FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
IN the issue of the Automobile Engineer for March
1931, appeared an article on "The Machine Tool: An
Analysis of the Factors Determining Obsolescence."
This article was not written as a criticism of
existing society. It was written, with considerable
detail statistical calculations, to assist employers or
their technical managers to determine under what
conditions the installation of new high-production
machinery can be profitable. Nevertheless the
conclusions reached were in the highest degree
revolutionary.
The first conclusion was to the effect that, quoting
the words of a paper of Mr. H. C. Armitage to the
Institute of Automobile Engineers: "high-production
machines that are being developed in America cannot be
economically used in this country." The reason given was
"because existing British plants can already produce
more rapidly than the products can be disposed of. . . .
The statement has been made many times that American
factories in the main industries could more than supply
the world's needs, even if all other supply sources
closed down." On this ground, objection was taken to the
common complaint Πof "uninformed critics of British
industry" that British employers had fallen behind in
the race because of maintaining "hopelessly out-of- date
factory equipment."
On the contrary, in fact, the British capitalists
knew very well what they were doing when they left their
German and American rivals during the decade after the
war to install gigantic modern equipment of large-scale
production at heavy expense, requiring heavy maintenance
costs and an enormous market, while they themselves
preferred mainly to concentrate on speeding up and
driving harder their labour on relatively older
machinery, requiring less maintenance costs and a
smaller market; on this basis they have been better able
to meet the crisis than their German and American
rivals.
22. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
The second conclusion went even further and declared
that this principle now applied also to American
industry:
The time has now arrived when Mr. Armitage's remarks
may be widened to a statement that the latest machine
tools now being developed in America cannot even be
economically used in the United States.
That is to say, the most modern developments of
technique can no longer be utilised in even the most
advanced countries of capitalism.
The third conclusion provides the complement to the
first two. One market, it is pointed out, still remains
for the most advanced machine tools. That market is the
Soviet Union.
American machine-tool makers, having a range of
equipment sufficient to meet the needs of the American
production plants, have supplied to Russia machine tools
outside this range, specially designed to obtain still
faster production. An excessive price has been demanded
for these special machines on the ground that, while the
tools show an improvement in output speed on their
standard lines, they have no immediate prospects of
finding other customers for them, there being no demand
outside Russia for faster production than can be
obtained with existing models.
Thus, according to the testimony of this technical
engineering journal, the most modern developments of
technique, making possible the most extensive and rapid
production with the minimum of labour, can no longer be
utilised in the countries of capitalism, where they have
originated, but can only be utilised to-day in the
country of socialist construction, in the Soviet Union.
The significance of this present stage of technique
and society here revealed-and this example is only one
of ten thousand constantly arising in every direction in
the present periodrequires no emphasis. Here, as in a
single crystal, is expressed the whole present stage of
the general crisis of capitalism, of the exhaustion of
the possibilities of Πproductive advance within the
fetters of the old private property ownership, and the
necessity of the socialisation of production as the sole
condition for further development.
In the situation that this picture reveals lies the
real root of the issue of Fascism or Communism. In this
situation lies the basic cause why precisely at the
present stage of social development
23. THE GROWTH OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
the issue of Fascism or Communism inescapably
confronts existing society.
I. The Growth of the Productive Porces.
A century ago, Robert Owen, on the basis of his
experience as a successful manufacturer, noted the
contradiction between the new social productive labour
and the private appropriation of the f ruits:
The working part of this population Of 2,500 persons
(in New Lanark) was daily producing as much real wealth
for society as, less than half a century before, it
would have required the working part of a population of
6oo,ooo to create. I asked myself, what became of the
difference between the wealth consumed by 2,500 persons
and that which would have been consumed (Robert Owen,
The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human
Race, 1849.)
The contradiction of capitalism was thus already
clearly seen by Owen on the basis of his conduct of the
model factory of New Lanark from 18oo, to 1829. But the
criticism remained an idealist criticism. For capitalism
in this period, despite all the cruelty and poverty
involved in its process, was still ascending; it was
still able to organise and develop the productive
forces; it was still a progressive factor, carrying
through the transformation from wasteful and uneconomic
small-scale production to modern large-scale production,
and thus preparing the material basis for the future
society. The critique of capitalism in this period by
Owen and others remained utopian.
The answer to this type of critique of capitalism was
provided by Marx in his discussion of a similar line of
argument of Proudhon: am Al
In 1770 the population of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain was fifteen millions and the productive
population three millions. The scientific power of
production would about equal a population of twelve more
millions; thus making a total of fifteen millions of
productive forces. Thus the productive power was to the
population as I is to I, and the scientific power was to
manual power as 4 is to I. ΠIn 1840 the population did
not exceed thirty millions; the productive population
was six millions, while the scientific power amounted to
650 millions, that is to say, it was to the whole
population as 2 1 to I, and to manual power as 108 to I.
24. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
In English society the day of tabour had thus
acquired in seventy years a surplus Of 2,700 per cent.
of productivity, that is to say that in 1840 it produced
twenty-seven times as much as in 17 7 o. According to M.
Proudhon it is necessary to put the following question:
Why is the English workman of 184o not twenty-seven
times richer than the workman of 1770?
In putting such a question one would naturally
suppose that the English had been able to produce these
riches without the historical conditions in which they
were produced-such as: the private accumulation of
capital; the modern division of labour; the automatic
workshop; anarchic competition; the wage system, and, in
fine, all that which is based upon the antagonism of
classes-having to exist. But these were precisely the
necessary conditions for the development of the
productive forces and of the surplus of labour. Thus it
was necessary, in order to obtain this development of
the productive forces, and this surplus of labour, that
there should be some classes which thrive and others
which perish.
(Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 1, 3.)
This basic conception of the capacity of development
of the productive forces as the measure of a progressive
or reactionary social order is no less strongly
expressed in Marx's praise of Ricardo:
The reproach moved against him, that he has an eye
only to the development of the productive forces
regardless of "human beings," regardless of the
sacrifice in human beings and capital values incurred,
strikes precisely his strong point. The development of
the productive forces of social labour is the historical
task and privilege of capital. It is precisely in this
way that it unconsciously creates the material
requirements of a higher mode of production.
(Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Kerr edition, P. 304.)
The Marxist critique of capitalism thus basically
differs from the utopian school still surviving in the
so-called "English Socialism." The Marxist critique
recognises the historical role of capitalism in the
development of the productive forces. But the Marxist
critique laid bare, already nearly a century ago when no
other economists or Πthinkers had the slightest
glimmering of the future line of development, that the
inner laws of capitalist development would inevitably
lead to a stage at which capitalism could no longer
organise the productive forces, but could only result in
successively more violent crises, stagnation and decay,
and at which only the new social class, the proletariat,
freed from the limitations of private property, could
THE GROWTH OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES 25.
alone organise the social productive forces to a
higher level. This is the heart of Marxism, whose
political expression is the dictatorship of the
proletariat as the necessary condition of the solution
of the problems of the present epoch.
It is this culminating stage of capitalism that we
are at present living through-the stage of imperialism
or capitalism in decay, and, more particularly now since
1914, the stage of the general crisis of capitalism, or
final phase within imperialism, when the forces of
production are in ever more violent conflict with the
cramping fetters of the existing property relations of
production, when capitalism in more and more obvious
decay is faced with the advance of victory of the
proletarian social revolution, and when capitalism in
decay is resorting to every device and expedient to
maintain its power.
Let us note first the gigantic growth of the
productive forces since the early criticisms of a
century ago.
The following table gives the growth of industrial
machinepower, omitting motor-transport power, in the
past century, in millions of horse power (one horse
power is commonly calculated as equivalent to the
muscular power of six men).
GROWTH OF INDUSTRIAL MACHINE POWER. (in million horse
power)
United Kingdom 1835 0.3, 1875 6, 1913 28.5, 1928 37.
France 1835 0.02, 18753, 1913 12.5, 1928 18.5. Germany
1835 0.01, 1875 4, 1913 21, 1928 32. USA 1835 0.3, 1875
7.8, 1913 86, 1928 162. Extra-European countries (other
than U.S.): 1835 0.01, 1875 1.9, 1913 31, 1928 93. World
1835 0.65, 1875 26.5, 1913 211, 1928 390.
(Hausleiter, Revolution in der Weltwirtschaft, 1932,
published in English under the title The Machine
Unchained, 1933.) ΠA century ago, we have seen, it was
already complained that productive power bad increased
twenty-seven times over in England in the previous
seventy years without any corresponding improvement in
the standards of the workers.
But in the century since 1835 industrial machine
power multiplied a further hundred times over in
England, and six hundred times over in the whole
world-and has ended in mass starvation and unemployment
without equal.
In the decade and a half alone between 1913 and 1928
industrial machine power in Europe has increased So per
cent.,
26. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
in the United States 100 per cent., and in the
extra-European countries other than the United States
200 per cent.
The inclusion of all forms of power would bring the
world total to something like 1,500 million horse power.
On this basis Stuart Chase in his Machines and Men
(1929) has estimated the machine power of the world as
representing the muscular power of 9,000 million
additional men, or equivalent to five slaves for every
man, woman and child of the human race.
Between 1913 and 1927 electrical power production,
according to the report on "Power Resources of the
World," presented to the World Power Conference in 1930,
increased from 47,000 million units to 200,000 million
units. Between the first and second World Power
Conferences in 1924 and 1930, electrical output doubled
from 150,000 million units to 300,000 million units
(Economist, 21 June, 1930).
This expansion of productive power has most strongly
affected manufacturing industry, but has also affected
agriculture and the output of raw materials, not in
equal degree, but far outstripping the growth of human
population.
Already by 1890, according to Hausleiter (op. cit.)
the costs of agricultural production in the great Grain
Circle (United States, Canada, Argentine, Australia) had
been reduced by mechanisation to one quarter of the
costs of the old production by hand-labour in 1830.
Between 1 890 and 192 1, according to the report of
the Senior Trade Commissioner in Canada for May 1930,
further mechanisation of agriculture and extension of
the area of cultivation had multiplied the yield of
wheat per agricultural worker fivefold:
Mr. Field lays great stress on the rapidity with
which power-driven machinery is displacing labour in
Canadian agriculture. Whereas in 1890 133/2 bushels of
wheat were grown for each rural dweller, there were
seventy in 1921; and as the most revolutionary machine,
the Πcombined reaper and thresher was only introduced
in 1924, the output per worker must now be a great deal
higher. Moreover, the scope for the mechanisation of
agriculture has by no means yet been fully exploited.-
(Economist, September 8, 1930).
Between 1920 and 1929 the number of tractors in the
United States increased from 246,000 to 843,000 (U. S.
Yearbook of Agriculture, 1930).
27. THE GROWTH OF THE PROD CTIVE FORCES
Between 1900 and 1924-8 the harvests of all cereals
increased in Australia 104 per cent., in the Argentine
172 per cent., and in Canada 330 per cent. Between 1913
and 1928 the volume of world grain exports increased 147
per cent. In the same period world population increased
11.6 per cent.
The old ignorant Malthusian notions of absolute
"overpopulation," or the modern lugubrious chants of
birth-control as the necessary solution of poverty, are
thus abundantly exploded by facts. It is worth noting
that this reactionary propaganda is still maintained,
not only in clerical and conservative quarters, but also
by the would-be "progressive" (actually, as we shall
have occasion to see, one of the real bulwarks of
conservatism in England) Labour Party. The Labour
official organ writes:
The figures published by the League of Nations show
that the world population, already 2,012,000,000, is
increasing by 20,000,000 a year.
That means that unless the rate of increase is
checked, it will have doubled in far less than a
century; for the increase is, as it were, at compound
interest.
There is not the least reason for assuming that the
"march of progress" will automatically provide ways and
means of feeding and supporting that doubled population.
There is only too much evidence-in India and China
for example - that the overcrowding of a too big
population brings with it appalling conditions of
misery.
Either an unendurable suffering, or the "natural
checks" of famine and pestilence and a high death rate.
Or, on the other hand, a deliberate and conscious
lowering and controlling of the birth rate.
Those are the alternatives that face humanity.
(Daily Herald editorial, August 8, 1932.) Œ
Fortunately, these are not the alternatives that
confront humanity to-day. The alternatives that confront
humanity to-day are serious enough; but they are
alternatives of the destruction and anarchy of
capitalism, involving still greater poverty and misery
in the midst of abundance and rising productive power,
or the social organisation of production, bringing
abundance for all. The "overpopulation" (like the
simultaneous "overproduction") is only relative to the
capitalist conditions of production. Against this
reactionary and vicious propaganda, concealing under
cover of obsolete clerical superstitions the true social
causes of poverty and misery (concealing
28. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
also, characteristically enough, the role of
imperialism in India in creating poverty) may be quoted
the opinion of the leading international statistician,
Sir George Knibbs, who estimated that even with present
resources and technique the earth could easily maintain
four times the present population at a good standard.
The late Sir George Knibbs . . . estimated after a
careful survey that the earth could well support a
population four times as great as at present, or about
eight thousand million.
(Dr. R. A. Fisher, of the Statistical Department of
the Rothamstead Experimental Station, Spectator, March
7, 1931.)
The facts of the crisis show a very different picture
to the cant of "overpopulation" outstripping natural
resources. Already by 1925, according to the reports
presented to the 1927 International Economic Conference
at Geneva, despite the destruction of the world war,
world production of foodstuffs and raw materials had
risen over pre-war by 16 to -18 per cent., against an
estimated increase of population by 5 per cent. Between
1913 and 1928, according to the League of Nations
Economic Section, world production of foodstuffs and raw
materials had increased by 25 per cent., of foodstuffs
by 16 per cent., of raw materials by 40 per cent. (of
industrial products enormously more), against an
estimated increase of world population by 10 per cent.
World stocks of primary products, on the basis of
1923-5 as 100, increased by the end of 1926 to 134, by
1928 to 161, by 1929 to 192, by 1930 to 235, by 1931 to
264, and by the end of 1932, despite all the destruction
of stocks, still stood at 263, or more than two and a
half times the volume of eight years before (Economist,
May 6, 1933). World stocks of manufactures showed a less
overwhelming accumulation only because "the existence of
a large volume of unemployed but immediately available
factors of production" has the Πsame effect in the
sphere of manufactures "corresponding to that exercised
by enormous stocks of primary products" (ibid., May 13,
1933).
The growth of production in every direction, whether
of foodstuffs, raw materials or manufactures, has thus
greatly exceeded the growth of world population. And the
increase of productive power, which has only been
partially and incompletely used under capitalist
conditions, with many artificial
PRODUCTIVE FORCES AGAINST EXISTING SOCIETY 29.
limitations and restrictions, has been in reality
enormously greater than the actual growth of production.
But this gigantic increase of productive power has
outstripped the capacity of capitalism to organise it.
The outcome of this gigantic increase of productive
power has been world crisis, stagnation and closing down
of production, mass unemployment, mass impoverishment
and the lowering of standards, on a scale without
parallel since the beginning of capitalism, accompanied
by growing social and political disturbance and
recurrent war.
This problem is the basic problem confronting
present-day society.
2. The Conflict of the Productive Forces Against
Existing Society.
This is the world situation which reveals that the
system of capitalist relations, the capitalist class
ownership of the means of production, has outlived its
progressive role, and has become a fetter on the
Organisation of production.
The world war was the beginning of the violent
explosion of this conflict, of the conflict between the
ever-growing productive forces and the limits of
existing property-society. Since 1914 we have entered
into a new era, the era of the general crisis of
capitalism and of the advance of the world socialist
revolution. The world economic crisis which opened in
1929 has brought these issues of the present stage of
society, and of the basic economic contradictions
underlying them, more sharply to the general
consciousness than ever before. But the significance of
this world economic crisis is commonly seen through too
narrow spectacles. It is seen as a special temporary
disorganisation breaking in on an otherwise harmonious
and smoothly working economic Πmechanism. Alike in the
pessimistic and the optimistic readings of its
significance the proportions have tended to be lost.
just as the extreme low depths of depression produced
almost universal utterances of pessimism and apocalyptic
gloom from the leaders and professors of capitalism, so
the first signs of an upward movement produced a
universal sigh of relief and reprieve, as if the worst
were over and all might yet be wen again. In fact, "the
devil was sick."
But the real significance of the world economic
crisis, which has so greatly exceeded in its scope all
previous economic crises,
30. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
can only be correctly understood in relation to the
whole development of capitalism, and in particular the
development of capitalism during the last two
decades-that is, in relation to the general crisis of
capitalism which opened in 19 14.
The general crisis of capitalism should not be
confused with the old cyclical crises of capitalism
which, although demonstrating the inherent
contradictions of capitalist relations, nevertheless
constituted an integral part and direct factor in the
ascent of capitalism. The cyclical crises, as
illustrated in 1920-I and 1929, continue, but take on a
new and intensified character in the period of the
general crisis.
The old cyclical crises were, according to Marx,
"always but momentary and forcible solutions of the
existing contradictions, violent eruptions, which
restore the disturbed equilibrium for a while" (Capital
III, P. 2 92 ). Their characteristic f eature was to
solve the contradictions, albeit by anarchically violent
and destructive means, to restore the equilibrium, and
permit of the resumption of production on a higher
plane. They weeded out the smaller and less efficient
concerns; they wiped out a portion of capital values in
order to save the remainder; they effected a
concentration of capital; they compelled a drive to open
up new markets. On this basis they permitted, after a
relatively short period, the resumption of capitalist
production at a higher level.
Elements of this character can also be traced in the
post-war world economic crisis; but these "progressive"
elements are overshadowed by the major, negative effects
of the whole process of the development of the cyclical
crisis on the basis of the general crisis of capitalism,
in the consequent destruction of stabilisation and
hastening of revolutionising processes.
For the general crisis of capitalism admits of no
such solution. The domination of the imperialist Powers
has already been expanded to its maximum extent
throughout the world; monopoly capitalism, which Πhad
already divided up the greater part of the world by the
beginning of the twentieth century, and by 1914 was at
war over its re-division, is now faced with a still
sharper situation of contradictions, not only between
the imperialist Powers, but also between imperialism and
socialism, So far from there being available new regions
to open up, one sixth of the world has passed out of the
sphere of capitalism into that of the social revolution;
the colonial peoples are rising in revolt; the world
available for capitalist exploitation has begun
PRODUCTIVE FORCES AGAINST EXISTING SOCIETY 31.
to contract. At the same time the growth of
productive power is greater than ever, the extreme
crisis, competition and war forcing forward technical
development at an unheard of pace. Under these
conditions there is no room for a harmonious solution,
but only for ever more violent conflict. The upward
movements within the general crisis become ever shorter;
depression becomes the normal, broken by short upward
movements and violent social and political explosions;
the recurrence of the old cyclical crisis within the
general crisis takes on a new intensity.
The general crisis of capitalism has now continued
for twenty years without a break, only changing one form
for another. The violent explosion of the world war only
gave place to the still more profound struggle of
revolution and counterrevolution throughout the world.
The defeat of the revolution in the countries outside
the Soviet Union brought no solution and peaceful
development, but only laid bare the post-war chaos of
capitalism. The temporary stabilisation and upward
movement of the middle 'twenties proved only a false and
illusory stabilisation; "the prosperity of the period
1923-29 was to a large extent illusory; and the seeds of
future trouble had already been sown" (British
Government Note to the United States, December 1, 1932).
Its only outcome was the new form of the basic
contradiction expressed in the extreme world economic
crisis which began in 1929 and continues now in its
fifth year. This in its turn breaks out into new and
violent explosions in the spread of Fascism and the
visibly approaching second world-war.
Already in the closing years of his life Engels noted
the approach of a new era: "there is now no doubt that
the position has changed fundamentally by comparison
with formerly"; "we have entered upon a period much more
dangerous for the old society than that of the ten- year
cycles"; "the crises become chronic" (Engels, letter to
Bebel, January 20, ISM). In 1909 Kautsky, writing then
as a Marxist theorist, in his Path to Power, exposed the
revisionist illusions of gradual and peaceful progress,
and demonstrated the now close entry of capitalism into
a period of violent explosions. In 1916 Lenin in his
Imperialism laid bare the foundations of the new period
as the period Πof monopoly capitalism, in which all the
contradictions come to a head, of decaying capitalism,
of the eve of the
32. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
socialist revolution, the period which broke into
violent explosion in 19 14.
UP to 1913 capitalist production, despite the
increasing tendencies of decay already visible in
imperialism, was still able to maintain an almost
continuous ascending line.
For many decades before the war, world production,
according to the best estimates available, increased
with remarkable regularity of trend, broken only in
minor degree by successive crises. This trend of
increase ran through both the period of declining prices
from 1873 to 1895, and the period of rising prices from
1895 onwards.
(League of Nations World Economic Survey 1932-3, p.
68.)
Between 1860 and 1913, according to the tables
presented in this publication, world production of basic
commodities ascended in an almost continuous line and
multiplied from four to five times. World industrial
production ascended in an almost continuous line and
multiplied over six times.
But the twenty years since 19 14 reveal a different
picture.
If the line of trend from 186o to 1913 is extended to
1932, the rather startling conclusion is reached that
the index of world production, on the hypothesis that
nothing bad occurred to alter its regular upward trend
for the fifty preceding years, would to-day be rather
more than twice as great as it actually is. (ibid., p.
82.)
The present world economic crisis is without
precedent:
There is no precedent for such a marked decline.
Statistical series ranging back to 186o fail to reveal
any previous period in which the decline in either raw
material production or manufactures has been so
precipitate or so severe. Independent estimates agree
that in 1932 the level of industrial production in the
world as a whole fell below that of 1913. (ibid., p.
82.)
Thus the war and post-war period, taken as a whole,
reveals the first large-scale absolute setback of
capitalist production.
The attempt is often made, on the basis of the above
facts and figures, to argue that, since 1914 appears as
the great dividing point, Πtherefore the war is the
cause of all the present maladies. Comparisons are
sometimes made to the postNapoleonic period of
unsettlement, revolutionary unrest and the industrial
revolution; and the inference is drawn that the troubles
of the present period are also troubles of post- war
unsettlement and of the "second industrial revolution,
PRODUCTIVE FORCES AGAINST EXISTING SOCIETY 33.
heralding a no less great expansion within the forms
of capitalism.
This very superficial approach to the real historical
move. ment of two entirely different periods, and to the
crux of modern world problems, is demonstrably incorrect
both in fact and in reasoning.
In the first place, no comparison is possible between
the post- Napoleonic period of young and ascending
capitalism and the twentieth century period of old and
declining capitalism. Fifteen years after the Napoleonic
wars, production, trade and employment were gigantically
above the pre-war level; capitalist society was bounding
forward. Fifteen years after the war of 1914-18
production, trade and employment are actually below the
pre-war level; capitalist society is in a greater
dilemma than ever, greater than even in the period
succeeding the war. The dislocation, instead of
diminishing as the war recedes, actually increases; it
is greater fifteen years after the war than it was ten
years after the war. It is obvious that some deeper
factor is at work than the disturbances consequent on
the war. At the same time, the social and political
issues of the two periods are basically different. The
issue of the first half of the nineteenth century was
still the issue of the bourgeois revolution, which swept
forward through the processes of the Napoleonic wars and
after, despite the seeming victories of reaction. The
issue of the first half of the twentieth century is the
issue of the proletarian social revolution, which began
its advance in the conditions of the war of 1914-18, and
which maintains its growing strength in the midst of the
capitalist reaction.
In the second place, it is not correct that the
division between before 1914 and after 1914 is a simple
and absolute division between the ascent and the descent
of the level of production. On the contrary, the actual
level of production in 1927-9 was for the short period
of the boom higher than the pre-war level; the real
growth of the contradictions, which was to find
expression in the subsequent slump falling below the
pre-war level, lay elsewhere. The true measure of the
decline and bankruptcy of the existing capitalist order
lies, not in any simple arithmetical figures of the
level of production, but in the growth of the
contradictions of the existing society to bursting
point, in the growth of the contradiction between the
potential productive Œ
34. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
power and the actual production, between the
conditions of existence of the bourgeoisie and of the
proletariat, between the rival imperialist Powers, and
the consequent expression of these in social and
political explosions. It is in this sense that the
general crisis of capitalism dates from 1914, but its
causes lie in the whole conditions of the imperialist
epoch *
Finally, and in consequence of the above, the world
war of 1914-18, so far from being the cause of the
crisis of capitalism, was on the contrary itself only an
expression and breaking out of the crisis-a link in the
chain of imperialist development. The war was no
arbitrary, accidental, unforeseeable first cause,
suddenly breaking in from nowhere to change the whole
course of development. It was the direct consequence of
the conditions of imperialism, which was itself the
direct outcome of the previous nineteenth-century
capitalist epoch. It was fully foreseen, and even
predicted in detail for years beforehand, as the outcome
of the growing tensions of imperialism. Its outbreak
coincided with the gathering industrial crisis which was
already beginning in America in 1913, and spreading
therefrom to hover menacingly over Europe. As the
war-leader, Lloyd George, confessed nearly twenty years
after, the war appeared as the way out from the
gathering crisis, which he is now convinced would have
in any case developed, even had the war not broken out
at that point:
If we had not had a great war, if we bad gone on as
we were going, I am sure that sooner or later we would
have been confronted with something approximately like
the present chaos. There must be something fundamentally
wrong with our economic system, because abundance
produce(Lloyd George, speech at Cambridge, Manchester
Guardian Weekly, April 7, 1933.)
The fact that the dynamic of capitalist development,
even after the direct destruction caused by the first
world-war has been repaired, only reverts to the
recurrence of still more gigantic economic crisis and
the visible approach to a second world-war, shows how
little of "accident" there was in the basic development
of capitalism through imperialism to world war, however
large the role of "accident" may appear to be in the
particular historical Πmanifestations of the process.
In order to understand the problems of the present
epoch of the general crisis of capitalism, it is
essential to be able to see
PRODUCTIVITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT 35.
deeper than the immediate surface manifestations and
episodes, whether of the world war of 1914 or the world
economic crisis Of 1929, and to understand these in
relation to the general line of development, of which
they are expressions. The general crisis of capitalism,
the conflict of the productive forces against the
existing relations of production, expresses itself in a
whole series of successively growing conflicts and
explosions, up to the final victory of the proletarian
social revolution. It is in relation to this development
of the general crisis of capitalism that Fascism is a
further stage and episode.
3. Productivity and Unemployment.
The development of the productive forces has rendered
the old class-society obsolete.
Already before the end of the war the leading trust
magnate, Lord Leverhulme, estimated that, if the then
existing productivity were organised, one hour's work
per week of all citizens would provide the necessaries
of life for all:
With the means that science has already placed at our
disposal, we might provide for all the wants of each of
us in food, shelter and clothing by one hour's work per
week for each of us from school age to dotage.
(Lord Leverhulme: Preface to Professor Spencer's
Wealth from Waste, Routledge, 1918.)
That was fifteen years ago. In the intervening decade
and a half, according to the engineer, J. L. Hodgson, in
his paper on "Industrial and Communal Waste" before the
Royal Society of Arts on June 20, 1932, in the course of
which he quoted and accepted Lord Leverhulme's
statement, "since that date our average potential
productivity has nearly doubled." One halfhour's work
per week should thus provide a minimum standard for all,
and one hour's work per week an overwhelming abundance.
Why should this almost immeasurable increase in
productive power and the possibility of universal
abundance result in universal impoverishment and
lowering of standards? ΠThis is the question that
confronts the whole human race, that is becoming a life
and death question for the nineteen hundred million
human beings of the capitalist world outside the Soviet
Union, to which these hundreds of millions must find the
answer or go down in catastrophe.
36. FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
It is evident that what is here in question is no
natural or technical causes, but only social causes-that
there is no social organisation of production.
This question is sharpened by the contrast of the
productive increase in the Soviet Union alongside the
actual decline of capitalist production. Between 1925
and 1932 industrial production in the Soviet Union (on
the base of 1025-9 as 100) increased from 59 to 240; the
corresponding figure for the United States decreased
from 95 to 58, for Britain from 99 to 86, and for
Germany from 89 to 66 (League of Nations World
Production and Prices 1925-1932, P. 49). Between 1929
and 11932 industrial production in the Soviet Union
increased by 65 per cent. and in the capitalist world as
a whole decreased by 37 percent. (League of Nations
World Economic Survey, 19321933, pp. 85 and 7 0
The most glaring and direct living expression of this
present stage of the contradiction between the growth of
the productive forces and existing society is the spread
of mass unemployment throughout the capitalist world,
already before the onset of the world economic crisis,
and reaching a total at the height of the world economic
crisis, in 1933, according to official figures, of
thirty millions, and according to unofficial figures of
fifty millions.
Britain, the oldest capitalist country, and the most
advanced in decay, first reached this basis of permanent
mass unemployment. This situation revealed itself in the
winter of 1920-2 1, and has continued up to the present
without a break; in the beginning of 1933 the Chancellor
of the Exchequer staggered the House of Commons by
announcing that he calculated on the continuance of such
mass unemployment for the next ten years. The other
countries in the succeeding years reached a similar and
even more extreme basis (running at the highest point to
eight millions in Germany and fourteen millions in the
United States).
Unemployment at a certain level has always been
present in capitalism. The development of production in
capitalist conditions has always displaced workers and
independent producers, and thus created the industrial
reserve army which was indispensable to meet the
fluctuations of capitalist production and to maintain
the proletariat in Πsubjection. But this industrial
reserve army was a part of the machinery of expanding
PRODUCTIVITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT 37.
capitalist production; the absolute number of
productive workers employed successively grew. It is
only since the war that the new phenomenon appeared of a
permanent unemployed army, grudgingly kept just alive at
the lowest level of subsistence by the bourgeoisie,
while the absolute number of productive workers employed
has directly decreased.
Of the possibility of such a stage of chronic
unemployment and absolute decline of the productive
workers, Marx wrote:
A development of the productive forces which would
diminish the absolute number of labourers, that is,
which would enable the entire nation to accomplish its
total production in a shorter time, would cause a
revolution, because it would render the majority of the
population superfluous.
(Marx, Capital, 111,
Engels wrote in 1886: p.309.)
America will smash up England's industrial
monopoly-whatever there is left of it-but America cannot
herself succeed to that monopoly. And unless one country
has the monopoly of the markets of the world at least in
the decisive branches of trade, the conditionsrelatively
favourable-which existed here in England from 1848 to
1870 cannot anywhere be reproduced, and even in America
the condition of the working class must gradually sink
lower and lower. For if there are three countries (say,
England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively
equal terms for the possession of the world market,
there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of
the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity
required.
(Engels, letter to Mrs. Wischnewetzky, February 3,
1886, reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Selected Correspondence, London and New York, 1935, P.
443.)
To-day we are face to face with this situation. The
position in America is reported as follows:
The United States Commissioner for Labour Statistics
recently stated that if 200 Out of the 1,357 boot and
shoe factories in the Πcountry worked full time, they
could satisfy the whole existing demand, and the
remaining 1,157 establishments could be closed down.
Similarly, 1,487 out of the 6,057 bituminous coal mines
could produce all the coal that was needed.
(H. B. Butler in the International Labour Review,
March 1931.)
Between 1919 and 1927 factory output in the United
States rose from 147 to 170, on the basis of 1914 as
100, while the
38 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
employment index fell from 12 9 to I 15 (Times, March
8, ' Between 1919 and 1929 the Federal Reserve Board
index of industrial production (1923-5 as 100) rose from
84 to 119; while the number of industrial wage workers
fell from 9,039,000 to 8,742,000 (United States
Statistical Abstract, 1932). This absolute decline in
employment was before the collapse, during the great
upward boom.
Britain reveals a similar picture. Between 1913 and
1928 the increase in output per head of workers employed
in thirty principal industries in Great Britain was 33
per cent., but the increase in employment was 2.2 per
cent., or less than the increase in population (Times
Trade Supplement, July 23,1932). Still more marked is
the process if the post-war period is taken alone.
Between 1923 and 1928 the number of insured workers in
employment fell from 8,368,000 to 7,898,000; the index
of production (London and Cambridge Economic Service,
based on1913 as 100)rose from 88.7 to 96.3. Production
rose 7.6 per cent.; employment fell 5.6 per cent. And
all this before the world economic crisis began to make
the heaviest effects of the process felt.
What is to happen to the "superfluous" workers? For
long the old theory of "alternative employment" was
still endeavoured to be put forward as applicable to
this situation. The decline in the industrial productive
workers was to be "compensated" by the increase of
auxiliary "services" and luxury occupations (clerical,
distributive, advertising, commercial, and luxury
services). Certainly, a very considerable increase in
these auxiliary and in the main non-productive
occupations is to be traced in the United States,
Britain and other countries during the post-war period,
thus providing the basis of the rapid expansion of the
so-called "new middle class," which became one of the
breeding-grounds of Fascism; just as the growth of the
permanent unemployed army provided a further
breeding-ground. The expansion of the rentier class on
the one side, and of luxury services and endlessly
multiplied salesmanship" services on the other, is a
measure of the degeneration of capitalism. ΠThe
capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand
enforcing economy in each individual business, on the
other hand begets by its anarchical system of
competition the most outrageous squandering of labour
power and of the social means of production,
PRODUCTIVITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT 39
not to mention the creation of a vast number of
employments at present indispensable, but in themselves
superfluous.
(Marx, Capital, I, p. 540.)
Nevertheless, this supposed "compensation" was soon
revealed as a doubtful solution. In the first place, it
was manifestly no solution for the millions of miners
and heavy industry workers thrown out of work. In the
second place, the extent of "compensation" had obvious
limits which were soon reached. For in these
occupations, too, rationalisation begins to get to work
and to repeat the process of throwing off the
superfluous workers. Mechanisation transforms clerical
work, and begins increasingly to replace clerks by more
and more elaborate calculating and book-keeping
machines; centralisation cuts down the number of
competing businesses; staffs are reduced. The
"white-collar workers" also find themselves increasingly
thrown on the market alongside their industrial
brothers.
Increasing doubts of the whole process and its
outcome, as well as of the stock explanations and
solutions, found expression in an editorial of the
London Times in 1930 on "American Unemployment"
(characteristically endeavouring to treat the problem as
an "American" problem, but in fact describing equally
unemployment in Britain):
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
unemployment must henceforth be counted as a permanent
American (!) problem. To ascribe its occasional
recurrence in an acute form to some special event is no
less delusive than to explain it as a merely "seasonal"
manifestation. . . . The experience of recent years has
gone to prove that recovery is less and less complete
after each crisis, and to show that forces other than
the seasonal and the accidental are at work. There is
little reason to doubt that permanent unemployment is
to-day the lot of an always growing number of American
men and women.
On this basis doubt is expressed of the whole system
of "mass production," i.e., of capitalist large-scale
production:
The advantages residing in a system which relies on
the mass production of standardised articles deserve
more critical examination Πthan they have yet been
given.
The current answers of "the apologists of the
system," that the reduced costs of production and
therefore reduced price means
40 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
increased demand and consequent re-absorption of the
unemployed, are "no longer altogether convincing":
It is still doubtful whether the increased production
can always be absorbed; it is a very large question
whether new industries are created quickly enough to
employ the displaced workers. In other words, it remains
to be seen how perilously the machine has run ahead of
man, and whether some re-adjustment of social condition
may not ultimately be imperative. The question drives
like rain to the roots of American (!) life. (Times
editorial, March 8, 1930.) Under the thin disguise of
"America" it is obvious that "the question drives like
rain to the roots" of capitalism in all countries, and
not least in Britain, with its longest record of
permanent mass unemployment.
What prevents capitalism from carrying out the
alternative solution universally proposed by all the
myriad schools of reformers of capitalism (reformist
socialists, social credit theorists, currency reformers,
etc.)-i.e., the general raising of the standards of the
workers to a point compatible with the consumption of
the increased production alongside higher profits for
the capitalists? The answer why capitalism is unable to
carry out this apparently simple solution, but is in
fact actively engaged in carrying out the opposite, lies
in the whole character of capitalism. The reformist
dream of grafting on to the capitalist mode of
production an entirely different and incompatible system
of distribution (whether by legislative means, raising
wages, social services, a "national dividend," or the
like) only reveals its advocates' failure to understand
the elementary workings of capitalism and the necessary
conditions of the capitalist mode of production. The
reformists apply in their fantasy the conceptions of an
organised society directly to the jungle of capitalism,
which, by the very conditions of private property and
production for profit, cannot follow the principles of
an organised economy, but can only follow entirely
different laws. In fact, even the very limited measure
of social reform which could be achieved, under the
pressure of the working class, in the conditions of
ascending capitalism become increasingly circumscribed
and even in part diminished and withdrawn in the
conditions of declining capitalism and of the capitalist
crisis. ΠThe realities of capitalism are both in fact
and in iron necessity entirely different. The greater
the crisis, the greater
PRODUCTIVITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT 41
becomes the need of the rival capitalist concerns to
lower the costs of production, to increase the rate of
exploitation, to drive the dwindling number of employed
workers harder, to attack the workers' standards and the
social services, in order to compete more successfully
for the dwindling market. At the same time the growth of
unemployment facilitates these attacks. The development
of the crisis has been accompanied in every country by
successively renewed and intensified attacks on the
workers' standards. The authentic voice of capitalism is
the voice of the American capitalist magnate, Owen D.
Young, the sponsor of the Young Plan, when he declared:
"Let no man think that the living standards of America
can be permanently maintained at a measurably higher
level than those of the other civilised countries"
(Economist, April 12, 1930.)
The Roosevelt "experiment," which has skilfully
utilised the reformist propaganda of higher standards as
the solution of the capitalist crisis, but utilised it
in fact for the exactly opposite purpose to carry
through intensified exploitation and lowered standards
(just as President Wilson of old utilised pacifist
propaganda for the purposes of war), is proving in
practice, as we shall later have occasion to see, only a
more complete demonstration of this reality.
The growth of productivity has been accompanied, not
by an increase of the workers' share, but by a decrease
of the workers' share. Between 1913 and 192 8 the
percentages of the national income going to wages fell
in the United States from 36.4 to 36, and in the United
Kingdom from 42.7 to 40.9 (World Economic Survey,
1932-3, p.101). In the United States, between 1921 and
1927, the value of the product of industry rose from
18.3 thousand million dollars to 27.5 thousand million
dollars (U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of
Manufactures); but in the same period the percentages of
the value of the product of industry going to wages and
salaries fell loom 58.7 per cent. in 1921 (54.2 per
cent. in 19'4) to 51 percent. in 1927 (P. H. Douglas,
Real Wages in the United States). in Great Britain,
between 1924 and 1930, according to Colin
Clark's The National Income 1924-31, the output per
person employed rose from 100 to 113, while the
proportion of wages to home-produced income fell from
41.5 per cent. (42.5 percent Πin 1911) to 38 per cent.
I 'The effect of the world economic crisis has been,
not to
42 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
reverse this process, but to carry it enormously
further forward. The drive to rationalisation to
speeding up, to extracting a still higher output per
worker for less return, has been intensified under the
conditions of the crisis. Between 1929 and 1932 the
output per man- hour has actually been forced up by 12
per cent. in the United States, alongside twelve million
unemployed!
Labour costs per unit of output have been
substantially reduced by an improvement in productive
efficiency. The output per manhour in the United States
increased by about 12 per cent. between 1929 and 193 2
(Economist, May 5, 1933.)
It is obvious that the effect of this is still
further to intensify the contradiction which already led
to the economic crisis.
In the face of these facts increasing doubts begin to
assail the capitalists whether there can ever be
full-scale employment again, even if the extreme
intensity of the crisis of 1929-33 should give place to
a considerable upward movement. Thus it is reported from
America:
American employment reached its highest point in
1918, American production in 1929, and it is carefully
and accurately computable to- day that if by some magic
a return could be made to the productive maximum of
three years ago, there would still be no work for 45 per
cent. of the present twelve million unemployed.
(Washington Correspondent of the London Times, November
2, 1932.)
From Britain comes the same tale:
If the 21/2 millions of unemployed were absorbed in
factory occupa. tions, the national output of
manufactured articles would be on such a scale that the
available buying markets . . . would be inadequate to
absorb it. Hence, if such a method of labour absorption
could and did take place, it would only precipitate a
new crisis.
(Times Trade Supplement, July 23, 1932.)
Such are the alternatives which begin to be seen by
the I capitalists, even if the present crisis should
give place to the Πmost extensive upward movement.
Either continued mass unemployment of millions, even if
"by some magic" the record level of the previous
production boom could be attained.
Or, if all the unemployed are absorbed into
productive
labour, then inevitably the immediate precipitation
of a new crisis.
PRODUCTIVITY AND UNEMPLOYMENT 43
As this new situation begins to be realised, the
beckoning phantom of a new world war as the only
"solution" to utilise the productive forces and wipe off
the "superfluous" population begins to exercise a
visibly increasing attraction on capitalist thought and
policy as the final gamble.
Nearly a century ago Engels wrote of the necessary
consequences of the inevitable future breakdown of the
British capitalist monopoly: "Should English
manufactures be thus vanquished . . . the majority of
the proletariat must become forever superfluous and has
no other choice than to starve or to rebel." (Engels:
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Ch.
xi.)
In 1932, eighty-seven years later, the British Prime
Minister spoke in the House of Commons of the prospect,
even if trade should recover and prosperity return, of
having to find "great bodies of men and women, perhaps
even amounting to a couple of millions, to be, to all
intents and purposes, in our society, superfluous
scrap." (J. R. MacDonald in the House of Commons,
November 2 2, 1932.)
In 1933 the leader of British Conservatism had to
make the same melancholy admission:
There is the great core of unemployment. We do not
know what the numbers may be. There may be a million, a
million and a half, or less than a million; but there
will be a vast number for whom there is but little hope
of employment being found in this country. The gates of
migration are closed against us. What can we do? That is
a problem that has baffled the country completely up to
now.
(Stanley Baldwin in the House of Commons, November
27, 1933.)
"What can we do?" This is the final answer of what
was once the most powerful capitalism in the world, when
faced today with the problem of millions who seek only
to work and live. ΠThere could be no sharper expression
of the bankruptcy of capitalism than when, in the midst
of wealth and unexampled productive power, it can no
longer even find the means to exploit a growing
proportion of its slaves, and is compelled to proclaim
millions of human beings, living, strong, and able and
willing to labour, as "superfluous scrap." The time
draws close for the second half of the alternative-"to
rebel"-as the only solution for the extending millions
of producers cut off from production, no less than for
the millions whose growing output is accompanied by
growing poverty.
44 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
4. The Alternative-Social Revolution or Destruction.
The alternatives which confront society at the
present stage are thus clear.
Capital can no longer utilise the productive forces.
Capital can no longer utilise the full labour-power of
the productive population. Monopoly capitalism is more
and more visibly choking the whole Organisation of
production and exchange.
The working masses can no longer find even the former
limited conditions of existence within the conditions of
capitalism. Increasing millions are thrown aside as
"superfluous." The standards of all are successively
attacked. Intensification of labour of the dwindling
numbers employed is accompanied by worsening of
standards.
The class struggle grows more intense. New forms of
widening mass struggle develop. New and intenser methods
of repression and coercion are brought into play by the
ruling class.
Against this situation the knowledge and
understanding, which begins to grow more and more widely
spread, of the scientific and technical possibilities of
unlimited production and abundance for all, confronts
existing society like a mockery and a torment: creating
on the one side, among a growing section of the
dispossessed, revolutionary anger and determination;
creating on the other side, among the doomed possessing
classes, growing desperation and recklessness, the
revolt against science, the revolt against mechanical
technique, and readiness to embark on ever more frenzied
courses of violence and destruction.
Two alternatives, and only two, confront existing
society at the present stage of development of the
productive forces and of social organisation. ΠOne is
to throttle the development of the productive forces in
order to save class-society, to destroy material wealth,
to destroy millions of "superfluous" human beings in the
slow rot of starvation and the quick furnace of war, to
crush down the working-class movement with limitless
violence, to arrest the development of science and
culture and education and technique, to revert to more
primitive forms of limited, isolated societies, and thus
to save for a while the rule of the possessing classes
at the expense of a return to barbarism and spreading
decay. This is the path which finds its most complete
and organised expression in Fascism.
THE ALTERNATIVE-REVOLUTION OR DESTRUCTION 45
The other is to organise the productive forces for
the whole society by abolishing the class ownership of
the means of production, and building up the classless
communist society which can alone utilise and organise
the modern productive forces. This is the path of
Communism, of the revolutionary working class.
The issue of these two paths is the issue of the
present epoch.
It is to the former of these two alternatives that
the existing capitalist world is to-day moving at an
increasing pace, and to which it will more and more
visibly develop in the period ahead, if the
revolutionary working class does not succeed in time in
saving the whole future of civilisation and of human
culture.