First Published: in Marxism. Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? Paul Mattick, published posthumously by Merlin Press, 1983, edited by Paul Mattick Jr.; Source: Collective Action Notes; Transcribed: by Andy Blunden, for marxists.org 2003; Proofread: by Chris Clayton 2006.
On the basis of its assumptions, Marx’s model of capitalist production could only end in the collapse of the capitalist system. However, this collapse was not conceived of as the automatic outcome of economic processes, independent of human actions, but as the result of the proletarian class struggle:
Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows ... (From: Marxists.org.)
Whereas Marx’s analysis of the social contradictions inherent in
capitalism refers to the general trend of capitalistic development, the actual
class struggle is a day-to-day affair and necessarily adjusts itself to
changing social conditions. These adjustments are bound to find a reflection in
Marxian theory. The history of capitalism is thus also the history of Marxism.
Although interrupted by periods of crisis and depression, capitalism was able
to maintain itself until now by the continuous expansion of capital and its
extension into space through an accelerating increase of the productivity of
labor. It proved possible not only to regain a temporarily lost profitability
but to increase it sufficiently to continue the acc... (From: Marxists.org.)
The bourgeois political revolution was the culmination of a drawnout process
of social changes in the sphere of production. Where the ascending capitalist
class gained complete control of the state, this assured a rapid unfolding of
the capital-labor relation. Feudalistic resistance to this transformation
varied in different countries. Though capitalism was on the rise generally, its
gestation involved both force and compromise, characterized by an overlapping
of the new and the old both politically and economically. The ruling classes
divided into a reactionary and a progressive wing, the latter striving for
political control through a democratic capitalist state. The division between
an entrenched autocracy and the liberal bourge... (From: Marxists.org.)
However reformable capitalism may prove to be, it cannot alter its basic wage
and profit relations without eliminating itself. The age of reform is an age of
spontaneous capital expansion, based on a disproportional but simultaneous
increase of both wages and profits. It is an age wherein the concessions made to
the working class are more tolerable to the bourgeoisie than the upheavals of
the class struggle that would otherwise accompany capitalist development. As a
class, the bourgeoisie does not favor minimum wages and intolerable working
conditions, even though each capitalist, for whom labor is a cost of production,
tries to reduce this expense to the utmost. There can be no doubt that the
bourgeoisie prefers a satisfied to a d... (From: Marxists.org.)
Those in the socialist movement who were thinking in terms of a proletarian
revolution were obliged to take all these facts into consideration. In their
view, the revolution would not result from a gradual growth of proletarian class
consciousness, finding its expression in the increasing might of working class
organization and the eventual “legal” usurpation of the bourgeois state
machinery, but would be the result of the self-destruction of the capitalist
system, leaving the working class no other choice than the revolutionary
solution of its own problems through a change of the social structure. And
because this choice was restricted to the working class, in opposition to all
other class interests, it had to lead to ... (From: Marxists.org.)
The workers’ failure to maintain control over their own destiny was due
mainly to Russia’s general objective unreadiness for a socialist development,
but also to the fact that neither the soviets, nor the socialist parties, knew
how to go about organizing a socialist society. There was no historical
precedent and Marxist theory had not seriously concerned itself with the problem
of the socialist reconstruction of society. However, past revolutionary
occurrences had some relevance, particularly as regards Russia, because of her
general backwardness. Following Marx and Engels, Russian Marxists were apt to
point to the Paris Commune as an example of a working-class revolution under
similarly unfavorable conditions. Trotsky... (From: Marxists.org.)
Lenin’s state was to be a Bolshevik state supported by workers and peasants.
As the privileged classes could not be expected to support it, it was necessary
to disfranchize them and thus end bourgeois democracy. Once in power, the
Bolsheviks restricted political freedoms – freedom of speech, press, assembly,
and association, and the right to vote and to be elected to the soviets – to the
laboring population, that is, to all people “who have acquired the means of
living through labor that is productive and useful to society, that is, the
laborers and employes of all classes who are employed in industry, trade,
agriculture, etc., and to peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who employ
no help for purposes... (From: Marxists.org.)
Contrary to Bolshevik expectations, the Russian Revolution remained a
national revolution. Its international repercussions involved no more than a
growing demand for the ending of the war. The Bolsheviks’ call for an immediate
peace without annexations and reparations found a positive response among the
soldiers and workers in the Western nations. But even so, and apart from
short-lived mutinies in the French and British armed forces and a series of mass
strikes in the Central European countries, it took another year before the
military defeat of the German and Austrian armies and general war weariness led
to the revolutionary upheavals that brought the war to a close.
The here decisive German Revolution of 1918 was a spont... (From: Marxists.org.)
In retrospect all lost causes appear as irrational endeavors, while those
that succeed seem rational and justifiable. The goals of the defeated
revolutionary minority have invariably been described as utopian and thus as
indefensible. The term “utopian” does not apply, however, to objectively
realizable projects, but to imaginary systems, which may or may not have
concretely given material underpinnings that allow for their realization. There
was nothing utopian in the attempt to gain control of society by way of workers’
councils and to end the market economy, for in the developed capitalist system
the industrial proletariat is the determining factor in the social reproduction
process as a whole, which is not nec... (From: Marxists.org.)
