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CHAPTER SIX The Meaning of Socialism and Communism propounded by Hitler and Mussolini to the deceleration by a Liberal politician late in the nineteenth century: “We are all socialists now.” This is not a recent development: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in their Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, devoted a chapter to an analysis of the many self-styled socialist and communist groups from whose ideas the authors of the Manifesto wished to distinguish their own aims and theories. Because “Socialism was in 1847 a middle class movement. Communism a working class movement”, Marx and Engels decided to call their Manifesto Communist. Later in the century they again used the name Socialism. The Socialist Party of Great Britain takes its stand on the same set of ideas whether called Socialism and Communism, and, like Marx and Engels, repudiates the numerous pseudo-Socialist theories which since 1848 or since have masqueraded as socialist or communist. Many of the ‘socialist’ nostrums of 1848 are flourishing still, as anyone can readily recognise from the description Marx and Engels gave of two of the groups. “To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole and corner reformers of every imaginable kind. “A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.” The propaganda of the Socialist Party of Great Britain through the years has been continually hampered by the need to explain that these and other policies for solving problems within the framework of capitalism have nothing in common with the socialist aim of replacing the class system, capitalism, by a classless social system in which production for sale, the exploitation of the working class by the receivers of rent, interest and profit, and the wages system will no longer exist. NATIONALISATION IS NOT SOCIALISM Politicians of various parties have a interest in perpetuating the confusion. Those who want to whip an opposition to some change or reform advocated by another political group will denounce it as ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’, hoping thereby to get support from reactionary sections of the population who fear change of any kind. And politicians (Hitler and Mussolini, for example) who want to pose as friends of the workers, may find that there is vote-catching value in naming their programme ‘socialist’. This exactly fits the British Labour Party and the Russian Communist Party, both of which have sometimes applied the name Socialism to nationalisation or state capitalism, while on the other occasions giving a correct description. (Lord Atlee, Prime Minister in the Labour Government 1945-51, once embarrassed his party, which was still claiming the Post Office to be ‘socialist’, by describing it as “the outstanding example of collective capitalism”, and one of his ministerial colleagues, the late Lord Morrison, told an audience that “more socialism was done by the Conservative Party, which opposed it, than by the Labour Party, which was in favour of it” – he meant, among other institutions, the Post Office.) In Russia , after the Communists seized power in 1917, the use of the word Socialism to mean first one thing and then something entirely different had a curious and complicated history, starting with the use of the terms Socialism and Communism to mean the same thing and ending with the use of Socialism as a label for state capitalism. Reference has already been made to the statement of Lenin early in 1918, that Russia needed State capitalism. In his ‘State and Revolution,’ written in August 1917 just before his party came to power, he had explained how State capitalist institutions would be operated. Like the British Labour Party he took the Post Office as an example, and like them he referred to it both as “an example of the Socialist system” and as “a State capitalist monopoly”. LENIN AND EQUALITY Lenin believed it possible to operate State capitalism on the basis of equal pay for everyone. He wrote: “We have but to overthrow the capitalists, to crush with the iron hand of the armed workers the resistance of these exploiters, to break the bureaucratic machine of the modern state – and we have before us a highly technically-fashioned machine freed of its parasites, which can quite well be set going by the united workers themselves, hiring their own inspectors, their own clerks, and paying them all, as indeed, every ‘State’ official, with the usual worker’s wage. Here is a concrete task immediately practicable and realisable as regards all trusts, which would rid the workers of exploitation... To organise our whole national economy like the postal system, but in such a way that the technical experts, inspectors, clerks and indeed all persons employed, should receive no higher wage than the working man, and the whole under the management of the armed proletariat – this is our immediate aim.” But less than a year later he was to admit that it had not been possible to carry out this procedure. In an address given in April 1918, published in translation as ‘The Soviets at Work,’ he said: “We were forced now to make use of the old bourgeois method and agreed a very high remuneration for the services of the bourgeois specialists. All those who are acquainted with the facts understand this, but not all give sufficient thought to the significance of such a measure on the part of the proletarian state. It is clear that such a measure is a compromise, that it is a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian rule, which demand the reduction of the average workers – principles which demand that ‘career-hunting’ be fought by deeds, not by words. “Furthermore, it is clear that such a measure is not merely a halt in a certain part and to a certain degree in the offensive against Capitalism (for Capitalism is not a quantity of money but a definite social relationship) but also a step backward by our Socialist Soviet State, which has from the very beginning proclaimed and carried on a policy of reducing high salaries to the standard wages of the average worker.” He went on to acknowledge that the backward step had a corrupting influence “both on the Soviets...and on the mass of the workers”, but he held out the prospect that perhaps within a year, or even less it might be possible o get rid of it. Of course it never has been got rid of in Russia. Far from being regarded as an evil, inequality has been established as a principle. Here again the parallel with the British Labour Party is remarkable. As late as 1935 Atlee, leader of the Labour Party, in his book ‘The Will and the Way to Socialism’ declared that “Socialists believe in the abolition of classes and in an equalitarian society”, and that under “socialist planning” there would be “no little cottages and no large private houses. All would be reasonably well housed....” As in Russia, no more was heard of equalitarianism when Attlee’s party came to power. In other ways, too, State capitalism has not developed in Russia as Lenin supposed it would. The country is still dependent for a large part of its agricultural produce on the private holdings of the peasants outside he State and collective farms, and there has been a growing development of ‘private enterprise’ (frequently illegally but none the less effectively). The advertising and marketing methods of the older capitalist countries have been copied and latterly greater use of the ‘profit incentive’ in the State concerns. The term Socialism has now been officially adopted to describe this state of affairs, while the term ‘communism’ is now used differently to apply to something in the distant future. Thus the British Communist Daily Worker (5 November 1949), in an issue celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the 1917 revolution, carried the headline ‘Thirty-two years of Socialism’. And in 1952 a commission under Stalin and Khrushchev which drew up new roles for the Russian Communist Party was reported as follows in the Daily Worker (14 October 1952): “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union achieved the overthrow of the power of the capitalists and landlords, the organisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of capitalism, the elimination of the exploitation of man by man, and in short, the building of a socialist society. The principle task of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union now consists in building a Communist society by a gradual transition from Socialism to Communism....” How far this use of the term Socialism differs from earlier use by the Russian Communist party can be seen from ‘A Short Course of Economic Science’ by A.Bogdanoff. Here Socialism and socialist society are described as “the highest stage of society we can conceive”, in which such institutions as taxation and profits will be non-existent and in which “there will not be the market buying and selling, but consciously and systematically organised distribution.” This work, first published in 1897 and extensively revised for the edition in August 1919 was used as a textbook in the schools and study circles of the Russian Communist Party. It was published in an English edition in 1923 by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Unlike the Communist Party and the British Labour Party, with their shifting definition to suit political expediency, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has consistently used the term Socialism in its original Marxist meaning and has never misapplied it to State capitalism. |
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