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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 10, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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What is Marxism all about?

Part 2: What's the alternative to capitalism?

By Deirdre Griswold

Some things about modern life just can't be hidden. The rich are getting ever richer. Poor people overflow the jails. Racist cops terrorize communities of color. Public services wither while colossal sums are spent on the military and the police.

Whole nations are pushed deeper into debt slavery by transnational super-banks. The assault on the environment threatens life on the planet--while little is done about it.

Is it any wonder there's a growing anti-capitalist movement? This system is decaying, and people are struggling to survive as its poisons spread.

But what's the alternative? Just being against something isn't enough. What can replace capitalism?

Just asking the question leads to a discussion of socialism--a society where production can be planned to meet human needs because it has been broken out of the stranglehold of private ownership.

Planning for profit or for people?

Modern social life requires large-scale planning, communications and movement of goods. Without this complex social interaction involving millions of people, things would grind to a halt. The population of most U.S. cities, for example, would starve without food constantly being brought in from agricultural areas--often thousands of miles away.

The problem today, however, is that economic planning is geared to the needs of profit-making, privately owned companies. They unilaterally make life-and-death decisions--to hire and fire, to move plants and offices from one place to another, to produce what sells for a profit versus what people need.

In a system where private capital is dominant, does it mean the state plays no role? No, even when all you hear from big business and the politicians is "privatization," the capitalist state still steps in to build roads, for example, or fund space exploration. No individual capitalist can make money in these areas but they all need highways, communications satellites, and so on to function.

This kind of state intervention into the economy is okay with the capitalists. It's no threat to the profit system. In fact, they need it. They only want to privatize those areas where they can squeeze out profit. And often it's profitable only because the government is really subsidizing the operation--like the companies that exploit prison labor, for example. It takes tens of thousands of dollars a year to lock someone up--much more than to send them to college.

Prison labor wouldn't be profitable at all except that tax dollars pay the bills while private companies reap the profits.

A lot of people confuse capitalist nationalizations with socialism. But nationalizations like the ones carried out by labor party governments in Western Europe after World War II actually helped capitalism. That's not what the rulers fear and dread.

What gives them nightmares is the fear that the workers who built the means of production will become organized, politically conscious, and powerful enough to pull this small class down from its pinnacles of power--as happened with socialist revolutions in Russia, then in China, and more recently in Cuba.

For at least 150 years, workers have been fighting to pull the plug on capitalism and build a socialist society. The socialist movements started in Europe because that's where the industrial revolution began. By the 20th century, the growth of capitalism around the world--often forced on other countries by colonial domination--had spread Marxism to the Third World, where it was embraced by hundreds of millions of oppressed people. Revolutionaries in Asia, Africa and Latin America then added their own experiences and ideas to the doctrine of how to bring down capitalist rule and construct a better society.

How Marxism got started

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were German socialists. They were also revolutionaries. During their lifetimes, being a Marxist meant being a revolutionary socialist.

There had been socialists around for a long time, but they were mostly utopians. These were people who believed that if they could set up a model society somewhere, they would inspire others to join them. This new society of equals would grow, they thought, until it prevailed over the cruelties and injustices of class society.

In the 19th century quite a few utopians came to the United States from Germany, England and other countries in Europe, got some land, and set up communities whose members shared what they produced. Some were religious, others were not.

Although they remained separate from the rest of society, some of these utopian communities set a precedent that others followed later on. New Harmony in Indiana, for example, proved that kindergartens, free schools, and other services could free women to play a broader social role--something that the conservatives of that time ridiculed and vigorously opposed. Eventually these progressive advances were adopted all over the United States.

Marx and Engels were not utopians, but they studied these movements carefully and learned from both their achievements and their mistakes. They were especially interested in the work of Robert Owen, a textile manufacturer who set up a model community called New Lanarck. It managed to produce efficiently at the same time that it eliminated the worst features of the factory system. The long hours and hellish conditions that had driven so many workers elsewhere to exhaustion, alcoholism and crisis in their personal lives were eliminated, and the workers themselves--women and men--decided how the community would be run.

While they sympathized with these movements, Marx and Engels saw that they didn't help the vast majority of the workers, who barely had the means to put enough food on the table, let alone start a new society somewhere. The conditions in the new industrial centers of England, Germany and other European countries were horrendous. What these workers needed was a way to fight their bosses. Marxism became the doctrine of the class struggle.

Thinkers and fighters

Marx and Engels were great thinkers, but they were also revolutionary fighters. In 1848, revolutions against feudal absolutism had swept Europe. In much of the fighting, it was detachments of workers who tipped the balance in favor of democracy versus absolutism. Marx and Engels, still in their twenties, were deeply involved in these revolutions.

Yet even as they participated in them, they analyzed their shortcomings and explained that the class taking power from the feudal nobility and landlords was not the workers or peasants, but the bourgeoisie. While the slogans of these revolutions promised equality and democracy for everyone, it was the people with money and businesses who were on top after the dust settled. The masses fought and died in these democratic revolutions, but they lacked the organization and clarity of purpose to be able to take the reins of society once the feudal lords had been unseated.

Marx and Engels put their ideas for revolution into the famous pamphlet "The Communist Manifesto." It was a brilliant and impassioned call for revolution against not just the moth-eaten aristocrats but the new moneymen. These merchants and manufacturers needed the support of the workers and the peasants to defeat the armies of the kings and feudal lords. But they took advantage of the democratic aspirations of the masses to promote their own class interests.

Marx and Engels believed that this new ruling class could only be removed by the revolutionary action of the workers. They advocated building working class political parties whose aim would be to take the power and reorganize society. They didn't rule out participating in elections, which were still a very new thing, but they had no illusions that the bourgeoisie would just surrender power if the workers voted them out.

After Marx and Engels died, the movement they had started gradually began to accommodate to the capitalist governments in Europe. Even as millions of workers were joining unions organized by Marxists, and were voting for social-democratic parties that had originated in the Marxist movement, these parties were losing their revolutionary orientation.

Years of militant struggle by the workers had won some improvements in wages and working conditions. That sapped some of their earlier revolutionary vigor. But there was an even more important reason behind the softening of the socialist movement.

The capitalists who had grown rich exploiting the workers at home were now investing more and more of their capital overseas, where labor and resources were even cheaper. The U.S. and most of the European countries were becoming openly imperialist, sending their armies to subdue uprisings in places like the Philippines, the Sudan, India and Cuba.

Theodore Roosevelt in the United States was an example of the new breed of imperialist politician. He came off as a friend of the "common man" at home, posing as a trustbuster against the super-rich and calling his party the Progressive Party. But at the same time he rallied the population behind wars of aggression in the Philippines and the Caribbean that brought these same robber barons new markets and opportunities for super-profits. So the rich tolerated his rhetoric, even while they exchanged insults with this popular president.

In Europe a section of the workers had become more privileged and conservative. In effect they were bribed with a small portion of the riches now pouring in from the colonies. They bought into the chauvinism of the rulers, who blamed all their problems on other countries.

War and revolution

The biggest crisis for the socialist movement came at the outbreak of World War I. The Socialist International had held several conferences in the years before the war at which it adopted fervent resolutions denouncing the military preparations of the capitalist governments. It had warned the workers of all countries that any war would be for capitalist plunder; it would hold nothing but death and destruction for the workers. It had called on the workers to refuse to fight in such a war and to do everything in their power to stop it.

But when the war actually started in 1914, the leaders of most of these parties, who still called themselves Marxists, succumbed to chauvinism and supported the capitalist governments in their respective countries. It was a monumental blow to the cause of international workers' solidarity. It paved the way for millions of workers to be slaughtered in the worst catastrophe the world had yet seen.

The leaders of the German Social Democratic Party led the betrayal by voting in the parliament for war credits--taxes to support the war. Other parties then followed suit, supporting their own rulers.

But there were notable exceptions. A small group of German socialists led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg broke with their leaders and denounced the war. In the United States, socialist leader and labor hero Eugene Victor Debs proudly went to jail for opposing the war.

The firmest internationalists were Vladimir Lenin of Russia and his Bolshevik Party. They had split from the compromisers many years before, and were best prepared to organize the population against a war that was to prove utterly disastrous for the workers of all the countries involved.

By the end of the capitalist war, 40 million people had died. But in Russia, the enraged masses had toppled two governments and set up a new state unlike any in existence--based on councils, or soviets, of workers and peasants. Marxism, which had become so watered down in Western Europe, had been rescued by Lenin and the Bolsheviks as the doctrine of revolutionary struggle.

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