels, “the proletariat alone is the really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and disappear in the face of modern industry: the proletariat is its special and essential product” (Communist Manifesto).
Thus, we can say from the foregoing that the mode of
extraction of surplus labor in capitalist society determines
the development of “new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle” (Communist
Manifesto). Years later, and after exhaustive
study, Marx enlarged on this idea. Speaking of the mode of
extraction of surplus value and its consequent effects on
capitalist society (and all class divided societies for that
matter) he wrote:
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labor
is pumped out of direct producers, determines the
relationship between those who dominate and those who are
in subjection, as it grows directly out of production
itself and reacts upon it as a determining element in its
turn. Upon this,
however, is founded the entire organization of the economic
community which grows up out of the production-relations themselves,
and thereby, at the same time, its specific political form. It is
always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of
production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally
corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the nature
and the method of labor and consequently of its social
productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden
foundation of the entire social structure and therefore also of the
political forms of the relations of sovereignty and dependence, in
short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not
prevent the same economic basis—the same as far as its main
conditions are concerned—due to innumerable different
empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations,
external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite
variation and gradation of aspect which can be grasped only by
analysis of the empirically given circumstances (Marx,
Capital, Volume III, p. 791).
Other Aspects of the Class Struggle
The class struggle, while having its origins in production, is not exclusively confined to the point of production. It is reflected, in one form or another and to one degree or another, in every sphere of life. If we look hard enough, the interests of opposing classes will be observed habitating in places that are seemingly above class, that appear to be class neutral.
Furthermore, these spheres are not separated one from the other, instead they interpenetrate. The ideological struggle, for example, is encased in every crevice of social life, it does not tail along behind the economic factor at some remote distance (E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory), and that is particularly true for bourgeois ideology which has at its disposal a ramified, flexible and sophisticated ideological apparatus, plus the weight of tradition behind it.
What is less evident, at least in its fully developed form, is working class ideology.
Thus a critical task of the more advanced workers in the course of struggle is to bring to the fore capitalism’s inner essence, to lay bare the ‘hidden foundation.’ For this reason, Lenin placed special emphasis on class struggle in the political and ideological spheres with the struggle for political power being the highest form of class confrontation. In What Is To Be Done?, he vigorously argued that the working class cannot confine itself to the economic struggle while conceding leadership to liberals and social democrats in the ideological and political struggle.
Some might interpret this to mean that the economic arena of struggle should be abandoned for higher tasks. Nothing could be further from the truth. Owing to the systemic nature of the economic crisis and the readiness of millions to think and act in new ways, it is imperative to organize millions around the economic issues. But for that to happen the working class and its allies must see the class roots of the crisis, come forward in a mass and militant way in the political arena, and bring their own advanced demands to bear on the crisis.
To do less is what Lenin called ‘economism.’ To be more specific, economism narrows the sights and the flood of activity of the exploited and oppressed. It relies on spontaneity. And, in today’s conditions, that would not only ensure that the economic conditions of tens of millions would worsen, but also inhibit the new positive trends which have been developing in the labor movement over the past decade. Nevertheless, there is a section of the labor leadership who are moving in this direction, including a number of union leaders who played a positive role in the struggle against Reagan and Bush in the 1980s. Plainly, a new emphasis on the rank and file in the labor movement is needed.
The class struggle is closely connected to the struggle for democracy: while each has its own dynamic, the two are interwoven in a number of ways. First of all, the drive to maximize corporate profits is the source of class oppression as well as the cause of the restriction of democratic rights. Second, the working class cannot achieve its class aims without allies nor can the democratic movement expand and deepen democracy without the working class. What other social force in society has the social and economic power to confront the big corporations directly? Finally, democracy is inextricably linked to the abolition of exploitation and socialism requires complete democracy.
Thus, to bypass the democratic struggle in the name of the class struggle is a prescription for defeat. Conversely, to separate the struggles for democracy from the class struggle is a profound mistake for which a high price will inevitably be paid.
In this connection, special importance attaches to the struggle against racism and for full equality of the racially and nationally oppressed. Because of the historical and present day developments of the United States, the two are tied, one to the other. The fight against racism and for full equality is at the heart of the struggle for class unity; by the same token, the struggle for class unity opens up new vistas in the struggle for full equality and against racism. Accordingly, the struggle for the wide concerns of the multi-racial, multi-national working class has to be closely bound up with the specific struggles for the special demands of racially and nationally oppressed people as a whole. Herein lies the basis of unity of the victims of class and racial oppression.
Nevertheless, there are those who counterpose the class struggle against anti-racism and for equality and vice versa. This kind of counterposing of problems serves the interests of capitalism and imperialism whose guiding principle is “divide and rule.” It also runs against the grain of Marxism-Leninism.
Writing at around the time of the Civil War, Marx made this
profound observation:
In the United States of America, every independent movement of
workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the
Republic, [sic.] Labor cannot emancipate itself
in the white skin where it
in the black is branded (Marx, Capital,
Vol. I).
This formulation is as relevant today as it was then to the United States but also to South Africa, in fact to all countries, and globally to the struggle against the imperialist countries.
Marxism binds alliances together or, expressed differently, dialectically connects the struggle for the complete eradication of racism and chauvinism irrevocably to the class struggle, the self-interest of workers of all races and nationalities.
While the alliance of the working class and the racially and nationally oppressed has proved in life to be strategic to the effective realization of the class struggle and democratic advance, it should be added that such unity is no better than a foundation of social progress. As the 1992 elections revealed, a broad and diverse front is necessary to curb the power and eventually eliminate the transnational corporations which dominate economic and political life.
In a different context, but with a similar objective of
amassing together a broad front, Lenin observed:
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without
revolts by the small nations in the colonies and in
Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the
petty bourgeoisie with all of their prejudice, without a
movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and
semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the
landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national
oppression, etc., to imagine all this is to repudiate
social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and
another, somewhere else, and one says “We are for
socialism” and another says, “We are for
imperialism”, and that will be a social
revolution… Whoever expects a ‘pure’
social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person
pays lip service to revolution without understanding what
revolution is (Lenin, The Discussion on
Self-Determination Summed Up. P. 485).
Advance and Retreat
The class struggle passes through various stages. But these stages are not neatly demarcated one from the other. Nor is there any universal pattern governing the transition from one stage to another stage all of which must follow, for “History as a whole and the history of revolutions in particular is always far richer in content, more varied, more multiform, more lively and ingenious than is imagined by even the best parties, the most class conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes” (Lenin, Left Wing Communism—An Infantile Disorder).
Nor is the class struggle necessarily a smooth, uninterrupted process free of setbacks.
While changes in the relative strength of the contending classes is a constant feature of the class struggle, at certain moments qualitative shifts occur in one direction or another, in favor of one contending class or another.
A key task of a revolutionary working class party is to discern these shifts and their concrete features before they are full blown and to make necessary adjustments in tactics—demands, slogans, forms of organization and so forth. To do this, a revolutionary working class party must be rooted among the working people and be able to sense their mood.
Although the class struggle urges [sic.] forward at certain moments, there are also moments when the working class finds itself on the defensive and experiences setbacks, sometimes strategic ones. The destruction of the left in the labor moment [sic.] during the 1950s which was, in the last analysis, the chief aim of McCarthyism, falls into this category.
Thus, knowing how to retreat and at what moment is as essential to a revolutionary working class party as understanding how to advance. Both require a sober estimate of the balance of class forces at any given moment.
Of equal importance is the ability to differentiate between longer term trends and momentary shifts in the class struggle. To mistake one for the other can result in major tactical blunders which, in turn, can set in train strategic setbacks for the working class.
Finally, leaping over stages can also bring unnecessary setbacks for the working class movement. Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ is an instance in which stages of development were ignored and an economically backward country attempted to construct a communism in the absence of the economic and political prerequisites. This was voluntarist and ultimately slowed down the process of socialist construction for decades.
The International Class Struggle
The struggle between the main contending classes is
international in scope. It is not confined to one or a few
countries. Its dimensions are and have been since its
infancy—worldwide. Nearly 150 years ago, Marx and Engels
remarked:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole globe. It must
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connection
everywhere (Communist Manifesto).
And as it does, it brings ever fresh continents into the network of capitalist exploitation thus enlarging the ranks of the working class. Presently, the new level of globalization of economic life has accelerated this process. The dominance of transnational corporations and banks over the global economy, following inter imperialist rivalry as manifested in the formation of economic blocs, and a new international division of labor which increasingly leaves entire nations and regions outside the mainstream of economic life, impresses on the international working class the imperative need to forge new bonds of solidarity and unity. But for that to happen concrete forms and practical actions are mandatory. General slogans and appeals won’t do it.
Anything short of that allows imperialism to continue to set worker against worker and nation against nation in capital’s predatory struggle for higher and higher profits. Here too the formation of a broad and varied anti-imperialist front with the working class in the center is on the agenda.
It is argued that restraint and collaboration are the only sensible course of action for the nation’s working people. Set aside your bold and imaginative plans. This is no time for ‘storming heaven’. Join the team, adopt to the logic and requirements of the global economy. And all will be the best in the best of all classless worlds.
As dubious as these propositions are, they still find their echoes in the progressive and left movement. To be sure, the motivation is usually genuine and the arguments are constructed somewhat differently. Without being exhaustive, a few are worth mentioning.
Some, for example, say that is [sic.] necessary to find a substitute for strikes which, it is said, are less and less winnable, while long strikes are doomed to defeat. The defeat of the recent struggle of the Greyhound bus drivers after a three year strike in which they won all of their demands give lie to this assertion. To be sure, it is more difficult to win strike struggles, but this should not be a reason to scale down labor’s sights, but cause to fight for new and ever wider forms of solidarity, for a higher level of class consciousness, for unflinching resolve and determination. Far from disappearing, the class struggle is moving to a higher stage.
Others say class interests should be subsumed and subordinated to universal human interest. But life shows that universal human interests can finally prevail only by the elimination of the system of capitalist exploitation for private profit: in other words, by the victory of the class struggle of all who labor. There is a conflict between universal human interests and the class struggle only if the former is used to obscure and expunge the latter. There is an alliance between the two when the primacy of the class struggle is recognized as crucial to the realization and eventual triumph of universal human interests.
And still others argue that the socialist movement, historically associated with the working class, no longer has a specific class identity. Instead it is constituted by a broad array of social movements and interests in which the working class and the labor movement are but one component. If it confers a privileged status on any grouping it is on intellectuals. Unlike the working class which is easy prey to the twin vices of opportunism and reformism, intellectuals and other non-working class strata are less apt to be moved by narrow class and crude material interests. Rather, rational appeals and discourse are their bread and butter. In a sense, anyone who has soiled hands, wears a blue collar, performs routinized work, or experiences economic hardship does not comprise the natural constituency for socialism. But the end results of this line of thinking is the same as the other two: the working class is reduced to a minor player, the foundation of the socialist movement is dissociated from class and class conditions, and by implication, very little is determined by the all embracing logic of class struggle.
Capitalism and its relations of production [sic.]
Such views gave in to the mystifications and modifications of capitalist ideologues, not to mention reflecting a detachment from the class struggle and working class life in any felt sense. Contemporary capitalist society is not less, but more determined by the imperatives of its accumulation process. It is by no means a harmless apparition. Its logic penetrates and shapes every area of life. Nor is the class struggle receding, but rather exercising a greater weight and influence on world development. And the international working class is not a bit player, but ever more so, the only social force capable of ‘storming heaven.’
In any case, these new ideological trends have to be combated, but partisans of the working class can be confident that we are on solid ground. The new developments in the capitalist countries and, tragic as it is, the disaster that overtook the socialist countries indicates the relevancy of the doctrine of class struggle. Both experiences show how unrelenting are the imperialists in fighting to preserve their profit system and the struggles which inevitably issue from this fact.
The class struggle is alive and well. It is being fought in the former Soviet Union, in all the former socialist countries, on all continents and in all countries.
Now more than ever before, Marxism-Leninism is necessary. It is grounded in the life and the struggle of the working class and people.
Now more than ever: “Workers of the World and all Oppressed People Unite”
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