Capitalism Creates Its Own Gravediggers

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SOCIALIST ACTION FUND DRIVE $ 13,997 PAID SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1992 17 Newspapers, radio, and television in this country all speak of the death of "communism." As evidence, they point to the demise of the Stalinist parties of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

But is communism really dead and buried, or has the corpse has been deliberately misidentified? In this column last month, we saw that communism has two definitions. According to the older and more general definition, communism is described as a society in which the means of production are held in common. We referred to Stone Age hunting and gathering societies as an example.

Now we come to the more restricted definition, the modern idea of communism.

This meaning of the word developed as a result of the rise of capitalism and the consequent first stirrings of the modern working class. True modern capitalism is based on machine production and is marked by the emergence of two new classes, the capitalist owners of industry and the modern working class which hires itself out to the capitalists for wages.

This system arose in the first factories to produce cotton cloth, in England, sometime between 1760 and 1780. From there, it has spread to conquer the world.

As in all previous class societies, capitalism contains within itself a class struggle. But unlike all previous class societies, capitalism has tended to reduce the number of conflicting classes and is continually wiping out intermediate classes, leaving the capitalist class and the wage workers as the major contending forces.

Modern communism, in addition to standing for a communist, classless society, is first and foremost a movement-the movement of the working class of the world toward its own emancipation. Insofar as it is a theory, it is the generalization of that It announced its birth in 1848, with the publication of the "Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

"Communist Manifesto"

Marx and Engels had developed the foundations of modern communism as young men in the 1840s. They were recruited by a clandestine group of communistminded workers in 1847. In turn, they won this group to their world outlook, and were asked by the group to write the "Manifesto."

Marx and Engels had been active in the movement for a democratic revolution in their native Germany. They had also been greatly influenced by workers' struggles. Engels had gone to England, where he witnessed the fight of the wage slaves there for the 10-hour day and other demands. A revolt by weavers in Silesia, then a part of Germany, impressed Marx.

The "Communist Manifesto" explained the development of history as a history of class struggles. It explained the fundamentals of how capitalism works and the nature of the class struggle between the the workers.

Capitalism had revealed the powers latent in human labor. A society of abundance with enough for all could be created on the basis of the methods developed by capitalism.

Capitalism was also conquering the globe and creating an interdependent world through the world market. It introduced cooperation in production and distribution at levels unheard of before and on an international scale.

The contradiction between such vast social cooperation and the private appropriation of its fruits by the capitalists drives this system to economic catastrophes and other crises like war.

But the system also produces its own gravediggers in the form of the modern working class. This class is educated by capitalism in cooperative production. It owns no private property in the means of production. In the course of its struggle against its own exploitation, the working class will "win the battle of democracy" in alliance with other producers like working farmers. It will then become the ruling class in place of the capitalist class.

It will use this state power to progressively expropriate the capitalist class through nationalizing the means of production, which will gradually become social property. The state form of a workers' democracy will itself gradually die away as its function of suppressing the property privileges of the former capitalist class becomes less and less necBy Sheppara essary.

The administration of people will gradually become the administration of things. The working class itself will gradually become the whole people. This will be done on a world scale, overcoming the divisions between rich and poor countries, and advanced and backward.

Communism was no longer a utopia, but a realistic perspective, founded on history, and firmly rooted in the movement of the workers. As such it came to be known as scientific socialism.

What about our corpse?

The October 1917 revolution in Russia was a revolution of the workers and peasants led by a working class party armed with scientific socialism. It set out to be the first in a chain of socialist revolutions in Europe that would create workers' states and begin the construction of the classless society.

But the revolution was defeated in the advanced capitalist countries. In the isolation and poverty of backward Russia, there was a counterrevolution based on a privileged caste of bureaucrats, which halted the progress towards socialism and saddled the workers' state with a murderous police $ 20,196 PLEDGED apparatus.

It's now clear that this bureaucracy wants to lead back toward capitalism. For a long time, it clothed its misrule with socialist rhetoric, and kept the name "communist." Now it has cast off even that mask.

So what is dead is not communism, but the pretensions of the Stalinist bureaucrats to be advocates of communism or socialism—as they rush to try to become capitalists.

The Soviet and Eastern European workers are resisting the concrete measures (such as layoffs and a rise in prices) that must be put into place before capitalism can be restored. Whatever the immediate outcome of this struggle, the workers there will continue to fight for their real interests. The generalization of that fight is-communism. The workers will learn this in the course of the battle.

Communism will arise again as a massive movement, cleansed of the anticommunist virus of Stalinism, because the movement of the workers towards their emancipation is inevitable-in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the whole capitalist world.

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