Will Capitalism Let Us Achieve Socialism Peacefully?

Last week we showed that to allow society to move forward the social ownership of all the means of production is essential.

How can the working class achieve this? Can the full takeover be achieved peacefully? This has been the main point - of controversy among socialists over the last hundred years.

The title of this article is deliberate. For everyone would like to see industry taken over peacefully and smoothly; but we do not live in a peaceful society, nor in a society which develops smoothly.

Exploiters always use violence We should like to take industry over peacefully. But will the giant monopolies and banks let us?

The whole history of human society, where new classes appeared and overthrew the old ruling classes, provides no example of any ruling class giving up its power without using violence against the rising class.

The capitalist class itself came to power only after the most stormy and convulsive revolutions.

In Britain Cromwell led an army against the absolute monarchy, and this gave the rising capitalist class the freedom to develop its new social system.

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America had to declare a war of independence against Britain for capitalism to flourish there, and later had to crush the slave society in the South.

The French ‘capitalists would like to forget the French Revolution, the Napoleonic campaigns and so on.

In its death agony Today it is the capitalist system which is in its death agony and which is prepared to maintain itself by the use of terrible violence—against the colonial peoples, for ex- -ample.

Would the capitalists use violence against their ‘own’ . peoples? Why not? Have the Tories and capitalists ever -Shown any mercy here when their privileges and power have been seriously challenged?

The Chartist struggle .. . miners shot down at Tonypandy . .. the army prepared for civil war in the 1926 General Strike: was not violence inflicted on our. workers? Have we forgotten how our unemployed were batoned by police before the second world war?

In 1956, in the Midlands, mounted police ran their horses through mass pickets to scatter them away ffom the BMC gates.

And only a few months ago police kicked and beat seated . crowds in an anti-H-bomb demonstration in London.

© Tue Tories and many Right-wing leaders tell us that the State is above classes. But the Tory Government has exploded this myth. . It quite openly steps into every industrial struggle on the side of the employers.

It tells them to resist wage claims. It tells arbitration boards not to ‘give in’, or even, as with the health workers, refuses to accept an award.

How will Labour fare when it takes office? The present leaders do not pretend that they intend to bring socialism in when next they form a government.

From the old. theory of ‘socialism coming gradually’ tanght by the Fabians, these leaders have arrived at its end product -—shares in capitalism!

We badly need to step up the struggle to get a full, socialist programme for Labour.

© THERE are those who maintain that, given a strong enough Labour government, it can introduce socialism peacefully by using the present State machine. This is the view of the Communist Party leaders.

What is the State? Is it just Parliament?

No, it includes the ARMED FORCES. The Army, Navy : and Air Force are run by capitalist generals, admirals and air marshals, Will these gentry just sit back and allow their class to be dispossessed?

In Spain twenty years ago, where a government introduced a few reforms under mass pressure—not socialism!—the generals raised an army revolt and finally imposed a brutal fascist dictatorship.

The POLICE and the LAW COURTS, with ruling-class judges administering laws essentially designed to maintain capitalism, would be used to stop Labour bringing in real:

The MONARCHY and the CHURCH would be used as tallying grounds for the privileged classes. The capitalist PRESS would fling its weight against any socialist measures.

And, as in Germany and Italy before the second world war, the capitalist class, once it saw a real struggle unfolding against it, would not hesitate to finance extra gangs like Mosley’s fascist thugs.

Would arm the workers Thus if Labour really intended to bring in socialism it would have to use other institutions than the present State institutions.

It would have to abolish the House of Lords. It would have to mobilize the soldiers to refuse to obey their officers, even to arrest them.

It would have to disband the police and creat a workers’

police force. .

It would have to disarm the capitalists.

To do all this it would have to arm the workers, and bring the workers’ own factory committees and councils into the Tunning of the economy, so. preventing sabotage by the dispossessed owners.

These committees and councils would be linked up nationally. In .other words a new State, a workers’ State, would (Continued overleaf)

have to be created if socialism were to succeed and if the resistance of the capitalists were to be overcome.

© RIGHT-WING Labour leaders and the present leaders of the Communist Party tell the workers that they can achieve socialism without their own organs of struggle and of power—factory and strike committees, workers’ councils etc.—playing the leading part.

They thereby lull the workers and help the capitalists prepare their violence against socialism.

To achieve socialism we must be ready for capitalism in its death throes to be very violent indeed. If we are prepared we are forearmed.

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From the lessons -history teaches, many socialists believe that the workers are most likely to take power as a result of big mass struggles that reach the point of. challenging the whole capitalist State.

Workers’ councils would be thrown up, link themselves nationally and become the new governing body.

This workers’ State would decree the take-over of all the’ basic industries, disarm the capitalists and their agents and proceed to the construction of socialism.

Germs of a workers’ State In 1926.the germs of such a State were here in- Britain. Local councils of action controlled all food passing through many of our cities. They were running part of the economy.

Unfortunately the trade union leaders did not want to go ahead and remove capitalism. They sold out.

Our task today is to build a leadership that will go all the way; a leadership that will not shirk the final challenge to capitalism; a leadership that will put before the workers at each stage of their struggles the ultimate aim of taking power.

[ LETTERS CRISIS MUST NOT BE OVER-SIMPLIFIED In Harry Finch’s interesting article “Why You Should Be a Socialist’ I was surprised to find the following sentence:

‘Eventually more goods are produced than can be sold, for the workers of the world are never paid enough to buy back the total amount of goods they produce.’

This statement does not correspond to the Marxist explanation of slumps.

First of ali, the workers would have no wish to ‘buy back’ the majority of the goods they produce, for a large part of these take the form of producer goods: pig iron, machine tools, railway engines.

Secondly, the producers have never consumed the whole product of their labour, and will certainly not do so under socialism, for otherwise prodtiction could not expand.

The basic contradiction of capitalism, as Harry Finch himself points out, lies in the fact that the social surplus is privately owned and controlled.

Spreads to world economy This surplus is allocated in the interests of expanding the profits of individual firms.

The anarchic, unplanned expansion of the economy takes place at the same time as the consuming power of the wage-earners is kept down. ;

Since production is socially tied together, the resulting collision between the expanded means of production and the limited market spreads from one or two sectors to the entire world economy.

Harry Finch’s over-simplification—no doubt due to the need for brevity—is a common one in the Labour movement, but Aucust 23, 1958 Pm, it can lead to many false political conclusions.

I look forward to the remaining instalments of this series, which is very timely.

Wembley (Mx) Cyril Smith